Swords From the West Read online

  Foreword vii

  Acknowledgments xi

  Introduction xiii

  The Red Cock Crows 1

  The Golden Horde 16

  The Long Sword 64

  Lionheart 85

  Protection 101

  Keeper of the Gate 116

  The Tower of the Ravens 18o

  The Grand Cham 199

  The Black Road 317

  Knights with Wings 329

  The Making of the Morning Star 344

  The Bells of the Mountains 475

  The Faring Forth 489

  Secret of Victory 504

  The Village of the Ghost 517

  The Iron Man Rides 564

  Doom Rides In 581

  Appendix 597

  About the Author 60,

  Source Acknowledgments 603

  Those familiar with Harold Lamb's work today likely remember the numerous histories and biographies he wrote from 1927 onward. They might know of his justly-famed Khlit the Cossack stories, but unless they themselves are pulp collectors they are unlikely to be familiar with the fiction printed here, most of which appeared originally in Adventure magazine in the 1920s and 1930s. Almost none of these tales have been reprinted since, and those that were turned up in fairly obscure publications.

  Lamb was always fascinated by borderlands and the clash of East and West. Asian cultures were a special interest for him throughout most of his life, especially those of Mongolia. Thus it should be no surprise that a Harold Lamb crusader story is far more likely to feature a foray into the steppes of Asia than to the walls of Acre.

  What may be surprising is Lamb's unprejudiced eye when portraying non-Western peoples. Lamb's Mongolians and Arabs are painted with the same insight into motivation as his Western protagonists. He takes no shortcuts via stereotype: foreign does not necessarily equate with evil, and villains can be found on either side of the cultural divide. Lamb went so far as to feature Moslems and Mongols as protagonists, though none of those adventures are printed in this particular volume (look instead to Lamb's Bison Books collections titled Swords from the Desert [2009] and Swords from the East [forthcoming, 2010]).

  There are other surprises here besides. Older adventure fiction has a reputation for predictable plotting and melodrama, yet you will seldom find Lamb guilty of either charge. Neither will you find his prose laden with excess verbiage or talking heads, nor will you see any sign of that deadliest sin for adventure fiction, slow pacing. The action flows swiftly from scene to scene, and the images are sharply etched - always against thrilling, exotic, painstakingly researched backdrops.

  Robert Weinberg's excellent essay introduces you to both Adventure magazine, Lamb's main fiction outlet, and "The Making of the Morning Star." As much as I enjoy "The Making of the Morning Star," which may yet be deservedly hailed as an adventure classic, I love the two Nial O'Gordon novellas contained within these pages even more. "The Golden Horde" and "Keeper of the Gate" are fabulous works penned at the height of Lamb's descriptive power. The triumphant final notes of these pieces ring in the air long after the reader has set them down, echoing with somber majesty. They were the very last stories he ever wrote for Adventure magazine. See if you, too, upon reading the last paragraph of "Keeper of the Gate," wish that Lamb had taken us with Nial O'Gordon on to Cathay. Surely if there had been more tales of Nial it would be the adventures of this character, even more so than those of the wily Cossack Khlit, with whom Harold Lamb would be most associated.

  The other stories within this book are shorter tales from Adventure, Collier's, and Cassell's. Collier's preferred stories of briefer length than those Lamb usually wrote for Adventure, and seemed also to prefer work from Lamb where the conclusion turned upon the hero winning the hand of a heroine. As a body of work the Collier's tales are more repetitive than Lamb's earlier fiction. Despite these constraints, Lamb managed to inject variety into many of them, and most of those dealing with crusaders are printed here the rest are printed in other Bison Lamb collections.

  In the 195os Lamb wrote a series of stories for the Saturday Evening Post where famous historical events were re-dressed-usually to include some romance a la the Collier's pieces-and given a contemporary framing story. To my eyes these framing stories are forced, and the stories themselves pale in comparison to Lamb's earlier work. One, though, Lamb's last published historical story, has the old fire. Thematically it doesn't belong in this volume, but it fits even less well in the other books in this book series-the protagonists, at least, come from the West. Step around the awkward frame opening to "Secret of Victory," and you'll be swept into an adventure about the fabled sword of Attila and a last desperate battle to keep the Hun from Roman lands.

