Beneath Ceaseless Skies #395, November 16th, 2023
“A Dragon in the Abbey” by James Morrow
“Valis Seeker Fierefiz” by Michael Echeverri Rivera
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
First in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #395 is “A Dragon in the Abbey” by James Morrow. This story is set in fourteenth century Spain during one of the waves of Black Death that swept the whole of Europe in the medieval period.
At the height of the 1348 outbreak of that plague, the protagonist receives a request from his twin sister to evaluate a magical text that could reverse the spread of the deadly pandemic. Our protagonist translates the ancient text and persuades the unexpectedly modern and forward thinking Abbess and nuns of the Santo Sepulcro convent to attempt the cure.
That is the point at which the story departs from our reality to a radically alternative Spain. In the author’s world, the gods of every religion are all equally real, able to interact directly with mankind and to alter the biology and physics of the planet Earth.
Their power can be accessed, even by mundane human beings, through artefacts such as the text offered to the convent and so the cure immediately begins to work, but that is not without consequences. The use of this blasphemous ancient wisdom calls down the most reactionary elements of the medieval church onto the convent. When the outraged inquisitors burn the heretical text and reverse the healing effect, the daring sisters assist our protagonist to reconstruct the magical artefact. They voyage to an exotic version of the Balearic isles only loosely attached to our mundane reality and gather the outlandishly bizarre components just in time to save the day once again.
This is a complex, slow-developing, near novella-length story which will mostly appeal to readers with an interest in the metaphysical premise that what you believe to be the truth may be surprisingly different to the multi-layered reality that actually is. However, the necessary inconsistency that all the rest of Spanish society carries on entirely oblivious to the consequences of the author’s proposed modifications to reality troubled this reviewer and may jar with others. It is especially difficult to reconcile that the great grandfathers of those Spaniards who sailed 4000 miles west to rape an entire continent in search of El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth are content to entirely ignore the magical artefacts and riches on an island less than 200 miles distant from their own shores.
The second offering is: “Valis Seeker Fierefiz” by Michael Echeverri Rivera. The first person narrator is Fierefiz, a female witch slayer in a world of sword, sorcery and frequent, sometimes gratuitous, violence. We gradually discover Fierefiz’s back story and the reason that she seeks the magical city of Valis, so at least the unusual title is then explained, but many of the other characters who appear and disappear remain a mystery even at the end of the story. In fact, many ends are left unravelled, many mysteries are left unsolved and the whole feel of the story is that it is actually a plot synopsis for a novel that never actually managed to reach its authorial escape velocity and burst free into the world.
Geoff Houghton lives in a leafy village in rural England. He is a retired Healthcare Professional with a love of SF and a jackdaw-like appetite for gibbets of medical, scientific and historical knowledge.