Banner of the Damned by Sherwood Smith
Cover art by Matt Stawicki
Book design by Elizabeth Glover
Published by DAW Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
This novel has its roots in Crown Duel (the reprint version in which the author restored the Sartorias-deles references, not the original two-volume version set in her YA fantasy world, Meld). There was a bit of backstory, offhandedly referred to, about a Marloven princess who married into the old Remalnan royal family. If one read closely, this bit of history explained some of the peculiarities of the Remalnan court, such as the use of runners rather than pages as other nearby kingdoms did, as well as Vidanric's time in the famous Marloven Riding Academy (later told in A Stranger to Command, another story that came into existence as a result of reader requests for more information about their favorite characters' lives). The latter novel also had a passing reference to the notorious King ivandred who rode into Norsunder (a sort of artificial Hell, a bolthole outside of space and time constructed by some long-ago villains and would-be tyrants).
After the publication of the Inda tetralogy, which delved deep into the early history of the Marloven people and their first empire, a lot of Ms. Smith's fans wanted to know how Inda's era related to the Marloven princess who went to Remalna and left her mark on that tiny country with its strange and wonderful colorwood forests. This book is the result, and it is a monumental work, larger than any single volume of the Inda tetralogy.
It is also notable in being told by an outsider who comes to know Marloven society, rather like Vidanric would come as a stranger centuries later in A Stranger to Command. However, Emras is not a Remalnan. Instead, she is from Colend, a nearby country famed for its art and beauty. Colend was originally created by a herald (a sort of diplomat), then expanded by a successor who charmed and flattered his way to empire, convincing a wide swath of the eastern part of the continent to unite under his kingship. The descendants of Matthias Lirendi have ruled over Colend ever since, building a society upon the principle of melende, a term that defies translation, but can mean style, courtesy, grace, and honor. Ugliness is abhorred, to the point even the most functional parts of an establishment are constructed and maintained with care to be pleasing to the senses. Life becomes almost like a dance or pageant, filled with ceremony that smooths over the rough places in every interaction. When people do transgress, punishments tend to focus less on causing pain (physical or emotional) and more upon giving the transgressor an opportunity to see how his or her actions have troubled others and how to go about mending one's ways and the broken boundaries that caused social disharmony.
It is one of those punishments that Emras has just completed when she begins her deposition (the novel is presented as her defense for some crime she has committed against the Scribal code, which will be revealed for both the court's and the reader's judgement as the story progresses). Emras had been in training as a Scribe, a very responsible position that combines the role of private secretary or administrative assistant with archivist and manager of government documents, with some other aspects that remind us this is a highly literate society that has never invented the printing press, that instead values hand-written documents that often become almost works of art. In a thoughtless moment Emras had made a remark that indicated she regarded the work of the servants as beneath a Scribe, an attitude that her superiors immediately took note of and decided to curb by reassigning her to the kitchens, where she would study the baker's arts until she learned that all honest labor has value, and the worker should be treated with courtesy and respect.
Now she has been given a second chance to qualify as a Scribe -- after half a year away from her classes, struggling to keep up with lessons on her own. She is to report for the Fundamentals, a critical test that will make or break a candidate, and cannot be passed simply by memorizing. Candidates must reason their way through complex and often ambiguous questions posed by the proctors, and must be able to explain their reasoning. It's a test comparable to defending one's master's thesis or doctoral dissertation in graduate school -- but it's given to fifteen-year-olds, which shows just how demanding Scribe training is.
Emras passes, but not quite with the flying colors she'd hoped, which may put a damper on her dreams of being a Royal Scribe, the most prestigious position in her line of work. However, she is a diligent student who rises to the top and manages to gain the attention, and then the favor, of the heir apparent, Princess Lasva, the younger sister of the childless queen regnant. As a result, she moves into circles that she might well have better never entered, for it will be as Princess Lasva's personal Scribe that Emras will go down a dark path, not out of personal desire for power, but because she sincerely believes that she is carrying out a broad and somewhat vague directive by the Queen.
