Delphi Works of Robert E. Howard (Illustrated) (Series Four)

by Robert E. Howard

  The movement was so sudden it almost swept the Moslems off their feet. They had not expected a charge so instantly to follow the coming up of the Christians. But the allies of the knights were struck by confusion. No orders had been given, no arrangement made for battle. The whole host was disordered by that premature onslaught. The Turcoples and Egyptians wavered uncertainly, drawing up about the baggage wagons.

  The whole first rank of the Saracen center went down, and over their mangled bodies rode the knights of Jerusalem, swinging their great swords. An instant the Turkish ranks held; then they began to fall back in good order, marshaled by their commander, a slender, dark, self-contained young officer, Salah ed din, Shirkuh’s nephew.

  The Christians followed. Amalric, cursing his mischance, made the best of a bad bargain, and so well he plied his trade that the harried Turks cried out on Allah and turned their horses’ heads from him.

  Back into the gut of the hills the Saracens retired, and turning there, under cover of slope and cliff, darkened the air with their shafts. The headlong force of the knights’ charge was broken in the uneven ground, but the iron men came on grimly, bending their helmeted heads to the rain.

  Then on the flanks, kettledrums roared into fresh clamor. The riders of the right wing, led by Shirkuh, swept down the slopes and struck the horde which clustered loosely about the baggage train. That charge swept the unwarlike Egyptians off the field in headlong flight. The left wing began to close in to take the knights on the flank, driving before it the troops of the Turcoples. Amalric, hearing the kettledrums behind and on either side of him as well as in front, gave the order to fall back, before they were completely hemmed in.

  To Giles Hobson it seemed the end of the world. He was deafened by the clang of swords and the shouts. He seemed surrounded by an ocean of surging steel and billowing dust clouds. He parried blindly and smote blindly, hardly knowing whether his blade cut flesh or empty air. Out of the defiles horsemen were moving, chanting exultantly. A cry of “Yala-l-Islam!” rose above the thunder — Saladin’s war-cry, that was in later years to ring around the world. The Saracen center was coming into the battle again.

  Abruptly the press slackened, broke; the plain was filled with flying figures. A strident ululation cut the din. The Turcoples’ shafts had stayed the Saracens’ left wing just long enough to allow the knights to retreat through the closing jaws of the vise. But Amalric, retreating slowly, was cut off with a handful of knights. The Turks swirled about him, screaming in exultation, slashing and smiting with mad abandon. In the dust and confusion the ranks of the iron men fell back, unaware of the fate of their king.

  Giles Hobson, riding through the field like a man in a daze, came face to face with Guiscard de Chastillon.

  “Dog!” croaked the knight. “We are doomed, but I’ll send you to Hell ahead of me!”

  His sword went up, but Giles leaned from his saddle and caught his arm. The fat man’s eyes were bloodshot; he licked his dust-stained lips. There was blood on his sword, and his helmet was dinted.

  “Your selfish hate and my cowardice has cost Amalric the field this day,” Giles croaked. “There he fights for his life; let us redeem ourselves as best we may.”

  Some of the glare faded from de Chastillon’s eyes; he twisted about, stared at the plumed heads that surged and eddied about a cluster of iron helmets; and he nodded his steel-clad head.

  They rode together into the melee. Their swords hissed and crackled on mail and bone. Amalric was down, pinned under his dying horse. Around him whirled the eddy of battle, where his knights were dying under a sea of hacking blades.

  Giles fell rather than jumped from his saddle, gripped the dazed king and dragged him clear. The fat Englishman’s muscles cracked under the strain, a groan escaped his lips. A Seljuk leaned from the saddle, slashed at Amalric’s unhelmeted head. Giles bent his head, took the blow on his own crown; his knees sagged and sparks flashed before his eyes. Guiscard de Chastillon rose in his stirrups, swinging his sword with both hands. The blade crunched through mail, gritted through bone. The Seljuk dropped, shorn through the spine. Giles braced his legs, heaved the king up, slung him over his saddle.

  “Save the king!” Giles did not recognize that croak as his own voice.

