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Read the previous entry in the serieshere. Read the next entry in the seriessoon.
Testimony from a Skilled apprentice written at Nettle‘s direction prefaces “Bingtown.” As the chapter begins, Bee wakes, assessing herself and the injuries she has sustained. She also nurses her dislike of Beloved, Amber, and the Fool, regarding each as a distinct person and not wanting much to do with any of them. Perseverance tends to her, urging her to make use of the limited time to experience liveships, since they will all transform. He also urges her to use the Skill to heal her own body: “You can’t make it unhappen, but you don’t have to carry around what they did to you. Don’t give them that power over you” (748). Bee reluctantly agrees and slowly begins to restore her body, working a little at a time to minimize others’ comments.
As the Vivacia continues away from Clerres, Bee finds herself more attuned to the liveship and the family that strides her decks. The liveship refuses to return to Divvytown in her haste to transform, and those who wish to make the return are allowed to do so, though they must bear the news of Kennitsson’s death. Bee undergoes a change, her skin darkening somewhat, as the voyage continues.
Bee finds herself obliged to address ennui and listlessness as she is, in effect, a passenger on the liveship. Beloved attempts to connect to her, and Bee rebuffs the efforts.
At length, the Vivacia arrives in Bingtown, where there is much upset. The pending end of the liveships has thrown the Traders into something like panic, but Bee, Perseverance, and Spark are delighted to find Lant awaiting them. He relates how he had escaped Clerres and arrived in Bingtown. Soon after, Althea conducts the group to the Vestrit home, where Ronica welcomes them. The older woman relates such tidings as she has, noting the brewing political difficulty among the Traders and having a small meal served to her guests. Bee is taken by the service, and she is gratified by the gift of clothing made to her. When her identity as a Farseer and the child of FitzChivalry is noted, Ronica exults, reporting developments in Kelsingra, to which Bee and her party will travel and from which they will return to the Six Duchies…by Skill-pillar, with which Bee is uncomfortably familiar.
The present chapter is not the first portion of the Realm of the Elderlings corpus to be titled “Bingtown”; there are three chapters in the Liveship Traders series with the title (here, here, and here), and there are many others in it and the Rain Wilds Chronicles that have the town in their title along with some other words. There is a small project, I think, in reading the chapters against one another; I recall making similar claims about other sets of chapters sharing titles. Contrasting length, reading level, characters present, rhetorical devices at work, and the like could prove interesting; for those involved in teaching literature, it might also well serve as a useful and possibly manageable student exercise. If I pretend for a moment that I’m going to be back at the front of a classroom, obliged to come up with some assignment for my students in a class on Hobb (single-author seminars happen!), it’s something I might well do. Even if it is not the case that I will be so, perhaps someone reading this is; I commend the exercise to you (but I would like citation for it, please).
As often, the prefatory materials compel some attention from me. This time, the notion of following what amount to being road-signs making things easier…it’s obvious, really, in retrospect, but it only can be so if the signs can be read. Use of the Skill-pillars has been…challenging throughout the Realm of the Elderlings corpus; much of that use has been unknowing or in desperation. That there were runes and sigils on the Skill-pillars was only revealed later in the novels, and even then, the focus of the narrative has been on characters not fully trained in the use of the Skill; indeed, Fitz was born into and raised up in a time when knowledge of the magic was waning, and his training (by Galen, at least) was conducted only with great reluctance. It is not to be wondered at that he and others like him would use the Skill poorly, nor is it to be wondered at that a campaign to divest of Skill knowledge would leave gaps into which many might fall. What is obvious to those accustomed to a thing is hardly so to those not taught; the prefatory materials on the present chapter serve as a reminder of it, of the need to check assumptions made.
