Last night we went to the cinema to watch The Sheep Detectives . It was a great, fun film packed with all the rollercoaster emotions you want from any movie. Interestingly, despite the fact the film was perhaps aged at a younger audience, everyone at the screening was quite a bit older. We made a comment later that, despite the fact the film is a PG rating, there was no way any of my nieces would be able to handle it. But the most appealing thing about the film was just how appealing it was! It was a murder mystery, of course, but it also bordered on drama, comedy, and romance. It certainly catered for all ages, with some of the references and topics which would be completely lost on young children. And it was not afraid to deal with some pretty brutal topics. In many respects, we expect these genre-collisions in films - we applaud them and celebrate them as crafty and creative. It's a shame, I think, that many books which portray a similar mixed approach at often overlooked as di...
A Good Death: The Stubborn Dictator and The Headstrong King - Inspiration for "Vercingetorix's Virgin"
I was thrilled to be asked to share a story for the Historical Writers Forum's Alternate Endings anthology. This post is a little insight into the historical figures of my story, Vercingetorix's Virgin, and why I changed what I did...
A Good Death:
The Stubborn Dictator and The Headstrong King
 |
| Memento Mori - Remember Death (This is actually in Nuremberg, but suited my purpose well!) |
Death is an inevitability. There is nothing which levels the playing-field more than the acknowledgement that everyone must die. All of humanity, whether kings or serfs, will end their days in death.
Throughout history, across regions and religions, this has been a factor which has played upon the minds of mankind. Unsurprisingly, this has given rise to the notion of a "Good Death". The Vikings knew they could enter Valhalla if they died in battle, Christians knew they would be counted amongst the saints if they suffered martyrdom.
But if there is a good death, there must also be a bad death. A life taken in violent circumstances before its time, is believed by some to result in a restless spirit. There are a multitude of ghost stories about victims of murder, those with unfinished business, those who failed to achieve their earthly goals because their fellow man robbed them of the chance to do so.
Meet two such individuals:
 |
The Stubborn Dictator ~ The Headstrong King |
The fact is, Julius Caesar and Vercingetorix had more in common than they would perhaps care to admit. And, while we remember far more about Caesar these days, if his life had been snuffed out at the same age as Vercingetorix, he may well have died at the feet of the statue of Alexander the Great, lamenting his own inadequacies. Vercingetorix, then, achieved more year for year than Caesar.
But such arguments are perhaps useless, because what people really remember of the two of them is the manner of their deaths. And they were both bad deaths. One was paraded as a trophy and then garrotted, the other was turned upon by his own people (and some historical conspiracies would have the ringleader as his own son) and stabbed to death before his peers. Like I said: bad deaths!
For the sake of Vercingetorix's Virgin, I wanted to change that. These men were giants of the ancient world, whether they spawned an imperial legacy or bloomed into a folk hero, both deserved to have a good death.
Vercingetorix was basically the anti-Caesar. Having a noble background, and revered as a king after leading his army to victory in Gergovia, this headstrong young man taunted the Romans at every opportunity - even needlessly risking his own army at times. But Caesar, perhaps older and wiser, perhaps only more stubborn, possessed far more patience. And patience was what won him the field at Alesia after a siege which had left the Gauls starved and weak.
They had both courted death at every opportunity. Always a good death, though. It wasn't fair that they died in the ways they did. So it was time to give them a second chance. Time to give them the opportunity to have their good deaths. I won't tell you what happens in the story, only that neither of them die in the manner they did in the original history.
As with all of us, their deaths were still inevitable, but now they could go on to achieve a good death. I gave them their chance to learn from one another. But you can never second-guess the response of that headstrong king or that stubborn dictator. They really did deserve each other, but they really didn't deserve to be remembered first and foremost for their bad deaths.
Read Vercingetorix's Virgin and seven other fantastic "What If?" stories in alternate endings!
Comments
Post a Comment