Sometimes you already know a novel will be bad, even before starting reading it. It’s not just «guess», or «presume», or «suppose», or even «think» that it will be bad. No, it’s exactly like that: know.
Such is the case with the second novel in the loose AD&D’s Birthright series, «Greatheart» by Dixie Lee McKeone (1996): you only need reading the title and the blurb and at once you know it will be a disappointment. And when you finally lay into the prologue, you realize your suspicions were spot on: it will be one of the worst reading experiences of your life, on a par with «The Spider’s Test», also by the same author.
Oh, please, spare me the elves!
Ok, I’ll admit I’m slightly biased here because I dislike elves, of any kind and flavor: and the story is all about the annoying pointy ears and their house human Cald who, turned an orphan by a gnoll raid on his parents’ caravan, has been raised by the treehuggers and now feels special just because he put on his big-boy pants under their tutelage, and doesn’t realize instead he is special indeed, from the elven perspective.
One of the reasons I love Birthright is exactly because the elves are the villains of the setting, with their hatred for humans and their hunts for humans and that Ruobhe guy, whose nickname I changed from Manslayer to Maneater («Mangiauomini», in Italian) in my campaigns, just to make him even more frightful, and intrinsically evil. Creepy bedtime stories stuff.
And the reason why I can’t stand elves is the same as anyone else’s: they are usually shown as smug smartasses who do the same things as you do, just better; and who also do a lot more wondrous things you can only dream of, while at the same time living in harmony with their environment, being immortal and just perfect in anything and condescending to anyone (nevermind that usually they also mess up things royally with their smugness, although – truth be told – not in this novel), in contrast to the typical human, who cannot help but be mean, rough, superficial, greedy and whatever.
Such is the case with this novel: this is a story about the elves, despite a human sellout as a protagonist (one who thinks it’s «better that the evil of the sword destroy a short-lived human than an immortal elf». See?). And the author never misses a chance to remind this to the reader, because even the personal rivalries between her annoying treehuggers are carried out with a heavy heart by the key players, and attended to with unexpected gentility, unlike any brutality you’d expect your average human regent would act or react with under similar suspicions.
And yet, the plot still makes no sense.
The idiot plot goes to 11
The story pivots around a sacred grove of the Sielwode elves, the Muirien Grove, your run-of-the-mill mystical place in the depth of a forest: for reasons, now and then this place turns into Times Square, because portals from the Shadow World open up as halfling refugees attempt to flee their lich lord, who usually is also on the hunt with his undead troops. So fights erupt in the grove until the portal closes, sucking in the Shadow World’s denizens again, but not the halflings.
In the first such occurrence the greatest, evilest, most whatever lich lord, Mmaadag Cemfrid, is killed effortlessly by one Eyrmin, the elven prince who adopted the human child and took him under his tutelage. But, at the same time, a huge branch is cut off by a spell and falls to the ground hitting Eyrmin, hence concealing both Mmaadag Cemfrid’s body (that will disappear as soon as the portal closes) and the sword he wielded (which won’t).
And this weapon is the driver of the story henceforth, which hangs on a thin but robust idiot plot: because this is Deathirst, the be-all and end-all sword that Azrai himself forged before Deismar for his beastman champion, and it is so powerfully imbued with his essence that it seeps with evil. Nonetheless, nobody notices it nor cares: after the fight, Eyrmin neglects to scour the battlefield; the Muirien Grove takes on a darker look; elven ghosts start haunting it; and the elves themselves, who are said to be mystically attuned with their grove («the bond between the elves and the forest was an innate magic peculiar to elves alone»), don’t even feel any disturbance, any influence of the sword’s foulest emanation, which is told to be «one of the most powerful concentrations of magic on Aebrynis»; that is, on Birthright’s Earth.
To make things even worse, later – much later – during one such forays of the Shadow World, Cald the house human uncovers and wields this sword, feeling overwhelmed at once by all of its malevolence, but as soon as he can he only hides it better…in a rabbit hole in the same grove (really!) and covers the protruding hilt with a fistful of dirt. And, most importantly, he neglects saying anything about it to his mentor, hence enabling the further developments, and Eyrmin’s demise.
This is what I mean by idiot plot: and I dare anyone to argue this.
It’s all about a sword…
Now, as for the plot. When the caravan of colonists from Mhoried he and his parents travel with is attacked and slaughtered by gnolls in Markazor, the not yet four-year old Cald Dasheft is driven into the north-western corner of the Sielwode (the province of Annydwr, I guess) by the terrified horses who are hauling the wagon he’s riding on: as soon as the cart overturns, the boy is hurled to the ground and lost. As the only survivor, he’s found the next morning by an elven patrol led by prince Eyrmin, the domain’s regent: even though elves slaughter every human entering «their» forest, Eyrmin is of a different opinion because Cald is only a child, despite his second-in-command’s advice, Relcan, who despises all non-elves and hence wants Cald slain.
