“To hear dead men making plots,” came Conan’s grimly amused voice.
“Heed him not,” scowled Zarono. Lifting his voice, he shouted for the men below to join him and Strombanni on the ledge.
The sailors started up the slanting trail, and one started to shout a question. Simultaneously there sounded a hum like that of an angry bee, ending with a sharp thud. The buccaneer gasped, and blood gushed from his open mouth. He sank to his knees, a black shaft protruding from his back. A yell of alarm went up from his companions.
“What’s the matter?” shouted Strombanni.
“Picts!” bawled a pirate, lifting his bow and loosing blindly. At his side, a man moaned and went down with an arrow through his throat.
“Take cover, you fools!” shrieked Zarono. From his vantage point, he glimpsed painted figures moving in the bushes. One of the men on the winding path fell back dying. The rest scrambled hastily down among the rocks about the foot of the crag. They took cover clumsily, not being used to fighting of this kind. Arrows flickered from the bushes, splintering on the boulders. The men on the ledge lay prone.
“We’re trapped!” said Strombanni, his face pale. Bold enough with a deck under his feet, this silent, savage warfare shook his ruthless nerves. “Conan said they feared this crag,” said Zarono. “When night falls, the men must climb up here. We’ll hold this crag; the Picts won’t rush us.”
“Aye!” mocked Conan above them. “They won’t climb the crag to get at you, that’s true. They’ll merely surround it and keep you here until you all die of thirst and starvation.”
“He speaks truth,” said Zarono helplessly. “What shall we do?”
“Make a truce with him,” muttered Strombanni. “If any man can get us out of this jam, he can. Time enough to cut his throat later.” Lifting his voice, he called:
“Conan, let’s forget our feud for the time being. You’re in this fix as much as we are. Come down and help us out of it.”
“How do you figure that?” retorted the Cimmerian. “I have but to wait until dark, climb down the other side of this crag, and melt into the forest. I can crawl through the line the Picts have thrown around this hill, return to the fort, and report you all slain by the savages—which will shortly be the truth!”
Zarono and Strombanni stared at each other in pallid silence.
“But not do that!” Conan roared. “Not because I have any love for you dogs, but because I don’t leave white men, even my enemies, to be butchered by Picts.”
The Cimmerian’s touseled black head appeared over the crest of the crag. “Now listen closely: That’s only a small band down there. I saw them sneaking through the brush when I laughed, a while ago. Anyway, if there had been many of them, every man at the foot of the crag would be dead already. I think that’s a band of fleet-footed young bucks sent ahead of the main war party to cut us off from the beach. I’m certain a big war band is heading in our direction from somewhere.
“They’ve thrown a cordon around the west side of the crag, but I don’t think there are any on the east side. I’m going down on that side, to get into the forest and work around behind them. Meanwhile, you crawl down the path and join your men among the rocks. Tell them to unstring their bows and draw their swords. When you hear me yell, rush the trees on the west side of the clearing.”
“What of the treasure?”
‘To Hell with the treasure! We shall be lucky if we get out of here with our heads on our shoulders.”
The black-maned head vanished. They listened for sounds to indicate that Conan had crawled to the almost sheer eastern wall and was working his way down, but they heard nothing. Nor was there any sound in the est. No more arrows broke against the rocks where the sailors were hidden. But all knew that fierce, black eyes were watching with murderous patience. Gingerly, Strombanni, Zarono, and the boatswain started down the winding path.
They were halfway down when black shafts began to whisper around them. The boatswain groaned and toppled limply down the slope, shot throuth the heart. Arrows shivered on the helmets and breastplates of the chiefs as they tumbled in frantic haste down the steep trail. They reached the foot in a scrambling rush and lay panting among the boulders, swearing breathlessly. “Is this more of Conan’s trickery?” wondered Zarono profanely.
“We can trust him in this matter,” asserted Strombanni. “These barbarians live by their own particular code of honor, and Conan would never desert men of his own complexion to be slaughtered by people of another race. He’ll help us against the Picts, even though he plans to murder us himself—hark!”
