The Bear

Once upon a time there was a bear. It belonged to my oldest son Michael. He was a baby, and he made the little bear his constant companion. I would find it all over the house... and I would have to find it, nearly every day, because Mike needed to know where it was before he went to bed and sleep. Eventually my boy became a child and no longer needed the bear for bedtime. The bear was placed on a shelf in Mike’s room where he could keep watch.

And so the bear remained, as memories remain, and love.

Every author’s work, even the highest and most epic of fantasies, is woven of bits and pieces of real life. The Triempery Revelations novels incorporate many such artifacts, particularly in The Second Stone—where the archived Past in which Hans has been living is enriched with details drawn from the author’s fond recollections of life in (and research into) Bolivia and its history. Tiwanaku and its ruins. Chuquiago was an Aymara settlement before Spanish conquerors renamed it La Paz. The courtyard of the house where Hans rooms is suffused with the author’s memory of the courtyard of a house on Esquina Colon in La Paz where she lived for a while with her husband’s family. The Church of San Francisco. The Witches Market. All of these places are vivid and real.

Real bits of my life show up also in the upcoming book, The Rill Lord. A small river with a bridge reimagined from one I played under as a child in Massachusetts. A leather coat with a fur hood that I dearly loved during my Dr. Zhivago fashion phase as a young adult. What frostbite looks and feels like. Lentil soup. Beards frosted with frozen breath. And a bear.

There’s a scene early in The Rill Lord where Dorilian and Hans sit in a farmhouse turned campaign headquarters and discuss magic, which at this point Hans knows for certain Dorilian can do. Dorilian suggests that maybe Hans can do it too and they toss about a small stuffed toy bear. A portion of that scene is included at the back of The Walled City.

Dorilian picked up a small child’s toy, forgotten behind a cushion. Shabby, brown, and soft, it vaguely resembled a bear. He bounced it in his hand, then tossed it easily toward Hans. “Catch!” he commanded.

With the old habit of childhood, Hans put up his hands and caught it neatly. He then sat there, on the edge of his seat, looking at Dorilian expectantly. “What do I do now?”

“You toss it back.”

Well, that bear is this bear.

After the bear’s owner went off to college I tucked the bear away. Sure enough, when I offered the bear back a decade or so later, Mike wanted the little guy. And has kept him. I asked for these pictures.

The description in the story isn’t absolutely precise. I gave the bear in the story seed eyes instead of plastic. There are no plastic toy parts in the Triempery. But the bear’s soft body and battered appearance, the way Dorilian looks at it with a somewhat mystified expression—

Dorilian frowned at the shabby little toy, evaluating it and finding some aspects wanting. The snout, battered and inquisitive, seemed to interest him.

—well, that’s me thinking “Should I wash this or not?”

Dorilian and I don’t have a lot in common, but we will always have the bear.