Conan the Usurper

TWO: Men from the Sea

Belesa idly stirred a sea shell with a daintily slippered toe, mentally comparing its delicate pink edges to the first pink haze of dawn that rose over the misty beaches. Dawn was now past, but the early sun had not yet dispelled the light, pearly clouds that drifted over the waters to westward.

She lifted her splendidly-shaped head and stared out over a scene alien and repellent to her, yet drearily familiar in every detail. From her small feet, the tawny sands ran to meet the softly-lapping waves, which stretched westward to be lost in the blue haze of the horizon. She was standing on the southern curve of a wide bay; south of her the land sloped up to the low ridge that formed one horn of that bay. From that ridge, she knew, one could look southward across the bare waters into infinities of distance as absolute as the view to the westward and to the northward.

Glancing listlessly landward, she absently scanned the fortress, which had been her home for the past year and a half. Against a vague, pearl-and-cerulean morning sky floated the golden and scarlet flag of her house. But the red falcon on its golden field awakened no enthusiasm in her youthful bosom, although it had flown over many a bloody field in the far south.

She made out the figures of men toiling in the gardens and fields that huddled near the fort, seeming to shrink from the gloomy rampart of the forest that fringed the open belt to the east, stretching north and south as far as she could see. She feared that forest, and that fear was shared by everyone in that tiny settlement. Nor was it an idle fear. Death lurked in those whispering depths … death swift and terrible, death slow and hideous … hidden, painted, tireless, unrelenting.

She sighed and moved toward the water’s edge, with no set purpose in mind. The dragging days were all of one color, and the world of cities and courts and gaiety seemed thousands of miles and ages of time away. Again she sought in vain for the reason that had caused a count of Zingara to flee with his retainers to this wild coast, hundreds of miles from the land that bore him, exchanging the castle of his ancestors for a hut of logs.

Belesa’s eyes softened at the light patter of small bare feet across the sands.

A young girl came running over the low, sandy ridge, naked and dripping, with her flaxen hair plastered wetly to her small head. Her wistful eyes were wide with excitement.

“Lady Belesa!” she cried, rendering the Zingaran words with a soft, Ophirean accent. “Oh, Lady Belesa!”

Breathless from her scamper, the child stammered and gestured with her hands.

Belesa smiled and put an arm about her, not minding that her silken dress came in contact with the damp, warm body. In her lonely, isolated life, Belesa had bestowed the tenderness of a naturally affectionate nature on the pitiful waif she had taken away from a brutal master on that long voyage up from the southern coasts.

“What are you trying to tell me, Tina? Get your breath, child.”

“A ship!” cried the girl, pointing southward. “I was swimming in a pool that the tide left in the sand, on the other side of the ridge, and I saw it! A ship sailing up out of the south!”

She tugged timidly at Belesa’s hand, her slender body aquiver. And Belesa felt her own heart beat faster at the mere thought of an unknown visitor. They had seen no sail since coming to that barren shore.

Tina flitted ahead of her over the yellow sands, skirting the little pools that the outgoing tide had left in shallow depressions. They mounted the low, undulating ridge. Tina poised there, a slender white figure against the clearing sky, with her wet, flaxen hair blowing about her thin face and a frail arm outstretched.

“Look, my lady!”

Belesa had already seen it: a billowing white sail, filled with the freshening south wind, bearing up along the coast a few miles from the point. Her heart skipped a beat; a small thing can loom large in colorless, isolated lives, but Belesa felt a premonition of strange and violent events. She felt that it was not by chance that this sail was wafting up this lonely coast. There was no harbor town to the north, though one sailed to the ultimate shores of ice; and the nearest port to the south must be nearly a thousand miles away. What had brought this stranger to lonely Korvela Bay, as her uncle had named the place when he landed?

Tina pressed close to her mistress, apprehension pinching her thin features.

“Who can it be, my lady?” she stammered, the wind whipping color to her pale cheeks. “Is it the man the count fears?”

Belesa looked down at her, her brow shadowed. “Why do you say that, child? How do you know my uncle fears anyone?”

“He must,” returned Tina naively, “or he would never have come to hide in this lonely spot. Look, my lady, how fast it comes!”

“We must go and inform my uncle,” murmured Belesa. “The fishing boats have not yet gone out, so that none of the men has seen that sail. Get your clothes, Tina. Hurry!”