A blood-freezing yell knifed the silence. It came from the woods to the west, and simultaneously an object arched out of the trees, struck the ground, and rolled bouncingly toward the rocks—a severed human head, the hideously painted face frozen in a snarl of death.
“Conan’s signal!” roared Strombanni, and the desperate freebooters rose like a wave from the rocks and rushed headlong toward the woods. Arrows whirred out of the bushes, but their flight was hurried and erratic; only three men fell. Then the wild men of the sea plunged through the fringe of foliage and fell on the naked painted figures that rose out of the gloom before them. There was a murderous instant of panting, ferocious, hand-to-hand effort.
Cutlasses beat down war-axes, booted feet trampled naked bodies, and then bare feet were rattling through the bushes in headlong flight as the survivors of that brief carnage quit the fray, leaving seven still, painted figures stretched on the bloodstained leaves that littered the earth. Farther back in the thickets sounded a thrashing and heaving; then it ceased, and Conan strode into view, his lacquered hat gone, his coat torn, his cutlass dripping in his hand.
“What now?” panted Zarono. He knew the charge had succeeded only because Conan’s unexpected attack on the rear of the Picts had demoralized the painted men and prevented them from falling back before the rush. But he exploded into curses as Conan passed his cutlass through a buccaneer who writhed on the ground with a shattered hip.
“We cannot carry him with us,” grunted Conan. “It wouldn’t be any kindness to leave him to be taken alive by the Picts. Come on!”
They crowded close at his heels as he trotted through the trees. Alone, they would have sweated and blundered among the thickets for hours before they found the beach trail—if they had ever found it. The Cimmerian led them unerringly as if he had been following a blazed path, and the rovers shouted with hysterical relief as they burst suddenly upon the trail that ran westward.
“Fool!” Conan clapped a hand on the shoulder of a pirate who started to break into a run and hurled him back among his companions. “You’ll bunt your heart and fall within a thousand yards. We’re miles from the beach. Take an easy gait. We may have to sprint the last mile; save some of your wind for it. Come on, now!” He set off down the trail at a steady jog-trot The seamen followed him, suiting their pace to his.
The sun was touching the waves of the western ocean. Tina stood at the window from which Belesa had watched the storm.
“The setting sun turns the ocean to blood,” she said. “The carack’s sail is a white fleck on the crimson waters. The woods are already darkened with clustering shadows.”
“What of the seamen on the beach?” asked Belesa languidly. She reclined on a couch, her eyes closed, her hands clasped behind her head.
“Both camps are preparing their supper,” said Tina. “They gather driftwood and build fires. I can hear them shouting to one another—what is that?”
The sudden tenseness in the girl’s tone brought Belesa upright on the couch. Tina grasped the windowsill, her face white.
“Listen! A howling, far off, like many wolves!”
“Wolves?” Belesa sprang up, fear clutching her heart. “Wolves do not hunt in packs at this time of year—”
“Oh, look!” shrilled the girl, pointing. “Men are running out of the forest!”
In an instant, Belesa was beside her, staring wide-eyed at the figures s
mall in the distance, streaming out of the woods.
“The sailors!” she gasped. “Empty-handed! I see Zarono—Strombanni—”
“Where is Conan?” whispered the child. Belesa shook her head.
“Listen! Oh, listen!” whimpered Tina, clinging to her. “The Picts!”
All in the fort could hear it now—a vast ululation of mad exultation and blood lust, from the depths of the dark forest. The sound spurred on the panting men, reeling toward the palisade.
“Hasten!” gasped Strombanni, his face a drawn mask of exhausted effort. “They are almost at our heels. My ship—”
“She is too far for us to reach,” panted Zarono. “Make for the stockade. See, the men camped on the beach have seen us!”
He waved his arms in breathless pantomime, but the men on the strand understood and recognized the significance of that wild howling, rising to a triumphant crescendo. The sailors abandoned their fires and cooking pots and fled for the stockade gate. They were pouring through it as the fugitives from the forest rounded the south angle and reeled into the gate, a heaving, frantic mob, half dead from exhaustion. The gate was slammed with frenzied haste, and sailors began to climb to the footwalk to join the men-at-arms already there. Belesa, who had hurried down from the manor, confronted Zarono.
