Curses of the Sun

Asherah crossed the mountains, made her way through cities breathing with a hundred smells and a hundred languages. She passed over mountains under a depthless sky, and then she came at last to the land she had been seeking, the land she had begun to half believe was a legend, for no such land could be real. It stretched before her, vast and empty and pale under the moon. Ushar, the desert, where her path led over colossal dunes in the ageless silence to the place where red stone pillars stood over crimson sands.

She rode a black horse with a long head and thin legs. It was taller and more agile than her lost pony, and very much swifter, but it did not have the same endless endurance. Asherah wore her sword at her side and new, black-fletched arrows bristled from her quiver. She bore new mail armor and a new scar underneath it. Her pale skin was wrapped in black cloth to keep the sun from it, and her eyes were painted dark to cut the glare. She had begun to learn the ways of the lands of daylight.

At first sight the desert looked like a land without form, the dunes in high waves like ice frozen on a pond. She remembered cascades of ice, and how the water would freeze solid at the grasp of winter and be fixed in shapes all through the cold seasons. This was like that, only the sand shifted beneath the hooves of her steed, and the sighing wind caught up the dust and whirled it into the sky. She was glad to have her face covered, to keep her from breathing it in like ground glass.

She had been warned to keep to the caravan routes that led south across the wasteland to Ahrimaz, and she saw the tracks of many beasts and men in the sand, and so she followed them. In places great posts stood up from the dunes, pennons bright at the tops of them, and they helped to mark the path. Asherah rode with her bow in hand and an arrows set to the string, ready in case some raiders or thieves thought to test her. This way was usually followed by caravans of pack animals, guarded by mercenaries. She rode alone, and so she knew she would seem a ripe target.

The trail led through the dunes and then into a barren, rocky land where ancient river channels cut through the stone and left wandering canyons it would be easy to become lost in. She camped by day in deep shadows, hiding from the fierce sun and the terrible heat. It was like the furnaces of a nightmare, under that blazing light. She traveled by night when there was cool air and starlight to guide her. The day was too bright, and too savage.

She rode for ten nights and sheltered for ten days, and then she followed the rising ground to a stony hill that let her see all around. The caravan path led southwest from here, into kinder lands, and she saw the beginnings of the grasslands she had been told of.

Her path led due east. She rode down the rocky hillside to a narrow defile where there was an oasis, with a small pool welling up from the stone. She let her horse drink while she filled her waterskins, and then she mounted again and rode away from the trail, and into the deep desert, where lay the accursed lands she sought.

Ill-Met in Lankhmar

“Two Sought Adventure” was the first published story by Fritz Leiber, printed in Unknown magazine in 1939. It was the introduction to the inimitable team of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser – the heroes who would go on to star in a multitude of stories and dominate Leiber’s literary legacy. He produced over 30 stories about the pair through his life, writing them through the 60s, 70s, and 80s until just a few years before his death in 1992, which makes them among the most long-lived Sword & Sorcery heroes in the canon.

Originally, the characters were invented by his friend Harry Fischer, and indeed they were based upon the pair – Leiber the tall one, Fischer the short – but while Fischer contributed to several stories, it was Leiber who made them immortal, most especially with his Hugo and Nebula-winning novella “Ill-Met in Lankhmar”. It was an origin tale, depicting the first time the two heroes met, and told, almost by accident, one of the most central and emotional stories about them.

Through the 60s and 70s Leiber was going through the Lankhmar stories and putting them in some sort of order, trying to tie the previously only loosely-connected tales into a kind of cohesive whole. That, in turn, put him in mind to fill in some gaps. The story of how the two met had not been told before, and it seemed an obvious choice. The story was published in 1970 in Fantasy and Science Fiction, then anthologized the same year in the inaugural Fafhrd and Gray Mouser collection Swords and Deviltry. It caused a sensation then, and remains among his best-remembered and -regarded works even today.

Leiber was not a young man when he wrote it. Howard was maybe twenty when he started carving out “The Shadow Kingdom”. Leiber was about sixty when he wrote “Ill-Met”, and half a century had passed since the pulp days of the 1920s. He wrote a story that is indelibly Sword & Sorcery, told with a poetic voice and yet with the grungy, underworld aesthetic he always evoked with the pair. He could have made it a romp or a caper, but instead he told a tale of tragedy. He told a story of his two heroes doing what they do best – stealing – and while they succeed at it, they pay a terrible price, all the more tragic because they are not the ones who pay, but those they love, who they unwittingly set in harm’s way.

It is a dark story, full of thieves, cutthroats, beggars, and sorcerers. It gives full play to the setting of Lankhmar as a place of both wealth and squalor. He shows us two heroes who are not heroes yet, who are fighting and scraping to survive, clinging to the dreams of adolescence, trying to be men when they are not quite there yet. Details like the Mouser’s sad and desperate home he has made for his beloved Ivrian, trying to care for her as a lady, strike a chord that it far too keen and knowing to have been written by a young man.

Yet Leiber does not skimp on the action, and the story is a thrill ride, with chases, swordfights, and humor to spare, and then he wallops you with the unexpected twist, and shows that his heroes have been joined all their lives not simply by friendship, but by a shared grief and guilt that they can never wipe away. They have their revenge, but the ending is still so raw that he had to write “The Price of Pain-Ease” the same year to give his heroes some closure.

1970 was an in-between year for Sword & Sorcery. The 60s boom in Howard reprints and pastiches was receding, though not yet gone, and the popular vision of S&S had not hit its lurid stride in the comics yet. Leiber was a respected master of Fantasy and SF, and could have simply rested on his laurels, but he chose not to. He showed that S&S still could tell vital, emotional stories. That it was not limited to young men fetishising gore and nudity, that it was not just naked slave girls and bulging biceps. He showed what Sword & Sorcery literature could be when it is taken seriously and written with care and respect and love for the form. None of those things should be forgotten.

The Forest God

The world was so much vaster than Asherah would have ever believed. She and her companion Tekru passed through the fallow lands below the frost, where the earth had been torn by ancient glaciers in their passing and left raw and dark beneath an iron sky. From there they entered rocky lands, with wide barren plains shadowed by jagged mountains. Under a crescent moon they left behind the northlands she had known, and rode into a land where the sun rose each day into a blazing sky.

She was glad when mists hid the sun, for the light was harsh to her, and she covered her face with her cowl when they traveled by day. But as the land grew rougher, and the cliffs rose on each side, there was more shade from the sun, and at last they descended into a long, steep valley between towering razor mountains, and reached a land of forest so deep it seemed to stretch forever in every direction, and she wondered how they would find their way.

The trees were huge and towered high over the path, the branches heavy and thick with mist. The carpet of fallen needles beneath the hooves of their horses was so thick they made no sound when they trod upon it. The land was silent and ageless, and she wondered if any human eyes had ever seen these deeps.

On the eighth day they climbed a long ridge beside the sighing of a great waterfall, tasting the mist in the air, and then they came to a place where the earth was churned and marked by the print of a great hoof. Asherah was amazed, for she had never seen a track so immense. It was the split hoof of a deer, but as far across as a shield, and the beast it suggested must stand as high as a great tree. Tekru saw it and shook his head, made a sign to ward off evil.

“We can dare no more. Here the path turns east, to take us out of this accursed land.” He pointed to where the mountains were cleft, and a pass was visible in the fog. “That way.”

“You said the red sands we seek are to the south,” she said. “Is there no way through?”

“The way south is swifter,” he said. “But only a madman would take it. From here the forest becomes something not meant as the domain of men. If you go south into those woods, you will not come out again.”

“I am already too far behind my quarry,” she said. In her mind she saw the face of Gathas the sorcerer, the one who stole the body of the emperor from its tomb and set her on this path. “I cannot delay.”

“Perhaps one such as you might pass through the forest, but do not risk it.” He gestured. “This way will take us back to the lands of men, and from there we may take a road to the south.”

“But it is the long way,” she said.

“As the path is marked, yes. But Vengru walks here, the ruler of the forest, the one who may be a god.” Tekru looked on the great hoofprint and shuddered. “He does not permit any to cross his land unmarked.”