Tag: norse

“The Sea Thy Mistress” Elizabeth Bear

The Sea Thy Mistress is the third book in Elizabeth Bear’s The Edda of Burdens series, following on from the end of both of the preceding books (All the Windwracked Stars (post) and By the Mountain Bound (post)). It’s pretty much impossible to talk about this book without some spoilers for the other two, so be warned there are spoilers ahead even for this one.

Both the previous books are stories about the end of the world, whether it be by a bang (BtMB) or a long drawn out whimper (AtWS). The Sea Thy Mistress is about a new beginning, and the tension comes from the vulnerability of the newborn world. At the end of All the Windwracked Stars Muire willing took up the role of Bearer of Burdens and brought life back to the world. But the Lady Heythe has ridden out of the first ending of the world into this new beginning. The world changed while she wasn’t there but she only aims to finish the job she started in By the Mountain Bound.

This story is also Cathoair’s story. With Strifbjorn’s soul but not Strifbjorn’s memories he’s an apt central character for this part of the trilogy. He (and the world) are at root the same as the previous man (world) but he (and the world) is also distinct and his (its) own individual self (world). And I hadn’t thought about it till writing this, but I think there’s a similar resonance for the world & the protagonist of each of the previous books. Muire & the world didn’t quietly give up & die in All the Windwracked Stars, instead they kept on going and even appearing to live despite the despair and/or dying that was concealed inside. I find it harder to articulate how the Wolf and the world match in By the Mountain Bound, but I still feel they do – something about being broken by someone using their very nature against them.

This story might take place a few decades after the end of All the Windwracked Stars, but it’s still a direct sequel. Cathoair hasn’t got over the traumatic events of the end that story. Muire is still gone, Astrid is still dead by his hand. He’s an immortal now – a new angel for a new world, and as such has a purpose and is alive. But he’s not really alive, more going through the motions. That starts to change when he becomes responsible for bringing up his son – Muire was pregnant by Cathoair when she made her sacrifice and the babe has been born and sent back to the living world (the Bearer of Burdens is presumably not a role that meshes well with bringing up even an immortal child).

And it is into this new life that Heythe walks. Of course the reader knows more than the protagonists do about Heythe – except the Wolf, but the Wolf is not trusted by Cathoair. And so Heythe has the cracks and flaws in Cathoair & the world that she needs to drive her wedges in and try to prise it all apart again. But this book is not a tragedy, and this new world is not as fragile as it first seems – there’s genuine hope at the end that the wounds of the last world are healed.

This has been one of my favourite of Bear’s series that I’ve read. I like what she’s done with Norse mythology, and I like the world & the people she’s created to inhabit it. I left it a bit long to write up this book, so I think I’ve forgotten some of the things I wanted to say about it, which is a shame. But I’m sure I’ll re-read it some day 🙂

“By the Mountain Bound” Elizabeth Bear

By the Mountain Bound is the second book in Elizabeth Bear’s The Edda of Burdens series. It is set before the events of All the Windracked Stars (post) so you could read them in either order, but I think it works best as I’ve done it this time (tho obviously as this is my first read of this book I haven’t tried out the other way round yet!).

The three protagonists of the story are the Wolf (Mingan), the Historian (Muire) and the Warrior (Strifbjorn) – the same three as in All the Windracked Stars, although Strifbjorn is reborn as the mortal Cathoair in that book. Muire was central in the first book, this book is the Wolf’s. Strifbjorn and Muire are both immortal Children of the Light, waelcyrge. (Immortal in the un-ageing sense – they can still be killed, for instance in battle.) The Wolf is … not quite the same as them, he is also a survivor from the world before there’s, and was already there when the Children first came into being. When the story opens superficially all is well in the world – we see where the cracks are but there’s nothing threatening about them. The opening chapters establish the world with a wedding between two waelcyrge, where we learn (amongst other things) that Strifbjorn is their war leader and they have no Cynge and no Lady despite setting chairs out for both. Into this good-enough world comes Heythe, who quickly establishes herself as the Lady returned. All is, of course, not quite what it seems and Heythe is soon manipulating the warlcyrge into their seemingly inevitable slide towards apocalypse.

The waelcyrge are not just warriors and avengers of mortals, they are also beings with loves of their own. And this story is also about loving unwisely or too well, and the consequences of that. When waelcyrge marry they share a part of their soul with their spouse via a kiss, but of course you don’t have to be married to kiss the one you love. Yet social pressure keeps most from risking such a thing pre-marriage – after all, if something changes and then you marry someone else then that someone else will discover they are sharing their soul not just with their spouse but their spouse’s previous lover. It’s the idea of pre-marital sex “tainting” those who do it, but applied rather more even-handedly. It’s clear that this attitude is to be seen as one of the flaws of waelcyrge society which Heythe exploits rather than a good thing. Waelcyrge are not terribly fertile, so marrying and having children to replace those who die are exalted to an almost sacred duty – Strifbjorn as war leader is under a lot of pressure to do so to set a good example. And there is no shortage of waelcyrge women who would marry him – some, like Muire, because they are in love with him, some because of the prestige being his wife would bring them. But unknown to the other waelcyrge Strifbjorn and Mingan are not just lovers, but have shared the kiss. And so the world of the waelcyrge is not as robust as it looks on the surface.

