Conan the Great

by Leonard Carpenter

  With clanging fury his mace struck the sword from the Corinthian’s fist; a second blow smote the gilded helmet from his brow. Moments later the foeman lay twisted on the ground, his gaping mouth filling with a rivulet of blood from the mortal gash in his skull.

  Thenceforth the surviving enemies retreated even faster, leading the harriers up the narrowing neck of the valley and over a low, meadowed pass. Beyond it, in the next, narrower valley, the square watchtower was finally visible again, though dwarfed by the broad black curtain of the Karpash peaks.

  Egilrude continued to press the initiative, naggingly aware that his cavalry was drawing far ahead of his infantry and supply column. The tower keep was his immediate goal, so he would have to trust to his officers to keep his trailing forces safe and intact. To complicate matters, the afternoon grew late, and one of the local summer storms swiftly gathered. Dark-mottled clouds flowed together atop the tree-girt ridges ahead, shrouding the jagged summits of the Karpash range in billowing white and iron grey.

  It was during a swift, galloping skirmish at a stream crossing that the flinty clouds finally struck forth lightning, and the first blood-warm raindrops fell.

  None of the riders troubled to seek shelter, even though the onslaught of thunder terrified their plunging steeds. They fought and chased onward, with each lightning stroke illuminating the animals’ staring, bloodshot eyes and bared yellow teeth. In the panic that followed, some riders were thrown or dragged from their saddles, others overtaken and slain by ravaging Aquilonian steel. The fight turned to a wild pursuit; it clattered along a stony stream-bed, whose waters flashed milky fire, and up the lane of a rude mountain village. The chase ended in a desperate fight above the town, at the gate of the looming tower keep.

  The defenders, confused perhaps by the fury of the storm, had ill-advisedly lowered the drawbridge to admit their fleeing countrymen. So close on their heels were the Aquilonians, the garrison had time to raise the span no more than a hand’s-breadth before it was weighted down with pelting Aquilonian destriers and their armoured riders. Egilrude and the best-mounted of his companions set upon the gate guards and kept them from closing the iron-bound doors or winding down the portcullis. Moments later, with more invaders arriving in the blinding downpour, the corps-marshal dismounted and led the hunt for the enemy through the dim, narrow corridors of the keep.

  At the end of it, the Corinthian knights lay slain to the last man, along with the fiercest of the tower’s defenders. A dozen or so bruised, sullen prisoners waited in the sodden courtyard under the command of the two score surviving Aquilonians. More numerous than both parties combined were the horses, who stood steaming and whickering in the persistent rain.

  Egilrude, making an effort to shrug off his exhaustion and look fearsome, strode out of the entryway into the downpour. “Now,” he barked, “I need a captive who speaks Aquilonian or Nemedian! Who of the prisoners is ready to deal with me?”

  Most of the Corinthians, leathery-skinned veterans, remained stone-faced with eyes downcast as their conqueror strode along their line. One of them, however, an elderly civilian with the look of a farmer or shepherd, could not help flashing a frightened glance up at the marshal. Egilrude stopped alongside him and, seizing his shoulder in an iron grip, jerked the man forward out of line. He fell to all fours on the muddy cobblestones.

  “How many Corinthian fighters are present in these hills?” the marshal bellowed at him. “What are their orders?” He gave the man a kick in the side, sending him sprawling in the mud. “And what is the purpose of this watchtower, raised up here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Please, Captain,” the man gasped in broken Nemedian, “I am but a poor shepherd, come here to sell my stock to the garrison.” He looked from the prisoners to his captor with imploring eyes. “I know nothing of the wars of great empires. Please, Sire, let me go home.”

  Egilrude regarded the man angrily. He thought of his own kinsmen, simple folk like this. Then he thought of the mission, and of his duty to the crown.

  “So, you refuse to cooperate!” he rasped. “These men are soldiers, their solemn vows prevent them from giving me information. But you... you are nothing, a mere peasant! By Erlik, answer me! I will have out of you your truth or your tongue!” At the shepherd’s anguished silence, he turned and snapped his fingers at a group of his men standing in streaming rain. “You two, take him inside! These others can be put in the lock-up below the keep. Secure the gate and drawbridge, post lookouts on the tower, and dispatch riders to guide the legion.”

