Homecoming

 

The sun returned to the city of Sinasekan with summer fire after the afternoon rain faded away over the sea.  The streets were all but still, the harbor emptied of all ships that could flee before the coming onslaught.  The news had come across the waters, whispered in taverns and brothels by night, passed from slave to servant to laborer to sailor in low-pitched voices.  No one who had ears to hear did not know that the enemy was coming, that the demon queen who commanded a fleet of warships was coming with the evening tide.

Merchants had packed their wares and fled, travelers had climbed aboard anything that would float and set the city in their wake.  Smugglers, traders, explorers, seekers of fortune all knew what was on the way, and none wished to remain in the path of destruction.  Seabirds cried as they flew over the harbor, their shadows racing across the still blue water.  There was a beauty in the stillness, in the poised and expectant quiet.

The Viceroy, lord of this place, was not a fool.  He had gathered all he could to try and stave off the coming attack, though he doubted it would be enough.  The entrance to the harbor was blocked by ships, rafts, and boats his men had seized.  They were lashed and chained together to make a barrier no ship could pass without pausing to chop a path through, and his men were on the sea walls with crossbows and rifles and cannons to stop that from happening.  The streets behind the outer gates were barricaded, and he had to hope he could reinforce the men holding them when it came to that.  He was sure after their attack on the harbor was blocked, they would come to the city by land as they had when they tried to kill him.

The Viceroy, Lord Dasato, looked down from the high window of his rooms to the jewel blue of the harbor.  He had served here for six years, and it had made him wealthy and respected.  He had never intended to return home.  This place was too beautiful, too lush and ripe with pleasures and ease.  Why would he ever go back to the moody, cold forests of Achen?  No, he had planned to die here in this faraway country, and now it seemed he would.

He had sent word for help, knowing it would take months to come, if it came.  Pleading for more aid so soon after the first time and the loss of the treasure fleet would destroy his reputation.  There would be no honorable retirement for him now, only disgrace.  He would be fortunate to attain an ignominious life on a plantation here somewhere, even if he could escape the rebels.  Now it seemed less and less likely that he could.  Perhaps he should have left with his family while there was yet time.  He had rejected that choice as a further disgrace upon his name, casting aside all pretense at courage.  Now he could not be sure if he regretted it.

She was coming, and it was with a sense of fate that he looked east over the sea and saw the white specks of ships gathering on the horizon.  Survivors had already told the tale of Aurich’s fall.  The paladin was gone and could not save them.  She was coming.  Jaya.  That was her name.

They said she was the daughter of a sea-devil.  That she rode a dragon and conjured storms.  The stories said she took the heads of those she slew, and that much he believed.  She had come here once before to kill him, and only the presence of the paladin had stopped her, now there was no such protection.  He watched the ships draw closer in the steep afternoon light, and he took a long breath.  Tonight would come the decision, and whatever deliverance he might hope for.  He called for the signal fires to be lit, to summon every man to arms.  Battle was coming on the night wind.

The Sea of Blood

 

The wind raved like curses through the jagged rocks of the Kasara Strait, whipping the waves into white-crested fury and screaming in between the spires.  This narrow neck of sea between the islands of Manu and Salua was dangerous water, and every sailor knew that was truth.  No ordinary captain or king could have gathered so many ships in this deadly place, only the fear of gods could have done it.

Aurich the Beast stood at the prow of the flagship, his great sword point down in the hard wood of the deck, his mailed hands grasping the guard.  The pitch and sway of the ship did not seem to concern him, nor did the wind or the spray that lashed against the sails.  It was high noon, and yet the sky was overcast and gray as hammered iron, heavy with the promise of rain.  Beneath his helm his face was hidden, giving no sign of what lay beneath.

The captain of the ship made his way forward, squinting into the wind.  The gusts backed around the compass, giving no warning.  To sail in such weather in this place was folly, and he would not be here save that this man – this steel-hearted fanatic from the homelands – was the one who truly commanded.  The captain knew that if he balked he would be headless and cast into the sea before he could finish his breath.  He had seen paladins before, but never one as unflinching and hard as this one.

When he was close he leaned against the rail for balance and pitched his voice to carry.  “There is no sign of them, lord.  Still no sign.”

“They will come,” Aurich said.  “Before nightfall they will come.  The information was bought with screams and with blood, it will be truth.”  From within his helm his voice sounded hollow and sepulchral.  “The demon child will come.  She has no choice.”

The Dragon's Teeth

 

A storm was sweeping across the sea from the darkened south, casting down rain and billowing wind, and the seaside outpost of Jinan lay beneath a pall of smoke.  Fires burned in the houses and outside in the forest, and warriors gathered there, making magic for their final war.  In the harbor six ships lay at anchor, their sails gathered in against the coming storm, and in the distance, on the edge of the horizon, there lurked the shadows of the ships of their enemies.

For days the enemy fleet had swept in with the dusk and battered the ships and shore with cannonfire, raking their targets, seeking to break up the defenses.  Dhatun, the warrior of the Ekwa, was the one who commanded now Jaya was gone, and though he was fierce and proven, his rule was tenuous.  Already warriors had begun to slip away into the jungles, feeling the gods had abandoned them.  The daily blasting of shell and flame had only made things worse.

The Reaper stood at anchor, more massive than any other ship in the harbor.  She was battered from her ordeal at sea, her hull splintered and her beams cracked.  She could not stand and do battle with the enemy ships, and the five others were low, lean craft made for speed rather than power.  Dhatun knew if they left the harbor they would be hunted down and destroyed.

So he waited, sure that the enemy would not want to risk the close confines of the lagoon.  They would not want to come ashore and fight a battle that would cost them blood.  They would keep him bottled up here until more ships arrived.  The enemy detachment was eight ships, three of them massive war-craft meant for battle.

Now they were coming close again, racing in a line through the heavy breakers as the wind picked up speed.  Lightning flickered under the stormclouds on the horizon, and the thunder was distant, like drums.  The people in Jinan hunkered down behind walls and trees, ready to weather another volley from the enemy.

The first ship swept past the headland and into the mouth of the bay, and its guns began to shout, bursting forth clouds of black smoke and jets of fire.  Cannonballs punched through the ship hulls at anchor, bounced inland and smashed through walls.  Every gun fired, and then the next ship, and the next.  Smoke erupted from the forest as hot shells struck home, splintering trees and setting brushfires.

The captain of the lead ship turned his craft back out to sea.  The storm would come in before nightfall, and by then they would have to anchor around the point and wait out the weather.  The devils might come by night, but in the rain and wind they would not be able to mount a large enough attack to be a threat.  He looked southward, seeking there the sails of the reinforcements he waited for.  Instead he saw a wake moving fast, the westering sun lighting it like a trail made of gold.

Volcanic Rituals

 

Jaya plunged down into the black waters, surrounded by the floating ruin of shattered wood and torn bodies.  She tried to swim, but her armor dragged at her, her boots filling with water and pulling her deeper no matter how she kicked for the light.  Looking up, she saw the surface crossed by the shadows of the ship’s hulls, the darting shapes of sharks as they tore at the wounded struggling in the deep.

She fought the straps on her shoulder-guards, shrugged them off, and then she cut the leather fastenings of her breastplate with her long dagger.  Her sword was gone, lost in the depths, and she had no time to mourn the loss.  She kicked for the surface, sliding her boots off, shedding all the belts and armor that had guarded her, but would kill her now if she did not set herself free of it.

Naked, she reached the surface and gasped for breath.  The waves were steep, and the wind was rising.  The Mordani warship was a flaming wreck sliding away from her, leaving a scatter of wreckage in its wake.  Smoke boiled up, filling the sky and cutting out the sun.  Everything was lost in a terrible haze that smelled of burning flesh, and though she looked for the Unjarah, she could see nothing.

A wave slapped her down and she had to fight back to the surface.  She clung to her dagger and gasped, caught a drifting piece of splintered wood, hung on to it as it rode up the face of a wave and the cresting top splashed her in the face.  She hung on, realizing she had to get away from here, from the spreading stain of blood and death that would bring the sharks and other sea-scavengers.  She had to get away from where her enemies would be looking for her.  She had escaped alive, but if they caught her, death would not be swift.

A tall fin knifed through the water near her, and she saw the pale shape of the beast as it slid past, held in the body of the rising wave as though it were on the other side of a glassine wall.  She saw the black, black eye, and she knew it regarded her.  She felt the cold glance, and she felt the indifference of the shark, like a cold wind.  She had lost the will of the gods, somewhere in her crusade, and she must have it back.

