The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart (56 page)

Rebecca Meiers

J
ESSE
B
ULLINGTON’S
formative years were spent primarily in rural Pennsylvania, the Netherlands, and Tallahassee, Florida. He is a folklore enthusiast
who holds a bachelor’s degree in history and English from Florida State University. He currently resides in Colorado, and
can be found online at
www.jessebullington.com
.

Have you always known that you wanted to be a writer?

To the best of my memory I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller but I wasn’t always sure in what medium I would most prefer
to work. I was writing short stories as soon as I could spell, and my first rejection letter was from
Highlights
or
Cricket
, one of those children’s magazines, when I was maybe seven or eight years old. At first it was just an innate desire to tell
tall tales, and as I grew up I vacillated amongst ambitions of working in film, television, comic books, theater, and fiction
proper, if there is such a thing. In the end I lacked the social-herding abilities required to realize your vision onstage
or in front of a camera, and comics were likewise out as I was never able to either render the imagery myself or con a skilled
friend into illustrating my stories. This is not to say that I became a novelist by default, but rather that for these flippant
reasons combined with a strong literary inclination I found novels to be the ideal medium to transmit my stories.

How did you get your big break into publishing?

By striking up a conversation with a stranger when I was working in a video store. That stranger wound up being the brilliant
and generous author Jeff VanderMeer, who offered me greater advice and assistance than we mortals are accustomed to since
our oracles fell silent. After checking out my novel Jeff blogged about it and posted an excerpt on his website, which was
seen by a very talented agent who offered to read the manuscript. That agent, Sally Harding, loved the novel and things progressed
rapidly. The moral here is obvious, I think.

When you aren’t writing, what do you like to do in your spare time?

Hiking is one of my favorite activities. I love few things more than a vigorous walk, regardless of the setting, season, time,
or weather. Nocturnal hikes are preferable, as starlight and shadow render mundane landscapes far more interesting, and the
increased risk of an animal mauling or a twisted ankle imbues such sport with the heady cologne of menace.

Who/what would you consider to be your influences?

All the usual sources—history, folklore, musicians, artists, film-makers, actors, my friends, my family, my dreams, my experiences,
cultures both foreign and domestic, the world around us, and other writers. In general I wear my influences on my page but,
that said, I am never one to pass up the opportunity to promote my favorites. Confining myself to a baker’s dozen of all sorts
of creative collectives and individuals and resigning myself to thinking up an even better list as soon as I’m finished, my
influences include the Tiger Lillies, Vincent Price, Angela Carter, Roald Dahl, Alan Moore, Edward Gorey, Clive Barker, Kentaro
Miura, Irvine Welsh, the Coen Brothers, Italo Calvino, Nick Cave, and the
Weird Tales
triumvirate.

The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart
is an amazing novel that’s truly like nothing else out there. How did you derive the idea for this novel?

A question I find every bit as tough as its reputation. I wanted to write a novel set in medieval Europe containing as many
of my favorite aspects of fiction as was feasible that also satirized dull literary devices and archetypes. That and I wanted
to take the romance out of grave robbing. A different sort of protagonist was mandatory, and once I had the Brothers themselves
sussed everything progressed naturally.

As per your studies, are Hegel and Manfried based upon any real characters in history?

The Brothers Grossbart are not based on any particular individuals but history is rife with their ilk. Modern society as well,
for that matter.

Do you think the novel is controversial? If so, why?

I think most things worth talking about are controversial if one asks around enough, but I didn’t give much thought to whether
or not my novel would qualify as such when I was writing it. I did intend to subvert some of the conventions of mainstream
fantasy fiction, so it may well end up being divisive anyway. Much of what I love about fantasy, horror, adventure, and historical
fiction seems at odds with what is currently popular in those genres, and this novel probably reflects that.

Now that
The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart
has been published, what will be next for you?

I have several projects percolating at any given time and anticipate completing two more novels in the next couple of years.

Finally, as a first-time author, what has been your favorite part of the publishing process?

Meeting individuals at Orbit and the Cooke Agency whose humor and friendliness are surpassed only by their wisdom and keen
insight. Also, having such a stunning artist as Istvan Orosz create a beautiful cover to house my humble words has made me
a very happy fellow indeed.

introducing

If you enjoyed

THE SAD TALE OF THE

BROTHERS GROSSBART,

look out for

by K. J. Parker

Hoping for a better life, five war veterans colonize an abandoned island. They take with them everything they could possibly
need—food, clothes, tools, weapons, even wives.

But an unanticipated discovery shatters their dream and replaces it with a very different one. The colonists feel sure that
their friendship will keep them together. Only then do they begin to realize that they’ve brought with them rather more than
they bargained for.

For one of them, it seems, has been hiding a terrible secret from the rest of the company. And when the truth begins to emerge,
it soon becomes clear that the war is far from over.

W
hen Teuche Kunessin was thirteen years old, the war came to Faralia. General Oionoisin led the Seventh Regiment down the Blue
River valley, trying to catch the enemy’s last remaining field army before it could get to the coast, where the fleet was
waiting to take it home. With hindsight, he admitted that he sent his cavalry too far ahead; the enemy dragoons cut them off
and routed them at Sherden, whereupon their commander lost his nerve and withdrew them behind the defences of the coast fort
at Greenmuir. The enemy immediately turned on General Oionoisin and, making full use of their cavalry superiority, forced
him to fight a pitched battle six miles east of Faralia, on a high ridge of open moorland pasture. The Seventh fought well,
holding off the dragoons for over an hour before their square finally broke. Once the pike wall was disrupted, however, the
enemy infantry moved against them and their annihilation was inevitable. After the battle, in the absence of any effective
opposition in the west, the enemy retraced their steps as far as Mesh-way, defeated General Houneka’s Fifth Regiment and laid
siege to the city. Most authorities now agree that Oionoisin’s error of judgement at Faralia prolonged the war by ten years.

