Then he braced himself. The red god was his, but the problem was, how to get the thing away? If it were solid it would be much too heavy to move, but a tap of the butt of his knife assured him that it was hollow. He was pacing about, his head full of schemes for knocking one of the carven thrones apart to make a sledge, levering the god off its base, and hauling it out of the temple by means of the extra horses and the chains that worked the falling front door, when a voice made him whirl.
“Stand where you are!” It was a shout of triumph in the Kezankian dialect of Zamoria.
Conan saw two men in the doorway, each aiming at him a heavy double-curved bow of the Hyrkanian type. One was tall, lean, and red-bearded.
“Keraspa!” said Conan, reaching for the sword and the knife he had dropped.
The other man was a powerful fellow who seemed familiar.
“Stand back!” said the Kezankian chief. “You thought I had run away to my village, did you not? Well, I followed you all night, with the only one of my men not wounded.” His glance appraised the idol. “Had I known the temple contained such treasure I should have looted it long ago, despite the superstitions of my people. Rustum, pick up his sword and dagger.”
The man stared at the brazen hawk’s head that formed the pommel of Conan’s scimitar.
“Wait!” he cried. “This is he who saved me from torture in Arenjun! I know this blade!”
“Be silent!” snarled the chief. “The thief dies!”
“Nay! He saved my life! What have I ever had from you but hard tasks and scanty pay? I renounce my allegiance, you dog!”
Rustum stepped forward, raising Conan’s sword, but then Keraspa turned and released his arrow. The missile thudded into Rustum’s body. The tribesman shrieked and staggered back under the impact, across the floor of the temple, and over the edge of the chasm. His screams came up, fainter and fainter, until they could no longer be heard.
Quick as a striking snake, before the unarmed Conan could spring upon him, Keraspa whipped another arrow from his quiver and nocked it. Conan had taken one step in a tigerish rush that would have thrown him upon the chief anyway when, without the slightest warning, the ruby-crusted god stepped down from its pedestal with a heavy metallic sound and took one long stride towards Keraspa.
With a frightful scream, the chief released his arrow at the animated statue. The arrow struck the god’s shoulder and bounced high, turning over and over, and the idol’s long arms shot out and caught the chief by an arm and a leg.
Scream after scream came from the foaming lips of Keraspa as the god turned and moved ponderously towards the chasm. The sight had frozen Conan with horror, and now the idol blocked his way to the exit; either to the right or the left his path would take him within reach of one of those ape-long arms. And the god, for all its mass, moved as quickly as a man.
The red god neared the chasm and raised Keraspa high over its head to hurl him into the depths. Conan saw Keraspa’s mouth open in the midst of his foam-dabbled beard, shrieking madly. When Keraspa had been disposed of, no doubt the statue would take care of him. The ancient priests did not have to throw the god’s victims into the gulf; the image took care of that detail himself.
As the god swayed back on its golden heels to throw the chief, Conan, groping behind him, felt the wood of one of the thrones. These had no doubt been occupied by the high priests or other functionaries of the cult in the ancient days. Conan turned, grasped the massive chair by its back, and lifted it. With muscles cracking under the strain, he whirled the throne over his head and struck the god’s golden back between the shoulders, just as Keraspa’s body, still screaming, was cast into the abyss.
The wood of the throne splintered under the impact with a rending crash. The blow caught the deity moving forward with the impulse that it had given Keraspa and overbalanced it. For the fraction of a second the monstrosity tottered on the edge of the chasm, long golden arms lashing the air; and then it, too, toppled into the gulf.
Conan dropped the remains of the throne to peer over the edge of the abyss. Keraspa’s screams had ceased. Conan fancied that he heard a distant sound such as the idol might have made in striking the side of the cliff and bouncing off, far below, but he could not be sure. There was no final crash or thump; only silence.
Conan drew his muscular forearm across his forehead and grinned wryly. The curse of the bloodstained god was ended, and the god with it. For all the wealth that had gone into the chasm with the idol, the Cimmerian was not sorry to have bought his life at that price. And there were other treasures.
