Its surface was muddy and adhesive, but underlain by hard-packed sand. It would show tracks but not greatly impede a fight. As the water drained from his breeches and boots, Conan paused over the array of weapons in the boat. He chose the Gunder buckler, his own familiar broadsword—which he slid into his dagger-belt—and a long, steel-tipped spear.
He eyed the longbow and quiver thoughtfully, but did not take them up. To feather his enemy with arrows before the man had left his boat, or immediately as he set foot on the sand, might look unkingly to the watching hordes. Furthermore, in Armiro’s hot-headed answers and readiness to fight, Conan sensed something he could not entirely bring himself to hate. Perhaps, if the princeling put on a brave show and fought him to a fair impasse, he might spare the lad’s life—’twould be victory enough, he told himself, to swear the prince to withdraw from Ophir along with his armies—and, of course, to release the Khorajan Queen Yasmela from captivity.
The welfare of Conan’s former lover had been much on his mind during the ride here. That, in truth, had been his main reason for goading Armiro to single combat; he planned to put him to the question on it. If Conan had his way, die Kothian prince’s survival would hinge on the good report he could give of her situation. Assuming that Yasmela was unharmed, the lordling might, after all, prove a useful ally on the road to world conquest—if he could be taught to render Conan the respect due a conqueror.
Raising his spear and buckler, the king strode forth onto the sand. Armiro’s boat was nearing the upper end of the islet, moving diagonally downstream under smooth forward strokes of the oars. The prince wore gleaming chest armour and a fur-trimmed cape of Kothian purple—a mad costume for a flood-swollen river, and yet Conan knew it made the Koth look more regal than his own motley garb. As he approached the head of the islet, there sounded acclaim from the watching soldiers on the bridge and palisade; fists were raised and weapons shaken, and a cheer drifted faintly to Conan’s ears over the river’s rushing murmur. By contrast, the salute given the king from the few friendly warriors visible on the downstream bank was a faint, silent pantomime.
But Conan’s attention was fixed primarily on Armiro's boat-handling; admirable as it seemed, there was something far too smooth and effortless about it. The low shallop moved steadily onward through the swirling currents; yet the prince’s oars swung at a stately, ineffectual pace, barely dimpling the water. Could the craft be propelled by some other force—sorcery, perhaps?
There became visible something dragging from the boat’s sides, from loops of rope girdling the gunnels: dark, wavy masses with long, straight antennae protruding upward and forward. As the craft drew into the shallows near the sand bar, these shapes resolved themselves into the heads and shoulders of men, submerged, a half-score of them walking on the river bottom. As the naked toilers emerged from the water, they cast aside the long reed mouthpieces they had been breathing through, grasped the boat by the loops of its tow-rope, and lifted it, carrying it up onto the beach.
Armiro had abandoned his stately pretence of rowing; he was already stepping forward out of the boat as it slapped down onto the sand. Smiling cynically, the prince fitted an arrow to the stout Kothian bow he had taken from beside him. Meanwhile his escorts, with water still draining from their silt-reddened hair and beards, reached into the bottom of the boat and drew out crossbows already drawn and primed, one of them for each man.
No vain formalities or words passed between the unequal sides. The prince’s arrow arched high and black against the fog and swooped down, to be struck aside by Conan using the stave of his spear. The bolts of the crossbowmen, who fanned out forward in a ragged line and discharged from standing or kneeling positions, were another matter. Those the king dodged more ignominiously, by dropping his spear and diving aside into a head-roll. He became instantly plastered with mud and received a slice on his leg from his own un-scabbarded sword. As he slithered on his belly into the river shallows, he felt tardy bolts striking the muck alongside him, felt them lodge in his clothing and even in his flesh, for all he could tell in the desperate press of the moment.
The chill water deepened, and Conan’s splashing, scuttling crawl turned to lizard-like swimming. He kicked off his boots and cast away his ungainly sword; yet he retained his helmet and shifted the wooden shield to his landward arm for protection. He gasped and sputtered for breath in the waist-deep water as the second volley of projectiles struck all around him. One clashed against his helmet with brain-jarring force; others drove like timber spikes into the buckler he raised up defensively at the churning, splashing surface of the river.
