Sentence of the Day: The Rage of Dragons Battle Scene

This book better not end on a cliff-y. I know there are three more volumes, I hope Evan Winter isn’t the kind of writer to tease the reader that way.

• Tau: Hero of The Rage of Dragons, a Lesser, fights with a sword in either hand.
• Jabari: his Best Friend, a Petty Noble
• Indlovu: Full-blooded Nobles, staging a coup

Tau followed, fighting off three Indlovu and trying to keep Jabari alive, though it seemed his onetime friend was determined to skewer himself on every blade that came close.

— The Rage of Dragons, p. 480

The Indlovu outnumber Tau and Jabari by 10 to 1. Can they still rescue the Queen?

A big Indlovu to Tau: “I am Abiodan Onyakachi of — ” Tau lunges.

If all the Indlovu are as stupid as this Abiodan fellow, Tau can dispatch them easily.

Super-exciting!

The Xhosa-Inspired Battle Scenes

Evan Winter, you dog, I don’t think I’ve been as excited to read battle scenes since The Expanse, three years ago. In interviews, Winter has said he based the events in The Rage of Dragons on the history of his Xhosa ancestors.

The Hedeni invade, and Scale Jayyed prepares to meet them.

• “Swords out!” screeched their inkokeli, his cry chased by the sound of an entire claw, one hundred and sixty-two men, clearing bronze from scabbards.

The Degradation of the Camps

You have to hand it to Aikins. At any point, he could have said, “I give up! It’s all too much! I want my life back!” After all, he’s a citizen of a rich Western country, he has a Pulitzer for chrissake. But in dogged pursuit of his goal — to prove whether it is indeed possible for an ordinary Afghan to escape from Afghanistan to the west — he stays in the filthy refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos (He’s lucky he undertook this journey in 2016, before covid. The risk of infection in the crowding and unsanitary conditions of a refugee camp would probably have been 90%)

So, um, the bathroom situation. Here goes:

I stood outside the toilet blocks, trembling, and lit another smoke. The line was longer now, and wound its way through dry patches in the sewage. I counted seven men’s stalls in the lower block, and another twelve uphill; a third block was out of order — the camp’s water often stopped running entirely. Nineteen toilets for several thousand men, along with some porta potties. The women had their own toilets but they were unsafe after dark, as were the fields outside the fence.

I walked back uphill, my cough joining the chorus around me. My throat was raw; it felt like I was catching something. Some kind of respiratory ailment was going around — maybe influenza. The children, especially, had swollen eyes and mouths. There’d been outbreaks of scabies and varicella in Moria; our bodies were covered in insect bites and rashes.

— The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, p. 203

Night, Annaghmakerrig

Took this picture of Annagmakerrig Lake on my last night at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, last November.

Posting for Jez’s Water, Water Everywhere Challenge # 176.

Self-Deport: Lesbos, 2016

The intrepid author and his friend Omar have managed to survive being on an overcrowded rubber dinghy and being rammed (repeatedly) by the (Turkish?) coast guard. Because of the repeated ramming, the dinghy gets pushed into Greek territorial waters (!), and the Turkish turn away. Whew! (The author: “It sometimes seemed like they were trying to sink the dinghy.” You think???)

They’re now on the Greek island of Lesbos, the one place they told their smuggler they did not want to end up in. (The author, still phlegmatic: “It had been apparent for some time that Hajji had lied.”)

At the overwhelmed registration center, the Greek authorities handed out pieces of paper ordering the migrants to self-deport, and then let them board the ferry to Athens, where they headed north through the Balkans, into Europe.

In August, a hundred thousand people landed in the Greek islands, most of them on Lesbos. A majority were Syrian, and there were unusual numbers of women and children among them, as it became apparent that you could travel safely once you reached solid ground.

