The Bloody Crown of Conan

by R. E Howard

  “What do you mean?” he whispered, a cold wind blowing on his spine. The rustling of rotten hangings down nameless black corridors stirred dim fear in his soul.

  She shook her head; she rose, came around the marble table, laid hands on his shoulders. Her eyes were wet and they shone with horror and a desperate yearning that caught at his throat. Instinctively his arm went around her lithe form, and he felt her tremble.

  “Hold me!” she begged. “I am afraid! Oh, I have dreamed of such a man as you. I am not like my people; they are dead men walking forgotten streets; but I am alive. I am warm and sentient. I hunger and thirst and yearn for life. I can not abide the silent streets and ruined halls and dim people of Gazal, though I have never known anything else. That is why I ran away – I yearned for life – ”

  She was sobbing uncontrollably in his arms. Her hair streamed over his face; her fragrance made him dizzy. Her firm body strained against his. She was lying across his knees, her arms locked about his neck. Straining her to his breast he crushed her lips with his. Eyes, lips, cheeks, hair, throat, breasts, he showered with hot kisses, until her sobs changed to panting gasps. His passion was not the violence of a ravisher. The passion that slumbered in her woke in one overpowering wave. The glowing gold ball, struck by his groping fingers, tumbled to the floor and was extinguished. Only the starshine gleamed through the windows.

  Lying in Amalric’s arms on the silk-heaped couch, Lissa opened her heart and whispered her dreams and hopes and aspirations, childish, pathetic, terrible.

  “I’ll take you away,” he muttered. “Tomorrow. You are right. Gazal is a city of the dead; we will seek life and the outer world. It is violent, rough, cruel; but better that than this living death – ”

  The night was broken by a shuddering cry of agony, horror and despair. Its timbre brought out cold sweat on Amalric’s skin. He started upright from the couch, but Lissa clung to him desperately.

  “No, no!” she begged in a frantic whisper. “Do not go! Stay!”

  “But murder is being done!” he exclaimed, fumbling for his sword. The cries seemed to come from across an outer court. Mingled with them there was an indescribable tearing, rending sound. They rose higher and thinner, unbearable in their hopeless agony, then sank away in a long shuddering sob.

  “I have heard men dying on the rack cry out like that!” muttered Amalric, shaking with horror. “What devil’s work is this?”

  Lissa was trembling violently in a frenzy of terror. He felt the wild pounding of her heart.

  “It is the Horror of which I spoke!” she whispered. “The Horror which dwells in the red tower. Long ago it came – some say it dwelt there in the lost years, and returned after the building of Gazal. It devours human beings. Bats fly from the tower. What it is, no one knows, since none have seen it and lived to tell of it. It is a god or a devil. That is why the slaves fled; why the desert people shun Gazal. Many of us have gone into its awful belly. Eventually all will have gone, and it will rule over an empty city, as men say it ruled over the ruins from which Gazal was reared.”

  “Why have the people stayed to be devoured?” he demanded.

  “I do not know,” she whimpered; “they dream – ”

  “Hypnosis,” muttered Amalric; “hypnosis coupled with decay. I saw it in their eyes. This devil has them mesmerized. Mitra, what a foul secret!”

  Lissa pressed her face against his bosom and clung to him.

  “But what are we to do?” he asked uneasily.

  “There is nothing to do,” she whispered. “Your sword would be helpless. Perhaps It will not harm us. It has taken a victim tonight. We must wait like sheep for the butcher.”

  “I’ll be damned if I will!” Amalric exclaimed, galvanized. “We will not wait for morning. We’ll go tonight. Make a bundle of food and drink. I’ll get the horse and camel and bring them to the court outside. Meet me there!”

  Since the unknown monster had already struck, Amalric felt that he was safe in leaving the girl alone for a few minutes. But his flesh crawled as he groped his way down the winding corridor and through the black chambers where the swinging tapestries whispered. He found the beasts huddled nervously together in the court where he had left them. The stallion whinnied anxiously and nuzzled him, as if sensing peril in the breathless night.

