Thongor and the Dragon City by Lin Carter

"...he may sit on the Dragon Throne and be Sark in the open view of his lords and nobles...but it is I who really wear the Dragon Crown!  Oh, my good friend, life is so good.  He does everything I tell him.  I told him to seek out that crafty old Alchemist, Oolim Phon, who had succeeded in isolating the rare anti-gravitic metal urlium, with which we shall construct a mighty fleet of flying boats and bring all of Lemuria under our--my--hand!"

In 1966 Ace published Lin Carter's Thongor of Lemuria with a cover by Gray Morrow.  In 1970 Berkley put out a revised edition of the book with a cover by Jeff Jones under the title Thongor and the Dragon City.  I actually own both paperbacks, not realizing they were essentially the same the day I found them for low prices at Martinsburg, West Virginia's Bank Books.  I can easily rationalize my superfluous purchase of the '66 version--even though I am going to be reading my copy of the '70 Berkley printing, the earlier Ace edition has a fun little interior illustration on the first page of Chapter 1.

Like the first Thongor novel, Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria, the second, today's topic, was a publishing success, going through many editions in several countries.  Some of the European covers suggest Thongor has access to a ray gun in Thongor and the Dragon City, so we have that to look forward to as we start this second installment in the Thongor saga.

Thongor and the Dragon City has an Introduction in which Carter engages in some reptile-exclusionary rhetoric by claiming the gods created the human race to keep the ambitious reptile people in check, and then suggests that these "Nineteen Gods of Creation" were permitted by "The Unknown One" to again intervene in Earthly affairs by creating and guiding Thongor.  This intro does not appear in the original '66 Thongor of Lemuria.  I personally am against adventure stories using these plots in which the gods or fate guide the hero--sure, maybe this is an effective allegory of the fact that the laws of physics prevent us from exercising free will or that in a complex modern society economic factors or government interventions or family ties keep us from doing but we want and are a major factor in whether or not we achieve our goals, but I would prefer an adventure story be about an individual who stands or falls based on his own merits, decisions, and personality.  If Carter's revisions consisted of adding this idea that Thongor is a pawn of the gods, I suspect I wouldn't consider them an improvement.

As the novel proper begins, Thongor the barbarian, Karn Karvus, exiled prince of Tsargol, and Sumia, exiled princess of Patanga, are travelling in Earth's only flying machine.  Blown off course in a thunderstorm, lightning bolts diminish the flying boat's gravity-defying properties, and the vehicle ends up floating on the ocean surface, where our heroes are attacked by a sea monster with teeth six feet long.  Luckily, this sea beast is distracted by a similar creature.  The boat washes up on a beach by a jungle that is full of dangerous mammals, including primitive men who look like apes but wield crude clubs and spears and speak the language everybody else in Lemuria speaks.  Thongor goes off hunting, and is knocked unconscious by one of these beastmen and left for dead; the beastman leaves Thongor's body behind because of the proximity of a dangerous black lion.

The prince and princess go looking for their missing friend, and, after tangling with carnivorous plants, KK and Sumia are captured by the beastmen.  The primitives plan to eat the royals, but shortly before the feast is to begin the beastmen's own king sneaks into the hut in which Sumia is imprisoned, thinking that, before she is cooked up, he will sample the physical charms of the princess, whose slim smooth pale body is so different from that of the squat and hairy women of his tribe.  Thongor, having woken up and eluded the lion, has been following his captive comrades Tarzan-style, moving unseen above from tree to tree, waiting for his chance to spring his friends.  Thongor busts into the hut just as his royal highness is about to have his way with a bound Sumia.  Seconds after punching out the apeman monarch, Thongor, for the second time in twenty pages, is knocked unconscious by a blow to the noggin from behind--this is going to affect Thongor's cognitive function if he is not careful.

In a case of mistaken identity, it was Karn Karvas who brained the barbarian.  Soon our cast is captive again, tied to stakes, about to be cooked!  Thongor busts free of his bonds and a terrible fight erupts, a fight brought to a conclusion by some heavily armed and armored strangers who join in the fracas just in a nick of time to save our heroes.  These strangers are the soldiers of the city of Thurdis, the city from which Thongor stole the air boat back in volume 1.

Thurdis is the "Dragon City" of the title; seeing as the first Thongor book was all about fighting reptile men who were called "Dragon Kings," maybe Carter should have thought of some other animal to represent Thurdis, whose population is 100% human.  (Similarly, Sumia's town Patanga is known as "The City of Fire," and the ape men who tried to cook our heroes call themselves "The Fire People.")  After Thongor refuses to tell Phal Thurid, the king of Thurdis, who aspires to conquer the whole of Lemuria with a fleet of air ships, where the prototype air boat is, the barbarian is sent to the dungeon to have this info tortured out of him.   

