As the sun rose, casting long shadows across the courts, the last remains of the wall in front of the tower were shoveled out of the way. Then, with a mighty creaking and groaning, the tower advanced. The Zuagirs shot at it, but their arrows merely stuck in the hides that covered its front. The tower was of the same height as the storey on which they stood, with ladders going up its rear side. When it reached the tower in the garden, the Yezmites would swarm up, rush across the small platform on top, and burst through the flimsy lattice on to the balcony on which Conan and his men crouched.
“You have fought well,” he told them. “Let us end well by taking as many Yezmite dogs with us as we can. Instead of waiting for them to swarm in here, let us burst the lattice ourselves, charge out on to the platform, and hurl the Yezmites off it. Then we can slay those that climb the ladders as they come up.”
“Their archers will riddle us from the ground,” said Antar.
Conan shrugged, his lip curling in a somber smile. “We can have some fun in the meantime. Send the men to fetch pikes from the armory; for this kind of push, a solid line of spears is useful. And there are some big shields there; let those on the flanks carry these to protect the rest of us.”
A moment later Conan lined up the six surviving Zuagirs with pikes, while he stood in front of them with a massive battle-ax, ready to chop away the lattice and lead the charge on to the platform.
Nearer rolled the tower, the men huddled behind it shouting their triumph.
Then, when the siege tower was hardly a spear’s length from the balcony, it stopped. The long trumpets blared, a great hubbub arose, and presently the men behind the tower began running back through the gap in the wall.
IX. The Fate of Yanaidar
“Crom, Mitra, and Asura!” roared Conan, throwing down his ax. “The dogs can’t be running before they are even hurt!”
He strode back and forth on the balcony, trying to see what was happening, but the bulk of the deserted siege tower blocked his view. Then he dashed into the armory chamber and up the winding stair to the observation platform.
Toward the north, he looked out over the roofs of Yanaidar along the road that stretched out in the white dawn. Half a dozen men were running along that road. Behind them, other figures were swarming through the fortifications at the rim of the plateau. A fierce, deep yelling came to the ears listening in the suddenly silent city. And in the silence Conan again heard the mysterious drumming that had disturbed him on previous occasions. Now, however, he did not care if all the fiends of Hell were dramming under Yanaidar.
“Balash!” he cried.
Again, the negligence of the guards of the Stair had helped him. The Kushafis had climbed the unguarded Stair in time to slaughter the sentries coming to mount guard there. The numbers swarming up on to the plateau were greater than the village of Kushaf could furnish, and he could recognize, even at this distance, the red silken breeches of his own kozaki.
In Yanaidar, frozen amazement gave way to hasty action. Men yelled on the roofs and ran about in the street. From housetop to housetop the news of the invasion spread. Conan was not surprised, a few moments later, to hear Olgerd’s whiplash voice shouting orders.
Soon, men poured into the square from the gardens and court and from the houses around the square. Conan glimpsed Olgerd, far down the street amidst a glittering company of armored Hyrkanians, at the head of which gleamed Zahak’s plumed helmet. After them thronged hundreds of Yezmite warriors, in good order for tribesmen. Evidently Olgerd had taught them the rudiments of civilized warfare.
They swung along as if they meant to march out on to the plain and meet the oncoming horde in battle, but at the end of the street they scattered, taking cover in the gardens and the houses on each side of the street.
The Kushafis were still too far away to see what was going on in the city. By the time they reached a point where they could look down the street, it seemed empty. But Conan, from his vantage point, could see the gardens at the northern end of the town clustered with menacing figures, the roofs loaded with men with double-curved bows strung for action. The Kushafis were marching into a trap, while he stood there helpless. Conan gave a strangled groan.
A Zuagir panted up the stair and stood beside Conan, knotting a rude bandage about a wounded wrist He spoke through his teeth, with which he was tugging at the rag. “Are those your friends? The fools run headlong into the fangs of death.”
“I know,” growled Conan.