  He saddled and bridled and hurriedly led them through the narrow opening onto the street. A few minutes later he was standing in the starlit court. And even as he reached it, he was electrified by an awful scream which rang shudderingly upon the air. It came from the chamber where he had left Lissa.

  He answered that piteous cry with a wild yell; drawing his sword he rushed across the court, hurled himself through the window. The golden ball was glowing again, carving out black shadows in the shrinking corners. Silks lay scattered on the floor. The marble seat was upset. But the chamber was empty.

  A sick weakness overcame Amalric and he staggered against the marble table, the dim light waving dizzily to his sight. Then he was swept by a mad rage. The red tower! There the fiend would bear his victim!

  He darted back across the court, sought the streets and raced toward the tower which glowed with an unholy light under the stars. The streets did not run straight. He cut through silent black buildings and crossed courts whose rank grass waved in the night wind.

  Ahead of him, clustered about the crimson tower, rose a heap of ruins, where decay had eaten more savagely than at the rest of the city. Apparently none dwelt among them. They reeled and tumbled, a crumbling mass of quaking masonry, with the red tower rearing up among them like a poisonous red flower from charnel house ruin.

  To reach the tower he would be forced to traverse the ruins. Recklessly he plunged into the black mass, groping for a door. He found one and entered, thrusting his sword ahead of him. Then he saw such a vista as men sometimes see in fantastic dreams. Far ahead of him stretched a long corridor, visible in a faint unhallowed glow, its black walls hung with strange shuddersome tapestries. Far down it he saw a receding figure – a white, naked, stooped figure, lurching along, dragging something the sight of which filled him with sweating horror. Then the apparition vanished from his sight, and with it vanished the eery glow. Amalric stood in the soundless dark, seeing nothing, hearing nothing; thinking only of a stooped white figure that dragged a limp human down a long black corridor.

  As he groped onward, a vague memory stirred in his brain – the memory of a grisly tale mumbled to him over a dying fire in the skull-heaped devil-devil hut of a black witchman – a tale of a god which dwelt in a crimson house in a ruined city and which was worshipped by darksome cults in dank jungles and along sullen dusky rivers. And there stirred, too, in his mind, an incantation whispered in his ear in awed and shuddering tones, while the night had held its breath, the lions had ceased to roar along the river, and the very fronds had ceased their scraping one against the other.

  Ollam-onga, whispered a dark wind down the sightless corridor. Ollam-onga whispered the dust that ground beneath his stealthy feet. Sweat stood on his skin and the sword shook in his hand. He stole through the house of a god, and fear held him in its bony hand. The house of the god – the full horror of the phrase filled his mind. All the ancestral fears and the fears that reached beyond ancestry and primordial race-memory crowded upon him; horror cosmic and unhuman sickened him. His weak humanity crushed him in its realization as he went through the house of darkness that was the house of a god.

  About him shimmered a glow so faint it was scarcely discernable; he knew that he was approaching the tower itself. Another instant and he groped his way through an arched door and stumbled upon strangely spaced steps. Up them he went, and as he climbed that blind fury which is mankind’s last defense against diabolism and all the hostile forces of the universe, surged in him, and he forgot his fear. Burning with terrible eagerness, he climbed up and up through the thick evil darkness until he came into a chamber lit by a weird glow.

  And before him stood a white naked
figure. Amalric halted, his tongue cleaving to his palate. It was a naked white man, to all appearances, which stood gazing at him, mighty arms folded on an alabaster breast. The features were classic, cleanly carven, with more than human beauty. But the eyes were balls of luminous fire, such as never looked from any human head. In those eyes Amalric glimpsed the frozen fires of the ultimate hells, touched by awful shadows.

  Then before him the form began to grow dim in outline; to waver – with a terrible effort the Aquilonian burst the bonds of silence and spoke a cryptic and awful incantation. And as the frightful words cut the silence, the white giant halted – froze – again his outlines stood out clear and bold against the golden background.

  “Now fall on, damn you!” cried Amalric hysterically. “I have bound you into your human shape! The black wizard spoke truly! It was the master word he gave me! Fall on, Ollam-onga – till you break the spell by feasting on my heart, you are no more than a man like me!”

