|
 But what of
the men who lived at that time? Were they just the conventional skin-clad savages? I was
also very interested in anthropology. Among ideas that struck home were the much-maligned
theories of Thor Heyerdahl. Whether his specific ideas about oceanic migrations were true,
I couldn’t say; but my interest in ships and sailing told me that a lot more was
possible than armchair-bound professors were insisting.
Our ancestors were at least as bright in their own terms as we are, and capable of
great things even with the most basic technology. If the medieval Welsh and Norwegians
could fish out in the far Atlantic in small boats, and the Polynesians cross the Pacific
in outrigger canoes, why shouldn’t other races have done as much or more? I thought
of the conventional ideas about the settlement of the American continents - that
proto-Native Americans (clumsy word) had strayed along the land bridge between present-day
Siberia and Alaska, perhaps down a narrow corridor that sometimes opened between the
ice-sheets.
That sounded like another armchair idea to me. Far more likely that the Siberians,
whoever they were, had discovered a new land by sea, fishing along the margins of the
glaciers like the Inuit or Cape Dorset, or the Welsh. Even skin-clad primitives could have
achieved as much; but what if they weren’t such primitives? What if there had been
earlier civilizations of men, whose traces had largely been obliterated by time and the
Ice? And from that came the chilling thought of what would have happened to them as it
advanced - and when at long last it melted?
I thought of peoples fleeing the Ice, searching out a new land of plenty - both
settling in this vast new land, with its dark and menacing heart of infinite forests. I
thought of the Native American cultures of the Northwest Coast, with their rich art and
ceremony and religion, mostly peaceful, yet veined with startlingly bloodthirsty ferocity.
What if there were two ancestral forces here? What if the Siberian refugees had met some
other folk, exploring in the opposite direction, a European people long before our own,
but from some of the same ancestral strains? And what if there was a still more ancient
culture, devastated by a previous Ice Age, whose last descendants would be the dying folk
we call Neanderthals?
In thinking about all this the Ice seemed to be so much the enemy, vast and lowering
and implacable, that I almost unconsciously began to cast it as an intelligence in itself
- the intelligence, ancient and hostile. What kind of mind would prefer an
Ice-world, beautiful but bleak and sterile? A mind that hearkened back to the world as it
had been, perhaps, in the long aeons before life appeared; a mind, or minds, whose reason
for existence had been that lifeless world, and now felt it had been usurped. Evil, in
their way; yet not to themselves, not entirely, and understandable. Elder gods, a
pantheon; yet not all gods agree, and in the legends Man has always had his friends,
Prometheus, Coyote, Loki and the other tricksters...
What could they have given men? Fire, certainly; but it would take more, much more.
Maybe that was where our concept of magic came from, an ability that faded as it was no
longer needed; and I remembered how many societies, from the Finns to the Berbers of North
Africa and the kingdom of Benin, and even Britain up to a couple of centuries ago treated
smiths as masters of a mysterious magical art. I was becoming irritated with fantasy books
that treated magic as a matter of waggling the fingers and reciting couplets of mangy
doggerel. Real magic, the magic cultures believe in, is laborious, hard, time-consuming -
something that could be reflected in real processes and techniques of metalworking. Real,
because I believe that reality is fantasy’s most essential ingredient. If you’re
going to have unreal happenings, then the background against which they happen has to be
that much more solid and believable. And, above all, they have to happen to real people -
as real as one can possibly make them, and not just muscle-brained barbarians who are
supposed to be able to wade through deep snow wearing only a fur loincloth.
Into this mix went a million other elements, of which music, both folk and classical,
was one of the most major. Another was the curious coincidences between Norse and Native
American myths, which I thought I was uncovering for myself, only to find that Victorian
scholars had found them already. The more I researched this world of mine, the more it
fascinated me. And I talked about it, with the help of many lunches and much beer, to the
editor who’d bought my first novels, and became one of my best friends, Richard
Evans. He listened with great patience; but all he told me was to wait. Until, as it
turned out, he moved to another company with a bigger budget, and was able to commission
what turned out to be not one novel but three.
Richard launched the Winter of the World on its course, with good advice,
awkward questions and the occasional brickbat, and enjoyed its success. He was eager for
me to continue the series, as were all my other publishers; but I felt I had taken the
original tale to its logical end, and I had no others as good to offer. I didn’t want
to over-extend the series into a soap opera. And so, with the exception of one short
story, Findings, which won a magazine award, the situation remained for nearly
twelve years, while I explored other and rather different imaginary realms. But then,
reading an archaeological article, I had an idea that grew to a tale almost at once,
characters and all, and that fitted exactly within the frame of my icebound world; and
this became The Castle of the Winds - not a sequel but a prequel, set a thousand
years earlier.
Going back to that icy era after so long was a strange experience - like returning to
your childhood home town. Some of the ways looked just the same; others completely
different. Some of them had changed; sometimes I had. There were some places I’d
forgotten, some I’d never explored. In some I’d even set traps for myself. Here
be dragons...
Richard was delighted; but sadly he did not live to read it.
Ideas are like buses. You wait for ages, and then they all come along at once.
Out of The Castle of the Winds and its
characters, even before I’d written it, grew another tale; and beyond that, another
still. Not a trilogy this time, but tales of the Great Winter that illuminate other times
and places in its long history - including some very dark corners, illuminated by flashes
of unexpected heroism. And some of these are already demanding stories of their own -
which I will tell, if they seem good enough, for as long as anyone is interested in
reading them.
But something has begun to worry me lately. Even at the time I was writing, a lot of
new evidence was emerging to worry those armchair experts, and these have vastly
increased. The same academics who were still lambasting Heyerdahl's claims about possible
contact between South America and Polynesia, were having to accept quietly that there
really had been contact the other way, between Polynesia and the NW Coast Indians, proven
by serology and DNA.
Very recently, human bones discovered at Kennewick NJ have proved to be both 10,000
years old and more Caucasian than Native American in type, causing unnecessary insecurity
in some Native American politicians. Settlements are being found in South America that
date back to a time when man was barely supposed to have arrived in the North; and more
recent remains of massive mountain-top citadels, dwarfing Macchu Picchu, built with more
dressed stone than the Pyramids, and with what it is suggested are Middle Eastern designs
and characters.
Links are being found between ancient cultures of the same period, but as far apart as
Siberia, Northern Europe and the Americas - almost as if some wide-ranging culture had
degenerated into savagery, much as I imagined happening. Elaborate burial practices are
among the strongest evidence of this - and the most worrying aspect of all.
Reviving my world is one thing; but what am I going to do if they start digging up my
characters? |
