Conan review #18: “The Black Stranger”

This is a direct sequel to “Beyond the Black River”. It also has a strange history: it’s the only Conan story rejected in Howard’s lifetime after “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” and “The God in the Bowl”, which were submitted to Weird Tales hot on the heels of the first one published, “The Phoenix on the Sword”. There’s no evidence that “The Vale of Lost Women” was submitted for publication, and it seems like Farnsworth Wright got in the habit of never rejecting a Conan story. So the fact that this one was found in a chest of unpublished papers along with a finished rewrite into an Age of Sail pirate story titled “Swords of the Red Brotherhood” (Conan turns into 17th century Irishman Black Vulmea) is strange.

In 1953, L. Sprague de Camp edited it into “The Treasure of Tranicos” so it would end linking up with the rebellion in Aquilonia that brought Conan to the throne.

Conan has been running west from Picts for a hundred miles. He takes cover from the arrows of 40 of them, and mysteriously the chief calls off the attack. Whatever refuge he’s using, they seem to have superstitious fear of it. Wolf-Picts “captured him, in a foray against the Aquilonian settlements along Thunder River, and they had given him to the Eagles in return for a captured Wolf chief”, so he’s even farther from his job in Aquilonia than the great distance he’s run.

He walks into a tunnel in his stone refuge and finds a heavy iron-bound oaken door He’s amazed, because he’s at least 200 miles west of Thunder River and near the coast, where the Picts are too fierce for civilized people to come and build things. Then he finds iron-bound chests ranged along the walls. There are also silent figures at table. Have you guessed that he found a pirate hideout?

Elsewhere, Lady Belesa of Zingara has been living a year in a log fortress her exiled Count uncle has built on the Pictish coast, a thousand miles north of home. We’re also introduced to Tina, a freed child slave. A pirate ship appears on the horizon! Hustling inside, the Zingarans find the newcomers approaching under a flag of truce. Strom the pirate captain acts like Count Valenso has treasure and no ship to take it away in. Valenso has an archer shoot Strom, who responds by having his pirates surround the fort. They figure out how to defeat the defenders, but then another ship flying the royal Zingaran flag scares them into retreat!

This turns out to belong to Black Zarono, a buccaneer and another enemy of Valenso. The enemy is invited to table, with none of his crew inside the log wall, where he insinuates that the Count has built a log simulacrum of his castle here on the shore of wilderness to hunt for treasure, which he denies, saying it was meant to be a temporary stop on his way away from the corrupt stink of Zingara’s court, and he’d go somewhere else in civilization if he could, “to Vendhya, or Khitai—” Zarono presses him, but is shocked into believing him when he says his navigator let anchor here for reasons he had not time to reveal before getting beheaded by a Pict.

“Supposing you to have already secured the treasure, I meant to take this fort by strategy and cut all your throats. But circumstances have caused me to change my mind—” What’s this, a double-cross story where no one’s good at lying?

So change of plans, Zarono says: I need to stay here to actually find the treasure of Tranicos, famous pirate of a hundred years ago who “stormed the island castle of the exiled prince Tothmekri of Stygia,” Times like this I feel Howard is daring the reader to stop suspending disbelief in his mashup of historical periods, but he seems to carry it with conviction.

So Zarono tries to strike a bargain where they split the treasure 50-50, lift anchor, and Valenso can have Zarono’s ship when he abandons it to settle down in Zingara with a noble wife – the non-consenting Belesa. Tina interrupts to report that a very tall black man showed up on the beach in a black boat alight with blue fire, which sends Valenso into violent terror. Now Belesa is motivated to get away from her uncle with the child he hurt.

When Chapter 5 rolls around, Zarono’s ship is destroyed in an unseasonable storm. The indefatigable pirate says the two groups have 260 men left between them and a vast forest, so let’s build another. This new plan is disrupted by the other pirate ship returning, and then Conan re-entering the story. A pirate from that ship was killed, and Strom blames one of the other two schemers, ignorant that Conan did it. He bursts into the negotiating room in hundred-year-old pirate garb, which he put on back in the tunnel. Zarono says: “Three years ago the shattered hull of your ship was sighted off a reefy coast, and you were heard of on the Main no more.” (Would that be the Wastrel he stole in “The Pool of the Black One”?) We’re told that by this time in his life, he’s seen as “a legendary character in the flesh.”

The pirate captains telegraph that they’d kill Conan for the treasure map he now has, so he throws it in the fireplace. With the only map in his memory, he offers thus:

“We’ll split the treasure four ways. Strom and I will sail away with our shares aboard the Red Hand. You and Valenso take yours and remain lords of the wilderness, or build a ship out of tree trunks, as you wish.”

