Conan the Warrior.
by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague DeCamp.
Introduction.
Of all the many kinds of fiction, the one that gives the purest entertainment is heroic fantasy: the story of sword-play and sorcery, laid in an imaginary world-either this planet as it was long ago, or in the remote future, or on another world, or in another dimension-where magic works and all men are mighty, all women beautiful, all problems simple, and all life adventurous. In such a world, gleaming cities raise their shining spires against the stars; sorcerers cast sinister spells from subterranean lairs; baleful spirits stalk crumbling ruins; primeval monsters crash through jungle thickets; and the fate of kingdoms is balanced on the b.l.o.o.d.y blades of broadswords blandished by heroes of preternatural might and valor.
One of the greatest writers of heroic fantasy was Robert Ervin Howard (1906-36), who was born and lived most of his short life in Cross Plains, Texas. Howard was a voluminous writer for the pulp magazines of the time. Jack London, Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and H. P. Lovecraft all influenced him.
Howard"s most memorable character was Conan the Cimmerian. Conan is supposed to have lived about twelve thousand years ago, in the Hyborian Age between the sinking of Atlantis and the beginnings of recorded history. A gigantic barbarian adventurer from the northern land of Cimmeria, Conan wades through rivers of blood and overcomes foes both natural and supernatural to become, at last, king of the Hyborian kingdom of Aquilonia.
Eighteen Conan stories were published in Howard"s lifetime, and several more have been discovered in ma.n.u.script since his early death. It has been my privilege to edit these for publication and to revise and complete those that were unfinished. Lancer Books plans to bring out the entire Conan saga-which comes to nearly half a million words-in twelve volumes, of which this will be the seventh.
Conan arrived as a youth in the kingdom of Zamora (see the map) and for several years made a precarious living as a thief there and in Corinthia and Nemedia. Then he was a mercenary soldier, first in the oriental realm of Turan and then in the Hyborian kingdoms. Forced to flee from Argos, he became a pirate along the coast of Kush, in partnership with a Shemitish she-pirate, Belit, and with a crew of black corsairs. Here he earned the name of Amra, the Lion.
After Belit"s death, Conan returned to the trade of mercenary in Shem and in the adjacent Hyborian kingdoms. Subsequently he adventured among the nomadic outlaws, the kozaks, of the eastern steppes; the pirates of the Sea of Vilayet; and the hill tribes of the Himelian Mountains on the borders of Iranistan and Vendhya. Then another stretch of soldiering in Koth and Argos, in the course of which he was briefly co-ruler of the desert city of Tombalku. Then back to the sea, first as a pirate of the Baracha Isles, then as captain of a ship of the Zingaran buccaneers. When this volume takes up, he was in his late thirties.
L. Sprague de Camp
Red Nails
For some two years, as captain of the Wastrel, Conan continues a highly successful career as a freebooter. However, the other Zingaran pirates, jealous of the outlander in their midst, at last bring him down off the coast of Shem. Escaping inland and hearing that wars are in the offing along the borders of Stygia, Conan joins the Free Companions, a band of condottiere under the command of one Zarallo. Instead of rich plunder, however, he finds himself engaged in uneventful guard duty in the border post of Sukhmet, on the frontier of the black kingdoms. The wine is sour and the pickings poor, and Conan soon gets tired of black women. His boredom ends with the appearance in Sukhmet of Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, a women pirate whom he had known in his Barachan days. When she takes drastic measures to repulse a Stygian officer, Conan follows her south into the lands of the blacks.
1 . The Skull on the Crag
The woman on the horse reined in her weary steed. It stood with its legs wide-braced, its head drooping, as if it found even the weight of the gold-ta.s.seled, red-leather bridle too heavy. The woman drew a booted foot out of the silver stirrup and swung down from the gilt-worked saddle. She made the reins fast to the fork of a sapling, and turned about, hands on her hips, to survey her surroundings.
They were not inviting. Giant trees hemmed in the small pool where her horse had just drunk. Clumps of undergrowth limited the vision that quested under the somber twilight of the lofty arches formed by intertwining branches. The woman shivered with a twitch of her magnificent shoulders, and then cursed.
She was tall, full-bosomed, and large-limbed, with compact shoulders.
Her whole figure reflected an unusual strength, without detracting from the femininity of her appearance. She was all woman, in spite of her bearing and her garments. The latter were incongruous, in view of her present environs. Instead of a skirt she wore short, wide-legged silk breeches, which ceased a hand"s breadth short of her knees, and were upheld by a wide silken sash worn as a girdle. Flaring-topped boots of soft leather came almost to her knees, and a low-necked, wide-collared, wide-sleeved silk shirt completed her costume. On one shapely hip she wore a straight double-edged sword, and on the other a long dirk. Her unruly golden hair, cut square at her shoulders, was confined by a band of crimson satin.
Against the background of somber, primitive forest she posed with an unconscious picturesqueness, bizarre and out of place. She should have been posed against a background of sea clouds, painted masts, and wheeling gulls. There was the color of the sea in her wide eyes. And that was as it should have been, because this was Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, whose deeds are celebrated in song and ballad wherever seafarers gather.
She strove to pierce the sullen green roof of the arched blanches and see the sky which presumably lay above it, but presently gave it up with a muttered oath.
Leaving her horse tied, she strode off toward the east, glancing back toward the pool from time to time in order to fix her route in her mind. The silence of the forest depressed her. No birds sang in the lofty boughs, nor did any rustling in the bushes indicate the presence of small animals. For leagues she had traveled in a realm of brooding stillness, broken only by the sounds of her own flight.
