The Other Tales of Conan

by Howard, R. E.

  “That is none of your affair.”

  “You have none,” confidently asserted the pirate. “I see pieces of ship’s mast in that stockade. It must have been wrecked somehow, after you landed here. If you’d had a ship, you would have sailed away with your plunder long ago.”

  “What are you talking about, damn you?” yelled the count “My plunder? Am I a Barachan, to bum and loot? Even so, what should I loot on this bare coast?” “That which you came to find,” answered the pirate coolly. “The same thing I’m after and mean to have. But I shall be easy to deal with. Just give me the loot and I’ll go my way and leave you in peace.”

  “You must be mad!” snarled Valenso.

  “I came here to find solitude and seclusion, which I enjoyed until you crawled out of the sea, you yellow-headed dog. Begonel I did not ask for a parley, and I weary of this empty talk. Take your rogues and go your ways.”

  “When I go, I’ll leave that hovel in ashes!” roared the pirate in a transport of rage. “For the last time: will you give me the loot in return for your lives? I have you hemmed in here, and a hundred and fifty men ready to cut your throats at my word.”

  For answer, the count made a quick gesture with his hand below the points of the palisade. Almost instantly, a shaft hummed venomously through a loophole and splintered on Strombanni’s breastplate. The pirate yelled ferociously, bounded back, and ran toward the beach, with arrows whistling all about him. His men roared and came on like a wave, blades gleaming in the sun.

  “Curse you, dog!” raved the count, felling the offending archer with his iron-clad fist. “Why did you not strike his throat above the gorget? Ready with your bows, men; here they come!”

  But Strombanni checked the headlong rush of his men. The pirates spread out in a long line that overlapped the extremities of the western wall; they advanced warily, loosing their shafts as they came. Although their archery was considered superior to that of the Zingarans, they had to rise to loose their longbows. Meanwhile the Zingarans, protected by their stockade, sent crossbow bolts and hunting arrows back with careful aim.

  The long arrows of the Barachans arched over the stockade and quivered upright in the earth. One struck the windowsill over which Belesa watched. Tina cried out and flinched, staring at the vibrating shaft.

  The Zingarans sent their missiles in return, aiming and loosing without undue haste. The women had herded the children into their huts and now stoically awaited whatever fate the gods had in store for them.

  The Barachans were famed for their furious and headlong style of battling, but they were as wary as they were ferocious and did not intend to waste their strength vainly in direct charges against the ramparts. They crept forward in their widespread formation, taking advantage of every natural depression and bit of vegetation— which was not much, for the ground had been cleared on all sides of the fort against the threat of Pictish raids.

  As the Barachans got nearer to the fort, the defenders’ archery became more effective. Here and there a body lay prone, its back-piece glinting in the sun and a quarrel shaft standing up from armpit or neck. Wounded men thrashed and moaned.

  The pirates were quick as cats, always shifting their position, and they were protected by their light armor. Their constant raking archery was a continual menace to the men in the stockade. Still, it was evident that as long as the battle remained an exchange of archery, the advantage must remain with the sheltered Zingarans.

  Down at the boathouse on the beach, however, men were at work with axes. The count cursed sulfurously when he saw the havoc they were making among his boats, which had been built laboriously of planks sawn out of solid logs.

  “They’re making a mantlet, curse them!” he raged. “A sally now, before they complete it—while they are scattered—”

  Galbro shook his head, glancing at the unarmored workers with their awkward pikes. “Their arrows would riddle us, and we should be no match for them in hand-to-hand fighting. We must keep behind our walls and trust to our archery.”

  “Well enough,” growled Valenso, “if we can keep them outside our walls.”

  Time passed while the inconclusive archery duel continued. Then a group of thirty men advanced, pushing before them a great shield made of planks from the boats and the timbers of the boathouse itself. They had found an oxcart and mounted the mantlet on the wheels, which were great solid disks of oak. As they rolled it ponderously before them, it hid them from the sight of the defenders except for glimpses of their moving feet.

  It rolled toward the gate, and the straggling line of archers converged toward it, shooting as they ran.

  “Shoot!” yelled Valenso, going livid. “Stop them ere they reach the gate!”

