Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

many Kings have a curious relationship with the patch of land they happen to be entitled to rule. If they are absent too long or failing in their duties, crops will not grow, cattle will die, and there will be general bad luck. Countries where a formerly good King develops a serious personality problem will in sympathy evolve a malign microclimate, entailing drought in winter, snow in summer, and rain during the harvest.13

  The nature of the “curious relationship” is not restricted to the cases brought up by Mendlesohn and Jones; but no matter what form it takes, it is different from the political rulership of, for instance, Aragorn. The sovereign is in one way or another connected directly to the land and affects it immediately rather than through intermediaries. I have therefore chosen to call this association, this “curious relationship,” the ruler’s direct link to the realm.14 Fantasy plots can be constructed around variations in direct links and their combinations with the political power (or lack thereof) of the rulers, as can be seen from the examples that follow.

  The political aspect of a ruler’s rule is different from his or her direct link to the realm, which becomes evident when Aragorn is compared to Arren, from Ursula K. Le Guin’s third Earthsea novel, The Farthest Shore.15 At a first glance, the two characters have a great deal in common: they are distant relatives of the previous kings; they ascend the throne after the threat against the world has been removed; and their rule is supposed to heal conflict-torn societies. Both characters are brave and noble enough to carry out various heroic exploits (including a trip through a realm of death), and in both cases, the restoration is not the novel’s central quest but an immediate result of it. Despite all their similarities, however, there is at least one major difference: while Aragorn takes the throne by virtue of his royal ancestry, Arren is crowned because he fulfills an ancient prophecy. Arren thus becomes king by historical necessity, by predestination rather than inheritance.

  Despite being destined to become king, Arren is predominantly a political leader. Like Aragorn, he heals his land by just governance, primarily introducing social stability rather than fertilizing the barren land. In this way, he is the almost total opposite of the Childlike Empress of Fantastica in Michael Ende’s Die unendliche Geschichte (1979; transl. The Neverending Story [1983]), a story that revolves around the restoration first of the ruler and then of the realm. The Empress is directly connected to her realm to such an extent that discussing ruler and realm as separate concepts is almost meaningless; ruler and realm are metonyms for each other. Her disease and the Nothing that destroys Fantastica are aspects of the same affliction and have the same source; both also have the same cure. When Bastian gives the Childlike Empress a new name, Fantastica is saved along with her. At the same time, she is not a political leader.

  The Childlike Empress—as her title indicates—was looked upon as the ruler over all the innumerable provinces of the [boundless] Fantastican Empire, but in reality she was far more than a ruler; [rather] she was something entirely different. […] She was simply there in a special way. She was the center of all life in Fantastica.16

  The Empress never exercises any political or military power; her governance is not just or unjust, it is nonexistent. Bastian (and the other people who have attempted to make themselves Emperors of Fantastica) cannot understand this metonymic relation, cannot realize that while the provinces of Fantastica can be conquered, it is impossible to become Emperor. The Childlike Empress and her realm are two sides of the same coin; each is the other, the two always linked. Bastian can rule politically, but the Empress does not rule her realm, she is her realm. She is as closely tied to Fantastica as is imaginable. A similar unity between ruler and realm is found—on a smaller scale—in Patricia A. McKillip’s Riddle-master series (1976–79), where rulership, or “land-rule,” comes with a total awareness of the realm, if only for a moment. When the land-rule is passed on to Prince Morgon of Hed, he briefly sees “every leaf, every seed, every root in Hed”; he even feels himself to be every leaf and seed.17

