The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume One: Crimson Shadows Read online

  My grandfather’s voice followed me out of the house and into the stables. It was a clear still day and his voice carried far, the only sound besides the squealing and kicking of the horses in the stables, the crowing of a distant cock, and the clamor of sparrows among the mesquites.

  Barbara Allen! An echo of a distant and forgotten homeland among the post-oak covered ridges of a barren land. In my mind I saw the settlers forging westward from the Piedmont, over the Alleghenies and along the Cumberland River–on foot, in lumbering wagons drawn by slow-footed oxen, on horse-back–men in broadcloth and men in buckskin. The guitars and the banjoes clinked by the fires at night, in the lonely log cabins, by the stretches of river black in the starlight, up on the long ridges where the owls hooted. Barbara Allen–a tie to the past, a link between today and the dim yesterdays.

  I opened the stall and went in. My mustang Pedro, vicious as the land which bred him, had broken his halter and was assaulting the bay horse with squeals of rage, wicked teeth bared, eyes flashing, and ears laid back. I caught his mane, jerked him around, slapping him sharply on the nose when he snapped at me, and drove him from the stall. He lashed out wickedly at me with his heels as he dashed out, but I was watching for that and stepped back.

  I had forgotten the bay horse. Stung to frenzy by the mustang’s attack, he was ready to kill anything that came within his reach. His steel shod hoof barely grazed my skull, but that was enough to dash me into utter oblivion.

  My first sensation was of movement. I was shaken up and down, up and down. Then a hand gripped my shoulder and shook me, and a voice bawled in an accent which was familiar, yet strangely unfamiliar: “Hyuh, you, Joel, yuh goin’ to sleep in yo’ saddle!”

  I awoke with a jerk. The motion was that of the gaunt horse under me. All about me were men, gaunt and haggard in appearance, in worn grey uniforms. We were riding between two low hills, thickly timbered. I could not see what lay ahead of us because of the mass of men and horses. It was dawn, a grey unsteady dawn that made me shiver.

  “Sun soon be up now,” drawled one of the men, mistaking my feeling. “We’ll have fightin’ enough to warm our blood purty soon. Old Bedford ain’t marched us all night just for fun. I heah theah’s a wagon-train comin’ down the valley ahaid of us.”

  I was still struggling feebly in a web of illusion. There was a sense of familiarity about all this, yet it was strange and alien, too. There was something I was striving to remember. I slipped a hand into my inside pocket, as if by instinct, and drew out a photograph, an old-fashioned picture. A girl smiled bravely at me, a beautiful girl with tender lips and brave eyes. I replaced it, shaking my head dazedly.

  Ahead of us a low roar went up. We were riding out of the defile, and a broad valley lay spread out before us. Along this valley moved a train of clumsy, lumbering wagons. I saw men on horseback–men in blue, whose appearance and whose horses were fresher than ours. The rest is dim and confused.

  I remember a bugle blown. I saw a tall rangy man on a great horse at the head of our column draw his sword and stand up in his stirrups, and his voice rang above the blast of the bugle: “Charge! Holler, boys, holler!”

  Then there was a shout that rent the skies apart and we stormed out of the defile and down into the valley like a mountain torrent. I was like two men–one that rode and shouted and slashed right and left with a reddened saber, and one who sat wondering and fumbling for something illusive that he could not grasp. But the conviction was growing that I had experienced all this before; it was like living an episode forewarned in a dream.

  The blue line held for a few minutes, then it broke in pieces before our irresistible onslaught, and we hunted them up and down the valley. The battle resolved itself into a hundred combats, where men in blue and men in grey circled each other on stamping, rearing horses, with bright blades glittering in the rising sun.

  My gaunt horse stumbled and went down, and I pulled myself free. In my daze I did not take off his saddle. I walked toward a group of officers and men who were clustered about the tall man who had led the charge. As I approached, I heard him say: “Gentlemen, it seems the enemy have shot off one of my stirrups.”

