The prospect of death did not trouble him; he only hoped to take as many foes as he could into the darkness with him.
Suddenly there came the clash of steel, the spurt of blood, and the icy gleam of a northern longsword. A giant figure hewed its way through the armored lines, leaving three blood-spattered corpses on the floor. With a mighty bound, the fair-haired northerner leaped to the dais. In his left arm he cradled a couple of heavy, round objectsbucklers of bronze and leather picked up from the floor where the victims of Conan's first outburst had dropped them.
"Catch this!" cried the newcomer, tossing one of the shields to Conan.
Their glances met and locked. Conan cried:
"Rolf! What do you here, old polar bear?"
"I will tell you later," growled the northerner, grasping the handle of the other buckler. "If we live, that is. If not, I am prepared to fight and die with you."
The unexpected advent of this formidable ally raised Conan's spirits even higher.
"Rush in, jackals," he taunted, waving his bloodstained scimitar. "Who will be the next to consign his soul to Hell? Attack, damn you, or I'll carry the fight to you!"
The steel-sheathed ranks of the Turanian soldiery had halted, forming a square about the dais. The two giant barbarians stood back to back, one black-haired and almost naked, the other blond and clad in somber black. They seemed like two royal tigers surrounded by timorous hunters, none of whom dared to strike the first blow.
"Archers!" cried an officer directing the Turanian troopers. "Spread out, so the shafts shall strike from all sides."
"They have us," growled Rolf "Had we but stout coats of Asgardean mail¦
Ah, well, it was fun while it lasted."
"Not quite," said Conan. "See you that row of windows? Here is my plan¦"
He whispered a few quick words to his comrade, who nodded. The two giants sprang forward, their blades flickering with the speed of striking snakes. Two guardsmen sank to the floor in their blood, and the others shrank back momentarily from the fury of the onslaught.
"Follow me, Rolf! We'll fool these dogs yet!" barked the Cimmerian, striking right and left.
The swords of the barbarians cleared a bloody avenue. The big northerner wheeled, thrusting and cutting, his sword cutting down the Turanians like wheat stalks before the scythe as he guarded Conan's back. As Conan rushed forward, Rolf followed in his wake, his sword widening the bloody path opened by the Cimmerian. His booming bass was casting forth the ringing tones of old northern battle songs, and the gleam of the berserk was in his gaze.
None could stand before their terrible attack. Turanian swords and spears sought their blood, but glanced harmlessly from the shields as the pantherish speed of the barbarians blurred the eyes of their adversaries. Conan bled from a score of wounds and Rolf's garb was in tatters, but the bodies heaped upon the floor bespoke the violence of their attack.
They put their backs to one of the large windows. For a few seconds both barbarians exploded into maniacal fury, laying about them with blood-crusted blades and clearing a space of several feet around them.
The massed soldiers shrank back for a moment. It seemed to their superstitious minds as if these were not men but invincible ogres, hard as steel, risen from the darker realms to wreak terrible vengeance.
Conan utilized this moment with lightninglike speed. The stained glass of the window shattered into thousands of gleaming, many-colored shards under blows from his scimitar that tore a great gap in the leaded pane.
Hurling their swords and shields into the faces of their foes, the Cimmerian and the northerner sprang through in headlong dives toward the sea two hundred feet below. A taunting laugh lingered behind them in the air as the guardsmen closed in.
"Archers! An archer, quickly, to have at them!" The commanding officer's voice was shrill with desperation. Five men stood forward, each armed with the powerful, double-curved Hyrkanian war bow. The window niche was cleared, and soon the twang of cords was heard. Then one of the bowmen shrugged his shoulders and turned to the officer,
"The range is too great in this treacherous moonlight. We cannot even discern their heads, and probably they are swimming under water most of the time. The task is beyond us."
Glaring, the general swung about and hurried to the king's chamber.
Yezdigerd had recovered from his shock. The only sign of damage was a small bandage round his forehead, partly covered by his turban. The terse account of the incidents elapsed was interrupted by the crash of the king's fist on a table, spilling vases and wine jugs to the floor.