  Metonymic relations between realm and ruler are uncommon, however; political power is generally combined with some direct link to the realm. For instance, despite the insistence of the murdered king Verence of Lancre that the land and the king are one,18 the sovereign in Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters is quite clearly a political figure. Lancre is explicitly divided into people and “kingdom” (meaning not only the geography but also all its animals and plants, as well as its history),19 political power first and foremost meaning power over the people. The direct link between realm and ruler only means that the king of Lancre must care for his kingdom; it is, as the witch Granny Weatherwax explains, like a dog, which “doesn’t care if its master’s good or bad, just so long as it likes the dog.”20 The usurper, Felmet, might not be popular with his subjects owing to his policy of killing people and burning down their cottages; but the kingdom takes offense only when he cuts down its forests out of sheer dislike for them. (Wyrd Sisters draws heavily on the life and plays of William Shakespeare, in particular Macbeth.) Feeling unloved by its king, the kingdom seeks help from the witches to have him removed. The happy ending is achieved when Felmet is replaced by the Fool, who clearly favors just governance and a healing of the land (even the possibility of a wedding is hinted at). The importance of caring for the kingdom above any political claim to the throne is emphasized when it is revealed to the reader that the Fool has no actual right to the throne, although this is only known to the witches.21 Political power might be more visible; but throughout the story, the direct link remains a vital plot element and is, ultimately, what being Lancre’s ruler is largely about.

  In Wyrd Sisters, the kingdom is unhappy without a king; in other fantasy stories, the realm’s need for a ruler is more pronounced, with countries lacking a sovereign somehow incomplete. One such example is Terry Brooks’s Kingdom of Landover, which is first presented in Magic Kingdom for Sale/Sold!22 Devoid of a king, the kingdom experiences social breakdown, environmental degradation, and failing magic. Ben, the buyer of the magic kingdom, realizes how king, land, and magic go together; that the king is more than a figurehead. To become the king that Landover needs, Ben has to do more than buy it and its throne; he has to be recognized as king by his subjects, and in order for them to grant this recognition, Ben must commit himself fully to the kingdom. Like Lancre, Landover needs a king to care for it, but it also needs a king to care for its people. Thus, before the magical healing of the land can commence, the king must use his political skill to heal society. Only by fulfilling his duty to his subjects and showing his commitment to the realm can Ben defeat Landover’s enemies, cleanse its environment, bring its magic back, and give new life to its magical royal castle. In Landover, the realm is incomplete without its ruler; political power and the direct link to the land are interwoven.

  In Brooks’s novel, as in Ende’s and Pratchett’s, the plot mainly concerns restoring the proper ruler and thus saving the realm. All three novels combine the ruler’s direct link to the land with political power, although in various ways—Bastian comes to assume a combination when there is none. My final example demonstrates how the process of separating these two elements of rulership can serve to bring out a story’s core theme. Tad Williams’s War of the Flowers is set in a modernized Faerie whose class society is ruled by a number of powerful Flower families.23 The novel describes the internal power struggle of these families as well as an uprising of the discontented masses, ending with the transition from a tyrannical oligarchy to a new political order. (Democracy is hinted at but not confirmed.) The world’s backstory also tells of an earlier coup, during which a cabal of Flower fairies imprisons Oberon and Titania, the original king and queen of Faerie, and seize power. The coup separates the political power of the rulers from their direct link to the realm. Despite being imprisoned, Oberon and Titania, like Fantastica’s Childlike Empress, represent the essence of their realm; and like Ben in Landover, they are needed to bring magic into the land. In Williams’s novel, these t
raits prove to be individual rather than connected to the office of the monarchs. The Flower fairy oligarchs cannot put the dethroned sovereigns to death because such an act would destroy the realm, but they can seize political power. When the oligarchy is finally overthrown, the former king and queen are not restored to power, however; instead they disappear, although the protagonist is told that they are in all probability still alive. The original rulers’ refusal to make a bid for the throne underscores the separation of power and direct link to the land, showing the latter to be a personal trait rather than a political issue. In Williams’s highly politicized version of Faerie, a direct link to the land may be required to channel magic, but it does not guarantee that the ruler will provide just governance. As in any modern democracy, the political power belongs to the people, no matter who happens to constitute the essence of the realm.24

  The examples just provided suggest some of the many possibilities afforded by a direct link between ruler and realm. The following two sections examine examples of the relationship between ruler and realm, before moving on to Dark Lords and Dark Lands.

