He swore with many ribald blasphemies that there were no gods anywhere, either
above or below Voormithadreth. As for the Voormis themselves, they were in-
deed a misbegotten species; but it was hardly necessary, in explaining their generation, to go beyond the familiar laws of nature. They were merely the remnant of a low and degraded tribe of aborigines, who, sinking further into brutehood, had
sought refuge in those volcanic fastnesses after the coming of the true Hyperboreans. ( BH 126)
So it would seem that the Hyperboreans were trespassers long before they
ever set foot in the Eiglophians. They accordingly tote crossbows and long-
handled bills for engaging in meaningful dialogue with the Voormis at a safe, or at least safer, distance. Forewarned is forearmed—forearmed to the teeth:
The whole party was variously studded with auxiliary knives, throwing-darts, two-handed scimitars, maces, bodkins, and saw-toothed axes. The men were all clad in jerkins and hose of dinosaur-leather, and were shod with brazen-spiked buskins.
Ralibar Vooz himself wore a light suiting of copper chain-mail, which, flexible as cloth, in no wise impeded his movements. In addition he carried a buckler of
mammoth-hide with a long bronze spike in its center that could be used as a
thrusting-sword; and, being a man of huge stature and strength, his shoulders and baldric were hung with a whole arsenal of weaponries. ( BH 125)
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The marshalling of so much martial paraphernalia, that “huge stature and
strength”—how many Weird Tales readers fell for Smith’s feint in the direction of the sword-and-sorcery Robert E. Howard had made so popular by 1934? After he
is separated from his men-at-arms, circumstances force Ralibar Vooz to serve as his own herald, trumpeting his significance to the sorcerer Ezdagor, but the latter, disturbed in mid-ritual, snaps “I care not if you are the magistrate of all swinedom or a cousin to the king of dogs” ( BH 129)—a retort of such brio as to reinforce what we already knew from The Dead Will Cuckold You, that Smith could have been a dramatist of some notoriety in any century save the twentieth.
Ezdagor proceeds to chastise the Hyperborean with a geas that compels him
to fight his weaponless way past the Voormis and deliver himself to none other
than Tsathoggua, the Primal Continent’s paramount toad-in-the-hole. For a psy-
chopomps he is loaned Rapthontis, the mage’s familiar, proof that the loss of the gazolba-bird to Zothique did not leave Hyperborea ornithologically bereft: “A lizard-tailed and sooty-feathered bird, which seemed to belong to some night-flying species of archaeopteryx, began to snap its toothed beak and flap its digited wings on the objectionably shapen stela that served it for a perch” ( BH 129). What follows reads like a Howardian means to a Smithian end:
Weaponless he fought them in obedience to his geas, striking down their hideous faces with his mailed fists in a veritable madness that was not akin to the madness of a huntsman. He felt their nails and teeth break on the close-woven links as he hurled them loose; but others took their place when he won onward a little into the murky cavern; and their females struck at his legs like darting serpents; and their young beslavered his ankles with mouths wherein the fangs were as yet un-grown. ( BH 132)
As “The Seven Geases” spelunks its way through caverns measureless to man, it
becomes clear that man is not the measure of all things. Ralibar Vooz is no Heracles, Odysseus, or Aeneas in the underworld, but merely an interruption and an irritant.
He survives repeated rejections by various entities and phantasmal phyla even if his amour-propre does not; among those he encounters is the “antehuman sorcerer”
Haon-Dor, whose thousand-columned palace might have rivaled Gaznak’s Fortress
Unvanquishable or Tsotha-lanti’s Scarlet Citadel had we been permitted to revisit in a completed “The House of Haon-Dor”: “A chill spirit of evil, ancient beyond all conception of man, was abroad in those halls; and horror and fear crept through them like invisible serpents, unknotted from sleep” ( BH 135). Ultimately redirected to “the bleak and drear and dreadful limbo known as the Outer World,” Ralibar Vooz is digesting not only humble pie but the sushi Rapthontis shares with him when he loses his footing as he has lost his place in the hierarchy of being. Pride goeth before a fall, but it goeth so many geases before this fall that current readers may be inclined to think, as does Ryan Harvey, of “the written equivalent of a rim-shot punctuating a stand-up comedian’s bad joke” (Harvey, “Fantasy Cycles” Part II). “The Seven
Geases” is not a throwaway, but its protagonist is.
