Bran Mak Morn: The Last King (20 page)

�here, there, Briton,�exulted he, pointing to the post, �here you shall pay! A scant payment for the debt your race owes mine, but to the fullest of your extent.� The old man� exultation would have been fiendish, except for a certain high purpose in his face. He was sincere. He believed that he was only taking just vengeance; and he seemed like some great patriot for a mighty, lost cause.

�ut I am a Briton!�stammered Cororuc. �t was not my people who drove your race into exile! They were Gaels, from Ireland. I am a Briton and my race came from Gallia only a hundred years ago. We conquered the Gaels and drove them into Erin, Wales and Caledonia, even as they drove your race.� �o matter!�The ancient chief was on his feet. � Celt is a Celt. Briton, or Gael, it makes no difference. Had it not been Gael, it would have been Briton. Every Celt who falls into our hands must pay, be it warrior or woman, babe or king. Seize him and bind him to the post.� In an instant Cororuc was bound to the post, and he saw, with horror, the Picts piling firewood about his feet.

�nd when you are sufficiently burned, Briton,�said the ancient, �his dagger that has drunk the blood of an hundred Britons, shall quench its thirst in yours.� �ut never have I harmed a Pict!�Cororuc gasped, struggling with his bonds.

�ou pay, not for what you did, but for what your race has done,�answered the ancient sternly. �ell do I remember the deeds of the Celts when first they landed on Britain �the shrieks of the slaughtered, the screams of ravished girls, the smokes of burning villages, the plundering.� Cororuc felt his short neck-hairs bristle. When first the Celts landed on Britain! That was over five hundred years ago!

And his Celtic curiosity would not let him keep still, even at the stake with the Picts preparing to light firewood piled about him.

�ou could not remember that. That was ages ago.� The ancient looked at him somberly. �nd I am age-old. In my youth I was a witch-finder, and an old woman witch cursed me as she writhed at the stake. She said I should live until the last child of the Pictish race had passed. That I should see the once mighty nation go down into oblivion and then �and only then �should I follow it. For she put upon me the curse of life everlasting.� Then his voice rose until it filled the cavern, �ut the curse was nothing. Words can do no harm, can do nothing, to a man. I live. An hundred generations have I seen come and go, and yet another hundred. What is time? The sun rises and sets, and another day has passed into oblivion. Men watch the sun and set their lives by it. They league themselves on every hand with time. They count the minutes that race them into eternity. Man outlived the centuries ere he began to reckon time. Time is man-made. Eternity is the work of the gods. In this cavern there is no such thing as time. There are no stars, no sun. Without is time; within is eternity. We count not time. Nothing marks the speeding of the hours. The youths go forth. They see the sun, the stars. They reckon time. And they pass. I was a young man when I entered this cavern. I have never left it. As you reckon time, I may have dwelt here a thousand years; or an hour. When not banded by time, the soul, the mind, call it what you will, can conquer the body. And the wise men of the race, in my youth, knew more than the outer world will ever learn. When I feel that my body begins to weaken, I take the magic draft, that is known only to me, of all the world. It does not give immortality; that is the work of the mind alone; but it rebuilds the body. The race of Picts vanish; they fade like the snow on the mountain. And when the last is gone, this dagger shall free me from the world.�Then in a swift change of tone, �ight the fagots!� Cororuc� mind was fairly reeling. He did not in the least understand what he had just heard. He was positive that he was going mad; and what he saw the next minute assured him of it.

Through the throng came a wolf: and he knew that it was the wolf whom he had rescued from the panther close by the ravine in the forest!

Strange, how long ago and far away that seemed! Yes, it was the same wolf. That same strange, shambling gait. Then the thing stood erect and raised its front feet to its head. What nameless horror was that?

Then the wolf� head fell back, disclosing a man� face. The face of a Pict; one of the first �erewolves.�The man stepped out of the wolfskin and strode forward, calling something. A Pict just starting to light the wood about the Briton� feet drew back the torch and hesitated.

The wolf-Pict stepped forward and began to speak to the chief, using Celtic, evidently for the prisoner� benefit. (Cororuc was surprized to hear so many speak his language, not reflecting upon its comparative simplicity, and the ability of the Picts.)

