The fight ahead would be fierce; swift, too, and decisive. The remainder of the Imperial fleet, struggling to catch up, would arrive too late, and might even fear to close in and battle the pirates in their new, captured flagship.
From the tight, fast-racing wedge of enemies Conan looked back to the ill-arrayed stragglers of his own fleet. There would be no need, he saw, to defend Commodorus against Xothar’s lethal embrace; the Tyrant would be killed or humiliated far more effectively by his chosen arena adversaries. He turned to warn him regardless....
Then the two oar-ships struck. With a grinding and splintering of timbers, a shuddering lurch and a sudden up-welling of screams, the big ship’s ram drove through the hull of the lone pirate craft. The bronze ram-sheave tore in just behind the galley’s own beak and did not punch a neat hole; instead, striking at a flat angle, it ground its way several man-lengths down the stricken ship’s keel, levering apart timbers and opening a huge rent in the forward hull.
Immediately water poured into the pirate. She settled swiftly onto the flagship’s ram, bearing the fore-part of the larger ship down in the water. The impact of the mighty ship grinding and scraping to a halt hurled officers and fighters to their knees and rowers from their benches. Simultaneously, ill-aimed arrows from marksmen in the barrage towers swept the pirate deck, slaughtering a few rowers but missing the pair of overseers. Conan saw the looks on their swarthy, unshaven faces as they picked themselves up and ran astern to hide; their expressions revealed no fear, but rather sly triumph.
The stadium crowd looked on, rapt and silent at the moment of collision. They saw the big ship’s ram smash into the galley; they saw it tear through row upon row of the pirate’s oar-banks, crushing helpless men along with the timbers they sat on. When water fountained up before the flagship’s bow, it frothed red; and where the victim’s hull gaped open, pinkish swirling plumes blossomed forth into the pale tides of the Circus Imperium.
At this sight, a trembling roar commenced in the great amphitheatre. Promptly it swelled into a shattering, thunderous stamping and shrieking of applause, a massive primal frenzy in recognition of fresh-spilled blood.
The sound was unnerving, even to a hardened arena veteran like Conan as he hauled himself up from the tangle of men and weapons in the bow of the flagship. What was most frightening about the noise was that, from its nightmarish crescendo, it did not diminish. Instead the sustained, shuddering roar was amplified by deeper and more widespread tremors and outcries. Once Conan had braced himself against one of the barrage towers and looked up from the ship’s sloping deck, he understood why.
Under the leaping, stamping fury of the crowd, the new construction that had been added to the giant amphitheatre could not hold. On the west side of the stadium, lying along the street-front, the largest of the great stone balconies was leaning and buckling with the sharp grating rumble of a mountain-face giving way. To the shouting, flailing horror of its occupants—even as they sprang up from their ledges and fought one another to get clear—it collapsed beneath them with a shuddering roar.
The thunder of falling stone fused with shouts and screams from all parts of the stadium—most particularly those underneath the massive, plummeting architecture. The shattering din gathered and funnelled together in a single voice, a havoc that drummed madly on the waters of the artificial sea, then rebounded skyward.
Amid the ear-wrenching turmoil, the wreckage of the crushed balcony smashed the understructure of the stadium and slumped forward in a single massive avalanche. It plunged into the man-made lake, sending a giant wave sweeping toward the ships locked in combat in the middle of the arena.
XIV
Survival Games
Outside the Circus Imperium, the masses unable to gain admission to the spectacle brought an air of hushed festivity to the surrounding streets. They clustered together in informal crowds with their attention focused loosely on the stadium, chatting and speculating on events under way inside the lofty walls. Gnawing fruit and pastry obtained from street vendors, they followed every rise and fall of crowd-murmurs from within the immense pile. With proprietary concern about the welfare of their bets, they listened to shouted reports from criers located atop the circus rim and in the mobbed entry-tunnels. “Now Commodorus boards his flagship,” they were told. “The Imperial fleet is aweigh. Now the chief pirate ship attacks our Tyrant’s vessel.”
