The God of Rock and Other Short Stories
Two diverse groups of short stories
The God of Rock
The God of Rock is novella composed of interlocking short stories, in which the destinies of a rock guitarist and a fledgling painter become intertwined. Brought together initially by desire, they are parted by life’s circumstance. Through dreams, memories and a long process whereby the ego unravels and allows the soul to lead, the two are eventually reunited many years later.
The Sarmations
This collection also includes The Burial, six tales of the Sarmations, the great horsemen of the steppe, which span from 500 BCE TO 1400 CE. The merger of historiography and archaeology produce a fictional reconstruction of a preliterate people, illuminating the eternal human condition.
Read an excerpt from the God of Rock
One morning the God of Rock woke from a sweet and enchanting dream. He lingered in bed savoring it, and for a moment, he was no longer a man deep into middle age with a furrowed face and an expansive belly but what he had once been. He had not thought about that particular woman for over thirty – five years, and he wondered why now, and why the dream should have made such an impression on him. Though he had lost the details of the dream, its flavor remained, and he kept returning to it all day as he went about his business. He worked in his gardens on the ridge, alongside his gardeners, just the way he imagined that Tolstoy had worked alongside his serfs.
It was good to be in the fresh air and sunlight, and the exercise kept him nimble despite his girth.
What had that woman’s name been? Laura, Lorna, Lola? Not Lola. Hmmm, it escaped him. Over lunch, he wondered how he had met her. She had been a bit older than the young girls who were his special favorites. The one thing he clearly recalled was her room, a heady blend of rugs, pillows and patchouli that recalled the casbah or a Bedouin’s tent. And he remembered a winding road through a canyon, and getting there late in the still cool darkness of night. California, that’s where it had been. But what had he been doing there in the first place?
By dinnertime, he remembered she had invited him into an old fashioned, cavernous kitchen and made lox and cream cheese on a bagel, with onion and capers. He distinctly recalled the blue and white plate she had served it on. Then they had gone outside to look at the stars and taken a bottle of champagne with them. Pink champagne. He went to his wine cellar and drew out a bottle; he had a particular taste for it. Perhaps that night had been the first time he had had it.
His wife, his second, had gone to new York to visit her sister. His children were grown and off on their own. He was a bit lonely and at loose ends. He had a magnificent library, full of first editions, leather chesterfields and silk velvet pillows, yet he did not feel like reading. He thought, perhaps a movie and settled into his screening room after picking Doctor Zhivago. Though he had seen it many times, the beginning always made him a bit teary: the snowstorm, the desolation, the little boy left orphaned and the waxen body of his mother so still in her frozen grave. Halfway through, he remembered the woman, who he now associated with Lara, standing in front of a bay window in the early morning light, watching the sun come up. He had been struck by her strongly muscled body, which was illuminated in the light and had gotten up from under the warmth of fur coverlet and stood behind her, holding her very close. He could stand above that scene now and look at himself as he had been, young and powerful, and even more beautiful than the girl. A terrible ache gripped him in the area between his heart and throat, which he identified with his soul.
He turned off the movie and sat in darkness, crying for no apparent reason, yet he could not stop himself. When he was finished he felt a bit foolish and laughed, but underneath, the sadness remained.
He went to the kitchen, which was bottle green with black and white tiles and put a selection of cheeses on a tray. Presently, he was overcome by the fact that the kitchen, which he had so carefully designed, and which was thought so original, recalled the one in that odd girl’s house. Then he remembered they had not drunk their champagne on the grass but had crawled off a Juliet balcony onto the roof.
It was closer to the stars, she had said.
The Sarmations
The Sarmatians belonged to one of the great horse cultures of the steppe. Though some historians believe they were of Persian stock, their initial appearance on the world scene seems to indicate they emerged from the Altai region, along with their relatives the Scythian and Alans.
They are first mentioned in Herodotus’ sometimes fanciful, The Histories, and primarily noted for their women warriors which are referred to as the Amazons. In the 20th century, however, archeological digs have unearthed much information about Sarmatian and Scythian lifestyles and beliefs.
They were the first knights, their initial armor made from pared horse hooves, giving both warriors and their horses the scaly appearance of dragons, though in subsequent eras their armor was made of chain. They lived on the steppe and were seasonal nomads, traveling with their herds. Later when they moved into Slavic territories they settled in villages. Initially, they seemed to have many traits in common with the Siberian peoples and Northern American Indians: the sweat lodge, hemp smoking, vision quests, shamanism, scalp taking and fine horsemanship.
Judging from their tombs, it seems that Herodotus was correct in his assertion that women had high status in these cultures.
