Coyclaws rubbed against Eleva’s leg.
* * * *
“Cows’ breath!” said Thorn on receiving the sheath. “Frost, I don’t have any gift for you!”
“This is no gift, Thorn. It’s payment. For all you have done for me.”
“Unh. Friends don’t pay each other.”
“Why not? If payment could never be given to friends, then folk would either need to nurture enmity or cease trade.”
Thorn grunted, grinned, and slid her knife into its new sheath. “All right. But this is full pay for the rest of the summer. Well, where now?”
Frostflower fingered Ennealdis’ token. “I would like to stay here in Center for a hatching or two. And read the secret scrolls. If you would not find it too boring.”
The warrior chuckled. “There should be a priest somewhere in this town willing to listen to a few new ideas about how to win back his land. And sanctuary only extends for three days’ walk from the outskirts of town. Yes, I think I can find some pretty good work for a hatching or two. But don’t be in too big a hurry to convert to our gods when you read those scrolls, Frost. I may need you to patch me up before we head north again.”
Dowl padded over to them and turned onto his back with his legs up.
“Fleabitten dog!” Thorn remarked, rubbing his underside with a gentle foot. “And maybe I’ll get another grub in my belly for you to sorcer out when we get back up to your mountains. I owe myself some pleasure. Spiked tails! I was almost ready to ask that blasted Windbourne if he didn’t think I deserved first go at him.”
“Even if I were to become convinced of the truth of your priestly creed,” Frostflower said slowly, “could I really give up the practice of my skills? For I know they are true also, Thorn. However I have them, they are perhaps the only truth I can be sure of.” And yet Windbourne seemed content to have exchanged them for Eleva and the priestly creed…
For now, however, the sun was warm, the breeze cool, and Lady Ena’s garden fragrant. Frostflower had gained access to the priests’ forbidden scrolls, and if she had not yet soothed her conscience far enough to permit herself the taste of cheese again, she was beginning to think this an odd scruple beside her delving into priestly secrets and handling scrolls of parchment and vellum. She smiled. “And as for your pleasure, Thorn, another babe would be a welcome playmate for Starwind.”
NOTES TO THE 2012 EDITION
I planned a trilogy. In fact, for months I hoped to make it a double trilogy, the titles of the first three novels beginning with Frostflower’s name, the titles of the second three beginning with Thorn’s. I even had dreams of an open-ended series, all the novels so titled that librarians going strictly by alphabetical order would nevertheless shelve them in chronological order (like the volumes of Mary Norton’s Borrowers stories).
The third novel even had three working titles—Hall of Fear and Learning; The Glorious Harvest; or, most likely, going by the Frostflower’s name plan—Frostflower’s Choice. I’m reasonably sure she would have chosen to remain a sorceress. She might, however, have discovered that the farmer-priestly religion was originally monotheist, that the polytheists were originally the split-off group which somehow (through rejecting pacifism?) came to be in control, while the original monotheists gravitated into their mountainous seclusion. The plot, which exists in two slightly variant outlines, would have concerned a renegade sorcerer who, after being power-stripped, developed the techniques of what we call “stage magic” in order to take the place of a farmer-priest in controlling a farm of his own.
In my alternative world of the pyschomystique, a.k.a. the world of the Reformed States of America, that third novel got written, resulting in “The Tanglelands Trilogy.”
But, at a time when every science fiction and fantasy convention I attended had authors on every hand weeping and wailing that “My editors insist that I’ve got to make it a trilogy—all the editors and publishers want is trilogies!”…my editors were apparently exceptional in not wanting the third novel I was panting to write. Nowadays, I would probably have written it anyway and held it in reserve. Back then, I still had inflated ideas of my ability to give publishers what they wanted.
So instead of a third novel, I ended by having some fun bouncing my Tanglelands co-heroines about among a variety of alternate worlds. These short stories I regard as apocryphal. Readers are free to accept them into—dare I call it?—the Tanglelands “canon,” or reject them as too much in conflict with the spirit of the novels. The late Marion Zimmer Bradley, wearing her editorial cap, accepted a number of them either for her DAW anthologies or her Fantasy Magazine.
But why didn’t my own editor and publisher want a trilogy, in that apparently trilogy-intoxicated era? The question has always bothered me.
It may have been a mistake not to include Thorn’s name up front in the title—say, “Frostflower and Thorn II,” or “Frostflower and Thorn Meet Windbourne.” Just to make sure the potential purchasers knew that Thorn was indeed still co-heroine. True, Thorn remains prominent on the original edition’s cover, looking to me more like some brothel dominatrix than a Tanglelands warrior (and I have no idea who that man might be that she’s got down at swordpoint; I like the image of Frostflower, though).
Another possibility: I have some impression that the earlier novel got an undeserved boost from feminists who mistakenly thought that a society where women did all the fighting was one in which women were generally dominant. Although evidence to the contrary exists in Frostflower and Thorn, in Frostflower and Windbourne it becomes inescapable—impossible to ignore. Any feminist readers who supposed that my own feminism lay in presenting a female-dominated society rather than strong female characters living their lives in a male-dominated society may have felt betrayed.
For myself, I think that Eleva alone should have been enough to mark the novel as essentially pro-feminist. Here is a very strong woman living an independent and self-sufficient life in a male-dominated society, which has to be harder than living such a life as a member of the dominant gender. But then, Eleva could also be part of the problem. In some sense she, more than either Thorn or Frostflower, emerges as the true heroine of the novel.
