Category Archives: Conan

Out of the Garden and into my Library

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Out of the Garden
Angeline Hawkes
Bad Moon Books
Trade Paper, 393 p., $20.00
ebook $3.99 Kindle  Nook

If you enjoy a good barbarian story, and who doesn’t, then you might want to check out the latest from Angeline Hawkes.  While most of her recent work is in the field of horror, she makes the occasional foray into the realms of fantasy, often giving us another exploit of her barbarian character, Kabar of El Hazzar.  All the stories so far have been collected in this volume.

These are pseudohistorical fantasies that may or may not take place in our world.  Some of the references to historical places and peoples, such as Nineveh or Hebrews, would incline one to think so.  But then there are references to all sorts of places that never existed.

None of which is really relevant.  What is, is the answer to the question, are the stories entertaining?

Yes, yes they are.  The title story, also the longest in the book, is by far the most unusual, in that Kabar wanders into the Garden of Eden long after Adam and Eve have left.  He finds it’s not uninhabited.  The other eleven stories vary in length, with some being short stories and others novelettes or novellas. 

The tone and plot vary, as well, from one story to the next.  Although several have the same basic plot skeleton, that being Kabar must go and fight a monster to bring back a magic item to aid someone, the difference and enjoyment is in the details. 

Kabar isn’t your typical Clonan.  Whereas Conan is a wanderer with no family, Kabar places great importance on family in spite of his travels.  In fact two of the stories don’t involve Kabar at all.  “The Treasure of Their Destinies” is an adventure of Kabar’s brother Aeneas in which Kabar isn’t even mentioned that I noticed.  This one reminded me of Sinbad.  Kabar’s wife Adina has the starring role in “Sacrifice of the Utukki”.  It’s in part this expanded cast that sets these stories apart from the pack of poor Robert E. Howard imitations.

That’s not the only thing different about this character.  Kabar is noble and good, not the antihero that Conan sometimes is.  He is more than willing to sacrifice or put himself at risk for those he cares about, whether they be friend or family.  Of course, he’s not above keeping some gold for himself or ravishing a beautiful (and willing) woman (or goddess) if opportunity arises.

That’s not to say that Robert E. Howard doesn’t cast a long shadow over these tales.  The author and her husband are former members of REHupa, after all.   The action, swordplay, danger, and sorcery are all there.  And the titles are worthy of Howard.  “The Skull of Zondamar” (nice twist on the end of that one), “To Hunt a God”, “Upon This Forgotten Altar”, “The Bloody Spear of Nineveh”, and others sound like Howard titles.

I found this collection to be enjoyable and fun, a nice addition to my sword and sorcery library.  The author’s website has a list of the stories in this series.  On that list is a novel in progress.  I’m keeping my eye out for it.

Blogging Conan: Iron Shadows in the Moon/Shadows in the Moonlight

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This has always been one of my favorite Conan yarns, in spite of the fact that it’s mostly an adventure story, without the depth of “The Tower of the Elephant” or “Red Nails”.  Still, there are some significant aspects to the story which could be overlooked. And that’s a shame, because the two things I want to focus on directly relate to some of the criticisms of Howard in particular and sword and sorcery in general.

There will be spoilers in this post.  Just so you know.


 The story opens with a young girl, Olivia, in a marsh on the edge of the Vilayet Sea, where she has fled from Shah Amurath, to whom she had been sold.  The Shah has cornered her on the edge of the sea and is about to take her back to the city of Akif when Conan bursts out of the reeds.  He has something of a grudge to settle.

Conan had been with the Free Companions, raiding along the Turanian, Zamoran, and Kothian borders, when Amurath had trapped and killed most of his companions.  They weren’t killed swiftly or painlessly.  Conan is the only survivor.  He’s been hiding out in the swamp, waiting for nightfall to row across the Sea in a boat he found earlier in the day.  Of course Conan makes short work of Amurath, even though he’s only wearing a loincloth and Amurath is in full armor.

This brings us to the first point I want to make.  Some people, who either clearly haven’t read Howard or paid sufficient attention if they did, criticize the Conan stories because they find Conan to be to much of a superhero.  Apparently they think he comes out of every fight without a scratch, in spite of the fact Howard routinely describes Conan’s body as being covered with scars.  Conan has been slithering through the muck, eating raw muskrats and roots he dug up.  Hardly the life of a successful superhero.

