Conan of the Red Brotherhood

by Leonard Carpenter

  The galley’s sail had been moved well forward of its usual position. The new, shorter mast rose almost from the bows, where the silk-clad astrologer now presided, seated before a giant kettledrum. The craft’s whole stem and middle sections aft of its low, broad sail were taken up by an enormous bellows. The low, tent-like enclosure of pleated cowhide stretched between long walls of railed planking to port and starboard. Between these planks and the ship’s side-wales were long narrow benches, fore-and-aft ones rather than the customary oar-seats athwart the hull.

  Along these benches sat the galley’s crew. Fifty or so they numbered, fewer than such a vessel’s normal complement, and most of them lacking oars. They sat facing inward, too, to the audible amusement of the crowd. Now, placing bare feet on the bellows’ side planks and bracing their backs against the ship’s rail, they thrust inward, to the sharp initial beats of Tambur Pasha’s drum. Their legs straightened, driving the bellows’ sides together to meet over the keel. A rushing exhalation sounded, and the white canopy of sail shivered, but it did not fill. The crew then drew back their legs and the bellows’ sides with them. Their motion caused a loud, sputtering inhalation through the intake port at the back of the ship.

  Alaph, once again acquainted with the general outlines of his competitor’s work, could not spare the time from his own preparations to watch closely. Whether it was the uniqueness of the astrologer’s invention, therefore, or its evident lack of success that caused the crowd to react with mirth was unclear to him.

  For whatever reason, as the obtruncated galley lay in the water soughing and wheezing—puffing out its low sail intermittently like an ambitious bullfrog, yet producing neither a thunderous noise nor any progress in the water, with its crew flexing their lower bodies pathetically in time to Tambur Pasha’s quickening drumbeats and shouted commands—the spectators’ response was a torrent of laughter, jeers, and ill-aimed fruit, most of which rebounded from the bellows and sail and rolled into the scuppers. The drollery became all the more lively and universal once it was pointed out that the ship, rather than moving ahead, drifted slowly to the rear toward the dock pilings, possibly on account of the greedy, flatulent suction of the bellows’ stem intake.

  Alaph, though frankly embarrassed at the failure of the ebullient astrologer’s scheme, was more troubled by the crowd’s discourtesy. Beset by a new plague of doubts regarding his own invention, he wondered if his reception would be the same or worse. Tinning away from his last-minute polishing and tidying, he looked on uneasily.

  Fortunately, the dockyard officers, like good carnival mountebanks, were ready with a new act in lieu of the failed one. The sloop prepared by Mustafar the draughtsman promptly sailed out from behind the wharf. It was an ordinary dhow, the same sort used for fishing or fleet communications, except for two objects mounted in the bows: a small ballista with an upright throwing-arm, and a spigot or siphon of some sort. From a short cable astern, the ship towed an even smaller craft: a quaint, mastless antique longboat with unmanned, trailing oars and a small, ornate cabin amidships—some kind of outmoded dispatch or ceremonial vessel, no doubt. Tacking out into view of the crowd, the crew of Mustafar’s sloop cast the unmanned boat adrift, then luffed around to approach it bow-on, maintaining just enough headway to minimize their roll and pitch in the mild inshore breeze.

  The sloop’s crew of four, overseen by Mustafar at the helm, then busied itself with the war engines in the bow. After two crewmen laboured. together to wind back the arm of the ballista, one of them carefully placed a spherical shot or flask in the spoon-shaped terminus, holding it there two-handed. The second man cranked the whole assembly around on a turntable, while a third took a blazing torch from a smouldering fire bucket hanging in the forechains and touched it to the sphere. Whether from this action or by some unseen control, the torsion-arm lashed free and sent the round missile flying. Its path through the air, traced by a curving ribbon of black smoke, arched straight into the stern of the drifting longboat. There followed a flash and a sputtering explosion of flame, which engulfed the stem part of the boat and caused its brittle old paintwork to ignite and bum vigorously. The demonstration, after the initial silent awe it evoked, was greeted with wild cheers from the crowd.

  Alaph, watching the burning hulk, wondered if the vessel might previously have been doused with lamp oil—but then decided that the bursting flask must have splashed some flammable humour over the old wood. A fiendishly effective device, that.

