Not a Disney Princess

Hiero's Journey, Chapter Four:

For a chapter-by-chapter index to this series, click here.
(For the previous installment in this series, look no further than here.)

Hiero and his companions finally reach the Inland Sea, whose waters are plied by merchants and pirates, and whose shores are adorned, here and there, with the radioactive ruins of old "First Strike targets" (75), still deadly 5,000 years after the final war. The sea is also, Hiero observes, home to a variety of mutant critters: huge four-footed amphibious grazers that resemble hippopotami; huge flying fish big enough to eat the grazers; and giant gulls with 30-foot wingspans, perhaps large enough to eat the flying fish.  The giant gulls may explain why the Unclean Evil Mutants don't use gliders in this area.  Or maybe Lanier thought we'd had enough of evil gliders for now.

Hiero is looking rather unheroic when he reaches the sea: matted hair and beard, "now stiff with filth" (76), and dirty clothes.  The party stops to wash; Gorm goes whuffling into the water, while Hiero helps Klootz clean his antlers.  In an aside, Lanier tells us the two have been together since "the great annual calf roundup six years ago" (81).  If there's ever a TV show called "Cute Overload: Post-Apocalyptic Mutant Edition," we know what's going to be on the first episode.

In addition to pirates and merchants, the Inland Sea is apparently also home to primitive screwheads (to borrow a term from Army of Darkness), for shortly after reaching the lakes Hiero foils the attempted sacrifice of a captive princess by barbarian savages.  The sacrificial victim was bound by a long cord to a stake, and was being savaged by the giant gulls (whom she was trying to fend off) while the barbarians and their kilted, drum-beating priests looked on.  We later discover that the woman's name is Luchare, and that she is in fact a teenage princess, a runaway from a far-off kingdom called D'alwah (likely near the old river or state) whose inhabitants live in walled cities, keep slaves of their own, and make war on one another.  Hiero finds this rather barbaric at the time, but he expresses no regrets about having rode in and rescued Luchare from the savages who have tied her up.

Did I mention that Luchare is African-American, and that the savages who were in the process of sacrificing her have white skin and blonde hair – an "archaic human stock," the biracial Hiero calls them (85)?  I suspect Lanier initially devised the rescue scene while recalling Conan stories or bad old movies, then decided to subvert the inherent racial stereotypes by inverting the captors' and captives' races.  It also appears that Hiero doesn't really care about racial differences, except to note that blonde white people are rare in his experience, and to indicate (by carefully describing Luchare's hair, skin, and facial features, rather than simply giving her a racial label) that he's never seen someone of African descent before but thinks that Luchare is more "normal"-looking than her captors.  I suppose, though, that if you've just been interacting with humanoid animal mutants and evil psychic specters who dissolve into putrid slime, human differences seem rather minor.

We might also note another authorial deviation from stereotype: Luchare, while very young, isn't a vaporous fainting damsel, but rather a fairly competent fighter, well-muscled and able to defend herself.  She takes a spear to help defend the party when then run into a canoe full of Blonde Barbarians some distance down the shore – apparently, the kilted priests had a mild case of telepathy and were able to summon reinforcements – though she doesn't get a chance to use it.  Instead, Hiero orders Klootz to submerge and swim under the canoe, then re-emerge from beneath and smash the vessel (and its passengers) to pieces.  Take that, honkies!

Coming next: Luchare recounts her own journey, from the walled medieval cities of future Delaware to the mutant-infested ports of future Indiana.