If you missed the last one…
This post is brought to you by the Swords of Fire 4, now out at last. Like the three previous collections, this one features four longer Sword & Sorcery adventures with the longest being “The Dragon God”, a Sirtago & Poet tale set in a country much like Japan. This is by Jack Mackenzie, of course. There is also the next adventure of Bradik the Slayer by M. D. Jackson, “The Star of Kanshalsus”. One of the other two tales is a new Arthan the Bear Man story, “The Twilight War” featuring an army of mercenaries versus giant spiders. And to round out the quartet, “Between the Dragon and His Wrath” by Will Parker. For the previous anthologies, go here.
Here’s a grab bag of tales, no real theme or anything. Some old, some newer.
“The Sword of the Sorcerer” by Gardner F. Fox originally appeared as the first of three sections in Kothar-Barbarian Swordsman (1969). This is Kothar’s debut. There would eventually be five volumes about the swordsman, but only the first book was done as separate stories. Kothar was one of a crowd of Conan clones who dominated that decade along with Brak, Thongor, Conan in the comics, and others.
Kothar discovers a tomb where the ancient sorcerer-lich Afgorkon dwells. The undead wizard gives Kothar the magic sword Frostfire. To possess the sword, Kothar can own no riches. He is sent to a witch’s hut where he meets the Queen Elfa, who gives him Greyling, his horse. Elfa charges Kothar with freeing the wizard Kazazael, who the powerful witch Red Lori has flayed alive then hung up in the sky. To save him, Kothar must find the cloak of the sea serpent Iormungar.
This creature lives in a cavern under a waterfall. Kothar goes there but first encounters a giant slug, which he kills with his sword. Going farther into the cavern, he finds the cloak suspended in the air. He begins climbing the wall when Iormungar shows up. Kothar battles the creature, blinding it. In its thrashing, Iormungar brings the roof down on itself and dies. Kothar takes the cloak back to the wizard and frees him. Kazazael prepares to fight red Lori’s magic but needs Kothar to keep the human guards away from him. Kothar gladly faces ten men and wins. Then he sees what looks like Queen Elfa but it is Slothann, Red Lori’s demon familiar. Kothar fights with Slothann who transform into a giant panther.
Kothar slashes off one of her paws before she flees. Using the severed hand he enters Red Lori’s inner chamber. Red Lori tries to enchant Kothar but Kazazael’s voice saves him. He tells Kothar to kill her. Red Lori protects herself by sending Belthamquar, her demon-master at Kothar. Kothar captures Red Lori, who tries to escape by turning into an ugly demon but this doesn’t work. She tries to seduce him by the power of Hastarth the she-demon but Kothar resists. Kazazael arrives and battles Red Lori. The captured witch is not killed but placed in a silver cage in Queen Elfa’s castle. Red Lori promises curses Kothar and will follow him in spirit and make his life hell. Elfa offers Kothar riches but he is not willing to give up Frostfire.
Gardner F. Fox wrote comic books for DC and other companies. (He is the inventor of Batman’s utility belt.) He also created the first Sword & Sorcery comic, “Crom the Barbarian” in 1950. It shouldn’t be too surprising that the Kothar stories read like comic books. Gary Gygax confessed this story was the inspiration for the Lich monster in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. My favorite image in the story is Kazazael hanging in the sky, flayed and screaming.
“Descales’ Skull” (Space & Time, July 1973) by David C. Smith (reprinted in Swords Against Darkness III, 1978) is a fun story (for me anyway) because it was the second thing David C. Smith ever published. Before all the Oron novels, Red Sonja and Bran Mak Morn pastiches, Smith sold to the semi-prozine Space & Time. This tale, which feels like it was named after two King Kull stories, “The Curse of the Golden Skull” and ” Delcardes’ Cat”, is a
traditional tale of the djinni’s wishes that come with a curse. Three rogues find the three pieces of the sorcerer Descales’ skull. Rejoining them revives the magician, who owes each man a wish. The first wishes for gold and more gold, until he drowns in it and dies screaming. The second man, a former slave, wishes for power. He is instantly the leader of a band of thieves, who perceive his weakness and cut him to ribbons. The last man is old and has never been with a woman. He has a sculpture of a beauty that the wizard turns into a woman who literally kills him by coitus. The wizard sees the three men down in Hell, suffering the insufferable and cheers. Not a traditional barbarian versus the sorcerer tale like Fox’s but a magic conte cruel of sorts.
