Ysan Inns

The murderous inter-dynastic deceit in Poul Anderson's Mother Of Kings approaches a crescendo. Haakon Jarl plans to kill Gold-Harald Knutson who plans to kill Harald Eiriksson who is sailing into a trap of the kind devised for Tryggvi Olafsson by Gudrod Eiriksson: the consequences of their own actions.

I seek temporary respite in the intriguing inns of Poul and Karen Anderson's uncanny city of Ys. See:

In An Ysan Inn
Time Passes
Inns In Ys
More Details About Ys
Epona's Horse
Appreciating Details

There may be more about Ysan inns and, of course, there is a lot about Ys, sadly inundated centuries before the events of Mother Of Kings.

Inns And Demons In Different Multiverses

This blog appreciates the three story-telling media:

narrative, which is verbal;

drama, which is usually audiovisual but just visual in mime and just auditory on the radio;

the sequential art story-telling medium, which is usually visual-verbal, rarely just visual.

Interconnected prose narrative fantasies by Poul Anderson present the Old Phoenix Inn and Satan whereas interconnected graphic fantasies by Neil Gaiman and Mike Carey present the Inn of the Worlds' End and Lucifer Morningstar after he has retired as Lord of Hell, an extraordinary concept.

When I want a visual alternative to prose late at night, I usually turn to graphic novels rather than to dvds and then find dramatic parallels like two inter-universal inns and two versions of the Devil.

Uminankh's Inn

Conan The Rebel, VII.

It is late here and I will be brief.

We appreciate inns in many worlds and times in Poul Anderson's works. I was all set to summarize an account of Uminankh's place in Khemi. However, it is so dreadful that I will leave it to other Poul Anderson enthusiasts to read it for themselves. I mean this, folks. Usually inns sound comfortable. This one does not. The plan is that Conan will spend at least a week holed up there but I am sure that something else will happen although I do not remember what.

I would not be reading a Conan novel if it had not been written by Poul Anderson. This one is good. He turned his hand to anything, also including the Man-Kzin Wars period of Larry Niven's Known Space History. The multiverse is vast.

Physics And Premises

In several works by Poul Anderson, there is interstellar travel but slower than light. Is this because faster than light travel is impossible or only because a means of FTL travel has not been discovered/invented? When reading such a work, we assume that the impossibility of FTL is one of its premises and, indeed, the invention of an FTL drive near the end of the Harvest of Stars Tetralogy or of Genesis would be discordant and would seem inconsistent. So the laws of physics differ in different fictional universes. Of course. There are fictional universes where magic works. And when multiple universes are found to coexist in a single multiverse, their physical laws continue to differ. Thus, both Valeria Matuchek, daughter of a werewolf and a witch, and Nicholas van Rijn, from a relativistic universe where FTL is possible but only by many rapid quantum jumps, visit the inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix. Thus also, mythical beings and ordinary people from a universe just like ours visit Neil Gaiman's Inn of the Worlds' End. We want to read long series set in both of these inns but we can't have everything.

The Eagle And Moon

The blog collects accounts of meals, inns and cities. Here is another inn. The Eagle and Moon, run by a black Nantucketer, is in the Alban (English) midlands:

whitewashed plaster interior;
burning logs in an open fireplace;
cast-iron stove;
long bar with brass rail;
roasting meat and onions;
fresh-baked bread;
carved beechwood staircase;
lamps hanging from rafters;
bright blankets on the walls;
crossed bronze-headed spears;
a sheathed short sword;
beds and bathroom upstairs;
acorn-fed roast pork;
ceramic mugs of hot mulled cider;
Nantucketers rest after a long ride.

We need to read this as well as accounts of journeys and battles.

SM Stirling, On The Oceans Of Eternity (New York, 2000), Chapter One, pp. 21-22.

Between Worlds

When a character moves between worlds, how does the author describe the transition? Sometimes, the character imagines another world, then enters it - and later wonders whether it was real - but usually the other world is unequivocally real. I will mention only a few examples from the works of three fantasy writers, CS Lewis, Poul Anderson and Neil Gaiman.

Lewis' most famous entrance to another world is a wardrobe but there is a better example in a later book. The characters look at a painting of the ship the Dawn Treader until it seems that the waves are moving, then they fall into the sea and are rescued by the ship's crew. Lewis never explains how a painting of a contemporary Narnian ship came to hang in an English house.

