Then she carried Valeria back to the throne-chamber where the survivors were gathered, after having carried the bodies of the slain into the catcombs. Four had failed to return and men whispered of the ghost of Tolkemec. She prepared to suck the blood from Valeria's heart to retain her own youth.

Meanwhile Conan had released Olmec, who swore to unite forces with him. Olmec led the way up a winding stair, where he struck Conan from behind. As they rolled down the stair Conan lost his sword, but strangled the prince with his bare hands.

Conan's leg was broken, but he hobbled to the throne room where he stumbled into a trap set for him. Then from the catacombs came old Tolkemec, who slew all the Tecuhltli with his magic and while he was so [Draft stops here; the fifty-second and probably last page of the typescript is apparently lost.]

341.

Ephemera 342.

Letter to P. Schuyler Miller Lock Box 313 Cross Plains, Texas March 10, 1936 Dear Mr. Miller : I feel indeed honored that you and Dr. Clark should be so interested in Conan as to work out an outline of his career and a map of his environs. Both are surprisingly accurate, considering the vagueness of the data you had to work with. I have the original map--that is, the one I drew up when I first started writing about Conan-- around here somewhere and I'll see if I can't find it and let you have a look at it. It includes only the countries west of Vilayet and north of Kush.

I've never attempted to map the southern and eastern kingdoms, though I have a fairly clear outline of their geography in my mind. However, in writing about them I feel a certain amount of license, since the inhabitants of the western Hyborian nations were about as ignorant concerning the peoples and countries of the south and east as the people of medieval Europe were ignorant of Africa and Asia. In writing about the western Hyborian nations I feel confined within the limits of known and inflexible boundaries and territories, but in fictionizing the rest of the world, I feel able to give my imagination freer play. That is, having adopted a certain conception of geography and ethnology, I feel compelled to abide by it, in the interests of consistency. My conception of the east and south is not so definite or so arbitrary.

Concerning Kush, however, it is one of the black kingdoms south of Stygia, the northern-most, in fact, and has given its name to the whole southern coast. Thus, when an Hyborian speaks of Kush, he is generally speaking of not the kingdom itself, one of many such kingdoms, but of the Black Coast in general. And he is likely to speak of any black man as a Kus.h.i.te, whether he happens to be a Keshani, Darfari, Puntan, or Kus.h.i.te proper. This is natural, since the Kus.h.i.tes were the first black men with whom the Hyborians came in contact--Barachan pirates trafficking with and raiding them.

As for Conan's eventual fate--frankly I can't predict it. 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 s.p.a.ce and years, as they occur to him.

Your outline follows his career as I have visualized it pretty closely. The differences are minor.

As you deduct, 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. He was born on a battlefield, during a fight between his tribe and a horde of raiding 343.

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 purebred Cimmerian. His grandfather was a member of a southern tribe who had fled from his own people because of a blood-feud 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 Conan, 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.

There was the s.p.a.ce of about a year between Vanarium and his entrance into the thief-city of Zamora. During this time he returned to the northern territories of his tribe, and made his first journey beyond the boundaries of Cimmeria. This, strange to say, was north instead of south.

Why or how, I am not certain, but he spent some months among a tribe of the aesir, fighting with the Vanir and the Hyperboreans, and developing a hate for the latter which lasted all his life and later affected his policies as king of Aquilonia. Captured by them, he escaped southward and came into Zamora in time to make his debut in print.

I am not sure that the adventure chronicled in "Rogues in the House" occurred in Zamora. The presence of opposing factions of politics would seem to indicate otherwise, since Zamora was an absolute despotism where differing political opinions were not tolerated. I am of the opinion that the city was one of the small city-states lying just west of Zamora, and into which Conan had wandered after leaving Zamora. Shortly after this he returned for a brief period to Cimmeria, and there were other returns to his native land from time to time. The chronological order of his adventures is about as you have worked it out, except that they covered a little more time. Conan was about forty when he seized the crown of Aquilonia, and was about forty- four or forty-five at the time of "The Hour of the Dragon." He had no male heir at that time, because he had never bothered to formally make some woman his queen, and the sons of concubines, of which he had a goodly number, were not recognized as heirs to the throne.

