Strange Shadows
Hosted by Tim Mendees and Rob Poyton of the Innsmouth Book Club, Strange Shadows is a fortnightly podcast devoted to the weird fiction of Clark Ashton Smith. One of the Trinity of Weird Tales authors, Smith, alongside Lovecraft and Howard, redefined cosmic horror and fantasy fiction.
With his distinct baroque style, Smith's work remains rich, powerful and evocative. Using the five volume Night Shade Press collection of Smith's work as our guide, we will be covering each of his stories in chronological order, as well as screen adaptations and aspects of the author's life.
Occasional guests will be joining us to share their knowledge and opinions about this most poetic of the Weird Tales writers. Episodes are free, with bonus content and other rewards available for patrons - click Subscribe or visit our Patreon page for details. See you in Zothique!
Strange Shadows
SS4 16 The Voyage of King Euvoran
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It's as distinctly avian theme this episode as we take flight on The Voyage of King Euvoran. We talk Boris Dulgoth, Carry On/carrion, a surfeit of lampreys, beef wood and, inevitably, tits...
Reader: Simon Frazier Nash
Favourite words: stymphalian, Aepyornis, byssus, involute, quadrireme, flagitious, bastinado, malapert, misericordia, oupires, volutation, passarines, magniloquent.
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SPEAKER_00The crown of the kings of Ustheim was fashioned only from the rarest materials that could be procured anywhere. The magically graven gold of its circlet had been mined from a huge meteor that fell in the southern isle of Sintrim, shaking the isle from shore to shore with calamitous earthquake. And the gold was harder and brighter than any native gold of earth, and was changeable in colour from a flame-like red to the yellow of young moons. It was set with thirteen jewels, every one of which was unique and without fellow even in fable. These jewels were a wonder to behold, starring the circlet with strange, unquiet fires and fulgurations terrible as the eyes of the cocketrice. But more wonderful than all else was the stuffed gazolba bird, which formed the superstructure of the crown, gripping the circlet with its steely claws above the wearer's brow, and towering royally with resplendent plumage of green, violent, and vermilion. Its beak was the hue of burnished brass, its eyes were like small dark garnets in bezels of silver. And seven lacy, miniated quills arose from its ebon-dapppled head, and a white tail fell down in a straightly spreading fan, like the beams of some white sun behind the circle.
SPEAKER_01Greetings, friends, and thank you for joining us for season four, episode 16 of Strange Shadows, the Clark Ashton Smith Podcast. The voice you just heard was friend of the show and bass player Extraordinaire Simon Fraser Nash, reading the opening of today's story, which sees us once again in Zothique. I'm one of your hosts, Rob Poynton.
SPEAKER_02And I'm the other one, Tim Mendy's, or does it? Or does it see us in Zoth Eek?
SPEAKER_01Oh yes, absolutely. Yes.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yes. This is another one of um Smith's very, very poetic stories, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01Yes, one for which we both had the dictionary out, I I suspect. Yes. But the large number of words that were uh not familiar to us.
SPEAKER_02Indeed. But first off, how the hell are we actually pronouncing? Because I keep cocking up and saying Eurovan.
SPEAKER_01Ah, right. I I've got a way around that. Right. Because I listened to the Double Shadow podcast, which was the uh well, uh a podcast that gave us the idea for this one, and and sadly, of course, they didn't go beyond. I think it's about 20 episodes they did, but anyway, because they had exactly the same thing as us. I think one of the one of the presenters actually introduced it as the voyages of King Eurovan. Um hang on. But in the readings, I'm not sure who was doing the readings for them, but they said Uvoran. Uvoran. So I'm going for Uvoran, which takes away the temptation to say Eurovan, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there we go. Guaranteed every time I see it, I'm gonna think, but Uvoren, right. Yeah, okay, that works. It doesn't sound like the the French version of uh Enterprise or Hertz, does it? Eurovan.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Uh having said that, there's a few other words here that I know I'm gonna struggle to pronounce. Yes, which we'll get onto in a minute, no doubt. Uh before we do news items, we just want to mention, of course, Innsmouth Literary Festival 2026, 19th of September, in Oddly Moist Bedford at the King's House Centre. We've got an excellent lineup of guests coming together now, including, of course, author Stephen Jones and artist Les Edwards. And potentially, possibly, we're just looking at something a little bit different for Innsmouth After Dark, but uh I won't say any more until things are confirmed.
SPEAKER_02Hmm, indeed. Now, yes, I want to apologize in advance if I sound a little bit hoarse. Nay, nay, nay. A little bit Shetland pony, as they say in certain parts of the country. Uh, it's because I've just come back from a three-day mini tour and my yeah, and I've picked up the plague, you know, the giglergy. You always get giglergy, don't you? You did go to Northampton. Yes, indeed, we did. But um, but yes, we um have just released uh we were only gonna do it as a um an official bootleg gig only CD, but we had a problem with the van, and we're having we're basically it's now gone online. You can buy a digipack, you could also buy a digital download. It's an eight-track album, and it includes the shuttered room. Oh, nice. Yes, inspired by uh HPL and weird fiction in general. So there we go. Yes, that's available on bandcamp.
SPEAKER_01Excellent. Okay, shall we start with our favourite words as we've got quite a list to work through? It is gonna take a while, innit? And I do feel we should put a little warning at the front of this episode just to say that this story does contain a lot of foul language.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, God, yes, it does, it does. And several of my words are pretty foul. So there we go.
SPEAKER_01Yes, well, I thought you might say for flock's sake when I said that, but for flock's sake, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yes, a lot of avian words, isn't there? Yes, right. The first one I'm gonna go with. Um no idea how you pronounce this. I think it's Stymphalion, which refers to anything related to the Stymphalion birds or the region of Stymphalia in Greek mythology, particularly the man-eating birds defeated by Heracles. Not Testocles, Heracles. Umphalia is a region in Arcadia near Lake Zaraka in Greek mythology.
SPEAKER_01There we go. I was totally unfamiliar with those, I have to say. And they they sound like as an old school DD player, they sound like the sort of thing I should know about, really.
SPEAKER_02But yeah, a group of large, aggressive, man-eating birds with bronze beaks, sharp metallic feathers, and poisonous droppings.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, great. I sound great. Yeah, well, on a on that similar avian theme, and again with a question mark against the pronunciation. My first choice is apionis, which is an extinct bird. They were known as elephant birds. Basically, it's a huge kiwi bird, about 10 foot tall.
SPEAKER_02Terrifying.
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna say prehistoric without any clue as to whether it was prehistoric, but I I imagine everything was bigger in those days, wasn't it? Indeed, indeed it was.
SPEAKER_02Right, my next one is Bissus, I think that's how you pronounce it. Bissus, spelt B-Y-S-S-U-S, which uh is either a fine ancient textile or the silky filaments secreted by molluscs to attach themselves onto objects.
SPEAKER_01Nice, nice. My second choice is involute, which is not a word I was familiar with, that simply means intricate, uh, particularly as relating to spiral patterns.
SPEAKER_02Nice. Right, I'm gonna go with quadriream again. I hope that's how you pronounce it, which is an ancient galley warship with four banks of oars, typically manned by multiple rowers. Uh, it sort of relates to the Hellenistic era.
SPEAKER_01Very nice. Now, uh again, I'm not sure of the pronunciation for this one, but I'm gonna go for flagitious again, totally unfamiliar to me. That basically means criminal. I thought you were gonna say flagellation. Well, funnily enough, we're gonna get onto that with my next one.
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay, right, yeah. I'm gonna go on with one now, which is it would be a great title for a goth track. Misericordia. Oh, yes, yes, which means mercy or compassion, and it's uh the Latin translates directly as a compassionate heart.
SPEAKER_01Hmm. Very nice. And uh yeah, I'll I'll speak about that when we get into the story because that plays a part, doesn't it? It does, yeah. So on to that uh idea of flagellation. This I was familiar with this word, and it's one of my favourite all-time words anyway, because it sounds like a choice insult. Bastinado. Yes, yeah, getifuya bastinado. And uh that was a a form of uh encouragement, shall we say, where the victim was beaten on the soles of the feet with a cane. So grim stuff. People pay a handsome price for that in uh certain places in Soho, I imagine. Yeah, and and places like Torture Garden, I seem to remember.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, indeed, indeed, indeed. Now one I'm gonna go with now is oopires, which is it's a vampire, but yeah, just a different spelling and pronunciation of it.
