Thursday, November 17, 2011

ALANNA: THE FIRST ADVENTURE, CHAPTER FOUR: DEATH IN THE PALACE, OR, IN WHICH EVERYBODY GETS SICK AS BALLS AND UNIMPORTANT PEOPLE DIE

You’d think that a chapter with a dramatic title like “Death in the Palace” would get right to the death at the beginning- you know, start off with a bang.  Instead we are treated to a mini-section about Duke Gareth lecturing Alanna about how fighting is wrong and true nobles never fight with their hands and blah blah blah.  This could easily have been stuck onto the end of the last chapter, but I guess Tamora Pierce wanted Alanna and Jon’s significant ambiguously gay moment to stand alone.  Alanna has to write a formal apology to Ralon’s father (who is presumably off buying his son a box of tissues for his many, many tears) and is restricted to the palace for two months.  No more sneaky eleven-year-old beers for our hero.



And now is there death?  Haha, no.  First we need to know about all of Alanna’s friends becoming squires!  After Midwinter (which is like Chistmas, but with no Jesus), Gary, Alex, and Raoul are no longer pages and Alanna helps them move into their new quarters.  She spends a few sentences missing them, but then she finds out that Jonathan is just as good at math as Alex (who used to help her in math class- yes, the pages in this medieval kingdom have math class, presumably they also have recess and sock hops), and they start hanging out a lot more, thusly:

“Many evenings after that they could be found in each other’s rooms, their heads bent over a map or a piece of paper.”

Yep.

March comes around and finally, FINALLY, there is some goddamn death in the goddamn Palace in the form of the Sweating Fever.  All of a sudden everyone is sick, from the people of the Lower City to the Queen.* The pages are the last ones to get sick, Raoul being the first of Alanna’s close friends.  Alanna remembers the conversation she had with Maude about her Gift of healing; she starts to feel guilty about not using it to help people, and decides to… continue not using it to help people.  Like you do.

Gary, Alex, and Francis (remember him? I didn’t!) are the next ones to get sick.  Francis, conveniently enough, is the sickest, falling into delirium on the very first day.  Because he hasn’t had any lines yet he’s pretty much a goner and, sure enough, he’s the first one to die.  Alanna’s all FUCK I COULD HAVE SAVED THE SHIT OUT OF HIM and angsts a bit.  (But only a bit.  You’ve got to save your feelings for people with dialogue.)

The next morning, Alanna gets the news that Jonathan is sick and calling for her.  She runs to his room and finds it full of smoke and incense and priests of the Black God chanting and, like, flagellation and moaning and ten kinds of freaky shit.  She freaks out and goes to get Myles, which is a little weird considering Myles is a minor knight with little influence.  Can’t she get Duke Gareth to go wave them out, or find George and make him cut off all their ears?  She tells Myles that she has the Gift and wants to help Jonathan.  Apparently all the healers in the Palace who try to cure people of the fever find themselves quickly drained of magic.  Myles charges into the room, orders out all the writhing death priests, and talks to Duke Baird, the royal healer.  Baird tells Alanna that the fever seems to be magical in nature, sent by an enemy sorcerer to drain healers and kill people, and mentions that he finds it interesting that the fever only struck the heir to the throne after all the Palace healers were out of commission.  He instructs Alanna to use her Gift to give him energy, just to test her strength; she nearly zaps him, convincing him that she is, in fact, strong enough to start putting the hurdy-gurdy on Prince Jonathan.  She uses the opportunity to have another gay moment with him, holding his hand and stroking his temples and basically doing everything but crooning Spanish love songs into his ear while licking his neck.  Seriously, Tortall must be the most open-minded place in the Eastern Lands.

She nurses Jonathan, with Coram and Myles taking shifts to help her, and he eventually coughs up the stuff in his lungs; his fever continues to rise, though, and for whatever reason Alanna continues to not use her goddamn magic.  King Roald and Queen Lianne (who is still weak from her own bout of fever) eventually come and visit to be like, “yo, why is this eleven-year-old taking care of our only son and heir?”  Alanna tells them that she did not mention her Gift when she first arrived because her mother and father both had it too, and when she died when the twins were born her father decided not to let either of them have anything to do with magic.  (So apparently Maude taught them on the sly?  Good to know.) (Also, it has been mentioned several times throughout the Tortall books that untrained mages end up kill people and blowing shit up accidentally, what the fuck, Lord Trebond needs a World's Best Dad award for sure.)  She says that even though she doesn’t want to be a knight who uses magic- it feels like cheating- she can’t keep letting her friends die.  A noble thought, that.  After all, next time it might be someone who talks.  King Roald mentions that Jonathan also has the Gift, and that if when he gets well he is going to hire ~someone to teach the pages about magic.  BUT WHO.

After they leave, Jonathan’s fever gets worse, and Alanna finally bites the bullet and casts a spell.  She calls on the Great Mother Goddess, and briefly sees that city from the first chapter again before starting to glow purple and speak in an adult (female) voice and other creepy shit.  Myles is in the room and notice all this, especially the adult female voice thing.  The Goddess speaks to Alanna- apparently her voice hurts Alanna’s ears, which is probably meant to convey divinity and power but makes me think that she’s just got one of those loud, flat, foghorn voices that make people sound like they’re yelling all the time- and tells he to call Jonathan back from Death.  And so Alanna sinks into Jonathan’s consciousness and into a place between life and death, and the Dark God’s all, SUP.  (He is dressed in a robe with a hood; it does not say if he is an anthropomorphic skeleton with a weakness for cats, but I have to assume he is.)  Alanna’s like, I’d like my friend back now and also if you could not kill me that’d be super.  The Black God’s like LOL K, because he’s cool like that.  Jon takes Alanna’s hand and Alanna notices that when he talks to her it’s in a grown man’s voice.  Why this happens is never really explained, so let’s just assume ~destiny and leave it at that.  
Anyway, they zoom back up into the world of mortals, where Jonathan now seems to be healthy and Myles is thinking very hard about the fact that he just heard Alanna talking in a lady-voice and Jonathan talking in a man-voice.

But he won’t get the chance to ask about it, because Alanna passes out as soon as she reenters her body.

Will Myles figure out the whole lady-voice/man-voice thing?  What mysterious sorcerer sent the Sweating Fever to Corus?  How many more gay moments can Alanna and Jonathan have?  (Lots.  The answer is lots.)  Find out next time in CHAPTER FIVE: THE SECOND YEAR, OR, SUDDENLY: TITS!









* Myles, notably, is not sick; this is actually only notable because he tells Alanna that he is too full of wine for there to be room for sickness, which I find interesting in the same way that I find Coram’s alcoholism interesting.  In her early books Pierce seems to be pretty blasé on the subject of alcohol dependency: everybody drinks and people who drink too much are just jolly drunks, whereas in the later books most of her main characters are said to drink water or fruit juice rather than alcohol and a few characters are described as having overcome alcoholism.  Hell, eleven-year-old Alanna’s pounding back beers in the Dancing Dove; eleven-year-old Kel is drinking sensible hot toddies in her room.  It seems that Pierce had a change of heart regarding alcohol consumption between writing Song of the Lioness and most of her other books.  I wonder if we’ll ever get an update regarding Coram’s drinking habits and whether or not he’s quit, as Myles seems to have done in the later books.  Just a thought that got too big for a parenthetical aside.

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