The Conan Chronology

by J. R. Karlsson

  As the riderless horse raced away, one of the two figures drew itself up on one elbow. It was the Yuetshi, whose life was welling fast from a ghastly cut across neck and shoulder. Gasping, he looked at the other form. Kurush Khan's beard jutted upwards as if in comic surprise. The Yuetshi's arm gave way and his face fell into the dirt, filling his mouth with dust. He spat red, gave a ghastly laugh from frothy lips, and fell back. When the Hyrkanians reached the spot, he, too, was dead.

  The Hyrkanians squatted like vultures about a dead sheep and conversed over the body of their khan. When they rose, the doom had been sealed of every Yuetshi in the valley of Akrim.

  Granaries, ricks, and stables, spared by Kurush Khan, went up in flames. All prisoners were slain, infants tossed living into the flames, young girls ripped up and flung into the bloody streets. Beside the khan's corpse grew a heap of severed heads. Riders galloped up, swinging tliese trophies by the hair, to toss them on the grim pyramid.

  Every place that might hide a shuddering wretch was ripped apart.

  One tribesman, prodding into a stack of hay, discerned a movement in the straw. With a wolfish yell, he pounced upon the stack and dragged his victim to light. It was a girl, and no dumpy, apelike Yuetshi woman either. Tearing off her cloak, the Hyrkanian feasted his eyes on her scantily covered beauty.

  The girl struggled silently in his grip. He dragged her toward his horse. Then, quick and deadly as a cobra, she snatched a dagger from his girdle and sank it under his heart. With a groan he crumpled, and she sprang like a she-leopard to his horse. The steed neighed and reared, and she wrenched it about and raced up the valley. Behind her the pack gave tongue and streamed out in pursuit. Arrows whistled about her head.

  She guided the horse straight at the mountain wall on the south of the valley, where a narrow canyon opened out. Here the going was perilous, and the Hyrkanians reined to a less headlong pace among the stones and boulders. But the girl rode like a windblown leaf and was leading them by several hundred paces, when she came to a low wall or barrier across the mouth of the canyon, as if at some time somebody had rolled boulders together to make a crude defence. Feathery tamarisks grew out of the ridge, and a small stream cut through a narrow notch in the centre. Men were there.

  She saw them among the rocks, and they shouted to her to halt. At first she thought them more Hyrkanians and then saw otherwise. They were tall and strongly built, chain mail glinting under their cloaks, and spired steel caps on their heads. She made up her mind instantly. Throwing herself from her steed, she ran up to the rocks and fell on her knees, crying: 'Aid, in the name of Ishtar the merciful!'

  A man emerged, at the sight of whom she cried out: 'General Artaban!'

  She clasped his knees. 'Save me from those wolves that follow!'

  'Why should I risk my life for you?' he asked indifferently.

  'I knew you at the court of the king at Aghrapur! I danced before you.

  I am Roxana, the Zamorian.'

  'Many women have danced before me.'

  'Then I will give you a password,' said she in desperation. 'Listen!'

  As she whispered a name in his ear, he started as if stung. He stared piercingly at her. Then, clambering upon a great boulder, he faced the oncoming riders with lifted hand.

  'Go your way in peace, in the name of King Yildiz of Turan!'

  His answer was a whistle of arrows about his ears. He sprang down and waved. Bows twanged all along the barrier and arrows sheeted out among the Hyrkanians. Men rolled from their saddles; horses screamed and bucked. The other riders fell back, yelling in dismay. They wheeled and raced back down the valley.

  Artaban turned to Roxana: a tall man in a cloak of crimson silk and a chain-mail corselet threaded with gold. Water and blood had stained his apparel, yet its richness was still notable. His men gathered about him, forty stalwart Turanian mariners, bristling with weapons. A miserable-looking Yuetshi stood by with his hands bound.

  'My daughter,' said Artaban, 'I have made enemies in this remote land on your behalf because of a name whispered in my ear. I believed you―'

  'If I lied, may my skin be stripped from me.'

  'It will be,' he promised gently. 'I will see to it personally. You named Prince Teyaspa. What do you know of him?'

  'For three years I have shared his exile.'

  'Where is he?'

