44 pages • 1 hour read
Rebecca RoanhorseBlack Sun
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The book counts down toward a convergence, where the return of the old crow god is prophesized.
Ten years before the convergence, Serapio’s mother Saaya makes him drink a milky white herbal tea which acts as both analgesic and poison. His mother, from the Carrion Crow clan, believes she is turning him into a god. She wears formal dress, including a collar of crow feathers, and paints his teeth red with dye. Earlier that day, she cut a haahan (sacred symbol) of crow wings on his back and a crow skull at the base of his throat. The haahan symbolizes perpetual mourning for what the clan has lost. Serapio stares at the sun during a solar eclipse, which in the crow religion is a sign that the crow god is holding sway over the world at that moment. His mother brings him inside and ties him to a chair. She hangs a bag of powder around his neck and sews his eyes shut permanently. She tells him that once he’s learned to see without his eyes, he must go to the central city of Tova and become a god. Serapio’s father pounds on the door; Saaya kisses Serapio’s forehead and jumps from their terrace to her death.
Chapter 2 Summary
Twenty days before the convergence, Xiala wakes up in jail in Cuecola with a terrible hangover. She gets the attention of one of the guards by banging on the door to the cellblock with her shoe. The guard takes her shoe and tells her she’ll have to wait for the tupile (constable) to decide what to do with her. Xiala naps and the constable arrives with a merchant lord, Lord Balam.
At first, Xiala thinks she is in jail because another merchant lord, Lord Pech, for whom she worked, had tried to not pay her for cargo which had spoiled on the ship’s journey. He claimed that her people, Teek, were essentially half-animal, and that she was at fault for the ruined goods. Annoyed, Xiala threw him into the sea.
However, it turns out that she is incarcerated because she picked up another woman while drunk at a cantina; the woman’s husband found her with his wife and caused a scene. The penalty is death.
Lord Balam bribes the constable and gets Xiala out of jail. As they walk, he asks her to take a ship with Serapio in it to Tova, the religious heart of the continent, and to do it in twenty days over stormy open water. Balam offers Xiala a job for twelve years, at the end of which she would be paid in full.
Chapter 3 Summary
The day of the convergence, Naranpa (Nara) is in the Coyote’s Maw neighborhood in the city of Tova, being dragged from the river by a witch and her two apprentices. As she goes in and out of consciousness, she remembers growing up poor in Coyote’s Maw; her parents sent her to be a servant to the priesthood in the celestial tower. There are four major clans in Tova, and they each send a priestly delegation to the celestial tower to rule the city together. Her siblings argue among themselves about which clan they would want to join, if they could. Naranpa’s parents chide them to be aware of their place in the world and that they will likely never be able to rise far. Since childhood, Naranpa has not returned to the Coyote’s Maw neighborhood to see what became of her family, but she assumes that they are all dead. She remembers rising through the ranks as a servant, dedicant, priest, and as the Sun Priest, the head of the entire priesthood. She realizes that her motivation for her actions throughout her life is faith in Tova.
Chapter 4 Summary
Twenty days before the convergence, in the city of Tova, Naranpa gathers at dawn with the rest of the priesthood for a procession through the city to show the inhabitants that the priesthood care. Before the convergence, which happens on the winter solstice, the priesthood usually enter twenty days of fasting and penance. The priests put on masks; Naranpa wears one designed to look like the Sun. Naranpa sees the priesthood as the force that unifies the disparate peoples and clans who live on the continent; one of her goals as Sun Priest is to unify them.
As they walk, one of the dedicants takes ill crossing a large bridge, and Naranpa stops to help them. They arrive together in the Odo district, home to the Carrion Crow clan. The Carrion Crow blame the priesthood for the Night of Knives, a mass killing of leaders of each clan which took place two generations prior. Some members of Carrion Crow worship an old god. The priesthood are welcomed coolly in Odo; when they cross into the Kun, home to the Winged Serpent clan, they are greeted warmly.
When the procession stops for lunch, an attacker dressed like a servant attempts to stab Naranpa with an obsidian knife. One of the other priests saves her and kills the attacker. Beneath his robes, the attacker has scarification in the shape of Carrion Crow’s emblem.
Chapter 5 Summary
The priests finish their procession and return to the celestial tower, where they symbolically lock the door to begin the sequestration which will last until the solstice. Naranpa retreats to her room, where she is protected by one of the other priests, Iktan. They discuss the assassination attempt and Iktan reveals that there was a previous attempt as well, which was kept from Naranpa. Annoyed, Naranpa sends Iktan away to rest.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
These initial chapters set up the interlocking narratives which will form the central structure of the novel. Each chapter is prefaced by the number of days until the convergence, serving as a cue for where the reader is in the scope of the narrative. Because there are a number of threaded stories, the preface also serves to anchor individual characters’ flashbacks—and, in Chapter 3, a flash-forward to the very end of the story.
Chapter 1 serves as the inciting incident for the primary plot arc: Serapio’s purpose in visiting Tova and his subsequent violent attack would not have happened without Serapio’s mother, who marks him by carving symbols into his body and sewing his eyes shut. It’s also the first time that the reader sees the symbols of the Carrion Crow clan which recur throughout the narrative: the bird skull carved into the skin of the throat, wings on the back, and the red dye used on the teeth. These symbols are used for religious, political, and ceremonial purposes to connect the humans of the clan with the crows—both fantastical giant crows and the regular-sized ones of everyday life—with whom they have a close bond. Carrion Crow clan identity is bifurcated between those who see the identity as primarily religious—and Serapio as a religious figure—and those who see it primarily as political—and Serapio as a potential nuisance at best, a danger to the entire clan at worst.
Xiala’s introduction in a jail cell serves as part of the author’s focus on LGBTQ+ identities which recurs throughout the book. Xiala faces a severe penalty for sex with another woman. Though existing in a secondary world fantasy, it is a type of discrimination unfortunately still common throughout the world today. Xiala is bisexual; her backstory shows that she has a sexually active and culturally fluid approach to romantic and sexual relationships.
The third main narrative thread introduced in these chapters is that of Naranpa, who was born in a slum, became a servant, and rose to the head of the priesthood in the city of Tova as the Sun Priest. Hers is a rags-to-riches story, which means that she fulfills the role of Sun Priest with less external political power from family and cultural connections than some of the other priests. The chapters which follow the priests’ procession are set across various neighborhoods in the city of Tova; this shows the reader various spaces of the city in a way that feels naturalistic to the plot. The assassination attempt in Chapter 4 is the inciting incident for the main subplot of this book: political machinations and intrigue among the priesthood to shift the balance of power in the continent’s landscape.
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