Conan's first sensation of returning consciousness was that of motion;
under him was no solidity, but a ceaseless heaving and plunging. Then he
heard wind humming through cords and spars, and knew he was aboard a
ship even before his blurred sight cleared. He heard a mutter of voices
and then a dash of water deluged him, jerking him sharply into full
animation. He heaved up with a sulphurous curse, braced his legs and
glared about him, with a burst of coarse guffaws in his ears and the
reek of unwashed bodies in his nostrils.
He was standing on the poopdeck of a long galley which was running
before the wind that whipped down from the north, her striped sail
bellying against the taut sheets. The sun was just rising, in a dazzling
blaze of gold and blue and green. To the left of the shoreline was a dim
purple shadow. To the right stretched the open ocean. This much Conan
saw at a glance that likewise included the ship itself.
It was long and narrow, a typical trading-ship of the southern coasts,
high of poop and stern, with cabins at either extremity. Conan looked
down into the open waist, whence wafted that sickening abominable odor.
He knew it of old. It was the body-scent of the oarsmen, chained to
their benches. They were all negroes, forty men to each side, each
confined by a chain locked about his waist, with the other end welded to
a heavy ring set deep in the solid runway beam that ran between the
benches from stem to stern. The life of a slave aboard an Argossean
galley was a hell unfathomable. Most of these were Kushites, but some
thirty of the blacks who now rested on their idle oars and stared up at
the stranger with dull curiosity were from the far southern isles, the
homelands of the corsairs. Conan recognized them by their straighter
features and hair, their rangier, cleaner-limbed build. And he saw among
them men who had followed him of old.
But all this he saw and recognized in one swift, all-embracing glance as
he rose, before he turned his attention to the figures about him.
Reeling momentarily on braced legs, his fists clenched wrathfully, he
glared at the figures clustered about him. The sailor who had drenched
him stood grinning, the empty bucket still poised in his hand, and Conan
cursed him with venom, instinctively reaching for his hilt. Then he
discovered that he was weaponless and naked except for his short leather
breeks.
'What lousy tub is this?' he roared. 'How did I come aboard here?'
The sailors laughed jeeringly--stocky, bearded Argosseans to a man--and
one, whose richer dress and air of command proclaimed him captain,
folded his arms and said domineeringly: 'We found you lying on the
sands. Somebody had rapped you on the pate and taken your clothes.
Needing an extra man, we brought you aboard.'
'What ship is this?' Conan demanded.
'The _Venturer_, out of Messantia, with a cargo of mirrors, scarlet silk
cloaks, shields, gilded helmets and swords to trade to the Shemites for
copper and gold ore. I am Demetrio, captain of this vessel and your
master henceforward.'
'Then I'm headed in the direction I wanted to go, after all,' muttered
Conan, heedless of that last remark. They were racing southeastward,
following the long curve of the Argossean coast. These trading-ships
never ventured far from the shoreline. Somewhere ahead of him he knew
that low dark Stygian galley was speeding southward.
'Have you sighted a Stygian galley--' began Conan, but the beard of the
burly, brutal-faced captain bristled. He was not in the least interested
in any question his prisoner might wish to ask, and felt it high time he
reduced this independent wastrel to his proper place.
'Get for'ard!' he roared. 'I've wasted time enough with you! I've done
you the honor of having you brought to the poop to be revived, and
answered enough of your infernal questions. Get off this poop! You'll
work your way aboard this galley--'
'I'll buy your ship--' began Conan, before he remembered that he was a
penniless wanderer.
A roar of rough mirth greeted these words, and the captain turned
purple, thinking he sensed ridicule.
'You mutinous swine!' he bellowed, taking a threatening step forward,
while his hand closed on the knife at his belt. 'Get for'ard before I
have you flogged! You'll keep a civil tongue in your jaws, or by Mitra,
I'll have you chained among the blacks to tug an oar!'
Conan's volcanic temper, never long at best, burst into explosion. Not
in years, even before he was king, had a man spoken to him thus and
lived.
'Don't lift your voice to me, you tar-breeched dog!' he roared in a
voice as gusty as the sea-wind, while the sailors gaped dumfounded.
'Draw that toy and I'll feed you to the fishes!'
'Who do you think you are?' gasped the captain.
'I'll show you!' roared the maddened Cimmerian, and he wheeled and
bounded toward the rail, where weapons hung in their brackets.
The captain drew his knife and ran at him bellowing, but before he could
strike, Conan gripped his wrist with a wrench that tore the arm clean
out of the socket. The captain bellowed like an ox in agony, and then
rolled clear across the deck as he was hurled contemptuously from his
attacker. Conan ripped a heavy ax from the rail and wheeled cat-like to
meet the rush of the sailors. They ran in, giving tongue like hounds,
clumsy-footed and awkward in comparison to the pantherish Cimmerian.
Before they could reach him with their knives he sprang among them,
striking right and left too quickly for the eye to follow, and blood and
brains spattered as two corpses struck the deck.
Knives flailed the air wildly as Conan broke through the stumbling,
gasping mob and bounded to the narrow bridge that spanned the waist from
poop to forecastle, just out of reach of the slaves below. Behind him
the handful of sailors on the poop were floundering after him, daunted
by the destruction of their fellows, and the rest of the crew--some
thirty in all--came running across the bridge toward him, with weapons
in their hands.
