Bran Mak Morn: The Last King (29 page)

It did not glow in an earthly fire,

Or clang to a mortal� sledge;

The hands that cast it grope in the night

Through the reeds at the fen-pool� edge.

It is laden with dooms of a thousand years,

It waits in the silence stark,

With grinning dwarves and the faceless things

That crawl in the working dark.

And it waits the Hand that shall wake its voice,

When the hills shall break with fright,

To call the dead men into the day,

And the living into the Night.

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INTRODUCTION

Early in 2004, Wandering Star editor Patrice Louinet, studying Robert E. Howard� early manuscripts and typescripts in his search for clues that would help in dating the author� work, received a package of materials he had requested from Glenn Lord. Lord owns the largest collection of original Howard manuscripts. Among these was a typescript that had been listed in the �npublished Fiction�section of his landmark bio-bibliography of Howard, The Last Celt, under the title �he Wheel Turns.� As he read it, Louinet was excited to discover that this was without doubt the �ovel�that Howard had referred to in a 1923 letter to his friend Clyde Smith (see page 324). While Glenn Lord had read the typescript more than thirty years ago, it was not until years later that Howard� letters to Smith had become available, so the connection had never been made.

Howard told Smith that the novel featured Bran Mak Morn. Unfortunately, alone among the characters Howard named in the letter, Bran does not appear in the typescript that has come to us. Perhaps his section was to come later. There is a Pict featured in one segment of this story, but his name is Merak. While the Pictish element of this tale is slight, we thought readers would enjoy this glimpse at a very early work of Robert E. Howard. At the very least, the letter to Smith indicates that Howard intended to bring Bran into this story!

We have adhered closely to Howard� typescript. No attempt has been made to correct spelling, punctuation, or grammatical errors. What follows here is the tale exactly as Howard wrote it.

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CHAPTER 1, BACK THROUGH THE AGES.

Men have had visions ere now. Men have dreamed dreams. Faint glimpses of other worlds and other ages have come to us, as though for a moment the veil of Time had been rent and we had peered fearfully into the awful vistas.

Scant and fleeting those glimpses, not understood. And from them men have have shaped heaven and hell.

Little they knew that it was but the stirring of memory, memory transmitted from age to age, surviving the changing and shifting of centuries. Memory, that is as strong as the soul of man.

Time has no beginning or ending. The Wheel turns and the cycles revolve for ever. The Wheel turns and the souls of all things are bound to the spokes through all Eternity.

Form and substance fades but the Invisible Something, the ego, the Soul, swings on through the eons. It is as beginningless, as endless as Time Itself. These visions, these dreams, these instincts and inspirations, they are but memories, racial memories.

To some comes clearness of vision, of memory. Shall I say I have dreamed? No, for they were not dreams, the glimpses I had of Eternity.

For Eternity I have seen, the Ages of long ago and the future Ages. For as sure as I have lived before and as sure as I shall live again, I have drawn back the veil of Time and gazed clear-eyed into the Centuries. Glimpses I had in my youth, in child-hood, in infancy. Fleet snatches I caught, in dreams, in the Mystic Bowl of the Orient, in the Crystal.

But in manhood my clearest sight was reached, in manhood, when I purchased, for ten times its weight in gold, the Mystic Plant of the Orient.

In the waste place of the Orient it grows scantily, and from a wandering Hindu faquir I purchased a small quantity.

�aduka,�I shall call it, although it is not Taduka nor is it anything known to or by, white men.

It is not an opiate, nor is its effect harmful in the least. It is to be smoked and when smoked, the world of today fades from about me and I travel back into the Ages or forward into the Future. Years, space, distance, time, are nothing. I have covered a million miles with the speed of light and a thousand years in as many seconds.

I have traversed empty space, from world to world. I have passed from Age to Age.

I have lived Centuries and Centuries on Centuries.

Sights I have seen and leagues on leagues have I traversed, in seconds time, for the effects of Taduka does not last many minutes, an hour at the utmost. A boon to humanity it would be, greater than the greatest inventions, greater than the written annals of history, and withal, absolutely harmless. Indeed, beneficient is Taduka.

So I have lived again the by-gone Ages of other lands.

And so it is that I, Stephen Hegen, knowing that the average human mind does not believe what it cannot conceive, and knowing that the conception of Mystery lies beyond the average human mind, yet I set down these, shall I call them adventures ? of mine.

I was a man in the Younger World. I lived in the trees and my only clothing was the thick, shaggy hair that grew on my body. I was not a large man but I was terrificly powerful.

I travelled through the trees, leaping and swinging from bough to bough like any ape.

I lived on fruit and nuts and such birds as I could snare and I crept, silently and fearful, to the river for water, glancing swiftly from side to side, ready to flee.

I was Swift-Foot the Tree-man, in those early days and my name did not lie. Swift of foot, men had to be in those days. Many a time have I footed it to the trees or the cliffs with the Mighty One, the lion, or old saber-tooth, the tiger, bounding behind me, shaking the earth with roars.

Once among the trees, nothing could catch me, not even the leopard nor the Hairy Fierce One, the ape.

The Hairy People, we called them, we of the Trees, for they were but savage apes. Powerful they were, and terrible, and possessed of a nasty temper. We of the trees were much higher in the scale of evolution. We had a sense of humor, childish and grotesque, I grant you, yet still, a sense of humor. The Hairy People had no sense of humor, and since they were morose and savage and of a hermit nature, we of the Trees let them alone.

Mighty fighters they were; a full grown male of the Hairy People was ten times as strong as a man of today, and nearly twice as strong as a man of the Trees.

If they had had union, they might have wiped out the Tree People, but when they came to steal the women of the Tree People, as they sometimes did, they came singly or only in twos and threes.

We of the Trees had feuds and fights with one another but we always united against a common enemy. And not one or three or ten Hairy Men could overcome the whole tribe of Tree People.

When a Tree Man was matched singly a Hairy Man, the Hairy Man almost invaribly came off victor.

Yet when a savage and powerful Hairy Man sought to carry off a girl of the Tree People whom I desired for a mate, I proved I was strong of arm as well as swift of foot.

For I saw red rage and there in the swaying tree-tops, a hundred feet from the ground, we fought, hand to hand, the Hairy Man and I, and bare-handed and unaided I slew him, there in tree-tops, when the world was young.

I was a slave in Egypt when Menes built the first pyramid. By day I toiled unceasingly with thousands of other slaves, working on the erection of the pyramids and at night I shared a squalid mud hut with other slaves.

I was tall and fair skinned and fair haired. One of the tribe of fair haired people who lived in caves on the coast of the Mediterranean. The ancestors of the Berbers of today.

I toiled without pause or rest and many a time I felt the slave-driver� lash, until I remembered that I had been a chief in mine own land. Then, laying hands on the slave-driver, I slew him and broke away, regaining my freedom with one bold stroke.

To Ethiopia I fled, and there I became a chief of fighting men. From power to power I rose, until the Karoon, the king of Ethiopia, jealous of my rising power, sought my life.

Again I fled, across the desert, until I came to a tribe of black men.

Fierce fighters they were, and they took me into their tribe. I led them to victory against other tribes and I was made a chief among them.

When we had conquered the tribes�enemies, I led an army of some two thousand out of the jungle, across the desert and into Ethiopia.

The black tribesmen were spearmen. They knew nothing of the bow and the Ethiopians were all skilled archers, and they greatly outnumbered us. But I led them skillfully and we fell upon the Ethiopians, surprizing them and closing in so swiftly that they had scant time to use their bows. In hand-to-hand fighting the Ethiopians could not stand before the fierce speamen and they broke and fled.

The Karoon, the king of Ethiopia, was slain in battle and I put myself on the Ethiopian throne.

Ethiopia became powerful under my rule and the Egyptians were forced to double their frontier armies.

I trained the armies of Ethiopia and I invaded Egypt. The Egyptian armies were hurled back and the Egyptian cities fell before the onslaught of my Ethiopian bowmen and savage black spearmen.

I conquered Egypt and for a time I reigned on the throne of the nation in which I had been a slave.