SPEAKER_01There we go. Voletation was another one that was totally new to me. That means flying.
SPEAKER_02Now we got um uh back to the birds here. Never heard of that before, which is it it basically relates to it's a genus relating to perching or songbirds.
SPEAKER_01Ah, yeah. And uh I'm I'm gonna finish with this one because this is possibly one of my favourite words of the whole lot, and again, totally new to me. Malapurt, which is uh basically an impudent chap. A saucy scoundrel.
SPEAKER_02I love it, I love that. Yeah, my final one, I'm gonna go with magniloquent. Oh, mainly because I just love saying the word magniloquent, because I am kind of magniloquent myself. It means using high flown or bombastic language. Excellent, excellent. Right, oh, so yes, moving on to the publication history. The voyage of King Uvoron was finished in mid-January 1933, and he submitted it to Farnsworth Wright with suggestion that it might be suitable for Weird Tales or its sister magazine, The Magic Carpet. Sadly, Wright rejected it. Of course he did. Of course he did. Of course he did. Why would you want a weird towel in Weird Towers? Well, yeah, exactly. Um now to find out why he rejected it, we're turning to eccentric impractical devils, the letters of August Derlith and Clark Ashton Smith, and to a letter dated February the 9th, 1933. Wright sent back King Uroven saying he had enjoyed it greatly himself, but feared that it would not have enough plot and suspense for many of his readers.
SPEAKER_01Hmm, I'm not sure how much plot you can have in a short story in any case, really. This is it.
SPEAKER_02When you're on the word count, this is it. But oddly, Smith actually agreed with it. Oh. Yeah. I agree in a way, it's hardly a magazine story, but it's more like a narrative poem in prose. If I print a pamphlet, I may include it for variety. I have an appointment next week with the printers who bought out two of my volumes of verse and will learn what, if anything, can be done. And this is exactly what Smith did. He was included as the lead story in The Double Shadow and Other Stories, which was released as a pamphlet and sold relatively cheaply, much to HBL's delight. But we'll get onto that later on. Now, over a decade later, Smith, wanting to capitalize on the success of his first Arkham House collection, set about trying to get some of the stories that didn't get printed in Weird Tales, printed in Weird Tales. And this was one of them. He cut about a third of the story, whittling it down from around 9,000 words to six, and submitted it to Dorothy McKilwraith, that wonderfully named editor at Weird Tales. Now, not only was it published in the September 1947 issue under the title Quest of the Gaz Alba. He changed the name of it for some reason, not sure why, but he did. But it was also given a cover illustration. It was the cover story. Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_01Nice, nice.
SPEAKER_02Now the illustration was done by Boris Dolgoth, who was a Ukrainian-born artist who lived between 1910 and 1958, who did a couple of hundred interior story illustrations for the pulps, mainly Weird Tales, and a handful of Weird Tales covers. His first cover being the November 1946 issue. He was born in Ukraine to a Jewish family who later had to leave due to the Russian Civil War and World War I. Uh the family eventually got to Hawaii, where he was sent to British Columbia, and later, finally to a family in Connecticut. And he married a widow in New York, but he stretched but oddly, he never became a U US citizen and may have been considered an illegal alien despite his marriage. He he basically took over a lot of the illustrations after Margaret Brundage stopped doing them. Right. He was one of the pool that started doing them instead, including Hannes Bock, Brown Coy, Matt Fox, Kelly Fries, and Virgil Finlay.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, but both Brundage and Hannes Bock very interesting lives as well. Maybe we'll devote a bonus episode or two to some of the artists at some point. That would be interesting.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And uh as Tim mentioned at the start there, is this his authink story? Well, the reason he said that was uh now this is from the Steve Berron's book, but also referencing Will Murray. The voyage of King Euvoren was originally conceived as a story for the Hyper Berea setting. It appears in Smith's list of the Book of Hyper Berea. And I think one thing that is an indicator of that as well is the level of humour in this. I mean, Smith, as we know, often has that grim or sardonic humour, even in the darkest stories. But this it does feel like a bit of a romp, this one, doesn't it? Albeit with torture and execution.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, it does feel like it fits that cycle more in terms of its tone, because as we've seen, the sorthique ones tend to be grimmer, more dour, more brooding, I think you'd say.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a good word. Yeah. So we are introduced to a royal item, isn't it? A very important royal item, this crown of the kings of Ustaim. Yeah. Fashioned from the r rarest materials. And the image I'm getting is of an all-nate crown with a big stuffed bird on the top. Already to me, that's looking comical because it's this very important, uh, almost holy relic. And yet there's a guy walking around with a stuffed bird on his head. Well, it's a little bit carry on up the jungle, innit?
SPEAKER_02It's like the oozlum bird.
SPEAKER_01And I mentioned about the colour because straight away in that opening, we've got the hue of burnish brass, its eyes were like small dark garnets and bezels of silver, seven lacy carmine quills arose from its ebon dappled head, and a white towel fell down. So uh a very striking item, both in terms of what it actually is and the the the makeup of it, all these different aspects that that go into making it. And do you think is there like an Emperor's new clothes thing going on here? At some point, this is like the Three Musketeers film, right? He tore our carpet. There's that little he's got a bird on his head. One of those kind of things going on.
SPEAKER_02It is, yeah, it does feel a little bit like that, doesn't it? But I like I like the Smith again just throwing in little details that give you pause for thought. Is the fact that it it was my the gold, the circle it was made of was mined from a huge meteor that fell in the southern isle of Synthron. Yeah, all these little again, he's with world building straight off. We get we get so many different place names in this one.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes. Well, Synthron, we we saw last time in the Dark Eyed Olon, and I think that popped up in the Isle of the Torturers as well. So, yeah, it's that nice little cross-referencing. It's not over world building as such, is it? It is it's very subtle. There's this subtle underpinning of all the stories, this sort of joining them all together.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_01So we learn that Uvoron, the son of Karpoom, was the ninth wearer of the crown, superbly and magnificently had worn it for two years and ten months following the death of Carpoon from a surfeit of stuffed ills and jellied salamanders eggs, which sounds like a really horrible meal. And I say that as an East Ender, and we're supposed to eat jelly deals and all that. Oh, vi vile, vile. And I'll even go on record as saying pie and mash and liquor. Not really, no thanks. No, you're not a fan. No, no, cockles and mussels, I can cope with those. Oh I. But this rang a bell for me with something, and I don't know if Smith was drawing on this, because there was an English king who died from a surfeit of lampreys. And that was King Henry the First in December 1135. He was on a little jolly jaunt to Normandy, and he decided for his breakfast or whatever it was, he was going to have a load of lampreys, which are a sort of ill-like creature, aren't they? Really? Indeed. And apparently he was said, Oh, you want to watch that, and ignored the advice. He ignored the yokel knowledge and uh passed away in agony. Uh interestingly enough, his intestines were buried somewhere else other than his body. I'm not quite sure what that was about. Right. Might be something I shall investigate further. Uh, he was the uh the fourth son of William the Conqueror as well, by the way. There we go. A surfeit of lampreys. Yeah, I think that pops up in Shakespeare somewhere as well, possibly.
SPEAKER_02Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, lampreys are interesting creatures. They're the ones with the sort of leech-like suckery mouths and an eel body. Yeah, vile-looking things. Yeah. Very Love Craftian, actually. Oh, yes. They're very Love Craftian creatures.
SPEAKER_01Now, food plays quite a big part in this story as well, because Uvoran is a king and is a man who likes the finer things in life. Well, it seems to me he's got two main interests apart from the obvious in uh Smithian's authentic stories food and torture. You know, everyone's got to have a hobby. It came to pass in the late autumn of the third year of his reign that King Uvoran rose from a goodly breakfast of twelve courses and twelve wines, and went forth as was his custom to the Hall of Justice, which occupied an entire wing of his palace in the city of Aram, looking down in several coloured marble from its palmy hills to the rippled lazuli of the Orient Ocean. And uh what what does any tyrant do after having a hearty breakfast? Well, that's this is when they call the criminals in and he decides on their punishment and sentencing.
SPEAKER_02Full often with his mace, the bones of the more flagitious offenders were broken immediately, or their brains were split in the king's presence on a floor that was strewn with black sand. Yeah, he he certainly liked a bit of the old the old ultraviolence, didn't he?
