Rescuing the Age of Chivalry

Patricia McKillip's latest novel, The Tower at Stony Wood, starts with the Lady of Shalott.

The details of Tennyson's poem -- the river, the water-lilies, the fields of barley (McKillip adds shallots, for good measure), the passers-by on the road, the lady's weaving (now transformed into embroidery, that most useless and ladylike of arts) -- all appear in the book, as well as in Kinuko Craft's intricate cover illustration.(Ace Fantasy has partnered McKillip and Craft for a number of years now, resulting in a very handsome and distinctive set of books.) Like the Lady of Shalott, McKillip's lady is forbidden on pain of death to view the world directly; she may see it only as reflected in her mirror.

It goes on to other stories that seem familiar -- the king who marries a false bride, the knight who rides out to rescue the lady in the tower, a sea creature who takes a human shape for love, and a young man seeking a dragon and its hoard of gold. If you've encountered McKillip before, however, you can guess that none of these stories will behave as it ever did before. You will expect strange transformations and verbal sleight-of-hand, as well as lines like this:

The long, graceful slope of her profile might be considered fishlike, Cyan saw, but it seemed only to adjust the boundaries of beauty, so that what had been called beauty until then became too small a realm without her.

The lady's mirror is only the first of a series of mirrors, eyes, and lenses scattered through the book. The stories are reflected, reduplicated, refracted, and turned upside down and backward, leaving us in a new landscape where the young warrior becomes the dragon instead of killing it and a girl's lover builds a wall of thorns to keep her out of the tower.

In place of Sir Lancelot, McKillip gives us Cyan Dag, a knight who "sees with his heart". Sent by a wise woman to rescue the lady in the tower, he journeys to the strange land of Skye. To his bewilderment, he finds that Skye abounds with towers -- but none of them contains the lady he is looking for. Instead he encounters Thayne Ysse, a young man seeking to free his conquered homeland, and Sel, a woman with forgotten powers who yearns for the sea. Neither does he manage to rescue anybody, though he sometimes requires rescue himself. Not surprisingly, he becomes more and more frustrated and reaches the end of his quest believing he has failed. Even the lady in the tower, when he finally finds her, proves other than he expected. It is only when he returns home that he discovers the unlikely consequences of his journey and finds that those actions he thought least of have proved the most important.

It sounds a bit glib, described like this. McKillip handles it with much more finesse -- so much that, as with others of her books, you may come to the end wondering what really happened and immediately go back and read the whole thing again. When I read it again, I realized that what really happened was no less than a subversive reinvention of the chivalric romance.

Let me explain. The modern fantasy genre, from Tolkien on down, traces part of its lineage from the chivalric romance itself and another part from Tennyson and later British romantics, who were themselves obsessed with the chivalric romance. (Hence the endless knights in armor, who show up everywhere including outer space.) The very name of King Arthur evokes not only the Age of Chivalry, but the generations of English schoolboys who longed for its return. The idea of a life lived according to a code of honor is seductive to the exreme.

Yet the modern fantasist must find chivalric romance problematic. Satirists from Cervantes to Monty Python have reflected on the results of applying the rules of the chivalric romance to real life; yesterday's hero is today's lunatic or criminal deviant. Feminists wishing to partake of the chivalric fantasy are just about required to write their own -- and have.

Moreover, chivalric romance bears an uncomfortable legacy as the literature of conquest. The task of the knight errant is invariably to venture out from the center of civilization (the king's court) into the periphery and to bring whatever other is out there -- dragons, brigands, Saracens, whatever -- under the dominion of Christendom. Not surprisingly, empire-builders ever since the Crusades have used the concept of knight-errantry to justify and glorify campaigns of invasion, subjugation, rape, pillage, and mayhem. Amadis de Gaul crossed the Atlantic in the sea-chests of the Conquistadores. Britain's imperial heyday produced Tennyson and Sir Walter Scott. Ivanhoe was hugely popular in the Antebellum South. (I owe this take of the relation of chivalric romance to empire to Professor Mary Gaylord and her course on Language, Literature and Empire in Spain's Golden Age.)

Back to McKillip, then. Her knight-errant is first among the knights of Regis Aurum (Latin, anyone?), whose state has conquered all the surrounding territories and holds them under uneasy sway. His reputation is built on strength of arms and loyalty to his king -- good, solid, knightly virtues. Yet the inscrutable Bard of Skye chooses him for her quest because of his compassion, and it is because of his compassion that he succeeds in his unintended errand -- not the rescue of individuals, but the prevention of a war and the liberation of a subjugated state.

He is a man of action who knows when to refrain from action. "You could have killed me," says the dragon, and lets him pass. He rescues others by obliging them (not always intentionally) to rescue him. In a haunting scene the night after a battle, keeping his wounded king hidden from the enemy, he calms the feverish monarch with a fiction: "I am hurt and they will kill me if you are not quiet." Concern for his friend cuts through the king's delerium as a mere shushing might not, and Cyan Dag earns his reputation as the king's most loyal knight. He lives by a code of honor -- yet he lays that code aside to help a hurt child from the opposing army. He strives to be heroic by conforming to a conventional model of knight-errantry -- but the heroism that is ultimately rewarded is all based on making moral choices, acting decently by real people, one at a time.

The scene of the king's rescue is reflected in his interactions with Sel and Thayne Ysse. Each of them is a prisoner, not of the tower but of their own anger and despair. What gets them out of their prisons is the discovery of their own power -- but it is Cyan Dag's compassion, and the compassion they feel in turn for him, that keeps their own power from destroying them.

The chimerical Lady of Skye says, "If I looked at the world, I would die. If the world looked at me, saw me with courage and compassion, and reached out to help me -- how could I not live? How could that not make me free?"

Beats the hell out of Lancelot's elegy, "She has a lovely face."

McKillip has preserved the form and the strange poetry of the chivalric romance while completely changing its moral underpinnings. Her moral code values compassion over gallantry, liberation over conquest, justice over vengeance, and individual moral choice over adhesion to a code of honor. Her heroes are those who, given the chance to destroy the enemy utterly, choose not to. In her happy ending, the periphery regains its independence, and the conquering state is itself freed to reclaim the magic it has forgotten in its struggle to dominate its neighbors.