'Shall we go home now, sire?' Prospero asked.
'Aye—home to Tarantia! I've had a bellyful of hunting. And of being hunted! Devil take these Hyperborean fogs! I've the sour taste of them in my throat' Conan growled. He thoughtfully gazed about.
'What is it, sire?'
'I was just wondering—would you have any more of that good red wine of the Poitanian vineyards? As I recall, after the hunt, there was a little left…'
Conan broke off, flushing. For Prospero had begun to laugh until the tears were pouring down his cheeks, cutting runnels through the caked dust.
Black Sphinx of Nebthu
L. Sprague de Camp & Lin Carter
I
Place of Skulls
Night lay like an ebon pall on the trampled, blood-soaked earth of Zingara. Through flying tatters of mist, as through a ragged shroud, the cold white skull of the moon leered down on a scene of horror. For the rolling, barren plain that sloped down to the shallow Alimane was encumbered with the sprawled, gore-splashed corpses of men and their mounts. In silent hundreds dead knights and yeomen lay, some face-down in pools of congealing blood, others on their backs, with dead eyes staring up into the grinning jaws of the mocking moon. The hideous mirth of hyenas rang weirdly through the still air as the scavengers crunched and gobbled.
Few dwelt in this dreary northeastern corner of Zingara, and those few had been further thinned by centuries of war with and raids from Poitain, across the Alimane. The land had been largely abandoned to the prowling wolf and the slinking leopard. Some whispered that the semi-human ghouls, legended to haunt certain hills in central Zingara, had recently been seen in this region also. Tonight there were the makings of a feast for both ghouls and hyenas.
The Zingarans called this grim region the Place of Skulls. Never before had it so well earned its name; never had the bitter sands drunk so deeply of hot blood. Never before had so many hacked and shaft-pierced men gone wailing down.the red road to Hell, to litter the bleak waste with their bones.
And here the bright imperial dreams of Pantho, duke of Guarralid, had been drowned in darkness, and the fires of his vaulting ambition had been quenched in blood. The throne of Zingara was vacant. For that prise, Pantho had gambled all. He had led his band of adventurers into Argos and made himself master of its western provinces. Old King Milo of Argos and his elder son had fallen in battle before him.
Then Duke Pantho had suddenly thrust his army deep into sunny Poitain, across the Alimane. Men supposed that he had done this to secure his rear before striking for the Zingaran capital of Kordava. But they could only guess, since none knew for certain, and Pantho's tongue had been silenced forever by an Aquilonian sword.
Some whispered over flickering candles in southern taverns that a demon had taken possession.of the great duke, or a sorcerer had sent a spell of madness upon him, goading him into this foolhardy venture. For, as everyone knew, the leopards of Poitain crouched between the paws of the mighty lion of Aquilonia. King Conan, ruler of the mightiest kingdom of the West, had instantly hurled his iron legions against Pantho in retaliation for this breach of the border.
The armies had first clashed on the green plains of Poitain. The wild Zingaran charge had broken like surf against the stolid pikemen of Gunderland, while the shafts of the Bossonian archers mowed the Zingaran knights down, nailing helmet to head and thigh to horse. As Pantho withdrew his mounted knights to regroup for a second charge, Conan had unleashed his own cavalry. Conan's own guard, the Black Dragons, had led the charge. Conan himself rode in the van, a warrior so heroic that a thousand legends clung like a cloak of glory about his towering frame.
The Zingarans faltered and broke. They fled in a mad scramble back across the marches of Poitain to Zingara. But Conan was angry, and his anger was such as to shake thrones and make princes turn pale. Leaving his foot to follow as best it could, Conan had hurled his horse across the Alimane in pursuit. On the desolate Place of Skulls, a few leagues south of the Alimane, Conan had caught up with the battered Zingaran host and cut it to ribbons. Many Zingarans died, some yielded. Few escaped. Pantho's bright dream had drowned in a crimson sea.
On a knoll commanding a view of the desolate, corpse-strewn battlefield stood a great tent. Above it flew a black banner charged with a golden lion, the ensign of King Conan. About the base of this hillock stood the tents of the lesser nobility, including one surmounted by the banerole of Poitain. Here old Count Trocero of Poitain gulped wine and cursed his surgeons as they dressed his wounds.
