Wind And Cave

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

Approaching the troll's cave, "Holger's tobacco-dulled nose..." (p. 140) prevents him from smelling the troll until after the others:

"The wind was more or less in his face. He heard it go whoo-oo and shake his plume and cloak; he felt how chill it was. Nothing more." (ibid.)

Two senses, sound and feel, but not yet smell. However, when they reach the cave mouth, he gags at a stench described as "...thick and cold..." (ibid.)

And when they enter the cave:

"'I would we might see the stars once more,' Alianora said. The wind blew her words away." (ibid.)

The wind comments that her hope is in vain?

There follows an adventure in the cave.

Spring Wind

Gallicena, VI, 1.

When Queen Vindilis has forcefully addressed her Sister Queen Fennalis:

"There was a silence..." (p. 120)

A silence underlines the importance of what has been said and gives both women time to think but, of course, there is more. The sentence continues:

"..., apart from a whoo-oo of spring-time wind under the eaves." (ibid.)

The silence is an absence of speech but not of thought or of the background wind. Indeed, the latter is almost omnipresent. The chapter had begun with the advent of spring which included:

"Sunbeams and cloud shadows pursued each other, with rainsqualls and rainbows, till the wind lay down to rest, and whiteness brooded huge in the blue." (p. 116)

The almost personified wind lying down to rest expresses peace. When appropriate, the Andersons' wind roar or shriek but not now. This paragraph is one of their most beautiful descriptions of any season not only in Ys but:

"...across the length of Armorica." (ibid.)

naked boughs

wet earth

blossoms

leaves

new grass

tender herbs

sunbeams

cloud shadows

squalls

rainbows

whiteness

blueness

lambs

calves

foals

meadows

brilliance

wives airing and scrubbing homes

farmers ploughing

mariners sailing

bleak freshness in Vindilis' house

Sound Effects

"The Sorrow of Odin the Goth."

The carved gods, beasts and heroes seem to move in the shifting shadows while:

"Whoo-oo said the wind, a noise as cold as itself." (p. 334)

As often in Poul Anderson's works, the wind comments on the action. I do not seem to have noted this example before. However, we have heard the sound "Whoo-oo" twice before (see here) (scroll down), once as a sound in battle and once yet again as the wind become almost a protagonist. It is said to whip Dahut as she runs through the streets of Ys.

Maybe some mentions of the wind are just mentions of the wind! When the Wanderer enters the hall:

"Wind flapped the edges of his blue cloak, flung a few dead leaves in past him, whistled and chilled along the room." (p. 339)

Maybe just the wind but also appropriate for the advent of Odin.

Marital Rape

Dahut casts a slumber spell on Gratillonius, then tries, in the dark, to arouse him sufficiently that he will have sex with her in the mistaken belief that she is one of his other wives. What she attempts here is the crime of rape. This crime requires neither a male perpetrator nor physical force. Its essence is lack of consent. Force, fear or fraud suffice to negate consent.

The consent must be not only to have sex but also to have it with a particular person. Thus, pretending in the dark or in disguise to be someone's husband constitutes rape. Similarly, pretending to be a man's wife or, in the case of polygamy, one of his other wives also constitutes rape.

When Gratillonius, alerted, hauls down the drape, letting light into the room, the wind is heard, "Whoo-oo," outside. (Dahut, Chapter X, section 3, p. 220) This wind seems to become a protagonist in the narrative. Dahut, identified and violently rejected by her father, runs naked into the city as she will run naked through its streets when she has caused its inundation. Ocean will destroy the city as it once destroyed her childhood sandcastle of the city. Dahut's entire life prefigures its end - and that end will be the beginning of something else.

War On Ishtar

Poul Anderson, Fire Time (St Albans, Herts, 1977).

Poul Anderson describes warfare convincingly while also showing us that "War is Hell." (This phrase is not Anderson's but is appropriate.)

Anderson displays a sound grasp of military terminology:

"...bartizans alternated with bastions. Each of the latter held a catapult throwing several darts at once, or a mangonel with incendiary ammunition." (p. 209)

Of the highlighted words, two were unfamiliar and I needed to check the precise meaning of the third.

"Valenneners worked catapults and trebuchets to cast heavy missiles..." (p. 211)

Trebuchets, like catapults, cast missiles so how do they differ?

The sounds of battle:

arrows whistle;
stones make a sound like "...whoo-oo-thump..." (ibid.);
there are howls, screeches, horn blasts and drum-thunder.

Other sensations:

grit stings eyes and crunches between teeth.

We are there, almost.

The battling Ishtarians are quadrupeds (see image) but earlier, on pp. 197-198, Anderson had described T-life (and see here), so alien that I find it difficult to summarize the description:

spherical torso;
five limbs;
the top limb culminating in five petals that are chemosensors and tongues for five jaws;
a sound-receiving tendril under each petal;
five symmetrical fingers on each arm;
one self-darkening eye under each arm and a third co-ordinating eye under the top limb;
protuberances of variable shape, color and odor to indicate the three sexes -

- but I may have misunderstood some of these details. We need more bizarrely shaped aliens in sf. Picture a Pierrson's Puppeteer, then imagine that Puppeteers write sf in which the galaxy is full of beings that look like them. As JRR Tolkien said to CS Lewis about Father Christmas and a talking lion in the same story, "It won't do..."