Homeland - Chapter Twenty
Jan. 30th, 2022 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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i_read_whatSo last time, much was made of an upcoming trip to the surface! Also scheming drow are scheming. That's not really new though.
There's a content warning for this part. We're about to see a drow raid and everything that entails. Brace yourself.
So we start off with the raiding party. There are fourteen members, including a cleric of Arach-Tinilith. There are some very nice descriptions here:
By the end of a tenday, all the drow could sense the difference in their surroundings. The depth still would have seemed stifling to a surface dweller, but the dark elves were accustomed to the constant oppression of a thousand thousand tons of rock hanging over their heads. They turned every corner expecting the stone ceiling to fly away into the vast openness of the surface world.
Breezes wafted past them—not the sulfur-smelling hot winds rising off the magma of deep earth, but moist air, scented with a hundred aromas unknown to the drow. It was springtime above, though the dark elves, in their seasonless environs, knew nothing of that, and the air was full of the scents of new-blossomed flowers and budding trees. In the seductive allure of those tantalizing aromas, Drizzt had to remind himself again and again that the place they approached was wholly evil and dangerous. Perhaps, he thought, the scents were merely a diabolical lure, a bait to an unsuspecting creature to bring it into the surface world’s murderous grip.
I like the emphasis on sensory details.
Anyway, the cleric finds an opening that, for now, looks only as large as a finger-width. She informs them that it's daylight above, and they'll have to wait. In a nice touch, she doesn't know exactly how long, but it won't be more than half a cycle of Narbondel. They're to rest.
Drizzt is sent through the opening first. And oh, this is cool:
As Drizzt passed the cleric, she spoke the orb’s command word and held it over Drizzt’s head. Black flakes, blacker than Drizzt’s ebony skin, drifted over him, and he felt a tremendous shudder ripple across his spine.
The others looked on in amazement as Drizzt’s body narrowed to the width of a hair and he became a two-dimensional image, a shadow of his former self.
Now that he's all flat and cartoony (isn't he always? yuk yuk.) He's able to get through the crack easily to the moonlit night beyond. We're told that even that seems bright to the drow, most of whom follow Drizzt. The cleric remains behind.
More great bits here:
He took a steadying breath and led them through the exit, under the open sky.
Under the stars! While the others seemed nervous under those revealing lights, Drizzt found his gaze pulled heavenward to the countless points of mystical twinkling. Bathed in the starlight, he felt his heart lift and didn’t even notice the joyful singing that rode on the night wind, so fitting it seemed.
Dinin heard the song, and he was experienced enough to recognize it as the eldritch calling of the surface elves. He crouched and surveyed the horizon, picking out the light of a single fire down in the distant expanse of a wooded valley. He nudged his troops to action—and pointedly nudged the wonderment from his brother’s eyes—and started them off.
Again, I really do find Dinin far more interesting than I did when I read this book as a kid. How much HAS he noticed about Drizzt?
So everyone's pretty anxious, except Drizzt, who feels a sense of serenity. "In his heart Drizzt had known from the minute he had stepped out of the tunnel that this was not the vile world the masters at the Academy had taken such pains to describe. He did feel unusual with no stone ceiling above him, but not uncomfortable. If the stars, calling to his heartstrings, were indeed reminders of what the next day might bring, as Master Hatch’net had said, then surely the next day would not be so terrible."
There's a nice bit where the drow are freaked out by the small forest nearby, and Dinin compares them to the mushroom groves back home - neither sentient nor harmful. And we're told that they jump and raise their weapons at the sounds of birds and squirrels. The Underdark is silent in comparison.
The raiders follow the elf song, and find their victims. Because, of course, they're here for a reason.
Transfixed by the sheer joy of the elves’ play, Drizzt hardly noticed the commands his brother issued then in the silent code. Several children danced among the gathering, marked only by the size of their bodies, and were no freer in spirit than the adults they accompanied. So innocent they all seemed, so full of life and wistfulness, and obviously bonded to each other by friendship more profound than Drizzt had ever known in Menzoberranzan. So unlike the stories Hatch’net had spun of them, tales of vile, hating wretches.
