Wolf of the Steppes Read online

  Wolf of the Steppes

  © 2006 by the Board of Regents of the

  University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lamb, Harold, 1892-1962. Wolf of the steppes / Harold Lamb; edited by Howard Andrew Jones; introduction by S. M. Stirling. p. cm. - (The complete Cossack adventures ; v. 1) ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-8048-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-io: 0-8032-8048-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) i. Cossacks—Fiction. 2. Steppes—Asia, Central—Fiction. 3. Asia, Central— History—16th century—Fiction.

  I. Jones, Howard A. II. Title. PS3523.A4235W65 2006 8i3'.52 —dc22 2005035138

  Set in Trump by Kim Essman.

  Designed by R. W. Boeche.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  IV

  Tal Taulai Khan

  VII

  Alamut

  v

  X

  The Mighty Manslayer

  V

  XII

  XVI

  The White Khan

  VI

  XIII

  XX

  Changa Nor

  V

  X

  XIV

  Roof of the World

  VI

  XII

  The Star of Evil Omen

  IV

  VI

  The Rider of the Gray Horse

  VII

  XI

  XV

  Appendix

  About the Author

  Source Acknowledgments

  Contents

  Foreword vii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction xv

  Khlit i Wolf's War 12 Tal Taulai Khan 41 Alamut 85 The Mighty Manslayer 154 The White Khan 229 Changa Nor 295 Roof of the World 372 The Star of Evil Omen 443 The Rider of the Gray Horse 521

  Appendix 595 About the Author 603 Source Acknowledgments 605

  Foreword

  The popular entertainments of 1917 and 2006 are separated by eighty-nine years and almost countless technological innovations. There were no televisions in 1917, and movie theaters were fairly recent developments. Talking motion pictures wouldn't replace silent films until the late 1920s. Those who craved stories like the adventures many find today in the theaters or on their home entertainment systems—either dvds or games—had few options other than the printed word.

  And so it was that America was a nation of readers. The magazine racks overflowed with periodicals printed on cheap pulpy paper, known as the “pulps.” These magazines were devoted to westerns, sports stories, war stories, detective stories, science fiction stories, romance stories, historical adventure stories— in short, stories from almost every conceivable genre, and were printed several times a month or even weekly.

  Like media today, most of this fiction was forgettable or so rooted in its time that it has become a historical curiosity. But there are always a few storytellers whose work transcends their time, writers who craft tales that speak widely enough to the human condition that their work stands long after the culture in which it was created has changed or vanished.

  Harold Lamb was a young man of twenty-five in 1917, recently married. He was finishing a brief stint in the military at the end of World War I and had begun to publish in some of the better-known magazines of his day—Argosy and Adventure—but nothing he'd written before 1917 seems that remarkable. Some appreciative letters had appeared in Argosy, true, but if Lamb had continued to craft his contemporary tales of western adventurers in Asia and stories of clever Chinamen who'd moved to America he'd be as forgotten as most of the rest of those whose names appear near his in those old tables of contents. Lamb, however, got his foot in the door at Adventure, and editor Arthur Sullivan Hoffman gave him leave to write what he wished.

  In his college days at Columbia Lamb had most often been found on the tennis court or within the library, though he did little to distinguish himself academically. In the library he discovered what he described as something “gorgeous and new”: histories of Asia. He was fascinated by them thereafter, and given free rein by Hoffman, he decided to use his interests to enrich his fiction.

  Adventure editor Hoffman was later to describe Lamb as a compulsive scholar. Lamb's stories brim with details—though they never overwhelm the plot, and he never seeks to trumpet his historical mastery. This historical accuracy is all the more remarkable if we consider how much more difficult it was to research in a time before copy machines and the Internet, when research often meant trips to distant libraries and countries.

  It is not accuracy alone that makes Lamb's adventure fiction stand out. Lamb was either too impatient or too much the natural storyteller to retain the stilted, often ponderous style of many of his predecessors and contemporaries. His prose is worded leanly and seldom slows from its headlong pace. His work was cinematic before there was much cinema; it swims with action.

