Equal credit for their success must go to Howard’s own ability as a writer. He was a natural storyteller, and this is the sine qua non of fiction writing. With this talent, many of any writer’s faults may be overlooked; without it, no other virtues make up the lack.
Although self-taught, Howard achieved a notable and distinctive style—taut, colorful, rhythmic, and eloquent. While using adjectives but sparingly, he achieved effects of color and movement by lavish use of active verbs and personification, as can be seen at the start of his one full-length Conan noveclass="underline" “Know, O Prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities … there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the Stars… .” With Howard’s perfected imagination, ingenious plots, hypnotic style, headlong narrative drive, and the intensity with which he put himself into his characters, even his pulpiest tales—his boxing and Western stories—are fun to read.
The fifty-odd Conan stories so far published relate the life of Conan from adolescence to old age. As a stage for his hero to stride across, sword in hand, Howard invented a Hyborian Age, set twelve thousand years ago between the sinking of Atlantis and the rise of recorded history. He postulated that barbarian invasions and natural catastrophes destroyed all records of this era, save for fragments appearing in later ages as myths and legends. He assured his readers that this was a purely fictional construct, not to be taken as a serious theory of prehistory.
In the Hyborian Age, magic worked and supernatural beings stalked the earth. The western part of the main continent, whose outlines differed signally from those on the modem map, was divided among a number of kingdoms, modeled on various realms of real ancient and medieval history. Thus Aquilonia corresponds more or less to medieval France, with Poitain as its Provence; Zingara resembles Spain; Asgard and Vanaheim answer to Viking Scandinavia; Shem with its warring city-states echoes the ancient Near East; while Stygia is a fictional version of ancient Egypt.
Conan is a native of Cimmeria, a bleak, hilly, cloudy northern land whose people are proto-Celts. Conan (whose name is Celtic) arrives as a youth at the easterly kingdom of Zamora and for several years makes his living as a thief. Then he serves as a mercenary soldier, first in the oriental realm of Turan and then in several Hyborian kingdoms. Forced to flee from Argos, he becomes a pirate along the coast of Kush, with a Shemitish she-pirate and a crew of black corsairs.
Later Conan serves as a mercenary in various lands. He adventures among the nomadic kozaks of the eastern steppes and the pirates of the Vilayet Sea, the larger predecessor of the Caspian. He becomes a chieftain among the hill tribes of the Himelian Mountains, co-ruler of a desert city south of Stygia, a pirate of the Barachan Isles, and captain of a ship of Zingaran buccaneers.
Eventually be resumes the trade of soldier in the senace of Aquilonia, the mightiest Hyborian kingdom of them all. He defeats the savage Picts on the western frontier, rises to general, but is forced to flee the murderous intentions of the depraved and jealous King Numedides.
After further adventures, Conan (now about forty years old) is rescued from the coast of Pictland by a ship bearing the leaders of a revolt against the tyrannical and eccentric rule of Numedides. They have chosen Conan as commander in chief of the rebelhon, and here the present story opens.
L. Sprague de Camp Villanova, Pennsylvania July 1978
WHEN MADNESS WEARS THE CROWN
Night hovered on black and filmy wings above the spires of royal Tarantia. Along fog-silenced streets cressets burned with the feral eyes of beasts of prey in primal wilderness. Few there were who walked abroad on nights like this, although the veiled darkness was redolent with the scent of early spring. Those few whom dire necessity drove out of doors stole forth like thieves on furtive feet and tensed at every shadow.
On the acropolis, round which sprawled the Old City, the palace of many kings lifted its crenelated crest against the wan and pallid stars. This castled capitol crouched upon its hill like some fantastic monster out of ages past, glaring at the Outer City walls, whose great stones held it captive.
On glittering suite and marble hall within the sullen palace, silence lay as thick as dust in moldering Stygian tombs. Servants and pages cowered behind locked doors, and none bestrode the long corridors and curving stairs except the royal guard. Even these scarred and battle-seasoned veterans were loath to stare too deeply into shadows and winced at every unexpected sound.
Two guards stood motionless before a portal draped in rich hangings of brocaded purple. They stiffened and blanched as an eerie, muffled cry escaped from the apartment. It sang a thin, pitiful song of agony, which pierced like an icy needle the stout hearts of the guardsmen.
“Mitra save us all!” whispered the guard on the left, through pinched lips pale with tension.
His comrade said naught, but his thudding heart echoed the fervent prayer and added: “Mitra save us all, and the land as well… !’
For they had a saying in Aquilonia, the proudest kingdom of the Hyborian world: “The bravest cower when madness wears the crown.” And the king of Aquilonia was mad.
Numedides was his name, nephew and successor to Vilerus III and the scion of an ancient royal line. For six years the kingdom had groaned beneath his heavy hand. Superstitious, ignorant, self-indulgent, and cruel was Numedides; but heretofore his sins were merely those of any royal voluptuary with a taste for soft flesh, the crack of the lash, and the cries of cringing supplicants. For some time Numedides had been content to let his ministers rule the people in his name while he wallowed in the sensual pleasures of his harem and his torture chamber.
All this had changed with the coming of Tbulandra Thuu. Who he was, this lean, dark man of many mysteries, none could say. Neither knew they whence or why he had come into Aquilonia out of the shadowy East.
Some whispered that he was a Witchman from the mist-veiled land of Hyperboria; others, that he had crept from haunted shadows beneath the crumbling palaces of Stygia or Shem. A few even believed him a Vendhyan, as his name—if it truly were his name— suggested. Many were the theories; but no one knew the truth.
For more than a year, Thulandra Thuu had dwelt’ in the palace, living on the bounty of the king and enjoying the powers and perquisites of a royal favorite. Some said he was a philosopher, an alchemist seeking to transmute iron into gold or to concoct a universal panacea. Others called him a sorcerer, steeped in the black arts of goetia. A few of the more progressive nobles thought him naught but a clever charlatan, avid for power.
None, though, denied that he had cast a spell over King Numedides. Whether his vaunted mastery of alchemical science with its lure of infinite wealth had aroused the king’s cupidity, or whether he had in sooth enmeshed the monarch in a web of sorcerous spells, none could be sure. But all could see that Thulandra Thuu, not Numedides, ruled from the Ruby Throne. His slightest whim had now become the law. Even the king’s chancellor, Vibius Latro, had been instructed to take orders from Thulandra as if they issued from the king himself.
Meanwhile Numedides’ conduct had grown increasing strange. He ordered the golden coinage in his treasury cast into statues of himself adorned with royal jewels, and oft held converse with the blossoming trees and nodding flowers that graced his garden walks. Woe unto any kingdom when the crown is worn by a madman—a madman who, moreover, is the puppet of a crafty and unscrupulous favorite, whether a genuine magician or clever mountebank!