The Conan Chronology

by J. R. Karlsson

  Across the road is a garden we call the Garden of the Stygian. There too, fifty warriors lurk in ambush. The house next to it is full of warriors, and so are the first three houses on the other side of the street.'

  ''Why tell me? I can see the dogs crouching in the orchard and on the roofs'

  'Aye! Then men in the orchard and the garden will wait until the Ilbarsis have passed beyond them and are between the houses. Then the archers on the roofs will pour arrows down upon them, while the swordsmen close in from all sides. Not a man will escape.'

  'Could I but warn them!' muttered Conan. 'Come on, we're going down.'

  He leaped down the stairs and called in Antar and the other Zuagirs.

  'We're going out to fight.'

  'Seven against seven hundred?' said Antar. 'I am no craven, but―'

  In a few words Conan told him what he had seen from the top of the tower. 'If, when Olgerd springs his trap, we can take the Yezmites in the rear in turn, we might just be able to turn the tide. We have nothing to lose, for if Olgerd destroys my friends he'll come back and finish us.'

  'But how shall we be known from Olgerd's dogs?' persisted the Zuagir.

  'Your reavers will hew us down with the rest and ask questions afterwards.'

  'In here,' said Conan. In the armory, he handed out silvered coats of scale mail and bronze helmets of an antique pattern, with tall, horsehair crests, unlike any he had seen in Yanaidar. 'Put these on.

  Keep together and shout 'Conan!' as your war-cry, and we shall do all right.' He donned one of the helms himself.

  The Zuagirs grumbled at the weight of the armour and complained that they were half blinded by the helmets, whose cheek plates covered most of their faces.

  'Put them on!' roared Conan. 'This is a stand-up fight, no desert jackal's slash-and-ran raid. Now, wait here until I fetch you.'

  He climbed back to the top of the tower. The Free Companions and the Kushafis were marching along the road in compact companies. Then they halted. Balash was too crafty an old wolf to rush headlong into a city he knew nothing about A few men detached themselves from the mass and ran towards the town to scout. They disappeared behind the houses, then reappeared again, running back towards the main forces. After them came a hundred or so Yezmites, running in ragged formation.

  The invaders spread out into a battle line. The sun glinted on sheets of arrows arching between the two groups. A few Yezmites fell, while the rest closed with the Kushafis and the kozaki. There was an instant of dusty confusion through which sparkled the whirl of blades. Then the Yezmites broke and fled back towards the houses. Just as Conan feared, the invaders poured after them, howling like blood-mad demons. Conan knew the hundred had been sent out to draw his men into the trap.

  Olgerd would never have sent such an inferior force to charge the invaders otherwise.

  They converged from both sides into the road. There, though Balash was unable to check their headlong rush, he did at least manage to beat and curse them into a more compact formation as they surged into the end of the street.

  Before they reached it, not fifty paces behind the last Yezmites, Conan was racing down the stairs.

  'Come on!' he shouted. 'Nanaia, bolt the door behind us and stay herd.'

  Down the stair to the first storey they pelted, out the door, past the deserted siege tower, and through the gap in the wall. Nobody barred their way. Olgerd must have taken from the palace every man who could bear arms.

  Antar led them into the palace and out again through the front entrance. As they emerged, the signal for the Yezmite attack was given by a deafening roar of a dozen long bronze trumpets in the hands of Olgerd's Hyrkanians. By the time they reached the street, the trap had closed. Conan could see the backs of a mass of Yezmites struggling with the invaders, filling the street from side to side, while archers poured arrows into the mass from the roofs of the houses on either side.

  With a silent rush Conan led his little group straight into the rear of the Yezmites. The latter knew nothing until the pikes of the Zuagirs thrust them through the back. As the first victims fell, the desert Shemites wrenched out their spears and thrust again and again, while in the middle of the line Conan whirled his axe, splitting skulls and lopping off arms at the shoulder. As the pikes broke or became jammed in the bodies of the Yezmites, the Zuagirs dropped them and took to their swords.