Conan and Olivia row all day and night until they come to an island.  Well, Conan rows.  Olivia is just along for the ride.  There they find an abandoned temple filled with large iron statues.  They decide to hide on the island until a passing ship has gone by, for fear of being captured.  Instead, the ship lands, filled with pirates.  Conan kills their captain in single combat but is taken captive and held in the temple while the pirates decide what to do with him.  (Not much of a superhero if he lets himself get captured, is he?) Some say he’s now the rightful captain, others that he isn’t because he wasn’t one of them when he killed the captain.

Olivia has stayed hidden during these events.  And this brings me to the main point I want to make.  The story is told entirely from her viewpoint.  Our knowledge of Conan’s activities come from what he tells Olivia.  His captivity is never described from his viewpoint.  What we see is the character development of Olivia from a simpering wall-flower to someone who chooses to live by the sword.

One of Howard’s favorite themes is on full display here, that of barbarism vs. civilization.  After he rescues her, Olivia tells Conan that her father, the king of Ophir, sold her because she refused to marry a prince of Koth.  She was sold several more times before she became the property of Amurath.  When she mentions her people consider Cimmerians to be barbaric, Conan’s response is that they don’t sell their children.

At first Olivia is afraid of Conan, but before the end of the story, she not only overcomes her fear of him but much of her fear in general as well.  She slips into the temple after the  pirates are asleep and frees Conan.  And while she hasn’t completely overcome her scream queen tendencies by the end, she is braver and more hardened than she was when we first meet her.  She thinks through how she was treated by civilized men and compares that treatment to the treatment she receives from Conan and decides she much prefers the treatment of a barbarian to that of a “civilized” man.  Given a choice, she decides to sail with Conan and the pirates for a life of raiding.  She’s not simply another nearly naked damsel in distress (although I wish someone would explain to me why those type of characters are so bad, without taking a sanctimonious tone).

I think this story deserves wider recognition.  It’s not a perfect story by any means.  But through the character of Olivia, Howard demonstrates a clear contrast between civilized and barbaric standards of behavior.  It’s pretty clear he considers the barbarians to be morally superior to civilized men who sell their children.  We shouldn’t let the adventure aspects make us lose sight of that.

Robert E. Howard

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Regarding a Movie About a Barbarian Seeking to Avenge the Murder of His Family

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I saw a movie over the Labor Day weekend.  It might be of interest to some of you.  The movie was filmed somewhere in Eastern Europe, and the scenery, particularly of the mountains, is gorgeous.

The storyline goes something like this.  There’s this young boy in a tribal village and these raiders swoop down and kill everyone, except this boy, who is the only one to survive.  He watches his friends and family killed.  The leader of the raiders takes a sword that the boy’s father has made.

After he grows up, the boy, now a mighty fighter, goes looking for the man who killed his family.  To pass the time until he finds him, he has a hobby of freeing slaves.  Eventually he finds the man who killed his family.  This man now has a grotesque mask and he’s seeking a particular young woman who is descended from a line of kings.  He needs her blood perform this ritual in which he raises this dark sorceress or goddess or something.  The barbarian is protecting her, but she gets kidnapped by the villain.  There’s a final fight in a citadel and the villain has the princess chained in a spread eagle position to perform the ritual, and there’s this fight on this bridge over a chasm, and…

…and the name of this barbarian…just in case you were wondering,…it isn’t “Conan”.

The name of the movie isn’t Conan the Barbarian, either. The movie I’m talking about is Wolfhound, and in spite of the way I used the common plot elements to make it sound like the recent Conan movie, there’s not much similarity between the two.  Wolfhound is a far superior film.  Not perfect by any means, but far superior.

It’s a Russian film, and stars Aleksandr Bukharov in the title role.  It also stars Oksana Akinshina as Princess Knesinka Helen.  I didn’t catch all the names of the characters, and the credits aren’t in English on my copy, so I’ll not try to list the entire cast.  They’re listed here and here if you’re interested.

And before we go any further, let me state that I am not, repeat, NOT saying that anyone associated with Conan the Barbarian (2011) plagiarized Wolfhound in any way, nor do I mean to imply such.

Rather, my point is what two different production companies can do with similar source material.  I took the common plot elements from the two movies to use in the lead-in for this post.  There are some major differences that bear mentioning.  Wolfhound’s companions actually do something useful.  (His name, which is the only one he has, comes from the fact that the man he’s hunting has a wolf’s head tattooed on the back of his hand.)  The magic is often understated and subtle, and in contrast to the magic in Conan, used for healing. There are gods and godesses (as near as I could figure out) directly helping Wolfhound, with the primary goddess encouraging him in a path of love and forgiveness at one point.  At least I think so.  Not something you would see in a Conan story.

