Conan Of The Isles

CHAPTER SIXTEEN IN THE DRAGON'S LAIR

At first he thought he was dead - that the sea of life had washed his waterlogged corpse up on the lightless shores of the afterworld. For a time he lay still, only blinking his eyes to clear them of the water that blurred his vision. Then, little by little., his senses awoke, and Conan knew he had somehow survived.

Incredibly, he still lived. By all odds he should.be a corpse, drowned by the weight of its mail shirt, rolling and bumping along the bottom of the swift stream.

He levered himself up on one elbow and stared around him. He lay in another vast cavern; and, curiously enough, it was not altogether dark. As his vision cleared, he made out thousands of little points of glowing green light on the distant walls and ceiling of the cave. For a fleeting in­stant he thought he was lying out of doors, and that the green glows were stars; but then he realized that no stars would be all of the same brightness or so uniformly dis­tributed.

He lay in wet, gritty sand on the shore of the subter­ranean river into which he had fallen. The river entered this cavern from a low, arched entrance, which he could dimly discern across the rushing water. The channel made a sharp bend, angling off to the left to vanish through yet another dark portal. The abrupt change of direction must have thrown his nearly lifeless body against the slope on the outer side of the curve, and some lingering spark of animation within him had forced him to haul himself the few feet further up the slope necessary to drag him out of reach of the torrent. Then he had collapsed into complete unconsciousness.

He heaved himself into a sitting position and examined himself as well as he could in the faint, green glow of the cavern walls. No bones seemed to be broken, but he was covered with minor cuts and bruises, where the teeth of the giant rats or the stones of the river bottom had marked him. His breeches were in shreds, and his boots had been slashed and gouged by the rodents' teeth until his gnarled toes and ankles showed through the rents. Luckily, the cold water of the underground river had washed his wounds clean.

A fine film of rust had already formed on the links of his mail shirt, so that the garment emitted a faint squeak as he moved. He still had his dirk, but his sword he had lost when he fell into the flood.

He tottered to his feet, staggered, and recovered. Every muscle in his mighty body ached. His battle with the rats had strained even his iron stamina almost beyond the limits of endurance. He had almost gone into a trancelike, berserker state of insensibility. Then, while he was still exhausted, he had come within a hairsbreadth of drowning. No doubt he had slept a whole day and a night, and perhaps longer.

As he gingerly flexed his stiff muscles, he became aware of the prickly pains of returning circulation. At the same time, renewed vigor surged back into his battered hulk. As he stalked back and forth on the crescent-shaped beach, his limbs Umbered up. He cast off the empty scabbard of his broadsword; too light to make an effective weapon, it would only encumber him.

He was, he realized,- hungry and thirsty. The thirst he quenched at the marge of the stream, but there was no way to satisfy his ravenous hunger. If only he had carried one of the giant rats down with him to devour ...

A pale blur of motion beneath the surface of the stream caught his attention. Then he saw another and perceived that there were fish in the river. He found an outcrop of rock that would serve as a convenient platform and settled himself upon it, watching the water with the patience of an old hunter.

Time passed. Then a sudden lunge of Conan's long arms, and his hands came out of the black water clutching a wriggling fish by the gills. He brained the fish against the rock, scraped off the scales with his dirk, and ate the firm, white flesh raw. When he had finished, he washed the blood and scales from his face and hands in the stream and set about exploring.

First he headed for the nearest wall of the cavern, moving cautiously and peering ahead of him warily, lest he step into some trench or pit, or fall down a shaft leading to a lower level of caves. Although the light was dim, many hours in darkness had made Conan's eyes sensitive to the faintest illumination.

Arriving at the place where the cavern floor curved up to join the wall, he looked at the nearest of the green glows that spangled the cavern walls. It seemed to come from some luminous object about the size and shape of a child's finger. Too cautious to touch unknown objects with his bare flesh, Conan drew his dirk and prodded the glow with the point. The green thing squirmed and fell from the wall, rolled past his feet, and set off at a brisk crawl across the floor of the cavern. A closer look showed Conan that the source of the light was a luminous grub or caterpillar of some sort. Hundreds of thousands of the creatures clung to walls and ceiling.

Conan gave a grunt of satisfaction. Instantly, hundreds of the glowworms nearest to him on the cavern wall went out, leaving a large patch of blackness. Conan remained quiet, staring, and presently the hundreds of little green glows returned, faintly at first and then brightening to their normal luminosity. Sudden sounds evidently frightened the worms into turning off their lamps.

