by Brian Kunde
Ready for another de Camp highlight? How about The Pixilated Peeress (Ballantine Books, New York, 1991). Last time around I completed my coverage of the de Camps’ late career two-volume Kukulkan series. Today I do the same for their other late two-volume series. This one started with the Eudoric Damberson short stories, later incorporated (pun intended) into The Incorporated Knight, profiled previously. Hence, some call this sequence the “Incorporated Knight” series, which … really won’t do. Because the follow-up novel (today’s book) has nothing to do with Eudoric and his corporate ventures. We’re off to different protagonists and a different country, here. The only connection with the previous work is that both take place in the same alternate fantasy world, that of the New Napolitanian Empire. A far better designation would be the Neo-Napolitanian series. That’s the designation I use whenever I have occasion to refer to it.
The bibliographic history is clean and simple—mostly. The Pixilated Peeress was first published as a hardcover by Ballantine Books’ Del Rey Books imprint in August 1991. This is the copy I have, and is hence scanned below. A mass market paperback followed in September 1992. There were supposedly two versions of this, one issued for the U.S. market and the other for the Canadian, the only distinction being that the second was priced higher, Canadian dollars being valued below the American. Note, though, that I wrote “supposedly.” The Internet Speculative Fiction Database distinguishes the two, but as far as I can tell, they’re the exact same edition, sold in both places, with both prices printed on the cover. Later on, there was the usual British ebook from Gateway/Orion, issued in September 2011. That’s the clean-and-simple part.
The complicated part involves the one foreign language edition. Hold on to your hats, here! An Italian version appeared in May 1993, in an omnibus double paired with a translation of Michael Kurland’s Ten Little Wizards, a pastiche novel featuring Randall Garrett’s “Lord Darcy.” (It’s good. Read it.) Maurizio Carità was the translator of both. In Italian, the de Camp novel became La dama bizarre (The Bizarre Lady), and the Kurland Dieci picoli maghi (a straightforward rendering of Ten Little Wizards), with the pairing designated Fantasy estate 1993 presenta dame e sortilegi (Fantasy, Summer 1993, Presenting Ladies and Sorceries). Just to muddle matters further, this Fantasy omnibus was but one of several published over the years by Monadori as supplements to its Fantasy Urania magazine, the fantasy counterpart to its (science fiction) magazine Urania. As with the main Urania title, each issue consisted of a translated foreign novel, or, as with this omnibus supplement, two. Which, incidentally, went with the regular May 1993 issue 60 of Fantasy Urania, which consisted of La sagezza della Luna (The Wisdom of the Moon), a translation (by Silvia Lalìa) of Greer Gilman’s 1991 novel Moonwise. I’d say that Fantasy Urania subscribers really got their money’s worth that month!
Okay! Washing that one from our mouths, let’s talk covers. The hardcover, as usual for Del Reys of the era, has that pseudo-medieval Darrell K. Sweet look, though thankfully, for a change, this one was by Romas Kukalis, or Romas, as he billed himself. Sweet, whatever his virtues, had the bad habit of dressing his characters like jester-Robin Hoods. On the upside, this did say “fantasy novel.” On the downside, it’s not suitable for all fantasies—take, for instance, Sprague’s Novarian novels The Unbeheaded King (1983)—full jester-Robin Hood—and The Honorable Barbarian (1990), where Sweet condescends to move his wardrobe east, just not east enough—he places the novel’s climatic scene somewhere around, say, Samarkand, rather than the Southeast Asian-style setting it cries out for.
In all honesty, Sweet’s defaults probably wouldn’t have hurt The Pixilated Peeress, as it takes place in the Neo-Napolitanian equivalent of the European High Middle Ages. Nonetheless, Romas’s more restrained treatment is a breath of fresh air. He gives us a wrap-around cover with a forest scene. The front cover area features hapless protagonist Thorolf Zigramson admonishing, from the ground, the horse-mounted and snippily intransigent female lead, Countess Yvette of Grintz. This exact scene may not be in the book, but Romas captures the characters perfectly. Around the spine, the back cover reveals a band of primitive, wickedly grinning Trolls sneaking up on the two. Also not from an exact scene, but the Trolls too are compatible with those in the book, so points for that.
