Conan the Barbarian

Prologue

Know, O Prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars. And thither came Conan, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, to tread the jewelled thrones of the Earth beneath his sandalled feet.

And know yet further, O Prince, that in that half-forgotten age, the proudest kingdom in the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming West. And this same Conan ruled from the throne of Aquilonia as Conan the Great, the mightiest lord of his day. And many were the tales spun about him as he was in his youth, wherefore it is now difficult to perceive the truth amid the many legends
. - The Nemedian Chronicles

I

The Sword

Privileged was I, Kallias of Shamar, above all my brethren amongst the scribes of Aquilonia, to have heard from the lips of my king, Conan the Great, the story of his travails and the high adventures that befell him along the way to the summit of his greatness. Here is the tale as he told it to me in the later days of his reign, when age had laid its fell hand upon him, albeit lightly.

On a rocky ridge swept clear of snow, a man and a boy braced themselves against the fury of the storm. All about them, like a demon, the night wind howled. Lightning rent the tortured sky, smiting rocks asunder and lashing the shuddering earth with a whip of fire. The man, burly and bearded like a troll, appeared in the fitful light to be of gigantic stature as he stood, legs apart, his massive frame wrapped in furs against the bite of the wind. The boy, likewise shielded from the cold, was perhaps nine years old.

Flinging back his cloak to float like a flag against the nighted sky, the man drew from its scabbard an enormous two-handed sword, the weapon of a god. As he chanted an ancient rune spell, compounded of strange words and an unearthly rhythm, he thrust the blade upward into the heart of the tempest. With mighty legs outspread against the buffetings of the wind, he brandished the splendid sword aloft, while the lowering clouds churned about him, as if the brand had pierced and wounded the very firmament.

“Harken, Conan!” shouted the man above the roar of the storm. “Fire and wind are born in the womb of the heavens, the children of the sky gods. And the mightiest of the gods is Father Crom, who ruleth earth and heaven and the broad and restless sea. Many secrets there be, whereof Crom is master; but the greatest of these is the secret of steel, a secret which the gods taught not to men but jealously guarded in their inmost hearts.”

The boy stared up into the huge man’s face, as stem in the inconstant light as the granite outcrop on which they stood. The man took the measure of his words, while the shrieking wind tore at his beard as if to silence him.

“Once,” the deep voice began again, “giants dwelt within the earth. Mayhap they dwell there still. Crafty and wise were they, the fashioners of stone and wood, the miners of gems and gold; and in the darkness of chaos, they be-fooled even Crom, the Father of Gods. By their wiles they stole from him the most precious possession of the immortals: the secret of the silvery metal that, when bent, springs into shape again.

“Greatly was Crom enraged. The earth trembled, and the mountains opened. With blasts of wind and bolts of fire, Crom smote the earth giants; and they fell down; and the earth swallowed them forever. Closing its rocky lips, the earth gulped them down into the bowels of the world, the unknown place where dark things creep and crawl, the place whereof man knoweth naught.”

The man’s eyes blazed like blue flames amid smouldering coals; and his thick black hair, caught by a fierce gust, spread out like the wings of an eagle. Young Conan shuddered.

“The battle won,” the man went on, “the gods departed for their celestial realm; but, wrathful still, they overlooked the secret of the beaten metal and left it upon the battlefield. There the first men found it, the Atlanteans of legend, our ancestors before the dawn of history.”

Conan began to speak; but the man lifted a warning hand. “We, who are men, now hold the secret of steel. But we are not gods; neither are we giants. We are but mortals, weak and foolish; and our days are numbered. Be wary of steel, my son, and hold it in respect; for it carries within it a mystery and a power.”

“I do not understand, Father,” faltered the boy.

The man shook his black mane. “You will in time, Conan. Before a man is worthy to bear a sword of steel in battle—a weapon such as the gods once bore against the giants—he must learn its riddle. He must understand the ways of steel. Know that in all the world you can trust no one, neither man nor woman nor beast, neither spirit nor demon nor god. But you can trust a blade of well-forged steel.”.

The man cupped his son’s small hands within his own and, curling the boy’s fingers about the hilt of the great sword, said; “The heart of a man is like a piece of unworked iron. It must be hammered by adversity and forged by suffering and the challenges flung by the thoughtless gods, nigh unto the point of breaking. It must be purged and hardened in the fires of conflict. It must be purified and shaped on the anvil of despair and loss.

“Only when your heart has become as steel will you be worthy to wield a keen-edged sword in battle and win against your enemies, as did the gods when they conquered the dark giants. When you have mastered the mysteries of steel, my son, your sword will be your very soul.”

All his life, Conan remembered those words, spoken by his sire on that lightning-riddled night. In time he began to comprehend the cryptic phrases, to understand the message that his father had striven to impart: out of suffering is born strength; only through pain and deprivation does a human heart become as strong as steel. But many and long were the years that passed before this wisdom became fully his.

Conan likewise remembered another night, a fortnight earlier, when the moon was an opalescent disk hung in the clear black sky like a silver skull on a sable shroud. The snow glistened in the eerie light, and a chill wind moaned through the snow-tipped pines as he walked through the sleeping village, down the rough road that led to his father’s smithy. There a fire blazed red, beating back the darkness. The firelight splashed with shifting hues of gold and crimson the smith’s leathern apron and cinder-scorched trousers. It gleamed on his sweat-beaded brow and flickered across the face of the boy, who watched, open-mouthed, from the doorway.

Tirelessly, the smith drove the bellows. Then, grasping a pair of long-handled tongs, he drew forth from the heart of the furnace a dazzling length of white-hot iron, flattened and glowing. As he placed it on the anvil and began to hammer it into shape, each ringing blow sprayed a shower of sparks into the ruddy gloom of the forge.

