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The Black Grail [MultiFormat]
eBook by Damien Broderick
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eBook Category: Fantasy
eBook Description: Deep in the future, the Sun is guttering out. God-like beings of immense power are trying to keep it alive--by stealing energy from their past. A barbarian warrior from our own post-Holocaust future is caught up by mistake in their wormline, and flung into the world of the Dying Earth. What he finds there will change all of history.
eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: 1986
Fictionwise Release Date: June 2007
Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [1.2 MB], eReader (PDB) [338 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [339 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [298 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [322 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [345 KB], hiebook (KML) [735 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [421 KB], iSilo (PDB) [276 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [345 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [424 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [452 KB]
Words: 96517
Reading time: 275-386 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
 
"Among novels set in the far future of Earth there are some that are placed near the very end, in the realm of the dying sun. These 'dying sun' novels are neither science fiction nor fantasy but a hybrid form that combines the strength of the two: science fantasy... Three exemplary novels are The Dying Earth (1950) by Jack Vance, The Book of the New Sun (1983), and The Black Grail (1986) by Damien Broderick. Each brings a different perspective: Vance creates the form, Wolfe pushes it to its fantasy edge, and Broderick drives it to its science fiction limit."--Michael Andre-Driussi, New York Review of Science Fiction
"The Black Grail rings changes on time travel and reality alteration. The narrator, Xaraf Firebridge, is born in a barbaric age over one thousand years in our future, after the destruction of civilization in a Holocaust. Immediately before the Holocaust was 'the Black Time,' one of high technology, including the genetic reconstruction of extinct species, such as the great baluchitheriums on which he and his people ride into battle. Xaraf is the disciple of Darkbloom, a tribal shaman who practices the way of the Open Hand, a doctrine that affirms the sanctity of life, and includes the rigorous development of expertise in non-fatal methods of self-defense. Xaraf is transported deep into his own future, where he finds the Sun is dying prematurely. The 'Powers,' seeming gods who control this future Earth, are beings who have returned from the stars and taken steps to save the planet from environmental catastrophe. They have used a 'wormline' to reach back in time and extract energy from the solar core every two hundred and fifty million years; they deprive Xaraf of his memory and send him upon a series of quests and adventures, designed to hone him to deal with whatever beings have interfered with the wormline and thus consigned the future Earth to lingering death."--Russell Blackford, Van Ikin, and Sean McMullen, Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction
ONE
Once Darkbloom asked me which animal I was.
"Animal?" I looked at him stupidly.
"Each of us has an inner creature," he told me, with that infuriating blissful smile that made me want to beat his face. I was ten years old. "It walks with our legs when we fail to pay attention. It can be cowed, or tamed, or befriended. So again I ask you, Xaraf: Which animal are you?"
"I am not an animal," I said angrily. I walked away from his meager fire and its stink of herbs and belly fat. The sun had not gone down but ice winds were blowing from the glacier. I slapped my hands on my biceps. "You fool, old fool, ugly man, I am a warrior."
"It certainly begins to look that way," Darkbloom said with a sigh. "Have I wasted my time with you, boy? I should take myself off and sleep in a hole in the ground."
The sun was cold and terribly bright across the peaks, putting long shadows on the ground and making my eyes blur.
"How can a man be an animal?" I said stubbornly, staring back at him and blinking. "It is a contradiction."
That made the shaman laugh. "Well, at least my instructions in logic have not failed to leave an impression." He cuffed me on the shoulder. "I think perhaps you are a dumb, clumsy bear cub, Xaraf." He got to his feet and went away into his squalid hut, leaving me to bite my lip and wonder how he had managed once again to insult and badger me and leave me feeling hungry for his company.
That wasn't the end of his witless, profound paradoxes.
"Which garment are you, little warrior?" he asked me, much later, after he had shown me the bitter truth of the Open Hand.
"Garment?" I was speechless with indignation. A man is not his garb. A man is his station in the tribe.
"What food, Xaraf? Which drink, which tree, which weapon, which dream?" Nodding half-asleep by his rancid fire, he asked me these questions, a warrior he had disabled with his beautiful guile.
Which dream was I?
It was unfair of him, and unnecessary, to ask which dream I was. Most of the dreams in my head he had placed there himself, like the unhatched eggs of some bird, marooned in a lonely nest. He left it up to me to warm them into life.
A bird was not, though, the animal I chose to be when he tried his quiz on me again. I was something stronger and faster and leaner and hungrier and more cunning than any bird.
(The weapon, of course, was a battlesword, but I told him it was the Open Hand. He looked hard at me, reproachfully, no fool.)
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