The boy is kind of adopted by Eyrmin, raised as an elf, and accepted by almost everyone in their small treehouse village, Reilmirid: at one point, when he’s eighteen or so, he’s also given a suit of armor, a bow and a sword, all of them crafted by the elves and likely magic; the armor is for sure.
Meanwhile, a few things did happen in the previous years: one day a portal opened in the elves’ sacred grove for a short while spilling in both halflings and undead from the Shadow World; thereafter, the portal keeps on appearing now and then, always to let halflings and undead pass, the former fleeing from the latter. Eyrmin is determined to give shelter to the fugitives despite, again, Relcan’s advice, so his elves keep engaging the undead.
In the first such occurrences the lich lord the halflings are fleeing from is killed by the elven prince, his sword lost on the ground: and his successor, the weaker Klasmonde Volkir, only manages to grab the lich’s crown of darkness before being sucked in the Shadow World again by the closing portal. But the crown is powerless without the sword, Deathirst, forged by Azrai himself, so Klasmonde Volkir keeps on chasing his halfling slaves in the hope they’ll open a portal again for him to travel through and claim the sword: but every time the elves are there to confront his undead army.
…and a poor excuse for an awnsheghlien
Even though the evil sword’s presence goes unnoticed to the local elves, who are magically linked to their forest and, even more so, their sacred grove, its power is caught by at least two awnsheghlien who live far away: the unfaltering Gorgon, who sends wave after wave of expendables to be butchered by the elves, and a new entry, the sloven and inept Czrak.
Formerly a Vos chieftain who at Deismar absorbed Azrai’s corrupting essence and now is a monster haunting the Elinian swamp, Czrak’s bloodform transformation turned him into a four-meter slug with eight spiderlike legs, two human arms and a distorted human head thrice as big as a normal human head. From temper tantrum to temper tantrum, in his cartoonishly comical scenes he assembles a small army and keeps sending it to invade Annydwr and recover the fabled sword; but they fail every single time, because elves.
Several more things happen now, all of them necessary to advance the plot one way or another: what really matters is that in the end Czrak is killed by the Stag (yep, the ehrsheghlien); his invasion is foiled by the elven ghosts who haunted the grove, invisible to anyone but Eyrmin and Cald, who also finds a way to release them; Eyrmin is sucked into the Shadow World; and the elven king acknowledges that the so-called betrayal by Eyrmin was just a slander by the resenting Relcan and his gang; nonetheless, he rewards Relcan with the regency of Annydwr, since there’s a vacancy now. The king also gives Cald, the halflings and the two goblins Bersmog and Stognad, who were peacefully living with the elves of Reilmirid ever since the first time the portal opened, the honorary citizenship. Please, try to hold back your laughter, the farce is almost over.
Some time later, it finally clicks with Cald, who realizes the reason why the portal keeps opening: the sword! So he goes back to the grove, envelops the sword in his magic armor and hides it in a tree trunk that opens on behalf of his elven magic, so nobody will sense it anymore. Then he leaves, to roam Cerilia in search of a way to bring Eyrmin back.
And years later, when he thinks he’s found how to, Cald goes back to the Sielwode again, recovers the sword and prepares to enter the Shadow World: but when the portal opens he’s greeted by Eyrmin’s ghost, who died in the meantime and reassures him he couldn’t be any better. He’s bound to the Shadow World now and cannot leave: but he’ll keep fighting the evil there as the elven ghosts Cald released did.
A story about secrets
Despite the nearly absence of female characters, «Greatheart» is a very womanly novel: you can feel it was written by a female author and, as such, it’s also lacking in the parts where you would expect a more rational succession of events, or where the long descriptions of minutiae and exceptionalities just make it boring and slow down the narration.
The tale in the appendix about the forging of the two magic swords featuring in the novel, Vorynn’s Starfire (wielded by Eyrmin and, after his demise, by Cald) and Azrai’s Deathirst, is a fitting example of the poor timing in the narration, as it’s a lenghty and pointless story that could have dealt with the subject in a fraction of the over twenty pages it spans across, and with a better outcome; nonetheless, despite the abundance of words, we still fail to know what powers the swords have, besides what can be guessed from the descriptions given in the novel!