  * * *

  At dusk the rain still fell, with periodic drummings of thunder and fulminations of lightning. The body of the shepherd, his life expended in torture, had been thrown from the wall into the flooded ditch beyond. Corps Marshall Egilrude paced the tower top with his one surviving adjutant.

  “So there is a western pass through the Karpash Range.” Egilrude peered around at the dimming landscape, whose black ridges were now near invisible, hinted at by grey convolutions of rain and mist. Where the cloud ceiling cut across the base of the mountains, it flickered occasionally with the play of unseen lightnings high above. “An unused pass, and this tower built to guard the descent against southern invaders.”

  “Aye, sir. The shepherd gave us the route in considerable detail, but he had a real fear of the place.” The adjutant sheltered from the rain under a shabby hide watch-cloak he had brought up from below. “Even in his last sufferings the wretch warned us against its haunts and curses. His peasant superstition was strong.”

  “Superstition!” Egilrude laughed bitterly. “Little needs superstition, if the place is haunted by weather like this!” He turned and paced away restlessly. “Even so, it is a valuable discovery. The emperor will be pleased and we will receive great honour.” His eyes searched the dismal cloudscape in vain. It was impossible to tell in what quarter the sun was setting, much less to find any lights or movement in the nearer distance. “What did the peasant say of the armies roving hereabouts?”

  “He swore the Corinthians we met were a full legion, some two thousand strong, with Brythunian auxiliaries among them. They were sent here to fall on the flank of any Aquilonian force that advanced eastward through the plain.”

  “So we surprised them... and they us.” Egilrude knit his brow and pondered deeply. “Even so, we enjoy superior numbers, and they are now leaderless and bereft of cavalry. If we can reunite our host, there will be little they can do against us.”

  “That should not be hard,” the adjutant observed. “We did not leave the main cohorts far behind.”

  “Aye. But in the night, with enemy harriers in the hills... and this devilish rain!” Egilrude snugged his travel cloak tighter, and stood outlined for a moment in a glimmer of lightning that flickered along the face of the mountains. “Those streams we galloped across in pursuit of the Corinthians are now torrents, remember. And it was hours agone that the cursed thunderclouds cut off our semaphores. If it does not clear, days could pass before we can regroup.”

  “Aye... ’tis true, Sire....” The adjutant could find nothing to say against this dismal appraisal.

  “Very well,” Egilrude said. “Since we can see nothing anyway, have a beacon fire built and kept alight all through the night. Display my shield beside it, as a signal to our scouts in the hills. Post an officer to relieve you at midnight, and have him awaken me at dawn.” Timing to the tented trap door, he ducked beneath and retired down the tower stair.

  The rain continued all the next day, but some time during the following night it ceased. Dawn broke ragged through a jumble of retreating clouds, glinting brightly on new, unseasonable snow along the crest of the Karpash peaks. As the sun came to bear on sodden forest slopes, it raised up curtains of steamy mist that caught and veiled its light in unearthly beauty.

  The watchers in the tower had little time to admire this spectacle, however. That same dawn revealed an enemy battalion newly arrived in the village outside their wall, mounting an
attack. They dared not lower the gate and launch a cavalry charge. Instead they sped arrows and hurled stones from the parapet. Meanwhile they flashed semaphores into the hills for reinforcements, all in vain.

  Given the wetness of the forest, fire was useless to the attackers. By mid-morning, however, the moat was drained by means of a ditch gouged deep into the hillside. Pry bars and shed-covered battering rams soon began pecking at the stones beneath the drawbridge, to good effect. By noon the gate had buckled and fallen in, allowing armoured Corinthians to find their way into the keep.

  King Conan and Count Prospero, having taken time to plan and refit before moving their main army southward into Corinthia, encountered scattered resistance in the Karpash foothills. Along the way, they gathered up remnants of the reconnaissance led southward by Marshall Egilrude some days before. The expedition had apparently encountered bad weather in the hills and become scattered; nevertheless, it had engaged a sizeable enemy force and kept the defenders skirmishing for days, thereby helping to clear the way for the king’s advance.

