Hello everyone!
For my last "regular" sort of book review before we dive right into all the Christmas stuff next week, I chose another game-related title.
As you may or may not remember, I became a big fan of Assassin's Creed when I accidentally stumbled over a gameplay on Youtube. Since then, I've gotten to about three quarters of both Odyssey and Origins, and need to just buckle down to finish the lot.
Shouldn't be too difficult.
In the meantime, however, I was delighted to find that the original Assassin's Creed novel content creator, Oliver Bowden, had written a prequel for his series.
Now I've had the rest of the books on a back burner for a bit, and haven't gotten around to reading them yet, so I may do it now with the holidays looming up ahead. However, this one can be read as a standalone, and you don't need to know what goes on in the other books to understand it.
We do run into fan favourites and characters from the game, though.
Don't fall down into a sand dune, it's time for Assassin's Creed Origins: Desert Oath.
You'll find a link to my other Assassin's Creed review at the bottom of this page, as always when there's anything remotely linked to what I'm typing up!
In Desert Oath, we first run into a killer that seems to be taking out the Medjay bloodlines, which is scary enough in itself, but we all know that one of our all-time favourites, Bayek, is ALSO a Medjay, so obviously this is a big problem for him.
Not that he thinks that way in that moment in time.
He's around fifteen/sixteen years old when our book begins, he's just starting to embark on his little romance with Aya (daughter of two Alexandrian scholars) and his father Sabu just won't really train him to be protector of Siwa.
Then Sabu suddenly gets called away and rides off into the unknown, and nobody knows a thing, which prompts Bayek to head out after the messenger to try and learn what the message was (against the wishes of his mother, but she eventually relents).
He catches up to the messenger and makes friends with a boy named Tuta, who tricks him into a trap laid for both the messenger and Bayek, though Bayek escapes, with no real knowledge about where Sabu's gone because the message made no sense, and goes for vengeance against Tuta's father who'd orchestrated the whole thing.
There, Aya pops up and slams a brick over the older man's head, and the three kids hightail it out of there to travel to Thebes and see whether or not they can find any information there about a certain tribe of Nubians whom Bayek is friendly with.
They also deliver Tuta to his mother and sister, who had left the patriarch because of his drunken and violent rages, and for a time life seems to be pretty good, for all of them.
Until the father shows up again and mortally wounds Tuta, prompting Bayek to go out and hunt the man so that he can exact vengeance and make sure there's no possibility of him ever hurting anyone again (you guessed it: death, obviously).
Meanwhile, they HAVE actually found the Nubians, and went on a rescue mission for one of the tribe members Kensa needed help with (Kensa being the one who originally taught Bayek all he needed to know about hunting, etc.), with a grave robber who also has history with Bayek's family: back in the day, they tried invading the tombs at Siwa but ran into Sabu, and so they raided his home, prompting terrible memories for Bayek and his mother to kill someone in his room.
Now he gets his revenge as they eradicate these grave robbers, but after Tuta's death, Bayek and Aya feel a little bit lost until Kensa tells them that there is, apparently, a Medjay in prison somewhere nearby.
The Medjay is supposed to be Sabu.
A little note about why Sabu's in prison: at this point in time, even in Bayek's youth, Egypt is struggling between old traditions and new cycles, the two sides clashing and warring, and especially the Medjay are being hunted, and have been for years. There's only a few of them left, but even they seem to be disappearing, which means they're pretty much dinosaurs at this point.
And still, they persist.
Just like Bayek, Aya and Kensa's Nubians, who go to free Sabu, only to learn it ISN'T actually Sabu in the prison cell, but someone Sabu planted there to draw out the Medjay killer - though of course his secretive ways backfire on him because things might have been a whole lot easier if he'd just TALKED to Bayek some, not let the boy come to his own conclusions and try and rescue a father who doesn't need rescuing.
Anyway!
The group are attacked by the Medjay killer, but are lucky in the sense that they manage to wound him and so he draws off. Sabu knows it isn't the end, however, and finally decides to start Bayek's training, as both protector and Medjay, and together with Aya the two men spend most of their time hiding out in the desert from the killer while the Nubians go their own way.
So years pass, and Bayek announces to his father he wants to marry Aya, among other things.
Aight, says Sabu, not that Aya's on board with this.
In fact, she straight-out tells Bayek no, that she plans to go back to Alexandria to her parents, and that she broke one of Sabu's rules and messaged Siwa to learn her aunt was sick, and she's leaving to go tend to her. Also, psych, there IS no Medjay killer, just Sabu's imagination, because why else would it have been years and years?
