Today it is time for another portion of the cover design for The Flame Before Us, together with another portion of the book itself. In terms of actual progress towards publication, the Author’s Notes section is now complete, and proof-reading the whole is well under way.
First, the picture. These are in fact Late Bronze Age steps, though not from the specific place described in the story. These are from Megiddo, somewhat to the north of Ramoth Hurriy where the story places them. Where do the steps go in The Flame Before Us? That’s a portion which I have not yet shared in any extracts…
Now for today’s section. It follows one of the newcomers into the land, Nikleos, a member of the Sherden clan led by Antos. It is in a rural setting in what is now the borderland between Israel and Lebanon.
Nikleos’ clan camped for the night in a valley bowl far enough beyond the crest of a ridge that their progress was clear. It had been a long drag upwards through the afternoon. The character of the land had changed again as they had worked their way south, and their pace had slowed considerably. Although the land was flatter, it was clothed with stands of low trees and scrub land. It was not like the great forests that stood further north and nearer the coast, but it was dense enough to seriously impede progress.
The sun was still quite high in the early spring sky when Antos blew his leader’s horn to call a halt, but a considerable time passed before they made camp. Finally the wagons were arranged in their circle, the beasts were inside, and fires had been set. The boys who had been tasked with the day’s hunting had all come back, prey in hand, and the smell of cooking drifted across the encampment.
He shook his head. With the young men constantly away with the raiding parties, the group was never properly mixed. Boys, older men, and women of all ages filled the camp and shared out the tasks that would normally fall to the lads. Perhaps in a few months they would settle again and life would return to its usual pattern.
Nikleos watched as the women of his family prepared the food. It crossed his mind that Kastiandra was too thin, but that would not change until they found a place to settle. All of them would stay too thin while the journey continued. When he thought back to their life on the other side of the sea, she had had a much more attractive roundness to her form which had been peeled away from her on the journey.
There, in their farmstead just outside the village where Antos had been arkon, there had been lamb and mutton whenever they wanted, plentiful butter and cheese, and honey always available from the bees who inhabited a nearby stand of trees. They had left that all behind when they set sail for Wilios. The men, himself included, had always boarded the quick ships to raid isolated towns or islands, but this was something new.
Families and clans from many different valleys and coastal bays had united that time, stirred up by Akamunas to seize the great prize of Wilios. It had been a fine sight, all those ships together crossing the water. The siege had been long and hard, and it had exposed violent disagreements among the clans themselves, but in the end they had done it. The enterprise had become too big, too prideful, to halt.
The final capture and plunder of the city had soon been turned into song, but it had left his people with a hard choice. Antos had led his people onwards, instead of returning over the sea. Many other village arkons had done the same, eager to find other cities with easy wealth to gather, quite sure that any of them would be easier than Wilios. And so now here they were, heading south through this land of which they knew nothing, unsure where or when to settle.
Don’t miss the next of the cover components being revealed!
I’m fascinated by the political, social and economic progress made by the Western World in the second half of the 19th century and I’m equally intrigued by the gigantic steps taken by science and technology at the same time. Like most Baby Boomers I had grandparents who had been born and had come to maturity in the last decades of that century and from them I learned enough to regard it as “history you can touch”. The scientific progress – achieved by titanic figures like James Clerk Maxwell, Pasteur, Mendeleev, Darwin, Röntgen, Koch, Ronald Ross, Lord Kelvin and a myriad others – transformed understanding of the world and heroic engineers – such as Edison, Tesla, Marconi, Parsons, Bell, Bessemer, Roebling, Greathead, Bazalgette and many more – established technologies that have flourished and spun off further developments ever since.
A. There is significant military experience in the family, both direct and via in-laws, and some of this very obviously rubs off. I myself have worked in a number of trouble spots and indeed once managed a company in an area torn by a vicious terrorist campaign, in which our operations, and I myself, were targets. One gets used to living with, and planning for, some very nasty risks. And just when I thought it was safe, when I retired about ten years ago, I found myself caught on a personal basis in a murderous attack in Africa in which eight were killed. A 200 yard sprint under AK-47 fire proved Churchill’s alleged statement that “There’s nothing as exhilarating as being shot at – and missed!”
And finally – Thanks Richard for taking the time to interview me! It’s been as much a pleasure to answer your questions as it is to know you and your work!
Today I want to look at one specific kind of writing – cuneiform tablets. These are usually surprisingly small, and incredibly densely packed with information. One wonders how, in dim light, it was possible to read the contents at any speed. One’s expectation is that the surface will be rough like a brick, but (unless the tablet has been physically damaged over the years) the surface is typically surprisingly smooth.
The most common cuneiform tablet is written using the Akkadian script – a character set where a symbol represents a syllable rather than a single letter. Akkadian was used as an international written form for well over 2 millennia, and on a smaller scale for nearly 3. It was used by different scribes to capture several different spoken languages – exactly like modern English letters are used today – so today’s reader of the tablet has to not only decipher the syllabic signs, but then identify the specific language being used. Another form of cuneiform, using the same technology to produce tablets, is found in Ugarit, on the Syrian coast. Ugaritic employs a smaller sign-list representing a true alphabet, closely related to modern Arabic but of course visually quite different. 
As regards my own writing, the CreateSpace version of Scenes from a Life went live a little while into 2014 (the kindle version being available in December 2013), and said book got through to the quarter finals of Amazon’s ABNA award. 
This year the big event should be the release of The Flame Before Us – hopefully by March or so, all being well. There will be no shortage of news about that… Right now I am working on the last major incomplete section, then comes a few rounds of editorial work and such like before release.
This is the rather sombre setting, with its continual sense of impending doom, that JD Smith has chosen to write about. The cast of characters is a mixed group of individuals, mostly drawn from a single extended family and their retinue, who are striving to preserve the way of life that they know. The question which dominates the book is whether Rome will be either willing or able to help, or whether the region would be better served by cutting loose altogether.
Tadugari is a high-ranking Ugaritic official, currently a refugee with his wife Anilat and the rest of their family following the sack of their city. Khuratsanitu is a personal guard.