Dimly, Conan remembered the coldly glittering thing he had found in his hand upon awakening from the prophetic dream., in the silence of his royal bedchamber – the jeweled talisman he had worn on a silver chain about his neck ever since, through all his subsequent adventures.
The strength had drained from his huge limbs, but he still bore within him the unquenchable vitality that had brought him through so many deadly perils in the course of his long and action-filled life. Now, in this hour of his greatest peril on earth, he called upon his hidden resources.
One massive, scarred hand rose to his throat, pulled the crystal phoenix out from beneath his mail shirt, and broke the chain with a jerk.
As a black vise closed about his brain, he dropped the talisman. Dimly, he heard it tinkle on the stone.
With his last ounce of consciousness, as his mind spun into a whirling void, he brought his booted heel down upon the amulet and crushed it into powder. Then he pitched forward into blackness.
CHAPTER TWENTY
GODS OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS
And when you face the Kraken's might,
that on the sacrifice has fed,
Stand fast, where other men have fled,
and let the crystal phoenix smite!
- The Visions of Epemitreus
From some vast distance, across nighted gulfs of cold and darkness, a far, faint voice was calling him . . .
As consciousness returned to Conan's brain, sensation filtered back into his body. He felt horny hands clutching him and rough stone scraping against his dragging legs. He gasped for air, choked, and opened bewildered eyes, to find himself supported between the wheezing hulk of Sigurd Redbeard on one side and the turbaned form of Goram Singh on the other.
'Set me down, in Crom's name,' he grunted. 'I can walk by myself.'
They stopped and helped him to stand. 'I think so, anyway’ he grumbled, as his numb limbs folded under him. He would have pitched forward down the slope of the pyramid if his comrades had not caught him and propped him up again.
They sat him down on one of the steps of the stone stair that led up the face of the pyramid. Conan felt a million hot needles in his limbs as circulation returned. He looked around, gathering his faculties. .
A huge, strange silence reigned over the scene. His men had dragged him halfway down the stair to the base of the pyramid. At the base, ranks of guards were drawn up. But the small brown warriors in glittering glass armor paid no heed to the pirates. With staring eyes and expressions of awe and terror, they gaped upward.
Turning to look back and up over his shoulder, Oman felt his marrow freeze. High above them all, over the temple atop the black-and-scarlet pyramid., a strange force pulsed., flickered, and grew.
'It came from the jewel you crushed underfoot,' muttered Sigurd,, casting an uneasy glance upward. 'Mitra only knows what's happening up yonder, but we all seemed to hear an inward voice, warning us to get away, and that right speedily. Sink me for a lubber, but all this devilish magic and witchery gets a simple fighting man down!'
Conan chuckled. Far above, a diamond-like dust of sparkling, shimmering light rose in gusts and whorls from the pulverized remains of the crystal talisman. The black cloud of Xotli still hung above the altar stone, its tendrils of dark, smoky stuff stirring and questing uneasily, as if it sensed the approach of a deadly foe.
The spinning motes of light rose and brightened, becoming a whirling galaxy of blazing brilliance. Spiral arms scintillated against the dark mass of Xotli like millions of stars against the dark of night.
Conan shivered, as if his hair had been ruffled by the icy winds that blow between the stars. A shape of light took form, sprang erect., and folded Xotli into a many-tentacled embrace. Mitra - for somehow Conan knew that this was indeed the god - spoke. The thunder of a thousand tempests boomed and rolled about the square of the pyramid. The earth shook, and the pyramid itself moved under the pirates' feet, bringing down a mass of masonry. With a deafening roar, a large section of the square caved in and dropped out of sight, carrying hundreds of shrieking little brown soldiers with it and sending up a blinding, choking cloud of dust. Conan realized that this must be the collapse of the cavern of the dragons.
'Get out!' roared Conan.
He lurched to his feet and stumbled down the remaining steps to the bottom of the stair. After him poured the howling pirates, those already armed in front. But, at the bottom, they found no foe to face them. The ranks of the Antillian soldiery had dissolved in rout. Dropping their glass-bladed weapons, the brown warriors were racing for the gates of the city, throwing aside their crystal helms and mail shirts to run faster. Only their dwindling backs were to be seen, and those not for long.
'Grab these weapons!' yelled Conan. 'Then to the harbor!'
Far above, the gods of light and darkness were locked in battle. Fiery blasts of lightning crackled from the whirling, starry form of light, about which tentacles of dark smoke also writhed and clutched.
