The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 1 The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 1

by Robert E. Howard

  Now Conn half crouched, sword ready, a bestial snarl of menace humming in his bull-throat, and from the defile there came a tall man, wrapped in a cloak beneath which the thrall glimpsed a sheen of mail. The stranger wore a slouch hat pulled so low that from his shadowed features only one eye gleamed, cold and grim as the grey sea.

  “Well, Conn, thrall of Wolfgar Snorri’s son,” said the stranger in a deep, powerful voice, “whither do you flee, with your master’s blood on your hands?”

  “I know you not,” growled Conn, “nor how you know me. If you would take me, whistle up your dogs and make an end. Some of them will taste steel ere I die.”

  “Fool!” There was deep scorn in the reverberant tone. “I am no hunter of runaway serfs. There are wilder matters abroad. What do you smell in the sea-wind?”

  Conn turned toward the sea, lapping greyly at the cliffs far below. He expanded his mighty chest, his nostrils flaring as he breathed deeply.

  “I smell the tang of the salt-spume,” he answered.

  The stranger’s voice was like the rasp of swords. “The scent of blood is on the wind–the musk of slaughter and the shouts of the slaying.”

  Conn shook his head, bewildered. “It is only the wind among the crags.”

  “There is war in your homeland,” said the stranger sombrely. “The spears of the South have risen against the swords of the North and the death-fires are lighting the land like the mid-day sun.”

  “How can you know this?” asked the thrall uneasily. “No ship has put in to Torka for weeks. Who are you? Whence come you? How know you these things?”

  “Can you not hear the skirl of the pipes, the clashing of the axes?” replied the tall stranger. “Can you not smell the war-reek the wind brings?”

  “Not I,” answered Conn. “It is many a long league from Torka to Erin, and I hear only the wind among the crags and the gulls screeching over the headlands. Yet if there is war, I should be among the weapon-men of my clan, though my life is forfeit to Melaghlin because I slew a man of his in a quarrel.”

  The stranger gave no heed, standing like a statue as he gazed far out across the reaches of hazy barren mountains and misty waves.

  “It is the death-grip,” he said, like one who speaks to himself. “Now comes the reaping of kings, the garnering of chiefs like a harvest. Gigantic shadows stalk red-handed across the world, and night is falling on Asgaard. I hear the cries of long-dead heroes whistling in the void, and the shouts of forgotten gods. To each being there is an appointed time, and even the gods must die…”

  He stiffened suddenly with a great shout, flinging his arms seaward. Tall, rolling clouds, sailing gigantically before the gale, veiled the sea. Out of the mist came a great wind and out of the wind a whirling mass of clouds. And Conn cried out. From out the flying clouds, shadowy and horrific, swept twelve shapes. He saw, as in a nightmare, the twelve winged horses and their riders, women in flaming silver mail and winged helmets, whose golden hair floated out on the wind behind them, and whose cold eyes were fixed on some awesome goal beyond his ken.

  “The Choosers of the Slain!” thundered the stranger, flinging his arms wide in a terrible gesture. “They ride in the twilight of the North! The winged hooves spurn the rolling clouds, the web of Fate is spun, the Loom and Spindle broken! Doom roars upon the gods and night falls on Asgaard! Night and the trumpets of Ragnarok!”

  The cloak was blown wide in the wind, revealing the mighty, mail-clad figure; the slouch hat fell aside; the wild elf-locks blew free. And Conn shrank before the blaze of the stranger’s eye. And he saw that where the other eye should have been, was but an empty socket. Thereat panic seized him, so that he turned and ran down the defile as a man flees demons. And a fearsome backward glance showed him the stranger etched against the cloud-torn sky, cloak blowing in the wind, arms flung high, and it seemed to the thrall that the man had grown monstrously in stature, that he loomed colossal among the clouds, dwarfing the mountains and the sea, and that he was suddenly grey, as with vast age.

  II

  Oh Masters of the North, we come with tally of remembered dead,

  Of broken hearth and blazing home, and rafters crashing overhead.

  A single cast of dice we throw to balance, by the leaden sea,

  A hundred years of wrong and woe with one red hour of butchery.

  The spring gale had blown itself out. The sky smiled blue overhead and the sea lay placid as a pool, with only a few scattered bits of driftwood along the beaches to give mute evidence of her treachery. Along the strand rode a lone horseman, his saffron cloak whipping out behind him, his yellow hair blowing about his face in the breeze.

