“In truth,” Conan said with a pensive frown, “the line between gods and demons is a thin, hazy one at best.”
“What you will find, I would guess, King Skull-breaker,” Delvyn opined at length, “is that gods, like kings, comprise only a small village. One would seek to become the best and most powerful god one could.” The jester spoke slowly and deliberately. “To do that, one would choose one’s friends carefully, and make alliance with only the greatest and most adept of the reigning gods....”
So their conversations went, ranging from the outrageous and blasphemous to the merely profound. The dwarf had a clever, penetrating mind. Himself, Conan wondered how he had ever gotten so far without the jester’s subtle advice. There indeed was proof of his having had divine guidance all his years. And Amlunia—in spite of her blood-lusting ways and her wanton’s wont, which after all befitted a warrior’s whim—she seemed devoted to him and astonishingly eager to show it. In all, he could not remember ever having had such boon marching companions.
With Prospero the king was less inclined to air his deepest ponderings. The nobleman, though courtly and sophisticated, was more linked to Conan’s old life of castle and court, and more burdened down with mundane concerns of statecraft. His evident dislike of Co-nan’s new friends—seldom stated, and masked as it was by his habit of respectful deference to his king—made Conan doubt his frankness. The monarch would have been more comfortable if Prospero had savagely denounced Delvyn and Amlunia, and gotten the matter out in the open. But he guessed that the Poitanian feared to take on the dwarf’s scathing tongue and Amlunia’s low-cutting sarcasm.
So open dissension did not complicate the journey. Leaders and troopers alike fell into the routine of waking, striking camp, marching, fortifying a new camp, and slumbering the night through, except for their watch duty. As they went, the way grew harder; new summits and chasms unfolded before them, each surpassing the previous one in steepness. To the fatigue of climbing was added the jarring rigour of descent, often over tangled roots and broken, sliding rock, into crevasses that would later require an even sheerer climb to escape. The roughest, narrowest parts of the trail inevitably caused the marching line to lengthen, with tiresome delays at the rear amid dusty, shadeless stones. At other times a whole long, weary day was spent hauling animals and stores up a single ragged incline by means of ropes. Those nights when the army was forced to camp divided, Conan ordered the bulk of the fighting forces into the forward camp, on the theory that the greatest threat lay in the unknown terrain ahead.
Then, when their bodies and equipment had been honed to feral leanness, the terrain all but levelled out to a high plateau of brush expanses and sparse, rocky meadows. The jagged summits of the Karpash peaks diminished to mere snags against a horizon of deep, transparent blue through which stars peered at eventide. Curiously for this higher elevation, the weather seemed to abate, with gusts less chilling and a milder, brighter sun. Even the lightning storms, which had come to be an expected relief and a tolerated threat each afternoon—since their bolts only occasionally obliterated an armoured man or a pack horse—ceased to boil in from the lower valleys. Evening came now with a stillness that gradually settled over the land, and a furnace-like glow that painted the westward-facing crags a blood-drenched gold.
One such afternoon, when the forward camp had been established well before sunset on a natural defensive site, Conan went for a solitary walk. Betimes he grew weary of Delvyn’s forced gaiety, Amlunia’s bawdy attentions, and Prospero’s unfailing politeness. Most of the soldiers had rolled into their blankets for an early sleep, in anticipation of rising before dawn on the morrow; so on the pretext of retiring for the night, the king was able to slip away from his guardians, sneak through camp, and scramble down one of the stone scarps that formed its perimeter. From there he made his way to a shallow ravine leading off into wilderness. He counted on the long mountain dusk to give him time for a brisk jog or climb.
The granite skeleton of the mountain was exposed underfoot—smooth, weathered stone with sparse grass and stunted trees rooted in its seams and fissures. Conan was aware that, if he should fail to return, it would be nigh impossible for others to trace his steps across the barren rock. He wondered if any human had ever trod here before—any lone wanderer or hunter, down the uncounted aeons of man’s existence.
