The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven

The only thing I knew about this book was that I liked the movie that John Huston made out of it in 1948. The movie has a different feel than most of what comes out of Hollywood, then and now: grittier, and a little subversive. Humphrey Bogart plays a delightful Dobbs -- a man who is neither hero nor villain, someone worth rooting for and against, a man who gets both a raw deal and what’s coming to him.

Little did I realize how subversive the movie’s source material actually was. And the mystery surrounding it and the identity of its author -- B. Traven, evidently a pseudonym for an author who managed to remain hidden for his entire career and, seemingly, to this day. 

The book, like the movie, is, at its core, a parable on the moral disintegration that accompanies greed. In its chosen idiom, the moral action of the narrative manifests in three people and their quest for gold in the mountains of the Sierra Madre.

“Anyway,” Howard, the old fellow, said, “anyway, gold is a very devilish sort of a thing, believe me, boys. In the first place, it changes your character entirely. When you have it your soul is no longer the same as it was before. No getting away from that. You may have so much piled up that you can’t carry it away; but, bet your blessed paradise, the more you have, the more you want to add, to make it just that much more. Like sitting at roulette. Just one more turn. So it goes on and on and on. You cease to distinguish between right and wrong. You can no longer see clearly what is good and what is bad. You lose your judgment. That’s what it is.”

Howard is the oldest and most experienced “prospector,” played by Walter Huston in the movie, and he lays out the overall theme pretty clearly, both in the movie and in these opening pages. He tells the others, Dobbs and Curtin, young and leaner men, about how in previous expeditions he had been on, once the gold started accumulating, the partners began turning on one another.

“You said it,” Dobbs nodded. “That’s exactly what I say. It is that eternal curse on gold which changes the soul of man in a second.” The moment he had said this he knew he had said something that never had been in his mind before. Never before had he had the idea that there was a curse connected with gold. Now he had the feeling that not he himself, but something inside him, the existence of which until now he had had no knowledge of, had spoken for him, using his voice. For a while he was rather uneasy, feeling that inside his mind there was a second person whom he had seen or heard for the first time.

It was right about here where I asked myself if this was not just a parable about greed, but more generally one about market capitalism -- and that perhaps that “second person” that Dobbs here meets for the first time is the “invisible hand” that guides it? 

In that context, Curtin’s response becomes even more curious.

“Curse upon gold?” Curtin seemed entirely unmoved by this suggestion. “I don’t see any curse on gold. Where is it? Old women’s tattle. Nothing to it. There is as much blessing on gold as there is curse. It depends upon who holds it -- I mean the gold. In the end the good or the bad character of its owner determines whether gold is blessed or cursed. Give a scoundrel a bag with little stones or a bag with silver coins and he will use either to satisfy his criminal desires if he is left free to do as he pleases. And, by the way, what most people never know is the fact that gold in itself is not needed at all. Suppose I could make people believe that I have mountains of gold, then I could arrive at the same end as if I really had that gold. It isn’t the gold that changes man, it is the power which gold gives to man that changes the soul of man. This power, though, is only imaginary. If not recognized by other men, it does not exist.”

That sounds a lot like libertarianism to me. It only has value because we say it does. The market has no external power. It doesn’t shape the nature of man -- it only reveals it. Man, ultimately, is free to make his own moral choices.

Once primed for this interpretation of the novel -- a treatise on the effects of market capitalism, with the characters each representing a certain psychological perspective or economic theory -- one begins to understand where Traven’s actual sympathies may lie.

The discussion about the registration of their claim brought comprehension of their changed standing in life. With every ounce more of gold possessed by them they left the proletarian class and neared that of the property-holders, the well-to-do middle class. So far they had never had anything of value to protect against thieves. Since they now owned certain riches, their worries about how to protect them had started. The world no longer looked to them as it had a few weeks ago. They had become members of the minority of mankind.

Those who up to this time had been considered by them as their proletarian brethren were now enemies against whom they had to protect themselves. As long as they had owned nothing of value, they had been slaves of their hungry bellies, slaves to those who had the means to fill their bellies. All this was changed now.

They had reached the first step by which man becomes the slave of his property.

Class. Proletarian. Property. We now begin to enter the actual vocabulary of Marxism. And it is a clue for what is to come.

The scene with the bandits is a memorable one. Holed up in the mountains, working in secret for months on a productive gold claim, the three prospectors are ever cautious about others snooping around and trying to horn in on their claim. When a troop of bandits arrive, their greatest fears are almost realized.

“Oiga, senor, listen. We are no bandits. You are mistaken. We are the policia montada, the mounted police, you know. We are looking for the bandits, to catch them. They have robbed the train, you know.”

“All right,” Curtin shouted back. “If you are the police, where are your badges? Let’s see them.”

“Badges, to god-damned hell with badges! We have no badges. In fact, we don’t need badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges, you god-damned cabron and ching’ tu madre! Come out there from that -- hole of yours. I have to speak to you.”

We don’t need no stinking badges! It’s almost comic in the movie -- and certainly made comic by others as it has been almost meme-ified in the decades since. But there is something deeper going on even here. Badges are emblematic of the state, and its monopolization on violence, especially in its protection of the propertied class. Of course, these bandits don’t have badges. But the more revealing line is the one in which they claim no need of them.

These men are never at a loss about what to do and how to do it. They are well trained in their churches from childhood on. Their churches are filled with paintings and statues representing every possible torture white men, Christians, inquisitors, and bishops could think of. These are the proper paintings and statues for churches in a country in which the most powerful church on earth wanted to demonstrate how deep in subjection all human beings can be kept for centuries if there exists no other aim but the enlargement of the splendor and the riches of the rulers. What meaning has the human soul to that branch of their great church? No follower of this same church in civilized countries ever seems to question the true origin of its grandeur or the way in which the riches of the church were obtained. So it is not the bandits who were to blame. They were doing and thinking only what they had been taught. Instead of being shown the beauty of this religion, they had been shown only the cruelest and the bloodiest and the most repulsive parts of it. These abhorrent parts of the religion were presented as the most important, so as to make it feared and respected not through faith or love, but through sheer terror and the most abominable superstition. This is why these men were wearing upon their breasts a picture of the Virgin or Saint Joseph, and why they go to church and pray an hour before the statue of San Antonio whenever they are on their way to commit a wholesale murder or a train-assault or a highway hold-up, praying to the statues before and after the deed and begging the saint to protect them in their crime against the shots the victim may fire at them, and to protect them afterwards against the authorities.

One might just call them anarchists. But they are actually much more than that. They are part of the ordered society, taking things just as the state has done, taking in the name of the religion that goes everywhere hand-in-hand with the state.

It is, in fact, theft, theft of all stripes, which undergirds this society and its class system. With the agents of the state -- badged and unbadged -- as its greatest perpetrators.

He knew how the big oil-magnates, the big financiers, the presidents of great corporations, and in particular the politicians, stole and robbed whenever there was an opportunity. Why should he, the little feller, the ordinary citizen, be honest if the big ones knew no scruples and no honesty, either in their business or in the affairs of the nation. And these great robbers sitting in easy chairs before huge mahogany tables, and those highwaymen speaking from the platforms of the conventions of the ruling parties, were the same people who in success stories and in the papers were praised as valuable citizens, the builders of the nation, the staunch upholders of our civilization and of our culture. What were decency and honesty after all? Everybody around him had a different opinion of what they meant.

