Hyrkania is a vast, barren eastern land of the Hyborian Age, a steppe realm that serves as the homeland of the nomadic Hyrkanian people and as a crucial waypoint in Conan's journey from enslaved boy to free warrior. It is the land of the pit master Toghrul, who purchases the young Cimmerian and carries him eastward, and the birthplace of Subotai, the Kerlait tribesman who becomes Conan's most trusted companion. More than a mere geographical setting, Hyrkania represents the threshold between the untamed barbarism of the west and the glittering, corrupt civilizations of the east, a place where Conan first learns the arts of organized warfare and begins to grasp the scale of the world beyond his ruined village.

Geography and the Eastern Frontier

Hyrkania lies far to the east, beyond the barren wastes of Hyperborea, and its distant borders mark the edge of the known world for the northern peoples. The land is characterized by an endless expanse of steppe, a flat prairie of withered grasses and scrub vegetation that breaks the monotony of the terrain. This is the source of man's wide migration, a landscape that has shaped the nomadic character of its inhabitants. The Hyrkanians themselves are a people of the horse and the bow, and their territory stretches toward the Vilayet Sea, on whose western shores the more civilized Turanians—men of Hyrkanian stock who have advanced in the arts and sciences of civilization—have reared glittering cities and learned the ways of urban life. The contrast between the nomadic Hyrkanians and their settled Turanian cousins is a defining feature of the region, marking the point where the wild steppe gives way to the beginnings of eastern urbanity.

The Pit Master and the Slave

It is from Hyrkania that Toghrul, a red-bearded pit master, hails, and it is he who carries the enslaved Conan eastward into this land. Toghrul travels with his troupe around Asgard and Vanaheim—together sometimes called Nordheim or the Northlands—staging fights for the amusement of local chieftains and their gaming cronies. He lures neighborhood champions with promises of gold to do combat with his Pit fighters, slaves all, whose final adversary is always Death. When Conan is brought to Toghrul's encampment, he is placed in pens with other Pit slaves, men selected as much for their savage truculence as for their powerful bodies and superior fighting skills. The journey east is brutal: Conan, chained to Toghrul's saddle pommel, is dragged over jagged stones with naked feet, his muscles aching from years of toil at the wheel, until the group reaches the encampment encircled by a rough log palisade.

Valamo and the Education of a Warrior

At Valamo, on the distant borders of Hyrkania, Conan receives his formal education in the arts of the sword. The master swordsman, a Hyrkanian named Oktar, imparts his secrets to the Cimmerian through a long winter of drilling and practice. By the time spring melts the heavy snows, Toghrul is satisfied that nothing remains to teach his champion. During his stay, Conan learns much about these eastern lands of which he had heard only the scantiest of rumors. As Toghrul's most favored Pit fighter, he is allowed to spend evenings in the Pit master's yurt when his master entertains warlords and chieftains who drift into Valamo to buy, sell, or trade gossip. Sometimes Toghrul is honored by the presence of Turanians, and Conan, sitting cross-legged and silent on the carpeted floor, plies these strangers with questions about methods of organized warfare. His questions amuse the war leaders, who think the principles of strategy and tactics of little use to a mere Pit slave, whose fate it is to fight a single adversary again and again until death overtakes him. Yet this education in the yurt, dismissed by the warlords, plants the seeds of the military acumen Conan will later display.

The Kerlait Tribesman

Hyrkania is also the homeland of Subotai, the small, lean man who becomes Conan's closest friend. Subotai identifies himself as a Hyrkanian of the Kerlait tribe, and in happier days an archer, an assassin, and a thief. He is found by Conan bound and helpless, the victim of a witch-woman's spell, and freed by the Cimmerian. The two men's partnership is forged on the road, and their journey together carries them out of the eastern steppe and toward the west. Subotai's Hyrkanian heritage is evident in his skills and his worldview: he is a man of stealth and cunning, hard-bitten courage, and an honesty that Conan finds to his liking. The friendship between the Cimmerian and the Hyrkanian is one of the book's central bonds, and it is rooted in the eastern land that produced Subotai.

The Road to Zamora and Beyond

The journey from Hyrkania to the west is long and weary, a trek across the vast emptiness of the firmament and the seldom-travelled track that snakes across the flat prairie and the rondure of patient hills. Conan and Subotai stride through this empty land with a measured pace that devours the leagues, the small man often trotting to keep up with the limber strides of the giant Cimmerian. They pass from the frontier town of Yazdir to the inner cities of Zamora, and finally to Shadizar, the city of thieves. But Hyrkania's pull on Conan remains. Years later, when he abandons Valeria in Shadizar to pursue his vendetta against Thulsa Doom, he rides east, picking his way through a pass in the Kezankian Mountains where the foothills reach the stone-strewn steppe of northernmost Turan—the very edge of the Hyrkanian world. He is no longer the penniless runaway slave who once traversed this forbidding land, but a warrior clad in fine raiment, bearing the ancient sword taken from the cave of the grinning skeleton. The land that once held him as a slave now serves as the road by which he returns to his destiny, a testament to how far he has come from the boy who staggered beneath the weight of his chain.