Conan of the Red Brotherhood

by Leonard Carpenter

  “Better to ask, who is it who knows and links those names?” Conan stood a little shy of the door, wary of some kind of sorcerous or treacherous attack. “Who are you?” “My name is of no consequence here.” Doubtless himself fearing some unseen menace, the visitor likewise kept back from the door. “I am a functionary of the Imperial Palace. My place is to hear and facilitate requests for help, both official ones and... unofficial.”

  “So?” Conan told himself he trusted this one less than the three preening admirals. “Who is that behind you?” he demanded, peering at the second, inscrutable figure.

  “I was asked to convey something to you.” Ignoring Conan’s question, the eunuch reached into the breast of his cowled robe. “The request came to me through long-established personal channels. Servants of the Imperial Palace, you may understand, have ties to servants of other offices and households, who sometimes seek favours, or repay them.”

  The man paused meaningfully, gazing at the darkness of the grille. “Servants care for one another’s well-being, you may know, as do freemen and nobles.” From his garments the visitor had extracted a small object, which he clutched in his fist. “My presence here may or may not have the approval of some higher personage, as well. There are constraints on what can be done by servants, even eunuchs of the Imperial court.”

  “Out with it, man!” Conan snarled impatiently. “Who sent it?”

  “That, too, is of no great importance.” The visitor extended his fingers in a careful, gingerly motion, passing what he held through one of the interstices of the grille. “Doubtless you will know what to do with it.”

  Conan grasped the object in his fingertips, wary of some trap. It felt like a key. When he drew it in, he found that it was looped to a string: a long, tough thong, whose end would not pass through the grating because of a small piece of wood or bone tied to it.

  “Farewell, Amra.” The eunuch, having turned away, was already starting up the ramp, his unknown companion beside him.

  “Wait! What does this mean?” Fearing a trap, Conan would not stick his fingers through the grille to fumble with the obstacle. Instead, planting a foot against the door, he wrenched hard and felt the thong stretch, then break free.

  “Who are you?” he called in an urgent whisper, bending back to the grille. Something in the quick, loose-hipped walk of the smaller hooded figure struck him as familiar. “Olivia?” But already the two were turning out of the ramp way, gone.

  The implement in his hand, held up against the light, was of heavy brass, cut away starkly: a skeleton key. Placing it in the keyhole of the door and twisting, he felt it catch and heard a faint, rusty grinding as the bolt began to slide. Then, at the scuffing of footfalls and a dreary exchange of hails from sentries in the courtyard above, he stopped and eased the key out of the lock. Catching the bright-eyed gaze of the lookout behind him, he grunted and drew the man back toward the wardroom for a conference.

  XVI

  Under the Skull-Jack

  The prisoners stormed the courtyard at first light, streaming through both gates and up the ramp ways on the heels of Conan and Vulpus. The Admiralty guards who first met their rush were the lucky ones; they were beaten down with mere fists and cudgel-strokes, blows that battered at their turbans and light mail without necessarily killing them. Henceforward the escapees bore weapons snatched from the defenders as they fell, and most of them were not in a mood to grant life to any helpless Imperial trooper who begged it.

  In spite of Conan’s strictures against noise, the tumult of fighting in the inner court could not help but spread alarm through the garrison. Luckily, the place was built more to keep invaders out than to hold fugitives in. An open stairway led up to the fort’s defensive bastions; by prearrangement, the leaders took their force over the dawn-gilded heights rather than trying to fight through narrow, crooked corridors toward the closely guarded gate.

  As the convicts burst out onto the broad parapet, trumpets and chimes sounded to rouse the fort; simultaneously, standing guards from the night-watch converged on the courtyard stair. Conan, wielding a borrowed halberd, drove and feinted between the first two of them, tripping up both with his stave. He did not turn back to chop or brain them; the pirates and cutthroats swarming behind could be trusted to take care of such details. Instead, he drove on through the patchily forming line of guards, past even the gate towers and drawbridge, toward the seaward side of the garrison, with its flags and its catapult battery. With but two hardy pirates sprinting close behind him, he mounted the stair to the harbour battlement.