The light was convenient, but Conan realized that by now he must be far off the track he had originally set himself. While fleeing from the rats, he had taken whatever path seemed to offer the fewest obstacles, heedless of the route he had so carefully memorized with the help of Metemphoc the master thief. There seemed to be no hope of retracing his steps and again picking up the thread of his original route. Even if he could somehow get back up the underground river, he might find the horde of giant rats still lingering where he had left them. And now he did not even have a sword to fight them off with.

He explored the vast cavern further. Titanic stalagmites rose here and there from the rocky floor to approach and sometimes to join with stalactites descending from above. These natural pillars reminded Conan of the columns of primitive temples to the gods of the underworld. Their immensity dwarfed even his giant form.

Now that his hunger was somewhat appeased, he gave thought to procuring a more effective weapon than the dirk. Although this was a stout and formidable dagger, he felt he needed something with more reach, for there was no telling what other nameless denizens of the underworld he might meet in his subterranean wanderings.

Stalagmites, he observed, were all rounded and blunt at the upper end. Wanting something he could use as a spear, he chose a slender stalactite instead. He picked up a loose lump of limestone, weighing perhaps twenty pounds, and swung it against the tapering shaft. The stalactite broke off; Conan dropped the piece of limestone and caught the falling stalactite. At the boom of the falling lump, half the glowworms went out and then slowly returned to their normal brightness.

He hefted his new weapon. It was a four-foot shaft of stone, as thick as his wrist at one end and tapering to a point at the other. While the point was not so sharp as that of a real spear, it would still pierce the body of a foe when backed by Conan's still-powerful muscles. It could also be grasped by the small end and swung as a club, although Conan entertained doubts of the strength of the material. It could even be thrown as a javelin for a short distance.

Thus armed, Conan felt fit to challenge even the nameless terrors of this dark realm. Cautiously, he began exploring again, in the direction in which the cave seemed to extend the farthest.

As he walked, the cavern narrowed and the ceiling became lower. The glowworms became fewer, so that in the increasing gloom Conan was forced to move warily, probing ahead of him with the stalactite lest he fall into some hole. His position was hazardous enough as it was, without the additional discomfiture of suddenly finding himself plunging down some well or shaft hundreds of feet deep.

As it was, he stumbled over an irregularity in the cavern floor and bumped into a stalagmite about his own height. The slender stone column broke off and toppled over with a loud boom, which reverberated in the confined space. Instantly every nearby glowworm winked out, leaving Conan in virtually complete darkness.

'Ahriman eat these accursed caves!' he growled. He continued in the direction in which he had been headed, feeling ahead with his feet and with the point of the stalactite.

Then his outstretched club touched something that moved. Conan froze motionless., straining his eyes and ears for some clue to the nature of the invisible being in his path.

A loud hiss came from the darkness before him, tike the hiss of a serpent but magnified many times over. A rank, reptilian odor filled his nostrils. He would have noticed it sooner but for the faint breeze that blew against his back and hence wafted the stench away from him until he was almost upon its source.

Sweat started on Conan's brow. Had he stumbled into a nest of snakes? Like most northern barbarians, he detested the snakes that swarmed the jungles of hot southern lands. Several times in his career he had experienced close calls with serpents far larger than any of the common species - monsters over fifty feet long, with heads as big as those of horses.

Thinking silently to withdraw, he took a step backwards. Then came a scraping sound, as if some heavy weight were being dragged across the stone before him. Conan halted and held his breath lest the slightest sound betray his presence.

Then the glowworms began to light up again. As their faint, greenish radiance suffused the tunnel, a well of cold, green light appeared in front of Conan, on a level with his own eyes. It was a huge eye. Then it swung to one side, and Conan saw that it was one of a pair.

As the glowworms again reached their normal level of illumination, Conan saw that he had encountered a dragon - a reptile similar in general outlines to one of the large, edible lizards he had seen on display in the butcher shops of Ptahuacan. But this was a fifty-footer. Its jaws opened slightly, revealing the gleaming sabers of its curved white fangs. From the tip of the tapering head, a forked, snake-like tongue flicked out, wavered in the air, and was withdrawn, testing for the scent of the being who had aroused it.