There are six short stories in this collection
The first story, The Burial, is a recreation of the life of a Shamaness, who died circa 500 BCE and was found in one of the Pazyryk burial sites in Altai. Her frozen body and grave were preserved exactly as I have described them within the story.
The second story, Horse Boy, Bee Girl, Bride, describes the mingling of the Sarmatians, who were moving westward on the steppe, with the Slavic people they encountered there. The Sarmatians, following in the wake of the Scythians, became the overlords of the Slavs, though within their own society, they had a rather egalitarian social structure. Their livelihood had always depended on their horse herds, and at that juncture, they added trading and raiding in the lands to the south to their repertoire.
Moving through time, the third story, The Contest, where I have presented the games which the reader will recognize from the medieval West (brought to France by the related Alans and common to the Cossacks, who continued age old traditions), takes place in the period when the Huns and other tribes were pushing the Sarmatians out of their long held territories into two areas; Ossetia and the Banat (a region directly north of Belgrade in present day Serbia). The Sarmatians conquered Singidunum (Belgrade) and held it for over a hundred years before they were ousted by the Magyars and were resettled in the countryside.
Singidunum, itself, was founded by the Celts and held by the Romans, Magyars, Byzantines, Bulgarians and Ostrogoths in various historical periods before coming into Serbian hands. It was sacked over four hundred times and destroyed often, a practice which continued to the end of the twentieth century.
When the Sarmatians first began to move into Dacian territory (present day Romania), they brought the practice of raiding with them. Dacia was a Roman colony at the time, and during one particular battle, the Sarmatian knights were defeated and sent to guard Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England (circa 175 CE). Some historians believe they brought their stories which influenced the Arthurian cycle. Though I think that the Welsh and Britons had their own well developed fantastical lore, there are similar elements to the Arthurian tales both within the Serbian Prince Marko cycle (formalized after the Turkish occupation in the late 14th century) and Ossetian stories.
In Among the Legions, I have used several Serbian tales that correspond to the Arthurian legends to create Alen’s stories, giving them a slightly Sarmatian slant.
Historically, the Romans, reneging on their agreement, never allowed the five thousand Sarmatians seconded to Hadrian’s Wall to return to their country, and so, they remained trapped in Britannia.
The Kingdom tells the tale of the first crusade, often called The People’s Crusade (1096 CE), when answering the call of the Pope Urban, common people from France and Germany embarked on foot for the Holy Land. On their way, they managed to kill thousands of Jews in Cologne and surrounding areas. When they arrived in the Balkans, their provisions having run out, they burned Belgrade to the ground after they had looted it. Arriving in the Holy Land, they were met by the well equipped and well trained Seljuk troops who rapidly dispatched all of them, sending them to their reward. I told this tale, not from the perspective of the Sarmatians, but from that of a man who might not have seen them in such a favorable light.
The final story, Defeat, takes place after the Battle of Kosovo, 1389 CE ,when the Serbs, a people who along with their fellow tribesmen, the Croatians, had been settled in the Balkans for some eight hundred years. Linguistic and DNA evidence indicates both Serbs and Croatians might have Sarmatian origins, though they mingled with the Slavs initially, then later with the peoples who were already living in the Balkans. Incidentally, we have no historical documentation as to whether Serbia was devastated, as were most parts of Europe in the Great Plague, though I have taken the liberty to imply it was so.
The story tells of resistance to the Ottoman occupation, but, philosophically, harkens back to the first and third stories. I sometimes used very simple, almost banal, language to tell these tales, simply because traditional peoples like the Shamanka and Satana would not have had extensive lexicons, and as epic poetry was being finalized in the era of the Bard and Militsa, simple stock phrases were used and reused: cold rock, white tower, clear sky, green grass etc. However, I think the reader will see the gradual changing of concepts over the fifteen hundred year span these stories cover, along with the changing twists and turns the human mind can, and often, does take.
Read an excerpt from Horse Boy, Bee Girl, Bride
Yakshah
Halcyon days: the grasses are yellow and ripple in the wind, and shift: side to side, side to side. The sun strikes at an angle in late afternoon and creates a golden world that turns to rose too quickly before the sun sets. Grasses, wind and light. That’s all there is. My horse and I, galloping across the grass, a wild joy rising up inside me. There is no greater happiness. Then I am sent to the land of the waters.
***
The Bee Girl’s legs are white like her hair but will turn gold in the summer sun. I watch her going to the woods and returning. She doesn’t look at me, or see my horse’s ears peeking above the tall summer grasses. She’s barefoot on the hard baked path, carrying her pot of honey. When she gets closer, I see a touch of red on her cheeks and red where the sun has burned around her hairline.