In this world it is Dobbs who makes the greatest transition -- as alluded to earlier, from proletariat to bourgeoisie. He constantly looks for the protection typically afforded to his new class…

These sounds gave him a great feeling of security. They were the sounds of civilization. He longed for civilization, for law, for justice, which would protect his property and his person with a police force. Within this civilization he could face Howard without fear, and even Curtin, should he ever show up again. There he could sneer at them and ridicule them. There they would have to use civilized means to prove their accusations. If those bums should go too far, he could easily accuse them of blackmailing him. He would then be a fine citizen, well dressed, able to afford the best lawyers. “What a fine thing civilization is!” he thought; and he felt happy that no such nonsense as Bolshevism could take away his property and his easy life.

…but tragically, seldom finds it.

Turning his head in the direction the voice had come from, he saw three ragged tramps lying in a hollow under one of the trees farthest away toward the field. They were mestizos, unwashed, uncombed, with ugly faces, types that are frequently met on the roads in the vicinity of cities, where they can sleep free of charge and wait for any opportunities the road may offer. Their look alone gave evidence that they had not worked for months and had reached the state where they no longer cared about finding a job, having tried in vain a thousand times. They were the human sweepings of the cities, left on the dumps of civilization, possibly escaped convicts, outlaws, fugitives from justice. They were the garbage of civilization with the headquarters near all the other garbage and junk a modern city spits out unceasingly day and night.

This, more often, is what Dobbs finds -- the dregs and dark side of the civilization he so covets, a civilization based on the integrity of property rather than human well-being. These three “mestizos” will kill Dobbs a few pages later, they will cut his head off with a machete, not even out of greed to rob him of his gold -- they don’t even recognize the “sand” in the bags tied to his burros as gold -- but in a short and brutish battle instigated more by Dobbs than by them.

Dobbs is alone when this happens because he has already separated himself from Howard and from Curtin in an attempt to steal all the gold for himself -- indeed, in the case of Curtin, Dobbs tries to murder him by shooting him several times in the back. As such, his murder by the “mestizos” is truly a tragicomic end to the story that has largely been his throughout the novel -- and one that is well summarized by Howard in the closing pages as he and Curtin, unaware that Dobbs is dead, reflect on their adventures with him and the way the gold “curse” seemed to overcome Dobbs and his humanity.

Howard meditated for a while; then he said: “Come to think of it, you can’t blame him.”

“Meaning what?” Curtin asked, as though he had not heard right.

“Meaning that I think he’s not a real killer and robber, as killers go. It’s rather difficult to explain it to you, with the slugs in you. You see, I think at bottom he’s as honest as you and me. The mistake was that you two were left alone in the depths of the wilderness with almost fifty thousand clean cash between you two. That is a goddamned temptation, believe me, partner. Being day and night on lonely trails without ever meeting a human soul -- that gets on your mind, brother. That eats you up. I know it. Perhaps you felt it, too. Don’t deny it. You may have only forgotten how you felt at certain times. The wilderness, the desolate mountains, cry day and night in your ears: ‘We don’t talk. It will never come out. Do it. Do it right now. At that winding of the trail do it. Here’s the chance of your lifetime. Don’t miss it. You only have to grasp it and it is yours. No one will ever know. No one can ever find out. Take it, it’s yours for the taking. Don’t mind a life, the world is crowded with mugs like him.’ If you ask me, partner, I’d like to know the man on earth who could resist trying it without nearly going mad. If I were still young and I had been alone with you or with him, to tell you the truth, Curty, I might have been tempted too. And I wonder, if you search your mind very carefully, if you won’t find that you had similar ideas on this lonely march. That you didn’t act on them doesn’t mean that you felt no temptation. You may have got hold of yourself just before the most dangerous moment.”

“But he had no scruples, no conscience, I know. I knew it long before.”

“He had as much conscience as we would have had under similar circumstances. Where there is no prosecutor, there is no defendant. Don’t forget that. All we have to do now is to find that cheat and get our money.

Dobbs is not really to blame, for he is not the moral agent in this tragedy. He acts the way the system designed him to act; no more, no less.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Roots by Alex Haley

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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It’s been more than two months since I blogged about a book I’ve read. I guess there’s two reasons for that. One is that I chose the 729-page Roots as my next book. The second is that I joined a novel critique group and have been spending a certain percentage of my free time reading other people’s unpublished novels.

It’s been a good experience for me. I had to read and critique two other novels before the group would read and critique mine. And so far I’ve read and critiqued one more after I got the group’s feedback on mine. Perhaps I should mention that it was Columbia: Reflections in Broken Glass that I asked them to review—just the odd chapters that comprise the main story line, because the full manuscript was too long for the group’s guidelines. Evidently, they think a 267,000-word novel by an unpublished author has little chance of getting published. They’re probably right.

But let me get to Roots. I but dimly remember the sensation the TV miniseries caused back in 1977, and now that I’ve read the story that inspired it, I can more clearly understand what the fuss was all about. Even in 2010, Roots reads very much like a ground-breaking novel. It’s almost shocking to speculate on how it must have affected people when it was published in 1976.

It’s also a novel that suffers some from its own fame. The first 164 pages, as a prime example, which document Kunta’s life in Africa from birth to teenager, are an interesting and all-enveloping look at life within Kunta’s culture—replete with its strict class structure, Muslim faith, and rites of passage. I may have appreciated these pages more had I not known what was going to happen—i.e., that at some painful moment Kunta was going to be captured by slave traders and shipped across to ocean to the British colonies in America. That tragedy hangs heavily over this entire first section of the novel, and when it finally comes on page 165, it is at once surprising and expected.

He was bending over a likely prospect when he heard the sharp crack of a twig, followed quickly by the squawk of a parrot overhead. It was probably the dog returning, he thought in the back of his mind. But no grown dog ever cracked a twig, he flashed, whirling in the same instant. In a blur, rushing at him, he saw a white face, a club upraised; heard heavy footfalls behind him.

What follows is 50 or so pages of one of the most harrowing stories ever told—Kunta’s ordeal on the slave ship. Near the very end of the novel, when Haley himself is traveling the globe to track down the activities of his ancestors, the author says this about the imperative he felt to write this section as accurately as possible:

When we put to sea, I explained what I hoped to do that might help me write of my ancestor’s crossing. After each late evening’s dinner, I climbed down successive metal ladders into her deep, dark, cold cargo hold. Stripping to my underwear, I lay on my back on a wide rough bare dunnage plank and forced myself to stay there through all ten nights of the crossing, trying to imagine what did he see, hear, feel, smell, taste—and above all, in knowing Kunta, what things did he think? My crossing of course was ludicrously luxurious by any comparison to the ghastly ordeal endured by Kunta Kinte, his companions, and all those other millions who lay chained and shackled in terror and their own filth for an average of eighty to ninety days, at the end of which awaited new physical and psychic horrors. But anyway, finally I wrote of the ocean crossing—from the perspective of the human cargo.

Indeed he does, and it isn’t something I will soon forget. Kunta and his companions are kept chained and lying naked on rough wooden planks, packed and stacked into the ship’s hold like so much cargo, without room to even sit up or roll over. They all become sick at one point or another, and the waste of their bodies—the vomit, the diarrhea, the urine—is allowed to collect around them for days at a time, until the hold is periodically opened and the ship keepers come down with tubs of vinegar water to fight the stench and trowels to scrape away all the filth. About as frequently the captives are brought up on deck and scrubbed with sea water and stiff-bristled brushes, the sores on their shoulders and joints from laying on their wooden bunks opened up nearly to the bone.

Kunta survives it all—most miraculously with his Muslim faith intact.

