A Witch Shall Be Born: An REH Classic

 

he two covers of "Savage Sword of Conan," both illustrating the famous scene from the REH classic "A Witch Shall be Born." The left one is by Boris Vallejo from back in the seventies, and the right one is by Joe Jusko for the current issue of Savage Sword. The seventies issue contains the actual adaptation of Howard's story by Roy Thomas and John Buscema. The new issue only contains a bunch of Conan short stories by current writers and artists. Good stuff, but I'd rather they'd just done a new adaptation of Howard's "Witch". For those of view unfamiliar with the story itself, it's about a good queen named Tamaris who is replaced by her evil twin sister Salome, the witch of the title. Every few generation a girl child is born with a witch's mark, and is left to die in the desert. An cruel act it would seem, only she truly is a witch, and very evil one. She is saved a wizard, and returns to get her revenge on Taramis, locking the real queen in the dungeon. Conan fingers her as an imposter, and she has the guard captain Constantius nail Conan to an X-cross out in the Turanian desert. Conan survives of course, the witch is defeated, and Taramis restored--but not before Conan slays a demonic creature Salome keeps and feeds her enemies to. And then our Cimmerian hero takes ferocious revenge on Costantius. The scene of the crucified Conan was incorporated into the 80s Conan movie, as was the Lin Cater pastiche "The Thing in the Crypt." The movie story though, is entirely different. The same thing was done with the red-cloaked ape from "Rogues in the House", for Conan the Destroyer.

People of the Black Coast: An ERB Connection

 

I first read REH's "People of the Black Coast" back in the days when I scoured the used paperback bookstores, for collections of Howard's fiction; I really hadn't known what I was missing until I read the Baen paperback: Cthulhu: Mythos and Kindred Horrors, a book that contained "Pigeons from Hell", perhaps the most terrifying story I'd ever read. The book was called "Black Canaan," the title of another Howard horror story contained within, with a cover illustrating "Black Coast" by artist Ken Kelly. The above pic is of another illustration for the same story, also by Kelly for Beyond the Borders, part of the "Robert E. Howard Library series of books released during the nineties. Both are out of print nowadays.

The story is a bizarre one: a man and his young finance are marooned on a strange island whose beach is backed by towering basaltic cliffs. While the hero is exploring to find the extent of the cliff wall, a terrible tragedy strikes; the man returns to find the girl dead and dismembered. Sick with grief, he wanders until collapsing with exhaustion. When next he wakes, to his horror he finds himself surrounded by the young woman's killers: enormous crab-monsters, whom he senses possess a vast intelligent, perhaps beyond his own. He muses that he felt as wild beasts must feel "when first confronted by men." I surmises that killed his fiance "to satisfy some useless scientific experiment." Fearsomely armed though they are, the protagonist is able to slay them with his blugeon, finding they have evolved to be less coordinated then their smaller brethren, presumably the result of their great intellect, similar to how humans have become weaker thanks to civilized degeneration. This gives our hero the advantage, and he spends the rest of his existence hunting and exterminating the creatures. The crab-monsters do, however, possess terrifying mental powers that can stun and overwhelm an attacker, perhaps to compensate their lack of physical prowess. The narrator tells us that they are at slower ebb at dawn, and that he must "strike and kill quickly, as a lion must kill an armed hunter before the victim can aim and fire." He plans he will eventually ascend up to the demon-city high in the cliffs where he will slaughter, and finally be slain himself, as a final act of vengeance. "They slew my mate, I take their lives."

Like many other non-Conan stories, this was adapted into a Conan tale by Roy Thomas called "Man Crabs of the Black Cliffs." This issue I never particularly cared for as the art by Buscema and Chan made the creatures appear more humanoid than they are in Howard's original. The crabs of the black coast have evolved sentience without evolving a form parallel to that of humans, something likely to be true of intelligent aliens, should they exist. 

But the really interesting thing about "People of the Black Coast" is that the intelligent crab scientists Howard's nearest equivalent of the Mahars, the sentient rhamphorynchoid pterosaurs of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar stories. Possessed of cold, vast intellect, seeing humans as mere curiosities to be studied and exploited, the similarity is striking, especially their frightening mental powers that can paralyze or kill a foe. There is a hint that this is also how they communicate with one another, in the same fashion as the Mahars, with powerful currents of intellect. The hero, though,  never establishes communication with them; he doesn't care to, seeking only revenge. 

Robert M. Price, an authority on the works of Lin Carter, states in Lin Carter: A Look Behind His Imaginary Worlds, that "the Mahars are absent from (Zanthodon) Carter's version of Pellucidar." He does note that there is a species of giant vampiric leeches (the Sluggahs), which a dwarfish race called the Gorpaks worship as gods and offer human victims, comes the closest, but that "these lack the Mahars' malevolent intelligence. The professor character does perceive what seems to be an icy intellect burning in the eyes of one of the sluggahs, but basically the leech-monsters are just animals, feeding off their victims as any other animal might. Very unlike Howard's crab-monsters, who are motivated by scientific curiosity.

