The City of Skulls

FOUR: The Ship of Blood

Above all, it was hot and it stank. The dead, vitiated air of the dungeon was stale. It reeked with the stench of close-packed, sweating bodies. A score of naked men were crammed into one filthy hole, surrounded on all sides by huge blocks of stone weighing many tons.

Many were small, brown Menivians, who sprawled about, listless and apathetic. There were a handful of the squat, slant-eyed little warriors who guarded the sacred valley, the Azweri. There were a couple of hawk-nosed Hyrkanians. And there were Conan the Cimmerian and his giant black comrade, Juma. When the Grand Shaman's staff had struck him into insensibility and the warriors had pulled down the mighty Juma by weight of numbers, the infuriated rimpoche had commanded that they pay the ultimate penalty for their crime.

In Shamballah, however, the ultimate penalty was not death, which in Meruvian belief merely released the soul for its next incarnation.

Enslavement they considered worse, since it robbed a man of his humanity, his individuality. So to slavery they were summarily condemned.

Thinking of it, Conan growled deep in his throat, and his eyes blazed with smouldering fires out of his dark face, peering through the shaggy, matted tangle of his uncut black mane. Chained beside him, Juma, sensing Conan's frustration, chuckled. Conan glowered at his comrade; sometimes Juma's invincible good humor irritated him. For a free-born Cimmerian, slavery was indeed an intolerable punishment.

To the Kushite, however, slavery was nothing new. Slave raiders had torn Juma as a child from his mother's arms and dragged him out of the sweltering jungles of Kush to the slave marts of Shem. For a while he had worked as a field hand on a Shemite farm. Then, as his great thews began to swell, he had been sold as an apprentice gladiator to the arenas of Argos.

For his victory in the games held to celebrate the victory of King Milo of Argos over King Ferdrugo of Zbgara, Juma was given his freedom. For a time he lived in various Hyborian nations by thieving and by odd jobs. Then he drifted east to Turan, where his mighty stature and skill in combat won him a place in the ranks of King Yildiz's mercenaries.

There he had come to know the youthful Conan. He and the Cimmerian had struck it off from the first. They were the two tallest men among the mercenary troops, and both came from far, outlandish countries; they were the only members of their respective races among the Turanians.

Their comradeship had now led them to the slave pits of Shamballah and would shortly lead them to the ultimate indignity of the slave block.

There they would stand naked in the blinding sun, poked and prodded by prospective buyers while the slave dealer bellowed praises of their strength.

The days dragged slowly past, as crippled snakes drag their tails painfully through the dust. Conan, Juma, and the others slept and woke to receive wooden bowls of rice, stingily shared out by their overseers. They spent the long days fitfully dozing or languidly quarreling.

Conan was curious to learn more about these Meruvians, for in all his wanderings he had never encountered their like. They dwelt here in this strange valley as their ancestors had done since time began. They had no contact with the outside world and wanted none.

Conan became friendly with a Meruvian named Tashudang, from whom he learned something of their singsong language. When he asked why they called their king a god, Tashudang replied that the king had lived for ten thousand years, his spirit being reborn in a different body after each sojourn in mortal flesh. Conan was skeptical of this, for he knew the sort of lies that kings of other lands spread about themselves. But he prudently kept his opinion to himself. When Tashudang complained mildly and resignedly of the oppression of the king and his shamans, Conan asked:

"Why don't you and your fellows get together and throw the whole lot into the Sumeru Tso, and rule yourselves? That's what we would do in my country if anybody tried to tryannize over us."

Tashudang looked shocked. "You know not what you say, foreigner! Many centuries ago, the priests tell us, this land was much higher than it now is. It stretched from the tops of the Himelias to the tops of the Talakmas—one great, lofty plain, covered with snow and whipped by icy winds. The Roof of the World, it was called.

"Then Yama, the king of the demons, determined to create this valley for us, his chosen people, to dwell in. By a mighty spell, he caused the land to sink. The ground shook with the sound of ten thousand thunders, molten rock poured from cracks in the earth, mountains crumbled, ard forests went up in flame. When it was over, the land between the mountain chains was as you now see it. Because it was now a lowland, the climate wanned, and the plants and beasts of the warm countries came to dwell in it. Then Yama created the first Meruvians and placed them in the valley, to inhabit forever. And he appointed the shamans as leaders and enlighteners of the people.

"Sometimes the shamans forget their duties and oppress us, as if they were but greedy common men. But Yama's command, for us to obey the shamans, still holds good. If we defy it, Yama's great spell will be nullified, and this land will rise to the height of the mountain tops and again become a cold waste. So, no matter how they abuse us, we dare not revolt against the shamans."

"Well," said Conan, "if that filthy little toad is your idea of a god—"

"Oh, no!" said Tashudang, his eyeballs glistening white in the dimness with fear. "Say it not! He is the only begotten son of the great god, Yama himself. And when he calls his father, the god comes!" Tashudang buried his face in his hands, and Conan could get no more words out of him that day.

The Meruvians were an odd race. Theirs was a peculiar lassitude of spirit—a somnolent fatalism that bade them bow to everything that came upon them as a predestined visitation from their cruel, enigmatic gods.

Any resistance to fate on their part, they believed, would be punished, if not immediately, then in their next incarnation.

It was not easy to drag information out of them, but the Cimmerian youth kept doggedly at it. For one thing, it helped to pass the unending days. For another, he did not intend to remain in slavery long, and every bit of information that he could gather about this hidden kingdom and its peculiar people would be of value when he and Juma came to try for freedom. And finally, he knew how important it was in traveling through a strange country, to command at least a smattering of the local language. Although not at all a scholar by temperament, Conan picked up languages easily. He had already mastered several and could even read and write some of them a little.

