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queensthiefSo, as some of you know, (1) Megan Whalen Turner loves the books of Rosemary Sutcliff, and (2) Ms. Turner sometimes includes implicit references to books she loves in her own novels. So I thought you folks might appreciate the beginning of Rosemary Sutcliff's Frontier Wolf, which I've just been rereading. The protagonist is under arrest for horribly disobeying orders.
o--o--o
The orderly set down the platter of cold meat and bread and the cup of wine on the end of the clothes chest, cast one half-contemptuous, half-sympathetic glance at the slight dark young man who sat hunched on the edge of the narrow cot with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, and went out, shutting the door behind him.
He was glad he was not Centurion Alexios Flavius Aquila.
And Centurion Alexios Flavius Aquila went on sitting with his head in his hands, staring at the floor but not seeing it. He felt dazed, as though he had taken a blow between the eyes; as though the past few days were all part of some monstrous nightmare from which he might wake up if only he knew how, to find himself back in his own quarters at Abusina. But the nightmare went on and on, and there was no waking up from it. . . .
The door opened again; but lost in his own private nightmare, Alexios did not know that someone else had come in, until the voice of Tribune Tetricus above him said, "Stand up!"
The orderly set down the platter of cold meat and bread and the cup of wine on the end of the clothes chest, cast one half-contemptuous, half-sympathetic glance at the slight dark young man who sat hunched on the edge of the narrow cot with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, and went out, shutting the door behind him.
He was glad he was not Centurion Alexios Flavius Aquila.
And Centurion Alexios Flavius Aquila went on sitting with his head in his hands, staring at the floor but not seeing it. He felt dazed, as though he had taken a blow between the eyes; as though the past few days were all part of some monstrous nightmare from which he might wake up if only he knew how, to find himself back in his own quarters at Abusina. But the nightmare went on and on, and there was no waking up from it. . . .
The door opened again; but lost in his own private nightmare, Alexios did not know that someone else had come in, until the voice of Tribune Tetricus above him said, "Stand up!"
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Date: 12/20/18 10:54 pm (UTC)Don't suppose there's a chance any of her stuff is at all queer?
no subject
Date: 12/21/18 06:45 am (UTC)She mainly wrote YA novels from the 1950s to the 1970s, so I think the most accurate answer is, "Wasn't allowed." M/M pairings of minor characters show up in a couple of her adult novels, "Sword at Sunset" (Arthurian) and "The Flowers of Adonis" (about Alkibiades; the novel covers the same time period as Mary Renault's "The Last of the Wine," but the main pairing is m/f).
However, if what you're seeking is something along the lines of Kamet and his companion . . . (Opens doors of treasure house.) Sutcliff is the queen of male bonding. Male friendship plays such an important role in her stories that, when one of her novels, "The Eagle of the Ninth," was turned into a movie a few years ago, the scriptwriter threw all caution to the wind and produced what the principal actors frankly described as a bromance. I think it was the director who said that they ditched the m/f romance in the original novel because they wanted their movie to concentrate on the novel's "love story" between the male characters.