The Writing of Servant

I can trace the genesis of Servant of the Underworld a long way into the past. Like much of my fiction, it is irretrievably linked to books I read as a child and later as a teenager – before I was a science fiction reader, I was a mystery reader.

My repertoire was Sherlock Holmes (my copy of which was bent and creased from several re-readings); Agatha Christie (the French translations of her books being easily available, even in the bookshops of the small Spanish town where we spent our holidays); John Dickson Carr (a personal favourite because of his outlandish locked-room mysteries); and many more. Through them, I not only discovered the intricacies of a plot with many reversals, but also a sense of place. Indeed, all of those have a not-so-obvious common point: they portray a society of the past, one which might look familiar but is already no longer our own. Their characters – the retired army majors from India, the single girls taking positions as private tutors, the adventuresses in dalliances with the kings of small European countries – they were part of another universe, something delightfully quaint, which bore very little resemblance to the world I myself inhabited.

This sense of place persisted in another discovery I made in my childhood: Christian Jacq. He was a French author who found great success writing about Ancient Egypt, and I devoured his re-imagined court intrigues of the Rameses era – an utterly foreign land, filled with danger and magic. The books almost always had mystery elements, but the ones that stayed with me were the Judge of Egypt trilogy. Instead of having a prince or a nobleman as its main character, it focuses on Pazair, a magistrate slowly caught in the machinations of the Pharaoh’s court, who uses his meagre resources to stay ahead of his adversaries, before becoming a masterly player of court games himself.

Another thing from my childhood that carried over into Servant of the Underworld was a fascination with mythology and fairytales. I was the proud owner of a full shelf of grey-jacketed books in the Tales and Legends From… series, ranging from the classics (Ancient Greece, Rome) to the more esoteric (Persia, China). They were windows into another world, and the weird creatures, places and deities filled me with a sense of unadulterated wonder and discovery I seldom found in classical French literature. That sense of both wonder and fear – for the ancient gods are fearsome creatures, and seldom benevolent – carried over into my first short stories, as I tentatively started to explore imagined and historical mythologies.

Aztec and Maya tales soon played a large part in my fiction. I’m not quite sure why, to this day. I think it’s a combination of two things: the first is that Mesoamerica is one of the rare parts of the world I knew next to nothing about when I started writing (as opposed to Greek, Roman and Egyptian, of which I’d read so much they felt stale). The second is a purely contrarian spirit: the Aztecs frequently are the underdogs of fiction. Whenever someone needs a bloodthirsty, barbaric people to act as villains in the story, chances are they’ll turn to some civilisation derived from either the Aztecs or the Maya. But, in reality, both civilisations had impressive scientific and political achievements: the Aztecs had one of the fairest systems of justice, which forbade torture and held noblemen to a harsher standard than peasants. I guess part of my motivation for starting to write in that setting was to prove that just because a civilisation seems bloodthirsty doesn’t mean it’s beyond the pale – thus adding my own meagre contribution to the ongoing war to rehabilitate the Mesoamerican civilisations.

The other thing I can see about the genesis of Servant of the Underworld is the way it grew out of my short fiction.

In 2007, I’d just come back from the Writers of the Future workshop, and I’d reached a crux in my own writing. I felt like I’d been writing the same short stories over and over, and it had become harder and harder to stay motivated. I toyed with the idea of writing a novel, but I was unsure of where to begin, or what the novel would be about. I’d always liked reading epic fantasies, but the idea of a multi-threaded, multi-character book scared me. I wanted to get my novel feet working on something smaller. Perhaps turning one of my short stories into a novel?

The one candidate that presented itself almost immediately was “Obsidian Shards”, the story that had won me that Writers of the Future place. It was a magic mystery set in Aztec times, featuring Acatl, a priest well versed in magic and forensics. But I was still hesitant to commit: a novel was a big endeavour; I knew enough about Aztec culture to fake a short story, but nowhere near enough for a longer work; and a fantasy mystery set in a non-Western culture didn’t seem like it would have enough appeal to be published at all.

And then I read two series of books that changed my outlook radically. The first was Liz Williams’s Detective-Inspector Chen novels, a mix of police procedural, magic and science fiction in a nonWestern culture; and the second, Elizabeth Bear’s New Amsterdam mysteries, set in an alternative America where vampires and magicians were commonplace. And that set me thinking: perhaps, after all, this wasn’t such a stupid idea…

In October 2007, I started the novel planning in earnest.

