Here Be Dragons (34 page)

In
Wyrd Sisters
, the kingdom is unhappy without a king; in other fantasy stories, the realm's need for a ruler is more pronounced, with countries lacking a sovereign somehow incomplete. One such example is Terry Brooks's Kingdom of Landover, which is first presented in
Magic Kingdom for Sale/Sold!
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Devoid of a king, the kingdom experiences social breakdown, environmental degradation, and failing magic. Ben, the buyer of the magic kingdom, realizes how king, land, and magic go together; that the king is more than a figurehead. To become the king that Landover needs, Ben has to do more than buy it and its throne; he has to be recognized as king by his subjects, and in order for them to grant this recognition, Ben must commit himself fully to the kingdom. Like Lancre, Landover needs a king to care for it, but it also needs a king to care for its people. Thus, before the magical healing of the land can commence, the king must use his political skill to heal society. Only by fulfilling his duty to his subjects and showing his commitment to the realm can Ben defeat Landover's enemies, cleanse its environment, bring its magic back, and give new life to its magical royal castle. In Landover, the realm is incomplete without its ruler; political power and the direct link to the land are interwoven.

In Brooks's novel, as in Ende's and Pratchett's, the plot mainly concerns restoring the proper ruler and thus saving the realm. All three novels combine the ruler's direct link to the land with political power, although
in various ways—Bastian comes to assume a combination when there is none. My final example demonstrates how the process of separating these two elements of rulership can serve to bring out a story's core theme. Tad Williams's
War of the Flowers
is set in a modernized Faerie whose class society is ruled by a number of powerful Flower families.
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The novel describes the internal power struggle of these families as well as an uprising of the discontented masses, ending with the transition from a tyrannical oligarchy to a new political order. (Democracy is hinted at but not confirmed.) The world's backstory also tells of an earlier coup, during which a cabal of Flower fairies imprisons Oberon and Titania, the original king and queen of Faerie, and seize power. The coup separates the political power of the rulers from their direct link to the realm. Despite being imprisoned, Oberon and Titania, like Fantastica's Childlike Empress, represent the essence of their realm; and like Ben in Landover, they are needed to bring magic into the land. In Williams's novel, these traits prove to be individual rather than connected to the office of the monarchs. The Flower fairy oligarchs cannot put the dethroned sovereigns to death because such an act would destroy the realm, but they
can
seize political power. When the oligarchy is finally overthrown, the former king and queen are not restored to power, however; instead they disappear, although the protagonist is told that they are in all probability still alive. The original rulers' refusal to make a bid for the throne underscores the separation of power and direct link to the land, showing the latter to be a personal trait rather than a political issue. In Williams's highly politicized version of Faerie, a direct link to the land may be required to channel magic, but it does not guarantee that the ruler will provide just governance. As in any modern democracy, the political power belongs to the people, no matter who happens to constitute the essence of the realm.
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The examples just provided suggest some of the many possibilities afforded by a direct link between ruler and realm. The following two sections examine examples of the relationship between ruler and realm, before moving on to Dark Lords and Dark Lands.

RULING THE MYTHICAL LANDSCAPE: THE FISHER KING IN
LAST CALL
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The first of the books in what Tim Powers refers to as his “Fisher King trilogy,”
²⁶
Last Call
has a plot that revolves around the mythical King
who, unbeknownst to the population in general, rules over the western United States. Powers's name for the three books indicates the centrality of the Fisher King motif, and the author's treatment of it is intimately tied to how he has constructed the world of the novels.
Last Call
is set solely in the primary world, but it is a primary world where, under the surface of the everyday, nonmagical domain of mundanity, there exists a domain of mythical forces. Gary K. Wolfe observes “a genuine mythic sensibility at work in [Powers's] fiction. […] It's an almost totally paranoid universe, where nothing is quite as it seems—in other words, a universe of myth.”
²⁷
I would add that the sense of paranoia observed by Wolfe derives from the fact that the mythical is obscured from everyday life; the reasons underlying the mundane events remain mysterious to the protagonists. The mythical causes behind everything that befalls the protagonists only slowly become apparent. The novel's two domains, of mundanity and myth, are thus kept separate yet intimately connected. Mundane events that have their causes in the mythical domain simply lead to incomprehension in those who are unaware of that domain—they understand
what
happens but not
why
(and invented causes and coincidence only take them so far). Rather than insistent explanations, it is leaps of faith in the face of too incredible coincidences that ultimately make the protagonists—Crane, Mavranos, and Diana—accept the mythical domain and the meaning it provides.