At last came the fateful day when the overseers in black leather strode amongst the slaves, wielding heavy whips and herding their charges out the door. "Now," sneered one, "we shall see what prices the princes of the Sacred Land will pay for your unwieldy carcasses, outland swine!"

And his whip raised a long weal across Conan's back.

Hot sun beat down on Conan's back like whips of fire. After being so long in darkness, he was dazzled by the brightness of day. After the slave auction, they led him up the gangplank to the deck of a great galley, which lay moored to the long, stone quays of Shamballah. He squinted against the sun and cursed in a growling undertone. This, then, was the doom to which they had sentenced him—to drudge at the oars until death took him.

"Get down in the hold, you dogs!" spat the ship's overseer, cuffing Conan's jaw with the back of his hand. "Only the children of Yama may stride the deck!"

Without thinking, the Cimmerian youth exploded into action. He drove his balled fist into the burly overseer's bulging belly. As the breath hissed from the man's lungs, Conan followed the blow with a hammerlike right to the jaw, which stretched the shipman on the deck. Behind him, Juma howled with joy and struggled to get up the line to stand beside him.

The commander of the ship's guard rapped out an order. In a flash, the points of a dozen pikes, in the hands of wiry little Meruvian marines, were leveled at Conan. The Cimmerian stood in the circle of them, a menacing growl rising to his lips. But he belatedly controlled his rage, knowing that any move would bring instant death.

It took a bucket of water to revive the overseer. He laboriously climbed to his feet, blowing like a walrus, while water ran down his bruised face into his sparse black beard. His eyes glared into Conan's with insane rage, then cooled to icy venom.

The officer began to issue a command to the marines: "Slay the—" but the overseer interrupted:

"Nay, slay him not. Death were too easy for the dog. Ill make him whimper to be put out of his misery ere I've done with him."

"Well, Gorthangpo?" said the officer.

The overseer stared over the oar pit, meeting the cowed gaze of a hundred-odd naked brown men. They were starved and scrawny, and their bent backs were criss-crossed by a thousand whip scars. The ship carried a single bank of long oars on each side. Some oars were manned by two rowers, some by three, depending upon the size and strength of the slaves. The overseer pointed to an oar in the waist, to which three gray-haired, skeletal old men were chained.

"Chain him to yonder oar! Those walking corpses are played out; they are of no more use to us. Clear the oar of them. This foreign lad needs to stretch his arms a bit; well give him all the room he needs. And if he follow not the pace, I'll open his back to the spine!"

As Conan watched impassively, the sailors unlocked the manacles that connected the wrist chains of the three old men to rings on the oar itself. The old men screamed with terror as brawny arms heaved them over the rail. They hit the water with a great splash and sank without a trace, save for the bubbles that rose one by one to the surface and burst.

Conan was chained to the oar in their place. He was to do the work of all three. As they fastened him to the filth-slimed bench, the overseer eyed him grimly.

"We'll see how you like pulling an oar, boy. You'll pull and pull until you think your back is breaking—and then you'll pull some more. And every time you slack off or miss a boat, I'll remind you of your place, like this!"

His arm swung; the whip uncoiled against the sky and came whistling down across Conan's shoulders. The pain was like that of a white-hot iron rod against his flesh. But Conan did not scream or move a muscle.

It was as if he had felt nothing, so strong was the iron of his will.

The overseer grunted, and the lash cracked again. This time a muscle at one corner of Conan's grimly set mouth twitched, but his eyes looked stonily ahead. A third lash, and a fourth. Sweat formed on the Cimmerian's brow; it trickled down into his eyes, stinging and smarting, even as the red blood ran down his back. But he gave no sign of feeling pain.

Behind him, he heard Juma's whisper: "Courage!"

Then came a call from the afterdeck; the captain wished to sail.

Reluctantly, the overseer gave up his pleasure of lashing the Cimmerian's back to pulp.

The sailors cast off the ropes that moored the ship to the quay and shoved off with boathooks. Aft of the oar benches but on the same level, in the shade of the catwalk that ran the length of the ship over the heads of the rowers, sat a naked Meruvian behind a huge drum. When the ship had cleared the quay, the coxswain lifted a wooden maul and began to thump the drum. With each beat, the slaves bent to the oars, rising to their feet, raising the looms, and leaning back until their weight brought them down on the benches; then pushing the looms down and forward and repeating. Conan soon caught the rhythm, as did Juma, chained to the oar behind him.

Conan had never before been on a ship. As he heaved at his oar, his quick eyes peered around him at the listless, dull-eyes slaves with whip-scarred backs, who worked on the slimy benches in the frightful stench of their own waste. The galley was low through the waist, where the slaves labored; the rail was only a few feet above the water. It was higher in the bow, where the seamen berthed, and in the carved and gilded stern, where the officers had their quarters. A single mast arose amidships. The yard of the single triangular sail, and the furled sail itself, lay along the catwalk over the oar pit.

When the ship had left the harbor, the sailors untied the lashings that held the sail and its yard to the catwalk and raised it, heaving on the halyard and grunting a chantey. The yard went up by jerks, a few inches at a time. As it rose, the gold-and-purple striped sail unfurled and shook out with snapping, booming sounds. Since the wind was fair on the quarter, the oarsmen were given a rest while the sail took over.

Conan noted that the entire galley had been made from some wood that either by nature or by staining was of a dark red color. As he gazed about, eyes half shut against the glare, the ship looked as if it had been dipped in blood. Then the whip sang above him and the overseer, on the catwalk above, yelled down:

"Now lay to, you lazy swine!"

A lash laid another welt across his shoulders. It is indeed a ship of wood, he thought to himself; slaves' blood.