Conan the Usurper

SEVEN: Men of the Woods

Night had fallen, but torches streamed across the strand, casting the mad scene into lurid revealment. Naked men in paint swarmed the beach; like waves they came against the palisade, bared teeth and blazing eyes gleaming in the glare of the torches thrust over the wall. Horn-bill feathers waved in black manes, and the feathers of the cormorant and the sea-falcon. A few warriors, the wildest and most barbaric of them all, wore sharks’ teeth woven in their tangled locks. The sea-land tribes had gathered from up and down the coast in all directions to rid their country of the white-skinned invaders.

They surged against the palisade, driving a storm of arrows before them, fighting into the teeth of the shafts and bolts that tore into their masses from the stockade. Sometimes they came so close to the wall that they were hewing at the gate with their war-axes and thrusting their spears through the loopholes.

But each time the tide ebbed back without flowing over the palisade, leaving its drift of dead. At this kind of fighting, the freebooters of the sea were at their stoutest. Their arrows and bolts tore holes in the charging horde; their cutlasses hewed the wild men from the palisades they strove to scale.

Yet again and again, the men of the woods returned to the onslaught with all the stubborn ferocity that had been roused in their fierce hearts.

“They are like mad dogs!” gasped Zarono, hacking downward at the dark hands that grasped the palisade points and the dark faces that snarled up at him.

“If we can hold the fort until dawn, they’ll lose heart,” grunted Conan, splitting a feathered skull with professional precision. “They won’t maintain a long siege. Look, they’re falling back.”

The charge rolled back. The men on the wall shook the sweat out of their eyes, counted their dead, and took a fresh grip on the blood-slippery hilts of their swords. Like blood-hungry wolves, grudgingly driven from a cornered prey, the Picts skulked back beyond the ring of torches. Only the bodies of the slain lay before the palisade.

“Have they gone?” Strombanni shook back his wet, tawny locks. The cutlass in his fist was notched and red; his brawny arm was splashed with blood.

“They’re still out there.” Conan nodded toward the outer darkness that ringed the circle of torches, made more intense by their light. He glimpsed movements in the shadows, the glitter of eyes and the red glint of copper weapons.

“They’ve drawn off for a bit, though,” he said. “Put sentries on the walk and let the rest eat and drink. ’Tis past midnight, and we’ve been fighting for hours without respite. Ha, Valenso, how goes the battle with you?”

The count, in dented, blood-splashed helmet and cuirass, moved somberly up to where Conan and the captains stood. For answer, he muttered something inaudible under his breath. And then out of the darkness a voice spoke: a loud, clear voice that rang through the entire fort.

“Count Valenso! Count Valenso of Korzetta! Do you hear me?” It spoke with a Stygian accent.

Conan heard the count gasp as if he had been stricken with a mortal wound.

Valenso reeled and grasped the tops of the logs of the stockade, his face pale in the torchlight. The voice resumed:

“It is I, Thoth-Amon of the Ring! Did you think to flee me once more? It is too late for that! All your schemes shall avail you naught, for tonight I shall send a messenger to you. It is the demon that guarded the treasure of Tranicos, whom I have released from his cave and bound to my service. He will inflict upon you the doom that you, you dog, have earned: a death at once slow, hard, and disgraceful. Let us see you buy your way out of that!”

The speech ended in a peal of musical laughter. Valenso gave a scream of terror, jumped down from the footwalk, and ran staggering up the slope toward the manor.

When the lull came in the fighting, Tina had crept to their window, from which they had been driven by the danger of flying arrows. Silently she watched the men gather about the fire. Belesa was reading a letter that had been delivered by a serving-woman to her door. It read:

Count Valenso of Korzetta to his niece Belesa, greeting: My doom has come upon me at last. Now that I am resigned if not reconciled to it, I would have you know that I am not insensible of the fact that I have used you in a manner not consistent with the honor of the Korzettas. I did so because circumstances left me no other choice. Although it is late for apologies, I ask that you think not too hardly of me; and, if you can bring yourself to do so, and by some chance you survive this night of doom, that you pray to Mitra for the soiled soul of your father’s brother. Meanwhile, I advise that you remain away from the great hall, lest the same fate that awaits me encompass you also. Farewell.

Belesa’s hands shook as she read. Although she could never love her uncle, this was still the most human action she had ever known him to take.

