The Conan Chronology

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The Conan Chronology Page 415

by J. R. Karlsson


  'A man of wisdom travels on his own feet,' Conan grumbled, 'or on the feet of beasts.'

  'Don’t be tedious,' she said. 'Even that great, hulking frame and those powerful muscles could bore me if your thoughts persist in being so narrow. Do you want to hear this?'

  'Forgive me,' he said. 'I am listening.' If she thought him stupid, so much the better.

  'That is more like it. Know then, that in the life of every civilisation, there are times of growth and times of stagnation. If a time of stagnation goes on too long, rot sets in and the civilisation falls. With each new, rejuvenating source of energy, the culture grows and stretches itself and tests its limits before sinking into self-satisfaction. So it always was with Janagar. As a young, barbaric race, we were drunk with the power of steel and bronze and the shedding of enemy blood. Then we expanded further with the power of gold and other wealth, the intoxication of acquisitiveness. Finally, we grasped the ultimate power of sorcery, and we worked our will upon the world of mankind, and even into other planes.

  'But even with us, there were limits. As a young race, we learned the limits of armed might In our middle age, we found that there were some things unobtainable even with the greatest wealth. In our final stage, we found that as humans, there were limits to the sorcerous powers we could wield.'

  ' ‘As humans,’ you say?'

  'Aye. So you are listening, after all. It was true. We knew that we shared the world with thinking creatures that were not human. In the worlds beyond, there were races infinitely ancient and infinitely powerful It chafed our pride that we could not be their equals. The human brain was not organised to wield their powers. The human body could not live long enough to perfectly master many arts customary to other races. It was decided that the masters of Janagar had to somehow absorb the substance of the nonhuman races.'

  With a numbing chill, Conan remembered the artistic motif he had seen everywhere in the city, above and below: entwined chains of human and demonic forms coupling in obscene combinations.

  'And so it was done,' she went on. 'In Janagar, men and women mated with beings in no wise ever intended to mingle their blood with that of mortal humans. It grew into a ritual and the core of our religion for the last thousand years of the city, and the progeny that sprang from this practice was strange beyond belief. Unholy combinations of human and alien sat upon the thrones of Janagar, and took part in councils that would strike any living human of today mad with horror.'

  'That I can well believe,' Conan said.

  'The price was terrible, but the mages of Janagar would pay any price, endure any sacrifice, for great knowledge. And great knowledge was theirs. The deepest secrets of matter and spirit were theirs to know and to exploit. Any knowledge they wished was theirs for desiring it, AH the creatures of this world became slaves to them. Even some of the beings of other worlds and planes bowed down to them.'

  'But not all?' Conan asked.

  'No,' she admitted. 'Not all.' For the first time, hesitation crept into her voice. 'There were beings in the higher planes, beings of such mind-blasting might that the half-human mages of Janagar called them only the Powers. At first, they seemed unbelievably great, but unnoticing of humans, like the accursed sun. Whatever their doings, they had no interest in man, whether hi this world or another.'

  'These Powers,' Conan said uneasily. 'Were they gods?'

  'Who knows what a god may be?' she said, waving a hand dismissively. 'As often as not, ‘god’ is only a word men attach to that which they do not understand, but fear. To me savage, animals and rivers, storms and lightning, are all gods. Some think fire is a god. Many have worshiped the accursed sun as a god. Often the god is manlike, usually no more than a magnified ancestor whose name is the oldest his descendants remember. Those wizards of old had long since ceased believing in gods. But they believed in the Powers.'

  By this time, their cups were empty again. She clapped her hands. 'This is a long tale, and it must not be hurried. Let us have some refreshment.' No sooner were the words gone from her lips than the slave girl came in with more wine, accompanied this time by another, who bore a tray of viands and set it before them. Bowing, the women withdrew.

  'Join me,' Omia said, waving a hand over the tray, Conan helped himself. He ignored the mushrooms in their various preparations and sauces. The tray also bore dried dates, raisins and figs, as well as other preserved fruits. He downed some honeyed figs and helped them along with a draught of wine. He knew that all of the fruits were typical products of Stygia. He took a handful of dates and held them before her.

