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Robert E. Howard (1906-36), the creator of Conan, was born in Peaster, Texas,
and spent most of his life in Cross Plains, in the center of Texas. During
his short life (which ended in suicide at the age of thirty) Howard turned out
a large volume of popular fiction: sport, detective, western, historical,
adventure, science fiction, weird, and ghost stories, besides his verse and
his many fantasies. Of his several series of heroic fantasies, the most
popular have been the Conan stories. Eighteen of these were published in
Howard's lifetime; eight others, from mere fragments and outlines to complete
manuscripts, have been found among his papers since 1950. The incomplete
stories have been completed by my colleague Lin Carter and myself. In addition, in the early 1950s, I rewrote four unpublished Howard manuscripts of Oriental adventure, with medieval and modern settings, to convert them into Conan stories by changing names, deleting anachronisms, and introducing a supernatural element. This did not prove hard, since Howard's heroes are pretty much cut from the same cloth, and the resulting stories are still about three-quarters or four-fifths Howard. Of these, the story The Flame Knife is the longest. Howard originally wrote it in 1934 as a 42,000-word novella of adventure in modern Afghanistan, called Three-Bladed Doom. The hero was Francis X. Gordon, one of Howard's large fictional family of brawny, brawling Irish adventurers and the hero of several published stories of Oriental adventure. In Three-Bladed Doom, the cult exposed by the hero is a modem revival of the medieval Assassins. When the original version failed to sell, Howard in 1935 rewrote it to a length of 24,000 words; but that version likewise failed to find a market. The story showed the influence of Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy. The present collaborative version, with 31,000 words, is intermediate in length between Howard's two original versions. Carter and I have also written several pastiches, based upon hints in Howard's notes and letters, to fill up gaps in the saga. BlackTears, in the present volume, is one of these. All these stories belong to a sub-genre of imaginative fiction that connoisseurs call heroic fantasy, or, sometimes, swordplay-and-sorcery fiction. Such a story is laid in an imaginary ancient or medieval setting - perhaps this world as it is supposed to have been long ago, or as it will be in the remote future, or on another planet, or in another dimension - where magic works and modern technology has not yet been discovered. Examples of the genre outside the Conan stories - are E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, J. R. R. Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the Rings, Fletcher Pratt's The Well of the Unicorn, and Fritz Leiber's stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. When well done, stories of this kind provide the purest fun of fiction of any kind. Of the several larger-than-life characters who stride through Howard's pages, Conan the Cimmerian is his hero of heroes. Conan lived, loved, and moved in Howard's imaginary Hyborian Age, about twelve thousand years ago, between the sinking of Atlantis and the beginnings of recorded history. A gigantic barbarian adventurer from the bleak, backward northern land of Cimmeria, Conan brawled and battled his way across half the world of his time, wading through rivers of gore and overcoming foes both natural and supernatural to become, at last, king of the mighty Hyborian kingdom of Aquilonia. Arriving as a raw, hulking, lawless youth in the kingdom of Zamora (see the map), Conan for a few years made a precarious living there and in the neighboring lands as a thief. Tiring of this starveling existence, he enlisted as a mercenary in the armies of Turan. For the next two years he traveled widely and refined his knowledge of archery and horsemanship. As a result of a quarrel over a woman with a superior officer, Conan fled from Turan. After an unsuccessful try at treasure-hunting in Zamora and a brief visit to his Cimmerian homeland, he embarked upon the career of mercenary soldier in the hyborian kingdoms. Circumstances - violent as usual - made him a pirate along the coasts of Kush, with a Shemitish she-pirate, Be1it, as his partner and a crew of bloodthirsty black corsairs. After Belit was slain, he became the chief of a black tribe, then served as a mercenary in Shem and among the most southerly Hyborian nations. Later still, Conan appeared as a leader among the kozaki, a horde of outlaws who roamed the steppes between the Hyborian lands and Turan. He captained a pirate craft on the great inland Sea of Vilayet. While serving as captain of the royal guard of Oueen Taramis of Khauran, Conan was captured by the queen's enemies, who crucified him. When a vulture flew down to try to peck his eyes out, Conan bit the bird's head off. (You can't have a tougher hero than that.) Olgerd Viadislav, Zaporoskan leader of a band of Zuagirs, the nomadic, desert-dwelling eastern Shemites, happened upon Conan at his juncture and rescued him - for his own purposes - from the cross. When friction arose between Conan and Olgerd, the hard-bitten Cimmerian ruthlessly ousted Olgerd from the leadership of the band, which - after overthrowing the enemies of Queen Taramis and restoring her to her throne - he led off eastward to plunder the Turanians. At that point, the present story begins. L. Sprague de Camp |