“I know what will happen. When I was a palace guardsman, I heard the Tiger tell his officers his plan for defense. See you that orchard at the end of the street, on the east side? Fifty swordsmen hide there. Across the road is a garden we call the Garden of the Stygian. There too, fifty warriors lurk in ambush. The house next to it is full of warriors, and so are the first three houses on the other side of the street.”
“Why tell me? I can see the dogs crouching in the orchard and on the roofs.”
“Aye! Then men in the orchard and the garden will wait until the Ilbarsis have passed beyond them and are between the houses. Then the archers on the roofs will pour arrows down upon them, while the swordsmen close in from all sides. Not a man will escape.”
“Could I but warn them!” muttered Conan. “Come on, we’re going down.”
He leaped down the stairs and called in Antar and the other Zuagirs. “We’re going out to fight.”
“Seven against seven hundred?” said Antar. “I am no craven, but “
In a few words Conan told him what he had seen from the top of the tower. “If, when Olgerd springs his trap, we can take the Yezmites in the rear in turn, we might just be able to turn the tide. We have nothing to lose, for if Olgerd destroys my friends he’ll come back and finish us.”
“But how shall we be known from Olgerd’s dogs?” persisted the Zuagir. “Your reavers will hew us down with the rest and ask questions afterwards.”
“In here,” said Conan. In the armory, he handed out silvered coats of scale mail and bronze helmets of an antique pattern, with tall, horsehair crests, unlike any he had seen in Yanaidar. “Put these on. Keep together and shout ‘Conanl’ as your war-cry, and we shall do all right.” He donned one of the helms himself.
The Zuagirs grumbled at the weight of the armor and complained that they were half blinded by the helmets, whose cheek plates covered most of their faces.
“Put them on!” roared Conan. “This is a stand-up fight, no desert jackal’s slash-and-run raid. Now, wait here until I fetch you.”
He climbed back to the top of the tower. The Free Companions and the Kushafis were marching along the road in compact companies. Then they halted. Balash was too crafty an old wolf to rush headlong into a city he knew nothing about. A few men detached themselves from the mass and ran towards the town to scout. They disappeared behind the houses, then reappeared again, running back towards the main forces. After them came a hundred or so Yezmites, running in ragged formation.
The invaders spread out into a battle line. The sun glinted on sheets of arrows arching between the two groups. A few Yezmites fell, while the rest closed with the Kushafis and the kozaki. There was an instant of dusty confusion through which sparkled the whirl of blades. Then the Yezmites broke and fled back towards the houses. Just as Conan feared, the invaders poured after them, howling like bloodmad demons. Conan knew the hundred had been sent out to draw his men into the trap. Olgerd would never have sent such an inferior force to charge the invaders otherwise.
They converged from both sides into the road. There, though Balash was unable to check their headlong rush, he did at least manage to beat and curse them into a more compact formation as they surged into the end of the street.
Before they reached it, not fifty paces behind the last Yezmites, Conan was racing down the stairs.
“Come on!” he shouted. “Nanaia, bolt the door behind us and stay here!”
Down the stair to the first storey they pelted, out the door, past the deserted siege t
ower, and through the gap in the wall. Nobody barred their way. Olgerd must have taken from the palace every man who could bear arms.
Antar led them into the palace and out again through the front entrance. As they emerged, the signal for the Yezmite attack was given by a deafening roar of a dozen long bronze trumpets in the hands of Olgerd’s Hyrkanians. By the time they reached the street, the trap had closed. Conan could see the backs of a mass of Yezmites struggling with the invaders, filling the street from side to side, while archers poured arrows into the mass from the roofs of the houses on either side.
With a silent rush Conan led his little group straight into the rear of the Yezmites. The latter knew nothing until the pikes of the Zuagirs thrust them through the back. As the first victims fell, the desert Shemites wrenched out their spears and thrust again and again, while in the middle of the line Conan whirled his ax, splitting skulls and lopping off arms at the shoulder. As the pikes broke or became jammed in the bodies of the Yezmites, the Zuagirs dropped them and took to their swords.
