Swords From the East Read online

  Foreword vii

  Acknowledgments xi

  Introduction xiii

  The Gate in the Sky i

  The Wolf-Chaser 12

  The Three Palladins 53

  The House of the Strongest 192

  The Road of the Giants 205

  Azadi's Jest 327

  The Net 340

  The Book of the Tiger: The Warrior 353

  The Book of the Tiger: The Emperor 394

  Sleeping Lion 445

  Appendix 458

  About the Author 475

  Source Acknowledgments 477

  Harold Lamb wrote that he'd found something "gorgeous and new" when he discovered chronicles of Asian history in the libraries of Columbia University. He remained fascinated with the East thereafter, which is evident from his first stories of western adventurers in Asia to the last book published before his death in 1962, Babur the Tiger. All of his popular fiction is anchored in Asia, whether it be the cycle of Khlit the Cossack, descended from the Tatar hero Kaidu, or Durandal's Sir Hugh of Taranto, who travels into Asia during the conquests of Genghis Khan, or even the adventures of Genghis Khan himself, as related in "The Three Palladins" in this volume.

  Lamb tried his hand at contemporary fiction and was published in a number of top-flight magazines; these stories, though, do not hold up very well today. The characters, even when adventuring in Lamb's favorite stomping grounds, come across as wooden and dated.* In this age, both the 192os and the 1120s are remote to us. It might seem odd that a story set in one time can sound old-fashioned and quaint while one set in the other does not, especially when they were crafted by the same writer, but looking over the whole of Lamb's work, one reaches an inescapable conclusion: it is when Lamb looked backward that his prose sprang to life. His historical characters are far better realized than his modern heroes. Passion for his subject was writ large in every historical story. Lamb loved what he was writing, and it shows, most especially in the tales crafted for Adventure magazine, where editor Arthur Sullivan Hoffman gave him free rein to write what he wished. Even today, some eighty or ninety years after their creation, no matter changed literary trends and conventions, these stories beguile with the siren song of adventure. Lamb's polished and surprisingly modern sense of plotting and pacing is in full evidence in every story in this volume.

  Lamb's first real writing success came from sending characters into Asia to adventure, but before too long he tried his hand at writing of adventurers who were Asian. (Khlit, of course, is of Asian descent, but he would have been more "western" and familiar to his first readers than those characters he encounters through his wanderings. Lamb tried his hand at several shorter tales with Mongolian protagonists, including "The Wolf-Chaser," a story of a last stand in Mongolia that proved so inspiring to a young Robert E. Howard that Howard outlined it and took a crack at drafting a version of the story himself.*

  Lamb then tackled a novel of a Mongol tribe's perilous migration east, with a westerner as one of the main-though not the only-protagonists. Before too much longer, though, he drafted what he might always have longed to do, given his abiding fascination with Genghis Khan. The result was "The Three Palladins," which explores the early days of Temujin through the eyes of his confidant, a Cathayan prince. On first reading it as a younger man, I was for some reason disappointed that it had nothing to do with Khlit the Cossack, and I failed to perceive its worth. Like almost all of Lamb's Adventure-era fiction, it is swashbuckling fare seasoned with exotic locale. There is tension and duplicitous scheming on every hand. The author seems to have had almost as much fun with the characters as the reader, for some of them turn up in other stories-the mighty Subotai, and the clever minstrel Chepe Noyon in the Durandal cycle and "The Making of the Morning Star," which is included in Swords from the West (Bison Books, 2009. And Genghis Khan, of course, as a shaper of events and mythic figure, haunts much of Lamb's fiction, affecting even the Khlit cycle set hundreds of years later, most famously in one of the best of all the Khlit the Cossack stories, "The Mighty Manslayer," which appears in Wolf of the Steppes (Bison Books, 2006).

