Dark Valley Destiny (44 page)

Just before Christmas 1934,
Weird Tales
published another Conan story, "A Witch Shall Be Born." Conan, now a mercenary soldier in the employ of Queen Taramis of the frontier kingdom of Khauran, is confronted by Constantius, the leader of an army of the queen's wicked twin sister, the witch Salome. Overwhelmed by numbers, Conan is captured, the queen imprisoned, and the city taken.

In perhaps the most famous of all the scenes in the Conan saga, Conan is crucified by Constantius's order. As the barbarian hangs near death on the cross, a vulture flies down to peck out his eyes. Rallying his fading strength, the Cimmerian bites off the bird's head. Obviously, for a man with such fortitude, the end is not in sight. A group of nomads from eastern Shem rescue him and help him to defeat the enemy. When Constantius in his turn hangs on the cross, Conan watches with satisfaction.

"You are more fit to inflict torture than to endure it," said Conan tranquilly. "I hung there on a cross as you are hanging, and I lived, thanks to circumstances and a stamina peculiar to barbarians. But you civilized men are soft. . . . And so, Falcon of the desert, I leave you to the companionship of another bird of the desert."

He gestured toward the vultures whose shadows swept across the sands as they wheeled overhead. From the lips of Constantius came an inhuman cry of despair and horror.
¹⁴

As we have already seen, one of Howard's most tenacious beliefs was that barbarians—as he perceived them—were men of enormous strength and endurance, while civilization weakened a man and stripped his finer qualities from him. True, the barbarian was a vengeful, brutal man who lived in fear of abominable gods and who faced a bloody end, Howard wrote to Lovecraft, but

... he was lithe and strong as a panther, and the full joy of strenuous physical exertion was his. . . . The wind blew in his hair and he looked with naked eyes into the sun. Often he starved, but when he feasted, it was with a mighty gusto . . .
^1S

This picture of barbarian life tells more about Howard's yearning for happiness than about real barbarians. Forced to restrain his pent-up rage and hatred, yet chafing under the constraints imposed on him by his parents' demands and domination, Howard cherished a dream of a life of primitive violence and blood-dripping drama. And to achieve the dream, he had but two choices: to invent a violent world or to do violence. Howard, for some years, chose the first alternative.

"Jewels of Gwahlur," published in March of 1935, is considered one of the very best Conan stories. Hearing of the priceless Teeth of Gwahlur, a fortune of jewels hidden somewhere in Keshan, Conan sells his services as a fighting man to the king of that black realm. But before his services can be accepted by the irascible monarch and his court, the chief priest must consult the oracle of Alkmeenon, an uninhabited city that not even the priests had entered for a hundred years.

As the priest and his attendants ride toward the dead city, the wily Cimmerian climbs the cliffs that rim it and, descending into the haunted vale, strides down deserted thoroughfares and enters the palace. He finds a golden throne and a portal leading to a chamber of great richness; and there, on a dais, lies the Princess Yelaya, the ancient oracle, coldly beautiful even in death. Her body is perfectly preserved, as is her silken garment, her gem-studded girdle, and the "darkly piled foam" of her

Jeweled hair. And then, to Conan's shocked amazement, a great gong olangs.

In this blood-tingling setting, Conan begins one of his most unforget
table
adventures—an adventure in which he needs all his strength, skill, •nd courage. The opening lines of this magnificent tale show Howard's
ftilly
developed descriptive power and his effective use of colors:

The cliffs rose sheer from the jungle, towering ramparts of stone that glinted jade-blue and dull crimson in the rising sun, and curved away to east and west above the waving emerald ocean of fronds and leaves. It looked insurmountable, that giant palisade with its sheer curtains of solid rock in which bits of quartz winked dazzlingly in the sunlight. But the man who was working his tedious way upward was already halfway to the top.
¹⁶

"Beyond the Black River," a novella of 21,000 words, appeared as
a
two-part serial in the May and June issues of 1935 and introduced a
new
note into the Conan series. According to Howard's map, between the mighty kingdom of Aquilonia and the Western Ocean lies the broad Pictish Wilderness, a land of dense temperate-zone forest inhabited by Btrange wild beasts and stranger, wilder men, the Picts. These are not
the
dwarfish British aborigines of some of the Howard stories; these Picts
are
a fictional version of the Iroquois Indians who lived in Upstate New York in the eighteenth century.

