Bloodlines

The Pier Hotel and Landseer Building, Milang

In Milang -- a haphazard town drowsing on a lake shore with its feet in the past and an uncertain future ahead -- I met an American who was in South Australia's Lakes District to track down her Scottish ancestors.

One Saturday night in the Pier Hotel I heard the unmistakable accent and turned to see a woman of forty or fifty: tall, strong bodied, with chestnut hair silvering at the temples. She was elbowing for space at a bar dominated by boaties and fishermen. Being already there, I turned sideways to make space and beckoned her in.

“You're American,” I observed.

“Damn, what gave me away?” She forced a chuckle -- she'd heard the line a thousand times. “Also Canadian, Scots and just a little bit Australian.”

“On holiday down here?”

“Looking for family who came over a long time ago.” She offered her hand. “Jo Campbell.”

I shook the hand. “Chris Daley.” I waited till she'd received a Gordon's with Cascade tonic, then led her to the stools under the high-mounted TV. Cricket was streaming from India, where Australia was being walloped in the third test.

“You got family around here?” I wondered after a long swallow of Coopers.

“Somewhere,” she sighed, “but I can't find them.” She hunted through her bag and produced a crisp new copy of an ancient photo of two young men, sepia and soft by the standards of modern photography. I frowned over it as she told me a little.

In 1889 two brothers sat on the side of a hay wagon in the hills near Loch Lomond and looked into the camera lens. Within the year one of them would go to Canada, the other to Australia. The new Canadian, Donald Campbell, found his way to Alberta, married an English girl and sired a tribe. His boy Jamie got work in Oregon in 1912, married an American and stayed to have two daughters and a son. Jo Campbell was born in 1964 and cherished memories of 'Gramps,' a tall man in his nineties who loved to spin stories of lumberjacking in BC as a youth, and in Oregon as a man.

The other brother, Gordon, landed in South Australia at Christmas, 1889. In letters home he said he put his cash into a small property and modest herd. With the Great War raging over Europe, the local Campbells ran beef cattle along the marshy coast between Milang and Clayton; and sometime in the 1920s they seemed to vanish into the ether.

Cattle country on the shore of Lake Alexandrina.

Floods of biblical proportions frequently overwhelm this area. More than likely, Gordon Campbell was ruined in a natural disaster and wound up working on another property not far from the land he had owned.

“You've looked at the parish records?” I asked.

She took a sip of G&T and nodded. “He married a girl called Maggie. No family name was recorded.” Her brow creased. “Is that weird, or did the locals often forget the bride's maiden name in those days?”

“Not as a rule,” I mused. “She might have been indigenous. Maggie probably wouldn't have been her birth name, and it's possible the parson omitted the full name because he couldn't even guess how to spell it.”

“Indigenous?” Jo's eyes widened.

For a split second I wondered if she might take umbrage. You stumble over racism in the least expected places, but these days it's so rare, one tends to speak unguardedly. I needn't have worried.

Blue-green eyes sparkled. “I hadn't thought of that. Gives me another line of inquiry -- and I know just who to talk to.” She finished the drink and hopped off the stool. “You staying in town?”

“At the motel.” I gestured along past the shops and the historic railway exhibit. “I'm doing routine water sampling, so I'll be here a few days.”

Milang Station, end of an extinct line and now a standing exhibit. In winter or early spring it's green.

“I'll catch up with you,” she promised.

And she did. On Tuesday I heard my name called in strident tones as I stepped out of the general store with a tall coffee. “Hey, you came up with something,” I hazarded -- an easy guess, going by the big smiles.

“I talked to a retired priest, old as God, lives halfway to Strathalbyn. Father Pat remembers local Campbells in the '30s and '40s. He says they moved across the lakes before I was born. They live in some place called Raukkan. D'you know it? How d'you get there from here?”

I knew it quite well: a quiet little place on the far shore of Lake Alexandrina, in the Narrung region. “It's quite a drive,” I told her, “but the roads are good and it's pretty country.”

“No bus?” she asked hopefully.

“No bus. What's wrong with your car?”