She had slaked her thirst at the pool, but now felt the gnawings of hunger and began looking about for some of the fruit on which she had sustained herself since exhausting the food originally in her saddlebags.
Ahead of her, presently, she saw an outcropping of dark, flintlike rock that sloped upward into what looked like a rugged crag rising among the trees. Its summit was lost to view amidst a cloud of encircling leaves.
Perhaps its peak rose above the treetops, and from it she could see what lay beyond-if, indeed, anything lay beyond but more of this apparently illimitable forest through which she had ridden for so many days.
A narrow ridge formed a natural ramp that led up the steep face of the crag. After she had ascended some fifty feet, she came to the belt of leaves that surrounded the rock. The trunks of the trees did not crowd close to the crag, but the ends of their lower branches extended about it, veiling it with their foliage. She groped on in leafy obscurity, not able to see either above or below her; but presently she glimpsed blue sky, and a moment later came out in the clear, hot sunlight and saw the forest roof stretching away under her feet.
She was standing on a broad shelf which was about even with the treetops, and from it rose a spirelike jut that was the ultimate peak of the crag she had climbed. But something else caught her attention at the moment. He foot had struck something in the litter of blown dead leaves which carpeted the shelf. She kicked them aside and looked down on the skeleton of a man. She ran an experienced eye over the bleached frame, but saw no broken bones nor any sign of violence. The man must have died a natural death; though why he should have climbed a tall crag to die she could not imagine.
She scrambled up to the summit of the spire and looked toward the horizons. The forest roof-which looked like a floor from her vantage point-was just as impenetrable as from below. She could not even see the pool by which she had left her horse. She glanced northward, in the direction from which she had come. She saw only the rolling green ocean stretching away and away, with just a vague blue line in the distance to hint of the hill range she had crossed days before, to plunge into this leafy waste.
West and east the view was the same; though the blue hill-line was lacking in those directions. But when she turned her eyes southward she stiffened and caught her breath. A mile away in that direction the forest thinned out and ceased abruptly, giving way to a cactus-dotted plain. And in the midst of that plain rose the walls and towers of a city. Valeria swore in amazement. This pa.s.sed belief. She would not have been surprised to sight human habitations of another sort-the beehive-shaped huts of the black people, or the cliff-dwellings of the mysterious brown race which legends declared inhabited some country of this unexplored region. But it was a startling experience to come upon a walled city here so many long weeks" march from the nearest outposts of any sort of civilization.
Her hands tiring from clinging to the spirelike pinnacle, she let herself down on the shelf, frowning in indecision. She had come far-from the camp of the mercenaries by the border town of Sukhmet amidst the level gra.s.slands, where desperate adventurers of many races guard the Stygian frontier against the raids that come up like a red wave from Darfar. Her flight had been blind, into a country of which she was wholly ignorant. And now she wavered between an urge to ride directly to that city in the plain, and the instinct of caution which prompted her to skirt it widely and continue her solitary flight.
Her thoughts were scattered by the rustling of the leaves below her.
She wheeled catlike, s.n.a.t.c.hed at her sword; an then she froze motionless, staring wide-eyed at the man before her.
He was almost a giant in stature, muscles rippling smoothly under his skin, which the sun had burned brown. His garb was similar to hers, except that he wore a broad leather belt instead of a girdle.
Broadsword and poniard hung from his belt.
"Conan, the Cimmerian!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the woman. "What are you doing on my trail?"
He grinned hardly, and his fierce blue eyes burned with a light any woman could understand as they ran over her magnificent figure, lingering on the swell of her splendid b.r.e.a.s.t.s beneath the light shirt, and the clear white flesh displayed between breeches and boot-tops.
"Don"t you know?" he laughed. "Haven"t I made my admiration for you plain ever since I first saw you?"
"A stallion could have made it no plainer," she answered disdainfully.
"But I never expected to encounter you so far from the ale barrels and meatpots of Sukhmet. Did you really follow me from Zarallo"s camp, or were you whipped forth for a rogue?"
He laughed at her insolence and flexed his mighty biceps.
"You know Zarallo didn"t have enough knaves to whip me out of camp," he grinned. "Of course I followed you.
Lucky thing for you, too, wench! When you knifed that Stygian officer, you forfeited Zarallo"s favor and protection, and you outlawed yourself with the Stygians."
"I know it," she replied sullenly. "But what else could I do? You know what my provocation was."
"Sure," he agreed. "If I"d been there, I"d have knifed him myself. But if a woman must live in the war camps of men, she can expect such things."
Valeria stamped her booted foot and swore.
"Why won"t men let me live a man"s life?"
"Thats obvious!" Again his eager eyes devoured hex. "But you were wise to run away. The Stygians would have had you skinned. That officer"s brother followed you; faster than you thought, I don"t doubt. He wasn"t far behind you when I caught up with him. His horse was better than yours. He"d have caught you and cut your throat within a few more miles."
"Well?" she demanded.
"Well what?" He seemed puzzled.
"What of the Stygian?"
"Why, what do you suppose?" he returned impatiently. "I killed him, of course, and left his carca.s.s for the vultures. That delayed me, though, and I almost lost your trail when you crossed the rocky spurs of the hills. Otherwise I"d have caught up with you long ago."
"And now you think you"ll drag me back to Zarallo"s camp?" she sneered.
"Don"t talk like a fool," he grunted. "Come, girl, don"t be such a spitfire. I"m not like that Stygian you knifed, and you know it."
"A penniless vagabond," she taunted.