The Six Nations of the Long House—the Iroquois—played a prominent part in the fiction of
Adventure Magazine,
but Howard's story shows even more clearly the influence of another author, Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933), a best-selling writer of popular fiction during the first three decades of this century. Several of Chambers's two dozen novels deal with the American Revolution; at least two were made into silent movies.

In reporting his sale of "Beyond the Black River" to Lovecraft, Two-Gun Bob explained:

In the Conan story I've attempted a new style and setting entirely— abandoned the exotic settings of lost cities, decaying civilizations, golden domes, marble palaces, silk-clad dancing girls, etc., and thrown my story against a background of forests and rivers, log cabins, frontier outposts, buckskin-clad settlers, and painted tribesmen.
¹⁷

At about the same time, Howard wrote his friend Derleth, saying that he wanted to discover whether he could write a salable Conan story without any sex interest—although, as a matter of fact, in several of the previous Conan tales, the erotic element had been slight or absent.
¹⁸
On both these counts, "Beyond the Black River" succeeded brilliantly. The story is considered one of Howard's best. He took his milieu straight out of Chambers's novel
The Little Red Foot
(1920). In this novella, and in his subsequent Pictish Wilderness tales, Howard set his scene in a land resembling the Mohawk River Valley and the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. Various actual place names mentioned by Chambers—Canajoharie, Caughnawaga, Oriskany, Sacandaga, Schoharie, and Thendara—become in Howard's tale: Conajohara, Conawaga, Oriskonie, Scandaga, Schohira, and Thandara. Even the name of the hero of "Wolves Beyond the Border," one of the later tales, comes from that of two fictional families that appear in Chambers's novel: the Hagers and the Gaults.

In "Beyond the Black River," Conan, in his late thirties, is serving as an officer in the Aquilonian army, detailed to scout duty. The Picts, who plot to recover their land from the Aquilonians, involve the barbarian and his men in cruel and bitter fighting. After killings, captures, escapes, and brushes with the supernatural, the Picts destroy Conan's base, Fort Tuscelan. After he helps the settlers in the region to flee, Conan confronts a demon sent by a Pictish shaman. The hero, sneering, asks the fiend why he failed to kill him earlier if he was so powerful. To this the demon replies:

"My brother had not painted a skull black for you and hurled it into the fire that burns for ever on Gullah's black altar. 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."
¹⁹

This reply seems to reflect Howard's philosophy of cosmic gear wheels that grind endlessly and, meshing, determine a man's fate. To anyone who relishes heroic fantasy, the story's nighted stealth, bursts of furious action, and phantasmagoria of supernatural menace keep the reader tuned to an almost unbearable pitch of tension.

During the following months, Howard made two unsuccessful attempts to complete a longer yarn in the same milieu. In the first, "Wolves Beyond the Border," Conan does not appear onstage. While he is busy leading a revolt against the degenerate King Numedides, the Picts plan to take advantage of the Aquilonian civil war to attack the settlers on the Pictish frontier. The tale is told in the first person by one of the settlers, Gault Hagar's son—a narrative style quite different from that in Howard's other stories.

This story fails in a curious way. It runs along at a good clip for about ten thousand words, to the point at which Gault and his comrades destroy the cabin in which the treacherous Lord Valerian is plotting. Then, although the tale is really only half done, Howard finished it off with a one-page synopsis. Perhaps he tired of the story and abandoned it; perhaps his subconscious let him down—a problem faced by many authors.

Howard made one more attempt at a story of Conan in the Pictish Wilderness, but "The Black Stranger" also failed to sell. This story of about 30,000 words, later retitled "The Treasure of Tranicos," finds Conan still a scout for the Aquilonians. He is captured by the Picts but escapes and flees to the shores of the Western Ocean, where he becomes involved with a self-exiled Zingaran nobleman and his pretty niece Belesa, who live in a stockaded manor house. But pirates have landed to search for treasure hidden by an earlier pirate, Tranicos; and, to make matters worse, the warlike Picts are trying to wipe out the whole enclave of foreigners.

