Bran Mak Morn: The Last King

Chapter .6.

It was not long before sunset when Bran came again to the reed-grown marge of Dagon’s-Mere. Casting cloak and sword-belt on the ground, he stripped himself to his short learthern breeches. Then gripping his naked dirk in his teeth, he went into the water with the smooth ease of a diving seal. Swimming strongly he gained the center of the small lake, and there, turning he drove himself downward. The mere was deeper than he had thought. It seemed he would never reach the bottom and when he did his groping hands failed to find what he sought. A roaring in his ears warned him and he swam to the surface. Gulping deep of the refreshing air, he dived again, and again his quest was fruitless. A third time he sought the depths, and this time his groping hands met a familiar object in the silt of the bottom. Grasping it, he swam up to the surface.

The Stone was not particularly bulky but it was heavy. He swam leisurely and suddenly was aware of a curious stir in the waters about him, which was not caused by his own exertions. Glancing over his shoulders he distinctly saw a swirl on the surface as if some object had dived under. Holding the Stone under one arm he shifted his dirk to his hand, and treading water with his feet, thrust his face below the surface and tried to pierce the blue depths with his eyes. Below and behind him he glimpsed a vast dim bulk that floated after him like a shadow. It seemed to be approaching him and he again took his dirk between his teeth and swam faster – not frightened, but wary. His feet struck the shallows and he waded up on the shelving shore. Looking back he saw the waters swirl again and then subside. He shook his head, swearing. He had discounted the ancient legend which made Dagon’s Mere the lair of a nameless water-monster, but now he instinctively felt that he had narrowly escaped death in some form. The time-worn myths of the land were taking form and coming to life before his eyes. What primeval shape lurked below the surface of that treacherous mere, Bran could not guess, but that it was some horrific form he knew from his indistinct glimpse. The fenmen had good reason for shunning Dagon’s Mere, after all.

Bran donned his garments, mounted the black stallion and rode across the fen in the desolate crimson of the sunset’s after-glow, with the Black Stone wrapped in his cloak. He rode, not to his hut, but to the west, in the direction of the Tower of Trajan and the Ring of Dagon. As he covered the miles that lay between, night fell and the red stars winked out. Midnight passed him in the moonless night and still Bran rode on. His heart was hot for his meeting with Titus Sulla. Atla had supposed he wished to torture the Roman. No such thought was in Bran’s mind. He intended giving the military governor a chance with weapons – with Bran’s own sword he should face the Pictish king’s dirk and live or die according to his prowess. And though Sulla was famed throughout the provinces as a swordsman, Bran felt no doubt as to the outcome.

Dagon’s Ring lay some distance from the Tower – a sullen circle of tall gaunt stones planted upright, with a rough-hewn stone altar in the center. The Romans looked on these menhirs with aversion; they thought the Druids had reared them; but the Celts supposed Bran’s people, the Picts, had builded them – and Bran well knew who reared those grim stones in lost ages, though why, he but dimly guessed.

The king did not ride straight to the Ring. He was consumed with curiosity as to how his grim allies intended carrying out their promise; that they could snatch Titus Sulla from the very midst of his men, he felt sure, and he believed he knew how they would do it, but he was not sure. He felt the gnawings of a strange misgiving, as if he had tampered with powers of unknown breadth and depth, and had loosed forces which he could not control.

Some instinct prompted him to ride toward the Tower. He knew he was near; but for the thick darkness he could have plainly seen its stark outline tusking the horizon. Even now he should be able to make it out dimly – an obscure, shuddersome premonition shook him and he spurred the stallion into a swift canter.

Now the the Tower leaped into view with startling suddeness – and Bran literally staggered in his saddle as if from a physical impact, so stunning was the surprize of what met his gaze. There was the impregnable Tower of Trajan – aye, but impregnable no longer! Bran’s astounded gaze rested on a gigantic pile of ruins – of shattered stone and crumbled granite, from which jutted the jagged and splintered ends of broken beams. At one corner of the tumbled heap one tower rose out of the waste of crumpled masonry, and it leaned drunkenly, as if its foundations had been half-cut away. Bran dismounted and walked forward, dazed by bewilderment. The moat was filled in places by fallen stones and broken pieces of mortared wall. He crossed over and came among the ruins. Where, he knew, only a few hours before, the flags had resounded to the martial tread of iron-clad feet, and the walls had echoed to the clang of shields and the blast of the loud-throated trumpet, a horrific silence reigned.

Almost under Bran’s feet a broken shape writhed and groaned. The king bent down to the legionary who lay in a sticky red pool of his own blood. A single glance showed the Pict that the man, horribly crushed and shattered, was dying.

Lifting the bloody head, Bran placed his flask to the pulped lips and the Roman instinctively drank deep, gulping through splintered teeth. In the dim starlight Bran saw his glazed eyes roll.

“The walls fell,” muttered the dying man, “They crashed down like the skies falling on the day of doom. Ah Jove, the skies rained shards of granite and hail-stones of marble!”

“I have no earth-quake shock,” muttered Bran.

“It was no earth-quake,” muttered the Roman, “Before last dawn it began – the faint dim scratching and clawing far below the earth. We of the guard heard it – like rats burrowing, or like worms hollowing out the earth. Titus laughed at us – but all day long we heard it. Then at midnight, the Tower quivered and seemed to settle – as if her foundations were being dug away – ”

A shudder shook Bran Mak Morn. The worms of the earth! Thousands of vermin digging like moles far below the castle – burrowing away the foundations –

“What of Titus Sulla?” he asked, again holding the flask to the legionary’s lips; in that moment the dying Roman seemed like a brother to him.

“Even as the Tower shuddered we heard a fearful scream from the governor’s chamber,” muttered the soldier, “We rushed there – as we broke down the door we heard his screams – they seemed to recede – INTO THE BOWELS OF THE EARTH! We rushed in; the chamber was empty. His blood-stained sword lay on the floor; in the stone flags of the floor, a black hole gaped. Then – the – towers – reeled – the – roof – broke – the – walls – crashed.”

A strong convulsion shook the broken figure.

“Lay me down, friend,” whispered the Roman, “I die.”

And he had ceased to breathe before Bran could comply. The Pict rose, mechanically cleansing his hands.

“Gods!” he whispered, and again, “Gods!”

Turning to his stallion he mounted and reined away, and as he rode over the darkened fen, the weight of the accursed Black Stone under his cloak was as the weight of a foul nightmare on a mortal breast.

As he approached the Ring, he saw an eery glow within, so that the gaunt stones stood etched like the ribs of a skeleton in which a witch-fire burns. The stallion snorted and reared and Bran tied him to one of the menhirs. Carrying the Stone he strode into the grisly circle and he saw Atla standing beside the altar, one hand on her hip, her sinuous body swaying in a serpentine manner. The altar glowed all over with ghastly light and Bran knew someone – probably Atla – had rubbed it with phosphorous from some dank swamp or quag-mire.

He strode forward and whipping his cloak from about the Stone, flung the accursed thing on the altar.

“I have fulfilled my part of the contract,” he growled.

“And they, their’s,” she retorted, “Look – they come!”

He wheeled, his hand instinctively dropping to his sword. Outside the Ring the stallion screamed savagely and reared against his tether. The night wind moaned through the waving grass and an abhorrent soft hissing mingled with it. Between the menhirs flowed Shadows, unstable and chaotic. The Ring filled with glittering eyes, which stayed beyond the dim illusive circle of light cast by the phosphorescent altar. Somewhere in the darkness a human voice tittered and gibbered idiotically. Bran stiffened, the shadow of a Horror clawing at his soul.

He strained his eyes, trying to make out the shadowy shapes that ringed him. In one place the shadows heaved and writhed and one of the forms was half pushed forward. But Bran got only a fleeting impression of a broad square head, loose writhing lips that barred curved pointed fangs, and a curiously misshapen, dwarfish body – all set off by those unwinking reptilian eyes. Gods, could a human race sink into such frightful depths of retrogression?

“Let them make good their bargain!” he exclaimed angrily, shaken.

“Then see, oh king!” cried Atla in voice of piercing mockery.

There was a stir, a seethe in the writhing mass of shadows, and from the darkness crept, like a four-legged animal, a human shape that fell down and groveled at Bran’s feet and writhed and mowed, and lifting a death’s-head, mewed and howled like a dying dog. In the ghastly light, Bran, soul-shaken, saw the blank glassy eyes, the bloodless features, the loose, writhing, froth-covered lips of sheer lunacy – gods, was this Titus Sulla, the proud lord of life and death of Ebbracum’s proud city?

Bran bared his sword.

“I had thought to give this stroke in vengeance,” he said somberly, “I give it in mercy – Vae, Caesar!”

The steel flashed in the eery light and Sulla’s head rolled to the foot of the glowing altar, where it lay staring up at the shadowed sky.

“They did him no harm,” Atla’s hateful laugh slashed the sick silence, “It was what he saw, and came to know that broke his brain! This night he has been dragged through the deepest pits of Hell, where even you might have blenched, though you knew of the Children of old. The Roman had not guessed the existence of them. Like all his heavy-footed race, he knew nothing of the secrets of this ancient land. Now give them their Black Stone!”

A cataclysmic loathing shook Bran’s soul with red fury.

“Aye, take your cursed Stone!” he roared, snatching it from the altar and hurling it among the shadows with a savage force that snapped bones. A hurried babel of grisly tongues rose and the thick shadows receded, flowing back and away from Bran like the foul waters of some black flood.

“Go back to Hell and take your idol with you!” he yelled, brandishing his clenched fists to the skies, “Gonar was right – there are shapes too foul to use against even Rome!”

He sprang from the Ring as a man flees the touch of a coiling snake, and tore the stallion free, wheeling the great horse about. At his elbow Atla was shrieking with fearful laughter.

“Kings of Pictland!” she cried, “King of fools! You blench at a little thing – stay and let me show you the real fruit of the pits! Ha! ha! ha! Run, fool, run! But you are stained with the taint – you have called them forth and they will remember! And in their own time they will come to you again!”

“The curse of R’lyeh on you, witch!” he yelled, and struck her savagely in the mouth with his open hand. She staggered, blood starting from her lips, but her fiendish laughter only rose higher.

Bran leaped into the saddle, wild for the clean heather and the cold blue hills of the north where he could plunge his sword into clean slaughter and his sickened soul into forgetfullness in the red storm of forthright battle. And forget the horror which lurked below the fens of the west. He gave the frantic stallion the rein, and rode through the night like a hunted ghost until the hellish laughter of the howling were-woman died out in the darkness behind him.

Fragment

Fragment

A grey sky arched over the dreary waste. The dry tall grass rippled in the cold wind; but for this no hint of movement stirred the primeval quietude of the level land, which ran to the low mountains rearing bleak and barren. In the center of this waste and desolation one lonely figure moved – a tall gaunt man who partook of the wildness of his surroundings. The wolfishness of his appearance was increased by his horned helmet and rusty mail-shirt. His lank hair was yellow, his scarred face sinister. Now he wheeled suddenly, his lean hand on his sword, as another man stepped suddenly from behind a clump of leafless trees. The two faced each other, tensed for anything. The new-comer fitted into the desolate scene even more perfectly than the other. Every line of his lean hard body betokened the wild savagery that had molded it. He was of medium height, but his shoulders were broad, and he was built with the savage economy of a wolf. His face was dark and inscrutable, his eyes gleaming like black ice. Like the first man he wore helmet and mail-shirt. And he was the first to speak.

“I give you greetings, stranger. I am Partha Mac Othna. I am on a mission for my leige – I bear words of friendship from Bran Mak Morn, king of Pictdom, to the chiefs of the Red-beards.”

The tall man relaxed and a grin twisted his bearded lips.

“I hail you, good sir. I am called Thorvald the Smiter, and until a day agone I was chief of a long-serpent and a goodly band of Vikings. But the storms cast my ship upon a reef and all my crew went to glut Fafnir except myself. I am seeking to reach the settlements on Caithness.”

Each smiled and nodded curteously, and each knew the other lied.

“Well it would be might we travel together,” said the Pict, “but my way lies to the west; and your’s to the east.”

Thorvald assented and stood, leaning on his sheathed sword, as the Pict strode away. Just out of sight the Pict glanced back and lifted his hand in salute and the impassive Norseman returned the gesture. Then as the other vanished over a slight rise, Thorvald grinned savagely and went swiftly in a course that slanted slowly eastward, swinging along with tireless strides of his long legs.

The man who had called himself Partha Mac Othna did not go far before he turned suddenly aside and slid silently into a brown leafless copse. There he waited grimly, his sword ready. But the grey clouds rolled and drifted overhead, the cold wind blew across the rattling grass, and no stealthy shape came gliding on his trail. He rose at last and swept the bleak landscape with his keen black eyes. Far away to the east he saw a tiny figure momentarily etched against the grey clouds on the crest of a hill. And the black-haired wanderer shrugged his shoulders and took up his journey.

The land grew wilder and more rugged. His way lay among low sloping hills bare except for the brown dead grass. To the left the grey sea boomed along the cliffs and the grey stone promontories. To his right the mountains rose dark and grim. Now as the day drew to a close, a strong wind from the sea rolled the clouds in flying grey scrolls and drove them torn and scattered over the world-rim. The sinking sun blazed in a cold crimson glow over the reddening ocean, and the wanderer came up upon a high promontory that jutted high above the sea, and saw a woman sitting on a grey boulder, her red hair blown in the wind.

She drew his eyes as a magnet draws steel. Indifferent to the chill of the wind she sat there, her only garments a scant kirtle which left her arms bare and came barely to her knees, and leather sandals on her feet. A short sword hung at her girdle.

She was almost as tall as the man who watched her, and she was broadly built and deep-bosomed. Her hair was red as the sunset and her eyes were cold and strange and magnetic. The Romans who represented the world’s civilization would not have called her beautiful, but there was a wild something about her which held the eyes of the Pict. Her own eyes gave back his stare boldly.

“What evil wind brings you into this land, feeder of ravens?” she asked in no friendly tone.

The Pict scowled, antagonized by her manner.

“What is that to you, wench?” he retorted.

“This is my land,” she answered, sweeping the bleak magnificence with a bold sweep of her strong white arm, “my people claim this land and own no master. It is my right to ask of any intruder, ‘What do you here?’”

“Its not my custom to give an account of myself to every hussy I happen to meet,” growled the warrior, nettled.

“Who are you?” how her hair glinted in the dying glow of the sun.

“Partha Mac Othna.”

“You lie!” she rose lithely and came up to him, meeting his scowling black eyes unflinchingly, “You come into the land to spy.”

“My people have no quarrel with the Red Beards,” he growled.

“Who knows against whom you plot or where your next raid falls?” she retorted, then her mood changed and a vagrant gleam rose in her eyes.

“You shall wrestle with me,” she said, “Nor go from this spot unless you overcome me.”

He snorted disgustedly and turned away but she caught his girdle and detained him with surprizing strength.

“Do you fear me, my black slayer?” she taunted me, “Are Picts so cowed by the emperor that they fear to wrestle with a woman of the Red People?”

“Release me, wench,” he snarled, “before I lose patience and hurt you.”

“Hurt me if you can!” she retorted, suddenly flinging her full weight against his chest and back-heeling him at the same instant. Caught off-guard by the unexpected movement, the warrior went down ingloriously, half smothered by a flurry of white arms and legs. Cursing luridly he strove to thrust her aside, but she was like a big she-cat, and with strong and cunning wrestling tricks she more than held her own for an instant. But the superior strength of the warrior was not to be denied and casting her angrily aside, her antagonist rose. But she, springing to her knees, caught his sword-belt and almost dragged him down again, and irritated beyond control, the Pict jerked her savagely to her feet by her red locks and gave her a terrific cuff with his open hand that felled her senseless at his feet. Swearing in disgust and wrath, he turned away, brushing the dust from his garments, then glanced at the motionless form of the girl and hesitated. Then with an oath he knelt beside her and lifted her head, flinging the contents of his canteen in her face. She started, shook her head and looked up, clear-eyed and fully concious. He instantly released her and let her head bump none too gently against the frosty ground as he rose to his feet and replaced his canteen.

She sat up cross-legged and looked up at him.

“Well, you have conquered me,” she said calmly, “What will you do with me now?”

“I should rip the skin from your loins with my sword-belt,” he snapped, “It is no small shame to a warrior to be forced into striving with a woman – and no small shame to the woman who thrusts herself into a man’s game.”

“I am no common woman,” she answered, “I am one with the winds and the frosts and the grey seas of this wild land.

Poem

Previously Unpublished

There’s a bell that hangs in a hidden cave

Under the heathered hills

That knew the tramp of the Roman feet

And the clash of the Pictish bills.

It has not rung for a thousand years,

To waken the sleeping trolls,

But God defend the sons of men

When the bell of the Morni tolls.

For its rope is caught in the hinge of hell,

And its clapper is forged of doom,

And all the dead men under the sea

Await for its sullen boom.

It did not glow in an earthly fire,

Or clang to a mortal’s sledge;

The hands that cast it grope in the night

Through the reeds at the fen-pool’s edge.

It is laden with dooms of a thousand years,

It waits in the silence stark,

With grinning dwarves and the faceless things

That crawl in the working dark.

And it waits the Hand that shall wake its voice,

When the hills shall break with fright,

To call the dead men into the day,

And the living into the Night.

Untitled

INTRODUCTION

Early in 2004, Wandering Star editor Patrice Louinet, studying Robert E. Howard’s early manuscripts and typescripts in his search for clues that would help in dating the author’s work, received a package of materials he had requested from Glenn Lord. Lord owns the largest collection of original Howard manuscripts. Among these was a typescript that had been listed in the “Unpublished Fiction” section of his landmark bio-bibliography of Howard, The Last Celt, under the title “The Wheel Turns.”

As he read it, Louinet was excited to discover that this was without doubt the “novel” that Howard had referred to in a 1923 letter to his friend Clyde Smith (see page 324). While Glenn Lord had read the typescript more than thirty years ago, it was not until years later that Howard’s letters to Smith had become available, so the connection had never been made.

Howard told Smith that the novel featured Bran Mak Morn. Unfortunately, alone among the characters Howard named in the letter, Bran does not appear in the typescript that has come to us. Perhaps his section was to come later. There is a Pict featured in one segment of this story, but his name is Merak. While the Pictish element of this tale is slight, we thought readers would enjoy this glimpse at a very early work of Robert E. Howard. At the very least, the letter to Smith indicates that Howard intended to bring Bran into this story!

We have adhered closely to Howard’s typescript. No attempt has been made to correct spelling, punctuation, or grammatical errors. What follows here is the tale exactly as Howard wrote it.

Untitled

CHAPTER 1,

BACK THROUGH THE AGES.

Men have had visions ere now. Men have dreamed dreams. Faint glimpses of other worlds and other ages have come to us, as though for a moment the veil of Time had been rent and we had peered fearfully into the awful vistas.

Scant and fleeting those glimpses, not understood. And from them men have have shaped heaven and hell.

Little they knew that it was but the stirring of memory, memory transmitted from age to age, surviving the changing and shifting of centuries. Memory, that is as strong as the soul of man.

Time has no beginning or ending. The Wheel turns and the cycles revolve for ever. The Wheel turns and the souls of all things are bound to the spokes through all Eternity.

Form and substance fades but the Invisible Something, the ego, the Soul, swings on through the eons. It is as beginningless, as endless as Time Itself. These visions, these dreams, these instincts and inspirations, they are but memories, racial memories.

To some comes clearness of vision, of memory. Shall I say I have dreamed? No, for they were not dreams, the glimpses I had of Eternity.

For Eternity I have seen, the Ages of long ago and the future Ages. For as sure as I have lived before and as sure as I shall live again, I have drawn back the veil of Time and gazed clear-eyed into the Centuries. Glimpses I had in my youth, in child-hood, in infancy. Fleet snatches I caught, in dreams, in the Mystic Bowl of the Orient, in the Crystal.

