Conan the Great

by Leonard Carpenter

  It was after a half-dozen courses of food that a messenger entered, flanked by two Black Dragon guards. Plastered with mud and dust from the road, he reeled slightly with saddle-stiffness. Yet he strode up and addressed the king directly.

  “Sir, I bring news of Khoraja via Ophir and Belverus, relayed to you by Count Prospero’s order.” “Excellent,” Conan said, waving to a servant. “Pour the man a cup of ale, that he may regale us less hoarsely. What news?”

  “Then, Sire, you have had no word of it before now?” Accepting his flagon, the man looked up across its foaming brim at Conan, seeming oddly hesitant to drink. “No news from Khoraja?”

  “Nay, courier, I think not. But how am I to know unless you tell me?” Impatiently the king leaned forward across his preening lap-kitten Amlunia. “Come, dog, spit it out!”

  “My liege... word has it that Yasmela, the princess-regent of Khoraja, is dead.”

  The silence that followed the pronouncement was momentous. Tb the watchers, it was clear that mighty emotions stirred and battled in Conan’s breast. Yet his stem kingly dignity scarcely permitted him to wail in anguish or sob forth his grief—if such he felt for this woman whom, after all, none of them knew. The bearer of the ill tidings stood stock-straight, unsure whether or not to fear for his own neck. Even Amlunia, twined in the monarch’s lap, grew quiet and watched him with alert, suspicious eyes. It was as if she tried to gauge how much power a woman could have over this man— the depth of his injury, and the expression it would find.

  It was Publius who, sensing the danger of the moment and anxious to cover his king’s public discomfiture, edged up from behind the messenger to continue the questioning. “Queen Yasmela, dead? Tell me, has it been put forth what caused her death?”

  The messenger turned aside and nodded, eager to discharge his duty. “’Tis said she died of a fall, milord Chancellor. Not at Castle Tarnhold where she had lived, but at some unknown rural retreat.”

  “Are there rumours of foul play, then?” At the man’s awkward but expressive silence, Publius continued, “Of course, such is always a likelihood in noble deaths. How does her passing affect the rulership of Khoraja and Koth?”

  “’Tis thought that Prince Armiro’s rule of Khoraja is strengthened,” the man said, “and with it, his sway over Koth.” Reporting this last, he evidently felt safer, long-lived enough, at least, to take a swallow of ale from his cup.

  “A fall,” the sullen king muttered. These, his first words in some moments, were spoken from beneath a brooding, thunder-clouded brow. “And yet, methinks a greater fall will follow.”

  “Your Majesty sees a... baneful influence in this?” Publius regarded his king carefully.

  “Baneful, yes... to the unnatural whelp Armiro, in Crom’s own time!” The king sat unmoving, his hands gripping the chair arms. “There is no doubt he ordered her killed... Yasmela, his own mother! I myself heard him threaten her before me.” Conan’s voice gradually intensified, grinding like a stone mill that remorselessly grated anguish into rage. “Does that leave you any doubt as to what kind of viperous enemy we face?... what stamp of low, perfidious skulkard?”

  About the hall knights arose angrily from their seats, answering the king’s exhortation with a chorus of rough, angry shouts.

  “That is why I vow to throttle him with this good hand!” Conan, too, bolted upright, dumping Amlunia unceremoniously from his lap. She was kept from falling to the floor only by a sure grip on her wrist from his free hand—the one that was not raised above his head, clutching and crushing air for the benefit of the watchers. “By Crom and Mitra, Mannanan and Kubal, Macha and Set, and by any other fell god who will accept my oath, I swear it!”

  That night and the ensuing days brought more discussion of war, more preparation for war, and more war. The last few fractious Nemedian loyals withdrew to the country’s eastern borderlands—there to be joined, it was rumoured, by foreign mercenaries sent to keep Conan’s conquest of Nemedia from being too swift and easy. Numalia was placed under a military governor nominated by Baron Halk, and the city’s stocks were plundered more deeply for the army’s refit.