He was, I think, king of Aquilonia for many years, in a turbulent and unquiet reign, when the Hyborian civilization had reached its most magnificent high-tide, and every king had imperial ambitions. At first he fought on the defensive, but I am of the opinion that at last he was forced into wars of aggression as a matter of self-preservation. Whether he succeeded in conquering a world-wide empire, or perished in the attempt, I do not know.

He travelled widely, not only before his kingship, but after he was king. He travelled to 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 can not foretell with any 344.

accuracy. I was much interested in your remarks concerning findings on the Yamal Peninsula, the first time I had heard anything about that. Doubtless Conan had first-hand acquaintance with the people who evolved the culture described, or their ancestors, at least.

Hope you find "The Hyborian Age" interesting. I'm enclosing a copy of the original map. Yes, Napoli's done very well with Conan, though at times he seems to give him a sort of Latin cast of the countenance which isn't according to type, as I conceive it. However, that isn't enough to kick about.

Hope the enclosed data answers your questions satisfactorily; I'd be delighted to discuss any other phases you might wish, or go into more details about any point of Conan's career or Hyborian history or geography you might desire. Thanks again for your interest, and best wishes, for yourself and Dr. Clark.

Cordially, P.S. You didn't mention whether you wanted the map and chronology returned, so I'm taking the liberty of retaining them to show to some friends; if you want them back, please let me know.

345.

Map of the Hyborian Age The following map was originally enclosed with Howard's letter of March 10, 1936, to P.

Schuyler Miller. It is, as Howard states, a copy of the original map of the Hyborian Age, which the Texan had prepared in March 1932 (see The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian). However, as can readily be seen by comparing the different versions, Howard updated his map during the copying process, adding several cities and countries mentioned in the tales.

346.

347.

Appendices 348.

HYBORIAN GENESIS PART III.

Notes on the Creation of the Conan Stories by Patrice Louinet As he was completing A Witch Shall Be Born, Robert E. Howard probably felt that he could sell almost any Conan story he submitted to Weird Tales. By 1934, after several years of hardship, including two years early in his career during which he did not sell a single story, Howard had become one of the stars of the magazine. Witch was, according to editor Farnsworth Wright, the "best" of the Conan stories submitted to date; praise for Howard and his Conan stories could be found in the letter column of almost every issue of Weird Tales, and, by far the most revealing factor, the Texan was present in ten of the twelve issues published in 1934, eight of these featuring Conan, with the last four winning cover privilege, an impressive record.

Howard had been immersed in Conan for months: People of the Black Circle had been written in February and March; The Hour of the Dragon was begun just afterward and sent to its intended British publisher on May 20; and A Witch Shall Be Born had been completed by early June. Howard's sole respite during those months was the short visit of his colleague E.

Hoffmann Price in April. Early in June, then, Howard took his first vacation in a long time. He later informed his correspondent August Derleth that he had "completed several weeks of steady work," and told him that "a friend and I took a brief trip into southern New Mexico and extreme western Texas; saw the Carlsbad Caverns, a spectacle not to [be] duplicated on this planet, and spent a short time in El Paso. First time I'd ever been there. . . ."

The friend in question was Truett Vinson, one of Howard's best friends since high school, about whom more later. The two men left Cross Plains, Howard's hometown, in early June and were gone for a week. That the trip proved enjoyable is attested by mentions of it in almost all of Howard's letters of the following weeks, with the visit to the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico as the high point of the short holidays. Howard was particularly impressed by these natural wonders and waxed at length about them to his correspondents, notably H. P.

Lovecraft: I can not describe the fantastic wonders of that great cavern. You must see it yourself to appreciate it. It lies high up among the mountains, and I never saw skies so blue and clear as those that arch t.i.tanically above those winding trails up which the traveller must labor to reach the entrance of the Cavern. They are of a peculiarly deep hue beggaring attempts at description.

The entrance of the Cavern is gigantic, but it is dwarfed by the dimensions of the interior. One descends seemingly endlessly by winding ramps, for some seven hundred feet. We entered at ten thirty o'clock, and emerged about four. The English language is too weak to describe the 349.