When the cooling core of iron had turned from white to yellow to dusty red, the smith replaced it in the furnace and resumed his pushing on the bellows. At last he glanced toward the door and saw the boy. His stem gaze gentled.

“What are you doing here, son? It’s time you were abed.”

“You told me I could watch you turn the iron into steel, Father.”

“Aye, so I did. With luck, the forging will be done tonight. The folk hereabouts think Corin the smith something of a warlock, turning iron into steel; and I would not disappoint them.”

In truth, the smith was something of a godling to his neighbours; he had come out of the south lands, bearing within his breast an arcane art—the secret of steel—that precious inheritance from the ancient Atlanteans, believed lost and forgotten by all who lived in this darkling age.

As the boy approached, the smith again withdrew the iron from the furnace. “Stand back, Conan; for the sparks fly high. I would not see you harmed.”

The anvil rang like a bronzen bell, giant-smitten. Fountains of sparks rose and fell before the toiling smith. Slowly the glowing length of iron assumed the shape of a mighty sword blade. Raising the metal in the tongs, he squinted along the edge, detected a curvature, and pounded it out with a few deft strokes.

After a final heating and inspection, Corin thrust the glowing brand into a vat of water, to temper the malleable metal before its final transformation into steel. The core hissed like a serpent, and a cloud of steam swirled up to invest the smith—for a moment only—in the diaphane garments of a god.

“Fetch me yonder bucket of charcoal,” said Corin to his awe-struck son. “To make steel strong yet flexible, the blade must now be baked at a constant temperature, as in a charcoal bed. This is the secret possessed of the folk of Atlantis; this is the knowledge I brought hither from the south when I fled my former clan. See, thus I let the fire cool...

As the blade lay for days buried beneath a blanket of hot coals, Conan watched his father toil over the remaining tasks. The cross-guard he fashioned with cunning into the form of a stag’s antlers. The two-handed grip he wrapped with string made from the gut of forest tigers. The pommel itself, of steel weighted to crush the skulls of foes, he cast in the likeness of the hooves of elk.

When at last the weapon was assembled, it was a thing of bright enchantments, of memorable beauty. The polished blade flashed like a mirror, reflecting sunshine and thunderclouds, as if the very fabric of the metal were somehow imbued with the spirits of the air.

“Is it done at last, Father?” asked the boy one evening.

“All but one thing,” rumbled the smith. “Come, and you shall see.”

In after years Conan remembered how rolling thunder-heads blotted out the stars as his father led him from the village of log dwellings into the upper reaches of the snow-clad mountain. As they clambered upward, the wind rose, biting the furs that sheltered them. They traversed white-lipped crevices, rough, flinty slopes, and bald outcrops where scarcely a toehold could be found. Thunder rumbled as they reached the summit. Then the storm broke.

Thus, in the fury of the elements, was the mystic rite performed to render the sword invincible.

Even upon the heels of that wild night of storm and incantation, Conan came to learn his first lesson in suffering. Cruel that lesson was and far too early for so young a child. But the north lands are bleak; life therein is harsh; and the hand of every stranger is lifted in enmity against his fellows.

Night shambled off before the silent footfalls of a frozen dawn. The waning moon, disconsolate, draped her face in a drifting veil of clouds. Only a tired wind stirred the silence as it whispered through the branches of the leafless trees.

Suddenly, the quiet was fractured by the clamour of horsemen who crashed through the bushes. Their horses, shod in iron, shattered the thin ice of the stream that paralleled the village. Dark and grim, wearing leather armour scaled with iron, and holding axes, spears, and swords in their gloved hands, the raiders swept down upon the hamlet.

Men and women, startled from their slumbers, awoke to find the rutted road between their huts blocked by mounted strangers. Confused and disorganized, the villagers emerged from their homes, clutching their coarse woollens about them and shouting at the invaders. One woman shrieked as she snatched a toddler from beneath a horse’s prancing hooves. With a roar of triumph, the rider leaned from his saddle to thrust his lance between the shoulders of the fleeing mother. She staggered as the spearhead burst into view between her breasts; then, limp as a rag doll, she was borne along, until the soldier, with an oath, tore the shaft loose from her mangled flesh.

“The Vanir!” roared Corin the smith as, swinging his blacksmith’s hammer, he plunged from the mouth of his hut.

Standing on his doorstep, the boy Conan stared in bewilderment, searching for order in the chaos all about him. But there was no order. A young girl darted past him, white with terror. Behind her sped a lean black hound, its jaws agape, its red tongue flapping. An instant later, the beast had pulled her down and worried her throat to crimson ribbons. Before Conan’s unbelieving eyes, one of her hands flopped like a beached fish on the mud-spattered snow.

A naked Cimmerian hunter, armed with a huge axe, sprang howling into the turmoil and swung his weapon like a wheel of death. It caught one raider on the thigh, hewing his leg away. Shrieking, the Van fell from his saddle, his blood spurting a scarlet arc across the snow. Above the clatter of hooves, the clank of iron, and the war cries of the Vanir, Conan heard the shrill wails of women and the screams of the maimed and dying.

Conan’s father pushed past his son, vanished into his hut, and reappeared with the great sword. The ensorcelled blade, which glittered like frozen lightning against the morning sky, swept all before it. Van after Van fell from his mount with entrails spilling out across the trampled, muddy snow.

Shaking off the paralysis of fear, Conan snatched up a fallen knife and dove into the fray, determined to stand beside his sire. Although the press of struggling men was too thick for the boy to hack through, his blade hamstrung one towering dark warrior, who stumbled into the path of the blacksmith’s sweeping sword. The invader’s head, sheared cleanly off, spun through the air like a well-tossed ball, to plop into the mud at Conan’s feet. The boy leaped back, nape-hairs astir, eyes almost starting from their sockets.