Conan The Freebooter

by L. Sprague De Camp

  "It would take a devil to storm that castle," growled Conan. "How are we to come at the king's brother in that pile of rock? Lead us to Artaban, so I can take his head back to the Zaporoska."

  "Be wary if you wish to wear your own," answered Vinashko. "What do you see in the gorge?"

  "A lot of bare stone with a fringe of green along the stream."

  The Yuetshi grinned wolflike. "And do you notice that the fringe is denser on the right bank, where it is also higher? Listen! From behind the waterfall we can watch until the Turanians come up the gorge. Then, while they are busy at Cleg's castle, we'll hide among the bushes along the stream and waylay them as they return. We'll kill all but Teyaspa, whom we will take captive. Then we'll go back through the tunnel. Have you a ship to escape in?"

  "Aye," said Conan, rising and stretching. "Vinashko, is there any way down from this knife edge you have us balanced on except that shaft we came up by?"

  "There is a trail that leads east along the ridge and then down into those gullies where your men camp. Let me show you. Do you see that rock that looks like an old woman? Well, you turn right there . . ."

  Conan listened attentively to the directions, but the substance of them was that this perilous path, more suit­able for ibex or chamois than for men, did not provide access to the gorge beneath them.

  In the midst of his explanation, Vinashko turned and stiffened. "What's this?" he said.

  Men were galloping out of the distant Hyrkanian camp and lashing their horses across the shallow river.

  The sun struck glints from lance points. On the castle walls helmets began to sparkle.

  "The attack!" cried Vinashko. "Khosatral Khel! They've changed their plans; they were not going to at­tack until evening! Quickly! We must get down before the Turanians arrive!"

  They levered their bodies into the shallow groove and crept down, step by step.

  At last they stood in the gorge and hastened toward the waterfall. They reached the pool, crossed the ledge, and plunged through the fall. As they came into the dim­ness beyond, Vinashko gripped Oman's mailed arm. Above the rush of water the Cimmerian heard the clink of steel on rock. He looked out through the silver-shim­mering screen that made everything ghostly and unreal, but which hid them from the eyes of anyone outside. They had not gained their refuge any too soon. A band of men was corning along the gorge—tall men in mail hauberks and turban-bound helmets. At their head strode one taller than the rest, with black-bearded, hawklike features. Conan sighed and gripped his sword hilt, moving forward a trifle, but Vinashko caught him.

  "In the gods' names, kozak," he whispered frantically "don't throw away our lives! We have them trapped, but if you rush out now—"

  "Don't worry, little man," said Conan with a somber grin. "I am not so simple as to spoil a good vengeance by a thoughtless impulse."

  The Turanians were crossing the narrow stream. On the farther bank they halted in an attitude of listening. Presently, above the rush of the waters, the men in the cave-mouth heard the distant shouting of many men.

  "The attack!" whispered Vinashko.

  As if it were a signal, the Turanians started swiftly up the gorge. Vinashko touched the Cimmerian's arm.

  "Bide here and watch. I'll hasten back and bring your pirates."

  "Hurry, then," said Conan, "It will be touch and go if you can get them here in time." And Vinashko slipped away like a shadow.

  In a broad chamber luxuriant with gold-worlced tap­estries, silken divans, and velvet cushions, the prince Te-yaspa reclined. He seemed the picture of voluptuous idle­ness as he lounged in silks and satins, a crystal jar of wine at his elbow. His dark eyes were those of a dreamer whose dreams are tinted with wine and drugs. His gaze rested on Roxana, who tensely gripped the bars of a case­ment, peering out, but his expression was placid and far­away. He seemed unaware of the yells and clamor that raged without.

  Roxana moved restlessly, glancing at the prince over her slim shoulder. She had fought like a tigress to keep Te-yaspa from falling into the gulf of degeneracy and resig­nation that his captors had prepared. Roxana, no fatalist, had stung him into life and ambition.

  "It is time," she breathed, turning. "The sun hangs at the zenith. The Hyrkanians ride up the slope, lashing their steeds and loosing their arrows vainly against the walls. The Zaporoskans pour arrows and stones down upon them, until bodies litter the slope, but they come on again like madmen. I must hasten. You shall yet sit on the golden throne, my lover!"