The Reaping Sea

 

Jaya drove her rowers hard through the morning.  The sun rose blazing behind them and she steered through waves that deepened and rolled more heavily as wind sprang up from the north.  At the prow she had a lookout watching the horizon, looking for her ships, and she could look to the north herself and see the sails of the oncoming enemies growing nearer, the wind driving them like whips.  She counted six sails, then ten, then sixteen, and she saw signals flashed from one to the other, a flickering of light.

The longboats rowed hard around the headland and she saw her own ships at anchor offshore, pitching as the sea grew rougher.  She had not brought her entire fleet here, only a flotilla large enough to deter attack.  She had six smaller ships, including her own Unjarah, and at the center one of the great warships she had captured and renamed the Reaper.

Seeing them at anchor like this sank her heart heavy in her chest, down into her belly.  They could never get underway fast enough to escape the enemy ships, and they were not enough to fight them.  The Mordani had brought a greater power to bear than she had foreseen, and now she knew this was the price of her strike against them.  They must have sent away for aid when she took Jinan, and now she was gathering the harvest of her success.

The rowers bent now, pulling fanatically until their skins were slick with sweat and their arms knotted and their backs groaned.  Jaya gave orders to her man at the prow and he shouted her commands ahead as far as his voice could bear them.  By the time they were close the ships were all dragging up their anchors and rushing to put on sail.  The heavy anchors of the Reaper would never come up in time, so men with chisels and hammers cut the chains away and set her loose.

Dhatun looked at her when they came near the immense warship.  The Reaper was his command, and it was his place to captain her.  Their gazes met for a long moment, and then he turned his boat for his ship as it began to move.  Jaya swallowed a heaviness in her throat.  She knew she would likely not see him alive again, if indeed any of them escaped this trap.

The City of Brass

 

Sinasekan lay quiet under the deepening summer, the days growing longer, the evening rains falling soft on the winding streets and the whitewashed houses.  By afternoon the humidity rose and steamed, and people escaped to their rooftops to lounge under silk canopies through the hottest part of the day.  They watched the air shimmer as the sun beat down, watched the towers of the palace of the viceroy seem to waver like the towers of a mirage, and they watched ships come and go from the great harbor.

So many ships, so many colors of hull and sail.  Traders from far Savindria and Sinagar, slavers from Achen, warships from Morda, and a dozen more purposes and nations all moving like swift fish through the blue waters.  The view reached far out over the sea, beyond the harbor where white towers stood watch, seeking the faded horizons and the stars that gleamed in the clear air even now, when the sun was high.  Sinasekan was a paradise on earth for its masters, who had seen the golden stone of the ancient palace gleaming in the sunset once and named it the City of Brass – the fabled home of a race older than man, and far more terrible.

The ship appeared in the swelling heat of midafternoon, and all marked it, for it was plainly one of the black ships that had set forth ten days ago, bound for the old kingdom with unimaginable riches swelling their holds.  The hull was black, and the sails had once been white but were now stained by smoke to a tattered gray.  The ship wallowed, her sails untrimmed, the driver alone forcing her onward at a walking pace, barely keeping steerage in the fallow sea.

Other ships turned to evade it, for it gave nothing to any other craft, only came on straight and slow and terrible.  Those who hove near from curiosity saw the bowsprit was draped with severed heads, flesh burned or torn away, eyes devoured by seabirds.  They veered away, terrorized, for when they came close they could smell the charnel reek of the ship, the miasma of death that followed it.  They saw the black hull was splashed with blood that crawled with a thousand flies, and in her wake were dragged bloodstained ropes with iron hooks at the ends of them, and from those hooks dragged pieces of shark-gnawed flesh that had once been men.

The Black Ships

 

The monsoon season died, and the rains receded, so that they came daily over the sea, rather than in the ageless storms that lasted for weeks.  Birds ventured over the water, and the winds blew again from the east, sending the trade ships and fleets once more across the azure sea.  This was the time of year when the colonies forged by the Mordani invaders gathered their accumulated wealth and sent it home across the waters.  This was the season when poor men became rich men, and rich men became princes.

In the harbor of the great city of Sinasekan, walled in by white cliffs and guarded by stone towers, the black fleet gathered.  Six ships, then ten, then a dozen.  Day and night, slaves carried the treasure of the islands over the gangplanks and into the dark holds under the watchful eyes of armored guards.  All year the mines of the islands were worked, gathering a fortune in silver and gold in the court of the viceroy, and when the rains ended, the treasure was loaded aboard ships with white sails and black hulls, and then the fleet sailed away, over the long course to Morda, on the other side of the world, there to make the king even richer, to pay for the wars with Achen and Savindria, so that the black stallion banner would fly over new lands and new conquests.

For three weeks the ships gathered, loaded until they were slung low in the water.  The port city seethed with spies and counterspies as corsairs sought the exact date of the departure and the Viceroy’s agents sought to conceal it, catch those who sought it.  Spies for the pirate brotherhoods were caught and hanged from gibbets, slaves who spoke too freely had their tongues torn out with red-hot pincers, and gossips who spoke unguarded were arrested and had their eyes put out, whether woman or child.

Lookouts on the cliffsides and headlands kept their eyes on the far horizons, for they knew the black fleet could not sail without warships to guard it.  The treasure ships were so loaded with wealth there was no room for fighting men or for much powder for the guns.  Each was so heavy that they wallowed like pigs in muck, and would be so slow they would be easy prey for any raider.  The traveled in a fleet so that even if one was picked off by a buccaneer, the others would escape while the one was looted.  In the twenty years since the ships began to sail, not one had been lost.

The Iron Brotherhood

 

It was dawn when the ship came out of the sea-mist, the ropes and planks creaking as it shifted on the waves.  It was a long, low sloop of war, with a dozen guns in closed ports along the sides and deck guns mounted on swivels along the rail.  The sails bellied somnolently, the wind barely enough to push the craft along, and when it came in sight of land a cry went up, and men moved on the shadowed deck.

Jaya went to the prow, wanting to see.  The island emerged from the hollow shade of misty dawnlight as a shadow without feature or mark.  The waves turned white as they crept into the shore, and beyond that the land was a dark mass that rose up and up toward the unseen peak at the center.  She saw the forest dark as night, heard the cries of the nightjars like little questions and the whooping of the monkeys as they came down to the sea to hunt crabs.

Her ship was crewed by Utani and by Ekwa she had gathered to her side.  Bastar steered the ship at her order, and Dhatun was her second.  She had taken this as her ship because it was the swiftest, the most agile in the water, quick as a shark or a falcon.  Unjarah, she had named it – the Reaver.  A name given to both hunters and killers.  To those who stole and devoured and could not be stopped.  So some called the Ekwa themselves, so some called the outcasts who dwelled in hidden places and came by night to rob and kill.  Her ship was dark, the hull painted black, weathered skulls hanging from beneath the bowsprit.

They came closer to land, and she signaled for the anchors to be lowered, the heavy iron hooks dropped into the sea with a sound she was sure could be heard all over the island, even if she knew it was not so.  She watched, seeking a flicker of a torch or a lantern, but the land remained dark, and the only sounds were those of the jungle.

Half a year since she had taken Jinan, and the fleet with it.  Jaya was not the same woman she had been.  Tattooed and painted with the marks of her people, as well as those of the Ekwa and the disciples of Hamau, she wore her hair in braids, some of them bleached white and set with shark teeth.  She wore hard leather vambraces and a piece of steel armor over her left shoulder, a keeled breastplate guarding her heart.  She wore tall sea-boots and necklaces of bones and teeth clacked around her ankles.  Always at her side was her father’s sword, still keen and bright, still hungry to take heads, and she wore two pistols ready in her belt.

A boat was lowered on pulleys and she climbed down, gathered in it with a dozen of her men and Bastar at her side.  She wanted Dhatun to guard the ship, and she could not leave the two of them alone, for one of them would be dead when she returned.

The men rowed, pushing the longboat across the fallow sea until the bottom scraped on the sand and they leaped out, drew the ship into the shallows.  Jaya stepped out from the boat and set foot upon the land, feeling a tremor in her heart.  It had been so long.

The Storm of Blood

 

Down from the hills the land was a pattern of green fields and darker gatherings of orchards and forest flowing to the sea, where the city of Jinan hunched like a barnacle clinging to the shore.  It looked ugly to her, and Jaya took pleasure in thinking she would soon wipe if from the face of this sacred island.  The afternoon sun slanted down across the water, setting the clouds on fire, and the whole sea was the color of blood.

