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"Galdra
Was My Terzian"
by
F.S. Kim
Author's
Notes:
Subtitle
to this essay: "Or How Pell Learned to Stop Pining
and Love the Lion."
*Spoiler
Warning* This essay refers to specific
incidents in the latest Wraeththu novel, The
Shades of Time and Memory. If you have not yet
read the book and do NOT want "spoilers," please hit
the Back button,
because this essay is a minefield. Don't say you weren't warned.
Thanks to ladyshazizzle and fredathebagel,
who provided excellent critical feedback for this essay. All sloppy mistakes
in thinking can only be attributed to the writer herself.
 So many disclaimers and where to start? First off, this essay
probably will have nothing deep or meaningful to say about spirituality
or sexuality or pop culture or even much of politics. To take
the sin of triviality even further, it shamefully spoils the
newest of the Wraeththu histories, The Shades of Time and
Memory and for what? Merely to scratch this reader's insistent itchy
misgivings about "the relationship" (the one, you know)
and that pesky and embarrassing question, "Pell, do you
think we are in love?" (Enchantments, 198).
Are these nuanced
emotional aspects best left alone? Don't the uncertainty and
prickly discomfort of the characters fuel their narrative drive,
and isn't that what we want, rather than tied up loose ends?
After all, "finished" characters end up on the shelf (like
Swift). Perhaps.
But who's to say? Maybe this ramble will turn
into a coherent and complex reflection on Time, Memory, and
exorcising or living with the past. Then again, it might just
be an excuse to wallow in the very interpersonal melodrama that
Shades seems to be moving away from (and moving towards
a grander cosmic destiny). To quote Cal, "Who knows? Who cares?"
"Well,
after the happy ending, life carries on. It has carried on.
End of story, or rather next installment of story."
-The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure
Of course, the ending of Shades brings us back to re-assess
the evolution (or stagnation) of Cal and Pell in all the previous
books. This essay, and the insane marginalia scribbled in my
own copy of Shades, all exploded from exasperation and
disbelief at that last argument/ reconciliation between our two
lovers. They made up, hmm, in a way, but too briefly, too quickly
— do I trust this?
I had to go back to the novel over and
over again, take note of every expression, twitch, remark, passing
thought, theme, and carefully (and stodgily) write up a "behind
the scenes" the explication of what those bits really mean.
Something that could become a reasonable basis for my fan dreams
of "happily ever after." After all, that short reconciliation
might be as fleeting as the ending of Fulfilments —
trick us
into believing things are all right, then crash the castle in
the clouds in the next volume.
How
much fan fiction was written post-Fulfilments (and
even post-Wraiths) based on those last few pages and "We have
learned how to love again. That makes up for all the bad times" (Fulfilments,
310), expanding on our deep-seated need for comfort and narrative
closure? And of course, an elaborate fluffy set up, where we
can play happy families with them forever. Surely, I'm not the
only one.
"I
understand that now. What I went through, at the time it
was pure hell, but if I hadn't experienced it all, I wouldn't
be who I am now. And I quite like the har I am."
-The Shades of Time and Memory
As Teapot 's
review of Shades deplored, all our "fluffy
bunnies" have been throttled. Cal settling into life in Immanion,
in the first four chapters, is claustrophobic and heart-wrenching.
Furtive, tense, looking over his shoulder, not knowing what
to do, he's floundering helpless in what looks like the role
he'd been trying to avoid for 30 years. The long-awaited reunion
doesn't seem to last much longer than the briefly sketched
out scenes at the end of Fulfilments. All
the hints from Cal, Pell, Flick, everyone, seems to come true,
in painful detail: "Sometimes,
I am sure, Pell and I will hate each other's guts because we
have both changed so much" (Fulfilments, 310). Certainly
the case. But one of the most striking themes of Shades that
struck me was not how the characters have changed in the 30 year
divide, but how much some haven't, and are finally forced to
face "time and memory" (the theme for this installment).
I'm talking about Pellaz of course.
This was the tribe that should have incepted Cal. He was like
them in appearance. What would life have been like if that had
ever happened?
-The Shades of Time and Memory
After flinching (every page, each reading) through Pell's affair
with Galdra har Freyhella, that cleaned-up and "pure" (and
blandly Norse) substitute for Cal whom Pell turns to after Cal's
disappearance, I had to pinpoint the source of my discomfort
with this episode, and what it means for Pellaz. What? No faithfully
ever after? Did he mean anything to you?
Galdra har Freyhella
does seem to be the perfect answer to all Pell 's (and an
impatient Hegemony's) list of requirements for second Tigron:
seemingly noble, stately, steady and serene, a born leader, "like
a warrior from myth, wearing wolfskin, his hair in braids, hanging
over his chest" (Shades, 355). Complete with what Pell
calls "integrity, or nobility, or something." Or
as Cal puts it, "far too saintly to be even remotely bearable."