At the window, Tina said: “There ought to be more men on the wall;. Suppose the black man came back?”

Belesa, going over beside her to look out, shuddered at the thought.

“I am afraid,” murmured Tina. “I hope Strombanni and Zarono are killed.”

“And not Conan?” asked Belesa curiously.

“Conan would not harm us,” said the child confidently. “He lives up to his barbaric code of honor, but they are men who have lost all honor.”

“You are wise beyond your years, Tina,” said Belesa, with the vague uneasiness that the precocity of the child often aroused in her.

“Look!” Tina stiffened. “The sentry is gone from the south wall! saw him on the ledge a moment ago; now he has vanished.”

From their window, the palisade points of the south wall were just visible over the slanting roofs of a row of huts which paralleled that wall for almost its entire length. A sort of open-topped corridor, three or four yards wide, was formed by the stockade and the back of the huts, which were built in a solid row. These huts were occupied by the serfs.

“Where could the sentry have gone?” whispered Tina uneasily.

Belesa was watching one end of the hut row, which was not far from a side door of the manor. She could have sworn she saw a shadowy figure glide from behind the huts and disappear at the door. Was that the vanished sentry? Why had he left the wall, and why should he enter so subtly into the manor? She could not believe it the sentry she had seen, and a nameless fear congealed her blood.

“Where is the count, Tina?” she asked.

“In the great hall, my lady. He sits alone at the table, wrapped in his cloak and drinking wine, with a face as gray as death.”

“Go and tell him what we have seen. I will keep watch from this window, lest the Picts steal over the unguarded wall.”

Tina scampered away. Suddenly remembering reading in the count’s letter about staying out of the main hall, Belesa rose, hearing Tina’s slippered feet pattering along the corridor, receding down the stair.

Then abruptly, terribly, there rang out a scream of such poignant fear that Belesa’s heart almost stopped with the shock of it. She was out of the chamber and flying down the corridor before she was aware that her limbs were in motion.

She ran down the stairs …and halted as if turned to stone.

She did nor scream as Tina had screamed. She was incapable of sound or motion.

She saw Tina, was. aware of the reality of small hands frantically grasping her.

But these were the only sane realities in a scene of blood-nightmare and lunacy and death, dominated by the monstrous, anthropomorphic shadow that spread awful arms against a lurid, hell-fire glare.

Out in the stockade, Strombanni shook his head at Conan’s question. “I heard nothing.”

“I did!” Conan’s wild instincts were roused; he was tensed, his eyes blazing. “It came from the south wall, behind those huts!”

Drawing his cutlass, he strode toward the palisade. From the compound, the wall on the south and the sentry posted there were not visible, being hidden behind the huts. Strombanni followed, impressed by the Cimmerian’s manner.

At the mouth of the open space between the huts and the wall, Conan halted warily. The space was dimly lighted by torches flaring at either corner of the stockade. And, about midway of that corridor, a crumpled shape sprawled on the ground.

“Bracus!” swore Strombanni, running forward and dropping on one knee beside the figure. “By Mitra, his throat’s been cut from ear to ear!”

Conan swept the space with a quick glance, finding it empty save for himself, Strombanni, and the dead man. He peered through a loophole. No living man moved within the ring of torchlight outside the fort.

“Who could have done this?” he wondered.

“Zarono!” Strombanni sprang up spitting fury like a wildcat, his hair bristling, his face convulsed. “He has set his thieves to stabbing my men in the back! He plans to wipe me out by treachery! Devils! I am leagued within and without!”

“Wait!” Conan reached a restraining hand. “I don’t believe Zarono …”

But the maddened pirate jerked away and rushed around the end of the hut row, breathing blasphemies. Conan ran after him, swearing. Strombanni made straight toward the fire by which Zarono’s tall, lean form was visible as the buccaneer chief quaffed a jack of ale.

His amazement was supreme when the jack was dashed violently from his hand, spattering his breastplate with foam, and he was jerked around to confront the passion-distorted face of the pirate captain.

“You murdering dog!” roared Strombanni. “Will you slay my men behind my back while they fight for your filthy hide as well as for mine?”

Conan was hurrying toward them, and on all sides men ceased eating and drinking to stare in amazement.

“What do you mean?” sputtered Zarono.

“You’ve set your men to stabbing mine at their posts!” screamed the maddened Barachan.

“You lie!” Smoldering hate burst into sudden flame.

