The Fool on the Hill: Motivation

As I wrote in Intermission, Merchant was conceived to be structurally a romance; a romance patterned on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in which a man proposes to a woman, she rejects him, circumstances push them together in adversity which allows her to get to know him better, they marry.

And that's what I started to write. It's what, in fact, I did write; having written it, hated. It was a bourgeois novel; it gave its heroine no honour and little agency. So I started to tear it apart, and reconstruct it.

But, I had characters.

Selchae

The part of Elizabeth Bennett was played by Selchae. Selchae's father is the hereditary autocratic ruler of the city state of Tchahua; her mother is a hereditary priestess believed to be a direct descendent in the female line of a fertility goddess whose cult is the state religion — a religion in which the common people of the city still sincerely believe, but which the elites, including Selchae and her parents, do not take seriously.

Selchae starts this story as an uncritical old Tory: she has inherited privilege; she expects to keep it; and she believe she is entitled to it.

The city's tradition is that legitimate rule is inherited in the female line from the goddess; the first of the (foreign) line of autocratic rulers gained his position by raping the hereditary priestess of his day, and his descendants have maintained their position by 'marrying' their mothers, sisters, daughters or cousins.

As Selchae herself says later in the narrative:

"It's been the practice in this city since the first ariston came here and slew the champion that the tyrranos hold the avatar more or less prisoner and force his seed upon her — call it marriage if you will. But it is the practice of the aristons that son succeed his father, and of the city that daughter succeed mother, and so we have this dreadful succession of men bedding their mothers and sisters and daughters, and false contests where an armed and armoured ariston faced an unarmed and drugged 'champion' in a slaughter on the shore."

Selchae's parents both want to end this practice by turning Selchae into a commoner, and changing the city's principal religious rite from a viscerally literal sex act in the ancient sanctuary on the rocks of the shore in the middle of the seal colony to something much more symbolic and decorous in a clean new marble sanctuary being built upriver.

They propose to turn her into a commoner by marrying her off to someone whom no one would accept as a ruler. Their chosen someone is a merchant seafarer trading in silk, whose great grandfather was a slave.

Dalwhiel

Enter Dalwhiel, who is playing the part of Mr Darcy. He's a thoroughly nice (but rich) young man, modest but competent (and, did I mention, rich). His father has made a substantial investment in new ships, of a type capable of making longer voyages than previous ship types, and these voyages are enormously profitable. Dalwhiel is co-captain of the first of these ships, and is consequently away from home most of the time.

Dalwhiel fancies Selchae. He's asked his father to try to arrange a marriage to Selchae for him, and Selchae's parents have, for their own reasons, thought this was an excellent plan.

In the initial draft of the novel, Dalwhiel was the hero; now, he's not. Among the leaders of the revolution he is one of those who set the ball rolling, but he's happy to stop the revolution at the point that it's a property-owning democracy with male suffrage. In the political lexicon of today he's your classic philanthropic liberal. He believes in equality before the law provided the law protects his right to (a very great deal of) property; and he's prepared to give some of that property away in conspicuous ways in order to gain public approval.

But he doesn't change much. He isn't on a journey. He does move left a little, influenced by others around him, but as the political mood in the city is captured by more radical elements, by the end of the story he has become relatively speaking, at least, a reactionary.

The narrative context

However, we're not at the end of the story yet. We're still at the beginning. We've had a big cymbal crash set-piece opening in which the merchants' guild has thrown a feast for all the important people of the city, and at that feast, Dalwhiel has publicly made an offer of marriage — an offer which had been pre-agreed by their respective fathers — to Selchae, who has very publicly rejected him.

"The boy is right," she said. "I am descended mother to daughter through thirty seven generations from the goddess herself, whose name I am honoured to bear. On my father's side I am descended from seven generations, father to son, of rulers of this place, who have built it from a muddy fishing village to the great city in which we live today.

"And before they even came here, my father's fathers were aristae, warriors, leaders of men. The man I shall wed shall be such a one. A warrior. A leader of men. A ruler. Someone whose tread makes the earth shake, makes the rulers of distant cities tremble. This boy? This spawn of slaves, this hawker of hodden and counter of coin, this wind-driven, wave-tossed wanderer? This is not the man for me."

Dalwhiel has then gone to sea again, on another long (and profitable) voyage.

While he has been away, the city has been conquered. The conquering army has put in charge of it, as interim governer and castellan, just such a man as Selchae described: Rothic, a younger son of a powerful aristocratic family from the currently most powerful city state in the region. The army has moved on, leaving Rothic in charge of an understrength and ill-disciplined garrison; and there's at least a hint that they left him behind in a city which was not a primary objective of their campaign because they thought he was a bit useless.

They've left him with a number of the elite maidens of the city essentially as hostages. They've also left him with a sufficiency of neither food to feed his men, nor money to pay them. As one of those hostages, Selchae has made a determined attempt to seduce Rothic, and has had sex with him.

In this situation, Dalwhiel has returned, with a cargo including both weapons and grain, a great deal of credit, some actual cash money, and a crew of seamen who are pretty handy in a fight. He's done a deal (the details of which are not explicit and I don't intend them to become entirely explicit) with Rothic; with the aid of his ship's crew he's expelled the mutinous part of the garrison from the city; he's given Rothic a substantial amount of grain and a fair bit of money; and Rothic has released the hostages including Selchae into Dalwhiel's custody.

But, and this is a very key point at the moment we're considering now, he's given Dalwhiel a bill of sale for Selchae:

She knew that the solitary slip of parchment on the desk was a notarised copy of a receipt which defined her as property, as spoils of war. She knew, too, that it was a copy — only a copy — and that throwing it out of the window would not aid her any, so she left it.

