Dark of the Sun

Read Dark of the Sun Online

Authors: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Tags: #Fantasy, #Fiction, #General, #Historical, #Horror, #Vampires, #Transylvania (Romania), #Krakatoa (Indonesia), #Volcanic Eruptions

For
Lindig Harris
in spite of the temperatures
 
More than twenty-five years ago while researching the fourth Saint-Germain book,
Path of the Eclipse
, I ran across references to the Year of Yellow Snow, sometimes called the Year of the Dark Sun, in Western reckoning A.D. 535–36, which was characterized by catastrophic drops in temperature, crop failures, and famine throughout Asia and Europe, with disruption of trade and movements of populations resulting from these losses—just the sort of event to set the speculative juices flowing, but not the object of my research, nor the period with which I was dealing, promising though it appeared. Then, about ten years ago, other researchers did some serious scholarship on those disastrous events and tried to determine the cause of what turned out to be a worldwide famine and, after considering a number of different scenarios from meteor collisions to a mini-ice-age—which indeed occurred—at last identified the probable source of the trouble as an eruption of that all-time bad-boy volcano, Krakatoa; this eruption was more overwhelming than many of its others, for, according to records in Indonesia, this eruption broke Sumatra off from Java—Krakatoa is at the hinge position of those two islands—and opened the Sunda Strait to a deep-water sea passage instead of its remaining the complex of reefs and shoals that had allowed passage of only the shallowest-draft boats, which it had been for centuries. The eruption occurred in late February or early March of A.D. 535, and its explosion was heard all the way to Beijing. It had been heralded by many months of regional instability, earthquakes, and drastic variations in ocean temperatures in and around what was becoming the Sundra Strait, making the shipping lanes more treacherous than they had been in the past. Many ships’ captains reported dangerous sailing in and around Indonesia, and over time, merchant ships avoided the region.
In April, following the eruption, the ash from the volcano had spread all around the world, and disaster followed after it, impacting global weather patterns and lowering the average temperatures sufficiently to keep crops from growing in most of Asia and Europe, as well as large portions of Africa and the Americas. Although every part of the world was affected, there were regions that bore more of the brunt of the tragedy than others. Many of the nomadic people of the Central Asian Steppes were driven out of their traditional grazing lands when their herds began to die because of lack of food as the grasslands became arid plains, and their struggle to find new pastureland was made much more difficult by the impact of the colder weather; the significant westward migration from Central Asia began as an attempt to find grass for their herds. In China and Tibet, the snow that continued to fall all the way into June and July was yellow due to the high levels of sulfur in the upper atmosphere. Closer to the eruption site, actual flakes of sulfur fell from the sky, burning people, animals, and fields alike and contaminating wells, springs, and rivers; the devastation of the Indonesian Islands was calamitous, with tens of thousands of people killed in tsunamis spawned by the eruption, by gaseous emanations, and by sulfur contamination, records of which still exist in the royal archives of the Srivijava Empire, which comprised most of modern Indonesia. For months afterward, the remains of humans, animals, trees, sea-life, and buildings washed up on the shores of what are now Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines, China, and India.
To add to the difficulties besetting China, this disaster occurred during the difficult period known as the Six Dynasties, when China was a cobbled-together collection of principalities, each with its own emperor and administration: the Northern (A.D. 386–81) and Southern (A.D. 420–581) Dynasties as well as the Eastern (A.D. 534–50) and Western (A.D. 535–56) Wei Dynasties. During the two years following the eruption, the level of relief required could not be adequately addressed by this loose and hostile federation of regional governments.
Whenever possible I have used the names of places as they were known at or about the period of this novel—Sunda Kalapa for modern Jakarta, Tumasik for modern Singapore, Thang Long for modern Hanoi, Kuang-Chou for modern Canton, Chang’an for modern Xian, the Southern Islands for the Phillippines, and so on, although the precise locations of these locales have shifted somewhat over the intervening centuries; other cities have vanished completely or relocated a significant distance from their sixth-century sites, such as Marakanda (Samarkand), Yang-Chau (Shanghai), and Sarai, which has changed location at least five times in the last two thousand years; those I have kept contemporary to this story as much as research can make possible. When there has been inadequate information, I have placed the missing towns and cities where it seems most likely they were and have used the most recognizable names for them. A few of the minor locations are fictional, but typical of the regions and era. The names of seas and oceans I have used in their modern forms, to make the descriptions accessible to those wishing to follow the mariners on maps, and the caravans along the branches of the Silk Road.
One of the most difficult aspects of researching the Silk Road at that period is that most of the various clans, tribes, and peoples were illiterate, and so records of their societies and behaviors come not from internal sources, but from observers such as Chinese, Persian, Byzantine, and European travelers, whose accounts are heavily flavored by their opinions and agenda. The occasional Christian churches in Asia kept written records of their districts out of religious duty; their accounts are often the only reliable information on the workings of trading centers that still remain; one of the reasons for Christianity’s remarkable success in the region was its high rate of literacy among its clergy, and the emphasis on record-keeping. There would most likely have been more records before the rise of Jenghiz Khan, who had an almost superstitious dread of the written word and systematically destroyed all books and other records he encountered during his conquest of Asia. Thanks to such policies, and the exigencies of the passage of time, what remains is fragmentary and often inconclusive, requiring a kind of informational triangulation to create a sense of the various groups that lived along the various trade routes from Europe to Asia, especially in these very disruptive years.