Not long after that last announcement, they heard the eerie murmur of applause rise to a thunderous roar, albeit strangely muted from within the stadium shell. Thrown upward to the sky and bounced back down, the tumult was nevertheless great enough to make the very cobblestones quiver underfoot.
“The flagship has spiked the pirate’s bow,” the cry came forth, almost drowned out by the applause. “A victory, a noble triumph!”
So great was the excitement that the crowd before the stadium burst likewise into wild cheering, madly elated over events they could not see. Their eyes were all on the Circus, their ears greedy for more reports and clues; but they were astonished to see the massive structure itself quake and tremble against the sky, as if its stone and mortar had been transmuted to quivering, excitable flesh. They heard a breaking, shuddering noise with repercussions deep in the earth. Meanwhile, the eerie sighing of the arena crowd rose in pitch from enthusiasm to a wail of fear.
To the groundlings’ amazement they saw the great pile begin to dismantle itself, the plastered archways of the high façade. detaching and dropping into the crowded court. Dust-plumes issued from the sloping tunnels, obscuring swift cascades of stony debris that drove out over the close-packed crowd. Ever-increasing shocks within the amphitheatre caused a broad section of the street-front to swell outward, then fall in on itself in a chaos of rubble and plaster dust.
Standing dumbstruck in their places outside the stadium gate, the onlookers then saw a more dreadful sight. For, within the fallen rubble there was a stirring and a shifting, as of some unthinkably huge beast awakening. From crevices in the still-smoking wreckage, dark tendrils emerged... and spread, and surged and sprayed over stone and mortal obstacles, as questing water found its way forth out of the ruin. The massive collapse inside the amphitheatre had undoubtedly ruptured the wall of the flooded stadium; now the vast interior lake, vexed to mad restlessness, sought an exit.
The threat to the watchers was intense and immediate. Even as they screamed and turned to run, slipping and tumbling on the already wet cobbles, the torrent poured forth in full wrath behind them. Stone wreckage and fleeing bodies in the fenced courtyard were thrust forward and aside—driven up against the iron gates, then borne over and down along with them as the surging flood refused to be penned in. Unchecked in its rush, the wall of water drove outward into the streets, overtaking fresh multitudes and rolling them under, or else hurling them terrifyingly forward with its furious rush.
Those who managed to resist the first wave— clinging in trees and high barred windows, or kept afloat in the shallower eddies—were met with delirious and dreadful sights. For, along with the grey turbid water and the trundling stones that swept forth out of the arena, there were other less wholesome debris. Mummies of dead gladiators, fallen from the crumbled niches in the Circus wall, proved dry and buoyant in the flood—more so than the pliant, boneless dead already mangled in courtyard and stadium. And too, aside from mummies and the freshly drowned, there were less identifiable and well-preserved remains, those of petty cheats and criminals informally interred in the stadium’s walls.
From the rift in the arena, the torrent spread down the streets on the Temple Hill’s flank. Drowning thousands in their flight, it washed countless others back to their flooded tenements at the foot of the hill. Along the way it filled the cellars and walled gardens of rich estates, populating them with sea-predators and deadly reptiles, and gouged hillside lanes into death-sewers banked with wrack and corpses.
While at its source atop the hill, as many knew, the fount of death flowed undiminished. The city’s a
queducts, redirected for the sake of the great spectacle, gushed relentlessly forth, striving to refill the Circus Imperium even as the raging cataclysm sought to empty it.
The great wave driven by the collapsing masonry pile swept straight across the flooded arena. Gathering puny ships before it like windblown chaff, it instantly capsized most of the heavily armed Imperial fleet and swamped the lighter pirates. The flagship, largest of the lot, was torn free of its scuttled foe and hurled violently to starboard. After a giddy rush atop the fanged wave, the hulk slammed with a crushing impact against the far wall of the arena. Falling askew like a discarded toy, it hung there in a tangle of broken spars and slumped rigging.