  These never grew here beneath the ground,' he said.

  'So they did not,' she agreed. 'But we do not speak here of commonplaces such as food. Now we speak of higher tilings.' Clearly, she did not wish to reveal the source of these tilings.

  He feigned indifference. ‘In truth, preserved fruits are a lowly subject compared to the rise and fall of empire. I but mentioned it because I far prefer these to your unending mushrooms.'

  At this she smiled. 'Our mastery of the cultivation of fungi extends to far more than mere mushrooms, although I would not expect you to know the difference. Long ago, we learned to grow things that have no need of the accursed sun, and our table is rich and varied, had you but the palate to discern its excellence.'

  'Stronger fare is the rule above the ground,' he said. 'I’ve no complaint about your wine, though.'

  He waved his third goblet with a slightly unsteady hand, feigning tipsiness. He had a strong head and could have drunk the golden wine at this rate for hours before giving way to genuine drunkenness.

  'Perhaps you had best avail yourself of it less lavishly,' she murmured. 'I might have little use for you later if you overindulge.'

  He laughed loudly. 'This? Why, I can drink like a camel! Have no fear of that. It takes more than a bit of drink to unman Conan of Cimmeria!' He laughed again, hoping that his windy boast further convinced her that he was an ignorant buffoon. It was more than clear to him that her attraction to him lay

  not in his brain power.

  'I rejoice to hear that,' she said, 'and you shall learn the reason anon. Now, where were we?'

  He ate slices of melon preserved in a gingery syrup, longing for some real meat. 'The Powers,' he reminded her.

  'Oh, yes. I continue: With their blending of human and inhuman and the many subtle shades thereof, the mages of Janagar became masters of certain arts previously unattainable to mere humans. As they exercised these arts and accomplished greater and yet greater feats, the dread notice of the Powers at last was turned upon them. Some unseen, unknown line had been crossed, and the Powers were alerted.

  At first, the great sorcerers sought to deal with these intelligences as they had with all others, to learn from them and to exploit the knowledge.

  'It was not to be. The attention of the Powers meant their unremitting wrath. One after another, the wizards who contacted them were blasted from existence by spells so terrible that the very fabric of the world vibrated every time one of the great sorcerers was struck down. In your travels, have you not heard many tales of ancient catastrophes that took place in time long past?'

  'That I have,' he said. 'Great earth-shakings and worldwide floods and terrible volcanic eruptions for a part of every myth cycle I have heard.'

  'And do these ancient myths not always have a tale of a war between gods, or between gods and giants, or gods and men?'

  'Aye,' he said. 'In my native Cimmeria, we have an old tale of a great fight between our god, Crom, and Ymir of the Æsir a battle that shook the earth. Everyone else has such a legend.' Without asking her leave, he refilled his goblet from the dew-beaded pitcher that stood upon the diminished platter of food.

  'All these tales date from that epochal combat between the Powers and the wizards of Janagar. It went on for centuries, and it altered the structure of the entire world.'

  'If the Powers were so great,' Conan said, 'how can it be that the fight was so lengthy? Surely these
god-things could easily crush mere wizards, however powerful they might be by mortal standards.'

  'A shrewd question. But you must remember that the wizards of Janagar were not truly human by this time. Their mastery of the higher arts was very near that of the Powers. It was in raw force that they were most inferior. But also these battles raged upon other worlds and other planes. For long, long years, the wizards of Janagar fought to keep the very location of our world secret from the Powers, whose driving aim was ever to destroy the very home world of their rivals. This, it was learned, they had done many, many times before.'

  'Your wizards trifled with things best left alone,' he said.

  She shrugged her shapely shoulders elegantly. 'It is not in the nature of a truly great people to shrink from challenges, whatever the odds and however great the consequences.'

  'But they risked the whole world!' he said.

