Conan review #17: Beyond the Black River

This is one of the shorter Conan novellas, being serialized over two issues of Weird Tales, May & June 1935. It didn’t make the cover. This did:

Apparently no one submitted Margaret Brundage bait that time.

In the Lancer series of paperbacks, it's included in Conan the Warrior, with Frazetta's cover depicting Conan vs. Picts.

This story is basically an anti-Western, set in the uncivilized wilderness west of Aquilonia. “The Black Stranger” shares that setting.

Yes, the adjective Black is something of a cliche in this series. If you ever have the opportunity to write a Conan story, having him and a woman menaced by the demon Th*** in the ruins of X*** in a yarn titled Beyond the People of the Queen of the Black Colossal Circle River Coast Pool of the Black Strange One would be a proper way to pastiche the original style.

Anyway, the theme of Westerns is said to be civilization’s need for gunslingers, but gun slinging makes you uncivilized, a liminal figure with no place in the society that’s inexorably replacing the uncivilized life ways of the natives. Here, SPOILERS, civilization doesn’t win, and guns don’t exist.

We have a viewpoint character other than Conan, a settler named Balthus, though unlike some stories with such protagonists, Conan is introduced quickly, before we even get Balthus’ name, not Chapter 2 or 3. His function is to show how tough a civilized man can be, being a frontier peasant.

Peasants are absurdly under-represented in this series. I don’t remember how many times Howard himself did it – and I’ll charitably say “not many” since I can’t count them, unlike girlfriends who disappear without explanation or embarrassingly racist use of black people – but Conan defeating his opponents because the narrator says they’re “city-bred” became quite the cliche. One would think there’s been an Industrial Revolution, if 85-90% of warriors are not farmers.

Conan is employed as a frontier scout by the King of Aquilonia (who he mentions strangling in his throne room, in the stories where he’s the usurping king), clad in buckskin boots, mail torso armor and a horned helmet. Howard cleverly establishes the socio-economics of his Western/medieval mashup:

This colonization business is mad, anyway. There’s plenty of good land east of the Bossonian marches. If the Aquilonians would cut up some of the big estates of their barons, and plant wheat where now only deer are hunted, they wouldn’t have to cross the border…

… some day a man will rise and unite thirty or forty clans, just as was done among the Cimmerians, when the Gundermen tried to push the border northward, years ago. They tried to colonize the southern marches of Cimmeria: destroyed a few small clans, built a fort-town, Venarium — you’ve heard the tale.”

Balthus experiences a frission of fear and admiration when Conan gives his name and admits being a 15-year-old slayer at Venarium. We’re told that Balthus knows his name but not how long he’s been living in civilization.

Finding a merchant’s corpse, Conan exposits that this is the fifth Aquilonian killed by “a forest devil” rather than a Pict. The Picts have a wizard named Zogar Sag who’s been summoning such, wanting revenge ever since the indignity of being thrown in a prison (he escaped). Specifically, the thing that killed the merchant has three-toed footprints transition between reptile and bird.

“It’s a swamp demon — they’re thick as bats in the swamps beyond Black River.”

This is an interesting statement, because Conan usually dwells in a “low fantasy” setting: non-human beings he encounters are unique or, if a race, confined to island ruins (cf. the nudist NBA players in “The Pool of the Black One” and “Shadows in the Moonlight”). Here we’re told that in much of the Pictish Wilderness, a species of monster is common as bats.

As could be expected in a pseudo-Western, Conan also calls Aquilonians “white men”, causing the narrator to say:

The Picts were a white race, though swarthy, but the border men never spoke of them as such.

Did Howard just say that race is socially constructed despite the existence of biological facts? That’s an interestingly sophisticated statement.

Chapter 1 ends with a swamp demon, which “gave off a glimmer of weird light, like a faint blue flame. Indeed, the eery fire was the only tangible thing about it”, tricking them by screaming like a woman. It decapitates the merchant, conveying to the reader that it’s something summoned by Zogar Sag, who’s collecting heads for an altar.

In Chapter 2, the scene moves to the log fort Tuscelan, which guards the western edge of Aquilonia at the titular Black River. Between here and Thunder River to the east, the king’s subjects make up a people group called Bossonians, who seem to be yeoman archers. Soldiery on the Aquilonian frontier seems to be paid work just like the US Army in Westerns: a mix of archers and pikemen, neither mercenaries nor feudal cavalry like we’re used to from other Conan stories. Valannus the governor explains to Conan that he has perhaps 750 soldiers to hold the west marches, who “do not believe in ghosts or devils” yet are weakened by fear of the unknown.

(This is what's called “low fantasy”: wizards may be a known part of the world, but not the undead, devils, or any other non-human group. Like in Gothic fiction, those are supposed to be an unknown quantity whenever the protagonist sees them.)

He gives Conan a suicide mission to kill Zogar Sag, for which Conan has authority over as many men as he chooses. He chooses a special forces team of Balthus and ten more. They stealthily row one large canoe. Conan disappears into the woods with nine men while Balthus is left to guard the canoe with one another. Then our viewpoint character is attacked by enemies in the dark.