  She pointed down the valley to where the turrets of the castle were just visible among the crags. 'In yonder stronghold of Gleg the Zaporoskan.'

  'It would be hard to take,' mused Artaban.

  'Send for the rest of your sea hawks! I know a way to bring you to the heart of that keep!'

  He shook his head. 'These you see are all my band.' Seeing her incredulity he added: 'I am not surprised that you wonder. I will tell you…'

  With the frankness that his fellow Turanians found so disconcerting, Artaban sketched his fall. He did not tell her of his triumphs, which were too well-known to need repetition. He was famous as a general for his swift raids into far countries―Brythunia, Zamora, Koth, and Shem ―when five years before, the pirates of the Sea of Vilayet, working in league with the outlaw kozaki of the adjoining steppes, had become a formidable menace to that westernmost Hyrkanian kingdom, and King Yildiz had called upon Artaban to redress the situation. By vigorous action Artaban had put down the pirates, or at least driven them away from the western shores of the sea.

  But Artaban, a passionate gambler, had gotten deeply in debt. To discharge his debts he had, while on a lone patrol with his flagship, seized a legitimate merchantman out of Khorusun, put all her people to the sword, and taken her cargo back to his base to sell secretly. But, though his crew was sworn to secrecy, somebody blabbed. Artaban had kept his head only at the price of a command from King Yildiz that almost amounted to suicide: to sail across the Sea of Vilayet to the mouth of the Zaporoska River and destroy the encampments of the pirates. Only two ships happened to be available for this enterprise.

  Artaban had found the fortified camp of the Vilayet pirates and had taken it by storm, because only a few of the pirates were in it at the time. The rest had gone up the river to fight a band of wandering Hyrkanians, similar to Kurush Khan's band, that had attacked the native Zaporoskans along the river, with whom the pirates were on friendly terms. Artaban destroyed several pirate ships in their docks and captured a number of old or sick pirates.

  To cow the absent pirates, Artaban had ordered that those taken alive should be impaled, burned by slow fires, and flayed alive all at once.

  This sentence was in the midst of being executed when the main body of the pirates had returned. Artaban had fled, leaving one of his ships in their hands. Knowing the penalty for failure, he had struck out for the wild stretch along the southwestern shore of Vilayet Sea where the Colchian Mountains came down to the water. He was soon pursued by the pirates in the captured ship and overtaken when the western shore was already in sight The resulting battle had raged over the decks of both ships until dead and wounded lay everywhere. The greater numbers and superior equipment of the Turanians, together with Artaban's adroit use of his ram, had barely given them a defensive, indecisive victory.

  'So we ran the galley ashore in the creek. We might have repaired it, but the king's fleet rules all of Vilayet Sea, and he will have a bowstring ready for me when he knows I've failed. We struck into the mountains, seeking we know not what―a way out of Turanian dominions or a new kingdom to rule.'

  Roxana listened and then without comment began her tale. As Artaban well knew, it was the custom of the kings of Turan, upon coming to the throne, to kill their brothers and their brothers' children in order to eliminate the chance of a civil war. Moreover it was the custom, when the king died, for the nobles and generals to acclaim as king the first of his sons to reach the capital after the event.

  Even with this advantage, the weak Yildiz could not have conquered his aggressive brother Teyaspa had it not been for his mother, a Kothian woman named Khushia. This formidable ol
d dame, the real ruler of Turan, preferred Yildiz because he was more docile, and Teyaspa was driven into exile. He sought refuge in Iranistan but discovered that the king of that land was corresponding with Yildiz in regard to poisoning him.

  In an attempt to reach Vendhya, he was captured by a nomadic Hyrkanian tribe, who recognised him and sold him to the Turanians. Teyaspa thought his fate was sealed, but his mother intervened and stopped Yildiz from having his brother strangled.'

  Instead, Teyaspa was confined in the castle of Gleg the Zaporoskan, a fierce semibandit chief who had come into the valley of the Akrim many years before and set himself up as a feudal lord over the primitive Yuetshi, preying on them but not protecting them. Teyaspa was furnished with all luxuries and forms of dissipation calculated to soften his fibre.

