Hour of the Dragon, Chapters 17-18

Conan and his crew of bloodthirsty ex-galley slaves continue sailing south. The pirates are all set to begin a new reign of terror on the high seas under Amra (that’s Conan, remember), but he’s just anxious to get to Stygia as quickly as possible. Fortunately, they don’t run into any other ships on the way, so it doesn’t come up. When Conan and company finally get to Stygia Conan drops anchor in a secluded bay and waits a couple of days until a hapless fisherman happens by. When he does, Conan steals his clothes and his boat and takes off for Khemi, the capitol of Stygia.

It’s getting dark in Khemi, so Conan manages to avoid notice in his fisherman’s disguise even though he’s a giant and white. Things are actually going pretty well until he runs into the snake. For those unfamiliar with the Conan mythos, the Stygians worship the snake god, Set, and his priests keep a lot of big consrictors around. The rules are that the snakes don’t get fed, they just wander the streets and whoever they decide to kill just has to take it like a man, no fighting back or anything. Then they eat you and everyone considers this a sacrifice to Set. It’s danerous for people in the streets, but I guess it gets around a lot of the messy details of human sacrifice, what with choosing the victim and tying them up and having a big ceremony and whatnot. Conan sees one of the big snakes coming his way and everyone around him is prostrating themselves and holding real still; unfortunately, Conan’s policy is that he doesn’t bow down to stuff. Ever. So he just stands there and looks the snake in the eye, which naturally attracts the snake’s attention. Now if I was a big snake and I saw a bunch of people lying on the ground trying not to move and this one guy standing up and looking at me menacingly, I’d go for the easy meat. But I guess the snake wasn’t used to having any opposition and couldn’t think about anything besides what a big meal Conan was going to make. The snake goes for Conan and, predictably, Conan kills it instantaneously. Everyone around is horrified because that’s really going to tick Set off and Set isn’t the kind of god you want to have angry at you, so pretty soon Conan’s running from an angry mob. Down a couple of side alleys, through a small door, and Conan’s safe from the mob, but now he’s inside some creepy Stygian temple and robed priests in weird masks are coming in. At this point, Conan makes the obvious next move (for him): he kills the first priest he finds alone and takes his robe and mask (this makes the fifth disguise Conan’s worn in jus this one adventure, four of which he got by either killing or kidnapping someone and then taking their clothes. I guess if it keeps working there’s no reason to change the formula).

Pretty soon all the priests head off for some ceremony and Conan tags along because Thutothmes is going to be there, and that’s the guy Conan’s looking for. Since he has a mask and robe, there’s obviously no chance that any of the other priests will notice that he’s white. Or a foot taller than everyone else.  

They’re all going to one of the biggest and oldest pyramids in town, and unfortunately there’s a guy at the door asking everyone for a password, which Conan doesn’t know. So he spends a minute pretending to tie his shoe and, after all the other priests have gone through and are out of sight he gives the guard the universal password (by which I mean he kills him and then hides the body).

 

That gets Conan into the building, but now he’s lost sight of the other priests and he doesn’t know his way around inside the big, creepy pyramid. After a few minutes Conan is hopelessly lost and, just as he’s wondering what to do, a beautiful, scantily-clad woman shows up and offers to help him find his way. Now maybe I’m just suspicious by nature, but if I was wandering around the most secret forbidden temple of an evil god in the capitol of a foreign, hostile country and a beautiful, mosly-naked woman that I’d never met before offered to help me out, I probably would not take that offer. Conan is a more trusting sort, however, (at least where scantily-clad women are concerned) and the last time he trusted a random girl in a dungeon things worked out pretty well, so he accepts her offer. The woman leads Conan farther and farther into the pyramid until they finally arrive in a small room with a few pieces of living room furniture and, bizarrely, a coffin. At this point the girl sits down on the couch and starts making small talk.

Conan doesn’t like this much, but when he insists that they get going again the mystery woman just starts monologuing about how great it is to be pretty and how you can stay that way forever if you know what you’re doing. At first it seems like this weird naked lady has dragged Conan all the way down here to sell him skincare products, but then it turns out that she’s a vampire. Who knew?

Conan’s not stupid and he left his garlic and stakes in his other disguise, anyway, so he only lets her kiss him once before he runs away. He spends awhile blundering around in the dark while maniacal laughter echoes through the corridors before he finally loses the vamp and her minions (Egyptian vampires apparently likes snakes better than bats, which I think is a good choice - snakes are scarier and bats are a cliche, anyway). Of course, now Conan doesn’t know where he is, but since he didn’t know where he was to begin with this is hardly the end of the world.

