Bran Mak Morn: The Last King Page 26

  A man could scarce find room to swing a sword and spears had been discarded as useless. It was the kind of hand-to-hand fighting I liked best. I was not so tall or so large as most of the men, and I fought crouching low, depending mostly upon stabbing and thrusting, my shield held above my head and shoulders. Most vikings preferred to stand erect and swing their long swords with all their power and with full reach, so such close fighting encumbered most of them.

  A long sword crashed down upon my upraised shield, bearing me to the deck. The wielder of the sword was Gathlaff. I sprang from the deck, stabbing as I leaped, but my sword was turned aside by the Angle� shield and in turn I side-stepped his sword as it swished down.

  Then I leaped in and my sword gashed Gathlaff� arm as he struck it aside. In another instant the battle had swirled away, separating the Angle and I. The battle raged fiercely on the quarter-deck.

  I saw Sigurd� foot slip and he went down on the deck. An Angle sprang forward, sword lifted. With an over-hand stroke I struck the Angle down and dragged Sigurd to his feet with the other hand. The Angles pressed in on us and we fought back to back until a space was cleared.

  Tostig and Gathlaff met in the prow of the dragon-ship. All about them the battling vikings drew away and left a space clear.

  The two chieftains were well matched, both skilled and savage fighters, both blond giants.

  Their swords whirled glittering in the air and clashed deafningly as they smote and warded.

  Back and forth they swayed and battled, blow after blow they struck and warded with lightning swiftness.

  Then Gathlaff� sword crashed down on Tostig� winged helmet. The Norseman staggered, reeled, and with one swift thrust drove his sword through Gathlaff� iron corselet.

  Gathlaff flung his arms wide and pitched backward over the ship-rail. Tostig reeled and then tumbled to the deck, his sword falling from his hand.

  For a moment both Norsemen and Angles stood, astounded at the fall of both chieftains.

  Then I saw my chance. I leaped forward, waving my sword.

  �ally, vikings!�I shouted, in ringing tones, �athlaff has fallen! Sweep the decks! One effort and we have conquered!� A berserk yell went up from the Norsemen. Yelling they surged forward and swept the Angles back and back until they were hemmed against the ship-rail. They fought like devils but the Norsemen hewed them down and hurled them over the rail until I sprang in and stopped them. I had to use my fists and the flat of my sword but Sigurd saw what I intended and aided me and presently the Norse vikings drew back reluctrantly and lowered their swords. Some twenty Angles stood at bay against the ship-rail, their swords red and notched, their armor rent and battered. But indomitable courage showed in their bearing. They showed no fear as they faced us.

  Along with several other accomplishments not usually possessed by vikings, I could speak a number of languages besides my own. Angle was one of those languages and using that language I addressed the Angles.

  �hrow down your arms.�I said, �t is useless to fight longer. You are surrounded by many times your number, Gathlaff, your chieftain, is slain. And see,�I continued, pointing to the other ships, �our other ship is taken.� On its deck a few Angles, at bay against the main-mast, stood off Ragnar� victorious Norsemen. I bade Sigurd hail Ragnar and stop the battle.

  �f you will throw down your arms you shall be spared.�I went on, � offer you the choice of entering our ships and becoming part of our company, on the same footing as the Norse vikings.� Angles and Norsemen stared at me in astonishment. Such offers were not over common, then.

  �e will never join with you, we will not go aboard your ships.�an Angle answered briefly, �lay us if you will; at least we will go down fighting.� The Norsemen moved restlessly, shifting their weapons. I motioned them back.

  �our long-boat has not been touched.�I said, �t should hold all of you. The dragon-ship will not float to land. Take the long-boat and go. The islands of Orkneyar are not far. You should be able to reach them safely.� �ou mean we are to go free?�asked an Angle, hesitatingly.

  �es.� They could scarcely comprehend the fact. Such things were uncommon on the North Sea.

  The Norsemen muttered dissaproval.

  �hat child� play is this?�grumbled old Rane.

