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chocolatepot) wrote2022-02-26 09:04 am
chocolatepot) wrote2022-02-26 09:04 am
Entry tags:
King's Dragon
OKAY
FINALLY
So King's Dragon, by Kate Elliott, is set in a world that is very, very heavily based in early medieval Europe. The map IS Europe, centered on the Holy Roman Empire about a century after Charlemagne's death; all of the countries/regions have counterparts here, sometimes only slightly renamed (Westfall, Austra, Gent). Once upon a time the land was united under the Dariyan (Roman) Empire, based out of Darre (Rome), where the skopos (papacy) now sits, and before that people don't really know what went on. Not!Europe is threatened by the Eika, who are not!Vikings that appear to be not human. There's some magic, but it's not part of everyday life, though everyone is aware of the existence of the Aoi (fae, fair folk, elves) in some other dimension and the seemingly more theoretical existence of daimones (demons); religion is much much much more present in everyday life. The religion is centered on the Lord and Lady, who together make up God, but there's also the Blessed Daisan who is basically Jesus plus an obscure gnostic I'd never heard of called Bardaisan - the orthodox tradition is that Daisan had a sort of vision and then ascended to heaven, but there's a heresy that he was actually tortured to death. The orthodoxy/heresy tension isn't very big in this book, but I strongly suspect that it becomes a more major part of later books. There are a lot of saints, mostly martyrs, and biscops (bishops), monasteries, etc. The book opens with a prologue in which a young nobleman named Henry chases down the Aoi mother of his baby son, only to lose her as she goes back to her people; eventually you realize that this Henry is now the not!HREmperor in the present of the novel, and the baby is now the grown up Prince Sanglant.
Our most main characters are Alain, the foster son of a merchant from the western edge of the empire, and Liath, who is hard to sum up ... she and her father traveled all over before settling in not!Denmark, and her father knew sorcery that had to be kept secret. Alain is destined to be given to the church, a plan that's scuppered when the local monastery is devastated by an Eika attack, and instead he's sent to the local count as part of an annual service levy. Liath's father dies, and to pay his debts there's an auction, which includes her as a slave to make up the difference. She is bought by the local priest, who wants her father's knowledge but also wants her as a possession and concubine.
The presence of religion in politics and everyday life is a major part of what makes this feel REALLY medieval, unlike a lot of fantasy. Time is kept by the religious services (nones, terce, etc. etc.) and the date by holidays (Mariansmass, Candlemass, St. Eusebe's Day, etc.). There are a lot of characters who are in the church in various positions and with various personalities, rather than the situation you often see where it's uniformly oppressive, misogynistic, and either zealous and persecuting True Believers or people just using the power of the institution to further their own ends. The characters, particularly Alain, also go to religious faith for comfort when frightened or sad, and both Alain and Liath see a saintly vision at one point (implying a certain amount of realness of the religion to the reader, and conforming with medieval primary sources as well).
Another big point of realism is how much power parents have in deciding their children's futures. "Young people are given more responsibility" is a common trope for "realistic" fantasy, but there should actually be this weird middle ground where teenagers are old enough to do all sorts of occupational stuff, but at the same time are completely under their parents' authority. You often see a sort of enforced childhood that they chafe under or parents wanting them to do something (usually get married) and the characters being shocked and rebellious. But it's the norm and most would accept it, as they do in the book. Alain would rather become a merchant, but he knows what he's supposed to do and is reluctantly willing to do it. Practically everyone in the church is there because their parents chose to put them there, and they're not resentful. Parents assign their children to their future careers with apprenticeships and such. It's just how it is. Duty and obligation.
At the same time, and very interestingly, Elliott vanishes sexism from her version of medieval Europe. The presence of Lord and Lady in the godhead allows for (or is allowed by?) men's and women's equality in life and marriage. A lot of inheritance is matrilineal, with women largely owning property and their husbands being given a role in running it - men marry out, while women keep the family property, with the eldest child of each typically doing that and the younger ones going into the church. The heir to the empire is decided by the reigning king sending out his children one by one as they come of age, and the one that gets pregnant or gets his wife pregnant first is seen as divinely chosen. Women do the same kinds of work as men, hold the same kind of positions in the church as men (if not better - all deacons are women, I'm not 100% on what deacons are but it's a position of authority) and sometimes fight as soldiers. There is not even rape culture: men do not think they have the right to a woman's body, women do not fear being raped if they're in dangerous situations. (Liath and Frater Hugh are a sort of special situation: he's violent toward her, but as she's a slave that's expected, he doesn't force her sexually (though there is certainly coercion involved), and I think most of the townsfolk think that he's just sort of offering her a position as his bedfellow, they don't really perceive that he's trying to Own Her.)