  Lamb was fortunate to have become established as a writer of both screenplays and history books by the time the Great Depression hit. Adventure, his mainstay, was no longer published as frequently or capable of paying as well. Lamb's fiction began to be printed in the slicks-Collier's and, a little later, the Saturday Evening Post (among a handful of similar magazines-where he still wrote short historicals as well as contemporary pieces. Among the later work included in this volume is a deft little mystery adventure titled "Sleeping Lion," with none other than Marco Polo as one of the primary characters, the other being a Tatar serving girl. Unfortunately, Collier's printed this story without its middle third. What remains is included. Sadly, the original is long since lost.

  There also exist two curious pieces from Lamb's Adventure days: "The Book of the Tiger: The Warrior" and "The Book of the Tiger: The Emperor." Together they tell the story of Babur, the Tiger, first Moghul emperor, mostly transcribed and condensed from Babur's fascinating autobiography. They presage Lamb's later books like Alexander the Great and Theodora and the Emperor, where the narrative is a history that occasionally drifts into fiction. Those volumes have never been among my favorites (Hannibal, both volumes of The Crusades, and March of the Barbarians top my list), but I'm fond of these Babur pieces even if they sometimes sound more like summaries than fully realized stories. Lamb captured the tone of a truthful and engaging historical character. The amount of luck hand the stupidity of his fellow mangy involved in Babur's survival through adversity is difficult to believe. Were I to invent such a story and submit it to a publisher, it would be dismissed out of hand as preposterous, but this one seems to be true! Lamb later turned to other Asian characters as protagonists and narrators, and you can find many of those tales in Swords from the Desert Bison Books, 2009 ~.

  Much of Lamb's fiction output revolved around conflicts generated by the colliding motivations of his characters and their cultures. Through most of the stories in this book, the physical environment takes on an antagonistic role as well, for the people in these tales of high Asia must contend with steep mountain passes, blinding snows, searing deserts, and ice-choked rivers. While justice may win out or protagonist triumph, the victories seem transitory, to be celebrated briefly before the candles are extinguished and the central characters shuffle off the stage. Kings, kingdoms, and heroes fall and fade to memory; nothing is eternal but the uncaring miles of mountain and steppe and the shifting northern lights that shine above them.

  That life is sweet and Lady Death ever eager for the embrace of heroes is a theme that can be found in Lamb's fiction from the very beginning, but readers may note that all of these tales-even the relatively light "Azadi's Jest"-are infused with a certain bleakness more marked than usual. We can exult in the adventure, but we are reminded to savor our sand castles before time and tide sweep them away.

  If you enjoy these stories of Mongolia, you have not far to look for more of Lamb's writing on the subject; his history and biography books are still held in many public libraries. Harold Lamb's first book, a biography of Genghis Khan, has fared better than any of his other works, remaining in print since 1927. Lamb himself thought this was peculiar because he believed his later books were better written. While Genghis Khan is a good read, I tend to agree: Tamerlane is a strong book, and March of the Barbarians is riveting. The latter title does little to reveal the quality within, for March is an in-depth history of the complex inner workings of the Mongol empire, written when Lamb was more experienced and had the financial wherewithal-as well as the clout with publishers-to take the time for extensive research. His Genghis Khan proposal had been approved by
the publisher only so long as he could write the book in two weeks, a demanding request even for someone intimately familiar with the subject matter. March of the Barbarians covers the same material as Genghis Khan in richer detail, and then goes on to describe the great Khan's successors with the same care. Frederick Lamb, Harold's son, named it the favorite of all his father's writing.

  Lamb always had the gift of taking facts and infusing them with fascinating vitality, be it in fiction or history or a combination thereof. It is my privilege now to step aside so that you can acquaint yourselves with some of the most extraordinary people and events he ever brought to life on the printed page.

  Enjoy!

  I would like to thank Bill Prather of the 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 and other research notes, and Alfred Lybeck, who provided "Camp-Fire" letters and additional information. I am grateful to Kevin Cook, who loaned me the Adventure text of "The Three Palladins"; to Sara E. F. Edwards for manuscript assistance; and to Simon Elliott of the Charles E. Young Research Library, Department of Special Collections at UCLA, who searched through the library's Harold Lamb collection for the original manuscript of "Sleeping Lion," unfortunately without success. The staff at Bison Books was, as always, a pleasure to work with, and I must give a special tip of the hat to Sabrina Stellrecht, Alicia Christensen, Jonathan Lawrence, and Alison Rold for their excellent work. I would also like to express my appreciation for the advice of Victor Dreger, Jan van Heinegen, and James Pfundstein, 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 75 percent of my Adventure manuscripts.

