The Unforsaken Hiero

Book 215: S.F. MASTERWORKS

by Sterling E. Lanier

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Apocalyptic

Synopsis

This is the story of the world after it ended . . .
Five thousand years after the apocalyptic event known as The Death, Per Hiero Desteen - priest, telepath, assassin - has been working to find ancient information to save his people.
The Brotherhood of the Unclean, a roving band of feral raiders, stage an unprecedented attack. They manage to nullify Hiero's telepathic powers, and leave him vulnerable and alone in the wasteland that once was North America.
Now he has to not only survive, but strike back and stop the Brotherhood before they can wipe the vestiges of civilisation from the face of the Earth . . . forever.
The sequel to the beloved novel Hiero's Journey, The Unforsaken Hiero takes us back into a world that has been irrevocably changed by the hubris of mankind, and the new races that rose to live in it.

Release date: September 26, 2024

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 352

Sample

The title of Lanier’s novel Hiero’s Journey: A Romance of the Future (1973) is a play on words gauchely charming in its obviousness. The protagonist, Hiero, is a native of Canada some 5000 years in the future, after a catastrophic atomic war has ruined and remade the planet. He is also the hero of the story. The ‘hero’s journey’ is Joseph Campbell’s essential code of all storymaking, a reworked and in some ways dumbed-down, version of the literary theory of Russian Formalist Vladimir Propp. Propp analysed thousands of folk takes and fairy stories, and from them determined an as-it-were grammar of story. This comprised ‘actants’ (the hero, the hero’s helper, the antagonist, the hero’s romantic interest and so on) and ‘narrative units’: the hero is set a task, the hero goes on a quest, is aided by a helper, hindered by an antagonist, moves through a world of enchantment and wonder, talking animals and magic objects, and eventually triumphs and gets the girl. Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949) treats all stories as elaborations of the hero’s journey: he calls it ‘the one, shape-shifting yet marvellously constant story throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance.’

Lanier’s novel reconfigures folk tale into science fiction. The handsome hero goes on a quest, pairs off with a princess, overcomes adversity, and triumphs. Since fairy tales include talking animals, so does Hiero’s Journey, in this case beasts who have been mutated by many generations of radioactive fallout after the ‘Death’ (as the nuclear apocalypse is called) and have grown able to communicate telepathically. Lanier’s hero, Hiero, is also a telepath, sent on a quest not for a grail or treasure but a computer, an example of pre-Death technology which could help his people combat the encroachments of increasingly dangerous evil forces, the ‘Brotherhood of the Unclean’. Hiero’s companions on his journey include a huge telepathic moose named Klootz, a telepathic black bear called Gorm, and Luchare, the beautiful princess from the distant kingdom of D’alwah – Delaware, as it once was – where live the Eleveners, followers of the Eleventh Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not destroy the Earth or the life thereon.’ This group has varied adventures, briskly and excitingly narrated by Lanier: they cross blasted wastelands and pass through dense forests, they encounter monsters, pirates and the evil Brotherhood itself. Hiero and his companions battle catpeople, ape mutants (the so-called ‘Hairy Howlers’), Devil-dogs, ‘shireking chattering man-rats’, Wizards of the Unclean, flying ‘powered ships’ and ‘lightning guns’.

The novel works as science fiction, as Fantasy – Gary Gygax, creator of the Dungeons & Dragons game, credited Hiero’s Journey as an important influence – and as political satire. Written at the height of the cold war, this is after all a story in which atomic evil must be averted by a journey to Washinton D.C.

Lanier planned a trilogy, but in the event only this follow-up novel, The Unforsaken Hiero (1983) was written. Once again the title is an ingenuously obvious pun: the original forsaken hero was Saint Paul: ‘at my first defence no one stood with me, but all forsook me,’ he says, ‘but the Lord stood with me and strengthened me, so that the message might be preached fully through me’ [2 Timothy 4:16-17]. Paul is modelling himself on Christ, the original hero who is forsaken and yet triumphs. It is a mythic archetype: Philoctetes is forsaken by the Greeks on their way to Troy; Belisarius is forsaken by the Byzantine Empire, on whose behalf he had reconquered Rome. But though the novel starts with Hiero alone, captured by his enemies, seemingly forsaken, the story as a whole inverts this paradigm: he is not abandoned by his friends.

