The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 2: Grim Lands

--rom knows!--answered Conan.----e seen his kind before, though. They live on the shores of Lake Zuad, near the border of Kush. They--e a sort of mongrel Stygians, mixed with another race that wandered into Stygia from the east some centuries ago and were absorbed by them. They--e called Tlazitlans. I-- willing to bet it wasn't they who built this city, though.-- Techotl-- fear did not seem to diminish as they drew away from the chamber where the dead men lay. He kept twisting his head on his shoulder to listen for sounds of pursuit, and stared with burning intensity into every doorway they passed.

Valeria shivered in spite of herself. She feared no man. But the weird floor beneath her feet, the uncanny jewels over her head, dividing the lurking shadows among them, the stealth and terror of their guide, impressed her with a nameless apprehension, a sensation of lurking, inhuman peril.

--hey may be between us and Tecuhltli!--he whispered once.--e must beware lest they be lying in wait!----hy don't we get out of this infernal palace, and take to the streets?--demanded Valeria.

--here are no streets in Xuchotl,--he answered.--o squares nor open courts. The whole city is built like one giant palace under one great roof. The nearest approach to a street is the Great Hall which traverses the city from the north gate to the south gate. The only doors opening into the outer world are the city gates, through which no living man has passed for fifty years.----ow long have you dwelt here?--asked Conan.

-- was born in the castle of Tecuhltli thirty-five years ago. I have never set foot outside the city. For the love of the gods, let us go silently! These halls may be full of lurking devils. Olmec shall tell you all when we reach Tecuhltli.-- So in silence they glided on with the green fire-stones blinking overhead and the flaming floors smoldering under their feet, and it seemed to Valeria as if they fled through hell, guided by a dark-faced, lank-haired goblin.

Yet it was Conan who halted them as they were crossing an unusually wide chamber. His wilderness-bred ears were keener even than the ears of Techotl, whetted though these were by a lifetime of warfare in those silent corridors.

--ou think some of your enemies may be ahead of us, lying in ambush?----hey prowl through these rooms at all hours,--answered Techotl,--s do we. The halls and chambers between Tecuhltli and Xotalanc are a disputed region, owned by no man. We call it the Halls of Silence. Why do you ask?----ecause men are in the chambers ahead of us,--answered Conan.--heard steel clink against stone.-- Again a shaking seized Techotl, and he clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering.

--erhaps they are your friends,--suggested Valeria.

--e dare not chance it,--he panted, and moved with frenzied activity. He turned aside and glided through a doorway on the left which led into a chamber from which an ivory staircase wound down into darkness.

--his leads to an unlighted corridor below us!--he hissed, great beads of perspiration standing out on his brow.--hey may be lurking there, too. It may all be a trick to draw us into it. But we must take the chance that they have laid their ambush in the rooms above. Come swiftly, now!--

Softly as phantoms they descended the stair and came to the mouth of a corridor black as night. They crouched there for a moment, listening, and then melted into it. As they moved along, Valeria-- flesh crawled between her shoulders in momentary expectation of a sword-thrust in the dark. But for Conan't iron fingers gripping her arm she had no physical cognizance of her companions. Neither made as much noise as a cat would have made. The darkness was absolute. One hand, outstretched, touched a wall, and occasionally she felt a door under her fingers. The hallway seemed interminable.

Suddenly they were galvanized by a sound behind them. Valeria-- flesh crawled anew, for she recognized it as the soft opening of a door. Men had come into the corridor behind them. Even with the thought she stumbled over something that felt like a human skull. It rolled across the floor with an appalling clatter.

--un!--yelped Techotl, a note of hysteria in his voice, and was away down the corridor like a flying ghost.

Again Valeria felt Conan't hand bearing her up and sweeping her along as they raced after their guide. Conan could see in the dark no better than she, but he possessed a sort of instinct that made his course unerring. Without his support and guidance she would have fallen or stumbled against the wall. Down the corridor they sped, while the swift patter of flying feet drew closer and closer, and then suddenly Techotl panted:--ere is the stair! After me, quick! Oh, quick!-- His hand came out of the dark and caught Valeria-- wrist as she stumbled blindly on the steps. She felt herself half dragged, half lifted up the winding stair, while Conan released her and turned on the steps, his ears and instincts telling him their foes were hard at their backs. And the sounds were not all those of human feet.

Something came writhing up the steps, something that slithered and rustled and brought a chill in the air with it. Conan lashed down with his great sword and felt the blade shear through something that might have been flesh and bone, and cut deep into the stair beneath. Something touched his foot that chilled like the touch of frost, and then the darkness beneath him was disturbed by a frightful thrashing and lashing, and a man cried out in agony.

The next moment Conan was racing up the winding staircase, and through a door that stood open at the head.

Valeria and Techotl were already through, and Techotl slammed the door and shot a bolt across it--the first Conan had seen since they left the outer gate.

Then he turned and ran across the well-lighted chamber into which they had come, and as they passed through the farther door, Conan glanced back and saw the door groaning and straining under heavy pressure violently applied from the other side.

Though Techotl did not abate either his speed or his caution, he seemed more confident now. He had the air of a man who has come into familiar territory, within call of friends.

But Conan renewed his terror by asking:--hat was that thing that I fought on the stair?----he men of Xotalanc,--answered Techotl, without looking back.--told you the halls were full of them.----his wasn't a man,--grunted Conan.--t was something that crawled, and it was as cold as ice to the touch. I think I cut it asunder. It fell back on the men who were following us, and must have killed one of them in its death throes.-- Techotl-- head jerked back, his face ashy again. Convulsively he quickened his pace.

--t was the Crawler! A monster they have brought out of the catacombs to aid them! What it is, we do not know, but we have found our people hideously slain by it. In Set-- name, hasten! If they put it on our trail, it will follow us to the very doors of Tecuhltli!----doubt it,--grunted Conan.--hat was a shrewd cut I dealt it on the stair.----asten! Hasten!--groaned Techotl.

They ran through a series of green-lit chambers, traversed a broad hall, and halted before a giant bronze door.

Techotl said:--his is Tecuhltli!-- III

THE PEOPLE OF THE FEUD

Techotl smote on the bronze door with his clenched hand, and then turned sidewise, so that he could watch back along the hall.

--en have been smitten down before this door, when they thought they were safe,--he said.

--hy don't they open the door?--asked Conan.

--hey are looking at us through the Eye,--answered Techotl.--hey are puzzled at the sight of you.--He lifted his voice and called:--pen the door, Xecelan! It is I, Techotl, with friends from the great world beyond the forest!--They will open,--he assured his allies.

--hey-- better do it in a hurry, then,--said Conan grimly.--hear something crawling along the floor beyond the hall.-- Techotl went ashy again and attacked the door with his fists, screaming:--pen, you fools, open! The Crawler is at our heels!-- Even as he beat and shouted, the great bronze door swung noiselessly back, revealing a heavy chain across the entrance, over which spearheads bristled and fierce countenances regarded them intently for an instant. Then the chain was dropped and Techotl grasped the arms of his friends in a nervous frenzy and fairly dragged them over the threshold. A glance over his shoulder just as the door was closing showed Conan the long dim vista of the hall, and dimly framed at the other end an ophidian shape that writhed slowly and painfully into view, flowing in a dull-hued length from a chamber door, its hideous blood-stained head wagging drunkenly. Then the closing door shut off the view.

Inside the square chamber into which they had come heavy bolts were drawn across the door, and the chain locked into place. The door was made to stand the battering of a siege. Four men stood on guard, of the same lank-haired, dark-skinned breed as Techotl, with spears in their hands and swords at their hips. In the wall near the door there was a complicated contrivance of mirrors which Conan guessed was the Eye Techotl had mentioned, so arranged that a narrow, crystal-paned slot in the wall could be looked through from within without being discernible from without. The four guardsmen stared at the strangers with wonder, but asked no question, nor did Techotl vouchsafe any information. He moved with easy confidence now, as if he had shed his cloak of indecision and fear the instant he crossed the threshold.

--ome!--he urged his new-found friends, but Conan glanced toward the door.

--hat about those fellows who were following us? Won't they try to storm that door?-- Techotl shook his head.

--hey know they cannot break down the Door of the Eagle. They will flee back to Xotalanc, with their crawling fiend. Come! I will take you to the rulers of Tecuhltli.--

One of the four guards opened the door opposite the one by which they had entered, and they passed through into a hallway which, like most of the rooms on that level, was lighted by both the slot-like skylights and the clusters of winking fire-gems. But unlike the other rooms they had traversed, this hall showed evidences of occupation. Velvet tapestries adorned the glossy jade walls, rich rugs were on the crimson floors, and the ivory seats, benches and divans were littered with satin cushions.

The hall ended in an ornate door, before which stood no guard. Without ceremony Techotl thrust the door open and ushered his friends into a broad chamber, where some thirty dark-skinned men and women lounging on satin-covered couches sprang up with exclamations of amazement.

The men, all except one, were of the same type as Techotl, and the women were equally dark and strange-eyed, though not unbeautiful in a weird dark way. They wore sandals, golden breast-plates, and scanty silk skirts supported by gem-crusted girdles, and their black manes, cut square at their naked shoulders, were bound with silver circlets.

On a wide ivory seat on a jade dais sat a man and a woman who differed subtly from the others. He was a giant, with an enormous sweep of breast and the shoulders of a bull. Unlike the others, he was bearded, with a thick, blue-black beard which fell almost to his broad girdle. He wore a robe of purple silk which reflected changing sheens of color with his every movement, and one wide sleeve, drawn back to his elbow, revealed a forearm massive with corded muscles. The band which confined his blue-black locks was set with glittering jewels.

The woman beside him sprang to her feet with a startled exclamation as the strangers entered, and her eyes, passing over Conan, fixed themselves with burning intensity on Valeria. She was tall and lithe, by far the most beautiful woman in the room. She was clad more scantily even than the others; for instead of a skirt she wore merely a broad strip of gilt-worked purple cloth fastened to the middle of her girdle which fell below her knees. Another strip at the back of her girdle completed that part of her costume, which she wore with a cynical indifference. Her breast-plates and the circlet about her temples were adorned with gems. In her eyes alone of all the dark-skinned people there lurked no brooding gleam of madness. She spoke no word after her first exclamation; she stood tensely, her hands clenched, staring at Valeria.

The man on the ivory seat had not risen.

--rince Olmec,--spoke Techotl, bowing low, with arms outspread and the palms of his hands turned upward,--bring allies from the world beyond the forest. In the Chamber of Tezcoti the Burning Skull slew Chicmec, my companion--

--he Burning Skull!--It was a shuddering whisper of fear from the people of Tecuhltli.

--ye! Then came I, and found Chicmec lying with his throat cut. Before I could flee, the Burning Skull came upon me, and when I looked upon it my blood became as ice and the marrow of my bones melted. I could neither fight nor run. I could only await the stroke. Then came this white-skinned woman and struck him down with her sword; and lo, it was only a dog of Xotalanc with white paint upon his skin and the living skull of an ancient wizard upon his head! Now that skull lies in many pieces, and the dog who wore it is a dead man!-- An indescribably fierce exultation edged the last sentence, and was echoed in the low, savage exclamations from the crowding listeners.

--ut wait!--exclaimed Techotl.--here is more! While I talked with the woman, four Xotalancas came upon us! One I slew--there is the stab in my thigh to prove how desperate was the fight. Two the woman killed. But we were hard pressed when this man came into the fray and split the skull of the fourth! Aye! Five crimson nails there are to be driven into the pillar of vengeance!-- He pointed at a black column of ebony which stood behind the dais. Hundreds of red dots scarred its polished surface--the bright scarlet heads of heavy copper nails driven into the black wood.

--ive red nails for five Xotalanca lives!--exulted Techotl, and the horrible exultation in the faces of the listeners made them inhuman.

--ho are these people?--asked Olmec, and his voice was like the low, deep rumble of a distant bull. None of the people of Xuchotl spoke loudly. It was as if they had absorbed into their souls the silence of the empty halls and deserted chambers.

-- am Conan, a Cimmerian,--answered the barbarian briefly.--his woman is Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, an Aquilonian pirate. We are deserters from an army on the Darfar border, far to the north, and are trying to reach the coast.-- The woman on the dais spoke loudly, her words tripping in her haste.

--ou can never reach the coast! There is no escape from Xuchotl! You will spend the rest of your lives in this city!----hat do you mean?--growled Conan, clapping his hand to his hilt and stepping about so as to face both the dais and the rest of the room.--re you telling us we--e prisoners?----he did not mean that,--interposed Olmec.--e are your friends. We would not restrain you against your will. But I fear other circumstances will make it impossible for you to leave Xuchotl.-- His eyes flickered to Valeria, and he lowered them quickly.

--his woman is Tascela,--he said.--he is a princess of Tecuhltli. But let food and drink be brought our guests. Doubtless they are hungry, and weary from their long travels.-- He indicated an ivory table, and after an exchange of glances, the adventurers seated themselves. The Cimmerian was suspicious. His fierce blue eyes roved about the chamber, and he kept his sword close to his hand. But an invitation to eat and drink never found him backward. His eyes kept wandering to Tascela, but the princess had eyes only for his white-skinned companion.

Techotl, who had bound a strip of silk about his wounded thigh, placed himself at the table to attend to the wants of his friends, seeming to consider it a privilege and honor to see after their needs. He inspected the food and drink the others brought in gold vessels and dishes, and tasted each before he placed it before his guests. While they ate, Olmec sat in silence on his ivory seat, watching them from under his broad black brows. Tascela sat beside him, chin cupped in her hands and her elbows resting on her knees. Her dark, enigmatic eyes, burning with a mysterious light, never left Valeria-- supple figure. Behind her seat a sullen handsome girl waved an ostrich-plume fan with a slow rhythm.

The food was fruit of an exotic kind unfamiliar to the wanderers, but very palatable, and the drink was a light crimson wine that carried a heady tang.

--ou have come from afar,--said Olmec at last.--have read the books of our fathers. Aquilonia lies beyond the lands of the Stygians and the Shemites, beyond Argos and Zingara; and Cimmeria lies beyond Aquilonia.----e have each a roving foot,--answered Conan carelessly.

--ow you won through the forest is a wonder to me,--quoth Olmec.--n by-gone days a thousand fighting-men scarcely were able to carve a road through its perils.----e encountered a bench-legged monstrosity about the size of a mastodon,--said Conan casually, holding out his wine goblet which Techotl filled with evident pleasure.--ut when we-- killed it we had no further trouble.-- The wine vessel slipped from Techotl-- hand to crash on the floor. His dusky skin went ashy. Olmec started to his feet, an image of stunned amazement, and a low gasp of awe or terror breathed up from the others. Some slipped to their knees as if their legs would not support them. Only Tascela seemed not to have heard. Conan glared about him bewilderedly.

--hat-- the matter? What are you gaping about?----ou--you slew the dragon-god?----od? I killed a dragon. Why not? It was trying to gobble us up.----ut dragons are immortal!--exclaimed Olmec.--hey slay each other, but no man ever killed a dragon! The thousand fighting-men of our ancestors who fought their way to Xuchotl could not prevail against them! Their swords broke like twigs against their scales!----f your ancestors had thought to dip their spears in the poisonous juice of Derketa-- Apples,--quoth Conan, with his mouth full,--nd jab them in the eyes or mouth or somewhere like that, they-- have seen that dragons are not more immortal than any other chunk of beef. The carcass lies at the edge of the trees, just within the forest. If you don't believe me, go and look for yourself.-- Olmec shook his head, not in disbelief but in wonder.

--t was because of the dragons that our ancestors took refuge in Xuchotl,--said he.--hey dared not pass through the plain and plunge into the forest beyond. Scores of them were seized and devoured by the monsters before they could reach the city.----hen your ancestors didn't build Xuchotl?--asked Valeria.

--t was ancient when they first came into the land. How long it had stood here, not even its degenerate inhabitants knew.----our people came from Lake Zuad?--questioned Conan.

--ye. More than half a century ago a tribe of the Tlazitlans rebelled against the Stygian king, and, being defeated in battle, fled southward. For many weeks they wandered over grasslands, desert and hills, and at last they came into the great forest, a thousand fighting-men with their women and children.

--t was in the forest that the dragons fell upon them, and tore many to pieces; so the people fled in a frenzy of fear before them, and at last came into the plain and saw the city of Xuchotl in the midst of it.

--hey camped before the city, not daring to leave the plain, for the night was made hideous with the noise of the battling monsters throughout the forest. They made war incessantly upon one another. Yet they came not into the plain.

--he people of the city shut their gates and shot arrows at our people from the walls. The Tlazitlans were imprisoned on the plain, as if the ring of the forest had been a great wall; for to venture into the woods would have been madness.

--hat night there came secretly to their camp a slave from the city, one of their own blood, who with a band of exploring soldiers had wandered into the forest long before, when he was a young man. The dragons had devoured all his companions, but he had been taken into the city to dwell in servitude. His name was Tolkemec.--A flame lighted the dark eyes at mention of the name, and some of the people muttered obscenely and spat.--e promised to open the gates to the warriors. He asked only that all captives taken be delivered into his hands.

--t dawn he opened the gates. The warriors swarmed in and the halls of Xuchotl ran red. Only a few hundred folk dwelt there, decaying remnants of a once great race. Tolkemec said they came from the east, long ago, from Old Kosala, when the ancestors of those who now dwell in Kosala came up from the south and drove forth the original inhabitants of the land. They wandered far westward and finally found this forest-girdled plain, inhabited then by a tribe of black people.

--hese they enslaved and set to building a city. From the hills to the east they brought jade and marble and lapis lazuli, and gold, silver and copper. Herds of elephants provided them with ivory. When their city was completed, they slew all the black slaves. And their magicians made a terrible magic to guard the city; for by their necromantic arts they re-created the dragons which had once dwelt in this lost land, and whose monstrous bones they found in the forest. Those bones they clothed in flesh and life, and the living beasts walked the earth as they walked it when Time was young. But the wizards wove a spell that kept them in the forest and they came not into the plain.

--o for many centuries the people of Xuchotl dwelt in their city, cultivating the fertile plain, until their wise men learned how to grow fruit within the city--fruit which is not planted in soil, but obtains its nourishment out of the air--and then they let the irrigation ditches run dry, and dwelt more and more in luxurious sloth, until decay seized them. They were a dying race when our ancestors broke through the forest and came into the plain. Their wizards had died, and the people had forgot their ancient necromancy. They could fight neither by sorcery nor the sword.

--ell, our fathers slew the people of Xuchotl, all except a hundred which were given living into the hands of Tolkemec, who had been their slave; and for many days and nights the halls re-echoed to their screams under the agony of his tortures.

--o the Tlazitlans dwelt here, for a while in peace, ruled by the brothers Tecuhltli and Xotalanc, and by Tolkemec. Tolkemec took a girl of the tribe to wife, and because he had opened the gates, and because he knew many of the arts of the Xuchotlans, he shared the rule of the tribe with the brothers who had led the rebellion and the flight.

