Savage sword of Conan #166, November 1989



Cover by Earl Norem, dramatizing this month’s story. Yes, those are pre-Columbian Americans!

Only one story this month.


The blood of brothers
Script by Gerry Conway
Art by Mike Docherty and Ernie Chan (Gary Kwapisz is also credited on the contents page, but not on the story’s splash page… and honestly i don’t recognize his work anywhere).

Veteran writer Gerry Conway replaces regular writer Charles Dixon for the first of a quartet of tales depicting how the king of Ithaca, trying to go back home to his wife and newborn son, is lost at sea and must endure many adventures before finally reaching his kingdom… only to find that he is believed dead and that his wife is pressed to marry again to give the land a new ruler.

Oh, did I say Ithaca? Sorry, I meant Aquilonia.

But fair is fair; we already had a splendid evocation of the Illiad and the Trojan war in Conan the barbarian #19-26; why not a similar treatment for the Odyssey in the pages of Savage sword?

Gerry Conway isn’t mostly known as a Conan writer, but he helped Roy Thomas with his Conan movie material (the two men co-wrote what would become Conan the destroyer, even though the story we saw on screen has -as is usually the case- been modified by the filmmakers. (The graphic novel "The horn of Azoth" is a better version of that tale). Conway has a good grasp of the Cimmerian’s strong personality, and his dialogues here are often pretty good.

I wish, though, that the editor had paid a little more attention to the story and asked for a few minor changes. I’ll point out the problems as we go along.

The artwork is okay; it's what one would expect from Docherty and Chan. I find the conflation of Mayan, Aztec and Inca imagery a little jarring, but not that annoying.

Conan’s odyssey will have him do something he has never done before: undertake a journey that will take him to America by crossing the Pacific ocean. That is an interesting prospect, an ambitious plan; it’s however fraught with the kind of implausibilities that should have been noticed before the book went to print. As a Conan fan, I find it regrettable that the attempt be made at all, for the entire point of the final Conan adventure, Conan of the Isles, was to have him disappear into the mists of legend as he was making the first trip to the mysterious western continent on the other side of the western ocean. Such an adventure is far less awe-inspiring if Conan has already been in America a few decades earlier!

What’s more, going to the other end of the world and back in primitive times, if at all feasible, took a lot of time. Magellan (or rather his surviving sailors) took three years to go around the world. I’d be willing to cut Conan some slack and bring the number of years down to two, say, but it’s not just a few months’ travel time… especially since Conan doesn’t know the way and finds himself shipwrecked a few times. That’s a fault I find in many Conan adventures: the world it depicts is too damn small!!!

Case in point: we open as Conan’s ship struggles against a storm at sea. The king of Aquilonia had been paying a diplomatic visit to… Vendhya!!!

Yes, yes, Conan has been to Vendhya before; he’s a well-travelled man. But this is the Hyborian age, not the XXI century; travels to the other side of the Indo-European continents are not a trivial affair. How many times did the kings of England or France travel to India for diplomatic purposes? Not even once. The very idea would be preposterous. But here such trips appear so common that Aquilonian sailors even have sayings like “only a fool takes to sea from Vendhya in the season of the summer storm”.

Anyway. Upon leaving Vendhya, the king is persuaded by a local sailor that he can cut time by travelling east instead of returning west, suggesting that Vendhyans are aware that the Earth is round but don’t know about the size of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, nor about the formidable obstacle that America represents in between the two. Conan agrees to try, perhaps because at heart he remains an explorer.



The ship is caught in a storm as we said, and by the miracle of comic-book logic that storm sends it across the entire Pacific in just eight days. Eight days!!! The ship crashes somewhere on the western shore of the Americas. The locals and their architecture look Meso-American, but their names and culture appear Inca so it’s hard to say where we are exactly; Mexico? Peru? The mountain range we encounter might be the Andes but also the Sierra Madre.

Conan is the sole survivor of the wreck, along with a sympathetic (if always complaining) sailor named Gobo, who acts as comic relief.



