Reading Darkover in the 21st Century: The Winds of Darkover

[patrick_morris_miller]

The Winds of Darkover

First publication in 1970 as Ace Double 89250, tête-bêche with The Anything Tree by John Rackham

Read from DAW omnibus A Word Divided (DAW Collectors #1278), published 2003

Time period: Against the Terrans - The First Age (Recontact)

When a mountain lord's keep is captured by bandits, he resorts to a desperate, forbidden tactic: body theft.

Dan Barron has just been sacked from his job in space traffic control at Darkover's Terran starport after nearly steering two ships into each other. He's been having visions, visions of the Darkovan highlands, visions he's told no one about, and his most recent one could have explosively redecorated the Terran enclave. He is given a last chance assignment: travel into the hills and teach the local lord's people how to make telescopes and use them for fire watch.

Elsewhere, Lady Melitta Storn has her own problems. Storn Castle has been taken by Brynat Scarface and his bandits; one of her brothers is in chains and the other, Lord Storn of Storn, lies in trance behind barriers of laran, and her eldest sister involuntarily married to Brynat. In her dreams Lord Storn speaks to her: he is bringing someone to help; she is to escape Castle Storn however she can and travel to Carthon, there to meet this help.

As Dan nears Armida, the Alton seat, his visions become stronger and more vivid: a woman bathed in flames, bound in gold chains. And in his dreams a voice commands him: go to Carthon! Melitta awaits you at Carthon!

Then, as Melitta negotiates the secret passages of Storn Castle and the Darkovan high country, Dan is overwhelmed by Lord Storn's sendings - and now Storn controls Dan's body. He slips away from his post and makes his way towards Carthon...

Continuity

Again we meet Valdir Alton and Larry Montray, now foster son to Valdir and going by the name Lerrys; Kennard is on Terra with Larry's family.

Storn reflects on how what he knows of laran is fragmentary and self-taught; later stories establish the dangers an untrained telepath faces and the importance of training. And Dan's exposure to Storn's powers awaken his own latent telepathy and send him into threshold sickness, which Melitta assures him is frightening but not serious or harmful; later stories, in which the nature of laran is further developed, will contradict this.

While much is made of the Compact, both attackers and defenders, Melitta included, use bow and arrow in the first fight for Storn Castle; yet later Melitta considers the use of "any weapon beyond the arm's reach of the wielder" to be an even worse breach than Lord Storn's mind-meddling.

And Aldaran, the Domain furthest in the Darkovan highlands, has outright rejected the Compact, accepting the judgment of the Comyn. Lord Aldaran states that the Compact only gives victory to the strongest swordsman, and that the rejection of matrix weapons has led to a loss of the matrix arts in general; he welcomes Terran weapons and ways, and teaches them, and his own people, matrix mechanics as a science and not as occultism.

Indeed, Desideria Leyner, a strong young telepath, rejects the the emotionless isolation from others historically demanded of Keepers (If it seems that the story throws her and Lord Storn together at the end of the novel: hold that thought.)

Carthon here is a nearly abandoned town being claimed by the Dry-towners, who are never mentioned in The Planet Savers.

And key to the ending is the goddess Sharra, who is invoked by Desideria (with a contingent of forge folk worshippers) to defeat Brynat's bandits, using a matrix that will cause a great deal of trouble later...

As Dan's telepathy kindles in response to Storn's control, Valdir Alton tells him that it will be useful for his work, as it will help him communicate with people whose language he has little grasp of. And later, Dan can understand Melitta's communication with the forge folk in their own language. This is almost entirely in contradiction to what Kennard says on the subject in Star of Danger.

Consent issues

This novel is dominated by violation: Brynat's rape under guise of marriage of Allira Storn, which is not depicted, and Lord Storn's mind control - first mental invasion, then outright body theft - of Dan Barron, which is. Dan firmly states his intention to settle matters with Lord Storn; Allira has no such opportunity, as Lord Storn - through his birds - dispatches Brynat before she gets the chance.

In the realm of just creepy, as Melitta and Storn-in-Dan travel the high paths from Carthon to Aldaran, telepathy makes Melitta aware of Storn's physical attraction to her - explained as simply a normal reaction to close contact. And in the mountains relations between siblings are not even forbidden (though it is known that inbreeding is not a good thing).

And Melitta reflects on how this is a likely issue for any woman travelling alone with a man, and custom considered it "wrong and cruelly whorish" to deny "some release" to such desire, even if inadvertently roused.

And we get our first exposure to the Dry-towners, essentially Gor cosplayers who consider an unowned woman to be an abomnination, and whose women are expected to take pride in their chains. Much more to come in later books.

Collected miscellanea

Neither Darkovan culture nor the text are sensitive to Storn's blindness; Melitta tells the Dry-towner bigwig that Storn cannot hold the estates and so Dan has been adopted as heir, and Storn himself thinks: What good is an invalid's life, anyhow? I've never been more than half alive, before this!

Aldaran's ideas about the Compact, and Melitta's disagreeing thoughts, echo the idea of the firearm as equalizer. Melitta sees that the rightness of one's cause has no more to do with the weapons they can muster than it does with their physical strength.

The Ghost Wind appears here, and not by Bradley's first intention. She had originally meant to title the novel The Wings of Darkover, after the mechanical birds the blind Lord Storn projects his mind into and sees through. By mistake the contract from Ace specified Winds; rather than suffer the delay of unsnarling that, she brought in the Ghost Wind, and the Ya-men it maddens, from an unrelated book.

Concluding thoughts

Bradley is becoming more ambitious as a writer, handling multiple story threads in alternation. And while the story here is an adventure first, more and more effort goes into making Darkover a living place.