Conan knew his only chance of escape lay in speed. He did not even
consider hiding somewhere near Belverus until the chase passed on; he
was certain that the uncanny ally of Tarascus would be able to ferret
him out. Besides, he was not one to skulk and hide; an open fight or an
open chase, either suited his temperament better. He had a long start,
he knew. He would lead them a grinding race for the border.
Zenobia had chosen well in selecting the white horse. His speed,
toughness and endurance were obvious. The girl knew weapons and horses,
and, Conan reflected with some satisfaction, she knew men. He rode
westward at a gait that ate up the miles.
It was a sleeping land through which he rode, past grove-sheltered
villages and white-walled villas amid spacious fields and orchards that
grew sparser as he fared westward. As the villages thinned, the land
grew more rugged, and the keeps that frowned from eminences told of
centuries of border war. But none rode down from those castles to
challenge or halt him. The lords of the keeps were following the banner
of Amalric; the pennons that were wont to wave over these towers were
now floating over the Aquilonian plains.
When the last huddled village fell behind him, Conan left the road,
which was beginning to bend toward the northwest, toward the distant
passes. To keep to the road would mean to pass by border towers, still
garrisoned with armed men who would not allow him to pass unquestioned.
He knew there would be no patrols riding the border marches on either
side, as in ordinary times, but there were those towers, and with dawn
there would probably be cavalcades of returning soldiers with wounded
men in ox-carts.
This road from Belverus was the only road that crossed the border for
fifty miles from north to south. It followed a series of passes through
the hills, and on either hand lay a wide expanse of wild, sparsely
inhabited mountains. He maintained his due westerly direction, intending
to cross the border deep in the wilds of the hills that lay to the south
of the passes. It was a shorter route, more arduous, but safer for a
hunted fugitive. One man on a horse could traverse country an army would
find impassable.
But at dawn he had not reached the hills; they were a long, low, blue
rampart stretching along the horizon ahead of him. Here there were
neither farms nor villages, no white-walled villas looming among
clustering trees. The dawn wind stirred the tall stiff grass, and there
was nothing but the long rolling swells of brown earth, covered with dry
grass, and in the distance the gaunt walls of a stronghold on a low
hill. Too many Aquilonian raiders had crossed the mountains in not too
distant days for the countryside to be thickly settled as it was farther
to the east.
Dawn ran like a prairie fire across the grasslands, and high overhead
sounded a weird crying as a straggling wedge of wild geese winged
swiftly southward. In a grassy swale Conan halted and unsaddled his
mount. Its sides were heaving, its coat plastered with sweat. He had
pushed it unmercifully through the hours before dawn.
While it munched the brittle grass and rolled, he lay at the crest of
the low slope, staring eastward. Far away to the northward he could see
the road he had left, streaming like a white ribbon over a distant rise.
No black dots moved along that glistening ribbon. There was no sign
about the castle in the distance to indicate that the keepers had
noticed the lone wayfarer.
An hour later the land still stretched bare. The only sign of life was a
glint of steel on the far-off battlements, a raven in the sky that
wheeled backward and forth, dipping and rising as if seeking something.
Conan saddled and rode westward at a more leisurely gait.
As he topped the farther crest of the slope, a raucous screaming burst
out over his head, and looking up, he saw the raven flapping high above
him, cawing incessantly. As he rode on, it followed him, maintaining its
position and making the morning hideous with its strident cries,
heedless of his efforts to drive it away.
This kept up for hours, until Conan's teeth were on edge, and he felt
that he would give half his kingdom to be allowed to wring that black
neck.
'Devils of hell!' he roared in futile rage, shaking his mailed fist at
the frantic bird. 'Why do you harry me with your squawking? Begone, you
black spawn of perdition, and peck for wheat in the farmer's fields!'
He was ascending the first pitch of the hills, and he seemed to hear an
echo of the bird's clamor far behind him. Turning in his saddle, he
presently made out another black dot hanging in the blue. Beyond that
again he caught the glint of the afternoon sun on steel. That could mean
only one thing: armed men. And they were not riding along the beaten
road, which was out of his sight beyond the horizon. They were following
him.
His face grew grim and he shivered slightly as he stared at the raven
that wheeled high above him.
'So it is more than the whim of a brainless beast?' he muttered. 'Those
riders cannot see you, spawn of hell; but the other bird can see you,
and they can see him. You follow me, he follows you, and they follow
him. Are you only a craftily trained feathered creature, or some devil
in the form of a bird? Did Xaltotun set you on my trail? Are you
Xaltotun?'