  �he act of a weakling!�shouted Wigstan, �hat, will you let these Angles, our foes, depart in peace with their boats and their weapons! What say, ye, vikings?� �e have heard my command.�I said, swinging about to face the grumbling Norsemen, my sword in my hand, �nd here I stand to back my orders.�I looked full into the eyes of the Norsemen and they gave back, abashed. I noted Sigurd standing near, a mocking smile on his face as he watched the vikings, his hand resting on his sword-hilt.

  There were some twenty Angles from the other dragon-ship, whom Ragnar realeased with their weapons at my word, though he raised his brows and then shrugged his shoulders.

  The two long-boats from the Angle ships held the men easily and they embarked, setting their course for the shores of Orkneyar, which were just visible on the far horrizon.

  Just before they pushed off, a tall, keen-eyed Angle who had done most of the speaking, addressed me, �hat do men call you?�he asked.

  �akon.�I answered.

  � am Oslaf of the White-sword.�he answered, �nd I will remember.� With those words, he swung down into one of the long-boats and took the tiller. The Angles bent to the oars and soon the two long-boats were speeding toward the distant Orkney islands, lifting to the waves.

  Tostig, it turned out was not slain. Gathlaff� sword descending on his bronze helmet, had merely knocked him unconcious. He came to, cursing savagely, and wishing to renew the battle.

  He cursed more when he found that the battle was over.

  �ere any prisoners taken?�he demanded.

  �o.�replied Sigurd.

  �hey were all slain?� �ll but some twenty on each ship.�Wigstan said, �nd those Hakon sent away with their boats and weapons.� Tostig was furious. �ou take much upon yourself, Hakon.�he thundered, � am chieftain here.� I gazed at him with a calculating eye. It was in my mind to draw sword and decide the chieftainship then and there but I decided it was not time. Too many men were still for Tostig.

  We found much plunder in the Angle galleys. The Angles were fierce, far-ranging pirates and they had taken many ships and sacked many villages.

  The loot we took from the two ships more than paid them for taking them, the Norsemen considered.

  The Angles had fought bravely and skillfully and some twenty Norsemen had been slain.

  But to fight, to slay and be slain was the Norsemen� idea of life. They cared for no other.

  We salvaged the two dragon-ships and having repaired them, manned them with men from the �raken�and from the �ormorant� Ragnar� ship.

  Later we sold them to the Juts at Brunanbuhr.

  Endnotes

  *1 Sea of Silent Waters = Pacific Ocean

  *2 Neandertals

  *3 Cro-Magnons

  *4 Mediterranean Sea

  *5 To avoid confusion I have used the modern terms for places and clans. �AUTHOR

  Appendices

  ROBERT E. HOWARD AND THE PICTS: A CHRONOLOGY

  CIRCA 1918�919

  Howard discovers, in a �anal Street library�in New Orleans, a book in which he first learns about the Picts. (See excerpts from Letter to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. January 1932, and Alvin Earl Perry, A Biographical Sketch of Robert E. Howard [1935], below.)

  UNTITLED ESSAY, CA. 1920�923

  Howard wrote this report on the history of the Picts, possibly for school. An initial page or pages are clearly missing, and are presumed lost.

  which has characterized them through all the ages. The cavemen that were left took refuge in deep forests and mountainous wilds from which they occasionly emerged to steal cattle, burn and murder and furnish the basis for tales of a later ages, telling of giants and ogre
s.

  Later on the great Celtic race swept over Europe and the Picts in their turn fled to the forests and caves, furnishing the basis of fairy tales of gnomes, elves and other fairies.

  But that was not until a much later date. The Picts scattered all over Europe. Some are still found in the mountains of the Pyrenees. But they made their longest stand in the British Isles and it is there that we are interested in them.

  The Picts of Britain underwent several complete changes in appearance and manner. There is no greater difference between the first Picts and the Indian than there was between the first Picts and the Picts who opposed Hengest.

  I have already described the Picts who first came to Britain. This type remained unchanged for several hundred years. The people remained peaceful, gaining their food by agriculture and becoming more and more civilized and more skillful artizans.

  Then came the great Celtic invasion and the laborious work and progress of half a thousand years was overturned and undone in an instant for that is a Celtic characteristic. The dawning Pictish generation was nipped in the bud.

  The Picts could not stand before the race of warriors skilled in the work of metals and the make and usage of weapons, but vastly inferior to the Picts in artizanship.

