Emperor of the Black Flame

 

Dust rose beside the river, and the sun set the ranks of spears afire as the legions marched to war.  Emperor Retarius rode among his armored bodyguard, watching his men deploy even as he kept an eye on the horizon where another cloud of dust showed the approach of his enemy.  All roads led to this place, all decisions and plans and strategies led to this single moment where men and blood and iron would decide the fate of kingdoms.

His plans to move his men south along the river and catch the approaching Hatta in between two armies had been checked, and the river battle had been costly.  He had lost both ships and men, but he had both in plenty.  The Hatta had taken the main crossing, and there they awaited him, and he knew they only waited because they expected reinforcement, and now that force was drawing close as well.

He had word that this desert usurper had allied himself with the deposed queen Arsinue, as well as the barbarian king of the Hatta, and that troubled Retarius, for he knew the true danger of a man who can make alliances as well as enemies.  A ruler must have both, after all, and the test of greatness is the choosing of them.  Retarius was a man with no enemies who remained alive, and so he felt a strange kind of gladness to meet a new enemy now, in this unexpected place.  He had come to put down the last spark of rebellion from an old, respected foe, and now he found himself grappling with a worthy adversary.

The river lay on his left, and the crossing was just out of sight to the south, over the scrub-covered hills and a cluster of date palms in a small orchard.  There was a town nearby, and he could just see the dusty rooftops if he looked to his right, but it was deserted and would not matter.  The enemy expected him to come and try the crossing, exposing his legions to the sweeps of Hattan horsemen, but he would not oblige them.  He knew this enemy would come leading with the charge of horse, and his foot-bound legions could not match their attack power against that.  Against a mounted enemy, he was forced onto the defensive, but he was prepared for it

The ground here was broken by small hills, scattered with irregular stones.  Already his men were setting their lines, picking up rocks and hurling them outward, where they would make charging horses trip and stumble.  He had siege weapons brought from the city, dragged here with great effort and set to fire on the rushing enemy.  Here the horsemen would find their mobility restricted, their charges shortened by a lack of open ground.  Arrows and javelins would bring them down and blunt their assault before it could land.  He knew if he could break their first two attacks, they would begin to lose heart, and his own position would strengthen.

There was little for him to do until the hour arrived.  His men knew their business, and he had no need to watch over them.  He rode to the small, upraised hill where a few broken pillars marked where a temple had once stood, and there his pavilion had been set, slaves waiting to attend him.  The enemy attack would not come until the afternoon, and he would rest until then.  Some cool water and cool wine, something to take away the close heat of this place.  He came down from his horse and went inside, feeling the tremble in the earth below him of armies on the move.

The Norseman

 

I have generally avoided reviewing some of the more notoriously bad films that burst out in the wake of the success of Conan the Barbarian in 1982.  There were a lot of shoddy attempts to cash in on the trend of oiled-up musclemen with European accents cavorting through cheap sets full of bikini models with feathered hair, and I have no particular desire to go through and skewer trash like Ator, the Fighting Eagle.  That said, I thought this one might have a bit more interest to it.  The Norseman came out in 1978 – before the barbarian surge – and was an attempt at actual historical fiction.  Turns out it is still embarrassingly terrible, but sometimes life is like that.

This was the big-studio directorial debut of Charles B. Pierce, who had made his reputation with the minor cult hit Legend of Boggy Creek, and this looks exactly like you’d expect a viking movie made by that guy would look.  The lead role is assayed by Lee Majors, who was then riding high on the popularity of The Six Million Dollar Man, and who seems to have taken the job as a bit of a lark, as it meant a Florida vacation between TV seasons.

This is ostensibly the story of a viking named Thorvald, who journeys to “Vineland” in search of his father, who vanished on a journey to the western seas years ago.  The longship they sail on looks pretty good, and seems to have been actually functional, as there are many shots of it tooling around the mangrove swamps where they filmed.  The ship is crewed by faded action star Cornel Wilde, walleyed character actor Jack Elam as some kind of wizard, and a host of Tampa Bay linebackers as background vikings, including one black dude, who is explained away with a throwaway line about a raid on North Africa, but otherwise doesn’t contribute any more than anyone else to this mess.

It turns out the missing King Eurich was captured and blinded by Native Americans, and he and some of his men are still kept as slaves.  None of the natives are played by actual indigenous actors, seeming to be mostly Italians and regular white dudes in long black wigs.  The Native costumes and general depiction are as shoddy and cringe-worthy as you would expect, given what kind of movie this is.

