The First Book of Swords

by Фред Сейберхэген

The Black Mountains borrows motifs rather than specific incidents from mythology and arranges these in opposing pairs to render the next great battle between East and West. Defeated Easterner Lord Chup, "the tall broken man," is wounded and healed, slain and reborn, degraded and redeemed so that he at last stands tall and whole — on the Western side. Som the Dead, an inhuman man, is annihilated by a godlike beast, the immortal Lord Draffut. (These two fantastical characters seem to echo every remembered tale of animated corpses and kindly nature spirits — the Nazgul king and Tom Bombadil from The Lord of the Rings spring to mind. Nevertheless, they are strikingly original creations.) Rolf's twin quests for his kidnapped sister and for the hidden life-principle of the demon Zapranoth end in the same place, resolved by the familiar fairytale device of the separable soul. Ultimately, demons prove as vunerable to men as men are to demons.

  Ardneh's World (the retitled Changeling Earth) reveals the secret of that being's identity. As the war front spreads out to its widest expanse, the distinctions between the two sides reach their sharpest contrast through the use of mythic prototypes. Like the ancient battle Indra the Generous fought with Vritra the Enveloper, this is a duel to the death between mankind's Advocate and its Adversary. The personifications of Defense and Aggression meet in mortal combat.

  The Demon-Emperor Orcus bears the Latin name for both Hades and its ruler. He is an Old World hell bomb turned New World hell-lord. (In the Mahabharata, demonic Vritra looks uncannily like a nuclear explosion's mushroom cloud: "He grew, towering up to heaven like the fiery sun, as if the sun of doomsday had arisen.") The malevolence of Orcus is sordid. This haunter of waterless places is not Milton's glamorous rebel but Meredith's bully who cringes away from starlight. Ominor, once his servant but now his master, chained him away beneath the earth for a thousand years. Now like Satan or Loki, the fiend bursts forth for the day of wrath and falls like lightning on his foe.

  Ardneh, like Orcus, has a substance "only partially subject to the laws of matter." But he was born of benevolent technology as the consciousness of a defense system that "damped the energies of nuclear fire" and "freed the energies of life." (His home base may have been SAC Headquarters in Omaha.) Although he is the actual author of the Change that transformed the world, he denies being a god. Perhaps a more appropriate title for the Archdemon's counterpart is Archangel like an angelic power, Ardneh "is where he works." By sacrificing himself to annihilate Orcus, he brings victory out of defeat while the Western army retreats to win the day.

  This paradoxical resolution recalls major triumphs in the berserker wars and even the Pascal mystery. It is, the capstone of all the paradoxes and ironies that shape the story. Draffut destroys Som the Dead by trying to heal him. Blows wound the one who struck them; spells rebound on the one who cast them. Tiny flaws widen and small kindnesses expand to undermine the mightiest citadels of evil. The weak can prove surprisingly strong and the strong, shockingly weak.

  Westerners, even Ardneh himself, resist temptation but Easterners sink ever lower in depravity by freely chosen stages. Refusing one shameful order pivots Chup against the East. The Western cause draws persons together but the East, that "society of essential selfishness" is hopelessly divided against itself as each member scrabbles for more influence. Absolute dominion as an end in itself brings scant satisfaction to him who wields it. At best, Ominor finds mild distraction in sadism.

  The white-clad supreme tyrant is "the most ordinarylooking" of the nine 'Unworthies' who sit on his council. His manner is as banal as his first name and his capital on the site of Chicago is nothing like Sauron's, its charm being marred only by a few impaling stakes among the flowerbeds. Sheer untiring wickedness has raised this apparatchik above the direst demons in malignant force.

  Exotic Lady Charmian, on the other hand, is supernally fair but eventually boring as she slithers from bed to bed. Her monotonous scheming inevitably brings about the very opposite of what she sought to achieve, at her father Ekuman's court, in Som's stronghold, and among the leaders of the East. Although she is mired in her rut of malice, her husband Chup still claims her. The same stubborness that saved his own integrity may yet undo the effects of her childhood pledging to the East. Chup's regeneration stands for the transformation of his troubled world. But the future of that world belongs to Rolf and his kind. As in The Lord of the Rings, the major figures on both sides disappear, leaving the world to men and to powers they can control. However, magic will not entirely vanish here, although technology will slowly revive. Having won the contest for mastery, men can now make of their lives what they will, whether by sorcery or science — or both.

