WORLD-BUILDING
In this series, set in 1801, Gilman has
created a legendary West that actually feels familiar. This world includes many
of the traditional people and places: marshals, trappers, farmers, miners,
saloon girls, gamblers, Native Americans, Spanish friars, tiny towns,
isolated farms, grassy plains, and barren mountains. Gilman takes all of these
and mixes in superstitions, religious fervor, Native American legends, supernatural
beasts, magical spells, and the devil himself. It's a winning combination. If
you’re wondering why I didn’t mention cowboys and cattle drives, remember that
this story takes place very early in the development of this country, at a time
when the land west of the Mississippi was truly a wild and isolated place.
In an online interview, Gilman describes
her series like this: “a fantasy
of...North America. Not the quest of empires, or the clash of armies, but the
movement of people, and the ever-shifting thing we call a frontier, where one
person’s home becomes another person’s hope—and conflict. About dividers and
demarcations—and the human urge, and need, to cross over them. And a
Western…invoking and involving the tropes of the restless frontier, and
twisting it…”
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| The dark brown section is the Territory. |
The action in the first book is set in the Devil’s West—the Territory—which,
according to Gilman (in another online
interview), "can be reasonably overlaid on the Louisiana Purchase,
which was about 828,000 square miles [located] west of the Mississippi,
stretching to the Rocky Mountains, and including the area that would eventually
become Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana,
Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and
Wyoming." (In the hardcover edition, Gilman includes a two-page
map showing the land distribution.) East of the Mudwater (aka the
Mississippi River), is the United States (with Thomas Jefferson as president),
which views the Territory “as a
wilderness to be claimed and tamed.” To the South and West is Nueva España (New Spain).
The Spanish “considered the Territory
unclean, dangerous, and everyone who lived there lost souls, to be saved or
burned.” To the North are the Northern Wilds, peopled mostly by Natives,
with some British presence. The Territory is the only part of this world in
which magic of all sorts exists. Outsiders regard the lands and residents of
the Territory with a mix of curiosity, fear, distrust, and—sometimes—hatred.
At
the center of the drama is the boss—the devil—who is the ultimate ruler of the
Territory. He holds court in the little town of Flood (in modern-day Kansas),
using his saloon as his headquarters. There, he plays cards for souls. Day in and
day out, people come to the saloon to sign contracts and strike Bargains with
the boss, changing their lives forever. Hundreds of years ago, even before the
Spanish conquistadors arrived, the devil made a settlement with the natives and
then with all newcomers to the Territory: “Take
only what you need, use only what you must, do not tread on another’s shadow,
do not give offense”—kind of like the Golden Rule.
This devil is not a red-scaled,
forked-tailed monster. He is an ordinary man. Well…maybe not so ordinary. His
facial features and hair color change constantly, but his keen, golden brown eyes
always remain the same. (The ever-changing hair was one of those
"wait-just-a-minute” details that had me paging back to affirm that the
boss’s hair started out dark, then became red, then blond.) Gilman uses this
subtle, but effective, method for establishing all of the world-building elements—slipping details into the
narrative and trusting her readers to synthesize them into a unified mythology.
The series heroine is Isobel (Izzy) Távora Lacoyo, one
of the boss’s indentured servants. Isobel came to the boss as a one-year-old child
through a Bargain with her parents, whose homestead was burned out when they trespassed on
Native lands. In return for safe passage back to Nueva España, they sold Isobel
to the boss for a 15-year indenture. Since then, Isobel has spent her entire
life in the saloon, the only home she has ever known. “Izzy had never been sick, never gone hungry, never been threatened by
real danger…She was safe here.” In the first chapter of Silver
on the Road, Isobel turns sixteen, which means the end of her indenture.
But Isobel isn’t sure what comes next. As she ponders her future, she remembers
the words of Ree, the cook: “When you
deal with the devil, first know what you want, and what you can pay.” But
what does she want? And how can she pay anything when she has no money? When
she asks the boss what she should do, he leaves it up to her: “Your cards, your call.”
