But the shaft was never loosed. He froze into motionlessness as the blood lust in his black eyes gave way to a look of startled recognition. With a whoop he gave back, throwing his arms wide to check the rush of his howling braves.
Although the man on the ledge above them understood the Pictish tongue, he was too far away to catch the significance of the staccato phrases snapped at the warriors by the crimson-feathered chief.
They all ceased their yelping and stood mutely staring up—not, it seemed to the man on the ledge, at him, but at the hill itself. Then, without further hesitation, they unstrung their bows and thrust them into buckskin cases at their girdles, turned their backs, and trotted back along the trail by which they had come, to disappear around the curve of the cliff without a backward look.
The Cimmerian glared in amazement. He knew the Pictish nature too well not to recognize the finality expressed in this departure. He knew they would not come back; they were heading for their villages, a hundred miles to the east.
But he could not understand it. What was there about his refuge that would cause a Pictish war-party to abandon a chase it had followed so long with all the passion of hungry wolves? He knew there were sacred places, spots set aside as sanctuaries by the various clans, and that a fugitive, taking refuge in one of these sanctuaries, was safe from the clan that raised it. But the different tribes seldom respected the sanctuaries of other tribes, and the men who pursued him certainly had no sacred spots of their own in this region. They were men of the Eagle, whose villages lay far to the east, adjoining the country of the Wolf Picts.
It was the Wolves who had captured the Cimmerian when he had plunged into the wilderness in his flight from Aquilonia, and it was they who had given him to the Eagles in return for a captured Wolf chief. The Eagle men had a red score against the giant Cimmerian, and now it was redder still, for his escape had cost the life of a noted war chief. That was why they had followed him so relentlessly, over broad rivers and rugged hills and through long leagues of gloomy forest, the hunting grounds of hostile tribes. And now the survivors of that long chase had turned back when their enemy was run to earth and trapped. He shook his head, unable to understand it.
He rose gingerly, dizzy from the long grind and scarcely able to realize that it was over. His limbs were stiff; his wounds ached. He spat dryly and cursed, rubbing his burning, bloodshot eyes with the back of his thick wrist He blinked and took stock of his surroundings. Below him the green wilderness billowed away and away in a solid mass, and above its western rim rose a steel-blue haze that, he knew, hung over the ocean. The wind stirred his black mane, and the salt tang of the atmosphere revived him. He expanded his enormous chest and drank it in. Then he turned stiffly and painfully about, growling at the twinge in his bleeding calf, and investigated the ledge on which he stood. Behind it rose a sheer, rocky cliff to the crest of the crag, some thirty feet above him. A narrow, ladderlike stair of handholds had been niched into the rock, and a few feet from the foot of this ascent a cleft, wide and tall enough for a man to enter, opened in the wall. He limped to the cleft, peered in, and grunted.
The sun, hanging high above the western forest, threw a shaft of light down the cleft, revealing a tunnel-like cavern beyond with an arch at its end. In that arch, illuminated by the beam, was set a heavy, iron-bound, oaken door.
This was amazing. This country was a howling wilderness. The Cimmerian knew that for a thousand miles, this western coast ran bare and uninhabited except by the villages of the ferocious sea-land tribes, who were even less civilized than their forest-dwelling brothers.
The nearest outposts of civilization were the frontier settlements along Thunder River, hundreds of miles to the east. The Cimmerian knew that he was the only white man ever to cross the wilderness that lay between that river and the coast. Yet that door was no work of Picts.
Being unexplainable, it was an object of suspicion, and suspiciously he approached it, ax and knife ready. Then, as his bloodshot eyes became more accustomed to the soft gloom that lurked on either side of the narrow shaft of sunlight, he noticed something else. The tunnel widened before it came to the door, and along the walls were ranged massive, iron-bound chests. A blaze of comprehension came into his eyes. He bent over one, but the lid resisted his efforts. He lifted his hatchet to shatter the ancient lock; then changed his mind and limped toward the arched door. Now his bearing was more confident, and his weapons hung at his sides. He pushed against the ornately-carven door, and it swung inward without resistance.