  She prostrated herself and kissed his slippers in an ecstasy of adoration, then rose and hurried out of the room, through another where ten great black mutes kept guard night and day. She traversed a corridor to the outer court that lay between the castle and the, postern wall. Though Teyaspa was not allowed unguarded out of his chamber, she was free to come and go as she liked.

  Crossing the court, she approached the door that led into the gorge. One warrior leaned there, disgruntled be­cause he could not take part in the fighting. Though the rear of the castle seemed invulnerable, the cautious Gleg had posted a sentry there anyway. The man on guard was a Sogdian, his felt cap perched on the side of his head. He leaned, on a pike, scowling, as Roxana approached him. "What do you here, woman?"

  "I am afraid. The cries and shouts frighten me, lord. The prince is drugged with lotus juice, and there is none to soothe my fears."

  She would have fired the heart of a corpse as she stood in an attitude of fear and supplication. The Sog-dian plucked his thick beard.

  "Nay, fear not, little gazelle," he said. "I'll soothe you." He laid a black-nailed hand on her shoulder and drew her close. "None shall touch a lock of your hair. I—ahhh!"

  Snuggling in his arms, Roxana had slipped a dagger from her sash and thrust it through his thick throat. One of the Sogdian's hands clutched at his beard while the other fumbled for the hilt in his girdle. He reeled and fell heavily. Roxana snatched a bunch of keys from his girdle and ran to the door. She swung it open and gave a low cry of joy at the sight of Artaban and his Turanians on the ledge across the chasm.

  A heavy' plank, used as a bridge, lay inside the gate, but it was far too heavy for her to handle. Chance had en­abled her to use it for her previous escape, when rare care­lessness had left it in place across the chasm and un­guarded for a few minutes. Artaban tossed her the end of a rope, which she made fast to the hinges of the door. The other end was gripped by half a dozen strong men, and three Turanians crossed the crevice, swinging hand over hand. They spanned the chasm with the plank for the rest to cross.

  "Twenty men guard the bridge," snapped Artaban. "The rest follow me."

  The sea wolves drew their steel and followed their chief. Artaban led them swiftly after the light-footed girl. As they entered the castle, a servitor sprang up and gaped at them. Before he could cry out, Dayuki's razor-edged yataghan sliced through his throat, and the band rushed into the chamber where the ten mutes sprang up, grip­ping scimitars. There was a flurry of fierce, silent right­ing, noiseless except for the hiss and rasp of steel and the gasps of the wounded. Three Turanians died, and the rest strode into the inner chamber over the mangled bodies of the blacks.

  Teyaspa rose, his quiet eyes gleaming with old fire, as Artaban dramatically knelt before him and lifted the hilt of his bloody scimitar.

  "These are the warriors who shall set you on your throne!" cried Roxana.

  "Let us go quickly, before the Zaporoskan dogs are aware of us," said Artaban.

  He drew up his men in a clump around Teyaspa. Swiftly they traversed the chambers, crossed the court, and approached the gate. But the clang of steel had been heard. Even as the raiders were crossing the bridge, savage yells rose behind them. Across the courtyard rushed a stocky, powerful figure in silk and steel, followed by fifty helmeted archers and swordsmen, "Gleg!" screamed Roxana.

  "Cast down the plank!" roared Artaban, springing to the bridgehead.

  On each side of the chasm bows twanged until the air over the plank was
clouded with shafts whistling in both directions. Several Zaporoskans fell, but so did the two Turanians who stooped to lift the plank, and across the bridge rushed Gleg, his cold gray eyes blazing under his spired helmet. Artaban met him breast to breast. In a glittering whirl of steel the Turanian's scimitar grated around Cleg's blade, and the keen edge cut through the camail and the thick muscles of the Zaporoskan's neck. Gleg staggered and, with a wild cry, pitched off into the chasm.

  In an instant the Turanians had cast the bridge after him. On the far side, the Zaporoskans halted with furious yells and began shooting their thick horn bows as fast as they could draw and nock. Before the Turanians, run­ning down the ledge, could get out of range, three more had been brought down and a couple of others had re­ceived minor wounds from the vicious arrow storm. Arta-ban cursed at his losses.