“Where is Conan?”
The buccaneer jerked a thumb toward the blackening woods. His chest heaved; sweat poured down his face.
“Their scouts were at our heels ere we gained the beach. He paused to slay a few and give us time to get away.”
He staggered away to take his place on the footwalk, whither Strombanni had already mounted. Valenso stood there, a somber, cloak-wrapped figure, strangely silent and aloof. He was like a man bewitched.
“Look!” yelped a pirate, above the deafening howling of the yet unseen horde. A man emerged from the forest and raced fleetly across the open belt.
“Conan!” Zarono grinned wolfishly. “We’re safe in the stockade; we know where the treasure is. No reason why we shouldn’t feather him with arrows now.”
“Nay!” Strombanni caught his arm. “We shall need his sword. Look!”
Behind the fleet-footed Cimmerian, a wild horde burst from the forest, howling as they ran—naked Picts, hundred and hundreds of them. Their arrows rained about the Cimmerian. A few strides more, and Conan reached the eastern wall of the stockade, bounded high, seized the points of the logs, and heaved himself up and over, his cutlass in his teeth. Arrows thudded venomously into the logs where his body had just been. His resplendent coat was gone, his white shirt torn and bloodstained.
“Stop them!” he roared as his feet hit the ledge inside. “If they get on the wall, we’re done for!”
Pirates, buccaneers, and men-at-arms responded instantly, and a storm of arrows and quarrels tore into the oncoming horde. Conan saw Belesa with Tina clinging to her hand, and his language was picturesque.
“Get into the manor,” he commanded in conclusion. “Their shafts will arch over the wall—what did I tell you?” A black shaft cut into the earth at Belesa’s feet and quivered like a serpent’s head. Conan caught up a longbow and leaped to the footwalk. “Some of you fellows prepare torches!” he roared, above the clamor of battle. “We can’t find them in the dark!”
The sun had sunk in a welter of blood. Out in the bay, the men aboard the carack had cut the anchor chain, and the Red Hand was rapidly receding on the crimson horizon.
VII. Men of the Woods
Night had fallen, but torches streamed across the strand, casting the mad scene into lurid revealment. Naked men in paint swarmed the beach; like waves they came against the palisade, bared teeth and blazing eyes gleaming in the glare of the torches thrust over the wall. Hornbill feathers waved in black manes, and the feathers of the cormorant and the sea-falcon. A few warriors, the wildest and most barbaric of them all, wore sharks’ teeth woven in their tangled locks. The sea-land tribes had gathered from up and down the coast in all directions to rid their country of the white-skinned invaders.
They surged against the palisade, driving a storm of arrows before them, fighting into the teeth of the shafts and bolts that tore into their masses from the stockade. Sometimes they came so close to the wall that they were hewing at the gate with their war-axes and thrusting their spears through the loopholes.
But each time the tide ebbed back without flowing over the palisade, leaving its drift of dead. At this kind of fighting, the freebooters of the sea were at their stoutest. Their arrows and bolts tore hole? in the charging horde; their cutlasses hewed the wild men from the palisades they strove to scale. Yet again and again, the men of the woods returned to the onslaught with all the stubborn ferocity that had been roused in their fierce hearts.
“They are like mad dogs!” gasped Zarono, hacking downward at the dark hands that grasped the palisade points and the dark faces that snarled up at him.
“If we can hold the fort until dawn, they’ll lose heart,” grunted Conan, splitting a feathered skull with professional precision. “They won’t maintain a long siege. Look, they’re falling back.”
The charge rolled back. The men on the wall shook the sweat out of their eyes, counted their dead, and took a fresh grip on the blood-slippery hilts of their swords. Like blood-hungry wolves, grudgingly driven from a cornered prey, the Picts skulked back beyond the ring of torches. Only the bodies of the slain lay before the palisade.
