Conan review #12: “The Devil in Iron”

This was first published as the cover story of the August 1934 issue of Weird Tales.

In the Lancer series of paperbacks, it was included in Conan the Wanderer. The Boris Vallejo cover illustrated Conan vs. Khosatral Khel.

We start with a Yuetshi, “who have dwelt in their rude fishing huts along the southern shore of the Sea of Vilayet since time immemorial.” going to visit the island of Xapur in the Vilayet (Caspian). There are ruins there, “built of gigantic blocks of the peculiar ironlike green stone found only on the islands of Vilayet” whose origin no one knows… and perhaps also a monster whose name starts with T.

On that note, Xuthal in Northeast Africa was built of peculiar green stone too. I don’t recall how the ruins from “Shadows in the Moonlight” were described, but they were on another Caspian island.

He sees a man lying as though dead on a golden block. The reader is intended to think it's Conan, as his black hair is described as “a square mane to his massive shoulders”. The Yuetshi tries to steal his valuable knife. The man wakes up! He attacks with his own knife, but “The blade splintered against the stranger’s corded belly as against a steel column, and then the fisherman’s thick neck broke like a rotten twig in the giant hands.”

Hmm, I don’t think Conan’s had knife-proof skin before. Maybe this isn’t him.

(Also, I’ve never figured out what a “square-cut mane” is. To my knowledge, its only definition is “whatever Conan’s haircut is.”)

Next chapter we meet– Jehungir Agha, lord of Khawarizm. His king is mad that he hasn’t stopped the steppe robbers. “On the broad steppes between the Sea of Vilayet and the borders of the easternmost Hyborian kingdoms, a new race had sprung up in the past half-century, formed originally of fleeing criminals, broken men, escaped slaves, and deserting soldiers.” These are the kozaks we’ve heard of before. While it’s neat to see Howard talk about ethnogenesis rather than treating ethnicities as eternal stereotypes, the fact they’re basically identical to the Cossacks millenia later makes it goofy. Further exposition:

Yezdigerd, king of Turan, was the mightiest monarch in the world. In his palace in the great port city of Aghrapur was heaped the plunder of empires. His fleets of purple-sailed war galleys had made Vilayet an Hyrkanian lake. The dark-skinned people of Zamora paid him tribute, as did the eastern provinces of Koth. The Shemites bowed to his rule as far west as Shushan. His armies ravaged the borders of Stygia in the south and the snowy lands of the Hyperboreans in the north. His riders bore torch and sword westward into Brythunia and Ophir and Corinthia, even to the borders of Nemedia.

This geography annoys me. Shemites as far west as Shushan? Shushan was built by the Elamites, east of the Tigris river that formed the eastern border of the Semitic language family! And if the Shemites don’t bow to his rule west of Shushan, how are his armies getting to the Nile? Less realistically, the Nemedians are a group from Irish mythology who lived on the shores of the Caspian before the titular Nemed took some of his followers sailing to Ireland, so it’s counter-intuitive of Howard to make them landlocked.

Anyway, we learn that the new kozak chief is Conan. Jehungir’s henchman Ghaznavi says he has observed Conan during parley with the kozaks, and his weaknesses are women and strong drink. So let’s bait a trap for him with a slave girl named Octavia (maybe they’ll tie a cask of rum around her neck like a St. Bernard).

If they can’t kill Conan when he’s surrounded by kozaks, they’ll lure him away from them to the island of Xapur, because “It has no shoreline but rises sheer out of the sea in cliffs a hundred and fifty feet tall. Not even an ape could negotiate them. The only place where a man can go up or down is a narrow path on the western side that has the appearance of a worn stair,” If trapped without henchmen on an uninhabited island, archers could hunt him like an animal.

The plan is to parley again, and take sexy Octavia with them. Conan will wish to buy her, but we’ll refuse to sell or exchange her for hostages. Then Octavia will “escape” and we’ll hire a Yuetshi to go tell Conan that she fled to Xapur.

