One, blood gushing from its torn jugular, lunged at him in a last spasm of ferocity, and fastened its fangs on his throat - to fall back dead, even as Conan felt the tearing agony of its grip.
The other, springing forward on three legs, was slashing at his belly as a wolf slashes, actually rending the links of his mail. Flinging aside the dying beast, Conan grappled the crippled horror and, with a muscular effort that brought a groan from his blood-flecked lips, he heaved upright, gripping the struggling, bearing fiend in his arms. An instant he reeled off balance, its fetid breath hot on his nostrils; its jaws snapping at his neck; then he hurled it from him, to crash with bone-splintering force down the marble steps.
As he reeled on wide-braced legs, sobbing for breath, the jungle and the moon swimming bloodily to his sight, the thrash of bat-wings was loud in his ears. Stooping, he groped for his sword, and swaying upright, braced his feet drunkenly and heaved the great blade above his head with both hands, shaking the blood from his eyes as he sought the air above him for his foe.
Instead of attack from the air, the pyramid staggered suddenly and awfully beneath his feet. He heard a rumbling crackle and saw the tall column above him wave like a wand. Stung to galvanized life, he bounded far out; his feet hit a step, halfway down, which rocked beneath him, and his next desperate leap carried him clear. But even as his heels hit the earth, with a shattering crash like a breaking mountain the pyramid crumpled, the column came thundering down in bursting fragments. For a blind cataclysmic instant the sky seemed to rain shards of marble. Then a rubble of shattered stone lay whitely under the moon.
Conan stirred, throwing off the splinters that half covered him. A glancing blow had knocked off his helmet and momentarily stunned him. Across his legs lay a great piece of the column, pinning him down. He was not sure that his legs were unbroken. His black locks were plastered with sweat; blood trickled from the wounds in his throat and hands. He hitched up on one arm, struggling with the debris that prisoned him.
Then something swept down across the stars and struck the sward near him. Twisting about, he saw it - the winged one!
With fearful speed it was rushing upon him, and in that instant Conan had only a confused impression of a gigantic manlike shape hurtling along on bowed and stunted legs; of huge hairy arms outstretching misshapen black-nailed paws; of a malformed head, in whose broad face the only features recognizable as such were a pair of blood-red eyes. It was a thing neither man, beast, nor devil, imbued with characteristics subhuman as well as characteristics superhuman.
But Conan had no time for conscious consecutive thought. He threw himself toward his fallen sword, and his clawing fingers missed it by inches. Desperately he grasped the shard which pinned his legs, and the veins swelled in his temples as he strove to thrust it off him. It gave slowly, but he knew that before he could free himself the monster would be upon him, and he knew that those black-taloned hands were death.
The headlong rush of the winged one had not wavered. It towered over the prostrate Cimmerian like a black shadow, arms thrown wide - a glimmer of white flashed between it and its victim.
In one mad instant she was there - a tense white shape, vibrant with love fierce as a she-panther's. The dazed Cimmerian saw between him and the onrushing death, her lithe figure, shimmering like ivory beneath the moon; he saw the blaze of her dark eyes, the thick cluster of her burnished hair; her bosom heaved, her red lips were parted, she cried out sharp and ringing at the ring of steel as she thrust at the winged monster's breast.
'Belit!' screamed Conan. She flashed a quick glance at him, and in her dark eyes he saw her love flaming, a naked elemental thing of raw fire and molten lava. Then she was gone, and the Cimmerian saw only the winged fiend which had staggered back in unwonted fear, arms lifted as if to fend off attack. And he knew that Belit in truth lay on her pyre on the Tigress's deck. In his ears rang her passionate cry: `Were I still in death and you fighting for life I would come back from the abyss-'
With a terrible cry he heaved upward hurling the stone aside. The winged one came on again, and Conan sprang to meet it, his veins on fire with madness. The thews started out like cords on his forearms as he swung his great sword, pivoting on his heel with the force of the sweeping arc. Just above the hips it caught the hurtling shape, and the knotted legs fell one way, the torso another as the blade sheared clear through its hairy body.