A brief non-sequitur – John Carter is going to Mars

I’m getting close (-ish) to the end of Hour of the Dragon and I’m starting to think about what I should read next. A Princess of Mars has been coming to mind a lot lately, which is a little weird because Burroughs is not typically one of my favorite authors. Maybe it’s because I’ve recently begun to appreciate Frank Frazetta’s awesome artwork and his John Carter stuff is some of his best. Like This:

Fact: gravity on Mars is less than 40% that of earth.

The crescent moon, black sky, and bizarre city in the background really say “alien landscape” to me. That and the 4-armed apes and the green-skinned guy.

Or maybe it’s because Disney’s John Carter is coming out in theaters this year and the newest trailer (not that new anymore) is pretty awesome. If you haven’t seen it yet, I’ll go ahead and spoil it for you – it’s got a Led Zeppelin song in it. So maybe I’ll pick up a copy of Princess. It’s available for free online, of course, but I like a hard copy. Especially if the hard copy has awesome cover art (which it probably won’t because old books with awesome cover art are often more expensive than a newly-returned student like myself wants to spend).

 

Hour of the Dragon, Chapters 14-16

Publio’s got great news for Conan: his spies have learned where the Heart of Ahriman is. Conan sets off for the designated place, but his timing is pretty unfortunate. He shows up right after the mysterious man who already murdered the jewel’s owner and made off with it, but just before the guys that Publio sent along to murder Conan. Conan’s timing isn’t as bad as those other guys’, though, because they arrive in plenty of time to take a shot at killing Conan, and that’s usually a fatal move. So most of them get killed and Conan has just enough time to realize that the man he came to murder has been marked with the Black Hand of Set (mark of the priests of the Stygian snake god). So while he’s blacking out, he realizes that he at least knows where he’ll need to go after he wakes up again. Meanwhile, some mysterious Khitaians (that’s Chinese for anyone who hasn’t yet figured out how Howard renamed everyone) show up and interrogate Publio about where Conan is, but it turns out they already know more than he does, so they intimidate him into giving them a ship and they take off after Conan.

But where has Conan gotten to? He’s on a ship, himself. It turns out that he fainted from blood loss or concussion or something down by the docks and a passing ship picked him up as an extra deck hand. Conan wakes up on deck the next day and finds himself on a surprisingly racially segregated ship (well, maybe not surprisingly, since the story was written in the ’30s, but most modern fantasy writers don’t mention race if they can get away with it). It turns out that all the black men on the ship are chained to their oars, and all the white men are deck hands. Except for the captain, who’s the captain. The captain explains to Conan that he’s a deckhand now and that he’d better get used to taking orders. Conan asks a few questions and learns that the ship just happens to be going exactly where he’s heading, anyway. A reasonable person might decide at this point to just lay low for a couple of days until the ship gets him where he needs to go and then go AWOL.

Instead, Conan does what is perhaps the most unreasonable thing possible. He immediately dislocates the captain’s shoulder, then grabs a boarding axe and kills a couple of the crew. While everyone else is standing around trying to figure out where they lost control of the situation, Conan jumps down into the galley pit and uses his axe to break the slaves’ chains. He then declares himself to be Amra, the lost pirate king (he’s not making that part up. Amra’s the name he went by when he was a pirate. But he didn’t get lost so much as he just left one day because he decided it would be more fun to take over a country than rule a bunch of pirates). The slaves get so excited about all this that they kill all of the crewmen and then wait impatiently for Conan to begin a voyage of robbery and terror to rival the good old days. Instead of doing this, however, Conan orders the newly-minted pirates to sail him to Stygia, which is exactly the same thing that was going to happen anyway, only now Conan had to go to all the trouble of an armed mutiny.

Hour of the Dragon, Chapters 12-13

Howard really surprised me at the beginning of chapter 12. In this chapter Conan rides off in search of the Heart of Ahriman…alone. That’s right, Howard went to all the trouble of introducing, not one, but two rescuable potential love interests in this story and halfway through Conan is off adventuring alone. Sure, it makes more sense this way but that’s never stopped Howard before. I mean, he dressed Albiona up like a corpse so she could go with Conan just a few chapters ago, I’d think he could think up something similar here.

