The Conan Chronology

by J. R. Karlsson

  Marique tasted blood. She struck me. She dared strike me! She came up on all fours like a cat, then started after the monk. You will pray that I let you die!

  Marique bolted through a short passage, then down a flight of stairs that spread out into a small courtyard. Back when the sun shined on the city, it had been a garden, but the molten river had long since nibbled away the edge on this level and all those below. Opposite the courtyard, she’d arranged a half-dozen statues of horned gods, thinking eventually to consign them to the flames, but at the moment she was pleased to have them there to witness her victory.

  Tamara turned, her back against the little garden’s wall.

  Marique spat blood. 'No one dares to strike me. No one.'

  The monk smiled. 'I’ll be happy to do it again.'

  'You don’t understand, my dear.' Marique raised her right hand and, with her index finger, inscribed a burning sigil in the air. 'You learned to fight. I taught myself to kill.'

  At a whispered word, the Acheronian sigil flew directly at Tamara. The monk dodged, impressing Marique with both her speed and agility. Neither mattered, however, as the sigil hit her in hip and spun her around. She slammed into the wall and bounced off it, dropping to her hands and knees, her head down.

  Marique marched over and grabbed a fistful of her hair. She yanked back, stretching the woman’s throat. She raised her right hand, the claw full of Stygian metal glinting gold in the hot river’s glow. 'And kill you I shall.'

  Tamara looked up. 'But if you kill me, you kill your mother!'

  Marique laughed. 'Who do you think it was who let my mother’s enemies take her in the first place?'

  The monk gasped in horror.

  Marique grinned.

  Her hand rose high and descended . . .

  . . . And the Cimmerian great sword took it off cleanly at the wrist.

  Marique spun, staring at the blood spurting from the stump, and the barbarian crouched with his back to the gods. She started to say something, but then the monk was again on her feet. Tamara spun and caught Marique with a kick to the belly. The witch flew from the garden, plummeting toward the river, but a stone post one level down stopped her. It snapped her spine, crushing her heart against her breastbone, then burst up through her chest. Impaled, she slid down its glistening length and stared up into the darkness.

  Conan and Tamara appeared above her, having descended to that level. They wore pitiless expressions. Marique would have smiled at that if she could. Then they vanished.

  Then her father came into view, blood smeared on the side of his face, his sword in hand. The mask displayed shock when he saw her. He jogged over and sank to a knee. 'Oh, Marique.'

  She tried to smile. You can resurrect me. You can make me whole. Please, Father.

  Khalar Zym looked down. 'I have loved you always, daughter mine. I would have loved you forever, but this proves that things were as I feared. Unlike your mother, you are simply too weak and, therefore, must be surrendered to Death’s embrace.'

  CONAN FOLLOWED TAMARA through the labyrinthine Acheronian ruins. They descended another level to get past a point of collapse, then worked their way up two more as the crevasse turned inland. And there, on the other side, he caught sight of what he took to be a sliver of night sky.

  'We have to get across.'

  Tamara pointed to a bridge. 'There.'

  Hope speeding them, they raced to the wooden bridge. It consisted of three spans, the middle resting on two columns that the river had not yet eroded. They darted across the first span, which, while a bit rickety, held them above the molten rock. Heat rose from it, but the wood had not charred. Odd sigils had been worked into the wood, and Conan wondered if it had been sorcery which had preserved it.

  They had gingerly made their way over the second span when Khalar Zym appeared at the far end. Conan turned to Tamara. 'Go. Get free. I’ll stop him.'

  'No, Conan, come.' She grabbed his hand. 'We can get away.' She pulled and her hand slipped from his as she stepped on the third span.

  A board cracked and she fell.

  Conan lunged and caught the chain as it unspooled from her forearm. The chain jerked tight, grinding his shoulder socket. He felt her strike the stone column twice. He pulled back and looped a length of chain around his wrist, but the slat he was using for leverage began to splinter.

  'Tamara.'

  'I’m here, Conan. My shoulder. I can’t pull myself up.'

  'I have you.'

  'But for how long, Cimmerian?' Khalar Zym sheathed his swords and approached with arms wide. 'Beside me, none are equal. Beneath me, all must submit. Before me, all are sacrifices to my glory!' He closed his eyes, basking in the sound of his own voice as it echoed through the ruins. 'Maliva, I summon you here!'

  Tamara jerked at the end of the chain. An ill wind rose off the lava, lifting clouds of bright embers to swirl like stars through the air. They fell on Conan’s hands and face, singed his hair, and sizzled against his flesh. 'Tamara?'

  'He’s summoned her, Conan. I can feel her entering me.'

  Khalar Zym chuckled and the mask glowed a malevolent green. 'Once again, a Cimmerian boy is caught holding a chain.'

  'Let me go, Conan. Drop me. I cannot fight her.'

  'No!' Conan, on one knee, stabbed the great sword into the railing at the base of the second span. It sank through the wood, splitting a sigil, and struck stone, anchoring him. Muscles bunched and quivered. Pain shot through his shoulders. 'His evil kills no more.'

  'You’re on one knee already, Cimmerian.' The man-god pressed his hands together. 'I offer you what I offered your father. Kneel before me and you shall live.'

  'Conan, I can feel her. She’s mad. Worse than the daughter. Drop me!'

  'What will it be, Cimmerian?'

  Conan, chest heaving, looked at Khalar Zym through sweaty locks of black hair. 'Do you want to know why I could beat you when you wielded my father’s sword?'

  Khalar Zym’s eyes tightened. 'Tell me.'

  'He did not make this sword for a boy . . . or a god. He made it for a man.' Conan tightened his hand on the hilt. 'A Cimmerian, born to war, who would someday slay a god!'

  Conan jammed the blade toward the far side of the bridge. As his father had done when levering ice to cool off a hotheaded son, so Conan levered an aged span of bridge off a tall pillar, and spilled a god toward a hell from which he would never escape. Yet even before Khalar Zym could fall, the realization of doom trapped in his horror-filled eyes, that same blade came up and around in a silver blur. It caught Khalar Zym one last time over the right ear and passed fully through his skull. It shattered the Mask of Acheron as it went, consigning master and device to the molten stone below.

  The sword stroke released more magickal energy, which shook the ruins to their heart. Lava splashed below, overrunning what had been the river’s banks. Stones fell. Terraces collapsed. A huge boulder tumbled down and smashed the bridge’s first span to flinders.

  Conan stood and hauled Tamara up from the hole. He held tightly for a moment, then retrieved his father’s sword. Together, they tested the planking on the remaining span, but soon gave this up as pointless since falling rocks posed more of a threat to the bridge than breaking boards did to them. At the far side they had to cut back toward the platform as collapsing terraces cut them off from the opening they’d seen.

  They burst from the cavern mouth and Conan immediately moved Tamara behind him for cover. While most of Khalar Zym’s troops were fleeing back toward Khor Kalba, two companies had remained. The man-god’s elite guard stood poised with swords drawn to oppose Conan, while fresh recruits huddled in their shadows much as Tamara sheltered in Conan’s.

  Conan shook his head. 'Your master is dead. His dreams are lost. How many of you wish to die for promises that will never be kept?'

  The elite guards’ captain took a step forward. 'Some of us fight for duty and honour, not plunder or power.'

  A soldier who had lurked behind him stepped half
way around, then pressed a dagger to the throat of Khalar Zym’s man. 'And some of us, Captain, fight for our friends.' Behind him, the other recruits similarly threatened Khalar Zym’s last company.

  Conan roared with laughter. 'Artus! What are you doing here? You were supposed to be warning the world about Khalar Zym.'

  'I whispered in the ear of one Shemite merchant, so the rumour is halfway round the world by now.' The Zingaran shrugged. 'We actually hadn’t intended on fighting, you see . . . We just wanted to let you know we sail for Hyrkania with the tide, and didn’t want you to be late.'

  Epilogue

  CONAN STOOD ON a hill overlooking a desolate Hyrkanian plain. Tamara stood beside him and Artus waited at the base with the horses. The sun beat down mercilessly, and heat made the land shimmer―though the Cimmerian was certain that the shimmer was not from heat alone.

  Tamara smiled. 'Yes, Conan, the monastery is out there. I can feel it. I can find my way through the wards.'