He lay there in the darkness hearing the voice of his father sternly warning him and Lamin never to wander off anywhere alone; Kunta desperately wished that he had heeded his father’s warnings. His heart sank with the thought that he would never again be able to listen to his father, that for the rest of whatever was going to be his life, he was going to have to think for himself.

“All things are the will of Allah!” That statement—which had begun with the alcala—went from mouth to ear, and when it came to Kunta from the man lying on his left side, he turned his head to whisper the words to his Wolof shacklemate. After a moment, Kunta realized that the Wolof hadn’t whispered the words on to the next man, and after wondering for a while why not, he thought that perhaps he hadn’t said them clearly, so he started to whisper the message once again. But abruptly the Wolof spat out loudly enough to be heard across the entire hold, “If your Allah wills this, give me the devil!” From elsewhere in the darkness came several loud exclamations of agreement with the Wolof, and arguments broke out here and there.

Kunta was deeply shaken. The shocked realization that he lay with a pagan burned into his brain, faith in Allah being as precious to him as life itself. Until now he had respected the friendship and the wise opinions of his older shacklemate. But now Kunta knew that there could never be any more companionship between them.

There are times when he wrestles with his faith—questioning how Allah, of whom it was said that He was in all places at all times, could possibly be there with them—but they are largely fleeting. And his view of the “pagans” in the hold with him never truly wavers. Even as Muslim and pagan begin to die all around him, he can never quite bring himself to see the suffering of the non-believers as something that presents a true moral challenge to his faith.

When he arrives in America and is bought by a plantation owner, Kunta continues to do the best he can to adhere to the restrictions of his Muslim faith—refusing to eat pork regardless of his hunger—and he looks upon the slaves he meets that were born in North America as something less than human.

It was after sundown when the horn sounded once again—this time in the distance. As Kunta watched the other blacks hurrying into a line, he wished he could stop thinking of them as belonging to the tribes they resembled, for they were but unworthy pagans not fit to mingle with those who had come with him on the big canoe.

It’s a bit surprising to me—all this intolerance—but it’s likely an accurate testament to the intractability of humans and their various dogmas, regardless of the color of their skin.

From a narrative perspective, Kunta’s rigid thinking about Muslims and pagans sets up one of the few flaws in the novel—the issue of Kunta’s eventual acclimatization to the new society he finds himself in. When Kunta first arrives in America, it’s as if he is a spirit that can never be tamed. He runs at the first opportunity, gets caught, and runs again. This continues for several cycles until they decide to cut off half of one of his feet to keep him from running. That it does, but it doesn’t seem to quench the fire that still burns within him.

But despite this, on page 287, we read:

Nearly everyone was gone for the next few days—so many that few would have been there to notice if Kunta had tried to run away again—but he knew that even though he had learned to get around all right and make himself fairly useful, he would never be able to get very far before some slave catcher caught up with him again. Though it shamed him to admit it, he had begun to prefer life as he was allowed to live it here on this plantation to the certainty of being captured and probably killed if he tried to escape again. Deep in his heart, he knew he would never see his home again, and he could feel something precious and irretrievable dying inside of him forever. But hope remained alive; though he might never see his family again, perhaps someday he might be able to have one of his own.

What’s strange is that the scene that I so vividly remember from the miniseries – Vic Morrow whipping LeVar Burton, telling him again and again that his name is Toby, and all the while LeVar whimpering and mumbling that his name is Kunta, Kunta Kinte—doesn’t happen in the book. But it could very well have. That’s how defiant Kunta is in his early years in America, and when Haley makes him succumb it seems a bit out of character. The Kunta who survived his manhood training in Juffure, I think, would have kept running—half a foot be damned—until they killed him.

But Kunta succumbs and Kunta survives, as Kunta must because if Kunta is killed there would be no more story and no Alex Haley to be writing it. Kunta marries and has a daughter he names Kizzy, and it is in his relationship with his daughter that the true extent of Kunta’s tragedy is made manifest. This scene from when Kizzy is seven and full of the natural curiosity of youth is especially poignant.

“Do I got a gran’ma?” asked Kizzy

“You got two—my mammy and yo’ mammy’s mammy.”

“How come dey ain’t wid us?”

“Dey don’ know where we is,” said Kunta. “Does you know where we is?” he asked her a moment later.

“We’s in de buggy,” Kizzy said.

“I means where does we live.”

“At Massa Waller’s.”

“An’ where dat is?”

“Dat way,” she said, pointing down the road. Disinterested in their subject, she said, “Tell me some more ‘bout dem bugs an’ things where you come from.”

“Well, dey’s big red ants knows how to cross rivers on leafs, dat fights wars an’ marches like an army, an’ builds hills dey lives in dat’s taller dan a man.”

“Dey soun’ scary. You step on ‘em?”

“Not less’n you has to. Every critter got a right to be here same as you. Even de grass is live an’ got a soul jes’ like people does.”

“Won’t walk on de grass no mo’, den. I stay in de buggy.”

Kunta smiled. “Wasn’t no buggies where I come from. Walked wherever we was goin’. One time I walked four days wid my pappy all de way from Juffure to my uncles’ village.”

“What Joo-fah-ray?”

“Done tol’ you don’ know how many times, dat where I come from.”

“I thought you was from Africa. Dat Gambia you talks about in Africa?”

“Gambia a country in Africa. Juffure a village in Gambia.”

“Well, where dey at, Pappy?”

“’Crost de big water.”

“How big dat water?”

“So big it takes near ‘bout four moons to get ‘crost it.”

“Four what?”

“Moons. Like you say ‘months.’”

“How come you don’t say months?”

“’Cause moons my word for it.”

“What you call a ‘year’?”

“A rain.”

Kizzy mused briefly.

“How you get ‘crost dat big water?”

“In a big boat.”

“Bigger dan dat rowboat we seen dem fo’ mens fishin’ in?”

“Big enough to hol’ a hunnud mens.”

“How come it don’ sink?”

“I use to wish it would of.”

“How come?”

“’Cause we all so sick seem like we gon’ die anyhow.”

“How you get sick?”

“Got sick from layin’ in our own mess prac’ly on top each other.”

“Whyn’t you go de toilet?”

“De toubob had us chained up.”

“Who ‘toubob’?”

“White folks.”

“How come you chained up? You don sump’n wrong?”

“Was jes’ out in de woods near where I live—Juffure—lookin’ fer a piece o’ wood to make a drum wid, an’ dey grab me an’ take me off.”

“How ol’ you was?”

“Sebenteen.”

“Dey ask yo’ mammy an’ pappy if’n you could go?”

Kunta looked incredulously at her. “Woulda took dem too if’n dey could. To dis day my fam’ly don’ know where I is.”

“You got brothers an’ sisters?”

“Had three brothers. Maybe mo’ by now. Anyways, dey’s all growed up, prob’ly got chilluns like you.”

“We go see dem someday?”

“We cain’t go nowhere.”

“We’s gon’ somewhere now.”

“Jes’ Massa John’s. We don’t show up, dey have de dogs out at us by sundown.”

“’Cause dey worried ‘bout us?”

“’Cause we b’longs to dem, jes’ like dese hosses pullin’ us.”

“Like I b’longs to you an’ mammy?”

“You’se our young’un. Dat Different.”

“Missy Anne say she want me fo’ her own.”

“You ain’t no doll fo’ her to play wid.”

“I plays wid her, too. She done tole me she my bes’ frien’.”

“You can’t be nobody’s frien’ an’ slave both.”

“How come, Pappy?”

“’Cause frien’s don’t own one ‘nother.”

“Don’t mammy an’ you b’long to one ‘nother? Ain’t y’all frien’s?”

