James Nicoll Reviews

1983’s The Dreamstone¹ is the first of two novels in C. J. Cherryh’s Ealdwood series.

Human encroachment being seemingly unstoppable, the Fair Folk went elsewhere. Some retreated deep underground or underwater. Others left for Faery. All save Arafel.

Arafel remained in her Ealdwood. Only the brave, the arrogant, the naïve, or the desperate Men trespassed in the Ealdwood.

Niall was desperate.

The warriors of An Beag overcame and killed the rightful King. The King’s heir, now King himself, is but an infant. Niall is a known King’s Man. Therefore, An Beag wants Niall dead. Therefore, Niall fled to the one place An Beag would not pursue: Arafel’s Ealdwood.

Arafel will not permit Niall to stay in the wood. But she is not without mercy. She guides Niall out of the woods. More, she provides the way to Beorc’s Steading, a haven from worldly affairs. There Niall lives safely… for a time.

The next Man desperate enough to flee into the woods is harper Fionn. Fionn is pursued by Evald of Caer Wiell, who claims the title of lord, but is better called usurper. Evald claims the harper and harp as his. Arafel offers to pay for them. Evald grudgingly demands a stone hanging around Arafel’s neck and leaves… for the moment.

Evald does not ask the nature of the object he took from Arafel. This is only one of a number of dire errors on Evald’s part. From none of them does he draw any useful lessons.

Evald’s death draws Niall from his safe haven. With Evald gone, the rightful order can be restored under Niall’s watchful eye. But there will be a price.

~oOo~

It is a sad review project that does not provide revelations. In this case, the revelation is that Cherryh had seven years and fifteen novels (!) under her belt before she wrote her first fantasy novel. A number of her earlier works superficially resembled fantasies, but all of those had super-science underpinning. The Dreamstone does not.

This may be in a secondary fantasy universe or it may be in a fantastical version of the past. If the second, it is the pagan past. The term god appears only in the plural.

The Dreamstone might strike some modern fantasy fans as odd, in that the plot is not a thinly reworked pastiche of Lord of the Rings², nor is the scale world-spanning. Focus is on a specific woods, and the human realms immediately adjacent to it. The stakes are personally high, but if the outcome were to be reversed, the global impact would be nil.

Cherryh, being a classics scholar, has as her model older stories, ones where foolish or desperate mortals encounter the last remnants of a fading, alien world order. An interesting question would be what inspired that view of the Fair Folk. Not garbled memories of the Classical world; the Fair Folk are much more inhuman, relics of the prehuman world.

Speaking of works that The Dreamstone is not, this isn’t one of those fantasies wherein the characters fortuitously happen to have values and customs similar to those of the modern day. The characters have their ways of telling right from wrong, but they are archaic values.

The plot is unusual in that once an antagonist has been removed, no effort is spared to rehabilitate their offspring. Coming as I do from a glorious tradition where the go-to method of preventing future trouble is to hurl the loser’s kids off (or possibly at) a castle parapet, the idea that one can end cycles of revenge in this way is an unfamiliar concept.

The Dreamstone is slender but reads like a longer novel, which is a pleasant contrast to all those lengthy novels by other authors that read like they should have been novellas. Or an email. The affect of the prose is oddly formal, which may reflect the source material on which Cherryh is drawing. The story is gripping.

The Dreamstone is available as part of The Dreamtree omnibus here (DAW), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Kobo), and here (Words Worth Books).

Bookshop US has only the audiobook version. The same is true of Chapters. I did not find The Dreamstone (alone or in omnibus) at Bookshop UK.

1: No relation to the British TV show of the same name.

2: Or for that matter, Game of Thrones: there are power-hungry jerks in this work, but their greed and lack of impulse control make them self-sabotaging.

USA delenda est.