The Sharing Knife - Series Review - Bujold

Lois McMaster Bujold burst onto the writing scene in 1986 with her first published work Shards of Honor, a science fiction work about a female astronomical survey star-ship captain named Cordelia Naismith. While surveying a newly discovered planet, she and her crew are attacked in camp. During the assault she is knocked unconscious and awakes to find all of her crew missing, but in the company of an injured colonist from Beta planet and another man, Captain Lord Aral Vorkosigan of the planet Barrayar. By this point in the Bujold story-line Lord Vorkosigan is known as the "Butcher of Komarr;" another planet in Buljold's constellation of colony worlds. Ms. Naismith eventually finds that Lord Vorkosigan is not only not a butcher, but a man she would partner well with.

Without giving away the plot, story-line, and rich texture, because all of Ms. Bujold's works are like this, and the reader should experience them first-hand, Captain Naismith and Lord Vorkosigan fall in love and marry.

Miles Vorkosigan, the character Ms. Bujold is best known for, is the son of this union.

Fantasy
Ms. Bujold has long wanted to write fantasy, though she has received numerous awards for her science fiction works. To date she has won four Hugo awards and at least one Nebula award. Any reader familiar with the Science Fiction genre knows that these awards are hard-won and quite prestigious.

Her first foray into fantasy was the book The Spirit Ring which she wrote "on speculation" (on spec). After shopping it around, to no avail, her primary publisher Jim Baen bought the rights on the promise that she'd continue to write more Sci-Fi Vorkosigan sagas. As it turns out Mr. Baen was correct with his deal as the Vorkosigan books sold quite well, while The Spirit Ring has mediocre sales at best.

It was another decade before Ms. Bujold attempted a fantasy yarn again in the form of The Curse of Chalion; this time Ms. Bujold decided to combine fantasy and romance and had an instant hit on her hands.

She has continued this "magic formula" in the series "The Sharing Knife" below.

I've gotten so much enjoyment (and even education¹) out of her science fiction stories that I felt I owed the author at least the amount of respect (and time) due to read a genre I am not particularly fond of.

I'm such a purist, when it comes to sci-fi, that I often mentally and vocally object to the habit publishers and libraries have of lumping the two story types together.

They are not the same thing! Well written science fiction usually deals with what may well be possible in a near or distant future. Fantasy deals with magic which science roundly rejects.

Still, she is such a fine author I felt I owed her at least the amount of time required to read these four books.

I wasn't disappointed.

This is a four book series based on a vague form of magic that the practitioners call "groundwork²." In this particular universe the world is pretty clearly Earth, but it is unknown what the century is. As Bujold is so often a master at telling a story and giving a general feeling of the "time" it occurs in without ever actually numbering the year.

As such the story could be taking place in the far past, or in a post-apocalyptic future where most technology has been forgotten.

"Ground", by the Bujold definition, is a sort of life-force that emanates from all things both living and non-living. In this "sharing knife" universe there are two classes of people who steadfastly keep themselves apart from one another; lakewalkers and farmers.

Lakewalkers
Lakewalkers are a nomadic people who are aware of and work with "ground-force." They are self-appointed guardians of humanity who work against a force of evil called "the malice." A malice springs from the ground and almost immediately begins stealing the life-force "ground" from all living things around it. In the process it is also capable of exerting a type of mind control on those living things. It's only purpose seems to be to take over more "ground" as it's power and mobility expand. In the process of its expansion a malice drains the life-force or "ground" in every larger areas around it's epicenter.

Lakewalkers live in camps composed of makers; metal-smiths, leather-crafts, horse breaders, weavers. Then there are the "malice" scouts called patrollers. In this world gunpowder and projectile weapons are unknown, though the bow and arrow are common.

The makers supply the patrol with all the tools required to dispatch malices. Patrollers are the mobile soldiers who seek out and destroy malices. Because lakewalker patrollers are aware of and have the ability to control "ground" they are able to approach a malice without immediately suffering the effects of mind-control; though if they remain near a malice long enough for it to penetrate a patroller "ground-shield" a take-over of thought is possible.

In the story line ten makers are required to support one patroller. Gunpowder is unknown.

Famers
A "farmer" is a human being who is unaware and incapable of detecting or making use of "ground." They have the same "maker" abilities as the support network of lakewalkers. They primarily settle into areas where they grow crops, raise livestock and in larger towns make glass, iron, steel, cloth, ink & paper. Farmers are clearly learning more and more and creating new technology as they settle and expand.

The Whole Society
Lakewalkers set themselves apart from Farmers due to continued misunderstandings between the two groups. In this (unnamed) past, farmers have settled lands lakewalkers have formerly had free access to. They have also killed lakewalkers out of fear of their magic.

