Here Be Dragons (36 page)

Amaz is more than a
written
palimpsest, however; it is a multilayered material record, a palimpsest in an archaeological or architectural sense.
⁴⁶
The notion of layer upon layer informs the descriptions of the city. History has left palimpsestic traces, with a new layer for each colonial power and foreign occupation (64–65), and other layers are added
when parts of the city are erased by fire and earthquake (14). This layering process is so clearly visible that Casey eventually supposes the city as a whole to be like a large version of the
damnatio memoriae
mosaic, repeatedly knocked down and rebuilt over the centuries since the two kings' war (176). Each new layer reflects a new winner in control of the city's physical environment, a new ruler to determine the topography.

The winner determines the present but also the past. The story of the Jewel King competes with the story of Sozran, each version traditionally casting the enemy in an unfavorable light. The dominant story of the Jewel King (the country's national epic) maintains the
damnatio memoriae
policy indicated by the graffiti and mosaic palimpsests, generally refusing Sozran even a name and referring to him simply as “the corrupt king.” In palimpsests, however, traces of the suppressed text remain; and in the Jewel King tale, Sozran's name does occur but is mentioned only once (188). Other stories also overlie, superimpose, and leak into each other: the fictive world of the Two Kingdoms, into which Angie has retreated and which she creates through her writing, ends up as a layer over Amaz when she ventures out (41–42, 156–57). Amaz, for its part, leaks into Angie's creation, changing her perceptions and causing her to recreate, in the Two Kingdoms, the old epic of the Jewel King without having read or heard it (165, 236). Even when the Parmenters finally manage to escape from Amaz, the superimposition of stories continues. As Mitchell and the girls tell one another of their adventures, “[t]heir voices overlapped” (235).

Jagged or curved becomes the ultimate question in Goldstein's novel, whether applied to a street, a piece of writing, or a legendary sword. Jagged or curved determines, and is determined by, allegiance, and the ancient feud between the two rulers' supporters shapes and reshapes the city's topography. Amaz thus becomes a place where the outsider is hopelessly lost—sides have to be taken in order to maneuver through the palimpsestic urban landscape and negotiate the stories it tells. It is certainly not a good place for tourists.

WHERE DARK LORDS LIVE: LANDSCAPES OF EVIL IN TOLKIEN, DONALDSON, AND JORDAN

The worst tourist spot that a fantasy world can offer is the territory that surrounds the stronghold, or prison, of the resident Dark Lord. Such a
realm reflects the evil of its ruler through highly unpleasant living conditions, being too hot, too cold, or simply too poisonous for normal life to thrive; and like the Dark Lords themselves, their lands share some general characteristics but are on the whole distinctly individual. Although a thorough exploration of the Dark Lord character is beyond the scope of this book,
⁴⁷
we may note how the genre presents Dark Lords as anything from evil gods and semidivine beings (the three examples in this chapter belong to this end of the scale) to “ordinary” mortals who have turned to evil,
⁴⁸
and other evil lords are best described as being somewhere between these extremes.
⁴⁹
Regardless of origin, the lords' association with dark powers invariably turns them into the epitome of evil, frequently reduced to destructive forces with only a single motivating goal
⁵⁰
—and they all seem to share a predilection for inhospitable dwellings.

I would like to clarify that by using the expressions
landscape of evil
and
evil landscape
, I do not mean that the landscape itself is necessarily evil. That would imply a volition that the land does not generally have; to the contrary, the land is commonly portrayed as a victim of its ruler's evil. (Tolkien provides a clear example of this.) Rather, the land is an expression, through its physical characteristics as well as through its flora and fauna, of the evil that resides there, mainly in terms of a Dark Lord. For this reason, I have refrained from using a (possibly) less ambiguous term such as
cacotopia
or
maletopia
(bad or evil place), as such a term removes the focus from the connection between the moral nature of, in particular, the evil rulers and the landscape of their realm. Furthermore, while the fantasy genre tends to favor a realm ruled by a Dark Lord, an evil landscape may well be constructed as a prison for its denizens (as in the case of Shai'tan). Although there is a fundamental difference between a terrible place created for oneself and one intended for someone else, I have treated these types similarly, focusing primarily on how the evil place is described.

“Such Starved Ignoble Nature”: Portrayals of Evil Lands

The idea that certain types of landscapes come with a peculiar, all but built-in, moral character is so widespread in the fantasy genre that when authors avoid it, they do so with an almost palpable self-consciousness. In her section on subversions of the portal–quest fantasy, Mendlesohn cites Barbara Hambly's novel
The Magicians of Night
(1992), observing how Hambly “[severs] the link between landscape and morality. The hills
that are splashed with golden sunlight, covered in wild ivy and buttercups, shelter evil, not elves.”
⁵¹
Mendlesohn and Hambly both recognize that portal–quest fantasy expects places of evil to be ugly and unpleasant.