Anyway, Conan heads off dressed like a roaming mercenary and doesn’t get far before he’s stopped by some local strongman looking for new recruits. Conan’s about to tell him to drop dead when the guy happens to mention that he’s just captured this merchant with an un-openable box and would Conan happen to have any experience in the field of torture and interrogation? To make a long story short, Conan convinces the merchant to reveal the secret to opening the box. He doesn’t, however, reveal the secret to opening the box without getting killed by the poison needle trap hidden in the lid (it turns out the secret is opening the lid while wearing thick gloves. Who knew?). Count You-should’ve-had-an-underling-do-that drops dead, and the lucky underling hits Conan over the head, grabs the Heart of Ahriman (which, no surprise, was in the box) and takes off.

I’m not sure why that seemed like a good idea to the underling, but he and Conan grab some horses and off they go on a big chase through the forest. And Conan would’ve gotten the guy, too, except his horse tripped and then he got attacked by ghouls. I know, it’s like someone took a Dungeons & Dragons adventure, hopped into a time machine to the ’30s, and paid Howard to narrativize it.

By now Conan’s lost his man, but there’s only one place he could be going – Messantia (it’s a major seaport and a great place to either skip town or sell something weird without attracting a lot of attention). The only problem with this is that Conan used to be a big-time pirate in the area and a lot of folks in Messantia will likely remember him without a lot of fondness. Fortunately, there’s this rich guy in town who made his money selling Conan’s stolen goods, and Conan thinks the guy’ll put him up for the night and then help him find the fugitive with the gem. The guy agrees to the deal, but he also hires a bunch of thieves to assassinate Conan.

And that about wraps things up. I really wanted to get three chapters into this post, but  I couldn’t do it. When Howard’s writing he doesn’t play around. No fancy descriptions, no cultural background, it’s exposition, action, or nothing.

Going Back to School

Remember when I said I was going to use this site to catalog interesting things that happened in my life, should such a thing ever occur (it’s on the “about” page, you can check)? Well, today’s the day, because I’m headed back to school. Under normal circumstances that’s not very exciting, but I haven’t been a full-time student for a while. I graduated back in ’09 with an education degree and a teaching license (anyone who just wondered why I’m not working as a teacher somewhere just got an F in both Economics and Current Events). I’ve spent the last few years roaming the job market, always with enough work to pay the bills but never anything better than I could have gotten right out of high school. I spent about 90% of 2011 working in the exciting field of data entry, and that was the last straw. I can handle jobs where I have to sit really still for hours at a time, but I don’t enjoy them. And I can handle jobs where I have to turn off most of my higher brain functions for hours at a time, but I don’t enjoy those, either. Spending a year doing both at the same time was too much. So now it’s back to school. Right now it’s prerequisites at the local community college, and later this year I’ll start applying to veterinary schools.

The Past

 I was going to do a “future” shot with a cow standing next to a vet covered in poop, but there’s already plenty of places you can go on the web for potty humor.

Hour of the Dragon, Chapters 10 & 11

Wow, that last post was long. I guess I just got excited about the awesome rescue adventure Conan was on. I’ll try to make this one a little shorter.

Conan, Albiona, and their rescuers-ex-machina eventually end up in a weird underground temple. They find out that their new friends are worshipers of Asura, who in Howard-land is a creepy Eastern death god (I don’t know anything about Asura in real-life mythology except that it’s a real thing – I’m feeling too lazy to look it up right now, even though with Google literally at my fingertips it would have taken me less time to look it up than it did to explain why I wasn’t looking it up). Conan starts to get worried that his disguise was less impenetrable than he thought. However, the high priest assures him that the Asura worshipers only recognized him because they’re trained to look below the surface for true meaning and no one not trained in the worship of Asura could possibly have seen past such a clever disguise (that must have been some eyepatch).

It turns out that the Asura folks liked King Conan because worshipers of the traditional Aquilonian god (Mitra) persecuted the Asura-ites. Conan was never interested enough in religion for persecution so his official policy was religious tolerance because that was easier. That part about Conan being non-religious isn’t strictly true, Conan worships the Cimmerian god, Crom, but since the correct way to worship Crom is to not bother him and solve your own problems it amounts to the same thing.

The high priest informs Conan about a magical artifact called the Heart of Ahriman, and Conan deduces that A) he must get this artifact to stop Xaltotun and save his kingdom and B) that this artifact is the object which he saw Tarascus giving to a servant on his way out of the dungeon back in chapter 6. So he decides to go on a quest to retrieve the Heart (he doesn’t call it a quest, but that’s what it is). The high priest offers to send some of his lackeys along to help Conan, but Conan declines, saying he doesn’t need any priests tagging along and slowing him down.

