Here we are, having reached the last story in the "Sword and Sorcery" section of The Big Book of Adventure Stories, rounding out the collection with two of the finer fantasy adventurers to follow in Conan's fur-booted footsteps. Fafhrd, a tall, northern barbarian equally adept with a broadsword and with a harp, and his friend and companion the Gray Mouser, thief and sometimes-magician, were the creation of author and sometimes-actor Fritz Leiber and his friend Harry Otto Fischer, and the stars of an entire cycle of stories set in and around the environs of the mythical world of Nehwon ("No When" backwards). Over the course of many adventures, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser encounter such strange and motley foes as devious wizards, conniving thieves' guilds (indeed, Leiber invented the concept of the "Thieves' Guild" as it exists in fantasy literature and role-playing games today), adventurers from Earth, maliciously intelligent rats, ice-witches, and even the weakened and dying Earthly gods Odin and Loki. A couple years back I picked up the entire series all at once, collected in eight volumes and started reading through them; Leiber wrote these stories over a period of nearly fifty years, and I think I quit reading somewhere near the end, where Leiber started filling the stories with pubescent girls and sexual imagery that I wasn't real comfortable with. I've never been one that needed to know the sexual proclivities of fictional characters nor the authors who wrote them, you know?
Along the way, they cross paths with a band of Kleshite (read: pseudo-African) priests, a long way from their homeland of Klesh. The reader is given some insight (that Fafhrd and the Mouser are not) that the Kleshites have maintained this small priesthood in the mountains for generations, guarding and serving a shrine to their patron god-demon-elemental entity. The seven priests assume (not totally incorrectly) that Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are infidel defilers, looking to loot and despoil the shrine the priests have spent their entire lives guarding. Certainly, after their first encounter with one of the priests ends in the Kleshite tumbling into an impossibly-deep ravine, the Gray Mouser becomes convinced that the priest was guarding something of value, and decides to search for it.
The shrine itself is a place of nightmare - a meager oasis of geothermal warmth in the snow, surrounded by rocky cliff-faces half-carved, half-melted into devilish shapes suggestive of human, or at least semi-human, faces, and it is within the "eye-socket" of one of these faces that the Gray Mouser finds his treasure: a polished diamond of ludicrous size (Leiber doesn't specify quite how big it is, but the way it's described I'm picturing something the size of a grapefruit), cemented into the face with a ring of tar. With little effort he pries the diamond eye out and puts it in his bag.
With the idolatrous eye stolen, it's not long before Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser find themselves being stalked across icy slopes and through treacherous, snow-choked mountain passes by the remaining priests. Our two heroes find themselves having to dodge immense snowballs sent rolling downhill at them, their thick cloaks peppered with the poisoned darts of the Kleshites...and possibly worse, in the Mouser's eyes, is the growing realization that each night, Fafhrd is communing, hypnotized, with something inside the diamond eye...
You know, I don't recall being that impressed with "The Seven Black Priests" when I first read it a year or two ago, but this time around I really got into it. The way the real "villain" of the story is slowly unveiled, their unusual nature and the surprising scope of what this villain hoped to accomplish really grabbed me by the throat this time around (and I'm hoping I can entice you, the readers, into checking out the story for yourselves, but not revealing too much about what's going on!) and held on tight, right up through the final paragraph. I will say that the story is deliciously vague as to whether the Kleshite priests are guarding what's in the shrine from Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or trying to protect Fafhrd and Gray Mouser from what's in the shrine...If I had to voice one complaint about the story it's that the Gray Mouser experiences a flash of insight that explains everything that's going on as it's happening, information flooding his brain in a sudden burst and allowing him to resolve the challenge he's faced with. It's the same thing I didn't care for with "The Devil in Iron" -- this Denouement Flash of Insight that allows the hero to neatly resolve everything instead of actually figuring out what's going on and reacting accordingly. I understand that there are deadlines and word-count limits that authors have to abide by, but I really am just not a fan of the sudden flash of insight.
Ever since my first exposure to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser back in college, when I picked up a reprint collection of Howard Chaykin and Mike Mignola's comic book adaptation of a few of the best of Leiber's tales of the adventurous duo, I've considered them -- not Conan, not the Fellowship of the Ring -- the true progenitors of the "Adventuring Party" in fantasy roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons. Fafhrd and Gray Mouser get stupid-drunk with regularity, get into ridiculous shenanigans for the hell of it, treat adventures across worlds and into other dimensions as everyday occurrences, and quite frequently need all-powerful "Quest-Giver" characters -- in this case, the feuding wizards Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes -- to motivate them to do anything. Which is pretty much exactly like every adventuring party I've been a part of or DM'd for.
That being said, I think the narrowly-thwarted villainous plot shown here would make an incredible end-of-campaign plot twist in a D&D campaign. Maybe someday when I've got more time to run games again...
Alright, so much for "Sword and Sorcery" -- join us again tomorrow when we begin the section of the book entitled "Megalomania Rules," starting with Loring Brent's "The Master Magician"!
No comments:
Post a Comment