  "All but six of you go forward to see that the way is clear," he ordered. "I follow with the prince. My lord, I could not bring a horse up this defile, but I will have the dogs make you a litter of spears—"

  "The gods forbid that I ride on my deliverers' shoul­ders!" cried Teyaspa. "Again I am a man! I shall never forget this day!"

  "The gods be praised!" whispered Roxana.

  They came within sight of the waterfall. All but the small group in the rear had crossed the stream and were straggling down the left bank, when there came a multi­ple snap of bowstrings, as though a hand had swept across the strings of a muted harp. A sheet of arrows hissed across the stream into their ranks, and then another and another. The foremost Turanians went down like wheat under the scythe and the rest gave back, shouting alarm.

  "Dog!" shouted Artaban, turning on Dayuki. "This is your work."

  "Do I order my men to shoot at me?" squalled the Hyrkanian, his dark face pale. "This is some new enemy!"

  Artaban ran down the gorge toward his demoralized men, cursing. He knew that the Zaporoskans would rig up some sort of bridge across the chasm and pursue him, catching him between two forces. Who his assailants were he had no idea. From the castle he heard the shouts of battle, and then a great rumble of hooves and shouting and clang of steel seemed to come from the outer valley. But, pent in that narrow gorge, which muffled sound, he could not be sure.

  The Turanians continued to fall before the storm of arrows from their invisible opponents. Some loosed blindly into the bushes. Artaban knocked their bows aside, shouting:

  "Fools!" Why waste arrows on shadows? Draw steel and follow me!"

  With a fury of desperation, the remaining Turanians charged the ambush, cloaks flowing and eyes blazing. Ar­rows brought down some, but the rest leaped into the water and splashed across. From the bushes on the farther bank rose wild figures, mail-clad or half-naked, swords in hands. "Up and at them!" bellowed a great voice. "Cut and thrust!"

  A yell of amazement rose from the Turanians at the sight of the Vilayet pirates. Then they closed with a roar. The rasp and clangor of steel echoed from the cliffs. The first Turanians to spring up the higher bank fell back into the stream with heads split. Then the pirates leaped down the bank to meet their foes hand-to-hand, thigh-deep in water that soon swirled crimson. Pirate and Tu­ranian slashed and slew in a blind frenzy, sweat and blood running into their eyes.

  Dayuki ran into the melee, glaring. His double-curved blade split a pirate's head. Then Vinashko leaped upon him barehanded and screaming.

  The Hyrkanian recoiled from the mad ferocity in the Yuetshi's features, but Vinashko caught Dayuki around the neck and sank his teeth in the man's throat. He hung on, chewing deeper and deeper, heedless of the dagger that Dayuki drove again and again into his side. Blood spurted around his jaws until both lost their footing and fell into the stream. Still tearing and rending, they were washed down with the current, now one face snowing above water, now another, until both vanished forever.

  The Turanians were driven back up the left bank, where they made a brief, bloody stand. Then they broke and fled toward the place where Prince Teyaspa stared entranced in the shadow of the cliff, with the small knot of warriors whom Artaban had detailed to guard him.

  Thrice he moved as though to draw his sword and cast himself into the fray, but Roxana, clinging to his knees, stopped him.

  Artaban, breaking away from the battle, hastened to Teyaspa. The admiral's sword was red to the hilt, his mail was hacked, and blood dripped from beneath his helmet. After him through the melee came Conan, bran­dishing his great sword in his sledgelike fist. He beat down his foes with strokes that shattered bucklers, caved in helmets, and clove through mail, flesh, and bone.

  "Ho, you rascals!" he roared in his barbarous Hyrka-nian. "I want your head, Artaban, and the fellow beside you there—Teyaspa, Fear not, my pretty prince; I'll, not hurt you."

  Artaban, looking about for an avenue of escape, saw the groove leading up the cliff and divined its purpose.

  "Quick, my lord!" he whispered. "Up the cliff! I'll hold off the barbarian while you climb!"

  "Aye, hasten!" urged Roxana. "I'll follow!"

  But the fatalistic mask had descended again on Prince Teyaspa. He shrugged. "Nay, the gods do not will that I should press the throne. Who can escape his destiny?"

  Roxana clutched her hair with a look of horror. Artaban sheathed his sword, sprang for the groove, and started up with the agility of a sailor. But Conan, coming up behind him at a run, reached up, caught his ankle, and plucked him out of his cranny like a fowler catching a bird by the leg. Artaban struck the ground with a clang. As he tried to roll over to wrench loose, the Cimmerian drove his sword into the Turanian's body, crunching through mail links, and into the ground beneath.