The army itself camped on the plain roundabout. Weary warriors snored in their blanket rolls or squatted by guttering fires. They diced for prizes: gold-inlaid shields, plumed helms, swords with gems twinkling in their hilts. With dawn they would drive deeper into Zingara to set a puppet on Ferdrugo's throne and end the dynastic squabbles that for years had roiled the peace of this contentious land.
Before the king's tent, guardsmen of the Black Dragons stood with naked broadswords, guarding the rest of their lord. But there was little sleep for Conan that night. Inside the tent, lanterns glowed and flickered in their wrought-iron cages. Weary, battle scarred commanders sat or stood about. At a folding table inlaid with precious ivory from distant Vendhya, the great king brooded over maps of crackling parchment as he planned the morrow's march.
Conan had seen over half a century of battle and bloodshed, and the years had left their mark on even so mighty a king. Time had laid its silver in the coarse black hair of his square-cut mane and had grizzled the heavy black moustache that swept out from either side of his long upper lip. Strange suns had burnt his flesh to a leathery hue, and weary years had etched furrows among the scars of war and conquest. But power still lay in the massive thews, and the vitality of his barbarian heritage still blazed in the deep-set eyes of volcanic blue that glared beneath scowling black brows.
Shifting his massive limbs and growling for wine, Conan stared at the maps. The sting of several small wounds annoyed him no more than the bite of a gnat, although a softer, city-bred man might have been stretched groaning on his pallet had he shed the blood that the Cimmerian had lost that day. While Conan pondered and consulted with his officers, his squires fussed about him, unbuckling the many straps of his harness, gently removing plate after plate, while the surgeon gingerly washed and bandaged his cuts and salved his bruises.
'This one needs must be sewn, sire,' said the surgeon.
'Ouch!' grunted Conan. 'Go ahead, man, and pay no heed to my plaints. Pallantides, which were the quickest route hence to Stygia?'
'That one, sire,' said the general, drawing a forefinger across the parchment.
'Aye; I followed it to here when I fled from Xaltotun's sorcery…'
Conan's voice trailed off. With his chin on his massive fist, he stared unseeing into space and time. A shadow of suspicion crossed his brain, evoked by the memory of his struggle with the dread Acheronian sorcerer, Xaltotun, a decade and a half before.
There was something about this mad invasion by Duke Pantho that did not fit what he had heard of that astute and crafty adventurer. Only a fool or a madman would have hurled his army against one of Conan's most loyal and warlike provinces. Conan, who had matched steel with Pantho that day and split the duke's skull with one terrific stroke, did not think that the man had been either mad or foolish.
He suspected an unseen hand behind that addle-pated expedition, a shadowy figure lurking at Pantho's back. He smelled a plot. In fact, he smelled sorcery.
II
Destiny in White
The captain of the king's guard that night was one Amric, an adventurer out of Koth, drawn to golden Tarantia years before by the magic of Conan's name and the legend of his prowess. 'Amric the Bull,' his fellow Black Dragons called him—as much for his amatory prowess as for his headlong onset in battle. He was barrel chested and deep voiced. Like many Kothians, he was olive of skin, with perhaps a trace of Shemitish blood, as suggested by his thick, ringleted black beard. When a quiet litt
le man in dirty white robes came gliding through the murk to the king's tent, Amric alone knew him for what he was.
'Fires of Moloch!' Amric swore. 'A druid out of Pictland, or I'm a eunuch!' He shifted his sword to his left hand so as to sketch a protective sign on the night air with his right.
The small man laughed and lurched; Amric suspected that he was drunk. 'Your sins have found you out, Amric of Khorshemish!' he said.
Amric swore heartily, invoking the nether organs of several of the more disreputable eastern demon-gods. He paled, and sweat beaded his brow. His fellow guards looked curiously at him, for never in the fiercest battle had they seen their captain show fear. They eyed the little man with curiosity and suspicion.
He was a harmless-looking person, well past middle years. Save for a few straggling wisps of thin white hair, he was bald as an egg. He had watery blue eyes in a pale, loose-wattled face. His legs, where they showed beneath his robe, were as scrawny as a fowl's. All in all, he was a most unlikely person to find on a battlefield.