Only a strident screech answered him, a screech vibrating with harsh
mockery.
Conan wasted no more breath on his dusky betrayer. Grimly he settled to
the long grind of the hills. He dared not push the horse too hard; the
rest he had allowed it had not been enough to freshen it. He was still
far ahead of his pursuers, but they would cut down that lead steadily.
It was almost a certainty that their horses were fresher than his, for
they had undoubtedly changed mounts at that castle he had passed.
The going grew rougher, the scenery more rugged, steep grassy slopes
pitching up to densely timbered mountainsides. Here, he knew, he might
elude his hunters, but for that hellish bird that squalled incessantly
above him. He could no longer see them in this broken country, but he
was certain that they still followed him, guided unerringly by their
feathered allies. That black shape became like a demoniac incubus,
hounding him through measureless hells. The stones he hurled with a
curse went wide or fell harmless, though in his youth he had felled
hawks on the wing.
The horse was tiring fast. Conan recognized the grim finality of his
position. He sensed an inexorable driving fate behind all this. He could
not escape. He was as much a captive as he had been in the pits of
Belverus. But he was no son of the Orient to yield passively to what
seemed inevitable. If he could not escape, he would at least take some
of his foes into eternity with him. He turned into a wide thicket of
larches that masked a slope, looking for a place to turn at bay.
Then ahead of him there rang a strange, shrill scream, human yet weirdly
timbred. An instant later he had pushed through a screen of branches,
and saw the source of that eldritch cry. In a small glade below him four
soldiers in Nemedian chain-mail were binding a noose about the neck of a
gaunt old woman in peasant garb. A heap of fagots, bound with cord on
the ground near by, showed what her occupation had been when surprised
by these stragglers.
Conan felt slow fury swell his heart as he looked silently down and saw
the ruffians dragging her toward a tree whose low-spreading branches
were obviously intended to act as a gibbet. He had crossed the frontier
an hour ago. He was standing on his own soil, watching the murder of one
of his own subjects. The old woman was struggling with surprising
strength and energy, and as he watched, she lifted her head and voiced
again the strange, weird, far-carrying call he had heard before. It was
echoed as if in mockery by the raven flapping above the trees. The
soldiers laughed roughly, and one struck her in the mouth.
Conan swung from his weary steed and dropped down the face of the rocks,
landing with a clang of mail on the grass. The four men wheeled at the
sound and drew their swords, gaping at the mailed giant who faced them,
sword in hand.
Conan laughed harshly. His eyes were bleak as flint.
'Dogs!' he said without passion and without mercy. 'Do Nemedian jackals
set themselves up as executioners and hang my subjects at will? First
you must take the head of their king. Here I stand, awaiting your lordly
pleasure!'
The soldiers stared at him uncertainly as he strode toward them.
'Who is this madman?' growled a bearded ruffian. 'He wears Nemedian
mail, but speaks with an Aquilonian accent.'
'No matter,' quoth another. 'Cut him down, and then we'll hang the old
hag.'
And so saying he ran at Conan, lifting his sword. But before he could
strike, the king's great blade lashed down, splitting helmet and skull.
The man fell before him, but the others were hardy rogues. They gave
tongue like wolves and surged about the lone figure in the gray mail,
and the clamor and din of steel drowned the cries of the circling raven.
Conan did not shout. His eyes coals of blue fire and his lips smiling
bleakly, he lashed right and left with his two-handed sword. For all his
size he was quick as a cat on his feet, and he was constantly in motion,
presenting a moving target so that thrusts and swings cut empty air
oftener than not. Yet when he struck he was perfectly balanced, and his
blows fell with devastating power. Three of the four were down, dying in
their own blood, and the fourth was bleeding from half a dozen wounds,
stumbling in headlong retreat as he parried frantically, when Conan's
spur caught in the surcoat of one of the fallen men.
The king stumbled, and before he could catch himself the Nemedian, with
the frenzy of desperation, rushed him so savagely that Conan staggered
and fell sprawling over the corpse. The Nemedian croaked in triumph and
sprang forward, lifting his great sword with both hands over his right
shoulder, as he braced his legs wide for the stroke--and then, over the
prostrate king, something huge and hairy shot like a thunderbolt full on
the soldier's breast, and his yelp of triumph changed to a shriek of
death.
Conan, scrambling up, saw the man lying dead with his throat torn out,
and a great gray wolf stood over him, head sunk as it smelled the blood
that formed a pool on the grass.