"You have dared to fail! The red-handed barbarians have escaped and mocked the majesty of Turan! Are my soldiers sucklings, that they cannot lay two men low? Every tenth man among the guards shall die in the morning, to bolster the courage of the rest!"
He continued in a lower voice: "See that two war galleys are outfitted at once. The barbarians will surely try to steal a boat and make their way across the sea. We shall overtake them. See that the ships are well-provisioned and manned by my best seamen and soldiers. Take the sturdiest slaves for rowers. When I have caught these dogs, they shall suffer the agonies of a thousand deaths in the torture chambers of Aghrapur!"
He laughed, animated by the grisly prospect, and gestured imperiously to his general. The latter hurried out, threading his way through the throng in the courtroom to carry out his lord's commands.
Khosru the fisherman sat patiently on the gunwale of his sloop, mending a net which had been broken by the thrashing of a giant sturgeon that afternoon. He cursed his misfortune, for this was a fine net. It had cost him two pieces of gold and the promise of fifty pounds of fish to the Shemite merchant from, whom he had bought it. But what could a poor, starving fisherman do? He must have nets to get his living from the sea.
Aye, if those were the only things necessary for him and his family!
But he must also strain and work to meet the taxes imposed by the king.
He looked up in venomous, furtive hatred at the palace, limned against the moonlit sky. It perched on the cliff like a giant vulture of gold and marble. The king's taxgatherers had supple whips and no compunction about using them. Welts and old scars on Khosru's back told of wrongs suffered when the shoals were empty of fish.
Suddenly the sloop heaved, almost unseating him. Khosru sprang up, his eyes starting from their sockets in terror. A huge, almost-naked man was climbing aboard, his black, square-cut hair disordered and dripping. He seemed to Khosru like some demon of the sea, an evil merman, come up from unknown deeps to blast his soul and devour his body.
For a moment the apparition simply sat on a thwart, breathing in deep gasps. Then it spoke in Hyrkanian, though with a barbarous accent.
Khosra took heart a little, for the tales depicted the demons as devoid of speech. Still he quavered before the smoldering eyes and ferocious mien of the giant. His terror increased as another figure, a huge, black-clad, golden-haired man with a broad-bladed dagger at his belt, followed the first over the gunwale.
"Fear not, sailor!" boomed the black-haired giant "We don't want your blood, only your ship." He drew a glittering diadem from die waistband of his loincloth and held it out. "Here is payment enough and more. You can buy ten such craft as this one with it. Agreedor?"
He flexed his thick fingers suggestively. Khosru, his head whirling, nodded and snatched the diadem. With the speed of a frightened mouse he scuttled into the dinghy moored to the stern of the sloop and rowed away at desperate speed.
His strange customers lost no time. The sail went swiftly up and billowed in the freshening breeze. The trim craft gathered speed as it steered out toward the east.
Khosru shrugged his shoulders, mystified. He paused to hold up the fabulous diadem, whose gems glittered in the moonlight like a cascade of splashing white fire.
5. The Sea of Blood
-
The wind blew hard. Salt spray was tossed from the waves by the howling gusts. Conan the Cimmerian expande
d his mighty chest in deep, joyous breaths, relishing the feel of freedom. Many memories crowded his mind from the earlier days when he, as chief of the pirates of Vilayet, had swept the sea with dripping sword blades and laid the Turanian seaports in smoking ruins.
Vilayet was still a Hyrkanian sea, dominated by the Turanian navy's swift war galleys. Trade was carried on to some extent by daring merchants from the smaller countries on the northeastern shore, but a merchantman's way across the turbulent waves was fraught with peril. No state of war was needed for a Turanian captain to board, plunder, and scuttle a foreign vessel if it pleased him. The excuse was simply "infringement upon the interests of the lord of the Turanian Empire."
Besides the greedy Turanian navy, there lurked another danger as great: the pirates!
A motley horde of escaped slaves, criminals, freebooters, and wandering adventurers, all with a common lust for gold and a common disregard for human life, infested the waters of this huge inland sea, making even Turanian shipping a hazardous venture. In the mazes of islands to the south and east lay their secret harbors.
