Eragon Group Spork Chapter 44: The Ramr River

[torylltales]

 

Eragon Group Spork Chapter 44: The Ramr River

Also known as the Zombie Horse chapter.

Technically this chapter opens with Eragon waking up, but at least it’s a little more creative and does a good job of setting the mood:

 

They forced themselves to rise early in the gray predawn hours. Eragon shivered in the cool air.

 

Having been on many overnight camps and hikes that required getting up before the sunrise, I know exactly how they feel. The description in this sentence is just enough and no more. It’s effective, but not overwritten.

 

They debate ways to transport Arya without slowing the horses down too much, and then agree on the stupidest idea of them all:

 

“Why don’t you tie the elf to my [Saphira's] belly? I’ll still be able to move freely, and she will be safer than anywhere else. The only danger will be if soldiers shoot arrows at me, but I can easily fly above those.”

 

And none of them could come up with a better idea than that, even though previous ideas have included building a sled for the horses to drag behind them (why not a makeshift saddle, if they have time and materials to make a sled?), tying her to Eragon’s horse, and Saphira simply carrying her in her claws.

 

At least two of those ideas would have been better than tying her to Saphira’s belly.

 

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Anyway, they wrap Arya in blankets and spare clothes and strap her to Saphira, and then finally decide to get a move on.

 

 

Murtagh’s eyes sparked dangerously, a tight smile lifting his lips. He glanced back the way they had come, where smoke from soldiers’ camps was clearly visible, and said, “I always did like races.”

“And now we are in one for our lives!”

 

At no point in the last two chapters has it felt like they are being hunted. No sign or mention of any hunters, except a passing reference to soldiers with dogs, but they way this chapter reads they may as well be on the other side of the country.

 

I would feel the tension more if they actually were in danger of being caught at any moment. Their musing should be interrupted by a howl in the darkness as the trackers close in, so they have to abandon their plans, secure Arya however they can and flee, being chased by dogs and horsemen across the plains, not being able to hide or stop, managing to stay just out of arrow range as the soldiers, with comparatively fresh horses, slowly gain on them. THAT would make for an interesting chapter.

 

Instead, we don’t get any clue that they’re being chased, they may as well be out for a casual stroll. The tone of the writing, their actions and conversation are all just calm and unemotional.

 

Even while they are supposedly being hunted, Eragon still can’t help but think about ‘the elf’ again, wondering what Roran would think of her.

 

It struck him that if he ever returned to Carvahall, he would have a hard time convincing anyone that his adventures had actually occurred.

 

This is a nice touch, it lends Eragon a bit of humanism, but it’s such a generic Fantasy Adventurer thought that I’m convinced he put it in simply because his favourite characters from other books said or thought something similar.

 

Aside from that, it also very much Not The Time. They’re supposed to be fleeing for their lives from soldiers and hunting dogs what want to capture and potentially torture and/or kill them. NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO BE THINKING “OH GOSH, WHAT A JOLLY ADVENTURE”!

 

 

For the rest of the day, Eragon and Murtagh sped through the land, ignoring discomfort and fatigue. They drove the horses as hard as they could without killing them. Sometimes they dismounted and ran on foot to give Tornac and Snowfire a rest. Only twice did they stop—both times to let the horses eat and drink.

Ah yes, the zombie horses that can gallop for a full day without collapsing.

Though the soldiers of Gil’ead were far behind now, Eragon and Murtagh found themselves having to avoid new soldiers every time they passed a town or village. Somehow the alarm had been sent ahead of them. Twice they were nearly ambushed along the trail, escaping only because Saphira happened to smell the men ahead of them.

After the second incident, they avoided the trail entirely.

See, this is the bit that I want a chapter devoted to, not half a page of discussing the logistics of carrying an unconscious elf and then a mere two paragraphs to the actually exciting part of fleeing while avoiding soldiers and dogs at every turn.

 

And now for an unscheduled, off-topic rant.

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I can’t remember if this was brought up in previous sporks, but… they were captured in, and escaped from, the city of Gil’ead, right? And now they’re trying to flee to somewhere they can safely hide from the soldiers of the empire. So they decided against heading to the nearby forest to the north where, even if they didn’t know about the elves, they could easily hide among the trees for a while until the heat dies down. Murtagh’s reason for not doing this is that he doesn’t like the idea of going past Gil’ead again.

 

So instead, they decide to travel right through one of the the most populated parts of the empire, following the river that runs from toward Gil’ead from just past Uru’baen. A river between those two important cities is sure to have comparatively heavily populated banks and roads, with town and trading posts and fishing villages and such dotted along the length. And, of course, the major city of Bullridge in the middle.

 

Yes, that makes sense, when you’re trying to avoid being caught by soldiers you should travel right through a major trade corridor following close to an important river between three major cities.

