ONE MORE DAY UNTIL "THE TYRANT AND THE TWINS"!!!

Helmet from the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo Burial

Well, Folks, looks like I'm down to the wire!  The Tyrant and the Twins, Book I of The Annals of Anavere, comes out on Kindle tomorrow!  See below, for a quick look!

Pictish or Briton Birdlip Mirror

The Tyrant and the Twins is not a medieval romance.  Nor is it one of the many contemporary updates of Arthurian legend, peppered with modern jokes and slang.  It is, rather, the reworking of an ancient tale, embedded in an archaic time and presented as its fifth-century characters would have portrayed themselves.

Herein, no white knight in shining armor rides the lists, a lady’s silken kerchief floating from his lance.  No wizard wearing a pointed hat waves a birchen wand to summon the wind.  No impossibly indefatigable hero rescues a damsel in distress.  No one disappears into a mysterious – and fictional – otherworld.  No quixotic fairy story, this.

Instead, brutish warriors, contrastingly armed with swords of light and clubs laced with boar’s tusks, battle one another to the death for an obsolete code of justice.  The ancient women within fought and reigned, lusted and loved, lived and died, not by their own rules, but by those of their epoch.  Names and places have been meticulously researched and restored to their original language and situation.

Magic here lies in phantom, white mists rising from frozen lakes and the discovery of giant footprints, long ago impressed into the same earth now trod daily by modern stockbrokers, secretaries, and barristers.  It is the magic of a newly recaptured age, which, on the close scrutiny of twenty-two years of research, yielded far more documentation than it is commonly supposed to have produced.  It was anything but a Dark Age.

Supplanting the usual heroes – Gawain, Arthur, Lancelot – the female heroines tell the story…dipping into the tongues of languages long dead.  Here, a foreign-frocked Anavere, the “Guinevere” of the piece, wreathed in the twinned cultures of the Picts of Scythia and the Gael of Ireland and steeped in the mores of a lost and outlawed sect, tells the story of her fosterage in the sanctuary of what is now the Isle of Man.

In classic “Beowulfian” style, the little-known, Jutish battle maiden, Cwenhild, relates the saga of the rise and fall and rise again of her father, Vortigern; of her training as a beranserc – a “bear-shirt” or berserker – and of her own elevation to the rank of guocwen, warrior-queen, among the Sons of Woden.

And the even more elusive “False Guinevere”, the true Guinevere’s half-sister and sometime political adversary, here styled “Rapha”, offers a third, twisted version of the tale.  Hers is a rose-colored account of the birth of her future husband, Arthyr Pendraig, and his golden Camóloth, juxtaposed against the sordid details of Rapha’s illegitimate birth and the seeds of the lifelong hate she bore her sister.  This ugly beginning presaged the destruction of Rapha’s Pollyanna-like dreams and of all those whose lives she touched.

Set in an age gone by, The Tyrant and the Twins is a brutal, ancient fairy tale.  Yet, its voices waft across the mists of time, ringing on the modern ear as familiarly as if they had spoken but yesteryear.