100 Books #115 - Aliette de Bodard's MASTER OF THE HOUSE OF DARTS

The Aztec godpunk trilogy that began with Servant of the Underworld and continued in Harbinger of the Storm comes to its Obsidian-y and Bloody end in this last volume but as should be the case in any good mystery series, Master of the House of Darts stands perfectly well on its own, even though we take up the thread of the story very soon after the conclusion of Harbinger.

The middle volume was all about the struggle for succession, and ended with the more or less expected victor emerging as Revered Speaker (in a bizarre and unique way), but his rule was not yet cemented, for various reasons. To do that, Tizoc-zin must lead his warriors in battle (his "coronation war"), capture physically perfect prisoners, and sacrifice them to the gods to ensure the continuation of the world as the Mexica knew it.

As we begin the action in Master of the House of Darts (the title given to the heir apparent to the Mexica throne, usually the Revered Speaker's younger brother), that battle has been fought and won, but a paltry 40 prisoners are brought back to Tenotichtitlan -- so the new Speaker's rule is already on shaky ground.

And then one the victorious warriors and one of the would-be sacrifices die unexpectedly and mysteriously.

And others suddenly aren't looking so good either.

Enter our hero, Acatl, the Death God Gumshoe, solver of crimes, defender of innocence, and High Priest of the Dead. He is by now a most seasoned solver of supernatural crime and has the scars and scabs to prove it.* Quickly, he determines that the sacrifice, an honorable warrior of a faraway kingdom now lying dead and leaking pus, died of most unnatural causes, namely a supernatural disease, as did the warrior who claimed credit for capturing him.

Uh and also oh.

Soon the plot is thicker than clotted blood as various candidates for the caster of the malign spell that has caused what threatens to become an epidemic are brought up and eliminated. Is it the merchant from a previously conquered city who turns out to have been a member of that city's Imperial Family? Is it the High Priest of the storm-god Tlaloc (a vicious frenemy of Acatl's -- and hey, the diseases's symptoms mimic suffocation or drowning, so this hypothesis immediately volunteers itself to the seasoned Obsidian & Blood fan)? The titular heir-presumptive, who happens to be a devotee of Tlaloc's wife Jade Skirt? All of them? None of them?

Acatl goes through all of the usual detective motions, trading hypotheses, interviewing suspects, raising the souls of the victims to ask what they remember of how they died... all the while stubbornly clinging to his faith in a person who has pretty much been the Archie to Acatl's Nero Wolfe. As the story and the mystery all finally come together, the roots of the later holiday, Dia de los Muertos, become evident and the reader suddenly feels a compulsion to re-read Malcom Lowry. As one does.

One also feels a need to go back and read the trilogy from the beginning, all in one go, to catch all the stuff she obviously missed. And knowing that she needs to read on an empty stomach.

And since a lot of elements in these stories are inspired by actual events, actual history -- the emperors, the inter-city politics, and yes, the epidemic -- one wants to do some non-fiction reading as well. As one does.

Damn fine stuff, this.

*Aztec spell-casting and other acts of propitiation and divination requiring that the supplicant donate quite a lot of his own as well as other animals and people's blood to the cause.

100 Books #114 - Jean Plaidy's LIGHT ON LUCREZIA

I thoroughly enjoyed Plaidy's earlier look at the life of the infamous but possibly unfairly maligned Lucrezia Borgia, Madonna of the Seven Hills, in which Plaidy neatly focused, not on the most infamous rumors and legends about this woman and her family, but on how those nasty tales might have gotten started. This is a nice distinction, maybe -- you can't talk effectively about rumors without mentioning their content, at least in passing, after all -- but one that Plaidy is a master of making, and making into satisfying novels.

Which is why I love her, and, as I mentioned when writing about The Scarlet Contessa, a book set in pretty much the same time and place as Plaidy's Borgia books, wish she'd taken up Caterina Sforza as a subject at some point. Oh, what a glorious book that would have been!

La Sforza does make an appearance in  Light on Lucrezia. the sequel to Madonna of the Seven Hills, but only for a few pages: a swift depiction of her resistance to Cesare's military onslaught and her famously rapey personal encounter with the man after he won the battle. How Plaidy could convey this account and then pass over the notion of writing a book about Caterina will always be a mystery to me. If I'm wrong about this, and she did write about Caterina in more detail under one of her many, many pseudonyms, please, for all love, enlighten me.