The king turned as the old woman spoke to him. She stood straight and
tall before him, and in spite of her ragged garb, her features,
clear-cut and aquiline, and her keen black eyes, were not those of a
common peasant woman. She called to the wolf and it trotted to her side
like a great dog and rubbed its giant shoulder against her knee, while
it gazed at Conan with great green lambent eyes. Absently she laid her
hand upon its mighty neck, and so the two stood regarding the king of
Aquilonia. He found their steady gaze disquieting, though there was no
hostility in it.
'Men say King Conan died beneath the stones and dirt when the cliffs
crumbled by Valkia,' she said in a deep, strong, resonant voice.
'So they say,' he growled. He was in no mood for controversy, and he
thought of those armored riders who were pushing nearer every moment.
The raven above him cawed stridently, and he cast an involuntary glare
upward, grinding his teeth in a spasm of nervous irritation.
Up on the ledge the white horse stood with drooping head. The old woman
looked at it, and then at the raven; and then she lifted a strange weird
cry as she had before. As if recognizing the call, the raven wheeled,
suddenly mute, and raced eastward. But before it had got out of sight,
the shadow of mighty wings fell across it. An eagle soared up from the
tangle of trees, and rising above it, swooped and struck the black
messenger to the earth. The strident voice of betrayal was stilled for
ever.
'Crom!' muttered Conan, staring at the old woman. 'Are you a magician,
too?'
'I am Zelata,' she said. 'The people of the valleys call me a witch. Was
that child of the night guiding armed men on your trail?'
'Aye.' She did not seem to think the answer fantastic. 'They cannot be
far behind me.'
'Lead your horse and follow me, King Conan,' she said briefly.
Without comment he mounted the rocks and brought his horse down to the
glade by a circuitous path. As he came he saw the eagle reappear,
dropping lazily down from the sky, and rest an instant on Zelata's
shoulder, spreading its great wings lightly so as not to crush her with
its weight.
Without a word she led the way, the great wolf trotting at her side, the
eagle soaring above her. Through deep thickets and along tortuous ledges
poised over deep ravines she led him, and finally along a narrow
precipice-edged path to a curious dwelling of stone, half hut, half
cavern, beneath a cliff hidden among the gorges and crags. The eagle
flew to the pinnacle of this cliff, and perched there like a motionless
sentinel.
Still silent, Zelata stabled the horse in a near-by cave, with leaves
and grass piled high for provender, and a tiny spring bubbling in the
dim recesses.
In the hut she seated the king on a rude, hide-covered bench, and she
herself sat upon a low stool before the tiny fireplace, while she made a
fire of tamarisk chunks and prepared a frugal meal. The great wolf
drowsed beside her, facing the fire, his huge head sunk on his paws, his
ears twitching in his dreams.
'You do not fear to sit in the hut of a witch?' she asked, breaking her
silence at last.
An impatient shrug of his gray-mailed shoulders was her guest's only
reply. She gave into his hands a wooden dish heaped with dried fruits,
cheese and barley bread, and a great pot of the heady upland beer,
brewed from barley grown in the high valleys.
'I have found the brooding silence of the glens more pleasing than the
babble of city streets,' she said. 'The children of the wild are kinder
than the children of men.' Her hand briefly stroked the ruff of the
sleeping wolf. 'My children were afar from me today, or I had not needed
your sword, my king. They were coming at my call.'
'What grudge had those Nemedian dogs against you?' Conan demanded.
'Skulkers from the invading army straggle all over the countryside, from
the frontier to Tarantia,' she answered. 'The foolish villagers in the
valleys told them that I had a store of gold hidden away, so as to
divert their attentions from their villages. They demanded treasure from
me, and my answers angered them. But neither skulkers nor the men who
pursue you, nor any raven will find you here.'
He shook his head, eating ravenously.
'I'm for Tarantia.'
She shook her head.
'You thrust your head into the dragon's jaws. Best seek refuge abroad.
The heart is gone from your kingdom.'
'What do you mean?' he demanded. 'Battles have been lost before, yet
wars won. A kingdom is not lost by a single defeat.'
'And you will go to Tarantia?'
'Aye. Prospero will be holding it against Amalric.'
'Are you sure?'
'Hell's devils, woman!' he exclaimed wrathfully. 'What else?'
She shook her head. 'I feel that it is otherwise. Let us see. Not
lightly is the veil rent; yet I will rend it a little, and show you your
capital city.'
Conan did not see what she cast upon the fire, but the wolf whimpered in
his dreams, and a green smoke gathered and billowed up into the hut. And
as he watched, the walls and ceiling of the hut seemed to widen, to grow
remote and vanish, merging with infinite immensities; the smoke rolled
about him, blotting out everything. And in it forms moved and faded, and
stood out in startling clarity.