“Ain’t de same. We b’longs to each other ‘cause we wants to, ‘cause we loves each other.”

“Well, I loves Missy Anne, so I wants to b’long to her.”

“Couldn’t never work out.”

“What you mean?”

“You couldn’t be happy when y’all grow up.”

“Would too. I bet you wouldn’t be happy.”

“Yo sho’ right ‘bout dat!”

“Aw, Pappy, I couldn’t never leave you an’ Mammy.”

“An’ chile, speck we couldn’t never let you go, neither!”

So much of the sadness of this book is wrapped up in this one section of dialogue—as well as so many of its core themes. Kunta comes to accept the facts of his life in America, but he pledges to himself that he will raise his daughter in a way that she is not ignorant of her African heritage and what it means to him. But as this section shows, it is a world she cannot conceive, much less understand—her and all her progeny. Kunta’s tale is one they hand down from generation to generation, carrying it like a talisman whose secret they can’t unlock. By the time Kizzy’s son Chicken George passes it on to his son Virgil, it has become little more than a stale recitation of facts, absent any of the richness of Kunta’s actual experiences.

“Listen here, boy! Gwine tell you ‘bout yo’ great-gran’daddy. He were a African dat say he name ‘Kunta Kinte.’ He call a guitar a ko, an’ a river ‘Kamby Bolongo,’ an’ lot mo’ things wid African names. He say he was choppin’ a tree to make his l’il brother a drum when it was fo’ mens come up an’ grabbed ‘im from behin’. Den a big ship brung ‘im ‘crost de big water to a place call ‘Naplis. An’ he had runned off fo’ times when he try to kill dem dat cotched ‘im an’ dey cut half his foot off!”

Yet it is these facts that eventually allow Haley to connect all the broken pieces of the chain that exists from Kunta to himself and which are what make Roots possible. For this reason, the words have magic, even if the people in the book don’t always know what that magic is.

One other thing about that section of dialogue between Kunta and Kizzy. It foreshadows the ultimate tragedy of Kunta’s life, when Kizzy is sold away from him and the plantation he cannot leave for forging a traveling pass so that another young slave—the boy she loves—can escape.

“O my Lawd Gawd!” Bell shrieked. “Massa, please have mercy! She ain’t meant to do it! She ain’t knowed what she was doin’! Missy Anne de one teached ‘er to write!”

Massa Waller spoke glacially. “The law is the law. She’s broken my rules. She’s committed a felony. She may have aided in a murder. I’m told one of those white men may die.”

“Ain’t her cut de man, Massa! Massa, she worked for you ever since she big ‘nough to carry your slopjar! An’ I done cooked an’ waited on you han’ an’ foot over forty years, an’ he…” gesturing at Kunta, she stuttered, “he done driv you eve’ywhere you been for near ‘bout dat long. Massa, don’ all dat count for sump’n?”

Massa Waller would not look directly at her. “You were doing your jobs. She’s going to be sold—that’s all there is to it.”

“Jes’ cheap, low-class white folks splits up families!” shouted Bell. “You ain’t dat kin’!”

Angrily, Massa Waller gestured to the sheriff, who began to wrench Kizzy roughly toward the wagon.

Bell blocked their path. “Den sell me an’ ‘er pappy wid ‘er! Don’ split us up!”

“Get out of the way!” barked the sheriff, roughly shoving her aside.

Bellowing, Kunta sprang forward like a leopard, pummeling the sheriff to the ground with his fists.

“Save me, Fa!” Kizzy screamed. He grabbed her around the waist and began pulling frantically at her chain.

When the sheriff’s pistol butt crashed above his ear, Kunta’s head seemed to explode as he crumpled to his knees. Bell lunged toward the sheriff, but his outflung arm threw her off balance, falling heavily as he dumped Kizzy into the back of his wagon and snapped a lock on her chain. Leaping nimbly onto the seat, the sheriff lashed the horse, whose forward jerk sent the wagon lurching as Kunta clambered up. Dazed, head pounding, ignoring the pistol, he went scrambling after the wagon as it gathered speed.

“Missy Anne!...Missy Annnnnnnnnnnne!” Kizzy was screeching it at the top of her voice. “Missy Annnnnnnnne!” Again and again, the screams came; they seemed to hang in the air behind the wagon swiftly rolling toward the main road.

When Kunta began stumbling, gasping for breath, the wagon was a half mile away; when he halted, for a long time he stood looking after it until the dust had settled and the road stretched empty as far as he could see.

The massa turned and walked very quickly with his head down back into the house, past Bell huddled sobbing by the bottom step. As if Kunta were sleepwalking, he came cripping slowly back up the driveway—when an African remembrance flashed into his mind, and near the front of the house he bent down and started peering around. Determining the clearest prints that Kizzy’s bare feet had left in the dust, scooping up the double handful containing those footprints, he went rushing toward the cabin: The ancient forefathers said that precious dust kept in some safe place would insure Kizzy’s return to where she made the footprints. He burst through the cabin’s open door, his eyes sweeping the room and falling upon his gourd on a shelf containing his pebbles. Springing over there, in the instant before opening his cupped hands to drop in the dirt, suddenly he knew the truth: His Kizzy was gone; she would not return. He would never see his Kizzy again.

His face contorting, Kunta flung his dust toward the cabin’s roof. Tears bursting from his eyes, snatching his heavy gourd up high over his head, his mouth wide in a soundless scream, he hurled the gourd down with all his strength, and it shattered against the packed-earth floor, his 662 pebbles representing each month of his 55 rains flying out, ricocheting wildly in all directions.

This tragic and powerful scene—Kunta finally turning his back on the beliefs of his African past and figuratively destroying his past life by shattering the calendar gourd—is the last we will ever see of Kunta. At this point, the book begins to treat Kizzy as the main character, and then her son Chicken George, and then people of the multiple generations that follow. There are times early on when you think that perhaps Kizzy will see her father again, but as the years wear on you realize that it isn’t so, and that Kunta will remain the sad and desperate victim of his final scene for the rest of time. In keeping true to the book’s theme, it is an absolutely masterful technique.

The book is only half done at this point, but Kunta has been such a large part of the book’s attention for so long that many of the following characters seem a little like strangers in comparison. Chicken George comes closest to capturing that attention again, especially as he struggles to find acceptance in a world run by whites without alienating his black family. Several interesting themes get developed through this story line.

First is the fact that George is part white. His father is actually his own master, who forced himself on his mother Kizzy shortly after her arrival on his property. He gets the name Chicken George as a teenager when he takes on an apprenticeship under his master’s aging negro chicken trainer, and begins to excel at the assignment. Massa Lea is a cock fighter, and it is through George’s raising, training, and betting on his prize chickens that a shadowy father/son relationship begins to develop between the two of them. It gives him many privileges that are not available to his mother, his wife or his children, but at the same time it separates him from them in ways that pains him and them.

But more interesting—and maybe unintentionally—is Haley’s use of names. Kunta was born Kunta, named by his father in one of the most important ceremonies of his African village. He is given the name Toby by his American master, but never accepts and never comes to think of himself as anything other than Kunta. It’s the name his wife Bell consistently says, and the one the narrative voice uses to refer to him throughout the novel.

George is born George, also named by his father, but much more cavalierly than the pains that Kunta’s father took in choosing a name. George, too, is later given another name by his American master—Chicken George—but unlike Kunta who never truly became Toby, George becomes Chicken George—to his family, to the narrator, even to himself. Once the name is applied, it is used throughout the rest of the novel as the universal way to refer to him.

