Stealing the Elf-King's Roses
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The Alfen were even then a primarily northern-hemisphere culture, with Elves living nearly everywhere habitable from the Arctic Circle to the Tropic of Cancer. But some of them had learned to cope with climactic conditions that could challenge even the most powerful magic-worker; and premier among these were the Elf-lords of the Americas. Their mixed heritage — descended from both the children of the great Asian-Aleutian migrations and the children of Alfen-European colonists — united the best of royal lines from both East and West; their situation presented them with a various and near-untameable weather and crop complex; but the relentless demands of natural selection caused the Elf-Kings of the Americas to rise to the occasion. When the Elves of both Eastern and Western Hemispheres met in Aien Mhariseth for the first time to determine the Kingship of their world, twelve thousand years ago, it was one of the “American” Elf-lords that took it, becoming rai’Hlavren, “world-masterer” — now “Laurin” in Alfen — and to the inhabitants of the other six worlds, the Elf-king. The kingship has not been out of the North American line since then, though there have been numerous attempts by the European lines to wrest power back.
Afterword
Of all the novels I’ve written in the last thirty years – probably more than fifty now – this is the one that has, from start to finish, taken the longest. I think the project started when I was eight.
In our living room we had a big breakfront – so my mom called it, anyway: a massive piece of mahogany furniture with drawers at the bottom, a writing desk part in the middle, and glass-doored bookshelves on either side. The shelves, stacked three high, were filled with an encyclopedia the name of which I can’t now remember – not one of the well-known names, anyway – and two other sets of books.
One of them was a set of the classics, identically bound in enthusiastically fake leatherette: brown, with gold-stamped backs. They were where I first met Shakespeare (in a rather oversimplified version which I was later shocked to find could be laid at E. Nesbit’s door) and the Robin Hood stories, with the wonderful Howard Pyle illustrations. I can’t remember much else about the classics collection: the Shakespeare and the tales of Sherwood were plainly what made the most impact on me.
The other set of books were thinner, taller, bound in red fake leatherette, and were straightforwardly storybooks. I can’t really remember now how they were organized. But one volume in particular was my favorite. It held, among other things, Celtic tales from Padraig Colum, and various other fairy stories of the world. And one of the stories was the tale of the Dwarf-King and his magical garden of roses.
I can still see the illustration to that story: the Dwarf-king, dressed in furs and royal robes, standing with one hand upraised and looking (for a dwarf) improbably majestic; and behind him, an amazing mountain range in sunset colors. Even now the sunset in that little four-by-five-inch illustration comes to haunt my dreams, despite my having years more recently seen the red-hot reality burning both in the Alps above Leukerbad and on the Santa Susanas in Los Angeles. The story, anyway, told of how the Dwarf-king caught sight one day of a beautiful human maiden and fell in love with her on the spot, and built a beautiful palace under the mountains for her, and then stole her away: and how though she came to love him, she also pined for the open air and the sight of the sky, and at last he let her go. And though troubles afterward befell both of them, she returned to him and became his Queen under the mountain, and they lived happily ever after.
It would be wrong to say that that story made some profound change in my life. But some aspects of it were unusual, a little unlike the usual run of fairy tales I’d been reading in the [Insert Your Favorite Color Here] Fairy Books collected by Lang. As a result, it burrowed in deep, as things you see in childhood often will, and waited for its moment. And something like twenty years passed.
Around then I was living in Manhattan, and stumbled across a restaurant on East Forty-Eighth street, just east of Fifth, called Chalet Suisse. The critics of the time spoke well of it; and as a psychiatric nurse with some disposable income and the country’s best restaurants on my doorstep, in the fullness of time I went to the place, fell in love with the Swiss food, and gradually became friends with the owner, the redoubtable Konrad Egli, who readers who’ve made it this far will immediately recognize. He was a quiet yet formidable force on the New York restaurant scene of the time, and unafraid of anybody – openly scolding the corporate suits from Exxon and NBC for smuggling the restaurant’s far-famed fresh-baked thin whole wheat biscuits out in bulk in their pockets, and once (I was there) telling Mick Jagger that a rich man like him could afford to wash his hair more often (apparently Jagger never again turned up there without having just seen to his hair).
It was the Zurich-born Konni who got me interested both in the history of Switzerland and its folklore. That interest gradually led into the long stretch of research that would culminate in Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South, and somewhere along that line I was surprised to run once again into my old friend the Dwarf-king. I discovered at this point that his history, and his story’s, was way more complicated than I had ever dreamed: and was, like so many other fairy tales, obscurely rooted in history. The enemies who came to take the captured princess away from him were in fact the Visigoths, and the princess was the intended of their leader, Theodoric (whose name later got corrupted into Dietrich by German saga-writers, and his then-base of Verona into Bern: which is why he turns up in Swiss folklore in some very confused forms indeed). I had in fact stumbled into a tangled and corrupted corner of the history of the late Roman Empire, close to its fall. This turned my brain around in my skull somewhat, but I turned my attention to the Dwarf-King and his story for a little while, out of pleasure at the renewal of old acquaintance.
