Goa

✍ Scribed by Kara Dalkey

• Publisher: Tor
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 131 KB
• Series: Blood of the Goddess 1
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

From Publishers Weekly

Portugal's exotic colony of Goa, on India's western
shore, was in the 16th century the farthest-flung outpost of Europe's fiercest
and longest-lasting Inquisition. Here, historical fantasist Dalkey (The
Nightingale) uses it as backdrop for an exemplary start to a new series. En
route to Cathay on an Elizabethan privateer to establish trade in Oriental
medicines, apothecary's apprentice Thomas Chinnery, an engaging young
Englishman, stumbles upon, but then loses, a sorcerer's vial of powder that can
resurrect the dead. In an obsessive quest for this unholy grail, Thomas follows
his only link to it, the enigmatic Hindu beauty Aditi, through Goa's teeming
multiracial byways, until he is trapped and interrogated under torture by the
colony's fearsome Holy Office, whose Inquisitor Major, Domine Rui Sadrinho, is
also hellbent on finding the eerie powder. Under investigation himself for
practices even the Portuguese Grand Inquisitor finds irregular, Sadrinho needs
the drug to extend beyond death the agonies he relishes inflicting in the name
of the Church. Dalkey's meticulous research pays off in ravishing atmospherics
that highlight the aromas, sights, sounds and traditions that shroud malevolent
European church-and-mercantile-state power politics on a mysterious
subcontinent. Every bit as absorbing is the author's rich tapestry of
characters, from Timoteo, a 13-year-old monk whose irresistible innocence is the
Inquisitor Major's most effective torture device, to sinister Father Antonio
Gonscao, the Machiavellian special envoy of the Grand Inquisitor. Dalkey serves
an exotic repast here, one that, like the exquisite spices of the Indies, tempts
the palate with tantalizing hints of wonders yet to come.

***

From Booklist

Here comes another historical fantasy trilogy, Blood of
the Goddess. The setting is late-sixteenth-to early-seventeenth-century
India-specifically, the Portuguese colony Goa. A young English apothecary meets
an alchemist with a strange powder that can restore life to the dead. In its
pursuit of heretics, a singularly corrupt Inquisition becomes involved in
things; a mysterious lady aids and betrays arbitrarily; and merchants from
Europe, the Arab nations, and the Mughal Empire all put their oars in. The
resulting book displays fine historical scholarship and a good deal of sound
characterization, but the sheer mass of erudition sometimes slows the pace
unduly. This is an encouraging beginning, however-one likely to draw enough
readers from the ranks of historical fantasy fandom to be a popular addition to
most collections.

***

From Kirkus Reviews

Hardcover debut and first of a projected historical
fantasy trilogy, from the author of The Nightingale, etc. In 1597, young
English apothecary's apprentice Thomas Chinnery voyages toward China in search
of rare herbs and curatives. Off Goa, a Portuguese colony in western India, his
ship intercepts a small galleon that's being pursued by a Portuguese warship;
aboard are the mysterious Lady Aditi and the sorcerer Bernardo De Cartago, from
whom Thomas takes a small phial of dried blood-blood that, he soon discovers,
has the power to raise the dead. Then, betrayed by his shipmate Andrew
Lockheart, Thomas is captured and brought before the Inquisition in Goa.
Lockheart, now dressed as a monk, tries to use the blood to raise De Cartago,
already several days dead. The Portuguese, preoccupied by a power struggle
between the Grand Inquisitor, Rui Sadrinho, and Special Envoy Antonio Gonscao,
sent from Lisbon to investigate the doings of the Inquisition, demand to be told
the source of the blood. Poor Thomas, tortured anyway as a heretic and sorcerer,
admits that De Cartago (now dead again through an insufficiency in the
restorative) gave him a map and hinted as to the location of the source.
Whereupon the dangerously obsessed Sadrinho organizes an expedition, including
Thomas, Lockheart, Gonscao, and a disguised Aditi. Splendid characters,
intriguing historical details, fascinating cultures, and agreeably restrained
sorceries: a highly auspicious launch.