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| A lesser effort from Brundage--the colors are bad, the perspective is clumsy, the composition is weak, and the women's bodies and faces are totally uninteresting |
"A Witch Shall Be Born" by Robert E. Howard
SF stories often offer fanciful explanations of the sources of religions and mythology; in "Shambleau," C. L. Moore tells us the source of the story of Medusa the Gorgon, in "Myths My Great-Granddaughter Told Me" Fritz Leiber offers a theory on the origin of Norse mythology, and Arthur C. Clarke in Childhood's End supplies an explanation of where our traditional image of the Devil comes from. In "A Witch Shall Be Born" Robert E. Howard explains where the Biblical Salome came from! You see, in the prehistoric civilization inhabited by Conan, there was a queen who had sex with a "fiend of darkness" and gave birth to a witch. Her family was cursed, and so every century a queen of her dynasty gives birth to a baby girl with a "scarlet half moon" birthmark between her breasts--this baby girl is a diabolical witch! These witches are always named Salome, and will continue to be born long after Conan's world is forgotten.
One of these Salomes was born in Conan's lifetime, the twin sister of a girl without such a birthmark, Taramis, and she was left in the desert to die. But Salome did not die! As "A Witch Shall Be Born" begins, the adult Taramis, Queen of Khauran, is awoken in the night to be confronted by the evil twin sister she didn't know was alive!
Salome explains to the queen how she survived being exposed in the desert, was raised by a wizard, and has now come to Khauran to impersonate Taramis and take her place as monarch. An army of mercenaries led by Constantius the Falcon, a man who has designs on the virgin Taramis's body, marches into the city and Taramis is imprisoned in her own dungeon!
In the first half of Part II we eavesdrop on a conversation between Valerius, a soldier and a Taramis loyalist, and his girlfriend. We learn that Conan of Cimmeria was captain of Taramis's palace guard, and when Salome ordered the army of Khauran disbanded and Constantius put in charge of defense, Conan, seeing through Salome's disguise, refused. In the resulting fighting the loyalists were defeated by Constantius's mercenaries.
Half of Part III is a letter written to a friend in the West by a foreign intellectual staying in Khauran; it is seven months since the arrival of Constantius and this philosophe has been here to see the whole thing. He describes life in Khauran under Salome, whom he, like everybody besides Conan and Valerius, thinks is a Taramis gone crazy. Crushing taxation, human sacrifice and rape are the order of the day under the new regime, and it is rumored that the queen has summoned a monster to which she feeds captives.
In the other half of Part III Howard presents a scene of Salome tormenting Taramis by bringing to her cell the severed head of one of her friends. "A Witch Shall Be Born" skimps on the depictions of hand-to-hand fighting we expect in a Conan story, but is full of torture and abuse.
In the brief Part IV we learn how, in the course of seven months, Conan has taken over the band of desert raiders and also amassed an army of emigres, soldiers who fled from Khauran and hunger to retake their home. With these two forces united under his command, Conan hopes to liberate Khauran and settle his score with Constantius.
In Part V Howard again tells his story indirectly through the eyes of one of the characters, as we learn about the field battle between Conan's and Constantius's armies along with Salome, who observes it from atop a tower and then in her crystal ball. The battle demonstrates Conan's cunning; first he tricks Constantius into marching outside the city walls, and then he surprises Constantius with his Khauran heavy cavalry; Constantius had planned his attack in the belief that Conan led only the light cavalry of the nomadic desert bandits. Constntius beaten, Salome realizes she is doomed and hurries to murder Taramis before Conan can get into the city.
In the final portion of the story, Part VI, Valerius and other members of the loyalist underground rescue Taramis from the dungeon, only to be ambushed by Salome and one of her priests. The witch's sorcery overwhelms the true queen's rescuers and Taramis is carried off to be fed to the monster. Luckily for Taramis, Valerius recovers and catches up to them, slaying the priest and the witch. With her last breath Salome calls upon her monster, a huge black toad with fangs and talons, but before it can wreak havoc Conan's army arrives and their archery makes short work of the, apparently unarmored, creature. Conan then has Constantius crucified and gloats that the mercenary lacks the sort of strength a barbarian like he himself has.
This story is noteworthy for the crucifixion scenes, which are pretty gross and eye-opening, and noteworthy in a less impressive way for Howard's questionable narrative decisions which leave Conan off screen much of the time, keep Conan from personally coming to grips with either Salome or the monster, and have us experiencing much of the story through expository dialog and in the epistolary form. While remarkable for these reasons, "A Witch Shall Be Born" is only a decent Conan story--Howard has produced much better ones.
Donald Wollheim made "A Witch Shall Be Born" the cover story of Avon Fantasy Reader No. 10 in 1949, and twenty years after that Hans Stefan Santesson included it in the anthology The Mighty Barbarians: Great Sword and Sorcery Heroes.
"Black God's Shadow" by C. L. Moore
Jirel, commander of the castle Joiry, in her dreams hears a small weak voice begging for help--it is the voice of Guillaume! Because Jirel killed him with magic from an alien world beyond the dominion of God, Guillaume's soul did not go to Hell, but to some place worse--the alien world from which Jirel attained the super weapon from the nameless black god!