The hero of Poul Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions, fighting Nazis on a Danish beach, finds himself in the Carolingian mythological universe. Later, mission accomplished in that universe, he returns to the Danish beach with no loss of time, like a returned ruler of Narnia.

In Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975), Puck tells Prince Rupert of the Rhine's companion, Will Fairweather:

"'...to speak of inns and such - My friend, if sorely pressed for shelter, think of this. There is a tavern known as the old Phoenix, which none may see nor enter who're not touched by magic in some way. It flits about, but maybe you can use his ring to find it, or even draw a door towards yourselves...'" (pp. 55-56) (Oberon and Titania have given Rupert a magic ring.)

Sure enough, the ring lights the way to the inn which appears before Rupert and Will although it remains invisible to their Puritan pursuers. A regular of the Old Phoenix tells us:

"Look for it anywhere, anytime, by day, by dusk, by night, up an ancient alley or in a forest where hunters whose eyes no spoor can escape nonetheless pass it by unseeing...you must be alert for its fleeting presence..." (Anderson, "House Rule" IN Anderson, Fantasy (New York, 1981), p. 9).

This regular finds it many times, once unbelievably on ship at sea, another time more reasonably on a country road after dark where he knows that:

"The inn might waver from sight at any instant." (Anderson, "Losers' Night" IN All One Universe (New York, 1996), p. 107)

It sounds like Neil Gaiman's Inn of the Worlds' End:

"Up the lane aways is the Inn. You just have to be SURE it's there, though. If you AREN'T sure, then fizzlywinks, it's only goin to be fireflies and treeses" (Gaiman, Neil, The Sandman: Worlds' End (New York, 1994), p. 22.

One Worlds' End guest enters it in stages. Brant Tucker is driving to Chicago at night on the interstate. So far then he is travelling though not as yet between worlds. (However, his Earth is that of the DC Universe where anything not only can happen but routinely does happen.) Then:

he was very tired, so did he dream everything that followed?;
he didn't think it was weird when it started to snow in June;
a large, strange animal ran in front of the car (we see this since we are reading graphic fiction);
the car went off the road, across a field, down a hill and into an oak tree;
Brant, carrying his unconscious co-driver, Charlene Mooney, could not find the road;
he was directed to the Inn by an apparently disembodied voice (see above - the reader realises that the speaker is a hedgehog; regular readers recognise the speaking hedgehog from Gaiman's The Books of Magic);
Brant finds a country road;
at the end of the road, is a light;
first it is fireflies in a hedge, then it is the Inn.

I think that the transition between realities began with the apparent snow storm which, we learn, was a reality storm, stranding travellers from many realms in the Inn. A sailor's account is different:

"Y'see, there was a storm, come up out of nowhere at midnight - - we were swept onto the rocks where there shouldn't've been rocks neither, nohow." (p. 67)

Brant and the sailor then disagree about whether the date is June, 1993, or September, 1914.

And a Necropolitan says:

" 'A dark thunderstorm arose suddenly, and the brougham in which my companions and I were travelling was washed into a river.' " (p. 42)

Making an ordinary journey seems to be the beginning of the process.

The landlady explains:

"This place is the Inn at the end of all worlds. None of you were BROUGHT here. Each of you was travelling, and was caught in an unseasonable storm of some kind. You made your way here by luck, and took refuge and advantage of the hospitality offered. And you WILL leave here, when the storm is over." (p. 139)

However, Charlene is allowed to stay to work in the Inn and we see her there in a later series, The Furies by Mike Carey. The characters offer different theories about what causes a reality storm. A common feature of the Old Phoenix and the Worlds' End is the telling of stories and some of these stories offer other routes between worlds:

"...the silver road...glittered and glimmered away beyond a street market." (Gaiman, p. 29)

The man who sees the silver road works in an office in a modern city where gravestones can have "...letters from forgotten alphabets..." (p. 28). That odd touch, if taken literally, means that the modern city is certainly not on any Earth like ours. The narrator of this story asks:

"Is there any person in the world who does not dream? Who does not contain within them worlds unimagined?" (p. 28)

And that is where the other worlds are.

An Ikranankan Inn

We have seen a lot of inns. Here is an Inkranankan one:

a wench approaches Padrick but withdraws when she sees that he is human!;
the smoky room becomes still as Adzel enters;
patrons draw forth knives;
torchlight, bright to natives, is dim and red to Adzel;
garments are sleazy;
faces are avian;
eyes are unwinking;
when Padrig introduces Adzel as the Emperor's guest, a drunk laughs and patrons resume drinking but remain watchful.

