‘Even in Menace’

The Thrust of a Knife: Chapter 6 of Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon

Reading from pages 120-130 of the DelRey edition

The illustration is darkly set in shadow with Conan gauntly powerful and appearing almost like a Comanche warrior, which might have pleased Howard, and seems to have been based on the original Weird Tales depiction of Conan from Red Nails, with Zenobia cringing beneath his shoulder.

Conan is depicted from the outset of the chapter being held in the grip of a deep fear and fleeing up the stairs in panic, where he is reunited with the beauty, Zenobia, a woman of real fears and desires and practical knowledge of the affairs of men which beg a backstory, which is ungiven, the reader left to assume that she has learned about men as an observant slave girl, serving their brutish kind. Conan, ever the savage, threatens to kill her if she “plays” him “false.”

The hero is depicted in totemic wise as all of Howard’s protagonists are when stalking their prey in darkness and stealth, as leopard-like or pantherish.  Conan is further portrayed as blood-mad for vengeance and unable to stay his hands from the flesh of his duplicitous enemy and is almost caught as he trips among draperies and such, a nice metaphor for his unease around civilization as he seems to re-emerge from the dungeon as a freshly awakened savage.

Conan finds time for a kiss and hug with the little slave girl, who is granted a small grace by the author who showed so much understanding for the feminine soul in regards to the masculine actionist he normally wrote of.  For not the first time in his fiction, Howard has a women living beneath normal social consequence seeking to snatch a mere moment with a true king so that she might have one warm memory to tide her over in her old age. 

The full panel illustration of Conan standing before a moonlit window admiring the seductively self-conscious figure of the nearly naked slave girl, who represents perhaps the best artistic tribute to the feminine form as realized by the most famous Conan illustrator, Frank Frazetta.

Conan’s escape is conducted realistically in the narrative and the chapter closes with an excellent heroic moment in which the barbarian king begins to walk old roads again, reduced to the bloody station of adventurer from which he originally made his ascent to greatness.

Gianni’s closing illustration is of an anonymously armored Conan mounting a  rearing stallion.

(c) 2019 James LaFond