Beyond the Black River

by Robert E. Howard

  7 The Devil in the Fire

  When Conan turned from the Velitrium road he expected a run of some ninemiles and set himself to the task. But he had not gone four when heheard the sounds of a party of men ahead of him. From the noise theywere making in their progress he knew they were not Picts. He hailedthem.

  'Who's there?' challenged a harsh voice. 'Stand where you are until weknow you, or you'll get an arrow through you.'

  'You couldn't hit an elephant in this darkness,' answered Conanimpatiently. 'Come on, fool; it's I--Conan. The Picts are over theriver.'

  'We suspected as much,' answered the leader of the men, as they strodeforward--tall, rangy men, stern-faced, with bows in their hands. 'One ofour party wounded an antelope and tracked it nearly to Black River. Heheard them yelling down the river and ran back to our camp. We left thesalt and the wagons, turned the oxen loose and came as swiftly as wecould. If the Picts are besieging the fort, war-parties will be rangingup the road toward our cabins.'

  'Your families are safe,' grunted Conan. 'My companion went ahead totake them to Velitrium. If we go back to the main road we may run intothe whole horde. We'll strike southeast, through the timber. Go ahead.I'll scout behind.'

  A few moments later the whole band was hurrying southeastward. Conanfollowed more slowly, keeping just within ear-shot. He cursed the noisethey were making; that many Picts or Cimmerians would have moved throughthe woods with no more noise than the wind makes as it blows through theblack branches.

  He had just crossed a small glade when he wheeled answering theconviction of his primitive instincts that he was being followed.Standing motionless among the bushes he heard the sounds of theretreating settlers fade away. Then a voice called faintly back alongthe way he had come: 'Conan! Conan! Wait for me, Conan!'

  'Balthus!' he swore bewilderedly. Cautiously he called: 'Here I am.'

  'Wait for me, Conan!' the voice came more distinctly.

  Conan moved out of the shadows, scowling. 'What the devil are you doinghere?--Crom!'

  He half crouched, the flesh prickling along his spine. It was notBalthus who was emerging from the other side of the glade. A weird glowburned through the trees. It moved toward him, shimmering weirdly--agreen witch-fire that moved with purpose and intent.

  It halted some feet away and Conan glared at it, trying to distinguishits fire-misted outlines. The quivering flame had a solid core; theflame was but a green garment that masked some animate and evil entity;but the Cimmerian was unable to make out its shape or likeness. Then,shockingly, a voice spoke to him from amidst the fiery column.

  'Why do you stand like a sheep waiting for the butcher, Conan?'

  The voice was human but carried strange vibrations that were not human.

  'Sheep?' Conan's wrath got the best of his momentary awe. 'Do you thinkI'm afraid of a damned Pictish swamp devil? A friend called me.'

  'I called in his voice,' answered the other. 'The men you follow belongto my brother; I would not rob his knife of their blood. But you aremine. Oh, fool, you have come from the far gray hills of Cimmeria tomeet your doom in the forests of Conajohara.'

  'You've had your chance at me before now,' snorted Conan. 'Why didn'tyou kill me then, if you could?'

  'My brother had not painted a skull black for you and hurled it into thefire that burns for ever on Gullah's black altar. He had not whisperedyour name to the black ghosts that haunt the uplands of the Dark Land.But a bat has flown over the Mountains of the Dead and drawn your imagein blood on the white tiger's hide that hangs before the long hut wheresleep the Four Brothers of the Night. The great serpents coil abouttheir feet and the stars burn like fire-flies in their hair.'

  'Why have the gods of darkness doomed me to death?' growled Conan.

  Something--a hand, foot or talon, he could not tell which, thrust outfrom the fire and marked swiftly on the mold. A symbol blazed there,marked with fire, and faded, but not before he recognized it.