  Roxana explained that she was one of the dancing girls sent to entertain him. She had fallen violently in love with the handsome prince and, instead of seeking to ruin him, had striven to lift him back to manhood.

  'But,' she concluded, 'Prince Teyaspa has sunk into apathy. One would not know him for the young eagle who led his horsemen into the teeth of the Brythunian knights and the Shemitic asshuri. Imprisonment and wine and the juice of the black lotus have drugged his senses. He sits entranced on his cushions, rousing only when I sing or dance for him.

  But he has the blood of conquerors in him. He is a lion who but sleeps.

  'When the Hyrkahians rode into the valley, I slipped out of the castle and went looking for Kurush Khan, in hope of finding a man bold enough to aid Teyaspa. But I saw Kurush Khan slain, and then the Hyrkanians became like mad dogs. I hid from them, but they dragged me out. O my lord, help us! What if you have but a handful? Kingdoms have been built on less! When it is known that the prince is free, men will flock to us! Yildiz is a fumbling mediocrity, and the people fear his son Yezdigerd, a fierce, cruel, and gloomy youth.

  'The nearest Turanian garrison is three days' ride from here. Akrim is isolated, known to few but wandering nomads and the wretched Yuetshi.

  Here an empire can be plotted unmolested. You too are an outlaw; let us band together to free Teyaspa and place him on his throne! If he were king, all wealth and honour were yours, while Yildiz offers you naught but a bowstring!'

  She was on her knees, gripping his cloak, her dark eyes ablaze with passion. Artaban stood silently, then suddenly laughed a gusty laugh.

  'We shall need the Hyrkanians,' he said, and the girl clapped her hands with a cry of joy.

  'Hold up!' Conan the Cimmerian halted and glanced about, craning his massive neck. Behind him, his comrades shifted with a clank of weapons.

  They were in a narrow canyon, flanked on either hand by steep slopes grown with stunted firs. Before them, a small spring welled up among straggling trees and trickled away down a moss-green channel.

  'Water here at least,' granted Conan. 'Drink!' The previous evening, a quick march had brought them to Artaban's ship in its hiding place in the creek before dark. Conan had left four of his most seriously wounded men here, to work at patching up the vessel, while he pushed on with the rest. Believing that the Turanians were only a short distance ahead, Conan had pressed recklessly on in hope of coming up with them and avenging the massacre on the Zaporoska. But then, with the setting of the young moon, they had lost the trail in a maze of gullies and wandered blindly. Now at dawn they had found water but were lost and worn out The only sign of human life they had seen since leaving the coast was a huddle of huts among the crags, housing nondescript skin-clad creatures who fled howling at their approach. Somewhere in the hills a lion roared.

  Of the twenty-six, Conan was the only one whose muscles retained their spring. 'Get some sleep,' he growled. 'Ivanos, pick two men to take the first watch with you. When the sun's over that fir, wake three others.

  I'm going to scout up this gorge.'

  He strode up the canyon and was soon lost among the straggling growth.

  The slopes changed to towering cliffs that rose sheer from the sloping, rock-littered floor. Then, with heart-stopping suddenness, a wild, shaggy figure sprang up from a tangle of bushes and confronted the pirate. Conan's breath hissed through his teeth as his sword flashed.

  Then he checked the stroke, seeing that the apparition was weaponless.

  It was a Yuetshi: a wizened, gnomelike man in sheepskins, with long arms, short legs, and a flat, yellow, slant-eyed face seamed with many small wrinkles.

  'Khosatral!' exclaimed the vagabond. 'What does one of the Free Brotherhood in this Hyrkanian-haunted land?' The man spoke the Turanian dialect of Hyrkanian, but with a strong accent.

  'Who are you?' grunted Conan.

  'I was a chief of the Yuetshi,' answered the other with a wild laugh.

  'I was called Vinashko. What do you here?'

  'What lies beyond this canyon?' Conan countered.

  'Over yonder ridge lies a tangle of gullies and crags. If you thread your way among them, you will come out overlooking the broad valley of the Akrim, which until yesterday was the home of my tribe, and which today holds their charred bones.'

  'Is there food there?'

  'Aye―and death. A horde of Hyrkanian nomads holds the valley.'