So she heads off, and unknowingly actually runs into said Medjay killer at a well where she's attacked by horse thieves, and he helps her, but then she goes her own separate way while in the desert, Bayek and Sabu argue.
Bayek is frustrated about many things, but mostly his father's inability to see beyond his own son and to the fact that he's ready to become a Medjay - in fact, Sabu only gives Bayek the medallion each Medjay wears when his son is practically walking away, but their tender moment is interrupted when the killer pops up and starts a battle with them.
It ends in tragedy: Sabu sacrifices himself so Bayek could live, and Bayek ends up floating off with the current of the Nile, somehow managing to evade both crocodiles and hippos, and ending up on a boat of an elderly couple who nurse him back to help.
He then hightails it back to Siwa, sensing that Aya's in danger, and in reality she is, because the killer has beat him to it and is making friendly with the girl. While she doesn't trust him whatsoever, he's still much too close for comfort by the time Bayek arrives and the final showdown begins. The killer explains that Aya must die, too, because she's pregnant with Bayek's child and he was tasked with eradicating the Medjay; he also tells Bayek who hired him (an old army comrade whom the killer owed a life debt to) and then passes on.
Bayek and Aya marry and have a son, Khemu, and Bayek knows he's the last of the Medjay who will always be hunted in this new regime that's trying to rise, because the killer had previously also done away with the old Medjay leader who actually led him to Sabu and Bayek.
He's also on his way to make sure that the old comrade of the killer's meets his end too, so that Bayek's young family can be safe.
And with that, a legend is born out of the desert sands!
Unlike with Odyssey, this book doesn't cover game material but instead focuses on a time BEFORE the game, when Bayek's life still seems to be relatively simple. He's trying to be the best son he can be, to impress his father and learn the ropes of an ancient tradition that's basically his destiny, and starting on his joint path with Aya.
Aya, though, I have a problem with.
In the game, she's honestly pretty awesome, even though she and Bayek spend most of their time apart, but she's portrayed as this fierce, talented, intelligent, and most of all LOYAL creature who will move mountains for her husband. In this book, however, there's no sign of that particular person. Instead, there's a petulant teenager who eventually grows into an insolent young woman; for some reason, she values the two scholar parents who dumped her with her aunt so they could work uninterrupted more than Bayek, and constantly tries to convince Bayek that what he's thinking and what he believes is outdated and wrong. Never in their conversations does she indicate that she MIGHT be willing to compromise - it's either going to be her way, or no way, and it leaves both the reader (and Bayek) completely bewildered.
Especially when we learn she's pregnant (also, HOW did the killer know this before any of the women? He wasn't a farmer as far as I know, so just ... how?), because I wonder what she would have done if Bayek hadn't come after her. Had the child all on her own? Not going to work, not in Egypt at the time. She's portrayed as an independent woman, but sadly this isn't how society worked back then. Women were little more than property in those times, as bad as it sounds, but it's just how it was - so there's no way she could have done it alone.
Yes, Bayek was a little bit clumsy in how he got himself into certain predicaments, but the thing is that he could see things more clearly than Aya: her parents really didn't give a rat's ass about her, so why should he worry about them? For that matter, why DID she worry about them so much? And honestly, she was just a stuck-up know-it-all who had no clue, who almost ended up killed out of her sheer stupidity, and who expected Bayek to bend to her every whim while she just laughed and did nothing to contribute to the equal measure of the relationship.
Ironically, she ends up being exactly who she didn't want to be: a brood mare for the Medjay, because she lands herself with Bayek's kid. What did she THINK was going to happen with the way she and Bayek were spending their spare time? That's what I'd like to know.
Okay, so my point is that we see most of the Bayek we know and love from the game in this book, but we see a completely different Aya who wants nothing more than to run off and have nothing to do with something that is extremely important to Bayek and which he values; she doesn't even make an effort to like it for his sake. So how this particular character turns into the Aya who's actually likeable in the game, I have no clue, though maybe she's unlikeable there too and I just haven't been paying attention?
As a whole, however, this is a fast-paced, captivating and entertaining read that provides some solid backstory for Bayek, and I encourage you to read it and form your own opinions on things.
And once you're done, check out Tmartn2's channel on Youtube, specifically his Assassin's Creed: Origins gameplay.
You won't be disappointed with either!
xx
*image not mine
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