Valenso is too terrified to stay that long. Belesa thinks all the negotiations are a farce, as all except her uncle are dishonorable pirates who won’t leave without the whole treasure and rival blood on their blades, and she no longer thinks much of her uncle either. For now, though, they need an intricate plan to carry the treasure out of the cave without one faction outnumbered and betrayed. Valenso is too scared to go, so they break it down as Conan, the two captains, and 15 bearers from each crew.

As they leave, Conan asks Valenso why he decapitated a Pict, or so he believes because he found the Count’s necklace at the scene of the murder. Then Galbro the Count’s seneschal tries to decipher what’s left of the map in the fireplace…

Then Belesa asks her uncle his thoughts on all the scheming. He says Strom would murder them all aboard ship for their share of the treasure. Zarono would be honest because he wants to marry her, but has no ship, so he’ll send fishermen in the dark to overwhelm the pirate ship’s skeleton crew. Then Zarono’s men will murder Strom and Conan on the beach, hoping the former’s death demoralizes his camping pirates, and sail away to share the treasure 50-50.

He goes on to explain who the black man is:

‘In my youth I had an enemy at court,’ he said, as if speaking more to himself than to her. ‘A powerful man who stood between me and my ambition. In my lust for wealth and power I sought aid from the people of the black arts—a black magician, who, at my desire, raised up a fiend from the outer gulfs of existence and clothed it in the form of a man. It crushed and slew my enemy; I grew great and wealthy and none could stand before me. But I thought to cheat my fiend of the price a mortal must pay…’

Conan has led four pirates to the treasure cave, where Tranicos and his captains sit dead. They also find Galbro dead. There’s bluish mist in part of the cave, which they guess is deadly – just before Conan shoves them into it! They recover and Conan kills one before jumping to a ledge as the rest of the pirate crews pour in. He goes prone on the crag outside, out of sight.

‘Well, what did you expect? You two were planning to cut my throat as soon as I got the plunder for you. If it hadn’t been for that fool Galbro I’d have trapped the four of you, and explained to your men how you rushed in heedless to your doom.’

‘And with us both dead, you’d have taken my ship, and all the loot too!’ frothed Strom.

‘Aye! And the pick of each crew! I’ve been wanting to get back on the Main for months, and this was a good opportunity!’

True, each captain had a plan to kill him, but Conan still comes across as a bad guy here. He sounds like he had a good job serving the King of Aquilonia on the frontier and wanted to go back to piracy because he was bored. The pirates reconstruct Conan’s plan to get the treasure out despite the mists, but he boasts that they won’t make it back alive without his woodcraft. To puncuate the point, Picts suddenly appear, enough to keep the pirates besieged in the taboo cave until they die of dehydration. They declare truce with Conan, who uses the Climb skill on the side opposite the cave mouth to help them slip around the semicircle of warriors to their west. Of course they run away unencumbered by heavy loot.

Soon, Picts attack them at the fort (the conspirators against Conan don’t shoot him on the way in, which I find unconvincing). That night they find a man of Strom’s dead, with no Pict either inside the wall or visibly running away. Strom blames Zarono. They fight. Then the Picts do break in. Strom and Valenso are dead by the time the chivalrous Conan reaches the girls, whom he finds being menaced by the smoky, horned, pointy-eared Black Man. He finds a piece of silver furniture to throw at it, knocking the thing back into the fireplace. He gets the girls to safety out on a headland, leaving only the Picts and the Dead behind.

Conan sends smoke signals to the few people who were out of the ship, surmising they’ll make him captain because none of them is a navigator.

‘What will you do when you get back to Zingara?’ Conan asked.

She shook her head helplessly. ‘I do not know. I have neither money nor friends. I am not trained to earn my living. Perhaps it would have been better had one of those arrows struck my heart.’

He gives her a handful of rubies he looted.

I might as well leave you for the Picts to scalp as to take you back to Zingara to starve,’ said he. ‘I know what it is to be penniless in a Hyborian land. Now in my country sometimes there are famines; but people are hungry only when there’s no food in the land at all. But in civilized countries I’ve seen people sick of gluttony while others were starving. Aye, I’ve seen men fall and die of hunger against the walls of shops and storehouses crammed with food. Sometimes I was hungry, too, but then I took what I wanted at sword’s-point.

Conan the Communist?

She asks what will become of him, and he says don’t worry, he’ll be fine because he’ll be a pirate again! Yo ho ho.

I like that we have three factions plus Conan planning to betray each other for treasure in a Treasure of the Sierra Madre moral fable. I like that the plot is complicated by people under the Count having agency and not following his plans (imagine how elaborate the plot would get if each pirate crew had been given such characters too). On the other hand, Conan’s morals are hard to sympathize with (even giving up his loot to help a woman has confusing motivation), there are lapses of logic, and the supernatural being seems superficial to the tale.

If I remember correctly, in de Camp’s edit, Conan is running from betrayal by the King of Aquilonia when the first group of Picts captures him and he ends up able to recover all the treasure. That’s tighter and more surprising, given the character’s track record with treasure.