Delphi Works of Robert E. Howard (Illustrated) (Series Four)

by Robert E. Howard

  ‘Their wings are in confusion!’ he cried. ‘Their knights reel back from the sword-play. But what is this? Your banner is in motion — the center sweeps into the stream! By Mitra, Valannus is leading the host across the river!’

  ‘Fool!’ groaned Conan. ‘It may be a trick. He should hold his position; by dawn Prospero will be here with the Poitanian levies.’

  ‘The knights ride into a hail of arrows!’ cried the squire. ‘But they do not falter! They sweep on — they have crossed! They charge up the slope! Pallantides has hurled the wings across the river to their support! It is all he can do. The lion banner dips and staggers above the mêlée.

  ‘The knights of Nemedia make a stand. They are broken! They fall back! Their left wing is in full flight, and our pikemen cut them down as they run! I see Valannus, riding and smiting like a madman. He is carried beyond himself by the fighting-lust. Men no longer look to Pallantides. They follow Valannus, deeming him Conan as he rides with closed vizor.

  ‘But look! There is method in his madness! He swings wide of the Nemedian front, with five thousand knights, the pick of the army. The main host of the Nemedians is in confusion — and look! Their flank is protected by the cliffs, but there is a defile left unguarded! It is like a great cleft in the wall that opens again behind the Nemedian lines. By Mitra, Valannus sees and seizes the opportunity! He has driven their wing before him, and he leads his knights toward that defile. They swing wide of the main battle; they cut through a line of spearmen, they charge into the defile!’

  ‘An ambush!’ cried Conan, striving to struggle upright.

  ‘No!’ shouted the squire exultantly. ‘The whole Nemedian host is in full sight! They have forgotten the defile! They never expected to be pushed back that far. Oh, fool, fool, Tarascus, to make such a blunder! Ah, I see lances and pennons pouring from the farther mouth of the defile, beyond the Nemedian lines. They will smite those ranks from the rear and crumple them. Mitra, what is this?’

  He staggered as the walls of the tent swayed drunkenly. Afar over the thunder of the fight rose a deep bellowing roar, indescribably ominous.

  ‘The cliffs reel!’ shrieked the squire. ‘Ah, gods, what is this? The river foams out of its channel, and the peaks are crumbling! The ground shakes and horses and riders in armor are overthrown! The cliffs! The cliffs are falling!’

  With his words there came a grinding rumble and a thunderous concussion, and the ground trembled. Over the roar of the battle sounded screams of mad terror.

  ‘The cliffs have crumbled!’ cried the livid squire. ‘They have thundered down into the defile and crushed every living creature in it! I saw the lion banner wave an instant amid the dust and falling stones, and then it vanished! Ha, the Nemedians shout with triumph! Well may they shout, for the fall of the cliffs has wiped out five thousand of our bravest knights — Hark!’

  To Conan’s ears came a vast torrent of sound, rising and rising in frenzy: ‘The king is dead! The king is dead! Flee! Flee! The king is dead!’

  ‘Liars!’ panted Conan. ‘Dogs! Knaves! Cowards! Oh, Crom, if I could but stand — but crawl to the river with my sword in my teeth! How, boy, do they flee?’

  ‘Aye!’ sobbed the squire. ‘They spur for the river; they are broken, hurled on like spume before a storm. I see Pallantides striving to stem the torrent — he is down, and the horses trample him! They rush into the river, knights, bowmen, pikemen, all mixed and mingled in one mad torrent of destruction. The Nemedians are on their heels, cutting them down like corn.’

  ‘But they will make a stand on this side of the river!’ cried the king. With an effort that brought the sweat dripping from his temples, he heaved himself up on his elbows.

  ‘Nay!’ cried the squire. ‘They cannot! They are broken! Routed! Oh gods, that I should live to see this day!’

  Then he remembered his duty and shouted to the men-at-arms who stood stolidly watching the flight of their comrades. ‘Get a horse, swiftly, and help me lift the king upon it. We dare not bide here.’

  But before they could do his bidding, the first drift of the storm was upon them. Knights and spearmen and archers fled among the tents, stumbling over ropes and baggage, and mingled with them were Nemedian riders, who smote right and left at all alien figures. Tent-ropes were cut, fire sprang up in a hundred places, and the plundering had already begun. The grim guardsmen about Conan’s tent died where they stood, smiting and thrusting, and over their mangled corpses beat the hoofs of the conquerors.