Alain's story leads into the thick of royal politics: Sabella, Henry's sister, is challenging him for the throne on the basis that the birth of Sanglant doesn't count (because he's illegitimate and only half-human), and when she visits Alain's count (Lavastine) her biscop sacrifices a stableboy to magically make Lavastine Sabella's puppet. She brings him on the warpath and has him challenge and defeat his cousin, and then stand with her and her allies against Henry's forces. Alain is very well placed to see what's going on because Lavastine's supernatural dogs which respond only to the count's commands also seem to like him, which leads to him being put in charge of them. He's also accompanied by Frater Agius, a priest who believes in the Heresy of Knives and is SEVERELY stressed throughout most of the book; Sabella gets his niece and uses her to force him to trick the biscop of Autun to leave her city. (The biscop and Agius were once in love, and when the biscop's father had her put in the church, Agius voluntarily joined the church himself and left his younger brother to take his spot in the secular world. I tell you this unnecessary detail because it's hella romantic. All in all I get a very Remus Lupin vibe from this guy: he's stressed, he's a kind of mentor figure for Alain, and there's an aura of tragedy and life-didn't-turn-out-right around him.) In the final meeting of the two forces, it's revealed that Sabella has a (very sick, nasty-looking) wyvern whose gaze freezes everyone not wearing the amulets her priests have been passing out, which is allowing her men to slaughter Henry's army. Agius sacrifices himself to distract the wyvern or maybe just as a means of suicide, not entirely clear, and Alain kills the wyvern; then he uses a rose given to him at the beginning of the book, when he had a vision of St. Perpetua, Lady of Battles, to clear the sorcery on Lavastine, who pulls his forces away, which allows Henry to win. After the battle, Lavastine acknowledges that Alain is his son (not a big shocker at this point) and goes to Henry to have him legitimized, as he has no heir.
OKAY.
Liath, on the other hand, gets rescued from Hugh when he beats her severely and causes a miscarriage of a fetus she didn't even realize she had; she's been in a state of trauma for months over her enslavement and sexual servitude. While nobody really cared about what happened before, this does get attention, and happily coincides with the King's Eagles coming to town. (The Eagles are the king's special scouts; there are also Lions, his infantry, and Dragons, who are like ... Green Berets?) The head Eagle of the group, Wolfhere, knew her father and has been looking for her, and they take her away with a friend to become one of them in the face of Hugh's anger. The group goes to Gent, where they meet up with Dragons, led by Sanglant - and where they are eventually besieged by Eika. Liath and Sanglant have a frisson and we get to see a glimpse of the problematic prince: handsome, but definitely looks Different from most humans; charming, charismatic, natural leader, etc. The two of them see a vision of Gent's patron saint in the cathedral, and she leads them to a passage that Liath eventually takes the populace through to safety when the Eika break through and the Dragons have to fight them to the death. Sanglant seems to have fallen with the rest, but of course at the very end it's revealed that he's still alive (his Aoi blood helps him heal quickly), and he fights the Eika's dogs to save himself. They are sort of mockingly impressed and put an iron collar and chain on him. Cliffhanger!! The second book is called Prince of Dogs and I'm SO EXCITED to read it.
OKAY.
I don't normally want to give such detailed rundowns of character arcs and such, but I want to talk about how all this reflects on the medieval setting! The big thing that pinged in my brain when I got to the end is the Wheel of Fortune. Rota Fortunae was a big thing in the Middle Ages, often depicted with men going up and down in status: a king at the top, a beggar at the bottom, a man reaching up on one side and very clearly falling on the other. It's so well reflected in the raising of Alain to the aristocracy while Sanglant becomes a slave of the Eika, literally having the gold torque of the royal family taken away and replaced with an iron collar. I am going crazy over it, it's perfect. Of course the long-lost heir is a staple of fantasy, but I don't think it comes off that way - Alain wasn't lost, he was just a bastard who wouldn't have been needed if Lavastine hadn't had this whole thing preventing him from having legitimate heirs. It's just luck, or divine fortune, that Alain didn't go into the church and ended up distinguishing himself to his father.