It sounds like Hell to me. How do League traders become used to going into such places?

Appreciating Details

Rereading and blogging involves noticing, appreciating and remembering many details forgotten from two or three previous readings.

(i) A lineage of the Gods: Tiamat, the pre-cosmic Chaos from Babylonian mythology, was the mother of the inhuman, squid- or kraken-like sea God, Lir, Who was the father of the anthropomorphic sea God, Mananaan mac Lir, Who in turn remains active several centuries later in two of Poul Anderson's Viking novels.

(ii) Elven Gardens: This exotically named location in Ys is mentioned several times but the reader has probably forgotten the early description of enclosed paths, topiaries, statues and a stairway to a Temple.

(iii) Ys: The characters refer to the city of Ys as beautiful and a wonder of the world but again we might not remember the occasional descriptions of its wall, friezes and gleaming, colored towers.

(iv) Ysan inns: Five are mentioned and three are described, providing comfortable contexts for character interactions and conversations. They differ, depending on the economic circumstances or life styles of various Ysans and visitors.

(v) Gratillonius' challengers: Long periods can pass without a challenge but one can come at any time. The identities and motivations of the six challengers are an important part of the story.

Two Inns

Poul Anderson uses his inn between the worlds as the setting of two short stories and an interlude and an epilogue in one novel whereas Neil Gaiman uses his inter-cosmic inn as the framing device for a series of stories, as in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Gaiman's approach works well especially since the author and his successive artists ensure that their readers remain continuously conscious both of each new story and of the inn where the stories are told. One difference is that Anderson's Old Phoenix as described remains a single small stable indoors place whereas the Inn of the Worlds' End sometimes abruptly alters its size and shape.

An Anderson collection with Old Phoenix-based introductions to original stories could have featured characters from different series each introducing an new addition to his or her particular narrative. Thus, such a collection would belong not to one series but to all and would unite them into a mega-series.

A Waterfront Tavern

We need an inventory of all the friendly inns visited by Poul Anderson's characters. There is one between the universes. There are several in the city of Ys; many in diverse futures and on other planets. Here is yet another. Ivar and his new Ythrian acquaintance:

"...sat in a waterfront tavern, wood-paneled, rough-raftered, dark and smoky. Windows opened on a view of the dock."
-Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010), p. 152.

Locals discuss Riverfolk, tinerans and Elders. One man practices Oneness under the Morning Star. A church-goer denounces such heathenism but both look for outside help against the Empire. Elders? God? Ythri? There is nothing better than a pub conversation to summarize current affairs and popular aspirations.

The reader does not yet realize that Anderson is preparing Ivar for the next stage of his journey, from tinerans to Riverfolk with the Ythrian's help - and closer to the source of the rumors of the Elders' return. 

Meanwhile, In Other Reading

For each of us, Poul Anderson (or any other writer) exists in the context of (different) other reading.

For me, right now:

Anderson's Fire Time, Chapter IX; 

the Dune series seems to be falling off my reading list;

I reread Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy the way some people reread JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings Trilogy;

I have read the first five of the twenty-five chapters in GK Chesterton's The Flying Inn but am not sure how much more I will read (the flying inn is like flying pickets - it does not fly);

appreciation of the visuals in Bryan Talbot's The Tale of One Bad Rat has led to rereading it several times in quick succession, an entirely different experience from prose-only fiction.

Next, we might consider an inn in Fire Time, another of Anderson's many inns.

On The Highroad River I

A long boat journey down a river offers comfort, in the boat's saloon or a cabin, and adventure as the travelers encounter each new place along the river. Poul Anderson describes two such journeys, the first in The Day Of Their Return, the second in The Game Of Empire. The place names on the maps at the beginning of The Game Of Empire become invested with meaning as the characters travel to and through them.

The relevant map of one part of the surface of the planet Daedalus shows the capital Aurea as just upriver from Paz de la Frontera, which is the head of navigation on the Highroad River. Targovi arrives on Daedalus by landing his ship, Moonjumper, at the spaceport in Aurea. The original town, which had been small because "...colonization was far-flung, enclaves in wilderness..." (Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy, new York, 2012, p. 221) has been mostly demolished or engulfed by sector defense command, civil bureaucracy, private enterprises, towers and industrial plants linked by streets, elways and air-space with round the clock traffic.

Aurea is on a plateau above a steep slope retaining a small part of the old town. Descending from the plateau, Targovi walks along a lane down the side of a cliff with, on his left, time-worn walls and, on his right, beyond the railing, a view of:

ice fields beyond northern mountains;
the headwaters and the river valley;
native growth;
farms and plantations;
southern plains receding to invisibility.

