When I all weary had the chase forsook,
I finished Crusader’s Torch last night. It was ok, I guess.
Like Yarbro’s other books, this is a very accurate and rather dry piece of historical fiction, with the main character being a vampire for no reason. I won’t harp too much on the fact that her vampirism once again doesn’t actually affect the plot at all, except to help us modern readers identify with her more. As usual, the story is about this vampire wanting to get out of a certain place and being unable to. Unlike the previous book in this series, instead of being stuck in one city for the entire book, it’s more of a road story; she wants to get from Tyre, an unpleasant place to be during the crusades, to Rome, her home. She has to deal with the usual religious bureaucrats, misogyny and in this case the issues relating to the crusades, on her travel to Rome. Also as usual, we’re introduced to a disease which is a mystery to those in the book but it recognizable by modern readers as porphyria, which afflicts Octavia’s traveling partner, getting them both branded as lepers. She eventually gets to Rome.
One thing I’ve enjoyed about these books is that they don’t fall into the trap which I’ve seen in a lot of historical fiction: that of having the main characters invent anachronistic devices. I don’t know how many times the lazy author of historical fiction has had their characters escape from a sticky situation by having them suddenly come up with the idea for the compass, or Greek fire, or gunpowder. Harry Harrison’s “Hammer and Cross” books were particularly bad in this respect, but I’ve seen it in a lot of other places as well. Yarbro does use Octavia’s great age (I think 500 years) as a way to have her know a lot about medicine or horses or things like that, but she never has her inventing the linked list in order to escape from a jail.
I’m now reading Robert Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky. This is a good book.