In the mythical domain reside “the eternal and terribly potent figures that secretly animated and drove humanity, the figures that the psychologist Carl Jung had called archetypes and that primitive peoples, in fear, had called gods” (26). These mythical forces are represented through symbols in myths, belief systems, rituals, and stories, and are connected to mundanity through such symbols. Each particular force is surrounded by, and defined through, a cluster of symbols shared by and linking those various myths that make up the mosaic of the mythical domain. Each symbol captures a trait or an aspect of the force with which it is associated and can be found in any number of myths and stories: one example would be how the Queen is also the Moon Goddess, both virgin and mother; Pallas Athena and Artemis, Isis and Ishtar, Demeter and the Virgin Mary all symbolize this force, and her traits are captured in the Empress Tarot card (see 273).

Through the symbolism of the mythical forces, the mythical domain interacts with mundanity. An understanding of the symbols imparts meaning to seemingly meaningless events. Wildly blooming rosebushes
become an omen of impending demise when they are understood as a powerful symbol of death; by keeping them tamed, their owner symbolically tames death (24). Putting one's tie and sunglasses on one's friend's decapitated head makes it, symbolically, one's own head (199–200). To enter the mythic domain is to understand this domain of symbols, to learn to see the world—to employ Wolfe's expression—as a universe of myth. In
Last Call
, the two domains are not separated by a physical boundary, nor do they exist in parallel. They are separated by knowledge, different in terms of how the world is understood. Symbols provide mundane events with an added layer of causality through the mythical forces they represent, but they also afford means to affect these forces. Rituals are, in Powers's novel, a symbolic manipulation of the forces, but impromptu use of symbols works in a similar manner, such as when the protagonists “psychically camouflage” their car as a bus by adding to it symbols for a great number of personalities (141–42, 169).

Powers draws on a great number of sources for the symbol complexes of the mythical domain and its forces. Four of the most central sources, and most relevant to the mythical King figure on which the plot centers, are Tarot cards, James Frazer's
The Golden Bough
(1890–1915), Jessie L. Weston's
From Ritual to Romance
(1920), and T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land
(1922). The most explicit collection of symbols related to the forces of the mythic domain are the Tarot cards. In the novel, the Lombardy Zeroth deck is portrayed as having particularly great powers, the symbols employed on the cards tapping the depths of the human collective unconscious. It is a card from the Lombardy Zeroth deck that destroys Crane's eye, and in a poker game played with the deck, he unknowingly sells his body to the incumbent King. The cards are even described as having a life of their own, if only in the mind of the person handling them. By association, however, other Tarot decks and even the modern playing cards derived from them are also powerful symbols in the mythical domain. Buying a hand of cards is thus of great mythical importance. “Fortune-telling by cards [is]
pre
scriptive rather than
de
scriptive,” Crane and Mavranos are told. “[A] hand of Poker is a number of qualities,” so if “you
pay
money, you've
bought
[…] those qualities.” (113) By their nature, however, the playing cards represent the most random aspect of the mythic forces, chance rather than fortune or destiny.

Where the cards portray the forces of the mythical domain through their symbolism, other myths and stories offer descriptions of these forces and how to relate to them in their various guises. Apart from a
few references to King Arthur, Powers's King character recalls Weston's treatment of the Fisher King figure in the Grail myths and her linking him to nature cults and vegetation gods, such as Tammuz and Adonis. The King character is also associated with the many symbols of the vegetation gods and fertility rites described by Frazer, to the point where any discussion of the King figure in
Last Call
must take these works into account.

