Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

  The Iron Council even becomes a part of the landscape through which it moves. The train travels, perpetually, on an ellipse of tracks through miles of gardens, cropland, and fields that, beyond the rails, were “dissipating and merging with wild flora.” Tame and wild nature merge around the railway tracks, which describe the path of a wheeled town “neither sedentary nor nomadic” (Iron 340–41). Again, there are no clear borders, only a hub where culture and nature have blended together and around which there is a porous boundary where tame and wild nature flow into each other.

  In the palimpsestic cityscape of New Crobuzon, among the fettered Armadan ships, and on the perpetual train, culture and nature meet—in different ways, to be sure, but always blurring the boundaries between the domains or even making the concept of separate domains indistinct. Around each of the three cultural centers, there is a fuzzy “hybrid zone” where the centers become part of the world and the world part of them. This indistinctness is also present in other meetings between nature and culture in New Crobuzon. The cultural oppression constituted by the pollution and waste creates a diseased “second nature,” a liminal zone situated between the domains, not natural (at least not in the sense of Keekok Lee’s naturenh) but also rejected by culture. The city landscape is not either natural or cultural but both, architecture and trash turning into landscape, landscape becoming part of city culture; and the cultural domain is dotted by nature, tame and feral, not quite separate from but melding with the cultural domain. The urban sprawl has turned into a cultural wilderness, just as wild as the natural wilderness that surrounds it, and the natural wilderness is brought together with the cultural. In Armada, the wild sea is a nonnegotiable fact of the city’s existence. That the tame, terrestrial nature that has been artificially created on the many vessels sometimes becomes wild is accepted and allowed; the small pockets of feral nature pale in comparison to the surrounding wilderness of the sea. The Iron Council, on the other hand, actively moves toward wilderness, turning the cultural artifact of the “perpetual train” into a blend of the natural and the cultural.

  Ultimately, the blending of nature and culture constitutes an example of the central concern in Miéville’s texts. On every level, blending takes place, from the meeting and mixing of genres to the various hybrid species that populate the world. The blurring of categories lies at the very heart of these stories. When Mr. Motley stresses that the chaotic aggregate that is his body “is not error or absence or mutancy,” his words are also a comment on the hybridity, blurring, and palimpsests that make up Miéville’s texts—and the world of Bas-Lag. And Motley’s emphatic point is as true of his impossible collection of features as of the three cities, where culture and nature flow into each other through porous boundaries: “This is totality” (Perdido 115).

  GROWING SOMEWHERE IN-BETWEEN: LIMINAL NATURE IN OMBRIA76

  Patricia A. McKillip’s Ombria in Shadow is set in the city-state of Ombria. Technologically and politically, the setting draws on the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, and the novel bases its plot on the political and personal conflicts that follow the ruthless regent Domina Pearl’s rise to power. The protagonists must negotiate a complex web of forged and broken loyalties to survive in their struggle against the cruel regent.77

  The story and its characters move through four clearly demarcated physical zones located between two poles. At the top and center of the city, Domina Pearl and the dark doorway form the duality of the first pole, she representing the city’s despair and the doorway its hope. Surrounding them is first the zone of hidden rooms, stairs, and passages of the secret palace, then the zone of the public palace beyond. Outside and beneath the palace lies the zone of the city streets, and under Ombria, furthest toward the periphery, lies the undercity. In this lowest and most peripheral zone, the second pole resides, the sorceress Faey. The crossing from zone to zone is central to the plot structure, something that is reflected in how nature is constructed as a liminal phenomenon in Ombria.

  On the surface, Ombria seems to encompass nature–culture relations that are very similar to those already identified in the cities discussed thus far. A closer analysis reveals a different pattern, however. As in Minas Tirith, very little nature is present in McKillip’s city; but on the other hand, what nature there is can be found inside the city—whatever wilderness or tame nature exists in the countryside surrounding Ombria is only referred to obliquely. Small patches of both tame and feral nature appear in the city, suggestive of the incursions of feral nature found in New Crobuzon, and the streets in Ombria certainly share some of the larger city’s wildness (for instance, the nightmarish gauntlet that the old prince’s mistress, Lydea, is forced to run through the dark streets of Ombria, while accosted by anonymous street people [10–11]). Unlike the situation with regard to New Crobuzon, however, no blurring occurs in Ombria; culture dominates the city without blending with nature. While Ombria shares this clear cultural domination with Newford, McKillip’s city sees no challenge from subjugated nature, nor is there any clear connection between nature and any of the city’s zones.