First
comparing his torrid affair to Cal's with Panthera (Fulfilments),
Pellaz finally concludes that his desperate and dependent fling
with Galdra was more similar to Cal's and Terzian's
relationship in Bewitchments. Was this last shot meant
to be a lover 's subtle warning, that the affair meant more
than the argument betrayed? Surely, then, to the mystified
reader, Panthera must be a more dangerous shadow, a more effective
emotional threat than Terzian? After all, we the readers got
a more personal view of this pair's entanglement up close in
Fulfilments, rather more intimate and touching than
the oblique mentions of Terzian (and his relationship with
Cal) through the eyes of his son Swift in Bewitchments.
The unspoken angle of Terzian 's place in this ghostly triangle,
then, is at the heart of what's bothering our icy first Tigron.
"These
were memories that could never be changed. It was as if they
were carved in stone in my head: an epic frieze, image after
image after image."
-The
Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit
Strangely disconcerting and disorienting to the reader eagerly
continuing from the last scene of Fulfillments, is the
spectre of Terzian, the absent patriarch of Bewitchments.
Terzian is the unlikely phantom (one of the shades of memory)
that looms over Cal and Pell 's long-awaited reunion, as well
as an (undeserved) guilty reminder for Cobweb and a deified inspiration
for Ponclast. Certainly, everyone 's special memory of Terzian
casts greater shadows than his actual, textual presence in Bewitchments.
Who
was Terzian anyway, and why does he matter so much now? This
superfluous question of "Who is Terzian and why should
we care?" leads us to the heart of the matter of Shades
of Time and Memory.
Especially
in a series whose three central texts are written in first
person narrative, the reader needs to sort out what 's going
on, what's in the speaker 's head, what does he know, what
does he think, what is just an outburst of grief/anger et cetera,
et cetera (sometimes overlapping, sometimes diverging, always
shaded), and what statements are overly colored by an obviously
blatant subjectivity. Whole events warp out of shape from perspective.
(Who wanted to ride into the glade first, before that fateful
first death? Pell says it 's himself, Cal remembers the opposite.
They each think they said "Let
me go first." Enchantments 206; Fulfilments 83)
It's
clear that Cal 's Terzian is not Pell 's. Neither is he the
same rival Pell was worried about in Enchantments, nor
is he the one he's grown to be obsessed with in Shades.
It's clear that Terzian becomes so many different figures for
each har, and each of these figures take on a prismatic expansion
of the forgotten original, generating volumes of history behind
it.
"I
can barely remember what Terzian looks like. I thought you
were dead."
-The Shades of Time and Memory
Memory
and the narrative reconstruction that follows it is what composes
these very individual histories, and are devastating because
it is the composite weaving of personal (and interpersonal)
histories that directly shape and shake a grander political,
racial, and cosmic history. A perceptive beta reader of this
essay pointed out that early Wraeththu history begins as history
of couplings, "pairings, triangles, even diamonds." Cal 's
narrative in Fulfilments is a case in point (Cal/Seel,
Cal/Zack, Cal/ Wraxilan, Cal/Pell, Cal/Orien, Cal/Flick/Seel,
Cal/Terzian/Cobweb, Cal/Swift/Leef... our boy sure gets around).
And it's not only the couple (triangle? diamond?) in question
who have emotional stakes in the relationship, but everyhar else
who has come into contact with one or the other (or all three
or four...). If Cal claims that Terzian meant nothing to him,
it's clear that Cobweb didn't see it that way, or Pell, or
even Seel.
"Cal,
do you like my father?"
"Like him... like him...?" Cal tapped his
lips with a pencil, thinking, his eyes glowing like coals in dark,
ravaged sockets. "I think perhaps I do. I don 't
dislike him, certainly. Pass me that green pen, Swift,
will you?"
-The Bewitchments of Love and Hate
How does Terzian matter then? He certainly meant a great deal
to Cobweb, whose devoted and unrequited love is the tragedy of
Bewitchments. To Swift, he was that glorious, distant father,
whose approval he so wanted when he was young, but who is mostly
away fighting, a sometimes welcome absence: "near the end
of the summer, my father had to go away for some weeks and Forever
breathed a sigh of relief and happily sagged in its foundations" (Bewitchments 23). To the Varrs, the later conquered Parsics, and to the transformed
Ponclast, he is a shining martyr to the Gelaming, the champion
of a long-subjugated Varrish way of life. To these hara closest
to him, his memory matters, because it becomes the inscription
of their history. Again, the theme of "time and memory" that
refuses fade, but returns with a vengeance. And who can know
what Cal was really thinking in Bewitchments?
"In
Terzian, I loved the Lion. And Exorcism? Maybe, but it is
not over yet..."
– The Fulfillments of Fate and Desire
Certainly not over, when "shades of time and memory" bring
back the past in full force, and dares our hara to look it in
the face. But back to the matters of personal dalliance (a relief
really, after all this heavy talk of history and memory).
With
Terzian, you can link the daisy-chain of pursuits: In Galdra,
Pell is looking for what he wanted in Cal, or what Cal might
have wanted with Terzian, who embodied a bit of what Cal had
wanted in Wraxilan, the Lion of Oomar. Hah!
