Fritz Leiber Studies: Swords Against Death, Part 6

The Seven Black Priests

This story picks up shortly after “The Sunken Land”. The lads are somewhere near the Cold Wastes, and are apparently shipwrecked. They’re trying to make their way to a familiar point so they can get their bearings. Fafhrd kills the time by composing and singing a ditty about Lavas Laerk, captain of the ship seen in prior tale.

Spoilers follow.

In this remote mountain pass in the north is a secret priesthood. Seven men from Klesh, Nehwon’s equivalent of Africa, guard a shrine to an unknown and improbably god. Yes, the Seven Black Priests are, literally, seven black priests. The first one to encounter the lads freaks out a bit, because they’re in the middle of nowhere, and no one ever goes there. That’s why the put the temple in that location. In his entire life the first priest has never seen an outsider, and here comes this big goofy Northman singing his lungs out. He tries to attack the lads, and gets comically thrown over a cliff for his efforts.

In the distance the Mouser sees a glowing light, which turns out to be a large jewel acting as the single eye of a large idol. He steals it, naturally. One by one the remaining six priests track and try to kill the lads and retrieve the gem. Fafhrd, who is carrying the jewel, begins acting strangely. He’s saying things in his sleep and then denying it, saying he was awake and the Mouser was having a nightmare. Unlike stories where the reader gets what’s going on pages before the protagonist, the Mouser gets it right away: the gem is somehow controlling or possessing Fafhrd. Great.  The “god” turns out to be Nehwon itself, sort of the malevolent Gaia-spirit of Nehwon. The priests don’t so much worship the god as guard it to keep it from escaping. There’s a prophecy that with the blood of heroes it will manifest in the form of a man and wipe mankind from existence and of course, our lads ‘ blood would do nicely.

This story first appeared in Other Worlds in 1953.  It’s one of Leiber’s tightest stories so far, but we’re still feeling the Lovecraft influence pretty strongly. There are, after all, weird cultists, strange behavior, and unknown gods. The priests seem comical, though, guarding while seeming to never actually expect to be challenged. This is yet another situation where the lads triumph not because of superior prowess as swordsmen or thieves but because their opponents are simply a bit incompetent. At times it seems a parody of a Lovecraft story; what would someone who wasn’t frightened of their own shadow do in these strange circumstances? We get a nod to this in the Mouser’s near-immediate recognition of the situation. How would he not notice that his best friend was acting strangely, and be able to figure out the cause? The inverted Lovecraft tropes continue with the god being the planet itself, rather than some alien being (not that this isn’t weird in and of itself), and man having mastered the god and put it in its place. And Nehwon is not just kept in its place by Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser. It was the borderline-incompetent seven black priests keeping it down. What does that say about all-powerful elder gods?

Someone will inevitably point out the potential racism of the piece. I can see whee it could be interpreted that way, bit don’t believe that it’s actually there on purpose. What I’m seeing is an attempt by Leiber to make the priests more exotic, but it also fits the story. If you think about it, Africa or the Middle East are often thought of as the places where civilization, or even life on Earth, began. We have tales of Eden, myths from Egypt, and so on. If Nehwon is similar to Earth in this respect, the priests would likely be from that region. Wanting to take the planet’s “soul” as far from the cradle, they’d end up in the Cold Wastes. That they seem as competent as Mantan Moreland is coincidental to their race.

In the next installment, we’ll look at the “Claws from the Night” and “The Price of Pain-Ease”.

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