  Instructing his henchmen to slash the catapult strings with their shared sabre, he raced on. Along the battlement stood three tall flagpoles intended for signals, weather warnings, and the like. Conan went to the tallest one, grabbed the halyard, and unwound it from the cleat. Fishing beneath his shirt, he dragged forth the flag his pirates had daubed on a sheet of rough bedding: a skull, grimy-white on a soot-blackened field, grinning over crossed sabres sketched redly in damp blood. The crescent banner of Imperial Turan had not yet been raised today; in its stead, Conan tied the skull-jack and ran it up the mast, arm over arm. Partway along, he stopped and severed the slack halyard with his ax, leaving a dangling end of rope. Then, hauling the pennant as high as it would go, he reached overhead with the poleax and cut the long, trailing end as well, so that both lines hung well out of reach and the flag could not be lowered from the parapet.

  He hoped someone was awake aboard the pirate fleet to see the agreed-upon signal. At the moment, his ships were a mere grey huddle of hulls and masts against the dawning watery-yellow of the eastern sky.

  “Amra, guards are upon us!” One of his escort pointed to a crowd of troops straggling from a farther stair: turbanless garrison troops, unarmored and all but shirtless from their early awakening, holding up scabbardless swords and yelling a groggy challenge.

  Rather than wait and fight, Conan fled, leading his pair of convicts back toward the main group. As he came to the downward stair, a lone guard barred his way, springing up from the narrow-railed passage and raising a short pike in his face. Feinting with his ax, Conan parried, tripped up the man’s legs and smote him in the groin with the haft of his weapon. Then he charged straight ahead, fetching the turbaned head a thump against the stone baluster as he ran over him. Behind him sounded more clanks, scuffs, and grunts as his companions claimed the fallen guard’s weapons and turned to beat back the pursuers.

  Ahead, according to plan, the escapees had cleared the parapet and broken into the broad, double gate-tower that hulked along the outer battlement. The stout oaken doors stood open, with convicts swarming around and passing inside; from within came shouts, clanks of weapons, and muffled curses. Conan shoved his way forward, jostling in through the nearer door to survey the torch-lit interior.

  The tower contained the drawbridge machinery; defensive slits, too, and broad machicolations looking down on the approach to the gate. The bridge was raised, and most of the clangour inside came from inmates trying to lower it. They hacked at the thick chains that held the heavy plank platform vertical, hoping to release it and span the shallow, muddy moat below. The only fighting was atop stairwells at each side of the double tower, where pirates drove back the Imperials trying to re-enter the place.

  Conan sized up the mechanism as he jostled among the escapees. The control to release the ramp was below in the gateyard, very likely; yet here at the head of the tower ranged the massive wooden gears, stone counterweights, and iron hardware. Taking careful aim at the flanged, iron-bound pivot half the size of a man’s head, Conan chopped down hard at it with the ax-blade of his halberd. The tough oak barely dented; but on his second stroke, the pawl split in its metal binding, deforming under the pressure of the heavy gear teeth it restrained. With a grate and a shudder, wheels began turning and chain links uncoiled. A crack of wan daylight appeared along the top edge of the wooden ramp-bridge directly before them.

  “Escape is ours, brothers! Follow if
you dare!” The convict Vulpus, sliding his stolen sword into his ragged sash, swung nimbly down through one of the broad machicolations and clung to one of the heavy chains where it was cleated to the timbers. As the drawbridge gained speed in its descent, he yelped and hooted, eliciting cheers from the watchers in the tower. Then, when the ramp trundled past half-slope, he let go his hold and slid down the timbers to jump clear. As the bridge thudded to rest, he stood in the gateway brandishing his sword and challenging the guards.

  In response to his cries, other convicts started down chains and grates that hung in either side of the archway. Meanwhile, the fighting at the stairs intensified as escapees battled their way downward toward freedom. Conan joined in, taking up one of the heavy, musty fieldstones kept on hand to bombard intruding horsemen or vehicles at the gate. Hefting it high, he cast it down onto the heads of the defenders in the spiral stair. In its thudding wake, he and the pirates were able to hasten to the bottom, slowed only by stunned and broken bodies littering the way.

