Dark Valley Destiny Read Online Free

lust for a woman.
    This is not to say that the other stories are womanless. In more than half of the tales, Conan is somehow involved with a woman, but even when the tale ends with her in the hero's brawny arms, she usually disappears before the beginning of the following story. This state of affairs need not excite the reader's wonder. For one thing, while there was much fornication in early heroic fantasy, sexual activity was discreetly kept off-stage. More importantly, explicit sexual activity, with its attendant emotional and physical consequences, would spoil the reader's phantasies of a life of carefree, irresponsible adventure.
    With the instinctive insight of a great storyteller, Robert Howard seemed to know that Conan's adventures were a dream—every young man's dream of freedom, power, and unlimited success. He knew, too, that dreams should be amorphous, undefined, only hinted at, so that the dreamer may sketch in his own details. Because his readers are free to combine the artist's larger fantasy with their own less opulent fancies, Conan fans can readily turn Howard's dream into a heroic expression of their own hearts' desires. This, we believe, is the secret of Conan's immortality.
    With equal clarity Robert Howard's vision of his Hyborian World emerged. He saw a land of sun and shadow, dotted with castles and crouching villages and shining cities huddled behind strong walls and towering battlements, from which bright pennants fluttered and horsemen emerged to ride against their foes. It was an age of warriors and pirates, thieves and highwaymen; more than that, it was a world peopled by witches, wizards, careless gods, and forces of evil that stagger the imagination.
    In the frozen northlands, whence came the great barbarian as a youth of seventeen, lay the bleak land of Cimmeria and, near it, the domain of the Aesir, a rugged folk who fought against wolves and supernatural enemies. In the untamed western reaches of the nameless continent lay the Pictish Wilderness, an ancient region of great forests and an elder folk who fought like fiends from Hell and whose shamans conjured up the evil aid of hoary gods.
    Traveling southward, the voyager must ride for endless days through misted mountain passes and topaz grasslands to arrive at last in a place of emerald jungles and ebon giants akin to Howard's imagined Africans. Along the way, perhaps, the wanderer might visit the realm of Stygia, peopled by beady-eyed brown men with shaven pates. Suspect were the intentions of the Stygians, whose magic lore was writ in unknown runes on tattered parchment, but was no less potent for that.
    To all these lands and more came Conan the Cimmerian, sword in hand. His wanderings and adventures were recounted in eighteen tales published during Howard's lifetime and in three more, which remained unsold at the time of his death. These unsold tales and fragments of others discovered by Glenn Lord and completed or edited by the senior author of the present work form the nucleus of the Conan saga.
    So vividly did Howard describe the snow-capped peaks, wide-flung deserts, and sapphire seas of this imaginary world that a reader might map the kingdoms as their geography unrolled before his ensorcelled eyes. In fact, two readers of Weird Tales did so. John D. Clark and P. Schuyler Miller, the first a physical chemist and the second a school administrator, drew a detailed map of the Hyborian World and sent it to Robert Howard. The Texan studied the sketch, made a couple of minor corrections, and told his admirers that their map was almost exactly as he had pictured it. 21 It is a map derived from this original that appears in every volume of Conan stories.
    Sometimes people ask us: Why has Conan the barbarian such an abiding appeal to lovers of tales of high adventure? Conan is the prototype of man against the universe—a hero who is dauntless against mortal enemies but withal fearful of unseen sinister forces beyond the control of his