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!
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.