  The intent of this new series of collections is to reprint all of Harold Lamb's magazine historicals not already collected in Bison Books editions. Lamb's crusader stories don't end with this volume: crusaders make an appearance in Swords from the Desert, and the appendix in the same volume has dozens of pages of historical information Lamb wrote on the subject. There are yet more crusader stories, for crusaders seem to have been Lamb's favorite historical subject after Cossacks. I was forced to exclude three short crusader novels from these collections, due both to space limitations and because another publisher is already caring for them in fine editions. For some years the first two books of the Durandal trilogy, Durandal and The Sea of Ravens, have been available in marvelous illustrated volumes from the publisher Donald M. Grant, and the third book, Rusudan, should follow soon. I urge you to seek them out if you have not already done so.

  Should these tales fire your interest in researching the historical period, look no further than Harold Lamb's own two-volume set on the Crusades. Later collected in one large book, both volumes, Iron Men and Saints and The Flame of Islam, can still be found on many library shelves. Lamb earned a medal from the Persian government for these books in recognition of the accuracy of his research, and the acclaim helped launch the rest of Lamb's career. The crusade books were well received in America and led to movie mogul Cecil B. DeMille hiring Lamb to cowrite his motion picture The Crusades, the first of many projects they worked on together. One interesting anecdote of Lamb's work on the film survives, reprinted here from Charles Higham's book Cecil B. DeMille ~Scribner's, 1973:

  Harold Lamb was constantly present during the shooting of the siege [of Acre], dodging arrows and narrowly avoiding being crushed by the siege tower. "Is that realistic enough, Mr. Lamb? " the director asked him at the end of the first exhausting rehearsal of the conflict.

  "Not nearly," Lamb replied, wiping his spectacles. "Those soldiers seemed almost fond of each other. Medieval warriors were infinitely more sanguinary, let me assure you. What you need is a thousand battle axes red with blood."

  "That would make it a shambles, " DeMille said.

  "Exactly. And also history," Lamb primlyreplied. (242)

  Lamb thereafter cowrote a multitude of screenplays for DeMille and spent the rest of his working life either drafting for the cinema or producing biographies and histories for Doubleday-putting aside his service for the oss during World War II, when he was posted to Persia. I discuss that period of his life in more detail in Swords From the Desert.

  Now it is time to settle back and read of crafty Sir John and his brave and loyal Arab friend Khalil. Herein learn what befell the daughter of Rusudan, from Lamb's Durandal trilogy. Read of the winged knights of Poland, the deadly horde of Tamerlane, and Richard the Lionheart's last stand. Ease back and let a master storyteller speak of fabled lands and faroff places and heroes who rode to doom or glory against all odds.

  Enjoy!

  Dedicated to the memory of heroic-fiction scholar Steven Tompkins (1960-2009).

&nbs
p; I would like to thank Bill Prather of Thacher School for his continued support. This volume would not have been possible without the aid of Bruce Nordstrom, who long ago provided Lamb's Collier's texts as well as his Saturday Evening Post and other research notes; Mike Ashley, who provided the text of "Doom Rides In"; and Alfred Lybeck, Kevin Cook, David Scroggs, and James Pfundstein, who provided "Camp-Fire" letters. I also would like to express my appreciation for the aid of Victor Dreger and Jan van Heinegen, gentlemen and scholars. Lastly I wish again to thank my father, the late Victor Jones, who helped me locate various Adventure magazines, and Dr. John Drury Clark, whose lovingly preserved collection of Lamb stories is the chief source of seventy-five percent of my Adventure manuscripts.

  The Long journey of the Morning Star

  ROBERT WEINBERG

  Updating an old ethnic joke, what do you get when you put ten pulp collectors in a locked room and ask them to name the best pulp ever published? The answer, of course, is eleven different answers. Everyone who collects has their favorite, and with over a thousand different pulp titles published, it's hard to settle on just one, or ten, or even twenty favorite magazines. Still, if most of the collectors were forced to agree upon one title for otherwise face the infamous Copper Bowl as so horrifically described by Major George Fielding Elliot in the pages of Weird Tales, there's a very good chance that the magazine they'd pick would be Adventure.

