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- Herausgeber: Planet 313
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
The creator of Conan looks to the stars in one of fantasy's most enduring science fantasy classics! Robert E. Howard's Almuric is a savage planet of crumbling stone ruins and debased, near-human inhabitants. Into this world comes Esau Cairn, Earthman, swordsman, murderer. Only he can overthrow the terrible devils that enslave Almuric, but to do so he must first defeat the inner demons that forced him to abandon Earth. Filled with vile beasts and thrilling adventure in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Almuric is one of Howard's few novels, and an excellent yarn from one of America's most distinct literary voices.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Almuric by Robert E. Howard
Foreword
It was not my original intention ever to divulge the whereabouts of
Esau Cairn, or the mystery surrounding him. My change of mind was
brought about by Cairn himself, who retained a perhaps natural and
human desire to give his strange story to the world which had disowned
him and whose members can now never reach him. What he wishes to tell
is his affair. One phase of my part of the transaction I refuse to
divulge; I will not make public the means by which I transported Esau
Cairn from his native Earth to a planet in a solar system undreamed of
by even the wildest astronomical theorists. Nor will I divulge by what
means I later achieved communication with him, and heard his story
from his own lips, whispering ghostily across the cosmos.
Let me say that it was not premeditated. I stumbled upon the Great
Secret quite by accident in the midst of a scientific experiment, and
never thought of putting it to any practical use, until that night
when Esau Cairn groped his way into my darkened observatory, a hunted
man, with the blood of a human being on his hands. It was chance led
him there, the blind instinct of the hunted thing to find a den
wherein to turn at bay.
Let me state definitely and flatly, that, whatever the appearances
against him, Esau Cairn is not, and was never, a criminal. In that
specific case he was merely the pawn of a corrupt political machine
which turned on him when he realized his position and refused to
comply further with its demands. In general, the acts of his life
which might suggest a violent and unruly nature simply sprang from his
peculiar mental make-up.
Science is at last beginning to perceive that there is sound truth
in the popular phrase, “born out of his time.” Certain natures are
attuned to certain phases or epochs of history, and these natures,
when cast by chance into an age alien to their reactions and emotions,
find difficulty in adapting themselves to their surroundings. It is
but another example of nature’s inscrutable laws, which sometimes are
thrown out of stride by some cosmic friction or rift, and result in
havoc to the individual and the mass.
Many men are born outside their century; Esau Cairn was born outside
his epoch. Neither a moron nor a low-class primitive, possessing a
mind well above the average, he was, nevertheless, distinctly out of
place in the modern age. I never knew a man of intelligence so little
fitted for adjustment in a machine-made civilization. (Let it be noted
that I speak of him in the past tense; Esau Cairn lives, as far as the
cosmos is concerned; as far as the Earth is concerned, he is dead, for
he will never again set foot upon it.)
He was of a restless mold, impatient of restraint and resentful of
authority. Not by any means a bully, he at the same time refused to
countenance what he considered to be the slightest infringement on his
rights. He was primitive in his passions, with a gusty temper and a
courage inferior to none on this planet. His life was a series of
repressions. Even in athletic contests he was forced to hold himself
in, lest he injure his opponents. Esau Cairn was, in short, a freak—a
man whose physical body and mental bent leaned back to the primordial.
Born in the Southwest, of old frontier stock, he came of a race
whose characteristics were inclined toward violence, and whose
traditions were of war and feud and battle against man and nature. The
mountain country in which he spent his boyhood carried out the
tradition. Contest—physical contest—was the breath of life to him.
Without it he was unstable and uncertain. Because of his peculiar
physical make-up, full enjoyment in a legitimate way, in the ring or
on the football field was denied him. His career as a football player
was marked by crippling injuries received by men playing against him,
and he was branded as an unnecessarily brutal man, who fought to maim
his opponents rather than win games. This was unfair. The injuries
were simply resultant from the use of his great strength, always so
far superior to that of the men opposed to him. Cairn was not a great
sluggish lethargic giant as so many powerful men are; he was vibrant
with fierce life, ablaze with dynamic energy. Carried away by the lust
of combat, he forgot to control his powers, and the result was broken
limbs or fractured skulls for his opponents.
