Zornhau

Ray Bradbury famously went to the doctor with a lump in the front of his throat. “Congratulations,” said the medic. “You've discovered the Adam's Apple. That'll be five dollars.”

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"In peace the sons bury their fathers, but in war the fathers bury their sons."

Andy's one of my oldest friends. We've played AD&D together, boozed together, shared a blues band for a few years, but now he's out on a limb in a location so remote you have to pay a skeletal ferryman two gold coins to get to, and he's playing his heart out:

At the very moment, I should be exchanging personly strokes of the longsword with my mates. Alas, yesterday I strained some muscles I did not know I had, and despite last night's attempt to use a traditional Indian cure purported to give me the suppleness of  a Cobra, I can't fence today... or bend down, or tie my laces without pain, but that's small beer compared to the fencing. (Did I mention I'm missing out on the fencing?) 

However, yesterday I taught a vast class of mixed abilities, and had them all throwing Krumphaus and Kurtzhaus by the end. Enough that it's spritually satisfying to see Medieval techniques brought to life in a 21st century church hall, but on top of this, I passed my Instructurship test and am now an official DDS Instructor, meaning that I have insurance for running Tuesday nights solo - a relief for Matt who's been heroically dragging himself out every week.

Better yet, Mr Steel Skull and I had our first fight for years. He used to be our top... nay Alpha fencer... until a few years back he had an non-WMA related accident. The fight marks a milestone in recovery for him - I'd say he's now at about 90% - and a fencing one for me; when last we fought, I had nothing to fight with except enthusiasm. Now I have German Longsword. 

So the race is on. Can I tighten my style faster than he can complete his recovery and assimilate the newly reconstructed system? (Yes, he's attending Tuesday night, which means ultimately the pendulum will swing back in his favour.)

God I love DDS!

We face off, krumphau in a Meyer-esque high Vom Tag, me in Goliath's lower Vom Tag...

...and this is the first time niether of us know what the other is going to do.

The thing is that Krumphau and I have known each other for the best part of a decade. It was the pair of who first realised there were flaws in Tobler's interpretation of Ringek - no aspersions on CT; such books are always hostage to time - and set about devising our own.

End result, every time we fought, we each knew what plays the other would expect, and the expected response, so we alternately clashed inconclusively, or else tried nippy silly work arounds that just looked scappy.

But now, we each finally know techniques that the other doesn't know, and the body of techniques we do share is so large that we can't second-guess each other until the blades start to move.

Tonight was unpredictable. Tonight was good.

I've now got the new LiveJournal Messenger. My Windows Live ID is zornhau@livejournal.com. Sign up now and we can chat!

"Wheeeee!" yells Morgenstern, aged nearly 2.

I'm using my Swordsman's Mighty Thews(TM), plus good body mechanics, to send her hurtling into the sky time and time again.
 
Earlier, as I was fielding some work-related emails, she marched into my study. "Bye bye Pepper Pig. Park now."

"OK," I said. "Garden first, though. Daddy has to put the washing out."

She shook her head. "My park now. My get my coat. My buggy now." (Yesterday it was "My splashing in my puddle!")

So now Morgenstern's a happy little vision of pink, earning her "Child Most Likely to Take Up Extreme Sports" badge. She zooms towards me, fine hair whirling in the wind, and treats me to her gap-toothed grin. "Wheeeee!"

"Morgenstern, can you say 'faster'?" I ask.

"Faster!"

I give her a good shove and the swing rockets upwards. "Can you say, 'higher'?"

"Higher! Higher!"

Another shove. "Can you say, 'Antidisestablishmentarianism'?"

My little girl shakes her head. "No!"

But I keep pushing her anyway.

Am on a quest to find non-embarrassing Heavy Metal that I like as much as Tull's Broadsword album....

I feel so at home in this place, it takes a while to realise that it reminds me of my study.

Weapons and armour roost on the walls, occult tomes jostle for shelf space with with history books and classics, and little fragments - locks of hair, an ancient book, or a  scrap of stone or pottery - remind us of a real and concrete past.

Yes, it's like my study, except it's an entire house... Abbotsford House on the Tweed near Melrose, the absolute archetype of a Fantasy writer's perfect mansion, except that it was built by the grandfather of historical novelists, Sir Walter Scott.