  Instead, nature appears where one zone is exited and another entered. At the borders between Ombria’s four zones, and especially where these borders are crossed, nature tends to turn up, wild or tame or—a common occurrence in the palace—as cultural representation. While this last type of nature is really an aspect of culture, the carvings, paintings, and drawings of flowers in particular are often brought metaphorically to life. On the walls, birds fly overhead and roses open, while doors grow gardens (79); and the painted irises on the black gate’s posts twine and bloom (32; also 288). These cultural representations fit the pattern of nature as a liminal phenomenon, suggesting a desire for the natural in a city where nature is largely if not completely absent. This desire for nature also comes across in Ducon’s drawings of what might be found beyond the dark portal. His drawings contain “fantasies of airy palaces, endless woods and frothy seas” and “a city that might have been Ombria, if […] the windows overlooking its twisted streets were filled with flowers” (213). Through his images, Ducon expresses a yearning for a world better than his own yet similar, surrounded by and adorned with nature. At the same time, these drawings reinforce the liminality of nature by associating it with the dark portal and thus with the border between Ombria and its shadow.

  Entering the innermost zone often constitutes a search for hope at the risk of finding despair. The prevalence of culturally represented nature is suggested already when Ducon first enters the secret palace with the five-year-old prince Kyel after the death of the boy’s father. Although he has used some hidden corridors to get away from Domina Pearl and her guards, it is not until they have passed through “three hinged panels limned with carved roses” (28) that he and Kyel are safe and free to talk. By entering the room behind the panels, they have reached what Ducon hopes is, and Kyel believes to be, a safe space. This feeling of safety and Ducon’s love for his younger cousin are further emphasized by the roses carved on the panels. Whereas the roses are only mentioned in passing at this point, the rose has already been introduced as a recurring symbol of safety and love. When Lydea is thrown out of the palace after the old prince’s death, her father’s tavern, the Rose and Thorn, is her only safe haven, and while, at the beginning, Lydea’s hope for her father’s love is tainted by despair, mutual if grudging love finally wins out. It is thus from the tavern that she takes her name when reappearing masked as Mistress Rose Thorn; and as Mistress Thorn, Lydea brings comfort to Kyel, who calls her his own secret Rose (215). While love remains strong if not powerful, the safety symbolized by the rose is never uncompromised in Ombria. When Ducon returns to the public palace to find himself at the mercy of Domina Pearl, it is into the old nurse’s room he has taken his young cousin. Their passage back leads through a secret door that, rather than being associated with safety, is connected to Domina Pearl’s superiority, to a place of despair. Kyel’s nurse, Jacinth, has been banished by the Black
Pearl, leaving only a scent of violets in her former room (35). In this room, Kyel is taken into custody and Ducon himself is warned not to interfere, first directly and then indirectly through the dead body of a courtier and conspirator, Hilil Gamelyn. It is also here that Kyel leaves the drawings that express the child’s own despair. Still, traces of nature linger around this crossing between zones, in the traces of Jacinth’s scent as well as in the palm leaf that has been placed over Gamelyn’s dead face.

  The palm leaf is echoed in the palms in the conservatory, where Ducon leaves the body. Apart from the palm leaf that covers the dead man’s face, this is the only place where the border between the secret and public palace is explicitly linked to actual nature. The secret door is hidden behind “a fan of giant fern leaves” (87), and the conservatory contains potted palms as well as representations of nature on its walls. While part of the zone of the public palace, it is a place seldom occupied and thus a suitable meeting place for the older courtiers, including Gamelyn, who are plotting against Domina Pearl. It is a place of transgression, of the border between the two zones, but also of Domina Pearl’s power as regent. Here, the courtiers attempt to persuade Ducon to change sides, to make him cross another border. Eventually, they fail in this effort just as they fail to keep their plot from the attention of the regent.