Drizzt sensed more than saw that his group was on the move, fanning out to gain a greater advantage. Still he did not take his eyes from the spectacle before him. Dinin tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the small crossbow that hung from his belt, then slipped off into position in the brush off to the side.
Drizzt wanted to stop his brother and the others, wanted to make them wait and observe the surface elves that they were so quick to name enemies. Drizzt found his feet rooted to the earth and his tongue weighted heavily in the sudden dryness that had come into his mouth. He looked to Dinin and could only hope that his brother mistakenly thought his labored breaths the exaltations of battlelust.
They start shooting, and the elves start dropping.
“No!” Drizzt screamed in protest, the words torn from his body by a profound rage even he did not understand. The denial sounded like just another war cry to the drow raiders, and before the surface elves could even begin to react, Dinin and the others were upon them.
Drizzt draws his own weapons, wanting to stop the battle. The elves, taken by surprise, are all unarmed. Sitting ducks. And Drizzt's own efforts:
One terrified female, dodging this way and that, came before Drizzt. He dipped the tips of his weapons to the earth, searching for some way to give a measure of comfort.
The female then jerked straight as a sword dived into her back, its tip thrusting right through her slender form. Drizzt watched, mesmerized and horrified, as the drow warrior behind her grasped the weapon hilt in both hands and twisted it savagely. The female elf looked straight at Drizzt in the last fleeting seconds of her life, her eyes crying for mercy. Her voice was no more than the sickening gurgle of blood.
His face the exultation of ecstacy, the drow warrior tore his sword free and sliced it across, taking the head from the elven female’s shoulders.
All credit to Mr. Salvatore, this chapter is very well done. We can feel Drizzt's horror and helplessness. He's got enough morality to realize, in his heart, that this is wrong. But he's paralyzed and brainwashed, and not yet at a point where he can fight back. It's getting to a moment of truth.
Only a moment later, another elf, this one a young girl, broke free of the massacre and rushed in Drizzt’s direction, screaming a single word over and over. Her cry was in the tongue of the surface elves, a dialect foreign to Drizzt, but when he looked upon her fair face, streaked with tears, he understood what she was saying. Her eyes were on the mutilated corpse at his feet; her anguish outweighed even the terror of her own impending doom. She could only be crying, “Mother!”
Rage, horror, anguish, and a dozen other emotions racked Drizzt at that horrible moment. He wanted to escape his feelings, to lose himself in the blind frenzy of his kin and accept the ugly reality. How easy it would have been to throw away the conscience that pained him so.
The elven child rushed up before Drizzt but hardly saw him, her gaze locked upon her dead mother, the back of the child’s neck open to a single, clean blow. Drizzt raised his scimitar, unable to distinguish between mercy and murder.
“Yes, my brother!” Dinin cried out to him, a call that cut through his comrades,” screams and whoops and echoed in Drizzt’s ears like an accusation. Drizzt looked up to see Dinin, covered from head to foot in blood and standing amid a hacked cluster of dead elves.
Dinin's jubilant praise to the Spider Queen gets to Drizzt, who rears back for a killing blow...
He almost did it. In his unfocused outrage, Drizzt Do’Urden almost became as his kin. He almost stole the life from that beautiful child’s sparkling eyes.
At the last moment, she looked up at him, her eyes shining as a dark mirror into Drizzt’s blackening heart. In that reflection, that reverse image of the rage that guided his hand, Drizzt Do’Urden found himself.
He brought the scimitar down in a mighty sweep, watching Dinin out of the corner of his eye as it whisked harmlessly past the child. In the same motion, Drizzt followed with his other hand, catching the girl by the front of her tunic and pulling her face-down to the ground.
