THE ATLAN SAGA: 5

  THE ATLAN SAGA by Jane Gaskell

  THE SERPENT

  THE DRAGON

  ATLAN

  THE CITY

  SOME SUMMER LANDS

  SOME SUMMER LANDS

  JANE GASKELL

  DAW BOOKS, INC.

  DONALD A. WOLLHEIM. PUBLISHER

  1633 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 1977, by Jane Gaskell. All Rights Reserved. A DAW Book by arrangement with the author.

  Cover art by James Gumey.

  DAW Collectors Book No. 666

  Firs! DAW Printing. March 1986

  123456789

  PRINTED IN THE USA.

  For Dwee Counihan (whose SAGA is such a joy) and Barbara

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Tanilh Lee PART ONE

  1 My Grandmother’s Hygienic Palace

  2 The Neighbourhood Abortionist’s Bam

  3 The Lynx in the Withy Cage

  PART TWO

  ! The Norther Hills

  2 Turrets

  3 The Darling Despair

  4 The Haunt in the Well

  5 The Blind Bed

  6 Journey North

  7 Northstrong

  PART THREE

  1 The Melancholy Plain. East

  2 The Mystic Floating Penis

  3 Dissolve

  INTRODUCTION

  ONCE UPON a time. when life was rather drab, I found another place to go to—a place of hot gold light, dark green forest dripping with insects, strange bird calls, rainbows, of mountains, hills and plains—a landscape large enough to be lost in, where the cities were as savage as the geography, and where the army, in whose wake I was being dragged, mounted its officers (when not on wine-girls) on the stalking backs of huge flightless birds- … I’d never read anything like it, and I couldn’t believe my luck-Along with helping to save my sanity at that time, Jane Gaskell had introduced me to a world that remains for me as primally fresh as its own origins. And to a heroine whose very weaknesses are her strengths. Cija, pronounced Keeya. Pleasing, maddening, poly-endurable Cija, ever unable to languish, unpredictably sensible, haphazardly armored by the roughest-shod experience. She is by turns a sulky aristocrat, a dashing tomboy, a cynical slut. a seduc-tress quite unconscious of her charms. She is an innocent who logically reels at life’s illogical punishments. She makes the journey most of us do, from the complacent security of infancy, out into the unfair world. Forever disillusioned, somehow Cija never gives up hope that things, and people, will improve-At the same instant Cija shows she has grasped that this is most unlikely. Never “Tragic,” there comes to be a sadness in her soul.

  I read the first books—The Serpent. The Dragon, then published as one volume—as an unputdownable adventure. That it was beautifully and often very humorously written, that the characters, even when giant size, were totally credible, that the writer understood their psychology, and human psychology at large—all that I took for granted as, with the best books, one often does. Grabbing up and gobbling my way through Allan later, the same process worked on me. I was ecstatic over her use of words, and her comments on the mortal condition, and the fact that she could make the most exotic of things seem as normal as tea and toast—while losing nothing of their foreignness, the peculiarity of what she conveyed. And, again, 1 couldn’t put the book down. We

  X SOME SUMMER LANDS

  had to wait for the third* novel. The City. The day I got it, 1 was almost afraid to start—this wasn’t so long as the others. If I wasn’t careful, I might finish it in a night. (By dint of great control. I made it last two.) Like the others, it had an episodic story-line that pulled you headlong, passages of description that made the mouth water, laughter and rage, and by now a touch of proper bitterness, for to live Cija’s life would be, surely, no joke-But there was beginning, too, to be something more. I detected it, reveled in it, explained it to myself this way: That -by now Cija had enough past for both heroine and writer to recall and re-examine it in the light of subsequent events.

