Conan the Great

by Leonard Carpenter

  The duke nodded and stood against the tapestried wall with his servant, both men looking more relieved than reluctant. Conan turned to Egilrude and nodded once, sharply. The officer told his band, “Come along, men! Swift and silent!”

  The rush of soft boots in the carpeted hall was scarcely louder than the drawing of swords had been. An eerie darkness closed on them as they left the candle behind; then a lighted archway came into sight ahead. Beyond it could be seen the figures of four helmeted guardsmen, standing with arms akimbo or leaning on pikes, watching an iron-bound door that opened on a torch-lit outer court.

  The guards did not expect trouble, clearly—least of all from within the castle. But at the last moment one of them heard or felt heavy footfalls and spun in alarm. Conan’s sword whizzed through the air and sheared in under the edge of his helm. It bit deep, thunking against metal or bone. When it wrenched free, its steel was oiled a thick, bright red. The man toppled, gargling blood, even as Conan raised his ax to parry a blow of the neighbouring guardsman’s pike.

  Two more guards appeared, lunging from unnoticed places beside an inner double door. Even so, the fight was short and one-sided. Conan met the second man with an ax-blow that fractured the nose piece of his helm, stopping him long enough for the officer Egilrude to deal him a killing thrust beneath his backplate. The other defenders fought futilely against worsening odds, the last one cut down by four different swords striking in rapid succession. None escaped to spread the alarm, though the din of weapons and death cries could scarcely have gone unnoticed in the near vicinity.

  As the last defender writhed and gasped to stillness on the stone floor, Duke Lionnard and his servant crept forth from the corridor. Following Conan’s wave, they passed on through the exit to the courtyard.

  “Shut that door and bolt it,” Conan ordered, giving two of his troopers a shove toward the portal. “Admit only Lionnard’s men, when and if they show. You two, come with me.” Returning his bloodied ax to the hook on his belt, he beckoned his remaining two troopers and Egilrude to the inner double door. “Here, stand ready,” he said, laying hold of one of the heavy ring handles. He hauled the thick oaken panel open partway and peered in through the hand’s-breadth-wide crack.

  Inside was a banquet hall, thronged with richly dressed men seated on stone benches at heavy stone tables. In the open area beyond the door stood a tapped, dripping ale keg on a wheeled trestle. Beside it, a brazier threw shimmering heat waves up around the hacked, drying carcass of a spitted pig. The nobles, some thirty or forty in number, appeared to have finished their meat if not their drink. Now they carried on a many-sided, boisterous discussion of some political or military subject. At the jarring of the door, a few of them glanced across at Conan, not evidently alarmed by his sullen face or by any sounds of strife that had filtered through the thick oaken panels.

  After only the briefest look, the king let the door fall shut and turned to the men around him. “Once I enter, bar this door behind me—use the pikes of the dead guards, there.” Conan’s voice rasped deeply, like the keel of a ship launched from a stony northern beach. “Let none but me pass through,” he told them. “Do not abandon your posts unless you are sure that I am dead.”

  Egilrude frowned at the king’s words. “Sire, if you are dead, our lives are nothing. What can we do to keep you from danger?”

  “Do as I command! I do not shirk danger.” He gave Egilrude a level look. “All I ever craved, before I was king or since, was sharp steel and a straight path to my enemies!”

  So saying, Conan turned to the double door. He grasped both rings of worn bronze, hauled both doors wide—though one would have been sufficient even for his kingly size—and stepped into the banquet hall. As the thick portals fell shut behind him he armed himself fully, drawing his ax from his belt with his swordless hand. He held both weapons wide and high as he strode forward.

  This time, at the unannounced entry of a large, heavily armed man, the discussion in the room faltered. A pair of burly, competent-looking underlings arose from a nearby table to head the intruder off.

  “And so, milord,” a speaker resumed, “without a doubt the citadel will hold. ’Tis clear our enemies are overextended. With aid of our Nemedian allies, we can sweep them from the field—but who is this, a messenger from our generals?” The speaker, a portly noble in a yellow silk cloak and cap, turned to gawk as Conan strode past the ale butt. “His weapons are red-rimmed! Is the war at our very gate, then?”

