The Conan Compendium

by Robert E. Howard

  Nine

  Conan could not suppress a grin when he saw Achilea emerge from her tent the next morning. “Are you sure you feel up to this?” he asked.

  She scowled at him. “It takes more than a little sunburn and thirst to stop one such as I, you Cimmerian dog.”

  This time, he laughed outright. She walked more stiffly man a man in full armor, and her skin was peeling as if she were shedding it like a snake. The new flesh beneath was as pink as that of a baby. She tried to maintain her stem scowl, only to smile and laugh weakly.

  “All right, I look like a dying lizard, not like a queen. I am still a warrior, though, and I am ready to sack that town.” She pointed to the hulking shape of Janagar.

  Conan eyed the gate. “We do not have to do this, you know,” he said. “We agreed to escort them here and protect them along the way. We did that. We could just gather all the water we can bear and ride away, our task finished with honor.”

  “Aye,” she said, glowering beneath her fine brows. “We could. But it would not satisfy me. Greater reward was implied. They said we were to have a share in the treasure. I want to look for it, even if it is no more than moonbeams in their minds.” She frowned. “Most of all, though, I do not like the way they treated us―riding off into the storm as if we were no more man dogs. I do not accept being treated with dishonor.”

  “Neither do I,” Conan said approvingly.

  “Then let us go find them.”

  “Come with me,” Conan said. “I’ve an idea.” They walked to the gate, where Jeyba stood with a coiled rope in his hand. Kye-Dee held a camel by its halter, looking up at the gem-set lintel with greedy eyes. The other Hyrkanians stood by, watching the proceedings with interest. Achilea’s women followed behind her.

  “Now what?” Achilea said.

  “Jeyba claims he is a strong man,” said Conan. “We are going to see how strong. Jeyba, mount the beast and stand atop its back. If you straddle its hump, you can rest your feet on its spine.”

  “Whatever you say.” The dwarf mounted the camel and stepped up onto its back. The beast did not like the unfamiliar sensation and shifted, but Kye-Dee held its head steady.

  “Are you going to try what I think you are?” Achilea asked, amusement showing through her mask of pain.

  “Watch,” said Conan. Like the mountain goat Kye-Dee had mentioned, he sprang lightly onto the camel just behind its neck, then up its back. “Steady, now,” he said as he stepped up onto the dwarfs muscular shoulders. Jeyba grimaced, but he grasped Conan’s ankles and kept his balance.

  Standing steady upon the dwarf, Conan stretched upward.

  At fullest extension, his fingertips just touched the massive lintel stone above the gate. “Let go now!”

  he told the dwarf. His ankles released, Conan pulled himself upward, anchored by the tips of his fingers alone. Teeth gritted, he slowly ascended until his face was pressed flat against the carved stone. Then he released me grip of one hand, stretched his arm full-length and began to pull himself up by the strength of that arm. His whole upper body turned scarlet with the strain, the great muscles of his shoulders and back standing out in bold relief and looking more solid than the stone he was climbing.

  Those below gasped in admiration at the incredible display of strength. Hand over hand, the Cimmerian pulled himself up over the carved surface until he could get his toes into the recesses of the stone. After dial, the climb went much more easily and he went up like a fly ascending a wall. The second his fingers grasped the parapet, he pulled himself over the wall and onto a sentry-walk on the other side, Conan looked around him, ignoring the clapping coming from his companions on the outside. He saw many buildings and a small plaza just within the gate. All was utterly deserted. Satisfied that no ambush awaited, he leaned over the parapet. “Throw me the rope.” The dwarf complied, and Conan made one end fast to a stone stanchion that looked as if it had once been a support for a catapult. He cast the rope over the wall.

  “Come on up!” he called.

  “Should we leave a man or two with the camels?” Kye-Dee asked.

  “No. They’ll not wander away from water. They would stay here the rest of their lives if the grass would hold out.”

  “What about those rogues following behind us?” Achilea asked.

  “If they come, one or two men will not be enough to protect the camels. Bring provisions, though.

