Klage = Lament, jot that down

Adam's Notes for May 26, 2024

I have a new sword and sorcery short story out this month in the Wishes and Wizards anthology from Indie Bites. "The Ysidra" is about a pair of lowly soldiers stumbling around in the chaotic aftermath of a battle. It has maggots and a dead wizard and rabbit-related cosmic horror, all kinds of good stuff. It's also about the toll of war and finding your place in society.

I think part of the reason I like writing fantasy is that fantasy allows us to examine real world problems minus the context of the real world, allowing us to explore and evaluate our problems while keeping our biases and prejudices at a slight remove.

Indie Bites is what’s considered a token paying market, meaning they pay something for stories but not a professional rate. I don’t mind being published by token or even non-paying venues, but the risk for me is that they’re just going to accept a story and then just slap it on their website or behind a paywall where it’ll die forgotten in an hour. That’s why I want to shout out co-editor Josie Jaffrey, who not only clearly took the time to read “The Ysidra” deeply and thoroughly, but offered some really helpful edits that improved the story and even made me rethink the relationship between the two main characters, Earwyrth and Klage.

By the way, if the name Klage rings a bell, that might be because I took it from the title of the medieval poem Die Nibelungenklage aka The Klage. The Klage is set in the bloody aftermath of the Nibelungenlied (you know, Sigfrid and Brunhild and all that), and is a re-telling of the first poem’s events as a lament for the passing of a generation of warriors, and that’s what I was trying to channel with the name and with the story: a sense that a great event has already passed, and we are left to wander in the wreckage, searching for meaning.

A print version is available on Amazon, and there is a free ebook available here.

Kriemhild's Complaint by Emil Lauffer (1879)

Pepys Show: Leaping off a balcony in May 1661

May 1661 begins with Pepys again on the road, now at Portsmouth, “a very pleasant and strong place.” It’s a work trip, attending to navy business, but Sam has brought his wife Elizabeth with him and they get to see a neat ship named for Pepys’ patron, and when they take lodgings Pepys notes whenever they’re in a room that the king or the queen mother has recently slept in. All the sailors and officers treat Pepys with great respect, but he pushes his luck with civilians: his buddy, Mr Creed, tries to get Pepys “made free of the town” (that is, given the freedom of the city), but the mayor says no. They have a good dinner with very merry, “discourse with the Drawers (waiters) concerning the minister of the Town, with a red face and a girdle.” Then “Anon we walked into the garden, and there played the fool a great while, trying who of Mr. Creed or I could go best over the edge of an old fountain well, and I won a quart of sack of him.” But the fun ends when Pepys and his wife have an argument over the beauty of their friend Mrs Pierce. To be fair to Sam, a lot of people do seem to comment on her beauty, but come on, man, you don’t say that to your wife about your mutual friend.

On May 6th, Pepys hears “to-night that the Duke of York’s son is this day dead, which I believe will please every body; and I hear that the Duke and his Lady themselves are not much troubled at it.” The worry is that this branch of the family has catholic sympathies, and would take the kingdom back to the pope were they to ascend to the throne.

On May 8th, Elizabeth Pepys has to have a tooth pulled, and the house is all in a mess because of the renovations. The concludes with kind of a funny story: “To-day I received a letter from my uncle, to beg an old fiddle of me for my Cozen Perkin, the miller, whose mill the wind hath lately broke down, and now he hath nothing to live by but fiddling, and he must needs have it against Whitsuntide to play to the country girls; but it vexed me to see how my uncle writes to me, as if he were not able to buy him one. But I intend tomorrow to send him one.”

On May 12, Pepys writes that Elizabeth has a bad night caused by “her old pain,” which Claire Tomalin’s biography says is a painful vaginal cyst. Pepys writes: “about the morning her swelling broke, and she was in great ease presently as she useth to be. So I put in a vent (which Dr. Williams sent me yesterday) into the hole to keep it open till all the matter be come out, and so I question not that she will soon be well again.” I have no idea what the vent is or consists of and I don’t want to know.

On May 15, he’s accosted in his office by two men sent by the Committee of Lords (I believe this is the House of Lords, but it might be the parliamentary committee in charge of the navy) who ask to see his books, wanting to compare them with Mr Huchinson’s, the Navy treasurer. Pepys gives them a surly answer and sends them off, but vows to go see the lords the next day. Pepys is worried though, about this and also about his ongoing household renovations. He notes he’s afraid to go to sleep because of the sawdust and shavings all over the house, a big fire hazard, especially in a time of hearths and candles.