But enough about the Lady of Forli; this book is about Lucrezia, picking up exactly after the previous book with the apprehensive coming of the second of her three husbands, Alfonso, illegitimate son of the king of Naples, to Rome. Plaidy protrays this marriage as utterly idyllic, marred only by what every relationship in Lucrezia's life seems to have been marred: the jealousy of the odious Cesare. Every page devoted to this marriage -- and there really aren't many of them -- foreshadows the poor Alfonso's inevitable fate, so when it comes, the reader yawns a bit. And yawns a bit further when Lucrezia predictably chooses to stick by her evil brother, whom she has been conditioned to worship and seek to please since birth.

The rest of the novel focuses on Lucrezia's third marriage, to another Alfonso, this one the heir to the Duke of Ferrara -- which is to say that things pick up from here. Ferrara is ruled by an ancient line of haughty, snotty aristocrats, the Estes (who trace their lineage to times before the Carolingians ruled a good chunk of Europe), who resent that their bloodline will now bear the taint of Borgia ancestry, too, if Lucrezia does her job and makes Este babies. Which is to say that Lucrezia is thrown into a den of vipers, with the chief she-snake being her sister-in-law, Isabella, Marquesa of Mantua, who has long regarded herself the prettiest, most stylish, most accomplished woman in Italy and so sees Lucrezia as a rival to be humiliated at every opportunity. Hilariously, the passive and pliant Lucrezia's non-reaction to Isabella's ploys (and those of Isabella's own sister-in-law, Elisabetta Gonzaga) is precisely the best way to keep her would-be rival at the height of annoyance.

As Lucrezia's domestic troubles take center stage, at last the figures of her father Rodrigo (Pope Alexander VI) and brother Cesare the Fratricide, fade into the background. This may be why a lot of readers have complained that this second Borgia novel is dull compared to the first; it lacks the dramatic focus the first book, devoted almost wholly to foreshadowing the murder of Giovanni Borgia by Cesare, had. But really? It's all in the title: Light on Lucrezia. Finally, Lucrezia Borgia is the heroine of her own life, or at least as much of one as a Renaissance Pope's only (acknowledged) daughter can be. Which is to say that the modern reader spends a lot of these books wanting to slap Lucrezia and tell her to take some control and set some boundaries, but yeah...

La Borgia's reputation seems to have been on the mend in my lifetime, and I wonder if Plaidy's books might not have helped get this started. For my part, I find her portrait of a passive people pleaser annoying but having the ring of truth to it. A pretty little girl with such monstrous relatives might well just teach herself not to see them as they were as long as they kept her in nice dresses and poets and behaved themselves when she was around, especially in a society that still exercised mighty energies to keep women in their places (the odd amazing virago like Caterina Sforza or Isabella d'Este notwithstanding; some people just don't follow the rules, no matter when they're born), and I find the idea that Lucrezia was such a one far more plausible than that she was a monstrous female Cesare, whoring and poisoning her way across Italy out of ego, malice and desire for power.

So yeah, Holliday Granger played her just right.

SUNS SUNS SUNS - Shadow of the Torturer 26-30

Last section ended on a very dramatic note, with Severian having found a very provocative note on one of the food trays at the Inn of Lost Loves, where he, Agia and Dorcas are hanging out until it's time for Severian to meet the hipparch on the Sanguinary Field. Severian immediately realizes that "you are my mother come again" means the note was not intended for him, but just as immediately zeroes in on Agia as the likely target because of reasons.

He then spends most of Chapter 26 interrogating Agia about whether or not she has ever had a child, and then alternately ogling her and the newly-cleaned up Dorcas (who is, of course, the one for whom the note was actually intended, but Severian never thinks of this because of reasons), with a brief break to ask the innkeeper who the Snape Trudo ("Trudo says the man is a torturer") might be? Oh, well there's an ostler here named Trudo, but you can't understand a damn word he says because he's from Southern Nessus and from across the river, to boot. Severian already seems to know that somehow, but we never find out the somehow because it turns out Trudo has scarpered for good and we'll never hear of him again.

The note likely came from one Ouen, the waiter, and we will learn more about him later.

And finally, COMBAT TIME! Or as they call it when you duel with averns, MONOMACHY TIME! Again, we are treated to some philosophical musings from Severian on the way to the Sanguinary Field, including the observation that in societies that have outlawed dueling, it's largely replaced with murder, and often ends up with two corpses instead of one, because society tracks down the killer and kills him for his crime. Point taken, Severian!

But of course, he is on his plodding way to become a "carnifex" aka executioner, so his point is pretty interesting, isn't it?

However...

As Severian arrives, people are bellowing out names; turns out it's tradition here to either announce yourself or have a servant do so, so that everyone knows one has turned up even if one's opponent has not. I suppose it would not be seemly to just announce that said opponent has chickened out. Severian tries bullying Agia into making his announcement for him "Severian of the Matachin Tower." She at first refuses, then takes it on herself to edit his cry to "Severian of the Torturers! Severlan of the Citadel! Of the Tower of Pain! Death! Death is come!" and Severian backhands her for it.