Hope lay in the twining currents. Fighting into deeper water, he let the river draw him away. He used helm and shield for protection during his brief, choking struggles for air, and alternately as ballast; their sodden weight drew him mercifully beneath the surface as he kicked and clawed out of sight of the enemy marksmen.
His real enemy found him then—or his imagined one. It was the river-haunt—the soul-thirsty red serpent that wrapped him in its tortuous folds and held him down in the chilly depths. Seizing hold of his limbs, his hair, his garments, the evil sprite strove to hide him away from light and air, to roll and tumble him forever in the slimy caress of its weedy bed.
Against the demon Conan fought determinedly, though it was hard to tell in the silty darkness which way was up, and which way to swim for his life. He felt that he was being drowned not in water but in thick, black oil, with the bubbles of his own escaping breath gurgling and chuckling evilly in his ears. And still, when he managed to break the surface, he was the target of mortal huntsmen whose barbs struck and skipped over the water around him.
Providentially, his officers had brought another boat from the landing. With it they met the king near the friendly bank, downstream and outside crossbow range of the islet. Trocero’s sturdy arms helped Conan up over the gunwale, and took from him his dented steel cap and dripping buckler, which bristled like a hedgehog with short, ugly crossbow bolts. Ottobrand and a common trooper rowed the boat back inshore as Conan removed his soaked shirt, revealing more spikes caught in its folds. On shedding his riding breeches, he cursed violently at finding a deep puncture in the flesh of one buttock. Lodged still in his leather trousers was the square-tipped quarrel that had caused it.
“It was the foulest treachery, my king!” Trocero assured him. “Praise be to all the gods that you survived! We could see something strange about the way Armiro was piloting his craft—but by then you were far beyond hail and recall.” The count shook his head, watching Conan guardedly. “Such a ruse proves that the prince, though quick and sly, is no honourable foe.”
As they rowed in under the eyes of the Aquilonian troops, Conan remained grimly silent. The only sound over the rushing current was the echo of cheers from upriver, as Armiro and his henchmen pulled back from the isle in a pair of boats.
“Well, my king,” Ottobrand ventured, “at any rate there is no great gain or loss—save Your Majesty’s wounds, which do not seem severe, and a few items of milord’s equipage. We can still defeat Armiro the Koth—in fact, I would guess, word of his perfidy will rally the spirit of every good Aquilonian against him. I have sent orders upstream that fire barges be prepared, to send down upon his bridge—”
“Well enough, General!” The king stepped naked from the row boat onto the river marge; there he accepted a horse blanket from one of his troopers and used it to buff himself dry in the pale, fog-filtered sun. “I know you and Count Trocero can defend this siege,” he continued, “so I leave it to you. I will be gone from Ianthe for a time.”
“But, Conan,” Trocero gasped, “my king, what mean you? Do you still intend to ride north and join Prospero in his Nemedian campaign? I warn you, Sire, if we cannot contain this Kothian bandit, he could have the city circled within days.” The count shook his head sombrely, gazing close into Conan’s eyes. “It will be more inconvenient then for you to return with a legion and break the siege.... Sire, are you in
your senses?” “I trust you to deal with Armiro the Koth,” the king said, donning common breeches and a singlet handed him by an officer. “Also to oversee my royal guests, Delvyn and Amlunia. If the fight comes to a full siege, better that I am gone, since defence was never my best skill.” After pulling the shirt down over his head, he leant nearer the count and addressed him confidentially. “Trocero, I ride to Khoraja. Alone, to see to the welfare of an old... ally of mine. I have heard tell she is ill-used, and even as king I cannot neglect such a trust.” “Conan... Your Majesty,” Trocero sputtered, finding it difficult to keep his voice low. “Can you truly abandon your conquests to go galloping off after an old flame? What of our enemies? If you lust after a foreign queen, why not send an army hence to free her?”
“An army is too slow!” the king shot back in a fierce whisper. “As for my enemy—if anyone can tell me how to lay low young Armiro, Supreme Tyrant of Khoraja, why, Yasmela can!”
