I’m very pleased to announce that at long last I’ve completed a novel that I first wrote over forty years ago. It has always started in about the same way: with a young boy who came to Babylon to serve as a page for Alexander the Great on his death bed on June 12 in 323 BCE. This start hooked a judge in a fiction-writing competition I entered in 1982 or 1983. And it hooked me into telling the rest of the story.
The boy grows to manhood during the first part of his journey which ends in China in the 4th Century BCE during the Warring States Period, a time of battle drums and blood, when seven kingdoms vied to rule over all the rest. Here, he meets a lovely maiden and of course, that complicates everything.
The novel grew to 720 pages and about 165,000 words long. Original versions were the sort of multi-viewpoint epic books that my mother used to read. And so began what became a forty+ year effort to get the book right. One version was called Vermilion after the Chinese maiden. Another was called Iskandr from the version of Alexander the Great’s name found on a rock near Alexandria Ultima, the farthest east of the many cities called Alexandria that the Great One founded.
But the story always seemed too big for me to limit it to a single viewpoint.
Another problem I had with it was it didn’t give me opportunities to introduce humor from time to time. If you’ve read any of my Cinderella, P. I. fairy tale retelling short stories for grown-ups featuring Cinderella, twenty years, three kids and a few extra pounds after the ball, you know exactly what I mean.
I’ll not trouble you by describing other renditions of this narrative except to say I now have a knee-high stack of notebooks and boxes containing print-outs of the different versions of the book in the home office. But just let it suffice you that, eventually, I solved these two problems by writing The Spoils of War, a Novel of the Ancient World, the first in a series of shorter novels told from the points of view of . . .
But I’ll let the characters introduce themselves.
I am Alexander of Macedonia, known as Xander, and this is my story, the tale of how I began a journey from Babylon where the famous Alexander entered my skull as He lay dying. He made me promise to complete His journey to the Great Outer Sea so Poseidon could receive His spirit and He would live in Elysium for all eternity. (The God Alexander probably would have been bored. But it’s a waste of time to argue with the Gods.) And by happenstance, before I completed that long journey to the sea, I grew up and came to the Red Kingdom where I met the beautiful Vermilion and—
Well, it’s my story, too. Let me tell this part.
Of course, my goddess. My love.
Thank you. Well, I was named Pink Peony when I was born. And as the Red King’s daughter, properly I should be called the Princess Pink Peony. But that name never really suited me. My father, the Red King, sometimes called me Tomboy, which suited me better, because I was very active, rode horses, climbed, played with shuttlecocks in spite of my tiny feet. (I got really sick with a fever when I was a young girl and they never grew right after that.)
I love your feet. I like to pet them as if they were—
None of that, Xander. Quit interrupting.
Of course.
Anyway, eventually, my father named me Vermilion, and when I was seventeen, it seemed very unfair that everybody but me knew the secret of what it’s like to lie with a man. My maidenhood seemed burdensome and so . . . Maybe I shouldn’t go any farther than that.
Maybe not . . .
Fans of George R. R .Martin’s Games of Thrones, Madeline Miller’s A Song of Achilles and Circe,
Ann Liang’s A Song to Drown Rivers, and possibly even James Clavell’s Shogun might enjoy this book, too.
Early reviews:
“a wonderful adventure”
“full of sumptuous details”
“I couldn’t put it down.”
“very suspenseful”
The Spoils of War, a Novel of the Ancient World, is available as an eBook at
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HGH7PH42
and as a trade paperback: ISBN 978-8-9974382-0-3
Please buy The Spoils of War, a Novel of the Ancient World, read it, and review it in either form you prefer. I’d appreciate that very much.
Best, Juliet Kincaid
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