King Conan’s small army had been “swept into eternity,” betrayed by his allies who lured him to a distant battlefield with only his personal bodyguard, at the behest of the unholy sorcerer of Koth, who reads ancient horrors from books fashioned of the skin of flayed slave girls.
“It took seven years and stacks of gold to train each and there they lie—kite’s meat!” Said the king of Koth as Conan stood on the neck of one of his knights, the ground around him piled high with the dead he had heaped there.
A typical manipulative villain, Xotha-Lanti, the sorcerer, wants Conan for a captive pet, to hold his puppet kings in check, which permits Howard a chance to sketch the nastiest dungeon in fiction. The sorcerer fells Conan with a touch and says, “The lion’s fangs are drawn,” and has Conan weighted in chains and carted off in the back of a chariot.
This sorcerer, “Who is greater than any king,” is, for Howard, an allegory for the international bankers who had the power to bring down nations. In our day, as our economies lie captive before the machinations of global financiers, The Scarlet Citadel strikes a keen note.
“Over all brooded the Citadel,” for although Koth was a kingdom, the temples of its gods and the palace of its king, were squat and tiny beneath the shadow of The Scarlet Citadel of the sorcerer, which gives away Howard’s mark, with the sorcerer’s tower obviously standing in for the investment banker’s sky scraper, that had risen in Howard’s youth, and from where manipulative men brought destruction on the American economy when he was about thirty.
“You and that black-faced pig beside you!” roared Conan at his captors. He then goes on to make a populist case for low taxation while he castigates the conspirator kings.
“Free my hands and I’ll varnish this floor with your brains!” he snarls, and then declines to betray his people by joining the conspiracy and is hauled off to the sorcerer’s dungeon.
Conan cursed his vulture-like captive, and soon gets to curse the black jailor, and experience the full horrors of the dungeon, which, in this reader’s mind, served for Howard as the twisted avarice-driven logic of the fiends who bought and sold kings and harvested their subjects like so much grain. A sorcerer, with a tower in one nation, collects slave kings under his spell in his quest to feed off of the entire human race like some great soul-eating fiend.
“Men and women were to the wizard no more than the insect is to the scientist,” and Conan was driven mad by the prospect of his slave girls’ pearly white skin being flayed by the sorcerer for the parchment pages of his damned books.
The dungeon is run exclusively by black men, one of whom owes a vendetta for Conan killing his brother in the black kingdoms. Their conversation, as Conan is chained and the black jailer torments him, is one of the most savage verbal exchanges in fiction, with tribal hatreds flaming bright. Howard, takes one swipe at the materialism then engulfing white America when he puts searing words into the black jailor’s mouth, that are too good to give away here.
Beyond that, Conan serves as the reader’s startled guide through the bowels of human society, the sullied abode from which the workings of civilization are controlled by the puppet masters that rule kings and lesser politicians as if they were pet monkeys. The horrific aspects of the story hinge on the precipice between sanity and insanity and finds its ultimate expression in the person of an evil flower, a flower with a name.