The conception of what an evil landscape should look like goes far back among the genre's taproot texts,
⁵²
including any number of dismal hells and realms of the dead. An early example is provided by the “d
gel lond” (secret, mysterious, or dark land) around Grendel's snake-infested mere in
Beowulf
.
⁵³
With its windswept cliffs, perilous fens, and dark woods full of wolves, it bears more than a passing resemblance to the mountains and the dark, disquieting lake near Moria's western gate (cf. FR, II, iv). Hell (Christian or otherwise), of course, is one of our most typical evil landscapes, Dante Alighieri providing Western literature's most influential depiction of the infernal regions. Dante's
Inferno
notwithstanding, lakes of fire and smoking brimstone tend to appear as the centerpiece of the majority of Christian Hells, but John Milton has some of his fallen angels explore beyond the fiery center and the surrounding cold, where they find other doleful landscapes, places of evil “Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds, / Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, / Abominable, inutterable.”
⁵⁴
One of the most vivid descriptions of an evil landscape in English literature occurs in Robert Browning's “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855). Roland explains how he has never seen “Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve: / For flowers—as well expect a cedar grove!”
⁵⁵
Plants are scarce no matter how hardy or prolific normally; even grass grows “as scant as hair / In leprosy” (st. 13:1–2). Two stanzas are worth quoting in full, as their echoes appear in the fantasy texts I discuss afterward:

No! penury, inertness and grimace,

In some strange sort, were the land's portion. “See
Or shut your eyes,” said Nature peevishly,

“It nothing skills: I cannot help my case:

'T is the Last Judgment's fire must cure this place,
Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.” (st. 11)

Places like this, lifeless landscapes of which Nature itself is ashamed and that can (implicitly or explicitly) be redeemed by nothing less than the end of the world, can be found in fantasy's many realms of evil. Browning took the title for his poem from
King Lear
(1623), and according to Tom Shippey, Edgar's snatch of song “Child Rowland to the dark tower came” is also part of the genesis of
The Lord of the Rings
;
⁵⁶
but it
is certainly Browning's grim landscape rather than Shakespeare's line that anticipates Mordor and its Dark Tower. Other early fantasy writers make use of similar landscapes of evil: Sir Kato's Outer Land in Astrid Lindgren's
Mio, min Mio
(1954; transl.
Mio, My Son
1956) is also a dark, stony, dead realm.
⁵⁷
Its dreary, dim daylight reminds us of Browning's poem and of the gloom in Dante's
Inferno
, whereas the blackness of its night is more akin to the “darkness visible” in Milton's Hell.
⁵⁸
The gloom of the evil landscape may, in fact, be a legacy bequeathed by the lands of the dead. The realms of Hades into which Odysseus and Æneas descend are certainly dark, at least on the outskirts; but they also offer groves and quite pleasant fields, making them appear almost cheerful compared to Childe Roland's plain.
⁵⁹

It is worth noting that the landscape in Browning's poem changes. While still nightmarish, it does not remain sterile:

Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,

Now patches where some leanness of the soil's
Broke into moss or substances like boils;

Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him

Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils. (st. 26)

This diseased landscape recalls Milton's perverse nature and “inutterable abominations”; rather than offering an image of death, it portrays the process of dying and decay. While less common in fantasy literature, this image still anticipates a number of evil landscapes, places where putrefaction destroys natural beauty.

As Mendlesohn's example from Hambly demonstrates, however, there is also an awareness of this traditional evil landscape among fantasy writers, and attempts have been made to vary the concept. Among the texts most explicitly conscious of the tradition is Glen Cook's
The Black Company
, wherein the Dark Lord is a Dark Lady:

We sprawled on the flank of a grassy hill. The Tower rose above the horizon due south. That basaltic cube was intimidating even from ten miles away—and implausible in its setting. Emotion demanded a surround of fiery waste, or at best a land perpetually locked in winter. Instead, this country was a vast green pasture, gentle hills with small farms dotting their southern hips. Trees lined the deep, slow brooks snaking between.

Nearer the Tower the land became less pastoral, but never reflected the gloom Rebel propagandists placed around the Lady's stronghold. No brimstone and barren, broken plains. No bizarre, evil creatures strutting over scattered human bones. No dark clouds ever rolling and grumbling in the sky.
⁶⁰

Cook's narrator (a mercenary who finds himself fighting on the side of evil) cannot quite believe that this is the Evil Land, partly because Evil, he feels, is neither fertile nor pleasant. Feels, yes; but a reader well acquainted with the fantasy genre would realize that not only emotion but also tradition demands a wasted land of evil, including allusions to wintry Narnia under the White Witch as well as to the volcanic plains around Mount Doom in Mordor. Indeed, the Mordor allusion is reinforced in the second paragraph by references to (the absence of) “brimstone and barren, broken plains” and “dark clouds ever rolling and grumbling in the sky.” Even the word
gloom
brings us echoes from Sauron's realm, given that continuous gloom is, as Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans point out, a recurrent image in descriptions of Mordor.
⁶¹

These images of the second paragraph are attributed to a source much more distinct than “emotion”: Rebel propaganda. The Rebels are the opposing side; that is, they would be the protagonists of a typical quest fantasy—the forces of Good fighting the Evil Lady. In Cook's novel, they are only good by default, not because they occupy any moral high ground, something that is clear from their willingness to spread lies to vilify their enemy. By invalidating the Rebel propaganda version of the evil land, a version that fits traditional fantasy expectations nicely, Cook also calls into question the goodness of any number of “good guys” throughout especially portal–quest fantasy, suggesting that the black-and-white-ness of the form results from the victors writing the history book.
⁶²

Nevertheless, the general conception of the evil landscape in fantasy is brought to us through focal characters on the side of Good, and the various realms they describe are everything that the pastoral land of Cook's Lady is not. The three locations explored in the section that follows, from
The Lord of the Rings
, the First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, and the Wheel of Time, demonstrate how traditional images of landscapes of evil may be used to reflect the individual characteristics of various Dark Lords and portray evil in different ways. While any number of portal–quest fantasies could provide examples, the two latter Dark
Lords and realms have been chosen for their distinct similarities and differences vis-à-vis Sauron and Mordor. Donaldson offers a quite similar landscape sprung from a different view of evil and its workings; Jordan's fairly Tolkienesque portrayal of evil results in a (superficially) different evil landscape.