A Coin from
Acheron: Chapter 10 of Robert E. Howard’s The Hour of the Dragon
Reading from
pages 155-163 of the DelRey edition
The thematic
illustration depicts Conan holding Albiona close in the midst of a crystal globe held in the undead hands of a
grinning skeletal figure hung with a cowled robe.
Conan,
barbarian usurper of the crux kingdom of his age, finds himself in refuge among
the heretical cult of Asura, whose master further enlightens him as to the nature
and extent of the awesome forces arrayed in the shadows of the world against
him, and, like some real estate tycoon from New York shocked to discover that
many evil-handed cults of power vie against him from below intricately woven
lies, he starts in denial at the implication that he battles mere puppets upon
cosmic strings and that he must lose if he does not embrace the dark and unseen
trails of power that thread the civilized world.
Interestingly,
he has only been saved from the forces of orthodoxy by the devotees of heresy
due to his enforcement of his very barbaric notion of freedom of religion,
which was not a significant current in popular thought in Howard’s time.
Indeed, Howard clearly realized that the real legacy of Western Civilization was
not one of liberty and freedom but one of shackled wills born under the ages of
layered orthodoxy that had removed Western Man’s soul, one collectivist notion
at a time, from his identity. The author does a superb job of expressing the
gnostic ideals coming to light during his lifetime as various crackpot
ideologies grounded in Atlantean fantasies and conflated myth come to life in
the philosophy of Hadrathus convincing, who, unlike the evil Xaltotun, has the
patience to reconfigure his knowledge into a form understandable to a fighting
man:
“Age follows
age in the history of the world, and now we enter an age of horror and slavery
as it was long ago.”
Seven pages
in to Conan’s dialogue with the serene occultist, he finally is given the gift
of perspective in his own case, able to finally envision himself as he is in
the eyes of the gods, the puppet born without strings in the playground of
towering evil that is the world, a doomed creature who might only prevail if he
rides the crests of the mighty powers striving for ultimate domination and then
only so much as a man might life, which is a mere breath in the reckoning of
that which he fights.
In A Coin
from Acheron Conan suffers the mind-blasting fate of H. P. Lovecraft’s many
doomed protagonists, who are faced with “the correlation of the contents of their
consciousness,” but instead of a suffering a psychological implosion, the
barbarian simply grows focused with the prospect of bloody work, enjoying the
super sanity of the physical quest, a journey beyond the ken of the intellectual.
The closing
two pages of the chapter illustrate the horrific plight of the mundane
conspirators who raised a 3,000 year old fiend from the dead to bring down a
savage king, only to realize that the former is gathering godlike powers to enslave
them and the latter is loose from the shackles of kingship to stalk them like
some hungry beast.
Mister Gianni’s illustration depicts
Valerius, wary king of the moment, with four sinister yellow men from the far
edge of the world who have sworn an arcane oath to hunt down Conan. Howard soon
found that placing the savage hero in a novel length story was going to require
a legion of frightening fiends just to keep to pace with the fact that his
protagonist, was in fact, the monster of his own imaginary age.
Diction of Note
-Laved
-Fain
