The Adventure of the Demonic, Ox
Lois McMaster Bujold
Career planning
The Adventure of the Demonic Ox is the 14th book (by publication order) in Lois McMaster Bujold‘s Penric and Desdemona series. Penric is now a respectable pater familias. His household holds three children: daughters Otta (11) and Rina (12) and son Wyn (9). (I’m not sure of any of those ages, but they should all be in the right ballparks.) Wyn and Rina are, I believe, Penric and his wife Nikys’s biological children. Otta is a very young sorceress. That means only that she harbors a chaos demon, which she has named Atto. Penric and Nikys adopted her so that she could receive the kind of care and training a sorceress needs. Also, Penric’s own demon Desdemona looks on Atto as her own daughter. That story was told in Demon Daughter.
To me, 11, 9, and 12 seem young for career planning, but that, more than anything, is what Demonic Ox is about. To be sure, there is a plot involving an ox that has contracted a demon. More surprising, the careerism comes not at parental impulse, but from the kids themselves. Wyn is working with his uncle Rodoa (Nikys’s brother), a master stone-worker currently building a bridge. Wyn is enjoying that, so he has a natural path to an apprenticeship. As a young sorceress, Otta’s career options are circumscribed, but attractive.
Most of the story is told from the point of view of Rina, who is not thrilled with her prospects. Penric’s family inhabits a conservative agrarian society, where women have few options. (Bret Deveraux reminds me that inhabitants of such social systems “make up a simply majority of all humans who have ever lived“, which makes their prevalence in Fantasy a little less annoying.) To be precise, everyone has few options, but women have fewer than men. Any career a woman might consider must take into account the possibility of child-bearing.
Demonic Ox is thus less exciting and action-packed than the average Penric and Desdemona story. It also has less of the Pen/Des banter we fans love. It’s a slice of life story from the 5GW.