  “Probably another battle deserter with calamitous news from die east,” a second, sceptical voice chimed in. “Why don’t you ask him how many Kothian foes he has swept from the field?”

  Further jibes were lost in an outcry of astonishment as Conan met the two guardians. The first he brained with his ax; the second, caught tardily drawing his sword, tried in vain to duck away. His head was struck cleanly from his shoulders by Conan’s lashing blade.

  “What, murder! Vile mutiny, ’tis a foul assassin! Stop him at once!” The cries rang out sharply as nobles sprang up from their tables, reaching for weapons. Yet fewer actually sought vengeance than cried out for it. Just three men darted toward Conan with alacrity, brandishing their rapiers high. The rest managed to stumble over their scabbards and each other’s feet, or otherwise found cause to hang back and watch.

  As the fighters met, steel clashed deafeningly overhead. The attackers rained slashes and thrusts at Conan, fanning out widely to gain access to their quarry. But his ax and broadsword danced through air with effortless swiftness, striking aside the lighter weapons and returning threat for threat, blow for blow. Amid the flurry of flashing steel a sword broke, sending a bright splinter whirling high overhead. Then a second sword fell clattering to the stone floor. A bloody scream rang out; then came an angry shout, silenced suddenly by a crunching ax-stroke.

  That left Conan facing a single adversary, stalking him swiftly and darting onto him as the man stumbled over the still-thrashing legs of one of his fallen comrades. A final, deadly sweep of Conan’s ax sent the man spinning away in a shower of red droplets. There was an appalled silence in the room, then the other nobles moving to confront the stranger slowed in their tracks.

  “’Tis a fighting demon!” someone was heard to whisper.

  “Here, berserker,” a more gravelly voice proclaimed, “come hither to me and let me soothe your gnawing madness! For know you, I have cured many such as you before.”

  The speaker, a stocky, white-haired man, was none other than King Balt, the battle-hardened monarch of Nemedia. He also happened to be the most heavily armoured man in the hall, clad from neck to knees in the thick leather hauberk that had enfolded him since his days as a line infantryman. Adorned now with bosses and lozenges of bright gold, it had through long use become his mantle of royal rank. Where his suit of mail ended, studded leather boots sheathed him. The monarch wore plated gauntlets as well, wrapped now around the hilt of a two-handed sword longer and broader than the one Conan plied in his right fist.

  Balt’s crown, though not a war helm, could almost serve as one, since its gold filigree overlaid a dinted, pitted steel cap. The old king was as broad-shouldered as a plough horse, and sturdy-limbed beneath his stoutness. He looked formidable even as he patiently waited, letting the unknown attacker come to him.

  “Nay, courtiers, keep back,” the old king shouted. “This reaver is mine! Your tricks will only play into his mad wiles.” Balt’s rebuke was addressed to his own seneschals, sporting the grey and brown livery of Nemedia. But it was spoken too late as, swinging their rapiers, the two came pelting impetuously around their king to head off his enemy.

  The first, meeting Conan in a blinding flurry of sword-strokes, halted abruptly in his tracks. He shuddered, sank down to one knee, then slipped aside to the floor, leaving his heart’s blood sleeting brightly from the tip of the Aquilonian’s withdrawn sword.

  The second, before he could even close in, toppled on his face senseless—felled by the flat of his own ki
ng’s blade as it struck his soft-hatted pate from behind.

  “Back, I say!” the old one roared. “This is my fight! I cannot promise to spare the next disobedient whelp who comes scampering to show me up!”

  Before Balt had finished his diatribe, Conan was upon him, his sword and ax swinging in swift, lusty arcs.

  And yet the old warrior stood his ground, taking the strokes solidly on his broadsword with a din of steel, or else spryly dodging them without lifting his booted feet from the floor. In so doing he used a stock of deft, confident tricks learned in an unnaturally long lifetime on the battlefield. Time and again Conan’s weapons slid aside off his heavy blade or scraped harmlessly down his padded armour.

  In return, the Aquilonian king felt the tip of the Nemedian’s heavier broadsword strike and gouge his breastplate with impacts that hammered breath out of his lungs, and came near to piercing or splintering the inferior steel. So the two kings struggled within the circle of watchers, who had evidently come to believe that no other hand was necessary to save hoary old Balt from his assailant.

