Vazkor, Son of Vazkor: What’s become of the baby?

Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (aka Shadowfire) by Tanith Lee

In Tanith Lee’s first novel written for adults, The Birthgrave (1975), Book #1 in her BIRTHGRAVE TRILOGY, the reader had been introduced to a very unusual young woman. Petite, albino, in command of a range of superhuman abilities, and with no memory of her past or even her own name, she had awoken in the heart of a dormant volcano and ventured forth on an epic journey of self-discovery. In the medieval-seeming world in which she’d traveled, she was hailed as a healer by some, a goddess by others, and had entered into a forced marriage with a magician/warlord named Vazkor. In one of the truly shocking moments of Book #1 (unavoidable spoiler ahead), our heroine had given birth to her son and left him as a changeling of sorts at the hill tribe where she’d been staying; her baby, thus, taking the place of the stillborn boy begat by Tathra, the chieftain’s wife. Our itinerant albino had thus gone on with her journeying, leaving the reader to later wonder (to quote the title of an old Grateful Dead song) “What’s become of the baby?” Fortunately for Tanith Lee’s many fans, the answer to that question was not too long in coming, in Book #2 of the series, Vazkor, Son of Vazkor.

This middle volume, as had The Birthgrave, was initially released as a DAW paperback, in 1978, this time with cover art from one Gino D’Achille, in full Frank Frazetta/Boris Vallejo mode; DAW would reissue the book in 1982 and ’84, with faithful cover art by Ken W. Kelly, and most recently in 2015, with the book’s title changed, for some unknown reason, to Shadowfire. Internationally, the novel would see editions in the U.K. (’78 and ’85, as Shadowfire), Italy (also ’78, as Vazkor, Figlio di Vazkor, or Vazkor, Son of … well, you know), Holland (’79 and ’86, as Schaduwvuur, or Shadowfire), Germany (’79, as Vazkor) and France (’84 and ’89, as Vazkor). This sequel was a much shorter affair as compared to its predecessor (90,000 words, rather than the original’s 185,000) but still managed to cram a remarkable abundance of detail and plot into its compact package.

The story commences a full 14 years following the events of Book #1, and is narrated this time by the mystery woman’s son himself, Tuvek. His tale is divided into two lengthy and discrete sections, the first of which largely transpires among the barbarous hill tribe where we’d last seen him as a newborn. Thus, we once again meet Ettook, the piggish chief of the tribe whom Tuvek despises but acts civilly to; Tathra, the out-of-tribe headwife of Ettook and Tuvek’s supposed mother; Kotta, a blind nurse who yet sees more than most; Seel, the malicious head priest; and Seel-Na, the priest’s lustful yet spiteful daughter. On the arrival of his 14^th year, Tuvek is declared a warrior when he bests four adult males in combat, but to the tribe’s dismay, it turns out that the young man cannot receive his ceremonial tattooing, his skin seemingly rejecting the ink somehow. As our narrator’s story progresses, he discovers that he possesses several other physical anomalies as well: His wounds heal remarkably quickly, he can somehow understand foreign tongues, and, most distressing of all, he can kill with just a glance (all powers that his unsuspected mother commanded, as well). By the time he is 19, Tuvek, we learn, possesses three wives, has fathered 13 sons, and has killed over 40 men. When a band of soldiers from the White Desert city of Eshkorek-Arnor arrives from across the mountains with cannon, attacks Ettook’s tribe as well as some of the neighboring tribes, and captures many men to be used as slaves, Tuvek follows them, single-handed. He frees the captured men and with them slays their Eshkor attackers, a task made easier by the city men’s stunned reaction to finding the spitting image of the long-dead Vazkor in their midst. Tuvek returns to his tribe a hero, bringing with him Demizdor, a beautiful city woman whom he soon makes his fourth wife. All seems well, until the dark day when Tathra dies giving birth to another stillborn; Kotta tells Tuvek of his actual origin; Tuvek kills Ettook using the unsuspected mental powers that are his; and Demizdor’s cousins, Zrenn and Orek, arrive in force to rescue the young lady and take vengeance on Tuvek himself. So ends the first section.

In the second, Tuvek is brought to Eshkorek-Arnor, a city-state much degraded after the martial events of Book #1. There, he is held by one of the city’s competing princes, Kortis, before being abducted by Prince Erran, who plans to use Tuvek as a horse breaker as well as the sire of a new race of indestructible supermen. But when our narrator kills an Eshkorek nobleman in anger, Erran decides to change his plans, and instead perform some radical body amputations on Tuvek, as a scientific study in regeneration. With Demizdor’s assistance, Tuvek escapes the city via a miles-long underground tunnel built by the dead race known as the Lost Ones, from which race, he has learned, his actual mother sprang. After a weeks-long chase, our hero manages to slay most of his pursuers, and makes his way to the edge of the sea, where he meets a young witch/healer named Hwenit. At Hwenit’s village, he meets her father, Peyuan, who had been one of his mother’s nine protectors in Book #1. From this kindly black man, now the head of his own village, Tuvek (who has come to identify more and more with his father, even thinking of himself as Vazkor by name) learns even more of his mysterious mother, who had vanished so completely two decades earlier. Along with Hwenit and one other, Vazkor, uh, Jr. retreats to an empty island some miles offshore to hide from his remaining pursuers. And it is on that lonely island that the final showdown will eventually come…

