The Conan Chronicles, Vol. 1: The People of the Black Circle

by Robert E. Howard

  Conan did not leave the gate until he was sure all his men ^who yet lived were out of the castle and started across the level meadow. Then he glanced again at the roaring pillar looming against the sky, dwarfing the towers, and he too fled that castle of nameless horrors.

  The Zingarans had already crossed the rim of the plateau and “were fleeing down the slopes. Sancha waited for him at the crest of the first slope beyond the rim, and there he paused for an instant to look back at the castle. It was as if a gigantic green-stemmed and white-blossomed flower swayed above the towers; the roar filled the sky. Then the jade-green and snowy pillar broke with a noise like the rending of the skies, and walls and towers were blotted out in a thunderous torrent.

  Conan caught the girl’s hand, and fled. Slope after slope rose and fell before them, and behind sounded the rushing of a river. A. glance over his straining shoulder showed a broad green ribbon rising and falling as it swept over the slopes. The torrent had not spread out and dissipated; like a giant serpent it flowed over the depressions and the rounded crests. It held a consistent course - it was following them.

  The realization roused Conan to a greater pitch of endurance. Sancha stumbled and went to her knees with a moaning cry of despair and exhaustion. Catching her up, Conan tossed her over his giant shoulder and ran on. His breast heaved, his knees trembled; his breath tore in great gasps through his teeth. He reeled in his gait. Ahead of him he saw the sailors toiling, spurred on by the terror that gripped them.

  The ocean burst suddenly on his view, and in his swimming gaze floated the Wastrel, unharmed. Men tumbled into the boats helter-skelter. Sancha fell into the bottom and lay there in a crumpled heap. Conan, though the blood thundered in his ears and the world swam red to his gaze, took an oar with the panting sailors.

  With hearts ready to burst from exhaustion, they pulled for the ship. The green river burst through the fringe of trees. Those trees fell as if their stems had been cut away, and as they sank into the jade-colored flood, they vanished. The tide flowed out over the beach, lapped at the ocean, and the waves turned a deeper, more sinister green.

  Unreasoning, instinctive fear held the buccaneers, making them urge their agonized bodies and reeling brains to greater effort; what they feared they knew not, but they did know that in that abominable smooth green ribbon was a menace to body and to soul. Conan knew, and as he saw the broad line slip into the waves and stream through the water toward them, without altering its shape or course, he called up his last ounce of reserve strength so fiercely that the oar snapped in his hands.

  But their prows bumped against the timbers of the Wastrel, and the sailors staggered up the chains, leaving the boats to drift as they would. Sancha went up on Conan’s broad shoulder, hanging limp as a corpse, to be dumped unceremoniously on to the deck as the Barachan took the wheel, gasping orders to his skeleton of a crew. Throughout the affair, he had taken the lead without question, and they had instinctively followed him. They reeled about like drunken men, rumbling mechanically at ropes and braces. The anchor chain, unshackled, splashed into the water, the sails unfurled and bellied in a rising wind. The Wastrel quivered and shook herself, and swung majestically seaward. Conan glared shoreward; like a tongue of emerald flame, a ribbon licked out on the water futilely, an oar’s length from the Wastrel’s keel. It advanced no further. From that end of the tongue, his gaze followed an unbroken stream of lambent green, across the white beach, and over the slopes, until it faded in the blue distance.

  The Barachan, regaining his wind, grinned at the panting crew. Sancha was standing near him, hysterical tears coursing down her cheeks. Conan’s breeks hung in bloodstained tatters; his girdle and sheath were gone, his sword, driven upright into the deck beside him, was notched and crusted with red. Blood thickly clotted his black mane, and one ear had been half torn from his head. His arms, legs, breast and shoulders were bitten and clawed as if by panthers. But he grinned as he braced his powerful legs, and swung on the wheel in sheer exuberance of muscular might.

  ‘What now?’ faltered the girl.

  ‘The plunder of the seas!’ he laughed. ‘A paltry crew, and that chewed and clawed to pieces, but they can work the ship, and crews can always be found. Come here, girl, and give me a kiss.’

  ‘A kiss?’ she cried hysterically. ‘You think of kisses at a time like this?’

