n the Earl of Verset's Grosper Palace, in the land of Alsonia, lived three physically identical young women, naturally born triplets, all possessed of mysterious mind powers, as was their mother. Drucilla, Tamara and Sabina, while identical on the outside and frequently in unison mentally as well, exhibited different personalities. Tamara was something of the leader, and adept at swordplay. Sabina knows healing herbs and the past glories of the land. Drucilla sees patterns and can bring them forth. The three royal ladies have spent all their lives till now in a world of ceremony and ease. Their powers have been hardly tested. But all that is to change.
Young and inexperienced King Arvor has taken on a new adviser, a priest named Chosen Forfind. This brutal and dogmatic figure counsels against such witches as the trio of girls and seems bent on conducting a pogrom to root them out. When the girls offend some officials visiting Grosper Palace, Chosen Forfind and his minions have a pretext to act, however illegally. The girls are spirited away in the night by a hired brigand and dumped over the edge of the known lands, into an underworld called the Dismals.
In the Dismals, the three seemed doomed to perish at the hands of the many monsters that live there. But they are rescued at first by a red catlike creature named Climber, and then by Climber's master, a human youth named Zolan. How Zolan came to the Dismals, and why he alone survives, is a mystery.
As the women get to know the place that they are seemingly doomed to inhabit for the rest of their lives, some of the mystery is explained. Zolan is under protection of the last living native sentient of the Dismals, an individual named Pharsali. When the girls meet Pharsali of the Jar People, she informs them that an evil Jugged One named Tharn has migrated to the human world, masquerading as Chosen Forfind. Tharn's plan: to open old interdimensional barriers and flood the human world with monsters.
Only Zolan and the triplets can possibly stop Tharn. But first they have to escape the pitfalls of the Dismals, a place from which no one has ever returned.
Final words from a Grand Master
Andre Norton, as most readers of this page probably already know, died recently at the age of 93, leaving behind well over 100 books bearing her name. Her reputation and influence will long outlive her in the generations of readers and writers she so deeply affected. I myself cut my teeth on her books, and still recall them with much pleasure.
In the publicity material accompanying Three Hands for Scorpio, editor Jim Frenkel relates that Norton believed this was to be her last novel, and it appears that her intuition was correct. As a capstone to the edifice of her career, it is not unambitious or utterly unsuccessful. But it is hardly her strongest work, nor will it change the shape of her oeuvre.
Splitting the protagonist point of view among three linked women is an admirable bit of experimentation. It allows, of course, for the narrative to continue even if one of the sisters is offstage or otherwise indisposed. But the sisters all sound identical in their first-person voices, and so the effect is muted. Other trademark Norton tropes are present—the frissons of antiquity; animal-human bonding; the hard lessons that lead to maturation—but are not plumbed as deeply as elsewhere in her canon. The best portion of the book, in fact, is the girls' Robinsonade in the Dismals, under the tutelage of the Tarzan-like Zolan.
What Norton rather mistakenly devotes most of her wordage to is her invented system of magic, which, as often as we think we've grasped it, turns out to have another overly complexified angle to it. The continually shifting circus of Sendings and other mystical effects eventually subsumes plot and character. It's like playing a Dungeons & Dragons game with no goals, only recitations of the rulebook. Norton has gotten seduced by her own inventiveness. The magic does not exist for the characters, but vice versa.
Add to this the fact that the villain of this piece is hardly to be seen onstage—Tharn appears only in the final few pages of the book, to be neatly disposed of—and you get a book that comes ever so close to evoking Norton's glory days, but falls short due to a faltering of strength and direction.
No shame to the Mistress of High Halleck, though. At her age, after what she's given us, she deserves our indulgence.