This book is a tragedy, not just in the modern sense of ending with dead people but in the original Greek sense too – it’s the inevitable working out of the flaws of the characters & society. The reason I think the ordering of these books works best this way round is that right from the beginning of this book you know where it ends. It ends with the end of the world, in blood and in ice. With Muire, the Wolf and Kasimir the only survivors of an apocalyptic battle pitting waelcyrge against waelcyrge and killing nearly all of them. So even the moments of hope and partial triumph are against a backdrop of watching the world end. It’s not depressing though – in part because for all the world ends in that battle, we also know from the first book that it’s not totally over and that there is yet hope.

In a nice touch this book ends almost exactly where the first one begins. We see some of the same scenes (not word for word, I think, but close enough to resonate), interspersed (and followed) with new information. But the repeated scenes have completely different emotional weight this time. At the beginning of the first book it’s just back story & characterisation – ticking little boxes for who these people are: “Muire, waelcyrge, survivor’s guilt” etc. This time tho, these are people we know and have come to care about over the course of the book and watching them die is heartbreakingly poignant (yet tragically inevitable).

Thoroughly recommended, and at time of writing I’m halfway through the next one & trying to make it last so that my time in this world with these characters won’t be over so soon.

“All the Windwracked Stars” Elizabeth Bear

The next book in my project of re-reading all the fiction I own (that is still on the shelves) is All the Windwracked Stars, by Elizabeth Bear. I actually replaced it with a Kindle version before re-reading it, along with buying the next two in the series (the series as a whole is called The Edda of Burdens). I know I’ve read this before, as I at least recognised the names of the protagonists and something of the world it is set in, but I remembered very little of the actual story so I might as well’ve been reading it for the first time.

We open with the end of the world in the aftermath of an apocalyptic battle, with the survivors – Kasimir, valraven steed of a slain waelcyrge; Muire, child of the Light, one of the wardens of Valdyrgard, poet, historian, metalworker; the Wolf, older than the world itself and has played his part in the ending of it. And after a chapter that establishes the characters (particularly Muire) the story jumps forward nearly two & a half thousand years to the aftermath of another apocalypse. As the book puts it:

Worlds, like gods, are a long time dying, and the deathblow dealt the children of the Light did not stop a civilization of mortal men from rising in their place, inventing medicine and philosophy, metallurgy and space flight.

Until they in turn fell, two-hundred-odd years ago, in a Desolation that left all Valdyrgard a salted garden. All of it, that is, except the two cities – Freimarc and Eiledon – that lingered. Life is tenacious. Even on the brink of death, it holds the battlements and snarls.

And in this end of the world, Muire, Kasimir and the Wolf still live among the shattered remnants of the human civilisation. It’s a world of both technology and magic – where at one moment there are recognisable computing devices, and at another we’re meeting a modified catwoman created from a cat, sorcery and a relic of the past or a modified ratman mage-engineer. The story is primarily Muire’s, although parts are from other points of view. But she’s the central figure, and we follow her from grief-stricken survivor’s guilt through to a realisation that perhaps the world can be reborn (albeit at great cost to herself).

Muire is the linchpin round which the story turns, but I think there are two other legs the plot rests on – the Grey Wolf and Cathoair. The Wolf I’ve already mentioned, he starts in the position of an antagonist – and where Muire feels she should not have survived but somehow can’t help but keep surviving, the Wolf is looking for death and not finding it. He’s been drawn to Eiledon by a sense that a piece of his past is being misused by the mortal ruler of the city, and although he’s no longer part of the company of the children of the Light he’s still not willing to let such things be misused.

Cathoair is a different sort of character – at first sight less mythic, more everyday survivor. He’s one of the mortal inhabitants of Eiledon, living in the slums and making a living in the fighting ring and as a prostitute. But his soul is that of one of Muire’s brothers, returned to life at another ending of the world (although Cathoair never knows about his past life). He gets caught up in the conflict between Muire and the Grey Wolf, as they’re both irresistibly drawn to the presence of someone they had both loved in the past. But he quickly becomes important in his own right, as even ordinary people can make a difference particularly when the world is ending.

The story takes place in a secondary world that is thoroughly steeped in Scandinavian mythology – as is presumably obvious just from the names of people and of things that I’ve mentioned in this review so far. The prose style also has something of that feel to it – recognising the subject matter as Norse in origin predisposes me to think this, but it often feels like some other language’s poetry translated into English prose. Not all of it by any means, but bits like this do:

The song still burns through his mind, scourging, polishing. Stripping him clean.

Madness is nothing. Madness is an old friend, a comfort to him. He is the son of a god and a giantess. He is a god-monster. He is the Sun-eater. He was born to destruction, to mayhem, to wrath. The world is full of things that want destroying, and also full of those who do not covet destruction. So he was chained to the end of the world. There was a poem that was also a prophecy, and he lived it. The wolf, till world’s end.

And now he is a wolf driven by the goad and the hunt, crazed by the cage and the chain. He is the wolf run mad —

One thing I particularly like about the world it’s set in is that magic and technology aren’t mutually exclusive. The bulk of the story is set in the remnants of a world that’s at least as technologically advanced as ours, if not more so. But it also has working magic, and some of (all of?) the technology is magic based – magic doesn’t replace the need for tech, nor vice versa. Which I think grows out of the Norse underpinnings of the world building – magic here is based on the word (runes, poetry, song) and also on metalworking. Muire as poet, historian, smith is also a mage, in a way that seems to go without saying. Some workings require music, some require working at the forge.

Having forgotten most of the story, I’d also forgotten how much I liked this book. I’m not sure why I didn’t get round to buying the other two in the series till now, but at halfway through the next one I’m pleased I finally got round to it 🙂

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