The traveller who goes exploring with an official guide, even a counter-cultural one, and a carefully worked out itinerary is no explorer, merely a high-minded tourist. The next time you enter a library do so with a blindfold! The Rubbish Tips of Paradise are more interesting than paradise itself.
As Vague Henri would say: Death to the barn owl!
Paul Fahrenheit.
The Priory
Cambria
18th of Germinal AD 143.799
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank my agent, Anthony Goff, and my editor at Penguin, Alex Clarke; Alexandra, Victoria and Thomas Hoffman, and Lorraine Hedger who types up my handwritten manuscripts with miraculous accuracy. Thanks also to the Penguin Rights department: Kate Burton, Sarah Hunt-Cooke, Rachel Mills and Chantal Noel. Also Nick Lowndes and my copy editor, Debbie Hatfield.
The description of King Zog and his habits is based on The Court and Character of King James 1, probably by Sir Anthony Weldon.
Bose Ikard’s speech claiming he has reached agreement with the Redeemers is substantially that of Neville Chamberlain’s speech in 1938 on returning from a meeting with Adolf Hitler, claiming that he had secured ‘peace for our time’.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer makes his usual extensive contribution to the observations of IdrisPukke. Sister Wray’s comments on the sun are from William Blake. The popular tune sung by Riba in the carriage has a line based on the title of W. H. Auden’s ‘O Tell Me The Truth About Love’. The line, ‘Love has no ending’ comes from Auden’s ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’. The words ‘under’ and ‘umbrella’ are borrowed from Rihanna Fenty. The trial of Conn Materazzi is partly based on the transcript of ‘The Trial of Sir Walter Raleigh’ in Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials. Cale’s comments about being seen to watch over his men echo the letter by Sullivan Ballou to his wife shortly before his death, and first quoted in The Left Hand of God. In some foreign editions this acknowledgement was inadvertently omitted. The exchange between Dorothy Rothschild and Cale that ends Chapter 31 is from a line by the underrated American President Calvin Coolidge. There are many half quotes or ones so buried and rewritten that I can no longer recognize or trace them. If the reader suspects other sources from Homer to Homer Simpson they can, of course, resort to Google cut and paste – the greatest sneak in the history of knowledge.
ARTEMISIA
The character of Artemisia in The Beating of His Wings is inspired by, but not based on, Artemisia of Halicarnassus, the admiral who fought for the Persians against the Greeks at Salamis in 480BC. Against prevailing opinion she strongly advised Xerxes not to attack the Greek fleet in the narrow straits where they would have too great an advantage. Fortunately for the subsequent development of the Greek Golden Age, the growth of democracy and, very possibly, Western civilization itself, Xerxes went along with the advice of the majority and as a result lost heavily. Although alternative history is a bit of a mug’s game, who knows if Artemisia had been listened to more carefully whether the Americans might have had to weed Saddam Hussein out of London or Paris rather than Baghdad. Perhaps there wouldn’t be an American democracy at all.
Contemporary feminist historians are deeply suspicious of the traditional account of her death, which claims she threw herself off a cliff because she had fallen in love with a younger man who did not return her affections. For them, perhaps rightly, it smacks of the sexism of the classical world. Such a tough-minded woman, they argue, would not have been so psychologically fragile. But perhaps not – the classical world also has similar tales of great soldiers confused by love – take Antony and Cleopatra. In our own time the militarily-much-admired former general David Petraeus, who stabilized the collapsing American occupation of Iraq in 2008, and had a reputation as a subtle and sophisticated thinker, was forced to resign his job as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency over his affair with his biographer. As Thomas Cale would have to accept, there’s nothing that unusual about having nerves of steel and a heart of glass.
JAN ZISKA
The origin of the tactics and practices of Cale’s New Model Army lies with the Hussite general Jan Ziska, military leader of what was, as Luther later acknowledged, the first Protestant Christian sect in early fifteenth-century Europe (based around the modern Czech Republic). Alexander the Great inherited an army whose skill and tactical superiority had been established by his father, but Ziska is very close to being unique in military history, in that he developed a way of fighting professional armoured soldiers in huge numbers using peasants armed with weapons based on agricultural implements and farm wagons. He also pioneered the development of lightweight gunpowder weapons. This problem-solving, tactically brilliant, completely original genius is barely known outside the Czech Republic. For further reading, try Warrior of God: Jan Zizka and the Hussite Revolution by Victor Vernay or The Hussite Wars, 1420–34 by Stephen Turnbull and Angus McBride.
BEX
The battle at Bex is sometimes but not always based on the Battle of Towton in 1461. Again oddly, despite probably having the highest death rate in English history (including the first day of the Somme) at around 28,000, Towton has faded from popular memory in favour of less important and less bloody conflicts. For further reading, try Blood Red Roses: The Archaeology of a Mass Grave from the Battle of Towton AD 1461 Veronica Fiorato (author, editor), Anthea Boylston (editor), Christopher Knusel (editor) and Towton: The Battle of Palm Sunday Field by John Sadler.
Some readers have been critical of the way in which the names of ‘real’ places turn up jumbled together without rhyme or reason in the geography of the world of The Left Hand of God trilogy. I’d ask them to consider the following: Riga Sweden Egypt Belfast Greece Norfolk Manchester Hamburg Kent Warsaw Cambridge London Peterborough Syracuse Rome Amsterdam Potsdam Batavia Dunkirk Reading (not far from Lebanon) Dover (not far from Smyrna) Mansfield Stamford Norwich Hyde Park Troy Bangor (next to Nazareth not far from Bethlehem) Sunbury Palmyra Westminster Emmaeus Mt Carmel Delhi Berlin Peru. The list could go on. What do these disparate places have in common? They are all towns, villages and small cities within 250 miles of New York (formerly New Amsterdam).
Find out more about The Left Hand of God trilogy by visiting:
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THE BEGINNING
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Table of Contents
THE BEATING OF HIS WINGS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents