The love interest is provided by Cusi Huaman, a young Inca warrior once scorned as a weakling by his father, and Micay, a healer and daughter of a Chachapoya rebel chief. Around them swirl dozens of historical and fictional characters, including three war chiefs who become the last Inca emperors. Writing with the detail and accuracy customarily accorded anthropological treatises, Peters (Tikal: A Novel About the Maya) recreates ritual initiations, internecine feuds, the crushing of rebellions and the active presence of the gods in daily life. Though the pace is slow and stately, this expansive novel plunges the reader into a maelstrom climaxed by the arrival of Francisco Pizarro and the "Bearded Ones" in 1532.

    Benjamin and Roger are ordered into Margaret's household to resolve certain mysteries as well as to bring about her restoration to Scotland.They begin by questioning Selkirk, a half-mad physician imprisoned in the Tower. He is subsequently found poisoned in a locked chamber guarded by soldiers. The only clue is a poem of riddles. However, the poem contains the seeds for other gruesome murders. The faceless assassin always leaves a white rose, the mark of Les Blancs Sangliers, a secret society plotting the overthrow of the Tudor monarchy...This novel was previously published under the pseudonym Michael Clynes.

    Yet this anthology, which includes both undisputed masterpieces and achievements in hitherto neglected fields, is the first to reveal the full range and diversity of the century's poetic riches. What emerges is the most complete picture available of the poetic vitality of the sixteenth century.

    Hale deploys an unprecedentedly rich corpus of images, many of supreme quality, which reflect the ways in which artists, often independently of patrons, responded to the facts of war, to violence and death, to battles and sieges, to ideas about its nature and causes, and, above all, to the men who made war possible, the common infantry soldiers.