  As a pulp (it turned into a rather mundane slick magazine late in its life), Adventure ran for an amazing 753 issues from 1910 to 1953. Many of those years it appeared twice a month (the first and the fifteenth) on the newsstand, and there were periods it appeared three times a month (the tenth, twentieth, and thirtieth, except for February, when it was published on the twenty-eighth). Issues from the early 192os, a favorite period of many collectors, were 192 pages of eye-straining print and usually included a complete novel, two or three complete novelettes (in reality short novels), and a goodly chunk of a serial. There would also be five or six short stories and a bunch of departments like "Old Songs That Men Have Sung," "Ask Adventure," and "Lost Trails." The letter column, known as "The Camp-Fire," was perhaps the best letter column published in any magazine, ever. Usually, authors of stories in the issues wrote long essays where they detailed the historical background of their work. Letters from readers argued over facts in previous stories. In an America just emerg ing from the Wild West and the First World War, the readers of Adventure weren't just armchair adventurers spouting theories. A typical letter began, "I enjoyed Hugh Pendexter's story about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but he got some of the details wrong. I was there and remember quite distinctly-" and continue on for three pages about the famous gun battle. There's a spectacular oral history of the American West in the letter columns of Adventure, and hopefully someday it will see print.

  Still, it was the stories that made the pulp memorable, and Adventure featured the greatest lineup of adventure writers ever assembled. There was Talbot Mundy, Arthur D. Howden Smith, Arthur 0. Friel, Georges Surdez, Hugh Pendexter, J. Allen Dunn, and many hundreds of others, penning some of the finest, most accurate historical and modern adventure stories ever written. These were the top men in their field, men who knew how to tell a good story with plenty of action and a dash of romance, and who understood that their audience wouldn't accept inaccuracies in their fiction, so they kept their history straight. Adventure was considered the most prestigious pulp magazine in America. It was the very best the pulps had to offer. And the very best author in Adventure was Harold Lamb.

  Lamb wrote seventy-five stories for Adventure from 1917 through 1933, many of them long novelettes and short novels. He was most famous for his series of stories about Khlit, an old and wily Cossack warrior. However, Lamb's finest fiction wasn't about Khlit but consisted of a thematic series of novellas featuring unjustly accused crusaders who joined the Mongol hordes of the great khans. The most popular of these adventures were three short novels featuring Sir Hugh of Taranto, which were later published in hardcover in 1931 as Durandal, A Crusader with the Horde. In the rambling adventure, Hugh fights treacherous Greeks and Moslems; finds Roland's lost blade, Durandal; and finally achieves a measure of revenge while riding with the hordes of Genghis Khan. Donald M. Grant Publications reprinted the first two short novels in this series, Durandal and The Sea of the Ravens, but has yet to publish the third and concluding volume, Rusudan. While the Durandal series is Lamb at the top of his form, it is not his best crusader-meets-the-Mongols story. That honor is reserved for the longest story in this volume, "The Making of the Morning Star."

  This action-packed short novel was written in 1924, before the Sir Hugh series, and features a similar plot. A crusader, Sir Robert, is betrayed by his comrades and later is taken captive by the Saracens. Unwittingly, he helps one of the leaders of the advancing Mongol horde and wins his freedom, but not before he goes into battle wielding a gigantic iron ball and chain, a weapon known as a morning star. If set on Barsoom or in Aquilo- nia, "The Making of the Morning Star," would have been hailed as a fantasy masterpiece, but because it takes place in historical times without any magical elements, it has remained forgotten in the pulps for eighty years, until this welcome reprinting.

  This short novel is just one of a number of superb stories contained in this long-overdue collection of Harold Lamb's crusader fiction. As a Lamb collector and fan for forty years, I envy all those who are reading his work for the first time. This book is a collection to be treasured, a book I guarantee you will read more than once.