  Suddenly he reined up so short that his spirited steed reared and snorted. From among the sand dunes had risen a man, tall and powerful, of wild, shock-headed aspect, and naked but for a loin-cloth.

  “Who are you,” demanded the horseman, “who bear the sword of a chief, yet have the appearance of a masterless man, and wear the collar of a serf withal?”

  “I am Conn, young master,” answered the wanderer, “once an outlaw, once a thrall,–always a man of King Brian’s, whether he will or no. And I know you. You are Dunlang O’Hartigan, friend of Murrogh, son of Brian, prince of Dal Cais. Tell me, good sir, is there war in the land?”

  “Sooth to say,” answered the young chief, “even now King Brian and King Malachi lie encamped at Kilmainham, before Dublin. I have but ridden from the camp this morning. From all the lands of the Vikings King Sitric of Dublin has summoned the slayers, and Gaels and Danes are ready to join battle–and such a battle as Erin has never seen before.”

  Conn’s eyes clouded. “By Crom!” he muttered, half to himself, “it is even as the Grey Man said–yet how could he have known? Surely it was all a dream.”

  “How come you here?” asked Dunlang.

  “From Torka in the Orkneys in an open boat, flung down as a chip is thrown upon the tide. Of yore I slew a man of Meath, kern of Melaghlin, and King Brian’s heart was hot against me because of the broken truce; so I fled. Well, the life of an outlaw is hard. Thorwald Raven, Jarl of the Hebrides, took me when I was weak from hunger and wounds, and put this collar on my neck.” The kern touched the heavy copper ring encircling his bull-neck. “Then he sold me to Wolfgar Snorri’s son on Torka. He was a hard master. I did the work of three men, and stood at his back and mowed down carles like wheat when he brawled with his neighbors. In return he gave me crusts from his board, a bare earth floor to sleep on, and deep scars on my back. Finally I could bear it no more, and I leaped upon him in his own skalli and crushed his skull with a log of firewood. Then I took his sword and fled to the mountains, preferring to freeze or starve there rather than die under the lash.

  “There in the mountains,”–again Conn’s eyes clouded with doubt–” I think I dreamed,” he said, “I saw a tall grey man who spoke of war in Erin, and in my dream I saw Valkyries riding southward on the clouds…

  “Better to die at sea on a good venture than to starve in the Orkney mountains,” he continued with more assurance, his feet on firm ground. “By chance I found a fisherman’s boat, with a store of food and water, and I put to sea. By Crom! I wonder to find myself still alive! The gale took me in her fangs last night, and I know only that I fought the sea in the boat until the boat sank under my feet, and then fought her in her naked waves until my senses went from me. None could have been more surprised than I when I came to myself this dawn lying like a piece of driftwood on the beach. I have lain in the sun since, trying to warm the cold tang of the sea out of my bones.”

  “By the saints, Conn,” said Dunlang, “I like your spirit.”

  “I hope King Brian likes it as well,” grunted the kern.

  “Attach yourself to my train,” answered Dunlang. “I’ll speak for you. King Brian has weightier matters on his mind than a single blood-feud. This very day the opposing hosts lie drawn up for the death-grip.”

  “Will the spear-shattering fall on the morrow?” asked Co
nn.

  “Not by King Brian’s will,” answered Dunlang. “He is loath to shed blood on Good Friday. But who knows when the heathen will come down upon us?”

  Conn laid a hand on Dunlang’s stirrup-leather and strode beside him as the steed moved leisurely along.

  “There is a notable gathering of weapon-men?”

  “More than twenty thousand warriors on each side; the bay of Dublin is dark with the dragon-ships. From the Orkneys comes Jarl Sigurd with his raven banner. From Man comes the Viking Brodir with twenty longships. From the Danelagh in England comes Prince Amlaff, son of the King of Norway, with two thousand men. From all lands the hosts have gathered–from the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Hebrides–from Scotland, England, Germany, and the lands of Scandinavia. “Our spies say Sigurd and Brodir have a thousand men armed in steel mail from crown to heel, who fight in a solid wedge. The Dalcassians may be hard put to break that iron wall. Yet, God willing, we shall prevail. Then among the other chiefs and warriors there are Anrad the berserk, Hrafn the Red, Platt of Danemark, Thorstein and his comrade-in-arms Asmund, Thorleif Hordi, the Strong, Athelstane the Saxon, and Thorwald Raven, Jarl of the Hebrides.”

  At that name Conn grinned savagely and fingered his copper collar. “It is a great gathering if both Sigurd and Brodir come.”