The movie, the version I have at any rate, had English dialogue overdubbed.  It was perfectly understandable most of the time.  Unfortunately, the sound track overpowered the dialogue in a few places.  Since everyone else in the house was trying to sleep, there was a limit to how loud I could turn the sound up, and as a result I missed a few bits of dialogue here and there.  I’m not sure who the woman (goddess perhaps?) who appears more than once to give Wolfhound aid and advice actually is.  But like I said, this is a Russian movie, and her identity might have been obvious to the original audience.  It wasn’t hard to figure out her part in the story, though. 

The comparisons to Conan are pretty depressing. There is more action, more (and better) fighting, more philosophy, more romance, and more story in Wolfhound than in Conan.  In fact, the only thing Conan had more of was bare breasts. 

As I said, Wolfhound is not without a few flaws.  Several of the fight scenes were choppy and poorly edited.  Wolfhound has a pet bat which gets directly involved in the fighting at the end, something I found to be ridiculous.  There’s scene when the princess’s party rescues a woman accused of witchcraft or something along those lines which was a bit over the top.  The movie is based on a Russian novel, and from what little I’ve been able to discover, the film and the book don’t have a lot in common.  Some things seem to be universal in the film world.

But even with the flaws, it’s a much better film than Conan.  The special effects are good; not great, but good.  The story hangs together better.  The characters don’t, for the most part, act in illogical or inconsistent ways.  They grow and change, but their motivations are understandable. 

And it’s definitely a Russian movie.  Sacrifice and fate are concepts that are addressed more than once.  The outlook is bleaker and more fatalistic in places than even the darkest US film.  For instance, the city of Galirad, home of Princess Knesinka Helen, lies under a curse and breaking the curse comes to play a large role in the story.  The city is cold and overcast, even though it’s summer.  As the Princess leaves for her wedding to a nobleman, the contrast between the city the meadow outside the walls is striking.  It makes the motivation for what some of the characters do later understandable.

Wolfhound gives us a glimpse of what Conan could have been, what it should have been.  Sadly, I doubt anyone in Hollywood is paying attention.

I’ve included a trailer from YouTube. There are several of them, and this was the best I could find.

What I Think of Conan the Momoan

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photo courtesy of mattrailer.com

I said in my post last Friday that I thought Conan the Barbarian was a semi-decent movie.  Now that things seem to be slowing down a little and I have time to write, I need to define that term.  Simply put, “decent” means not good but not particularly bad, either.  “Semi” means not even that good.

The problem, as more people than I’m going to try to link to have said, is that the movie simply doesn’t deliver in terms of story.  There are just too many holes in the internal logic.  I’ll discuss the things that stuck out to me, but first I’ll discuss why this character isn’t Conan as written by Robert E. Howard.

There were a couple of attempts to tie this movie to what Howard wrote.  Some of the initial lines narrated by Morgan Freeman in the opening were quotes from Howard.  One of the characters summarizes the events of “The Tower of the Elephant” in about one sentence when he’s bragging about Conan’s exploits.  Then there’s the famous quote, “I live…I love…I slay, and I am content” that was taken completely out of context and not even quoted correctly.  The actual quote is from “The Queen of the Black Coast” and is “I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”  Beyond that, there’s nothing directly from Robert E. Howard in the film.

The argument to counter this criticism is that the film captures the spirit of the Conan stories.  But even there the film falls short.  I won’t rehash the origin story criticisms.  Others have said it better than I.  Nor will I get into the depiction of Conan as a crusader against slavery.  There’s no point in throwing stones at the fight choreography.  In this type of movie, the If-I-Did-This-In-A-Real-Fight-I’d-Be-Gutted school of combat is almost unavoidable.  Instead I’ll point out a few lapses in logic that others seem to have missed.

First, Tamara.  She seems to be the only one of the female monks who has any idea how to fight, and she’s quite accomplished at it.  Why?  Is she unique in her interests and abilities in this area, or was she singled out for special training?  If she was, what explanation was given to her and the rest of the monks?

If Tamara’s such a great fighter, and tells Conan that she won’t go with him after he rescues her, why is she docilely accepting being tied up in the next scene and at no time trying to escape?  Is she into bondage?  The sex scene didn’t indicate she was, but maybe that was too racy for the R rating.  Nah.  Probably not.

