Titled “Xuthal of the Dusk” by the author, this story was accepted for publication in the September 1933 issue of Weird Tales, changing names in the process.
“his only garment was a silk loin-cloth, ... At his feet rested a girl, one white arm clasping his knee, against which her blond head drooped.” This opening is more attention-grabbing in hindsight than when first published. It’s the famous Frazetta pose!
Conan and a girl named Natala are lost and thirsty in a desert. He was part of a mercenary army serving a defeated rebel prince of Koth, which went all Xenophon through Shem and Stygia before being wiped out by the latter’s army; she was merchandise in a slave market they smashed along the way. They were cops– I mean, fled into the desert as the last survivors. He lets her finish their canteen, planning to put her out of her misery and then die, when he notices a walled city. Might be a mirage, but no sense dying without checking. It’s real, but there’s nobody at the gate save a man lying as though dead. After they walk past him, he gets up and tries to kill Conan with a sword. Spooky!
“There’s water somewhere in this city, and I’ll find it, if I have to kill every man in it.”“But what if they come to life again?” she whispered.“Then I’ll keep killing them until they stay dead!”
I like the cut of his jib.
They meet no one as the city gets weirder, rooms lit by “a soft weird light that seemed to emanate from jewels set in the walls”. It seems people are just hiding from them, as they find a table set with a feast. Exploring again, they find a man dead or asleep on a dais. Then, like something out of German expressionist film, they see only his shadow as another shadow appears like that of no man or beast, and consumes the man-shadow. Then they find a waking man, who looks high and addresses them in a language neither knows. Conan manages to communicate in Stygian.
(Language tally: Cimmerian, Nemedian, Zamoran, Kothic, Ophirean, presumably Kushitic, and now Stygian. That's seven.)
High Guy proceeds to hit on his girl, so Conan smacks his hand away, which elicits a response of “Fade!” as though he considers them a dream. Then he runs away screaming.
Next they meet an alabaster-skinned woman with Stygian facial features, named Thalis. She identifies the man-eating shadow as Thog (so we now have a Thaug and a Thog). She explains this city of Xuthal was built by immigrants from the east, when they found an oasis and pits where black lotus grows. They spend most of their days in lotus dreams, exactly like the Lotophagi of the Odyssey. Thog is the god of the city, an active one who needs no altar of human sacrifice because he walks around chowing down on them himself. She also exposits that Xuthal has golden wine that works as Cure potions. Oh, and the men of Xuthal are gang rapists when awake:
“They will put [Natala] through paces she never dreamed of! She is too soft to endure what I have thrived on. I am a daughter of Luxur, and before I had known fifteen summers I had been led through the temples of Derketo, the dusky goddess, and had been initiated into the mysteries.”
Conan decides it’s time they took their leave, to which Thalis reacts by flirting with him to stay. When he shoves her off in favor of Natala, she abducts Natala as soon as his back in turned.
Elsewhere in the building, Natala gives Thalis a superficial wound with a knife, which angers her into chaining her to the ceiling (for Thog to eat at will, leaving Conan single for her) and angrily whipping her, per the cover. But then, with poetic justice, Thog casts his shadow across the room and grabs Thalis to eat! So Natala is left alone naked in suspension bondage.
“She saw a great toad-like face, … She could tell nothing about the creature’s body. Its outline seemed to waver and alter subtly even as she looked at it; yet its substance was apparently solid enough. There was nothing misty or ghostly about it. As it came toward her, she could not tell whether it walked, wriggled, flew or crept. Its method of locomotion was absolutely beyond her comprehension.”
Then she screams as one of its tentacles grabs her. (Is the difference between Lovecraft proper and Howard’s Lovecraftism that the latter has the indescribable tentacled entity described by a naked woman rather than a fully-clothed male scholar?)
Flash back to Conan. Following the women, he first encounters twenty men with swords, at which he makes no attempt at diplomacy. A well-written gory fight scene happens: Conan decapitates one man, severs a second’s sword hand, and dodges a charging third, which causes his sword to pierce an ally instead. Leaping away from that enemy, he parries a fifth and disables him with a blood-spurting riposte across the belly. He makes a harmless 360 degree slash just to clear the eight spaces around himself, then leaps so high he goes over the circle of men’s swords. Ambushed at the bottom of a staircase, he cleaves through three more men fast enough to keep running ahead of the large group he fears for his life from.
Whew, I wish my RPGs supported fight scenes like that! Howard is striking a nice balance here between a Boring Invincible Hero who doesn’t worry about a circle of eight opponents and “LOL you can’t survive a sword fight when outnumbered” realism. And it’s not over yet: Conan is ambushed by one more man, who has the high ground on another staircase. Ducking, he’s cut superficially across the back rather than across the throat, then thrusts upward from that position with a… success-fumble?
“So terrific was his headlong drive that the sinking of the saber to the hilt into the belly of his enemy did not check him. He caromed against the wretch’s body, knocking it sideways. The impact sent Conan crashing against the wall; the other, the saber torn through his body, fell headlong down the stair,” where his split corpse checks the pursuit of everyone else. Winding through different empty rooms, his pursuers finally find him, and he flees into the bedroom of “a yellow-skinned woman, loaded with jeweled ornaments but otherwise nude” (are we on Barsoom?) She jerks a rope that sends him falling through a trap door… into the room where Natala is bound!
Conan fumbles trying to attack Thog’s weird body. “It seemed to flow about him in almost liquid waves, to envelop and engulf him. His madly slashing saber sheared through it again and again, his ripping poniard tore and rent it; he was deluged with a slimy liquid that must have been its sluggish blood.” Thog has enough members to grapple him and still bite, claw and strike him with scorpion stingers.
Eventually, Conan is able to do enough damage by sinking his saber into the toad face that Thog attempts to retreat and heal. However, Conan grips the hilt so strong that he gets dragged along and is able to maybe kill Thog (his body dissipates into blinding light), but only because dual-wielding swords allows him to continue making attacks. Bleeding and indeed dying, Conan staggers back to cut Natala’s bonds. He makes her lead him to a door, where they find water but no enemies. She bathes his torn flesh and bandages the deeper wounds with strips torn from a silk hanging, but thinks he’s still doomed. Swiping one of his swords, she sneaks like a thief into the next room, where a woman is sleeping, and steals a jar of golden-colored liquid, believing it to be the potion described by Thalis.
“By Crom,” he said with a deep sigh, “I feel new life and power rush like wildfire through my veins.”
I should remember to have my RPG characters say that when their life is restored by a Cure potion.
They find a window in the next room, steal some water, and, after Conan successfully removes the bars, climb down to the ground outside with a rope made of bedsheets (or equivalent). It seems they’ll make it out of the desert, as Thalis claimed there’s an oasis a day’s walk south and grasslands within a day of that.
Natala blames all they’ve suffered on him making eyes at that she-demon, to which Conan:
“When the oceans drown the world, women will take time for jealousy. Devil take their conceit! Did I tell the Stygian to fall in love with me? After all, she was only human!”
Freeze frame, roll credits.
We’re going to see numerous variations on the formula “lost city + supernatural being + naked damsel in distress” in this series, and I remembered this being the weakest one. On a re-read, it still might not be much as literature, but it is an exciting fantasy adventure.
No comments:
Post a Comment