Sir Walter Scott is Scotland's Edgar Rice Burroughs, only his prolific muse took him to the local past, rather than into space, and he wrote to wipe out a debt, rather than to escape a boring job. His Targe and Tartan yarns put Scotland on the 19th-century tourist map. If his text is past its sell-by date, his stories live on on the screen, big and small. He was so famous in his day, that both Blucher and Wellington were glad to meet up when he visited the field of Waterloo. When he fell ill, the government lent him a Royal Navy frigate so he could tour the Mediterranean. Oh, and,  Hail to the Chief? Guess who wrote the original verses...

But it's not Sir Walter's fame that draws me back to his home, and has done since I was a child. Nor is it is books, which I confess I have not read. It's the place he created. Abbotsford House is an eye in History's storm. A sort of static TARDIS decked with the trophies of a time-travelling imagination.

A fragment of stone embeded in the garden wall boasts that a Vexilla of the 20th Legion did... who can say? Nearby, naked Classical heroes brandish spears in the company of weather-worn medallions of Renaissance potentates. In the Hall, bullet-riddled cuirasses echo with the screams of the wounded at Waterloo, and a pair of 16th-century armours, Pompeii-like, preserve the imprints of German knights who might have toasted the Reformation, or helped to toast the heretics who sought to shrug off the yoke of Rome. On another wall, bucket boots and black armour seem to reek of the 30 Years War - burning flesh and the egg-stinking gunpowder. A few paces way, exotic Persian maces and Indian gauntlet swords jostle for space around an original portrait of James IV. He seems too refined to have fallen with steel harness on his back and a sword in his hand, until you notice the bullish neck. The king who fell at Flodden, shares the company of a horned Celtic chamfron that once lent a terrible aspect to a tiny pony as it trundled a war chariot along behind it while painted savages chanted prayers to Morrigan and god knows what gods.

And then there are the books. Just the titles - because that's all the visitor ever gets to read - are enough to transport you to otherwhen. Histories of sorcery, of war, of architecture, of Romans and Greeks, knights and warriors. Classical texts and classic texts. Gazetteers and guidebooks...
 
To wander Abbotsford House is to confront the reality of the totality of History. Any of the doors could open out onto a world of Romans or warriors, or knights or knaves. All you need is the imagination to turn the key.

This is a Man.

Best quote, "What do you think I voted for on Omaha beach?" Watch and weep...

Kurtzhau, aged almost six, bursts into the kitchen. "Daddy, can you help me with the upgrades.... please?"

Half an hour before, I started Blitzkrieg Burning Horizon for him, managed the fiddly business of having the infantry pick up their machine guns – why is it that games developers like to randomly dive into pointless micromanagement? – and left him to guide Rommel's division over a hellacious opposed river crossing.
 
Two bridges, one tank-friendly but broken and covered by irate Belgians (fresh from oppressing natives in the Congo, before you get too squeamish), the second OK for infantry only, but off on the far flank. The trick is supposed to be to send the infantry around by the second bridge, and, while they keep the enemy busy, repair the first and get the tanks over. God knows I was stuck on it.

"Kurtzhau!" I say in my you're being silly voice. "You can't do upgrades in the middle of a battle."

"No! No!" says my angelic little boy. "I got the infantry over the wooden bridge and put them where the British tanks would come using their own tank traps - the Belgian ones I mean - to protect them from the tanks then they got in range of the mortars and the mortars bombarded up the tanks and then I could see the guns so I called in a Stuka airstrike and they VAPORISED the Belgian 25-pounders so then my men OBLITERATED all the infantry and the engineers could repair the bridge and the Panzers could go across and..."

He makes a sort of open palm gesture. "...and I won some kind of medal."

Haloed by whispy hair, a vision in pink, Morgenstern, aged almost two, climbs to the top of the garden slide. "I'm dragon, Daddy."

"Dragons go RAHHH!" I say. "Can you go rahhh?"

She shakes her head firmly. "Baby dragon," she says, as if to an idiot.

Later, the electrician arrives and we're confined to one end of the house. Kurtzhau, aged almost six, helps his little sister build a crazy train track so Mackapacka and Peppa Pig can ride all over the livingroom floor. Then they discover the fishing nets from the butterfly game, and play at rescuing their cuddly dinosaurs. One ear on the mayhem, I see the electrician out and start to prepare dinner in time for Frau Hau's return from work.