  Most valuable of all was the arrival of one of Egilrude's couriers, diligent and well-briefed. He told them of conditions ahead, and bore a detailed map purporting to show the king’s best route through the Karpash Mountains. The pass was said to be low, direct, and virtually undefended from either direction. It had traditionally been shunned and ill regarded, the man said, due to local supernatural beliefs. These, however, could scarcely pose a threat to a military host armed and provisioned for a major campaign. So King Conan’s army pressed on toward the mountains at its best speed.

  Deep in the hills, as foretold by the courier, the army arrived at a watchtower marking the approach to the pass. This was said to be the farthest point of Egilrude’s march; but if the marshal had proceeded no further, there seemed little likelihood that he would be found alive. The tower with its adjacent court and keep were broken and gutted. The villagers and foreign soldiers had fled at word of Conan’s approach, leaving the place abandoned.

  Conan and Prospero led a company of men inside. Even before entering, the stench of death told them at some distance that the bodies had not been cleared away. The undermined gate had not been repaired, and the drained moat was but a trickling brook underfoot. Bodies of men and horses clogged the courtyard, and a trail of fallen Aquilonian and Corinthian knights led the way up a spiral staircase that was sticky with drying blood.

  At its very top, on the tower parapet, Egilrude’s corpse lay stiff against a rampart. He was decapitated, his head having evidently been kicked into the ashes of a fire at the parapet’s centre. Conan and Prospero gazed briefly down at the remains. Then they turned, inhaled the fresh mountain breeze, and gazed out at the serpent-like column of their army as it marched up the forested valley.

  “A sorry death for a brave soldier,” Conan remarked, scanning the view of serried ridges and the gleaming mountains ahead.

  “Aye, Egilrude was brave,” Prospero concurred, “and impetuous. His zeal in this expedition may well have drawn us into war with Corinthia and Brythunia.”

  “I hope not,” Conan said. “I am not ready to fight them just yet. But I have sent Publius to meet with their emissaries. I trust him to smooth things out in that quarter.”

  “His greatest feat of diplomacy lies ahead of him,” Prospero said, uncorking the wineskin at his side. “Meanwhile, war or no, safe passage or no, we strike southward.” He raised the wineskin to his lips. “Down with Koth!”

  “Aye, and death to Armiro!” Conan heartily agreed, reaching out and accepting the flask from Prospero. “And thanks once again to Egilrude, for finding us a path through the mountains.” He poured a small libation of wine from the flask, choosing the officer’s body rather than his disembodied head to receive the compliment.

  “In finding it, he may have made some enemies hereabouts,” Prospero said, glancing dubiously at the gory head rolled in ashes. “Egilrude was not the most compassionate of men. This empire-building can make them over-eager at times.” With a polite, cautious gesture the count managed to retrieve his flask from Conan. It still had some wine left in it.

  “Even so, he was every inch a soldier.” The king turned from the rampart and strode toward the stair. “I will have him posthumously declared a Hero of the Realm.”

  XVII

  The Ancient Shrine

  Conan treated the march into the Karpash Mountains as a welcome escape from the trials and temptations of government, conquest, and diplomacy. Skirmishing by local Corinthian forces had ceased—understandably, since the defenders would have been foolish to hinder a massive armed force now bent on leaving their territory. The king felt secure in the empire he had carved thus far; Baron Halk, after all, would defend his Nemedian satrapy to the last, and the rest of Conan’s domain was in able enough hands—at least until he could strike his decisive blow against Armiro’s heartland of Koth. And so he regarded his foray into the wilderness as a vacation from royal cares.

  Not that he rested. Rather, he occupied himself daily at the head of the marching column, overseeing and joining in the breaking of trail. Through countless years, brush, windfalls, and avalanche debris had accumulated on the little-used route; now the progress of a well-provisioned army required the cutting of a road up the mountainside. In such tasks Conan’s skill at woodcraft, gained on the rugged Pictish frontier of Aquilonia, equalled that of his most hard-bitten master sergeant.

