Weird Fiction review: "The Challenge From Beyond"

This was a round robin story by Catherine L. Moore (known for medieval French sword and sorcery and Solar system-set Weird SF), Abraham Merritt (a novelist whose staple genre was “lost races”), H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and someone named Frank Belknap Long. It was the brainchild of Julius Schwartz, then a literary agent, but better remembered for his work at DC Comics long after the deaths of Lovecraft, Howard, and Merritt. It was written in the summer of 1935 for the September issue of Fantasy magazine.

C.L. Moore

George Campbell, a geology professor, is camping during summer break. When an animal disturbs his campsite, he picks up a rock to throw at it, but it’s “Square, crystal smooth, obviously artificial, with dull rounded corners.” It’s an age-worn artificial cube of quartz, and inside is a small disc with “Wedge-shaped characters, faintly reminiscent of cuneiform writing.” (He didn’t notice this while making camp?) He’s weirded out by how this could exist, his internal monologue running in the channel we now call “Lovecraftian”, even though it’s not his turn yet. “could there, in a Paleozoic world, have been things with a written language who might have graven these cryptic wedges upon the quartz-enveloped disc he held? Or—might a thing like this have fallen meteor-like out of space into the unformed rock of a still molten world?” He turns off his flashlight… did the cube continue glowing a moment?

Bare summary doesn’t do justice to Moore’s luxurious prose, the positive feature that balances her harebrained plot development.

A. Merritt

Campbell can’t sleep. He gets back up to experiment with the cube. It acts weird when photons hit it, but only if he’s paying attention. “His mind must travel along the ray, fix itself upon the cube’s heart, if its beat were to wax, until … what?” Much unnecessary detail of sights, sounds, etc. follows, then the object absorbs him.

And he passes the baton to…

H.P. Lovecraft

Campbell’s mind traverses the vast physical distance between where he was and some unknown cosmic destination. It’s scary to not have a body, especially if your internal monologue assumes materialism! He tries to think as he moves, and “Some cell-group in the back of his head had seemed to find a cloudily familiar quality in the cube—and that familiarity was fraught with dim terror.” Because of course he remembers that, as a professor, he’s familiar with the Eltdown Shards, cuneiform-like clay tablets geologists found in pre-carboniferous strata in England thirty years ago. While a few scientists “hinted at” their heretical artificiality (in Lovecraft, do academics ever make clear claims rather than hinting or insinuating?), he only remembers something about a cube because he’s also read the far less reputable book by “a deeply learned Sussex clergyman of occultist leanings” purporting to translate the Eltdown Shards. If the Reverend is right (of course he is), on an extra-galactic planet “a mighty order of worm-like beings whose attainments and whose control of nature surpassed anything within the range of terrestrial imagination” gradually colonized their entire galaxy. No technology could let them navigate to other galaxies in person, so in their thirst for knowledge of all space and time “They devised peculiar objects—strangely energized cubes of a curious crystal containing hypnotic talismen and enclosed in space-resisting spherical envelopes of an unknown substance—which could be forcibly expelled beyond the limits of their universe,” and when by chance a mind observed one some indefinite amount of time after it landed on a planet, the hypnotized mind will be beamed to the worm-people’s planet, where one of the natives can perform a mind-swap to go exploring the victim’s extra-galactic space-time coordinates.

Sometimes, when a potentially important race capable of space travel was found, the worm-like folk would employ the cube to capture and annihilate minds by the thousands, and would extirpate the race for diplomatic reasons—using the exploring minds as agents of destruction.

Only a few of the numberless cubes sent forth ever found a landing and response on an inhabited world—since there was no such thing as aiming them at goals beyond sight or knowledge. Only three, ran the story, had ever landed on peopled worlds in our own particular universe. One of these had struck a planet near the galactic rim two thousand billion years ago, while another had lodged three billion years ago on a world near the centre of the galaxy. The third—and the only one ever known to have invaded the solar system—had reached our own earth 150,000,000 years ago.