SPEAKER_01Bit of torture, Paul. Yeah. And again, very cinematic because in this scene the king is sitting on his Kraken sculptured throne of ivory, and he's got the executioner on one side and the torturer on the other. So uh I can almost see a Frank Frazetta painting in that.
SPEAKER_03Yes, yeah.
SPEAKER_02But it kind of also gives you sort of Game of Thrones vibes, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes. And uh yeah, the the torturer he busied himself continually with the screws and pulleys of certain fearsome instruments of torture as a warning of their fate to all evildoers, and not always idle with the turnings of these screws and the tightening of these pulleys, and not always empty with a metal bed of the machines. So it it's it's already quite grim in tone.
SPEAKER_02Well, it turns out that it wasn't it was basically anybody who committed any kind of infraction, wasn't it? It wasn't just like murderers, rapists, that kind of thing. Like, because uh on this morning the constables of the city brought before King Urovin only a few petty thieves at Suspicious vagrants. So slim pickings.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. This is like you know, wearing a loud shirt in a built-up area after nine o'clock, isn't it? And that's looking at me in a funny way. These are those sort of charges. And as much as he enjoys uh the torture, he he's got no reason to inflict anything upon them.
SPEAKER_02No, because this is he's trying to extort from them in turn an admission of some graver crime than that whereof they were accused. So yeah, it's like, come on, he must have done something worse than just picking your nose in public, you know.
SPEAKER_01Having said that, the punishment that they do get is bad enough because uh this is the bastonado, and I like this little phrase, away with these mackerel, he roared to the officers. These like small fish. Yeah, yeah. And his crown shook with indignation, and the tall gazolba bird on the crown appear to nod and bow. Away with them, for they pollute my presence. Give each of them a hundred strokes with the hardwood briar on the bare sole of each foot, and forget not the heels. Oh, a hundred strokes on the sole of the foot. Oh, that's almost as bad as treading on a Lego, isn't it? That worst paint in the universe, that is. Yeah, yeah. But then things take a turn for the peculiar. We're already in peculiar territory, of course. This is I think, but it gets even odder with the uh appearance of another prisoner. And this this was such a great scene, I thought, because this prisoner is dragging his captors in.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_01It's usually the other way around. There entered the hall of justice two belated constables, hailing between them a peculiar and most unsavoury individual with the long handled many pointed hooks that were used in our Romoum for the apprehending of malefactors and suspects. And though the hooks were seemingly embedded in his flesh, as well as in the filthy rags that served him for raiment, the prisoner bounded perpetually aloft in the manner of a goat, and his captors were obliged to follow in these lively and undignified salations, so that the three presented the appearance of tumblers. This guy is kind of skipping in in a very capright manner.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, almost pan-like, in it.
SPEAKER_01Well, I I did wonder, I mean, we find out sort of what he is, I suppose, in a moment. Well, we find out he's a necromancer, but he's not human, is he, as we see. No. Or if he is, he is possessed of very, very strange powers.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you get that almost uh satire kind of like thing to him, don't you, with the the goatishness and the the skipping and yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes, which you know, as we mentioned before, Smith does draw a lot on Greek myth with our stymphalian birds earlier and everything.
SPEAKER_03Indeed, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So maybe it is another a draw from that. And I like that they've basically arrested him because this is how he was walking along the street. People get arrested for jaywalking, he's been arrested for goat walking. Goat walking, I love it. Such behaviour is highly suspicious, round Uvoran. Hopefully, prisoner, declare your name, your nativity and occupation, and the infamous crimes of which, beyond doubt, you are guilty. And I thought this was great. Again, it's just little details from Smith, but it draws such a vivid picture. The captive who was cross-eyed appeared to regard Uvoran, the royal mace wielder, and the royal torture in his instruments, all in a single glance. It reminded me that there's always a character, particularly in Laurel and Hardy films, who'd look at the camera with that slightly sort of cross-eyed look. Just has that feel about it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I like this. I have many names. So it's almost biblical that, you know.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Now, that's almost a textbook definition of a liminal space, isn't it?
SPEAKER_02That absolutely.
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna have to remember that.
SPEAKER_02Sir, you are a malapert.
SPEAKER_01That's great, isn't it?
SPEAKER_02Isn't it?
SPEAKER_01That's getting logged for future use, that is. And potentially is made a mistake here because apparently necromancy is a capital crime in his name, which is a little bit surprising given that it seems to be widely practiced everywhere. But you know, different cities and different different states have different laws, I suppose. I suspect almost anything is a capital crime in his name, to be honest. You know, whistling on a Wednesday is probably uh get you put on the rack or something. Uh and speaking of the rack, this is exactly what they chain him to. Or well, it's described as the iron bed that produced a remarkable elongation of the limbs of its occupants. Yes. But although they turn the wheel and turn the wheel, and his arms and legs are getting longer and longer, he appeared to experience no discomfort whatever. And to the stupefication of all present, it became plain that the elasticity of his arms and legs and body was beyond the extensibility of the rack itself. So, in effect, well, he literally does break the rack in a moment because he just decides to stand up, uh, which obviously he could have done at any time. So it's showing off a little bit here.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, because he just basically says, It were well to release me, O King Urvan. Say you so, the king cried out in a rage. However, it is not thus that we deal with felons and you stain. But yeah, he's not he's not having any of it, he's not selling it at all, is he?
SPEAKER_01He's like, pull me about all you like, mate. But yeah. So the king calls in the executioner who comes forward quickly, rearing his massive leaven-headed mace aloft. Suit you. And uh the neck yeah, necromancer just stands up, breaks all the chains as though they have been made of grass, then towering to a terrible height, because he's just been stretched out, so he's like twelve foot tall or something at the moment. He pointed his long forefinger, dark and seer as that of a mummy, at the king's crown, and simultaneously he uttered a foreign word that was shrill and eldritch as the crying of migrant fowl that pass over toward unknown shores in the night. And lo, as if in answer to that word, there was a loud, sudden flapping of wings above Uvaran's head, and the king felt that his brow was lightened of the crown's goodly and well accustomed weight. And I didn't really think of this on first reading this, but of course the guy's a necromancer, so he's just brought a dead bird back to life. Yeah. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Brilliant. Just conjures up a great image of this big, sort of bloviating king with a bird flopping about on his head.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and it flies out the window with the crown in its claws, off it goes. You sort of get an image of people jumping up trying to catch it, perhaps, or something, you know.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. And it just squawking indignantly at them.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And uh the necromancer goes with it with great bounds and goatish leapings, is off away as well. Those who saw him depart from the city swore that he went north along the ocean strand, while the bird flew directly eastward, as if homing to the half fabulous isle of its nativity. And we should mention as well that um the Gazolba bird is said to be extremely rare. This may have even been the last one. It's uh extremely rare, possibly extinct species, which only adds to its importance as this uh symbol.
SPEAKER_02I think this is why I keep thinking of carry on up the jungle, because that's the whole gist of that, innit? The Uslan bird, you know, disappears of its own, you know what, you know.
SPEAKER_01Now, this is a double blow to the king because not only is this great symbol of his power disappeared, but it's also revealed his baldness, which was very funny, rudely bared to the gaze of the thieves and vagrants in the hall of justice. Yeah, you know, so his um egotistical in the extreme, this guy, isn't he? It kind of reminds me, it's almost like you imagine, is he got a bit of an orange, orangish tinge to his skin, this king, you know? Yes, well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I do wonder. I like the fact how to I like the fact how to get over his uh hide his baldness, he starts donning a voluminous turban of purple samite.
SPEAKER_01You think he'd have someone uh he'd have a wig on standby, a nice syrup on standby from the the royal wig makers or something. Yeah, he can't have much left up there because he you know otherwise he'd have gone for the comb over, probably, you know.
SPEAKER_02You know, the old the old Bobby Chop. Yes, yes.
SPEAKER_01So he calls a meeting of his sages' ministers, and none of them have got a clue, really. Uh, but this is uh a big blow to his authority and to the kingdom, because as the news spreads, the land became filled with lamentable doubt and confusion, and some of the people began to murmur covertly against Uvoran, saying that no man could be the rightful ruler of that country without the Gazolba crown. So he's trying the ministers. Where do you go next? To the temple, right? To the god now. How are you going to pronounce this one? It's G-E-O-L. Gil? G-O-G-L.
SPEAKER_02Gil? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Gil. Yeah. But have have we seen this name before? It didn't ring a bell.