Internal strife often crippled their power, to the satisfaction of the king of Turan, until there came among them a strange barbarian from the West, with blue eyes and raven hair. Oman swept aside their quarreling captains and took the reins of leadership in his own hands. He united the pirates and forged them into a fearsome weapon aimed at the heart of Turan. Conan smiled in recollection of those days, when his name was a curse in Vilayet harbors, and prayers and incantations were chanted against him in die temples of the seaports.
The sloop was a trim and well-built craft. Her sharp bow cut the water like a scimitar, and her single sail billowed tautly before the wind.
Aghrapur had been astern for nearly twenty hours. Conan guessed their speed to be greater than that of Turanian warships. Should the breeze die, however, they would have a problem. They could never hope to equal the speed of a galley, propelled by hard-driven slave rowers, by means of their own puny sweeps. But the wind showed no sign of slackening, and Rolfs capable hand guided the small vessel before it so as to extract the last ounce of sailpower from it.
Rolf was telling the long tale of the wanderings and adventures that had led him to Aghrapur. "¦ so here I am, a fugitive from my native Asgard and from Turan both."
"Why did you join me?" asked Conan. "You were comfortably off at the Turanian court."
Rolf looked offended. "Did you think I had forgotten the time you saved my life, in that battle with the Hyperboreans in the Graaskal Mountains?"
Conan grinned. "So I did, didn't I? After so many battles, I had forgotten myself." He shaded his eyes and looked at the unbroken blue line of the horizon. "I doubt not that at least a couple of Yezdigerd's war galleys are on our heels," he said grimly. "The rascal must be hot for vengeance. I doubt he will soon forget how we pulled his beard."
"True," rumbled Rolf. "I hope this fine wind keeps up, or we shall soon be at grips with his galleys."
Conan's active mind was already dwelling on another topic. "In my days with the Red Brotherhood," he mused, "this area was the surest one for a sweep to catch a fat merchantman from Sultanapur or Khawarizm. Aye, but those traders fought well; sometimes the sea was red with our blood as well as theirs before we had the prize. Some of the pirate ships should be nearby." His eagle eyes continued to scan the endless blue vista.
He stiffened like a lion sighting its prey and thrust out an arm to starboard.
"Rolf, we have company? Those yellow sails can mean but one thing: a pirate. We might as well drop our sail and await them; they could overtake us in a half-hour if they wished!"
Eyes fixed on the oncoming vessel, he waited, outwardly stolid and unmoved.
Conan drank in the measured thump of oars in their locks, the creak of spars, the shouts of boatswains, and the smell of tar with gusto. Half a cable's length away a slim sailing galley, its yellow sail ablaze in the afternoon sun, hove to. The black flag of the Brotherhood fluttered from its masthead, Conan and Rolf rowed toward the pirate craft.
The gunwale was lined with faces. Many were swathed in colorful headcloths. Some favored the eastern turban; others wore helmets of steel or bronze. A few had pates shaven and bare except for a scalp-lock. The din and clamor lessened. Cold, cruel eyes scrutinized the two strangers in the sloop.
The small craft bumped against the side of the bigger vessel. A rope was lowered. Hand over hand, Conan and Rolf climbed with the agility of practiced seamen. Clearing the gunwale, they found themselves in the center of a half-circle of curious pirates, all shouting queries at once. Among them Conan recognized several who had followed him in former days. He snarled:
"Dogs, don't you know me? Is your memory so short that you must be reminded of my name, or have your eyes grown dim with age?"
Several men in the throng had drawn back, blanching from the shock of recognition. One, white-faced, rasped:
"A ghost, by Tarim! Erlik preserve us! It is our old admiral, come back from his grave to haunt us!" Veteran though he was, the grizzled pirate was obviously terrified as he pointed at Conan. "You perished many years ago, when the vampires of the Colchian Mountains assailed your crew as they fled from the Turanians after taking vengeance on Artaban of Shahpur. Begone, spirit, or we shall all be doomed!"
