Where there’s an archaeologist there must be an artefact. It was on the basis of this reasoning that I set about researching the history of Peshawar for A God in Every Stone – at that point a novel-in-the-making about which I knew very little beyond the fact that it would include archaeologists in Peshawar in the early 20th century. Fairly quickly I stumbled upon a name that sounded as if it came right out of a fantasy novel – Scylax.
This Scylax, it transpired, had been sent by the Persian emperor, Darius, to chart the course of the River Indus in 515 BC, and started his voyage from a place called Caspatyrus, which some historians have identified as modern-day Peshawar. Darius’s interest was in the navigational information Scyalx brought back; mine was in the fantastical tales he wrote down, which shaped the Greek and Persian imagination about India for the next two centuries – until Alexander’s admiral, Nearchus, wrote his own (more accurate, less colourful) version of his own journey down the Indus.
Concerns about misrepresentation disappear if you go back far enough in time, so I felt nothing but delight when discovering, via secondhand sources, Scylax’s2,500-year-old claims about the tribes he encountered in India (though as I’m now writing in the present day I feel constrained by factual accuracy to point out that Scylax’s India is entirely located within what is now Pakistan).
My favourites were the Skyapods, or Shadow-Feet, who had feet so large that when the day’s heat became too unbearable they would drop onto the ground and raise their legs in the air – their feet would cast shadows large enough to shade their bodies entirely. Runner-up favourites were the Otoliknoi or Winnowing-Fan Ears who used their large ears like umbrellas. Clearly the heat of India, and the question of how to survive it, occupied Scylax’s imagination greatly.
Scylax was famous in his time. Aristotle wrote about him; so did Herodotus, who told us that he was deeply trusted by Darius. Nothing remained of his original writings – only scraps of secondhand reference – but those scraps were sufficiently engaging to make me invent an artefact that belonged to him and send my archaeologists in search of it. It was only several months into the writing of the novel that I thought to look more deeply into a line that cropped up occasionally in various sources of meagre biographical data – that he might have been the same Scylax who wrote a biographical account of the general, Heracleides of Mylasa, three decades or so after the voyage along the Indus.
I was at this point fairly stuck – somewhere there was an underlying motif that was pulling all the different stories together, but what was it exactly? Then I read that Hercalides was from Caria, the westernmost part of the Persian empire, and Scylax’s own homeland, and that in 498 BC he led a Carian revolt against Darius. Although the revolt was ultimately quashed, along the way Heracleides led his men to a successful ambush and defeat of Darius’s troops, an astonishing victory given the might of the Persian army. And Scylax, that most trusted of Darius’s men who once helped his emperor expand his territory east into India: was he the one to write a biography immortalising that victory of his countrymen?
There’s no justification for my certainty that yes, he did – unless dramatic symmetry can be cited as justification – but for the purposes of my novel I didn’t need certainty, only possibility. In the ways in which we always seek for clean narratives, I’m now convinced that thinking about Scylax the Trusted responding to news of a Carian victory over the Persians was what made me recognise the underlying motif of all the stories in A God in Every Stone. It was the age-old one of how to contend with competing pulls of loyalty, whether you’re an English archaeologist who loves a Turkish man at the start of the first world war, or a British Indian soldier who wonders why he’s risking death at Ypres to defend someone else’s land when his own is colonised, or a sailor-storyteller trusted by the Emperor against whom his countrymen have take up arms.
Extract
July–August 1914
Vivian Rose Spencer was almost running now, up the mountainside, along the ancient paving stones of the Sacred Way, accompanied by an orchestra of birds, spring water, cicadas and the encounter of breeze and olive trees. The guide and donkeys were far behind, so there was no one to see her stop sharply beside a white block which had tumbled partway down the mountain centuries ago and rest her hands against its surface before bending close to touch her lips to it. Marble, grit, and a taste which made her jerk away in shock – the bones of Zeus’s sanctuary had the sweetness of fig. Either that, or a bird flying overhead might have dropped a fruit here, and the juice of it smeared against the stone. She looked down at her feet, saw a split-open fig.
— Labraunda! she called out, her voice echoing.
— Labraunda! she heard, bouncing back down the mountain at her. That wasn’t her voice at all. It was a man, his accent both familiar and foreign. But no, she was the foreign one here. She picked up the fig, held it to her nose and closed her eyes. She never wanted to return to London again.
More about A God in Every Stone
Review: “A God in Every Stone is an ambitious piece of work, and its pages are lit by Shamsie’s eloquent prose. Her feeling for place is sensitive and sometimes exquisite. The flowering orchards of Peshawar are as vivid as the blood hosed by firemen from the streets of Qissa Khwani Bazaar.” - Helen Dunmore
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Books podcast: Kamila Shamsie and Louisa Young discuss the fiction of the first world war.
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A God in Every Stone is published by Bloomsbury in the UK and Atavist Books in the US, and is available from the Guardian Bookshop at £7.19.