But in manhood my clearest sight was reached, in manhood, when I purchased, for ten times its weight in gold, the Mystic Plant of the Orient.

In the waste place of the Orient it grows scantily, and from a wandering Hindu faquir I purchased a small quantity.

“Taduka,” I shall call it, although it is not Taduka nor is it anything known to or by, white men.

It is not an opiate, nor is its effect harmful in the least. It is to be smoked and when smoked, the world of today fades from about me and I travel back into the Ages or forward into the Future. Years, space, distance, time, are nothing. I have covered a million miles with the speed of light and a thousand years in as many seconds.

I have traversed empty space, from world to world. I have passed from Age to Age.

I have lived Centuries and Centuries on Centuries.

Sights I have seen and leagues on leagues have I traversed, in seconds time, for the effects of Taduka does not last many minutes, an hour at the utmost. A boon to humanity it would be, greater than the greatest inventions, greater than the written annals of history, and withal, absolutely harmless. Indeed, beneficient is Taduka.

So I have lived again the by-gone Ages of other lands.

And so it is that I, Stephen Hegen, knowing that the average human mind does not believe what it cannot conceive, and knowing that the conception of Mystery lies beyond the average human mind, yet I set down these, shall I call them adventures ? of mine.

I was a man in the Younger World. I lived in the trees and my only clothing was the thick, shaggy hair that grew on my body. I was not a large man but I was terrificly powerful.

I travelled through the trees, leaping and swinging from bough to bough like any ape.

I lived on fruit and nuts and such birds as I could snare and I crept, silently and fearful, to the river for water, glancing swiftly from side to side, ready to flee.

I was Swift-Foot the Tree-man, in those early days and my name did not lie. Swift of foot, men had to be in those days. Many a time have I footed it to the trees or the cliffs with the Mighty One, the lion, or old saber-tooth, the tiger, bounding behind me, shaking the earth with roars.

Once among the trees, nothing could catch me, not even the leopard nor the Hairy Fierce One, the ape.

The Hairy People, we called them, we of the Trees, for they were but savage apes. Powerful they were, and terrible, and possessed of a nasty temper. We of the trees were much higher in the scale of evolution. We had a sense of humor, childish and grotesque, I grant you, yet still, a sense of humor. The Hairy People had no sense of humor, and since they were morose and savage and of a hermit nature, we of the Trees let them alone.

Mighty fighters they were; a full grown male of the Hairy People was ten times as strong as a man of today, and nearly twice as strong as a man of the Trees.

If they had had union, they might have wiped out the Tree People, but when they came to steal the women of the Tree People, as they sometimes did, they came singly or only in twos and threes.

We of the Trees had feuds and fights with one another but we always united against a common enemy. And not one or three or ten Hairy Men could overcome the whole tribe of Tree People.

When a Tree Man was matched singly a Hairy Man, the Hairy Man almost invaribly came off victor.

Yet when a savage and powerful Hairy Man sought to carry off a girl of the Tree People whom I desired for a mate, I proved I was strong of arm as well as swift of foot.

For I saw red rage and there in the swaying tree-tops, a hundred feet from the ground, we fought, hand to hand, the Hairy Man and I, and bare-handed and unaided I slew him, there in tree-tops, when the world was young.

I was a slave in Egypt when Menes built the first pyramid. By day I toiled unceasingly with thousands of other slaves, working on the erection of the pyramids and at night I shared a squalid mud hut with other slaves.

I was tall and fair skinned and fair haired. One of the tribe of fair haired people who lived in caves on the coast of the Mediterranean. The ancestors of the Berbers of today.

I toiled without pause or rest and many a time I felt the slave-driver’s lash, until I remembered that I had been a chief in mine own land. Then, laying hands on the slave-driver, I slew him and broke away, regaining my freedom with one bold stroke.

To Ethiopia I fled, and there I became a chief of fighting men. From power to power I rose, until the Karoon, the king of Ethiopia, jealous of my rising power, sought my life.

Again I fled, across the desert, until I came to a tribe of black men.

Fierce fighters they were, and they took me into their tribe. I led them to victory against other tribes and I was made a chief among them.

When we had conquered the tribes’ enemies, I led an army of some two thousand out of the jungle, across the desert and into Ethiopia.

The black tribesmen were spearmen. They knew nothing of the bow and the Ethiopians were all skilled archers, and they greatly outnumbered us. But I led them skillfully and we fell upon the Ethiopians, surprizing them and closing in so swiftly that they had scant time to use their bows. In hand-to-hand fighting the Ethiopians could not stand before the fierce speamen and they broke and fled.

The Karoon, the king of Ethiopia, was slain in battle and I put myself on the Ethiopian throne.

Ethiopia became powerful under my rule and the Egyptians were forced to double their frontier armies.

I trained the armies of Ethiopia and I invaded Egypt. The Egyptian armies were hurled back and the Egyptian cities fell before the onslaught of my Ethiopian bowmen and savage black spearmen.

I conquered Egypt and for a time I reigned on the throne of the nation in which I had been a slave.

But the Egyptians rose against me and I was forced to flee to Ethiopia.

But no Egyptian army ever successfully invaded Ethiopia during my reign and I was content with the kingdom of Ethiopia for I made it into a mighty nation, supreme in that part of Africa.

I was a Pict and my name was Merak. I was a wiry man of medium height, with very black hair and very black eyes.

My tribe lived in wattle huts on the east coast of Britain. It was not known as Britain then, for the Brythons had not yet given the island its name.

My people were artizans, then, not warriors. We hunted a little and tilled the soil and were a peaceful people.

I sat before the door of my hut, fashioning a spear of bronze.

Before the Gaelic invasion, the Picts made their weapons and implements of skillfully fashioned flint and obsidian and jade.

But the first Celts had come from Hibernia and had settled in Britain, bringing with them the first metal ever seen by the Picts of the island. The Gaels had not conquered Britain entirely, by any means, nor did they ever entirel subjugate the Picts.

We were artizans and we were not warriors but we were cunning and skilled in crafts of many kinds.

As I fashioned the spear I glanced up, to see Mea-lah, the daughter of one of the chief’s councilors, passing.

I was aware of large, dark, beautiful eyes gazing into mine. Just an instant and then the girl had walked on.

I watched her, a vague yearning filling my soul.

Mea-lah’s eyes were very beautiful, her skin was as softly white as snow. Her soft, dark hair rippled down over her slim, snowy shoulders. She tripped lightly along on dainty feet that seemed scarcely to touch the ground.

She was going toward the sea-shore and presently I saw her slight form outlined against the cloud-flecked sky. She was standing upon a great rock, gazing sea-ward, her rippling hair floating in the sea-breeze.

A dainty, lovely thing, scarce more than a girl-child – and she was to marry the son of the chief.

Had those beautiful eyes seen in me more than a common artizan of the village? Had there been a certain wistfullness in their gaze?

I, but an ordinary Pictish tribesman, he, the son of the chief of the tribe – yet I had seen her shrink from him.

He was a cruel man, was Neroc, son of the chief and Mea-lah was made to be caressed and used tenderly. But her father was councilor –

I shrugged my shoulders and bent to work on the spear.

But now and again I looked up, to gaze at Mea-lah, standing on the rock by sea-shore.

From the sea came merchants, in those days, and traders. Tyrians and Phoenecians from Spain.

We were not a sea-faring people, but to us the sea was all that was strange and romantic, for the merchants and traders told us of lands afar off and of strange people and strange seas.

Mea-lah had always spent much time on the sea-shore, playing with the wavelets, tripping about the beach or lying upon the sand, gazing toward the blue haze that marked the far horrizon, dreaming dreams.

And I watched the girl dumbly, dreaming my own dreams, yearning for her.

And one I came to the door of my wattle hut, to see strange, long, black ships sweeping in from the sea. Long oars and sail swept them them swiftly forward. And they were crowded with men strange to us, huge, fierce men, with winged helmets and fair hair and long, fair, beards, who shook spears and long swords and roared strange, heathen, war-cries.

The ships swung inshore. These were no Phoenecian traders, no African merchants. They were warriors, pirates, from the far North.

They were Norsemen, Vikings. Some of the first of the fierce races that harried the coasts of Britain for centuries after.

They swept down on the Pictish village with fire and sword.

The Picts were not warriors. They could not stand before the giant Vikings with their iron and bronze armor and their great swords.

We fled from the village, men, women and children, the men but seeking to cover the retreat of the women and children.

The Norsemen took the offensive, ever, hurling themselves into the battle with a recklessness that the Picts had never seen equalled. The Picts, on the other hand, fought only on the defensive, ever retreating, and when the women and the children had found safety in the forest, the Pictish men broke away and fled in every direction. Many of them were cut down, among them Neroc, the chief’s son.

I was making for the forest, with some speed, glancing back from time to time toward the village, where the Norsemen were tearing the wattle huts to pieces in search of loot and women who might be hiding.

Some of them were leaping and branishing their weapons in some kind of a wild dance, others roaring uncouth war-songs, others applying the torch to the huts.

Nearer to me were scattered groups of warriors, pursuing the fleeing Pictish men and any Pictish women who had not dissapeared into the forest.

The screams of women rose above the clash of swords and the savage war-cries.

And then I heard my name called.

“Merak! Merak!”

And I saw who called me. Mea-lah struggled in the arms of a huge Norseman who carried her as if she was an infant.

Her beautiful dark eyes were wide, her lovely face white with terror and the horror of fear. Her soft arms were out-streched to me, appealingly, imploringly.

And I saw the red mist of rage and charged the Norseman, silently, savagely.

The Norseman, turning, saw but a Pict armed with a long bronze dagger, rushing at him.

With a roaring laugh, he shifted the struggling girl, and holding her helpless under one mighty arm, with the other raised a great sword to exterminate the presumptious Pictish fool that dared to charge a Norseman.

He was arrogantly over-confident and could not have gaged the speed at which I was coming. The great sword had scarcely reached the highest point of its upward arc, when I darted in under his arm and stabbed him thrice, driving the dagger through crevices in his corselet of iron.

With a bellow he staggered backward, his sword spinning from his grasp. He crashed to the ground, his thick, yellow beard pointing upward, the girl dropping from his arms as he fell.

I snatched her up and pushed her toward the forest. Without pausing to see whether sh made for it or not, I turned to meet the rush of three other Norsemen, who were charging down upon me with savage shouts.

But I had learned one thing. I was much quicker than the Norsemen and lighter on my feet.

As they swept down upon me, I ducked under the side-swing of a sword and tripped the wielder so that he fell sprawling. The flat of another’s sword struck me a staggering blow across the head but I rallied and lunging forward, I plunged my dagger to the hilt in the Norseman’s breast, wrenching it out as he fell.

The other Viking had stopped several yards away and was poising a long spear over his shoulder to throw.

I flung my dagger with all my force against his breast. As he lunged forward he hurled the spear but the shaft only struck me a glancing blow on the forest.

I staggered and someone caught me, supporting me. It was Mea-lah.

My senses were reeling, but I caught her by the hand and we fled into the forest.

The Norsemen did not care to follow the Picts into the thick forest and soon we were safe.

Then I leaned against a great tree, spent and weak, but happy.

And then I felt soft arms about my neck, soft hair falling about my face and rippling down over my shoulders, a soft, slender, girl-ish form clinging and nestling in my arms, soft lips against mine. Mea-lah.

I was Lakur the archer in the land of Kita. We were a war-like people and many and many a time have I marched through the great gates of Carchemish, with hundreds and sometimes thousands, of bowmen and swordmen and spearmen and chariot drivers.

We fought in defense of our country, for the most part, and we had wars enough at that.

Sometimes the armies came back through the great gates of Carchemish, straggling, defeated; more often with long trains of loot-filled wains and captives, strong men, handsome children and young women for slaves.

In the first-mentioned event, old men and women and the soldiers of the city manned the wall and prepared to hold the city.

In the latter, the whole great populace turned out and made a gala day and the loot was distributed and the slaves sold.

Speaking of slaves, there was a proverb, “Better a slave among the Hittites than a free man in Assyria.”

For we Hittites were famous for our mild treatment of prisoners and slaves. Fierce and savage we were in war, but in peace we were a fair and just people. We had none of the Semitic cruelty, and we were of a different race than the other tribes of Canaan.

It is not recorded in history that captives taken in war begged to be sold among the Hittites but it is the truth.

It was no law that caused the indulgence of slaves, but the leniency of the Hittite nature. I cannot explain why the Hittites were more kindly disposed than the other tribes of Canaan but the fact remains that they were.

Once we marched through the gates of Carchemish to oppose a mighty army that came from the East across the desert, laying waste the country as they came.

Assyrians they were, the warriors of of the fiercest and most war-like nation that early Asia ever knew.

They were led by a great general, a mighty man of valour, whose skill was so great that few tribes dared resist his army, and whose savage cruelty surpassed his skill and valour.

Where e’re the Assyrian army went, looting, murder, fire and rapine were. They slew men, women and children, sparing only the most beautiful of the young women for slaves and concubines.

They were, for a time, the lords of Asia, except for the Hittites.

We marched to meet the Assyrian army and we met it leagues from Khita. Such was the custom of the Hittites, never to fight a battle within their boundaries, and thus spare the people of Khita the horrors of an invading army, and in case of defeat to give them time to gain walled cities.

We did not join battle at once with the Assyrians. Our camp was pitched on a slope, theirs on the plains; and the plain was white with their tents.

They greatly outnumbered us, but we held the stragetic position, for at the foot of the slope whereon we camped, were many ravines and gulchs and huge boulders.

The Assyrians did not care to attack us there until they had supplied themselves with provisions and had looked to their weapons. Not for nothing had the Hittites held their own against all hostile nations for more than eight hundred years.

Nor did we care to sally out against them so we rested and raised fortifications and strung bows and sharpened swords and the Assyrians looted and ravaged on the plain and the smoke of burning cities and villages rose to the skies with the screeches of murdered men and children and the screams of women.

With the coming of the dark Asian night, many scouts and spies stole forth from the Hittite camp to spy among the Assyrians, to learn their numbers and if possible their plans.

I, Lakur the bowman, was one the spies.

It was a difficult business and full of risk for the spies. The Assyrians had many sentries stationed about the camp and some of the Hittites were discovered and went down, fighting, beneath the Assyrian sword.

But some of them gained the Assyrian camp and among them, I.

I entered the camp stealthily, now gliding noiselessly from shadow to shadow, now creeping forward on my hands and knees, now lying flat, scarcely daring to breathe as an Assyrian passed close by.

At last I found myself close to a large tent which seemed the pavilion of some chief.

I crept close to it, keeping ever in its shadow and daring greatly, cut a small slit in the cloth with my dagger.

Peering in with great caution, I saw that the tent was occupied by three or four women, one of them a captive, the others slaves but Assyrian women.

There was a stake driven into the dirt floor of the tent and beside this the captive woman crouched, her wrists bound to the stake. She was little more than a girl, a slender, beautiful girl, who, for her aristocratic features and daintiness, might have been the daughter of a great chieftain or a king.

Her eyes were wide with terror and her golden hair fell in confusion about her bare shoulders. Her single, robe-like garment was torn in places and a bruise showed on her soft round arm, showing that she had been roughly used.

As I watched, the tent-flap parted and an Assyrian warrior strode in. He was a chief, a tall, large man, heavily bearded, with a harsh, cruel face. The captive girl shrank away from him with a low cry of fright.

He smiled cruelly and drove the slave women from the tent.

Then he approached the girl and unbinding her hands, raised her to her feet.

I could not understand their language but I could tell that she was pleading frantically, piteously. The Assyrian only laughed at her.

He drew her close to him and kissed her roughly, again and again. Then he thrust her from him with such force that she fell prostrate on the tent-floor. She lay there, her slim form shaken with sobs. The Assyrian sneered and lifting her again in his arms, crushed her to him, gazing lustfully into her eyes, ignoring her weeping and pleas.

I wondered how any man could find it in him to mis-use so dainty and helpless a girl as she.

But cruelty was a predominant trait of the the Assyrians. The Assyrian was but playing with her as a cat plays with a mouse.

The girl’s hand, pushing against her captor, as she struggled in his arms as her bore her to a couch in the corner of the tent, touched the hilt of a dagger in his girdle.

Instantly she snatched it out and tried to stab the Assyrian with it. But he was too quick for her. He wrested the dagger from her hand and flung it across the tent. Then, his expression changed from sneering laughter to cruel rage, he hurled her to the tent-floor at his feet.

He snatched up a chariot-whip and with one savage jerk, tore the girl’s garment from her body, and brought the whip down across her soft, snowy shoulders. A red welt appeared upon her dainty skin but she did not cry out. She only hid her face in her hands and waited, shuddering, for the next blow.

The Assyrian’s treatment of his fair captive had angered me, but I had interfered for I felt I could not chance discovery by the camp. But now my rage was too much.

Gloating over the girl and deciding where the whip would strike next, the Assyrian did not hear the cloth of the tent part as I ripped a seven foot slash. He did not me as I charged silently across the tent. I was nearly upon him before he turned.

His eyes went wide and then narrowed to slits as he saw me.

“A Hittite!” he hissed as he snatched a short sword from his girdle. Before he could use it, my dagger glittered in the light of the tent as I struck once.

The Assyrian swayed and pitched backward, his sword falling from his hand.

A moment I stood over him, alert for any sound. But I heard none except the sound of the warriors gambling and revelling in other tents or by the great camp-fires.

I turned to the girl. She was still crouching, gazing first at me and then at the body of the Assyrian. Her eyes lighted as she saw he could harm her no more, and then filled with doubt as she looked at me.

I raised her to her feet and spoke reassuringly to her and though she did not understand my language, some of the fear faded from her lovely face. Then she glanced at herself and her cheeks went crimson and she averted her eyes with shame.

A long cloak such as Assyrian chiefs wore lay on a couch and I picked it up and draped it about the girl.

Then I went to the front of the tent and peered out. No one was near. Replacing my dagger and drawing my short sword, I took the girl by the hand and motioning for silence, led her through the slit I had made in the tent. Her presence would hamper my escape, but what sense or right would there have been to have rescued her from one Assyrian and to have left her in the power of several thousand of them?

Silently we made our way in the direction I led. I had seen groups of horses tied here and there within the camp and it was toward some of them that I was making my way.

We had much a-do to avoid the warriors and stay out of the lights of the fires but at last we reached a place where several horses were tethered. Two Assyrians sat near, dicing.

Chancing all upon one cast, I caught up the girl with one arm and landed amongst the horses with a single panther leap.

They reared and plunged but the tethers held and in an instant I was on the back of one, holding the girl close. With three slashes of my sword I parted the tethers and the next moment was doing my best to keep my seat as my horse stampeded wildly across the camp with the others.

The Assyrians had sat, gaping at me, almost dazed by my sudden appearance and swift actions. But now their presence of mind returned and they sprang up, shouting wildly.

In a moment the whole camp was in an up-roar. Men rushing about, shouting, (as I learned after) some that there was mutiny in the camp, some that the Hittites were upon them.

Men slashed at me with swords and a few arrows were aimed at me. But fire-light is deceptive and I passed through the entire Assyrian camp without having received a scratch. Neither had the horse nor the girl.

As I dashed past the last line of tents, I was aware that someone was close behind me, on a horse and riding like the wind.

Half turning I raised my sword but the horseman swept up beside me and I could see he was unarmed.

“Keep your sword for Assyrians!” he shouted, in the tongue of Khita, “I am your friend whether you are Hittite, Bashanite, or devil! All I ask is to accompany you.”

I could tell he was no Assyrian.

“Come if you wish.” I answered.

That was a ride! I shall never forget it.

A ride worth remembering, it was, sweeping along on a horse scarce less swift than the night-wind that struck against my face, blowing about my face and my shoulders the soft hair of the girl I carried before me; and and the strange horseman riding at my elbow.

