THE ATLAN SAGA: 5 THE ATLAN SAGA by Jane Gaskell THE SERPENT THE DRAGON ATLAN THE CITY SOME SUMMER LANDS SOME SUMMER LANDS JANE GASKELL DAW BOOKS, INC. DONALD A. WOLLHEIM. PUBLISHER 1633 Broadway, New York, NY 10019 Copyright � 1977, by Jane Gaskell. All Rights Reserved. A DAW Book by arrangement with the author. Cover art by James Gumey. DAW Collectors Book No. 666 Firs! DAW Printing. March 1986 123456789 PRINTED IN THE USA. For Dwee Counihan (whose SAGA is such a joy) and Barbara CONTENTS Introduction by Tanilh Lee PART ONE 1 My Grandmother's Hygienic Palace 2 The Neighbourhood Abortionist's Bam 3 The Lynx in the Withy Cage PART TWO ! The Norther Hills 2 Turrets 3 The Darling Despair 4 The Haunt in the Well 5 The Blind Bed 6 Journey North 7 Northstrong PART THREE 1 The Melancholy Plain. East 2 The Mystic Floating Penis 3 Dissolve INTRODUCTION ONCE UPON a time. when life was rather drab, I found another place to go to�a place of hot gold light, dark green forest dripping with insects, strange bird calls, rainbows, of moun- tains, hills and plains�a landscape large enough to be lost in, where the cities were as savage as the geography, and where the army, in whose wake I was being dragged, mounted its officers (when not on wine-girls) on the stalking backs of huge flightless birds- ... I'd never read anything like it, and I couldn't believe my luck- Along with helping to save my sanity at that time, Jane Gaskell had introduced me to a world that remains for me as primally fresh as its own origins. And to a heroine whose very weaknesses are her strengths. Cija, pronounced Keeya. Pleasing, maddening, poly-endurable Cija, ever unable to languish, unpredictably sensible, haphazardly armored by the roughest-shod experience. She is by turns a sulky aristocrat, a dashing tomboy, a cynical slut. a seduc- tress quite unconscious of her charms. She is an innocent who logically reels at life's illogical punishments. She makes the journey most of us do, from the complacent security of infancy, out into the unfair world. Forever disillusioned, somehow Cija never gives up hope that things, and people, will improve- At the same instant Cija shows she has grasped that this is most unlikely. Never "Tragic," there comes to be a sadness in her soul. I read the first books�The Serpent. The Dragon, then published as one volume�as an unputdownable adventure. That it was beautifully and often very humorously written, that the characters, even when giant size, were totally credi- ble, that the writer understood their psychology, and human psychology at large�all that I took for granted as, with the best books, one often does. Grabbing up and gobbling my way through Allan later, the same process worked on me. I was ecstatic over her use of words, and her comments on the mortal condition, and the fact that she could make the most exotic of things seem as normal as tea and toast�while losing nothing of their foreignness, the peculiarity of what she conveyed. And, again, 1 couldn't put the book down. We X SOME SUMMER LANDS had to wait for the third* novel. The City. The day I got it, 1 was almost afraid to start�this wasn't so long as the others. If I wasn't careful, I might finish it in a night. (By dint of great control. I made it last two.) Like the others, it had an episodic story-line that pulled you headlong, passages of description that made the mouth water, laughter and rage, and by now a touch of proper bitterness, for to live Cija's life would be, surely, no joke- But there was beginning, too, to be something more. I detected it, reveled in it, explained it to myself this way: That -by now Cija had enough past for both heroine and writer to recall and re-examine it in the light of subsequent events. From about sixteen, I had read elsewhere in Ms. Gaskell's oeuvres, always fascinated by what I found there. But the element in me that was currently making of me primarily a fantasy writer made the Cija books my primary target. If I was low, or had flu, 1 would go back to The Serpent and start right in again. I'd bathe the gray areas of mind and heart in those wet forests, volcanic cities, those wolf winters, those sunsets of red skulls. I think that at the date of writing this, late in 1984, I can guess I have read the first Atlan novels about five times each, and the first volume six. After Allan, anyway, mere came the longest wait of ali. There was a problem, too, in the case of Cija. I suppose I instinctively felt that. Even though the last book. The City, had ended on one of the great cliff-hanging sequel-setters of all time. Though more was about to happen, had to happen, what more could Cija offer from her multitudinous cupboard of responses? It was not that her possibility had been ex- hausted, but that the character herself was tired out. You could feel it. She was real