El Borak and Other Desert Adventures (94 page)

The business of the ruby has its immediate antecedents in “The Blood of Belshazzar,” a story from the Cormac FitzGeoffrey series. In that tale the Crusader protagonist learns of a giant ruby, found by a pearl diver clutched in the hand of a skeleton on a throne sunk to the bottom of the Persian Gulf. In “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” the throne is moved to a more plausible location on land, though the pearl diver still gets a cameo.

In October 1934, a new Howard story featuring an American adventurer seeking a vast treasure in city of outlaws hidden deep in Central Asia appeared in
Top Notch Magazine
. The name of the dauntless swordsman was Kirby O’Donnell. Despite all the effort Howard put into creating Gordon over the years, it was Kirby O’Donnell that saw print first. Howard had written two O’Donnell stories in close succession, “Gold from Tatary” and “Swords of Shahrazar.” The second tale is a sequel to the first. For whatever reason,
Top Notch
bought “Swords of Shahrazar” but did not buy “Gold from Tatary,” which was published in
Thrilling Adventures
in January 1935.

There is a degree of similarity between O’Donnell and Gordon, enough that some might think of O’Donnell as an alternate version of Gordon. O’Donnell is Irish-American while Gordon is Scots-Irish. Both have a
nom de guerre:
O’Donnell’s is “Ali el Ghazi.” Both are able to disguise themselves as natives. Both men are dark haired, of medium height yet well muscled, and have skin bronzed by the sun. Gordon’s comrade-in-arms is Yar Ali Khan, a ferocious and gloomy killer; O’Donnell gets help from Yar Muhammed, a
cheerful bandit. O’Donnell’s eyes are Aryan-blue while Gordon’s are Pictish-black. To a superficial critic Gordon and O’Donnell might seem like cookie-cutter heroes, mass-produced by Howard. The critical difference between the characters is in their motives and reactions to the situations they encounter.

The crux of “Gold from Tatary” and “Swords of Shahrazar” is O’Donnell’s friendship with Orkhan Bahadur, a dashing yet ruthless Turkoman khan. The complicating factor in that friendship is a massive pile of gold amassed by the Khan of Khuwarezm and hidden since the Mongol invasion of the 1200s. Ultimately, O’Donnell faces a choice: get his share of the loot and let Orkhan Bahadur take the rest, which the khan will use to finance bloody wars of conquest, or deny Orkhan Bahadur (and himself) the gold but thereby risk a violent break with his friend. This story isn’t about getting the loot, it is about the moral dilemma of having the loot. Instead of predictable pulp-fiction plot-complications the reader finds a resolution that pits the hero’s self-seeking instinct against his impulse to do what is best for others. It is indicative of Howard’s fascination with and ambivalence towards conquering warlords that Orkhan Bahadur, no matter how sympathetic, doesn’t get the money to make war.

When O’Donnell disposes of the gold, he finds himself being blackmailed. Herein lies an even greater difference between O’Donnell and Gordon. Where Gordon’s dynamic personality allows him to dominate any situation, O’Donnell tends to follow the path of least resistance. Though he is a savage fighter, O’Donnell has to wait for his opportunity to come rather than making it, El Borak style.

The treasure of Shahrazar links these tales into Howard’s cycle of Crusader tales. In “Sowers of the Thunder,” the protagonist, Cahal O’Donnel, rides into the East in search of the treasure of Shahazar, where the sultans sent their gold. A character in the tale tells of a legendary raid on the treasure by Cormac FitzGeoffrey. However, Cahal doesn’t find the gold. Instead he finds the shattered remnants of the Kharesmian Turks fleeing the Mongols. Despite the variations in spelling, Shahazar and Kharesmian are cognates of Shahrazar and Khuwarezm. None of this would have been particularly apparent to readers of the tales, as the stories were published in different magazines over a period of several years. Nor is it precisely economy of ideas, any treasure would do, as would any name for a hidden city. What one finds here is a personal mythology in which the connections are only apparent to a reader lucky enough to have all the material at hand. Lovecraft’s observation holds true for Kirby O’Donnell just as for El Borak.

There is a third O’Donnell story which remained unpublished in Howard’s lifetime. “The Trail of the Blood-Stained God” continues the treasure hunt
motif. O’Donnell plays the part of the honest thief, who seeks treasure without succumbing to the amoral avarice that brings the others to their doom. It is as if Howard wanted to resurrect the treasure hunting aspect of Gordon, but didn’t see that as part of Gordon’s character anymore. The El Borak of the 1930s is more of an idealist, while O’Donnell carries his greedier side.