I think that says a lot about the world these people lived in. Wikipedia says there is some doubt over whether or not Haley plagiarized some of the content of his book—but even if he did, there are subtle elements like that throughout which add a lot of depth and meaning to the reading experience. There’s also some not-so-subtle descriptions that quickly and effectively orient you towards the alternate universe (to our modern sensibilities, at least) that the characters are living in. Descriptions like:

He had heard many a whispering of cooks and maids grinning and bowing as they served food containing some of their own bodily wastes. And he had been told of white folks’ meals containing bits of ground glass, or arsenic, or other poisons. He had even heard stories about white babies going into mysterious fatal comas without any trace of the darning needle that had been thrust by housemaids into their soft heads where the hair was thickest.

And like:

Kunta thought about how “high-yaller” slave girls brought high prices at the county seat slave auctions. He had seen them being sold, and he had heard many times about the purposes for which they were bought. And he thought of the many stories he had heard about “high-yaller” manchildren—about how they were likely to get mysteriously taken away as babies never to be seen again, because of the white fear that otherwise they might grow up into white-looking men and escape to where they weren’t known and mix the blackness in their blood with that of white women. Every time Kunta thought about any aspect of blood mixing, he would thank Allah that he and Bell could share the comfort of knowing that whatever otherwise might prove to be His will, their manchild was going to be black.

This is a strange land we’re visiting in Roots, but what makes the novel so powerful is the realization that this land is really not that far away. The story traces the generations down to the present day, and helps the reader see not just how far our society has come, but how painfully recently the improvements have actually been.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER NINE

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK ONE:

STONE TO FLESH

Years before Sir Gildegarde Brisbane would set out on his mission to kill the dragon Dalanmire, he was introduced to a second cousin of the King, a young woman named Madeline. The occasion was a formal banquet in honor of the King’s birthday and it bore an air of importance and sobriety. When Madeline Farchrist tripped on the hem of her gown and fell into the punch bowl, Brisbane helped her to her feet and placed his overcoat around her wet shoulders. Madeline wrapped the coat around her frame, covering the now transparent fabric of her dress and embarrassingly thanked the man she would one day marry and to whom she would one bear a son for his kindness and chivalry.

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The first thing Brisbane noticed was the stench. The room contained only a collection of small kneeling benches, all facing the wall through which they had entered. On that wall was a mural depicting gigantic hands parting a bank of clouds, faded with age and festooned with spiderwebs. There was a stairway in the far corner, leading down into the earth, and it was from there that the stench came.

Roundtower and Shortwhiskers were making their way to the stairs and Roystnof was following them. Brisbane’s feet moved of their own accord, taking him across the room to the staircase. The stink became worse with each step, like rotting meat and gangrene. It passed over him in waves and made his eyes water. He didn’t know how the others could stand it.

As they reached the stairs, there was a low rumble from below that shook the building. The same eerie voice, soft and threatening, came out of the depths.

“And you are not alone, are you, paladin? I can smell the meat of a dwarf and two other humans. One of those humans is even more afraid than you are.”

Roystnof’s light spell extended down into the cellar, and as Brisbane made his way down the steps, the room revealed more and more of itself to his eyes. It was bare. All he could see was the bare stone of the floor and two walls. It wasn’t until his friends had collected at the bottom of the stairs and he was near the end that the creature standing against the far wall came into his view.

It was hideous. An unnatural mishmash of animals that could never have been created under their will of a caring god. Bipedal, it stood nearly nine feet tall, its massive legs slimming down to shiny black cloven hooves. Hairless and sexless, its body was that of a muscular man, but the skin was green and scaly like that of a snake. Its powerful arms ended in massive red crab pinchers and perched upon its solid neck was the head of a bull, with glowing red eyes and horns out to its broad shoulders. The stench Brisbane smelled came off the creature like heat from a flame. But perhaps most terrifying of all, painted on the far wall directly behind the monster, in a strange dark red ink, was the outline of a circle as big as a man, and inside the circle was drawn a five-pointed star.

Roundtower took a step towards the beast, his shield held in front and his sickly green sword held tight and ready to strike.

“Demon-spawn,” the warrior cursed. “Prepare to meet thy doom.”

The demon roared as Roundtower charged into battle. Shortwhiskers advanced a pace behind Roundtower and Roystnof backed up to the bottom stair and began to prepare a spell. Brisbane soon found himself alone and unsure of what to do.

Between the two of them, Roundtower and Shortwhiskers had the demon on the defensive. But every swing they made was seemingly easily blocked by one of the creature’s red claws. These appendages seemed impervious to their blades. Each time they collided, a shower of sparks erupted, but there seemed to be no other effect. Brisbane took a few helpless steps forward, wondering what good he could do. There was really no room for him to fight with Roundtower and Shortwhiskers there, and this monster was no simple ogre.

Then, tragedy struck. The demon caught Shortwhiskers’ sword between one of its pinchers and with a quick snap, broke the blade in two. While expertly parrying with Roundtower with its other claw, the demon unleashed a horrible blow to the unarmed dwarf, lashing a quick swipe across his face and knocking Shortwhiskers out and out of combat.

Quicker than Brisbane would have thought possible, the demon turned on Roundtower with an insane grin spreading on its bull jaws.

“Now you die, paladin!” it squealed, death heavy in its voice.

A huge claw fastened around Roundtower’s waist and the demon’s muscles bulged as it lifted Roundtower off the ground and held him at arm’s length. Roundtower cried out in pain and desperately brought his sword down fast on the demon’s head. But blindingly fast, the second claw came up and swiped Roundtower’s thrust aside, just as it had done to Shortwhiskers’ body. Roundtower’s blade flew out of his grasp and skidded across the stone floor.

It came to rest directly at Brisbane’s feet.

Roystnof’s magic struck. As he had done to the ogre, a huge bolt of red lightning crackled out of his fingers and struck the demon full in the chest, throwing it back and pinning it against the pentacle on the far wall. Roundtower fell out of the spasming grasp of the demon, falling heavily to the floor.

The lightning flashed and was gone, leaving the demon standing on shaky hooves and with a blackened chest. Shortwhiskers lay unconscious to one side of it and Roundtower, weaponless, was crawling slowing away, favoring one leg. The demon looked up and fixed its red eyes on Brisbane.

Brisbane tossed his short sword aside and bent down to pick up Roundtower’s slender blade. His hand closed around the hilt carefully as he slowly lifted it from the ground. Power surged up Brisbane’s arm and wrapped itself around his heart. A seductive, deep, and wholly feminine voice echoed in his brain.

—Greetings, young Gildegarde Brisbane.—

The demon was breathing hard. “And what do we have here?” it gasped. “A boy or a man?”

Brisbane could feel the demon’s voice working on his fear but the strange woman’s voice in his head was much more compelling to him.

—I have waited centuries for a warrior such as you. Roundtower was devout, but your potential eclipses his.—

Who are you? Brisbane thought.

Roundtower was kneeling off to one side. “My sword,” Brisbane could hear him saying, his voice faint and very far away. “Gil, give me my sword.”

—My name is Angelika.—

The demon roared and rushed at Brisbane, snapping him out of his reverie. The sword became a green flash in Brisbane’s hands, swooping up and attacking the demon almost of its own accord. Brisbane beat the penetrating claws aside, one after the other, searching for an opportunity to strike. The sword felt natural in his grasp. It was an extension of his own arm and he used it like a seasoned veteran. If Brisbane had stopped to think about it, he probably would not have believed he could do what he was doing.