  'So you will go.'

  She reached up and rested a hand on his shoulder. 'I have considered what you suggested, but I feel I must.'

  He nodded. 'You are very loyal to your master.'

  'It’s not just him.' Tamara took his hands in hers and turned them over, exposing the chain scars. 'Master Fassir told me about Khalar Zym in a roundabout way. He said that there were madmen in the world who saw patterns as portents in almost anything. Those sorts of men were the kind who kidnap children and make other children orphans. He left the monastery to save me from the consequences of such a madman. His burden passed to you. And now I must accept it from you. Somewhere, out there, will be a child who is sought as I was sought. As Master Fassir saved me, so I shall be able to save that child.'

  'That child will be very lucky.' Conan smiled. 'And the world as well, for your effort.'

  Tamara squeezed his hands and looked up into his eyes. 'You could come with me.'

  'I do not need saving, Tamara Amaliat Jorvi Karushan.'

  'The monastery is a place where you can find peace, Conan.'

  The Cimmerian pulled her into his arms and gave her a kiss, then released her and took a step back. 'I was not born for peace, Tamara. I am a Cimmerian. I have a sword at my side, a horse to carry me to conquest, and enemies who need to be slain. It is my life, my friend, and I could never know any greater joy.'

  The Vale of Lost Women

  Robert E. Howard

  I

  The thunder of the drums and the great elephant tusk horns was deafening, but in Livia’s ears the clamor seemed but a confused muttering, dull and far away. As she lay on the angareb in the great hut, her state bordered between delirium and semi-unconsciousness. Outward sounds and movements scarcely impinged upon her senses. Her whole mental vision, though dazed and chaotic, was yet centered with hideous certitude on the naked, writhing figure of her brother, blood streaming down the quivering thighs. Against a dim nightmare background of dusky interweaving shapes and shadows, that white form was limned in merciless and awful clarity. The air seemed still to pulsate with an agonized screaming, mingled and interwoven obscenely with a rustle of fiendish laughter.

  She was not conscious of sensation as an individual, separate and distinct from the rest of the cosmos. She was drowned in a great gulf of pain – was herself but pain crystallized and manifested in flesh. So she lay without conscious thought or motion, while outside the drums bellowed, the horns clamored, and barbaric voices lifted hideous chants, keeping time to naked feet slapping the hard earth and open palms smiting one another softly.

  But through her frozen mentality individual consciousness at last began slowly to seep. A dull wonder that she was still bodily unharmed first made itself manifest. She accepted the miracle without thanksgiving. The matter seemed meaningless. Acting mechanically, she sat up on the angareb and stared dully about her. Her extremities made feeble beginnings of motions, as if responding to blindly awakening nerve-centers. Her naked feet scruffed nervously at the hard-beaten dirt floor. Her fingers twitched convulsively at the skirt of the scanty under-tunic which constituted her only garment. Impersonally she remembered that once, it seemed long, long ago, rude hands had torn her other garments from her body, and she had wept with fright and shame. It seemed strange, now, that so small a wrong should have caused her so much woe. The magnitude of outrage and indignity was only relative, after all, like everything else.

  The hut door opened, and a black woman entered – a lithe pantherish creature, whose supple body gleamed like polished ebony, adorned only by a wisp of silk twisted about her strutting loins. The whites of her eyeballs reflected the firelight outside, as she rolled them with wicked meaning.

  She bore a bamboo dish of food – smoking meat, roasted yams, mealies, unwieldy ingots of native bread – and a vessel of hammered gold, filled with yarati beer. These she set down on the angareb, but Livia paid no heed; she sat staring dully at the opposite wall, hung with mats woven of bamboo shoots. The young black woman laughed evilly, with a flash of dark eyes and white teeth, and with a hiss of spiteful obscenity and a mocking caress that was more gross than her language, she turned and swaggered out of the hut, expressing more taunting insolence with the motions of her hips than any civilised woman could with spoken insults.

  Neither the wench’s words nor her actions had stirred the surface of Livia’s consciousness. All her sensations were still turned inward. Still the vividness of her mental pictures made the visible world seem like an unreal panorama of ghosts and shadows. Mechanically she ate the food and drank the liquor without tasting either.

