Conan of Cimmeria Part 1

Conan of Cimmeria.

by Robert E. Howard, Lin Carter and L. Sprague DeCamp.

Introduction.

Robert Ervin Howard (1906-36) was born in Peaster, Texas, and lived most of his life in Cross Plains, in the center of Texas between Abilene and Brownwood. During his last decade, this prolific and versatile writer turned out a large volume of what was then called "pulp fiction"- sport, detective, western, historical, adventure, weird, and ghost stories, as well as his many stories of adventure fantasy. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert W. Chambers, Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, Jack London, and H. P. Lovecraft (of whom he was a pen pal) all influenced him. At the age of thirty, he ended a promising literary career by suicide.

Howard's adventure fantasies belong to a kind of fiction called heroic fantasy, or sometimes swordplay-and-sorcery stories. Such stories are laid in a world not as it is or was but as it ought to have been. The setting may be the world as it is conceived to have been long ago, or as it will be in the distant future, or on another planet, or in another dimension. In such a world, magic works and spirits are real, but modern science and technology are essentially unknown. Either they have not yet been discovered, or they have been forgotten. Men are mighty, women are beautiful, problems are simple, and life is adventurous.

When well done, such tales furnish the purest fun to be found in modern fiction. They are designed primarily to entertain, not to educate, uplift, or convert to some faith or ideology. They derive ultimately from the myths, legends, and epics of ancient times and primitive peoples. After several centuries of neglect, William Morris revived the genre in England in the 1880s. Early in this century, Lord Dunsany and Eric R. Eddison made further contributions to the field. A notable recent addition to it has been the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R.

R. Tolkien.

The appearance of the American magazines Weird Tales in 1923 and Unknown Worlds in 1939 created new markets for heroic fantasy, and many notable stories in the genre were published. Among these, Howard's tales were outstanding. Howard wrote several series of heroic fantasies, most of them published in Weird Tales. Of these, the longest and most popular series comprised the Conan stories. Eighteen Conan stories were published in Howard's lifetime. Eight others, from complete ma.n.u.scripts to mere fragments and outlines, have been discovered among Howard's papers since 1950.

Late in 1951, I stumbled upon a cache of Howard's ma.n.u.scripts in the apartment of the then literary agent for Howard's estate. These included a few unpublished Conan stories, which I edited for publication. Other ma.n.u.scripts have been found in more recent years by Glenn Lord, literary agent for the Howard estate, in collections of Howard's papers.

The incomplete state of the Conan saga has tempted me and others to add to it, as Howard might have done had he lived. In the early 1950s, I rewrote the ma.n.u.scripts of four of Howard's unpublished adventure stories, with medieval or modern settings, to turn them into Conan stories. More recently, my colleagues Bjorn Nyberg and Lin Carter have collaborated with me in the completion of the stories that Howard left unfinished and in the composition of pastiches, based upon hints in Howard's notes and letters, to fill the gaps in the saga. The reader must judge how successful our posthumous collaboration with Howard had been.

During the past three years, Lancer Books has been engaged in the publication of the complete Conan saga-Howard's original stories, the stories begun by him and finished by other hands, and the pastiches-all in chronological order to give a coherent biography of our hero.

Because of legal complications, it was not possible to issue the volumes in chronological order. Thus this, the tenth volume to be published, is actually the second volume in chronological order, following Conan and preceding Conan the Freebooter. The ten volumes now in print include all the Conan stories by Howard-those completed by him and those finished by Carter or by me. At present, two more volumes of pastiche are planned to fill the remaining gaps. One, inshallah, will deal with Conan's career as a captain of the Zingaran buccaneers; the other, with his later years as king of Aquilonia.

Before he undertook the writing of the Conan stories, Howard constructed a pseudo-history of Conan's world, with the geography, ethnography, and political units clearly worked out. It is partly the concreteness of Howard's imaginary world that gives his stories their vividness and fascination-his sharp, gorgeous, consistent vision of "a purple and golden and crimson universe where anything can happen-except the tedious." He incorporated this plan in a long essay, "The Hyborian Age," which is printed in two parts in the volumes Conan and Conan the Avenger of this series.

