Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures Read online

  THE FULLY ILLUSTRATED ROBERT E. HOWARD LIBRARY

  from Del Rey Books

  The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian

  The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane

  The Bloody Crown of Conan

  Bran Mak Morn: The Last King

  The Conquering Sword of Conan

  Kull: Exile of Atlantis

  The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 1:

  Crimson Shadows

  The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 2:

  Grim Lands

  The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard

  El Borak and Other Desert Adventures

  Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures

  Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Del Rey Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2011 by Robert E. Howard Properties, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  ROBERT E. HOWARD, DARK AGNES, and related names, logos, characters, and distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks or registered trademarks of Robert E. Howard Properties, Inc., unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.

  Published by arrangement with Robert E. Howard Properties, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Howard, Robert E. (Robert Ervin), 1906–1936.

  Sword woman and other historical adventures / Robert E. Howard ;

  fully illustrated by John Watkiss.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52432-4

  1. Adventure stories, American. 2. Historical fiction, American. I. Title.

  PS3554.E43S96 2011

  813′.54—dc22

  2010039976

  www.delreybooks.com

  Cover design: Dreu Pennington-McNeil

  Cover art: John Watkiss

  Art Directors

  Jim & Ruth Keegan

  Editor

  Rusty Burke

  v3.1

  Spears of Clontarf

  first published in Spears of Clontarf, 1978

  Hawks Over Egypt

  first published in The Road of Azrael, 1979

  The Outgoing of Sigurd the Jerusalem-Farer

  first published in Verses in Ebony, 1975

  The Road of Azrael

  first published in Chacal, 1976

  The Lion of Tiberias

  first published in The Magic Carpet Magazine, July 1933

  Gates of Empire

  first published in Golden Fleece, January 1939

  Hawks of Outremer

  first published in Oriental Stories, Spring 1931

  The Blood of Belshazzar

  first published in Oriental Stories, Fall 1931

  Red Blades of Black Cathay

  first published in Oriental Stories, February–March 1931

  The Sowers of the Thunder

  first published in Oriental Stories, Winter 1932

  The Skull in the Clouds

  first published in The Howard Collector, Spring 1962

  A Thousand Years Ago

  first published in Night Images, 1976

  Lord of Samarcand

  first published in Oriental Stories, Spring 1932

  Timur-lang

  first published in The Howard Collector, Summer 1964

  Sword Woman

  first published in REH: Lone Star Fictioneer, Summer 1975

  Blades for France

  first published in Blades for France, 1975

  The Shadow of the Vulture

  first published in The Magic Carpet Magazine, January 1934

  The Road of the Eagles

  first published in Lord of Samarcand and Other Adventure Tales of the Old Orient, 2005

  Untitled Fragment (The Track of Bohemund)

  first published in The Road of Azrael, 1979

  Untitled Synopsis (The Slave-Princess)

  first published in The Howard Reader, 2003

  Untitled Fragment (The Slave-Princess)

  first published in The Howard Reader, 2003

  Untitled Fragment (“He knew de Bracy …”)

  first published in Lord of Samarcand and Other Adventure Tales of the Old Orient, 2005

  Untitled Fragment (“The wind from the Mediterranean …”)

  first published in Amra, November 1959

  Recap of Harold Lamb’s “The Wolf Chaser”

  first published in Lord of Samarcand and Other Adventure Tales of the Old Orient, 2005

  Untitled Fragment (“The Persians had all fled …”)

  first published in Lord of Samarcand and Other Adventure Tales of the Old Orient, 2005

  The Sign of the Sickle

  first published in A Rhyme of Salem Town and Other Poems, 2002

  Mistress of Death

  appears here for the first time

  This book is dedicated to my deceased wife, Lorraine,

  who I’m sure would have been pleased

  that I finally got to illustrate a book by such a great writer.

  —John Watkiss

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Illustrations

  Artist’s Foreword

  Introduction

  Spears of Clontarf

  Hawks Over Egypt

  The Outgoing of Sigurd the Jerusalem-Farer

  The Road of Azrael

  The Lion of Tiberias

  Gates of Empire

  Hawks of Outremer

  The Blood of Belshazzar

  Red Blades of Black Cathay

  The Sowers of the Thunder

  The Skull in the Clouds

  A Thousand Years Ago

  Lord of Samarcand

  Timur-Lang

  Sword Woman

  Blades for France

  The Shadow of the Vulture

  The Road of the Eagles

  Miscellanea

  Untitled Fragment (The Track of Bohemund)

  Untitled Synopsis (The Slave-Princess)

  Untitled Fragment (The Slave-Princess)

  Untitled Fragment (“He knew de Bracy …”)

  Untitled Fragment (“The wind from the Mediterranean …”)

  Recap of Harold Lamb’s “The Wolf Chaser”

  Untitled Fragment (“The Persians had all fled …”)

  The Sign of the Sickle

  Mistress of Death

  Appendices

  Howard’s Journey

  Notes on the Original Howard Texts

  Illustrations

  “Touch it not,” exclaimed Asmund

  His mighty right hand held ready the stained sword

  Cormac thundered his battle cry …

  “They have crossed the Jordan!”

