The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (Conan the Cimmerian, #1)

by Robert E. Howard

“In writing these yarns I’ve always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as he told them to me. That’s why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him.”

Weird Tales often lived up to its subtitle, “The Unique Magazine,” walking a fine line between the magazine’s commercial imperatives and Wright’s literary inclinations.

“There is no literary work, to me, half as zestful as rewriting history in the guise of fiction. I wish I was able to devote the rest of my life to that kind of work….I could never make a living writing such things, though;

Howard wanted to ensure that no reader would be left wondering what a Turanian looked like, or be unaware that his Vanir and Æsir lived in the northern parts of the world. By telescoping history and geography to create a universe that was new and yet familiar, Howard was deliberately striving for efficacy and stereotype, a technique that allowed him to create an exotic background with a minimum of description.

Manifestly, the majority of Howard’s work – and the Conan tales in particular – can be read as an exploration of the theme of “Barbarism versus Civilization,” with Howard standing firmly on the barbarians’ side.

Lovecraft thus wrote: “It is hard to describe precisely what made Mr. Howard’s stories stand out so sharply; but the real secret is that he himself is in every one of them.”

Civilization is not the final phase of human development; it may be an “inevitable consequence” of that development, but it is a transitory state: civilizations are bound to wither and decay, eventually to be swept over by conquering hordes of savages or barbarians who will themselves, after a time, become civilized….

This was not a case, as some commentators have argued, of belief in the superiority of barbarism over civilization or of a conception of the barbarian as a “Noble Savage”:

The civilizing process bears in itself the seeds of its own destruction by removing itself from what is natural.

Lovecraft once wrote, Howard “was greater than any money-making policy he could adopt”

But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.”

“Why does he hate Conan?” “Poets always hate those in power. To them perfection is always just behind the last corner, or beyond the next. They escape the present in dreams of the past and future. Rinaldo is a flaming torch of idealism, rising, as he thinks, to overthrow a tyrant and liberate the people.

“Wits and swords are as straws against the wisdom of the Darkness,” growled the Stygian, his dark eyes flickering with menacing lights and shadows.

“I did not dream far enough, Prospero. When King Numedides lay dead at my feet and I tore the crown from his gory head and set it on my own, I had reached the ultimate border of my dreams. I had prepared myself to take the crown, not to hold it. In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword and a straight path to my enemies. Now no paths are straight and my sword is useless.

“Rinaldo is largely responsible,” answered Prospero, drawing up his sword-belt another notch. “He sings songs that make men mad. Hang him in his jester’s garb to the highest tower in the city. Let him make rimes for the vultures.” Conan shook his lion head. “No, Prospero, he’s beyond my reach. A great poet is greater than any king. His songs are mightier than my scepter; for he has near ripped the heart from my breast when he chose to sing for me. I shall die and be forgotten, but Rinaldo’s songs will live for ever.

“My Ring!” he whispered in terrible exultation. “My power!”

Conan sensed their uncertainty and grinned mirthlessly and ferociously. “Who dies first?” he mumbled through smashed and bloody lips.

They put a goblet to his bloody lips and he drank like a man half dead of thirst. “Good!” he grunted, falling back. “Slaying is cursed dry work.”

“See first to the dagger-wound in my side,” he bade the court physicians. “Rinaldo wrote me a deathly song there, and keen was the stylus.”

“In Mitra’s name, lord king, be silent!” It was the high-priest of Mitra who cried out, and his countenance was ashen. Conan threw up his head like a lion tossing back its mane, and his voice was thick with the growl of the angry lion. “Am I a slave, to shut my mouth at your command?”

“Man,” said he, “tell me your name, so that my brothers in Vanaheim may know who was the last of Wulfhere’s band to fall before the sword of Heimdul.” “Not in Vanaheim,” growled the black-haired warrior, “but in Valhalla will you tell your brothers that you met Conan of Cimmeria.”

seeking to shake the blindness out of his eyes as a lion might shake his mane.

It is not pleasant to come upon Death in a lonely place at midnight.

“You understand what he said?” asked the Inquisitor. “What have you to say?” “That any man who touches me will quickly be greeting his ancestors in hell,” the Cimmerian ground between his powerful teeth, his eyes glinting quick flames of dangerous anger.

“You see what happens to those who cross the police,” he said. The Cimmerian spat with a sneer of cruel contempt for the moaning clerk. “He’s a weakling and a fool,” he growled. “Let one of you touch me and I’ll spill his guts on the floor.”

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.

he knew that Zamora’s religion, like all things of a civilized, long-settled people, was intricate and complex, and had lost most of the pristine essence in a maze of formulas and rituals.