Around this time I think I had just started expanding my reading of the works of C. S. Lewis to works beyond the Narnian stories – having moved through the Planetary trilogy (echoes of which can be heard dimly in High Wizardry) and then having come upon what for my money is the greatest of his novels, Till We Have Faces. The twin issues of beauty as a characteristic of the divine, and of physical beauty and how human beings handle its presence – or absence — is central to that book: and somewhere along the line that theme, in my mind, got itself tangled up with Tolkien’s handling of the beauty of the Elder Races in the Lord of the Rings sequence and the Silmarillion. The exact transition point would now be impossible for me to identify clearly, but there was a point when I looked away from the Dwarf-king and then looked back, and found that he had been transformed into an Elf. Legolas might have been shocked. (Or, taking into account the character’s development through the three volumes, maybe not.)
After that the worldbuilding got going in earnest. I have around here somewhere (and will add it if I can find it) an image of one of my earliest notes on tesseract structure as it affected the Eleven Worlds: it’s carefully drawn on a piece of the He-Man notepad paper that Paul Dini, Robby London and I were given while we were working at Filmation on He-Man’s first version. (My sole contribution to the project was the map of Eternia that appeared in the He-Man series bible.)
Work on the plot continued for years thereafter — a little here, a little there — while other projects passed in and out of the house: a lot of Star Trek as both novels and TV, some work with comics characters both in prose and comic format, and so on and so forth. But all the time the image of the Rose Garden as symbol, problem and solution was at the back of my mind, and the character business associated with it continued to grow and evolve until I had a framework that would bear the weight of the fairly large plot I intended to hang on it. Serious work began in around 1999, at which point the book sold and was turned in… just in time for the events of September 11, 2001.
As a result, the Alpine garden where the Elf-king’s Roses grow became indelibly associated, for me, with the terrible snow of ash in lower Manhattan that followed on the Towers’ fall. As a native New Yorker — born on East 86th Street , raised i
n the City’s suburbs and later working and playing more or less in the Towers’ shadow — the blow hit me hard. Suddenly one final aspect of the book’s plot structure revealed itself to me – the idea that our world would be seen by the others in the sheaf not just as an opportunity to make money, but as a symbol of a deadly contagion that could not under any circumstances be allowed to spread. That material was added to the book before it went to press in 2002.
As usual, when you look at a work almost ten years after you’ve written it, you find things that the almost-ten-years-on writer really wants to fix. There are little edits all through this edition, but in particular the last few chapters have been rewritten to try to clarify exactly what the heck is going on. Previous readers of my work will know that I have no trouble at all playing Cosmic Conkers – i.e., banging two universes together and seeing which one breaks first — but this situation was big and complex even by my standards. I hope the revisions satisfy both old readers returning to a favorite work, and new ones reading it for the first time. (In particular, some readers have mentioned that they’ve never read the book because the original cover gave them the idea it was a romance. I hope the new cover will have remedied this.)
Finally: every now and then people ask me when I’m going to do another book in this worldset. Until now the answer had been, “I’m not sure where else I can go with this.” Now, though, after the revision, I begin to see some ways forward. We’ll see how this realization plays out over the next year or so.
In the meantime, thanks for visiting the Garden with me! I hope the Roses have burned bright for you too.
—Diane Duane
Dublin, Ireland
November 2011
About the Author
Diane Duane has been writing science fiction and fantasy for thirty years, in an assortment of formats—books, short stories, comics, television (both live-action and animated) and computer games.
With her husband and frequent collaborator, Belfast-born novelist and TV writer Peter Morwood, she lives in Ireland in a peaceful rural townland forty miles south of Dublin. There, acting as the Owl Springs Partnership (http://www.owlspringspartnership.com), the two of them pursue total galactic domination in company with their cat Goodman, their computers Calanda, Ayeka and Isileth, an ever-growing crowd of characters, and (at last count) six hundred and twenty-four cookbooks.
To find out more about her other books, please visit http://www.dianeduane.com , or her online bookstore at http://ebooksdirect.dianeduane.com .
Table of Contents
Prologue
*1*
*2*
*3*
*4*
*5*
*6*
*7*
*8*
*9*
*10*
*11*
*12*
*13*
APPENDICES
THE SEVEN WORLDS
About the Author