  From about sixteen, I had read elsewhere in Ms. Gaskell’s oeuvres, always fascinated by what I found there. But the element in me that was currently making of me primarily a fantasy writer made the Cija books my primary target. If I was low, or had flu, 1 would go back to The Serpent and start right in again. I’d bathe the gray areas of mind and heart in those wet forests, volcanic cities, those wolf winters, those sunsets of red skulls. I think that at the date of writing this, late in 1984, I can guess I have read the first Atlan novels about five times each, and the first volume six. After Allan, anyway, mere came the longest wait of ali.

  There was a problem, too, in the case of Cija. I suppose I instinctively felt that. Even though the last book. The City, had ended on one of the great cliff-hanging sequel-setters of all time. Though more was about to happen, had to happen, what more could Cija offer from her multitudinous cupboard of responses? It was not that her possibility had been exhausted, but that the character herself was tired out. You could feel it. She was real enough to be on the verge of total collapse. And now 1 have a strange matter to relate, believe or disbelieve as you will.

  I have never met Jane Gaskell, and knew nothing of her work habits or program. But 1 distinctly recollect that I thought to myself a year or so after the third (fourth now) Allan book, that it seemed to me the way to go on with those tumbling lands and lives was to write the next book in the person of Cija’s daughter.

  *Since The Serpent is now published in two volumes. The City has become, of course, ^fourth novel.

  INTRODUCTION xl

  Imagine my astonishment when, around ten years after Atlan, Some Summer Lands appeared, a history told now not by Cija, but by Seka, her second-bom. Jane Gaskell, however, uses a device 1 would have missed, would never have thought of. perhaps wouldn’t have dared to try. It was sound precedents (with Charles Dickens, for example). Seka constructs her book from the vantage of adulthood, yet she tells it unvarnished as she saw it when a child.

  It is a frank and occasionally shocking series of revelations that follow. Any kid gloves employed in the past works have been sloughed-Children are normally savages, and the sexual and social savagery which Seka exhibits, coupled to the profoundly adult observations to which so many intelligent small children are prone, startle, jolt, amuse, disturb the reader, and may sometimes even throw one sprawling.

  Some Summer Lands is a very different book altogether. And yet utterly connected to the forerunners. It contains their spirit of primal things—and I don’t merely mean in the terms of era or landscape. The novel is an adventure both in the sense of plot and in the manner of the telling. Ultimately, too, it is a metaphysical book. A set of metaphysics so lightly and readably presented that there is no reason on earth not to forget 1 just said that. These pages can be absorbed as a fantasy novel without a sideways glance. Although a novel is very certainty what it is. Apart from anything else, one now has the lemon-Juice joy of seeing all the characters—most of all, Cija herself—those creatures one has only been able to look at with a single perspective—suddenly advanced through another, and a completely unlike other at that. (Cija’s view of Seka, and Seka’s view of Seka, should give pause to the wisest parent.) Seka. naturally, has the child’s pure skepti-cism, which makes Cija’s redundant. And Seka, unswayed by the conscious or un-sexual-romantic yearnings of the pubescent girl, judges all genders with equal asperity. Sex to Seka is body-pleasure, which can be the gift of anything from a door to a set of male fingers. On that level, door and man have the same competing chance. But personalities, auras— Seka is sharp on those. And the wild dark witchcrafts, the gleaming revelations gain a brilliance and a deceptive sim-plicity, coming as they do out of the mouth of a babe.

  To my mind, this book, the rogue of the quartet-quintet, is perhaps the most significant of them all. It shows what

  xli SOME SUMMER LANDS

  sequels always should, a leap forward, using the previous material as a launching pad. It shows a daring, and a vital development, it shows the blazing spark is continuous.