  Mustafar’s crew, meanwhile, turned its attention to the second object in the foresheets. It was another heavy bellows—not nearly so huge as the one installed by Tambur Pasha, but still oversized—hinged together at the front like the familiar blacksmith’s tool, mounted on a pivot afore-ships, and worked by a pair of long handles extending straight out to the rear. The long, thick snout of this implement was now directed astern and downward by the crew, its tip submerged in a keg secured to the mast. Then, with bellows parted wide, the men swivelled it around to point toward the burning longboat. Three of the crew, one at either side and one at the rear, forced the handles violently together with a swift, practised movement. The result was a long, spouting column of fluid that squirted toward the burning hulk, some falling across the bows, most of it splashing into the water.

  The bow section of the longboat was not yet aflame, and the liquid did not visibly add to its destruction. So the watching crowd made no applause—not until Mustafar himself, taking a blazing torch from a firepot astern, whirled it overhead and flung it in the same direction. The thick black fluid, which could still be seen floating sluggishly on the waves, caught the falling torch and burst into flame. It made a line of liquid fire, along which bright flames raced; reaching the vessel’s side-wales, they leaped aboard. The target now burned with two distinct fires, and Mustafar’s men set feverishly to work with the bellows, tracing more lines of living flame across the water and turning the longboat and its watery surroundings into a single, shapeless holocaust.

  The cheers of the watchers were by then unrestrained. Alaph, quietly intrigued by the pyrotechnic display, noted that Mustafar’s crew never used its torch to ignite the fuel as it left the bellows. That, presumably, would create a torrent of airborne fire, a terrifying sight indeed to an enemy. Yet it might also pose a danger to the ship and crew, or even to the onlookers. Likely, Mustafar was wise to refrain.

  The alchemist’s musings were cut short by the realization, from the energetic signalling of Nephet Ali near the emperor’s pavilion, that he was expected to try his own experiment next. Hopping down into the bows of his ship and casting off, he ordered his crew to follow his example and shove free of the dock, out into the open harbour.

  Alaph’s ship, though just as large as Tambur Pasha’s and lacking both mast and sail, had a complement of only two, including himself. It must have seemed odd to those standing ashore watching the small, heavy galley wallow on the waves with but a captain and a single crewman. Yet the man, a burly, tongueless Zamoran eunuch, set diligently to work, feeding the hearthfire to maintain heat. Young Captain Alaph went straight to the business of adjusting the brass steam cocks set low in the vessel’s bilge.

  Much of the space ordinarily occupied by oar-benches and crew was artfully filled in—first with a double layer of light earthen tiles, some of them specially moulded to the contours of the hull. Aft were bins of fuel, fine-split hardwood that could be spread evenly through the firepit laid in the ship’s bottom.

  Then, nested over the keel and supported by strong metal braces athwartships, was the steam vat: a bronze vessel improvised, for lack of better resources, from a squarish metal sarcophagus looted out of the tomb of one of Turan’s traditional enemy-kings. Carried home as Imperial treasure after a successful campaign, and stored in the palace gem-troves, it had only lately been adapted to this special purpose by drilling into its sides and forging shut the lid. The mortal contents were long since discarded, of course. Now the coffin made an efficient water-boiler, readily
heated and well able to contain the substantial pressures that would be needed to effect Alaph’s plan.

  Leading from the sides of the sarcophagus, hammered metal tubes sealed by heavy turncocks continued straight out through holes cut in the planking of the hull at the waterline, stoutly reinforced and caulked. Once outside the hull, the tubes curved sharply back toward the ship’s stem, like the bent spouts of the baker-boy’s first teakettles. The nozzles, crowded with frantically escaping steam-devils from the boiler, were meant to provide the ship’s forward motion. If this vessel was heavier than the ones that used to spin over his father’s hearth—why, the boiling-vat was that much larger, and the volumes of water it held that much greater.

