Chapter two opens with Corwin continuing his new Crossfit regimen. Remember: he’s a super strong guy who can lift (half of a) car and 400 pound boulders and duel for 26 hours! Except right now he really isn’t. Again, Zelazny de-powers his characters, which makes them more human and more relatable… and more interesting. He disguises himself cunningly by wearing different colors and styling his various hairs in different ways and hiding his sword. When you’ve got super identifiable symbols (specific colors, a specific flower/sigil/emblem, a specific magic sword) it’s pretty easy for people to forget what YOU look like, especially when it’s been a long time and they don’t expect you. So Corwin garbs himself in brown and walks around all shaggy and Ganelon doesn’t recognize him even as he gets stronger and faster, his stamina increasing, getting to super human levels. Also he “disguises his voice.” Does he do the “I’m Batman” Batman voice? In my heart of hearts I say yes. Yes, he does. Just walking around with a goofy voice that is obviously fake that everyone overlooks because he dragged home their Big Damn Hero and is also going to fight alongside them against The Big Bad Evil Guy(s). Please can we get this on tv? Just a beefy bearded guy walking around with a fake gruff voice as he fences and wrestles people.
The country was called Lorraine, and so was she.
Female characters in Zelazny’s books are basically crumbs. If you want to know them you really have to fill in a lot of blanks. Knowing that, knowing that I’m filling in a ton of blanks, knowing that I’m bringing a lot of myself and my desires to Lorraine… I really like her. She’s a sex worker with a traumatic past, carrying a lot of guilt and grief. Her trauma and grief are both incredibly mundane and also, you know, fantasy world. Corwin thinks she’s hot and exchanges knowing flirty glances with her, but neither of them makes a move on the other until he’s feeling like his old self at which point he hires her.
She’s just, you know, she’s just a woman. She’s not a stunning beauty, she’s not a great wit, she’s not super cosmopolitan or stylish.
Her hair was rust-colored with a few strands of gray in it. I guessed she was under thirty, though. Eyes, very blue. Slightly pointed chin. Clean, even teeth inside a mouth that smiled at me a lot. Her voice was somewhat nasal, her hair was too long, her make-up laid on too heavily over too much tiredness, her complexion too freckled, her choice in clothing too bright and tight. But I liked her. I did not think I’d actually feel that way when I asked her out that night because, as I said, liking her was not what I had in mind.
He’s a Prince of Amber in temporary exile, a master of alternate worlds, a man who considers himself a rightful king of the one true world of which all others are imitations, and she’s… a nice lady who smiles and has nice boobs or something. She’s also perceptive, chatty, and not afraid to ask questions.
Don’t worry, he gets cockblocked by a demon.
Someone attempts to contact Corwin via Trump and he resists it, taking the opportunity to discount his sisters yet again. Only Gerard might mean you well, Corwin? Really? Not Llewella? Not Deidre who is your full blood sister and who you are very weird about? ANYWAY one of the big failings of Trumps is there’s no caller ID.
I wonder if Merlin would have found a way to fix that. Or Luke. More likely Luke.
Lorraine sees Oberon’s face, though, which is odd behavior for Trump contact.
Corwin responds by slapping her, which I am not a fan of! On a personal level! I’m not UPSET about it, but I don’t really like it. Interestingly, “hitting a woman” has already been contextualized as “bad, actually.” Lorraine’s ex/dead husband used to get drunk and hit her and this is presented as A Shitty Thing. Then Corwin smacks her. In context it’s also A Shitty Thing. I deeply appreciate that context.
The night gets darker and stormier and Corwin has Lorraine get up and bar the door. He turns the lights out (except for a candle) and retrieves Grayswandir, which is made of silver. Lorraine’s too scared to leave and ask Corwin if he can protect her and he straight up tells her the truth. He doesn’t know. Bad Shit is coming and he’s not confident he’ll be victorious.
He finds out a little more about Lorraine – she’s got a bit of magic to her, “a touch of the hot stuff” to quote “This Immortal.”
“I used a spell to get my first man,” she said, “and look what he turned out to be. If I hadn’t, I’d have been a lot better off. I wanted a pretty daughter, and I made that happen—” She stopped abruptly and I realized she was crying.
“What’s the matter? I don’t understand…”
“I thought you knew,” she said.