For Europe, north of Naples, there was frost every month of the year 535, and the pattern continued into 536, the first break in the cold taking place around August of 536. There are reports from Greece to Norway referring to the sun having lost its power or been darkened by an invisible eclipse; in the New World, the temperatures shifted enough to force certain tribal groups to begin to wander, searching for a place where they could get enough food to survive. In part because of this period of cold weather, the military aggression of the Byzantines was put on hold for almost a year due to the dramatic changes in climate, which the Byzantines in particular called the Year of the Dark Sun, due to the failure of crops to thrive and the generally lowered temperatures; nautical trading in the Mediterranean was cut in half due to inclement weather and a lack of surplus goods and foodstuffs to sell. Shipping stalled and overland caravans had to be abandoned due to lack of food for the horses, ponies, asses, camels, and donkeys. In many areas where agriculture had been marginal, it had to be abandoned altogether because of the failure of what had been chancy crops at best, and subsequent famine. The results were far-reaching and endured for many years, even after the climate began to recover, and the sun once again penetrated the dust layer in the upper atmosphere.
General shortages of essential food and matériel brought about social unrest and collapse, as well as a declining birthrate and an increase in epidemic disease. From the western Pacific to the eastern Atlantic, outbreaks of many kinds of illness spread, in large part a result of the malnutrition that was pervasive everywhere, the effects of which were felt for many years after these events by those who survived them. The rate of miscarriages and stillbirths rose sharply, as did death among the very young, the aged—and by aged, it means anyone over thirty-five—and infirm. The resulting malaise affected every aspect of life and led in many cases to extremes of social behavior and religious exercises that attempted to deal with the calamity.
This crucial loss of food was far from the only impact the Year of Yellow Snow or the Dark Sun had on regional policies in the world. To a greater or lesser degree, every portion of the world was impacted by the prolonged eruption; no place was immune to the influence of this catastrophe. As far away as South America the weather was marked by unusual cold, as well as a sharp increase in storms; it was observed by the Maya in Central America that the sun had lost its power, shining without warmth, a development that left a lasting impression on the emerging city-state of Copán, among others, compelling a great deal of increased military adventurism in order to augment their failing food supply. From Chile to Canada, the peoples of the Americas were struck by this worldwide calamity almost as drastically as the peoples of Asia and Europe were.
Widespread refugeeism became increasingly prevalent, and it was not long before the various marginal clans and similar groups took to traveling in the hope of finding a haven, or at least enough to eat. Soon the population disruption became so vast that whole regions of Asia were changed from that time onward because of the migrations of whole tribes. The desperation among the peoples of the world expressed itself in many ways, from religious austerity to wholesale carnality, from willing slavery to reckless adventurism, from rigorous adherence to tradition to dramatic revolution, from passive withdrawal from the world to the most heinous aggression. Attempts to explain the reason for the loss of the strength on the part of the sun, as well as the dramatic shifts in weather patterns, varied from place to place; few of them made any association between the volcanic eruption—even if they were aware it had happened—and the resultant environmental chaos, although the royal archives of Indonesia proposed the connection for obvious reasons, since Indonesia was ground zero for the event, and the self-destruction of a large mountain accompanied by tsunamis was hard to miss.
By A.D. 500 Christianity had spread to India and China, but Islam had not yet arrived in the world; most of the Middle East was Zoroastrian or worshiped a large variety of local gods, usually connected to the weather. Judaism was not as splintered as it had been at the height of the Roman Empire, but it was not so cohesive as to be able to unite in the face of so comprehensive a disaster as this period provided. There were still pockets of classical Greek and Roman deities, and some traces of Mithraism, usually among the Greco-Byzantine military. The utter failure of most religions to address this dreadful environmental collapse did much to hasten the rise of Christianity, which attributed power and worth to suffering, as well as to create the social climate that made Islam possible.
Of the many aspects of daily life impacted by this catastrophe, trade probably suffered the hardest immediate blow and was the one that took the most time to recover from. Trading meant covering significant distances, and in this hard period, it required that all the necessities of life be carried by the travelers, for opportunities to resupply were either far between or nonexistent. Because of the scarcity of food and matériel, not only were foreigners—and most merchants were foreigners—regarded with dread, but the economies of almost every region engaging in trade collapsed, leaving traders stranded in hostile societies. Required by law to have names that could be written in Chinese but were obviously not Chinese, foreigner traders in China were easy targets for punitive taxes, customs tariffs, and other legally justified seizures of goods and monies that became increasingly prevalent as the crisis deepened and spread. Travel, which had been risky but fairly routine, became much rarer and therefore more dangerous. This change in safety and commensurate increases in costs and risks exposed the merchants to more hardships than those within any settled group faced, and it left an impact on trading that lasted for almost a century, resulting in policies that were designed to make trading a treacherous enterprise for the next seven centuries.
 
