Category: Book Excerpt

Another factor that strengthened the unity of the early village was the temple and its service. The immigrants from the north either brought with them or developed not long after their arrival an abiding faith in one special deity as the protector of their settlement, and with the building of their first houses they also erected a home for their divinity. For example, underlying the ruins of Eridu, one of Sumer’s most venerated cities, archeologists unearthed a mud-brick temple built on virgin soil by the original Ubaidian inhabitants. It was a small rectangular shrine, about 15 feet long, and its furnishings consisted of nothing more than a crude altar and an offering table. But as the villages prospered through agriculture and expanded into sizable towns, such humble shrines were enlarged into elaborate structures each set atop a lofty mud-brick platform, a prototype of the future ziggurat, or temple-tower. Each temple served an entire community, rather than an individual family or clan, and thus generated and intensified local patriotism, pride and effort.

Nor was the temple merely an edifice of lifeless brick and mortar; it was a holy place that had to be tended and cared for every day, year in and year out. Hymns and prayers had to be composed, formalized and recited; rites and rituals had to be performed; sacred festivals had to be celebrated. And so a specialized priesthood came into being, starting no doubt with the selection of one or two individuals noted for their learning and spiritual powers and proliferating in number and function over the centuries. In the course of time the temple and its priestly coterie naturally became the intellectual center of each community, and it is therefore not surprising that it was in the temple that writing was later invented and developed.

— Cradle of Civilization, pp. 33-34

[Colonel Glover] Johns was a “basics” man and a total soldier. He taught—and insisted that his company commanders teach—things like terrain appreciation, the knowledge of which was a basic tool of a soldier’s trade: to be able to look at a piece of ground and appreciate the slightest differences in the contour; to notice how the ground unfolds and be able to think There’s cover over there—cover, the one essential, providing protection from direct enemy fire; to recognize a stream line, a gully, or a treed area as an avenue of approach through which a unit could move unseen; to understand and identify the best ground from which to launch or repel an attack. Shoot, scoot, and communicate—the “three R’s” of infantry….

— About Face, Chapter 12

Author’s emphasis.

There is another detail that recurs on many stones, almost the only exception to the otherwise crude depiction of the heroes’ bodies. Time and again, the fingers of the warrior-hero’s hands are shown outstretched, explicit and bigger than-life-size. His hands seem to matter more than any other part of his body, perhaps because they were the part of him with which he imposed his power on the world around him. The hand is the agent of the burning warrior self, the essential instrument of the weapon-wielding man. That is also the role played by hands in the Homeric epics. Both Hector and Achilles have "manslaughtering hands," and it is Odysseus’s hands that are steeped in blood as he exacts his final revenge on the suitors. It is as if the hands had concentrated in them all the destructive power of the warrior-hero. And when, in the Iliad‘s culminating scene of mutual accommodation, Priam, the king of Troy, comes to Achilles in the Greek camp, it is through the hands that the drama is played out: "Great Priam entered in and, coming close, clasped Achilles’s knees in his hands and kissed his hands, the terrible man-slaughtering hands that had slaughtered his many sons."

— Why Homer Matters, pp. 138-39

Ankokuji Eikei…had his hiding-place revealed by a Ronin, who bore him a grudge for turning his former master out of his fief…. How gratified [Tokugawa Ieyasu] was may be gathered from his presenting ten pieces of gold to the Ronin, who at first emphatically refused to take it, declaring that his motive was only the very proper one of revenge, and that he did not wish to profit otherwise. But Ieyasu would not take a refusal, and so he received this quite large sum, but distributed it among the people of his village in true recluse style.

— Shogun, Chapter 23

The Sumerians invented kingship, priesthood, diplomacy, law, and war. They gave the West its founding stories: the opposition of darkness and light at the Beginning; the Flood, with its ark and dove and surviving patriarch; the tower of Babel; the distant ancestors of Odysseus and Hercules. The Sumerians established the outlines of our political, legal, and temporal structures too, with the first kings and assemblies, the first written laws, the first legal contracts, and the sexagesimal system of counting that regulates the hours and seconds of our days.