  The gateway was soon cleared of guards and filled with escapees. Vulpus, after outflanking and menacing the defenders, had made it his business to threaten his fellow convicts even more fiercely, keeping the first arrivals from scattering across the bridge into the Navy Yard. Such random flight within the walled enclosure, as Conan had explained, would have bought the escapees short-lived freedom at best. Now, as a massed, coherent group, they were ready to move against any goal or obstacle, if only their leaders could keep them together. Once Conan bulled his way to the front of the mob, they started forth.

  The harbour front beyond the drawbridge was already astir in the pale morning. As the planks thudding under Conan’s feet gave way to the hard paves of the wharf, he was surprised to see work gangs, civil and harbour officials, and even bands of foppish, courtly citizens aboard. These latter, in particular, gaped in horror at the flood of filthy troglodytes emerging from the garrison. Indeed, given the convicts’ matted beards and untrimmed hair, their sodden, grimy rags and dung-pit stench, there was no way that the bulk of them could have taken shelter among the townsfolk. The nobles—who, Conan realized, must be early arrivals come to find choice places for the naval show—scattered in fear before the racing swarm. Other, rougher folk gave ground more grudgingly, raising shouts of alarm and menace.

  “Call out the guards! The prisoners have burst their cage!” “That huge one must be the pirate Amra! Get a rope!” “Nay, get four ropes! We will not so easily be cheated of this day’s sport!”

  Yet none, even the gaudy officials with their ceremonial swords, stood fast to oppose the felons; those who could not scatter quickly enough cowered away smartly from clouts and sabre-slashes. With Vulpus, Ivanos, and his other lieutenants assigned either to bring up the rear or to stop at turns and bully the fugitives along the right path, Conan was able to lead his dozen-score in a mass toward the docks.

  “Come, you prison hounds!” he bellowed as the throng began to slow and separate. “Follow me to escape and glory!”

  “But, Amra,” one of the convicts complained, “the city gate is over there! This way lies the river, and few of us know how to swim!”

  “Forget the Mitra-blasted city,” Conan exhorted the prisoner, hauling him along by one shoulder. “We cannot breach another gate so easily now that the alarm is out. Anyway, Aghrapur is a vile trap, full of knaves who want to rend us limb from limb. Ahead lies our best hope, to find ourselves a ship!”

  Just ahead, indeed, were the navy docks. Conan had seen some likely looking galleys waiting unmanned the day before. But since then, he saw, things had changed; the smaller and less prepossessing ships had been moved, most likely for the sake of the pageant. In their place floated but a single vessel: a high, long, splendid tripledecker, trim and newly painted, its approach cordoned off by a dozen smartly uniformed Imperial troops. It was an elite warship, a decireme at least; the name gilded onto the stem rail above the brightly painted steering-sweep was Remorseless.

  “There you see it. Our ship awaits!” Unwilling to let the outlaw band’s momentum falter, Conan ignored his misgivings and waved his men forward with redoubled energy. “Come, dogs, and help snatch her from these paltry few guards!” The shout the convicts raised in reply as they jogged forward was half a croak of enthusiasm, half a rumble of awe. Luckily, few of them knew anything about ships; for his part, Conan felt savagely elated at the prospect of seizing such a beautiful craft, whether or not his few-score untrained men could handle it.

  The guards stood valiantly across the head of the dock. They drew swords, waiting in nervous readiness... until the mass of yelling, weapons-flailing convicts hit. Then they were overrun, hacked down and trampled, some few of them hurled off the sides of the dock to flounder or sink helpless in the neck-deep harbour. The attackers were hardly delayed, scarcely injured. In a moment they swarmed out along the drumming planks toward the stately ship, whose vacant oars stood out at an upward angle to its benches like pale, graceful wings.

  “Look there, the pirate fleet is aweigh!” Ivanos, reaching a place where the pier afforded a clear view of the harbour, pointed exuberantly to the straggle of ships that were raising sail and turning under oars in the distance.