Dorcas suggests that wasn't a very good idea, as it will only make Agia hate him more. More than what, Severian asks (disingenuously, in my opinon). But soon there are more important things to think about; Severian's opponent has showed up, and showed up in armor. Should they fight naked? The hipparch declares that his people only go naked in the presence of women. But he's in armor! Oh noes!

Of course the real reason the hipparch refuses to remove his armor -- particularly his helmet -- is because Severian would recognize him as Agia's brother Agilus. If this were to happen, the jig -- because while Severian thinks this is the Guild's roundabout way of punishing him without violating the law but it's really just a ruse the twins cooked up to part him from his valuable sword and fulgin cloak -- would be up. Oh noes! But at last a compromise is reached; the hipparch takes off his breastplate (Severian is already shirtless, of course) and Severian will wear his Super Scary Torturer's Mask. Fine. Soon the leaf-chucking, audience hazardous foolishness of avern combat is underway.* They fight awhile, and then Severian goes down in confusion and the hipparch "in an oddly familiar voice" claims victor's right to Severian's clothing and weapon. Ho ho! But then Severian gets up, ready for Round Two, and the hipparch, with a glance at Agia, runs away.

Next thing we know, Severian is in an infirmary of sorts, hallucinating giant apes with dog's heads and trying to plan how he's going to explain to his Master how he lost both sword and cloak before he was even out of Nessus; he's buck naked in his bed. But no, there is Dorcas with his stuff. Oh, and it turns out the dog-headed ape is real, but I don't know what to make of that. Anyone? Bueller?

Turns out he's in a sort of barracks, part of the Hall of Justice, among a lot of soldiers back from fighting the Ascians (about whom we'll learn more later) in the North. Turns out he'd been hit by a leaf, which didn't just have poison dripping from its edges, but also drinks blood if it's left embedded in the wound.** We learn, too, that his opponent injured many while making good his escape, so hey, at least the audience got to watch someone die, har har.

Meanwhile, turns out Dorcas rescued Severian from his own avern, which was busy turning on him, like averns apparently do?

Like I said, I don't even.

But so anyway, this is another near-death for Severian, but like I've said elsewhere, I'm really not interested in the many-Severians reading of these books. They hurt my brain enough as it is.

Meanwhile, Dorcas is interested in what was up with the note at the Inn, anyway? Which she didn't ask about earlier because she didn't want Agia to hear. Severian seems to interpret this as just females gettin' jealous because who doesn't want a piece of him, but really, Dorcas was onto Agia from the start, I think. Anyway, a discussion ensues, in which Severian opines that Dorcas is not old enough to have had a grown child (which Ouen certainly is) and she breaks down and cries that she doesn't remember.

And then BOOM! As Severian is shopping for a new dress for Dorcas at what amounts to the commisary there by the Hall of Justice, the portreeve (a kind of bailiff, here, I think) stops him and asks him to stand by to act as a carnifex since there's a guy on trial and they're pretty sure he's going to be found guilty. Well! Severian can't say yes fast enough. Even before finding out who his likely client is.

Well, what do you know! The client is none other than Agilus, who managed to kill no fewer than nine people while making his crappy escape from the Sanguinary Field! And Agia is with him. "Because you lived, he has to die," she says to Severian. And even then Severian (supposedly) doesn't get it until Agia laboriously explains her ruse and the penny drops. "You tried to kill me. Just for my sword."

Then Agilus tries to bamboozle our hero with talk of Severian's having wronged him three times and an old law that says a man three times wronged may claim a boon of the one who did poorly by him. First, he claims, Severian entrapped him by carrying an heirloom blade into Agilus' orbit. Second, Severian refused to sell the sword at any price, which "in our commercial society" amounts, Agilus says, to treason. And third, Severian obviously cheated on the Sanguinary Field. The boon Agilus claims is, of course, not being executed, please.

When that argument doesn't work, Agia leaps onto Severian to kiss him all over and proclaim her love for him, and all but demands that he "take" her right there in Agilus' cell. Of course, while she's pawing him, her fingers slip into his man-purse and he hears the rustle of paper and he flings her away from him. She conks her head against a stone in the wall and starts crying. Severian finally chases her out of the cell and has "the talk" with her brother about how best to present himself for death the next day. Don't eat too much, have a pee before the sword comes down, etc. Considerate fella, that Severian.

