Walking the Wall

I finished re-reading Patricia McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld a week or so ago and have been mulling it over. One of the most powerful lines in the book is spoken by Sybel after Coren gives her the baby Tamlorn and tells her to keep him safe from the wars of men:

“I know nothing of wars, but I know something of sorrow. And that, I think, is what you pass from hand to hand at Terbrec.”

That theme runs deeply throughout the book, the idea that war is mankind passing sorrows and pain back and forth. Sybel has no concept of war and a deep resistance to becoming involved in war in anyway or in involving Tamlorn in war until she is wronged so greatly that she cannot hold onto her sorrow and pain and feels she has to pass it back to the King who visited it on her. Even one of the most interesting characters in the book, the illusive and and mythological Liralen said to be a glorious white swan that had saved people from a war–had as its other aspect the deadly Blammor that killed everyone that looked in its eyes. How did it kill people? By turning their own fear back on themselves. And isn’t that the same as men passing their sorrows back and forth in war–because war is also about men passing their fears back and forth, hand to hand. When the king finally did die, it was because “he saw what was in himself and it destroyed him”.

This book is a powerful story about people finding “silence of the mind that is like clear, still water, in which nothing is hidden” and where fear and sorrows don’t accumulate until they are so overwhelming that we have to hand them off to someone else. It is about people really understanding, as Maelga whispers, “My child, we are all of one world.” So that when we hand our fear and sorrow onto someone else, we are really handing it back to ourselves in an endless cycle that has the power to destroy us.