  Meanwhile, through the near provinces, word of Nemedia’s subjugation spread. Peasant and squire alike murmured the wildfire reputation of Conan the Great. But more often, among inhabitants of settled districts fearful of invasion, the whispers were of Conan the Ravager, Conan the Despoiler, Conan the Terrible. However cruel the existing rulership, its downfall in war could be seen only as a great calamity. To provide against it, farmers dug shelters in the forest, buried their winter stores of seed and provender, and hid away their oxen and women.

  Then in eastern Nemedia a trap was sprung. Die-hard loyalists were lured in strength out of their border forest, pursuing what they thought was a small force of Baron Halk’s knights. Once in brushy meadowland, they found themselves encircled by a full Aquilonian legion that had marched up and deployed secretly the night before. The cavalry battle was wide-ranging, with lightning strike and counterstrike; the clash of infantry was short and brutal. Conan’s regiments won the day, writing an end to the Nemedian Resistance as a fighting force.

  It was a small battle, the harsh conclusion of a whirlwind campaign. But it was remembered for a rumour which arose there, to be repeated with wonder and dread by King Conan’s foes and friends alike. Whether true or false, it. was woven into the many-hued cloak of legendary that adorned his name in later years.

  The tale, or rather the vision, attended the thickest part of the fight. Survivors told of seeing the emperor’s chariot sweep across the battlefield, its horses red-eyed and foaming at their bits, guided negligently or not at all by a dwarf who rode postilion, straddling the leftmost horse. With his legs locked tightly in the brute’s harness, the manikin strummed on a lute as he rode, letting the team’s reins trail through mud and blood and over the bodies of the slain.

  On the chariot’s platform—so the tale went—mindless of its giddy course and of the swords and spears raised all around, Conan and his battle-mistress Amlunia stood locked in a wild, passionate embrace. Bereft of much of their armour and clothing, they stripped away more as they strove together in frenzy, baring one another’s flesh like immortals scornful of earthly barb or edge. Mouth to greedy mouth they clung as their vehicle plummeted through crowds of footmen and horsemen. Their mad transports of lust were the last terrible vision of many a dying man, so it was whispered, and a sight to haunt the battle’s survivors for the remainder of their days.

  XV

  Dark Communion

  Armiro, Supreme Tyrant of Khoraja and High Prince Designate of Koth, awoke from a troubled sleep into gusty alien darkness.

  At least, he dreamt that he awoke. He came to himself standing upright out-of-doors, clad in the black silk shirt and pantaloons he usually slept in for the sake of ready concealment from night assassins. His feet, he sensed, were shod in the same soft boots he remembered placing beside his cot that evening; but of the familiar dagger he kept hidden beneath his pillow, there was no trace on his person.

  His surroundings were not totally obscure. As he peered about him, a feathery crescent moon edged from behind a vaporous cloud overhead and lit the scene eerily. He stood in a plaza of monumental stonework— walls, pillars and entablatures, all quaint and ancient-seeming in design. Yet they stood here untouched by time, looming straight and square against a moon-pale firmament masked by racing cloudlets.

  Something about those pale stars bothered him. He stepped forward to view them better, and found the surface of this dream world as hard and smooth under his feet as polished stone ought to be. But after a pace or two he stopped, dazzled. Light sprang up suddenly ahead— basins of low, reddish flame blossoming upward from carved sconces and braziers set around the courtyard.

  No hand had lit them, as far as he could see. No human servants stood by to tend and refill them. Except for the prince himself, the place was deserted.

  The flames, he noted, glinted on the wavele
ts of a circular, oily-dark pool at the centre of the court. Its surface rippled, possibly with the same faint, chill stirrings of air that tugged and fretted the hems of his garments; unless, as it almost seemed, the pond harboured a restless life of its own. It was the central feature of the place, and the only other moving object; somehow the dream-jaded prince was hardly surprised when a deep liquid voice bubbled up from its centre in sensible, intelligible accents.

  “Welcome, Prince Armiro, Lord of Koth, and seeker of an even broader empire. It gratifies me to allow such noble feet to tread the ancient stones of my temple.”

  “Who are you,’ Armiro challenged directly, “to waft me here at this ungracious hour and vex my rightful slumbers?”

