Cross plains universe: texans celebrate robert e. howard scott a cuup & joe r. lansdale (eds) all ch
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This book would not have happened without the help and prodding of some special folks who deserve to be recognized.
First, we want to thank the people at FACT, Inc. (The Fandom Association of Central Texas, Inc.) for providing the impetus for the book, specifically Renee Babcock and Fred Duarte.
Also, Jack and Barbara Baum, who owned many of the Robert E. Howard copyrights during the initial stages of the book, and Fred Malmberg and Paradox Entertainment who now owns all the Howard rights. They were supportive throughout the genesis of this work.
Mark Finn and Rusty Burke worked as liaisons with the copyright owners and provided much needed encouragement and advice.
Willie Siros pushed to make sure that this book happened. It was as much his vision as anyone else’s that allows you to hold this volume in your hands.
Chris Roberson agreed to make the tales into a volume that would be admired by all.
Thirty years ago, Steven Utley and George Proctor put together the first all-Texan anthology. Their Lone Star Universe served as a model for this volume.
Our wives, Sandi and Karen, put up with our obsessions and lifestyles and make it all worthwhile.
And, without the genius of Robert E. Howard, this volume would not have existed. He remains, seventy years after his death, a strong and vital influence on writers, not just from Texas, but from the whole, wide world.
Project Pride
The Fandom Association of Central Texas is proud to celebrate the life and literature of Robert E. Howard during the 2006 World Fantasy Convention. In partnership with MonkeyBrain Books, and with the cooperation of Paradox Entertainment, we present this anthology as tribute to the creator of Conan the Cimmerian and the heroic fantasy tradition he inspired. If you would like to help preserve Howard’s legacy and honor his contributions to fantasy literature, please support Project Pride, the non-profit institution that maintains Robert E. Howard’s family home and heritage in Cross Plains, Texas. Project Pride can be found on the Web at: www.crossplains.com/howard/museum.htm, or mailed at Project Pride, PO Box 534, Cross Plains, TX 76443.
Contents
Introduction: Cross Plains and Imagination
Scott A. Cupp
The Pillar in the Mist
Ardath Mayhar
A Penny a word
Rick Klaw & Paul 0. Miles
Slim and Swede and the Damned Dead Horse: A Tale of Bloodsong
C. Dean Andersson
The King Comes to Texas
Bradley Denton
An Excerpt from
The Stone of Namirha
Bill Crider & Charlotte Laughlin
Two Hearts in Zamora
Jessica Reisman
One Fang
Scott A. Cupp
The Bunker of the Tikriti
Chris Nakashima-Brown
Six from Atlantis
Gene Wolfe
A Whim of Circumstance
Mark Finn
Wolves Of The Mountains: An El Borak Story
James Reasoner
Thin, On the Ground
Howard Waldrop
The Warrior and the King
Carrie Richerson
The Diamonds of Golkonda
Lillian Stewart Carl
Prince Koindrindra Escapes
Jayme Lynn Blaschke
Boomtown Bandits
L. J. Washburn
The Jewel of Leystall
Chris Roberson
The Heart
Neal Barrett, Jr.
The Toughest Jew in the West
Lawrence Person
The Sea of Grass on the Day of Wings
Melissa Mia Hall
The Roaming Forest
Michael Moorcock
About the Authors
Cross Plains and Imagination
by Scott A. Cupp
Texans are a funny lot. They love their state and decry anyone who suggests that they live elsewhere. Your two editors have logged about a hundred years in the state. Some of the writers in this volume can claim many years while others got here as fast as they could.
The state had a wild and varied birth. Settled only by Native Americans until the arrival of the Spanish, it was a sleepy sort of place until various people began offering free land to anyone who could survive on it. The settlers came. They came from a variety of countries (communities of Germans, Czechs, and Poles flourished among the Americans and Hispanics). The popular amusement park concern Six Flags, which got its start near Dallas, was named for the six flags which at various times flew over the state (Spain, Mexico, France, Texas, Confederate States of America and USA, for those curious). It is a huge state and that is a source of state pride (Alaska notwithstanding). It is the only state to have been an independent, functioning republic (1836 to 1845) before entering the US. There is still a provision that, should it be deemed necessary, it can divide into five separate states.
Texans were among the greatest liars of all times. When the westward expansion of the US began, Texas was a popular spot. “Gone
to Texas” was a frequent sign seen in abandoned homes and businesses. But it was not heaven. It took hard work to scrape out a living. There were a variety of natural causes for failure the heat, droughts, snakes, flash floods, Comanches, deserts, and hurricanes all took their tolls.
But as people settled in, Texas towns attracted more and more residents. And those hardy settlers were a wild sort. Proper and genteel Eastern families did not make the move. It was made by dreamers and visionaries, younger sons who would not inherit the family business, people who had a reason (frequently of a legal variety) to remove themselves from an area. New identities were as easy to have as anything. You’re wanted as John Carter in Virginia, move to Central Texas and become Carson Napier. Simple.
Visionaries, dreamers, and liars. Great stock for the writers to come.
For our purposes, the single most important fiction writer from Texas is Robert E. Howard. born in Peaster, Texas in 1906, he began writing in his teens and continued until the day he died. Throughout his life, he had heard stories from these various characters of Texas. He would have heard the life stories of people who fought in the Civil War, who fought the Comanches, people who survived out on the Llano Estacado, who had relocated from out East or from Europe via covered wagon, people who had seen the Texas Rangers in action.
As a result Howard had an outstanding breadth of knowledge and wrote everything westerns, boxing stories, detective fiction, oriental tales, medieval tales, sea tales, humor pieces, and the fantasies. About the only things he did not write were outright romance stories or science fiction (to our thought, Almuric is science fantasy rather than
science fiction). While his fame rests on the fantasy work, Howard never wrote a bad tale in any of those genres. He had a sense of pacing that was unrivaled and his dialogue may occasionally be stilted but it rang true for his characters. His suicide remains a pivotal day in the history of Texas writers.
Now Texas has had quite a few writers of science fiction and fantasy over the years. Walter Miller wrote much of A Canticle for Leibowitz while living south of Austin in Wimberley, Texas. Greg Benford and Tom Reamy grew up in the Dallas area. John Varley, Gene Wolfe, and Sean Stewart were all born in Texas. Marion Zimmer Bradley spent quite a while in the state. Chip Delany spent a summer working the shrimp boats in the Houston/Galveston area.
Everyone knows many of the current Texas writers Bruce Sterling, Joe Lansdale, Brad Denton, Elizabeth Moon, Howard Waldrop, William Browning Spencer, even our British transplant Michael Moorcock award-winning, idiosyncratic writers all. Texas is a part of their soul and their writing.
So, to celebrate the centenary of Howard’s birth, we asked fifty Texas writers to provide us with stories that featured a Robert E. Howard character, featured REH himself as a character, or which were inspired by Howard’s work. Seems a rather broad request. Lots of leeway for the writers.
Also, in 1976 George Proctor and Steve Utley, two young Texas writers, put together Lone Star Universe, an original anthology of Texas speculative fiction writings. It was our wish to provide an updated version of that volume along with honoring Robert E. Howard.
The editors got back an amazing assortment of tales covering all these aspects of REH’s work. They are as wild and varied as their inspiration, sometimes making a tenuous stab at connectivity to our theme. They represent some of the best of Texas fiction in any field.
While there are many fine writers represented here, we could not get everyone in. Check out some of the folks who are not here. Writers like the aforementioned Bruce Sterling, Elizabeth Moon, William Browning Spencer and Sean Stewart. Science fiction and fantasy writers like Martha Wells, Aaron Allston, Lou Antonelli, Don Webb, John Moore, Angeline Hawkes-Craig, Carole Nelson Douglas, Pat Anthony, Kim Kofmel, P. N. Elrod, Christopher Fullbright, Rachel Caine, Katherine Eliska Kimbriel, Walton Simons, Thomas Knowles, and Charlee Jacob. Former Texans now hiding in other states/countries like Steve Utley, Lewis Shiner, Steve Gould, and Lisa Tuttle. Other genre writers like Elmer Kelton (the greatest western writer ever), mystery writers Jesse Sublett, Rick Riordan, Ben Rehder, Carolyn Banks, Susan Rogers Cooper, Jeff Abbot, Jan Grape and Mary Willis Walker. Romance writers like Jane Archer. In the works of these writers and many, many more, you will find imagination and the spirit of Texas.
