Conan doesn't get the girl?

Conan the Champion

by John Maddox Roberts

Three non-Howard Conan franchise paperbacks from my recently purchased box of books, three reviews, and so far each book has been better than the last. I give Conan the Champion by John Maddox Roberts fairly high marks. Except for a few significant but intriguing deviations from the world-building established by Conan's creator, Robert E. Howard, this novel cleaves reasonably close to the tone, pacing, and grittiness of the original tales of everyone's favorite Cimmerian.

Conan the Champion is a one woman kind of book

One of the rare Conan stories with a single central female character, and even more rare Conan doesn't end up banging her. Alcuina, Queen of the Cambres, leads a tribe of what I would guess to be Aesir in a region near the uppermost tip of the Vilayet Sea. She was her father's only heir and finds herself caught between the fat and besotted King Odoac and the cruel but cunning kingdom-builder King Totila, a former outlaw with little royal blood but the backing of a Hyperborean sorcerer. Each king wants Alcuina to marry them so they may seize her lands and use her to breed an heir.

Conan the Castaway

Conan washes up on shore after a shipwreck and soon finds himself wondering to which faction he should sell his sword. An overzealous follower of Odoac declares all goods from shipwrecks washed up along shore belong to his king, including live bodies such as the Cimmerian. Under the dubious protection of a seaside merchant, Conan is warned to not stray from the trading post or he will find himself sold to slavers. Chafing at the boredom of the merchant camp, Conan soon strays. Happening upon Alcuina and her warriors under attack by Odoac's men, the self-appointed slave catcher among them, Conan kills the braggart, but a later use of that favorite Conan franchise menace, the undead, ensures our hero has to kill the man yet again.

Iilma, Totila's sorcerer, summons most of the mystical threats, Alcuina's own mage being more of a hedge wizard or druid and only capable of countering or weakening Iilma's spells. Iilma first reanimates the dead warriors to send against Alcuina's stronghold of last resort. Later, he summons demons to abduct the young queen from her chambers. Unfortunately, the demons are the dumb kind, and Alcuina runs off the first chance she gets after being abducted to the spirit realm. This is where the deviation from REH's worldbuilding has me looking somewhat askance at the story.

Elves in the Hyborian Era?

While fleeing from demons in the spirit world, Alcuina is captured by a band of elf-like hunters. They are old-style fey; beautiful, capricious, and cruel. They take Alcuina in but not to help her. The refugee queen soon finds herself bathed, "clothed" in gold and jewels and not much else, and used as the plaything of the elf-king's sister. It isn't so much the scenario that jars me out of the story. If it had been Zingaran buccaneers or Shemite nomads, Alcuina's plight wouldn't be all too different from that of other women in Conan's adventures. It is the inclusion of fey-type beings that seems out of place.

Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age, even the other prehistoric eras where his non-Conan stories take place, has never featured anything like elves. The closest Howard ever approached such beings might be the subhuman little people dwelling in tunnels beneath earthen mounds in stories such as The Children of the Night or The People of the Dark. Even then, they are only cited as being the origin of stories about fairies and goblins. The reality of them as a dwarfish and devolved race is quite another thing from what most fantasy readers think of as the fey.

The cosmology of Howard's worlds tends toward the Lovecraftian. Huge, inhuman forces dwell in the Outer Dark and the rituals of their mortal slaves give them access to our world so they might revel in madness, terror, and slaughter. Of the forces for good, there are a few mostly abstracted deities, such as Mitra and Ibis, called upon in time of need but rarely doing anything to stop the misshapen hell-spawned shadows that constitute the majority of gods in Conan's time. Which is all a way of saying that there isn't much room for elves in Howard's writing, good, bad, or indifferent. The so-called "elder races" in Howard's world-building are usually just as bad as the dark gods, being serpent men, gaunt, red-eyed giants, and the like.

Can you commit genocide on elves?

After defeating what can only be a robot sent to destroy them, described as a giant, metallic horse and warrior joined as one, Conan and Alcuina's wizard reach the dark fortress to which the kidnapped queen has been taken. Conan rescues Alcuina from the Getae as the fey call themselves and plants the seeds for their ultimate extinction by smashing a magic mirror that contains their collective power. No great loss, I say. Nor does Conan seem particularly bothered by the idea of wiping out an entire race of pointy eared sorcerers.

Conan doesn't get the girl

Still clad in the scanty harem gear given her by the Getae, Alcuina has to remind a handsy Conan who makes no mistake of his intentions that she is a queen and he is her champion, no matter how grateful she might be for her rescue. The wizard's presence at this point might be considered as something of a chaperone. Conan has bedded plenty of women who went on to other husbands, but Alcuina's virtue is preserved for her future huband, the nephew and heir of King Odoac. The royal nephew Leovigild is a latecomer to the cast, developed here and there throughout the second half of the book, presumably in order to provide a suitable match for Alcuina.

Conan, Alcuina, and her hedge wizard all return to the Hyborian realms and the final battle is joined against Totila and Iilma. In order to deprive Totila of his pet sorcerer's assistance, Iilma must be deprived of his own supernatural aid. The battle between Conan and the sorcerer's demonic familiars, twin demons that normally flit about in the form of magpies, is one of my favorite parts of the book. Another is the final man-to-man battle between Conan and Totila, who are evenly matched and which ends with Conan stabbing the would-be king through the mouth with his sword.

All's well that ends quickly

Following the climax of the final battle, which (ike many of these expansion novels) is rushed, this one taking a scant five pages, Conan the Champion ends with the abruptness of an old kung-fu movie. Using less than a page of text to set Conan back on the road southward once the main villain is dead. Alcuina's people are victorious and the followers of Totila and Odoac unite under her rule. Conan seeks out the merchant he met at the tale's start and agrees to tell of his recent adventure in exchange for some good Turanian wine.

As an extra bonus before signing off, I found the Ken Kelly cover painting without the trade dress. Enjoy!