  Lamb also was an accomplished plotter. In adventure fiction we are used to and often make excuses for the fact that certain elements appear and reappear time and again. We may even see the same plot redressed by the same author—as Edgar Rice Burroughs so often did—or have a good sense of how it will turn out after the first few pages. Yet even a jaded reader or one familiar with Lamb's work is unlikely to anticipate all the turns his plots will take.

  Harold Lamb wrote more than a hundred short stories and novels for the pulp magazines featuring a variety of heroes. A few highlights among the tales of Vikings and explorers are two novels about John Paul Jones, a cycle of Crusader novellas centered around the famed sword Durandal, two action-packed novellas of the intrepid knight Nial O'Gordon, and a novel about Genghis Khan. Lamb's longest series of stories, and his earliest, consisted of almost thirty loosely related short stories and novels whose most frequent recurring character was a hero of Odyssean wit. This was Khlit the Cossack.

  There's no way to know how Lamb settled on a Cossack as a main character or whether he imagined the array of stories about Khlit that would follow on the heels of the first. However it happened, Lamb wrote the first story, “Khlit,” in 1917, and Adventure published it in November of that year. It is a short piece, and if Lamb had stopped there it might have been nothing more than a pleasant little curiosity to scholars and pulp collectors reading their way through dusty yellowed magazines today. But Lamb did not stop—he wrote a longer sequel, “Wolf's War,” and the potential glimpsed in the first story brightened into flame. This tale was followed by another, “Tal Taulai Khan,” at which point Lamb's creation blazed like a roaring bonfire.

  Khlit was certainly not the first heroic serial character in literature, but he is one of the first who can still be read for sheer pleasure. The stories sound modern, apart from the dashed omission of curse words and the unstated but implied sexual tension. Victorian sensibilities prevailed, and Lamb knew that when a character spoke of sharing the bed of a male friend, his readers would understand that they did so for warmth in winter; nothing else would have been assumed.

  Khlit is already old when his saga begins, late in the sixteenth century in the grasslands of central Asia. He is a veteran Cossack, an expert horseman and swordsman. He is unlettered and only a step removed from barbarism, but wise in the ways of war and men. Gruff and taciturn, Khlit is a firm believer in justice. He is the friend and protector of many women, but he leaves romance to his sidekicks and allies. He rides alongside heroes from many different nationalities with varied beliefs—among them a heroic Afghan Muslim, a Manchu archer, a Hindu swordsman, and daring Mongol horsemen.

  Fiction originally printed within the pulps has a poor reputation. It is not difficult to find quotes from learned scholars who dismiss pulp fiction as being u
niversally sexist, racist, and juvenile. A great deal of it was, but like many topics, the truth is far more complicated. Over the course of his journeys Khlit may bear some of his own prejudices with him, but Lamb wrote without bias from the viewpoints of Mongols, Muslims, and Hindus. Khlit's prejudices are the prejudices of his times, and his perceptions grow and change: the Cossack first views Tatars as hereditary enemies, then embraces their culture as his own. And then there is the devoted friendship shared between Khlit and Abdul Dost (who narrates four of the tales found in Volume 2 of this series), an Eastern Orthodox Christian and a Muslim. Both are devout in faiths that have lost little love for one another, yet the men are brothers of the sword. Lamb has no theological or philosophical axe to grind—he aims only to present a cracking good story, and he almost always succeeds.

  Lamb had an enormous impact on Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan. Howard sometimes used Lamb's histories and historical fiction for research, and there are obvious signs of Lamb's influence on Howard's historical fiction and the famous Conan stories. Howard listed Harold Lamb as a favorite writer and wrote that he had respect and keen admiration for him besides.