Cavern. The pictures do not give a good idea; for one thing they exaggerate the colors; the coloring is really subdued, somber rather than sparkling. But they do not give a proper idea of the size, of the intricate patterns carved in the limestone throughout the millenniums.... In the Cavern natural laws seem suspended; it is Nature gone mad in a riot of fantasy. Hundreds of feet above arched the great stone roof, smoky in the mist that eternally rises. Huge stalact.i.tes hung from the roof in every conceivable shape, in shafts, in domes, in translucent sheets, like tapestries of ice. Water dripped, building gigantic columns through the ages, pools of water gleamed green and weird here and there. . . . We moved through a wonderland of fantastic giants whose immemorial antiquity was appalling to contemplate.

Shortly upon his return to Cross Plains, Howard set out to write yet another Conan story, The Servants of Bit-Yakin. The story is not a particularly memorable one, with a rather unconvincing plot and insipid heroine, but it has a setting markedly different from the other Conan tales, taking place entirely in a vast natural wonder, filled with caves and subterranean rivers, which was evidently greatly inspired by Howard's visit to the Carlsbad Caverns. As he concluded to Lovecraft: "G.o.d, what a story you could write after such an exploration! . . .

Anything seemed possible in that monstrous twilight underworld, seven hundred and fifty feet below the earth. If some animate monster had risen horrifically from among the dimness of the columns and spread his taloned anthropomorphic hands above the throng, I do not believe that anyone would have been particularly surprized." Howard probably decided he could write the tale himself, after all.

The result is not quite satisfying, but it was paving the way for greater things to come: for the first time in the series, Howard was weaving elements of his own country into his Conan tales.

It was a timid first step to be sure, but an important one nonetheless. The story is not mentioned in any of the extant Howard letters and no record of submission survives. It was accepted by Farnsworth Wright for $155, payable on publication, and published in the March 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Some confusion exists as to Howard's original t.i.tle for the tale. The story first appeared in Weird Tales under the t.i.tle Jewels of Gwahlur. Howard wrote three drafts: the first is unt.i.tled, while the second and third are t.i.tled The Servants of Bit-Yakin. The third draft has come to us as a carbon of the version sent to Weird Tales, hence the definitive one. A third t.i.tle, Teeth of Gwahlur, appears in a listing found among Howard's papers long after his death (from which the information on the price paid by the magazine comes). This listing was not prepared by Howard himself, though evidently derived from either an original Howard doc.u.ment or series of doc.u.ments. From internal evidence, it appears that this page was prepared well after the story was published and was very probably intended as a listing of stories sold to Weird Tales to establish what was owed to Howard's estate by the magazine, following his death. In his listings of sales, Howard, as a general rule, would always give the published version's t.i.tle rather than his own, which is the case in this doc.u.ment (The Slithering Shadow over Xuthal of the Dusk, Shadows in the Moonlight over Iron Shadows in the Moon). It seems quite probable, then, that Teeth was simply an error: perhaps Howard himself, in giving 350.

the t.i.tle, was remembering the name of the necklace in the story, and the later transcription carried forward the error.

In the weeks that followed, Howard once again decided to experiment with his Conan stories.

The attempt itself did not result in a complete story, but it led to a major evolution in the series.

If The Servants of Bit-Yakin timidly borrowed from a place Howard had visited, this time the Texan opted for a definitely American setting, at the price of an eviction of the Cimmerian himself from his Hyborian world.

In the second part of 1934, it was possible to detect a growing distancing of Howard from his Cimmerian creation, notably in the conversations he had with Novalyne Price, whom he began dating in August. In October, he confided to her that he was "getting a little tired of Conan. . . .

This country needs to be written about. There are all kinds of stories around here."

The author to whom Howard looked when it came to finding inspiration for this new tale was one of his favorites: Robert W. Chambers. Howard's library included three of this author's novels dealing with the American Revolution: The Maid-at-Arms (1902), The Little Red Foot (1921) and America, or the Sacrifice (1924). These novels were to provide the background and inspiration for Howard's next tale of the Hyborian Age, Wolves Beyond the Border. A lot of confusing and erroneous information on Howard's use of the Chambers material had appeared over the years until Howard scholar Rusty Burke set the record straight. All the conclusions on the exact degree of that influence originate with Burke's research or are derived from his pioneering efforts.