Lakewalkers, on their part, avoid farmers because farmers cannot control their "ground projection." This, in turn, causes a great deal of distrust for farmers because they know so little about lakewalkers. As with real-life situations gossip abhors a vacuum and rumor, innuendo, and wild speculation fill farmer knowledge gaps.

Story Setup
Because there are two very firmly separated societies here there is an immediate and seemingly permanent tension between the two groups of humans.

The setting is a time where the making of iron and steel are known, but there are no machines beyond printing presses. The technology is roughly equivalent to that of the 1800s. No steam power or automotive technology exists; motive power is via animal, flat-boat, or sailing ship.

Published in 2006 we are introduced to the two principal characters Fawn Bluefield and Dag Redwing Hickory.

Fawn is a farmer girl running away from home due to an unexpected and unwanted pregnancy. It is not Fawn who does not want the child, though she is unfamiliar with motherhood and only just suspects that she is carrying a child. The father is betrothed to another and threatens to expose Fawn as a "loose woman."

She's strong willed and bright, however, and decides to leave the scene without telling her family.

Convinced that she can make her own way, she sets out to Glassforge, a town a number of days from her homestead. There she sets out to recreate herself, have her child, and become a functional member of this town.

On the way she is accosted and kidnapped by two bandits, one of which seems to know she is pregnant. As it happens Dag Redwing Hickory has been tracking the bandits too and suspects there is more involved here than mere robbery.

Dag suspects that there's a malice nearby and has been tracking the robbers because one of them looks like a "mud-man³." As it happens Dag is right and after Fawn is hauled into a shallow cave Dag follows and finds Fawn literally face to face with a malice.

The malice has ripped the ground of Fawn's unborn child, killing it, and she is very close to having her own "ground" ripped from her; a deadly situation at best.

Dag tosses her a sack of two knives created just for this sort of confrontation and she stabs the malice first, with the wrong knife and again with the "primed" knife. The malice turns to dust and the captive humans and mud-men scatter in confusion now released from the malice's mind-hold.

Dag and Fawn leave the cave and Fawn has a miscarriage. Dag nurses her through this with his magic ("ground-setting") and they eventually return to her family farm where she can recover fully. This is a journey of about three days. In the process Dag and Fawn become much more familiar with each other as people. She becomes entranced with his good looks and "plain sense," and he entranced with her bright mind and intelligence.

Once at the Bluefield homestead, Dag is met with downright hostility and anger by Fawn's family. Lakewalkers and farmers do not associate beyond the limited needs of commerce. Dag is welcomed into the home only because he has saved the errant daughter's life, but the farmer family have a set of preconceived notions about Lakewalkers, many of which include the suspicion of cannibalism and black-magic.

Dag realizes that the two societies cannot continue to exist so apart from one another. Both populations are growing and the need to track down and dispatch malices will depend on mutual collaboration between both groups.

Of course Fawn and Dag become infatuated with each other and the book ends with a farmer/lakewalker marriage. Dag and Fawn then set out to Hickory Lake Camp to let his family know of the union.

Legacy picks up where Beguilement left off. Published in 2007 the story follows Fawn and Dag on their trip to Hickory Lake. Dag has taken the last name of his bride, a lakewalker custom, and is now calling himself Dag Bluefield.

Of course once they make Hickory Lake Camp the name change is the least of Dag's problems. Most lakewalkers resist any more than passing association with farmers. For this reason Fawn is viewed by most with a great deal of apprehension. Dag's own family outright rejects the marriage and Dar, Dag's younger brother and a knife-maker, challenges the marriage before the nine member camp council.

Neither Dag nor Fawn are about to let a ruling against them destroy the marriage and they jointly determine to stay together no matter what the ruling.

In an odd twist banishment is not meted out, rather a split decision results when four vote against Dag and Fawn, four vote for the couple, and one abstains.

Dag is denied his due share of camp goods, but the couple are not banished.

Dag and Fawn decide to leave the camp anyway as Dag's "ground-setting" powers are increasing and causing him some extreme worry. The couple set out to find someone who will help teach Dag more about his powers and Dag is determined to bridge the gap between farmer and lakewalker feeling certain they were one people in the distant past.

Of course there are more encounters with malices and a surprising variety of people both lakewalker and farmer.

Published in 2008 Passage is the immediate followon to Legacy. In this book Fawn and Dag determine to travel south along Grace River toward the gulf of a great ocean.

They first stop off at the Bluefield farm where Whit, Fawn's youngest brother, greets them (unexpectedly) with open arms. As they stock up on supplies Whit provides Fawn with her own horse, named Magpie. Dag has his own horse Copperhead and Whit brings a small string of ponies to along to sell.