As such, there are not really any sets, save for the viking ship and the cave where the prisoners are kept.  The costumes are hideous, looking like they simply raided the prop rooms of older movies to come up with a bunch of plastic shields and helmets.  Said helmets have ridiculous-looking cow horns stuck on them – which might also have been plastic – causing the vikings to look like an invasion of bovines.  Majors wears a different style of helmet which seems to be influenced by the one Kirk Douglas wore in The Vikings, and it’s the only one that looks any good at all.

Everything about this is pretty painful.  The script is incredibly tedious, with long stretches of nothing happening, or scenes where people declaim things to each other.  Nobody acts in this movie, they just declaim.  The pace is glacial, and even at barely 90 minutes the movie feels extremely padded out.  Even when an actual fight scene breaks out, things don’t get better, as the action choreography is what I would call “nonexistent”, and there is a heavy use of slow-motion to further deaden any excitement that might leak through.  There is a little bit of fake blood, so it’s not completely G-grade, but there’s just not much going on here.

I find it hard to believe that Majors, who was then the star of one of TVs biggest shows, could not find something better to do with his time.  His casting is a misfire on a par with John Wayne in The Conqueror, as Majors is a similar kind of broad, American actor, and he’s not attempting any kind of accent or performance.  When he pulls out his plastic sword and starts to invoke “Our gawd Oden” the major reaction is to snicker.  If this had been made 20 years earlier, then it might have shared the screen with movies more like itself, and be remembered with a bit more affection, but in the 70s it was already a throwback to an earlier era, and not a good one.

I find it interesting that this movie arrived at a similar place as Pathfinder would almost 30 years later, though the point of view regarding the natives is completely flipped.  The theme of men, far from home, at war with a strange people and a strange land remains a compelling one, and could be made into something quite good.  Survival, savagery, a hostile wilderness and the strange powers of an unexplored world and mythology could be the basis of a compelling story, it just has not been done, or at least, not done well.

Rivers of Blood and Fire

 

Prows sheathed in bronze gleamed like gold in the haze of dawn as they cleaved through the wine-dark waves.  Out of the shadows a great fleet emerged, dark sails furled, oars scything through the water as they cut across the calm seas toward the glittering lights of Qahir where it dreamed on the shores of Ashem.  The great lighthouse shone its blaze forth into the dying night, but no one saw the oncoming ships until the sun turned the eastern sky to fire.

Cries went up along the shore, and fishermen headed to their daily toil paused and stared at the rank upon rank of warships coming in toward land.  Alarms sounded on the walls of the palace, and people just roused from sleep gathered their children and ran, hiding themselves in their houses and beneath false floors.  Bells rang and horns blared, and soldiers on the fortifications watched as a greater armada than they had ever seen came swarming to the docks.

One after another, the beating drums of the oarmasters ceased, and the oars lifted from the water and vanished into the black hulls.  Ropes were cast, planks dropped, and formations of legionaries began to pour forth from the ships like swarms of ants.  To the east, ships forced their way up the river mouth and drew ashore within the city, disgorging more troops.  Hundreds, thousands.  The ships unloaded their men and then withdrew to make room for the next, and the next.  The waterfront swelled with armed men beneath spears like grain and battle standards hung with gold leaves and wolf skins.

A grand ship came ashore and from it came a cohort of men in gilded armor, and in their midst slaves carried a purple canopy and the warriors who walked beside it carried naked swords and watched from behind silver war-masks that made them seem like statues rather than men.  The Varonan legions pushed into the city, clearing the roads with careless force, and they made their way toward the tall towers of the royal palace, clearing a path for the canopy and the standard of the imperial power.

Barbarians

 

Considering what a big deal it is, historically, I am kind of surprised that we haven’t seen more coverage of the battle of the Teutoberg Forest in film.  Fought in 9 AD, it was one of the most decisive contests in military history, in which gathered Germanic tribes dealt Rome one of the most severe defeats it ever suffered, destroyed three entire legions, and captured three regimental eagles, two of which were never recovered.  Shocked by the crushing setback, the aging Emperor Augustus decided never to push the empire’s borders beyond the Rhine, and the eastern Germans would never be subservient to Rome.

Barbarians (Barbaren in the original German) is a six-episode miniseries about the lead-up to the battle and the characters that drove it, finishing up with the epic event itself.  A German series, it was picked up for international distribution by Netflix.  The settings default to dubbed, but it is easy to switch back to the original spoken German and Latin, and I highly recommend that.  The German is modern, but it still adds a layer of verisimilitude to see historical Germans speak their actual language.  The Latin in the series has been lauded as being pretty authentic Classical Latin, and watching it all in subtitles emphasizes the cultural distance between the two cultures.