Now, if I seem to have given away too much of Tanith Lee’s astonishing story line here, please rest assured that what you have just read is merely the sketchiest of outlines of what is actually a fairly complex and beautifully detailed affair. Unlike Book #1, which can rightly be labeled an epic fantasy with a distinct leavening of sci-fi, this sequel contains not a trace of science fiction to speak of, and I suppose might be termed a heroic fantasy, perhaps of the sword & sorcery ilk, with a decided debt to Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. As in the first book, Lee’s extraordinary use of language is a major selling point here; thus, the reader might expect to encounter such sentences as these: “The seasons slunk past like people in a mist.” “The gate between her thighs was golden as her hair, and the road beyond the gate was made for kings.” “The night had turned chill, blue-black as raven’s wings with stars caught in the feathers of it.” It would seem that the unschooled Tuvek, like his mother, wrote surpassingly well, a fact that might cause the reader to wonder how this barbarous warrior is capable of penning his story so impressively. But then again, we must recall that Tuvek was somehow capable of understanding all tongues, and that we have no idea how old he is when he sat down to write his story. All I know is, he employs some words here that even I had to break out the ol’ Merriam-Webster’s to look up: “dawson,” “jink,” “byre,” “smalt,” “carious,” “equerry” and “clepsydra.” And I just love his term for a dead person: “crowpie”! I’ll try to remember that one going forward!

Again to her great credit, Tanith Lee does a marvelous job at switching from a female narrator’s voice to a male POV, and writes convincingly as a young man with a fairly brutal attitude toward life and women. Thus, we get sentences such as these: “May you eat dung and pass blood, and may the ravens squabble for your liver.” “Presently, I had a city sword, red to its hilt, and I was bathed with blood.” “These men who had jeered as they watched me writhe in Eshkorek now ended their quest on my blades.” You’d never guess these words were written by a 30-year-old woman, would you? To give Tuvek his due, the character does change over the course of his story, and the tragedies he suffers, as well as his love affair with Demizdor, do ultimately reveal a more compassionate side to his nature … not that he ever loses his ability to mete out death and destruction in a wholesale manner! Speaking of which, Tuvek’s grim story does contain much in the way of strong violence (Erann’s description of his proposed plan for scientific study is especially grisly), and the book contains a fairly high body count. Indeed, more than half of the novel’s main players lie dead by its conclusion, so perhaps it would be best to not grow overly attached to any one character!

Vazkor, Son of Vazkor does not feature quite as many scenes of thrilling action, intense drama or astonishing revelation as had The Birthgrave, but again, the sequel is only half as long! (Plus, nothing could possibly top that amazing chariot race in Book #1!) Still, any number of sequences do manage to make an impact. Among them: Tuvek’s fight with four adult men during the Boys’ Rite; the Eshkorians’ stunning cannon attack; Tuvek’s daring rescue of the kidnapped men, and his victorious return to the tribe that was already conducting his funeral rites; Tuvek’s falling out with his beloved “mother,” Tathra; a poisoning attempt on Tuvek’s wedding night; the back-to-back-to-back death of Tathra/revelation of Kotta/slaying of Ettook (a very tough day for our young narrator!); the breaking of a drugged and murderous horse in Prince Erran’s stable; the 10-day chase through the underground Worm’s Way; Tuvek’s slaying of 18 of his pursuers via sword, knife and mind; Peyuan’s wonderful recounting of the events he witnessed in Book #1; and finally, Tuvek’s showdown with Zrenn and Orek on that desert island. Prospective readers should also prepare themselves for a surprising bit of brother-sister incest, some casually brutal treatment of female tribe members, and three scenes of unexpected suicide. Truly, nothing seemed to be off-limits for the young Tanith Lee!

For the rest of it, this sequel also features some wonderful details regarding Tuvek’s tribal life: the Boys’ Rite, weddings, migrations, burials, even divorce. (As for the latter, it seems to be largely a matter of bringing the Mrs. back to her father’s tent, saying “Here is your daughter … You may have her back,” renouncing the kids you had with her, throwing down some gold, and that’s it! Easy-peasy! I love it!) And, I might add, it really is nice seeing those half dozen characters from Book #1 again! All told, the novel is another fairly remarkable piece of work from Tanith Lee, concerning which I only have two minor quibbles. First, her repeated confusing of the words “turgid” and “turbid.” (Sometimes, I feel like I’m one of the few who can discern the difference!) And second, this Book #2 of THE BIRTHGRAVE TRILOGY fails to reveal which world we are on (Earth? Who knows?) and what happened to Tuvek’s mother after the events of The Birthgrave. Hopefully, these matters will be addressed in Book #3. But really, these are my only quibbles here!

At the tail end of his narrative, Tuvek – in full hatred of his mother for having abandoned him 19 years earlier, and for having killed the father he now fully identifies with – swears an oath to avenge Vazkor by seeking out his mother and killing her! Along with the Eshkorian slave Long-Eye, he pushes off from that barren island, heading for an unknown land to the southeast, as his new quest begins. What in the world (whichever world this might be) could possibly happen next? I suppose I’ll just have to proceed on to Book #3, the culmination of the trilogy, Quest for the White Witch (also released in 1978), to find out more. Stay tuned…