There's also a whole subplot I neglected to describe. Rosvita is a religious scholar who gets a few chapters from her own perspective: she's writing a history book (her intellectual process is perfectly rendered like medieval historians, who of course had to make do with very few sources and hearsay) and Henry asks her to go talk to this ancient hermit, who was one of the last students of Kunigonde, the last wife of Taillefer, the counterpart of Charlemagne. He gives her his own book and drops two pieces of information: first, that Taillefer had found a legal precedent for making an illegitimate son his heir over his legitimate daughters in the law of the Salians (i.e. Salic Law), and second, that Kunigonde was said to have been pregnant but nobody knew what happened to the child. The second bit is ignored pretty quickly but IMO it's something that will be picked back up in a later book, because while "did that kid ever get born? did they die in infancy? did they just live in obscurity?" are completely normal questions frequently left unanswered in medieval history, in fiction they do not just sit there. The first bit is the key thing for the political situation, because everyone knows Henry wants Sanglant to be his heir. He has three legitimate children, Sapientia (who has a temper and is impetuous), Theophanu (who is competent but has zero charisma), and Ekkhard (who is still pretty young), but Sanglant is like the perfect king, except for his birth.
Which brings me to my final(?) point: I AM IN LOVE WITH SANGLANT. It's funny, he doesn't really get his own perspective until the very end, and I am a bit cynical about the sexual tension between him and Liath (it's at least lampshaded by her being confused/annoyed with herself for being attracted to him when she's still in recovery from what happened with Hugh, but it is really kind of random for him to be as compelled by her as he is so quickly - but maybe I am picturing her as too ordinary), but there are two things I love, royalty and illegitimacy. They are both complete social constructs with huge significance in historical and fantasy-historical contexts, both non-norms but at opposite ends of the spectrum. And then you combine them and you have this awkward situation (very much explicitly on the page) where someone meets some of the demands of the social construct while failing at others ... Sanglant is kingly but cannot be a king, illegitimate but recognized and loved by his father. Fascinating. But also, on a personal level as a character he is attractive, brave, has lots of integrity, but there's also this wry kind of sadness, presumably at his awkward situation. And I mean, I love me some hurt/comfort, taking a golden prince and bringing him about as low as possible is *chef's kiss*. I'm very much looking forward to him getting more attention in the next book, which I've already put in for from the library.
Also, the shamelessly over-the-top ca. 2000 fantasy covers ... I have a couple of Mercedes Lackey paperbacks in the same vein.
FINALLY
So King's Dragon, by Kate Elliott, is set in a world that is very, very heavily based in early medieval Europe. The map IS Europe, centered on the Holy Roman Empire about a century after Charlemagne's death; all of the countries/regions have counterparts here, sometimes only slightly renamed (Westfall, Austra, Gent). Once upon a time the land was united under the Dariyan (Roman) Empire, based out of Darre (Rome), where the skopos (papacy) now sits, and before that people don't really know what went on. Not!Europe is threatened by the Eika, who are not!Vikings that appear to be not human. There's some magic, but it's not part of everyday life, though everyone is aware of the existence of the Aoi (fae, fair folk, elves) in some other dimension and the seemingly more theoretical existence of daimones (demons); religion is much much much more present in everyday life. The religion is centered on the Lord and Lady, who together make up God, but there's also the Blessed Daisan who is basically Jesus plus an obscure gnostic I'd never heard of called Bardaisan - the orthodox tradition is that Daisan had a sort of vision and then ascended to heaven, but there's a heresy that he was actually tortured to death. The orthodoxy/heresy tension isn't very big in this book, but I strongly suspect that it becomes a more major part of later books. There are a lot of saints, mostly martyrs, and biscops (bishops), monasteries, etc. The book opens with a prologue in which a young nobleman named Henry chases down the Aoi mother of his baby son, only to lose her as she goes back to her people; eventually you realize that this Henry is now the not!HREmperor in the present of the novel, and the baby is now the grown up Prince Sanglant.
Our most main characters are Alain, the foster son of a merchant from the western edge of the empire, and Liath, who is hard to sum up ... she and her father traveled all over before settling in not!Denmark, and her father knew sorcery that had to be kept secret. Alain is destined to be given to the church, a plan that's scuppered when the local monastery is devastated by an Eika attack, and instead he's sent to the local count as part of an annual service levy. Liath's father dies, and to pay his debts there's an auction, which includes her as a slave to make up the difference. She is bought by the local priest, who wants her father's knowledge but also wants her as a possession and concubine.
