These adventures, set in medieval-era Europe and the Near East, are among the most gripping Howard ever wrote, full of pageantry, romance, and battle scenes worthy of Tolstoy himself. Most of all, they feature some of Howard’s most unusual and memorable characters, including Cormac FitzGeoffrey, a half-Irish, half-Norman man of war who follows Richard the Lion-hearted to twelfth-century Palestine—or, as it was known to the Crusaders, Outremer; Diego de Guzman, a Spaniard who visits Cairo in the guise of a Muslim on a mission of revenge; and the legendary sword woman Dark Agn?s, who, faced with an arranged marriage to a brutal husband in sixteenth-century France, cuts the ceremony short with a dagger thrust and flees to forge a new identity on the battlefield.
Contents:
Spears of Clontarf
Hawks Over Egypt
The Outgoing of Sigurd the Jerusalem-Farer (v)
The Road of Azrael
The Lion of Tiberias
Gates of Empire
Hawks of Outremer
The Blood of Belshazzar
Red Blades of Black Cathay
The Sowers of the Thunder
The Skull in the Clouds (v)
A Thousand Years Ago (v)
Lord of Samarcand
Timur-lang (v)
Sword Woman
Blades for France
The Shadow of the Vulture
The Road of the Eagles
Miscellanea:
Untitled Fragment (The Track of Bohemund)
Untitled Synopsis (The Slave-Princess)
Untitled Fragment (The Slave-Princess)
Untitled Fragment (“He knew de Bracy…”)
Untitled Fragment (“The wind from the Mediterranean…”)
Recap of Harold Lamb’s “The Wolf Chaser”
Untitled Fragment (“The Persians had all fled…”)
The Sign of the Sickle (v)
Mistress of Death