Then, with a lightninglike abruptness, his manner changed again. He recoiled with a startled curse, knife and hatchet flashing as they leaped to positions of defense. An instant he poised there, like a statue of fierce menace, craning his massive neck to glare through the door.
He was looking into a cave, darker than the tunnel, but meagerly illuminated by the dim glow that came from the great jewel that stood on a tiny ivory pedestal in the center of the great ebony table, about which sat those silent shapes whose appearance had so startled the Cimmerian.
These did not move, nor did they turn their heads toward him; but the bluish mist that overhung the chamber seemed to move like a living thing.
“Well,” he said harshly, “are you all drunk?”
There was no reply. He was not a man easily abashed, yet now he felt disconcerted.
“You might offer me a glass of that wine you’re swigging,” he growled, his natural belligerence aroused by the awkwardness of the situation. “By Crom, you show damned poor courtesy to a man who’s been one of your own brotherhood. Are you going to—”
His voice trailed off into silence, and in silence he stood and stared a while at those bizarre figures sitting so silently about the great ebon table.
“They’re not drunk,” he muttered presently. “They’re not even drinking. What devil’s game is this? He stepped across the threshold. Instantly the movement of the blue mist quickened. The stuff flowed together and solidified, and the Cimmerian found himself fighting for his life against huge black hands that darted for his throat.
II. Men from the Sea
Belesa idly stirred a sea shell with a daintily slippered toe, mentally comparing its delicate pink edges to the first pink haze of dawn that rose over the misty beaches. Dawn was now past, but the early sun had not yet dispelled the light, pearly clouds that drifted over the waters to westward.
She lifted her splendidly-shaped head and stared out over a scene alien and repellent to her, yet drearily familiar in every detail. From her small feet, the tawny sands ran to meet the softly-lapping waves, which stretched westward to be lost in the biue haze of the horizon. She was standing on the southern curve of a wide bay; south of her the land sloped up to the low ridge that formed one horn on that bay. From that ridge, she knew, one could look southward across the bare waters into infinities of distance as absolute as the view to the westward and to the northward.
Glancing listlessly landward, she absently scanned the fortress, which had been her home for the past year and a half. Against a vague, pearl-and-cerulean morning sky floated the golden and scarlet flag of her house. But the red falcon on its golden field awakened no enthusiasm in her youthful bosom, although it had flown over many a bloody field in the far south.
She made out the figures of men toiling in the gardens and fields that huddled near the fort, seeming to shrink from the gloomy rampart of the forest that fringed the open belt to the east, stretching north and south as far as she could see. She feared that forest, and that fear was shared by everyone in that tiny settlement. Nor was it an idle fear. Death lurked in those whispering depths— death swift and terrible, death slow and hideous—hidden, painted, tireless, unrelenting.
She sighed and moved toward the water’s edge, with no set purpose in mind. The dragging days were all of one color, and the world of cities and courts and gaiety seemed thousands of miles and ages of time away. Again she sought in vain for the reason that had caused a count of Zingara to
flee with his retainers to this wild coast, hundreds of miles from the land that bore him, exchanging the castle of his ancestors for a hut of logs.
Belesa’s eyes softened at the light patter of small bare feet across the sands.
A young girl came running over the low, sandy ridge, naked and dripping, with her flaxen hair plastered wetly to her small head. Her wistful eyes were wide with excitement.
“Lady Belesa!” she cried, rendering the Zingaran words with a soft, Ophirean accent. “Oh, Lady Belesa!”
Breathless from her scamper, the child stammered and gestured with her hands. Belesa smiled and put an arm about her, not minding that her silken dress came in contact with the damp, warm body. In her lonely, isolated life, Belesa had bestowed the tenderness of a naturally affectionate nature on the pitiful waif she had taken away from a brutal master on that long voyage up from the southern coasts.
“What are you trying to tell me, Tina? Get your breath, child.”