  But what happens to that bright-seeming future? It develops its own kind of darkness. Two thousand years after Empire, power games continue in The Book of Swords. But "game" is no metaphor here for plot turns are actually stages in a formal game being played by beings who call themselves gods and simultaneously fit into a wider contest between entities that may be playing through these gods. That action begins in the Ludus ("Game") Mountains signals the artificiality of all that follows.

  Game-oriented sf has almost become a sub-genre of storytelling. Saberhagen has written some himself, such as those berserker stories cited earlier and his novel Octagon (1981) which focusses more on the players than the game being played. (A version of the latter is now commercially available.) Original games that act both as story subjects and symbols appear in Philip K. Dick's Solar Lottery (1955) and The Game Players of Titan (1963) and in Samuel R. Delany's Fail of the Towers (1970) and Triton (1976), to cite but a few examples. Other sf writers incorporate familiar games such as chess. In "The Immortal Game" by Poul Anderson (1954), a computer activates robotic chesspieces but The Squares of the City (1965) by John Brunner moves real human beings around on a sociopolitical grid. Andre Norton's Quag Keep (1978) is based on Dungeons and Dragons while Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes (1981) brings an adventure game to life and The Saturn Game by Poul Anderson (1981) demonstrates the risk in playing an improvised mental game too passionately. Many sf stories have been converted to role-playing simulation games, for instance, Starship Troopers, adapted from the 1959 novel by Robert A. Heinlein. Several periodicals including Ares, Dragon Magazine, Sorcerer's Apprentice, and The Space Garner serve the sf gaming audience.

  However, The Book of Swords intends to pioneer new territory. Aside from the reading pleasure it gives, this trilogy is being written to provide the data base for an intricate new computer game that will uniquely combine both adventure-text and interactive features for play on a microcomputer. As of this writing, the designing has not yet begun. Until it is marketed, interested readers may amuse themselves by analyzing the "playable" elements of the story. (For example, the chase scene in the Maze of Mirth obviously lends itself to rendering in computer graphics.) The quick reversals of luck, the brisk introductions, removals, and translations are appropriate for a game scenario. The tendency for the characters to draw together in small teams suggests multivalent strategic possibilities in the war for possession of the enchanted swords.

  "The swords made by the gods are beautiful things in themselves," observes one character, "Whatever the purpose behind them may be." They are also wonderfully versatile plot devices. The ease with which they can be confused and the restrictions on their use multiply dramatic possibilities. (Saberhagen shrewdly builds drawbacks as well as benefits into his magic.) Although the full Song of the Swords inventory may not be destined to actually appear in the trilogy's text, a dozen artifacts is an ambitiously large group. (Series that use as many as six talismans are rare, one example being Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising pentalogy.) Nevertheless, twelve is the traditional number of completeness and is thus an appropriate count for a pantheon.

  Although Saberhagen categorically denies a schematic purpose, by curious coincidence, his list matches twelve major divine powers. These can be most conveniently discussed under their classical Greek names.

  Coinspinner, giver of blind luck,
belongs to Tyche, the fickle goddess of fortune. Its natural opposite, Doomgiver, the instrument of all-seeing justice, belongs to Zeus in his role as universal judge.

  Dragonslicer, exemplifying the heroic use of force, fits Apollo, slayer of the monster Python. (Celestial heroes who kill cthonic dragons are common in both Indo-European and Semitic myth, for instance, Thor versus Midhgardhsormr or Baal versus Yam.) But Shieldbreaker expresses purely brutal might and thus belongs to Ares.

  Farslayer is as futilely vengeful as Hera raging over the infidelities of Zeus. On the other hand, the Sword of Mercy suits Demeter, the Earth-Mother who presided over the deathand-rebirth mysteries of Eleusis.