It was useless to call on Crom, because he was a gloomy, savage god, and he hated weaklings. But he gave a man courage at birth, and the will and might to kill his enemies, which, in the Cimmerian’s mind, was all any god should be expected to do.

“It was made from the black lotus, whose blossoms wave in the lost jungles of Khitai, where only the yellow-skulled priests of Yun dwell. Those blossoms strike dead any who smell of them.”

He only felt that he was looking upon a cosmic tragedy, and he shrank with shame, as if the guilt of a whole race were laid upon him.

We saw your people rise under a new name from the jungles of the apes that had been Atlanteans.

“I offer you life, Conan,” said Tsotha, a cruel mirth bubbling at the back of his voice. “I give you death, wizard,” snarled the king,

“You sit on satin and guzzle wine the people sweat for, and talk of divine rights of sovereignty – bah! I climbed out of the abyss of naked barbarism to the throne and in that climb I spilt my blood as freely as I spilt that of others. If either of us has the right to rule men, by Crom, it is I! How have you proved yourselves my superiors?

The folk that yelled and scattered had only a fleeting glimpse of a mailed figure on a black stallion, a wide scarlet cloak flowing out on the wind.

“But I choked my ire and held my peace, and the judge squalled that I had shown contempt for the court, and that I should be hurled into a dungeon to rot until I betrayed my friend. So then, seeing they were all mad, I drew my sword and cleft the judge’s skull;

Ships did not put unasked into this port, where dusky sorcerers wove awful spells in the murk of sacrificial smoke mounting eternally from blood-stained altars where naked women screamed, and where Set, the Old Serpent, arch-demon of the Hyborians but god of the Stygians, was said to writhe his shining coils among his worshippers.

Naïve as a child in many ways, unfamiliar with the sophistry of civilization, he was naturally intelligent, jealous of his rights, and dangerous as a hungry tiger.

“Who is Bêlit?” “The wildest she-devil unhanged. Unless I read the signs a-wrong, it was her butchers who destroyed that village on the bay. May I some day see her dangling from the yard-arm! She is called the queen of the black coast. She is a Shemite woman, who leads black raiders. They harry the shipping and have sent many a good tradesman to the bottom.”

“Give me a bow,” requested Conan. “It’s not my idea of a manly weapon, but I learned archery among the Hyrkanians, and it will go hard if I can’t feather a man or so on yonder deck.”

She turned toward Conan, her bosom heaving, her eyes flashing. Fierce fingers of wonder caught at his heart. She was slender, yet formed like a goddess: at once lithe and voluptuous. Her only garment was a broad silken girdle. Her white ivory limbs and the ivory globes of her breasts drove a beat of fierce passion through the Cimmerian’s pulse, even in the panting fury of battle.

“Look at me, Conan!” She threw wide her arms. “I am Bêlit, queen of the black coast. Oh, tiger of the North, you are cold as the snowy mountains which bred you. Take me and crush me with your fierce love! Go with me to the ends of the earth and the ends of the sea! I am a queen by fire and steel and slaughter – be thou my king!”

Conan agreed. He generally agreed to her plans. Hers was the mind that directed their raids, his the arm that carried out her ideas. It mattered little to him where they sailed or whom they fought, so long as they sailed and fought. He found the life good.

“Their chief is Crom. He dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune! He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man’s soul. What else shall men ask of the gods?”

“I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death.

Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”

“my love is stronger than any death! I have lain in your arms, panting with the violence of our love; you have held and crushed and conquered me, drawing my soul to your lips with the fierceness of your bruising kisses. My heart is welded to your heart, my soul is part of your soul! Were I still in death and you fighting for life, I would come back from the abyss to aid you – aye, whether my spirit floated with the purple sails on the crystal sea of paradise, or writhed in the molten flames of hell! I am yours, and all the gods and all their eternities shall not sever us!”

In adapting themselves to the changing conditions, they had sunk far below their original level. But the lethal waters altered them even more horribly, from generation to more bestial generation.

Speechless the Cimmerian looked on the Queen of the Black Coast as she hung from the yard-arm of her own galley. Between the yard and her white throat stretched a line of crimson clots that shone like blood in the gray light.

Then something swept down across the stars and struck the sward near him. Twisting about, he saw it – the winged one!

In one mad instant she was there – a tense white shape, vibrant with love fierce as a she-panther’s. The dazed Cimmerian saw between him and the onrushing death, her lithe figure, shimmering like ivory beneath the moon; he saw the blaze of her dark eyes, the thick cluster of her burnished hair; her bosom heaved, her red lips were parted, she cried out sharp and ringing as the ring of steel as she thrust at the winged monster’s breast.