My writing process is very much an engineer’s approach. I am an obsessive outliner, and tend to get as much of the research down beforehand as I can. The main reason is that I’m also fundamentally lazy: it’s much less work to cut something at the outline stage than in the first draft.

In the case of Servant of the Underworld, I was comforted in that approach by the genres I had chosen to meld. Essentially, by choosing to make the novel a historical mystery with magic, I had to deal with two genres that required forethought. Historical settings can’t be improvised, and I couldn’t rely on vague ideas of daily life in Aztec times to start plotting – lest I end up discovering that I’d got everything wrong, and that the scenes had to be completely rewritten. As for mysteries… they’re unforgiving in terms of plot. Everything has to hang together by the end. Of course, cutting and pasting and fixing works very well for some people, but I can’t do that. I can’t hold a whole novel plot in my mind, so I needed a relatively clear idea of where the novel was going and of the reasons behind the characters’ actions. Better get the shape of the plot right, and then fill in only the little details.

Accordingly, I invested in research books. A lot of research books, that I read cover to cover in an attempt to get the bases of Aztec culture into my brain before starting to outline, let alone write. A lot of those books were on Aztec daily life, though I also had some on Aztec mythology, Aztec architecture, Aztec history…

Those last turned out to be crucial for the novel planning, because the act of turning a short story into a novel started with a very simple thing: I had to decide which era in history I wanted Acatl to have lived in. It wasn’t that important for the setting itself. We barely have enough records of Aztec life in the time of the Spanish Conquest, so it was illusory to think that I’d have access to documents that predate it by decades. Though the setting had certainly evolved over history, I’d never be able to capture that. What it was important for was the context. After some discussions (in particular with fellow writer, Sara Genge), I’d decided that Acatl would no longer be a small priest in a small parish, but High Priest for the Dead, evolving within the political intrigues of the Imperial Court. That meant I had to know which Emperor I was dealing with.

Though the lifetime of the Aztec Empire was very short, it still covered about a century, and eleven emperors. The choice hinged on the setting I wanted: an Aztec Empire near the peak of its glory, stable enough to allow Acatl to investigate in an environment not riven by all-out warfare or invasions, but with enough political intrigues that I could drawn on later if necessary. For those reasons, I discarded the first few emperors, those of the humble beginnings; and the last one, Moctezuma II, during whose reign the Aztec Empire collapsed into oblivion. That didn’t actually leave me much choice. It was a tie between Ixcoatl, who, like Napoleon in France, gave the Empire many of the structures that defined it up till the Spanish Conquest; and Axayacatl, an Emperor with few grand realisations, but one whose reign was relatively unmarred by war or famine.

One note caught my eye: Axayacatl’s reign was succeeded by the short five-year reign of Tizoc, and then by the very young Ahuizotl, who extended Aztec domination into faraway places. Ahuizotl seemed a prickly character, prone to fits of anger, but fiercely loyal to his soldiers, seldom hesitating to share their lives on the march. His name was also that of a creepy water-beast I planned to use in the book, though no one knew why he chose it on ascending the throne.

I made some quick calculations: no one knew Ahuizotl’s birth date, but assuming he became emperor at twenty-two – a very young age as emperors go – then he would have been seventeen in the last year of Axayacatl’s reign. What if Acatl met him? That would give him one more reason to be embroiled in court politics; and Ahuizotl would be the perfect age to see Acatl as a father or older brother figure. Plus, that would allow me to work plot reasons why Ahuizotl chose his name, and there’s nothing that titillates me more than the prospect of adding to a secret history (even though most people would miss it).

The last year of Axayacatl’s reign would also be a time full of possibilities: the prolonged death of a longlived emperor would give me a background rife with political intrigues and magical ones. And, as the emperor lay dying, the magical protection he’d extended over the empire would wane – leaving the gates wide open for the interference of other powers in mundane affairs.

Therefore, I chose to set Servant of the Underworld at the tail end of Axayacatl’s reign.

