If you missed last time’s selections…
Once again, my picks from old magazines that you may have been missed. There really are quite a few at the same time it seems there are so few. (There’s a paradox for yuh!)
The Barrow Troll
“The Barrow Troll” (Whispers #8, December 1975, reprinted in Whispers: An Anthology of Fantasy & Horror, 1977) by David Drake is one of his historical Sword & Sorcery tales not about those Romans, Vettius and Dama. This is a grim tale and you know it from the first sentence. Any story about a man named Ulf Womanslayer isn’t going to be pretty. Ulf kidnaps a German priest named Johann and heads into the remote country. As Johann suffers a cutting leather noose around his neck and other abuse, he learns how Ulf got his sobriquet. A woman who refused to allow him to steal her sheep, dies at his hand when he comes back and kills everyone in her home. The woman is fey and tells him about the troll that guards a fortune in gold. She also tells him that he will need a Christian priest to set a fire to defeat the monster.
Johann builds the blessed fire at the mouth of the cave, surrounded by skulls on posts and half-eaten dead things. Ulf goes into the cave and duels with the monstrous creature. Only after his shield is broken does he call to Johann to light his fire. The smoke hurts the troll, allowing Ulf to kill it with his ax. Once dead, he discovers the thing is only a man, though grown hairy and vile. The interior of the cave is gross, covered in slime and feces. Also in the cave are five rotten chests of gold.
His role done, Ulf tries to slay the priest, who runs away. He wants to pursue but the power of the gold holds him in the cave. He can’t leave lest someone take the treasure. He is doomed to stay there and be the new troll.
Drake’s portrait of a Norse berserker maybe very accurate. The man is obviously demented by violence and entirely unlikable. Contrast this with the story by D. Sandy Nielsen below.
Talisman
“Talisman” by Larry Niven and Dian Girard (Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1981) is part of Niven’s Warlock series. When Niven published the first story “Not Long Before the End” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1969) he insisted it wasn’t Fantasy but Science Fiction since he had an explanation for the source of magic. “Talisman” makes that case much harder to prove. With the exception of one character explaining that magic is leaving the world, it is a first class Sword & Sorcery/Dungeons & Dragons style adventure.
When a wandering wizard comes to the inn, the innkeeper, Bayram Ali, draws Sparthera the thief into a plot to rob him. The woman thief beds the mage before taking a teardrop pointer from his luggage. The device is reputed to point to Gar’s treasure, a lost hoard of gold. Sparthera has the bauble copied. We get to meet Sparthera’s former lover, a tinker turned hedge wizard, Shubar Khan. He energizes the real magical device (while putting his apprentice’s life in danger). We meet Sparthera’s mother, who wants nothing to do with her, and her brother, Bruk, who helps her capture a wild donkey that turns out to have small, stunted wings.
Finally Sparthera goes after the hoard, only to fall into hand of the wizard she robbed, Sung Ko Ja. The mage puts a geas on her making her his servant for seven years or until they retrieve her weight in gold. Sung reveals that the teardrop is a fake. It is actually the box that holds the item that tells where the gold is. (Shubar Khan’s spell actually made the teardrop locate the box.) They follow some small pieces from the hoard to a cave where it appears all the gold was long pillaged. Sparthera saves herself by finding one last treasure, one that Sung desires most, a charm that allows levitation. She has the chance to leave without giving up her new wealth but chooses to stay with the wizard.
When I first read the story in the magazine when it first appeared I wondered if Larry was getting old and all his new stuff would have co-authors. (Think of Andre Norton, who I love, but all her final books are collabs.) Reading it now, I know that’s not what happened and I can guess a much better reason for the duo author byline. The tale of Sparthera and Sung Ko Ja is one of sexual politics. In a world with magic, that power could be used for ordinary evil like rape. Niven wanted a woman’s opinion and assistance to make sure the story did not go off the rails into male wish fulfillment or worse. There is enough sexist Sword & Sorcery out there without adding to it.
Draco, Draco
“Draco Draco” by Tanith Lee first appeared in Maxim Jakubowski’s Beyond Lands of Never (1984)and reprinted in Year’s Best Fantasy 11 (1984). This was the story that made me a Tanith Lee fan. I had read “The Sombrus Tower” in Weird Tales #2 (1980) but this was one that really cemented it for me. I don’t usually like re-written fairy tales. For example Gardner Dozois’s “Fairy Tale” is a completely revolving story to me. Sure, it is a feminist tract but as a fairy story it is unpleasing.
Fortunately Tanith Lee (and Jane Yolen is another) can rework classic material and wrought something both new that still honors the original. “Draco Draco” tells of an unnamed apothecary who joins up with a dandy, Caiy, who wants to slay a dragon. The duo, astride the potion-dealer’s unattractive horse, Negra, come to a village deep in dragon country.
They have arrived in time for the season’s sacrifice. The apothecary meets the girl who will give up her life, the beautiful Niemeh. She asks him to ease her pain with some kind of drug. He goes to the town’s chieftain so he won’t be accused of anything. He agrees.
