The Guns of Avalon, chapter 8

Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of The Guns of Avalon by Roger Zelazny, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. Unless you're the sort of person who likes skipping to the last page, go read the book first.

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Corwin of Amber arrived in a Shadow world named Avalon to obtain a quantity of jeweller's rouge to use as a gunpowder substitute, because gunpowder is inert in Amber, but rouge is explosive. His brother Benedict is the ruler of Avalon. While there, Corwin met and fell in love with Benedict's great-granddaughter, Dara. After purchasing the rouge, he and his ally Ganelon left Avalon secretly to travel to Earth, but they were pursued by Benedict, who wanted revenge on Corwin for a supposed murder. They defeated Benedict, and summoned brother Gérard to retrieve him while they escaped.

In Belgium, Corwin orders a shipment of automatic rifles from an arms dealer he knows named Arthur, and arranges to have a Swiss manufacturer make custom ammunition primed with jeweller's rouge. Corwin speaks with Gérard to follow up on Benedict, who has heard Corwin's side of the story and now has doubts he is the murderer he is looking for.

Afterward, Corwin goes back to his house in New York. It has been five years since he left, and the house has been abandoned and looted; but his most prized possession, a Mori woodcut, is still there. Not only that, it has been recently cleaned, as though his return was anticipated. He finds a letter from Eric in his safe, in which Eric requests his help fighting the incursions into Amber from the black road. Corwin ignores the request.

This is a short chapter, sandwiched between two longer, action-packed chapters. It's a bit of a break before the novel's climax.

Ganelon is basically sidelined for this chapter, and sent on a sightseeing trip to Italy. He isn't much use to Corwin on Earth, because he doesn't speak English. They speak to each other in Thari, the language of Amber. There is a real Thari language, spoken by a people of the same name in southeast Pakistan. However, I guess Zelazny borrowed the name from Shelta Thari, the argot spoken by Irish Travellers. This seems more consistent with his borrowing of English and Irish folklore thus far. The arms dealer Arthur provides a little comic relief in this chapter, between trying to figure out what language Corwin and Ganelon are speaking, and his efforts to dissuade Corwin from pursuing what appears to be an eccentric, if not downright insane, plan. He of course has no idea why Corwin needs ammo made with silver bullets and nonreactive gunpowder, nor why he needs no export permit to get the munitions out of the country.

Corwin's prized woodcut is by Yoshitoshi Mori (1898–1992), a Japanese artist who specialized in kappazuri, a kind of printmaking in which the outline of the picture is printed in black ink from a woodcut, then it is coloured via stencilling. Corwin's print, titled Face to Face, depicts "two warriors in mortal combat." Ha! Symbolism! No wonder Eric and he both like it. I couldn't find an image of a Face to Face on the Web—it may be fictional—but Mori did create prints depicting samurai in combat, so it might look something like this:

At the end of Nine Princes in Amber, the freshly escaped Corwin sent Eric a note by messenger bird, reading, "I'll be back." Now we know how Eric reacted to that revelation: he went back to New York himself and borrowed Corwin's samurai picture. Corwin's family may hate each other, but there's a code of honour between them. They won't stab each other in the back, if it would rob them of an opportunity to meet face-to-face and stab each other there.

The bodies Ganelon found in a shallow grave, which he told Corwin how to find, are indeed the servants whom Benedict thought Corwin had murdered. And yet Ganelon told Corwin Benedict had killed them. I smell a set-up. Something tells me Ganelon's not quite on the up and up.

With one chapter remaining in The Guns of Avalon, there a still many loose ends to be tied up. Either a lot of questions get answered next Thursday, or there's a big cliffhanger on its way.