Ju Shao, a Cynthian, runs an inn perched on the cliff.

Hospitable inns are a major feature of Anderson's fictional worlds. There is one between the universes and there are several in the city of Ys as well others scattered among many times and places. In the Patrician System, Hassan runs the Sign of the Golden Cockbeetle in the old quarter of Olga's Landing on the planet Imhotep and Ju Shao runs her place in old Aurea on Daedalus.

Inns In Ys

We learn at last that the "...disreputable old haunt in the Fish Tail..." is not the same place as the Green Whale which has also been mentioned (Poul and Karen Anderson, Dahut (London, 1989), p. 198). The text implies that the Green Whale is more expensive but the characters have prospered and can now afford it.

By contrast with the old haunt already described, the Green Whale is "...spacious, clean, sunny, muralled with fanciful nautical images." (p. 199) There are several tables. The resident courtesan has "...learning and conversational abilities..." as well as beauty and sexual skills. (p. 198)

Zeugit the landlord's clientele do more than swap songs and tales. " 'They talk of a new Age...' " (p. 199) Ys, brought out of its centuries-old isolation by King Gratillonius, is now a busy seaport visited by strangers from everywhere bringing new Gods, ways and ideas. The old faith is weakened. Some men seek Mithras whose legionaries want volunteers, not conscripts. Zeugit says, " '...change is in the air, you can smell it like the sharpness before a lightning storm.' " (p. 199)

The old unnamed inn in the Fish Tail slum, with its ancient, sea-damaged building, was like a haunt of the primordial Ysan sea god, Lir, whereas the Green Whale is frequented by young men eager for the New Age when glorious Ys might "'...succeed Rome as mistress of the world.'" (p. 199)

There has indeed been a New Age since then but it has not been what anyone then could have imagined. Across Ocean in the western continent discovered by Ysans is a seaport with towers, named after the Romano-British city of Eboracum - Novum Eboracum, New York.

A Scotian Mithraic initiate addressing Gratillonius, " 'Tis honoured I am, Father," is an ancestor of generations of Irish Catholics addressing their priests as "Father" although he could not have suspected that as we do not know what will come after us. (p. 167)

Romans In Ys

What do Roman soldiers do in Ys?

(i) They are barracked in Warriors' House.

(ii) On a rota, they guard the palace with Ysan marines because their centurion is now King.

(iii) The catechumen Budic visits the church where he finds the chorepiscopus entertaining his good friend, Queen Bodilis. She has ensured that the clergyman is well treated and has tried to get him elected to the Symposium because he and she:

"'...share love of books, art the wonders of earth and sea and heaven.'" (Roma Mater, p. 172)

This is a good example of a fruitful inter-faith exchange. (Someone from our meditation group occasionally attends a gathering of local Christians, Muslims etc. On such occasions, we learn to eat not sandwiches but samosas.)

(iv) Guided by a deckhand in the Ysan navy, Cynan and Arminius set off to walk by Aurochs Gate and Goose Fair to the inns in the Fishtail slum -

- interrupted!

Peter And Poul

I have now read two alternative historical fictitious accounts of the English Civil War. In Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest, Shakespeare was the Great Historian. It follows from this fantastic premise not only that Auberon, Titania, Puck etc existed and that Prospero's magic worked but also that there was knowledge of the Earth's sphericity in Lear's time and that there were clocks in Caesar's time. This early knowledge of science and mechanics led to an industrial revolution in the seventeenth century. The Roundheads had steam trains and balloons.

In Peter Cakebread's The Alchemist's Revenge, there was an alchemical revolution in the seventeenth century. Cavaliers and Roundheads fought each other with magical mechanisms, philosopher's stones and elementals.

In all three seventeenth centuries, ours, Anderson's and Cakebread's, the Roundheads were led by Oliver Cromwell whereas the Cavaliers were led by Charles I and Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Rupert is Anderson's hero but a minor character in Cakebread's novel. All three Ruperts could meet in the Old Phoenix, Anderson's Inn between the parallel universes.

As I have said before on this blog, Anderson's characters meet in many colourful dives and inns, including the Old Phoenix. Cakebread matches these with the Throttled Pig, the most dangerous pub in Oxford, whose landlord is rumoured to be in the pay of cutthroats. I have just started to read The Alchemist's Revenge and will look out for any more parallels of interest to Anderson fans - although, meanwhile, since the novel is also well written, I will enjoy it in any case.