The Pillar in the Mist
by Arclath Mayhar
We tore through the thickening mist like mad things. I was drunk with rage and my steed unnerved by the weirdness of the place and the wind that in some strange way failed to dissipate the fog. We were on a moor, pounding along a winding track that skirted distorted tors and treacherous bogs, but I was too lost and angry for fear.
Flavius Severus had chosen to leave me behind when the legions returned to Rome, ignoring the fact that my father was one of his finest centurions. Even now, months afterward, I burned with anger at his words. “You are a half-breed, Kerak, born to a barbarian woman. I do not agree with those who consider their half-breed troops to be Roman. I do not return to Rome with inferiors among my soldiers.” A flame singed my heart every time I thought of that.
My Briton mother had died soon after my father left, and I gathered my few possessions, took my father’s horse Camerak, and headed toward the southeast, hoping to find a way to reach the mainland. I would go to Rome! But I found that metheglyn eased my hurt, and so I drank away my small patrimony. Now I was a trained soldier without an army, drunk and desperate, lost in the mists on a mount gone wild and uncontrollable.
If I had been less intoxicated I would have understood his terror, for this track, on this night, was a terrifying place. After a time, sobered by the chill mist on my face and the effort to control Cam’s wild careering along the track, I began to feel my hair rise on my neck, and I pulled harder on the reins, trying to slow the maddened horse.
Ahead the mist swirled in the wind, and for an instant I saw, standing in the center of the track, a pale pillar of stone. I used all my strength, striving to turn the animal’s head, but he sped forward as if determined to dash out his brains against that standing stone. Now my heart was thudding as if to break from my chest, and I knew that if I did not act swiftly I would die with Cam. Perhaps I would be dashed to death on a boulder beside the track, but I had to choose at once. Without pausing to think, I threw myself from the horse and rolled painfully over splinters of stone, to land in a prickly gorse.
Half stunned, I struggled to catch my breath, but before that was done I heard the agonized whinny of Cam as he thudded into the pillar. Pushing myself upright, I staggered toward the sound. Yet the mist and the eerie feel of the place made me reach for my sword to find it gone, tied with my pack on the back of the horse. I must find it. The last remnant of my life as a Roman soldier, it was vital to my survival as a free man. The knife I pulled from the thong at my waist was not enough to protect anyone from the wicked forces now afoot in this land. Still I held it, comfortingly solid in my hand, as I moved toward my dying horse and the mist-shrouded pillar that had killed him.
The darkness was complete, now, and it was only because the edges of the track were overgrown that I was able to follow in the path of the horse. I found him by stumbling over his leg and falling onto his still-
warm body. I could feel it quivering beneath me, as the animal’s life ebbed, and I found myself strangely moved. Cam was the last connection to my father, and with his going my life changed from that of a mounted man to one afoot. And that brought difficulties and dangers even greater than those I had faced before.
Crouching beside the dead horse, I retrieved my pack, luckily a small one, found my sword, and unbound my leather cloak from Cam’s back. Even as I worked, I felt some chilly presence about me, and I knew I must leave this spot beside the tall stone. The thing had killed my horse, and I felt that if I remained within its baleful influence it might well kill me, as well. My father had talked of the Old Ones and their cruel rites, and this place reeked of old deaths and agonies.
Traveling this unchancy road in darkness seemed almost as frightening as staying in place, but I had been a soldier, though not for very long, and I scorned to let my fears drive me. I felt my way cautiously around the still-warm carcass and touched the stone itself. My hand jerked, burned and frozen equally by the uncanny nature of that pillar. Without touching it again, I edged along the side of the road, feeling the growth of gorse against my elbow, until I no longer sensed the pillar. Yet even then my feet disliked the texture of the road, rough and tussocky, with scattered stones to trip the unwary.