SPEAKER_02No, I I was trying to think that myself. Um I don't think so, but I could be wrong.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean we have like Poseidon and others mentioned previously, and obviously Thoggy and all the rest. But yeah, this is possibly a new one. But I I like his description. He entered the dim aditum where the image of Gil, hotbellied and wrought of earth-brown defiance, reclined eternally on its back and regarded the moats in a narrow beam of sunlight from the slotted wall. Smith likes his lazy gods, doesn't he? He does.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, very much. Yeah. Because it is kind of like old Toady, isn't it? A little bit in the description. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So he gives the appropriate homage, and he gets a voice issues from the god's naval, as if a subterrene rumbling had become articulate. And the voice said to King Uvoran, Go forth and seek the Gazolba in those isles that lie beneath the Orient Sun. There, O king, on the far coasts of dawn, thou shalt again behold a living bird, which is the symbol and the fortune of thy dynasty. And there, with thine own hand, thou shalt slay the bird. So there we go. He's had his fortune told. And in the sense that the rest of this story reminds me of the Dark Eidolon and one or two other stories as well. In that it's this succession of encounters with increasingly strange entities and beings, and it just sort of gets more and more bizarre. There was something else I had to look up here, because yeah, I looked up a quadrareem as well, uh, which you you mentioned earlier. But it describes them as having ores of beef wood. That was something I was not at all familiar with. But this is from an Australian tree. It's a red hardwood from the Australian beef oak. Which is kind of interesting because now I'm going off a memory here. One of the big islands in Zothique corresponded to Australia, I think. Right. So I'm I might have to check that. I'll don't take that as red listener, but I've got a feeling because we have we had like Greenland and all that sort of stuff, didn't we? In in some of the other stories. Uh in the hyper hyperhea stories. But I'm pretty sure one of the islands in Zothique is uh a sort of Australia of the future. So yes, oars of beefwood and sows of stout woven byssus dyed in yellowish scarlet, and a long gonfalon at the masthead, bearing the gazolba bird in its natural colours on a field of heavenly cobalt. So again, very colourful, very cinematic.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'm seeing that again what we talked about last time, with the you know, I'm seeing this in technicolor, then beautiful 60s, very sumptuous, very bright colours, you know, Anthony Cleopatra, carry on Clio, that kind of thing, right?
SPEAKER_01Jason and the Argonauts, right? Yeah, yeah. Again, this is uh what was the one with the mechanical owl? Golden Voyager Simbad, wasn't it? Ah, right, right. Yeah, because an owl uh we've had that metallic bird thing, and an owl does pop up later on.
SPEAKER_02It does it pop it pops off again very quickly, it doesn't stay around for long, but uh yeah, I was having definite Harry House and flashes with this.
SPEAKER_01Now, the king being who he is, he doesn't travel light, does he? I mean he's got about how many ships go with him? This reminded me of in English history when you'd have the uh the Earl of Essex or whatever, and the the monarch would say, Oh, we're gonna be visiting your house the next month, and they'd go, Oh fuck's sake. Because it's not just a king and queen, it's the king and queen and sixty or seventy courtiers and all the rest of them. Yeah, and basically they would bankrupt people because they come and stay at your house and you have to feed them and entertain them for a month, and then of course, when you had to sell the house, then the crown would buy it. This is this is how the monarchy operates.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and he to begin with, he's having a right old time, isn't he? Because he laughed at the rivalries of his fools and unquenchable ancient baudaries that had won the laughter of other kings in the sea loss continents of Yore, and his women diverted him with harlotries that were older than Rome or Atlantis.
SPEAKER_01Harlotries, that's a great word, isn't it? Sounds like a pleasure cruise. Yes, absolutely, yeah. And uh we get a mention of fierce mercenaries from Zilak, which of course we were we we were in Zilak last time in the Dark Eyedolon, and we know that they're they're uh uh not a savory bunch. So it's definitely a theme of the Zothic setting that there's very few, if any, good people in any of these stories.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, it's the pinnacle of Smith's decadence into decay, isn't it? That's that decaying decadence is the final end is just going to be the worst of the worst, you know. Which, you know, it's probably true. If you think about it, who are the ones who can afford to have bunkers and survive the apocalypse? You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, actually, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very true, very true. So, yeah, it is like a a big jolly outing, really, with uh, you know, drinking and merry-making and all the rest, the harlotries and all that sort of stuff going on. But they get off to a good start, the winds were unfailing and auspicious, and the fleet sped onward. So after a fortnight, they came to Sotar, and I like this little mention of the low-lying host of Cassio and Sago barred the sea for a hundred leagues from north to south. That's a bit Hodgson, isn't it? The Sargasso Sea and all that kind of stuff. Yes. And the other thing that re this reminded me of to an extent was the Dreamlands stories, you know, particularly Randolph Carter, where you get almost uh a travel log, they go from one strange place to the next.
SPEAKER_02Yes, I agree.
SPEAKER_01So they start in Sotar, and some of the people there said that a cunning sorcerer of that isle named Iphibos had drawn the Gazolber bird down through his sorcery and closed it in a cage of sandalwood. So off they go to Lloyd to see Iphibos. It was a tedious journey, and Uvoran was much annoyed by the huge and vicious gnats of Sotar, which were no respecters of royalty, and were always insinuating themselves under his turban. I love that.
SPEAKER_02The gnats of Sotar. That should be a story title, but then you could have the Midges of Glen Glenmule.
SPEAKER_01But Midges of Glenmule. Eventually they come to the house of Iphibos, but it turns out that the bird is captured is just a vulture. It's a brightly plumaged vulture, but it's just a vulture nonetheless, which Iphibos had tamed for his own amusement. So the king returned to Lloyd after declining somewhat rudely the invitation of the sorcerer, who wished to show him the unusual feats of falconry to which he had trained the vulture. This sorcerer just has all these people turn up. Oh, we want to see your bird. Oh yes, it's very interesting, and it's and they just turn their back on him basically, and off they go. By the way, I I don't know if you've ever seen a vulture in real life, but there's uh uh out in the fens, an odd sort of garden centre that we went to once that had like a big aviary attached to it.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yeah.
SPEAKER_01And they had vultures there, or they had a vulture. Fucking massive, huge thing.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, they got one in London Zoo.
SPEAKER_01So anyone who can train that to do falconry, which presumably it sits on your wrist. Yeah, that's quite interesting because they're basically they're carrying, aren't they? Vultures.
SPEAKER_03Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_01You know, what a what a carry-on, carry-on vulturing. They're not really hunters as such. Wasn't that a far side cartoon? Sod patience, can't we just kill this? I'm hungry. Yes, it was far side, yeah, yeah. The guy crawling across the desert.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and there's like about six of them found it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So, no gazolba bird there. Next stop, Tosk, whose people were more akin to apes and lemurs than to men. And uh he asked them about the Gazolba bird and received only the chattering of apes in answer. Now, this is where his status as an absolute bastard is confirmed. Because he's so annoyed at this, he orders his men at arms to catch a number of these savage islanders and crucify them on the cocoa palms for their incivility, which is not very nice, is it? No, not really.
SPEAKER_02It's basically colonialism turned up to 11, isn't it, at this point?
SPEAKER_01Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And then beyond that, because they're so quick and agile, these things, his men at arms can't capture any, so he has them crucified instead.
SPEAKER_03Lovely.
SPEAKER_02No, yeah, he's he's not a very nice chap. And uh you know, you get that distinct impression of that this is one of Smith's com to cruels, isn't it? You know, setting him up for a real fall because he's such an arsehole.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes. So from there we're off to Yumatot, whose inhabitants were mostly cannibals, nothing there, and beyond that, we're into the Elozian Sea, and I begin to touch at partly mythic shores on islands charted only in story. So we are now in that sort of we're on the edge of the map, here be monsters territory. And while he's here, because of course he brought his longbow with him, and they're landing on these islands, and there's a whole range of birds, some of which I'd never even heard of that Smith lists here. Loracetes, lyre birds, boobies, golden cockatoos, dodo, dinornis, even mighty griffins. I suppose they're not strictly birds, but uh certainly quite impressive to see. And uh the king shoots at them all. Again, very colonial. It's just hunting tigers out in India, isn't it? It is, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Well done for saying boobies without la without without laughing.