  And yet the Nemedian’s deadliest trick came unexpectedly. Conan felt his sword trapped in an unseen crevice, a sword-breaking spur forged near the base of King Balt’s heavier blade. To the elder king’s snarl of exultation, Conan’s hilt began to twist aside out of his grip with hard-levered, wrist-snapping force.

  A desperate sweep of the Aquilonian’s ax struck the juncture of the two blades, knocking them apart. The release of tension interrupted the old butcher’s practised motions, throwing him momentarily off balance. It was fierce, agile improvisation that made Conan’s ax plummet heavily on the back swing, striking his adversary’s steel helmet-crown. The force split the headpiece in two, doing equal damage to the white-haired skull beneath. The gruesome spectacle of cloven brains was wrenched swiftly out of the victor’s sight as King Balt plunged lifeless to the floor.

  “By Erlik!” a voice cried from the watching throng, frozen now with horror. “It is Conan, the enemy king! Conan of Aquilonia has felled the King of Nemedia!”

  “Aye,” a second watcher marvelled, “I recognize^ him from the coins—he comes to slaughter us in our very fortress!” The realization was accompanied by an indecisive slowing in the rush of the crowd toward Conan, who stood panting with a half-dozen bodies at his feet.

  “King or knave, he is a villain, a monster!” another voice cried. “But hold, brothers, keep back from him,

  I have him now! Just give me a clear shot--” These exhortations came from a bearded, broad-shouldered man who stood beyond a table at the back wall of the chamber. He had just finished stringing a darkly varnished wooden bow, probably taken down from the mantelpiece behind him. Now the noble was carefully nocking an arrow from a quiver at his side. “Here, miscreant, I offer you payment for your black sins of murder this day....”His voice trailed off in massive effort as he drew back the bowstring, his clenched hand trembling visibly from the force needed to bend the heavy stave.

  And yet when released, the flight was obscured by a metallic flicker. The arrow went untrue, skittering low into the crowd at one side, and producing howls of pain from one of the watchers. The archer himself lowered his arm, the bow turning slackly in his grasp. He twisted slowly and tottered backward against the wall, where he slumped open-mouthed—his chest cloven by the ax that had flown a dozen paces across the room from Co-nan’s lashing, thick-muscled arm.

  An eye-blink afterward the thrower himself came bounding in his axe’s wake, striking down a first, then a second interloper with his whistling sword. He cleared the table in a bound, to hack down a third rival with vicious cuts before turning to snatch the bow from the slack fingers of its dying owner.

  The quiver stood ready; on the instant, an arrow was plucked from it, nocked, drawn, and released. The smooth, disciplined motion left the shaft lodged in the throat of a nobleman, an Ophirean lord who had stepped forward with his straight-sword raised. Almost before the eye could follow back to the archer, a second shaft shivered in the breastbone of the man just behind him. A third attacker turned to run; instead he took Conan’s arrow below his shoulder blade and lunged forward against his comrades, grunting less with pain than with the force of the strike.

  Pandemonium gripped the hall as men strove to save themselves at the expense of all others. They shrieked and collided, hurling themselves over and beneath tables to avoid death’s whimsical, airborne touch. Some huddled behind furniture, others behind corpses. All cringed from the black-haired slayer’s inferno-eyed gaze as he stalked the head of the room, quiver at his shoulder, choosing his victims with silent efficiency. Only a desperate few tired of their coy flirtation with death and laid hands on weapons, to charge forward and meet extinction head on.

  There was no third choice, for the banquet hall had but one entry: the great double door, where a crowd of men now battered and clamoured in vain. A second smaller door existed in a rear comer of the room, leading presumably to a closet or pantry; early in the fight, servants had scuttled inside and barred it. Now their masters begged, pounded, and rattled the latch in vain, stumbling over bodies of former supplicants who had grovelled there too long.

