'Why don't you and your fellows get together and throw the whole lot into the Sumeru Tso, and rule yourselves? That's what we would do in my country if anybody tried to tryannize over us.'
Tashudang looked shocked. 'You know not what you say, foreigner! Many centuries ago, the priests tell us, this land was much higher than it now is. It stretched from the tops of the Himelias to the tops of the Talakmas―one great, lofty plain, covered with snow and whipped by icy winds. The Roof of the World, it was called.
'Then Yama, the king of the demons, determined to create this valley for us, his chosen people, to dwell in. By a mighty spell, he caused the land to sink. The ground shook with the sound of ten thousand thunders, molten rock poured from cracks in the earth, mountains crumbled, ard forests went up in flame. When it was over, the land between the mountain chains was as you now see it. Because it was now a lowland, the climate wanned, and the plants and beasts of the warm countries came to dwell in it. Then Yama created the first Meruvians and placed them in the valley, to inhabit forever. And he appointed the shamans as leaders and enlighteners of the people.
'Sometimes the shamans forget their duties and oppress us, as if they were but greedy common men. But Yama's command, for us to obey the shamans, still holds good. If we defy it, Yama's great spell will be nullified, and this land will rise to the height of the mountain tops and again become a cold waste. So, no matter how they abuse us, we dare not revolt against the shamans.'
'Well,' said Conan, 'if that filthy little toad is your idea of a god―'
'Oh, no!' said Tashudang, his eyeballs glistening white in the dimness with fear. 'Say it not! He is the only begotten son of the great god, Yama himself. And when he calls his father, the god comes!' Tashudang buried his face in his hands, and Conan could get no more words out of him that day.
The Meruvians were an odd race. Theirs was a peculiar lassitude of spirit―a somnolent fatalism that bade them bow to everything that came upon them as a predestined visitation from their cruel, enigmatic gods.
Any resistance to fate on their part, they believed, would be punished, if not immediately, then in their next incarnation.
It was not easy to drag information out of them, but the Cimmerian youth kept doggedly at it. For one thing, it helped to pass the unending days. For another, he did not intend to remain in slavery long, and every bit of information that he could gather about this hidden kingdom and its peculiar people would be of value when he and Juma came to try for freedom. And finally, he knew how important it was in travelling through a strange country, to command at least a smattering of the local language. Although not at all a scholar by temperament, Conan picked up languages easily. He had already mastered several and could even read and write some of them a little.
At last came the fateful day when the overseers in black leather strode amongst the slaves, wielding heavy whips and herding their charges out the door. 'Now,' sneered one, 'we shall see what prices the princes of the Sacred Land will pay for your unwieldy carcasses, outland swine!'
And his whip raised a long weal across Conan's back.
Hot sun beat down on Conan's back like whips of fire. After being so long in darkness, he was dazzled by the brightness of day. After the slave auction, they led him up the gangplank to the deck of a great galley, which lay moored to the long, stone quays of Shamballah. He squinted against the sun and cursed in a growling undertone. This, then, was the doom to which they had sentenced him―to drudge at the oars until death took him.
'Get down in the hold, you dogs!' spat the ship's overseer, cuffing Conan's jaw with the back of his hand. 'Only the children of Yama may stride the deck!'
Without thinking, the Cimmerian youth exploded into action. He drove his balled fist into the burly overseer's bulging belly. As the breath hissed from the man's lungs, Conan followed the blow with a hammerlike right to the jaw, which stretched the shipman on the deck. Behind him, Juma howled with joy and struggled to get up the line to stand beside him.
The commander of the ship's guard rapped out an order. In a flash, the points of a dozen pikes, in the hands of wiry little Meruvian marines, were leveled at Conan. The Cimmerian stood in the circle of them, a menacing growl rising to his lips. But he belatedly controlled his rage, knowing that any move would bring instant death.
It took a bucket of water to revive the overseer. He laboriously climbed to his feet, blowing like a walrus, while water ran down his bruised face into his sparse black beard. His eyes glared into Conan's with insane rage, then cooled to icy venom.