  We may be here for a while.”

  Payna came up first, men Lombi and Ekun. The agile women pulled themselves up the rope while “walking” up the wall with their feet. Achilea insisted upon doing the same, although still far from fully recovered. The women watched worriedly while she made slow progress up the wall. As she was about to give out, Conan reached down and grasped her wrist. With a powerful heave, he brought her up over the parapet and deposited her standing on the walk, She smiled as she surveyed the scene, her eyes bright with excitement “At last! The treasure city!”

  “It’s a city, at any rate,” said Conan. “Come on, you horse-eating dogs!” he shouted to the Hyrkanians below.

  “Are we monkeys to climb ropes?” Kye-Dee said, eyeing the rope and the wall with a wary expression.

  “Don’t be so timid,” Conan said in exasperation. “Just tie a loop in the end of the rope and stand in it. We’ll haul you up.”

  “What is more useless than a Hyrkanian off his horse?” Ekun asked in disgust.

  “I heard that!” Kye-Dee yelled.

  Eventually, all the Hyrkanians stood atop the wall. Last came Jeyba, after tying water skins and bags of food to the rope.

  “Curse it!” Kye-Dee said. “I meant to pry loose some of the opals from the wall on the way up.”

  “How could you?” Lombi asked, spitting over the walk to the plaza below, “You were grasping the rope with both hands and had your eyes tightly shut.”

  “Let’s go,” Conan said. “Everyone pick up a portion of the provisions. We have some people to find.”

  “And some treasure to pick up,” Achilea said.

  “That, too,” Conan agreed.

  As the others gathered their goods and settled their weapons about them, Conan performed a last scan of the crater rim. It was a strange horizon for this desert: a perfectly level stretch of sand, as regular as if it were carved in stone.

  “That is odd,” he mused.

  “What?” Achilea asked.

  “Where are the tracks? A good many people and camels have come over that rim and down that slope in the last few days, and there has been no wind to speak of, yet the whole thing is now as smooth as a bowl of glazed clay.”

  She scanned the view and shuddered a little. “Welt, we knew this place was not natural. It restores itself, like flesh healing.”

  “I suppose―” The Cimmerian caught a tiny flash of something on the rim of the crater. He pointed toward it. “Do you see something there?”

  Achilea squinted at the spot “It is not steel this time, and it is right on the sand It appears purple, like violet glass or-―” she cast him an uneasy expression “―like the crystals that wizard toyed with.” The others looked warily at the spot

  Conan nodded. His eyes were keener and he could make out the tiny man-shape. “It is the homunculus.” He tested the fit of his sword in its sheath, “No matter. If the mage had any spirit, he would be down here, not out in the desert sending his little stooge to spy upon us. Come, we have work to do.”

  A few yards from the gate, they found a stair descending to the plaza below. A minute later, they stood in the little plaza and the Cimmerian noted that it resembled no abandoned town he had ever seen before. There were no leaves littering the flags, no buildup of dirt or sand, no signs of animals having passed through, not so much as a feather dropped by a passing bird. It might have been a city in which all the inhabitants had gone indoors to escape the heat of the day, except that no inhabited city was ever so clean.

  “Was ever a place so strange?” Achilea said, a hand resting on her
sword-hilt “Or so silent?” said Lombi.

  “Or so lacking in interest?” said Kye-Dee. “Why do we stand here like bumpkins who have never seen a town, much less sacked and burned one? Let’s find a palace and get some loot!”

  Following this eminently sensible advice, they left the plaza to explore deeper into the city. A road paved with smooth, polished white stone led from the gate area to a short flight of steps that debouched onto small, open courtyard, surrounded by high buildings with lavish balconies, hi its center was a fountain in which water sprayed from the wings of a rising phoenix into the broad, circular pool below.

  “This makes no sense,” said the dwarf, his eyes searching the skies overhead. ‘In the middle of such a desert, so much water should attract every bird that flies past Yet it looks as if none has ever landed here.”

  “I think you will find that is exactly the case,” Conan said.

  “Eh?”

  “I will explain later. Come on.”

  They passed many splendid structures, all of them perfectly intact. There seemed to be no straight streets cutting through the city. Instead, many short streets and flights of steps led to squares and courtyards with no overall plan. Sometimes the streets ended in blind cul-de-sacs and they had to pass through buildings to the next street In other places, there were tunnels through large blocks of structures and what appeared to be marketplaces sheltered beneath roofs of translucent alabaster.

  In the buildings they saw many paintings, frescoes, mosaics and murals, as well as much statuary, but little of value that was portable. The art depicted scenes of great lascivious-ness and even greater bloodshed, but most of it seemed to be of a ritual nature, as if the religion of the people who had lived in Janagar was dedicated solely to the gods of blood and fertility.

  “What sort of people were they?” Achilea wondered as she roused over one such mural, a vast fresco in which naked bodies, human and demonic, were intertwined in combinations so complex that they eye wearied in trying to follow all the permutations.

  Conan shrugged. “I have seen the temples and holy places of many peoples in my travels, from the oak groves of Asgard to the jungle shrines of the black tribesmen and the great altars of the civilized lands between. Most folk try to buy the favor of their gods with rituals and sacrifices and prayers,: hoping to win mercy and avert anger. Their wants are simple, for the most part―good crops, healthy children, victory in battle.

  “But there are others―old, rich nations that have forgotten hunger and hardship and misfortune and have known only luxury for many generations. They want to be as gods themselves, and their rites are intended to secure them power, even immortality. The folk of Janagar may have been such a nation.”

  “Perhaps that is why they were destroyed,” Achilea said, “Were they destroyed?” the dwarf asked, gazing doubtfully at the buildings all around them, perfect in every detail.

  “They must have been,” Achilea said. “This city is untouched, completely without life. It is as the twins said―the people of Janagar fled in a single night and no one ever came back.”

  Something in her words struck Conan as wrong, though he could not say what it was. “This place is a maze,” he announced. “Let’s climb one of these towers and get our bearings from the top.”

  They came to a spacious building with tall, slender, star-topped towers ascending from each of its comers and went within. Before them lay a vast chamber, capped with a low dome. The chamber was

  filled with sculptures in which stone, metal, glass and ceramic were combined to render the figures incredibly lifelike. Here, once again, were depicted rituals involving the most abandoned love making along with the ghastliest bloodshed.

  “At last!” cried Kye-Dee, pointing to a sculptured group depicting a hideously masked priest and his sacrificial victim. The victim was a beautiful, bound woman from whose slashed throat blood poured in the form of cascading rubies, garnets and amethysts. At sight of genuine treasure, one of the Hyrkanians strode to the artifice, opening the flap of his belt-pouch as he reached for the jewels.

  Conan’s avarice was aroused as well, but something in the repellent nature of the fabulous sculptures made him uneasy. “Wait,” he said. “Best not―” But the man ignored him, eyes wide and gleaming with greed. He grasped the cascade of jewels and instantly his body went rigid, save for his head, which snapped back with an audible crunch of bones. His tongue thrust forth, along with a strangled cry of anguish as his eyeballs started from their sockets. Wisps of smoke rose from his grasping hand; men black, greasy smoke poured in a thick column from his gaping mourn.

  Before their horrified eyes, the man’s flesh hissed and bubbled and fell away from his bones as he was consumed by unnatural, invisible fire. In minutes, there remained only a heap of blackened bones in a pool of steaming, sizzling fat. Alt the flesh and blood had been consumed.

  “These people may be long dead,” Achilea said, her voice as hoarse as it had been at the end of her desert trek, “but their curse is still strong. Touch nothing until we know it is safe to do so.”

  “We will perform the rites for him when we return to our homeland,” Kye-Dee told his surviving companions. “Unless one of you wants to collect his bones now?” The others made vigorous signals of negation.

  “Come,” said Conan, his dread about the city now redoubled.

