Peter Alan Orchard - 'The Painter of Lemnos'

The new story follows Kindulos, a painter from Bronze Age Lemnos in the Aegean. When he is forced to flee the island for fear of his life, he finds himself amongst the soldiers of Agamemnon who are embroiled in the Trojan War. But he is sent back to the island, with a mission...

The Painter of Lemnos (c.12,000 words) is $1.99.

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EXCERPT:

The dog was barking. The yelping filled the roof space and bounced off the walls of the houses on the street below. It brought Kindulos tottering to his feet, clawing at his ears with both hands and desperate for peace.

It was morning and a thin, grey light washed over the harbour. One of the ships, a broad-hulled merchantman, its square sail lowered, had been launched off the beach and rocked gently in the shallows.

The dog fell silent, its job done, its eyes bright with unfocused satisfaction. In the courtyard below Kindulos and the dog, a thin elderly man stood with the stub of a torch.

'Have you seen him, Senefu?'

'Seen who?'

'The runaway. Had his brother killed, that's all I know. The word's gone round since yesterday.'

'Word from where?'

'From his village, up the coast. The king's making a gift to the Akhaians again, so there's wine coming from all over. One of them probably passed it on, the wine people.'

Senefu began to laugh, a sound like jackals fighting. 'And they told you, Kratas? A miserable, cheating piece of rubbish like you?'

'I live up the road, my friend,' said Kratas evenly. 'I was sent round here. That's all. Other folk went other ways. No-one likes a man who cheats the gods or fratricide, and this one's both.'

'No.'

There was silence for a moment or two, then Kratas mumbled, 'He's a painter, the man. Walls. Flowers and stuff.'

Kindulos lay down flat on the roof and froze to the stone. Not a word, Senefu, he begged in his mind. Not a word.

'No-one here, Kratas,' Senefu said.

'If you -'

'Don't wag your finger at me. I've seen no-one. Off you go, Kratas. No fun for you here.'

The dog set up a low, determined growling and Kindulos heard Kratas leave. The dull red of his torch brushed against the grey of the street and was gone.

A few moments later Kindulos heard footsteps on the stairs and Senefu's head appeared over the parapet.

'Leave,' he said. 'Now.' Apologetically he turned his palms upwards. 'If you're the one he's looking for, which I think you are, you have to leave the city. Every damn fool with a weapon will know who you are. No painter will be safe, no outsider will be safe and I won't be safe. That old rat wanted to get me out of this house years ago - don't ask, it's not your business - and finding you here would have the mob at my door.'

'So why protect me?'

'I'm not protecting you, I'm getting rid of you. If you're not here, you never came here.'

There was a ripple of sound up the street. From somewhere in the distance came shouting, wheezing and the rattle of hooves on the stones. Kindulos shrank down behind the parapet.

'Calm down, ' Senefu said. 'It's donkeys with cargo. There are ships leaving with supplies for the Akhaians, so the king's sending wine over to the leaders. Keep them drunk, keep them friendly, keep them on the plain outside Ilion.'

Kindulos stood up again, his decision made. 'Then the wine will come from all over the island and no-one will notice a stranger. Back up down the steps, Senefu. I'm going with them.'


Peter
http://www.peteralanorchard.net/
http://twitter.com/peteraorchard

On olives, longevity and litigiousness

There's something serious about olive-trees. Gnarled, ironhard, producing grey-green leaves and succulent salty fruits often for centuries on end, they are frankly a bit special. Nowadays there is a connoisseur trade in ancient olive-trees, symbols of a timeless rustic lifestyle, old masters with bark on them.

In Greece olive oil was essential as a staple crop for local consumption and export, as it still is, and in Athens the trees were under regular inspection. Amongst them the sacred olive-trees were especially precious, as the un-named defendant of a lawsuit in around 395BC knew well. Scattered across the farms of Attica, some of them little more than stumps with fences around them, these trees were thought to descend from one presented to the infant city by Athene herself and were protected by religious law.

We know of the case, though not its outcome, from the speech written for the defendant by the professional speechwriter Lysias. The piece of land in dispute had once been confiscated from a discredited oligarch and since then resold to the defendant, who had proceded to rent it out to a series of tenants. The accusation had been made, for reasons unknown, that he had uprooted and removed a sacred olive stump from his land. This could have resulted in his exile and the confiscation of his property by the state, so the man's defence was robust.