‘Is your horse thirsty?’ and then, ‘the Rusalke live near the water. Aren’t you afraid they’ll drag you in?’ she asks. The Bee Girl doesn’t go down to the water alone, she goes with her friends, all of them blond, rosy, white. They strip and play in the water, laughing and shouting.
Rivers and streams cross this marshy land. At night, I dream I am floating on a great river, its flow carrying me past rushes and willows that trail their branches in the water; the sky and clouds reflected within me, on the water, on my way to an unknown country.
I guard the border at the edge of our lands. My people move with the herds in great wagons and settle down. The others, the Bee Girl’s people, call themselves Slaveni, the glorious ones. Their beauty is glorious, their poverty atrocious, their ideas simple and touching.
The Bee Girl says, ‘Your people worship the sword. I have seen them kneel before it.’ And what am I to tell her, the sword where it crosses, points to the earth below, the sky above, and to the west and east – the four corners of the interlocking worlds. It is all one. So I say, ‘In the eastern mountains far beyond the plain, where the Skiti and Sarmati come from, there stands a great tree that holds the seeds of life. Its branches rise to the heavens above, its roots stretch to the world below. It contains all knowledge and all forms of creation. The sword is just a reminder of that.’
The Bee Girl thinks about this and laughs. Her eyes are as deep and as transparent as the sky. She puts her pot down, and shifts her weight to one leg, looking at me askance and raising her hand towards my horse’s muzzle.
‘He likes it when you scratch his mane, like this,’ I demonstrate, and she imitates the nibbling of a horse’s teeth with her small fingers. The horse exudes peace and contentment. The afternoon is hot, sultry, and quiet, save for the sound of crickets and grasshoppers chirping in the grass. A hawk glides on a current of air far above in the sky, and then, flapping its wings, disappears.
I hold my hand out to the Bee Girl, and picking up her pot, she places her filthy bare foot on mine and swings her leg around, seating herself behind me, holding on to my waist with one hand. The horse trots, and she laughs, bouncing up and down a little. I take her around the parameter of the border, we gallop, and canter, and finally, slowly walk toward her village. She jumps off before we get in sight of it, and smiling, waves goodbye. She likes the horse and soon will come to me because of him.
Read an excerpt from The Burial
Today we buried the Shamanka. The sky was blue, the earth so green, and I chose six dark horses, grown fat on sweet summer grass to travel with her, and they followed me meekly because they trusted me.
She was embalmed, the contents of her body removed and peat and moss stuffed in its place. We dressed her in a silken yellow blouse spun from the cocoons of wild butterflies, and a red woolen skirt, girded with a belt of woven gold. Her stockings were embroidered, her body was adorned with necklaces and gold. Upon her head we put the black pointed hat of her station and pinned it to her blond hair with a gold stag, and under the felt, the wooden frame of the headdress was carved with with swans and panthers, a crouching griffin at the base.
We lay her in a hollowed log long enough to accommodate the headdress that made her deeds magic. We lay her on her side as if she would sleep a short nighttime only. She was a tall woman, and the log was long and heavy, and the tomb deep and wide. We placed her coffin upon rocks and logs, many layers deep, and then we put her things around her. Her head faced east, her feet lay west, and near her face we put a bowl of coriander seeds. On a low birch table, we placed a pitcher filled with mares’ milk, and a hunk of horse meat, and a bronze knife, so that she would never go hungry even after she had passed to the next world. Behind her knees a red cloth case held the bells and beads and the mirror she used for scrying.
I cut her horses’ manes and braided their tails and put fine saddles upon them. Golden griffins and rams ornamented their bridles, tassels and felt fish adorned their saddles. They were old horses but fine. I led them to the burial site, where they were killed by blows to the head, while I turned and looked away. We lowered the horses into the hole and covered it with boulders and rocks so high, so high the mound could be seen from a far, far distance away.
Old women brought roasted mutton and made a feast, and the people told stories about her into the night and for days afterward. They all said twenty-seven summers was too soon, too short a life, for such a one as her. They all told what they knew, but few knew her.
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What readers say:
Nice Collection! Just the job for short story addicts. Five Stars.
Emerald Guardian
Although I thoroughly enjoyed both sections of this this book, I found The Sarmation stories particularly engaging. The fascinating blend of history and myth recreates a past that has a relevance in our world today.
Diana
The God of Rock consists of eleven lovely interlocking stories. Even though the novella is written as fiction, I think most of us reading this story will find much truth and a part of our lives in this tale. Though it is sentimental, it is also expertly written.
Before you start to read the collection of short stories titled, The Sarmations, ranging from 500 BCE to 1400 CE, my suggestion is to read the Author’s note to see how the author beautifully engages the reader’s interest in history and anthropology. It is worthwhile to read and learn from these stories.
I loved both sections
Zlata
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