Then, coming over a stone hummock, he found his question indisputably answered; there before him, nestled between the rock slope and a stand of scrawny trees, was a small, squat building. It was made of stone; thick granite boulders and slabs had been cut roughly to shape, hoisted or trundled into position—and then, it appeared, carved and adorned with runes, patterns, and human figures sculpted in shallow relief. The result hulked before him in the purpling twilight, oddly uneven in shape but ornately and skilfully decorated.
Conan, deeming the place long deserted, eased down nearer to it. He squinted at the sculptures, which predominantly featured a noble, square-bearded patriarch. He decided the place must be an ancient, forgotten shrine to the god Mitra.
So this glen, rather than being primal wilderness, had known human habitation. Or perhaps it was but a way station, a shrine for devout travellers on an older, once frequented route over the pass. Conan’s instinct would ordinarily be to shun hoary temples and tombs; but this edifice, suggesting as it did a benign, prosperous past, interested him. He moved near the doorway, cautiously in case the yawning hole was the lair of some wild beast. The stone posts and lintel were indeed ancient— lichen-crusted, and crumbling away at their comers. The interior gloom was difficult for his eyes to pierce with the light outside rapidly dimming.
“Look’st thou for treasure? There still may be aught inside. It is many a year since pilgrims came this way.”
The voice came from behind Conan; it jarred him to action as it spoke, making him dive and roll aside over bruising rocks to land on one knee, dagger pointed ready in his hand.
But the speaker who now emerged from the thicket posed no evident threat. It was an elderly, grey-bearded man with a stoop to his walk and a quizzical smile on his seamed, sun-darkened face. With his crooked gait he advanced gingerly over the rocks and branches that littered the ground, pausing a respectful distance from the battle-ready king.
Conan returned his dagger to its sheath—a gesture hinting at contempt more than trust—and took in the stranger. He was clad in a deeply soiled, robe-like garment hanging under a fur cap and fur-lined vest. He carried no weapons except a skinning knife sheathed at his waist, and a slender pole with a wire loop wagging from its end. From a strap slung over his shoulder depended a deep, roundish cage of bronze mesh—an animal trap of some kind, already seemingly weighted with the day’s catch. The skirts of the old man’s robe were bound up around his thighs, exposing skinny, wiry-looking shanks terminating in dusty sandalled feet. The fellow, though bent and filthy, looked capable enough of survival in this remote place or any other.
“What, then, Grandfather,” Conan asked sceptically, “why do you challenge me? Are you priest or hermit of this crumbling shrine?”
“Me, a priest of Mitra?” The old one grinned crookedly, exposing a partial set of yellow-stained teeth. “Nay, stranger, I have never been a follower of haughty southern gods! I am but a wanderer like yourself, a hunter ranging these hills for my livelihood.”
Conan examined the cage at the elder’s side, thinking he detected the glint of beady red eyes and the probing of pointed snouts at the interstices. “You look to be naught but a rat-catcher, old fellow. Is that the noblest game to be hunted among these cliffs?”
The old one responded with a twinkle in his eye. “Not the noblest, to be sure.” He shrugged crookedly. “But the most populous, certainly, and the readiest to hand. The little devils are hellish prolific—someone must hunt them, else they would overrun the world and devour all there is.”
“I see.” The king nodded slowly, pondering the unlikelihood of this chance meeting in the midst of nowhere. “Y
ou subsist on rats, then?”
“Rats, yes, and assorted other vermin.” The old hunter nodded judiciously. “Whatever is in season. I have been known to trap serpents as well.”
“Hmm.” The king took his time answering, searching for some direction in the odd conversation. The other had not asked who he was, causing Conan to feel his royal reputation slighted. Even so, he resolved not to volunteer anything, lest the fellow grow greedy for ransom; he might decide to try out one of his traps on royal game. “What of the treasure you mentioned?” Conan finally asked. “Are you here in search of that?” “Treasure? Why, what would I want with treasure?” The old one knitted his brows in genuine-seeming astonishment. “What could it be to me, I ask you, except something too heavy to carry—till it were wrested away from me by a young tough like yourself? —and me likely killed, or further maimed in die taking! Nonsense, I need no treasure! My wants are provided for.” “I see.” Conan decided not to dispute this remarkable claim. “But if I hear you aright, you think there may be treasure”—he gestured toward the yawning archway of the shrine—“and you expect me to go and seek it out.”