Once I had done this, things fell into place: working out the history of all my characters, I realised that they’d all have been connected with the worst famine in Aztec history. That turned out to be a major motivation for Eleuia. The disastrous Chalca Wars that plagued Axayacatl’s reign ended up as both an important part of Neutemoc’s background, and the turning point for the divine conspiracy. Both Tizoc and the future Ahuizotl made appearances – and I was so interested in Tizoc that I have ended up making him a major character in the sequel, Harbinger of the Storm.

I wrote the synopsis, and tinkered with it over a week or so, trying to estimate how much plot would fit into 100,000 words. And then it was time to commit. I sat at the keyboard and started writing: a typical night for Acatl at his temple, though trouble was already afoot…

Of course, things never quite go as planned. The first I knew of that was when two characters stole the show. One was Teomitl, the young Ahuizotl. I had given him a role, but nothing like the mixture of arrogance and naiveté he soon exhibited. Originally planned to appear in a few scenes prior to the big showdown, he ended up having a much stronger role and more interactions with Acatl.

The other character had barely featured in the outline except as a placeholder, but Mihmatini, Acatl’s sister, developed a strong personality, and turned from a shadow into a unique character. Every reader of my first draft loved her; and everyone also liked Teomitl: together with Mihmatini, they brought much-needed levity to a blood-soaked and grim storyline. From there it wasn’t such a huge step to implement one of my fiancé’s suggestions, and sketch in a nascent romance between the two of them.

Other difficulties included getting the setting across. I had deliberately twisted history and chosen short names for all the main characters (in reality, the longer Aztec names were the more prestigious), but I still had many difficulties visualising the locations of the scenes. Finally, I resorted to using a French book, Les Aztèques by Jacques Martin, which had reconstructions of the major sites, including temples, marketplaces and palaces. When nothing was quickly available, I left gaps in the manuscript, which I filled in later in dedicated sessions with the research books by my side. Several scenes ended up shifting slightly to accommodate the difference between my mental picture of a place and what it really looked like: chief among them were the Floating Gardens, which had been very vague maize fields in the beginning, and gained solidity as I researched Aztec peasant houses and the exact process of maize planting.

Localisation and timing also were a bigger problem than I’d thought: I finally got my hands on a scale map of the region in 1519 AD, accurate enough to allow me to determine what the distances were, but I kept having to refer to my maps of the Sacred Precinct and of the city to see where the characters were going. Halfway through the first rewrite, I also realised that Acatl had an impossibly exacting schedule, which saw him doing dozens of things per day, barely getting enough sleep, and never eating anything. I tweaked the storyline so that he was fairly busy, but over more days (though it’s no wonder he ends up bone-weary at the end of the book, since he still snatches very little sleep overall).

The biggest rewrites took place near the beginning. I am not, by nature, a writer who plunges into the thick of the action, and the first version of Servant of the Underworld was hopelessly talkative. More importantly, it failed to set the tone: the time and place were unclear, and the first magic spell (the summoning to Mixcoatl) appeared only at the end of the second chapter. For a cross-genre novel, that was critical, and the agent rejections that I garnered complained either about the too-strong murder-mystery overtones, or the surprise shift into epic-ish fantasy at the end. Clearly, I had not managed to make it obvious that the book was both a mystery and a fantasy. I needed a better beginning.

My critique group suggested moving things around so that the magic spell opened the novel. It was a sound idea, except that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make it work. After much thought (and stupendous advice from Pat Esden), I wrote a brand-new opening scene, intended to replace the original first chapter. That one had a minor magic spell right off the bat; and the second scene that followed had Acatl trying to work out what had happened in the blood-soaked room by magical means, rather than have exposition handed to him on a platter by Ceyaxochitl. The first scene also ended with an aerial view of Tenochtitlan, which made it very clear where and when the story was taking place.

I kept, however, putting off submitting the new version for various reasons, the main one being that I was also embroiled in writing another novel at the time and couldn’t find time to solicit feedback from readers. But, as fate would have it, that was around the time I headed to World Fantasy 2008 – and, though I had no intention of mentioning the novel to anyone, due to a plane cancellation, I found myself stuck in a hotel lobby with new agent John Berlyne and new publisher Marc Gascoigne, who both showed enthusiasm for my improvised pitch. On the way home, I finally got my act together, polished my new beginning, and sent it to them both.

And, wouldn’t you know, you hold the result in your hands.