The southern horizon, over the water, was all a black frontier of churning cloud and lances of violet lightning.  The monsoon had begun, though it had yet to come ashore.  For days she had watched ships scuttle in from the sea to take shelter in the harbor here, anchoring themsleves securely, ready to hold out through the torrents of rain and wind they knew would come.  Even the outlanders had learned the ways of the great storms that came when the seasons turned.  She would use that to grind them into pieces.

It was good to look on the sea again, to watch the waves roll and swell and fall in on themselves, the crests growing higher and higher as the storm out to sea gained intensity.  The thunder was distant, but that would change.  She felt the winds shifting as she closed her eyes, feeling the breath of the sea on her face, smelling the salt and blood and the seaweed and dead fish rotting on the beaches.  As familiar as her own voice.  The gods were close to her now, and she remembered all they had laid upon her.  The favor shown by Arang who had saved her life, of Ularu who had spared it, of the blessing of Sa-Hantu who lit the deep with his fire, and of Hamau the tigress, who haunted her wake like a promise of vengeance.

Dhatun stood by her, and she was glad of his presence.  He frowned down at the town spread along the shore.  It had not been made for defense, and the walls were low and old, but it was plain measures had been taken since the battle at the Basu, and from here they could see barricades raised to block the streets inside the gate, and logs used to raise the walls higher and reinforce them.  The two cannons she had captured would not breach a hole easily.

The Red Sun

 

Smoke turned the sky dark at midday, and it turned the sun red as blood.  Jaya looked out from her hillside vantage and saw the line of fire stretched across the countryside, and she tasted the smoke of the ruined farms and the slain Utani.  The Mordani, the giants, were on the move, and they came with fire and steel.

She had expected they would react to the destruction of the manor house and the slaying of their elder, but their wrath was greater than she had foreseen.  She had not thought them foolish enough to raze the very farms and plantations that made them lords.  That their rage would cause them to scourge the land itself in the hopes of driving her out of her forested sanctuary.  Now they beat the bush and the scrublands, driving all before them, and by tomorrow morning they would reach the edges of the forest itself.

Her one-eyed messenger came through her assassins and bowed low.  “One has come who says he is known to you.  He has the marks of an Ekwa raider.”

Jaya felt her heart leap, and she smiled.  “Bring him, bring him quickly.”  She had not dared to hope that Dhatun had survived the wreck, all those years gone.  She wondered if it would be him, or another of his kind come to seek her out.

It was him.  He towered above the smaller Utani, lean and hard and marked by the intricate tattoos of his people.  He wore his long hair in a nest of braids, but they were no longer limed white and stiff.  She realized he must have been here since they wrecked, and not returned home to his people.  Yet he still carried himself stiff and proud as he walked, and smiled his tight-lipped smile when he saw her.

“My chief,” he said, and gave his small tilt of the head that was all the bow an Ekwa would grant.  “I never doubted that you lived, and when I heard the tales of this uprising, I knew it must be you.”

She smiled and then embraced him, glad of the feel of his solid, sinewy muscle.  “I am glad to find you alive as well.  There is no other I would rather see today.”  She looked at him.  “You have not returned home.”

He shrugged.  “My people are much feared here, I have lived on the wild coasts, spear-fishing and stealing from the dirt-grubbers.  It is a long voyage home, over uncertain seas, almost impossible alone, in a hide boat.  I awaited a sign, and now I have one.”

Children of the Bones

 

Smoke lay over the hills and forests of Tarakan, and the roads were emptied when the night came, for death had come to live in the night, and no man dared venture forth under the sign of the moon.  The smoke was from the burning of the fields and the lodges of those the Mordani judged to be rebels, and the roads were marked by the bodies of the executed, hung by their wrists until they ceased to cry out, and the birds came to devour their eyes and tongues.

By day the Mordani lords roamed the paths in armed companies, horses breathing hard as they rode with drawn swords and smoking matches in their guns.  The country they had once held as their own was now dangerous for them, and any man who went alone would not return.  Those lost vanished in the dark and the jungle and their heads were found when morning came, hanging from tree limbs, or at the crossroads where they executed those who rebelled against them.  By night the slain Utani were taken down and replaced by Mordani taken from their beds in the night, by women who vanished in the dark.  All knew the fear of the rebellion, and all feared the mark of the serpent and the tiger.

The Utani in the fields bent their necks and endured, working their crops by day, seeking to give no offense to their masters, but by night many of them covered their faces and crept out into the forest.  They slipped up on manor houses and set them afire, or they stole and slaughtered cattle and horses.  They poisoned wells, stole children, and took the heads of any man who fell into their grasp.

So by day the land simmered under the late-summer heat, the skies to the west dark with gathering storms, though the first real monsoon of the season had not yet some striding ashore.  Thunder often rumbled distantly while the sun yet shone and the rains fell through the afternoon light in scintillant color.  The Mordani warlords traveled the roads with swords bared and struck down any who so much as looked them in the face, striving to use terror to subdue.

By night the land belonged to the Tigress, and though none knew her name, some claimed to have seen her.  They said she was a witch out of the high country, tattooed as in the old ways and with the magic of the Old Gods.  They said she could vanish at will, that she transformed under the crescent moon into a tigress the size of a horse, and that no blade could touch her.  The young men and women, driven to rage by the cruelty of their overlords, had become her disciples, and it was she who nurtured the flame of revolt in Tarakan, and who had sworn to drive the Mordani out with fire and steel.

The Ancient Ones

 

The skies broke open when Jaya came to the high places at the heart of the island.  She emerged from the shroud of the forest and stood upon a rocky hillside looking out over the expanse of the central plateau, the jagged mountains lying all around her in a vista that stole her breath.  The peaks of the mountains stood like phantoms, the mist fading their shoulders so that they seemed to float above the earth like giants, the hollows and folds of the foothills heavy with fog and dark with jungle.

And before her stood the place where her race had been born.  Sigara had been the fortress of her people from the eldest days, a refuge from their enemies, and the womb of their strength before they broke forth upon the outer world and subjugated it.  It was not like any other mountain, being instead a solid mass of stone, not diluted with soil, but like a great rock set down upon the earth by the hands of the gods themselves.  Looking on it from the south, she saw the narrow path etched up from below, cut back and forth across the rock face, and the idol of Hamau near the top, many times larger than any human shape.

The stone was fretted with green where vines grew up from below or dangled down from the top, and she saw streams where water cascaded down over the edge of the rock and fell to the jungle below like rain.  Above there would be pools and channels cut into the stone to make reserves and keep the rain for the inhabitants of the shrine and to fill the hanging gardens.  She wondered if those ancient feats of construction had been preserved, or if they had decayed along with the veneration of the gods.

She started down the slope toward the base of the rock.  For days she had seen no marks of human hand, no sign of pursuit or ambush, and yet she moved cautiously through this dreamlike landscape, certain that there were those hunting her blood through the dark.  Now there was no way for her to hide.  The sky split apart and the rain turned to blazes of color between the clouds.  Lightning flickered among the ghostly peaks of the mountains, and birds screamed as they passed overhead in their thousands.

The path led through stone pillars now broken and covered in moss, and up a long, weaving stair thick with fungi and lichens.  She expected to find guardians, or at least a sentinel, but all was quiet as she reached the base of the stone and looked up along the switching stairs, higher and higher.  It was a long climb to the top, and she set the haft of her spear upon the path and began to climb.

The End of an Age

So there's no easy way to say this, but this blog is going to be coming to an end.  My personal circumstances have changed and I am just getting too busy to keep up with the content schedule anymore, and something in my life has to give.  So there's no review this week, and there will not be any more of my "in between" articles or reviews.  I am going to keep up with the stories - or try to - so I can finish out the current arc.  I am really enjoying the story, and I don't want to leave it half-finished.

There will be twice-monthly stories through the end of this year, but after that, I will not be continuing.  I am going to make an effort to finally get the rest of the ebooks done, but I don't know when.  Like I said, I am just getting a lot busier and can't keep up with the demands of the blog.

I have enjoyed my work here.  I wanted to inject some quality into the Sword & Sorcery genre, because I love it and Howard is a major influence on me.  I wanted to try and grow this place and make it into maybe a big enough income stream that it would be my job.  That never really happened, and that is probably because I never had the time or energy to add real membership perks to the Patreon.  Those of you who have contributed, I appreciate every dollar you have given.