With an incoherent howl, Strombanni heaved up his cutlass and cut at the buccaneer’s head. Zarono caught the blow on his armored left arm, and sparks flew as he staggered back, ripping out his own sword.

In an instant, the captains were fighting like madmen, their blades flaming and flashing in the firelight. Their crews reacted instantly and blindly. A deep roar went up as pirates and buccaneers drew their swords and fell upon one another. The men left on the walls abandoned their posts and leaped down into the stockade, blades in hand. In an instant the compound was a battleground, where knotting, writhing groups of men smote and slew in a blind frenzy. Some of the men-at-arms and serfs were drawn into the melee, and the soldiers at the gate turned and stared down in amazement, forgetting the enemy that lurked outside.

It all happened so quickly …smoldering passions exploding into sudden kittle …that men were fighting all over the compound before Conan could reach the maddened chiefs. Ignoring their swords, he tore them apart with such violence that they staggered backward, and Zarono tripped and fell flat.

“You cursed fools, will you throw away all our lives?”

Strombanni was frothing mad and Zarono was bawling for assistance. A buccaneer ran at Conan from behind and cut at his head. The Cimmerian half turned and caught his arm, checking the stroke in midair.

“Look, you fools!” he roared, pointing with his sword.

Something in his tone caught the attention of the battle-crazed mob. Men froze in their places and twisted their heads to stare. Conan was pointing to a soldier on the footwalk. The man was reeling, clawing the air, and choking as he tried to shout. He pitched headlong to the ground, and all saw the black arrow standing out from between his shoulders.

A cry of alarm arose from the compound. On the heels of the shout came a clamor of blood-freezing screams and the shattering impact of axes on the gate. Flaming arrows arched over the wall and stuck in logs, and thin wisps of blue smoke curled upward. Then, from behind the huts that ranged the south wall, came swift and furtive figures racing across the compound.

“The Picts are in!” roared Conan.

Bedlam followed his shout. The freebooters ceased their feud. Some turned to meet the savages; some sprang to the wall. Savages were pouring from behind the huts and streaming over the compound; their axes clashed against the cutlasses of the sailors.

Zarono was still struggling to his feet when a painted savage rushed upon him from behind and brained him with a war-axe.

Conan, with a clump of sailors behind him, was battling with the Picts inside the stockade; Strombanni, with most of his men, was climbing up on the stockade, slashing at the dark figures already swarming over the wall. The Picts, who had crept up unobserved and surrounded the fort while the defenders were fighting among themselves, were attacking from all sides, Valenso’s soldiers were clustered at the gate, trying to hold it against a howling swarm of exultant demons who thundered against it from the outside with a tree trunk.

More and more savages streamed from behind the huts, having scaled the undefended south wall. Strombanni and his pirates were beaten back from the other sides of the palisade, and in an instant the compound was swarming with naked warriors. They dragged down the defenders like wolves; the battle resolved into swirling whirlpools of painted figures surging about small groups of desperate white men. Picts, sailors, and men-at-arms littered the earth, stamped underfoot by the heedless feet.

Blood-smeared braves dived howling into huts, and shrieks rose above the din of battle as women and children died beneath the red axes. When they heard those pitiful cries, the men-at-arms abandoned the gate, and in an instant the Picts had burst it and were pouring into the palisade at that point also. Huts began to go up in flames.

“Make for the manor!” roared Conan, and a dozen men surged in behind him as he hewed an inexorable way through the snarling pack.

Strombanni was at his side, wielding his red cutlass like a flail. “We can’t hold the manor,” grunted the pirate.

“Why not?” Conan was too busy with his crimson work to spare a glance.

“Because …uh!” a knife in a dark hand sank deep in the Barachan’s back. “Devil eat you, bastard!” Strombanni turned staggeringly and split the savage’s skull to his teeth. The pirate reeled and fell to his knees, blood starting from his lips.

“The manor’s burning!” he croaked, and slumped over in the dust.

Conan cast a swift look about him. The men who had followed him were all down in their blood. The Pict gasping out his life under the Cimmerian’s feet was the last of the group that had barred his way. Al about him, battle was swirling and surging, but for the moment he stood alone.

He was not far from the south wall. A few strides and he could leap to the ledge, swing over, and be gone through the night. But he remembered the helpless girls in the manor …from which, now, smoke was rolling in billowing masses. He ran toward the manor.

