Sword & Sorcery Stories You Might Have Missed VIII

Sword & Sorcery Stories You May Have Missed VIII…hm. I’ve been reviewing Sword & Sorcery tales for a while now. And I am always surprised that there are so many great stories out there that I missed. Maybe you missed them too. If you have, I hope these little snippets will get you looking for them. Many appeared in magazines and anthologies that are hard to track down. But it is worth the look.

“Caravan to Illiel” (Flashing Swords #3: Warriors and Wizards, 1976) by Avram Davidson is a wonder to behold. Davidson’s erudite and jovial style shows how much depth a S&S tale can have. Anyone who accuses modern heroic fantasy of having no literary flourish has not read Davidson. The editor tells us that the story was inspired by Oscar Wilde’s “The Fisherman and His Soul” (A House of Pomegranates, 1891) ‘In the fourth month we reached the city of Illel…The interpreter of the caravan answered that we had come from the island of Syria with much merchandise.”

The plot has Corydon of Styria exiled because he can’t pay the tax on his sword. His pouch, which magically produces coin, has been cut from his belt by a thief. Having to leave the city, he signs on with Abelaphon’s caravan. He has a sword given to him but it is not his sword that was taken when he couldn’t pay the tax. He encounters gryphons, Tartars (that he defeats with an avalche Mulan-style), pygmies and learns more about that sword he ended up with.

I have baldly told you the plot but it can’t even begin to convey the style of this story. Here is a paragraph on the subject of the contents of a ship:

The sea was the color of his green-gray eyes and here and there small boats and rowing barges plied to and from the great tar-black hulls of the cargo vessels moored out in the channel: yonder gallipot held ware of terra cotta, from huge amphorae to tiny votive lamplets; the narrow sailing craft beyond her (as the breeze even disclosed) was laden lightly with unguent of nard stored in flagons made of the small horns of yearling goats, each one costing the price of a Scyth slave; no cargo less precious would make it worth while to send so slight a craft so far. Beyond these twain ships stood at anchor a vast sea-mother of a ship, a sort of sea-sow, with piglet boats nuzzling all alongside of her and receiving, sack by sack by sack by sack, the cargo of grain: millet and wheat and barley and spelt. Rice and rye and pan.

Coyrdon would appear again in “The Head of Shemesh the Eshuirian” in Heroic Visions II (1986).

“Stoneskin” by John Morressy from Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1984 also appeared in Arthur W. Saha’s Years Best Fantasy 11 (1985). The story begins with a not very nice warrior rescuing a woman from bandits only to demand sex from her. He wakes to find she has changed from the most beautiful woman he ever saw to an old crone. She is, of course, a witch. She feeds him then gives him a gift: the skin from the arm of Kembrec, a powerful demi-god who was hacked apart by his enemies.

The warrior soon learns that the skin makes him invulnerable to all weapons (but not poison). Using this ability he collects followers, first a village then a region and finally becomes King Stoneskin. He learns to be a good ruler and all is well for decades. One day he is visited by a young man and a blind woman. She begs for him to cure her. He can not. Once alone she reveals she is the witch and the young man the king’s son. They have come for the sleeve that gives invincibility.

Stoneskin is powerless to stop them. The witch takes the sleeve and gives it to her son. The young man in thanks kills his mother, not wanting to be dominated by her. The boy gloats over his father, who he has hated all his life. He plans to hang around a while and make Stoneskin his fool. But the king gets one over on him. He releases a trap in the floor that plummets the new Stoneskin into a deep pit. This is filled with concrete and boulders. The king reminds himself it is not important to be invulnerable, only that others think he is.

I wasn’t surprised to see that this story appeared in F&SF. It has that timeless faery feel that tales like Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Silken Swift” (F&SF, November 1953) have. It is different than the Fantasy John W. Campbell published in Unknown, being less of a Science Fiction disguised as Fantasy.

“Rite of Vengeance” by Deborah Wheeler in Sword & Sorceress V (1988) was a treat for me. I had seen Wheeler’s name in the contents pages of most of this series but this was the first I read. I tried to find some of her books and thought she had disappeared with the old anthology series. I was happily mistaken. She changed her name when she got married. She publishes under Deborah J. Ross now. She collaborated with Marion Zimmer Bradley back in the early 2000s and now does her own wonderful thing with the Petal-Shaped Shield series.

As “Rite of Vengeance” shows, she loves action as well as magic. In the intro MZB wrote:

Every year I receive many stories on this same general theme. Why do I usually take them when they are written by Deborah Wheeler and turn them down when they are written by anyone else? It’s the writing; she certainly can turn out a good story. In addition to being an excellent writer, Deborah is also a very good chiropractor.

The story follows the warrior, Tyr Swordsister, as she takes on the Djenne raiders who destroyed her entire village. She encounters Elarra, an old witch who also wants to deal with the Djenne but more carefully. The raiders had been a part of the tough steppe lifestyle but have become dangerous as they now worship a goddess of violence and empire.

Tyr makes a foolhardy attack on the Djenne by herself. She has sworn vengeance on the Djenne leader, Chandros, who drives the Djenne to greater and greater violence in the name of the goddess. Tyr gets close but fails to kill him. Chandros attacks her with mystical snakes. Only by jumping onto her horse at the last second does she escape.