  'You dared make the sign which only a priest of Jhebbal Sag dare make.Thunder rumbled through the black Mountain of the Dead and the altar-hutof Gullah was thrown down by a wind from the Gulf of Ghosts. The loonwhich is messenger to the Four Brothers of the Night flew swiftly andwhispered your name in my ear. Your head will hang in the altar-hut ofmy brother. Your body will be eaten by the black-winged, sharp-beakedChildren of Jhil.'

  'Who the devil is your brother?' demanded Conan. His sword was naked inhis hand, and he was subtly loosening the ax in his belt.

  'Zogar Sag; a child of Jhebbal Sag who still visits his sacred groves attimes. A woman of Gwawela slept in a grove holy to Jhebbal Sag. Her babewas Zogar Sag. I too am a son of Jhebbal Sag, out of a fire-being from afar realm. Zogar Sag summoned me out of the Misty Lands. Withincantations and sorcery and his own blood he materialized me in theflesh of his own planet. We are one, tied together by invisible threads.His thoughts are my thoughts; if he is struck, I am bruised. If I amcut, he bleeds. But I have talked enough. Soon your ghost will talk withthe ghosts of the Dark Land, and they will tell you of the old godswhich are not dead, but sleep in the outer abysses, and from time totime awake.'

  'I'd like to see what you look like,' muttered Conan, working his axfree, 'you who leave a track like a bird, who burn like a flame and yetspeak with a human voice.'

  'You shall see,' answered the voice from the flame, 'see, and carry theknowledge with you into the Dark Land.'

  The flames leaped and sank, dwindling and dimming. A face began to takeshadowy form. At first Conan thought it was Zogar Sag himself who stoodwrapped in green fire. But the face was higher than his own and therewas a demoniac aspect about it--Conan had noted various abnormalitiesabout Zogar Sag's features--an obliqueness of the eyes, a sharpness ofthe ears, a wolfish thinness of the lips; these peculiarities wereexaggerated in the apparition which swayed before him. The eyes were redas coals of living fire.

  More details came into view: a slender torso, covered with snaky scales,which was yet man-like in shape, with man-like arms, from the waistupward; below, long crane-like legs ended in splay, three-toed feet likethose of some huge bird. Along the monstrous limbs the blue firefluttered and ran. He saw it as through a glistening mist.

  Then suddenly it was towering over him, though he had not seen it movetoward him. A long arm, which for the first time he noticed was armedwith curving, sickle-like talons, swung high and swept down at his neck.With a fierce cry he broke the spell and bounded aside, hurling his ax.The demon avoided the cast with an unbelievably quick movement of itsnarrow head and was on him again with a hissing rush of leaping flames.

  But fear had fought for it when it slew its other victims, and Conan wasnot afraid. He knew that any being clothed in material flesh can beslain by material weapons, however grisly its form may be.

  One flailing talon-armed limb knocked his helmet from his head. A littlelower and it would have decapitated him. But fierce joy surged throughhim as his savagely driven sword sank deep in the monster's groin. Hebounded backward from a flailing stroke, tearing his sword free as heleaped. The talons raked his breast, ripping through mail-links as ifthey had been cloth. But his return spring was like that of a starvingwolf. He was inside the lashing arms and driving his sword deep in themonster's belly--felt the arms lock about him and the talons ripping themail from his back as they sought his vitals--he was lapped and dazzledby blue flame that was chill as ice--then he had torn fiercely away fromthe weakening arms and his sword cut the air in a tremendous swipe.

  The demon staggered and fell sprawling sidewise, its head hanging onlyby a shred of flesh. The fires that veiled it leaped fiercely upward,now red as gushing blood, hiding the figure from view. A scent ofburning flesh filled Conan's nostrils. Shaking the blood and sweat fromhis eyes, he wheeled and ran staggering through the woods. Bloodtrickled down his limbs. Somewhere, miles to the south, he saw the faintglow of flames that might mark a burning cabin. Behind him, toward theroad, rose a distant howling that spurred him to greater efforts.

 
; 8 Conajohara No More

  There had been fighting on Thunder River; fierce fighting before thewalls of Velitrium; ax and torch had been piled up and down the bank,and many a settler's cabin lay in ashes before the painted horde wasrolled back.

