Conan The Warlord.

By Leonard Carpenter.

Prologue: The Skeleton Troop

The Varakiel marshes were a desolate, legend-haunted place for a child to grow up in. From eastern Nemedia they stretch in uncounted leagues of isle and fen toward the sun's birthplace in the Brythunian steppe. Impa.s.sable alike to foot, hoof and boat, the great swamp has ever been a stagnant backwater of history, its miry expanse fabled as a death-snare for armies and a last refuge of hunted men.

For a boy of only eleven summers, life on the edge of such a vast, unexplored tract could be tantalizing in its sense of brooding mystery. The forlorn squeak of the marsh birds and the fluting of wind across nodding reeds permeated the soul, especially if the child was a dreamer, without brothers and sisters, and given to wandering away from familiar fields against his parents' warnings.

Lar had left his log raft far behind in the excitement of exploring the new land he had discovered-land that his father, strangely, had never spoken of. Doubtless the harsh old man knew of it, for he knew more of the Varakiel than anyone, and he reverenced its secrets.

Perhaps, then, this part was secret. Whether the cryptic expanse of dry ground was an island or a peninsula, the boy had not yet learned. The answer, in any case, might vary from season to season, depending on the yearly contest of flood and drought.

Lar's progress had been slowed by mires and willow thickets, and by the constant necessity of watching for bear, cat and snake. But ahead the terrain rose and opened out to a stretch of firm, dry gra.s.sland, like the farm pastures his father tilled far to westward. Rich, arable land, and yet not homesteaded-why?

Lowering the b.u.t.t of his fishing spear to serve as a walking stick, Lar took up a swinging gait, scanning the horizon for tall trees or other vantage points.

Then, rounding an alder clump, he froze. A hideous sight reared just ahead of him: the bleached skeleton of a horse, upright and at the gallop, bearing on its back a grinning, skeletal rider clad in rusting sc.r.a.ps of armor!

Lar did not flee in superst.i.tious terror. He regarded panic as beneath him, and his reason told him there was no immediate danger. He merely shrank back behind the screen of foliage and stood stock-still, listening. He heard only the rustle of leaves stirring in a breeze that had just arisen. No hoofbeats, no clank of arms. When the pounding of his heart subsided, Lar crept forth and looked past the alders once again.

The spectral rider was still there, galloping in place through spa.r.s.e meadow gra.s.s. There was only one movement to the tableau, that of the fluttering, windborne tatters of colorless cloth yet clinging to the bones and decaying armor-clasps.

Spying carefully, Lar could see that horse and rider were fixed to the ground and held upright by a vertical wooden stake; it pa.s.sed straight through the belly and saddle of the horse and up the empty rib cage of the horseman. He shuddered to note that the skull itself was impaled on the stake, the pointed end of which had apparently poked through bone to raise the rust-eaten crown of the helm a few inches above its normal fit.

Lar knew that slow impalement was a mode of execution favored by the stern Brythunians. He guessed instinctively that the rider, if not the horse, had been placed in that position while still living. The thought sickened him, yet he could not tear his eyes away.

He walked forward, widely skirting the elongated, big-toothed skull of the war stallion while gazing up at the dead rider. And he saw with a thrill of delicious fear that the horseman was the leader of a troop.

s.p.a.ced about the clearing in a loose formation, nine other horses and riders were impaled, each as ancient and desiccated as the first. Some of them had sunk to the bases of their weathered stakes, where they lay as mere piles of rust-stained bones, while others sported crusty-gray leather hauberks and wore the green-bra.s.s hilts of rotted iron tulwars at their waists.

Most peasant boys would have been overcome by the weird menace of the place. They would have run home, babbling incoherent tales for their parents to dismiss laughingly or to silence with stern, frightened looks.

But Lar was different; he was a dreamer, and his mind had ranged wider than the minds of most boys of eleven winters. In early boyhood he had pondered deeply the meaning of certain remarks heard on late evenings before the fire, when the adults thought him safely asleep in his chimney-corner.