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“She was the little girl in the Fairy Circle. I thought you knew…”
“I’m sorry.”
“I wish I didn’t have the touch. I never use it any more. But it won’t let me alone. It still brings me dreams and signs, and they are never over things I can do anything about. I wish it would go away and devil somebody else!”
Corwin drops the tough news on her that she’s stuck with this ability. She, of course, asks if he also has special abilities because she’s perceptive. He admits that he does. They talk about reason why The Horned One might send someone after Corwin and he muses about the ghost of his dad. I have A Lot To Say about this but am torn between OH NO SPOILERS (for books that are decades old) and YES LET US DO THIS. For right now I’m going to split spoiler posts off onto their own thing.
Lorraine does a bit of confused prophesying and Corwin tells her to shut up.
The demon pops up, as promised.
It held a short, heavy sword of dark metal in its right hand, and there were runes carved all along the blade.
The dark metal sword, the runic blade, is a nice counterpoint to bright silver Grayswander and the bit of pattern etched into it. Just a nice little mirroring.
Corwin refuses to meet the thing’s gaze because the eyes are the windows to the soul and his soul is all marked up. The demon cats knew him when they looked upon him. He doesn’t want this demon dude to do the same. He throws a little spell at the demon, which I think is the only example of him using magic other than Shadow Shaping/Walking and Trump stuff. Uh, and the magic birds, I guess. And his big Curse. That’s still not a lot compared to what kind of magic we see people tossing around later!
The demon states that he needs to request entry, and be refused, four times before it can enter. It’s interesting to see ‘four’ instead of ‘three.’ It’s also kind of futile like… you can say no all you want and it can still come in.
The fight quickly turns dirty, involving a hidden heart, a chair, and a bit of strangulation. Corwin takes a freaked out Lorraine back to her place and they cuddle for the rest of the night.
Corwin, Ganelon, and Lancelot ride out several days to scout things out. Ganelon brings up the messenger bird over a breakfast of dried meat. Lance has no idea what they’re talking about. Ganelon asks some pointed questions of Corwin – I mean, Corey – trying to figure out what the note actually meant. And, you know, a strange dude rocks up and gets a message from a magic bird proclaiming that an evil sorcerer king is returning and he’s big and super strong with super stamina and maybe a camp follower says he fought a demon and it, uh, I’d ask some pointed questions too.
Lancelot has his own stories about what a piece of shit Corwin of Amber was – a “demon lordling” who abdicated when the pressure got to be too much. Amberites cast Shadows of their own on Shadows around them. The question remains: just what kind of king WAS Corwin? Because he really comes across as a nasty piece of work who’s changed quite a bit. That nasty piece of work on the Throne of Amber? How frightful would that be? If he hadn’t grown and changed over his centuries on Earth, would Eric truly have been the worst choice as King of Amber?
Ganelon drops a bit of his own lore:
“The one I knew certainly was,” said Ganelon, “for he banished me from a lland neither art nor artifice can discover now.”
“You never spoke of this before,” said Lance. “How did it occur?”
“None of your business,” said Ganelon, and Lance was silent once again.
Just a great big “nunya.”
They scope out the bad guys, Corwin feels guilty, they head back home.
Corwin offers to take Lorraine someplace safe and she declines. She’s had some capital-V Visions about him fighting the leader of the demons, and about her own death. She casts a little spell on him to keep him safe while he sleeps even though she’d previously mentioned that every time she uses her magic she’s lost something.
She tells Corwin that she loves him and he yells at her and she cries and they have sex again.
I think about Lorraine a lot.
References:
- “Breaking Training” is when an athlete stops living the good morally pure athletic life and drinks, smokes, does drugs, and/or has sex – engages in vices. Corwin is drinking and intends to have sex.
- Silver traditionally does extra damage to supernatural creatures like vampires, werewolves, demons, etc.
- The bassoon is a pretty cool sounding instrument.
- Cirrhosis is a chronic health condition where your liver is scarred from disease. There’s a few different causes, but the most commonly known one is alcoholism.
- “Misli, gammi gra’dil” is a phrase in Shelta Thari and means “be off, and bad luck to you!” which is a pretty, uh, pretty tame “spell.”
- “Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home” is a very old children’s rhyme that’s kind of dark actually! (your house is on fire, your children will burn) Hence “come in and burn” I suppose.
- A league is, again, about three miles over land.
