for a happy ending. Though it is the story of Sir Miles that pulls us onward through the narrative, it is the conqueror Zenghi who most fascinates. Brave, capable, even witty, we are shown contemptible cruelty at his hand at the story’s open. Yet Howard is too skilled to present us with a one-dimensional villain. Later we learn that the one action Zenghi regrets in his long life is the brutal death of young Achmet that so stuns the reader in the opening scene of “Tiberias.” Miles may be as clever and as accomplished as any of Howard’s protagonists, but it is Zenghi who we remember most when the tale is done. Like Baibars and Tamerlane, he is a lion among men who dares to mold the earth as his own. It is he who brings about his own downfall; he sets his own death in motion as surely as if he had slit his own throat, first by slaying the noble prince, then by sparing John Norwald. Once more Howard brings us a tale of the fall of kingdoms and the death of kings, but seldom has any writer delivered a conclusion so somber and otherworldly without resorting to the fantastic. When Zenghi’s advisor Ousama approaches the atabeg’s tent, he finds the unexpected.
He stopped short, an uncanny fear prickling the short hairs at the back of his neck, as a form came from the pavilion. He made out a tall white-bearded man, clad in rags. The Arab stretched forth a hand timidly, but dared not touch the apparition. He saw that the figure’s hand was pressed against its left side, and blood oozed darkly from between the fingers.“Where go you, old man?” stammered the Arab, involuntarily stepping back as the white- bearded stranger fixed weird blazing eyes upon him.“I go back to the void which gave me birth,” answered the figure in a deep ghostly voice, and as the Arab stared in bewilderment, the stranger passed on with slow, certain, unwavering steps, to vanish in the darkness. Once more the dreams of empire fade, and Ousama eloquently mourns his master when he discovers the body of Zenghi. “ ‘Alas for kingly ambitions and high visions!’ exclaimed the Arab. ‘Death is a black horse that may halt in the night by any tent, and life is more unstable than the foam on the sea!’ ” It is just one more memorable quote from a story that is laced with them.
In each of the last three stories, Howard has played variations upon one of his favorite themes; that we must eat and drink and be merry while we can, for death comes all too swiftly, even for the great.
While an eastern monarch again plays a leading role in the next of Howard’s historicals, Suleyman is much less the focus than Red Sonya and Gottfried von Kalmbach. It is probably well enough known now that Red Sonya has little in common with the comic-book character Red Sonja other than a similar name, red hair, and a skill with weapons. At no point during the length of the story does Howard’s Red Sonya don a chainmail bikini; she and von Kalmbach neatly steal the show without the use of gimmicks.
Life may be just as grim under “The Shadow of the Vulture” as it was amongst Tiberian Lions and Thunder Sowers, but Howard finds greater room for other tones within the work. Von Kalmbach is strong and courageous, but he’s a drunkard always out to enjoy himself a bit even if he’s doomed. He’s essentially good natured; the grim melancholy that has dogged the other male protagonists is mostly absent from von Kalmbach himself, although the environment he moves through is not so different. Howard avoids the temptation to make the character a comic sendup, though he does furnish von Kalmbach with a straight man in the person of Red Sonja, his brighter half. As much as von Kalmbach might desire it, he and Red Sonja do not become romantically linked, but they do recognize each other as two of the few who are competent enough to stand the walls, and she watches out for him. If not as explicitly intelligent as some of Howard’s other characters, Sonja can think on her feet, and it is her brains that save von Kalmbach and that set the final scheme in motion that finishes the vulture.
Suleyman, for all that he is portrayed as intelligent, does not fare as well; he comes across as cultured but a little petulant. His aims at conquest are thwarted, but he decides to celebrate the campaign’s failure as a success anyway, a point of irony from history that amused Howard. Though Suleyman does not die like the monarchs in the Howard historicals that precede him – he would live on for many years yet – his evil henchman does, and surely Mikhal Oglu is the blackest figure yet used in these history tales, one who “recalled with satisfaction the blackened, corpse-littered wastes – the screams of tortured men – the cries of girls writhing in his iron arms; recalled with much the same sensation the death-shrieks of those same girls in the blood-fouled hands of his killers.” There’s nothing redeemable in the man but his efficiency. We feel no sympathy for either him or the haughty Suleyman come story end, when the two are face to face a final time.