“A ship!” cried the girl, pointing southward. “I was swimming in a pool that the tide left in the sand, on the other side of the ridge, and I saw it! A ship sailing up out of the south!”
She tugged timidly at Belesa’s hand, her slender body aquiver. And Belesa felt her own heart beat faster at the mere thought of an unknown visitor. They had seen no sail since coming to that barren shore.
Tina flitted ahead of her over the yellow sands, skirting the little pools that the outgoing tide had left in shallow depressions. They mounted the low, undulating ridge. Tina poised there, a slender white figure against the clearing sky, with her wet, flaxen hair blowing about her thin face and a frail arm outstretched.
“Look, my lady!”
Belesa had already seen it: a billowing white sail, filled with the freshening south wind, bearing up along the coast a few miles from the point. Her heart skipped a beat; a small thing can loom large in colorless, isolated lives, but Belesa felt a premonition of strange and violent events. She felt that it was not by chance that this sail was wafting up this lonely coast. There was no harbor town to the north, though one sailed to the ultimate shores of ice; and the nearest port to the south must be nearly a thousand miles away. What had brought this stranger to lonely Korvela Bay, as her uncle had named the place when he landed?
Tina pressed close to her mistress, apprehension pinching her thin features.
“Who can it be, my lady?” she stammered, the wind whipping color to her pale cheeks. “Is it the man the count fears?”
Belesa looked down at her, her brow shadowed. “Why do you say that, child? How do you know my uncle fears anyone?”
“He must,” returned Tina naively, “or he would never have come to hide in this lonely spot. Look, my lady, how fast it comes!”
“We must go and inform my uncle,” murmured Belesa. “The fishing boats have not yet gone out, so that none of the men has seen that sail. Get your clothes, Tina. Hurry!”
The child scampered down the low slope to the pool where she had been bathing when she sighted the craft and snatched up the slippers, tunic, and girdle that she had left lying on the sand. She skipped back up the ridge, hopping as she dressed in mid-flight.
Belesa, anxiously watching the approaching sail, caught her hand, and they hurried toward the fort. A few moments after they had entered the gate of the log palisade that inclosed the building, the strident blare of a trumpet startled the workers in the gardens and the men who were opening the boathouse doors to push the fishing boats on their rollers down to the water’s edge.
Every man outside the fort dropped his tool or left his task and ran for the stockade without pausing to look about for the cause of the alarm. As the straggling lines of fleeing men converged on the open gate, every head was twisted over its shoulder to gaze fearfully at the dark line of woodland to the east; not one looked seaward. They thronged through the gate, shouting questions at the sentries who patrolled the footwalk below the up-jutting points of the logs that formed the palisade:
“What is it?”
“Why are we called in?”
“Are the Picts coming?”
For answer, one taciturn man-at-arms in worn leather and rusty steel pointed southward. From his vantage point the sail was now visible to the men who climbed up on the footwalk, staring toward the sea.
On a small lookout tower on the roof of the manor house, which was built of logs like the other buildings in the inclosure, Count Valenso of Korzetta watched the on-sweeping sail as it rounded the point of the southern horn. The count was a lean, wiry man of medium height and late middle age; dark, somber of expression. His trunk-hose and doublet were of black silk, the only color about his costume being that of the jewels that twinkled on his sword hilt and the wine-red cloak thrown carelessly over his shoulders. He nervously twisted his thin black mustache and turned his gloomy eyes on his seneschal, a leather-featured man in steel and satin.
“What do you make of it, Galbro?”
“A carack, sir,” answered the seneschal. “It is a carack trimmed and rigged like a craft of the Barachan pirates —look there!”
A chorus of cries below them echoed his ejaculation; the ship had cleared the point and was slanting inward across the bay. And all saw the flag that suddenly broke forth from the masthead: a black flag with the outline of a scarlet hand. The people within the stockade stared wildly at that dread emblem. Then all eyes turned up toward the tower, where the master of the fort stood somberly, his cloak whipping about him in the wind.
