I have read a lot of Robert E. Howard’s writing over the years. My introduction to Howard’s fiction was in the form of the Roy Thomas adaptations for Marvel Comics. The first actual Howard verbiage I read was, “The Hour of the Dragon”, the longest Conan story he ever wrote, and still one of my favorites. I still enjoy Howard, for the most part, though this is diminished when my inner editor gets out of his cell and starts screaming about all of the things Howard does that he would never let me get away with in my own writing.
There are a LOT of these things, unfortunately. Howard was a verbose atmospheric writer; I am a terse character writer. But still: Howard is credited with creating the “Sword & Sorcery” genre, and while my stuff isn’t EXACTLY that, it is closer to that than to any other sub-genre.
I recently consumed the first half of a two volume set that presents Howard’s original “Weird Tales” Conan stories in as close to Howard’s original words as possible. And somewhere along the line, I grabbed that vociferous inner editor by the collar and said, “I’ll make you a deal. You leave me alone to read my nostalgia fantasy to the end of this book, and you and I will REWRITE a Howard story to your specifications, OK?” He fainted, but he didn’t forget, so I had a new project.
The first trick was to find a Howard story that had enough structural integrity to survive the treatment. That turned out to be a BIG issue, because Howard’s stories are full of wild coincidences, blind luck, and assorted variations on deus ex machina. Mine just aren’t.
I finally came around to “Worms of the Earth”, which is one of Howard’s most highly regarded stories. It’s also a definite H.P. Lovecraft homage, with unusually little action by Howard’s standards, and some definite Lovecraft shout-outs (one mention of R’lyeh and three of Dagon). The end result was my story “Fool’s Fortress”, which vaguely follows the outline of “Worms”, but, well, see for yourself.
“Worms of the Earth” is in the public domain, and is available free from Project Gutenberg, among other sources. There follows a synopsis of Howard’s original story, followed by my notes on why I made the changes I did. The notes are longer than the synopsis, and sometimes quite snarky. Welcome to my writing process; you have been warned.
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“Worms of the Earth”: Synopsis and Commentary
Setting: Roman Britain, sometime after the construction of Hadrian’s Wall (1)
Characters:
Bran Mak Morn, King of the Picts (2)
Titus Sulla, Roman governor of Eboracum (present day York)
The Worms of the Earth (Human-snake subterranean creatures) (3)
Atla, a “witch”, a Worm/human half-breed (4)
Nameless, a Pict
Valerius, a Roman soldier
Before the story started, Nameless accused a Roman merchant of cheating him. The merchant struck Nameless, and Nameless killed him. As the story begins, Nameless is being crucified for murdering a Roman citizen. Sulla is presiding, Bran (masquerading as his own envoy) is observing. Valerius is standing guard. Once the cross has been erected, Sulla tells Valerius to give Nameless some water. Valerius attempts to do so, but Nameless spits in his face; Valerius draws his sword and kills Nameless. Sulla reviles Valerius for sparing Nameless the torture of death on the cross, and orders him to be incarcerated overnight, with other punishment to follow.
Later, in private, Bran swears vengeance against Sulla. (5) That night, he breaks into the military prison and kills Valerius, (6) and then leaves Eboracum and heads north to Pictish lands. Once there, he seeks out the half-breed witch Atla, and asks for her aid in getting the Worms to kidnap Sulla for him. Atla first attempts to kill Bran, but when she fails, she says that she knows of something precious to the Worms that Bran can steal, and then ransom back to them for their services, but she wants “the kisses of a king” (a night of sex) as payment. (7)
Bran steals and then hides the item, and then he and Atla descend into the lair of the Worms to negotiate the ransom with Atla as go-between. (8) The worms agree, and an exchange is scheduled for the following night.
The next night, Bran recovers the object from its hiding place (9) and heads to the rendezvous, but on a whim visits the Roman fortress where he knows that Sulla is. He finds the fortress in ruins. He rushes into the debris and manages to find a single dying soldier. This soldier was among those who broke into Sulla’s room after he screamed, and found Sulla missing, and a tunnel that led deep into the earth– and then the fortress collapsed. (10)
At the rendezvous, Atla again serves as go-between, and the exchange is made. Bran had intended to force Sulla into a duel, but Sulla’s mind has been destroyed by his time with the Worms, and Bran just kills him. As Bran prepares to leave the place, Atla taunts him, and he strikes her in the mouth before mounting his horse and riding away. (11)
Comments:
1) Howard’s story is undated, and could have taken place at any time between the completion of Hadrian’s Wall and the Roman withdrawal. As the antagonist of my story shifted away from Sulla and to Rome as a whole, the choice of focusing on the abandonment of the Antonine Wall became obvious.
