Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

  Even before this shift takes place, the Djelibeybi gods as well as the destroyed time indicate that Djelibeybi is separated from the rest of Discworld. “The valley of the Djel had its own private gods,” Teppic muses, “gods which had nothing to do with the world outside” (32). In the Discworld, gods exist because people believe in them (179–80) (an idea that Pratchett develops in greater detail in Small Gods); but Teppic clearly distinguishes between the Djelibeybi gods and the pantheon of other Discworld gods, just as he sees the world as divided into Djelibeybi and “the world outside.” The kingdom is set apart not only politically but also, as suggested before, pantheonically and temporally. The pyramids’ burning of time is limited to the polder, providing a basis for its anachronism. Whereas a tradition is connected to its specific society, the lack of new time is a phenomenon that, theoretically, would concern an entire world. The boundaries of the kingdom are also the boundaries for the temporal destruction, however. This localized effect on the time flow becomes particularly evident from the way various characters experience time in the country. Teppic, for instance, reflects on how time might pass everywhere else but not in Djelibeybi (104), and how this makes the air feel “as though it’s been boiled in a sock” (203). The lack of time, or at least the absence of change caused by it, is noticeable not only intuitively but as a physical sensation. It is also restricted to the kingdom.

  With pantheon, temporal destruction, and dimensional shift all confined to the kingdom, there are obviously boundaries that do the confining, but the plot turns on high priest Dios’s attempts to maintain the separate reality of Djelibeybi rather than its boundaries. Recalling Clute’s definition of a polder from earlier in this chapter, polder boundaries must be maintained, often by a “significant figure”; it is the defense that protects the polder’s separate reality.94 Whereas Dios is certainly significant, it is not the boundaries that he actively maintains; his efforts are aimed directly at protecting the reality in the polder. Instead of preventing the wrong time of the outside world from trickling in, Dios actively opposes change in the kingdom by incessantly manning the bilge pumps, as it were. The death of Teppic’s foreign mother is relevant in this context: what little is mentioned about her suggests that she attempted to effect change. For instance, she disliked pyramids, a position that in Djelibeybi is “like disliking breathing” (17). The veiled threat in the simile is carried out: she is eaten by crocodiles when swimming in the river (17). Throwing someone to the crocodiles proves to be the priesthood’s favorite way of getting rid of people (this is how Ptraci is meant to be sacrificed [119] and how two blasphemous priests are dispatched [182–83]), so while Teppic’s absentminded father supposes that his wife had simply forgotten about the crocodiles, it is far more likely that she was killed by Dios or at least at his command. The late queen is the first crack in Dios’s bulwark against change, and he fails to deal with this crack expediently enough; it is because of a promise extracted by the queen before her death that Teppic is actually sent abroad to study, a departure (or “going forth”) that sets in motion the chain of events that leads to Dios’s undoing.

  The failure to maintain the boundaries leads to the end of the polder by allowing Teppic to go forth as well as come back; each transgression constitutes an important turning point in the plot. The novel and its first part both bear the title The Book of Going Forth (a title that, as Langford points out, refers to the literal title of the ancient Egyptian guide to the afterlife, “The Book of Coming Forth by Day”95), and Teppic’s crossing of the polder’s boundaries is what makes us aware of those boundaries. Their presence is made obvious by the fact that they are transgressed, rather than by the process of transgression. For both Tolkien’s and Holdstock’s polders, the entering of the polder is an essential part of how the polder is presented. Djelibeybi, on the other hand, is entered and exited as a matter of course. Teppic crosses the kingdom’s border on five occasions in the story (leaving three times, returning twice), and not until Djelibeybi is removed from the Discworld does he encounter any difficulties. Examined in terms of change, Teppic’s boundary transgressions—his departures and returns—turn out to be linked to pivotal points in the struggle to reform the kingdom (and thus end the polder).