Conan whirled and ran headlong through the gloom, seeking a way around the giant reptile. The dragon raised its scaly body off the rock where it had been resting and started after Conan, its bowed legs swiveling outward in an awkward, mechanical-looking gait that nevertheless covered the ground with ominous speed.

In trying to circle around the dragon, Conan found himself headed down a side passage. The glowworms were fewer here, forcing the Cimmerian to proceed cautiously; but far ahead appeared a stronger light. Moreover, its color was not the emerald green of the glowworms but the neutral shades of ordinary daylight.

Behind him, the dragon's claws scraped loudly on the stone with each stride, while the scales on the lower side of its tail hissed as the member was dragged along over the rough stone floor. In the open, Conan thought he could outrun one of these reptiles; but here he had to watch his every step lest he take a tumble and be snapped up by his pursuer before he could rise again.

The tunnel he was traversing widened into another chamber, and the light from up ahead waxed a little stronger. It was strong enough for him to see, in plain sight, two more dragons, one on either side. One was asleep, while the other was finishing a meal. A quick glance showed Conan the nature of the meal: a pair of human legs dangled from the creature's jaws.

As Conan dashed between the two monsters, the sleeping one opened its eyes. The other made a gulping motion, whereupon the human legs slid a little further into its jaws and out of sight. Had both reptiles been alert and unencumbered, they could easily have caught the Cimmerian by a quick sideways lunge of their huge, scaly heads as he passed.

As it was, the pursuing dragon, uttering a deep, sonorous grunt or beUoWj clattered into the cavern between the two others. Soon all three were in pursuit of Conan. The one with the man in its jaws gulped frantically to down its morsel so as to have its gullet free for another one.

This cavern was a kind of anteroom to a still larger chamber, illuminated by a narrow shaft of daylight that came down from a hole in the ceiling. The chamber, which had apparently been enlarged by the hand of man, was roughly square. At one side rose a pair of huge bronze doors, like those which Conan had seen on the front of the great stepped pyramid in the main square.

On the other side, a set of spikes had been driven into the stone wall, forming a kind of ladder that extended up from the floor to a height of thirty feet. Here was a small platform, which opened into a tunnel. Conan had a fleeting impression of an armed Antillian lounging on the platform, but he had no time to observe the man more closely now.

His main attention was on the six slate-gray dragons, ranging from a mere pup ten feet long to a hoary old sixty-footer, in the middle of the cavern floor. They squatted in a circle, with their heads inward and directly under the shaft overhead. Their heads were raised, each scaly muzzle pointing upward toward the opening through which the daylight filtered, as if engaged in some mysterious reptilian worship of the ancestor of all dragons. Jagged crests of keeled scales ran down their backs from behind their heads to the ends of their scaly tails.

Now Conan's lungs were filled with the stifling musty reek of the reptiles' bodies. Amid the filth that covered the floor of the chamber, Conan glimpsed the leathery surfaces of half-buried reptilian eggs, bigger even than the eggs of the ostriches of Kush. There were also what appeared to be undigested human bones - here a skull., there a jawbone., elsewhere a pelvis.

As Conan dashed into the chamber, followed by the three pursuing dragons, the six in the wheel formation in the center broke off their vigil to lower their heads and stare with eyes like great, green jewels. As their sluggish reptilian brains registered the fact that here was more meat, they turned and started toward the Cimmerian, the claws on the ends of their long-toed, splayed feet scraping over the floor with each lurching stride, and their huge tails swishing from side to side.

To Conan's right gaped the mouth of another tunnel. He ran toward it, but as he reached it the sight of two pairs of great green eyes and the slither of scales on stone halted him. He perceived that two more dragons, aroused by the noise, were coming to investigate. And this tunnel was not wide enough for him to dodge past them.

Next, he made a dash for the bronze doors. But these proved to have no latch or handle on the inside, ,nor did they yield to his pushing.

The dragons were pouring down upon him, now. He found himself facing a semicircle of the brutes. Sweat ran down his forehead and stung his eyes.

This was worse than the rats. They at least were warmblooded mammals - his remote kin, according to some philosophers - but these titanic, sluggish saurians were at the opposite end of the scale from man. They were slithering monsters from the primal slime, leftovers from the youth of the world, when the earth had shaken to the tread of their even mightier forebears, millions of years before the first man thought to stand erect on his hindiegs and fight for a dominating place in Nature's world.

On they came^ like living nightmares from some hideous Hell.