The Sumerians wrote the first epics and constructed the first monumental buildings. They invented the wheel, the sailing boat, the dome, and the arch. They were the first people to cast, rivet, and solder metals. They were the first to develop mathematics, calculating the hypotenuse of a right triangle two thousand years before Pythagoras and enabling extraordinary achievements in civil engineering. Compiling methodical lists of plants and animals, the Sumerians were the first people to apply rational order to our knowledge of the natural world.

The Sumerians wrote down almost everything they knew, much of it on disposable clay tablets that have survived the millennia. Some thirty-nine centuries after the last of the Sumerians died, another inventive and curious people, the Victorians of the nineteenth century [C.E.], initiated a remarkable period of foreign exploration in Iraq. Thanks to this colorful and dramatic intellectual adventure, which began in the 1840s, today we can follow the course of Sumerian lawsuits, track Sumerian inventories, and study the terms of Sumerian marriages, wills, and loans. We read the overtures of Sumer’s diplomats. We follow in detail the provisioning of Sumer’s armies and the triumphs or disasters of their expeditions. We know intimately the pleadings of Sumerian students for more money from their fathers, and the pleadings of their fathers for more diligence from their sons. We track the transactions of Sumerian merchants in copper or onions. We admire the complex and perfect calculations of Sumerian engineers.

— Land Between The Rivers, Prologue

…The horse is also a fighter, unlike many other herd animals and antelopes and deer, their wild distant relations. These animals rely on their numbers for protection, but individual horses defend themselves vigorously against attacks by predators: wolves, mountain lions, and even cheetahs. This is especially true of stallions and mares with foals. For a prey animal, the horse packs quite a kick and delivers a dangerous bite….

— Raiders, Rulers, and Traders, Chapter 1

A portal opened…. The apprentices moved toward it, falling into a line. Once through the portal, Galen found himself on a path lined on both sides by mages. The path led to a tent standing separate from the others, a tent he hadn’t seen before. That was where his transformation would take place.

The interior was dark, and as Galen entered, he found himself somehow alone. No one seemed to be in front of him or behind him. A globe of light appeared farther inside the tent. It hovered over a table of dark crystal.

In the faint light, Galen noticed that to the side of the entryway were several stacks of canisters. The canisters were smaller than the ones that held the chrysalises, about two feet high and one foot across, and they were covered in an opaque outer layer that was ornate, carved with runes. This must be how the Circle stored the implants, once they made them. Galen marveled that something so intricate and so powerful could be so small.

Galen approached the table and rested a hand on it. The cold surface stung his raw skin. Obviously he was meant to lie on it. He eased himself down onto the crystal table. As soon as he was supine, a great force—like an invisible hand—slammed down on him. He was pinned flat against the cold surface. His breath came in short gasps. He couldn’t move. His lungs couldn’t fully inflate against the pressure.

The light above him went out. All was silent except for the panting of his breath. A line of fire cut through the darkness above him, curled itself into the rune for solidarity. The rune descended until it hovered just above him, the same size as his body. The heat of it awakened more pain in his skin. He tried to turn his head to the side to escape from it, but he could not move.

Then the rune began to unravel. The line of fire whipped out and down, driving into the flesh of his shoulder. Galen screamed.

Fire burned like a micro thin wire shot down his arm. It split into three parts as it reached his hand, running down his thumb, index, and middle fingers and exiting out the tips. The three lines of fire rose and turned back toward him, plunged into the fingertips of his other hand and blazed up his arm, joining and popping our at the shoulder.

Galen’s breathing grew harder, faster. The fire ran up into the darkness and vanished. He lay in blackness, the line of fire an afterimage above him, anticipating the appearance of the next rune. He didn’t know if he could stand six more of them.

He remembered Fed joking nervously, If it were painless, then everyone would want to do it, right? Fed was going through the same thing.

If Fed could do it, then he could do it.