  Geoffrey Fulcher loomed through the crush, dealing great strokes. He seized the rein of Giles’ steed; half a dozen reeling, blood-dripping knights closed about the frantic horse and its stunned burden. Nerved to desperation they hacked their way clear. The Seljuks swirled in behind them to be met by Guiscard de Chastillon’s flailing blade.

  The waves of wild horsemen and flying blades broke on him. Saddles were emptied and blood spurted. Giles rose from the red-splashed ground among the lashing hoofs. He ran in among the horses, stabbing at bellies and thighs. A sword stroke knocked off his helmet. His blade snapped under a Seljuk’s ribs.

  Guiscard’s horse screamed awfully and sank to the earth. His grim rider rose, spurting blood at every joint of his armor. Feet braced wide on the blood- soaked earth, he wielded his great sword until the steel wave washed over him and he was hidden from view by waving plumes and rearing steeds.

  Giles ran at a heron-feathered chief, gripped his leg with his naked hands. Blows rained on his coif, bringing fire-shot darkness, but he hung grimly on. He wrenched the Turk from his saddle, fell with him, groping for his throat. Hoofs pounded about him, a steed shouldered against him, knocking him rolling in the dust. He clambered painfully to his feet, shaking the blood and sweat from his eyes. Dead men and dead horses lay heaped in a ghastly pile about him.

  A familiar voice reached his dulled ears. He saw Shirkuh sitting his white horse, gazing down at him. The Mountain Lion’s beard bristled in a grin.

  “You have saved Amalric,” said he, indicating a group of riders in the distance, closing in with the retreating host; the Saracens were not pressing the pursuit too closely. The iron men were falling back in good order. They were defeated, not broken. The Turks were content to allow them to retire unmolested.

  “You are a hero, Giles ibn Malik,” said Shirkuh.

  Giles sank down on a dead horse and dropped his head in his hands. The marrow of his legs seemed turned to water, and he was shaken with a desire to weep.

  “I am neither a hero nor the son of a king,” said Giles. “Slay me and be done with it.”

  “Who spoke of slaying?” demanded Shirkuh. “I have just won an empire in this battle, and I would quaff a goblet in token of it. Slay you? By Allah, I would not harm a hair of such a stout fighter and noble toper. You shall come and drink with me in celebration of a kingdom won when I ride into El Kahira in triumph.”

  THE END

  Horror Stories

  Although Howard is best known today for his sword and sorcery epics, he also retains a strong reputation as a writer of horror stories in the weird fiction tradition. As well as almost single-handedly creating the Weird Western genre, he was a frequent correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft and several of Howard’s stories offer important contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos — a rich fictional mythology about a race of horrific super-beings that populated the Earth in ancient times, waiting to be recalled by terrible occult practices. The horror in these stories can be said broadly to stem from a terror of the insignificance of man’s place in the infinite universe of space and time. Howard also created the recurring character of John Kirowan for some of his Cthulhu stories. Professor Kirowan is a younger son of a titled Irish family and a scholar of the Mythos, who travels widely in search of forbidden knowledge. Other horror tales chronicle strange and terrifying events in settlement of Faring Town and the exploits of the Norman werewolf De Montour.

  Weird Tales, May 1932, which featured Howard’s pioneering ‘Weird Western’ story, ‘The Horror from the Mound’

  Weird Tales April-May 1931, which featured the first John Kirowan story

  JOHN KIROWAN

  CONTENTS

  THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT

  THE HAUNTER OF T
HE RING

  THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT

  First published in Weird Tales, April-May 1931

  THERE were, I remember, six of us in Conrad’s bizarrely fashioned study, with its queer relics from all over the world and its long rows of books which ranged from the Mandrake Press edition of Boccaccio to a Missale Romanum, bound in clasped oak boards and printed in Venice, 1740. Clemants and Professor Kirowan had just engaged in a somewhat testy anthropological argument: Clemants upholding the theory of a separate, distinct Alpine race, while the professor maintained that this so-called race was merely a deviation from an original Aryan stock — possibly the result of an admixture between the southern or Mediterranean races and the Nordic people.

  “And how,” asked Clemants, “do you account for their brachycephalicism? The Mediterraneans were as long-headed as the Aryans: would admixture between these dolichocephalic peoples produce a broad-headed intermediate type?”