A few eye blinks later and Morgenstern cuddles up with her dinosaur and milk and goes to sleep.

Frau Hau drives off to fetch Granny from the airport. Kurtzhau grandly attempts to play Blitzkrieg Burning Horizon solo for the first time - "You can help me if there's any text to read" - while I make like a CIA clean up squad and remove all trace of the electrician's visit.

As I put the dishwasher on, Kurtzhau  bursts into the kitchen. "Daddy! Daddy! I keep seeing a Lysander and the British artillery keeps shelling my Panzer IVs and I CAN'T get ANY fighter cover to shoot it down!"

"Left click the Air Support button, then click on the button with the two aeroplanes. Then right-click near the Lysander," I say.

"I did! I did! It doesn't work."

"Go try again."

Later still, after a Biggles story from me and a cuddle from Mummy, he's tucked up in bed and I go in to kiss him goodnight. "Look what Granny brought me from Cyprus." A plush turtle emerges from under the duvet. Kurtzhay makes little happy "squee" sounds and lends it life with just the right flippery-scuttley waddle.

I sit on the bed. "We're going to have a lazy morning tomorrow."

"Not me," says Kurtzhau. "I'm going to have breakfast and watch TV then go straight to the computer to play Blitzkreig."

...but somebody else has just sent me a nice email asking to see the full manuscript.

I must admit that I'm getting a bit blase about the whole thing - like an artillery commander with faith in his weapons, shelling an area in the knowledge that one of the rounds will hit the enemy ammo du---WHAM! There it goes.

Yesterday evening, I got an email from my most promising agent. Another rejection, but saying that "Swords Versus Tanks" is publishable, and making suggestions for destinations rather than changes.

And then I grabbed my bag of swords and went and taught my first longsword class in months.

The room was packed and the Krumphau is a windmill action involving leaping to the side and cutting down into the vacated space. So the big challenge was choreopgraphing the students to avoid... negative synergies.

But, with some hasty changes to the lesson plan, it worked.

I'm not aiming for immediate perfection. German longsword is like one of those Sacred Landscapes so beloved of Druidic tree-huggers. The landmarks - all those odd saucily-shaped stones - on make sense in the context of the landscape, but the significance of the landscape means understanding the landmarks. So, we're going to cycle through the Five Meisterhaus (The Master Cuts) as quickly as possible, as often as possble. Each ten weeks should bring us back to the start, adding layers of understanding.

So, the novices began to learn the form, and get the moves approximately right. The main challenge was getting them to keep it simple. People always want to whirl the swords, move the hands about, fight with a flourish, whereas the Krumphau is really just "Bong! Splat!" - you hit his blade with your long (true) edge, and then his face with your short (false) edge.

Meister Dobringer agrees:


The more experienced swordspeople became tighter and more effective. Just watching them validates our five year quest to rebuild the system. Not only does it look right, it works for other people with no emotional investment in it.

So the steel sang, and I heard the distant echo of the Ancient Meisters toasting us from Valhalla.

And the novel...?

Meister Dobringer wrote in 1389:

When you have done the first strike [Vorschlag] then you shall without any delay do the second and you should also stay in motion and do one thing after another. If the first  does not work then the second, the third or the fourth will hit..

Very useful D&D post here. See especially the comments.

From an article on the Zepplin Pulps


http://ratmmjess.livejournal.com/218848.html

Yes, finally driven to distraction by the WWII obsession, I decided to deploy a Strategic Bedtime Story.

This entailed picking the one Conan story that I knew would make sense to a 5-year old and expurgating for rant and racism as I read.

Just like The Hobbit, it passed the Interpretative Playmobil Threshold (see left).

They told me it would take at least two weeks to recover from the gross operation, and they were right. I'm up and about now, but even a short walk tires me out - not sure why; somebody reckoned it's the effect of the anasthetic. I plan to be gently back in circulation next week, and to take up the sword again the week after. 

Joshua is posting PDFs of the first chapters of his debut novel. It's an incredible trilogy, but very hard to review without spoilers, which is why I haven't up until this point. Let me try to walk the line....

