"Flaming Arrow" (1982/1985)

No, I haven't broken my good resolution to stop writing. I finished the story Flaming Arrow on January 8, 1982. This was quite a while before November 7, 1984 (my 70th birthday) when I swore off writing. The book in which this appeared (Magic in Ithkar #2) had its first printing in December 1985 and was copyrighted by Andre Norton and Robert Adams in 1985. — Letter, 1987

“I’m impressed by your irrationality. It’s beyond anything I ever met with in my own time. I’m impressed by your illogic. And above all (or should I say ‘below all’?), I’m impressed by your reeking magic, your cloying magic, your suffocating magic.”

Lafferty wrote a number of pieces of collaborative fiction, chapters in shared fun such as “The Great Ratchet of Sumatra,” “Traitors of Tarshish,” and “Haunter of Moons,” but I think his only published work of collaborative fiction is “Flaming Arrow,” a short story that appeared in Magic of Ithkar 2.

The four Magic of Ithkar volumes are examples of wretched 1980s fantasy. Edited by Andre Norton and Robert Adams, they pull together stories by various authors set in a shared world centered on a magical fair and a temple. Adams, author of the Horseclan novels, wrote the background material for the setting, which appears at the beginning of the book. Unimaginative schlock, it lays out the lore, geography, economy, and laws of Ithkar. It all smells like Lester Del Rey’s armpit. It is quite simply impossible to imagine Lafferty writing a straight story in such a setting. So, instead, Lafferty wrote “Flaming Arrow.” (I will include a PDF of the setting document at the end of the post.)

“Flaming Arrow” is about a loner named Peter Flaming-Arrow who will pass into legend. He is a fletcher from Kara Cove who creates controversy among the trade guilds of Ithkar by saying that his trade allows him to attach feathers and wings to anything. This includes wagons and boats. He constructs a "boat without a bottom" (a glider) and flies it up the Ith River to the great fair. Far from using magic, he says he used the arithmetic of flame and air. At the fair, he stays with the poor and befriends two magicians, the Irish named Draoi and Asarlaí. They help him create a magical covenant with a meadow mouse, and the creature becomes his familiar.

It turns out that the secret rulers of Ithkar maintain control through hidden technologies and a fraudulent Floating Island in the low sky. They see Peter as a threat to their authority. Not knowing quite what to do, they consult a skull excavated from a future geological stratum. I want to pause here, because this is one of several examples of Lafferty hilariously pushing against the dead setting. Digging in a future stratum is the kind of thing one would expect to find in a Lafferty novel or in “Continued on Next Rock.”

In any case, the rulers decide to eliminate Peter. The instrument? An amateurly built incendiary rifle. He does know that it is the day he will die, having used haruspicy to determine this. Peter leaves his mouse familiar behind. He flies his glider to the Floating Island to investigate the "Three Lordly Ones." There, he discovers the Lordly Ones are humans using machinery to simulate thunder and divinity. There is a good bit about thunder sheets. The impostors hang Peter, break his neck, and push his body and boat off the island.

As Peter’s body glides downward, the rulers on the ground shoot him with the advanced rifle. He is incinerated in a pyrotechnic display that the public is manipulated into interpreting as a devil's fall. Peter is now dead, but there is the matter of his familiar. An ember of Peter’s consciousness survives within his mouse. The story ends with the mouse hiding, studying ancient texts and training its voice to mimic thunder. Once its voice is loud enough, it will thunder like the very trumpet of judgment and resurrect Peter, thus fulfilling a prophecy from the Book of Jasher that Lafferty gives as a paratext.

This is an amusing story, in a way that is unique within the Lafferty canon. It is funny partly because Lafferty meets the dumb brief more fully than many of the other contributors to the Magic of Ithkar anthology, and partly because he does exactly what they do not. He goes his own way, sending it up, importing bits of real astronomy and both Christianizing and gnosticizing the book’s stultifying worldbuilding. I will say something about each in turn.

Lafferty wisely discards most of Adams’s world creation. Most notably, he seems to rewrite the central myth about the three benevolent aliens who landed on Ithkar, cut out, and were later worshipped. He reshapes this material so that one can imagine something Trinitarian in the story's Higher Sky. At the same time, he writes the story very closely to the map. Its labels become Lafferty’s plot devices and constraints. Peter begins just beyond the far left edge of the map, past the arrow pointing off into nowhere. It is fun to imagine that Lafferty did not want his Peter Flaming-Arrow to be entirely native to such a vapidly imagined setting, and so mercifully gives him a home just outside it.

And the big conflict over Peter’s bottomless boat answers a geographic problem on the map: rapids choke the Great River Ith, and a canal exists as the official workaround to reach the docks. Lafferty isnt having it. He rejects the rapids the way he rejects the setting constraints: he invents the glider, so Peter can simply fly over the hokum.

The story’s climax also depends on the map’s marginal details. The futuristic skull is unearthed near the Galzar Pass marked in the north, which Lafferty makes more interesting than anything in the official setting. (The linguistically dead “Galzar Pass” is exactly what Lafferty excoriates heroic tedium in his nonfiction.) Peter’s crash takes place in the Death Swamp, helpfully labeled with a trashy skull and crossbones in the southeast. In this way, Lafferty both works within the constraints of the Ithkar map and executes a clean end run around them.

But then there is what Lafferty does to the story bible of the setting, the "Prologue" published at the beginning of Magic of Ishkar 1 & 2, which puts great emphasis on the arrival of the three aliens who become worshipped as gods. Here, Lafferty really goes to work. He reseeds the setting with Christian theology and iconography, transforming the boilerplate Ithkar material into a Gnostic cosmology.

Building on earth details, he gives us a True Cross in the high sky, mirrored by a False Cross in the low sky. Lafferty uses this pairing to symbolize the spiritual conflict between genuine divinity and the concupiscence of the false Three Lordly Ones who rule from their floating island. By the end of the story, Peter has become a syncretic Christ–Lucifer figure at the center of a Passion-and-resurrection cycle. Born with a red noose that marks him for martyrdom, he is hanged on a gibbet, a tree, and is prophesied in the apocryphal Book of Jasher to rise from the dead after a biblically resonant seven-year tribulation. He is heralded by a trumpet on the mountain.

Lafferty has obvious fun here. He plays with the idea of The Mouse That Roared as an archangelic summons at the Last Judgment. At one point, the antagonists weaponize scripture, misapplying Luke 10:18, “I saw a demon fall like lightning,” and then quote Milton, with one significant alteration, to recast the light-bringer as a satanic rebel. They also make extensive use of crosses, not as signs of redemption, but as instruments of desecration, using them to impale truth-seekers.

By the end of the story, Lafferty has brought his strategy of counterfiguration fully into play. What readers get is a kind of War in Heaven, in which a propagandized Morning Star is a martyr defying a sinister, demiurgic orthodoxy.

One can only imagine the disappointment of the 1980s trash pandas.

Magic in Ithkar - Prologue.pdf

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