Conan the Gladiator

by Leonard Carpenter

  Conan’s air ran out. He gasped and ducked, drawing in the merest fraction of what had flown forth. His vision began to swim.

  This, then, was the embrace Roganthus had felt. Him, and how many others? It had been part of Xothar’s plan, he guessed... to drive him back to the unstable edge of the stadium, where his footing must soon fail. Taking as much punishment as necessary along the way.

  The dead air soured in his lungs. He gasped, choked, and this time drew in nothing, no breath at all. The snake-grip tightened further, squeezing bright daylight into darkness, pinching off the sun.

  Beneath him, earth trembled and fell away. He felt his head strike something, then was plummeting free.

  The grip loosened.

  Then he was rolling, tumbling, flailing. He choked and convulsed—gratefully, on dry dust, sweet billowing dust! His limbs were free now; gloriously free to claw, scrabble, and abrade themselves on ragged stone. Sucked underneath a torrent of rattling, sliding rubble, he fought his way desperately to the surface, to roll and ricochet with loose shards.

  His sliding, tumbling fall halted... except for the slow trickle of debris all around. He pried his extremities out of the rubble and was free to crawl unfettered. From somewhere near him came a sigh... a moaning, rasping exhalation.

  Xothar lay face-up, pinned amid the wreckage. Atop his chest was a giant granite slab, firmly wedged and bedded against other massive debris. His face, dust-caked and seeping blood, hung inverted against a jagged stone pillow, with eyes and mouth agape.

  Conan gazed down at him dispassionately, as Manethos might have examined a mummy-candidate. The jagged-edged slab was far too heavy to lift, without a doubt. If dislodged, it might slip further and shear off the victim’s face.

  Xothar stared up at Conan with mortal fear in his eyes. The wrestler tried to draw in breath, but failed.

  A small river of dust trickled down, making a little white cloud over the supine man’s face. When Conan brushed it away, there remained only a pale, motionless death-mask.

  Turning, he began to pick his way down through the wreckage of the arena.

  XV

  “Long Live the Tyrant!”

  Before he had wandered far, Conan happened across Muduzaya, who had clung to an oar of the Imperial fleet and been swept out of the arena. The Kushite’s habitual preference for fighting nearly naked had saved him... as had his dexterity at snapping crocodiles’ jaws.

  Although the city streets were lawless, and the citizens particularly mistrustful of any reminder of Commodorus and his ill-starred Circus, the pair were well adapted to survival. Food and drink were far from scarce in Luxur, at least during those first few days; and there were other sources of wealth, free for the taking, which ensured that they would not go wanting.

  Conan heard that most of Luddhew’s people had survived the cataclysm and set up camp in the temple grounds, as keepers of the sacred menagerie. Their former hilltop environs were rendered pestilential by the mass death and flooding, even after the aqueducts were shut off... so the old, easy life was over. But Conan did not doubt that the circus troupers would soon again find an audience for their varied talents.

  “Muduzaya,” he remarked one morning, lying in the feast-hall of the rich ownerless villa where they made their home, “it has been long since I saw Kush. Tell me, do the wild parrots still bend the trees with their weight? And do roebeasts yet flock like termite-swarms through the veldt?”

  “Aye, Conan, they do,” his friend affirmed. “Your speech makes me homesick, I must say.”

  “I have been thinking that I would like to do some fine hunting. Get away from cities and priests and tyrants, and live close to nature once again. Does your fancy turn southward?”

  “Aye, surely enough,” the former Sword master said. “But what of your girlfriend and her pet tiger? I have been expecting these past few nights to waken and find that creature drooling over me, and her over you.”

  “Nay, Muduzaya,” Conan confided, shaking his head. “In sooth, I do not think I am cut out for circus life. And I am sure she is not cut out for any other. Things are better left as they stand.”

  With that resolution made, they did not linger long in the city. It was just as well; for there ensued in Luxur a fortnight of civil uprisings and reprisals against foreigners. After all, had the great cataclysm not been a result of adopting ungodly foreign ways? And had not the final slaughter of gladiators in the arena been an omen, a symbolic triumph and revenge of Stygia’s ancient beast-gods?

  At the end of it, when the fires were extinguished and the hated Corinthians finally driven out of the capital, a stem commander was named Tyrant of Luxur. He was a ruthless young enforcer named Dath—who, by uniting the street toughs to fill the dangerous vacancy of power, restored order to the city and won the trust of wise old Nekrodias, High Primate of Set’s Temple.

  Once he was installed in his seven-year term, Dath’s first public decree was to level the unsightly ruin of the Circus Imperium. There was to be built in its place a tomb, one in which all the mortal remains of the victims would be piously interred.

  Thus was the ancient city of Luxur preserved, and its people brought back to their age-old traditions under the just rule of the gods.

  Table of Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV