The Story So Far

There’s a frontier war going on the between the Aquilonians and the Picts, the former trying to expand westward and the latter trying to keep their territory by any means necessary. The Aquilonians have better weapons and fortification, but the Picts in the area have a secret weapon in the sorcerer Zogar Sag, who incidentally is out for revenge against Fort Tuscelan. We follow Balthus, a young Aquilonian warrior set to be at Fort Tuscelan, and Conan, a Cimmerian who is currently working as a mercenary for the Aquilonian government. The first believes that expansion is both possible and good for humanity; the latter does not. As far as Conan’s concerned he’s doing it for the paycheck, but that doesn’t stop him from wanting Zogar Sag’s head on a platter—for the sorcerer’s treacherousness if not to defend the fort. Indeed this Pictish sorcerer has been collecting human heads for the purposes of blood sacrifices.

Regrouping at the fort, Conan assembles a crack team of warriors to cross Black River and take out Zogar Sag on the down-low, so as to hopefully prevent an all-out skermish between the Picts and the fort. It goes about as well as you’d expect: all the men get killed off, either right away or in the sorcerer’s hideout, and Balthus only lives because Conan rescues him. They discover, perhaps too late, that the sorcerer is not fucking around, as he’s able to conjure (among other things) a giant snake and a shadowy beast that stalks the woods. Killing Zogar Sag becomes secondary to making it out of Pict territory alive, but also warning the fort.

Enhancing Image

What began now as an assassination attempt has now turned into a losing battle. Conan expressed doubts that the Aquilonians could hold the frontier earlier, and these doubts are proved valid when Zogar Sag’s forces cross Black River in search of the fort, where they will be sure to give no quarter. It’s here that Conan and Balthus split up, and it’s also here that we’re introduced to our last major character: Slasher, a mangy dog who was orphaned when his settler owners got killed. Depending on your politics Howard might be doing too much to humanize the settlers, despite also thinking that their cause is a fatally misguided one, not helped by the Picts being written as mindless brutes. Still, this is more nuance than one would expect from a pulpy sword-and-sorcery tale with lots of delicious gore that was written in the ’30s. One has to wonder what Howard would’ve done had he lived to contribute to the more “socially aware” Unknown a few years hence.

Howard is not known for his delicateness with language (despite writing a fair amount of poetry), and true enough his writing is often at its best with either dialogue or visceral action. He does, however, sometimes plop a bomb in the reader’s lap in the form of a really juicy passage. He crystalizes what makes Conan special, both in the context of his world (as a future barbarian king), and as a seminal figure in heroic fantasy. There was, to my knowledge, not a single character in the annals of heroic fantasy prior to Conan who stood so boldly against everything “polite society” in Howard’s day stood for, nor illustrated so clearly. Observe:

He felt lonely, in spite of his companion. Conan was as much a part of this wilderness as Balthus was alien to it. The Cimmerian might have spent years among the great cities of the world; he might have walked with the rulers of civilization; he might even achieve his wild whim some day and rule as king of a civilized nation; stranger things had happened. But he was no less a barbarian. He was concerned only with the naked fundamentals of life. The warm intimacies of small, kindly things, the sentiments and delicious trivialities that make up so much of civilized men’s lives were meaningless to him. A wolf was no less a wolf because a whim of chance caused him to run with the watchdogs. Bloodshed and violence and savagery were the natural elements of the life Conan knew; he could not, and would never, understand the little things that are so dear to civilized men and women.

One gripe I have with this story is that Zogar Sag is not a character; he doesn’t really have a personality, nor do anything that immediately distinguishes him from other Conan villains. He’s almost unnecessary for the story to even work, but admittedly how Conan disposes of him does offer the one little ray of light in what is otherwise a gloomy ending. Sure, Conan kills the demon Zogar Sag is linked with (the latter dying at the fort from seemingly nothing), and the sorcerer’s death demoralizes the Picts enough to make them retreat, but it’s a pyrrhic victory. All the men who stood to defend the fort have been killed with a single exception. The loss of the fort is so big that the border will be pushed back. Balthus and Slasher die in battle, fighting off Picts just so the women and children have enough time to evacuate, otherwise there would’ve been no survivors. Conan is literally one of only two survivors by story’s end.

A certain colleague of mine said that when she had first read this story many moons ago that Slasher’s death made her cry. It didn’t get that reaction out of me on either reading, but a) it speaks to Howard’s skills as a storyteller that we can feel for an animal that only shows up in the last quarter of the story, and b) on this second read I did feel sort of overwhelmed by the sheer gloominess of this story’s climax. Not that the Conan series is known for being uplifting (Conan himself is a pessimist and characters, be they heroic or villainous, are likely to meet bad ends), but even by those standards Beyond the Black River stands out as probably the gloomiest in the whole series. We’re told at the end that civilization “is a whim of circumstance,” and curiously this final line is not spoken by Conan but by an unnamed woodsman, who nonetheless shares Conan’s worldview. Appeal-to-nature fallacy aside, Howard seems to be saying that civilization, no matter how great, is only temporary; once it inevitably gives way, barbarism will take its seat on the throne, just as it had done previously.

A Step Farther Out

Beyond the Black River is arguably the best Conan story done by Howard’s pen, but I wouldn’t recommend it as one’s first Conan story. Aside from the genre mixing, this is an especially dark tale that lacks some of what had become hallmarks in the series, like Conan saving a scantily clad damsel in distress, and indeed there’s no romance plot nor any named female characters to speak of. This is not necessarily a bad thing. This was not the last Conan story written or even published in Howard’s lifetime, but it feels like a culimination of what Howard was trying to say with the character. This is the most vivid thesis statement on what Conan represents and what Howard was trying to do with the series. As such I would recommend reading it only after getting at least a few prior Conan stories under your belt; it becomes more rewarding the more you put into it.

And that’s it—my last serial review until 2025. 2024 will be focused on short stories, novellas, and the occasional novel. Reviewing serials takes a certain amount of energy out of me, and as I’m looking for a new job (yes, I’m back on the job hunt), I don’t wanna become fatigued on this blog. I love writing about mostly old-timey SFF and it would be a shame if personal issues got in the way of this specific hobby of mine. This is not my last review for 2023 (there’s one more in the oven), but still it marks the beginning of a hiatus I’m taking from reviewing a mode of fiction.

See you next time.