--or a few years, then, they dwelt at peace within the city, doing little but eating, drinking and making love, and raising children. There was no necessity to till the plain, for Tolkemec taught them how to cultivate the air-devouring fruits. Besides, the slaying of the Xuchotlans broke the spell that held the dragons in the forest, and they came nightly and bellowed about the gates of the city. The plain ran red with the blood of their eternal warfare, and it was then that--He bit his tongue in the midst of the sentence, then presently continued, but Valeria and Conan felt that he had checked an admission he had considered unwise.

--ive years they dwelt in peace. Then't--Olmec-- eyes rested briefly on the silent woman at his side----otalanc took a woman to wife, a woman whom both Tecuhltli and old Tolkemec desired. In his madness, Tecuhltli stole her from her husband. Aye, she went willingly enough. Tolkemec, to spite Xotalanc, aided Tecuhltli. Xotalanc demanded that she be given back to him, and the council of the tribe decided that the matter should be left to the woman. She chose to remain with Tecuhltli. In wrath Xotalanc sought to take her back by force, and the retainers of the brothers came to blows in the Great Hall.

--here was much bitterness. Blood was shed on both sides. The quarrel became a feud, the feud an open war. From the welter three factions emerged--Tecuhltli, Xotalanc, and Tolkemec. Already, in the days of peace, they had divided the city between them. Tecuhltli dwelt in the western quarter of the city, Xotalanc in the eastern, and Tolkemec with his family by the southern gate.

--nger and resentment and jealousy blossomed into bloodshed and rape and murder. Once the sword was drawn there was no turning back; for blood called for blood, and vengeance followed swift on the heels of atrocity. Tecuhltli fought with Xotalanc, and Tolkemec aided first one and then the other, betraying each faction as it fitted his purposes. Tecuhltli and his people withdrew into the quarter of the western gate, where we now sit. Xuchotl is built in the shape of an oval. Tecuhltli, which took its name from its prince, occupies the western end of the oval. The people blocked up all doors connecting the quarter with the rest of the city, except one on each floor, which could be defended easily. They went into the pits below the city and built a wall cutting off the western end of the catacombs, where lie the bodies of the ancient Xuchotlans, and of those Tlazitlans slain in the feud. They dwelt as in a besieged castle, making sorties and forays on their enemies.

--he people of Xotalanc likewise fortified the eastern quarter of the city, and Tolkemec did likewise with the quarter by the southern gate. The central part of the city was left bare and uninhabited. Those empty halls and chambers became a battle-ground, and a region of brooding terror.

--olkemec warred on both clans. He was a fiend in the form of a human, worse than Xotalanc. He knew many secrets of the city he never told the others. From the crypts of the catacombs he plundered the dead of their grisly secrets--secrets of ancient kings and wizards, long forgotten by the degenerate Xuchotlans our ancestors slew. But all his magic did not aid him the night we of Tecuhltli stormed his castle and butchered all his people. Tolkemec we tortured for many days.-- His voice sank to a caressing slur, and a far-away look grew in his eyes, as if he looked back over the years to a scene which caused him intense pleasure.

--ye, we kept the life in him until he screamed for death as for a bride. At last we took him living from the torture chamber and cast him into a dungeon for the rats to gnaw as he died. From that dungeon, somehow, he managed to escape, and dragged himself into the catacombs. There without doubt he died, for the only way out of the catacombs beneath Tecuhltli is through Tecuhltli, and he never emerged by that way. His bones were never found, and the superstitious among our people swear that his ghost haunts the crypts to this day, wailing among the bones of the dead. Twelve years ago we butchered the people of Tolkemec, but the feud raged on between Tecuhltli and Xotalanc, as it will rage until the last man, the last woman is dead.

--t was fifty years ago that Tecuhltli stole the wife of Xotalanc. Half a century the feud has endured. I was born in it. All in this chamber, except Tascela, were born in it. We expect to die in it.

--e are a dying race, even as those Xuchotlans our ancestors slew. When the feud began there were hundreds in each faction. Now we of Tecuhltli number only these you see before you, and the men who guard the four doors: forty in all. How many Xotalancas there are we do not know, but I doubt if they are much more numerous than we. For fifteen years no children have been born to us, and we have seen none among the Xotalancas.

--e are dying, but before we die we will slay as many of the men of Xotalanc as the gods permit.-- And with his weird eyes blazing, Olmec spoke long of that grisly feud, fought out in silent chambers and dim halls under the blaze of the green fire-jewels, on floors smoldering with the flames of hell and splashed with deeper crimson from severed veins. In that long butchery a whole generation had perished. Xotalanc was dead, long ago, slain in a grim battle on an ivory stair. Tecuhltli was dead, flayed alive by the maddened Xotalancas who had captured him.

Without emotion Olmec told of hideous battles fought in black corridors, of ambushes on twisting stairs, and red butcheries. With a redder, more abysmal gleam in his deep dark eyes he told of men and women flayed alive, mutilated and dismembered, of captives howling under tortures so ghastly that even the barbarous Cimmerian grunted. No wonder Techotl had trembled with the terror of capture. Yet he had gone forth to slay if he could, driven by hate that was stronger than his fear. Olmec spoke further, of dark and mysterious matters, of black magic and wizardry conjured out of the black night of the catacombs, of weird creatures invoked out of darkness for horrible allies. In these things the Xotalancas had the advantage, for it was in the eastern catacombs where lay the bones of the greatest wizards of the ancient Xuchotlans, with their immemorial secrets.

Valeria listened with morbid fascination. The feud had become a terrible elemental power driving the people of Xuchotl inexorably on to doom and extinction. It filled their whole lives. They were born in it, and they expected to die in it. They never left their barricaded castle except to steal forth into the Halls of Silence that lay between the opposing fortresses, to slay and be slain. Sometimes the raiders returned with frantic captives, or with grim tokens of victory in fight. Sometimes they did not return at all, or returned only as severed limbs cast down before the bolted bronze doors. It was a ghastly, unreal nightmare existence these people lived, shut off from the rest of the world, caught together like rabid rats in the same trap, butchering one another through the years, crouching and creeping through the sunless corridors to maim and torture and murder.

While Olmec talked, Valeria felt the blazing eyes of Tascela fixed upon her. The princess seemed not to hear what Olmec was saying. Her expression, as he narrated victories or defeats, did not mirror the wild rage or fiendish exultation that alternated on the faces of the other Tecuhltli. The feud that was an obsession to her clansmen seemed meaningless to her. Valeria found her indifferent callousness more repugnant than Olmec-- naked ferocity.

--nd we can never leave the city,--said Olmec.--or fifty years no one has left it except those--Again he checked himself.

--ven without the peril of the dragons,--he continued,--e who were born and raised in the city would not dare leave it. We have never set foot outside the walls. We are not accustomed to the open sky and the naked sun. No; we were born in Xuchotl, and in Xuchotl we shall die.----ell,--said Conan,--ith your leave we--l take our chances with the dragons. This feud is none of our business. If you--l show us to the west gate we--l be on our way.-- Tascela-- hands clenched, and she started to speak, but Olmec interrupted her:--t is nearly nightfall. If you wander forth into the plain by night, you will certainly fall prey to the dragons.----e crossed it last night, and slept in the open without seeing any,--returned Conan.

Tascela smiled mirthlessly.--ou dare not leave Xuchotl!-- Conan glared at her with instinctive antagonism; she was not looking at him, but at the woman opposite him.

-- think they dare,--retorted Olmec.--ut look you, Conan and Valeria, the gods must have sent you to us, to cast victory into the laps of the Tecuhltli! You are professional fighters--why not fight for us? We have wealth in abundance--precious jewels are as common in Xuchotl as cobblestones are in the cities of the world. Some the Xuchotlans brought with them from Kosala. Some, like the firestones, they found in the hills to the east. Aid us to wipe out the Xotalancas, and we will give you all the jewels you can carry.----nd will you help us destroy the dragons?--asked Valeria.--ith bows and poisoned arrows thirty men could slay all the dragons in the forest.----ye!--replied Olmec promptly.--e have forgotten the use of the bow, in years of hand-to-hand fighting, but we can learn again.----hat do you say?--Valeria inquired of Conan.

--e--e both penniless vagabonds,--he grinned hardily.---- as soon kill Xotalancas as anybody.----hen you agree?--exclaimed Olmec, while Techotl fairly hugged himself with delight.

--ye. And now suppose you show us chambers where we can sleep, so we can be fresh tomorrow for the beginning of the slaying.-- Olmec nodded, and waved a hand, and Techotl and a woman led the adventurers into a corridor which led through a door off to the left of the jade dais. A glance back showed Valeria Olmec sitting on his throne, chin on knotted fist, staring after them. His eyes burned with a weird flame. Tascela leaned back in her seat, whispering to the sullen-faced maid, Yasala, who leaned over her shoulder, her ear to the princess--moving lips.

The hallway was not so broad as most they had traversed, but it was long. Presently the woman halted, opened a door, and drew aside for Valeria to enter.

--ait a minute,--growled Conan.--here do I sleep?-- Techotl pointed to a chamber across the hallway, but one door farther down. Conan hesitated, and seemed inclined to raise an objection, but Valeria smiled spitefully at him and shut the door in his face. He muttered something uncomplimentary about women in general, and strode off down the corridor after Techotl.

In the ornate chamber where he was to sleep, he glanced up at the slot-like skylights. Some were wide enough to admit the body of a slender man, supposing the glass were broken.

--hy don't the Xotalancas come over the roofs and shatter those skylights?--he asked.

--hey cannot be broken,--answered Techotl.--esides, the roofs would be hard to clamber over. They are mostly spires and domes and steep ridges.-- He volunteered more information about the'sastle--of Tecuhltli. Like the rest of the city it contained four stories, or tiers of chambers, with towers jutting up from the roof. Each tier was named; indeed, the people of Xuchotl had a name for each chamber, hall and stair in the city, as people of more normal cities designate streets and quarters. In Tecuhltli the floors were named The Eagle-- Tier, The Ape-- Tier, The Tiger-- Tier and The Serpent-- Tier, in the order as enumerated, The Eagle-- Tier being the highest, or fourth, floor.

--ho is Tascela?--asked Conan.--lmec-- wife?-- Techotl shuddered and glanced furtively about him before answering.

--o. She is--Tascela! She was the wife of Xotalanc--the woman Tecuhltli stole, to start the feud.----hat are you talking about?--demanded Conan.--hat woman is beautiful and young. Are you trying to tell me that she was a wife fifty years ago?----ye! I swear it! She was a full-grown woman when the Tlazitlans journeyed from Lake Zuad. It was because the king of Stygia desired her for a concubine that Xotalanc and his brother rebelled and fled into the wilderness. She is a witch, who possesses the secret of perpetual youth.----hat-- that?--asked Conan.

Techotl shuddered again.

--sk me not! I dare not speak. It is too grisly, even for Xuchotl!-- And touching his finger to his lips, he glided from the chamber.

IV

SCENT OF BLACK LOTUS

Valeria unbuckled her sword-belt and laid it with the sheathed weapon on the couch where she meant to sleep. She noted that the doors were supplied with bolts, and asked where they led.

--hose lead into adjoining chambers,--answered the woman, indicating the doors on right and left.--hat one----pointing to a copper-bound door opposite that which opened into the corridor----eads to a corridor which runs to a stair that descends into the catacombs. Do not fear; naught can harm you here.----ho spoke of fear?--snapped Valeria.--just like to know what sort of harbor I-- dropping anchor in. No, I don't want you to sleep at the foot of my couch. I-- not accustomed to being waited on--not by women, anyway. You have my leave to go.-- Alone in the room, the pirate shot the bolts on all the doors, kicked off her boots and stretched luxuriously out on the couch. She imagined Conan similarly situated across the corridor, but her feminine vanity prompted her to visualize him as scowling and muttering with chagrin as he cast himself on his solitary couch, and she grinned with gleeful malice as she prepared herself for slumber.

Outside, night had fallen. In the halls of Xuchotl the green fire-jewels blazed like the eyes of prehistoric cats. Somewhere among the dark towers a night wind moaned like a restless spirit. Through the dim passages stealthy figures began stealing, like disembodied shadows.

Valeria awoke suddenly on her couch. In the dusky emerald glow of the fire-gems she saw a shadowy figure bending over her. For a bemused instant the apparition seemed part of the dream she had been dreaming. She had seemed to lie on the couch in the chamber as she was actually lying, while over her pulsed and throbbed a gigantic black blossom so enormous that it hid the ceiling. Its exotic perfume pervaded her being, inducing a delicious, sensuous languor that was something more and less than sleep. She was sinking into scented billows of insensible bliss, when something touched her face. So supersensitive were her drugged senses, that the light touch was like a dislocating impact, jolting her rudely into full wakefulness. Then it was that she saw, not a gargantuan blossom, but a dark-skinned woman standing above her.

With the realization came anger and instant action. The woman turned lithely, but before she could run Valeria was on her feet and had caught her arm. She fought like a wildcat for an instant, and then subsided as she felt herself crushed by the superior strength of her captor. The pirate wrenched the woman around to face her, caught her chin with her free hand and forced her captive to meet her gaze. It was the sullen Yasala, Tascela-- maid.

--hat the devil were you doing bending over me? What-- that in your hand?-- The woman made no reply, but sought to cast away the object. Valeria twisted her arm around in front of her, and the thing fell to the floor--a great black exotic blossom on a jade-green stem, large as a woman't head, to be sure, but tiny beside the exaggerated vision she had seen.

--he black lotus!--said Valeria between her teeth.--he blossom whose scent brings deep sleep. You were trying to drug me! If you hadn't accidentally touched my face with the petals, you-- have--why did you do it? What-- your game?-- Yasala maintained a sulky silence, and with an oath Valeria whirled her around, forced her to her knees and twisted her arm up behind her back.

--ell me, or I--l tear your arm out of its socket!-- Yasala squirmed in anguish as her arm was forced excruciatingly up between her shoulder-blades, but a violent shaking of her head was the only answer she made.

--lut!--Valeria cast her from her to sprawl on the floor. The pirate glared at the prostrate figure with blazing eyes. Fear and the memory of Tascela-- burning eyes stirred in her, rousing all her tigerish instincts of self-preservation. These people were decadent; any sort of perversity might be expected to be encountered among them. But Valeria sensed here something that moved behind the scenes, some secret terror fouler than common degeneracy. Fear and revulsion of this weird city swept her. These people were neither sane nor normal; she began to doubt if they were even human. Madness smoldered in the eyes of them all--all except the cruel, cryptic eyes of Tascela, which held secrets and mysteries more abysmal than madness.

She lifted her head and listened intently. The halls of Xuchotl were as silent as if it were in reality a dead city. The green jewels bathed the chamber in a nightmare glow, in which the eyes of the woman on the floor glittered eerily up at her. A thrill of panic throbbed through Valeria, driving the last vestige of mercy from her fierce soul.

--hy did you try to drug me?--she muttered, grasping the woman't black hair, and forcing her head back to glare into her sullen, long-lashed eyes.--id Tascela send you?-- No answer. Valeria cursed venomously and slapped the woman first on one cheek and then the other. The blows resounded through the room, but Yasala made no outcry.

--hy don't you scream?--demanded Valeria savagely.--o you fear someone will hear you? Whom do you fear? Tascela? Olmec? Conan?--

Yasala made no reply. She crouched, watching her captor with eyes baleful as those of a basilisk. Stubborn silence always fans anger. Valeria turned and tore a handful of cords from a nearby hanging.

--ou sulky slut!--she said between her teeth.---- going to strip you stark naked and tie you across that couch and whip you until you tell me what you were doing here, and who sent you!-- Yasala made no verbal protest, nor did she offer any resistance, as Valeria carried out the first part of her threat with a fury that her captive-- obstinacy only sharpened. Then for a space there was no sound in the chamber except the whistle and crackle of hard-woven silken cords on naked flesh. Yasala could not move her fast-bound hands or feet. Her body writhed and quivered under the chastisement, her head swayed from side to side in rhythm with the blows. Her teeth were sunk into her lower lip and a trickle of blood began as the punishment continued. But she did not cry out.

The pliant cords made no great sound as they encountered the quivering body of the captive; only a sharp crackling snap, but each cord left a red streak across Yasala-- dark flesh. Valeria inflicted the punishment with all the strength of her war-hardened arm, with all the mercilessness acquired during a life where pain and torment were daily happenings, and with all the cynical ingenuity which only a woman displays toward a woman. Yasala suffered more, physically and mentally, than she would have suffered under a lash wielded by a man, however strong.

It was the application of this feminine cynicism which at last tamed Yasala.

A low whimper escaped from her lips, and Valeria paused, arm lifted, and raked back a damp yellow lock.--ell, are you going to talk?--she demanded.--can keep this up all night, if necessary!----ercy!--whispered the woman.--will tell.-- Valeria cut the cords from her wrists and ankles, and pulled her to her feet. Yasala sank down on the couch, half reclining on one bare hip, supporting herself on her arm, and writhing at the contact of her smarting flesh with the couch. She was trembling in every limb.

--ine!--she begged, dry-lipped, indicating with a quivering hand a gold vessel on an ivory table.--et me drink. I am weak with pain. Then I will tell you all.-- Valeria picked up the vessel, and Yasala rose unsteadily to receive it. She took it, raised it toward her lips--then dashed the contents full into the Aquilonian't face. Valeria reeled backward, shaking and clawing the stinging liquid out of her eyes. Through a smarting mist she saw Yasala dart across the room, fling back a bolt, throw open the copper-bound door and run down the hall. The pirate was after her instantly, sword out and murder in her heart.

But Yasala had the start, and she ran with the nervous agility of a woman who has just been whipped to the point of hysterical frenzy. She rounded a corner in the corridor, yards ahead of Valeria, and when the pirate turned it, she saw only an empty hall, and at the other end a door that gaped blackly. A damp moldy scent reeked up from it, and Valeria shivered. That must be the door that led to the catacombs. Yasala had taken refuge among the dead.

Valeria advanced to the door and looked down a flight of stone steps that vanished quickly into utter blackness. Evidently it was a shaft that led straight to the pits below the city, without opening upon any of the lower floors. She shivered slightly at the thought of the thousands of corpses lying in their stone crypts down there, wrapped in their moldering cloths. She had no intention of groping her way down those stone steps. Yasala doubtless knew every turn and twist of the subterranean tunnels.

She was turning back, baffled and furious, when a sobbing cry welled up from the blackness. It seemed to come from a great depth, but human words were faintly distinguishable, and the voice was that of a woman.--h, help! Help, in Set-- name! Ahhh!--It trailed away, and Valeria thought she caught the echo of a ghostly tittering.

Valeria felt her skin crawl. What had happened to Yasala down there in the thick blackness? There was no doubt that it had been she who had cried out. But what peril could have befallen her? Was a Xotalanca lurking down there? Olmec had assured them that the catacombs below Tecuhltli were walled off from the rest, too securely for their enemies to break through. Besides, that tittering had not sounded like a human being at all.

