I sing of arms and the woman (and the occasional guy)

More Valeriya

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:18:50 GMT

Well, all good things must come to an end. I have the closest thing to a doctorate that L’Université Polygnostique d’Elysailles will give to a woman, and my family is no longer willing to subsidize my garret apartments and philosophical experiments until the good gentlemen of the university realize that giving young ladies a diploma and a few letters after our names isn’t going to do something dreadful to our wombs. It is time to return, at least for now, to Mother Kyrillia. I have missed the place – the West is so compacted compared to my homeland, the weather just doesn’t have the bite it ought to, and Elysaillesians wouldn’t know decent tea if they drowned in it – but I don’t look forward to being stranded with my father and brothers waving their egos about and my mother trying to set me up with someone before I get old and become even more unmarriageable than I currently am.

I wonder what she’ll think of my current “situation.” I did warn her about it in my first letter after The Experiment, but I know the woman’s capacity for wishful thinking from long experience, and she’s probably hoping that the lightning burns and other, more interesting side effects of injecting otherworldly beast ichor into one’s veins will fade like some exotic but curable rash. I could tell her to cheer up, at least they aren’t syphilitic lesions, but she’d probably take the fact that I knew what syphilitic lesions were as a sign of the folly of higher education for girls. She can be a frightful prude like that. My father would either think it was funny or yell at me for arguing with my elders. (Never mind that “There are several disfiguring conditions, which are progressive, eventually more unsightly than my current appearance, and ultimately fatal” is a simple fact which can be verified in any medical dictionary.) Maybe I should use leprosy for my example instead of syphilis, but then I might get accused of impiety. (Yes, leprosy does show up in Holy Writ. So do goats. Should I never refer to them in casual hypothetical terms?) My family are, I suppose, not bad people in their way (not that I’m in a position to judge anyone’s personal character, at least not by conventional standards), but they are not what one would call disciples of reason.

I’m on the train east from Elysailles Station, now. We’re going through wine country. I suppose vineyards could be interesting up close, if one likes that sort of thing, but from a distance they all look rather green and lumpy at this time of year. They would provide a decent amount of hiding places for bandits who didn’t mind scrunching up, but the people you’d be in the best position to ambush would be vineyard workers, and I don’t think that even after the Revolution made all men equal vine tenders got paid very much. Of course, nowadays the monarchy’s been restored and people are un-equal again, so unless you’re a bandit who has his heart set on pruning tools, robbing vineyard workers would be a waste of your time. Of course, you could always steal the grapes, but taking them off the vines would be no more work and pose a lower chance of getting caught. But then again, people who worry about the risk versus payoff potential of various forms of crime tend not to go into banditry. They enter government service instead.

I have read how much poverty there was in the Languedouil countryside before the Revolution – and even now, after they lost so much on ill-advised foreign military adventures. (If their Emperor was such a genius, why didn’t he realize that the only force ever to successfully invade Kyrillia more than a month after the autumnal equinox was General Frost’s?) But in my opinion, any country where people can afford to make vodka out of fruit just needs to learn to manage its money better. Maybe building palaces that don’t cost a fortune to heat would be a good start.

I splurged on a new hat for the trip – my old one really hasn’t been the same since the silverfish colony took up residence in the fake chrysanthemums – and a nice thick veil to go with it, but I’m still attracting attention from a few of the passengers. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’m taller than most of the men in my compartment and carrying a hatbox labeled “Caution: Live Snakes.” (It’s actually just full of delicate lab equipment – I only used it to transport live reptiles once, as a favor to a friend – but the label seems to encourage people to handle the box carefully and not mess with it too much, so I haven’t bothered to remove it.) I have my seat to myself, which is a mercy, although there still isn’t enough room to really stretch my legs properly. Mother would say that this shouldn’t be an issue, as ladies do not have muscles below their diaphragms, or at least don’t publicly admit to the existence of such. I’ve read about many interesting prodigies of nature in my studies, but body parts that appear and disappear with the social requirements of the situation are a new one to me.