  Such was the mad fury of Conan's onslaught that he and his little squad had felled thrice their own number before the Yezmites realised they were taken in the rear. As they looked around, the unfamiliar harness and the shambles of mangled bodies made them give back with cries of dismay. To their imaginations the seven madly slashing and chopping attackers seemed like an army.

  'Conan! Conan!' howled the Zuagirs.

  At the cry, the trapped force roused itself. There were only two men between Conan and his own force. One was thrust through by the kozak facing him. Conan brought his axe down on the other's helmet so hard that it not only split helm and head but also broke the axe handle.

  In an instant of lull, when Conan and the Zuagirs faced the kozaki and nobody was sure of the others' identity, Conan pushed his helmet back so that his face showed.

  'To me!' he bellowed above the clatter. 'Smite them, dog-brothers!'

  'It is Conan!' cried the nearest Free Companions, and the cry. was taken up through the host.

  'Ten thousand pieces of gold for the Cimmerian's head!' came the sharp voice of Olgerd Vladislav.

  The clatter of weapons redoubled. So did the chorus of cries, curses, threats, shrieks, and groans. The battle began to break up into hundreds of single combats and fights among small groups. They swirled up and down the street, trampling the dead and wounded; they surged into the houses, smashed furniture, thundered up and down stairs, and erupted on to the roofs, where the Kushafis and kozaki made short work of the archers posted there.

  After that, there was no semblance of order or plan, no chance to obey commands and no time to give them. It was all blind, gasping, sweating butchery, hand-to-hand, with straining feet splashing through pools of blood. Mingled inextricably, the heaving mass of fighters surged and eddied up and down Yanaidar's main street and overflowed into the alleys and gardens. There was little difference in the numbers of the rival hordes. The outcome hung in the balance, and no man knew how the general battle was going; each was too busy killing and trying not to be killed to see what was going on around him,

  Conan did not waste breath trying to command order out of chaos. Craft and strategy had gone by the board; the fight would be decided by sheer muscle and ferocity. Hemmed in by howling madmen, there was nothing for him to do but split as many heads and spill as many guts as he could and let the gods of chance decide the issue.

  Then, as a fog thins when the wind strikes it, the battle began to thin, knotted masses splitting and melting into groups and individuals.

  Conan knew that one side or the other was giving way as men turned their backs on the slaughter. It was the Yezmites who wavered, the madness inspired by the drugs their leaders had given them beginning to die out.

  Then Conan saw Olgerd Vladislav. The Zaporoskan's helmet and cuirass were dented and blood-splashed, his garments shredded, his corded muscles quivering and knotting to the lightning play of his saber. His grey eyes blazed and his lips wore a reckless smile. Three dead Kushafis lay at his feet and his saber kept half a dozen blades in play at once. Right and left of him corseleted Hyrkanians and slit-eyed Khitans in lacquered leather smote and wrestled breast to breast with wild Kushafi tribesmen.

  Conan also saw Tubal for the first time, plowing through the wrack of battle like a black-bearded buffalo as he glutted his wild-beast fury in stupendous blows. And he saw Balash reeling out of the battle covered with blood. Conan began beating his way through to Olgerd.

  Olgerd laughed with a wild gleam in his eyes as he saw the Cimmerian coming toward him. Blood streamed down Conan's mail and coursed in tiny rivulets down his massive, sun-brown
ed arms. His knife was red to the hilt.

  'Come and die, Conan!' shouted Olgerd. Conan came in as a kozak would come, in a blazing whirl of action. Olgerd sprang to meet him, and they fought as the kozaki fight, both attacking simultaneously, stroke raining on stroke too swiftly for the eye to follow.

  In a circle about them, the panting, bloodstained warriors ceased their own work of slaughter to stare at the two leaders settling the destiny of Yanaidar.

  'Aie!' cried a hundred throats as Conan stumbled, losing contact with the Zaporoskan blade.

  Olgerd cried out ringingly and whirled up his sword. Before he could strike, or even realise the Cimmerian had tricked him, the long knife, driven by Conan's iron muscles, punched through his breastplate and through the heart beneath. He was dead before he struck the ground, tearing the blade out of the wound as he fell.