Jehungir thinks that dumb, because why would he follow her without any kozaks?

“Does a man take a band of warriors with him, when going to a rendezvous with a woman he desires?” retorted Ghaznavi. “The chances are all that he will go alone. But we will take care of the other alternative. We will not await him on the island, where we might be trapped ourselves, but among the reeds of a marshy point, which juts out to within a thousand yards of Xapur. If he brings a large force, we’ll beat a retreat and think up another plot.

I mean, what intelligent Player Character wouldn’t take all his henchmen to a rendezvous with a woman he desires?

Octavia says she’d rather die than be bait, so her owner lets in a Shemite muscleman to rape her until she relents. Um, ew.

Next chapter, we find Octavia having escaped to the coast via a stolen horse. She swims the thousand yards to Xapur, which actually fulfills the plot she heard and rejected, especially since she tells the reader she did flirt with Conan under compulsion in the temporal gap between chapters.

She hears someone playing a drum, then a human arm grabs her in the dark and carries her off in that direction.

In Chapter 4, we meet Conan! He’s rowing to Xapur in a crimson headscarf, silk breeches of flaming hue, and a silk poet shirt. Number of official illustrations where he dresses like this: zero.

“The muscles of his heavy, bronzed arms rippled as he pulled the oars with an almost feline ease of motion.” This grabs my attention as an example of Howard’s prose fumbling. He pulls the oars almost as easily as a cat? I’m pulled out of the story into a different one about cats who are great sailors.

It will likely surprise no one that Conan is noted as having wandered into the armed camps of the kozaks with no other possession than his wits and his sword. If you want a fantasy RPG to be Conan-esque, always make sure adventurers lose the gold they accumulate.

He starts climbing the carved stair, Jehungir watching him with troops.

Among the trees, rose something that his reason told him was not possible. It was a great dark green wall, with towers rearing beyond the battlements.

Conan stood paralyzed in the disruption of the faculties which demoralizes anyone who is confronted by an impossible negation of sanity. He doubted neither his sight nor his reason, but something was monstrously out of joint. Less than a month ago, only broken ruins had showed among the trees.

The affront to all sense and logic panics him like unto a Lovecraft scholar who’s seen something that contradicts the current scientific paradigm. But hold, what’s this? A piece of torn silk that smells like Octavia! The scales are re-balanced toward staying, and the future course of kingdoms is changed. He follows evidence of Octavia into the city that should be ruins, where he finds houses with perishable material like curtains, rugs and furs. Soon he finds a sleepy-eyed girl with black square-cut hair like his, wearing just a silk loincloth. Don’t get your hopes up that she’ll be a female Conan, though. He fails to understand her native language, but she then makes herself understood in archaic Yuetshi. (Language 8 for Conan.)

She introduces herself as Yateli, and says “You are not a Dagonian. I suppose you are a mercenary. Have you cut the heads off many Yuetshi?” Conan snorts: his code of honor prevents him from warring on “water rats”, in a benevolent sort of racism. She disagrees: they are fierce rebel slaves, who climbed the walls and burned while the burghers cried in vain to their god Khosatral Khel. She’s confused as to what is real and what’s a dream – blast it, let’s just have sex and fall asleep! Conan is too weirded out to consent. He thinks “she must be an addict of some drug, perhaps like the black lotus of Xuthal.”

Next he encounters a bald man sleeping on the floor. Hearing a noise, he hides behind a secret panel. He stumbles upon a passage out to a throne room, where a giant snake sits on the throne. Moving along, Conan is hypnotized by an inhuman voice speaking Nemedian.

Transported beyond his age and his own individuality, he was seeing the transmutation of the being men called Khosatral Khel which crawled up from Night and the Abyss ages ago to clothe itself in the substance of the material universe.