However, Conan apparently feels that pretty young noblewomen are less trouble than priests because he takes Albiona with him without a second thought. I leave the reader to draw his (or her) own conclusions.

Conan and Albiona set off down the river in a boat painted all black except for the white skulls all over it. My first thought was that Conan was masquerading as a pirate, but the actual explanation is less interesting. It turns out that when the followers of Asura die their bodies gets escorted back to the far east in one of these boats (and since the locals are afraid of Asura no one will mess with the skull boats, so Conan gets a free pass as long as he stays on the river). Conan is disguised as the boat’s lone sailor and Albiona is disguised as the corpse, which is boring and creepy at the same time. She should’ve stayed home.

After a few days on the river Conan and Albiona leave the boat and head cross-country towards Poitain, which is one of the few provinces still in rebellion against Valerius. Conan is recognized almost immediately and escorted to the local ruler’s palace. The locals want to raise a new army and reconquer the rest of Aquilonia, but by now Conan has his heart set on the “regain the Heart of Ahriman” plan so he turns them down. Fortunately, the local congregation of Asura has ascertained the Heart’s recent whereabouts (it turns out that Asura is also the god of discovering other people’s secrets) and Conan prepares to track down the magical artifact unaided except for the help of (inexplicably) Albiona.

Hour of the Dragon, Chapter 9

Normally I try to recap two or three chapters per blog post because Howard wrote short chapters and I don’t want the story to drag. In this case, however, I’m reserving an entire post for one chapter because this one is so full of undiluted pulpy awesomeness that I want to give it the space it deserves.

But first, I hope you’ll bear with me for a short historical detour. I’d like to take a moment to talk about Peter the Great (hang on, it will all make sense in a minute). Peter the Great ruled Russia from 1682 to 1725 and was single-handedly responsible for dragging Russia kicking and screaming out of the Middle Ages and into the Enlightenment. One of the means whereby he accomplished this was the so-called “Grand Embassy,” in which Peter gathered up as many people as he could and toured the major capitols of Europe. The Grand Embassy had a number of major goals, including teaching Russian craftsmen how to build modern ships. Peter was so excited about this particular project that he would dress himself as a craftsman and spend weeks on end hanging out with the shipbuilders under the pseudonym “Peter Petrovich.” As far as I am aware there is no record of anyone confronting Peter about his disguise, and he continued to use it over and over again so he clearly considered it a success. However, most historians theorize that the deception was likely imperfect at best. The reason? Peter the Great was, in the medical sense, a giant. He stood 6′ 7″ (some sources say 6′ 8″) in a world where the average male clocked in at 5′ 2″. In addition, he wore a European-style mustache when all the other Russians were still wearing the traditional full beard. He was, to put it mildly, not inconspicuous. The likeliest reason that no one confronted him about his deception is not that no one noticed, but that if one of the most powerful and capricious men on the continent wants to act like no one knows who he is it’s best to let him.

You can probably see where I’m going with this, but I’ll explain it anyway. Conan is, as Howard has made extremely plain, a giant. He is both taller and broader than anyone around him. In addition, Conan is a Cimmerian, and Cimmerians don’t look like the native Aquilonians. And yet Conan throws on some old clothes, an obscuring hood, and an eyepatch and walks through the entire town undetected. Howard attributes this to the drunkenness of the Nemedian guards and the preoccupation (because of the occupation) of the Aquilonians. However, as I picture Conan’s disguise in my head, I can imagine no combination of eyepatch and hat that could possibly make Conan look like anything other than a gigantic Cimmerian (and there’s only one gigantic Cimmerian in town). Sure, everyone think he’s dead, but he came back from the dead just a few months back in “The Scarlet Citadel,” so that shouldn’t be a major obstacle to anyone. So why doesn’t anyone notice Conan walking into town? They probably do, but everyone wisely neglects to mention it. The locals in general won’t mind him being back and I’m sure the Nemedian guards all did the math in their heads and decided they weren’t getting paid enough to get killed by Conan.

Conan makes his way through the city undetected (ha ha) and uses a convenient secret passage to make his way to the dungeon. Once there, Conan amusingly decides that his previous costume worked so well that he’s going to try another one, so he waylays the executioner (who just happens to be on the way to chop off the Countess Albiona’s head), kills him, and steals his clothes. I laughed out loud at this point for two reasons. First, because this is the third time in this story that Conan has disguised himself (the first time was when he stole the Nemedian mercenary’s armor during his escape from Belverus). If he keeps this pace up, he’ll run out of things to disguise himself as long before the end of the novella. The second reason is that, while the executioner is described as being both broad and tall, I bet he’s no giant. I imagine Conan squeezing into pants that are much too small for him – he can’t button them closed at the top and they don’t even come down to his ankles. The shirt is even worse because he has to hold his arms out from his sides to keep from ripping the shoulders. The mask probably fits all right because the human head only gets so big and I think executioner masks were kind of baggy, anyway.

While Conan is getting dressed we cut to a dungeon cell. In it we find a beautiful Aquilonian woman with lustrous, blonde hair and “scanty” clothing. The chances that Conan is going back for Zenobia are going down by the second. We also find three masked men who are obviously irritated by the executioner’s lateness. But just as they’re getting down to complaining about it the executioner comes in. Apparently he’s running late because his clothes shrunk in the wash.

Instead of cutting off Albiona’s head as expected, the executioner dramatically removes his mask and, since he’s not wearing the eyepatch anymore, everyone in the room instantly recognizes Conan. The three conspirators are dealt with in seconds and soon Conan and Albiona are on their way out of the dungeon. The only things they still have to worry about are the dozen or so prison guards chasing them, the dozen or so city watch in front of them, and the fact that Conan spent so much time working on his disguise that he neglected to formulate a plan for getting out of the city once he’d rescued Albiona (planning isn’t one of Conan’s major strengths).

Just as the guards/watch are surrounding the two fugitives and it looks like the time has finally come for Conan to die a heroic death, a bunch of masked men show up and start killing Nemedians. It’s the Aquilonian resistance! It turns out that some more-than-watchful eye did, in fact, penetrate Conan’s disguise and has gathered the troops to rescue the king and the countess from Conan’s inability to think a plan all the way through. They kill the guards, bolt through an inconspicuous door, and fade to black on one of the greatest rescues in the history of literature.

The Hour of the Dragon, Chapters 7 & 8

This is my favorite image in the entire book. Not only does it have a great depiction of a giant wolf stretching like a housedog, but what is that little old lady doing with beer mugs that size? She's going to drink herself into a coma.

After some more reflection about how awesome he must be for Zenobia to have fallen for him like that, Conan flees the Nemedian capitol on horseback. He decides to cut across country in order to avoid pursuit. Unfortunately, a pesky raven keeps following him and cawing at him. This wouldn’t be such a big deal except for the fact that a few miles farther back there’s a second raven following the first raven. And a few miles behind that there’s some armored guys on horses following the second raven. Absurdly well-trained birds or sorcery at work? Either way it’s throwing Conan’s groove off and he needs to get away in a hurry.

While Conan’s cutting through the woods and worrying about the implications of all this he comes upon a quartet of Nemidian soldiers torturing an old lady. He decides to put a stop to this and rescues her. Almost. Right before he guts the last guy Conan trips over a fallen branch and, embarrassingly, falls on his face like a B-movie heroine running from a dinosaur. Fortunately Conan, himself, gets saved at the last second by a giant wolf. Seem bizarrely random? That’s because it is. It turns out the old lady’s a witch with a specialization in beast-mastery and the wolf is her buddy (she didn’t need Conan’s help after all). However, she’s grateful for the thought so she sics another of her friends (an eagle this time) on that pesky raven and, once it’s gone, hides Conan in her witch’s hut.

After dinner and an improbably large tankard of homemade beer, the witch does some fortune-telling for Conan. It turns out that the war’s over, as most of the populace decided it made more sense to give up early than to get themselves killed fighting a war for a king who’s already dead and who doesn’t have an heir. Valerius has already been crowned king and the soldiers who remain loyal to Conan have fled the capitol. The witch also prophecies that the only way for him to regain his throne will be to find the heart of his kingdom. Predictably, Conan doesn’t know what this means and, just as predictably, the old woman can’t be any more specific.

The next day Conan takes off and reaches the outskirts of his capitol. He briefly hides out with one of the few surviving noblemen remain loyal to him and we get a lot more exposition. The noble in question is pretty emphatic that the war is over and there’s no way to start it again. He suggests that Conan skip the country and start over somewhere else. Conan isn’t going to do that for two reasons. First, Conan likes a challenge. Second, it turns out that one of Conan’s staunchest political supporters (who also happens to be a beautiful woman) is about to be executed for refusing to become the new king’s love interest. Conan knows when he’s being set up for a zany-yet-heroic one-man rescue, so he demands that his host provide him with a sturdy stick, a floppy hat, and an eyepatch.