“Vulture” is another epic, close on the heels of the three previous – four truly excellent historical adventures, all dashed off in a single year. It was quite an achievement. For once Howard himself voiced awareness of the story’s worth. To Lovecraft he wrote that “… I do like ‘The Shadow of the Vulture.’ I tried to follow history as closely as possible, though I did shift the actual date of Mikhal Oglu’s death. He was not killed until a year or so later, on the occasion of a later invasion of Austria, in which the Akinji were trapped and destroyed by Paul Bakics.”
Howard was also proud of his characters, writing to Lovecraft in March of 1933 that “I’m curious to know how the readers will like Gottfried von Kalmbach, one of the main characters in a long historical yarn I sold Wright, concerning Suleyman the Magnificent’s attack on Vienna. A more dissolute vagabond than Gottfried never weaved his drunken way across the pages of a popular magazine: wastrel, drunkard, gambler, whore-monger, renegade, mercenary, plunderer, thief, rogue, rascal – I never created a character whose creation I enjoyed more. They may not seem real to the readers; but Gottfried and his mistress Red Sonya seem more real to me than any other character I’ve ever drawn.”
Truer or not – for by this point Howard had breathed convincing life into any number of characters – von Kalmbach and Red Sonya are some of his most compelling characters, and we can lament the fact that we never heard more from Howard about them. Von Kalmbach is not quite so dissolute as Howard paints him here; the fellow in the story is almost staid by comparison to the way he’s described to Lovecraft. Those same words might better describe the protagonist of “Gates of Empire.”
Some Howard fans name the run of work from “The Sowers of the Thunder” to “The Shadow of the Vulture” as Howard’s historical high water mark, but “Gates of Empire” succeeds just as well. The fact that it is not more widely celebrated, even among Howard fans, may be because it’s different in style and tone from almost everything else in Howard’s entire canon. It’s not that details and events within the tale are any less grim than those of the historicals that come before it, but that the character who drunkenly weaves his way through all the blood and battle and death is another kind of fellow entirely. Howard was so confident now with the material that he was experimenting with construction and character; every historical from this point forward was a chance to further flex his muscles. Unfortunately we can only speculate as to what Howard might have gone on to write in the genre had the market not closed to him.
“Gates of Empire” is not the broad slapstick comedy of the Breckinridge Elkins stories. Giles is just this side of realism, and while a comic figure, is one who is constantly in danger. Not so Elkins, who will never be harmed. Throughout “Gates of Empire” Howard reveals a fine sense of comic timing and understatement. The pacing is brilliant. Guiscard de Chastillon always manages to arrive at just the worst, and most entertaining, moment. Sometimes the humor in the piece arises from characters having what would be a perfectly reasonable conversation if it were not completely based upon lies that Giles has told them about his own condition. A rogue, Giles is mostly harmless, and likable, clever enough to stay just ahead of any situation he’s created for himself. Indeed, almost everything that befalls Giles comes of his own poor choices. His cleverness allows him to make lemonade every time he falls into a vat of lemons, but in climbing out of one barrel he nearly always manages to make another poor choice that leads him into another.
Following Giles is nothing like following Conan, who is usually one step ahead of the readers. With Giles, Howard lets us in on the joke. We’re the superior to Giles in many ways, although few of us would be likely to lie so convincingly when the chips are down. As readers we know far better than Giles that the lovely girl leading him on through the darkness cannot possibly intend anything good for him; we have a greater understanding than Giles of exactly what he is up against in scene after scene and it creates a different kind of tension than Howard is famous for. Conan will surely get out of the scene via his prowess and intelligence, but how will Giles manage to avoid destruction this time? Dumb luck? More clever improvization? “Gates of Empire” is one of those stories that only improves upon revisiting.
Sadly, although it would have been nice to know what Howard thought of the story, or his progress as a writer, no surviving letter discusses either Giles or “Gates of Empire,” and he was never to write another piece quite like it.
A FINAL FLURRY