The blog itself will not be taken down, and will remain here as long as the platform does.  I am proud of the work I have done here, and I thank you all for sharing it with me.

The Faceles Idol

 

The rains came as Jaya climbed the narrow jungle trails, but the foliage over her was so thick she felt only the drops that trickled through and dripped warm off the tips of leaves and spattered on her shoulders like blood.  The air was heavy, and steam rose from the loamy soil underfoot.  Each step and she sank in to her ankle, feeling the heat of the decay on her skin.

The trees became immense – slick gray trunks towering above her like pillars girded by vines and parasitic fungi that glowed in the darkness.  Birds flitted high above, calling out their cannibal songs, and beneath that was the domain of older and more primal things.  Dragonflies as long as her arm hummed between the branches, and moths with wings like cloaks hung from the bark, watching her with glowing eyes.  Serpents thick as her thigh crawled slow in the undergrowth, and spiders as long as a man hung their webs between the tree-boles like fisherman’s nets.

Jaya made her way with care, watchful of where she stepped.  Her people had dark legends of the terrors that dwelled in these forests, and she recalled more of them than she wished to.  She knew the stories of spiders large enough to devour an elephant, of bats that stung with envenomed tails, and serpents that whispered in human voices.  The Moon Forest, they called this place.  The domain of the gods themselves.  Not the Unnamed Gods, but older ones.  The gods of wind and rain and the shaking of the earth.

She saw tracks now and again in the dimness beneath the trees.  Water ran down the thick trunks in little rivers, and from these she could drink when she wanted, tasting the forest itself.  Here the earth was wet and heavy with mud, and here she saw the prints of feet that were not human, but were near to it.  The ape demons dwelled here in the ancient legends – neither beast nor quite man.  They hungered for flesh, and would rend it from trespassers with terrible claws.  Her most ancient ancestors had bred them from jungle apes to protect the pathways to their mountain home in the days before their conquest.

The way became stonier, and she picked out a path that wove between jagged black rocks among thorned vines, and she began to have glimpses of the heavy, cloud-covered sky.  Rain came in the morning, and again in the afternoon.  Thunder was her constant companion.  Soon she would mount the edge of the stony hills and stand upon the central plateau, and then she would face other dangers she could not foretell.

She looked back, down the long, mist-shrouded slopes, and she saw dark forms on another rocky finger below her.  Made small by distance, she knew they were not.  The apes crouched upon the stone and looked up at her, black-furred and clutching the rock with long talons.  They watched her, and she wondered if they followed, or simply marked her passing.  If she returned this way, she would learn.

It was morning when she saw again the marks of human hands in this place.  Some of the stone was cut into steps underfoot, and she saw worn faces watching from the rock walls around her, smoothed by rain over centuries until they were no more than the suggestions of human countenance.  Her ancestors watched her pass while they slept.

At the high place in the trail, under the canopy of branching, twisted trees, she found the statue.  Even covered in vines and mosses that clung, she knew the shape of Hamau, the Tigress.  Her claws still shone in glassine rock, but her face had been chipped and dashed away, leaving her blinded, and unseen.  The sight of it made Jaya angry.

This was what she had thought to find.  The heretics below her in the town had named another god, and she had seen their revulsion at the name of Hamau.  She was right to come here.  There was a great shrine of the Claw Goddess high in the mountains, and some lesser cult had burrowed into it like a maggot, and she would cut and burn them away.

She moved closer, wishing to clear away some of the vines and leaves and see what had become of the face of the goddess.  But when she reached up her hand, one of the vines moved, and she saw it flush and change color, turning a bright and luminous blue.  Scales rasped on the stone, and a serpentine body as thick as her leg shifted around the ancient idol.  Jaya saw a wide, spearhead-shaped skull come into sight, the neck coiling back and back on itself, and she saw the golden eyes of the nightmare viper.

It hissed, low and long and deep-voiced, and Jaya moved back slowly, her hand still raised, not taking her glance from the serpent as it moved, rearing up higher, tongue flicking out.  It was a big one, as long as three or four people, the head wider than her own, eyes bigger than the palms of her hands.  It swayed side to side, body heaving as it breathed.

Jaya bowed her head.  “Gentle, great one.  Gentle.  I walk in the name of Ulau, the Serpent King.  Your lord as well as one of mine.  I heed you, Death-Speaker.  I seek no harm to the idol of Hamau, I come walking in the footsteps of vengeance.  The time has come for all to be made right.”  She held up her empty hands and kept her eyes on the ground.  “I come in service to the gods.”

She held still, hardly daring to breathe, and she heard then the whispering sound that was almost words.  She smelled the sweet breath of the viper, that was said to be able to send men into endless dreams from which they would never awake, so they did not stir when they felt the sting of the fangs.  The ghost flick-flick of the dark tongue touched her outstretched hands, and she closed her eyes and waited.

Another whisper, and then silence.  She held still for a very long time, but when she looked up at last she saw the serpent had gone, and she was alone with the faceless god.  Slowly she brushed aside the vines and leaves until she could touch the chisel-marks on the stone where the face had been struck away, and she ground her teeth with anger.  She would walk to the heart of darkness on a path of fire.

Beowulf & Grendel

 

I don’t know if this is the best version of the epic that has yet been done, but it’s certainly the best one I have seen, though I have to stress that it is still not very good.  Filmed in Iceland with a strong cast, this adaptation at least has its heart in the right place, and some interesting ideas.  Part of the failing of this film is from elements that it adds, and part of it derives from the source material and flaws that are essentially baked in, but this movie is at least trying to do a respectful treatment of the Beowulf legend.

The use of Iceland to stand in for Dark Ages Denmark was a good idea, as it presents the filmmakers with endlessly cool-looking, primal vistas of land and sea to set the mood.  In a place like that, you just put an extra in armor and have him stand on the headland with a spear and bam – instant atmosphere.  The film gets a huge shot of verisimilitude from this and from the generally excellent costuming and set design.  The movie lets the vikings look colorful and use actual period armor and weapons, and it gives the whole thing an authentic feel.

The cast is pretty good here.  Gerard Butler is actually one of the weaker links, as he never really comes across – he is just a good-looking guy with ridiculous L’Oreal hair and an indestructible Scots accent.  Stellan Skarsgard is much better as the aging Hrothgar, successfully conveying the king’s despair as he fails to protect his people.  Tony Curran and a very young Rory McCann turn up as secondary characters, and the background is filled out with a bunch of solid Scandinavian actors.  Sarah Polley is here as a witch named Selma, and she is hilariously, radioactively miscast with her flat SoCal accent and her terrible wig – she seems like she just wandered in from some other movie.

The best performance here, really is from Icelandic actor Ingvar Sigurdsson as Grendel himself.  Depicted, essentially, as a kind of primitive hominid, Sigurdsson’s Grendel is a highly believable creation, and his commitment to the role creates a distinctive, frightening monster who is still very human.  He is shown as a being as capable of intelligence and emotion as anyone, but also indelibly, savagely strange, stamped with a deep hatred and sense of vengeance, and very alone.  Sigurdsson is not a huge guy, but the tricks of perspective they use to make him look like a towering monster work pretty well.

The real failing here is in the script, because the poem does not have enough action in it to fill out a movie, even when you include Grendel’s mother.  The film feels like it has to add some prequel-styled scenes to explain that Hrothgar killed Grendel’s dad and that’s why the whole thing gets started.  It also spends a lot of time showing us Beowulf before he arrives without showing him doing anything, so it comes across as slow and very talky.  The movie as a whole is slow and heavy with dialogue, which contrasts sharply with the way it was marketed as a kickass action piece.

The movie also dawdles getting to the big fight between Beowulf and Grendel, trying to draw things out and add more resonance.  An issue with the source material is that Beowulf just shows up to fight the monster with no personal stakes, and for a modern movie that’s a problem.  Here Beowulf is depicted as rather ambivalent about killing Grendel.  He sees the need to end the slaughter, but he feels like the monster has a reason for his vendetta, and as a result we have a protagonist whose motivation feels vague, and who does not really drive the action forward.  In this version, he does not even sever Grendel’s arm, but rather catches it in a snare and then the monster cuts off his own arm to escape – which is an interesting twist, but it doesn’t work.  Grendel could have easily escaped another way, and so it seems like he cuts off his own frigging arm for no real reason.

