This is it. The final chapter. The book is coming to a close.
Corwin and Ganelon roll out in a pair of trucks. I guess Ganelon’s learned how to drive. Corwin does some Shadow magic so they don’t have to worry about crossing borders this time.
Corwin finds his little hairy guys, the ones he rounded up and sent to their deaths the first time he attacked Amber. He’s willing to throw more of them into the meat grinder of his ambition and for all his musings on death and tragedy in the first book he doesn’t really care this time around. He swings wildly between being an anti-hero, being a tragic hero, and being a jackass. This is him being a jackass.
The push the trucks as far as they can until they ultimately stop working. Internal combustion engines and magic lands don’t mix. I like that Zelazny kept the detail of the trucks changing form, just like Flora’s car did in the first book. It’s such a bigger magic than just being able to travel through worlds.
Corwin once again drags death and destruction through the Forest of Arden. The slog is relatively peaceful. There’s a scuffle with some of Julian’s forces that resulted in the deaths of those forces and one furry guy either shot himself or got hit by friendly fire which is pretty dang realistic. They overall manage to be sneaky, though. There’s a storm brewing, and Corwin has ominous dreams including of Lorraine. Is that Lorraine the place, or Lorraine the person? It isn’t specified. I like to think it’s Lorraine the person, though, that she’s impacted him that strongly that he still misses her. He’s dragging his furry guys off to their death, and he caused Lorraine’s death too via The Black Road.
Gerard mentioned that The Black Road lead all the way to the foot of Kolvir. Eric’s letter states that Amber is under attack by monsters etc. Corwin and his troops are attacked by manticores and razor-beaked birds. And he decides that, ah, Eric is throwing monsters at him. Because Corwin is, of course, The Main Character. But no. No. It becomes obvious that the creatures are coming from along the Black Road – and Eric is shooting them with lightning which is cool as hell.
Corwin sneaks off to spy on the war and think about his options. He decides to be A Big Damn Hero and sweep in and save the day and make Eric look bad. And look. It’s honestly kind of nice to have someone resolve to Do The Right Thing and Save The Day… while also being petty as fuck. Just like… “ha HA! If I show up with my men and my guns everyone will see how great I am, how heroic, how Eric shouldn’t have put out my eyes and consigned me to a dungeon!! I’m the REAL winner! Eric sucks! ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!”
God, he is SUCH a middle child.
I keep imagining Eric posting to the Am I The Asshole subreddit.
“Am I the Asshole for burning out my brothers eyes and locking him in a dungeon?
“Hear me out. I know how this sounds. I, 3000 M and my brother 3500 M, let’s call him Cory, have never really gotten along. He’s the Golden Child and our dad is a real narcissist who absolutely played favorites. He’s strung us all along regarding who’d inherit the family business. I’ve been putting in the work every day, keeping things running, especially lately when dad upped and vanished. Where was Cory this whole time? No idea. He finally showed up with our half brother, let’s call him Blake, and tried to stage a hostile takeover…”
Anyway, he makes up his mind and heads back and BOOM! There’s Dara. She’s acting VERY seventeen years old here, super focused on only one thing. What’s a little war, anyway? She’s got things to DO. She has a totes plausible explanation for why she wasn’t at home when Gerard brought Benedict back, and how she ended up where she is now.
“I don’t believe you are telling me the whole truth,” I said, “but I haven’t the time to care.”
Buddy, you don’t know the half of it. He parks her with some guards, which she doesn’t want, and heads off to shoot monsters. These ones set on fire when killed which is great. She thunders past him on a horse while he’s picking off beasts, saying she’ll meet him in Amber. This is, of course, a very normal course of action for someone to take in the middle of a war.
Meanwhile, Eric is dying.
He and Corwin share some words, including instruction about using the Jewel of Judgement. Eric mentions Corwin’s curse and the fact that he could feel it… and that Corwin didn’t need to die to make it stick. Which does make me wonder if Corwin is somehow more magically strong than some of the other Amberites, or if the others simply haven’t been put in that sort of situation before. Eric utters a curse that apparently is a real doozy of a curse, then dies. Corwin Trumps Benedict and…
Benedict doesn’t know who Dara is.
Corwin assumes he’s keeping up the pretense but no, Benedict declares that he doesn’t have any descendants and also that he came there via Trump and not via Shadow which makes sense. And it starts clicking into place. Why didn’t Gerard remember her? Why did Benedict keep claiming not to know who she is? Why did she show up during an active war intent on walking the Pattern? She has Plans. Corwin doesn’t know what those plans are, just that they are probably not good plans and that he has to stop them. Random’s still a prisoner so Corwin asks him to Trump Corwin through to Castle Amber so they can head to the Pattern.