It was with this latter that Dr. Winters-Hall’s “translation” chiefly dealt.

Fortunately for Earth, it was then dominated by the Great Race, who knew a thing or two about mind transference, so their scientists reacted efficiently and “carefully hid the thing from light and sight, and guarded it as a menace.”

Now and then some rash, unscrupulous adventurer would furtively gain access to it and sample its perilous powers despite the consequences—but all such cases were discovered, and safely and drastically dealt with.

 

(I love the mental image of tentacled, cone-shaped adventures, wielding weapons and bracing their mighty muscles.)

Fifty million years ago, the beings sent their minds ahead to escape a peril from the inner Earth, and the whereabouts of the cube were lost to Earthly minds ever since. In a delightful bit of self-parody, Lovecraft has Campbell note the length and detail of this “translation” relative to the small number of Eltdown glyphs.

He wakes up and tries to move, bu thoughts like “move my hand” have no coherent output, and his five senses are not what he’s used to. Good ol’ body horror. A fellow being comes in, like a pale grey centipede, and appears to threaten him.

Robert E. Howard

He fought down an unreasoning horror. Judged from a cosmic standpoint, why should his metamorphosis horrify him? Life and consciousness were the only realities in the universe. Form was unimportant. His present body was hideous only according to terrestrial standards.

Campbell mans up (centipedes up?) and thinks of his old body as just a cloak that would have been cast off upon a natural death anyway. What had that life “ever given him save toil, poverty, continual frustration and repression?” The only positive things in memory were “the physical delights of his former life.”

But he had long ago exhausted all the physical possibilities contained in that earthly body. Earth held no new thrills. But in the possession of this new, alien body he felt promises of strange, exotic joys.

Bwah?

Campbell also has access to the neurons of the being who left this body, Tothe of the planet Yekub. “Carved deep in the physical tissues of the brain, they spoke dimly as implanted instincts to George Campbell; and his human consciousness seized them and translated them to show him the way not only to safety and freedom, but to…” power! He’s doing the full Nietzsche.

Understanding that the centipede threatening him with a metal box is Yukth, “supreme lord of science”, he kills him anyway. He uses Tothe’s memories to run to the shrine of a floating white sphere and seize it – the god of Yekub! (though why the aliens worship a dumb old sphere for an idol has been forgotten for a million years.) Conan the Centipede kills the nearby priest and glories in thoughts of how he’ll be king now! He, who dared the easy thing no “man of Yekub” ever would, for as an Earthling he is Beyond Good and Evil as the centipedes subjectively think of them! Muwhahaha!

Frank Belknap Long

In Campbell’s body, Tothe walks around like an idiot, frothing at the mouth. His fingers are clawed now?

Meanwhile Conan the Centipede streaks through fern-planted avenues between the cyclopean buildings under the alien sun. Woo, got your god!

Back on Earth, Tothe is overwhelmed by bestial human brain patterns and tries to eat a live fox.

Meanwhile thousands of worm-shapes prostrate themselves as the ex-Campbell undulates toward the throne of spiritual empire.

Back on Earth, Campbell’s body/Tothe dies by drowning and is found by a fur trapper. He finds it much hairier and beast-like than Campbell left it, and dripping black ichor instead of blood.

Meanwhile the divine sphere acts on Tothe’s body, burning with “a supermundane spirituality all animal dross.” Then it communicates:

“On all earth, living creatures rend one another, and feast with unutterable cruelty on their kith and kin. No worm-mind can control a bestial man-body when it yearns to raven. Only man-minds instinctively conditioned through the course of ten thousand generations can keep the human instincts in thrall. Your body will destroy itself on earth, seeking the blood of its animal kin, seeking the cool water where it can wallow at its ease. Seeking eventually destruction, for the death-instinct is more powerful in it than the instincts of life and it will destroy itself in seeking to return to the slime from which it sprang.”

Thus spoke the round red god of Yekub in a far-off segment of the space-time continuum to George Campbell as the latter, with all human desire purged away, sat on a throne and ruled an empire of worms more wisely kindly, and benevolently than any man of earth had ever ruled an empire of men.