Such was the mad fury of Conan’s onslaught that he and his little squad had felled thrice their own number before the Yezmites realized they were taken in the rear. As they looked around, the unfamiliar harness and the shambles of mangled bodies made them give back with cries of dismay. To their imaginations the seven madly slashing and chopping attackers seemed like an army.
“Conan! Conan!” howled the Zuagirs.
At the cry, the trapped force roused itself. There were only two men between Conan and his own force. One was thrust through by the kozak facing him. Conan brought his ax down on the other’s helmet so hard that it not only split helm and head but also broke the ax handle.
In an instant of lull, when Conan and the Zuagirs faced the kozaki and nobody was sure of the others’ identity, Conan pushed his helmet back so that his face showed.
“To me!” he bellowed above the clatter. “Smite them, dog-brothers!”
“It is Conan!” cried the nearest Free Companions, and the cry was taken up through the host.
“Ten thousand pieces of gold for the Cimmerian’s head!” came the sharp voice of Olgerd Vladislav.
The clatter of weapons redoubled. So did the chorus of cries, curses, threats, shrieks, and groans. The battle began to break up into hundreds of single combats and fights among small groups. They swirled up and down the street, trampling the dead and wounded; they surged into the houses, smashed furniture, thundered up and down stairs, and erupted on to the roofs, where the Kushafis and kozaki made short work of the archers posted there.
After that, there was no semblance of order or plan, no chance to obey commands and no time to give them. It was all blind, gasping, sweating butchery, hand-to-hand, with straining feet splashing through pools of blood. Mingled inextricably, the heaving mass of fighters surged and eddied up and down Yanaidar’s main street and overflowed into the alleys and gardens. There was little difference in the numbers of the rival hordes. The outcome hung in the balance, and no man knew how the general battle was going; each was too busy killing and trying not to be killed to see what was going on around him.
Conan did not waste breath trying to command order out of chaos. Craft and strategy had gone by the board; the fight would be decided by sheer muscle and ferocity. Hemmed in by howling madmen, there was nothing for him to do but split as many heads and spill as many guts as he could and let the gods of chance decide the issue.
Then, as a fog thins when the wind strikes it, the battle began to thin, knotted masses splitting and melting into groups and individuals. Conan knew that one side or the other was giving way as men turned their backs on the slaughter. It was the Yezmites who wavered, the madness inspired by the drugs their leaders had given them beginning to die out.
Then Conan saw Olgerd Vladislav. The Zaporoskan’s helmet and cuirass were dented and blood-splashed, his garments shredded, his corded muscles quivering and knotting to the lightning play of his saber. His gray eyes blazed and his lips wore a reckless smile. Three dead Kushafis lay at his feet and his saber kept half a dozen blades in play at once. Right and left of him corseleted Hyrkanians and slit-eyed Khitans in lacquered leather smote and wrestled breast to breast with wild Kushafi tribesmen.
Conan also saw Tubal for the first time, plowing through the wrack of battle like a black-bearded buffalo as he glutted his wild-beast fury in stupendous blows. And he saw Balash reeling out of the battle covered with blood. Conan began beating his way through to Olgerd.
Olgerd laughed with a wild gleam in his eyes as he saw the Cimmerian coming toward him. Blood streamed down Conan’s mail and coursed in tiny rivulets down his massive, sun-browned arms. His knife was red to the hilt.
“Come and die, Conan!” shouted Olgerd. Conan came in as a kozak would come, in a blazing whirl of action. Olged sprang to meet him, and they fought as the kozaki fight, both attacking simultaneously, stroke raining on stroke too swiftly for the eye to follow.
In a circle about them, the panting, bloodstained warriors ceased their own work of slaughter to stare at the two leaders settling the destiny of Yanaidar.
“Aie!” cried a hundred throats as Conan stumbled, losing contact with the Zaporoskan blade.
Olgerd cried out ringingly and whirled up his sword. Before he could strike, or even realize the Cimmerian had tricked him, the long knife, driven by Conan’s iron muscles, punched through his breastplate and through the heart beneath. He was dead before he struck the ground, tearing the blade out of the wound as he fell.