Valeria hurried back down the corridor, not stopping to close the door that opened on the stair. Regaining her chamber, she closed the door and shot the bolt behind her. She pulled on her boots and buckled her sword-belt about her. She was determined to make her way to Conan't room and urge him, if he still lived, to join her in an attempt to fight their way out of that city of devils.

But even as she reached the door that opened into the corridor, a long-drawn scream of agony rang through the halls, followed by the stamp of running feet and the loud clangor of swords.

V

TWENTY RED NAILS

Two warriors lounged in the guardroom on the floor known as the Tier of the Eagle. Their attitude was casual, though habitually alert. An attack on the great bronze door from without was always a possibility, but for many years no such assault had been attempted on either side.

--he strangers are strong allies,--said one.--lmec will move against the enemy tomorrow, I believe.-- He spoke as a soldier in a war might have spoken. In the miniature world of Xuchotl each handful of feudists was an army, and the empty halls between the castles was the country over which they campaigned.

The other meditated for a space.

--uppose with their aid we destroy Xotalanc,--he said.--hat then, Xatmec?----hy,--returned Xatmec,--e will drive red nails for them all. The captives we will burn and flay and quarter.----ut afterward?--pursued the other.--fter we have slain them all? Will it not seem strange, to have no foes to fight? All my life I have fought and hated the Xotalancas. With the feud ended, what is left?-- Xatmec shrugged his shoulders. His thoughts had never gone beyond the destruction of their foes. They could not go beyond that.

Suddenly both men stiffened at a noise outside the door.

--o the door, Xatmec!--hissed the last speaker.--shall look through the Eye--

Xatmec, sword in hand, leaned against the bronze door, straining his ear to hear through the metal. His mate looked into the mirror. He started convulsively. Men were clustered thickly outside the door; grim, dark-faced men with swords gripped in their teeth--and their fingers thrust into their ears. One who wore a feathered head-dress had a set of pipes which he set to his lips, and even as the Tecuhltli started to shout a warning, the pipes began to skirl.

The cry died in the guard-- throat as the thin, weird piping penetrated the metal door and smote on his ears. Xatmec leaned frozen against the door, as if paralyzed in that position. His face was that of a wooden image, his expression one of horrified listening. The other guard, farther removed from the source of the sound, yet sensed the horror of what was taking place, the grisly threat that lay in that demoniac fifing. He felt the weird strains plucking like unseen fingers at the tissues of his brain, filling him with alien emotions and impulses of madness. But with a soul-tearing effort he broke the spell, and shrieked a warning in a voice he did not recognize as his own.

But even as he cried out, the music changed to an unbearable shrilling that was like a knife in the ear-drums. Xatmec screamed in sudden agony, and all the sanity went out of his face like a flame blown out in a wind. Like a madman he ripped loose the chain, tore open the door and rushed out into the hall, sword lifted before his mate could stop him. A dozen blades struck him down, and over his mangled body the Xotalancas surged into the guardroom, with a long-drawn, blood-mad yell that sent the unwonted echoes reverberating.

His brain reeling from the shock of it all, the remaining guard leaped to meet them with goring spear. The horror of the sorcery he had just witnessed was submerged in the stunning realization that the enemy were in Tecuhltli. And as his spearhead ripped through a dark-skinned belly he knew no more, for a swinging sword crushed his skull, even as wild-eyed warriors came pouring in from the chambers behind the guardroom.

It was the yelling of men and the clanging of steel that brought Conan bounding from his couch, wide awake and broadsword in hand. In an instant he had reached the door and flung it open, and was glaring out into the corridor just as Techotl rushed up it, eyes blazing madly.

--he Xotalancas!--he screamed, in a voice hardly human.--hey are within the door!-- Conan ran down the corridor, even as Valeria emerged from her chamber.

--hat the devil is it?--she called.

--echotl says the Xotalancas are in,--he answered hurriedly.--hat racket sounds like it.--

With the Tecuhltli on their heels they burst into the throneroom and were confronted by a scene beyond the most frantic dream of blood and fury. Twenty men and women, their black hair streaming, and the white skulls gleaming on their breasts, were locked in combat with the people of Tecuhltli. The women on both sides fought as madly as the men, and already the room and the hall beyond were strewn with corpses.

Olmec, naked but for a breech-clout, was fighting before his throne, and as the adventurers entered, Tascela ran from an inner chamber with a sword in her hand.

Xatmec and his mate were dead, so there was none to tell the Tecuhltli how their foes had found their way into their citadel. Nor was there any to say what had prompted that mad attempt. But the losses of the Xotalancas had been greater, their position more desperate, than the Tecuhltli had known. The maiming of their scaly ally, the destruction of the Burning Skull, and the news, gasped by a dying man, that mysterious white-skin allies had joined their enemies, had driven them to the frenzy of desperation and the wild determination to die dealing death to their ancient foes.

The Tecuhltli, recovering from the first stunning shock of the surprize that had swept them back into the throneroom and littered the floor with their corpses, fought back with an equally desperate fury, while the door-guards from the lower floors came racing to hurl themselves into the fray. It was the death-fight of rabid wolves, blind, panting, merciless. Back and forth it surged, from door to dais, blades whickering and striking into flesh, blood spurting, feet stamping the crimson floor where redder pools were forming. Ivory tables crashed over, seats were splintered, velvet hangings torn down were stained red. It was the bloody climax of a bloody half-century, and every man there sensed it.

But the conclusion was inevitable. The Tecuhltli outnumbered the invaders almost two to one, and they were heartened by that fact and by the entrance into the m--l--e of their light-skinned allies.

These crashed into the fray with the devastating effect of a hurricane plowing through a grove of saplings. In sheer strength no three Tlazitlans were a match for Conan, and in spite of his weight he was quicker on his feet than any of them. He moved through the whirling, eddying mass with the surety and destructiveness of a gray wolf amidst a pack of alley curs, and he strode over a wake of crumpled figures.

Valeria fought beside him, her lips smiling and her eyes blazing. She was stronger than the average man, and far quicker and more ferocious. Her sword was like a living thing in her hand. Where Conan beat down opposition by the sheer weight and power of his blows, breaking spears, splitting skulls and cleaving bosoms to the breastbone, Valeria brought into action a finesse of sword-play that dazzled and bewildered her antagonists before it slew them. Again and again a warrior, heaving high his heavy blade, found her point in his jugular before he could strike. Conan, towering above the field, strode through the welter smiting right and left, but Valeria moved like an illusive phantom, constantly shifting, and thrusting and slashing as she shifted. Swords missed her again and again as the wielders flailed the empty air and died with her point in their hearts or throats, and her mocking laughter in their ears.

Neither sex nor condition was considered by the maddened combatants. The five women of the Xotalancas were down with their throats cut before Conan and Valeria entered the fray, and when a man or woman went down under the stamping feet, there was always a knife ready for the helpless throat, or a sandaled foot eager to crush the prostrate skull.

From wall to wall, from door to door rolled the waves of combat, spilling over into adjoining chambers. And presently only Tecuhltli and their white-skinned allies stood upright in the great throneroom. The survivors stared bleakly and blankly at each other, like survivors after Judgment Day or the destruction of the world. On legs wide-braced, hands gripping notched and dripping swords, blood trickling down their arms, they stared at one another across the mangled corpses of friends and foes. They had no breath left to shout, but a bestial mad howling rose from their lips. It was not a human cry of triumph. It was the howling of a rabid wolf-pack stalking among the bodies of its victims.

Conan caught Valeria-- arm and turned her about.

--ou--e got a stab in the calf of your leg,--he growled.

She glanced down, for the first time aware of a stinging in the muscles of her leg. Some dying man on the floor had fleshed his dagger with his last effort.

--ou look like a butcher yourself,--she laughed.

He shook a red shower from his hands.

--ot mine. Oh, a scratch here and there. Nothing to bother about. But that calf ought to be bandaged.--

Olmec came through the litter, looking like a ghoul with his naked massive shoulders splashed with blood, and his black beard dabbled in crimson. His eyes were red, like the reflection of flame on black water.

--e have won!--he croaked dazedly.--he feud is ended! The dogs of Xotalanc lie dead! Oh, for a captive to flay alive! Yet it is good to look upon their dead faces. Twenty dead dogs! Twenty red nails for the black column!----ou-- best see to your wounded,--grunted Conan, turning away from him.--ere, girl, let me see that leg.----ait a minute!--she shook him off impatiently. The fire of fighting still burned brightly in her soul.--ow do we know these are all of them? These might have come on a raid of their own.----hey would not split the clan on a foray like this,--said Olmec, shaking his head, and regaining some of his ordinary intelligence. Without his purple robe the man seemed less like a prince than some repellent beast of prey.--will stake my head upon it that we have slain them all. There were less of them than I dreamed, and they must have been desperate. But how came they in Tecuhltli?-- Tascela came forward, wiping her sword on her naked thigh, and holding in her other hand an object she had taken from the body of the feathered leader of the Xotalancas.

--he pipes of madness,--she said.--warrior tells me that Xatmec opened the door to the Xotalancas and was cut down as they stormed into the guardroom. This warrior came to the guardroom from the inner hall just in time to see it happen and to hear the last of a weird strain of music which froze his very soul. Tolkemec used to talk of these pipes, which the Xuchotlans swore were hidden somewhere in the catacombs with the bones of the ancient wizard who used them in his lifetime. Somehow the dogs of Xotalanc found them and learned their secret.----omebody ought to go to Xotalanc and see if any remain alive,--said Conan.----l go if somebody will guide me.-- Olmec glanced at the remnants of his people. There were only twenty left alive, and of these several lay groaning on the floor. Tascela was the only one of the Tecuhltli who had escaped without a wound. The princess was untouched, though she had fought as savagely as any.

--ho will go with Conan to Xotalanc?--asked Olmec.

Techotl limped forward. The wound in his thigh had started bleeding afresh, and he had another gash across his ribs.

-- will go!----o, you won't,--vetoed Conan.--nd you--e not going either, Valeria. In a little while that leg will be getting stiff.----will go,--volunteered a warrior, who was knotting a bandage about a slashed forearm.

--ery well, Yanath. Go with the Cimmerian. And you, too, Topal.--Olmec indicated another man whose injuries were slight.--ut first aid us to lift the badly wounded on these couches where we may bandage their hurts.-- This was done quickly. As they stooped to pick up a woman who had been stunned by a war-club, Olmec-- beard brushed Topal-- ear. Conan thought the prince muttered something to the warrior, but he could not be sure. A few moments later he was leading his companions down the hall.

Conan glanced back as he went out the door, at that shambles where the dead lay on the smoldering floor, blood-stained dark limbs knotted in attitudes of fierce muscular effort, dark faces frozen in masks of hate, glassy eyes glaring up at the green fire-jewels which bathed the ghastly scene in a dusky emerald witch-light. Among the dead the living moved aimlessly, like people moving in a trance. Conan heard Olmec call a woman and direct her to bandage Valeria-- leg. The pirate followed the woman into an adjoining chamber, already beginning to limp slightly.

Warily the two Tecuhltli led Conan along the hall beyond the bronze door, and through chamber after chamber shimmering in the green fire. They saw no one, heard no sound. After they crossed the Great Hall which bisected the city from north to south, their caution was increased by the realization of their nearness to enemy territory. But chambers and halls lay empty to their wary gaze, and they came at last along a broad dim hallway and halted before a bronze door similar to the Eagle Door of Tecuhltli. Gingerly they tried it, and it opened silently under their fingers. Awed, they stared into the green-lit chambers beyond. For fifty years no Tecuhltli had entered those halls save as a prisoner going to a hideous doom. To go to Xotalanc had been the ultimate horror that could befall a man of the western castle. The terror of it had stalked through their dreams since earliest childhood. To Yanath and Topal that bronze door was like the portal of hell.

They cringed back, unreasoning horror in their eyes, and Conan pushed past them and strode into Xotalanc.

Timidly they followed him. As each man set foot over the threshold he stared and glared wildly about him. But only their quick, hurried breathing disturbed the silence.

They had come into a square guardroom, like that behind the Eagle Door of Tecuhltli, and, similarly, a hall ran away from it to a broad chamber that was a counterpart of Olmec-- throneroom.

Conan glanced down the hall with its rugs and divans and hangings, and stood listening intently. He heard no noise, and the rooms had an empty feel. He did not believe there were any Xotalancas left alive in Xuchotl.

--ome on,--he muttered, and started down the hall.

He had not gone far when he was aware that only Yanath was following him. He wheeled back to see Topal standing in an attitude of horror, one arm out as if to fend off some threatening peril, his distended eyes fixed with hypnotic intensity on something protruding from behind a divan.

--hat the devil?--Then Conan saw what Topal was staring at, and he felt a faint twitching of the skin between his giant shoulders. A monstrous head protruded from behind the divan, a reptilian head, broad as the head of a crocodile, with down-curving fangs that projected over the lower jaw. But there was an unnatural limpness about the thing, and the hideous eyes were glazed.

Conan peered behind the couch. It was a great serpent which lay there limp in death, but such a serpent as he had never seen in his wanderings. The reek and chill of the deep black earth were about it, and its color was an indeterminable hue which changed with each new angle from which he surveyed it. A great wound in the neck showed what had caused its death.

--t is the Crawler!--whispered Yanath.

--t-- the thing I slashed on the stair,--grunted Conan.--fter it trailed us to the Eagle Door, it dragged itself here to die. How could the Xotalancas control such a brute?-- The Tecuhltli shivered and shook their heads.

--hey brought it up from the black tunnels below the catacombs. They discovered secrets unknown to Tecuhltli.----ell, it's dead, and if they-- had any more of them, they-- have brought them along when they came to Tecuhltli. Come on.-- They crowded close at his heels as he strode down the hall and thrust on the silver-worked door at the other end.

--f we don't find anybody on this floor,--he said,--e--l descend into the lower floors. We--l explore Xotalanc from the roof to the catacombs. If Xotalanc is like Tecuhltli, all the rooms and halls in this tier will be lighted--what the devil!-- They had come into the broad throne-chamber, so similar to that one in Tecuhltli. There were the same jade dais and ivory seat, the same divans, rugs and hangings on the walls. No black, red-scarred column stood behind the throne-dais, but evidences of the grim feud were not lacking.

Ranged along the wall behind the dais were rows of glass-covered shelves. And on those shelves hundreds of human heads, perfectly preserved, stared at the startled watchers with emotionless eyes, as they had stared for only the gods knew how many months and years.

Topal muttered a curse, but Yanath stood silent, the mad light growing in his wide eyes. Conan frowned, knowing that Tlazitlan sanity was hung on a hair-trigger.

Suddenly Yanath pointed to the ghastly relics with a twitching finger.

--here is my brother-- head!--he murmured.--nd there is my father-- younger brother! And there beyond them is my sister-- eldest son!-- Suddenly he began to weep, dry-eyed, with harsh, loud sobs that shook his frame. He did not take his eyes from the heads. His sobs grew shriller, changed to frightful, high-pitched laughter, and that in turn became an unbearable screaming. Yanath was stark mad.

Conan laid a hand on his shoulder, and as if the touch had released all the frenzy in his soul, Yanath screamed and whirled, striking at the Cimmerian with his sword. Conan parried the blow, and Topal tried to catch Yanath-- arm. But the madman avoided him and with froth flying from his lips, he drove his sword deep into Topal-- body. Topal sank down with a groan, and Yanath whirled for an instant like a crazy dervish; then he ran at the shelves and began hacking at the glass with his sword, screeching blasphemously.

Conan sprang at him from behind, trying to catch him unaware and disarm him, but the madman wheeled and lunged at him, screaming like a lost soul. Realizing that the warrior was hopelessly insane, the Cimmerian side-stepped, and as the maniac went past, he swung a cut that severed the shoulder-bone and breast, and dropped the man dead beside his dying victim.

Conan bent over Topal, seeing that the man was at his last gasp. It was useless to seek to stanch the blood gushing from the horrible wound.

--ou--e done for, Topal,--grunted Conan.--ny word you want to send to your people?----end closer,--gasped Topal, and Conan complied--and an instant later caught the man't wrist as Topal struck at his breast with a dagger.

--rom!--swore Conan.--re you mad, too?----lmec ordered it!--gasped the dying man.--know not why. As we lifted the wounded upon the couches he whispered to me, bidding me to slay you as we returned to Tecuhltli--And with the name of his clan on his lips, Topal died.

Conan scowled down at him in puzzlement. This whole affair had an aspect of lunacy. Was Olmec mad, too? Were all the Tecuhltli madder than he had realized? With a shrug of his shoulders he strode down the hall and out of the bronze door, leaving the dead Tecuhltli lying before the staring dead eyes of their kinsmen't heads.

Conan needed no guide back through the labyrinth they had traversed. His primitive instinct of direction led him unerringly along the route they had come. He traversed it as warily as he had before, his sword in his hand, and his eyes fiercely searching each shadowed nook and corner; for it was his former allies he feared now, not the ghosts of the slain Xotalancas.

He had crossed the Great Hall and entered the chambers beyond when he heard something moving ahead of him--something which gasped and panted, and moved with a strange, floundering, scrambling noise. A moment later Conan saw a man crawling over the flaming floor toward him--a man whose progress left a broad bloody smear on the smoldering surface. It was Techotl and his eyes were already glazing; from a deep gash in his breast blood gushed steadily between the fingers of his clutching hand. With the other he clawed and hitched himself along.

--onan,--he cried chokingly,--onan! Olmec has taken the yellow-haired woman!----o that-- why he told Topal to kill me!--murmured Conan, dropping to his knee beside the man, who his experienced eye told him was dying.--lmec isn't so mad as I thought.-- Techotl-- groping fingers plucked at Conan't arm. In the cold, loveless and altogether hideous life of the Tecuhltli his admiration and affection for the invaders from the outer world formed a warm, human oasis, constituted a tie that connected him with a more natural humanity that was totally lacking in his fellows, whose only emotions were hate, lust and the urge of sadistic cruelty.

-- sought to oppose him,--gurgled Techotl, blood bubbling frothily to his lips.--ut he struck me down. He thought he had slain me, but I crawled away. Ah, Set, how far I have crawled in my own blood! Beware, Conan! Olmec may have set an ambush for your return! Slay Olmec! He is a beast. Take Valeria and flee! Fear not to traverse the forest. Olmec and Tascela lied about the dragons. They slew each other years ago, all save the strongest. For a dozen years there has been only one dragon. If you have slain him, there is naught in the forest to harm you. He was the god Olmec worshipped; and Olmec fed human sacrifices to him, the very old and the very young, bound and hurled from the wall. Hasten! Olmec has taken Valeria to the Chamber of the's

His head slumped down and he was dead before it came to rest on the floor.

Conan sprang up, his eyes like live coals. So that was Olmec-- game, having first used the strangers to destroy his foes! He should have known that something of the sort would be going on in that black-bearded degenerate-- mind.

The Cimmerian started toward Tecuhltli with reckless speed. Rapidly he reckoned the numbers of his former allies. Only twenty-one, counting Olmec, had survived that fiendish battle in the throneroom. Three had died since, which left seventeen enemies with which to reckon. In his rage Conan felt capable of accounting for the whole clan single-handed.

