“Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars — Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold.
So begins the first Conan story published, in Weird Tales, December 1932. “Oh Prince” is the addressee of a fictional lost book called the Nemedian Chronicles. The writer, the keeper of memories, is telling their ancient reader that between two big moments in the course of human events as described by the Theosophists*, there was a whole age which, unlike Atlantis and such, no one dreams of. This was when Conan lived.
(I have to say, “with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery” is some fine prose-poetry.)
*In Theosophy’s outline of history, the Aryans – meaning all Indo-Europeans – were one of the seven human races that evolved on the continent of Atlantis before it sank. All seven evolved from one of the seven races of black people who populated Lemuria. “Secondary worlds” not having been invented by Tolkien yet, this purportedly-true fiction made a handy playground for fantasy writers like the Lovecraft circle.
Anyway, in the first act of our drama, masked conspirators skulk in the labyrinth of alleys in the capital city of Aquilonia. They just left a meeting with Ascalante, whose dusky slave mocked them after they went. For this is no mean slave, but Thoth-Amon, a famous magician of Stygia, most of whose power exists in a Ring, which he lost. Why do masters of the dark arts do that? It couldn’t be mindless imitation of Tolkien, since he’d never published a book by 1932.
The conspirators are “Volmana, the dwarfish count of Karaban; Gromel, the giant commander of the Black Legion; Dion, the fat baron of Attalus; Rinaldo, the hare-brained minstrel.”
Aye, except for Thoth-Amon, everything about this setting is so medieval European that they literally have a Rinaldo. They’ve formed a far-reaching conspiracy controlling everything from liquor smuggling to a diplomatic mission, to the effect that the barbarian usurper King Conan only has enough warriors around that 20 cutthroats will be able to sneak in and overpower them. But why does the conspiracy have a minstrel?
“Poets always hate those in power. To them perfection is always just behind the last corner, or beyond the next. They escape the present in dreams of the past and future. Rinaldo is a flaming torch of idealism, rising, as he thinks, to overthrow a tyrant and liberate the people.”
This is a frustrating combination of insightful and anachronistic. Traditional people believed in a Golden Age in the past, but there wasn’t a rival worldview that believed the True and Only Heaven was to exist in the future, brought about by human effort.
Next we find Conan complaining to his advisor:
“I did not dream far enough, Prospero. When King Numedides lay dead at my feet and I tore the crown from his gory head and set it on my own, I had reached the ultimate border of my dreams. I had prepared myself to take the crown, not to hold it.“When I overthrew Numedides, then I was the Liberator—now they spit at my shadow. They have put a statue of that swine in the temple of Mitra, and people go and wail before it, hailing it as the holy effigy of a saintly monarch who was done to death by a red-handed barbarian. When I led her armies to victory as a mercenary, Aquilonia overlooked the fact that I was a foreigner, but now she can not forgive me.
If he hates wizards, why let a man named Prospero be his trusted adviser?
Also note that with this reading order, we can see that “led Aquilonian armies to victory as a mercenary” was a tale Howard never told.
Prospero says they should hang Rinaldo for sedition, but Conan says no:
A great poet is greater than any king. His songs are mightier than my scepter; for he has near ripped the heart from my breast when he chose to sing for me. I shall die and be forgotten, but Rinaldo’s songs will live for ever.
Meanwhile, Thoth-Amon tries to get Dion to believe he’s not an ordinary slave, but a great man he should betray Ascalante with.
I was a great sorcerer in the south. Men spoke of Thoth-Amon as they spoke of Rammon. King Ctesphon of Stygia gave me great honor, casting down the magicians from the high places to exalt me above them. They hated me, but they feared me, for I controlled beings from outside which came at my call and did my bidding. By Set, mine enemy knew not the hour when he might awake at midnight to feel the taloned fingers of a nameless horror at his throat! I did dark and terrible magic with the Serpent Ring of Set, which I found in a nighted tomb a league beneath the earth, forgotten before the first man crawled out of the slimy sea.
“Before the first man crawled out of the sea” is a technically sloppy cliche in SF and weird fiction, but taken literally this would mean Set existed and was worshiped by someone building and forgetting tombs in the Late Devonian.)