  His laughter boomed above the snap and thunder of the sails, as he caught her up off her feet in the crook of one mighty arm, and smacked her red lips with resounding relish.

  ‘I think of Life!’ he roared. ‘The dead are dead, and what has passed is done! I have a ship and a fighting crew and a girl with lips like wine, and that’s all I ever asked. Lick your wounds, bullies, and break out a cask of ale. You’re going to work ship as she never was worked before. Dance and sing while you buckle to it, damn you! To the devil with empty seas! We’re bound for waters where the seaports are fat, and the merchant ships are crammed with plunder!’

  AFTERWORD:

  Robert E. Howard and Conan: The Early Years By Stephen Jones

  Robert Ervin Howard was born in the fading ex-cowtown of Peaster, Texas, about forty-five miles west of Forth Worth, on January 22, 1906. He was the only son of Dr Isaac Mordecai Howard and Hester Jane (Ervin) Howard. The couple met while living in Mineral Wells, in Palo Pinto County, and were married on January 24, 1904.

  Named after his great-grandfather, Robert Ervin, Howard later revealed in a 1931 biographical sketch: ‘I come of old pioneer American stock. By nationality I am predominantly Gaelic, in spite of my English name - some three-fourths Irish, while the rest is a mixture of English, Highland Scotch (sic), and Danish … Practically all my life has been spent in the country and small towns, outside of a few brief sojourns in New Orleans and some of the Texas cities.’

  After moving around the state and living briefly in a number of different locales, in September 1919 the family finally settled in the small oil-boom town of Cross Plains, in Callahan County, Texas. Howard would live there for the rest of his life.

  ‘As my father had his practise and did not attempt to run a farm, I had more leisure time that the average country kid,’ Howard later recalled. ‘I lived pretty much the average life of the time and place. Then (as now) I had more enemies than friends, but I did not lack companionship of my own age. I played the rough and savage games popular in those parts then, wrestled, hunted a little, fished a little, trapped a little, stole watermelons, went swimming and spent more time than all in wandering about over the countryside on foot or on horseback.’

  Suffering from poor health (probably rheumatic fever) as a child, he once told his father, ‘Dad, when I was in school, I had to take a lot because I was alone and no one to take my part, so I intend to build my body until when anyone crosses me up, I can with my bare hands tear him to pieces, double him up, and break his back with my hands alone.’

  Although he started attending school when he was eight, Howard was mostly self-educated and read voraciously, revealing in one letter: ‘In my passionate quest for reading material, nothing could have halted me but a bullet through the head.’

  Despite hating ‘the clock-like regularity’ of school, in 1923 he graduated at the age of seventeen from Brownwood High School and, not being able to afford college, attended the Commercial School at Howard Payne College in Brownwood, where he studied non-credit courses in shorthand, typing, book-keeping and commercial law.

  In her 1986 memoir about Howard, One Who Walked Alone, former Cross Plains high-school teacher Novalyne Price Ellis described her first meeting with the author in the late spring of 1933: ‘He was not dressed as I thought a writer should dress. His cap was pulled down low on his forehead. He had on a dingy white shirt and some loose-fitting brown pants that only came to his ankles and the top of his high-buttoned shoes. He took off his cap and I saw that his hair was dark brown, short, almost clipped. He ran his hand over his head.’

  E. Hoffman Price was one of the few writers and f
ellow correspondents who actually visited Howard. In 1934 he drove down to Cross Plains and recalled years later meeting a ‘… broad, towering man with a bluff, tanned face and a big, hearty hand, and a voice which was surprisingly soft and easy, instead of the bull-bellow one would expect of the creator of Conan and those other swashbucklers … Robert Howard was packed with whimsy and poetry which rang out in his letters, and blazed up in much of his published fiction but, as is usually the case with writers, his appearance belied him. His face was boyish, not yet having squared off into angles; his blue eyes, slightly prominent, had a wide-openness which did not suggest anything of the man’s keen wit and agile fancy. That first picture persists - a powerful, solid, round-faced fellow, kindly and somewhat stolid.’