He stared at the familiar towers and streets of Tarantia, where a mob
seethed and screamed, and at the same time he was somehow able to see
the banners of Nemedia moving inexorably westward through the smoke and
flame of a pillaged land. In the great square of Tarantia the frantic
throng milled and yammered, screaming that the king was dead, that the
barons were girding themselves to divide the land between them, and that
the rule of a king, even of Valerius, was better than anarchy. Prospero,
shining in his armor, rode among them, trying to pacify them, bidding
them trust Count Trocero, urging them to man the wall and aid his
knights in defending the city. They turned on him, shrieking with fear
and unreasoning rage, howling that he was Trocero's butcher, a more evil
foe than Amalric himself. Offal and stones were hurled at his knights.
A slight blurring of the picture, that might have denoted a passing of
time, and then Conan saw Prospero and his knights filing out of the
gates and spurring southward. Behind him the city was in an uproar.
'Fools!' muttered Conan thickly. 'Fools! Why could they not trust
Prospero? Zelata, if you are making game of me, with some trickery----'
'This has passed,' answered Zelata imperturbably, though somberly. 'It
was the evening of the day that has passed when Prospero rode out of
Tarantia, with the hosts of Amalric almost within sight. From the walls
men saw the flame of their pillaging. So I read it in the smoke. At
sunset the Nemedians rode into Tarantia, unopposed. Look! Even now, in
the royal hall of Tarantia----'
Abruptly Conan was looking into the great coronation hall. Valerius
stood on the regal dais, clad in ermine robes, and Amalric, still in his
dusty, blood-stained armor, placed a rich and gleaming circlet on his
yellow locks--the crown of Aquilonia! The people cheered; long lines of
steel-clad Nemedian warriors looked grimly on, and nobles long in
disfavor at Conan's court strutted and swaggered with the emblem of
Valerius on their sleeves.
'Crom!' It was an explosive imprecation from Conan's lips as he started
up, his great fists clenched into hammers, his veins on his temples
knotting, his features convulsed. 'A Nemedian placing the crown of
Aquilonia on that renegade--in the royal hall of Tarantia!'
As if dispelled by his violence, the smoke faded, and he saw Zelata's
black eyes gleaming at him through the mist.
'You have seen--the people of your capital have forfeited the freedom
you won for them by sweat and blood; they have sold themselves to the
slavers and the butchers. They have shown that they do not trust their
destiny. Can you rely upon them for the winning back of your kingdom?'
'They thought I was dead,' he grunted, recovering some of his poise. 'I
have no son. Men can't be governed by a memory. What if the Nemedians
have taken Tarantia? There still remain the provinces, the barons, and
the people of the countrysides. Valerius has won an empty glory.'
'You are stubborn, as befits a fighter. I cannot show you the future, I
cannot show you all the past. Nay, _I_ show you nothing. I merely make
you see windows opened in the veil by powers unguessed. Would you look
into the past for a clue of the present?'
'Aye.' He seated himself abruptly.
Again the green smoke rose and billowed. Again images unfolded before
him, this time alien and seemingly irrelevant. He saw great towering
black walls, pedestals half hidden in the shadows upholding images of
hideous, half-bestial gods. Men moved in the shadows, dark, wiry men,
clad in red, silken loincloths. They were bearing a green jade
sarcophagus along a gigantic black corridor. But before he could tell
much about what he saw, the scene shifted. He saw a cavern, dim, shadowy
and haunted with a strange intangible horror. On an altar of black stone
stood a curious golden vessel, shaped like the shell of a scallop. Into
this cavern came some of the same dark, wiry men who had borne the
mummy-case. They seized the golden vessel, and then the shadows swirled
around them and what happened he could not say. But he saw a glimmer in
a whorl of darkness, like a ball of living fire. Then the smoke was only
smoke, drifting up from the fire of tamarisk chunks, thinning and
fading.
'But what does this portend?' he demanded, bewildered. 'What I saw in
Tarantia I can understand. But what means this glimpse of Zamorian
thieves sneaking through a subterranean temple of Set, in Stygia? And
that cavern--I've never seen or heard of anything like it, in all my
wanderings. If you can show me that much, these shreds of vision which
mean nothing, disjointed, why can you not show me all that is to occur?'
Zelata stirred the fire without replying.
'These things are governed by immutable laws,' she said at last. 'I can
not make you understand; I do not altogether understand myself, though I
have sought wisdom in the silences of the high places for more years
than I can remember. I cannot save you, though I would if I might. Man
must, at last, work out his own salvation. Yet perhaps wisdom may come
to me in dreams, and in the morn I may be able to give you the clue to
the enigma.'