  As Conan ruminated this, a step brought him about, to see Ivanos approaching.

  'Hah!' Conan scowled. 'I told you to watch while the men slept!'

  'They are too hungry to sleep,' retorted the Corinthian, suspiciously eyeing the Yuetshi.

  'Crom!' growled the Cimmerian. 'I cannot conjure food out of the air.

  They must gnaw their thumbs until we find a village to loot―'

  'I can lead you to enough food to feed an army,' interrupted Vinashko.

  Conan said, his voice heavy with menace: 'Don't mock me, my friend! You just said the Hyrkanians―'

  'Nay! There's a place near here, unknown to them, where we stored food.

  I was going thither when I saw you.'

  Conan hefted his sword, a broad, straight, double-edged blade over four feet long, in a land where curved blades were more the rule. 'Then lead on, Yuetshi, but at the first false move, off goes your head!'

  Again the Yuetshi laughed that wild, scornful laugh, and motioned them to follow. He made for the nearer cliff, groped among the brittle bushes, and disclosed a crack in the wall. Beckoning, he bent and crawled inside.

  'Into that wolf's den?' said Ivanos.

  'What are you afraid of?' said Conan. 'Mice?'

  He bent and squeezed through the opening, and the other followed him.

  Conan found himself, not in a cave, but in a narrow cleft of the cliff.

  Overhead a narrow, crooked ribbon of blue morning sky appeared between the steep walls, which got higher with every step. They advanced through the gloom for a hundred paces and came out into a wide circular space surrounded by towering walls of what looked at first glance like a monstrous honeycomb. A low roaring came from the centre of the space, where a small circular curbing surrounded a hole in the floor, from which issued a pallid flame as tall as a man, casting a wan illumination about the cavity.

  Conan looked curiously about him. It was like being at the bottom of a gigantic well. The floor was of solid rock, worn smooth as if by the feet of ten thousand generations. The walls, too regularly circular to be altogether natural, were pierced by hundreds of black square depressions a hand's breadth deep and arranged in regular rows and tiers. The wall rose stupendously, ending in a small circle of blue sky, where a vulture hung like a dot A spiral stairway cut in the black rock started up from ground level, made half a complete circle as it rose, and ended with a platform in front of a larger black hole in the wall, the entrance to a tunnel.

  Vinashko explained: 'Those holes are the tombs of an ancient people who lived here even before my ancestors came to the Sea of Vilayet There are a few dim legends about these people; it is said they were not human, but preyed upon my ancestors until a priest of the Yuetshi by a great spell confined them to their holes in the wall and lit that
fire to hold them there. No doubt their bones have all long since crumbled to dust. A few of my people have tried to chip away the slabs of stone that block these tombs, but the rock defied their efforts.' He pointed to heaps of stuff at one side of the amphitheatre. 'My people stored food here against times of famine. Take your fill; there are no more Yuetshi to eat it.'

  Conan repressed a shudder of superstitious fear. 'Your people should have dwelt in these caves. One man could hold that outer cleft against a horde.'

  The Yuetshi shrugged. 'Here there is no water. Besides, when the Hyrkanians swooped down there was no time. My people were not warlike; they only wished to till the soil.'

  Conan shook his head, unable to understand such natures. Vinashko was pulling out leather bags of grain, rice, moldy cheese, and dried meat, and skins of sour wine.

  'Go bring some of the men to help carry the stuff, Ivanos,' said Conan, staring upward. 'I'll stay here.'

  As Ivanos swaggered off, Vinashko tugged at Conan's arm. 'Now do you believe I'm honest?'

  'Aye, by Crom,' answered Conan, gnawing a handful of dried figs. 'Any man that leads me to food must be a friend. But how did you and your tribe get here from the valley of the Akrim? It must be a long steep road.'

  Vinashko's eyes gleamed like those of a hungry wolf. 'That is our secret. I will show you, if you trust me.'

  'When my belly's full,' said Conan with his mouth full of figs. 'We're following that black devil, Artaban of Shahpur, who is somewhere in these mountains.'

  'He is your enemy?'

  'Enemy! If I catch him, I'll make a pair of boots of his hide.'

  'Artaban of Shahpur is but three hours' ride from here.'