Echoes of Ambrose

In summary: The Swords of Lankhmar has a slow start. In fact, it has two slow starts. But once the beat drops, as it were, the story swings into action and lots of weird things happen at an increasingly rapid pace. This is a story on a bigger canvas than Leiber usually allows himself, but remains a sword-and-sorcery adventure by virtue of its action and its wry, scurrilous details. A solid entry in the long-running series about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, ergo an essential read for the sword-and-sorcery fan. Don’t read it if rats freak you out, though.

Details (and spoilers) follow.

This book is generally accepted as the only novel in Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series —and it is. And it isn’t.

What’s a novel? Can we call a book a novel when it’s a set of stories about the same characters, collected into a single volume, ostensibly in chronological order? We can, because we can do anything we want, but some people will reject that label.

Some people, especially genre readers, describe this kind of a book as a fix-up, because that’s what Van Vogt did when he smashed his brilliant, crazy magazine stories from the 1940s into incoherent paperback novels in the 1950s.

I reject this label for Leiber’s F&G books or for the Lancer Conan books (or, for that matter, Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, collections of which were sometimes marketed as novels) because these are fundamentally different enterprises. Van Vogt rewrote his stories for book publication, screwing them up in the process. In contrast, Leiber rewote his stories with a light and skillful hand, creating connective material (including whole new stories) to fit his existing stories (mostly published in magazines) into a re-imagined chronology for his Ace collections.

I consider these to be a kind of novel, the episodic or picaresque novel, a kind of book with a long but mostly forgotten tradition in English. But I’m not going to be mad if people feel differently. We’re all friends here, and if you’re not then get the hell out.

But The Swords of Lankhmar is a slightly different beast than the rest of Leiber’s F&G books. In 1961 he’d published a novelette called “Scylla’s Daughter”. Rather than stuffing it into a collection, he wrote a long continuation of the novella, and published the whole thing as a standalone novel in 1968. The volume has no descriptive table of contents and no interior chapter or section titles, just numbered chapters. This is pretty typical for books of the period, but makes The Swords of Lankhmar an outlier in the F&G series, and maybe less user-friendly than the other volumes.

I. Chapter One: a kind of prologue

For this volume, Leiber wrote a brief introductory scene in which Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser return to Lankhmar after a long absence, and are met with a bunch of people who are mad at them, mostly because of unpaid bills.

They face swords, staves, and sorcery, and because this is the first few pages of the novel they defeat their attackers with ease in a scene full of stylized, even cartoonish action. After they’ve done this, the herald of Glipkerio Kistomerces, Lankhmar’s weird Overlord, steps forward to recruit them for a mission.

He doesn’t explain what the mission is, and the next scene will find them embarked on the mission, where necessary background detail will be worked in. So why is this scene even here? Why not just begin where the story actually begins?

The answer lies in real-world chronology (as opposed to Leiber’s invented chronology). This is the first of the Ace F&G volumes to actually appear on bookstands. Leiber had been writing about the Mighty Twain for 30 years, but The Swords of Lankhmar would have been the first time many readers encountered them. This opening scene was clearly written to introduce the Twain and their adopted city.

Does it work?

Hard to say. I like the comradely back-and-forth between the two, which contains one of my favorite lines by the Mouser. They’re talking about why the people they’re approaching are mad at them. Fafhrd says that the Mouser should have paid his dues to the Thieves Guild.

“It’s not so much the dues,” the small man said. “It slipped my mind to split with them after the last job, when I lifted those eight diamonds from the Spider God’s temple.

The big man sucked his tongue in disapproval. “I sometimes wonder why I associate with a faithless rogue like you.”

The small man shrugged. “I was in a hurry. The Spider God was after me.”

I love that bit. Frequently when I’m late arriving somewhere, I apologize by saying, “The Spider God was after me.” This has the virtue of silencing all questions (at the possible risk of someone trying to have me committed). Some of the other stuff works as well, I’d say.

But the action is too cartoony to be taken seriously. Fafhrd and the Mouser deflect death spells and armed mobs with remarkable, almost tedious ease; they slay or drive off the sorcerers and thugs, and are left alone and conveniently unwounded by the end of the non-adventure.

Since this was not my introduction to the Mighty Twain, I can’t really tell if it does its job in creating reader interest in the main characters. I can tell you that I skim over this or skip it on rereading.

