When Conan, realizing the substitution, took his stand with Taramis and was defeated, Constantius had him crucified outside the city. By chance, Olgerd Vladislav, chief of the local band of Zuagir outlaws, had come riding by and had cut Conan down from his cross, saying that if he survived his wounds he might join their band. Conan not only survived but also proved so able a leader that in time he ousted Olgerd from the band, which he had led from this day to this.
But this was the end of his leadership. Gomer of Akkharia sighed deeply. Conan had ridden before them for the last two days, sunk in his own grim lust for revenge. He did not realize the depth of the passion in the hearts of the Zuagirs. Gomer knew that, although they loved Conan, their superstitious terrors had driven them to the brink of mutiny and murder. To the scarlet gates of Hell they might follow the Cimmerian―but no further into the Land of Ghosts.
The Shemite idolized his chieftain. But, knowing that no threat would swerve the Cimmerian from the path of vengeance, he could think of but one way to save Conan from the knives of his own men. From a pocket in his white khalat he withdrew a small, stoppered phial of green powder.
Secreting it in his palm, he rejoined Conan by the campfire, to share a bottle of wine with him.
3. Invisible Death.
When Conan awoke, the sun was high. Heat waves shimmered across the barren sands. The air was hot and still and dry, as if the heavens were an inverted brazen bowl heated to incandescence.
Conan staggered to his knees and clutched his throbbing brow. His aching skull felt as if he had been clubbed.
He lurched to his feet and stood swaying. Through bleary eyes, squinted against the glare, he looked slowly about him. He was alone in this cursed, waterless land.
He croaked a curse on the superstitious Zuagirs. The entire troop had decamped, taking with them all the gear, the horses, and the provisions. Two goatskin water bags lay beside him. These, his mail shirt and khalat, and his broadsword were all that his erstwhile comrades had left him.
He fell to his knees again and pulled the stopper from one of the water bags. Swirling the lukewarm fluid about, he rinsed the vile taste from his mouth and drank sparingly, reluctantly replacing the stopper before his fiery thirst was half assuaged. Although he longed to up-end the bag over his aching head, reason asserted its dominance. If he were lost in this sandy waste, every drop would be needed for survival.
Through the blinding headache and the groggy state of his wits, he could see what must have occurred. His Zuagirs were more fearful of this dubious realm than he had supposed, despite Gomer's warnings. He had made a serious―perhaps a fatal―error. He had underestimated the power of superstition over his desert warriors and overestimated his power to control and dominate them. With a dull groan, Conan cursed his own arrogant, bull-headed pride. Unless he learned better, it might some day be the death of him.
And perhaps this was the day. He took a long, stony look at his chances. They seemed slim. He had water for two days on short rations―three, if he would risk madness by limiting his intake further.
No food and no horse, which meant he must wend afoot.
Well then, on he would go. But whither? The obvious answer was: back the way he had come. But there were arguments against that course. Of these, the most eloquent was that of distance. They had ridden for two days after leaving the last water hole. A man on foot could travel at best at only half the speed of a horse. For him, then, to return by the route they had come would mean he must travel for at least two full days without any water at all…
Conan rubbed his jaw reflectively, trying to forget the throbbing in his skull and to cudgel some sense out of his groggy wits. Retracing his steps would not be the best idea, for he knew there was no water closer than four days' march away.
He looked ahead, where the trail of the fleeing Vardanes stretched straight from this place to the horizon.
Perhaps he should continue to follow the Zamorian. While the path led into unknown country, the mere fact that the land was unknown was in its favor. An oasis might lie just beyond the nearest dunes. It was hard to reach a sensible decision under such circumstances, but Conan resolved upon what seemed the wiser course. Girding his khalat about his mailed form and slinging his sword across his shoulders, he strode off along Vardanes' track, the water bags slapping against his back.
The sun hung forever in a sky of burning brass. It blazed down like a fiery eye in the brow of some colossal cyclops, gazing upon the tiny, slow-moving figure that trudged across the baking surface of the crimson sands. It took forever for the afternoon sun to glide down the vast, empty curve of the sky, to die on the flaming funeral pyre of the west Then purple evening stole on shadowy wings across the vault of the heavens, and a trace of blessed coolness crept across the dunes, with soft shadows and a light breeze.