  There are many parallels between Lamb's fiction and that of Howard, along with those who followed in Howard's footsteps. There are only occasional suggestions of the fantastic in Lamb's stories. But in Lamb you will find all the other elements you see in the work of Howard and the fantasy writers who followed him. There are heroes who must live by their wit and weapon skills in a deadly borderland, beset by schemers and intriguers. There is treasure to be found, and ancient secrets, and lovely women: some are keen-eyed adventurers on whom you should not turn your back and others are damsels in need of rescue. There are loyal comrades, implacable foes, powerful but foolish kings, secret societies, fabulous kingdoms, and those who pass themselves off as wizards and miracle workers. You will even find quotations heading up many stories and chapters, a practice favored by fantasy writers. Lamb, of course, quoted real (though obscure) sources rather than inventing his own. In short, if you read the sword and sorcery writers and then turn to Lamb, the lineage is obvious—their stories are fashioned with the same spirit, from love of the same plot elements.

  In 1927 Lamb penned a biography of Genghis Khan and launched his book writing career. Soon after, his Crusades volumes caught the attention of Cecil B. DeMille, who hired Lamb to help write the screenplay of “The Crusades,” a major epic of its time. Over the following decades Lamb helped author some three dozen scripts for DeMille, and Lamb and his family prospered. Lamb found little time to draft historical fiction anymore, and the demand for it was drying up in any case as the pulp magazines went into decline.

  By 1962 Lamb was in his seventies. He still wrote articles and occasional stories for the Saturday Evening Post, and he still crafted best-selling biographies. Anticipating the reprinting boom that would soon catapult characters like Conan and John Carter of Mars back into prominence, Lamb's publisher, Doubleday, asked him to select a collection of stories featuring Khlit. Sadly, Lamb did not live to usher others into print, dying before the first collection appeared on bookstore shelves. A smaller collection of Khlit stories followed, but by the 1970s Khlit the Cossack had vanished. Two Khlit novels were printed prior to World War II (White Falcon in 1926 and Kirdy in 1933) and are resultantly even more scarce today than the Doubleday collections.

  Here at last, under the Bison Books imprint, are the complete stories of Khlit the Cossack: four volumes that collect every adventure Lamb penned, not only of Khlit but of his allies Ayub and Demid, his grandson Kirdy, his best friend—the Muslim swordsmen Abdul Dost—and sundry Cossack heroes. Adventure sometimes published letters from Lamb explaining the historical events within his stories, and you will find these collected in the appendix of every volume.

  For too long Lamb has languished nearly forgotten, at most a footnote mentioned in the introductions to the works of other authors. Only a handful of us, lucky enough to have been pointed to his work or to have stumbled across it on our own, have found this gleaming treasure-trove. It is my sincere hope that this collection will be a springboard for Lamb's rediscovery—not as a writer of classics, for, as Twain commented, a classic is a book everyone has on their shelves and no one opens—but as a writer to be read.

  Enjoy!

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Bill Prather of Thacher School for his continued support, encouragement, enthusiasm, and friendship. I also would like to express my appreciation for the tireless efforts of Victor Dreger, who pored over acres of old maps to compile a map of the locations that appear in the final version printed within this book. Thank yous also are due to the tireless Bruce Nordstrom, Dr. Victor H. Jones, and Jan Van Heiningen for aid in manuscript acquisition, as well as S. C. Bryce, who kindly provided a timely and time-consuming last-minute check of some key issues of Adventure, and Dr. James Pfundstein and Doug Ellis for similar aid. A great deal of time was saved because of the manuscript preservation efforts of the late Dr. John Drury Clark. I'm grateful to the staff at the University of Nebraska Press for their support of the project and for efficiently shepherding the manuscript through the publication process. I'm likewise appreciative and delighted by the hard work of cover artist and map artist Darrel Stevens. Thank you all for your hard work and dedication—you have helped bring Khlit the Cossack and his world to life.

  Introduction

  S. M. Stirling

  The word “Cossack” derives from the same root as “Kazakh” in “Kazakhstan”: both mean “freebooter,” “adventurer,” or, less charitably, “wandering bandit.” The Cossacks had their origins on the southern and eastern fringes of the zone of Slavic settlement in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in what is now the Ukraine, along the great rivers—the Don and Dneiper.

