This chapter ends with a by now familiar Biblical reference.
Yewwl's surviving companions flee. She takes the gun that killed her son and glides to attack an approaching human one-man flyer. Mortally wounded by what feels like a hailstorm, she remains aloft long enough to see and kill the pilot. As his craft hits and sinks through the ice while more flyers approach, she swerves around so that she too will fall into the opened water because:
"She would lay her bones to rest above those of the man she had slain to her wounding. Oath-sister, farewell." (p. 194)
See A Man To My Wounding.
We can trust Poul Anderson to hit us in just the right way at the end of a chapter and of a character's life.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree, Anderson knows very well how to have his characters die well.
While I don't always think modern translations of the Bible give us the kind of grand and stately language of the older versions, in many cases they do make clearer Scriptural texts that otherwise doesn't make much sense.
E.g., this is how the NEW AMERICAN BIBLE renders Genesis 4.23b: "I have killed a man for wounding me,/a boy for bruising me." Which makes more sense than the Rheims/Challoner: "for I have slain a man to the wounding of myself, and a stripling to my own bruising."
Ad astra! Sean
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