The Conan Chronology

by J. R. Karlsson

  Jerked off balance, the slaver sprawled at Conan's feet. As the man scrambled up, snarling curses, he half drew the heavy, razor-edged Ghanata knife― really more a short sword―from its scabbard thrust through his girdle.

  Before the weapon could clear its sheath, Conan kicked the slaver in the face, knocking him down again. Conan then bent, pulling the blacks chained next in line to him off their feet in turn, and seized the hilt of the knife. Another slaver raced toward Conan, whirling an axe up over his head to split the Cimmerian's skull. Before the blow could fall, Conan drove the knife to the hilt in the slaver's belly, so that the point stood out of hand's breadth from the man's back just above the kidneys.

  As the slaver paled, gurgled, and collapsed, the clearing erupted into a whirling mass of yelling men. Chained as he was, Conan had no chance. Still, it took five men to hold him and three more to batter his thick skull with clubs until he again sagged to the ground, unconscious.

  Mbonani, struggling to keep his frightened mare under control, watched the flurry of action with an appraising stare. 'Well,' he grunted, 'that one at least has spirit. A white man, too; what does he here?'

  'I mentioned him earlier,' said the slaver lieutenant. 'There is a white woman, also―that one, yonder.' Mbonani looked Chabela over appraisingly.

  'The two best of the lot,' he said. 'Treat them well, Zuru, or it will go hard with you.'

  Mbonani walked his horse forward to where Co-nan, his face a mask of blood from scalp wounds, was dazedly lurching to his feet again. As Conan raised his bloody face, Mbonani struck the Cimmerian across the cheek with his riding ship.

  'That for slaying one of my men, white man!' he barked.

  The blow raised a welt, but the barbarian neither winced nor cried out. He watched the slaver captain with cold, expressionless hatred. Mbonani grinned wolfishly, showing white teeth against his black skin.

  'I like your guts, white man!' he said. 'Keep them, so that the Amazons shall pay a good price. Now forward!'

  Escorted by the ragged slavers, the double line of captives clanked along the trail to Gamburu.

  Conan marched with the rest, his iron frame stol-idly enduring the heat, the thirst, the flies, and the burning weight of the sun. He wondered what had befallen the Cobra Crown, but it was an idle thought. When one's life is at hazard, he had long since learned, loot becomes a mere side issue.

  At length he noted a bulge in one of Zuru's saddle bags. Conan's eyes gleamed with savage humour. The slaver lieutenant might bow and scrape before Captain Mbonani, but he obviously had a mind of his own.

  The Ghanta slavers led their captives out of the jungle and into an area of grassy veldt. On the next day, gleaming in the low sun of the late afternoon, the stone city of Gamburu loomed on the horizon.

  Conan stared at the city appraisingly. Compared to glittering Aghrapur, the capital of Turan―or even Meroe, the capital of the kingdom of Kush― Gamburu was not impressive. Still, in a land where most houses were squat cylinders of dried mud and thatch, and a city wall was a stockade of sharpened wooden poles, and a 'city' was but an overgrown village by the standards of more northerly lands, Gamburu stood out.

  About the city ran a low wall of uncemented stone blocks, rising to about twice the height of a man. Four gates broke the circle of this wall, each flanked by guard towers with slits for archers and machicolations for the abuse of besiegers, Massive wooden valves were set in the gates.

  Conan noted the masonry of the gates. Some of the stones were ordinary fildstone, crudely chipped to fit. Others were finely dressed ashlars, but worn as if by great age. As Mbonani led his clanking column through the western gate, Conan observed that the houses inside the city showed a similar mix-ture. Most of the buildings were of one or two stories, with roofs of thatch. The lower story was in most cases made largely of the old, well-carved stones, while the upper was composed more of newer and cruder masonry. Here and there a bit of sculpture, such as a frowning, demonic face, appeared on the surface of one of the worn old stones; but it was as often as not mounted in its wall sideways or upside down.

  From his previous experience with ruined cities, Conan drew his own conclusions.