“Ring? Ring?” Thoth had underestimated the man’s utter egoism. Dion had not even been listening to the slave’s words, so completely engrossed was he in his own thoughts, but the final word stirred a ripple in his self-centeredness.“Ring?” he repeated. “That makes me remember—my ring of good fortune. I had it from a Shemitish thief who swore he stole it from a wizard far to the south, and that it would bring me luck.
… so Thoth-Amon kills him. He uses the ring to summon a gigantic baboon demon, telling it to kill Ascalante.
Later that night, the dreaming King Conan hears a curious call he cannot ignore.
He came upon a wide stair carved in the solid rock, and the sides of the shaft were adorned with esoteric symbols so ancient and horrific that King Conan’s skin crawled. The steps were carven each with the abhorrent figure of the Old Serpent, Set, so that at each step he planted his heel on the head of the Snake, as it was intended from old times.
(Genesis 3:15 – this is one of only a couple times Howard goes Biblical on us. Salome and the crucifixion is the other one.)
He meets Epemitreus the Sage, dead 1500 years, who tells him of portents “against which your sword can not aid you.” So he gives Conan a magic sword, providing the story’s title!
The last chapter begins with the conspirators and their picked men sneaking up on King Conan in the palace. They knock down his door upon reaching it, but find “not a naked man roused mazed and unarmed out of deep sleep to be butchered like a sheep, but a barbarian wide-awake and at bay, partly armored”.
Much is made of the importance of armor:
there had been lack of time to don the heavy plumed casque, or to lace in place the side-plates of the cuirass, nor was there now time to snatch the great shield from the wall.
Eventually Conan would be depicted as surviving all his combats in a loincloth, but that's a story for another time. Heavily outnumbered and not in a full armored shell, “Conan himself did not hope to survive,”
The theme of Conan wanting to not kill Rinaldo continues:
“Rinaldo!” his voice was strident with desperate urgency. “Back! I would not slay you—”“Die, tyrant!” screamed the mad minstrel, hurling himself headlong on the king. Conan delayed the blow he was loth to deliver, until it was too late. Only when he felt the bite of the steel in his unprotected side did he strike, in a frenzy of blind desperation.Rinaldo dropped with his skull shattered, and Conan reeled back against the wall, blood spurting from between the fingers which gripped his wound.
One has to wonder if the Cimmerians have bards who are considered important and holy.
Then Conan’s life is saved by the mob of enemies running in fear from the baboon demon. As bid, it kills Ascalante. It then grips Conan’s arm, and “Conan felt his soul shrivel and begin to be drawn out of his body, to drown in the yellow wells of cosmic horror which glimmered spectrally in the formless chaos”.
Remembering that only magic weapons can hurt such things, he grabs the lower part of his sword that broke in the fight and stabs, which is enough to kill it. And when it dies, it completely vanishes. Some courtiers rushing to his aid think he’s delusional. He goes on about the dead sage’s ghost, which makes the high priest of Mitra cry “lord king, be silent!” It seems that everything he’s blabbing about that corridor is “one of the Mysteries, on which Mitra’s cult stands.”
This isn’t one of my favorites, but it’s short and tightly-written.
This first Conan story was a re-write of one of Howard’s King Kull stories, “By This Axe I Rule!” Kull stories had been published in Weird Tales twice, but since Howard’s Muse inspired him to write one with no supernatural element, he submitted it to Argosy and Adventure in 1929, where it was rejected. He got the idea for “an age undreamed of” and its barbarian adventurer, which he fleshed out as he revised BTAIR. As soon as he was finished, he started filling in Conan’s youth with “The Frost Giant’s Daughter”, then “The God in the Bowl” in which Thoth-Amon also figured. Then he forgot all about the character, until writing The Hour of the Dragon, in which Conan slaughters a rival cabal of Stygian priests for a MacGuffin, indifferent to the fact that he strengthened Thoth-Amon by eliminating rivals.
That’s all to say that this character was not a Conan villain. Conan never had a villain, just different antagonists. The arch-nemesis is a rule of writing an adventure series that hadn’t solidified yet. How many times did Conan Doyle write Sherlock Holmes trying to stop the master criminal Moriarty? Twice?
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