  That curious something I sensed beginning in Allan with its hind-sight, is brought to full expression in Some Summer Lands. Yes, it has the same burning or murky vistas, the laughter and pain, the imaginative breadth and height of its siblings, and a whole mosaic of outlandish, extraordinary scenes all its own. But it has also a quality of inner thought, of intellectual guts that the previous novels possess but do not expand to the same degree. The very fact of Seka’s pristine perception enables you to see through the glamours to the bedrock, or the fatal flaws. It is Seka who shows the corresponding child in Zerd, and, too, the panther-demon of Zerd’s psychic life—Cija found only the boy and the god. While the alternate attraction and repulsion of Smahi! is peeled away by Seka’s vision of him, bit by bit. If the new vision is less or more palatable, will be the individual’s choice. And meanwhile, the forces of the world, of Atlan herself, are given room to work their destiny alongside the human personas. No convention or moral, literary or commercial, is allowed to hold anything up, or back. Everything fulfils itself, in whatever sense that fulfilment has come to mean.

  Ail of which said, there is yet an elusive quality to the book which frankly can only be discovered by reading it. So turn the page and find out. Firsts are always special: I envy you your first reading of Some Summer Lands.

  —Tanith Lee London. 1984

  My Grandmother’s Hygienic Palace

  THIS PALE YOUNG woman, looking romantically out of windows, is my earliest memory.

  My mother lived a lot of her life at windows. As she was cautious and sensible, a natural observer of life unless forced to be a protagonist, and a coward too, windows were absolutely her element-I remember her at the windows of the castle where I was born. They were high-beamed, bleak windows, empty of all but sky with gales in it. “Watch here, Seka,” she would say to me. “Watch and see if your father arrives over the hill.” She said it as though it would be an interesting treat for me if he did, something to make my day exciting before supper-time. Those were the very early days, before 1 lost my voice without hope of Finding it again But even then, when I could have spoken to her, I didn’t say to her: “He won’t come. He doesn’t arrive. He never does arrive.”

  She knew that. She didn’t say it.

  I knew it. Why should I say it?

  When we reached my grandmother’s safe little palace, the comfort lapped us round like warm bath-waters, warm wines. Suddenly, after the long chilly greasy travels, we were part of a long gold summer. We ate such nice things. We wore clean soft clothes. Instead of those gentlemen with greedy busy faces and bodies who used always to be pulling and pushing us around, here loving sentimental women with their heads sweetly to one side smiled at me and clucked at me as they rolled us into the food and the comforts. And there were quiet languorous decorative easy scenes for my mother to watch unfolding beneath her window.

  And then she stopped watching. One day she was as usual

  IS

  16 SOME SUMMER LANDS

  sitting for hours looking at it all out there. The next day she wouldn’t go near the window. She made detours round our furniture so she could keep well away from her golden windows (with their pierced screens made to deflect assassin-arrows, and with luck the plerodactyla which still sometimes scavenged around the high turrets of my grandmother’s kingdom, hawking and honking like filthy old men flapping at private windows.) (But most of all the screens were to deflect eyes.)

  Say she was near a window. Then in the dark shadowed apertures of honeycomb wails of the barracks opposite, across the square, a flash of red cloak or of weaponry was seen; as some officer talking with fellow commanders over there turned before some window, caught one moment in the omnivorous sun—then, then she would dart away from our own window.

  She would put a hand over each breast in a typical personal gesture, as though eyes could bruise her tenderest nicest places. Holding her little breasts—she had a soprano bosom, high and sweet—she would hurry away as if to be seen herself could be some ultimate terror. I knew what had happened. He had arrived.

  He had ridden at last over the hill.

  He was here in my grandmother’s barracks. And my mother, she was terrified.

  Even at that eariy age, I found it pretty clear that my cautious, sensible mother was an extremely silly lady. She was always either very happy or very unhappy. She was very brave about being unhappy, desperately hiding the fact. even from herself, which involved effort and some drastic chronic resignation. She was unhappy only about situations which did not exist. As, for instance, this man she didn’t love had not appeared in the window. Or, on the other hand, for instance, this man she didn’t love had now appeared after all in our kingdom.

  She thought she had herself almost under control, but the giveaway, even to one of my tender age, came when she insisted that from now on she would not be leaving her apartments at all.

  “Not coming down to dine?” my grandmother asks.

