Conan Of The Isles Read online

  Conan Of The Isles

  L. Sprague De Camp

  As the Red Terror, a bizarre, magical dark force whose victims disappear without a trace, descends upon Aquilonia, King Conan sets out to destroy its source, evil, conquest-hungry sorcerer-priests from across the sea.

  INTRODUCTION

  There is a kind of story laid, not in the world as it is or was, but as - to an armchair adventurer - it ought to have been. It is an adventure-fantasy, laid in an imaginary prehistoric or medieval world, where magic works and the scientific revolution has not taken place. Or perhaps it is in some parallel universe, or in this world as it will be in the distant future, when science has been forgotten and magic has revived.

  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 bloody broadswords brandished by heroes of preternatural might and valor. In such a world, men are mighty, women are beautiful, life is adventurous, and problems are simple. Nobody even mentions the income tax or the dropout problem or socialized medicine. Such a story is called 'heroic fantasy' or, sometimes, 'sword-and-sorcery.'

  The purpose of heroic fantasy is neither to solve the problems of the steel industry, nor to expose defects in the foreign-aid program, nor to expound the questions of poverty or intergroup hostility. It is to entertain. It is escape reading in which one escapes clear out of the real universe. But, come to think, these tales are no more 'unreal' than the many whodunnits wherein, after the stupid police have fallen over their own big feet, the brilliant amateur - a private detective, a newspaper reporter., or a little old lady - steps in and solves the crime.

  Heroic fantasies combine the color, gore., and lively action of the costume novel with the atavistic terrors and delights of the fairy tale. They furnish the purest fun to be found in fiction today. If you read for fun, this is the genre for you.

  The heroic fantasy traces its ancestry back to the myths and epics of ancient times - to the stories of Odysseus and Rustam and Sigurd and Cuchulainn. Down the centuries, many civilized writers like Ovid, Firdausi, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Spenser, and James Stephens have collected these tales, edited or rewritten them, and composed pastiches based upon them.

  During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stories of the supernatural were neglected in Europe. Then, however, fantasy re-entered the main stream of Western literature through three channels: the oriental fantasy narrative, which first appeared in the form of Galland's translation into French of the Arabian Nights; the Gothic novel, brought from Germany to England by Horace Wai-pole with his Castle of Otranto (1764); and the child's fairy tale, originally based upon the peasant tales written up and popularized by Andersen and the Grimm brothers.

  At the same time, Walter Scott launched the modern historical novel with his Waverley (1814) and its many successors. Although people had long written stories laid in periods before their own - Homer's Iliad is an obvious example - Scott was the first to realize that the past had been drastically different in many ways from the present and that these differences of costume and custom in themselves had entertainment value, which a skilled storyteller could exploit. Scott's novels were so influential that they touched off a wave of British medieval romanticism.

  In the 1880s, William Morris, the versatile British artist, decorator, poet, reformer, publisher, and novelist, created the modern heroic fantasy. In his pseudo-medieval novels like The Well at the World's End, Morris combined the antiquarian romanticism of Scott and his imitators with the supernaturalism of Walpole and his imitators. After Morris, Lord Dunsany adapted heroic fantasy to the short-story form early in the present century, while Eric R. Eddison composed his long Zimiamvian novels in the same genre.

  The appearance of the American magazines Weird Tales in 1923 and Unknown Worlds in 1939 created new markets for heroic fantasy. Many notable tales of swordplay and sorcery appeared in them - notably those of Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, L. Ron Hubbard, and Fritz Leiber. The market for such fiction shrank after these magazines ceased publication (in 1943 and 1953 respectively) and it looked for a while as if heroic fantasy had become a casualty of the machine age.

  Certain trends of the time in mainstream fiction were against heroic fantasy. These included the vogue for stories presenting a strongly subjective, sentimental, or psychological view; stories about an anti-hero - a dull, pathetic little twerp who could do nothing right; stories concealing their lack of an interesting narrative by a pyrotechnic display of stylistic eccentricities; and stories with an intense and absorbing interest in contemporary politics or in sex, especially in its more bizarre manifestations. A lecturer lately has said that, if a fiction writer wants sales, he should write exclusively either about politics or about sex. (A novel called The President's Boyfriend ought to be a lead-pipe cinch.)

  There are still, however, many readers who read, not to be enlightened, improved, uplifted, reformed, baffled by the writer's obscurity, amazed by his cleverness, nauseated by his scatology, or reduced to tears by the plight of some mistreated person, class, or caste, but to be entertained. To please such readers^ heroic fantasy has been revived in recent years. The first sign of this revival was the surprising success of J. R. R. Tolkien's trilogy. The Lord of the Rings., which appeared in the middle 1950’s.

  Of course, to enjoy heroic fantasy, one needs some slight imagination. One must be able to suspend one's disbelief in ghoulies and ghosties and other denizens of the worlds of fantasy. If, however, the reader can believe in international spies who race about in superpowered cars from one posh gambling joint to another and find a beautiful babe awaiting them in bed at each stops a few dragons and demons ought not to daunt him.