II. Chapters Two through Six: “Scylla’s Daughter”

As chapter 2 opens, we find the Twain far from Lankhmar, engaged in an extremely cushy gig. They are on a grain ship, one of several being sent under the protection of Lankhmar’s navy from Lankhmar’s Overlord to his wavering ally, Movarl the Lord of the Eight Cities. Also on the ship is the Demoiselle Hisvet, a Lankhmart of high status, daughter of the grain merchant Hisvin. She and her twelve highly trained white rats are part of the gift package that Glipkerio is sending to Movarl to shore up his doubtful loyalty to their alliance.

What could go wrong? “Practically everything,” you say, and right you are.

For one thing, this isn’t the first grain fleet sent by Glipkerio to Movarl. It’s the third. The first two were destroyed in transit by some unknown attacker, and the present fleet is being pursued by an unknown ship that sneaks along just under the horizon. In addition another weird craft has been seen drifting across the sea, like a black cloud flecked with lights.

There’s a lot of exposition in the first eleven pages of this section, and not a lot of event. We learn that Fafhrd can imitate the love-cry of a sea-monster. We meet a German-speaking, sea-monster-riding traveller in time and space named Karl Treuherz (“Charlie Trueheart”). We hear the legend of the Thirteen: a shadowy rumor that all kinds of animal are ruled by an inner council of thirteen super-intelligent beasts. Slinoor, the captain of the Squid (the ship F&G and co. are travelling in), thinks that the Thirteen of Rats are none other than the twelve rats in Hisvet’s care, with the freakish Hisvet herself as the 13th rat.

Fafhrd and the Mouser talk this last idea down. For one thing, it’s obviously superstitious nonsense. For another, they’re horny.

How horny? Horny enough that the idea of Hisvet being part-rat doesn’t turn them off. The Twain side with Hisvet and her rats in a quarrel that develops between the passengers of Squid and the captain, backed by the naval captain Lukeen, who’s often stopping by Squid to shout at people, insult them, and spit in their face.

Through fair means and foul, the Mouser and Fafhrd succeed in allaying the crew’s suspicions about Hisvet and her ratty comrades. The Twain are rewarded with a special dinner in Hisvet’s cabin, where she sends them kisses and other favors by way of her attendant Frix.

But Slinoor is not convinced. He dopes the food sent to Hisvet’s cabin, hoping to take Hisvet and her partisans unaware. Fafhrd and the Mouser fall into a drugged stupor, but Hisvet and Frix, warned by the white rats, don’t eat the food. When the sailors start to break down the door to the cabin, the rats and the women arm themselves and sneak away into the ship’s hold through a trap door. The sailors drag the unconscious Fafhrd and the semi-conscious Mouser up to the deck and tie them up. From this vantage point, the Mouser witnesses the increasingly chaotic battle that the sailors fight against the ship’s rats, black and white, resulting in a total victory by the rats.

At some point during the banquet scene the story transitions from a slow, unsettling tale to a fast-paced nightmare. The leaders of the rats (Hisvet, her father Hisvin, and one of the white rats named Skwee) reveal themselves. Hisvet is fond of torture and murder as part of her romantic games, and it looks as if Fafhrd and the Mouser are going to play a role in her fantasies, when Fafhrd (waking belatedly from his opium-daze) summons the solution to their problems as only he knows how. (“Hoongk!“)

The opening part of the story requires some patience from the reader. It’s not a good introduction to the heroic pair, but if you already know them it’s agreeable to see them lounging around and enjoying themselves for once. The first thing the Mouser says in Chapter 2 is “Fat times in Lankhmar!” They’re not exactly in Lankhmar when he says it, but those-who-know will recognize the callback to “Lean Times in Lankhmar”, published in Fantastic only 18 months before “Scylla’s Daughter”. (The Ace collection including it, Swords in the Mist, would appear on the stands later in the same year as The Swords of Lankhmar.)

The balance of the story is a lot more lively. And everything in the slow opening section gets used again, and significantly, in the action-packed part of the story, right down to the ship’s kitten who has a love-hate relationship with Fafhrd.

This novelette began life back in the 1930s as a long, meandering story set on Earth in the reign of the Roman emperor Claudius I. Leiber was deeply enamored of Robert Graves’ historical novels, especially I, Claudius and Claudius the God. And why not? They’re some of the greatest historical fiction ever written. For a while he pursued the idea of making the Mighty Twain heroes in a series of historical fantasies, where they would be reborn or somehow emerge on Earth once every hundred years or so.