Elysailles is a cosmopolitan city, but for all its famed attractions, not everyone who goes there seems to want to stay. My compartment has several foreigners besides myself. There's a black Askian Amazon woman, looking very sharp in blue taffeta with matching scabbard for her scimitar, who, as much as I can judge when she’s sitting down, must be almost as tall as I am. There’s a whole family of little Sidonians chatting away in their own language – they look well-dressed, and have a lot of flat boxes, so I would guess they were jewelers. I’m seated behind a short, stern-looking gentleman who would look the epitome of sober respectability if it wasn't for his braided waist-length beard. His seatmate is a rather slight, dusky gentleman in smoked spectacles watching the countryside with a rapt expression. I wonder if he’s some foreign scholar sent by his government to gather useful information for the establishment of his country's own wine industry. One of our own emperors did something like that about a hundred years ago, although he was more interested in military and civilian infrastructure than beverages. Most of Kyrillia isn't grape country, anyway, and even the part that is, isn’t much like eastern Languedouil. We have a rather less temperate climate.

"Isn’t this lovely, Mademoiselle?" the small dark man asks, presumably referring to the countryside. His accent is comprehensible – no thicker than mine is when I’m not watching my vowels – but impossible to trace. "So fertile! So green! Farms in every direction!" I have nothing against green, fertile land, but the thick clusters of farms actually bother me a bit. Civilized living required breathing room. If people had to live too close to each other, they eventually went a little stir-crazy and started looking for more efficient ways of chopping each other’s heads off.

Hmmm...

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:32:50 GMT

I think by this point Valeriya's boss (Colonel/General/"whatever military title is appropriate for someone in his position once I get the necessary research done" Shostakov) needs an actual personality. Bringing someone in who's obviously just there for the characters I actually care about to bounce off of antagonistically doesn't seem fair somehow.

NaNo Excerpt - Ekaterina had an unhappy childhood

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 07:01:17 GMT

Reminiscences. Still rather plotless. First person, angsty, possibly rather self indulgent, will probably be revised in the future.
Oh, and Snezhinka = Snowflake, in fangirl Russian.

When I was seven years old, they gave me a kitten. I should have expected there to be some kind of catch, but they gave me what sounded like a good reason at the time, and I wasn’t inclined to be too skeptical. I suppose part of me was afraid that if I drew it to their attention too much in any way it’d just be taken away again. We had a few months of happiness. I wonder if that’s what children who weren’t raised by malevolent international conspiracies feel like all the time.

I should have known it couldn’t last. Maybe other people can have good things happen to them, but nothing just happens to the children of the Aristoi. There’s always an ulterior motive, and never, in my case, one that would lead to anything pleasant. So far, I had put up with it. Why not, since they had their own way in everything, anyway? Even Captain Markov is not enough of a masochist to deal with the consequences of taking them on over everything, and one’s personal pride is not necessarily well developed at the age of seven.

I remember the day this all changed. I was eight. It was late spring. Really rather beautiful, although I hadn’t had much chance to appreciate it. Major R (not one of my regular teachers at this point, although I knew him all too well in a few years) called me in, and told me to bring Snezhinka with me. I knew that something unpleasant was going to happen, but had no idea what to do about it until he informed me that my cat was going to have to die, that I would be expected to kill him, and that I shouldn’t take too long about it. Then the august gentleman handed me a knife, and turned to pour himself a glass of water.

At that point, I did what any self-respecting cat lover and assassin in training would do. My only regret is that it did not completely succeed. In my own defense, this was the first time I’d ever done something like this on a living subject, and my primary concern was with Snezhinka’s safety. I left Major R bleeding on his desk, leapt out the window (his office was on the ground floor), and headed for the woods.

