“Go and tell him what we have seen. I will keep watch from this window, lest the Picts steal over the unguarded wall.”
Tina scampered away. Suddenly remembering reading in the count’s letter about staying out of the main hall, Belesa rose, hearing slippered feet pattering along the corridor, receding down the stair.
Then abruptly, terribly, there rang out a scream of such poignant fear that Belesa’s heart almost stopped with the shock of it. She was out of the chamber and flying down the corridor before she was aware that her limbs were in motion. She ran down the stairs—and halted as if tamed to stone.
She did nor scream as Tina had screamed. She was incapable of sound or motion. She saw Tina, was aware of the reality of the small girl’s arms frantically grasping her. But these were the only sane realities in a scene of nightmare and lunacy and death, dominated by the monstrous, anthropomorphic shadow that spread awful arms against a lurid, hell-fire glare.
Out in the stockade, Strombanni shook his head at Conan’s question. “I heard nothing.”
“I did!” Conan’s wild instincts were roused; he was tensed, his eyes blazing. “It came from the south wall, behind those huts!”
Drawing his cutlass, he strode toward the palisade. From the compound, the wall on the south and the sentry posted there were not visible, being hidden behind the huts. Strombanni followed, impressed by the Cimmerian’s manner.
At the mouth of the open space between the huts and the wall, Conan halted warily. The space was dimly lighted by torches flaring at either corner of the stockade. And, about midway of that corridor, a crumpled shape sprawled on the ground.
“Bracus!” swore Strombanni, running forward and dropping on one knee beside the figure. “By Mitra, his throat’s been cut from ear to ear!”
Conan swept the space with a quick glance, finding it empty save for himself, Strombanni, and the dead man. He peered through a loophole. No living man moved within the ring of torchlight outside the fort.
“Who could have done this?” he wondered.
“Zarono!” Strombanni sprang up spitting fury like a wildcat, his hair bristling, his face convulsed. “He has set his thieves to stabbing my men in the back! He plans to wipe me out by treachery! Devils! am leagued within and without!”
“Wait!” Conan reached a restraining hand. “I don’t believe Zarono—”
But the maddened pirate jerked away and rushed around the end of the hut row, breathing blasphemies. Conan ran after him, swearing. Strombanni made straight toward the fire by which Zarono’s tall, lean form was visible as the buccaneer chief quaffed a jack of ale.
His amazement was supreme when the jack was dashed violently from his hand, spattering his breastplate with foam, and he was jerked around to confront the passion-distorted face of the pirate captain.
“You murdering dog!” roared Strombanni. “Will you slay my men behind my back while they fight for your filthy hide as well as for mine?”
Conan was hurrying toward them, and on all sides men ceased eating and drinking to stare in amazement.
“What do you mean?” sputtered Zarono.
“You’ve set your men to stabbing mine at their posts!” screamed the maddened Barachan.
“You lie!” Smoldering hate burst into sudden flame.
With an incoherent howl, Strombanni heaved up his cutlass and cut at the buccaneer’s head. Zarono caught the blow on his armored left arm, and sparks flew as he staggered back, ripping out his own sword. In an instant, the captains were fighting like madmen, their blades flaming and flashing in the firelight. Their crews reacted instantly and blindly. A deep roar went up as pirates and buccaneers drew their swords and fell upon one another. The men left on the walls abandoned their posts and leaped down into the stockade, blades in hand. In an instant the compound was a battleground, where knotting, writhing groups of men smote and slew in a blind frenzy. Some of the men-at-arms and serfs were drawn into the melee, and the soldiers at the gate turned and stared down in amazement, forgetting the enemy that linked outside.
It all happened so quickly—smoldering passions exploding into sudden kittle—that men were fighting all over the compound before Conan could reach the maddened chiefs. Ignoring their swords, he tore them apart with such violence that they staggered backward, and Zarono tripped and fell flat.
“You cursed fools, will you throw away all our lives?”
Strombanni was frothing mad and Zarono was bawling for assistance. A buccaneer ran at Conan from behind and cut at his head. The Cimmerian half turned and caught his arm, checking the stroke in midair.