As he leaves, he finds that where the orichalk he offered Agia to get herself some food was flung by that ungrateful girl, someone has crudely scratched the image of Jurupari, "wreathed in letters I did not know." I've always glossed over this before, but this time I did some digging, and found that Jurupari is the name of a rather nasty Brazilian jungle god, born of a virgin, and also that "jurupari" with a lowercase J is the species name for a popular aquarium fish called the Earth Eater, so this is probably a hidden reference to bad old Abaia, the alien leviathan who will one day swallow the continents. So, who scratched that design there? Agia? Does that mean Agia is in league with Abaia and the rest who are already working to prevent the New Sun?

I think it does.

As Severian leaves the dungeon where Agilus awaits his services, he encounters something new to him: Torturer Fanbois and Fangurls. They want to know all about him, including his real name. One woman almost touches his bare chest. One forces a handkerchief on him and asks him to get some of the prisoner's blood on it. She'll pay him.

And now that I have read There Are Doors, I'm struck by a bit of this scene in which one of the fanbois starts wittering on to Severian about a "paracoita" (sexdoll?) he used to have. It's hard not to think of this fellow as a devotee of the goddess whom Pine knew as Lara in that other book, even though There Are Doors was written eight years after Shadow of the Torturer. So, retroactively creepy. Anyway, this guy lost his doll somehow, and in his twisted way is now all about the Torturers and Carnifexes getting maximal suffering out of their clients as revenge for the theft of said doll. Um..

Nor is that the only ickiness with which this section ends, for now that it's just Severian and Dorcas against the world ("it would be said of her that she was a torturer's woman, who gave herself under the scaffold for money spotted with blood"), there are certain, ah, expectations when they retire to their windowless room (foreshadowing, as he himself observes, Severian's time to come serving as Carnifex for the "windowless" city of Thrax, whenever he gets there). Weirdly, he savors the idea of not sleeping with her, at first: "the pleasure I would have had in abstinence would then have been at least as great (as I thought) as I would have had in possession, with the additional pleasure of knowing that on the next night she would feel the more obliged because I had spared her."***

But while Severian is busily completely denying Dorcas any say in the matter of whether she's going to sleep with him, she reveals that she's kind of thinking about doing so, but only in the most abstract terms: she is wondering what memories will surface when she has sex again. Like an abuse victim. So, ew.

But of course, they do a thing. And the reader says eww, and then eww again as we run out the rest of the chapter with Severian getting himself all psyched up to kill Agilus with the blessing of the state. Eye of the Tiger, Shadow of the Torturer, bitches.

*My friend Paul Weimer, aka @PrinceJvstin on Twitter, tells me he actually worked up an avern combat system for a role-playing game he ran a few years ago. That must have been hilariously fun to play out.

**One pauses to contemplate the evolutionary forces that could shape such a plant on any world. Then one's head explodes.

***Of course, all of this is even ickier once one is in possession of the knowledge that Dorcas is [REDACTED].

100 Books 113 - Lee Battersby's THE CORPSE-RAT KING

Is that a crown in your pocket, or are you just happy to come and rule us?

That's not a quote from this novel, but really? It totally could be.

Marius Helles makes his living robbing the corpses of soldiers who have fallen in battle, a practice he has refined to an art -- until he has no living to make at all. Tee hee. What happens is, he robs the wrong corpse -- that of a fallen king -- and is observed holding a crown by one of the recently dead, who misreads the situation and next thing Marius knows, he's been sucked down to the world of the dead! Whom the gods are ignoring! Because, the dead think, they have no king! So they need a king! Marius has a crown, therefore he must be a king! So he can be their king! But of course, Marius doesn't want to be dead, even if he gets to be KING DEAD!

All of that sounds spoilery, but that's all just the first chapter of The Corpse-Rat King, in which the newly-dead Marius gets his mission: find the dead a king, or else. But like all good Heroes, Marius at first Refuses the Call, and runs away. As excuses for a tour of a funky fantasy world go, this is a highly original one.

Battersby, too, took some time making this more than just a generic fantasy world. There are a lot of nice touches, like a short discourse on a tradition of throwing corn dollies into the water at the beginning of an ocean voyage and the industry of dolly-making that has grown up around it, that, combined with Zombie Marius' antics, make this book a genuine pleasure to read.

There are some disturbingly funny moments, such as when Marius almost "rescues"* a drowned Mad King who is a dig-in-your ribs reference to Caligula (he even named his horse "Littleboot" which is roughly an English translation of "Caligula" -- the nickname bestowed on the beloved toddler son of the Roman commander Germanicus that stuck right on through the kid's rise to the imperial throne) and rides him like a horsey beneath the waves. Or when... but that would be spoilery. Eff off. But oh, how I giggled.

