Solomon Kane

SOLOMON KANE Stories and Poems by Robert E. Howard The Dunyazad Digital Library www.dunyazad-library.net Solomon Kane Stories and Poems by Robert E. Howard First published 1928–1932 (Some stories unpublished during the author’s lifetime) The Dunyazad Digital Library www.dunyazad-library.net The Dunyazad Digital Library (named in honor of Shahrazad’s sister) is based in Austria. According to Austrian law, the text of this book is in the public domain (“gemeinfrei”), since all rights expire 70 years after the author’s death. If this does not apply in the place of your residence, please respect your local law. However, with the exception of making backup or printed copies for your own personal use, you may not copy, forward, reproduce or by any means publish this e- book without our previous written consent. This restriction is only valid as long as this e-book is available at the www.dunyazad-library.net website. This e-book has been carefully edited. It may still contain OCR or transcription errors, but also intentional deviations from the available printed source(s) in typog- raphy and spelling to improve readability or to correct obvious printing errors. A Dunyazad Digital Library book Selected, edited and typeset by Robert Schaechter First published April 2010 Release 1.01a · August 2020 2 About the Author Robert E. Howard was born in a small Texan town on January 22nd, 1906, as the only child of the traveling country physician Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard, and his wife Hester Jane Ervin. During Howard’s early years the family moved from one small Texas town to the next, relocating every year or two, until in 1919 they finally settled in the hamlet of Cross Plains, where Dr. Howard would be a well-respected general practitioner — here Howard would spend the rest of his life. Howard started to write early — from childhood on, he had known that this was what he wanted to do — and he turned into an incredibly prolific author. Fantasy was only one of many genres in which he wrote, and even within the fantasy genre the Conan stories make up only a fraction of his immense literary output. Howard wrote to earn a living, and since the magazines that bought his stories were paying poorly, he had to make up for this by volume. He was a careful writer, usually writing outlines and several drafts of his stories before he submitted them, but he wrote fast, rarely ran out of ideas (or of older stories to re-use and improve), and above all he was an unremitting worker: “Writing is pounding out one damn yarn after another, pounding them out whether you want to or not … the only way I can get anything done is to keep pounding away” (as quoted by Novalyne Price Ellis, in her biography One Who Walked Alone). Howard pounded away at historical fiction, fantasy, adventure, horror, boxing, western, detective and comedy stories, and also at several hundred poems — though these, he knew, would not be published by the magazines he was writing for. 3 All this time, Howard’s life was troubled. From early age on he suffered from depression, and then he was burdened by the chronic illness of his mother. It was she who in his childhood had installed in him the love for literature and poetry, and he felt very close to her — when she became bed-ridden, despite his father being a doctor, it was he who for many years attended to her. His unsteady commercial success as a writer did not mitigate the pain of his depression, and a longstanding on-and-off love affair with the only woman he had ever been closely acquainted with was leading nowhere. When he was told that his mother would not awake from the coma she had fallen into, on June 11th, 1936, he felt released of his duty to her, walked out to his car, took a gun he had borrowed from the glove box, and shot himself. Solomon Kane is a very different character from Howard’s most fa- mous fantasy hero, Conan. Though almost equal in physical strength, there is nothing of the barbarian’s careless and carefree vitality for Kane, the Puritan. And different from Conan, Kane has an agenda — he is out to right all wrongs, protect all weaker things, avenge all crimes against right and justice. There is a much darker force inside of him, though, which he cannot confront, and by which he is relentlessly and restlessly driven. The promise of joy and happiness at the end of Moon of Skulls is not for him, and homecoming, after all his adventures, barely offers a short repose. In Solomon Kane we may find more of Howard himself than in any other major character he has created. But no need for us to delve into that darkness now — let us enjoy these fascinating tales! 4 About this Edition This collection contains the nine complete Solomon Kane stories, two major fragments (two very short fragments were omitted), and four poems. Regarding sequence, some arbitrary decisions had to be made. The “N’Longa/Staff of Solomon” cycle that is indicated in the Table of Contents has not been designated as such by the author or by a previous publisher. The poem “The Song of the Bats” does not strictly belong into a Solomon Kane anthology, but was included here as a preface to “The Footfalls Within.” Apart from correcting the occasional obvious printing errors, one systematic change has been made to Howard’s text: the words Negro and Negroid are capitalized throughout, and Black is capitalized when it is used as a noun: the Black, but the black man. This edition presents an un-bowdlerized version of Howard’s texts. Regrettably and indisputably, racist concepts and remarks appear in these stories. The fact that Howard’s racism has to be seen in the context of his time and place, which was Texas in the early decades of the 20th century, does not make it less objectionable. To bowdlerize the text, though, as has been done elsewhere in print and on the net, is not an acceptable solution. At its worst, the racism in these stories reads like this, when Solo- mon Kane finds himself inside a monumental and splendid stone palace (“not even in the courts of Europe had he seen such grandeur”) in the deepest African jungle: Still the thought hovered in Kane’s mind as he watched — who built this place, and why were Negroes evidently in possession? He knew this 5 was the work of a higher race. No black tribe had ever reached such a stage of culture as evidenced by these carvings. There is a bowdlerized version that changes this to: … who built this place, and why were these people evidently in possession? Fighting men such as they were could not have reached the culture evidenced by these carvings. While avoiding the overt racism, this doesn’t make much sense. The bowdlerization of Howard’s texts, though, has gone farther than that, by eliminating the word black to an almost absurd extent. About Queen Nakari Howard writes: A black woman she was, young and of a tigerish comeliness. In a bowdlerized version we read: A tawny woman she was … Black slaves got bowdlerized, too. When Solomon Kane encounters a slave train (“Wo unto ye, sons of iniquity, for the wrath of God is upon ye,” Kane curses the slavers), Howard’s words are: More than a hundred Blacks, young men and women, staggered along the trail, stark naked and made fast together by cruel yoke-like affairs of wood. In a bowdlerized edition we read: More than a hundred natives, young men and women, staggered along the trail, stark naked … And in a different one: More than a hundred young men and women staggered along the trail, stark naked … I ask the reader to understand that keeping Howard’s original words is in no way meant to condone the racist attitudes that they sometimes express — but a historical work of literature is not served by clumsily re-writing it to purge it of what offends us today. 6 Table of Contents Red Shadows [Solomon Kane] † 8 Skulls in the Stars 43 The Right Hand of Doom 57 Rattle of Bones 63 The Moon of Skulls 72 The One Black Stain (Poem) 135 The Blue Flame of Vengeance [Blades of the Brotherhood] 139 The Hills of the Dead † 175 Hawk of Basti (Fragment) † 200 The Return of Sir Richard Grenville (Poem) 210 Wings in the Night † 212 The Children of Asshur (Fragment) † 250 The Song of the Bats (Poem) 277 The Footfalls Within † 278 Solomon Kane’s Homecoming (Poem) 297 † The N’Longa/Staff of Solomon cycle Note: Titles in [ ] are alternative titles under which these stories have been published. 7 Red Shadows 1. The Coming of Solomon The moonlight shimmered hazily, making silvery mists of illusion among the shadowy trees. A faint breeze whispered down the valley, bearing a shadow that was not of the moon-mist. A faint scent of smoke was apparent. The man whose long, swinging strides, unhurried yet unswerving, had carried him for many a mile since sunrise, stopped suddenly. A movement in the trees had caught his attention, and he moved silently toward the shadows, a hand resting lightly on the hilt of his long, slim rapier. Warily he advanced, his eyes striving to pierce the darkness that brooded under the trees. This was a wild and menacing country; death might be lurking under those trees.

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