  “You can say,” my mother explained in what she thought a cool voice, “that I have taken a Vow of Silence, a religious thing, with which no one dare argue.”

  MY GRANDMOTHER’S HYGIENIC PALACE 17

  “You can eat without speaking a word. if only he could see you.”

  My little mother looked down at her vulnerable lap. “How should his seeing me do you any good, Mother? His consort is with him.”

  “How can she be his consort when you were crowned his Empress?” snorted my grandmother whose grasp of State law is always based on what she for the moment considers moral. This is all right in her own dictatorship, where the law of the land and the justice of the realm are ever on the wing, and are never anything but what she wants. But other emperies, other ethics.

  “That lady is providing him with her own personal army,” my mother replied, and she picked me up and nested me on her lap, which she these days often did as though I were therapeutic to hold against her stomach—

  I’d noticed her stomach was a bit more interesting these days in fact. It had got peachy, and was always warm; even her breasts seemed more of a handful for her to manage now:

  they were peaches too, instead of those thin hard little pears.

  “So you see,” my mother went on reasonably, “of course she is his consort. Any woman who can provide Zerd with anything at all is to be heaped by him with honour. That’s the law of his realm.” I slid off her and walked back into the fountain where I had seen a superb cockroach.

  I wondered whether to go and play with the door. But I’d already done that twice this morning and the second time a woman had seen me and stopped me: “Bad girl. you know you are not to do that. Get off that door at once.” And 1 hadn’t even finished, and it left you in a funny state for a while to be stopped from playing on the door, holding both its handles tight and nibbing yourself against the edge of the door with a leg either side it, if you weren’t allowed to get to the bit where you worked up to feeling ‘the bumps’ coming banging between your bottom. I thought I wouldn’t bother to start in case I was stopped again before the bumps; it wasn’t worth it. Perhaps later, when my mother didn’t need protect-ing from my grandmother, when my grandmother had gone I would sneak up on the roof and watch the parade. “Besides, the crux of the matter is,” my mother ended fretfully, “that she was his first love.”

  “Nonsense,” my grandmother regally spat. “Did I not

  18 SOME SUMMER LANDS

  engineer it,” she demanded, “that he should love you to the exclusion of all other women?”

  “You engineered. Mother, if you remember, a little matter of my attempting his assassination.”

  “AA,” my grandmother triumphantly said. “Exactly. And he was so taken with your sweet little attempts to kill him that he married you.” “I refuse to meet him, now of all times.” my mother said dryly, “now he in his own land has pro-claimed me witch and whore.”

  She stood, to dismiss my grandmother. I could see that the movement swam her head. A nearby slave, and I, born looked up alert. The slave came nearer.

  My grandmother rudely shoved the slave aside and smoothed Cija’s forehead with maternal munnurings. “Now he’s here,” she hissed, “Right in my dictatorship, on our soil yours and mine. and will you lift a finger to keep his power and friendship mine! For our little land that has seen such blood-shed and erosion! For our little nation! Oh, that a daughter of mine … Besides, tf you’re going to see him at all, which you know you will sooner or later, you’d better do it before your belly betrays you.”

  My mother shuddered. She signed frantically to my grandmother, who didn’t understand. “The slaves,” Cija muttered. “I don’t trust your slaves.”

  The slaves who always stand at the end of my grandmother’s train keeping its serpentine yards off the ground stood with impassive faces, but I know they have ears like lynx’. My grandmother won’t use mutes because they’re no good to her as spies (Just as she never realised / might be trained into something discreet and useful, with my two ears and no voice) but today she said impatiently, “For Gods’ sakes, Cija, I can have their tongues cut.”

  “Don’t be so wasteful.”

  My grandmother did dismiss them. They backed into the black inner apartment, superciliously passing Cija unimpressed by her intervention, and went off with the train to comb the sleek monkey-heads with which it is fringed.

  “Why do you think 1 may be pregnant of all things?” my mother inquired.

 

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