With my third novel, Prince of Malorn, ready to publish by the middle of May, I'm conducting a series of "interviews" with my characters. This one is the seventh. Enjoy!
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I meet Sergeant Sanjik on a hillside just out of sight of
the Mountain Folk army camp, and we sit down on a pair of boulders to
talk. Snow robes the nearby mountain
peaks, and although none has fallen at this elevation, the winter breeze makes
us shiver.
“I’m sorry we have to meet here,” Sanjik apologizes,
wrapping his coat more tightly around himself, “but for security reasons no
visitors are allowed in the camp.”
I assure him I understand and pull out my list of questions.
How would you most like to spend a day off?
“With my family. I have a wife and two young children, whom I
haven’t seen since I came up here last month.
I miss them, but it will most likely be weeks until I see them again – months,
even, perhaps. Of course, depending on
how things turn out, I might very well not return alive; and if we don’t defeat
Rampus, my life won’t be worth much even if I survive the battle. That worries me for my family’s sake more than
my own. I would hate to see my son and my
little daughter grow up without their father, but unfortunately that’s the way
it sometimes happens in war.”
What motivates you?
“The prince’s safety.
I had a lot of respect for his father, the late King Kerman, and I’ve
always wondered if I could somehow have prevented his death. It’s worried me to see the way Regent Rampus has
been gaining power, and I’m certain Prince Korram is next on his list of people
to eliminate. As a palace guard, it
would be my responsibility to protect him in any case. But now that he’s given me the charge of
training his personal troops, I have the even greater responsibility of helping
him gain victory over the regent.”
Do you have any siblings? How did
you get along with them when you were growing up?
“I have a brother and two sisters. We got along all right, though I was so much
younger than any of them that we never really played together. My brother Ebbrem is fourteen years my elder. He was always at the top of his class at
school and better than anyone else at everything he did – or at least that’s
the way it appeared to me as a child. I
looked up to him, but at the same time, I resented the fact that everyone expected me to look up to him, to try to
model my life after his. And so I
purposely did things my own way and chose not to follow in his footsteps. We both liked sword fighting, for example,
but rather than use his old weapon, I saved up to buy my own and had it made in
a slightly different style. I arranged
to take lessons from a family friend instead of letting him teach me. I was interested in being a soldier, but
after he joined the military, I made up my mind that I never would. So I ended up on the palace guard instead,
and I’ve been quite content there for over a decade. Look at me now, though.” Sanjik chuckles. “Here I am in a position I never dreamed of:
in command of Prince Korram’s private army.
My title hasn’t officially changed, but in a way, I’m serving as a
general. Ebbrem doesn’t know about any
of this yet, but I can imagine his surprise if he were to find out that for all
practical purposes, I outrank him.”
What is your greatest
fear?
Sanjik turns sober again.
“I’d never actually trained anyone until the prince gave me this mission
– not from scratch, anyway. I mean, I
helped lead training exercises for the new guard recruits, but that’s not the
same. They come in knowing how to fight
already, and many of them have been in the military. Anyway, it’s the captain’s job to really get
them in shape and make sure they know the ropes. Here, I’m the ranking officer, and everything
about the soldiers’ training is my responsibility. I keep thinking how much better Ebbrem would
be at this and trying to remember what I’ve heard from him about training
soldiers. I’m doing my best, but I’m
constantly worried that it won’t be good enough. If and when these men and women meet up with Rampus’s
troops, then we’ll see whether my training has been sufficient. I try not to let the soldiers see, but I’m
worried that it will all have been for nothing and we’ll just be slaughtered.” He sighs, staring up the slope toward where I
know his soldiers are camped. “And I
worry that we’ll have to fight against my brother. He’s loyal to Prince Korram and won’t
knowingly turn against him, but if I know the regent, he’ll make sure none of
the soldiers realize who they’re really fighting against until it’s too late.”
What do you imagine
your brother would think of the job you’ve done training Prince Korram’s army?
Sanjik grins. “I’d
like to think he’d be proud of me, but probably his first reaction would be to
laugh. I haven’t exactly followed any normal
training procedures, because the Mountain Folk are so different than Lowlanders. Besides, we don’t have the same resources up
here. There are no uniforms, for
example, and I don’t suppose anyone could get the Mountain Folk to wear them
even if there were. I don’t have a
trumpet or a trumpeter to play it, so I use a homemade whistle and a series of
codes that I made up. And we don’t have
swords, so we’re using their traditional weapons, spears. I first had to get them to teach me to use
one myself, and then I had to think up specific combat techniques and names for
them. It wasn’t easy to teach these
things to a peaceful culture that uses their weapons mainly as tools to fish or
herd goats. Most of them had never
fought against another person before, or only with their fists, if anything. The whole idea of being soldiers was foreign
to them – I mean, they had no concept of marching and no clue what it meant to
stay in formation or stand at attention.
At first they resented being required to do things so contrary to their
culture, especially by an outsider. But
they’ve accepted me now and are a lot better at following orders. Still, I daresay this is the most unusual
army Malorn has ever seen.”
What annoys you the most?
“Being compared to my brother. I’ve chosen my own path in life, and though some
would say he’s more successful than I, I wouldn’t trade our positions if I had
the choice. No, I don’t wish I were in
the army. No, I don’t regret not having
been promoted as quickly or frequently as he has been. No, I don’t wish I had as many medals as he’s
earned. No, I’m not jealous of the fact
that he’s a captain and I’m only a sergeant.
Things work differently in the palace, and I’m content with the life I
have.”
What’s your secret to
getting along with the Mountain Folk when so many people look down on them and
claim that they’re vicious, uncivilized brutes?
“Those
who claim that have certainly never known any personally. For one thing, they’re definitely not
vicious. They’d be a lot easier to train
into soldiers if they were! And they may
be uncivilized, at least by our standards, but they aren’t brutes by any
means. Now that I’ve gotten to know
them, I can tell you that they have just as much intelligence, creativity,
compassion, and just as good a sense of humor as the average Lowlander. And when it comes to loyalty and
determination, I think most of them are ahead of us. The thing is, not many Malornians really know
much about them, because the Mountain Folk seldom leave the Impassables. So all we hear in the city are stories from
farmers in the foothills, and we’re only getting one side of those
stories. It’s true that the Mountain
Folk steal crops, for example, but they don’t think of it as stealing, just
picking what they find available. And I’ve
heard stories from them about farmers stealing their goats and horses, cheating
them in trade, injuring and even sometimes killing them. So of course the Mountain Folk resent our people
and are less than friendly toward us!
The problem doesn’t lie with the Mountain Folk themselves as much as it does
in the misunderstandings between our culture and theirs. Prince Korram realizes that, and he is
determined to change things on both sides once he takes the throne. Assuming his army and I can help keep him
alive long enough to do it, of course.”
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