9 Princes in Amber: Ch. 6 Pt. 1

[chroniclingamber]

The climate was warm and the colors bewildering, and everyone thought we were gods.

Bleys takes Corwin to review his fighting force. His soldiers are fairly demonic looking, lacking only horns and barbed tails. Their clothes are all blue or grey, which is kind of a Star Trek vibe (everyone wearing almost exactly the same thing). The land is called Avernus, which is an actual place in Italy – a site said to be the location of the entrance to the underworld.

Corwin points out a lot of flaws in Bleys’ plan – he doesn’t have enough guys, for one. He expresses some pretty grave misgivings about the whole thing and Bleys lashes out, pointing out accurately that Corwin is bringing nothing to the war table. He suggests finding a Shadow of his Shadow and mustering up some troops there, a suggestion that hurts Corwin’s heart. He refuses and heads off to find his own nonhuman troops.

We get another example of how stiff necked and proud they are, when Bleys offers to apologize for not being nice enough to Corwin.

“Stay with me, please. I will even apologize.”

“That is not necessary,” I said, knowing what this thing means to a prince of Amber. “I’ll stay. I think I can help you.”

Which is pretty extreme, honestly. They are SO grandiose and SO dramatic yet it fits.

Corwin promises to get his own bodies to throw into the sausage grinder and does so – furry little guys with fangs and claws. I always think of them as being blue for some reason; maybe because Bleys’ guys are red. Corwin gathers up his troops to pursue his birthright, musters up these little furry guys who think he’s a god, but he feels kind of bad and guilty about it.

[…] and about as intelligent as a freshman in the high school of your choice-sorry, kids, but what I mean is they were loyal, devoted, honest, and too easily screwed by bastards like me and my brother. I felt like the dee-jay of your choice.

It’s an evocative description, one that I “got” when I myself was a freshman in high school and one that resonates even more now when I, an old person, look at kids in high school and what they have to deal with and how easily betrayed they are. I don’t mean this as a slight against teenagers – I love teens, they’re great. It’s an admission that there’s a lot of adult predators who use teens, manipulate them, to get what they want and then toss them aside. It’s sick and it’s sad.

But I was feeling kind of funny. Most of these troops were destined to die. I was the agent responsible for much of this. I felt some remorse, though I knew the difference between Shadow and Substance. Each death would be a real death; however, I knew that also.

This is the biggest difference between Corwin and his siblings. They’ve never been regular jagoffs. Corwin has lived among regular jagoffs, has thought he was a regular jaggoff, has loved regular jaggoffs. These little furry guys are regular jagoffs int heir own way. and a part of Corwin (the jagoff part) recognizes the jagoff in them. He’s managed, despite the odds, to have grown a conscience (about regular jagoffs). But he’s still able to shove that bit of conscience into a box and ignore it to get what he wants. They’re going to die, it’ll be a real death, but at least it’ll uh be a death with honor and er in service to their god (him).

Corwin deals himself a tarot reading, a thing that largely is not brought up again; although a story written a few decades after this involves a different (and very cool) form of fortune telling. He actually does this a few times, looking for different things. He gets the same result each time – one of his brothers, Caine. He calls Caine up and they gossip, they banter, they work out a deal where Caine will hold his ships back while Corwin and Bleys sneak their own ships through. Caine also requests “a regency” (note again, not a dukedom or earldom or whatever, a regency) and also wants to murder Random which… I can see it. Corwin says no to that last one, though.

He consults with Gerard, who goes along with his ideas. He can’t reach Benedict, though, and when he tries Brand something unpleasant happens – Brand screams and begs for help and things go wild before the connection is severed. This comes up again in the next book.

Having made contact with several people and perhaps feeling a bit maudlin Corwin considers his father’s Trump and attempts to make contact. Amazingly he succeeds – he and Oberon have a quick chat and Oberon doesn’t tell him what happened, claims nobody else consulted him, and gives Corwin his blessing to take the throne – urging him to do it quickly. Corwin does not tell anyone about this or make a second attempt to reach him.

He does, however, check in with Bleys about what would have happened if he hadn’t popped up when he did. What would Bleys have done? Bleys tells him a nice story about his previous plans, including the fact that he purposely went to a Shadow where a brother would help him. Benedict, maybe? A different brother having a sudden change of heart? The story is a thin one, though, and Corwin has doubts about it; but he knows Bleys as such a brilliant tactician that of course he’d have made it work. Of course. He totally didn’t have some other secret plan.

Corwin realizes, happily, that he can still navigate Shadow and can recognize a route to Amber.

Corwin is bringing troops by sea and Bleys by land. It’s not going well, mostly for Bleys, although after 8 days of journey it’s Corwin’s turn to have troubles. Namely, it storms. It pounds them for hours without lightening up; Corwin ties himself to the ship’s steering wheel so he can continue guiding the ship without them getting blown horrifically off course (or getting washed overboard). How bad is it? So bad a leviathan or whatever gets itself gone.

“Storm?” he said.

“You bet your sweet ass. It’s the granddaddy of them all. I think I see a monster off to port. If he has any brains, he’ll aim for the bottom… He just did.”

After the storm, Corwin realizes that he’s lost half the fleet.

He also needs a bit of hot gos and Trumps Random for the latest news. More on that in the next post.

References:

• Caine is an alternate spelling of Cain, the first born of Adam and Eve in the Christian mythos. Cain was a farmer, and his brother Abel was a shepherd. Both offered up sacrifices to God and God was not super accepting of Cain’s grains and fruits but he was well pleased with the smoking fat and meat and blood of Abel’s offerings. Cain, jealous, killed his brother Abel, committing the world’s first murder. God then banished Cain, sentencing him to a lifetime of wandering.


• The “Russian Campaign” refers to the catastrophic French attempts to invade Russia. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed by starvation, disease, and the cold, accomplishing nothing (other than setting Corwin a few steps further toward Amber).


• “Guide and Opener of the Way” sounds like it refers to something – possibly Robert Bloch’s short story collection “The Opener of the Way.” Some of the stories are part of the Cthulian mythos. A god leading a force of young men to their doom in a different world might have some overlap there, you know?


• “To die, to sleep—/ To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub!” This is a bit from Hamlet, which basically means “Damn, it’d be great to die. Wouldn’t that be great? Just lie down and die. It’d be like sleeping. Oh wait no, what if I have dreams when I’m dead? That would sure suck. There’s the rub (problem) indeed!”


• “Inches and Hours” might be related to the phrase/aphorism “Repentance is not to be measured by inches and hours,” although I can’t find a source for it.


• “Then the winds arose, and-if you’ll excuse the expression-broke-upon the vessel I rode.” “Breaking wind” is another euphemism for “passing gas.” It’s a fart joke. Feel free to correct me if there’s a different reference I’m missing but uh… it’s a fart joke.


• “Tempest-tossed” is a Shakespearean turn of phrase. I want to say that “storm-torn” is as well, but it’s so widely used it’s hard to tell the origin. Emma Lazarus used the phrase “tempest-tost” in her poem “The New Colossus.”