Swords From the East (2 page)

Lamb then tackled a novel of a Mongol tribe's perilous migration east, with a westerner as one of the main-though not the only-protagonists. Before too much longer, though, he drafted what he might always have longed to do, given his abiding fascination with Genghis Khan. The result was "The Three Palladins," which explores the early days of Temujin through the eyes of his confidant, a Cathayan prince. On first reading it as a younger man, I was for some reason disappointed that it had nothing to do with Khlit the Cossack, and I failed to perceive its worth. Like almost all of Lamb's Adventure-era fiction, it is swashbuckling fare seasoned with exotic locale. There is tension and duplicitous scheming on every hand. The author seems to have had almost as much fun with the characters as the reader, for some of them turn up in other stories-the mighty Subotai, and the clever minstrel Chepe Noyon in the Durandal cycle and "The Making of the Morning Star," which is included in Swords from the West (Bison Books, 2009. And Genghis Khan, of course, as a shaper of events and mythic figure, haunts much of Lamb's fiction, affecting even the Khlit cycle set hundreds of years later, most famously in one of the best of all the Khlit the Cossack stories, "The Mighty Manslayer," which appears in Wolf of the Steppes (Bison Books, 2006).

Lamb was fortunate to have become established as a writer of both screenplays and history books by the time the Great Depression hit. Adventure, his mainstay, was no longer published as frequently or capable of paying as well. Lamb's fiction began to be printed in the slicks-Collier's and, a little later, the Saturday Evening Post (among a handful of similar magazines-where he still wrote short historicals as well as contemporary pieces. Among the later work included in this volume is a deft little mystery adventure titled "Sleeping Lion," with none other than Marco Polo as one of the primary characters, the other being a Tatar serving girl. Unfortunately, Collier's printed this story without its middle third. What remains is included. Sadly, the original is long since lost.

There also exist two curious pieces from Lamb's Adventure days: "The Book of the Tiger: The Warrior" and "The Book of the Tiger: The Emperor." Together they tell the story of Babur, the Tiger, first Moghul emperor, mostly transcribed and condensed from Babur's fascinating autobiography. They presage Lamb's later books like Alexander the Great and Theodora and the Emperor, where the narrative is a history that occasionally drifts into fiction. Those volumes have never been among my favorites (Hannibal, both volumes of The Crusades, and March of the Barbarians top my list), but I'm fond of these Babur pieces even if they sometimes sound more like summaries than fully realized stories. Lamb captured the tone of a truthful and engaging historical character. The amount of luck hand the stupidity of his fellow mangy involved in Babur's survival through adversity is difficult to believe. Were I to invent such a story and submit it to a publisher, it would be dismissed out of hand as preposterous, but this one seems to be true! Lamb later turned to other Asian characters as protagonists and narrators, and you can find many of those tales in Swords from the Desert Bison Books, 2009 ~.

Much of Lamb's fiction output revolved around conflicts generated by the colliding motivations of his characters and their cultures. Through most of the stories in this book, the physical environment takes on an antagonistic role as well, for the people in these tales of high Asia must contend with steep mountain passes, blinding snows, searing deserts, and ice-choked rivers. While justice may win out or protagonist triumph, the victories seem transitory, to be celebrated briefly before the candles are extinguished and the central characters shuffle off the stage. Kings, kingdoms, and heroes fall and fade to memory; nothing is eternal but the uncaring miles of mountain and steppe and the shifting northern lights that shine above them.

That life is sweet and Lady Death ever eager for the embrace of heroes is a theme that can be found in Lamb's fiction from the very beginning, but readers may note that all of these tales-even the relatively light "Azadi's Jest"-are infused with a certain bleakness more marked than usual. We can exult in the adventure, but we are reminded to savor our sand castles before time and tide sweep them away.

If you enjoy these stories of Mongolia, you have not far to look for more of Lamb's writing on the subject; his history and biography books are still held in many public libraries. Harold Lamb's first book, a biography of Genghis Khan, has fared better than any of his other works, remaining in print since 1927. Lamb himself thought this was peculiar because he believed his later books were better written. While Genghis Khan is a good read, I tend to agree: Tamerlane is a strong book, and March of the Barbarians is riveting. The latter title does little to reveal the quality within, for March is an in-depth history of the complex inner workings of the Mongol empire, written when Lamb was more experienced and had the financial wherewithal-as well as the clout with publishers-to take the time for extensive research. His Genghis Khan proposal had been approved by the publisher only so long as he could write the book in two weeks, a demanding request even for someone intimately familiar with the subject matter. March of the Barbarians covers the same material as Genghis Khan in richer detail, and then goes on to describe the great Khan's successors with the same care. Frederick Lamb, Harold's son, named it the favorite of all his father's writing.

Lamb always had the gift of taking facts and infusing them with fascinating vitality, be it in fiction or history or a combination thereof. It is my privilege now to step aside so that you can acquaint yourselves with some of the most extraordinary people and events he ever brought to life on the printed page.

Enjoy!