  We fell to it, thrusting, slashing …

  So I gave the horse the rein and rode at a reckless gallop

  Artist’s Foreword

  Robert E. Howard’s crowning glory in literature was Conan the Cimmerian. His epic tales written from a remote place in Texas were remarkable in character, landscape, and mood.

  At the age of fourteen, I first came across his stories in paperback editions. At that time, as a young artist, I had been
studying anatomy with regard to drawing the human figure. The exotic, mysterious, action-packed stories of the Conan saga were a perfect vehicle for inventive figure renditions and stagings.

  At that time I could only dream about working on Howard’s stories. Now I have realized that dream, illustrating Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures.

  I hope you enjoy Howard’s work as much as I enjoyed illustrating it.

  —John Watkiss

  2010

  Introduction

  Historical fiction has been a part of our literary heritage for almost as long as we have possessed the written word, since some forgotten scribe in the court of Rameses XI put pen to papyrus to create the “Report of Wenamon.” Over the centuries it became the province of skalds and poets; bards and playwrights plundered whole archives to find fodder for the ages, while historians and antiquarians used fictionalized history as a means of understanding long-vanished civilizations. Today, while its form and function as a genre has changed, the appeal of historical fiction remains undiminished. It is the literature of spectacle and pageantry; at its simplest it is pure entertainment wrapped in a veneer of respectability often denied to its close cousin, fantasy. In the hands of a master, however, historical fiction does more than entertain … it puts a distinctly human face on our collective past.

  Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) was such a master. Though his professional career spanned but a little more than a decade, he wrote, by conservative estimate, some three million words of poetry and prose, much of it having an historical slant. Indeed, a love of times past ran deep in Howard’s veins; a survey of his correspondence reveals that virtually every letter between 1923 and 1936 makes some mention of his interest in things historical – from the Celtic migrations to the lives of local gunfighters. With this in mind, it’s relatively easy to make the case that even Howard’s non-historical writings, his tales of Conan of Cimmeria or Kull of Atlantis, are at heart historical fiction. Who can read Black Colossus, for instance, and not see the shadow of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the plight of the tiny city-state of Khoraja? Does not the blood-feud in Red Nails echo the equally bloody Lincoln County War? Such parallels abound in Howard’s fiction – some tenuous, others flare-bright and obvious.

  The stories collected in this volume, however, are solidly historical. They owe their genesis to Howard’s literary patron and Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, who solicited the young Texan in the summer of 1930 to contribute to his newest pulp magazine, Oriental Stories: “I especially want historical tales,” Wright’s letter stated, “tales of the Crusades, of Genghis Khan, of Tamerlane, and the wars between Islam and Hindooism.” This was a welcome opportunity for Howard, and he seems to have wasted little time in acting upon it.

  “There is no literary work, to me, half as zestful as rewriting history in the guise of fiction,” he commented in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft. And indeed, Howard’s zest, his passion, is evident in every detail and turn of phrase. These stories rank among REH’s finest – lean and descriptive, with headlong plots and a rogues’ gallery of characters who embody the kind of grim fatalism that has become a hallmark of his work. They span the breadth of the Middle Ages – from war-torn eleventh-century Ireland (Spears of Clontarf) to sixteenth-century Ottoman Crimea (The Road of the Eagles) – and they explore a similar theme, what Howard called his “continual search for newer barbarians, from age to age.” The violent clash of civilizations and its tragic consequences fascinated Howard, as did the stoic heroism that arises in the face of inescapable doom. These themes crop up often in REH’s oeuvre, in the travels of Solomon Kane, in the knife’s-edge maneuverings of Francis Xavier Gordon, and in the determined resistance of Bran Mak Morn. But here, in his stories of Outremer and the Old Orient, Howard most eloquently questions the dominance of barbarism over civilization – a question he would ultimately answer in 1934, in the final paragraph of one of his most celebrated tales, Beyond the Black River:

  Barbarism is the natural state of mankind … civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.

  Though passionate about his material and confident in his ability to spin a yarn, Howard nonetheless felt that the writing of historicals exposed one of his great faults to the world: “My knowledge of the Orient is extremely sketchy, and I have to draw on my imagination to supply missing links which I can’t learn in the scanty references at my command.” And though he seems to have considered the introduction of imagination into historical fiction to be a weakness, it is that selfsame imagination that gives these stories such a dramatic flair. Howard’s prose has the power to bring history to life – grim and vicious life, but life all the same; he had a poet’s eye for evoking sensations that surely must have existed, even if no mention is made of them in the historical narrative – from the color of the night sky over a sacked and burning citadel to the taste of blood and gunpowder to the bitter stink of death that hangs in the morning air. When woven into the skein of history, these dollops of imagination elevate the rote recitation of dates and deeds into a potent form of art.