  RULING THE MYTHICAL LANDSCAPE: THE FISHER KING IN LAST CALL25

  The first of the books in what Tim Powers refers to as his “Fisher King trilogy,”26 Last Call has a plot that revolves around the mythical King who, unbeknownst to the population in general, rules over the western United States. Powers’s name for the three books indicates the centrality of the Fisher King motif, and the author’s treatment of it is intimately tied to how he has constructed the world of the novels. Last Call is set solely in the primary world, but it is a primary world where, under the surface of the everyday, nonmagical domain of mundanity, there exists a domain of mythical forces. Gary K. Wolfe observes “a genuine mythic sensibility at work in [Powers’s] fiction. […] It’s an almost totally paranoid universe, where nothing is quite as it seems—in other words, a universe of myth.”27 I would add that the sense of paranoia observed by Wolfe derives from the fact that the mythical is obscured from everyday life; the reasons underlying the mundane events remain mysterious to the protagonists. The mythical causes behind everything that befalls the protagonists only slowly become apparent. The novel’s two domains, of mundanity and myth, are thus kept separate yet intimately connected. Mundane events that have their causes in the mythical domain simply lead to incomprehension in those who are unaware of that domain—they understand what happens but not why (and invented causes and coincidence only take them so far). Rather than insistent explanations, it is leaps of faith in the face of too incredible coincidences that ultimately make the protagonists—Crane, Mavranos, and Diana—accept the mythical domain and the meaning it provides.

  In the mythical domain reside “the eternal and terribly potent figures that secretly animated and drove humanity, the figures that the psychologist Carl Jung had called archetypes and that primitive peoples, in fear, had called gods” (26). These mythical forces are represented through symbols in myths, belief systems, rituals, and stories, and are connected to mundanity through such symbols. Each particular force is surrounded by, and defined through, a cluster of symbols shared by and linking those various myths that make up the mosaic of the mythical domain. Each symbol captures a trait or an aspect of the force with which it is associated and can be found in any number of myths and stories: one example would be how the Queen is also the Moon Goddess, both virgin and mother; Pallas Athena and Artemis, Isis and Ishtar, Demeter and the Virgin Mary all symbolize this force, and her traits are captured in the Empress Tarot card (see 273).

  Through the symbolism of the mythical forces, the mythical domain interacts with mundanity. An understanding of the symbols imparts meaning to seemingly meaningless events. Wildly blooming rosebushes become an omen of impending demise when they are understood as a powerful symbol of death; by keeping them tamed, their owner symbolically tames death (24). Putting one’s tie and sunglasses on one’s friend’s decapitated head makes it, symbolically, one’s own head (199–200). To enter the mythic domain is to understand this domain of symbols, to learn to see the world—to employ Wolfe’s expression—as a universe of myth. In Last Call, the two domains are not separated by a physical boundary, nor do they exist in parallel. They are separated by knowledge, different in terms of how the world is understood. Symbols provide mundane events with an added layer of causality through the mythical forces they represent, but they also afford means to affect these forces. Rituals are, in Powers’s novel, a symbolic manipulation of the forces, but impromptu use of symbols works in a similar manner, such as when the protagonists “psychically camouflage” their car as a bus by adding to it symbols for a great number of personalities (141–42, 169).

  Powers draws on a great number of sources for the symbol complexes of the mythical domain and its forces. Four of the most central sources, and most relevant to the mythical King figure on which the plot centers, are Tarot cards, James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915), Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920), and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). The most explicit collection of symbols related to the forces of the mythic domain are the Tarot cards. In the novel, the Lombardy Zeroth deck is portrayed as having particularly great powers, the symbols employed on the cards tapping the depths of the human collective unconscious. It is a card from the Lombardy Zeroth deck that destroys Crane’s eye, and in a poker game played with the deck, he unknowingly sells his body to the incumbent King. The cards are even described as having a life of their own, if only in the mind of the person handling them. By association, however, other Tarot decks and even the modern playing cards derived from them are also powerful symbols in the mythical domain. Buying a hand of cards is thus of great mythical importance. “Fortune-telling by cards [is] prescriptive rather than descriptive,” Crane and Mavranos are told. “[A] hand of Poker is a number of qualities,” so if “you pay money, you’ve bought […] those qualities.” (113) By their nature, however, the playing cards represent the most random aspect of the mythic forces, chance rather than fortune or destiny.