But the demon was just too quick. It was all Brisbane could do to swat the angry claws away from him, and although the sword was much lighter than it appeared to be, Brisbane was tiring. Soon, he would miss one of those claws and it would snap him in two as it had to Shortwhiskers’ blade.

Suddenly, Roystnof cried out to him. “Strike, Gil! I have slowed it. Strike now!”

Brisbane made the decision in an instant. After blocking the thrust of the first claw, he ignored the second, which would certainly finish him if Roystnof was somehow wrong about his slow spell, and brought the blade of the sword down hard on the demon’s muscular chest.

The blade cut into the scales covering the demon’s body and an explosion of the demon’s black blood spewed out of the gaping wound. Brisbane was able to wrench his sword—for now, oddly, now that he had drawn blood with it, he knew the sword was truly his—free and block the approach of the second claw in the nick of time. Roystnof’s spell had worked. The creature was slowed.

The demon, eyes bulging with fury and pain, bore down upon the human warrior, amazed and terrified at his unexplainable speed. Brisbane cut again, deeply across the demon’s abdomen, and brought his sword out in time to mash the next claw attack aside. The slimy green snakes that were the demon’s intestines pushed their way out of their host, dangling from its belly and falling on the floor. The demon gave up the attack and crouched over, uselessly trying to push its organs back into its body with its misshapen claws. Its roars of rage had decayed into whines of agony.

—Strike the beast down, Brisbane. Send it back to its unholy maker.—

With the strange female voice echoing in his head, Brisbane, in a huge sweeping swing, brought his blade down on the top of the demon’s bull head and cleaved it nearly in two. The beast fell completely to the ground and lay still.

—It is done. Praise Grecolus for His wisdom and praise Brisbane for his bravery.—

Brisbane looked at his surroundings. At his feet lay the crumpled form of the demon, its body already turning to ashes as the spirit that had inhabited it was forced back to its plane of origin. To his right stood Roundtower, his shield lowered and his eyes wide in amazement. To his left, Shortwhiskers was weakly getting to his feet, one hand rubbing the side of his face. And the pentacle on the far wall began to run, the dried blood that had been its ink turning fresh and running down the face of the stone, smearing the image and dissolving the magic.

Brisbane felt a reassuring hand rub his shoulder. He turned and met Roystnof’s eyes.

“Roy,” Brisbane said. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” Roystnof said. “For what?”

Brisbane opened his mouth but nothing came out. He knew what he was sorry for. He was sorry that he had rejected the magic Roystnof had taught him and, in a time of crisis, had resorted to the warrior instinct that had always been inside him but which had never been nurtured. Brisbane knew all of this, but he could not bring himself to tell Roystnof about it.

Roystnof shook his head. “No, Gil. Do not be sorry. Perhaps it was wrong for me to try and teach you something I knew you could never fully accept. You are a Brisbane, Gil. Like it or not, you are a Brisbane. Your destiny is tied to the sword and not the spell.”

Roundtower stepped forward. “Brisbane?” he said. “I thought your name was Parkinson?”

Roystnof gave Brisbane an uncomfortable look.

Brisbane shook his head, letting his friend know he held nothing against him. “Parkinson is the name of my stepfather,” he said to Roundtower, “and I have adopted it as he has adopted me. I was born with the name Gildegarde Brisbane.”

“Gildegarde Brisbane?” Roundtower asked, a sprinkling of awe audible in his voice. “As in the famous Knights of Farchrist?”

Brisbane nodded defeatedly. “I am the illegitimate son of Sir Gildegarde Brisbane the Second. My mother was pregnant with me when she left Raveltown the night he died. Please don’t hold it against me.”

Roundtower looked a little shocked at Brisbane’s request. “I wouldn’t think of it,” he said distantly.

Brisbane lowered his head and saw the pile of ashes that had been the body of the demon. He still had his sword in his hand and he felt almost as if he couldn’t drop it if he had to. Forcing himself, he held the sickly green blade up and offered it, pommel first, to Roundtower, silently hoping—

knowing

—the warrior would not accept it.

—No, Brisbane. I am yours now. I am for you.—

Roundtower reached out his hand to take the sword, but he slowly drew it away. He stood silently for a moment and then nodded his head, as if making a momentous decision.

“It is a sign from Grecolus,” the warrior said. “For me and for you. She is now yours to combat the forces of evil. Without her, there is now nothing to stop me from riding to Farchrist Castle. She is a holy relic, but as a magical device, she would only be a hindrance to my quest for the knighthood.”

“She?” Brisbane said, not understanding.

“The sword,” Roundtower said. “Her name is Angelika, She has the enchantment of Grecolus.”

Brisbane looked incredulously at his weapon and the seductively feminine voice rang in his head again.

—I am for you, Brisbane. And you are for me.—

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

I was surprised to learn, when I looked this one up on Wikipedia, that:

In 2005, the novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels since 1923. The editors of Modern Library named the work as one of the greatest English-language novels of the twentieth century.

That is definitely not the novel I read. Further described as a “mixture of the philosophical and the picaresque,” I found it much more picaresque than philosophical. Indeed, when the philosophical started to punch its way through in the closing pages, it seemed woefully out of place.

“Why do you say that, Jake?” said Hugo. “Every man must have a trade. Yours is writing. Mine will be making and mending watches, I hope, if I’m good enough.”

“And what about the truth?” I said wildly. “What about the search for God?”

“What more do you want,” said Hugo. “God is a task. God is detail. It all lies close to your hand.” He reached out and took hold of a tumbler which was standing on the table beside his bed. The light from the door glinted on the tumbler and seemed to find an answering flash in Hugo’s eyes, as I tried in the darkness to see what they were saying.

“All right,” I said, “all right, all right, all right.”

“You’re always expecting something, Jake,” said Hugo.

“Maybe,” I said. I was beginning to find the conversation a burden.

Yeah. Me, too. The sudden reference to truth and God, especially from Jake who, up to that point, had seemed consumed not with such an existential quest, but with his picaresque adventures, from “the kidnapping of a movie-star canine to the staging of a political riot on a film set.” 

I put on my coat and began to walk slowly down the main stairs. My head was in turmoil. The side of the building which faced the bicycle yard had lights upon it which were kept burning all night. Anyone trying to enter from the yard would be clearly in view from the street. The ends of the transepts came into the radius of the street lamps, and the main building had its own row of lamp posts, which encircled the main courtyard. There remained the transept gardens, which were wells of darkness. Most of the windows which opened onto these gardens were the windows of patients’ rooms. It was impossible to think of entering through one of these; for even if I had had the nerve to fo now and satisfy myself that one of these windows was open, I had certainly not the nerve to re-enter through it at two a.m. and run the risk of being pursued by the screams of some nervous inmate. There were other possibilities, such as the scullery window of Corelli I. But this would fall too much under the eye of the Corelli I night sister, whose room was next door to the scullery; and the same objection applied to the other windows which led from the garden into the administrative rooms of the ward. My only hope lay in the more anonymous and public parts of the transept, round about the Transept Kitchen. It was true that there was likely to be somebody in and around the kitchen all night; but there were a number of cloakrooms and storerooms round about which seemed to be derelict and unvisited even during the day, and whose windows lay at the very end of the garden, where it would be darkest.