“On the fritz. I did the rent-a-wreck thing, and I'm regretting it -- don't think I want to to take off for the wilderness in that thing.”

“Not quite the wilderness,” I chuckled, “but...” I glanced at my watch. “What the hell? Grab your bags and kick in twenty for petrol, and we're outta here.”

We were on the road minutes later. She was installed in rooms behind the Landseer building, and ran back for her bag and camera. My Land Cruiser was beat up but utterly reliable, and I pointed it at Langhorne, Wellington and, far off, Narrung, without a qualm.

The Narrung road -- in November, almost summer. Far side of Lake Alexandrina.

Good weather, chicken salad rolls and a lot of Johnny Cash passed the time. It's beautiful country: gentle hills, vast skies, and the further out you get, the better I like it. Peace and quiet settle over the land, giving a tenuous impression of how it might have been before Europeans intruded.

Narrung car ferry.

We waited for the Narrung ferry and then, just after noon, I stopped a few meters short of the town boundary. The stone gateway is marked Raukkan on one side, Nguldi Arndu on the other. 

It's an indigenous town: laid back, quiet, isolated, single storey building line, houses sprawled wide because there's elbow room aplenty -- fronting onto the vast blue expanse of the lake.

Jo read the roadside infoboards, shaded her eyes with one hand and wondered, 

 “How would I find a guy called Uncle Ben Campbell?”

Gateway to the town of Raukkan.

“Try the post office,” I suggested. “They'll definitely know where he lives. They won't hand out his address, but they can send a message. If he wants to meet, he'll be here.”

She peered back at the infoboard. “Post office...”

“Straight ahead on your right, past the clinic.” I pointed. “Look, I'll stay in the car. This is a family affair. You're the Campbells, I'm just the transportation.”

I watched her walk on into town and listened to quiet so profound, a warbling magpie seemed unpardonably loud. You don't hear such quiet in any city. I find it as humbling as it's pacifying … for a moment one realizes how infinitesimal humans are, lost in infinities of space we can't even visualize, much less comprehend.

Six assorted kids chased a soccer ball down the street; a crow called from the roof of the sandstone hall with the smart new galvanized roof; a flight of pelicans went gliding between Lakes Albert and Alexandrina, right over my head, white against the blue.

In fifteen minutes Jo jogged back up the road with a cautious smile and the wind in the copper-and-silver hair. “I'm invited to the drop-in centre for tea. Wanna be my 'plus one'?”

“For tea? Sure.” I was parched.

The drop-in centre is right by the old post office, facing the park. The kids were playing footy there now -- Aussie rules with a soccer ball, and a great time being had by all. Kids don't change, the world over; it's adults who write the rules, then break them every chance they get and make trouble. Jo and I settled in a corner of the centre, which was almost deserted at this hour. The chance to get out of the sun was welcome, and no cuppa tastes better than the one you didn't make yourself.

We waited half an hour for Ben Campell, and I held my breath, hoping for Jo's sake. She'd told me a little of her own story, and I knew she was the last of her clan from North America. The name disappeared when the daughters scattered across the globe with their husbands; after the world wars, only her father, another Jamie, remained to perpetuate the name. He passed away, leaving Jo the only surviving Campbell -- the last of her line who identified as Campbell. She'd lost touch with the distant cousins in Ontario, New Zealand, Illinois. One erstwhile Campbell daughter was said to be back in Scotland, but with the name gone and the bloodline diluted, they were difficult to find and seemed reluctant to correspond.

So here were the last actual Campbells descended from the intrepid Gordon and Donald. One was a six-foot, sturdy American; the other stepped in out of the sun, and I crossed my fingers. Ben Campbell was close to full-blood Ngarrindjeri. I stepped back, not wanting to be in the way. Someone at the post office had sent a coherent message, and Raukkan's surviving Campbell was as curious as the one from Portland, Oregon.

He was over eighty, but straight-backed, thin and wiry, with snowy hair and beard -- in bluejeans, sweatshirt, sneakers, the uniform of every generation. Ben studied Jo from under a white bush of brows. Dark eyes took her apart, limb from limb, and put her back together. I guess he recognized a fellow Campbell, because he brought out his wallet and produced an ancient photograph.