By then, Conan's leg muscles were beyond pain. Fatigue had numbed the ache in them, and he stumbled forward on limbs like stone columns animated by sorcery.
His great head was bowed on his massive chest He plodded on numbly, needing rest but driven by the knowledge that now, in the coolness of evening, he could make the most distance with the least discomfort.
His throat was caked with dust; his swarthy visage was dusted brick-red with a mask of desert sand. He had drunk a mouthful an hour ago and would drink no more until it became so dark that he could no longer see to follow Vardanes' trail.
His dreams that night were turgid and confused, filled with shaggy nightmare figures with one glaring eye in their bestial brows, who beat his naked body with whips of red-hot chain.
When he blinked awake, he found the sun already high and another hot day before him. It was agony to rise. Every muscle throbbed as if tiny needles had been thrust deep into his tissues. But rise he did, to drink lightly and go forward.
Soon he lost track of time, but still the tireless engine of his will drove him on, step after staggering step. His mind wandered away into shadowy bypaths of delusion. But still he held three thoughts before him: to follow the trail of hoofprints, to save water stringently, and to stay on his feet. If once he fell, he knew he would be unable to rise again. And if he fell during the scorching day, his bones would desiccate and whiten amidst these scarlet wastes for ages to come.
4. The Deathless Queen.
Vardanes of Zamora halted at the crest of the hills and stared down at a sight so strange that it struck him dumb. For five days, since the botched ambush against the Zuagirs had rebounded upon the Turanians, he had ridden like a madman, scarcely daring to snatch an hour or two of rest for himself and his mare. A terror so great that it robbed the very manhood from within him goaded him on.
Well did he know the vengeance of the desert outlaws. His imagination was filled with sickening scenes of the price the grim avengers would exact from his body if ever he fell into their hands. Thus, when he saw that the ambush had failed, he had galloped straight out into the desert. He knew that devil, Conan, would flay the traitor's name from Boghra Khan and then would come howling on his heels with a bloodthirsty mob of Zuagirs. Nor would they easily give up the quest of their treacherous former comrade.
His one slim chance had been to head out into the trackless reaches of Shan-e-Sorkh. Although Vardanes was a city-bred Zamorian of culture and sophistication, the fortunes of his age had flung him in with the desert outlaws, and he knew them well. He knew they dreaded the very name of the Red Waste and that their savage imaginations peopled it with every monster and devil ever dreamed of. Why the desert tribesmen feared the Red Waste so terribly he neither knew nor cared, so long as their fear would keep them from following him very far into that deadly desert.
But they had not turned back. His lead on them was so slight that, day after day, he could see the clouds of dust raised by the Zuagir horsemen behind him. He pressed ahead with every moment, eating and drinking in the saddle and pushing his mount to the verge of exhaustion in order to widen that narrow gap.
After five days, he knew no
t whether they were still on his track; but soon it mattered little. He had exhausted the food and water for himself and his mare and pressed on in the faint hope of finding a water hole in this endless waste.
His horse, caked with dry mud where desert dust had stuck to lathered sides, staggered forward like a dead thing driven by a sorcerer's will.
Now it was near to death. Seven times this day it had fallen, and only the lash of the whip had driven it to its feet again. Since it could no longer support his weight, Vardanes walked, leading it by its rein.
The Red Waste had taken a fearful toll of Vardanes himself. Once handsome as a laughing young god, he was now a gaunt, sunblackened skeleton. Bloodshot eyes glared through matted, stringy locks. Through cracked, swollen lips he mumbled mindless prayers to Ishtar, Set, Mitra, and a score of other deities. As he and his trembling steed lurched to the crest of yet another row of dunes, he looked down and saw a lush green valley, dotted with clumps of emerald-green date palms.
Amid this fertile vale lay a small, walled city of stone. Bulging domes and squat guard towers rose above a stuccoed wall, wherein was set a great gate whose polished bronzen hinges redly reflected the sun.