“Adept’s Gambit” is the only complete story that survives from that period, but there also is a lengthy fragment from “The Tale of the Grain Ships” (which appeared in the New York Review of Books, May 1997, and in the collection Strange Wonders, Subterranean 2010). It’s fairly interesting, with zero apparent overlap with “Scylla’s Daughter”. In it, the Mouser emerges from the sewer into the kitchen of Claudius’ palace and interacts with the kitchen staff and some others, including Claudius himself. On balance, I’m glad Leiber shook off the shackles of history and put the Twain back into imaginary world fantasy where they belong.

“Scylla’s Daughter” was a worthy addition to the series, but it pales in comparison to the balance of the novel, which finds Leiber at or near the top of his game.

III. Chapters Seven through Sixteen: The war between the Lankhmars

The rest of the book is a braided plot, where we follow four distinct series of events until they all tie together at the novel’s conclusion.

In one strand we follow the adventures of Fafhrd, travelling solo. The Mouser left him in Kleg Nar, Movarl’s city on the north coast of the Inner Sea. He’s been having fun drinking and gambling and sleeping with a woman named Hrenlet. But Hrenlet sneaks a cow into his bed and sneaks away with Fafhrd’s money, and Fafhrd has to get out of town rapidly. He’ll travel to Lankhmar via the land route, despite an invasion of Mingols and more eldritch horrors, visiting the Twain’s patron sorcerers, Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, along the way.

The Mouser sailed with Squid back to Lankhmar, hoping to get the reward of bringing the good news of how they saved the grain fleet from rats. When he gets to the Overlord’s palace, he finds that Hisvet and Hisvin have already sold Glipkerio on their own version, where they were the ones who saved the fleet from the rats. They pretend now to be helping Glipkerio fight off an ongoing invasion of rats from Lankhmar Below. The Mouser consults Sheelba for help, and Sheelba gives him a magic potion that, he is told, will put him “on a footing to deal with the situation”. He ends up unexpectedly rat-sized, trying to spy out the counsels of the Thirteen who rule ratkind.

A third strand follows events in the palace, focused on the depraved Glipkerio and his long-suffering servants. Glipkerio is a cowardly sadist whose only real happiness lies in two things: watching his servants be tortured and dreaming of escape from the world of Lankhmar, which he thinks doesn’t appreciate him.

The fourth strand is a running third-person omniscient narration of the degenerating situation in Lankhmar, as the rats of Lankhmar Below become increasingly aggressive toward the inhabitants, human and other animals, of Lankhmar Above.

All the braids tie into a single knot at the story’s climax, when Fafhrd summons supernatural aid of the direst kind to battle the monstrous tide of rats, the Mouser foils the wily leaders of the rats, and the ship’s kitten from Squid emerges to save the day (or at least help save it).

IV. Chapter Seventeen: epilogue

It won’t have surprised you to hear that the rats are defeated, but it also probably won’t surprise you that Fafhrd and the Mouser don’t get credit for it. If they did, then their status would change from outsiders to insiders, and the series would end, or at least dramatically change. Leiber isn’t ready for that. So the last chapter finds Fafhrd and the Mouser, reunited with each other and their sweethearts of the moment, riding out of Lankhmar in search of new adventures.

Final comments:

A. Theatricality

This is the most theatrical of Leiber’s novels, even including The Big Time (which Poul Anderson claimed would work as a stage play) and A Specter Is Haunting Texas (which is about an actor). It even has a character, Frix, who murmurs stage directions to herself and lingers on the stage long enough to see the drama play out before making her own spectacular exit, concluding the climactic scene.

In the aftermath, the Mouser jokingly accuses Fafhrd of being a scene stealer. When Fafhrd objects to being called an actor, after all he’s been through, the Mouser says

“Halfway around the Inner Sea you say . . . and nevertheless time your entrance perfectly! Why you’re the greatest actor of them all!”

Leiber was, in some sense Fafhrd as he admits in “Fafhrd and Me” and elsewhere. But Fritz Leiber jr. was also the son of Fritz Leiber sr., a once-famous (and infamously vain) Shakespearian actor. If the vanity that Leiber jr. repeatedly attributes to the Mouser reminds him, consciously or unconsciously, of Leiber sr., these lines could read as wish-fulfillment on the author’s part. An avatar of his stagey father is awarding him the highest accolade in the family business (which Leiber jr. early pursued, but didn’t excel or persist in).

B. Weird sex.

It can get very weird indeed with Leiber. When Fafhrd accuses the Mouser of having a penchant for childlike women, it’s only the truth. We saw it when he briefly retired to become a respectable extortionist in “Lean Times in Lankhmar”; we saw it when he had an affair with the Eyes of Ogo in “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar”; and we see it here, in his obsession with the treacherous, sadistic, and at best semi-human Hisvet. She would seem to be of an age to legally consent, but much is made of her girlish figure. The Mouser never does find out in this novel how much of Hisvet’s anatomy comes from her rodent ancestry, but he never tires of trying to find out.