  “Special conditions might bring about a change in an originally long- headed race,” snapped Kirowan. “Boaz has demonstrated, for instance, that in the case of immigrants to America, skull formations often change in one generation. And Flinders Petrie has shown that the Lombards changed from a long- headed to a round-headed race in a few centuries.”

  “But what caused these changes?”

  “Much is yet unknown to science,” answered Kirowan, “and we need not be dogmatic. No one knows, as yet, why people of British and Irish ancestry tend to grow unusually tall in the Darling district of Australia — Cornstalks, as they are called — or why people of such descent generally have thinner jaw-structures after a few generations in New England. The universe is full of the unexplainable.”

  “And therefore the uninteresting, according to Machen,” laughed Taverel.

  Conrad shook his head. “I must disagree. To me, the unknowable is most tantalizingly fascinating.”

  “Which accounts, no doubt, for all the works on witchcraft and demonology I see on your shelves,” said Ketrick, with a wave of his hand toward the rows of books.

  And let me speak of Ketrick. Each of the six of us was of the same breed — that is to say, a Briton or an American of British descent. By British, I include all natural inhabitants of the British Isles. We represented various strains of English and Celtic blood, but basically, these strains are the same after all. But Ketrick: to me the man always seemed strangely alien. It was in his eyes that this difference showed externally. They were a sort of amber, almost yellow, and slightly oblique. At times, when one looked at his face from certain angles, they seemed to slant like a Chinaman’s.

  Others than I had noticed this feature, so unusual in a man of pure Anglo- Saxon descent. The usual myths ascribing his slanted eyes to some pre-natal influence had been mooted about, and I remember Professor Hendrik Brooler once remarked that Ketrick was undoubtedly an atavism, representing a reversion of type to some dim and distant ancestor of Mongolian blood — a sort of freak reversion, since none of his family showed such traces.

  But Ketrick comes of the Welsh branch of the Cetrics of Sussex, and his lineage is set down in the Book of Peers. There you may read the line of his ancestry, which extends unbroken to the days of Canute. No slightest trace of Mongoloid intermixture appears in the genealogy, and how could there have been such intermixture in old Saxon England? For Ketrick is the modern form of Cedric, and though that branch fled into Wales before the invasion of the Danes, its male heirs consistently married with English families on the border marches, and it remains a pure line of the powerful Sussex Cedrics — almost pure Saxon. As for the man himself, this defect of his eyes, if it can be called a defect, is his only abnormality, except for a slight and occasional lisping of speech. He is highly intellectual and a good companion except for a slight aloofness and a rather callous indifference which may serve to mask an extremely sensitive nature.

  Referring to his remark, I said with a laugh: “Conrad pursues the obscure and mystic as some men pursue romance; his shelves throng with delightful nightmares of every variety.”

  Our host nodded. “You’ll find there a number of delectable dishes — Machen, Poe, Blackwood, Maturin — look, there’s a rare feast — Horrid Mysteries, by the Marquis of Grosse — the real Eighteenth Century edition.”

  Taverel scanned the shelves. “Weird fiction seems to vie with works on witchcraft, voodoo and dark magic.”

  True; historians and chronicles are often dull; tale-weavers never — the masters, I mean. A voodoo sacrifice can be described in such a dull manner as to take all the real fantasy out of it, and leave it merely a sordid murder. I will admit that few writers of fiction touch the true heights of horror — most of their stuff is too concrete, given too much earthly shape and dimensions. But in such tales as Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, Machen’s Black Seal and Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu — the three master horror-tales, to my mind — the reader is borne into dark and outer realms of imagination.

  “But look there,” he continued, “there, sandwiched between that nightmare of Huysmans’, and Walpole’s Castle of Otranto — Von Junzt’s Nameless Cults. There’s a book to keep you awake at night!”

  “I’ve read it,” said Taverel, “and I’m convinced the man is mad. His work is like the conversation of a maniac — it runs with startling clarity for awhile, then suddenly merges into vagueness and disconnected ramblings.”