�hat is this?�asked the Pict who had played wolf. � man is to be burned who should not be!� �ow?�exclaimed the old man fiercely, clutching his long beard. �ho are you to go against a custom of age-old antiquity?� � met a panther,�answered the other, �nd this Briton risked his life to save mine. Shall a Pict show ingratitude?� And as the ancient hesitated, evidently pulled one way by his fanatical lust for revenge, and the other by his equally fierce racial pride, the Pict burst into a wild flight of oration, carried on in his own language. At last the ancient chief nodded.

� Pict ever paid his debts,�said he with impressive grandeur. �ever a Pict forgets. Unbind him. No Celt shall ever say that a Pict showed ingratitude.� Cororuc was released, and as, like a man in a daze, he tried to stammer his thanks, the chief waved them aside.

� Pict never forgets a foe, ever remembers a friendly deed,�he replied.

�ome,�murmured his Pictish friend, tugging at the Celt� arm.

He led the way into a cave leading away from the main cavern. As they went, Cororuc looked back, to see the ancient chief seated upon his stone throne, his eyes gleaming as he seemed to gaze back through the lost glories of the ages; on each hand the fires leaped and flickered. A figure of grandeur, the king of a lost race.

On and on Cororuc� guide led him. And at last they emerged and the Briton saw the starlit sky above him.

�n that way is a village of your tribesmen,�said the Pict, pointing, �here you will find a welcome until you wish to take up your journey anew.� And he pressed gifts on the Celt; gifts of garments of cloth and finely worked deerskin, beaded belts, a fine horn bow with arrows skilfully tipped with obsidian. Gifts of food. His own weapons were returned to him.

�ut an instant,�said the Briton, as the Pict turned to go. � followed your tracks in the forest. They vanished.�There was a question in his voice.

The Pict laughed softly, � leaped into the branches of the tree. Had you looked up, you would have seen me. If ever you wish a friend, you will ever find one in Berula, chief among the Alban Picts.� He turned and vanished. And Cororuc strode through the moonlight toward the Celtic village.

Poem

Previously published as �he Drums of Pictdom�

How can I wear the harness of toil

And sweat at the daily round,

While in my soul forever

The drums of Pictdom sound?

Miscellanea

NOTES ON MISCELLANEA

Two of Howard� stories of the Picts, written only about two years apart, present strikingly different conceptions of the eventual fate of the race. In The Little People, probably written in 1928, Howard suggests that �he legend is that these Picts, whom the Celts looked upon as scarcely human, fled to caverns under the earth and lived there, coming out only at night, when they would burn, murder, and carry off children for their bloody rites of worship.�The story, clearly influenced by Arthur Machen� The Shining Pyramid (which itself serves as a plot device to set Howard� tale in motion), makes the Picts a race of underground dwellers with �tunted bodies, . . . gnarled limbs, . . . snake-like, beady eyes that stared unwinkingly, . . . grotesque, square faces with their unhuman features. . . .� But in The Children of the Night, written about two years later, the author says that the Picts, as well as the Celts, despise these loathsome underground dwellers, now called Children of the Night. And to compound the problem, in The People of the Dark, written in 1931, Howard makes the linkage between The Little People and The Children of the Night explicit: they are both names for the same race of pre-Pictish inhabitants of the British Isles, driven underground and devolved to a state scarcely human. In both of these latter two stories, the �hildren�or �ittle People�are said to be descended from a �ongoloid�race that inhabited Europe before the coming of, first, the Picts, and then the Celts.

Given the internal consistency in Howard� other tales of the Picts, this difference in relating their ultimate fate may strike the reader as odd. What happened is that, in August 1930, weird fictionist H. P. Lovecraft had written Howard a letter in which he expounded a theory, supposedly subscribed to by archaeologists, that the �editerraneans�(Howard� �icts�, who spread over Europe and the British Isles before the coming of the Celts, were themselves preceded on the Continent by �he squat Mongoloids now represented by the Lapps,�who, in the wake of conquest first by the Mediterraneans and then by �ordics,��ook to deep woods & caves, & survived for a long time as malignantly vindictive foes . . . sinking so low in the anthropological scale that they became bywords of dread and repulsion.�Howard immediately adopted this idea.