After much thought, Isobel tells the boss
that she wants to keep working for him, that she wants to be as important to
him as Marie, the woman who is his Right Hand, but the boss has a different
proposition. He explains, “We each have
two hands, of equal strength and dexterity. Each with things it does well,
better than the other.” He tells Isobel that Marie will be his Right Hand for years to come,
managing his daily affairs in Flood, but he offers Isobel the
position of Left Hand, his representative out in the Territory, “the quick knife in the darkness, the cold
eye and the final word.” In the first book, Isobel learns just what this means.
To accompany Isobel and serve as her
mentor, the boss selects Gabriel Kasun, a lawyer who has forsaken his
profession to become a Rider of the road. When Gabriel fled the Territory for
the cities of the East, he had been “desperate
to be away from this land that whispered in his veins, laced around his own
bones…But he had not been able to stay away, the distance tearing at him every
breath he took. Two Voices, the Hochunk named him, but Two Hearts might be
better suited, or Two Spirits, to yearn for a place and hate it so.” Gabriel
is an honorable man and a good teacher, but he has some dark secrets. In the
first book, Gilman gives the reader only a partial explanation of the Bargain
Gabriel makes with the devil.
The road
is just as important as the human and magical characters because it has its
own, almost sentient, magic. As Isobel and Gabriel travel across the Plains to
the mountains, he teaches her the tricks of on-the-road travel, and she learns
to reach inside herself for magic that she didn't realize was there. This is a
coming of age story (but NOT a YA story) that follows Isobel from her sheltered
life in Flood to her eventual realization and acceptance of her Left Hand
powers on the Road.
Prior to writing Silver on the Road,
Gilman wrote two short stories set in this world: “Crossroads” and “The Devil’s
Jack.” Click HERE to read "Crossroads." You can
find “The Devil’s Jack” in the
anthology entitled Dead Man’s Hand (2014).
NOVEL 1: Silver on the Road
PUBLISHER'S BLURB:
A
heroic fantasy by an award-winning author about a young woman who is trained in
the art of the sinister hand of magic, but at what price?
East of
the Mississippi, in the civilized world, dime store novels and gossips claim
that the territory to the west is home to monsters and magic, wild Indians and
disreputable whites. They claim that in order to survive, any who live there
must make a deal with the Devil. Some of this is true.
Isobel is a child of the Territory. She grew up in a saloon, trained to
serve drinks and fold laundry, to observe the players at the card tables and
report back to her boss on what she saw. But when she comes of age, she is
given a choice….
“The right hand gathers and gives, visible to
all. But the left hand, Isobel, the manu sinistra? It moves in shadows, unseen,
unheard…. Until I deem it time for it to be seen and heard. And when it moves,
its work cannot be undone. It is the strength of the Territory, the quick knife
in the darkness, the cold eye and the final word.”
She looked up, away from his hands, and was caught
by a gaze the burnt gold of the morning sun.
“I have been lacking a left hand for too long,
now. Are you strong enough for that, Isobel nee Távora Lacoyo?”
Isobel chooses power. Chooses risk. Chooses to throw her cards in with
the Devil, Master of the Territory. But the costs of that power are
greater than she ever imagined; the things she must do, the person she must
become. And she needs to learn her new role quickly: pressures from both
outside the Territory and within are growing, and the Devil’s Hand has work to
do.
MY REVIEW:
In
the early pages, Isobel ends her fifteen-year indenture to the boss—the devil—and
makes a Bargain to become his Left Hand. The next morning, Isobel finds
herself on horseback, riding away from Flood and the saloon she has called home
all her life. Leading the way is Gabriel, a man she met only the night before. His job is to mentor her, to teach her enough that she can eventually travel the road alone. Among
the things Gabriel teaches Isobel are the three rules of the road: 1. “Don’t pick up more than you can carry.”;
2. “Eat when you can, especially if someone else is cooking”; 3. “If you can
avoid lying, you should.” Gabriel has constant misgivings about his promise
to teach Isobel about the road, to turn “this
girl-child into a rider…to harden [her] against the dust and sun, the bad food and
hard beds, to be harder than the folk she’d find…to become whatever it was the
devil intended her to be….This was far too much to expect of a child, even if
Isobel thought it was what she wanted…He should have known a devil’s Bargain
would be a damned uncomfortable thing.” In this book, the relationship between
Isobel and Gabriel is strictly teacher/student, with no hint of romance between
them. Gilman has stated in interviews that the two will eventually become
friends and partners, but never lovers, although each will probably develop a
physical relationship with someone we have yet to meet.