  It was still mechanically that at last she rose and walked unsteadily across the hut, to peer out through a crack between the bamboos. It was an abrupt change in the timbre of the drums and horns that reacted upon some obscure part of her mind and made her seek the cause, without sensible volition.

  At first she could make out nothing of what she saw; all was chaotic and shadowy, shapes moving and mingling, writhing and twisting, black formless blocks hewed out starkly against a setting of blood-red that dulled and glowed. Then actions and objects assumed their proper proportions, and she made out men and women moving about the fires. The red light glinted on silver and ivory ornaments; white plumes nodded against the glare; naked black figures strutted and posed, silhouettes carved out of darkness and limned in crimson.

  On an ivory stool, flanked by giants in plumed head-pieces and leopard-skin girdles, sat a fat, squat shape, abysmal, repulsive, a toad-like chunk of blackness, reeking of the dank rotting jungle and the nighted swamps. The creature’s pudgy hands rested on the sleek arch of his belly; his nape was a roll of sooty fat that seemed to thrust his bullet head forward. His eyes gleamed in the firelight, like live coals in a dead black stump. Their appalling vitality belied the inert suggestion of the gross body.

  As the girl’s gaze rested on that repellant figure, her body stiffened and tensed as frantic Life surged through her again. From a mindless automaton, she changed suddenly to a sentient mould of live, quivering flesh, stinging and burning. Pain was drowned in hate, so intense it in turn became pain; she felt hard and brittle, as if her body were turning to steel. She felt her hate flow almost tangibly out along the line of her vision; so it seemed to her that the object of her emotion should fall dead from his carven stool because of its force.

  But if Bajujh, king of Bakalah, felt any psychic discomfort because of the concentration of his captive, he did not show it. He continued to cram his frog-like mouth to capacity with handfuls of mealies scooped up from a vessel held up to him by a kneeling woman, and to stare down a broad lane which was being formed by the action of his subjects in pressing back on either hand.

  Down this lane, walled with sweaty black humanity, Livia vaguely realised some important personage would come, judging from the strident clamor of drum and horn. And as she watched, one came.

  A column of fighting men, marching three abreast, advanced toward the ivory stool, a thick line of waving plumes and gl
inting spears meandering through the motley crowd. At the head of the ebon spearmen strode a figure at the sight of which Livia started violently; her heart seemed to stop, then began to pound again, suffocatingly. Against that dusky background, this man stood out with vivid distinctness. He was clad like his followers in leopard-skin loin-clout and plumed head-piece, but he was a white man.

  It was not in the manner of a suppliant or a subordinate that he strode up to the ivory stool, and sudden silence fell over the throng as he halted before the squatting figure. Livia felt the tenseness, though she only dimly knew what it portended. For a moment Bajujh sat, craning his short neck upward, like a great frog; then, as if pulled against his will by the other’s steady glare, he shambled up off his stool, and stood grotesquely bobbing his shaven head.

  Instantly the tension was broken. A tremendous shout went up from the massed villagers, and at a gesture from the stranger, his warriors lifted their spears and boomed a salute royale for King Bajujh. Whoever he was, Livia knew the man must indeed be powerful in that wild land, if Bajujh of Bakalah rose to greet him. And power meant military prestige – violence was the only thing respected by those ferocious races.

  Thereafter Livia stood with her eyes glued to the crack in the hut wall, watching the white stranger. His warriors mingled with the Bakalas, dancing, feasting, swigging beer. He himself, with a few of his chiefs, sat with Bajujh and the headmen of Bakalah, cross-legged on mats, gorging and guzzling. She saw his hands dipped deep into the cooking pots with the others, saw his muzzle thrust into the beer vessel out of which Bajujh also drank. But she noticed, nevertheless, that he was accorded the respect due a king. Since he had no stool, Bajujh renounced his also, and sat on the mats with his guest. When a new pot of beer was brought, the king of Bakalah barely sipped it before he passed it to the white man. Power! All this ceremonial courtesy pointed to power – strength – prestige! Livia trembled in excitement as a breathless plan began to form in her mind.