Whoa, he ended it with a huge Take That to Howard’s intentions.

Well, you don’t read a round robin for narrative cohesion. You want to see the different authors’s styles contrasting in small chunks. And this one is better than most, because not everyone just spews their style onto the page with a straight face: Lovecraft in particular has the self-awareness to make fun of himself. Howard might have been doing the same: Conan the Centipede is a more over-the-top power fantasy than actual Conan, who often showed a code of ethics.

Merritt does the least by far. Moore had the job of creating a character and MacGuffin, so she couldn’t run wild like Howard or Howard. And not having read Frank Belknap Long, his section, while very distinct, has the least to contextualize it. How does an alien not understanding human instincts turn the body into a werewolf? What were Long’s psychological preoccupations as an author? That stuff about the unutterable cruelty of Earth life and how humans can only act better because of ten thousand generations of conditioning echoes the French Counter-Revolutionary philosopher Joseph de Maistre (e.g. Seventh St. Petersburg Dialogue), filtered through the later Darwinian paradigm shift.

Weird Fiction reviews, Howard bonus round: "The Shadow Kingdom"

This story was originally published in the August, 1929 issue of Weird Tales.

King Kull is an outcast from the barbarian tribes of Atlantis who usurped the throne of Valusia, dominant power of his age. A Pictish emissary arrives. He asks Kull to come alone to a state feast to be recognized as king of kings. Kull is a meditative sort, and ponders how strange it is that his ambition has cost him the ancient friendship of kin and made him friend of the Atlanteans’s ancient enemies.

Strange to him were the intrigues of court and palace, army and people. All was like a masquerade, where men and women hid their real thoughts with a smooth mask.

Who was he, a straightforward man of the seas and the mountain, to rule a race strangely and terribly wise with the mysticisms of antiquity? An ancient race—

He decides the invitation is not a trap and attends the feast of the Pictish statesman Ka-nu. Dismissing everyone else, Ka-nu tells Kull that he could bring the Atlantean tribes under Valusian rule as well as its hegemonic alliances with other empires and the Picts, despite his name being accursed as an outcast:

I know whereof I speak. And then warfare will cease, wherein there is no gain; I see a world of peace and prosperity — man loving his fellow man — the good supreme. All this can you accomplish — if you live!”

Ka-nu mysteriously refuses to reveal what the threat is, but shows that he has a holy gem stolen from the Serpent temple and says he’ll send Brule the Spear-Slayer to help Kull. He returns introspectively to the City of Wonders:

“You are young,” said the palaces and the temples and the shrines, “but we are old. The world was wild with youth when we were reared. You and your tribe shall pass, but we are invincible, indestructible. We towered above a strange world, ere Atlantis and Lemuria rose from the sea;

Later, Brule climbs in a palace window, into a room Kull has stationed 18 guards outside of. He says the strange words “Ka nama kaa lajerama!” He shows the baffled king a hidden door in his own palace, warning him that it’s full of such, and night and day he is watched by many eyes. In a room at the base of a flight of stairs they spy on… the same 18 guards! Kull sneaks back to the study, and those guards are still outside the door. He demands to know what sorcery is this.

“we are but barbarians — infants compared to the Seven Empires. Not even they themselves know how old they are. Neither the memory of man nor the annals of the historians reach back far enough to tell us when the first men came up from the sea and built cities on the shore. But Kull, men were not always ruled by men!”

A Councilor Tu skulks with a dagger along the stairs. He tries to kill Kull, but is killed instead. As he dies, his human features are replaced by a serpent’s head!
The tale goes that when the first humans came to be, there were already civilized serpent men. In time they were decadent and defeated, and they were cast out into the wastelands, where the survivors all learned a magic charm to change their appearance. So they returned when humans were too decadent to care about the old wars, wearing the faces of any human they willed in order to continue ruling the world.

