One can only wish Howard had written all that he lists here. It is likely, though not altogether certain, that Howard was introduced to many of these topics in the fiction and non-fiction of Harold Lamb, who wrote of Babur, and who’d written of Baibars three months before “Sowers of the Thunder” saw print, for Adventure was steadily publishing excerpts from Lamb’s upcoming history of the Crusades.
By this point, though, Lamb’s influence is no longer as obvious in Howard’s own historicals. Donald’s decision to flee the west with his newfound companion to serve in the east is reminiscent of Sir Robert’s departure with a disguised Chepé Bega to serve Genghis Khan in the opening of Lamb’s “The Making of the Morning Star,” but it is far from identical, and the persons of Tamerlane and Bayazid are similar in their portrayal only in that they are powerful rulers. Gone is the sense from “Red Blades of Black Cathay” that the historical figures have been borrowed from Lamb’s own depiction of them; Howard has grown confident enough in his own abilities that he makes of them what he wishes.
As with “Sowers,” “Lord of Samarcand” is the tale of an eastern monarch and a western man who crosses his path. In the case of “Samarcand,” Donald serves Tamerlane because he desires vengeance against Bayezid, and continues his work for the aging king because he has no other real options or allies, nor indeed does he have many pleasures. And as with “Sowers,” the story concludes with a last confrontation between fighting man of the West and monarch of the east. In “Samarcand,” though, the westerner slays Tamerlane. Howard cleverly writes Donald out of recorded history – for there is no record of a westerner slaying Tamerlane – yet still delivers us the ending he desires.
Reduced to an overview, the stories sound more similar in scope than they truly are; what they share more certainly are a bleak sense of hardship and loss, of victories won for priceless costs, of lives and empires tossed aside on whims. Even the mighty can fall, and fall they do when they overlook simple details, like the love of Donald for a simple slave girl who is not even true to him, or when they place trust in the wrong person, as does Bayazid when he relies upon Donald.
“Samarcand,” like all the best of Howard’s historicals, is an epic threaded with tragedy, showing us the sweep of battle sometimes from a distant vantage point and sometimes from a close-up. It compresses the span of years or months with a few choice phrases, and describes a relationship between characters with a few well-turned conversations. The prose is gilt everywhere with words that are crystal clear and descriptive, beautiful even when it describes the fall of cities and the death of men.
Perhaps the grimmest of all these historicals is “The Lion of Tiberias.” No matter that Sir Miles and Ellen survive for a happy ending. Though it is the story of Sir Miles that pulls us onward through the narrative, it is the conqueror Zenghi who most fascinates. Brave, capable, even witty, we are shown contemptible cruelty at his hand at the story’s open. Yet Howard is too skilled to present us with a one-dimensional villain. Later we learn that the one action Zenghi regrets in his long life is the brutal death of young Achmet that so stuns the reader in the opening scene of “Tiberias.” Miles may be as clever and as accomplished as any of Howard’s protagonists, but it is Zenghi who we remember most when the tale is done. Like Baibars and Tamerlane, he is a lion among men who dares to mold the earth as his own. It is he who brings about his own downfall; he sets his own death in motion as surely as if he had slit his own throat, first by slaying the noble prince, then by sparing John Norwald. Once more Howard brings us a tale of the fall of kingdoms and the death of kings, but seldom has any writer delivered a conclusion so somber and otherworldly without resorting to the fantastic. When Zenghi’s advisor Ousama approaches the atabeg’s tent, he finds the unexpected.
He stopped short, an uncanny fear prickling the short hairs at the back of his neck, as a form came from the pavilion. He made out a tall white-bearded man, clad in rags. The Arab stretched forth a hand timidly, but dared not touch the apparition. He saw that the figure’s hand was pressed against its left side, and blood oozed darkly from between the fingers.
“Where go you, old man?” stammered the Arab, involuntarily stepping back as the white-bearded stranger fixed weird blazing eyes upon him.
“I go back to the void which gave me birth,” answered the figure in a deep ghostly voice, and as the Arab stared in bewilderment, the stranger passed on with slow, certain, unwavering steps, to vanish in the darkness.
