Tag Archives: Sintia

Moonphase

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In which Priscilla Mendoza is cast out.

There’s a lot more in this story than I noticed the first time I read it, and much of it I’m not sure I have a solid grip on yet.

One thing I do feel confident saying is that the arc of the Moonhawk and Lute stories, from “Where the Goddess Sends” to here (and beyond, to the extent that Moonhawk and the Goddess continue to be mentioned) is a lot clearer to me after this re-read, and particularly with the addition of “Moon’s Honor”, which did a lot to clarify which details are recurring themes.

The tendency Moonhawk talks to Priscilla about in this story, of the Circle’s purpose being waylaid by the greed of power and personal importance, is one of those recurring themes. The impression I get is that Lute and Moonhawk have been acting as a counter to that tendency; one thing Moonhawk’s travels with Lute achieve, in both versions we’ve seen, is to remind her to think about the Temple’s role and its effects on the other people of the world (with the result, not shown but implied by Moonhawk’s nature, that having realised the Temple is out of line she’ll do what she can to put things right).

So it’s worrying that Moonhawk says here that the Circle having been keeping her apart from Lute, and keeping her in check by limiting the tools she has to work with. That means the power-hungry have had centuries to get hungrier and less thoughtful, and to bend the workings of the Temple toward their purposes. (I wonder who first starting restricting Moonhawk’s actions, and how much they understood of what they were doing.)

(A second thing I wonder about is the Names. It’s mentioned that there are fourteen living Names, which is the same number of Names who bound themselves to the Goddess’ path in Crystal Dragon — except that one of those was Lute, so they can’t be exactly the same fourteen. And the two Names Priscilla calls out during the climactic confrontation are modern-sounding names, not like “Moonhawk” or “Oatflower”. Added to something that was mentioned in “A Matter of Dreams”, the impression I get is that these days there are more than fourteen Names being reincarnated in the service of the Goddess, with perhaps a restriction that only fourteen may be incarnated at any one time. And that makes me wonder if there’s any deck-stacking going on, so that the Names who might want to resist the Temple’s slide from grace are being edged out by Names who support it.)

One of the later novels indicates that there is a Lute to go with this Moonhawk, who would be at this time still a halfling boy only a couple of years older than Priscilla. No wonder Moonhawk warns Priscilla that he can’t yet stand against the Circle directly. (A third thing I wonder is whether that means he will stand against the Circle some day. I can’t imagine Moonhawk and Lute letting them go on getting away with this forever.)

Tomorrow, we round off the tale of Priscilla’s departure with the Prologue to Conflict of Honors. If you’re not wanting to split things up, you can skip it until next week when we return and do the rest of Conflict of Honors, and we’ll see you in a couple of days.

A Matter of Dreams

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In which a pilot dreams of Moonhawk.

After the thought I had (and expressed rather incoherently, I fear) yesterday, about the magics of this setting perhaps having technological underpinnings, it’s interesting to follow up immediately with a story in which (I hadn’t remembered) the macguffin is part of the technological underpinning of the witches of Sintia.

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen Sintia, and Moonhawk. Some things have changed: Sintia is now a technological society with its own spaceport and trade with other planets. (Fiona, our narrator, neglects to name the city that hosts the spaceport, presumably because as a Spacer she’s not much interested in local geography.) Some things are not as much changed as one might like: the representatives of the Temple are still, or again, having the same problem with their priorities that Lute called out Lady Rowan on in “Moon’s Honor”. The thing that they consider most important about the theft from the Temple is not the harm that might have been done, but the affront to the Temple’s self-importance.

There’s no Lute to call them out on it, however; this Moonhawk is still young, and does not appear to have met her Lute yet.

Nobody says it out loud — it would probably have been distinctly unwise to say it out loud — but I reckon that Cly Nelbern’s desire for an escort is less about physical protection than about entangling the pilots so that if she goes down, they go down too. And I reckon that Fiona has realised the same thing by the time she asks if Nelbern will be wanting an escort again to her second meeting.