SPEAKER_01Chasing boobies, my word. It's Saturday night in Brighton, you know. Until they arrive at on the sunset of a day in the fourth moon, the vessels approached a nameless isle that towered mile higher with cliffs of black naked basalt, around whose base the sea cried with baffled anger, and about whose precipices there were no wings nor voices of birds. The isle was topped with gnarly cypresses that might have grown in a windy graveyard, and suddenly it took the afterglow as if drenched with a gore of darkening blood. But they do see the openings of caves far up in the cliffs. So from the start, this place is quite sinister.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I like the gnarly cypresses might have grown in a windy graveyard. It's very evocative.
SPEAKER_01Darkness falls, and of course, he's having his supper. I can imagine he has about eight meals a day, this guy.
SPEAKER_02Well, we've already had mentioned that he had about 12 wines with his breakfast.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's I'm going, isn't it?
SPEAKER_02That is, isn't it? That's sort of Keith Floyd levels of gastronomy in there.
SPEAKER_01Because that's the thing in fine dining, isn't it? You have a wine for each, of course, your dessert wine and your repair of teeth and all that.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, gradually getting pissed as you eat. Well, and and here is sipping the golden arach of sotar between mouthfuls of mango jelly and fenicopters meat. Oh, I had to look up fennycopters as well. Float. Flamingo.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_01Well, there you go. He's eating a flamingo. Not much meat on the leg, but you know. And this is where we get that mention of the oopires. Because those who peered from the ports and oar holes saw that the lanterns of their neighbours had been quenched, and perceived a milling and seething as of low driven clouds in the darkness, and saw that foul black creatures, large as men and winged like oopiers, were clinging to the range doors in myriads. And those who dared to approach the open hatches found that the decks, the rigging and the masts were crowded with similar creatures, who, it seemed, were of nocturnal habit and had come down in the manner of bats from their caves in the islands.
SPEAKER_02I just wanted to check because in Lovecraft's letters, in one of the letters, he mentions Night Gaunt, and I wanted to see if it was related to this. But it wasn't. It was something completely unrelated. But don't they remind you a little bit of Night Gaunt?
SPEAKER_01That's the first thing I wrote down with this was Night Gaunt. Yeah. Yeah. Because obviously he mentions the vampiric aspect. And they are they're drinking people's blood as well, right? Yeah. And bat like and everything. But yeah, night gaunts did immediately spring to mind, especially in this type of setting. This almost Dreamlandish sort of setting. Yeah, exactly. And I like that there's there's this huge fight going on across the fleet. Again, very cinematic. You can imagine this sweeping shot of the sailors and soldiers and everyone else having these desperate battles on the decks. Anyone who falls gets feasted on. And what's the king doing? Sort of eating his supper, saying, Can you keep the noise down out there? You're spoiling my appetite, you know.
SPEAKER_02It's almost Joan Sims with the I seem to have got a little plastered, you know.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes. And eventually, when his golden arrach was spilt and the dishes of rare meat were emptied on the floor by the vessel's violent rocking, he would have issued from his cabin, fully armed, to try conclusions with his piacular miscreants. But even as he turned to fling wide the cabin door, there was a soft infernal pittering at the portholes behind him. The king saw in the lamplight a grisly face with the teeth and nostrils of a flitter mouse that leaned in through one of the cabin ports. I thought flitter mouse, that's a great name for a bat, isn't it? Flaeder mouse, flitter mouse, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I love that flitter mouse.
SPEAKER_01And we basically get this big fight that goes on for the whole rest of the night until the sun rises. And they manage to prevail just that sunrise the bat creatures disappear back to their cliffs, as you might expect. And um well, it's not looking good, is it? Out of fifteen vessels, seven have been sunk, borne under and swamped by those obscenely clinging hordes of Upiers, and the decks of the others were bloody as abattoirs, and half of their sailors and rowers and men at arms were lying flat and flaccid as empty wineskins after the greedy drinking of the great bats. So he's lost half of his ships and most of his men. I wonder how grim that is. So they kind of limp off from this place. I like that there's a lovely phrase. There was the stain and reek of a stymphalion foulness. And it takes a couple of days for them to come to a coral island with a calm lagoon that was haunted only by ocean fowl. So they're gonna put in here to repair the sows and all the rest of it. From there they continue going deeper into this strange archipelago and deeper into the regions of myth and story. I've thought this next part, this is one of those Smith journeys again, isn't it, into somewhere else. Usually it's going to a star or a planet or another dimension. But this is going into this land of myth. Yeah. It sort of reminds me of the sort of voyage where you get those medieval drawings of men with faces on their stomachs and all that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_02Oh, some of them are brilliant. The best one is that just Google medieval drawings of cats. Some of them are just bonkers.
SPEAKER_01Eventually they arrive at a new and unheard of shore curving for many miles from northeast to southwest, with sheltered harbours and cliffs and pinnacled crags that were interspaced with low-lying verdurous dells. So we've got towers on these crags, which sort of is an indicator that there's intelligent life here. So they sowl in and enter the harbour. There's no sign of man, but the place was full of an extraordinary number and variety of birds, ranging in size from little tits. Sorry. Ranging in size from little tits and passerines to creatures of greater wing spread than eagle or condor. So they're in the land of the birds, basically. Not the planet of the apes. We've had that. They're in the land of the birds.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I like this this little phrase here. Motley Flox. Oh.
SPEAKER_01That could be a band name, couldn't it? Motley Flox, yeah. I think he starred with Foxton Locks in some old uh Ealing comedy films. Oh yeah. Probably the same same era as Musty Tomes, I think.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I think they all worked with people like Robin Asquith, didn't they? That kind of crowd.
SPEAKER_01Oh, Motley Flox. Yeah, and this really is the land of the birds. Everything is set up for birds. Uh there's no paths or roads or anything else. It's just these towers that seem desolate with birds flying in and out of their windows. And this is where we get the appearance of a small owl. A very brief appearance. Here at the slope's bottom, Uvorin saw a small owl that slept in one of the cedars, as if wholly unaware of the commotion made by the other birds in their flight. And Uvoran trained an arrow and shot down the owl, though ordinarily he would have spared a prey so paltry. And he was about to pick up the fallen owl when one of the men who accompanied him cried out in alarm. Then turning his head as he stooped beneath the foliage of the cedar, the king beheld a brace of colossal birds, larger than any had yet described on that aisle, who came down from the tower like falling thunderbolts. So I I don't know if it was shooting the owl that triggered this, although, you know, that's justified enough, really. Do you want to shoot a little owl for? Such cute little things.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it is that that again a colonial thing, innit? Because the first thing you do, you go somewhere, you see something you've never seen before, you shoot it. Yeah. Well, yeah. I like I love this little passage here. Before he could fit another arrow to the string, they were upon him, making a loud roar with the drumming of their mighty vans and beating him instantly to the ground, so that he was aware of them only as a storm of dreadfully rushing plumes and a hurly burly of cruel beaks and talents.
SPEAKER_01Hurly burly.
SPEAKER_02I love that, I love that word, hurly burly.
SPEAKER_01And they pick up the king and take him off like the eagles from Mordor. Yeah. This is where we get the first mention of the misericordia. He had no weapon remaining other than Sharp Misericordia, which uh we'll get to in a little bit. I thought the funny thing with this is basically flown up to this tower, and you can picture it, he's in the talons of this huge eagle-type creature or whatever it is, and all the other little birds are fluttering around as well, going, Oh, ooh, ooh, and he gets totally disorientated and he gets airsick. Then, as he began to wretch in his sickness, he was borne in through one of the windows and was dropped rudely on the floor of a high and spacious chamber. He sprawled at full length on his face and lay vomiting for a while, heedless of his surroundings. Oh, how the mighty you have fallen. We've all been there. Usually after 15 pints of the kebab. And this is where we get this really nice inversion because what we've got now is the king, the ruler, on this quite spectacular throne, and this vomit-covered creature twitching on the floor before it. So it almost goes back to the start of the story kind of thing. Yeah. Where we had these poor wretches thrown in front of the king. Except the king is now a giant bird. Indeed. It is surreal, isn't it? What was he on? What was he smoking at this point? Yeah, I know. Yeah. He beheld before him, above a sort of dais, an enormous perch of red, gold, and yellow ivory, wrought in the form of a new crescent arching upward. The perch was supported between posts of black jasper, flecked as if with blood, and upon it there sat the most gigantic and uncommon bird, eyeing Euvoran with a grim and dreadful and austere mean, as an emperor might eye the gutter scum that his guards have howled before him for some obscene offence. The plumage of the bird was Tyrian purple, and his beak was like a mighty pickaxe of pale bronze that darkened greenly toward the point, and he clutched the perch with iron talons that were longer than the mouth fingers of a warrior. His head was adorned with quills of turquoise blue and amber yellow, like a many pointed crown, and about his long unfeathered throat, rough as the scaled skin of a dragon, he wore a singular necklace composed of human heads and the heads of various ferrine beasts, such as the weasel, the wildcat, the stoat, and the fox, all of which had been reduced to a common size and were no larger than ground nuts. I mean, where does he get that? I don't know, but it's brilliant. It's got a necklace of shrunken heads. Yeah. Uvoran was terrified by the aspect of this fowl. You bloody well would be, wouldn't you?
