“I’m going home to the Singing Hills abbey…”
Nghi Vo’s latest installment in the Singing Hills Cycle is a bit of a departure from the previous novellas. Cleric Chih isn’t travelling to an exotic location to collect new stories. Instead, they’re returning to the Singing Hills abbey to be reunited with their old friend Cleric Ru, their former mentor Clerc Thien, and their neixin companion (think super-intelligent hoopoe bird with eidetic memory) Almost Brilliant, who’s been staying at the abbey for three years for super-important reasons.
It’s an understatement to say that the reunion doesn’t go to plan. Cleric Thien passed away weeks earlier, and Cleric Ru has had to step into their shoes as the new Divine of the abbey, what with most of the clerics being off documenting an ancient town at the bottom of a lake that’s been temporarily drained. The project couldn’t have come at a worse time, because two ancestors of Cleric Thien from before they were a cleric have come to claim the body for burial in their family cemetery, and they’re not taking no for an answer.
Mammoth, Chih thought, frozen. Mammoths at the gates.
The existence of regiments who ride mammoths into battle is just one of the delightful elements of Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle. This is a land of magic and ghosts and intelligent, talking birds, and it’s anchored by the fact that everyone in it (including the intelligent, talking birds) has to deal with the mundane heartache of knowing that nothing gets to stay the same forever.
The death of Cleric Thien is a crushing loss for Chih. The author effortlessly conveys a world of backstory in just a few pages, full of Thien’s kindness and empathy and funny moments of being a toddler-aged Novice spying on Thien in prayer, and Thien seamlessly working into his prayers the fact that they can see them, Chih. But Chih doesn’t have much time to really sit with his memories. Cleric Ru’s new position means their relationship is irrevocably changed, and it’s hard to tell sometimes how much their impatience and bluster is due to this, or to the long-unresolved resentment that Chih got to become a travelling cleric and see the world and Ru…didn’t. Cleric Thien’s granddaughters – the imperious Tui In Hao and the easygoing Vin In Yee – refuse to believe that honored burial with the other Devines of the abbey is better than being returned to the cleric’s real family. And worst of all, Cleric Thien’s neixin Myriad Virtues is even more crushed by Thien’s death than Chih is, (because remember, she has perfect memory and can recall every moment of what she’s lost) and no one seems to know how to bring her out of it.
All of this chaos makes for the perfect conditions for a funeral.
We’d all like to think that the grief of losing a beloved friend or family member would automatically bring everyone closer. But let’s be honest, funerals are the perfect breeding ground for conflict and drama. In one gathering you can have siblings who haven’t been speaking to each other for years. Children and estranged parents are reunited, with all the opportunity now to spit out the reasons they’ve been a disappointment to each other. Somebody’s bitter that their life hasn’t been as big a success as they’d hoped. Someone’s not going to take things seriously; someone else is so sad that it’s making everyone uncomfortable and people start making accusations that they’re “milking it for attention” or they “really need to get over it.” And at some point someone’s going to get drunk and reveal that the dearly beloved was a human being and one time made a really shitty spur-of-the-moment decision and now everybody has to have that memory alongside all the good ones, and how dare you, fake news fake news!
Since this is a Singing Hills book, it’s natural that the main focus of the funeral is stories. Even though everyone has a different view of the proper place for Cleric Thien, they all have a reason to remember them with love and respect. The story-within-a-story format is one of the things I love about this series, and we get several fireside tales here showing who Thien was: a wise leader, a canny lawyer, a good friend, someone who would literally walk for miles to make sure a neixin or a homesick Novice wouldn’t be in pain.
This isn’t a kumbaya moment where everyone bonds over shared stories and learns to respect each other; in fact we literally get to the point where defenders are having to man the walls as royal mammoths try to bash down the gates. Having magic and ghosts as part of the equation means that there’s a solution not really available to most people grieving the loss of a loved one, although it’s not the solution I was expecting. It’s still a lovely picture of grieving and love, and how memories are both a curse and sometimes the only reason to keep going when the person we love is gone. The story also has an adorable baby neixin, who I do hope makes an appearance in future books.