The dragon arrives with the whole town watching. The creature comes out of its cave, drinks some water then smells the sacrifice. Caiy calls out to the beast and attacks. His sword has little effect against its scales. He is thrown thirty feet. The dragon ignores him and eats the girl. Full, it goes back into its cave. Caiy awakens, only stunned not dead, and follows the beast into the darkness.
Later someone is at the cave mouth. It is Caiy. The dragon is dead. Celebrated as a hero, Caiy enjoys the beds of willing women and the drinking cups of cheering men. The apothecary cares nothing for it all and rides away. But Caiy comes riding out to meet him, not out of affection but with a threat. He demands an oath that includes calling him “dragonslayer”. The potion-peddler acquiesces and rides away. Both men know the poison he gave Niemeh killed the dragon.
I can see Lee reworks the story of St. George and the dragon, perhaps the Kenneth Grahame version, “The Reluctant Dragon” (1938). The last big version of the story was Gordon R. Dickson’s The Dragon and the George (1976) which uses a John W. Campbell/Unknown approach, looking at it from the dragon’s POV. Dickson spun it out to nine novels. Lee doesn’t need 720,000 words to do the job. Her words are simple but still poetic. This is her true magic. She makes it look effortless. (Just try it.)
The Lingering Minstrel
“The Lingering Minstrel” (Heroic Visions II, 1986) by Jessica Amanda Salmonson begins with the editor venting a little about being recognized for one character. Her Tomoe Gozen novels had won her a level of fame but she makes a point of using one of her stories not set in Naipon. She promises the main character will be back in form in another work.
Esben Danesworth gets a surprise at the Brass Ass Inn when the poorly received minstrel, Ernro, sits down with him. The man knows who Esben is, having seen him stab an acquaintance in the heart with a sword. The minstrel tries to knife him but Esben defends himself then deflates the situation. He has no desire to kill the sad musician.
Esben meets the minstrel outside the inn and realizes the man is suicidal. He wonders why he tried to get stabbed by him when there are plenty of lakes and rivers to drowned in. After Ernro commits the deed, Esben ends up with his lute.
The traveler rides on into the wilderness. In camp that night, Esben plucks the instrument out of boredom when Ernro appears. The minstrel is cold, blue and wet. Esben realizes it is his ghost. He gets very little sleep that night.
And the next day, when the minstrel appears again, his ghostly appearance is further damaged as his dead body suffers the river. Esben gets upset and rides off in the wrong direction, getting lost. When the ghost appears that night he rides his horse in the dark and becomes even more lost.
Desperately he rides on, finding a road, then an abandoned cabin. He expects the ghost to show again, now even further rotted and horrific. Esben realizes that it is the lute that is haunted. Ernro will follow him until Esben destroys the instrument. As he tries to throw it into the burning fireplace, Ernro’s dagger flies in and cuts his wrist. A desperate battle with the flying dagger ensues. During the fight, Esben steps on the lute by accident, hurting the ghost. The mystical dagger weakens and finally falls. The traveler throws the lute into the fire. The ghost tells him he has missed a few splinters, allowing them to have a final farewell. Esben wonders why a man who wanted to die should hold on so tight to ghostly afterlife. Later, back in the minstrel’s home city, he learns of the events that drove the man from the court to a sad life and finally death.
Salmonson’s talents as a horror writer make this story stronger. Since half of Sword & Sorcery is a horror, someone who understands ghost stories can use that to their advantage. Esben almost becomes something of a ghostbreaker. Andrzej Sapkowski would expand the Sword & Sorcery hero as occult detective in his Witcher series. Salmonson may have lead the way.
Thorval’s Victory
“Thorval’s Victory” (Bardic Runes XII, 1995) by D. Sandy Nielsen. Nielsen is a Canadian author from Brampton, Ontario. He wrote a series of stories about the Viking, Thorval. Bardic Runes was a small press zine published by Michael McKenny in 1994-1996 out of Ottawa. (Michael always rejected my S&S stories because they were too close to horror. So, in that sense, Bardic Runes maybe a heroic fantasy mag but not S&S. It was the 1990s. Sword & Sorcery was a pejorative.)
Nielsen’s tale has three generations of Thorvals: Thorval, Thorval the Elder and Thorval Ancient. The protagonist is the youngest, who must live up to the reputations of his kin. The author splits the story between a nasty battle, in which Thorval goes into a red rage and decapitates King Frithuwald, and his remembering a conversation with his father about good farming soil. The elder has no desire to go to Valhall and fight for the gods. Instead, he prefers the growing of living things. The story is an object lesson in what is a true victory and a true legacy. The fighters in this tale are a far cry from David Drake’s Ulf Womanslayer.
Well, that’s Sword & Sorcery Stories You Might Have Missed VII. Don’t waste any time. Get on it! those old magazines and anthologies are out there. Go find them.
And until next time…
