Writer's Grove

The Chapel Perilous

I have something beautiful to show you that is seriously a geekout of the highest order.

Background first: I’ve been a fanboy of T.S. Eliot’s for many years—you may have caught some of my allusions to his works in the series—and I used to teach “The Wasteland” to juniors and break down all the hidden stuff in there for them. The kids were always blown away; they never realized that poetry could do that, that you could pack so much meaning into a single work, especially since they were accustomed to lyrics with such depth as “It’s getting hot in here/so take off all your clothes”. While preparing myself to teach that poem, I read a lot of the source material Eliot used, including From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston and other works that spoke of the quest for the Holy Grail. The old stories about the Grail quest are full of seriously crazy shit, ranging from a mild WTF to Dear Gods Below I’m Afraid To Go To Sleep Now. The bit that always made me shiver and scream a little inside was whenever the grail knight got to the Chapel Perilous.

Monty Python made fun of it a bit in their movie—remember Lancelot saving Galahad from the Castle Anthrax?

Lancelot: We were in the nick of time. You were in great peril.
Galahad: I don’t think I was.
Lancelot: Yes you were. You were in terrible peril.
Galahad: Look, let me go back in there and face the peril.
Lancelot: No. It’s too perilous.

There are many versions of the old Grail legends, but the oldest we have—the closest to the “original” tales,  though even they were written down hundreds of years after the actual events—feature Gawain. Lancelot, Galahad, and all those other dudes showed up in later iterations of the tale, and those later tales got steadily more Christianized. The earliest Grail knights were Gawain and Percival.

When Shawn Speakman invited me to contribute to the Unfettered anthology, I saw my chance to tell a story of Atticus’s past rooted in Grail legend and marry it to my series mythology. The story is basically one big geekout for me and, as it happens, something of an origin story for Atticus. We learned in Hounded how he came to possess Fragarach, and we learned in Two Ravens and One Crow how he learned the recipe for Immortali-Tea, but what makes him the Iron Druid is his cold iron amulet and the silver charms on his necklace. The ideas for those come to him in “The Chapel Perilous,” as well as his inspiration to teach language to animals (such as Oberon). Now that Shawn has returned US rights to the story to me, I can let y’all snag it separately for cheap.

“The Chapel Perilous” is now available semi-worldwide through Amazon and B&N, and will be available through iBooks and Kobo as I can manage. I say semi-worldwide because it is not available separately in the UK & Commonwealth countries, nor Australia & New Zealand. That is because Unfettered, which contains “The Chapel Perilous” among many other spiffy stories, will be published by Orbit UK in those countries in February, and Orbit understandably would rather not have the competition. I only have the rights to publish on my own in the US and markets where English is not the primary language. Fret not, UK and Australian peeps: Unfettered is one hell of an anthology and well worth it.

To sell it online I needed a “cover” for it, so I approached Galen Dara, Hugo-award winning artist, to see if she’d like to take a shot at bringing the story alive. And oh my, did she come through! I described Atticus and Apple Jack coming upon the Chapel Perilous in the rain and she painted something haunting and beautiful and perfect. I love it so much. Here it is:

Galen will sell you a print of that if you like—just contact her online. I have a print and it is My Precious. And I stress that it’s not just because that’s Atticus in sixth-century armor; this painting represents anybody’s quest, because a quest can often be a lonely thing in the rain, you know, and I love that we have both death and salvation waiting for the questing knight, a gloomy and forbidding forest but with paths through it that lead to the light. I see doom and hope and perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds.

Anyway. My geekout is that I’ve contributed in a wee way to the Grail legends that I love so very much and that Galen has so perfectly given a visual representation to a vital part of those legends. Hope you enjoy the words and Galen’s painting. Here’s the final cover, and again, the story’s available for ninety-nine cents or its equivalent in those places that aren’t being served by Orbit UK:

HANDY LINKY-POOS:
The Chapel Perilous for Kindle
The Chapel Perilous for Nook