But that was just the beginning of the horror—for the bireme, engorged deep in the galliot’s shattered timbers, did not back oars and withdraw. Instead, it continued its forward impetus—oars churning, driving on and riding over the wreckage it had created. Beneath the massive wallowing hull, men shrieked in agony and fear—for the ram thrust and tore, the great keel crushed and splintered, and the steel-bladed oars hacked timbers and human limbs alike, driving and churning mindlessly, stirring up bloody sea foam as they forced the great hull over and through the smaller one.
What strength it must have taken at those oars, to row through wood and flesh as if through water, was hard for Conan to understand. The grey-faced oarsmen had no human hearts, it was plain; they did not flinch, nor exult either, nor even glance aside while obeying the fisted gestures of their white-robed captain. Here was sorcery indeed, and of the most atrocious kind.
The bireme passed the length of the sinking galley, forced it under, and drove its ram out the farther side. Of the survivors who crawled free, most were hacked and slashed to pieces by oars as they tried to swim away. Conan shivered at the inhuman sight. He felt almost relieved to turn his mind back to the more imminent peril that threatened his own life.
Rather, perils... for the mysterious roofed galley had drawn almost even with the hellfire-ship, and now bore in on him with menacing speed. The two attackers lay at near angles, converging fast. Conan had but small hope of reaching the nearer of the two, the flameship, in time to dispose of it before the second enemy would be upon him.
He had no desire, in any event, to enter into the accursed pall of smoke. Against a single foeman, perhaps, he might have risked it—as Santhindrissa had done—with at least an even chance of finding and ramming the enemy before one’s own ship was scuttled. But to grope blindly through noon darkness with two ships on his track... particularly if one of the two, as rumour had it, belonged to the all-seeing wizard Crotalus, the one Conan had once played cat-and-mouse with in the stifling fogs of the Eastern Vilayet. No, he would rather court death by healthy daylight. Accordingly, he leaned on his sweep, bidding Ivanos to do the same. The bireme’s course shifted to starboard, toward the seaward edge of the smoke and the fast-converging ship.
He then sent Ivanos forward to carry a hasty message to the captains of every oar on his vessel—for, if he was going to fence with two sorcerers, he had best be ready with tricks of his own. He watched the roofed galley draw near the drifting smoke, then sheer off slightly. The ship stayed in plain view along the black pall’s very edge, perhaps to preserve the option of veering out of sight at a moment’s notice.
Conan glimpsed the devil-ship further to port, at the cloud’s seething vortex—and the angry glare of red, un-consuming fire, the black-smudged demon face of a crew man, the rectangular glint of the huge metal coffin at the ship’s heart. The churning oars, he noted for the first time, seemed to be worked by an overhead beam that thrust in and out of two metal boxes in a tireless, copulatory motion.
Gradually the huffing, hissing fury of the fireship became a tumult; it caused Conan’s rowers to glance around over their shoulders in fear. Crotalus’s roofed galley came on in silence, though the Cimmerian thought he could discern the swish of its prolonged, sinuous oar stroke as it raced nearer.
Ivanos returned to his place at the starboard sweep, signifying with a wave that the orders had been delivered. Conan called for more speed, and heard Yorkin’s kettledrum obediently accelerate to the new pace. The first shreds of smoke drifted in over the bows, and within moments the ship glided through sun-slanting greyness.
“Starboard rowers, ship oars! Now, at once! Haul ’em in smartly, dogs, or you’ll be picking your teeth with ’em! Port oars, keep stroking! Helm, hard a-starboard!”
Conan bellowed his commands and threw his weight against the steering-sweep, trusting Ivanos to do the same. Amid the thump and trundle of oarshafts, he felt the ship yaw and turn underfoot. The port oars continued to bite, causing the keel to pivot faster. Then, from starboard, the hull of the roofed galley drove against them in a crashing, grinding collision.
