The Conan Compendium Page 26

  When all was silent again, Conan drew a long breath. Holding high his Hyperborean sword, he opened the door a crack, then more widely as he viewed naught but the empty corridor. With the door ajar, the dim light of the torches pierced the gloom, and he could make out the contents of the chamber. Here were a pile of fresh torches, a barrel of pitch, and in one corner, a heap of straw to garnish the cell floors in lieu of carpets.

  It was but the work of a moment for Conan to toss the pile of straw about the chamber, overturn the barrel of pitch upon it, and spread the viscous stuff around. Darting out into the passageway, he snatched a torch from the nearest bracket and heaved it into the combustible mass that covered the floor of the storeroom. Crackling lustily, the flames ate their way through the straw and belched black smoke along the corridor.

  Tarred from face to boots and coughing from the acrid fumes, Conan caught Rann’s hand, sprinted down the winding stairs, and regained the alcove through which he had gained entry. How long before the Witchmen would discover that their castle was ablaze, Conan knew not; but he trusted this diversion to occupy their full attention while the rescuer and rescued squirmed through the narrow slit and clambered down the rope to the safety of the frozen ground.

  4 • That Which Pursued

  Jarl Njal bellowed with joy and seized the laughing, weeping girl in his arms, crushing her against his burly chest. But even in his joy, the chieftain paused to look deep into Conan’s eyes and clap the youth on the shoulder with a friendly buffet that would have knocked most striplings off their feet.

  As they hastened to the Asgard camp beneath the cover of the snow-tipped pines, the youth, in terse words, described the day’s adventure. But words were scarcely needed. Behind them a raven cloud of soot besmudged the afternoon sky, and the crash of collapsing timbers and fire-blackened masonry resounded like distant thunder in the hills. The Witchmen would doubtless save part of their fortress; although many of the lank, flaxen-haired devils must have already perished in the conflagration.

  Wasting no time, Njal ordered his men to begin the long trek back to Asgard. Not until he and his band were deep in their own land could the chief of the Æsir count himself safe from Hyperborean vengeance. There would, no doubt, be pursuit; but for the moment the dwellers in Haloga had other matters to busy them.

  The Æsir made haste to depart, and in their hurry they sacrificed concealment to speed. Since the face of the wan sun was still pillowed on the treetops, they could with effort put leagues between themselves and the castle before the early fall of the northern night.

  From the parapet of Haloga, the agelessly beautiful Queen Vammatar watched them go, her jasper eyes cold with hate as she smiled a slow and evil smile.

  There was little greenery in this flat land of bog and hillock, and what there was lay blanketed in snow. As the sun neared the horizon, clammy coils of choking fog rose from the stagnant meres and laid a chill upon men’s hearts. The travelers saw few signs of life, save for a couple of Hyperborean serfs who fled from the band and lost themselves in the mist.

  From time to time, one or another of the Æsir set an ear to the ground, but no drumming of hooves could be heard. They hastened on, slipping and stumbling on the uncertain, frozen footing. But before day wrapped her icy cloak around her shoulders and departed, Conan glanced to the rear, and cried out: “Someone follows us!”

  The Æsir halted and gazed in the direction that he indicated. At first they could see nothing but the endless, undulant plain, whose junction with the sky was hidden in the mists. Then a Northman with vision that transcended the sight of his fellows exclaimed:

  “He is right. Men on foot pursue us, mayhap…mayhap a half a league behind.”

  “Come!” growled Njal. “We will not stop to camp this night. In these fogs, ’twere easy for a foe to creep upon us, no matter how many sentries we might post.”

  The band staggered on while the setting sun was swallowed by the voracious mists. After the Æsir had long trudged in darkness, a wan moon climbed above the mists that hemmed them in, and its light shone on a faint patch of rippling shade. It was the pursuing force, larger and nearer than ever.