This is another novel that I started and let go by the wayside because of shiny things that came my way. This should not reflect on the book's quality, however. I'm just distractable that way. And though I had read many other things between the putting-aside and the taking-back-up-again (a span of three or four weeks), I did not have to refresh my memory as to what had been going on. And once I was reading it again, I kept on at a giddy pace, carried away by Battersby's wonderful world building (and cathedral building; the Cathedral of Bones licks the Iron Throne hollow as an enduring taunt/symbol of a founding ruler's conquests) and Marius' resourcefulness as he first runs away from and then embraces his quest, like every hero does.

The ending leaves room for a sequel, by the way. Hurrah for Mostly Dead Marius!

*For "rescue" read "spirits away so he can proceed to the land of the dead and become their king."

100 Books #112 - David Colby's DEBRIS DREAMS

So come on now, admit it. You've always felt, deep down inside, that the one thing that science fiction was still missing, egregiously so, was a good and thorough discussion of the pressure differential implications of farting in a spacesuit.

Problem. Solved.

David Colby's debut novel, Debris Dreams has such a discussion, and much, much more to offer the young adult or the supposedly grown-up science fiction aficionado, and plenty to offer the more casual reader as well. Colby has packed a primer in space habitat sociology, a convincing space-borne war story*, a charming coming of age narrative, and a tale of the ultimate in sucky long-distance relationships, into a brisk-reading 284 pages of microgravity adventure.

Our heroine, Drusilla Xao, is a sixteen-year-old conscript into the Chinese-American-Alliance's Space Marines, suddenly called to war when a demented-yet-calculating band of militant Lunan seperatists launch a successful terrorist attack and destroy Earth's one and only space elevator, completely cutting off the post-petroleum society down the gravity well from its colonies, destroying a good chunk of Kenya in the process, and stranding everyone in near-Earth orbit. Drusilla's parents lived and worked on that elevator, as did most of her companions' parents; they now have nothing left to love or fight for but each other -- except for Drusilla, who has an e-girlfriend she has always longed to meet in person and be together as a couple with... down in Ontario.

Drusilla's homosexuality is only a minor plot point, but it tells everything about the society Colby hopes we'll one day achieve. In Drusilla's world, being gay is just a thing like having green eyes or dry ear wax or not liking artichokes (that it also allows our young author/narrator to engage in a bit of wolf-whistling at some of his female characters' physical attributes now and then without being an icky white male ogler-in-prose is merely by the bye**). There are more important things to worry about, like always having breathing equipment handy in case of a hull breach or not stranding yourself unable to move in the middle of a room at zero gee or if that heat signature in that cloud of space debris is maybe another Lunan attack on the way.

A lot of the world-building takes the form of Drusilla's email exchanges with her beloved Earthbound Sarah as she explains her world and her culture, smitten teenager to smitten teenager. Since This is War and resources are limited, these exchanges are short and thinly dispersed and so don't intrude overly on the narrative, but are nicely informative all the same -- Dru and her author have given a lot of thought to conveying a lot in just a few words, packing in infodump and heartbreaking longing in a tiny space. The effect of this device is to make Drusilla's world comprehensible without once feeling like the author is talking down to his readers, which is something a lot of novelists with a lot more work under their belts than Colby has could stand to pay attention to.

My only real complaint about the book is a niggling little one (which, see addendum below). Because the governing alliance includes China, the characters' most intense and passionate moments tend to contain a lot of Chinese vocabulary. In places, the book has actual characters, but most of the words are in pinyin (Chinese syllables rendered into the western alphabet). Somehow, the characters came out fine in my Epub copy, but the pinyin got garbled, and thus is full of question marks in place of letters. Sometimes I could interpolate the letters (I took Mandarin in college mumble mumble years ago) but sometimes a lot of question marks in a row left me questioning, too. Fortunately, context clues let the reader gloss over these bits, but it's a pity nonetheless.

So yes, if you loved the anime series Planetes, or Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, or the TV series Firefly or Brand Gamblin's Tumbler, or Robert A. Heinlein's juvenile fiction (or even some of his more adult fiction with its casual sexual hijinx), or all of the above -- and really, I have a hard time imagining how it could not be all of the above -- Debris Dreams will feel quite familiar to you, but as I've explained, that doesn't mean it's a rehash of any of those, or that it will bore you. Quite the contrary!

Where was this stuff when I was a young adult sci-fi fan? Oh yeah, the author wasn't even born then. Um...

*The best elements of the novel are the combat scenes, many of which feature young Space Marines fighting out in the black in power armor, i.e., not in spaceships of any kind. And fight scenes within space habitats and orbiting factories, featuring the sights and smells of blood spraying in microgravity. These scenes are simply stunning.