Just as Gordon is too large to be contained in his own stories, Howard’s supporting cast was too restless to corral in Central Asia. Khoda Khan shows up in “Names in the Black Book,” a story Howard wrote in 1934 during his brief fling with the detective genre. Khoda Khan is a supporting character, this time with Detective Steve Harrison and Joan La Tour in a sequel to “Lord of the Dead.” Essentially the tale is a Fu Manchu pastiche. Howard’s underworld has no gangsters as such, instead being full of swaggering swordsmen from the Djebel Druse and the Hindu Kush. The villain is not a civilized Chinese in imitation of Fu Manchu, but a Mongol, a criminally minded heir to Genghis Khan. This Tamerlane of the Underworld is named Erlik Khan, thus linking him to the devil-worship cult of the Black Kirghiz in “The Daughter of Erlik Khan.”

Much as the Conan stories gleefully pillage freely from history and genre fiction, “Lord of the Dead” and “Names in the Black Book” mix a cast more at home in an El Borak tale into a detective story. Incongruous though it may be, the strategy is not a bad one. Dashiell Hammett wrote detective stories and added the trappings of adventure fiction, most notably in
The Maltese Falcon
. Unfortunately, Howard’s interlude with the detective genre proved to be a dead-end.

While the stories of Steve Clarney and Kirby O’Donnell are entertaining, full of vigor and action, these treasure hunters lacked something: for whatever reason, they were not the character into which Howard could really put himself. He had to return to his boyhood dreams.

In November 1933 Howard sent “Swords of the Hills” to his agent, Otis Adelbert Kline. With this tale El Borak was back. Howard used quite a few of his favorite themes: the adventurer with dreams of conquest, the lost city, and he even put a boxing match in the story. One distinction that signals the turn that Gordon was to take in the stories written in the ’30s is that the man seeking an empire is the villain. The Genghis Khan-Gordon of the “Iron Terror” is gone.

Essentially the tale inverts Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King.” Kipling’s protagonists, Carnehan and Dravot, find a hidden kingdom founded by Alexander the Great in remote Afghanistan. They usurp the kingship, but soon are overthrown. Dravot is cast over a cliff to his death; Carnehan is crucified, but survives (shades of Conan in “A Witch Shall be Born”!), bearing
away Dravot’s crowned skull, a memento strongly indicative of the hollow nature of glory.

In “Swords of the Hills,” Gordon visits a valley of long-lost Alexandrian Greeks and wins the right to be king by defeating the ruler in single combat. But Gordon refuses to make himself king: his goal is to stop the plot of Hunyadi, not to exploit the people of Iskander. Where Hunyadi (or Dravot and Carnehan or even Conan) reaches for power, Gordon is self-denying. From a practical perspective, Howard’s heroes tend to be peripatetic loners and kingdoms are not usually portable. Kingship is an end-point, not a beginning.

“Swords of the Hills” has an almost naive preoccupation with feats of strength. Gordon’s physical strength, endurance, and agility all play a role in defining him. In “Swords of the Hills,” his physical prowess is pushed to its limit. The reader has a sense that the hero is mortal, that his eventual victory is hard won and not a foregone conclusion.

But “Swords of the Hills” goes beyond that. There is a subtle sense that the Greek ideal of the athletic body is at work. Gordon’s entree into Attalus comes from freeing a man trapped by a massive boulder, a dramatic use of strength to save a life. At one point Bardylis even admires Gordon’s physique, “devoid… of surplus flesh.” The very kingship of Attalus itself is determined by who can best the king in a no-holds-barred fight.

Although Kline was unable to sell “Swords of the Hills,” Howard apparently retained an interest in it. In
One Who Walked Alone
, Novalyne Price Ellis recalled that Howard said he was he was studying Alexander the Great’s conquests and colonization of Central Asia. He told her that he intended to write a story about one such colony surviving intact until the present day. Either Price Ellis mis-remembered and Howard told her he
had
written such a tale, or perhaps he was writing a new one.

In any case Howard was committed to writing El Borak stories. In December 1933 he sent Kline the typescript for “The Daughter of Erlik Khan.” This story would see publication in the December 1934 issue of
Top Notch
as a “novel.”
Top Notch
typically ran a novelette as its lead feature calling it a novel. Although Howard’s work had that distinction, it did not get the cover illustration.