The carnage among the rowers was fearful. The port side oars were flailed and levered in their oar-ports like titans’ clubs by the pressure of the water outside; moments later, the starboard oars rammed and smashed inward upon collision with the stone wall. The splintering oar-helves snapped men’s spines and drove straight through their bodies like spears. Most of the fighting-crew were swept instantly overboard by the crushing torrent; others, knocked senseless by the shattering impact, slipped quietly into the flooded bilges to drown where they lay.
Conan, soaked and battered but shielded from the worst of the havoc by the sagging wreckage of the barrage towers, appeared to be the only one left alive in the fore of the ship. Untangling himself from the debris, he saw that, amid utter chaos, there could be little hope of a coordinated rescue. It was every man for himself. Gazing at the ruin, Conan fleetingly wondered what the priest Manethos would have done.
As he dragged himself stern-ward to the mainmast, it was across inert bodies. Seizing hold of a tangled net of rigging, he hauled himself up hand over hand toward the rim of the arena.
Above, the cataclysm was far from ended. Both stadium balconies adjacent to the toppled one, weakened by the shocks to the arena’s structure and the sudden, impulsive movement of the crowds swarming on top, had begun to sag and lean. As Conan watched dully, the northernmost structure slowly, agonizingly, gave way.
Crumbling with horrid deliberation, it slumped like a leisurely avalanche onto throngs of scrabbling, fleeing, tumbling spectators. Most of the debris, luckily or not, fell straight downward; its grinding flow halted at the railed edge of the arena, though some wreckage cascaded slowly into the water in a spray of muddy, bloody splashes.
Thus the collapse did not generate a second giant wave. But it was plain that, as a result of the damage to the amphitheatre, the flooded oval sea had begun to drain out. The level of the restless, surging water did not noticeably fall, but clumps of cloudy silt and floating debris... and struggling bodies, with hungry water-beasts worrying at them... began to drift. Even whole ships, some with live crews chained in their benches, made their way steadily toward the murmuring, yawning crevice that gaped in the crushed wall of the stadium, to be sucked into the maelstrom. Closer at hand, no more than an arm’s length from where Conan struggled to climb the barricade, panic ruled the crowd. Arena patrons shoved, tumbled, fought, and trampled one another to get out from under the sagging overhang and find an exit. Terrified watchers were spectators no longer, suddenly finding themselves contestants in a survival match more desperate than any arena game. Knives were bloodied, eyes gouged out, and skulls dashed fiercely against unyielding stone in numberless futile struggles over non-existent space. Where the balcony above the Heroes’ Gate shuddered and sagged but did not immediately fall, Circus patrons and civil officials by the score were shoved over the brink in the blind stampede—down into the flooded arena itself, there to shriek and flounder in teeming waters which for them spelled hideous, unimaginable fear.
But surely the worst trampling and crushing of all occurred inside the last remaining uncollapsed entry-tunnels. There the mad throng converged, leapt, and clawed their way relentlessly inward, faster than any crowd could possibly have exited. In grim consequence, the lower reaches of the tunnels were soon blocked entirely by crushed, hard-packed bodies.
Meanwhile Conan, dragging himself up to the arena rail, straddled it against the pressure of swarming, faceless humanity. He considered it mere luck that none of the frantic crowd were trying to force themselves down the mast into the ruined boat. The crush of fugitives beyond the stone barrier was too violent, too dense; so he stood atop the wall and chose his way, steadying himself against the flagship’s splintered mast.
Scanning the broad, shaded slope of ledge-seats above him, at length he found what he sought: a lithe female shape, flanked by a large and shapeless patch of darkness, the two striding and leaping together through the mad, scattering throng. Sathilda’s athletic fitness gave her an advantage, he saw, as did the presence of her black tigress Qwamba. For the giant beast’s satiny bulk was, without doubt, one of the few sights that could turn aside crazed arena-goers in full cry.
