The Serpent in Shadow

Malika, Queen of Meru, lay coiled on the heaped cushions of her bedchamber, and she waited for night to fall. Curtains screened away the light of the fading day, and she was glad of it. She had been born a woman, but now she was something other, half-changed in her shape, and her blackened eyes no longer loved the light of the sun. It was Utuzan who had unmade her when she tried to defy him. He had stayed his hand from killing, and instead he had twisted her mortal form into the travesty she now wore.

From her waist upwards she was as a woman, save with skin as pale as frost. Below she was a tremendous serpent, pearl-scaled and strong as iron. Utuzan, the Black Flame, had transformed her when she turned upon him, and now she bided her time. She awaited the night, she awaited the moment, and she believed it had come.

Lanterns always burned in her darkened chambers, day and night. She watched as the last light of day blazed down beyond her walls, sun setting in fire over the endless desert, and then the chill of night came creeping in on silent feet. She heard insects sing in her garden outside, frogs calling out in the waters of the pool, and she waited, for she knew her lover would soon arise.

Gladiator

Gladiator was one of those lightning-in-a-bottle movies where a bunch of shit that shouldn’t have worked came together and transformed the whole landscape of film in ways which are still evident today, two decades later. Director Ridley Scott had a good reputation, as the auteur behind movies like Alien and Blade Runner, but he hadn’t really had a hit in a long time, mostly turning out forgotten movies like Someone to Watch Over Me and Black Rain. Russell Crowe was clearly on his way up, after his breakout role in 1997’s LA Confidential, but would audiences buy him in a period piece like this one?

Further than that, it has to be remembered that the so-called “Sword & Sandal” genre had been out of fashion for literal decades by the year 2000. The big upswell of movies about ancient Greece and Rome had seen its heyday in the early 60s, and there had been almost nothing but TV movies and Masterpiece Theatre since then. As Crowe himself pointed out, for a very long time in Hollywood, if you were on-set in a toga, it meant you were doing a comedy. Nobody had attempted to approach historical drama about Rome with any kind of seriousness since the days of Spartacus and Cleopatra. It was an Old-Hollywood genre and nobody had seriously tried to revive it.

The film didn’t even begin with a completed script. There had been a treatment about the death of Emperor Commodus, who was drowned in his bath by his slave Narcissus (Crowe’s character was even called Narcissus in early drafts) but that was quickly expanded into what became a big, action-oriented movie filled with intrigue, treachery, and what were, at the time, almost unprecedented levels of violence.

Because a big change that Gladiator brought to Hollywood movies that can be seen even to this day was the elevation of action choreography as it pertained to swordfights and other close-up forms of combat. Fight scenes and stunts in the old Sword & Sandal films had been pretty primitive, and the blood in them kept to a low level so as not to offend censors of the day. With modern standards and modern effects, Scott was able to bring the fight scenes to a whole new level. The violence was visceral, bloody, and exciting in a way no one had ever seen before – not in depicting combat in the ancient world. The arena sequences in particular were absolutely electrifying, conveying what it must have been like to see such spectacles in the real Colosseum.

The effect on future movies was profound, as not only did Gladiator touch off a series of historical epics focused on Greece and Rome – Troy, 300, Alexander, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, and Rome among others – it also set a standard for action and excitement that other works had to deal with. You couldn’t just crap out something about the ancient world and call it a day, you had to at least try to stand up to Gladiator’s level of choreography and gore. Scott didn’t just make the Sword & Sandal epic viable again, he made it respectable. Gladiator didn’t feel cheap or silly, it took its subject matter deeply seriously, with a first-rate cast and what may be Hans Zimmer’s finest hour as a composer, creating a score that has been almost as influential as the movie itself.

And the history of Sword & Sorcery fiction is steeped in the ancient world, as it was a major area of fascination for writers from Howard to Mundy. Howard’s tales of the Picts only work with the backdrop of the Roman Empire to push against, and the opening battle in Gladiator is like something right out of one of his stories. Despite the brutality of battle, Scott does not shy from showing the exaltation of war, or the excitement in spite of the horror. The arena scenes range from ugly to grandiose, and yet they are never less than edge-of-your-seat thrilling.

Ancient Rome during the Empire is definitely a morally compromised world, and we see various characters struggling with that through the course of the film, trying to find a way to be moral in an amoral society that has become decadent and dangerous. Commodus stands as the avatar of that moral decay, and as such the symbolism becomes far too rich for Sword & Sorcery, even if the overarching theme of revenge is one that fits right in.

Gladiator is definitely not a Sword & Sorcery film, but it had a huge impact on action cinema in general, and infused a tremendous amount of blood and violence into the mainstream of Hollywood blockbusters. It affirmed that R-rated films could make money in an era of bland PG-13 fare, and it brought back a fascination with the Classical World that served as a major wellspring of inspiration for S&S authors old and new.

Brother to Lions

The sun set in a blaze of fire across the hills of Kadesh, illuminating the grasslands below in patterns of light and shadow as the burning clouds drifted across the silvering sky. The light fell on the ancient city of Hatara, turning the stone walls to gold and touching the tips of the high towers with points of fiery light, like the points of spears. Eagles circled overhead in the deepening dusk, and drums pounded to drive away the breath of evil, for a king lay dying.

Arnuzana, the War-lord, the Thunder-breaker, lay in his chambers awash in the dying sun, and all knew he would not see it rise again. The wind from the far seas was cool, and it fluttered the curtains and the horsetails that hung from the pillars of the great bed. Age had sunken the flesh on his lean face, leaving behind his narrow mouth and hawk nose like monuments. His eyes were wide-set and dark, almost slitted from many years of squinting through wind and dust. He was a warrior-king, or he had been. Now time and infirmity robbed him of his strength in his last hours.

Servants and slaves clustered in the shadows of the room, but it was only to his three sons that he spoke, his voice ragged and dry as the wastelands of his desert home, far away to the east and the north. He did not speak the complicated, whispering speech of Ashem, but the jagged words of his native tongue.