Conan stood in the moonlit silence, the dripping sword sagging in his hand, staring down at the remnants of his enemy. The red eyes glared up at him with awful life, then glazed and set; the great hands knotted spasmodically and stiffened. And the oldest race in the world was extinct.
Conan lifted his head, mechanically searching for the beast-things that had been its slaves and executioners. None met his gaze. The bodies he saw littering the moon-splashed grass were of men, not beasts: hawkfaced, dark skinned men, naked, transfixed by arrows or mangled by sword-strokes. And they were crumbling into dust before his eyes.
Why had not the winged master come to the aid of its slaves when he struggled with them? Had it feared to come within reach of fangs that might turn and rend it? Craft and caution had lurked in that misshapen skull, but had not availed in the end.
Turning on his heel, the Cimmerian strode down the rotting wharfs and stepped aboard the galley. A few strokes of his sword cut her adrift, and he went to the sweep-head. The Tigress rocked slowly in the sullen water, sliding out sluggishly toward the middle of the river, until the broad current caught her. Conan leaned on the sweep, his somber gaze fixed on the cloak-wrapped shape that lay in state on the pyre the richness of which was equal to the ransom of an empress.
5 The Funeral Pyre
Now we are done with roaming, evermore;
No more the oars, the windy harp's refrain; Nor crimson pennon frights the dusky shore; Blue girdle of the world, receive again
Her whom thou gavest me.
The Song of Belit
Again dawn tinged the ocean. A redder glow lit the river-mouth. Conan of Cimmeria leaned on his great sword upon the white beach, watching the Tigress swinging out on her last voyage. There was no light in his eyes that contemplated the glassy swells. Out of the rolling blue wastes all glory and wonder had gone. A fierce revulsion shook him as he gazed at the green surges that deepened into purple hazes of mystery.
Befit had been of the sea; she had lent it splendor and allure. Without her it rolled a barren, dreary and desolate waste from pole to pole. She belonged to the sea; to its everlasting mystery he returned her. He could do no more. For himself, its glittering blue splendor was more repellent than the leafy fronds which rustled and whispered behind him of vast mysterious wilds beyond them, and into which he must plunge.
No hand was at the sweep of the Tigress, no oars drove her through the green water. But a clean tanging wind bellied her silken sail, and as a wild swan cleaves the sky to her nest, she sped seaward, flames mounting higher and higher from her deck to lick at the mast and envelop the figure that lay lapped in scarlet on the shining pyre.
So passed the Queen of the Black Coast, and leaning on his red-stained sword, Conan stood silently until the red glow had faded far out in the blue hazes and dawn splashed its rose and gold over the ocean.
Conan at the Demon's Gate
Prologue
The Pictish Wilderness, in the reign of Conan the Second, known as Conn:
My name is Nidaros, son of one who did not care to acknowledge me.
Likely enough he was a noble with a full purse and influence at Court, both of which he used for my advancement. Otherwise I might be in the ranks of the Tenth Black River Guards instead of commanding a company.
On the edge of the Pictish Wilderness, the patrols beyond the outpost line wait for spring. The Picts in their native forests are no easy prey even when one does not have to fight the snow and cold as well.
In the sixth year of the reign of Conn, son of Conan, King of Aquilonia, Great Count of Poitain, Protector of Bosso
nia, and bearer of too many other titles to burden you with here, spring came early. It was decided (I do not know by whom, and it hardly matters anyway) that we should begin our patrols at once.
I looked from the sky to the face of the messenger (an officer of the elite Black Dragons, the royal bodyguards) and back to the sky.
"At once?"
"At once."
"The ground is not yet dry enough to let a soldier put one foot in front of another."
"That does not seem to stop the Picts. They have already raided farms along Silver Creek."