Once more the dreams of empire fade, and Ousama eloquently mourns his master when he discovers the body of Zenghi. “ ‘Alas for kingly ambitions and high visions!’ exclaimed the Arab. ‘Death is a black horse that may halt in the night by any tent, and life is more unstable than the foam on the sea!’ ” It is just one more memorable quote from a story that is laced with them.
In each of the last three stories, Howard has played variations upon one of his favorite themes; that we must eat and drink and be merry while we can, for death comes all too swiftly, even for the great.
While an eastern monarch again plays a leading role in the next of Howard’s historicals, Suleyman is much less the focus than Red Sonya and Gottfried von Kalmbach. It is probably well enough known now that Red Sonya has little in common with the comic-book character Red Sonja other than a similar name, red hair, and a skill with weapons. At no point during the length of the story does Howard’s Red Sonya don a chainmail bikini; she and von Kalmbach neatly steal the show without the use of gimmicks.
Life may be just as grim under “The Shadow of the Vulture” as it was amongst Tiberian Lions and Thunder Sowers, but Howard finds greater room for other tones within the work. Von Kalmbach is strong and courageous, but he’s a drunkard always out to enjoy himself a bit even if he’s doomed. He’s essentially good natured; the grim melancholy that has dogged the other male protagonists is mostly absent from von Kalmbach himself, although the environment he moves through is not so different. Howard avoids the temptation to make the character a comic sendup, though he does furnish von Kalmbach with a straight man in the person of Red Sonja, his brighter half. As much as von Kalmbach might desire it, he and Red Sonja do not become romantically linked, but they do recognize each other as two of the few who are competent enough to stand the walls, and she watches out for him. If not as explicitly intelligent as some of Howard’s other characters, Sonja can think on her feet, and it is her brains that save von Kalmbach and that set the final scheme in motion that finishes the vulture.
Suleyman, for all that he is portrayed as intelligent, does not fare as well; he comes across as cultured but a little petulant. His aims at conquest are thwarted, but he decides to celebrate the campaign’s failure as a success anyway, a point of irony from history that amused Howard. Though Suleyman does not die like the monarchs in the Howard historicals that precede him – he would live on for many years yet – his evil henchman does, and surely Mikhal Oglu is the blackest figure yet used in these history tales, one who “recalled with satisfaction the blackened, corpse-littered wastes – the screams of tortured men – the cries of girls writhing in his iron arms; recalled with much the same sensation the death-shrieks of those same girls in the blood-fouled hands of his killers.” There’s nothing redeemable in the man but his efficiency. We feel no sympathy for either him or the haughty Suleyman come story end, when the two are face to face a final time.
“Vulture” is another epic, close on the heels of the three previous – four truly excellent historical adventures, all dashed off in a single year. It was quite an achievement. For once Howard himself voiced awareness of the story’s worth. To Lovecraft he wrote that “… I do like ‘The Shadow of the Vulture.’ I tried to follow history as closely as possible, though I did shift the actual date of Mikhal Oglu’s death. He was not killed until a year or so later, on the occasion of a later invasion of Austria, in which the Akinji were trapped and destroyed by Paul Bakics.”
Howard was also proud of his characters, writing to Lovecraft in March
of 1933 that “I’m curious to know how the readers will like Gottfried von Kalmbach, one of the main characters in a long historical yarn I sold Wright, concerning Suleyman the Magnificent’s attack on Vienna. A more dissolute vagabond than Gottfried never weaved his drunken way across the pages of a popular magazine: wastrel, drunkard, gambler, whore-monger, renegade, mercenary, plunderer, thief, rogue, rascal – I never created a character whose creation I enjoyed more. They may not seem real to the readers; but Gottfried and his mistress Red Sonya seem more real to me than any other character I’ve ever drawn.”
Truer or not – for by this point Howard had breathed convincing life into any number of characters – von Kalmbach and Red Sonya are some of his most compelling characters, and we can lament the fact that we never heard more from Howard about them. Von Kalmbach is not quite so dissolute as Howard paints him here; the fellow in the story is almost staid by comparison to the way he’s described to Lovecraft. Those same words might better describe the protagonist of “Gates of Empire.”