264 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
J. R. R. Tolkien said of the saurian whose hot pursuit of a single item thieved from his hoard draws Beowulf into one last man-versus-monster confrontation
that “Nowhere does a dragon come in so precisely where he should” (Tolkien,
“Beowulf” 31). Similarly, nowhere does a monster for whom the arrival of a
“plump and well-fed” moneylender guarantees that he, too, will feed well come in so precisely where he should as in “The Weird of Avoosl Wutthoqquan”:
The entity was wholly and outrageously unhuman; and neither did it resemble any species of animal, or any known god or demon of Hyperborea. Its aspect was not
such as to lessen the alarm and panic of the moneylender; for it was very large and pale and squat, with a toad-like face and a swollen, squidgy body and numerous
cuttlefish limbs or appendages. It lay flat on the shelf, with its chinless head and long slit-like mouth overhanging the pit, and its cold, lidless eyes peering obliquely at Avoosl Wuthoqquan. ( BH 69)
The usurer’s comeuppance is richly deserved (and richly encumbered as he
flounders in a “treacherous quicksand” of wealth). His pursuit of profit leads him to the discovery that the story’s creature is itself a moneylender or speculator of sorts, one that suffered two of its emeralds to be borne away into the outside
world, confident that it need not bestir itself like the Beowulf-dragon—that there would be a return on its investment. Best of all, it gloats over Avoosl Wuthoqquan
“in a thick and loathsome voice, like the molten tallow of corpses dripping from a wizard’s kettle” ( BH 69). The monsters of the Hyperborean stories are never misunderstood; they are dependably, forthrightly-or-wrongly, monstrous. Smith abhorred modernism as a crawling chaos, and yet to read some of his stories is to experience the distinctly modern sensation of crossing a razor-edged bridge from the conte cruel to the acte gratuit.
As we have it Hyperborea contains fewer “facts on the ground” than its coe-
vals the Attluma of David C. Smith or Theem’Ohrdra the Primal Land of Brian
Lumley; although had Farnsworth Wright not been so discouraging with his rejec-
tions and reconsiderations the continent might be better endowed cartographically and chronologically. “The White Sybil” is an exception; a cup that overrunneth
with createdness as for the first time we see the First Continent through a poet’s eyes—or, more accurately, the poet outside the story allows us to see it through the eyes of the poet inside:
Tortha, the poet, with strange austral songs in his heart, and the umber of
high and heavy suns on his face, had come back to his native city of Cerngoth, in Mhu Thulan, by the Hyperborean sea. Far had he wandered in the quest of that
alien beauty which had always fled before him like the horizon. Beyond Commo-
riom of the white, numberless spires, and beyond the marsh-grown jungles to the south of Commoriom, he had floated on nameless rivers, and had crossed the
half-legendary realm of Tscho Vulpanomi, upon whose diamond-sanded, ruby-
gravelled shore an ignescent ocean was said to beat forever with fiery spume. He
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had beheld many marvels, and things incredible to relate: the uncouthly carven
gods of the South, to whom blood was split on sun-approaching towers; the
plumes of the huusim, which were many ells in length and were colored like pure flame; the mailed monsters of the austral swamps; the proud argosies of Mu and
Antillia, which moved by enchantment, without oar or sail; the fuming peaks that were shaken perpetually by the struggles of imprisoned demons. ( BH 94)
Now Tortha is back in Cerngoth, where he is be-Mused by the White Sybil, a belle dame sans merci as well as a poetic inspiration:
No human lover had aspired to the Sybil, whose beauty was a perilous bright-
ness, akin to meteor and fireball; a fatal and lethal beauty, born of trans-arctic gulfs, and somehow one with the far doom of worlds. Like the brand of frost or