  With a roar that was like the gust of a black wind, the creature charged. Amalric sprang aside from the clutch of those hands whose strength was more than that of the whirlwind. A single taloned finger, spread wide and catching in his tunic, ripped the garment from him like a rotten rag as the monster plunged by. But Amalric, nerved to more than human quickness by the horror of the fight, wheeled and drove his sword through the thing’s back, so that the point stood out a foot from the broad breast.

  A fiendish howl of agony shook the tower; the monster whirled and rushed at Amalric, but the youth sprang aside and raced up the stairs to the dais. There he wheeled and catching up a marble seat, hurled it down upon the horror that was lumbering up the stairs. Full in the face the massive missile struck, carrying the fiend back down the steps. He rose, an awful sight, streaming blood and again essayed the stairs. In desperation Amalric lifted a jade bench whose weight wrenched a groan of effort from him, and hurled it.

  Beneath the impact of the hurtling bulk Ollam-onga pitched back down the stair and lay among the marble shards, which were flooded with his blood. With a last desperate effort, he heaved himself up on his hands, eyes glazing, and throwing back his bloody head, voiced an awful cry. Amalric shuddered and recoiled from the abysmal horror of that scream. And it was answered. From somewhere in the air above the tower a faint medley of fiendish cries came back like an echo. Then the mangled white figure went limp among the blood-stained shards. And Amalric knew that one of the gods of Kush was no more. With the thought came blind, unreasoning horror.

  In a fog of terror he rushed down the stair, shrinking from the thing that lay staring in the floor. The night seemed to cry out against him, aghast at the sacrilege. Reason, exultant over his triumph, was submerged in a flood of cosmic fear.

  As he put foot on the head of the steps, he halted short. Up from the darkness Lissa came to him, her white arms outstretched, her eyes pools of horror.

  “Amalric!” it was a haunting cry. He crushed her in his arms.

  “I saw It,” she whimpered – “dragging a dead man through the corridor. I screamed and fled; then when I returned, I heard you cry out, and knew you had gone to search for me in the red tower – ”

  “And you came to share my fate,” his voice was almost inarticulate. Then as she tried to peer in trembling fascination past him, he covered her eyes with his hands and turned her about. Better that she should not see what lay on the crimson floor. As he half led, half carried her down the shadowed stairs, a glance over his shoulder showed him that a naked white figure lay no longer lay among the broken marble. The incantation had bound Ollam-onga into his human form in life, but not in death. Blindness momentarily assailed Amalric, then, galvanized into frantic haste, he hurried Lissa down the stairs and through the dark ruins.

  He did not slacken pace until they reached the street where the camel and stallion huddled against one another. Quickly he mounted the girl on the camel, and he swung up on the stallion. Taking the lead-line, he headed straight for the broken wall. A few minutes later he breathed gustily. The open air of the desert cooled his blood; it was free of the scent of decay and hideous antiquity.

  There was a small water-pouch hanging from his saddle bow. They had no food, and his sword was in the chamber in the red tower. He had not dared touch it. Without food and unarmed, they faced the desert; but its peril seemed less grim than the horror of the city behind them.

  Without speaking they rode. Amalric headed south; somewhere in that direction there was a water hole. Just at dawn, as they mounted a crest of sand, he looked back toward Gazal, unreal in the pink light. And he stiffened and Lissa cried out. Out of a breach in the wall rode seven horsemen; their steeds were black, and the riders were cloaked in black from head to foot. There had been no horses in Gazal. Horror swept over Amalric, and turning, he urged their mounts on.

  The sun rose, red, and then gold, and then a ball of white beaten flame. On and on the fugitives pressed, reeling with heat and fatigue, blinded by the glare. They moistened their lips with water from time to time. And behind at an even pace, rode seven black dots. Evening began to fall, and the sun reddened and lurched toward the desert rim. And a cold hand clutched Amalric’s heart. The riders were closing in. As darkness came on, so came the black riders. Amalric glanced at Lissa, and a groan burst from him. His stallion stumbled and fell. The sun had gone down, the moon was blotted out suddenly by a bat-shaped shadow. In the utter darkness the stars glowed red, and behind him Amalric heard a rising rush as of an approaching wind. A black speeding clump bulked against the night, in which glinted sparks of awful light.

