Naomi Kritzer is an extremely prolific writer of short stories (my favorite format), and her collection Comrade Grandmother made me curious to see what she can do when she has an entire novel’s worth of room. In Freedom’s Gate – the first book in The Dead River’s trilogy – Kritzer expands on the world hinted at in her short story “Spirit Stone”.
Lauria was born a free woman in the Greek territory of Elpsia. It isn’t easy being half-Danibeki in a land where most of her mother’s people are slaves, but she’s built a comfortable life for herself and gained the trust and respect of her boss, the military officer Kyros. It’s that trust and her heritage that makes Kyros pick her for a dangerous assignment: infiltrate the bandit tribes of the Alashi – Danibeki who fled to the steppes to live as nomads – and find out the details of their planned attack on the Greek border towns.
It’s risky trying to spy on the Alashi. They execute any spies they catch, and it’s rumored that they sacrifice travelers to their gods and force anyone who wants to join to prove that they’re worthy by letting themselves be bitten by poisonous spiders. And even before she can reach the Alashi, Lauria will have to temporarily give up her status as a military aide and take on the role of the lowest member of society: an escaped slave.
The author gets things moving pretty quickly, with Lauria in chains and on the way to her new “master” before the end of the first chapter. I need to throw in a trigger warning here, because Kyros feels that Lauria needs to learn how to act like a slave by spending a couple of weeks with the military officer Sophos, posing as a new concubine in his harem. And of course it will be perfectly safe, both Kyros and Sophos swear nothing will happen to her, and absolutely no one will touch her without her permission.
So. You can imagine how well that goes.
Lauria “escapes” right on schedule, mostly traumatized and completely enraged. She holds onto the thought that Kyros will make everything better and hand out some richly-deserved punishment as soon as she completes her mission. She also takes another concubine with her when she escapes, since Tamar catches her sneaking out and threatens to raise the alarm otherwise. Lauria’s only half-sorry to bring the fourteen-year-old girl along; it makes the trek across the desert to the Alashi that much harder, but Lauria can’t leave behind someone who hates life in Sophos’s harem as much as she does.
After surviving the desert and attacks by bandits (real bandits, the ones who deserted from the army and rape and pillage their way across the steppes), they reach an encampment of Alashi. And it’s here that the really interesting part of the story begins, because Lauria and Tamar are assigned to a soldier sisterhood and told that they’ll have to pass tests before they’ll be accepted into the clan. No, they’re not going to have to be bitten by spiders or made to walk through fire, and while they’ll be trained to ride and shoot and fight they’re not just going to be tested on battle skills. In order to join the free people of the Alashi, they have to learn how to not be slaves.
“You were not raised among us; you don’t know our ways. You have, in short, been taught to be slaves. It falls to us to teach you to be people.”
I liked the turnaround here, where Lauria started the book having to learn how to act like a slave, and now has to prove that she can be her own master. You’d think that would be fairly easy for someone as resourceful and independent as Lauria, but it absolutely isn’t. It becomes pretty clear that Lauria has devoted her life to being valued by her country’s conquerors. Both she and Tamar jump to obey orders, eager to please, and it makes them fail test after test when they rush off to complete errands without asking questions or doing what they need to do rather than what they’ve just been told to do. And even when they think they know something is a test, the sisterhood’s leader Janiya is nobody’s fool, and very good at being able to tell the difference between someone who’s figured out the correct answer, and someone who doesn’t actually need to think about it.
If all the talk about sisterhoods and women having to suffer abuses by men makes you think this book has a lot of “rah rah rah women power!” well, it does, sort of. Unmarried members of the Alashi are separated by gender during the summer months, so you don’t see a whole lot of men after the first few chapters. But Kritzer manages to portray strong, competent women having to deal with everything the world (and men) can throw at them, and finding their own hidden strengths while doing so, without crossing the line into Down With Men territory.
A lot of the women in Lauria and Tamar’s sisterhood are perfectly fine doing without male companionship permanently or temporarily (I liked the term Kritzer comes up with for the female pair-bonding that takes place during the warm months: summer friends). But there are also women who look forward to the winter when they spend the months with their male lovers, or the women who are perfectly okay with hooking up with nice-looking male merchants, even if it means getting pregnant and having to spend the summer with the rest of the married couples. There were a lot of very believable relationships going on through the book, from Tamar and Lauria bonding as blood-sisters, to respect tinged with a healthy amount of dislike for some of the more difficult members of the sisterhood, even a situation where one woman would have liked to be summer friends with someone but had to accept being thoroughly friend-zoned.
Just like in Kritzer’s short stories, this book is written in a flowing, easy-to-read style, and the pace is fast; I tore through the whole book in just a few days. I found myself liking and admiring Lauria very much, even when I wanted to shout at her for continuing on with her mission even when she knows that most of what she’s been told about the Alashi (a history which, don’t forget, has been written by the victors of the war between the Greeks and the Danibeki) is a lie. It’s not a question of if, but when Lauria’s conflicted life is going to self-destruct, and by the end of the book she’s had to take a long hard look at everything’s she’s done and everything she’s sat back and allowed to be done.The next two books will be taken up by Lauria’s new mission, an impossible task facing impossible odds. And I think anyone standing against her should be very, very worried.