Conan the Triumphant (Robert Jordan's Conan Novels 4)

Conan the Destroyer

Conan the Victorious

The Conan Chronicles

The Further Chronicles of Conan

ROBERT JORDAN WRITING AS REAGAN O’NEAL

These gripping tales of love and bravery in America’s tumultuous past chronicle the lives of the Fallon men as they encounter adventure, forbidden love, and history.

The Fallon Blood

The Fallon Pride

The Fallon Legacy

ROBERT JORDAN WRITING AS JACKSON O’REILLY

Cheyenne Raiders

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Snared in a web of lust and sorcery by the Lady Synelle, his life sought both by Karela, fierce woman bandit, and by Antimi

des, who seeks the throne of Ophir, only Conan of Cimmeria stands between the world and the bloody malevolence of the horned god, Al’Kiir.

“Robert Jordan is one of the few writers to successfully capture much of the spirit of Howard’s original character.”

—Science Fiction Chronicle

“Robert Jordan is an excellent, colorful action writer … sensual, detailed, action/suspense oriented. Robert E. Howard would approve.”

—Science Fiction Review

CONAN THE INDESTRUCTIBLE

By L. Sprague de Camp

The greatest hero of the magic-rife Hyborian Age was a northern barbarian, Conan the Cimmerian, about whose deeds a cycle of legend revolves. While these legends are largely based on the attested facts of Conan’s life, some tales are inconsistent with others. So we must reconcile the contradictions in the saga as best we can.

In Conan’s veins flowed the blood of the people of Atlantis, the brilliant city-state swallowed by the sea 8,000 years before his time. He was born into a clan that claimed a homeland in the northwest corner of Cimmeria, along the shadowy borders of Vanaheim and the Pictish wilderness. His grandfather had fled his own people because of a blood feud and sought refuge with the people of the North. Conan himself first saw daylight on a battlefield during a raid by the Vanir.

Before he had weathered fifteen snows, the young Cimmerian’s fighting skills were acclaimed around the council fires. In that year the Cimmerians, usually at one another’s throats, joined forces to repel the warlike Gundermen who, intent on colonizing southern Cimmeria, had pushed across the Aquilonian border and established the frontier post of Venarium. Conan joined the howling, blood-mad horde that swept out of the northern hills, stormed over the stockade walls, and drove the Aquilonians back across their frontier.

At the sack of Venarium, Conan, still short of his full growth, stood six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds. He had the vigilance and stealth of the born woodsman, the iron-hardness of the mountain man, and the Herculean physique of his blacksmith father. After the plunder of the Aquilonian outpost, Conan returned for a time to his tribe.

Restless under the conflicting passions of his adolescence, Conan spent several months with a band of Æsir as they raided the Vanir and the Hyperboreans. He soon learned that some Hyperborean citadels were ruled by a caste of widelyfeared magicians, called Witchmen. Undaunted, he took part in a foray against Haloga Castle, when he found that Hyperborean slavers had captured Rann, the daughter of Njal, chief of the Æsir band.

Conan gained entrance to the castle and spirited out Rann Njalsdatter; but on the flight out of Hyperborea, Njal’s band was overtaken by an army of living dead. Conan and the other Æsir survivors were led away to slavery (“Legions of the Dead”).

Conan did not long remain a captive. Working at night, he ground away at one link of his chain until it was weak enough to break. Then one stormy night, whirling a four-foot length of heavy chain, he fought his way out of the slave pen and vanished into the downpour.

Another account of Conan’s early years tells a different tale. This narrative, on a badly broken clay prism from Nippur, states that Conan was enslaved as a boy of ten or twelve by Vanir raiders and set to work turning a grist mill. When he reached his full growth, he was bought by a Hyrkanian pitmaster who traveled with a band of professional fighters staging contests for the amusement of the Vanir and Æsir. At this time Conan received his training with weapons. Later he escaped and made his way south to Zamora (Conan the Barbarian).

Of the two versions, the records of Conan’s enslavement by the Hyrkanians at sixteen, found in a papyrus in the British Museum, appear much more legible and self-consistent. But this question may never be settled.