  Of all the stalwart heroes of heroic fantasy, the most vigorous, virile, brawny, and mettlesome is Conan the Cimmerian. Conan was the invention of Robert E. Howard (1906-36). Howard was born in Peaster, Texas, and lived most of his life in Cross Plains, in the center of Texas. During his last decade, he 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 poetry and his many fantasies. He was influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert W. Chambers, Harold Lamb, Jack London, H. P. Lovecraft, Talbot Mundy, and Sax Rohmer among others. At the age of thirty, he ended a promising literary career by suicide.

  Although he had his faults as a writer, Howard was a natural storyteller, whose narratives are unmatched for vivid, gripping, headlong action. His heroes - King Kull, Conan, Bran Mak Mora, Solomon Kane - are larger than life: men of mighty thews., hot passions, and indomitable will, who easily dominate the stories through which they stride. In fiction, the difference between a writer who is a natural storyteller and one who is not is like the difference between a boat that will float and one that will not. If the writer has this quality, we can forgive many other faults; if not, no other virtue can make up for the lack, any more than gleaming paint and sparkling brass on a boat make up for the fact that it will not float.

  Howard wrote several series of heroic fantasies, most of them published in Weird Tales. Of these, the longest single series comprised the Conan stories, which have also proved the most popular. In reading the Conan stories, one gets the illusion that one is listening to the mighty adventurer himself, sitting before a fire and reeling off tales of his exploits.

  Eighteen Conan tales, from a 3,000-word short story to a 66,000-word novel, were published in Howard's lifetime. Eight others, from complete manuscripts to mere fragments and outlines, have been discovered among Howard's papers since 1950.
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  Late in 1951, it was my fortune to find a cache of Howard's manuscripts 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 manuscripts have been discovered during the last few years, in other collections of Howard's papers, by Glenn Lord, literary agent for the Howard estate. (Howard seemingly never threw anything away; even his high-school examination papers still exist.)

  The obviously incomplete state of the Conan saga has tempted me and others to add to it, as Howard might have done had he lived. Besides editing the unpublished Conan stories, I undertook, in the early 1950’s, to rewrite the manuscripts of four other unpublished Howard adventure stories to convert them into Conan stories. These stories were laid in the Orient in medieval and modern times. The conversion did not prove difficult, since the heroes were all cut from the same cloth as Conan. I had merely to change names, delete anachronisms, and introduce a supernatural element. The stories remained about three-quarters or four-fifths Howard.

  Since then, in company with my colleagues Bjorn Ny-berg and Lin Carter, I have been engaged in completing the incomplete Conan stories and in writing several pastiches, based upon hints in Howard's notes and letters, to fill the gaps in the saga. The present story, by Carter and me, is based upon a paragraph in a letter that Howard wrote, three months before his untimely death, to the educator and science-fiction writer P. Schuyler Miller, an old Conan fan. Howard wrote:

  [Conan] travelled widely, not only before his kingship, but after he was king. He travelled in Khitai and Hyrkania, and to the even less known regions north of the latter and south of the former. He even visited a nameless continent in the western hemisphere, and roamed among the islands adjacent to it. How much of this roaming will get into print., I cannot foretell with any accuracy...

  (The entire letter is printed in the volume Conan of the present Lancer series, pp. 16-20.)

  Of the present Lancer series, six volumes have already been published, with several more to come. Because of legal complications, it was not possible to issue these volumes in chronological order; Conan, the first volume chronologically, was the fifth to appear. Present plans call for a total of at least twelve volumes, of which this one will be chronologically the last.

  Readers who want to know more about Conan, Howard, or heroic fantasy generally are referred, first to the list of other Conan books, and other books by Howard published by Lancer, on the page preceding the title page, and further to two periodicals and one book. One periodical is Amra, published by George H. Scithers, Box 9120, Chicago, Illinois, 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, Texas, 77501; this is given to articles, stories, and poems by and about Howard. The book is The Conan Reader., by the present author, published by Jack L. Chalker, 5111 Liberty Heights Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland, 21207; this consists of articles on Howard, Conan, and heroic fantasy previously published in Amra. I also listed many works by Howard and sword-and-sorcery stories by other writers in my introduction to the volume Conan in the present series.

  Conan lived, loved, and fought about twelve thousand years ago, eight thousand years after the sinking of Atlantis and seven thousand years before the beginnings of recorded history. In this time (according to Howard) the western parts of the main continent were occupied by the Hyborian kingdoms. These comprised a galaxy of states set up by northern invaders, the Hyborians, three thousand years before 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 Cim-meria, Hyperborea, Vanaheim, and Asgard. West, along the ocean, were the fierce Picts. To the east glittered the Hyrkanian kingdoms, of which the mightiest was Turan.

  Conan was a gigantic barbarian adventurer who roistered and brawled and battled his way across half the prehistoric world to rise at last to the kingship of a mighty realm. The son of a blacksmith in the bleak, backward northern land 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 post of Venarium.