The editing and pacing of the film is rather inept, as there are long dialogue scenes that don’t really go anywhere, or that impart needed information but take far too long to do it, while important scenes often seem truncated or rushed.  Thus the movie as a whole rather lacks focus, with the central rivalry sketched but not detailed, and a hero who just seems to be there without any really strong reason to be involved.  The cinematography and action are well-done, the music is lackluster, and while the movie labors to elevate all of this into myth, it never manages it.

The production was famously difficult, and there was an award-winning documentary about the filming called Wrath of Gods that detailed the unbelievably bad weather that plagued the set and threatened the lives of nearly everyone involved.  It says pretty much all you need to know that a movie about the making of Beowulf & Grendel was far better received than the product itself, and tells a much more interesting story.

The Valley of Winds

 

For the first time in her life, Jaya left the sea behind her.  All the days since she was born she had never gone beyond the smell of the salt and the sound of the waves, the cry of the sea-birds when dawn came or the winds at dusk.  Now she turned her path northward, away from the shore, into the mountainous heart of the island of Tarakan, away from anything she had ever known.

She passed through terraced farmlands, avoiding any contact with either her own people or the giants who traveled the black stone roads.  The land lay under mist and rain, and it was not hard to remain concealed.  It galled her to turn her back on scourging the invaders, even for a time, but now the tiger shrine called her, and she could not believe that was an accident.  If she would follow the will of the gods, she must be ready to answer when they spoke.  The forbidden heartland of her race called to her, and she would heed it.

The land rose up and up, the trees growing taller and the roads less well-kept, until once again she followed foot-worn trails through the mud.  On the third day she stole sandals from a farmer’s hut and strapped them on, for the way was becoming more stony and rough, and she believed it would only become more rugged as she climbed.  She had never seen mountains close, and the few glimpses she had through the stormclouds looked too far away and too immense to be real.

The path led upward, through a series of narrower passes between hills, and she saw fewer villages, fewer signs of the things of man.  Only here and there did faded columns or worn archways mark that once her race had built great things on this soil.  Stone heads watched her from the hillsides, half-covered with moss, their features all but worn away.

There was a last village, and she found it empty, the houses abandoned and the roofs falling in.  She found no bones, no signs of death, but the lodges stood empty, many useful things still inside.  Glad of the chance, she went inside and gathered dried meats, a new waterskin, and some javelins for hunting.  She found new laces for her sandals and spent the evening repairing them, cutting them to fit her better.  Already she had walked much farther than she ever had before.

Beowulf (1999)

 

If you were counting down the worst adaptations of the Beowulf story (which I guess I kind of am), this one would be fighting it out for the bottom spot with the 2007 big-budget version.  I only rate that one as a bigger failure because that movie was a $150 million major studio effort with a huge amount of talent to draw on, while this one is a bargain-bin straight-to-video disaster of the kind that were all over video stores in the 90s.  With a bleached-blond Christopher Lambert in the title role and a then-unknown Rhona Mitra as his bland love interest, this one is a complete mess from minute one.

Rather than attempt a historical epic, this movie sets the Beowulf legend in a vaguely-defined post apocalypse, with Heorot replaced by an “Outpost” on an undefined border between warring armies of leather-clad S&M fetishists in ridiculous costumes.  Everything in the wardrobe design is way over the top, with horned helmets, spikes, straps, and skull masks.  You would think that would make it cool, but this is so cheap and so poorly filmed that it just looks dorky.

Hrothgar is not a king in this movie, just the lord of this bleak outpost that is now plagued by a monster that kills and blah blah – we know the deal here.  This kind of thing doesn’t have to be boring, but again, this is very badly directed, and so the performances are bad, the dialogue is bad, and everything just seems to take way too long.  Takes are long, the shots are static and just look at people doing nothing, saying nothing.  Everything comes off as tremendously awkward, like an amateur theater production.

They spent a lot of effort on the fight choreography, adding in a shit-ton of unnecessary backflips, jarring cuts, and wacky-looking weapons to try and inject some pizzazz, but it just comes off as tremendously silly.  Beowulf has an arsenal of weapons that seem to have been designed by 9-year-olds, including rapid-firing crossbows, a telescoping flail with a spike that comes out of the bottom, an axe that has a sword hidden in the hilt, and a bunch of daggers concealed everywhere in more and more elaborate places.  The backflips, in particular, look ridiculous, as Lambert’s stunt double will do literally 15 backflips away from the monster and then get smacked down anyway, so all that work never seems to do him any good.  His fighting style seems to be “when in doubt, do a backflip,” to the point that if you took a shot every time, it would kill you.

The Grendel design is kind of not bad, even if it has the expected Giger vibe to the look of it.  They obviously just had a cheap rubber suit, which they try to hide by putting a camera effect over it, to try and simulate the monster having some kind of field that makes him hard to see.  That’s a cool idea, but executed here it just seems like he’s got a blur filter on all the time, and it’s painfully obvious they are just trying to cover up the rubber suit.

Interestingly, this movie arrived at the “Grendel is Hrothgar’s bastard son” idea almost a decade before the Zemeckis movie.  When Grendel’s mother shows up, she is literally some Fredrick’s of Hollywood model in a wispy negligee and fucking crimped blonde hair (not kidding) who gives a long speech about killing Hrothgar’s men, leaning hard on the “hot blood pumping down my throat” and similar vulgarisms before she turns into a ludicrous CGI monster.  She looks like a spider made of bat wings rendered by a PS1, and has an entirely unconvincing battle with the backflipping hero until she is incinerated by the Outpost’s negligent fire safety standards.

It really is painful.  Believe me, if my description of this makes it sound like it might be a fun kind of terrible, it really, really isn’t.  It is mostly just boring and clunky, and Lambert especially seems like he is wishing he were somewhere else every moment he is on screen.  I only rate this as the second-worst Beowulf movie because it is just 80% painful to watch, as opposed to 100%.

The Black Road

 

Jaya followed the path, the dirt trampled smooth and hard by the passage of many.  It offended her to see it cut into the soil of this holy island.  She tried to harden her heart to it, knowing she would see many more such outrages before she was done.  She set her mind to eradicating the presence of the giants upon this land, and she swore she would water the earth with their blood in answer for their crimes.

The rains came, and she sheltered by night beneath the spreading leaves of a tamaka tree.  Soon the rains would come more heavily, and then the season of the monsoons.  She wondered if the giants could endure that, though if they had been here for years, they must know the way.  Part of her wished the islands themselves could drive out the invaders.  Then she thought that she was the answer to that – that the gods had called her because she was chosen to drive the enemy away.

Several days brought her to a place of wider fields, and she saw many of the Utani working in the long rows.  They cultivated rice and beans and breadfruit trees, and she watched them from a distance, laboring under the hot sun.  Here and there she saw giants moving among them, watchful and malignant, and she yearned to kill them, but she knew she could not become involved in a struggle here, so far from the seat of their power.  She must go to the sea, to the place called Jinan.

Beowulf (2007)

 

There have been a number of film adaptations of the story of Beowulf, and it’s not hard to see why.  It’s not only the first written English story, it’s a compelling story about heroism, sacrifice, and the battle against evil.  It also gives a film great excuses to put all kinds of cool monsters on the screen.  So I thought I would spend some time this year reviewing all the versions I can get my hands on.  I already did The 13th Warrior some time ago, so I will kick off here with what I think is the very worst version ever done: the 2007 disaster directed by Robert Zemeckis.

The first thing to really deal with is how much talent there is involved in this movie, and how it was all so deliberately and criminally wasted.  Ray Winstone is not exactly A-List, but at the time he was on a high, having starred in movies like King Arthur and Cold Mountain.  There was a feeling that he was on his way up, rather than what ended up happening, which was his sidestep into character acting, where he has remained.  You also have Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Brendan Gleeson, and Robin Wright among others.  Many of these actors (like Jolie and Malkovich) were such hot properties at the time they bordered on radioactive, so it remains even more mystifying how they ended up in this turd.

The biggest misstep is Zemeckis’s decision to render this all in CG, using the motion-capture technology he’d pioneered in Polar Express a few years earlier, which I think we can all agree looks like ass.  There were people impressed by it then, but oh boy it has not aged well, and it makes this movie look like a video game cutscene on a PS2.  Zemeckis is an odd filmmaker, with genuinely good work in his resume, like the Back to the Future trilogy and Romancing the Stone.  But he is too-often seduced by the lure of fancy technology, producing showy but empty crap like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, and Contact.

