Streams of Silver - Chapter Thirteen

[kalinara]

Last time our intrepid heroes fought trolls and a giant worm. Good for them! Not the easiest thing to recap in a review though. But there's still more of the Trollmoors to go.



So now that the worm is melodramatically dead, Regis is feeling hopeless about the group's chances. He and Bruenor bicker, mostly good-naturedly about it, while Drizzt notices that Wulfgar is favoring his leg. But when he notices Drizzt looking, he straightens up and stiff upper lips him.

Drizzt, he's a teenager. Don't let him do that. But Drizzt also knows that they can't really wait for Wulfgar to heal and they can't exactly carry him. The narrative indeed confirms to us that Wulfgar hurt his back at some point in the last battle, and now that adrenaline is wearing off, it's becoming a real problem. We're told that Drizzt can see that, just as he can see Regis's despair and Bruenor's exhaustion. Because Drizzt is the wise, thoughtful one, of course.

Once they get on the raft, everyone falls asleep, except Drizzt of course. I'd bitch about that, but if I recall my Forgotten Realms lore correctly, elves don't sleep per se. Or sometimes they do. But not all the time. That said, even Drizzt starts zoning out.

But thankfully, he's got his lightning reflexes, so when the water trolls attack again, he's not taken too off guard. Wulfgar and Bruenor wake up and fight too. It takes a whole paragraph, and Regis sleeps through it.

They decide to keep moving at night: two pushing the raft and two resting. Regis is too small, but Wulfgar is okay with pushing by himself with Regis keeping guard. There's no further mention of Wulfgar's back injury, so I guess he slept it off.

Drizzt is up for martyrdom though:

Drizzt climbed up on the logs for the first time that day and put his head down on his pack. He did not close his eyes, though. Bruenor's plan of working in turns sounded fair, but impractical. In the black night, only he could guide them and keep any kind of lookout for approaching danger. More than a few times while Wulfgar and Regis took their shift, the drow lifted his head and gave the halfling some insight about their surroundings and some advice about their best direction.

There would be no sleep for Drizzt again this night. He vowed to rest in the morning, but when dawn at last broke, he found the trees and reeds again hunched in around them. The anxiety of the moors itself closed upon them, as though it were a single, sentient being watching over them and plotting against their passage.

I feel like maybe if Drizzt brought this problem up to the others, they could MAYBE find a fair solution. But that would interfere with Drizzt being a martyr, so nope.

They make really good time on the water actually, which I'm happy about because this makes for a really boring review. Sorry. When they reach dry land, they're much closer to the end of the Trollmoors. They make camp early, and set up defenses, and finally have the brains to set up a fire trap, which they'll light when the trolls get to camp.

We're told that "Drizzt alone recognized the weakness of the plan, though he had nothing better to offer". Of fucking course.

He's fought trolls before, you see, and he realizes that the fire trap will die down and they'll still have to fight trolls. Probably true, but Drizzt still annoys me. Sorry.

By nightfall, the trolls take their sweet time in appearing, and Bruenor and Regis start getting antsy. Drizzt, of course, urges them to be patient and glad, because if they start fighting later that night, they increase their chances of seeing dawn.

Yes. That's how time works.

Wulfgar is actually pretty comfortable and calm though, which helps a lot more than Drizzt's platitudes.

Eventually, we get to the fight. I will spare you a play by play. As usual, it's fun to read, dull to summarize. Our heroes use torches and oil and their big trap to cause a great deal of havoc, and Drizzt gets them running as soon as possible.

They make it to daylight, and keep running. At some point Regis falls, but Wulfgar grabs him. I feel like I've recapped these events before. But Wulfgar is heroic like that.

And then there's Drizzt:

Drizzt abandoned all tactics of finesse now, understanding the situation that was fast developing behind him. More than once he had to slow for Bruenor's stumbling and he doubted Wulfgar's ability to continue while carrying the halfling. The exhausted barbarian obviously couldn't hope to raise Aegis-fang to defend himself. Their only chance was straight flight to the border. A wide bog would defeat them, a box gully would entrap them, and even if no natural barriers blocked their way, they had little hope of keeping free of the trolls for much longer. Drizzt feared the difficult decision he saw forthcoming: flee to his own safety, for he alone seemed to have the possibility of escape, or stand beside his doomed friends in a battle they could not win.

This is actually really intriguing to me. Drizzt is constantly portrayed, even now, as a paragon of virtue. Even when he doesn't necessarily deserve it. And I'd say here, he doesn't really deserve it. He is at least contemplating leaving his friends behind. Now granted, he isn't going to do it. But the fact that he's even THINKING about the idea goes against the way we're supposed to see his character.

And indeed: Bruenor falls, and: The fateful decision came easily to Drizzt. He swung back around, scimitars ready. He couldn't possibly carry the stout dwarf, nor could he defeat the horde of trolls that even now closed in. "And so our tale ends, Bruenor Battlehammer!" he cried out. "In battle, as it should!"

Wulfgar staggers over and scoops up Bruenor in his free arm, and his heroic act inspires Drizzt to a purple prose feat of heroism:

Seething flames danced again within his lavender eyes, and his blades whirred into their own dance of death.

So Drizzt gets to heroically kick troll ass while Wulfgar gets the short people to safety. There's no mention of the fact that Drizzt hasn't slept in four days and Wulfgar has a back injury, so I wonder why those were mentioned at all. Except so that we can admire their stoicism, I suppose. Or maybe they'll be remarked upon when the danger is past.

Drizzt has one more trick to play: he lights Wulfgar up with faerie fire. This is a drow ability that has never really made sense to me, given that they live underground and use infravision to see. Basically, it lights up a target with illusory flames that don't burn.

You'd think that would be counterproductive for people who don't use conventional sight: the sudden influx of light would be blinding. And since they don't give off heat, they wouldn't be detected in infravision. But then again, one wonders why they have that globe of darkness ability too. Again, they're from an environment where everything is dark.

This isn't Salvatore's fault mind you. I'm pretty sure these abilities can be credited to either Greenwood (who created Forgotten Realms) or Gygax. Either way though, they don't really make sense.

Anyway, Drizzt's nonsensical fire is effective. They're able to get out of the Moors and into the forest, which we're told is under the protective eye of Lady Alustriel and the gallant Knights of Silver.

As I recall, Alustriel is one of Ed Greenwood's stable of very beautiful elven women with goddess like powers. She's probably one of the more restrained examples, serving basically as kind of a Galadriel role. Or maybe Elrond of Rivendell, since Silverymoon is a bit more cosmopolitan than Lothlorien. My vague recollection is that she isn't that bad in this series. Probably because Salvatore saves HIS purple prose for Drizzt Do'Urden.

Anyway, the trolls don't follow them out, and our heroes basically collapse with exhaustion.

And thus ends the chapter. God willing, the next one will involve some character interaction as opposed to endless fighting, if only for the sake of my poor, boring reviews.