  Subsequently, joining in a raid with a band of Æsir 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 the map.) 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.

  Growing tired 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 Meru and Khitai. He also refined his archery and horsemanship, both of which had been at best indifferent up to the time of his joining the Turanians,

  As a result of a quarrel with a superior officer., Conan left Turan. After an unsuccessful try at treasure-hunting in Zamora and a brief visit to his Cimmerian homeland, he embarked upon the career of a mercenary soldier in the Hyborian kingdoms. Circumstances - violent as usual -made him a pirate along the coasts of Kush, with a crew of black corsairs and the Shemitish she-pirate Belit as his partner. The natives called him Amra, the Lion.

  After Belit was slain, Conan became a chief among the black tribes. Then he served as a condottiere in Shem and among the southernmost Hyborian kingdoms. Later still, Conan appeared as a leader of the kozaki, a horde of outlaws who roamed the steppes between the Hyborian lands and Turan. He was captain of a pirate craft on the great inland Sea of Vilayet and a chief among the nomadic Zuagirs of the southeastern deserts.

  After a stretch as a mercenary captain in the army of the king of Iranistan, Conan arrived in the foothills of the Himelian Mountains, a vast stretch of broken country sundering Iranistan, Turan, and the tropical kingdom of Vendhya. In the course of wild adventures, he tried but failed to weld the fierce hill tribes into a united power. Next, he returned westward for another stretch of soldiering in Koth and Argos. During this period, 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 rival buccaneers sank Conan's ship, he served again as a mercenary in Stygia and among the black kingdoms. Then he wandered north to Aquilonia and became a scout on the Pictish frontier. When the Picts, with the help of the wizard Zogar Sag, attacked the Aquilonian settlements, Conan failed to save Fort Tuscelan but did save the lives of a number of settlers between the Thunder and Black rivers.

  After rising to command in the Aquilonian army and defeating a Pictish invasion, Conan was lured back to Tarantia, the capital, and imprisoned by the jealous King Numedides. Escaping, he became involved in a three-cornered conflict among the Picts and two crews of pirates on the western coast of Pictland. Then he was chosen to lead an Aquilonian revolution against the degenerate King Numedides. Slaying Numedides on his own throne, Conan, in his early forties, became the ruler of the mightiest Hyborian kingdom.

  Conan soon found that being king was no bed of houris. A cabal of discontented nobles almost succeeded in assassinating him. By a ruse, the kings of Ophir and Koth trapped and imprisoned him in order to have a free hand with the conquest of Aquilonia. With the help of a fellow prisoner - a wizard - Conan escaped in time to turn the tables on the invaders.

  Subsequently, a cabal of rivals plotting to gain the rule of Aquilonia revived the mummy of a long-dead Acheron-tian wizard, Xaltotun,
to aid them in their enterprise. Conan was defeated and driven from his kingdom, but again he returned to confound his foes.

  In the process, Conan for the first time acquired a legitimate queen. This was Zenobia, a slave girl who saved his life when he was imprisoned in the dungeon under the palace of King Tarascus of Nemedia. He tactfully dismissed his harem of shapely concubines and settled down to the pleasures and pains of wedded life. A Khitan sorcerer kidnapped Zenobia, forcing Conan to travel across half the world, through manifold perils, to recover her. Other plots and adventures involved Conan and his young son, also named Conan but usually known by his nickname of {Conn.'

  Time passed; Zenobia died. Conan found his son near-ing maturity and old age creeping upon himself. A growing restlessness perturbed and irritated him...

  L. Sprague de Camp

  '- And at the last, O Prince, there came to pass that which all the plots of Ascalante the Rebel had failed to bring about, and for which the grim shade of Xaltotun was conjured in vain from the mouldering dust of his Acherontic tomb, and which even the hell-spawned sorceries of Yah Chieng, the Yellow Wizard of nighted and demon-ridden Khitai, failed to accomplish; and Conan of Aquilonia gave over the crown and the throne of the mightiest kingdom of all the West, and ventured forth into the Unknown, wherein he vanished forever from the knowledge of man.'

  - THE NEMEDIAN CHRONICLES

  After the events described in the volume Conan of Aquilonia (to be published later) Conan's rule is for several years relatively peaceful. His old foes Thoth-Amon and King Yezdigerd are no more, and turbulent Zingara has been reduced to a quiet client kingdom under the rule of Conan's docile puppet. The savage Picts resent and resist the constant pressure against their forest fastness, but that is to be expected.

  The event of these years that most affects Conan is the death of his queen, Zenobia, in childbirth. Thereafter, Conan finds the routine of a peaceful reign increasingly irksome. He haunts the royal library, finding in dusty scrolls and crumbling codices strange accounts of lands beyond the Western Ocean. He spends time with his children, but the yawning gap in age - he is in his sixties, while they are still infants and adolescents - makes it hard for him to reach any true intimacy with them. And then a sudden catastrophe shatters his mood of vague, half-resigned discontent...