Random assumes, of course, that Corwin killed Eric.
Then he takes a moment to talk about how great his wife is. Random is, yes, A Wife Guy. He talks about love and Corwin does the whole “uh huh. uh huh. sure. uh huh.” non response people make to goomy love-guys who feel inferior because they’ve been in prison this whole time for trying to kill the king. Corwin reminds him that trying to kill Eric means that Random is in good with Corwin, who’s the guy in charge now. Has several years of prison been worth it to be one of Corwin’s faves? Who can say. Why, exactly, did Vialle fall in love with Random? Zelazny never goes into that. But he’s less of a psychopath from here on out. They sprint on down to the Pattern but Dara’s already walking it.
It seemed to tower hugely in that always unsubstantial-seeming chamber. Then shrink, die down, almost to nothing. It seemed a slim woman for a moment-possibly Dara, her hair lightened by the glow, streaming, crackling with static electricity. Then it was not hair, but great, curved horns from some wide, uncertain brow, whose crook-legged owner struggled to shuffle hoofs along the blazing way. Then something else… An enormous cat… A faceless woman… A bright-winged thing of indescribable beauty… A tower of ashes…
She later states that in times of stress she has some stock forms that she reverts to. They are… incredible forms. And they aren’t all living beings! A tower of ashes! She’s a tower of ashes! How cool is that?
She gives Corwin a pretty confused boner.
Yes, it was Dara! Tall and magnificent now. Both beautiful and somehow horrible at the same time. The sight of her tore at the fabric of my mind. Her arms were upraised in exultation and an inhuman laughter flowed from her lips. I wanted to look away, yet I could not move. Had I truely held, caressed, made love to-that? I was mightily repelled and simultaneously attracted as I had never been before. I could not understand this overwhelming ambivalence.
“Are you calling him a monster fucker?” I am, yes. We find out later that Oberon’s lineage has its roots in Chaos and that certain of his family can shape shift. Perhaps there’s something in Corwin that resonates to the non-human.
“What the hell,” said Random then, “was that?”
This specific way of breaking up dialog was not super common at the time this book was published, I believe. I see it a lot now, although I might just be noticing it more. It feels extremely modern, though. I’ve read a fair amount of Golden Age Fantasy & Science Fiction, stuff that was published around this time, and a lot of it is dated in the way that “Well, THAT happened” is dated – there’s trends in cadence and slang and punctuation and tone that come and go. The specific punchy “opening statement, possibly with a deadpan cuss, description of who’s talking, end statement” is something I associate very strongly with Zelazny.
And that’s it, that’s the end.
Eric is dead, Corwin’s set to become king, there’s a new Amberite running around with power over Shadow (and the ability to shape shift) and hatred toward Amber in her heart. They’re still at war, and while they have guns they have a finite amount of ammunition.
Don’t worry, the next book starts with a bang.
References:
- Wine-dark sea comes from The Odyssey. There’s a lot of back and forth over whether it refers to color, hue, or something else entirely.
- Sophistry is “a subtly deceptive reasoning or argumentation.”
- Lucency is “the quality or state of being lucent;” Lucent means “glowing with light” or “luminous.”
- A bivouac is a rough temporary shelter. These guys may or may not have had tents.
- Manticores are pretty cool. They have a human face, lion-type body, and a tale that’s either a huge scorpion stinger or else covered in poison porcupine-like quills. They have three rows of teeth. They’re sometimes depicted with dragon-type leathery wings, although Zelazny has outfitted this one with feathery eagle wings. They eat humans.
- A thing about wyverns is: are their two legs hind legs that they walk upon, with wings instead of arms, or are they front legs/arms and they propel themselves with their tails and also they have wings? Just how snake-like are they?
- War Bonds are a way for a government to raise money to fund a war. You basically loan the government money, then get a return on your investment. He’s not sure if Amber is going to win or not. Zelazny was born in 1937 so war bonds would have been something he remembered from childhood.
- “I would not hate thee…” is a spoof of the poem To Lucasta Going To The Wars. The original lines are “I could not love thee (Dear) so much/Lov’d I not Honour more.”
- Heaven’s Artillery is a war song from the early 1900s. It was apparently popular enough to be in a bunch of player piano rolls, but here’s a person playing it. It’s also a nice way of saying that the thunder and lightning were dying down.
- “Amber Will Be Destroyed” echoes “Carthago Delenda Est” or “Carthage Must Be Destroyed.”