Now he moved among the skeletons, chill awe sweeping over him. At the center of the cavalry formation lay another relic, the ruin of a chariot. The team that pulled it had not been staked upright as had the others, yet it waited patiently in its traces-three tumbled clumps of bone, tangled with leather harness straps in the gra.s.s. The vehicle was a ma.s.s of collapsed timbers: gray, splitting spokes and spars bleached white as the bones around them, crusted with lichen and with curling flakes of once-gaudy paint.

Mingled in the debris were parts of an eleventh human skeleton, the skull incomplete, doubtless cloven by some long-since rotted blade. Lar liked not the look of the ancient headbone's unbroken half, noting a strange flatness and elongation in contrast with the other skulls on display, and an odd prominence of tooth.

But there, in the midst of it all, shining from beneath a tattered leather sc.r.a.p that might once have been a shield or an awning, Lar's eye caught the glint of an untarnished surface. He peered into the shadow and gasped. A golden statue! Kneeling before the wreckage, remembering to watch for swamp adders, he peeled back the leather fragment. Dry bones clacked as he shoved them eagerly aside.

It was an oval gem case, molded and embellished to look like a golden serpent's head. To one who had seen but few pieces of worked metal in his life, the intricacy of it seemed miraculous. The eyes were great gems; when Lar gingerly rubbed the dust from one of them with a fingertip, the faceted surface gleamed deep green. The serpent's fangs were also jewels, tapering prisms as clear as icicles.

Looking over the chest, Lar could see hinges at its rear. He placed a trembling hand between the fangs and raised the lid. It was heavy and stiff with disuse, but he managed to force it back to an upright position. The inner surface of the serpent's mouth blazed in the sun's rays, mirror-polished white gold. The bottom of the chest was full of blood-red gems from among which the snake's gold tongue protruded. But the real prize rested on the two-p.r.o.nged tongue-a golden, jewel-encrusted chaplet.

Lar knew of crowns and treasures only through the fanciful tales spun by his uncles on midwinter evenings. Still, he understood instantly the ornament's use. He longed to place it on his brow .and view his reflection in the gleaming lid of the cask.

A sudden chill pa.s.sed through him, and a terror touched his heart. He felt sure that if he dared look up, he would see the skeletal hors.e.m.e.n coming to life, flexing their chalk-white limbs, swiveling their creaky-hinged necks, wheeling their ghastly steeds toward him. He scarcely dared to raise his eyes. But finally he did, and saw that nothing was amiss. The riders were still there, the nearest looming over him as hideous as ever, yet motionless.

Iron clouds rolled over the marshland's distant reeds and trees, warning of a weather change. But nothing moved in the meadow except gra.s.s stalks. The wind among the bones made a faint sibilance in Lar's ears.

After all, he asked himself, what could be so evil or unholy about this place? Why should he fear to glimpse these vestiges of ancient power and mystic wonder? All his life he had heard the grandfolk prattle superst.i.tiously against eldritch things; now he knew that he despised their cowardice! Not for him the cringing fears of ignorant serfs. He turned to the cask and reached inside to take the chaplet.

As his hand closed on the prize, he heard a metal latch disengage, and the lid of the chest slammed tightly down on his arm. He cried out in agony, feeling one of the ornamental serpent's needle-sharp fangs pierce his flesh to the bone.

Lar sobbed as he used his free hand to force the heavy, spring-loaded lid open, struggling to withdraw his arm. The deep perforation burned fiercely, like lye-yet already he felt a numbness creeping along the injured limb. His brain, too, was beginning to cloud.

As he pushed himself away from the chest and staggered upright, his dimming senses scarcely noticed that the serpent's jewel-pointed fang dripped not only blood, but yellow venom.

Three days later, his father found him staggering through a reed-choked slough near the leek field. He was dazed, and neither questions nor blows would bring him to speech. The old man hoisted his son on his shoulder and carried him back to their cottage, where the boy's mother waited.

"Lar! Oh Lar, my dearest child, why did you disobey me? Promise that you will never leave your mother's side again!" The distraught woman bathed and dried him, laid him on a pallet before the fire, and made a poultice for the festering wound on his arm.

