Okay.
I shared a couple of chapters of Tag, a work-in-progress, last month and you can read the backstory there.
Well…I got about 80 pages written and realized I was rushing the story, not letting it develop the way it needed to, so I started over.
And here’s the rewrite of the first chapter.
Do let me know what you think.
Before I rewrite it again.
Father Patreo looked up from his workbench. Well-soled boots crunched dry earth as someone made their way to his small cottage. A book lay opened to Patreo’s side, the pages illuminated with strange beasts. He used a leather strip to mark his place and closed it. Gray, yellow, and ochre powders lay in separate, small piles on his workbench and he covered them with a white, muslin cloth.
He closed his eyes and focused on the footsteps.
Male. Heavy. Healthy heavy, not sickly heavy.
Patreo frowned. Most visitors to his cottage came sickly.
A horse clomped and cart wheels squeaked from the opposite direction. The footsteps, horse clomps, and squeaking cart wheels combined into a strange rhythm, music from an unknown land; step step clomp clomp squeak, step step clomp clomp squeak, step step clomp clomp squeak. It made an interesting contrasts to the birds singing in his gardens.
Patreo glanced at the sunlight coming in his far window. Baron Konstigian’s mistress would be by soon. She carried the Baron’s child and Konstigian wanted no bastards in his court. If she did not rid herself of the child, the Baron would slaughter her before the child quickened.
He shuffled his stool to a clear space on his workbench and winced at the screeching sound it made on the hard wood floor, pulled over his mortar and pestle, and reached for pennyroyal and fenugreek. He crushed the leaves and stems by hand into the bowl then ground them into a fine powder, the cupping of the mortar and the turning of the pestle familiar, comforting motions, like the stars and planets, the sun and moon in their orbits.
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