  “Come now, my dear prince,” the voice bubbled forth humorously, “are you claiming that a peaceful rest was interrupted? I know better! But then, who would expect one of your precarious station—and your, shall we say, firm manner of dealing with others—to be blessed with easy dreams?”

  Armiro barked a cynical laugh. “You know me well, phantom! In truth, my dreams were of hard blows being struck, and harridans’ coarse, cruel laughter, and of murderers creeping upon me in the dark. Such is the usual content of my dreams. Never, till lately, have they contained phantasms and disembodied voices!”

  “Good; then you are attuned to my growing and returning power. Mere days ago I would have lacked the ability to reach into your dreams, much less bring a rank non-believer such as yourself here to my side.”

  “Who are you, I ask again, and what is this eldritch place?” Staying a half-dozen paces back from the low curb of the pool, Armiro nevertheless drew himself up straighter and looked around in a confident, commanding manner. “Is this our familiar world? If so, your power includes that of moving the stars in the celestial spheres, for the constellations overhead are oddly disfigured to my eye. But hold! —this cannot be the earth I know, for yonder hangs another moon.” His air of lordly unconcern was shaken slightly as he raised an arm to point. There, in the wake of a drifting bank of cloud low down near the horizon, skulked a second, coarser crescent.

  “Now, now, my prince,” the bubbling voice chided him, “do not assume that this is other than your home. Know you, the stars swirl across the sky in their own infinitely slow evolutions like dust motes in a breeze. If these heavens seem strange, perhaps it is because I prefer to recall a time when this earth of yours had two moons!

  “As for myself,” the liquid voice simmered on, “I am Kthantos, a god. I was, in times long past, the greatest god... the only one, to all purposes. My power declined, due in part to the predictable folly of my priests, who let themselves be violently hated. More foolishly, they let themselves be wiped out.” The bubblings slowed a moment, then plopped heavily, emitting what could be construed as a yawn. “My grasp declined too, I admit, through my own diminished interest in my worshippers and a weariness with their petty affairs.”

  Armiro asked guardedly, “Your worshippers were men?”

  “Men? Yes, of course—or nearly so, it matters not. Down the ages your race has changed less markedly than the face of the heavens.” A riffle of unarticulated bubbles gave the impression of something shifting restlessly beneath the pool’s surface. “In any case, I have decided to resume my seat as ruler of this world—as divine ruler, that is, with a place beneath me for a mortal monarch of virtually limitless power. Accordingly, I now find it appropriate to gather followers, to shade the course of history with dreams, visions, and summonings, and even to reach forth in small excursions into your world. Though time troubles a god less than a mortal, I have spent enough aeons in this pond to grow weary of its dank emptiness.”

  “You remain here always?” Armiro asked with an air of casualness.

  “Unless I choose to emerge—but I seldom do. This was once my sacrificial pool, and I remember it fondly as the sanguine, rippling heart of a world-spanning empire. What I miss most is a warm soul to keep me company. I have these few relics, of course”—from the surface of the pond there abruptly broke skeletal arms, some brandishing swords and rusted shields, others flailing aimlessly; then, just as unceremoniously, they sank and disappeared beneath the surface—“but they are mere residue. Their mortal essences, which can stir and tickle so pleasantly, are long since consumed and dissipated. I did encounter a fine soul recently—a warm, vibrant, sensitive spirit. I touched it and almost seized it for my own—but alas, it slipped away from me, likely into the care of some lesser, meeker god. A sore pity!” “I warn you, Kthantos,” Armiro said, his voice echoing out across the pond, “you would not find my soul so warm or tickling in nature. Do not think to snatch it from me.”

  “Nay, Prince! For you, I have another proposal. I know of your overweening ambition—also of your competence and your freedom from the nagging traditionalism that shackles so many able rulers. You do not care too deeply, I gather, for your fellow beings.”

  “Care?” Armiro asked negligently. “Why should I care? None has yet cared for me—nobody, that is, who had the power to give me what I craved.”

  “Ah, Prince, I see more clearly the hard, bristly shape of your soul. In truth, it is not one that I would choose to comfort me. Still, your independence and resourcefulness are your best strengths.”

  “And why not?” Armiro asked bitterly. “I always had to do for myself.”

