First published in the October 1933 issue of Weird Tales. It didn't make the cover.
From Conan the nomad chief on the Indian frontier, we jump to the Western Ocean where Conan is a pirate. In the order we’re reading, this is disappointing. From a leader of 500 men or thousands with henchmen who are leaders in their own right, he goes to being a common tough half a world away. You can't hold that against Howard, though. This story was published a year earlier.
Sancha, captured daughter of a Zingaran duke, yawns on the deck of the good ship Wastrel when suddenly a man jumps aboard from the sea.
“I am Conan,” the other answered imperturbably. Sancha pricked up her ears anew; she had never heard Zingaran spoken with such an accent.
(Zingaran is language #9 for Conan.)
The skeptical captain is named Zaporavo, whom Conan knows of. It seems there are two factions of pirates round these parts, who hate each other: Argives based in the Bacharan Isles and these Zingarans. Conan says he found it prudent to leave a Barachan rendezvous in a dingy, now just give me a job.
“A ship can always use another good sailor,” answered the other without resentment. Zaporavo scowled, knowing the truth of that assertion. He hesitated, and doing so, lost his ship, his command, his girl, and his life. But of course he could not see into the future,
Why telegraph the ending, Bob?
The crew hazes Conan, and when the leader of it spits in his face and puts hand to sword, Conan quickly punches him to death. After this, he makes himself well-liked with appropriate (gigantic?) mirth and doing “the work of three men, and was always first to spring to any heavy or dangerous task.” He hides his motive for coming aboard, letting them think whatever made him run from the bloody Barachans was something nasty and respectable. Oh, and hey, he “roared ribald songs in a dozen languages“.
Zaporavo takes the ship away from the civilized coast into the west, where there are no towns to pillage unless he finds a lost island or continent like he’s brooding about. After many weary weeks they find an island. While his men eat the local fruit, Zaporavo goes exploring for loot alone. Ordered to stay aboard, Sancha gets naked and swims ashore. She finds the men asleep (don’t eat strange fruit, kids). Going into the trees, she finds Zaporavo dead. Hearing a figure rustling the foliage, she calls Conan’s name, assuming he killed Zaporavo to take over. But someone else grips her.
Earlier Conan, abstaining from the fruit, was stalking the living captain into the woods. He was indeed planning to kill him in secret and, denying it, hope his popularity would get him voted captain. Zaporavo saw him and drew his sword. The fight ended with Z. falling dead in the position Sancha saw him.
As Conan cleans his blade, though, he sees a tall naked black man carrying off a struggling naked white figure. The NBA not having been invented yet, Conan is freaked out by the man’s size. Following to the island’s high point, he finds green shining walls and towers, camouflaged by the greenery until he got close.
He realized uneasily that no ordinary human beings could have built them. There was symmetry about their architecture, and system, but it was a mad symmetry, a system alien to human sanity.
Now taking your best modern architecture jokes, readers.
Inside, he looks over a parapet into another swarded court and sees of beings that squatted about a dark green pool in the midst of the court. They’re all naked, black, and the least of them head-and-shoulders taller than him. And they’re sacrificing the youngest sailor from his ship in that pool. One of them plays a flute Conan can’t hear, yet it makes the youth cringe, quiver and writhe in a compulsive dance of obscenity and lasciviousness: “desire without pleasure, pain mated awfully to lust.” Conan is shocked at “the cosmic obscenity of these beings which could … find pleasure in the brazen flaunting of such things as should not be hinted at,”
Clean-limbed barbarians are against porn.
When the weird figures quit the court, Conan sneaks in and finds shelves with thousands of tiny figures. Om a high shelf, he sees that the pirate boy was transformed into one of those dolls. Even weirder, the lower shelves exclusively have figures that “either embodied merely the artists’ imagination, or typified racial types long vanished and forgotten.” It seems these creeps have been collecting for untold ages.
Hearing a feminine scream, Conan bounds high onto the wall to look over. Another of the locals is dragging Sancha toward the pool! Conan hides. Seeing the figure carry Sancha by head and crotch (ew) toward the pool, he charges, killing him with a sword through the groin.
While he wastes time talking with Sancha, the rest of the uncanny men return, each carrying one or two of the pirates who fell asleep. Conan comes up with a plan to make them chase him, then Sancha will shake the pirates awake so they can grab their swords.
His plan: make a deadly leap toward the circle, then run away: “thrice his blade flickered before any could lift a hand in defense;” each flickering splitting a skull.
He finds himself in a dead-end room, enemies forming a semicircle around him. But one killing blow lets him run between the two figures flanking the fallen one without them getting to hit him. Running into a different room, he sees them forming a solid square in hopes of flowing around him when he attacks. He tries to jump and climb a ledge. The jutting ledge gives way and only the fact that it’s a grassy court prevents his spine breaking. Conan is doomed… save that the pirates come charging into the room, facing the weird men’s backs. There are deaths on both sides, but Conan survives as it turns into a rout and a chase. Seeing his side losing, one Black One speaks for the first time, and it’s some sort of spell that makes the pool flood. Conan, Sancha and friends run as fast as they can for shore. All who survived the battle reach the beached boats, just ahead of the magic pool’s tide that “flowed out over the beach, lapped at the ocean, and the waves turned a deeper, more sinister green.”
Conan’s wounds are tallied: “Blood thickly clotted his black mane, and one ear had been half torn from his head. His arms, legs, breast and shoulders were bitten and clawed as if by panthers.” He’s accepted as captain, he maybe ambiguously gets the girl, and the story ends with a line of dialogue by him.
Yes, we’ve seen this formula elsewhere. It’s also a pretty simple plot and Sancha is a non-entity.
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