Wisdom's Kiss (96 page)

I don't think it's a secret that I adore
castles

And you know what all my favorite castles have in common? They're fake. Well, okay, they're not fake as in "made out of plastic," but they're definitely fake as in "never looked like this way back when," back in the Middle Ages when folks really used castles. Castles such as Burg Eltz, Vincennes, and Pierrefonds were "restored" in the nineteenth century, the latter two by the architect Viollet-le-Duc, whose professional philosophy was to make buildings look the way he thought they should—the kind of guy who'd say "I know what Monticello needs: light bulbs!" And Neuschwanstein was built from scratch in the 1870s by Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria.

I used to love castles because they looked like fairy tales. Then I learned that fairy tales as we know them today were basically invented by the French in the 1600s.
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Charles Perrault, who wrote "Cinderella," "
Puss in Boots
," "Sleeping Beauty," and "Little Red Riding Hood," doubtless visited Château de Vincennes—although he probably didn't take the Paris Metro to it, as you can today (climb the steps and there it is—wowsa), and the château back then didn't look quite so fancy.

Fairy tales exploded in popularity in the nineteenth century—at the exact same time that all these castle were being restored. Coincidence? Not by a long shot. These castle (re)designers used for inspiration anything they could find: existing ruins, medieval illustrations, fairy tales. Really big fairy tales, sometimes: Mad King Ludwig based Neuschwanstein on the operas of Wagner.

If you're an architectural historian, reconstructions don't count, so you'll never get to study these castles in a medieval architecture class. But make no mistake: these castle are history. They're an expression—a very expensive, decades-of-construction expression—of an intense romantic passion. Charles Perrault's stories describe an idealized society where knights fought for ladies' honor and cats could talk and chivalry ruled the forest. This society never existed; it certainly didn't in medieval Europe, when castles were lice-infested prisons. But that doesn't mean we can't fantasize. These castles don't look like fairy tales; they are fairy tales. Fairy tales that we can visit, and dream in.

More Author Commentary
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Author Commentary: Solstice Terrace
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You know that spot you're supposed to listen to, that thing you feel in your heart, or sense in your gut? My agent gets a tickling feeling between her shoulder blades (so she says). The witch in
Macbeth
had a prickling in her thumbs. Well, I don't know where my spot is exactly, but I've learned to listen to it. And for years I'd get a thing—you know, a prickling-somewhere thing—whenever I pondered this one scene I'd thought up, a scene featuring a young woman and a young man, handsomely dressed, standing together on a lush green terrace against the setting sun.

This may have originated in our family's own terrace project, one of those interminable construction debacles that leave you convinced that not only will you be dead before it's finished but that your children will dead and rotting as well ... But I don't think that's where the idea came from. For one thing, this other terrace image thrilled rather than exhausted me, but more important, that terrace edged a cliff of hundreds and hundreds of feet, not our measly four-foot drop.
That
terrace
looked over a void so vast, the mountains were only shadows on the horizon. And the sun was setting and the light was gold, the grass was green and the couple was courting. And it thrilled me.

Problem was, I didn't quite know what to do with this ... picture. Where to set it. I had kind of been hoping to do another book featuring the Kingdom of Montagne, which I'd created for
Princess Ben
, but Chateau de Montagne didn't have any terraces...

Or should I say it didn't have any terraces yet. Sophia, the architect queen of
Princess Ben,
would have been perfectly capable of erecting a terrace—of erecting pretty much anything. It was a great concept, actually, such a powerful woman erecting a massive balcony overhanging the cliffs of Montagne simply so she could see the sunset. That would be very, very Sophia. Soon I had it all figured out; I even wrote it into an
early draft
of
Queen of All the Heavens.

It seemed rather a pity, though, to create this great architectural detail and then leave it there, wasting all the drama of the drop, the vista, the balustrade ... Couldn't I put it to use later in the story, perhaps combine it with something else?

At some point, ashamedly late in my writing, I realized that
Tips
needed to show his stuff. The poor guy was stuck with two lovesick, bickering girls; he needed to be—they needed to see—we needed to see—a hero. Thus the sword fight with the gardener, recounted in delectable if probably inaccurate detail by
Felis
, and
by Dizzy
from her own perspective. Now I had a use for the Solstice Terrace as Tips battled an evil schemer with the balustrade as heart-stopping backdrop. Perhaps I could even somehow finagle the Globe d'Or into this sword fight, and combine all three magnificent elements! Imagine it, the great and magnificent Globe d'Or rising silently over the balcony, slipping out of the void as the sun sets it aglow, tendrils of mist curling noiselessly about its basket...

What I find curious is that the thrill came first, my visceral reaction to the architecture—to the backdrop. But it took years (literally) of hard work and dead ends and editing to fabricate a story worthy of that backdrop—to make it equally thrilling for everyone else. Perhaps my mystery body part understood what the Solstice Terrace was capable of long before my conscious intellect caught up.

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Author Commentary: The Empire of Lax
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Wisdom's Kiss
emerged in part from my fairy tale
Princess Ben,
which features a young Princess Ben struggling to protect Montagne from rapacious neighboring Drachensbett. I knew little about the fictitious world beyond these two kingdoms, nor did I care; the conflict was between a small, oppressed nation and the larger belligerent force over which it ultimately triumphs.
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In besting Drachensbett, though, Montagne—which is to say the adventure story involving Montagne; Montagne's residents would doubtless delight in peaceful monotony—required a new adversary. (See my discussions elsewhere on
villains
and
antagonists
.) Farina worked nicely (if "nice" and "Farina" can be used together, which they probably can't), but a greater authority was needed as well, with an agenda ill-disposed to both Farina and Montagne, something that had some power but not too much, with an overarching yet oddly ineffectual political structure, so that everyone was jockeying and elbowing as peers rather than subordinates.
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In other words, something akin to the Holy Roman Empire.

Before starting
Wisdom's Kiss
I knew pretty much nothing about the Holy Roman Empire other than the classic history joke that it was neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire. (I said the joke was classic; I didn't say it was funny.) But I'd been reading Colin McEvedy's
New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History and the Harper Collins Atlas of World History,
and I found them utterly fascinating. North-central medieval Europe wasn't an empire the way Rome, say, was an empire; it was more a collection of squabbling, power-hungry little states all desperately trying to undermine each other while also weakening the poor schlub elected (yes, elected) emperor.