The first reference to the titular silver
comes at the beginning of part 2, when Isobel and Gabriel approach a crossroad. Crossroads are always dangerous because they are magical. To determine whether
this crossroad is safe to pass through, Gabriel tosses in a silver coin. If it
tarnishes, the crossroad is not safe. “Silver
for cleansing. Silver for protection.” Fortunately, this first crossroad is safe. Later in the book, we learn that there are two kinds of silver: silver
ore, which is commonly mined, and dangerous living silver, which runs in veins
deep down in the earth—veins that miners try to avoid. “Silver ore was malleable, usable. Living silver resisted, often with
terrible results.” Eventually, Isobel realizes, “I’m like silver…The boss tosses me in and I see if it’s safe. And if
it’s not…”
Days into their journey (across present-day Kansas and Colorado), Isobel
and Gabriel make a stop at a farmstead, where they find all of the family members dead.
Then, they find an entire town empty of all of its inhabitants. Meanwhile, some
semi-friendly Natives and talking rattlesnakes stop by for a visit, all of whom
give them ambiguous warnings of magical troubles ahead. Midway though the book,
they meet a magician who attaches himself to them for the rest of their
travels. In this world, magicians are to be feared ("If you ever see a
magician, run. Do not pause, do not speak, by all that you value, do not catch
their attention, just run.") Eventually, evil magic pervades their journey,
along with political and religious elements that complicate their travels and
put their lives in danger.
As the days and weeks pass, Isobel
gradually learns that she has a deep magical connection with the boss—the
devil—but she yearns to have some powers that are her own. She also wishes that
the boss had warned her of the troubles she would encounter on this trip. At
one point, she complains, metaphorically, about having to deal with unexpected and
increasingly dangerous situations: “Some
folk might be fine being thrown into the creek; she preferred to know how swift
the current was first. And now, this was a river, not a creek, and the water
was well over her head.” As the dark magic becomes stronger, Isobel reviews
the situation: something dark and hungry is cracking the bones of the earth—tipping
the world out of balance—and it is her job as the devil’s Left Hand to root out
that darkness and stop its spread. (No pressure, Isobel!) The manner in which
she resolves this massive conflict is unpredictable until she does it, and then
you say to yourself, “Of course,” because all of what went before leads
directly to this climactic moment. Masterful story-telling in action!
Gilman seamlessly slips the world-building
into the narrative—not in big chunks, but in brief scenes that seem utterly
natural. For example, we first get a hint about the magic of the Territory when
Isobel goes for a walk on the outskirts of Flood and approaches the border, where
she feels “the ground rumble faintly
through the soles of her boots, part warning, part welcome…The town knew her,
had known her since she was knee-high.” In another example, Marie looks at
the boss’s map of the Territory, “the
lines moved as she watched. Small shifts, quivers, trembles. Changes. A patch
of red shaded to pink; a shadow of blue melted to yellow…They called it the
Devil’s West, but they didn’t know the truth of it.” When Gabriel selects a
place for their first overnight camp, we learn that he has water-finding
abilities and that he carries a coalstone that can make fire. We first learn of
the existence of magical creatures when the couple encounters four bounty
hunters in search of an escaped fetch—the
incorporeal form of a living body. Later, Gabriel tells Isobel that he once
mentored a chimera. The magic of the Territory simmers in the background throughout the book, sometimes boiling over with a sinister hiss to affect the lives of the human inhabitants, generally to their detriment.
The only place in which Gilman’s subtlety
stumped me was in a single scene (pp. 237-239) in which she uses the pronoun
“them” instead of “him” when referring to a Native seer named Calls Thunder. Here’s
an example: “She didn’t know who Calls
Thunder was, but the way Bear Who Runs didn’t look at their other companion,
she thought it might be them. Why didn’t they let him speak?” And again a
few paragraphs later: “She looked up
into Calls Thunder’s eyes…she couldn’t help but reach up and touch…that warm
flesh. They lifted their own hand and covered hers with gentle fingers. They
understood what she felt.” I’d love to know what others think about this
scene. Is Calling Thunder “them” because he is a dream-talker—a man with two
identities, or natures? Or is something else going on? What am I missing?