  The heat was already substantial, as the hiss of scalding humours through the imperfect joints of the coffin-lid signalled to Alaph’s ears. Now, with the fire banked up and flaming in its tiled enclosure, the energy of the trapped devils must be swiftly increasing. Hurriedly rounding his ship’s rail, stooping and carefully avoiding the stray steam-jets, Alaph opened each turncock just halfway; then, peering overside, he was thrilled to see bubbles streaming out of the ends of the tubes and foaming at the surface in tiny puffs of steam.

  Even so, he felt no hint of forward motion. The ship still rocked lightly in the harbour waves, floating near the shadow of the pier and its waiting occupants. The spouting devils, to his eye, lacked the fury they had shown in his kitchen hearth; it was as if, returned straight to their watery element, they lost all ambition. He looked to his crewman—no fault there, the burly fireman stroked the fire briskly, streaming with sweat. Impatient, Alaph walked around the ship again and opened all the cocks fully. The jets bubbled more profusely now alongside, yet the ship still did not get under way.

  Shouts came from ashore. “Bun-boy, what are you doing? Brewing our morning tea?”

  “Or is this a new way, perchance, of serving up boiled fish?”

  The crowd had not waited long, and most had no idea of what was expected to happen, so the taunts were not savage, at least not yet. Alaph, while pained and baffled by his failure, caught himself sincerely hoping that the courtly mob had exhausted all its vegetables on the unlucky Tambur Pasha. Drifting dead in the water, he looked around desperately for a distraction. Luckily, he found one, at the same moment the restless crowd did.

  It was the launch of the Remorseless, latest grand ship of the Imperial line. With the fitting-out and crewing just completed, this day had been chosen as an auspicious one for the maiden voyage... and now, in the face of Alaph’s discreet failure, the Admiralty evidently felt the moment had come. The decireme, with its three unequal rows of oars on a side—the bottom oar-benches triple, the upper one quadruple-manned, causing it to be rated a “tenner”—typified the new class of larger ships, more powerful than dromons. It made a fine spectacle as it pulled away from the western pier to the throbbing of the drum, dwarfing the lesser ships that had been tried out that day. Stroking smoothly, with only occasional clashing and disarray among its oar-crew of several hundred, the high, broad ship gained speed quickly.

  Another fast-stroking ship soon diverted the crowd’s gaze: Zalbuvulus’s bireme, with its specially conditioned crew, returning from its morning endurance run. The rowers still maintained their brisk pace, though presumably they had fared out all the way to the Ilbars River mouth; their early return seemed a highly favourable advertisement for the Corinthian’s sorcerous skill. They came on briskly, with oars kicking up bright sprays of water and bubbles that streamed gaily over the submerged double ram. As the vessel drew in close, white-robed Zalbuvulus himself could be seen quite clearly between the two pairs of steersmen on the afterdeck—passing them brisk orders, it appeared, and then pacing forward to issue commands to the burly Vendhyan drummer who sat prominent at the break of the deck.

  Obediently, the dark-skinned hortator ceased his drumming, crossing the heavy mallets on the bronze drumhead before him. Yet strangely, although his insistent thumping halted, the bireme’s crew did not cease rowing. The oarsmen stroked on, their pace only slightly altered. It began to appear that there might be some danger of a collision with the new dromon Remorseless as it glided out into the cross-channel. Zalbuvulus was seen to bellow a command; he gesticulated angrily, without apparent result. Behind him, the steersmen struggled to turn their ship aside by paddling their two slim sweeps; they were hard-pressed to do so as long as the oarsmen drove ahead oblivious at brisk cruising speed.

  Alaph, from his place in the smaller ship, at once understood the problem. It was the giant decireme, whose heavy drumbeats still rang out across the harbour. The ensorcelled rowers, dazed by heavy labour and suddenly deprived of the drumming they had lived with night and day, now toiled instead to the beat of the larger ship’s drum, which thumped nearer by the moment.

  As the alchemist watched rapt, events confirmed his theory. The Remorseless’s officers, hoping to run clear of a collision, increased their rowers’ tempo to full ram-speed; Zalbuvulus’s crew, weary as they must be, likewise doubled speed. Surging forward with last-minute energy, they drove their bow straight into the big ship’s forequarter. The impact, though not directly visible from the pier, could be judged from the groaning and rending of wood, the flying curtain of spray and broken oars, and the screams of maimed, trapped crewmen, which were soon matched by shouts and cries of alarm from the dockside spectators.

