Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of The Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. You may well have a lot of reading ahead of you.
Riding through Shadow from Amber to Chaos, Corwin was twice confronted by Brand, claiming that Oberon had failed in his attempt to repair the primal Pattern, and is now dead. Corwin did not believe Brand and escaped his traps. Spending the night in a cave, he met another man taking shelter from an approaching storm, who believed him to be the "Archangel Corwin" described in his holy scriptures. Corwin recognized the storm as Shadow undoing itself because of the change to the Pattern. He also discovered that his horse, Star, had been abducted and taken underground by a group of little people. He and Star barely escaped from them.
Corwin continues his hellride toward Chaos. As he does, the storm continues to bear down upon him, and Shadow appears to be coming apart around him, becoming more bizarre. He uses the Jewel of Judgment an area of stability.
As he rests, he is approached by a woman who calls herself simply "Lady." She has a picnic basket, and they share a meal. She also offers the hospitality of her pavilion to wait out their final hours; however, Corwin declines.
Corwin continues on his hellride, but suddenly Star is shot by a man with a crossbow. It's Brand again.1 Corwin draws Grayswandir, intending to kill him. However, Brand, using his power to act as a "living Trump," teleports to another vantage point and takes another shot at him. Corwin raises a windstorm to throw off Brand's aim, to buy time while he tries to set up a lightning strike, but Brand continues to outwit him by Trumping from place to place. At the last minute, Corwin's red messenger bird returns to protect him, injuring Brand's eye and causing him (and it) to disappear.
Corwin's hellride goes south, meaning Chaos lies south of Amber, whatever it is supposed to mean in a multiverse of coexisting realities. As we saw a few chapters back, he could still move between Shadows by riding in circles.
The character Lady seems too enigmatic for a once-off picnic, and I suspect we'll be seeing her again. Perhaps she is a Shadow near-facsimile of someone we've already met—Dara, for example. For all I know, she actually is Dara, one of the handful of characters that can change form.
As Corwin continues to ride away from his narrow escape from the little folk (it occurred to me later—leprechauns?), he again contemplates the nature of Shadow, echoing some of the questions I've raised. "Do we make the Shadow worlds? Or are they there, independent of us, awaiting our footfalls?" In Nine Princes of Amber, it's suggested that Amberites can walk through Shadow willing things in and out of existence until they achieve the world they want. In which case, as Corwin asks, did he create that world? Or does the multiverse consist of all possible Shadows,2 and can he find the right one simply by conceiving of it?
Corwin remembers something he had read during his time on Earth: "Few people can say of themselves that they are free of the belief that this world which they see around them is in reality the work of their own imagination." The quotation comes from Isak Dinesen's short story "The Deluge at Norderney," from her 1934 collection Seven Gothic Stories. Solipsism is the belief that only the self can be known to exist, Dinesen's (and Corwin's) point being no one is completely immune from that belief. Nonetheless, Corwin isn't truly a solipsist; his self-oubts notwithstanding, he recognizes that Chaos is "completely not-I," evidenced by the weirdness of the terrain as he approaches it.
In one of the weird Shadows he rides through, he observes: "I looked to the east, from whence the day brightened. No sun stood new-risen in the heavens, but rather a great, blindingly burnished crown, a gleaming sword hanging through it." This is a description of the Ace of Swords from a tarot deck. The Trump cards are a plot device in the Amber series, but I believe this is the first time one of the Minor Arcana cards has been explicitly referenced. I know next to nothing about tarot reading (not being superstitious enough to take fortune-telling seriously), but my limited research suggests that the card represents clarity or insight. The card shows a sword thrust upward through a crown, but Corwin sees it inverted, which is obviously meant to change the interpretation. I wonder what the significance of that is: instead of clarity, obscurity? Does it have to do with his confusion about the nature of Shadow?
Again Brand appears to oppose Corwin, and just as (it seems) he has the upper hand, a deus ex machina appears in the form of the bloodbird, pecking at Brand's face until he is forced to withdraw. I admit I don't find this section of The Courts of Chaos to be the best-written part of the Chronicles of Amber. It's a little strange and repetitive. Though if I find out it's leading up to something truly interesting, it's in me to forgive.
Footnotes
1 An arrowing experience footnote: While trying to generate an AI illustration for this post, I learned that it was possible to prompt DALL-E to generate a picture of a crossbow … but impossible to prompt it to show a man wielding a crossbow. It depicted a longbow, every time. After dozens of iterations, I finally had to settle for the one image in which Brand is far enough away that you can't tell. AI has a way to go.
2 The best of all possible footnotes: I am somewhat reminded of a story by Jorge Luis Borges titled "The Library of Babel," in which a huge library stores all possible books. Librarians search the library for knowledge, but the vast majority of the books contain only gibberish. (A searchable Web site simulates the Library. Good luck finding hidden wisdom.)
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