“Treasure, yes, there must certainly be! Most indisputably!” The old one’s nods seemed earnest and guileless. “But you will have to go deep, I wager. The greatest treasure always lies deepest within.”
“Into that stone hut?” Conan asked, now perplexed. “How deep can one go, I ask you?”
The old man reached over his shoulder and dragged a tattered rucksack halfway forward around his side. He fished in it with a manner too abstracted to be threatening. “I will help you, if you like. Here,” he said, producing a lantern and a leather pouch clearly fashioned to contain flint, steel, and tinder.
Moving forward, the old man leaned his loop-ended stave against the front of the shrine. He knelt and plied steel deftly against flint, then set his tinder flame to the wick of the mesh-chimneyed lamp. As it flared up, a brightening spark in the swiftly darkening evening, he flicked down the windscreen and stood up beside the watching king. “Here, take the lamp and follow! I will go first.”
Taking up his staff, the old one stepped into the night-black archway. Conan could see no conceivable reason not to follow him. He entered, holding the lamp to one side, away from his eyes. By its beams, the shrine looked narrow and cloistered as expected; but its floor angled sharply downward into a cave or tunnel.
Ahead of him the old one made a sudden move. Conan tensed; he watched a pair of red eyes glowing from an angle of carving inside the shrine. The wire loop flicked at the end of its pole; the rustling became frantic, and the vermin was skilfully whisked to the cage at the elder’s side, where a mesh lid opened and closed over it.
“Congratulations, old man! You have found your treasure already!” Conan inched the lamp forward behind his guide.
“In sooth: temples, tombs, and castles are full of rats. They like to undermine the foundations. But you must know where to look.” The wire loop lashed forth again, snaring a less visible quarry from behind the noble foot of a rough-carved statue. “If you want to be a rat-catcher, you must be sly.” The metal trap clashed shut again. “Sly and light-footed.”
They had descended beneath ground level, and now it was apparent that the place was a cavern. Protrusions of natural stone, variously spindling and bulbous, hung from the walls and ceiling; the only path through them was the one from the shrine above, presumably cut by human hands. Lamplight played weirdly on the festoons and spires of flowstone, bringing out lurid colours in their moulded, glistening surfaces. The shadows fled from the lamp-bearer’s approach, as did the bent shadow and shape of the old man. Rats and rat spoor ceased to be in evidence; the air cooled, and the scent of mountain balsams was replaced by the dank smell of earth’s innards.
“So it ever was,” the old rat-catcher remarked. “Every temple of man is raised on an older sanctuary of the earth itself—even shrines of great and lofty Mitra.”
“What makes you so sure this is a temple of Mitra?” Conan argued back, talking primarily to ward off the looming shadows.
“If not Mitra, then who?” The elder one twisted crookedly about to regard Conan. The lamp’s glow played sharply on his wizened, impish face, highlighting its quizzical wrinkles.
“Why, old man, for all you know, it could be a temple to me!” His voice did not really quaver like a child’s with the boast; only the echoes in the cave made it seem so.
“You regard yourself as one of the immortal gods?” The rat-catcher turned from him and proceeded into the cave, so that Conan was obliged to follow with the lamp just to keep him in sight. “Do you have the patience for it? I would think that the gods, forced to haunt musty sanctums such as this down the centuries, grow immortally weary of them.”
“Patience was never a vice of mine,” Conan said gruffly. “If I become a god, it will be through my lack of patience.”
“Hmm. ’Tis not so much patience that is required,” the spirited old voice muttered back, “as an unswerving sense of your own worth. Are you struggling with imaginary wraiths and hobgoblins just to disprove or excuse your secret doubts of yourself? Or can you see a worthy goal and hold to it?”
“At the moment, old man, I can see no goal—nor anything worthwhile, including yourself! But enough of this—how much further must we go down this rat-hole?”