  Then before I could hear anything else, I came face to face with a man I recognized at last. Yet like all else he was subtly altered. I gasped: “Why, granddad! You’re young again! You’re younger than I am!” And in that flash I knew; and I clenched my fists and stood dumbly waiting, frozen, paralyzed, unable to speak or stir. Then something crashed against my head and with the impact a great blaze of light lighted universal darkness for an instant, and then all was oblivion.

  “–Sweet William, he has died of grief,

  And I shall die of sorrow!”

  My grandfather’s voice still wailed in my ears, faint with the distance, as I staggered to my feet, pressing my hand to the gash the bay’s hoof had laid open in my scalp. I was sick and nauseated and my head swam dizzyingly. My grandfather was still singing. Less than seconds had elapsed since the bay’s hoof felled me senseless on the littered stable floor. Yet in those brief seconds I had travelled through the eternities and back. I knew at last my true cosmic identity, and the reason for those dreams of wooded mountains and gurgling rivers, and of a brave sweet face that had haunted my dreams since childhood.

  Going out into the corral I caught the mustang and saddled him, without bothering to dress my scalp-wound. It had quit bleeding and my head was clearing. I rode down the valley and up the hill until I came to the Ormond house, perched in gaunt poverty on a sandy hill-side, limned against the brown post-oak thickets behind it. The paint on the warped boards had long ago been worn away by rain and sun, both equally fierce in the hills of the Divide.

  I dismounted and entered the yard with its barbed-wire fence. Chickens pecking on the porch scampered squawking out of the way, and a gaunt hound bayed at me. The door opened to my knock and Jim Ormond stood framed in it, a gaunt, stooped man with sunken cheeks and lacklustre eyes and gnarled hands.

  He looked at me in dull surprize, for we were only acquaintances.

  “Is Miss Rachel–” I began. “Is she–has she–” I halted in some confusion. He shook his bushy head.

  “She’s dyin’. Doc Blaine’s with her. I reckon her time’s come. She don’t want to live, noway. She keeps callin’ for Joel Grimes, pore old soul.”

  “May I come in?” I asked. “I want to see Doc Blaine.” Even the dead can not intrude uninvited on the dying.

  “Come in,” he drew aside and I went into the miserably bare room. A frowsy-headed woman was moving about listlessly, and cotton-headed children looked timidly at me from other doorways. Doc Blaine came out from an inner room and stared at me.

  “What the devil are you doing here?”

  The Ormonds had lost interest in me. They went wearily about their tasks. I came close to Doc Blaine and said in a low voice: “Rachel! I must see her!” He stared at the insistence of my tone; but he is a man who instinctively grasps sometimes things that his conscious mind does not understand.

  He led me into a room and I saw an old, old woman lying on a bed. Even in her old age her vitality was apparent, though that was waning fast. She lent a new atmosphere even to the miserable surroundings. And I knew her and stood transfixed. Yes, I knew her, beyond all the years and the changes they had wrought.

  She stirred and murmured: “Joel! Joel! I’ve waited for you so long! I knew you’d come.” She stretched out withered arms, and I went without a word and seated myself beside her bed. Recognition came into her glazing eyes. Her bony fingers closed on mine caressingly, and her touch was that of a young girl.

  “I knew you’d come before I died,” she whispered. “Death couldn’t keep you away. Oh, the cruel wound on your head, Joel! But you’re past suffering, just as I’ll be in a few minutes. You never forgot me, Joel?”

  “I never forgot you, Rachel,” I answered, and I felt Doc Blaine’s start behind me, and knew that my voice was not that of the John Grimes he knew, but
another, different voice, whispering down the ages. I did not see him go, but I knew he tip-toed out.

  “Sing to me, Joel,” she whispered. “There’s your guitar hanging on the wall. I’ve kept it always. Sing the song you sang when we met that day beside the Cumberland River. I always loved it.”