The presence of religion in politics and everyday life is a major part of what makes this feel REALLY medieval, unlike a lot of fantasy. Time is kept by the religious services (nones, terce, etc. etc.) and the date by holidays (Mariansmass, Candlemass, St. Eusebe's Day, etc.). There are a lot of characters who are in the church in various positions and with various personalities, rather than the situation you often see where it's uniformly oppressive, misogynistic, and either zealous and persecuting True Believers or people just using the power of the institution to further their own ends. The characters, particularly Alain, also go to religious faith for comfort when frightened or sad, and both Alain and Liath see a saintly vision at one point (implying a certain amount of realness of the religion to the reader, and conforming with medieval primary sources as well).
Another big point of realism is how much power parents have in deciding their children's futures. "Young people are given more responsibility" is a common trope for "realistic" fantasy, but there should actually be this weird middle ground where teenagers are old enough to do all sorts of occupational stuff, but at the same time are completely under their parents' authority. You often see a sort of enforced childhood that they chafe under or parents wanting them to do something (usually get married) and the characters being shocked and rebellious. But it's the norm and most would accept it, as they do in the book. Alain would rather become a merchant, but he knows what he's supposed to do and is reluctantly willing to do it. Practically everyone in the church is there because their parents chose to put them there, and they're not resentful. Parents assign their children to their future careers with apprenticeships and such. It's just how it is. Duty and obligation.
At the same time, and very interestingly, Elliott vanishes sexism from her version of medieval Europe. The presence of Lord and Lady in the godhead allows for (or is allowed by?) men's and women's equality in life and marriage. A lot of inheritance is matrilineal, with women largely owning property and their husbands being given a role in running it - men marry out, while women keep the family property, with the eldest child of each typically doing that and the younger ones going into the church. The heir to the empire is decided by the reigning king sending out his children one by one as they come of age, and the one that gets pregnant or gets his wife pregnant first is seen as divinely chosen. Women do the same kinds of work as men, hold the same kind of positions in the church as men (if not better - all deacons are women, I'm not 100% on what deacons are but it's a position of authority) and sometimes fight as soldiers. There is not even rape culture: men do not think they have the right to a woman's body, women do not fear being raped if they're in dangerous situations. (Liath and Frater Hugh are a sort of special situation: he's violent toward her, but as she's a slave that's expected, he doesn't force her sexually (though there is certainly coercion involved), and I think most of the townsfolk think that he's just sort of offering her a position as his bedfellow, they don't really perceive that he's trying to Own Her.)
Alain's story leads into the thick of royal politics: Sabella, Henry's sister, is challenging him for the throne on the basis that the birth of Sanglant doesn't count (because he's illegitimate and only half-human), and when she visits Alain's count (Lavastine) her biscop sacrifices a stableboy to magically make Lavastine Sabella's puppet. She brings him on the warpath and has him challenge and defeat his cousin, and then stand with her and her allies against Henry's forces. Alain is very well placed to see what's going on because Lavastine's supernatural dogs which respond only to the count's commands also seem to like him, which leads to him being put in charge of them. He's also accompanied by Frater Agius, a priest who believes in the Heresy of Knives and is SEVERELY stressed throughout most of the book; Sabella gets his niece and uses her to force him to trick the biscop of Autun to leave her city. (The biscop and Agius were once in love, and when the biscop's father had her put in the church, Agius voluntarily joined the church himself and left his younger brother to take his spot in the secular world. I tell you this unnecessary detail because it's hella romantic. All in all I get a very Remus Lupin vibe from this guy: he's stressed, he's a kind of mentor figure for Alain, and there's an aura of tragedy and life-didn't-turn-out-right around him.) In the final meeting of the two forces, it's revealed that Sabella has a (very sick, nasty-looking) wyvern whose gaze freezes everyone not wearing the amulets her priests have been passing out, which is allowing her men to slaughter Henry's army. Agius sacrifices himself to distract the wyvern or maybe just as a means of suicide, not entirely clear, and Alain kills the wyvern; then he uses a rose given to him at the beginning of the book, when he had a vision of St. Perpetua, Lady of Battles, to clear the sorcery on Lavastine, who pulls his forces away, which allows Henry to win. After the battle, Lavastine acknowledges that Alain is his son (not a big shocker at this point) and goes to Henry to have him legitimized, as he has no heir.
OKAY.