  The first of Teppic’s departures gives him the education he needs to oppose Dios’s regime of changelessness. When the prince is sent to spend his formative years in Ankh-Morpork, future change is inevitable. As this departure is the main “forth-going” in the first part of the novel, “The Book of Going Forth,” the scene becomes further charged with import (obscured but not diminished by the somewhat befuddled focus character of the scene, Teppic’s father). At the end of part 1, Teppic returns to Djelibeybi, loaded, as it were, with potential for change and set up as Dios’s main opponent. As he wades ashore, illuminated by the flarelights, he feels ready to rule. He considers the traditional care for the dead and the founding of the country, seven millennia previously (66–67). Unbeknownst to Teppic, this is what his return will ultimately put an end to: the burning of time, the tyranny of tradition, and the ancestor worship, all introduced by Dios when Djelibeybi was founded.

  Teppic’s second departure comes at the end of book 2, when he and Ptraci escape from Djelibeybi just as the kingdom leaves the Discworld. Teppic seems to have lost the struggle against Dios; the kingdom disappears and becomes a world of its own, with a reality governed by the beliefs that Dios has instilled in the Djelibeybi population over the millennia. The realization of those beliefs, including the appearance of the kingdom’s (mutually exclusive and therefore rather irascible) gods and the return of some fourteen hundred mummified ex-rulers, is a greater change than Dios can initially handle, however. Tradition cannot help him deal with Djelibeybi’s profoundly different reality: “[Dios] did not know what to do. For him, this was a new experience. This was Change. […] All he could think of, all that was pressing forward in his mind, were the words of the Ritual of the Third Hour” (187). In fact, Dios is at a loss for what to do throughout Teppic’s absence (book 3). Not until faced with the prospect of further change, when the old king informs the high priest that the dead intend to destroy the pyramids, does Dios resume control.

  Teppic’s second return to Djelibeybi, at the end of book 3 and beginning of book 4, is the only time when crossing the boundary is in any way complicated. Since the boundary now separates not only two domains but two worlds, Teppic requires the assistance of his mathematically gifted camel and also has to outwit the sphinx that guards the boundary between the worlds. His goal is to return the country to the world outside by flaring off the stored time in the Great Pyramid, an effort Dios means to stop but never has a chance to deal with. Teppic’s success causes not only Djelibeybi’s return and the consequent banishment of the gods but also the destruction of the pyramids and restoration of a proper temporal flow, as well as the blasting of Dios back to the time of Djelibeybi’s founding.

  At the very end of the novel, Teppic goes forth a final time, leaving Ptraci to rule the country. The former handmaiden’s escape and short stay in the world outside has changed her enough to suggest that the kingdom is facing a serious modernization scheme. Like that of Teppic, Ptraci’s going forth starts a process that allows her to break free from tradition and set about changing the kingdom (see 207). Unlike him, she does not have to work within the polder: she is not opposed by the shrewd Dios but by the “incompetent” Koomi (282), and she has new time to work with—two facts that allow change to actually take place.

  It is worth noting how the anachronistic polder is brought to an end by outside education, not only in the main conflict between Dios and Teppic but also in the subplot, which concerns the building of the Great Pyramid. Teppic’s going forth to train at the Assassins’ Guild in Ankh-Morpork brings skills and ideas almost beyond Dios’s control into the country, but only almost. In fact, Teppic escapes the high priest’s clutches only because of the dimensional shift caused by the Great Pyramid. The “paracosmic�
� architect behind the pyramid, Ptaclusp IIb, has been sent to the best schools and returned with “an education” (91). The fact that Ptaclusp IIb “worships geometry” and designs aqueducts hints at his having been educated in Ephebe (the Discworld version of ancient Greece), where the people “believe the world is run by geometry” (110; see also 69). Teppic and Ptaclusp IIb are made agents of change by virtue not only of their foreign education but because they have been educated at all—in Teppic’s view, an opposition exists between schools and mindless worship (248). In combination, their respective educations eventually result in the destruction of the pyramids and the return of a normal time flow to Djelibeybi.