The officer began to issue a command to the marines: 'Slay the―' but the overseer interrupted:
'Nay, slay him not. Death were too easy for the dog. Ill make him whimper to be put out of his misery ere I've done with him.'
'Well, Gorthangpo?' said the officer.
The overseer stared over the oar pit, meeting the cowed gaze of a hundred-odd naked brown men. They were starved and scrawny, and their bent backs were criss-crossed by a thousand whip scars. The ship carried a single bank of long oars on each side. Some oars were manned by two rowers, some by three, depending upon the size and strength of the slaves. The overseer pointed to an oar in the waist, to which three grey-haired, skeletal old men were chained.
'Chain him to yonder oar! Those walking corpses are played out; they are of no more use to us. Clear the oar of them. This foreign lad needs to stretch his arms a bit; well give him all the room he needs. And if he follow not the pace, I'll open his back to the spine!'
As Conan watched impassively, the sailors unlocked the manacles that connected the wrist chains of the three old men to rings on the oar itself. The old men screamed with terror as brawny arms heaved them over the rail. They hit the water with a great splash and sank without a trace, save for the bubbles that rose one by one to the surface and burst.
Conan was chained to the oar in their place. He was to do the work of all three. As they fastened him to the filth-slimed bench, the overseer eyed him grimly.
'We'll see how you like pulling an oar, boy. You'll pull and pull until you think your back is breaking―and then you'll pull some more. And every time you slack off or miss a boat, I'll remind you of your place, like this!'
His arm swung; the whip uncoiled against the sky and came whistling down across Conan's shoulders. The pain was like that of a white-hot iron rod against his flesh. But Conan did not scream or move a muscle.
It was as if he had felt nothing, so strong was the iron of his will.
The overseer grunted, and the lash cracked again. This time a muscle at one corner of Conan's grimly set mouth twitched, but his eyes looked stonily ahead. A third lash, and a fourth. Sweat formed on the Cimmerian's brow; it trickled down into his eyes, stinging and smarting, even as the red blood ran down his back. But he gave no sign of feeling pain.
Behind him, he heard Juma's whisper: 'Courage!'
Then came a call from the afterdeck; the captain wished to sail.
Reluctantly, the overseer gave up his pleasure of lashing the Cimmerian's back to pulp.
The sailors cast off the ropes that moored the ship to the quay and shoved off with boathooks. Aft of the oar benches but on the same level, in the shade of the catwalk that ran the length of the ship over the heads of the rowers, sat a naked Meruvian behind a huge drum. When the ship had cleared the quay, the coxswain lifted a wooden maul and began to thump the drum. With each beat, the slaves bent to the oars, rising to their feet, raising the looms, and leaning back until their weight brought them down on the benches; then pushing the looms down and forward and repeating. Conan soon caught the rhythm, as did Juma, chained to the oar behind him.
Conan had never before been on a ship. As he heaved at his oar, his quick eyes peered around him at the listless, dull-eyes slaves with whip-scarred backs, who worked on the slimy benches in the frightful stench of their own waste. The galley was low through the waist, where the slaves laboured; the rail was only a few feet above the water. It was higher in the bo
w, where the seamen berthed, and in the carved and gilded stern, where the officers had their quarters. A single mast arose amidships. The yard of the single triangular sail, and the furled sail itself, lay along the catwalk over the oar pit.
When the ship had left the harbour, the sailors untied the lashings that held the sail and its yard to the catwalk and raised it, heaving on the halyard and grunting a chantey. The yard went up by jerks, a few inches at a time. As it rose, the gold-and-purple striped sail unfurled and shook out with snapping, booming sounds. Since the wind was fair on the quarter, the oarsmen were given a rest while the sail took over.
Conan noted that the entire galley had been made from some wood that either by nature or by staining was of a dark red colour. As he gazed about, eyes half shut against the glare, the ship looked as if it had been dipped in blood. Then the whip sang above him and the overseer, on the catwalk above, yelled down:
'Now lay to, you lazy swine!'
A lash laid another welt across his shoulders. It is indeed a ship of wood, he thought to himself; slaves' blood.
