Guest Post: RecipeArium by Costi Gurgu

“But ser,” broke in one of the deckpaws. “The greatest jewel in the world is said to be guarded by the fearsome kraken, as tall as the queen’s castle with tentacles longer than ten vessels nose to tail!”

“Which is why, m’dear, we not be partakin’ of the flesh of the inkton,” Cinrak explained. “Kraken’s cousins have proven intelligent and good friends of Rodentkind. Friends not be eatin’ friends. The mer archives tell us, yes, once beasts of Kraken’s size did exist. It be not our place to tempt The Depth’s wrath.”

The entire crew undulated two digits in a v shape of warding.

– “Search for the Heart of the Ocean”

In Thor: Ragnarok, a motley collection of hunters challenges a confused Thor with, “Are you friend, or are you food?” It’s a play on the hail “friend or foe,” building a dangerous world reveling in its violence and cannibalism in one swift sentence.

Cinrak’s rodent pirate world is one of fun, love, silliness, and respect. I wanted to create a through line about balance in community, nature, body, and spirit. What if pirates oversaw the equal distribution of resources? What if trans people had easy and equitable access to the health care they deserve? What if the monarchy answered to the people? What would keeping balance in the oceans look like?

As the quote above suggests, respect for the sapience of ocean creatures is baked (see: puns most definitely intended in this book) into the myths, legends, and superstitions of Rodentdom. The great kraken, the protector of sea creatures, has not been seen for hundreds of years. Rather than take this as carte blanche to chow down on the crumbed calamari with chili sauce, the rodents ask what so upset the balance of life that an entire species would suddenly disappear.

In early drafts, I made strong points about climate change and over-fishing disturbing not just the way of life, but magic. This too upset balance; the sweetness and respect for letting the world building bleed in from the edges and the unspoken had been compromised. Opting for a softer approach, I let the silent Agnes””the enormous kraken of myth””speak for herself. She forms a bond with one of Cinrak’s crew, shows them the wonders of the ocean, and becomes a mascot to the Impolite Fortune. Playful as a puppy, and knowing her worth, Agnes unapologetically takes up space. She just wants to hug… the whole ship.

Agnes becomes the herald in “The Hirsute Pursuit.” Her link to the ocean grapevine (seawood tangle?) allows her to be first with the news that a once in a generation harvest is ready. This story introduces another significant piece of Rodentdom’s ecosystem: a food source with properties that acts like hormone replacement for trans people. The only magic in this microcosm is how it has been guarded to ensure equal distribution of resources. Are the fairies rodent-flesh eaters? Their biology and behavior suggest something to that effect in their distant past. Or they could have found a solution to defending their land against colonial invasion. Either way, when left alone they understand and undertake balance, sharing their bounty with the rodents.

The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper is full of women who enjoy their food. Not for the spectacle of observers, but for pleasure and the nourishment of their bodies. As a pirate captain, Cinrak understands keeping her crew full, fit, and happy is a tool for community bonding and efficient livelihood. The food is in the detail. No one goes without a good cup of tea, or breakfast.

Including Agnes. Who cronches that shark with relish (pun alert!). Because she knows who is friend and who is food.

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BIO: AJ Fitzwater lives between the cracks of Christchurch, New Zealand. Their work focuses on feminist and queer themes, and has appeared in venues of repute such as Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Giganotosaurus, GlitterShip, and in various anthologies. They are the author of rodent pirate escapades in The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper and the WW2 land girls shapeshifter novella No Man’s Land. With a background in radio, AJ lends their voice to podcast narrations, including for the Escape Artists universe. They enjoy maintaining a collection of bow ties. A unicorn disguised in a snappy blazer, they tweet @AJFitzwater. Their website is pickledthink.blogspot.com.

Purchase The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper from your preferred retailer or directly from Queen of Swords Press.

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Imagine a Hellmouth. No, not the one in Sunnydale, California””a medieval Hellmouth, straight out of a manuscript illumination. Pointy teeth, flames, unhappy people.
When I decided that I wanted to write a book about a medieval woman who leads a raid on Hell, that was the sort of underworld that immediately came to my mind. A mouth, though, implies a throat, and a stomach, and, well, everything else.