I would like to thank Bill Prather of the Thacher School for his continued support. This volume would not have been possible without the aid of Bruce Nordstrom, who long ago provided Lamb's Collier's texts and other research notes, and Alfred Lybeck, who provided "Camp-Fire" letters and additional information. I am grateful to Kevin Cook, who loaned me the Adventure text of "The Three Palladins"; to Sara E. F. Edwards for manuscript assistance; and to Simon Elliott of the Charles E. Young Research Library, Department of Special Collections at UCLA, who searched through the library's Harold Lamb collection for the original manuscript of "Sleeping Lion," unfortunately without success. The staff at Bison Books was, as always, a pleasure to work with, and I must give a special tip of the hat to Sabrina Stellrecht, Alicia Christensen, Jonathan Lawrence, and Alison Rold for their excellent work. I would also like to express my appreciation for the advice of Victor Dreger, Jan van Heinegen, and James Pfundstein, gentlemen and scholars. Lastly, I wish again to thank my father, the late Victor Jones, who helped me locate various Adventure magazines, and Dr. John Drury Clark, whose lovingly preserved collection of Lamb stories is the chief source of 75 percent of my Adventure manuscripts.

It was all Harold Lamb's fault. I had just asked my mother another one of Those Questions. Most questions we asked her got answers, but Those Questions got very serious, lengthy discussion-type answers. My first one of Those Questions, I distinctly remember, was when I asked my mother the meaning of a word which, as far as I was concerned, was just something that rhymed with "truck." The answer turned out to be quite complex, linguistically and biologically. The current question got almost as unexpected and serious an answer: I had asked my mother if "Mongol" meant the same thing as "Mongoloid."

The question was important to me, because I had been reading Harold Lamb's Genghis Khan: Emperor of All Men and, as far as I was concerned, the Mongols were pretty damn cool, and it was also fairly clear what they were: a confederation of tribes from the Gobi Desert who swept out under the leadership of Genghis Khan to establish the greatest empire in the history of the world. (It was like Dune, except real. Also, they weren't religious fanatics or spice addicts.) But I had been reading some other stuff (Heinlein's Sixth Column, I think) where "Mongoloid" was used as a racial designation, along with "Caucasoid" and "Negroid" and other ugly but impressive-sounding words. (Everything becomes more manageable if you slap the "-oid" suffix on it. A complex human individual turns out to be merely one sample of a type of humanoid, and even a hemorrhage is demoted to a mere hemorrhoid. Apply the right medicine to any "-oid" and it will shrink until you hardly notice it anymore.) And I had been hearing "Mongoloid" used as a slur on the school playground. I consulted a map and found the Caucasus Mountains and, as it happened, an Outer Mongolia but no Inner Mongolia, which struck me as very sus picious, very suspicious indeed. The Internet not having been invented yet (it was that long agog, I finally decided to ask Mom.

My mother, it seems to me now, was not a naturally patient woman, and the patience she was born with had lots of work to do, but she took a lot of trouble answering Those Questions from any of her kids. This was not one of her more satisfying answers, but that wasn't her fault: it's what she had to work with. By the end of it I had a lot of information about Down syndrome and abusive terms that one could but should not use in a variety of social environments, but the big (if unspoken) takeaway was how stupid people could be about race (a lesson worth learning early and often, unfortunately).

Never mind. Certain things became clear: people with Down syndrome were people with Down syndrome. People who used "Mongoloid" as a slur in any context were losers. And Genghis Khan was the emperor of all men.

I soon tracked down Lamb's historical narrative of the Mongol conquests, March of the Barbarians, and his last book, Babur the Tiger (based on Babur's autobiography, which Lamb also adapted for two stories that appear in this volume, and I even branched out to his other biographies, like Hannibal (although nowadays I think the good guys won that particular world ward and his two-volume history of the Crusades. One book I was especially eager to lay Iny hands on was his biography of Tamerlane "the Iron Limper." I never did find it (though I did file away that image of a tough guy who limped; seemed like it might be useful one days. Looking for Lamb's Tamerlane, I found Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, and whole new worlds opened up.

New worlds: that is probably Lamb's greatest gift to most people who discover him. There are some who have the history of the Moghuls in India or the migration of the Torgut Mongols at their fingertips: they won't have this experience from Lamb. For the rest of us, and I think it's most of us, no matter what our heritage, Lamb takes us places that are new, even though they have always been there-places that are richly imagined, even though they are real.

As a westerner writing about Asia, Lamb is often concerned about the clash between East and West, but his fiction is not polluted by the Yellow Peril hysteria so common in his generation (and later ones). As has often been observed, Fu Manchu and his villainous ilk can only exist as aliens in someone else's culture; in these stories, the westerners (if any are the outsiders. Western characters play the villain as often as the hero, and in the longest story in this book there are no European characters at all. Lamb is confronting Genghis Khan, Subotai Bahadur, Ye Liu Chutsai, and others on their own ground, and he does so by taking the radical position that they are human beings-of various cultures, to be sure, but no more or less inherently inscrutable than someone from Brooklyn or Chicago. In fact, Lamb's stories are unusually free from racism of any sort, so that it is startling to read in one a casual reference to "thieving blacks." (Even that might be the attitude of the viewpoint character rather than the narrator.