He gathered up his sword and Rustum’s bow, and went out into the morning sunshine to pick a horse.
8. THE LAIR OF THE ICE WORM
Haunted by Atali’s icy beauty and bored with the simple life of the Cimmerian villages, Conan rides south toward the civilized realms, hoping to find a ready market for his sword as a condottiere in the service of various Hyborian princelings. At this time, Conan is about twenty-three.
I.
All day, the lone rider had breasted the slopes of the Eiglophian Mountains, which strode from east to west across the world like a mighty wall of snow and ice, sundering the northlands of Vanaheim, Asgard, and Hyperborea from the southern kingdoms. In the depth of winter, most of the passes were blocked. With the coming of spring, however, they opened, to afford bands of fierce, light-haired northern barbarians routes by which they could raid the warmer lands to the south.
This rider was alone. At the top of the pass that led southward into the Border Kingdom and Nemedia, he reined in to sit for a moment, looking at the fantastic scene before him.
The sky was a dome of crimson and golden vapors, darkening from the zenith to the eastern horizon with the purple of oncoming evening. But the fiery splendor of the dying day still painted the white crests of the mountains with a deceptively warm-looking rosy radiance. It threw shadows of deep lavender across the frozen surface of a titanic glacier, which wound like an icy serpent from a coomb among the higher peaks, down and down until it curved in front of the pass and then away again to the left, to dwindle in the foothills and turn into a flowing stream of water. He who traveled through the pass had to pick his way cautiously past the margin of the glacier, hoping that he would neither fall into one of its hidden crevasses nor be overwhelmed by an avalanche from the higher slopes. The setting sun turned the glacier into a glittering expanse of crimson and gold. The rocky slopes that rose from the glacier’s flanks were dotted with a thin scattering of gnarled, dwarfish trees.
This, the rider knew, was Snow Devil Glacier, also known as the River of Death Ice. He had heard of it, although his years of wandering had never before chanced to take him here. Everything he had heard of this glacier-guarded pass was shadowed by a nameless fear. His own Cimmerian fellow-tribesmen, in their bleak hills to the west, spoke of the Snow Devil in terms of dread, although no one knew why. Often he had wondered at the legends that clustered about the glacier, endowing it with the vague aura of ancient evil. Whole parties had vanished there, men said, never to be heard of again.
The Cimmerian youth named Conan impatiently dismissed these rumors. Doubtless, he thought, the missing men had lacked mountaineering skill and had carelessly strayed out on one of the bridges of thin snow that often masked glacial crevasses. Then the snow bridge had given way, plunging them all to their deaths in the blue-green depths of the glacier. Such things happened often enough, Crom knew; more than one boyhood acquaintance of the young Cimmerian had perished thus. But this was no reason to refer to the Snow Devil with shudders, dark hints, and sidelong glances.
Conan was eager to descend the pass into the low hills of the Border Kingdom, for he had begun to find the simple life of his native Cimmerian village boring. His ill-fated adventure with a band of golden-haired Aesir on a raid into Vanaheim had brought him hard knocks and no profit. It had also left him with the haunting memory of the icy beauty of Atali, the frost giant’s daughter, who had nearly lured him to an icy dea
th.
Altogether, he had had all he wanted of the bleak northlands. He burned to get back to the hot lands of the South, to taste again the joys of silken raiment, golden wine, fine victuals, and soft feminine flesh. Enough, he thought, of the dull round of village life and the Spartan austerities of camp and field!
His horse picked its way to the place where the glacier thrust itself across the direct route to the lowlands. Conan slid off his mount and led the animal along the narrow pathway between the glacier on his left and the lofty, snow-covered slope on his right. His huge bearskin cloak exaggerated even his hulking size. It hid the coat of chain mail and the heavy broadsword at his hip.
His eyes of volcanic blue glowered out from under the brim of a horned helmet, while a scarf was wound around the lower part of his face to protect his lungs from the bite of the cold air of the heights. He carried a slender lance in his free hand. Where the path meandered out over the surface of the glacier, Conan went gingerly, thrusting the point of the lance into the snow where he suspected that it might mask a crevasse. A battle-ax hung by its thong from his saddle.