On reaching the bottom of the stairs I turned, with an air of conspicuous casualness, towards the Transept Kitchen. When I am up to something I find it very hard to realize that I probably look no different from the way I look on other occasions. I felt sure that the expression of my face must be betraying me, and whenever I passed anyone in the corridor I turned this telltale surface in the other direction. I walked firmly past the door of the kitchen. The upper half of the door was made of plain glass, and out of the corners of my eyes I could see figures moving about within. I selected a room two or three doors farther on, and turned into it sharply. I had remembered right. It was a storeroom, against each wall of which the iron frames of bedsteads were leaning ten deep. I closed the door quietly behind me and walked down the aisle in the middle of the room. In a square of sun and shade the garden was revealed and the rows of cherry trees. The shadow from the Corelli side fell sharply across the lawn and cut it into two triangles of contrasting greens. I stood for a moment looking out. Then I unlatched the window.

It was a simple casement window with one catch halfway up the frame, and a perforated bar at the bottom which regulated the aperture. I unpinned the window and undid the catch, opening the window an inch or two, so that the catch rested against the glass on the outside. I didn’t want the window to look as if it were undone; and on the other hand I wanted to be certain that I should be able to pull it open from the outside when the time came. It took me some minutes to satisfy myself that both these conditions were met. Then I marked the position of the window carefully in relation to the rows of trees. After that I went back and listened at the door until I was sure that there was no one in the corridor. I emerged, closed the door, and walked back towards Corelli. No one had seen me. A moment later I was leaving the building.

Too much of the novel is this -- long stretches of inner monologue, describing the most mundane of activities. Like the narrator, the prose wanders, often and obviously looking for a point and, more frequently, failing to find one. I know. I’ve written my share of that kind of fiction, too.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Soldiers’ Pay by William Faulkner

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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I think this is Faulkner’s first book and there were parts I actually liked.

I know, I know, Faulkner is supposed to be everyone’s favorite American author, but I always have a hard time getting into his books. The way he writes, it’s like nothing sinks in, it just kind of skims across the surface.

I’m not sure I liked this book so much as I like the book it could have been.

Donald Mahon comes back wounded, scarred, and dying from World War I and the buzz of small town life goes on its merry way around him, oblivious to the fact that the war has changed him.

Small town life even tries to ensnare him in its petty machinations and does not notice in its self-absorption that he has become something outside of it and has grown beyond its influence.

And that is already the curse of our civilization -- Things, Possessions, to which we are slaves, which require us to either labor honestly at least eight hours a day or do something illegal so as to keep them painted or dressed in the latest mode or filled with whisky or gasoline.

That’s the book I wanted this to be. There was some of that in there, but not enough for my tastes.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER EIGHT

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK ONE:

STONE TO FLESH

After Gildegarde Brisbane had become a Knight of Farchrist, it was his duty to scour the land of evil and ensure the safety of the King and his subjects. This he did without quarter, defeating threat after villainous threat with his blade and with his wits. When Gregorovich Farchrist II decided to send a small party to Dragon’s Peak to dispatch the evil Dalanmire from his place on this earth, it included only the King’s own son, Gregorovich III, a dwarven ambassador to function as their guide across the Crimson Mountains and Desert of Despair, a high priestess of the Royal Temple of Grecolus to ensure a moral commitment to the quest, and Sir Gildegarde Brisbane. When asked if he feared for his life in such an endeavor, Brisbane answered by saying that in his experience, the bravest deeds often sprang directly out of fear.

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They stood before the wall of the oasis in a small group. There had been little discussion that morning. All had seemed occupied with their own thoughts. They all appeared ready for battle. Roundtower and Shortwhiskers wore their chainmail and carried shields. Brisbane wore his studded leather jerkin, as was becoming usual, and held the short sword that had been given to him before him like a torch to light his way. Roystnof wore no armor, but he had been studying his spell book since sunrise.

Once the group had crossed the wall and entered the garden itself, what little conversation there had been ceased completely, and they made their way through the trees and shrubs in silent determination. Shortwhiskers took the lead because he had seen in which direction the small stone structure sat from his perch the day before. Roystnof followed the dwarf and, in single file behind them, came Brisbane and finally Roundtower.

As soon as Brisbane’s feet touched the soft earth inside the wall he began to worry about coming across the basilisk. But now, added to his fears was the knowledge of what the basilisk could really do to him, the prison he could be shut in. His rational mind told him that even if he was turned to stone, Roystnof could turn him back just as quickly. But his fear told him that Roystnof would be unable to work the magic if something got to the wizard first. More than ever, Brisbane told himself, he would allow no harm to come to his magician friend. He did not want to spend eternity alone with his thoughts.

They trudged through the undergrowth as quietly as possible and Shortwhiskers led them with deliberate directness to their goal. They were going deeper into the center of the garden, and the trees became thicker and thicker as they went. Eventually, the canopy of leaves blocked out the sunlight altogether, and Brisbane found himself walking through a small forest.

Brisbane’s nerves were tense and they twinged at every snapped twig and rustle of leaves. He kept a firm grip on the short sword and kept his eyes open and roving. He saw no other life-like stone statues along the route and spotted many small furry woodland animals. He took both of these as signs that these woods were not patrolled by a platoon of basilisks, and that the one Roundtower had seen was a solitary beast.

Then, suddenly, Brisbane could see the glow of sunlight far ahead at the end of the makeshift path they were following. As they approached the light it became obvious that the trees were going to break into a large clearing. Brisbane could see over the heads of Roystnof and the dwarf, and his glances showed him that the small stone building which they sought stood in the center of that clearing.

Shortwhiskers reached the clearing and stepped aside to let the rest of the party in before advancing. Roystnof walked out into the sunshine followed closely by Brisbane and Roundtower. The four stood on the rim of a circular clearing about one hundred yards in diameter. In the center stood a twenty foot cube of stone with a black doorway facing the group. This was the structure they had come to see but now, none of their eight eyes were fixed upon it. They all looked at the human figure of stone that stood immobile in front of the structure.

Shortwhiskers spoke. “I think we have found the den of your basilisk-creature, Roystnof.”

“I’m not so sure,” Roystnof said. “That’s no natural formation of rock. Somebody built it.”

Shortwhiskers nodded. “Somebody that died long ago and when the basilisk found it empty, it moved right in.”

“The basilisk is not here.”

The voice belonged to Roundtower. The other three stared at the warrior.

“How do you know?” Shortwhiskers asked.

Roundtower kept his gaze in the distance and shook his head. “I’m not sure. But I can feel it. There is something in there, something evil, but it is not the basilisk.”

Brisbane did not understand how Roundtower could know this, but his voice carried the conviction of truth. Shortwhiskers was shaking his head, as if he thought the warrior was crazy, but Roystnof seemed very interested in whatever it was that Roundtower was sensing.

“Can you feel anything else, Ignatius?” the wizard asked.

“Roundtower slowly nodded, still looking off into the distance. When he spoke, it was as if he was talking in his sleep. “Yes. It is wrong. The evil is wrong. Not just in the way that all evil is wrong, but wrong because it is in this place. I feel this to be a place of such goodness that the evil festering here is nothing but the highest sacrilege.”

Brisbane stared at Roundtower’s chiseled face, remembering what the warrior had said the night before about the mistakes he feared he had made in the purging of evil.

Roundtower drew his sword and Brisbane saw the blade out of its scabbard for the first time. It was long, slim, and double-edged. The metal of the blade was of a type Brisbane had never seen. It had a sickly greenish tinge to it and appeared to glow a bit brighter than the strong sunlight could account for. The pommel was long as well, meant for two hands, but the weapon was quite obviously light enough to be wielded effectively with one. Set into the circular base of the pommel was one large emerald.

Brisbane felt an odd sensation wash over him as he gawked unconsciously at Roundtower’s blade. The weapon was strangely compelling to him, as if it bore some great significance in his life. Brisbane found himself wanting that sword, and a little voice inside his head told him that soon he would have it.