Brule backstabs Kull and gets killed, also turning into a serpent man! Just as Kull meditates paranoid on how many men are even human, the real Brule steps through the secret door again. He reassures Kull that no serpent man can speak the shibboleth “Ka nama kaa lajerama.”

“Through the dim corridors of memory those words lurk; though you never heard them in this life, yet in the bygone ages they were so terribly impressed upon the soul mind that never dies, that they will always strike dim chords in your memory, though you be reincarnated for a million years to come. For that phrase has come secretly down the grim and bloody eons, since when, uncounted centuries ago, those words were watch-words for the race of men who battled with the grisly beings of the Elder Universe.

“the bird-women, the harpies, the bat-men, the flying fiends, the wolf-people, the demons, the goblins — all [gone] save such as this being that lies at our feet, and a few of the wolf-men. Long and terrible was the war, lasting through the bloody centuries, since first the first men, risen from the mire of apedom, turned upon those who then ruled the world.”

The Picts had a legend that when their ancestors first seized land from the Valusians, the king came out to meet them in battle, where he died and turned into a serpent man. From that clue, Ka-nu pieced together that every time a human becomes king, the serpent men kill and replace him. So he tried to help Kull avoid that fate, and end the wars between peoples they use to distract us.
The next day, there’s a new Tu in the palace, and Kull sits on the throne keeping his own counsel.

Always he had seen their faces as masks, but before he had looked on them with contemptuous tolerance, thinking to see beneath the masks shallow, puny souls, avaricious, lustful, deceitful; now there was a grim undertone, a sinister meaning, a vague horror that lurked beneath the smooth masks.

Was it the real Kull who sat upon the throne or was it the real Kull who had scaled the hills of Atlantis, harried the far isles of the sunset, and laughed upon the green roaring tides of the Atlantean sea? How could a man be so many different men in a lifetime? For Kull knew that there were many Kulls and he wondered which was the real Kull. After all, the priests of the Serpent went a step further in their magic, for all men wore masks, and many a different mask with each different man or woman; and Kull wondered if a serpent did not lurk under every mask.

He’s starting to think of even himself as an illusion.
He declares “Ka nama kaa lajerama!”, and every noble in the hall recoils. Slaying them, another illusion falls: the council room is actually the room called Accursed, disused since an earlier king died in it, and when they rush to the real council room, another Kull is addressing the true human versions of the same nobles! Kull kills the impostor and declares:

Here I swear that I shall hunt the serpent-men from land to land, from sea to sea, giving no rest until all be slain, that good triumph and the power of Hell be broken.

As you can guess from the precocious reference to Hell, the serpent men of this imagined prehistory are supposed to remind us of the Serpent Adam and Eve knew. But the references to Atlantis, Lemuria, and predecessors thereto is based on Theosophy, and that carried with it secondhand Hindu-Buddhist concepts like maya (illusion). Those religions have their own serpent men: nagas. Nagas are ambivalent figures, sometimes divine and sometimes loathed,* and in Southeast Asian traditions of receiving civilization from India, the first Indian may be met by an indigenous leader identified as a naga. So Howard was mixing cultural symbols and their emotional valence to make a new myth.

*The positive view is more common, but for instance the Mahabharata starts with a frame story where all nagas/cobras are loathsome things the king wants to exterminate.

Conan review #21: The Hour of the Dragon

This novel was first serialized in Weird Tales, December 1935 through April 1936. Margaret Brundage’s cover art depicted Zenobia giving Conan keys while he sits in a dungeon cell being like “Alms, alms for the poor.”

When later published as a novel, as originally intended, its titled changed to Conan the Conqueror, with Frank Frazetta painting a battle scene.

Four conspirators use a gem called the Heart of Ahriman to raise a mummy from the dead. He is Xaltotun, a wizard from the land of Acheron, which coexisted with Stygia until falling to Hyborian barbarians 3,000 years ago. They want his magical aid in replacing Conan with one of them, the deposed king’s son, and replacing the king of Nemedia with another, his younger brother.