A wild ride and the stranger made it still wilder by chanting a barbaric war-cry until I bade him be silent lest he betray us to the Assyrians.

I had no desire to recieve an arrow from a sentry of my own nation nor did I wish to throw the camp into a panic.

So instead of riding straight for the Khitan camp, I sheered off and circled about it, stopping at a point some distance from the camp and a greater distance from the Assyrian camp, of course, though not as distant as I could have wished.

I dismounted and lifted the girl from the horse. She clung to me and I knew she was frightened. I tried to reassure her as best I knew and then spoke to the stranger, “We will await here until dawn and then enter the Hittite camp.”

“Good.” he answered.

We staked out the horses and then made ourselves as comfortable as we could among a group of great boulders that afforded warmth from the chill night air as well as a hiding place from the Assyrians.

The stranger and I sat facing each other, with our backs against a boulder. The girl huddled close to me, shuddering at every faint sound that came from the distant Assyrian camp. The poor child was very much afraid but she seemed to have perfect trust in me.

In the darkness I could not see the features of the stranger and I wondered what manner of man he might be. We talked in low tones.

“Whoever you are,” he said with a chuckle, “and what your mission was in that camp of Assyrian devils, I doubtless owe you my life. Indeed, an Assyrian was lifting his sword against me when those horses bolted through camp, knocked down the Assyrian and scattered the others who held me. So I leaped on the back of one of the horses, first knocking down two or three Assyrians so they would remember me, and and rode for it. I percieved you riding out of camp at a speed which seemed to indicate that you were not greatly welcome, so I decided to throw in my lot with you. For the time being, at least.” then with a slight change of tone, “The pretty little Assyrian seems to come willing enough or have you frightened her into submission?”

I saw that he thought the girl was an Assyrian woman whom I had carried off forcibly.

“The girl is no Assyrian,” I answered, “nor did I abduct her. She was a captive of the Assyrians and I rescued her, slaying her captor.”

“Good.” he applauded softly, “You are a Hittite, I percieve from you speech.”

“Yes, I am Lakur, a bowman of Carchemish. And you –”

“My name is Ammon,” he replied, “and I am an Amalekite.”

“An Amalekite? Then what do you so far north?”

“I am something of a wanderer.” he replied, whimsically, “I have always a craving to see new places and strange lands. I was fighting in the army of of Babylon when I was captured by those Assyrian devils.”

And so we talked, telling each other tales of war and camp-life and cities and nations, speaking in low tones so as not to awake the girl who slumbered in my arms.

I told him of the great nation of Khita and the mighty city of Carchemish and he told me of his land which lay on the border of the desert of Shur. He told me of wars with the Philistines and the Amorites and the Canaanites and Midianites. He told me of the Salt Sea in the land of the Amorites and of the Gulf of Akaba and of the deset of Zin on whose borders dweldt the the Canaanitish giants. He told me of the cites of Horeb and Kadesh and Gaza and Askalon and Babylon.

He was not boastful in his speech, although he had traveled farther and seen more sights and strange lands and had taken part in more battles than any other man I had ever seen.

He had the gift of speech, likewise, and in the mere telling of a tale he made it so plain that his listener straightway had a picture in his mind of what the Amalekite related.

He was a North-Amalekite, one of the tribes who dwell in Canaan, between the desert of Shur and the desert of Zin. The South-Amalekites had their home in the mountains of the desert of Paran, north of the land of the Midianites. I had heard of the Amalekites but Ammon was the first I had met. I had heard that they were wild tribesmen, savage in battle but peaceable if let alone.

As dawn began to lighten the rugged land-scape of the desert, we made ready to go to the Hittite camp. In the light I saw that Ammon was fairly tall, lithe built man, with a true fighting-man’s build, broad of shoulder, narrow of hip and long of arm. His forehead was high and broad, showing a high intellect and his eyes were clear and seemed dancing with merriment and good humor. Altogether Ammon the Amalekite was a handsome man and I had never seen a man whose appearance I liked better.

We awoke the girl. She started up, a look of fright in her lovely eyes, but smiled when she saw me and held out her hands to me like a trustful child. She stared curiously at Ammon the Amalekite.

“Truly she is no Assyrian.” he commented, “Nor is she Hittite, Bashanite nor Babylonian.”

He spoke to her in several different languages and at last it seemed he used one she could understand. Her face lighted and she answered. They conversed for awhile and then Ammon turned to me.

“She is a princess of Cilicia.” he said, “She was journeying to Agade, to wed the lesser king there, when she and her escort were set upon by a raiding band of Assyrians. She was captured and brought along with the Assyrian army.”

So the girl I had carried before me on a half-wild Assyrian horse, the girl who had slept in my arms, was a princess. I marveled that I, Lakur, a common archer in the army of Carchemish, should been priveleged to so much as touch a person of royal lineage. I felt diffident about carrying her as I had but there was no other way so soon we were under way, the girl sitting the horse sideways, her arms about my shoulders. And when she smiled I felt strangely at ease.

Without incident we reached the Hittite camp. The princess I gave in charge of a general, who was pleased to aid her, as by doing so we might gain an alliance with Cicilia.

Then I sought out the company of archers of which I was a member.

Ammon expressed his wish to join in the battle so I asked him, “With whom do you wish to fight? Are you a bowmen, spearman or what?”

“Give me a sword,” he responded, “a sword and a horse and let me fight among the horsemen.”

I had him accompany me to my captain, Gurom, to whom I told Ammon’s wishes.

“A horse you shall have.” Gurom answered, “When the Assyrians march against us we will need stout warriors, I think. As for swords, take your choice.”

And he motioned to a rack filled with weapons. Ammon’s eyes sparkled as he examined the weapons rapidly. He selected a long, narrow-bladed, double edged sword, a Midianite sword, I think it was.

With an exclamation of satisfaction he whirled the sword until it sang and seemed a circle of glittering steel.

The Assyrians advanced with a blair of trumpets and a clashing of armor. There were thousands on thousands of them. The heavily-armed footmen came first, flanked on either side by the heavy cavalry. Behind these came the chariots of war and the lighter-armed footmen. Light-armed horsemen skirmished about the plain.

Slowly the great army surged forward like waves of steel.

Not a shout from the Hittite army, not a a trumpet-blast. Not an arrow was discharged, not a spear was hurled until the Assyrians had almost reached the great boulders at the foot of the slope. Then, in answer to an order given in the form of a spear flashing in the air, the air was filled with arrows raining upon the Assyrians. Still they came on, raising their shields against the arrows. They reached the boulders and the formation was broken as the first ranks of the army entered the gulchs and ravines. And then upon them leaped the Hittite spearmen and swordsmen who had lain concealed there.

Leaping and advancing and retreating to advance again, the Hittites plied swords and battle-axes and hurled heavy spears at close-range while higher up on the slope the light-armed footmen hurled javelins and throwing spears and still higher the bowmen, shooting high over the heads of their people, rained down flight after flight of arrows upon the Assyrians.

Unused to such fighting, the Assyrians gave way. They fled from the slope and reforming on the plain, advanced again. Horsemen and chariots were useless among the boulders so it was only the footmen who could be sent against us. And again and again our men broke the Assyrian power and drove them back. At last scouts came with the news that part of the Assyrian army was making a detour to mount the slope at a point distant from the battle-field and thus attack us from the rear. Then while the Assyrian army was divided, the king of Khita made his bold stroke.

He gave the order to form for a charge. Swiftly the boulders blocking the roads we had built were rolled away. Arriving before the Assyrians, and working under the cover of night, we had in a fashion, smoothed and levelled out roads down the slope which would allow chariots and horsemen to descend. The Assyrians were not aware of this for we had blocked the roads with great boulders. They thought we were no more able to hurl the full strength of our horsemen and chariots against them than they were us.

Thus it was with the utmost amazement that they saw the whole Hittite army careering down the slope toward them, at reckless speed.

The archers followed swiftly, discharging flights of arrows as they ran. A band of horsemen whirled past my company. Among them, riding like a whirlwind was Ammon the Amalekite. He had been fighting with the Hittites among the boulders and his sword was already red.

“Ho!” he shouted as he whirled past me, swinging his sword, “This is the way to fight! Not like foxes among the rocks!”

Coming as they did down that slope, at a speed like that of the wind, the chariots and horsemen of Khita struck the Assyrian army. Many a horse and rider went down, many a chariot plunged downward on that slope but the chariots that remained drove right through the Assyrian ranks and the Hittite horsemen swept in behind them.

Behind them came the heavy-armed footmen, then the light-armed footmen, then the archers.

That was a battle! For the Assyrians, rallying under the orders of that fiendish general of theirs, fought like devils and almost turned defeat into victory.

From two ranked battle-lines the battle became a surging, mingled mélee, in which chariot, horsemen, footmen and archers were mingled without order or formation.

I found myself in the midst of the battle, fighting with short sword and dagger. Such close, hand-to-hand fighting was not to my liking and I was getting the worst of the conflict, being hemmed in by three Assyrian swordsmen when a tall, pantherish warrior, smashed his way through the battle-press. With three flashing, lightning-quick thrusts he disposed of the three Assyrians and I saw it was Ammon the Amalekite. His sword was red from point to hilt, his shield and helmet were dented and battered and he was bleeding from sword-cuts about his arms and a slight cut on his cheek. But his eyes were dancing with enjoyment.

“A great battle!” he shouted swinging up his his shield in time to catch a descending sword and thrusting the Assyrian through. A spear he turned aside with his sword and at the same time dashed his shield into the face of the Assyrian who wielded the spear with such force that man pitched backward.

“That devil of a general begins to rally the Assyrians!” he shouted, “We are lost unless we can smash this part of the army before the other part comes down the slope upon us.”

For a moment the space about us was cleared as the battle swirled away.

“Look!” shouted Ammon seizing my arm, “See the Assyrian fiend?” he pointed at a chariot some distance away. In it I saw a man. A chief he was, dressed in costly armor, with a long black beard and a look of such malign cruelty that even at the distance I shuddered.

“’Tis he!” Ammon shouted, “It is the Assyrian general!”

There were a few arrows left in my quiver. I selected one with care but hastily.

Sighting along the smooth shaft, I drew with all my strength. I loosed. Far and fast sped the arrow, upon it resting the rescue of the Hittite nation.

And the Assyrian flung wide his arms and plunged headlong from his chariot, as the arrow parted that long black beard and drove through his corselet of iron and bronze.

“Ho!” shouted Ammon the Amalekite. He whirled his sword high in the air.

“Ho!” he shouted again, “A wonder! A noble bowman are ye, Lakur the Hittite!”

And from the Assyrian ranks rose the shout, “Flee! The general is slain! The terrible Seni-Asshur is slain!”

“Rally, men of Khita!” shouted Ammon, “Rally and smite these Assyrians!”

And he leaped into the battle-press, his sword whirling and leaping like a flame.

The annals of Khita will tell you how the Hittites rallied under the commands of their general. How they hurled themselves with reckless valor against the wavering Assyrians and drove them back across the plain, defeated, their army shattered. How then the general of Khita swung the army about and met the charge of the other Assyrian army that was careering down the slope, and hurled back that army in defeat.

The annals of Khita will tell you how the remnants of that mighty and terrible Assyrian army fled back across the plain in swift retreat and how the Hittite warriors marched back through the great gates of Carchemish with many prisoners and rich plunder, while the people rejoiced and made a gala day of it.

They will tell you of the cunning and daring of the Hittite general, of the might and daring of the warriors of Khita.

And all that is as it should be, for no mightier warriors, no more sagacious general, ever lived than the warriors and the general of Khita.

But I say, and say it without vainglorious boasting, that it was the arrow of I, Lakur the bowman, who won that battle for the Hittites and so says Ammon the Amalekite.

CHAPTER 2,

THE VIKING.

I dwelt in a land far to the north. It was cold there, with snow and driving sleet and screeching blizzards.

My people lived on the shores of a great sea and were a sea-faring folk. We were tall and strongly made, with flowing fair hair and the men wore heavy, fair beards. We were a war-like people and people who roamed the sea.

My name was Hakon and I differed from most of my tribe in that my hair was black and my eyes were grey.

I was a fair-sized man, but no giant such as were many of my people.

When a young man I went to one of the fiercest and most powerful sea-captains of that time, one Tostig the Mighty.

And mighty he was, a great, yellow bearded giant of a man, a terrible warrior and a man whose wish was his only law.

He towered inches higher than I, his winged helmet adding to his height, his hand resting, as if by habit, on the hilt of his great sword.

“You wish to join my crew?” he stared at me rather contemtously, “As you will, but do not join unless you are willing to fare far and fight many battles.”

He had two dragon-ships. He commanded one himself and the other was captained by a viking named Ragnar.

Swift, fierce-fought battles and rich plunder were ever for Tostig’s men. We sailed recklessly out into the great seas, our long, low galley tossing like a chip on the waves but riding the highest seas stanchly.

Ships were not over-numerous upon the seas in those days, but we took every one we could over-haul and who was not too strong for us.

Phoenecian and Italian traders and merchants, other pirate ships, any ship was loot to us.

Nor were we averse to raiding inland. Many a village we looted in Alba, in Hibernia and in Britain.

There was a fierce old viking who had a skalli on the coast of Jutland. Every ship that passed that part of the coast was forced to pay toll.

Our dragon-ships swung around the out-jutting promontory where the old viking’s skalli was.

Instantly a long, low dragon-ship came sweeping around the point of land and swept toward us.

Our two ships closed in on it and after a short skirmish at long range, the dragon-ship turned and made for the small bay from which it had come. We could see the viking’s skalli upon the highest part of the promontory.

“After them!” thundered Tostig, “By Odin and Thor! We will sack the skalli!”

“Slowly, Tostig, slowly.” quoth old Rane, “Perchance it is some trap. Erling is as cunning as a fox and ’tis well known that he posseses five dragon-ships. We have seen only one.”

But Tostig was carried away by the lust of battle and the prospect of loot.

“I care not if old Erling hath an hundred dragon-ships crowded with men!” he shouted, “Steer for the bay, helmsman!”

Into the bay we drove, and there upon the beach where they had dragged her, lay the dragon-ship. But she was deserted.

“When we have looted and burned the skalli,” quoth Tostig, “we will take the ship with us for she is a sound ship and a handsome one.”

“But where are her men?” asked Sigurd, “And where are the other ships of Erling?”

“This’s ship’s men have doubtless gone to defend the skalli.” answered old Rane, “As to the other ships, I have no idea.”

“They have fled.” Tostig answered, “They have all fled for they learned that Tostig the Mighty was coming to loot the skalli and the village.”

And just so many people fled at the coming of Tostig.

Little use it is to relate that battle at Erling’s skalli. We quit our ships and charged up the slope, yelling our war-cries.

The warriors and house-carls in the skalli fought boldly but we out-numbered them and we swarmed over the skalli-walls and in a short time our enemies were prisoners or had fled and a number were slain.

In the great hall of the skalli old Erling confronted us.

He had been disarmed and his hall was thronged with the armed vikings of Tostig the Mighty, but he glared at us defiantly and with haughty pride.

“But that my other four dragon-ships and most of my men were off on a raiding cruise, our places would be changed, Tostig.” said Erling.

“Ho, ho!” laughed Tostig, gustily, “High words for a captive! Had all your ships and all your vikings been here, I would have conquered just the same! I am Tostig, Tostig the Mighty and I am unconquerable!”

Erling glared at him with hate. Just at that moment a girl, Erling’s daughter, rushed into the room, pursued by some of Tostig’s men. She ran to her father and clung to him.

Tostig gazed at her.

“A fair girl.” he said, “I will take her.”

“You would not!” Erling cried.

“Why not?” queried Tostig, “I am Tostig the Mighty. What I wish, I take.” Then craftily, “What will you pay for your freedom and the girl’s?”

Erling was beaten and he knew. He spoke an order to a house-carl and presently slaves came into the hall, bearing hampers and armloads of treasure.

They dumped it all down on the long table. There were gold ornaments, bracelets, armlets, rings, there were piles of golden and silver coins, there costly weapons and armor and rich clothing.

“It is the wealth I have gathered from years of raiding and looting.” Erling said, “Take it all and depart.”

“Aye, we will do so.” said Tostig coolly, “It is a fair dower for your girl, Erling.”

The girl cried out and clung to her father. She was not like most of of our Norse women, for she was small and slender with a timid air and large, pleading violet eyes.

Erling glared at Tostig. “Villian!” he exclaimed, “You will take all this great treasure and break your vow? You are forsworn!”

“Nay,” Tostig said coolly, “I took no vow and you shall go free, Erling.”

And at that moment Sigurd dashed into the skalli.

“Away, away!” he shouted, “The ships of Erling are upon us! To sea!”

Instantly all was confusion. Tostig’s vikings rushed toward the door of the skalli, releasing the prisoners and snatching at whatever loot was handiest. Erling’s vikiings and house-carles fell upon the men of Tostig with shouts and war-cries, seeking to snatch weapons.

I had been edging toward the table where the loot was and I happened to be nearest to it. The house-carles leaped like tigers on Tostig and Erling caught up the girl and retreated toward the rear of the skalli.

“Hakon!” bellowed Tostig, scattering his assailants right and left with sweeps of his great sword, “Seize the girl and bear her away!”

“Fenris seize the girl and you also!” I yelled, springing to the table. Erling, backing away, swung the girl behind him, shouting for his men to rally about him. I paid no attention to him. I had no time for girls when loot was to be had. I snatched up a hamper filled with loot and fled for the door of the skalli.

Erling’s vikings sought to seize me and struck at me with swords and spears, but I ducked and side-stepped and avoided every blow. Out of the skalli door I leaped, and fled down the slope toward our galleys with the rest of Tostig’s vikings, Tostig among them.

For we could plainly see four long, low galleys sweeping in from the sea and outnumbered as we were, we only wished to get aboard our galleys and flee to the sea. Not even Tostig cared to stay and fight against such odds. The galleys tried to hem us in the bay, but we made it out into the open sea. For several leagues they followed us, but finally turned and sailed back to Erling’s bay.

All of Tostig’s vikings were in an ugly humor, Tostig no less. For vikings were not used to running from enemies and there was fighting and fleeing and no loot. I smiled as I watched the vikings.

“No loot.” said Holgar, angrily, “Not a trinket, not a coin.”

“We might have had plunder by boat-fulls had not Tostig tried to seize the girl.” Einar added.

That was the talk I was pleased to hear. I had hidden my hamper of loot under some furs. Now I lifted it and bore it to the middle of the deck. All the vikings watched me, perplexed.

“Here are some few trinkets.” I said, “Had I obeyed Tostig’s order and carried off the girl, we should not have this now.”

I took from the hamper a golden-hilted dagger in a golden sheath and a handful of bracelets and rings.

“Divide the rest amongst yourselves.” I said, with a wave of my hand toward the hamper.

“By Thor!” swore Lodbrog with amazement, “Such generosity I have not met with for long! Unless my eyes belie me, there is in that hamper a silver sword-sheath I would fain possess.”

I watched them, a slight smile on my face, as with many a hearty oath, they divided the loot. Their respect and esteem for me was going forward by leaps and bounds, as I intended it should.

Then came old Rane, to announce that Tostig commanded me before him at once. I went forward to the quarter-deck, where Tostig was.

Tostig was in a fine rage, cursing all Jutes in general and Erling in particular.

He glared at me furiously, his hand playing with his sword-hilt.

“I ordered you to seize the girl and bear her away.” he said, furiously, “You disobeyed my command.”

“That I might bear away some of Erling’s plunder and men should not say the raid was for naught and that we fled empty-handed.”

“What care I?” he thundered, “Your place is to obey.” And he sent his fist with all his power against my face. I caught the blow on an up-flung arm but the force was enough to knock me from my feet and send me rolling along the deck.

From the vikings came a murmur of dissaproval.

Half-stunned, I got to my feet. I turned to the vikings.