Liath, on the other hand, gets rescued from Hugh when he beats her severely and causes a miscarriage of a fetus she didn't even realize she had; she's been in a state of trauma for months over her enslavement and sexual servitude. While nobody really cared about what happened before, this does get attention, and happily coincides with the King's Eagles coming to town. (The Eagles are the king's special scouts; there are also Lions, his infantry, and Dragons, who are like ... Green Berets?) The head Eagle of the group, Wolfhere, knew her father and has been looking for her, and they take her away with a friend to become one of them in the face of Hugh's anger. The group goes to Gent, where they meet up with Dragons, led by Sanglant - and where they are eventually besieged by Eika. Liath and Sanglant have a frisson and we get to see a glimpse of the problematic prince: handsome, but definitely looks Different from most humans; charming, charismatic, natural leader, etc. The two of them see a vision of Gent's patron saint in the cathedral, and she leads them to a passage that Liath eventually takes the populace through to safety when the Eika break through and the Dragons have to fight them to the death. Sanglant seems to have fallen with the rest, but of course at the very end it's revealed that he's still alive (his Aoi blood helps him heal quickly), and he fights the Eika's dogs to save himself. They are sort of mockingly impressed and put an iron collar and chain on him. Cliffhanger!! The second book is called Prince of Dogs and I'm SO EXCITED to read it.
OKAY.
I don't normally want to give such detailed rundowns of character arcs and such, but I want to talk about how all this reflects on the medieval setting! The big thing that pinged in my brain when I got to the end is the Wheel of Fortune. Rota Fortunae was a big thing in the Middle Ages, often depicted with men going up and down in status: a king at the top, a beggar at the bottom, a man reaching up on one side and very clearly falling on the other. It's so well reflected in the raising of Alain to the aristocracy while Sanglant becomes a slave of the Eika, literally having the gold torque of the royal family taken away and replaced with an iron collar. I am going crazy over it, it's perfect. Of course the long-lost heir is a staple of fantasy, but I don't think it comes off that way - Alain wasn't lost, he was just a bastard who wouldn't have been needed if Lavastine hadn't had this whole thing preventing him from having legitimate heirs. It's just luck, or divine fortune, that Alain didn't go into the church and ended up distinguishing himself to his father.
There's also a whole subplot I neglected to describe. Rosvita is a religious scholar who gets a few chapters from her own perspective: she's writing a history book (her intellectual process is perfectly rendered like medieval historians, who of course had to make do with very few sources and hearsay) and Henry asks her to go talk to this ancient hermit, who was one of the last students of Kunigonde, the last wife of Taillefer, the counterpart of Charlemagne. He gives her his own book and drops two pieces of information: first, that Taillefer had found a legal precedent for making an illegitimate son his heir over his legitimate daughters in the law of the Salians (i.e. Salic Law), and second, that Kunigonde was said to have been pregnant but nobody knew what happened to the child. The second bit is ignored pretty quickly but IMO it's something that will be picked back up in a later book, because while "did that kid ever get born? did they die in infancy? did they just live in obscurity?" are completely normal questions frequently left unanswered in medieval history, in fiction they do not just sit there. The first bit is the key thing for the political situation, because everyone knows Henry wants Sanglant to be his heir. He has three legitimate children, Sapientia (who has a temper and is impetuous), Theophanu (who is competent but has zero charisma), and Ekkhard (who is still pretty young), but Sanglant is like the perfect king, except for his birth.
Which brings me to my final(?) point: I AM IN LOVE WITH SANGLANT. It's funny, he doesn't really get his own perspective until the very end, and I am a bit cynical about the sexual tension between him and Liath (it's at least lampshaded by her being confused/annoyed with herself for being attracted to him when she's still in recovery from what happened with Hugh, but it is really kind of random for him to be as compelled by her as he is so quickly - but maybe I am picturing her as too ordinary), but there are two things I love, royalty and illegitimacy. They are both complete social constructs with huge significance in historical and fantasy-historical contexts, both non-norms but at opposite ends of the spectrum. And then you combine them and you have this awkward situation (very much explicitly on the page) where someone meets some of the demands of the social construct while failing at others ... Sanglant is kingly but cannot be a king, illegitimate but recognized and loved by his father. Fascinating. But also, on a personal level as a character he is attractive, brave, has lots of integrity, but there's also this wry kind of sadness, presumably at his awkward situation. And I mean, I love me some hurt/comfort, taking a golden prince and bringing him about as low as possible is *chef's kiss*. I'm very much looking forward to him getting more attention in the next book, which I've already put in for from the library.
Also, the shamelessly over-the-top ca. 2000 fantasy covers ... I have a couple of Mercedes Lackey paperbacks in the same vein.