Black Wolves by Kate Elliott
Cover art by Larry Rostant
Published by Orbit Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
Way back in 2010, when I finished Traitor's Gate, I wondered about the long-term effects of the changes that Anji and his forces were working upon the land known as the Hundred. Whereas formerly the land had been a loose confederation of towns bound together by common laws and tradition and by the systems of eagle reeves and Guardians, it now had a king. Worse, his mother was bringing in priests of a monotheistic religion known to be hostile to other faiths, which did not bode well for Anji's attempts to integrate into the culture of his new land and do things in ways that his new subjects would understand, including at least respect for its system of seven gods and goddesses, each with a sphere of life and a priesthood.
So when I heard that Kate Elliott had a new novel out in the same world as the Crossroads trilogy, but set a generation later, I immediately wanted to read it. I had t wait a little while, since financial constraints meant I had to borrow a copy from our local library -- which meant putting it on hold and waiting for it to get to our branch, increasing the anticipation.
Finally I get it in my hands and set to reading it. As soon as I begin, I see that things have changed, and not for the better. We meet Kellas on a mission to search out one of the "cloaked demons," the beings once known as Guardians. In the Crossroads trilogy, a significant number of them had gone corrupt, not out of greed but out of a desire for justice that went awry, and had thrown the Hundred into civil war. As a result, the elders of the villages were quite happy to welcome Anjihosh and his Qin soldiers as restorers of order -- and Anji condemned all the Guardians, corrupt and good alike, as demons to be exterminated.
And then, as Kellas reports to his king, we see one of the most disturbing changes. For all that Anji was going to do his best to respect the culture and customs of the Hundred, he has made Law Rock his palace. This was a sacred place where the Law was written out on a pillar, where all were free to come and visit and see with their own eyes the Las that governed the Hundred. On festival days, young men often made it a challenge to climb the face of Law Rock. But now Anji has put an end to the free coming and going of ordinary people. Anyone who wants to climb the Thousand Steps and visit the palace must obtain a pass. And anyone who attempts to climb the rock face is to be put to death.
Seven years earlier, a young and impetuous Kellas had climbed the rock face for the heck of it, deciding that he could bear the boredom of his life no longer and would rather die daring than live on his knees. Something about his brashness attracted the king's attention, and instead of ordering Kellas killed, Anji offered him a place in the Black Wolves, the elite royal guard who also serve as the king's special agents.
In these early chapters we also get a view of Anji's family, now that the lovely Mai has been thrust from court and supplanted by Zarya, a princess of the Sirniakan Empire and a worshipper of Beltak Who Rules Alone. It's a place full of intrigues, where Zarya's sons are secretly killed so that she cannot seek to have them supplant Anji's designated heir Atani, who is actually the son of exiled Mai. And there is also tomboyish Dannarah, whose great ambition in life is to jess one of the great eagles and become a Reeve, perhaps even Marshal of the Reeves. Her father tries to explain that such things are not under his control, that he cannot give such status to even his beloved daughter, because the eagles make those decisions.
And then we turn a page and discover the words "Forty-Four Years Later."
This is not the first time that Kate Elliott has made a major chronological jump -- the Crossroads novels often had a gap between the introductory chapters and the main part of the novel. But this jump is more than double the largest jump in the earlier books, time enough for a whole generation or two to go from infancy to adulthood.
Anji is long dead, and so is Atani. Anji's grandson is now king in the Hundred, and there are more and more signs that he is not a good leader. Even his aunt Dannarah, now Marshal of the Reeves, is growing concerned at the way in which he is falling under the influence of the priests of Beltak who Rules Alone and making things steadily more difficult for the followers of the traditional polytheistic religion of the Hundred. Although Dannarah was raised in the faith of Beltak, she has become quite sympathetic to the old ways in the course of her service at various Reeve Halls about the land. And she knows that, while cultures can be changed, a traditional culture cannot be changed too swiftly without causing trouble.
Meanwhile, things are not going well among the Ri Amarah, the secretive people known as the Silvers because of the silver jewelry they wear as portable wealth. Sarai has lived as an outcast among her own people, hidden away in her family's estate with her only companion an elderly and disabled great-aunt, all because of something that happened before she was born. Something so terrible that nobody will talk about it, save to condemn her mother as having betrayed her people in a way that left Sarai tainted, forever suspect.
And then the call comes from the palace, demanding that Sarai leave her family to be betrothed to a young nobleman, Gilaras Herelian. He is the youngest son of a man condemned as a traitor, and is noteworthy primarily because he is the only one who can continue the family line. For you see, it was not enough for the royal government to punish his father for an act of treason with death. No, they also decreed that all the traitor's sons be castrated -- which was an effective death sentence for the two youngest, in spite of their mother's devoted nursing, thanks to the lack of aseptic procedure or effective antiseptics in this pre-industrial culture. (As always, Kate Elliott never spares us what it means to live in a pre-industrial society, whether it be the dangers of surgery without modern medical theory or how a village can consider itself rich because no one in it is going hungry -- yet she never wallows in the nastiness of it, unlike certain more popular authors). Gil was still in the womb at the time the sentence was carried out, so he was spared when he was finally born.
Perhaps because of that, he is grown into an indolent and somewhat feckless youth. A good part of his storyline involves the scrapes he gets into, at least partly because of his questionable friends, but also because of his own unrestrained impulsive nature. Unlike his older brothers, he feels no great need to prove himself or his loyalty to the new king.