He neared the end of the narrow path between the glacier and the hillside, where the glacier swung away to the left and the path continued down over a broad, sloping surface, lightly covered with spring snow and broken by boulders and hummocks. Then a scream of terror made him whip around and jerk up his helmeted head.
A bowshot away to his left, where the glacier leveled off before beginning its final descent, a group of shaggy, hulking creatures ringed a dim girl in white furs. Even at this distance, in the clear mountain air, Conan could discern the warm, fresh-cheeked oval of her face and the mane of glossy brown hair that escaped from under her white hood. She was a real beauty.
Without waiting to ponder the matter, Conan threw off his cloak and, using his lance as a pole, vaulted into the saddle. He gathered up the reins and drove his spurs into the horse’s ribs. As the startled beast reared a little in the haste with which it bounded forward, Conan opened his mouth to utter the weird and terrible Cimmerian war cry, then shut it again with a snap. As a younger man he would have uttered this shout to hearten himself, but his years of Turanian service had taught him the rudiments of craftiness. There was no use in warning the girl’s attackers of his coming any sooner than he must
They heard his approach soon enough, however. Although the snow muffled his horse’s hoofs, the faint jingle of his mail and the creak of his saddle and harness caused one of them to turn. This one shouted and pulled at his neighbor’s arm, so that in a few seconds all had turned to see Conan’s approach and set themselves to meet it
There were about a dozen of the mountain men, armed with crude wooden clubs and with stone-headed spears and axes. They were short-limbed, thick-bodied creatures, wrapped in tattered, mangy furs. Small, bloodshot eyes glared out from under beetling brows and sloping foreheads; thick lips drew back to reveal large yellow teeth. They were like leftovers from some earlier stage of human evolution, about which Conan had once heard philosophers argue in the courtyards of Nemedian temples. Just now, however, he was too fully occupied with guiding his horse and aiming his lance to spare such matters more than the barest fleeting thought Then he crashed among them like a thunderbolt.
II,
Conan knew that the only way to deal with such a number of enemies afoot was to take full advantage of the mobility of the horse, to keep moving, so as never to let them cluster around him. For while his mail would protect his own body from most of their blows, even their crude weapons could quickly bring down his mount. So he drove toward the nearest beastman, guiding his horse a little to the left.
As the iron lance crushed through bone and hairy flesh, the mountain man screamed, dropped his own weapon, and tried to clutch at the shaft of Conan’s spear. The thrust of the horse’s motion hurled the sub-man to earth. The lance head went down and the butt rose. As he cantered through the scattered band, Conan dragged his lance free.
Behind him, the mountain men broke into a chorus of yells and screams. They pointed and shouted at one another, issuing a dozen contradictory commands at once. Meanwhile Conan guided his mount in a tight circle and galloped back through the throng. A thrown spear glanced from his mailed shoulder; another opened a small gash in his horse’s flank. But he drove his lance into another mountain man and again rode free, leaving behind a wriggling, thrashing body to spatter the snow with scarlet.
At his third charge, the man he speared rolled as he fell, snapping the lance shaft. As he rode clear, Conan threw away the stump of the shaft and seized the haft of the ax that hung from his saddle. As he rode into them once more, he leaned from his saddle. The steel blade flashed fire in the sunset glow as the ax described a huge figure-eight, with one loop to the right and one to the left. On each side, a mountain man fell into the snow with a cloven skull. Crimson drops spattered the snow. A third mountain man, who did not move quickly enough, was knocked down and trampled by Conan’s horse.
With a wail of terror, the trampled man staggered to his feet and fled limping. In an instant, the other six had joined him in panic-stricken flight across the glacier. Conan drew rein to watch their shaggy figures dwindle, and then had to leap clear of the saddle as his horse shuddered and fell. A flint-headed spear had been driven deep into the animal’s body, just behind Conan’s left leg. A glance showed Conan that the beast was dead.