Shifting the pack, I stopped for a long moment, thinking. With the legion. I had to do little of that, for there was always some officer to tell me what to do. Now I was entirely on my own. but I knew I must go cleverly. My size was a benefit, my training also, but I had seen bigger and better trained men than I surprised, ambushed, killed by small and tricky enemies. I did not want to find such opponents waiting for
me along that terrible track. I felt the gorse, seeking a passage through. If I could find a spot that was sheltered from the wind and that ghostly mist. I might wrap myself in my cloak and wait out the night. Dawn might show me enemies, but they would not be invisible ones.
A few steps along. I located a break, and I pushed through it and picked my way cautiously along amid the stickery growth. My thick leather sandals crushed smaller plants beneath them as I went, feeling before me with one hand and holding my blade in the other. Other beasts than men ranged the moors, I knew too well, though I had never traveled here before.
As I probed a gorse bush with the sword the metal clanged against stone. I flinched, hoping it was not one of the forbidding menhirs that studded these lands. Or worse another pillar like that in the road. Still. I wanted to know what faced me. so I slashed away the intervening growth and moved to lay my hand on the obstacle.
This stone was as cold as death, damp with the mist. Slinging my sword. I felt along what seemed to be leaning slabs of stone a barrow! I had run into a barrow here in the desolation, an ancient grave. I had no wish to make closer acquaintance with the long-dead tenant, yet this was the only reasonable hope of shelter. And I was had been! a soldier, son of a centurion. Fear was not something I could admit to easily.
Kicking my way through a tangle of grass and weed, I moved around the thing, searching for a gap that would let me through into whatever shelter it might offer. When I found it, my hand slipped through into some space within. As I prepared to follow it, a grip as strong and relentless as death itself fastened upon my wrist and pulled me
through a narrow opening into the musty barrow. Expecting even thicker darkness, I found to my surprise that a chill gleam lit the interior dimly, though after the darkness before it seemed quite bright.
The ghostly glimmer showed a rude stone bier holding rubble that might once have been a corpse and its wrappings, but there was no sign of whoever or whatever had caught my wrist. Even as I began to relax, a whisper rustled through the confined space. “Outlander!” it breathed. “Slayer of my children’s children.”
I stood as erect as the space allowed and grasped my sword with both hands. No sane man failed to fear the dead, but I was a soldier and the son of a soldier. I would not accept guilt not my own.
“I am a Briton, though my father is Roman,” I protested. “I have killed no Britons, only raiding northerners or those who prey on travelers. My mother is a daughter of this soil, as am I. Do not hold me responsible for the misdeeds of those who came before me. Given that my mother’s folk have been here for many lives of men, I may be one of your descendants.”
There came a soft gust of laughter. “I have watched these lands for time beyond remembering. I have seen the Picts driven out by the Romans, and they were nearer kin to me than your kind. Yet you are brave, and I respect that. You came to me this night, sent by means of the pillar my clan set in the road.” The voice gusted through that cold space, setting my teeth on edge and my skin to goose-pimpling.
“This night I have need of a warrior, one skilled with the blade and able to stand against terrible foes. On this night, once again after the passage of two thousand winters, those who killed my children are doomed to return to the scene of their terrible action, and the spirits of
my people must suffer again their dreadful deaths. So our gods will it, and thus it is fated. But this time I will send against them a warrior who will stand against the slayers, if you are the one and if you have the courage to cleanse this place of its ancient haunting.”
I could feel unseen eyes examining me, a spirit, strong and incredibly old, measuring my determination and my abilities. A realization came to me that my life had been worthless, since the legions left our shores. No purpose drove me, no family depended on me for sustenance. Not even my horse was left as a responsibility. I was free to follow my own whim . . . or the needs of the slain.