  But the squire had drawn the flap close, and in the confused madness of the slaughter none realized that the pavilion held an occupant. So the flight and the pursuit swept past, and roared away up the valley, and the squire looked out presently to see a cluster of men approaching the royal tent with evident purpose.

  ‘Here comes the king of Nemedia with four companions and his squire,’ quoth he. ‘He will accept your surrender, my fair lord—’

  ‘Surrender the devil’s heart!’ gritted the king.

  He had forced himself up to a sitting posture. He swung his legs painfully off the dais, and staggered upright, reeling drunkenly. The squire ran to assist him, but Conan pushed him away.

  ‘Give me that bow!’ he gritted, indicating a longbow and quiver that hung from a tent-pole.

  ‘But your Majesty!’ cried the squire in great perturbation. ‘The battle is lost! It were the part of majesty to yield with the dignity becoming one of royal blood!’

  ‘I have no royal blood,’ ground Conan. ‘I am a barbarian and the son of a blacksmith.’

  Wrenching away the bow and an arrow he staggered toward the opening of the pavilion. So formidable was his appearance, naked but for short leather breeks and sleeveless shirt, open to reveal his great, hairy chest, with his huge limbs and his blue eyes blazing under his tangled black mane, that the squire shrank back, more afraid of his king than of the whole Nemedian host.

  Reeling on wide-braced legs Conan drunkenly tore the door-flap open and staggered out under the canopy. The king of Nemedia and his companions had dismounted, and they halted short, staring in wonder at the apparition confronting them.

  ‘Here I am, you jackals!’ roared the Cimmerian. ‘I am the king! Death to you, dog-brothers!’

  He jerked the arrow to its head and loosed, and the shaft feathered itself in the breast of the knight who stood beside Tarascus. Conan hurled the bow at the king of Nemedia.

  ‘Curse my shaky hand! Come in and take me if you dare!’

  Reeling backward on unsteady legs, he fell with his shoulders against a tent-pole, and propped upright, he lifted his great sword with both hands.

  ‘By Mitra, it is the king!’ swore Tarascus. He cast a swift look about him, and laughed. ‘That other was a jackal in his harness! In, dogs, and take his head!’

  The three soldiers — men-at-arms wearing the emblem of the royal guards — rushed at the king, and one felled the squire with a blow of a mace. The other two fared less well. As the first rushed in, lifting his sword, Conan met him with a sweeping stroke that severed mail-links like cloth, and sheared the Nemedian’s arm and shoulder clean from his body. His corpse, pitching backward, fell across his companion’s legs. The man stumbled, and before he could recover, the great sword was through him.

  Conan wrenched out his steel with a racking gasp, and staggered back against the tent-pole. His great limbs trembled, his chest heaved, and sweat poured down his face and neck. But his eyes flamed with exultant savagery and he panted: ‘Why do you stand afar off, dog of Belverus? I can’t reach you; come in and die!’

  Tarascus hesitated, glanced at the remaining man-at-arms, and his squire, a gaunt, saturnine man in black mail, and took a step forward. He was far inferior in size and strength to the giant Cimmerian, but he was in full armor, and was famed in all the western nations as a swordsman. But his squire caught his arm.

  ‘Nay, your Majesty, do not throw away your life. I will summon archers to shoot this barbarian, as we shoot lions.’

 
Neither of them had noticed that a chariot had approached while the fight was going on, and now came to a halt before them. But Conan saw, looking over their shoulders, and a queer chill sensation crawled along his spine. There was something vaguely unnatural about the appearance of the black horses that drew the vehicle, but it was the occupant of the chariot that arrested the king’s attention.

  He was a tall man, superbly built, clad in a long unadorned silk robe. He wore a Shemitish head-dress, and its lower folds hid his features, except for the dark, magnetic eyes. The hands that grasped the reins, pulling the rearing horses back on their haunches, were white but strong. Conan glared at the stranger, all his primitive instincts roused. He sensed an aura of menace and power that exuded from this veiled figure, a menace as definite as the windless waving of tall grass that marks the path of the serpent.

