Smith, Sherwood. (April 2012) *Banner of the Damned* DAW, New York

Sherwood Smith. Banner of the Damned. DAW, April 3, 2012. 695 pages


Section 1 – Court
Section 2 – Love
Section 3 - Colend Goes to War
Section 4 – Magic
Section 5 – The Fox Banner
Section 6 - Glory

Banner of the Damned is set in the secondary fantasy world of Sartorias-deles; the events take place four centuries after the close of the previous Sartorians-deles epic series: Inda, The Fox, King’s Shield, Treason’s Shore, commonly called the Inda series. It is not necessary to have read these books before reading Banner of the Damned. All these titles are available from DAW.


I have guest blogged about Banner of the Damned here, on the online magazine, SF Signal.

Below is the opening section of the lengthy piece.

Armies vs. Melende
Sherwood Smith should rank high on any list of military writers, though her novels are not military fantasy fiction per se. Julius Caesar wouldn't have caveats about her cavalry battle scenes. Her naval campaigns and battles, and the hand-to-hand fighting scenes on board ship, are the equal of Patrick O'Brian's.

The cavalry battles, hand-to-hand, strategy sessions, the aftermaths of battles, these scenes in Banner of the Damned, roll across the page with the effortless mastery that the courtiers at the Colendi court strive to embody, what in their language they call melende. The action scenes feel so right the reader doesn’t sense the author's work to make them so. This is writing combat accoding to the melende code. Battle and grace are in conflict with each other throughout the novel, yet the contradiction between them is resolved through the power of compositional melende. Melende evolved in fact, as a way to resolve conflict without the use of physical violence.


The code of melende, the dark side and the bright, the silly and the amusing, is in play throughout Banner of the Damned: to humiliate the courting Chwahir King Jurac who doesn't know how to dance; to conceal a love affair from the court ravenous for gossip; to Princess Lasva’s making of melende a carapace impervious to her mad royal father-in-law's paranoia.

Colend’s state use of melende includes diplomacy and trade, while Marloven Hesea stands upon the warrior code absorbed at its Academy, and the Chwahir can only imagine the blunt force of conquest. The Marloven warrior code has its bright side as well as melende has – profound loyalty of the warriors to each other, their leaders and their cohort; their brilliant battle skills, their physical endurance. Like the melende code it too has a dark side, abusing those who are vulnerable. Both courts lack the best of the other. Marloven Hesea lacks art and play, while Colend's strategy sessions when threatened with invasion become comic operetta, except they know the consquence of no military and no battle experience are likely to be lethal.

The best way to describe melende may be to say it melds the mannered formality of Japan’s classical Heian court with the sprezzatura sparkle of the late Renaissance Italian courts.

English doesn’t have a word that matches what is contained by sprezzatura. So we turn to Castiglione, whose power of verbal invention created the concept and the word that contains the conception. In his The Book of the Courtier, Castiglione presents an idealized, successful courtier – the courtier who retains the support of his ruler, from whom all good things flow. The ideal courtier was skilled in weaponry, leadership, horsemanship, hunting and games, and equally skilled in music and dancing. His presence was always a grateful addition to company, never a drag on it. Further, the courtier had make his mastery of martial, hunting and artistic skills appear effortless as well as graceful. Castiglione describes it thus:

“I have found quite a universal rule which in this matter seems to me valid above all other, and in all human affairs whether in word or deed: and that is to avoid affectation in every way possible as though it were some rough and dangerous reef; and (to pronounce a new word perhaps) to practice in all thing a certain sprezzatura [nonchalance], so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”

Sprezzatura is a public performance, at the heart of which is paradox: the face assumes a mask of naturalness, naturalness as artifice, a contrived persona, fabricated to disguise the obsessive jousting for rank and status.

Melende masks the condition of total war that is Colend’s court, waged upon the battlefields of dinner parties, poetry recitations, court receptions, balls and certainly in the bedrooms. Melende’s weapons are wealth and fashion, wit and gesture, art (particularly the theater) and style, and the lethal poison of rumor and gossip. The melende code is part of the Colend state strategy that prefers the diplomacy and trade which fills the coffers and disdains the destructive expense of warriors and armies.

Another way to view the melende code that rules Colend's court is to see it as “a hieroglyphic world,” as Edith Wharton named polite society of the United States’ Gilded Age. Such a milieu demands stern control of personal verbal and physical expression, as well as exquisitely practiced skills to read the tiny clues embedded in tiny gestures, tiny color choices, tiny timbre change in laughter. This meticulous, constant cataloging of interpreted detail, the anxiety that every presentation and every reading be just right, builds the fuss and feathers atmosphere of the Colend court. There is a strong suggestion that despite the uncertainities, life away from the Colend court and its melende strictures, is a lot more interesting, and even a relief for more than one of our characters.