“Have they gone?” Strombanni shook back his wet, tawny locks. The cutlass in his fist was notched and red; his brawny arm was splashed with blood.
“They’re still out there.” Conan nodded toward the outer darkness that ringed the circle of torches, made more intense by their light. He glimpsed movements in the shadows, the glitter of eyes and the red glint of copper weapons.
“They’ve drawn off for a bit, though,” he said. “Put sentries on guard and let the others rest, eat and drink. Tis past midnight, and we’ve been fighting for hours without respite. Ha, Valenso, how goes the battle with you?”
The count, in dented, blood-splashed helmet and cuirass, moved somberly up to where Conan and the captains stood. For answer, he muttered something inaudible under his breath. And then out of the darkness a voice spoke: a loud, clear voice that rang through the entire fort.
“Count Valenso! Count Valenso of Korzetta! Do you hear me?” It spoke with a Stygian accent.
Conan heard the count gasp as if he had been stricken with a mortal wound. Valenso reeled and grasped the tops of the logs of the stockade, his face pale in the torchlight. The voice resumed:
“It is I, Thoth-Amon of the Ring! Did you think to flee me once more? It is too late for that! All your schemes shall avail you naught, for tonight I shall send a messenger to you. It is the demon that guarded the treasure of Tranicos, whom I have released from his cave and bound to my service. He will inflict upon you the doom that you, you dog, have earned: a death at once slow, hard, and disgraceful. Let us see you mulct your way out of that!” The speech ended in a peal of musical laughter. Valenso gave a scream of terror, jumped down from the footwalk, and ran staggering up the slope toward the manor.
When the lull came in the fighting, Tina had crept to their window, from which they had been driven by the danger of flying arrows. Silently she watched the men gather about the fire. Belesa was reading a letter that had been delivered by a serving-woman to her door. It read:
Count Valenso of Korzetta to his niece Belesa, greeting:
My doom has come upon me at last. Now that I am resigned if not reconciled to it, I would have you know that I am not insensible of the fact that I have used you in a manner not consistent with the honor of the Korzettas. I did so because circumstances left me no other choice. Although it is late for apologies, I ask that you think not too hardly of me; and, if you can bring yourself to do so, and by some chance you survive this night of doom, that you pray to Mitra for the soiled soul of your father’s brother. Meanwhile, I advise that you remain away from the gr
eat hall, lest the same fate that awaits me encompass you also. Farewell.
Belesa’s hands shook as she read. Although she could never love her uncle, this was still the most human action she had ever known him to take.
At the window, Tina said: “There ought to be more men on the wall; suppose the black man came back?”
Belesa, going over beside her to look out, shuddered at the thought.
“I am afraid,” murmured Tina. “I hope Strombanni and Zarono are killed.”
“And not Conan?” asked Belesa curiously.
“Conan would not harm us,” said the child confidently. “He lives up to his barbaric code of honor, but they are men who have lost all honor.”
“You are wise beyond your years, Tina,” said Belesa, with the vague uneasiness that the precocity of the child often aroused in her.
“Look!” Tina stiffened. “The sentry is gone from the south wall! saw him on the ledge a moment ago; now he has vanished.”
From their window, the palisade points of the south wall were just visible over the slanting roofs of a row of huts which paralleled that wall for almost its entire length. A sort of open-topped corridor, three or four yards wide, was formed by the stockade and the back of the huts, which were built in a solid row. These huts were occupied by the serfs.
“Where could the sentry have gone?” whispered Tina uneasily.
Belesa was watching one end of the hut row, which was not far from a side door of the manor. She could have sworn she saw a shadowy figure glide from behind the huts and disappear at the door. Was that the vanished sentry? Why had he left the wail, and why should he also subtly into the manor? She could not believe it the sentry she had seen, and a nameless fear congealed her blood.
“Where is the count, Tina?” she asked.
“In the great hall, my lady. He sits alone at the table, wrapped in his cloak and drinking wine, with a face as gray as death.”
The Other Tales of Conan Page 54