Vazkor, Son of Vazkor

Vazkor, Son of Vazkor.  I’ve taken much delight in just saying the title of the book.  Not so much saying it as announcing it.  “Oh hey, what have you been up to?  I’ve been reading Vazkor, Son of Vazkor!” with an appropriately grand gesture.  It’s unfortunate that I haven’t been taking nearly as much pleasure in actually reading it.  Luckily it was a short read.  A short, very purple read.  With a whole lot of rape.

I knew I was going to really hate this book on page 8.  I quote:

“He had sons by other women, but Tathra he prized.  I have seen him stand and look at some plundered bangle he meant to hang on her, and his cock would push out his leggings from just that.  I could have killed him then, the red pig grunting for my mother’s white flesh.”

Maybe it’s a lady thing, but I don’t have much patience for boner induced angst.

Anyway, this is the story of Tuvek, who later goes by Vazkor (son of) and then Mordrak for a couple of pages.  He’s born in a barbarian tribe, his mother a beautiful woman stolen from her original tribe and his assumed father the chief of this one. His father beats him for not looking much like him and for being so strong and awesome.  There is nothing that Tuvek is bad at.  At age 13 he’s so great at rape that it makes the girls want more, he’s the best hunter in the tribe, and he’s a fearsome warrior that can take on 4 fully grown and battled hardened fighters at a time.  He also heals pretty much overnight from any wound, which causes him some trouble with the village shaman.  Still, he thrives and manages to rape himself up 3 wives who bear him tons of sons.

Then the city folk attack with their cannons and their horses and pretty much humiliate the barbarians.  They take some as slaves and leave the rest, including Tuvek.  He asks his father’s permission to take some warriors to go free their tribesmen, but his father just laughs at him for hiding.  So Tuvek sets out on his own.  Using a combination of murder and stealth he makes his way into the city folk’s camp and finds a pit filled with slaves from all sorts of tribes, including his own.  He frees them and just as they are about to make a break for it, they are discovered.  His head suddenly filled with the city language, he stands up and announces himself as Vazkor and demands that the city folk kneel in obedience before him.  The older ones do, and the tribesmen rise up and slaughter them all.

As they set about to plunder, Vazkor stumbles on a tent that has 3 suicided generals and 1 city woman.  She’s hot so he totally rapes her and then takes her to be his slave.  They all make their way home and Vazkor is celebrated as a hero.  He wants to marry his new slave, who is named Demizdor, but he knows that right now she will just hate him.  So he has an awesome plan:  He’ll give her as a slave to his wives who already hate her and let them abuse her, so then she’ll want him.  It works, of course, and so they get happily married and he tosses out the wife who abused her the most.

Tuvek’s mother becomes pregnant again and this causes problems, the biggest being both her and the child dying, which leads to the revelation that she’s not his real mother; he’s the son of an albino woman who ran off after giving birth.  When Tuvek goes to confront his father over it, he knows he will kill him.  But instead of sticking a knife in his guts like a good barbarian, instead he suddenly shoots white lasers out of his eyes at him, and then passes out. When he wakes up Demizdor is being repeatedly raped and they are getting ready to kill him.  Instead, the city folk arrive again, looking for Demizdor.  They take her and at her insistence they take Tuvek too.  First he thinks his wife loves him, but really, she just knows that he looks exactly like an old evil overlord and that they can get a lot of money letting people that overlord abused torture Tuvek.

One of the guys in on the plan has a different plan and steals Tuvek, now being called Vazkor, and makes him a highly-regarded slave.  He spends his days breaking horses and being hated by Demizdor, and his nights learning music and poetry and trying to get slave girls pregnant.  See, his new owner wants to breed a race of slaves that have Vazkor’s super healing abilities, but this fails because city women are too pampered and indolent so they are all infertile.  Eventually Demizdor conspires to have Vazkor killed by a poisoned, maddened horse but he uses his latent sorcery to heal the horse and then stabs Demi’s new boyfriend in the guts.  Naturally he is scheduled to be tortured to death, but Demizdor breaks him free, gives him a horse, and swears her eternal love and hate.  Then she goes back to her room and hangs herself.

As Vazkor runs from his pursuers, as well as murdering them whenever possible, he stumbles across a tribe of peaceful vegetarians and decides to hang out with them for a while. A woman named Hwenit claims that he is a demon that she summoned and names him Mordrak. She’s out summoning demons, you see, because she wants to marry her half-brother and he has this crazy idea that maybe siblings shouldn’t have sex. Surprisingly, Vazkor takes the brothers side in all this. While he is with them, he hears more about how good and kind and wise his mother was, which naturally makes him swear a blood oath to the shade of his father that he will kill her once he finds her. Once the hunt catches up with him, they almost kill Hwenit, which makes him realize that she ought to have sex with her brother, so he uses his power to save her life. As Hwenit and her brother are getting it on, Vazkor decides that he needs to take his hunt for his mother over the sea and sets off to find a boat.

Now apparently this book is the second in a series, the first following the travels of Uastis, but it’s written to be able to be read as a stand-alone book. The first half comes off as very “Hey look guys, I can do Conan too!” with the rest devolving into its own silliness. What really bugged me was how forced the sexism was. As you look over my recap, you’ll see that there’s a whole lot of rape. What I left out is how much there is devoted to how silly, stupid, vile, mean, petty, and generally icky women are. And Tanith Lee is a woman. It comes across as someone who decided that her setting needed to be sexist and thought that meant that everyone had to constantly be talking and thinking about how horrible women are. That is one form of sexism, but it’s not the most persuasive to present when you’re doing world building, and it just came off as forced and ultimately silly.

And now, the sentence in a rape scene that made me laugh most: “The gate between her thighs was golden as her hair, and the road beyond the gate was made for kings.”