He wakes bound upright to a post in an open space. It’s the middle of a Pictish wattle-and-daub village, with men in loincloths and naked women and children. And they’ve made a little pyramid of the skulls of Conan’s men. “he was aware that the number of men clustered about them was out of proportion to the size of the village.” Zogar Sag has the charismatic authority to assemble warriors from many clans. He summons a sabretooth tiger: “No Hyborian hunter had looked upon one of those primordial brutes for centuries.” (The march of civilization drives both natural and supernatural species extinct.) He also summons a venomous constrictor with a head the size of a horse’s, “the Ghost Snake.” It’s going to eat Balthus, until Conan reappears (turns out he survived by being one of the few who combines a Fighter’s ability to wear armor with the Move Silently skill) to bloodily distract it with a javelin. He flees with Balthus, throwing an ax to slay a Pict who inadvertently pursues them in the chaos.

In Chapter 5, Conan and Balthus avoid the paths back to the river, as that’s where swarms of Picts will be looking for them. Hiding, they’re trailed by a leopard, whom Conan dispatches with another throwing ax. Yeah, throwing attacks are overpowered.

So about that shaman:

“He can’t command all the animals. Only such as remember Jhebbal Sag.”

“Jhebbal Sag?” Balthus repeated the ancient name hesitantly. He had never heard it spoken more than three or four times in his whole life.

“Once all living things worshipped him. That was long ago, when beasts and men spoke one language. Men have forgotten him; even the beasts forget. Only a few remember. The men who remember Jhebbal Sag and the beasts who remember are brothers and speak the same tongue.”

This is folk tale stuff. All over the real world, we find stories where animals speak human language. The way Howard weaves that into this “Western without guns” without the disparate elements cracking is genius. Jhebbal Sag also has a special sign:

“I saw it carved in the rock of a cave no human had visited for a million years,” muttered Conan, “in the uninhabited mountains beyond the Sea of Vilayet, half a world away from this spot. Later I saw a black witch-finder of Kush scratch it in the sand of a nameless river. He told me part of its meaning — it’s sacred to Jhebbal Sag and the creatures which worship him. Watch!”

Another leopard comes out and doesn’t reach their hiding place, instead bowing to the sign of Jhebbal Sag Conan carved with awe and adoration. Conan says they have to warn Valannus that at least fifteen Pictish clans are preparing a united attack, averaging 200 warriors each.

Random ethnographic detail: the Picts believe in “the Hairy One who lives on the moon — the gorilla-god of Gullah.”

Balthus is impressed that Conan has

“seen all the great cities of the Hyborians, the Shemites, the Stygians, and the Hyrkanians. I’ve roamed in the unknown countries south of the black kingdoms of Kush, and east of the Sea of Vilayet. I’ve been a mercenary captain, a corsair, a kozak, a penniless vagabond, a general — hell, I’ve been everything except a king of a civilized country, and I may be that, before I die.”

They’re attacked when they reach the river, and at this point in his life Conan is tough enough to survive seven attackers if his sidekick kills two. Next chapter, they acquire a canoe by killing its lone rower, an envoy from Zogar. On foot on the east bank near the fort, they meet Slasher the dog. He survived his original owner’s slaying. “The frontier was no less hard for beasts than for men. This dog had almost forgotten the meaning of kindness and friendliness.”

The trio arrive to find the fort already completely surrounded. Conan decides that what’s left to do is warn the settlers to withdraw to the log walls of the next fort, Velitrium. There’s nineteen miles of farmsteads between where they stand and Velitrium, and the first thing they see on their run is Picts cheering over their killing of a young married couple, to show the reader “what will happen to every man, woman, and child this side of Thunder River if we don’t get them into Velitrium in a hurry.” Conan splits off from Balthus and Slasher so they can warn more people. Balthus and Slasher are able to kill five enemies without Conan, saving the lives of four women and numerous children. But those five Picts have reinforcements.

Chapter 7 switches to Conan’s POV. Herding settlers, he hears Balthus’ voice cry “Wait for me!” But it’s one of those glowing, shimmering swamp demons. It calls Zogar Sag brother and says Conan is doomed because

“He had not whispered your name to the black ghosts that haunt the uplands of the Dark Land. But a bat has flown over the Mountains of the Dead and drawn your image in blood on the white tiger’s hide that hangs before the long hut where sleep the Four Brothers of the Night. The great serpents coil about their feet and the stars burn like fireflies in their hair.”

How poetic. The demon says his brother is son of Jhebbal Sag himself by a woman, while his mother is “a fire-being from a far realm.”

With incantations and sorcery and his own blood he materialized me in the flesh of his own planet. We are one, tied together by invisible threads. His thoughts are my thoughts; if he is struck, I am bruised.

You can see where this is going: Conan kills the brother, which leaves Zogar dead too. Without his charismatic leadership, the united force of Picts peters out when otherwise it would have besieged Velitrium successfully, meaning the deaths of the settlers Conan and Balthus successfully led away.

So knowledge saves Conan’s life against Zogar Sag. But his victories are only personal. A huge coalition of Picts succeed in driving the settlers from Beyond the Black River back to the east bank of Thunder River. Conan splits off from his co-protagonist to go east with a warning. Balthus and a big dog named Slasher heroically sacrifice themselves to save many settlers. Later, a messenger catches up with Conan in a tavern east of Thunder River with the news.

“The heads of ten Picts shall pay for his, and seven heads for the dog, who was a better warrior than many a man.”

“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,” the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. “Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”

That’s why I call it an anti-Western. A Western would tell us that civilization always ultimately triumphs.