“Oh, my,” Jo whispered, and dug though her bag.

The two photos sat side by side on the table between the empty cups. Hers was a recent copy, faithfully reproducing every crease and scratch. His was old, fragile, printed on card, the original sepia, no hint of gloss. The same photo.

They pulled up chairs, sent for more tea and talked. They'd talk for hours, but I stayed just long enough to learn that Gordon married the local girl and fought with the family back home over it. He never had the chance to mention Maggie was Ngarrindjeri -- which could have been an issue a century ago -- because he'd originally promised to wait for his childhood sweetheart to arrive out here … both families back home were too furious to acknowledge another letter. A fire reduced his property to scorched earth in 1916, so he worked on a station between Clayton and Finiss until '24, and retired to Poltaloch, across the lake. His boy, Donald, married a full-blood Ngarrindjeri lass and had one surviving son to carry on the family name.

Benjamin was still alive and well, and living in Raukkan.

Jo and Ben had so much to talk about. They'd both forgotten me,so I wrote my name and number on a postcard and left it with the girl at the counter. If I was needed, they'd call.

With a smile I stepped back into the sun, hands in pockets, contemplating the drive back to Milang in the growing afternoon shadows.

oOoooOoooOo

This is fiction, though it's set in real places and the story is so perfectly possible, I'd actually be surprised if something similar hasn't happened. Maybe a Canadian tracking down Irish ancestors. 

Dave and I went right around Lake Alexandrina on my 2015 "birthday trip" -- that is, an overnight getaway, where we'll stay at the Milang Lakes motel on Saturday night, and be able to go further the next day, before turning for home. 

Here we are parked beside the infoboard described above -- the town gate is just out of frame to the right...

And here's the left-side poster you see in the little shelter there -- a kind of tourist guide to the Narrung and Corrong regions. (The image is uploaded at full size and is perfectly readable.) 

It's a gorgeous part of the world, one of my favorites. If you're interested, there's more about Milang, the Lakes District and so forth, on my old travel blog, Meander to the Max. I'm remembering four or five posts featuring Milang, so -- browse around, you'll find them.

(Dang, I need to do some work on the travel blog. There's about another 50 posts I need to make, without delay. More. Must set aside an hour or two here and there, and see what I can do.) 

Essay: A Milestone

There's a first time for everything, and although I've been published several times, and also at professional level, appearing in a very major magazine with full-on distribution is -- to me! -- an achievement, and a thrill. The contributor's copies of ANALOG Jan/Feb 2022 arrived yesterday, and how sweet it was to have it in my hand and chart this moment. The first step on a road which, I hope, will lead eventually to me marking a day, when I'm cradling a novel in both hands and making another milestone!

I did report the date when ANALOG accepted the story (before the launch of this blog, so it was marked on my personal blog, here on Dec 20, 2020); and  also posted my news when the issue was released a couple of weeks ago (here) -- but this is quite different. Actually having the magazine in my hands makes it ... real. 

It's also an inspiration to me, to be creative, keep driving forward. I do have stories to tell, and if one is completely honest, it can be a lot of fun telling them. I'd also like to write about writing, and in coming weeks and months I'll indulge myself here; but not at the moment when, after an absence of months, the muse has finally deigned to whisper into my ear. I'm hoping to complete a third story in as many weeks.

Updating this a little while later -- let's call that four stories in four weeks, and am about to start another! Eden Can Wait worked out well, though it came in at about twice the length I'd hoped for (about 10k, which will certainly make it harder to sell). However, A Marriage of Inconvenience came in at 3.5k, as did Dust Gets in Your Eyes, and from what I've come to understand about short story writing, this is close to the perfect length ... at least as far as editors understand it! 

Writers might have a different view. For myself, I find it very much more difficult writing a coherent short story than writing a novel. This might sound odd, given that there's twenty times more work (no exaggeration) in a novel than in a short story, but trying to cut a story to fit into a 2,000 - 10,000 word window is ... agony. It's pure torture, which simply means I'm not a natural short story writer. Right. 