Back to the former predication, the novel is marred first and foremost by a lack of logic, messy action scenes that don’t make sense, and one of the key elements that betray a female author’s hand: secrets. The protagonists of their stories have a secret, must have, but they won’t tell anyone about it and protect it stubbornly, against every common sense. Such is the case with Cald, who against any logic not only doesn’t tell anyone he found a sword – an evil sword for that – in the sacred grove but on the contrary he even hides it, twice! This is the typical stubborn behavior you’d expect from a female character, or from a character written by a female author, which would lead me to further speculations that I decided not to delve into here. I’ll leave that task to the reader.
As to the remainder, the novel faces several more issues I’ve already hinted to in the paragraphs above: it’s a love letter to the elves, and its plot is a mess that more often than not makes no sense. Luckily though there’s no love story included, not even the one that was a hair’s breadth from clicking when the eighteen-year old Clad met with the equal in age human girl Jelia just outside the Sielwode: in a few pages she appears suddenly and quickly disappears, never to return again, to the reader’s relief.
Speaking of names, there are too many named characters that appear only once, like one Ulcher, a twisted scholar in the employ of Klasmonde Volkir who only features in a single chapter – giving it his point of view – and then disappears from the novel, erased, taking his subplot with himself. Which is a pity, because he was a mage on team Azrai at Deismar, and was even crippled by an enemy spell: there would have been a lot more to tell about this character, and surely it would have been cool to learn more about him and life in the Shadow World.
But not today, sadly.
The best part: the Deismar memories
Well, actually there’s something this novel does well: the Deismar memories; that is, the memories of those characters who were at Deismar, which is already a distant event in the novel’s timeline. It’s difficult to estimate how distant though, because no timeframe is given: nonetheless, inner clues suggest that about a thousand years have passed since then.
On the one hand, the domains borders are the same as in the Anuire map provided by the RPG sources: Mhoried borders Markazor, and a narrow strip of goblin land divides Mhoried from the Sielwode; Elinie is to the south, and the swamp in Hope’s Demise already borders the elven domain; and the Gorgon to the north already controls the Gorgon’s Crown, Markazor and Mur-Kilad included. Hence, it feels like it’s set after the fall of the empire, possibly even in the current year of 1524, by the campaign setting.
On the other hand, this is the time as well when the halflings began to pour in from the Shadow World: I don’t seem to remember if the setting’s lore ever stated when halflings first appeared in Cerilia (and I think it was left vague intentionally), but any year in the Cerilian history it was, this is it. When the halflings appear in the Muiren Grove for the first time they’re not yet considered common Cerilian denizens and are directed to the Burrows instead, «where my people are gathering», as one of them says. Actually, they still don’t even know how to open the portals, it just happens: «I believe they have an innate magic that is triggered by fear or desperation. Perhaps there is no magic involved», states the elven sage Glisinda at one point, which means they haven’t learned yet how to shadow walk freely.
Anyhow, it was the Deismar memories that I wished to point to, as this is what this novel does well: it gives as many as three different points of view about the key event in Birthright’s history, each of which would have deserved some deeper insight. As a starter, there’s prince Eyrmin, who at first fought on Azrai’s side: but, to save his and the elves holiness, the author also has him state that they all defected the night before the battle and took sides with the humans, as soon as the elves realized whom they were about to fight for. When Deismar was blown out, he and his folk were also conveniently spared the corrupting shards of Azrai’s essence because they took shelter behind a cliff created by the sinking of the earth. Typical elven luck; that is, plot armor.
Then there’s Czrak’s tale, who fought on Azrai’s side with his Vos clan and was one of the closest to the mountain to survive but not the closest: hence, he only absorbed a fraction of Azrai’s essence, which only made him thirst for more. So he resorted to blootheft, even on his clansmen: then, when he had collected enough power, he chose both to turn into an awnsheghlien and the monstrous shape he would take on.
Finally, the most interesting memories are Ulcher’s, the limping scholar in both Mmaadag Cemfrid’s and Klasmonde Volkir’s service, about whom I already wrote above: and these I would have enjoyed reading more about, just because Ulcher looks like an interesting character, mainly due to his point of view, both as a mage at Deismar and as a denizen of the Shadow World.
Nonetheless, the Deismar memories of these characters are only given a few sentences at most, even though they are the best part of the novel and would have made for a very interesting read of their own: yet the novel takes on a different turn, a very boring and railroaded path that makes «Greatheart» just a dull novel.
One that just fills your time but, all in all, also wastes it.
If you enjoyed this article and are looking for more hidden classics and unvarnished opinions, feel free to check out my full archive of book reviews in English here on Libri Pulp.