  A storm of arrows whistled across the palisade and feathered themselves harmlessly in the thick wood. A derisive yell answered the volley. Shafts were Ending loopholes now as the rest of the pirates drew nearer; a soldier reeled and fell from the ledge, gasping and choking, with an arrow through his throat.

  “Shoot at their feet!” screamed Valenso. “And forty men at the gate with pikes and axes! The rest hold the wall!”

  Bolts ripped into the sand before the moving shield. A bloodthirsty howl announced that one had found its target beneath the edge. A man staggered into view, cursing and hopping as he strove to withdraw the quarrel that skewered his foot In an instant he was feathered by a dozen arrows.

  But, with a deep-throated shout, the pirates pushed the mantlet against the gate. Through an aperture in the center of the shield they thrust a heavy, iron-tipped boom, which they had made from the ridgepole of the boathouse. Driven by arms knotted with brawny muscles and backed with bloodthirsty fury, the boom began to thunder against the gate. The massive gate groaned and staggered, while from the stockade bolts poured in a steady stream; seme struck home, but the wild men of the sea were afire with fighting lust.

  With deep shouts they swung the ram, while from all sides the others closed in, braving the weakened anow-storm from the walls and shooting back fash and hard. Cursing like a madman, the count sprang from the wall and ran to the gate, drawing his sword. A clump of desperate men-at-arms closed in behind him, gripping their spears. In another moment the gate would cave in, and they must stop the gap with their bodies.

  Then a new note entered the clamor: a trumpet, blaring stridently from the ship.

  On the crosstree, a figure waved and gesticulated wildly. The thunder of the ram ceased, and Strombanni’s bellow rose above the racket:

  “Waitl Wait, damn you, listen!”

  In the silence that followed that bull’s bellow, the blare of the trumpet was plainly heard, and a voice that shouted something that was unintelligible to the people inside the stockade. But Strombanni understood, for his voice was lifted again in profane command. The ram was released, and the mantlet began to recede from the gate as swiftly as it had advanced. Pirates who had been trading shafts with the defenders began picking up their wounded fellows and helping them hastily back to the beach.

  “Look!” cried Tina at her window, jumping up and down in wild excitement, “They flee! All of them! They are running to the beach! Look! They have abandoned the shield! They leap into the longboat and pull for the ship! Oh, my lady, have we won?”

  “I think not.” Belesa was staring seaward. “Look!”

  She threw the curtains aside and leaned from the window. Her clear young voice rose above the amazed shouts of the defenders, who turned their heads in the direction she pointed. They sent up a deep yell as they saw another ship swinging majestically around the southern point. Even as they watched, she broke out the royal flag of Zingara.

  Strombanni’s pirates were swarming up the sides of their carack and heaving up the anchor. Before the stranger had progressed halfway across the bay, the Red Hand was vanishing around the northern horn.

  III. The Dark Stranger

  The blue mist had condensed into a monstrous black figure, dimly seen and not quite definite, which filled
the hither end of the cave, blotting out the still, seated figures behind. There was an impression of shagging pointed ears, and close-set horns.

  Even as the great arms shot out like tentacles toward his throat, the Cimmerian, quick as a flash, struck at them with his Pictish ax. It was like chopping at a trunk of the ebony tree. The force of the blow broke the handle of the tomahawk and sent the copper head flying with a clank against the side of the runnel; but, so far as the Cimmerian could tell, the blade had not bitten into the flesh of his foe at all. It took more than an ordinary edge to pierce a demon’s hide. And then the great fingers closed upon his throat, to break his neck as if it were a reed. Not since he had fought Baal-Pteor hand to hand in the temple of Hanuman in Zamboula had Conan felt such a grip upon him.

  As the hairy fingers touched his skin, the barbarian tensed the thickly-corded muscles of his massive neck, drawing his head down between his shoulders to give his unnatural foe the least possible purchase. He dropped the knife and the broken hatchet handle, seized the huge black wrists, swung his legs upward and forward, and drove both bare heels with all his might against the chest of the thing, straightening out his long body.

