Vazkor, Son of Vazkor by Tanith Lee

"Whoever and whatever he is, he shall suffer."  His eyes returned to me.  "Do you comprehend?"

"I comprehend that in Eshkorek the women are vipers, and the men dogs walking on their hind limbs."

In Tanith Lee's 1975 novel The Birthgrave, Karrakaz, the sole survivor of an ancient lost race of almost indestructible psykers, was impregnated by Vazkor, the human wizard and conqueror whom she both loved and hated.  Karrakaz switched her and Vazkor's super strong baby with the almost dead baby of brutish barbarian chief Ettook and his beautiful wife Tathra, and 1978's Vazkor, Son of Vazkor, is a memoir written by this super-powered changeling.  Vazkor, Son of Vazkor, is like 210 pages of text in my copy (DAW No. 272, UJ1350), split into two books, Book One relating the narrator's youth among the barbarians who raised him, Book Two his adventures after leaving the tribe as a captive of the sophisticated inhabitants of a city ravaged by the wars caused by his ambitious father. 

Karrakaz and Vazkor were not particularly sympathetic characters, and so their son, called Tuvek among the barbarians, is just following in their footsteps when on the third page of this novel he rapes a fellow teenager--but hey, she was leading him on!  Tuvek is not popular with the other kids because lovely Tathra is resented by all the other women of the tribe, the subject of their envy and jealousy as an outsider whom piggish Ettook captured on a raid.  It doesn't help that Tuvek is better at everything than everybody else--shooting a bow, throwing a spear, wrestling, etc.--and that his super body never scars--the fact that he can't wear the ritual scars and tattoos borne by all tribal warriors marks him as an outsider even more than his foreign looks.  Tuvek also has an Oedipal thing going, doting on the beautiful woman he thinks his mother and detesting his fat ugly "father." 

Tuvek, by age fifteen, is the best warrior in the tribe and has killed many enemies in the raids and battles that are so common among these nomadic tribes; by age nineteen he has killed more men than he can remember and has three wives and a dozen sons.  (Lee demonstrates the low esteem in which women are held among the tribes by having Tuvek not even keep track of how many daughters he has sired on his wives and the numerous other willing and unwilling recipients of his seed.)  A party of slave raiders from the city of Eshkorek carries off some men from the tribe--the raid is irresistible because it is preceded by a surprise artillery barrage, which leaves the barbarian tribesmen, who have no experience with gunpowder weapons, in shock and awe.

Some editions of Vazkor, Son of Vazkor, bear the title Shadowfire

Only Tuvek is brave enough to pursue the slavers.  Among the slavers are former soldiers of Vazkor's armies, and Tuvek so resembles Vazkor they think their former master has risen from the grave and are stunned, making them easy prey for Tuvek and the slaves he liberates.  Tuvek rapes a gorgeous city woman he finds in the slavers' camp and brings her to the tribe as his slave.  This woman, Demizdor, has contempt for the barbarian Tuvek and his people's primitive culture, but she can't help but fall in love with him; similarly, Tuvek, who has always treated women like possessions on the same level as his dogs and horses, finds himself feeling tenderly about the haughty Demizdor, even craving her approval and consent!  These two crazy kids try to stifle their feelings, but eventually succumb and get married, causing some upheaval in the tribe, who have it in for the beautiful outsider, Demizdor, just as they do for Tathra and Tuvek.

At the close of Book One many pivotal events happen at once and set the plot on a new course.  Tathra dies in childbirth, and the midwife reveals to Tuvek that Tathra and Ettook were not his blood parents, that he is the son of a strange woman who referred to her mate as Vazkor, the name of that warmongering tyrant Demizdor was telling him about.  Tuvek immediately conceives a hatred for his biological mother for abandoning him and because she killed his father.  His antipathy for Ettook is enflamed into a murderous rage because Tathra died trying to fulfill the chief's selfish demand for another son.  The realization his real father was a wizard triggers some of the powers he has inherited, and Tuvek uses them to kill Ettook; this first use of his psychic abilities exhausts him, and the tribesmen tie him up and gang rape Demizdor.   Tuvek and Demizdor are saved from a painful execution when, months after Tuvek seized her, a cavalry company from Eshkorek finally arrives to rescue Demizdor and capture Tuvek.  The people of Eshtorek abominate the memory of Vazkor for starting the wars that wrecked their city, and are eager to take out their bitterness on Vazkor's purported son.  A still unkinder cut is that Demizdor, back among her city slicker countrymen, now also hates Tuvek, he having dragged her from sophisticated city life into the nightmare community of Ettook's tribe of barbaric rapists. 

(Lee is not afraid to portray women as embodiments of all the age-old stereotypes men hold of women, a pack of petty, fickle, vain, jealous, envious, and phony backstabbing bitches, and a big theme of these Karrakaz books is how we resent the power over us held by those we love or desire and how our disappointment when they fail to live up to our hopes can turn our love to hate.) 

In Book Two we find that the people of the half-ruined city of Eshkorek are split into three competing factions.  The leader of one such faction kidnaps Tuvek, saving him from torture and death at the hands of the other two.  Tuvek becomes this guy's cossetted slave, a sort of pet given the job of breaking horses and held in reserve as a sort of super weapon.  Tuvek's service is rewarded with fine food and plenty of women.  There is palace intrigue, in which people, including Demizdor, try to murder Tuvek.  When Demizdor's elaborate plan to get Tuvek killed by a crazed horse succeeds only in getting him sentenced to execution, Demizor's love suddenly overcomes her hate ("You are my life," are her last words to him) and she guides Tuvek to a tunnel through which he can escape the city before she commits suicide.  (A lot of people commit suicide in this book.)

The miles-long and elaborately carved and mosaiced tunnel is the centuries-old work of Karrakaz's people (well, the work of their slaves at their direction, I guess.)  Fighting men from Eshkorek, some of Demizdor's relatives and admirers among them, pursue Tuvek through the tunnel and out the other end, and there are chases and woodcraft and ambushes and all that sort of business.  In the last quarter of the book, Tuvek meets the same generous tribe of vegetarians his mother met at the end of The Birthgrave, and they guide him to a secret island just off the coast.  There a young tribeswoman, a healer and mystic, helps Tuvek learn about his psychic powers and, perhaps thinking this is a Theodore Sturgeon story, argues against the incest taboo.  When Tuvek's pursuers catch up to him and in the ensuing fracas fell the woman, Tuvek is able to heal her mortal wound.  But the story doesn't quite end on this redemptive note: Tuvek swears a solemn oath to the shade of his father that he will kill his mother and following a clue sets sail for a lost continent on his mission of matricide.    

Vazkor, Son of Vazkor has many of the remarkable elements of The Birthgrave--rape, bestiality, incest, suicide, spouses who hate each other, parents who hate their children and vice versa, slavery--but it is somewhat less striking and compelling.  There are fewer monsters and less magic and mystery and surprise, for one thing.  The story is also less tragic and grim; one of its themes is Tuvek growing as a person and learning to treat women better, and many of the scenes with the kindly tribe of vegetarians at the end are actually sweet and cute, though the prominence of incest in these passages will sour them for some readers. 

(My copy of Vazkor, Son of Vazkor also has lots of annoying typos, which I found distracting.  Hopefully this was remedied in later editions.) 

While not as impressive as its predecessor, I still enjoyed Vazkor, Son of Vazkor and feel no hesitation about reading the final installment of this epic, Quest for the White Witch, and finding out how the saga of Karrakaz and Vazkor and their son finally shakes out.