“Look, you fools!” he roared, pointing with his sword.
Something in his tone caught the attention of the battle-crazed mob. Men froze in their places and twisted their heads to stare. Conan was pointing to a soldier on the footwalk. The man was reeling, clawing the air, and choking as he tried to shout. He pitched headlong to the ground, and all saw the black arrow standing out from between his shoulders.
A cry of alarm arose from the compound. On the heels of the shout came a clamor of blood-freezing screams and the shattering impact of axes on the gate. Flaming arrows arched over the wall and stuck in logs, and thin wisps of blue smoke curled upward. Then, from behind the huts that ranged the south wall, came swift and furtive figures racing across the compound.
“The Picts are in!” roared Conan.
Bedlam followed his shout. The freebooters ceased their feud. Some turned to meet the savages; some sprang to the wall. Savages were pouring from behind the huts and streaming over the compound; their axes clashed against the cutlasses of the sailors.
Zarono was still struggling to his feet when a painted savage rushed upon him from behind and brained him with a war-axe. Conan, with a clump of sailors behind him, was battling with the Picts inside the stockade; Strombanni, with most of his men, was climbing up on the stockade, slashing at the dark figures already swarming over the wall. The Picts, who had crept up unobserved and surrounded the fort while the defenders were fighting among themselves, were attacking from all sides, Valenso’s soldiers were clustered at the gate, trying to hold it against a howling swarm of exultant demons who thundered against it from the outside with a tree trunk.
More and more savages streamed from behind the huts, having scaled the undefended south wall. Strombanni and his pirates were beaten back from the other sides of the palisade, and in an instant the compound was swarming with naked warriors. They dragged down the defenders like wolves; the battle resolved into swirling whülpools of painted figures surging about small groups of desperate white men. Picts, sailors, and men-at-arms littered the earth, stamped underfoot by the heedless feet.
Blood-smeared braves dived howling into huts, and shrieks rose above the din of battle as women and children died beneath the red axes. When they heard those pitiful cries, the men-at-arms abandoned the gate, and in an instant the Picts had burst it and were pouring into the palisade at that point also. Huts began to go up in flames.
“Make for the manor!” roared Conan, and a dozen men surged in behind him as he hewed an inexorable way through the snarling pack.
Strombanni was at his side, wielding his red cutlass like a flail. “We can’t hold the manor,” grunted the pirate.
“Why not?” Conan was too busy with his crimson work to spare a glance.
“Because—uh!” a knife in a dark hand sank deep in the Barachan’s back. “Devil eat you, bastard!” Strombanni turned staggeringly and split the savage’s skull to his teeth. The pirate reeled and fell to his knees, blood starting from his lips.
“The manor’s burning!” he croaked, and slumped over in the dust.
Conan cast a swift look about him. The men who had followed him were all down in their blood. The Pict gasping out his life under the Cimmerian’s feet was the last of the group that had barred his way. All about him, battle was swirling and surging, but for the moment he stood alone. He was not far from the south wall. A few strides and he could leap t
o the ledge, swing over, and be gone through the night. But he remembered the helpless girls in the manor—from which, now, smoke was rolling in billowing masses. He ran toward the manor.
A feathered chief wheeled from the door, lifting a war-axe, and, behind the racing Cimmerian, lines of fleet-footed braves were converging upon him. He did not check his stride. His downward-sweeping cutlass met and deflected the axe and split the skull of the wielder. An instant later, Conan was through the door and had slammed and bolted it against the axes that thudded into the wood. The great hall was full of drifting wisps of smoke, through which he groped, half blinded. Somewhere a woman was whimpering little, catchy, hysterical sobs of nerve-shattering horror. He emerged from a whirl of smoke and stopped dead in his tracks, glaring down the hall.
The hall was dim and shadowy with drifting smoke. The great silver candelabrum was overturned, the candles extinguished; the only illumination was a lurid glow from the great fireplace and the wall in which it was set, where the flames licked from burning floor to smoking roof beams. And limned against that lurid glare, Conan saw a human worm swinging slowly at the end of a rope. The dead face, distorted beyond recognition, turned toward him as the body swung; but Conan knew it was Count Valenso, hanged to his own roof beam. But there was something else in the hall. Conan saw it through the drifting smoke: a monstrous black figure, outlined against the hell-fire glare. That outline was vaguely human, although the shadow thrown on the burning wall was not human at all.