In the final fight scene, Tamara falls through a bridge of wooden slats.  She has a chain on her wrist, and Conan catches the chain to save her.  The distance she falls before he catches her is enough to dislocate her shoulder if not tear her arm off.  She isn’t even bruised.  That’s pushing things a little too far.

Last gripe about Tamara.  If she was supposed to fill the role of Belit in this film (it was Belit the above quote was spoken to), why does he ride off and leave her in the end?  Belit was the one great love of Conan’s life.  There was no real reason for him to leave her.  Except maybe that since he’d bedded her, it was time for new conquests.  And he would never do that to Belit.

I can’t buy Conan deliberately allowing himself to be taken prisoner in order to get close to one of the men he’s after.  My memory may be misleading me, but I don’t recall Conan ever doing anything like that.  I do remember more than once him threatening to kill anyone who laid a hand on him.

When Tamara is kidnapped from the ship, why wasn’t there a man on watch?  Robert E. Howard’s Conan would never be so stupid as overlook a thing like that.  And earlier, when Khalar Zim first tries to kidnap her, don’t any of these people realize they’re coming.  Khalar Zim has a land ship pulled by eight elephants, fer cryin’ out loud.

I didn’t buy the scene where young Conan fights and kills the Picts early on, either.  Not while holding an egg in his mouth.

On the other hand, there were some things I liked about the movie.  The fight scene with the sand demons was exciting and (I thought) genuinely suspenseful.  Of all the scenes, I thought this one best captured the spirit of Robert E. Howard, at least until he defeats the sand demons and fights Khalar Zim directly.  Too bad more of the others didn’t.

I don’t have any major gripes about the sets and the cast, although I know some people do.  Jason Momoa did a much better job as Conan than I expected him to.  I can see him playing this role again.  I only hope he gets to, and in a film that’s actually based on Howard’s work.  Unfortunately, the movie is doing so poorly that it will probably kill any chance for a genuine Howard adaptation for another generation.

One final thought.  The makeup Rose McGowan wore as Marique placed an image in my head that I can’t get out, so I’m going to share it with you.  Her hair reminded me of Londo Mollari from Babylon 5, while the spots on her neck and forehead made me think of Dax from Star Trek:  Deep Space Nine.  If those two ever had a love child, Marique is what she would look like.

Conan the Movie

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I just came from seeing this movie called Conan the Barbarian.  It’s a semi-decent sword and sorcery flick about this guy who has these adventures.  He just happens to be named Conan.

Interestingly enough, one of my favorite writers, Robert E. Howard, also created a sword and sorcery character named Conan who goes around having all these adventures.

Other than some place names, there’s not much more in common than that.

I’ve got to pack up the van for one last short summer jaunt before school starts for my son on Monday.  I’ll write a more detailed review sometime in the next few days.  I doubt anything I have to say will have any impact on how well the film does, but I do want my thoughts to be coherent.  I will say that the movie wasn’t as bad as I feared (an advantage to setting your expectations really low) but not as good as I’d hoped.  I’ll elaborate on the semi-decent remark in the full blown review.

Blogging Conan: The Tower of the Elephant

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Of all the Conan stories, this one, “The Tower of the Elephant”, is arguably the best.  It’s one of the shortest, but it contains some of the strongest writing Howard ever did.  For example, from the opening paragraph, in which Howard describes the the Maul, the part of town smart people don’t go into after dark:  “Along the crooked, unpaved streets with their heaps of refuse and sloppy puddles, drunken roisterers staggered, roaring.  Steel glinted in the shadows where wolf preyed on wolf, and from the darkness rose the shrill laughter of women, and the sounds of scufflings and strugglings.  Torchlight licked luridly from broken windows and wide-thrown doors, and out of those doors, stale smells of wine and rank sweaty bodies, clamor of drinking-jacks and fists hammered on rough tables, snatches of obscene songs, rushed like a blow in the face.” 

That’s only three sentences.  Yet Howard managed to pack more description in those three sentences, more atmosphere and sense of place, than most writers do in three paragraphs.  He does more than paint a word picture.  He places the reader in the middle of the scene.

It’s into this scene that a young man named Conan comes. 

The plot is pretty straight forward.  Conan overhears a kidnapper bragging in a tavern.  The man mentions a tower known as the Elephant’s Tower.  He questions the man, who tells him that somewhere in the tower, guarded by more than human guards, is a priceless jewel known as the Elephant’s Heart.  The tower is the domain of the sorcerer Yara. 

When Conan says that courage is what is keeping the local thieves from stealing the jewel, the man attacks him.  Conan kills him, then decides to rob the tower himself.  While doing so, he encounters another thief named Taurus, who has been planning the heist for months.  They decide to team up. 

