Saturday 29 April 2017

Dinner In A Hunting Lodge

SM Stirling, The Sunrise Lands (New York, 2008), Chapter Seven, pp. 158-159:

roast venison killed two days earlier;
cake;
real coffee, rare and expensive;
oranges;
dates;
figs;
sweet dessert wine;
liqueur.

(Coffee and fruit shipped across stormy, pirate-infested seas.)

The meal is a preliminary to a cosy chat between two soul-friends by the fire.

I will say it first this time: a meal to tempt van Rijn!

4 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

You beat me to saying that Old Nick would have loved such a banquet! (Smiles)

And if Nicholas van Rijn had been born about the time of the Change I can imagine him becoming a merchant adventurer and founding a company very much like his Solar Spice & Liquors firm. He would certainly go everywhere in the Changed world, exploring and finding goods and services to buy and sell. Old Nick would not be intimidated by pirates!

Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

Ah, wait until you meet the Feldman family, of Feldman & Sons, merchant-venturers of Newport (the seaport of Corvallis). Particularly Moishe Feldman, captain-owner of the Tarshish Queen.

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Mr Stirling,
I can't wait!
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Dear Mr. Stirling,

But I have "met" the Feldmans of "Feldman & Sons." Interesting that such devout Jews would be willing to do business with pagans they MUST privately consider appallingly superstitious.

And we also see a similar family of merchant adventurers from one of the successor post Change kingdoms of South America. This time they were Jews who converted to Catholicism. But, as we find out, sincerely so. That would give them another thing in common with Old Nick!

Sean