  The door through which Faey’s protégée Mag sees Ducon disappear in the hallway is a safer door than both the door in Jacinth’s room and the one in the conservatory. As on the panels, the rose symbol is employed here: Mag finds that pressing a small rosette in the wall opens a door into the secret palace, allowing her to enter it (125). At this point, she has already fallen in love with Ducon (although she does not understand it herself) and searches for him to prevent his death. Again, the rose symbol is linked to safety and love; but this time Mag fails in her quest. The same door also saves Lydea from the guards, bringing her from certain capture in one zone to an uncertain chase in the maze of another (259). In both cases, the women’s attempts are nearly frustrated by Domina Pearl; Mag is locked into the regent’s secret library but escapes with the help of Kyel’s tutor, and Lydea, rather than accepting capture, leaps through the dark doorway. The rosette that marks the way across the border into the secret palace does not ensure uncompromising safety, but it does not signify any ultimate failure, either.

  The most noticeable threshold guardians are found at the palace’s west gate. Although some gardens are mentioned, and these might be construed as marking the border between the zones of the palace and the streets of Ombria, these gardens are there in name only. Lydea thinks back on her time as the old prince’s mistress, recalling “a view of the gardens and the sea” (193) from high up in the palace. The impression of the gardens as a border phenomenon is reinforced when Ducon uses a passage “beneath the back gardens to the street” (216) to get into the city, which lies between the palace and the sea. In both cases, the gardens remain empty, featureless, and devoid of description; but they confirm that nature is a liminal phenomenon. That pattern becomes more distinct at the palace’s west gate, which is the main crossing between the zone of the palace and that of the city streets. There grows “the gaudy patch of sunflowers […] that did nothing all day long but turn their golden-haired, thousand-eyed faces to follow the sun. The Prince of Ombria […] never bothered with what stood outside his iron gates on their graceful, gargantuan stalks and sometimes peered over his wall” (15). Metaphors transform the flowers to animals or even people. The imagery focuses on the sunflowers as spectators of the drama that takes place in the palace and at its gates, seeing that which is hidden to Ombria’s citizens. When Lydea is expelled by Domina Pearl after the prince’s death, the sunflowers “[hang] their heavy heads like mourners” (8) and seem to watch the proceedings with “[t]heir great, strange faces, all eyes” (9). Even the sunflowers fail to see all the dark dealings that go on, however. When Mag delivers the death spell to Domina Pearl, the flowers droop by the gate, their eyes picked out by birds (24); and once the change has been carried through and a new Ombria has been established, the ersatz witnesses are no longer needed. When Lydea passes through the west gate in what is the novel’s final crossing from palace to city streets, only a “crop of blind, withered sunflowers” is left (297). The palace is no longer hidden from the view of the citizenry; there is no more need for watchers at the gate.

  The one other entrance into the palace unwatched by the sunflower spectators is still associated with them. Mag has found a way that passes under the flowers, and on both occasions when she ventures into the palace it is (explicitly) under the sunflowers she has to go (73, 122). They remain, in the text, the boundary markers that must be passed in the crossing from one zone into the other. To Mag, however, the chamber under the sunflowers is also the only meeting point of Faey’s and Domina Pearl’s dominions. Neither sorceress can venture into the city streets of Ombria. Although nothing seems to prevent the regent from leaving the palace, she never goes farther than the west gate, whether to expel the unwanted mistress or to receive a charm from Mag. Her information comes from spies, and the only mention of her moving into the city streets (apart from a vague hint that she rides to the old prince’s funeral in a carriage) is when the Black Pearl escapes from the forces that come through the portal. She might have vanished, it is suggested, “into the streets of Ombria, where she would find no opening door that would save her, and no bed except her last” (287). Nor are the city streets, or any zone other than her own, accessible to Faey. When she leaves the undercity, and then only to go to Domina Pearl’s timeless sanctum in the secret palace, the balance between Ombria and its shadow shifts (278). Like Domina Pearl, she needs an intermediary to act in the no man’s (or, rather, woman’s) land between them that is Ombria’s streets.