I wished, not aloud, that demons fly away with Silver Creek and all its Poitainian colonists. I cannot believe that any part of Poitain is so crowded that folk with their wits about them would flee to a land where a Pict can spit in their soup kettles any evening.
The messenger seemed to read my thoughts. He tapped the seal on the parchment. I did not suspect forgery, only the wits of whoever penned the command.
"As it is ordered, so it shall be done," I said. "But the wet ground is a fact that all the generals of ten realms cannot alter. A barefoot Pict can skip lightly where a booted and battle-ready soldier will sink."
"The orders do not say how the patrols shall be equipped," the man said. "Or how far they shall go."
I must have gaped. A Black Dragon with his wits about him was a marvel, like a two-headed calf, or a babe with one arm a bird's wing. The man replied with a grin and a shrug.
"I have kin who fought the Picts when Conan the Great commanded on the border," he said. "Those kin told many tales around the fireside, and I have not forgotten all I heard then."
"Nor have I forgotten what became of friends who sought dry ground and ran into a Pictish ambush," I said. I added a few details, half-expecting the man to turn pale and excuse himself. Since the wars of Conan's early reign, the Black Dragons have mostly stayed close to the palace. Few of this man's apparent years (ten less than my forty) were battle-seasoned.
Instead, he nodded. "I never thought my kin lied, but hearing and seeing are not the same." He frowned. "The next fort is my last duty.
If you have not led out your men when I return, may I come with you?"
"If you are your own master I began.
"I am," he said.
I could hardly put into words my suspicion that he was a spy for one of rank, perhaps even for one at Court. Nor in truth did I feel any great desire to do so. I trusted my men (half Bossonians, half the best sort of Gunderman mercenaries) and my sergeants as I did myself.
Barring ill luck, no bad reports would return to this fellows master.
If ill luck did come, nothing and no one would return from the wilderness at all.
Moreover, this man looked to be a worthy addition to our ranks. I judged he might have had Gunderman, or even Cimmerian, blood himself, from his height and breadth of shoulder. I could not see his hair under a rain-sodden hood, nor his eyes clearly in the dim lamplight of my hut.
The mail I glimpsed at his wrists seemed well-wrought, though, the sword and dagger on his belt were both for use rather than show, and his riding clothes had seen long journeys if not hard fighting. None of these would keep a Pictish arrow from his gizzard if his luck was not in, but they showed he did not trust altogether to luck. Such a man knew the first lesson of border warfare, and so might live to learn others.
"You will be welcome. Make haste, though. If we march swiftly enough, we may catch some of the woodsrunners' hunting parties. No Pict is ever easy prey, but one with an empty belly gives honest men a fighting chance."
As a toast to his safe journey and good hunting afterward, we drank the last wine fit to offer a guest. My second sergeant saw him to his horse while the first and third turned out the men.
***
Battlements of thundercloud rose to the west the morning we at last found the Picts, or they found us.
They found us at a disadvantage, because we were a watering party of twenty. I led, because it was my turn, and Sarabos of the Black Dragons came because he wished it. I did not wish to have two leaders away from the camp at the same time, but one could argue that Sarabos had no real rank.
The men obeyed him readily enough, however, when the Picts struck. This was just after we had picked our next campsite, a stretch of open ground at the foot of a frowning rocky hill.
They came out of the woods howling fit to waken the dead and put the living in their tombs, behind a shower of arrows and throwing-spears.
Knowing that our bows had the range of theirs, they waited until the lay of the ground and the pattern of the trees let them slip close, all in that silence that none except cats and Picts on the hunt can maintain.
Our archers had time for but one flight before five times their number of Picts let loose. The Picts still favor flint for their arrowheads, but try telling a man struck deep by one that it is a child's weapon.
That we suffered little was due more to the stoutness of our armor than the weakness of the Picts' weapons.