“You see,” I said, “How Tostig deals with those who disobey his commands. By seizeing the loot for all of us, instead of the girl, I went against Tostig’s orders. Now ye know that Tostig must be obeyed.”

Thus I spoke craftily, and Tostig glared at me, not sure whether to smite me down or not. Then he could see, that though they said nothing, the vikings were clearly on my side. I believed I could have started a mutiny there and then but such was not my intention. Tostig’s eyes blazed and he stepped forward, his fingers closing around the hilt of his sword.

But before he could speak I skillfully turned aside whatever he might say, by seeming to acknowledge his supremacy.

“See that you obey Tostig’s commands in all things.” I said, still adressing the vikings, “I did wrong in not seizing the girl for Tostig. Knowing that we all would share in the loot, I took it. But Tostig is our chieftain and it is for him to say whether or not we shall take plunder. Why should I disobey Tostig and take loot for ourselves when he commands me to seize a woman for Tostig? With all submission to you, Tostig.” I added humbly and walked away, leaving Tostig glaring after me uncertainly, and the vikings with puzzled looks on their face. I smiled to myself. Oh, I was crafty, I, Hakon the Norseman.

Tostig and the vikings were puzzled. Craft meant little to them. All save one. I saw Sigurd watching me and a faint smile was on his lips. No word passed between us but glances of understanding.

The hamper of loot had been a large one and filled to the brim with much costly plunder. I had scarcely managed to carry it, and there was not a viking on the ship that did not recieve his share.

Unseen myself, I heard two of the vikings discussing the loot and myself.

“Tostig did wrong in smiting Hakon.” quoth Erik, “Had it not been for Hakon, we should have come away from Erling’s skalli empty-handed.”

“But if Hakon had carried off Erling’s daughter, as Tostig ordered,” argued Garulf, “we might have had all of Erling’s wealth as ransom.”

Erik laughed scornfully, “Think you Tostig would have given her up for ransom? Besides if Hakon had carried her off, Erling would have followed us with his five dragon-ships and slain us all. No, Hakon did as he should have done.”

“Doubtless you are right.” agreed Garulf.

Cunningly, without speaking against Tostig and giving him an excuse to slay me, craftily, without drawing suspicion of any sort to myself, I turned the vikings against Tostig, against his arrogance, his over-bearing ways, his cruelty. Many of them hated Tostig anyway, so it was not such a difficult matter. For Tostig was arrogant and selfish and cruel, ruling with a hand of iron.

Ragnar’s ship, that had become separated from Tostig’s ship in the flight from Erling’s bay, met us again.

The two ships swept along-side and the vikings shouted to each other.

“What loot have ye?” Holgar yelled sarcastically. The answer was a torrent of curses, directed mostly at Erling and his Jutes.

The men on Tostig’s ship waved their plunder and shouted taunts.

“You have no man like Hakon on your ship!” shouted Lodbrog, “He alone had the swiftness and wit to bring away any loot.”

Later when Ragnar came aboard the “Kraken” as Tostig’s dragon-ship was called, and was told, by Tostig with many curses, of my feat, the viking chief looked at me appraisingly. I was appraising him likewise. Ragnar was not so famed in battle as Tostig, yet he was close behind the chieftain in fame and he was shrewder and more skilled in council. I decided I could use Ragnar.

“We will sail for Bretland.” said Tostig, “There should be much plunder along the coast.”

So for Bretland we sailed. Tostig scorned to hug the coast and we sailed straight out across the sea.

Not far off the coasts of Orkneyar, the Orkney islands, we sighted two dragon-ships. They tacked to meet us and soon we saw that they were Angles, the vikings of Gathlaff who was as fierce and cruel a chieftain as Tostig. There was little friendship between Norseman and Angle and and the vikings joined battle instantly. Straight for Gathlaff’s dragon-ship drove the “Kraken”, hurled through the water by long oars that bended in the rowers’ hands as they drove the ship forward, the vikings crowding the rails of all the ships, brandishing their weapons and yelling savage war-cries. Tostig stood in the bows of the “Kraken”, his long, yellow beard streaming down over his corselet, his voice booming battle-cries and curses, wild and gusty as the sea-winds, his great sword glittering in his hand.

The ships struck with a crash and in an instant were fastened together with swift-thrown grappling irons and the ship-rails were crowded with battling men, and was a din of clashing swords and bucklers as each crew sought to board the other ship. A swift glance cast over my shoulder showed the other Angle ship and Ragnar’s ship, grappled together in the same manner.

For awhile the struggle on the ships-rail was undecided and then, with a berserk shout, Tostig cleared a space with a terrific sweep of his sword and leaped over the rails onto the the deck of the Angle ship.

The Angles wavered for a moment and then gave back a few steps before a determined rush of the Norsemen and some score of us managed to clamber over the rail and join Tostig on the deck.

In an instant the whirlwind of battle shifted from the ships-rails to deck of the Angle’s ship.

The deck was a swirling sea of glittering swords and battling vikings. Tostig and Gathlaff were striving to come near each other and their men were seeking to aid them, but the battle-press was too great.

A man could scarce find room to swing a sword and spears had been discarded as useless. It was the kind of hand-to-hand fighting I liked best. I was not so tall or so large as most of the men, and I fought crouching low, depending mostly upon stabbing and thrusting, my shield held above my head and shoulders. Most vikings preferred to stand erect and swing their long swords with all their power and with full reach, so such close fighting encumbered most of them.

A long sword crashed down upon my upraised shield, bearing me to the deck. The wielder of the sword was Gathlaff. I sprang from the deck, stabbing as I leaped, but my sword was turned aside by the Angle’s shield and in turn I side-stepped his sword as it swished down.

Then I leaped in and my sword gashed Gathlaff’s arm as he struck it aside. In another instant the battle had swirled away, separating the Angle and I. The battle raged fiercely on the quarter-deck.

I saw Sigurd’s foot slip and he went down on the deck. An Angle sprang forward, sword lifted. With an over-hand stroke I struck the Angle down and dragged Sigurd to his feet with the other hand. The Angles pressed in on us and we fought back to back until a space was cleared.

Tostig and Gathlaff met in the prow of the dragon-ship. All about them the battling vikings drew away and left a space clear.

The two chieftains were well matched, both skilled and savage fighters, both blond giants.

Their swords whirled glittering in the air and clashed deafningly as they smote and warded.

Back and forth they swayed and battled, blow after blow they struck and warded with lightning swiftness.

Then Gathlaff’s sword crashed down on Tostig’s winged helmet. The Norseman staggered, reeled, and with one swift thrust drove his sword through Gathlaff’s iron corselet.

Gathlaff flung his arms wide and pitched backward over the ship-rail. Tostig reeled and then tumbled to the deck, his sword falling from his hand.

For a moment both Norsemen and Angles stood, astounded at the fall of both chieftains.

Then I saw my chance. I leaped forward, waving my sword.

“Rally, vikings!” I shouted, in ringing tones, “Gathlaff has fallen! Sweep the decks! One effort and we have conquered!”

A berserk yell went up from the Norsemen. Yelling they surged forward and swept the Angles back and back until they were hemmed against the ship-rail. They fought like devils but the Norsemen hewed them down and hurled them over the rail until I sprang in and stopped them. I had to use my fists and the flat of my sword but Sigurd saw what I intended and aided me and presently the Norse vikings drew back reluctrantly and lowered their swords. Some twenty Angles stood at bay against the ship-rail, their swords red and notched, their armor rent and battered. But indomitable courage showed in their bearing. They showed no fear as they faced us.

Along with several other accomplishments not usually possessed by vikings, I could speak a number of languages besides my own. Angle was one of those languages and using that language I addressed the Angles.

“Throw down your arms.” I said, “It is useless to fight longer. You are surrounded by many times your number, Gathlaff, your chieftain, is slain. And see,” I continued, pointing to the other ships, “your other ship is taken.”

On its deck a few Angles, at bay against the main-mast, stood off Ragnar’s victorious Norsemen. I bade Sigurd hail Ragnar and stop the battle.

“If you will throw down your arms you shall be spared.” I went on, “I offer you the choice of entering our ships and becoming part of our company, on the same footing as the Norse vikings.”

Angles and Norsemen stared at me in astonishment. Such offers were not over common, then.

“We will never join with you, we will not go aboard your ships.” an Angle answered briefly, “Slay us if you will; at least we will go down fighting.”

The Norsemen moved restlessly, shifting their weapons. I motioned them back.

“Your long-boat has not been touched.” I said, “It should hold all of you. The dragon-ship will not float to land. Take the long-boat and go. The islands of Orkneyar are not far. You should be able to reach them safely.”

“You mean we are to go free?” asked an Angle, hesitatingly.

“Yes.”

They could scarcely comprehend the fact. Such things were uncommon on the North Sea.

The Norsemen muttered dissaproval.

“What child’s play is this?” grumbled old Rane.

“The act of a weakling!” shouted Wigstan, “What, will you let these Angles, our foes, depart in peace with their boats and their weapons! What say, ye, vikings?”

“Ye have heard my command.” I said, swinging about to face the grumbling Norsemen, my sword in my hand, “And here I stand to back my orders.” I looked full into the eyes of the Norsemen and they gave back, abashed. I noted Sigurd standing near, a mocking smile on his face as he watched the vikings, his hand resting on his sword-hilt.

There were some twenty Angles from the other dragon-ship, whom Ragnar realeased with their weapons at my word, though he raised his brows and then shrugged his shoulders.

The two long-boats from the Angle ships held the men easily and they embarked, setting their course for the shores of Orkneyar, which were just visible on the far horrizon.

Just before they pushed off, a tall, keen-eyed Angle who had done most of the speaking, addressed me, “What do men call you?” he asked.

“Hakon.” I answered.

“I am Oslaf of the White-sword.” he answered, “And I will remember.”

With those words, he swung down into one of the long-boats and took the tiller. The Angles bent to the oars and soon the two long-boats were speeding toward the distant Orkney islands, lifting to the waves.

Tostig, it turned out was not slain. Gathlaff’s sword descending on his bronze helmet, had merely knocked him unconcious. He came to, cursing savagely, and wishing to renew the battle.

He cursed more when he found that the battle was over.

“Were any prisoners taken?” he demanded.

“No.” replied Sigurd.

“They were all slain?”

“All but some twenty on each ship.” Wigstan said, “And those Hakon sent away with their boats and weapons.”

Tostig was furious. “You take much upon yourself, Hakon.” he thundered, “I am chieftain here.”

I gazed at him with a calculating eye. It was in my mind to draw sword and decide the chieftainship then and there but I decided it was not time. Too many men were still for Tostig.

We found much plunder in the Angle galleys. The Angles were fierce, far-ranging pirates and they had taken many ships and sacked many villages.

The loot we took from the two ships more than paid them for taking them, the Norsemen considered.

The Angles had fought bravely and skillfully and some twenty Norsemen had been slain.

But to fight, to slay and be slain was the Norsemen’s idea of life. They cared for no other.

We salvaged the two dragon-ships and having repaired them, manned them with men from the “Kraken” and from the “Cormorant”, Ragnar’s ship.

Later we sold them to the Juts at Brunanbuhr.

Endnotes

^*1 Sea of Silent Waters = Pacific Ocean

^*2 Neandertals

^*3 Cro-Magnons

^*4 Mediterranean Sea

^*5 To avoid confusion I have used the modern terms for places and clans. – AUTHOR

Appendices

ROBERT E. HOWARD AND THE PICTS: A CHRONOLOGY

CIRCA 1918–1919

Howard discovers, in a ‘Canal Street library’ in New Orleans, a book in which he first learns about the Picts. (See excerpts from Letter to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. January 1932, and Alvin Earl Perry, A Biographical Sketch of Robert E. Howard [1935], below.)

UNTITLED ESSAY, CA. 1920–1923

Howard wrote this report on the history of the Picts, possibly for school. An initial page or pages are clearly missing, and are presumed lost.

which has characterized them through all the ages. The cavemen that were left took refuge in deep forests and mountainous wilds from which they occasionly emerged to steal cattle, burn and murder and furnish the basis for tales of a later ages, telling of giants and ogres.

Later on the great Celtic race swept over Europe and the Picts in their turn fled to the forests and caves, furnishing the basis of fairy tales of gnomes, elves and other fairies.

But that was not until a much later date. The Picts scattered all over Europe. Some are still found in the mountains of the Pyrenees. But they made their longest stand in the British Isles and it is there that we are interested in them.

The Picts of Britain underwent several complete changes in appearance and manner. There is no greater difference between the first Picts and the Indian than there was between the first Picts and the Picts who opposed Hengest.

I have already described the Picts who first came to Britain. This type remained unchanged for several hundred years. The people remained peaceful, gaining their food by agriculture and becoming more and more civilized and more skillful artizans.

Then came the great Celtic invasion and the laborious work and progress of half a thousand years was overturned and undone in an instant for that is a Celtic characteristic. The dawning Pictish generation was nipped in the bud.

The Picts could not stand before the race of warriors skilled in the work of metals and the make and usage of weapons, but vastly inferior to the Picts in artizanship.

So they fled to the northern mountains. Many descendants of the early cavemen lurked in the mountains and Pictish cunning concieved a plan of utilizing together the great strenth and brute courage of the aboriginals with the shrewdness of the Picts, to the discomfort of the Celtic invaders. So hunter and artizan banded themselves together against the warrior and the ancient enemies were united. So when the Celts grew tired of Britain and marched north, they met with so many unpleasant surprises, mostly in the shape of ambuscades and night attacks that they retreated back into Britain and it was not until the Brythonic invasion, years later, that the Celts ever gained a foothold in Scotland, though many went on into Ireland.

Living close together and fighting as one nation, naturally lessened the mutual contempt and hate and the Picts and aborigines began to intermarry.

For some reason or other the Picts as Silurian that fled to Wales did not unite with the cave-men’s descendents and the early types of Picts remained unchanged, except as, later they were altered by intermarriage with the Celts, fleeing before other invaders. And to this day in mountains of western Wales are still to be found traces of the ancient Pictish type.

The first Celts to invade Britain were Gaels with brown hair, grey eyes and tall rather spare forms. They came from Gaul, especially Brittany, where the people today have much Celtic blood in them.

The next invaders were also Celts but differed from the Gaelic Celts in many ways.

They were tall, like the Gaels but with larger, heavier bodies. As a rule they had blue eyes and red or yellow hair. The came mainly from what is now Belgium and the Netherlands and were called Brythons from which the names Britain and Briton were derived. Possibly they had some Teutonic blood in them. They overcame the Gaels as the Gaels overcame the Picts and the Gaels retreated into Wales and Scotland.

LETTER TO TEVIS CLYDE SMITH, 5 OCTOBER 1923

I’m writing a book which doubtless would make you tired and would sound like a lot of fool stuff to most folks, but as I am writing it for my own amusement, the opinion of other people about it don’t interest me, as I know of.

The book takes in lots of territory and a lot of characters. Some of the characters are Ammon the Amalekite, who was a famous swordsman, Swift-Foot, the tree-man, Tostig the Mighty, a viking and something of a villian, Hakon, a Norseman and crafty as a fox, Bran Mak Morn, who was the greatest chief the Picts ever had, and many others too numerous to mention.

DECEMBER 1924

The Lost Race is returned to Howard by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright,

for revisions.

From Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, 1928

This is a thinly disguised autobiographical novel, based on Howard’s life over the previous four years. ‘Steve’ is Steve Costigan, Howard’s alter-ego; ‘The Forgotten Race’ is The Lost Race; ‘Bizarre Stories’ is Weird Tales.

As for ‘The Forgotten Race,’ he [the editor of ‘Bizarre Stories’] had found several faults with it, in that it left too much to the imagination and left some important facts unexplained. Steve perceived that even the readers of other magazines were not supposed to have any intellect or imagination of their own. However, the editor professed himself ready to take the story if the changes and additions which he suggested were made....Yet he [Steve] somehow felt a sinking of the heart when he contemplated rewriting ‘The Forgotten Race.’ Once a story was completed, he was through with it, eager to start something else, and he wished to look on it again only in print. He doubted his ability to make the tale come up to standard, even with the editor’s remarks to guide him, and, dreading a second refusal, delayed several days before he made the changes. He sent off two more stories with it when he returned it. These two came back, but Bizarre Stories accepted the revised story, offering $30.00, payable on publication.

7 JANUARY 1925

The Lost Race is accepted by Weird Tales.

LETTER TO TEVIS CLYDE SMITH, 14 JANUARY 1926

In this letter Howard sketched out the two waves of Celtic migration into Britain. Referring to the first wave, the Gaels, he says: From Ireland they spread to Britain, chasing the Picts into Scotland and Wales. And: Some of the Lowland Scotch, and Welsh and most of the Cornish are Brythonic, though the Cornish are mixed a lot with Pict and Gael.

LETTER FROM FARNSWORTH WRIGHT TO ROBERT E. HOWARD, 16 MARCH 1926

Dear Mr. Howard:

I thoroughly enjoyed MEN OF THE SHADOWS, but I fear I can not use it in WEIRD TALES. It is too little of a “story,” despite the vigorous action in the opening pages. It is rather a chronicle of a tribe, a picture of the evolution of a race; and thereby it lacks the suspense and thrill that a story of individual conflict and hopes and fears and drama would have.

I do not know of any magazine that would take a story like this, unless possibly FRONTIER. But if you send it to FRONTIER, I suggest that you first clarify the conflict between Bran Mak Morn and the wizard, on page 11, for the reader is left in the dark as to what happened, as to what Bran Mak Morn did to cause the wizard to give up.

JANUARY 1927

The Lost Race is published in Weird Tales.

CIRCA 1928

Howard writes The Little People.

LETTER TO HAROLD PREECE, 20 OCTOBER 1928

About Atlantis – I believe something of the sort existed, though I do not especially hold any theory about a high type of civilization existing there – in fact, I doubt that. But some continent was submerged away back, or some large body of land, for practically all peoples have legends about a flood. And the Cro-Magnons appeared suddenly in Europe, developed to a high state of primitive culture; there is no trace to show that they came up the ladder of utter barbarism in Europe. Suddenly their remains are found supplanting the Neanderthal Man, to whom they have no ties of kinship whatever. Where did they originate? Nowhere in the known world, evidently. They must have originated and developed through the different basic stages of evolution in some land which is not now known to us.

The occultists say that we are the fifth – I believe – great sub-race. Two unknown and unnamed races came, then the Lemurians, then the Atlanteans, then we. They say the Atlanteans were highly developed. I doubt it. I think they were simply the ancestors of the Cro-Magnon man, who by some chance, escaped the fate which overtook the rest of the tribes.

All my views on the matter I included in a long letter to the editor to whom I sold a tale entitled The Shadow Kingdom, which expect will be published as a foreword to that story – if ever. This tale I wove about a mythical antediluvian empire, a contemporary of Atlantis.

1928–1929

Howard writes most of his stories of Kull, king of the antediluvian land of Valusia (of which The Shadow Kingdom was the first) during this period. Most of the stories feature Kull’s Pictish friend Brule, and other Pictish characters.

1929

Howard writes a long narrative poem, The Ballad of King Geraint, featuring among its many characters Dulborn, a Pict.

CIRCA MARCH 1930

The Dark Man is accepted for Strange Stories (planned companion magazine to Weird Tales).

Kings of the Night accepted for Weird Tales (submitted to Strange Stories but Wright accepted for Weird Tales).

LETTER TO HAROLD PREECE, 4 JANUARY 1930

The Welsh who broke the armies of William Rufus were powerfully built men, deep-chested and strong, but short in height. Admixture with the Silurian natives, doubtless of Iberian blood, or a strong Roman strain may have been responsible for this loss of height, as well as the change in complexion.