  I took up the ancient guitar, and though I never played one before, I had no doubts. I struck the worn strings and sang, and my voice was weird and golden. The dying woman’s hands were on my arm, and as I looked, I saw and recognized the picture I had seen in the defile of the dawn. I saw youth, and love everlasting and understanding.

  “Sweet William lies in the upper churchyard,

  And by his side, his lover,

  And on his grave grew a lily-white rose,

  And on hers grew a briar.

  They grew, they grew to the church-steeple-top,

  And there they grew no higher,

  They tied themselves in a true lover’s knot,

  And there remained for ever.”

  The string snapped loudly. Rachel Ormond was lying still and her lips were smiling. I disengaged my arm gently from her dead fingers and went out. Doc Blaine met me at the door.

  “Dead?”

  “She died years ago,” I said heavily. “She waited long for him; now she must wait somewhere else. That’s the hell of war; it upsets the balance of things and throws lives into confusion that eternity can not make right.”

  The Tide

  Thus in my mood I love you

  In the drum of my heart’s fast beat,

  In the lure of the skies above you

  And the earth beneath your feet.

  Now I can lift and crown you

  With the moon’s white empery,

  Now I can crush and drown you

  In my passion’s misty sea.

  I can swing you high and higher

  Than any man of earth,

  Draw you through stars and fire

  To lands of the ultimate birth.

  Were I like this forever

  You’d only too little to give,

  But here tonight we sever

  For life loves life to live.

  And the higher a man may travel

  The lower may he fall

  And the skein that I must unravel

  It was never meant for all.

  And what do you know of glory,

  Of the heights that I have trod,

  Of the shadows grim and hoary

  That hide my face from God!

  Would you understand my story,

  My torments and my hopes,

  Or the red dark Purgatory

  Where my soul in horror gropes!

  Now I am man and lover

  Rising with you at side

  To peaks where the splendors hover–

  But drifting with the tide.

  And the tide? It is mine to shake it,

  To battle the winds and spray,

  To batter the tide and break it

  Or batter my heart away.

  So I leave you–that you never

  The grim day have to face

  When I would be gone forever

  And a stranger in my place.

  Tonight, tonight we sever

  For my race is my own race.

  The Valley of the Worm

  I will tell you of Niord and the Worm. You have heard the tale before in many guises wherein the hero was named Tyr, or Perseus, or Siegfried, or Beowulf, or Saint George. But it was Niord who met the loathly demoniac thing that crawled hideously up from hell, and from which meeting sprang the cycle of hero-tales that revolves down the ages until the very substance of the truth is lost and passes into the limbo of all forgotten legends. I know whereof I speak, for I was Niord.

  As I lie here awaiting death, which creeps slowly upon me like a blind slug, my dreams are filled with glittering visions and the pageantry of glory. It is not of the drab, disease-racked life of James Allison I dream, but all the gleaming figures of the mighty pageantry that have passed before, and shall come after; for I have faintly glimpsed, not merely the shapes that trail out behind, but shapes that come after, as a man in a long parade glimpses, far ahead, the line of figures that precede him winding over a distant hill, etched shadow-like against the sky. I am one and all the pageantry of shapes and guises and masks which have been, are, and shall be the visible manifestations of that illusive, intangible, but vitally existent spirit now promenading under the brief and temporary name of James Allison.

  Each man on earth, each woman, is part and all of a similar caravan of shapes and beings. But they can not remember–their minds can not bridge the brief, awful gulfs of blackness which lie between those unstable shapes, and which the spirit, soul or ego, in spanning, shakes off its fleshy masks. I remember. Why I can remember is the strangest tale of all; but as I lie here with death’s black wings slowly unfolding over me, all the dim folds of my previous lives are shaken out before my eyes, and I see myself in many forms and guises–braggart, swaggering, fearful, loving, foolish, all that men have been or will be.

  I have been Man in many lands and many conditions; yet–and here is another strange thing–my line of reincarnation runs straight down one unerring channel. I have never been any but a man of that restless race men once called Nordheimr and later Aryans, and today name by many names and designations. Their history is my history, from the first mewling wail of a hairless white ape cub in the wastes of the arctic, to the death-cry of the last degenerate product of ultimate civilization, in some dim and unguessed future age.