'He knows you, Bull,' rumbled a blond Vanr. 'Is't a daughter, old man, with an unexpectedly black-avised babe, or an unpaid wineshop bill the size of a duke's treasury?'
The others laughed loudly, but Amric scowled. 'Keep civil tongues in your heads, you northern heathen,' he rumbled. Turning to the small man, who leaned on his staff with a faint, cherubic smile, he bowed and pulled off his dragon-crested helm.
'What can I do for you, Holy Father?' he asked with more civility than was his wont.
Amric had learned the wisdom of such politeness years before, when he had served on the Bossonian Marches. There he had seen the terrific power wielded by mild-seeming white-robed men like this, who walked with oaken staves and with golden sickles thrust through their girdles as emblems of their rank. For they were the druids, the priests of the Ligureans. The Ligureans, a race of light-skinned barbarians who dwelt in small clans in Pictland, intermingled with the shorter, darker, and more savage Picts. Those bloody savages, who feared neither god, man, beast, nor devil, still cowered before the authority of the druids.
'I am fain to see your king ere taking a bit of rest,' said the little man. Casually, he added: 'I am Diviatix, chief druid of Pictland. Pray tell your king Conan that I am come from the Great Grove with a message. The Lords of Light have given me a command for their servant, Conan, and I bear his destiny in my hand.'
Amric the Bull shivered, signed himself with the sign of Mitra, and meekly turned to obey the behest of the White Druid.
Conan sent his commanders away, ordered hot spiced wine, and sat back. He ignored the sting of his bandaged wounds to listen to the spindle-shanked little messenger from Pictland.
The king of Aquilonia cared little for the priests of any god. His own shadowy Cimmerian god, Crom, was indifferent to the woe or weal of mankind, as befitted one of the Old Gods who one day chanced playfully to mould the earth from a lump of mud and set it spinning amid the stars for an idle jest—thereafter paying it little heed, perhaps forgetful they had wrought it at all. But, like Amric, Conan had borne a blade against the howling Pictish hordes and deeply respected their prowess. Not even the mighty warriors of the frozen North, in their berserker madness, could long stand against the inhuman ferocity of the Picts, whose neighbours and allies the Ligureans were only a shade less fierce.
As for the mystic wizard-priests of the Ligureans—Conan's long, bloody career had brought him into contact with half the cults and creeds of the world. Of them all, he thought, none stood so near the blinding flame of ultimate truth as did the quiet, smiling, white-robed men who wore the oak-leaf crown.
It took several cups of mulled vintage to get the whole message out of Diviatix. Conan had heard of the priest, for he was first among the world's druids. More than once had the gods spoken to the men of his age through the lips of this unimpressive sleepy-looking old man, notoriously fond of the juice of the grape. Even the bloodthirsty war chief of the Pictish Confederation, Dekanawatha Blood-axe, who knelt to no man or devil, groveled in the dirt as Diviatix ambled past his palace-hut, its mud-bricks dyed russet with the blood of countless foes.
From the Great Grove at Nuadwyddon had the chief druid come, obeying the Lord of the Great Abyss, Nuadens Argatlam of the Silver Hand. Diviatix bore a message from the Lords of Creation to the grim giant they had brought out of wintry Cimmeria long years before to crush evil in the world's West. The token they bade the White Druid bring was a small tablet of nameless stone, slick and heavy as jade but as purple as the towers of age-forgotten Valusia. Conan knew of that stone, albeit 'not even the iron-bound Book of Skelos dared whisper of it.
For an hour by the ringed time candle, Conan listened to the White Druid's sleepy, wine-befuddled discourse. The moon sank; dawn ensanguined the east. The heir to the throne of Zingara, daughter of the late King Ferdrugo, had come out of exile with her husband to beg the king of Aquilonia for help in regaining the crown. But Conan kept Princess Chabela, with her consort Olivero and their highborn entourage, waiting on the slope below his tent while he queried the sleepy little man in tattered robes that had once been white.