According to Howard's scheme, Conan lived, loved, and plunged into his desperate adventures about twelve thousand years ago, eight thousand years after the sinking of Atlantis and seven thousand before the beginnings of recorded history.

In this time (according to Howard) the western parts of the main continent of the Eastern Hemisphere were occupied by the Hyborian kingdoms. These comprised a galaxy of states set up by northern invaders, the Hyborians, three thousand years earlier on the ruins of the evil empire of Acheron. South of the Hyborian kingdoms lay the quarreling city-states of Shem. Beyond Shem slumbered the ancient, sinister kingdom of Stygia, the rival and partner of Acheron in the days of the latter's bloodstained glory. Further south yet, beyond deserts and veldts, were barbarous black kingdoms. North of the Hyborians lay the barbarian lands of Cimmeria, Hyperborea, Vanaheim, and Asgard. West, along the ocean, were the fierce, savage Picts. To the east glittered the Hyrkanian kingdoms, of which the mightiest was Turan.

About 500 years after the time of Conan the Great, most of these realms were swept away by barbarian invasions and migrations. After some centuries during which the earth supported a drastically shrunken population of wandering, quarreling barbarians, civilization- what was left of it-was further overwhelmed by the last advance of the glaciers from the poles and by a convulsion of nature like that which had previously destroyed Atlantis. At this time, the North and Mediterranean Seas were formed, the great inland Vilayet Sea shrank to the dimensions of the present Caspian, and vast areas of West Africa arose from beneath the waves of the Atlantic. Mankind sank to the most primitive savagery. After the retreat of the ice of this glaciation, civilization again revived and recorded history began.

Conan was a gigantic barbarian adventurer who roistered, brawled, and battled his way across half the prehistoric world, to rise at last to the throne of a mighty realm. The son of a blacksmith in the bleak, backward northern country of Cimmeria, Conan was born on a battlefield in that land of rugged hills and somber skies. As a youth, he took part in the sack of the Aquilonian frontier settlement of Venarium.

Later, joining a band of AEsir in a raid into Hyperborea, Conan was captured by the Hyperboreans. Escaping from the Hyperborean slave pen, he wandered south into the kingdom of Zamora. For several years he made a precarious living there and in the adjacent lands of Corinthia and Nemedia as a thief. (See map, pages 6 and 7.) Green to civilization and quite lawless by nature, he made up for his lack of subtlety and sophistication by natural shrewdness and by the herculean physique he had inherited from his father.

Tiring of this starveling existence, Conan enlisted as a mercenary soldier in the armies of Turan. For the next two years he traveled widely, as far east as the fabled lands of Mem and Khitai. He also refined his archery and horsemans.h.i.+p, both of which had been at best indifferent up to the time of his joining the Turanians. It is during the later part of his Turanian service that the present volume begins.

Readers who would like to know more about Conan, Robert E. Howard, or heroic fantasy in general are referred to the other volumes of this series (listed in chronological order on the page before the t.i.tle page of this volume) and to two periodicals and one book. One periodical is Amra, published by George H. Scithers, Box 9120, Chicago, Ill., 60690.

This is the organ of the Hyborian Legion, a loose group of admirers of heroic fantasy and of the Conan stories in particular. The other periodical is The Howard Collector, published by Glenn Lord, literary agent for the Howard estate, Box 775, Pasadena, Tex., 77501. This is devoted to articles, stories, and poems by and about Howard.

The book is The Conan Reader, by the present writer, published by Jack L. Chalker, 5111 Liberty Heights Ave., Baltimore, Md., 21207. This consists of articles on Howard, Conan, and heroic fantasy previously published in Amra. I have also listed many works by Howard, currently available, in my introduction to the volume Conan of the present series. For those who wish to try heroic fantasy by other authors, besides the Tolkien trilogy and the various works by Lin Carter and myself, a number of excellent stories of this type are available in paperback form. These include the books by Jane Gaskell (three novels of Atlantis), John Jakes (Brak the Barbarian), Fritz Leiber (three books about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser), Michael Moorc.o.c.k (the four-volume History of the Runestaff, Lancer Books), Andre Norton (six "Witch World" novels), Fletcher Pratt (The Well of the Unicorn, Lancer Books), and Jack Vance (two collections of "Dying Earth" stories). I hope you have half the fun out of them that I have had.