The child scampered down the low slope to the pool where she had been bathing when she sighted the craft and snatched up the slippers, tunic, and girdle that she had left lying on the sand. She skipped back up the ridge, hopping as she dressed in mid-flight.

Belesa, anxiously watching the approaching sail, caught her hand, and they hurried toward the fort. A few moments after they had entered the gate of the log palisade that enclosed the building, the strident blare of a trumpet startled the workers in the gardens and the men who were opening the boathouse doors to push the fishing boats on their rollers down to the water’s edge.

Every man outside the fort dropped his tool or left his task and ran for the stockade without pausing to look about for the cause of the alarm. As the straggling lines of fleeing men converged on the open gate, every head was twisted over its shoulder to gaze fearfully at the dark line of woodland to the east; not one looked seaward.

They thronged through the gate, shouting questions at the sentries who patrolled the footwalk below the up-jutting points of the logs that formed the palisade:

“What is it?”

“Why are we called in?”

“Are the Picts coming?”

For answer, one taciturn man-at-arms in worn leather and rusty steel pointed southward. From his vantage point the sail was now visible to the men who climbed up on the footwalk, staring toward the sea.

On a small lookout tower on the roof of the manor house, which was built of logs like the other buildings in the enclosure, Count Valenso of Korzetta watched the on-sweeping sail as it rounded the point of the southern horn. The count was a lean, wiry man of medium height and late middle age; dark, somber of expression.

His trunk-hose and doublet were of black silk, the only color about his costume being that of the jewels that twinkled on his sword hilt and the wine-red cloak thrown carelessly over his shoulders. He nervously twisted his thin black mustache and turned his gloomy eyes on his senescal, a leather-featured man in steel and satin.

“What do you make of it, Galbro?”

“A carack, sir,” answered the senescal. “It is a carack trimmed and rigged like a craft of the Barachan pirates … look there!”

A chorus of cries below them echoed his ejaculation; the ship had cleared the point and was slanting inward across the bay. And all saw the flag that suddenly broke forth from the masthead: a black flag with the outline of a scarlet hand.

The people within the stockade stared wildly at that dread emblem. Then all eyes turned up toward the tower, where the master of the fort stood somberly, his cloak whipping about him in the wind.

“It is a Barachan, all right,” grunted Galbro. “And unless I am mad, ’tis Strombanni’s Red Hand. What is he doing on this naked coast?”

“He can mean us no good,” growled the count. A glance below showed him that the massive gates had been closed and that the captain of his men-at-arms, gleaming in steel, was directing his men to their stations, some to the ledges, some to the lower loopholes. He was massing his main strength along the western wall, which contained the gate.

A hundred men —soldiers, vassals, and serfs— and their dependents had followed Valenso into exile. Of these, some forty were men-at-arms, wearing helmets and suits of mail, armed with swords, axes, and crossbows. The rest were toilers, without armor save for shirts of toughened leather; but they were brawny stalwarts, skilled in the use of their hunting bows, woodsmen’s axes, and boar spears. They took their places, scowling at their hereditary enemies. For more than a century the pirates of the Barachan Isles, a tiny archipelago off the southwestern coast of Zingara, had preyed on the people of the mainland.

The men on the stockade gripped their bows or boar spears and stared somberly at the carack as it swung inshore, its brasswork flashing in the sun. They could see the figures swarming on the deck and hear the lusty yells of the seamen.

Steel twinkled along the rail.

The count had retired from the tower, shooing his niece and her eager protegee before him. Having donned helmet and cuirass, he betook himself to the palisade to direct the defense. His subjects watched him with moody fatalism. They intended to sell their lives as dearly as they could, but they had scant hope of victory, in spite of their strong position. They were oppressed by a conviction of doom. More than a year on that naked coast, with the brooding threat of that devil-haunted forest looming forever at their backs, had shadowed their souls with gloomy forebodings. Their women stood silently in the doorways of their huts, inside the stockade, and quieted the clamor of their children.

Belesa and Tina watched eagerly from an upper window in the manor house, and Belesa felt the child’s tense little body quiver within the crook of her protecting arm.

“They will cast anchor near the boathouse,” murmured Belesa. “Yes! There goes their anchor, a hundred yards offshore. Do not tremble so, child! They cannot take the fort. Perhaps they wish only fresh water and supplies; perhaps a storm blew them into these seas.”

