Conan reviews #20: “The Scarlet Citadel”

Originally published in Weird Tales, January 1933. Beaten for the cover by “Buccaneers of Venus”.

Frank Frazetta illustrated it as the cover for Conan the Usurper.

King Conan stands on a battlefield with “the pick of his chivalry” all dead around him, none having fled. (He’s said to have brought 5,000 knights, so if that’s “the pick” rather than a supreme effort, Aquilonia’s military resources must approximate France’s circa Agincourt.) He came as an ally of King Amalrus of Ophir to the south, whose plea for help was a double-cross: at Ophir’s southern border, he joins forces with purported enemy King Strabonus of Koth. Tsotha-lanti, the wizard of Koth, forces his king to take Conan alive. Tsotha does this by touching him where the mail was hacked away, with a ring that has a retractile spike.

“It is steeped in the juice of the purple lotus which grows in the ghost-haunted swamps of southern Stygia,” said the magician. “Its touch produces temporary paralysis.”

That's the fifth color of lotus in these stories, I think.

The king sends his General Arbanus to the Aquilonian border, to “invest the city of Shamar”, while kings and wizard withdraw the wounded with part of the baggage train to Koth’s capital. Conan recovers chained in a citadel. The rulers say they’ll free him and give him gold if he’ll abdicate. He says:

“I found Aquilonia in the grip of a pig like you—one who traced his genealogy for a thousand years. The land was torn with the wars of the barons, and the people cried out under oppression and taxation. Today no Aquilonian noble dares maltreat the humblest of my subjects, and the taxes of the people are lighter than anywhere else in the world.”

Conan the libertarian!

The King of Ophir wants to kill Conan, but Tsotha casts a temporary blindness spell with a powder to stop him. He has him chained down in the dungeon instead.

“And so, farewell, barbarian,” mocked the sorcerer. “I must ride to Shamar, and the siege. In ten days I will be in your palace in Tamar, with my warriors. What word from you shall I say to your women, before I flay their dainty skins for scrolls whereon to chronicle the triumphs of Tsotha-lanti?”

The first dungeon encounter is with an eighty-foot venomous snake (why would such a huge snake evolve venom – what larger prey would it need to hunt?). The outer door suddenly clangs and the snake slithers away. The source of the noise is a gigantic black nudist, taunting Conan with the keys: “What will you give me for them?” This guy is taunting him because when Conan was a corsair, he sacked a walled village called Abombi. The man’s brother died, Conan (and presumably Belit, not named here) sailed away with the loot, and this man ended up enslaved by Stygians for lack of village defenses. Conan of course has to be reminded because he’s killed a lot of people’s brothers.

Holy cow, Conan was the original M. Bison.

He offers his tormentor’s weight in gold pieces for the keys, but money can’t buy what he’s lost! He wants bloody revenge.

“The price I ask is—your head!”

The last word was a maniacal shriek that sent the echoes shivering. Conan tensed, unconsciously straining against his shackles in his abhorrence of dying like a sheep; then he was frozen by a greater horror. Over the black’s shoulder he saw a vague horrific form swaying in the darkness.

“Tsotha will never know!” laughed the black fiendishly, too engrossed in his gloating triumph to take heed of anything else, too drunk with hate to know that Death swayed behind his shoulder.

(Laughing “Tsotha will never know!” at the top of his lungs just makes me think he’s Dan Backslide.)

Anyway, at that moment the snake darts out to make him its dinner, and the dead guy drops those precious keys.

Now Conan is free in a locked dungeon with monsters and possibly traps. He just needs to find some other Player Characters for this story to really be like an RPG. Next, Shukeli the eunuch/chief jailer, who had followed his stolen keys, confronts Conan from behind a barred gate. He gets stabbed through said gate for his trouble.

Conan thinks he hears a woman weeping and skulks in that direction, but…

Its unstable outlines somewhat suggested an octopus, but its malformed tentacles were too short for its size, and its substance was a quaking, jelly-like stuff which made him physically sick to look at. From among this loathsome gelid mass reared up a frog-like head, and he was frozen with nauseated horror to realize that the sound of weeping was coming from those obscene blubbery lips.