Still, one perseveres -- and its also true that some story ideas will actually fall apart if they're treated at greater length. In fact, the story I'm about to write this afternoon is one of these ... so, time to get busy!

Poem: How the Garden Sings

Silver morning sky,

Soft rain, cool upon my face --

How the garden sings!

In South Australia, rain comes so seldom amid summer's ferocious heat, when it happens -- it's worth celebrating the event with a "bookmark in memory." This is our second consecutive La Nina summer, and while some parts of the country are ablaze, just for a short time ... the garden sang.

North Wind (Thinking through my fingertips)

Not quite a resolution, but I've made the decision to not let really neat ideas just escape. When something springs to mind that has potential, I'll write the story flash-fashion, if nothing else, and come back to it later, perhaps years later. I've lost hundreds of ideas which were filled with potential, so let's stop that! Here we go...

North Wind 

(Thinking through my fingertips)

In Feynafell, high in the Alcaus Mountains, where barren foothills fall away into mist and great peaks loom like the pavilions of a regiment of wargods on the horizon, the story of Bragutai is still told. His name means North Wind, and his bloodline can be traced through many generations of the royal house’s greatest racers  —  but the claims he was bred in the king’s stable are false.

Bragutai was wild born, in the years when Eldric, Prince of the Feyn, still tried in vain to grow a man’s beard — when his sister, Zamarah, grew taller, shot straighter, swung an axe truer than their father’s favourite. It was Zamarah, not Eldric, who found Bragutai, no more than a bundle of bony legs, shivering beside his mother’s body when snows returned, far too late in the season … Zamarah who carried him home, fed him with her own hands, nurtured him, until he grew taller, stronger than the sires of the king’s best racers.

Save for custom, she would have ridden him to war, but the traditions of a hundred generations of the Feyn forbade girls to bear arms in battle. Many years of war had taught them that young women are the key to the future of any people, and must be shielded, not squandered, at least until their duty to the people is done, and the next generation half-grown to replace them.

So, it fell to Eldric to bear King Andregar’s colours into battle against the seething hoards of the Veru, savage tribes from the west who poured across the hills like tidal waves and offered no quarter. By now a young man, Eldric carried his father’s sword: time had caught up Andregar, leaving the old king trembling in his limbs, wandering in his thoughts, so frail that Princess Zamarah sat in his place upon the Kestrel Throne of the Feyn, and the chieftains took her counsel.

Two things only could Zamarah do for her brother, as he girded on his swords and laced his armour. She gave to him Olnar, the storm witch whose family — for their poverty and debt — were indentured to the Feyn royal house a decade before the boy’s birth. Olnar grew up with the gift of Sight. Wasted in the olive groves and kitchens, he spent his youth at the feet of Feynafell’s greatest mages, mastering every skerrick of magic they could teach while he learned how to command his gift, lest it destroy him as wildfire races through the forest.

And on the eve before battle, Zamarah sent for Eldric, and into his hand placed Bragutai’s halter. She trusted no horse before him. Twice, he saved her life when she was still only a girl — fought and defeated a mountain krall with fangs like scythes, and carried the young princess through a brawling river, when the bridge on the Tane collapsed. No magic or prayer could keep Eldric off the battlefield, for the Veru were starving at winter's end, as always. The instinct for survival spurred them east into gentler, more fecund lands than their own. But if any force could bring Eldric home, Zamarah placed her faith not in her father’s careless gods, who seemed deaf even to the entreaties of their own priests, but in Bragutai.

She watched from the revetment above Feynafell until her people’s battle colours faded from sight. Everything she held most dear marched beneath those banners, and she would receive no word until couriers raced home with news. Only Olnar could send messages, and then merely through the wyrd dreams which haunted Zamarah through the late spring and into the summer…

The winds swung southeast and warmed; spring rain fell as the new year’s crops were seeded; new foals romped and kicked in the paddocks where Andregar’s best stock were bred. She watched Bragutai’s progeny born in those months, while she fretted through the nights, her dreams filled with images of battle, hardship, danger and the longing for home. She might have wondered which dreams were Olnar’s and which were pure fancy, but instinct always told her the truth.