Gilman tells the story in a moderate, steady pace that mimics the
leisurely manner in which Isobel and Gabriel travel along the road. Writing in
the third-person voice from the alternating perspectives of Isobel and Gabriel,
Gilman divides the book into six sections:
"Flood": world-building
details and character introductions
"The
Road": Isobel's physical and mental adjustments during her first weeks of riding horseback across the plains
"Dust and
Bones": the manifestation of some magic-related problems,
including a deserted town, a dark cloud, and a mad magician
"Crossroads": a
battle with a magical monster and a confrontation with some human religious
fanatics
"The Rising
Wind": the build-up to and culmination of the climactic
showdown scene
"Silver on the
Road": a brief epilogue
Gilman has an exquisite way with words,
and I kept marking passages that I didn’t want to forget—like these:
As Isobel and Gabriel leave Flood, the
road is “wide-open…cleared of rocks and
smooth of holes, exactly the way you’d expect the road to perdition to look.” (This
is my favorite sentence in the entire book.)
Getting a feel for the road through the
plains: “The road…was…wide enough for
two wagons to pass without one of them going in the ditch, pocked with
hoofmarks and wheel ruts…just a long ribbon unrolling in front of them,
occasionally disappearing up, over and down a hillock as they rode. The
land…was flat, rolling away from the riverbanks; the soil there was good for
farming, soft and rich, but past that it was grassland. Sere and low in the
winter, dull enough to drive you to tears if you looked at it too long, but now
with spring well along, the grassheads were speckled with tiny bursts of color
where flowers reached toward the sun, yellow and blue against the endless
shades of green.”
The spooky factor: “The nape of her neck itched, and something pricked the palm of her
left hand, sharply enough that her fingers flexed…She looked around even as her
right hand went to the knife at her side...Nothing was visible on the road…The
feeling intensified, thrumming through her, and then...disappeared…’I felt
something,’ she said…Not the way she’d felt the road under her feet; more like
how she’d come to know something was watching her, a sense of unease that had
no obvious source…She waited, calmer now, but still feeling the sweat on her
skin and the slight pinch of her boots, the smell of horse and leather and her
own skin, and the sensation, still lingering, that something had been watching.”
The sinister, crazed
magician, Farron Easterly: “All in
all…he was as unremarkable as the rocks on either side of the road, and colored
much the same. Then he turned to face them, and Izzy took back all her previous
thoughts. His skin was rough like a man who’d spent his life in the wind and
sun, his nose a sharp beak, his forehead a high dome, and the eyes that studied
them were as dark and deep as the earth itself. The smile that he flashed them,
though, was that of a predator, a coyote upright on two legs.”
RT Book Reviews has awarded this book
4.5 stars, with the following review: “Silver on the Road takes an underused setting for fantasy—the
American West—and uses it to explore coming of age, the limits of power and
responsibility, and the importance of mingling compassion and justice. It’s
fresh and original and the language is both stark and lovely. The descriptions
of the natural landscape of the West fit beautifully with descriptions of
talking animals, travelling magicians and terrifying supernatural forces.” I couldn’t have said it
better. Gilman twists our view of the Old West just enough to add
freshness and a hint of modernity, but maintains the traditional rhythms of
life, speech, and morality. This book is a joy to read.
In an on-line interview, Gilman says that she is writing, “about the choices you make when you don’t have enough information, and the
second chances you get to remake those choices. Dancing on quicksand, hoping
they don’t drown.” That is a perfect description of Isobel's journey in this book. The three main
characters—Isobel, Gabriel, and Farron—are a delight, all fully developed, but
all with secrets still left to uncover. Gilman has much to mine in future
books, all of which I am looking forward to reading. This is a terrific
start to a gritty, thought-provoking, imaginative new series. Click HERE to read an excerpt
from Silver on the Road.