It was for this reason that he withdrew from college life,
unsatisfied and embittered, and entered the professional ring. Again
his fate dogged him. In his training-quarters, before he had had a
single match, he almost fatally injured a sparring partner. Instantly
the papers pounced upon the incident, and played it up beyond its
natural proportions. As a result Cairn’s license was revoked.
Bewildered, unsatisfied, he wandered over the world, a restless
Hercules, seeking outlet for the immense vitality that surged
tumultuously within him, searching vainly for some form of life wild
and strenuous enough to satisfy his cravings, born in the dim red days
of the world’s youth.
Of the final burst of blind passion that banished him for ever from
the life wherein he roamed, a stranger, I need say little. It was a
nine-days’ wonder, and the papers exploited it with screaming
headlines. It was an old story—a rotten city government, a crooked
political boss, a man chosen, unwittingly on his part, to be used as a
tool and serve as a puppet.
Cairn, restless, weary of the monotony of a life for which he was
unsuited, was an ideal tool—for a while. But Cairn was neither a
criminal nor a fool. He understood their game quicker than they
expected, and took a stand surprisingly firm to them, who did not know
the real man.
Yet, even so, the result would not have been so violent if the man
who had used and ruined Cairn had any real intelligence. Used to
grinding men under his feet and seeing them cringe and beg for mercy,
Boss Blaine could not understand that he was dealing with a man to
whom his power and wealth meant nothing. Yet so schooled was Cairn to
iron self-control that it required first a gross insult, then an actual
blow on the part of Blaine, to rouse him. Then for the first time in
his life, his wild nature blazed into full being. All his thwarted and
repressed life surged up behind the clenched fist that broke Blaine’s
skull like an eggshell and stretched him lifeless on the floor, behind
the desk from which he had for years ruled a whole district.
Cairn was no fool. With the red haze of fury fading from his glare,
he realized that he could not hope to escape the vengeance of the
machine that controlled the city. It was not because of fear that he
fled Blaine’s house. It was simply because of his primitive instinct
to find a more convenient place to turn at bay and fight out his death
fight.
So it was that chance led him to my observatory.
He would have left, instantly, not wishing to embroil me in his
trouble, but I persuaded him to remain and tell me his story. I had
long expected some catastrophe of the sort. That he had repressed
himself as long as he did, shows something of his iron character. His
nature was as wild and untamed as that of a maned lion.
He had no plan—he simply intended to fortify himself somewhere and
fight it out with the police until he was riddled with lead.
I at first agreed with him, seeing no better alternative. I was not
so naive as to believe he had any chance in the courts with the
evidence that would be presented against him. Then a sudden thought
occurred to me, so fantastic and alien, and yet so logical, that I
instantly propounded it to my companion. I told him of the Great
Secret, and gave him proof of its possibilities.
In short, I urged him to take the chance of a flight through space,
rather than meet the certain death that awaited him.
And he agreed. There was no place in the universe which would
support human life. But I had looked beyond the knowledge of men, in
universes beyond universes. And I chose the only planet I knew on
which a human being could exist—the wild, primitive, and strange
planet I named Almuric.
Cairn understood the risks and uncertainties as well as I. But he
was utterly fearless—and the thing was done. Esau Cairn left the
planet of his birth, for a world swimming afar in space, alien, aloof,
strange.
Esau Cairn’s Narrative
Chapter 01
The Transition was so swift and brief, that it seemed less than a
tick of time lay between the moment I placed myself in Professor
Hildebrand’s strange machine, and the instant when I found myself
standing upright in the clear sunlight that flooded a broad plain. I
could not doubt that I had indeed been transported to another world.
The landscape was not so grotesque and fantastic as I might have
supposed, but it was indisputably alien to anything existing on the
Earth.
But before I gave much heed to my surroundings, I examined my own
person to learn if I had survived that awful flight without injury.
Apparently I had. My various parts functioned with their accustomed
vigor. But I was naked. Hildebrand had told me that inorganic
substance could not survive the transmutation. Only vibrant, living
matter could pass unchanged through the unthinkable gulfs which lie
between the planets. I was grateful that I had not fallen into a land
of ice and snow. The plain seemed filled with a lazy summerlike heat.
The warmth of the sun was pleasant on my bare limbs.