As he had done in 1932 when he made the decision to write The Hyborian Age to give more coherence to his Hyborian world, Howard first proceeded to jot down a series of notes that would help him feel more at ease with the events and locale he was to write about (see page 285). There can be no doubt at all that Chambers' novels were very much in Howard's mind when he wrote this. Almost all the names are taken nearly verbatim from the novels: Schohira for Schoharie, Oriskany for Oriskonie, Caughnawaga for Conawaga, etc. The situation and events Howard describes in his doc.u.ment also clearly evoke Chambers' dramatization of the American Revolution. More names derived from Chambers would find their way into Wolves Beyond the Border.

Wolves is one of the most intriguing Conan fragments precisely because it is not, strictly speaking, a Conan story. It was not the first time Howard had attempted to do something different with Conan and, as we are about to see, not the first time he experimented with another character because he was starting to feel "out of contact" with one of his creations.

Shortly before he wrote his novel The Hour of the Dragon, Howard had attempted another story in which Conan is only an off-stage presence for a significant part of the tale. In that case, however, Conan's absence was confined to the first chapters of a story which was envisioned 351.

as a novel; as the synopsis for the complete story attests, the Cimmerian was intended as a prominent character, if not actually the protagonist of the story. The situation can be seen as a parallel to that of A Witch Shall Be Born, in which the Cimmerian acts mostly off-stage. But in the case of Wolves Beyond the Border, the situation is markedly different, most notably due to the fact that this is a first-person narrative, in which Conan makes no appearance, though he is mentioned several times in the course of the story.

A very similar situation had arisen a few years earlier in Howard's career, and makes for an interesting comparison. In 1926, Howard created Kull the Atlantean, his first epic fantasy character, about whom the Texan wrote or began a dozen tales. In 1928, however, Howard apparently started to lose interest in his character. He then began but never completed a very intriguing fragment in which the major character was not Kull, who was relegated to a minor role, but his friend Brule, the Pictish warrior, whose characteristics were markedly different in that tale than in his previous appearances. Kull was apparently becoming merely a supporting character in his own series, in quite the same fashion Conan seems to be in Wolves Beyond the Border. Howard never completed the fragment, but from that moment on the character of Kull underwent a drastic evolution. It is quite striking to see that in those two fragments, the off-stage characters are barbarians who have become or are becoming kings of civilized countries. And in both fragments, the sentiments of the new protagonists when it comes to politics are about the same. Compare the following: The people of Conajohara scattered throughout the Westermarck, in Schohira, Conawaga, or Oriskawny, but many of them went southward and settled near Fort Thandara. . . . There they were later joined by other settlers for whom the older provinces were too thickly inhabited, and presently there grew up the district known as the Free Province of Thandara, because it was not like the other provinces, royal grants to great lords east of the marches and settled by them, but cut out of the wilderness by the pioneers themselves without aid of the Aquilonian n.o.bility. We paid no taxes to any baron. Our governor was not appointed by any lord, but we elected him ourselves, from our own people, and he was responsible only to the king. We manned and built our forts ourselves, and sustained ourselves in war as in peace. And Mitra knows war was a constant state of affairs, for there was never peace between us and our savage neighbors, the wild Panther, Alligator and Otter tribes of Picts. (from Wolves Beyond the Border) "We of The Islands are all one blood, but of many tribes, and each tribe has customs and traditions peculiar to itself alone. We all acknowledge Nial of the Tatheli as over-king but his rule is loose. He does not interfere with our affairs among ourselves, nor does he levy tribute or taxes.... [H]e takes no toll of my tribe, the Borni, nor of any other tribe. Neither does he interfere when two tribes go to war unless some tribe encroaches on the three who pay tribute.... And when the Lemurians or the Celts or any foreign nation or band of reavers come against us, he sends forth for all tribes to put aside their quarrels and fight side by side. Which 352.

is a good thing. He might be a supreme tyrant if he liked, for his own tribe is very strong, and with the aid of Valusia he might do as he liked but he knows that though he might, with his tribes and their allies, crush all the other tribes, there would never be peace again...." (from the unt.i.tled Kull fragment) Here are more than pa.s.sing resemblances. In both instances, the peculiar political turmoil can also be read as a mirror of a similar turmoil taking place in Howard's psyche, connected to the social situation of his regular protagonists: Kull the king of Valusia and Conan the soon-to-be king of Aquilonia. In both instances, the Picts only mentioned once so far in the Conan series (in The Phoenix on the Sword) appear as the necessary catalysts for the change: Brule is a Pict, and the threat they pose to the Aquilonian settlement triggers the events of Wolves Beyond the Border. The Picts the savages forever present in Howard's universe force the Howardian characters to reveal their true nature.