As he lay in the dark, though, something glided over his raw shoulder, faint as a shoulder. He started, but the jerk of his muscles had no effect against the force holding him clown. Something thin and cold and wet pushed into the tiny hole burned by the fire. It worried inside him, deeper and deeper, generating a dull tingling hat spread like goose bumps down his arm. On his shoulder, the length of its body followed into the hole, contracting and relaxing, contracting and relaxing. Its head passed his biceps and continued toward his elbow, drawing a line of coldness with it.

At the other shoulder a second invader stirred, wriggling its way inside. This was not the way it had felt when he’d entered chrysalis stage. One implant had been inserted at the base of his skull. He’d been asleep during the procedure, and he’d awoken only with a vague headache. He’d never had the feeling of something inside him, something other.

These new implants would connect to that original one, accessing all the information that had been gathered and stored while he trained with the chrysalis. Yet they felt different. These things moving inside him that were not him were wrong. They did not belong.

At last, as they each split into three and pushed into his fingertips, the movement slowed, stopped. His hands and arms tingled, infused with the cold. The tech was inside him now, waiting. Above him, a line of fire appeared and twisted into the rune for secrecy.

The pressure holding him down suddenly vanished. Galen’s gasp turned into a huge ragged inhalation. The desire to run was nearly overwhelming, though he felt too weak to move. Were they giving him a chance to leave? Was this another test?

The rune descended and unraveled, the end of the line of fire raised, poised to strike. Galen realized what was wanted of him. With numb fingers he turned himself onto his stomach. The pressure returned, and with it, the fire.

The pattern was repeated for each of the seven runes of the Code as Galen watched the lines of fire reflected in the table and panted against its surface. Twin tunnels were burned across the back of his shoulders, one down each side of his spine, and four from the base of his skull up into his brain.

Each time the formation of the tunnel was followed by the insinuation of the tech, cold, thin, and wet, contracting and relaxing, pushing inside him, stretching the skin of his back, sending prickles like tiny needles down his spine, driving the cold in intricate coils through his brain and settling there, making his body its home.

He sensed something then, like an echo of an echo of an echo, the faintest hint of what he had felt with the chrysalis. The echo carried his revulsion back to him.

The pressure lifted, and Galen’s head fell to the side in relief. Numbness spread through his body. He was not who he had been.

He was not himself anymore. He was something that was part himself and part other.

He was a techno-mage.

— Casting Shadows, chapter 6

The complexity of human and horse interaction reflects the fact that every horse, like every human, has a distinctive personality. Horses have strong likes and dislikes—particularly of some other horses and of certain people, as any pair of riders who have tried to ride two horses holding a grudge against each other will know. Horses are social animals in a way that other herd animals are not. They cooperate, compete, and play with one another, much like us. They live comparatively long lives, twenty or thirty years, and their life phases correspond to some extent to our own. They form enduring bonds with other horses, and are capable of forming such attachments with humans. This social aspect of horses is closely studied today, since many urban owners leave their horses alone in stables, ride them rarely, and discover later that the horse suffers from isolation, not only from their owners but also from other horses. They lose their social skills, and can be quite difficult or even dangerous to ride. Similar concerns are rarely expressed about the social skills of sheep or goats. Put another way, as the relationship between horses and humans evolved over the prehistoric centuries, the bond between the two became essential for the well-being of both.

— Raiders, Rulers, and Traders, Chapter 1

No animal has had as profound an impact on human history as the horse. The journey begins in prehistory, with a small, shy animal that humans hunted for food. Hunters domesticated the horse in order to ensure a supply of meat and, later, mare’s milk, which is more nutritious than cow’s milk. This was a watershed event for both species, transforming the horse from an animal fleeing at a gallop from the mere smell of humans into the most valuable of their livestock. The horse’s need to roam far and wide for pasture prompted the horse herders to spread out across the Eurasian steppe. Then herders learned to ride horses in order to keep up with their far-flung herds….

