Conan Of The Isles

As a result of a quarrel with a superior officer., Conan left Turan. After an unsuccessful try at treasure-hunting in Zamora and a brief visit to his Cimmerian homeland, he embarked upon the career of a mercenary soldier in the Hyborian kingdoms. Circumstances - violent as usual -made him a pirate along the coasts of Kush, with a crew of black corsairs and the Shemitish she-pirate Belit as his partner. The natives called him Amra, the Lion.

After Belit was slain, Conan became a chief among the black tribes. Then he served as a condottiere in Shem and among the southernmost Hyborian kingdoms. Later still, Conan appeared as a leader of the kozaki, a horde of outlaws who roamed the steppes between the Hyborian lands and Turan. He was captain of a pirate craft on the great inland Sea of Vilayet and a chief among the nomadic Zuagirs of the southeastern deserts.

After a stretch as a mercenary captain in the army of the king of Iranistan, Conan arrived in the foothills of the Himelian Mountains, a vast stretch of broken country sundering Iranistan, Turan, and the tropical kingdom of Vendhya. In the course of wild adventures, he tried but failed to weld the fierce hill tribes into a united power. Next, he returned westward for another stretch of soldiering in Koth and Argos. During this period, he was briefly co-ruler of the desert city of Tombalku. Then back to the sea, first as a pirate of the Baracha Isles, then as captain of a ship of the Zingaran buccaneers.

When rival buccaneers sank Conan's ship, he served again as a mercenary in Stygia and among the black kingdoms. Then he wandered north to Aquilonia and became a scout on the Pictish frontier. When the Picts, with the help of the wizard Zogar Sag, attacked the Aquilonian settlements, Conan failed to save Fort Tuscelan but did save the lives of a number of settlers between the Thunder and Black rivers.

After rising to command in the Aquilonian army and defeating a Pictish invasion, Conan was lured back to Tarantia, the capital, and imprisoned by the jealous King Numedides. Escaping, he became involved in a three-cornered conflict among the Picts and two crews of pirates on the western coast of Pictland. Then he was chosen to lead an Aquilonian revolution against the degenerate King Numedides. Slaying Numedides on his own throne, Conan, in his early forties, became the ruler of the mightiest Hyborian kingdom.

Conan soon found that being king was no bed of houris. A cabal of discontented nobles almost succeeded in assassinating him. By a ruse, the kings of Ophir and Koth trapped and imprisoned him in order to have a free hand with the conquest of Aquilonia. With the help of a fellow prisoner - a wizard - Conan escaped in time to turn the tables on the invaders.

Subsequently, a cabal of rivals plotting to gain the rule of Aquilonia revived the mummy of a long-dead Acheron-tian wizard, Xaltotun, to aid them in their enterprise. Conan was defeated and driven from his kingdom, but again he returned to confound his foes.

In the process, Conan for the first time acquired a legitimate queen. This was Zenobia, a slave girl who saved his life when he was imprisoned in the dungeon under the palace of King Tarascus of Nemedia. He tactfully dismissed his harem of shapely concubines and settled down to the pleasures and pains of wedded life. A Khitan sorcerer kidnapped Zenobia, forcing Conan to travel across half the world, through manifold perils, to recover her. Other plots and adventures involved Conan and his young son, also named Conan but usually known by his nickname of {Conn.'

Time passed; Zenobia died. Conan found his son near-ing maturity and old age creeping upon himself. A growing restlessness perturbed and irritated him...

L. Sprague de Camp

'- And at the last, O Prince, there came to pass that which all the plots of Ascalante the Rebel had failed to bring about, and for which the grim shade of Xaltotun was conjured in vain from the mouldering dust of his Acherontic tomb, and which even the hell-spawned sorceries of Yah Chieng, the Yellow Wizard of nighted and demon-ridden Khitai, failed to accomplish; and Conan of Aquilonia gave over the crown and the throne of the mightiest kingdom of all the West, and ventured forth into the Unknown, wherein he vanished forever from the knowledge of man.'

- THE NEMEDIAN CHRONICLES