Del Rey’s paperback reprint(s) repeat the hardback cover. The Gateway cover is its customary non-pictorial travesty of and-black-print-on-a-yellow-field, and oddly credits the novel to L. Sprague de Camp with Catherine Crook de Camp, not and, which looks slightly patronizing. As for the Italian omnibus’s cover … what can I say? Artist Oliviero Berni gives us a piece unconnected to either novel inside, showing a Sweet-style (possible) Yvette in a pink and red gown, flanked by two more barbaric lasses—at left, a Bride-of-Frankenstein-cum-banshee-cum-Frazetta femme, holding a head on a spear, and at right a warrior lady in a fur bikini top and thigh-high armor boots, also with spear (but sans head). Circling the group’s feet is a snake-like dragon, breathing fire. Cool scene, but WTF? Did Berni’s compensation include hallucinogens?
Onward. Plot. Unlike The Incorporated Knight, set in the west lands of the New Napolitanian Empire and foreign climes east and west, The Pixilated Peeress takes place in the borderlands to the south; the Helvetian Mountains and the city-states of northern Tyrrhenia beyond. The main setting is the town of Zurshnitt in Rhaetia, a republic that some generations back won independence from the Kingdom of Carinthia. We’re talking analogs of the Alps, Lombardy, Zurich, Switzerland and Austria, here.
Hero Thorolf Zigramson is the son of a local political figure, though that’s no leg up in republican, egalitarian Rhaetia, whose folk frown on any whiff of nepotism. He dreams of becoming an academic, but positions being scarce must content himself for the nonce with an army career.
Our heroine is Countess Yvette of Grintz, pixilated peeress of the title. Pixilated can mean crazy, addled, drunken, or enchanted, all of which apply to Yvette at one time or another in the novel. She is one of the de Camps’ better termagants, holding her own among such worthies as Alicia Dyckman of the Krishna series, Alexis Ritter of The Venom Trees of Sunga, and, closer to home, Princess Yolanda of The Incorporated Knight. Yvette, rightful heir to the County of Grintz in Carinthia, has been displaced by the forces of Duke Gondomar of Landai—who, to seat his claim more firmly, wants her as well. Willful Yvette will have none of it and escapes just ahead of the posse, ending up in Rhaetia. Tired and dirty from her ordeal, she decides to clean up skinny-dipping very near where Thorolf, on his day off, has gone fishing.
Yvette has picked a very bad spot to bathe, and Thorolf a bad time to fish, because the lass was pursued by Gondomar’s soldiers, who catch up to her right about … now. As Thorolf is chivalrous and takes a dim view of foreign incursions, he champions Yvette, and together they get away. Having seen her in the altogether, he’s infatuated. For her part, she’s no better than she should be, but to her he’s a commoner, so, hey, nice rescue, but know your place, peasant! Yeah. Not the best start. If this sounds like the beginning of a bookload of bickering and never quite bedding, well, it is.
Natheless, as Sprague would say, our hero feels responsible for Yvette. To hide her from her pursuers, he resorts to his old friend Doctor Bardi, a sorcerer who can fix her up with a disguise spell. Which goes awry, turning her into an octopus, and leaving her pixilated indeed! Hijinks ensue. More entangled in Yvette’s fortunes than ever, Thorolf must find a more powerful sorcerer to disenchant her.
Enter sketchy Doctor Orlandus, political climber, leader of a sinister cult of brainwashed victims, and of course, not at all a fictional stand-in for de Camp’s once colleague and later nemesis L. Ron Hubbard. (Yeah, sure!) Who, naturally, sees … possibilities … in her plight. Orlandus is up for the job and capable enough, but charges a stiff price to remove the spell—and then refuses to release Yvette, claiming she has voluntarily become one of his initiates! When Bardi and Thorolf protest, the former ends up murdered, with the latter framed for the deed.