  When time returns to a normal flow after seven millennia, this does not mean the destruction of the polder. As the Great Pyramid explodes, Dios is thrown backward in the time dimension, to find himself, concussed and with memory lapses, at the moment when the valley is brought into existence (at least as a part of the Discworld) by a flock of thirsty camels (284–85). That the high priest is destined to go through another round of Djelibeybi history is obvious: the thought that compels him to pick up his staff of office is that he must “explain about gods and why pyramids were so important” to Djelibeybi’s founder-to-be (285). The staff, decorated with snakes that are biting their own tails (284), is a symbol of the never-ending. Dios is destined to create Djelibeybi as a changeless polder, maintain it, and finally see it destroyed over and over again. He more than maintains the polder’s anachronistic nature; he becomes the center around which the polder exists. The polder’s boundary is not so much spatial as temporal; the polder is a seven-thousand-year-long bubble in time within which Dios is forever trapped. Teppic never destroys the polder, he just ends it, sending Dios back to its beginning. From this perspective, Pyramids is very much about transgressing polder boundaries; Teppic’s struggle is the process of leaving the temporal polder, of truly going forth.

  Turning Geography into History

  Unlike its actual-world namesake, the fantasy polder is not so much an area protected from the inimical world around it as the remnant of an era kept safe from the wrong time outside. “They are falling rather behind the world in there,” is Treebeard’s verdict on the elves of Lothlórien (TT, III, iv, 456), and this assessment is equally true of the other polders. The Elder Days continue on in the diffuse time of the elven realm; ancient myths come to life in Ryhope Woods; and Djelibeybi is kept changelessly stuck in its own past. These are bubbles of long-past days that have been kept in isolation while time has gone by outside.

  A polder is not so much a protected area as a protected era. If we revisit Clute’s polder definition, we find that the boundaries surround “enclaves of toughened reality” and “active microcosm[s],” which certainly implies that polders are spatially defined—enclaves and microcosms tend to be places, after all—but also that they are “anachronism[s] consciously opposed to wrong time.”96 Lothlórien, Ryhope Wood, and Djelibeybi have borne out this assertion, that time is an aspect central to polders. In all three cases, a past is protected from the ravages of time in the world. To varying extents, this past is situated sufficiently long ago to cause a time abyss to open for the characters who enter, as well as for the reader. To cross the boundary is to travel in time rather than in space.97 The experience is one of history rather than of geography.

  Polders thus contribute both topology and temporal thickness to fantasy worlds. An anachronism implies that time moves on and the world changes. Polders belie the static impression of many worlds, demonstrating how the present of the story (which is usually but not always that of the protagonists) differs from the past as conserved within their boundaries. Like insects trapped in amber, long-gone eras are preserved in the polders and extend the world backward in time, while letting the reality of the past impinge on the world of the present. Each of the three polders discussed in this chapter reaches back through several millennia, but the pasts they shelter have different functions in their respective stories. In Ryhope Wood lies the past that we all carry within us, the setting neither a landscape nor a timescape but a mythscape, a place of tales that are in some way eternal. In Djelibeybi, the oppressively primitive past is itself an antagonist to escape from, a distorted mirror image of the Edenic wonders of the Elder Days found in Lothlórien. The elven polder stands as a monument to these wonders, maintaining them while simultaneously mourning their disappearance from the world.

  Time can thus be spatially encoded in fantasy worlds; with geography comes history. Darko Suvin condemns “heroic fantasy”98 as suffering from “[g]eographic gigantism.” “[O]ne is tempted to say: the less history the more geography,” he remarks. But he concedes that some fantasy comes equipped with a “secondary or other history,” and he even offers a handful of variations on secondary history.99 It is thus mainly fantasy’s lack of connectedness to the history of the actual world (the author’s or reader’s “historical web of forces”) that Suvin’s critical perspective causes him to take issue with. History is inextricably part of the secondary landscape, and not simply because any landscape holds inscribed on it the history of the people who have lived there.100 Through polders, past eras are given spatial locations, past and present are juxtaposed, and the journey across the land turns into time travel.