He stalked through the world as a god, for no earthly weapon could harm him, and to him a century was like an hour. In his wanderings he came upon a primitive people inhabiting the island of Dagonia, and it pleased him to give this race culture and civilization, and by his aid they built the city of Dagon and they abode there and worshipped him.

But after many ages, a fierce and brutish people appeared on the shores of the sea. They called themselves Yuetshi, and after a fierce battle were defeated and enslaved, and for nearly a generation they died on the altars of Khosatral.

… and after that generation they rebelled, as we’ve heard. The rebel leader “had not slain his foe, because he wished to hold the threat of his loosing over the heads of his own rebellious subjects. He had left Khosatral lying upon the golden dais with the mystic knife across his breast for a spell to hold him senseless and inanimate until doomsday.” So the Conan lookalike of steel abs from Chapter 1 was Khosatral Khel.

Elsewhere, Jehungir takes a ship full of rowers to the island. Conan meets Khosatral face to face, swings his sword, and finds it won’t cut. Conan takes a punch and finds his enemy’s body to be living steel. “Conan caught up a heavy bench and hurled it with all his power. It was such a missile as few men could even lift. On Khosatral’s mighty breast it smashed into shreds and splinters. It did not even shake the giant on his braced legs.”

I like how Conan’s Game Master responds to his staple moves.

Throwing a tapestry at his enemy’s eyes, Conan runs and bolts the door behind him. Octavia is in the next room. He picks her up and springs to the opposite door as Khosatral splinters the bolted one. Soon Conan has them locked in a room with only one door: oops. Octavia tells Conan he’s strong, can’t you kill him? Since he can’t, she asks him to kill her, as apparently Khosatral too threatened to rape her. Instead he offers to distract the being with a futile attack while she runs for his boat. But suddenly there’s the sound of muttering and beating wings, and Khosatral is gone. Suddenly, they piece together enough of the plot and geography to defeat him: the magic knife was left in a dome Conan has been in, and he knows how to retrace his steps there via the snake’s throne room. The snake awakens and grapples Conan as Octavia acts all distressed (there’s our cover shot). Conan’s free right arm gets in a killing stroke, but not before having his ribs crushed costs a lot of Hit Points: “He was sick and dizzy, and blood oozed from his nose.”

He gets the magic knife in the next room, then they make it all the way to the western wall, the one closest to the carved stair on and off the island. He had appropriated a thick tapestry rope in the great hall, which lets them safely get to the ground outside the wall. The duo spots Jehungir, who escaped the slaughter of his men by Khosatral and found that the rowers left behind have already rowed away. If Conan had taken any more time, Jehungir would have stolen his boat. The two men fight, Conan getting the deadly victory. Khosatral appears again, and Conan chases him with the magic knife. This one cuts his body like common flesh. He still has to strike again and again while dodging every anvil-like punch to defeat him. As soon as he dies, the city reverts to ruins.

Conan asks Octavia why she didn’t escape alone in his boat. She was too honorable to desert. He reminds her of her flirting.

Her red lips curled in disdain. “Do you think I was enamored of you? Do you dream that I would have shamed myself before an ale-guzzling, meat-gorging barbarian unless I had to? My master — whose body lies there — forced me to do as i did.”

“Oh!” Conan seemed rather crestfallen. Then he laughed with undiminished zest. “No matter. You belong to me now. Give me a kiss.”

“You dare ask—” she began angrily, when she felt herself snatched off her feet and crushed to the hetman’s muscular breast. She fought him fiercely,

Consent, shmonsent. This changes her mind, and the story ends on a sentence that echoes Conan’s final flirting in “Shadows in the Moonlight”:

“I’ll burn Khawarizm for a torch to light your way to my tent.”

So yeah, this story (published 8/34) is a rehash of "Shadows in the Moonlight" (4/34). Howard was concerned with selling enough stories to make a living rather than art, but this is still surprising, due to the short time gap.

I think this story is the superior version.