  Alaph watched the scene, horror-struck by his first glimpse of naval combat. As the Remorseless settled in the harbour, filling and swamping, she likewise bore down Zalbuvulus’s trapped ship, whose crew had finally ceased rowing.

  All at once a new and nearer source of cries and alarms was heard. Mustafar, after setting his target launch afire, had turned to filling his bellows with seawater overside, using the weapon as a sprayer to drown most of the flames on the charred hulk. Yet he and his crew, stopping to watch the nearby collision, must have drifted afoul of one of the still-burning patches on the harbour, or made some other blunder. Now they swatted and bailed water at a lively fire amidships, trying to extinguish it before it spread to their kegs of burnable tar-oil.

  Alaph, again unable to offer help, turned attention to his own launch. His fire-stoker, like himself, had been hopelessly distracted by the recent events. Even so, the fire under the boiling-vat still burned briskly, the flames having given way to hot, pinkish coals. Stepping to the starboard rail, Alaph examined the underwater nozzles. He saw no bubbles or steam-ghosts rising—nothing at all, even though the turncocks were fully open. Vapour hissed less strongly from the seams of the vat, he noted. The bronze sarcophagus looked rather strange to him, the heavy metal blushing reddish and bulging outward at its top and sides. An odd, vexatious, metallic squeaking issued from its hammered comers.

  Then, of a sudden, he bethought himself. Shouting a warning, he turned and sprang to the galley’s rail. As he dove overside, an impact struck his boot-soles. The fiery fist of a god smote him and hurled him headlong into the darkness beneath the pier and its surging, troubled waters.

  Prince Yezdigerd, turning from the splashing chaos in the harbour and the strident emergency on the dock, strode along the main wharf. So swift and restless was his pace through the scattered, gawping crowd that his two bodyguards had difficulty flanking him and shouldering aside unrecognised persons. Behind him in the tepid estuary, Turan's new flagship Remorseless lay swamped; her oarsmen stood hip-deep, attempting to paddle the hulk back into the slips, while troopers on the raised decks stripped off their Imperial armour and swam ashore in dozens.

  Of the various experimental craft, one bireme blundered about in the channel, her crew unable, for all intents and purposes, to turn; one was now a smoking, half-burned hulk abandoned by captain and crew; one wallowed helpless beside the dock, sucking and blowing futilely—Tambur Pasha’s impromptu notion of reversing the great bronze intake and outlet nozzles, so that the giant slave-operated bellows now jetted out air astern, had not yet produced any forward motion. And th
at was without considering the sorcerer Crotalus’s ships, which had been lost at sea.

  As for young Alaph’s coffin-scow, it was nowhere to be seen... having rent itself to tiny fragments in a burst of smoke and noise, with considerable injury and panic both at sea and ashore. A great destructive force, to be sure, if only the empire could contrive to visit it on their enemy’s ships rather than upon their own. If the little alchemist still lived, which seemed unlikely; no trace of him had been seen since the blast.

  Yezdigerd, pushing with his seconds through the cordon of household guards, strode up to the Imperial pavilion. “Sir,” he declared to the emperor on the instant, “you must not dismiss the whole enterprise because of the mischances of one ill-befallen day! A few misfortunes in a new undertaking do not mark the ideas as unworthy, any more than do the slips and stumbles of a tiny babe portend that the man will never walk. I entreat you, Father, do not abandon this endeavour—”

  “What? Cancel the naval contest, you mean?” Emperor Yildiz, reclining in a capacious swinging seat with lush harem-maids seated close on either hand, turned his face up good-naturedly to his officious kin. “Just because of the loss of a few puny vessels, and some piddling damage to a large one? Or a few scorched turbans among my courtiers? Indeed, no, Yezdigerd. Why, naval ships are made to be battered about and handled roughly, are they not?” The monarch guffawed a little drunkenly. “This morning’s display was most, ah, instructive. I would not think of putting an end to something that provides such capital entertainment. ’Tis the next best show to the Zamoran slave-fights! By Tarim, I have not laughed so hard in years as I did at the sight of these blundering, would-be admirals colliding and setting fire to themselves—have I, girls?”