  Some ancient― perhaps pre-human―folk had originally built a city here. Centuries later, the ancestors of the present inhabitants had taken possession of the town. In building and rebuilding, they had re-used the ancient stones and had also imitated, though crudely, the stone-building methods of their predecessors.

  The hooves of Mbonani's mare kicked up little clouds of dust from the unpaved streets and betimes splashed through a mud puddle. As the column shambled along the main street, the Gamburuvians crowded to the sides to let them pass.

  Conan's glance darted from side to side as he strode along. He noted that, in this city, the sexes differed in an unusual way. The women were tall and powerful; they strode imperiously, like great black panthers, with bronze swords slapping their naked thighs. They were resplendent in bangles and beads, in plumes and lion-skin headdresses.

  The men, on the other hand, were puny, sad-looking blacks, inches shorter than the women and confined to such menial tasks as street-cleaning, chariot-driving, and litter-bearing. Conan, tall even for a Cimmerian, towered over them all.

  The column crossed a bazaar, where merchandise lay spread under awnings in the twilight, and thence down a broad avenue to a central plaza. This huge open space, a bowshot across, was fronted on one side by the royal palace, a worn but imposing structure of dull-red sandstone. On either side of the gate rose a pair of massive, squat statues of the same material. They were not the statues of human beings―that much was evident from their proportions―but just what they were meant to represent was hard to tell, so worn by the weather of ages were they. They could have originally been figures of owls, of apes, or of some unknown pre-human monstrosities.

  Conan's attention was next drawn to a peculiar pit in the centre of the plaza.

  This shallow depression was a good hundred feet across. Its rim was cut down into the earth in a series of concentric steps, like the rows of stone benches in an amphitheatre. The floor of the pit was strewn with sand, in which stood a few puddles from recent rains. In the midst of these sands rose a peculiar clump of trees.

  Conan had never, in all his travels, seen an arena like this. He was, however, allowed only a momentary glimpse of it before he was hurried along to the slave pen. There he remained with his fellow captives through the night under heavy guard.

  That one glimpse, however, had shown Conan a disquieting detail. Scattered about the bases of the strange-looking trees, white against the yellow-brown of the sand, was a clutter of clean white bones ―human bones, such as one might find about the lair of a man-eating lion.

  Conan thought about this oddity all the way to the pen. The Argosseans, he knew, sometimes fed condemned criminals to lions in their arena in Messantia; but such an arena was so planned that no lion could leap from the floor up into the tiers of benches where sat the spectators. This pit was too shallow for such a purpose; a lion could clear it in a single bound.

  The more Conan thought about this phenomenon, the more uneasy he became.

  XIII

  The Queen of the Amazons

  Dawn broke in orange flame above the squat stone towers of the city of the Amazons. The display did not long abide; for in these tropical latitudes, the sun soared almost straight up from the horizon. With dawn, Conan, Chabela, and the other new-caught slaves were herded from the pen and marched to the bazaar.

  Here, one by one, they were stripped, led to the block, displayed, bargained over, and finally led away.

  The buyers were all women, who were the ruling sex in Gamburu. The tall, lean Mbonani stood to one side, his hawklike black face impassive, as the buyers haggled with his lieutenant Zuru. The warrior women accorded more respect to the Ghanatas, whose slave-catching talents they valued, than they did to their own men.

  When Chabela's turn came, the girl blushed scarlet
and tried to hide her person with her hands as she stood naked on the block. When Zuru had made her turn about, he shouted for bids.

  'Five quills,' said a voice from a veiled litter.

  Zuru glanced around the crowd of Gamburuvians and said: 'Sold!'

  Since both had spoken in the bastard Ghanatan used as a trade language from the kingdom of Kush southward, Conan understood. He was surprised that such a low bid had not been topped. A 'quill' was a length of quill from the wing feathers of one of the larger birds, filled with a minute amount of gold dust; for the land of the Amazons had not yet learned the use of coined money. Still, Conan wondered why an aristocratic young beauty like Chabela had not fetched a higher price. The person in the litter must be so important that nobody dared bid against him―or her, Conan corrected himself.