He saves her instead. He slices his scimitars above her clothing and smears the blood from her mother's headless corpse over her (taking grim satisfaction that the elven mother would be pleased to know that, in dying, she had saved the life of her daughter.) He tells her to stay down, though she can't understand him.
That poor poor child. One thing I remember is that this deed of Drizzt's does come back to haunt him in a much later book, and the girl, understandably, neither comprehends nor is particularly appreciative of what Drizzt does here. And I like that a lot. Because why should she be grateful? Her world has been destroyed. Just because one invader chose, for some perverse reason, not to kill her. She's still alone, bathed in her mother's blood, in a dead village. It's a nice bit of nuance from an author who I normally don't credit with such things.
Dinin is jubilant. He praises Drizzt for two kills, but another protests. Only one! Drizzt has a moment of fear that his colleague knows about his deception, and thinks that he'd fight to save the child. He'll kill his companions, even his brother, at this moment. But thankfully, the drow is claiming credit for the mother.
It came as a reflex, an unconscious strike against the evil all about him. Drizzt didn’t even realize the act as it happened, but a moment later, he saw the boasting drow lying on his back, clutching at his face and groaning in agony. Only then did Drizzt notice the burning pain in his hand, and he looked down to see his knuckles, and the scimitar hilt they clutched, spattered with blood.
“What are you about?” Dinin demanded.
Thinking quickly, Drizzt did not even reply to his brother. He looked past Dinin, to the squirming form on the ground, and transferred all the rage in his heart into a curse that the others would accept and respect. “If ever you steal a kill from me again,” he spat, sincerity dripping from his false words, “I will replace the head lost from its shoulders with your own!”
Drizzt's quick thinking saved himself here, but he's not Zaknafein. He can't accept the flawed parry. He can't keep quiet and controlled in the face of injustice.
I realize that it sounds like I'm insulting Drizzt or complaining when I say this. I'm not. I'm admiring a very nice, well developed theme. Vierna's right. Drizzt won't survive life in the Underdark. But it's that same inability to compromise and accept injustice that allows him to venture out and thrive somewhere else.
For his part, Dinin seems genuinely pleased that Drizzt finally has learned what it is to be a drow warrior. Yep. He has.
So there's one more duty before they return home. They must witness "the ultimate horror of the surface world, that [they] might warn [their] kindred"
Our kindred? Drizzt mused, his thoughts black with sarcasm. As far as he could see, the raiders had already witnessed the horror of the surface world: themselves!
Heh, Drizzt has undergone a moral event horizon and developed snark.
But no. The real horror:
The eastern sky assumed a hue of purplish pink, then pink altogether, its brightening causing the dark elves to squint uncomfortably. Drizzt wanted to deny the event, to put it into the same pile of anger that denied the master of Lore’s words concerning the surface elves.
Then it happened; the top rim of the sun crested the eastern horizon. The surface world awakened to its warmth, its life-giving energy. Those same rays assaulted the drow elves’ eyes with the fury of fire, tearing into orbs unaccustomed to such sights.
“Watch!” the cleric cried at them. “Witness the depth of the horror!”
One by one, the raiders cried out in pain and fell into the cave’s darkness, until Drizzt stood alone beside the cleric in the growing daylight. Truly the light assaulted Drizzt as keenly as it had his kin, but he basked in it, accepting it as his purgatory, exposing him for all to view while its stinging fires cleansed his soul.
The sunrise. The drow retreat below to leave their surface cousins to suffer the flames. Even Drizzt can't take it much longer, and he retreats too, back into "the darkness of their existence.
This very excellent chapter ends here.
So Drizzt has had his moment of truth, and I really appreciate that it isn't over the top. He doesn't suddenly become the superhuman hero that cuts down his fellows to save the day. He's mostly helpless, paralyzed by horror and realization. But there's one moment, where he CAN act, and he does.
It reminds me a bit of the invasion of Jakku in The Force Awakens. Finn doesn't get a "save the child" moment (that comes later, when he rescues Poe), but it's a very similar set up and scene. And makes me realize that I would very much enjoy a movie where John Boyega played Drizzt Do'Urden. I think he'd do a spectacular job in the role.