enough to be on the verge of total collapse. And now 1 have a strange matter to relate, believe or disbelieve as you will. I have never met Jane Gaskell, and knew nothing of her work habits or program. But 1 distinctly recollect that I thought to myself a year or so after the third (fourth now) Allan book, that it seemed to me the way to go on with those tumbling lands and lives was to write the next book in the person of Cija's daughter. *Since The Serpent is now published in two volumes. The City has become, of course, ^fourth novel. INTRODUCTION xl Imagine my astonishment when, around ten years after Atlan, Some Summer Lands appeared, a history told now not by Cija, but by Seka, her second-bom. Jane Gaskell, how- ever, uses a device 1 would have missed, would never have thought of. perhaps wouldn't have dared to try. It was sound precedents (with Charles Dickens, for example). Seka con- structs her book from the vantage of adulthood, yet she tells it unvarnished as she saw it when a child. It is a frank and occasionally shocking series of revelations that follow. Any kid gloves employed in the past works have been sloughed- Children are normally savages, and the sexual and social savagery which Seka exhibits, coupled to the profoundly adult observations to which so many intelligent small children are prone, startle, jolt, amuse, disturb the reader, and may sometimes even throw one sprawling. Some Summer Lands is a very different book altogether. And yet utterly connected to the forerunners. It contains their spirit of primal things�and I don't merely mean in the terms of era or landscape. The novel is an adventure both in the sense of plot and in the manner of the telling. Ultimately, too, it is a metaphysical book. A set of metaphysics so lightly and readably presented that there is no reason on earth not to forget 1 just said that. These pages can be absorbed as a fantasy novel without a sideways glance. Although a novel is very certainty what it is. Apart from anything else, one now has the lemon-Juice joy of seeing all the characters�most of all, Cija herself�those creatures one has only been able to look at with a single perspective�suddenly advanced through another, and a completely unlike other at that. (Cija's view of Seka, and Seka's view of Seka, should give pause to the wisest parent.) Seka. naturally, has the child's pure skepti- cism, which makes Cija's redundant. And Seka, unswayed by the conscious or un- sexual-romantic yearnings of the pubescent girl, judges all genders with equal asperity. Sex to Seka is body-pleasure, which can be the gift of anything from a door to a set of male fingers. On that level, door and man have the same competing chance. But personalities, auras� Seka is sharp on those. And the wild dark witchcrafts, the gleaming revelations gain a brilliance and a deceptive sim- plicity, coming as they do out of the mouth of a babe. To my mind, this book, the rogue of the quartet-quintet, is perhaps the most significant of them all. It shows what xli SOME SUMMER LANDS sequels always should, a leap forward, using the previous material as a launching pad. It shows a daring, and a vital development, it shows the blazing spark is continuous. That curious something I sensed beginning in Allan with its hind-sight, is brought to full expression in Some Summer Lands. Yes, it has the same burning or murky vistas, the laughter and pain, the imaginative breadth and height of its siblings, and a whole mosaic of outlandish, extraordinary scenes all its own. But it has also a quality of inner thought, of intellectual guts that the previous novels possess but do not expand to the same degree. The very fact of Seka's pristine perception enables you to see through the glamours to the bedrock, or the fatal flaws. It is Seka who shows the corres- ponding child in Zerd, and, too, the panther-demon of Zerd's psychic life�Cija found only the boy and the god. While the alternate attraction and repulsion of Smahi! is peeled away by Seka's vision of him, bit by bit. If the new vision is less or more palatable, will be the individual's choice. And mean- while, the forces of the world, of Atlan herself, are given room to work their destiny alongside the human personas. No convention or moral, literary or commercial, is allowed to hold anything up, or back. Everything fulfils itself, in what- ever sense that fulfilment has come to mean. Ail of which said, there is yet an elusive quality to the book which frankly can only be discovered by reading it. So turn the page and find out. Firsts are always special: I envy you your first reading of Some Summer Lands. �Tanith Lee London. 1984 My Grandmother's Hygienic Palace THIS PALE YOUNG woman, looking romantically out of win- dows, is my earliest memo...
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