Afterword

I sat across a kitchen table from my best friend Maggie Forest in the early hours of one morning, many years ago now, after we had returned from a concert which we’d gone to together, both of us nursing cups of coffee we should probably never have had at 3 AM but still too high from the concert to contemplate going to bed. I remember she sat there, smiling at me, her chin pillowed in the palm of her left hand, and suddenly saying dreamily, “We should write a story together.”

It was three in the morning, I was still in a different reality, and the coffee was starting to work. “Yes,” I agreed enthusiastically, “we should.”

“Good,” she said. “You start.”

 

That was the beginning of the story we both knew as “the Sabrina novel”. In theory we shared out the characters, but I got carried away as usual and I kept on creating more and more of them. Sabrina herself was all mine, but so were Uncle Bob/Gregor and Marco/Igor (and, well, Lucifer, by extension), and Shura, and Fiana. I’m not sure which of us claimed Paul, or if he was a real collaboration. But Jack, the taniwha of Lake Manapouri, was all hers. She crafted him carefully and lovingly. And then I moved away and the story languished on the vine for a little while… until I rediscovered it, and asked Maggie if she would mind if I picked it up and reworked it and published the result. She generously released Jack for that purpose. I am here to attest that without Maggie and without Jack this story could not exist, and to give all the credit where it is due, for that.

 

We wrote the story, and it was a bit of a mixed bag, a quilt – the setting, of course, was real, and we had both been to the underground dam at Manapouri so parking the story there was a pretty cool thing to do (and I WAS sorry to wreak such havoc on it, in the end, but what can you do when the story needs a catastrophe?...) – but of course we had to take massive liberties with. We certainly make no claims that the dam on Lake Manapouri was built for any but the most legitimate of purposes. As far as the dam is concerned, we have “inside knowledge”, as it were, of only the outer layers – we invented the security system, the “service shafts”, and certainly invented the “identity” of the lower cavern and the possibility of escaping the dam in the way our people do.

Any other errors we made were entirely our own - and mine, if I created them anew when I rewrote this thing – and for this I ask pardon in advance. This was a story knitted together, at the last count, from at least three different mythologies, a hierarchy of legendary archetypes, and some of the more controversial trappings of one major world religion. It was knitted together from real history and imagined events. It would in fact be surprising if we never missed a stitch. I can only claim, on both Maggie’s behalf and my own, the ultimate amendment to any literary constitution, poetic licence - and if we either of us erred we did not mean to cause irritation or offence.

Any similarities to persons living or dead are, of course, utterly coincidental. This is fiction. More than that, it is fantasy. But I do confess to feeling a little annoyed that a man like Marco never really existed…

 

This story had a soundtrack – thanks are due to Michael Flatley and the “Lord of the Dance” CD which was spinning constantly with what became themes linked to individual places or people in the story. For instance, the “lake of broken glass” in the first chapter is painted very evocatively by track 3, “Celtic dream”. The chase into the woods to rescue Jack and Fiana from the rusalka is almost precisely echoed by track 14, appropriately entitled “Nightmare” – you can even hear the thuds of the axe in the music. The night at Uncle Bob’s house, there in the substation, during which so many things are revealed is encapsulated in track 10, “Lament”. And Sabrina herself can be glimpsed in track 5, “Gypsy”.

 

In terms of acknowledgements, debts are owed to a great many people, ranging from my friend Bill the electrical engineer who said, rather nonplussed, that certain things are possible (but why on earth would be want them to happen?…) to the lady who explained the workings of the station to us on-site. Later on, there were people like Deck Deckert (my husband, and always my first editor), Phyllis Irene Radford (who beta read the final revised MS) and Marissa Doyle (who went above and beyond the call of duty in rooting out all the tiny errors which creep into every manuscript when the author isn’t looking). And there are always the unsung legions of people in whose published works we found all the information that we required – the Maori legends, the Russian mythology, and the idea that selkies are actually fallen angels…

 

Alma Alexander

July 2017

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You can find more books by Alma Alexander at Book View Café

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Read on for the first chapter of EMPRESS.