“It is a Barachan, all right,” grunted Galbro. “And unless I am mad, ‘tis Strombanni’s Red Hand. What is he doing on this naked coast?”
“He can mean us no good,” growled the count. A glance below showed him that the massive gates had been closed and that the captain of his men-at-arms, gleaming in steel, was directing his men to their stations, some to the ledges, some to the lower loopholes. He was massing his main strength along the western wall, which contained the gate.
A hundred men—soldiers, vassals, and serfs—and their dependents had followed Valenso into exile. Of these, some forty were men-at-arms, wearing helmets and suits of mail, armed with swords, axes, and crossbows. The rest were toilers, without armor save for shirts of toughened leather; but they were brawny stalwarts, skilled in the use of their hunting bows, woodsmen’s axes, and boar spears. They took their places, scowling at their hereditary enemies. For more than a century the pirates of the Barachan Isles, a tiny archipelago off the southwestern coast of Zingara, had preyed on the people of the mainland.
The men on the stockade gripped their bows or boar spears and stared somberly at the carack as it swung inshore, its brasswork flashing in the sun. They could see the figures swarming on the deck and hear the lusty yells of the seamen. Steel twinkled along the rail.
The count had retired from the tower, shooing his niece and her eager protegee before him. Having donned helmet and cuirass, he betook himself to the palisade to direct the defense. His subjects watched him with moody fatalism. They intended to sell their lives as dearly as they could, but they had scant hope of victory, in spite of their strong position. They were oppressed by a conviction of doom. More than a year on that naked coast, with the brooding threat of that devil-haunted forest looming forever at their backs, had shadowed their souls with gloomy forebodings. Their women stood silently in the doorways of their huts, inside the stockade, and quieted the clamor of their children.
Belesa and Tina watched eagerly from an upper window in the manor house, and Belesa felt the child’s tense little body quiver within the crook of her protecting arm.
“They will cast anchor near the boathouse,” murmured Belesa. “Yesl There goes their anchor, a hundred yards offshore. Do not tremble so, child! They cannot take the fort. Perhaps they wish only fresh water and supplies; perhaps a storm blew them into these seas.”
“They are coming ashore in the longboat!” said the child. “Oh, my lady, I am afraid! They are big men in armor! Look how the sun strikes fire fr
om their pikes and helmets! Will they eat us?”
Belesa burst into laughter in spite of her apprehension. “Of course not! Who put that idea into your head?”
“Zingelito told me the Barachans eat women.”
“He was teasing you. The Barachans are cruel, but they are no worse than the Zingaran renegades who call themselves buccaneers. Zingelito was a buccaneer once.”
“He was cruel,” muttered the child. “I’m glad the Picts cut his head off.”
“Hush, Tina!” Belesa shuddered slightly. “You must not speak that way. Look, the pirates have reached the shore. They line the beach, and one of them is coming toward the fort. That must be Strombanni.”
“Ahoy, the fort there!” came a hail in a voice as gusty as the wind. “I come under a flag of truce!”
The count’s helmeted head appeared over the points of the palisade. His stern face, framed in steel, surveyed the pirate somberly. Strombanni had halted just within earshot: a big man, bareheaded, with hair of the tawny hue sometimes found in Argos. Of all the sea-rovers who haunted the Barachans, none was more famed for deviltry than he.
“Speak!” commanded Valenso. “I have scant desire to convene with one of your breed.”
Strombanni laughed with his lips, not with his eyes. “When your galleon escaped me in that squall off the Trallibes last year, I never thought to meet you again on the Pictish coast, Valenso!” said he. “But I wondered at the time what your destination might be. By Mitra, had I known, I should have followed you then! I got the start of my life a little while ago, when I saw your scarlet falcon floating over a fortress where I had thought to see naught but bare beach. You have found it, of course?”
“Found what?” snapped the count impatiently.
“Do not try to dissemble with me!” The pirate’s stormy nature showed itself in a flash of impatience. “I know why you came here, and I have come for the same reason. I will not be balked. Where is your ship?”
The Other Tales of Conan Page 47