But the innate craft of the wilderness rose to guide his berserk rage. He remembered Techotl-- warning of an ambush. It was quite probable that the prince would make such provisions, on the chance that Topal might have failed to carry out his order. Olmec would be expecting him to return by the same route he had followed in going to Xotalanc.

Conan glanced up at a skylight under which he was passing and caught the blurred glimmer of stars. They had not yet begun to pale for dawn. The events of the night had been crowded into a comparatively short space of time.

He turned aside from his direct course and descended a winding staircase to the floor below. He did not know where the door was to be found that let into the castle on that level, but he knew he could find it. How he was to force the locks he did not know; he believed that the doors of Tecuhltli would all be locked and bolted, if for no other reason than the habits of half a century. But there was nothing else but to attempt it.

Sword in hand, he hurried noiselessly on through a maze of green-lit or shadowy rooms and halls. He knew he must be near Tecuhltli, when a sound brought him up short. He recognized it for what it was--a human being trying to cry out through a stifling gag. It came from somewhere ahead of him, and to the left. In those deathly-still chambers a small sound carried a long way.

Conan turned aside and went seeking after the sound, which continued to be repeated. Presently he was glaring through a doorway upon a weird scene. In the room into which he was looking a low rack-like frame of iron lay on the floor, and a giant figure was bound prostrate upon it. His head rested on a bed of iron spikes, which were already crimson-pointed with blood where they had pierced his scalp. A peculiar harness-like contrivance was fastened about his head, though in such a manner that the leather band did not protect his scalp from the spikes. This harness was connected by a slender chain to the mechanism that upheld a huge iron ball which was suspended above the captive-- hairy breast. As long as the man could force himself to remain motionless the iron ball hung in its place. But when the pain of the iron points caused him to lift his head, the ball lurched downward a few inches. Presently his aching neck muscles would no longer support his head in its unnatural position and it would fall back on the spikes again. It was obvious that eventually the ball would crush him to a pulp, slowly and inexorably. The victim was gagged, and above the gag his great black ox-eyes rolled wildly toward the man in the doorway, who stood in silent amazement. The man on the rack was Olmec, prince of Tecuhltli.

VI

THE EYES OF TASCELA

--hy did you bring me into this chamber to bandage my legs?--demanded Valeria.--ouldn't you have done it just as well in the throneroom?-- She sat on a couch with her wounded leg extended upon it, and the Tecuhltli woman had just bound it with silk bandages. Valeria-- red-stained sword lay on the couch beside her.

She frowned as she spoke. The woman had done her task silently and efficiently, but Valeria liked neither the lingering, caressing touch of her slim fingers nor the expression in her eyes.

--hey have taken the rest of the wounded into the other chambers,--answered the woman in the soft speech of the Tecuhltli women, which somehow did not suggest either softness or gentleness in the speakers. A little while before, Valeria had seen this same woman stab a Xotalanca woman through the breast and stamp the eyeballs out of a wounded Xotalanca man.

--hey will be carrying the corpses of the dead down into the catacombs,--she added,--est the ghosts escape into the chambers and dwell there.----o you believe in ghosts?--asked Valeria.

-- know the ghost of Tolkemec dwells in the catacombs,--she answered with a shiver.--nce I saw it, as I crouched in a crypt among the bones of a dead queen. It passed by in the form of an ancient man with flowing white beard and locks, and luminous eyes that blazed in the darkness. It was Tolkemec; I saw him living when I was a child and he was being tortured.-- Her voice sank to a fearful whisper:--lmec laughs, but I know Tolkemec-- ghost dwells in the catacombs! They say it is rats which gnaw the flesh from the bones of the newly dead--but ghosts eat flesh. Who knows but that--

She glanced up quickly as a shadow fell across the couch. Valeria looked up to see Olmec gazing down at her. The prince had cleansed his hands, torso and beard of the blood that had splashed them; but he had not donned his robe, and his great dark-skinned hairless body and limbs renewed the impression of strength bestial in its nature. His deep black eyes burned with a more elemental light, and there was the suggestion of a twitching in the fingers that tugged at his thick blue-black beard.

He stared fixedly at the woman, and she rose and glided from the chamber. As she passed through the door she cast a look over her shoulder at Valeria, a glance full of cynical derision and obscene mockery.

--he has done a clumsy job,--criticized the prince, coming to the divan and bending over the bandage.--et me see--

With a quickness amazing in one of his bulk he snatched her sword and threw it across the chamber. His next move was to catch her in his giant arms.

Quick and unexpected as the move was, she almost matched it; for even as he grabbed her, her dirk was in her hand and she stabbed murderously at his throat. More by luck than skill he caught her wrist, and then began a savage wrestling-match. She fought him with fists, feet, knees, teeth and nails, with all the strength of her magnificent body and all the knowledge of hand-to-hand fighting she had acquired in her years of roving and fighting on sea and land. It availed her nothing against his brute strength. She lost her dirk in the first moment of contact, and thereafter found herself powerless to inflict any appreciable pain on her giant attacker.

The blaze in his weird black eyes did not alter, and their expression filled her with fury, fanned by the sardonic smile that seemed carved upon his bearded lips. Those eyes and that smile contained all the cruel cynicism that seethes below the surface of a sophisticated and degenerate race, and for the first time in her life Valeria experienced fear of a man. It was like struggling against some huge elemental force; his iron arms thwarted her efforts with an ease that sent panic racing through her limbs. He seemed impervious to any pain she could inflict. Only once, when she sank her white teeth savagely into his wrist so that the blood started, did he react. And that was to buffet her brutally upon the side of the head with his open hand, so that stars flashed before her eyes and her head rolled on her shoulders.

Her shirt had been torn open in the struggle, and with cynical cruelty he rasped his thick beard across her bare breasts, bringing the blood to suffuse the fair skin, and fetching a cry of pain and outraged fury from her. Her convulsive resistance was useless; she was crushed down on a couch, disarmed and panting, her eyes blazing up at him like the eyes of a trapped tigress.

A moment later he was hurrying from the chamber, carrying her in his arms. She made no resistance, but the smoldering of her eyes showed that she was unconquered in spirit, at least. She had not cried out. She knew that Conan was not within call, and it did not occur to her that any in Tecuhltli would oppose their prince. But she noticed that Olmec went stealthily, with his head on one side as if listening for sounds of pursuit, and he did not return to the throne-chamber. He carried her through a door that stood opposite that through which he had entered, crossed another room and began stealing down a hall. As she became convinced that he feared some opposition to the abduction, she threw back her head and screamed at the top of her lusty voice.

She was rewarded by a slap that half stunned her, and Olmec quickened his pace to a shambling run.

But her cry had been echoed, and twisting her head about, Valeria, through the tears and stars that partly blinded her, saw Techotl limping after them.

Olmec turned with a snarl, shifting the woman to an uncomfortable and certainly undignified position under one huge arm, where he held her writhing and kicking vainly, like a child.

--lmec!--protested Techotl.--ou cannot be such a dog as to do this thing! She is Conan't woman! She helped us slay the Xotalancas, and--

Without a word Olmec balled his free hand into a huge fist and stretched the wounded warrior senseless at his feet. Stooping, and hindered not at all by the struggles and imprecations of his captive, he drew Techotl-- sword from its sheath and stabbed the warrior in the breast. Then casting aside the weapon he fled on along the corridor. He did not see a woman't dark face peer cautiously after him from behind a hanging. It vanished, and presently Techotl groaned and stirred, rose dazedly and staggered drunkenly away, calling Conan't name.

Olmec hurried on down the corridor, and descended a winding ivory staircase. He crossed several corridors and halted at last in a broad chamber whose doors were veiled with heavy tapestries, with one exception--a heavy bronze door similar to the Door of the Eagle on the upper floor.

He was moved to rumble, pointing to it:--hat is one of the outer doors of Tecuhltli. For the first time in fifty years it is unguarded. We need not guard it now, for Xotalanc is no more.----hanks to Conan and me, you bloody rogue!--sneered Valeria, trembling with fury and the shame of physical coercion.--ou treacherous dog! Conan will cut your throat for this!-- Olmec did not bother to voice his belief that Conan't own gullet had already been severed according to his whispered command. He was too utterly cynical to be at all interested in her thoughts or opinions. His flame-lit eyes devoured her, dwelling burningly on the generous expanses of clear white flesh exposed where her shirt and breeches had been torn in the struggle.

--orget Conan,--he said thickly.--lmec is lord of Xuchotl. Xotalanc is no more. There will be no more fighting. We shall spend our lives in drinking and love-making. First let us drink!-- He seated himself on an ivory table and pulled her down on his knees, like a dark-skinned satyr with a white nymph in his arms. Ignoring her unnymphlike profanity, he held her helpless with one great arm about her waist while the other reached across the table and secured a vessel of wine.

--rink!--he commanded, forcing it to her lips, as she writhed her head away.

The liquor slopped over, stinging her lips, splashing down on her naked breasts.

--our guest does not like your wine, Olmec,--spoke a cool, sardonic voice.

Olmec stiffened; fear grew in his flaming eyes. Slowly he swung his great head about and stared at Tascela who posed negligently in the curtained doorway, one hand on her smooth hip. Valeria twisted herself about in his iron grip, and when she met the burning eyes of Tascela, a chill tingled along her supple spine. New experiences were flooding Valeria-- proud soul that night. Recently she had learned to fear a man; now she knew what it was to fear a woman.

Olmec sat motionless, a gray pallor growing under his swarthy skin. Tascela brought her other hand from behind her and displayed a small gold vessel.

-- feared she would not like your wine, Olmec,--purred the princess,--o I brought some of mine, some I brought with me long ago from the shores of Lake Zuad--do you understand, Olmec?-- Beads of sweat stood out suddenly on Olmec-- brow. His muscles relaxed, and Valeria broke away and put the table between them. But though reason told her to dart from the room, some fascination she could not understand held her rigid, watching the scene.

Tascela came toward the seated prince with a swaying, undulating walk that was mockery in itself. Her voice was soft, slurringly caressing, but her eyes gleamed. Her slim fingers stroked his beard lightly.

--ou are selfish, Olmec,--she crooned, smiling.--ou would keep our handsome guest to yourself, though you knew I wished to entertain her. You are much at fault, Olmec!-- The mask dropped for an instant; her eyes flashed, her face was contorted and with an appalling show of strength her hand locked convulsively in his beard and tore out a great handful. This evidence of unnatural strength was no more terrifying than the momentary baring of the hellish fury that raged under her bland exterior.

Olmec lurched up with a roar, and stood swaying like a bear, his mighty hands clenching and unclenching.

--lut!--His booming voice filled the room.--itch! She-devil! Tecuhltli should have slain you fifty years ago! Begone! I have endured too much from you! This white-skinned wench is mine! Get hence before I slay you!-- The princess laughed and dashed the blood-stained strands into his face. Her laughter was less merciful than the ring of flint on steel.

--nce you spoke otherwise, Olmec,--she taunted.--nce, in your youth, you spoke words of love. Aye, you were my lover once, years ago, and because you loved me, you slept in my arms beneath the enchanted lotus--and thereby put into my hands the chains that enslaved you. You know you cannot withstand me. You know I have but to gaze into your eyes, with the mystic power a priest of Stygia taught me, long ago, and you are powerless. You remember the night beneath the black lotus that waved above us, stirred by no worldly breeze; you scent again the unearthly perfumes that stole and rose like a cloud about you to enslave you. You cannot fight against me. You are my slave as you were that night--as you shall be so long as you shall live, Olmec of Xuchotl!--

Her voice had sunk to a murmur like the rippling of a stream running through starlit darkness. She leaned close to the prince and spread her long tapering fingers upon his giant breast. His eyes glazed, his great hands fell limply to his sides.

With a smile of cruel malice, Tascela lifted the vessel and placed it to his lips.

--rink!-- Mechanically the prince obeyed. And instantly the glaze passed from his eyes and they were flooded with fury, comprehension and an awful fear. His mouth gaped, but no sound issued. For an instant he reeled on buckling knees, and then fell in a sodden heap on the floor.

His fall jolted Valeria out of her paralysis. She turned and sprang toward the door, but with a movement that would have shamed a leaping panther, Tascela was before her. Valeria struck at her with her clenched fist, and all the power of her supple body behind the blow. It would have stretched a man senseless on the floor. But with a lithe twist of her torso, Tascela avoided the blow and caught the pirate-- wrist. The next instant Valeria-- left hand was imprisoned, and holding her wrists together with one hand, Tascela calmly bound them with a cord she drew from her girdle. Valeria thought she had tasted the ultimate in humiliation already that night, but her shame at being manhandled by Olmec was nothing to the sensations that now shook her supple frame. Valeria had always been inclined to despise the other members of her sex; and it was overwhelming to encounter another woman who could handle her like a child. She scarcely resisted at all when Tascela forced her into a chair and drawing her bound wrists down between her knees, fastened them to the chair.

Casually stepping over Olmec, Tascela walked to the bronze door and shot the bolt and threw it open, revealing a hallway without.

--pening upon this hall,--she remarked, speaking to her feminine captive for the first time,--here is a chamber which in old times was used as a torture room. When we retired into Tecuhltli, we brought most of the apparatus with us, but there was one piece too heavy to move. It is still in working order. I think it will be quite convenient now.-- An understanding flame of terror rose in Olmec-- eyes. Tascela strode back to him, bent and gripped him by the hair.

--e is only paralyzed temporarily,--she remarked conversationally.--e can hear, think, and feel--aye, he can feel very well indeed!-- With which sinister observation she started toward the door, dragging the giant bulk with an ease that made the pirate-- eyes dilate. She passed into the hall and moved down it without hesitation, presently disappearing with her captive into a chamber that opened into it, and whence shortly thereafter issued the clank of iron.

Valeria swore softly and tugged vainly, with her legs braced against the chair. The cords that confined her were apparently unbreakable.

Tascela presently returned alone; behind her a muffled groaning issued from the chamber. She closed the door but did not bolt it. Tascela was beyond the grip of habit, as she was beyond the touch of other human instincts and emotions.

Valeria sat dumbly, watching the woman in whose slim hands, the pirate realized, her destiny now rested.

Tascela grasped her yellow locks and forced back her head, looking impersonally down into her face. But the glitter in her dark eyes was not impersonal.

-- have chosen you for a great honor,--she said.--ou shall restore the youth of Tascela. Oh, you stare at that! My appearance is that of youth, but through my veins creeps the sluggish chill of approaching age, as I have felt it a thousand times before. I am old, so old I do not remember my childhood. But I was a girl once, and a priest of Stygia loved me, and gave me the secret of immortality and youth everlasting. He died, then--some said by poison. But I dwelt in my palace by the shores of Lake Zuad and the passing years touched me not. So at last a king of Stygia desired me, and my people rebelled and brought me to this land. Olmec called me a princess. I am not of royal blood. I am greater than a princess. I am Tascela, whose youth your own glorious youth shall restore.-- Valeria-- tongue clove to the roof of her mouth. She sensed here a mystery darker than the degeneracy she had anticipated.

The taller woman unbound the Aquilonian't wrists and pulled her to her feet. It was not fear of the dominant strength that lurked in the princess--limbs that made Valeria a helpless, quivering captive in her hands. It was the burning, hypnotic, terrible eyes of Tascela.

VII

HE COMES FROM THE DARK

--ell, I-- a Kushite!-- Conan glared down at the man on the iron rack.

--hat the devil are you doing on that thing?-- Incoherent sounds issued from behind the gag and Conan bent and tore it away, evoking a bellow of fear from the captive; for his action caused the iron ball to lurch down until it nearly touched the broad breast.

--e careful, for Set-- sake!--begged Olmec.

--hat for?--demanded Conan.--o you think I care what happens to you? I only wish I had time to stay here and watch that chunk of iron grind your guts out. But I-- in a hurry. Where-- Valeria?----oose me!--urged Olmec.--will tell you all!----ell me first.----ever!--The prince-- heavy jaws set stubbornly.

--ll right.--Conan seated himself on a near-by bench.----l find her myself, after you--e been reduced to a jelly. I believe I can speed up that process by twisting my sword-point around in your ear,--he added, extending the weapon experimentally.

--ait!--Words came in a rush from the captive-- ashy lips.--ascela took her from me. I--e never been anything but a puppet in Tascela-- hands.----ascela?--snorted Conan, and spat.--hy, the filthy--

--o, no!--panted Olmec.--t-- worse than you think. Tascela is old--centuries old. She renews her life and her youth by the sacrifice of beautiful young women. That-- one thing that has reduced the clan to its present state. She will draw the essence of Valeria-- life into her own body, and bloom with fresh vigor and beauty.----re the doors locked?--asked Conan, thumbing his sword edge.

--ye! But I know a way to get into Tecuhltli. Only Tascela and I know, and she thinks me helpless and you slain. Free me and I swear I will help you rescue Valeria. Without my help you cannot win into Tecuhltli; for even if you tortured me into revealing the secret, you couldn't work it. Let me go, and we will steal on Tascela and kill her before she can work magic--before she can fix her eyes on us. A knife thrown from behind will do the work. I should have killed her thus long ago, but I feared that without her to aid us the Xotalancas would overcome us. She needed my help, too; that-- the only reason she let me live this long. Now neither needs the other, and one must die. I swear that when we have slain the witch, you and Valeria shall go free without harm. My people will obey me when Tascela is dead.-- Conan stooped and cut the ropes that held the prince, and Olmec slid cautiously from under the great ball and rose, shaking his head like a bull and muttering imprecations as he fingered his lacerated scalp. Standing shoulder to shoulder the two men presented a formidable picture of primitive power. Olmec was as tall as Conan, and heavier; but there was something repellent about the Tlazitlan, something abysmal and monstrous that contrasted unfavorably with the clean-cut, compact hardness of the Cimmerian. Conan had discarded the remnants of his tattered, blood-soaked shirt, and stood with his remarkable muscular development impressively revealed. His great shoulders were as broad as those of Olmec, and more cleanly outlined, and his huge breast arched with a more impressive sweep to a hard waist that lacked the paunchy thickness of Olmec-- midsection. He might have been an image of primal strength cut out of bronze. Olmec was darker, but not from the burning of the sun. If Conan was a figure out of the dawn of Time, Olmec was a shambling, somber shape from the darkness of Time-- pre-dawn.

--ead on,--demanded Conan.--nd keep ahead of me. I don't trust you any farther than I can throw a bull by the tail.-- Olmec turned and stalked on ahead of him, one hand twitching slightly as it plucked at his matted beard.

Olmec did not lead Conan back to the bronze door, which the prince naturally supposed Tascela had locked, but to a certain chamber on the border of Tecuhltli.

--his secret has been guarded for half a century,--he said.--ot even our own clan knew of it, and the Xotalancas never learned. Tecuhltli himself built this secret entrance, afterward slaying the slaves who did the work; for he feared that he might find himself locked out of his own kingdom some day because of the spite of Tascela, whose passion for him soon changed to hate. But she discovered the secret, and barred the hidden door against him one day as he fled back from an unsuccessful raid, and the Xotalancas took him and flayed him. But once, spying upon her, I saw her enter Tecuhltli by this route, and so learned the secret.-- He pressed upon a gold ornament in the wall, and a panel swung inward, disclosing an ivory stair leading upward.