THE NIGHT OF THE WOLF, 1930

In this story, rejected by Argosy in a letter dated June 3, 1930, Cormac Mac Art, a 5th century Irish reiver, is witness to a confrontation between Norsemen who have built a steading on an island in the Shetlands, and a Pictish chief, Brulla, whom they beat and throw out of their hall when he orders them to leave the islands. In the climactic battle, Picts from all over the Shetlands attack the Norse settlement. In one scene, Cormac sees them stealing through the forest:

Something took shape in the shadows. A long line of figures moved like ghosts just under the shadows of the trees; a shiver passed along Cormac’s spine. Surely these creatures were elves, evil demons of the forest. Short and mightily built, half stooping, one behind the other, they passed in almost utter silence. In the shadows their silence and their crouching positions made them monstrous travesties on men. Racial memories, half lost in the misty gulfs of conciousness, came stealing back to claw with icy fingers at Cormac’s heart. He did not fear them as a man fears a human foe; it was the horror of world-old, ancestral memories that gripped him – dim felt, chaotic dream-recollections of darker Ages and grimmer days when primitive men battled for supremacy in a new world.

For these Picts were a remnant of a lost tribe – the survivals of an elder epoch – last out-posts of a dark Stone Age empire that crumbled before the bronze swords of the first Celts. Now these survivors, thrust out on the naked edges of the world they had once ruled, battled grimly for their existence.

LETTER FROM H.P. LOVECRAFT TO ROBERT E. HOWARD, 20 JULY 1930

It’s true that the Celts share most vigourously the myth-cycle of fairies, gnomes, & little people, which anthropologists find all over western Europe (in a distinctive form marking it off from the general Aryan personification system which produces fauns, satyrs, dryads, etc.) & attribute to vague memories of contact with the Mongoloids was wholly prior to their invasion of Britain. Since these fair Nordic Celts found a smaller, darker race in Britain & Ireland, there is a tendency on the part of some to be misled, & to assume that the “little people” legends allude to contact with those dark aborigines. This, however, can clearly be disproved by analysis of the myths; for such myths invariably share with the parallel Continental myths the specific features (or tracks of these features) of having the “little people” essentially repulsive & monstrous, subterraneous in their habits of dwelling, & given to a queer kind of hissing discourse. Now this kind of thing does to apply to Mediterraneans – who are not abnormal or repulsive from the Nordic standpoint, (being very similar in features) who did not live underground, & whose language (possibly of a lost branch, but conceivably proto-Hamitic, Hamitic or even Semitic) could scarcely have suggested hissing. The inevitable probability is that all the Nordics met with this old Mongoloid stock at a very early date, when it shared the continent with the northward-spreading Mediterraneans & with the remnants of other Paleolithic & Neolithic races now lost to history; & that after the ensuing conquest the defeated Mongoloids took to deep woods & caves, & survived for a long time as malignantly vindictive foes of their huge blond conquerors – carrying on a guerrilla harassing & sinking so low in the anthropological scale that they became bywords of dread & repulsion. The memory of these beings could not but be very strong among the Nordics, (as well as among such Mediterraneans & Alpines as may have encountered them) so that a fixed body of legend was produced – to be carried about wherever Celtic or Teutonic tribes might wander.

LETTER TO H.P. LOVECRAFT, CIRCA AUGUST 1930

Your observations regarding the Mongoloid aborigines and their relation to the fairy tales of western Europe especially interested me. I had supposed, without inquiring very deeply into the matter, that these legends were based on contact with the earlier Mediterraneans, and indeed, wrote a story on that assumption which appeared some years ago in Weird Tales – “The Lost Race.” I readily see the truth of your remarks that a Mongoloid race must have been responsible for the myths of the Little People, and sincerely thank you for the information.

LETTER TO H.P. LOVECRAFT, CIRCA SEPTEMBER 1930

Thank you very much for the kind things you said about the “Bran-cult.” I notice the current Weird Tales announces my “Kings of the Night” for next month’s issue. I hope you like the story. Bran is one of the “Kings.” I intend to take your advice about writing a series of tales dealing with Bran.

LETTER TO TEVIS CLYDE SMITH, CIRCA SEPTEMBER 1930

Weird Tales announces for next month’s issue my story, “Kings of the Night” – ($120.00). Some ways this story is the best I ever wrote. Nothing very weird about it, but good battle stuff, if I do say so myself.

CIRCA OCTOBER 1930

The Children of the Night is accepted for Weird Tales.

LETTER TO H.P. LOVECRAFT, CIRCA OCTOBER 1930

By the way, I recently sold Weird Tales a short story, “The Children of the Night” in which I deal with Mongoloid-aborigine legendry, touch cryptically on the Bran-cult, and hint darkly and vaguely of nameless things connected with Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Tsathoggua and the Necronomicon; as well as quoting lines from Flecker’s “Gates of Damascus” and lending them a cryptic meaning which I’m sure would have surprised the poet remarkably!

LETTER TO HAROLD PREECE, OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1930

Have you read my latest story in Weird Tales? I believe you’ll like it; it deals with Rome’s efforts to subjugate the wild people of Caledonia. The characters and action are ficticious but the period and the general trend of events are historical. The Romans, as you know, never succeeded in extending her boundaries very far into the heather and after several unsuccessful campaigns, retreated south of the great wall. Their defeat must have been accomplished by some such united effort as I have here portrayed – a temporary alliance between Gaelic, Cymric, aboriginal and possibly Teutonic elements. I have a pretty definite idea that a slow filtration of Germanic settlers had begun in eastern Caledonia long before the general overflow that swamped the Latinized countries.

Some day I’m going to try to write a novel length tale dealing with that misty age: allowing myself the latitude that a historical novelist is supposed to be allowed, I intend to take a plot something like this: dealing with the slow crumbling of Roman influence in Britain, and the encroachment of Teutonic wanderers from the East. These, landing on the eastern coast of Caledonia, press slowly westward, until they come in violent conflict with the older Gaelic settlements on the west. Across the ruins of the ancient pre-Aryan Pictish kingdom, long pinned between implacable foes, these war-like tribes come to death-grips, only to turn on a common foe, the conquering Saxons. I intend the tale shall be of nations and kings rather than individuals. Doubtless I shall never write it.

As regards the pre-Aryan communities I mentioned in “The Voice of El-lil”, as you know all western Europe was once inhabited by small, dark, garlic eating tribes of Neolithic culture, known variously as Mediterraneans, Iberians, Basques, Long-heads, Garlic-eaters, and in Britain, Silures or Picts. Traces of these people, conquered and subjugated by the Aryan Celts, show still in the races today in the British Isles, and these primitive peoples I mentioned are undoubtedly vestiges of the race – whence doubtless come the legends of Phoenician settlements in Cornwall and Ireland. New races of Nordic Celts or Teutons coming into the Isles, seeing these small dark men concluded that they were of Semitic blood, or Egyptians. The fact is, they preceded all other races into the west, possibly excepting a very primitive Mongoloid proto-type which was soon extinct.

This Mediterranean type underlies all races and only a few centuries is required for this people to change the physiognomy of their conquerors. Who, for instance, not knowing their real origin, would realize that the first Aryan ancestors of the Italian, the Greek, the Persian and the high-caste Hindu were light eyed blonds, almost identical with the present day Scandinavian?

But to return to the Mediterraneans of the Isles, where these tribes remained a race apart longer than anywhere else. These aborigines are popularly known as Picts, and by this name I have designated them in all my stories – and I have written a number in which I mentioned or referred to them – “The Lost Race”, “The Shadow Kingdom,” “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune”, “The Dark Man”, “Kings of the Night”, to say nothing of several which I have not marketed.

Doubtless this term is in strictest sense, incorrect. I doubt very much if those ancient folk had any term that designated them as a people; Tuatha Feda, roughly, forest people, was the name given them by the Gaels of Ireland.

Bede says the Picts came to Scotland from Scythia after the Gaels had arrived in Ireland. The Gaels drove them into Scotland, rather, would not let them settle in Ireland, and later came over and dissposessed them. It is readily seen that these people were not aborigines, since the Gaels came into Ireland as late as the first century A.D.

But here arises a question: did these “Scythic” people take the name of an older race among which they settled, or did they lend those older peoples their name?

It is no doubt but that the “Picts of Galloway” were of a very mixed race, with Celtic no doubt predominating. But when I speak of the Picts proper, I am referring to the older, pure-blooded pre-Aryan type.

I think the following theory to be fairly logical: that Caledonia was inhabited from earliest times by a dark Mediterranean people; that the conquest of the Romans drove numbers of Cymric Britons into the heather, whence, no doubt, comes the tales of the “Caledonians”, large, fair haired people who fought with war-chariots. No doubt these tribes mixed a great deal with the natives.

Then, in the press of Roman conquest, which no doubt caused displacements of many Celtic tribes, doubtless including the Gaels, who must have come into Ireland from the mountains of Spain or Southern Gaul, another wave of Celts came into Caledonia, that race known as Picts. They may have been of Gaelic, Belgic or Brythonic type, though all evidence points to a non-Gaelic language. Or they may have been a type of Celt unclassified. Very likely it was already a mixed race, with Latin, Teutonic or even Semitic elements. This race, settling in Caledonia, possibly conquered the natives and gave its name to them.

You understand I have little or no foundation for this theory and am merely putting it forth as a supposition.

The natives of Galloway were spoken of as “The Picts of Galloway” long after the coming of the Saxons. Doubtless a strong strain of Mediterranean blood coursed in their veins, but they were a very mixed breed – besides the Pictish blood mentioned, they had strong elements of Gaelic, Brythonic, Danish and Saxon. More especially as Galloway, as the name implies (Gael-Gall, meaning a province under the control of the Gall, or foreigners) was early conquered by the Angle kings and did not regain its independence for a long time. The name Pict came to mean merely a native of Galloway. But behind that local term loomed a great shadowy realm reaching back into the Stone Age. Therefore, the term Pict as I use it, refers to that old, old Neolithic race in its purity and completeness.

According to Scotch legends, which speak of the Picts with the utmost horror and aversion, the Pictish kingdom was destroyed and its subjects wiped out by Kenith McAlpine. Doubtless the kingdom was destroyed but it is likely that the people were absorbed by the surrounding Gaelic tribes. And this kingdom was the mixed one of which I have already spoken. The old pure Mediterranean type had largely disapproved. The old pure Mediterranan type had largely disappeared. Distance lends perspective but it also distorts and foreshortens. Doubtless the legends of the Picts became mixed with the older, darker legends of the ancient Mongoloids of the Continent. These tales form the basis of the Aryan folk lore – as regards dwarfs, elves, gnomes, kobolds, demons, and the like – and twining themselves about the myths of the Picts, lent them a supernatural accent – demoniac appearance, sub-human stature, and so on. No doubt the later Picts were of more stocky build and unprepossessing appearance than the purer blooded Gaels, but I cannot believe that they were as hideous in aspect as the legends make them out.

NOVEMBER 1930

Kings of the Night is published in Weird Tales.

29 OCTOBER 1931

People of the Dark is returned by Strange Tales for rewrite. The Picts are only glancingly mentioned in this story, but the ‘little people’ or ‘children of the night’ are featured prominently.

DECEMBER 1931

The Dark Man is published in Weird Tales.

CIRCA JANUARY 1932

The People of the Dark is sold to Strange Tales.

SELECTIONS FROM THE HYBORIAN AGE, EARLY 1932

In this essay Howard outlined his imaginary history of the worlds of Kull and Conan, linking them, ultimately, with historical peoples. The Picts feature prominently throughout the essay, as one of the oldest races in the world, rarely rising above a state of barbarism.

Of that epoch known by the Nemedian chroniclers as the Pre-Cataclysmic Age, little is known except the latter part, and that is veiled in the mists of legendry....

The barbarians of that age were the Picts, who lived on islands far out on the western ocean; the Atlanteans, who dwelt on a small continent between the Pictish Islands and the main, or Thurian Continent; and the Lemurians, who inhabited a chain of large islands in the eastern hemisphere....

The Thurian civilization was crumbling; their armies were composed largely of barbarian mercenaries. Picts, Atlanteans, and Lemurians were their generals, their statesmen, often their kings....

Then the Cataclysm rocked the world. Atlantis and Lemuria sank, and the Pictish Islands were heaved up to form the mountain peaks of a new continent....

The barbarians fared a little better than the civilized races. The inhabitants of the Pictish Islands were destroyed, but a great colony of them, settled among the mountains of Valusia’s southern frontier, to serve as a buffer against foreign invasion, was untouched. The Continental kingdom of the Atlanteans likewise escaped the common ruin, and to it came thousands of their tribesmen in ships from the sinking land. Many Lemurians escaped to the eastern coast of the Thurian Continent, which was comparatively untouched....

To the continental kingdom of the Atlanteans, from sunken areas, swarmed myriads of beasts and savages – ape-men and apes. Forced to battle continually for their lives, they yet managed to retain vestiges of their former state of highly-advanced barbarism. Robbed of metals and ores, they became workers in stone like their distant ancestors, and had attained a real artistic level, when their struggling culture came into contact with the powerful Pictish nation. The Picts had also reverted to flint, but had advanced more rapidly in the matter of population and war-science. They had none of the Atlanteans’ artistic nature; they were a ruder, more practical, more prolific race. They left no pictures painted or carved on ivory, as did their enemies, but they left remarkably efficient flint weapons in plenty.

These stone age kingdoms clashed, and in a series of bloody wars, the outnumbered Atlanteans were hurled back into a state of savagery, and the evolution of the Picts was halted. Five hundred years after the Cataclysm the barbaric kingdoms have vanished. It is now a nation of savages – the Picts – carrying on continual warfare with tribes of savages – the Atlanteans. The Picts had the advantage of numbers and unity, whereas the Atlanteans had fallen into loosely-knit clans. That was the west of that day. ...

After the Pictish-Atlantean wars had destroyed the beginnings of what might have been a new culture, another, lesser cataclysm further altered the appearance of the original continent ... and the attendant earthquakes, floods and volcanoes completed the ruin of the barbarians which their tribal wars had begun.

A thousand years after the lesser cataclysm, the western world is seen to be a wild country of jungles and lakes and torrential rivers. Among the forest-covered hills of the northwest exist wandering bands of ape-men, without human speech, or the knowledge of fire or the use of implements. They are the descendants of the Atlanteans, sunk back into the squalling chaos of jungle-bestiality from which ages ago their ancestors so laboriously crawled. To the southwest dwell scattered clans of degraded, cave-dwelling savages, whose speech is of the most primitive form, yet who still retain the name of Picts, which has come to mean merely a term designating men – themselves, to distinguish them from the true beasts with which they contend for life and food. It is their only link with their former stage. Neither the squalid Picts nor the apish Atlanteans have any contact with other tribes or peoples....

Look at the world five hundred years later.... To the west the apish Atlanteans are beginning the long climb upward. They have completed the cycle of existence; they have long forgotten their former existence as men; unaware of any other former state, they are starting the climb unhelped and unhindered by human memories. To the south of them the Picts remain savages, apparently defying the laws of Nature by neither progressing nor retrogressing....

The tale of the next thousand years is the tale of the rise of the Hyborians, whose warlike tribes dominate the western world. Rude kingdoms are taking shape. The tawny-haired invaders have encountered the Picts, driving them into the barren lands of the west. To the northwest, the descendants of the Atlanteans, climbing unaided from apedom into primitive savagery, have not yet met the conquerors....

Five hundred years later the kingdoms of the world are clearly defined.... North of Aquilonia, the westernmost Hyborian kingdom, are the Cimmerians, ferocious savages, untamed by the invaders, but advancing rapidly because of contact with them; they are the descendants of the Atlanteans, now progressing more steadily than their old enemies the Picts, who dwell in the wilderness west of Aquilonia....

But the barbarians have kept their bloodstream pure... The Picts are of the same type as they always were – short, very dark, with black eyes and hair....

Five hundred years later the Hyborian civilization was swept away ... it was in the west that a power was growing destined to throw down the kings of Aquilonia from their high places....

But the Picts were growing amazingly in population and power. By a strange twist of fate, it was largely due to the efforts of one man, and he an alien, that they set their feet upon the ways that led to eventual empire. This man was Arus, a Nemedian priest, a natural-born reformer. What turned his mind toward the Picts is not certain, but this much is history – he determined to go into the western wilderness and modify the rude ways of the heathen by the introduction of the gentle worship of Mitra. He was not daunted by the grisly tales of what had happened to traders and explorers before him, and by some whim of fate he came among the people he sought, alone and unarmed, and was not instantly speared.

The Picts had benefitted by contact with Hyborian civilization, but they had always fiercely resisted that contact. That is to say, they had learned to work crudely in copper and tin, which was found scantily in their country, and for which latter metal they raided into the mountains of Zingara, or traded hides, whale’s teeth, walrus tusks and such few things as savages have to trade. They no longer lived in caves and tree-shelters, but built tents of hides, and crude huts, copied from those of the Bossonians. They still lived mainly by the chase, since their wilds swarmed with game of all sorts, and the rivers and sea with fish, but they had learned how to plant grain, which they did sketchily, preferring to steal it from their neighbors the Bossonians and Zingarans. They dwelt in clans which were generally at feud with each other, and their simple customs were blood-thirsty and utterly inexplicable to a civilized man, such as Arus of Nemedia. They had no direct contact with the Hyborians, since the Bossonians acted as a buffer between them. But Arus maintained that they were capable of progress, and events proved the truth of his assertion – though scarcely in the way he meant.

Arus was fortunate in being thrown in with a chief of more than usual intelligence – Gorm by name. Gorm can not be explained, any more than Genghis Khan, Othman, Attila, or any of those individuals, who, born in naked lands among untutored barbarians, yet possess the instinct for conquest and empire-building. In a sort of bastard-Bossonian, the priest made the chief understand his purpose, and though extremely puzzled, Gorm gave him permission to remain among his tribe unbutchered – a case unique in the history of the race. Having learned the language Arus set himself to work to eliminate the more unpleasant phases of Pictish life – such as human sacrifice, blood-feud, and the burning alive of captives. He harangued Gorm at length, whom he found to be an interested, if unresponsive listener. Imagination reconstructs the scene – the black-haired chief, in his tiger-skins and necklace of human teeth, squatting on the dirt floor of the wattle hut, listening intently to the eloquence of the priest, who probably sat on a carven, skin-covered block of mahogany provided in his honor – clad in the silken robes of a Nemedian priest, gesturing with his slender white hands as he expounded the eternal rights and justices which were the truths of Mitra. Doubtless he pointed with repugnance at the rows of skulls which adorned the walls of the hut and urged Gorm to forgive his enemies instead of putting their bleached remnants to such use. Arus was the highest product of an innately artistic race, refined by centuries of civilization; Gorm had behind him an heritage of a hundred thousand years of screaming savagery – the pad of the tiger was in his stealthy step, the grip of the gorilla in his black-nailed hands, the fire that burns in a leopard’s eyes burned in his.

Arus was a practical man. He appealed to the savage’s sense of material gain; he pointed out the power and splendor of the Hyborian kingdoms, as an example of the power of Mitra, whose teachings and works had lifted them up to their high places. And he spoke of cities, and fertile plains, marble walls and iron chariots, jeweled towers, and horsemen in their glittering armor riding to battle. And Gorm, with the unerring instinct of the barbarian, passed over his words regarding gods and their teachings, and fixed on the material powers thus vividly described. There in that mud-floored wattle hut, with the silk-robed priest on the mahogany block, and the dark-skinned chief crouching in his tiger-hides, was laid the foundations of empire.

As has been said, Arus was a practical man. He dwelt among the Picts and found much that an intelligent man could do to aid humanity, even when that humanity was cloaked in tiger-skins and wore necklaces of human teeth. Like all priests of Mitra, he was instructed in many things. He found that there were vast deposits of iron ore in the Pictish hills, and he taught the natives to mine, smelt and work it into implements – agricultural implements, as he fondly believed. He instituted other reforms, but these were the most important things he did: he instilled in Gorm a desire to see the civilized lands of the world; he taught the Picts how to work in iron; and he established contact between them and the civilized world. At the chief’s request he conducted him and some of his warriors through the Bossonian marches, where the honest villagers stared in amazement, into the glittering outer world.