Later, when the father had plodded off again to the fields, she tried to feed hot soup to her boy, but he would not take any. When she coaxed him, raising the wooden spoon to his lips, he seized her arm and bit it deeply. She screamed in his clutch; the wound burned like lye.

CHAPTER 1.

The Dance of the Clubs

The dungeon was rank with the smells of human misery. Its fetid gloom made a tangible fog of despair that somehow was only deepened by the single source of light: a thin, dusty ray falling from a window grating high overhead. Where it struck the water puddled together with rotting hay on the floor, wisps of steam arose.

A score or more of the room's prisoners lounged or squatted in the shadows around its rough stone walls. Some of them were Nemedian serfs, swarthy-faced men clad in coa.r.s.e, knee-length shirts corded at the waist with frayed rope. Others had more exotic rags and a more foreign look: jaunty street-thieves of Dinander, or wealthless travelers run afoul of munic.i.p.al authority. The inmates varied widely in their physical health also, from the robust toughs loitering in choice positions near the cell door, to peasant wretches broken by torture, moaning in the darkest corners.

Least fortunate of all was the one who sprawled facedown in the center of the wet floor, his limbs twisted under him and one dirty, sandaled ankle protruding into the barred patch of daylight. It was his plight that seemed to concern his fellows the most, and they called attention to it in loud voices.

"Jailer! Poor Stolpa's dead! Come haul him away!"

"Yes, come and get him. He's starting to stink!"

A stout, full-bearded prisoner ambled to the wooden door and gave it three hard kicks that failed even to rattle its heavy timbers. He leaned down and shouted through the peephole: "Warden! Come along here! The fellow's been dead half the morning. He's going to sprout maggots!"

"Get rid of him! Get him out!" A chorus of yells and hoots built to a raucous crescendo. All the able men contributed l.u.s.tily, with one exception.

He was a northern barbarian-a tall, well-muscled youth of perhaps eighteen seasons, with s.h.a.ggy black hair and the faintest shadow of a beard. His ill-fitting townsman's shirt and trousers made a parody of his hulking size; yet as he lounged against the wall near the cell door, his catlike ease belied the ungainliness of his garb. He kept his eyes steadily on the doorway, whispering at intervals to the man beside him, a broken-nosed ruffian who now and again added a jeer to the general outcry.

"They are coming!" The crook-nosed man's battered face suddenly grew serious. "Just look to your own part, Conan! The others will do theirs."

"Aye, Rudo. May Crom favor us!"

A loud thump sounded at the door. The youth eased himself upright as his cellmates' shouts died away.

"You sc.u.m!" a gravelly voice racketed through the peephole. "Let's have some order in there, or I'll shoot quarrels into the lot of you!"

The bearded door-kicker took a step forward in front of the spyhole, spreading his hands amicably, and pointed to the motionless one in the center of the floor. "Your Honor, Stolpa's been dead for hours, and the cell's crowded as it is. We'd like to have him out of here, please."

"Dead, eh?" the unseen warder rasped. "And which of you miscreants throttled him?"

The spokesman nervously clasped his hands. "No one, sir. He's been ailing for some time, as you know."

"Well then, let his ailing carca.s.s rot. And yours with it, Falmar!" The voice murmured irritably aside for a moment, then came back to the eyehole. "How do I know it's not a trick?"

A stir of displeasure sounded among the prisoners, and crook-nosed Rudo stepped quickly from his place beside the barbarian. He went to the middle of the cell and, waving aside the bearded man, addressed the door. "Sir. With your permission. . . ."

Elaborately he swung back his buskined foot, aimed and planted a kick in the middle of the inert body, with force enough to drive it a handsbreadth across the slimy floor.

"Stolpa's suffering has ended, sir." Rudo faced the door and lowered his head slightly. "Ours is only commencing. Will you take him, sir?"

The prisoners waited, as still as stones. After a moment an indistinct question and answer were exchanged outside the cell. Then the voice barked in through the peephole, "All right. But you must fetch him out, in case he died of the creeping palsy. Two of you carry him forth, no more."

Rudo and Falmar stooped over the body and hoisted it up by its legs and arms. As the dull sliding of the doorbolt sounded, the inmates shifted nervously.

