Original story.
Sep. 2nd, 2012 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silver_sunOkay, so anybody on my flist in unlikely to be unaware that I spent August taking part in Camp NaNoWriMo - as it was pretty much all I posted about for the whole month.
So here is an edited (although probably not final) version of the first 1900 words of the story.
I would say ratings wise if this was a TV show it would be around about a pg13 to 15. If anybody on my flist is familiar with TV series like Sharpe or Hornblower I'm aiming for a similar sort of level.
The 57th Jondheim light infantry marched to the beat of a solitary drum, their grey and red uniforms faded after long months in the hot Sithian sun. The heat shimmered off the dusty white limestone outcrops that stood on either side of the narrow mountain track, while the sun shone down relentlessly from the cloudless late summer sky.
Behind the column of thirty men followed the cargo convoy that they were escorting back to the fort at Timballie. The four large, cumbersome wagons each pulled by a pair of heavy draught horses lurched slowly on the uneven, friable surface as, with axles grinding, they climbed higher up the mountainous road.
Standing on one of the taller rocky outcrops, Lieutenant Jago Sarpedon, watched the painfully slow progress of his men as they toiled on towards the Arram pass and the road down to the fort at Timballie in the foothills. He’d hoped to see an end in sight to the relentless climb, but the road appeared to continue to rise for at least another two miles before finally levelling out.
Sweat ran down his face to soak into the already wet collar of his heavy, dust covered uniform jacket. Sighing, he took off his hat and dragged his fingers through his thick sandy coloured hair causing it to stick out wildly. He'd be damn glad when they finally reached Timballie.
Hopefully he'd get a few weeks of barrack life and the opportunity to frequent the tavern and bordello that had opened there in the six months following the arrival of the five hundred men that formed half of the 57th Jondheim light infantry. The other half had remained stationed in Avronia, resting up after a long tour of duty in the Ring Way Islands.
The presence of the Avronian army in Sitherand was damn strange in itself to him. Avronia was not at war with Sitherand, nor were they defending it from an outside aggressor. Rather, they were there because Queen Betya of Avronia had agreed to the request from her sister, the dowager Queen Elenia of Sitherand, for extra military support against a possibly uprising by her own people.
There hadn't been any signs of revolution or discontent that Sarpedon had seen so far. Although since he had been stationed in Timballie, where the Avronian army made up ninety percent of the people he came into daily contact with, perhaps it wasn’t that surprising.
The decision to send troops hadn’t been an entirely selfless one on Betya’s part, as it gave something for the not inconsiderably sized Avronia army to do. With the loss of Prethia as a crown dependency just a few years earlier and its subsequent formation into the Prethian Free State, and trouble along the Thaabian and Kondysian borders at an all time low there had been calls to reduce military budget. Even without those calls, having thousands of bored and idle soldiers waiting in over crowded garrisons was a potential source of unrest and altercation at home.
A shout followed by a string of curses snapped him back to the immediate situation just in time to see the rear most of the wagons lurch and then begin to roll backwards down the steep incline. The shuddering backward roll halted suddenly as the rear wheel that was nearest the edge of the road dipped into a rut. Then with a creak and crack the wheel splintered and the wagon topped over, the weight on it pulling it over the side of the precipice that ran along the side of the track.
Slipping and sliding on the loose stones, Sarpedon ran back down the slope and along the side of the column of men, calling on them to halt as he did so. He passed where the other three wagons had halted and then stopped as he tried to take stock of the damage than had been done.
The two wagoners who’d been driving the wagon were just picking themselves up off the ground from where they had thrown themselves clear before it had gone over the edge. While on the slope below them there was the shrill screams of the injured horses, while all around the animal's broken bodies and the ruined wagon lay the scattered cargo of Solidagan rifles.
“Damn it,” Sarpedon swore quietly, then asked Sargent Terris who had hurried back down the length of the column, “What the bloody hell happened?”
Sargent Terris, stocky man in his late thirties, grabbed the bridle of one of the horses on the nearest wagon and trying to steady before he replied, “I’m not sure, sir.” Looking back at the soldiers, who were still standing in line, he yelled, “Private Perrin get you skinny arse over here and take this horse off me. You know what to do with them.”
