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/.

The Hour of the Dragon, Chapters 2 & 3

And we’re back after a brief Christmas-themed interlude. Our story picks up in Nemedia (that’s the country next door to Aquilonia).  All is not well in Nemedia, because there’s been an outbreak of the black plague. Not the disease we know as the black plague, a different one that kills within hours and turns the entire body a blackish-blue color.  Sounds scary, but most diseases that virulent burn themselves out pretty quickly – that’s why ebola never really took off. The plague does, however, get the king and all of his sons.  Luckily, there’s a royal cousin willing to take over – and look, it’s our friend Tarascus from the last chapter.

Once the coronation business is over and the plague (conveniently) has died down, Tarascus decides that it’s time to get down to business.  Now, if I suddenly became king I can think of a lot of things I’d like to do, but one thing I wouldn’t like to do would be to head over to the kingdom next door so a bunch of angry men and their mythically heroic king could try to stab me.  I mean, if I wanted to do that there’s no reason I should go to all the trouble of becoming king first.  But that’s what Tarascus does because Conan has usurped the throne of Aquilonia and Tarascus wants to get it back for the rightful king, Valerius (we met Valerius in the last chapter as well).

Incidentally, I wonder what would happen if someone who was familiar with fantasy tropes but had never heard of Conan picked up this story. Could they correctly identify Conan as the protagonist at this point in the adventure? By all rights Valerius should be the hero of the piece. He had his entire family killed by a marauding barbarian and, as I mentioned, he’s the rightful king. That counts for a lot in most fantasy stories. Tolkien teaches us that the heir to the kingdom is the heir to the kingdom, even if the last king in the line lived 1000 years ago and disgraced himself by claiming the malevolent artifact he was supposed to be destroying. I don’t even want to discuss the things we can justify on Elric’s behalf just because he’s trying to regain a lost kingdom. Valerius seems mild by comparison.

So armies from both kingdoms go to war and Conan’s about to get suited up to lead his troops into battle when he’s jumped by some kind of apparition and paralyzed (temporarily, sure, but he’s going to miss the big fight). Without Conan around to lead the charge the Aquilonian army is going to experience a serious morale problem. Fortunately, Pallantides (that’s Conan’s general) comes up with a clever plan. He finds a soldier who looks a lot like Conan and has him put on Conan’s armor in Conan’s place. With the visor down, no one will know the difference.  Bear in mind that the Hyborian Age predates the age of Classical Greece by a couple of millenia.  As a result Pallantides will not have read the Illiad and therefore can not reasonably be expected to know how this plan is likely to turn out.  On the bright side, the poor soldier who just drew the short straw does get to wear Conan’s awesome armor (it’s all black and comes with a visored helmet with a wyvern crest and a black plume) and ride Conan’s awesome horse (it’s all black, too, and big enough to carry Conan, whom Howard has described using the word “giant” at least five times already in this story alone).

The Aquilonians start out doing pretty well in the big fight. In fact, it looks like they’re going to win until a whole line of cliffs collapses on their cavalry line, killing all of the knights as well as Faux-nan (I’m calling him that because he’s a faux Conan).  Bad luck for the Aquilonians (or was it? Has anyone been keeping track of that Xaltotun guy, and wasn’t he supposed to be some kind of big-shot sorcerer?). Tarascus and a couple of flunkies track Conan down in his tent and try to kidnap him, but even in his half-paralyzed state Conan kills a couple of the flunkies and, in a fit of rage-fueled awesomeness, grabs a bow and throws it at Tarascus. The bow has no appreciable effect. Just then Xaltotun rides up on a chariot, claims Conan as his slave, and drives off with his captive as a confused and slightly intimidated Tarascus looks on.

Told After Supper

I know, I’ve only done one chapter of “The Hour of the Dragon” and I’m already putting off the next chapter. I’m really not as distractable as all that. I was all set to read the next chapter of Dragon when my wife decided that she wanted to generate some Christmas cheer, so instead of reading about how Xaltotun’s insidious plan for Conan plays out I read her one of my favorite Christmas stories, “Told After Supper,” by Jerome K Jerome (I’m writing this up as we watch A Christmas Story – Ralphie just found out that his Little Orphan Annie decoder pin didn’t come in the mail today). For those not familiar with his works, Jerome was a Victorian humorist best known for his travelogue Three Men in a Boat, and it’s well worth a read if you’ve got a lazy Sunday afternoon on your hands.

Not to digress, but have you ever read Dickens’  A Christmas Carol, or listened to The Christmas Song (I’m not being vague, that’s the name of the song – it’s the one with the chestnuts) and wondered whether the English had some kind of thing about ghost stories at Christmas? Well wonder no longer because Jerome begins his story with some detailed exposition concerning the English love for Christmas-themed ghost stories, the types of stories one is most likely to hear when listening to ghost stories at Christmas, and so on.  It’s a bit long-winded, but Jerome’s like that sometimes.

The meat of the story is that Jerome (J’s stories always star a fictionalized version of himself) is attending a Christmas party at his uncle’s house and, after the womenfolk go to bed, the men stay up to drink and swap stories.  Because it’s Christmas Eve, most of these stories turn out to be ghost stories (because the English like ghost stories at Christmas, remember).