On every side stretched away a vast level plain, thickly grown with
short green grass. In the distance this grass attained a greater
height, and through it I caught the glint of water. Here and there
throughout the plain this phenomenon was repeated, and I traced the
meandering course of several rivers, apparently of no great width.
Black dots moved through the grass near the rivers, but their nature I
could not determine. However, it was quite evident that my lot had not
been cast on an uninhabited planet, though I could not guess the
nature of the inhabitants. My imagination peopled the distances with
nightmare shapes.
It is an awesome sensation to be suddenly hurled from one’s native
world into a new strange alien sphere. To say that I was not appalled
at the prospect, that I did not shrink and shudder in spite of the
peaceful quiet of my environs, would be hypocrisy. I, who had never
known fear, was transformed into a mass of quivering, cowering nerves,
starting at my own shadow. It was that man’s utter helplessness was
borne in upon me, and my mighty frame and massive thews seemed frail
and brittle as the body of a child. How could I pit them against an
unknown world? In that instant I would gladly have returned to Earth
and the gallows that awaited me, rather than face the nameless terrors
with which imagination peopled my new-found world. But I was soon to
learn that those thews I now despised were capable of carrying me
through greater perils than I dreamed.
A slight sound behind me brought me around to stare amazedly at the
first inhabitant of Almuric I was to encounter. And the sight, awesome
and menacing as it was, yet drove the ice from my veins and brought
back some of my dwindling courage. The tangible and material can never
be as grisly as the unknown, however perilous.
At my first startled glance I thought it was a gorilla which stood
before me. Even with the thought I realized that it was a man, but
such a man as neither I nor any other Earthman had ever looked upon.
He was not much taller than I, but broader and heavier, with a great
spread of shoulders, and thick limbs knotted with muscles. He wore a
loincloth of some silklike material girdled with a broad belt which
supported a long knife in a leather sheath. High-strapped sandals were
on his feet. These details I took in at a glance, my attention being
instantly fixed in fascination on his face.
Such a countenance it is difficult to imagine or describe. The head
was set squarely between the massive shoulders, the neck so squat as
to be scarcely apparent. The jaw was square and powerful, and as the
wide thin lips lifted in a snarl, I glimpsed brutal tusklike teeth. A
short bristly beard masked the jaw, set off by fierce, up-curving
mustaches. The nose was almost rudimentary, with wide flaring
nostrils. The eyes were small, bloodshot, and an icy gray in color.
From the thick black brows the forehead, low and receding, sloped back
into a tangle of coarse, bushy hair. The ears were small and very
close-set.
The mane and beard were very blue-black, and the creature’s limbs
and body were almost covered with hair of the same hue. He was not,
indeed, as hairy as an ape, but he was hairier than any human being I
had ever seen.
I instantly realized that the being, hostile or not, was a
formidable figure. He fairly emanated strength—hard, raw, brutal
power. There was not an ounce of surplus flesh on him. His frame was
massive, with heavy bones. His hairy skin rippled with muscles that
looked iron-hard. Yet it was not altogether his body that spoke of
dangerous power. His look, his carriage, his whole manner reflected a
terrible physical might backed by a cruel and implacable mind. As I
met the blaze of his bloodshot eyes, I felt a wave of corresponding
anger. The stranger’s attitude was arrogant and provocative beyond
description. I felt my muscles tense and harden instinctively.
But for an instant my resentment was submerged by the amazement with
which I heard him speak in perfect English!
“Thak! What manner of man are you?”
His voice was harsh, grating and insulting. There was nothing
subdued or restrained about him. Here were the naked primitive
instincts and manners, unmodified. Again I felt the old red fury
rising in me, but I fought it down.
“I am Esau Cairn,” I answered shortly, and halted, at a loss how to
explain my presence on his planet.
His arrogant eyes roved contemptuously over my hairless limbs and
smooth face, and when he spoke, it was with unbearable scorn.
“By Thak, are you a man or a woman?”
My answer was a smash of my clenched fist that sent him rolling on
the sward.
The act was instinctive. Again my primitive wrath had betrayed me.
But I had no time for self-reproach. With a scream of bestial rage my
enemy sprang up and rushed at me, roaring and frothing. I met him
breast to breast, as reckless in my wrath as he, and in an instant was
fighting for my life.