There's a content warning for this part. We're about to see a drow raid and everything that entails. Brace yourself.
So we start off with the raiding party. There are fourteen members, including a cleric of Arach-Tinilith. There are some very nice descriptions here:
By the end of a tenday, all the drow could sense the difference in their surroundings. The depth still would have seemed stifling to a surface dweller, but the dark elves were accustomed to the constant oppression of a thousand thousand tons of rock hanging over their heads. They turned every corner expecting the stone ceiling to fly away into the vast openness of the surface world.
Breezes wafted past them—not the sulfur-smelling hot winds rising off the magma of deep earth, but moist air, scented with a hundred aromas unknown to the drow. It was springtime above, though the dark elves, in their seasonless environs, knew nothing of that, and the air was full of the scents of new-blossomed flowers and budding trees. In the seductive allure of those tantalizing aromas, Drizzt had to remind himself again and again that the place they approached was wholly evil and dangerous. Perhaps, he thought, the scents were merely a diabolical lure, a bait to an unsuspecting creature to bring it into the surface world’s murderous grip.
I like the emphasis on sensory details.
Anyway, the cleric finds an opening that, for now, looks only as large as a finger-width. She informs them that it's daylight above, and they'll have to wait. In a nice touch, she doesn't know exactly how long, but it won't be more than half a cycle of Narbondel. They're to rest.
Drizzt is sent through the opening first. And oh, this is cool:
As Drizzt passed the cleric, she spoke the orb’s command word and held it over Drizzt’s head. Black flakes, blacker than Drizzt’s ebony skin, drifted over him, and he felt a tremendous shudder ripple across his spine.
The others looked on in amazement as Drizzt’s body narrowed to the width of a hair and he became a two-dimensional image, a shadow of his former self.
Now that he's all flat and cartoony (isn't he always? yuk yuk.) He's able to get through the crack easily to the moonlit night beyond. We're told that even that seems bright to the drow, most of whom follow Drizzt. The cleric remains behind.
More great bits here:
He took a steadying breath and led them through the exit, under the open sky.
Under the stars! While the others seemed nervous under those revealing lights, Drizzt found his gaze pulled heavenward to the countless points of mystical twinkling. Bathed in the starlight, he felt his heart lift and didn’t even notice the joyful singing that rode on the night wind, so fitting it seemed.
Dinin heard the song, and he was experienced enough to recognize it as the eldritch calling of the surface elves. He crouched and surveyed the horizon, picking out the light of a single fire down in the distant expanse of a wooded valley. He nudged his troops to action—and pointedly nudged the wonderment from his brother’s eyes—and started them off.
Again, I really do find Dinin far more interesting than I did when I read this book as a kid. How much HAS he noticed about Drizzt?
So everyone's pretty anxious, except Drizzt, who feels a sense of serenity. "In his heart Drizzt had known from the minute he had stepped out of the tunnel that this was not the vile world the masters at the Academy had taken such pains to describe. He did feel unusual with no stone ceiling above him, but not uncomfortable. If the stars, calling to his heartstrings, were indeed reminders of what the next day might bring, as Master Hatch’net had said, then surely the next day would not be so terrible."
There's a nice bit where the drow are freaked out by the small forest nearby, and Dinin compares them to the mushroom groves back home - neither sentient nor harmful. And we're told that they jump and raise their weapons at the sounds of birds and squirrels. The Underdark is silent in comparison.
The raiders follow the elf song, and find their victims. Because, of course, they're here for a reason.
Transfixed by the sheer joy of the elves’ play, Drizzt hardly noticed the commands his brother issued then in the silent code. Several children danced among the gathering, marked only by the size of their bodies, and were no freer in spirit than the adults they accompanied. So innocent they all seemed, so full of life and wistfulness, and obviously bonded to each other by friendship more profound than Drizzt had ever known in Menzoberranzan. So unlike the stories Hatch’net had spun of them, tales of vile, hating wretches.