**Though this does give Drusilla a slight taint of Mary Sue when coupled with her meteoric rise from civilian apprentice spacer to "Star Corporal" in the Space Marines. But it's only a slight taint.

ADDENDUM (Nov. 30) - I spent a few days in discussion with Kate Sullivan at Candlemark and Gleam, this novel's publishers, and we determined that what was going on in the pinyin was a fault in how a lot of e-readers handle accent marks -- tone marks in pinyin. The rising tone was fine, but the rest were rendered as question marks. Kate asked me whether the garbled accented letters were worse than not having the textbook-correct pinyin and I told her it would be better to just have the syllables in regular italics. The hard core Mandarin speakers would be able to tell from context most of the time which meaning for a syllable was meant, and the rest would just see the italics and either gloss over the foreign words or look them up. Kate has since decided to do away with the accent marks and just present the Mandarin words in italics, sparing us all the question marks and gobbledygook. You think a big Six Five Four publisher would do that for us? HA.

100 Books #111 - Jeanne Kalogridis' THE SCARLET CONTESSA

Let me take a moment to observe, very gratefully, that this has got to be one of the most misleading book covers I've encountered in quite a while. Sing hosannah! When I got a proper look at it, I felt I'd made a dreadful mistake and ordered some ridiculous softcore porn "romance" novel that was only sort of about Caterina Sforza, badass military bee-hatch of the Italian Renaissance.

Whew! Especially since The Scarlet Contessa seemed to be the only novel -- indeed, the only book -- devoted to Sforza that I could find after wondering what the hell kind of possibly-just-anachronistic-but-wouldn't-it-be-awesome-if-not hot chick in armor riding with the "bad" guys Gina McKee was supposed to be in The Borgias.

For a lot of the novel, though, Caterina is barely present. Much in the way Diana Paxon's The White Raven told the legend of Tristan and Isolde/Iseult from the point of view of the princess' maidservant, The Scarlet Contessa is mostly about Caterina's lady-in-waiting, Dea, a woman of even more dubious origins than Caterina (Caterina was a Duke's bastard daughter, but Renaissance Italy didn't make as big a deal about that as some cultures. As might be expected of a place and a time in which a supposedly celebate Pope made his son the commander of the papal armies and stuff) and who has a preternatural gift for reading Tarot cards. Which means the first third of the book is pretty much a giant foreshadowing yawn fest.

I guess I should have taken our lady-in-waiting's name -- Dea means "goddess" I do believe -- as a warning. There isn't quite enough supernatural/magical claptrap to make this a fantasy novel, but it comes awfully close. Dea inherited her murdered mother's "gift" with the Tarot, which gift seems to involve her not only reading the cards but also projecting herself bodily into their images (i.e. almost getting hit by falling masonry from the Tower card, which comes up over and over to make sure we Get It). In addition, Dea performs rituals to "find her angel" in the best New Agey bulldada tradition. This goes on for ages and pages until the non-New Age reader wants to Throw Up.

And of course everything Dea's Tarot cards predict Comes True. Quite literally. So, e.g., when the Two of Cups turns up in a reading, the promised lover shows up with a gift of two golden goblets. And of course Caterina -- remember, this is sort of supposed to maybe be a novel about Caterina? -- here presented as the most spoiled young woman ever, must have Dea by her side at all times so she can get a reading whenever she wishes. Huh what?

In the "further reading" section at the end of this book is a short -- unpardonably short! -- list of books that contain more information about the Lady of Forli, none of which are recent at all and so are most likely out of print. Sing hosannah I live in the Age of the Internet and can track down copies of those with relative ease, because if there's one thing I want to do after reading this book, it's read a better book about this fascinating woman.

I wish Jean Plaidy had written about her.

SUNS SUNS SUNS - Shadow of the Torturer 21-25

We left Severian and Agia touring Father Inire's bizarre masterpiece, the Botanic Gardens of Nessus. Severian did not want to leave the Sand Garden, feeling strangely drawn there (since these gardens are pretty much just an extension of Father Inire's optical time machine, I maintain that it's entirely possible that he got sucked into the life of Apu-Punchau then; who wouldn't want to stick around and be a Mu'ad Dib-ish desert god?), but now blundered into the Jungle Garden to have one of the strangest encounters in this entire novel: the Jungle Hut.