  “Aye. They head inshore as we agreed.” Feeling fairly sure of the truth of this, Conan glanced back toward the square bulk of the naval garrison to see if his pennant still flew. It did, flapping languidly, its ropes trailing out over the battlements in the morning breeze. On the parapet directly beneath was an indistinguishable flurry of activity; the guards would be chopping down the flagpole, he guessed, as the quickest way of ridding themselves of his skull-jack.

  The view closer at hand was less encouraging. Along the harbour front came hundreds of soldiers in pursuit, some of them marching in disciplined files under the purple banner of the Imperial Household Guard, others running and swarming ahead in the grey tunics of garrison troops. They would arrive at the pier in a matter of moments—certainly in a shorter time than it would take to board the ship and get under way. To make things worse, these harbour piers bristled with catapults. Pausing amid the flow of fugitives, Conan waited for Vulpus, unsure whether the river pirate would accept his command.

  “Vulpus, take some well-armed men and guard the base of the pier.”

  The brawny convict grunted, his face impassive. Then he nodded and turned, calling fighters to go with him.

  Gratified, Conan started for the ship. “Hold them off as long as you can,” he called over his shoulder. “I will be back to join you.”

  Springing from the pier to the ship’s rail, ignoring the thronging gangplank, Conan found Ivanos already assigning the ragtag crew to their places. The layout of the vessel, a decireme, was fortunate; two of its three levels of oar-benches, staggered alongside a central gangway, seated three men apiece, while the upper one extended outboard to accommodate a fourth man. Consequently, each long oar needed only one crewman with a rower’s skill to guide it, with two or three more men to add raw strength. With the crew he had, still numbering over two hundred, Conan could fill up two oar banks and little more. It would be far from the ship’s most efficient strength, and a weak, lubberly crew at best. Even so, with one of Conan’s pirates to command every oar, they might at least row the tub clear of the harbour.

  “Good work, Ivanos!” he said as he worked his way forward. “Get under way as soon as you can! You and Ferdinald steer. I will cast off. ’ ’

  Getting to the forepart of the ship, he greeted deaf old Yorkin, who was hoisting his copy of the skull-jack to the top of the foremast. Then he climbed the rail, leaped down to the pier, and unlooped the mooring lines from the pilings.

  Nearby stood a heavy spoon-style catapult, its stone weights already cranked high, with a trough of iron balls ready to load beside it. It was a land weapon, though, mounted on a metal pivot instead of caissons. Conan had seen engines like it before, had even served one himself as a soldier in Turan's provincial wars.

  This one
, however, would require several men to aim it. An iron bracket, furthermore, limited its traverse to keep it from sighting back along the dock, so it could not readily be turned against the Turanians. Accordingly, Conan slid the head of his halberd underneath the ammunition bin; straining upward against the thick haft, he levered the trough over on its side and allowed the heavy, trundling balls to roll off the dock into the harbour.

  Then he headed back toward shore, breasting the stream of the last escapees running for the gangplank. Ahead of him Vulpus’s men had gone to meet the enemy. Now they retreated, doubtless because Imperial archers took aim from the shoreline, making the landward end of the pier indefensible. A few stray arrows arched through the air after the escapees, and harsh commands were shouted as the pursuers swarmed out along the dock.

  “Back, now,” Conan called to his fellows. “Board the ship, take oars, and row clear of this place! Do not wait. I will rejoin you!”

  He halted to meet Vulpus and his men, smiting the big Shemite on the shoulder as he sprinted for the Remorseless. Oars were beginning to clash together and thump against the dock as the shouting, cursing crew made ready. Then, turning with a murderous yell, he brandished his halberd high and went charging back along the pier toward the attackers.

  It was a mad tactic, the one his foes least expected. The dock was wide enough for three men to stride abreast, or for one to defend with a long-hafted weapon. Now, as Conan drove into their midst, the Imperials were too surprised and too closely grouped to react well. Men scattered left and right, falling inevitably into the harbour; else-wise they fought stiffly, lacking room to fence as Co-nan’s ax-bit hacked and thrust at them. The middle ranks, coming up against the backs of those who had stopped short, were still pushed by others advancing from behind, and lost many overside. By then, Conan, driving relentlessly forward, was close in among his foes, too much so to be safely picked off by arrows loosed from shore.