Conan review #15: Red Nails

This novella was originally serialized in the July through October issues of Weird Tales. This was the last Conan story sold by Howard. He mailed it to editor Farnsworth Wright in July of 1935, at which time his ailing mother had major medical expenses and Wright already owed him $800 for stories already published. On February 11, 1936, he wrote to H.P. Lovecraft,

“As for my own fantasy writing, whether or not I do any future work in that field depends a good deal on the editors themselves. I would hate to abandon weird writing entirely, but my financial needs are urgent, immediate and imperious.”

(At the time of his 1936 suicide, Howard was mostly making his living as a writer of Westerns, with three different magazines having a backlog of monthly stories to publish. He was an incredibly prolific writer despite markets seeming to push him away from his muse. Before barbarians, his inspirations had included such forms as poetry and boxing stories. No wonder that his only known girlfriend, Novalyne Price, was introduced to him as someone who could show her how to become a published writer.)

We start from the POV of Valeria, “of the Red Brotherhood, whose deeds are celebrated in song and ballad wherever seafarers gather.” Despite being a pirate, she’s acquired a horse, on which she’s fled into rain forest after knifing a would-be rapist. A mile to her south, she sees the rain forest thin out abruptly into cactus-dotted desert… with a walled city! Suddenly she hears someone rustling the leaves behind her:

“Conan, the Cimmerian!” ejaculated the woman. “What are you doing on my trail?”

Among the pre-king stories, we can tell this one is late in his career, since elsewhere it was something of a cliche that he had to tell people “I am Conan, a Cimmerian.”

So he’s followed her from the southern border of Stygia where the knifing happened.

“If I’d been there, I’d have knifed him myself. But if a woman must live in the war camps of men, she can expect such things.”

Valeria stamped her booted foot and swore.

“Why won’t men let me live a man’s life?”

“That’s obvious!” Again his eager eyes devoured her. “But you were wise to run away.”

He goes on to explain that the rapist’s brother followed her for revenge, and he helpfully caught up with the brother and killed him. So all this, including Conan the Orbiter, could have been avoided if she’d disguised herself as a man.

They exchange insults along the line of “penniless vagabond!”

“Where are the fine ships and the bold lads you commanded now?” she sneered.

“At the bottom of the sea, mostly,” he replied cheerfully. “The Zingarans sank my last ship off the Shemite shore — that’s why I joined Zarallo’s Free Companions. But I saw I’d been stung when we marched to the Darfar border. The pay was poor and the wine was sour, and I don’t like black women.

Since the last time Howard wrote about people of Darfar they were trying to eat Conan and he doesn’t mention “being cannibals” as a reason he doesn’t like their women, I infer the cannibals are a cult, not the whole ethnic group. So that’s nice at least.

One thing I like about the dialogue here is how Howard economically conveys someone other than Conan having wide-ranging adventures. Just a couple of sentences can convey that Valeria was a pirate until her captain tried to make her his mistress, so she jumped ship while anchored in one country and walked to another, finding mercenary work.

Conan, though, is being too pushy to come off as a good guy: he says he “won’t leave empty-handed” and when Valeria pulls a sword on him, he brags of being such a superior fighter that he can take it and spank her with the flat. At least Howard tells us “No living man could disarm Valeria of the Brotherhood with his bare hands”, so Conan comes across as a braggart and not a horny Marty Stu.

Their unpleasant banter is interrupted by the sound of something killing their horses. It’s a dragon! Or rather a carnivorous dinosaur, though one that resembles a Stegosaurus, or at least an ankylosaurid with a thagomizer. But that’s as close as Conan got to fighting a dragon until pastiche authors came along.

Even at this stage in his career and with another adventurer who’s, if not his peer, in the ballpark, Conan assumes they can’t fight it and they must retreat up a crag beyond its reach on hind legs. Of course we know Conan and Valeria will overcome it with violence, but it’s interesting that even with a partner Conan never assumes he’s leveled up into a dragon-slayer. The dinosaur is even said to be so tough that they’d break swords on its armor.

Since they have trees on the crag, Valeria asks if they can’t swing away through the branches like apes. Conan says he’s read the Tarzan books too, but no luck: the branches are too light to support her weight. Bored, hungry and with Conan touching her, Valeria scans the environment and finds fruit… but it’s the Apples of the Queen of the Dead. You can see where this is going: they drive off the dino with poison fruit jabbed in its mouth at the end of a weapon.

