DARK EARTH

The author of In the Days of Rain (2017) and Darwin’s Ghosts (2012) returns to fiction with a mix of history and fantasy.

“Dark earth” is the name geologists give to the layer of dirt—rich in organic matter, sometimes flecked with artifacts—that indicates a long period of human settlement. The narrative that Stott constructs here is built from an actual archaeological find—a Saxon brooch unearthed in the ruins of a bathhouse—and the figurative dark earth of the city once called Londinium. Beginning in the first century B.C.E., Britain was a Roman province for almost 400 years, and the historical record for the 500-year period after the occupiers withdrew is scant. Stott builds a rich world from fragments of fact and mythic imagining. Her central character, Isla, lives with her sister, Blue, and their father on an island in the Thames. A smith with the rare gift of making “firetongued” swords, Isla’s father is captive to Osric, Seax Lord of the South Lands; when he dies, Isla must deliver a sword to Osric without revealing that her father broke the taboo against teaching a woman his craft. Once she and Blue arrive at Osric’s court, they have to navigate complex politics after having been raised in isolation. Ultimately, they will have to flee for their lives into the “Ghost City” that has fallen into ruin since the “Sun Kings” disappeared. Stott presents a diverse Dark Ages. Isla and Blue are friends with—and protected by—Caius, descended from a line of African soldiers recruited by the Romans and now working for the Saxons who rule the south of Britain. There are Christian priests and Wiccans and a woman named Crowther who is a priest to Isis. In the Ghost City, Isla and Blue meet runaways from many lands. Most of them are women, and Isla falls in love with one of them. The conflict at the climax of this novel is not a clash of arms but a battle between brute power and cunning, between selfish greed and communal strength.

Stott fills holes in written history with magic, mythic resonance, and 21st-century wish fulfillment.