  He was tired, hungry, and in a vile temper. He had been clubbed until his scalp was a mass of wounds and swellings. He had been forced to walk leagues in the broiling sun, had been given precious little food or drink or sleep, and he was as touchy as a lion with a toothache. So, when one of the slavers jerked his chain to lead him to the block, he almost― but not quite―burst into violent and unthinking action.

  A few years before, Conan would have laid lethal hands on the slaver and damned the consequences. But hard-won experience checked his impulse. He could undoubtedly kill this one guard, and perhaps several more before they brought him down, as they inevitably would. These were hardened marauders who had dealt with many a recalcitrant slave before. At ten paces, one of them could hurl a javelin through the ring made by a man's thumb and forefinger without touching his flesh.

  If Conan attacked them, he might get a few, but the rest would stick him full of spears and hack him apart with their knives before he could fill his lungs to give a war cry. And then, who would care for Chabela? In taking on her cause, he had―he hated to admit it, even to himself―assumed a certain responsibility for her. He must live.

  His eyelids narrowed to slits; his mouth was compressed to a thin gash; the veins in his temples throbbed and swelled with his suppressed fury. His limbs quivered with the effort of his self-control as he walked to the block. A nearby slaver mistook this tremor for a sign of fear and whispered as much to a comrade, smiling as he spoke. Conan sent the turbaned black a hard, level gaze that wiped the smile from his features.

  'Strip, you!' snapped Zuru.

  'You will have to help me off with these boots,' said Conan calmly. 'My feet are swollen from much walking.' He sat down on the block and held out one leg.

  Zuru grunted and seized the boot. For an instant he wrestled vainly with it.

  Then Conan gently placed his other foot against the slaver's backside, relaxed the foot in the boot, and shoved. Zuru shot away as if hurled from a catapult, to fall face-down in a puddle.

  With a scream of rage, the slaver lieutenant bounded to his feet. Snatching a whip from another slaver, Zuru ran back to where Conan sat with a faint smile on his grim features.

  'I―I will teach you, white dog―' yelled Zuru, making a furious cut at Conan with the whip.

  As the lash of hippopotamus hide snaked toward him, Conan shot out a hand and caught the whip. Then, still not rising from the block, he pulled the whip in, hand over hand, drawing Zuru toward himself.

  'Be careful, little man,' he rumbled. 'You would not wish to damage your merchandise, now would you?'

  The slaver chief, Mbonani, had been watching the scene. Trying to suppress a smile, he spoke: 'The white dog is right, Zuru. Let his new owner teach him manners, not you.'

  But Zuru was too far gone in rage to heed even his captain. With an inarticulate howl, he whipped out his Ghanata knife. Conan rose to his feet, gathering the slack of the chain that connected his wrists to use as a weapon.

  'Holdl' cried an imperious voice from the veiled litter. Its tone of command brought even the infuriated Zuru to a halt.

  A jewelled black hand whipped aside the muslin hangings, which concealed the rider within from the eyes of the vulgar. A black woman stepped from the palanquin, and Conan's eyes widened with involuntary admiration.

  The woman was well over six feet in height―almost as tall as Conan, and of robust build. Black as oiled ebony was she, and sunlight gleamed in satiny highlights on the curves of her heavy breasts, sleek thighs, and long, muscular legs. A jewelled coif in her bush of kinky mack hair bore ostrich plumes dyed several brilliant colours: peach, rose, and emerald green. Uncut rubies gleamed in her ear lobes, and pearls shone softy in multiple strands about her neck.

  Bracelets of pure, soft gold jingled on her arms and ankles. Otherwise, her only garment was a brief kilt of leopard skin about her voluptuous loins.

  Nzinga, queen of the Amazons, bent a lingering gaze upon the giant Cimmerian.

  Silence fell upon the bazaar. Slowly the queen's full lips parted in a languorous smile.

  'Ten quills for the white giant,' she said at last.

  There were no further bids.

  Chabela found her new life as a slave almost unendurable. It was bad enough that she, who had been the pampered daughter of a powerful monarch, must now fetch and carry at the behest of a black queen. Worse yet was the fact that slaves were required to go about their tasks naked; garments were for free tribesmen only.

