Reading from
pages 148-155 of the DelRey edition.
The
illustration of Conan dressed as a one-eyed old pilgrim walking through the
crowded streets of the city he so recently left with a crown on his head is
faithful to the text, down to the failure of the loose robes in concealing the
“hard lines” of his frame.
The rescue
of Albiona from The Iron Tower reflected a standard trope of Howard’s time, an
almost obligatory rescue of a damsel in distress. It also served pulp
convention by keeping a feminine figure on the page in as many installments as
possible. But Howard overdoes the entire chapter in brutal wise, with his
butchery of traitors conducted with savage malice on the part of the reverted
savage.
Irony spiced
with menace. Butchery
basted in irony. Vengeance
savored in savage exultation. The shame of
cruel cold law supplanted by the true justice of judge, jury and executioner as
one flew as much in the face of the false moral banality of Howard’s America as
it does in our own bland version.
Foremost
among the evils of civilization, evils magnified by the evil of modernity, all
things that were antithetical to what it was to be human across the many
innumerable generation of our natural ancestors are:
-Law,
-Order,
-Justice,
-Imprisonment,
-Trial,
-Judgment,
-And proxy
execution.
All of these
and more of the avarice corruption our society is built upon are dashed into
gory gobs by Howard as he depicts Conan snuffing out the life of the royal
headsman and taking his scything place on behalf of the dainty condemned. Howard’s heroes, unlike most others of his time, were
permitted by their creator free reign for their passions, particularly their
deep and abiding hatreds.
Maiming and
disemboweling one traitor, Conan curses, “…Die as thieves die!” and then
grunts, “Lie there and bleed to death.”
In top pulp
form another plot twist confronts the furious barbarian as he cuts his way out
of another palace, as he does in most tales, and many times in this one, the
chief object of Conan and indeed all of his heroes seems to be the violent
extraction of the hero and a woman from the clutches of some monolithic
example of civilized architecture.
Diction of Note
-Impulsion, the act of impelling, driving onward, pushing.
