Empress

Empress is the first volume of the Godspeaker trilogy, by Australian author Karen Miller, and a book that does something unusual enough to be worth describing carefully. Most fantasy novels with a slave-girl protagonist follow a fairly well-marked road: the heroine is mistreated, escapes, gathers allies, overthrows her oppressors, and ends the book as a better, freer person than she started. Empress walks the same path for about two hundred pages and then very deliberately turns off it, and what it does after that is the thing that will either keep you reading or close the book and go and find something less uncomfortable.

The setting is Mijak, a hot, theocratic desert kingdom whose entire civic and military life is organised around the worship of a single god. This is not a kind god. The Mijaki god is hungry for blood, demands constant ritual sacrifice, speaks through a hierarchy of Godspeakers who interpret his will, and rules through a structured priesthood capable of crushing the warlords as easily as it crushes anyone else. The book's title is also a fair description of where its theology sits on the spectrum: this is a religion that produces empresses, not saints, and the god approves.

Hekat is born in a stretch of desert wasteland to a violent father and a beaten mother. Unnamed and unwanted, she is sold to a pair of slave traders, Abajai and Yagji, who recognise her unusual beauty and intend to deliver her to the city of Et-Raklion to be trained up as a courtesan and sold on at considerable profit. On the journey, one of their party calls her a little hell-cat, and she takes the name Hekat for herself. The opening section of the book, in which she walks across the desert with her captors without quite understanding that she is now a slave, is genuinely affecting writing. Miller makes you care about Hekat. She makes you root for her escape. She then spends the rest of the novel slowly demonstrating that what you were rooting for was a monster in the making.

Once in Et-Raklion, Hekat escapes the slave traders and enters the service of the warlord Raklion as a warrior, training as a knife-dancer under the brutal disciplines of the Mijaki military. She begins to hear voices, which she takes to be the direct instructions of the god, and starts climbing both the military and the religious ladders with a single-mindedness that does not bend for anyone or anything. She manoeuvres herself into Raklion's bed and his confidence, and when it becomes clear he cannot father a child, gets herself with child by Vortka, a fellow former slave who has risen in the priesthood and who is more or less the only person in the book Hekat treats with anything resembling tenderness. The child, Zandakar, is presented as Raklion's son and the future warlord of Mijak. By the closing pages Hekat is not merely powerful; she is the de facto ruler of Mijak and the most feared person in it, and she has spent the latter half of the book doing things that make her opening chapters as a frightened girl in the desert read like a different book.

The cast around her is, by design, no real counterweight. Vortka is decent but easily handled. Raklion is besotted and out of his depth. Nagarak, the High Godspeaker who actually has the institutional power to oppose Hekat, gets closer than anyone else to seeing her clearly, but he is the kind of opposition that ends the way opposition to Hekat tends to end. Hanochek, Raklion's old warleader, sees what is happening and is sidelined for his trouble. Miller seems to have deliberately resisted giving Hekat a true antagonist of her own scale, which has the effect of making the book feel airless in stretches, because there is no perspective allowed to seriously challenge hers and nobody capable of derailing her.

The other thing the book commits to, and one which divides readers more than the protagonist does, is its language. The Mijaki characters speak in a heavily formalised dialect, peppered with ritual exclamations like "Aieee" and pious constructions about the god's eye and the god's desire, and every other noun in the religious vocabulary is bolted to the prefix "god": godhouse, godpool, godstone, godbells, godbraids, godmoons. The intention is clearly to make Mijak feel saturated by its religion, to render its people unable to think outside the god's vocabulary. The effect is genuinely immersive in short bursts and genuinely fatiguing across nearly seven hundred pages. By the closing third of the book the dialect starts to obscure rather than illuminate, and the religious apparatus, which is the engine of the plot, begins to crowd out the human business it is supposed to be driving.

That is also where the book starts to labour. The opening half has the pull of watching a deeply unsettling character emerge from a sympathetic one. The closing third is largely the consequences of decisions Hekat has already made, and the reader has long since stopped having any hope of her redemption, which removes the tension that has been carrying the novel. There is a great deal of incident, much of it bloody, and not quite enough forward movement to justify the page count.

It is, in spite of that, an interesting book, and an unusual one. There are not many fantasy novels willing to spend nearly seven hundred pages making their protagonist into someone the reader wants to lose, and Miller's commitment to the experiment is the most admirable thing about Empress. Whether the next two volumes can sustain a trilogy with the same engine remains to be seen.