The other mistakes made here are legion, and more than a little ridiculous.  The look of Beowulf himself is supposed to be based on Jesus – no I am not kidding about that.  Why Jesus would look like a towering Viking warrior is not explained, but I would guess the reason rhymes with “shmacism”.  The characters all look like they have been glazed over with some kind of putty, and the artifacts of the 3-D technology means everything looks smeary and dark, with as much stuff as possible poking out at you.

The art design is a criminal mess, as Grendel – the coolest monster in fiction – resembles a massive, parboiled fetus that just isn’t interesting or pleasant to look at.  The dragon at the end is a depressingly boring design that looks like one rejected from a Harry Potter movie.  Angeline Jolie plays Grendel’s mother, and rather than the ogress we would expect, she is basically a sweaty, naked Angelina Jolie covered in golden slime, wielding a 14-foot prehensile braid and equipped with built-in stiletto heels.  I only wish I was kidding.

This brings us to the weirdly sexual themes worked into the story where they did not exist before.  We first have Beowulf depicted as battling Grendel in the nude – only this is a PG-13 movie, so we can’t be allowed to see Beowulf’s dong flapping around, so they make sure there is always something in the way in the foreground so we don’t.  This just reminds one of the same gag in Austin Powers, and renders one of the most iconic confrontations in fiction unintentionally comical.

There is lots of commentary on Beowulf having a huge cock, lest we forget that he is supposed to be the “physical ideal” – you know, like Jesus.  He goes to confront Grendel’s Mother, and rather than fight, she seduces him.  See, Grendel is supposedly Hrothgar’s son, and he is all grody and fucked-up looking because Hrothgar gave her weak, sad, old-man sperm.  She wants Beowulf’s super-manchowder, and she gets it in a scene where she literally strokes and caresses his sword until it melts into silvery goo that gushes over her thigh and drips down to her stiletto-heeled feet.  No, I am not making that up.  This plot idea makes the dragon Beowulf’s son, thus not only obliterating the Platonic ideas that fueled the original, but making this just another stupid Hollywood movie about Daddy Issues.

So Beowulf kills Grendel in the nude in a scene that makes it really seem like he is just murdering a handicapped person, and then he doesn’t kill Grendel’s Mother but fucks her and they have a dragon-baby, who looks boring and comes to kill him for some reason and then he kills it but he dies – at least they got that right.  But then that leaves Mama Jolie unharmed and ready to pump out another monster baby for the next hero who comes along.  It all makes complete hash of the story’s themes and ideas without replacing them with anything compelling.

It’s just a mess.  So much talent wasted among the cast, so much money spent on technology that just makes it look worse than if they had filmed it practically with the money they had available.  This movie cost $150 million and it looks like some mockbuster from the Ukraine, the quality of the CG is so terrible.  The script is bad, (and let’s not forget that Neil Gaiman worked on this) the performances are bad, and the characterization is almost nonexistent.  Then you have the bizarre sexual focus of the story just adding a degree of sleaziness that brings the whole thing down, and it all adds up to a movie that I bet a lot of the participants wish had never been made.  I know I do.

Blood Oaths

 

The dawn revealed a desolate shore, and Jaya stood on a jagged grip of rock and looked out over the horizons now closed to her.  The storm had passed and left the seas slow and uneasy, waves crossing and shifting with the uncertain winds, and nowhere was there the sign of any other living human form.  The strands was littered with the tide-mark of the sea-weeds, and there were scraps of driftwood as well as pieces of her shattered ship, the wracked boards jutting from the sand like ribs.

Here and there she saw the wash of the waters disturbed by lumps that did not stir, and she knew them to be corpses.  She had walked one to the other, seeing the faces of her Ekwa, and one of the former slaves, but no sign of Dhatun, nor of Bastar.  She was not certain which one she had most hoped to find alive, and that troubled her.

To the far south the sky was a wall of smoke, billowing high into the blue, a dark shadow across the limits of her sight.  Here and there she saw the flickers of the lightning that reached between the pillar of smoke and the mountain, but the island itself was far beyond her vision.  Streaks of darkness painted the air above her, but she had come a long way from the reach of the volcano.

She found her sword among the tide-pools and took it up, washed by the sea.  She carried it above the tide-mark and scrubbed it with sand to dry it.  The sheath was still on its cord about her waist, but she would have to let it dry before she used it.  She found a hard piece of black stone and sharpened the bright steel, glad of the craft that had made it in another age.

Now she found herself returned to the islands where her ancestors had ruled, and she looked inland, seeking some sign.  This was no small island, for north of her the land rose up in green folds higher and higher, and at the limits of her sight were the snow-touched peaks of mountains like she had never seen.  All was hazy with distance, lit by the golden rising sun, and she hungered for the name of this place, for the piece of her history she now stood upon with bare feet.

First she must find fresh water, and so she set out to the west.  To the east the land was rocky and forbidding, so she took the easier path.  The shore was wide and white, and crabs scuttled from her shadow as she set the sun behind her and followed it.  Along the shore until she could find a stream, and then she would start inland.  Along a waterway she would find what people there were, and they might tell her where she had landed.

She carried her sword ready, thinking on her lost ship, and on the dagger face of Lozonarre, so close to her, so near to her final stroke, and yet he had escaped her.  She had drawn blood from his leg, and now his face, next time, she would let out his life entire.

ARAVT

One of the better side effects of the streaming age is that all these different services – desperate to attract subscribers and starving for content – often provide wider access for foreign films that otherwise would never have been seen outside their homeland.  Streaming on Prime, Aravt is a Mongolian film – and by that I mean an actual Mongolian film – not just a film about Mongols.  This was made by Mongols, starring Mongols, and was shot in actual Mongolia, providing a degree of authenticity and verisimilitude that is a pleasure to see just by itself.

Set in the 12th century, during the reign of Genghis Khan, this is a story about a unit of soldiers – an aravt or what is sometimes called an arban.  This was the most basic unit of Mongol military organization, consisting of ten men who lived and fought and rode together.  Ten aravts made a zuun, ten zuuns made a mingghan of a thousand men, and ten mingghans made a tumen, sometimes called an ordu, from which comes the word “horde”.

So rather than a story about massive armies clashing on the battlefield, this is more like a squad-level movie, where the aravt is sent off to find a renowned physician to deal with a spreading plague on the orders of Genghis Khan – though neither said plague nor the khan are shown onscreen.  The rest of the tale consists of them trying to carry out their mission in the face of the menace of a rival clan, recently defeated by the Khan, who are still rebellious and determined to fight.

The cinematography is first-rate, and they take great advantage of the vast, primal landscape of Mongolia, while not restricting themselves to open steppe.  We see hills and forests and foggy mornings, as well as the sweep of distant mountains and the endless horizons.  The costuming is pretty much flawless, and while the prop weapons don’t always look the best, they are better than what we usually get in films like this.

The cast is actually quite good, and despite it sometimes being difficult to tell actors apart under their very similar outfits, everybody does good work here.  The spoken Mongolian adds yet another layer of authenticity to this, and even if the subtitles are sometimes not great, actual mongols speaking actual Mongolian, riding real steppe ponies across the genuine Mongolian steppe is still a thing to see.

The pacing of the movie is the part most likely not to sit well with a Western audience, as the script is slow, and sometimes is a bit of a slog.  The film spends a lot of time developing the characters, but sometimes you are wishing for a bit of action rather than yet another fireside conversation.  The movie is surprisingly talky, and rather than a story with action peppered along the way, it is mostly building up to a big, final battle.

Once said battle arrives, then the film shows off some rather good choreography, with a lot of visceral impact.  It’s not a very bloody battle, and what blood there is, is mostly CG, which looks a bit rough.  The riding and stunts are really good though, making the battle exciting even if the action is not always as clear as it could be.  The script suffers from a case of there being too many factions and too many characters with their own agendas, and sometimes you can’t tell what people are doing or where, and you see plot elements introduced that never really pay off.  That might be a result of editing, as the cutting can be choppy in places.  Important things happen and you don’t see who did them, and they don’t seem to be given enough weight.

Anyone interested in Mongol history should check this out, as the degree of accuracy is off the charts compared to what you usually get in movies about the Mongol Empire.  Also, it is cool to see a story set in this time and place that is not about Genghis Khan himself, and not about some massive invasion or huge stakes.  This is much more the kind of plot you use for a Sword & Sorcery story, as it is a small group of men pitted against both the environment and implacable enemies, all in a quest to satisfy honor and seeking death before disgrace.