  So they fled to the northern mountains. Many descendants of the early cavemen lurked in the mountains and Pictish cunning concieved a plan of utilizing together the great strenth and brute courage of the aboriginals with the shrewdness of the Picts, to the discomfort of the Celtic invaders. So hunter and artizan banded themselves together against the warrior and the ancient enemies were united. So when the Celts grew tired of Britain and marched north, they met with so many unpleasant surprises, mostly in the shape of ambuscades and night attacks that they retreated back into Britain and it was not until the Brythonic invasion, years later, that the Celts ever gained a foothold in Scotland, though many went on into Ireland.

  Living close together and fighting as one nation, naturally lessened the mutual contempt and hate and the Picts and aborigines began to intermarry.

  For some reason or other the Picts as Silurian that fled to Wales did not unite with the cave-men� descendents and the early types of Picts remained unchanged, except as, later they were altered by intermarriage with the Celts, fleeing before other invaders. And to this day in mountains of western Wales are still to be found traces of the ancient Pictish type.

  The first Celts to invade Britain were Gaels with brown hair, grey eyes and tall rather spare forms. They came from Gaul, especially Brittany, where the people today have much Celtic blood in them.

  The next invaders were also Celts but differed from the Gaelic Celts in many ways.

  They were tall, like the Gaels but with larger, heavier bodies. As a rule they had blue eyes and red or yellow hair. The came mainly from what is now Belgium and the Netherlands and were called Brythons from which the names Britain and Briton were derived. Possibly they had some Teutonic blood in them. They overcame the Gaels as the Gaels overcame the Picts and the Gaels retreated into Wales and Scotland.

  LETTER TO TEVIS CLYDE SMITH, 5 OCTOBER 1923

  I� writing a book which doubtless would make you tired and would sound like a lot of fool stuff to most folks, but as I am writing it for my own amusement, the opinion of other people about it don� interest me, as I know of.

  The book takes in lots of territory and a lot of characters. Some of the characters are Ammon the Amalekite, who was a famous swordsman, Swift-Foot, the tree-man, Tostig the Mighty, a viking and something of a villian, Hakon, a Norseman and crafty as a fox, Bran Mak Morn, who was the greatest chief the Picts ever had, and many others too numerous to mention.

  DECEMBER 1924

  The Lost Race is returned to Howard by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright,

  for revisions.

  From Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, 1928

  This is a thinly disguised autobiographical novel, based on Howard� life over the previous four years. �teve�is Steve Costigan, Howard� alter-ego; �he Forgotten Race�is The Lost Race; �izarre Stories�is Weird Tales.

  As for �he Forgotten Race,�he [the editor of �izarre Stories� had found several faults with it, in that it left too much to the imagination and left some important facts unexplained. Steve perceived that even the readers of other magazines were not supposed to have any intellect or imagination of their own. However, the editor professed himself ready to take the story if the changes and additions which he suggested were made....Yet he [Steve] somehow felt a sinking of the heart when he contemplated rewriting �he Forgotten Race.�Once a story was completed, he was through with it, eager to start something else, and he wished to look on it again only in print. He doubted his ability to make the tale come up to standard, even with the editor� remarks to guide him, and, dreading a second refusal, delayed several days before he made the changes. He sent off two more stories with it when he returned it. These two came back, but Bizarre Stories accepted the revised story, offering $30.00, payable on publication.

  7 JANUARY 1925

  The Lost Race is accepted by Weird Tales.

  LETTER TO TEVIS CLYDE SMITH, 14 JANUARY 1926

  In this letter Howard sketched out the two waves of Celtic migration into Britain. Referring to the first wave, the Gaels, he says: From Ireland they spread to Britain, chasing the Picts into Scotland and Wales. And: Some of the Lowland Scotch, and Welsh and most of the Cornish are Brythonic, though the Cornish are mixed a lot with Pict and Gael.

  LETTER FROM FARNSWORTH WRIGHT TO ROBERT E. HOWARD, 16 MARCH 1926

  Dear Mr. Howard:

  I thoroughly enjoyed MEN OF THE SHADOWS, but I fear I can not use it in WEIRD TALES. It is too little of a �tory,�despite the vigorous action in the opening pages. It is rather a chronicle of a tribe, a picture of the evolution of a race; and thereby it lacks the suspense and thrill that a story of individual conflict and hopes and fears and drama would have.