However, it would not have happened if not for two key events that completely rearranged the life of the Princess. The first is the birth of a daughter to the Queen, which moves Princess Lasva out of the direct line of succession. The second is the arrival of a Marloven embassy, led by Ivandred, the crown prince. He has been escorting his sister Tharais to Remalna to marry their crown prince and thus cement an alliance, and is visiting Colend because he's heard so much about this land of delicate beauty so different from his own country of warriors. A chance meeting with Lasva leaves him smitten, but before he can explore possibilities, she is kidnapped.
In the Inda tetralogy, Chwahirsland was a rather grim land seen primarily through those who had left it, but it was not yet the Land of Villains that it would be in the CJ notebooks (a group of YA stories and novels that have their origins in Ms Smith's earliest writings about Sartorias-deles, begun when she was about the age of her protagonists). In the period of Banner of the Damned, its reputation is such that its name is generally avoided in Colendi polite society, and "hum" or "hummer" is used as a euphemism -- or a slur (it refers to the custom of the Great Hum, a wordless vocal chorus that is the principal musical art of the Chwahir). However, the necessities of diplomacy meant that the Chwahir crown prince, Joras Sonscarna, had to be allowed to visit the Colendi court -- and in the process became obsessed with Lasva, unwilling to accept that she was not interested in him.
In desperation he decides to kidnap her -- an act of war. Thus we get to see the Colendi set out to go to war, in the same way they live the rest of their lives, as an intricate dance of precedence and negotiation, filled with symbolism and politesse. To Ivandred, trained in a far harsher military tradition, all this posturing is an absurd waste of time, and will pretty much ensure defeat. So he and his First Lancers cut past all the protocol and retrieve the lovely Princess, who has not exactly been a passive victim in the meantime. Her show of spunk and determination only cements Ivandred's certainty that he must win her affection, and her hand in marriage, while the Colendi are still overwhelmed with awe at his prowess and gratitude that he rescued her.
It is amidst all that joy that the seeds of disaster are planted, not out of malice, but from the best of intentions. Emras agrees to go to Marloven Hesea to continue her role as royal Scribe to Princess Lasva, and is called to a secret audience with her sovereign. Queen Hatahra has heard that the Marlovens, like the Chwahir, are dabbling in dark magic, and wishes to protect little sister from potential malign influences. So the queen gives Emras a broad and open-ended mandate to protect the princess from dark magic.
No doubt Queen Hatahra avoided clearer and more detailed directives in order to give Emras the broadest possible range of action as situations developed thousands of miles away from home and the possibility of more specific direction. However, the absence of any guidance, given to someone who is known for thoroughness and diligence in her studies but has only the vaguest, most glancing understanding of magic, proves to be a recipe for disaster -- and a bit of reflection on the problems of security by obscurity.
As Emras contemplates her secret orders, she realizes that her first problem is going to be recognizing dark magic when she sees it. Like all the people of Sartorias-deles, she's used basic magic like the Waste Spell, glow globes and cleaning magic all her life, but they are appliances to her, like electricity and electronics are to us here in the Primary World. She has no real understanding of the principles by which they work or how they differ from the dark magic that is so universally abhorred among the decent people of Colend. She decides to go about rectifying her ignorance of magic theory and practice, and puts out some discreet feelers through her personal network about the possibility of laying hands on a book of magic. Because of the secret nature of her mandate, she can't give any further details about what she wants it for, so she ends up being given a copy of a book so full of formulae and shorthand that she has to struggle to make heads or tails of it. But being a diligent and determined student, she sets herself to memorizing it with the hope that things will become clearer by the time the royal company sets off for Marloven Hesea.
A little more discreet inquiry leads to the information that this is probably a copy of a senior mage's personal notebook, which leads Emras to become increasingly uncomfortable about her continued possession of it. But just as she's wondering if she's wrong to seek this sort of information, she is met by a messenger of the Mage Council, who wants her to report to them on the rumors that the Marlovens are involved in dark magic. She agrees, and then tells herself it is now all the more essential that she understand the theory and practice of magic in order to recognize dark magic when she encounters it, because if she is oblivious to its presence, she can't fulfill either of her missions.
Using what she's learned from the book before she discards it, Emras works out some simple spells that she thinks will help protect the Prince's entourage, and might well help to prevent war and violence in general. When Prince Ivandred's return to his native land is greeted by an ambush, she decides to try a spell she'd come up with on the road as a way to stop a battle.