— Raiders, Rulers, and Traders, Prologue

Prehistoric hunters’ enthusiasm for horse meat had a solid basis in nutrition, too. In the cold, harsh environment of the last Ice Age, horse meat proved to be high in protein, and rich in fatty acids essential for health and growth. Compared to other meat, it contains less saturated fat. Humans can digest horse meat more easily. Partly for this reason, today’s Mongols favor horse meat to wean toddlers off mother’s milk. The rarity of horse meat in European and American cuisine reflects an eighth-century [C.E.] ban by the Catholic Church, in an era in which the newly evangelized Germans consumed horse meat as part of their old pagan rituals. How else to explain the disappearance of this delicious and nutritious food from Western diets?

— Raiders, Rulers, and Traders, Chapter 1

…In Japan the great monasteries have always tended to accumulate possessions owing to the freedom from taxation and control by the civil governors that they enjoyed, and the right they had of affording refuge to those who wished to escape from the oppression of the competitive world outside. These rights needed guarding in a land like Japan, where the military were not much inclined to be frightened by the ghostly terrors with which the monks tried to threaten them, and so the soldier monk consequently eventuated. Since the temples had so much property there would be no lack of volunteers for the honor of guarding it, and the great groups of temples like Hieizan and Nara (Tendai and Ritsu sects), and later the Amida and Nichiren sects, not to speak of the Shingon of Koya and Negoro, not only resisted the military government, but fought viciously among themselves, in all cases for loaves and fishes, or fish and saké rather, and not for any particular belief in the efficacy of their doctrines….

— Shogun, Chapter 4

The eighty thousand people living in Uruk by 3000 [B.C.E.] sheltered behind walls that were forty feet high and six miles long. Archaeologists estimate these to have cost over five million man-hours to build. The fourth-millennium city occupied about 1.7 square miles, a little bit less than imperial Rome at its peak (2.1 square miles) and larger than classical Athens.

— Land Between The Rivers, Prologue

It is noticeable that the introduction of firearms through the Portuguese made it easier to get some sort of an army of comparatively untrained farmers, though the matchlock did not prove such a great asset as they may have hoped, since it was not very convenient to use when the weather was wet, as it often is in Japan, and its range was possibly not greater, and its accuracy not as great, as the bow and arrow. It is here that there is some difference between conditions in Japan and Europe, for in Japan the samurai was an archer, either horse or foot, and did not trust so much to his armor as the European knights did, neither did he advance in the massed charging formation that would be more vulnerable to gun fire.

— Shogun, Chapter 4

[Anegawa in 1570 C.E.] was a real feudal battle judging by the account in the Mikawa Fudoki, which gives a vivid picture of the bands of retainers fighting in groups, the lopping of heads by sword and bill, the confused mingling of the armies, the clouds of black smoke and dust, and above all the streams of perspiration that bathed the combatants, for it was the hottest season of the year….

— Shogun, Chapter 6

“Give as few orders as possible,” [Duke Leto Atreides] had told him once…. “Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.”

— Dune, Book Three, Chapter 3

Thought Admiral Kethas epetai-Khemara had deep wrinkles in his knobbed forehead, hair very white at his temples. He was fifty-two years old, an age at which Klingons of the Imperial Race should be dead by one means or another, yet his eyes were clear and sharp as naked stars.

…

“Shortly you will be ten years old,” Kethas said, a figure of gold and darkness—but no dream, [Krenn] knew. “It will be time for you to choose what you will be. Have you thought on this?”

“The Navy,” [Krenn] said instantly.

Kethas did not smile. “You know that I do not require this of you? That you may, as you wish, be a scientist, or an administrator—or even a Marine?”

“I know, father. And I would not be anything else.”

Then the Thought Admiral smiled. “And so you should not….”

…

[Human] Dr. Tagore said, “I believe I once told you I had a theory, about the Klingon observance of death.”

“You did not say what it was.”

“Well, it isn’t popular among my colleagues…. At any rate, when one of our race dies, we hold a ceremony, sometimes simple, sometimes very elaborate.”

“You celebrate a death?”

