“I can grow you more dreamberries.”
“No, thanks. You’ve already grown me more than we agreed on back then. Any more would go stale before I could sell them. No, all this has been my bloody scheming and my own damn expense, and the best way to pay Spendwell off will be as his blasted bodyguard. I can try a little matchmaking, too.” She grinned. “Me, matchmaking. By this time next year, I think I can have him on a steady diet of beef and Small Spider. She’s itching for him already, if I know the signs. After that, maybe I’ll see how her Lady Reverence is handling her Farm. And after that… Hell, what are you going to do now?”
“I must search.” Frostflower gazed up at the study-house, its outlines blending with the mountainside. Whatever other sorceri had done in her place—if any others had indeed found their powers intact when their virginity was broken—she would not keep it secret. She would tell everything. Perhaps old Moonscar could explain to her what had happened. She would listen to his counsel, accept his wisdom…but if he told her she must never again use her power, she would not obey him. “I have lost my God, Thorn…or, at least, my certitude in God. I must find it again, or something to replace it.”
“Well, if you don’t want your God any longer, Frost, I’ll take him. I think he’s—she’s?—pretty good. Doesn’t seem to mind working with the Warriors’ God, either. In fact, they work pretty damn well together.”
Frostflower smiled, envying her friend. “Your world is very simple, Thorn. Perhaps you are right. I think the truth must indeed be simple, if I could find it.”
“Hell, you never wanted to milk Spendwell, and so your God just didn’t count it. What’s the problem?… Well, how are you going to search?”
“I must have a year…or at least a winter to suckle the infant and to study all I can learn in my old retreat. I will learn the third power, also—the power of free travel, traveling only with the consciousness and not with the body. If they will not teach it to me in Windslope, because of what has happened, then after a year I will leave and find another retreat where they will teach me. I think I must come out again in any case, to travel through the Tanglelands, to learn from the farmer’s folk.” To learn from them, she added in her thoughts, not try to convert them. “Perhaps I can find someone who will teach me the writing of the priests,” she went on aloud, “and allow me to study their books.…”
“Gods, you’ll need five lifetimes and then some. Are you going to lug the brat around during all this?”
Frostflower gazed down. Starwind was sleeping peacefully, looking as if he knew all the truth she did not. It was the deceptive look of infants, who knew nothing and could only wait to be taught. “No. I will not expose him to danger again. He will grow in safety at Windslope until he is old enough to choose his own life and dangers. But I must find something I can teach him, if only it is something that I can be sure is false, to warn him against it.”
Dowl whined and thrust his nose under her hand, impatient of waiting for his share of attention.
Thorn laughed and reached over to rub his fur. “I suppose you’ll be taking this mangy mongrel again, though?”
“Yes, unless he finds another sorceron. I didn’t take him with me when I began this journey, Thorn. I started down the mountain, and Dowl chose to run after me.”
Thorn closed her hand around Dowl’s muzzle and tug-of-warred with him for a few moments. “Suppose he decides to come back down now with the merchant and me, hey? All right, dog, all right.” She released Dowl and grew serious again. “Wait for me, Frost. I’m not going to let you go chasing around the bloody Tanglelands by yourself again. You wanted a year with the grub? I’ll be back for you in a year.” She paused and grinned. “Well, the future doesn’t exist yet. Give me a year—give or take a couple of hen’s-hatchings.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
NOTES, 1980
* * * *
“Sheen-amber” is a Tanglelands name for tiger’s eye.
The form “hung” is used in preference to “hanged” because the Tanglelands method of execution differs from our method.
For Frostflower’s lactation, see Milk: The Mammary Gland and Its Secretion, edited by S. K. Kon and A. T. Cowie. (New York, London: Academic Press, 1961. 2 vol.) Vol 1, pp. 289-291.
* * * *
NOTES, 2012
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In preparing my text for e-publication, I have made some few authorial changes beyond correcting obvious typos (and, no doubt, adding new ones despite proofreading). Nothing major. As I remarked of my 2012 version of Idylls of the Queen, it would take either an eidetic memory or a line-by-line collation to spot most of them. Indeed, there are far fewer in this novel than in Idylls. I tended to change such constructions as “It’s not” to “It isn’t,” and where feasible to reposition the word “now” in sentences, to help bypass the notorious now/not typo. Always my primary concern was to make my original thought more clear where I found it possibly unclear or too susceptible to the ravages of misprint.