“Payment in Kind” by C. A. Cador is from The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 2 (1976) and reprinted in Fantasy Tales, Spring 1981. If Lin Carter’s intro is to be believed he received it courtesy of Poul Anderson who found it in “…an occult newspaper I have never seen or read…” The plot is a chain of characters, each who receives a terrible dream that is more real and terrible than life. You are in a desert filled with sharp glass and you wake up with torn and bleeding feet and worse. It begins with Boaz passing the dream onto Nissan the barber, who gives it to Shamash, a priest of the goddess of Anahita, who gives it to Zadok, another priest, who gives it to Poros the merchant, who hires Nasirkhand the magician to work backwards and find the originator of the curse. He does not proceed fast enough to save his patron, but stops long enough to grab some spilled treasure before he leaves. A cloaked figure in an inn gloats at his sins. It is a short and nasty piece that reminds me more of Clark Ashton Smith than Robert E. Howard. (I have to admit I wrote a similar story, a passing curse that haunts you as soon as you close your eyes–never having read Cador until 2026–called “Night Visions” (Dark Moon Digest, July 2012). I found a different ending, having the last victim being a man of God who can’t pass on the curse in good conscience, nor can he commit suicide.) I seem to remember Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp” being the spur for that one….I wonder where Cador got the idea?
“The Hero Who Returned” (Heroic Fantasy, 1979) by Gerald W. Page This story came to my attention through an unusual source. I was quite familiar with Page and Reinhardt’s anthology but not this particularly story. I had it recommended by the Youtube channel Post Mortum and their “Rollin’ Shorties’. (Thanks!) This one is certainly the best piece in this post, with the tale of Dunsan the ferryman. (That name is certainly Dunsany without the Y.) His job is to take heroes across the river to a haunted castle, where no one ever returns from. His latest customer is Faulk, an older hero who has come looking for his son (who never returned, of course). Dunsan’s wife, Maelwyd, seems enamored with the old knight, making Dunstan feel dull and ordinary. He digs out an old sword from his shed and brings it with him on this trip.
As with all the others, Faulk does not return from his encounter with Kernshenlee’s ghost. Dunsan takes up his sword and goes in search of him. He finds the knight in the moat with a broken leg. The ferryman uses his sword and Faulk’s to splint his leg. Now they must cross the castle to a bridge on the other side to get away. All the while Faulk is trying to figure out the secret behind the place, one which I won’t reveal as it is key to their encounter with the ghost. The two return to find Maelwyd waiting for her husband avidly.
The idea for this tale reminds me of C. L. Moore’s last Jirel of Joiry tale, “Hellesgarde” (Weird Tales, April 1939), which also has a hero seeking a killer ghost in an old castle. Page writes a much different kind of story, one of romance and emotion between husband and wife, father and son. Despite the Dunsan name, this doesn’t strike me as a Dunsanian tale (unlike “The Castle at the World’s Edge”), which rarely focus on character so much. Oddly, it didn’t make the Years’ Best but was reprinted in Isaac Asimov’s Magical Worlds of Fantasy: Spells (1985) by Asimov and Greenberg.
“Gryphon’s Nest” (Dragon Magazine, July 1992) by Ardath Mayhar is the most recent of this potpourri of tales. It’s another non-traditional story about Fantasy monsters, rather than humans. In fact, no humans appear in any of it (except as a snack suggestion). Griselle is an older gryphon, with poor eyesight and a waning motherly nature. She is looking for her nest so she can finish hatching what she hopes is her last brood. The misty night causes her to find the wrong nest. She ends up hatching a clutch of basilisks. When she finally gets back to her nest, she finds her mate, Garamond (for those who love type faces, that name is hilarious) has a new mate, a basilisk who has lost her nest. In the end, both females hatch each others eggs, and Garamond isn’t so interested in continuing with Griselle. (Though she knows if Garamond tries to mate with his new girlfriend, he’ll die.) Griselle isn’t upset about it either, as she has found her new calling as a babysitter. Not a hard-hitting piece, but it is fun for RPGers to see the numerous monsters in their dungeons as something more than just hit points. Mayhar wisely points out that nursing baby gryphons is quite unpleasant because of their beaks. She also slyly makes comments on husbands who dump their wives for a younger model. Their is truth in her humor. Sadly, Dragon dropped fiction from their magazine in the years to come.
Conclusion
Well, I said it was a grab-bag, didn’t I. Despite that, there is also a sense of the history of heroic fantasy over the decades. Fox’s piece is pure Conan while Page’s, only ten years later, proves that not all S&S is just thud & blunder. The other three pieces examine sorcery and fantastic creatures. You can complain that AD&D “generified” the genre (I have elsewhere) but it was also a chance to explore the finer workings of Fantasy ideas. A tale about gryphons raising their young would not have sold in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s. But by 1992, we all had the common experience of wandering around in a dungeon, looking for gold, and stumbling on wandering monsters. That experience fueled the changes that had already arrived by the 1990s. The narrower confines of “Sword & Sorcery” were replaced by a freer genre category that would range from Vanilla Fantasy to Grimdark.
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
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