Som’s Hoard and Be As I Am

Chup’s adventures in and under Som’s citadel occupy chapters 5 and 6 or The Black Mountains. Since the story picks up immediately after Chup’s discovery that his rival Tarlenot lives again, Charmian needs to provide some exposition, which is further supplemented by Chup’s conversations with the men of Som’s guard. We learn just a bit about the functioning of the valkyries, which bear wounded and dead men back up the mountain to be healed by Lord Draffut. The guardsmen need to wear the Old World collars if they are to be picked up by the valkyries, but Draffut apparently owes no particular loyalty to Som. Indeed, Som or some predecessor as viceroy first came here to be near to Draffut, who gave out the collars and the valkyries’ succor without regard to East or West. This naturally makes a reader wonder why such apparently altruistic largesse is wasted on the Empire’s forces. In fact, the ability of the guardsmen to regenerate rapidly from injury or death may be a greater advantage in their defense of Som’s citadel than the fortress’s position high atop the cliffs. Even if such regeneration is imperfect (and a few pages later, Chup encounters a pair of men who were apparently not healed as completely as Tarlenot), Draffut’s aid is incredibly valuable to the powers of the East.

Charmian has a plan, which appears to be to pass ownership of the love charm to the High Lord Som. This doesn’t sound like an especially promising strategy—a minor (if nonetheless unaccountably powerful) magical charm versus a man who has command over one of the mightiest demons of the East. Oh course, the charm still works perfectly well on Chup, and it’s a bit creepy the way Charmian, who obviously has no regard whatsoever for her husband, grudgingly permits him to “have his way” with her. It’s actually noticeable that these books always stop a little short of overt sex. Nudity, “having his way,” and even implied rape are there, but nothing quite explicit. (In the third book, there is actually an explicit reason why some of the characters don’t have sex, although even there, I don’t think it’s every discussed explicitly as a prohibition on “sex.”)

Charmian’s plan entails Chup sneaking the charm into Som’s extremely well-guarded treasury. The three types of guardians Chup must face follow a rather traditional fantasy progression. First there are human guards, who can be bribed or fought as needed (and it turns out that both bribery and combat are required in this instance). Then there is an dangerous animal—a giant, poisonous, creepy-crawly thing, like the spider in Howard’s “The Tower of the Elephant,” which I pointed out features a similar progression of hazards for would-be thieves to face. Finally, there are the truly eldritch guardians—seven quite minor ones in this case, which are not that challenging to deal with, since Chup knows the passwords. If an evil lord’s abundant hoard weren’t guarded by multiple layerings of minions in this way, that would actually be a subversion of the conventions of the fantasy genre. However, there’s still plenty of freedom, even within the genre conventions, to make things creative. Saberhagen himself actually returns to a similar scenario in The Second Book of Swords—which features a total of seven wards protecting the great treasure of the Blue Temple. That’s an very interesting story—my favorite of the several Swords books that I read—but it has some serious shortcomings as well.

The real standout in this episode from The Black Mountains was, for me, the giant centipede. I don’t like centipedes in real life. Their knobbly bodies and thick jointed legs give me the creeps. It doesn’t help that I know they’re predators, and poisonous in varying degrees. (Millipedes, on the other hand, I generally find rather cute. They are slow moving, smooth, and herbivorous. Once, at a children’s museum, I let a millipede almost two feet long walk down my arm, because my daughter wanted me to.) In fantasy, giant centipedes are conventional if not particularly commonly occurring monsters. Honestly however, I don’t think I’ve ever come across a giant centipede in fiction that I found particularly affecting—except this one. (Giant centipedes are also pretty common monsters in Dungeons & Dragons, and although I know my player characters have faced off against them numerous times, I never found them very compelling in the gaming context either.) I think the issue is that my discomfort with centipedes is a very sensory phenomenon; what bothers me is how they look and how I imagine they would feel against my skin. Chup’s adventure with the captive centipede doesn’t really start to move me until he has to wrestle with the monster, gripping its poison-barbed tail and carrying its long body, covered in countless scritching legs, across his shoulders. The idea of doing that is too viscerally discomfiting to be ignored.