SPEAKER_03Really?
SPEAKER_01You would, wouldn't you?
SPEAKER_02Gigaltic monster chicken with a bunch of seven heads around his neck.
SPEAKER_01And what I thought here where where he's on his perch, because this is described in a little bit as well. I wonder it almost feels like it's got a little ladder and a mirror on it as well. It goes up and down the little ladder, looks in the mirror, rings a little bell.
SPEAKER_02It's kind of giving me flashbacks of years ago. I was asked by a publisher. Um, they were doing a it was just a little silly thing um for Thanksgiving. They're an American publisher saying they wanted Thanksgiving horror. So I did a comedy Thanksgiving horror story, cosmic horror, and created a great old one, which was a monstrous turkey god called Goberthaca.
SPEAKER_01Nice.
SPEAKER_02It's in my second collection, it's called Feathers of Fear.
SPEAKER_01Oh, brilliant, brilliant. This does someone someone end up getting stuffed in there. Pretty much. Spoiler alert. Now, just to make it even stranger, this huge bird addresses him in human speech in a harsh but magniloquent and majestic voice. Too heartily, O filth of mankind, thou hast intruded on the peace of Ornava. I oh, that is sacred to the birds, and wantonly thou hast slain one of my subjects, for I am the monarch of all birds that fly, walk, wade, or swim on this terakqueous globe of earth. Oh, there was a word I missed, terakious. So, yeah, the the the roles have been totally reversed. He's now the uh the one accused of a crime, and is going to suffer the judgment of the king or the emperor, the monarch of all birds.
SPEAKER_02I love this g this this birdie chap. I love it, I love it. I just love the language. I will give thee hearing now, for I would not that even the vilest of earthly vermin and the most pernicious should accuse me of iniquity or tyranny. Very well spoken, giant chicken, innit? Yeah, yeah, for a bird. He's got an excellent vocabulary, isn't he? Yeah, he must have been down Auburn Library with Smith. You can just see it, Smith in one corner, big old bird god in the other.
SPEAKER_01Reading the reading the Websters. Perhaps it's like a parrot. He was just listening to Smith as he read through the dictionary. Because I imagine he was reading out loud. Polly won the cracker.
SPEAKER_02Maybe. My favourite parrot ever was outside a pub in Bridgenorth. He was an old ship's parrot, and he could speak, or he only sung dirty sea shanties. Oh he communicated through dirty sea shanties.
SPEAKER_01Brilliant, brilliant. They can have quite a large vocabulary, I think, aren't they? The talking birds.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah. Well, my family have got one up in Macclesfield, an Amazon, and that knows several several hundred insults that are usually directed at me.
SPEAKER_01Do you not get on?
SPEAKER_02No, no, you get on fine. He just likes to call me a twonk and a pillock and all kinds of brilliant.
SPEAKER_01Being burned by a bird.
SPEAKER_02No, well, frequently, frequently. I think I think it must have been my gran that taught it or something.
SPEAKER_01So basically, the sentence is funnily enough, as we just mentioned, to be stuffed, it's going to get taxidermied. And I like the fact that it's not allowable nor sufferable that man should do this to birds, which of course they would have done to the Gazolba bird. But it's okay for us to do it to you. Again, that's Smith having a nice little dig at certain types of law, isn't it? And again, how royalty or authority often works.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the ruling classes often get skewered in Smith's stories, don't they?
SPEAKER_01So the king is put into a cage, and uh obviously all his remaining attendants and guards and all the rest of it are still outside. And he starts feeling starts feeling a bit sorry for himself.
SPEAKER_02Yes, can I just say because it describes it as confine it to a man cage, do not type man cage into Google without safe search on, or you're gonna get lots of very unpleasant images of chastity devices.
SPEAKER_01Oh man, yes, okay, man cage.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, now my mind is what now I'm gonna get testicular torture. That's the ones, the uh the old CBT stuff, yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I like the fact that while Uvoron is waiting for his doom in the man cage, they bring in water and raw grain. He gets a little bowl of water and some bird seed. Yeah. Oh dear, it's not not getting very good tweetment, is he?
SPEAKER_02Oh god. We had your full repertoire of avian buttons yet.
SPEAKER_01Oh, probably not. I'll probably see if I can ring some it ring another one out. Uh he does hear outside the sounds of strife, and a vengeful shrilling as of harpies in battle. Then presently the clamour ebbed away and the shoutings grew faint, and Uvora knew that his men had failed to take the tower, and hope waned within him, dying in a darker murk of despair. The one thing that the birds haven't done, of course, is taken his little dagger away because why would they? They don't know what that is. And uh that turns out to be what saves him, well, saves him from one fate anyway. And a night guard comes in to relieve the day flying fowl who warded the captive king. The newcomer was a Nyctolops with glowing yellow eyes, and he's still taller than Uvor and himself, and was formed and feathered somewhat in the burdy fashion of an owl, and he had the stout legs of a megapode. I dare you to go up to someone next time you're in a pub and go, Yeah, love, you got the stout legs of a megapode. Let's see what happens. You have a woman's hand, yes. So this thing comes up and has a a look at him, and uh a plan begins to form. He does the old oh, I'm feeling ill thing, right? Oh, oh, I'm I'm dying, I'm dying. Of course, the thing gets close into him to have a look. He rips whips out his misericordia, which was long and double-edged and needle sharp at the tip, and he does for this big bird. Big bird gets it. Oh no, not big bird. So, yeah, misericordia, by the way, as as we said before, like mercy. Well, I've seen it used in three contexts. One is it was like a a little wooden shelf in churches that people could rest on during long services. Yes. The other thing I've seen it in musical terms where a piece of music is described as a misery cord. But what we have here is very much the weapon, that long narrow dagger that was used to administer, well, to bring mercy.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, through the ribs, wasn't it? Straight into the heart, through the ribs. It was designed to go to slip between the rib cage.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's it. And um, the other version of this, which was used in battle, was designed to go between the gaps in armour. Misericordia, you know, it's a lovely, nice sounding word. You know what the English called it, don't you? Gore. A bollock knife. A bollock knife. Yes. This is what the longbowman carried. Nice. Yeah, so like Agincore and all that. The knights would be down in the mud, and the longbowmen would run up with their bollock knives and you know, give him the good news. Bollock knife. Give him a bollockin. Well, maybe that's where that's from. Never know, eh? So he he he stabs the this poor bird who ends up choked on his own blood, and then he skins it and basically puts its feathers on to disguise himself. With much labour using the msericordia, he skinned the mighty nictolops and cleaned the blood from its plumage as best he could. Then Uvoran wrapped himself in the skin, with the head of the nyctolops rearing above his own head, and eye holes in its burly throat through which he could look out amid the feathers. And the skin fitted him well enough because of his pigeon breast and his pot belly, and his spindle shanks were hidden behind the heavy shanks of the bird as he walked. So it's quite comical again, even though it's it's it's grim. It is, yeah, it's almost pantomime horse kind of territory, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And disguised as such, it creeps out of the tower. There's loads of birds asleep on perches. It's almost like Shaw of the Dead when they're pretending to be zombies, isn't it? The room below this was the ground story of the tower, and its windows and portals were guarded by several gigantic nightfowl, similar to those whose skin was worn by the king. Here indeed was his greatest peril, and the supremest trial of his courage, for the birds eyed him alertly with their fiery golden orbs, and they greeted him with a soft woo-hooing as of owls, and the knees of Uvora knocked together behind the bird shanks, but imitating the sound in reply, he passed among the guards and was not molested by them. To wit to woo. And he makes his escape and manages to get back to the remainder of his men, who promptly shoot him.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, this did make me laugh.
