This month’s cover art by Todd Sharp features the blood-red silhouettes of three men mounted on galloping horses. The curlicues of the art nouveau background, rendered in textured shades of brown, evoke the hand-tooled leather of western saddles. All three of the men are wearing broad-brimmed hats. Two of them are brandishing sabers. The image immediately raises a question: “Are these cowboys… with swords?”
The short answer: kinda. As I have noted before, the character of Gelgarth Arbekka is based in no small part on my paternal grandfather, a retired Arkansas state trooper. In writing his dialogue, Gelgarth’s cadences and even some pronunciations came out sounding like my grandfather’s, and soon I had populated a region of my Fantasy world with people who sounded like they were from the Ozarks. Four chapters later, when I returned to Gelgarth and decided to recount some of his backstory as a ‘Rider of the Wyrn,’ I realized the accent that worked so well in the setting of Gelgarth’s farm would sound odd in the mouths of heroic knights and dashing cavaliers. Slowly but surely, the chivalrous Riders evolved into a hybrid of the Ranger of Fantasy and the cowboy of the American West, living comfortably in the shared elements of horse culture, frontier justice, self-reliance, and harsh realities that have been romanced into self-serving myth. Or, if you prefer: cowboys with swords.