I was silent for a long while, considering the thing asked of me. What value had I to any living being? None that I could see. If I might serve this tormented spirit, my life and my training could justify themselves. A warrior without an army is useless, unless he stands alone against great evil. In my death I might serve more truly than I might have done in the legions of Rome.
With a long sigh, I lowered my blade. “You have found your sacrifice,” I told the invisible spirit. “I will stand by that pillar and await what comes. Yet I doubt there is any chance that I might halt the force that will come there.”
The atmosphere eased a bit, the chill lessening, the gleam becoming brighter. “It is well,” whispered the voice. “And there is a chance of survival. Stand your ground. Hold to your courage and your purpose. Many elements have worked together to bring you here on this night, and those things have not been without purpose. Work the will of the Goddess, and you may see the sun rise again.”
Then the gleam died, the voice was gone, and I knew what I must do. I found my way out of the barrow and located the broken gorse marking my track. Following that, I found the road and moved along it to stand with my back to that pale pillar. This time I did not touch my skin to the stone, but its solidity against my back offered reassurance.
I settled my pack and took both sword and knife in hand. I would wait until the marauding specters came or did not come, as I began to think. Was I a fool or a dreamer? I leaned harder against the stone and drifted into a sort of doze. Almost I laughed, thinking I had been befooled by the mist and the strange air of the moor.
Then I heard the clanking of metal and the thudding of feet on the track. The mist swirled aside, and I could see a blur of motion between the gorse thickets, glitters of brightness, pale shapes, half shadow and half moonlight, as the ensorcelled raiders approached. Though they were not real, they were there, and I knew I must face them in the name of my father, my mother, and the Goddess. Else I would deny my worthiness to call myself a man and a warrior.
“Hold!” I cried, raising my blade and stepping forward. “No spirit will pass tonight to slay those who bide, unresting, on this moor. ”
There was a pause in the motion, and the shadows seemed to coalesce into a formidable mass. A gaunt shape moved toward me, and in its hand was a great axe, double-bitted and still holding the tint of blood.
“We are doomed by the gods to re-enact our deeds on this night. Who dares to question our passage?”
“I am Kerak, son of Rome and Britannia, once warrior of the legion of Flavius Severus. I am required by the Goddess to halt this cruel act
and the sufferings of the spirits trapped here, face me, one or all. I will not let you pass. ”
As he moved forward, heat surged through my body, took control of my hands and my mind. Battle-fury, which I had not forgotten in the months since being left behind, governed me as I met the rush of that spectral leader, slashing my blade through his insubstantial body as he belabored me with the axe. Strangely, though I could feel his blows they drew no blood, nor did my strokes do more to him.
We stood, face to face, our weapons busy, our hearts burning with rage. The ghostly horde took no part but drew about us, as if waiting for the outcome of our battle. I grew weary, my legs beginning to shake, my shoulders aching with the effort of my swordplay, and I began to wonder if any living man might meet the challenge of the untiring dead. Yet I strove, until he swung his axe widely, and I took advantage of the opening to thrust my knife straight into his blurred face.
As the metal went in, I felt a shudder of departing energy, and the fleshless entity sank slowly, becoming a puddle of mist. Around us, the horde gave a sigh like a strong gust of wind and began to dissolve into individual columns of mist. Exhausted, my strength spent, I leaned against the pillar, which was no longer cold but gratefully warm.
A breeze scented with gorse blossom rose and dissipated the last of the mist and the entire horde of accursed beings. I saw in the east the first dim line of light marking the dawn, and I sank beside that longwaiting pillar and slept.
When I woke the moor was bright with noon, and no hint was there that it had ever been haunted. I gathered dead gorse and whin and
burned poor Cam’s body, before searching along my crushed trail for the barrow I had found in the night.
The stones were there, but they had long been sunk into the soil, and no one could have entered it to talk with the dead. Yet I knew what had happened to me, and I also understood that I was a warrior worth employing. I would, I decided, go across the Narrow Sea to Gaul and find some chieftain who might value one who had fought a battle with the dead . . . and won.