Arus no doubt thought that he was making converts right and left, because the Picts listened to him, and refrained from smiting him with their copper axes. But the Pict was little calculated to seriously regard teachings which bade him forgive his enemy and abandon the warpath for the ways of honest drudgery. It has been said that he lacked artistic sense; his whole nature led to war and slaughter. When the priest talked of the glories of the civilized nations, his dark-skinned listeners were intent, not on the ideals of his religion, but on the loot which he unconsciously described in the narration of rich cities and shining lands. When he told how Mitra aided certain kings to overcome their enemies, they paid scant heed to the miracles of Mitra, but they hung on the description of battle-lines, mounted knights, and maneuvers of archers and spearmen. They harkened with keen dark eyes and inscrutable countenances, and they went their ways without comment, and heeded with flattering intentness his instructions as to the working of iron, and kindred arts.

Before his coming they had filched steel weapons and armor from the Bossonians and Zingarans, or had hammered out their own crude arms from copper and bronze. Now a new world opened to them, and the clang of sledges re-echoed throughout the land. And Gorm, by virtue of this new craft, began to assert his dominance over other clans, partly by war, partly by craft and diplomacy, in which latter art he excelled all other barbarians.

Picts now came and went freely into Aquilonia, under safe-conduct, and they returned with more information as to armor-forging and sword-making. More, they entered Aquilonia’s mercenary armies, to the unspeakable disgust of the sturdy Bossonians. Aquilonia’s kings toyed with the idea of playing the Picts against the Cimmerians, and possibly thus destroying both menaces, but they were too busy with their policies of agression in the south and east to pay much heed to the vaguely-known lands of the west, from which more and more stocky warriors swarmed to take service among the mercenaries.

These warriors, their service completed, went back to their wilderness with good ideas of civilized warfare, and that contempt for civilization which arises from familiarity with it. Drums began to beat in the hills, gathering-fires smoked on the heights, and savage sword-makers hammered their steel on a thousand anvils. By intrigues and forays too numerous and devious to enumerate, Gorm became chief of chiefs, the nearest approach to a king the Picts had had in thousands of years. He had waited long; he was past middle age. But now he moved against the frontiers, not in trade, but in war.

Arus saw his mistake too late; he had not touched the soul of the pagan, in which lurked the hard fierceness of all the ages. His persuasive eloquence had not caused a ripple in the Pictish conscience. Gorm wore a corselet of silvered mail now, instead of the tiger-skin, but underneath he was unchanged – the everlasting barbarian, unmoved by theology or philosophy, his instincts fixed unerringly on rapine and plunder.

The Picts burst on the Bossonian frontiers with fire and sword, not clad in tiger-skins and brandishing copper axes as of yore, but in scale-mail, wielding weapons of keen steel. As for Arus, he was brained by a drunken Pict, while making a last effort to undo the work he had unwittingly done. Gorm was not without gratitude; he caused the skull of the slayer to be set on the top of the priest’s cairn. And it is one of the grim ironies of the universe that the stones which covered Arus’ body should have been adorned with that last touch of barbarity – above a man to whom violence and blood-vengeance were revolting.

But the newer weapons and mail were not enough to break the lines. For years the superior armaments and sturdy courage of the Bossonians held the invaders at bay, aided, when necessary, by imperial Aquilonian troops. During this time the Hyrkanians came and went, and Zamora was added to the empire.

Then treachery from an unexpected source broke the Bossonian lines....

And then the Pictish invasion burst in full power along those borders. It was no mere raid, but the concerted rush of a whole nation, led by chiefs who had served in Aquilonian armies, and planned and directed by Gorm – an old man now, but with the fire of his fierce ambition undimmed. This time there were no strong walled villages in their path, manned by sturdy archers, to hold back the rush until the imperial troops could be brought up. The remnants of the Bossonians were swept out of existence, and the blood-mad barbarians swarmed into Aquilonia, looting and burning, before the legions, warring again with the Nemedians, could be marched into the west.... The Picts surged irresistibly eastward, and host after host was trampled beneath their feet. Without their Bossonian archers the Aquilonians found themselves unable to cope with the terrible arrow-fire of the barbarians. From all parts of the empire legions were recalled to resist the onrush, while from the wilderness horde after horde swarmed forth, in apparently inexhaustible supply. And in the midst of this chaos, the Cimmerians swept down from their hills, completing the ruin. They looted cities, devastated the country, and retired into the hills with their plunder, but the Picts occupied the land they had over-run. And the Aquilonian empire went down in fire and blood....

Nemedia, unconquerable by Hyborians, reeled between the riders of the east, and the swordsmen of the west, when a tribe of Æsir, wandering down from their snowy lands, came into the kingdom, and were engaged as mercenaries; they proved such able warriors that they not only beat off the Hyrkanians, but halted the eastward advance of the Picts.

The world at that time presents some such picture: a vast Pictish empire, wild, rude and barbaric, stretches from the coasts of Vanaheim in the north to the southern-most shores of Zingara. It stretches east to include all Aquilonia except Gunderland, the northern-most province, which, as a separate kingdom in the hills, survived the fall of the empire, and still maintains its independence. The Pictish empire also includes Argos, Ophir, the western part of Koth, and the western-most lands of Shem. Opposed to this barbaric empire is the empire of the Hyrkanians....

Gorm was slain by Hialmar, a chief of the Nemedian Æsir. He was a very old man, nearly a hundred years old. In the seventy-five years which had elapsed since he first heard the tale of empires from the lips of Arus – a long time in the life of a man, but a brief space in the tale of nations – he had welded an empire from straying savage clans, he had overthrown a civilization. He who had been born in a mud-walled, wattle-roofed hut, in his old age sat on golden thrones, and gnawed joints of beef presented to him on golden dishes by naked slave-girls who were the daughters of kings. Conquest and the acquiring of wealth altered not the Pict; out of the ruins of the crushed civilization no new culture arose phoenix-like. The dark hands which shattered the artistic glories of the conquered never tried to copy them. Though he sat among the glittering ruins of shattered palaces and clad his hard body in the silks of vanquished kings, the Pict remained the eternal barbarian, ferocious, elemental, interested only in the naked primal principles of life, unchanging, unerring in his instincts which were all for war and plunder, and in which arts and the cultured progress of humanity had no place....

For a short age Pict and Hyrkanian snarled at each other over the ruins of the world they had conquered. Then began the glacier ages, and the great Nordic drift... All over the western world, the Picts and Hyrkanians were staggering before this younger, fiercer people....

The western world was now dominated by Nordic barbarians. The Picts still held Aquilonia and part of Zingara, and the western coast of the continent....

There was no such thing, at that time, as a consolidated Nordic empire. As always, the tribes had each its own chief or king, and they fought savagely among themselves. What their destiny might have been will not be known, because another terrific convulsion of the earth, carving out the lands as they are known to moderns, hurled all into chaos again....

In the west the remnants of the Picts, reduced by the cataclysm once more to the status of stone age savages, began, with the incredible virility of their race, once more to possess the land, until, at a later age, they were overthrown by the westward drift of the Cimmerians and Nordics. This was so long after the breaking-up of the continent that only meaningless legends told of former empires.

CIRCA JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1932

Worms of the Earth is accepted by Weird Tales.

LETTER TO H.P. LOVECRAFT, CIRCA JANUARY 1932

Referring again to your sense of placement with Rome – which is a subject so interesting to me I can hardly keep off it – your explanation is logical and without doubt correct. My sense of placement among the various western barbarians can doubtless be explained as logically. But there is one hobby of mine which puzzles me to this day. I am not attempting to lend it any esoteric or mysterious significance, but the fact remains that I can neither explain nor understand it. That is my interest in the people which, for the sake of brevity, I have always designated as Picts. I am of course aware that my use of the term might be questioned. The people who are known in history as Picts, are named variously as Celts, aborigines or even Germans. Some authorities maintain they came into Britain after the Britons, and just before the coming of the Gaels. The “wild Picts of Galloway” which figure largely in early Scottish history and legendry, were doubtless of a very mixed race – probably predominantly Celtic, both Cymric and Gaelic, and speaking a sort of bastard Cymric, adulterated with elements of Gaelic and aborigine, of which latter strain there must have been quite a percentage in the blood of the Picts. There might have been considerable Germanic or Scandinavian mixture, as well. Probably the term “Pict” was properly applied only to the wandering Celtic tribe which settled in Galloway and presumably conquered and was absorbed by the aboriginal population. But to me “Pict” must always refer to the small dark Mediterranean aborigines of Britain. This is not strange, since when I first read of these aborigines, they were referred to as Picts. But what is strange, is my unflagging interest in them. I read of them first in Scottish histories – merely bare mentionings, usually in disapproval. Understand, my historical readings in my childhood were scattered and sketchy, owing to the fact that I lived in the country where such books were scarce. I was an enthusiast of Scottish history, such as I could obtain, feeling a kinship with the kilted clansmen because of the Scottish strain in my own blood. In the brief and condensed histories I read, the Picts were given only bare mention, as when they clashed with, and were defeated by, the Scotch. Or in English history, as the cause of the Britons inviting in the Saxons. The fullest description of this race that I read at that time, was a brief remark by an English historian that the Picts were brutish savages, living in mud huts. The only hint I obtained about them from a legendary point of view, was in a description of Rob Roy, which, mentioning the abnormal length of his arms, compared him in this respect to the Picts, commenting briefly upon their stocky and ape-like appearance. You can see that everything I read at that time, was not calculated to inspire an admiration for the race.

Then when I was about twelve I spent a short time in New Orleans and found in a Canal Street library, a book detailing the pageant of British history, from prehistoric times up to – I believe – the Norman conquest. It was written for school-boys and told in an interesting and romantic style, probably with many historical inaccuracies. But there I first learned of the small dark people which first settled Britain, and they were referred to as Picts. I had always felt a strange interest in the term and the people, and now I felt a driving absorption regarding them. The writer painted the aborigines in no more admirable light than had other historians whose works I had read. His Picts were made to be sly, furtive, unwarlike, and altogether inferior to the races which followed – which was doubtless true. And yet I felt a strong sympathy for this people, and then and there adopted them as a medium of connection with ancient times. I made them a strong, warlike race of barbarians, gave them an honorable history of past glories, and created for them a great king – one Bran Mak Morn. I must admit my imagination was rather weak when it came to naming this character, who seemed to leap full grown into my mind. Many kings in the Pictish chronicles have Gaelic names, yet in order to be consistent with my fictionized version of the Pictish race, their great king should have a name more in keeping with their non-Aryan antiquity. But I named him Bran, for another favorite historical character of mine – the Gaul Brennus, who sacked Rome. The Mak Morn comes from the famous Irish hero, Gol Mac Morn. I changed the spelling of the Mac, to give it a non-Gaelic appearance, since the Gaelic alphabet contains no “k”, “c” being always given the “k” sound. So while Bran Mac Morn is Gaelic for “The Raven, Son of Morn”, Bran Mak Morn has no Gaelic significance, but has a meaning of its own, purely Pictish and ancient, with roots in the dim mazes of antiquity; the similarity in sound to the Gaelic term is simply a coincidence!

But what I intended to say was, I am not yet able to understand my own preference for these so-called Picts. Bran Mak Morn has not changed in the years; he is exactly as he leaped full-grown into my mind – a pantherish man of medium height with inscrutable black eyes, black hair and dark skin. This was not my own type; I was blond and rather above medium size than below. Most of my friends were of the same mold. Pronounced brunet types such as this were mainly represented by Mexicans and Indians, whom I disliked. Yet, in reading of the Picts, I mentally took their side against the invading Celts and Teutons, whom I knew to be my type and indeed, my ancestors. My interest, especially in my early boyhood, in these strange Neolithic people was so keen, that I was not content with my Nordic appearance, and had I grown into the sort of a man, which in childhood I wished to become, I would have been short, stocky, with thick, gnarled limbs, beady black eyes, a low retreating forehead, heavy jaw, and straight, coarse black hair – my conception of a typical Pict. I cannot trace this whim to an admiration for some person of that type – it was a growth from my interest in the Mediterranean race which first settled Britain. Books dealing on Scottish history were easier for me to obtain than those dealing with Irish history, so in my childhood I knew infinitely more about Scottish history and legendry than Irish. I had a distinct Scottish patriotism, and liked nothing better than reading about the Scotch and English wars. I enacted those wars in my games and galloped full tilt through the mesquite on a bare-backed racing mare, hewing right and left with a Mexican machete and slicing off cactus pears which I pretended were the heads of English knights. But in reading of clashes between the Scotch and the Picts, I always felt my sympathies shift strangely. But enough of this; it isn’t my intention to bore you.

LETTER TO H.P. LOVECRAFT, CIRCA MARCH 2, 1932

As to my feelings toward the mythical Picts, no doubt you are right in comparing it to the Eastern boy’s Indian-complex, and your own feelings toward Arabic things. My interest in the Picts was always mixed with a bit of fantasy – that is, I never felt the realistic placement with them that I did with the Irish and Highland Scotch. Not that it was the less vivid; but when I came to write of them, it was still through alien eyes – thus in my first Bran Mak Morn story – which was rightfully rejected – I told the story through the person of a Gothic mercenary in the Roman army; in a long narrative rhyme which I never completed, and in which I first put Bran on paper, I told it through a Roman centurion on the Wall; in “The Lost Race” the central figure was a Briton; and in “Kings of the Night” it was a Gaelic prince. Only in my last Bran story, “The Worms of the Earth” which Mr. Wright accepted, did I look through Pictish eyes, and speak with a Pictish tongue!

In that story, by the way, I took up anew, Bran’s eternal struggle with Rome. I can hardly think of him in any other connection. Sometimes I think Bran is merely the symbol of my own antagonism toward the empire, an antagonism not nearly so easy to understand as my favoritism for the Picts. Perhaps this is another explanation for the latter: I saw the name “Picts” first on maps, and always the name lay outside the far-flung bounds of the Roman empire. This fact aroused my intense interest – it was so significant of itself. The mere fact suggested terrific wars – savage attacks and ferocious resistance – valor and heroism and ferocity. I was an instinctive enemy of Rome; what more natural than that I should instinctively ally myself with her enemies, more especially as these enemies had successfully resisted all attempts at subjugation. When in my dreams – not day-dreams, but actual dreams – I fought the armored legions of Rome, and reeled back gashed and defeated, there sprang into my mind – like an invasion from another, unborn world of the future – the picture of a map, spanned by the wide empire of Rome, and ever beyond the frontier, outside the lines of subjugation, the cryptic legend, “Picts and Scots”. And always the thought rose in my mind to lend me new strength – among the Picts I could find refuge, safe from my foes, where I could lick my wounds and renew my strength for the wars.

LETTER FROM FARNSWORTH WRIGHT TO ROBERT E. HOWARD, 10 MARCH 1932

In this letter, Wright says, I want to schedule WORMS OF THE EARTH soon, for that is an unusually fine story, I think. Also in this letter, he rejects The Frost-Giant’s Daughter and returns The Phoenix on the Sword for revisions; these are the first two Conan stories submitted by Howard to Weird Tales.

MARCHERS OF VALHALLA, CIRCA APRIL 1932

This is Howard’s first story of James Allison, who remembers past incarnations, generally as a barbaric warrior in an epoch before the dawn of history. It tells of the world-spanning migration of a band of pre-Aryan Nordics, a band which includes one man not of the tribe.

We came of many clans, but all of the golden-haired AEsir, except the man who strode beside me. He was Kelka, my blood brother, and a Pict. He had joined us among the jungle-clad hills of a far land that marked the eastern-most drift of his race, where the tom-toms of his people pulsed incessantly through the hot star-flecked night. He was short, thick-limbed, deadly as a jungle-cat. We of the AEsir were barbarians, but Kelka was a savage. Behind him lay the abysmal chaos of the squalling black jungle. The pad of the tiger was in his stealthy tread, the grip of the gorilla in his black-nailed hands; the fire that burns in a leopard’s eyes burned in his.

JUNE 1932

People of the Dark is published in Strange Tales.

NOVEMBER 1932

Worms of the Earth is published in Weird Tales.

LETTER TO H.P. LOVECRAFT, CIRCA DECEMBER 1932

Concerning “Worms of the Earth” – I must have been unusually careless when I wrote that, considering the errors – such as “her” for “his”, “him” for “himself”, “loathsome” for “loathing”, etc.. I’m at a loss to say why I spelled Eboracum as Ebbracum. I must investigate the matter. I know I saw it spelled that way, somewhere; it’s not likely I would make such a mistake entirely of my own volition, though I do frequently make errors. Somehow, in my mind, I have a vague idea that it’s connected some way with the Gaelic “Ebroch” – York.

THE VALLEY OF THE WORM, FEBRUARY 1934

This is another story of James Allison, remembering a past incarnation as a hero whose battle with a monstrous creature inspired later legends of dragon-slayers. In this story, the AEsir come into a land inhabited by the Picts.

I will take up the tale at a time when we came into jungle-clad hills reeking with rot and teeming with spawning life, where the tom-toms of a savage people pulsed incessantly through the hot breathless night. These people came forth to dispute our way – short, strongly built men, black-haired, painted, ferocious, but indisputably white men. We knew their breed of old. They were Picts, and of all alien races the fiercest. We had met their kind before in thick forests, and in upland valleys beside mountain lakes. But many moons had passed since those meetings.

I believe this particular tribe represented the easternmost drift of the race. They were the most primitive and ferocious of any I ever met. Already they were exhibiting hints of characteristics I have noted among black savages in jungle countries, though they had dwelt in these environs only a few generations. The abysmal jungle was engulfing them, was obliterating their pristine characteristics and shaping them in its own horrific mold. They were drifting into head-hunting, and cannibalism was but a step which I believe they must have taken before they became extinct. These things are natural adjuncts to the jungle; the Picts did not learn them from the black people, for then there were no blacks among those hills. In later years they came up from the south, and the Picts first enslaved and then were absorbed by them.

CIRCA OCTOBER 1934

Beyond the Black River is accepted by Weird Tales. This story prominently features the Hyborian Age Picts. Two other Conan stories, the unfinished Wolves Beyond the Border, possibly written before Beyond the Black River, and an unsold story, The Black Stranger, which was likely written afterward, also feature the Picts.

ALVIN EARL PERRY, A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF ROBERT E. HOWARD, FANTASY MAGAZINE, JULY 1935

As to his fictional characters, we’ll let Mr. Howard speak for himself. He says: “The first character I ever created was Francis Xavier Gordon, El Borak, the hero of ‘The Daughter of Erlik Khan’ (Top-Notch), etc. I don’t remember his genesis. He came to life in my mind when I was about ten years old. The next was Bran Mak Morn, the Pictish king (‘The Kings of the Night,’ etc., Weird Tales). He was the result of my discovery of the existence of the Pictish race, when reading some historical works in a public library in New Orleans at the age of thirteen. Physically he bore a striking resemblance to El Borak.”

ROBERT E. HOWARD, BRAN MAK MORN AND THE PICTS

Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet

“There is one hobby of mine which puzzles me to this day,” wrote Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft in 1932. “That is my interest in the people which, for the sake of brevity, I have always designated as Picts. I am of course aware that my use of the term might be questioned.... But to me ‘Pict’ must always refer to the small dark Mediterranean aborigines of Britain. This is not strange, since when I first read of these aborigines, they were referred to as Picts. But what is strange, is my unflagging interest in them.”

The Picts are the only fictional creations to appear throughout Howard’s writing career. Only one other creation, Francis X. Gordon (‘El Borak’) appears at both the beginning and the end of Howard’s career, but he was notably absent from the early 1920s until 1934. Picts, on the other hand, appear in no fewer than thirty stories, poems, and fragments, from The West Tower (probably written circa 1922–1923), a Steve Allison fragment, to The Black Stranger, one of the last Conan stories, probably written in 1935, and rarely a year passes that they do not appear in some story. It seems likely that, had he lived longer, the Picts would have surfaced again in his work.