As Conan straightened to look around, there came a new outcry, somehow different from what he would have expected to hear as his men set upon the broken Yezmites. He looked up and saw a new force of armed men clattering down the street in a solid, disciplined formation crushing and brushing aside the knots of fighters in their way. As they came close, Conan made out the gilded mail and nodding plumes of the Iranistanian royal guard. At their head raged the mighty Gotarza, striking with his great scimitar at Yezmite and kozak alike.
In a twinkling the whole aspect of the battle had changed. Some Yezmites fled. Conan shouted: “To me, kozaki!” and his band began to cluster around him, mixed with the Kushafis and some of the Yezmites. The latter, finding Conan the only active leader against the new common foe, fell in with the men with whom they had just been locked in a death grapple, while along the front between the two masses, swords flashed and more men fell.
Conan found himself facing Gotarza, who swept the field with blows that would have felled small oaks. Conan’s notched blade sang and flashed too fast for the eye to follow, but the Iranistani was not behind him. Blood from a cut on the forehead ran down the side of Gotarza’s face; blood from another flesh wound in Conan’s shoulder crimsoned the front of his mail. But still the blades whirled and clashed, neither finding an opening in the other’s guard.
Then the roar of battle rose in pitch to screams of pure terror. On all sides, men began to leave the fight to run for the road to the Stair. The panic push drove Conan into a corpse-corps with Gotarza. Breast to breast they strained and wrestled. Conan, opening his mouth to shout, found it full of Gotarza’s long black beard. He spat it out and roared:
“What in Hell is going on, you palace-bred lap dog?”
“The real owners of Yanaidar have come back,” shouted Gotarza. “Look, swine!”
Conan risked a glance. From all sides, hordes of slinking gray shadows with unblinking, soulless eyes and misshapen, doglike jaws swarmed, to fasten upon any man they met, wherever a clawed but manlike hand could-find a hold, and begin to tear him apart and devour him on the spot. Men struck at them with the strength of maniacal terror, but their corpselike skins seemed almost impervious to weapons. Where one fell, three others leaped to take its place.
“The ghouls of Yanaidar!” gasped Gotarza. “We must flee. Smite me not in the back till we win clear, and I’ll hold my hand from you. We can settle our own score later.”
The rush of fugitives bowled the two
off their feet. Conan felt human feet on his back. With a tremendous effort he forced himself back on his knees and then to his feet, striking out with fists and elbows to clear enough space to breathe.
The rout flowed out northward along the road to the Stair, Yezmites, kozaki, Kushafis, and Iranistanian guards all mixed together but forgetting their three-cornered battle in the face of this subhuman menace. Women and children mingled with the warriors. Along the flanks of the rout swarmed the ghouls, like great gray lice, flowing over any person who became momentarily separated from the rest. Conan, thrust out to the edges of the crowd by the buffeting of the fugitives, came upon Gotarza staggering under the attack of four ghouls. He had lost his sword, but gripped two by the throat, one with each hand, while a third clung to his legs and a fourth circled around, trying to reach his throat with its jaws.
A swipe of Conan’s knife cut one ghoul in half; a second took off the head of another. Gotarza hurled the others from him, and then they swarmed over Conan, ripping and snapping with claws and fangs. For an instant they almost pulled him down. He was dimly aware that Gotarza had pulled one off him, thrown it to the ground, and was stamping on it with a sticklike snapping of ribs. Conan broke his knife on another and crushed the skull of a third with the hilt.
Then he was running on again with the rest. They poured through the gate in the cyclopean wall, down the Stair, down the ramps, and out across the floor of the canyon. The ghouls pursued them as far as the gate, pulling down man after man. As the last fugitives jammed through the gate, the ghouls fell back, scurrying along the road and into the orchards to fall snarling upon the bodies over which little knots of their own kind already snapped and fought.
The Other Tales of Conan Page 40