Xaltoun sends a plague through Nemedia’s capital, striking down serf, merchant and knight as well as the king and his sons. The new King Tarascus declares war on Aquilonia, and they meet in a low Aquilonian valley framed by rugged cliffs.

(For those keeping track, Tarascus’s army outnumbers Conan’s, but only 50,000 to 45,000. And that’s after a civil war and all the losses in “The Scarlet Citadel”.)

In his tent, Conan wakes from a nightmare and begins to surmise that the plague in Nemedia was sorcery.

“Why did it cease when [the king] died?”

“Men say he sinned — ”

“Men are fools, as always,” grunted Conan. “If the plague struck all who sinned, then by Crom there wouldn’t be enough left to count the living! …

“No! The black plague’s no common pestilence. It lurks in Stygian tombs, and is called forth into being only by wizards. I was a swordsman in Prince Almuric’s army that invaded Stygia, and of his thirty thousand, fifteen thousand perished by Stygian arrows, and the rest by the black plague that rolled on us.

Sure, blame Stygia for everything.

A shadowy figure casts a spell of paralysis on Conan. His aides react with a Patroclus Gambit: putting a look-alike named Vallanus in the king’s armor. Everything looks fine until a magic rockslide kills the false Conan and the knights he was leading: morale collapses and the Nemedians win. Finding Conan, Tarascus wants him slain with arrows, but Xaltoun wants him taken alive (deja vu). The wizard throws a fireball (it’s described like a grenade), leaving Conan unconscious with 0 hit points so he can be thrown in a dungeon. He also intimidates some soldiers by casting an illusion that a man’s belt is a venomous snake.

Note that when Conan is thrown in the dungeon by four slaves, to make room for him they literally have to move a skeleton chained cartoonishly to a metal ring in the wall.

A girl brings Conan three different keys, letting him escape. She says her motive is that she’s a harem girl the late king never even took to bed, and she loved Conan from afar when first she saw him, and her means was getting three of the four slave guards drunk. Without the fourth key, he’ll have to escape the long way. She also gives him a dagger, impressing him with her practical intelligence.

Soon he spies a carnivorous ape in the dungeon, which would have been let into his cell were he still present to eat.

these apes were the goblins of Hyborian legendry, and were in reality ogres of the natural world, cannibals and murderers of the nighted forests.

In reality they’re ogres, but legendry downgraded them to goblins? Huh.

He fatally stabs the ape’s heart, then gets out to where the girl Zenobia is waiting. Doing a Polonius behind curtains, Conan overhears King Tarascus telling a rogue to go throw the Heart of Ahriman stolen from Xaltoun in the sea, “so far from land that neither tide nor storm can wash it up on the beach.” Now a Reverse Polonius: Tarascus is alone so Conan leaps out of the curtains and stabs him, non-fatally. Zenobia catches up with him and explains how he can escape alone to where she has a horse waiting. He promises to come back for her. On the outskirts of the city, he encounters someone literally called “one of the Adventurers, a class of warriors peculiar to Nemedia”, whom he has to slay to escape, riding off in the Adventurer’s armor. Thus ends Chapter 6 of 22. If only Conan had found a wizard who could summon a byakhee, this wouldn’t be a novel!

Once in Aquilonia, Conan finds four soldiers trying to kill an old woman, who turns out to be a witch who can summon animals. She scries for him and they see that Valerius has already been crowned king, with many people satisfied. Next he visits a loyalist named Servius on his plantation, who explains the political situation as doomed because there was no heir to rally to. And with the king alive, the central provinces won’t rise up because they’ve already seen sorcery used against loyalists. Servius also mentions that Countess Albiona is slated for execution, which Conan departs to stop.

A disguised Conan sneaks into a tower in the capital, where he spies the executioner and stealthily kills him. He then rescues Albiona, but outside they’re pinned between guards chasing them and ten soldiers in front. Conan can kill three, but masked loyalists have to backstab the rest for him to make it out of the encounter.

The loyalists are led by Hadrathus, high priest of Asura, whose cult owes Conan a debt for letting them worship openly in Aquilonia.