V
Rogue's Moon
For seven days, Conan and Juma sweated over the massive oars of the red galley as it plodded its way around the shores of the Sumeru Tso, stopping overnight at each of the seven sacred cities of Meru: Shondakor, Thogara, Auzakia, Issedon, Paliana, Throana, and then―having made the circuit of the sea―back to Shamballah. Strong men though they were, it was not long before the unremitting labour brought them to the edge of exhaustion, when their aching muscles seemed incapable of further effort. Yet still the tireless drum and the hissing whip drove them on.
Once a day, sailors drew buckets of cold, brackish water up over the side and drenched the exhausted slaves. Once a day, when the sun stood at the zenith, they were given a heaping bowl of rice and a long dipperful of water. At night they slept on their oars. The animal-like round of unvarying drudgery sapped the will and drained the mind, leaving the rowers soulless automata.
It would have broken the strength of any man―save for such as Conan.
The young Cimmerian did not yield to the crushing burden of fate as did the apathetic Moravians. The unending labour at the oars, the brutal treatment, the indignity of the slimy benches, instead of sapping his will, only fed the fires within him.
When the ship returned to Shamballah and dropped anchor in the wide harbour, Conan had reached the limits of his patience. It was dark and still; the new moon―a slim, silver scimitar―hung low in the western sky, casting a wan, illusive light. It would soon set. Such a night was called a 'rogue's moon' in the nations of the West, for such poorly-lit night were wont to be chosen by highwaymen, thieves, and assassins to ply their trades. Bent over their oars, ostensibly asleep, Conan and Juma discussed escape with the Meruvian slaves.
On the galley, the feet of the slaves were not fettered. But each wore a pair of manacles joined by a chain, and this chain was strung through an iron ring loosely looped around the loom of the oar. Although this ring slid freely along the loom, its travel was stopped at the outer end by the oarlock and, at the inner, by a collar or ferrule of lead.
This collar, securely fastened to the butt end of the oar by an iron spike, acted as a counterweight to the blade of the oar. Conan had tested the strength of his chain and of the manacles and the ring a hundred times; but even his terrific strength, hardened by seven days of rowing, could not strain any of them. Still, in a tense, growling whisper, he urged schemes of revolt upon his fellow slaves.
'If we could get Gorthangpo down on our level,' he said, 'we could tear him to pieces with our nails and teeth. And he carries the keys to all our bonds. While we were unlocking the manacles, the marines would kill some of us; but once we got loose, we should outnumber them five or six to one―'
'Do not speak of it!' hissed the nearest Meruvian. 'Do not even think of it!'
'Aren't you interested?' asked Conan in astonishment.
'Nay! Even to talk of such violence turns my bones to water.'
'Mine, too,' said another. 'The hardships we suffer have been inflicted upon us by the gods, as a just punishment for some misdeed in a former life. To struggle against it were not only useless but a wicked blasphemy as well. I pray you, barbarian, hush your unholy talk and submit with becoming humility to your fate.'
Such an attitude went against Conan's grain, nor was Juma a man to bow without resistance to any threat of doom. But the Meruvians would not listen to their arguments. Even Tashudang, unusually loquacious and friendly for a Meruvian, begged Conan to do nothing that would enrage Gorthangpo, the overseer, or bring down upon them a worse punishment from the gods than that which their divinities had already inflicted upon them.
Conan's arguement was cut short by the song of the whip. Aroused by the murmur, Gorthangpo had crept out on the catwalk in the darkness. From the few whispered words he overheard, he divined that mutiny was brewing. Now his whip hissed and cracked on Conan's shoulders.
Conan had had enough. In one surge of motion, he bounded to his feet, seized the lashing end of the whip, and tore it out of Gorthangpo's grip. The overseer yelled for the marines.
There was still no way for Conan to get the iron ring off the loom of his oar. In his desperation, an inspiration struck him. The construction of the oarlock limited the vertical motion of the loom to a height of less than five feet above the deck on which he stood. Now he pushed the butt end of the oar up as far as it would go, climbed to the bench, and crouching, placed his shoulders beneath the loom. Then, with a terrific heave of his long, powerful legs, he straightened up.