  As a brief historical footnote, in 1974 Ted Dikty, the co-owner of FAX Collectors Editions, asked me to edit two series of trade paperbound books reprinting the best adventure fiction from the pulps. One series was titled Famous Fantastic Classics and featured only science fiction stories, while the other was titled Famous Pulp Classics and was going to reprint only high adventure fiction. When I assembled the first issue of Famous Pulp Classics, there was no question in my mind what to use as the lead story-"The Making of the Morning Star." Rights to the story did not seem to be a problem, so Ted commissioned up-and-coming artist Michael Kaluta to paint a cover illustration based on the story. It was only when the book was ready to print that we learned that Donald Grant had licensed some of Lamb's work and was strongly opposed to us reprinting "The Morning Star" story. Don felt that our reprint would cut into sales of his planned Lamb reprints, even though they were years away. To keep the peace, we dropped the story, and instead substituted a Malcolm WheelerNicholson adventure in its place. For those who might be interested, the Kaluta painting for "The Making of the Morning Star" still appeared on the cover of Famous Pulp Classics #1, though it didn't illustrate any story in the book. It's still great art for a great story!

  Piculph, the sergeant at arms, always made his rounds in the city of Tana at dusk. In that hour, after vesper bells and the muezzin's call, wine flowed in the taverns and blood in the alleys. A watchful fellow like Piculph could always pick up something good.

  Tana was a slave port-the last post of Europeans in Asia-at the far end of the Charnomar, that is now called the Black Sea. Over this sea the galleys from Constantinople brought Christian slaves, boys and young women, Greeks and all sorts, to be sold to rich Moslems. And from the East, along the caravan road, came the turbaned folk bringing red leather and hemp and musk and opium and sword blades. And Tana had never been noisier at dusk than this evening of the year of grace 1402.

  Piculph went warily, turning the corners wide, with his ear cocked to the bickering and brawling that went on, only half seen. It was the hour, he had said more than once, when the Horned One held open market. Piculph himself was a Lombard redbeard with a knack of stabbing and a nice touch for stealing. He served Messer Andrea, the master of the slave brokers, and he held himself to be better than the masterless rogues, the ribalds of the alleys-such rogues as he now paused to watch.

  In the deep shadow under the stone arch of an open gate in the city wall some half dozen
ragged figures were clustered, looking out at the road. Piculph, being mounted, could see over their heads. Beyond this gate, out on the plain, the glow of sunset lingered. And Piculph's curiosity grew as he watched.

  Often he had watched stout Turks driving laden asses through that gate and sallow Armenians moving through the dust raised by their sheep and grim Tatars whirling lariats as they trotted beside the herds of their shaggy ponies. But he had never seen a man leading a horse.

  And now a tall man was approaching with the long stride of one who had come far on foot. He wore boots of soft leather laced to his knees, a faded mantle gray with dust, and a tarnished steel cap set a little upon one side of his yellow head. Great of bone he was, and though alone, he did not seem to fear the darkness under the gate. The sword slung upon his hip in its leather scabbard was too heavy and too long to be handy in a brawl. So thought Piculph.

  And so thought the ribalds under the arch who had seen that the stranger led a lame horse, a gray Arab racer whose saddlecloth was gleaming cloth of gold. Since the stranger was alone and the horse one of price, the thieves made ready to slay the man-there in the darkness under the arch that smelled of charcoal and sheepskins.

  Piculph grinned in his beard, for he saw what they were about, and he meant to ride in upon them after their work was done and seize the horse himself.

  The stranger entered the arch, and the masterless men thronged about him.

  "Yah huk-yah huk!" they yelled in unison, the beggar's cry of Asia's streets. And at their call a pockmarked devil in a tattered cloak came running up with a lantern as if to light the way before the tall man. Instead he thrust the lantern close to the stranger's eyes-clear gray eyes that looked at them out of a lean, sun-darkened face.

  "Give, in God's name!" whined a beggar, pushing through his mates until his groping hands closed upon the right arm of the stranger. The beggar was blind, his pupils white-filmed, his lids eaten by flies.