Lots is written all over the web about this scene, in which Severian and Agia both do and do not interact with some inhabitants of the Garden in their hut. Robert and the Zulu shaman Isangoma (his name literally means "shaman" in the Zulu language) can see Severian and Agia, but Marie cannot. We learn that, per Isangoma, it's because Robert is an artist and has trained himself to observe what is actually there, while Marie just sees what she expects to see, but only Robert seems prepared to treat Severian and Agia as actual visitors to his hut; Isangoma regards them as "tokoloshe" -- spirit creatures that occur "when man think bad thought or woman do bad thing" and then remain until the end of the world. Or, as Robert says, kind of agreeing with Isangoma but pulling his punches a bit "They are the spirits of the future, and we make them ourselves."

From all the clues strewn about, including a plane that appears, readers generally conclude that Marie and Robert are 20th Century missionaries who, either accidentally or by Father Inire's design, happened across the corresponding geographical location of one of Inire's mirror-access-point-things and wound up in the Jungle Garden. Possibly Isangoma and his tribe did as well, and might be from a yet different point in time, though how they got from Africa to South America...? I don't even.

Anyway, Isangoma recites an interesting bit of rhyme, that may or may not be another hologram of Severian's story and eventual role in the universe:

In the night when all is silent,
Hear him screaming in the treetops!
See him dancing in the fire!
He lives in the arrow poison,
Tiny as a yellow firefly!
Brighter than a falling star!
Hairy men walk in the forest.*
He comes when the sun is setting,
See his feet upon the water!
Tracks of flame across the water!"

There is apparently more to this rhyme, but this is what we get. Note that while Severian's world features a dying red sun, but all of this sun imagery is yellow. Either Isangoma in his little diorama only knows the good old yellow sun that we enjoy, or this is a reference to the New Sun. Hmm.

Even more curiously, Isangoma basically uses this celebration of Severian (wink) as a banishing charm against Severian and Agia. Coincidentally, his poetry slam coincides with Agia getting bored and wanting to leave. "If you want to stay... you'll have to get your avern yourself, and find your way to the Sanguinary Fields." And if he doesn't show up, "the snake called yellowbeard" will be sic'd on Severian's family and friends, including her.

Insert your favorite joke about Graham Chapman's snake here.

They argue some more about the nature of the Gardens and their effect on certain people. Like Severian. No Garden of Delectation for him. Not that there's time anyway. Macht schnell! Off to get the damn avern.

Severian is not expecting a lake, and neither are we. I talked a little bit last time about the Lake of Birds, and the popular reader theory that this is a reference to Lake Avernus, a volcanic crater lake that may once have emitted poisonous, bird-killing fumes. It all fits very nicely.

I'm kind of surprised my good friend EssJay didn't jump up and down and yell "Dead Marshes" at me when she got to this part, actually. There are some major similarities: the tea-colored water "has the property of preserving corpses" for instance. But here, the corpses are sunk into it deliberately, with weights, their positions mapped so they can be fished out later if anyone wants to, Agia explains.

But someone begs to differ. OK, I'm not going to get too into this whole thing with the Boatman and who he probably is, and Dorcas and who she probably is here, because my first time read-alongers will just throw things at me, but it's pretty common knowledge. Anyway, here's  the Boatman , doing his Charon bit, on a boat on the Lake of Birds, and he's having a hell of a time finding his beloved Cas, because the Map of Corpses sucks. Or the corpses move around because there is a pipeline to Gyoll that keeps the Lake of Birds from drying out** and manatees (or undines, wink) come and go as they please and mess things up. It is because of the manatundines that the averns were planted on Father Inire's orders, furthermore. Anyway, five years  the Boatman  has been doing this! Severian is sympathetic, though he suspects  the Boatman is "spell-caught" and his kindness earns him a "wish I could help you, but my boat is too small" from the old man. Fortunately, there's another, proper ferryman nearby.

But first Severian has to catch Agia, who is tear-assing along as fast as her messed-up leg*** can take her, so he has to sort-of-run to catch up to her. So of course he falls into the water. He sure does like almost drowning, that Severian. Is he really just crying out to be baptized? While in the water, he drops his sword, which he now has to frantically search for in the stems of the reeds growing in the lake. And while he's doing so, he makes contact with what feels like a human hand. And it feels like that hand is returning his sword to him, Lady of the Lake style. Juturna again?

Or maybe it's the woman with "streaming yellow hair" who helps Severian back onto land. What? Where did she come from? Oh, and Agia and another man, who proves to be one Hildegrin and is the other ferryman, are there now, too. But who's the blonde, covered in mud, wearing little but rags? Introductions all around, including a contemptuous reference to Severian as Agia's fish that seems pretty interesting (see my immediate prior Suns Suns Suns post for a refresher on Father Inire's fish) but nobody notices.

The blonde is Dorcas. And she doesn't remember how she got there. Maybe she just wandered in? Maybe someone sank her under the waters because she was in a "com'er" and they thought she was dead? But who's this ferryman, then?

