Out of Season 4/4 - for lady_songsmith

[nfe_gremlin]

Title: Out of Season
Author: edenfalling
Recipient lady_songsmith
Rating: PG-13
Possible Spoilers: no plot spoilers, extensive use of background and settings from The Horse and His Boy
Warnings: background presence of slavery, discussion of and planning for something equivalent to human sacrifice
Summary: In the fourteenth year of Rishti Tisroc's reign, a demon in the

Comments

[edenfalling]

Thank YOU for such a wonderful prompt! I'm really glad you liked my take on Calormen, and that Shezan's insider/outsider perspective on the court and its politics worked for you. The flowery language is mostly my attempt to imitate Lewis's Calormene dialogue (without getting too ridiculously far from my own, more plainspoken style), and a lot of the physical details, the style of political maneuvering, and the general "feel" of the culture are loosely inspired by India under the six Great Mughal emperors.

As for some other details: I stole the honeycomb ceilings of Rishti Tisroc's pavilion from the Alhambra in Spain. The architectural technique is called either muqarna or mocárabe; I am not quite sure of the difference between the two terms. The outside of the pavilion is based on the shape of a kind of domed pavilion common in India, the name of which sadly escapes me. Also, the titles of the Tisroc's wives are Mongol in origin; Takhun is a simple anagram of khatun (meaning "steel" and/or a khan's wife) while Tabek is related to beki in the same way that Tarkaan is related to khan

[lady_songsmith]

As one geek to another on this score -- Regarding Tarkaan, I came across 'tarkan' as a word in... I can't remember whether I was looking at Turkish or Farsi at the time. I will have to hunt up the link, if I can!

[edenfalling]

Oh, neat!