  Howard bolstered his imagination by reading, widely and voraciously – no mean feat in Depression-era rural Texas. In his ongoing correspondence with fellow Weird Tales author H. P. Lovecraft, Howard lamented the dearth of culture in West Texas, stating that “… it is almost impossible to obtain books on obscure and esoteric subjects anywhere in the state.” Despite the difficulties, Howard amassed a vast store of historical knowledge, both for the American Southwest and for lands far-flung. He counted Sir Walter Scott among his favorite authors, along with Talbot Mundy, Stanley Lane-Poole, and the much-esteemed Harold Lamb. And from every one, both fiction and nonfiction, he took away something with which to inform his own work.

  Absent first-hand experiences garnered through travel, or the where-withal to perform one’s own research in situ, cannibalizing and absorbing the works of others is a time-honored tradition among writers. Every book, story, and article one reads has the potential to supply a phrase or fact, a description or a bit of color. Of course, we should not confuse this with plagiarism; a good author – and Howard was one of the best – takes only inspiration, recasting the actual words to suit his own voice, his own style. Gates of Empire, included in this volume, boasts a perfect example of this tradition.

  The scene is thus: in twelfth-century Cairo, emissaries of the Crusader King Amalric of Jerusalem, accompanied by that Falstaffian rogue, Giles Hobson – perhaps the most unique protagonist Howard ever created – have been granted an audience with the reclusive Fatimid Caliph of Egypt. Their escort is the wily vizier, Shawar …

  At the gates of the Great East Palace the ambassadors gave up their swords, and followed the vizier through dim tapestry-hung corridors and gold arched doors where tongueless Sudanese stood like images of black silence, sword in hand. They crossed an open court bordered by fretted arcades supported by marble columns; their ironclad feet rang on mosaic paving. Fountains jetted their silver sheen into the air, peacocks spread their iridescent plumage, parrots fluttered on golden threads. In broad halls jewels glittered for eyes of birds wrought of silver or gold. So they came at last to the vast audience room, with its ceiling of carved ebony and ivory. Courtiers in silks and jewels knelt facing a broad curtain heavy with gold and sewn with pearls that gleamed against its satin darkness like stars in a midnight sky.

  While The Arabian Nights could easily have inspired Howard’s sumptuous vision in the above passage, it is in fact rigorously historical – the details recorded at Amalric’s behest by his friend and confessor, Archbishop Guillaume de Tyr, in his Latin history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Historia Rerum in Partibus Transmarinis Gestarum (A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea). The Historia was rare in the 1930s – a modern English translation did not come out until 1943 – and only slightly less rare today. So where did Howard encounter it? In answer, we need only turn to the works of two of REH’s favorite writers: Harold Lamb and S
tanley Lane-Poole. Both men read Latin and traveled to the lands they wrote about. Lamb, an American adventure writer, split his time between fiction and non-fiction; Lane-Poole, a British archaeologist and Orientalist, wrote non-fiction histories with a storyteller’s eye. Both men wrote extensively on the Crusades. In their books, Howard no doubt found limitless inspiration.

  Weigh the passage from Gates of Empire against this, Lamb’s version of the Caliph’s opulent palace, from The Crusades: the Flame of Islam:

  The Fatimid kalif lived in guarded seclusion. Sudani swordsmen filled the corridors of the Great Palace, and paced the mosaic floors of the antechambers, by the marble fountains where peacocks strutted and parrots screamed. The audience hall glistened like a gigantic treasure vault with its ceiling of carved wood inlaid with gold, and its inanimate birds fashioned of silver and enamel feathers and ruby eyes. But the kalif was hidden from the eyes of the curious by a double curtain of gilt leather.

  Now, place both against an excerpt from Stanley Lane-Poole’s Saladin and the Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which incorporates both the colorful description of the palace and the mission of the ambassadors – much of it in the words of Guillaume de Tyr, himself:

  The introduction of Christian ambassadors to the sacred presence, where few even of the most exalted Moslems were admitted, was unprecedented; but Amalric was in a position to dictate his own terms. Permission was granted, and Hugh of Cæsarea with Geoffrey Fulcher the Templar were selected for the unique embassy. The vezir himself conducted them with every detail of oriental ceremony and display to the Great Palace of the Fatimids. They were led by mysterious corridors and through guarded doors, where stalwart Sudanis saluted with naked swords. They reached a spacious court, open to the sky, and surrounded by arcades resting on marble pillars; the panelled ceilings were carved and inlaid in gold and colours; the pavement was rich mosaic. The unaccustomed eyes of the rude knights opened wide with wonder at the taste and refinement that met them at every step;– here they saw marble fountains, birds of many notes and wondrous plumage, strangers to the western world; there, in a further hall, more exquisite even than the first, “a variety of animals such as the ingenious hand of the painter might depict, or the license of the poet invent, or the mind of the sleeper conjure up in the visions of the night,– such, indeed, as the regions of the East and the South bring forth, but the West sees never, and scarcely hears of.” At last, after many turns and windings, they reached the throne room, where the multitude of the pages and their sumptuous dress proclaimed the splendour of their lord. Thrice did the vezir, ungirding his sword, prostrate himself to the ground, as though in humble supplication to his god; then, with a sudden rapid sweep, the heavy curtains broidered with gold and pearls were drawn aside, and on a golden throne, robed in more than regal state, the Caliph sat revealed.