  “Of late you have shown even less compunction—as on your army’s march into neutral Argos, whose lands you are now laying waste. Do you not find yourself progressively freer of the petty constraints of humanity and mercy?”

  “Yes... of late I have suffered a loss,” the prince replied. “Not a loss that, in itself, would unhinge or weaken me, or warrant a show of unprincely grief—but by confirming my long-held belief in human frailty and deceit, and the ultimate futility of human life, the affair has sobered me.” Armiro stood tall and straight, scanning the pond and the pillars beyond it with composed features. “Sobered me, yes, and made me firmer in my purpose.”

  “Firmness is called for, it would seem, considering the strength and ferocity of those who oppose you.” “Strength? Ferocity?” This time Armiro’s laugh was scornful. “Say rather, luck and bombast!” Suddenly restless, he turned aside, strode a pace or two, and wheeled back to face the pond. “My chief enemy just now is a boob so uncultured, a lout so rough and rude, that I can summon no respect or kinship for him as a monarch! In truth, I scarcely regard him as a man, but as some spouting, posturing relic of a mythical past age. He knows scant little of diplomacy, even less of the science of modem war, and is borne up in his conquests on the shoulders of his generals and advisors, serving as a sort of archaic figurehead—with all his twaddle of noble savagery and the unconquerable will! A beef-slabbed idol with a crowned, gilded brow, and feet of dung!

  “And yet,” the prince continued, “he has intruded upon me in an unpardonable way. Not just lately, in regard to my troublesome loss; I find that once before he made the mistake so many others have, of playing a dubious part in my despised past.” Armiro frowned with a deep inner vexation. “So it becomes my duty and my special pleasure to silence his noxious blatting. In time I shall settle on a punishment for him that is condign.”

  “Truly a diverting struggle, even to one of my world-weariness—between two mortal kings who are, whatever you may say, formidable. Your manoeuvres in this burgeoning war strike one as being careful and measured, neither impetuous nor hurried.”

  “What needs hurry, when my aim is to draw him inevitably into conflict with other foes, whom I can in turn cajole—but stay!” Armiro brought himself up short. “I never was one to disclose my plans, and I do not feel inclined to do so now. Not even in a dream, within the dark, cavernous reaches of my own benighted skull.”

  “If you think this shrine lies within your skull, then you have a sombre image of your own spirit, my prince.” The bubbles in the flame-lit pond roiled and tossed luridly a moment, then subsided. “Here, in any case, is my proposal: every
earthly conqueror needs a god to conquer righteously for. Given your fealty to me, I will guide your war to a clear and imminent confrontation between you and your principal foe. If you prove yourself the better king, I will ensure the completeness of your triumph.”

  “Hmm, you may just be capable of it.” Armiro’s parleying face was rigid and inexpressive, his arms folded across his chest, his attitude of intense thought signalled by only a slight forward inclination of his head. “And yet, your guarantee to me is no guarantee at all. You double-deal with that brigand Conan as well, methinks. But I gather that you find my view of the world more congenial to your own.”

  The submerged voice riffled forth a cluster of bubbles. “The question is this: can you accept me, Kthantos, as the One True God? And can you accept and honour. my high priest, in whatever odd shape he may come to you?” The dark surface stilled for a moment. “Think on these things, Prince Armiro. You need not render me an answer now....”

  Of a sudden, the nests of flame in the braziers began to sink and gutter low. The unearthly prospect was gradually obscured; even the stars and the tissue moons faded. Then there was darkness, turbid and redress—followed by blazing light, as Armiro blinked open his eyes on the misty sun-glare of a bright Argossean morning.

  “Mmm. Uhh. Guards....” Screening his eyes one-handed against the seam of fiery light that edged the tent flaps, the prince hauled himself up to a sitting position in his field cot.

  The day-glare intensified briefly as a trooper let himself into the tent, and then was mercifully blocked by his armoured bulk. “Ready at your order, O Prince!” “Guard, why have I been allowed to sleep so late? ’Tis past sunrise.”

  “Sire, your seneschal was unable to rouse you. You muttered in your sleep, and so we all retired outside lest we overhear portentous state secrets.”