Now onto the city, with the poisoned dinosaur chasing them. On the way, Conan makes food out of cactus.

“I was a kozak before I was a pirate,” … “It’s food and drink to a desert man. I was a chief of the Zuagirs once — desert men who live by plundering the caravans.”

“Is there anything you haven’t done?” inquired the girl, half in derision and half in fascination.

“I’ve never been king of an Hyborean kingdom,” he grinned, taking an enormous mouthful of cactus. “But I’ve dreamed of being even that. I may be too, some day. Why shouldn’t I?”

Mystery is raised by the fact that there are no farms around the city, no hoofprints, no road. Yet there are ancient irrigation ditches. The gate is rusted and has cobwebs. Valeria hopes to find treasure gathering dust and cobwebs.

“The opened gate, or door, gave directly into a long, broad hall which ran away and away until its vista grew indistinct in the distance.” The whole city will turn out to be a dungeon crawl. The walls are jade-coated, the vaulted ceiling of lapis lazuli, adorned with green stones that gleam with a poisonous radiance. There’s also daylight, via skylights of “translucent sheets of some crystalline substance.” Balustraded galleries reveal the walled city to be a great four-storied house. Checking rooms, the furnishings are precious and not collecting dust. Noticing friezes, Valeria asks what race the people in them belong to. Sadly, the answer is not “sapient crinoids.”

“I never saw people exactly like them. But there’s the smack of the East about them — Vendhya,” she asks with snark if he was a king out there. “No. But I was a war chief of the Afghulis who live in the Himelian mountains above the borders of Vendhya.”

Valeria complains that the deserting population must have taken all their treasures with them, a strange complaint when they could strip the walls and ceilings of precious materials. Suddenly, Valeria sees a man, who strangely does not resembles the figures depicted on the friezes. Sneaking after him into another room, she finds him dead and spies another man. The second man is threatened by a bone-white muscleman with a bare skull for a head, like Belit and Skeletor had a baby. She decapitates the apparition for him, breaking a spell: it was a brown person with a mop of black hair. The Distressed Dude, Techotl, info dumps names on Valeria as he thanks her: this is Xuchotl, where the people of Xotalanc and Tecuhltli fight each other.

(These names are meant to be Uto-Aztecan, which makes a pun of Conan identifying the builders as Vendhyan/Indian.)

There’s a fight scene, whose resolution explains the title: “Five crimson nails for the black pillar! The gods of blood be thanked!” Techotl’s side records their kills with red nails in an ebony pillar. Valeria and Conan are implored to follow silently back to the safety of Tecuhltli, because wandering monsters… er, Xotalancas could ambush anywhere. They are indeed attacked in the dark, Conan’s sword striking “the Crawler! A monster they have brought out of the catacombs to aid them!”

Our heroes are introduced to the prince and princess of this small weird tribe, Olmec and Tascela. The way the latter eyes Valeria is hinted to be lesbianism. Conan lets slip that they stopped a dragon with poison, which makes a shocked Olmec explain that the thousand men of their migrating ancestors came inside Xuchotl with the women and children for fear of the “invincible” dragons. Only a few hundred people dwelt there, and a vengeful slave named Tolkemec let the immigrants in, in exchange for the captured natives being turned over to him. As to the natives:

“their magicians made a terrible magic to guard the city; for by their necromantic arts they re-created the dragons which had once dwelt in this lost land, and whose monstrous bones they found in the forest. Those bones they clothed in flesh and life, and the living beasts walked the earth as they walked it when time was young.”

“So for many centuries the people of Xuchotl dwelt in their city, cultivating the fertile plain, until their wise men learned how to grow fruit within the city — fruit which is not planted in soil, but obtains its nourishment out of the air — and then they let the irrigation ditches run dry and dwelt more and more in luxurious sloth, until decay seized them. They were a dying race when our ancestors broke through the forest and came into the plain. Their wizards had died, and the people had forgot their ancient necromancy.”

“For a few years, then, they dwelt at peace within the city, doing little but eating, drinking, and making love, and raising children. There was no necessity to till the plain, for Tolkemec taught them how to…” work the hydroponics. Then brother leaders started fighting over a woman. Since then, the dungeon has been divided into feuding factions: “Tecuhltli dwelt in the western quarter of the city, Xotalanc in the eastern, and Tolkemec with his family by the southern gate.” Though “Twelve years ago we butchered the people of Tolkemec,” — aw come on, wiping out the third faction before the Player Characters arrive is bad dungeon design.