  At other times he rode beside Amlunia and Delvyn, or with Prospero, who generally stayed apart from the former two. As king he enjoyed free run of the marching column and lacked any leather-voiced superior to hound him relentlessly onward. Yet aside from that, his round did not much differ from that of a common soldier immersed in the relentless, exacting toil of manhandling stock, equipment, and supplies up the steep slopes and rocky canyons of the Karpash Range.

  While Conan laboured, his mind could not avoid matters which had long lain unexamined in neglected byways. Thinking of Zenobia and Conn, his faithful queen and adoring son, he reproached himself that their loving companionship should not be enough to satisfy him. He was prey, he knew, to a primal restlessness, a sense of incompletion and exclusion that sent him off time and again on remote, perilous adventures. Was it only boredom—his lifelong fear of rest, repletion, and the spiritual death that came along with them?

  Gods knew, he despised a fat, easy life! All the worse he dreaded the thought of declining into age, growing weak and complacent—and of letting his throne and his manhood slip away or be snatched away, as he had seen so many other self-crowned kings do. Of late, he reminded himself, the tell-tale warnings had been there for any who had the keenness to note them—the jibes and japes at his authority, the insidious questioning of his strength, and the sniffing and pawing of hungry wolflings like Armiro, eager to unseat a regal lion such as himself.

  Crom knew it was hard enough to snatch a crown, harder yet to cling to it! It had required all his wit and strength, and that of his friends, in all their loyalty, just to keep his place. Now long labours, short sleep, and the sweaty frustration of the mountain trek led him to question: why was such a challenge not enough? —kingship, and the endless work of improving his domain—strengthening Aquilonia and making it a place where art and knowledge could grow, a realm to be hailed in legend as the finest, happiest homeland a folk ever knew? Such was Zenobia’s dream; why could it, and the simple joys of family life, never possess him totally, as they did her?

  And yet he was also aware of his own unsatisfiable, illimitable nature. He wanted every ell of it—yes, and more. He had already tasted rewards, conquests, mortal perils and ecstasies... but were some souls not fated to quest even farther and mount even higher? Since his earliest years, had he not smelled the faint reek of destiny on every wind that buffeted him, however cruelly? Things had ever been... not easy, but possible for him, things that defied other men’s skills and fortunes even to the point of their death.

  Was not he himself, so long ba
thed in the glow of the gods’ favour, at last ripening into a new sort of god? Already he had a god’s power over men, a godlike force and clarity of will, and a virtual divine warrant of success at any task he set his hand to. He was ready now to move from the notion of declaring himself a god for kingly expediency, to that of actually becoming one. At times he could feel the power surging in his inmost soul—not always a bright, benign power; often grim and destructive, like the dark dreams that troubled his sleep of late, and the waking visions that oft-times coloured his sight even on the sunniest day. But power it was, to be sure: a seething fountain of dark, primal power.

  “After all, King Head-chopper,” Delvyn said to him on the trail one day, “men have been made gods before, but no mortal king has yet ruled all the earth. Would not the second achievement automatically entail the first?”

  “Me-seems it would.” Conan, having dismounted from his horse to negotiate a narrow shoulder of ravine with a sharply overhanging rock wall, found it necessary to look up at Delvyn to answer. The dwarf, whose weight and height scarcely added to that of his pony and traps, had remained in the saddle ahead of the others.

  “You speak wisely, Delvyn. Does he not, Amlunia?” The king glanced back to his consort, who led her steed close behind his. She was always a congenial sight with her leather laces undone, as on a sunny morning like this. “Have I the makings of a god, do you think, girl? And must I thrash the whole weary world to prove it?”

  “A god, Master? To be sure! Why else do you think I cry out the names of a dozen strange gods when we lie together?” Fair as Amlunia’s skin was, it scarcely coloured when her pert, innocent mouth issued wanton remarks. “But truly, my king,” she went on, “would you really wish to be a boring old god? My tastes run more to an imp, a djinn, or a fire demon! Or possibly a lizard-skinned incubus!”