There is in Wisconsin a small town named Eleva. The story we heard was that the man they hired to paint “Elevator” on the grain elevator got drunk on his first day’s wages and never came back to paint the last three letters, so they solved the problem by naming their town for what they had. It makes a good story, and after passing that sign a number of times on our drives downstate, I decided it’d be a good name for one of my farmer-priestesses. In my own mind, I hear it pronounced more or less “ih-LEHV-uh.” What I aimed for was a third-heroine farmer-priestess sympathetic in as different a way as I could achieve from the first novel’s Inmara. Perhaps Eleva takes some of the interest away from Thorn and Frostflower in a way that Inmara does not.
I was going for the whodunit template. That in many ways this novel also fits the modern romance template is accidental and coincidental. It was not until decades later that I started seriously reading modern romances—which turn out to contain quite a lot of doggone good storytelling, if you get the right ones—with a view (so far abortive) to produce saleable manuscripts of my own. Had I known at the time of writing Frostflower and Windbourne how stereotypical that cleft chin is for a hero of Modern Romance, my sorcerer would not have had one.
Frostflower and Windbourne may of course suffer from sequelitis.
I might also have been shrewder to aim for that kind of trilogy which is really one continuous story in three volumes (e.g., The Lord of the Rings), rather than for the kind in which each novel can be read more or less independently.
One other possible factor. As a consumer of fiction, I find that whenever I read or listen to an abridgment I feel unsatisfied somehow, even if I have never met the work in its unabridged version.
And even the original printed edition of Frostflower and Windbourne might be called an abridgment. My original manuscript ran, as I recall, to about 127,000 words, where the first novel, Frostflower and Thorn, had been about 100,000. When the copyedited ms. was returned for my okay, I almost wept to see what cuts the copyeditor had made—in my own opinion, deleting much of what was really important and leaving much that was expendable. My okay was needed at once. I telephoned the editor and said, “You can publish it like this, but I want my name off it.” She kindly said, “How quickly can you do an alternate cutting?” I said, “Give me a week.” Or words to that effect: it happened thirty years ago this past spring, and must have imprinted itself deeply to have left as clear a memory as it did. I spent most of that week sitting up in bed with the ms. and colored pencils, and actually, if my memory continues to serve, got out more words than the copyeditor had, though they were rarely the same words. Learning—perforce—much about cutting, I was ruthless with my own work, and ended with what seemed to me at the time a much tighter and better novel. So much so that, given the opportunity this year to retype it for an e-edition, I made the conscious and deliberate decision to take apart one of my spare print copies rather than return to the original typed ms. It could nevertheless be that the novel might have read better in its original length. It could also be that my insistence on a published text I could leave with made me a “difficult” author in the editorial viewpoint, and that they might have given me my chance to write the third novel if I had let the second go through as initially copyedited.
There was one passage which I always regretted deleting (especially when I found how many blank pages the original paperback edition left between chapters), one passage which I determined, almost from the moment it was too late to do anything about it at the time, that I would put back in if ever given the chance. This year, I have put it back in. It appears in Chapter 7. I here reproduce it, with the words deleted in the first edition reproduced in boldface.
* * * *
She remembered briefly that it was in a place like this, an open yard before a priestly temple, that she had been scaffolded last summer. But here the scaffold had been taken down, with nothing but a square of flat stones covering the post holes to show where it would be built again at need; and the song of an assembly of worshippers was so different from the clamor of a crowd of execution watchers that it seemed incredible the folk were of the same species, even perhaps many of the same individuals. Drawn by the reverent majesty of the hymn, she crossed the open yard and sat cross-legged at one side of the temple’s gauze-curtained door. Dowl lay beside her with one soft sigh and a few thumps of his tail.
This hymn was in the ancient language of the priests. As spoken and explained by Elvannon and his family, it seemed to bear some resemblance to the ancient language of the sorceri, according to the pronunciation rules as interpreted in the northern mountains. When a small group of Elvannon’s folk sang a hymn, Frostflower could almost make sense of some of the verses. When a throng of midland townsfolk sang, in their slightly different accent, clearly with little knowledge of the sense of the words, the echoes of the building causing their voices to blend and run together, the sorceress had no hope of catching more than a word here and there. She caught the word for “seven,” and soon afterwards a sound that resembled the ancient sorcerous word for “tree,” and from these she guessed it might be a hymn to Jehandru of the Seven Secret Names, often depicted in priestly statuary as a tree. She gave up listening for words, closed her eyes, and let her concentration drift in the slow, majestic cadences.
* * * *
The important re-insertion is the one in the first paragraph above: the mystery of the same people or kind of people behaving so differently in different situations, the mystery grappled with in our Gospels every Easter week, the mystery I was to grapple with at length a few decades later in my novel Inquisitor Dreams. The second of these two paragraphs could really have remained trimmed as it was in the first edition, but I thought it interesting both from a linguistic angle and as an example of the kind of whittling down I did throughout the rest of the book.
In 1982, I used “holy hall” and “temple” interchangeably. In 2012, I decided to use “holy hall” consistently. By this alone, the reader can see that my retyping is not an exact word-for-word, comma-for-comma, capital-for-capital reproduction of the original edition, with only obvious misprints corrected. I have made numerous changes. They are almost always small, usually typographical alterations that would not be noticed in oral delivery, and have mostly been made in the interest of rendering my original intention clearer, more immediately obvious, and less vulnerable to typos somewhere down the road—for instance, the notorious not/now typo; the embarrassing one involving the word “shift,” which word I have ended by all but eliminating from my writing vocabulary; or any word such as “did” which I have found, in speaking, liable to be misheard as “didn’t.”
* * * *
I suspect that the flowers called “goddess-tears” in the Tanglelands (see the second paragraph of ch. 3) are what we call “bleeding hearts.”
—Barnes, Wisconsin
September, 2012
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