  The tremendous impulse of the Cimmerian’s mighty back and legs tore his neck loose from that lethal grip and sent him shooting like an arrow back up the tunnel down which he had come. He landed on the stone floor on his back and flipped over in a back somersault on to his feet, ignoring the bruises and ready to flee or fight as occasion required.

  As he stood there, however, glaring with bared teeth at the door to the inner cave, no black, monstrous form shambled out after him. Almost as soon as Conan had wrenched himself loose, the form had begun to dissolve into the blue mist from which it had condensed. Now it was all gone.

  The man stood poised, ready to whirl and bound up the tunnel. The superstitious fears of the barbarian whirled through his mind. Although he was fearless to the point of rashness toward men and beasts, the supernatural could still throw him into terror-stricken panic.

  So this was why the Picts had gone! He should have suspected some such danger. He remembered such demonological lore as he had picked up in his youth in cloudy Cimmeria and later in his wanderings over most of the civilized world. Fire and silver were said to be deadly to devils, but he had neither at the moment.

  Still, if such spirits took gross material form, they were in some measure subject to the limitations of that form. This lumbering monster, for instance, could run no faster than a beast of its general size and shape, and the Cimmerian thought that he could outdistance it if need be.

  Plucking up his wavering courage, the man shouted with boyish braggadocio: “Ho there, ugly-face, aren’t you coming out?”

  No reply; the blue mist swirled in the chamber but remained in its diffused form. Fingering his bruised neck, the Cimmerian recalled a Pictish tale of a demon sent by a wizard to slay a group of strange men from the sea, but who was then confined in that cave by this same wizard lest, having once been conjured across nighted gulfs and given material form, he turn upon those who had snatched him from his native hells and rend them.

  Once more, the Cimmerian turned his attention to the chests that lay ranked along the walls of the tunnel…

  Back at the fort, the count snapped: “Out, quick!” He tore at the bars of the gate, crying: “Drag that mantlet in before these strangers can land!”

  “But Strombanni has fled,” expostulated Galbro, “and yonder ship is Zingaran.”

  “Do as I order!” roared Valenso. “My enemies are not all foreigners! Out, dogs, thirty of you, and fetch the mantlet into the stockade!”

  Before the Zingaran ship had dropped anchor, about where the pirate ship had docked, Valenso’s thirty stalwarts had trundled the device back to the gate and manhandled it sideways through the opening.

  Up in the window of the manor house, Tina asked wonderingly: “Why does not the count open the gate and go to meet them? Is he afraid that the man he fears might be on that ship?”

  “What mean you, Tina?” asked Belesa uneasily. Although no man to run from a foe, the count had never vouchsafed a reason for his self-exile. But this conviction of Tina’s was disquieting, almost uncanny. Tina, however, seemed not to have heard her question.

  “The men are back in the stockade,” she said. “The gate is closed again and barred. The men still keep their places along the wall. If that ship was chasing Strombanni, why did it not pursue him? It is not a war galley but a carack like the other. Look, a boat is coming ashore. I see a man in the bow, wrapped in a dark cloak.”

  When the boat had grounded, this man paced in leisurely fashion up the sands, followed by three others. He was a tall, wiry man in black silk and polished steel.

  “Halt!” roared the count “I will parley with your leader, alone!”

  The tall stranger removed his helmet and made a sweeping bow. His companions halted, drawing their wide cloaks about them, and behind them the sailors leaned on their oars and stared at the flag floating over the palisade.

  When the leader came within easy call of the gate, he said: “Why, surely, there should be no suspicion between gentlemen in these naked seas!”

  Valenso stared at him suspiciously. The stranger was dark, with a lean, predatory face and a thin black mustache. A bunch of lace was gathered at his throat, and there was lace on his wrists.

  “I know you,” said Valenso slowly. “You are Black Zarono, the buccaneer.”

  Again the stranger bowed with stately elegance. “And none could fail to recognize the red falcon of the Korzettas!”

  “It seems this coast has become a rendezvous of all the rogues of the southern seas,” growled Valenso. “What do you wish?”

  “Come, come, sir!” remonstrated Zarono. “This is a churlish greeting to one who has just rendered you a service. Was not that Argossean dog, Strombanni, just now thundering at your gate? And did he not take to his sea-heels when he saw me round the point?”