Because there’s another pun involved in Hiero’s name: he is a priest. Specifically he is a ‘warrior-priest’ of the Kandan Universal Church, which is, as Lanier tells us, ‘the state religion of the Metz Republic and the Otwah League: an amalgam of most current Christian beliefs, with a strong core of traditional Roman Catholicism, though there has been no contact with Rome for millennia. Celibacy is long gone, as are many other beliefs and attitudes held by the ancient churches’. Hiero’s name comes from ἱερός (hierós, “holy”) – a hierophant is an archaic word for a priest. In The Unforsaken Hiero, a sentient black lake, an ‘amalgam of fungoid intelligence’ that presides over a huge valleyful of old bones, and that draws Heiro in with its telepathic potency, reveals itself to be a gigantic snail-beast. Though the beast is hideous, and the encounter dangerous, Hiero uses it as an occasion for religious contemplation.

It was itself an actual, living child of The Death! For what were the fires and the heat, the passing lights and the shaken mountains, but a living memory of what had destroyed the Earth countless years in the past? Ever since that time, this creature had stayed here in the hills, growing and growing, accumulating wisdom as it grew in size, teaching itself by experience, wondering, studying, groping for knowledge. And always it was alone! What must it have been, that life of millennia, always alone? Hiero’s pity was stirred, even as he considered that incredible existence. Here was living proof of the thesis of Brother Aldo and those of his fellow Eleveners that all life had purpose.

The variety of Lanier’s storytelling, its restless inventiveness of incident and character, is an expression of this sense of life in all its diversity as partaking of divine purpose. For a novel series that began in the 1970s, the Hiero chronicles are remarkably current in their engagement with diversity: many of the characters are people of colour, an environmentalist ethos pervades the whole. Respect for difference, empathy and love characterise the good guys, and the lack of these things is what distinguishes the bad guys from them.

Though the planned third book in the Hiero saga was unfinished at the author’s death, it has recently been completed by his goddaughter, Lucy Andrews Cummin. Hiero’s adventure lives on. And all around the world, the ‘cleric’ adventurer in Dungeons and Dragons games, carries on Hiero’s journey. Dozens of fan-written continuations and spin-offs have been written. A Hiero never dies.

In the five thousand years that had passed since The Death, the world had changed. Much of the land was covered with vast forests or desert wastelands. What had once been five lakes now formed a single Inland Sea. The climate was warmer, since the earth was deep in an interglacial period. Some species of plants and animals had died, and others had evolved in strange ways.

In what had once been western Canada, the Metz Republic was struggling to preserve a measure of civilization and to regain lost knowledge, guided by the scholar-priests of the Abbeys. But more and more, they were losing to the Unclean, a Dark Brotherhood of those who sought to destroy normal humanity and subvert natural law to evil purposes. Even the mental powers developed by the Abbeys could not protect them from the latest attacks of the Unclean and their foully mutated beast hordes, the Leemutes.

The Most Reverend Abbot Kulase Demero was sure that a means to defeat the Unclean might be found among all the records and artifacts collected from the past and stored in the Abbey’s central files. But the task of gathering and collating all that seemingly random information required time and manpower that he did not have. Once, he knew, such work had been done by something called a computer. Abbot Demero had no computer – but he had evidence that such a device might still exist, buried far to the south.

To find and bring back the computer, however, would be an endeavor fraught with peril. Little was known of the region south of the Inland Sea, and the way there led through lands that were dominated by the Unclean. For this dangerous mission, Abbot Demero chose his former student, Per Hiero Desteen, a warrior-priest who had proved his ability as Rover and Senior Killman in the Frontier Guards.

Hiero set forth, mounted on his morse Klootz, an evolved moose. The intelligent and loyal animal was controlled telepathically and was an invaluable ally against the foe. They were soon joined by Gorm, a young bear whose Elders had sent him to study human ways. Gorm gave Hiero mental warning that the Unclean had sent an adept to waylay him. The bear helped defeat the adept and later the hordes of loathsome Leemutes the Unclean began mustering against the companions.