  I do not know of any magazine that would take a story like this, unless possibly FRONTIER. But if you send it to FRONTIER, I suggest that you first clarify the conflict between Bran Mak Morn and the wizard, on page 11, for the reader is left in the dark as to what happened, as to what Bran Mak Morn did to cause the wizard to give up.

  JANUARY 1927

  The Lost Race is published in Weird Tales.

  CIRCA 1928

  Howard writes The Little People.

  LETTER TO HAROLD PREECE, 20 OCTOBER 1928

  About Atlantis �I believe something of the sort existed, though I do not especially hold any theory about a high type of civilization existing there �in fact, I doubt that. But some continent was submerged away back, or some large body of land, for practically all peoples have legends about a flood. And the Cro-Magnons appeared suddenly in Europe, developed to a high state of primitive culture; there is no trace to show that they came up the ladder of utter barbarism in Europe. Suddenly their remains are found supplanting the Neanderthal Man, to whom they have no ties of kinship whatever. Where did they originate? Nowhere in the known world, evidently. They must have originated and developed through the different basic stages of evolution in some land which is not now known to us.

  The occultists say that we are the fifth �I believe �great sub-race. Two unknown and unnamed races came, then the Lemurians, then the Atlanteans, then we. They say the Atlanteans were highly developed. I doubt it. I think they were simply the ancestors of the Cro-Magnon man, who by some chance, escaped the fate which overtook the rest of the tribes.

  All my views on the matter I included in a long letter to the editor to whom I sold a tale entitled The Shadow Kingdom, which expect will be published as a foreword to that story �if ever. This tale I wove about a mythical antediluvian empire, a contemporary of Atlantis.

  1928�929

  Howard writes most of his stories of Kull, king of the antediluvian land of Valusia (of which The Shadow Kingdom was the first) during this period. Most of the stories feature K
ull� Pictish friend Brule, and other Pictish characters.

  1929

  Howard writes a long narrative poem, The Ballad of King Geraint, featuring among its many characters Dulborn, a Pict.

  CIRCA MARCH 1930

  The Dark Man is accepted for Strange Stories (planned companion magazine to Weird Tales).

  Kings of the Night accepted for Weird Tales (submitted to Strange Stories but Wright accepted for Weird Tales).

  LETTER TO HAROLD PREECE, 4 JANUARY 1930

  The Welsh who broke the armies of William Rufus were powerfully built men, deep-chested and strong, but short in height. Admixture with the Silurian natives, doubtless of Iberian blood, or a strong Roman strain may have been responsible for this loss of height, as well as the change in complexion.

  THE NIGHT OF THE WOLF, 1930

  In this story, rejected by Argosy in a letter dated June 3, 1930, Cormac Mac Art, a 5th century Irish reiver, is witness to a confrontation between Norsemen who have built a steading on an island in the Shetlands, and a Pictish chief, Brulla, whom they beat and throw out of their hall when he orders them to leave the islands. In the climactic battle, Picts from all over the Shetlands attack the Norse settlement. In one scene, Cormac sees them stealing through the forest:

  Something took shape in the shadows. A long line of figures moved like ghosts just under the shadows of the trees; a shiver passed along Cormac� spine. Surely these creatures were elves, evil demons of the forest. Short and mightily built, half stooping, one behind the other, they passed in almost utter silence. In the shadows their silence and their crouching positions made them monstrous travesties on men. Racial memories, half lost in the misty gulfs of conciousness, came stealing back to claw with icy fingers at Cormac� heart. He did not fear them as a man fears a human foe; it was the horror of world-old, ancestral memories that gripped him �dim felt, chaotic dream-recollections of darker Ages and grimmer days when primitive men battled for supremacy in a new world.

  For these Picts were a remnant of a lost tribe �the survivals of an elder epoch �last out-posts of a dark Stone Age empire that crumbled before the bronze swords of the first Celts. Now these survivors, thrust out on the naked edges of the world they had once ruled, battled grimly for their existence.