  Numerous doors between the street zone and the undercity are mentioned in the narrative, most of them merely in passing. The door under the patch of sunflowers has already been discussed, but two other crossings are described in the text in detail. When Lydea searches for Mag, she enters through an old, dilapidated shop from which Faey takes her to an illusory chamber on the bank of the dark river. Not only are its walls “sprigged with painted violets,” the chamber is filled with potted plants (108). These plants become emblematic for the room, recurring in the text during Faey and Lydea’s discussion there until, eventually, the sorceress disbands the illusion. During their conversation, Faey fans herself with leaves from the plants, nibbles them, and finally lets them wither when the illusion is removed (110–12, 132). Constantly, the reader’s attention is drawn back to the plants until they disappear, once Faey has made up her mind to let Lydea enter her house. In this way, the plants become associated with the liminal nature of the “leafy chamber” (131), highlighting Lydea’s crossing from the street zone to the zone where Faey resides.

  The tutor encounters a different border marker during his crossing with Mag. They meet

  in a small, leaf-choked courtyard surrounded by empty buildings. A century ago they had been an inn and its stables and carriage house. Now, roofs were sunken under the weight of moss and rain; […] Those who needed Faey made their way through drifts of leaves and shadows and fallen roof beams to the cupboard door beneath the stairs. (203)

  While probably not the most convenient of doors to Faey’s undercity, it certainly suits the tutor’s passion for history. The dilapidated buildings show the ravages of time; nature has gone feral, “choking” the courtyard and weighing down the roof. It is a place on the border between the zones, situated in one but only visited by those people who have business in the other.

  Across the four zones, a field of power stretches between the two poles. Christine Mains remarks on how a split occurs between positive and negative power in Ombria. Domina Pearl wields power from the top of the palace above the city, just as Faey does from her mansion in the undercity. Mains observes how the two women are a catalyst-figure split in two: even if the regent has preserved the same appearanc
e for generations and Faey changes hers several times a day, they are in many ways similar.78 Taking Mains’s observation further, we can examine how their realms mirror each other. These two locales are “edifices,” a type of fantasy setting that dominates its landscape and to which there is always more than meets the eye.79 In Ombria, one edifice towers above the city, another lurks below, each hiding a labyrinth at its heart. Faey occupies the border between the city’s present and its past; the Black Pearl can be found on the border between Ombria’s present and its future. This future is split into the despair caused by the cruel regent and the desperate hope offered by the dark doorway at the top of the secret palace. The impenetrable gate cannot be opened through most of the novel, acting as a terminus rather than a border—the only future available remains one of despair. Through the doorway, Lydea springs into “nowhere” with Kyel (266); and when Ducon is cornered there, Domina Pearl offers him the choice between the “quick predictable death here, or the long fall into the unknown or the palace cellar, whichever rises to meet you first” (283–84).

  Once Ducon opens the gate to Ombria’s shadow, the unknown becomes known; the terminus becomes a border across which Ducon’s father arrives with his forces to save the city from the oppression of the Black Pearl. This border is similarly associated with nature. The doorway is “distinguished by painted irises twining up the carved wooden posts. One post was cracked, bent under the shifting weight of the ceiling, the paint long warped away. The other still bloomed irises in delicate greens and purples” (32; see also 212, 288). The differences between the doorposts hint at differences between the two worlds on either side of the gate. The shadow city is not simply a copy of Ombria, it is something other. Through the narrative, we are led to suspect that this other place is, in fact, better, and the similarity between Ombria and umbra suggests that real and shadow are not absolutes—the cities are shadows of each other. “The shadow world is your hope,” Ducon’s father tells him. “When you no longer despair, you no longer need us” (286). The cracked and bent post signifies an Ombria troubled by Domina Pearl’s misuse of power, while the delicate green and purple irises represent the hope of the shadow city. This tie to nature through representation is further strengthened by other sensations experienced at the black opening. Through the gate, Ducon hears the sound of rain, bird-cry, and wind soughing through tall trees, and sometimes the air on the threshold smells of grass, slow rain, and lavender (212, 32; see also 285). Just as the fragrance of athelas is used to evoke nature in Minas Tirith, the smells coming through the gate evoke nature in Ombria. It is not primarily the shadow city that is associated with nature in this way, however, but the doorway itself. The irises decorate the doorposts, and it is on the threshold that the fragrance of nature reaches Ducon (32).