Private Perrin, a short, thin lad of about sixteen or seventeen with raggedly cut ginger hair, hurried over to them, although he slowed a little as he approached the horses.
Terris passed the reins to Perrin, then nodded towards one of the other wagoners who was trying to get the their horses and loads moved off to a safe distance replied. “Well go and help them, lad.”
Sergeant Terris turned back to Sarpedon. “I think you’d be best asking him, sir. If you want to know what happened.” He points to the dazed and rather bloody wagon driver who's sat at the edge of the track staring at the scene of carnage below with a look of horrified disbelief on his face.
“Very well, Sergeant. You get the men organised to get those rifles back up here sharpish.”
“Will do, sir,” Terris said with a salute. He turned to the men. “All right, lads, let’s get this show on the road.”
“Well?” Sarpedon asked as he walked over to the leader driver of the crashed wagon. “What just happened?”
The man looked up at him with a blank expression before answering, “One of the wheel bracers went.” He took a slightly shaky breath, then continued “The horses tried to hold it, sir, they really did.” He looked down at the injured horses, before turning away, tears in his eyes.
It could have been worse, Sarpedon thought grimly, it could have been the powder wagon that went over. Carrying the best part of a 500lb of fine black powder as its cargo it would have likely caused half the road to be blown away and taking most of them with it. It was no comfort though.
“How much can we salvage?” he asked as he indicated the wreckage with a nod of his head to Sergeant Terris who had rejoined him after lining up two dozen of the men ready with ropes to climb down the slope to the wagon.
One of the horses shrilled again and kicked spasmodically in the tangled traces of the wagon, although one of its legs, which was twisted at an unnatural angle, remained still. The other horse was silent, death rapidly over taking it.
Sarpedon felt bile rise in his throat. There was nothing to be done for the animal but to end its suffering. He unslung his rifle from his shoulder and then nodded to Sergeant Terris to do the same.
Powder, ball and wadding, it was automatic to him now after so many years in the military. Lifting it to his shoulder, he took aim - winging the animal and leaving it in more pain while he reloaded was not an option - and fired.
******
An hour later, Sarpedon was supervising the retrieval of as many of the unbroken or still repairable guns as possible.
Without any more senior ranked officers there to tell him differently, Sarpedon had stripped off his uniform jacket, rolled up his shirt sleeves and had scrambled down the slope to the wagon with some of the men to begin the retrieval.
Old habits picked up in the first mercenary unit he'd served in where their commander, the self styled 'Captain' Buck Corson, had did everything his men had, had stayed with Sarpedon, despite those high up in the Avronian military telling him it was unnecessary or even counter productive.
Few of the men under his command now had been with him since his mercenary days, but even those that hadn't had got used to his rather unorthodox ways. Sarpedon knew they saw him as a little eccentric in the way they saw the Major Bellon who was in charge of the garrison at Timballie as eccentric; Bellon, with his penchant for books and a gaggle of floppy eared spaniels that followed him everywhere, even to meetings with Generals.
It was at times like this though that he missed the simpler command structure of the mercenary unit, where often all there was were men, Sergeants and Captains. Corson's Rangers, as they had been known, had grown to such a size that Lieutenants had been necessary as well. But it had still been a simpler life, with more scope for promotion and for plunder, if a man was that way so inclined.
Sometimes Sarpedon was sure it was the worse day’s work Queen Betya did was to commission whole scale all the mercenary units attached to the main regiments and make them into soldiers of the Avronian army. Especially as there hadn't been a combat related need to have done so at the time – although the war of independence with the Prethian Free State had soon put pay to that shortly afterwards.
His commissioning into the Avronian Army and the 57th Jondheim Light Infantry had been the best part of ten years ago. He'd been a newly promoted Lieutenant then, barely twenty two years old, and hungry for further adventure. But since then there hadn't been even a sniff of a bloody promotion, he thought grimly, and as far as he could tell it had been the same for most of the other men who had been signed over. A few rankers had made sergeant, but that was the extent of it.
No, the mercenary officers had been passed over in favour of up and coming nobles, men promoted because of their fathers’ statuses, rather than their ability in the field. It galled him that it the army could operate like that, although by all accounts the Navy was worse in his rigid adherence to rank being dictated by class. Not that it made it any better.