Roundtower suddenly stepped forward and began walking towards the structure. Brisbane looked at Roystnof and the dwarf, their faces saying that they could do nothing but follow the warrior. So, the small group approached the center of the clearing with Roundtower two or three paces ahead of the others. The darkness of the opening in the building remained an obscure void, and no matter how hard they tried to peer into its depths, it kept its secrets hidden from them.

Brisbane’s eyes scanned the circle of trees surrounding the clearing. He looked for any signs of movement, something that would reveal the monsters certain to be lurking in the shadows. But he saw nothing of any danger. He looked back at the building and was surprised to see how much distance they had closed during his glances about. The stone figure stood not ten yards away and the small building not twenty beyond that.

They gathered around the statue and began to circle around it like some totemistic children’s game. The statue had obviously been there for a long time. It was of a young man, older than Brisbane but younger than Roystnof, and its stone surface was worn and weatherbeaten. The man was dressed simply in a knee-length tunic and trousers. His hair was long and loose, and fell about his hollow face in stone clumps. He wore a backpack. He was devoid of any color as Roundtower had been, but his granite had a sickly gray-white stain in its pores, and it reeked of dirty rainwater.

“Another victim of the basilisk,” Roystnof said simply.

“How long do you think he has been here?” Brisbane asked, looking at the erosion running down the statue’s sunken cheeks.

Roystnof pondered. “Years, I would say. Perhaps more than ten. Perhaps even twenty. There is really no way to tell.”

Brisbane saw Roundtower shudder. He could only guess what the warrior was thinking after his weeks in solitary.

“Can you help him?” Roundtower asked the wizard.

“I can transform his back,” Roystnof said, “if that’s what you mean. But I don’t know if that would be wise now.”

“Why not?” Roundtower asked.

Roystnof pursed his lips. “Ignatius.” His voice was soft. “I know you may not want to recall it, but you know how your…well, how your sanity had deteriorated after only two weeks as stone. This one has been imprisoned for perhaps decades.”

The wizard’s words obviously had their effect on Roundtower. The warrior held his head low and had his eyes shut. Brisbane began to worry that maybe Roystnof had spoken too plainly when Roundtower brought his head up and spoke with clear eyes.

“The ordeal may well have driven him insane, but as long as he stays in this state, he will continue to suffer. I say you release him.”

Brisbane was a bit shocked at the tone of Roundtower’s voice. It seemed as if he was ordering Roystnof around. He looked at the mage with lines of concern in his forehead.

Roystnof offered a smile to Brisbane. “In our travels,” he explained, “my magical services have always been up to a vote of the party in circumstances such as this. Ignatius was only letting me know his feelings in this matter. Gil, I feel that you now have as much say as any one of us. What is your vote?”

Brisbane felt better about Roundtower’s reaction after this explanation. He still felt the warrior had been issuing an order, but he could reasonably attribute the tone of voice to Roundtower’s current state of mind. Brisbane himself did not wish to see the innocent suffer. But he also felt important now in spite of himself. Roystnof had more or less officially named him a member of their little group. He was tired of feeling like an outsider.

“I vote you free him,” Brisbane said with as much dignity as he could muster.

Roystnof turned to the dwarf. “And you, Nog?”

Shortwhiskers, who had been unusually quiet during the conversation, looked up at the wizard through his thick eyebrows. Brisbane saw an odd and almost angry look in the dwarf’s eyes, and his jaw was set in a way Brisbane had not seen before. It gave him a queer feeling that all was not well and he irrationally found himself wondering why Shortwhiskers’ whiskers were short.

Shortwhiskers spat. “I don’t like the smell of his stone. Let him rot.”

Brisbane was startled at the dwarf’s gruffness and Roundtower ventured a quizzical look at his smaller friend, but Roystnof ignored the tone of his response and simply took the vote as a no.

“Myself,” Roystnof said, “I vote to transform this man back to flesh, so the matter his settled. But I think we should wait until after we have explored the structure. Agreed?”

Brisbane and Roundtower agreed that perhaps that was best but Shortwhiskers only grumbled that he thought it was a bad idea whenever they decided to do it. The party turned their attention upon the stone structure.

It was a twenty foot cube of stone constructed of four great slabs of rock set upright and a fifth placed heavily atop their edges as a roof. The wall facing the approaching party bore an opening, five feet wide and ten feet high, and around this portal were strange glyphs and runes, carved into the rock. Standing this close to the entrance, Brisbane could see a few feet of the stone floor inside the building before the darkness swallowed the sunlight.

Shortwhiskers made a quick circle of the structure and reported no other entrances. The dwarf then stood before the doorway, peered carefully inside, and scanned the interior. He reported nothing warm-blooded inside. Brisbane thought that was odd, but the dwarf had been very specific. Nothing warm-blooded inside.

Roundtower was lightly running his fingertips over the engravings that surrounded the entrance when he cried out.

“I know these markings!”

The others gathered around. Roundtower spoke more to himself than to his companions. “I have not seen them used in a long time. They are ancient.”

Brisbane looked closely at the markings. They appeared as no more than meaningless scribbles to him. “What do they mean?”

Roundtower looked about as if noticing his friends for the first time. “They were used in the old worship rites of Grecolus. This one here,” the warrior said, placing his finger on a series of wavy lines crossing a circle, “stands for peace and safe passage for all loyal to Grecolus. The others are more obscure and I do not recall their individual meanings.”

Roundtower looked about at the blank faces of his companions. “Don’t you understand? This is a shrine of some sort. A shrine devoted to Grecolus!” The warrior’s voice was becoming quite agitated.

“And what of this sensation of permeating evil?” Roystnof asked.

Roundtower sobered. “As powerful as ever. That such a terror should inhabit such a holy place…it makes my blood boil. This evil is powerful, and I can still feel its presence.”

Brisbane was wondering how Roundtower could be so certain of this sightless evil when an icy voice croaked from deep inside the small building.

“Just as I can feel the presence of your holy blade, paladin. Come, and I will drown you in your own blood.”

The party froze. Brisbane at first thought he had imagined the words, but now he saw by the fear in the faces of his friends that it had chilled their bones, too. Brisbane had never heard the word ‘paladin’ before, but the voice from the shrine spoke it as a venomous curse.

Roundtower picked up his shield, which he had placed against the building, and tried to enter the shrine. Brisbane stopped him.

“Wait,” Brisbane said, unable to think of a reason. He only knew he was afraid of whatever it was that spoke in that horrible voice.

Roundtower turned harshly to Brisbane, but quickly softened his posture. He gently shrugged Brisbane’s hand off his shoulder. “I have been challenged, Gil. It is now a matter of honor.”

“I feel fear in your heart as well,” the cackling voice cried from the darkness. “I have won half the battle already. Face me, coward!”

Roundtower set his jaw. “And now I have been mocked. I must go.”

“Yes,” Roystnof piped in. “But not alone.”

The wizard brought his hand up in a sweeping gesture and spoke a single magic word. The darkened shrine exploded with bright light, shimmering from no apparent source. Roundtower held his shield before him as he entered. He was closely followed by Shortwhiskers. Before entering himself, Roystnof looked Brisbane in the face for a full second and slowly nodded his head.

This is it, Brisbane saw the wizard’s eyes say. This is forever the end of your peaceful life in Scalt as the son of Otis Parkinson the tavernkeeper. Step through this portal with me and hold onto your sword. For you need only your weapon, your wits, and the magic I have taught you to survive. It is a dangerous place that you go, but take heart, for you are not going alone.

Brisbane followed Roystnof into the shrine.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.