This story was first published in the March 1935 issue of Weird Tales. It didn’t make the cover.
Conan is climbing a 300-foot cliff. Why is he climbing a 300-foot cliff? He wants treasure. There’s a little niche of a cave near the top, which contains a mummy. Conan, “late of the Baracha Isles, of the Black Coast, and of many other climes”, doesn’t want a mummy. However, there’s a roll of parchment that seems important. Then he reaches the top, a mesa a few miles in diameter with a lost city called Alkmeenon. He seeks to rob the poor kingdom of Keshan of its lost treasure, under the cover story of offering his services as a General or master Drill Sergeant to train its army against its rival Punt, that fabled land of the gods the Egyptians, er, Stygians import incense from. But things got more complicated. Thutmekri the Stygian came in with an embassy from Zembabwei, telling the Keshan rulers that Punt had recently expelled the Zembabwan traders and burned their fortresses, so hey, we’ll help you conquer them but you can annex all the territory… just give us some of those lost Teeth of Gwahlur to seal the treaty in our temple, alongside the foreign idols. Conan decided to go use his Climb skill because the high priest Gorulga declared that their (sigh) White Goddess, the Oracle of Alkmeenon, must be asked what to do. Conan and Thutmekri know each other and Conan expects his rival to steal the jewels when the high priest lets the embassy in here, then run off, double-crossing the king of Zembabwei, whom he has believing he’ll win a war of expansion. Whew.
So now Conan is there ahead of them, and among the ruins he finds the golden throne of Alkmeenon. “He weighed it with a practised eye. It represented a fortune in itself, if he were but able to bear it away.” Aw yeah, that’s the old Dungeons & Dragons spirit. In the next room, he finds the body of a woman on an ivory dais. She’s motionless as Conan taps the dais with sword, fruitlessly hoping it’s a hollow treasure chest. He also finds a secret alcove, where a priest can throw their voice to be the oracle.
He puzzles over the parchment:
“In his roaming about the world the giant adventurer had picked up a wide smattering of knowledge, particularly including the speaking and reading of many alien tongues. Many a sheltered scholar would have been astonished at the Cimmerian’s linguistic abilities, for he had experienced many adventures where knowledge of a strange language had meant the difference between life and death.”
He gathered that the writer, the mysterious Bit-Yakin, had come from afar with his servants, and entered the valley of Alkmeenon.”
The scroll is in “archaic Pelishtic”, which is apparently a chronolect of Semitic, which Conan speaks and is literate in (that's language number ten! Two remain unaccounted for).
Suddenly he hears a gong. Fearing company, he finds it… with no one around. Beneath the gong the polished marble flagstones splinter under him and he falls into icy black water.
He discovers metal ladders at regular intervals in the subterranean river and makes his way out. What is this, a modern swimming pool?
When he makes it back to the room with the woman’s body… she’s alive! “She sat up with a supple ease, still holding his ensorcelled stare.” She tries to command him, but he figures out that she’s really Muriela, the slave girl of Zargheba, another foreign notable in Zembabwei’s embassy. He must have sent her here in advance of the priestly party as part of a plan to fool the locals. Seeing his anger, she throws her arms around him and pleads that she was forced to impersonate the oracle.
“Why, you sacrilegious little hussy!” rumbled Conan. “Do you not fear the gods? Crom! Is there no honesty anywhere?”
OK, that’s pretty funny.
It turns out that Gwarunga, a priest (not the high priest), is in on Thutmekri and Zargheba’s scheme, and revealed a hidden cave they could use to beat the main party (and even Conan the Climber) here. Conan says he’ll free her from slavery if she makes a change of plans:
When the priests come, you’ll act the part of Yelaya, as Zargheba planned — it’ll be dark, and in the torchlight they’ll never know the difference. But you’ll say this to them: ‘It is the will of the gods that the Stygian and his Shemitish dogs be driven from Keshan. They are thieves and tratiors who plot to rob the gods. Let the Teeth of Gwahlur be placed in the care of the general Conan. Let him lead the armies of Keshan.
He skulks off to hunt Zargheba, but someone has decapitated him.
Seeing the priestly party approach, he Moves Silently back in to watch them from behind the secret panel he found earlier. She does as he told her. Then the party moves off save Gwarunga, who throttles Muriela. Conan tries to kill him but he twists and only gets knocked out by the force of the flat. Good dexterity on that guy. Conan pauses to coup de grace him, but Muriela screams… and disappears, replaced by the incorruptibly dead body of Yelaya the goddess. He opens a secret door she must have been dragged through. Beyond, he finds falling stone traps, which scare him into looking for another route. Backtracking, Yelaya had again vanished! And so did the man he didn’t kill.
Hiding in shadows, he follows the high priest and friends, and sees them confronted by Yelaya. She tells them:
Alkmeenon is no longer holy, because it has been desecrated by blasphemers. Give the Teeth of Gwahlur into the hands of Thutmekri, the Stygian, to place in the sanctuary of Dagon and Derketo. Only this can save Keshan from the doom the demons of the night have plotted. Take the Teeth of Gwahlur and go; return instantly to Keshia; there give the jewels to Thutmekri, and seize the foreign devil Conan and flay him alive in the great square.
When the priests leave to obey, he sneaks up on Yeyala… and she’s dead! What is this, Weekend at Yeyala’s? A black shape attacks in the dark. Conan fights, not knowing it’s Gwarunga until he’s dead. He moves into another room. “staring for ever toward the arched doorway, sat the monstrous and obscene Pteor, the god of the Pelishti, wrought in brass, with his exaggerated attributes reflecting the grossness of his cult. And in his lap sprawled …” Muriela. Her wrists are chained to the Priapic idol’s gold armbands.
Whoa. Was Howard daring Margaret Brundage to paint an un-publishable cover for this issue?
Muriela was grabbed by hairy gray apes that walk like humans. It turns out that’s what Bit-Yakin’s servants were. Conan says he learned from the scroll that Bit-Yakin and his apes came here after it was abandoned, and found Princess Yayela’s dead body. He made an oracle of it, himself proving the voice. He ate Yayela’s offerings, while his apes used the ladders in the subterranean river to fish for human corpses, whose source is the funerals of Puntish highlanders. And it was they who killed Zargheba.
Conan follows the priests and finds the apes killing them. He goes after the cask of jewels they’d taken out. From him it passes to Muriela, then an ape grabs her and it, walking high above the rushing water… well you can guess where this is going. The monster dies and drops both, but Conan can catch only one. He chooses the girl.
When they reach safety, he tells her not to cry about the jewels. He has a new plan:
I’ll tell [Punt] that Keshan is intriguing with Thutmekri to enslave them — which is true — and that the gods have sent me to protect them — for about a houseful of gold. If I can manage to smuggle you into their temple to exchange places with their ivory goddess, we’ll skin them out of their jaw teeth before we get through with them!”
Spit take
Does every black kingdom have an ivory goddess in Howard’s mind? Just clones of She Who Must Be Obeyed under different names, sprawled across Africa?
I like these stories where everyone is trying to double-cross each other, but this is a weaker example of the type within the Conan series. Muriela is another non-entity of a woman, making me much prefer the scheming of Nefertari in “Shadows in Zamboula”.
Here the pieces don’t add up as well as they could: there’s the fraudulent supernatural, but then there are also corpses that never corrupt and such unexplained stuff, there aren’t enough schemers on-stage, and then it ends by casually adding a racist trope.
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