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Excerpted: The Dark King Swallows the World
In his latest novel The Dark King Swallows the World (Radiant Press), acclaimed sci-fi author Robert G. Penner builds a mystical world set during World War II in which a dark king brainwashes adults (*ahem*) while a precocious teenager embarks on a fantastical journey through realms of faeries and the dead to bring back her brother.
Read a passage from chapter two, below.
An excerpt from The Dark King Swallows the World
by Robert G. Penner (Radiant Press)
From Chapter Two
Old Mr. Lawry was telling Nora about the saints who brought Christianity to Cornwall. It was his cottage Nora had seen the night of the accident and to which Mr. Lawry and Mr. Davies had eventually carried Charles from the wreck of the car. They’d been staying with the widowed farmer since that awful night, largely because he was closest to the scene of the accident. It was all a bit of a mess, really. The owner of the house in Penzance had finally fled the blitz in London and come down to reclaim it—and Mrs. Lean—and the doctor said it would be best if Charles convalesced with his bad back and broken leg for a few weeks before attempting a journey so substantial as a return to London. So they were stuck in Cornwall, and to make matters worse, Nora’s mother groused endlessly about her lack of funds and repeatedly maligned Nora’s grandfather in America for refusing to send her more. Mr. Winter had offered to accommodate them, but much to Nora’s relief, Charles angrily refused. So the relentlessly decent Mr. Lawry suggested they stay with him for a few more weeks. He was lonely since his wife had died and his daughters had gotten married and left, he said, it would be a nice change. Nora’s mother frequently tried to pay him rent with the crumbs in her pocketbook, but he refused, saying it would be uncharitable. Nora thought her mother didn’t try quite as hard as she should have.
Charles and Nora and her mother all slept together in a room behind the kitchen, in a big bed that years ago held all five of the Lawry children. Charles and Nora’s mother did not speak to each other. Her mother spent a lot of time crying quietly to herself, and Charles, who seemed to have aged ten years, just sat grimly on his side of the bed with his leg in a cast and stretched out in front of him, saying nothing to anyone except the occasional grunted thanks when he was helped back from the privy or brought a cup of tea. After the first few days, there was a big fight, and Nora’s mother began to spend a great deal of time up at Mr. Winter’s house. She brought back cheeses and meats and chocolates, which Nora and Charles rudely rejected and Mr. Lawry politely ignored. Most nights, once she thought Nora and Charles were asleep, she snuck into the kitchen to devour the dainties. Nora knew this because she snuck up to the door once to see what her mother was up to, and there she was sitting at the uneven wooden table stuffing the morsels into her mouth one after the other, barely chewing, and surely not tasting a thing. She was, Nora thought, getting a little bit of a belly, something that in the past was unthinkable.
“The king was very jealous and believed his wife was an adulteress,” Mr. Lawry said to Nora. They were sitting together on the bench by the back door, with a view of the fields rolling off into the distance, the sweep of the horizon broken here and there by the crumbling brick towers that marked the location of old mines. Mr. Lawry spoke very carefully and slowly, and Nora imagined him randomly capitalizing his words. “So when he found out she was pregnant, he went mad with rage and had her sealed up into a barrel and thrown into the sea from the cliffs at Gwennap Head.”
A delicious wave of horror washed over Nora. “That’s awful,” she said. “What a horrible way to die.”
“Well, they weren’t Christians in Cornwall yet,” said Old Lawry apologetically. “Not many of them anyways. And they didn’t know better. But God knew the poor girl was innocent, that she had never hurt anyone or done anything wrong. He knew she was full of nothing but love.”
“What’s that matter? If he knew that? She still died.” Nora shook her head in disgust. “Horribly.”
“But she didn’t you see,” said Mr. Lawry. “The angels fed her, and cared for her, and she had her child in that barrel, out in the Irish Sea.”
“Is this supposed to be a historical story?” asked Nora. “Is this supposed to be accurate? Is this something you actually believe? This sounds like a myth.”
“I don’t know about that,” answered Mr. Lawry. “About myths and such. I was never much for history. Does it make it a better story if it’s historical?”
“No,” said Nora. “But it makes it true.”
Mr. Lawry thought about this for a while.
Nora fidgeted impatiently. “What happened next?” she finally asked.
“The barrel washed up in Ireland, near a monastery, and the mother became a nun and the boy grew up to be a monk and a great Christian,” said Mr. Lawry. “And when he was ready, he came back to Cornwall to convert the heathens, and the first person he saved was his old pagan dad.”
“The first half of that story was very good,” said Nora. “But the ending was the same as all the rest. Don’t you think it was more interesting here before Christianity?”
“Well,” replied Mr. Lawry. “To me, it’s the first half of the stories that seem the same, all misery and suffering, and the endings that are exciting.
* * *
Robert G. Penner lives and works in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is the author of Strange Labour, one of Publishers Weekly‘s Best Science Fiction Books of 2020. He has published numerous short stories in a wide range of speculative and literary journals under both his name and various pseudonyms. He was also the founding editor of the online science fiction zine Big Echo.