With dawn, the trumpets sang. The tents were struck, and the knights of Aquilonia mounted up. Conan settled the problem of the Zingaran royal succession in ten minutes. He had known Chabela twenty years before, when she had been a buxom lass still in her teens and he, captain of a Zingaran privateer. Then Conan had saved the throne and fortunes of old King Ferdrugo from the villainous schemes of the Stygian master-sorcerer, Thoth-Amon.
In the intervening years Chabela had put on weight. She was still a handsome woman but in a plump, matronly fashion. The graying king kissed her heartily, asked after her eleven children, but did not linger to hear her account of their inches and illnesses. He bade her harried consort kneel, slapped Olivero on both shoulders with the flat of his nicked broadsword, and heard his oath of allegiance and fealty. Conan issued a curt fiat proclaiming the flustered couple rightful king and queen of Zingara under the overlordship of Aquilonia. He dispatched them in haste to Kordava, with a troop of Aquilonian knights to see them safely installed.
Then, stifling a prodigious yawn, Conan swung up on his black stallion, and the lion banner moved southeast to the tread of six thousand horses and foot. Southeast to the Argossean border and beyond that toward Stygia.
III
The March to the Styx
They marched southeast by stages often hours each. The steady stride of the strong Aquilonian yeomen ate up the leagues, and the army was across the border of Argos before the Argosseans learned that Duke Pantho, whose incursions had shattered their peace, was no more. Conan sent a message to Milo's second son, young Ariostro, who was trying to rally the scattered Argossean forces in the South. This princeling was told that the Zingaran menace had been dissipated, so that nought prevented Ariostro from proclaiming himself king of Argos. Meanwhile, King Conan would count it a courtesy if Ariostro would graciously permit the Aquilonian force to pass through his dominion on their way to Stygia.
Then Conan dispatched heralds in black-and-gold tabards to his vassal-kings, Ludovic of Ophir and Balardus of Koth. He curtly bade them each to raise a force of two thousand horse and foot. These forces were to rendezvous with the Aquilonians at the ford of Bubastes on the Styx, between the green meadows of Shem and the tawny sands of Stygia.
League after league, Conan drove deeper southeast in grim silence, pressing his men hard. With them came the little druid in a rattling mule cart. Conan told none why he had sent the senior herald, Black Wyvern King at Arms, back to Tarantia guarded by a troop of light horse. Even Prospero and Trocero dared not ask him about his intentions. His old comrades knew better than to question him when he was in one of these dour, secretive, taciturn moods.
Conan descended upon Shem like a steel whirlwind. By forced marches, he drove his army across the meadow-lands in fifteen days. From time to time they passed one or another of the Shemitish cities, each of which raised its dra
wbridge and locked its gates in alarm, rousing archers to man the walls.
Conan dispatched Trocero with heralds to pacify each agitated Shemitish kinglet in turn. The old Count, a silver-tongued master diplomat, soothed the tempers ruffled by this unexpected intrusion. To the ruler of each petty city-state he explained that the Aquilonian army was but passing peacefully through, with—it was hoped—the kind permission of the Shemitish princelings. A token tribute of good Aquilonian silver was paid over, each thick coin stamped with Conan's square-jawed, scowling profile. Relieved, their ruffled pride sleeked by Trocero's oratory, the kinglets beamed graciously and waved the Aquilonian host on with their blessings.
The army, of course, had meant to go on anyway. But it is better, Conan had learned, to do these things with official blessing when possible. To be fair, Conan saw that his troops observed his laws against looting and raping. The few of his soldiers who turned aside to chase a dark-eyed Shemitish wench into a thicket or to leaven their field rations with some peasant's fat pig were promptly hanged in view of their comrades. It went against Conan's grain to deprive the poor fools of their lives, for as a young mercenary, he, too, had done the same offenses many times.
But the law is the law. The last thing Conan wanted when he reached the borders of ominous, hostile Stygia with his modest force was to leave an aroused countryside at his back buzzing with outraged petty kings and swarming with vengeful soldiery. Ordinarily the Shemitish city-states did not bother the neighbouring nations, being occupied with their internal royal feuds and theological bickerings. The one thing that would unite them, however, was the passage of a marauding, murdering foreign army. Conan had fought with Shemites before, both at their side and against them. He knew that the hooknosed, black-bearded, mailed asshuri were, man for man, as tough and ferocious as any soldiers in the world.
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