Through the throng came a wolf: and he knew that it was the wolf whom he had rescued from the panther close by the ravine in the forest!
Strange, how long ago and far away that seemed! Yes, it was the same wolf. That same strange, shambling gait. Then the thing stood erect and raised its front feet to its head. What nameless horror was that?
Then the wolf’s head fell back, disclosing a man’s face. The face of a Pict; one of the first “werewolves.” The man stepped out of the wolfskin and strode forward, calling something. A Pict just starting to light the wood about the Briton’s feet drew back the torch and hesitated.
The wolf-Pict stepped forward and began to speak to the chief, using Celtic, evidently for the prisoner’s benefit. (Cororuc was surprized to hear so many speak his language, not reflecting upon its comparative simplicity, and the ability of the Picts.)
“What is this?” asked the Pict who had played wolf. “A man is to be burned who should not be!”
“How?” exclaimed the old man fiercely, clutching his long beard. “Who are you to go against a custom of age-old antiquity?”
“I met a panther,” answered the other, “and this Briton risked his life to save mine. Shall a Pict show ingratitude?”
And as the ancient hesitated, evidently pulled one way by his fanatical lust for revenge, and the other by his equally fierce racial pride, the Pict burst into a wild flight of oration, carried on in his own language. At last the ancient chief nodded.
“A Pict ever paid his debts,” said he with impressive grandeur. “Never a Pict forgets. Unbind him. No Celt shall ever say that a Pict showed ingratitude.”
Cororuc was released, and as, like a man in a daze, he tried to stammer his thanks, the chief waved them aside.
“A Pict never forgets a foe, ever remembers a friendly deed,” he replied.
“Come,” murmured his Pictish friend, tugging at the Celt’s arm.
He led the way into a cave leading away from the main cavern. As they went, Cororuc looked back, to see the ancient chief seated upon his stone throne, his eyes gleaming as he seemed to gaze back through the lost glories of the ages; on each hand the fires leaped and flickered. A figure of grandeur, the king of a lost race.
On and on Cororuc’s guide led him. And at last they emerged and the Briton saw the starlit sky above him.
“In that way is a village of your tribesmen,” said the Pict, pointing, “where you will find a welcome until you wish to take up your journey anew.”
And he pressed gifts on the Celt; gifts of garments of cloth and finely worked deerskin, beaded belts, a fine horn bow with arrows skilfully tipped with obsidian. Gifts of food. His own weapons were returned to him.
“But an instant,” said the Briton, as the Pict turned to go. “I followed your tracks in the forest. They vanished.” There was a question in his voice.
The Pict laughed softly, “I leaped into the branches of the tree. Had you looked up, you would have seen me. If ever you wish a friend, you will ever find one in Berula, chief among the Alban Picts.”
He turned and vanished. And Cororuc strode through the moonlight toward the Celtic village.
Poem
Previously published as ‘The Drums of Pictdom’
How can I wear the harness of toil
And sweat at the daily round,
While in my soul forever
The drums of Pictdom sound?
Miscellanea
NOTES ON MISCELLANEA
Two of Howard’s stories of the Picts, written only about two years apart, present strikingly different conceptions of the eventual fate of the race. In The Little People, probably written in 1928, Howard suggests that “the legend is that these Picts, whom the Celts looked upon as scarcely human, fled to caverns under the earth and lived there, coming out only at night, when they would burn, murder, and carry off children for their bloody rites of worship.” The story, clearly influenced by Arthur Machen’s The Shining Pyramid (which itself serves as a plot device to set Howard’s tale in motion), makes the Picts a race of underground dwellers with “stunted bodies, . . . gnarled limbs, . . . snake-like, beady eyes that stared unwinkingly, . . . grotesque, square faces with their unhuman features. . . .”
But in The Children of the Night, written about two years later, the author says that the Picts, as well as the Celts, despise these loathsome underground dwellers, now called Children of the Night. And to compound the problem, in The People of the Dark, written in 1931, Howard makes the linkage between The Little People and The Children of the Night explicit: they are both names for the same race of pre-Pictish inhabitants of the British Isles, driven underground and devolved to a state scarcely human. In both of these latter two stories, the ‘Children’ or ‘Little People’ are said to be descended from a ‘Mongoloid’ race that inhabited Europe before the coming of, first, the Picts, and then the Celts.
Given the internal consistency in Howard’s other tales of the Picts, this difference in relating their ultimate fate may strike the reader as odd. What happened is that, in August 1930, weird fictionist H. P. Lovecraft had written Howard a letter in which he expounded a theory, supposedly subscribed to by archaeologists, that the ‘Mediterraneans’ (Howard’s ‘Picts’), who spread over Europe and the British Isles before the coming of the Celts, were themselves preceded on the Continent by “the squat Mongoloids now represented by the Lapps,” who, in the wake of conquest first by the Mediterraneans and then by ‘Nordics,’ “took to deep woods & caves, & survived for a long time as malignantly vindictive foes . . . sinking so low in the anthropological scale that they became bywords of dread and repulsion.” Howard immediately adopted this idea.
In these stories, racial memory and ancient tribal hatreds play a prominent role. Without attempting to excuse this, we should understand the context in which these stories were created. Racialism, in the years before Hitler, was quite intellectually acceptable. Prominent scientists, naturalists, and philosophers promoted theories of racial differences that, generally, ‘proved’ the superiority of white Europeans, many going so far as to suggest that only whites were capable of cultural creation and innovation. Some went even further, and subdivided white Europeans into separate ‘races,’ to show that Northern Europeans (Aryans, or Nordics) were superior to Slavs (Alpines) and Southern Europeans (Mediterraneans). A focus of anthropology and archaeology was the idea of a volk, or ethnic/racial group, that had a unique language, used specific types of artifacts, and maintained an unique behavioral identity. Rooted in the nationalism prevalent at the time, these ideas were propounded by such eminent scholars as Gustaf Kossina and V. Gordon Childe. Social evolution was seen by these scholars as being due to a hazily defined ‘racial/ethnic vigor,’ intellectual and linguistic superiority, and hard work. ‘Social Darwinism,’ the idea that the theory of evolution applied to individuals and societies, as well as species, was in vogue, and ‘survival of the fittest’ meant that the most vigorous races would survive. Many writers undertook to warn the white race that they could not be complacent in the face of the rising power of the ‘colored’ world, lest they lose their favored position. It was the heyday of eugenics, the science dealing with the ‘improving’ of races through the control of genetic factors, to be accomplished by restrictions on reproduction among those with ‘inferior’ genes. The intelligence testing movement was gaining steam, using spurious (or simply fabricated) data to ‘prove’ that some races of mankind were more innately intelligent than others. Much of this pseudo-science, or selective presentation of data in support of preconceived biases, was widely accepted at the time, and was used as evidence when the United States established strict immigration quotas in 1924, giving preference to Northern Europeans. Even scientists who disavowed racism and discrimination, such as Franz Boas (Howard’s “Boaz”), still spent a great deal of time and effort in studying and attempting to isolate the physical characteristics of races.