She knew when the Feynafell regiments were routed and sent scrambling for cover among the passes; she saw when fire overtook their supply column, and men went hungry while they cut the dogs loose to hunt for themselves and the horses made do with the high hills’ sparse graze. Zamarah knew when a spearpoint found Olnar’s leg, and he thrashed for days in delirium, wondering if it would be gone when he woke — and she also glimpsed the battle when the Feynaell regiment overrode the Veru, drove them northwest. They fell back, broken for the season just as the caribou returned to their hills and the hunting paths opened.

But Olnar had warned many times, victory would not be won without great cost; the butcher’s bill must be paid. The last battle soon shattered into a desperate scramble for the high ground, and though Eldric’s lieutenants — the chieftains Gareth and Weyland — wrought victory out of chaos, Eldric found himself cut off from the regiment. Wounded, he beat a path through crags and high timber where the Veru and the sickle-fanged krall could smell blood on the air.

Messages of victory sped to Feynafell with regimental couriers, ahead of the wagons bearing the wounded, but the force remained in the north, searching the passes for Eldric. In a week, even Gareth and Weyland gave him up for dead. Only Olnar continued to swear that Eldric lived and was at liberty, though even he could not find the prince in the tangle of rock and heather, where the high hills became the low slopes of the Alcaus Mountains.

In a month, only a token force remained at Trolldance Rocks, and that because Olnar refused to leave. The young witch wrote to Zamarah, swearing on his gods that he could feel Eldric in the wild. Placing her faith in her childhood friend, and with the Veru danger spent now, Zamarah took a party of scouts and lancers and hurried north from Feynafell.

At sunset, when the krall began to wail over the high valleys, they came upon the camp in the wind-shadow of the high granite outcrop known as Trolldance Rocks. Olnar’s wound had healed well enough for him to ride, and at dawn they went out, following his fey instincts … but it was Bragutai who brought Eldric back — both of them wounded, at the end of their strength.

Eldric would recover, with the finest surgeons the old king could provide, but Bragutai’s race was run, and the horse knew it. He had become a legend already, and would never be forgotten — the people of Feynafell tell his story still. Zamarah sang his elegy as he was honoured the way all great horses are: his head, his heart and his hooves were buried deep, where the krall would not find them, among purple heather on a wild hillside not a mile from where he was born.

***

This feels to me as if it would make an excellent YA high fantasy novel, aimed at all people but 65% at girls. I might come back to this, when time permits, and write it. 

Announcement: The Way Back is published in ANALOG Jan - Feb 2022

 

Brilliant news: The Way Back has been published  in the January - February 2022 issue of ANALOG. This is a great thrill for me, since I've been reading this magazine for decades, and it's the SF market leader.

Here's the link to the current issue ... please note that after February 2022, this link won't work: it's specifically for the current issue. Newsstand magazines really are "ephemera;" when they're off the stands, no longer current, one falls back on used copies, which change hands on eBay, Amazon and so forth. And for those, I can't provide a link. Alas, the ANALOG site has no store where you can buy specific back issues. They sell subscriptions, not copies, and the same is true of Amazon. If you're ordering before the end of February, 2022, however, that sub should include the issue in which The Way Back appears. 

Get this issue on Amazon

Announcement: Vector is online, at Dark Recesses Press

 

I'm rather late with this announcement ... Christmas, New Year, the holiday season, the hot Aussie summer -- blame one and all. But, somewhat belatedly, it's my great pleasure to announce that Vector has gone online at Dark Recesses Press ...

And here is the link!

It's an offbeat little tale of a cat, a litterbox, a new brand of cat-litter, and something perfectly ghastly afoot. A five minute quick-read, and if you enjoy a shiver...

Review: Sailing to Byzantium

Still enjoying some of Science Fiction's classics, I'm re-reading Robert Silverberg's award winner, and enjoying it again, after all these years, though it raises some questions, at least in my mind...