The two circus performers, running together, cleared the balcony’s treacherous overhang as Conan watched. They appeared to be heading upward toward the rim of the stadium, rather than descending to find an exit. That, he decided, was a wise course.
“Conan, my friend,” a voice came from below him. “Lend a hand here if you will!”
“Commodorus! I thought you were washed overside!”
Looking down behind him, Conan was amazed to see the Corinthian adventurer close on his heels, creeping up the same web of rigging he had himself climbed. The Tyrant looked unhurt—though drenched, with his short tunic loose and disarrayed. He needed Conan to make room for him on the rail, and extended a supplicating hand for aid.
“I was thrown into the water, in sooth, with the first great surge of the ship. The sea-gods must have favoured me greatly, because another wave threw me back aboard.”
Conan grunted in understanding. He found himself doubting whether, if any sea-god truly favoured Commodorus, the mock sea itself would have thrown him back into the world of men.
That same moment, looking downward past the Tyrant, his attention was caught by a stirring amid the drowned and broken bodies in the waist of the wrecked ship. A familiar thick, shaved head looked upward at the two, and a familiar hulking form began to pull itself free of the wreckage. Wigless now, but still in the game.
“Come up, then, Commodorus. This wreck might shift at any moment.” Conan could tell that, with the artificial lake flooding out through the broken wall, the water level around the floating hulks in the arena was subsiding faster—and with it, the waterlogged wreck of the flagship. Bending and reaching down, he hauled his employer up onto the rail. There, with a restraining arm, he kept him from toppling forward into the shoving, staggering citizenry who flowed blindly past.
“This way now, follow me.”
Stepping up to the mast’s broken cross-trees, then literally launching himself over the heads of the throng, Conan leapt across to a row of carved, high-backed stone chairs that served as a kind of island in the desperate, streaming tide. Turning back, he caught hold of Commodorus as he likewise sprang across. The Corinthian, being in sound physical shape, made the jump easily. Behind him, to Conan’s relief, the broken mast splintered with a further groaning and cracking, and slipped away out of sight.
“Now, Tyrant,” Conan said, “you may command your subjects. Do what you can to bring an end to this panic.”
“What?” In frank uncertainty, Commodorus looked from Conan to the faces of the swarming crowd, and from them up at the sagging, leaning amphitheatre all around them. “What do you want me to do, prop those grandstands back up again? Keep this one from collapsing? It looks as if it will fall on us in a moment or two!”
“You boasted to me how much the people love and respect you,” Conan growled at him. “Now is your chance to reassure them and call forth their loyalty. Come, fellow,” he added a moment later in impatience, “is there no one you can command, no guards or officers you can call to your service?” Looking ill-at-ease, the Tyrant peered down at the throng, whose racing frenzy had begun to bum down to plodding desperation.
He leaned down from his perch and tentatively clasped the shoulder of a prosperous citizen—who stared briefly up at him, slack-jawed, then pushed on wordlessly past. “Nay, it is no use,” Commodorus spiritlessly declared, shaking his head and turning back to Conan. “You are the only one who will listen to me. Now tell me, what is it you propose to do?” Conan snorted in disgust. The shaded ledge-seats above them, to which he now pointed, were fairly clear of stragglers. By climbing upward at an angle beneath the deadly overhang, and avoiding the jammed, riotous tunnels, they could make progress. “This way,” he told Commodorus, starting out from ledge to ledge.
“Where, then, are you taking us?” the Tyrant demanded, following along less than enthusiastically. “This whole place could crumble at any minute, considering the shoddy work of the Stygian crews who made it.”
“More than likely the place is rotten through with all the bodies you’ve hidden in it,” Conan rebuked him. “In any case, our best chance of escape is to flee across the rooftops.” He had no idea whether this was really possible, but he wanted to reach Sathilda, who by now was somewhere near the stadium’s upper rim.
“I see,” Commodorus said. “That is as good a gamble as any, I guess. But, by Mitra,” he complained a moment later, “this trek is cursed hard on a fellow’s legs!”
Conan the Gladiator Page 20