By the time “Hour of the Dragon” gets written we’re about a year out from Howard’s suicide. Whether this is showing up in his writing or his social ideas are just developing more strongly on their own I don’t know, but Howard’s later Conan stories have a strong streak of cynical social commentary. In some ways (as I’ve suggested before) Howard is the anti-Tolkien. Conan is a great king, not because he’s the “rightful heir,” but precisely beause he isn’t. Howard was very distrustful of social elites in general and anyone privileged enough to be the heir of a whole kingdom would automatically be suspect in his opinion. Unfortunately, the fact that Conan is a non-royal (and therefore potentially a great ruler) also makes the people unwilling to fight for him. As a result, Aquilonia is caught in a sort of Catch-22 whereby they’re practically guaranteed to have a corrupt, inefficient government.

 

The Hour of the Dragon, Chapters 4-6

Xaltotun takes Conan to Tarascus’s castle at Belverus and, in a secret chamber attended only by his most loyal servants, offers Conan his freedom in return for eternal obedience. Apparently Xaltotun hasn’t heard a lot about this Conan guy, because at some point he must have thought that this idea might work. Predictably Conan rejects the offer, so Xaltotun sends him off to the dungeon to rot until he changes his mind.

Since he’s been dead for the last three millenia it’s hard to fault Xaltotun for underestimating Conan. His co-conspirators might have been able to warn him, but this whole plan about turning Conan into a henchman is supposed to be a secret, so they don’t know about it. So it’s not one’s fault, really, that this is how it turned out, but Conan was probably still pretty surprised to find himself chained up in a wizard’s dungeon after being taken prisoner instead of killed after a major military defeat. Again. That’s right, even though Howard wrote “The Scarlet Citadel” two years earlier, that story immediately precedes this one in Conan’s personal timeline. That means the two stories are probably only separated by a few months to a few years chronologically. However, I’m sure Conan didn’t say to himself “Huh, what are the odds being toppled from my throne and ending up in an evil wizard’s dungeon twice in six months?” Being a barbarian and all, he probably said something much more colorful. I won’t speculate.

Unfortunately for Conan, the last time he found himself in this predicament he needed outside help to get free of his cell. Fortunately, Hyborian dungeons are apparently crawling with helpful strangers because here comes 0ne now – In this case it’s Zenobia, the scantily clad (why is everyone in Hyboria scantily clad? Doesn’t Conan live at the tail end of the last ice age?) concubine of the Nemedian king who fell in love with Conan after seeing him in a military parade a few years back and is now willing to risk anything to set him free. If it seems like Howard has strayed into the realm of teenage fantasy, well, nobody’s perfect. I particularly enjoy the part where he says “it was not strange that a passionate young beauty should be risking her life to aid him; such things had happened often enough in his life.” Bear in mind that Conan has to be over 50 by now. But Howard was pushing 30 by this time himself and rather than abandon his childish teenage fantasies I guess he was setting up some childish middle-aged fantasies to replace them.

Anyway, Zenobia lets him out of his cell and he sneaks out of the castle, but not before killing a giant, carnivorous ape that’s supposed to be the terror of the dungeon. Along the way, he learns that Tarascus has stolen the magical gewgaw that powers Xaltotun’s major spells and given it to a flunky to toss into the ocean. I only mention it because it’s possible that the gewgaw in question is about to turn into a macguffin. On the way out Conan also promises Zenobia that he’ll come back for her. This would’ve made Z less happy if she’d paid attention to all those stories about Conan, because no female character appears in more than a single story, regardless of how close she and Conan seem to be at the end of the current story. He’s like James Bond, only without the British accent, tuxedo, pistol, cool car, gadgets, or Russians.

On the way out Conan also kills a mercenary and takes his armor. I’d think that a reasonably well-equipped mercenary would probably carry a bow or a crossbow or something and therefore be able to take care of a near-naked refugee with ease, but this one didn’t and as a result Conan got a new sword and a suit of armor (slightly blood-spattered).

Merry Christmas

And if you don’t celebrate Christmas, I still hope December 25th treats you all right.

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because because they know they can be impolite without getting coal in their stockings, as a general thing.

As awesome as this comic book cover is, it’s not real. I copied it from http://amalgamage.blogspot.com/.