Wisdom's Kiss (68 page)
Authors: Catherine Gilbert Murdock
Wilhelmina the Ill-Tempered
>
* Wisdom's Kiss>
The Imperial Encyclopedia of Lax
>If I for one single second believed I could get away with it, I'd write an entire book in encyclopedia entries. Yes, encyclopedias might
seem
boring, but the drama is there, people, buried like pirate treasure: "The rise of Rome from an insignificant pastoral settlement to perhaps the world's most successful empire—supreme as a lawgiver and organizer, holding sway over virtually all the then-known world west of Persia, on which it left a permanent imprint of its material and cultural achievements—is one of the great epics of history." That's a quotation from
The Columbia Encyclopedia
(5th edition, Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 2351). Doesn't it give you goose bumps?
The Imperial Encyclopedia of Lax
—unlike
The Columbia Encyclopedia,
in case you can't tell (and wouldn't it be cool if you couldn't?! Well, cool for me)—is an utter fake, fabricated solely for the benefit of
Wisdom's Kiss.
My first entry was
Alpsburg
, because I couldn't figure out how else to explain the location of the inn in which Trudy worked. I mean, I could explain it, but my explanation was ridiculously long, boring, and didactic, so I figured why not turn lemons into lemonade and make that didacticism part of the story? ("Didactic," by the way, means "intended to teach," not always in a positive way—think "preachy.")
Once I got the bug, I couldn't stop. For one thing, the encyclopedia solved SO MANY PROBLEMS. Seriously. Read an entry such as "
Rudiger IV
" or "
Cuthbert of Montagne
" and then try to figure out how the heck else to get all that information into the story. Wilhelmina musing on the potential for espionage by Circus Primus? Dizzy and Mrs. Sprat debating the laws of succession? I don't think so. For one thing, if Wilhelmina suspected espionage, she'd slip into full red-alert paranoia—well, fuller. By compacting all this information into concise, instructive (if often inaccurate—more on that in a minute) passages,
The Imperial Encyclopedia of Lax
reduced the length of
Wisdom's Kiss
by at least 20 percent, and saved me months of headaches.
It was also—in case this isn't clear enough—an absolute blast to write.
Cuthbert's biography
, for example ... bliss. Ditto the
Elephantine Stiltdancers entry
, which I could not fit into
Wisdom's Kiss
proper no matter how hard I tried, but at least it's preserved here for your reading pleasure.
For all its pomp and officiousness,
The Imperial Encyclopedia of Lax
is not all that accurate; in fact, it's often dead wrong. I did this for several reasons. Most important, I needed to make clear the challenges that magic poses (which I discuss
elsewhere
as well, including in my commentary on the
Globe d'Or
and
Trudy's sight
.) Study the encyclopedia and you'll learn that suspected witches are burnt at the stake, that the mere suspicion of magic endangers even royal pets, and that only fools consider magic feasible.
The message: magic doesn't exist; only madmen believe otherwise; talk about it and we'll kill you. This heightens the tension surrounding Ben and Dizzy's ultimate decision to break their vows and risk their lives by practicing magic, and it also explains why they wait so long.
As a one-time historian, I had a second goal as well with
The Imperial Encyclopedia of Lax,
a goal that can be summed up as "query all." Which is not to say you should disbelieve everything—or even most everything—of what you read, but don't accept an account as pure truth. (This sentiment is encapsulated in the book's
epigraph
.) Every writer has a bias; it's the human condition. The anarchy of the Internet has gone a long way to educate people—rational people, anyway—about the dangers of conspiracy theories, hoaxes, scams, and just plain craziness. I fear, however, that this might leave some readers, particularly younger readers, believing that books are even safer: "Well, it got printed so it must be good/correct." Um, no. Crackpots have been printing claptrap since long before Gutenberg; sometimes these crackpots run schools or countries, and at times they convince millions of people that wacko theories aren't.
Particularly astute readers might wonder at the "eighth edition" specified in the title. Most encyclopedias—the printed kind, anyway—come in editions, each new version an update featuring corrections, plus additions on whatever's happened since the last printing. By giving
The Imperial Encyclopedia of Lax
an eighth edition, I'm implying that it's been around for a while. This is one important book.
Not being able to leave well enough alone, I sought to exploit this concept by concluding
Wisdom's Kiss
with an entry from the ninth edition ... although even in my most delusional moments I recognized that no one would pick up the whole eighth-versus-ninth thing. So I deleted it, far preferring that the book end with our friend
Puss
. But you can still read
here
the supermeta explanation of
Wisdom's Kiss.
*=enhanced ebook only
Alpsburg>
Circus Primus>
Cuthbert of Montagne>
Doppelschläferin>
Elemental Spells>
Escoffier of Montagne>