Until my latest WIP, the only thing I had ever really
researched for a book was how to kill a man with one blow.
Um… OK. That is weird, I concede. I don’t want to kill
anyone, honest. My protagonist was just an assassin with Japanese jujutsu
skills. No really. I mean it…
Moving right along…
That was until I got to In the Company of the Dead.
The castle is under siege, so there’s lots of catapults and
burning oil and stuff. This led me to Greek fire, which was a terrible scourge
in ancient times, as it was very difficult to put out. The Byzantines had a
frightening way of squirting it from their ships onto enemy boats and it would
burn on water. In fact, water could not be used to extinguish it, and only sand,
strong vinegar and old urine would put it out. But what was it?
We don’t know! We know neither the chemical compound to make
Greek fire nor the mechanism used to project it from ships. Thought the secret
has been lost, modern scholars suspect it was based on petroleum and may
resemble modern napalm. It is probably the inspiration for the wildfire used in
the Battle of Blackwater in Game of Thrones when King’s Landing comes under
attack by Stannis Baratheon and also Quegan Fire in Raymond E Feist’s Midkemia
books.
Then I unexpectedly needed to research how to pull an arrow
out. The short answer was – you don’t really want to have to do this because
there’s a good chance the victim will die. That wasn’t a very good outcome for
the book, so I had to find the long answer.
A plot twist suddenly had me wondering how you know sappers
are tunnelling under your castle walls, how you find them once you know you’re
there, and then what you do about it when you locate them. This is not an easy
thing to learn, although fortunately I found enough to get me by.
Since the conventional approach of dealing with siege
engineers wasn’t really an option for my beleaguered heroes (on account of
available resources and the like) I had to think of another option. Perhaps
some sort of explosive?
Hmmmm. More questions. What kind of explosives might be
believable in a high fantasy novel with a roughly medieval feel?
More research…
Turns out the Ancient Chinese had crude explosives from
close to the beginning of the AD calendar. Who knew? They even had crude
grenades in clay pots and soft-case grenades too – presumably made from
something akin to papermache. They definitely had gunpowder (which I now know
is made from saltpetre, sulphur and carbon) and saltpetre was even called Chinese
Snow. Saltpetre is white, where I had always thought it was black. It’s the
carbon added to make gunpowder that makes it ‘black’ powder. I even know where
saltpetre can be obtained!
It’s amazing the stuff you can learn while writing a genre
often dismissed as ‘fairy tales for adults’.
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