“Our ancestors came from Vendhya, beyond the Sea of Vilayet and the blue Himelian mountains. We are sons of the East, not the South, and we have knowledge of all the wizards of the East, who are greater than the wizards of the West. And not one of them but would be a straw in the wind before the black might of Xaltotun.”

But he was conquered once, when he lost the Heart of Ahriman… and wasn’t there something about a thief throwing it in the sea? Hadrathus offers to send Clerics questing with Conan, but he says “This is a task for a fighting-man”, not an adventuring party, apparently.

Meanwhile, Valerius is informed of the violence Conan just wrought, and it turns out that Valerius has four exiled mages from Khitai in the Far East serving him (apparently Conan’s not the only Hyborian who travels that far).

Conan escapes as the “Charon” in a boat burial, with Albiona posing as the corpse. At a waterfall, an acolyte of Asura meets them with horses (and the GM fails to railroad them into accepting him into the party).

When sitting with the loyal Count Trocero, word comes that Valerius’s thief was killed by mountain bandits, whose chief Zorathus is on his way to the main port of Argos to sell the Heart of Ahriman. Conan attempts to chase him in the armor of a Free Companion. Conan’s mind starts to revert to type:

Why should he not seek forgetfulness, lose himself in the red tides of war and rapine that had engulfed him so often before? Could he not, indeed, carve out another kingdom for himself? The world was entering an age of iron, an age of war and imperialistic ambition; some strong man might well rise above the ruins of nations as a supreme conqueror. Why should it not be himself? So his familiar devil whispered in his ear, and the phantoms of his lawless and bloody past crowded upon him. But he did not turn aside

He’s stopped by a robber baron named Valbroso, who’s imprisoned Zorathus, who won’t give up a locked MacGuffin box. Dying on the rack, he tells Valbroso how to open it, just so a sharp protrusion can poison him. A Captain Beloso smashes things over Conan’s head so he can be the one to run off with the Heart. Conan is knocked unconscious in the chase and wakes up being attacked by a ghoul. He kills it and saves his pony from others.

Later, in Argos, Conan imposes on the hospitality of the merchant Publio, a contact from his Black Corsair days. He tells him about Beloso and the gem, and Publio decides to betray him. Beloso is traced to the House of Servio, where Conan finds him slain by a sorcerer of the black hand of Set. He escapes Publio’s assassins by feigning death just as he sees a Stygian galley row out to sea. But they return to report his death while Publio is being threatened by the mages from Khitai. They find Conan gone from the beach and extort a ship from Publio.

Conan’s “escape” was merely being impressed by a passing galley. Unfortunately for its owners, they have eighty black men chained as rowers and Conan recognizes them as old corsairs, so he starts shouting “I’m Amra!” Slaves start breaking free. Reaching Stygia, they find that the man who took the Heart in Argos was probably a priest named Thutothmes. He’d said to be seeking occult power to overthrow Thoth-Amon.

A Stygian city is described, and it’s all very evil and oppressive: few people out after dark! There’s a snake! Conan kills it instead of letting it eat someone, so he’s called a blasphemer. He ducks into a temple, where he kills a priest and takes his animal mask as a disguise. He joins a procession to find Thutothmes.

They might have been ghosts, moving toward that colossal pyramid that rose out of the murk of the desert. … No man could approach one of those somber piles of black stone without apprehension. The very name was a symbol of repellent horror among the northern nations, and legends hinted that the Stygians did not build them; that they were in the land at whatever immeasurably ancient date the dark-skinned people came into the land of the great river.

This is actually a relatively late pulp example of “Egyptians didn’t build the Pyramids”: it started in 1898.

Inside the pyramid, he gets separated from the priests and stumbles into a room with an ivory-skinned woman. He refuses to answer her, as speech would give away his alien origin.

“You are not a priest,” she said. “You are a fighting-man. Even with that mask that is plain. There is as much difference between you and a priest as there is between a man and a woman.