Unlike the centipede, the demons in this chapter are rather minor barriers (at least to one who knows the daily incantations). Asleep (and apparently fully corporeal), they are a lot less threatening than the demon from the first chapter—although the reader is informed that, were they awake, they would be much nastier than the mindless centipede. In effect, Chup’s interaction with the demons is mostly a chance for him to rescue the little furry creature one of them had been tormenting. This serves to remind the reader that Chup is not a sadist, unlike the demons or their master Som. This is the very trait of Chup’s that Som sets out to remedy in the next chapter.

As soon as he disposes of the the hair charm, passing its ownership to Som, Chup is freed from the enchantment that had bound him to Charmian. It’s interesting to contrast his earlier befuddled behavior, from when he was completely dominated by the lust for his wife, with his newfound clarity. Saberhagen follows Chup’s thought processes as the former satrap tries to get an accurate assessment of what he’s gotten himself entangled in. There is a rapid a string of realizations, as Chup’s renewed rationality rapidly raises and addresses all the unsavory questions that ought to have occurred to him earlier—culminating in the revelations that Charmian has sent him to the vault to die and that the disfigured guards are to be accomplices in his murder. What follows is his impressive job grappling with the arthropod.

After Chup’s escape, he finally gets to meet Som. Charmian has met him before, but not for a personal audience. Som evidently has the same kind of sadistic streak as Ekuman, and he hits the former princess in one of the few areas where she is truly vulnerable, threatening to take away her youthful appearance.

By the time Chup gets back to the villa (after dropping in on Charmian’s audience), it’s swarming with Som’s secret police. With black uniforms and skull insignia, they are obviously supposed to be reminiscent of the organs of Nazi Germany—the black-garbed Geheime Staatspolizei and the Schutzstaffel, with their totenkopf emblem. Unlike the Third Reich however, the police state governed by Som and his emperor appears to have a substantial number of female operatives, including in supervisory positions. Along with the most murderous aspects of their ideology, the Nazis also favored ultraconservative social policies, and there were essentially no women at all in their hierarchy. Som’s secret police are more egalitarian, apparently—like the Cheka.

Chup intervenes to save Charmian’s mistreated servants from a full grilling by the viceroy’s security apparatus. The secret police appear only briefly in this story, but they seem rather businesslike to me. In contrast, it soon turns out that Som’s sadism is actually a job requirement. In order to win Som’s lasting favor, Chup needs to do something “small and mean,” as he puts it. While this might come naturally to a man like Ekuman, it is rather contrary to Chup’s nature. He’s the kind of warrior who wants to look an enemy in the face and engage them in a fair fight. I noticed that the Chamberlain seems quite taken aback by Chup’s behavior when the two of them are poking around the demon pit—first because Chup doesn’t realize that he is being prepared for his pledging ceremony, and then when Chup wants to confirm his orders with Lord Som. To be honest though, it seems pretty foolish of Chup for him to question the viceroy’s orders in a matter of this magnitude, and Som’s forgiving response to Chup’s insolence was rather surprising.

Chup’s visit to Som’s personal chamber, below the main audience hall, is an excellent bit of horror writing. Previously, during Charmian’s audience, the narration included whiffs of his gangrenous smell and mention of the fact that, when viewed from the corner of the eye, the viceroy appears to be a bare skeleton. (Saberhagen does adroitly give a concrete reason why Charmian is looking at him from a steep angle; she is demurely lowering her eyes as she bows before the lord.) These are nice effects, but rather conventional ones. On the other hand, the strange candle that casts darkness instead of light, set at the focus of a polygonal arc of mirrors, is much more original. (The odd light and the cold of the room, in spite of the torches, reminds me atmospherically of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure more than anything else. The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun was one of a couple early adventures that were designed with particular horror elements.) I also realized that in an odd way, the dark candle really does illuminate Som’s face, for it shows him as he truly is—not human. This encounter would make a wonderful scene in a film adaptation of these books.

Offered the command of the citadel’s thousand collared guardsmen, Chup accepts his assignment. We’ll see how his pledging ceremony works out next week—although first we must spend some time back with the forces of the West in chapter 7 (which includes perhaps my favorite encounter of the whole three-book epic).