The Picts appear in many different contexts. In the second story Howard sold professionally, The Lost Race, they are living underground, apparently some-where in the south of Britain, having been driven there by Celtic invaders. In the Bran Mak Morn tales, they are the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Scotland, fighting back the invading forces of Roman Britain. In the stories of Turlogh O’Brien and Cormac Mac Art, they are the last surviving remnants of Bran’s people, now pitted against the Norsemen who have established themselves in the remote northern islands off the coast of Scotland. In the Kull series, they are barbaric allies of the Valusian king, while in the Hyborian Age of Conan, they are the savage inhabitants of a wilderness that stretches from the western borders of Aquilonia to the sea. In the James Allison stories, they are a bestial, jungle-dwelling race. Always they are at the outer fringes of the world.

Howard told an interviewer, “The first character I ever created was Francis Xavier Gordon, El Borak.... He came to life in my mind when I was about ten years old. The next was Bran Mak Morn, the Pictish king.... He was the result of my discovery of the existence of the Pictish race, when reading some historical works in a public library in New Orleans at the age of thirteen.”

Somewhat earlier, Howard had told H.P. Lovecraft that he had first read of the Picts in histories of Scotland, of which he was an enthusiast, but that these had been “bare mentionings, usually in disapproval.”

“Then when I was about twelve I spent a short time in New Orleans and found in a Canal Street library, a book detailing the pageant of British history, from prehistoric times up to – I believe – the Norman conquest. It was written for school-boys and told in an interesting and romantic style, probably with many historical inaccuracies. But there I first learned of the small dark people which first settled Britain, and they were referred to as Picts. I had always felt a strange interest in the term and the people, and now I felt a driving absorption regarding them. The writer painted the aborigines in no more admirable light than had other historians whose works I had read. His Picts were made to be sly, furtive, unwarlike, and altogether inferior to the races which followed – which was doubtless true. And yet I felt a strong sympathy for this people, and then and there adopted them as a medium of connection with ancient times. I made them a strong, warlike race of barbarians, gave them an honorable history of past glories, and created for them a great king – one Bran Mak Morn.”

While, in the absence of a definite statement from Howard, we cannot know with real certainty which book it was in which he found the Picts, methodical research has finally yielded a very strong candidate: The Romance of Early British Life: From the Earliest Times to the Coming of the Danes, by G.F. Scott Elliot (London: Seeley and Co. Ltd., 1909). The book fits so many of the particulars in Howard’s description, and in it we find so many descriptions and incidents which find resonance in Howard’s work, that one almost feels it has to be the book in question, especially in the absence of any other candidates. In discussing the spread of Neolithic culture from the region of the Caucasus and Mesopotamia, across Northern Africa, and into Spain, for instance, Scott Elliot writes: “This was the first race of man to be thoroughly domesticated. Like the sheep, goats, and oxen which they brought with them, they had been themselves tamed, trained, and taught to labour. Their descendants still exist all along the Mediterranean, and not only there but in our own islands. This people, or rather this race of mankind, has been called by many different names. The most sonorous is not doubt ‘Homo Mediterraneus,’ but they have also been called Basques, Iberians, Silurians, the Firbolg, the Dolmen-builders, the Picts, and Eaters of Garlic. We shall call them Picts, because this is the shortest name, and by using it we shall save time, labour, ink, and paper in writing about them.”

These Mediterraneans are the people whom Scott Elliot says migrated to Britain in Neolithic times, and slowly wrested the islands from the previous inhabitants, a race of red-haired cave dwellers. Interestingly, he fabricates a little story about a party of Picts from Brittany preparing to paddle across the English Channel in dugout canoes loaded with their possessions and livestock. “A strong force of the oldest men in the settlement, well armed and watchful, were ‘seeing off’ the party of emigrants. These were all young men, mostly of a disagreeably bold and enterprising disposition, and of young women who were inclined to be insubordinate and disrespectful to the heads of the tribe. So they were selected as being the best to depart, not merely for their own good, but for the future peace of the old settlement.”

Compare this with the story told to Cororuc by the ancient Pict in The Lost Race:

“Our people came from the south. Over the islands, over the Inland Sea. Over the snow-topped mountains, where some remained, to stay any enemies who might follow. Down into the fertile plains we came. Over all the land we spread. We became wealthy and prosperous. Then two kings arose in the land, and he who conquered, drove out the conquered. So many of us made boats and set sail for the far-off cliffs that gleamed white in the sunlight. We found a race of red-haired barbarians, who dwelt in caves.”

One of the most powerfully suggestive correspondences between The Romance of Early British Life and Howard’s Pictish stories is in the chapter Scott Elliot titles “My General, Agricola.” In it, he tells the story of a Tungrian serving in the Roman legion in Britain, and relates their troubles in Caledonia.

“We [the 2nd Cohort of Tungrians] would go in front and choose the road for the legion. Then a few of us would go first, and watch carefully for an ambush. Often there would be a sudden storm of stone-headed arrows upon us; a Caledonian might be lurking behind every tree or any boulder, and they are clever at concealing themselves. A soldier of ours was cooking his dinner beside a small pool, and had been there two hours watching the banks of it. Then he turned his back, and a savage came out of the water below where he stood and pierced him with his spear before he could turn round. They can stay for hours together with only the lips and nose above water, and no one can see them if the water is dark or full of reeds.”

Compare this with the story told by the Norse narrator of Men of the Shadows, particularly the incident in which Romans are killed on the shore of a lake (p. 8).

Scott Elliot’s outline of Pictish history is generally in accord with the scholarship of the day, differing from the mainstream only in using the term “Picts” to designate these Mediterranean invaders of ancient Britain. Most authorities seem to have preferred the term “Iberians,” but for the most part, they agreed that this short, dark people had spread across most of Western Europe from North Africa (though it was not known if they had originated there), eventually migrating into the British Isles, and were the bringers of Neolithic culture. They were thought to be related (though none could say precisely how) to the Basques, and some speculated that they were kin to the Silures (ancient Welsh), Picts (ancient Scots), Lapps, Finns, and other remnants of pre-Celtic peoples. Because they were thought to have originated in northern Africa, and were physiologically similar, they were thought by some to have been related to the Berbers.

Of Howard’s first attempts to write about the Picts, we know little. In his January 1932 letter to Lovecraft, he mentioned “a long narrative rhyme which I never completed, and in which I first put Bran on paper,” saying he had “told it through a Roman centurion on the Wall.” A listing of Howard’s poems made by his agent, Otis Adelbert Kline, after his death, included one titled Bran Mak Morn, with the notation that it was ten pages long. Unfortunately, this poem has not surfaced and may be forever lost. In a letter dated October 5, 1923, Howard told his friend Clyde Smith of a book he was writing “for my own amusement” which featured, among others, “Bran Mak Morn, who was the greatest chief the Picts ever had....” This work, too, has not surfaced. Possibly Howard did not get far with it. [Note: The story has been found. See page 289.]

The earliest work featuring Bran or the Picts that we do have is Bran Mak Morn, three handwritten pages on composition paper, probably dating from Howard’s high school days (circa 1922–23). It is set during a time when the Picts are warring against both Gaelic and Norse invaders, but Bran apparently sees a greater foe looming: “A hard, thank-less task it is to raise the Pict nation out of savagery and bring it back to the civilization of our fathers. Of the Age of Brennus. The Picts are savages. I must make them civilized.... Because I know that no barbarian nation can stand before Rome.”

Here is our earliest glimpse of a theme that will run throughout Howard’s dealings with the Picts: they are a once-great, civilized race, fallen into barbarism or savagery. This theme, of course, finds echoes in much of Howard’s other work, as well.

Another work that apparently dates from 1922–23, also hand-written, consists of four pages outlining the history of the Picts and Celts in Britain, essentially following the story as found in The Romance of Early British Life. Of some interest is his account of the immediate aftermath of the Celtic invasion. After relating that most of the Picts had fled to the mountains in the north (what are now the Scottish highlands), he notes that one group, who came to be called Silurians, had fled instead into Wales. The former group, he said, had eventually begun intermarrying with the red-haired savages who had preceded them; the latter were a different story.

“For some reason or other the Picts as Silurian that fled to Wales did not unite with the cave-men’s descendents and the early types of Picts remained unchanged, except as, later they were altered by intermarriage with the Celts, fleeing before other invaders. And to this day in mountains of western Wales are still to be found traces of the ancient Pictish type.”

It is these “Picts as Silurian” who figure in Howard’s first (so far as we know) completed story of these people.

In the fall of 1924, Howard got his first literary break, when he sold Spear and Fang, a story about cavemen, to Weird Tales. The eighteen-year-old had been submitting stories to professional magazines for about three years, and this was his first sale. He hastened to follow up. According to his fictionalized autobiographical novel, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, “There lingered in the back of his mind a desire to glorify the neolithic man – a hangover from some imagined romance of his early childhood. So he followed up [Spear and Fang] with a wild tale of early Britain, [The Lost Race].” The story was returned to him by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright: “As for [The Lost Race], he had found several faults with it, in that it left too much to the imagination and left some important facts unexplained.... However, the editor professed himself ready to take the story if the changes and additions which he suggested were made.” (Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, p. 35; Howard had used the thinly disguised titles, Talon and Bow and The Forgotten Race).

Though he “felt a sinking of the heart when he contemplated rewriting [The Lost Race],” Howard did make the changes sought by Wright, and the tale became his second sold to, and fourth published in, the magazine, appearing in the January 1927 issue.

The Lost Race, like Spear and Fang, is a relatively straightforward adventure story with little of the truly “weird” in it. A Briton named Cororuc is travelling from Cornwall to his home somewhere to the east, when he is captured by a band of very small, dark-complexioned men, armed with stone tools and dressed in furs. They take him to an immense cavern where he is brought before their apparent leader, an incredibly ancient man, from whom he learns that these people are Picts. He is incredulous: “Picts!... I have fought Picts in Caledonia...; they are short but massive and misshapen; not at all like you!” “They are not true Picts,” the ancient tells him, and relates to him the story of “the lost race,” which we have already quoted above.

Cororuc is bewildered by the ancient’s evident hatred of him, and of all the Celts: “That these people were even human, he was not at all certain. He had heard so much of them as ‘little people.’ Tales of their doings, their hatred of the race of man, and their maliciousness flocked back to him. Little he knew that he was gazing on one of the mysteries of the ages. That the tales which the ancient Gaels told of the Picts, already warped, would become even more warped from age to age, to result in tales of elves, dwarfs, trolls and fairies... just as the Neanderthal monsters resulted in tales of goblins and ogres.”

There is little in this story of the Picts that we do not find in Scott Elliot’s book (save, of course, Howard’s passionate intensity). As for the stories Cororuc had heard, already becoming “warped,” we find in Scott Elliot: “A great many stories of giants are probably dim and jumbled-up traditions of the tall, red-haired cave-men seen by the first Picts who invaded Britain.... But at a much later period the conquering Pict is himself overcome by the Gaelic Celt. Then it is his turn to become a malignant gnome, a dark little dwarf, whose stone arrows are much to be dreaded.... It is by no means improbable that the ‘little people’ – that is, the small, dark Picts – did live on for many years in those underground houses of theirs....” This idea was not original with Scott Elliot, of course. Numerous writers of the time expressed the idea that fairy tales and myths must have some basis in historical fact.

The Lost Race was accepted by Weird Tales in January 1925 (it was not published until two years later). It is just over a year later that we find evidence of the next story of the Picts, when Weird Tales editor Wright rejects Men of the Shadows, saying: “I thoroughly enjoyed MEN OF THE SHADOWS, but I fear I can not use it in WEIRD TALES. It is too little of a ‘story,’ despite the vigorous action in the opening pages. It is rather a chronicle of a tribe, a picture of the evolution of a race; and thereby it lacks the suspense and thrill that a story of individual conflict and hopes and fears and drama would have.”

This is, so far as we now know, the first completed story featuring Bran Mak Morn and, while Wright’s comment that “it is too little of a ‘story’” seems just, it is a seminal work for our understanding of Robert E. Howard’s conceptions of the Picts, with it’s lengthy “history” of the race, as told by an aged wizard. It is here that we find new elements grafted onto the story of the “Mediterranean” race.

“Men of the Shadows” is narrated by a yellow-haired Norseman who has served with the Roman legions manning Hadrian’s wall. We have already noted that The Romance of Early British Life also told the story of a Roman legionary serving in Caledonia, and that the incident by the lake, in which our narrator’s final two companions are speared by a Pict who has submerged himself, very clearly echoes a similar incident in Scott Elliot’s book.

The narrator is captured by the Picts, but they are stayed from killing him by the command of their leader, before whom he is brought after he has recovered. When this chief refers to the Picts as “my people,” the Norseman remonstrates, “But you are no Pict!” “I am a Mediterranean,” the chief replies.

“Who are you?”

“Bran Mak Morn.”

“What!” I had expected a monstrosity, a hideous, deformed giant, a ferocious dwarf built in keeping with the rest of his race.

“You are not as these.”

“I am as the race was,” he replied. “The line of chiefs has kept its blood pure through the ages, scouring the world for women of the Old Race.”

Bran, then, is a “pure” Pict, while the rest of the race has degenerated. (The ancient in The Lost Race had said the Picts of Caledonia were “not true Picts.”) We will recall that, in both Scott Elliot and The Lost Race, it was suggested that the Picts, pushed by the Celts into the wild hills of the west and north to which they had themselves pushed the earlier, red-haired cavemen, had interbred with their savage predecessors “and became a race of monstrous dwarfs.” Because the line of chiefs “has kept its blood pure,” though, Bran represents the race as it once was. We can only wonder what his relationship to the Silurian Picts might be, for Howard does not make it explicit.

The Norseman is then witness to a confrontation between Bran and an aged wizard, what appears to be a contest of wills, a “combat between the eyes and the souls behind them.” When Bran has triumphed, the ancient relates to his listeners the history of his race, and we find some remarkable new elements now grafted onto the story of the Picts. We learn that they were a “Nameless Tribe” in the beginning, and had their origin somewhere in the northwest of the continent we now know as North America. They were the “First Race” of men, though “beast men” (Neanderthals) preceded them. The “Second Race” were Lemurians, the “Third Race” Atlanteans (also identified as Crô-Magnons), and the “Fourth Race” Celts. The beast-men (who may be identical with the “reindeer men,” red-haired savages) first fled southward before the Nameless Tribe, then crossed over to Africa via a chain of marshy islands, then northward into Europe. The Picts (or Nameless Tribe) first drifted from their original home to islands southeast of there, then fled eastward when a cataclysm destroyed their islands (now mountain peaks), then migrated into South America during the Ice Age, and then moved on to Atlantis (driving the Atlantean Crô-Magnons into Europe, where they displaced the Neanderthal beast-men). Following an internecine conflict, a portion of the Nameless Tribe migrated to Africa, and from this point their story follows the historical one.

These new elements appear to be derived from several sources. The “First Race” and successors come from Theosophy, a quasi-religious movement founded by Madame Helena Blavatsky in the 19th century. Her work was a hopeless gallimaufry of quasi-Oriental religion and philosophy combined with imperfectly understood science (or, more frequently, her rantings against science) and anthropology, not to mention flights of pure unbridled fancy, but she attracted a huge following. It is possible that Howard learned of Madame Blavatsky’s theories of the “root races” and “sub-races” of mankind through friends acquainted with occult literature, or through secondary sources. It would not appear that he had read Blavatsky’s own work, for he does not follow her identifications of the races in most particulars (certainly not her ludicrous physical descriptions), nor does he seem to allude in a direct way to any of her ideas.

Another source for these ideas appears to have been the work of the British folklorist Lewis Spence, particularly his The Problem of Atlantis (1924) and Atlantis in America (1925). In these works Spence brings together a great mass of geological, botanical, anthropological, and other evidence, together with accounts from Classical sources, in an attempt to prove the former existence of an Atlantean continent in the Atlantic Ocean. Spence, having written a number of scholarly treatises on the folklore of many cultures, was able to make it all sound convincing enough, at least to readers with no particular scientific knowledge, or those who wanted to be convinced (as, apparently, he did himself). His books have a much greater aura of plausibility than those of the occultists.

Spence’s argument, in brief, hinged upon the “sudden” appearance of the Crô-Magnons in southwestern Europe, and the assumption that, since no evidence of an earlier, transitional stage was known, they must have acquired their culture somewhere other than Europe or Africa. He attempts to tie together a great mass of anthropological data to show a common culture-complex spreading through Africa, Europe, and the Americas at roughly the same time, suggesting that this culture must have originated at some mid-point between those lands, a place no longer accessible to archaeologists – Atlantis. This identification of Atlantis as the source of Crô-Magnon man and his culture seems to have been original with Spence, and as we have seen, Howard identifies the Atlanteans as Crô-Magnons. Atlantis in America goes into greater detail on the American evidences for his thesis, and includes a chapter, “The Analogy of Lemuria,” which presents a brief outline of evidences adduced by other writers for the previous existence of a Pacific continent. Howard must have encountered these ideas between the writing of The Lost Race (accepted in January 1925) and Men of the Shadows (rejected March 1926).

Late in July 1925, Howard began a story called The Isle of the Eons. He appears to have written the first 26 pages of the story, which are fairly straightforward action, in that month, then set the tale aside for a time. He then resumed writing the story at about the same time he wrote Men of the Shadows, i.e., early 1926. He took up the tale where he had left it, and wrote an additional 17 pages, bringing the total to 43 pages, leaving the story, once again, unfinished. He would return to this draft once more, in 1927 or 1928, and then write two other drafts in 1929.

The 1926 portion of the first draft ends as the unnamed “Dutchman” of the story deciphers some hieroglyphics, concluding that the isle on which he and his companion have been stranded is a remnant of Lemuria: “Lemuria iss to der Pacific, vot Atlantis iss to der Atlantic.... Von Kaelmann alvays said ... dot dey had a great civilization vhen der der men on Atlantis ver still apes, who ver der ancestors uf der Cro-Magnon peoples” (from unpublished draft, p. 43).

It seems possible, perhaps even likely, that Howard stopped working on The Isle of the Eons to write Men of the Shadows, a story in which he would refine and develop these new ideas.

We may also note that the 1926 section of The Isle of the Eons provided new information about the buildings and ruins found on the island, including a number of allusions and comparisons to Central and South American monuments or cities. While Spence posited that the pre-Columbian cultures of South and Central America owed much to Lemuria, Howard’s source for the new material in The Isle of the Eons seems to have been not Spence, but E.A. Allen’s The Prehistoric World: or, Vanished Races, published in 1885, a copy of which was in Howard’s library.

In this book Howard not only found names and descriptions he could use in The Isle of the Eons, but also found several chapters that no doubt commanded his attention, in view of his interest in the Picts. Chapter 6, for example, is devoted to “The Neolithic Age in Europe,” and particularly to the “Turanians.” The word “Pict” does not appear in the book, but we can read that “history, tradition, linguistics, and ethnology conspire to fortify the conclusions that, in prehistoric times, all Europe was overspread by the Mongoloid (Turanian) race, of which remnants have survived to our own times in the persons of the Basques, Finns, Esths, Lapps, and some smaller tribes.” As to their physical description, it conforms to that of the writers we have already mentioned: “a race of people, small in stature, dark visaged, and oval-faced – fond of war and the chase, yet having a rude system of agriculture.”

Allen’s book, of course, makes no mention of a possible Atlantean or Lemurian connection for the Picts, and his Turanians are not described as the “First Race,” coming from America. Howard, though, did not hesitate to use some of Allen’s conclusions to his own ends. For instance, Allen devotes his tenth chapter to the mysterious “Mound Builders” of America, and offers the following commentary concerning a mysterious effigy-mound:

“In this case, however, nearly all observers conclude that it was a religious work. Mr. MacLean, after describing these three figures, propounds this query: ‘Does the frog represent the creative, the egg the passive, and the serpent the destructive power of nature?’ Not a few writers, though not acquainted with the presence of the frog-shaped figure, have been struck with the combination of the egg and the serpent, that plays such an important part in the mythology of the Old World. We are told that the serpent, separate or in combination with the circle, egg, or globe, has been a predominant symbol among many primitive nations.”