“Crom!” muttered Conan aghast, paralyzed by the realization that he was confronted by a being against whom his sword was useless. He saw Belesa and Tina, clutched in each other’s arms, crouching at the bottom of the stair.
The black monster reared up, looming gigantic against the flame, great arms spread wide. A dim face leered through the drifting smoke—semi-human, demoniac, altogether terrible. Conan glimpsed the close-set horns, the gaping mouth, the peaked ears. It was lumbering toward him through the smoke, and an old memory woke with desperation.
Near the Cimmerian lay the great overturned candelabrum, once the pride of Korzetta Castle: fifty pounds of massy silver, intricately worked with figures of gods and heroes. Conan grasped it and heaved it high above his head. “Silver and fire!” he roared in a voice like a clap of wind, and hurled the candelabrum with all the power of his iron muscles. Full on the great black breast it crashed, fifty pounds of silver winged with terrific velocity. Not even the black one could stand before such a missile. The demon was carried off its feet—hurtled back into the open fireplace, which was a roaring mouth of flame. A horrible scream shook the hall, the cry of an unearthly thing gripped suddenly by earthly death. The mantel cracked, and stones fell from the great chimney, half hiding the black, writhing limbs at which the flames ate in elemental fury. Burning beams crashed down from the roof and thundered on the stones, and the whole heap was enveloped in a roaring burst of fire. Flames were creeping down the stair when Conan reached it. He caught up the fainting child under one arm and dragged Belesa to her feet. Through the crackle and snap of the fire sounded the splintering of the front door under the war-axes.
He glared about, sighted a door opposite the stair landing, and hurried through it, carrying Tina and dragging Belesa, who seemed dazed. As they came into the chamber beyond, a crash behind them announced that the roof was falling in the hall. Through a strangling wall of smoke, Conan saw an open, outer door on the other side of the chamber. As he lugged his charges through it, he saw that it sagged on broken hinges, lock and bolt snapped and splintered as if by some terrific force.
“The devil came in by this door!” Belesa sobbed hysterically. “I saw him—but I did not know—”
They emerged into the firelit compound a few feet from the row of huts that lined the south wall. A Pict was skulking toward the door, eyes red in the firelight and axe lifted. Dropping Tina and swinging Belesa away from the blow, Conan snatched out his cutlass and drove it through the savage’s breast. Then, sweeping both girls off their feet, he ran, carrying them, toward the south wall.
The compound was full of billowing smoke-clouds that half hid the red work going on there, but the fugitives had been seen. Naked figures, black against the dull glare, pranced out of the smoke, brandishing gleaming axes. They were still yards behind him when Conan ducked into the space between the huts and the wall. At the other end of the corridor, he saw other howling shapes, running to cut him off.
Halting short, he tossed Belesa bodily to the footwalk, then Tina, and then leaped up after them. Swinging Belesa over the palisade, he dropped her into the sand outside, and dropped Tina after her. A thrown axe crashed into a log by his shoulder, and then he, too, was over the wall and gathering up his dazed and helpless charges. When the Picts reached the wall, the space before the palisade was empty of all except the dead.
VIII. Swords of Aquilonia
Dawn was tinging the dim waters an old-rose hue. Far out across the tinted waters, a fleck of white grew out of the mist—a sail that seemed to hang suspended in the pearly sky. On a bushy headland, Conan the Cimmerian held a ragged cloak over a fire of green wood. As he manipulated the cloak, puffs of smoke rose upward, quivered against the dawn, and vanished. Belesa crouched near him, one arm about Tina. She asked: “Do you think they’ll see it and understand?”
“They’ll see it, right enough,” he assured her. “They’ve been hanging off this coast all night, hoping to sight some survivors. They’re scared stiff; there’s only half a dozen of them, and not one can navigate well enough to sail from here to the Barachan Isles. They’ll understand my signals; ‘tis the pirate code. They’ll be glad to ship under me, since I’m the only captain left.” “But suppose the Picts see the smoke?” She shuddered, glancing back over the misty sands and bushes to where, miles to the north, a column of smoke stood up in the still air.
