Bran Mak Morn: The Last King Read Free

Frost-Giant� Daughter and The Phoenix on the Sword, the first tales of Conan the Cimmerian, who would keep Howard busy chronicling his adventures for the next three years. The Picts, of course, inhabit Conan� Hyborian Age, which lies in the mythical past between the pre-Cataclysmic Age of Kull and our own historical epoch. As always, they are on the fringes of that world, savage inhabitants of the primeval forests of the west, age-old foes of Conan� people (who are descendants of the Atlanteans), bitterly contesting any attempt to enter their domains. The Picts play a central role in one of Howard� last, and best, Conan tales, Beyond the Black River, in which he played out in fiction the struggle that had taken place on the American frontiers, including his native Texas. Tellingly, the Picts in that story take back land that was taken from them, scoring a temporary success against the Aquilonians, just as Bran had warded off the incursions of the Romans in Caledonia.
    In The Hyborian Age, an essay in which Howard outlined a pseudo-history for Conan� world, linking it with the age of Kull and our own dim prehistory, he tells us that, about five hundred years after Conan� time, the Hyborian kingdoms were overthrown by the growth of a vast Pictish empire, the handiwork of a great chieftain named Gorm. But, Howard noted, �onquest and the acquiring of wealth altered not the Pict; out of the ruins of the crushed civilization no new culture arose phoenix-like. The dark hands which shattered the artistic glories of the conquered never tried to copy them. Though he sat among the glittering ruins of shattered palaces and clad his hard body in the silks of vanquished kings, the Pict remained the eternal barbarian, ferocious, elemental, interested only in the naked primal principles of life, unchanging, unerring in his instincts which were all for war and plunder, and in which arts and the cultured progress of humanity had no place.� Throughout his writing career, from the pre-Cataclysmic exploits of Brule the Spear-Slayer, through the Hyborian Age of Conan and the primordial eras of Marchers of Valhalla and The Valley of the Worm, through the historical world of Bran Mak Morn and even surviving into our own day, the Picts play a central role in the work of Robert E. Howard. More than Conan, more than Kull, they represent for him the elemental, Eternal Barbarian.
    Rusty Burke 2001
    Men of the Shadows
    Men of the Shadows
    From the dim red dawn of Creation
    From the fogs of timeless Time Came we, the first great nation,
    First on the upward climb.
    Savage, untaught, unknowing,
    Groping through primitive night, Yet faintly catching the glowing,
    The hint of the coming Light.
    Ranging o�r lands untraveled,
    Sailing o�r seas unknown Mazed by world-puzzles unraveled,
    Building our land-marks of stone.
    Vaguely grasping at glory,
    Gazing beyond our ken Mutely the ages�story
    Rearing on plain and fen.
    See, how the Lost Fire smolders,
    We are one with the eons�must. Nations have trod our shoulders,
    Trampling us into the dust.
    We, the first of the races,
    Linking the Old and New �Look, where the sea-cloud spaces
    Mingle with ocean-blue.
    So we have mingled with ages,
    And the world-wind our ashes stirs, Vanished are we from Time� pages,
    Our memory? Wind in the firs.
    Stonehenge of long-gone glory
    Sombre and lone in the night, Murmur the age-old story
    How we kindled the first of the Light.
    Speak night-winds, of man� creation,
    Whisper o�r crag and fen, The tale of the first great nation,
    The last of the Stone Age men.
    Sword met sword with clash and slither.
    �illa! A-a-ailla!�rising on a steep pitch of sound from a hundred savage throats.
    On all sides they swarmed upon us, a hundred to thirty. Back to back we stood, shields lapped, blades at guard. Those blades were red, but corselets and helmets, too, were red. One advantage we possessed, we were armored and our foes were not. Yet they flung themselves