The story is marked with the year 1375; on internal evidence, this has to be the year in which the main events of the story occurred, not the years-later time at which the narrator is telling the story. Fair enough, since that’s the same logic on which I’ve placed the story here in the chronological order.

Tomorrow: “Moonphase”

The Wine of Memory

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In which Master Lute gives a friend more help than he knew he was capable of.

It’s amazing, the details one notices when one starts paying attention. As for instance: this story is also in the wrong place; I had never realised before, but it goes between “Where the Goddess Sends” and “A Spell for the Lost”. (I’m beginning to think that when this big re-read is over, I’m going to have to do another smaller one, just the Moonhawk and Lute stories, to get them straight in my head.)

Moonhawk and Lute have been travelling together for just a few days, and Moonhawk has just mastered her first piece of Craft Magic. She’s already started snarking about how he’s a terrible teacher, and he about how she’s a disrespectful apprentice. And he’s already started offering her new perspectives on the relationship between the Temple and the towns.

The anecdote about Rowan learning to read also says something about the way society works on Sintia. (Incidentally, this is the first story, in the order we’ve been reading them, to explicitly name the setting as Sintia.)

More characters named after plants (though this time with some orthographic variations), including merlot (a grape varietal used in winemaking), vervain, rowan, and juniper. (This Rowan is the second we’ve encountered recently; the Witch of Dyan Circle who was hunting Lute down in “Moon’s Honor” also bore that name.)

Speaking of plants, the association of rosemary with memory is a piece of folklore of long standing. (“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.”)

These stories do really well at the atmospheric spell-casting scenes.

I like the way Lute’s attempt to help Veverain turned out. It’s got some interesting implications (and I bet this is another story Priscilla’s teachers didn’t tell properly if they told it at all).

I like the story about how Tween the cat came to be named.

In fact, I like this story period. It’s my favourite of the Moonhawk and Lute set.

A Spell for the Lost

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In which Moonhawk and Lute, pooling their varied resources, find that which is lost.

Moonhawk and Lute have been travelling together for a month now. Underneath all the teasing banter, Lute has come to regard Moonhawk highly, surprising Moonhawk when she gets an idea of how worried he is for her safety. What she thinks of him is not as clear, since he doesn’t do anything to frighten her the way she frightens him.

Speaking of frightening, the scene where Moonhawk is working her spell is very atmospheric.

We learn that Moonhawk is from Dyan City (like that other Moonhawk, and that settles the question I had about whether Dyan and Huntress are the same). One of the undercurrents of these stories makes another appearance with Lute’s comment about the differences between life in the cities and elsewhere.

The people in this story are named after plants: Cedar is a tree, and Laurel, Aster, Senna, and Tael are flowering plants. (Tael, being a plant that doesn’t exist on Earth, is carefully introduced in passing a few pages before the girl’s name is first mentioned.) The mention of Laurel, Moonhawk’s old teacher, is reassuring; it’s evidence that this kind of theme naming is widespread, and that Tael and Cedar had a better basis for their relationship than the coincidence of both having parents who named their children after vegetables. I also hope that Senna was named for one of her namesake’s more congenial properties than the one that first came to my mind; medicinally, senna is useful but unpleasant, which is not bad for a plant but would be an unhappy reputation for a person to bear.

You know who Lute reminds me of in this story? Shan yos’Galan. They have the theatrical mannerisms in common, of course, but the resemblance isn’t usually so strong. I think maybe it’s the lounging about with a glass of wine in his hand that does it.

Where the Goddess Sends

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In which Moonhawk and Lute meet and decide to travel together across the world.

If I was right yesterday, then this is the first time we’ve seen Moonhawk and Lute since the Great Migration – and my, how they’ve changed.

This Moonhawk is human, a priestess of the Goddess. This Lute is human, as well, and though he is a Master of prestidigitation, in contrast to his former self he can wield only enough actual magic to summon a small light, and even that costs him a great deal of effort.

It has to be said that this Lute is much more entertaining than the old one. (Perhaps that’s only to be expected of a man who makes his living as an entertainer.) Moonhawk has something of a dry sense of humor as well. So, come to that, does the narrator, particularly when it comes to people being knocked on the head.