The story offers a nod to Talbot Mundy in the form of the heroine Yasmeena, echoing Mundy’s Yasmini, and also revisits the narrative elements of “The Man Who Would Be King,” but this time the motifs are even more rearranged. Instead of being loveable rogues like Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot, Ormond and Pembroke are murderers, devoid of principle, unable to show loyalty even to each other. The Black Kirghiz are an isolated pagan tribe much like Kipling’s Kafiris. But the Black Kirghiz have no noble heritage from Greece’s glory. They are squalid devil worshipers, “bestial” and “ignorant of
all but evil.” The Black Kirghiz recognize a talisman of authority just as the Kafirs do and allow the Englishmen to pass. But it is not the Masonic symbol of universal brotherhood, it is a token from Yasmeena. The Black Kirghiz have no interest in or much connection to the outside world. Where Dravot impersonates a god in order to assume power, Yasmeena finds that the role of divinity is thrust upon her. Moreover, there is no power in being a goddess in Yolgan. Rather she is a prisoner. Her sole desire is to escape and resume an ordinary life in India.

Just as “The Daughter of Erlik Khan” inverts familiar motifs from Kipling, the classic Western motifs devised by Cooper are rearranged. The traditional narrative is about restoring a captive white woman to civilization and domesticity. But Yasmeena is not white, her father is a native of Yolgan and her mother is Indian. Although she is a prisoner of the Black Kirghiz, Yasmeena arrives voluntarily. Domesticity is what she fled, if that concept can extend to a psychopathic husband who intends to beat her to death with a slipper. El Borak offers escape, but nothing else. There is no cabin on the Afghan border with Mrs. Yasmeena Gordon raising young ’uns. Yasmeena says, “[Y]our soul is a whetted blade on which I feared I might cut myself.” El Borak is simply a violent means to an end.

While Gordon may seem like a superman, his physical limits factor strongly. By the end of the story, Gordon is nearly drunk with fatigue. His face is like a grinning skull and his feet leave bloody smears on the rock. The feats of strength celebrated in “Swords of the Hills” have become a grim test of endurance.

While Howard emphasized Gordon’s physical prowess, he also carefully crafted Gordon’s personality. Self-assurance and duty are Gordon’s hallmarks, a sharp antithesis to Kirby O’Donnell. When his friend Achmet is murdered deep in a remote region full of bloodthirsty savages, Gordon does not turn back for reinforcements, he does not indulge in histrionics, nor even pause to consider options. He simply builds a cairn for his friend and goes after the killers. “Blood must pay for blood. That was as certain in Gordon’s mind as hunger is certain in the mind of a gray timber wolf.” Diego Valdez has returned as an avenger.

Gordon’s single-mindedness parallels his utter confidence. Just as he has no doubts about his purpose, Gordon never betrays doubts about himself. “[H]is bearing was no more self-conscious among a hundred cutthroats hovering on the edge of murder than it would have been among friends.” Gordon’s attitude alone allows him to dominate situations in which compromise would end in certain death. When attitude will not serve, El Borak backs up his words with deeds. He provokes a fight with a bandit chief
with no other aim than taking over the outlaw band. He ruthlessly cuts down a bandit who attempts a mutiny. Gordon threatens torture and death against Yogok to secure the priest’s cooperation.

Yet all the mayhem is directed ultimately toward the goal of helping a friend. Gordon’s initial motive is revenge, but he shifts his priority to rescuing Yasmeena when he realizes her predicament. He has no hesitation in using the Turkoman bandits to his own ends and enforcing his will with death. But once the bandits accept Gordon as their leader, he accepts responsibility to them. His duty to Yasmeena is balanced very delicately against his duty to bring the Turkomans out alive. Even Yogok will earn his freedom. The Diego Valdez aspect of Gordon is more than revenge and death.

Gordon’s devotion to duty reinforces the distinctive characterization of the supporting cast. Their motivations and attitudes are not muted by romanticism or glossed over as incomprehensible. They stand in sharp relief to the almost dreamlike fantasy of savage tribes, impenetrable mountains, hidden treasure, and devil-worship. Yogok, the high priest of an ancient cult that worships a pre-human deity of pure evil, wants to get rid of Yasmeena and her influence without arousing the ire of her worshippers. Like so many other politicians, he wants to eat his cake and have it too. Howard details Yogok’s network of spies and assassins to good effect and has the arch-priest betray more-or-less every other character that crosses his path. Yogok is a memorably sleazy villain, anti-romantic in that he could easily be transplanted to a political thriller or a hard-boiled crime story.