Conan gave a gusty laugh. He slapped his thigh with mirth, plucked Rolf's dagger from its sheath, and hurled it to the deck so that the point was driven inches deep into the planking and the hilt quivered upright. Then he pulled the weapon out.
"Have you taken leave of your senses, Artus?" he roared. "Could a ghost make that nick in the deck? Come, man, I am as alive as the lot of you and, if you believe me not, I'll crack a few heads to prove it! I escaped both the vampires and the Turanians, and what befell me after that is no concern of yours. Do you know me now?"
Conan's old followers now joyfully milled about the towering Cimmerian to shake his hand and clap his back. Men who had never seen him before crowded with the others, fired with curiosity about a man whose name was legendary, and whose fantastic exploits were still told by the wine legs on still evenings.
Suddenly a sharp voice sheared through the clamor: "Avast, there!
What's going on? Who are they? I told you to fetch them to me as soon as they were picked up!"
A tall man, wearing a light mail shirt, stood on the bridge, one fist banging the rails. A blazing red cloth was wound around his head. A badly-healed scar from eye to chin disfigured his long, narrow face.
"It is Conan, Captain!" cried old Artus, the shipmaster. "Our old admiral has returned!"
The captain's close-set eyes narrowed as his own sight sought confirmation of the oldster's words. An evil light blazed in those eyes as he picked out the bronzed form of the Cimmerian. He opened his mouth to speak, but Conan beat him to it.
"Are you not glad to see me, Yanak? Remember how I kicked you out of the fleet for hoarding spoils that belonged to all? How have you managed to trick your way to a captaincy? Ill days must have dawned for the Brotherhood!"
With his mouth working, Yanak spat back: "For that, barbarian, I will have you hung by the heels and roasted over the ship's fire! I am captain and give the orders here!"
"That may be," retorted Conan. "But I am still a member of the Brotherhood." He looked challengingly around, and nobody chose to deny his assertion. "I claim a right according to the articles. The right of any member of the brotherhood to fight the captain of a ship for the captaincy in a captain's duel."
He tossed up the dagger he had borrowed from Rolf and caught it again.
It was a formidable weapon with a broad, eighteen,-inch blade, but still no sword. He and Rolf had cast aside their swords in order to swim to the sloop, so the dagger was the only weapon they had between them.
The crew murmured, for all knew that in such a duel Conan would have to fight with whatever weapon he had with him at the time, while Yanak could choose what weapons he pleased. Yanak's armor, too, wou
ld give him a further advantage.
"This is madness, Conan!" Arms plucked the Cimmerian's elbow. "Yanak will cut you to pieces. I have seen him fight three brawling drunkards at the time and lay them low. We'll depose him instead and choose you for captain. All your old followers are on your side."
Conan shook his head and rumbled: "Half the crew don't know me and would oppose such a move. The men would be split into factions and our strength would be weakened. No, it must be done the traditional way."
Several crewmen were already clearing a space around the mast. Yanak approached, a gleeful smile on his scarred face as his hands tested the supple strength of a keen, straight sword. It was a weapon forged by a master craftsman, as could be seen by its brightly gleaming blade and sharply honed edges, tapering to a needle point.
Conan gripped his dagger firmly and strode towards the mast. A wide circle six yards in diameter was already drawn in charcoal on the deck around the mast. The rules of the fight were simple. The antagonists were to fight inside the circle. Any trick was allowed. The fight would be to the death, or until one of the duelists was so badly hurt he could not go on. In that case he would simply be flung overboard anyway. If one of the fighters stepped out of the circle, the onlookers would at once thrust him back in.
The instant Conan entered the circle, Yanak bounded forward, cleaving the air with a whistling stroke. But the barbarian was too old a hand to be surprised. He leaped sideways, and Yanak was saved from a dagger thrust in his side only by twisting his body aside at the last moment.
After that, he moved more warily, although he was clearly at an advantage. The longer reach of his weapon almost matched him evenly with Oman's brawn and stature. Now and then he made a sudden attack, shouting and cursing, but the silent Cimmerian parried or evaded the blows with effortless ease and continued to circle around the mast.
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