  The Mindsword that beguiles the inner self recalls triple-faced Selene/Artemis/Hecate, stern Lady of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. However, Sightblinder's deception of the senses is one effect Dionysus produces while wandering the world unrecognized. (The ecstatic god is a more sophisticated version of the crude, conniving Trickster who looms so large in African and Amerindian myth.)

  Despair, constraint, and utter sterility surround Soulcutter as they do the dead-god Pluto. But Wayfinder elates, liberates, and enlightenment as does cheerful Hermes in his capacities as god of travellers and master of occult wisdom.

  Stonecutter, the Sword of Seige, is no more resistible than Aphrodite, goddess of love. (One is tempted to read unwitting double-entendres into this sword's stanza.) Its natural counterpoise is Townsaver, a weapon befitting the armored virgin Athena Polias, protector of her city.

  Thus the swords can be assigned to six masculine and six feminine principles. (Grouping the weapons into equal positive, negative, and ambiguous sets is left to the reader's ingenuity.) Since the above assignments were not consciously intended by the author, there is no reason to expect correspondences between the swords and deities seen in this book. Hermes has nothing to do with Dragonslicer except deliver it and Vulcan matches with none of the blades he forges. The supposedly divine players may have chosen their roles by whim, but their twelve playing tokens represent fundamental categories of experience.

  The neatness of these comparisons and the associations they evoke offer the strongest possible demonstration of Saberhagen's innate feeling for myth. It is a matter of instinct with him, not rote learning. (As he modestly explains, "My reading in mythology has been sporadic at best.") Nevertheless, it lays a sure and true foundation under his fiction. The great mythologist Mircea Eliade might have been describing this situation when he observed that mythic images "act directly on the psyche of the audience even when consciously, the latter does not realize the primal significance of any particular symbol."

  The most dramatic imagery operating here centers around swords, metalworking, and fire — each a landmark achievement of homo faber.

  Any human culture that makes swords spins fables about them. As the masculine symbol par excellence, swords are the essence of the gods and heroes who wield them. (The Japanese say that the sword is the soul of the samurai.) Swords have been objects of worship and emblems of fertility. As prized heirlooms, they fit into the cult of dead ancestors. They may be linked with the destiny of one hero or of an entire dynasty. They can confer invincibility — at a price. Legendary swords are fashioned by mystic means, especially through blood sacrifice to transfer the victim's life into the blade. (Damascus steel was reportedly quenched in blood and bloody offerings are a normal component of smithcraft in many primitive cultures.) Finally, because swords have distinctive personalities, they are given names.

  The prowess of medieval heroes lay in their swords. (Arthur's Excalibur is, of course, the most famous example.) Aragorn's Anduril in The Lord of the Rings carries on this noble tradition in fantasy. Perhaps the most impressive sword of virtue in science fiction to date is Terminus Est in Gene Wolfe's Book o f the New Sun (1980-83).

  But doomswords of Norse inspiration give sf grimmer drama. The pre-eminent example is Tyrfing in Poul Anderson's Broken Sword (1954), the baleful brand with "a living will to harm." This is the model for Michael Moomock's Stormbringer, the "stealer of souls" whose bloodlust cannot be slaked until the last man on earth is slain. More recently, the accursed blade motif receives a scientific rationale in C. J. Cherryh's Book of Morgaine (1976-79) where Changeling is an alien device that cleaves the space-time fabric.

  Saberhagen's swords confer sublime power without regard for the user's fate. Their properties seem to be good, evil, or ambiguous. Made at the cost of five lives, they are destined to take countless others. Although the divine smith who forges them with earthfire within an icy peak uses the Roman name Vulcan (source of the word "volcano"), he looks and acts like a brutal giant out of Northern myth. Since the swords and Mark were created within the same week indeed, he would not have come into existence without them — their destinies are uniquely linked. In effect, his own heirloom Townsaver chose him as its heir. He is also the only person in this book to use all four of the named blades.