In the chapter, proper, I find Perseverance’s comments to Bee about healing of interest. (Clearly, since I quote him.) It is tempting to read the comment as somewhat naïve, to think only a child could assert that the removal of a physical mark is enough to reject the power of whoever made it. In context, however, it reads differently; the quote from Perseverance comes as he has discussed his own Skilled healing and the erasure of an injury done him in Bee’s defense. He speaks from experience; while he has not endured what Bee has endured, he is far from sheltered and untouched, so that it is not in ignorance that he comments as he does. And he does not say it is an easy thing to do, either; his commentary explicitly cites the help he has had in arriving where he is, and the very fact that he thinks to make the comparison to Bee bespeaks the degree to which the injury, while not even showing a scar from the Skill of the healing, remains with him. Moving forward from what has been done is a process, and it is one that few can do alone, but it can be done with time and care and aid…perhaps a bit cliché, but not untrue.
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The work I do is dragging on, And I think I might like to move on To seek greener fields And find what each yields, But I know doing so would go wrong.
Read the previous entry in the serieshere. Read the next entry in the serieshere.
Part of a letter from Prilkop to the Fool precedes “Furnich.” The chapter opens with Fitz recalling what the Fool told him of his earlier escape from Clerres and attempting to follow along with it. The path laid out, Fitz proceeds, his progress traced and the difficulties he faces reported as he addresses them. Motley rejoins him early in his progress, Nighteyes approving of the crow, although all three acknowledge that there will be no full bond among them.
Such corvid beauty! Photo by Siegfried Poepperl on Pexels.com
One night, as he rests, Fitz assesses himself through the Skill, noting changes to his abilities since being splattered with Silver. He reaches out through the magic and is overwhelmed by it, even as he notices again the presence of larger entities within its flow. The experience leaves him puzzling over it and himself.
Fitz’s progress continues, and his condition deteriorates. Nighteyes remarks on the presence of worms in him, and Fitz struggles to move onward. He notes additional changes in himself as he presses ahead, and he steals to survive as he does so. At length, he comes to a port and plies his magics to secure a berth on a ship headed where he wants it to go. The passage on the ship is unpleasant for him, and Fitz finds himself in mind of Verity as he goes.
Arriving at last in Furnich, Fitz disembarks and makes for a Skill-pillar that has been reported to him. The presence of Skill-stone in the area hinders him, as the memories the stones exude tell of betrayal and despair. Motley warns him of others as he struggles onward, and he comes under attack–not out of his attackers’ need, but out of their boredom. Exercising his magics, Fitz kills them, although he is astonished at his ability to do so. He takes what he can from them and presses onward, at length finding the Skill-pillar and entering into it with the crow.
As is often the case, the prefatory materials of the chapter attract my attention. The comments about the limited survival of the contents of the library at Clerres bring to mind once again the Cotton Library and lamentation for what has been lost, both what is known to have been lost and what is no longer known. The confirmation in those comments of the rapacious attempted genocide of dragons by the Servants and the effects of the same is perhaps a bit on the nose; again, there is something cartoonish in the evil of Clerres on display, and I am struck again by it.
Further, the seeming assumption by Prilkop of primacy for White Prophets over others and of himself over the survivors of Clerres–“Our Servants,” he writes, and “I assumed the care of the few remaining Whites” (731)–stands out. While it is the case that he is the seniormost among them, Prilkop is also very much a relic of a time that seems no longer to exist, and he asserts a pride of place that the ill-gotten “longevity of the Four” (731) implies is a danger. It is something of a trope that the long-lived and precognitive tend towards evil; they get bored and crave stimulation, or they become fixated on their visions and blind to the possibility that they may be in error. It happened in Clerres already; Prilkop seems positioned to repeat the error, or at least to reiterate the sytems that conduce to the error.
So much said, the comment that “Many [of the refugees from Clerres] have ceased dreaming” (731) is suggestive. Whether this is an opening for potential further development in the Realm of the Elderlings corpus of competing centers of power (not that I expect Hobb to explore that kind of thing; I make no such demands, even as I can see possibilities) or simply a nod towards verisimilitude in that things go on even when others do not look on, I am unsure. But I can see that there are things that could be done with it, given Marvell’s “world enough and time.”
As to the main chapter: It is with some interest that I note Fitz’s comment early on that he has left open a leadership position that Prilkop might fill (731). He does have something of a tendency to play kingmaker across his career as an assassin; for but two examples, early in his training, Chade makes explicit reference to Fitz of possible changes in leadership, and Fitz’s actions secure Dutiful’s succession. That Fitz does such a thing again is telling; he may not be Prilkop’s friend, but it is clear that he does, as averred, respect him.