The cataclysm did not cease, but thundered on and on. Crotalus’s vessel, instead of ramming the hull amidships as the bireme’s previous course dictated, struck the turning warship a glancing blow, scraping along its overhanging side with nothing to check its momentum. As it went, the Remorseless's keel raked down the length of the enemy’s starboard oar-bank, snapping and splintering the heavy wooden helves in a sustained, calamitous din. The bireme’s oars, having been drawn inboard a moment before, were undamaged—except for one tardy shaft that split and twisted in its thole, bruising rowers on both decks. The Turanian ship’s severed oar blades whirled and flew above the bireme’s bow. Some few clattered inboard, yet did no serious damage.
As the rending clamour abruptly ceased, with the enemy hull continuing to scrape past, Conan’s crew looked around at each other and their intact ship. Those who were not busy straining at the port oars raised a fierce, triumphant cheer.
Alaph the alchemist, blinded and half-choked by the effusions of his fire-demons, cursed the trailing wind that sent his own stench flying after him. He cursed himself as well for—after half a lifetime as fire-tender and bakery hand—not devising some sort of chimney for his coffin-boiler. He might have changed course to escape the smoke, except for the goal that hung so tantalizingly near him: the stolen, pirate-infested bireme, whose fresh rowers and improved speed had nevertheless failed to outpace his hissing steam-demons.
Now the enemy fleet had come about to face him. The first rams had driven home, and one of the marauding ships had already ghosted past, blundering perilously near in the smoke. It would be mere moments before the grand duel, which he so feared and so desired, was joined... if only he could keep the big ship in sight.
Crotalus had closed with him from the north, Alaph had seen, and Zalbuvulus from the south. Each of his rivals had already vanquished smaller ships, so far as he could tell. The best way for the alchemist to distinguish himself would be to defeat the giant vessel, and possibly others as well. But now Crotalus threatened to move in on his prize. And for all he knew, Zalbuvulus’s ship might lurk somewhere behind him in the smoke. He simply would have to do his utmost, both to exceed their victories and to avoid any treachery they might have in mind, such as ramming and sinking his heavy-laden ship under cover of his own reek.
There again, through a momentary gap in the smoke, loomed the Remorseless, with white-water spraying under its roughly handled oars. The bireme now steered to Alaph’s left, doubtless to meet the flanking threat from Crotalus. The alchemist eased up on his port oars and called for his steersmen to adjust to course, taking aim at the theoretical point where the ships would meet at their combined speeds. It was not necessary, he reminded himself, to strike with any great force. Even a near miss or a boarding action might enable him to use the steam ram. He merely had to nose in alongside.
Smoke obscured his vision yet again, blown ahead by fitful morning breezes. But he could plainly hear the sounds of the big ship over the puffing of his own launch: the thump of the kettledrum, the captain’s shouted profanities, the scrape and rattle of oars. The giant lay close ahead now; the sea felt choppy from its churning progress.
Then, almost on top him, sounded the slow, rending crash of a collision. It was a hellish din, sharp and sustained, as of a giant ax hewing down a whole forest of trees at a single stroke. Alaph clutched at his bronze pipe-cocks in fear, blinking ahead across the waist of his ship through smarting, watering eyes. Yet he did not slow or sheer off, for fear of losing his one chance. The grinding and scraping of hulls seemed to be almost behind him in the murk. Then came an exultant roar from the pirates. Alaph knew they must have driven in ahead and spitted Crotalus’s ship on their mighty ram.
Here, then, was his best chance to strike, while the enemy stopped dead in the water. Just ahead, through drifting curtains of smoke, materialized the curving wall of a hull
ribbed by oars, wheeling and turning in the water as he watched. He drove straight on, ignoring frightened shouts from his crew. As the ship lay dead ahead, he twisted open the metal cocks that would send devil-force to the ram, adding its power to the speed of his charging ship.
Water and seething vapour. exploded before the bow, with bits of broken planking whirling on high. Alaph felt a numbing jolt underfoot, with a thunderous crack as of a tree smitten by Tarim’s bolt. Still the coffin-ship drove onward from its momentum, even as Alaph wrenched down the control bars and stopped his oars from dipping. The galley’s arching prow, as he watched helpless, ground straight on into an abyss of buckling, shifting planks before it finally shuddered to a halt.
