Savage Lands

Ashari walked in and out of days, passing like a shadow beneath the canopy of the high forest. As time passed she grew stronger, more inured to the heat and the constant rain, and every day she ate what she could find and was glad of it – berries, fruits, fungi, insects, lizards – whatever she could catch was her dinner. She chafed inside, remembering platters of rare meats and carefully roasted fruits, of delicacies and sweets. Again, she told herself, she would live like a queen again.

The mountains sloped downward for days, the rain slackening, the ground becoming harder and rockier. It was not long before she saw the red blaze of the sun through the thinning trees, and then she stepped forth from the shadow of the jungle and onto the edge of a seemingly endless grassland. Low mountains lay to the south, and ahead of her the land rose up and up in a series of gentle waves, fading into hazy distance studded with the towering boles of scattered trees.

She saw no sign of civilization, and yet she knew she was on the edge of the Thran kingdoms. It was said to be a decadent, dangerous place too far over the mountains and jungles for the reach of the empire to have ever fallen upon it. It was a place spoken of in stories, but she had never met anyone who had been here. If she traveled west far enough, she would come to the shores of the Sea of Azar, where ancient cities were said to cling to the coast like jewels beneath the nighted sky.

Almost nothing remained of her clothing, and she wore little more than the straps that held her weapons and the shining bronze-red of her bare skin. It did not concern her. She was a Sheda, who had once been a race of great and terrible warrior-kings and sorcerers. Hardship was forging her into something more like her ancestors, making her harder and tougher, grinding away weakness and leaving steel behind.

Conan the Rebel

 

It is amusing, with all the years of disdain heaped on Howard’s style by snobby critics, to see writer after writer fail at imitating it. Poul Anderson is certainly the most celebrated writer to ever take up a pen and write a Conan novel. One of the luminaries of the Golden Age of SF, Anderson won seven Hugos and three Nebulas in his lifetime, along with a SFWA Grand Master award and a slew of lesser-known accolades. I expected something interesting, at least, but this book is a terrible chore to have to wade through.

Conan the Rebel delves into one of the more interesting periods of Conan’s life – when he sailed with Belit, the deadly Queen of the Black Coast. The original story is divided into two parts, and a lot of action is elided and alluded to, but not shown in between them, so there is a place for a broader tale. I only wish it did any kind of justice to the material at hand.

Concerned primarily with a rebellion in Stygia, the book is atrociously slow to start, spending the first three chapters doing little but show us scenes of characters talking to each other. The story opens with the villain, the Stygian wizard Tothapis, having a vision sent by Set that he has to stop Conan, and then we spend a lot of time with him talking to other Stygians about what that might mean. Then we get a whole chapter where Belit fills in her backstory, which we didn’t need.

The characterization of Conan is all right here, not really accurate, but not as bad as Offutt usually made him. The characterization of Belit, however, is fatally off. In the original “Queen of the Black Coast”, Belit is depicted as a woman who was really more than a little insane. A blood-hungry madwoman who commanded her warship in the nude and took no prisoners, evoking a superstitious awe from her crew. She was also the one real love of Conan’s life in the canon, and he never loved again after her death.

This Belit is far too well-adjusted and chatty, but that doesn’t matter as much, because if you thought this book would be Conan and Belit carving a path across Stygia, you would be wrong. Instead Belit gets left behind on her ship and we don’t even see her again until the end, all while Conan makes goo-goo eyes at a young chief’s daughter who we have never met before. It is a sad waste of one of Howard’s great characters, and yet another silly attempt to make Conan Fall In Love with the damsel of the week. It’s even less explicable because his one great love interest is right there.

The plot is a muddled tangle on nonsense where Conan is supposed to go and get a sacred axe of Mitra to use against the Stygians, and there are express elements of divine intervention which do not fit the Conan universe at all. Gods, like magic, are never present as real, tangible deities in Howard’s fiction, they are often spirits or monsters who are worshiped as gods, but are not anything of the sort. The quest for the axe plotline is a standard, high fantasy trope, and it doesn’t fit Conan at all.

Anderson’s prose is perfectly good, but he lacks any lightness or sense of adventure. The plot slogs along at a deathly slow pace, and it seems much, much longer than its 75,000 word length. The characterization of the hero is weak, and he spends a lot of time bantering with his band of scrappy misfits and being rescued from things the real Conan could have handled himself. All of these early pastiche writers completely lacked the sense of Conan’s primal, savage vitality and iron will. Conan won many battles just because he refused to give in, because he could endure pain and hardship no civilized man could withstand, and because his willpower enabled him to overcome sorcery and treachery.

None of that is in evidence here, and while I was expecting this one to be a bit better than the standard pastiche, it is really much, much worse. A dull, dragging bore of a book.

The Bones of Kings

Through storm and cruel seas, Shath the Iron-Handed dragged his boat to the shore and then climbed over the battered gunwale and set his feet upon the lands of his birth. This was no soft land for soft men, but the bitter realms of volcanic glass and poisoned fume that had long guarded the Horned Clans from invasion. Cruel winters had forced them southward, away from their homelands, until this had become their home. Harsh and cruel, where the soil itself was made of glass daggers and the rains burned flesh.

He stood knee-deep in the cold waters and pulled the meager supplies he still had from the boat, and then he let it go and saw it washed back out into the dark that clung to the waters before the red dawn. The night sky was alive with thousands of stars as well as the shards of the broken moon, and the light was silver upon the sky, while the land lay mired in shadow.

He carried a small bag slung over his shoulder, a little food tucked within along with the rolled, scraped skin of a sea monster. He carried two long knives sheathed in his rope belt, and he bore two hunting spears over his broad shoulder. His muscles ached from three days of battles with the sea, while his new right arm felt nothing. He waded up from the waters until he stood on black sands above the mark of the high tides, and he drove both spears into the sands and then knelt down and kissed the earth. Now he was returned, he would find the remains of his people, and he would gather them once more into an army.

Shath knew where his people would go, for there was one holy place where they would gather if they were driven away. He turned his head to face true north and walked, careless of rest and contemptuous of weakness. He was of the Horned Clans, and he would not give way before his own privations. He was made of iron and of wrath; he was a son of wind and cold and the howls of war. He feared nothing, not death nor pain nor the devils of a thousand ages.