This is also the first time we’ve heard of the Goddess, and won’t be the last. She comes in somewhere in every story set on Sintia, and more remarkably in several stories that aren’t; the Goddess seems to have a presence on many planets. (For those who might find an active Goddess an incongruous thing to find in a space opera, the account of the Great Weaving in Crystal Dragon implicitly provides a context.)

The world they’re travelling through is a bit of a mixture. It seems to be generally sort of medieval, but there are stories about “the ship that brought our foremothers here”, and lingering bits of technology.

Lute mentions Huntress City, famous for its electric lights. In “Moon’s Honor”, we see Dyan City, with its electric lights; I’m not sure whether these are the same city at different points in its history or if there’s more than one city with electric lights. (Dyan is said in “Moon’s Honor” to be one of “the Three Cities”, which perhaps suggests the latter.) Either way, juxtaposing the two names brings to mind the Romans’ Diana, a noted huntress and goddess of the moon. I bet the authors had her in mind, but I don’t know if the Sintians knew enough Roman mythology to be using it for place names.

The part about the two things which must without fail be said is striking, and I have always remembered it. (And since reading “Moonphase”, I have often wondered if the version of this story Priscilla learned included the two things – assuming that her teachers told this story at all.)

Moon’s Honor

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In which Moonhawk and Lute meet for the first time… again.

Well, I gave it my best shot and I blew it: Now I’ve read Moon’s Honor, I’m pretty sure it’s set after the existing trilogy of Tales of Moonhawk and Lute.

So, if you haven’t actually read it yet, you might consider leaving it for now and coming back to this post in three days. (Or not. Up to you.)

The other thing you might want to know if you haven’t read it yet is that Moon’s Honor was originally conceived as the beginning of a novel, so while the immediate situation is resolved at the end there are lots of loose threads left dangling.

(Apparently the authors couldn’t find a taker for the full novel; according to the foreword, Meisha Merlin and then Baen were more interested in more Korval novels, and everybody else they tried before Meisha Merlin just wasn’t interested. I can kind of see why, I think; I want to know what happens next, but my interest in the characters and situation got a head start from already knowing something about these people and places from other stories, and I can’t say for certain that I’d have been interested if I’d come to it cold.)

Here we have a Moonhawk and Lute recognisably similar to the pair from the Tales, but also different. They’re still on Sintia, which I had wondered whether would be the case. They’re brought together by the call of the Goddess, but this time it’s Lute who is called to where Moonhawk is. This Moonhawk is still a priestess, more advanced in some ways (and less so in others). This Lute is still a magician whose power lies more in the quickness of the hand than in supernatural gift, but instead of a lone wanderer he’s a member of a widespread guild. (One wonders whether, if it were possible to trace the chain of apprentices and masters back to its beginning, one would find the earlier Lute and the apprentice he took in “Where the Goddess Sends”.) He also seems to have more supernatural gift than that earlier Lute; it’s seductively easy to create a trend out of two data points, of course, but I do wonder if part of the planned arc of the Moonhawk and Lute stories is/was that each successive Lute had more of the supernatural at his beck than the one before. (And then again, Plan B suggests a third data point, and the trend still holds.)

Speaking of the overall arc, it’s also interesting that the embodied Moonhawk and Lute have a tendency to find a pattern with Lute as mentor and Moonhawk as student, considering that with the original Moonhawk and Lute it was Moonhawk who was usually in charge.

We see more of the Temple than in any other story than perhaps “Moonphase”, and there are signs already of what it will have become in that story, in the incidental stories about some of the priestesses’ attitudes, and in that very pointed exchange about where Lady Rowan’s loyalty lies.

I think Master Lute’s interplay with the Lady Rowan may be my favourite part of the story; for my favourite part of my favourite part, it’s a toss-up between the exchange about loyalty and the result of Lady Rowan commanding Lute to be silent.

An odd incidental detail that might or might not have been elaborated on had the novel been completed: in addition to the Moon, the night sky here contains two fast-moving objects referred to as the Hounds.