‘The Coming of the White Worm’ – Clark Ashton Smith

I know I’m repeating myself but this week has been crazy and there’s still a couple of days left to go… I can’t wait for the weekend! Last night was a familiar tale then of my not having a lot in me for reading but having just enough for watching ‘Doctor Who’ with a little bit left over for reading a short story before bed. ‘Doctor Who’ will be the subject of another post; right now, it’s all about the short story ‘The Coming of the White Worm’...

I’ve had a lot of fun reading Clark Ashton Smith’s works, over the last few months, so it wasn’t a hard choice to go back to ‘The Emperor of Dreams’ last night. This time round, choosing the story to read was accomplished by the highly scientific method of ‘I never pick a tale from the end of the book, lets pick a tale from the end of the book…’ ‘The Coming of the White Worm’ it was then.

'Evagh the warlock, dwelling beside the boreal sea, was aware of many strange and untimely portents in mid-summer. Chilly burned the sun above Mhu Thulan from a heaven clear and wannish as ice. At eve the aurora was hung from zenith to earth, like an arras in a high chamber of gods. Wan and rare were the poppies and small the anemones in the cliff-sequestered vales lying behind the house of Evagh; and the fruits in his walled garden were pale of rind and green at the core. Also, he beheld by day the unseasonable flight of great multitudes of fowl, going southward from the hidden isles beyond Mhu Thulan; and by night he heard the distressful clamour of other passing multitudes. And always, in the loud wind and crying surf, he harkened to the weird whisper of voices from realms of perennial winter.'

I haven’t read loads of Clark Ashton Smith but I like to think that I’ve read enough to know that it’s a beautifully drawn yet grim world that he tells his tales in. Nothing ends well here and the closest we ever get to a ‘happy ending’ is when the protagonist still has their life come the conclusion to the story. I don’t think I’ve read a tale, of his, though where we’re told right at the beginning that things are not going to go well. The portents are not only ill, they are all… cold. If that wasn’t enough, a boat beaches with the crew frozen so solid that when the boat is burnt around them (as a pyre), the crew remain in the positions that they died in. Whatever is headed Evagh’s way, it is cold and it doesn’t mean well at all. Intrigued? I was, the title gives the game away but there was still enough here to make me both wonder and speculate on what was going to float up next. On a side note, I’m not ashamed to say that I had to go and look up the word ‘boreal’. It’s a great word to be used here (‘of the north or northern regions’) that really helps set the scene very quickly.

And then it gets even colder with Evagh’s magics proving useless against him, and his whole house, being transported to the iceberg home of the White Worm itself where he is pressed into service with the promise of keeping his life but also gaining power. This is where Clark Ashton Smith not only goes all ‘Cosmic Horror’ but seems to have a lot of fun describing Rlim Shaikorth (the White Worm) at great length.

‘Something he had of the semblance of a fat white worm; but his bulk was beyond that of the sea-elephant. His half coiled tail was thick as the middle folds of his body; and his front reared upward from the dais in the form of a white round disk, and upon it were imprinted vaguely the lineaments of a visage belonging neither to beast of the earth nor ocean creature. And amid the visage a mouth curved uncleanly from side to side of the disk, opening and shutting incessantly on a pale and tongueless and toothless maw.’

I could go on but you get the picture ;o)

What we have with ‘The Coming of the White Worm’, so far then, is Clark Ashton Smith doing what he normally does, making expansive use of flowery, yet always well chosen, language to really take us into his world and keep us there while he tells his story. I was getting into that groove, really easily, and so was very surprised then to see Ashton Smith take the story from the fairly narrow view of Evagh and turn it into something far more expansive and apocalyptic. What does an Ice God do when they’re stuck on floating iceberg? Freeze everything else of course! What we get now is a mini ice-age with nowhere safe from Rlim Shaikorth's urges. This is great all by itself but what I really liked about Evagh’s character here is that although he’s not happy to see his world freeze (he has an eye for beauty and doesn’t want to see it frozen) what really stirs him to ultimately take action is that it turns out that Rlim Shaikorth is eating his way through his wizardly coterie and Evagh doesn’t want to end up as the final course. Nothing like a bit of self-interest to get you to save the world… The ending may seem a little easy but not only is it not without cost to Evagh, I like that Gods can be beaten here. Man may not understand the beings of the cosmos but he can take up arms against them and I like that Ashton Smith injects a little heroism here, even if it is self-serving.

‘The Coming of the White Worm’ was a little different, to what I’ve read, and that ended up being just what I needed. If you want to read it yourself (and I’d recommend it), you can find ‘The Coming of the White Worm’ over Here.