  'What of that? Failure meant the destruction of Janagar and all its people. Should that dread consequence come to pass, what could it matter that all the inferior races were exterminated as well? If your house bums, do you weep for the rats and roaches that perish in the blaze?'

  'You have a point,' he conceded. It was not the first time Conan had encountered such an attitude.

  Many a king had declared that upon his own demise, it booted nothing whether fire or flood consumed the earth.

  'In time,' she went on, 'the greatest mages were no more, and all the higher planes were lost to us.

  In the end, all our efforts devolved to a frantic attempt to stave off defeat and save our world and empire.

  Of course the most powerful spells were invoked to preserve Janagar itself. Others protected the greater cities of the empire. The spells centered upon the temples, where the most awesome and terrible rites were carried out, day and night.'

  'What sort of spells could protect them from such beings?' Conan asked, fascinated in spite of himself by this tale of the death-throes of an empire.

  'The final spell, resorted to after all else was exhausted, was the Great Spell of Unchanging. Once it was in place, the city thus protected would remain as it was, inviolate and without alteration. More to the point, it would become invisible to the Powers, and without the focal point of these places of great wizardry, they could not enter this world to destroy and consume.'

  'So that explains the city above,' Conan said. 'But if the Powers never found this world, how was the land destroyed and the fertile fields of Janagar turned to sandy desert?'

  'That was not done by the Powers. The sheer force required to maintain the spells sapped the very life-force of the land, sucking the fertility from it like water into a sponge. Once Janagar lay near a great river, and from it we drew water by the most wonderful system of canals ever known. The river dwindled between its banks and finally disappeared.'

  'Why did not Janagar perish then?' he asked, already knowing the answer. 'When a city’s water is no more, the city dies. I have seen it happen, when a besieged city’s aqueducts are cut and it has no wells. When the cisterns are exhausted, death is certain.'

  'Surely even you have guessed,' she said, smiling. 'We dug until we found our river again. It had abandoned the land above, but it still flowed through a great system of caverns beneath the ground. The high priests of Janagar declared that Ike am. was accursed, that if we were not to perish, we must dig, hewing a new Janagar from the bowels of the earth.

  'But to maintain the Great Spell of Unchanging, the city above the ground must be kept exactly as it was upon the day that the spell went into effect. To that end, every night after the accursed sun has gone down, teams of expert artificers go up through the great temple and out into the city to repair such trifling damage as the passage of time has inflicted. Since the winds and sands of the desert do not intrude, and since it never rains, this damage is slight.'

  'What became of the other cities?' Conan asked.

  'They lacked the perfect will of Janagar. Some persisted for centuries, but they failed to maintain their cities unchanging, and the spell was thereby sapped. One by one, we lost contact with them and by then, doubtless the Powers were otherwise distracted, for they made no attempt to enter our world through the ruins.'

  Conan remembered the great ruined temple where he had seen the twins communing with the ancient. It must have been a remnant of one of those cities of the empire of Janagar. Now only the ruins of a single building remained, and all that was left of its Great Spell of Unchanging was a rectangular patch of grass that no animal would graze upon.

  'And you have lived here beneath the ground ever since?' Conan asked. 'You have eschewed the sun and clean, open air?'

  'That is so,' she said, rolling onto her belly and cradling her chin upon crossed forearms. 'It has suited us well, but it is a way of life not without … consequences. That is how you and your companions happen to interest us.'

  'How so?' he asked, knowing he would not relish the answer.

  'Preserving ourselves from the Powers, and then from the curse of the sun, solved only our most immediate problem,' she said. 'What we had done to ourselves hi our pursuit of wizardly knowledge needed undoing.'

  'You mean mixing human blood with inhuman?' he asked.

  'Exactly. The folk who first burrowed here beneath the earth would not look to you like your near kin, to say the least'

  His flesh crept at the thought. 'That I can well imagine.'

  'What was needed first was a strict breeding program, to eliminate all trace of the nonhuman from among us. It took hundreds of generations, but at last the deed was accomplished and at last the people of Janagar became truly human once more.'