The Burning Mountain

 

 

The day was dark as night, without moon or stars, only the glow of the mountain where it lay ripped open and bleeding fire.  Jaya stood on the bow and looked at it, smelling the burning smoke, seeing the thick layer of ash drifting on the sluggish waves.  She had heard tales of the mountains of fire, but she had never seen one, and had never dreamed she would see one this close.  The pillar of smoke rose up and up until it blotted out the sky, and violet lightning lanced from the cloud to the mountainside and the sea where it churned below.

Bastar steered them north, keeping them on the edges of the burning darkness, following the current to where he said it met another that flowed from the west.  The winds were slow, but uneasy, and Jaya scented a storm.  If the winds turned on them, they would be buried under a cloud of death, choked like the dead birds that floated on the oily waves, their eyes blind and blank.

They drew nearer to the black shore, and steam boiled up from the sea where it touched the land.  Jaya saw trails of dark fire flowing over the rock, the edges of the rivers glowing bright as a steel-forge, the surface blackened and rippling, smoking as they ran down.  Where the rivers touched the water, steam roared upward, making pillars of haze as dark as the smoke.  It made a bitter, blood scent on the air, and the Ekwa and the slave girls coughed and choked on it, washing the ash from their skins and sweeping it from the deck.

They rounded a point of rock and Jaya saw the low, dark form of a ship drawn upon the shore, and she went back to the afterdeck and pointed it out to Bastar.  “There,” she said.  “Is that the War Eagle?”

“Too small,” he said, adjusting the cloth over his face.  “That must be the wreck Logor said was here, the one Lozonarre came to plunder.”  He pulled out a glass and squinted through it.  “Looks like a merchantman from Achen.  Not gold then, but things like powder and shot, silks or sailcloth.  Provisions for another slave raid.”

“Bring us closer,” Jaya said.  “We should see if he was here or not.”

He looked at her sidelong, and she knew he was thinking of the cloud of death looming over them.  If the mountain blew apart they would all be wiped away.  She waited to see if he would argue with her, but he did not.  He grunted and spun the wheel.  There was not much wind, and what there was backed and gusted uneasily.  Jaya heard thunder, but did not know if it was the voice of the mountain.  She looked at the dead sea and closed her eyes for a moment, calling on Arang.  Show me the path to my vengeance.

Cast A Deadly Spell

 

This one is a little outside my usual vibe for this blog, but it’s a personal favorite that not a lot of people have seen, so I am making an exception.  Cast A Deadly Spell dates from a lost era in TV history, when HBO was still just kind of testing the waters on original content, and when fantasy and SF subjects were still considered a little bit odd, not mainstream like they are now.  This was years before HBO invented the “prestige” miniseries with And the Band Played On and other award-winning stuff.  This little 1991 movie stands out as an experiment.

You get the premise on a title card just as the movie opens: “Los Angeles 1948.  Everyone used magic”, and that’s all the explanation you get for it.  There are context clues that make it seem like maybe, in this world, magic really became a thing after the war, but it’s not made specific.  What you have is a film that replaces the fears of technology taking over with magic being the game-changer, with some people riding the trend and some people bucking it.

What’s surprising, for a movie, is how much they committed to the worldbuilding.  You get lots of little throwaway gags, like people lighting cigarettes with magic flames, kids blowing out tires by chanting curses, and waiters using magic to levitate glasses while they pour martinis.  A lot of work went into filling the background with these little details that help sell the setting, and it works surprisingly well.  A lot of these gags are essentially throwaway jokes, but they show that the filmmakers thought about their premise beyond the obvious.

A good cast helps immeasurably to make this work.  Fred Ward is at his craggy, straight-man best as H. Phillip Lovecraft – an ex-cop and private eye who is known for refusing to use magic in his work.  David Warner is pitch-perfect as the wealthy client who hires him to retrieve a book called the Necronomicon that was stolen from him.  Clancy Brown (who looks so young in this) is oily and thuggish as Lovecraft’s former partner-turned-gangster Harry Bordon.  Julianne Moore gets to wear a succession of fabulous gowns as Lovecraft’s ex and Harry’s current moll Connie Stone.  The screenplay goes hard with the period slang and getting the rhythm of the fast back-and-forth style of dialogue in those classic noir films.

The movie gives some great moments to lesser-known and character actors as well.  The late Charles Hallahan plays Lovecraft’s old boss, Detective Bradbury, Arnetia Walker is a delight every second she is onscreen as Lovecraft’s landlady Hypolite Kroptkin, and longtime character actor Raymond O’Connor is brilliant as Tugwell – Harry’s deadly, dapper, white-suited sorcerer hitman.

The overall plot is not as smart as the dialogue, and it is pretty much just throwing every noir fiction trope into the mix and seeing how it plays out with magic added, which is admittedly pretty fun.  There are some twists and turns along the way, but not that many.  The effects are often cheap-looking, as this was made in 1990, before the era of digital effects, and was reportedly made for just $6 million – a bargain-bin budget even in those days.  Director Martin Campbell (later to go on to Mask of Zorro, Goldeneye and Casino Royale) does a lot to keep things well-shot and well-paced, but even he can’t overcome the guy in a rubber suit playing a gargoyle and the extremely cheap-looking monster at the end.  This is a made-for-TV movie, and it looks like it.

The racial and sexual politics are not great, though not bad for the time.  The movie kills the hell out of its gays, but it does not treat them as punchlines or objects of revulsion.  Most of the black people in the movie are zombies imported from the Caribbean, except for Lovecraft’s landlady and her all-too-briefly seen lawyer brother Thadius Pilgrim.  It is weird to see a Los Angeles with no Hispanics in it, but rather par for the course at the time, as the movie is more interested in portraying LA as it appeared in movies than as it actually was.

Cast a Deadly Spell is pretty much the definition of a cult film, as it was broadcast on HBO, released on VHS, but was never put out on DVD except in PAL format in Spain of all places.  So the fact that it is up for streaming on HBO Max means it is finally possible for a lot of people to see this neat little movie.  If you have an interest in Lovecraftiana, Film Noir, or genre-mixing, I highly recommend it.

A Sign of Fire

 

Jaya smelled it on the wind long before they sighted land.  It was late afternoon, and the sun was blazing down behind clouds ahead of them.  Tatters of rain drifted above them, and the air was humid and dense.  The Ekwa were taxed to coax any speed at all from the sluggish breeze as it shifted restlessly from quarter to quarter, teasing them with the promise of cooler weather after dark.

At the prow, Jaya kept a watch ahead, looking out for the landfall she had been promised.  They had seen more ships the past few days, first as white specks against the deep blue, and then as shadows over the waters, close enough to see the men as they moved on deck.  It made her uneasy to see so many of the enemy ships, and she realized she was going to a place the giants had made for themselves, and the prospect did not please her.

The waters shallowed, and she saw it turn from deep midnight to a paler shade, and she could make out the flitting shapes of fish as they schooled in the Hunter’s shadow.  Reefs jutted up from the seamounts where the sun shone, and she signaled Bastar so he could steer around them.  Small islands dotted the far horizons, and she smelled green growing things and flowers again; she knew they were close to land.

The sweet smells of the jungle were not what warned her, it was a stink she had never tasted before – the smells of smoke and sweat and human shit all mixed together.  She flinched from smells of rot and strange perfumes, and she squinted to the southwest and saw there the dark blur of an island, and she knew they must be near to their goal.  The island called Rau.  It meant something like “scorched”, and so she did not think to find it an impressive place.

“Land!” she called back to Bastar, pointing the way, and she saw him wave in answer and then she felt the ship turn.  The Ekwa trimmed the sails as they shifted to a more northerly course.  He had told her they would pass the north shore of the island, and there find the harbor where the place called Arwan was to be found.  Rain spat down on the deck, and the winds shifted again, bringing another wash of that reek to her.  She coughed and went back to the afterdeck where the wheel stood, and she looked at Bastar, trying to imagine what kind of village men like this would build.

“I can already smell this place,” she said.  “It smells foul.”

Draug

 

Sometimes it is important to remember the horror element that went into creating Sword & Sorcery.  Howard was not really a horror writer, but he enjoyed horror fiction and was pen pals with both Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, so horror was definitely on his mind, plus, S&S was a product of the kind of strange, cross-genre stew in the early pulps that came to be called “weird fiction”, which was a mix of horror, fantasy, sci-fi, lost race stories, past-life regression, ghost tales, and historical fantasizing.  Horror is a definite component in Sword & Sorcery fiction and that should not be forgotten.