“They are coming ashore in the longboat!” said the child. “Oh, my lady, I am afraid! They are big men in armor! Look how the sun strikes fire from their pikes and helmets! Will they eat us?”

Belesa burst into laughter in spite of her apprehension. “Of course not! Who put that idea into your head?”

“Zingelito told me the Barachans eat women.”

“He was teasing you. The Barachans are cruel, but they are no worse than the Zingaran renegades who call themselves buccaneers. Zingelito was a buccaneer once.”

“He was cruel,” muttered the child. “I’m glad the Picts cut his head off.”

“Hush, Tina!” Belesa shuddered slightly. “You must not speak that way. Look, the pirates have reached the shore. They line the beach, and one of them is coming toward the fort. That must be Strombanni.”

“Ahoy, the fort there!” came a hail in a voice as gusty as the wind. “I come under a flag of truce!”

The count’s helmeted head appeared over the points of the palisade. His stern face, framed in steel, surveyed the pirate somberly. Strombanni had halted just within earshot: a big man, bare-headed, with hair of the tawny hue sometimes found in Argos. Of all the sea-rovers who haunted the Barachans, none was more famed for deviltry than he.

“Speak!” commanded Valenso. “I have scant desire to convene with one of your breed.”

Strombanni laughed with his lips, not with his eyes. “When your galleon escaped me in that squall off the Trallibes last year, I never thought to meet you again on the Pictish coast, Valenso!” said he. “But I wondered at the time what your destination might be. By Mitra, had I known, I should have followed you then! I got the start of my life a little while ago, when I saw your scarlet falcon floating over a fortress where I had thought to see naught but bare beach. You have found it, of course?”

“Found what?” snapped the count impatiently.

“Do not try to dissemble with me!” The pirate’s stormy nature showed itself in a flash of impatience. “I know why you came here, and I have come for the same reason. I will not be balked. Where is your ship?”

“That is none of your affair.”

“You have none,” confidently asserted the pirate. “I see pieces of ship’s mast in that stockade. It must have been wrecked somehow, after you landed here. If you’d had a ship, you would have sailed away with your plunder long ago.”

“What are you talking about, damn you?” yelled the count “My plunder? Am I a Barachan, to burn and loot? Even so, what should I loot on this bare coast?”

“That which you came to find,” answered the pirate coolly. “The same thing I’m after and mean to have. But I shall be easy to deal with. Just give me the loot and I’ll go my way and leave you in peace.”

“You must be mad!” snarled Valenso. “I came here to find solitude and seclusion, which I enjoyed until you crawled out of the sea, you yellow-headed dog. Begone! I did not ask for a parley, and I weary of this empty talk. Take your rogues and go your ways.”

“When I go, I’ll leave that hovel in ashes!” roared the pirate in a transport of rage. “For the last time: will you give me the loot in return for your lives? I have you hemmed in here, and a hundred and fifty men ready to cut your throats at my word.”

For answer, the count made a quick gesture with his hand below the points of the palisade. Almost instantly, a shaft hummed venomously through a loophole and splintered on Strombanni’s breastplate. The pirate yelled ferociously, bounded back, and ran toward the beach, with arrows whistling all about him. His men roared and came on like a wave, blades gleaming in the sun.

“Curse you, dog!” raved the count, felling the offending archer with his iron-clad fist. “Why did you not strike his throat above the gorget? Ready with your bows, men; here they come!”

But Strombanni checked the headlong rush of his men. The pirates spread out in a long line that overlapped the extremities of the western wall; they advanced warily, loosing their shafts as they came. Although their archery was considered superior to that of the Zingarans, they had to rise to loose their longbows.

Meanwhile the Zingarans, protected by their stockade, sent crossbow bolts and hunting arrows back with careful aim.

The long arrows of the Barachans arched over the stockade and quivered upright in the earth. One struck the windowsill over which Belesa watched. Tina cried out and flinched, staring at the vibrating shaft

The Zingarans sent their missiles in return, aiming and loosing without undue haste. The women had herded the children into their huts and now stoically awaited whatever fate the gods had in store for them.

The Barachans were famed for their furious and headlong style of battling, but they were as wary as they were ferocious and did not intend to waste their strength vainly in direct charges against the ramparts. They crept forward in their widespread formation, taking advantage of every natural depression and bit of vegetation … which was not much, for the ground had been cleared on all sides of the fort against the threat of Pictish raids.