  They went to a comer of the great room and entered the tower. The doorway opened onto a spiral stairway and they began to ascend. The steps turned to the left as they climbed, and this struck the Cimmerian as odd. All such stairways in his experience spiraled to the right on the ascent―castle towers were designed so that an attacker’s sword-arm was crowded against the central pier, while the retreating defender had a wide sweep for his own weapon-arm.

  The stairs, broad at first, became more narrow and cramped as they climbed. The tower was subtly tapered, a designer’s and builder’s stratagem that reduced the weight load, saved on materials and gave a viewer below the illusion that the tower was taller than it really was, all at once. Just when the passage was almost too narrow for Conan’s broad shoulders, they stepped out onto a broad platform that encircled me tower. The platform was provided with a waist-high railing of marble carved into a lacy, openwork design of twining vines. They stepped out warily, doubtful that the seemingly fragile structure could be solid after so long an abandonment.

  “First,” Conan said, “let’s see if our followers are lurking out there.” He peered out over the city wall. “Crom!” The others gasped and made sounds of disbelief. Hands went to protective amulets, and spells were muttered.

  They could see for miles, and beyond the city walls mere lay no desert, but rather endless acres of tilled land, divided into orderly fields by low walls of stone and well-trimmed hedges. Straight canals cut through the landscape. At intervals stood cranelike, counterweighted devices for raising water from the canals into the fields. In the distance they could see houses that looked like the mansions of fine country estates,

  “What is this?” Achilea cried.

  Conan placed his broad hands on the railing and peered over the edge, into me city below. The others did likewise. There were people in the streets, people dressed in colorful garb. As they watched, a procession of warriors rode through a street, light flashing from their gilded armor and the bronze frontlets on their horses’ brows.

  Slowly, they circled the tower. They saw that from the broad, steplike terraces of the largest buildings there hung huge, flower-rich vines in overgrown masses. In the terrace gardens, tall

  trees―cedar and cypress―pointed to the sky. Fragrant myrrh shrubs and palms heavy with dates grew in profusion. From the altars of the temples, great columns of : smoke ascended above the sacrificial fires.

  “What is happening here?” Achilea said.

  “This is an accursed place!” Payna cried, unnerved. “Let us be away from here, my queen!”

  Conan did not like this uncanny turn of events, but he was unafr
aid. “This is some sort of illusion.

  We are seeing Janagar as it was in ages long gone. Listen. Hear you any sound? I do not. It is all as silent as when we came through the streets.”

  “We are very high up,” Kye-Dee said doubtfully, having never before been atop such a tower “We would hear something,” Conan insisted. “I have been upon towers far taller than this one and you can still hear the sound of horses’ hooves on the streets. Does anyone smell smoke? I do not, yet there are fires all around us.”

  “Supposing you are right,” Achilea said, “where do you think we should go from here?”

  “There.” Conan’s long arm stretched out and he pointed to a vast structure hulking atop a hill in the center of the city. It looked squat, but that was only because of its massiveness. From it towered a dome higher than any other in the city, and made, so it appeared, of innumerable panels of glass. “If the twins are to be found in this city, that must be where they are.”

  “Look!” said a Hyrkanian, pointing downward. Around the base of their tower came an immense elephant, its flanks pointed with colorful designs and its long, curved tusks plated with gold. Upon its back was the statue of a god or demon, many-eyed and hideous. After it followed other elephants bearing the images of other monstrous deities. Around the beasts flocked musicians who played pipe and drum, horn and tambour, while dancers in furs and feathers whirled ecstatically and other worshipers gashed themselves with knives and flung severed parts of themselves at the idols, all in perfect silence.

  “Who they are and what they are doing, I know not,” Conan said somberly, “but they have been dust blowing hi the wind for thousands of years. By some working of magick, we see them as they once were.”

  “Let us go,” Achilea urged, catching his dark mood.

  “These visions of the long-dead oppress me. I do not know if I even want this treasure now. I just want some answers.”

  They descended the tower and no one spoke so much as a word until they departed the building.

  Out upon the street, alt was as it had been. The warriors and worshipers, the horses and elephants―all were gone as if they had never existed.