  She slept on a verminous pallet in the slave quarters. A harsh-voiced, heavy-handed slave-mistress roused her and her companions in thralldom with the first light of dawn to cook and clean, scrub and mop, and serve at the royal table. It did her no good to see the erstwhile Zingaran buccaneer, Conan, lolling on fat cushions at these feasts, guzzling banana wine and gorging on fish cakes and pastries.

  Her estimate of the redoubtable Cimmerian fell. She did not have a word equivalent to the modern 'gigolo,' but she knew the concept well enough. Her contempt for Conan was aggravated by the fact that he did not seem to resent his status as the queen's kept lover. No man worthy of the name, she told herself, would sink so low as to enjoy such disgusting servitude. Experience had not yet taught her, as it had long taught Conan, to accept such conditions as came one's way when one could do nothing to change them.

  Since Conan was the only person in this dreadful city whom she could even consider as a friend, she would have despaired utterly, had not Conan, on a few rare occasions when nobody was looking, tipped her a broad wink. The wink said―or at least she hoped that it said―'Keep up your courage, girl; 111 get you out of this yet.'

  On the other hand, even Chabela was forced to admit that Queen Nzinga was a magnificent woman. The girl tried to imagine their behaviour in bed; but, having been delicately reared, she lacked the worldly knowledge to do so. She could not know that, however the splendid black lioness of Gamburu might queen it' in public, Conan was the master of the bedroom.

  This was something new, too, for Queen Nzinga. Her experience, and the whole culture of her kingdom, assumed that woman was man's natural superior. A hundred queens had reigned before her on the Ivory Throne. Each of them had despised and degraded their men, using them as servants and as tools of pleasure and parenthood, and discarding them when they became sickly or exhausted or tiresome. Such had also been her way.

  Until the giant Cimmerian had come into her life, she had easily dominated all her men. But Conan could not be dominated; his will was harder than iron, and he was even taller and stronger than she. In the clasp of his mighty arms, the black Amazon found pleasures beyond her previous experience. She became insatiable in her hungers.

  She also became fiercely jealous of all the women whom the Cimmerian must have known before her. Of them, however, he would say nothing; her questions were ignored. Conan was not without a certain rude chivalry in such matters. Rail and bellow and smash things though she would, he remained unmoved, with a faint smile on his lips.

  'And what of that plump little white wench the Chanatas captured along with you?' Nzinga flared. 'She was your lover, yes? You found her soft, perfumed body desirable, did you not? More desirable than Nzin
ga, eh?'

  Looking at her in the passion of her fury, with her eyes blazing and the ebon globes of her breasts dancing, Conan had to admit that never since his first great love, Bêlit of the Black Corsairs, had he known a more splendid woman.

  But, now that he knew she was jealous of Chabela, he must be careful ―extremely careful. He must find some way to quench those suspicions, or Chabela would suffer.

  Nzinga was quite capable of ordering the head smitten off anyone, man or woman, who thwarted her.

  Conan had hitherto done what little he could to lessen Chabela's misery. Now, however, he would not dare to intervene even to that small extent, lest Nzinga get wind of it.

  He yawned. 'Chabela? I hardly know the child,' he said. 'She is a highborn Zingaran, and such folk place an absurdly high value on virginity. If I had loved her, she wouldn't be here now.'

  'What mean you?'

  'She'd have slain herself, as they are taught to do there.'

  'I believe you notl You are trying to protect―'

  Conan seized Nzinga in the grip of one mighty arm, bent her backwards into the nest of pillows, and drank furious kisses from her panting mouth. He knew that he could dare her temper just so far. In the present situation, there was only one treatment that he could count upon to take her mind off her jealous broodings…

  XIV

  Under the Lash

  For several days more, time passed without incident. Then…

  Nzinga lolled on cushions in her seraglio or private quarters. For two days, the white slave, Chabela of Zingara, had been assigned to the most exhausting and degrading tasks. These chores were performed under the very eye of Conan. Nzinga saw to this by a system of carefully planned subterfuge and accident.

  Wary of the queen's attention, Conan assumed a mask of indifference, although he often boiled with a rage to strike out on behalf of the captive princess.