Anybody else remember Sword & Sorceress, the yearly anthology of fantasy stories (always with a female protagonist) that Marion Zimmer Bradley edited for DAW Books from about 1985 till her death? If so, I’m hoping you can help me track down an author and series of stories. The protagonist of these stories was a black woman who rode a war-bull; she was a defrocked member of a group of quasi-Amazon bodyguards for a king, and had been exiled from her native land because the sacred tree which supposedly contained her soul had been burned down, and her continued survival was a religious contradiction. I’m thinking the author might be Charles de Lint, but I’m not sure why I think so.
If anyone recalls the tales about this character and can point me to any information on it, I’d be grateful.
I don’t remember that one specifically, but I stopped reading them after about 8 or 9. Here’s a site with a list of all the S&S short stories: http://feministsf.org/anths/anthss.html#sword1
You rock, WhyNot. I take back all the slanderous canards I’ve been spreading about you and at first opportunity* shall scratch out the obscene limerick I wrote about you in the men’s bathrooms in FedEx Forum.
I was almost certain my De Lint memory was wrong; it was Charles Saunders, and the stories appeared in the first few S & S anthologies (which I agree got less, ah, professional in the writing as they proceeded. I blame Aquaman.
*“First opportunty” = no later than one month from now. “Scratch out” = [del]Pretending to obliterate but actually drawing a single line through it like this so people can still read it though technically I’ve kept my word.[/del]