In other words, at least according to the laws of the city which is their new overlords, she's his slave.

There are no such bills of sale for the other former hostages.

The problem of naturalistic exposition

So, there's a point I need to get clear, here. In rejecting the marriage her parents had negotiated, there's a reasonable inference that readers might make that Selchae has sided with her grandmother. Her paternal grandmother, Gordala, also in direct line from the goddess, has used her position as hereditary priestess (as well as sheer force of personality) to achieve for herself substantial effective power — effective power that Selchae's mother has never managed to take on.

This being a fertility cult, the role of the priestess passes on when the heir to the role becomes of child bearing age, so Selchae's mother was constitutionally in that role since before Selchae was born, and Selchae herself is constitutionally in that role now. But in practice Gordala has clung onto what actual power within the city that the role offered. She does not want the practice of having a hereditary priestess to be extinguished, because it would undermine her own power. So she wants Selchae to inherit the position.

(Everyone suspects that Selchae's parents are dead, but this is not confirmed until later.)

But she also wants her grandson, Selchae's half brother Selachen, to become the new autocrat, which means that he has to be the male participant in the fertility rights which Selchae must, as priestess, conduct, and must be father of Selchae's children. I don't think this culture has quite the revulsion of incest that ours does, but Selchae absolutely does not want this. She could not have been unaware of her grandmother's plans.

A lot of the backstory and the cultural context I want the reader to infer from clues in the story, rather than bashing them over the head with bludgeons of exposition, but reading my drafts this seemed like a reasonable inference which I did not want the reader to make. It implies a degree of religiosity which she should not at this stage have. She has not been brought up to believe herself avatar of an actual god, and does not.

But at the same time I don't like the 'omniscient narrator' school of storytelling. Like all magic, I feel it hurts plots.

Exposing Selchae's motivation

At the beginning of the narrative, Selchae very publicly rejects the marriage her father has arranged for her with Dalwhiel. Why does she do this? Well, explicitly, because she holds merchants in contempt. She wishes to marry an ariston. But from the way I've written it now, it looks as if she's siding with her grandmother, Gordala, who we learn later wants Selchae to become the consort/concubine of her (Selchae's) brother Selachen.

I need to make it clear that in her immature arrogance, Selchae is hoping she can outplay both her parents and her grandmother, and force her parents to seek a marriage for her with a Huandun ariston. Her parents were extremely annoyed with her rejection of the arranged marriage, which they had thought they had been arranging to save her from that fate, so they are not sympathetic with her. Consequently she thinks things are going at least partly her way when Rothic, who is the sort of person she was hoping to marry, rocks up. But her plan to entrap him into marriage goes horribly wrong, because, essentially, he finds women too easy and found her too easy; and does not appreciate that she still has political value.

If I need to give exposition here — and I feel that I do — then I need someone whom Selchae trusts to whom she can say this. There are two such people whom Selchae has conversations with at this stage in the plot: Dalwhiel's sister; and a girl called Karda, about the same age as Selchae, whom the reader will later learn (and Selchae almost certainly already knows) fancies Dalwhiel. There is a third person, Sôf, this story's John the Baptist or Ghandi figure, who would be perfect, except for narrative problems.

Planning this change, I noted that Selchae could talk to:

1. Daltorae, in sx020 (Bought and sold);
2. Karda, in sx030 (A long time in politics) or in sx072 (Women's work);
3. Sôf, but it's hard to see where because by the time they know each other well enough to be conversing in private, Sôf has been injured and can't talk; and by the time she can talk again it's too late to give this information to the reader.

Naturalistically, I think Selchae would be most likely to say it to Karda, and most likely to say it in the conversation in Women's work; but for the reader's understanding I think it needs to happen earlier, so perhaps to Daltorae in Bought and sold.

I've tried having her say it to Daltorae (Dalwhiel's sister), and I cannot make that work; especially as Selchae very much does not want the fact that she has had sex with Rothic to become public.

So here's what I have in the current draft:

There were fewer of the women on the ship now; families had come to collect some. Now Lindoren — a silk merchant, who traded mainly east, to Huandun and beyond — was here with two porters and a little handcart to collect his daughter Lindsae.

But still, it was hard to get a moment of privacy on the ship; a ship is not a large space, and there were a lot of people aboard. As the handcart rattled away north along the quay, Lindsae waving farewell, Selchae spoke in an undervoice to Karda.

"My blood has come in."

"You sound relieved?"

Selchae shrugged. "I am."

"Will it not make things awkward with Master Dalwhiel?"

"Not yet," said Selchae; and then, "less awkward than otherwise, certainly."

"Your brother will not ransom you? You preferred him to Dalwhiel in the spring"

"That was not my choice," said Selchae. "I wanted — I was a fool — I thought I could refuse both my father's and my grandmother's plans for me, and that somehow I would find someone different. An ariston, a warrior, a leader of men. When Rothic came here — even though he came as our conqueror — I thought he was a gift from the gods, that my wish had come true."

"We all saw you seek to win Rothic; that did not go well?"

"I was a fool," said Selchae, again, emphatically. "Selachen was not eager to ransom me. Rothic sold me. The only one of them willing to pay gold for me, the only one who values me..."

Dalwhiel was leaning against the rail of the afterdeck, supervising the loading of cargo. Karda's eyes followed Selchae's gaze.

"The one you publicly rejected. Humiliated. That must be... uncomfortable, at nights."

Selchae turned away.

"He has not sought to lie with me — yet. I don't know whether he will. Things would be so very different if I had made another answer in the spring."

Oh, and, Reader, she will not marry him.

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