  This, the Cimmerian gravely doubted. There was more to humanity than appearance, and a bloodline so utterly polluted could never be rendered truly human again. He suspected that they had

  achieved no more than to regain the look of humanity.

  'Once again,' she said, 'our great accomplishment came at an equally great price. Our pool of human blood was too restricted from the beginning. For reasons both supernatural and alchemical, there are undesirable consequences to be met when building from so narrow a base.'

  'A lot of words,' Conan said, 'to say that inbreeding produces degeneracy.'

  'You oversimplify,' she said, frowning. 'We are not breeding animals here, but human beings. In any case, it has been our policy that whenever human stock of exceptional merit should happen our way, we introduce it into our bloodlines. The desert being what it is, this does not happen often.'

  'Why do you not go out and find fresh blood on your own?' he demanded.

  'You forget that we cannot abide the rays of the accursed sun. No. here we stay, and any new stock must come to us. Long ago, we exhausted the possibilities of the desert nomads. For a while, a single nomadic tribe brought us captives of exceptional merit, but the desert grew too vast In the end, they could no longer carry enough water Co keep themselves and their captives alive for the journey.

  They were the last outside people to know the location of Janagar.'

  Conan guessed that this tribe must be the Wadim of whom the old man had told him. Their strange, fragmentary, twisted tale had been the last flickering ancestral memory of a time when their tribe was young and the desert was smaller and less forbidding.

  'But you have contact with the outside world by means of the river,' he said, speaking very slowly and deliberately, like a man on the border of drunkenness. He poured himself another goblet. 'You cannot gull me. These fruits―' he waved a hand, almost oversetting the pitcher '―these are from outside. And I have seen things of Stygian make down here.'

  'We have some contact,' she said, 'with a small tribe of river-men who live near the place where our river reenters the world of the accursed sun. The river-folk are a small, malformed people who do not interest us, and they are too weak to take desirable captives to trade. They keep our existence silent lest other tribes learn their secret and slay mem all to seize the trade for themselves.'

/>   Conan nodded ponderously. 'I can well see how you desire us as breeding stock,' he said, deliberately slurring his words. He smote himself upon his brawny chest. 'I am of the pure blood of Cimmeria, home of the greatest warriors in the world. Achilea is a magnificent woman, stronger than almost any man. Her three women are splendid, strapping wenches, much finer than the women here.'

  He pondered for a while, as if not fully aware of what he had said. 'Yourself excepted, of course,' he amended.

  At this, she shook her head and laughed. 'Barbarian, do you truly think that it is for your strength and looks that we wish to mingle your blood with ours?'

  'Is it not?' he said, truly puzzled this time.

  'By no means. When we lost our empire and were forced to breed the nonhuman from among ourselves, we lost as well our capacity for working magick. We have much knowledge and no way to use it. It is as if we were the greatest of miners, yet had no picks or shovels or sledges.'

  She smiled strangely, and in that smile Conan detected the lingering taint of the nonhuman. 'With your clean, barbaric blood, the blood of a younger race, we may regain our power to wield the great spells of our ancestors. Janagar may once again rise to her rightful place as queen of the world!'

  Of all the reasons she could have for desiring him, this was the last one Conan would have chosen.

  'So you want me to breed with, eh?' he said.

  'Yes,' she replied. 'And I see no need for further discussion of the matter.' Lazily, she began to push herself up from her recumbent posture. Her sheer robe fell away, revealing even more of her ripe contours.

  'Aye!' he agreed heartily. 'Let’s be about it.' He grasped her beneath the arms and lifted her without effort. With one hand, he peeled away her veil and then he planted a sloppy kiss upon her lips.

  Still holding the woman, he lurched to his feet 'Wait!' she cried in exasperation. 'You are too―'

  'Too what?' he demanded, fumbling at her cape as if the knot that bound it at her throat were too complex for his dexterity. Finally, he simply ripped the garment away, She pounded at his face with her fists. 'Slowly, you drunken oaf!'

 

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