As was the case with the Kull fragment then, Howard did not complete Wolves Beyond the Border. His first draft diminished to part-story, part synopsis, while the second was simply abandoned. The tale was probably at the same time too derivative of Chambers and too much a necessary exercise before Howard could fully tackle this new phase of his character's evolution.

To say that Beyond the Black River was born on the ashes of Wolves Beyond the Border would be belaboring the obvious. This time, however, Howard got rid almost entirely of the Chambers influence. There is no plot element in Black River which can be traced back to Chambers, and only a few names still show the initial connection (for instance, Conajohara was carried on from Wolves and "Balthus" was derived from the "Baltus" of The Little Red Foot). Beyond the Black River is pure Howard.

The tale was particularly dear to Howard. To August Derleth he remarked that he "wanted to see if [he] could write an interesting Conan yarn without s.e.x interest." He was a little more explicit with Lovecraft, writing that his latest sale to Weird Tales was "a two-part Conan serial: 'Beyond the Black River' a frontier story... In the Conan story I've attempted a new style and setting entirely abandoned the exotic settings of lost cities, decaying civilizations, golden domes, marble palaces, silk-clad dancing girls, etc., and thrown my story against a back-ground of forests and rivers, log cabins, frontier outposts, buckskin-clad settlers, and painted tribesmen."

It was to Novalyne Price that Howard fully bared his sentiments toward that story: Bob began to talk. But he was not berating civilization; instead, he was praising the simple things that civilization had to offer: standing on street corners, talking with friends; walking with the warmth of the sun on your back, a faithful dog by your side; hunting cactus with your 353.

best girl.

"I sold Wright a yarn like that a few months ago." He turned and looked at me, his eyes turbulent. "I'm d.a.m.ned surprised he took it. It's different from my other Conan yarns . . . no s.e.x . . . only men fighting against the savagery and b.e.s.t.i.a.lity about to engulf them. I want you to read it when it comes out. It's filled with the important little things of civilization, little things that make men think civilization's worth living and dying for."

He was excited about it because it was about this country and it sold! He had a honing to write more about this country, not an ordinary cowboy yarn, or a wild west shoot 'em up, though G.o.d knew this country was alive with yarns like that waiting to be written. But in his heart, he wanted to say more than that. He wanted to tell the simple story of this country and the hardships the settlers had suffered, pitted against a frightened, semi-barbaric people the Indians, who were trying to hold on to a way of life and a country they loved. . . . But a novel depicting the settlers' fear as they tried to carve out a new life, and the Indians' fear as they tried to hold on to a doomed country; why, girl, all that would make the best d.a.m.n novel ever written about frontier life in the Southwest.

"I tried that yarn out to see what Wright would do about it. I was afraid he wouldn't take it, but he did! By G.o.d, he took it! "

Beyond the Black River is considered by many Howard scholars to be his best story, encapsulating the essence of his philosophy: "Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. . . .

Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circ.u.mstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph."

Indeed, all the characters who are not barbarians meet their doom in the tale: Tiberias the merchant, presented as the epitome of civilized decadence, is of course the first example, portrayed with evident scorn as a man unwilling or unable to adjust his civilized ways to life on the Frontier. But even the woodsmen, born to civilization but having lived their lives on the frontier, can not hope to prevail: "They were sons of civilization, reverted to a semi-barbarism.

[Conan] was a barbarian of a thousand generations of barbarians. They had acquired stealth and craft, but he had been born to these things. He excelled them even in lithe economy of motion.

They were wolves, but he was a tiger." The frontiersmen, Balthus, and Valannus all died because of this, and Howard's genius was not to sacrifice his story for the sake of the usual 354.

conventions of the genre.

Much has been written about the exact signification of the last paragraph of the story. Many erroneously credit the statement to Conan, as if it were his sentiment, but it is not Conan but an unnamed forester who utters these words. That the barbarians always ultimately triumph is a simple report of what has just transpired: only Conan and the Picts have survived the ordeal, because it was their nature to survive. That Conan had in fact more in common with the Picts he was fighting than with the Aquilonians had been made clear by Howard earlier in the story: "But some day a man will rise and unite thirty or forty clans [of the Picts], just as was done among the Cimmerians, when the Gundermen tried to push the border northward, years ago.