Book One is twisty turny assassin's journey that could have been written by the bastard offspring of Clark Ashton Smith and Mary Renault. Think monarchs who are sort of gods, a vaguely Mediterranean setting, and a backstory containing a doomed ancient civilisation. There's a resonance with Robin Hob, but the setting is urban, and the pace, fast.

The remaining books are are what Heinlein would have written had he read too much Fritz Leiber--think Honor Harrington does Sim City in a Sword and Sorcery universe. (Or a hard edged take on the central idea of Pratchett's Pyramids.) There are not many writers who can make the business of being in charge interesting, so I hope Joshua continues in this vein.

Beyond the world and the plot, Joshua's real strength is his crisp and clear writing style. The books will blow your mind in places, but they'll never confuse you.

So, I rather like them.

Friday lunchtime and Kurtzhau's telling me a story....

"Sir Wolfram babble blabber blabber. And you know who he had with him? William Marshal! And.... who's that other knight...?"

"Don Pero Nino," I supply, meekly. 

Sir Wolfram is the Playmobil figure I brought back from Germany about two years ago. His boxed set equips him as both knight and hunter, so I wove him into a German adventurer, sort of Durer meets the Brothers Grimm, for tales of dark forests and castles perched on rocky summits.  I choose Germany partly because I like the setting, but mostly because - even then - I guessed that WWII would feature in Kurtzhau's mindscape and I wanted to add some positive ideas about Germany into the mix.

I'm pleased we've kept Sir Wolfram going for so long - when Kurtzhau travels, Sir Wolfram and his now expanded retinue tends to go with him, complete with tents, campfire, and boar to hunt.

Even so, I'm still convalescing and it's hard to maintain my focus in the face of such a torrent of narrative enthusiasm.

"An Don Pero Ninio! Welllll.... babble blabber blabber." His words lull me like the sound of a mountain brook, "Then William Marshal took the spearmen out to the front of the castle and made them run around like chickens."

"What?" I raise my head off the table. "Like chickens?"

"Yesss," says Kurtzhau, smugly. "And, do you know? While the people in the castle were looking at the spearmen behaving like chickens, Sir Wolfram and his men were climbing up the back to attack them. (Attack the men in the castle, not the spearmen behaving like chickens, Daddy.)"

"This is good stuff," I say. "Perhaps I'll turn it into a story for you."

"No, Daddy," says Kurtzhau. "I'll tell the story and you write it down on your computer."

And I sense an opportunity.

Kurtzhau presents something of a challenge with regard to his reading and writing.  He can't read the stuff he'd like to read ("Read me that book on armoured cars, Daddy...") and - I've long suspected - he can't write fast enough to keep up with the story in his head. So, normally, he can't be bothered with either reading or writing.

So after Morgenstern crashes out for her afternoon power nap, I sit at the computer. Kurtzhau hauls the piano stool into my cupboard executive suite... and perches next to me. We dicker over fonts, and settle on Comic Sans.

Kurtzhau settles himself comfortably. "Well I have to tell you, this is Episode 2," he says. "Episode 1 is too boring and nothing happens." And then he dictates. At first he's doing it in a singsong, one... word... at... a... time way. But after a nudge from me, just tells the story as fast as I can type.

I keep my input to the minimum beyond adding commas and line breaks. When the pronouns become complicated, I suggest using descriptive tags like "the barbarian." And I remind him that in this house we say "mail" and not "chainmail".  About half way through, I introduce him to the idea of not always starting a line of dialogue with a "he said" construction - you can see where. But that's that.

At the end of the first thee paragraphs I interrupt. "Now you have to read it back to check the words."

And, he does. No whinging, squirming or falling off his seat to truncate a particularly bland passage. At my prompting he makes a couple of changes, e.g. "person" becomes "barbarian." I pitch these as improvements, rather than "got it wrong first time".

And  repeat.

Here's what we ended up with:
( Kurtzhau's Story Episode 1 and Episode 2 )
It's nice he can splurge out a story, but mostly I'm relieved that I've finally got him reading for fun, rather than homework.

I'm left with one problem, though. I rather like the idea of a monstrous castle that walks around. Baba Yaga's hut on steroids.

But, what are the ethics of borrowing a story idea from your five-year-old son?