I, who had always had to restrain and hold down my strength lest I
injure my fellow men, for the first time in my life found myself in
the clutches of a man stronger than myself. This I realized in the
first instant of impact, and it was only by the most desperate efforts
that I fought clear of his crushing embrace.
The fight was short and deadly. The only thing that saved me was the
fact that my antagonist knew nothing of boxing. He could—and did—
strike powerful blows with his clenched fists, but they were clumsy,
ill-timed and erratic. Thrice I mauled my way out of grapples that
would have ended with the snapping of my spine. He had no knack of
avoiding blows; no man on Earth could have survived the terrible
battering I gave him. Yet he incessantly surged in on me, his mighty
hands spread to drag me down. His nails were almost like talons, and I
was quickly bleeding from a score of places where they had torn the
skin.
Why he did not draw his dagger I could not understand, unless it was
because he considered himself capable of crushing me with his bare
hands—which proved to be the case. At last, half blinded by my
smashes, blood gushing from his split ears and splintered teeth, he
did reach for his weapon, and the move won the fight for me.
Breaking out of a half-clinch, he straightened out of his defensive
crouch and drew his dagger. And as he did so, I hooked my left into
his belly with all the might of my heavy shoulders and powerfully
driving legs behind it. The breath went out of him in an explosive
gasp, and my fist sank to the wrist in his belly. He swayed, his mouth
flying open, and I smashed my right to his sagging jaw. The punch
started at my hip, and carried every ounce of my weight and strength.
He went down like a slaughtered ox and lay without twitching, blood
spreading out over his beard. That last smash had torn his lip open
from the corner of his mouth to the rim of his chin, and must surely
have fractured his jawbone as well.
Panting from the fury of the bout, my muscles aching from his
crushing grasp, I worked my raw, skinned knuckles, and stared down at
my victim, wondering if I had sealed my doom. Surely, I could expect
nothing now but hostility from the people of Almuric. Well, I thought,
as well be hanged for a sheep as a goat. Stooping, I despoiled my
adversary of his single garment, belt and weapon, and transferred them
to my own frame. This done, I felt some slight renewal of confidence.
At least I was partly clothed and armed.
I examined the dagger with much interest. A more murderous weapon I
have never seen. The blade was perhaps nineteen inches in length,
double-edged, and sharp as a razor. It was broad at the haft, tapering
to a diamond point. The guard and pommel were of silver, the hilt
covered with a substance somewhat like shagreen. The blade was
indisputably steel, but of a quality I had never before encountered.
The whole was a triumph of the weapon-maker’s art, and seemed to
indicate a high order of culture.
From my admiration of my newly acquired weapon, I turned again to my
victim, who was beginning to show signs of returning consciousness.
Instinct caused me to sweep the grasslands, and in the distance, to
the south, I saw a group of figures moving toward me. They were surely
men, and armed men. I caught the flash of the sunlight on steel.
Perhaps they were of the tribe of my adversary. If they found me
standing over their senseless comrade, wearing the spoils of conquest,
their attitude toward me was not hard to visualize.
I cast my eyes about for some avenue of escape or refuge, and saw
that the plain, some distance away, ran up into low green-clad
foothills. Beyond these in turn, I saw larger hills, marching up and
up in serried ranges. Another glance showed the distant figures to
have vanished among the tall grass along one of the river courses,
which they must cross before they reached the spot where I stood.
Waiting for no more, I turned and ran swiftly toward the hills. I
did not lessen my pace until I reached the foot of the first
foothills, where I ventured to look back, my breath coming in gasps,
and my heart pounding suffocatingly from my exertions. I could see my
antagonist, a small shape in the vastness of the plain. Further on,
the group I was seeking to avoid had come into the open and were
hastening toward him.
I hurried up the low slope, drenched with sweat and trembling with
fatigue. At the crest I looked back once more, to see the figures
clustered about my vanquished opponent. Then I went down the opposite
slope quickly, and saw them no more.
An hour’s journeying brought me into as rugged a country as I have
ever seen. On all sides rose steep slopes, littered with loose
boulders, which threatened to roll down upon the wayfarer. Bare stone
cliffs, reddish in color, were much in evidence. There was little
vegetation, except for low stunted trees, of which the spread of their
branches was equal to the height of the trunk, and several varieties
of thorny bushes, upon some of which grew nuts of peculiar shape and
color. I broke open several of these, finding the kernel to be rich
and meaty in appearance, but I dared not eat it, although I was
feeling the bite of hunger.
