The Bloody Crown of Conan

by Robert E. Howard

  The story began with Taramis, Queen of Khauran, awaking in her chamber at the sight of a spot of light glowing on the velvet-tapestried wall. In that spot she saw the head of her sister, Salome, who had been carried into the desert shortly after her birth, to die, because she had the witch-mark upon her bosom – the blood-red crescent. In the conversation which followed it was explained that because, centuries before, a Queen of Khauran had cohabited with a pre-Adamite demon, every so often a witch would be born in the royal family. Salome said there had always been witches named Salome, and always would be. She, Taramis’ twin sister, had been carried into the desert, but had been discovered by a Khitan magician travelling from Stygia in a carvan. He had recognized the witch mark and had taken her and brought her up, instructing her in many black arts. Now she had returned to seize the throne. Her master had driven her forth, because she lacked the cosmic scope of true wizardry, was merely a harlot of the black arts. She had fallen in with a Kothian adventurer who commanded an army of professional fighting men, Shemites from the western cities of Shem. This man had come to Khauran and asked the hand of Queen Taramis. He was at that time camped with his hosts outside the city walls. The gates were carefully guarded, for Taramis did not trust the man. Salome told Taramis that she had entered the palace secretly, by drugging all the queen’s servants. She told her that she, Taramis, would be cast into a dungeon, and she, Salome, would reign in her place. The Kothian entered just then, and Salome cynically handed her sister over to be raped by him, while she went forth to give the soldiers at the gates orders to admit the Shemites.

  The next scene was that of a young soldier being bandaged by his terrified sweetheart, as he told of the treachery. Queen Taramis had apparently given orders to her dumbfounded soldiers that the Shemites were to be admitted into the city. This was done, and she announced that she would make him king to reign beside her. The soldiers and populace rose, but only her guard were left in the city. These were cut down by the Shemites, except the captain of the guard, Conan the Cimmerian, who refused to believe that Taramis was Taramis. He swore it was some devil in her shape, and fought ferociously before being overpowered. The boy said that the Kothian was having him crucified outside the city wall. This happened; Conan fought off the vultures with his teeth, and attracted the attention of a bandit chief who was scouting near the walls in hopes of plunder. This was Olgerd Vladislav, a Zaporoskan, or kozak, who had wandered down from the steppes and established himself among the nomadic Shemitish tribes of the desert. He freed Conan and took him into his band, after a savage test of the Cimmerian’s endurance.

  In the meantime – as a letter from a savant visiting in Khauran showed – Salome, posing as Taramis, had abolished the worship of Ishtar, filled the temples with obscene images, made human sacrifices and placed in the shrine a hideous monster from the outer gulfs. The young soldier, convinced that Taramis was slain or imprisoned and a fraud reigning in her stead, haunted the palace and prisons disguised as a beggar, and Salome, having tortured her sister by showing her the head of a trusted councillor, tossed it to the beggar to dispose of, and unwittingly revealed the secret. He hurried to Conan with the news. Conan had in the meantime, wishing vengeance on the Kothian, raised a great army of nomads. Olgerd intended taking and sacking Khauran, but Conan deposed him, and announced his intention of rescuing Taramis and placing her back on the throne.

  The young soldier rescued Taramis from prison, but they were driven into the temple by Salome. But Conan defeated the Kothian, swept into the city, destroyed the monster. The Kothian was crucified, and Taramis set back upon her throne.