— The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, pp. 167-168

Stiff Upper Lip All the Way

Self is now on p. 155 of The Naked Don’t Fear the Water (about halfway). She truly appreciates how deadpan Matthieu Aikins is when dealing with certain unforeseen situations. A few pages earlier, a companion takes him to a restaurant in a Kurdish section of Istanbul. “The police don’t come here,” the companion says. At that same moment, “a middle-aged cop walked in, his radio and pistol passing at eye level. We went quiet and looked down at our plates.” LOL

Now, on p. 155, his smuggler tells him they should get going, a ship has been found that will take Aikins and his friend Omar to a Greek island. They are taken in a white Hyundai to a nearby mosque, where they transfer to a taxi driven by “a very nervous Turk” who first takes them “down a steep blind alley” and then has to “reverse back up, the clutch burning.” They eventually arrive at a hotel, where they transfer yet again, to an empty white van. They make a stop to pick up more passengers. “Young men started piling in, one after the other, until they were sitting on each other, their heads at an angle against the ceiling.” Aikins and Omar are sitting all the way in the back, surely they are spared this undecorous seating arrangement, if not then surely Aikins will comment on the extraordinary experience. Only, he doesn’t. All he writes is: “The men were speaking Arabic; I tried the little I knew. The guy on my lap said they were from a village in Aleppo, in northern Syria — I’d been there on reporting trips.” omg, Matthieu has such presence of mind, he can’t stop interviewing people for information, and what better subject than a man sitting on his lap, lol

Finally, they join 50 other migrants in an inflatable rubber boat meant to hold 25. The “pilot” is a refugee who’s never piloted a boat before, but he’s being offered free passage so he gladly accepts the responsibility.

This is all too exciting!

Kehinde Wiley at the de Young

I had never heard about Kehinde Wiley until I saw the Obama portrait, last year. A few days ago, went to the de Young to catch the Ansel Adams exhibit, and caught the Kehinde Wiley show, Archaeology of Silence. Blown away by his bronzes.

Posting for Travel with Intent’s One Word Sunday: Shadow.

Across How Many Borders

If there’s one thing going for Matthieu Aikins (going for him in a big way), it’s the dreamlike feel of the narrative:

Matthieu’s friends chicken out. He goes back to Kabul, aching with frustration. His friends will try another way to get out of Afghanistan.

He then ends up making some complicated travel arrangements: Istanbul, Venice, Trieste, Llubljana, Van. He flies out of Istanbul, disembarks in Venice, takes the train to Trieste, spends the night at a friend’s house, then takes the bus to Llubljana, where he catches a flight to Istanbul. At Istanbul, he undergoes some things: he is searched by a man wearing gloves (UGH), he is interrogated and put into a waiting room. He becomes friendly with a man who tells Matthieu that he has been in the waiting room for six months (Waiting Room = Oxymoron, lol). He tries to distract himself by reading Toni Morrison (Beloved) He is sent back to Llubljana.

The “emotion-recording apparatus,” as Robert Graves called it

The author’s companion Omar is having second thoughts, only a day into the journey.

I tried to think of what I could say to rally Omar. He’d once been up for almost anything, but as the years went on, I found him less eager to take risks on our assignments together. He’d had too many close calls and seen too many bodies. Of course it was different when you were doing it for pay instead of glory, but for me, repeated exposure had the opposite effect. I understood that I was probably damaged, but at the time it seemed useful for working in places like Afghanistan and Syria, I thought I could separate feeling from reason. And it was natural, but not rational, for your fear to spike when it came time to act.

— The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, p. 89

Passing Kandahar

Matthieu Aikins can write.

On the bus from Kabul:

It was lunchtime but despite the passengers’ protests, the driver refused to stop. We kept driving west, and later that afternoon, crossed the Helmand River, where the road that forked south to the provincial capital was cut off by the Taliban. I saw another familiar face on a billboard: Commander Hekmatullah, the district police chief killed by a roadside bomb last year. Posters of heroes became posters of martyrs, and their ink faded pale blue in the sun. I had met Hekmatullah in 2014, during the season’s record-breaking opium harvest, which had more than doubled since the year 2000. He’d kindly sent some of his men with me so that I could tour the edges of his district where the poppies started, fields that ran deep into arid wastes cultivated with bore wells and pumps, increasingly solar-powered.

— The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, p. 84