Conan and Chulainn set out before first light. They took nothing with them save their weapons and heavy cloaks, flint and steel for making fire, and a bag of black bread, dried meat, and slabs of hard cheese. They did not bother with water bottles, since a traveler in the Cimmerian highlands was never more than a few paces from fresh water. They walked with the hillman's long stride that covered the miles more efficiently than a horse's uncertain hooves yet left them unfatigued at the end of a day's travel.
They had plotted the straightest possible line of march, and were able to use the best routes and all the daylight hours because of the truce with the other clans. Even so, it was a long and arduous journey, taking them ever higher into the fastness of the mountains.
Late in the afternoon of the fifth day they saw, silhouetted against the lowering sun along a mountain ridge, men marching in single file.
Instinctively, Chulainn started to dive for cover. Then, remembering the truce, he sheepishly rejoined Conan.
"Old habits are hard to break." Conan grinned. "Those must be the Galla, by the look of their topknots."
"Perhaps we had better take cover anyway," Chulainn said. "They are a
distant clan, and the Bloody Spear may not have reached them yet."
At that moment the men on the ridge caught sight of the travelers and waved their spears overhead as a sign of peaceful intentions. Had they meant harm, they would have howled a war cry and charged. "Let's go talk to them," Conan said. "They may have seen or heard something of use."
The two men trotted to the ridge.
The Galla were considered wild and primitive even among Cimmerians.
Their warriors were tattooed all over their bodies in intricate whorls and spirals, and the hair knotted high on their heads was ornamented with carved bone amulets and charms. They bore long, flat shields of wood, and, alone among the Cimmerian tribes, their favored weapon was a knotty-headed club, made from the stone-hard wood of a stunted tree native to their clan territory. A few bore iron-headed spears. Their only garments were brief kilts of wolfskin, and their tattooed feet were bare.
Without preamble the leader of the Galla said, "Why are you not going to the Standing Stone?"
"We have another mission," Conan said. "We go to Ben Morgh."
"What business have you on the sacred mountain?"
"Business of our own," Conan said gruffly. "How long have you been on the march?"
"A runner came to us with the Bloody Spear two nights gone. We have been on the path since first light yesterday."
"Most armies would take a week to cover the distance between here and Galla land," muttered Conan.
"Have these demon-things struck in Galla land?" Chulainn asked.
"Four families wiped out," answered the leader. "We are eager to see if they have brains to scatter." He shook his fearsome club, whipping the massive weapon about his head as easily as if it were a wand.
"We'll not keep you from the gathering of spears, then," Conan said.
Without a further word the Galla set off at a steady trot, which they
could maintain all day. Late as it was, they would put many more miles behind them before darkness forced a halt.
"Those will be good men to have beside us when the battle comes,"
Conan said as he and his companion resumed their march.
"I am sorry to miss the gathering," Chulainn said wistfully. "Never have I seen a great army in one place. It would be something to tell my grandchildren."
"You'll see them, if we survive our mission," Conan assured him. "If not, then no sense worrying about armies and grandchildren."
That night they rested beneath a rock overhang while a light snow began to fall. Beneath the sheltering rock they found a few turves of peat left from some herdsman's store, and they quickly struck a fire with flint and steel. The cheering flames pressed against the dark. The two men stared brooding into the fire for a while, each occupied with his own dark thoughts.
"Conan," Chulainn asked at last, "what do you think we may be up against? What will we find on Ben Morgh?"
"How should I know? Monsters, demons, tribal spirits out of Kush, for all anybody has seen of them."
"But why do they take prisoners?" Chulainn persisted.
"For slaves, maybe," Conan said. "Or for food."
"Then why only women and children?"
"Perhaps they make better eating," Conan hazarded. "Grown Cimmerian men may be too tough for them."
Chulainn stared into the fire, a picture of despondency. He did not want to picture his Bronwith as a feast for some nameless horror from a madman's nightmare.
As they approached the Field of the Dead they could see a lurid glow in the sky above the hulking form of Ben Morgh. In the dimness they could just make out the stark outlines of cairns raised to Cimmerian chieftains
and heroes in ages past. A light dusting of snow still lay on the ground, but the sides of the cairns were bare and dark.