“Far, indeed.” The old one glanced back to Conan with an admonishing frown. “I told you, the greatest treasures lie deep within.” He walked on briskly with his crooked gait, then abruptly slowed. “But here, just ahead, may be a challenge that will keep your fickle mind distracted. Come forward—but walk lightly.”
As Conan overtook the old man, he could see him stooping at the brink of a dark pit. The rim of lamplight ebbed down its farther wall as Conan approached but it did not strike any visible bottom. When the king took his place beside the rat-catcher on the edge of the abyss, he could peer down into its depths and see nothing at all—beyond a few faint contours of its stone walls a dozen man-lengths below. That it had a bottom was only suggested by echoes of faint liquid sounds from beneath.
The pit was all the more formidable, because it appeared to stretch from wall to wall of the cavern, which narrowed here to a roughly circular shape. The level part of the cave continued beyond it some way at least; this could be seen by raising the lamp high and projecting crazed shadows against crazier stone surfaces.
But the only way across to the far side of the chasm was an antique arched bridge made of roughly shaped stones.
The span was rail-less and unsafe; its outer edges had crumbled away, so that the level space for walking was but a single stone wide, the width of a grain sack. If there had ever been mortar in the joints between the rocks, it had long since fallen away into the void. All that remained was an improbable pile of rough stones leaning precariously together over nothingness.
“A challenge, indeed.” The old rat-catcher, pulling a filthy rag out of his knapsack, stooped toward Conan and busied himself with the lamp. He unstoppered the hole in its side, and from it tipped some lamp oil onto the cloth, dousing it well. Then he raised it to the flaming chimney and, with a swift, simultaneous motion of his hand, flicked the scrap aside. The rag exploded into flame and flew out into the void, to plummet down and down.
Leaning out over the pit, both men saw it fall, flaring brightly with the rush of air past it. A long way it flew until finally its light reflected on the chasm’s floor, an ebon pool.
The thin fluid of the pool looked somehow too dark to be water; it bubbled at its centre, making liquescent sounds and spreading circular ripples across its surface. When the rag struck, poison vapours must have been ignited; for there came a ghostly blue flash and a whoosh! which caused the king and rat-catcher to step back from the rim of the pit, shading their faces.
That same instant, a rush of hot air and a tremor overtook them; the shock caused debris to sift down from the rotten bridge, while the rats fought and chittered with excitemen
t inside the old man’s cage. Conan too was momentarily abstracted; the sight of the black pond put him in mind of certain dreams he had been having of late. It brought an oily quease of fear to his stomach, and the sweat that broke out on his forehead was not wholly related to the blast of heat.
“So, onward!” the old man urged him. “Let us pass this obstacle and continue our quest. You were the one who was bored, so you may take the lead.”
Conan, his brow still aprickle with sweat, protested vehemently. “Old man, I am an adventurer, not a fool! I would never trust my life to that ramshackle pile! What kind of simpleton must you think me, that you could so easily bring me to my death?”
“You fear to go.” The rat-catcher pursed his pert old mouth in a way that did not necessarily imply scorn. “Very well then, you hold the lamp and I will go first. If I succeed, you must follow.”
“Old fellow, do not test the bridge! I would not, even if I had your paltry few years left.” Seeing that the other paid him no heed, he said, “Very well! But if you try and fail, your death be not on my head.”
Conan watched as the old one walked to the end of the span, set first a foot on it, then his full weight. With careful, measured steps that were remarkably agile for one so old and crooked, he made his way forward. At the centre of the bridge he stopped and looked back at Conan; then he proceeded to the far side and hopped off.
“Well?” he asked, turning back again to look across the chasm. “Are you coming?”
Conan, though admittedly relieved that the old gadfly had made the crossing, experienced a deep flush of shame that he himself had not gone first. It was almost new to him, this feeling of being bested; it smote the king in him more cruelly than the man. “What, old vermin-eater,” he demanded, “you call me coward? And will you swear by the god you hold sacred that you will not poke and prod at the stones with your rat stick to send me to my death? If you try and fail, no god or demon will save you from my ire!”
Conan the Great Page 20