Once past the mandatory fight against a stranded octopus-like beast, Conan and Gobo hide from the rain. (Kudos to Conway, here; he doesn’t have the storm conveniently end right after its role in the plot has been fulfilled). The two men are quickly spotted and attacked by soldiers wearing strange garments (whom we recognize as proto-Incas).

Straining the willing suspension of disbelief to the utmost, these guys speak the same language as Conan and Gobo! (It is well known that everyone in the universe speaks English). At least the Star Trek or Hitchhiker aliens had the excuse of using a universal translator or Babelfish! Conan beats the newcomers up, but deciding he needs help to build a new boat to get home he then decides to surrender to the lone survivor of the attacking group, a soldier named Yuhar. The man takes the pair to Kuzko, the capital of the land.



The people of Kuzko give an impression of youth and vitality, and Conan thinks they remind him of his own Cimmerian brethren. Despite this initial good impression, the king of Aquilonia discovers that the land is beset by the same problems encountered in the Hyborian lands: the throne is disputed by a family feud. Upon the previous Inca’s (oops, sorry… “inka’s “) death, the throne went to his young son… but Yupanqui, the new king’s uncle, wanted it for his own. The new Inka is married to his own (older) sister, who is clearly maneuvering him for her own purposes.



Probably unsatisfied by the Inka’s *ahem* juvenile sceptre, the princess doesn’t hesitate to throw some innuendo at Conan.



Uncle Yupanqui has an ace up his sleeve: he has seized the mummy of the previous ruler, and is holding it hostage. Conan is charged to recover it, in exchange of which he will get a new ship to continue his journey home. And perhaps a little more, depending on how we interpret the princess’s words.



After some exciting action, Conan faces Yupanqui himself, who turns out to be a necromancer as well as a pretender to the throne. And he has animated the mummy of the previous Inka!



In the following battle, the mummy is brought down and Yupanqui is knocked out. But then Gobo arrives upon he scene with dire news: he’s overheard the princess’s plans for the Aquilonian king, and she intends to betray him as soon as he brings the mummy back. Conan decides to douvle-cross the double-crosser, and strikes a secret deal with another Kuzko highborn.

The next day, the princess discovers that Conan has left the impaled corpse of the previous Inka on the central plaza of the city, a sacrilege that triggers an enraged reaction in the population. The princess, her brother and Yupanqui are all blamed for this blasphemous turn of events, and it is clear that the scheming family is not long for this world.



The nobleman with whom Conan struck a deal is all set to pick up the pieces and make himself king. I like the way he and Conan part ways:

“That’s all you want? A ship?”

“No, my new lord Inka. I want my wife, my son, my kingdom. But all you can give me is a ship”.

And so Conan takes to the waves again on a makeshift boat, with Gobo and three other sailors. (Why would they want to leave America to go to Aquilonia is not explained).


Notes:

- Conway gives in to the idea, popularized by the movies, that Conan lost his parents as a child. As he’s in the process of drowning, early in the story, “his father’s face flashes across the window of his mind… a face glimpsed so briefly, in a childhood so dim, it isn’t even quite a memory”. Well, sorry, but in the Marvel universe Conan learned of his father’s passing in SSoC #119, when the Cimmerian was probably thirty-one or thirty-two.

- “In the chaos, Conan finds himself wondering what color his son’s eyes will be when the boy reaches manhood”. That’s an easy one: both Conan and Zenobia are blue-eyed so all their children will be as well.

- Inca words like "coya" and "malquis" are used properly, even if they are anachronistic. (Conan lived ten thousand years before our time, and the Incas rule started around the 13th century. But it's not the first time an anachronism or two surface in the Conan stories!)

- To celebrate the special nature of this story, the map at the beginning is a new one, showing Khitai and Vendhya on the left and "Terra Novum" (America) on the right, with the Pacific in the middle. We can see Australia in the bottom left corner, a land Conan will visit in SSoC #193.