They tried to colonize the southern marches of Cimmeria: destroyed a few small clans, built a fort-town, Venarium, you've heard the tale."

"So I have indeed," replied Balthus, wincing. . . . "My uncle was at Venarium when the Cimmerians swarmed over the walls. . . . The barbarians swept out of the hills in a ravening horde, without warning, and stormed Venarium with such fury none could stand before them.

Men, women and children were butchered. Venarium was reduced to a ma.s.s of charred ruins, as it is to this day. The Aquilonians were driven back across the marches, and have never since tried to colonize the Cimmerian country. But you speak of Venarium familiarly. Perhaps you were there?"

"I was," grunted the other. "I was one of the horde that swarmed over the walls. . . ."

"Then you, too, are a barbarian!" he exclaimed involuntarily.

The other nodded, without taking offense.

"I am Conan, a Cimmerian."

The import of this pa.s.sage was not merely to give some additional biographical information on the Cimmerian, but rather to make explicit the connection between Conan and the Picts. Conan is a barbarian "as ferocious as the Picts, and much more intelligent" and this is why he will survive. The insistence on Conan's elemental nature, much more marked than in any of the previous tales of the Cimmerian, very probably provoked the emergence of Balthus as the character readers and Howard himself could relate to. Critic George Scithers once noted that Howard had undoubtedly projected himself and his dog Patches into this story under the guise of Balthus and Slasher. As a civilized man himself, Howard could no more hope to 355.

prevail in the Hyborian Age than his civilized characters.

It was a rare thing indeed in pulp fiction to see a tale concluding with so bleak an ending, in which most of the characters die and the situation is worse at the end of the story than it was at its beginning. Howard was here trying to deliver a message much more than to simply add another Conan story to his bibliography.

Beyond the Black River was bought by Farnsworth Wright in early October 1934. It was published as a serial in the May and June 1935 issues of Weird Tales, but without the honors of the cover. Either Wright wanted to add some variety to his covers (he hadn't granted The Servants of Bit-Yakin cover privilege either), or the lack of a semi-naked heroine prevented him from doing that. The cover for the May 1935 issue did not feature an undressed woman, though, so that question must remain unanswered.

In the months of October and November 1934 Howard was apparently too much occupied with his romance with Novalyne Price to devote any time to writing new Conan tales. At about the time Beyond the Black River was accepted, though, Howard received bad news from England: "Just got a letter informing me that the English company which had promised to bring out my book [the Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon] had gone into the hands of the receiver. Just my luck. The yarn's in the hands of the company which bought up the a.s.sets, but I haven't heard from them." The novel was, however, soon returned. Howard very probably touched it up very slightly, sent it to Weird Tales later in the year, and soon received news that it was accepted, probably in early January 1935. Wright was apparently satisfied that Howard was returning to less experimental tales: "Wright says it's my best Conan story so far."

In December, as he was informing Lovecraft of the sale of Beyond the Black River and commenting on its unusual tone, he added: "Some day I'm going to try my hand at a longer yarn of the same style, a serial of four or five parts."

It appears that Howard didn't wait very long before writing this serial. The Black Stranger is one of those Howard stories for which we have no information regarding composition, but the writing date can be estimated around January and/or February 1935 thanks to the partial drafts of other stories found on the backs of the pages of several drafts. On the back of The Black Stranger are found several pages for stories composed in December 1934 and early 1935. It seems reasonable enough to suppose that Howard began work on that serial after his revision and the acceptance of The Hour of the Dragon.

The Black Stranger was evidently conceived as a follow-up of sorts to Beyond the Black River featuring once again Conan opposed to the Picts, and once again it was a very experimental tale, as the Cimmerian isn't introduced until halfway through the novelette-length story. (He is, of course, featured in the first chapter, but his ident.i.ty is not revealed to the reader.) 356.