  “That was the doing of Gormlaith,” responded Dunlang.

  “Word had come to the Orkneys that Brian had divorced Kormlada,” said Conn, unconsciously giving the queen her Norse name.

  “Aye–and her heart is black with hate against him. Strange it is that a woman so fair of form and countenance should have the soul of a demon.”

  “God’s truth, my lord. And what of her brother, Prince Mailmora?”

  “Who but he is the instigator of the whole war?” cried Dunlang angrily. “The hate between him and Murrogh, so long smoldering, has at last burst into flame, firing both kingdoms. Both were in the wrong–Murrogh perhaps more than Mailmora. Gormlaith goaded her brother on. I did not believe King Brian acted wisely when he gave honors to those against whom he had warred. It was not well he married Gormlaith and gave his daughter to Gormlaith’s son, Sitric of Dublin. With Gormlaith he took the seeds of strife and hatred into his palace. She is a wanton; once she was the wife of Amlaff Cauran, the Dane; then she was wife to King Malachi of Meath, and he put her aside because of her wickedness.”

  “What of Melaghlin?” asked Conn.

  “He seems to have forgotten the struggle in which Brian wrested Erin’s crown from him. Together the two kings move against the Danes and Mailmora.”

  As they conversed, they passed along the bare shore until they came into a rough broken stretch of cliffs and boulders; and there they halted suddenly. On a boulder sat a girl, clad in a shimmering green garment whose pattern was so much like scales that for a bewildered instant Conn thought himself gazing on a mermaid come out of the deeps.

  “Eevin!” Dunlang swung down from his horse, tossing the reins to Conn, and advanced to take her slender hands in his. “You sent for me and I have come–you’ve been weeping!”

  Conn, holding the steed, felt an impulse to retire, prompted by superstitious qualms. Eevin, with her slender form, her wealth of shimmering golden hair, and her deep mysterious eyes, was not like any other girl he had ever seen. Her entire aspect was different from the women of the Norse-folk and of the Gaels alike, and Conn knew her to be a member of that fading mystic race which had occupied the land before the coming of his ancestors, some of whom still dwelt in caverns along the sea and deep in unfrequented forests–the De Danaans, sorcerers, the Irish said, and kin to the faeries.

  “Dunlang!” The girl caught her lover in a convulsive embrace. “You must not go into battle–the weird of far-sight is on me, and I know if you go to the war, you will die! Come away with me–I’ll hide you–I’ll show you dim purple caverns like the castles of deep-sea kings, and shadowy forests where none save my people has set foot. Come with me and forget wars and hates and prides and ambitions, which are but shadows without reality or substance. Come and learn the dreamy splendors of far places, where fear and hate are naught, and the years seem as hours, drifting forever.”

  “Eevin, my love!” cried Dunlang, troubled, “you ask that which is beyond my power. When my clan moves into battle, I must be at Murrogh’s side, though sure death be my portion. I love you beyond all life, but by the honor of my clan, this is an impossible thing.”

  “I feared as much,” she answered, resigned. “You of the Tall Folk are but children–foolish, cruel, violent–slaying one another in childish quarrels. This is punishment visited on me who, alone of all my people, have loved a man of the Tall Folk. Your rough hands have bruised my soft flesh unwittingly, and your rough spirit as unwittingly bruises my heart.”

  “I would not hurt you, Eevin,” began Dunlang, pained.

  “I know,” she replied, “the hands of men are not made to handle the delicate body and heart of a woman of the Dark People. It is my fate. I love and I have lost. My sight is a far sight which sees through the veil and the mists of life, behind the past and beyond the future. You will go into battle and the harps will keen for you; and Eevin of Craglea will weep until she melts in tears and the salt tears mingle with the cold salt sea.”

  Dunlang bowed his head, unspeaking, for her young voice vibrated with the ancient sorrow of womankind; and even the rough kern shuffled his feet uneasily.

  “I have brought you a gift against the time of battle,” she went on, bending lithely to lift something which caught the sun’s sheen. “It may not save you, the ghosts in my soul whisper–but I hope without hope in my heart.”

  Dunlang stared uncertainly at what she spread before him. Conn, edging closer and craning his neck, saw a hauberk of strange workmanship and a helmet such as he had never seen before,–a heavy affair made to slip over the entire head and rest on the neckpieces of the hauberk. There was no movable vizor, merely a slit cut in the front through which to see, and the workmanship was of an earlier, more civilized age, which no man living could duplicate.