This wasn't the case with my own (mostly unsuccessful) attempt at writing a Pellucidar-like lost world novel myself The Eighth Continent. True Mahar analogues are present, in the form of giant cephalapoid mollusks, which survived the end of the dinosaur era, and evolved intelligence in the intervening millions of years. They developed a communication system based on skin colors and patterns, a vastly more advanced form of what octopoid mollusks actually possess. They may own their existence to Howard as much as Burroughs. I also tried to incorporate lost human civilizations into the mix as well, a concept that didn't really work well. It would have been better to have the "Great Lords", dominating a world in habited soley by "cave people", similar to the world of the Mahars.

Conan: Cult of the Obsidian Moon

 

I just got finished reading Cult of the Obsidian Moon, the new Conan pastiche novel by James Lovegrove. It turned out to be not merely THE best Conan pastiches I've ever read, but one of the best novels I've ever read period. Okay, it's not in Howard's style. No other writer could match Howard's style, of course, and that's not to be expected.  That said, Lovegrove's style, like few other writers, is very engrossing, and keeps one turning pages until the finale. 

The story involves Conan teaming up with another Howard hero, a one-shot whom relatively few might have heard of, namely Hunwulf of the short story "Garden of Fear", one of the James Allsion stories, wherein the bedridden Allison relives past incarnations.  One need not have read "Garden of Fear" to enjoy this novel; the entire story is reiterated by Hunwulf as he explains to Conan about his past. To brief it, Hunwulf and his mate Gudrun flee their Aesir tribe to escape retribution from his kinsmen, as he has slain a fellow Aesir to claim her. Gudrun, whom Howard describes as much more beautiful than any woman of the modern age, is abducted by a bizarre winged humanoid, and flown to a black tower, surrounded by a circular field of vampiric blossoms which drain to blood of anyone foolish enough to venture within. Hunwulf uses fire to stampede a herd of mammoths who crush the flowers, after which he is able to scale the tower and rescues Gudrun, slaying the winged creature in the process. The story was adapted by Roy Thomas and drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith back in the early days of the Conan comic, with Conan himself in the Hunwulf role. It is not known exactly if Howard intended Hunwulf's saga to take place in the Hyborian age, but Lovegrove assumes that it does, and who's to say he's wrong. 

Anyway, Conan befriends the couple following a bar fight in Eruk, a small Shemite town, and he learns that the two have spent most of their lives on the run from Ragnar Leifson, and his small band of Aesir warriors, bent on revenge for the slaying of Ragnar's brother. Ragnar was formerly a friend of Hunwulf's, but now he plans a most gruesome death for him and Gudrun for betraying their tribe. We also learn that Hunwulf and Gudrun now have a nine-year-old ashen-haired son named Bjorn, whom Conan befriends and teaches; Bjorn seems very like a young Conan himself. In another reference to Howard's James Allison stories, Hunwulf has knowledge and visions of past lives. This gives him the power to partially predict the future, and sues this psychic gift to win at gambling. Bjorn seems to have inherited a form of his father's powers, and can establish a psychic bond with animals, which he does with a street dog about to attack him, the first time he and Conan meet. 

As the next paragraph might contain spoilers for the middle portion of the novel, skip it if you don't want to know.

At Conan's advice, the Aesir couple leave to set up a trap for the pursuing Ragnar. They leave Bjorn in Conan's charge, but a wily, treacherous thief, whom Conan had assumed killed in an opening scene, appears, claiming he wants to treat Conan to a drink at a local tavern. Conan does not fully trust the man, but takes him up on the offer anyway (one wonders why). The thief, of course, betrays Conan to corrupt city guard, and meanwhile, Bjorn leaves his hiding place and ends up captured by Ragnar. Conan manages to bribe the guard captain, kills the man who betrayed him, and he, Hunwulf and Gudrun set out in pursuit of Ragnar and the kidnapped boy. It's at this point that, while Ragnar and his cronies are sitting about their campfire discussing their plans, with Born trussed up as bait, that we learn that Ragnar may still some measure of honor about him, but has become blinded by his desire for vengeance. One of his friends says he wants to kill the boy right there for wounding him during his capture, but Ragnar insists the boy be used as bait. Right about then a mysterious winged monsters tears out of night sky, slaying all of the seasoned warriors, save Ragnar, who is still fatally wounded, then makes off with Bjorn. When Conan and his friends ride into their camp prepared for battle, they come upon the scene of slaughter, with Bjorn nowhere in sight. The dying Ragnar relates what happened to Hunwulf, and they at least establish somewhat of a truce at the end, Ragnar seeing now only the friend that Hunwulf once was. 

Then the real quest begins.

I am not not going to relate anything further beyond this point for fear of spoilers, but I will say that I first expected that the winged monster was some kin of the creature that captured Gudrun in the original "Garden of Fear"; (references to both this, and the winged ape-like monster that slew Belit in "Queen of the Black Coast" are referenced throughout the novel), seeking some vengeance of his own. This proved not to be the case at all; the race of Bjorn's abductor (yes, there's more than one of them), are referred to as scaley and lizard-like, whereas the being in "Garden" was more manlike with ebony skin, more like Howard describes the yagas of the planet Amulric in the novel by the same name. Moreover, the creature in "Garden" and the winged ape of "Queen", themselves appear to be of disparate races, the latter being the last degenerate member of a highly advanced technological species. 

If this is ever adapted into comics form for Savage Sword or Conan the Barbarian, it would span several issues, not a single one like the Chuck Dixon novel I covered in a previous post. 

Anyway, this is very good novel, easily the best Conan pastiche I've read so far.