flame, her memory burned in Tortha. Musing among his neglected books, or walk-
ing abroad in reverie on which no external thing could intrude, he saw always before him the pale radiance of the Sybil. He seemed to hear a whisper from boreal solitudes: a murmur of ethereal sweetness, poignant as ice-born air, vocal with high, unearthly words, that sang of inviolate horizons and the chill glory of lunar auroras above continents impregnable to man. ( BH 96)
The poet-protagonist’s eventual tryst with all of that pale radiance and chill glory carries Smith’s prose even deeper into poetry:
It was real beyond all that men deem reality: and yet it seemed to Tortha, at
moments, that he, the Sybil, and all that surrounded them, were part of an after-mirage on the icy deserts of time; that he was poised insecurely above life and death in some bright, fragile bower of dreams. ( BH 100)
Both insecurity and fragility are cruelly confirmed, for Tortha cannot help himself; as a man he seeks to possess what as an artist he yearns merely to express:
Dreadfully, unutterably, she seemed to change in his arms as he sought to
embrace her—to become a frozen corpse that had lain for ages in a floe-built
tomb—a leper-white mummy in whose frosted eyes he read the horror of the ul-
timate void. Then she was a thing that had no form or name—a dark corruption
that flowed and eddied in his arms—a hueless dust, a flight of gleaming atoms,
that rose between his evaded fingers. Then there was nothing—and the faery-
tinted flowers about him were changing also, were crumbling swiftly, were falling beneath flurries of white snow. The vast and violet heaven, the tall slim trees, the magic, unreflecting stream—the very ground under him—all had vanished amid
the universal, whirling flakes. ( BH 100)
Tortha’s fall is very different from that of Ralibar Vooz, and is paralleled by the fall of Clark Ashton Smith into the story through identification with his fellow poet.
The denouement is for once rueful rather than ruthless as Tortha is nursed back to health by a Sybil-substitute named Ilara among the “half-savage people of the
266 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
mountains” ( BH 102). Barbarism borders several of the Hyperborean stories, quietly subverting the civilizational claims of the First Continent’s annalists; here we might think not only of Ilara’s folk but also “the savage robbers of uncouth outland tribes” mentioned in “Athammaus” ( BH 47) and the fact that one of Eibon’s offenses in “The Door to Saturn” is his collection of tribal art and artifacts. Backwardness in many fantasy stories signifies not just primitivism, but an eminently justified orientation.
As accounts of poets whose artistic reach exceeds their human grasp, “The
White Sybil” and Karl Edward Wagner’s “The Dark Muse” are a matched set
carved from ebony and ivory. Wagner’s Klinure, the muse of dream, is a figurine sculpted by one Amderin of Carsultyal: “Black as the starless night of sleep, the night she dwells within, the night from which she calls . . . the shadow of unfinished dreams” (Wagner 109). During “The Dark Muse” we learn that Amderin had
been found “crushed and broken as if he had fallen from a very great height”—
which of course he did (Wagner 108). Smith is both more and less merciful to
Tortha.
The White Sybil had promised “a strange doom” for Commoriom “long before
the encroachment of the ice” ( BH 95), and in “The Testament of Athammaus” a survivor of that doom, the eponymous lord high executioner, looks back from a
“grey city of the sunken years” upon the receding reverie of the lost capital:
Opulent among cities, and superb and magnificent, and paramount over all
was Commoriom, to whom tribute was given from the shores of the Atlantean sea
to that sea in which is the immense continent of Mu; to whom the traders came
from utmost Thulan that is walled on the north with unknown ice, and from the
southern realm of Tscho Vulpanomi which ends in a lake of boiling asphaltum.