The Black Stranger has never received the critical attention it is due, primarily because it was not published in its original form until 1987, when Karl Edward Wagner included it in an anthology. In all its previous appearances, the story had been mercilessly butchered. The tale is simple enough on its surface, mixing elements of piratical adventure and Indian warfare, but should definitely not be dismissed in a cavalier way, as has been done sometimes. The Black Stranger is an extremely complex tale once one has understood that it is replete, consciously or unconsciously, with autobiographical elements, much more so than any of the stories Howard had written to date.

The story is set on the coasts of the Hyborian Age's equivalent of the United States, at a time which would roughly correspond to our seventeenth century. It is the tale of early settlers of a sort on a continent that is still largely dominated by wild tribes, the Hyborian Age equivalent of Native Americans. A child is prominently featured, a rare occurrence in a Howard tale. Tina is quite a mystery to the reader: she is presented as a "pitiful waif . . . taken away from a brutal master encountered on that long voyage up from the southern coasts." What few children appear in Howard's fiction all share an unhappy youth; all are orphans or have been abandoned by their parents, and Tina is no exception. In this case, however, Belesa has apparently adopted the child as her own. A mysterious Black Man is hiding in the forest around the settlers'

stockade.

"Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us?" asks the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter of her husband, Roger Chillingworth. Hawthorne's novel, published in 1850, presents points of remarkable resemblance to Howard's tale. Both stories are centered around a woman and her child (real or adopted), forced to live in a hostile environment, victims of the scorn of the men around them. The time frame and settings are remarkably similar, and Pearl, the young heroine of Hawthorne's novel, is a child as strange and fey as Tina. In both stories, the child is frightened by a mysterious Black Man almost always offstage. There is too much similarity to consider this a simple matter of coincidence.

Hawthorne was not represented in Howard's library, and he is never mentioned by Howard in any of the surviving papers. That he had read Hawthorne, perhaps as part of his schooling, seems more than probable, though: The Scarlet Letter seems to have furnished a lot of background for The Black Stranger, even though the events themselves have nothing in common.

All this invites a different reading of the tale, in which Tina may be seen as a fatherless child, particularly sensitive to the presence of the Black Man. Readers familiar with Howard's biography will be even more startled, for in Hawthorne's novel Pearl's mother is named Hester, and the father she does not know, counterpart to Tina's Black Man, is the blue-eyed physician Roger Chillingworth. Howard's mother's name was Hester, and she was married to a blue-eyed physician.

The Black Stranger apparently failed to sell to Weird Tales, though no record for this survives.

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Wright was perhaps irritated by Howard's experimental forays, and, probably around February or March 1935, for the first time in many months rejected a Conan tale. Howard decided to salvage what he could, and rewrote the story. He invented a new character Terence Vulmea, an Irish pirate to replace Conan, got rid of all the Hyborian references, and submitted the new story, rechristened Swords of the Red Brotherhood, to his agent Otis Adelbert Kline in late May 1935. The new version was circulated for several years, and was sold in 1938, but the magazine which was to publish it folded, so this version didn't see print until 1976.

The next Conan tale would be anything but experimental. The Man-Eaters of Zamboula was apparently written around March 1935, judging from the stories found on the back of the draft pages. It is a routine Conan story, similar in quality to those Howard had been forced to write when he was in dire need of money. Surrounded by such masterpieces as Beyond the Black River, The Black Stranger and the future Red Nails, it more than pales in comparison. It seems that Howard borrowed the settings from the various Middle Eastern adventures he was writing at the same time (featuring his characters Kirby O'Donnell and Francis Xavier Gordon), while borrowing some of the premises of an unsold detective story, Guests of the Hoodoo Room, which very likely preceded the Conan story by a few months. Guests also featured cannibals capturing poor wretches by way of a rigged hotel room. The plot is rather unconvincing, but Howard probably knew this wouldn't prevent Wright from accepting the story. The scene in which Zabibi/Nafertari dances naked amid the snakes seems to have been written with only one goal to mind: to win the cover spot. Brundage's cover ill.u.s.tration for that story is indeed a remarkable one. That it does not feature the Cimmerian was something Howard was growing accustomed to: of the nine Weird Tales covers ill.u.s.trating a Conan story, the Cimmerian himself was portrayed in only three.

On December 22, 1934, Howard presented Novalyne Price with a most surprising Christmas present: expecting a history book, she was presented instead with a copy of The Complete Works of Pierre Lous: "A history?" I asked bewildered.