Drizzt sensed more than saw that his group was on the move, fanning out to gain a greater advantage. Still he did not take his eyes from the spectacle before him. Dinin tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the small crossbow that hung from his belt, then slipped off into position in the brush off to the side.
Drizzt wanted to stop his brother and the others, wanted to make them wait and observe the surface elves that they were so quick to name enemies. Drizzt found his feet rooted to the earth and his tongue weighted heavily in the sudden dryness that had come into his mouth. He looked to Dinin and could only hope that his brother mistakenly thought his labored breaths the exaltations of battlelust.
They start shooting, and the elves start dropping.
“No!” Drizzt screamed in protest, the words torn from his body by a profound rage even he did not understand. The denial sounded like just another war cry to the drow raiders, and before the surface elves could even begin to react, Dinin and the others were upon them.
Drizzt draws his own weapons, wanting to stop the battle. The elves, taken by surprise, are all unarmed. Sitting ducks. And Drizzt's own efforts:
One terrified female, dodging this way and that, came before Drizzt. He dipped the tips of his weapons to the earth, searching for some way to give a measure of comfort.
The female then jerked straight as a sword dived into her back, its tip thrusting right through her slender form. Drizzt watched, mesmerized and horrified, as the drow warrior behind her grasped the weapon hilt in both hands and twisted it savagely. The female elf looked straight at Drizzt in the last fleeting seconds of her life, her eyes crying for mercy. Her voice was no more than the sickening gurgle of blood.
His face the exultation of ecstacy, the drow warrior tore his sword free and sliced it across, taking the head from the elven female’s shoulders.
All credit to Mr. Salvatore, this chapter is very well done. We can feel Drizzt's horror and helplessness. He's got enough morality to realize, in his heart, that this is wrong. But he's paralyzed and brainwashed, and not yet at a point where he can fight back. It's getting to a moment of truth.
Only a moment later, another elf, this one a young girl, broke free of the massacre and rushed in Drizzt’s direction, screaming a single word over and over. Her cry was in the tongue of the surface elves, a dialect foreign to Drizzt, but when he looked upon her fair face, streaked with tears, he understood what she was saying. Her eyes were on the mutilated corpse at his feet; her anguish outweighed even the terror of her own impending doom. She could only be crying, “Mother!”
Rage, horror, anguish, and a dozen other emotions racked Drizzt at that horrible moment. He wanted to escape his feelings, to lose himself in the blind frenzy of his kin and accept the ugly reality. How easy it would have been to throw away the conscience that pained him so.
The elven child rushed up before Drizzt but hardly saw him, her gaze locked upon her dead mother, the back of the child’s neck open to a single, clean blow. Drizzt raised his scimitar, unable to distinguish between mercy and murder.
“Yes, my brother!” Dinin cried out to him, a call that cut through his comrades,” screams and whoops and echoed in Drizzt’s ears like an accusation. Drizzt looked up to see Dinin, covered from head to foot in blood and standing amid a hacked cluster of dead elves.
Dinin's jubilant praise to the Spider Queen gets to Drizzt, who rears back for a killing blow...
He almost did it. In his unfocused outrage, Drizzt Do’Urden almost became as his kin. He almost stole the life from that beautiful child’s sparkling eyes.
At the last moment, she looked up at him, her eyes shining as a dark mirror into Drizzt’s blackening heart. In that reflection, that reverse image of the rage that guided his hand, Drizzt Do’Urden found himself.
He brought the scimitar down in a mighty sweep, watching Dinin out of the corner of his eye as it whisked harmlessly past the child. In the same motion, Drizzt followed with his other hand, catching the girl by the front of her tunic and pulling her face-down to the ground.
He saves her instead. He slices his scimitars above her clothing and smears the blood from her mother's headless corpse over her (taking grim satisfaction that the elven mother would be pleased to know that, in dying, she had saved the life of her daughter.) He tells her to stay down, though she can't understand him.