--his stair is built within the wall,--said Olmec.--t leads up to a tower upon the roof, and thence other stairs wind down to the various chambers. Hasten!----fter you, comrade!--retorted Conan satirically, swaying his broadsword as he spoke, and Olmec shrugged his shoulders and stepped onto the staircase. Conan instantly followed him, and the door shut behind them. Far above a cluster of fire-jewels made the staircase a well of dusky dragon-light.

They mounted until Conan estimated that they were above the level of the fourth floor, and then came out into a cylindrical tower, in the domed roof of which was set the bunch of fire-jewels that lighted the stair. Through gold-barred windows, set with unbreakable crystal panes, the first windows he had seen in Xuchotl, Conan got a glimpse of high ridges, domes and more towers, looming darkly against the stars. He was looking across the roofs of Xuchotl.

Olmec did not look through the windows. He hurried down one of the several stairs that wound down from the tower, and when they had descended a few feet, this stair changed into a narrow corridor that wound tortuously on for some distance. It ceased at a steep flight of steps leading downward. There Olmec paused.

Up from below, muffled, but unmistakable, welled a woman't scream, edged with fright, fury and shame. And Conan recognized Valeria-- voice.

In the swift rage roused by that cry, and the amazement of wondering what peril could wring such a shriek from Valeria-- reckless lips, Conan forgot Olmec. He pushed past the prince and started down the stair. Awakening instinct brought him about again, just as Olmec struck with his great mallet-like fist. The blow, fierce and silent, was aimed at the base of Conan't brain. But the Cimmerian wheeled in time to receive the buffet on the side of his neck instead. The impact would have snapped the vertebr-- of a lesser man. As it was, Conan swayed backward, but even as he reeled he dropped his sword, useless at such close quarters, and grasped Olmec-- extended arm, dragging the prince with him as he fell. Headlong they went down the steps together, in a revolving whirl of limbs and heads and bodies. And as they went Conan't iron fingers found and locked in Olmec-- bull-throat.

The barbarian't neck and shoulder felt numb from the sledge-like impact of Olmec-- huge fist, which had carried all the strength of the massive forearm, thick triceps and great shoulder. But this did not affect his ferocity to any appreciable extent. Like a bulldog he hung on grimly, shaken and battered and beaten against the steps as they rolled, until at last they struck an ivory panel-door at the bottom with such an impact that they splintered it its full length and crashed through its ruins. But Olmec was already dead, for those iron fingers had crushed out his life and broken his neck as they fell.

Conan rose, shaking the splinters from his great shoulder, blinking blood and dust out of his eyes.

He was in the great throneroom. There were fifteen people in that room besides himself. The first person he saw was Valeria. A curious black altar stood before the throne-dais. Ranged about it, seven black candles in golden candle-sticks sent up oozing spirals of thick green smoke, disturbingly scented. These spirals united in a cloud near the ceiling, forming a smoky arch above the altar. On that altar lay Valeria, stark naked, her white flesh gleaming in shocking contrast to the glistening ebon stone. She was not bound. She lay at full length, her arms stretched out above her head to their fullest extent. At the head of the altar knelt a young man, holding her wrists firmly. A young woman knelt at the other end of the altar, grasping her ankles. Between them she could neither rise nor move.

Eleven men and women of Tecuhltli knelt dumbly in a semicircle, watching the scene with hot, lustful eyes.

On the ivory throne-seat Tascela lolled. Bronze bowls of incense rolled their spirals about her; the wisps of smoke curled about her naked limbs like caressing fingers. She could not sit still; she squirmed and shifted about with sensuous abandon, as if finding pleasure in the contact of the smooth ivory with her sleek flesh.

The crash of the door as it broke beneath the impact of the hurtling bodies caused no change in the scene. The kneeling men and women merely glanced incuriously at the corpse of their prince and at the man who rose from the ruins of the door, then swung their eyes greedily back to the writhing white shape on the black altar. Tascela looked insolently at him, and sprawled back on her seat, laughing mockingly.

--lut!--Conan saw red. His hands clenched into iron hammers as he started for her. With his first step something clanged loudly and steel bit savagely into his leg. He stumbled and almost fell, checked in his headlong stride. The jaws of an iron trap had closed on his leg, with teeth that sank deep and held. Only the ridged muscles of his calf saved the bone from being splintered. The accursed thing had sprung out of the smoldering floor without warning. He saw the slots now, in the floor where the jaws had lain, perfectly camouflaged.

--ool!--laughed Tascela.--id you think I would not guard against your possible return? Every door in this chamber is guarded by such traps. Stand there and watch now, while I fulfill the destiny of your handsome friend! Then I will decide your own.-- Conan't hand instinctively sought his belt, only to encounter an empty scabbard. His sword was on the stair behind him. His poniard was lying back in the forest, where the dragon had torn it from his jaw. The steel teeth in his leg were like burning coals, but the pain was not as savage as the fury that seethed in his soul. He was trapped, like a wolf. If he had had his sword he would have hewn off his leg and crawled across the floor to slay Tascela. Valeria-- eyes rolled toward him with mute appeal, and his own helplessness sent red waves of madness surging through his brain.

Dropping on the knee of his free leg, he strove to get his fingers between the jaws of the trap, to tear them apart by sheer strength. Blood started from beneath his finger nails, but the jaws fitted close about his leg in a circle whose segments jointed perfectly, contracted until there was no space between his mangled flesh and the fanged iron. The sight of Valeria-- naked body added flame to the fire of his rage.

Tascela ignored him. Rising languidly from her seat she swept the ranks of her subjects with a searching glance, and asked:--here are Xamec, Zlanath and Tachic?----hey did not return from the catacombs, princess,--answered a man.--ike the rest of us, they bore the bodies of the slain into the crypts, but they have not returned. Perhaps the ghost of Tolkemec took them.----e silent, fool!--she ordered harshly.--he ghost is a myth.-- She came down from her dais, playing with a thin gold-hilted dagger. Her eyes burned like nothing on the hither side of hell. She paused beside the altar and spoke in the tense stillness.

--our life shall make me young, white woman!--she said.--shall lean upon your bosom and place my lips over yours, and slowly--ah, slowly!--sink this blade through your heart, so that your life, fleeing your stiffening body, shall enter mine, making me bloom again with youth and with life everlasting!-- Slowly, like a serpent arching toward its victim, she bent down through the writhing smoke, closer and closer over the now motionless woman who stared up into her glowing dark eyes--eyes that grew larger and deeper, blazing like black moons in the swirling smoke.

The kneeling people gripped their hands and held their breath, tense for the bloody climax, and the only sound was Conan't fierce panting as he strove to tear his leg from the trap.

All eyes were glued on the altar and the white figure there; the crash of a thunderbolt could hardly have broken the spell, yet it was only a low cry that shattered the fixity of the scene and brought all whirling about--a low cry, yet one to make the hair stand up stiffly on the scalp. They looked, and they saw.

Framed in the door to the left of the dais stood a nightmare figure. It was a man, with a tangle of white hair and a matted white beard that fell over his breast. Rags only partly covered his gaunt frame, revealing half-naked limbs strangely unnatural in appearance. The skin was not like that of a normal human. There was a suggestion of scaliness about it, as if the owner had dwelt long under conditions almost antithetical to those conditions under which human life ordinarily thrives. And there was nothing at all human about the eyes that blazed from the tangle of white hair. They were great gleaming disks that stared unwinkingly, luminous, whitish, and without a hint of normal emotion or sanity. The mouth gaped, but no coherent words issued--only a high-pitched tittering.

--olkemec!--whispered Tascela, livid, while the others crouched in speechless horror.--o myth, then, no ghost! Set! You have dwelt for twelve years in darkness! Twelve years among the bones of the dead! What grisly food did you find? What mad travesty of life did you live, in the stark blackness of that eternal night? I see now why Xamec and Zlanath and Tachic did not return from the catacombs--and never will return. But why have you waited so long to strike? Were you seeking something, in the pits? Some secret weapon you knew was hidden there? And have you found it at last?-- That hideous tittering was Tolkemec-- only reply, as he bounded into the room with a long leap that carried him over the secret trap before the door--by chance, or by some faint recollection of the ways of Xuchotl. He was not mad, as a man is mad. He had dwelt apart from humanity so long that he was no longer human. Only an unbroken thread of memory embodied in hate and the urge for vengeance had connected him with the humanity from which he had been cut off, and held him lurking near the people he hated. Only that thin string had kept him from racing and prancing off for ever into the black corridors and realms of the subterranean world he had discovered, long ago.

--ou sought something hidden!--whispered Tascela, cringing back.--nd you have found it! You remember the feud! After all these years of blackness, you remember!-- For in the lean hand of Tolkemec now waved a curious jade-hued wand, on the end of which glowed a knob of crimson shaped like a pomegranate. She sprang aside as he thrust it out like a spear, and a beam of crimson fire lanced from the pomegranate. It missed Tascela, but the woman holding Valeria-- ankles was in the way. It smote between her shoulders. There was a sharp crackling sound and the ray of fire flashed from her bosom and struck the black altar, with a snapping of blue sparks. The woman toppled sidewise, shriveling and withering like a mummy even as she fell.

Valeria rolled from the altar on the other side, and started for the opposite wall on all fours. For hell had burst loose in the throneroom of dead Olmec.

The man who had held Valeria-- hands was the next to die. He turned to run, but before he had taken half a dozen steps, Tolkemec, with an agility appalling in such a frame, bounded around to a position that placed the man between him and the altar. Again the red fire-beam flashed and the Tecuhltli rolled lifeless to the floor, as the beam completed its course with a burst of blue sparks against the altar.

Then began slaughter. Screaming insanely the people rushed about the chamber, caroming from one another, stumbling and falling. And among them Tolkemec capered and pranced, dealing death. They could not escape by the doors; for apparently the metal of the portals served like the metal-veined stone altar to complete the circuit for whatever hellish power flashed like thunderbolts from the witch-wand the ancient waved in his hand. When he caught a man or a woman between him and a door or the altar, that one died instantly. He chose no special victim. He took them as they came, with his rags flapping about his wildly gyrating limbs, and the gusty echoes of his tittering sweeping the room above the screams. And bodies fell like falling leaves about the altar and at the doors. One warrior in desperation rushed at him, lifting a dagger, only to fall before he could strike. But the rest were like crazed cattle, with no thought for resistance, and no chance of escape.

The last Tecuhltli except Tascela had fallen when the princess reached the Cimmerian and the girl who had taken refuge beside him. Tascela bent and touched the floor, pressing a design upon it. Instantly the iron jaws released the bleeding limb and sank back into the floor.

--lay him if you can!--she panted, and pressed a heavy knife into his hand.--have no magic to withstand him!-- With a grunt he sprang before the women, not heeding his lacerated leg in the heat of the fighting-lust. Tolkemec was coming toward him, his weird eyes ablaze, but he hesitated at the gleam of the knife in Conan't hand. Then began a grim game, as Tolkemec sought to circle about Conan and get the barbarian between him and the altar or a metal door, while Conan sought to avoid this and drive home his knife. The women watched tensely, holding their breath.

There was no sound except the rustle and scrape of quick-shifting feet. Tolkemec pranced and capered no more. He realized that grimmer game confronted him than the people who had died screaming and fleeing. In the elemental blaze of the barbarian't eyes he read an intent deadly as his own. Back and forth they weaved, and when one moved the other moved as if invisible threads bound them together. But all the time Conan was getting closer and closer to his enemy. Already the coiled muscles of his thighs were beginning to flex for a spring, when Valeria cried out. For a fleeting instant a bronze door was in line with Conan't moving body. The red line leaped, searing Conan't flank as he twisted aside, and even as he shifted he hurled the knife. Old Tolkemec went down, truly slain at last, the hilt vibrating on his breast.

Tascela sprang--not toward Conan, but toward the wand where it shimmered like a live thing on the floor. But as she leaped, so did Valeria, with a dagger snatched from a dead man, and the blade, driven with all the power of the pirate-- muscles, impaled the princess of Tecuhltli so that the point stood out between her breasts. Tascela screamed once and fell dead, and Valeria spurned the body with her heel as it fell.

-- had to do that much, for my own self-respect!--panted Valeria, facing Conan across the limp corpse.

--ell, this cleans up the feud,--he grunted.--t-- been a hell of a night! Where did these people keep their food? I-- hungry.----ou need a bandage on that leg.--Valeria ripped a length of silk from a hanging and knotted it about her waist, then tore off some smaller strips which she bound efficiently about the barbarian't lacerated limb.

-- can walk on it,--he assured her.--et-- begone. It-- dawn, outside this infernal city. I--e had enough of Xuchotl. It-- well the breed exterminated itself. I don't want any of their accursed jewels. They might be haunted.----here is enough clean loot in the world for you and me,--she said, straightening to stand tall and splendid before him.

The old blaze came back in his eyes, and this time she did not resist as he caught her fiercely in his arms.

--t-- a long way to the coast,--she said presently, withdrawing her lips from his.

--hat matter?--he laughed.--here-- nothing we can't conquer. We--l have our feet on a ship-- deck before the Stygians open their ports for the trading season. And then we--l show the world what plundering means!--

Cimmeria

Written in Mission, Texas, February, 1932; suggested by the memory of the hill-country above Fredericksburg seen in a mist of winter rain.

--Robert E. Howard

I remember

The dark woods, masking slopes of sombre hills;

The grey clouds--leaden everlasting arch;

The dusky streams that flowed without a sound,

And the lone winds that whispered down the passes.

Vista on vista marching, hills on hills,

Slope beyond slope, each dark with sullen trees,

Our gaunt land lay. So when a man climbed up

A rugged peak and gazed, his shaded eye

Saw but the endless vista--hill on hill,

Slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers.

It was a gloomy land that seemed to hold

All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,

With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds,

And the dark woodlands brooding over all,

Not even lightened by the rare dim sun

Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it

Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.

It was so long ago and far away

I have forgot the very name men called me.

The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream,

And hunts and wars are shadows. I recall

Only the stillness of that sombre land;

The clouds that piled forever on the hills,

The dimness of the everlasting woods.

Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.

Oh, soul of mine, born out of shadowed hills,

To clouds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun,

How many deaths shall serve to break at last

This heritage which wraps me in the grey

Apparel of ghosts? I search my heart and find

Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.

Appendices

BARBARIAN AT THE PANTHEON-GATES

by Steven Tompkins

In [Frederick Jackson] Turner-- intellectual scenario, the frontier was visualized as a terrain on which two kingdoms of force,--avagery and civilization,--stood toe to toe contending for supremacy. As long as neither held dominance there was danger, but there was also boundless freedom. Into this landscape came the archetypal American, an American who was free in a way that no American has been free since. Free to choose patterns of conduct from an infinity of choices, free to move easily back and forth across the line which separated savagery and civilization, free to take the best from the wilderness and the best that civilization had to offer, free to create his self from the materials of a totally unrestricted environment.

--Tom Pilkington, State of Mind: Texas Literature and Culture

That knocking you hear, polite but persistent, is the people who assembled Volumes I and II of The Best of Robert E. Howard, addressing themselves to the front door of the American literary pantheon. Let-- be upfront while we--e out front: not only do we put Howard's finest work on a pedestal, we--e even gone so far as to pick out a place of honor for that pedestal within the pantheon't marmoreal recesses. These books are designed to be more than just a Petition for Admittance; our aim has been a show of force, an effort to rout derisive interdiction with a decisive intervention in a debate that-- been too non-evidentiary for too long.

In a sense that debate has been underway since at least the fall of 1934, while Howard was still writing--let-- join a conversation already in progress back then between two cousins, both small-town schoolteachers in West Texas, as they discuss a writer dismissed by one as small-time. Enid Gwathmey refuses to accept--he pulp and confession magazines as legitimate starting places for writers. Good stories had stood the test of time. Examples of good writing were put into literature books.--That-- all Novalyne Price, to whose invaluable 1986 memoir One Who Walked Alone we owe the recap of this cousinly disagreement, needs in order to pounce:

--ou read Edgar Allan Poe, don't you? I heard you talking about him to your class the other day.-- She looked at me as if I had the measles.--oe is a good writer,--she said.--was pointing out what a wonderful choice of words he had; I was trying to get my students to enjoy using words carefully to improve their writing.----ob has a wonderful choice of words, too,--I insisted,--nd as far as the content of his stories and of Poe--, they write the same kind of nightmarish stuff. The main difference is that Poe-- works are in the literature books and Bob-- aren't--et. Someday, some English teacher will be telling kids to try and write like Bob.----will have to see that to believe it,--Enid said.--will certainly have to see that to believe it.--

The Best of Robert E. Howard would enable Enid to see and believe, but handing the two volumes to her would require some time travel. More encouragingly, the readers of today and tomorrow now have the opportunity to verify the'sonderful choice of words--defended by Novalyne Price for themselves in the preceding pages. Those words do indeed deserve to be--n the literature books,--and are closer to getting there thanks to Del Rey's Library of Robert E. Howard. And while only a few English teachers are telling their pupils to--ry and write like Bob--as of yet, he is beginning to be thesis-fodder or a dissertation-magnet, a trend that the overdue-but-impending arrival of his Collected Letters and Complete Poems can only galvanize.

Novalyne-- attribution of--he same kind of nightmarish stuff--to both Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Ervin Howard is a reminder that the Texan is already a redoubtable presence in one pantheon. We can't be certain that she took her cue from her sometime boyfriend in measuring him against Poe, but we do know that years before Howard met her, in a December 1928 letter he alluded with a sort of self-deprecating bravado to--he school to which Poe contributed and I at present honor with my presence--literarily speaking--I mean the school of fantasy and horror writing.--That he was at the top of his class within that school has been confirmed by generations of fans and a generous entry in the 1997 Encyclopedia of Fantasy, in which John Clute deems him--f central interest in the field of fantasy--and attributes his--uge appeal to later readers--to--onsiderable invention'tand--he feel of the wind of Story.-- Heroic/epic fantasy authors and historical novelists specializing in the edged-weapon clashes of ancient or medieval warfare are often quick to tip their plumed, crested, or horned helmets to Howard. As David Weber recognized in an introduction to a 1995 collection of the Bran Mak Morn stories,--ran and Cormac and Kull are always ready to teach yet another generation of writers how to tell the high, old tales of doom and glory.-- Howard was more than just a fantasist, although there is no--ust--about his achievements in the genre. While it would be silly to label him, or anyone, an American Tolkien, it is not at all silly to alter a few pronouns in one of leading Tolkienist Verlyn Flieger-- observations about the Englishman in order to render her insight applicable to both men:--y looking backward [their] fantasy reflected the present, the temporal dislocation of [their] escape mirrored the psychological disjunction and displacement of [their century].--Flieger goes on to emphasize that--he very act of escape acknowledges that which it flees, and nostalgia, like modernism, must have a ground from which to turn away.--In Howard's case that ground was American, and therefore controlled by a dominant down-to-earth outlook given to shooting down flights of fancy; the national lore of settlers and strivers usually chased anything more outrageous and fact-flouting out of town.

