Formerly published as ‘Ebon Throne’, revised
This untitled and unsold piece is of four verses: one of eight lines, two of ten lines each, and one of seven lines. It seems to involve Howard’s youthful fascination with dark women of power and rare knowledge, which would come into full life in Black Canaan, Xuthal of the Dusk, and in the psychopathically dark tales of Solomon Kane, the Puritan avenger who travelled the lonely places of Europe and Africa murdering wrongdoers.
The protagonist of the poem is haunted by terrible visions as a youth, then, as a man, struggles through an abysmal swamp of doubt haunted by terrible ghouls, until the swamp itself embraces him like a fetid, monstrous woman.
The dry-footed world of his adulthood is depicted as even more bestial for its invitation of the young man’s involvement and includes black-faced pigs that roared in the devil’s own pig pens, demons playing maddening music, “And naked witches, young and brazen-eyed, Flaunted their buttocks to a lustful moon.”
The protagonist is chased on through a night hunted by shambling devils until he is finally flung naked, “Before a great dark woman’s ebon throne. How dark, inhuman, strange, her deep eyes shone!”
Howard once described himself to a fellow writer as having been “Off his noodle” when he wrote Wolfshead, about a doomed outpost on the African coast in which the Europeans and local natives were at the mercy of a werewolf from Europe. After reading this poem this reader is inclined to agree that Howard was definitely subject to such moments. Needless to say, no pulp editor would consider publishing such a thing in Howard’s day.
The subject of this dark, seething verse seems to have formed a seedbed for Howard's vision of female villainy, most often juxtaposed [as in Xuthal of the Dusk] with an equally strong vision of feminine virtue, and in other tales, such as Black Canaan and Worms of the Earth, providing a test of the hero's character. In Moon of Skulls and Red Nails both dichotomies are wedded to great affect.
A Well of Heroes