“They’re not likely to see it. After I hid you in the woods, I crept back and saw them dragging barrels of wine and ale out of the storehouses. Already most of them were reeling. By this time, they’ll all be lying around, too drunk to move. If I had a hundred men, I could wipe out the whole horde—Crom and Mitra!” he cried suddenly. “That’s not the Red Hand after all, but a war galley! What civilized state would send a unit of its fleet hither? Unless somebody would have words with your uncle, in which case they’ll need a witch-woman to raise his ghost.”
He scowled out to sea in an effort to make out the details of the craft through the mist. The approaching ship was bow-on, so that all he could see was a gilded bow ornament, a small sail bellying in the faint onshore breeze, and the bank of oars on each side rising and falling like a single pair..
“Well,” said Conan, “at least they’re coming to take us off. It would be a long walk back to Zingara. Until we find out who they are and whether they’re friendly, say naught of who I am. I’ll think of a proper tale by the time they get here.”
Conan stamped out the fire, handed the cloak back to Belesa, and stretched like a great, lazy cat. Belesa watched him in wonder. His unperturbed manner was not assumed; the night of fire and blood and slaughter, and the flight through the black woods afterward, had left his nerves untouched. He was as calm as if he had spent the night in feasting and revel. Bandages torn from the hem of Belesa’s gown covered a few minor wounds that he had received in fighting without armor.
Belesa did not fear him; she felt safer than she had felt since she landed on that wild coast. He was not like the freebooters, civilized men who had repudiated all standards of honor and lived without any. Conan, on the other hand, lived according to the code of his people, which was barbaric and bloody but at least upheld its own peculiar standards of honor.
“Think you he is dead?” she asked.
He did not ask her to whom she referred. “I believe so,” he replied. “Silver and fire are both deadly to evil spirits, and he got a bellyfull of both.”
“How about his master?”
“Thoth-Amon? Gone back to lurk
in some Stygian tomb, I suppose. These wizards are a queer lot.”
Neither spoke of that subject again; Belesa’s mind shrank from the task of conjuring up the scene when a black figure skulked into the great hall, and a long-delayed vengeance was horribly consummated.
The ship was larger, but some time would yet elapse before it made shore. Belesa asked:
“When you first came to the manor, you said something of having been a general in Aquilonia and then having to flee. What is the tale on that?” Conan grinned. “Put it down to my own folly in trusting that quince-faced Numedides. They made me general because of some small successes against the Picts; and then, when I’d scattered five times my own number of savages in a battle at Velitrium and broken their confederacy, I was called back to Tarantia for an official triumph. All very tickling to the vanity, riding beside the king while girls scatter rose petals before you; but then at the banquet the bastard plied me with drugged wine. I woke up in chains in the Iron Tower, awaiting execution.”
“Whatever for?”
He shrugged. “How know I what goes on in what that numb-wit calls his brain? Perhaps some of the other Aquilonian generals, resentful of the sudden rise of an outland barbarian into their sacred ranks, had worked upon his suspicions. Or perhaps he took offense at some of my frank remarks about his policy of spending the rdyal treasury to adorn Tarantia with golden statues of himself instead of for the defense of his frontiers.
“The philosopher Alcemides confided to me, just before I quaffed the drugged draught, that he hoped to write a book on the use of ingratitude as a principle of statecraft, using the king as a model. Heigh-ho! I was too drunk to realize he was trying to warn me.
“I had, however, friends with whose aid I was smuggled out of the Iron Tower, given a horse and a sword, and turned loose. I rode back to Bossonia with the idea of raising a revolt, beginning with my own troops. But, when I got there, I found my sturdy Bossonians gone, sent to another province, and in their place a brigade of ox-eyed yokels from the Tauran, most of whom had never heard of me. They insisted on trying to arrest me, so I had to split a few skulls in cutting my way out. I swam Thunder River with arrows whizzing about my ears… and here I am.”
The Other Tales of Conan Page 55