It made him want to turn his back on the army sometimes, to resign his commission and either join a mercenary unit based in somewhere like Corris or set up his own free company. Yet he’d never got further than entertaining it as an idle thought. Joining a foreign unit would do him little good in terms of promotion – they would favour their own countrymen over some outsider and he didn’t have the amount of money needed to finance his own company, nor did he didn’t have the sort of reputation that would get him a wealthy benefactor who’d stump up the gold required.
Even if he didn’t want to admit it to himself, he was secretly becoming resigned to the fact that he would live out his army days as a Lieutenant, probably becoming a distant eyed quartermaster in some backwater supply depot with his head full of past glories.
This is the first time any of this setting has been posted anywhere, despite being around in one form or another since about 1996 (When it was more a traditional medieval type setting).
So if anybody wants to read it and tell me what they think of it they can. The main thing is, is it too heavy or too light on the descriptions of people/setting/actions?
So here is an edited (although probably not final) version of the first 1900 words of the story.
I would say ratings wise if this was a TV show it would be around about a pg13 to 15. If anybody on my flist is familiar with TV series like Sharpe or Hornblower I'm aiming for a similar sort of level.
The 57th Jondheim light infantry marched to the beat of a solitary drum, their grey and red uniforms faded after long months in the hot Sithian sun. The heat shimmered off the dusty white limestone outcrops that stood on either side of the narrow mountain track, while the sun shone down relentlessly from the cloudless late summer sky.
Behind the column of thirty men followed the cargo convoy that they were escorting back to the fort at Timballie. The four large, cumbersome wagons each pulled by a pair of heavy draught horses lurched slowly on the uneven, friable surface as, with axles grinding, they climbed higher up the mountainous road.
Standing on one of the taller rocky outcrops, Lieutenant Jago Sarpedon, watched the painfully slow progress of his men as they toiled on towards the Arram pass and the road down to the fort at Timballie in the foothills. He’d hoped to see an end in sight to the relentless climb, but the road appeared to continue to rise for at least another two miles before finally levelling out.
Sweat ran down his face to soak into the already wet collar of his heavy, dust covered uniform jacket. Sighing, he took off his hat and dragged his fingers through his thick sandy coloured hair causing it to stick out wildly. He'd be damn glad when they finally reached Timballie.
Hopefully he'd get a few weeks of barrack life and the opportunity to frequent the tavern and bordello that had opened there in the six months following the arrival of the five hundred men that formed half of the 57th Jondheim light infantry. The other half had remained stationed in Avronia, resting up after a long tour of duty in the Ring Way Islands.
The presence of the Avronian army in Sitherand was damn strange in itself to him. Avronia was not at war with Sitherand, nor were they defending it from an outside aggressor. Rather, they were there because Queen Betya of Avronia had agreed to the request from her sister, the dowager Queen Elenia of Sitherand, for extra military support against a possibly uprising by her own people.
There hadn't been any signs of revolution or discontent that Sarpedon had seen so far. Although since he had been stationed in Timballie, where the Avronian army made up ninety percent of the people he came into daily contact with, perhaps it wasn’t that surprising.
The decision to send troops hadn’t been an entirely selfless one on Betya’s part, as it gave something for the not inconsiderably sized Avronia army to do. With the loss of Prethia as a crown dependency just a few years earlier and its subsequent formation into the Prethian Free State, and trouble along the Thaabian and Kondysian borders at an all time low there had been calls to reduce military budget. Even without those calls, having thousands of bored and idle soldiers waiting in over crowded garrisons was a potential source of unrest and altercation at home.
A shout followed by a string of curses snapped him back to the immediate situation just in time to see the rear most of the wagons lurch and then begin to roll backwards down the steep incline. The shuddering backward roll halted suddenly as the rear wheel that was nearest the edge of the road dipped into a rut. Then with a creak and crack the wheel splintered and the wagon topped over, the weight on it pulling it over the side of the precipice that ran along the side of the track.
Slipping and sliding on the loose stones, Sarpedon ran back down the slope and along the side of the column of men, calling on them to halt as he did so. He passed where the other three wagons had halted and then stopped as he tried to take stock of the damage than had been done.
