Amal El-Mohtar

They bring daughters of earth back down to the land of death—but death does not claim them.

You say my letter found you in a moment of hunger. How to say what it means to me, that I might have taught you this—shared it, somehow, infected you with it. I hope it isn’t a burden at the same time that I want you seared by it. I want to sharpen your hungers fully as much as I long to satisfy them, one letter-seed at a time.

I want to tell you something about myself. Something true, or nothing at all.

PS. I’m so happy you read the Mitchison. Constantinople is difficult—but it helps sometimes to think of the book as moving through phases of storytelling time. Myth and legend give way to history, which gives way again to myth, like curtains parting and meeting again on either side of a performance. Halla begins in Mitchison’s Norse myths outside of book-time, and by the end has been absorbed—embedded, perhaps—into the myths of those she travelled with. All good stories travel from the outside in.