The White Rose by Glen Cook
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Croaker in Love? It’s desperate times for the much-reduced mercenary company in Glen Cook’s third Black Company novel, The White Rose (1985). The company and Croaker, their historian and our narrator, are hiding out from the Lady and her Taken wizards and armies in the Plain of Fear, a region where trees walk, menhirs talk, whales fly, change storms terrify, and Old Father Tree stands with his leaves tinkling like wind chimes. There in their subterranean hideout the Hole, the brothers in arms process information about the enemy and protect their leader, the deaf mute twenty-something Darling, who also presumably happens to be the White Rose, the reincarnation of the heroine who, 400 years earlier, defeated the Dominator and the Lady and imprisoned them and their Taken wizards in the Barrowland. Several decades before the present of the story, a wizard called Bomanz awakened the Lady to learn from her, only to be used by the sorceress to escape her imprisonment and found a new empire, one that through the first two books of the Annals of the Black Company the company had been serving, till circumstance forced them to defect and champion the White Rose. When a menhir cryptically says, “Strangers are on the Plain, Croaker,” things start heating up. The Lady is sending her Taken wizards and their armies to stamp out the company and the White Rose once and for all. Even with Darling’s magic nullifying nature, can the puny company and their bizarre Plain of Fear allies stop the Lady’s armies? Meanwhile, someone is sending Croaker manuscripts depicting Bomanz’s attempts to contact the Lady while posing as a quirky antiquarian artifact hunter. It’s clear that Bomanz knows the Dominator and the Lady and their Taken wizards are evil and powerful and best left undisturbed, and he is no Resurrectionist trying to bring the Dominator back into the world, but he wants the Lady to illuminate ancient mysteries, which would make him a mighty, wealthy, and famous mage and finally satisfy his nagging wife Jasmine. He is also capable of musing about what it says about human nature that although the White Rose’s burial place is long forgotten and unsought for, there are numerous customers wanting to buy artifacts from the evil empire. In a great scene Bomanz plays a game of multi-player checkers/backgammon with his family, using magic to cheat on the dice rolls while considering his final attempt to contact the Lady. The man sending Croaker the Bomanz manuscripts turns out to be a mysterious limping veteran named Corbie who has shown up near the Barrowland to do odd jobs for the Eternal Guard watching the evil wizards’ tombs by day and to renovate the abandoned Bomanz house by night. Just who is Corbie and what is he up to? Apart from a nearly absurd air battle featuring weaponized flying carpets and giant windwhales, this novel brings to a satisfying conclusion the first set of three black company books, while further developing the interesting relationship between Croaker, “an old, tired man,” and the Lady. For years his company brothers have been teasing Croaker re his “girlfriend,” the superhuman scary arch-villainess, while he has been translating ancient documents in a futile attempt to find her true name and trying to come to terms with his sense that the Lady still might have some light or humanity inside her. We also find out more about Raven (who apparently died in a bathing accident at the end of the second novel), his background, and his relationship with Darling. The novel has plenty of Cook’s spare military prose and ironic humor: “The still desert air had a lenselike quality. The riders seemed frozen in time, moving without drawing closer. We took turns counting. I could not get the same number twice running.” “A breath of a breeze whined in the coral, stirred the leaves of Old Man Father Tree. They tinkled off one another with the song of wind chimes. To the north, the glimmer of change lightning limned the horizon like the far clash of warring gods.” “Menhirs have the most malevolent laughs this side of fairy stories.” Fans of well-written, hardboiled military fantasy with a touch of romance should like this novel, but should (of course) start with the first one, The Black Company (1984). View all my reviews
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