VIII
The Tarnhold
Conan the Cimmerian, self-crowned King of Aquilonia, was a hard man not to recognize. He had ranged the wide world from sea-lapped Argos to fabled Khitai and back to Zingara, not once but many times. Especially along this trans-Hyborian Road of Kings had he marched, galloped, slunk, and been dragged in chains at various times, with trouble usually racing just ahead of him or close at his heels. Not a man to be forgotten, he—rather, one to be awaited with a tickle of sweat on the brow. The kind to watch carefully, and to conceal one’s wealth and marriageable daughters from.
Down the years, Conan’s name had been bruited abroad as that of criminal, rebel, saviour, and conqueror. Under the name Conan and other names, in a score of lands, he had won more friends than enemies— at least, than surviving enemies. Men and women alike had rallied to his side and had prospered or died in his service. Most recently, they had hailed him as monarch of the greatest nation of the Hyborian world. Not the man to pass most easily was Conan, alone and anonymous, through enemy Koth.
To compound the difficulty, he was a rare sort of foreigner—a northern savage by birth, whose square features and icy blue eyes set him apart in this land of dusky, oval-faced southerners. His robust size and obvious strength, tempered with the catlike grace of movement he had ever possessed, merely posed further obstacles to a discreet passage eastward.
A remedy to all this was, firstly, the coarse, common garb and weapons Conan wore. The hooded cloak he draped over himself was soon frayed and dusted liberally by travel, enough to avoid any seeming of kingliness. For horseflesh, he resorted to a pair of sturdy common mounts, mud-coloured and heavy in the shanks, one to ride upon and one to trail behind him. At a larcenous rate of exchange, before leaving Ophir, he traded his purseful of pure Aquilonian gold staters for the baser coinage of eastern realms, which would be far less noticed.
He let his beard grow out coarse and grey-grizzled, eschewing for a time the morning kiss of the steel that rode ever keen at his side. At times he feigned a limp; it was not difficult, in view of the painful effect of the long days’ rides on the perfidious wound that marred a private part of his anatomy. While keeping his injuries clean, over the rest of his person he cultivated a smell shrewdly calculated to fend off the few hostlers and stablers he had contact with, to hold them at long range and avert idle conversation.
Most important and most difficult, perhaps—since Conan as both thief and king was best known for his fighting prowess and quickness of temper—he disguised himself by affecting a meek, reclusive nature. In spite of several brisk encounters on the road and in lodging places along the way, he reined back his ire and refused to heed the urgings of steel—the steel which, all his days, had saddled and ridden him across the world in much the same way he rode unreflecting horses and camels.
So King Conan traversed the scorched, conquered farmlands of southern Ophir, and the castled, mead-owed vastnesses of Koth. As far as he could tell, he went unrecognised and unremembered. Even so, if some of the innkeepers and horse-tenders he dealt with looked closely at the Aquilonian silver groats among the bastard coin they handed him in change, they might have seen gleaming up at them the very face of the sullen, hurrying stranger who had spent the previous night in their hayloft, arriving at dusk and departing well before dawn.
Now, forsaking Koth’s hilly plains for the narrow valleys of the mountain kingdom Khoraja, Conan had ample time to dwell on his memories of the country’s former Princess-Regent Yasmela: how she had boldly chosen him, the first stranger she met on a nighted city street, to command her nation’s armies in obedience to some wild vision she had of the god Mitra’s will. How together they defeated the undead sorcerer Natohk, known to men as the Black Colossus, and celebrated their triumph one moonlit, passionate night amid desert ruins.
His brow furrowed as he recalled how, when subsequently he courted her, she had grown less compliant to him, weighted by concerns of family and kingdom; how she sacrificed all her time and passion to palliate the land’s misrule by her brother King Khossus; and how, after Conan’s departure, she ended by using her womanly charms to sway nobles of high blood—whether as a player or a pawn in the age-old game of courtly intrigue, neither she nor anyone else could say.
