Conan Of The Isles

CHAPTER FIFTEEN DUNGEON OF DESPAIR

Sigurd of Vanaheim was disgusted. When the stout old Vanr, like the rest of the Red Lion's crew, had succumbed to the narcotic vapor released by the men of the Antillian dragon-ship, he hardly expected ever to see daylight again. But Death had withdrawn its black claws from the fallen warrior. Not this time had Sigurd met his bane.

Instead, dazed and confused, the old pirate had awakened with sharp, aromatic fumes in his nostrils. He found himself in the capacious hold of the Antillian vessel, amid his Barachan shipmates^ who were also returning to consciousness. They were surrounded by small., brown, grinning warriors in weird glass armor.

As Sigurd slowly recovered his wits, he saw that the dragon-ship was not really built from gold or some other yellow metal, but was just thinly plated with it. The planking under his feet was of good, solid wood, seemingly as hard as oak and of a darker color. Wooden bulkheads and hull planking surrounded him. To his ears came the muffled thunder of waves breaking against the curved hull, and Sigurd knew what must have happened.

His eyes searched the faces of his crew. They were battered and bloody, and a couple bore bad wounds. But nearly all of them seemed to be present and alive, even if prisoners in the hands of the Antillians.

A pang went through the old freebooter's heart. Anxiously he searched the faces of his men again – but where was Conan? The familiar scarred, frowning face under the iron-gray mane was not to be seen.

Sigurd's heart sank as a doleful expression clouded his ruddy features. He well knew the iron courage of the old Cimmerian; few men during Conan's long life, could boast of having taken him alive. Fiercely attached to his freedom, the old gray wolf might well have preferred to go down fighting rather than to be taken prisoner by these doll-like little brown men. And, if Conan were indeed among the slain, then upon Sigurd's bowed head devolved the awesome responsibility of command.

'Courage, my hearties!' he rumbled. 'Belike we be free men no more, but we still live. And whilst we draw breath, sink me for a lubber, but there's always a chance of fighting our way to freedom!'

Goram Singh probed him with large, somber black eyes. 'Where is the lord Amra, O Sigurd? Why is he not amongst us?' the Vendhyan demanded.

Sigurd slowly wagged his graying red beard. 'By Shai-tan's tail and the star of Ningal, comrade, I know not. Mayhap he is in another part of this cursed galley ...'

The Vendhyan silently nodded, but he bowed his tur-baned head and avoided Sigurd's eye. He knew as well as the Vanr that Conan would probably not have been chained apart from the rest. More likely, the mighty Cimmerian had gone down to the cold halls of the restless dead with an Antillian glass sword in his vitals.

The voyage to the harbor of Ptahuacan took them nearly an hour, what with the extra weight of half a hundred burly pirates in the hold. Sigurd blinked in the sunlight as they were led out of the gold-sheathed dragonship in heavy glass chains. Curiously, he peered at the vista of the ancient city of weathered stone and gaudily painted stucco, rising tier upon tier up the slope of the mountain. Never in all his days had Sigurd of Vanaheim seen so strange a metropolis, whose every building was covered with sculptured friezes of monster-headed gods and animal-headed men, with monolithic gateways of solid stone and strange pylons climbing into the bright morning sky. Over all, the cryptic and ominous shadow of the vast, black-and-crimson pyramid shed a pall of gloom. Rising from the temple on its top, a perpetual plume of smoke streamed from the structure as from a man-made volcano.

The pirates, however, caught only a brief glimpse of the ancient Atlantean city. Their guards led them briskly through the city streets, up the stupendous ramps from tier to tier, and through the bronze gates of the gray citadel adjoining the square of the great pyramid. When those mighty gates clanged to behind their backs, the pirates saw their last of open air and blue skies for many a long day.

Guards herded them down endless stone stairs, which coiled deeply into the bowels of the mountain on .whose side Ptahuacan was built. When their knees, aching from the interminable descent, seemed ready to collapse under them, they came at length into a tremendous chamber cut from the solid stone. Here their shackles were unlocked while they stood, guarded by alert wardens with leveled., glass-headed pikes.

Next, their ankles were secured to a long chain of glass, which ran through looped rings set into the stone wall. Although they had a little slack - enough to move about and lie down - for practical purposes they were confined to an area extending a few feet from the wall.

Then the guards filed out, and the captives were left in solitude.

In this huge room, vast stone columns, like the trunks of gigantic trees, rose to support the roof. They seemed to be part of the natural rock and to have been left standing when the rest of the chamber was excavated, to provide support for the roof.

