Liner Notes for The Gladiator's Salute
Liner Notes for The Gladiator’s Salute
This wasn’t my first plan for this year’s set of stories. I had intended to do a series of stories, built around variations of the same cast, all journeys, but all reincarnated as different versions of themselves each time. Each journey by different methods, across different terrain, for different reasons. And so each character having to take a different role, so in a peaceful train journey the warrior is a security guard with nothing to do, when driving a supply truck across a war torn landscape he’s in charge etc.
But to be honest I didn’t have any idea what to do with it. Sure, I could come up with 13 different journeys but what did it add up to? I was gambling I could come up with an ending. I was with this as well, but we know how to end a gladiator series – a big fight!
I thought I’d get more mileage from the world gates, but they’re just there, this is the only time it actually matters and I could have written Eyes and Lady Amazingha coming in through tunnels under the city or similar. It does help to contextualise the angels. People who are familiar with moving between worlds via magic doors obviously meet strange things, strange magics, and interact with them. The angels though, they’re from elsewhere. They do unearthly things. They are messengers from the great beyond. It’s weird!
Not that weird, you can still fight them and hurt them. The Optimisers (sorry, riffing off the Optimates of the late Roman Republic) have put their final reliance on magic angels. But to bring in supernatural forces creates supernatural powers that rise against you. And not from the political enemies they anticipate!
I needed to give everybody something to do, and I wanted to use a couple of ideas I’d not had the chance to put into action. The masts that create shade were an obvious one. Just a pity I couldn’t have a duel up there. Still, a bit of siege work was a good one and gave me a chance to put Olianos somewhere he didn’t want to be, doing something more than just getting stuck into the melee in the arena.
They had to fight the city guard of course – all gladiators have to do that at some point, either a street or tavern brawl, in defence of an unjustly accused, or a full scale insurrection like here. This is one of the bits I foreshadowed when Agonistes told his recruits how to fight regular soldiers. I knew it was coming! In one way or another.
The politics are fairly stupid, but then again that’s often the case with historical politics too. I’ve lifted this from my memories of the late Roman Republic, the various agrarian laws proposed which it took the first Triumvirate to actually pass. (I didn’t look up the details). The point, such as it was, is to make the people in charge rash and paranoid, and wanting to put spectacles on in the arena. Hence Agonistes being condemned for a fight, and everyone being there for the events. That’s all it has to do, land reform in the Empire Of Mora doesn’t need to make sense!
(It does on a superficial level, all the wealth and slaves from conquest are going to the nobles. They’re buying up the best land, driving the free peasants into debt, so the only way they can survive is for their sons to join the army and send their pay home. But there’s a limit to how this works, and no limit to the greed of the nobles, and hence this situation. The Optimisers, the party of the nobility, being the ones trying to solve it is not the paradox it seems – they’re seeking to use it to reward their followers and get mass support on their side, funding it through selling publicly owned land – to themselves! Making money and dispersing their opponents’ supporters.)
What about the magic though? Is the Prophecy real? As ever, I didn’t have time to write the Prophecy properly, making sure it met (or pointedly didn’t meet) events in the story. Sorry about that, I didn’t plan this in advance. I meant to write the 13 journey stories! Still, Vinculus brought back the Silence, passed it to Vittles, who used it to shut down the Angels, keep them mortal. And so make them vulnerable.
How does Mischa fly? She just does, I say as much in the story. How do the angels transform? That’s their (super)nature! The portals? You open them you go from place to place. It’s all like that. Why fight in the arena? Because it’s there.
I hope that I managed a satisfying ending from all the bits and pieces I scattered about in the earlier stories. I had thought there would be more training, and more exploration of the difference between those who became gladiators through choice (more or less) and those enslaved that way. More slavery in fact. Perhaps this isn’t the vehicle for that. Anyway, that’s it for now. Don’t forget to give a thumbs up or thumbs down!