However, he also dotes upon his new wife, and is delighted to discover her to be an intelligent and knowledgeable young woman. He encourages her curiosity, and she pursues her interest in the mysterious demon coils with redoubled effort now that she is in the capital.
But court is not an easy place for a Ri Amarah woman. By Ri Amarah tradition she must keep a Book of Accounts -- but by the tradition of the Sirnakarnians, women do not read and write. And they certainly do not take prized possessions into the chambers set aside for the periods of uncleanness associated with menstruation, or flatly refuse to part with those possessions for ritual burning afterward. Sarai's stubbornness in these matters quickly put her at odds with the queen, even as her husband is getting into more and more trouble.
For it is clear that the Beltak priesthood is manipulating things to their advantage, levying more and more expensive fees for things that were once free in order to snare the ordinary people in a net of debts beyond their capacity to repay, along with multiplying the number of forbidden things so that it is difficult or even impossible to avoid breaking one rule or another. As a result, the priests and their enforcers are increasingly able to arrest people at will and put them into the labor gangs, and nobody dares protest, lest some offense be found in their lives.
Gil's case is a murky one, since there is the matter of the Ri Amarah who died mysteriously after providing them with a ride in a hired carriage. But it's enough to get him sent into duress vile, and into the power of one of the few characters who approaches a pure black-hat villain without any redeeming qualities. Chief Roni is so viciously nasty that his abuses and humiliation of Gil made me seriously want to run him over with a truck, then back it up and run him over a second time. My response to that scene was so visceral that it left me wondering whether one could commit murder in one's heart by desiring to kill a purely fictional character.
Meanwhile, Chief Dannarah is having trouble of her own. Her foolish young nephew the king has decided that the old system by which eagles choose their own Reeves is no longer acceptable. It's simply too chaotic, and leads to all kinds of completely unsuitable people being jessed, including lowly people who should not aspire to rise to such lofty stations in life. People like Lifka, an outsider adopted into a clan, an outsider who by the lights of the priests ought to be a slave. Henceforth, when a Reeve dies, the eagle will no longer be permitted to return to the mountains for a period of mourning. Instead, the eagle will be taken into captivity and presented to suitable young men who have proven their worthiness to this position.
It works about as well as expected, with the eagles literally tearing several of the candidates to pieces. At least one eagle seems to have decided it prefers death to having to accept whatever it is given, but in another case one of the candidates realizes what he needs to do to make himself acceptable to the eagle before any other candidates are killed. Dannarah is horrified, but realizes that her nephew the king will not budge on the matter, thanks to the insistence of the Beltak priests.
Worse comes when the women Reeves are effectively cashiered. The bond between human and eagle can't be severed once formed, and King Jehosh is not yet ready to have the women Reeves executed outright to free the eagles for jessing by more suitable candidates. But he can order the women transferred to duties that give them no meaningful authority. They will henceforth carry messages and perform other light duties suitable to their gender, but will no longer confront wrongdoers or otherwise fight and exercise authority.
Disgusted with the systematic destruction of one of the deepest and most important traditions of the Hundred's system of rule by Law, Dannarah turns to Kellas for help. He proves to be a patriot and traditionalist at heart, disgusted by what the Beltak priests have done to his country and wanting to restore the old system by which the Law was first and foremost, and the apparatus of government, from the various village councils through the eagle Reeves and the courts, existed to serve and maintain it. Together they hatch a desperate plan, but we are left with one hell of a cliffhanger, and a serious reason to wonder whether they have instead succeeded only in making matters worse.
It is interesting to read this book not just in the context of the original Crossroads trilogy, but also in the light of the knowledge that the author is Jewish. For instance, while the characters may be gray, morality is not. Characters may have to make difficult decisions in an imperfect world of constrained options and incomplete information, but there are moral principles that are for the ages: justice for both victim and perpetrator, generosity toward the vulnerable and the sojourner, honest dealings and good old-fashioned hard work.
Furthermore, it can be argued that many of the themes and patterns of the novels are drawn from the Jewish scripture. The importance of the Law in the society of the Hundred echoes the centrality of the Torah, the five books of the Jewish Law, in the Jewish faith. The disorder in the Hundred after the failure of its system of judges and the eagerness of the people for a King to restore order echo the situation in ancient Israel at the end of the book of Judges, when everyone did as was right in his own sight and the Children of Israel went to the prophet Samuel begging for a king. And much as Samuel warned that a king would rule over them and tax them and otherwise become a tyrant, changing their way of life in negative rather than positive ways, in this volume, we see the consequences of the eagerness of the people of the Hundred to accept Anji as their king.
There is a second volume in the works. It has been written, and there is even a cover prepared. However, the date of its release has become mysteriously tentative, and it appears to have become stuck in publication hell. Why is hard to tell. Perhaps the books aren't selling as well as the publisher would like to see, and they're deciding to see if sales pick up before actually releasing the book. Perhaps they do not like some of the themes of these novels, in particular how a strong desire for justice can become an obsession to the point of becoming destructive, which may seem in the eyes of the doctrinaire to be a veiled critique of the Social Justice Warriors. There may be other things that we can't even begin to guess.
I just hope it comes out, because I want to see how well or badly things turn out as a result of Dannarah and Kellas's actions at the end of this novel. And I definitely want to know what happens to Sarai, considering that she ended up in one hell of a pickle.
Review posted June 20, 2018
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