  As Conan straightened to look around, there came a new outcry, somehow different from what he would have expected to hear as his men set upon the broken Yezmites. He looked up and saw a new force of armed men clattering down the street in a solid, disciplined formation crushing and brushing aside the knots of fighters in their way. As they came close, Conan made out the gilded mail and nodding plumes of the Iranistanian royal guard. At their head raged the mighty Gotarza, striking with his great scimitar at Yezmite and kozak alike.

  In a twinkling the whole aspect of the battle had changed. Some Yezmites fled. Conan shouted: 'To me, kozaki!' and his band began to cluster around him, mixed with the Kushafis and some of the Yezmites.

  The latter, finding Conan the only active leader against the new common foe, fell in with the men with whom they had just been locked in a death grapple, while along the front between the two masses, swords flashed and more men fell.

  Conan found himself facing Gotarza, who swept the field with blows that would have felled small oaks. Conan's notched blade sang and flashed too fast for the eye to follow, but the Iranistani was not behind him.

  Blood from a cut on the forehead ran down the side of Gotarza's face; blood from another flesh wound in Conan's shoulder crimsoned the front of his mail. But still the blades whirled and clashed, neither finding an opening in the other's guard.

  Then the roar of battle rose in pitch to screams of pure terror. On all sides, men began to leave the fight to ran for the road to the Stair.

  The panic push drove Conan into a corps-ti-corps with Gotarza. Breast to breast they strained and wrestled. Conan, opening his mouth to shout, found it full of Gotarza's long black beard. He spat it out and roared:

  'What in Hell is going on, you palace-bred lap dog?'

  'The real owners of Yanaidar have come back,' shouted Gotarza. 'Look, swine!'

  Conan risked a glance. From all sides, hordes of slinking grey shadows with unblinking, soulless eyes and misshapen, doglike jaws swarmed, to fasten upon any man they met, wherever a clawed but manlike hand could find a hold, and begin to tear him apart and devour him on the spot Men struck at them with the strength of maniacal terror, but their corpselike skins seemed almost impervious to weapons. Where one fell, three others leaped to take its place.

  The ghouls of Yanaidar!' gasped Gotarza. 'We must flee. Smite me not in the back till we win clear, and I'll hold my hand from you. We can settle our own score later.'

  The rush of fugitives bowled the two off their feet Conan felt human feet on his back. With a tremendous effort he forced himself back on his knees and then to his feet, striking out with fists and elbows to clear enough space to breathe.

  The rout flowed out northward along the road to the Stair, Yezmites, kozaki, Kushafis, and Iranistanian guards all mixed together but forgetting their three-cornered battle in the face of this subhuman menace. Women and children mingled with the warriors. Along the flanks of the rout swarmed the ghouls, like great grey lice, flowing over any person who became momentarily separated from the rest. Conan, thrust out to the edges of the crowd by the buffeting of the fugitives, came upon Gotarza staggering under the attack of four ghouls. He had lost his sword but gripped two by the throat, one with each hand, while a third clung to his legs and a fourth circled around, trying to reach his throat with its jaws.

  A swipe of Conan's knife cut one ghoul in half; a second took off the head of another. Gotarza hurled the others from him, and then they swarmed over Conan, ripping and snapping with claws and fangs. For an instant they almost pulled him down. He was dimly aware that Gotarza had pulled one off him, thrown it to the ground, and was stamping on it with a sticklike snapping of ribs. Conan broke his knife on another and crushed the skull of a third with the hilt.

  Then he was running on again with the rest. They poured through the gate in the cyclopean wall, down the Stair, down the ramps, and out across the floor of the canyon. The ghouls pursued them as far as the gate, pulling down man after man. As the last fugitives jammed through the gate, the ghouls fell back, scurrying along the road and into the orchards to fall snarling upon the bodies over which little knots of their own kind already snapped and fought.

  In the canyon, men collapsed from weariness, lying down upon the rock heedless of the proximity of their late foes or sitting with their backs against boulders and crags. Most were wounded. All were blood-spattered, disheveled, and bloodshot of eye, in ragged garments and hacked and dented armour. Many had lost their weapons. Of the hundreds of warriors who had gathered for the battle in Yanaidar in the dawn, less than half emerged from the city. For a time the only sounds were those of heavy breathing, the groans of the wounded, the ripping of garments as men made them into crude bandages, and the occasional clink of weapons on the rock as they moved about.