“Crom damn me for a meddling fool!” he growled to himself. Horses were scarce and costly in the northlands. He had ridden this steed all the way from far Zamora. He had stabled and fed and pampered it through the long winter. He had left it behind when he joined the Aesir in their raid, knowing that deep snow and treacherous ice would rob it of most of its usefulness. He had counted upon the faithful beast to get him back to the warm lands, and now it lay dead, all because he had impulsively intervened in a quarrel among the mountain folk that was none of his affair.
As his panting breath slowed and the red mist of battle fury faded out of his eyes, he turned toward the girl for whom he had fought. She stood a few feet away, staring at him wide-eyed.
“Are you all right, lass?” he grunted. “Did the brutes hurt you? Have no fear; I’m not a foe. I am Conan, a Cimmerian.”
Her reply came in a dialect he had never heard before. It seemed to be a form of Hyperborean, mixed with words from other tongues, some from Nemedian and others from sources he did not recognize. He found it hard to gather more than half her meaning.
“You fight, like a god,” she panted. “I thought, you Ymir come to save Ilga.”
As she calmed, he drew the story from her in spurts of words. She was Ilga of the Vininian people, a branch of the Hyperboreans who had strayed into the Border Kingdom. Her folk lived in perpetual war with the hairy cannibals who dwelt in caves among the Eiglophian peaks. The struggle for survival in this barren realm was desperate; she would have been eaten by her captors had not Conan rescued her.
Two days before, she explained, she had set out with a small party of Virunians to cross the pass above Snow Devil Glacier. Thence they planned to journey several days’ ride northeast to Sigtona, the nearest of the Hyperborean strongholds. There they had kinsmen, among whom the Virunians hoped to trade at the spring fair. There Ilga’s uncle, who accompanied her, also meant to seek a good husband for her. But they had been ambushed by the hairy ones, and only Ilga had survived the terrible battle on the slippery slopes. Her uncle’s last command to her, before he fell with his skull cleft by a flint ax, had been to ride like the wind for home.
Before she was out of sight of the mountain men, her horse had fallen on a patch of ice and broken a leg. She had thrown herself clear and, though bruised, had fled afoot. The hairy ones, however, had seen the fall, and a party of them came scampering down over the glacier to seize her. For hours, it seemed, she had run from them. But at last they had caught up with her and ringed her round, as Conan had seen.
Conan grunted his sympathy; his profound dislike of
Hyperboreans, based upon his sojourn in a Hyperborean slave pen, did not extend to their women. It was a hard tale, but life in the bleak northlands was grim. He had often heard the like.
Now, however, another problem faced them. Night had fallen, and neither had a horse. The wind was rising, and they would have little chance of surviving through the night on the surface of the glacier. They must find shelter and make a fire, or Snow Devil Glacier would add two more victims to its toll.
III.
Late that night, Conan fell asleep. They had found a hollow beneath an overhang of rock on the side of the glacier, where the ice had melted away enough to let them squeeze in. With their backs to the granite surface of the cliff, deeply scored and striated by the rubbing of the glacier, they had room to stretch out. In front of the hollow rose the flank of the glacier, clear, translucent ice, fissured by cavernous crevasses and tunnels. Although the chill of the ice struck through to their bones, they were still warmer than they would have been on the surface above, where a howling wind was now driving dense clouds of snow before it.
Ilga had been reluctant to accompany Conan, although he made it plain that he meant the lass no harm. She had tugged away from his hand, crying out an unfamiliar word, which sounded something like yakhmar. At length, losing patience, he had given her a mild cuff on the side of the head and carried her unconscious to the dank haven of the cave.
Then he had gone out to recover his bearskin cloak and the gear and supplies tied to his saddle. From the rocky slope that rose from the edge of the glacier, he had gathered a double armful of twigs, leaves, and wood, which he had carried to the cave. There, with flint and steel, he had coaxed a small fire into life. It gave more the illusion of warmth than true warmth, for he dared not let it grow too large lest it melt the nearby walls of the glacier and flood them out of their refuge.
The Other Tales of Conan Page 16