'What now?' panted Zarono. He knew the charge had succeeded only because Conan's unexpected attack on the rear of the Picts had demoralized the painted men and prevented them from falling back before the rush. But he exploded into curses as Conan passed his cutlass through a buccaneer who writhed on the ground with a shattered hip.
'We cannot carry him with us,' grunted Conan. 'It wouldn't be any kindness to leave him to be taken alive by the Picts. Come on!'
They crowded close at his heels as he trotted through the trees. Alone, they would have sweated and blundered among the thickets for hours before they found the beach trail — if they had ever found it. The Cimmerian led them as unerringly as if he had been following a blazed path, and the rovers shouted with hysterical relief as they burst suddenly upon the trail that ran westward.
'Fool!' Conan clapped a hand on the shoulder of a pirate who started to break into a run and hurled him back among his companions. 'You'll burst your heart and fall within a thousand yards. We're miles from the beach. Take an easy gait. We may have to sprint the last mile; save some of your wind for it. Come on, now!'
He set off down the trail at a steady jog-trot. The seamen followed him, suiting their pace to his.
The sun was touching the waves of the western ocean. Tina stood at the window from which Belesa had watched the storm.
'The setting sun turns the ocean to blood,' she said. 'The carack's sail is a white fleck on the crimson waters. The woods are already darkened with clustering shadows.'
'What of the seamen on the beach?' asked Belesa languidly. She reclined on a couch, her eyes closed, her hands clasped behind her head.
'Both camps are preparing their supper,' said Tina. 'They gather driftwood and build fires. I can hear them shouting to one another — what is that?'
The sudden tenseness in the girl's tone brought Belesa upright on the couch. Tina grasped the windowsill, her face white.
'Listen! A howling, far off, like many wolves!'
'Wolves?' Belesa sprang up, fear clutching her heart. 'Wolves do not hunt in packs at this time of year —'
'Oh, look!' shrilled the girl, pointing. 'Men are running out of the forest!'
In an instant, Belesa was beside her, staring wide-eyed at the figures small in the distance, streaming out of the woods.
'The sailors!' she gasped. 'Empty-handed! I see Zarono — Strombanni —'
'Where is Conan?' whispered the child. Belesa shook her head.
'Listen! Oh, listen!' whimpered Tina, clinging to her.
'The Picts!'
All in the fort could hear it now — a vast ululation of mad exultation and blood lust, from the depths of the dark forest. The sound spurred on the panting men, reeling toward the palisade.
'Hasten!' gasped Strombanni, his face a drawn mask of exhausted effort. 'They are almost at our heels. My ship —'
'She is too far for us to reach,' panted Zarono. 'Make for the stockade. See, the men camped on the beach have seen us!'
He waved his arms in breathless pantomime, but the men on the strand understood and recognised the significance of that wild howling, rising to a triumphant crescendo. The sailors abandoned their fires and cooking pots and fled for the stockade gate. They were pouring through it as the fugitives from the forest rounded the south angle and reeled into the gate, a heaving, frantic mob, half dead from exhaustion. The gate was slammed with frenzied haste, and sailors began to climb to the footwalk to join the men-at-arms already there.
Belesa, who had hurried down from the manor, confronted Zarono. 'Where is Conan?'
The buccaneer jerked a thumb toward the blackening woods. His chest heaved; sweat poured down his face. 'Their scouts were at our heels ere we gained the beach. He paused to slay a few and give us time to get away.'
He staggered away to take his place on the footwalk, whither Strombanni had already mounted. Valenso stood there, a somber, cloak-wrapped figure, strangely silent and aloof. He was like a man bewitched.
'Look!' yelped a pirate, above the deafening howling of the yet unseen horde. A man emerged from the forest and raced fleetly across the open belt.
'Conan!' Zarono grinned wolfishly. 'We're safe in the stockade; we know where the treasure is. No reason why we shouldn't feather him with arrows now.'
'Nay!' Strombanni caught his arm. 'We shall need his sword. Look!'
