Beyond the Gate of Shadows: Harold Lamb’s The Grand Cham by Bill Ward “As evening closed in they were threading through gorges that hastened the coming of darkness. Often they looked back in the failing light. No one desired to be last. And then Rudolfo, in the lead, halted abruptly. ‘Before them in the twilight stood a great mound of human skulls.” When we are first introduced to Michael Bearn, young Breton ship-master in Venetian employ, he and his shipwrecked crew are slaves to the Turkish Sultan, Bayezid the Great, ‘the Thunderbolt.’ Bearn, talented, headstrong, and proud, refuses to kneel before the conqueror, the ruler of an empire stretching from the Danube to the Euphrates, and Bearn is cruelly cowed when his arm is crushed by an iron sleeve. Crippled, brutalized, Bearn vows his revenge to the Sultan’s laughing face — and thus colossal events are set underway with the snapping of a man’s bones, and the humiliation of his soul. For Bearn is a man of immense drive and cleverness, and Bayezid is not the only great conqueror in the vast lands of the East . . . Harold Lamb’s The Grand Cham was first published in Adventure Magazine in 1921, and it teeters between long novella and short novel in length. Currently available in the tremendous collection of Lamb’s mostly Crusades-era stories, Swords From the West, The Grand Cham exemplifies much of Lamb’s historical fiction: tight pacing, fidelity to historical authenticity, and a refusal to dwell in stock stereotypes. His fascination with the kaleidoscope tapestry of the people and cultures in this era of clashing civilizations ensures that Lamb breathes real life into his characters even while he thunders ever onward, telling their story in true pulp style – Lamb’s characters feel real enough, they just don’t spend all day telling you their autobiography because they actually have interesting lives to lead and important things to do: such as the making and breaking of history. Bearn cleverly escapes his Turkish captivity with a handful of his fellow Europeans – all of whom are slain to a man outside the Gate of Shadows, the East-West pass linking the lands of the Sultan with those of Tartary. Bearn, with five more reasons to hate ‘The Thunderbolt,’ has a choice after he buries his companions outside this mountain pass shunned...