The magic gets away from her, with horrific consequences. Another person might recoil from what they have done and decide to have nothing further with magic. But as Emras is recovering from the draining effect of having used magic so inexpertly, she overhears Ivandred talking with another man about the use of magic for healing, which only reinforces her certainty that magic can be used for good, for peace, and that she cannot possibly fulfill either of her mandates -- to the queen or the Mage Council -- if she cannot even recognize Norsundrian magic when she sees it.
The mysterious man proves to be the king's mage, who has become interested in her. He offers to tutor her in return for some work on the layers upon layers of wards and tracers that have been laid upon the capital and the royal palace over the generations since magic went from something rare and guarded by the Mage Council in Sartor (in Inda's time) to something that, while not yet ubiquitous and casual as it is for CJ and her friends, is far more easy for rulers to obtain and learn. For a woman feeling overwhelmed by her duties, on top of the ever-growing drain upon her mental and emotional energy that is the process of acculturation into a society utterly alien to everything she's grown up with, it seems like a wonderful opportunity to learn what she needs to know to protect both the princess and their new home from potential threats.
And in the grim Marloven court, with a suspicious old king who could give Stalin a run for his money in the paranoia department, having someone take an interest in her studies seems like a good thing. If anything, Queen Hatahra underestimated the danger that Marloven Hesea presented to Princess Lasva, who knows little of this world of brutal and direct violence, and even less of how to protect herself from it.
This section of the book is also a fascinating study in the process by which a person becomes acculturated into a new society, or fails to do so. From the moment that Princess Lasva first got on a horse and was nicknamed "Bean" for the way she bounced up and down in the saddle like a bean in a frying pan, she became determined to learn Marloven culture and win the respect of these hard, stoic people. Yet at the same time she was also determined to give them some gifts of her own culture's richness and beauty, in ways that they could understand and appreciate rather than simply dismiss as soft, as indulgence in weakness. She will not be like Queen Wisthia from the Inda books, who remained forever a foreigner among the Marlovens, and who quickly returned to her homeland after her husband's murder in one of the Marlovens' periodic civil wars.
And just when things couldn't get worse for Marloven Hesea and the Colendi transplants, the old king's lingering sickness can no longer be held back by magic and he dies, making Ivandred king -- and Lasva queen. And yet another civil war is simmering under the surface, as certain ambitious jarls probe the young king for weakness. All this turmoil only increases Emras's determination that she must learn magic, not just so that she can recognize Norsunder's fingerprints on it when she sees it, but also so that she can keep the peace in her adopted homeland, thus fulfilling both her obligations to Scribal law and to her queen's charge upon her.
The sheer complexity of these motivations and loyalties drive the novel relentlessly toward its explosive (quite literally -- dark magic can be intensely exothermic, and quite destructive when it goes out of control) conclusion. It's a novel that I really want to re-read to pick up the nuances I missed the first time around, the things that become more significant when one knows where the story is going. Back in my youth, when speculative-fiction books were hard to come by, this is the sort of novel I would've read over and over again, revisiting the world at every chance until the librarian would take me aside and point out that I shouldn't monopolize library resources, or until a personal copy started falling apart.
I love the attention to history, and how it is viewed from the long perspective. For instance, although Inda and many of his friends, family and other associates are still remembered, people's understanding of them is often at striking variance from what we read in the Inda tetralogy. Most markedly, many people believe quite firmly that Elgar the Fox is a myth, any historical basis so confused that it's impossible to say for certain that there was actually a single human being behind the stories, and not an amalgam of multiple historical figures.
And I love the moral complexity of the characters' actions. I firmly believe that a great novel needs a strong moral center, but it can't be delivered in a manner that is too blatant and in-your-face or it becomes dreary and didactic, with that mediciney taste of good-for-you. What makes for a great story is characters struggling to do the right thing while dealing with incomplete or contradictory information, some of which may be plain wrong, with no way to know for certain which is the case until after the decision has been made and action has been taken. Overlapping and sometimes contradictory loyalties that the characters struggle to balance, often including sudden and surprising revelations as to where one or another character's loyalties actually lie. And of course having to live with the consequences of the actions one took, because waiting to act until one had complete information was simply not an option.
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Review posted December 12, 2020