  ‘Hail, Xaltotun!’ exclaimed Tarascus. ‘Here is the king of Aquilonia! He did not die in the landslide as we thought.’

  ‘I know,’ answered the other, without bothering to say how he knew. ‘What is your present intention?’

  ‘I will summon the archers to slay him,’ answered the Nemedian. ‘As long as he lives he will be dangerous to us.’

  ‘Yet even a dog has uses,’ answered Xaltotun. ‘Take him alive.’

  Conan laughed raspingly. ‘Come in and try!’ he challenged. ‘But for my treacherous legs I’d hew you out of that chariot like a woodman hewing a tree. But you’ll never take me alive, damn you!’

  ‘He speaks the truth, I fear,’ said Tarascus. ‘The man is a barbarian, with the senseless ferocity of a wounded tiger. Let me summon the archers.’

  ‘Watch me and learn wisdom,’ advised Xaltotun.

  His hand dipped into his robe and came out with something shining — a glistening sphere. This he threw suddenly at Conan. The Cimmerian contemptuously struck it aside with his sword — at the instant of contact there was a sharp explosion, a flare of white, blinding flame, and Conan pitched senseless to the ground.

  ‘He is dead?’ Tarascus’ tone was more assertion than inquiry.

  ‘No. He is but senseless. He will recover his senses in a few hours. Bid your men bind his arms and legs and lift him into my chariot.’

  With a gesture Tarascus did so, and they heaved the senseless king into the chariot, grunting with their burden. Xaltotun threw a velvet cloak over his body, completely covering him from any who might peer in. He gathered the reins in his hands.

  ‘I’m for Belverus,’ he said. ‘Tell Amalric that I will be with him if he needs me. But with Conan out of the way, and his army broken, lance and sword should suffice for the rest of the conquest. Prospero cannot be bringing more than ten thousand men to the field, and will doubtless fall back to Tarantia when he hears the news of the battle. Say nothing to Amalric or Valerius or anyone about our capture. Let them think Conan died in the fall of the cliffs.’

  He looked at the man-at-arms for a long space, until the guardsman moved restlessly, nervous under the scrutiny.

  ‘What is that about your waist?’ Xaltotun demanded.

  ‘Why, my girdle, may it please you, my lord!’ stuttered the amazed guardsman.

  ‘You lie!’ Xaltotun’s laugh was merciless as a sword-edge. ‘It is a poisonous serpent! What a fool you are, to wear a reptile about your waist!’

  With distended eyes the man looked down; and to his utter horror he saw the buckle of his girdle rear up at him. It was a snake’s head! He saw the evil eyes and the dripping fangs, heard the hiss and felt the loathsome contact of the thing about his body. He screamed hideously and struck at it with his naked hand, felt its fangs flesh themselves in that hand — and then he stiffened and fell heavily. Tarascus looked down at him without expression. He saw only the leathern girdle and the buckle, the pointed tongue of which was stuck in the guardsman’s palm. Xaltotun turned his hypnotic gaze on Tarascus’ squire, and the man turned ashen and began to tremble, but the king interposed: ‘Nay, we can trust him.’

  The sorcerer tautened the reins and swung the horses around.

  ‘See that this piece of work remains secret. If I am needed, let Altaro, Orastes’ servant, summon me as I have taught him. I will be in your palace at Belverus.’

  Tarascus lifted his hand in salutation, but his expression was not pleasant to see as he looked after the departing mesmerist.

  ‘Why should he spare the Cimmerian?’ whispered the frightened squire.

  ‘That I am wondering myself,’ grunted Tarascus.

  Behind the rumbling chariot the dull roar of battle and pursuit faded in the distance; the setting sun rimmed the cliffs with scarlet flame, and the chariot moved into the vast blue shadows floating up out of the east.

  * * *

  4. ‘From What Hell Have You Crawled?’

  Of that long ride in the chariot of Xaltotun, Conan knew nothing. He lay like a dead man while the bronze wheels clashed over the stones of mountain roads and swished through the deep grass of fertile valleys, and finally dropping down from the rugged heights, rumbled rhythmically along the broad white road that winds through the rich meadowlands to the walls of Belverus.