But the Egyptians rose against me and I was forced to flee to Ethiopia.

But no Egyptian army ever successfully invaded Ethiopia during my reign and I was content with the kingdom of Ethiopia for I made it into a mighty nation, supreme in that part of Africa.

I was a Pict and my name was Merak. I was a wiry man of medium height, with very black hair and very black eyes.

My tribe lived in wattle huts on the east coast of Britain. It was not known as Britain then, for the Brythons had not yet given the island its name.

My people were artizans, then, not warriors. We hunted a little and tilled the soil and were a peaceful people.

I sat before the door of my hut, fashioning a spear of bronze.

Before the Gaelic invasion, the Picts made their weapons and implements of skillfully fashioned flint and obsidian and jade.

But the first Celts had come from Hibernia and had settled in Britain, bringing with them the first metal ever seen by the Picts of the island. The Gaels had not conquered Britain entirely, by any means, nor did they ever entirel subjugate the Picts.

We were artizans and we were not warriors but we were cunning and skilled in crafts of many kinds.

As I fashioned the spear I glanced up, to see Mea-lah, the daughter of one of the chief� councilors, passing.

I was aware of large, dark, beautiful eyes gazing into mine. Just an instant and then the girl had walked on.

I watched her, a vague yearning filling my soul.

Mea-lah� eyes were very beautiful, her skin was as softly white as snow. Her soft, dark hair rippled down over her slim, snowy shoulders. She tripped lightly along on dainty feet that seemed scarcely to touch the ground.

She was going toward the sea-shore and presently I saw her slight form outlined against the cloud-flecked sky. She was standing upon a great rock, gazing sea-ward, her rippling hair floating in the sea-breeze.

A dainty, lovely thing, scarce more than a girl-child �and she was to marry the son of the chief.

Had those beautiful eyes seen in me more than a common artizan of the village? Had there been a certain wistfullness in their gaze?

I, but an ordinary Pictish tribesman, he, the son of the chief of the tribe �yet I had seen her shrink from him.

He was a cruel man, was Neroc, son of the chief and Mea-lah was made to be caressed and used tenderly. But her father was councilor � I shrugged my shoulders and bent to work on the spear.

But now and again I looked up, to gaze at Mea-lah, standing on the rock by sea-shore.

From the sea came merchants, in those days, and traders. Tyrians and Phoenecians from Spain.

We were not a sea-faring people, but to us the sea was all that was strange and romantic, for the merchants and traders told us of lands afar off and of strange people and strange seas.

Mea-lah had always spent much time on the sea-shore, playing with the wavelets, tripping about the beach or lying upon the sand, gazing toward the blue haze that marked the far horrizon, dreaming dreams.

And I watched the girl dumbly, dreaming my own dreams, yearning for her.

And one I came to the door of my wattle hut, to see strange, long, black ships sweeping in from the sea. Long oars and sail swept them them swiftly forward. And they were crowded with men strange to us, huge, fierce men, with winged helmets and fair hair and long, fair, beards, who shook spears and long swords and roared strange, heathen, war-cries.

The ships swung inshore. These were no Phoenecian traders, no African merchants. They were warriors, pirates, from the far North.

They were Norsemen, Vikings. Some of the first of the fierce races that harried the coasts of Britain for centuries after.

They swept down on the Pictish village with fire and sword.

The Picts were not warriors. They could not stand before the giant Vikings with their iron and bronze armor and their great swords.

We fled from the village, men, women and children, the men but seeking to cover the retreat of the women and children.

The Norsemen took the offensive, ever, hurling themselves into the battle with a recklessness that the Picts had never seen equalled. The Picts, on the other hand, fought only on the defensive, ever retreating, and when the women and the children had found safety in the forest, the Pictish men broke away and fled in every direction. Many of them were cut down, among them Neroc, the chief� son.

I was making for the forest, with some speed, glancing back from time to time toward the village, where the Norsemen were tearing the wattle huts to pieces in search of loot and women who might be hiding.

Some of them were leaping and branishing their weapons in some kind of a wild dance, others roaring uncouth war-songs, others applying the torch to the huts.