The oar broke in its oarlock with a rending crash. Quickly, Conan slipped his ring off the broken end. Now he had a serviceable weapon: a club or quarterstaff nine feet long, with a ten-pound mass of lead on one end.
Conan's first terrific swing caught the goggling overseer on the side of the head. His skull shattered like a melon, spattering the benches with a bloody spray of pulped brains. Then Conan hauled himself to the catwalk to meet the charge of the marines. Below on the benches, the scrawny, brown Meruvians crouched, whimpering prayers to their devil-gods. Only Juma imitated Conan's act, breaking his oar at the oarlock and slipping his slave ring loose.
The marines were Meruvians themselves, lax and lazy and fatalistic.
They had never had to fight a slave mutiny; they did not believe such a thing possible. Least of all had they expected to have to face a burly young giant armed with a nine-foot club. Still, they came on bravely enough, although the width of the catwalk allowed them to approach Conan only two abreast.
Conan waded in, swinging wildly. His first blow hurled the first marine off the catwalk and into the benches with a broken sword arm. The second dropped the next man with a shattered skull. A pike was thrust at his naked breast; Conan knocked the pike out of its welder's hand, and his next blow hurled two men at once off the catwalk; the one whom he had struck with crushed-in ribs, and his companion jostled off the walk by the impact of the first victim's body.
Then Juma climbed up beside him. The Kushite's naked torso gleamed like oiled ebony in the dim moonlight, and his oar mowed down the advancing Meruvians like a scythe. The marines, unprepared to face two such monsters, broke and ran for the safety of the poop deck, whence their officer, just aroused from slumber, was screeching confused commands.
Conan bent to the corpse of Gorthangpo and searched his pouch for the key ring. Swiftly he found the key to all the manacles on the ship and unlocked his own, then did the same for Juma.
A bow twanged, and an arrow whistled over Conan's head and struck the mast. The two freed slaves did not wait to pursue the battle further.
Dropping off the catwalk, they pushed through the cowering rowers to the rail, vaulted over the side, and vanished into the dark waters of Shamballah's harbour. A few arrows sped after them, but in the dim light of the setting crescent moon the archers could do little more than shoot at random.
VI
Tunnels of Doom<
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Two naked men hauled their dripping bodies out of the sea and peered about them in the murk. They had swum for hours, it seemed, looking for a way to get into Shamballah unobserved. At last they had found the outlet to one of the storm sewers of the ancient stone city. Juma still trailed the length of broken oar with which he had fought the marines; Conan had abandoned his on the ship. Occasionally a faint gleam of light came into the sewer from a storm grating set into a gutter in the street overhead, but the light was so feeble―the thin moon having set―that the darkness below remained impenetrable. So, in almost total darkness, the twain waded through the slimy waters, seeking a way out of these tunnels.
Huge rats squeaked and fled as they went through the stone corridors beneath the streets. They could see the glimmer of eyes through the dark. One of the larger scavengers nipped Conan's ankle, but he caught and crushed the beast in his hands and flung its corpse at its more cautious fellows. These quickly engaged in a squealing, rustling battle over the feast, while Conan and Juma hurried on through the upward-winding tunnels.
It was Juma who found the secret passage. Sliding one band along the dank wall, he accidentally released a catch and snorted with surprise when a portion of the stone gave way beneath his questing fingers.
Although neither he nor Conan knew where the passage led, they took it, as it seemed to slope upward toward the city streets above.
At last, after a long climb, they came to another door. They groped in utter darkness until Conan found a bolt, which he slid back. The door opened with a squeak of dry hinges to his push, and the two fugitives stepped through and froze.
They stood on an ornamental balcony crowded with statues of gods or demons in a huge, octagonal temple The walls of the eight-sided chamber soared upward, past the balcony, to curve inward and meet to form an eight-sided dome. Conan remembered seeing such a dome towering among the lesser buildings of the city, but he had never inquired as to what lay within it.
The Conan Chronology Page 148