So I had a Hellbeast on my hands, a creature that spends centuries underground, but occasionally makes an appearance on the surface. It’s a little like a platypus, but without the bill. And a lot bigger.

Within the Hellbeast, there are revenants. But there are also humans””some have been altered in various ways, and some are extremely long-lived, but they are humans nonetheless. This led me to an unusual world-building question: What do people eat in the underworld?

That is a trick question, of course. Should you find yourself in any sort of underworld, and/or in Faerie, it’s best not to eat anything at all. The old stories are quite clear on that point. Probably the most famous example is that of Persephone, who is obliged to spend part of every year in the underworld because she ate a pomegranate seed there.

Food is a medium of communication between the world below and the world above. To be in a world””to see it, to speak to its inhabitants””is to be of that world. The food of the underworld is part of the underworld, and makes the eater part of the underworld too.

Conversely, food allows the dead to become, temporarily at least, part of the world above once more. When Odysseus wants to speak to the dead, he pours a libation of milk, honey, wine and water, and sprinkles barley meal over the whole mess, praying to Persephone, among others. What really draws the dead to him, though, is sheep’s blood that he lets run into a pit. The seer Teresias will only speak to him after drinking the blood.

Red wine and honey were also in the jars sent along to the afterlife with King Tutankhamun in Egypt, who could also choose from a variety of mummified meats slathered in tree resin.

In an underworld, food isn’t just about communication, status and sustenance. It’s often about torment. Hel, the ruler of the Norse underworld, has a plate called Hunger and a knife called Famine. Tantalus stole nectar and ambrosia, and murdered his own son to feed him to the gods. His punishment is to stand in water, with a fruit-laden branch over his head, just barely unable to drink or eat.

In Dante’s Inferno, a nobleman named Ugolino (who may have eaten his children’s bodies in the final throes of his own starvation) is frozen in a pit next to the man who betrayed him, forever gnawing on his enemy’s head. He is both tormentor and the tormented.

Hell was one of several medieval examples of a “topsy-turvy world”, writes Herman Pleij in Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life. If you ate too much, or committed some other food-related sin such as cannibalism, your punishment in the world below would be to become food yourself, to be denied food, or to be forced to eat unclean or disgusting food. Gluttons would be punished by being made “to suffer such terrible hunger and thirst that they eventually beg for hay, dregs of wine, and finally excrement and urine” before being served the meat of toads or even dragons.

Sometimes, the residents of Hell punish themselves. In the allegory of the long spoons, the residents of Hell are unable to get the food to their mouths because their spoons are too long; in heaven, the same spoons cause no difficulty, as people there are kind enough to feed each other.

I had some ideas, then, for what sort of food would be right in my medieval European Hellbeast. Something that would be of the underworld, not just in it. Something red, to recall pomegranates and wine. Something that would be a little horrifying to the world above. Something that recalls the sacrifice Odysseus made, when he needed to bridge the world of the living and the dead. And for practical reasons, something that would be available in those long centuries when the Beast is dormant under the earth.

I’m sorry to say that what I came up with is the blood of the Beast itself. The denizens of Hell drink it, and they eat it, in the form of glittering balls that look a little like caviar, or like pomegranate seeds.

This is not a meal I can endorse, as a vegetarian. As a substitute, might I suggest some pomegranate tapioca?

BIO: Kate Heartfield’s debut novel Armed in Her Fashion (CZP) is available as an ebook as of April 24, and as a paperback as of May 17. Her interactive novel The Road to Canterbury is now available from Choice of Games. Tor.com Publications will publish two time-travel novellas by Kate, beginning with Alice Payne Arrives in late 2018. Her fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, and Monstrous Little Voices: New Tales from Shakespeare’s Fantasy World. Kate is a former newspaper editor and lives in Ottawa, Canada.

Website: https://heartfieldfiction.com/
About Armed in Her Fashion: https://chizinepub.com/armed-in-her-fashion/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35497377-armed-in-her-fashion
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kateheartfield

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines.