On the raised platform in the bows stood a slim figure whose white skin glistened in dazzling contrast to the glossy ebon hides about it. Bêlit, without a doubt. Conan drew the shaft to his ear – then some whim or qualm stayed his hand and sent the arrow through the body of a tall plumed spearman beside her.
Hand over hand the pirate galley was overhauling the lighter ship. Arrows fell in a rain about the Argus, and men cried out. All the steersmen were down, pin-cushioned, and Tito was handling the massive sweep alone, gasping black curses, his braced legs knots of straining thews. Then with a sob he sank down, a long shaft quivering in his sturdy heart. The Argus lost headway and rolled in the swell. The men shouted in confusion, and Conan took command in characteristic fashion.
'Up, lads!' he roared, loosing with a vicious twang of cord. 'Grab your steel and give these dogs a few knocks before they cut our throats! Useless to bend your backs any more: they’ll board us ere we can row another fifty paces!'
In desperation the sailors abandoned their oars and snatched up their weapons. It was valiant, but useless. They had time for one flight of arrows before the pirate was upon them. With no one at the sweep, the Argus rolled broadside, and the steel-beaked prow of the raider crashed into her amidships. Grappling-irons crunched into the side. From the lofty gunwales, the black pirates drove down a volley of shafts that tore through the quilted jackets of the doomed sailormen, then sprang down spear in hand to complete the slaughter. On the deck of the pirate lay half a dozen bodies, an earnest of Conan’s archery.
The fight on the Argus was short and bloody. The stocky sailors, no match for the tall barbarians, were cut down to a man. Elsewhere the battle had taken a peculiar turn. Conan, on the high-pitched poop, was on a level with the pirate’s deck. As the steel prow slashed into the Argus, he braced himself and kept his feet under the shock, casting away his bow. A tall corsair, bounding over the rail, was met in midair by the Cimmerian’s great sword, which sheared him cleanly through the torso, so that his body fell one way and his legs another. Then, with a burst of fury that left a heap of mangled corpses along the gunwales, Conan was over the rail and on the deck of the Tigress.
In an instant he was the centre of a hurricane of stabbing spears and lashing clubs. But he moved in a blinding blur of steel. Spears bent on his armour or swished empty air, and his sword sang its death-song. The fighting-madness of his race was upon him, and with a red mist of unreasoning fury wavering before his blazing eyes, he cleft skulls, smashed breasts, severed limbs, ripped out entrails, and littered the deck like a shambles with a ghastly harvest of brains and blood.
Invulnerable in his armour, his back against the mast, he heaped mangled corpses at his feet until his enemies gave back panting in rage and fear. Then as they lifted their spears to cast them, and he tensed himself to leap and die in the midst of them, a shrill cry froze the lifted arms. They stood like statues, the black giants poised for the spear-casts, the mailed swordsman with his dripping blade.
Bêlit sprang before the blacks, beating down their spears. She turned toward Conan, her bosom heaving, her eyes flashing. Fierce fingers of wonder caught at his heart. She was slender, yet formed like a goddess: at once lithe and voluptuous. Her only garment was a broad silken girdle. Her white ivory limbs and the ivory globes of her breasts drove a beat of fierce passion through the Cimmerian’s pulse, even in the panting fury of battle. Her rich black hair, black as a Stygian night, fell in rippling burnished clusters down her supple back. Her dark eyes burned on the Cimmerian.
She was untamed as a desert wind, supple and dangerous as a she-panther. She came close to him, heedless of his great blade, dripping with the blood of her warriors. Her supple thigh brushed against it, so close she came to the tall warrior. Her red lips parted as she stared up into his somber menacing eyes.
'Who are you?' she demanded. 'By Ishtar, I have never seen your like, though I have ranged the sea from the coasts of Zingara to the fires of the ultimate south. Whence come you?'
'From Argos,' he answered shortly, alert for treachery. Let her slim hand move toward the jewelled dagger in her girdle, and a buffet of his open hand would stretch her senseless on the deck. Yet in his heart he did not fear; he had held too many women, civilised or barbaric, in his iron-thewed arms, not to recognise the light that burned in the eyes of this one.
'You are no soft Hyborian!' she exclaimed. 'You are fierce and hard as a grey wolf. Those eyes were never dimmed by city lights; those thews were never softened by life amid marble walls.'
'I am Conan, a Cimmerian,' he answered.
To the people of the exotic climes, the north was a mazy half-mythical realm, peopled with ferocious blue-eyed giants who occasionally descended from their icy fastnesses with torch and sword. Their raids had never taken them as far south as Shem, and this daughter of Shem made no distinction between Æsir, Vanir or Cimmerian. With the unerring instinct of the elemental feminine, she knew she had found her lover, and his race meant naught, save as it invested him with the glamor of far lands.
'And I am Bêlit,' she cried, as one might say, 'I am queen!'
'Look at me, Conan!' She threw wide her arms. 'I am Bêlit, queen of the black coast. Oh, tiger of the North, you are cold as the snowy mountains which bred you. Take me and crush me with your fierce love! Go with me to the ends of the earth and the ends of the sea! I am a queen by fire and steel and slaughter – be thou my king!'
His eyes swept the blood-stained ranks, seeking expressions of wrath or jealousy. He saw none. The fury was gone from the ebon faces. He realised that to these men Bêlit was more than a woman: a goddess whose will was unquestioned. He glanced at the Argus, wallowing in the crimson sea-wash, heeling far over, her decks awash, held up by the grappling-irons. He glanced at the blue-fringed shore, at the far green hazes of the ocean, at the vibrant figure which stood before him; and his barbaric soul stirred within him. To quest these shining blue realms with that white-skinned young tiger-cat – to love, laugh, wander and pillage –
'I’ll sail with you,' he grunted, shaking the red drops from his blade.
'Ho, N’Yaga!' her voice twanged like a bowstring. 'Fetch herbs and dress your master’s wounds! The rest of you bring aboard the plunder and cast off.'
As Conan sat with his back against the poop-rail, while the old shaman attended to the cuts on his hands and limbs, the cargo of the ill-fated Argus was quickly shifted aboard the Tigress and stored in small cabins below deck. Bodies of the crew and of fallen pirates were cast overboard to the swarming sharks, while wounded blacks were laid in the waist to be bandaged. Then the grappling-irons were cast off, and as the Argus sank silently into the blood-flecked waters, the Tigress moved off southward to the rhythmic clack of the oars.
As they moved out over the glassy blue deep, Bêlit came to the poop. Her eyes were burning like those of a she-panther in the dark as she tore off her ornaments, her sandals and her silken girdle and cast them at his feet. Rising on tiptoe, arms stretched upward, a quivering line of naked white, she cried to the desperate horde: 'Wolves of the blue sea, behold ye now the dance – the mating-dance of Bêlit, whose fathers were kings of Askalon!'
And she danced, like the spin of a desert whirlwind, like the leaping of a quenchless flame, like the urge of creation and the urge of death. Her white feet spurned the blood-stained deck and dying men forgot death as they gazed frozen at her. Then, as the white stars glimmered through the blue velvet dusk, making her whirling body a blur of ivory fire, with a wild cry she threw herself at Conan’s feet, and the blind flood of the Cimmerian’s desire swept all else away as he crushed her panting form against the black plates of his corseleted breast.
Conan the Rebel
Poul Anderson
I
The Vision of the axe
Night lay heavy on Stygia. Where the great river emptied into its bay, no whisper of wind came off the ocean beyond. The sky was hazed, so that only a few stars glimmered in sight above Khemi, and it was as if they w
ere embers of that furnace heat which the stones of the city still radiated after day had long departed. Outer walls lifted sheer to hold off any coolness the sea might have sent, even as they held off the world from the secret doings within. Around those iron-gated cliffs, watchtowers reared higher yet, their battlements like teeth bared at heaven. The streets beneath were guts of blackness, silent, deserted, save where a sacred python rustled scales dryly over the paving in search of prey, or footfalls padded of someone from whom it slithered back with a hiss of alarm.
The air was otherwise where the magician Tothapis slept. In a crypt among those carved deep out of bedrock, slaves toiled at a giant wheel driving fan blades in a shaft. The breath they sent aloft lent its chill to the sultriness and incense of their lord's bedchamber. The whir made an undertone for the slumber-music, a carillon played by that same machinery. Though his mattress was hard, as became a man of austerity, it was stuffed with the dresses of sacrificial maidens, while his gown and sheets were of silk, ebon-hued, so fine that the fabric might have been spun by spiders.
Nevertheless, on this night he slept ill, tossing and muttering. Abruptly he woke, sat up, gasped. Four sable candles at the corners of his bed, man-tall, mounted in the leg bones of behemoths, flared up and went out.
Such a sign had not come to him before in his centuries of life, he knew what it portended. He scrambled free of the top sheet
with which he had been struggling and sought the floor. There he prostrated himself, kissed the carpet, writhed serpentine. 'Ho, Setesh!' he shrilled. 'Anet neter aa, neb keku fentut amon!'
Only then did he dare raise his head and stare before him. Amidst the blindness now prevailing, he saw a pale yellow glow; amidst the deafness, he heard a susurration that came out of no human mouth. The glow strengthened, grew, became the image of a huge golden-coloured snake coiled in a circle from floor to high ceiling. By its light he could dimly see the hieroglyphs on every free surface in the room. The sibilance became a monstrous rushing noise, like that of the River Styx in its cataracts far to the south-east. Tothapis grovelled again and adored his god.
The noise formed language: 'Speak, man. Declare who I am.'
'You are Set,' the wizard intoned, 'lord of the universe, whom the Stygians worship before all others.'
'Declare how you yourself do serve me.'
Words torrented forth: 'In every way that man may serve That which was before he was, and will be when he is no more. I am a priest in your temple, and if I am not its chief hierophant, the reason is that I can further your cause the better in the Black Ring of magicians whereof I am head. My spells confound the infidels who acknowledge you not, my counsel strengthens the hand of the king against them. Soon, soon they will learn from us how terrible is your wrath, O Set. True, my service is but the least and humblest of tributes to your darkling glory. You have made my days and my nights long in the world; you have given me power over both men and demons; foremost of what you have granted has been an ever more profound understanding of those mysteries that are of your essence. And tonight you have revealed yourself to your slave. What else dare I ask? What else dare I offer in return, O Set?'
'Rise, man. Behold me. Hearken.'
Tothapis got to his feet and stood rigid, arms held straight out, palms down. The reptile head gaped before him, tongue aflicker between fangs, but the lidless eyes unmoving in their stare. 'Heed me well,' he heard. 'You have called me lord of the universe, but you know how many and diverse are the gods of earth, sea, sky, and underworld. You know how few of them own me their master, how
few of their peoples look on me as aught but a devil. Mightiest of my rivals is Mitra of the Sun, who would fain tread me underfoot.'
'Cursed be Mitra and the Hyborians that follow him,' Tothapis mumbled.
'Cursed indeed,' answered the apparition. 'Yet through chronicles and through more arcane lore you know its strength from of old. I send this sending unto you to warn of a new danger. It menaces yourself, your king, your nation, and your very god. This day a man and a woman have joined. Never will any child come of their union; but already, all unwitting, they have begotten a destiny. Can it not be slain in womb or cradle, it will fast grow gigantic, and in its hands will be a war axe that hews down many -that will at last, in years to come, strike at the pillars of mine own sanctuary.'
Tothapis, who had gazed with calm upon hellish things, shuddered. If Set could not smite down a pair of mortals, but must instead call for mortal help, then unimaginable Powers were at strife in the world beyond the world.
'Sorcerer, fear not,' hissed the voice. 'What is to happen must happen on earth alone, for if the great gods intervened, that could bring on the Last Strife. Yet I, who am Stealth-in-the-Night, bear to you the foreknowledge you will need; and you will have your wonted cunning, your magic and monsters and demons, at your beck, against a foe who remains ignorant of what he himself portends. He is but flesh and blood, however powerful the flesh and fiery the blood. Were it not for this chance encounter with the woman, he would live and die an obscure rover - as you can still make him die.
'Watch, and learn well.'
Within the circle of the serpent's coil, an image came to being. It was as if Tothapis winged out through the dome of his house to a mile above Khemi. He saw the city hunched by the gleam of river and bay and ocean, he saw cultivated hinterlands like a grey tapestry silver-threaded by canals and spotted with humble villages. Upward his view receded, until Stygia lay stretched immense along the stream that was its northern boundary. Beyond reached the farmlands and grasslands of Shem, southward desert,
and then the jungles and velds of Rush. At this height he discerned no trace of man's works.
Dizzyingly swift, his vision swept down the Kushite seaboard. Rain forests brooded over surf; swamps and rivers sheened; as the view descended, he glimpsed open spaces where the black primitives had burnt off woods for their plantings. Hawk-like, sight swooped westward across the water.
Tothapis saw a ship. She was a fighting craft, a lean black galley with a raised deck from stem to stern. Below were benches, and below them a main deck covering the hold. At her prow gleamed a gilt image, the snarling head of a tiger. Shields hung on the low rails. The forty oars were inboard, for a wind bellied out her single square sail and drove her north in long, feline bounds across white-caps. Most of the crew were at rest, their sleeping bags laid on decks or benches. As his sight drew close, Tothapis saw that they were Negroes, strong young men who wore little clothing or none but who showed battle scars and kept weapons ready at hand.
His view ranged astern. A small poop deck formed the roof of what must be the captain's cabin. On it stood a white man and woman. The man's right hand grasped the tiller of a steering oar, his left arm lay around her waist, and she caressed him in her turn. They were easy to see, for here the sky was altogether clear, thronged by stars and girdled by a brilliant Milky Way, while phosphorescence went swirling over the waves.
Tothapis was celibate, lest he lose energy to the ordinary things on earth. But as he looked upon this woman, the air whistled between his teeth. She was young, thinly clad though the sea wind must be cold, a dirk at her hip and a silver headband her sole accessories of dress. Raven-dark hair blew loose, well-nigh down to her waist. Somehow the starlit vision of Tothapis showed colours; he saw that her eyes were big and lustrous brown beneath level brows, her complexion olive, her lips full and vivid. That, together with the finely sculptured curve of nose and the high cheekbones, proclaimed her a Shemite. She was taller than was usual for her race, and never had he beheld such a figure - large yet firm bosom, slim-waisted, long-limbed, no trace of softness underlying those curves. When she moved, she moved like a panther.
'Here is Bêlit,' the voice of Set told him. 'Female, she has nonetheless turned her savages into the most fearsome pirate crew that ever harried the Black Coast; and now they are beating north of Stygia. This day she attacked a vessel whereon Conan of Cimmeria was travelling. She took it at heavy
cost, since he fought against her. As he did, love flamed between them across the sword-blades, and they made peace; but together they would make war ... Take your heed off her, you fool! Observe Conan.'
Tothapis hastened to obey. The helmsman was also young, albeit at first glance he seemed older. In height and bulk he over-topped most men. The play of muscles in an arm that effortlessly handled the heavy, bucking oar bespoke strength to match his size. However, he was no less agile and supple than his mate. A square-cut black mane fell to his shoulders. The clean-shaven countenance was handsome in a massive fashion. Its sternness had eased into lines of laughter, and the blue eyes sparkled where formerly they had often smouldered. A tunic he had slipped on when he and Bêlit decided to go topside for a while was rather too small for him. Thus the watcher glimpsed skin the sun had not bronzed; its whiteness proclaimed a man of the far North -a barbarian.
The sibilance ended. In its place Tothapis heard rush of waters, creak of timbers, thrum of rigging. He could almost feel the deck pitch and sway underfoot, or taste salt blown on wind. Bêlit spoke, her husky voice gone soft. 'The stars rejoice with us, beloved.'
She used the nautical lingua franca. Conan's bass replied in the same tongue, his Cimmerian accent musical enough to surprise a Stygian who had read few and vague accounts of that remote warrior folk. 'Well they might, seeing they look on you.' He chuckled and hugged her closer. 'But they will miss you at your most beautiful, when we go below again.' 'Soon?' she purred.
'Quite soon. I told you I just wanted a breath of air, and thought I might as well get some practice at seamanship, if we are to adventure as corsairs. Yes, I'll call N'Yano and Mukatu back to this tiller in a few more pulse beats.' Conan grinned. 'And back to their envy, no doubt.'
'Fear no envy or treachery from our crew,' Be lit assured him. 'They are my own dear men of the Suba, who have given me their blood oath. Never once while we fared has any laid untoward hand on me, or offered me the least insult.'
The Conan Chronology Page 233
