Loving and hating

Mount Hood reflected in Mirror Lake, Oregon

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
by Patricia McKillip,
Introduction by Pat Cadigan (2015).
Fantasy Masterworks,
Gollancz 2014 (1974).

For a novel written in her early twenties, Patricia McKillip’s award-winning fantasy is extraordinarily nuanced, with well-developed characters to the fore and the magical aspects only playing a supportive role. For this is a story of primal human emotions, of love and hate, of self-knowledge and fear, where even the ‘forgotten beasts’ of the title have human feelings. And individual wants and needs decide outcomes that affect many, whether for good or bad, in a world created from memories and echoes of ancient myths, legends and lore.

Sybel is the descendant of a line of wizards, from Heald through Myk and Ogam. Her particular skill is ‘calling’, drawing beasts and humans to her and subtly bending their will to hers. This is a dangerous power to wield, and one that demands great responsibility; when we see her, either aged 16 or 28, it is a talent the ethics of with she still has to wrestle with.

In her mountain fastness within Eldwold, with her beasts around her, she can pretty much please herself, calling for another legendary beast and studying her library of magical books. But when the outside world comes calling in the form of a young warrior bearing a child, she has to balance her own desires with the reasonable and unreasonable demands of politics and power.

McKillip sketches in a world composed of geographical aspects of her own state of Oregon and legends culled from Northern European traditions, particularly from the Celtic world. I fancy that in snow-capped Eld Mountain we may imagine Oregon’s distinctive Mount Hood (which the author may been able to see from her native Salem over a hundred miles distant), and the rivers, lakes, forests and plains may have resembled the landscapes of her state. Here she sets creatures cousins to those of Irish or Welsh or Arthurian lore: the Boar Cyrin, the Falcon Ter, the Dragon Gyld, the Lyon Gules, the Cat Moria, the Black Swan of Tirlith and the White Brid Liralen. They will have their parts to play.

But our focus is largely on the humans: the warring families of Sirle and Eldwold, and their neighbours. Maelga the witch comes closest to what Sybel needs as a maternal figure, Coren of Sirle it is who first brings trouble to Sybel in the form of the infant Tamlorn, child of Drede, King of Eldwold, and thereafter, try as she may, Sybel’s life is entangled with the affairs of strangers and she is forced to decide on loyalties.

McKillip’s story is woven with skill and craft, and once we get past the extended prologue it’s impossible not to get involved with Sybel’s ups and downs, her relationships with Coren — the seventh son of a seventh son — young Tamlorn as he grows to be a young adult, and King Drede,  a man with major issues. Between these main characters we witness love unconditionally given despite provocation, a desire to forge a familial relationship, a path towards self-knowledge being sought desperately, and the obsession that could lead to coercive control or to fear.

Inklings of what may be in store are provided by the riddles uttered by the beasts, particularly the gnomic sayings offered by the Boar, such as this:

“The giant Grof was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there.”

One of the most powerful emotions that will drive the action is hate, most effectively expressed by Sybel:

“How did you hate? Did you nurse revenge from a tiny, moon-pale seedling in the night places in your heart, watch it grow and flower and bear dark fruit that hung ripe — ripe for the plucking? It becomes a great, twisted thing of dark leaves and thick, winding vines that chokes and withers whatever good things grow in your heart; it feeds on all the hatred your heart can bear –“

Chapter 11

Compared to an earlier statement of Sybel’s — “I know nothing of hating, and only a little of loving” — this is quite a volte-face, and a consequence of her experience of the outside world. In the meantime there are also dark things afoot in Eldwold which will take all Sybel’s wit and power to contend against. Can all this lead to a conclusion that is simultaneously satisfying and psychologically credible?

Above all these dramas towers the cold, pale triangle of Eld Mountain, a basis for all that transpires and for which Mount Hood may have been the inspiration. Three years earlier Mount Hood had also provided a pivot for the events in The Lathe of Heaven by another Oregon-based author, Ursula Le Guin. Whatever occurs on or around this visually striking peak it remains impassive, an implacable presence and witness during all the loving and hating, the living and the dying.

McKillip’s writing is both certain and convincing while containing what Maria Sachiko Cecire has elsewhere identified as “the genre’s profound capacity to convey important affective experiences like enchantment, pleasure, and joy.” Intriguingly there is a passing reference to a certain Riddle-Master, an allusion perhaps to the trilogy of the same name that was yet to come.