( BH 46)
But what follows is not an elegy; there is a perceptible lightness at work, or at play, in the story. “I raised the sword of justice high in air and smote with heroic might,”
Athammaus assures us ( BH 55), but heroic might does him no more good than do
“huge stature and strength” Ralibar Vooz. The power vested in him by his hereditary office and headsman’s prowess is powerless against Smith’s delight at having set something much more panic-inducing than a cat among his Hyperborean pigeons:
I guess you won’t wonder that Commoriom was deserted when you read this ex-
planation of the raison d’etre. In my more civic moods I sometimes think of the clean-up which an entity like Knygathin Zhaum would make in a modern town. I
really think that he (or it) is about my best monster to date. (Murray, BH 12) Knygathin Zhaum loses his head repeatedly, but never his focus, and cleans up the town by clearing it out. Smith sketched a sequel to R. H. Barlow in September
1934:
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Knygathin Zhaum, the half-breed Voormi, reverted to the most primitive an-
cestral characteristics following the stress of his numerous decapitations. I have yet to translate the dire and abominable legend telling how a certain doughty denizen of Commoriom (not Athammaus) returned to the city after its public evacua-
tion and found that it was peopled most execrably and innumerably by the
fissional spawn of Knygathin Zhaum, which retained no vestige of anything
earthly. (Murray, BH 169)
Note the slyness of that verb “peopled”—the war against the Voormis has come
home to those who launched it. Hyperborean justice in “The Testament of
Athammaus” is blind, blind to the handwriting on the city walls.
The incursion of outsideness in “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” is that of the
would-be desecrators Satampra and Tirouv Ompallios into Commoriom, which
has been a Forbidden City to humans since “The Testament of Athammaus.”
Vegetation is frequently animalistic in Smith’s work, and the rotting riot of jungle fecundity in this story, the “oppressive odors of lush growth and vegetable corruption” ( BH 18), are all the more noticeable when contrasted with the icy sterility elsewhere in the series, an overabundance as opposed to an absence of life. The story does not so much feature a monster as it does acquire monstrous elasticity and ulteriority itself, as when its larcenous narrator becomes aware of “a night that clung to us and clogged us like an evil toad, like the toils of a monstrous web” ( BH
23). The trespassers are hounded “with an effortless glide, with a surety of motion and intention too horrible, too cynical to be borne” ( BH 24), and the word “cynical” jumps out at the reader; if not necessarily strange bedfellows, cynicism and horror are also not necessarily compatible ones.
From White Sy
bil to White Worm: the events of “The Coming of the White
Worm,” with their “weird whisper of voices from realms of perennial winter” ( BH
107), are so chilling as to induce readers to huddle next to a Jack London story or Robert W. Service poem for warmth. Discussing the Hyberborean tales where
Smith’s bonfire of the vanities becomes a freezer-burn for Howard Jones’s Sword
& Sorcery website, Ryan Harvey proposes “a link to the grim gods of the Norse-men” (Harvey, “Fantasy Cycles Part II”), but Smith was after something behind or beneath the Norse elements of Leiber’s Rime Isle and Greg Bear’s “Thor Meets Captain America,” behind or beneath Fimbelwinter and Niflheim, something even
older and colder than “the fiendish spirit of ice and frost and darkness that the sons of the North deified as Odin” in Howard’s “The Cairn on the Headland.”
That something is personified, or vermified, in Rlim Shaikorth:
Something he had of the semblance of a fat white worm; but his bulk was beyond
that of a sea-elephant. His half-coiled tail was as thick as the middle folds of his body; and his front reared upward from the dais in the form of a white round disk and upon it were imprinted vague lineaments. Amid the visage a mouth curved
uncleanly from side to side of the disk, opening and shutting incessantly on a pale
268 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
and tongueless and toothless maw. Two eye sockets lay close together above the
shallow nostrils, but the sockets were eyeless, and in them appeared from moment to moment globules of a blood-colored matter having the form of eyeballs; and
ever the globules broke and dripped down before the dais. And from the ice-floor there ascended two masses like stalagmites, purple and dark as frozen gore, which had been made by this ceaseless dripping of the globules. ( BH 114)
Unusually for the Hyperborean cycle, all this story’s grotesquerie is concentrated in the White Worm. A brilliant coup de theatre sees to it that the bodily fluid that gushes from his wound is “hotter by far than blood, and smoking with strange steam-like vapours” ( BH 121), a detail that links the wound-inflicting warlock Evagh to Sigurd Fafnirsbane and northern dragonslaying lore. But although he is an exceptionally unprepossessing Muse, it cannot be gainsaid that Rlim Shaikorth provokes a poetry “pale and frigid as fire of ice” ( BH 110) from Smith:
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