"What is the cause of that glow?" Chulainn said. "Can it be fire? There is neither wood nor peat on Ben Morgh."
"You ask a great many questions," Conan said, "and you ask them of one with no more answers than you have yourself. Were I you, I would save my breath for more important things, such as fighting."
"And who might we be fighting?" Chulainn asked.
"To begin with, the lurking swine on the other side of this cairn." With this, Conan sprang up the mossy-side of the pile of stones next to them.
Chulainn, Cimmerian to the bone, spent not an instant in standing dumbfounded, but scrambled up the cairn behind his companion before Conan's sword was fully drawn. At the crest of the cairn they saw two crouching forms waiting with polearms ready to hew down unwary passersby. These scarce had time to look up as the two blackhaired Cimmerians descended on them.
The shapes below seemed roughly human albeit misshapen; but the hiss loosed from the throat of the first came from no human larynx. Conan was swinging as he leaped down, and his sharp blade plowed through the skull of his chosen target before his feet touched earth.
Chulainn landed too far from his foe, and the creature lunged at him with a broad-bladed glaive on a short pole. Chulainn sidestepped the clumsy weapon and replied with a thrust of his spear, which barely penetrated the scaly hide over the monster's chest. With an enraged hiss the creature spun unexpectedly, and a long, thick tail lashed around, caught Chulainn in the side, and sent him tumbling against the cairn. The glaive came up for a deathblow, but Chulainn rolled aside and Conan's sword skewered the creature from back to front. With a vicious hiss the serpent-thing expired.
"Crom!" Conan said, wiping his blade. "It takes some real force to push a blade through these things. They grow their own armor."
Chulainn staggered painfully to his feet. "I am sorry, Conan," he wheezed. "I know we needed one for questioning. I thought I had that one, but my spear would not go in."
"We'd have had no answers from these beauties," Conan said. With his dirk he pricked forth the tongue of one. It was long, thick, and forked. "If these things have a language, it is one no man understands, I'll wager.
Tongues like this could form no human words, save, perhaps, the secret speech of the serpent priests of Set."
"Set?" Chulainn said. "Is that a god?"
"Aye, and an evil one. Set may be behind these things, for all the sorcerers of Stygia are minions of that vile god." Chulainn could sense behind Conan's steady-spoken words a deeply ingrained horror of the supernatural.
"Surely this Set cannot challenge Father Crom on his own mountain,"
Chulainn said.
"Wager no coins on what gods and demons can or cannot do," Conan observed. "At least we know this lot die if you strike hard enough.
Remember that trick with the tail, though. That kind of blow can take an honest fighting man by surprise. I'd like to get a better look at these things. But we dare not strike a light this close to Ben Morgh."
"I wonder if these were posted here,"
Chulainn said, "or if they were sent to intercept us."
"I would give a great deal to know that myself," Conan said. Did their enemy know that they were coming? The thought was unsettling.
Abruptly, Conan turned and began walking so fast in the direction of the mountain that Chulainn had trouble keeping up with him. "Now, about that light in the sky," he continued as if the incident with the two lizard-things had never transpired. "In the South I have seen a kind of black stone burned for fuel. It comes from the ground, where there is no wood or peat, but a thick and stinking smoke comes from it, and I see no smoke up there."
They had almost reached the upper end of the Field of the Dead when they saw a figure seated atop a small cairn, perhaps one of the oldest monuments in the ancient burial place. The trespasser sat motionless, a cold breeze fluttering what appeared to be tattered garments, but the travelers could see only its outline against the bloodred sky. Two swords hissed snakelike from sheaths as the Cimmerians strode to within ten
paces of the cairn.
"Speak swiftly if you do not want your blood to feed some old chief of our race," Conan demanded.
The creature shifted on its seat and cackled. "Say, northerner, you like to buy another amulet? I sell, very cheap."
For several seconds Conan stood speechless, rooted in one spot. "Crom!"
he said at last.