As always, there are many people to thank for their help in researching this novel: James Atterling, who provided his thesis on Romanesque European agricultural history; Roland Bai for his information on the history of foreign trade in China, with emphasis on its general collapse in the first third of the sixth century; Rhea Crovander for access to her books on early Christianity in Asia; Dorthy Daur for access to her thesis on the trade routes of Europe, Russia, and Siberia, 1–1000 C.E.; Patrick K. Doughle for his many insights into the worldwide impact of the eruption, particularly on the Americas; Michel V Felipov for providing information on Jou’an-Jou’an (Avar), Hun, Turk, and Mongol names and naming customs; S. W “Daisy” Gerunstein for the loan of her atlases of historical maps; Julian Hasp for his information on east-west caravan routes and trading centers of the Byzantine period; Wilma Jacobssen for showing me her collection of historical bits, horseshoes, and other equestrian equipment as well as her information on historical saddlery and the evolution of the stirrup; Marynelle Losely for providing variant place names used along the Silk Road in the sixth century; Jonas McChesney for his references on European climatology from A.D. 400–800; Ng Xiaoli (Lealand) for providing so much material on names and nomenclature in sixth-century China, particularly as pertained to resident foreigners; Edgar Pomeroy for discussing his theories about the Dark Ages in Eastern Europe, particularly the rise and fall of the Khazar Empire; Morgan Reyes for his information on sixth-century climatological shifts; Elihu Sayles for showing me the results of his research on the history of seaports in China; Alicia Slavin for her material on volcanoes and the environment; J.A.T. for allowing me to see his analysis of soil chemistry from sixth-century samples; Benjamin D. Vollsung for his information on Eastern Europe during this period; Conrad Wentz for his research on the east-west slave trade; and Hilary Yout for her thesis material on the agricultural collapse in Central America in the sixth century. Any errors in accuracy or historicity are mine and made for exigencies of story, not as a result of the expertise of any of these very helpful people.

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