Sharrukin's Palace

More forward progress on the rough draft of Twice-Crowned. As of this morning I’ve got just over 17 kilowords down.

I’ve been going back to the beginning of the story, to set up Alexandra’s situation and the reason why she has to flee from her home city to Athens. I think the first section of the novel is going to take place all in a single day, beginning with Alexandra about to succeed to her mother’s throne, and ending with her fleeing for her life with a single companion.

I’m still evolving my novel-writing technique. Decades of being a failed novelist have shown me several approaches that don’t work, at least not for me. Now I think I’m getting somewhere with the strategy of just dumping scenes and bits of business onto the page, with the assumption that I’ll whip the results into a coherent story later. When I work from extensive outlines and world-building notes, I tend to over-think everything.

One result of this strategy is that I don’t always see potential conflicts and themes until I’m already in the middle of them. That seems to be happening here. A bit of explanation may be in order.

This story has always been driven by the idea of writing a “return of the true king” tale, while turning the usual trope on its head. My protagonist is a very young woman who would be pretty helpless in a battle. She has to think her way through situations, calling upon her mental and magical talents, instead of just charging forward with a big shiny sword.

So, how do I get a story set in Classical Hellas, in which a woman has any chance of being a ruling monarch? I mean, that did happen once in a great while – we have the example of Queen Artemisia of Karia – but it was extremely rare.

I did it by setting up an alternate history, based on some of the more sensational interpretations of Bronze Age Greece. It’s not clear whether Minoan Crete or the pre-Greek societies of mainland Hellas were ruled by women, and it’s not very likely. Still, if you go with Robert Graves or Riane Eisler, those societies were probably more gender-egalitarian than the Hellenic culture that followed them. (Admittedly, this would not be at all difficult.) So let’s arrange for a survival of pre-Greek civilization into the Classical era. As I’ve documented elsewhere, what I ended up with was a city founded at the end of the Bronze Age by Minoan refugees, at the site of what we know as Syracuse. Although this city (Danassos) eventually became more or less Hellenic in culture, it remains the most gender-egalitarian society in the Greek world, and it tends toward female rulers.

Meanwhile, Robert Graves gave me one possible model for how a pseudo-Hellenic society might manage female rulership. That’s the idea of a “year-king,” in which the ruling queen selects a different male partner each year. That way, no one man could dominate, and the queen could keep various factions among the people in line by favoring one, then another. At least it might work that way in theory. No doubt, in practice, the system would tend to break down whenever a particularly ambitious year-king came along. Mary Renault’s novel The King Must Die, which is based heavily on Gravesian speculation, does a good job of showing us how such a system might fail.

There’s even some precedent in real-world Greek political structures. In Athens, for example, there was the office of the archon basileus (the “king archon”) who was elected or appointed each year. The archon basileus didn’t have that much of a role in actually governing the city, but he (and his wife) took care of some of the religious duties that had once been carried out by the kings.

So in Danassos, at least in Alexandra’s time, there is a ruling Queen who is essentially a constitutional monarch. She is the foremost religious and legal authority in the city, she has an important role in forming foreign policy, and she presides over meetings of the democratic assembly. Each year, at the spring equinox, she selects a new year-king; no man is permitted to serve more than once. The kingship doesn’t carry a lot of authority, but it’s considered a great honor, especially if the partnership results in the birth of a new member of the dynasty. Meanwhile, the city’s other administrative and military offices are filled by some combination of royal appointment, selection by lot, and democratic election. The whole structure is probably rather baroque; most Greek city-states had pretty complex systems of government.

At the beginning of the story, Alexandra is just days away from becoming the new Queen of Danassos, with all that implies.

So far, so good. It occurred to me, though, that in the real world this kind of monarchy would have rather unsettling implications. Just how does the Queen of Danassos select a king each year? She probably has lots of political implications to think about. Does she select a man from this faction or that one? Which candidate will do the most to support her rule and defend the city from its enemies? What if the best candidate for the city is a man she finds personally repugnant? What if a given Queen just isn’t all that fond of men in the first place? Does the Queen ever get a chance to pick a candidate just because she is attracted to him, or because she loves him? And even if she does, it’s just for a year, and she has to give him up at the next spring equinox.

Are the Queens of Danassos the most powerful women in the Hellenic world, or are they the most expensive prostitutes?

I’m going to have to think about that, while I keep working on the rough draft. There’s some good conflict there, and good potential for character development for my protagonist. There are also a lot of land-mines I’ll have to watch out for.