  “True,” grunted the count grudgingly, “although there is little to choose between a pirate and a renegade.”

  Zarono laughed without resentment and twirled his mustache. “You are blunt in speech, my lord. But I desire only leave to anchor in your bay, to let my men hunt for meat and water in your woods, and, perhaps, to drink a glass of wine myself at your board.”

  “I see not how I can stop you,” growled Valenso. “But understand this, Zarono: no man of your crew shall come within this palisade. If one approaches closer than thirty paces, he shall presently find an arrow through his gizzard. And I charge you to do no harm to my gardens or the cattle in the pens. One steer you may have for fresh meat, but no more. And, in case you think otherwise, we can hold this fort against your ruffians.”

  “You were not holding it very successfully against Strombanni,” the buccaneer pointed out with a mocking smile.

  “You’ll find no wood to build mantlets this time, unless you fell trees or strip it from your own ship,” assured the count grimly. “And your men are not Barachan archers; they’re no better bowmen than mine. Besides, what little loot you’d find in this castle would not be worth the price.”

  “Who speaks of loot and warfare?” protested Zarono. “Nay, my men are sick to stretch their legs ashore, and nigh to scurvy from chewing salt pork, May they come ashore? I guarantee their good conduct.”

  Valenso grudgingly signified his consent. Zarono bowed, a shade sardonically, and retired with a tread as measured and stately as if he trod the polished crystal floor of the Kordavan royal court—where indeed, unless rumor lied, he had once been a familiar figure.

  “Let no man leave the stockade,” Valenso ordered Galbro. “I trust not that renegade cur. The fact that he drove Strombanni from our gate is no guarantee that he, too, would not cut our throats.”

  Galbro nodded. He was well aware of the enmity that existed between the pirates and the Zingaran buccaneers. The pirates were mainly Argosssean sailors turned outlaw; to the ancient feud between
Argos and Zingara was added, in the case of the freebooters, the rivalry of opposing interests. Both breeds preyed on the shipping and the coastal towns; and they preyed upon each other with equal rapacity.

  So no one stirred from the palisade while the buccaneers came ashore, dark-faced men in flaming silk and polished steel, with scarves bound around their heads and golden hoops in their ears. They camped on the beach, a hundred and seventy-odd of them, and Valenso noticed that Zarono posted lookouts on both points. They did not molest the gardens, and the steer designated by Valenso, shouting from the palisade, was driven forth and slaughtered. Fires were kindled on the sand, and a wattled cask of ale was brought ashore and broached. Other kegs were filled with water from the spring that rose a short distance south of the fort, and men with crossbows in their hands began to straggle toward the woods. Seeing this, Valenso was moved to shout to Zarono, striding back and forth through the camp:

  “Do not let your men go into the forest! Take another steer from the pens if you lack enough meat. But if the men go tramping into the woods, they may fall foul of the Picts. Whole tribes of the painted devils live back in the forest. We beat off an attack shortly after we landed, and since then six of my men have been murdered in the forest at one time or another. There’s peace between us just now, but it hangs by a thread. Do not risk stirring them up!”

  Zarono shot a startled glance at the lowering woods, as if he expected to see a horde of savage figures lurking there. Then he bowed and said: “I thank you for the warning, my lord.” He shouted for his men to come back, in a rasping voice that contrasted strangely with his courtly accents when addressing the count If Zarono’s vision could have penetrated the leafy screen, he would have been even more apprehensive. He would have seen the sinister figure that lurked there, watching the strangers with inscrutable black eyes—a hideously-painted warrior, naked but for his doeskin breechclout, with a hornbill feather drooping over his left ear.

  As evening drew on, a thin skim of gray crawled up from the sea-rim and overcast the sky. The sun sank in a wallow of crimson, touching the tips of the black waves with blood. Fog crawled out of the sea and lapped at the feet of the forest, curling about the stockade in smoky wisps. The fires on the beach shone dull crimson through the mist, and the singing of the buccaneers seemed deadened and far away. They had brought old sail canvas from the carack and made shelters along the strand, where beef was still roasting and the ale granted them by their captain was doled out sparingly.