Since his kingship, news of Khoraja had come to Conan primarily through legates and spies. He knew that King Khossus had died some time ago—of an illness, it was publicly stated, though such a death could also result from some highly-placed person’s ill-will. Princess-Regent Yasmela, instead of acceding directly to the throne, played some unclear and diminishing role in the long, slow waltz of barons, pretenders, chancellors, and princes-designate. These successions ultimately led to an obscure princeling’s seizure of power as Supreme "tyrant—a tide most likely invented by Armiro himself, to enhance his power. In any event, Khoraja’s political tempests soon must have seemed petty to him, subsumed as they were into the grander turmoil of Koth, the new arena for the Khorajan upstart’s ambitions.
Whatever the upheavals in the mountain kingdom, Conan had assumed that Yasmela, as sweetheart of Khoraja—and, through his own efforts, its saviour— would retain an honoured, protected place in public life. It had taken a schemer as high-handed as Armiro to shut her away from sight in the Tarnhold; whether she still lived, lying tortured and starved in one of its catacombs, was the king’s gnawing concern. It preyed on him as he descended the forested slopes from the northern border passes, into the rumour-haunted valley and down to the dark, ill-regarded tarn.
He remembered hearing in earlier days of the remote castle and sometime prison known as the Tarnhold. Now it lay before him, a massive keep asprawl with layers and accretions of masonry added on over the centuries in ungainly, clashing styles. The whole was surrounded by a sheer, battlemented wall, with rank forest growing without. Both keep and curtain wall edged directly on the mountain tarn, even extending some distance out into its waters. Such was true of many of the squirely fastnesses of lake-rich Khoraja; yet most of them managed to avoid the forbidding aspect of this place.
From horseback atop a hummock in the lakeside trail, Conan tried to judge what made the Tarnhold look so menacing. Possibly it was the greyish-black hue of the massive stonework, unaccountably darker than the bleached granite of the surrounding cliffs. Or the patchiness of the vegetation—blighted, possibly, by a rising water level. Maybe it was the murky look of the pond itself; for it seemed to catch the heavens’ light and deaden it to greyish-green, rather than hurling it back skyward in sun glints and daylight reflections as most mountain lakes would. It could be due to the brooding clots of cloud impaled atop the nearby mountain peaks; their sullen shadows seemed to flow down the forested slopes, pooling darkly around the Tarnhold and its prisoned shoreline.
It seemed to Conan that, in a setting so bleak, Yasmela could hardly be enjoying life and health. He knew with certainty that a pedlar he had tried to ask about the Tarnhold, at the inn in the neighbouring valley, had reacted to his questions with fear and evasion. Reluctant to discuss the cas
tle at all, the man had cut off their talk guiltily and abruptly when Princess-Regent Yasmela’s name was mentioned—an open admission, as Conan saw it, of her misfortune. The anonymous king had decided not to press the matter to knuckle-edge or knife point., lest some hint of his own veiled intentions should reach the castle’s warders.
The few guards his questing eyes now saw did not seem any too formidable: grey-liveried figures bearing their halberds to and fro along the battlements, with no look of hardness or readiness about them. Scaling the wall would pose no challenge, in view of the age and crudity of the stonework. The warders, he guessed, would keep more vigilant watch inward than outward. It would be easy to slip past, even slay them if he felt a need for it, moving stealthily by night.
Except that he had no intention of waiting so long. Night was a poor time for spying; little could be seen, and most tell-tale activities were halted. Furthermore, entering a strange abode in darkness required the use of a light, sure to draw attention to the bearer. He had resolved to enter by daylight, if only to learn the inner scheme of the place. He would wait in hiding within or, if necessary, return later.
He guided his horses off the trail, hobbling, the animals near plenty of water and forage where a sparse forest of scrub trees and dead-white snags screened them from the castle. He rubbed them down and replaced his saddle and traps on their backs, leaving them ready for a quick escape. Then, stripping off most of his own garments and weapons, he crept to the lakeside.
The tarn was warm, reeking faintly of sulphur. He guessed that the action of submerged hot springs or brimstone seeps accounted for its murky colour. Along its rim, amid tangles of sedge and reed, floated thick clumps of algae. Conan slid into the water and laved himself well in it, using handfuls of the muddy scum as soap—since the unwashed smell that had helped conceal him could now just as easily betray him. He edged deeper then into the lake until the water rose to his eyes, and paddled forward in the direction of the fortress.
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