Jirel takes up her two-handed sword and goes down that tunnel to the alien world--this part of "Black God's Shadow" feels like a repetition of the similar scene in the first Jirel story. Once on the alien world Jirel again deals with a multitude of crazy apparitions and surreal terrain, though Moore has some new weird phenomena for us. Jirel follows Guillaume's pathetic pleading voice to a hideous caricatured statue of him, a statue which represents all the evil in his character and life history. Jirel, who is a good person even though it kind of sounds like she spends most of her time hitting people with swords, has a psychic battle with the unnamed black god for Guillaume's soul; this is a mental battle of light versus dark, Jirel summoning happy memories of friendship love and joy to hurl against the black god's engulfing darkness.
Guillaume's soul, in the form of a shadow, is liberated form the statue and floats across this insane countryside; Jirel gives chase, encountering viscous living bodies of water, dangerous animate trees, and other bizarre phenomena on the way which she must overcome with her wits, spirit and sword. She has two more psychic battles with the black god, the final in a temple full of carvings depicting the souls of the guilty suffering their punishment. (This alien world, I guess, is like Hell, but for people from other planets who are outside the influence of the God of Abraham, or something.) After this final mental/spiritual struggle, Guillaume's soul is released from this alien world and Jirel is able to leave knowing she has done a good deed; the last line of the story is "She toiled up the slope, dragging her sword listlessly, weary to the very soul, but quite calm now, with a peace beyond understanding;" that last phrase is presumably a paraphrase of the famous line from Paul's letter to the Philippians, rendered in the King James Bible as "And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."
Moore is a good writer who conveys emotional and psychological states with passion and intensity and also offers up striking and strange images. However, in the Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry stories I am finding she hits the same themes and ideas again and again, within the same story and across stories, which makes them feel repetitive and dulls their power somewhat; "Black God's Shadow" is not a bad story, but it suffers from this characteristic of Moore's early writing. Did Jirel really need to have three psychic light vs dark struggles with the black god, each of which is much like the other? "Black God's Shadow" can also feel a little monotonous--there are no conversations and a minimum of physical confrontations; Jirel is just running through the dark from one surreal psychic battle to the next almost the entire time.
"Black God's Shadow" has been reprinted many times in Moore collections, but doesn't seem to have ever been anthologized in English. Now that Moore has exhausted the possibilities of Jirel's relationship with Guillaume (I think!), I am wondering what the lady of Joiry will be up to in the third Jirel story.
"Xeethra" by Clark Ashton Smith
Xeethra is a teen-aged goatherd living in a desolate mountainous area with the irascible old uncle who raised him because his parents died when he was very young. One day Xeethra finds a newly opened cleft in a cliff wall, from which a sweet smell wafts; he follows the tunnel to a beautiful fertile valley full of fruit trees and other vibrant life. He eats a delicious fruit and is thus cursed by the demon, Thasaidon, who owns this paradise.
Xeethra is afflicted with the memories of a king of a prosperous seaside kingdom, forgets he is a poor goatherd in the remote wilderness and takes on this monarch's personality. Not knowing how he ended up in this desolate mountain region, the king marches east for many days, seeking his kingdom. When he finally reaches his kingdom he finds its once prosperous villages and farmlands an unpopulated desert, and when he gets to the seaside capital city where his lies his palace it is all ruins, inhabited by lepers who make fun of him. His kingdom collapsed centuries ago.
Xeethra regains his memories of his life as a goatherd so that he now has both his ancient royal and current goatherd memories. A representative of Thasaidon appears, and makes Xeethra a bargain--if Xeethra pledges his soul to Thasaidon, his prosperous kingdom will be restored, but if he should ever regret being made monarch, the magic gift will be revoked. Xeethra accepts the deal.
Again Xeethra forgets his goatherd existence as the city and the kingdom are restored to vibrant magnificent life. For years, as peace and good economic times reign, Xeethra is a happy king. But then war and plague and drought strike, and, having no leadership abilities and none of a soldier's or administrator's skills, Xeethra can do nothing to save the kingdom but only sink himself in ever more decadent and outré entertainments. When he proves that he regrets being king by trying to sneak away, Thasaidon returns him to the present, to the ruined city haunted by lepers, where he again is afflicted with knowledge of a life as a monarch and as a goatherd, lives he precipitously threw away.
Much of this story is taken up by Smith's poetic descriptions of landscapes and cityscapes, which are good, but they are not particularly surprising or striking, and "Xeethra" lacks the horror or gore or jokes that make the best Smith stories so memorable. This one is just alright. In their extensive and interesting notes on the story, the editors of The Last Hieroglyph: Volume Five of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, call the story "heart-wrenching" (like Tom Shippey, they obviously enjoyed it more than I did) and quote Smith complaining that "the casual reader is purblind and even hostile to literature of a poetic cast" and that poetry in America "has fallen into the hands of a lot of literary gangsters."
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These stories are a little underwhelming; all three are competent, but all lack something. "A Witch Shall Be Born" has the striking crucifixion scenes, but otherwise feels kind of detached, and Conan, Salome and the monster are all underutilized. (Weird Tales readers still voted "A Witch Shall Be Born" the best piece in the issue.) "Black God's Shadow" is kind of repetitive and monotonous, and "Xeethra" is a little long, flat and uninvolving. Judged against the whole universe of SF stories these stories are moderately good, but they are far from the stories I would say best exemplify what I like about Howard's, Moore's or Smith's bodies of work.
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