L. Sprague de Camp

The Curse of the Monolith

Following the events of "The City of Skulls" (in the volume Conan), Conan rises to the rank of captain in the Turanian service. His growing repute as an irresistible fighter and a good man in a tight spot, however, instead of leading to soft jobs with large pay for little work, causes King Yildiz's generals to choose him for particularly hazardous missions. One of these takes him thousands of miles to eastward, to fabled Khitai.

Chapter One.

The sheer cliffs of dark stone closed about Conan the Cimmerian like the sides of a trap. He did not like the way their jagged peaks loomed against the few faint stars, which glittered like the eyes of spiders down upon the small camp on the flat floor of the valley. Neither did he like the chill, uneasy wind that whistled across the stony heights and prowled about the campfire. It caused the flames to lean and flicker, sending monstrous black shadows writhing across the rough stone walls of the nearer valley side.

On the other side of the camp, colossal redwoods, which had been old when Atlantis sank beneath the waves eight thousand years before, rose amid thickets of bamboo and clumps of rhododendron. A small stream meandered out of the woods, murmured past the camp, and wandered off into the forest again. Overhead, a layer of haze or high fog drifted across the tops of the cliffs, drowning the light of the fainter stars and making the brighter ones seem to weep.

Something about this place, thought Conan, stank of fear and of death.

He could almost smell the acrid odor of terror on the breeze. The horses felt it, too. They nickered plaintively, pawed the earth, and rolled white eyeb.a.l.l.s at the dark beyond the circle of the fire. The beasts were close to nature. So was Conan, the young barbarian warrior from the bleak hills of Cimmeria. Like his, their senses were more delicately turned to the aura of evil than were the senses of city-bred men like the Turanian troopers he had led into this deserted vale.

The soldiers sat about the fire, sharing the last of this night's ration of wine from goatskin bags. Some laughed and boasted of the amorous feats they would do in the silken bagnios of Aghrapur upon their return. Others, weary from a long day's hard ride, sat silently, staring at the fire and yawning. Soon they would settle down for the night, rolled in their heavy cloaks. With their heads pillowed on saddlebags, they would lie in a loose circle about the hissing fire, while two of their number stood guard with their powerful Hyrkanian bows strung and ready. They sensed nothing of the sinister force that hovered about the valley.

Standing with his back to the nearest of the giant redwoods, Conan wrapped his cloak more closely about him against the dank breeze from the heights. Although his troopers were well-built men of good size, he towered half a head over the tallest of them, while his enormous breadth of shoulder made them seem puny by comparison. His square-cut black mane escaped from below the edges of his spired, turban-wound helmet, and the deep-set blue eyes in his dark, scarred face caught glints of red from the firelight.

Sunk in one of his fits of melancholy gloom, Conan silently cursed King Yildiz, the well-meaning but weak Turanian monarch who had sent him on this ill-omened mission. Over a year had pa.s.sed since he had taken the oath of allegiance to the king of Turan. Six months before, he had been lucky enough to earn this king's favor; with the help of a fellow-mercenary, Juma the Kus.h.i.+te, he had rescued Yildiz's daughter Zosara from the mad G.o.d-king of Meru. He had brought the princess, more or less intact, to her affianced bridegroom, Khan Kujala of the nomadic Kuigar horde.

When Conan returned to Yildiz's glittering capital of Aghrapur, he had found the monarch generous enough in his grat.i.tude. Both he and Juma had been raised to captain. But, whereas Juma had obtained a coveted post in the Royal Guard, Conan had been rewarded with yet another arduous, perilous mission. Now, as he recalled these events, he sourly contemplated the fruits of success.

