Hyrkanians

The Hyrkanians are a nomadic people of the eastern steppes, a race whose mounted warriors and far-ranging caravans knit together the scattered lands of the Hyborian Age. Their homeland lies beyond barren Hyperborea, stretching toward the Vilayet Sea, where some of their stock have settled into urban life. They are a people of movement and trade, of horses and chains, and their presence in Conan's story marks every stage of his transformation from captive to avenger.

Origins and Way of Life

The Hyrkanians are first encountered through Toghrul, a red-bearded pit master who travels with his troupe around Asgard and Vanaheim, lands sometimes together called Nordheim or Northlands. He stages fights for the amusement of local chieftains and their gaming cronies, sometimes luring neighborhood champions with promises of gold to do combat with his Pit fighters—slaves all, whose final adversary is always Death. This is the Hyrkanian trade in its rawest form: the buying and selling of human life for spectacle, conducted with the same ease as the exchange of goods at a market.

Their reach extends to the western shores of the Vilayet Sea, where Turanians—men of Hyrkanian stock who have drawn ahead of their nomadic fellows in the arts and sciences of civilization—have reared glittering cities and learned the ways of urban life. These settled cousins represent the civilizing impulse within the Hyrkanian bloodline, a counterpoint to the wandering horsemen of the steppe. The contrast between the two branches of the same people illustrates the broader tension in the Hyborian world between nomadic freedom and urban order.

The Slave Trade and Conan's Captivity

The Hyrkanians are the engine of Conan's enslavement. After the Vanir raid on his Cimmerian village, the boy is marched into captivity, and it is Toghrul who becomes his new owner. The pit master trots smartly from town on his shaggy pony, the chain wound around his saddle pommel, clanking against the clumsy wooden collar that confines the Cimmerian's neck. Conan's legs, strong from years of toil at the wheel, ache as his master quickens his pace from a trot to an easy canter, and stones thrust jagged edges against the slave's naked feet.

At Toghrul's encampment, encircled by a rough log palisade, Conan finds the full apparatus of the Hyrkanian slave economy: houses and sheds, a corral for horses, and pens for the Pit slaves—men selected as much for their savage truculence as for their powerful bodies and superior fighting skills. The Hyrkanians have refined the brutal calculus of the arena, choosing their fighters not merely for strength but for temperament, breeding a class of warriors whose only future is combat until death.

The Education of a Champion

Under Hyrkanian tutelage, Conan receives the education that will carry him through the rest of his life. At Valamo, on the distant borders of Hyrkania, the master swordsman Oktar, himself a Hyrkanian, imparts his secrets to the Cimmerian. All through the winter, the youth drills and practises under Oktar's direction, and by the time spring melts winter's heavy snows, Toghrul is satisfied that nothing remains to teach his champion.

As Toghrul's most favored Pit fighter, Conan is often allowed to spend evening hours in the pit master's yurt, where his master entertains the warlords and chieftains who drift into Valamo to buy and sell or to trade gossip. Here Conan sits cross-legged and silent on the carpeted floor, plying the strangers with questions about methods of organized warfare. The war leaders are amused, thinking the principles of strategy and tactics of little use to a mere Pit slave, but Conan realizes that the more he knows, the better his chances of survival. He resolves that he will not be a Pit slave forever, and since the world appears to be a place of constant conflict where the strong take whatever they have the power to take, he will learn to do likewise. The Hyrkanians, in their casual contempt for the slave's ambition, unwittingly forge the very cunning that will undo their trade.

The Kerlait Tribe and Subotai

The Hyrkanians are not a single monolithic people but a collection of tribes, and one of their number becomes Conan's closest companion. Subotai, a Hyrkanian of the Kerlait tribe, describes himself in happier days as an archer, an assassin, and a thief. He is small and lean as a ferret, with a set of head and shoulders that reflects stealth and cunning, hard-bitten courage, and an honesty that Conan finds to his liking. Conan judges him a man who might throw a lie in your face but would never stab you in the back.

Subotai's skills complement Conan's brute strength throughout their adventures. When the two travel to Shadizar of Zamora, it is Subotai who leads Conan through obscure apertures and back alleys, navigating the city's hidden passages with the ease of a native-born thief. Their friendship, forged in the release from shackles and tested in the cult's dungeons, represents the positive face of the Hyrkanian character—the cunning and loyalty that exist alongside the slave trade's cruelty.

The Cult of Set and Hyrkanian Corruption

The Hyrkanians also appear within the ranks of the Cult of Set, where their nomadic heritage merges with the serpent god's dark worship. In the cult's ceremonies, young women and men, some scarcely more than children, dance and chant to the rhythm of myriads of tambourines, draped in soiled white garments with garlands of wilted flowers crowning their unbound hair. The procession winds toward a slender dark tower that pierces the sky, draped in shadows despite the brilliance of the day, and the chant rises: "Doom... Doom... Thulsa Doom..."

Within the cult's dungeons, the Hyrkanian presence is felt in the litter of corpses, male and female, some fresh, others far gone in decay, still others reduced to skeletal remains. The cult's practices—the mesmerized girl who throws herself into the corpse-filled pit, the flagellants who lash their naked flesh with whips made of serpents' hides barbed with snakes' fangs—represent the corruption of the eastern peoples into a death cult that worships destruction. The Hyrkanians, who once traded in slaves for the amusement of chieftains, now feed the insatiable appetite of a god who demands human sacrifice.

The Mountain of Power and the Great Cleansing

The Hyrkanian connection to the Cult of Set reaches its horrifying culmination at the Mountain of Power, where the cult's followers have become pilgrims to their own doom. Hung from meat hooks beside a great cauldron, half-hidden by steam and flickering firelight, the adventurers find human bodies, drawn and bloodless, like beef sides or plucked fowl. The victims had once been pilgrims to the Mountain of Power, followers of the serpent god, and now beast-men hack up their bodies with cleavers and toss the pieces into the boiling liquid.

Thulsa Doom, the cult's master, preaches the Great Cleansing to his gathered Faithful of Set, promising that all who stand against them in high places—parents, teachers, judges—shall depart in a night of blood and fire. The Hyrkanians, who once sold slaves for the arena's spectacle, have become the instruments of a far greater and more terrible sacrifice. Their journey from nomadic traders to cultist butchers traces the moral arc of the eastern peoples in Conan's world, from a harsh but comprehensible commerce to an incomprehensible devotion to death itself.

Significance in Conan's Journey

The Hyrkanians serve as both obstacle and teacher in Conan's rise. They are the first people to enslave him after the destruction of his village, the ones who forge his body into a weapon through the wheel and the pit. They give him his first education in warfare and strategy, even as they mock his ambition. They provide him with his truest companion in Subotai, and they confront him with the darkest face of eastern civilization in the Cult of Set. When Conan finally rides east through the Kezankian Mountains, clad in fine raiment with a tunic of mesh-mail and a cloak of well-tanned wolf skin, he carries with him the lessons of the Hyrkanians—their brutality, their cunning, and their capacity for both loyalty and corruption. The Hyrkanians are the crucible in which the Cimmerian is tempered, and their mark remains on him long after he leaves their lands behind.