Some Howard fans name the run of work from “The Sowers of the Thunder” to “The Shadow of the Vulture” as Howard’s historical high water mark, but “Gates of Empire” succeeds just as well. The fact that it is not more widely celebrated, even among Howard fans, may be because it’s different in style and tone from almost everything else in Howard’s entire canon. It’s not that details and events within the tale are any less grim than those of the historicals that come before it, but that the character who drunkenly weaves his way through all the blood and battle and death is another kind of fellow entirely. Howard was so confident now with the material that he was experimenting with construction and character; every historical from this point forward was a chance to further flex his muscles. Unfortunately we can only speculate as to what Howard might have gone on to write in the genre had the market not closed to him.
“Gates of Empire” is not the broad slapstick comedy of the Breckinridge Elkins stories. Giles is just this side of realism, and while a comic figure, is one who is constantly in danger. Not so Elkins, who will never be harmed. Throughout “Gates of Empire” Howard reveals a fine sense of comic timing and understatement. The pacing is brilliant. Guiscard de Chastillon always manages to arrive at just the worst, and most entertaining, moment. Sometimes the humor in the piece arises from characters having what would be a perfectly reasonable conversation if it were not completely based upon lies that Giles has told them about his own condition. A rogue, Giles is mostly harmless, and likable, clever enough to stay just ahead of any situation he’s created for himself. Indeed, almost everything that befalls Giles comes of his own poor choices. His cleverness allows him to make lemonade every time he falls into a vat of lemons, but in climbing out of one barrel he nearly always manages to make another poor choice that leads him into another.
Following Giles is nothing like following Conan, who is usually one step ahead of the readers. With Giles, Howard lets us in on the joke. We’re the superior to Giles in many ways, although few of us would be likely to lie so convincingly when the chips are down. As readers we know far better than Giles that the lovely girl leading him on through the darkness cannot possibly intend anything good for him; we have a greater understanding than Giles of exactly what he is up against in scene after scene and it creates a different kind of tension than Howard is famous for. Conan will surely get out of the scene via his prowess and intelligence, but how will Giles manage to avoid destruction this time? Dumb luck? More clever improvization? “Gates of Empire” is one of those stories that only improves upon revisiting.
Sadly, although it would have been nice to know what Howard thought of the story, or his progress as a writer, no surviving letter discusses either Giles or “Gates of Empire,” and he was never to write another piece quite like it.
A FINAL FLURRY
“The Road of the Eagles” returned Howard to the driven men and the darker tone more typical of him, but he strove even further this time, presenting us with a host of characters, all at odds, each so compelling that we cannot help but root for all of them, even though we know that for any one of them to triumph the others will fail and almost surely die. In the first pages it may seem at first that Ivan’s mission of vengeance will be the story’s central focus, but before long we meet Osman Pasha, and after some time in his company his agile mind and capable arm win our admiration. On the run, he has no options left him until the girl Ayesha begs him for aid in freeing a prince who will surely grant a kingdom to him and his followers. The chief conflict falls between Ivan’s chase of Osman and Osman’s pursuit of his dream, but there is also the matter of Ayesha, who’s fallen in love with the Turkish prince and uses all the wiles and charms at her command to win his freedom. She is merciless but determined, and we cannot help but root for her success. Howard even allows us a glimpse of the prince’s potential, hashish-addled though he is: “But there were strong lines in his keen face, not yet erased by sloth and dissipation, and under the rich robe his limbs were cleancut and hard.” Even so minor a character as Kral, who desires to aid the Kazaks and avenge himself upon the Turkomans, is brought to life, and death.
Death awaits nearly everyone over the course of the story, Howard sending each of them neatly on their way to their ends with the precision of an accomplished tragedian. The only moment within the piece that really falters is the conclusion, where Ivan and Osman discover that they are old friends, far from home. After so many fine scenes, from the irony of the prince’s death moments before men arrive to liberate him to our final glimpse of Kral, this last one feels less like the concluding moment and more like one hammerstroke too many on the bell of futility. In Howard’s defense, though, it is hard to imagine the story ending happily for either character, and this conclusion, at least, is a surprise.