  My name has been Hialmar, Tyr, Bragi, Bran, Horsa, Eric, and John. I strode red-handed through the deserted streets of Rome behind the yellow-maned Brennus; I wandered through the violated plantations with Alaric and his Goths when the flame of burning villas lit the land like day and an empire was gasping its last under our sandalled feet; I waded sword in hand through the foaming surf from Hengist’s galley to lay the foundations of England in blood and pillage; when Leif the Lucky sighted the broad white beaches of an unguessed world, I stood beside him in the bows of the dragon-ship, my golden beard blowing in the wind; and when Godfrey of Bouillon led his Crusaders over the walls of Jerusalem, I was among them in steel cap and brigandine.

  But it is of none of these things I would speak. I would take you back with me into an age beside which that of Brennus and Rome is as yesterday. I would take you back through, not merely centuries and millenniums, but epochs and dim ages unguessed by the wildest philosopher. Oh far, far and far will you fare into the nighted Past before you win beyond the boundaries of my race, blue-eyed, yellow-haired, wanderers, slayers, lovers, mighty in rapine and wayfaring.

  It is the adventure of Niord Worm’s-bane of which I would speak–the root-stem of a whole cycle of hero-tales which has not yet reached its end, the grisly underlying reality that lurks behind time-distorted myths of dragons, fiends and monsters.

  Yet it is not alone with the mouth of Niord that I will speak. I am James Allison no less than I was Niord, and as I unfold the tale, I will interpret some of his thoughts and dreams and deeds from the mouth of the modern I, so that the saga of Niord shall not be a meaningless chaos to you. His blood is your blood, who are sons of Aryan; but wide misty gulfs of eons lie horrifically between, and the deeds and dreams of Niord seem as alien to your deeds and dreams as the primordial and lion-haunted forest seems alien to the white-walled city street.

  It was a strange world in which Niord lived and loved and fought, so long ago that even my eon-spanning memory can not recognize landmarks. Since then the surface of the earth has changed, not once but a score of times; continents have risen and sunk, seas have changed their beds and rivers their courses, glaciers have waxed and waned, and the very stars and constellations have altered and shifted.

  It was so long ago that the cradle-land of my race was still in Nordheim. But the epic drifts of my people had already begun, and blue-eyed, yellow-maned tribes flowed eastward and southward a
nd westward, on century-long treks that carried them around the world and left their bones and their traces in strange lands and wild waste places. On one of these drifts I grew from infancy to manhood. My knowledge of that northern homeland was dim memories, like half-remembered dreams, of blinding white snow plains and ice fields, of great fires roaring in the circle of hide tents, of yellow manes flying in great winds, and a sun setting in a lurid wallow of crimson clouds, blazing on trampled snow where still dark forms lay in pools that were redder than the sunset.

  That last memory stands out clearer than the others. It was the field of Jotunheim, I was told in later years, whereon had just been fought that terrible battle which was the Armageddon of the Æsir-folk, the subject of a cycle of hero-songs for long ages, and which still lives today in dim dreams of Ragnarok and Goetterdaemmerung. I looked on that battle as a mewling infant; so I must have lived about–but I will not name the age, for I would be called a madman, and historians and geologists alike would rise to refute me.

  But my memories of Nordheim were few and dim, paled by memories of that long, long trek upon which I had spent my life. We had not kept to a straight course, but our trend had been for ever southward. Sometimes we had bided for a while in fertile upland valleys or rich river-traversed plains, but always we took up the trail again, and not always because of drouth or famine. Often we left countries teeming with game and wild grain to push into wastelands. On our trail we moved endlessly, driven only by our restless whim, yet blindly following a cosmic law, the workings of which we never guessed, any more than the wild geese guess in their flights around the world. So at last we came into the Country of the Worm.