Running away, he trips over something and loses his only torch. Some Lovecraftian horrors are insinuated, then Conan finds another prisoner, held in bondage with weird vines. Freed, he says he’s Pelias, a rival sorcerer.

He pent me in here with this devil-flower whose seeds drifted down through the black cosmos from Yag the Accursed, and found fertile field only in the maggot-writhing corruption that seethes on the floors of hell.

(That’s the planet Yag-Kosha and all his kin came from. “The Tower of the Elephant” was actually the next story written after this one.)

The wise man explains the dungeon’s backstory:

“He did not dig them. when the city was founded three thousand years ago there were ruins of an earlier city on and about this hill. King Khossus V, the founder, built his palace on the hill, and digging cellars beneath it, came upon a walled-up doorway, which he broke into and discovered the pits, which were about as we see them now. But his grand vizier came to such a grisly end in them that Khossus in a fright walled up the entrance again.”

Interestingly enough, one of the largest subterranean towns in the real world was rediscovered when a local homeowner was doing renovation in his basement and discovered a mysterious room behind a wall. That was only forty years after it was abandoned, though.

Pelias casts a Fear spell on the snake, briefly animates the dead Shukeli, and scrys on Shamar. Conan says it’s hopeless to rally his kingdom if they escape, because Shamar is a day’s ride and the capital five more. So Pelias summons a winged creature “neither bat nor bird”, from the far reaches of the skies, its species unguessed of men, for Conan to ride. Pelias says it’s OK to split the party: he’ll cast another spell and catch up at Shamar.

Meanwhile at the capital, Count Trecero whom Conan left in authority tries to be honorable, but the commons riot out of distrust of each noble’s ignoble past, making an opening for one Prince Arpello to seize the baton and declare himself king. Class conflict is narrated at length. Suddenly, Conan awes the people with his supernatural authority by simply landing the Lovecraftian bird-bat on a tower. Arpello attacks him and gets thrown off the tower.

After the necessary time for persuasion and logistics, King Conan rides to lift the siege of Shamar.

“You are mad!” squalled Tsotha, starting convulsively. “Conan has been in Satha’s belly for days!”

You say, without having stayed to watch. What a Bond villain.

Strabonus with vastly superior force plucks defeat from the jaws of victory by getting into single combat with Conan, whose zweihander crushes his skull through its helmet. So the invaders’ morale is hurt. In the general retreat, Conan recklessly chases Tsotha for revenge.

Conan rushed, sword gleaming, eyes slits of wariness. Tsotha’s right hand came back and forward, and the king ducked quickly. Something passed by his helmeted head and exploded behind him, searing the very sands with a flash of hellish fire. Before Tsotha could toss the globe in his left hand, Conan’s sword sheared through his lean neck.

He must feel really good about himself. The kingdom is safe and personal revenge was had– or no, wait, what’s this? Tsotha’s head still glares at him, and a sightless body gropes for its head. Luckily the wise man Pelias prepared for contingencies beyond a barbarian’s ken: an eagle swoops down to fly away with the head, and laughs with Pelias’ voice.

Then a hideous thing came to pass, for the headless body reared up from the sand, and staggered away in awful flight on stiffening legs, hands blindly outstretched toward the dot speeding and dwindling in the dusky sky. Conan stood like one turned to stone, watching until the swift reeling figure faded in the dusk that purpled the meadows.

“Crom!” his mighty shoulders twitched. “A murrain on these wizardly feuds! Pelias has dealt well with me, but I care not if I see him no more.

I love that ending. I also love the whole middle section with Conan in the dungeon, despite any and all literary shortcomings.

I don’t sympathize a lot with Conan, though. My attention is drawn more to Pelias and the Phyrric-victorious Aquilonia. We’re told:

Of the nineteen hundred knights who had ridden south with Conan, scarcely five hundred lived to boast of their scars, and the slaughter among the archers and pikemen was ghastly.

That’s 6,400 professional warriors/landowners/administrators and countless commoners dead. Seems like an absolute disaster for the victors.