Conan bounded out on the bridge and stood poised above the upturned
black faces, ax lifted, black mane blown in the wind.
'Who am I?' he yelled. 'Look, you dogs! Look, Ajonga, Yasunga, Laranga!
_Who am I?_'
And from the waist rose a shout that swelled to a mighty roar: 'Amra! It
is Amra! The Lion has returned!'
The sailors who caught and understood the burden of that awesome shout
paled and shrank back, staring in sudden fear at the wild figure on the
bridge. Was this in truth that blood-thirsty ogre of the southern seas
who had so mysteriously vanished years ago, but who still lived in gory
legends? The blacks were frothing crazy now, shaking and tearing at
their chains and shrieking the name of Amra like an invocation. Kushites
who had never seen Conan before took up the yell. The slaves in the pen
under the after-cabin began to batter at the walls, shrieking like the
damned.
Demetrio, hitching himself along the deck on one hand and his knees,
livid with the agony of his dislocated arm, screamed: 'In and kill him,
dogs, before the slaves break loose!'
Fired to desperation by that word, the most dread to all galleymen, the
sailors charged on to the bridge from both ends. But with a lion-like
bound Conan left the bridge and hit like a cat on his feet on the runway
between the benches.
'Death to the masters!' he thundered, and his ax rose and fell
crashingly full on a shackle-chain, severing it like matchwood. In an
instant a shrieking slave was free, splintering his oar for a bludgeon.
Men were racing frantically along the bridge above, and all hell and
bedlam broke loose on the _Venturer_. Conan's ax rose and fell without
pause, and with every stroke a frothing, screaming black giant broke
free, mad with hate and the fury of freedom and vengeance.
Sailors leaping down into the waist to grapple or smite at the naked
white giant hewing like one possessed at the shackles, found themselves
dragged down by the hands of slaves yet unfreed, while others, their
broken chains whipping and snapping about their limbs, came up out of
the waist like a blind, black torrent, screaming like fiends, smiting
with broken oars and pieces of iron, tearing and rending with talons and
teeth. In the midst of the mêlée the slaves in the pen broke down the
walls and came surging up on the decks, and with fifty blacks freed of
their benches Conan abandoned his iron-hewing and bounded up on the
bridge to add his notched ax to the bludgeons of his partisans.
Then it was massacre. The Argosseans were strong, sturdy, fearless like
all their race, trained in the brutal school of the sea. But they could
not stand against these maddened giants, led by the tigerish barbarian.
Blows and abuse and hellish suffering were avenged in one red gust of
fury that raged like a typhoon from one end of the ship to the other,
and when it had blown itself out, but one white man lived aboard the
_Venturer_, and that was the blood-stained giant about whom the chanting
blacks thronged to cast themselves prostrate on the bloody deck and beat
their heads against the boards in an ecstasy of hero-worship.
Conan, his mighty chest heaving and glistening with sweat, the red ax
gripped in his blood-smeared hand, glared about him as the first chief
of men might have glared in some primordial dawn, and shook back his
black mane. In that moment he was not king of Aquilonia; he was again
lord of the black corsairs, who had hacked his way to lordship through
flame and blood.
'Amra! Amra!' chanted the delirious blacks, those who were left to
chant. 'The Lion has returned! Now will the Stygians howl like dogs in
the night, and the black dogs of Kush will howl! Now will villages burst
in flames and ships founder! Aie, there will be wailing of women and the
thunder of the spears!'
'Cease this yammering, dogs!' Conan roared in a voice that drowned the
clap of the sail in the wind. 'Ten of you go below and free the oarsmen
who are yet chained. The rest of you man the sweeps and bend to oars and
halyards. Crom's devils, don't you see we've drifted inshore during the
fight? Do you want to run aground and be retaken by the Argosseans?
Throw these carcasses overboard. Jump to it, you rogues, or I'll notch
your hides for you!'
With shouts and laughter and wild singing they leaped to do his
commands. The corpses, white and black, were hurled overboard, where
triangular fins were already cutting the water.
Conan stood on the poop, frowning down at the black men who watched him
expectantly. His heavy brown arms were folded, his black hair, grown
long in his wanderings, blew in the wind. A wilder and more barbaric
figure never trod the bridge of a ship, and in this ferocious corsair
few of the courtiers of Aquilonia would have recognized their king.
'There's food in the hold!' he roared. 'Weapons in plenty for you, for
this ship carried blades and harness to the Shemites who dwell along the
coast. There are enough of us to work ship, aye, and to fight! You rowed
in chains for the Argossean dogs: will you row as free men for Amra?'
'_Aye!_' they roared. 'We are thy children! Lead us where you will!'
'Then fall to and clean out that waist,' he commanded. 'Free men don't
labor in such filth. Three of you come with me and break out food from
the after-cabin. By Crom, I'll pad out your ribs before this cruise is
done.'
Another yell of approbation answered him, as the half-starved blacks
scurried to do his bidding. The sail bellied as the wind swept over the
waves with renewed force, and the white crests danced along the sweep of
the wind. Conan planted his feet to the heave of the deck, breathed deep
and spread his mighty arms. King of Aquilonia he might no longer be;
king of the blue ocean he was still.
16