Although the story has the usual Howardian rush of action and many vivid sequences, it displays the faults of careless plotting. The diverse elements of the plot are poorly integrated. Moreover, two of the menaces—a deadly gas in the cave of Tranicos and a vengeful Stygian wizard—are vague and unconvincing.

In addition, Conan behaves in an uncharacteristically treacherous fashion. And finally, both "The Black Stranger" and "Wolves Beyond the Border" involve chronological impossibilities. In their original
form
they could not be fitted into the Conan saga, unless Conan were much older when he became king of Aquilonia than Howard said he was. Both are among the Conan stories rewritten or completed by the senior author of this book.

Failing to sell "The Black Stranger," Howard turned it into "Swords of the Red Brotherhood," a tale of the Spanish Main. He deleted some of the supernatural elements, introduced matchlock muskets and other seventeenth-century props, and moved the locale to the
dark Valley destiny

west coast of North America. Unfortunately, the scenery and the Indians remained those of Upstate New York, not at all like those of aboriginal California. This glaring discrepancy between setting and reality may have been the reason for Howard's failure to sell the story during his lifetime. A second yarn in this abortive series, "Black Vulmea's Vengeance," likewise failed to sell while Howard lived, but it was bought by a short-lived magazine after his death.

The Conan story "Shadows in Zamboula," which appeared in the November 1935 issue of
Weird Tales,
was gratifyingly well-received. To the largely Stygian city of Zamboula comes Conan to drink and gamble. Finding himself low in funds, he takes a room at the edge of the city, away from the town's busy, noisy center, a place bright with flags and minarets and the traffic of many feet. Something about the barred windows of the inn and the slippered feet of his host stirs suspicion in Conan's barbarian breast. His nape hairs rise when some small sound wakens him and he discovers a giant Negro standing, cudgel in hand, beside his bed.

Soon Conan has to rescue a woman. Thus he becomes involved in court intrigue and in the unpleasant custom of allowing cannibals to roam the nighted streets to seek unwary strangers to devour. Novalyne Price, who was dating Howard at the time this story was written, never forgot Bob's telling her about a naked girl being chased down the darkened street by cannibals.

Although the tale has splendid color and fast action, some readers may dislike Howard's portrayal of a caste of black, apelike man-eaters shuffling along on "bare splay feet."
²⁰
Yet, in his use of racial stereotypes, Howard was neither better nor worse than most pulp writers of his time.

Best-known and best-loved of all the Conan stories is the novel, which Howard called
The Hour of the Dragon
, an arresting title but one having little relation to the story line. When, in 1950, the novel was published as a hardcover book by Gnome Press, in New York, it was renamed
Conan the Conqueror;
and by this name it is known today.

The circumstances surrounding its creation and publication are interesting. Despite all his hard work, Robert Howard had never seen one of his yarns in book form; so, late in 1933, when he learned that the British market was open to fantasy, he bundled up several of his short stories—two of them Conan tales—and sent them to the firm of

Dennis Archer in England. The editor replied that he could not publish
a
collection but urged the young Texan to try a book-length piece on the firm's affiliate, Pawling and Ness Ltd.

Thus, during the winter of 1933—34, Howard undertook the task of writing a Conan novel. He combined elements from several earlier Conan yarns: the ousted monarch; the ancient sorcerer revived by magic; the great red jewel with magical properties; the evil serpent-god. The resulting work is one of the best in the genre of heroic fantasy, ranking with such classics as Eddison's
The Worm Ouroboros,
Pratt's
The Well of the Unicorn,
and Dunsany's
The King of Elfland's Daughter.

In May of 1934, Howard sent the manuscript to England and was delighted to receive a contract for publication from Pawling and Ness. But then, a few months later, he was informed that Pawling and Ness was in receivership, and that the purchaser of the assets had decided not to publish
The Hour of the Dragon.

Although the novel did not appear in book form until 1950, Howard had no difficulty in selling it to
Weird Tales.
Being much longer than the usual magazine story,
The Hour of the Dragon
had to be scheduled far in advance. Consequently there was a delay of a year and a half before the work could be published in the issues for December 1935 and January, February, March, and April 1936.