“So! Then ’tis far worse than I thought.” Delvyn fell to one knee and stared into the mirror-like stillness of the pool a long moment. “Forgive me, Immortal Lord! I did not sufficiently credit your wisdom.” The dwarf bowed in obeisance, then shook his head. “Pray, Kthantos, if your powers extend far enough to gather this earthly knowledge—is it then possible that you could reach out and affect the fall of events in the mortal world? For, assuming indeed that our champion still lives—”
“Conan lives, you spoke true in that.” The god’s voice dribbled forth without discernible wrath or reproach from the pond’s surface, which had grown smooth and unbroken. “For although Queen Yasmela is a doting mother, she harbours a most unmotherly, astonishing attachment to her son’s sworn, blooded enemy. In answer to your question—yes, I can affect the earthly world. I told you before that I have the power to kill.”
“Pray use it, then, Lord! This woman, Yasmela—the damage she might do is unthinkable, a menace to your plans and to your renewed godhead—”
“Enough! ’It will be done even as you pray! Not this moment—’tis hard to reach so far and pluck a life. But as you see, my power increases daily. It need not wait long.”
“The woman Zenobia, too, Lord Kthantos—I had not thought to ask it. But the one death may rebound, and necessitate another....”
“My, what a greedy little man you are—greedy for death. Although I am a bountiful god, you must not ask so many favours at once! The first boon I have granted. As to the other—we must wait and see.”
XII
Roads of Conquest
In the days and weeks that followed, the courts of Hyborea resounded with the fall of kings and trembled with the uneasy shifting of alliances. From inn to farmstead to lordly manor, a grim word was murmured; it spread northward and inland faster than the burgeoning of new green buds in spring. The word was “war.”
Well might the alarm be spread, since Aquilonia and Roth stood snarling at one another across the prone, gutted body of Ophir, like lion and hyena tearing at a slain antelope. Then, of a sudden, the ill-tempered Aquilonian cat swept forth its thorny paw to tear a living
, bleeding chunk from the side of kingless Nemedia as well. And meanwhile, the stirrings and skirmishings of armies in western Ophir came near enough to the border of Argos to cause mutterings of concern in the nation’s seaport capital, Messantia.
In Ophir itself the opposing forces lay stalemated, perhaps because both commands had been abandoned by their kings to less aggressive subordinates. Swift marches culminating in a fierce attack on the bridgehead by Captain Egilrude’s lancers, and subtle feints by Count Trocero, had driven the Kothians back across the Red River—but without the final, crushing victory the Aquilonian commander sought. Armiro’s forces, by dint of stubborn obedience and patient drill, withdrew intact across their timber bridge.
The very next morning, as if in retaliation, a Kothian attack spearheaded by siege towers and wall-smashing rams penetrated the eastern half of the capital. Kothian troops, flushed with victory, pressed inward all the way to the river. Only after days of fighting was the city wall retaken by Trocero and Lionnard. The transpontine half of Ianthe lay in ruins, burned—as was Armiro’s bridge, part of its length still standing out from the east bank of the Red River as a charred monument to the vain ambitions of war.
The King of Aquilonia returned ragged and travel-weary to the Ophirean capital. His long absence was attributed variously by his observers and detractors to pagan religious devotions, a galloping brain-fever, or the secret negotiation of foreign alliances. Though his officers half expected another enemy capital to have fallen to their king during his travels, he was grimly silent about the nature and success of his expedition. When asked privately by Trocero whether he had made progress toward unseating Armiro, he answered with a snarled curse, saying:
“I only learned that which will make it harder to undo him.”
The count’s reaction was non-committal. As he had learned from sore experience, it would take consummate generalship to defeat the legions of Armiro the Koth.
The king’s sojourn in Ianthe was brief. After a single day and a night, and these spent first in festive eating, then locked in a bedchamber with the courtesan Amlunia, Conan left the Ophirean campaign in the patient hands of Trocero and Ottobrand. Departing northward with Amlunia, the jester Delvyn, and a sizeable corps of Black Dragon guards under the newly promoted Egilrude, the king rode to join Prospero in Nemedia. His parting words to Trocero were:
“Remember, old friend, keep Armiro’s legions occupied on this front. I’ll roll up his northern flank until Ophir falls of its own weight. We shall go on conquering, if need be, until Koth and Khoraja are but islands amid a vast Aquilonian sea!”