Behind the fleet-footed Cimmerian, a wild horde burst from the forest, howling as they ran — naked Picts, hundreds and hundreds of them. Their arrows rained about the Cimmerian. A few strides more, and Conan reached the eastern wall of the stockade, bounded high, seized the points of the logs, and heaved himself up and over, his cutlass in his teeth. Arrows thudded venomously into the logs where his body had just been. His resplendent coat was gone, his white shirt tom and blood-stained.
'Stop them!' he roared as his feet hit the ledge inside. 'If they get on the wall, we're done for!'
Pirates, buccaneers, and men-at-arms responded instantly, and a storm of arrows and quarrels tore into the oncoming horde. Conan saw Belesa with Tina clinging to her hand, and his language was picturesque.
'Get into the manor,' he commanded in conclusion. 'Their shafts will arch over the wall — what did I tell you?' A black shaft cut into the earth at Belesa's feet and quivered like a serpent's head. Conan caught up a longbow and leaped to the footwalk. 'Some of you fellows prepare torches!' he roared, above the clamor of battle. 'We can't find them in the dark!'
The sun had sunk in a welter of blood. Out in the bay, the men aboard the carack had cut the anchor chain, and the Red Hand was rapidly receding on the crimson horizon.
VII
Men of the Woods
Night had fallen, but torches streamed across the strand, casting the mad scene into lurid revealment. Naked men in paint swarmed the beach; like waves they came against the palisade, bared teeth and blazing eyes gleaming in the glare of the torches thrust over the wall. Hornbill feathers waved in black manes, and the feathers of the cormorant and the sea-falcon. A few warriors, the wildest and most barbaric of them all, wore sharks' teeth woven in their tangled locks. The sea-land tribes had gathered from up and down the coast in all directions to rid their country of the white-skinned invaders.
They surged against the palisade, driving a storm of arrows before them, fighting into the teeth of the shafts and bolts that tore into their masses from the stockade. Sometimes they came so close to the wall that they were hewing at the gate with their war-axes and thrusting their spears through the loopholes. But each time the tide ebbed back without flowing over the palisade, leaving its drift of dead. At this kind of fighting, the freebooters of the sea were at their stoutest. Their arrows and bolts tore holes in the charging horde; their cutlasses hewed the wild men from the palisades they strove to scale.
Yet again and again, the men of the woods returned to the onslaught with all the stubborn ferocity that had been roused in their fierce hearts.
'They are like mad dogs!' gasped Zarono, hacking downward at the dark hands that grasped the palisade points and the dark faces that snarled up at him.
'If we can hold the fort until dawn, they'll lose heart,' grunted Conan, splitting a feathered skull with professional precision. 'They won't maintain a long siege. Look, they're falling back.'
The charge rolled back. The men on the wall shook the sweat out of their eyes, counted their dead, and took a fresh grip on the blood-slippery hilts of their swords. Like blood-hungry wolves, grudgingly driven from a cornered prey, the Picts skulked back beyond the ring of torches. Only the bodies of the slain lay before the palisade.
'Have they gone?' Strombanni shook back his wet, tawny locks. The cutlass in his fist was notched and red; his brawny arm was splashed with blood.
'They're still out there.' Conan nodded toward the outer darkness that ringed the circle of torches, made more intense by their light. He glimpsed movements in the shadows, the glitter of eyes and the red glint of copper weapons.
'They're draw
n off for a bit, though,' he said. 'Put sentries on the wall and let the rest eat and drink. 'Tis past midnight, and we've been fighting for hours without respite. Ha, Valenso, how goes the battle with you?'
The count, in dented, blood-splashed helmet and cuirass, moved somberly up to where Conan and the captains stood. For answer, he muttered something inaudible under his breath. And then out of the darkness a voice spoke: a loud, clear voice that rang through the entire fort.
'Count Valenso! Count Valenso of Korzetta! Do you hear me?' It spoke with a Stygian accent.