Teuche’s father knew the soldiers were somewhere in the parish. He’d met Tolly Epersen as he was driving the herd back to
the sheds for evening milking, and Tolly reckoned he’d seen them, a dark grey blur on the slopes of Farmoor. Teuche’s father
was worried, naturally enough. His sheep were on Big Moor, a hopelessly tempting prize for a large body of hungry men. He
considered the risks and options: if Tolly had seen them on Farmoor an hour ago, even if they were coming straight down the
combe, it’d still take them four hours to reach the pasture where the sheep were. There should be plenty of time, therefore,
to get up to Big Moor and drive the flock into Redwater combe, where with any luck they wouldn’t be noticed. Normally he’d
have gone himself and left the milking to Teuche, but as luck would have it, he’d put his foot in a rabbit hole and turned
over his ankle two days earlier, and was still limping badly. He didn’t like the thought of sending the boy out where there
might be stray soldiers, but he couldn’t risk anything happening to the sheep. He called Teuche out of the barn, where he’d
been mending hurdles, and told him what to do.

Teuche clearly wasn’t wild about the idea, but he could see that it had to be done, and that his father was in no fit state
to do it. He whistled up the dogs, put some rope in his pocket just in case he did meet any soldiers (if the dogs ran ahead,
they’d give him away; once he got up on the top he’d put them on the lead, just in case) and set off up the course of the
dried-up stream. It wasn’t the shortest way, but he figured he could keep out of sight behind the high banks on that side,
if there turned out to be soldiers on the moor.

The stream bed ran down the steepest side of the hill, but Teuche was young, fit and in a hurry. Because he was keeping well
over to the lower side, in the shade of the ninety-year-old copper beeches his great-grandfather had planted along the top
of the bank to act as a windbreak, he could neither see nor be seen, and the wind in the branches made enough noise to mask
any sound he made, though of course going quietly had long since been second nature to him. It took him no more than an hour
to reach the gate in the bank that led from Pit Mead into Big Moor. There he paused, pulled himself together, and peered over
the gate to see what he could see.

To begin with, he had no idea what they could be. They were far too dark to be sheep, too big to be rooks or crows. If he’d
been a stranger to the neighbourhood he might well have taken them for rocks and large stones; not an unusual sight on the
top of the moor, where the soil was so thin and the wind scoured more of it away every year. But, thanks to his great-grandfather’s
windbreak, Big Moor was good pasture with relatively deep, firm soil; there were one or two outcrops down on the southern
side, but none at all in the middle, and these things, whatever they were, were everywhere. His best guess was that they were
some kind of very large birds; geese, perhaps.

At first, they only puzzled him; he was too preoccupied by what wasn’t there, namely the sheep. He curbed the impulse to run
out into the field and look for them. If they weren’t there, it might well mean that the soldiers had got there first and
were down out of sight in the dip on the eastern side. By the same token, the sheep might be down there too, though they only
tended to crowd in down there when they needed to shelter from the rain. He couldn’t decide what to do for the best, and as
he tried to make up his mind, he considered the unidentified things scattered all over the field; not sheep or rooks, not
stones, and there had to be hundreds of them. Thousands.

He stayed in the gateway for a long while, until he realised that time was getting on, and he still didn’t know where the
sheep were. Very cautiously, he climbed the gate and dropped down as close as he could to the bank, where he’d be harder to
see. His idea was to work his way along the bank as far as the boggy patch, where he could use the cover of the reeds to get
far enough out into the field to spy down into the hidden dip. It was a good plan of action. In spite of his anxiety, he felt
moderately proud of himself for keeping his head in a difficult situation.

The first one he found was lying in the bottom of the narrow drainage rhine that went under the bank about a hundred yards
down from the gate. Because of the clumps of couch grass that edged the rhine, he didn’t see him until he was no more than
five feet away. He stopped dead, as though he’d walked into a wall in the dark.

The man was lying on his face, his arms by his sides, and Teuche’s first thought was that he was drunk; passed out and sleeping
it off in a ditch, like old Hetori Laon from Blueside. He noticed that the man had what looked like a steel shell that covered
his top half, from his neck down to his waist, and under that a shirt apparently made out of thousands of small, linked steel
rings. Then he realised that the man’s face was submerged in the black, filthy water that ran in the rhine. He ran forward
to see if he could help, but stopped before he got much closer.

He’d never seen a dead man before. When Grandfather died, his mother had made him stay out in the barn; when he was allowed
back inside there was no body to be seen, just a long plank box with the lid already nailed down. Maybe as a result of that,
he’d always imagined that a dead body would be a horrifying, scary sight; in the event, it was no such thing. It looked just
like a man lying down—a man lying down drunk, even, which was comedy, not tragedy—but he could tell just by looking at it
that it wasn’t human any more, it wasn’t a person, just a thing. Teuche wasn’t afraid of things. He went closer.