But what happens to that bright-seeming future? It develops its own kind of darkness. Two thousand years after Empire, power games continue in The Book of Swords. But 'game' is no metaphor here for plot turns are actually stages in a formal game being played by beings who call themselves gods and simultaneously fit into a wider contest between entities that may be playing through these gods. That action begins in the Ludus ('Game') Mountains signals the artificiality of all that follows.
Game-oriented sf has almost become a sub-genre of storytelling. Saberhagen has written some himself, such as those berserker stories cited earlier and his novel Octagon (1981) which focusses more on the players than the game being played. (A version of the latter is now commercially available.) Original games that act both as story subjects and symbols appear in Philip K. Dick's Solar Lottery (1955) and The Game Players of Titan (1963) and in Samuel R. Delany's Fail of the Towers (1970) and Triton (1976), to cite but a few examples. Other sf writers incorporate familiar games such as chess. In 'The Immortal Game' by Poul Anderson (1954), a computer activates robotic chesspieces but The Squares of the City (1965) by John Brunner moves real human beings around on a sociopolitical grid. Andre Norton's Quag Keep (1978) is based on Dungeons and Dragons while Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes (1981) brings an adventure game to life and The Saturn Game by Poul Anderson (1981) demonstrates the risk in playing an improvised mental game too passionately. Many sf stories have been converted to role-playing simulation games, for instance, Starship Troopers, adapted from the 1959 novel by Robert A. Heinlein. Several periodicals including Ares, Dragon Magazine, Sorcerer's Apprentice, and The Space Garner serve the sf gaming audience.
However, The Book of Swords intends to pioneer new territory. Aside from the reading pleasure it gives, this trilogy is being written to provide the data base for an intricate new computer game that will uniquely combine both adventure-text and interactive features for play on a microcomputer. As of this writing, the designing has not yet begun. Until it is marketed, interested readers may amuse themselves by analyzing the 'playable' elements of the story. (For example, the chase scene in the Maze of Mirth obviously lends itself to rendering in computer graphics.) The quick reversals of luck, the brisk introductions, removals, and translations are appropriate for a game scenario. The tendency for the characters to draw together in small teams suggests multivalent strategic possibilities in the war for possession of the enchanted swords.
'The swords made by the gods are beautiful things in themselves,' observes one character, 'Whatever the purpose behind them may be.' They are also wonderfully versatile plot devices. The ease with which they can be confused and the restrictions on their use multiply dramatic possibilities. (Saberhagen shrewdly builds drawbacks as well as benefits into his magic.) Although the full Song of the Swords inventory may not be destined to actually appear in the trilogy's text, a dozen artifacts is an ambitiously large group. (Series that use as many as six talismans are rare, one example being Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising pentalogy.) Nevertheless, twelve is the traditional number of completeness and is thus an appropriate count for a pantheon.
Although Saberhagen categorically denies a schematic purpose, by curious coincidence, his list matches twelve major divine powers. These can be most conveniently discussed under their classical Greek names.
Coinspinner, giver of blind luck, belongs to Tyche, the fickle goddess of fortune. Its natural opposite, Doomgiver, the instrument of all-seeing justice, belongs to Zeus in his role as universal judge.
Dragonslicer, exemplifying the heroic use of force, fits Apollo, slayer of the monster Python. (Celestial heroes who kill cthonic dragons are common in both Indo-European and Semitic myth, for instance, Thor versus Midhgardhsormr or Baal versus Yam.) But Shieldbreaker expresses purely brutal might and thus belongs to Ares.
Farslayer is as futilely vengeful as Hera raging over the infidelities of Zeus. On the other hand, the Sword of Mercy suits Demeter, the Earth-Mother who presided over the deathand-rebirth mysteries of Eleusis.
The Mindsword that beguiles the inner self recalls triple-faced Selene/Artemis/Hecate, stern Lady of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. However, Sightblinder's deception of the senses is one effect Dionysus produces while wandering the world unrecognized. (The ecstatic god is a more sophisticated version of the crude, conniving Trickster who looms so large in African and Amerindian myth.)
Despair, constraint, and utter sterility surround Soulcutter as they do the dead-god Pluto. But Wayfinder elates, liberates, and enlightenment as does cheerful Hermes in his capacities as god of travellers and master of occult wisdom.