  It was all Harold Lamb's fault. I had just asked my mother another one of Those Questions. Most questions we asked her got answers, but Those Questions got very serious, lengthy discussion-type answers. My first one of Those Questions, I distinctly remember, was when I asked my mother the meaning of a word which, as far as I was concerned, was just something that rhymed with "truck." The answer turned out to be quite complex, linguistically and biologically. The current question got almost as unexpected and serious an answer: I had asked my mother if "Mongol" meant the same thing as "Mongoloid."

  The question was important to me, because I had been reading Harold Lamb's Genghis Khan: Emperor of All Men and, as far as I was concerned, the Mongols were pretty damn cool, and it was also fairly clear what they were: a confederation of tribes from the Gobi Desert who swept out under the leadership of Genghis Khan to establish the greatest empire in the history of the world. (It was like Dune, except real. Also, they weren't religious fanatics or spice addicts.) But I had been reading some other stuff (Heinlein's Sixth Column, I think) where "Mongoloid" was used as a racial designation, along with "Caucasoid" and "Negroid" and other ugly but impressive-sounding words. (Everything becomes more manageable if you slap the "-oid" suffix on it. A complex human individual turns out to be merely one sample of a type of humanoid, and even a hemorrhage is demoted to a mere hemorrhoid. Apply the right medicine to any "-oid" and it will shrink until you hardly notice it anymore.) And I had been hearing "Mongoloid" used as a slur on the school playground. I consulted a map and found the Caucasus Mountains and, as it happened, an Outer Mongolia but no Inner Mongolia, which struck me as very sus picious, very suspicious indeed. The Internet not having been invented yet (it was that long agog, I finally decided to ask Mom.

  My mother, it seems to me now, was not a naturally patient woman, and the patience she was born with had lots of work to do, but she took a lot of trouble answering Those Questions from any of her kids. This was not one of her more satisfying answers, but that wasn't her fault: it's what she had to work with. By the end of it I had a lot of information about Down syndrome and abusive terms that one could but should not use in a variety of social environments, but the big (if unspoken) takeaway was how stupid people could be about race (a lesson worth learning early and often, unfortunately).

  Never mind. Certain things became clear: people with Down syndrome were people with Down syndrome. People who used "Mongoloid" as a slur in any context were losers. And Genghis Khan was the emperor of all men.

  I soon tracked down Lamb's historical narrative of the Mongol conquests, March of the Barbarians, and his last book, Babur the Tiger (based on Babur's autobiography, which Lamb also adapted for two stories that appear in this volume, and I even branched out to his other biographies, like Hannibal (although nowadays I think the good guys won that particular world ward and his two-volume history of the Crusades. One book I was especially eager to lay Iny hands on was his biography of Tamerlane "the Iron Limper." I never did find it (though I did file away that image of a tough guy who limped; seemed like it might be useful one days. Looking for Lamb's Tamerlane, I found Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, and whole new worlds opened up.

  New worlds: that is probably Lamb's greatest gift to most people who discover him. There are some who have the history of the Moghuls in India or the migration of the Torgut Mongols at their fingertips: they won't have this experience from Lamb. For the rest of us, and I think it's most of us, no matter what our heritage, Lamb takes us places that are new, even though they have always been there-places that are richly imagined, even though they are real.

