Wrath-Bearing Tree (A Tournament of Shadows Book Two) Paperback

by James Enge

  What in other cultures would have been state functions (national defense, dispute resolution, even road-building and repair, etc.) were carried on by voluntary cooperatives: the Arbiters of the Peace, the Guild of Silent Men, the League of Rhetors, etc. Most famous in the unguarded lands was the Graith of Guardians, sworn to maintain the guard.

  The Graith had three ranks of Guardian: the lowest and most numerous were the thains, wearing a gray cape of office. They were hardly more than candidates to the Graith proper, and they undertook to obey their seniors in the Graith, even more senior thains.

  Vocates, in contrast, were full members of the Graith, privileged to stand and speak at the Graith’s councils (known as Stations). Their only obligation was to defend the Guard, and the Guarded, as they saw fit. Their cloak of office was bloodred.

  Most senior in the Graith were the Three Summoners. They had no power to command but were generally conceded the authority to lead the vocates of the Graith proper. The Summoner of the City convened and presided over Stations of the Graith. The Summoner of the Outer Lands was charged with watching for threats to the Guard from the unguarded lands. The Summoner of the Inner Lands was charged with watching for internal threats: those who would try to disrupt the fertile anarchy of the Wardlands and establish the sterility of political order.

  The greatest danger to the anarchy of the Wardlands was obviously the Graith itself. Members of the Graith were pledged to abide by the First Decree, which forbade any acquisition of power or authority over those under the Guard. Nevertheless, Guardians were exiled more often than the Guarded for political aspirations to government (euphemistically referred to as “impairment of the Guard”). Power corrupts, and the Guardians wielded power more often than their peers among the Guarded.

  Dorothy L. Sayers subtitled Busman’s Honeymoon “A love story with detective interruptions,” and I was almost inclined to follow her lead and call this book “a love story with sword-and-sorcery interruptions.” But there are only so many subtitles a book or a reader can stand, so I thought better of it in the end.

  The subtitle was the least of my worries. Accounts of the ill-fated love business between Morlock and Aloê are among the most diverse and problematic source-material in the Ambrosian legends. There are scraps of Khroic ekshal concerning it. They have a certain entertainment value, as the Khroic poet-seers tried to wrap their pyramidal heads around a love story involving a very different biology from their own. Von Brauch devotes a portion of the Gray Book to a tediously Arthurian rendition of it: here we see Morlock as a crooked knight errant clanking about in plate armor while Aloê is a pink-skinned wimpled nonentity who is always getting kidnapped by giants, for reasons never made entirely clear. The Dwarvish hero-songs, when they depict Aloê, make her into a wingless harpy, a vicious and insensate monster comparable to the Signy of the Volsunga Saga. Anti-Ambrosian satire from the late Ontilian Empire makes Aloê a tragic figure—heroic in some respects, but fatally influenced by the fell shadow of the Ambrosii.

  There were probably always at least two versions of the story, Morlock’s and Aloê’s. I have tried to do them both justice here, piecing together a plot from stories which, candidly, are completely incompatible with each other.

  My task was made easier by Julian Emrys’ translation of The Life of Blÿdhwocax, a Kaenish hagiography about the heresiarch who unified the Kaenish local religions, a crusade that began in or about the 395th Ring (as counted in the Wardlands).

  Some readers may be interested in consulting this work for Blÿdhwocax’s groundbreaking theory that orthodoxy is the ultimate heresy in a society that values religious dissent. Others may prefer reading about the religious persecutions his theory enabled (though they have a bloody sameness about them, after the first two or three). My own interest was strictly in the backstory: frequently Blÿdhwocax’s mission took him to cities that were still in turmoil from Morlock and Aloê’s passage, and the local accounts provided some useful material for my plot.

  The dubious document known in the field as “Danadhar’s credo of the unfaith” also yielded some key details. It’s true that Dr. Gabriel McNally considers the work a forgery written (in McNally’s acid phrase) “in entirely peccable Dwarvish.” But I’m hoping that someone who knows enough about Laent to forge an entire document in Dwarvish (however peccably) might also know something about Morlock and his kith. And I confess I’m convinced by the argument of Danadhar (or pseudo-Danadhar) that the Gray Folk and the Ambrosians must have a common ancestry.

  James Enge lives with his wife in northwest Ohio, where he teaches classical languages and literature at a medium-sized public university. His first novel for Pyr, Blood of Ambrose, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 2010. He is also the author of This Crooked Way, The Wolf Age, and A Guile of Dragons, as well as a number of shorter fictions (most, but not all, focusing on Morlock Ambrosius). He appears infrequently on Twitter (as “jamesenge”) and more frequently on Facebook (as “james.enge”). His website is cunningly named jamesenge.com.