payment page
Summary
Part Two: No Laws Beyond These, Chapters 6-7
H.S. Curie journal entry
Curie relays the Scythe Commandments, which are the only laws the scythes must follow. These rules forbid having spouses, children, and personal possessions beyond a robe, ring, and journal. They also require scythes to kill the families of those who resist being gleaned, and they prevent them from killing any other scythe except for themselves. Curie admits to reflecting on the Commandments often and being profoundly disturbed by the tenth one, which places scythes above all other laws. The history behind the Commandments is lost to time.
Chapter 6: An Elegy of Scythes
On what seems like an ordinary flight ready to take off, a businessman watches a group of scythes, called an elegy, board the plane. The scythes wear elaborate robes covered in jewels. He has heard rumors that scythes will glean the person in a random seat they select, and he hopes they don’t choose his seat. One stewardess flees, and the scythes announce they will glean everyone on the plane. The businessman and other passengers try to flee the plane but abandon the idea once the scythes remind them they will glean their families as punishment for resisting. The leader of the scythes tells the businessman he will allow him to choose the order in which they kill everyone since he showed decisiveness. The businessman refuses because he can tell the scythes are looking forward to the slaughter. He shouts for others to kill themselves and then thrusts himself into the lead scythe’s weapon to deny him the pleasure of the kill.
H.S. Curie journal entry
Curie notes that scythes rarely wear anything other than their robes, even though nothing prevents them from wearing more contemporary clothing. She asserts that the distinction in appearance is necessary for scythes to do their work as they must maintain a separation between themselves and the rest of humanity. Unlike other people in uniform, scythes are never off the clock.
Chapter 7: Killcraft
Faraday commences training Citra and Rowan. His otherwise simple home has an elaborate and impressive weapons den, encompassing everything from firearms to blades to poisons. They train with weapons and in a scythe martial art called Black Widow Bokator. They also study a range of academic disciplines, from history to chemistry, and maintain apprentice journals. Faraday also teaches them that scythes must glean a quota of people annually and insists that not all scythes are good, a lesson that disturbs Citra and Rowan. Before now, they had never heard of a bad scythe. Faraday likes to be creative with his methods, never repeating them, but admits other scythes are more ritualistic. Regardless of preference, Citra and Rowan must become proficient in all of the killcrafts.
Citra and Rowan both struggle with the demands of being an apprentice, though in different ways. Citra cries herself to sleep at night, disturbed by the people they have gleaned. Used to keeping his thoughts private, Rowan particularly objects to the journaling requirement, despite the privacy afforded to them as apprentices. He and Citra often bicker and compete, yet Rowan finds himself drawn to her. One day, the homesick Citra receives permission to attend a family wedding, but she finds the experience disappointing. Her immediate family is distant with her, and she feels like an outsider. She returns to Faraday early and suspects that he granted her permission for the visit because he anticipated her dissatisfaction.
H.S. Curie journal entry
Curie admits that despite their vocation, scythes do not know everything about death. Curie relates a gleaning experience in which someone asked what would happen to them after death. The scythe was able to provide factual logistical details—that they would add the person’s memory construct to the Thunderhead and return the body to surviving relatives—but she proved unable to describe what happens to someone beyond that.
Analysis
The murky ethics of being a scythe are exposed by the juxtaposition of the Scythe Commandments and Faraday’s training program. As Curie’s journal notes, the Commandments are the only rules scythes must answer to, and the rules provide much leeway. Technically, nothing that occurs during the mass gleaning on the airplane is a violation of the rules, but the tone is very different from the dignified, respectful approach Citra and Rowan witness in Faraday’s gleanings. The scythes who conduct the mass gleaning have no respect for their victims and clearly enjoy the bloodshed. Faraday insists that his apprentices will make good scythes precisely because they are not eager or willing to take life. The scene on the plane also demonstrates his warning that not all scythes are good, and the notion of an amoral or even immoral scythe unsettles Rowan and Citra. At this point in the narrative, Curie remains unidentified, but Faraday’s approach clearly meshes more with this as-yet-unknown scythe’s philosophies versus those of the group of flashy scythes who relish violence and treat the people they glean with barely concealed contempt.
The Scythedom’s use of Commandments without any apparent belief in an afterlife and Faraday’s peculiar day-to-day habits continue to illustrate the post-mortal world’s confused adaptation of mortal-age culture. In her journal, Curie admits to being unsure of what happens to people after they die, and the practical description offered to the inquisitive soon-to-be-gleaned woman suggests no particular religious system. Still, the Scythe Commandments borrow so heavily from the biblical Ten Commandments that they even use the archaic wording of “shalt,” “thy,” and “thou” used in the King James Bible. In a world that prides itself on its advancements beyond mortal-age knowledge and culture, the scythes continue to cling to select parts of it. Faraday’s training methods also suggest an attachment to mortal-age thought. Rowan considers Faraday’s use of a desk and traditional physical journals outdated throwbacks to the Age of Mortality. This aspect of scythe training clicks more naturally for Citra than Rowan, as evidenced by his jealous realization that she has studied traditional penmanship.
The euphemistic language used both by scythes and regular people to discuss killing illustrates how detached the post-mortal world has become toward death. Throughout the narrative, scythes “glean” rather than kill, the euphemistic language disguising the reality of their actions. By contrast, the Scythe Commandments bluntly label their work as killing. Indeed, not once do the Commandments reference gleaning, which suggests that the scythe habit of calling their work “gleaning” postdates the earliest scythes and may be part of the lost history Curie references. Moreover, the businessman at the mass gleaning on the airplane recognizes that what the bloodthirsty scythes are doing is wholesale slaughter. Nonetheless, nobody is willing to admit that this is what they’re experiencing, and everyone continues to refer to the event as a mass gleaning. This tension between gleaning and killing suggests that both ordinary people and scythes in this post-mortal world have lost sight of the reality of death.
Despite the ways in which the Scythe Commandments bind them, the mass gleaning reveals that scythes have developed their own norms and culture apart from the dictates of these Commandments. The businessman and Faraday alike both know that scythes are not supposed to enjoy their work, but that is never directly codified in the Commandments. Likewise, per Faraday, scythes must meet an annual quota, but the Commandments make no mention of such a thing. Clearly, customs beyond the Commandments guide the work of the scythes, perhaps more than they wish to acknowledge. The presence of these additional customs suggests that, as with all human endeavors, the reality of being a scythe is far more complex than the established rules can adequately address. Still, the tension between the dictates of the Commandments, which ironically manage to be both so precise and so vague, and the lived reality of scythe practices fuels much of the scythe factionalism introduced later in the book.
