Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading magazine printings of the stories collected in 1960's The Abominations of Yondo, a volume of fiction and poetry by Clark Ashton Smith. So far we've read the first six stories in The Abominations of Yondo in two batches, talking about "The Nameless Offspring," "The Witchcraft of Ulua," and "The Devotee of Evil" in one blog poat, and "The Epiphany of Death," "A Vintage from Atlantis" and "The Abominations of Yondo" in a second. It doesn't look like "The White Sibyl," the seventh story in The Abominations of Yondo, ever appeared in a magazine, so until such time as I get my hands on a copy of a book with that story, we'll have to skip it. I have already read the tenth story in the 1960 collection, "The Master of Crabs," so today we'll talk about the eighth, "The Ice-Demon," ninth "The Voyage of King Euvoran," AKA "Quest of the Gazolba," and eleventh, "The Enchantress of Sylaire," all of which appeared in Weird Tales issues available to one and all at the internet archive.
"The Ice-Demon" (1933)
Like "The Testament of Athammaus" and "The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan," which I praised in August of this year, "The Ice-Demon" is set in the prehistoric fantasy milieu of Hyperborea, where there are wizards and monsters and so forth. The background to this story is that over the centuries a glacier has been travelling south, engulfing cities and driving before it the populations of various kingdoms. Fifty years ago a king marched north at the head of an army, a wizard by his side, to challenge the glacier. The wizard conjured up a globe of fire to melt the glacier, but, as a handful of survivors described, the expedition came to disaster and king and wizard were among those who did not return. Recently, a hunter pursuing an unusually large fox onto the glacier spotted the bodies of the king and wizard frozen in the ice--he reported to his brother that the king's robes were adorned with rubies of tremendous worth. That hunter's brother, Quanga, as the story begins, is guiding two jewel merchants up into the environs of the glacier in quest of these valuable gems. This is a forbidding mission, as both the survivors of that doomed royal expedition of fifty years ago, and Quanga's brother (who got killed by a bear after telling Quanga of the rubies), were convinced that the glacier was a living, malevolent being.
The plot of the story concerns this mission and the horrifying supernatural dangers faced by the three greedy men; these dangers are a little unusual, consisting not of attacking ghosts or monsters made of ice or living dead corpses, as you might expect, but the ice and environment themselves shifting and changing. Smith handles this material ably, with vivid descriptions and effective pacing; "The Ice-Demon" is a solid sword and sorcery horror piece, and I enjoyed it. Elements of the tale reminded me of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, in particular the very first F&GM story, "Jewels in the Forest" (AKA "Two Sought Adventure") and I wondered what influence "The Ice-Demon," and Smith's larger oeuvre, might have had on Leiber's famous series.
The least complex and challenging of the three Smith stories we are exploring today, it doesn't look like "The Ice-Demon" has been anthologized beyond various Smith collections.
"The Voyage of King Euvoran" (AKA "Quest of the Gazolba") (1933)
This is a fun and clever story! Sadistic and gluttonous King Euvoran is the ninth of his line to wear a crown made of metal from a meteorite adorned with a stuffed specimen of the purportedly extinct gazolba bird. This one-of-a-kind crown is the symbol of his royal family and his political legitimacy, so when a necromancer that Euvoran offends brings the stuffed bird to life and it flies away with the crown, Euvoran's rule is threatened. After consulting a local god, the bare-pated potentate organizes an expedition and sails to the semi-mythical islands where the gazolba bird is said to be, armed with bow, sling, and blowpipe with poison darts--the god told him that he must kill the undead gazolba with is own hand.
Smith puts the king through a series of horrifying and at times amusing adventures, all of them quite entertaining. One of the strengths of this story is that I had no idea what the king's ultimate fate would be, return home in triumph, an agonizing death far from his throne, or something in between? An interesting aspect of "Quest of the Gazolba" is the question of to what extent we should see it as a morality tale. Do his harrowing adventures inflict upon King Euvoran condign punishment for his perversions and vices? Does his perilous voyage inspire him to reform? Or does Smith refuse to take a stand on moral and ethical issues, simply describing a world with a morality and code of ethics different from his own?
