C J Cherryh, ‘Gate of Ivrel’ (1976)

This is Cherryh’s first published novel. In a later interview she said that, having been writing since her teens, this ‘was the first time a book really found an ending and really worked, because I had made contact with Don Wollheim at DAW, found him interested, and was able to write for a specific editor whose body of work and type of story I knew.’ The reference to an ending is a little odd, since this book, on its own, doesn’t really end—indeed two sequels followed in short-ish order, carrying on the narrative [Well of Shiuan in 1978 and Fires of Azeroth in 1979; the three books were collected as The Chronicles of Morgaine (1985)] with another installment a decade later [Exile's Gate (1988)]. Still: this is a good novel. Stark, absorbing, a fantasyland quest with real friction through a believable, immersive world, and a fascinating main character. Wollheim got Andre Norton to write a preface to the volume: ‘I do not know the author,’ said Norton, ‘but her talent is one I must envy’, adding: ‘never since reading The Lord of the Rings have I been caught up in any tale as I have been in Gate of Ivrel.’

The story is set on a planet called Andur-Kursh, a pre-medieval world of clans, warriors, horses, honour, life a hardscrabble existence in a chill, Nordic landscape of mountains and plains. Humans share the world with regular animals and also certain kinds of monster, haunting the wilderness; there is a caste of folk with supernatural powers, witches and wizards called here qujalin. There are remote places, with strange structures erected upon them, which are considered cursed.

We start with handsome young Vanye, the illegitimate son of a Nhi lord called Rijan (his mother was a bondswoman from a rival clan, the Cha). After a lifetime of bullying by Rijan’s legitimate sons, Kandrys and Erij, Vanye ends up killing the former defending himself in a fight and is banished.

So: the landscape of this planet is dotted with certain ‘gates’ and we learn right at the beginning—in a long prelude, rather infodumpishly disposed—that these are sciencefictional devices, spacetime gateways constructed by a now-vanished alien civilisation. It was through these gates that humans first came to this world, although their use is now entirely forgotten by the locals and they are all now deactivated, or at least are in what we might call sleep-mode. What the qujalin have access to is not magic but advanced technology, and the monsters that haunt the forests are actually alien lifeforms shipped-in from other planets.

Vanye, fleeing his home, the castle of Ra-Morij—so many ‘j’s and ‘q’s in this made-up language! think of the Scrabble possibilities!—passes-by one of these gates just as it activates. Out rides Morgaine: the beautiful qujalin warrior-witch-queen. She’s not any of these things, actually: she’s just a regular woman (she’s not even qujalin, in the sense that this word strictly refers to the blood of the ancient, extinct qhal who made the gates; although she has various items of Clarkean sufficiently-advanced-tech indistinguishability, like a phaser and a sophisticated medical pack and a ‘sword’ that is actually an atom-bomb, or something equivalent). It turns out—we learn this betwixt and between the ongoing story—Morgaine is the last survivor of a team sent long ago to destroy the gates, since they are dangerous and could be world-ending. The problem is they also enable unscrupulous people to extend their lives, even to achieve immortality, by using them to swap their souls (I think: it wasn’t entirely clear) into healthy young bodies. One such is Thiye of Hjemur, one of the original team who has gone rogue and now rules as a wicked king in the far north.

A hundred years before the story began, Morgaine raised an army of a thousand warriors from the land of Koris and rode north to stop Thiye, but the latter used magic to ‘raise a mighty wind’ that slew every last one of these soldiers—actually what he did, I think I’m right in saying, is open a gate onto interstellar vacuum, sucking a chunk of the atmosphere of the world out into space and dragging the army with it, which is a pretty improbable manoeuvre, I'd say. But there you go. Anyway so far as the inhabitants of Koris are concerned, Thiye is a mighty wizard who destroyed the army with magic, and Morgaine is to blame for leading them into such a doomed endeavour. Persecuted, Morgaine flees on horseback and, to escape capture, rides into a gate in the far south. No time passes for her, though a century rolls-by in Andur-Kursh. Now she rides out again, meets Vanye and puts him under an oath to serve her for a year and a day as her ilin. There are complicated honour-bound reasons why Vanye must agree to this, though he doesn't want to, for he is thereafter in effect her slave. He wants to ride south to more temperate lands, but Morgaine is determined to travel to the far north and finish what she started with Thiye.