Then Hiero rescued a young girl from a tribe that was torturing her. Her name was Luchare, and she claimed to be a princess of D’alwah, a nation on the Lantik Ocean coast. She told of fleeing from an unwelcome marriage, of being caught by slavers, and finally of being sold to the torturers. She was unlike any human Hiero had seen, since her skin was very dark and her hair was tightly curled; his people, the Metz, were straight of hair and had reddish skins, since they were descendants of the Metis, crossbreeds of French Canadians and Indians.

Later, Hiero was captured by the Unclean. In their stronghold, his mental powers were nullified by the perverted science of the adepts, but he learned to use a hitherto unknown band of mental power. With it, he seized the mind of an adept and forced the man to help him escape.

Reunited with his companions, Hiero continued to explore his new abilities, while training Luchare in the use of her growing mental powers. They fled eastward, with the Unclean in hot pursuit. But progress became increasingly difficult. Eventually, they were trapped in the half-submerged ruins of an ancient city.

They were saved by the sudden appearance of an Elevener, one of the mysterious wanderers who followed the so-called Eleventh Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not destroy the Earth nor the life thereon.’ Brother Aldo used his Elevener power over animals to call up a monster from the depths to destroy the Unclean attackers. Then, joining the companions, he led them to a ship and persuaded Captain Gimp to give them passage across the Inland Sea.

They were pursued and attacked by the Unclean’s power-driven destroyers, but were able to reach the southern shore of the sea before their ship was wrecked. Together with Captain Gimp and the sailors, the companions headed into the unknown dangers of the great southern forest – their only route to safety and the probable location of the computer Hiero sought.

After an encounter with a strange race of women who lived in the trees, they approached the area indicated on Hiero’s ancient map. There with the help of Gorm, Hiero finally located an entrance to a vast underground installation, filled with mysterious machinery.

Before he could complete his investigation, the forces of the Unclean began pouring into the underground complex. Hiero had barely time to set a timing device Brother Aldo indicated. Then he and his companions were forced to flee. From a safe distance, they watched as a tremendous explosion destroyed the entire area. If a computer had ever been there, it was now lost forever.

Then Brother Aldo pointed to what Luchare had discovered underground and brought up with her. She was holding a work in three volumes entitled Principles of a Basic Computer! With that information, the Abbeys could build their own device. Hiero’s mission was accomplished. Now all he had to do was return the books to Abbot Demero in the North.

But Brother Aldo had other plans for him.

There were two fires burning in the night, providing the only lights on the dark plain. A small group was scattered about one. A short distance away, Hiero and Luchare sat by the other, facing Brother Aldo. The old man was staring into the flames, his tightly curled white beard standing out brightly against skin that was as dark as that of Luchare.

‘I must go north at once,’ Brother Aldo said at last. ‘I must arouse those of my Brotherhood. We have sought peace for many lives, but now there is no peace. Destruction is coming upon us, and we must take action against it. It is no longer enough to watch and study the foe.’ Sadness deepened the lines on his face, momentarily revealing his great age.

Hiero waited in silence. His skin was lighter and redder in hue than that of his companions, and his black hair was coarse and straight, trimmed just below the ears in a short bob. With his hawk nose and sturdy, lithe frame, he might almost have been one of his remote Amerindian forebears, save for the neat mustache; the facial hair indicated the Caucasoid admixture of his once despised ancestry.

Beside him, Luchare seemed to be drowsing, her head resting against his shoulder. He tightened his arm around her waist, smiling fondly. To his right, he could see that Captain Gimp and the sea rovers were still talking around their fire. Off to his left, the line of the great forest towered in the dark. He wondered what the strange women of the trees and their queen Vilah-ree were doing. Would he ever see one of them again? With an effort, he brought his mind back to the present as Brother Aldo began speaking again.

‘We have done well, this far,’ the old man said. ‘We’ve blocked the Unclean, destroyed many of them, and we have this.’ He pointed to the packet that held the lost volumes of the ancients. ‘You have accomplished your mission, Per Hiero. But your work is not done. The next danger comes from the South. And it is there that you must go – you and Luchare!’