The ride to Nemedia was longer than it had been, because Aquilonia had annexed extensive territory in the fertile valley known as the Tybor Gap. The farmers and herders who dwelt there were not much in evidence; their wealth and numbers had been too much depleted by conscripting and foraging armies. Their farms and fields looked abandoned but little harmed; it was further northward and eastward, approaching the Nemedian capital Belverus, that the ravages of war were fully seen—in broken castles, looted towns, and scorched farmsteads. In some roadside hamlets, widows and black-clad mothers knelt and keened over newly filled graves. In others, where no living humans remained to bury the dead, harsh-voiced crows did the keening.
The king had recently completed an epic journey and was mindful of many tedious battles to come. So he passed the trip as restfully as possible. Part of each day he lounged in the high saddle of his great black destrier Shalmanezer. Alternately, he rode with his companions Delvyn and Amlunia in his heavy brazen war chariot, pulled by a team of four Zamboulan bay geldings. The chariot provided a chance for banter, wine-toping, and even merrymaking, insofar as the often grim aspect of their surroundings would allow.
King Conan, oddly enough, seemed more touched by the scenes of desolation and despair than did his fresh-faced concubine or his comic dwarf. Perhaps the cause lay in the knowledge of his own sovereign responsibility for them. As kings will, he sought the rare opportunity to do good, dispensing a word where it might allay suffering, a coin or a loaf in the hope of redeeming a life. Yet most of the sufferers, rather than awaiting his boon, fled or cowered away from his sight, regarding him as their ruthless conqueror. The resulting ridicule and witticisms from Delvyn and Amlunia the king bore stoically, as a bitter dose that was somehow his due.
The capital Belverus rose into sight still intact, its roofs and spires sharp against blue sky. Its massive outer wall loomed imperially, although smoke-blackened in places, notched and trailing rubble in others. The fighting that had finally ruptured the gate had come from within, from forces loyal to the Aquilonian nominee Baron Halk. The baron, an avowed ally of the western conquerors, now ruled the city under Aquilonia’s flag. At first sight of the black and gold lion banner flying above the gate, Conan’s column of troops halted in the road and raised a lusty cheer.
The king kept his troops in tight order within the city. He had to spur his horse ahead to stop Amlunia from driving the chariot recklessly through the market district, at cost of innocent life and limb; otherwise the procession passed safely to the royal palace. The domed, minaretted pile was battle-scarred, with broken portals under hasty repair, but scarcely looted and still sumptuous.
Baron Halk was not in Belverus; he had ridden eastward with Prospero, to subdue fractious outer provinces and lay siege to Numalia. The baron’s troops held the capital well in hand; Conan noticed that the citizens quailed even more from the grey-cloaked provincial guards than from the aloof, well-disciplined Aquilonian invaders.
Halk and his supporters hailed from the north-western provinces of Nemedia, close up against Aquilonia. The northerly barons were harsh men, battle-hard from strife against raiding Cimmerians and the adventuring warlords of the Border Kingdoms. No love was lost between Halk’s faction and t
he southern Nemedians, who had long held imperial sway over the country from the remote and, to a northerner’s eye, decadent splendour of Belverus.
Hence, in the turmoil following close on the death of a king, Halk and his neighbouring barons sided with the Aquilonians. Rightly or not, they expected greater license and hegemony as clients of invaders than they had yet enjoyed under native Nemedian monarchs.
With matters so firmly in control, Conan did not linger long in Belverus. One afternoon’s rest for his troops, and one night’s carouse with local authorities and officers—during which he made a point of drinking the hardiest of them under the feast table—was more than enough. Late the next morning, when the last of his troopers had been rounded up from stews and brothels in the teeming joy-district, he set forth again on the Road of Kings.
Scenes of devastation greeted them—more recent ones here, with some vanquished castles still smoking on their hilltops, and some corpses still bloating unscavenged in the grass. Captured spies and turncoats tossed and moaned, too, on cross-trees raised at road junctions. They were placed there by time-honoured Nemedian custom, probably at Baron Halk’s order.