A few specific notes of possible interest:
* * * *
To Gene Wolfe, who perused an early draft of what became Chapter 1 when he was a guest author at George R. R. Martin’s Clarke College Workshop, I owe thanks for his suggestion of a world where all the warriors were women. Occasionally, over the years, I have felt bemused by readers who seem to regard this novel as “feminist” on no other grounds than the fact that women do all the fighting—seeming to miss the evidence that men are very much in control of the farmer-priestly society, and do none of the actual fighting because the male body is regarded as far too important to risk. Things may perhaps be getting more egalitarian in the growing towns, and the sorceri have developed true gender equality in their retreats—but when Thorn bullies Spendwell, not only their individual personalities, but also a sort of class distinction comes into play: it has not fallen out of the farmers’ memory, at least, that once warriors were priestesses, while merchants have always been commoners; and farmer-priests regard themselves as above commoners. What does it say about our own society if we automatically assume that whichever sex does the gruntwork fighting is the dominant sex? (My personal sympathies have always been feminist. But I think it better to explore than to preach; and I feel it is not the feminism, chauvinism, or egalitarianism of the setting that makes a fiction pro- or anti-woman, but how the female characters are shown coping with their milieu, whichever it is.)
This same workshop saw much complaint of “moon” as an overly easy time unit made almost a cliche by its overuse in the Sword & Sorcery (a.k.a. “Thud and Blunder”) genre of fiction. Hence, my decision to use “a hen’s-hatching” (21 days).
It sort of bothers me to have used the word “warriors” when they don’t really fight “wars” in the Tanglelands, only raids. Probably I should have used the word “raiders.” But it’s a little late to change that now. Chalk it up to translation problems.
Because I glimpsed something somewhere on the Internet a few years ago that more or less credited me as the originator of the words “sorceron” and “sorceri,” I might here affirm that, while serendipity is always possible, I cannot remember seeing these anywhere prior to my devising them as quick and relatively painless gender-inclusive terms. Someone else, somewhere, somewhen, objected to them as mixing Greek and Latin elements; but I like them anyway.
An early review, I think in Locus, summed this novel up thus: “Sorceress and swordswoman raise a baby.” It still makes me chuckle.
I’m rather amazed at how well I managed, by and large, to do Dowl. While still a primary-grader, I developed a phobia of dogs thanks to being bitten without provocation by a feisty little thing on a chain longer than I had thought it was; I did not become anything even remotely resembling a “dog person” until adopting my Australian Shepherd Mix, Abby, in 2006. (Now, I remotely resemble a “dog person.”) Still, throughout life, I had always been able to make exceptions in my phobia for various gentle, friendly, and familiar canines encount
ered here and there. My own dog eats nothing of vegetable origin uncooked, except grass and some fruits of the softer kind; but I understand that other dogs are readier to chomp raw carrots and lettuce and such. I also know of dogs who refuse to eat peas whether raw, cooked, or even smashed; cooked peas give Abby no pause.
* * * *
The first printing of the paperback first edition had my surname misspelled “Carr” on the blurb page—which amused me—and headed the blurb: “THE INQUISITOR”—which horrified me, since that was the very impression I had striven mightily to avoid. In the world of the Tanglelands, the prejudice cuts both ways: the sorceri, who in some sense actually collaborate in their own persecution, are every bit as prejudiced against the farmer-priests as vice versa. And I myself find Maldron quite a tragic figure; it broke my heart to kill him.
Subsequent printings omitted my name from the blurb page, but left the offensive (to me, anyway) “Inquisitor” heading. Yet perhaps it bore fruit. It could have been one factor that led me, years later, to some intensive research on the Spanish Inquisition, chiefly in the sober and internally cohesive studies of Henry Lea and Henry Kamen, and flowered at last in Inquisitor Dreams, which I regard as one of my best novels.
* * * *
From Chapter 1: …A couple of merchants were going in opposite directions, each leading a donkey with sacks of merchandise. Probably one was taking blue cloth from the east side of Three Bridges to the west, while the other was taking green cloth from west to east.
When completed, this novel was submitted to an Indiana University summer workshop. One of the pro authors who spent a day or two as visiting advisors was Ursula K. LeGuin, who either hated my work or gave a darn good impression of hating it. (Something of a distinction in itself, from a ghod like Ursula K. LeGuin!) I think possibly she thought that in my Tanglelands world “warrior” was another name for “prostitute.” Among her specific objections was the passage cited above, which she found guilty of the cardinal offense of breaking point-of-view. Since that bit would have gone in almost word for word even if I’d been working in first person from Thorn’s pov, I never changed it.
* * * *
From Chapter 4: She hoped she had made a clear, prudent plan about hiding in the Rockroots. She began to mistrust her thoughts—that simile about the miser’s rotting and calcined teeth seemed in retrospect dangerously near a dream musing.
This paragraph appears in my original draft (top of p. 85 in the typescript). Who cut it, and when, and whether or not I approved, I no longer remember. But the passage itself I remembered, and sharply missed it while retyping, which I took as a clear signal that it should go back in.
* * * *
From Chapter 13: She squeezed his thigh once, sympathetically, before pressing forward as far as she could go and still keep out of sight.
Originally, “thigh” was “leg.” In the galley proofs, I found it misprinted “log.” Decided to eliminate that interesting possibility in any future reprints.
Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
DEDICATION
PREFACE TO THE 2012 EDITION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
NOTES, 1980
NOTES, 2012
Frostflower and Thorn Page 34