My thirst bothered me more than my hunger, and this at least I was
able to satisfy, although the satisfying nearly cost me my life. I
clambered down a precipitous steep and entered a narrow valley,
enclosed by lofty cliffs, at the foot of which the nut-bearing bushes
grew in great abundance. In the middle of the valley lay a broad pool,
apparently fed by a spring. In the center of the pool the water
bubbled continuously, and a small stream led off down the valley.
I approached the pool eagerly, and lying on my belly at its
lush-grown marge, plunged my muzzle into the crystal-clear water. It, too,
might be lethal for an Earthman, for all I knew, but I was so maddened
with thirst that I risked it. It had an unusual tang, a quality I have
always found present in Almuric water, but it was deliciously cold and
satisfying. So pleasant it was to my parched lips that after I had
satisfied my thirst, I lay there enjoying the sensation of
tranquility. That was a mistake. Eat quickly, drink quickly, sleep
lightly, and linger not over anything—those are the first rules of
the wild, and his life is not long who fails to observe them.
The warmth of the sun, the bubbling of the water, the sensuous
feeling of relaxation and satiation after fatigue and thirst—these
wrought on me like an opiate to lull me into semislumber. It must have
been some subconscious instinct that warned me, when a faint swishing
reached my ears that was not part of the rippling of the spring. Even
before my mind translated the sound as the passing of a heavy body
through the tall grass, I whirled on my side, snatching at my poniard.
Simultaneously my ears were stunned with a deafening roar, there was
a rushing through the air, and a giant form crashed down where I had
lain an instant before, so close to me that its outspread talons raked
my thigh. I had no time to tell the nature of my attacker—I had only
a dazed impression that it was huge, supple, and catlike. I rolled
frantically aside as it spat and struck at me sidewise; then it was on
me, and even as I felt its claws tear agonizingly into my flesh, the
ice-cold water engulfed us both. A catlike yowl rose half strangled,
as if the yowler had swallowed a large amount of water. There was a
great splashing and thrashing about me; then as I rose to the surface,
I saw a long, bedraggled shape disappearing around the bushes near the
cliffs. What it was I could not say, but it looked more like a leopard
than anything else, though it was bigger than any leopard I had ever
seen.
Scanning the shore carefully, I saw no other enemy, and crawled out
of the pool, shivering from my icy plunge. My poniard was still in its
scabbard. I had had no time to draw it, which was just as well. If I
had not rolled into the pool, just when I did, dragging my attacker
with me, it would have been my finish. Evidently the beast had a true
catlike distaste for water.
I found that I had a deep gash in my thigh and four lesser abrasions
on my shoulder, where a great talon-armed paw had closed. The gash in
my leg was pouring blood, and I thrust the limb deep into the icy
pool, swearing at the excruciating sting of the cold water on the raw
flesh. My leg was nearly numb when the bleeding ceased.
I now found myself in a quandary. I was hungry, night was coming on,
there was no telling when the leopard-beast might return, or another
predatory animal attack me; more than that, I was wounded. Civilized
man is soft and easily disabled. I had a wound such as would be
considered, among civilized people, ample reason for weeks of an
invalid’s existence. Strong and rugged as I was, according to Earth
standards, I despaired when I surveyed the wound, and wondered how I
was to treat it. The matter was quickly taken out of my hands.
I had started across the valley toward the cliffs, hoping I might
find a cave there, for the nip of the air warned me that the night
would not be as warm as the day, when a hellish clamor up near the
mouth of the valley caused me to wheel and glare in that direction.
Over the ridge came what I thought to be a pack of hyenas, except for
their noise, which was more infernal than an Earthly hyena, even,
could produce. I had no illusions as to their purpose. It was I they
were after.
Necessity recognizes few limitations. An instant before I had been
limping painfully and slowly. Now I set out on a mad race for the
cliff as if I were fresh and unwounded. With every step a spasm of
agony shot along my thigh, and the wound, bleeding afresh, spurted
red, but I gritted my teeth and increased my efforts.