The first fifty pages of Thongor and the Dragon City are weak, a bunch of repetitive and inconsequential events, people getting saved in a nick of time again and again.  The novel comes to life in the dungeons under Thurdis when we meet the torturer, Thalaba, a hunchbacked dwarf who hides his body in cloak.  Thalaba actually has a personality and is a good horror figure.  When the lonely torturer  is alone with Thongor, telling him how they are going to become bosom buddies, he throws off his cloak to reveal he has a horrible disease--half his body is covered in a "spongy mould" which is eating his flesh away!  Portions of his form are naked to the bone, others consist of oozing sores!  Thalaba doesn't get information out of captives with whips or blades or thumbscrews--he merely threatens to infect those in his custody with his own disease!  And Thalaba has further astonishing revelations to make!  The torturer is the grey eminence behind the Dragon Throne of Thudis--he has addicted Phal Thurid to drugs, and when the king is stoned out of his mind, Thalaba whispers to him, whispers Phal Thurid takes to be the voices of the Gods!  It was Thalaba who gave the king the idea to hire the wizard-engineer who built the air boat, and who has inspired Phal Thurid to undertake the conquest of all of Lemuria!

The tunnels beneath Thurdis are an endless and unexplored relic of the centuries before the rise of Man, and are inhabited by unspeakable monsters that cannot abide light.  When Thalaba hears a sound, he scurries off to investigate, and a friend from Thongor's time as a mercenary in the army of Phal Thurid, Ald Turmis, sneaks in to free Thongor.  The two fighting men escape the dungeons via an underground river, encountering a colossal translucent slug along the way.  In an amazing coincidence that I guess we are going to have to chalk up to divine intervention, the air boat, which has regained its weightlessness and slipped its moorings, floats right to where Thongor is after making his getaway from the Dragon City.

Thongor almost immediately loses control of the flying boat, and it is drawn many miles across Lemuria, far from Thurdis, to an ancient ruined city in a jungle, to a giant piece of magnetic artillery mounted on a high spire that looms above the overgrown metropolis.  Thongor and Ald Turmis are captured by gaunt men who move sluggishly and look like desiccated corpses.  For one thousand years this lost city has been ruled by a master of esoteric science, a tremendously obese man named Xothun who drinks the blood of the city's inhabitants.  He spotted the flying boat in his remote viewer and quickly built the powerful magnetic ray projector so he could acquire it.  Xothun is eager to drink the healthy blood of a muscleman like Thongor, but Thongor, with the help of a native, overcomes the fat vampire's technological edge and kills him, freeing his long-suffering subjects.             

Meanwhile, the army of Thurdis has marched to Patanga to lay siege to that city.  Phal Thurid and Thabala have brought Karm Karvus and Samia along with them at the head of the army; the king of Thurdis can claim he is trying to restore Princess Samia to the throne which was stolen from her by the Yellow Druids.  KK and Samia sneak away in the night, only to be captured at once by the Yellow Druids.  

The army of Thurdis is about to storm the city, and the Yellow Druids are about to unleash their chemical warfare agents on the Thurdians, when suddenly everybody's armor and weapons are sucked up into the sky--Thongor has had the magnetic ray projector affixed to the flying boat.  The Thurdian army is thrown into confusion, and in the chaos Thabala and Phal Thurid are killed.  Within the walls of Patanga, the aristocracy and the city mob, who love Samia and resent the Yellow Druids, overthrow the  Druids and their supporters, who are easy prey bereft of their armor and swords.  

Samia marries Thongor right there on the battlefield, and Thongor is proclaimed Emperor, with authority over both Patanga and Thurdis.  It is traditional for guys like John Carter and Conan to eventually win a throne, but I feel like Carter and the Cimmerian demonstrated leadership to a much higher degree before their coronations than has Thongor, who has sort of married his way into the ruling class.

There follows an appendix which foreshadows the next Thongor book, and a second appendix which is a glossary of Lemurian terms.  (That first appendix does not appear in the original 1966 edition of Thongor of Lemuria.)

(No man-portable ray gun appears in the novel--never put your trust in the covers of SF books, kids.)

The first third or so of Thongor and the Dragon City is poor, worse than any part of Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria, it being silly filler.  And Carter's style isn't very good, and he doesn't seem to have put enough hours into copyediting and revision.  For example, as the sun sets, Thongor sees "the great golden Moon of Lemuria" peering down on the city of Xothun, but in the next chapter, when Karm Karvus and Samia are sneaking away from the camp of the army of Thurdis, KK thanks "the Gods of his House for a dark and moonless night."  Maybe we can interpret that as meaning it is cloudy over Patanga, but it certainly looks like Carter simply forgot he just told us nine pages ago that it was a moonlit night.

On the plus side, however, the middle section of Thongor and the Dragon City is better than anything in the first Thongor novel; Tabala is the best character in either book, and the translucent slug is the best monster in either book; the scenes in the dungeons under Thurdis are legitimately good, and the lost city scenes with Xothun aren't bad, either.

As I did with Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria, I can mildly recommend Thongor and the Dragon City to fans of this sort of material.  Next stop: the third Thongor book, Thongor Against the Gods.