2) I had originally intended to leave Bran’s name intact, but as the story grew, I realized that Bran wasn’t really a character I wanted to write about, so I went to the list of Pictish kings (all of whom were later than the Roman withdrawal, by the way) on Wikipedia and went name shopping. My Taran is definitely NOT Lloyd Alexander’s Taran, but I will at least tip my hat to him.
3) Snake people? Really, Bob? You had all of British folklore to play with, and you decided to use snake people? Just… No.
4) It was clear from the outset that my half-breed witch was going to be saner and more detailed than Howard’s Atla, so I never considered using her name. Though she did bequeath her first initial to Aethlan.
5) This is where my story really breaks from Howard’s. Howard’s Bran is ultimately motivated by pride; he is offended that Sulla had the temerity to pass judgment on a Pict, and did not turn him over to local government for punishment. This is, frankly, insane. Look at the crime. It seems that Nameless, a decidedly second class citizen in a Roman city, brought a knife to a fist fight, and fatally stabbed an unarmed man. This is a story that ends with AT LEAST life in prison, pretty much anywhere in the world, at any point in history. Sulla was stupid to brag about it to a Pict of substance, but in the end, he was really just being a typical Roman. After a fair amount of thought, I fixed this by taking away Nameless’ knife, and letting the Roman merchant live. I don’t know of a specific instance of a local being crucified for knocking out the tooth of a Roman citizen, but it’s EXTREMELY likely that it happened somewhere along the line.
6) This is the point at which I decided I didn’t want to use Howard’s Bran at all. I have read this story a few times over the years, but it wasn’t until I approached the death of Valerius as a writer that I realized how despicable it was. Bran killed an unarmed man from ambush. A millennium later, the Norse (who were not at all squeamish about violent death) would have regarded this as a “secret murder”, and a capital offense. So just no.
7) Howard’s Atla is just insane. She breaks a knife against Bran’s hauberk, and then agrees to betray the Worms in exchange for a night of sex? Really, Bob? But this insanity DID make sex a part of the transaction, which led to the idea that the key was not the sex, but rather siring a child, and that launched Aethlan’s personality. So I guess I’m grateful.
8) More insanity. By acting as Bran’s go-between, Atla has marked herself as Bran’s most probable source of information about the Magic Bowling Ball (sorry, Howard called it “the Black Stone”, but that’s what it was). So not only did Atla betray the Worms for a roll in the hay, she admitted to the betrayal in front of them. Really?
9) Bran hid the Black Stone by carefully tossing it into the middle of a pond. A pond of unknown depth and bottom contour, which was rumored to house some kind of monster. Naturally, he has more trouble than he expected recovering it. Having dived to the bottom of a small lake after a handful of mud a few times, I would say that his chance of finding the thing at night in “surprisingly deep” water was pretty much zero. So chalk up this one to blind luck. Unrelated but worth noting: The pond monster hints at being real, making this the most Lovecraftian passage in a story with lots of Lovecraft influence. Vague unrealized menace was Lovecraft’s stock in trade.
10) On the subject of blind luck: The sole survivor of the collapse of Trajan’s Tower just happens to be one of the men who rushed into Sulla’s quarters, and he lives just long enough to tell his story to Bran. Howard’s art, and he is good at it, is to make you not notice how absurd this is. But that doesn’t make the melodrama any less blatant.
11) The bit about striking Atla in the mouth is interesting. Howard had a personal code against striking women, and he generally shared that with his protagonists. So this, in the penultimate paragraph of the story, is just… strange. (OK, I can rationalize it by saying that Bran was so disgusted and horrified by his contact with the worms that Howard had him break a taboo to express it, but I don’t actually believe that.)
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So… I started out with Howard’s Lovecraftian sword & sorcery horror story, and transmogrified it into a sword & sorcery love story. I didn’t expect Aethlan to become nearly as big a character as she ultimately did, and I very much did not expect Taran to marry her. (My characters seem to have a real tendency to marry each other when I am not paying attention. I’m not sure what to make of that. Maybe I really AM a romance writer, after all.)
“Fool’s Fortress” weighs in at about 3600 words; “Worms of the Earth” is about 12,300. They both contain about the same amount of story, and they both include a short list of common landmarks. I think that “Fool’s Fortress” wants to be bigger than it is, but I don’t really see where adding to it won’t also weaken it. Such is life.
So. I think I have exhausted my supply of arrogance and audacity, at least for a while. Thanks for your company.
P.D. Haynie
November 12, 2022