His devil-driven ram, he realized, must have cracked the keel of the enemy ship and broken its back. Now the hull sagged and parted unevenly before him in the gathering smoke, settling dangerously around his bows as water surged through the shattered planks. His own vessel looked undamaged, from the hasty glance he gave it as he worked to adjust his controls for reverse movement. He must back off the broken ship and get free, before the two craft fouled together, and fierce pirates swarmed aboard from the stricken hulk.
Then from the vessel before him, a new and hideous tumult arose. More planks split and shattered overhead, sending a veritable rain of fragments into the air. Ahead in the smoke, against grey-filtered daylight, there loomed a titanic and devilish shape. Homed, many-armed, writhing and twisting, it arched down across the whole length of the coffin-ship to catch at Alaph with its scrabbling, taloned mouth.
***
Conan, though exultant at his successful oar-rake of the enemy ship, fiercely silenced the crew’s cheering. He let the port oars continue stroking, meanwhile waiting for the crippled foe to drag clear. The chuffing of the fire-galley still echoed close at hand in the smothering murk, and he blinked intently to spy it. He was amazed to note that as the lame ship scraped past his stem rail, the broken stubs of its oars still flexed and circled, rowing steadily in their odd, fluid rhythm even though their shattered ends did not touch the water.
The next moment, madder chaos erupted. Rank, fuming water splashed up over the stem, a new cacophony of groaning, wrenching timber commenced, and impacted seawater jolted under the keel. The crippled roof-ship halted dead in its progress, causing the two adjacent hulls once again to crash and scrape together.
It took a brief, confused moment for Conan to grasp the fact that his own vessel had not been holed. Instead, peering over the stem rail, he saw the flaring devil-ship driving its beak yet deeper into the hull of the same galley he had just disabled. As he watched, the flaming hell-boat ground to a halt, its crew fallen to their knees from the impact, its oars stroking level and mindlessly clear of the water.
In a flash, he understood what had happened. By passing between the two ships in the blinding smoke, turning unexpectedly and veering aside, he had not only avoided both intended rams, he had unwittingly put one of his enemies in the path of the other. Now the roofed ship, having turned blindly in place through its far-seeing wizard’s unknown sorcery, was surely and utterly destroyed. He had only the smaller, more fearsome enemy to deal with. A shame it was that the flameship lay astern; there might not be enough time to circle back and ram it before it could extricate itself from the wreck and get under way.
He gathered breath, ready to order his starboard crew to unship their oars and fend off from the sinister wreck. But as he turned to them, he was greeted by panicked cries and a still greater straining and rending of wood. Alongside their benches, less than an oar’s-length away, the timber roof of the mysterious galley bulged and splintered upward. Pegged woodworking gaped and flew to pieces with the stress, and from beneath emerged the monster it had concealed: the writhing, twisting, many-armed insect that rowed the ship in the absence of any human crew. With it, in its thrashing rage, came a stench that was all too familiar to Conan—the same sour reek of the giant centipede-thing his crew had slain on the isle of bones in far-off Hyrkania.
As if in a dream, while he froze in uncanny revulsion, the answer came to him. It was for the sake of the centipedes that Crotalus had travelled to that distant shore, for them alone. They were the nimble, scrabbling creatures that could, through his wizardly skill, be shaped and nurtured into gigantic monsters capable of rowing an Imperial oarship. Their clawed feet, writhing in sinuous rhythms, could ply the rows of oars more strongly and smoothly than could any mortal crew. And they could obviously be endowed with some form of mind, or at least with an overbearing sorcerous will, adequate to meet the tests of a warship at sea.
Such was the wizard’s scheme, and the gems were his means. For those jewels, the amber-like crystals with dim shapes moving inside, were in fact living seeds, the eggs of the many-clawed monsters. Clustered together in the sacred tree, they had been worshipped and protected by the Hyrkanians and the Guardians alike. What better guardian, after all, than a parent for its own offspring? But the monstrous spawn, sold westward by the dead Knulf, had been made more monstrous by necromancy. This writhing abomination before him, caught in the foundering ship’s belly, was the fruit of the single gem Crotalus had managed to obtain. More of them might serve to propel an entire fleet.