Stonecutter, the Sword of Seige, is no more resistible than Aphrodite, goddess of love. (One is tempted to read unwitting double-entendres into this sword's stanza.) Its natural counterpoise is Townsaver, a weapon befitting the armored virgin Athena Polias, protector of her city.
Thus the swords can be assigned to six masculine and six feminine principles. (Grouping the weapons into equal positive, negative, and ambiguous sets is left to the reader's ingenuity.) Since the above assignments were not consciously intended by the author, there is no reason to expect correspondences between the swords and deities seen in this book. Hermes has nothing to do with Dragonslicer except deliver it and Vulcan matches with none of the blades he forges. The supposedly divine players may have chosen their roles by whim, but their twelve playing tokens represent fundamental categories of experience.
The neatness of these comparisons and the associations they evoke offer the strongest possible demonstration of Saberhagen's innate feeling for myth. It is a matter of instinct with him, not rote learning. (As he modestly explains, 'My reading in mythology has been sporadic at best.') Nevertheless, it lays a sure and true foundation under his fiction. The great mythologist Mircea Eliade might have been describing this situation when he observed that mythic images 'act directly on the psyche of the audience even when consciously, the latter does not realize the primal significance of any particular symbol.'
The most dramatic imagery operating here centers around swords, metalworking, and fire — each a landmark achievement of homo faber.
Any human culture that makes swords spins fables about them. As the masculine symbol par excellence, swords are the essence of the gods and heroes who wield them. (The Japanese say that the sword is the soul of the samurai.) Swords have been objects of worship and emblems of fertility. As prized heirlooms, they fit into the cult of dead ancestors. They may be linked with the destiny of one hero or of an entire dynasty. They can confer invincibility — at a price. Legendary swords are fashioned by mystic means, especially through blood sacrifice to transfer the victim's life into the blade. (Damascus steel was reportedly quenched in blood and bloody offerings are a normal component of smithcraft in many primitive cultures.) Finally, because swords have distinctive personalities, they are given names.
The prowess of medieval heroes lay in their swords. (Arthur's Excalibur is, of course, the most famous example.) Aragorn's Anduril in The Lord of the Rings carries on this noble tradition in fantasy. Perhaps the most impressive sword of virtue in science fiction to date is Terminus Est in Gene Wolfe's Book o f the New Sun (1980- 83).
But doomswords of Norse inspiration give sf grimmer drama. The pre-eminent example is Tyrfing in Poul Anderson's Broken Sword (1954), the baleful brand with 'a living will to harm.' This is the model for Michael Moomock's Stormbringer, the 'stealer of souls' whose bloodlust cannot be slaked until the last man on earth is slain. More recently, the accursed blade motif receives a scientific rationale in C. J. Cherryh's Book of Morgaine (1976-79) where Changeling is an alien device that cleaves the space-time fabric.
Saberhagen's swords confer sublime power without regard for the user's fate. Their properties seem to be good, evil, or ambiguous. Made at the cost of five lives, they are destined to take countless others. Although the divine smith who forges them with earthfire within an icy peak uses the Roman name Vulcan (source of the word 'volcano'), he looks and acts like a brutal giant out of Northern myth. Since the swords and Mark were created within the same week indeed, he would not have come into existence without them — their destinies are uniquely linked. In effect, his own heirloom Townsaver chose him as its heir. He is also the only person in this book to use all four of the named blades.
It is most fitting that Vulcan makes the enchanted swords out of meteoric iron since celestial origins give this material a special mystical prestige. Intact iron meteorities have been worshipped as images of divinity, for instance the Palladium of Troy and the Ka'ba of Mecca. The oldest word for 'iron' is anbar, Sumerian for 'star- metal' because 'thunderstones' were the first accessible source of the substance used in Mesopotamia. Meteorites were hammered into objects as early as the third millenium B.C. and were also used by peoples such as the Eskimos who had no knowledge of metallurgy. Superior qualities made weapons shaped from meteoric iron legendary. Even in this century, the Bedouin believed meteoric iron swords to be invincible.
As Eliade discusses in his fascinating study The Forge and the Crucible, 'the image, the symbol, and the rite