I had some stealth and survival training at this point, and the advantages of being small and light on my feet, but had never seriously hoped for a permanent escape for myself. I was trying to buy time for Snezhinka. He had a strong predatory instinct – although I’d so far mostly seen it manifested on flies, my own hair ribbons and stockings, and on one memorable occasion a rat nearly as big as he was – which led me to believe that he had a good chance of surviving on his own. Certainly better odds than he would under Major R’s beady little eyes. Once out of sight of the fortress, we played one last game of dandelion puff football, and I untied my ribbon from his neck – I didn’t want it to get caught on anything when he was climbing trees or crawling through briars. Then he noticed a squirrel – fortunately, not running in the direction of the “school” – and took of after it. I ran off in the opposite direction, trying not to leave too obvious a trail. I hadn’t noticed it earlier, but there must have been a lot of pollen in the air that spring. It was irritating my eyes something fierce.

Eventually, they found me, as I knew they would (although one of the trackers managed to twist his ankle in a freak encounter with a gopher hole, which pleased me), and I was punished, as I knew I would be. But the worst they could inflict was temporary suffering – I knew that I had nothing more to lose, even if they hadn’t quite realized it. And more than that, I knew that, in the way I most cared about, I had beaten them. Everything under the Aristoi’s eye lives and dies by their command – except for my cat. I knew that they hadn’t tracked him down and killed him themselves (or found his body and taken the credit for the actions of a less reprehensible kind of predator), because if they had, they would have played it up to me in order to reinforce the futility of disobedience. I knew then, that they weren’t omnipotent. And that even someone like me could defy them and achieve something with it, as long as I didn’t mind how much it hurt. Pain and pleasure are strong though fleeting things, but spite and moral victory can keep you warm in a Siberian blizzard.

NaNo Excerpt - enter Valeriya

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 05:23:59 GMT

Edited for basic readability, but may be more seriously rewritten at some point.
Just a bit with Valeriya in her younger and less scary days. Not much plot, lots of geography.

Valeriya Perunovna Termena, known to most of the faculty and students as Valerie Theremine, was feeling homesick. Not because she was particularly fond of most of the people she’d left at home in Kyrillia, with the exception of her babushka, her Tjotia Marina, and a couple of the family’s borzois, but because she missed her homeland itself. Yes, Elysailles had its particular metropolitan charms, particularly for students of natural philosophy – that was why Valeriya was there in the first place – but it lacked sweep. Everything in the city – in the country itself – seemed so compacted. Valeriya approved of agriculture a great deal – a person couldn’t live on game, wild fruit, fish, and forest mushrooms indefinitely – but there was something not quite right about rural villages being so close to each other. Well, things were different this side of the Azbugas.

The other issue was the weather. Shorter winters had their benefits, Valeriya supposed, even if they did make a country pathetically easy to invade. The problem was that even the cold was different out here. The fog off the river, gentle as it looked, was twice as insinuatingly chilly as a foot of snow, and you couldn’t even make ice cream with it or throw it at people. Valeriya believed that weather should be bold and assertive, if it was going to go to the trouble at all – thunderstorms were fine in their place, assuming that nothing she cared about was getting struck by lightning, but she had no use for generalized atmospheric clamminess.

At least local politics seemed more interesting than Kyrillian ones, although possibly that was just a side effect of Perun Termen not being around to expound on everything at top volume, with no apparent pauses for breath or to let anyone else get in a syllable, at the most inopportune hours. You’d think in an absolute monarchy people outside the government and royal family wouldn’t find much to argue about, but no. Of course, Elysaillesians argued too, but it was equal-opportunity arguing, and if she got sick of a local’s line of reasoning she could find another table at the café. It wasn’t as if she had any strong opinions about the recent Emancipation of the Serfs, anyway. Other countries seemed to do all right without them, and it wasn’t likely that she’d ever be running the family’s country property in any case. Let the serfs do what they liked, so long as they didn’t run off with any of her stuff and someone was around to make breakfast when she went home. Valeriya’s culinary skills had, by necessity, improved during her school days, but she still didn’t feel up to making her own croissants, and importing them by rail car seemed less than practical. Anyway, she’d seen a couple of barricades put up in her days as a student, and found that there was something exhilaratingly purposeful about the whole project, even if she had no idea what an amateur-built fortification in the middle of a busy street would actually do for the causes of liberty and republicanism. But then, Valeriya was a natural philosopher, not a political one. Her area of expertise was more in the area of assessing the barricade’s structural integrity. She’d made no calculations in this area, but observation suggested that Elysaillesian cheap furniture was surprisingly durable. (And that Republicanism was possibly over-rated, given that the elected servants of the people always seemed to be disgracing themselves and getting overthrown in coups by glamorous ambitious types in fancy uniforms.) The key to staying in power, Valeriya thought, was to act like you know what you’re doing, and to put on a good show. People need to feel that their leaders have everything under control – but first, get their attention.