A city in this scorching waste? A lush valley of cool, green trees and soft lawns and limped lotus pools, in the heart of this bleak wilderness? Impossible!
Vardanes shuddered, shut his eyes, and licked his cracked lips. It must be a mirage, or a phantom of his disordered wits! Yet a shard of half-forgotten lore, gleaned from his youthful studies long ago, came back to him. It was a fragment of legend called Akhlat the Accursed.
He strove to recover that thread of memory. It had been in an old Stygian book, which his Shemite tutor kept locked in a sandalwood chest. Even as a bright-eyed lad, Vardanes had been blessed or cursed with greed, curiosity, and nimble fingers. One dark night, he had picked that lock and pored with mingled awe and loathing through the portentous pages of that dark grimoire of elder necromancy. Penned in a spidery hand on pages of dragon parchment, the text described strange rites and ceremonies. The pages crawled with cryptic hieroglyphs from elder kingdoms of sorcerous evil, like Acheron and Lemuria, which had flourished and fallen in time's dawn.
Among the pentacle-crowded pages had been fragments of some dark liturgy designed to draw down undying demon-things from dark realms beyond the stars, from the chaos that ancient mages said reigned beyond the borders of the cosmos. One of these liturgies contained cryptic references to "devil-cursed and demon-haunted Akhlat in the Red Waste, where power-mad sorcerers of yore called down to this earthly sphere a Demon from Beyond, to their unending sorrow … Akhlat, where the Undying One rules with a hand of horror to this very day… doomed, accursed Akhlat, which the very gods spurned, transforming all the realm round about into a burning waste …"
Vardanes was still sitting in the sand by the head of his panting mare when grim-faced warriors seized him and bore him down from the ring of stony hills that encircled the city―down into the garden valley of date palms and lotus pools―down to the gates of Akhlat the Accursed.
5. The Hand of Zillah.
Conan roused slowly, but this time it was different. Before, his awakening had been painful, prying gummed lids open to squint at the fiery sun, hoisting himself slowly erect to stagger forward across broiling sands.
This time he awoke easily, with a blissful sensation of repletion and comfort. Silken pillows lay beneath his head. Thick awnings with tasseled fringes kept the sun from his body, which was clean and naked save for a fresh loincloth of white linen.
He sprang instantly to full alertness, like an animal whose survival in the wild depends upon this ability. He stared about with unbelieving eyes. His first thought was that death had claimed him at last and that his spirit had been borne beyond the clouds to the primitive paradise where Crom, the god of his people, sat enthroned amid a thousand heroes.
Beside his silken couch lay a silver ewer, filled with fresh, clear water.
Moments later, Conan lifted his dripping face from the ewer and knew that whatever paradise he was in, it was real and physical. He drank deep, although the state of his throat and mouth told him that he was no longer racked with the burning thirst of his desert trek. Some caravan must have found him and borne him to these tents for healing and succor. Looking down, Conan saw that his limbs and torso had been washed clean of desert dust and smeared with soothing salve. Whoever his rescuers might be, they had fed and cherished him while he raved and slumbered his way toward recovery.
He peered around the tent. His great broadsword lay across an ebony chest. He padded toward it on silent feet, like some wary jungle cat―then froze as he heard the tinkle of a warrior's harness behind him.
The musical sound, however, came from no warrior but from a slim, fawn-eyed girl who had just entered the tent and stood staring. Dark, shining hair fell unbound to her waist, and tiny silver bells were threaded through these tresses. Thence had come the faint tinkle.
Conan took in the girl in one swift glance: young, scarcely more than a child, slim and lovely, with a pale body that gleamed enticingly through gauzy veils. Jewels glistened on her slim, white hands. From the golden bangles on her brow and the look of her large, dark eyes, Conan guessed her to be of some folk akin to the Shemites.
"Oh!" she cried. "You are too weak to stand! You must rest some more to regain your strength." Her language was a dialect of Shemitish, full of archaic forms but close enough to the Shemitish that Conan knew for him to understand.
