The Adventures of Thula

The Adventures of Thula was a series of five Sword & Sorcery tales featured in Lin Carter’s The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 1-5. Pat McIntosh, the Scottish author of these tales, was a mystery to me. Her stories appeared first in John Martin’s British fanzine Anduril but nowhere else. She was an obvious favorite of Lin’s, along with other women writers such as Tanith Lee, C. J. Cherryh and Janet Fox. He called McIntosh “…a new British writer bound to go places in the years to come!”

Falcon’s Mate

“Falcon’s Mate” (The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories, 1975) begins with Thula hiring on as a baby-sitter for a rich bride-to-be named Aneka. Her chances of delivering the bride become dicy when a strange supernatural being named Fenist comes for Aneka in the night. Thula’s sword holds him off even as she is frozen by a spell. Fenist promises to return and take his prize. Which he does, by kidnapping both women. Thula plays a Fantasy version of chess against the werefalcon, but loses. Aneka chooses to stay with Fenist, though Thula reminds her, “A friend has two edges.”

Cry Wolf

“Cry Wolf” (The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 2, 1976) has Thula fall in with two scruffy travelers, Barlach and Wolf. As a devotee of her temple, it is forbidden for her to sleep in the same room as men (or to have more intimate contact). Despite this, Thula throws in with them and shares a room at the inn. Later in the common room, where Wolf and Thula are eating dinner, a man with a crescent-shaped birthmark calls Wolf a werewolf. The people in the bar attack Wolf, taking him to the river to drown him. Thula rescues him , and Barlach who was knock unconscious at the inn.

Whenever she touches Wolf she gets visions of his past. She learns he has suffered at the hands of Gonseir, Wolf’s cousin and High King of the Westlands. Three ravens arrive with a message from the wizard’s council. Wolf has been cleared of the crimes Gonseir accused him of. The two men ride off, but Wolf promises their paths will cross again.

Ring of Black Stone

“Ring of Black Stone” (The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 3, 1977) begins with Thula coming upon an old woman and a young girl, Melagra. The mother and father have been killed and the older daughter, Melvia, taken by soldiers. The old woman is a witch and she knows she will die soon. She transfers her power to Thula. The trio go to the nearest town to find Melvia. On the road, the grandmother is killed when an elemental covers her in a rockslide. The elemental gives Melagra a ring of black stone to use on her enemies.

Once in town, Thula meets Captain Zarkas and Melvia. The two have married. Melagra, thinking Zarkas killed her family — something Zarkas denies, blaming in on the wild men known as The Eyries–gives Zarkas the black stone ring as a wedding present. The ring slowly creeps up the man’s arm every time he yells at his new wife. When it gets to his neck he begins to choke to death. Thula sees how much Melvia actually loves her man and uses love to reverse the spell.

In this tale, Thula becomes both swordswinger and sorceress. It is interesting to see her new powers grow in later stories.

The Cloak of Dreams

“The Cloak of Dreams” (The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 4, 1978) is almost a one-act play taking place inside a farm house. Thula is in the middle of a riddle that she must figure out. She is with an old crone and a pregnant girl named Iliena. The mother-to-be wants the father of her child, Gansser, who has mysteriously disappeared. Iliena’s mother is high priestess of the Temple and has cursed the union. The old crone presses Thula to use her new powers and a set of Tarot tiles. She must find the missing Gansser or Iliena will die in childbirth. In the end, the warrior-woman burns the cloak that Gansser gave her. Gansser appears and the mother’s curse is broken. The old crone and the others disappear, leaving Thula alone.

Like all the previous Thula stories McIntosh is character focused rather than action-oriented like most S&S writers. She weaves Tarot masterfully through this story (better than the similar use of Chess in the first story) at the same time she offers well-researched detail on agricultural life in times past.

Child of Air

“Child of Air” (The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 5, 1979) is the final showdown between the High King and his brother, Wolf. Thula is upset because some unknown person has bought her contract from the temple. She tries to divine who will affect her future with an air elemental but fails. The whiny creature continuously whines to be returned to its element. Thula soon learns it is Wolf’s brother, Gonseir, the High King, who has purchased her. He takes her to his castle and strips her.

Wolf comes to rescue her. He uses the air elemental to track her. Gonseir’s spell for hiding Thula fails because of Wolf’s connection to fire. Wolf claims Gonseir can not buy the swordswoman because she is his apprentice. Gonseir accepts this and the two wizards begin a duel. If Wolf loses, Gonseir can claim Thula. The two fight with their elements, water and fire. In the end, Wolf wins because Thula adds her small powers to his. Wolf relinquishes his claim over her as master, but Thula chooses to become his apprentice. Sadly, there are no tales of Thula the warrior woman who is also a mage. Sword & Sorcery at its finest!

McIntosh’s Magic

The entire series of five stories is a little unusual in what you might expect from a sub-genre that gave us Red Sonja. Thula does very little hacking and slashing. Only her rescue of Wolf at the river comes close to the battle-oriented fiction that some fans expect of S&S. By the second story the series moves away from physical combat for magic. This may be the influence of C. L. Moore, who created the first Sword & Sorcery female character in Jirel of Joiry. That series, too, was more often about magic than bone-crunching fight scenes.

Conclusion

Pat McIntosh did not disappear after the adventures of Thula. She went on to write the successful Medieval Murder Mystery series about Gilbert and Alys Cunningham, eleven novels between 2004 and 2016. The Thula stories have never been collected or continued.

McIntosh’s amazonian Thula may have been part of the inspiration for Janet Fox’s Scorpia and Deborah Wheeler’s Tyr Swordsister. I suspect not, since Anduril wasn’t easily available in the US. Instead I think they all hail from the same female Valhalla. Descendants of Jirel, the contents of just about any of the Sword & Sorceress anthologies harken back to Thula and her kind. Oddly, Thula never appeared in Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s Amazons! series of anthologies.