As the behemoth towered and twisted in its pain and rage, rocking and battering both ships with its frenzied weight, Conan saw that it had the same segmented body, the same armoured plates and hooked talons as its smaller relatives. Whether it shared the evil will and predatory habits of the Guardians, or the more subtle wit of Crotalus, he had no wish to find out. He had seen no sign of the black-skinned sorcerer on the ship, so presumably the Zembabwan’s will was somehow manifested in the bug. If so, the insect was all the more dangerous.
After the initial realization, thought and action were as one; Conan bellowed at his oarsmen to shove off from the wreck, and he leaped with Ivanos to the port sweep to achieve the same end by levering the steering blade against the wallowing, sinking hull. The enemy vessel’s back was broken, he now could see, and the monster was likewise cut in half, or at least crimped in two by the invading ram. The other end—the head, presumably—had also broken free of its confines in violent frenzied pain. It now writhed atop the smoking fire-galley, making the small ship plunge and wallow with its massive weight. Of the ship’s sooty crew, one bald, thick-chested swimmer could be seen splashing fearfully in the water; no other survivors were visible.
At the sound of renewed smashing and sudden, rending screams, Conan turned from his efforts at the sweep. The tail of the vast centipede, breaking through the bulwark of its own ship, had splintered his midships rail and half-crushed one of his pirates. The other brigands, doing their best to ply the heavy oars overhead, struggled to fend away the looming trunk, whose many long legs and scything hooks caught viciously at them. Conan rushed forward, seized hold of the broken oarshaft, and raised its splintered tip to prod and stab at the flailing monstrosity. The sharp point found a weak place between the segments, and the added pain was enough to make the thing twist clear of the bireme and lodge against the planks of its own hull.
But now the danger intensified, with blasts of heat and explosions from astern. Going to the rail, waving aside gouts of nauseating smoke, Conan saw greedy flames spring up out of the wreckage below. Kegs of flammable oil in the coffin-ship had been ruptured by the centipede’s weight, spreading fire down its length, fore and aft of the giant bronze coffin-pyre where it had been contained. The jagged wreckage that overhung the bows was also afire, spreading and engulfing the roofed vessel in flame. The smaller ship’s oars no longer flexed above the water, the animated beam having been battered down by the centipede’s thrashings.
The giant armoured insect was now, most obviously, feeling the heat. As Conan watched, its claws twitched and scrabbled at the wood and metal fittings within reach, which were beginning to shimmer with flame. Without warning it arched up, its hideous head looming close above the rail where Conan stood. The sharp, many-fing
ered mandibles clicked and chattered at him; in a hideous voice comprised of equal parts hissing and twittering, it screamed.
Conan raised his broken oar-helve and stabbed. The monster’s weight could cave in his ship’s stem, to be sure; worse, those jaws might easily suck or scrabble up a man whole. And if the Cimmerian was not mistaken, the twitching crescent claws at either side of its face-segment were full of withering venom. The flailing horror leaned in close, its claws scraping at the rail, and Conan drove his jagged spear straight into the joint between two segments of the armoured neck. Arching back from the stem, the thing chittered shrilly again.
But now the crew, shoving and straining with its oars, finally succeeded in putting distance between the Remorseless and the fouled wreckage. The flailing centipede receded into the smoke, its broken, thrashing body wreaking random devastation amid the searing flames. Conan’s rowers resumed a regular stroke, pulling smoothly away from the fire without the need of shouted orders. Smoke poured forth behind them, shutting off even the lurid flames and the beast’s Cyclopean writhings. For some moments they rowed through formless, drifting greyness.
Then from astern came an ear-splitting detonation. Smoke and heated air swept over them, and the sea nearby was pattered with smoking fragments of wood, metal, and what looked like charred centipede. A brisk wave spread from the blast, as well; it overtook the pirates, splashing water over their stem rail as they passed out of the sorcerous gloom into sunlight.
Conan of the Red Brotherhood Page 25