  Though he had been fighting, running, and climbing most of the time since the previous afternoon, Conan was one of the first on his feet.

  He yawned and stretched, winced at the sting of his wounds, and stalked about, caring for his own men and gathering them into a compact mass.

  Of his squad of Zuagirs, he could find only three including Antar.

  Tubal he found, but not Codrus.

  On the other side of the canyon, Balash, sitting with his leg swathed in bandages, ordered his Kushafis in a weak voice. Gotarza collected his guardsmen. The Yezmites, who had suffered the heaviest losses, wandered about like lost sheep, staring fearfully at the other gathering groups.

  'I slew Zahak with my own hands,' explained Antar, 'so they have no high officer to rally them.'

  Conan strode over to where Balash lay. 'How are you doing, old wolf?'

  'Well enough, though I cannot walk unaided. So the old legends are true after all! Every so often, the ghouls issue from chambers under Yanaidar to devour any men so rash as to have taken up residence there.' He shuddered. 'I do not think anybody will soon try to rebuild the city again.'

  'Conan!' called Gotarza. 'We have things to discuss.'

  'I'm ready,' growled Conan. To Tubal he said: 'Gather the men into formation, with those least wounded and best armed on the outside.'

  Then he strode over the rock-littered canyon floor to a point halfway between his group and Gotarza's. The latter came forward too, saying:

  'I still have orders to fetch you and Balash back to Anshan, dead or alive.'

  'Try it,' said Conan.

  Balash called from his sitting-place: 'I am wounded, but if you try to bear me off by force, my people will harry you through the hills till not one lives.'

  'A brave threat, but after another battle you would not have enough men,' said Gotarza. 'You know the other tribes would take advantage of your weakness to plunder your village and carry off your women. The king rules the Ilbars because the Ilbarsi tribes have never united and never will.'

  Balash remained silent for a moment, then said: 'Tell me, Gotarza, how did you find whither we had gone?'

  'We came to Kushaf last night, and the prickle of a skinning knife persuaded a boy of the village to tell us you had gone into Drujistan and guide us on your trail.

  In the light before dawn, we came up to that pl
ace where you climb a cliff by a rope ladder, and the fools in their haste did not draw it up after them. We bound the men you had left to guard your horses and came up after you.

  'But now to business. I have nought against either of you, but I have sworn an oath by Asura to obey the commands of Kobad Shah, and I will obey them while I can drew breath. On the other hand, it seems a shame to begin a further slaughter when our men are so weary and so many brave warriors have fallen.'

  'What had you in mind?' growled Conan.

  'I thought you and I might settle the question by single combat. If I fall, you may go your ways, as there will be none to stop you. If you fall, Balash shall return to Anshan with me. You may be able to prove your innocence at that,' Gotarza added to the Kushafi chief. 'The king shall know of your part in ending the cult of the Hidden Ones.'

  'Not from what I know of Kobad's mad suspiciousness,' said Balash. 'But I'll agree, as no city-bred Iranistani dog could worst Conan in such a duel.'

  'Agreed,' said Conan shortly, and turned back to his men. 'Who has the biggest sword?'

  He hefted several and chose a long, straight one of Hyborian pattern.

  Then he faced Gotarza. 'Are you ready?'

  'Ready,' said Gotarza, and came on with a rush.

  The two blades flashed and clanged in a whirl of steel, so fast that the onlookers could not see clearly what was happening. The warriors leaped, circled, advanced, retreated, and ducked decapitating slashes, while the blades continued their din, never stopping for a second.

  Slash― parry―thrust―cut―lunge―parry they went. Never in Yanaidar's thousands of years had those crags looked down upon so magnificent a display of swordsmanship.

  'Hold!' cried a voice. Then, as the fight continued: 'I said hold!'

  Conan and Gotarza backed away from each other warily and turned to see who was shouting.

  'Bardiya!' cried Gotarza at the stout major-domo, who stood in the notch of the gully that led to the cliff of the rope ladder. 'What do you here?'