Cherryh’s novel is under 200-pages long but feels longer, in part because of her spare, often stark style: the details of life on this gruelling world are well chosen—struggling on horseback over snow-blocked mountain passes, building fires in woodland to keep oneself warm and alive, but not too large a fire (you don't want to attract the attention of the monsters who live there). Cherryh renders landscape with brisk but vivid descriptive writing, and there’s a lot of interpersonal jockeying for duty-defined or honourbound positioning (attacked on their journey, Vanye recognisers their assailants and calls out: ‘hai, Chya! Chya! Will you put kin-slaying on your souls? We are clan-welcome with you, cousins … I am Nhi Vanye i Chya ilin to this lady, who is clan-welcome with Chya’). The blend of this highly structured formality and the often brutal, to-the-death intermissions of hard fighting, savagery, makes for a distinctive, effective vibe.

The two travel to a homestead ruled by a mad lord, then further north to Koris, where Morgaine is a fell legend and then they go still further north. Then, in the last fifty pages or so, the plotting abruptly picks up speed, loads happens in a rather blizzardy way, and the book ends. This structural ineptness is a shame: the wintry slow-build of the first two thirds gets scattered. But then again, there are the sequels, to pick-it up again.

Fundamentally this novel is what my friend Justina Robson calls ‘fit-bloke Fantasy’. An older woman (in this case literally a hundred years older, though she is still beautiful and alluring) acquires for herself a buff, handsome young feller. In the first place he agrees to serve her unwillingly, but as they adventure together he falls under her spell. She tantalises him, he adores her. All good. And I liked the twist the novel offres on what I’d identify as one of the main structural functions of Fantasy—the Walter Scott dynamic, or Lukácsian dialectic, in which romantic older worlds (feudal, heroic, shame-culture, honour, status cultures) clash with inevitable modernity (bourgeois, respectable, Whiggish guilt-culture, contract-rather-than-status worlds), the interaction dramatized by a ‘waverley’ figure who wavers between the two worlds, though he (usually a he) really belongs in the latter. In Gate of Ivrel Morgaine is literally from the former—she’s been gone a hundred years, and speaks an English full of ostentatious archaicisms—and Vanye is the ‘modern’; but actually Morgaine is the future, the coming of modernity as such, and Vanye a relict of an outmoded feudal honour-status-romantic past.

That said, though the novel starts with Vanye it seems to lose interest in him as things go along. Halfway through we discover that, despite his martial prowess and warrior-loyality and general buffness and hotness, he’s actually a coward inside (‘he was not brave. He had long ago discovered in himself that he had no courage … he feared a great many things: he feared death, he feared Morgaine …’ [87])—this seems, as the kids say, a weird flex for the character. But perhaps not: what Cherryh really loves here is Morgaine herself. And Morgaine is a fascinating, compelling piece of characterisation.

One irritant, especially given Cherryh’s reputation (quoth Wikipedia: ‘Cherryh's works depict fictional worlds with great realism supported by her strong background in languages, history, archaeology, and psychology’) are the various sunspots and errors. Horses clop along despite the fact that they’re unshod and travelling over wilderness, not metalled road. Morgaine’s archaisms, designed to show us that she’s out-of-time, are bungled: ‘thee has a place,’ Morgain tells Vanye, ‘go to it’ [95]; and later: ‘thee is an idiot’ [99]— that these should be ‘thou hast’ and ‘thou art’ respectively would not take any very strong background in languages to realise. It’s as if the mere fact of an archaic form is enough for Cherryh's purposes. In Return of the Jedi there's a scene where Darth Vader approaches the Emperor with ‘what is thy bidding, my master?’—George Lucas (who wrote the screenplay with Lawrence Kasdan) means to suggest that there’s something old-world, something formal and ‘historical’ about the two men’s relationship. But it’s bonkers to suggest that Vader would, as the French say, tutoie Palpatine! They’re simply not that matey! Ah well.

Also, the first-edition cover (up top) is egregiously bad: at no point does Morgaine swan around this chilly winter-world in a bikini top and loincloth. She'd catch her death.