  Just before dawn some faint reviving of life touched him. He heard a mumble of voices, the groan of ponderous hinges. Through a slit in the cloak that covered him he saw, faintly in the lurid glare of torches, the great black arch of a gateway, and the bearded faces of men-at-arms, the torches striking fire from their spearheads and helmets.

  ‘How went the battle, my fair lord?’ spoke an eager voice, in the Nemedian tongue.

  ‘Well indeed,’ was the curt reply. ‘The king of Aquilonia lies slain and his host is broken.’

  A babble of excited voices rose, drowned the next instant by the whirling wheels of the chariot on the flags. Sparks flashed from under the revolving rims as Xaltotun lashed his steeds through the arch. But Conan heard one of the guardsmen mutter: ‘From beyond the border to Belverus between sunset and dawn! And the horses scarcely sweating! By Mitra, they—’ Then silence drank the voices, and there was only the clatter of hoofs and wheels along the shadowy street.

  What he had heard registered itself on Conan’s brain but suggested nothing to him. He was like a mindless automaton that hears and sees, but does not understand. Sights and sounds flowed meaninglessly about him. He lapsed again into a deep lethargy, and was only dimly aware when the chariot halted in a deep, high-walled court, and he was lifted from it by many hands and borne up a winding stone stair, and down a long dim corridor. Whispers, stealthy footsteps, unrelated sounds surged or rustled about him, irrelevant and far away.

  Yet his ultimate awakening was abrupt and crystal-clear. He possessed full knowledge of the battle in the mountains and its sequences, and he had a good idea of where he was.

  He lay on a velvet couch, clad as he was the day before, but with his limbs loaded with chains not even he could break. The room in which he lay was furnished with somber magnificence, the walls covered with black velvet tapestries, the floor with heavy purple carpets. There was no sign of door or window, and one curiously carven gold lamp, swinging from the fretted ceiling, shed a lurid light over all.

  In that light the figure seated in a silver, throne-like chair before him seemed unreal and fantastic, with an illusiveness of outline that was heightened by a filmy silken robe. But the features were distinct — unnaturally so in that uncertain light. It was almost as if a weird nimbus played about the man’s head, casting the bearded face into bold relief, so that it was the only definite and distinct reality in that mystic, ghostly chamber.

  It was a magnificent face, with strongly chiseled features of classical beauty. There was, indeed, something disquieting about the calm tranquility of its aspect, a suggestion of more than human knowledge, of a profound certitude beyond human assurance. Also an uneasy sensation of familiarity twitched at the back of Conan’s consciousness. He had never seen this man’s face before, he well knew; yet those features reminded him of something or someone. It was like enco
untering in the flesh some dream-image that had haunted one in nightmares.

  ‘Who are you?’ demanded the king belligerently, struggling to a sitting position in spite of his chains.

  ‘Men call me Xaltotun,’ was the reply, in a strong, golden voice.

  ‘What place is this?’ the Cimmerian next demanded.

  ‘A chamber in the palace of King Tarascus, in Belverus.’

  Conan was not surprised. Belverus, the capital, was at the same time the largest Nemedian city so near the border.

  ‘And where’s Tarascus?’

  ‘With the army.’

  ‘Well,’ growled Conan, ‘if you mean to murder me, why don’t you do it and get it over with?’

  ‘I did not save you from the king’s archers to murder you in Belverus,’ answered Xaltotun.

  ‘What the devil did you do to me?’ demanded Conan.

  ‘I blasted your consciousness,’ answered Xaltotun. ‘How, you would not understand. Call it black magic, if you will.’

  Conan had already reached that conclusion, and was mulling over something else.

  ‘I think I understand why you spared my life,’ he rumbled. ‘Amalric wants to keep me as a check on Valerius, in case the impossible happens and he becomes king of Aquilonia. It’s well known that the baron of Tor is behind this move to seat Valerius on my throne. And if I know Amalric, he doesn’t intend that Valerius shall be anything more than a figurehead, as Tarascus is now.’

  ‘Amalric knows nothing of your capture,’ answered Xaltotun. ‘Neither does Valerius. Both think you died at Valkia.’

  Conan’s eyes narrowed as he stared at the man in silence.

  ‘I sensed a brain behind all this,’ he muttered, ‘but I thought it was Amalric’s. Are Amalric, Tarascus and Valerius all but puppets dancing on your string? Who are you?’