‘What about the books?’ Hiero protested. ‘I am supposed to get them to Abbot Demero as fast as I can. These southern wastes are not my territory. I came here only to get the knowledge we need in the North.’

The Elevener smiled faintly. ‘Don’t worry about Demero, my boy. The books will go north with me. Your abbot will approve. I know Demero – have known him longer than you have lived. Who do you think put me on watch for you? Why do you think I was so handy when you were trapped in the drowned city? Think about it for a moment.’

Hiero grunted in surprise. But Aldo’s words explained many things. It had been no accident, no fortunate coincidence, that had brought the Elevener to aid them so opportunely. How many others had somehow been alerted to watch over this mission? Hiero grinned ruefully. ‘I should have guessed that Demero would have a few extra tricks he never told me about,’ he admitted.

Brother Aldo chuckled, then sobered quickly. ‘I’ll leave for the North at dawn. I’ll take Gimp and his men with me. We’ll get a boat somehow; there are many ways. But I must also take Gorm with me. Call him.’

Hiero sent a rapid mind call on the wavelength of the young bear. A moment later, the burly shape of Gorm padded up to them from where he had been curled in apparent sleep. Does no other ever sleep around here? came a mental mumble as the bear flopped his bulk down beside them.

Hiero laughed. You do nothing but sleep while we have to do all the hard thinking and planning. He eyed Gorm appraisingly. It was fantastic that this strange folk had hardly been noticed by the Abbey students. Their brains were quite as good as human minds, and only their desire for privacy had kept them so long hidden. The Death had caused strange and horrible mutations, but it had also created wonders, and one of those was the race of Gorm, the silent and hidden bear folk, whose Wise Ones had sent Gorm out to gather knowledge.

You want me to go north with the Old One here, came Gorm’s thought. He seemed quite placid, and his brain waves were clear and undisturbed.

‘I don’t want you to go anywhere away from me,’ Hiero said aloud, then put the idea into thought. He was conscious of how much he would miss this furry friend. But Brother Aldo thinks it might be best if you went north with him and got back in touch with the Wise Ones of your folk.

To Hiero’s surprise, Brother Aldo had picked up his thoughts, those he meant to be private as well as those to the bear. Now the old man sent a message meant for both Hiero and Gorm.

Listen well, both of you. This is a great struggle between that which is evil and vile and that which we believe to be good and blessed. The high Councils of the Unclean are sealed to us. But my Order has watched them for many years, back beyond the life span of the remotest grandsire of any here. They seek universal domination and they would restore the evils that brought The Death to the world.

We must work together, we of the honest and life-preserving ones of whatever form. We must fight them wherever they appear. There is great evil rising in the South, in D’alwah and its neighbors. I want Hiero to go there with Luchare, to her ancient kingdom, the nation where I was once a native and which I knew well. And you, Gorm, I want to go north and make report to your Elders, to tell them of our need. What say you?

There was an instant of mental silence. Then an ursine thought came in answer. I must go. I understand some of what you think. It must be so, for it is the charge laid upon me by the Wise Ones of my people. Now can I sleep?

Suiting action to thought, Gorm got up and wandered off into the dark, where they could hear him curling up again.

‘Well, Hiero,’ Brother Aldo said, ‘we can use speech again. All this thought sending wears one out, eh?’ He smiled.

Hiero found little to smile about. ‘Even if Abbot Demero might agree to let me go, what do you think I can do down in the South? I know little of D’alwah, save for what Luchare has told me. How can I help in a strange country with unknown laws and rules of behavior? What can I do in a foreign land without friends, except for this one?’ He bent his cheek to nuzzle the mop of tight black curls that lay on his shoulder.

Luchare looked up at him with eyes that were clear, with no sign of sleep in them. ‘What can you do? Look, Per Hiero Desteen, have you forgotten who I am? My father is King Danyale of D’alwah, and I’m his only heir. You’re my husband. You’ll be a prince of the unknown North. Everyone will accept you.’ She looked over at Brother Aldo. ‘You have many Eleveners there, don’t you? I’ve seen them helping the village people when there’s trouble. That means we have allies there – though not in public. And we’ll have Klootz.’