  Where the cards portray the forces of the mythical domain through their symbolism, other myths and stories offer descriptions of these forces and how to relate to them in their various guises. Apart from a few references to King Arthur, Powers’s King character recalls Weston’s treatment of the Fisher King figure in the Grail myths and her linking him to nature cults and vegetation gods, such as Tammuz and Adonis. The King character is also associated with the many symbols of the vegetation gods and fertility rites described by Frazer, to the point where any discussion of the King figure in Last Call must take these works into account.

  The fourth source that Powers has mined for King symbolism, Eliot’s The Waste Land, resonates powerfully in the novel through numerous quotations, allusions, and explicit references ranging from the obvious (chapter 17 is called “The Sound of Horns and Motors” and contains extensive quotations from “The Fire Sermon”) to the oblique (apart from its poker allusion, the novel’s title could be taken to allude to the pub closing in “A Game of Chess”). Rather than only using references to the Fisher King figure from Eliot’s poem,28 however, Powers has brought the poem’s imagery into the cluster of mythical symbols that surrounds his King, thus facilitating a Fisher King–oriented reading of The Waste Land from the perspective of Last Call. Many of the Eliot lines quoted in chapter 17, for instance, follow almost immediately after the passage in which the person “fishing in the dull canal” muses “upon the king my brother’s wreck / And on the king my father’s death before him.”29 In the novel, the quoting is done by the King (associated with the Fisher King figure), which confers Fisher King characteristics on Eliot’s fishing royalty regardless of other possible interpretations.30 Frequently, Last Call explicitly demonstrates how to read The Waste Land’s symbols in terms of the King. Thus, the “Fire Sermon” line “Old man with wrinkled female breasts” (163; l. 219) becomes an obvious description of the King, who is a man inhabiting the body of an
old woman. Less obviously, the end of The Waste Land (line 430 translates as “the Aquitanian Prince with his ruined tower”) also recalls Powers’s King: in the novel, the King’s tower is symbolically destroyed, and whereas Last Call only tells us that he hails from France, Earthquake Weather reveals the King to come from the Bordeaux region in Aquitaine.31

  With these sources in mind, we can address the question of how the King in Last Call is related to his realm through the mythical domain, turning first to Weston’s opinion of the Fisher King figure of the Grail texts. Like other characters that have come down to us through medieval romances, the Fisher King lacks a definitive source. Instead, he appears under various names and in various guises in a number of medieval texts. Comparing several of these medieval texts, Weston finds that

  the presentment of this central figure is much confused; generally termed Le Roi Pescheur, he is sometimes described as in middle life, and in full possession of his bodily powers. Sometimes while still comparatively young he is incapacitated by the effects of a wound, and is known also by the title of Roi Mehaigné, or Maimed King. Sometimes he is in extreme old age, and in certain closely connected versions the two ideas are combined, and we have a wounded Fisher King, and an aged father, or grandfather. But […] in no case is the Fisher King a youthful character; that distinction is reserved for his Healer, and successor.32

  This summary of the Fisher King’s characteristics also covers the basic traits of the Kings in Last Call. The reader meets a succession of three Kings: the gangster Benjamin Siegel is King during part of the back-story; Georges Leon rules for most of the narrative; and Scott Crane takes the throne in the denouement. All three Kings are associated with fishing, and Leon and Crane are wounded if not incapacitated. Leon most clearly matches Weston’s description, even combining apparently contradictory versions: through his ability to take over others’ bodies, he is simultaneously in “middle life” and “extreme old age,” both father and son—one of the bodies he has taken is that of his son, Richard. Crane is the “youthful” successor, healer of the land if not of his predecessor. In Last Call, the land is not healed by healing the King, however, but by having a King of sterility replaced by one of fertility.