"Nonsense, girl, I'm fit enough," he replied in the same tongue. "Was it you who tended me here? How long since you found me?"
"Nay, strange lord, 'twas my father. I am Zillah the daughter of Enosh, a lord of Akhlat the Accursed. We found your body amid the everlasting sands of the Waste three days past," she replied, veiling her eyes with silken lashes.
Gods! he thought, but this was a fair wench. Conan had seen no woman in weeks, and he frankly studied the swelling contours of her lithe body, scarcely hidden by the gauzy veils. A trace of scarlet rose to her cheeks.
"So your pretty hand tended me, eh, Zillah?" he said. "My thanks to you and your sire for this mercy. I was close enough to death, I'll warrant. How did you chance upon me?" He strove without success to recall any city by the name of Akhlat the Accursed, although he thought he knew every city of the southern deserts, by repute if not by an actual visit.
"It was not by chance; indeed, we came in search of you," said Zillah.
Conan's eyes narrowed as his nerves tingled to the sense of danger.
Something in the sudden hardening of his grim, impassive face told the girl that he was a man of swift animal passions, a dangerous man unlike the soft, milda townsmen she had known.
"We meant you no harm!" she protested, lifting one slim hand defensively. "But follow me, sir, and my sire will explain all things to you."
For a moment, Conan stood tense, wondering if Vardanes had set these people on his trail. The silver he had carried off from the Turanians should be enough to buy the souls of half a hundred Shemites.
Then he relaxed, deliberately calming the blood lust that rose within him. He took up his sword and slung the baldric over his shoulder.
"Then take me to this Enosh, lass," he said calmly. "I would hear his tale."
She led him from the chamber. Conan squared his naked shoulders and padded after her.
6. The Thing from Beyond.
Enosh was poring over a wrinkled, time-faded scroll in a high-backed chair of black wood, as Zillah conducted Conan into his presence. This part of the tent was hung with dark purple cloth; thick carpets muffled the tread of their feet On a coiling stand composed of intertwined serpents of glinting brass, a black minor of curious design reposed.
Eery lights flickered in its ebon depths.
Enosh rose and greeted Conan with courtly phrases. He was a tall, elderly man, lean but straight His pate was covered with a headdress of snowy linen, his face was lined with age and creased wi
th thought, and his dark eyes were weary with ancient sorrow.
He bade his guest be seated and commanded Zillah to bring wine. When the formalities were over, Conan asked abruptly: "How did you come to find me, O shaykh?"
Enosh glanced at the black mirror. "Whilst I am no fell sorcerer, my son, I can make use of some means not altogether natural."
"How is it that you were looking for me?"
Enosh lifted a thin, blue-veined hand to quiet the warrior's suspicions. "Be patient, my friend, and I will explain all," he said in his quiet, deep-toned voice. Reaching to a low tabouret, he set aside his scroll and accepted a silver cup of wine.
When they had drunk, the old man began his tale: "Ages ago, a wily sorcerer of this land of Akhlat conceived of a plot against the ancient dynasty that had ruled in this place since the fall of Atlantis," he said slowly. "With cunning words, he made the people think their monarch ―a weak, self-indulgent man―was their foe, and the people rose and trampled the foolish king into the mire. Setting himself up as a priest and prophet of the Unknown Gods, the sorcerer pretended to divine inspiration. He averred that one of the gods would soon descend to earth to rule over Akhlat the Holy―as it was called―in person."
Conan snorted. "You Akhlatim, it seems, are no less gullible than the other nations I have seen."
The old man smiled wearily. "It is always easy to believe what one wishes to be true. But the plan of this black sorcerer was more terrible than any could dream. With vile and nameless rites, he conjured into this plane of existence a demoness from Outside, to serve as goddess to the people. Retaining his sorcerous control over this being, he presented himself as the interpreter of her divine will.
Struck with awe, the people of Akhlat soon groaned beneath a tyranny far worse than that which they had suffered from the old dynasty."
Conan smiled wolfishly. "I have seen that revolutions often throw up worse governments than those they replace."
The Conan Compendium Page 490