The two wagoners who’d been driving the wagon were just picking themselves up off the ground from where they had thrown themselves clear before it had gone over the edge. While on the slope below them there was the shrill screams of the injured horses, while all around the animal's broken bodies and the ruined wagon lay the scattered cargo of Solidagan rifles.
“Damn it,” Sarpedon swore quietly, then asked Sargent Terris who had hurried back down the length of the column, “What the bloody hell happened?”
Sargent Terris, stocky man in his late thirties, grabbed the bridle of one of the horses on the nearest wagon and trying to steady before he replied, “I’m not sure, sir.” Looking back at the soldiers, who were still standing in line, he yelled, “Private Perrin get you skinny arse over here and take this horse off me. You know what to do with them.”
Private Perrin, a short, thin lad of about sixteen or seventeen with raggedly cut ginger hair, hurried over to them, although he slowed a little as he approached the horses.
Terris passed the reins to Perrin, then nodded towards one of the other wagoners who was trying to get the their horses and loads moved off to a safe distance replied. “Well go and help them, lad.”
Sergeant Terris turned back to Sarpedon. “I think you’d be best asking him, sir. If you want to know what happened.” He points to the dazed and rather bloody wagon driver who's sat at the edge of the track staring at the scene of carnage below with a look of horrified disbelief on his face.
“Very well, Sergeant. You get the men organised to get those rifles back up here sharpish.”
“Will do, sir,” Terris said with a salute. He turned to the men. “All right, lads, let’s get this show on the road.”
“Well?” Sarpedon asked as he walked over to the leader driver of the crashed wagon. “What just happened?”
The man looked up at him with a blank expression before answering, “One of the wheel bracers went.” He took a slightly shaky breath, then continued “The horses tried to hold it, sir, they really did.” He looked down at the injured horses, before turning away, tears in his eyes.
It could have been worse, Sarpedon thought grimly, it could have been the powder wagon that went over. Carrying the best part of a 500lb of fine black powder as its cargo it would have likely caused half the road to be blown away and taking most of them with it. It was no comfort though.
“How much can we salvage?” he asked as he indicated the wreckage with a nod of his head to Sergeant Terris who had rejoined him after lining up two dozen of the men ready with ropes to climb down the slope to the wagon.
One of the horses shrilled again and kicked spasmodically in the tangled traces of the wagon, although one of its legs, which was twisted at an unnatural angle, remained still. The other horse was silent, death rapidly over taking it.
Sarpedon felt bile rise in his throat. There was nothing to be done for the animal but to end its suffering. He unslung his rifle from his shoulder and then nodded to Sergeant Terris to do the same.
Powder, ball and wadding, it was automatic to him now after so many years in the military. Lifting it to his shoulder, he took aim - winging the animal and leaving it in more pain while he reloaded was not an option - and fired.
******
An hour later, Sarpedon was supervising the retrieval of as many of the unbroken or still repairable guns as possible.
Without any more senior ranked officers there to tell him differently, Sarpedon had stripped off his uniform jacket, rolled up his shirt sleeves and had scrambled down the slope to the wagon with some of the men to begin the retrieval.
Old habits picked up in the first mercenary unit he'd served in where their commander, the self styled 'Captain' Buck Corson, had did everything his men had, had stayed with Sarpedon, despite those high up in the Avronian military telling him it was unnecessary or even counter productive.
Few of the men under his command now had been with him since his mercenary days, but even those that hadn't had got used to his rather unorthodox ways. Sarpedon knew they saw him as a little eccentric in the way they saw the Major Bellon who was in charge of the garrison at Timballie as eccentric; Bellon, with his penchant for books and a gaggle of floppy eared spaniels that followed him everywhere, even to meetings with Generals.
It was at times like this though that he missed the simpler command structure of the mercenary unit, where often all there was were men, Sergeants and Captains. Corson's Rangers, as they had been known, had grown to such a size that Lieutenants had been necessary as well. But it had still been a simpler life, with more scope for promotion and for plunder, if a man was that way so inclined.
Sometimes Sarpedon was sure it was the worse day’s work Queen Betya did was to commission whole scale all the mercenary units attached to the main regiments and make them into soldiers of the Avronian army. Especially as there hadn't been a combat related need to have done so at the time – although the war of independence with the Prethian Free State had soon put pay to that shortly afterwards.