Brian Attebery-- The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature--essential reading, provided one avoids falling into the book-- Howard-shaped hole--begins with an examination of how fantasy was endangered before the genre could even acquire a tradition in--he country where pragmatism became a philosophy and--ormalcy--a point of faith.--Nor should we forget the ur-faith of Puritanism, which ensures that even today places exist in the United States where a burning eagerness to read, say, the Harry Potter novels is met with an eagerness to burn the Harry Potter novels. The Enlightenment so thoroughly incorporated in the Founders--blueprints was hardly more encouraging; how, for example, is a model home like Monticello to be haunted? The fantastic survived, in Attebery-- words,--s a resistance movement, working to undermine the national faith in things-as-they-are,--one given to--iding out in the nursery and periodically venturing out disguised as romance or satire or science fiction.-- L. Frank Baum paved the yellow brick road for the fantasists that followed, but his Oz is arguably more of a proto-Disneyland than a fully functioning American fairyland, as disinviting to many adults, and adolescents aspiring to adulthood, as it is come-hitherish to children and those other adults who aspire to revisit childhood. Edgar Rice Burroughs afforded Howard his principal model of a dream-life gaudier and boasting the performances of more exotic megafauna than any three-ring circus, but told his most enduring stories on the far, the optimistic side of the First World War, before shell-shock and trench fever went to work on Victorian values. To us Barsoom and Amtor and Pellucidar seem to yield too quickly to empire-building and futures of cultural terraforming rather than terror swarming. Howard's dark fantasy is more informed by history, as is his history by dark fantasy--witness the Suleyman-who-is-no-longer-quite-so-Magnificent of The Shadow of the Vulture, for whom imminent defeat appears as--gray plain of the dead, where corpses dragged their lifeless bodies to an outworn task, animated only by the will of their master.-- But Howard's well-situated alcove in the fantasy pantheon isn't enough for us; by hook or by crook, or rather by battering ram or skeleton key, we--e looking to get him into another pantheon as well, the one implicit in the argument Novalyne Price had with her cousin Enid:--oe-- works are in the literature books and Bob-- aren't--et.--To highlight what makes Howard an American classic, we must agree on what makes a classic. Although science fiction writer Gordon R. Dickson, in his introduction to the 1980 Howard collection The Road of Azrael, defined a genuine classic as the'solden bell-sound--of a unique voice, that of an author--ho has something to give which did not exist in the world before he came into it, and which disappeared forever when he went out of it,--we need credentials to sway those who feign deafness to, or genuinely cannot hear, the golden bell-sound.

Howard's own words to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith after he received the first of many missives from fellow Weird Tales contributor H. P. Lovecraft could be construed as a warning:--e-- out of my class. I-- game to go the limit with a man my weight, but me scrapping with him is like a palooka climbing into a ring with a champion.--He was wrong as can be about that--geography forced his sparring-partnership with Lovecraft (unlike, say, the bond between Tolkien and C. S. Lewis) to play itself out on paper, and most semi-impartial judges have awarded a majority of the rounds to Howard'sbut a few too many ill-considered comparisons and we might as well present his literary standing with a one-way ticket to Palookaville. Are we shoving him into the ring against opponents to whom he would be lucky to lose? Do even his most unforgettable stories belong in the same weight class as those of Poe and Hawthorne, Twain and Bierce, Hemingway and Faulkner? Are we being delusional if we borrow what D. H. Lawrence said of Herman Melville----e was neither mad nor crazy. But he was over the border. He was half a water animal, like those terrible yellow-bearded Vikings who broke out of the waves in beaked ships. He was mad to look over our horizons. Anywhere, anywhere out of our world. To get away, out!----and apply it to Howard? Well, as Sailor Steve Costigan says of himself and Mike, his throat-seeking missile of a bulldog, in this volume-- The Bulldog Breed,--lways outclassed in everything except guts and grip!-- The American literary pantheon is not on any map (--rue places never are,--Melville reminds us in Moby Dick) but just as baseball boasts Cooperstown and rock-and-roll its Hall of Fame in Cleveland, The Library of America is an approximation, a simulacrum, the earthly tabernacle or reliquary for--merica-- best and most significant writing.--Like America itself, an American pantheon should be a work in progress, a movable--and expandable--feast. Room is being found for those who never asked to be Americans, or did indeed ask but were rejected, and if the Library of America-- seal of approval can be read as the functional equivalent of a pantheon induction, the hospitable welcomes recently extended to H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick should be cause for Howardist rejoicing. The Library-- blurbage for Lovecraft salutes his--lassic stories of the strange and fantastic from the visionary master of cosmic horror--and--ntensely personal vision.--The vision of his Texas correspondent was equally intense and personal; the word--mpersonal--might as well be Etruscan in terms of its usefulness when examining Howard's work.

Far from being teacher-- pets, idealizations with ichor or ink in their veins instead of blood, the residents of the American pantheon fascinate as human beings, deeply flawed but even more deeply talented. Our inductee-in-waiting will fit right in; he is always going to be a controversial figure, one with not only his fair share of faults, but also an unfair share of alleged faults. Lovecraft somehow neglected to accuse him of complicity in the Lindbergh kidnapping, but sent so many other reproaches his way that Howard allowed himself a little fun in a July 1935 letter:

Recalling off-hand the charges you have made against me, I remember that at various times you have accused me of being: Exalter-of-the-Physical-Above-the-Mental; Enemy of Humanity; Foe of Mankind; Apostle of Prejudice; Distorter of Fact; Repudiater of Evolutionary Standards; Over-Emphasizer of Ethics; Sympathizer of Criminals (that one broke all altitude records); Egotist; Poseur; Emotionalist; Defender of Ignorance; Sentimentalist; Romanticist. If I were guilty of all the things of which you--e accused me, I not only wouldn't be fit to live; I wouldn't have sense enough to live.

To which list of charges some pantheon-gatekeepers would hasten to add, Pulp Hack, Racist, Sexist, Suicide, Bully, Arrested Adolescent, and Creator of Conan. Yes, Conan, the Cimmerian, he of the gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, he who poses a gigantic problem in that his huge, but decidedly non-Schwarzeneggerian, shadow falls across the rest of Howard's work. Stick up for Howard to her cousin Enid though she did, Novalyne Price herself seems to have regarded Conan as a deal-breakingly undesirable potential brother-in-law, a dependably bad influence on the writer she was dating. And down through the decades since then, the Cimmerian has gone the way of Tarzan and James Bond as a creation whose links to his creator have been repeatedly severed, so that in John Wayne-- America: The Politics of Celebrity we catch the otherwise staggeringly erudite Garry Wills referring to--onan the Barbarian, created by John Milius.----onan the Barbarian,--as dumbed-down as he is pumped-up, is merely a multimedia reduction of Conan the Cimmerian, the character displayed to optimum effect in this volume-- The Tower of the Elephant and Red Nails, and in The People of the Black Circle and Beyond the Black River of its predecessor. The title of the present afterword, which positions Howard as a barbarian at the pantheon-gates, is intended as more than a rote invocation of his uncivilized-and-proud-of-it characters. For much of America-- cultural history, any homegrown writer who presented himself at the gates guarded by Europeans--and those Americans who, in the words of Ernest Hemingway,--rote like exiled English colonials from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they were making----was ipso facto a barbarian, an outlander.

When we run a banner with the strange device--arbarian'tup the flagpole in an American context to see if anyone salutes, we get some historically and culturally freighted responses. Before Howard happened to--arbarism--and--arbarian,--European-Americans usually associated those words with the continent-- previous owners. Europeans for their part have reached for the adjective--arbaric--and the noun--arbarian'tso often when considering Americans of any sort that it would be forgivable to conclude that the New World was named in honor of the navigator Barbario Vespucci. And Americans have been almost as quick to call each other barbarians; for New Yorker George Templeton Strong, that always-quotable diarist/ onlooker of the antebellum and Civil War years, all Southerners bore the mark of Cain as soon as congressman Charles Sumner bore the marks of the hotheaded Preston Brooks--cane, and were besides--race of lazy, ignorant, coarse, sensual, swaggering, sordid beggarly barbarians.-- The childhood adage is only half right: sticks and stones may break our bones, but names can hurt hellaciously as well. However, names are also like sticks and stones in that they can be picked up and thrown back in the face of tormentors. In recent decades epithets meant to identify and isolate the members of certain groups have been worn by those members as badges of affirmation, and before that a few Americans comfortable in their own figurative buckskins taught themselves to take pride in, rather than umbrage at,--arbarian'tand its variants. Walt Whitman't I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world in Song of Myself is only the most famous instance.

American barbarians force their way in where they are least expected. Henry James was a writer so unlike Howard it is a wonder the English language was big enough for the two of them; and yet in his 1877 novel The American, protagonist Christopher Newman visits the Louvre, where he is perceived as--he great western barbarian stepping forth in his innocence and might, gazing a while at this poor effete old world, and then swooping down on it.--John Dos Passos--explanation for his return to America after the Great War was that--or us barbarians, men from an unfinished ritual,--postwar Europe was once again overly--entle.--And barbaric resolve of a sort that Howard might have found admirable is implicit in this Henry Miller exhortation in Tropic of Cancer:--t may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us; but if that is so let us set up a last, agonizing, blood-curdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war-whoop!--In his Seven Keys to Texas the historian T. R. Fehrenbach even frames the'sternal dilemma--of the Lone Star State writer in nigh-Howardian terms:--o go or not to go to Rome, and when in Rome, to try to become Roman, or make his living explaining his barbarian ways to Romans--who may find them greatly entertaining.--

Howard was aware that his barbarians might be mistaken for Noble Savages. Writing to Lovecraft in late October 1932, he denied possessing an--dyllic view of barbarism,--and expressed impatience--ith the depiction of the barbarian of any race as a stately, god-like child of Nature, endowed with strange wisdom and speaking in measured and sonorous phrases.--He freely admitted that the barbarian of history was subject to tabus like--harp sword-edges, between which he walked shuddering,--and more often than not brutal, squalid, childish, treacherous, and unstable. And yet--he day and night were his book, wherein he read of all things that run or walk or crawl or fly. Trees and grass and moss-covered rocks and birds and beasts and clouds were alive to him, and partook of his kinship. The wind blew his hair and he looked with naked eyes into the sun. Often he starved, but when he feasted, it was with a mighty gusto.--The Howard barbarian might leave Eden, an Eden more unforgiving in different ways than the Genesis-garden, but he does so of his own accord, and when he ventures city-ward he functions as an x-factor, a reality principle, handwriting on the wall scrawled forebodingly before ever the wall was built.

We might transfer to Conan what Paul Horgan said of the mountain man in his Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History:--e was an American original, as hard as the hardest thing that could happen to him,--but after that--and this is crucial--much would still need to be said. From the criminality of the City of Thieves--Maul, The Tower of the Elephant scales the sheer, silvery cliff-face of cruelty, of a highly civilized barbarity exposure to which will move Conan, the nominal barbarian, to shoulder the guilt of the entire human race. The not-from-around-here thief or assassin, the off-limits temple or tower, the monstrous or demonic hench-being of a blackly renowned necromancer awaiting the intruder--these are the basic building blocks of a fantasy subgenre with which presumed familiarity easily breeds contempt. Yet Howard, decades before sword-and-sorcery was even dubbed sword-and-sorcery, used the blocks to construct something startlingly non-formulaic, so much so that when Tom Shippey, as perceptive an academic as has ever engaged with modern fantasy, picked Tower for his 1994 Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories, he remarked on the'snexpected--compassion of--oward-- normally brutish hero.--

And so we open the pages of one of the pivotal American heroic fantasy tales and find an outlander pitying a being who is infinitely more of an outsider, while the monster-killing imperative yields to the decision to assist the monster in its revenge-killing. We are told in The Tower of the Elephant that Conan recalls Yara to wakefulness--ike a judge pronouncing doom,--and the barbarian as the feral Rhadamanthus by way of whom his creator pronounces the dooms of civilization't sophistries and shibboleths, the certainty that those who live off the fat of the land will die from that same luxury in the blink of history-- eye--these concepts are epitomized and versified in that crucial Howard poem, A Song of the Naked Lands.

The Howardisms of this parable-as-paradigm----rim was the barter, red the trade,--or--he prison of satin and gold--known as--ulture and Art----should not distract us from realizing that the Texan was not the first to shoe and saddle this particular hobbyhorse. The cheerless tune of Song is audible in Henry David Thoreau-- observation--t was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf, that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were,--and dates all the way back to Herodotus. The much-traveled Greek chose to end his Histories with a moral courtesy of Cyrus the Great. As translated by Aubrey de S--lincourt and A. R. Burns, the hero-king is urged to help himself to a--etter--country. He does not burst into song, but he does anticipate A Song of the Naked Lands:

--oft countries breed soft men. It is not the property of any one soil to produce fine fruits and good soldiers too.-- The Persians had to admit that this was true and Cyrus was wiser than they; so they left him, and chose rather to live in a rugged land and rule than to cultivate rich plains and be subject to others.3

The point to this quick look at the backstories of terms like--arbarian'tor--aked lands--is that Howard dealt himself into debates that were old before 1492 and did not embarrass himself--one of the reasons why he would not embarrass the pantheon either.

But can that august-if-virtual institution be persuaded to take in a lowly pulpster? The Library of America allowed in Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who made Black Mask a legend, years ago, but then allowances are easily made for the brass knucks and coshes of hardboiled detective fiction, thanks to that subgenre-- bruisingly unsparing reportorial function. Hammett and Chandler were also fortunate enough to have John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, and Howard Hawks adeptly adapting their work for another, even more popular medium. With Lovecraft-- tentacles now snaking across the Library-- threshold, perhaps the pulpily fantastic will win itself more space.

When he gave the title Pulp Fiction to one of the defining movies of the Nineties, Quentin Tarantino may or may not have intended to acknowledge the fact that the best pulps have aged well because they showcased work that turned out to be ageless, but Michael Chabon't sincerity in his Pulitzer Prize--inning novel The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, where he calls the pulps--rgosies of blood and wonder,--is incontrovertible. A democracy-- pantheon should be hospitable to those who achieve excellence in intrinsically democratic venues. Stephen King, who came along too late for the pulps, started out by selling to even less prestigious markets like Dude, Cavalier, Adam, and Swank, and now seems poised for induction in the aftermath of his 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (an event that reduced Defender of the Canon Harold Bloom to weeping tears of blood).

Paul Seydor----econsideration'tof Sam Peckinpah-- Westerns is deservedly admired for seeing those movies as if for the first time and with the clearest of eyes. While trying to find a niche in the pantheon for his artist, Seydor singles out American literature----ascination--bordering, some might argue, on the pathological--with the exotic, the foreign, the criminal, and the wild. This fascination in turn results in a fiction that rarely moves far from escapist genres. The reasons our artists give for this almost always reduce to the same one when we cut through the rhetoric of individualism and freedom: the insufficiency of mainstream American life to vitalize the imagination.--Sure enough, Howard's imagination was vitalized by the exotic, the foreign, the criminal, the wild. With transatlantic voyages not yet an option, the only New World available to Donald MacDeesa in Lord of Samarcand, who hails from the uttermost West of his day, is the East; he is limited to crossing seas of sand and oceans of grass. Yet how well Leslie Fiedler-- summation of classic American tales in general, and Poe-- Arthur Gordon Pym in particular----nd through it all the outcast wanderer, equally in love with death and distance, seeks some absolute elsewhere----suits the wayward clansman as he looks back down--he bitter trail of his life--and hugs an isolation colder than the bones of the moon. If Seydor is correct, if the truest American writing is fringe writing, all edge and no center, then by working the genre fringe Robert E. Howard teleported himself smack-dab into the center, the dream-center, of our culture. When everything is margin, marginalization becomes moot.

The title of one of the poems in this volume, Which Will Scarcely Be Understood, would do as well for a summary of Howard's critical reception, such as it was, until the late Seventies at the earliest. And yet much of the cryptography needed to decode his meaningfulness had already been done.--uring my last year in college, I-- read several of D. H. Lawrence-- books,--Novalyne Price tells us in One Who Walked Alone.--could see they were sexy. I didn't know whether to tell Bob about reading them or not.--Had she dipped into Lawrence-- nonfiction as well as his fiction, specifically 1923-- Studies in Classic American Literature, she would have bristled with a whole arsenal of talking points when making the case for Howard's pantheon-readiness to cousin Enid.

Lawrence-- survey is as eccentrically electric, or electrically eccentric, as any of the newly identified classics he was covering, and no better description of what he was up to exists than cultural historian Ann Douglas--in her Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, which despite its title is about much, much more than Manhattan or the 1920s:

The'sssential American soul,--[Lawrence] proclaimed, is--ard, isolate, stoic,--and a--iller.--America is full of--ampires,--the'serrible--hosts--of the black and red men the white settlers had exterminated, exploited, and, unbeknownst to themselves, envied and assimilated. For Lawrence, America was a King Kong figure--King Kong-- cinematic debut was only a decade away--careening amid the wasteland of the West, and he was King Kong-- prophet.4

Douglas goes on to stress that--awrence called the American literature he was writing about--lassic----recognized and revered, in other words, by those acknowledged to be best able to judge the matter--but next to no one knew it. Using the term was, in fact, a publicity stunt, Lawrence-- bold bid to canonize a group of authors who were largely ignored, forgotten, or misread.--Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville were for him avatars of a shadow-side America, the'snner nature of brutality [of which was] more extreme and more at odds with its public mask and voice than was the case anywhere else.--When the mask slipped, when Kong broke his chains, as per Douglas paraphrasing Lawrence,--merica might be the only nation capable, if uncensored and unchecked, of flooding the civilized world with what William Carlos Williams called in his self-consciously Lawrentian study In the American Grain (1925),--ich regenerative violence.--

And flood the civilized world it did, with red harvests and blood meridians, wild bunches and magnum forces. Imagery that conjures a civilized world flooded, by forces at last unchecked, with rich regenerative violence is of course also ground zero for Howard studies. Lawrence----old bid to canonize--leads straight to Leslie Fiedler-- Love and Death in the American Novel, Richard Slotkin't Regeneration Through Violence trilogy about the mythology of the American frontier, and to Howard's most powerful work. Those of us who--e worked on The Best of Robert E. Howard are driven by a--elf-consciously Lawrentian agenda--of our own--we too are partisans of a writer--argely ignored, forgotten, or misread,--and we--e sure that because his finest stories are classic,--hough next to no one [knows] it,--they should be promoted as such in a repeat of Lawrence-- 1923--ublicity stunt.-- The slightest suggestion of Howard's induction-potential will have some of the unconverted demanding the installation of a metal detector in the pantheon't entrance. Is the violence that convulses Howard's stories rich and regenerative, or just rote?--his young man has the power to feel. He knows nothing of war, yet he is drenched with blood,--Ambrose Bierce conceded of Stephen Crane. Similarly drenched if similarly unbaptized by fire, Howard too possessed a power to feel that his readers never cease to feel. Jack London was the authorial father-figure who taught the Texan the most about luring romanticism into the dark alleys where realism was waiting. George Orwell thought London--ssentially a short-story writer,--conspicuous for--is love of brutality and physical violence and, in general, what is known as--dventure.-- Alfred Kazin for his part noted in his 1942 overview of modern American literature On Native Ground,--othing is so important about London as the fact that he came on the scene at a time when the shocked consciousness of a new epoch demanded the kind of heady violence that he was always so quick to provide.--Howard, who came of age in an even newer epoch, trafficked in even more unsparing violence; early in Lord of Samarcand a battlefield----hrieks of dire agony still [rise] to the shivering stars which [peer] palely out, as if frightened by man't slaughter of man.-- Yes, his work is full of swords, but they are often double-edged, and a preoccupation with the survival of the fittest is shadowed by the certainty that both fitness and survival are fleeting. At his best, Howard was a purveyor not of cheap thrills but of frissons costly for both the writer and his more alert readers.--ne problem in writing bloody literature,--he mused to HPL in 1932,--s to present it in such a manner as to avoid a suggestion of cheap blood-and-thunder melodrama--which is what some people will always call action, regardless of how realistic and true it is.--In an April 1932 letter Howard vented,----l swear, I--e written of Christian armies being defeated by Moslems until my blood fairly seethes with rage. Some day I must write of the success of the earlier Crusades to gratify my racial vanity.--He never did (and perhaps would not have been able to had he tried), but in Lord of Samarcand Donald MacDeesa topples both Bayazid the Thunderer and Timour the Lame--the pistol shot with which he redresses his grievance with the latter is anachronistic, but also precociously American.

