The Story So Far

Valeria of the Red Brotherhood is a warrior-pirate who was aboard ship not too long ago, but jumped in order to escape an unwanted marriage proposal. She then joined an army of mercenaries, but left that as well, after killing one of the officers. She’s now a fugitive, but she’s not alone, for Conan was in the same army and also deserted, with the intent of following Valeria’s trail. Conan doesn’t wanna kill Valeria, indeed having killed the brother of the officer she had killed off-screen, but rather is curious about her—in more ways than one. Aside from being warriors, one thing Conan and Valeria have in common is that they’re very bad at taking orders. They’re having a “fun” time bickering when a dragon in the forest they’re hiding out in kills their horses, and looks to have them for lunch next. Using a spear and some poison fruit, Conan’s able to incapacitate (although probably not kill) the dragon, and the two make a run for it on foot. On the plains by the forest there’s a domed city, called Xuchotl, which once had an indigenous population but which is not thinly populated by two clans, who years ago had moved in and slaughtered the original residents. Yes, that is technically genocide. We’re told that the indigenous people of the city were no better than those who killed them, and in some ways might’ve been worse. Now it’s a war between the last members of the Tecuhltli and Xotalancas, clans named after their founders. No children have been born in these clans in quite a few years, and it seems each is a mini-civilization on its last legs.

With the help of a Tecuhltli named Techotl, Our Heroes™ get introduced to the Tecuhltli higher-ups, namely their “king” Olmec and his partner Tascela (in the previous installment I said they were married, but their relationship is actually more ambiguous than that), the latter appearing youthful and yet, it turns out, being centuries old. Olmec sort of hires Conan and Valeria in the hopes that they’ll help vanquish the remaining Xotalancas. (The red nails of the title refer to red nails that are stuck into a column in Olmec’s chamber, each representing a vanquished enemy.) This arrangement goes sideways, though, when later that day one of Tascela’s servants tries to put Valeria into a deep sleep with the help of a black lotus. Valeria doesn’t appreciate this very much, so she tortures the servant until she confesses what Tascela’s plan is, although she escapes into the catacombs, never to be seen again but likely to be killed off-screen by something. It’s at this point that Valeria hears swords clashing at the gates, which probably means the Xotalancas have chosen now to make their final assault.

Enhancing Image

A battle goes down, with the Tecuhltli being victorious, of course. They’ve killed the last of the Xotalancas, which ordinarily would mean everyone gets to live happily ever after, but as you know, Tascela has other plans. Olmec also has plans of his own, and ultimately the two rulers fight for a bit over who gets a piece of Valeria’s ass. Olmec wants to rape Valeria while Tascela somehow has even worse plans in mind. Of course, while Olmec is a burley bearded guy who can break someone’s spine in half, Tascela is a sorceress who many years ago had put a spell on Olmec so that he would be unable to lay much more than a finger on her. Is this the only Howard-written Conan story with both a heroine and a villainess? Unfortunately, by this point Valeria has become little more than the obligatory damsel who needs rescuing, although while she’s physically helpless she does have quite the mouth on her. We hear about some “profanities” coming from her and it’s easy to imagine her dropping several F bombs if not for censorship. I sort of get the criticism of Valeria not being enough of a badass heroine, but at the same time I do think she works as a kind of foil to Conan. I think it’s also worth mentioning that it’s easy to believe Howard had based Valeria on Novalyne Price, his girlfriend at the time, namely through her assertive attitude and penchant for cursing, as was apparently Novalyne’s habit when she wasn’t on the job. Clearly by the last couple years of his life Howard was moving in a direction that, while not exactly feminist, was more sympathetic to women as people. Remember that this is a guy who really could not imagine living in a world without his mother in it.

As if to compensate for the slow middle section of the novella, the back end of Red Nails is nonstop violence and conspicuously erotic imagery (I don’t mean that last part in a bad way). Howard said in at least one letter that he thought of Red Nails as his sexiest Conan story, and between the two BDSM-coded torture scenes it’s easy to believe him. Yes, a second BDSM-coded torture scene has hit the towers! This time it’s Valeria who’s on the slab, with the dark-skinned Tascela towering over her, in an image that provided the cover for the first installment. (I should probably have mentioned by now that Tascela is coded as being equivalent to ancient Egyptian royalty, going by how Howard describes her clothing and especially with how she’s illustrated in the version of Red Nails printed in The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume II.) Conan kills Olmec and comes in for the rescue, but it looks like Our Heroes™ are outnumbered when the thing from the catacombs emerges as a deus ex machina, in the form of Tolkemec, who had been banished there many years prior. Conan kills Tolkemec while Valeria takes the chance to stab Tascela in the back, who despite being able to replenish her youth and make people follow her every order is apparently made of tissue paper if someone manages to catch her off-guard. “I had to do that much, for my own self-respect!” says Valeria, as almost a meta statement on how given her damsel status for much of the story she had to take down someone. Why not her evil counterpart, then? It makes enough sense. It also acts as a bit of a twist on its own, if also as an anticlimax, since Tascela shows herself to not be much of a fight after all, at least physically.

As I was reading Mark Finn’s Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard (a good one-volume biography, if also unfortunately sloppy in the proofreading department), and Finn makes a point that I’m sure is not new but which I thought useful for my own read of Red Nails: he considers Red Nails to be a thematic counterpart to Howard’s earlier Beyond the Black River, which might still be my favorite Conan story. Granted that Beyond the Black River benefits from a tighter narrative focus and the damsel being a man instead of a beautiful woman for Conan to make out with, the two novellas do each show one side of the same coin, with Beyond the Black River showing barbarism creeping up on civilization while Red Nails shows what Howard saw as the inherent evil of civilization. A more conventionally racist (mind you that Howard did have racist tendencies) narrative would’ve painted the original inhabitants of Xuchotl as backward “savages,” but from what we’re told about them they were actually quite an advanced and “civilized” people—at least on paper. But they were also decadent, and their collective villainy made way for the settlers that came in and slaughtered them. Now that the clans have been wiped out as well, Conan sees the city being truly bereft of human life now as no great loss. “It’s well the breed exterminated itself,” he says, which could be referring to the original inhabitants, the clans (who after had spawned from one people), or both. For both Conan and Howard, civilization is only temporary, and at some point will meet its end. This is the view of a philosophical pessimist, which one could argue is the most essential foundation for dark fantasy.

A Step Farther Out

I have to admit that when I finished Red Nails I felt a bittersweetness, because it was the last Conan story Howard wrote; even had he lived longer it’s unlikely he would’ve written more Conan, as he made it clear in letters at the time that he was getting tired of the character, and moreover he was getting tired of writing fantasy in general. That one can think this while only pushing thirty is something many of us would now think of as absurd, but Howard really meant it. About a year after he finished Red Nails he got in his car, took out a revolver, put it to the side of his head, and pulled the trigger. It’s ironic that he had basically intended this as the final Conan story, since it ends on a relatively upbeat note (I mean hey, all the bad people are dead) and implies more adventures between Conan and Valeria—only we never got to see those. Eventually I’ll cover more Howard, specifically work of his that isn’t Conan, assuming I don’t follow my leader.

See you next time.