“Commemorate, rather.”

“And the one dead appreciates this.”

Dr. Tagore smiled thinly, said, “That depends on the culture. But the practical function is to allow the survivors a vent for their grief, a time when emotion may be released, shared.”

“Sharing diminishes the…grief?”

“Such is our experience.”

Krenn said, “We do not do this.”

“I know. And I wonder what happens to the energy, the stress…. I think it helps to drive your culture. To expand…to conquer, if you like.”

“Nal komerex, khesterex [That which does not grow, dies],” Krenn said….

“I know that, too. And your environment is hostile, and your life-cycle is short and rapid. As I say, my hypothesis is not popular.”

…

Dr. Tagore sighed [to Krenn]. “I still have not lived among Klingons long enough. I still think of you as aging as we do…you must be, what, twenty-five?”

“Nearly so.”

“And I will be seventy-nine on my next birthday. And still we aren’t so far apart…we both have twenty or thirty years left, if we avoid violence.” Krenn was not insulted by that. “Maybe even longer….”

…

Meth was correct: information was power, secrets weapons. Krenn thought how strange it was that this secret, that he was not the son of Rustazh, had made him even more the son of Khemara; given him exactly the weapon with which Kethas had tried to arm him. The weapon of patience, against which Klingons had no defense.

— The Final Reflection, Chapters 1, 2, 6, 7, & 9

This novel was written in 1984, and the Star Trek novels have never been considered canon lore. In 1994, A Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode set the canon that Klingons live longer than Humans. Personally, I find that Dr. Tagore’s theory better explains the Klingon psyche.

I read the letter, a few sparse lines on the white piece of paper, a part of Spenser’s poem.

• “One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
• But came the waves and washed it away:
• Again I wrote it with a second hand,
• But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.”

Below four words were written in Greg’s blood.

Amehe

Tervan

Senehe

Ud

The words blazed with red fire. A powerful spasm gripped me. My lungs constricted, the room blurred, and through the dense fog the beating of my heart sounded loud like the toll of a church bell. A tangle of forces swirled around me, catching me in a twisted mess of slippery, elastic power currents. I reached out, and gripped them, and they carried me forth, far into the amalgam of light and sound. The light permeated me and burst within my mind, sending a myriad of sparks through my skin. The blood in my veins luminesced like molten metal.

Lost. Lost in the whirlwind of light.

My mouth opened, struggling to release a word. It wouldn’t come and I thought I would die, and then I said it, pouring my power into the weak sound.

“Hesaad.” Mine.

The world stopped spinning and I found my place in it. The four words towered before me. I had to say them. I held my power and said the words, willing them, forcing them to become mine.

“Amehe. Tervan. Senehe. Ud.“

The flow of power ebbed. I was staring at the white piece of paper. The words were gone and a small puddle of crimson spread across the sheet. I touched it and felt the prickling of magic. My blood. My nose was bleeding.

Pulling a dressing from my pocket, where I always carried some, I pressed it against my nose and leaned back. I’d burn the bandages later. The watch on my wrist said 12:17 p.m. Somehow within those few instants I had lost almost an hour and a half.

The four words of power. Obey, Kill, Protect, and Die. Words so primal, so dangerous, so powerful that they commanded the raw magic itself. Nobody knew how many of them there were, where they came from, or why they held such enormous hold over magic. Even people who had never used magic recognized their meaning and were subject to their power, as if the words were a part of some ancient racial memory we all carried.

It wasn’t enough to merely know them; one had to own them. When it came to acquiring power words, there were no second chances. You either conquered them or you died trying, which explained why so few among the magic workers could wield them. Once you made them yours, they belonged to you forever. They had to be wielded with great precision and using them took a chunk of power that left the caster near exhaustion. Greg and my father both warned me that the power words could be resisted, but so far I hadn’t had a chance to use them against an opponent that did. They were the last resort, when all else failed.

Now I had six words. Four given to me by Greg and two others: Mine and Release. My father taught them to me long ago. I was twelve and I almost died making them mine. This time it had been too easy.