  As a westerner writing about Asia, Lamb is often concerned about the clash between East and West, but his fiction is not polluted by the Yellow Peril hysteria so common in his generation (and later ones). As has often been observed, Fu Manchu and his villainous ilk can only exist as aliens in someone else's culture; in these stories, the westerners (if any are the outsiders. Western characters play the villain as often as the hero, and in the longest story in this book there are no European characters at all. Lamb is confronting Genghis Khan, Subotai Bahadur, Ye Liu Chutsai, and others on their own ground, and he does so by taking the radical position that they are human beings-of various cultures, to be sure, but no more or less inherently inscrutable than someone from Brooklyn or Chicago. In fact, Lamb's stories are unusually free from racism of any sort, so that it is startling to read in one a casual reference to "thieving blacks." (Even that might be the attitude of the viewpoint character rather than the narrator.

  Buddhists are not so lucky: Buddhism and the allied (or at least entangled) tradition of Bon are normally painted in hostile colors in Lamb's fiction. I don't mean to minimize this; I would just say that this represents a historical attitude that Lamb probably found in his sources, rather than importing it there. Howard Jones, the editor to whose tireless labor we owe these splendid new editions of Lamb's fiction, has wisely decided against meddling with Lamb's text for political reasons or any other reason. Even the rather Victorian dashes that mask the characters' mild and infrequent profanity survive in these editions unaltered.

  In these adventures in a patriarchal world, most of the characters are men, but when women appear, they are not mere plot-coupons or MacGuffins. Nadesha (from "The Road of the Giants" ~, in particular, is a dashing, heroic figure, and the bitter Cherla ("The House of the Strongest" and the tragic Aina ("The Net" are, in their ways, equally memorable. Lamb often draws his characters in broad strokes, but they are never mere caricatures, and if he is intent on portraying historical realities that test the limits of our sympathy, he never forgets to make his characters sympathetic.

  Lamb was also a gifted stylist of plain, eloquent English. That may be surprising: most of the stories in this volume originally appeared in a pulp magazine, not a medium famous for its literary sophistication. But Adventure was an unusual pulp, deliberately pitched at readers looking for more intelligent fare. (The young Sinclair Lewis worked there as an editor.) And, even when he was being paid by the word, Lamb just wasn't the type to lard his sentences with excess verbiage. He almost invariably (as Twain puts it) picks "the r
ight word, not its second cousin."

  I like, for instance, the ambiguous threat the hero makes to the opposing general in "The Wolf-Chaser": "'Tell Galdan Khan what you have seen,' smiled Hugo. 'Say that he will never see his mirzas again. On the first clear night I will come into his lines and speak with him."' His characters don't all sound the same, but he likes to craft ones that speak with a certain snap. An exchange from "Sleeping Lion" ~a tale of Marco Polo at the court off Kublai Khan):

  "Can you make me invisible so that I may pass through gates unseen?"

  "I can make a mountain invisible," he croaked.

  "How?

  "By looking the other way," he snarled.

  Lamb doesn't bother to strain for unusual verbal effects. He picks subjects worth talking about, then describes with searing directness what his mind's eye sees. Here are the Torguts on the move (from "The Road of the Giants"): "With steady eyes he was looking into a sunrise that, seen through the smoke, was the hue of blood. This ruddy glow tinged the brown faces that passed the Khan; it dyed red the tossing horns of the cattle. Two hundred thousand humans had burned their homes and were mustering for a march in the dead of winter over one of the most barren regions of the earth."

  Lamb writes a good deal about war, and he doesn't write about it, as someone once said of Vergil, "with eyes averted." These are ripping yarns in the finest tradition. Out of many examples, here's part of a scene from "The Three Palladins" where the Mongols are fighting over the ruins of their leader's tent. It was attacked during the night by assassins, shot full of arrows, and finally set afire. Temujin (later Genghis Khan[ is feared dead, but then "the sand [was] stirring at the edge of Temujin's crumpled and blazing tent. The sand heaved and fell aside as if an enormous mole were rising to the surface, but instead of a mole a blackened face was revealed by the glow of the fire. Presently the body of a man followed the face, and Temujin climbed out of the hole he had dug in the loose sand while the arrows slashed through his yurt." He tunneled his way out of the assassination scene and lived to make his would-be assassins sorry that they'd missed. All in a day's work-if you're Genghis Khan.