  Dunlang looked at it askance, with the characteristic Celtic antipathy toward armor. The Britons who faced Caesar’s legionaries fought naked, judging a man cowardly who cased himself in metal, and in later ages the Irish clans entertained the same conviction regarding Strongbow’s mail-clad knights.

  “Eevin,” said Dunlang, “my brothers will laugh at me if I enclose myself in iron, like a Dane. How can a man have full freedom of limb, weighted by such a garment? Of all the Gaels, only Turlogh Dubh wears full mail.”

  “And is any man of the Gael less brave than he?” she cried passionately. “Oh, you of the Tall People are foolish! For ages the iron-clad Danes have trampled you, when you might have swept them out of the land long ago, but for your foolish pride.”

  “Not altogether pride, Eevin,” argued Dunlang. “Of what avail is mail or plated armor against the Dalcassian ax which cuts through iron like cloth?”

  “Mail would turn the swords of the Danes,” she answered, “and not even an ax of the O’Briens would rend this armor. Long it has lain in the deep-sea caverns of my people, carefully protected from rust. He who wore it was a warrior of Rome in the long ago, before the legions were withdrawn from Britain. In an ancient war on the border of Wales, it fell into the hands of my people, and because its wearer was a great prince, my people treasured it. Now I beg you to wear it, if you love me.”

  Dunlang took it hesitantly, nor could he know that it was the armor worn by a gladiator in the days of the later Roman empire, nor wonder by what chance it had been worn by an officer in the British legion. Little of that knew Dunlang who, like most of his brother chiefs, could neither read nor write; knowledge and education were for monks and priests; a fighting man was kept too busy to cultivate the arts and sciences. He took the armor, and because he loved the strange girl, agreed to wear it–“If it will fit me.”

  “It will fit,” she answered. “But I will see you no more
alive.”

  She held out her white arms and he gathered her hungrily to him, while Conn looked away. Then Dunlang gently unlocked her clinging arms from about his neck, kissed her, and tore himself free.

  Without a backward glance he mounted his steed and rode away, with Conn trotting easily alongside. Looking back in the gathering dusk, the kern saw Eevin standing there still, a poignant picture of despair.

  III

  The campfires sent up showers of sparks and illumined the land like day. In the distance loomed the grim walls of Dublin, dark and ominously silent; before the walls flickered other fires where the warriors of Leinster, under King Mailmora, whetted their axes for the coming battle. Out in the bay, the starlight glinted on myriad sails, shield-rails and arching serpent-prows. Between the city and the fires of the Irish host stretched the plain of Clontarf, bordered by Tomar’s Wood, dark and rustling in the night, and the Liffey’s dark, star-flecked waters.

  Before his tent, the firelight playing on his white beard and glinting from his undimmed eagle eyes, sat the great King Brian Boru, among his chiefs. The king was old–seventy-three winters had passed over his lion-like head–long years crammed with fierce wars and bloody intrigues. Yet his back was straight, his arm unwithered, his voice deep and resonant. His chiefs stood about him, tall warriors with war-hardened hands and eyes whetted by the sun and the winds and the high places; tigerish princes in their rich tunics, green girdles, leathern sandals and saffron mantles caught with great golden brooches.

  They were an array of war-eagles–Murrogh, Brian’s eldest son, the pride of all Erin, tall and mighty, with wide blue eyes that were never placid, but danced with mirth, dulled with sadness, or blazed with fury; Murrogh’s young son, Turlogh, a supple lad of fifteen with golden locks and an eager face–tense with anticipation of trying his hand for the first time in the great game of war. And there was that other Turlogh, his cousin–Turlogh Dubh, who was only a few years older but who already had his full stature and was famed throughout all Erin for his berserk rages and the cunning of his deadly ax-play. And there were Meathla O’Faelan, prince of Desmond or South Munster, and his kin–the Great Stewards of Scotland–Lennox, and Donald of Mar, who had crossed the Irish Channel with their wild Highlanders–tall men, sombre and gaunt and silent. And there were Dunlang O’Hartigan and O’Hyne, chief of Connacht. But O’Kelly, brother chief of the O’Hyne, and prince of Hy Many, was in the tent of his uncle, King Malachi O’Neill, which was pitched in the camp of the Meathmen, apart from the Dalcassians, and King Brian was brooding on the matter. For since the setting of the sun, O’Kelly had been closeted with the King of Meath, and no man knew what passed between them.