SPEAKER_01Because they're they're basically coming to attack the tower at night, and of course, you imagine they're walking up to this and they see a giant bird walking towards them. So I suppose it's only natural. It's probably lucky they're not very good shots, really. Well, well, he is wounded slightly, isn't he? Uh, which causes him to drop the skin quickly and they realise their mistake. You wonder what happened to that guy who shot him.
SPEAKER_02Well, yeah, one of those situations where we're like, who did that? He did.
SPEAKER_01Step forward, that man. So they make their escape from the island. They want to put as much uh space between themselves and this island as they can. And uh Uvoran wastes no time in catching up on his food and drink because all he's had to eat is uh some bird seed over the last day. Uh, this is where the big storm hits, right? It wouldn't be a long voyage without a tempest of some sort, would it? Very true, very true. It's an easy thing to put in a sea voyage, isn't it, as part of your plot device?
SPEAKER_02Oh, absolutely. That's why uh when I wrote one that was set at sea, I went the other way and did be calming. Ah went the other way.
SPEAKER_01Oh, back to Hodgson again, eh?
SPEAKER_02Indeed, it was it was a Hodgson-inspired tale, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh this is quite the storm as well. Three days and nights with no glimmer or sun or star discerned through the ever boiling murk. The vessel was hurled onwards as if caught in a cataract of elements, pouring to some bottomless gulf beyond the verges of the world. And early on the fourth day the clouds were somewhat riven, but a wind still blew like the breath of perdition. Then, lifting darkly through the spray and vapour, a half seen land arose before the prow, and the helmsmen and the rowers were wholly helpless to turn the doomed ship from its course. So the vessel, there's it's the only ship. Left now. All the other ones have gone, or they've been sunk, or they're dispersed in the storm. And this vessel now hits the reef as it goes in towards this island and begins to sink. Uvora manages to save himself though, of course he does, while the rest of his crew drown. He lashes himself to an empty wine barrel and casts himself from the sloping deck. That's quite a desperate measure, but you know, that makes sense and it does work, leaving the rest of his crew to be drawn under in the seething maelstroms or beaten to death on the rocks. So he's washed up on the beach and is battered and is semi conscious and is lying there dazed. When he hears the shrilling of an unknown bird, opening his eyes he beheld betwixt himself and the sun, librating on spread wings, that various colour glory of plumes and feathers, which he knew as the gazolba. So he's found his bird. Or has he? He staggers to his feet and starts chasing the bird, his prize. They get off the beach, they go uh through some high and rugged crags into a sheltered valley. And here there's his gazolba, but there's several others as well. There's hundreds of the buggers. There's tons of them. It's not rare at all. It's not extinct, it's not one of a kind.
SPEAKER_02See, this reminds me, you know, when you go to any kind of like town, a market town specifically, and in the centre, the marketplace, you always have loads of pigeons, and there's always some little kid, three, four, five-year-old kitty, right? Running around chasing them, trying to catch one of them. That's what this reminded me of.
SPEAKER_01That's pretty much what he does, right? He thinks, well, yeah, at least if I can get back with one of these, I've got a gazolba bird. Who's to know? I'm not going to say anything. So he's picking up sticks and stones and chucking them at these things and manages somehow to kill one of them, probably a very old and slow one, I would imagine. Uh this is where a man appears at this point, a man in tattered raiment of an uncouth cut, armed with a rude bow, and carrying over his shoulder a brace of gazalbas, tied together at the feet with tough grass. And the man wore, in lieu of other headgear, the skin and feathers of the same fowl. He came toward Uvoran, shouting indistinctly through his matted beard, and the king beheld him with surprise and anger. Vile serf, how darest thou to kill the bird that is sacred to the kings of Ustaim? And knowest now not that only the kings may wear the bird for headgear? I, who am King Uvoran, shall hold you to a dire accounting of these deeds. Right, will you?
SPEAKER_02Okay. I love this. He does so look, sorry, point he does does that point and laugh thing, doesn't he? Just goes Ah dickhead.
SPEAKER_01Uh because it is mentioned again that, of course, in the tumult of the uh of the sea and the storm, his turban was snatched away, leaving his baldness without disguise. So I get the impression he's laughing at his baldness as much as anything.
SPEAKER_02You know the impression it's almost like a Samson parable, isn't it? Because it's like, you know, without his hair or without something to cover up the fact that he's as bald as a plucked chicken, he loses all of his power, you know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, very true, very true. It's interesting, isn't it, how people will follow symbols, no matter how vile the person is, which again uh is a point Smith is making here, I suppose.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So this Robinson Crusoe character, uh, basically been shipwrecked here for nine years as a sea captain from a far southwestern land of Ulla Troy, and the sole member of my ship's company that survived and came safe to shore. He's been here on his own with no other companionship other than the birds, which of course is going to kill to eat them and make his clothes and all the rest of it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, because he has the bird headdress, doesn't he? Similar to what uh Yurivan had, you know.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's that's a nice inversion again, isn't it? Because again, we've got this guy is the ruler of this island, in effect, if only by default.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And he's got this grovelling, wretched creature before him, uh who's still trying to draw on all this power that he's got, but he hasn't got any power at all. Yeah. But this guy is a nice guy. It th this is perhaps one of the rare nice people in Zothik, or perhaps uh being on his own for so long has just made him desperate for company. So he says, Look, all right, yeah, never mind all that. It doesn't really matter. But I've I can give you hand to gut and skin that bird if you want, and we can cook it, because you know I know how to do this, I've been doing this for years, and uh a nice little dig at the end. For I must deem that you are more familiar with the products of this culinary art than with the practice. Yes. That's a nice way of saying it, isn't it? Yeah, Baldy tubster.
SPEAKER_03Oh God.
SPEAKER_01Uh I think you're you've on there's a sort of realization here, a bit of an epiphany at this time that right, okay. It came to him that never again should he see the marble houses of our Aramoam, nor live in pleasant luxury, nor administer the dooms of law between the torturer and the executioner in the hall of justice, nor wear the Gazalba crown amid the plaudits of his people. So, not being utterly bereft of reason, he bowed him to his destiny and said to the sea captain, There is sense in what you say, therefore lead on. We learn that the shipwrecked guy, his name is Naz Obama.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he's got a little cave side hole, and he's got a nice little house in a cave, you know. He's made the best of his situation.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes. He's even uh got some wine, right, that he made from certain berries. And it ends thus. Thereafter they shared the isle of the Ghazalbas, killing and eating the birds as their hunger ordained. Sometimes, for a great delicacy, they slew and ate some other fowl that was more rarely met on the isle, though common enough perhaps, in Nustaim or Ulatroi. And King Uvoran made him a headdress from the skin and plumes of the Gazalba, even as Naz Obama had done, and this was the fashion of their days till the end. I like that last little bit that the birds that are rare here are common. That's probably like your pigeon and your sparrows and all that sort of stuff. They're the they're the rarity here, and and the the exotic bird is common as muck.
SPEAKER_02Oh well, I've seen it when you get tourists from far afield in the UK on the seaside, amazed by the seagulls and the size of them. Oh right. Taking pictures of seagulls and things, because they're they're exotic birds to them, you know, whereas they're bloody pests to us.
SPEAKER_01Dire rats. Yeah, yeah. So I think, yeah, that that's one of the funniest Smith Tales, I think we've read, with that underlying grimness and that sardonic humour all the way through, and uh, a lot of nice little digs at um, you know, authority and uh and the rest of it in there as well. So I believe we have the a mentioned in our Dornwood Spire, sir.
SPEAKER_02Well, kind of. It's not ri he doesn't specifically mention the story, but it's he's talking about the um the double shadow and all the stories. And the main reason I'm reading this is the main reason we read a lot of HBL's letters. It's for the return address. And and the the beginning paragraph of this is just tremendous. So here we go. The 29th of June 1933. Field of the ultra-spectral rays, hour of the spiral wind from Nyth. Tremendous.
SPEAKER_01The wind from Nith, marvellous.
SPEAKER_02Dear Clock Ashton, the hand that indicts these words trembles with a decay that is not of years alone, and the haggard face above the page is shrivelled with a thousand lines of horror that were not there two nights ago. For, and may God help me, I looked with the mirror's aid at a passage in that crumbling tome of Elder Lore which stands next to the nameless icon. Now, in spite of all, of heaven's vaunted mercy, I know. The veil is withdrawn, and I have glimpsed that which has bowed me in convulsive terror for the few days or weeks of life which remain to me. Eye Shubragurath is the grey rite of Azatoth, no more of a veil.