The earth quivered underfoot. Across the square, the huge gray Vestibule of the Gods came crashing down in a slow landslide of rubble, soon hidden from sight in a vast cloud of dust. Like a giant tree felled by a woodman, a tall, tapering tower leaned, buckled, and slammed to earth, making the ground beneath the pirates' feet jump.
Conan led his men on a jog-trot through the streets of Ptahuacan, paying no heed to the few Antillians they passed. The latter, in a frenzy of terror, likewise ignored the escaping captives in their own frantic efforts to save themselves.
'This way!' roared Conan. "To the harbor, before the whole damned city falls on us! ‘
Behind them, the shadows of afternoon lengthened in the pyramid square, now and then lit by a blaze of brilliance brighter than the noonday sun. The sounds of the supernatural combat crackled, boomed, roared, growled, and thundered. Before shafts of intolerable light, the black cloud seemed to fold in upon itself. It shrank, dissipated - and died.
The tension of supernatural forces that held it together was released. As these forces failed, the city shook like the head of a beaten drum, and more buildings crumbled. The square of the pyramid vanished. In its place, a ball of fire, many times brighter than the sun, blazed for an instant and was gone with a thunderclap that temporarily deafened every human being within the city.
A stupendous column of thick, black smoke arose over the broken city, mushrooming upward. The starry lightnings of the god of light played for an instant about its top like a supernal crown. Then these, too faded, and the smoky column began to disperse, mingling with the gray cloud of dust that hung over the city. Here and there> darker smoke rose from a burning house.
Little by little, Ptahuacan crept back to life. Its people trickled back from the countryside. But, on their return, they found a surprise.
Most of the priesthood had either been killed in the fall of the temples or had fled out of the city. Within Ptahuacan, during the night and day following the catastrophe, only one man remained at the head of any strong grouping. This was Metemphoc, the master thief.
While the city was nearly empty, his well-disciplined corps of thieves seized the remaining large buildings and the stores of arms. The few priests they found, they slew. The dungeons were thrown open, releasing not only convicted felons of Metemphoc's band but also hundreds of ordinary Antillians who, on one pretext or another, had been jailed to await sacrifice to Xotli. Many of these allied themselves with Metemphoc, although others refused for fear of the priests and their god, or preferred to wait to see which side would prove the stronger.
The priests who had fled the city gathered a small force of warriors still faithful to them and tried to fight their way back into the metropolis. But Conan's band, now fully armed, took them in the rear and sent then fleeing again.
So, under the leadership of fat, crafty old Metemphoc, Ptahuacan settled down to its huge task of repair and rebuilding. The master thief might not prove an ideal ruler; but he could hardly do worse than the priesthood that had held t
he land in its fearsome grip for so many centuries. And so to this last, lone outpost of the great civilization of old Atlantis, some little time of peace and quiet came.
And perhaps from some unknown realm beyond the stars, the ghosts of those old gods who had reigned in the skies above Atlantis in ages gone, and who had turned upon the island continent at last and plunged Her into the depths of the great, green sea when her children abandoned them to worship dark Xotli - perhaps those dead gods saw, and smiled, and - with what little power that remained to them - blessed.
Crom, but it felt good to have a solid deck underfoot again - even a cursed strange deck like this one! After the fall of Ptahuacan, a month and a half before, Conan had eaten and drunk deep. Worn to exhaustion by his struggles through the underworld of Ptahuacan and then in the city itself, he had slept a whole day and two nights through. But in the days that followed, as he loafed and lazed, swapping yarns with his men and eating and drinking enough for three, his old strength crept back.
Now, as dawn painted the East with strokes of crimson and gold, he strode the gilded planking of the dragon ship and drank deeply of the clear, cold, salt breeze, which lifted the gray fog from the green face of the Western Main. He felt a vast contentment. Ha! Old, was he? Time to creep beneath the covers and let mumbling physickers take over, to glide him painlessly into the afterworld?
He snorted. He could still give the woman Catlaxoc a night that left her limp but happy. The old urge to adventure, the old wanderlust, still filled his breast. Enough vitality lingered in his gaunt, towering form for another adventure or two, at least!
He slapped the gilded rail with a firm hand., as a man might clap the flank of a lusty stallion. One last adventure ...
He gazed about him. With the unerring eye of an old freebooter, Conan had seized the best ship in the harbor when he had burst into the waterfront with his gasping, staggering pack of dust-gray pirates at his heels and half the city falling in ruin behind him. He had herded them aboard this superb craft, the deadliest fighting ship he had ever seen. She had fought the Red Lion to a standstill when, months before, she had loomed out of the gray mists like some monster from earth's dawn. He chuckled at the thought of the consternation the weird Atlantean craft would cause back in the Barachas.