  A strange quiet followed the storm, in which people gathered and talkedin hushed voices, and men with red-stained bandages drank their alesilently in the taverns along the river bank.

  There, to Conan the Cimmerian, moodily quaffing from a great wine-glass,came a gaunt forester with a bandage about his head and his arm in asling. He was the one survivor of Fort Tuscelan.

  'You went with the soldiers to the ruins of the fort?'

  Conan nodded.

  'I wasn't able,' murmured the other. 'There was no fighting?'

  'The Picts had fallen back across the Black River. Something must havebroken their nerve, though only the devil who made them knows what.'

  The woodsman glanced at his bandaged arm and sighed.

  'They say there were no bodies worth disposing of.'

  Conan shook his head. 'Ashes. The Picts had piled them in the fort andset fire to the fort before they crossed the river. Their own dead andthe men of Valannus.'

  'Valannus was killed among the last--in the hand-to-hand fighting whenthey broke the barriers. They tried to take him alive, but he made themkill him. They took ten of the rest of us prisoners when we were so weakfrom fighting we could fight no more. They butchered nine of us then andthere. It was when Zogar Sag died that I got my chance to break free andrun for it.'

  'Zogar Sag's dead?' ejaculated Conan.

  'Aye. I saw him die. That's why the Picts didn't press the fight againstVelitrium as fiercely as they did against the fort. It was strange. Hetook no wounds in battle. He was dancing among the slain, waving an axwith which he'd just brained the last of my comrades. He came at me,howling like a wolf--and then he staggered and dropped the ax, and beganto reel in a circle screaming as I never heard a man or beast screambefore. He fell between me and the fire they'd built to roast me,gagging and frothing at the mouth, and all at once he went rigid and thePicts shouted that he was dead. It was during the confusion that Islipped my cords and ran for the woods.

  'I saw him lying in the firelight. No weapon had touched him. Yet therewere red marks like the wounds of a sword in the groin, belly andneck--the last as if his head had been almost severed from his body.What do you make of that?'

  Conan made no reply, and the forester, aware of the reticence ofbarbarians on certain matters, continued: 'He lived by magic, andsomehow, he died by magic. It was the mystery of his death that took theheart out of the Picts. Not a man who saw it was in the fighting beforeVelitrium. They hurried back across Black River. Those that struckThunder River were warriors who had come on before Zogar Sag died. Theywere not enough to take the city by themselves.

  'I came along the road, behind their main force, and I know nonefollowed me from the fort. I sneaked through their lines and got intothe town. You brought the settlers through all right, but their womenand children got into Velitrium just ahead of those painted devils. Ifthe youth Balthus and old Slasher hadn't held them up awhile, they'dhave butchered every woman and child in Conajohara. I passed the placewhere Balthus and the dog made their last stand. They were lying amid aheap of dead Picts--I counted seven, brained by his ax, or disemboweledby the dog's fangs, and there were others in the road with arrowssticking in them. Gods, what a fight that must have been!'

  'He was a man,' said Conan. 'I drink to his shade, and to the shade ofthe dog, who knew no fear.' He quaffed part of the wine, then emptiedthe rest upon the floor, with a curious heathen gesture, and smashed thegoblet. 'The heads of ten Picts shall pay for his, and seven heads forthe dog, who was a better warrior than many a man.'

  And the forester, staring into the moody, smoldering blue eyes, knew thebarbaric oath would be kept.

  'They'll not rebuild the fort?'

  'No; Conajohara is lost to Aquilonia. The frontier has been pushed back.Thunder River will be the new border.'

  The woodsman sighed and stared at his calloused hand, worn from contactwith ax-haft and sword-hilt. Conan reached his long arm for thewine-jug. The forester stared at him, comparing him with the men aboutthem, the men who had died along the lost river, comparing him withthose other wild men over that river. Conan did not seem aware of hisgaze.

  'Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,' the borderer said, stillstaring somberly at the Cimmerian. 'Civilization is unnatural. It is awhim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.'