  At the main doors the half-score fugitives reached a frenzy, pressing the door panels apart and outward with their massed weight, meanwhile sawing and chopping at the makeshift bars with knives and swords, against the half-visible efforts of the guards posted outside. Several captives hefted a heavy stone bench and ran with it to batter the doors wide. But even as they did so, Conan was picking targets among them. Pluck, nock, draw, release—in a few fatal moments, the numbers before the door were thinned. The battering ram fell abandoned, its surviving bearers sprawling for cover behind tables, benches, the dead and one another—

  —none too soon for Conan to turn and meet a nearer threat, as a half-dozen desperate men combined to lift one of the heavy stone tabletops from its massy pedestal. They tilted it up protectively before them and advanced behind its shield against the murderous archer, seeking to pen him into a comer and crush him with it.

  They came forward at a rush, but Conan backed coolly away, feathering first an exposed leg, then the shoulder of a second man. The wounded fell aside and the advance slowed, the circular slab thudding and scraping against the paves. Drawing the last arrow from his quiver, Conan sent it at short range through the shin of one of the remaining carriers. Then, nearly trapped, he sprang forward from the wall and drove his full weight in a kick high against the faltering tabletop. It paused, canted over backward, and slid to the floor, its weight cushioned by the nether limbs of two or three men unable to escape from beneath it. Instead of a thunderous crash, its fall produced only their bleating gasps and the sound of cracking bones.

  “O horror, the demon yet lives!” one of them wailed. “Spare us, please, O terrible one! We are few, we are beaten! We crave only life!”

  “He is king!” others cried. “Hail him, our conqueror! Praise and fealty to Conan, King of Aquilonia and Ophir!” The salute was a travesty, piped from three or four dry, quavering throats.

  “Where is Malvin?” Drawing his sword, Conan slashed the string of the bow and cast it aside. On the arm which had held it, the thick sleeve of his travelling coat was frayed and blood-fringed from repeated, ill-protected lashings by the bowstring. “Lead me to Lord Malvin!” he rasped hoarsely. “I have him yet to slay!” He strode the room, sword in hand, kicking bodies onto their backs and squinting at faces pale with death, pain, or fear. The place was not awash in blood, for the arrows had pinned only thin scarlet love-ribbons upon their chosen favourites. When he passed hiding places of the living and peered in at them, feeble voices croaked, “Hail, Conan the Great!”

  Uninterested in killing these last pathetic few, he went to the only place in the room where there was any independent stirring—an oval table larger than the rest. Beneath and near it, survivors huddled. A short, seam-faced man in commoner’s garb crept out from underneath it and stood resolutely,
raising a long knife to protect others still hidden.

  “Fight him, I say! Save your kingdom!” This voice was high, but not with fear: female, though it came from a mannishly clad, leather-caped figure. She crouched beside the table and expostulated with someone under it. “Kill him! Or at least face him and prove you were a man! I promise to die beside you.” Glancing up as Conan approached, she dragged a rapier out of a scabbard at her belt. Her figure was trim and leather-sheathed, her dark red hair cropped just long enough to tremble with agitation as she stood there. Her cloak was open down the front, exposing the half-contained fullness of her bosom.

  A voice murmured from beneath the table, too faint for Conan to hear the sense of it. The woman cocked her red-maned head down attentively, then tossed it back in outrage. “Bargain, you say? Offer him... what? Nay, Malvin, cowardly wretch, I offer you death!” With a sudden, diving thrust she drove her sword into the shadows beneath the table, then released hold, abandoning it there. In reply came a gasping, scraping flurry of limbs. A figure stirred and dragged itself halfway clear of the table—a nobleman, devoid now of his bright steel battle armour. Her sabre protruded upward from his neck, its hilt standing out just behind his ear.

  “Amlunia...” Lord Malvin gasped, reaching weakly to her booted ankle. Then he collapsed, a red froth drooling from his lips. The male retainer before the table gaped down at the noble death. He tossed aside his knife to clatter on the tabletop and stood open-handed in surrender.

  The woman Amlunia ignored all this. She strode forward to meet Conan, stepping boldly into reach of his sword. “Kill me if you must, marauder... or else spare me! What Malvin would have asked a kingdom for, I give you freely!” She pressed closer to Conan, her bosom flattening against his hauberk as she craned up on her toes to plant a hot, moist kiss on his lips. “He was no man—but you are a man, and a king! King of Ophir, and of me, if you can hold what you have won by slaughter!”