The Dead God's Hand

They crossed the furious stormland of the black desert, lost among monoliths and raging winds. The cold princess and the king without a country. She led the way, her one hand gripping her spear as she strode the dunes. The black sands sifted and slid away like water, and the sky was dark with wind. They had lost the trail they followed, could see no more than a dozen steps before them. Violet lightning scarred the sky, and none could say whether it was day or night.

Chona found the cold did not bother her, not now. Her head was wrapped in cloth to keep the deadly sand from her face, but she could scarcely see. Prickles of red lightning crawled at the tip of her spear and over the steel rim of her shield, twitched at her skin. She leaned into the wind, feeling no pain nor fatigue. The poison that Khamag had poured into her body had not slain her, but had only drawn her into a different life. A colder life, without the hungers and failings of her old body.

That was the only reason she could walk as an equal with the giant who traveled with her. Kumura was a hulk of pale skin and muscles like iron. He feared nothing and no hardship seemed to touch him, save that his remaining eye, weak from years of imprisonment, could not bear the light of day.

The wind buffeted and clawed at them, and she struggled to remain upright. Over the moaning of the storm she heard the winding of the terrible horn, foretelling the pursuit of the deadly nomads of the Black Desert. Even in such a storm they would not turn aside, as their god of the dark skies drove them on, calling them to feed blood to the wind and the sands. They drove through the desert on their lean black steeds, and nothing seemed to turn them aside from the hunt.

Chona knew by now they could not shake the pursuit, and they would have to fight. She only drove them on to find a place where they might make a stand in the darkness. If they fought in the open they would be surrounded and cut down, separated and left to stumble alone even if they escaped death. Kumura was a beast, but he sought the same enemy, and he was the only ally she possessed. She would not give him up easily.

Conanism

If there is a problem with the Sword & Sorcery genre, it is that it dwells in the shadow of its most famous hero, and it’s not possible to study the history and development of Sword & Sorcery as a whole without being struck by the fact that 90% of people’s interest in the genre lives and dies with Conan of Cimmeria.

This is not a new problem. Conan casts a loooong shadow, not just in a relatively small fantasy subgenre, but in the popular culture as a whole. Everyone knows Conan, and when I talk about Robert E. Howard with the uninitiated, I usually have to use Conan as a reference point to explain who he even is. The fact of the matter is that Conan, as both a character and a pop-culture icon, outgrew both his genre and his creator, and looms larger than both.

Howard created a lot of characters, and his most well-known are his continuing ones that went through multiple tales. It was a feature of the era in the pulp magazines – every writer wanted to create a hero that connected with the audience, that way readers would follow the hero and clamor for more of his adventures. It helped sell stories to editors and helped sell magazines, and so when a character hit it worked out for everyone. Howard made a lot of these two-fisted action heroes, from the real-world adventurers like Steve Costigan and Solomon Kane, to dwellers in worlds of pure fantasy.

A lot of the characters we think of as being fantasy heroes – like Cormac Mac Art or Bran Mak Morn – were actually men who lived in historical periods. Howard only really created two ongoing heroes who lived in purely fantastical worlds: Kull, and his kindred barbarian Conan.

Kull was very much the prototype for Conan. A barbarian who leaves his primitive homeland and ventures through an exotic world of strange civilizations, cutting his way with sword and iron will, eventually carving his way onto a throne. Kull inhabited a rather poorly-defined world of generic fantasy with a number of Lovecraftian flourishes. For Conan, Howard made the Hyborian Age, and it is rather surprising that he created such a well-realized fantasy world and then never used it for any other characters. I suppose he might have, had he lived.

Conan was a major hit, and so Howard kept writing stories about him, and they sold like crazy. In 1934 and 1935, when he was selling at his peak, Howard was making the equivalent of over $30,000 a year just from writing – a pretty extraordinary achievement for a freelance author in any time period. Conan was the most lucrative character he created, and the most enduring.

That hasn’t changed. Sword & Sorcery fiction in print, films, and comics, is dominated by Conan. There have been a lot of other S&S heroes of many kinds, but none of them has made the same impact, for whatever reason. Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn are just as interesting, if not moreso, but Conan is the one the fandom took to heart, and has never relinquished.

And in any genre there will be indelible works that continue to attract new fans. The advent of new fantasy does not tarnish the Lord of the Rings, the emergence of new bands does not reduce the appeal of classic music. But Conan’s overpowering ubiquity seems to drown out any other real development of the genre. No original Sword & Sorcery tale is going to get the attention the umpteenth Conan pastiche gets, and in fact the very genre of S&S is unfashionable among publishers today. Rather than a vital, expanding fantasy subgenre such as we get with Urban Fantasy or Steampunk, we get Conan, and only Conan, always and forever.

I feel like this is doing a terrible disservice to literature as a whole. The Sword & Sorcery genre is little-seen, and not taken very seriously, when it is viewed as just part of an aging IP being exploited by film studios or comic book publishers. The effect is similar to what would have happened if “rock and roll” was seen as just “Elvis music”, and rather than an entire genre of creativity and expression we just got Elvis repressings and cover songs forever, with no thought given to what else might be done with the form. I would much rather Conan was the beginning of the genre, rather than just being seen as the end.

The Reaping of Kings

The sky was dark with a curse of smoke, and fire rained down on every side. The towers stood stark against the horizon, and the smell of burning and blood was oppressive as the foot of the invader. It was the fourth day of the siege of Utar, and it promised to be the last. The walls of the city wee scarred and blackened by the unending bombardment of mangonel and catapult, and the ground beneath them was strewn with the scorched forms of the fallen. Carrion birds wheeled in the sky, screaming for death.

At the gates the two armies clashed, and the battle was reaching a crescendo of violence and fury. The invaders crushed against the gate and the battered walls, hurling grapnels and ladders up in the face of the hail of arrows that sleeted down upon them. The ground was black with blood and covered with the dead and wounded, and yet they came onward. Behind them stretched a sea of men, men gathered to take the places of the dead, men with swords and shields ready and eyes filled with the zeal of fanatics.

Above the whole black host waved the banner of the new age. A great black war-standard emblazoned with the sign of the red hand. The Left Hand of Fire, the master of the dark army that marched through the lands, scouring one kingdom after another in the name of their dead god. At the center of the army stood the great tomb, drawn by a thousand slaves dragging chains affixed to the iron tusks of the beasts cast in silver that reared at the front of it. Within the wheeled crypt lay the body of the Sleeping Tyrant, the Nameless King, the Undying, the God of all Kings.

The attackers screamed their war prayers as they rushed the gates, hammering a ram upon the ancient timbers until they snapped, and then they chopped at the broken wood with axes and swords. The defenders sent arrows down upon them, poured hot oil and sand on them and cast down torches to set them aflame, and yet the power of the Left Hand would not let the fire ignite. The battle was an agony of trampled dying men, bloodied steel, and savaged flesh, and then the gates gave way.