Amlunia, seated beside her king, had a constructive suggestion to offer as the war chariot drew near the first of these unfortunates. “Arrow practice, Conan!” she blithely cried. “Or javelins, if you prefer. Each strike to the heart wins a tot of ale... or shall we shoot for the crosspiece instead? That would be harder, a throat or eye shot—”
“Quiet, wench,” the king warned her, speaking with gruff restraint. “I once had my own taste of crucifixion, and I can tell you, ’twas no idle sport.”
“But oh, Master,” Amlunia cried, clinging to the Aquilonian’s shoulder in the teasing, coaxing fashion that was her wont. “Please, Conan, to lighten the boredom of this march! It would serve the wretches well, by granting them a merciful death!”
“Aye, true, Milord Throat-piercer! You should not mind that!” Delvyn spoke up from his place on a packing chest at the front chariot rail, where, in full armour, he stood holding the reins. “Know you, Amlunia, royal Conan is a great mercy killer. I first laid eyes on him easing the pangs of his dying battle foes. He would have done the same for me, in his kingly zeal, had I not pointed out to him that I was not injured....” “Enough!” Conan spoke in a voice whose restraint was cracking, with as much real ire as he had yet shown his sycophants. “Egilrude!” he called out resoundingly. “Captain, over here!” Having compelled his chariot mates’ silence with grim looks, he rapped out orders that a party of troopers take pincers and extract the spikes holding the crucified men in place. Those who survived the ordeal of their liberation were to be left with stocks of bread and water by the roadside, to live as they might. “If they be real traitors,” Conan declared, “then their countrymen will slay them after we are gone.”
So passed the march, winding oh for days, until the royal party overtook Prospero’s Aquilonian legions and the host of Nemedian troops loyal to Baron Halk. They lay encamped before the gates of Numalia, the great walled city of the eastern realm.
From afar across the plain could be seen upward-angling campfire smoke in an arc about the city. A line of tents and rough fortifications stretched in a circle just outside bowshot of the wall. As the marchers drew nearer, the snap and thud of catapults became audible, counting off a steady, monotonous barrage. At length the arching projectiles were visible, glinting in a thin haze of dust their impacts raised over the town’s west gate and the massive square towers that flanked it. Aside from raising dust, the bombardment had done no apparent damage.
At last, to the heralding blare of trumpets, the Black Dragons rode into the main camp. On the arrival of the king, a well-drilled cheer rang up heavenward from the besieging troopers:
“Hail, Conan the Great!”
The cry echoed faintly away northward and southward as it spread along the siege perimeter. The king, flanked by his guards, spurred his mount straight up to the command pavilion, bright with gold-embroidered flaps and pennons. There a handful of officers stood assembled.
“Conan! Hail, O King!” Prospero exclaimed. Foremost in the delegation, he knelt in a low, elegant bow before stepping forward to the monarch’s horse. “Happy we are to have you here, milord. And how timely your arrival!” He turned to the nobleman beside him, who was still recovering from his bow. “This is Baron Halk, our Nemedian ally, a fierce and unyielding fighter,” he announced, helping the man to his feet.
The Baron, though middle-aged and hale-looking, was stout and heavily armoured, which may have accounted for his difficulty in rising. He seemed slightly flushed, unused to making obeisances. Or perhaps, the king thought, his ungainliness and reddish colour were the result of excessive drink. Conan felt the baron’s purplish gaze on him as he swung down from the saddle, and when he turned to the delegation, Halk’s hand was extended. The baron fumblingly grasped the king’s arm, palm to wrist, in the legionary fashion, half in greeting and half to steady himself on his feet.
“Greetings, Sir King,” he declared, giving Conan’s forearm a middling squeeze. “You are indeed Cimmerian bred, ’tis plain from the cast of your face. There is Cimmerian blood in my royal line as well, the legacy of fierce northern invaders.” He relinquished Conan’s arm and laid his own on the shoulder nearest him, for better support. “Glad I am that you sent the silver tongued Prospero to drink and dicker with me, for it has proven a profitable alliance.” The taint of wine was evident in his words, as on his wafting breath. “It befits well that we of northern blood should clap these womanish southerners under our yoke.”