  It is most fitting that Vulcan makes the enchanted swords out of meteoric iron since celestial origins give this material a special mystical prestige. Intact iron meteorities have been worshipped as images of divinity, for instance the Palladium of Troy and the Ka'ba of Mecca. The oldest word for "iron" is anbar, Sumerian for "star-metal" because "thunderstones" were the first accessible source of the substance used in Mesopotamia. Meteorites were hammered into objects as early as the third millenium B.C. and were also used by peoples such as the Eskimos who had no knowledge of metallurgy. Superior qualities made weapons shaped from meteoric iron legendary. Even in this century, the Bedouin believed meteoric iron swords to be invincible.

  As Eliade discusses in his fascinating study The Forge and the Crucible, "the image, the symbol, and the rite anticipate sometimes even make possible the practical applications of a discovery." Since iron fallen from the sky was transcendent, so was iron mined and smelted on earth. This awe soon extended to every aspect of metallurgy.

  But iron's occult power can act for either good or ill. It can ward off demons, spells, poisons, curses, sickness, or bad weather. Faerie folk cannot bear the touch of it nor enter a place protected by it: Cold Iron can inhibit magic. However, iron is also the symbol of war and the agent of violence. Many primitive cultures — especially those oppressed by better-armed foes — fear iron and all who work in it. (The Masai purify all new iron objects to remove the taint of the smith's hand.)

  Thus, to some, supernatural smiths may be wise, civilizing gods, adept at song, dance, poetry, and healing. (The wondersmiths of the Kalevala excel in each of these areas.) But to others, they may be the gods' vicious foes — dwarves, giants, demons, or Satan himself. (Norse sagas and fairytales abound in examples.) Human smiths display the same ambivalence. As Eliade observes, "The art of creating tools is essentially superhuman — either divine or demoniac (for the smith also forges murderous weapons)." A spiritual aura clings to the act of making, whether homo faber be godlike or devilish.

  The smith, like the shaman, is pre-eminently a master of fire. Fire was primitive Man's earliest instrument for controlling the cosmos. As the initial means of accelerating natural processes, it commenced the conquest of time, a campaign technology has continued ever since. By the hand or through the spirit, initiates into the mysteries of fire can break the bonds confining other beings to win mastery of their environment.

  Note that Vulcan's first act in the opening line of this volume is to grope for fire. His erupting volcano glows on the game board's eastern edge like a signal lamp. The smith god represents the power to shape inorganic matter but the BeastLord personifies organic matter's potential for growth. Unharmed by fire, Draffut can quicken Vulcan's molten lava to momentary life. Yet Draffut's confrontation with the upstart gods is only one episode in the contest that begins, proceeds, and will end via Vulcan's swords.

  The gods call the game their own, but is it? Their pretentions to divinity ring hollow yet they are clearly more than human. Given the subtle hint in the Prologue that Vulcan has
been "programmed" for his task, are they perhaps some magical equivalent of the huge robotic god-figures in Berserker's Planet? They could be automata animated by quasimaterial beings such as djinni.

  Overshadowing these meddlesome, amoral gods are the images of Ardneh and the masked figure known as the Dark King. The Demon-Slayer and Hospitaller has become more of an Apollo than an Indra, a patron of humane technology opposed to Vulcan's brutal methods. Unlike Orcus, the Dark King is suave and manlike but his title would be a suitable alias for Hell's overlord. (By an irony of history, their common antagonist Ominor has been transformed from a mirthless, plodding tyrant to a legendary buffoon.) But why are they here at all, since god and demon presumably destroyed each other in Empire? (The question puzzles theologically aware Sir Andrew.) Did the quasimaterial beings prove immortal after all? Or are these identities, like the names of the gods, idiosyncratic choices of the games ultimate players?

  Revelation of these and other enigmas must await publication of the second and third volumes of The Book of Swords. But a few observations about Mark are possible even at this early stage in the contest. His very name is packed with allusion — is he a piece of labeled property or a symbolic witness? Like Berserker Man's Michael, he is.a Child-Hero begotten under mysterious circumstances and born into a web of contradictory influences which will surely confound the evil forces that plan to make use of him. Lake Empire's Rolf, young Mark is sent off into epic adventures where he will confound both chance and fate, to learn through passages of sword-play that mastery of self is the kind most worth striving for.

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