  Pirates approached with dripping blades. Teyaspa spread his hands, saying: "Take me if you will. I am Te­yaspa."

  Roxana swayed, her hands over her eyes. Then like a flash she thrust her dagger through Teyaspa's heart, and he died on his feet. As he fell, she drove the point into her own breast and sank down beside her lover. Moaning, she cradled his head in her arms, while the pirates stood about, awed and incomprehending.

  A sound up the gorge made them lift their heads. They were but a handful, weary and dazed with battle, their garments soaked with blood and water.

  Conan said: "Men are coming down the gorge. Get back into the tunnel."

  They obeyed, but slowly, as if they only half under­stood him. Before the last of them had ducked under the waterfall, a stream of men poured down the path from the castle. Conan, cursing and beating his rearmost men to make them hurry, looked around to see the gorge thronged with armed figures. He recognized the fur caps of the Zaporoskans and with them the white turbans of the Imperial Guards from Aghrapur. One of these wore a spray of bird-of-paradise feathers in his turban, and Co-nan stared to recognize, from these and other indications, the general of the Imperial Guards, the third man of the Turanian Empire.

  The general saw Conan and the tail of his procession too and shouted an order. As Conan, the last in line, plunged through the waterfall, a body of Turanians de­tached themselves from the rest and ran to the pool.

  Conan yelled to his men to run, then turned and faced the sheet of water from the inner side, holding up a buck­ler from a dead Turanian and his great sword.

  Presently a guardsman came through the sheet of wa­ter. He started to yell, but the sound was cut off by a meaty chunk as Conan's sword sheared through his neck. His head and body rumbled separately off the ledge into the pool. The second guard had time to strike at the dim figure that towered over him, but his sword rebounded from the Cimmerian's buckler. The next instant he in turn fell back into the pool with a cloven skull.

  There were shouts, partly muffled by the sound of the water. Conan flattened himself against the side of the tunnel, and a storm of arrows whipped through the sheet of water, bringing little splashes of droplets with them and rebounding with a clatter from the walls and floor of the tunnel.

  A glance back showed Conan that his men had van­ished into the gloom of the tunnel. He ran after them, so
that when, a few moments later, the guardsmen again burst through the waterfall, they found nobody in front of them.

  Meanwhile in the gorge, voices filled with horror rose as the newcomers halted among the corpses. The general knelt beside the dead prince and the dying girl.

  "It is Prince Teyaspal" he cried.

  "He is beyond your power," murmured Roxana. "I would have made him king, but you robbed him of his manhood ... so I killed him . . ."

  "But I bring him the crown of Turan!" cried the gen­eral. "Yildiz is dead, and the people will rise against his son Yezdigerd if they have anyone else to follow—"

  "Too late!" whispered Roxana, and her dark head sank on her arm.

  Conan ran up the tunnel with the feet of the pursuing Turanians echoing after him. Where the tunnel opened into the great natural chimney lined with the tombs of the forgotten race, he saw his men grouped uncertainly on the floor of the pit below him, some looking at the hissing flame and some up at the stair down which they had come.

  "Go on to the ship!" he bellowed through cupped hands. The words rattled back from the black cylindrical walls.

  The men ran out into the cleft that led to the outer world. Conan turned again and leaned against the side of the chimney just alongside the tunnel entrance. He waited as the footsteps grew louder.

  An Imperial Guard popped out of the tunnel. Again Conan's sword swished and struck, biting into the man's back through mail and skin and spine. With a shriek the guard pitched head-first off the platform. His momentum carried him out from the spiral stair toward the middle of the floor below. His body plunged into the hole in the rocky floor from which issued the flame and wedged there like a cork in a bottle. The flame went out with a pop, plunging the chamber into gloom only faintly re­lieved by the opening to the sky far above.

  Conan did not see the body strike the floor, for he was watching the tunnel opening for his next foe. The next guard looked out but leaped back as Conan struck at him with a ferocious backhand. There came a jabber of voices; an arrow whizzed out of the tunnel past Conan's face, to strike the far side of the chamber and shatter against the black rock.