I note, too, that the chapter, proper, reinforces the depravity of Clerres. In Furnich, the memories of the Elderlings fleeing Kelsingra and its cataclysm bespeak the planning of the Servants, who lay in wait to eliminate the refugees of that city. If it is the case that Prilkop was unaware of such planning–and it seems to be so, given his presented nostalgic idealism and the reported timing of his journey to Aslevjal–then it calls into question how good a leader Prilkop can be of even so small a group as he has taken into his care; he seems blinded by his hope no less than were the Servants by their greed. If it is the case that Clerres might well rise again, it seems it will be on a shaky foundation.
If.
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Thrice a week, I have gone to the gym That I might regain my fighting trim, But I grow ever older And I have hurt my shoulder; I’ve lost one more chance to grow slim.
It’s a familiar sight. Photo by Anete Lusina on Pexels.com
More than a third of the way through, and I’ve still got more to give you!
Following on from last week’s session of the tabletop roleplaying game I am running at the local library, I reminded the players that the current “term” ends on 30 April 2026–three weeks hence. I also revisited the question from last week of why so many roleplaying games continue to employ ambiguously (neo-)medievalist settings, such that doing so is the dominant model of the genre. That is, there are tabletop roleplaying games that get away from the (neo-)medievalist–Deadlands and Traveller come to mind as examples–but most have operated and continue to operate with the base assumption of a vaguely feudally stratified society (with interestingly poly- or henotheistic tendencies); why this would be so was the focus of the brief preliminary discussion at the table. Such concerns, speaking to genre-features and -histories, as well as to some philosophical considerations, allowed the stated need for overtly educational content to be addressed well enough, I think.
Pretty typical. Photo by London Aaga Bits – LAB on Pexels.com
As far as play goes, the players continue to fall into a common trap: overthinking. It’s a natural enough thing to do, of course; access to information within a game is limited by narration, so asking many questions to elicit additional information is a good and useful thing. But, like most things, it can be overdone, and easily. Take, for example, an exchange from a previous game, in which one player’s character repeatedly investigated a small altar because “there has to be a button.” Given the context, the character was unable to find such a button and was told as much in more or less those words; failing a check when one is present and succeeding at one when it is not will yield the same result. That there was not such a button present flatly did not occur to the player; only reluctantly did that player move on to the next thing, and even then, the player was certain there was something to find.
In this week’s session, there was another example of such. The party, still second-level characters, faced a gelatinous cube. One of the players sought to have another player’s character, bolstered by magic, pass through the cube to see if it could be bypassed rather than engaged, thinking to use a rope to pull other characters along. The thought process was that the available magic would allow moving through what is, in essence, a sliding open stomach without injury and without it pursuing the party–none of which was evidenced by the creature’s behavior, and all of which ran counter to actions taken up to that point, including by the player’s own character. Dungeon crawls do, admittedly, constrain action, such that they provoke thinking of ways to get around things, but there is often no way but through.
There is some amusement in watching such things happen, of course. Players do it to themselves with very little prompting; I know this well, having often been a player, myself, and not seldom having fallen into such traps both in games and in “real life.” It does make for ease in planning out games, too, as things will take longer than might well have been anticipated–and there is no telling what will prompt such zeal. And it can open other narrative avenues, to boot; what players take interest in is ripe for expansion and development into future games…if there are future games. In such situations as the present, with a seemingly clear end looming, it’s not quite so good, even if it is seemingly inevitable.
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Once again, the time is rushing by; I can’t stop it, and I shouldn’t try. It ever moves on, Each new moment is gone, Slipping by me; how much I could cry!
Tick. Tock. Photo by u16dfu16deu16a8u16dau16b9 u16a8u16b1u16b2u16dfu16beu16cau16b2u16c1 on Pexels.com
One third being gone means two-thirds still remain, and I’ve still got more to give you!
Elliott RWI 