Like "The Testament of Athammaus," "Quest of the Gazolba" is a great mix of adventure, magic, gore and humor. I awarded "The Testament of Athammaus" nine out of a possible ten flesh-eating orifices; I'll give "The Voyage of King Euvoran" (in its 1947 "Quest of the Gazolba" guise) eight out of a possible ten drowned concubines.
Besides the expected Smith collections, "The Voyage of King Euvoran" has appeared in a French and an Italian anthology.
"The Enchantress of Sylaire" (1941)
"The Enchantress of Sylaire" is a story about sexual desire, the perils it leads us into and the compromises it leads us to make, and about how people's surface appearances and self-presentations so often differ from their true identities. How are we to navigate such a world, to seek fulfilling relationships within it?
When bookish young aristocrat Anselme is rejected by pretty Dorothee he is so shaken he retreats to the forests of Averoigne to live as a hermit! (Smith wrote quite a few stories about the province of medieval France he called Averoigne, including "The Maker of Gargoyles," which we also read in August.) This dude is horny--his sleep at night is disturbed by feverish erotic dreams! Over a year after leaving society to live in rustic solitude, Anselme meets a beautiful woman who introduces herself as Sephora the Enchantress.
Anselme meets Sephora in the time-honored way young men in fiction generally meet hot chicks in the woods--he spies her as she bathes nude in a pool! Smith describes in detail Sephora's beauty, and how Sephora employs her charms to drive Anselme into a frenzy of desire as she leads him to the entrance of her magical domain, a doorway composed of old druid megaliths. Beyond this magical portal, in Sylaire, which Sephora tells Anselme is "a land lying outside time and space as you have hitherto known them," Anselme learns that there is reason to believe that Sephora is no hot chick, but a hideous monster in disguise! The spoiler-rich table of contents of this issue of Weird Tales has already made this clear to us eagle-eyed readers, but Anselme only begins to realize this after already having had sex with her!
You see, after Anselme and Sephora have consummated their love on the grass as the sun sets and then all night long in her castle (despite the apparent jealousy of the huge black wolf Sephora keeps as a pet), Sephora has to go to her magical library to tend to her magical business, so Anselme takes a walk around the grounds. Out there he meets the huge wolf, who transforms into a man and explains that Sephora is a lamia, an ancient monster that sucks the life force out of young men, and that her curiously pale servants are vampires. This guy is the wizard Malachie, a discarded lover of Sephora's whom she has turned into a werewolf--only rarely can he assume human form, and he has used one of these rare opportunities to warn poor Anselme.
Or so he claims! When Anselme, still smitten, fesses up to Sephora, relating his conversation with the werewolf to her, she claims that it is Malachie who is the evil monster and that the disgruntled wizard has passed along a lot of lies born of his jealousy. Anselme gets mixed up in the sorcerous war between these bitter ex-lovers, and things get still more crazed when Dorothee, having relented and now interested in marrying Anselme, shows up--our hero is now involved in two love triangles!
Harassed Anselme has to choose which magic-user, Sephora or Malachie, to side with, and which woman, Sephora or Dorothee, to take as his (as we say nowadays) "life-partner." As in "The Voyage of King Euvoran," Smith's choices in how he concludes "The Enchantress of Sylaire" force us to consider to what extent Smith is endorsing, refuting, or just ignoring conventional 20th-century Western morality; feminists may be preoccupied by the fact that the story is about how women who are beautiful on the outside may be ugly on the inside and by Smith's ambiguous take on whether men should investigate a sexually attractive woman's true character or just embrace and enjoy her surface beauty and ignore the likely grim reality under that surface.
Entertaining.
After its debut in Weird Tales, "The Enchantress of Sylaire" was included by Robert Boyer and Kenneth Zahorski in their 1978 anthology Dark Imaginings: A Collection of Gothic Fantasy, and by Jean Marigny in a French anthology (also 1978) of translations of vampire stories originally written in English, as well as various Smith collections.
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Three readable and engaging stories that fit comfortably within the sword and sorcery genre (there are wizards, monsters, and guys shooting arrows and swinging swords at them) but are also full of surprises. Bravo to Clark Ashton Smith. More Smith and more Weird Tales in our future!
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