Not exactly the three musketeers
Joel Rosenberg
325 pages
1999 - États-Unis
SF, Fantasy - Roman
Intérêt: 0
Ce roman de l'écrivain américain Joel Rosenberg, auteur
d'une série d'héroic-fantasy intitulée Guardians of
the flame, est caractéristique du genre:
aventures guerrières dans une société médiévale
agrémentée de sorciers et de dragons télépathes... Sans
grande originalité, le livre raconte l'histoire de trois
soldats chargés d'une mission apparemment anodine, et
qui révéleront, après force duels et massacres, un
complot contre l'Empire.
 Le lien avec l'oeuvre
de Dumas tient bien sûr au titre (Pas vraiment les
trois mousquetaires), d'autant plus étrange que
sa justification ne saute pas aux yeux.
Les héros sont certes au nombre de trois, mais le dos de
couverture, en les présentant brièvement, conclut:
"Athos, Porthos and Aramis they're not" (ils ne sont pas
Athos, Porthos et Aramis). De fait, les quelques points
communs avec les personnages de Dumas sont mêlés à
d'autres caractéristiques bien différentes. Kethol a
peut-être l'idéalisme et le sens de l'honneur d'Athos,
mais il est aussi passablement stupide. Durine a la
force de Porthos, mais il est rusé. Pirojil a
l'intelligence d'Aramis, mais sa laideur est
terrifiante...
Quant à d'Artagnan, il n'apparaît nullement, sauf si
l'on considère que le sorcier escroc qui se joint aux
trois guerriers évoque le quatrième mousquetaire.
Si l'on ajoute que les héros du roman sont violents,
joueurs et ne reculent pas devant les opérations les
plus louches pour arrondir leur réserve de pièces d'or,
même s'ils éprouvent une grande fidélité envers leurs
maîtres, peut-être faut-il arriver à la conclusion que
le titre du roman est à prendre au premier degré, comme
un simple hommage à l'archétype des romans d'aventures.
Le livre, en tout état de cause, est très inférieur à
l'autre excellente série d'héroic-fantasy inspirée,
elle, très directement par Les trois mousquetaires,
celle de Steven Brust avec The Phoenix
guards, Five
Hundred Years After et The viscount of
Adrilankha.
Extrait du chapitre 2 The Dowager Empress
When they stayed in Biemestren, the three rented a pair
of rooms at a rooming house near the imperial barracks,
just down the hill, at the base of the road that led up
to the keep which dominated the city below.
It was far enough away from the Biemestren refuse heap
that they didn't have too many rats, and a row of
two-story buildings provided enough shade that their
rooms didn't heat up too much during the day.
For a small bribe to the cooks, a fresh, covered tray
from the soldiers' mess arrived twice a day, which kept
them out of the way of the officers. House Guard
officers all too often felt that they had to keep
billeted baronial troops busy with doing something, and
Pirojil had mucked out enough stalls, cleaned and oiled
enough polearms, and walked enough extra guard patrols
in his time.
Besides that, their pair of rooms gave them a private
enough place to share an occasional whore brought up
from the city. Safer than a dungtown brothel, and
cheaper, too, when you split the cost three ways.
Arranging for the rooms had taken a bit of the sort of
barracks politics that Kethol always despised aloud,
that he said his father, a soldier-turned-huntsman, used
to swear was the ruin of good soldiering, but Pirojil
didn't much mind when such things brought the sort of
privacy that he and the other two liked for their own
private reasons.
If Durine was moved by it, or by anything else, he
didn't show it. It was the usual pattern: Kethol
complained, Pirojil endured, and Durine didn't mind. Or
at least he didn't mind aloud, not even to the other
two.
It was one thing, of course, to be a private soldier,
another to be a valued retainer, and yet another to be
an expendable baronial man-at-arms in an age when
private loyalties were being dissolved in an imperial
soup, like overcooked turnips turning into textureless
mush.
Pirojil had been a soldier long enough not to flinch at
eating what was set before him, but he had been raised
far away, in a house where one ate with one's backside
on a well-carved -chair and one's boots on a polished
wooden floor, not on stools on packed dirt, and he had
been used to dishes cooked properly and separately, each
having its own character, not thrown in a pot to be
turned into indistinguishable, neutral mush.
Pirojil had little use for mush, in any sense. If he had
to be somebody's hireling, and he clearly did, he'd
rather serve the Cullinanes, each of whose faces he
knew, and not some dough-faced dowager empress or, much
worse, an empire. You could put yourself in the way of a
sword - and he had - thinking that it was your job to
protect the sleeping children of the man who made sure
you were housed and fed, or you could do it for the food
and housing and money...
But not for a faceless mush of an empire.
Durine shook his massive head as he sorted through the
gems and coins scattered across the rough-hewn surface
of the table. "It looked better on the street," he said.
"But it's still an edible piece of meat."
"Well," Pirojil said, "if it fills the belly, it will
serve."
"Aye," Kethol said.
They never spoke among themselves about money and
valuables, except by indirection. You did the best you
could to be sure you weren't overheard, but maybe the
best wasn't enough, and it was of a certainty that
uncountable throats and bellies had been slit for much
less than this.
Pirojil picked up one gem, a fine amber garnet with only
a minor flaw, and that just a speck close to the
surface. It probably hadn't been visible when mounted.
Fairly cheap gems, certainly - he had hardly expected to
find Durine taking a bag of rubles and diamonds off a
pair of street thieves - but the garnets were good, and
the crimson quartz was superb.
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