So the trap closes,
and we are back to Cal 's own Uigenna beginnings in Wraxilan: "Like
a glamorous, brutal father, he influenced my Wraeththu shaping,
and is perhaps responsible for what I am now. I feared him, I
supplicated at his feet. OK, I was sixteen for God 's sake!" (Fulfilments,
206). If Wraxilan was the brutal creator of Cal 's origins,
he is also godlike to a young Cal who looks up to him: omnipotent
but also dependable in his power, and ironically, creating a
safe, familiar haven (from which, like the Judeo-Christian god,
he expels him).
But to the point, it is this aspect of benevolent
safety, like the respite Terzian provided in Forever, that Galdra
brings into Shades (loathe as I am to admit it). Both
Terzian and Galdra love devotedly, as even Cal 's caustic voice
somberly admits: "Terzian was good to me. I must take care
not to abuse his memory" (Fulfilments, 48). They are staunchly
masculine supporters, in nurturing roles that inversely scream
feminine. They're there to rescue and protect, lend strength,
then go away when unwanted. If even this reluctant reader can
admit to finding all this in common in the new Lions, then it's
no wonder Pell saw the appeal in being swamped with doting concern,
being dependent for once (instead of just wishing for it from
Cal, and finding him missing). Is it Pell who finally exorcises
the memory of Terzian by indulging in his own Terzian fling?
What finally clinches the comparison (safe in the bosom of the
Lion), and brings it together with the themes of "time
and memory," personal histories going cosmic, Pell's
demand for security, as well as his fixation with Cal 's
past, is the fruit of Cal's other relationships, that tangible
shade of memory: his son with Terzian, Tyson.
"All
through his childhood, when Seel had looked at him in a certain
sour way, Tyson had imagined being a spark of life in the
cauldron of creation, being made by two hara lost in bliss."
- The Shades of Time and Memory
Tyson's
wry reflection in Shades sums up the whole messy business succinctly
and indelicately: "Both Pellaz and
Seel had been jealous of Terzian, because he 'd had a relationship
with Cal that neither of them had ever had. Simple as that. Not
that they'd ever admit it. When they looked at Tyson, they
saw Cal taking aruna with Terzian. He was living proof of it." (99).
It
's not just memory that haunts Pell. After all, look at the
(incomplete) list of couplings up there; Cal 's been around
the block, and then some. "We cannot be selfish
with each other," is certainly not the case when "a
very special kind of aruna" spawns "living proof," that's
annoyingly in front of your eyes for 30 years.
Early
Wraeththu history as a series of couplings make way for a
more indelible history, written in harlings. Certainly, a new
kind of history has to be written, one not so rooted in the
linear progression of generations, as with the human reproductive
life span. If the succession of generations loses some of
its urgency, it's due to quick maturity (at 7 or 8) and longevity
(150 years) that far outreaches a human family cycle. How
many relationships and "generations" are
lost within such a lifetime? If couplings fade away with
time, are the desire for harlings an outdated need to put ones
special mark on history? After all, reproduction leaves a trace,
and to fulfill the requirements of Terzian 's legacy, Galdra
has left his mark on (in?) Pell, with that unwanted pearl,
in the end claimed/named by Cal. (Can this become more
than a patrilineal history, repeating itself, ad infinitum?)
If,
as Tyson impatiently insists, "we're meant for more than
breeding like humans" and "the drive to create new life is
somehow missing the point" (Shades, 322-3), harlings
must become more than one generation 's relationship markers
on (monogamous) history. Wraeththu history, individual and
racial, struggles to uproot itself from linear reproductive
progression to make space for circular or spiraling episodes
of personal history. The old adage "children are our future," turns to
its modified and expanded version, "hara will invest for
the future in harlings." As Cal explains, rather mysteriously, "that
is their strength. Harlings are banners you can ride behind.
They represent an idea, sovereignty. The mixing of blood
is alchemy." (Shades,
312). A new kind of history, and an old kind of exorcism,
where the future in harlings will become more than an expression
of unbearable (excuse the pun) memories.
"Cal,
I hope we are still in love."
"Course
we are. Soul mates. Love that transcends death, space, and
time. Everyhar knows that. We 're a legend."
-The Shades of Time and Memory
And after that last conversation with its spoken and unspoken
scores, Cal and Pell move on past their respective changes, and
return full circle to overlap with the beginning of their journey,
a little older and wiser, with super powers among other appendages.
A dazed and slightly petulant Pell, with Cal as his caustic but
good-natured protector, and now with a harling in tow (theirs
in name at least) that will "nail" their relationship
onto history. Some things never change. Some things have to.
But it's all familiar. And we can indulge in a bit of relief
(fan fiction anyone?) before the final volume shakes us up again.
"It's
okay. Don 't go all strange on me. You look mad. Relax."
- The Shades of Time and Memory
About
the Author:
F.S. Kim resides
in central New York State and spends her spare hours writing portions
of a Ph.D Dissertation in English on Gypsies, Nomads, and Mid-Victorian
Nationalism. The major part of her life is spent happily immersed
in thinking about Wraeththu and reviewing Harry Potter slash fiction.
She can be reached at frogslayr@gmail.com. |