Instead of seeking shelter where they can easily hide and at least set up an ambush for any soldiers who might follow them into the forest.

 

Murtagh didn’t want to skirt past Gil’ead to the nearby hope of safety, but he’s perfectly fine with leading them past a string of villages, the major city of Bullridge, and behind Uru’baen itself, the seat of the Emperor, in order to reach safety from the Empire. Travelling almost the entire length of the Empire including Galbatorix’s backyard, to avoid travelling past Gil’ead again.

 

I’m beginning the think the only reason they chose to go southeast is because Paolini wanted them to get to the dwarves. Another case of Plot Over Practicality.

"Dance, my meat-puppets!" - Actual real quote from Paolini

ANOTHER POINT!

 

I just noticed that in an earlier chapter just after they escaped from Gil’ead, Eragon and Saphira discuss the fact that they’d overheard that urgals, possible under the command of Galbatorix, had been migrating south-east, and ponder the possibility of Galby forming an urgal army.

 

So what direction do they decide to head in? Southeast. TOWARDS the massive urgal army that Galby might well be mustering.

 

Makes perfect sense!

 

Rant over.

So, they skirt past the city of Bullridge, which would have been entirely unnecessary if they had decided to travel a few miles north to the first instead of travelling the entire length of the Empire to avoid being captured by... the… Empire…

 

ahem. They skirt around Bullridge after one day of travel around various other towns and cities, and avoiding the roads.

 

Somehow the alarm has been sent ahead of them so all the soldiers at every city and town is looking out for them. This little detail of magical communication between cities will never be brought up again, except in passing reference later on as a flimsy excuse for Eragon to choke a young soldier to death with his bare hands.

It occurred to me later during editing this section that soldiers on the open flat road would be able to travel much faster between cities than Eragon and Murtagh could going cross-country and trying to avoid detection, so this makes more sense than I originally thought, but still comes across as a little unrealistic in the way its written).

 

They had covered sixteen leagues in a day.

 

I’m no expert on horses, but is this likely, given they had to ride cross-country avoiding roads and towns and hiding from guard patrols?

 

They find “a small stand of juniper trees” to sleep in without being visible by passers by.

 

If they have juniper trees in this world, does that mean they potentially have gin? I mean, Brom acted like he was always either drunk or hungover from too many gin&tonics, so it makes sense.

 

When they wake and continue travelling, Saphira worries about the elf’s health given she’s in a coma and hasn’t eaten for three days. Eragon guesses, just completely out of thin air, that maybe the coma was self-induced for her protection.

...

To me that reads as an authorial intrusion. Eragon shouldn’t know what Paolini knows. For him to make a wild guess based on nothing, for a thing he doesn’t even know is possible let alone probable, and he just happens to be completely correct ? That’s unbelievable to me. Maybe if he threw it out among other more probable suggestions it could have been a nice bit of foreshadowing, but him just unerringly getting the incredibly improbable correct answer as his first and only guess is just… sloppy writing, really.

I should have mentioned, as Paolini did, that the juniper trees they sheltered under were located between two sides of the ridiculous horseshoe the Ramr river makes as it decides to stop flowing south, hugs the outline of something that looks like a hill for about half the distance as the distance between Gil’ead and Bullridge (which, you may remember, is about a day’s horse ride)

But I digress again.

 

Eventually the sky brightened in the east. The morning star Aiedail appeared as they reached the edge of a steep bank covered with mounds of brush. Water roared below as it tore over boulders and sluiced through branches.
“The Ramr!” said Eragon over the noise.

 

Four things: In a culture that has names like Helen, Gertrude, Greta, Harold, Larkin, Quimby, Angela, Delwin, and Fredric, why would they have a name for the morning star as different as “Aiedail”? I could believe Andale , Airdale (or Airedale) or Aidale, but “Aiedail” just doesn’t seem to fit with Broddring phonotactics. Not a single name of human origin has more than 2 vowels in a row, and in fact not a single named character, of any race, in the entire series has a tripthong (3 vowels together), only dipthongs (2 vowels) or single vowels. Just for good measure I went through the list of Ancient Language words and found only 2 other words with more than two vowels in a row, namely breoal (family, house), and néiat (not). And only 1 other word with two sets of dipthongs, dauthleikr (mortal – although this is is arguably a compound word and therefore doesn’t count, as dauth is given separately as “death”). Every other word that includes a dipthong either only has the dipthong, or couples it only with single vowels (CC*C, C*CC or C*CC*C, never CC*CC). So we could argue that “aiedail” is inconsistent with elvish phonotactics as well.

Did Brom teach Eragon the elven name for the morning star? Why? And why would Eragon immediately abandon whatever name the Carvahall villagers have to the morning star, and start using the elven name instead?

