Conan the Barbarian

Sun & 13 Cantons (Soho)

Producers, Associate Producers, Assistant Producers, Series Producers, Executive Producers and, worst of all, Video Editors, lined the bar ten deep.

It was a press more furious than the battle for Aquilonia. My broadsword hissed furiously from its sheath, my fur-trimmed war boots in a fighting stance. One that left plenty of room between my mighty knees.

The crowds parted and I advanced on the bar. Just as well I always carry four feet of sharpened steel. Without an instrument of death forged by long-dead giants, I probably would not have been served all night . . .

I brushed aside a few half-men with a mighty-thewed arm and approached the serving wench.

“I seek the sorcerer Thulsa Doom. He killed my father. He took my father’s sword. A witch prophesied that I would find him somewhere in the West End.”

“No, no, he’s not in tonight.”

“Hmmm.” A disappointment. But that which does not kill us makes us stronger.

“Friday night’s always rammed to the rafters. You might find, say, a Wednesday lunchtime better for questing.”

She may have been right, but that changed nothing. “Nonetheless, woman, I am here now. Bring me wild hog, spit-roasted over a roaring fire-pit.”

“Fire-pit got taken out when they did the new décor. We’ve got a lot of mirrors, now, though.”

“So I see.” I gave the mirrors a piercing warrior’s stare. “Good for seeing enemies approaching from behind.”

“Crisps, maybe?”

“Wild hog flavour?”

“I can do smoky bacon.”

“Hmmm.” Another disappointment, but I feared it was as close as we would get to hog in Soho. “Have you foaming mead?”

“Erm . . . not sure we’ve got that. We have Staropramen—”

“By Crom! Magic words! Away from me, sorceress!”

“No! No! Put down the sword! It’s not magic, it’s Czech! A Czech beer!”

“Ah.” I lowered the blade. Czechs were good. Hardy and muscular folk. My kind of people. “A flagon of that, then. But I smell so much as a whiff of sorcery and it’s swording time. And if you do see the sorcerer Thulsa Doom, I’ll be over there by the fancy hat stand.”

The masses crushed in behind me like vultures on a corpse as I left the bar, struggling to carry pint, sword and crisps at once – truly work for a hero chosen by the gods. There were more people than ever now, their hair strangely primped and waxed, rather than left to flow freely down a bronzed back like an honest warrior’s.

They crowded against the windows on the pavement, they sat upon the curb next to their accursed scooters. A man loomed up before me. Or half a man, at least. Perhaps an agent of the sorcerer Thulsa Doom.

“Step aside or suffer,” I warned him in my mightiest warrior's voice. He could scarcely hear me over the mindless babble of the bar, louder even than the bloodthirsty roar of the audience at the Pits of Death.

“You what? Just trying to get to the toilet, mate. German, are you?”

“Cimmerian,” I answered, my righteous rage swilling within my manly breast. “But my people were scattered long ago and I was taken as a slave and forced to push a wheel of pain.”

“Pff. Tough game, that, the old wheel of pain.”

“The toughest,” I answered, my fury mounting. “Now step aside or die!”

“Go to the gym, do you? I keep meaning to go more, but I’ve got this problem with my neck—”

“Enough talk!”

A storm of steel raged through the Sun and Thirteen Cantons that Friday night. A red tide. Not a single person working in television did I leave alive. The mirrors were dashed with brains. The pavement ran with blood and distressed denim. I left expensive haircuts in ruins, the scooters I made heaps of twisted metal.

At least now you can get to the bar.

Conan’s rating for the Sun and Thirteen Cantons: Four swords out of . . .

I cannot count past four.

Jabercrumble