So here we have Swedish movie Draug, which was an independent production originally released in 2018 without much notice.  For those who don’t know, draug or draugr is a term for a kind of undead presence in Nordic myth – something between a ghost and a zombie.  The definition is flexible, which makes it a good term for a lot of things, plus it’s a cool word that looks and sounds menacing in English.

Set in the 11th Century in Sweden, the movie starts right off with a guy named Hakon and his adoptive daughter Nanna.  He has been called upon to investigate the disappearance of a missionary and the men who traveled with him, who all left for the northlands and have not been heard from since.  He recruits some men and they head off into the mountainous forests.  The film benefits greatly from being filmed in the exact location where it is set, and the brooding forests are both beautiful and menacing.

Along the way Hakon and Nanna pick up another guy, Kettil, who is apparently an old friend of Hakon, but who is also a raging asshole.  He provides a lot of tension, as while he and Hakon seemingly share a past, and his men and help are needed, no one really trusts him.  The movie spends a good amount of time with them moving deeper into the wilderness, letting the suspense build up, as the moody music and the isolation are inherently unnerving.

Along the way they encounter some rebels, have a satisfyingly chaotic and bloody battle, and then they are even more isolated, hunted by enemies, and burdened with wounded.  One by one the men die off, and Nanna emerges as the real protagonist, with a connection to the events as they unfold.  It is here that the supernatural horror, only hinted at before, begins to ratchet up.  The buildup is very subtle, and the movie gets a lot of mileage out of the slow pans across the forest while you watch intently, waiting for something to move, and then it does and you get a jolt.  It’s a simple device, but it works.

The costumes are solid, even if there are some anachronistic bits here and there.  The weapons and equipment look good, and the combat is depicted very realistically, without any action-movie flourishes.  The prosthetics are good, and the effects overall are effective.  The story elements are subtle, and not everything is plainly spelled-out, so you have to pay attention.  Plus, horror derives a lot of power from uncertainty, and the filmmakers here remembered that.

So this is definitely a lower-budget movie, but it uses what it has, and it succeeds in creating a dark, haunted mood that will stick with you.  Hardcore horror fans will doubtless find it too light on scares and gore, but I think it is a solid, well-acted, and surprisingly well-written little movie that actually ties up its themes and character arcs in a satisfying way.  This is on Prime right now, and it is only in Swedish with well-done subtitles.  If you enjoyed The Ritual or shows like Zone Blanche, then this is a good bet.

The Deep Forest

 

Dawn lit the far edge of the sea, and the wind came in from shore and snapped the dirty white sails taut.  Jaya watched them as they bellied and swelled, and then the tide began to draw them out to sea and the heavy, ungraceful ship began to move.  It did not glide over the water like a proper canoe, but seemed to wallow and dig into the waves.  Every rope and beam creaked and groaned as the wind pushed it, and she shook her head at such an ungainly beast.

She watched Bastar as he steered, standing close with her hand on her sword to strike him down if he did anything she distrusted.  He worked the great, spoked wheel that controlled the ship with the ease of familiarity, letting it spin this way and then that way, seeming to feel his way out of the cove.  She stood closer to the rail and looked down, saw the sea-foam curl along the heavy hull as they slipped between the headlands of the anchorage and out into the wider sea.

The ship felt the waves shift and swung to the side, and Bastar turned to go with them, letting the currents guide him.  There were rocks and shoals out here, and she had to trust that he knew how to evade them.  She watched how he did it, his feet planted wide to brace himself.  He was so tall that she had to look up at him, and she didn’t like that.  He was even larger than the other giants, even if his hair was not that sickening yellow.  He had so much hair on his arms and his chest that he looked like a beast himself.

The forward sail began to ruffle and her Ekwa hurried to trim it.  They did not know the ways of this ship, but Bastar had shown them everything he could, and the principles were the same.  The Ekwa might not trust this ship any more than she did, but they knew the sea, and sailcraft, and they learned quickly.

Bastar squinted upward, watching the pennons used to judge the wind, and he nodded, gave the wheel another spin.  They were close-hauled, headed southward across the winds out of the west.  Later, they were meant to turn north, tacking westward so long as the winds stayed steady.

“Four or five days,” he said, “if the winds hold.  Sometimes there are storms this time of year.”  He glanced at her.  “You don’t know these waters.”

She narrowed her eyes at him.  “They do,” she said, indicating her warriors.  Nine, now, including Dhatun.  They had burned the two slain by the dragon and scattered their ashes to the sea.  The others had not asked to return home, and she had not offered.

“The Ekwa,” he said, and shook his head.  “They tell stories of them to curdle a man’s blood, how is it they obey you?”

“Perhaps they fear me,” she said.  “Perhaps they should.”  She gave him a meaningful look and he ducked his head, made a placating gesture with his fingers, still holding the wheel.

Age of Samurai: Battle for Japan

 

This is another Netflix docu-drama not far from the vein of Rise of Empires: Ottoman, with a combination of documentary-style narration with fully-acted scenes depicting the critical moments of the history in question.  If you couldn’t tell from the title, this is a series about the end of the so-called Sengoku Period.  The period actually stretches from the mid-1400s to the very end of the warring states in 1615, but this 6-part series focuses on the fairly coherent period from the rise of the warlord Oda Nobunaga in 1551 through the Battle of Sekigahara and the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1600.

For the novice, this is a dense and complex period of history, and the show does a good job of laying things out and explaining what went on.  For those already familiar with the period, it will seem to belabor things a bit, but really, making this tangle of alliances, betrayals, and wars make sense is a challenge the series rises to pretty well.  Six episodes is not a lot of time to cover the three great unifiers of Japan in their fifty-year dance of conquest and power, but they do it well.

The acted scenes are not as in-depth as the ones in Ottoman, but the production values are first-rate, with especial praise needed for the costumes and armoring, as they look fantastic.  The interior sets are decent, even if a lot of them look smaller than you would expect, and the battle scenes are largely more impressionistic, with a lot of disconnected moments of violence cut together to give the feel of a battle, rather than masses of troops maneuvering.  You do get some larger-scale shots, though they are obviously done with CGI.  The quality of the violence is pretty good, even if they do use a bit too much digital blood for my taste.

What really makes this of interest to the Sword & Sorcery fan is the laying out of the period as a highly dramatic opera of larger-than-life personalities engaged in one of the most Byzantine struggles for power ever seen in any country.  Oda Nobunaga, the first of the great warlords to begin the unification of his island nation after centuries of warfare, was known as “The Demon King” for his ruthless slaughter of defeated enemies, and his campaign of conquest only came to an end when he was betrayed by one of his own generals and committed suicide before he could be slain.

His death led to another scramble for power, and the one who succeeded him was Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a common-born soldier who had risen through the ranks by sheer ability, and who avenged his fallen lord and then proceeded to dominate Japan for the next sixteen years, enlarging his power base, defeating and then allying such colorful vassals as Date Masamune, the “One-Eyed Dragon”, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, the future master of Japan.

The show carefully details the personal and political conflicts that fueled the warfare within the realm, and so it makes sense that once Hideyoshi had pacified Japan, he turned that energy outward in a bid to conquer mainland China.  The drama of the small, island nation hurling itself against the massive, ancient empire, ruled by a fading dynasty, is irresistible, and from a narrative standpoint, it is disappointing that the invasion bogged down into a quagmire in Korea and never achieved anything significant.

The ultimate victory of the Tokugawa – after the festival of beheadings, massacres, betrayals and suicides that preceded it – seems almost anticlimactic in retrospect.  Ieyasu built on what had already been done, and simply took the last few steps that needed to be taken.  The curtain came down on the warring states period, and Japan became an isolated totalitarian state for 268 years.  The battle of Sekigahara – while easily the decisive battle in Japanese history – does not have the barbaric drama of the earlier wars.  Tokugawa was a schemer and a strategist, but no one was ever going to call him a “Demon King”.

This is a solid show, and it provides plenty of grist for the mill of ideas from which Sword & Sorcery springs.  Themes of war and cruelty are universal, as are struggles for power, conquest, and the collisions of personal hatreds with political ambition.  A setting like this, in a period of war, when war has been the rule for centuries, is a rich one for tales of adventure and bloody action.  Warriors with rigid codes of honor, clashing in savage struggles where morality is erased beneath ambition and necessity – that sounds like the essence of S&S to me.