Dirge-dire, Lord is enough of a revenge tragedy to frighten a Jacobean. If Howard the poet likens the nations Timour tramples underfoot to--ost women crying in the mountains at night,--Howard the dramaturge takes over when MacDeesa assures Bayazid,--would go through greater hells to bring you to the dust!--The Texan blithely challenges both Christopher Marlowe and Edgar Allan Poe; indeed, by helping himself to several chapter epigraphs, Howard induces Poe to attend his somber feast even as Bayazid is forced to be present at Timour--. This volume-- Son of the White Wolf, wherein the titular predator is a rough beast whose hour comes round again in one of the Great War-- only--lamorous--sideshows, also aspires to be--loody literature.--Bloody, and prescient--cultures force-marching themselves into imagined pasts in pursuit of illusory purity and predestination are a regrettably familiar phenomenon to us in the twenty-first century.

Black Vulmea's Vengeance demonstrates that Howard was potentially a pirate novelist capable of boarding the flagships of Stevenson and Sabatini, but also transcends--heap blood-and-thunder melodrama--in its exploration of mercy as a form of revenge more devastating to its undeserving recipient than even the most massively retaliatory payback would be. Living with one-- own crimes can be more painful and more protracted than dying because of them. Elsewhere we find a vignette swollen into a metaphor in The Man on the Ground, as a feud-driven Texan't hatred,--n almost tangible abstraction--a hate too strong for even death to destroy; a hate powerful enough to embody itself in itself, without the aid or necessity of material substance,--outlives him among dry-gulching-facilitating rocks--otter than the hearthstones of hell.--D. H. Lawrence speaks in his chapter on The Scarlet Letter of--black and complementary hatred, akin to love,--and Howard was no stranger to that perverse intimacy situated in the far regions of antipathy. Witness not only The Man on the Ground but also the final story in this volume, Red Nails, as remarkable an American treatment of the feudist cul-de-sac as there-- been since Huck Finn, caught up in the quarrel between the Shepherdson and Grangerford clans, was told--y-and-by everybody-- killed off, and there ain't no more feud. But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time.-- The story-- inspiration has little to do with the Hyborian Age and much to do with the Lincoln County War in which Billy the Kid shot to fame as a shootist. As Patrice Louinet explains in Hyborian Genesis Part III (see The Conquering Sword of Conan), a vacation that took Howard to the hyperbolically haunted site of Lincoln, New Mexico, left him speculating as to whether--he nature of the Bonito Valley determined the nature of the feud--narrow, concentrated, horrible.--What was for him local, or at least regional, color also appears in the story----actus-dotted plain'tand reference to--liff-dwellings of the mysterious brown people----we are not far from Brian Attebery-- description of Burroughs--Barsoom,--dream or fantasy vision of the American Southwest.--As Rusty Burke comments in his in-depth study Journey Inside: The Quest of the Hero in Red Nails, much of the story-- nomenclature--Olmec, Chicmec, Tezcoti, Xuchotl----ings with the history of the Pre-Columbian peoples of Mexico and Central America, from whom Howard drew for the story-- proper names.--Pre-Columbian shadings may also have contributed to what the Texan teased to Clark Ashton Smith as being--he grimmest, bloodiest, and most merciless story of the series so far,--the elements of the Mesoamerican worldview that T. R. Fehrenbach, in his Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico, summarized as--agic and mystery, blood and horror,--all perceived through--filter of darkest night, or in a violent blast of sun blaze.-- Another New World underpinning is disclosed when we learn that the'sinister crimson'tcity was founded on the enslavement and slaughter of black people. (Xuchotl does not seem to be haunted by these original victims, but maybe, just maybe, everything that befalls all subsequent citizens, whether Kosalan or Tlazitlan, can be traced to the founding atrocity.) Conan and Valeria, the two adventurers who tip the balance of the feud, are once and future Aquilonians respectively, and therefore, given the special significance of Aquilonia (which in the Conan series--eigns supreme in the dreaming West--, Americans of a sort. The Cimmerian grins--ardily--when he accepts an offer from the Tecuhltli----e--e both penniless vagabonds. I-- as soon kill Xotalancas as anybody----thereby expressing an unmistakably American attitude: the history behind other people-- feuds is of little importance, and space, the essential New World resource, heals the wounds that time turns gangrenous.

But a December 1934 letter to Lovecraft in which Howard professes himself indifferent to European--quabbles and massacres,--describing the continent as--othing but a rat-den where teeming, crowded rodents, jammed together in an unendurable mass, squeal and gnash and murder each other,--cautions us against too quickly single-sourcing the story. Europe had been a Xuchotl in 1916--note that the city has its own no-man't-land, the Halls of Silence which lie between the feuding factions--and by 1935 looked to be one again, as the postwar years in which Howard grew up gave way to prewar years during which he and others grew aware that dictatorships were calling the tune to which democracies desperately danced. Neither entirely an Old World story nor entirely a New World story, Red Nails becomes an underworld story, a visit to a realm sealed off and trapped by the cave-in of Tlazitlan sanity. Murmurous with the ghosts of old murders, Xuchotl rises architecturally above several ossuaries--worth of skeletons at its foundation but morally descends into--he black corridors and realms of the subterranean world.--D. H. Lawrence called Poe--n adventurer into vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul,--and from those same passages in Red Nails the Crawler, the Burning Skull, and the pipes of madness emerge, while Tolkemec, Howard's diabolus ex machina, returns from the vaults of the dead as memorably as anyone has since Madeline Usher. Xuchotl surpasses even the Blassenville Manor of Pigeons from Hell as a contender to be Howard's equivalent of Shirley Jackson't Hill House, Stephen King-- Overlook Hotel, or Poe-- palace of Prince Prospero----nd one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel--covers the people of Xuchotl as well as the masquers of the Red Death.

In the stories just mentioned our pantheon prospect asked rather than evaded questions about the vengeance-imperative that powers so much genre fiction; and although he could be as pulpy as the occasion warranted----ow long can you avoid the fangs of the Poison People?--an especially odious high priest taunts a cobra-beset dancer in one of the Conan stories--the truth is that we--e dealing with an overachiever, a better writer than he needed to be to succeed in the markets available to him. Lovecraft beat everyone else to this realization while grieving for his friend in print:--e was greater than any profit-making policy he could adopt--for even when he outwardly made concessions to Mammon-guided editors and commercial critics, he had an internal force and sincerity which broke the surface and put the imprint of his personality on everything he wrote.--The imagery here,--nternal force and sincerity--breaking the surface and imprinting themselves, is precisely what D. H. Lawrence sought and found in his chosen American classics. And to Lovecraft-- tribute we can append the follow-up assertion that Howard was also greater than the profit-making policies adopted by too many of those who presumed to package his work in the decades after his death.

A natural, he possessed the unnatural degree of dedication and perseverance that getting the most out of being a natural entails. In her memoir How It Was, Mary Hemingway quoted her husband Ernest as having said,--he secret is that it is poetry written into prose and it is the hardest of all things to do--in some ways it was a little easier for Howard, much more of a born poet if much less of a prose revolutionary than Hemingway, with a bardic knack for investing subjectivity and selectivity through the sheer rightness of word-choices with much of the irrefutability of objectivity. His style is rather like the second of the two gifts the Nemedian girl Zenobia gives the dungeon-immured Conan in The Hour of the Dragon (the first being his freedom):--t was no slender stiletto, selected because of a jeweled hilt or gold guard, fitted only for dainty murder in milady-- boudoir; it was a forthright poniard, a warrior-- weapon, broad-bladed, fifteen inches in length, tapering to a diamond-sharp point.--The forthright and undainty pointedness of Howard's best prose is equally diamond-sharp. A character resents--he slow fading of the light as a miser begrudges the waning of his gold.----ll the sanity--goes out of another-- face--ike a flame blown out by the wind.--The lightning-bolts of an epic storm are--eiled in the falling flood like fire shining through frosted glass, turning the world to frosty silver.-- The active voice usurps the passive like one of Howard's pushful swordsmen ousting an enfeebled dynasty, and the pathetic fallacy could not work harder for him were it his indentured servant, as in one of this volume-- nerve-shredding crescendos, Wings in the Night:--shuddering white-faced dawn crept back over the black hills to shiver above the red shambles that had been the village of Bogonda.--To describe the vitality that crackles through his paragraphs we can enlist the aid of the reborn, regenerated-through-violence Esau Cairn in Almuric, Howard's unfinished roughing-up of the Burroughsian planetary romance:--tingled and burned and stung with life to the finger tips and the ends of my toes. Every sinew, vein, and springy bone was vibrant with the dynamic flood of singing, pulsing, humming life.--Looking again to Ann Douglas--Terrible Honesty, we read that--itality, not verisimilitude, is the criterion of classic American literature; it offers a portrait of energy itself, of the adrenaline of the psyche, a portrait in which the external landscape is never separate from the landscape within.--Howard specializes in portraits of energy itself and constantly injects his work with the adrenaline of his psyche'smany of his opening paragraphs are not so much invitations to continue reading as forcible abductions. American exceptionalism is perhaps better suited to literature than geopolitics, and Howard's immediacy and intensification combine for an exceptionalism like a Texas-accented emanation of Archibald MacLeish----ontinent where the heat was hotter and the cold was colder and the sun was brighter and the nights were blacker and the distances were farther and the faces were nearer and the rain was more like rain and the mornings were more like mornings than anywhere else on earth--sooner or sweeter and lovelier over unused hills.-- He is rarely given to stately symmetry, and if some of his work (though not supremely accomplished tales like Worms of the Earth or Lord of Samarcand ) can be jagged, jittery, and joltingly uneven, we need only remember that the most influential writing about the American classics often considers not whether the glass is half empty or half full, but why it tends to be half cracked. Richard Chase in his The American Novel and Its Tradition stresses the'sadical disunities and contradictions--and attraction to--xtreme ranges of experience--of the best American novels, while the eminent critic George Steiner once observed that--he uncertainties of taste in Poe, Hawthorne and Melville and the obscuring idiosyncrasies of their manner point directly to the dilemmas of individual talent producing in relative isolation.--We don't think the idiosyncrasies of Howard's manner are obscuring, except perhaps to certain bouncers on the pantheon payroll, but as a later but arguably even more isolated individual talent, he too was making much of it up as he went along, which brings us to his claim that he'sas the first to light a torch of literature in this part of the country, however small, frail, and easily extinguished that flame may be. I am, in my way, a pioneer.-- In his essay Southwestern Literature?, Larry McMurtry comments,--he tendency to practice symbolic frontiersmanship might almost be said to characterize the twentieth century Texan,--and that tendency is almost impossible to avoid when discussing the twentieth-century Texan who concerns us here. Howard's self-identification as a torch-lighting trailblazer is not only symbolic frontiersmanship but a striking example of a well-known Leslie Fiedler generalization:--The American writer] is forever beginning, saying for the first time (without real tradition there can never be a second time) what it is like to stand alone before nature, or in a city as appallingly lonely as any virgin forest.--

In Terrible Honesty Ann Douglas sketches the'sulturally impoverished--Ernest Hemingway,--tarting in some sense from scratch, less freighted with cultural baggage,--and therefore freed up to--ashion, with little resistance or waste, the new literary tools the modern experience demanded.--The culturally impoverished and isolated Howard labored long in a short life to fashion the new literary tools his startlingly modern varieties of heroic fantasy and historical adventure demanded.

Being a literary fire-bringer and torchbearer in West Texas was the only way in which progress still permitted Howard to be a pioneer.--e should have lived his life a generation before, when men threw a wide loop and rode long trails,--he writes of his doomed hero in Wild Water, one of the stories we--e most excited about including in this collection, and although Howard himself could continue throwing wide loops and riding long trails at his typewriter, that wasn't enough for him.--hat I want is impossible, as I--e told you before,--he emphasized in a 1933 letter to Lovecraft,--want, in a word, the frontier--which is compassed in the phrase, new land, open land, free land--land rich and unbroken and virgin, swarming with game and laden with fresh forests and sweet cold streams, where a man could live by the sweat of his hands unharried by taxes, crowds, noise, unemployment, bank-failures, gang-extortions, laws, and all the other wearisome things of civilization.--The Howard heroes Francis Xavier Gordon and Esau Cairn, both born--n the Southwest, of old frontier stock,--light out for improbable territories where they need not try to pry open Frederick Jackson Turner-- closed frontier. Gordon, represented in The Best of Robert E. Howard by Hawk of the Hills and Son of the White Wolf, hurls himself into--owling adventures among the Indians,--only now the wild warriors are those of Afghanistan and Arabia. Cairn is hurled through space by one Professor Hildebrand-- teleportation device to a paradoxical interstellar homecoming:

I had neither companionship, books, clothing, nor any of the things which go to make up civilization. According to the cultural viewpoint, I should have been most miserable. I was not. I revelled in my existence. My being grew and expanded. I tell you, the natural life of mankind is a grim battle for existence against the forces of nature, and any other form of life is artificial and without realistic meaning.

Someone living that vicariously through Cairn't frontier-fresh start is unlikely to be either urbane or urban, although The Tower of the Elephant begins at the bottom, in a (mean)-street-level beggars--banquet where only--atchmen, well paid with stained coins,--represent law and order. The setting of Vultures of Wahpeton is a cluster of mining camps with pretensions to townhood, not a city, but in its gold rush throes, Wahpeton effectively caricatures the unrestrained capitalism Franklin Delano Roosevelt was saving from itself while Howard worked on his novella: a welter of getting and spending, gouging and fleecing, wheeling and dealing in smoke-filled rooms and gunsmoke-filled dives. More typically dreamlike are Samarcand--when Donald MacDeesa looks upon that Central Asian capital for the first time, it--shimmers] to his gaze, mingling with the blue of the distance,--like--city of illusion and enchantment----and the fireworks-bedecked Constantinople of The Shadow of the Vulture, a--ealm of shimmering magic, with the minarets of its mosques like towers of fire in an ocean of golden foam.--The most mysterious of all cities for Howard is obviously domesticity, and although drawn to the Middle Ages, he had difficulty imagining middle age for himself or his characters. Still, if Conan in a standoff with Valeria and Gottfried von Kalmbach flummoxed by Red Sonya are mere skirmishes in the battle of the sexes, they are skirmishes fought zestfully by both combatants. And the'sastoral quietude--of a chance meeting between a disenchanted king and a distraught slave girl in By This Axe I Rule! should serve as a warning against underestimating this writer-- range.

What-- more, different kinds of range exist; Howard certainly ranged across recorded history and the invitingly blank pages of unrecorded history. In The Star Rover Jack London imagines a--ider full-panoplied and astride of time,--and his Texan admirer, for whom that novel was something of a sacred text, clung convincingly to bucking temporal broncos in his historical fiction, especially a set of stories from the early Thirties that pit Crusaders against Eastern conquerors. Here the contending supernatural forces are not Jehovah and Allah but Hubris and Nemesis. The Shadow of the Vulture features--he Armageddon of races, Asia against Europe,--but equally stupendous and far more exotic is the death-grapple between Asia and Asia when Bayazid and Timour meet in Lord of Samarcand, as--he thunder of cymbals and kettle-drums--contends with the'swesome trumpeting--of war-elephants, and--lasts of arrows and sheets of fire--wither--en in their mail like burnt grain.-- To range we should also add reach, and a refusal to be intimidated by historical distances and distinctions. The English specialist in American literature Tony Tanner was struck by the brashness with which T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound availed themselves of--ragments of the world-- past and disparate cultures to build their own private worlds. This sort of relatively unfettered eclecticism when dealing with the past is peculiarly American and an utterly different thing from the European writer-- sense of the past. If anything it negates the historical sense--he results and new juxtapositions can be brilliant, breathtakingly original and very un-European.--The Hyborian Age of the Conan stories also looms in Carl Van Doren't comparison of James Branch Cabell-- fantasies to The Faerie Queen:--eographical and chronological boundaries melt and flow, wherein fable encroaches upon history, and the creative mood of the poet re-cuts his shining fabrics as if they were whole cloth intended solely for his purposes.--And when Tanner says of Herman Melville-- prose that with--ts vast assimilations, its seemingly opportunistic eclecticism, its pragmatic and improvisatory nonchalance, its capacious grandiloquence and demotic humour, it is indeed a style for America--the style of America,--he also captures many of the stylistic attributes of an American named Robert E. Howard. Opportunistic eclecticism and improvisatory nonchalance can't help but improve a talented writer-- range.

Also pertinent to this issue is the fact that Howard spent much of his time at the typewriter trying to make editors and readers laugh. Sailor Steve Costigan, the'srdinary ham-an'tegger--who broke big for his creator in the pugilistically inclined pulp Fight Stories, is represented here by The Bull Dog Breed. Steve comes equipped with a concussion-proof skull and a repercussion-proof gullibility, and the stories about him focus on the ties that bind man and--ublin gentleman'tbulldog, and the inability of two-fistedness to keep up with two-facedness. A few years later Breckinridge Elkins, the first and most illustrious of Howard's mountain man man-mountains, arrived as discreetly and understatedly as a rockslide, and he was soon joined by Pike Bearfield. Pragmatically cloned for a new market, Bearfield acquires his own, epistolary-narrative-shaking identity in this volume-- Gents on the Lynch, and also The Riot at Bucksnort and A Gent from the Pecos.