Howard draws upon this in Men of the Shadows, thus reinforcing his mythical connection between America, Atlantis and the Picts:

“The ancient took a flaming brand from the fire and with a motion incredibly swift, inscribed the circle and triangle in the air. And strangely, the mystic symbol seemed to hover in the air, for a moment, a ring of fire.

“‘The circle without beginning,’ droned the wizard. ‘The circle unending. The Snake with its tail in its mouth, that encompasses the Universe. And the Mystic Three. Beginning, passivity, ending. Creation, preservation, destruction. Destruction, preservation, creation. The Frog, the Egg, and the Serpent. The Serpent, the Egg, and the Frog.’”

In depicting the contest of wills between Bran and the wizard, Howard seems to suggest more than a personal struggle for power between two men. Rather, the two are the focal points through which unseen powers seek to loose themselves upon the world. “The wizard was the Stone Age typified; the chief, the coming civilization. The destiny of the Pictish race, perhaps, hinged on that struggle.” The wizard warns Bran that if he wins “the Serpent coils again”: the serpent, as usual with Howard, is associated with the enemy, with destruction. Bran, on the contrary, is associated with the “coming civilization.”

It is interesting to note that in Men of the Shadows, and in the earlier playlet, Bran Mak Morn, Bran is referred as a chief. It is not until later in 1926, and the stories of Kull, that the theme of kingship, which we can see as, precisely, a step toward “coming civilization,” is first dealt with. It will be almost exactly four years before we see Bran Mak Morn again, this time as a king. It is in the Kull stories that we next find the Picts.

The Picts of the Kull series are barbarian allies of the ancient kingdom of Valusia. In the first published Kull story, The Shadow Kingdom, which Howard worked at sporadically between the summer of 1926 and September 1927, we learn that Kull, as an Atlantean, is a “hereditary enemy of all Picts,” though as king of Valusia he is their most important ally. He and a Pictish warrior, Brule, though their first meeting was marked by “mutual tribal enmity seething beneath their cloak of formality,” come to be fast friends in this series, and on more than one occasion it is Brule who saves Kull’s life. The Kull stories are set in the far recesses of an imaginative past, long before the great cataclysms that supposedly destroyed Atlantis and Lemuria, so the “historical” Picts of the early tales were now adopted by Howard as a means of connection, not just with “ancient times,” but with the world of fantastic adventures through which Kull, and later Conan, would move. Howard completed 10 stories of Kull (including two in which he is merely an offstage character), a poem, and began three stories which he left unfinished, most written between 1927 and early 1929. Of these, only three stories (the first, Exile of Atlantis, and the two in which Kull is offstage) and the poem do not include Brule the Spear-Slayer and the Picts.

Some time in 1928, Howard wrote a story entitled The Little People in which the Picts are featured, with inspiration from yet another writer added into the mix. In this story, set in the modern day, a brother and sister, Americans named Costigan, are in England during a European tour. When his young sister expresses disgust for the “foolishness” of Arthur Machen’s The Shining Pyramid, which he considers a “masterpiece of outré litrature,” Costigan lectures her, telling the story of the Picts essentially as outlined in The Romance of Early British Life. But the reference to Machen’s The Shining Pyramid suggests that Howard has now taken the Welsh writer’s conception of The Little People and added it to his conception of the Picts.

In The Shining Pyramid, two Englishmen investigate the puzzling disappearance of a young woman from a local village, and ultimately are horrified witnesses when she is burned to death in a sacrificial ceremony by a host of loathsome underground dwellers, “things made in the form of men but stunted like children hideously deformed, the faces with the almond eyes burning with evil and unspeakable lusts.” Their flesh is described as a “ghastly yellow,” and they speak to one another in “tones of horrible sibilance.” In explaining to his friend Vaughan the chain of deductions that led them to that horrible scene, Dyson explains: “I remembered what people had said about Annie Trevor’s disappearance, that she had been ‘taken by the fairies’.... And the hint came of the old name of fairies, ‘the little people,’ and the very probable belief that they represent a tradition of the prehistoric Turanian inhabitants of the country, who were cave dwellers: and then I realised with a shock that I was looking for a being under four feet in height, accustomed to live in darkness, possessing stone instruments, and familiar with the Mongolian cast of features!”

Howard’s linkage of the Picts with the Little People suggests that the once-proud Pictish race eventually devolved into misshapen underground monsters. This conception would undergo another change very soon.

In the spring of 1930, Howard returned for the first time in four years to Bran Mak Morn, selling two stories to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, Kings of the Night and The Dark Man. In the former, Bran has brought together forces of Gaels and Norsemen to join his Picts in what he hopes will be a decisive battle against the Romans. But the Norse leader has died, and his men refuse to follow either Bran or Cormac the Gael, insisting upon “a king, neither Pict, Gael nor Briton” to lead them. Through the sorcery of the aged wizard Gonar, King Kull of Valusia appears upon the scene, and takes on the leadership of the Norsemen. In The Dark Man, Howard’s Irish outlaw, Turlogh O’Brien, learns that Bran Mak Morn has become a God to the remnants of the Pictish nation he forged. A brief synopsis of a Bran Mak Morn story has also been found among Howard’s papers which seems to date from this time: it may in fact have been written before either of the completed stories, and represent a clear transition in Howard’s thinking about Bran, for in this synopsis, which deals largely with the intriguing of Roman commanders to seize power for themselves in the period following the assassination of Carausius (Howard states: “The time is between 296 A.D. and 300 A.D.”), Bran is first identified as “chief of the Cruithni Picts, but then as “the Pictish king.” In both Kings of the Night and The Dark Man, Bran is referred to as “king” of the Picts, whereas in Bran Mak Morn and Men of the Shadows, he was a “chieftain.” In Kings, it is made explicit that Bran rose “by his own efforts from the negligent position of the son of a Wolf clan chief, had to an extent united the tribes of the heather and now claimed kingship over all Caledon.” The battle recounted in this tale is said to be “the first pitched battle between the Picts under their king and the Romans,” thus comes early in Bran’s career.

In this story Howard clearly links his imaginary pre-Cataclysmic world of Kull to our own historical world. The wizard, Gonar, tells Bran that he is a descendant of Brule the Spear-slayer, and tells how only the Picts survived the cataclysm that claimed Valusia, Atlantis, and Lemuria, that they won up the ladder again to civilization before being overrun by the Celts and again “hurled into savagery.” “Here in Caledon,” he says, “is the last stand of a once mighty race. And we change. Our people have mixed with the savages of an elder age which we drove into the North when we came into the Isles, and now, save for their chieftains, such as thou, Bran, a Pict is strange and abhorrent to look upon.”

The Dark Man, set some eight centuries after Kings of the Night, makes clear that Bran’s initial triumph, while it forged the Picts into a united nation and enabled them for a time to keep the Romans south of the Wall, was ultimately in vain. “Bran Mak Morn fell in battle; the nation fell apart. Like wolves we Picts live now among the scattered islands, among the crags of the highlands and the dim hills of Galloway. We are a fading people. We pass.”

Some observers have noted the strong correspondences between Howard’s poem, The Song of a Mad Minstrel, and Rudyard Kipling’s A Pict Song, from his book Puck of Pook’s Hill, and suggested that Kipling’s tale, in that book, of the British Roman Parnesius and his struggle to hold the Wall of Hadrian against the Picts and Northmen during the reign of Maximus may have been an influence on Howard’s Bran Mak Morn tales. It is a tempting hypothesis, with some strong circumstantial evidence. For instance, Howard’s poem, with lines like “I am the thorn in the foot, I am the blur in the sight; I am the worm at the root, I am the thief in the night,” clearly echoes Kipling’s “We are the worm in the wood! We are the rot in the root! We are the germ in the blood! We are the thorn in the foot!” When we note that The Song of a Mad Minstrel was sold to Weird Tales in March 1930, the same month Howard sold Wright The Dark Man and Kings of the Night, we might be excused for thinking it more than coincidence. Add to this the fact that in Kipling’s tale of Parnesius, he has him making tentative alliances with Picts and Norsemen who are threatening the Wall, to try to hold them from attacking until Maximus is able to triumph in Gaul and return the legions he has taken with him, seeming to echo the plot line outlined in Howard’s Bran synopsis, and the case seems even stronger. However, Kipling’s Picts (which he, like Machen, refers to as “Little People”) are far from being Howard’s (“Picts seldom fight,” Parnesius says. “I never saw a fighting Pict for half a year. The tame Picts told us they had all gone North.”), and none of the particulars of Howard’s tales seem to suggest a linkage with Kipling’s.

During the summer of 1930, Howard began a correspondence with the great weird fictionist H.P. Lovecraft. Among the earliest exchanges was a discussion which directly bears upon Howard’s treatment of the Picts. Lovecraft, saying that he believed it probable that if there were any human inhabitants of the British Isles before the coming of the Mediterraneans, they were not cavemen or savages, but possibly “some of the squat Mongoloids now represented by the Lapps,” wrote:

“It’s true that the Celts share most vigorously the myth-cycle of fairies, gnomes, & little people, which anthropologists find all over Western Europe... & attribute to vague memories of contact with the Mongoloids.... Since these fair Nordic Celts found a smaller, darker race in Britain & Ireland, there is a tendency on the part of some to be misled, & to assume that the ‘little people’ legends allude to contact with those dark aborigines. This, however, can be clearly disproved by analysis of the myths; for such myths invariably share with the parallel Continental myths the specific features (or tracks of these features) of having the ‘little people’ essentially repulsive & monstrous, subterraneous in their habits of dwelling, & given to a queer kind of hissing discourse. Now this kind of thing does not apply to Mediterraneans - who are not abnormal or repulsive from the Nordic standpoint (being very similar in features), who did not live underground, & whose language... could scarcely have suggested hissing.”

Howard replied:

“Your observations regarding the Mongoloid aborigines and their relation to the fairy-tales of western Europe especially interested me. I had supposed, without inquiring very deeply into the matter, that these legends were based on contact with the earlier Mediterraneans, and indeed, wrote a story on that assumption which appeared some years ago in Weird Tales - ‘The Lost Race.’ I readily see the truth of your remarks, that a Mongoloid race must have been responsible for the myths of the Little People, and sincerely thank you for the information.”

Howard almost immediately put this new “knowledge” to use, in The Children of the Night, which he sold to Weird Tales in October 1930, less than two months after the above exchange. In the opening scene of this story, several scholars are having a bull session in the library of a man named Conrad. The discussion turns to the Nameless Cults of Von Junzt, and the author’s contention that the “Bran cult” is still active.

“‘But when Von Junzt speaks of Picts, he refers specifically to the small, dark, garlic-eating peoples of Mediterranean blood who brought the Neolithic culture into Britain. The first settlers of that country, in fact, who gave rise to the tales of earth spirits and goblins.’

“‘I can not agree to that last statement,’ said Conrad. ‘These legends ascribe a deformity and inhumanness of appearances to the characters. There was nothing about the Picts to excite such horror and repulsion in the Aryan peoples. I believe that the Mediterraneans were preceded by a Mongoloid type, very low in the scale of development, whence these tales-’

“‘Quite true,’ broke in Kirowan, ‘but I hardly think they preceded the Picts, as you call them, into Britain. We find troll and dwarf legends all over the Continent, and I am inclined to think that both the Mediterranean and Aryan peoples brought these tales with them from the Continent. They must have been of extremely inhuman aspect, these Mongoloids.’”

From this point on, Howard’s degenerated race of underground dwellers are no longer identified with the Picts, as they had been in The Little People. In fact, in Children of the Night, when the narrator, O’Donnel, is recalling a past life as Aryara, he says of the abhorrent race his people called “the Children of the Night,” “They had once overrun and possessed this land, and they had been driven into hiding and obscurity by the dark, fierce little Picts with whom we contested now, and who hated and loathed them as savagely as did we.”

In People of the Dark, written in 1931, Howard makes clear that The Little People and Children of the Night are the same. In this story, too, we learn of an object they worship:

“In the center of the chamber stood a grim, black altar.... Towering behind it on a pedestal of human skulls, lay a cryptic black object, carven with mysterious hieroglyphics. The Black Stone! The ancient, ancient Stone before which, the Britons said, the Children of the Night bowed in gruesome worship, and whose origin was lost in the black mists of a hideously distant past. Once, legend said, it had stood in that grim circle of monoliths called Stonehenge, before its votaries had been driven like chaff before the bows of the Picts.”

The People of the Dark was returned to Howard by Strange Tales in September 1931, with a request for revisions. It was probably between that date and February 1932 that he wrote the story in which all these elements at last came together, a story that is generally regarded by most Howard fans as one of his very best, Worms of the Earth.

H.P. Lovecraft, memorializing his friend, said, “It is hard to describe precisely what made Mr. Howard’s stories stand out so sharply; but the real secret is that he himself is in every one of them....” The best of Howard’s tales are centered squarely on the viewpoint character. This is why Worms of the Earth is by far the best of the Bran Mak Morn stories: it is the only one in which Bran is not seen through the eyes of another character. Howard himself recognized this, writing to Lovecraft shortly after this story was accepted:

“My interest in the Picts was always mixed with a bit of fantasy – that is, I never felt the realistic placement with them that I did with the Irish and Highland Scotch. Not that it was the less vivid; but when I came to write of them, it was still through alien eyes - thus in my first Bran Mak Morn story – which was rightfully rejected – I told the story through the person of a Gothic mercenary in the Roman army; in a long narrative rhyme which I never completed, and in which I first put Bran on paper, I told it through a Roman centurion on the Wall; in ‘The Lost Race’ the central figure was a Briton; and in ‘Kings of the Night’ it was a Gaelic prince. Only in my last Bran story, ‘The Worms of the Earth’ which Mr. Wright accepted, did I look through Pictish eyes, and speak with a Pictish tongue!”

This would also prove to be the last Bran Mak Morn story Howard would write. In the same letter (dated March 10, 1932) in which Weird Tales editor Wright told Howard, “I want to schedule WORMS OF THE EARTH soon, for that is an unusually fine story, I think,” he had returned two other stories, asking for revisions to one: these were The Frost-Giant’s Daughter and The Phoenix on the Sword, the first tales of a Cimmerian adventurer named Conan who would dominate Howard’s fiction for the next three years. The Picts were, of course, present in Conan’s prehistoric “Hyborian Age”: they were the hereditary enemies of the Cimmerians, who were themselves descendants of the pre-Cataclysmic Atlanteans of Kull. The Pictish wilderness stretched from the western borders of Aquilonia to the sea, and it is on that border that one of Howard’s finest Conan tales, Beyond the Black River, is set. Pictish characters also play supporting roles in two of the James Allison stories, Marchers of Valhalla and The Valley of the Worm. But Bran, having made his foul bargain with the Worms of the Earth, is never heard from again.

It is tempting to see in Bran Mak Morn an autobiographical representation of Robert E. Howard. More so than any other of his characters, Bran feels the heavy weight of personal responsibility for his people, much as one suspects Howard must have felt toward his aging parents, especially his sickly mother. Bran knows that he is the last of his line, as perhaps Howard, an only child, may have felt he was the last of his. And Howard seems to explicitly suggest this connection when he insists upon his undying fascination with the Picts, and says “had I grown into the sort of a man, which in childhood I wished to become, I would have been short, stocky, with thick, gnarled limbs, beady black eyes, a low retreating forehead, heavy jaw, and straight, course black hair – my conception of a typical Pict.” Of course, Howard is at some pains to show us that Bran Mak Morn differs from the “typical Pict,” though sharing the characteristics of being small and dark-complected, with dark hair and eyes. This was not, as Howard says, his own type (“I was blond and rather above medium size than below”), making it all the more noteworthy that so many of his earliest characters share these features. Howard explicitly states, for instance, that Bran “physically...bore a striking resemblance to El Borak,” the first character he created, some two years before Bran. His alter-ego in the fictionalized autobiographical novel, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, is described as a “black Celt,” “spare and gaunt,” a “dark youth.” And he related to H.P. Lovecraft a dream he had had as a child, in which the characters match this description:

“I dreamed that I slept and awoke, and when I awoke a boy and a girl about my age were playing near me. They were small and trimly shaped, with very dark skin and dark eyes. Their garments were scanty, and strange to me, now that I remember them, but at the time they were not strange, for I too was clad like them, and I too was small, and delicately fashioned and dark ... Now, as I woke in my dream, this scene was fully familiar to me, and I knew that the boy and the girl were my brother and sister; it was not as if I had merely wakened from a sleep, returning to my natural, work-a-day world. And suddenly in my dream, I began to laugh and to narrate to my brother and my sister the strange dream I had had. And I told them of what – if there was any truth at all in reality – constituted my actual waking life... I told them that my dream had seemed so vivid while dreaming it, that I had actually thought it to be real, and believed myself to be a stocky blond child living a waking life, without knowledge of any other....” (Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. December 1930, in Robert E. Howard: Selected Letters 1923–1930, p. 77).

Many of Howard’s Pictish characters share another interesting feature: they have names that share either a b/r or g/r consonant pattern. All the chieftains of the Picts have the b/r pattern: Bran, Brule (in the Kull stories), Berula (The Lost Race), Dulborn (The Ballad of King Geraint), Brogar (The Dark Man and Tigers of the Sea), and Brulla (The Night of the Wolf), while more “primitive” Picts generally have names with a g/r pattern, such as Grom, Gonar, Grok, and Grulk, or names that fit neither pattern. However, the b/r pattern is not reserved to Picts alone: such characters as El Borak, Turlogh O’Brien, Iron Mike Brennon, and Steve Bender also fit the b/r pattern and are short, dark-featured, or both. All, like the Picts, are from early in Howard’s writing career. El Borak, as we have said, actually predates Bran.

What this suggests is that the b/r naming pattern, and even more so the seeming identification with small, dark-featured characters, may have had roots in strong and lasting unconscious patterns, and that Howard’s admiration for the Picts, leading him to adopt them “as a medium of connection with ancient times,” may have stemmed from something prior to his discovery of the Pictish race and creation of Bran, possibly predating even El Borak. But while he created many characters who shared these features, he rarely adopted them as his viewpoint characters (even the earliest El Borak stories are generally told through his associates), until he was able to ally his strong emotional connection and storytelling skills in Worms of the Earth, following which he wrote no further tales of Bran.

Interestingly, then, after Worms of the Earth no Pictish character fits the b/r pattern: we have Teyanoga (Wolves Beyond the Border; in the first draft his name was “Garogh”) and Zogar Sag (Beyond the Black River) in the Conan series, and in these stories (and The Black Stranger) the Picts are primarily howling savages; and in the James Allison tales we find a Kelka (Marchers of Valhalla) and Grom (The Valley of the Worm), both blood brothers to the AEsir heroes, during an era when the Picts seem to be jungle-dwellers. Even the great chieftain of “The Hyborian Age,” who, five hundred years after Conan, leads the Picts in overthrowing the Hyborian kingdoms and establishing an empire, while dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed, is named “Gorm.” In other words, Worms of the Earth seems to be the last story in which Howard felt a really personal connection with the Picts, the first and last time he would “look through Pictish eyes, and speak with a Pictish tongue!”

NOTES ON THE ORIGINAL HOWARD TEXTS

The texts for this edition of Bran Mak Morn: The Last King were prepared by Rusty Burke and David Gentzel, with the assistance of Glenn Lord. The stories have been checked either against Howard’s original manuscripts and typescripts, copies of which were provided by Lord, or the first published appearance if a manuscript or typescript was unavailable. Every effort has been made to present the work of Robert E. Howard as faithfully as possible.