She whistled sharply and waved an arm over her head. Hiero smiled as a towering shape paced up to the girl, massive hooves clicking on bits of gravel as it came. A giant head with blubber lips and a drooping snout lowered itself so that the huge, soft nose touched her hair briefly. Then the morse stood quietly waiting to see why he had been summoned.

When humanity began to pick itself up after The Death, the horses were gone, vanished without a trace. In the far North, the reviving structure of the Abbeys and their dependent farms tried many other animals and found these mutated descendants of the moose to be best. Hiero and Klootz had chosen each other at the annual calf-pick years before, and they had never been separated.

I wonder how he’ II like the South, Hiero thought to his mate and the older man. Nothing like him there. Will the people be afraid of him?

‘Not afraid,’ Luchare answered, stroking a leg of the morse. ‘He would be admired as a creature no one had ever seen before. He would add to your prestige.’

Hiero stood up and began to stroke the enormous, palmate antlers with careful fingers, peeling off the velvet where it came away easily. He could feel the heat underneath where this outer cover of the new antlers was not ready. Klootz lipped his shoulder affectionately.

Aldo resumed his argument. ‘Consider what you have already done in a land foreign to you and with only the help of friends you found along the way. You’ve saved a princess, crossed the great Inland Sea, and fought and beaten some of our worst enemies. And you’ve accomplished a nearly impossible mission.’

‘You’ve done what no one else could have done,’ Luchare added when Aldo stopped. ‘You have defeated the one who calls himself S’duna, the chief of their horrid Blue Circle. Now you can go on to be a leader of my people.’

Hiero looked down at her, and his heart filled with this love that was greater than he had ever known before. Then he thought of Abbot Demero, the grim old warrior who had sent him on this mission. Would the ruler of the Abbey Council approve of his going south with a new wife and a new task? He seemed to see the lined old face in his mind, and it was smiling at him. A sign? Hiero shrugged at the idea and then thought again. Perhaps he was picking up a vague and transient thought from far away. He smiled and looked at Brother Aldo, another wise old man who had gone to war because he had no choice in his own soul.

‘Tell Gimp that you’ll leave for the North at dawn. Luchare and I will go south on Klootz. I assume that you can communicate with your Eleveners in the South? Then send me word and we’ll open a channel of messages.’ He laughed a little sourly. ‘You say you know Abbot Demero. Then you can keep him off my back and not let me be cursed and expelled from the church. Now let’s get a little sleep.’

Golden sunlight streamed through the narrow windows of the palace, and a great gong boomed, announcing that day had come again to mighty D’alwah. The sound was echoed and reechoed from far and near as the watch on the walls and the patrols along the bridges and covered ways answered with their smaller strikers of ringing metal. The whole walled city pealed and rang, a vibrant diapason of challenging sound. Hiero sat up in bed with a jerk, covering his ears against the clamor and muttering darkly.

‘You do that every morning,’ Luchare’s voice said. ‘After all the time we’ve ben here, I should think you’d be used to the gong.’

He pried his eyes open to see her dressed and seated at her mirror, coloring her lips and her eyelashes with the bluish paste which was currently the height of fashion at court. He pursed his lips and made a light spitting noise.

She looked around and grinned merrily. ‘Don’t be so stiff. I have to look my best when I’m officially entertaining the noble ladies at breakfast. And what kept you up till all hours last night? Talking religion with our high priest again?’

‘Umm.’ He’d found the breakfast she had ordered for him on a tray beside the bed and he began eating. ‘Old Markama isn’t bad for a high priest – for a D’alwah high priest, that is. But, my God, what has happened to the church down here? Celibate priests! And all these so-called monasteries where the nobles send their unwanted young of both sexes to paint wooden pictures or sew and pray all day – and to live in silence and chastity! It’s as if the Unclean were already in control and determined to make people go crazy.’ His face became suddenly serious. ‘And I can’t be sure that this isn’t a hotbed of the Unclean with their minions all wearing mechanical mind shields.’