  However, Hoffman also discovered that there was a darker side to Howard whilst his host was driving Hoffman and his new wife, Wanda, to the nearby town of Brownwood for a shopping and sightseeing trip: ‘Suddenly, he took his foot off the throttle, cocked his head, idled down. We were approaching a clump of vegetation which was near the roadside. He reached across us, and to the side pocket. He took out a pistol, sized up the terrain, put the weapon back again, and resumed speed. He explained, in a matter-of-fact tone, “I have a lot of enemies, everyone has around here. Wasn’t that I figured we were running into anything but I had to make sure.”’

  Some time later Howard confided to Novalyne Price Ellis that a man with as many enemies as he had needed to be careful. ‘Anybody who is not your friend is your enemy,’ he explained pleasantly to her.

  Howard had written his first story - a historical adventure about a Viking named Boealf - at the age of nine or ten, and he was fifteen when he began writing professionally. ‘I took up writing simply because it seemed to promise an easier mode of work, more money, and more freedom than any job I’d tried. I wouldn’t write otherwise.’ He sent off his first effort to Adventure, but it was rejected, and it was another three years before Howard made his professional debut in the pulp magazine Weird Tales.

  Originally selling for just twenty-five cents on newsstands, and printed on low-grade ‘pulp’ paper, Weird Tales was the first magazine devoted exclusively to weird and fantastic fiction. It ran for 279 issues, starting in March 1923 and finally giving up the ghost in September 1954. Although just one title amongst many hundreds being published at that time, it carried the subtitle ‘The Unique Magazine’, and during its original thirty-two-year run (the tide has been revived - unsuccessfully - on several occasions since) it presented all types of fantasy fiction, from supernatural stories to Gothic horror, sword and sorcery to science fiction. Among some of its most famous contributors were H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Seabury Quinn, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Manly Wade Wellman, Jack Williamson, Henry S. Whitehead, and even Tennessee Williams.

  At the time Howard began submitting manuscripts, Farnsworth Wright had replaced Edwin F. Baird as editor of the Chicago-based magazine, after founder and owner J. C. Henneberger was forced to reorganise the title owing to debts. From the November 1924 issue onwards, Weird Tales began to flourish under Wright’s guidance, and he edited 179 copies before retiring after the March 1940 edition. He died from Parkinson’s disease in June that same year.

  Written when Howard was just eighteen, ‘Spear and Fang’ was a story about the struggles between prehistoric man. Wright published it in the July 1925 issue and paid its teenage author a fee of $16.00 at half-a-cent a word. Even in pre-Depression Texas that would not go far, and Howard quickly realised that he would have to work at a variety of jobs to supplement his meagre income from writing. These included picking cotton, branding cattle, hauling garbage, working in a grocery store and a law office, jerking soda in a drug store, trying to be a public stenographer, packing a surveyor’s rod and working up oil-field news for some Texas and Oklahoma papers. However, by his own admission, he ‘. .. wasn’t a success at any of them’.

  In his 1931 biographical sketch he told Wright: ‘Pounding out a living at the writing game is no snap - but the average man’s life is no snap, whatever he does. I’m merely one of a huge army, all of whom are bucking the line one way or another for meat for their bellies - which is the main basic principle and reason and eventual goal of Life. Every now and then one of us finds the going too hard and blows his brains out, but it’s all in the game, I reckon.’

  Thanks to Wright and Weird Tales, things soon began to change for Howard. In just three years his income from writing jumped from $772.50 to $1,500.26. The prolific author also began to sell other types of fiction - Westerns, sports stories, horror tales, ‘true confessions’, historical adventures and detective thrillers - to pulp markets besides Weird Tales, while at the same time he began to develop a series of characters with whom he would for ever be identified with: the English Puritan swordsman Solomon Kane (actually created while he was still in high school); the king of fabled Valusia, King Kull; Pictish chieftain Bran Mak Morn; prize-fighter Sailor Steve Costigan; Celtic warrior Turlogh O’Brien; soldier of fortune Francis X. Gordon, also known as ‘El Borak’; humorous hillbilly Breckenridge Elkins; and of course the mighty barbarian, Conan.