A feathered chief wheeled from the door, lifting a war-axe, and, behind the racing Cimmerian, lines of fleet-footed braves were converging upon him. He did not check his stride. His downward-sweeping cutlass met and deflected the axe and split the skull of the wielder. An instant later, Conan was through the door and had slammed and bolted it against the axes that thudded into the wood.

The great hall was full of drifting wisps of smoke, through which he groped, half blinded. Somewhere a woman was whimpering little, catchy, hysterical sobs of nerve-shattering horror. He emerged from a whorl of smoke and stopped dead in his tracks, glaring down the hall.

The hall was dim and shadowy with drifting smoke.

The great silver candelabrum was overturned, the candles extinguished; the only illumination was a lurid glow from the great fireplace and the wall in which it was set, where the flames licked from burning floor to smoking roof beams. And limned against that lurid glare, Conan saw a human worm swinging slowly at the end of a rope. The dead face, distorted beyond recognition, turned toward him as the body swung; but Conan knew it was Count Valenso, hanged to his own roof beam.

But there was something else in the hall. Conan saw it through the drifting smoke: a monstrous black figure, outlined against the hell-fire glare. That outline was vaguely human, although the shadow thrown on the burning wall was not human at all.

“Crom!” muttered Conan aghast, paralyzed by the realization that he was confronted by a being against whom his sword was useless. He saw Belesa and Tina, clutched in each other’s arms, crouching at the bottom of the stair.

The black monster reared up, looming gigantic against the flame, great arms spread wide. A dim face leered through the drifting smoke …semi-human, demoniac, altogether terrible. Conan glimpsed the close-set horns, the gaping mouth, the peaked ears. It was lumbering toward him through the smoke, and an old memory woke with desperation.

Near the Cimmerian lay the great overturned candelabrum, once the pride of Korzetta Castle: fifty pounds of massy silver, intricately worked with figures of gods and heroes. Conan grasped it and heaved it high above his head.

“Silver and fire!” he roared in a voice like a clap of wind, and hurled the candelabrum with all the power of his iron muscles. Full on the great black breast it crashed, fifty pounds of silver winged with terrific velocity. Not even the black one could stand before such a missile. The demon was carried off its feet …hurtled back into the open fireplace, which was a roaring mouth of flame. A horrible scream shook the hall, the cry of an unearthly thing gripped suddenly by earthly death. The mantel cracked, and stones fell from the great chimney, half hiding the black, writhing limbs at which the flames ate in elemental fury. Burning beams crashed down from the roof and thundered on the stones, and the whole heap was enveloped in a roaring burst of fire.

Flames were creeping down the stair when Conan reached it. He caught up the fainting child under one arm and dragged Belesa to her feet. Through the crackle and snap of the fire sounded the splintering of the front door under the war-axes.

He glared about, sighted a door opposite the stair landing, and hurried through it, carrying Tina and dragging Belesa, who seemed dazed. As they came into the chamber beyond, a crash behind them announced that the roof was falling in the hall. Through a strangling wall of smoke, Conan saw an open, outer door on the other side of the chamber. As he lugged his charges through it, he saw that it sagged on broken hinges, lock and bolt snapped and splintered as if by some terrific force.

“The devil came in by this door!” Belesa sobbed hysterically. “I saw him …but I did not know …”

They emerged into the firelit compound a few feet from the row of huts that lined the south wall. A Pict was skulking toward the door, eyes red in the firelight and axe lifted. Dropping Tina and swinging Belesa away from the blow, Conan snatched out his cutlass and drove it through the savage’s breast. Then, sweeping both girls off their feet, he ran, carrying them, toward the south wall.

The compound was full of billowing smoke-clouds that half hid the red work going on there, but the fugitives had been seen. Naked figures, black against the dull glare, pranced out of the smoke, brandishing gleaming axes. They were still yards behind him when Conan ducked into the space between the huts and the wall.

At the other end of the corridor, he saw other howling shapes, running to cut him off.

Halting short, he tossed Belesa bodily to the footwalk, then Tina, and then leaped up after them. Swinging Belesa over the palisade, he dropped her into the sand outside, and dropped Tina after her. A thrown axe crashed into a log by his shoulder, and then he, too, was over the wall and gathering up his dazed and helpless charges. When the Picts reached the wall, the space before the palisade was empty of all except the dead.