For your reading pleasure, here is a very early opening chapter to The Seven-Petaled Shield.
I've left it just as I wrote it, without attempting to bring spelling,
name usage, place names, and the like, into congruence with the final,
edited version. For myself, I find it fascinating to see how an author
develops the characters and story. I hope this is interesting and
rewarding to you, too.
This is the first of several sketches and out takes, which will be archived under "Read A Story" as I post them here.
Chapter 1
Late summer dusk hung like a pearly veil over the spires and
towers of Verenzza. The glare of the day, hot and bright as the marble mined in
the far reaches of the Gelon Empire, fell away. Even the water lapping the
ancient piers hushed, as the borders between wave and wood, sky and earth
melted. The shoremen, teams of
bronze-skinned, shaven-headed Xians, moved slowly through the slow spiral
coiling of ropes, the dance of knots, the lifting of crate and barrel. Above
them hung a moon just past half full, the lesser part still holding its
secrets. Bright and dark alternately patterned the water.
The ship glided between the jetties, past barges and
slavers, jooks and pleasure craft, its single sail limp, its oars barely
touching the barred ripples. Moon and
twilight touched the craft, its sides like oyster silver, the spars and ropes
to beaded pearl. No Verenzzan ship this, with strange symbols carved like
amulets into the prow. Every line of her
breathed out a rare perfume, as if she had just drifted down from the glory
fading in the western clouds.
The shoremen paused and watched, caught for a moment. Then the light shifted, and the ship
diminished, swallowed by the brine-laced shadows, one more sea-wracked craft
limping into harbor, using the tidal current to spare its crew.
In short time, the ship was moored and anchored, the fees
paid to the Emperor’s harbormaster.
Tomorrow the shoremen would return to unload the cargo, but by now, ink
stained the silver. The moon paled
against a milky banner of stars.
Soon the deck was empty except for the watch. Within the oddly shaped cabin, light
flickered, softly gold against the silver-black night. A half-grown boy clambered up the rope ladder
from below, moving slowly, pausing before the final reach and haul to gain the
deck. He wore ragged-hemmed drawstring
pants several sizes too big for him, his hair a tousled fall of night. The skin over his thin ribs was unmarked,
velvet, as if the dust of the faroff lands still clung like a perfume. He moved to the cabin door with an odd,
liquid grace, a grace practiced and hidden from ordinary eyes.
A woman’s voice murmured within the cabin, clear as the sky
after a storm, each syllable echoed in measured precision. The boy tapped, listened, went in.
The captain’s cabin, never spacious, had been divided with a
patched curtain like a map of ports and lands, scraps of brocade and homespun,
greasy suede and camel’s-hair cloth from far Azkhantia.
The woman sat on the single bed, built snug into the side of
the cabin, narrow and spare, its mattress pressed like sandstone into the
wooden frame. An oil lamp hung beside
her shoulders, and she held herself calm and straight. The golden light burnished her skin to
bronze, gleamed on the high cheekbones, the long knife-slim nose, the huge
shadowed eyes. She wore a loose hooded
robe, desert-style, covering her from wrist to throat to toe tip. On her lap, she held a book, tipping it to
catch the light. White salt crystals
stiffened the leather covers.