Almost incidentally, we see a final Lamb influence within this tale, for the speech of Ivan and his friends – sometimes the very cadence and rhythm of their words – is reminiscent of the talk and behavior of Ayub and Demid. By this point, though, Howard is not writing pastiche. He is like a fine musician who has listened well to the playing of a piece and can effortlessly weave part of that theme into his own work.
In “The Road of the Eagles” Howard experimented with the rising and falling of fates of a whole host of characters and managed to make us care about all of them, despite the fact that none of them were explicitly good, or bad – although it might be conceded that “Ivan” is the least black-hearted among them, for all that he is a slayer like the others. “Hawks Over Egypt” is a return in some ways to the focus of Howard’s earlier historicals, although the twists and turns of the plot and its focus on a single span of days rather than a course of years is different from the epic sprawl of his four master tales (beginning with “The Sowers of the Thunder” and ending with “The Shadow of the Vulture”). Each of those four deals with the fall of cities and the death of kings – usually from their own hubris – the disintegration of empires or the dreams of those empires. Once Howard reaches “Gates of Empire” the events within take place over no more than a span of months. “The Shadow of the Vulture” might be said to look back toward its three predecessors and forward – with its greater focus upon character and telescoped narrative – toward the next. But then there are seldom clear boundary lines in any discussion of fiction, be it genre definition or periods and phases of an author’s work.
It must be noted, too, that these last three complete historicals – “The Road of the Eagles,” “Hawks Over Egypt,” and “The Road of Azrael” – did not see print within Howard’s lifetime. Likely that was because, in the depths of the depression, Oriental Stories did not generate enough income to survive, even with a name change to Magic Carpet. Howard had created a backlog of stories that didn’t see print, despite the efforts of Otis A. Kline, his agent. He was to write nothing more in a similar vein, and once claimed that writing the historicals took far too much time. One wonders, though, if Howard might have plunged forw
ard into a genre for which he clearly had a natural talent had there been more markets. Could he have been putting the best face on a bad situation when his historical markets dried up? Clearly he loved the study of history and found rich inspiration for stories whenever he read of it. A letter to H. P. Lovecraft in April of 1932 bears witness:
I read with much interest and appreciation your speculations on the possible trend of history, in the event of the destruction of Rome by the Gauls; they seem to have considered all possible angles. Continuing with these theoretical wanderings: suppose that Martel had not stopped the Arabs at Tours? Or that Tamerlane or Genghis Khan had conquered Europe? Or, speculating from the other way, suppose that Alexander the Great had conquered India, and pressing on, subjugated the Cathayan empire? Would the East have been Aryanized, or the Western races sunk that much quicker in a mire of Orientalism? And suppose the Black Prince had carried out his dream of Oriental conquest? He was probably the only Western general of medieval times capable of holding his own with the great Eastern conquerors. In fact, I am convinced that, with his English archers, he would have proven more than a match for Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, Baibars, Subotai, Saladin, or any of the rest. The main reason that the Crusaders and other western armies were so repeatedly defeated and overthrown by the Moslems and Mongols was partly because of the extreme mobility of the Oriental armies, partly because of the incredible inefficiency of the western kings and generals.
In this exchange we can see a brief glimpse of viewpoints that are likely to strike modern readers as politically incorrect, but we cannot castigate a man for being a part of his own time rather than ours. Howard’s views on race were hardly unique to him; what were then considered scientific discussions of race were all the vogue in Howard’s day, and before the rise of the Nazis, discussion of the Aryan race as superior did not have the same sinister connotations that we experience today at the mere mention of the concept. Howard’s own views on race seem almost to have more of a “home-town” pride feel to them than anything else; in that same letter to Lovecraft, Howard writes: “I’ll swear, I’ve written of Christian armies being defeated by Moslems until my blood fairly seethes with rage. Some day I must write of the success of the earlier Crusades to gratify my racial vanity.”
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