dr_pretentious | Expecting to Shock, Shocked in Turn

After a lovely ritual at Turtle Hill, I worked up my courage to ask the newcomer a question I thought might really disturb him. But he was a drum-maker by trade, and manifestly a good one, as we could all hear from the drums he'd brought along. (One of them was hollowed from a 360+-year-old tree that, falling on power lines, had knocked out electricity in the town of Haverford for a week. You'd be amazed at the people your local drum-maker knows. The tree removal folks for all the utilities, the animal control people and anybody who has professional dealings with road kill, etc. If the job involves wood or hides, C knows somebody who does it.) So he was the person I needed to ask about the characters north of the Forest Wall, the ancient vanquished enemies of the Old Beltresins.

"Um, if I told you there was a tribe whose funerary customs involved skinning their dead to make drumheads, would you find that to be implausible, impractical, or merely gross?"

Why am I so obsessed with bizarro funerary customs, anyway? Wasn't the ritual graverobbing weird enough? Apparently not.

But the drum-maker didn't bat an eye. "I don't see why it would be any of those things," he said. "After all, the Aztecs used to skin their war prisoners alive, stitch them back into their skins, pump the skins full of air, and beat on them as drums until they died. What you propose is no weirder than that."

Well, there's a detail I have no desire to write into my series. I could have gone my whole life without knowing the Aztecs used to do that. You could have gone your whole life not knowing it, too. Pity for all of us.

But I wasn't quite done. "Okay, so, what if they also did, say, ritual scarification? Would the scars ruin them as future drumheads?"

"If the scars were fresh, yes. If they were old, though, that would be okay."

Fair enough. So, funerals for young adults north of the Forest Wall are especially lugubrious: since you can't make drums of them, you have to disassemble the deceased even further to make flutes, because, dammit, you must have the voices of your dead to advise you. It's not negotiable.

It didn't occur to me until I was driving home that I should have asked whether the skin of the very elderly was unsuitable for drumheads. Just at the moment when I could have asked the newcomer, somebody else got him talking about tattoos. Tattooed drumheads are, apparently, just as muscially sound as un-tattooed ones, but it's hard to find a veterinarian who will anaesthetize a live goat for tattooing if you tell him you're going to make the goat into drumheads and stew just as soon as the tattoo heals up. The drum-maker had put considerable time and effort into exploring the logistical details necessary for making a set of inked djembes.

The increasingly tattooed

catpaw67 was not at all put off by my observation that she'd make a beautiful drum. One sort of recycling is much like another.

The things you turn up, doing research for novels.