Not that his appropriation of this craft, which he named the Winged Dragon,, had been without difficulties. The pirates, conservative like all sailors, had disliked the strange rig. Why not, they said, pump out the beached hull of the Red Lion and put her back into service? But Conan discovered that the Red Lion had been too badly damaged to repair and refit without the aid of a shipyard of the lands across the ocean. Her hull had been burnt through in places; her masts and sails and rigging were gone and could be replaced only with enormous effort. It was more practical to salvage her stores of weapons and materials and transfer them to the Winged Dragon.
Then many days of practice were needed to familiarize his crew with the exotic rig and to make the changes in the ship that Conan decided upon. Morever, the Winged Dragon was a galley; therefore she required a larger crew than a sailing vessel of the same size. Luckily, there were plenty of adventurous youths among the Antillians who signed on as rowers,
Sigurd Redbeard clumped up the ladder to the poop deck, hawking and spitting. 'Ha, Lion!' he grunted. 'Sleep well?'
'Like a dead man.’
Sigurd shrugged and glanced back to where the seven isles of Antillia were hidden by the morning mists. 'There be dead men back there a-plenty,' he sadi. 'By the green beard of Lir and Dagon's fish tail, I do admire the way ye stage a prison break!'
'What mean you ?' demanded Conan.
'Naught, naught! But a man must needs respect the way ye spring your comrades out of a tight spot - if ye have to lay half the city in ruins to do it.'
Conan laughed harshly. 'Aye! And I'd gladly lay the other half in ruins to have an old walrus like you beside me.'
Sigurd sighed. ' 'Tis good of ye to say so, Amra. Me, I'm no longer so limber as once I was.' He glanced at the peaks of Antillia, rising out of the mist. 'We might have done worse than take up Metemphoc's offer, to let him hire us as his mercenary army.'
Conan grinned and shook his head. 'We former kings get proud as the devil. We won't serve other men when we can be masters ourselves.'
The sun was up, filling the sky with brightness. White gulls circled, squealing, and blue waves slapped the newly tarred and painted hull of the Winged Dragon. Conan took another deep breath. Beside him, Sigurd squinted against the brightness of dawn and glanced at his scared, gray-bearded comrade.
'Whither now, Lion?' he queried. 'Back to the Bara-chas, or to harry the coasts of Stygia and Shem?'
Conan shook his head. 'This ship is not made to cross the great gap of ocean. With all these rowers to feed and water, we'd never make it.'
'That green galley we first met did.'
'Aye, but I'm no sorcerer, to summon up a crew of spirits to ply the oars.'
Conan pondered. Old Metemphoc had told him much. Even farther west, at the very rim of the world, the old thief had confided, lay a vast new continent. Mayapan, the Atlanteans and their Antillian descendants had called it. They raided its coasts for gold, emeralds, and virgin copper; for red-skinned slaves and curious birds with gorgeous plumage; for tiger-like cats whose pelts were marked with black rosettes on tawny gold. Here, too, were barbarian states founded by renegades from Atlantis and Antillia, where the cults of the Giant Serpent and of the Saber-toothed Tiger carried on their ferocious rivalry in a welter of human sacrifice and abominable worship.
A new world, he thought; a world of trackless jungles and spacious plains, of towering mountains and hidden lakes, where immense rivers writhed like serpents of molten silver through depths of emerald jungle, where unknown peoples worshiped strange and fearsome gods . ..
What sights and adventures might not await him in the remotenesses of Mayapan? Conan wondered. Metemphoc had called him 'Kukulcan,' but whether this was a sobriquet in the Antillian tongue, or a corruption of 'Conan Cimmerian' or some such phrase, Conan never knew. If he went to this new world, where people had never seen bearded men with weapons of steel and glass - why, he mieht conauer another vast empire, be worshiped as a god, bring bits of civilization of the old world to the new, and become the hero of legends that would endure ten thousand years...
'Crom knows!' he snorted. 'Let's break our fast and talk on this matter. Saving the world surely gives one an appetite! ‘
They went below. A few hours later, the great ship, which the folk of Mayapan were to call Quetzdcoatl -meaning 'winged (or feathered) serpent' in their uncouth tongue - lifted anchor. She sailed south and then, skirting the Antillian Isles, into the unknown West.
But whither, the ancient chronicle, which endeth here., sayeth not.
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