With that thought, Valeriya’s meditations were interrupted, as she found herself at her destination. This was a large building in the self-consciously imposing style of half a century ago, which had probably had the little bronze cast sculpture over the door replaced a half-dozen times with the changing political climate (Valeriya could still see traces of where an eagle might once have stretched its wings) before settling on a bust of the Goddess of Wisdom and saving its members a lot of time, trouble, and political anxiety regarding the decorating. This wasn’t something Valeriya had needed to trouble herself much about, as women’s perceived opinions tended to be given less weight (at least by men) and most of the locals thought that the Kyrillian landed aristocracy were a bunch of barbarian feudalists anyway and didn’t credit her with much political consciousness. Infinitely annoying as this was in principle, it did save Valeriya from having to worry about whether wearing her blue bolero with gold buttons over a maroon dress would get her picked up by the gendarmes and interrogated about her possible radical political connections.

The institution in question called itself La Maison de Minerve, and its fame as a source of books on esoteric subjects was an open secret among university students. However, some of them, particularly the young men, had rather limited definitions of “esoteric,” and stories circulated throughout the natural philosophy department of young men who went there on a search for banned novels and were bodily thrown out by an indignant librarian. Valeriya’s own goals were little more respectable, although less prurient. She merely wished to, as her babushka always put it, “call spirits from the vasty deep.”

Of course, this was a more colorful than accurate way of putting it. Valeriya was a woman of science, not a theurge. Most beings of the unseen realms interested her for the same reasons that fish from the lightless depths of the ocean or pond-scum that grows in volcanic springs hotter than any samovar would, with just an additional touch of intrigue for being even further out of her everyday experience. Valeriya's current expedition, however, was motivated by something a little more purposeful than intellectual curiosity. She was, to borrow a metaphor from botany, looking for the chinchona, not just any interesting tropical plant.

While Valeriya would never have called herself an invalid – she was too busy to be sick! – in certain peculiar ways, her constitution was far from what she wished it to be. While her mental disposition was lively to the point of tempestuous, the cold, dry humors dominated her physical state to a point where they were slowly but overtly changing the physical structure of her body. She’d only found a few other examples of the condition in accounts of medical curiosities, but the prognosis was not cheering. Her particular case was progressing more slowly than the books’ examples, and she had pulled her own regime together to keep it that way (plenty of stretching, and “hot” or “wet” foods – despite the decreasing fashionability of the humoral theory, she thought it couldn’t hurt), but didn’t trust such measures to keep it at bay forever. At some point, this situation was going to require heroic measures.

When reading a book about the history of “natural metaphysics” (as natural history applied to otherworldly creatures had been called in those days), Valeriya had come across an account of the Beasts of G’nash. These creatures vaguely resembled cephalopod mollusks but could survive in the open air for longer, and their body fluids possessed some interesting properties. A natural philosopher and amateur musician who accidentally introduced some of the creature’s tentacle mucus into a small open wound on his hand, found that the cut healed without a scar and, ever after, his fingers on that hand enjoyed greater range of motion, although at first this was at the cost of a slightly weakened grip.

For a woman afflicted with too little flexibility, creatures who had it to spare and could bestow it on others seemed worth the effort of pursuing. However, the university libraries had no other information about these particular beasts – otherworldly biology still carried vague associations with alchemists and demonologists that only the most iconoclastic – or just plain eccentric – were willing to risk being labeled with. Valeriya was proud to number herself among those few.