The Picts were of two different clans, and as is often the case, one attacked a trifle before the other. So we had warning and escaped being surrounded, although by the margin of the thinnest hair in the mane of a newborn foal. We turned and ran for the best place at hand for defense, that open ground at the foot of the outcrop.
Our archery took some of the heart out of the first clan, not to mention leaving two-score warriors kicking or still among the ferns and rotted logs. We covered some hundreds of paces through tangled second growth with only one man dead, his comrades able to carry him, and no one else hurt past fighting.
Then the second clan attacked, without the warning of an arrow shower but instead charging from cover to reach close quarters almost at once.
As with most Picts, they wore feathers and tattoos, breechclouts and war paint, and precious little else. But more of them than I cared to see had swords and knives of metal, sometimes their own bronze or copper, sometimes captured steel.
I do not know how long the fight lasted. I had my broadsword, a short-handled mace, and good Aquilonian mail with a helm of Zingaran style standing between me and the Picts. All did good service, too. I know I slew a fair hand'sworth and more, and took only two grazes in return.
Others were less fortunate. Six of us died or were hurt past fighting in that brawl at close quarters. It ended in our favor because, as was most often the case, the two clans' war parties had leapt into battle without any common plan. Most Pictish chiefs would sooner serve up their sons in a stew than take orders from another chief.
So there was no one to tell the first clan to hold their arrows until the second had drawn away from us. The first clan began shooting again, and their arrows rained down alike on friend and foe. Foes mostly bore armor, although a Gunderman died with an arrow in the eye. Friends were mostly naked, and another score of Picts died howling or moaning with Pictish arrows through their gizzards.
Sarabos leapt into the midst of this fratricidal slaughter with a broadsword in one hand and a long dagger in the other. I saw him behead one Pict, geld a second, chop the arm from a third, and break the leg of a fourth with a kick like a mule's, all in one continuous flow of movement. A circle grew around him, inhabited only by the dead or those about to die.
At last he sheathed his weapons, hoisted the fallen Gunderman over one shoulder like a miller hoisting a sack of grain, and pointed toward the rocks.
"I thought I heard you bid us withdraw that way," he said to me. "I see at least one cave in that ravine to the south." With a long arm covered in other men's blood, he pointed.
His eyes were keener than mine, and his ears had heard no such orders, but I thanked him with a nod for saving my authority over my surviving men. I put myself with the rearguard while Sarabos and his burden led, and we tramped up the slope.
It was my plan, formed in my mind as we moved, to climb to the crest of the rocks and light our smoke torches. That would tell the camp where we were, and they would be up with us long before
the surviving Picts could muster numbers or courage to come at us on the high ground.
Conan the Great had a favorite saying: "A man can think out a battle beforehand as much as he pleases, but Fate will still spit in the beer." (Although he did not say "spit.") He never called it his own invention, and I much doubt that it was. Kull of Atlantis could have coined it in his wars against the Snakemen of Valusia.
What spat in our particular tankard that day was the thunderstorm. The clouds swept over the rocks before we could reach the heights. As Sarabos laid the dead Gunderman down, the first drops of rain fell.
Thunder crashed overhead. I looked up to see a thunderbolt sear the ridge. I spat from an all-but-dry mouth. If we climbed to that crest in our armor and the lightning went on playing, more than torches might be set alight.
I looked downslope to judge the closeness of our pursuers. To my surprise, I saw them running off as if we had turned into a band of demons and were on their heels. They were even leaving the weapons of the dead, and it takes great fear to make a Pict do that.
It struck me that whatever so daunted Picts might also be something Aquilonians could justly fear. I saw the same thought on faces around me, but”and all honor to my men and their kin”no one said a craven word.
We did keep our formation as we searched the slope for that cave. It was well that it was not far, for in about the time it takes to change the guard, the rain was coming down in a deluge. We might have been standing under a waterfall, and neither good leather nor oiled wool nor any armor ever forged could keep us from being sodden to the skin.
The Conan Compendium Page 401