BLURB
This book was inspired by a passage in the Spanish epic poem La Araucana, which I have translated. In the original story, a Spanish soldier, after a battle, is accosted by an Indian woman who asks him to lead her to her husband’s body, to pay her last respects. In the original story, she disappears. In Pearlman the hero is contemporary, but he does time and space travel to those legendary times, and the woman turns out to be Auchimalgen, the Araucanian Moon Goddess. She seduces and enlightens him. There is a backdrop of Chile, with its incredibly volatile ecosphere and long history of protracted conflict. This story combines romance with sci-fi and time travel.
EXCERPT
Her skill in undoing my armour was worthy of any trained white man. “We are supremely adaptable; we learn avidly from those we observe and oppose”, she whispered, her teeth gleaming in her smile. As I saw the chain mail and the cuirass lying there, discarded, I saw that the rust had all disappeared.
Deft hands tenderly peeled my sweat-ridden leather and cotton; it was lovely to be nursed without immediate wounds to distract from the exquisite sensations.
“You must be proud of your exertions!” she said. The power in her words was akin to a duelling challenge. (The time warp flashed me into my happy collaboration with that beautiful fitness trainer, when I imagined that lithe, toned form excelling itself at the Olympic High Jump as her prelude to our delicious consummation.)
I looked up towards her breasts, to see the matching metal, discs, chains, bangles – an array of gold, silver and jade; I sensed their resilience beneath their cover. She read my response with total ease; with a radiant smile, she whispered “do as you have been done by.”
My hands trembled a little as I delicately negotiated the pins and clasps, but I succeeded in making a harmonious pattern of them, like a crown at the head of my discarded armour. It was good to have gained intimate knowledge of those metallic treasures in the museums.
The face of a full moon, reciprocating its radiation on Tegualda’s face and eyes, beamed its glittering reflections, as if casting off a diaphanous robe, to reveal the perfect body of its illuminated rocks, bouncing back and forth around the elaborated grid of our variegated metalwork – steel, bronze, silver and gold – its luminosity almost suggesting that it would all come to life, radiant in the flames of their smelting, almost as two armies facing each other. In turn, the beams flooded our faces, giving an external flourish to our luminous vibrancy charged from within.
She took my hand, and made it caress her sealskin robe: “please do the honours”. I lifted it at the bottom. My hands reached up inside it until they could feel her firm but still slender waist. Repeating my earlier gesture, she raised her arms in surrender and conquest, the robe clouding into a transient veil over her noble features.
Then Tegualda cast off her gleaming white cotton camisera for me with all the challenging flourish of a toreador. She tamed me and fired me simultaneously with her lovely self-revelation.
The walls of my time-capsule were fractured. There glistened across the world, ricocheted back and forth across the centuries a composite of the world’s beauties, celebrated in poetry and song, painting and sculpture, melted, distilled and poured into one vibrant, impassioned, soul-suffused body. Egyptian and Grecian statues and mural figures melted into an array of Hollywood dream sublimities deeply embedded in my memory. This was a spiritual earthquake, embracing all history and culture, the distilled essence of all artistic striving poured into one giant goblet.
BOOK INFO
Length: 10,000 words.
Heat Level: 3.
Publisher: Bella Tulip Publishing
BOOK LINKS
Pearlman eBook: David Russell: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pearlman-David-Russell-ebook/dp/B0776G2JRF
Amazon US https://www.amazon.com/Pearlman-David-Russell-ebook/dp/B0776G2JRF
Pearlman by David Russell | Jeris Book Attic
https://jerisbookattic.com/pearlman-by-david-russell
Brittany’s Book Blog
http://www.brittanysbookblog.com/blog/pearlman-by-david-russell-release-day-with-giveaway
Review
By Marilyn Baron on 9 December 2017 – Published on Amazon.com
Pearlman, David Russell’s mythological fantasy and time travel, is a story to be enjoyed on many levels. Pearlman, Russell’s contemporary hero—someone as precious as a jewel, someone in search of a precious jewel—has a fascination for the period of the Spanish conquests and wishes to travel back in time to that era. The story was partly inspired by a passage in the Spanish epic La Araucana, concerning the conflict between the Conquistadores and the Native Chileans, in which the narrator, a Spanish soldier, is approached by Tegualda, a native woman, who asks him to lead her to her husband’s body, so she can pay her last respects. Tegualda, a noblewoman in the original epic, turns into a moon goddess. She and the hero have a physical and metaphysical tryst, and are mutually enlightened.
Russell gives a factual backdrop to a fictional story set in Chile, one of the most unstable places on earth—abounding in earthquakes and volcanoes and political instability. As a romance writer and reader, I recommend this story to romance readers.
About David Russell
B. 1940 Resident in the UK. Writer of poetry, literary criticism, speculative fiction and romance. Main poetry collection Prickling Counterpoints (1998); poems published in online International Times. Main speculative works High Wired On (2002); Rock Bottom (2005). Translation of Spanish epic La Araucana, Amazon 2013. Romances: Self’s Blossom; Explorations; Further Explorations; Therapy Rapture; Darlene, An Ecstatic Rendezvous (all pub Extasy (Devine Destinies). Self-published collection of erotic poetry and artwork, Sensual Rhapsody, 2015. Singer-songwriter/guitarist. Main CD albums Bacteria Shrapnel and Kaleidoscope Concentrate. Many tracks on You Tube, under ‘Dave Russell’. My works have recently been taken on by Bella Tulip Publishing. Pearlman and Self’s Blossom have already been released, due to be followed by Explorations, Further Explorations and Dreamtime Sensuality Vols I & II.