SPEAKER_01Nice, very nice.
SPEAKER_02Well, I have read the brochure through now and can truthfully say that each of the tales retains all its original appeal for me. Indeed, I think that the devotee of evil is even stronger than before, though I cannot quite put my finger on the seat of the change. My favourites, I think, are the Double Shadow, The Maze of the Enchanter, and A Knight in Malneot. Though it is indeed hard to assign the other three a lesser status. The whole thing is really magnificent, and a marvellous value for a quarter. I hope the sale will remain steady if not spectacular. I have now distributed quite a number of the circulars and believe that at least a few of these will result in sales. One sale of ebony and crystal is also virtually assured. The very reasonable price of the booklet will help its sale. People will fork over a quarter when they wouldn't be so apt to spend a dollar or two. I hope Coates will be wise enough to bind the Shun House cheaply and whittle the price down to a minute. So there we go. Yeah, like I said, the the the low price was obviously a a big selling point to Lovecraft.
SPEAKER_01And you know, all of those other struggling artists. Yeah, well, 25 cents. I mean, I I don't know what the equivalent would be nowadays, but it doesn't sound like it'd be much, does it? Really?
SPEAKER_02No, no.
SPEAKER_01Considering the the standard of the the writing and the work you get in.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I love reading Lovecraft's letters. I mean, that reads like one of his stories, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes. I just wonder how he, you know, when he went shopping, how did he speak to the shopkeeper or the the man in the fountain pen shop? I wondered if he was so so similarly voluble in in speaking every day. I like to think so.
SPEAKER_02Behold, yes, he certainly was magniloquent.
SPEAKER_01There we go. There we go.
SPEAKER_02There we go.
SPEAKER_01That's the voyages of King Uvora and then. Do let us know, dear listener, your thoughts and any uh avian-related incidents or stories that you might have. Ever been attacked by a vulture? No, ever been challenged by an owl? I've been chased by bloody geese.
SPEAKER_02Bookston pavilion gardens as a kid. I made the mistake of whipping out a sandwich and I was chased around, chased around by a bloody flock of angry geese all honking and hissing at me.
SPEAKER_01That's kind of uh almost a right of passage for kids in the UK, isn't it? To be chased at geese or swans at the same time.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01And and at some point someone will tell you, oh, those swans, they can break your arm with a wing, you know. They do give a good hiss, swans, I know that.
SPEAKER_02Oh, don't they just?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the ones in Bedford on the river in Bedford. They're quite hissy. But you never had an encounter with great tits or anything like that.
SPEAKER_02Well, again, I don't kiss and tell, darling.
SPEAKER_01All right, so let's move on to the mailbag, shall we? Before things it's not gonna get any better. Well, actually, no. Now now I'm looking at this first one from Niels. Um, if if I had thought of it, that that could sound like quite a clever link, but unfortunately, I'm I'm not that clever. So this is from Niels on the Innsmouth Forum, and our mailbag uh here this time we're talking about episode 15, the Dark Eyed Olon. And Niels wrote in one of Tim's favourite words in the Dark Eye O'Lon, Beesum, there's a funny story about it. Now, Besum uh was one of the favourite words last time, and it's a broom, right? One of those old-fashioned brooms.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and it's also a derogatory term for a woman up north.
SPEAKER_01Right. So Niels adds, I interviewed Ron Hilger, one of the editors for the Nightshade editions of Smith's Collective Fantasies, which are the books we're working from, of course. I had asked him what kind of surprising things he discovered when he was putting together the collection with Scott Connors. His response was, and this is Ron Hilger now, every printed version of the Colossus of Elorne had the following line. A comet far in the south had swept the stars with its luminous bosom for a few nights. Luminous bosom? That's in Wheel Tales version, in the Arkham House version, and it's in all the other versions as well. I was thinking that really doesn't sound right, but at some point I found the manuscript and sure enough it was a beesum, a broom. The comet swept the stars with its luminous beesum. Of course, those old type scripts could very easily mistake an E for an O. That typo would have given quite a different meaning to the use of Besum in the dark eyedolon. Coming to the open portals of Namira's house, the emperor saw that they were guarded by great crimson wattled things, half dragon, half man, who bowed before him, sweeping their wattles like bloody bosoms on the flags of Darkonyx. I replied to Nil that I almost prefer that version, actually. Sweeping their wattles like bloody bosoms.
SPEAKER_02My favorite typo, I must have mentioned it, but if not on here, I will have mentioned it on the IBC. Um, was in a collection of Lovecraft. Um, somebody then they was a typo replacing Gibbons moon with Gibbons Moon. So rising above Rising Above Arkham was a Gibbons moon. Monkey's ass.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yes, when there's a story titled When Gibbon's Moon. Oh, yeah, there you go. I was thinking like Button Moon and those kind of things. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Okay, sticking with the Innsmouth Forum, we've got one in from our friend of the show, Tobias Nielsen. So, in the latest Strange Shadows episode, if I remember correctly, you were a bit stumped by the word fast. And as you mentioned, it was an old word, not really in use anymore. I wonder if it isn't a word that's come over from us Scandinavians back when we were frequent visitors in Denmark, we use the word farz in Swedish. I'm not even gonna try to pronounce that for prepared minced meat, i.e. i.e., minced meat that's been mixed with a binding substance like eggs and milk or water for making meatballs and the like. It is also incorporated into certain dish dishes names, like far, meat loaf or fast bread to be precise, and any number of farceret, something or the other where you take the farz and shove it into something else, be it a bell pepper, a turkey, or something completely different, and you'll have fast bell pepper, fast turkey, and so on. This has precious little to do with the story, but it's fun to go out on a tangent once in a while. Well, as an ex-chef, I I fully appreciate that. So thank you for that, Tobias.
SPEAKER_01Marvellous. Oh, that's great. That's great, Tobias. Thanks for that. Yeah, I didn't know that at all. That's the that's a mention of stuffing this episode.
SPEAKER_02Indeed, it is. Yeah, jolly good stuffing.
SPEAKER_01And finally, on Facebook, Ralph Grasso posted, Great show. This is CAS that is weirdest. It falls in no real category as it is not sword and sorcery, cosmic horror, mundane horror, but a futuristic dark fantasy. Perhaps CAS is most brutal. I do believe that he picked up some of Auburn's psychedelic fungi before writing this. Too bad Wright did not take the original form and print it. Yes, Ralph, indeed, we did speculate as to what state of mind uh Mr. Smith may have been in some of the more florid passages in the Dark Eye Dolon, but maybe in this story as well. Well, that's what I was just about to say.
SPEAKER_02Of this whole run, the last like three or four, he probably found some uh particularly interesting edibles, let's say.
SPEAKER_01Yes, it's certainly been Smith that is most inventive and evocative, I think, this uh this volume. And uh we're gonna see that continue with the next few stories, especially next time. I think we're back to Mars next time. Indeed, we are, yes, indeed. With Vol Thum, which is a tremendous story. Marvellous. So thanks for joining us today, folks. As always, do keep your comments, questions, and suggestions coming in via YouTube, Facebook, the Innsmouth Forum, and of course, our Patreon page where you can sign up and support the show. And when you do so, you'll get the bonus content of Strange Shadows and the Innsmouth Book Club. You'll get your quarterly copy of Innsmouth News. In fact, the spring edition has just been released. There's a feature in there on Hugh B. Cave and uh some interesting essays. There's a review of Hodgson's The Nightland, a new edition of that. And Heather Miller has done a nice little article on us on Genius Lochi and that idea we were talking to her about in Innsmouth of the landscape as part of the strangeness, as part of the weirdness of many of these stories. And to cap it all, you get free entry to the Innsmouth Literary Festival, of course. Do keep an eye out on our socials for some announcements coming up of special guests at the ILF and that evening entertainment as well. And before we go, just a quick welcome to our new patrons, Heather Miller, Watchiek Alta Cobza, and Casa Torveld. Thank you very much, folks, for signing up and supporting the show.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, thank you very much. It's very, very much appreciated.
SPEAKER_01Oh, and just one last thing before we go. Of course, we're planning our next bonus episode for Strange Shadows. If you do have any ideas or suggestions, any particular topics you'd like us to cover, or perhaps uh a story or something outside of Smith, then do let us know. We're always pleased to hear your suggestions.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01Okay, on that note, thanks again for joining us today. It's goodbye from him, Tim Mendys. And it's goodbye from him, Rob Poyton.