Some novellas deserve to be full novels, and Sailing to Byzantium is one of them. Robert Silverberg wrote this cross-genre jewel -- a mix of SF, fantasy, time travel, romance and mystery -- in 1984 and, deservedly, it won the Nebula Award. 

In fact, the real mystery is why it hasn’t been filmed long before now, because it has the makings of a gloriously visual movie, especially in this age of CG effects, when the spectacular visuals (laid out in a narrative that must have been mind-bending in its day) can be brought to life in 3D.

The other mystery, equally confounding,  is why Silverberg took an immense story that touches on so many subjects, and invested only a novella’s length in it. The plot is simple enough, to be sure; but the world he explores in a scant 40k words remains arresting almost forty years since the Hugo and Nebula were awarded. A novella, for this story? One wonders ... why?!

In the fiftieth century, the world as we know it is gone (no surprise there), and the homogenized descendants of humanity are a comparative handful of functional immortals: physically perfect, they are masters of a magical technology which enables them to live as what one can only term ‘eternal tourists,‘ forever traveling from one fantastic city to another. 

The rub is this: every city is a recreation of one of history’s great metropolises, raised from dust by legions of machines, permitted to exist for a short time then demolished, no doubt to be cannibalized for the materials to build another. 

All the great cities of history are being recreated, five at a time (the limit is firmly imposed, no reason given, but one can hypothesize about the availability of materials, or the machinery that makes it all go). And the immortal citizens of the fiftieth century simply travel, party, enjoy, socialize, and generally have a great time among the grandeur and the teeming populations of ‘temporaries,’ who appear to be androids, possibly even hard-light holograms, all of them whisked into existence to complete the illusion of Alexandria, or Chang-An, or Constantinople itself.

Only a tiny percentage of the human population don’t enjoy the eternal lifestyle. One in a thousand, or perhaps ten thousand, still grow old. After an extended youth, when the aging comes upon them, they age rapidly. Such is Gioia, the lovely young thing with whom Charles Phillips falls in love. And Charles himself is the other, and even rarer, anomaly. 

He’s a ‘visitor’ in the future: synthetic body and mind, machine-designed and built to bring the past to vibrant life for the entertainment (and perhaps the education) of the citizens, who -- by our standards -- often seem callow, and occasionally even moronic.

Charles isn’t the only visitor, but there’s barely a handful like him, constructs drawn from whatever century. Being synthetic, he’s a misfit, greater than the ‘temporaries’ but lesser than the citizens. Gioia is drawn to him as like is drawn to like: she also is a misfit, doomed to age with an incurable genetic condition. 

When the rapid aging begins she flees, and as Charles literally pursues her around the world, city to city, he discovers what he is. Not a twentieth century man at all; not even a naturally-born human … something more, he decides, not less. Being synthetic, he's as timeless as the physically perfect (and intellectually somewhat dense) citizens; but what of Gioia, who is aging alarmingly. What can be done for her, amid this kaleidoscope of incredible technology?

The prose is stylish and rich and the world building tantalizing. If Sailing to Byzantium were double or triple the length, properly fleshed out and with the panoply of amazing concepts fully explored, it would make a novel today’s reader would deem awesome. At 40k words, it seems oddly abbreviated, in places thin to the point of anorexia. Silverberg has remarked on how the novella is a format he likes a great deal, and he clearly had a fine time here. But the material demanded, and deserved more.

Nebula and Hugo Awards notwithstanding, and as much as I adore Robert Silverberg, I want to give Sailing four stars rather than five, because it surely needed more growth, more investment, just more, to work truly brilliantly. It might have read better in 1984. Current readers -- in this age of hundred-episode sagas on tv and book series running many thousands of pages -- are seldom satisfied when thematic material is underdone. Sailing has a ‘rare’ quality, perfect on the outside but a tad too pink in the middle to suit all tastes. Which isn’t to say I don’t love this story -- I do! But my imagination runs away on flights of creative fantasy, filling in the blanks and building the sumptuous, thick novel I wish Robert Silverberg has written.