  Conrad shook his head. “Have you ever thought that perhaps it is his very sanity that causes him to write in that fashion? What if he dares not put on paper all he knows? What if his vague suppositions are dark and mysterious hints, keys to the puzzle, to those who know?”

  “Bosh!” This from Kirowan. “Are you intimating that any of the nightmare cults referred to by Von Junzt survive to this day — if they ever existed save in the hag-ridden brain of a lunatic poet and philosopher?”

  “Not he alone used hidden meanings,” answered Conrad. “If you will scan various works of certain great poets you may find double meanings. Men have stumbled onto cosmic secrets in the past and given a hint of them to the world in cryptic words. Do you remember Von Junzt’s hints of ‘a city in the waste’? What do you think of Flecker’s line:”

  ‘Pass not beneath! Men say there blows in stony deserts still a rose

  But with no scarlet to her leaf — and from whose heart no perfume flows.’

  “Men may stumble upon secret things, but Von Junzt dipped deep into forbidden mysteries. He was one of the few men, for instance, who could read the Necronomicon in the original Greek translation.”

  Taverel shrugged his shoulders, and Professor Kirowan, though he snorted and puffed viciously at his pipe, made no direct reply; for he, as well as Conrad, had delved into the Latin version of the book, and had found there things not even a cold-blooded scientist could answer or refute.

  “Well,” he said presently, “suppose we admit the former existence of cults revolving about such nameless and ghastly gods and entities as Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Tsathoggua, Gol-goroth, and the like, I can not find it in my mind to believe that survivals of such cults lurk in the dark corners of the world today.”

  To our surprise Clemants answered. He was a tall, lean man, silent almost to the point of taciturnity, and his fierce struggles with poverty in his youth had lined his face beyond his years. Like many another artist, he lived a distinctly dual literary life, his swashbuckling novels furnishing him a generous income, and his editorial position on The Cloven Hoof affording him full artistic expression. The Cloven Hoof was a poetry magazine whose bizarre contents had often aroused the shocked interest of the conservative critics.

  “You remember Von Junzt makes mention of a so-called Bran cult,” said Clemants, stuffing his pipe-bowl with a peculiarly villainous brand of shag tobacco. “I think I heard you and Taverel discussing it once.”

  “As I gather from his hints,” snapped Kirowan, “Von Junzt includes this particular cult among those still in existence. Absurd.”

  Again Cl
emants shook his head. “When I was a boy working my way through a certain university, I had for roommate a lad as poor and ambitious as I. If I told you his name, it would startle you. Though he came of an old Scotch line of Galloway, he was obviously of a non-Aryan type.

  “This is in strictest confidence, you understand. But my roommate talked in his sleep. I began to listen and put his disjointed mumbling together. And in his mutterings I first heard of the ancient cult hinted at by Von Junzt; of the king who rules the Dark Empire, which was a revival of an older, darker empire dating back into the Stone Age; and of the great, nameless cavern where stands the Dark Man — the image of Bran Mak Morn, carved in his likeness by a master-hand while the great king yet lived, and to which each worshipper of Bran makes a pilgrimage once in his or her lifetime. Yes, that cult lives today in the descendants of Bran’s people — a silent, unknown current it flows on in the great ocean of life, waiting for the stone image of the great Bran to breathe and move with sudden life, and come from the great cavern to rebuild their lost empire.”

  “And who were the people of that empire?” asked Ketrick.

  “Picts,” answered Taverel, “doubtless the people known later as the wild Picts of Galloway were predominantly Celtic — a mixture of Gaelic, Cymric, aboriginal and possibly Teutonic elements. Whether they took their name from the older race or lent their own name to that race, is a matter yet to be decided. But when Von Junzt speaks of Picts, he refers specifically to the small, dark, garlic-eating peoples of Mediterranean blood who brought the Neolithic culture into Britain. The first settlers of that country, in fact, who gave rise to the tales of earth spirits and goblins.”

  “I can not agree to that last statement,” said Conrad. “These legends ascribe a deformity and inhumanness of appearances to the characters. There was nothing about the Picts to excite such horror and repulsion in the Aryan peoples. I believe that the Mediterraneans were preceded by a Mongoloid type, very low in the scale of development, whence these tales—”