‘Hiero!’ Her face grew troubled as she stared at him. ‘I know you really believe that. You may even be right. But you haven’t found any proof – just a few people whose minds you can’t read. And you told me when you were training me that a lot of people have natural screens, people who are unaware of it themselves.’

He sighed and dropped the subject, while she turned the conversation to the Court Ball that was being given in the palace that evening. But after she left for her official duties, he dressed and moved slowly out of the palace and into the maze of the city, still brooding as he exercised his legs.

There was something ugly and dangerous going on in the royal castle. He could feel it, though no clear thoughts came through to him. But there was a deep undercurrent of hatred, impossible to disguise from someone who had been through all he had with the Unclean and their allies.

Yet he had been treated very well. When he and Luchare appeared on Klootz, the guard at the main gate had saluted, let them through, and given her full royal honors. An hour later, he had been closeted with Luchare and her father, Danyale IX, hereditary ruler of the sovereign state of D’alwah.

To Hiero’s surprise, he liked the king, and Danyale made it plain that he liked his new son-in-law.

The king was a large, heavy man, still muscular, but inclining a little to fat, now that he had passed the half-century mark. His curly, graying hair was worn short, and his face was handsome and open over his mustache and beard. His kilts and robes were of a magnificent weave and color, and he wore many rings and pendants. But he was never without a long, two-edged sword whose handle was plain and worn. His handgrip was firm and hard.

Was this the brutal tyrant whose only daughter had fled into the wilderness to avoid a marriage foisted upon her by her dynastic minded father, as Luchare had claimed?

Danyale brought the matter up while he and Hiero sat on the edge of a parapet of the palace. The ever-present guards had been waved out of earshot and lounged some distance away, conversing in low tones and watching both their ruler and their new prince.

‘Look, Hiero, I know what Luchare must have told you about that business of marrying her off to Efrem. But all my nobles insisted – the whole council, including the church fathers. What was I to do? God knows, we must have allies. Chespek was all there was. Efrem is afraid of me, and I thought I could control him, see that he didn’t harm the girl. I know the bastard’s reputation as well as she does. But, damn it, this kind of thing is part of being a king. And with my only son dead …’ He looked into Hiero’s eyes and said nothing further for a moment.

‘I understand,’ the Metz priest said quietly. ‘The realm has to come first, all the time.’ He rather admired the older man. It couldn’t be easy for the king to apologize for something he saw as a vital, standard matter of politics.

There was no trouble in communication, and Luchare had coached him in the speech of D’alwah for weeks as they journeyed toward her home.

‘What will Efrem do now?’ Hiero’s question was only partly idle. The priests, awed by his powers and knowledge of the past, had told him much, and he had learned more by mind search. But, as a matter of honor, he could not probe Luchare’s father. And he needed to know what the man thought, how his mind worked, and what his capabilities were. If D’alwah were to be protected from the Unclean and their grim allies – if it were to be enlisted on the side of the Abbeys – then much still had to be learned.

Danyale’s answer was a snort of contempt. ‘He’ll fume in private, then do whatever the priests tell him when he goes to confession for half-murdering some slave girl. Forget him.’ He eyed Hiero, his wariness apparent all at once. ‘You seem to have pull with the Church Universal, my boy. Do the nobles up your way control the priests? Down here it has been a long, constant struggle to keep the power in my hands and out of theirs – or worse, from some puppet whom they might raise up against me. You seem to know all their priestly secrets and a lot of your own as well. You could be of much help to me,’ he added. The attempt was regrettable, Hiero thought; Danyale was no intriguer, but a decent, if not-too-bright, soldier, trapped in a decadent court and surrounded by schemers, both civil and ecclesiastic.

‘We do things differently,’ he evaded. ‘Our nobles and gentry are so busy fighting the Unclean that we learned long ago to be one pillar of the state and support the church as the other. And,’ he added, as if in afterthought, ‘of course we have no actual king, but only a noble, supreme Council with both church and civil members.’ It was only half a lie, since the Abbey Council was actually that. The fact that there were no nobles could wait until Hiero and the Metz Republic were ready.

‘Well,’ Danyale said heavily, ‘I suppose you have secrets, t. . .