 

Second thing, this is a major river between the empire’s capital and two major cities. Why is this section of it completely uninhabited and unmanaged? We could argue that any transport barges are unloaded at the point where the horseshoe ends almost meet and is transported over land to the next part of the river, bypassing the horseshoe section entirely because that would make logistical sense, but Eragon Saphira and Murtagh would have had to cross over that land road, which, being a vital trade and transport route between Gil’ead and Uru’baen, would most likely have patrols and wagons and such on it.

 

Third point, the river is, according to Saphira, half a mile wide. And yet earlier on the page it was described as rapidly rushing whitewater, roaring and “tearing over boulders”. This is the point at which it dramatically turns back on itself and does a huge u-turn. Meandering rivers that turn back and forth and make u-turns and so on are generally on the flat plains, and usually slow-flowing because they’re not falling down a mountainside. This river is acting like it’s way up near its source, rapidly falling down a steep slope. But it’s supposedly been on the plains for more than 50 miles before this point. In fact the 50 mile signpost would have been back before their juniper tree campsite a day’s ride back.

 

Fourth point, because I just thought of this: if the river is “roaring” like it’s described, they should not be surprised to come across it. They should have heard it a while back getting gradually louder as they got closer. But Eragon’s exclamation of “The Ramr!” sounds like he just stumbled onto it completely by surprise. Also, and this will be a continuing theme through the series as a whole, they knew from the start they would have to cross the river at some point. They knew where it was, and where they were going. They knew they would need to cross the river at some point to continue their southward journey.

 

But none of them had any sort of plan for doing so, spent time looking for good crossing areas or fords along the way, or anything like that. None of them took a moment to think “we’re going to have to cross this river soon – how might we do that?” until they were literally standing on the river bank.

I’d better move on or this spork is going to take forever.

 

They decide that Saphira will carry everything over the river, because now she’s strong enough to carry a horse in her forelegs despite the fact that carrying Arya would have been way too tiring for her a chapter or two ago.

 

The horses are obviously terrified by being grabbed from above by a dragon strong enough to carry them into the air (but, of course, Murtagh’s horse is described as being much more terrified than Eragon’s horse, because Eragon has to have the bravest horse) , and their screams attract the attention of a search party “more than a league away”.

 

They’re in late evening if not full night time (it isn’t quite clear, except that by the time Saphira returns for the third time to pick up Snowfire, it is very dark). How can he tell in the “inky” darkness how far a league is? Assuming English leagues rather than Roman ones, that’s slightly over three miles away. How could they have heard the horses and then pinpointed its location, using only the sound, through three miles of wild scrub between two bends of a rapid, “roaring” river?

 

 

Anyway, Saphira scoffs at the “silly animals” for being prey species who get terrified by a predator carrying them off in the night, and mentions that Murtagh “had to tie [Tornac] down” to stop him from bolting in terror.

 

I’m not sure if Paolini has ever handled horses, but did he really think that tying a spooked horse up so it can’t move is going to calm it down? If anything Tornac is liable to injure himself (or Murtagh) in his panic.

 

I don’t know much about horse care, so I’ll leave this for others to rant in the comments, but – how callous, how absolutely heartless Paolini makes everyone in this scene. Horses are prey animals. Dragons eat horses. A dragon has just grabbed this horse in the dark night and flown off with it, and you’re surprised that it gets scared and starts panicking?! And your response to that is to tie it up instead of trying to reassure it and soothe it? All three of them are animal abusers.

 

Is this how you would imagine Aragorn treating Roheryn or Hasufel in the Lord of the Rings books? Would Alexander the Great treat his favourite horse Bucephalus like that? Can you imagine Atreyu tying up Artax when he got spooked?

 

*deep breath*

 

Another thing. Has Paolini ever tried to tie up a panicking horse? Murtagh would be more likely to get his teeth kicked in than to get a rope around Torrnac’s legs. Unless Saphira pinned the horse down, which would only make the poor thing’s fright even worse.

 

 

Anyway. They all eventually get across the river and then, when the horses had calmed down, they keep on going until they reach the edge of the terrain tile and the ground very suddenly just becomes sand.

 

Eventually the ground became soft and gave way under their feet, forcing them to halt.

 

That’s… I mean we can’t expect Paolini to have actually visited the edge of a desert before, but a bit of common sense and basic research should have told him that deserts don’t have defined edges. They don’t just suddenly start. Even the Sahara, which the Hadarac is very obviously based on, has a gradual progression from scrub to grassland to rocky plains to sand dunes, the sand doesn’t just suddenly begin.

 

Regardless, They had reached the Hadarac Desert, the chapter is finished, and I can have a couple of days before starting the next chapter. Which is mercifully short and probably should have been pruned and combined with this one, which should also have been either cut back, or expanded into a major portion of the story and not just a potentially thrilling side-note that fails to follow-through on its potential.