The fourth source that Powers has mined for King symbolism, Eliot's
The Waste Land
, resonates powerfully in the novel through numerous quotations, allusions, and explicit references ranging from the obvious (chapter 17 is called “The Sound of Horns and Motors” and contains extensive quotations from “The Fire Sermon”) to the oblique (apart from its poker allusion, the novel's title could be taken to allude to the pub closing in “A Game of Chess”). Rather than only using references to the Fisher King figure from Eliot's poem,
²⁸
however, Powers has brought the poem's imagery into the cluster of mythical symbols that surrounds his King, thus facilitating a Fisher King–oriented reading of
The Waste Land
from the perspective of
Last Call
. Many of the Eliot lines quoted in chapter 17, for instance, follow almost immediately after the passage in which the person “fishing in the dull canal” muses “upon the king my brother's wreck / And on the king my father's death before him.”
²⁹
In the novel, the quoting is done by the King (associated with the Fisher King figure), which confers Fisher King characteristics on Eliot's fishing royalty regardless of other possible interpretations.
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Frequently,
Last Call
explicitly demonstrates how to read
The Waste Land
's symbols in terms of the King. Thus, the “Fire Sermon” line “Old man with wrinkled female breasts” (163; l. 219) becomes an obvious description of the King, who is a man inhabiting the body of an old woman. Less obviously, the end of
The Waste Land
(line 430 translates as “the Aquitanian Prince with his ruined tower”) also recalls Powers's King: in the novel, the King's tower is symbolically destroyed, and whereas
Last Call
only tells us that he hails from France,
Earthquake Weather
reveals the King to come from the Bordeaux region in Aquitaine.
³¹

With these sources in mind, we can address the question of how the King in
Last Call
is related to his realm through the mythical domain, turning first to Weston's opinion of the Fisher King figure of the Grail texts. Like other characters that have come down to us through medieval romances, the Fisher King lacks a definitive source. Instead, he appears
under various names and in various guises in a number of medieval texts. Comparing several of these medieval texts, Weston finds that

the presentment of this central figure is much confused; generally termed Le Roi Pescheur, he is sometimes described as in middle life, and in full possession of his bodily powers. Sometimes while still comparatively young he is incapacitated by the effects of a wound, and is known also by the title of Roi Mehaigné, or Maimed King. Sometimes he is in extreme old age, and in certain closely connected versions the two ideas are combined, and we have a wounded Fisher King, and an aged father, or grandfather. But […] in no case is the Fisher King a youthful character; that distinction is reserved for his Healer, and successor.
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This summary of the Fisher King's characteristics also covers the basic traits of the Kings in
Last Call
. The reader meets a succession of three Kings: the gangster Benjamin Siegel is King during part of the back-story; Georges Leon rules for most of the narrative; and Scott Crane takes the throne in the denouement. All three Kings are associated with fishing, and Leon and Crane are wounded if not incapacitated. Leon most clearly matches Weston's description, even combining apparently contradictory versions: through his ability to take over others' bodies, he is simultaneously in “middle life” and “extreme old age,” both father and son—one of the bodies he has taken is that of his son, Richard. Crane is the “youthful” successor, healer of the land if not of his predecessor. In
Last Call
, the land is not healed by healing the King, however, but by having a King of sterility replaced by one of fertility.

All three Kings have traits that associate them with the Fisher King figure, most notably related to fishing and various wounds. For Siegel and Leon, fishing is described as part of their struggle over the King-ship (17, 20); Crane has sustained a number of fishing-related wounds when growing up (69, 93) and is, notably, given a nonhealing wound in his side by a fishing spear, thus adding to the notional link between the Fisher King and Christ already established by the fish symbolism. Apart from their association with fishing, Crane's injuries offer symbolic connections to the (nonhealing) wound that the Fisher King figure, as Roi Mehaigné, has in several versions. In Chrétien de Troyes's
Perceval, ou Le Conte du Graal
(c. 1182), for instance, the Fisher King has a leg wound; the same goes for the later Fisher King figure, King Pelles, in Sir Thomas
Malory's
Le Morte Darthur
(1485)
³³
—and Crane suffers throughout the story from a self-inflicted stab wound in the leg. Leon's original body, the ninety-one-year-old “Doctor Leaky,” is wounded in a manner similar to the Fisher King Anfortas in Wolfram von Eschenbach's
Parzival
(c. 1210). Anfortas suffers a nonhealing and evil-smelling wound from a spear thrust through his testicles;
³⁴
“Doctor Leaky” has had his genitals shot off, leaving the body sterile and accompanied by a pervasive smell of leaking urine.