Yazdir

Yazdir stands as the gateway to Zamora, the first settlement the travellers reach after crossing the border from the empty steppe. It is a frontier town of stone houses with thatched roofs, enclosed by a wall two man-heights high, with a clutter of barns, sties, pens, and corrals outside its perimeter housing a multitude of livestock. The town presents a façade of modest prosperity, yet its guards at the gate are so engrossed in a game of dice that they do not look up as Conan and Subotai pass, an early sign of the laxness and corruption that pervade the region. To the young Cimmerian, however, the muddy, noisome alleys seem far more impressive than the crooked lanes of his native village or the thoroughfares of the little towns of Nordheim and Hyperborea, marking his first real encounter with what passes for civilization in the south.

The Threshold of Zamora

Yazdir is the point where Conan and Subotai cross from the wilderness into the settled lands of the Hyborian world. The journey to this border town has been long and weary, across a seldom-travelled track snaking over flat prairie and patient hills, where naked black soil flaunts withered grasses and scrub vegetation alone breaks the monotony of the steppe. As stars begin to wink in the twilight, the two adventurers reach the border, and Subotai gestures broadly to explain the geography: south lies Zamora, the land to the west is Brythunia, and following the river eastward a few leagues enters the territory of Turan. In Zamora, Subotai declares, cross all the caravans of the world, laden with the riches of distant kingdoms—superb carpets from Iranistan, spiced fruits from Turan, the famed pearls of Khosala, gems from the iron hills of Vendhya, and the heady wines of Shem. It is here that Subotai poses his rhetorical question about whether Conan has tasted the pleasures of civilization, and Conan curtly replies that he has not yet, urging them to reach the border town before nightfall and waste no further time on words.

The town itself is the first place where Conan sees the diversity of the southern world. The centre square is paved with flagstones, and around it are set several larger buildings: the temple, the barracks, the courthouse, the inn, and large houses that Subotai guesses to be the mansions of local magnates. In the square, merchants of a score of nations hawk exotic wares, some packing up their merchandise for the night while others are still in full cry. Conan buys a round loaf and a sausage and munches them as he strolls about, eyeing the dazzling assortment of weapons, garments, jewellery, slaves, and such humble goods as farm implements and cooking pots. He and his companion meander past pens and cages housing strange animals—yaks, camels, and a snow leopard—and continue into a street where, with musical clangour, smiths work copper, brass, silver, and iron, and around a corner find workers tooling leather and offering displays of shoes, boots, belts, scabbards, saddles, harness, and leather-bound coffers.

The Quest for the Serpent Symbol

Yazdir is also the first place where Conan actively pursues the central mystery of his life: the meaning of the twisted snakes upholding a black sun. From time to time, he pauses before one stall or another to ask whether anyone knows aught of a design of two serpents intertwined and facing each other, with a black sun between. The responses are largely fruitless. Sometimes the merchant addressed has no knowledge of the Hyrkanian tongue, and Conan has not yet learned the language of Zamora. Sometimes the reply is obsequious, with the merchant deflecting to sell other wares, such as goblets of true Shemitish glass made from the pure sands of the river Sulk. The quest is thus established as a thread that will carry him through the cities of Zamora and ultimately to the Mountain of Power, but at Yazdir it remains unanswered, a symbol whose meaning is still opaque to him.

The town also reveals the economic pressures that will shape Conan's next steps. With his money low and his chances of employment poor until he can better master the language of Zamora, he knows he must find some means of satisfying his leonine appetite. It is in this context that Subotai whispers of fabulous riches, of a place where comes the tribute of the believers from every Set cult in the kingdom—gold, drugs, jewels, wine, and women—but in particular jewels, for the Set worshippers prize polished precious stones, deep and unwinking like the eyes of the serpents they adore. Conan, who has never in his life stolen anything more than a piece of fruit from the tree of a Cimmerian neighbour and who has despised all thieves until meeting Subotai, hesitates. Cimmerian villagers do not steal from one another, although they freely raid the lands of clans with whom they are at feud. This hesitation marks the moral threshold he crosses in the city, and Yazdir is where the pressure first becomes acute.

The Contrast of Civilization and Savagery

Yazdir introduces Conan to the double face of southern civilization. On one hand, the town and its square display the wealth and variety of the world—the merchants, the exotic animals, the craftsmen, the array of goods from a score of nations. On the other hand, the back streets reveal the squalor and violence that underlie this prosperity. In the crooked alleys swarm hags and pimps, painted children for sale to degenerates, the poor and the ill; here flesh is for sale, or at least for rent, and every pleasure, however decadent, can be had for money. In these back streets lurk violence and sudden death. Once, as Conan and Subotai stride through the crowd, a woman screams, men curse and scuttle away on furtive feet, and in a trice the two find themselves alone in the narrow way with their hands on the hilts of their blades. At their feet, a man writhes as he clutches a wound in his belly from which a steady stream of blood trickles through his fingers. Conan begins to ask what has happened, but the scene is left unresolved, a glimpse of the casual brutality that pervades the city.

This contrast between the impressive centre and the violent margins is the first lesson Conan receives about the nature of the lands he has entered. The town is far more impressive than anything he has known, yet it is also a place where a man can be stabbed in the street and left to die. The frontier settlement thus serves as a microcosm of Zamora itself, which Subotai describes as a darkling land of shadowed secrets, furtive spies, profound philosophers, depraved kings, and sloe-eyed women, where each traveller hopes to find that which he seeks: Conan, the meaning of the twisted snakes upholding a black sun; Subotai, wealth that could be his for the taking. Yazdir is the first step into this world, the threshold where the barbarian begins to learn the ways of civilization—its wonders, its temptations, and its dangers.