The witch Elarra nurses Tyr back to health, making her promise when she goes back to kill Chandros, she will take the old woman with her. The two do walk into the Djenne camp again, but this time Elarra’s magic defeats Chandros’s. It is Tyr’s job to hold back the Djenne warriors while Elarra does her thing, which proves to become the earth goddess herself, and reset the world of the steppe.

Ross (Wheeler) does a great job of describing the fight scenes but also giving her characters great soul. Tyr has a horse named Hellsteed that fights with its hooves like no other horse in Sword & Sorcery fiction. Elarra describes him: “A mount who can carry you to the very depths…and then back again.”

I will go back and read every Wheeler story in the Sword & Sorceress anthologies. They are quite a few of them.

“Blind Man’s Blade” by Fred Saberhagen was the opening tale in An Armory of Swords (1995). Now, it is no secret that Fred is an amazing storyteller. I have been a fan of his Berserkers and his vampire novels for a long time, but it was Empire of the East (collected in 1978) and its Swords sequels that followed that draw me back time and again. Most of the tales in this series are novel-length so it was fun to find a short story by Fred. (The book has eight tales by strong heroic fantasy writers like Walter Jon Williams, Robert E. Vardeman and Michael A. Stackpole. Getting to play in Fred’s world of gods and swords must have been a treat! )

The story begins with the gods of Olympus waiting for Vulcan to hand out the thirteen magical swords of the contest. Mars is impatient while Demeter is indifferent.  The story actually stars a lowly human named Keyes and his servant, Lo-Yang. Keyes is spying on the handing out of the swords, an act that would get you killed instantly if the gods found out.

Mars discovers Keyes and puts him down a deep hole in the mountainside. He doesn’t kill him because he wants to test his sword on him later. The gods don’t know which swords they will get so testing is a good idea. To make it harder for Keyes to escape, Mars makes him blind, thus the title of the story.

Saberhagen has a lot of fun at Mars’s expense when Keyes finds a sword. Mars throws his weapon, Soulcutter, the only cursed sword, in not knowing that Keyes already has one. Armed with both Doomgiver (the Sword of Justice) and Soulcutter, Keyes is able to reverse-curse the gods, making all the swords go to humans. This, of course, sets up the entire series of eleven novels.

Keyes eventually gets Stonecutter and chops a set of stairs out of the hole. He survives the unsurvivable adventure by using his logic (shades of Saberhagen’s Science Fiction background). This makes the tale feel almost like a John W. Campbell era  Unknown problem story. Saberhagen’s comedic Mars is too much fun so I can ignore this a little. This story is not a Thud & Blunder barbarian tale but the nice blend of SF/Fantasy that Empire of the East was.

“The Dragon’s Gate” by Pat Murphy (Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2003) also appeared in In Lands That Never Were: Sword & Sorcery from Fantasy & Science Fiction (2004) edited by Gordon Van Gelder. This story is a great example of what people mean when they say “the new Sword & Sorcery”. Murphy creates a lovely character in Alita, a traveling storyteller who dressed like a boy but is a girl. Her mother falls afoul of the ice people and is stricken with ice sickness. She will sleep until she dies. To save her mother Alita needs three drops of dragon’s blood.

The girl climbs up to the ruined castle and meets the dragon. She knows that the dragon will response to her fear so she tells herself a story with a happy ending. Like Bilbo, she talks to the dragon but instead of conflict the beast proves to like stories and tells one about how a princess named Tara who became a dragon. The lowlanders kill her father with assassins disguised as minstrels. Using a magic horn given to her grandfather, she becomes a dragon until the tears of her enemy are given freely. (All back story, of course.) The dragon gives Alita three drops of blood but also asks for a promise that the girl will return when her mother is better.

Alita gives the blood to a crone who cures her mother. The leech speak of a Prince Dexter of Erland’s plans to slay the dragon. Alita rushes back, arriving just before the prince and his men. She intervenes, trying to stop Dexter from his task. Throwing herself on the dragon, Alita’s tears fall on the scales and the dragon transforms back into Princess Tara. Dexter offers to marry her but she knows such an arrangement is just another trap. Tara takes control of the her father’s land and soon it will be prosperous again.

Alita returns to her mother. She promises to tell the whole story that night in the inn. She begins by confessing she is a woman not a man. She doesn’t tell the story of the dragon but her own…

Murphy examines so many things all in a single novella: gender roles, the art of story-telling, fairy tales and their structure and the nature of audiences. It was selected for Years’ Best Fantasy (Hartwell) but won no awards. This story is so good it is a shame it wasn’t even nominated for a Hugo.

In retrospect, this session turned out to be a Fantasy & Science Fiction alumni-fest. Ross, Morressy, Murphy and Fred Saberhagen all appeared there. Davidson was editor for three years and published many of his most famous stories there. I don’t often think of F&SF as a Sword & Sorcery publisher, certainly not since they published many of the best parodies of the genre including Poul Anderson”s “The Barbarian” (May 1956) and Larry Niven’s “Not Long Before the End” (April 1969). Despite that, they also published the Conan pastiche “The Hall of the Dead” by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp (February 1967) and the Hugo winning “Ill-Met in Lankhmar” (April 1970) by Fritz Leiber. I think the editors just weren’t fond of the lunk-headed barbarian brand of S&S, preferring intelligent tales like these five selected here.