Words I Wish I’d Written: Angelfood Cake

The Mouser made a very small parry in carte so that the thrust of the bravo from the east went past his left side by only a hair’s breath. He instantly riposted. His adversary, desperately springing back, parried in turn in carte. Hardly slowing, the tip of the Mouser’s long, slim sword dropped under that parry with the delicacy of a princess curtsying and then leaped forward and a little upward, the Mouser making an impossibly long-looking lunge for one so small, and went between two scales of the bravo’s armored jerkin and between his ribs and through his heart and out his back as if all were angelfood cake.

— Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

Fritz Leiber was the quintessential author of sword and sorcery, and his best known work concerns the heroic (?) duo Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. I was re-reading the story “Ill-Met in Lankhmar”, in which our heroes first begin working together, and was struck the above lovely passage. Fight scenes are every bit as common in current fantasy as in past days, though they tend to draw on the vocabulary of the martial arts rather than that of fencing as this does; but rarely do I see a fight described more clearly and concisely than this. And then there are the rhetorical flourishes: a sword drops “with the delicacy of a princess curtsying” and then goes through the bravo “as if all were angelfood cake”.

Modern prose is more gritty, more in the moment; Leiber intentionally stands back a bit, and so has the opportunity for this kind of thing. Lovely.

Incidentally, the monkey doesn’t represent the author of the words I wish I’d written; it represents the one doing the wishing.