Far above their heads, plates of shiny metal were set in the ceiling. By some forgotten Atlantean science or wizardry, these plates glowed with a soft, ruddy light, shedding a wan illumination upon the chamber beneath. Sigurd wondered for an instant whether these plates were made of the rumored Atlantean metal, orichalcum, but he had too many other things of more urgency to spend much time with this surmise.

Once a day the captives were fed. Buckets of greasy, tepid stew were dumped into a long, foul, stone trough that ran along the wall behind them. The stuff was lumpy with cold grease and stretched out with some unpalatable meal. But hunger soon overcomes squeamishness, and Conan's crew came eagerly to await the feeding hour. It took all of Sigurd's authority to keep them from fighting over this unappetizing swill.

Immured in this dank place, far from a sight of the heavenly bodies^ the pirates lost all sense of time. Had they been here hours or days? They argued endlessly among themselves over this question, until Sigurd roared: 'Shut up, all of you! Ye'll drive me mad with your clack. We can be pretty sure they feed us at the same time every day, so each feeding marks one day. Yasunga, ye shall be our timekeeper. Find a place on the wall and make a scratch there for each serving of this slop.'

'But Sigurd,' complained a small Ophirean, 'we know not how many days have passed up to now. Some say four, some five, some six or seven. How shall we know-—'

He broke off as the Vanr, shaking huge fists in his face until his chains rattled, roared: 'Shut up, Ahriman blast you, or I'll wind a chain around your scrawny neck and tighten it until your lousy little head comes off! Every man can add his own guess to the number of days shown on Yasunga's tally, and it matters not a dam anyway!

And the next man who raises this question, I'll smash his skull like an egg!'

‘Ah, eggs!' said Artanes the Zamorian, a stout-bellied bull of a man renowned among the pirates for his appetite. 'What I could do with a couple of dozen fresh fowl's eggs...'

They grew matted with filth. Their untended wounds: either festered or scabbed and began to heal. Two died: a burly Shemite, who had taken a cracked skull in the battle, died screaming and fighting invisible foes. The other was a stolid black from the steaming jungles of southern Rush, whose tongue had been cut out by Stygian slavers before he had escaped to the Baracha Isles, and who perished from a fever. Both bodies were taken away by glass-mailed Antillian guards for some unknown disposal.

With the help of Yasunga the navigator, Milo the boatswain, and Yakov the bowmaster, Sigurd did his best to keep his men in order and their spirits up. This was not easy, for they were a motley lot, given to irrational grudges and hatreds, outbursts of violent passion, superstitious fears and crotchets, and sudden fits of gloom, despair, or quarrelsomeness. And Sigurd, while a mighty man whose name commanded respect among the Red Brotherhood, lacked the aura of invincible luck and supernatural power that accompanied Amra the Lion.

The best way to keep them interested and out of mischief, the Northman found, was to encourage them to talk about their exploits of the past. So they reminisced for hours, arguing point by point through battles, sieges, and forays in which they had taken part.

Again and again they recalled the deeds of Conan - or Amra the Lion, as most of them knew him. They told and retold how, at the sleek side of Belit, his first great love, he had plundered the Black Coast and ventured deeply into the unknown jungle rivers of the South, where the she-pirate had come to a grisly doom in a ruined city of stone. They told how, a decade later, he had reappeared out of nowhere to sail with the Barachan pirates, and how still later he had cut a swath as captain of a ship of Zingaran buccaneers. Again and again they recalled the fantastic career of their chief, the hero of a thousand perils and the victor of a thousand fights, from single duels to earthshaking battles.

At length, even Sigurd's spirit began to fail. The dark, dank dungeon with its silent stone walls, the pall of gloom that weighed down their spirits, and the threat of an unknown doom all spread a mood of sullen, hopeless depression heavy enough to bow down the brightest spirits.

Several times Sigurd, with the help of the strongest men in the company, tried to break the chains that bound them. The links were fashioned of what looked like fragile glass - but no glass he had ever seen was as tough as this transparent material. It was as strong and unyielding as bronze. No amount of pulling, pounding, stamping, twisting, or jerking did more than slightly mar its slick, iridescent surface.

No, escape appeared to be beyond their powers. They could only wait for doom to strike in its own good time. And, at last, strike it did.

The metallic clash of spears on shields aroused Sigurd from uneasy slumbers. He started up from the straw to see the room filled with small, flat-faced soldiers and to see his comrades being prodded into wakefulness and their hands being bound behind them.

'What is it, Captain?' muttered Goram Singh.

Sigurd shook his head, so that the unkempt, graying red beard wagged. 'Crom and Mitra know, shipmate!' he growled. Then he raised his voice: 'Look alive, lads! Straighten up and show these brown dogs we be men, even though kenneled here in our own filth like beasts. If it be the executioner's block, then by the green beard of Lir and the red heart of Nergal, we'll show these stinking pigs how men can die, eh lads? Be ye with old Sigurd to the last?'