"No, just Cha the fortuneteller. Crom live higher up." The Khitan mountebank jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Ben Morgh.
"You know this oldster, Conan?" Chulainn asked. He had not been able to understand the exchange.
Cha turned his face to the younger Cimmerian. "Conan and I old friends," he said in mangled Cimmerian.
"Is it human?" Chulainn asked. "It talks worse than a Pict."
"He's human," Conan told him. "In his own way." He turned back to the Khitan. "Why did you pretend to be a mere seller of amulets and charms, Khitan?"
"What the matter?" demanded Cha in tones of hurt outrage. "You not like my amulet? Bet you not be here right now if not for my amulet!"
Conan thumbed the keen edge of his sword. "I do not like being played with, Khitan," he said in a low, dangerous voice. "That bitch Hathor-Ka played me for a fool, and now I find you have done the same."
"From the start I tell you you just playing-piece for the gods," Cha said.
"You mad now because it true?"
"True or not," Conan growled, "I feel like killing somebody for it, and you're handy." He started to ascend the small cairn.
"Wait," the Khitan said hastily. "You need me, and I need you."
Conan paused. "Why do I need you?" he asked suspiciously.
"Because I very great magician, while you just fighter. Up there"―he pointed toward the glowing crest of Ben Morgh―"is great magic. Bad magic. You need more than swords to fight magic."
"From the look of this," Conan growled, "we'll need more than your piddling amulets."
"No fear," the Khitan said, smiling teeth showing in the dimness, "my magic plenty powerful. How you think I get here?"
"I was about to ask that." Conan looked puzzled. "Chulainn, I last saw this little beggar in Khorshemish, a city many weeks of travel to the south, yet here he is ahead of me. How did you do it, mountebank?"
"Easy," the Khitan said, descending from the cairn and adjusting his rags. "I flew on a dragon. Now, you want to go up the mountain?"
Mystified, the two Cimmerians trudged on uphill alongside the shabby Khitan sorcerer.
The Field of Chiefs lay silent and deserted in the first gray light of dawn. No clan farmed here, and none grazed its cattle and sheep amid the eerie, strangely carven stones of the field. So mossy were they grown that one could stand in their midst for a great while before noticing the geometric patterns wrought upon their surfaces, and even longer before realizing that the geometry thus represented was not the same as that taught by the wise men of Aquilonia. The Cimmerians knew nothing of geometry, canny or uncanny, and had never noticed that particular strangeness.
The stones lay scattered about the little plain―odd, humped forms, upon which the moss seemed to grow equally upon all sides, unlike ordinary moss. In the center of the field towered the Standing Stone. It was a stark shaft of black rock and no such stone was native to these mountains. Its surface was rough and pitted, but no moss grew upon its surface. According to immemorial legend, this stone had been a missile in a long-ago war between Crom and Ymir. Ymir, god of the Nordheimers, had challenged Crom for the suzerainty of the North. Ymir, who was lord of storms and king of the frost giants, had sent a terrible, freezing winter, and many thousands of Crom's subjects had died. When he thought that Crom was sufficiently weakened, Ymir and his giants had marched upon Cimmeria. Crom, unweakened, had torn the great stone from a
mountaintop in Hyperborea, still glowing from the heat of the internal flames of that mountain. It had arced for many leagues through the air and landed in this spot, directly before the advancing army, so close that it singed Ymir's beard. The Nordheimer god, seeing that Crom was in no way weakened, had turned in his tracks and gone home. After that time Crom had made sure to imbue his people with the extraordinary endurance of extremes of cold and heat that so characterized the Cimmerians.
The boy thought of this legend as he climbed the Standing Stone, his fingers and toes finding easy purchase on the rough surface. Cimmerians are climbers from birth and this one swarmed up the side of the vertical stone as swiftly as a civilized youth would have climbed a stair, and he reached the top without the slightest trace of breathlessness. He was the first to arrive. He had awakened in the dark of night and had stolen from the camp in order to arrive here ahead of his kinsmen. Now he would be able to tell his grandchildren that he was first among the clansmen to reach the Standing Stone upon this hosting. If he survived the fighting.