Conan heard the count gasp as if he had been stricken with a mortal wound. Valenso reeled and grasped the tops of the logs of the stockade, his face pale in the torchlight. The voice resumed:
'It is I, Thoth-Amon of the Ring! Did you think to flee me once more? It is too late for that! All your schemes shall avail you naught, for tonight I shall send a messenger to you. It is the demon that guarded the treasure of Tranicos, whom I have released from his cave and bound to my service. He will inflict upon you the doom that you, you dog, have earned: a death at once slow, hard, and disgraceful. Let us see you mulct your way out of that!'
The speech ended in a peal of musical laughter. Valenso gave a scream of terror, jumped down from the footwalk, and ran staggering up the slope toward the manor.
When the lull came in the fighting, Tina had crept to their window, from which they had been driven by the danger of flying arrows. Silently she watched the men gather about the fire. Belesa was reading a letter that had been delivered by a serving-woman to her door. It read:
Count Valenso of Korzetta to his niece Belesa, greeting:
My doom has come upon me at last. Now that I am resigned if not reconciled to it, I would have you know that I am not insensible of the fact that I have used you in a manner not consistent with the honour of the Korzettas. I did so because circumstances left me no other choice. Although it is late for apologies, I ask that you think not too hardly of me; and, if you can bring yourself to do so, and by some chance you survive this night of doom, that you pray to Mitra for the soiled soul of your father's brother. Meanwhile, I advise that you remain away from the great hall, lest the same fate that awaits me encompass you also. Farewell.
Belesa's hands shook as she read. Although she could never love her uncle, this was still the most human action she had ever known him to take.
At the window, Tina said: 'There ought to be more men on the walls. Suppose the black man came back?'
Belesa, going over beside her to look out, shuddered at the thought.
'I am afraid,' murmured Tina. 'I hope Strombanni and Zarono are killed.'
'And not Conan?' asked Belesa curiously.
'Conan would not harm us,' said the child confidently. 'He lives up to his barbaric code of honour, but they are men who have lost all honour.'
'You are wise beyond your years, Tina,' said Belesa, with the vague uneasiness that the precocity of the child often aroused in her.
'Look!' Tina stiffened. 'The sentry is gone from the south wall! I saw him on the ledge a moment ago; now he has vanished.'
From their window, the palisade points of the south wall were just visible over the slanting roofs of a row of huts which paralleled that wall for almost its entire length. A sort of open-topped corridor, three or four yards wide, was formed by the stockade and the back of the huts, which were built in a solid row. These huts were occupied by the serfs.
'Where could the sentry have gone?' whispered Tina uneasily.
Belesa was watching one end of the hut row, which was not far from a side door of the manor. She could have sworn she saw a shadowy figure glide from behind the huts and disappear at the door. Was that the vanished sentry? Why had he left the wall, and why should he steal so subtly into the manor? She did not believe it was the sentry she had seen, and a nameless fear congealed her blood.
'Where is the count, Tina?' she asked.
'In the great hall, my lady. He sits alone at the table, wrapped in his cloak and drinking wine, with a face as grey as death.'
'Go and tell him what we have seen. I will keep watch from this window, lest the Picts steal over the unguarded wall.'
Tina scampered away. Suddenly remembering the warning in the count's letter about staying out of the main hall, Belesa rose, hearing Tina's slippered feet pattering along the corridor, receding down the stair.
Then abruptly, terribly, there rang out a scream of such poignant fear that Belesa's heart almost stopped with the shock of it. She was out of the chamber and flying down the corridor before she was aware that her limbs were in motion. She ran down the stairs — and halted as if turned to stone.
She did not scream as Tina had screamed. She was incapable of sound or motion. She saw Tina, was aware of the reality of small hands frantically grasping her. But these were the only sane realities in a scene of black nightmare and lunacy and death, dominated by the monstrous, anthropomorphic shadow that spread awful arms against a lurid, hell-fire glare.
Out in the stockade, Strombanni shook his head at Conan's question. 'I heard nothing.'
'I did!' Conan's wild instincts were roused; he was tensed, his eyes blazing. 'It came from the south wall, behind those huts!'