Thorolf lights out for the high Alps—sorry, Helvetians—seeking refuge among some old friends, a local Troll tribe. The Helvetian Trolls, formerly widespread throughout the continent, are now a marginalized community displaced from most of their former range by humanity—we apprehend they are, in fact, remnant Neanderthals, a nice de Campian touch.
To his dismay, Thorolf finds himself among the wrong Trolls—an enemy tribe to that he once befriended. Sanctuary comes at the cost of betrothal to the chief’s daughter—and ridding the neighborhood of a local dragon preying on the tribe. (Ah, had Eudoric but known! He wouldn’t have had to travel all the way to Pathenia in his quest to slay-and-flay one in the previous novel!) Thorolf handles the situation humanely, organizing the Trolls to capture the beastie and sell it to the Zurshnitt Zoo, whose keeper, Berthar, is another friend. This adventure seems to echo the inset tale “King Fusinian and the Teeth of Grimnor” from the Novarian novel The Goblin Tower (Pyramid Books, 1968). The dilemma of Thorolf’s betrothal, meanwhile, is reminiscent of that of Athelstan Cuff among the mutated baboon people of “The Blue Giraffe” (Astounding Science Fiction, August 1939), and is ultimately resolved in like fashion. Sprague liked recycling stuff!
The Trolls facilitate Thorolf’s successful attempt to gut Orlandus and save Yvette, setting the stage for a final stand-off between our mismatched pair, the cult, and Duke Gondomar, which goes Thorolf’s way more by good luck than good management. Free of her enemies, Yvette busily sets about raising forces to regain her county, amid which her on-again, off-again semi-romance with Thorolf goes by the wayside. Shrugging it off, the latter enlists as a sell-sword in the Tyrrhenian wars.
Here we get an exciting combat scene, extraneous to the main tale, though it advances our hero’s personal story and gives us de Camp’s take on how best to survive battlefield defeat. Hint: it entails keeping your band together and in good order so the victors bypass you for easier prey. It does not involve fighting till you’re the last man on your side and then running away. Take that, Mister Conan! In the aftermath, Thorolf saves a young woman named Ramola from rape-inclined soldiers. The two hit it off, and just like that he acquires a more suitable mate than Yvette. Though he’s not quite done with the captivating countess…
Returning to Zurshnitt, Thorolf re-encounters his old flame. Her Grintzian putsch having miscarried, she’s come down a few pegs in the world, and been reduced to wedding zookeeper Berthar in order to eat and survive. Seeing Thorolf in a better light, she proposes they abandon their new spouses and run off together. But no, he’s happy with Ramola, and close to attaining his coveted academic position as well. Sorry, Yvette!
So, is this a weighty, important tome adding accolades, kudos and luster to the reputations of the authors? Not really. Is it a rollicking, slightly cynical adventure, and great fun, to boot? You bet! Is it worth buying, reading, and maybe coming back to in later years and reading again? Most definitely! It may not set the world afire, but you really can’t go wrong with this one. This is good de Camp, even very good de Camp. You’ve been warned!
No dedication. I’ve claimed, at times, that the de Camps almost always dedicate their books. Blanket statements like this are dangerous things, no sooner uttered than exceptions start turning up. I’ve encountered numerous undedicated de Camp books since, and this is one of them. In this book we get, instead, a short authorial foreword which pinpoints the novel in space (“the same fictitious world as The Incorporated Knight”) and time (“a few decades later, with different characters”), helpfully indicates the proper pronunciation of Rhaetia (“Reesha”), and name-drops a real world equivalent for one of the locales (the Green Dragon Inn). We also get a few paragraphs “About the Authors” at the end of the book, repeated on the end flap (where they’re paired with (Frank) Kelly Freas’s famous caricatures of the twain). The front flap and back cover provide a bit of plot description and an excerpt of the octopus transformation scene, respectively.
spraguedecampfan 