His commissioning into the Avronian Army and the 57th Jondheim Light Infantry had been the best part of ten years ago. He'd been a newly promoted Lieutenant then, barely twenty two years old, and hungry for further adventure. But since then there hadn't been even a sniff of a bloody promotion, he thought grimly, and as far as he could tell it had been the same for most of the other men who had been signed over. A few rankers had made sergeant, but that was the extent of it.
No, the mercenary officers had been passed over in favour of up and coming nobles, men promoted because of their fathers’ statuses, rather than their ability in the field. It galled him that it the army could operate like that, although by all accounts the Navy was worse in his rigid adherence to rank being dictated by class. Not that it made it any better.
It made him want to turn his back on the army sometimes, to resign his commission and either join a mercenary unit based in somewhere like Corris or set up his own free company. Yet he’d never got further than entertaining it as an idle thought. Joining a foreign unit would do him little good in terms of promotion – they would favour their own countrymen over some outsider and he didn’t have the amount of money needed to finance his own company, nor did he didn’t have the sort of reputation that would get him a wealthy benefactor who’d stump up the gold required.
Even if he didn’t want to admit it to himself, he was secretly becoming resigned to the fact that he would live out his army days as a Lieutenant, probably becoming a distant eyed quartermaster in some backwater supply depot with his head full of past glories.
This is the first time any of this setting has been posted anywhere, despite being around in one form or another since about 1996 (When it was more a traditional medieval type setting).
So if anybody wants to read it and tell me what they think of it they can. The main thing is, is it too heavy or too light on the descriptions of people/setting/actions?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-09-07 02:39 pm (UTC)Setting - good. Believable, I can picture it, have a feel for the world it's set in. All of that is good.
It isn't however a good start of a novel. Nothing happens in these words. An officer sees a cart go off a cliff and he muses about his life, past and present. This does not feel like the start of the story.
The story should start at the inciting incident. The THING that happens that changes everything and sets Sarpedon on his quest. Everything you have here is background that can be worked into the action later.
Now, if he was having all those musings about mercenary officers being passed over for noble men, while swinging from a tree branch and knocking the head off the bad guy ambushing his commanding officer, the dumbshit nobleman he's thinking of specifically - then it becomes a much more interesting piece of writing.
I hope these comments are of some help.
And come on lurkers. You know you like Silver Sun's fics. Comment on this and help her out. It's really hard transferring to original fic. Feel free to disagree with me. Say what you liked. Say what didn't work for you. It is all helpful for the author.
cheers
McP
no subject
Date: 2012-09-07 09:52 pm (UTC)I know the start is a bit slow, but the story definitely can't start at the event that really changes the situation in Sitherand.
This is because there is a smaller (in scale) event that is equally significant to the plot that has to happen before the story gets to that point.
It might be possible to start it at the smaller event (Which is in the second part I posted here: http://the-silver-sun.livejournal.com/196486.html#cutid1 ) Also Sarpedon isn't actually there when the big event takes place, rather he arrives and has to deal with what has happened and get the news out.
I also don't think that the musings on his lack of promotion could or even should be included in the middle of a combat scene. Partially because in the middle of fighting for his life he'd be more likely to be thinking about how not to get killed (or for the first fight scene in the story 'who the hell are these people') rather than the current unfair state of the army's promotion system. And also because including it at that point is going to get in the way of the flow of the action.
Now, if he was having all those musings about mercenary officers being passed over for noble men, while swinging from a tree branch and knocking the head off the bad guy ambushing his commanding officer, the dumbshit nobleman he's thinking of specifically - then it becomes a much more interesting piece of writing.
I'm not sure that does make it a more interesting piece of writing. What it definitely does give it though is the same done to death formula that's the staple of just about ever cop/action hero etc film or TV series seem to fall back on
So while the musings may or may not work where they are, I think they'd work less well in the middle of an action scene. That said there is a point later where I could actually have him be discussing this with somebody rather than just thinking about it. So that might actually be a better place to have it to.
Thank you again for commenting, and for giving me things to think about with the story, even if the changes I eventually make aren't these ones.