In these stories, racial memory and ancient tribal hatreds play a prominent role. Without attempting to excuse this, we should understand the context in which these stories were created. Racialism, in the years before Hitler, was quite intellectually acceptable. Prominent scientists, naturalists, and philosophers promoted theories of racial differences that, generally, �roved�the superiority of white Europeans, many going so far as to suggest that only whites were capable of cultural creation and innovation. Some went even further, and subdivided white Europeans into separate �aces,�to show that Northern Europeans (Aryans, or Nordics) were superior to Slavs (Alpines) and Southern Europeans (Mediterraneans). A focus of anthropology and archaeology was the idea of a volk, or ethnic/racial group, that had a unique language, used specific types of artifacts, and maintained an unique behavioral identity. Rooted in the nationalism prevalent at the time, these ideas were propounded by such eminent scholars as Gustaf Kossina and V. Gordon Childe. Social evolution was seen by these scholars as being due to a hazily defined �acial/ethnic vigor,�intellectual and linguistic superiority, and hard work. �ocial Darwinism,�the idea that the theory of evolution applied to individuals and societies, as well as species, was in vogue, and �urvival of the fittest�meant that the most vigorous races would survive. Many writers undertook to warn the white race that they could not be complacent in the face of the rising power of the �olored�world, lest they lose their favored position. It was the heyday of eugenics, the science dealing with the �mproving�of races through the control of genetic factors, to be accomplished by restrictions on reproduction among those with �nferior�genes. The intelligence testing movement was gaining steam, using spurious (or simply fabricated) data to �rove�that some races of mankind were more innately intelligent than others. Much of this pseudo-science, or selective presentation of data in support of preconceived biases, was widely accepted at the time, and was used as evidence when the United States established strict immigration quotas in 1924, giving preference to Northern Europeans. Even scientists who disavowed racism and discrimination, such as Franz Boas (Howard� �oaz�, still spent a great deal of time and effort in studying and attempting to isolate the physical characteristics of races.

Perhaps most importantly, for Robert E. Howard, one of his favorite writers, Jack London, promulgated many of these ideas in his work. Influenced by many of these prominent thinkers, such as Herbert Spencer (who coined the term �urvival of the fittest,�and from whose work Social Darwinism grew) and Ernst Haeckel (who first posited that �ntogeny recapitulates phylogeny,�that the biological development of the individual reproduces the evolutionary stages of its species, and who wrote that Negroes were �ncapable of a true inner culture and of a higher mental development�, London was in his turn a profound influence on Howard. (In fact, in some of his letters Howard discusses Spencer and Haeckel, to whose ideas he may have been first introduced by London.)

In Howard� stories of racial memory, such as The Little People and The Children of the Night, can be clearly seen the strong influence of London� works, including The Human Drift, Before Adam, and perhaps most importantly, The Star-Rover, � book that I�e read and re-read for years, and that generally goes to my head like wine.�The thousand-year-long treks, the superior Aryans or Nordics driving the �esser breeds�before them, the �creaming primordial savagery,�and the narrator who can vividly recall all his past incarnations, encoded as they are into his very genetic structure, �acial memories,�all are borrowings from London, to which Howard adds a passionate intensity and story-telling verve all his own. The ideas may be rooted in discredited pseudo-science, but there� no denying the power of the stories.

Rusty Burke 2001

With thanks to Dr. Mark Hall

The Little People

[originally untitled]

The Little People

My sister threw down the book she was reading. To be exact, she threw it at me.

�oolishness!�said she. �airy tales! Hand me that copy of Michael Arlen.� I did so mechanically, glancing at the volume which had incurred her youthful displeasure. The story was �he Shining Pyramid�by Arthur Machen.

�y dear girl,�said I, �his is a masterpiece of outre literature.� �es, but the idea!�she answered. � outgrew fairy tales when I was ten.� �his tale is not intended as an exponent of common-day realism,�I explained patiently.

�oo far-fetched,�she said with the finality of seventeen. � like to read about things that could happen �who were �he Little People�he speaks of, the same old elf and troll business?� �ll legends have a base of fact,�I said. �here is a reason �� �ou mean to tell me such things actually existed?�she exclaimed. �ot!� �ot so fast, young lady,�I admonished, slightly nettled. � mean that all myths had a concrete beginning which was later changed and twisted so as to take on a supernatural significance. Young people,�I continued, bending a brotherly frown on her pouting lips, �ave a way of either accepting entirely or rejecting entirely such things as they do not understand. The �ittle People�spoken of by Machen are supposed to be descendants of the prehistoric people who inhabited Europe before the Celts came down out of the North.