Drawing his cutlass, he strode toward the palisade. From the compound, the wall on the south and the sentry posted there were not visible, being hidden behind the huts. Strombanni followed, impressed by the Cimmerian's manner.
At the mouth of the open space between the huts and the wall, Conan halted warily. The space was dimly lighted by torches flaring at either corner of the stockade. And, about midway of that corridor, a crumpled shape sprawled on the ground.
'Bracus!' swore Strombanni, running forward and dropping on one knee beside the figure. 'By Mitra, his throat's been cut from ear to ear!'
Conan swept the space with a quick glance, finding it empty save for himself, Strombanni, and the dead man. He peered through a loophole. No living man moved within the ring of torchlight outside the fort.
'Who could have done this?' he wondered.
'Zarono!' Strombanni sprang up, spitting fury like a wildcat, his hair bristling, his face convulsed. 'He has set his thieves to stabbing my men in the back! He plans to wipe me out by treachery! Devils! I am leagued within and without!'
'Wait!' Conan reached a restraining hand. 'I don't believe Zarono —'
But the maddened pirate jerked away and rushed around the end of the hut row, breathing blasphemies. Conan ran after him, swearing. Strombanni made straight toward the fire by which Zarono's tall, lean form was visible as the buccaneer chief quaffed a jack of ale.
His amazement was supreme when the jack was dashed violently from his hand, spattering his breastplate with foam, and he was jerked around to confront the passion-distorted face of the pirate captain.
'You murdering dog!' roared Strombanni. 'Will you slay my men behind my back while they fight for your filthy hide as well as for mine?'
Conan was hurrying toward them, and on all sides men ceased eating and drinking to stare in amazement.
'What do you mean?' sputtered Zarono.
'You've set your men to stabbing mine at their posts!' screamed the maddened Barachan.
'You lie!' smouldering hate burst into sudden flame.
With an incoherent howl, Strombanni heaved up his cutlass and cut at the buccaneer's head. Zarono caught the blow on his armoured left arm, and sparks flew as he staggered back, ripping out his own sword.
In an instant, the captains were fighting like madmen, their blades flaming and flashing in the firelight. Their crews reacted instantly and blindly. A deep roar went up as pirates and buccaneers drew their swords and fell upon one another. The men left on the walls abandoned their posts and leaped down into the stockade, blades in hand. In an instant the compound was a battleground, where knotting, writhing groups of men smote and slew in a blind frenzy. Some of the men-at-arms and serfs were drawn into the melee, and the soldiers at the gate turned and stared
down in amazement, forgetting the enemy that lurked outside.
It all happened so quickly — smouldering passions exploding into sudden battle — that men were fighting all over the compound before Conan could reach the maddened chiefs. Ignoring their swords, he tore them apart with such violence that they staggered backward, and
Zarono tripped and fell flat.
'You cursed fools, will you throw away all our lives?'
Strombanni was frothing mad and Zarono was bawling for assistance. A buccaneer ran at Conan from behind and cut at his head. The Cimmerian half turned and caught his arm, checking the stroke in midair.
'Look, you fools!' he roared, pointing with his sword.
Something in his tone caught the attention of the battle-crazed mob. Men froze in their places and twisted their heads to stare. Conan was pointing to a soldier on the footwalk. The man was reeling, clawing the air, and choking as he tried to shout. He pitched headlong to the ground, and all saw the black arrow standing out from between his shoulders.
A cry of alarm arose from the compound. On the heels of the shout came a clamor of blood-freezing screams and the shattering impact of axes on the gate. Flaming arrows arched over the wall and stuck in logs, and thin wisps of blue smoke curled upward. Then, from behind the huts that ranged the south wall, came swift and furtive figures racing across the compound.
'The Picts are in!' roared Conan.
Bedlam followed his shout The freebooters ceased their feud. Some turned to meet the savages; some sprang to the wall. Savages were pouring from behind the huts and streaming over the compound; their axes clashed against the cutlasses of the sailors.
Zarono was still struggling to his feet when a painted savage rushed upon him from behind and brained him with a war-axe.
The Conan Chronology Page 589
