This post is brought to you by Blades & Alchemy by Jack Mackenzie. This collection is the first volume in the Collected Sirtago & Poet saga, with Blades & Abominations coming in the Summer. Of the six stories included you will find Ka Sirtago, heir to the throne of an empire, and his sidekick, the slender and sensitive, Poet, getting into trouble with magic and monsters on a regular basis. Included is one my favorites, “Frozen Doom” with the lads stuck in the north with some particularly nasty “things”.
In several previous posts I looked at strange adventures by Edmond Hamilton. We followed the A. Merritt format in “The Lake of Life” and “The Fire Princess”. This time Hamilton drops the Merritt stuff for another of his favorite themes, the party of men taken from different periods of time. “The Six Sleepers” appeared in Weird Tales, October 1935, perhaps the first time he has used the idea. He will assemble another team in “The Inn Outside the World” (Weird Tales, July 1945), Hamilton’s personal favorite at one time. He even used the team idea a little in the previous stories I looked at, where he had a collection of different kinds of men fighting together. They were all from our time though.
Garry Winton is avoiding Berbers in the Atlas Mountains while prospecting. To do this, he pulls a John Carter, and goes into a mysterious cave that the locales won’t enter. There he finds a Crusader in plate armor sleeping on the floor, then a Roman soldier, a buccaneer, an Italian condottiere from the 15th Century, and a nobleman from the 18th century. The strange gas in the chamber gets Winton too, and the six sleepers all wake up in unknown age. The roof has collapsed and let all the weird gas out. No time machine here. Hamilton has skipped from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Buck Rogers with a gas that causes suspended animation.
The six sleepers are, from oldest to youngest:
The Legionnaire is Quintus Maximus of Emperor Trajan’s army
The Crusader is Count Richard of Launsing from the Crusade of Saint Louis
The Italian, Francesco Grappone lieutenant to Cesare Borgia
Charles Vicomte d’Epernon from the court of King Louis the 16th
The buccaneer, Tom Haskins of the Spanish main
Garry Winton, prospector of 1935
Garry remembers his Latin from school, so even Maximus can communicate with him. The men form a pact to look out for each other in this new world. The buccaneer gives one of his two cutlasses to Garry and all six men are armed with swords and ready for whatever lies ahead. This turns out to be jungle where the desert-dry Atlas Mountains once stood.
Traversing the vines, they spy a tall, distant city built after Garry’s time. They hear noises in the brush and come to the rescue of a woman surrounded by rat-monsters. These creatures are giants with rat-bodies but the heads of men. The woman is Lenya, who is dressed in furs and armed with a spear. Her companion is a wolf-man named Hath, wolf body with a human head like the rats. The six fight the rats but d’Epernon and Maximus are dragged off. The companions pursue but lose their friends in gigantic tunnels.
Lenya explains that the rat-creatures live under the far city called Khmur. In the basements of that place, the rats sacrifice their captives once a month to their goddess, That Which Dies Not. Lenya was out searching for her brother who was also taken by the rats. They all agree to go after the captives but Garry wants Lenya to wait beyond the city. They approach the towers but Lenya sneaks in after them.
Inside the towers, Garry sees machines that he figures are atomic batteries. The men learn that long ago the Masters lived in a world of tall skyscrapers, flying machines and atomic energy. They went to war with each other and wiped each other out. They left behind their genetically altered service animals, the rats and wolves. Lenya belongs to a tribe that are the last of the pure humans left in the world.
The warriors, each armed with his sword, leave Lenya behind. Garry has Maximus’s and d’Epernon’s weapons as well. The swordsmen find the captives in a kind of arena at the bottom of rows of rat watchers. The men cut their way to the bottom, free their friends, including Lenya’s brother, Imos, and rearm them in time to meet That Which Dies Not. She is a snake-creature like the rats and wolves, created by the long dead Masters. The crusader, Richard of Launsing, slices off its head with his longsword. But the rats don’t run. They attack and the swordsmen must hack their way out.
It begins to look pretty grim when the future men, and Lenya and her rescued brother, are surrounded by swarms of rat-creatures. It is up to Garry to use his modern knowledge of Science to save them. He rigs up an atomic generator and burns the rats out. The humans all leave the city for Lenya’s tribe. Garry and Lenya now a couple.
What future adventures did these six sleepers have? We’ll never know because it never became a series for Hamilton. That is all there is. I had to giggle a little with That Which Dies Not, which echoes Lovecraft, but I couldn’t help but think of Rumpole and his “She Who Must Be Obeyed” borrowed from Haggard. Despite all the sword worship in this tale, it is good old-fashioned Science that saves their bacon.
Conclusion
That’s all folks! Or is it? This story made me think of a novel I had read many years ago. That book was Andre Norton’s second, Star Man’s Son or Daybreak 2250 (1952). This novel features a young man living the primitive lifestyle in a world ruined by nuclear war. He ventures to the city that is inhabited by rat monsters. Did Norton read “The Six Sleepers” back in 1935? It is quite possible since she was twenty-three then and a fan of SF & Fantasy. If not, she made some similar logical jumps about what cities would be like after a WWIII and what would survive. Her rat monsters, if I recall correctly, did not have human head but were very large.
In this way, whether intentional or not, we do get to see more of what living in Hamilton’s future world was like. Norton doesn’t bother with bringing modern people into the future. But why not tell the story from Lenya’s POV without the guys? Well, I think for Ed it was about having fun with five of his favorite historical periods and the swords used in those times. Some other choices might have included a Norseman or a Celtic warrior, but then language would have been a problem. Four of the five know English of some sort and the other Latin.
The fun of this kind of tale was not the province of Hamilton alone. Poul Anderson used it too, like in his novel The Dancer From Atlantis (1971). The “time team” allows the writer to play with historical types while the post-apocalyptic future story uses extrapolations on what would still be around in the far future (Yes, I am aware 2250 is only two hundred and twenty-five years from now.) Hamilton got to do both in this story.
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