  Appendices

  HYBORIAN GENESIS PART II

  Notes on the Creation of the Conan Stories

  by Patrice Louinet

  The year 1933 ended on a much more positive note than it had begun for Robert E. Howard. It had promised to be catastrophic. In 1932, Fiction House had ceased publication of Fight Stories and Action Stories, two magazines which had paid modestly but regularly, ensuring Howard of a meager yet regular income. The arrival of Strange Tales – a direct competitor to Weird Tales – which paid well, and on acceptance rather than publication, had been a compensation, but late in 1932 Howard had learned that this magazine was also going out of circulation. As 1933 began, he was left with only one regular market: Farnsworth Wright’s magazines Magic Carpet Magazine, a fledgling quarterly, and Weird Tales. There was but one thing to do, and for a few weeks Howard literally deluged Weird Tales with submissions, with one clear aim: to sell as much as possible. Among the stories submitted were most of the inferior Conan stories, written with a visible need for a quick sale. It was only in the spring of 1933, with an impressive number of Conan stories awaiting publication in Wright’s magazine (Xuthal of the Dusk, Queen of the Black Coast, The Pool of the Black One, Iron Shadows in the Moon and Black Colossus), that Howard began to devote his attentions to building other markets. Hiring Otis Adelbert Kline as his agent, the Texan spent most of the next few weeks trying to sell some more of his boxing yarns and dabbling in genres that were new to him: detective stories and westerns. He also began to seriously consider the question of the rights to his stories, and looked into the possibility of having short-story collections published in England.

  October 1933 found Howard returning to Conan. Weird Tales had already published three of the five Conan stories in their backlog, as it was becoming evident that the character was a popular success. The Devil in Iron, completed circa October 1933, was a somewhat half-baked effort from a Howard who had not written a Conan story in six months, drawing heavily from the earlier Conan story, Iron Shadows in the Moon. Both tales showed Howard’s debt to Harold Lamb, a pillar of Adventure, a publication whose influence on Howard was probably greater than that of Weird Tales.

  If Howard was an early devotee of Weird Tales – we know he was already aware of the magazine’s existence less than six months after it first appeared on the newsstands – his first love was clearly adventure fiction, much more than the tales of the weird. The Texan’s discovery of Adventure was a cherished memory: “…Magazines were even more scarce than books. It was after I moved into ‘town’ (speaking comparatively) that I began to buy magazines. I well remember the first I ever bought. I was fifteen years old. I bought it one summer night when a wild restlessness in me would not let me keep still, and I had exhausted all the reading material on the place. I’ll never forget the thrill it gave me. Somehow it had never occurred to me before that I could buy a magazine. It was an Adventure. I still have the copy. After that I bought Adventure for many years, though at times it cramped my resources to pay the price. It came out three times a month, then.… I skimped and saved from one magazine to the next; I’d buy one copy and have it charged, and when the next issue was out, I’d pay for the one for which I owed, and have the other one charged, and so on.”

  By 1921, when Howard discovered it, Adventure was a well-established magazine, one of the leading if not the leading fiction magazine of its times, hosting the talents of Talbot Mundy and Harold Lamb on a regular basis. Arthur D. Howden-Smith delivered tales of Viking adventures and Rafael Sabatini graced the magazine’s pages for the first time in that summer of 1921. These authors would influence Robert E. Howard much more than any of the Weird Tales writers. Howard’s interest in Adventure went beyond the mere reading of the stories: he had two letters published in the magazine in 1924 and corresponded semi-regularly with R.W. Gordon, who was in charge of its folk-song department. It was apparently Adventure which gave Howard the desire to become a writer: “I wrote my first story when I was fifteen, and sent it – to Adventure, I believe. Three years later I managed to break into Weird Tales. Three years of writing without selling a blasted line. (I never have been able to sell to Adventure; guess my first attempt cooked me with them for ever!)” These lines were written in the summer of 1933, a few weeks before the Texan was to start writing adventure fiction. Beyond the half-amused, half-exasperated tone Howard uses, one ca
n feel his frustration at not having ever been published in the magazine. The entirety of Howard’s surviving early output from 1922 and 1923 can be best described as a teenager’s sincere attempts at emulating what he was reading in Adventure: he thus began – but never completed – a dozen stories featuring Frank Gordon, whose adventures were derived from Talbot Mundy and whose nickname – “El Borak, the Swift” – was borrowed from Sabatini.

  Significantly enough, when Howard resumed writing adventure stories in October 1933, the process started with a resurrection as improbable as Xaltotun’s in The Hour of the Dragon: the protagonist of his first mature adventure stories was Francis X. Gordon, “El Borak,” a revamped version of his teen-age creation. He thus wasn’t exploring new ground but bridging a gap of ten years. In the second Gordon story, The Daughter of Erlik Khan, Gordon explores the city of Yolgan, niched in a mysterious Oriental mountain, where the beautiful Yasmeena is held prisoner. In the Texan’s next tale, the Conan story The People of the Black Circle, the mysterious Oriental mountain is called Yimsha and it is there that Conan rescues another beautiful Yasmina. As Howard had exclaimed just after reading his first Mundy novels in 1923: “…Yasmini? She’s some character, isn’t she?”