The farther west the English language got, the greater its Americanization, as Paul Horgan recognizes:--ts inflations and exaggerations were brandished in reply to the vastness of the West, the bulk of mountains, where man was so little. If there was vulgarity in its expression, there was also pathos, for what showed plain was the violent dancing of a spirit that must assert or be lost.--Only a generation or two removed from all of this, Howard knew what he wanted to recapture for Pike Bearfield and Breck Elkins; to Lovecraft in 1931 he admitted,--estern folkways and traditions are so impregnated with savagery, suffering and strife, that even Western humor is largely grim, and, to non-Westerners, often grotesque.--The savagery, suffering, and strife of Vultures of Wahpeton'tsque elements like Mustang Stirling-- outlaws and a Vigilante Committee are reprised farcically in Gents, as Bearfield-- spirit dances violently in passages like--olks is always wanting to lynch me, and quite a few has tried, as numerous tombstones on the boundless prairies testifies.--Gents also features Howard, who seethed over attempts by Easterners to impose their frames of reference on the Southwest, gleefully imposing a Southwesterner-- frame of reference on the most hallowed events of East Coast history:--e said the Britishers was going to sneak out of a town named Boston which I jedge must have been a right sizable cowtown or mining-camp or something, and was going to fall on the people unawares and confiscate their stills and weppins and steers and things.-- The man responsible for a story called By This Axe I Rule! is likely to disdain check-swings of that axe; not for Howard the hedging of bets and eying of exits found in earlier American fantastic fiction. He did not so much write his stories down or type them out as commit them--nd commit to them. For Ann Douglas, Melville-- books--ove forward when he is in close connection with himself, in the grip of his daemon.--That is also true of Howard, to the point where he abandoned several fan-favorite characters because the close connection had been lost; his daemon had shifted his grip. But the grip is searingly, serratedly tight in, for example, Wings of the Night; Melville-- Ahab, a Quaker, describes himself as--adness maddened--during his pursuit of the white whale, and the akaanas of Wings airlift Kane, the Puritan, to a similarly far gone state. Howard dwells upon their--earful mirth to see men die wholesale,--their--trange and grisly sense of humor [that is] tickled by the suffering of a howling human.--We could be dealing with the'soys--of King Lear----s flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport,--although in this instance it is not the flies but the boys who are winged. While the akaanas are not divine or even supernatural, Howard does liken them to--emons flying back to hell through the dawn,--and they call to mind Richard Slotkin't Regeneration Through Violence comment on the forests of Nathaniel Hawthorne:--he man who enters the wilderness hunting for something he regards as truth or power is always led to a place where devils dance in a ring, inviting him to a black Eucharist.-- Having agreed with Lovecraft--hat Puritanism provides a rich field for psychological study,--in an October 1930 letter, Howard exploits that rich field in Wings as nowhere else in his Solomon Kane series. America-- Puritan and African antecedents encounter each other in a--re-American'tsetting:--he Dark Continent, land of shadows and horror, of bewitchment and sorcery, into which all evil things had been banished before the growing light of the western world.--And yet the supposedly Dark Continent illuminates Solomon Kane as he seeks out the shadows, becomes most fully himself, acquires a context that his birthplace Devon, as is evidenced by the hail-and-farewell of Solomon Kane-- Homecoming, can never hope to provide. In his 2004 essay Heritage of Steel: Howard and the Frontier Myth, Steven R. Trout memorably discusses the one-sided dialogue between Kane and the'shriveled, mummified head of Goru, whose eyes, strangely enough, did not change in the blaze of the sun or the haunt of the moon.--Goru is an eloquent if wordless accuser; the Englishman has failed in what might otherwise seem an objectionably paternalistic role--proved better at being a Kane than being a Solomon. He is a king whose kingdom is raptored away from him, and the akaanas, it should be noted, arrive from Europe to prey upon and despoil--in effect, colonize--Africans.

As Brian Attebery emphasizes,--he American writer must find some way of reentering the ancient storytelling guild: he must validate his claim to the archetypes that are the tools of the trade.--Howard's modus operandi involved straightforward breaking and entering, after which he helped himself to whatever archetypes he needed. Thus the harpies of Wings, on loan from Jason and the Argonauts, and the advisory to readers at the start of The Valley of the Worm acknowledging that they--ave heard the tale before in many guises wherein the hero was named Tyr, or Perseus, or Siegfried, or Beowulf, or Saint George----and yet it is Niord/James Allison/Robert E. Howard who knows best, by dint of having known first. Such effrontery is a way for the American fantasist to plant his feet and his feats. Against the Conqueror Worm, Howard sets the worm-conqueror in not only The Valley of the Worm but also Red Nails.

In 1938 J. R. R. Tolkien, moonlighting as a draconologist not long after he had unleashed Smaug,--he Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities,--in The Hobbit, assured an audience of children in an Oxford lecture that a dragon is--ore terrible than any dinosaur--and--he final test of heroes,--so it is quite fitting that a dragon should test Conan the Cimmerian in his final adventure (final in the sense of last to be written). Howard's hero brings, of course, a forthrightly American attitude to the confrontation:--here-- no law against killing a dragon, is there?--is his libertarian question to Olmec in an early draft of Red Nails. In his indispensable Beowolf: The Monsters and the Critics, Tolkien makes the case that--here are in any case many heroes but very few good dragons,--and faults the Beowulf-dragon for--ot being dragon enough,--due to trace elements of symbolism and allegory that threaten to dilute the effectiveness of--ome vivid touches of the right kind.--His ideal is a--eal worm, with a bestial life and thought of his own.--Howard's dragon in Red Nails is nothing but vivid touches and bestial life, hungry, enraged, vengeful--woe betide any allegorical readings foolish enough to be caught downwind of him. He squats--atching [Conan and Valeria-- crag] with the frightful patience of the reptile folk. So might one of his brood have glared up at their troglodyte ancestors, treed on a high-flung rock, in the dim dawn ages.--Later he wallows on the ground--ike a dog with pepper in its eyes,--and--noisy gurgling and lapping--betrays his attempt to quench his poison-inflamed thirst.

Conan, who will soon be faced with the riotously unnatural Xuchotl, broad-jumps the abyss of ages and the great divide between mammal and reptile to accept the dragon as a fellow natural born killer:--e attributed to it characteristics similar to his own, and saw in its wrath a counterpart of his rages, in its roars and bellowings merely reptilian equivalents to the curses he had bestowed upon it.--Unlike Sigurd Fafnir---bane, he does not need to dine on dragon-heart to gain understanding, and that he feels--kinship with all wild things, even dragons--makes Conan wilder and the dragon more real. Seldom exhibiting an appetite for fantasy of any sort, the American pantheon has never been motivated to seek out a definitive New World dragonslaying, but were it to do so, Red Nails would be waiting.

Like many Americans, some of whom are now pantheon residents, Howard preferred to skirt, or slink away from, certain of the misshapen menhirs and dolmens that stand out so starkly in our psychic landscape. Comforting though it would be to report that he was ahead of his time in his views on people who did not look like him, he was simply, even simplistically, of his time in his over-reliance on--ace,--a construct both highly artificial and built with the shoddiest of materials, as an organizing principle. Howardists are fond of recalling one occasion on which Steven R. Trout, for whom the celebrating-in-the-endzone triumphalism of Wings in the Night about the'shite-skinned conqueror--just got to be too much, remarked,--don't remember ever seeing such a clear indication that ol--Bob would--e lost money had he bet the Louis/Schmeling fight.-- Still, when considering a story like this volume-- Pigeons from Hell it is worth remembering that African-Americans stimulated Howard's imagination when he was a child--witness one tale he recalled to Lovecraft, invariably set in--he ruins of a once thriving plantation,--in which--lways, as [vagrants] approach the high-columned verandah through the high weeds that surround the house, great numbers of pigeons rise from their roosting places on the railing and fly away----and, in ways that will not appease all readers nowadays, troubled his conscience when he was an adult.--don't. I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!--insists Quentin Compson when he is accused of hating the South at the end of William Faulkner-- Absalom, Absalom! Howard, a Southwesterner rather than a Southerner, was never quite as much on the defensive as is Harvard student Quentin--n the iron New England dark.--And yet we should not lose sight of the fact that--outh--comes before--est--in the word--outhwest,--so Southern pride goes before, or remains after, a fall, the possibility of which would never have occurred to the less history-burdened. Clark Edward Clifford acknowledges the complicated shadows in his In the Deep Heart-- Core: Reflections on Life, Letters, and Texas:--ven if we manage to kill Mexicans and Indians with John Wayne remorselessness, Southern-ness lurks in the shadows, ever ready to remind us that we too have done something wrong, have lost a war, have declined, have once been human.-- Have once been human--or, in some instances, inhuman.--er past and her traditions are close to my heart, though I would be a stranger within her gates,--Howard once wrote of the South, and Griswell, the (Lovecraft-esque?) New Englander of Pigeons From Hell, permits the Texan to return as a stranger to the strangest of American lands. If not quite a first person narrator, Griswell is first among equals as a third person actor in the story; he's the viewpoint character, and his viewpoint is that of--rantic abhorrence of these black woods, the ancient plantation houses that hid forgotten secrets of slavery and bloody pride.--Howard was capable of confiding,--have often wished strongly that I had lived on the ancestral plantations in the Deep South in the days before the Civil War,--or maintaining that the horrors of slavery were frequently exaggerated, but we have evidence that he was not so much a loyal son as a transplanted grandson who knew a bit too much to be quite as loyal as he would have liked.

In Pigeons he does not insult our intelligence with blameless Blassenvilles, social workers who happen to own a plantation, apostles of outreach and uplift victimized by their motivelessly malevolent maid Joan. But neither can he bring himself to insult regional pride by attributing to a rootedly Southern, irreproachably bloodlined family atrocious mismanagement of their human property. So the Blassenvilles turn out to be of European origin and Caribbean extremism, in Sheriff Buckner-- words a--rench-English family. Came here from the West Indies before the Louisiana Purchase. The Civil War ruined them, like it did so many.--Quicker to apply the whip and slower to leave off because they--ot their ideas in the West Indies,--as Buckner puts it, the family is convenient for Howard's conflicted purposes, and it is only logical that Celia,--he last one of the family to come to these parts,--hence even less of an adoptive Southerner than her relatives, is the cruelest of the cruel.

While Celia is drawn to voodoo culture, Joan, her victim and subsequent victimizer, has--hite blood in her,--and pride of her own. In a sense they are each other-- weird sisters, and instead of an American melting pot Pigeons posits a bubbling witches--cauldron in which what should be the boundaries between Celia and Joan dissolve--the identities and fates of the two characters are not disentangled until the final paragraph. Howard's dark American fantasy reflects multihued American reality in that the disentanglement of fates and identities is impossible.

In the quasi-autobiographical Post Oaks & Sand Roughs, Howard's false start at a novel in the late Twenties, his alter ego announces,--ow, I wish for a fair craft, three-masted, full-sailed, with a fair wind and a clear sea path--to where? The Isles of Yesterday, mayhap, or the coasts of Romance, or the beaches of Adventure, or the turquoise sea of Dawn.--But by the time he wrote to fellow pulp pro E. Hoffmann Price on February 15, 1936, he lamented having--one so far along the path of romantic-exotic writing that it's devilish difficult to find my way back to common-place realism, and yet every urge in me is to write realism.--Realism nevertheless accompanied him on that romantic-exotic path; Post Oaks & Sand Roughs provides the too-much-too-soon observation,--boom town drugstore is an ideal place to study humanity,--and in 1931 Howard told Farnsworth Wright,--y boyhood was spent in the oil country--or rather oil came into the country when I was still a young boy, and remained.--Oil came, oil remained--where others saw a windfall, a resource to be exploited, Howard saw an invading force, an occupying army. In many of his letters he stole a march on the distinguished historian Bernard DeVoto, who in works like 1947-- Across the Wide Missouri described the American West as--plundered province,--one that was being--ystematically looted.----he money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization,--Roosevelt declared in his First Inaugural in 1933. The temples of Howard's civilizations were frequently the haunts of horrors, so he presumably approved of FDR-- words. If, like the Thirties-redolent hard-boileds in the pages of Black Mask, certain Conan stories flirt with vulgar Marxism, vulgar Marxism has aged better than any other kind.--ye, I--e seen men fall and die of hunger against the walls of shops and storehouses crammed with food,--the Cimmerian marvels in The Black Stranger, and when a former fence protests that he is now--espectable--in The Hour of the Dragon, Conan't derisive reply is,--eaning you--e rich as hell.--Another story dispenses with--he long, long ago when another world lifted its jeweled spires to the stars--while retaining the low expectations of high finance. At the start of Wild Water a bankrupt farmer-- unspeaking but unyielding neighbors, who ensure by their--ard-eyed--auction attendance that his property is not snapped up but instead sold right back to him for a pittance, are familiar to us from Depression iconography. This story outdoes Vultures of Wahpeton in depositing the Howard hero in a situation, in a civilization, where he can no longer be the Howard hero.--imes is changed, can't you understand?--another character says to Jim Reynolds,--throwback, the personification of atavism.--Hailing from--he high ridge of the Lost Knob country--(Did Howard intend a joke about post-frontier emasculation when he fictionalized Cross Plains as Lost Knob?) Reynolds is both--ark as an Indian'tand the owner of a Ford roadster. Although still a bit larger than life, he is smaller than the system at the center of which sits Saul Hopkins, the financier who pulls strings--o which were tied loans and mortgages and the subtle tricks of finance.--(As Howard saw fit to bestow--he hooked nose of a vulture--upon him, it comes as a relief that the character-- last name is Hopkins.)

-- am hemmed in by laws, laws, laws,--Kull roars in By This Axe I Rule!, but he ultimately shatters the most superannuated of those laws. Jim Reynolds, born into a different sort of Pre-Cataclysmic Age, is far more hemmed in. He can gun down the king of Locust Valley, but can never hope to declare himself--ing, state, and law!--like Kull. State and Law are too much for him, or any man, as the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of the frontier in the more-than-meteorological storm of Wild Water. Like Harry Morgan, gutshot in Hemingway-- To Have and Have Not, Reynolds dies cursing, done in not by the lawmen with whom he is hell-bent on shooting it out, but by a friend. That friend, Bill Emmett, has taken up residence where those wronged by modernity often relocate, in the Book of Revelations, from which he is eager to visit an--wful mountain of black water--on the low-lying town of Bisley and witness the'socust and Mesquital rollin'tdown like the rivers of Judgment.--Although--n the devil-- business,--Emmett can quote scripture, but he is also capable of summoning the authentic voice of the twentieth century:--ou--e small stuff; you killed one enemy. I aim to kill thousands!-- Volume II of The Best of Robert E. Howard ends with one of his most memorable poems, which doubles as a prelude or overture to the Conan series. Cimmeria came to Howard just before the favorite son of that--and of Darkness and the Night--did, and the's--who speaks throughout the poem, who effects the beautifully intuitive shift from--inds and clouds, and dreams that shun the sun'tto--louds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun'tis not Conan but his creator.--remember,--that----declares; one cannot remember the future, and the absolute power that not-always mournful but neverending remembrance exercised over Howard may help to explain both the brevity of his life and the longevity of his storytelling. Cimmeria may not be a state of the Union, but it is a state of mind, and as its creator stands before the pantheon-gates the fairminded should recognize the heritage that--raps [him] in the grey apparel of ghosts.-- He was an American classic as early as The Shadow Kingdom and its follow-up The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, which asks,--hat worlds within what worlds [await] the bold explorer?--and cranes from the Siege Perilous of the Valusian throne to glimpse--ome far country of [Kull--] consciousness.--Assessing his body of work, such as it then was, to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith in February 1929, Howard poor-mouthed Mirrors as--ague and badly written; this is the deepest story I ever tried to write and I got out of my depth.--A good many classic American writers got to be classics by venturing out of their depth and diving instead of drowning, and in this story Howard discovered just how deep his depth truly was. The Hall of a Thousand Mirrors offers reflections that some who do not dream enough would never dream of encountering in a sword-and-sorcery story; Tuzun Thune-- glassy surfaces reflect W. H. Auden't insight that most American stories--re parables; their settings, even when they pretend to be realistic, symbolic settings for a timeless and unlocated (because internal) psychomachia.--

The wizard-- mirrors also reflect Ann Douglas--contention that an American trademark is the'sdisplacement of] mimesis--o what the critic Richard Poirier, speaking of American narrative and borrowing a term from Shakespeare-- Coriolanus, has called--world elsewhere.--Forced into exile, Coriolanus turns the tables on those who exile him by telling them,----l banish you. There is a world elsewhere.-- Douglas sees the'sillful conversion of exile from the known and familiar world into an enhanced power of exploration and vision in another unknown but compelling world, this exchange of the recognizably real for a place or mode defined as more insistently real, a place where provincials are recognized as sovereigns--as the'sentral strategy of classic American literature.--Kull, already exiled from his native Atlantis and a provincial grudgingly recognized as a sovereign, in Mirrors reaches the point of susceptibility to exchanging the recognizably real for the at-first-phantasmal-but-then-more-insistently real:--ay by day had he seemed to lose touch with the world; all things had seemed each succeeding day more ghostly and unreal.--Pantheon, please note: neither wars nor women nor wealth are won in Mirrors or The Tower of the Elephant--these are not stories of wish fulfillment but rather perspective-enhancement, imagination-enlargement.

Howard might have lit his pioneering torch in an unpromising hinterland, but he kindled imaginations around the world. That he lived and died with no inkling of the passion that his passionate storytelling would eventually ignite, or the power with which artists would respond to his power, is intolerable. He has created many, many readers and not a few writers as well, the more conscientious of whom have been determined, not to write like Howard but rather to write, like Howard. Brian Attebery accords L. Frank Baum, imperfections and all, the status of--ur Grimm and our Andersen, the man who introduced Americans to their own dreams.--Despite being an imperfect man and writer, Howard told perfectly wonderful stories that reintroduced twentieth-century Americans (and much of the world) to their own nightmares--but also to the chance of triumph, however hard-won and soon-lost, over those nightmares.

By now our confidence that Robert E. Howard could not help thinking or writing five classically American things before breakfast each morning must be apparent.--writer who wishes to produce something both American and fantastic--is for Attebery compelled to--ove against the currents, restoring what has been lost over the years or finding eddies of tradition that have resisted the general erosion of the marvelous.--It-- time to acknowledge that Howard, whose sense of loss was at least as keen as his other five senses, was eminently qualified to undertake such tasks. So here-- to a viable, meritocratic, and open-audition-offering pantheon, one into which this author will not have to fight his way once his ability to write his way in is better known. His induction will leave the pantheon more sensitive to the call of the wild and the pall of the mild; more tragic but also more comic; more fantastic but also more realistic; brawnier, but more poetic; more physical, but more haunted. No other country in the world could have produced a Robert E. Howard, and, regrettably, few other countries would have been as slow to realize his stature and significance. But as the afterlives of earlier classic writers--work have taught us, late is still much, much better than never.