Busy Seaports

Inns In Ys
Thucydides Wrote
Verbals And Visuals

No doubt there are others. The three linked posts are about Ys, Tyre and Harfleur, respectively, with references made to New York and San Francisco.

Ys is a busy seaport where strangers bring new ways and young men are eager for the New Age when Ys might succeed Rome as mistress of the world.

Trade from the known world flows through Tyre, "...queen of the sea."

Merchant adventurers will set sail from Harfleur for the New World and Everard has just time traveled to Harfleur from San Francisco, 1990.

Three good places to live.

Parallels And Comparisons

Rereading Neil Gaiman's The Sandman generates several interesting points of comparison with Poul Anderson:

quotations from the poet, James Elroy Flecker;
expeditions to Hell;
Latin;
two Shakespeare plays;
two intercosmic inns;
Martians;
contrasts but also interactions between the extraterrestrial and the supernatural, thus also between sf and fantasy.

Gaiman, like Anderson, also addressed:

time travel (not in sf but in fantasy);
the coexistence of gods from different mythologies;
the fate of the Roman Empire after Augustus (see here);
an immortal living through history, changing his identity every few decades, denying that he is the Wandering Jew (see here).

Poul Anderson, Neil Gaiman and SM Stirling display major parallel themes but also a comparable creative originality.

A Sea-Dwellers' Tavern

Virgin Planet, CHAPTER XVI.

Yet another inn:

From the harbor, down a narrow street;
"...a smoky kennel..." (p. 120);
a painted gable anchor;
sooty rafters;
benches and tables;
casks lining a wall;
hung scrimshaw;
stuffed fish;
a whole sealbird roasting in the fireplace;
a cask and goblets of brandy.

We recall many inns in many worlds and times in Poul Anderson's works.

Kalava's Period

Kalava's period is so far in our future that his Earth might as well be another planet:

plants include bloomgrain, paperleaf, richen and shipwood;

Kalava sails the River Lonna, the Gulf of Sirsu, the North Coast and the Windroad Sea as far as the Ending Islands and visits a port of the people of the Shining Fields;

in Sirsu, he knows the Grand Fountain in King's Newmarket, the Flame Temple, the column in Victory Square, the Helki suburb, docks, workshops, bazaars and inns;

his skin is coal-black, long hair bleached white, mustache dyed red and he is a big man who daunts warriors;

his chariot is pulled not by horses or similar beasts but by four huge, long-legged slaves bred for generations to be draft animals;

his ship is pulled across the sea by a great tailed and flippered blue sea animal called a huukin;

Ruvio the Thunderer is the favorite god of most mariners.

There is more but I am finished for today and hope not to dream about Kalava.

Revisiting The Technic History

Because the question of Flandry's age came up, I started to reread The Game Of Empire. It is always enjoyable to re-immerse our willing suspension of disbelief in this future history and, fortunately, it is long enough that we can reread parts of it at different times without exhausting it quickly.

In Ensign Flandry, when Dominic Flandry is nineteen, Miriam is the youngest of Max Abrams' three children. Abrams has not seen her for over a year and is told that she is changing out of recognition. The oldest of the three children has started to see a certain young man a lot. So how old does that make Miriam? I take her to be only a few years old.

In The Game Of Empire (IN Flandry's Legacy, New York, 2012), which is set "'...forty-odd years...'" later, Miriam, approaching fifty, is married to Flandry, approaching seventy (pp. 212, 318). If we take forty years as a round number, then that would take him to sixty nine and her to her forties which is about right (Later: I miscounted here. See Comments).

There are other details to notice in The Game Of Empire. In Chapter One, Diana sees Axor approaching:

"Around the corner of a Winged Smoke House..." (p. 199)

What is that? In Chapter Two, A Cynthian innkeeper offers the Tigery Targovi "'...ryushka...'" (p. 223)

- to which he replies:

"'I thank you, but the Winged Smoke is only for when I can take my ease...'" (p. 223)

- so it is a drug that is smoked and I do not remember noticing it before.

At the Sign of the Golden Cockbeetle, another of the many hospitable inns in Anderson's works, Diana sees:

"...men, outback miners to judge by their rough appearance...," drinking with joygirls and a Tigery (p. 204).

Why do I quote this? Because I really enjoy Anderson's vivid imagining of guys leading ordinary working lives, indeed their entire lifespans, on a colonized extra-solar planet inhabited by other rational species a thousand years hence.