The heavy panel grated inward.

"Come on, then! Be quick about it." The harsh voice belonged to a man with a gray-jowled face, wearing the bronze helmet and red-leather vest of a munic.i.p.al guard. He indicated the way through the door with a jerk of his crossbow, and the corpse-bearers lugged their burden forward. A second, leaner jailer grasped the door by its bolt brackets, waiting to close it on their heels.

As they pa.s.sed through the portal, the prisoners' tense watchfulness finally disintegrated; they made sudden, swift rush for the exit. The northern youth sprang to the door and, seizing the nearest guard's arm so as to wrench it free of the door handle, dragged the man bodily inside the cell; meanwhile, the two corpse-carriers set violently on the senior warder. Their attack was aided by their dead burden, Stolpa, who sprang out of their arms in a miraculous, frenzied resurrection.

Inside the dungeon the young barbarian took precious moments to beat down the guard with savage blows of his elbows and fists. He seized the man's cudgel, wrenching and twisting at its lanyard until he heard joints crack in the wrist it was tied to; finally the thong pulled loose. Clutching the hardwood baton, he threw aside its former owner, relinquishing him to the driving feet and fists of other prisoners.

Then, shrilling a bloodcurdling war-whoop, he hurled himself into the stream of men pouring through the doorway.

By that time the wardroom was a ma.s.s of fighting bodies. The thick-jowled warden was down and disarmed, trying to crawl out from beneath the fight, his face bright with blood from a split in his scalp. At least four other guards had joined the fray; as the barbarian shouldered through the crowd, two more uniformed men mustered up the narrow stone stair from the torture-rooms.

The youth met the second of them at the top of the steps, his club already slashing in air. The stroke was partly wasted on the edge of the warder's helm; nevertheless, it sent the man tumbling back down to the torchlit doorway at the stairwell's bottom.

In an instant the first guard turned back to avenge his companion; the youth twisted aside, and the cudgel-blow struck him smartingly across the shoulders. The two fenced, oak clacking against oak, until the northerner landed a rap across the other's knuckles. As the guard's baton slipped from agonized fingers, a cracking blow across the eyes laid him flat. A straggly haired inmate swiftly fell upon him to appropriate his weapon.

Meanwhile, the barbarian drove toward the ascending stair, where more guards cl.u.s.tered. There crook-nosed Rudo flailed at them with the stock of the chief warder's discharged crossbow, while other prisoners sought to grapple close and get inside the swing of the defenders' cudgels. Falmar strove fiercely against a burly guard, strangling him with his own stick; the scrawny Stolpa lay sprawled on the floor against the base of the stairs. This time his portrayal of a dead man looked even more authentic than before.

The young barbarian threw himself into the skirmish line, and struck viciously at the warders, who were already hard-pressed. Since metal hats covered their heads, he aimed slanting blows at their necks. He was quickly rewarded with a snap and a scream as a collarbone gave way.

A fierce battle-rhythm possessed the youth. His movements among guards and prisoners became a violent, intricate dance. When an enemy's cudgel nicked an arm or raked across his ribs, the flare of pain only quickened the tempo. Dodge aside, drive forward, parry, strike! Primitive blood chanted a savage war song in his ears.

The turmoil that raged around him seemed to slow and become trivial and remote. He felt all-powerful, invulnerable, his foes falling left and right before him like scythed stalks toppling in a grainfield.

Then the northerner was brought back to immediacy by urgent cries from behind. Dazedly, shaking off his battle-trance, he glanced around to see that more guards had come from the lower dungeon and sealed off the cell's exit. Some of the prisoners had either been driven back into the stinking hole or had never left it, due to cowardice or physical inability; now the mutineers' force was divided. Fletta, the tall, moonfaced interrogator, stood at the cell door, backed by two guards and plying a copper mallet against the skulls of those who tried to exit the cell or clear its entryway.

A misfortune, clearly, and a dangerous one to turn back and try to correct now. Still, there was good hope for most of the prisoners to escape up the dungeon stair. Only two guards defended it, and they were retreating up the steps before the flailing clubs of Rudo and Falmar, who led the attack.