His exhortations raised a ragged cheer from the pirates, who croaked: 'Ay, Redbeard!'

'Good lads, all! And mayhap 'twill be only the slave-dealer's mart, eh? With the luck of the Brotherhood, I think such lusty lads as we will be purchased by high-born ladies, for special service in their boudoirs!' He gave an exaggerated wink.

The men responded with a chorus of catcalls and obscene jests. Sigurd grinned and chuckled, but it was all pretense. For he thought he could guess the terrible end that awaited them, here among the black-hearted heathen of these cursed islands at the edge of the world.

Sigurd was right. Blinking blearily in the unaccustomed sunlight, the pirates gazed around them, awestruck at the spectacle. Above soared the blue vault of heaven, like a sapphire dome in some palace of the gods. The sun stood almost overhead, blazing down upon them with a furnace-like heat that was welcome after the cool darkness of the stinking dungeon. They drank in the fresh sea breeze from the harbor, knowing that it might be their last chance in this world to draw a lungful of salt air.

They had issued from the portals of the grim, gray citadel called the Vestibule of the Gods into the square of the great red-and-black pyramid. The pyramid towered up in front of them, over the heads of the thousands of An-tillians who thronged the square.

At the head of the line, Sigurd looked back upon his comrades. They were a sorry-looking lot, ragged and filthy, with long hair and matted beards. Ribs showed through the holes in their tattered shirts from the meager, unwholesome diet.

Ranks of soldiers kept a lane open through the throng from the Vestibule to the base of the pyramid., and along this lane the pirates' guards prodded their captives until they came to the tail of a tine of naked AntiUians.

Priests in feathered robes and stilted shoes, towering over the throng, bustled officiously about, while others stood in ranks at the base of the pyramid, holding up curious standards and banners.

The pyramid loomed above them now. Whips sang and cracked over the bedraggled pirates' shoulders as the soldiers herded them into place at the end of the file of naked AntiUians. The latter toiled slowly, silently, and unresistingly up the steep stone stair that climbed the near face of tiie ziggurat.

Sigurd tipped back his head, gazing through slitted, watering eyes at the top of the pyramid and trying to see what was happening there against the glare of the noonday subtropical sky. He made out a great black stone altar and, next to it, a tall throne on which sat a feather-robed figure.

One by one, the silent Antillians were led with bowed heads to the temple at the top. Sigurd could see beast-masked, feather-robed priests seizing them by the arms, cutting their bonds, and stretching them on their backs on the stone. Then another figure stepped forward in an even more fantastic costume of plumes and jewels, although it was too far to make these out clearly. He extended a gaunt, brown arm to trace some cryptic symbol on the naked chest of the supine Antillian. Then . ..

Sigurd's eyes suddenly watered, and he lowered his head to wipe them. When he could look up again, it was to see the arm of the high priest raised with something in its fist - a knife that glittered Like glass. The knife descended in a sharp arc. The figure on the stone gave a convulsive jerk. For an instant the hierarch bent over his victim, sawing with his knife and groping with his free hand.

Then the lean, crimsoned brown arms rose again, lifting agains the bright sky a dripping, crimson mass - the heart of the victim, cut from his body while he was still alive.

The assembled thousands gasped. The priests set up a low-pitched chant, swaying in time to their slow, hypnotic song, which reminded Sigurd of the rhythmic murmur of the sea. The sacrificial fire next to the altar gushed dark smoke as the heart of the sacrifice was added to the many already heaped upon the glowing coals. The corpse was dragged away beyond Sigurd's vision by the crimson-splashed attendants, and the next silent victim was led forward. Numbly, Sigurd wondered how long this grisly rite had been going on.

The guards urged the line forward another step. The pirates behind Sigurd were as silent as he, struck dumb by the terror that lurked above them on the pyramid. The old freebooter felt nothing but a cold emptiness, as if time had stopped and the universe had shrunk to the dimensions of his own body. A few moments more and all would be over, the long voyage ended, the tale told. And what did it all matter? Was every human life as meaningless as his had proved to be ? And yet...

Within his bristling chest, Sigurd's stout old heart surged with abhorrence. His manhood revolted at this spineless submission to fate. Was he no better than these dwarfish islanders? By Thor's hammer, no! Death he did not fear. He and it were old shipmates. What, then, was the gust of revulsion that rose within him ? Pride! Aye, by Badb and Morrigan, that was it; sheer pride!

Sigurd gave a bark of laughter that brought looks of wonder and surprise to the faces of the pirates nearest to him in the slow-moving line. Aye, this was a Hell of a way for an old Vanr to die!