As Whit, Fawn and Dag make their way to the Grace river they are joined by another companion named Hod who seems to be a simple minded petty thief. During the night Hod approaches Copperhead to steal food from Dag's saddlebags. Though it's night, Dag's "ground-sense" tells him Hod is approaching the horse and Dag decides to let Copperhead deal with Hod. The result is a disaster as the horse shatter's Hod's kneecap.

Dag, feeling guilty for no interceeding, heals Hod's knee with "ground-setting," and determines that Hod's overwhelming hunger is caused by a tape-worm. Dag heals both problems and finds himself stretched to the very limit of his powers. It also frightens him when Hod become besotted with Dag as a result of the magic.

Dag has now discovered why lakewalkers avoid healing or contacting farmers; beguilement. This he learns later is a problem no lakewalker medicine maker has ever successfully dealt with and it is at the very root of the separation of the two types of humans. Hod continues to haunt Dag with a Münchhausen syndrome by repeatedly hurting himself so Dag can do more ground-setting.

When they finally reach the river they hire a woman flat-boat boss named Berry and quickly befriend her. Two other patrollers join the party and the flat-boat quickly becomes fully crewed with Dag and Hod acting as oarsmen and Berry at the tiller.

In the process Dag is even more astonished and worried about his powers, even though he manages to convince many farmers and lakewalkers alike that the separation between the two peoples need not last. The protagonist is especially successful at convincing non-lakewalker types that lakewalkers are human, do no practice black-magic, and can be good people to know.

By the end of the novel Whit, Fawn's brother, and Berry, the boat-boss, are married.

River Life
In the process of writing the book Lois McMaster Bujold wanted to tell a realistic story of river-life prior to the mid-eighteenth century. This means passage was always down river due to the lack of steam or other powered water-craft.

In that effort Ms. Bujold read The Keelboat Age of Western Waters by L.D. Baldwin, Old Times on the Upper Mississippi by George Byron Merirck, The Adventures of T.C. Collins by himself, and A-Rafting on the Mississip' by Charles Edward Russell.

The final of the tetralogy The Sharing Knife, Horizon was published in 2009. Now that Dag and Fawn are at the southern ocean they decide to stay for a while. During the day Fawn asks around for a powerful groundsetter and finds one in Arkady New Moon.

Arkady invites Dag to the New Moon Cutoff camp, but he and Fawn are met with the same skepticism they found back at the Hickory Lake camp, though Arkady convinces the camp council to at least allow Fawn assist Dag in both his instruction and healing training.

Dag convinces Arkady, by demonstrating how to un-beguile someone, that lakewalker medicine makers should be allowed to heal farmers. This meets with even stiffer resistance from the camp council. All of them leave including Arkady.

Leaving New Moon cutoff they decide to travel "The Trace" back toward Fawn and Berry's homeland. Along the way they meet more adventure, slay more malices, and determine that farmers and lakewalkers can indeed peacefully coexist and help each other.

Dag's dream of close cooperation is taking root and the story closes on Fawn nursing she and Dag's first baby; a girl.

Julie Bell has illustrated at least one hundred (100) book and magazine covers since 1990. This includes album cover work for Meat Loaf (Bat out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose). I have placed a graphic of the two first book covers side by side so you can see the overall effect of this work.

Ms. Bell must read the stories before attempting a painting as each cover coincides exactly with some segment of each story.

For those of you who are familiar with Bujold's science fiction work you may be initially disappointed. The language and situations are somewhat reminiscent of Mark Twain's characterizations with a bit of the flair of the wild-west. In prose, they are nothing like the Vorkosigan series. Yet the storytelling, characters, and situations are just as engaging as with her science fiction works.

The story telling is as solid, interesting, thrilling, and engrossing as any of Ms. Bujold's other works. By the end of the first book, I no longer felt that I was reading fantasy; indeed by the end of Beguilement I did not feel that I was reading fantasy at all. There were no knights, witches, dragons or sorcerers. Or at least not sorcerers of the Camelot variety.

I'm leaving an incredible amount out here. Particularly why the knives are called "sharing knives," but if you read the series their meaning will become immediately clear.

As always it's the characters that really move the story along. Her scenic descriptions were rich and near photographic and the travel by animal and water richly detailed and interesting.

¹ If an author causes me to refer to a dictionary from time to time I feel my time reading them is well-rewarded. Ms. Bujold has a huge vocabulary.

² Grondwork, groundsetting, and groundsense are all lakewalker perceptions of the life-force all living things are endowed with. Ground work means healing that force, setting means bolstering that force, and sense means detecting it.

³ In this series a "mud-man" is a former animal, turned slave of a malice.

The author was not compensated in any way, either monetarily, with discounts, or freebies by any of the companies mentioned.

Though the author does make a small profit for the word count of this article none of that comes directly from the manufacturers mentioned. The author also stands to make a small profit from advertising attached to this article.

The author has no control over either the advertising or the contents of those ads.