'What enigma?' he demanded.
'The mystery that confronts you, whereby you have lost a kingdom,' she
answered. And then she spread a sheepskin upon the floor before the
hearth. 'Sleep,' she said briefly.
Without a word he stretched himself upon it, and sank into restless but
deep sleep through which phantoms moved silently and monstrous shapeless
shadows crept. Once, limned against a purple sunless horizon, he saw the
mighty walls and towers of a great city such as rose nowhere on the
waking earth he knew. Its colossal pylons and purple minarets lifted
toward the stars, and over it, floating like a giant mirage, hovered the
bearded countenance of the man Xaltotun.
* * * * *
Conan woke in the chill whiteness of early dawn, to see Zelata crouched
beside the tiny fire. He had not awakened once in the night, and the
sound of the great wolf leaving or entering should have roused him. Yet
the wolf was there, beside the hearth, with its shaggy coat wet with
dew, and with more than dew. Blood glistened wetly amid the thick fell,
and there was a cut upon his shoulder.
Zelata nodded, without looking around, as if reading the thoughts of her
royal guest.
'He has hunted before dawn, and red was the hunting. I think the man who
hunted a king will hunt no more, neither man nor beast.'
Conan stared at the great beast with strange fascination as he moved to
take the food Zelata offered him.
'When I come to my throne again I won't forget,' he said briefly.
'You've befriended me--by Crom, I can't remember when I've lain down and
slept at the mercy of man or woman as I did last night. But what of the
riddle you would read me this morn?'
A long silence ensued, in which the crackle of the tamarisks was loud on
the hearth.
'Find the heart of your kingdom,' she said at last. 'There lies your
defeat and your power. You fight more than mortal man. You will not
press the throne again unless you find the heart of your kingdom.'
'Do you mean the city of Tarantia?'
She shook her head. 'I am but an oracle, through whose lips the gods
speak. My lips are sealed by them lest I speak too much. You must find
the heart of your kingdom. I can say no more. My lips are opened and
sealed by the gods.'
* * * * *
Dawn was still white on the peaks when Conan rode westward. A glance
back showed him Zelata standing in the door of her hut, inscrutable as
ever, the great wolf beside her.
A gray sky arched overhead, and a moaning wind was chill with a promise
of winter. Brown leaves fluttered slowly down from the bare branches,
sifting upon his mailed shoulders.
All day he pushed through the hills, avoiding roads and villages. Toward
nightfall he began to drop down from the heights, tier by tier, and saw
the broad plains of Aquilonia spread out beneath him.
Villages and farms lay close to the foot of the hills on the western
side of the mountains, for, for half a century, most of the raiding
across the frontier had been done by the Aquilonians. But now only
embers and ashes showed where farm huts and villas had stood.
In the gathering darkness Conan rode slowly on. There was little fear of
discovery, which he dreaded from friend as well as from foe. The
Nemedians had remembered old scores on their westward drive, and
Valerius had made no attempt to restrain his allies. He did not count on
winning the love of the common people. A vast swath of desolation had
been cut through the country from the foothills westward. Conan cursed
as he rode over blackened expanses that had been rich fields, and saw
the gaunt gable-ends of burned houses jutting against the sky. He moved
through an empty and deserted land, like a ghost out of a forgotten and
outworn past.
The speed with which the army had traversed the land showed what little
resistance it had encountered. Yet had Conan been leading his
Aquilonians the invading army would have been forced to buy every foot
they gained with their blood. The bitter realization permeated his soul;
he was not the representative of a dynasty. He was only a lone
adventurer. Even the drop of dynastic blood Valerius boasted had more
hold on the minds of men than the memory of Conan and the freedom and
power he had given the kingdom.
No pursuers followed him down out of the hills. He watched for wandering
or returning Nemedian troops, but met none. Skulkers gave him a wide
path, supposing him to be one of the conquerors, what of his harness.
Groves and rivers were far more plentiful on the western side of the
mountains, and coverts for concealment were not lacking.
So he moved across the pillaged land, halting only to rest his horse,
eating frugally of the food Zelata had given him, until, on a dawn when
he lay hidden on a river bank where willows and oaks grew thickly, he
glimpsed, afar, across the rolling plains dotted with rich groves, the
blue and golden towers of Tarantia.
He was no longer in a deserted land, but one teeming with varied life.
His progress thenceforth was slow and cautious, through thick woods and
unfrequented byways. It was dusk when he reached the plantation of
Servius Galannus.
8