Maybe the power of the blood grew with age. I wished Greg was alive so I could ask him.

I glanced to the floor. The orange lines of Greg’s ward had grown so dim, I could barely see them. They had absorbed everything they could.

The words clamored in my head, shifting and tossing, trying to find their place. Greg’s last gift. More precious than anything he could have given me.

— Magic Bites, Chapter 2

Author’s emphases, both bold and italic.

“Why all the secrecy, Bishop? And the white smoke?”

“The Church is more often good theater these days than good religion. The secrecy originated in this century. Before the collapse of the papal states, the cardinals used to vote in St. John Lateran and live in the Lateran Palace. Each day they would walk down the street to the basilica of St. John Lateran for their day’s work and chat with the populace…. Even when the conclave was moved up to the Sistine Chapel, there was little attempt to keep the events secret. Everyone knew at the end of the day what the count was and who had voted for whom. The secrecy was imposed to protect the cardinals from the Roman emperor, that is to say, the Austrian emperor, whose ambassador had vetoed an election in 1903.”

“There isn’t an Austrian emperor anymore,” I said.

“You’ve noticed?”

— White Smoke, p. 71

The book is historical fiction but the historical fact is true.

No one knew better than Alexander [the Great] that heroic temperaments such as his own were subject to excesses: as he was excessively brave and extravagantly generous, he was excessively vengeful and extravagantly passionate when thwarted.

— The Gates of Hell, Chapter 1

In southern Holland there appears to have been a taboo against placing weapons in graves, which occurs but very rarely, perhaps indicating that weapons were less a personal possession than held on behalf of the group…. This changes in the Early Iron Age, after about 800 BCE, when male graves with weapons do occur more frequently…. Swords in graves have often been altered, in ways that require considerable skill, such as fashioning them into a circle or folded, concertina-like, which has the side-effect of putting them out of use as swords; bending swords in this way without breaking them requires at least as much skill as making them in the first place….

— Magic: A History, p. 225

Good luck using that (magical?) sword you looted! 😀

…Now we came to a region of caves, hollowed and windswept, and Buliwyf dismounted from his horse, and all the warriors of Buliwyf did likewise, and proceeded by foot. I heard a hissing sound, and verily I saw puffs of steam issue from one and another of these several caves. We entered one cave and there found dwarves.

They were in appearance thus: of the ordinary size of dwarf, but distinguished by hands of great size, and bearing features that appeared exceedingly aged. There were both male and female dwarves and all had the appearance of great age. The males were bearded and solemn; the women also had some hair upon the face, so they appeared manlike. Each dwarf wore a garment of fur or sable; each also wore a thin belt of hide decorated with bits of hammered gold.

The dwarves greeted our arrival politely, with no sign of fear. Herger said these creatures have magic powers and need fear no man on earth; however, they are apprehensive of horses, and for this reason we had left the mounts behind us. Herger said also that the powers of a dwarf reside in his thin belt, and that a dwarf will do anything to retrieve his belt if it is lost….

Now I saw that the hissing and steam issued from great cauldrons, into which hammered-steel blades were plunged to temper the metal, for the dwarves make weapons that are highly prized by the Northmen. Indeed, I saw the warriors of Buliwyf looking about the caves eagerly, as any woman in a bazaar shop selling precious silks.

Buliwyf made inquiries of these creatures, and was directed to the topmost of the caves, wherein sat a single dwarf, older than all the others, with a beard and hair of purest white, and a creased and wrinkled face. This dwarf was called “tengol,” which means a judge of good and evil, and also a soothsayer.

This tengol must have had the magical powers that all said he did, for he immediately greeted Buliwyf by his name, and bade him sit with him. Buliwyf sat, and we gathered a short distance away, standing.

Now Buliwyf did not present the tengol with gifts; the Northmen make no obeisance to the little people; they believe that the favors of the dwarves must be freely given, and it is wrong to encourage the favors of a dwarf with gifts….

— Eaters of the Dead, Chapter 11