Der Fluch der Aurelia Chapters 3-4: Too Good to Be True; What Could Be More Important?
In this book, Cadoc
Aalstrom, rather than being a fantastic creature, is a human who regards
fantastic beings as a resource to hunt down and exploit, so in that respect he
has more in common with Petrosius von Bilsenkraut, the alchemist who had
created Nesselbrand. Unlike Petrosius,
however, he is not a genius who would be capable of creating a cyborg dragon
like Nesselbrand or a homunculus like Fliegenbein.
Instead, he
relies on the abilities of his reluctant fabulous-being slave, a copper
elemental whom he simply calls Kupfer (Copper), and whom he terrorises just as
Nesselbrand terrorised Fliegenbein.
Okay, you can’t threaten to eat
someone who is much larger than yourself, immensely strong and made of metal,
but since copper can be corroded by salt or acid, Cadoc has only to menace
Kupfer with a spray-bottle of salt water or lemon juice to ensure
obedience. What we haven’t been told yet
is how Kupfer became Cadoc’s slave in the first place; unlike Fliegenbein, he
isn’t a construct who has no concept of having any purpose in life other than
serving his master. But we will
presumably find out.
The Drachenreiter books don’t explain when
Barnabas went from trying to convince everyone around him of the existence of
fantastic beings, in the first book, to working to keep the fantastic beings’
existence a secret for their own safety, in Die
Feder eines Greifs. Of course, this
left fans free to speculate. My friend Evilkat23 had already written a fanfic, Into the Fire (part of a
series about the adventures of an older Ben, in a timeline in which the
Wiesengrund family didn’t found MÍMAMEIÐR) in which Ben and a friend are
rescuing dragons who have been captured by an evil scientist. Inspired by this and Die Feder eines Greifs, I wrote my own fanfic, called The Clay Soldier, set between Drachenreiter and Die Feder eines Greifs, in which Barnabas’s well-meaning attempts to
educate people about fantastic beings were what had set the villainous
scientist on his dragon-hunting path in the first place. And this, of course, would have been what
drove Barnabas to change his tactics.
In this novel,
however, Cadoc Aalstrom had known about fantastic beings since childhood, when
his grandfather had taught him to see fairies – and the young Cadoc had decided
that they were repulsive, but worth capturing if he could use them. And Barnabas and Kahurangi had been
protecting creatures from Cadoc ever since their schooldays – along with
another friend, Lizzie Persimmons, until Cadoc had drowned her while she was
rescuing a mermaid from him. And all
this is backstory set well before Drachenreiter,
so it still doesn’t explain Barnabas’s later change of policy.
Among a few
details that stood out for me in Chapter 3, one was that, like Dorian Gray, Cadoc
Aalstrom is obsessed with keeping his youthful good looks, and has been killing
moss-fairies to preserve his youth since the age of fourteen! This seems a
particularly odd age to choose. As a
child, I wouldn’t have minded if I could find some way to avoid reaching
puberty at all, and I can well imagine teenagers wanting to grow up to the age
of about twenty and stop ageing at that point.
But if your physical ageing stops at fourteen, you’ve got all the
hormonal upheaval of puberty, without coming to your full strength and height,
and with no hope of ever looking old enough to drive, buy alcohol, or meet any
non-paedophiles who are willing to have sex with you.
A very minor
detail is Cadoc humming the song ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’. This is triply ironic since (a) Cadoc had
seemingly never, even when young, been the sort of innocent child that the boy
in the song was, and (b) he has arranged to stay physically young forever, as
the boy in the song could not, and (c) the Drachenreiter
series deliberately averts the ‘Growing Up Sucks’ message of
songs like ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’ – after all, if you were lucky enough to
encounter fantastic beings as a child, why would you not still be interested in them as an adult? It’s just a matter of whether you are (as
both a child and an adult) interested in befriending fantastic beings, or
exploiting them.
Chapter 4 takes
us to the Rim of Heaven, the hidden valley in the Himalayas where the last
dragons in the world live, and which Lung had been on a quest to find in the
first book. Ben has been spending a
blissfully happy few weeks with his dragon friends, including thirteen
hatchlings, three of whom are the children of Lung and his wife Maja.
As he plays with
one of the hatchlings, whose sharp claws dig into him, Ben expects to see a
wound – and realises that his skin is growing tougher. Lung points out that not only had another of
the hatchlings bitten Ben earlier, again without harming him, but that an adult
dragon, Lung’s friend Tattoo, had accidentally flamed him without Ben even
noticing.