A Penny a Word
by Rick Klaw & Paul O. Miles
It is sometimes shocking what occult information can be unearthed. While researching my family history, I discovered that my paternal great-grandfather Jacob Klau (d. 1933) wrote short fiction under the pseudonyms “S. B. H. Hurst” and “Bugs Sinnat.” His modest output produced in 1931-32 at least two known short stories for Weird Tales and one story for Oriental Tales. One of the stories “The Ball of Fire” appeared in the reprint anthology Oriental Stories edited by William H. Desmond, Diane and John Howard, and Robert K. Weiner (Odyssey Publications OP 3, 1975) and another, “The Splendid Lie,” was used in 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg (Barnes & Noble, 1993). For most of his life, Klau worked as a train conductor and there is strong evidence that he inspired Robert Bloch’s classic tale “That Hellbound Train.”
Hungry for more information about my ancestor, I visited the Library of Congress. After a search through government documents turned up nothing further on my great-grandfather, on a whim I looked for Weird Tales. Below is the transcript of Vito (Sonny) DiCarlo’s shocking May 11, 1951 testimony before Estes Kefauver’s
legendary Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce (aka The Kefauver Committee), the first such committee established to challenge organized crime. While DiCarlo’s statement may on the surface appear ludicrous, it does cast an interesting light on that generation of pulp writers especially Robert E. Howard, in whom Kefauver seemed to have a particular interest. The notes in parenthesis are mine. I also cleaned up some of the spelling inconsistencies.
The key was the rejection letters. Early on, as the grift was on its first legs, we headed down to Greenwich Village to scope some writers out, get into their heads. A bigger group of smelly, redeyed lushes you never saw. And it was Tommy March (Antonio Marza b 1893, The Bronx) who figured out that writers like to be miserable. In fact, they didn’t trust praise or happiness; in the brothels, we trained the whores to build a man up for this con, we needed to keep the rubes down. So for every story we accepted, we rejected two. And we kept the rejection letters formal, a sentence or two like we were saying: get this piece of shit story off the bottom of my shoe.
By this time, what would be known as the Weird Tales grift had been running for the better part of three years. The Brooklyn mob loved it for its simplicity: create a “magazine”, invite submissions, then make the desperate rubes come over with the cash to see their pathetic stories in print. Charge ‘ em a penny a word. We would have Ernie (Twelve Fingers) Bronk (Enchase Brazzio b. 1899 Queens, New York) print up 100 or so cheap copies, send the writers a few for their egos and bank the profits. We told the mooks if they sold enough to get into the black, then they’d
see some cash till then, spread the risk. We put an ad with a post office box in the back of The Saturday Evening Post, Adventure and other magazines and waited. The stories and the checks rolled in.
In fact, we had to open a store up to the Empire State and hire a twist, Edie Weinraub, to run it as the secretary. Edie was nice on the eyes, and smart went to Fordham for a year, even, but she was Dutchie Schultz’s cousin so everybody knew to keep hands off.
She spent her days, letter opener in hand, slicing up the pile of manila envelopes and counting up the number of words in the stories to make sure the rubes didn’t try and short us. Every month or so, we’d pull a couple of them, get Sy Hurt (b. 1882, The Bronx) to paint a cover—who knew? Most of the time Sy was doing a different kind of painting and mail the rag out to our marks to keep them on the hook.
Weird Tales was the sweetest little con you ever knew: none of these backwater jerks were ever going to tumble to the fact they were being hiked they just wanted to see their names on paper. And if they did, who gives a shit what some yokel from Fuckdale, Arkansas has to say, anyway?
Then we got our first submission from Bob (Robert E.) Howard, who you were asking about. First thing, we checked on a map to make sure there was a Cross Plains in Texas since that sounded like the name some apple-cheeked G-Man might come up with to reel us in for mail fraud. Edie found it a real getmethefuckouto ere burg if I ever saw one. Edie opened the envelope and pulled out the story and a few crumpled bills. Cash. I liked the boy immediately.
We didn’t think anything of it, except this mook started to send new stories every week. To me, whatever, I’ll take your money any way you