That poor poor child. One thing I remember is that this deed of Drizzt's does come back to haunt him in a much later book, and the girl, understandably, neither comprehends nor is particularly appreciative of what Drizzt does here. And I like that a lot. Because why should she be grateful? Her world has been destroyed. Just because one invader chose, for some perverse reason, not to kill her. She's still alone, bathed in her mother's blood, in a dead village. It's a nice bit of nuance from an author who I normally don't credit with such things.
Dinin is jubilant. He praises Drizzt for two kills, but another protests. Only one! Drizzt has a moment of fear that his colleague knows about his deception, and thinks that he'd fight to save the child. He'll kill his companions, even his brother, at this moment. But thankfully, the drow is claiming credit for the mother.
It came as a reflex, an unconscious strike against the evil all about him. Drizzt didn’t even realize the act as it happened, but a moment later, he saw the boasting drow lying on his back, clutching at his face and groaning in agony. Only then did Drizzt notice the burning pain in his hand, and he looked down to see his knuckles, and the scimitar hilt they clutched, spattered with blood.
“What are you about?” Dinin demanded.
Thinking quickly, Drizzt did not even reply to his brother. He looked past Dinin, to the squirming form on the ground, and transferred all the rage in his heart into a curse that the others would accept and respect. “If ever you steal a kill from me again,” he spat, sincerity dripping from his false words, “I will replace the head lost from its shoulders with your own!”
Drizzt's quick thinking saved himself here, but he's not Zaknafein. He can't accept the flawed parry. He can't keep quiet and controlled in the face of injustice.
I realize that it sounds like I'm insulting Drizzt or complaining when I say this. I'm not. I'm admiring a very nice, well developed theme. Vierna's right. Drizzt won't survive life in the Underdark. But it's that same inability to compromise and accept injustice that allows him to venture out and thrive somewhere else.
For his part, Dinin seems genuinely pleased that Drizzt finally has learned what it is to be a drow warrior. Yep. He has.
So there's one more duty before they return home. They must witness "the ultimate horror of the surface world, that [they] might warn [their] kindred"
Our kindred? Drizzt mused, his thoughts black with sarcasm. As far as he could see, the raiders had already witnessed the horror of the surface world: themselves!
Heh, Drizzt has undergone a moral event horizon and developed snark.
But no. The real horror:
The eastern sky assumed a hue of purplish pink, then pink altogether, its brightening causing the dark elves to squint uncomfortably. Drizzt wanted to deny the event, to put it into the same pile of anger that denied the master of Lore’s words concerning the surface elves.
Then it happened; the top rim of the sun crested the eastern horizon. The surface world awakened to its warmth, its life-giving energy. Those same rays assaulted the drow elves’ eyes with the fury of fire, tearing into orbs unaccustomed to such sights.
“Watch!” the cleric cried at them. “Witness the depth of the horror!”
One by one, the raiders cried out in pain and fell into the cave’s darkness, until Drizzt stood alone beside the cleric in the growing daylight. Truly the light assaulted Drizzt as keenly as it had his kin, but he basked in it, accepting it as his purgatory, exposing him for all to view while its stinging fires cleansed his soul.
The sunrise. The drow retreat below to leave their surface cousins to suffer the flames. Even Drizzt can't take it much longer, and he retreats too, back into "the darkness of their existence.
This very excellent chapter ends here.
So Drizzt has had his moment of truth, and I really appreciate that it isn't over the top. He doesn't suddenly become the superhuman hero that cuts down his fellows to save the day. He's mostly helpless, paralyzed by horror and realization. But there's one moment, where he CAN act, and he does.
It reminds me a bit of the invasion of Jakku in The Force Awakens. Finn doesn't get a "save the child" moment (that comes later, when he rescues Poe), but it's a very similar set up and scene. And makes me realize that I would very much enjoy a movie where John Boyega played Drizzt Do'Urden. I think he'd do a spectacular job in the role.