who died in the fourteenth century BC and was buried with iron artefacts that may well have been Hittite. They do not appear to have used iron for weaponry; it was evidently too precious for that. Iron was produced in other areas at the time, but it does seem to be true that it was only after the fall of the Hittites that iron-making, particularly for weapons, became widespread, and the ‘Iron Age’ began. The main advantage of iron compared to bronze was actually the ready availability of iron ore compared to the scarcity of tin; high-quality bronze weapons could certainly be a match for lower-quality iron weapons. Here I have imagined that high-quality iron precociously developed in Hittite workshops affords a brief advantage to Northland in their conflict with the Trojans.
This novel is set at the end of the European Bronze Age. Just as depicted here it was a time of significant changes across Europe, from the abandonment of high-altitude farmlands in Britain to the collapse of ancient empires like the Hittites in the east, and the onset of the Greek ‘Dark Age’ in which even literacy was lost. These changes have been ascribed to cultural and systemic factors. But the advent of a new climate regime, punctuated by such events of global impact as volcanic explosions, may well have had something to do with it (see for example The Long Summer by Brian Fagan, Granta Books, 2004). In early 2010 a minor eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull injected enough ash into the air of north Europe to force airspaces to be closed. Hekla, called here the Hood, is a bigger brother of Eyjafjallajokull. And it did erupt in the year 1159 BC, as depicted here, as proven by ash layers in ice cores extracted from the Greenland ice cap; the resulting injection of smoke and ash into the air seems to have caused several ‘years without a summer’ which would have ravaged the marginal livelihoods of subsistence farmers. My details of the eruption have been taken from the geological evidence of Hekla’s eruptive history.
The use of plague vectors as primitive ‘bio-weapons’, as depicted here, seems to have a deep history. Plague was used as a weapon by the Hittites as early as the fourteenth century BC (see ‘The Hittite Plague, the epidemic of Turalemia and the first record of biological warfare’, Siro Trevisanato, Medical Hypotheses vol. 69, pp. 1371-4, 2007, and Adrienne Mayor’s Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs, Overlook, 2009). The ‘coughing plague’ depicted here is a variant of the pneumonic form of the plague of which the best known manifestation is bubonic.
My ‘People of the Jaguar’ are Olmec, a Mesoamerican culture that flourished in an area within modern Mexico c. 1400 BC-AD 100 (for a recent study see Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica by C. Pool, Cambridge, 2007). I have freely extrapolated details of Olmec culture here. My ‘Altar of the Jaguar’ is meant to be the site now known as San Lorenzo, preserved from the decline it suffered in our history by the intervention of the Northlanders. As the Vikings discovered around 1000 AD, to sail to the Americas via the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland requires the crossing of no more than 800 kilometres of open sea. Of course the Vikings had the ship technology they needed; I have imagined here a precocious acceleration of ship-building after the first fluked crossings depicted in book one of this series.
In our world, a major feature of the fifteenth-century contact between Europe and the Americas was the devastating transmission of ‘herd diseases’ such as smallpox and measles to the American populations (see Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, Vintage, 1998). In my different prehistory I have imagined continual contacts across the Atlantic since the eighth millennium BC, so American populations have had a chance to develop resistance to these diseases.
The plot of this novel hinges to some extent on the (apparently) humble potato, which is brought to Europe by the Northlanders millennia before the post-Columbus explorers of our own history. The potato is a crop that will grow in poor soils and unfavourable positions and climates, it requires only the simplest of implements and techniques to cultivate, and it is tremendously more productive than grain in terms of yield per hectare. Arguably, by fuelling the population growth that underpinned the Industrial Revolution and Europe’s rise to economic dominance, the potato changed world history — just as it changes history in this novel (see Redcliffe Salaman’s The History and Social Influence of the Potato, Cambridge University Press, 1985).
This is a novel, and not meant to be taken as a reliable history. Any errors or inaccuracies are of course my sole responsibility.