  This area is part of the great grassland that stretches from Hungary to Manchuria across the northern ranges of the Eurasian supercontinent. On the southern fringe of this sea of grass are the Middle East and the great oasis cities of Central Asia, Samarkand and Bohkara; on the north the endless forests of Siberia, the Urals, and European Russia. Across it ran the caravan routes of the Silk Road, winding six thousand miles from China to the cities of the Levant.

  For most of recorded history the great steppe has been the stamping ground of the wandering herdsmen, from the Iranianspeaking Scythians and Saka of antiquity through the Pechenegs, the Avars, and the Magyars. Through here have passed the great nomad hordes of history, of whom Attila and his Huns were but one example; and above all, the great wave of conquest from Mongolia that began in the lifetime of Temujin—better known as Genghis Khan—and continued through the lives of his sons and grandsons. Europe knew their terror, as the armies of Batu and Subotai defeated the Teutonic Knights and the Poles, laid Hungary waste, and rode their ponies to the gates of Vienna.

  The full fury burst on Russia. The “Tartars” came from the east like a wind bearing a fire through the steppe, and the great Russian cities fell in an orgy of plunder and butchery—even those in the forests of the north, for the Mongol armies rode up the icy rivers in midwinter to kill and burn, feeding their mounts on the frozen bodies of their enemies. After their native Gobi, a Russian winter was positively balmy! For three centuries the eastern Slavs fell under the “Mongol Yoke,” ground down by tribute of money and men. For centuries more, the remnants of the Golden Horde remained a danger, raiding as far west as the Carpathians in search of booty and slaves.

  Into this land of great distances and huge skies, of burning summers and savage near-Siberian winters, the first Russian-Ukrainian settlers pushed after the Golden Horde's power was broken. They were not agents of the czar in Moscow at first, though those monarchs claimed suzerainty over them, as did other rulers—the Turkish sultans and their subject khans in the Crimea, for instance, and the kings of Poland-Lithuania.

  But the Cossacks in their great days acknowledged no lords, carrying their liberties on their lance-points. They w
ere what their name implied, freebooters. Adventurers, criminals, broken men, serfs fleeing the tightening bonds of servitude, deserters, and wanderers set out into the boundless steppe and there sired sons even wilder than themselves. They gathered in bands for mutual protection—and to more effectively plunder others. Their favored strongholds were islands in the great rivers, where they pursued the trades of fishing, herding, small farming, river-piracy, and mounted raids in search of booty. There they created a legend similar in many ways to the buccaneers of the Caribbean, with the steppe for their ocean. In fact, some of them became seagoing corsairs on the Caspian.

  These communities elected their own leaders, their hetmen, and obeyed them when they felt so inclined; a riotous, anarchic liberty was their delight, in stark contrast to the slavelike servitude suffered by ordinary men in the realms of Muscovy or Poland. They fought the Tartars and learned much from them, copying their whirlwind style of mounted warfare in an endless round of skirmish and ambush, and they carried off their women. They fought for and against the Polish-Lithuanian nobles who carried the banners of that odd hybrid kingdom into the Ukraine, and they struck deep into the domains of the Crim Tartars and the Turks. For the czars they had little use, though bound to them by their Russian speech and above all by their fierce Orthodox faith, which divided them from Catholic Pole and Muslim Tartar alike. In the end they broke the steppe peoples and won Siberia as far as the borderlands of China for Russia.

  If the sixteenth century was the golden age of the Cossacks, the earlier twentieth was the golden age of the adventure pulps. This genre is fondly remembered today, though in truth most of it was unspeakably bad. Robert E. Howard is well-remembered for his Conan stories in Weird Tales, but he also wrote for the other subvarieties of the pulps: western, detective, boxing, and “Oriental.” The latter covered everything from stories of the Crusades to the insidious likes of Fu Manchu. One recent collection of this type of story was entitled It’s Raining Corpses in Chinatown, which captures the flavor of most.