Fafhrd, on the other hand, is having sex with Kreeshkra, a female Ghoul, a race of people with invisible flesh so that they appear to be animated skeletons. They also enjoy killing and eating people who aren’t Ghouls, but she hasn’t killed Fafhrd. Yet.

Then there’s Glipkerio’s and Hisvet’s separate obsessions with torture. They are obviously not Our Heroes, but Leiber’s frequent returning to this theme (Hasjarl in “The Lords of Quarmall” had the same kink) might be a little disturbing.

How do we deal with this? Should we deal with it, or just toss Leiber into the memory hole?

Not the latter, I’d say. We don’t have to assume that Leiber is advocating human/rat sex, for instance, just because he depicts it as happening in this imaginary world. I’d say the same for the rest of the sexual variations Leiber depicts.

C. What kind of series is this?

Back in 1952, James Blish distinguished between two types of story-series: template and evolving. A template series is when all the stories in the series are written around a character or set of characters that are essentially changeless. Each installment is a new adventure, but at the end of it the hero(es) will still be around to have another adventure.

A lot of great genre fiction has been written on this template model. Consider Sherlock Holmes, for instance, or Jeeves & Wooster, or any of the pulp heroes from the 30s-40s, like The Spider!, The Shadow, Doc Savage etc. Almost all TV shows used to be on the template model. Series like this can go on as long as the audience is willing to pay attention.

Evolving series are where the writer(s) permit their characters and situations to change and grow, even at the risk of disrupting the premises of the series and bringing it to an end. One of Blish’s examples for this is the Foundation series where, once the premises of the series are solidly established, Asimov throws a Mule-sized wrench into Seldon’s Plan. But what Blish really wants to talk about are his own Okie stories, nowadays available as the tetralogy Cities in Flight. A more recent example would be Le Guin’s Earthsea series or her Hainish series, where the main characters tend to be transformed by the end of the book.

Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories began as a template series. Whenever it looked as if the characters or their relationships were going to permanently change (e.g. in “Lean Times in Lankhmar” or “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar”), it was just a fake out and pretty soon the Mighty Twain are on the road again seeking new adventures together.

The first collection of F&G stories (Two Sought Adventure, Gnome 1958) and the first three Ace Books installments of the series to actually appear (The Swords of Lankhmar, January 1968; Swords Against Wizardry, July 1968; Swords in the Mist, September 1968) are all stories of the template type.

But already with “The Unholy Grail” (Fantastic, October 1962) Leiber was starting to do something different. In creating a backstory for his heroes (continued, of course, with “The Snow Women” and “Ill-Met in Lankhmar”), Leiber became committed not only to the idea that his heroes could change, but that they had already changed. Whether we like what he was doing, he knew what he was doing when he wrote the origin stories of the Twain (collected as Swords and Deviltry, May 1970) and then embedded the earliest F&G stories in that retroactive continuity (Swords Against Death, July 1970).

The template stories were now just an island of stability in a pair of long adventurous careers, presenting only stage two or even stage three of the heroes’ lives.

Lots of people who like Leiber and like this series really dislike Swords and Deviltry. This is interesting to me, and also weird to me. Some people talk about “The Cold Women” as if it were The Eye of Argon. Others more guardedly say that it’s not a good introduction to the series.

For my money, both views are mistaken. But I think (looking at the shift from a template series to an evolving one) some people just really prefer the template model. For those with this preference, it’s best to look at the books as collections of stories and skip the ones that give them the ick.

The end of the 1960s was a rough time for Leiber. His beloved wife Jonquil died of cancer; he fell off the wagon for another harrowing round of alcohol and drug abuse. But he never stopped writing. His greatest novel (Our Lady of Darkness, a.k.a. “The Pale Brown Thing”) and some of his best short fiction (e.g. “Catch That Zeppelin”) lay ahead of him.

And as the 1970s wore on, he turned away from Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’s past and started thinking about how they would change in the future. The long-running series would change and change again in the next collection, Swords and Ice Magic (Ace, July 1977). I’ll talk about that one another time.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.

I was trying to figure out why you couldn’t say this in Latin, then thought, “Well, it could only improve garum”, and finally realized: oh, they mean cocina latina.

Some of these keywords for Bluesky feeds are deeply ambiguous. (“Conan” in the s&s feed is another one.) But I’m enjoying the surreal tangents they generate.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.