Then suddenly a new commotion sounded above. Fresh defenders came streaming through the archway, hurrying down the railless, curving stair. These were Iron Guardsmen of the province's elite army, clad in black-metal caps and cuira.s.ses; as they approached the fray, they drew long, curved sabers.

Their commander strode through the arch at the top and watched them descend; he was a lean, distinguished-looking man with trim black mustachios. He placed his hand upon the hilt under his cloak, yet remained on the edge of the landing to survey the scene, turning aside only to whisper a word to a lesser officer who started down the stair. Then, calm and taciturn, he gazed down--directly it seemed, at the young northerner.

Thereafter the fight was short and brutal, the luckier prisoners falling before the warders' vengeful cudgels, the less fortunate methodically hacked or skewered by the Iron Guard. The northerner was hemmed in by guardsmen and disarmed by one who forced his thick, leather-vested body between the youth and his straining club. When he continued to struggle, a stinking shirt was clapped over his face from behind and he was dragged to his knees.

Yet he fought on against the cruel fists striking him from unseen directions. At any moment he expected to feel the chill of cold steel raping his guts, but for some reason his captors only pummeled and restrained him. His arms were bent behind his back, and there tied deftly and tightly. His thrashing neck was girdled by a large, sweaty bicep.

Around him he heard the last random thuds, moans and pleadings for mercy as the brawl ended. He was to be spared, it seemed; and so he strove all the harder, conjuring behind his sightless eyes vivid pictures of the tortures and indignities that might await him, if he lived so long.

Finally he could tell that the surviving prisoners were being herded back into the cell amid shouted orders and curses-yet he was kept kneeling on the floor in silence.

A level, businesslike voice spoke from somewhere near him. "This is the one called Conan?"

"Aye, sir, a Cimmerian. A dangerous fighter, and probably one of the ringleaders." The guard's voice quivered with anger and contempt. "With your indulgence, Marshal Durwald, he should be hamstrung, sir. Or killed straightaway!"

"Uncover his face."

The shirt was wrenched off, revealing to Conan the body-littered wardroom, the expressionless face of the black-cloaked military officer and the b.l.o.o.d.y-nosed visage of the munic.i.p.al guardsman beside him.

The officer stared at him coldly for a moment. Then he spoke tonelessly: "Put him in a solitary cell, to be transported later." Marshal Durwald swiveled on his heel, his cloak billowing behind him. Over his shoulder he added, while stalking away, "He is remanded to baronial authority."

CHAPTER 2.

The Manse.

As the chariot rumbled down the back streets of Dinander, furtive eyes followed it from the darkened windows and doorways of the town. Even at night, and even among offal-strewn alleys, its pa.s.sing was carefully noted, as were all such comings and goings in this dull, provincial capital, whether for the sake of gossip, or political intrigue, or out of simple fear.

The war-chariot gave its occupants a violent ride across road paves purposely made rough for the traction of horses' hooves. Its iron-shod wheels jolted sharply over the cobbles in the clopping wake of the three matched roan stallions. At each of the shallow, open sewers that cut across the pavement, ,the vehicle dropped giddily, then banged high into the air.

It was a difficult ride for both driver and pa.s.senger perched side by side on the padded plank set athwart the fighting-platform. It was harder still on the one who lay p.r.o.ne on the chariot's timber deck, his hands bound behind him.

"Keep down, you stinking barbarian, or I'll club you down!" The driver's muttered threat was emphasized by a fist wrapped around a heavy knife-hilt, with which he smote the prisoner's writhing back.

"Crom! You're killing me!" The stirrings and complaints from the floor were m.u.f.fled by a horse blanket that had been thrown partly over the chariot's human cargo. "I can hardly breathe!"

"Quiet, Cimmerian." The voice of the pa.s.senger, black-cloaked Marshal Durwald, was level and matter-of-fact. "This journey is by the baron's order. If you are seen, your usefulness to him will be ended; then you will find a fate that befits your station in the world and your recent crimes. Stay quiet, and you may fare better." He glanced down contemptuously. "Don't bother working at your bonds. We are almost to the Manse."