The stories are actually pretty amusing in their own right. My favorite involves a ghost who appears at a man’s bedside at midnight to show him that there is a buried treasure located somewhere in his house.  The next day the man tears down the indicated wall and discovers nothing. On the following night the ghost indicates a slightly different location and the man, assuming that he had simply misunderstood the first time, tears up the floor at the second spot. This continues every night until the house is entirely destroyed. No explanation for the ghost’s behavior is given and the listeners conclude that the ghost was just mean.

After all the stories are told, Jerome’s uncle reveals that his own house is haunted and that each Christmas Eve the ghost of a notorious serial killer arrives in a specific bedroom of the home in order to battle with the souls of his victims.  In a frenzy of drunken courage Jerome claims the right of sleeping in the haunted room to face the ghost.

To make a short story even shorter, Jerome retires to bed, meets the ghost, and the two bond over stories of the ghost’s misdeeds (the ghosts of the victims aren’t coming, they’re tired of getting punched every Christmas Eve).  At some point the ghost has to leave and Jerome agrees to walk him to the street corner.  On the way the two meet a local policeman, who is not pleased to see someone out and about in the middle of the night.  Jerome explains that he is walking his friend to the street corner, whereupon he discovers that not only is his friend nowhere to be seen, but in his haste to leave the house he has also forgotten to put on his pants (he’s still wearing a nightshirt, but for a Victorian this was considered pretty embarrassing).

So the constable leads Jerome home in disgrace, he insists there was a ghost, everyone ignores him, and now he doesn’t talk to that side of the family anymore.   Not Jerome’s (the author’s, not the character’s) best work, but an interesting half-hour diversion if you’re in the mood for some light Christmas reading and don’t want to get a lot of heavy-handed moralizing about how Christmas makes everyone happy.

And that’s it for today. Back later this week with some more honest-to-Crom barbarian-style adventure.

The Hour of the Dragon, Chapter 1

I had a hard time deciding what story to read first for this blog.  I knew I wanted to read a long Conan story because I just got volumes 2 & 3 of the Del Rey Conan anthology in the mail.  The choice was between “Hour of the Dragon” and “Beyond the Black River.”  I’ve read Black River before but was considering reading it again because it’s great and if I kick my shiny new blog off with a good story I’m more likely to stay interested until new habits form.  I haven’t read Dragon, so if I picked that I’d get to read something new, but it might not be good.  Since you’ve already read the title of this post, you know I decided to take a chance on the new material.  So here we go.  Incidentally, this story comes from volume 2 of the aforementioned anthology, The Bloody Crown of Conan, by Robert E Howard.

The story kicks off with four guys with an axe to grind (not the four guys on the book cover, they’re just mooks).  They all have their own motivations, but the short version is that they want to kill Conan, king of Aquilonia, and restore the rightful heir to the throne (for those not familiar with Conan’s story arc, this is a legitimate beef.  He killed the old king and all his relatives before declaring himself king of Aquilonia; one guy just happened to be out of town at the time.  Conan’s a jerk).  They’ve decided that the best way to accomplish their goal is to locate the three-thousand-year-old mummy of an evil wizard, steal the only artifact that can bring him back to life, perform a blasphemous ritual to resurrect the old codger, and then trust him to think of a way to get rid of Conan.

Savvy readers will note that this is not a good plan.  Not only does it conspicuously lack an endgame, it also calls for the resurrection of an ancient evil which will surely double-cross its allies.  In the conspirators defense, this is the third (probably, Howard wrote the Conan stories all out of order) major attempt to remove Conan from the throne and the other two, despite being well-organized, were spectacular failures.  If they’re grasping at straws by this point, that shouldn’t be a surprise.

So the conspirators perform the aforementioned blasphemous ritual, give the magical artifact to the newly-revived mummy, and, because his three-thousand-year-old burial robes didn’t make the transition very well, dress him in a black velvet robe printed with gold stars and crescent moons purchased specifically for that purpose.  This is a great example of how fiction sometimes ages weirdly.  In the ’30s black robes with moons and stars were probably considered appropriately sinister apparel for evil wizards.  Today they’re not, and it’s a jarring image.  I reconcile the problem by imagining the following off-screen dialogue between the conspirators immediately before the ceremony:

Orastes: Tarascus, did you get the robe?

Tarascus: Yes, it’ right here.

Orastes: Good, let’s…wait a minute, why does it have these moons and stars all over it?  Did you get this from the magical supply merchant like I told you to?

Tarascus:  Of course, what other merchant would have a black robe with stars and moons labeled “evil wizard’s robe?”

Orastes: Well, right off the top of my head, the costume merchant.

Tarascus: Oh. I guess that explains the wigs.

Orastes: Nevermind, we don’t have time for this.  Xaltotun’s been out of circulation for three thousand years.  We’ll just tell him this is what all the evil wizards are wearing these days.

And…problem resolved.  The conspirators get Xaltotun (that’s the mummy) up to speed and he’s on board.  The chapter ends with the wind howling ominously in the background.