If the gods do practice love, can it be greater

In the chronicle of Conan's youth, few utterances carry the weight of the words he later spoke to his scribe about Valeria: "If the gods do practice love, can it be greater?" The question, posed long after the events it recalls, is not merely a rhetorical flourish but a confession from a man who had sworn never to weep and who measured life in blood and vengeance. It stands as the novel's most direct acknowledgment that, for all his savagery and solitude, Conan once encountered a love so profound that he could imagine no higher form, not even among the immortals he seldom deigned to address.

The Context of the Utterance

The words arise from a specific, tender memory that Conan never forgot. In a poor tavern, at dawn, the lovers ate hungrily together: Conan carved a steaming slab of meat from the spit and proffered it to Valeria on the point of his dirk, while she gnawed the fragment with enthusiasm, grease trickling down her chin. They washed the meat down with wine cooled in snow carried from the mountaintop—a beverage for lordlings. Drunk with loving as much as with strong drink, Valeria leaned against the rough settle and watched Conan eat, admiring the coiled springs of his muscles moving beneath his skin like the musculature of a splendid animal. He, in turn, admired her sensuous beauty as she sat in repose before the embers, her garments disarrayed, revealing her fair neck and shoulders. It was in the aftermath of this scene that Conan, years later, told his scribe: "If the gods do practice love, can it be greater? No woman before her or since could be her equal—but of this I had no knowledge at the time." The final clause is crucial: the full magnitude of what he had experienced was only understood in retrospect, after loss had given it definition.

The Woman Who Inspired the Words

Valeria was no ordinary lover, and the expression's power derives from who she was. When Conan first encountered her, she emerged from the shadows near the Tower of the Black Serpent, a figure of steely grace: over tight undergarments of black silk, she wore an abbreviated suit of black leather that left her arms and legs bare, her limbs sun-bronzed and endowed with steely strength. Her blonde hair rippled about her leather-clad shoulders, bound out of her way by rings of ebony, and a band of metal protected her brow. Slung from her girdle were a knotted length of silken cord and a three-pronged grappling hook, while a curved knife, almost as long as a sabre, was strapped against her thigh. She was a thief, a warrior, and—as Conan would discover—a former Pit fighter. When he put his hands to his scarred neck, revealing the marks of the cruel collar he had worn, Valeria kissed the scars with frenzied kisses and threw herself upon him in a convulsion of sexual pleasure. Then, undulating in his embrace, she tossed back her long hair and showed him identical scars. She, too, had endured long nights as a Pit fighter. This shared history of bondage and bloodshed forged a bond that transcended mere desire; it was a recognition of kindred spirits, both forged by suffering into steel.

The Expression Against Conan's Stoic Code

The utterance stands in stark contrast to the code that otherwise governs Conan's life. From his father Corin, he had learned that "the heart of a man is like a piece of unworked iron. It must be hammered by adversity and forged by suffering and the challenges flung by the thoughtless gods, nigh unto the point of breaking." This doctrine of hardening, of becoming steel, left little room for tenderness. When Conan brushed away a tear at the Wheel of Pain, he made a vow to his indifferent northern gods: never again shall lords or men or devils wring from his eyes a single tear. And he made another vow in the silence of his heart: "Men shall die for this!" This is the man who, when asked by a Hyrkanian general what the best of life is, replied, "The best of life is to confront your enemy face to face, to see his hot blood spill upon the earth, and to hear the lamentations of his women!" The Pit had not broken his spirit, and his identity was built on rage, pride, and the courage to endure. Yet the expression about the gods' love reveals a fissure in this armor—a moment when the heart, hammered and hardened, was nonetheless capable of being moved by something other than vengeance.

The Thematic Resonance of the Question

The rhetorical question "If the gods do practice love, can it be greater?" does more than praise Valeria; it elevates human love to a divine plane while simultaneously questioning whether even the gods could surpass it. This is a remarkable sentiment from a man who, facing almost certain death, prayed to Crom with the words: "Crom, I have no tongue for prayer, and to you the outcome of this battle does not matter. Neither you, nor any other, will remember why we fought or how we died. But valour pleases you, Lord Crom, and to me it is important." Conan's relationship with the divine is transactional and bleak—he expects nothing from the gods but revenge. Yet in the memory of Valeria, he imagines a love that might be the province of gods themselves, and finds it wanting in comparison. The expression thus becomes a quiet rebellion against his own stoicism, a buried acknowledgment that the heart, for all its forging, retains a capacity for something the code of steel cannot account for. It is a love that, in the end, proves stronger than death itself, as Valeria's sacrifice and Conan's subsequent actions demonstrate. The words spoken to the scribe are not a boast but a lament, the closest Conan ever comes to admitting that the riddle of his life—the riddle of steel, of the heart, of what truly matters—was, for one brief moment, answered by a woman who was his equal.