“The Dark Isle” (Weird Tales, May 1939)

Bloch, Robert. “The Dark Isle.” Weird Tales, May 1939, pp. 23-38.
https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v33n05_1939-05_AT-sas/page/n23/mode/2up

The Roman admiral, Vincius, also known as “The Reaper,” arrives at Anglesey, an island off the coast of Wales known for the magic of the secretive druids who are reputed to live there. With his hundreds of well-trained and equipped soldiers, Vincius is confident that he can take the island for the Empire with little trouble. The Roman legions land on the beach are immediately attacked by a frenzy of poison arrows. Many fall. Those who do reach the tree line are hacked to pieces by the hidden enemy. Vincius is knocked unconscious and wakes only after the battle has been lost. Among the corpses, he meets Lupus, a man dressed as a druid, but who speaks flawless Latin. Lupus claims he has been held prisoner by the druids and wants to escape to the fleet. The beach is guarded as are other escape points. Lupus proposes an escape through the passageway under the altar, and Vincius, seeing no alternatives, agrees. They wait until the priests are finished with their ritual for the night—a rite that includes the execution of many Roman soldiers—and enter the subterranean pair. They are accosted by snakes and hear mysterious music all around them. Finally, they reach the secret center of druid power: a chamber dominated by a black pool and an altar stone holding a massive, severed tongue. The high priest explains that they use the tongue of a sea creature they call a dragon to harvest poison for their arrows. Armed with that knowledge, Vincius kills everyone in sight using his poison-soaked sword. In the tumult, Lupis is killed. Vincius emerges at the sea and returns to his fleet where he plans the morning’s assault on the leaderless and powerless druids. 

This story was recently republished by DMR Books as part of their sword and sorcery series, Renegade Swords. It is interesting to think about this as a sword and sorcery piece. It seems as if Bloch is straddling two worlds here. There is something clearly necromantic about the first being Vincius meets, the blue man who climbs onto the ship surreptitiously to murder as many Roman sailors as he can. For example, when Vincius kills him, he dissolves into a puddle of good. But then the story takes a few turns. The hail of arrows is described as magical somehow, but, once we understand the end, we know that the arrows succeed because of their numbers and also the fast-acting poison they have been dipped in. The giant tree beings could be human-constructed mechanisms as easily as animated plants. The poison might be just a discovery made by people of a naturally occurring substance. After the first encounter with the blue-goo man, it seems as if the story becomes a battle for Vincius to resist seeing Anglesey as anything other than just a mundane island about which fantastic fictions have been told. The blue-goo man does stand out as unexplainable, however, unless we consider that it came and went without causing a stir; only Vincius saw him. It is possible that Vincius either dreamt him or hallucinated him. That would make this story totally mundane. The swords are here, for sure, but, perhaps, none of the sorcery. Finally, the architecture of the druid’s altar is similar to that depicted in Bloch’s “The Druidic Doom.” Such a creepy thing to imagine that under the place of ritual and mystery lies an even more foreboding descent into madness. This is a really fun story!