The speech touches on several aspects of Athenian society. First the defendant denies that there had ever been this olive-stump on his land in the first place, then blames the Peloponnesian War, in which the Spartan army had devastated olive-trees, which take a generation to grow large enough to bear fruit, as a scorched-earth tactic. Why, he went on, should he do anything so stupid as to destroy a sacred object in broad daylight, when anyone could report him? Even if he had managed to keep it secret, his own slaves could have blackmailed him for ever after. In any case, there were no other olives on that piece of land and its absence would have been obvious for all to see. He has offered those same slaves for torture - a common tactic implying an absence of anything to hide - but his generous offer was spurned by his accuser, who dismissed slave evidence as unreliable.

The details go on, but the speaker ends with a familiar appeal. Since Athenian law concentrated not purely on the case but on the characters of the plaintiff and defendant, he plays up his services to the city - financing a trireme for the navy, supplying funds for a play at one of the dramatic festivals (themselves semi-religious affairs) - and piles on the sack-cloth and ashes. How unfortunate I would be, he says, driven into exile, torn from my children, leaving my mother destitute and my house deserted!

All about a tree-stump. But in the Athenian context it was a matter of enormous importance, bringing together religious belief, social and political jealousy, the master-slave relationship, past history, civic identity and the love of going to law. Being rich enough to equip a warship meant that this defendant was also rich enough to hire Lysias, but he had to deliver every word of the speech himself. On the Hill of Ares, before the King-Arkhon and jurors, with the prospect of exile in front of him, this unknown man was on his own.

It's in this context that I wrote A Pig in the Roses, which includes a trial held in this court - full details are at http://peteralanorchard.net/, along with my children's story The House in Athene Street, my short story collection Voices in the Past and the latest Anglo-Saxon story, Starlight.

STOP PRESS: A Pig in the Roses is a miserly $1.99 this week at Smashwords if you use coupon ST73U (offer ends on June 3).

Peter
http://www.peteralanorchard.net/
http://twitter.com/peteraorchard

Ancient Greece for mystery-lovers... and for children

As I wrote my ancient Athens mystery, A Pig in the Roses, I grew rather fond of the hero's family: Diokles himself, the determined but harrassed merchant with a lot on his mind; his wife Helike, a bustling country girl making a go of city life; their young daughter Xanthippe, bright-eyed and curly-haired, desperate to achieve some grown up dignity in spite of the activities of her much younger brother Euphemos, a self-absorbed bundle of chaos.

One of the elements I tried to maintain in what is in places quite a dark book - it contains several deaths and some murky social undertones - was the picture of a normal family coping with a desperate situation while trying to maintain their normality. There was no criminal investigation in ancient Greece, and it was the duty of the family to pursue an offender and bring cases to court, so Diokles is knocked sideways when his wife's uncle Makron, earning a living in town as a stonemason and living with his hypochondriac ex-slave mistress in Diokles' house, is hauled before a magistrate and accused of murdering his brother, an elderly farmer.

The book is set in 431 BC, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, a time of country folk abandoning their villages to cram themselves into every available living-space in Athens, of tensions and divided loyalties. The chain of events involves several murders and all the family becomes involved. Diokles bears the brunt of it, with his persistence, trading contacts and tendency to jump in with both feet, but Helike makes important contributions through her dealings with other wives and spiky encounters with another key figure, Melitta, a young Samian courtesan.

Xanthippe and Euphemos, too, have their parts to play, and it was involving the children which made me think there was a story for young readers to be made out of the family, or characters based on them. The result was The House on Athene Street, a 10,000-worder for the 9-12s. This is a much more straightforward plot. Those who read both books will recognise the family, but most of the names are changed and the hero is an elder brother, the 13-year-old Hermippos, created for the children's story. Athene Street keeps the social context, ditches the politics and goes for a kidnap and chase plot involving the youngest child, the Egyptian girl Tiya, who keeps a perfume-stall, Tiya's uncle Wenamun, a length of rope, a pottery horse and rider and a stroppy red-head up a tree. Hermippos, naturally, saves the day, with lessons learnt about loyalty, bravery, co-operation, difference and the persistence of small brothers.

The difference in writing between the two? Not much, really. The Pig is much the more complex and has elements which children will not (probably should not) follow, but still qualifies as a 'cozy'. The parents are seen in a protective role in Athene Street, with the children to the front of the action, and nobody comes to much harm except the villain's dignity.

Both books are Smashwords titles, are available in all the usual formats and are scheduled to appear at the main ebook sellers as part of Smashwords' premium programme. All the details, summaries, buy links and excerpts are on my website, http://www.peteralanorchard.net/, and my Smashwords page.