The authenticity of the show overall is high.  The Roman costuming is first-rate, and the Germanic characters are dressed in line with what we know about what the people of that era wore.  The weapons and armor are really excellent, as they are all accurate to the arms of the time period.  The soldiers of the legions wear a mix of styles of armor, from scaled to mail, and they don’t all look identical.  The swords all look really good, from the Romans with their gladii to the longer Germanic swords.  Spears are used much more often than we usually see in period pieces, and there is some effort to show the actual, historical battlefield tactics.

But this isn’t just a show about a battle.  Barbarians is a story about the conflicts between two peoples, expressed by characters.  The central figure of the battle is Arminius, who was born in Germania, then later went to Rome as a leader of auxiliary troops and returned to his homeland as a cavalry officer.  Here he is depicted as a son of a chief who was taken away as a hostage and raised by Varus, the Roman commander of the legions in Germania.  He comes onscreen presenting as a pure Roman, proud of his position and his adopted culture, who is pulled back to allegiance to his people by events and the ties of family and friendship.  Played by German actor Laurence Rupp with tremendous magnetism, Arminius is multilayered and conflicted.  Rupp is going to be a star someday soon, or he should be, with his gift for microexpressions and his bright blue stare.

The other two sides of the triangle are the invented character of Folkwin, Arminius’s childhood friend, and Thusnelda, the woman they both come to love.  Folkwin is played by David Schutter with a wonderful, mercurial energy, and I promise you that actress Jeanne Goursaud is going to get some attention.  Not only is she head-turningly beautiful, but she plays Thusnelda with complexity and ferocity.  She is completely believable as both the daughter of a Roman sympathizer caught up in events beyond her control, and as the war-painted, bloody-eyed witch-woman slaughtering legionaries with a spear.

The show goes to a lot of effort to not paint either side in black and white.  The Romans are patronizing and imperialist, and the show does not soft-pedal that, but we see them as actual human beings with their own desires and flaws.  Varus, the Roman commander who led the legions to disaster, is rather likeable in his own way, and we see him through Arminius’s eyes as a man who treated him well, and raised him like a father.  The Germans are fractious and fight each other at a moment’s notice, and they are not depicted as any kind of “noble savages”.  The show simply lays the battle out as a conflict of cultures, brought to a point by the choices of a few people who found themselves at particular places in the crucial moment.

So this is a series for Sword & Sorcery fans to dig in on.  It presents morally gray characters making choices against a backdrop of political intrigue and personal danger.  The violence is visceral and the fight scenes are satisfyingly brutal.  The culminating battle is suitably epic, even if, for my taste, there could have been a more detailed treatment of the tactics used, that’s just me being a military history nerd.  The show does a good job balancing known historical facts with the needs of drama, and makes for a satisfying historical epic.

The Valley of the Dead

 

Night brought the moon, and the red haunter on the horizon brought forth the sorcerer.  Dekenius waited with unease, for he was more accustomed to granting audiences than having them granted.  He waited in a ring of burning torches upon the sand-cut ruins of some forgotten temple, and as always he wondered at the age of this place.  So many centuries of rise and fall, of passion and war and the slow returning of the floods year after year.  So many ruins to be seen everywhere, places without names, none remembering what they had been.

There were no guards, he would not look the fool by thinking his men could protect him from one like this.  He had seen what this desert warlock had done at the battle, and it frightened him, and the fact of that fear was like a stone on his tongue he could not swallow.  Dekenius feared little, and he ill-liked the taste of it now.  He had called for aid in a moment of weakness, and it was bitter.

The sky was clear as glass, ancient stars blazing on high, and he saw a darkness come from the horizon beneath the moon.  It billowed like a banner, and then he heard the beat of hooves.  A lone rider approached, robed in ebon like the night.  The horse was black and breathed glowing light as from a fire, and sparks trailed from the hooves where they touched the earth.

The rider drew closer, and larger, until Dekenius saw it was a horse taller than any he had seen, if horse it was, and the man who sat upon it was a giant who loomed against the stars.  Beneath the cowl he saw the shadow of a white face and dark eyes that gleamed like jewels, and there was a scent of bitter earth and heavy incense that came from within the black robes.  The rider drew to a stop and looked down at him, and Dekenius had never felt so small.