Taurus is killed by one of the guardians of the tower, and Conan proceeds alone.  Normally in these posts about Conan, I would have stopped summarizing by this point, but I’m going to make an exception here.  It’s what happens when Conan finds the jewel that makes “The Tower of the Elephant” stand out among Howard’s work and among works of twentieth-century fantasy.

Conan discovers the chamber containing the Elephant’s Heart is occupied by a creature with the body of a man, green in color, and the head of an elephant, with the head being disproportionately large for the body.  The creature is blind.  He’s also been tortured for centuries by Yara. 

At first Conan is horrified, then as he realizes the creature, who we learn is named Yogah or alternatively Yag-kosha, is no threat he feels a great sense of pity for him.  Yogah explains how he came to be trapped there (mentioning Valusia and Kull’s world, although not specifically naming Kull), then asks Conan to aid him in his revenge against Yara.  Conan does as he’s asks.  He kills Yogah, then squeezes his heart out on the jewel he’d come to steal.  The blood soaks into the jewel as if it were a sponge.  Conan takes the jewel to a lower level in the chamber, where Yara is in a trance.  He awakens Yara and gives him the jewel along with a verbal message from Yogah.  He then makes his escape from the tower.

What?  You think I’m going to tell you all the details of Yara’s demise?  You’ll have to read the story for that.  It’s short, and more than worth your time.

It’s Conan’s reaction to Yogah, even more than Howard’s prose, that lifts this story above most others.  Howard did a lot with the Conan stories to establish the trope of the thief stealing an ensorcelled item, yet in one of the earliest Conan stories he breaks the very stereotype he’s establishing by adding a layer of depth and feeling and having the thief willingly give up the item he’s come to steal. 

The popular misconception of Conan is that he’s a ruthless killer with little or no empathy for the pain of others.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Yes, there are stories in which Conan’s bloodthirsty streak is the characteristic that is displayed most prominently.  But Conan is a three dimensional character.  The compassion he shows here, while harsh, is still compassion.  He acts out of mercy, not bloodlust.  Only by killing Yogah can Conan free him from the torment he’s suffered and allow him to take revenge on Yara.  Conan genuinely feels compassion for Yogah.

It’s easy to see why “The Tower of the Elephant” is considered a masterpiece.  If you haven’t read it, or read it recently, you owe it to yourself to do so.  Then compare the storytelling you find here with what you’ll see in the movie when it comes out this week.  See if there’s a difference.  We’ll talk more about that when I review the move.

Blogging Conan: The People of the Black Circle

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“The People of the Black Circle” is one of Robert E. Howard’s best Conan tales, a masterpiece of action, adventure, and all around creepiness.  It was one of only four Conan tales included in the two volume The Best of Robert E. Howard published a few years ago by Del Rey.  It appears in The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 1: Crimson Shadowsalong with “Beyond the Black River”.  The other two stories, “The Tower of the Elephant” and “Red Nails” are in The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 2: Grim Lands.  We’ll look at all of them before this series is over.

It’s one of the longer Conan tales.  The story opens, as do many of the best of Howard’s work featuring Conan, with characters other than the Cimmerian, something we’ve discussed in other posts in this series.  In this case it’s the king of Vendhya, who is dying from some sort of supernatural afflication.  At his side are various slave girls (who seem to serve no other function than to cringe), a priest, and his sister Yasmina.  Waiting in another part of the city for the king to die are the nobleman Kerim Shah, who is working for the king of Turan to destablize the country, and a man name Khemsa.  He’s an acolyte the Black Seers of Yimsha, who are behind the supernatural assault on the king.  Before he dies, the king manages to tell Yasmina who is responsible for his death.

Conan appears later, when Yasmina has assumed the throne and vowed vengeance on the Black Seers.

The scene now shifts to a citadel outside a town on the border where seven raiders are being held prisoner.  Their captain, a foreigner named Conan, has demanded their release.  The deadline he has given is the next morning.  The commander of the citadel is writing a letter to the queen, telling her of the situation, when he has an unexpected visitor, the Queen herself.  She’s arrived secretly with a plan to use the prisoners as leverage to force Conan to destroy the Black Seers.  She tells the commander all this and retires to her chambers for the night.  Shortly afterwards, Conan climbs through the window of the commander’s chamber and demands the release of the prisoners.  It’s something of a face-off until Yasmina walks in unexpectedly.  She had seen Kerim Shah in the city, and suspicious of his presence, wanted to warn the commander about him.  Instead, she’s taken hostage by Conan, who flees out the window and into the night with her.  His intention is to use her to force the release of his men

And that’s when things take off.  Conan flees with Yasmina.  Khemsa, who is in love with Yasmina’s maid, allows himself to be talked into betraying his masters, the Black Seers, and try to make a power grab himself.  To do this, they magically kill the prisoners Conan came to free.  And Kerim Shah strikes out on his own to accomplish his mission.  And this is where you have to go and read the story for yourself if you haven’t already.