As the Barachans got nearer to the fort, the defenders’ archery became more effective. Here and there a body lay prone, its back-piece glinting in the sun and a quarrel shaft standing up from armpit or neck. Wounded men thrashed and moaned.

The pirates were quick as cats, always shifting their position, and they were protected by their light armor. Their constant raking archery was a continual menace to the men in the stockade. Still, it was evident that as long as the battle remained an exchange of archery, the advantage must remain with the sheltered Zingarans.

Down at the boathouse on the beach, however, men were at work with axes. The count cursed sulfurously when he saw the havoc they were making among his boats, which had been built laboriously of planks sawn out of solid logs.

“They’re making a mantlet, curse them!” he raged. “A sally now, before they complete it … while they are scattered…”

Galbro shook his head, glancing at the unarmored workers with their awkward pikes. “Their arrows would riddle us, and we should be no match for them in hand-to-hand fighting. We must keep behind our walls and trust to our archery.”

“Well enough,” growled Valenso, “if we can keep them outside our walls.”

Time passed while the inconclusive archery duel continued. Then a group of thirty men advanced, pushing before them a great shield made of planks from the boats and the timbers of the boathouse itself. They had found an oxcart and mounted the mantlet on the wheels, which were great solid disks of oak. As they rolled it ponderously before them, it hid them from the sight of the defenders except for glimpses of their moving feet.

It rolled toward the gate, and the straggling line of archers converged toward it, shooting as they ran.

“Shoot!” yelled Valenso, going livid. “Stop them ere they reach the gate!”

A storm of arrows whistled across the palisade and feathered themselves harmlessly in the thick wood. A derisive yell answered the volley. Shafts were ending loopholes now as the rest of the pirates drew nearer; a soldier reeled and fell from the ledge, gasping and choking, with an arrow through his throat.

“Shoot at their feet!” screamed Valenso. “And forty men at the gate with pikes and axes! The rest hold the wall!”

Bolts ripped into the sand before the moving shield. A bloodthirsty howl announced that one had found its target beneath the edge. A man staggered into view, cursing and hopping as he strove to withdraw the quarrel that skewered his foot In an instant he was feathered by a dozen arrows.

But, with a deep-throated shout, the pirates pushed the mantlet against the gate. Through an aperture in the center of the shield they thrust a heavy, iron-tipped boom, which they had made from the ridgepole of the boathouse.

Driven by arms knotted with brawny muscles and backed with bloodthirsty fury, the boom began to thunder against the gate. The massive gate groaned and staggered, while from the stockade bolts poured in a steady stream; some struck home, but the wild men of the sea were afire with fighting lust.

With deep shouts they swung the ram, while from all sides the others closed in, braving the weakened arrow-storm from the walls and shooting back fast and hard.

Cursing like a madman, the count sprang from the wall and ran to the gate, drawing his sword. A clump of desperate men-at-arms closed in behind him, gripping their spears. In another moment the gate would cave in, and they must stop the gap with their bodies.

Then a new note entered the clamor: a trumpet, blaring stridently from the ship.

On the crosstree, a figure waved and gesticulated wildly.

The thunder of the ram ceased, and Strombanni’s bellow rose above the racket:

“Wait! Wait, damn you! Listen!”

In the silence that followed that bull’s bellow, the blare of the trumpet was plainly heard, and a voice that shouted something that was unintelligible to the people inside the stockade. But Strombanni understood, for his voice was lifted again in profane command. The ram was released, and the mantlet began to recede from the gate as swiftly as it had advanced. Pirates who had been trading shafts with the defenders began picking up their wounded fellows and helping them hastily back to the beach.

“Look!” cried Tina at her window, jumping up and down in wild excitement, “They flee! All of them! They are running to the beach! Look! They have abandoned the shield! They leap into the longboat and pull for the ship! Oh, my lady, have we won?”

“I think not.” Belesa was staring seaward. “Look!”

She threw the curtains aside and leaned from the window. Her clear young voice rose above the amazed shouts of the defenders, who turned their heads in the direction she pointed. They sent up a deep yell as they saw another ship swinging majestically around the southern point. Even as they watched, she broke out the royal flag of Zingara.

Strombanni’s pirates were swarming up the sides of their carack and heaving up the anchor. Before the stranger had progressed halfway across the bay, the Red Hand was vanishing around the northern horn.