  Conan quickly became his most popular character, and Howard set his savage exploits in the Hyborian Age, a fictional period of pre-history ‘… which men have forgotten, but which remains in classical names, and distorted myths’. He detailed Conan’s world in a pseudo-historical essay entitled ‘The Hyborian Age’, which ran as a serial in Donald A. Wollheim’s amateur magazine The Phantagraph in the issues dated February, August and October-November 1936. However, the fanzine only published the first half of the essay, and it finally appeared in its complete form as a mimeographed booklet in 1938.

  According to his creator, Conan ‘… was born on a battle field, during a fight between his tribe and a horde of raiding Vanir. The country claimed by and roved over by his clan lay in the northwest of Cimmeria, but Conan was of mixed blood, although a pure-bred Cimmerian. His grandfather was a member of a southern tribe who had fled from his own people because of a bloodfeud and, after long wanderings, eventually taken refuge with the people of the north. He had taken part in many raids into the Hyborian nations in his youth, before his flight, and perhaps it was the tales he told of those softer countries which roused in Gonan, as a child, a desire to see them.

  ‘There are many things concerning Conan’s life of which I am not certain myself. I do not know, for instance, when he got his first sight of civilized people. It might have been at Vanarium, or he might have made a peaceable visit to some frontier town before that. At Vanarium he was already a formidable antagonist, though only fifteen. He stood six feet and weighed 180 pounds, though he lacked much of having his full growth.’

  However, despite what Howard would claim later, the mighty-thewed barbarian did not leap fully formed into his creator’s mind. The June 1932 issue of Strange Stories contained Howard’s story ‘People of the Dark’, whose hero was a pirate named Conan the reaver, who was physically similar to the later Conan and also swore ‘by Crom!’

  The first published Conan story, ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’, is one of the final adventures in Conan’s chronology, set after he had become king of Aquilonia. Wright conditionally accepted it in a letter dated March 10, 1932, describing it as having ‘… points of real excellence. I hope you will see your way clear to touch it up and resubmit it.’ It eventually appeared in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales and was an instant hit, as indicated in the February 1933 edition of the letters column, ‘The Eyrie’, where readers and writers alike were invited to air their comments and opinions about the magazine: ‘ “The Phoenix on the Sword” fairly took my breath away with its fine intrigue and excellent action and description,’ exclaimed a reader from Denver, Colorado, adding: ‘It was a magnificent story. Mr Howard never writes but that he produces a masterpiece.’ In fact, the story was a reworking of an unsold King Kull tale entitled ‘By This Axe I Rule!’, which finally saw prin
t in its original form in the 1967 collection King Kull.

  Still king of Aquilonia, Conan was ambushed and shackled in a dungeon, where he encountered an enormous serpent in ‘The Scarlet Citadel’, published in the January 1933 Weird Tales. Although Howard had already been awarded the coveted cover spot on previous issues of the magazine (his first had been for ‘Wolfshead’ back in April 1926), the covers for the December and January issues were two out of four, which J. Allen St John produced consecutively for Otis Adelbert Kline’s serial ‘Buccaneers of Venus’.

  Howard also missed out on the cover for the March 1933 issue, which contained ‘The Tower of the Elephant’. As Howard later explained in a letter written to P. Schuyler Miller, ‘Conan was about seventeen when he was introduced to the public in ‘The Tower of the Elephant’. While not fully matured, he was riper than the average civilized youth at that age.’ The author apparently borrowed the setting for the Zamorian thieves’ quarter from one of his favourite movies, the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  Conan led an army against a revived wizard in ‘Black Colossus’, his fourth adventure in Weird Tales, in the June 1933 issue. It also marked the first of nine cover appearances Howard’s Conan series would make on the magazine.

  Margaret Brundage’s paintings were featured on most of the Weird Tales covers during the mid-1930’s, and her cover for ‘Black Colossus’ depicted the naked Yasmela reaching out to touch the seated stone idol. A former Chicago fashion artist, Brundage was paid $90 per cover and usually worked in delicate pastel chalks on canvas. Wright admitted in the magazine that they had to be careful handling the artist’s work: ‘The originals are so delicate that we are afraid even to sneeze when we have a cover design in our possession, for fear the picture will disappear in a cloud of dust.’