“Now we of Tecuhltli number only these you see before you, and the men who guard the four doors: forty in all. How many Xotalancas there are we do not know, but I doubt if they are much more numerous than we. For fifteen years no children have been born to us, and we have seen none among the Xotalancas.”

Valeria and Conan agree to kill the Xotalancas in exchange for all the jewels they can carry away. They’re shown to bedrooms, where Conan is told that beautiful young Tascela is the woman the feud has been fought over for 45 years… she’s a witch whose spell of youth is a dark secret.

Valeria sleeps happy that the NPCs split the party, but that was just an excuse to imperil an isolated hero: she finds Tascela’s maid drugging her with a black lotus. She leaps awake:

“You sulky slut!” [Valeria] said between her teeth. “I’m going to strip you stark naked and tie you across that couch and whip you until you tell me what you were doing here, and who sent you!”

… and that’s exactly what we see until Yasala the maid says she’ll tell all, but she begs for a drink. Untied, she throws it in Valeria’s face and flees, into the catacombs. In there, though, an inhuman sound makes her go “Ahhh!”

Elsewhere, Conan leaps into action because the enemy has entered Tecuhltli due to magical piping. It’s noted that the women on both sides fight as madly as the men. Tascela and Valeria rejoin the scene. Tecuhltli defeats the outnumbered enemy, surmised to be desperate. Conan goes to evaluate the hypothesis that they’re extinct. Conan’s escort is told by Olmec to kill him, which of course fails. Apparently it was so Olmec could take Valeria. Stalking to the rescue, he finds Olmec strapped into a torture device. Tascela had betrayed him to get Valeria, who she intends to sacrifice to prolong her youth. So perhaps it wasn’t lesbianism after all: the spell requires beautiful young women, and maybe Tascela had run out in the city.

Conan finds Valeria naked on an altar, similar to the cover scene. Alas, the door has a hidden bear trap. Then Tolkemec saunters into the room for vengeance. In the lean hand of Tolkemec waved a jade-hued wand, on the end of which glowed a knob shaped like a pomegranate. He shoots a death ray from it. When only he, Conan, Valeria, and Tascela are alive, the last deactivates the trap Conan’s in so he can save her. Conan twists aside as the death ray fires again (save vs. death ray!) and fatally throws a knife. Tascela dives for the wand and Valeria stabs her to death while she’s prone.

Now here comes the cliche about treasure we’ve been expecting:

I don’t want any of their accursed jewels. They might be haunted.”

“There is enough clean loot in the world for you and me,” she said,

Now she consents to kiss him, and the story ends with a line of Conan’s dialogue boasting of future pillage. Yes, that cliche too.

So ends the last fantasy story written by Robert E. Howard, though we still have a ways to go since that’s not our reading order. But we should remember it as we ask how well he conveyed his ideas within the form of a fantasy story.

Two-Gun Bob’s words to chaste gentlemanly friend H.P. Lovecraft:

“The last yarn I sold to Weird Tales –and it well may be the last fantasy I’ll ever write– was a three-part Conan serial which was the bloodiest and most sexy weird story I ever wrote. I have been dissatisfied with my handling of decaying races in stories, for the reason that degeneracy is so prevalent in such races that it can not be ignored as a motive and as a fact if the fiction is to have any claim to realism. I have ignored it in all other stories, as one of the taboos, but I did not ignore it in this story…”

More bluntly, to Novalyne Price:

I’m working on a yarn like that now — a Conan yarn. … When you have a dying civilization, the normal, accepted life style ain’t strong enough to satisfy the damned insatiable appetites of the courtesans and, finally, of all the people. They turn to Lesbianism and things like that to satisfy their desires…

This isn’t clearly conveyed, for Tascela’s lust for Valeria involves the latter’s youth and beauty being “spell components”, so to speak, and Valeria isn’t approached by other lesbian suitors (though there’s some vague touching). Further, for something Howard believed was a real-world phenomenon, “decaying/dying civilization” is under-defined here. The people we meet in Xuchotl were immigrants fifty years ago and degenerated into a blood feud only five years after arriving.

Well regardless, it’s a heck of a story. It prefigures Dungeons & Dragons more than any other Conan yarn, with a vitality that would be impossible for any writer to replicate anymore, when that game casts a long shadow on the fantasy genre.