  “Ride, girl!” he cried despairingly. “Go on – save yourself; it is me they want!”

  For answer she slid down from the camel and threw her arms about him.

  “I will die with you!”

  Seven black shapes loomed against the stars, racing like the wind. Under the hoods shone balls of evil fire; flesh jaw bones seemed to clack together. Then there was an interruption; a horse swept past Amalric and the horse, a vague bulk in the unnatural darkness. There was the sound of an impact as the unknown steed caromed among the oncoming shapes. A horse screamed frenziedly, and a bull like voice bellowed in a strange tongue. From somewhere in the night a clamor of yells answered.

  There was some sort of violent action taking place. Horse’s hoofs stamped and clattered, there was the impact of savage blows, and the same stentorian voice was cursing lustily. Then the moon abruptly came out and lit a fantastic scene.

  A man on a giant horse whirled, slashed and smote apparently at thin air, and from another direction swept a wild horde of riders, their curved swords flashing in the moon light. Away over the crest of a rise seven black figures were vanishing, their cloaks floating out like the wings of bats.

  Amalric was swamped by wild men who leaped from their horses and swarmed around him. Sinewy naked arms pinioned him, fierce brown hawk-like faces snarled at him. Lissa screamed. Then the attackers were thrust right and left as the man on the great horse reined through the crowd. He bent from his saddle, glared closely at Amalric.

  “The devil!” he roared; “Amalric the Aquilonian!”

  “Conan!” Amalric exclaimed bewilderedly. “Conan! Alive!”

  “More alive than you seem to be,” answered the other. “By Crom, man you look as if all the devils in this desert had been hunting you through the night. What things were those pursuing you? I was riding around the camp my men had pitched, to make sure no enemies were in hiding, when the moon went out like a candle, and then I heard sounds of flight. I rode toward the sounds, and by Crom, I was among those devils before I knew what was happening. I had my sword in my hand and I laid about me – by Crom, their eyes blazed like fire in the dark! I know my edge bit them, but when the moon came out, they were gone like a puff of wind. Were they men or fiends?”

  “Ghouls sent up from Hell,” shuddered Amalric. “Ask me no more; some things are not to be discussed.”

  Conan did not press the matter, nor did he loo
k incredulous. His beliefs included night fiends, ghosts, hobgoblins and dwarfs.

  “Trust you to find a woman, even in a desert,” he said, glancing at Lissa, who had crept to Amalric and was clinging close to him, glancing fearfully at the wild figures which hemmed them in.

  “Wine!” roared Conan. “Bring flasks! Here!” He seized a leather flask from those thrust out to him, and placed it in Amalric’s hand. “Give the girl a swig, and drink some yourself,” he advised. “Then we’ll put you on horses and take you to the camp. You need food, rest and sleep. I can see that.”

  A richly caparisoned horse was brought, rearing and prancing, and willing hands helped Amalric into the saddle; then the girl was handed up to him, and they moved off southward, surrounded by the wiry brown riders in their picturesque semi-nakedness. Conan rode ahead, humming a riding song of the mercenaries.

  “Who is he?” whispered Lissa, her arms about her lover’s neck; he was holding her on the saddle in front of him.

  “Conan, the Cimmerian,” muttered Amalric. “The man I wandered with in the desert after the defeat of the mercenaries. These are the men who struck him down. I left him lying under their spears, apparently dead. Now we meet him obviously in command of, and respected by them.”

  “He is a terrible man,” she whispered.

  He smiled. “You never saw a white-skinned barbarian before. He is a wanderer and a plunderer, and a slayer, but he has his own code of morals. I don’t think we have anything to fear from him.”

  In his heart he was not sure. In a way, it might be said that he had forfeited Conan’s comradeship when he had ridden away into the desert, leaving the Cimmerian senseless on the ground. But he had not known that Conan was not dead. Doubt haunted Amalric. Savagely loyal to his companions, the Cimmerian’s wild nature saw no reason why the rest of the world should not be plundered. He lived by the sword. And Amalric suppressed a shudder as he thought of what might chance did Conan desire Lissa.