(The term “fighting man” instead of “fighter” in the earliest versions of Dungeons & Dragons is universally mocked, yet I’ve almost never seen "fighter" in a pre-1974 fantasy story. Tolkien’s Return of the King does have an orc say “There’s a great fighter about”.)

He grabs her throat, which is “cold as marble”, and they start to talk. She offers to lead him to Thutothmes and the stolen object, which makes him suspicious. It begins to dawn on him that she is Akivasha, “that ancient, evil, beautiful princess still lived the world over in song and legend, though ten thousand years had rolled their cycles since the daughter of Tuthamon had reveled in purple feasts amid the black halls of ancient Luxur.” (Thoth-Amon, Tuthamon, Thutothmes… Howard’s Egyptian names are getting annoyingly narrow.)

She tells him to let her drink his blood and love her, to which he throws her and says “Damned vampire!”

Conan knowing every type of monster by name feels like a very D&D attitude for a protagonist. But the description of psychological horror is kind of good:

To so many dreamers and poets and lovers she was not alone the evil princess of Stygian legend, but the symbol of eternal youth and beauty, shining for ever in some far realm of the gods. And this was the hideous reality. This foul perversion was the truth of that everlasting life. Through his physical revulsion ran the sense of a shattered dream of man’s idolatry, its glittering gold proved slime and cosmic filth.

In the pyramid’s catacombs, Thutothmes is preparing to resurrect all the elites mummified there, who stretch back 10,000 years. But before even the first, the mages from Khitai burst in. Demanding the Heart starts a fight, which the Khitans conduct entirely with Sticks to Snakes. They also have a lot of hit points, but the Stygian high priest has his death touch. Finally, Conan leaps out of the shadows and kills the fight’s sole survivor to steal the Heart. Oh, but that time it sat on the first mummy to be resurrected had an effect: he sits up all fleshy. The priest Thoth-mekri, 3,000 years dead, turns out to be a nice fellow who guides Conan out of the pyramid and lets him keep the Heart. Soon he’s back on the pirate ship, sailing for Zingara.

Xaltotun has been aloof since Aquilonia fell, and one of the original conspirators rushes into a council to tell the two kings that he is being hailed as arch-priest by mountain folk whose race was here before the Hyborians and summoning mirages of land and city as they were 3,000 years ago: “I tell you he would restore Acheron by his magic, by the sorcery of a gigantic blood-sacrifice such as the world has never seen. He would enslave the world, and with a deluge of blood wash away the present and restore the past!”

Xaltotun bursts in and kills him with a spell. Wizard and kings prepare for Conan’s rebel army from the west. Examining the terrain, they determine that he relies on a strategic river crossing to bring his forces to bear, but Xaltotun can take the long time to cast a spell causing rain and flood. Uncanny beings are heard in the wizard’s tent.

The next day, they learn there was no flood. But hope comes when a local named Tiberias offers to show Valerius the goat pass around Thermopylae, letting part of the army strike King Conan from behind. However, he leads them into a canyon to be ambushed by a rabble of people Valerius has harmed by his misrule. Whoa, secondary hero out of nowhere!

Xaltotun prepares to turn the tide of battle by sacrificing a virgin when the witch and high priest of Asura appear at the altar. The priest boasts that he dispeled Xaltotun’s rain magic and cast fog to trap Valerius. Holding the Heart, he intends to undo Xaltotun’s resurrection: “You shall go down the dark road to Acheron, which is the road of silence and the night. The dark empire, unreborn, shall remain a legend”.

The battle is mopped up with Conan defeating Tarascus in single combat, giving him quarter. He orders him to give the slave girl Zenobia as his ransom, and she’ll be made queen of Aquilonia.

This was the only Conan novel that Robert E. Howard wrote, at the behest of a British publisher that went out of business between accepting and publishing it. The form loses some of the compelling pacing of the better short stories, but I think Howard showed himself a skilled novelist by bringing back nearly everything he introduces back in the final chapter.

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.

Conan reviews #19: "The Phoenix on the Sword"

 

“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?

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.

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.

Conan review #16: “Jewels of Gwahlur”

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.