It is worrying
that Tattoo was being so careless. He
and nearly all of the Himalayan colony of dragons apart from Maja had been
turned into stone, and although a group of dwarves had managed to free them, Tattoo discovers
in Die Feder eines Greifs that his
period of being stone had left him with a different Breath Weapon: instead of breathing harmless, healing fire, he (and quite likely all the other dragons who had been petrified) has fire
which turns anyone he flames to stone.
We haven’t yet seen how Tattoo is getting on, or whether he has been
spiritually or psychologically affected by his experiences in Die Feder eines Greifs.
At any rate, Ben
is discovering that being a Dragonrider gives you extra Class Features as you
level up – taking on some of the qualities of your dragon gives you not only
tougher skin, but enhanced strength, sharper senses, and the ability to communicate with animals - and even with plants. (Okay, this
series has plenty of talking animals anyway, but apparently humans can
understand their speech only when there is a magical being around.) However, Lung reassures Ben that it isn’t
going to make him look like a dragon.
In the meantime,
Schwefelfell isn’t nearly as delighted by the birth of the baby dragons as Ben
is. In the previous book, where Lung had
been worried about how homesick Schwefelfell was for Europe, he had hoped that
having baby dragons to play with would cheer her up. But as it is, she just complains that the
hatchlings chew up her stash of mushrooms and leave the remains tasting burnt,
and ‘My whole life tastes burnt!’
This chapter
carries a theme of ‘be careful what you wish for’. As Schwefelfell tells Ben that Fliegenbein,
back in MÍMAMEIÐR, is waiting to talk to him via the lake at the bottom of the
valley, we discover that, in a recent mission, Fliegenbein had finally got what
he most longed for: being reunited with one of his brothers, whom he had
believed dead.
Again, fan
writers were way ahead of canon. While
Evilkat23 and I had written stories in which Fliegenbein met different kinds of
homunculus, Avrel the Teller had written a story, The Other Homunculus, in which one of Fliegenbein’s brothers
(called Mizell in that story) survives and is eventually reunited with
him. And I had always thought that if there was a survivor, it would
be the one who had been named Flea – after all, it’s famously hard to kill a
flea!
At any rate, the
existence of a surviving brother – originally named Flohkopf, ‘flea-head’, but
now calling himself Freddie – has finally been confirmed as canon. He and Fliegenbein had been dramatically
reunited in the events of Die
Vulkan-Mission – except that, in-universe, Die Vulkan-Mission was the play that Freddie wrote about the story,
and produced with some of his new friends at MÍMAMEIÐR, and, according to
Fliegenbein, is ‘a monstrous product of Freddie’s unbridled fantasy.’
As you might
guess from this, settling into being family again after being separated for so
long isn’t going smoothly. Freddie is
extroverted and endlessly cheerful and optimistic, the opposite of Fliegenbein
in personality, which means that Fliegenbein finds his constant enthusiasm for everything wearing. Yet at the same time, he is identical to
Fliegenbein in appearance and gestures, which Ben finds funny but Fliegenbein
himself thinks is creepy, as it implies that he is ‘just a copy’.
Fliegenbein reflects that Barnabas had tried to reassure him that he is still unique, as probably each homunculus had been made from a slightly different animal. Fliegenbein replies that he was probably made from a cockroach and Freddie is so hyperactive that he must surely have been made from a peacock spider, a genus of Australian jumping spiders. I wondered whether peacock spiders were a fictional species invented for this universe, but apparently they’re real (even if there is no way that a 16th century European alchemist could have had access to one).
Personally, I think Freddie would probably have been created from a butterfly, but I’m not sure about Fliegenbein himself.
I had always
thought that the Drachenreiter books
reminded me of the Vorkosigan series, and in particular, that while Fliegenbein’s redemption in the first book, and transferring his
slavish devotion from the villain to the protagonist, reminds me of Konstantine Bothari, his angst over being both an artificial human and (as far as he knew up until now) the only one of the batch to survive reminds me of numerous other characters in the series, particularly Terrance Cee, Sergeant Taura, and Mark Vorkosigan.
So it is fitting
that now, the friction between two long-lost, finally-reunited brothers echoes that
between Miles and Mark in the Vorkosigan books.
Freddie, like Miles, is adventurous, hyperactive, charismatic, and
instantly good at making friends, and refuses to allow being physically
disabled to slow him down. Fliegenbein,
like Mark, is prickly, deeply and dependently in love with the one person he
sees as a close friend, and much happier in a library than in the heat of a
dramatic adventure. But on the other
hand, Fliegenbein, like Miles, had always wished that he had siblings, and is
protective of his younger brother, whether Freddie wants him to be or not.
Inevitably, they rub each other up the wrong way.
Well, it wouldn’t
have been entertaining (or realistic) if they just lived happily ever after,
would it?
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