"Uly's News" by Ed Calkins, Steward of Tara

In Bryony, the first book of Denise M. Baran-Unland's supernatural/literary BryonySeries, protagonist Melissa Marchellis meets one vampire who stands apart from the Victorian society in which she travels with composer and pianist John Simons.

            That vampire is Ed Calkins, who calls himself, "The Steward of Tara."

            Ed believes that it is the right of every Irishman to create myth. Under this premise, Ed penned my "Irish" genealogy.

            This genealogy first appeared in serial installments on the BryonySeries blog in late 2010 and early 2011. We published it in book form in 2018 and it's available in print in the BryonySeries store and in print and Kindle on Amazon. 

             Here is the first chapter. Happy reading!

           

                                                      CHAPTER ONE: ULY'S NEWS

 Although Denise's Irish ancestry cannot be directly proven, it’s quite apparent to any rational being that lacks prejudices to the contrary.

            Denise’s first known ancestor is a man named “Uly of Too Many Children."  He was smallish man, studious, numerant, and, if eyeglasses had been invented before 1700 B.C. and available along the eastern Mediterranean coast, he would have worn very thin lenses.

            Uly married a woman to whom he never paid much attention since he favored scrolls and theroms to her feminine charms. Nonetheless, she bore sixteen children, none of which were fathered by Uly. So Uly, after Number 16, (which was actually the child's name because Uly was very good with numbers, but had trouble with names and complex sentence structures, although he was very good with complex equations) realized that his wife had been cheating! As he prepared to throw her out, it suddenly occurred to him that she had been gone for several months.

            Anyway, poor Uly and his sixteen unknown children were left to fend for themselves. What did Uly do? He took a paper route by ocean. Because this was three thousand years before the invention of the printing press, a carrier in Uly’s time had to compose the paper first, copy it as many times as he had customers, then deliver it. One could say that Uly was a publisher, reporter, and carrier. The route consisted of the ancient equivalent of a trailer court and gated community.

            Each morning, Uly would compile his observations of the following day, write them on a scroll, and give it to the lowest numbered child to replicate. That child would give his copy to the child whose number was one less than his until all children were copying and all editions were written.

            Uly had two publications to deliver: The Hellenic Times and the Trojan Inquirer. Each bore the same news, but the trailer court, which preferred the Hellenic Times, and the gated community which received the Trojan Inquirer, were none the wiser.

            In addition, it might be added that the children quickly grew bored of their coping tasks. Sometimes, bored with journalistic integrity and ready at any chance to rebel against parental authority, they wrote their own views instead of Uly's representations of the facts. Others drew comedic pictures. In this way, Uly's papers might have invented the editorial and the political cartoon.