There are some truly creepy passages when Conan is in the citadel of the Black Circle.  By this time, Yasmina is their prisoner, and he’s trying to get her back.  If snakes give you the creeps, then this portion of the story will make your skin crawl.  Some of Howard’s best writing, in any of his work, is here inside the citadel, where Conan and his companions fight the members of the Black Circle. 

In the end all of the political subplots are tied up nicely.  Conan wants Yasmina to go with him and share a life of robbery.  This in my opinion was one of the time Howard handled a female character with depth and subtly. 

Rusty Burke said the purpose of The Best of Robert E. Howard was to give readers, particularly readers who weren’t familiar with the breadth and depth of Howard’s work, a chance to see just how versatile a writer he was.  Because of that, there were limits on how many stories could feature series characters, such as Kull, Conan, and Solomon Kane.  It’s easy to see why “The People of the Black Circle” made the cut.

Blogging Conan: A Witch Shall be Born

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It’s been hectic the last few weeks.  I just finished two back to back conferences at which I made presentations and will fly home tomorrow.  As a result, I’ve not posted much other than a review at Futures Past and Present of a Jack Vance novel I read on the plane.  Things should start to pick back up.

“A Witch Shall be Born”, although not without flaws,  inspired the Margaret Brundage cover seen on the left.  This is one of my favorite Conan stories, even with the flaws.  Some of the strongest imagery in the whole series can be found in this story.  Also some of the most unbelievable protrayals of women.
The story opens as Taramis, the queen of the small city state Khauran, is awakened during the night.  She had a twin sister at birth, Salome, who was left to die in the desert.  A curse lies on the royal family of Khauran, so that every century a child is born with a cresecent shaped birthmark on her chest.  The child will become a witch and do much damage to the kingdom.  When Taramis and Salome were born, Salome had the mirthmark and was left in the desert to die.  Found by an eastern sorcerer returning home from a visit to Stygia, she was raised to become a powerful sorceress.  Now she’s come back to take what she claims is her birthright. 

How she can speak the language without any accent is never addressed, which was something of a stumbling block for me.
With Salome is a mercenary captain named Constantius.  He had entered the city a few days ahead of Salome and had publicly proposed marriage to Taramis.  She of course rejected his proposal.  Constantius joins Salome.  After a brief discussion, in which Salome reveals that she intends to take Taramis’ place, she goes to declare herself queen, leaving Taramis to be raped by Constantius.
She orders all the soldiers to assemble in the city’s central square unarmed.  They all do, except for the Queen’s guard, who are led by a certain Cimmerian.  They show up armed.  Conan doesn’t fall for the trap.  Instead he declares Salome an imposter.  The Queen’s guard are butchered, and Conan is crucified by Constantius outside the city gates.
One of the guard escapes, a young man named Valerius, whose devotion to the queen comes across as though he’s in love with her.  His lover Ivga tolerates this.  Why, I don’t know.  He clearly cares more for the queen than he does for her.  Ivga comes across as child-like, the way Muriela did in “The Servants of Bit-Yakin”.  This was the other portrayal I thought was unrealistic.
Still, this is a better than average story.  One of the things that Howard does is to tell the story from the viewpoints of Taramis, Salome, and Valerius as much as from Conan’s viewpoint, if not more.  In fact, we don’t actually get a passage from Conan’s viewpoint until the crucifixion scene.  A variation of this scene, by the way, was in Conan the Barbarian, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.  While this approach does lend itself to some infodumps, it has the advantage of defining Conan’s character through the eyes of others.  One thing I thought interesting was how Conan treated Taramis.  I’ll not elaborate on that, at least not in this post, since I’m trying not to give too many spoilers away.
There’s plenty of action and intrigue, with touches of the civilization vs. barbarism theme Howard included in many of the Conan works.  The crucifixions are especially well done, and the images I Howard’s words formed in my mind the first time I read this story are still with me, a quarter of a century later.  This one is worth checking out.