  Much has been written about the influence of Talbot Mundy on this particular Conan tale, but while Howard’s source material for this story has yet to be identified, Mundy was very probably not part of it. It very much seems that Howard’s background research for his “Eastern adventure” stories also furnished the background for the new Conan tales. In The Devil in Iron, for instance, Howard had changed the name of the king of Turan from Yildiz (in Iron Shadows in the Moon) to Yezdigerd. Much of the action of that story taking place on the isle of Xapur, it is quite probable that the names were derived from the historical Yezdigerd – a Persian king and a conqueror, just as Howard’s character – and Shapur, his father. Yezdigerd returned in The People of the Black Circle, and with him several new elements of geography which Howard added to his Hyborian world with this story, such as the Himelian Mountains, Afghulistan and Vendhya.

  The People of the Black Circle was Howard’s longest Conan effort to date; it is a true, and successful, novella and not merely a “long short story.” A tale of that length could not stand on Conan’s shoulders alone, and Yasmina is a welcome change from some of the earlier stories’ cringing women. However, it was in Khemsa that Howard created a memorable secondary character, torn between his loyalty to his masters and his love for Gitara, between his spiritual and his earthly cravings. For, as befits a story exploring the East and the West, The People of the Black Circle is a study on duality: a brother and a sister, one dead, the other alive; two antithetic couples, Conan and Yasmina versus Khemsa and Gitara (two couples in which rivalry for power is a significant factor in the relationship). But where the former are masters (hill chief and queen respectively), the latter are but servants of chiefs. The opposition between the primitive hillmen and the Seers of Yimsha, that is to say between the physical and the mental, was evidently nourished by the year-long debate on the subject which had occupied Howard and H. P. Lovecraft for most of the year 1933.

  If the tale at times evokes Mundy’s penchant for mysticism, Howard’s treatment is entirely his own. In fact, there was probably little need for the Texan to look to Mundy to find inspiration for mysticism: he had bathed in it for years. More: once one has scratched away the Oriental trappings of the tale, what is revealed is a story that strangely touches on many points on Howard’s family history. His father, Dr. Isaac M. Howard, was all his life interested in mysticism, yoga and hypnotism. He regularly practiced hypnotism on his patients, sometimes with a young Robert E. Howard present, and had annotated his copies of The Hindu Science of Breath and Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy by Yogi Ramacharaka. If Howard needed documentation on Eastern mysticism, he needn’t reread Mundy, as he had a much better source of information under his own roof. The opening scene – recounting Yasmina’s brother’s death at her own hands – is another striking autobiographical example. On a literary plane, it invites comparison with several other tales, notably Dermod’s Bane, in which a man is afflicted beyond reason by the death of his twin sister. In Howard’s fiction, brothers and sisters often have to separate, and usually in painful conditions. The reasons for such an obsession may very well originate from a reported (though undocumented) miscarriage suffered by Howard’s mother in 1908, when Howard was aged two. This would invite us to draw a parallel between Yasmina and Howard, both having experienced the loss of a sibling. However, and as usual in Howard’s fiction, these biographical elements were soon diluted and distorted in the story the Texan had to tell in order to sell it to Farnsworth Wright. The People of the Black Circle is a particularly satisfying Conan story for all these reasons. The tale functions very well on an escapist level and is leagues ahead of standard pulp-fare plotting, but there is a definite depth and texture to all its aspects, which ranks it among the three or four best Conan stories Howard had written to date.

  Farnsworth Wright must have been rather impressed with it since less than five months elapsed between its acceptance and the publication of the first part of the serialization. He was, however, not so pleased with the increasing liberties Howard was taking with his dialogue and the explicitness of certain situations, and in several instances severely toned down some of the Cimmerian’s oaths and sexual allusions.