  • • •

  Borders and boundaries unite rather than divide. A border between two domains would be impossible if those domains were not juxtaposed; a polder boundary would not have a purpose unless the polder were part of the world outside. Both types of thresholds hold the fantasy world together but they also keep it variegated, a patchwork of distinct realities that opens up the geography in a fashion that mere distance cannot do. They expand the world by joining different realities together.

  In Modern Fantasy, Colin N. Manlove presents a definition of fantasy, a central part of which is that fantasy contains “supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects.”101 Although the definition is too exclusive to fully suit the purposes of this study, Manlove’s explanation of what he means by “supernatural or impossible” has a bearing on the function of thresholds in fantasy worlds. Originally, he explains that it means “of another order of reality from that in which we exist and form our notions of possibility”;102 but he later republished the definition and discussion in a gently revised version with an added afterword, in which he also adds that “no extension of nature can arrive at supernature, just as no extension of possibility can arrive at impossibility.”103 Manlove’s remarks are concerned with ways of identifying the edges of the fantastic, but they are also applicable when discussing worlds of fiction.

  All fantasy worlds have rules for what is possible and impossible, what is natural and supernatural. These rules may not be—in fact, generally are not—the same as in the actual world, nor are they necessarily shared by several worlds. Once it has been established what these rules are, however, the genre’s demand for internal consistency104 requires them to stay the same. No matter how far you travel in a world, the rules remain unchanged: no extension of nature or the possible will change that. The reality is of a given order, to use Manlove’s expression.

  The exception—and it is a common exception—occurs when a border or boundary is crossed. On the other side lies another order of reality, a place where the rules are different. Extend the journey across a threshold into another domain, and the impossible will become possible; the supernatural of one domain is the natural of another. What is possible or natural is a question of in which domain, not in which world, the story is set. These are the kinds of worlds that Lubomír Doležel calls “dyadic worlds”—and they are often triadic, tetradic, or, occasionally, even more polyadic (such as the place cobbled together by pieces of other worlds in Diana Wynne Jones’s The Merlin Conspiracy [2003])—where a world’s domains have mutually contradictory rules.105 Each domain holds another order of reality, even if the domain is only the tiniest of polders.

  Stories arise from the crossing of thresho
lds, and in fantasy, they are widely varied. Doležel points out how, in “the divided world with rigid boundaries, the story of the cross-world journey is of perennial fascination.”106 He claims, however, that there are only two variants of this story: that of the observer, who gathers information but cannot physically interact with the other domain (exemplified by Odysseus’ visit to Hades); and that of the mission, wherein the human visitor can interact but is bound by some prohibition (Orpheus is the example given). Whereas Vlad Taltos’s trip to the domain of the dead clearly belongs to this second category, and Teppic’s goings-forth into the outside world could possibly be construed as representative of the first—he only brings back knowledge; his physical interactions are of secondary importance—the four other domains discussed in this chapter illustrate how other stories spring from journeys between domains. In Lothlórien, the Company certainly obtains information; but the items its members bring with them are of even greater importance—in particular, to the hobbits—during the quest but also afterward. Even so, the prohibitions placed on them are quickly lifted. Visiting the elven realm is a small part of the story, but the polder is a key node in the plot, the effects of which affect the characters and the events profoundly for the rest of the novel. In Ryhope Wood as well as in Tristran’s Faerie, returning is of subordinate or no importance; the new order of reality is a place of exploration in which the protagonists remain, forging new lives. In the Abhorsen series, there is, ultimately, no privileged direction of transgression; protagonists come from both sides and move in both directions. The fantasy genre, in which the “cross-world journey” is a common trope, thus offers far more than two basic variants of such stories. Instead, the crossing and the differences between the domains provide a deep fount of greatly varied stories.