The youth wore the blue face paint of Clan Tunog and little else. Despite the biting wind he did not trouble himself with a cloak and only a wolfskin loincloth eased the bite of a wide belt heavy with the weight of sword and dagger. He had left his spear leaning against the base of the stone. His long black hair streamed like a banner in the breeze as he stood in the alert half-crouch of the mountain-bred warrior. Had he known it, an artist of the civilized lands would have considered him to be the very picture of the savage, warlike north, but he neither knew nor cared about such things. He slitted his gaze against the wind and awaited the coming of the clans.
The boy's keen eyes caught the first movement just as the rising sun peered over the mountain crest to the east, flooding the Field of Chiefs with a bloody light. From several directions he saw lone runners converging upon his point of vantage. These were the best runners of each clan, bearing their Bloody Spears ahead of the main body. Within minutes the field was black with dark-haired warriors, for the Cimmerians do not march stolidly to battle like civilized armies, but instead run at the mile-eating trot of the high valleys.
As they neared, each runner cast his spear at the great stone in accordance with an ancient custom no longer understood but still
practiced at such times. "Greeting, warriors!" called the youth atop the stone.
A Raeda with plaited hair looked up and grinned. "I had hoped to be first. You arose early this morning, I'll wager."
''You would win," the youth called. "Come on up and see such a sight as few men ever behold in a lifetime!" The young runners scaled the stone with the agility of monkeys and soon crowded together on the treacherous footing as casually as Aquilonian loungers in the great square of Tarantia.
"They come!" said one. "Raeda, Tunog, Canach, Lacheish, Dal Claidh, all the clans in one place. Was there ever such a sight?"
One pointed to the northeast, where a long file of men were trotting through a narrow pass, their spearbearer at their head. "Yonder come the wild Galla, by the look of their topknots. I have never laid eyes upon a man of that clan. They are said to be uncommonly fond of battle." This was an awesome pronounceme
nt coming from a Cimmerian.
"Ahh," exulted a youth whose temples were shaven in the fashion of Clan Lacheish, "does not the light of morning glitter most fairly upon the spearpoints of such a host?"
Now a grizzled chieftain reached the base of the stone and he stood with fists on hips, staring up at the boys. "You've gazed your fill, now come down from there. There's little fighting to be found atop the Stone, and much work to be done down here."
As the young men descended the stone several other chiefs joined the one who had hailed them. Among them was Canach. As the chief who had called for the hosting, he was leader of the clansmen, at least as far as any one man could lead the wild tribes of Cimmeria, even in time of peace.
"We gather quickly," he said with approval. "We'll not have long to wait before we set forth. Even the Galla have arrived early on the first day."
"The Galla travel faster than most," said Raeda. "Others will be arriving throughout the day. Some of the lowland clans may not arrive until the morrow."
"I hope that they do not take longer than the midday to arrive," Canach said. "I feel that time is important now. We must set off before the sun is
much past its zenith tomorrow, with or without all the clans."
Throughout the day the men gathered. There was no making of speeches. All knew why they were there and they were ready to fight. No more need be said. They sat talking around small fires, some of them eating from their scant supply of marching rations. By nightfall the last of the clans had arrived. All the able fighting men of Cimmeria, save only Conan and Chulainn, were present for the hosting at the Standing Stone.
Canach was sitting at a fire with his fellow chiefs when a final group arrived, and these were not Cimmerians. "Foreigners come," a man said quietly. Canach stared into the dimness outside the circle of firelight. He heard the faint click and jingle of arms, sounds that the Cimmerians did not make even when fully armed. Ordinarily, these sounds would have had him reaching for his weapons, but this time he was certain that those who approached were not foes.
Three men stepped within the firelight. "I was told that I would find the chieftains here," said the tallest. Like the others, the speaker had long yellow hair and beard. Unlike the Cimmerians this man and his followers wore helmets adorned with horns short enough to be clear of a sword blow, and coats of iron or bronze scales. They also wore many ornaments of gold set with gems.
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