“I differ not between northern and southern blood— nor does my sword. In fact it may be that I have more enemies north of the Gunder Marches than south.” Conan returned the other’s gaze coldly, knowing that in any case the baron would remember little of this meeting. “But I trust Prospero’s rede that you will be my loyal confederate and an able guardian of this realm, once it is subdued and given over into your keeping.” He turned to the Poitanian. “Both of you have done well so far. I commend you. But, Prospero,” he declared to the count, “as I look about the camp today, your force seems to be standing idle.”
“Aye, Your Majesty,” the Poitanian answered, his lips pursing non-committally between moustache and goatee. “So it would seem.”
“You have offered the city magistrates fair terms of surrender?”
“Yes, milord. Our envoy was sent dragging back to us hog-tied, his hair glued to his horse’s tail with pitch and pine resin.”
“I see. A flagrant insult.” Conan scowled grimly around him, then pointed. “Those catapults, now—do you truly think they will have any effect on the bronze gate, or its granite bastions and butments? Their missiles only peck at it, man, like pigeons at a stone granary!”
“Yes, Sire, you are right.” Prospero nodded in frank concurrence with his king. “The catapults seem to be doing no damage whatever.”
“Well, good Count,” Conan said, rounding again on his subordinate, “I never thought I would have to spur you to greater effort in reducing a city! Know you, a lengthy siege never helped an army’s fighting spirit.” He drew Prospero a little aside to keep from upbraiding him too publicly. “Plague and starvation will tell as sorely on us as on the defenders—they drain a trooper’s will. And I, for one, lack the time to wait. A long siege here, followed by another and yet another, though each were victorious, would lose us this campaign!” Abruptly the king ceased his tirade. Reluctant to abuse his long-time friend and counsellor further, he left the final word to Prospero. “Well, man, what have you to say for yourself?”
For a moment there was no sound except a distant artillery officer’s shout, the snap of the catapult, and the crack of a projectile against unyielding stone. Then the count raised his arm innocently and pointed. “When yonder candle bums out, the gates of Numalia will fall.”
“What?” The king’s gaze followed Prospero’s pointing finger. On a camp table under the ten
t’s broad canopy sat a crystal chimney mounted on an ornate bronze base; within it, the remains of a white tallow candle burned. The taper which remained was less than a stub, its wax all but consumed, its wick doubling over and near to sputtering out. Conan, registering these facts, sized up the figure who stood over the lamp, intent upon its glow—a scrawny, elderly man with a balding grey pate, clad in a silk jerkin and pantaloons that looked dusty black in the shade of the awning.
“What, Prospero,” Conan asked in a gruff, restrained voice, “you have resorted to wizardry? You know my opinion of such things. Although, to shorten a siege—”
“Nay, my king, ’tis not sorcery!” Evidently the Poitanian, having finished with some private joke, was now anxious to reassure Conan lest the king betray unseemly ignorance to the others present. “The venerable Minias there is a sapper, captain of a whole company of miners brought to us by Baron Halk. The dirt in those breastworks”—he pointed to a line of field defences, apparently raised to fend off sallies out of the city—“has been dug from beneath the north gate tower, and carried here through tunnels engineered by Minias.” At the further mention of his name, the elderly captain looked around long enough to give a respectful nod to Conan, then turned back to his candle. Prospero continued, “This pelting by catapults is meant only to cover the noise of the sappers’ digging, so the Numalians will not sink shafts of their own and send miners to attack ours.”
“I see,” Conan said with an air of sagacity he did not truly feel. “It sounds like the methods used by certain thieves of my youthful acquaintance, when I dwelt in Zamora.” He glanced back to the camp table with a slightly puzzled look. “But tell me, how will the snuffing of yon candle make the gate fall? Is it a signal?” Prospero concealed any amusement he may have felt, but was still groping for words as Minias turned to answer the king. “Your Majesty,” the engineer said in Nemedian, “I sent an identical candle, lit at the same instant, down into the mines to pace my men’s labour. It will bum out too, at the same time. By now timber props are set in place, the supporting earthen walls cut away, and ropes connected to the last braces to trigger a cave-in.” The engineer gave a guarded look around the expanse of tents, troopers, and makeshift defences. “Your troops stand ready, O King, by Lord Prospero’s order. We have taken pains to look at ease, so as not to alert the watchers on the city wall. But believe me, all is in readiness.”
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