The next day he puts on his velvet coat and heads into London by water. The lords surprise him, though, by treating him civilly and assuring him it’s just due diligence done out of zeal for the king. Pepys treats himself to a play, “The Mayd’s Tragedy,” “which I never saw before, and methinks it is too sad and melancholy.”

On the 18th, Pepys heads into London by taking a boat along the Thames, as he often does, but there’s some tricky business that involves him exiting the boat while it transits under London Bridge? A comment from 2004 on the Pepys site explains: “Sam went by boat to the bridge; got off but didn't go up onto the top of the bridge but instead stayed at water-level and climbed onto the protective base of one of the bridge's columns, and squeezed his way through to the other side. Meanwhile it took at least three men to drag the boat through the archway”.

He stick around to watch an impromptu race happening along the water (a somewhat uncommon occurrence at the time due to all the river traffic). Pepys gets in a friend’s boat to watch, but the race is chaotic and ends with one crew accusing the other of foul play, ruining the fun.

The Spanish ambassadors are in town on the 19th, drawing a crowd to Westminster. After seeing his patron, Sir Montague, Pepys takes Captain Ferrers and a friend to dinner at the Crown, a cookshop and pub. The proprietor has no meat on hand, but one of the customers does and happily shares (a lot of these places are BYOM). Afterwards, it’s back to the drawing room of Lord Montagu’s residence for more laughing and drinking. Captain Ferrers confesses he’s worried about an upcoming sea voyage, and so Pepys gives him a pep talk, at which Ferrers, “grew so mad with joy that he fell a-dancing and leaping like a madman.”

Ferrers goes to the balcony and starts talking about jumping. “I told him I would give him 40L if he did not go to sea,” which doesn’t help. Sam and his friend try to restrain Ferrers and shut the door to the balcony, but Ferrers opens them again and leaps over with “most desperate frolic that ever I saw in my life.” Pepys and the friend rush down to the garden and find Ferrers crawling around, unable to stand and looking like a dead man. Sir Montague pops out to see what all the noise is about, and has them move Ferrers to a bed and send for a doctor. Once Ferrers is attended, a bunch of the king’s musicians show up with music for Montague, which Pepys says was performed finely.

Pepys goes by barge to Deptford on the 21st, and is passed on the way by the king’s barge and then caught in “one of the greatest showers of rain fell that ever I saw.” It rains most of the week, leading Pepys at one point to talk with one Mr. Ashmole, who “did assure me that frogs and many insects do often fall from the sky, ready formed.”

Going over his accounts, Pepys finds he’s now worth 500L, up from 40L when he began the diary in January 1660, and, we’re told worth roughly £77,000 in 2023 pounds. Pepys’ wealth is consistently rising, so that his final account in the diary, in 1667, sees him with 6900L.

On the 27th he’s at Westminster, and afterwards at dinner he runs into Mr Pearse (the surgeon husband of the noted beauty Elizabeth that Pepys and his wife were arguing about) as well as Mr. Rolt (“formerly too great a man to meet upon such even terms”) as well as Captain Ferrers (“this being the first day of his going abroad since his leap a week ago, which I was greatly glad to see”).

He runs into his former school fellow Jonathan Radcliffe on the 29th, who is now preaching outside of London. Pepys doesn't much care for the sermon and says Radcliffe is “yet a mere boy.” Then Pepys is asked to be godfather to the child of Sir William Batten’s sister. Pepys’ comment: “Which, however, did trouble me very much to be at charge to no purpose, so that I could not sleep hardly all night, but in the morning I bethought myself, and I think it is very well I should do it.” They decide to have a coach race on the way home, and Pepys is in the winning coach, but he gets dirt all over his nice velvet coat.

On the 30th, Pepys meets with the inventor Greatorex at Arundell House along the Thames. He’s shown the nice garden and the statues, and reports that on the stairs leading back down to the Thames he stopped at a closed latrine to take a dump. For a long time this passage was censored.

Finally, the month closes out with Pepys’ parents fighting again. Pepys reports: “indeed my mother is grown now so pettish that I know not how my father is able to bear with it. I did talk to her so as did not indeed become me, but I could not help it, she being so unsufferably foolish and simple, so that my father, poor man, is become a very unhappy man.”

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That’s all for this week. As ever, thanks for reading!

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P.S.

If you read “The Ysidra” and have any thoughts on it, I’d love to hear from you. Send to: adamjmcphee28 AT gmail DOT com.