Well, for starters, he's not a ferryman, but a "badger"**** -- basically, an excavator of things -- but he has a big boat, and when Severian tells him about meeting  the Boatman, Hildegrin says he feels sorry for the old guy and will do this favor for  the Boatman's sake.

But first, Agia really wants to get rid of Dorcas, who is still pretty out of it. Severian makes lots of suggestions, trying, basically, to get her to go to a better, warmer part of the Gardens, like maybe the Sand Garden? Because it's dry and sunny there? "Yes. Sun." (!) But finally they give up on ditching her and she gets to come in the boat. And hear Hildegrin's lecture about the Lake of Birds, most of the substance of which I've already shared, except for the bit about the Cave of the Cumaean (as in the Cumaean Sibyl, who may or may not be the same person as the historical Cumaean Sibyl), whom the Autarch wants there "so he can come and talk without travelin' to the other side of the world" (Italy?). We'll have more about her later, though.

This is my favorite Cumaean image. That is one butch sibyl, Michaelangelo!

Oh, and during some more of Severian's pseudo-philosophical ruminations, Dorcas maneuvers him into grabbing her breast. "Now what are your thoughts? If I have made the external world sweet to you, aren't they less than they were?"

I'm pretty sure that would be a big 10-4, granny.

And finally, it's avern time.

Freaky weird things, averns. Basically, I guess they're weaponized mutant sunflowers. "Each leaf was like a dagger blade, stiff and pointed, with edges sharp enough to satisfy even Master Gurloes." And poisoned. It even kills off the birds and the bees 8o But the flowers are very pretty. Almost hypnotically pretty: "their petals curled in a way that... formed a complex swirling pattern that drew the eye like a spiral limned on a revolving disk." Oh yeah, combat with this will be interesting. Who the Snape thought of that, anyway?

And the actual method of combat-by-avern is totally the Quidditch of BotNS. Instead of swinging it like a mace, like Severian expects, instead one twists off the leaves one by one and chucks them at one's opponent. OK, half Quidditch, half Oriza. While being careful to make sure the opponent can't grab the bare patch you leave by twisting off leaves, and wrestle your flower away from you. And not pricking yourself with the poisoned leaves. Or being hypnotized by  your or your opponent's blossom.

I don't even.

But so, it's almost combat time for real, so at last we leave the Gardens and head to the Inn of Lost Loves (all good duels start at a picturesque inn. It's the law), which is right near the huge and (in Dorcas' opinion) terrifying City Wall, which "goes halfway to the sky" (but what wall doesn't, really? What is the height of the sky, again? Exactly). I must confess, this inn sounds like my kind of place. No buildings are permitted so close to the wall, so it has neither walls nor roof, and is basically a series of platforms surrounded by greenery.

And Severian gets ready to fight. He has explained earlier that he believed the challenge was the Guild's round-about way of finally executing him for the crime of assisting Thecla in her "escape" and so he is letting himself be led to the slaughter, but I call bullshytt on this: if he didn't care if he survived, why bother practicing with the avern? Surely not just because Agia is sexy. Surely. Right? And yet here Agia is, offering to do, uh, something, behind the screen...

But no! Because NOTE DRAMA! After the innkeeper lays down the law on how much and when he is going to get paid (snickerhoot at the deposit for dinner, with the rest paid when you eat, and if you don't survive your duel, well, that's why his prices are so darn reasonable!), he is discovered to have left a scrap of folded paper beneath a tray. Severian jokes about the melodramatic possibilities of getting a secret note before a duel, but Agia takes it so seriously that she gets naked and say's she'll schtup him then and there if he promises not to read the note. But Severian is more interested in the note, for all of his protestations to us of how she made him "stupid with desire."

The note is interesting. "The woman with you has been here before. Do not trust her. Trudo says the man is a torturer. You are my mother come again."

*Here Isangoma is interrupted by Agia, so this may be a lacuna.

**I stumbled across a delightful theory on Urth.net, the gyst of which is that the Lake of Birds is Lake Avernus in Italy at the time of its fume-belching worst, but that the pipeline the Boatman mentions is to the Gyoll of Urth. Which would mean that Gyoll, untold thousands of years in our future, is keeping a volcanic lake from hundreds of years in our past, full of water. Oh, and it also allows undines to go back and forth between the river and the lake as they need to. Possibly to switch the corpses around?

***Another reason folks like Borski posit Agia as a relative of Severian's: she's lame like he will be, for a while. OK.

****And, Severian susses out from his familiar voice when he says something about getting the females to safety, Hildegrin is probably the guy who was hanging out with Vodalus the night Severian saved Vodalus' life. THICK PLOT IS THICK!