  In early January 1934, as Howard was writing The People of the Black Circle, he at last received news of the story collection he had submitted to Denis Archer in England in June of the past year. The answer wasn’t a positive one. If the editor had found the stories “exceedingly interesting,” it was not enough: “The difficulty that arises about publication in book form, is the prejudice that is very strong over here just now against collections of short stories, and I find myself very reluctantly forced to return the stories to you. With this suggestion, however, that any time you find yourself able to produce a full-length novel of about 70,000–75,000 words along the lines of the stories, my allied company, Pawling and Ness Ltd., who deal with the lending libraries, and are able to sell a first edition of 5,000 copies, will be very willing to publish it.”

  With the exception of his partly autobiographical Post Oaks and Sand Roughs (1928), Howard had never completed a novel, though he was demonstrating he was learning the craft with The People of the Black Circle, whose final version runs 31,000 words. Many other writers would have stopped their efforts here, confronted with a publisher who took six months to answer, negatively at that, refusing a collection of stories which he had asked for in the first place. Later that month, however, Howard reported to August Derleth: “An English firm, after keeping a collection of my short stories for months, finally sent them back, saying that there was a prejudice over there just now against such collections – of short stories, I mean – and suggested that I write a full length novel for them. But I’m not overly enthusiastic about it, for I’ve been disappointed so much. Of course, I’ll do my best.”

  Howard probably began working on the novel in February 1934, but he was to abandon the story a few weeks later.

  Almuric – for this is very probably the novel Howard began to write for the British publisher – was abandoned midway, as he had written a first draft and the first half of the second one. This was to have to been Howard’s third – and last – Yasmina/Yasmeena tale, after The Daughter of Erlik Khan and The Devil in Iron. Like her namesakes, this Yasmeena also lived in a strange mount: Yuthla. Why Howard insisted that his Yasmeenas/Yasminas dwell in “y” mountains will probably remain a mystery. The novel cannibalized several key scenes from the stories which had been initially submitted to the publisher. The winged Yagas of Almuric, for instance, definitely owed something to the winged creatures of the Solomon Kane story Wings in the Night. Howard was indeed making sure that his novel would be “along the lines of the stories” he had previously submitted. Nevertheless, Howard left Almuric incomplete for reasons t
hat remain mysterious. (The novel would linger for several years, until it was eventually published in the pages of Weird Tales after Howard’s death, completed by another writer).

  After abandoning Almuric, Howard probably realized that it was only logical to make Conan the central character of his novel: the sale of The People of the Black Circle in late February or March 1934 showed him that he could write successfully at length about the character. Much more importantly the setting – the Hyborian Age – and the protagonist were very much in Howard’s mind, and little if any work was needed to build a background for the intended novel. Lastly, Conan tales had also been included in the first batch of stories sent to Archer: he would, once again, be submitting material “along the lines” of what he had already proposed to the British publisher.

  The surviving synopsis and 29-page draft of that first Conan effort are intriguing to say the least, a sharp departure from the other Conan stories. This “Tombalku” draft was begun and abandoned after Howard had finished The People of the Black Circle and abandoned Almuric, in all probability in mid-March 1934. Conan is not the protagonist of the story; that role falls to one Amalric (whose name evokes Almuric). Reading the synopsis and first draft, it is easy enough to see that there wasn’t enough good material here to make a novel; there was in fact scant good material at all. The connection between the first part of the story and what would have been the Tombalku chapters is unconvincing, and clearly the story wasn’t going anywhere. Howard soon realized it and abandoned this tale, too, to begin work on his third – final and successful – attempt at writing his novel: The Hour of the Dragon.

  There was very little to salvage from Howard’s two previous efforts. On the surface, there is indeed very little to show that the three stories were penned at about the same time: in The Hour of the Dragon, Conan briefly mentions a Ghanata knife, a tribe otherwise mentioned only in the unfinished Tombalku draft; in an early draft of the novel we are informed that Conan was once called “Iron Hand,” the same nickname given Esau Cairn on the planet Almuric. There is also the mention of a “Prince Almuric” in The Hour of the Dragon, but this may have been derived more from his namesake in Xuthal of the Dusk – another prince who met his doom at the hands of Stygians – than from the novel of the same title.