Yildiz had entrusted the Cimmerian giant with a letter to King Shu of Kusan, a minor kingdom in western Khitai. At the head of forty veterans, Conan had accomplished the immense journey. He had traversed hundreds of leagues of bleak Hyrkanian steppe and skirted the foothills of the towering Talakma Mountains. He had threaded his way through the windy deserts and swampy jungles bordering the mysterious realm of Khitai, the easternmost land of which the men of the West had heard.

Arrived in Kusan at last, Conan had found the venerable and philosophical King Shu a splendid host. While Conan and his warriors were plied with exotic food and drink and furnished with willing concubines, the king and his advisers decided to accept King Yildiz's offer of a treaty of friends.h.i.+p and trade. So the wise old king had handed Conan a gorgeous scroll of gilded silk. Thereon were inscribed, in the writhing ideographs of Khitai and the gracefully slanted characters of Hyrkania, the formal replies and felicitations of the Khitan king.

Besides a silken purse full of Khitan gold, King Shu had also furnished Conan with a high n.o.ble of his court, to guide them as far as the western borders of Khitai. But Conan had not liked this guide, this Duke Feng.

The Khitan was a slim, dainty, foppish little man with a soft, lisping voice. He wore fantastical silken garments, unsuited to rugged riding and camping, and drenched his exquisite person in heavy perfume. He never soiled his soft, long-nailed hands with any of the camp ch.o.r.es, but instead kept his two servants busy day and night ministering to his comfort and dignity.

Conan looked down upon the Khitan's habits with a hard-bitten barbarian's manly contempt. The duke's slanting black eyes and purring voice reminded him of a cat, and he often told himself to watch this little princeling for treachery. On the other hand, he secretly envied the Khitan his exquisitely cultivated manners and easy charm. This fact led Conan to resent the duke even more; for, although his Turanian service had given Conan some slight polish, he was still at heart the blunt, boorish young barbarian. He would have to be careful of this sly little Duke Feng.

Chapter Two.

"Do I disturb the profound meditations of the n.o.bly born commander?"

purred a soft voice.

Conan started and s.n.a.t.c.hed at the hilt of his tulwar before he recognized the person of Duke Feng, wrapped to the lip in a voluminous cloak of pea-green velvet. Conan started to growl a contemptuous curse.

Then, remembering his amba.s.sadorial duties, he turned the oath into a formal welcome that sounded unconvincing even in his own ears.

"Perhaps the princely captain is unable to sleep?" murmured Feng, appearing not to notice Conan's ungraciousness. Feng spoke fluent Hyrkanian. This was one reason for his having been dispatched to guide Conan's troop, for Conan's command of the singsong Khitan tongue was little more than a smattering. Feng continued:

"This person is so fortunate as to possess a sovereign remedy for sleeplessness. A gifted apothecary concocted it for me from an ancient recipe: a decoction of lily buds ground into cinnamon and spiced with poppy seeds..."

"No, nothing," growled Conan. "I thank you, Duke, but it's something about this accursed place. Some uncanny premonition keeps me wakeful when, after a long day's ride, I should be as weary as a stripling after his first night's bout of love."

The duke's features moved a trifle, as if he winced at Conan's crudity-or was it merely a flicker of the firelight? In any case, he suavely replied, "I think I understand the misgivings of the excellent commander. Nor are such disquieting emotions unusual in this-ah-this legend-fraught valley. Many men have perished here."

"A battlefield, eh?" grunted Conan.

The duke's narrow shoulders twitched beneath the green cloak. "Nay, nothing like that, my heroic Western friend. This spot lies near the tomb of an ancient king of my people: King Hsia of Kusan. He caused his entire royal guard to be beheaded and their heads buried with him, that their spirits should continue to serve him in the next world. The common superst.i.tion, however, avers that the ghosts of these guardsmen march in review, up and down this valley." The soft voice dropped even lower. "Legend also states that a magnificent treasure of gold and precious jewels was buried with him; and this tale I believe to be true."

Conan p.r.i.c.ked up his ears. "Gold and gems, eh? Has it ever been found, this treasure?"

The Khitan surveyed Conan for a moment with an oblique, contemplative gaze. Then, as if having reached some private decision, he replied, "No, Lord Conan; for the precise location of the trove is not known-save to one man."