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hawkwing_lbI have achieved a second draft of my conference paper, "The Experience of Entrance at the Pergamene and Koan Asklepieia." Hopefully this is a near-final draft.
Maybe now I will feel less useless and depressed. Next thing to do, make powerpoint with sanctuary plans.
There are four weeks left during which I must take classes. It will be a great relief when I can sit down to do research without having to keep up with Greek homework also. Perhaps then I will be able to write again.
Interestingly - and in things which give me hope - I wrote a whole paragraph of fiction today.
“Truth is,” the fat man said, with an unfocused kind of misery, “Truth is, I killed him.”
The dive stank of sweat and sewage and alcohol. The Book prohibits intoxicants, but sailors are sailors, even on the Red Coast. The miasmic fog of hashish and raw whiskey fumes nearly overpowered the odour of unwashed men and close-packed bodies.
“Shut up,” I said to the fat man, settling back against the drystone wall. The night was hot, the dive stifling, and I wanted with quiet desperation to cut the desert grit from my throat, eradicate the long dust of the overland passage behind me.
Bloody caliphs and their bloody wars.
He stared at me with bleary, bloodshot eyes. He had the look of a man who’d been drinking to forget, drinking to oblivion, but hadn’t quite got there yet. By the hook-handled Sabaean dagger at his belt and the once-white fine weave of his linen burnoose, he’d recently been wealthy. Not now. No wealthy man comes to a dive on the harbourfront’s edge to drink yellow beer cut with raw alcohol until it’s nearly clear.
There are easier ways to die.
“Malik Kemal,” he said. “You look like him.”
Kemal, the caliph’s son. Commander of the army in the west, prince of princes, conqueror of the land of the three cities and the floodplain valley of the Ilissos. Young and glorious and dead - betrayed, rumour had it, the night before a battle by a friend.
“Shut up,” I said, more viciously, and shoved to my feet. I had no desire to be anywhere near a madman. Claim you killed a prince, and sooner or later burly men with hard faces and sharp knives turn up to ask unpleasant questions.
Behind me, as I left, the fat man started to weep.
Not that it'll go anywhere. But, hell. Writing that in half an hour made me feel a hell of a lot better than I have in at least a week or so.
Damn the world for being so big and inimical anyway.
Maybe now I will feel less useless and depressed. Next thing to do, make powerpoint with sanctuary plans.
There are four weeks left during which I must take classes. It will be a great relief when I can sit down to do research without having to keep up with Greek homework also. Perhaps then I will be able to write again.
Interestingly - and in things which give me hope - I wrote a whole paragraph of fiction today.
“Truth is,” the fat man said, with an unfocused kind of misery, “Truth is, I killed him.”
The dive stank of sweat and sewage and alcohol. The Book prohibits intoxicants, but sailors are sailors, even on the Red Coast. The miasmic fog of hashish and raw whiskey fumes nearly overpowered the odour of unwashed men and close-packed bodies.
“Shut up,” I said to the fat man, settling back against the drystone wall. The night was hot, the dive stifling, and I wanted with quiet desperation to cut the desert grit from my throat, eradicate the long dust of the overland passage behind me.
Bloody caliphs and their bloody wars.
He stared at me with bleary, bloodshot eyes. He had the look of a man who’d been drinking to forget, drinking to oblivion, but hadn’t quite got there yet. By the hook-handled Sabaean dagger at his belt and the once-white fine weave of his linen burnoose, he’d recently been wealthy. Not now. No wealthy man comes to a dive on the harbourfront’s edge to drink yellow beer cut with raw alcohol until it’s nearly clear.
There are easier ways to die.
“Malik Kemal,” he said. “You look like him.”
Kemal, the caliph’s son. Commander of the army in the west, prince of princes, conqueror of the land of the three cities and the floodplain valley of the Ilissos. Young and glorious and dead - betrayed, rumour had it, the night before a battle by a friend.
“Shut up,” I said, more viciously, and shoved to my feet. I had no desire to be anywhere near a madman. Claim you killed a prince, and sooner or later burly men with hard faces and sharp knives turn up to ask unpleasant questions.
Behind me, as I left, the fat man started to weep.
Not that it'll go anywhere. But, hell. Writing that in half an hour made me feel a hell of a lot better than I have in at least a week or so.
Damn the world for being so big and inimical anyway.