  Njal, a man of iron, strode forward with his exhausted daughter in his arms; nor would he entrust so precious a burden to another. Conan, full as he was with the vigor of youth, ached in every limb and sinew as he followed the giant jarl. The other raiders, uncomplaining, maintained the grueling pace. Yet their pursuers seemed to tire not at all. Indeed, the host from Haloga had not slowed, but was on the contrary gaining upon them. Njal cursed hoarsely and urged his men to greater speed. But however doggedly they struggled on, they were altogether played out. Soon they must turn and make a stand, albeit the jarl well knew that no seasoned warrior would choose to do battle on a strange terrain when overtaken by exhaustion. Still, their meager choice was plain: either fight or be cut down.

  Each time they crested a low hill clad in winter’s silvered garment, they could see the silent mass of moving men, twice their number, drawing nearer than before. There was something strange about these pursuers, but neither Njal nor Gorm nor any other of the company could quite tell what was wrong with them.

  As the hunters drew closer, the hunted perceived that not all the members of the oncoming force were Witchmen, a race that tended to be taller and more slender than the Northmen. Many of the pursuing host had mighty shoulders and massive frames and wore the horned helmets of the Æsir and Vanir. Njal shivered, as from the icy touch of some uncanny premonition of despair.

  The other strange thing about the pursuers was the way they walked.…

  Ahead, Njal spied the loom of a hill, higher than most of the eminences of this flat land, and his weary eyes brightened. The crest of the hill would serve for a defensive position, although the chieftain wished it higher yet and steeper to force the enemy to charge uphill in the teeth of Æsir weapons. In any case, the foe was almost snapping at their heels, so stand they must, and soon.

  Shouldering the girl, Njal turned to shout from a raw throat: “Men! Up yonder hill and speedily! There we shall make our stand.”

  The Æsir plodded up the misty slope, to assemble at the crest, well pleased to cease putting one road-weary foot before the other. And like true warriors everywhere, the prospect of a bloody battle brightened their flagging spirits.

  Thror Ironhand and the other captains passed around leathern bottles of wine and water, albeit little enough was left of either. The raiders rested, caught their breath, and limbered their bows. Long shields of wicker and hide, which had been slung upon their backs, were cast loose and fitted together to form a veritable wall of shields, encircling the crest of the hill. One-eyed Gorm uncovered his harp and began in a strong, melodious voice to chant an ancient battle song:

  Our blades were forged in the flames that leap

  From the burning heart of Hell,

  And were quenched in frozen rivers deep,

  Where the icy bones of dead men sleep,

  Who fought our sires and fell.

  The respite was short. Shouldering through the fog, a swarm of sinister figures emerged from the murk, and with steady, rhythmic steps stalked up the slope, like men walking in their sleep or puppets worked by strings. The flight of javelins that met the shambling attackers slowed them not at all, as they hurled themselves against the ring of shields. Naked steel flashed darkly in the wan moonlight. The attackers swung high sword and axe and war hammer and brought them whistling down upon the living wall, cleaving flesh and shattering bone.

  In the van Njal, bellowing an ancient Æsir war cry, hewed mightily. Then he paused, blinking, and the heart in his bosom faltered. For the man he was fighting was none other than his own captain, Egil the huntsman, who had died that morn on the end of a rope, suspended from the walls of Haloga. The light of the pallid moon shone plainly on that familiar face and turned Jarl Njal’s bones to water.

  5 • “Men Cannot Die Twice!”

  The face that stared stonily int
o his own was surely that of Njal’s old comrade; for the white scar athwart the brow betokened a slash that Egil, five summers before, had suffered in a raid against the Vanir. But the blue eyes of Egil knew not his jarl. Those eyes were as cold and empty as the skies above the starless, misty night.

  Glancing again, Njal saw the mangled flesh of Egil’s naked breast, whence hours before the living heart had been untimely torn. Revolted by the thing he saw, Njal perceived that however much he wounded his adversary’s flesh, these wounds would never bleed. Neither would his old friend’s corpse feel the bitter kiss of steel.

  Behind the dead but battling Æsir, a half-charred Witchman stumbled up the slope, his face a grinning mask of horror. Here, thought Njal, was a denizen of Haloga who had perished in the fire set by the wily Conan.

  “Forgive, brother,” whispered Njal through stiffened lips, as with a backhand stroke, he hamstrung Egil’s walking corpse. Like a puppet with severed strings, the dismembered body flopped backward down the hill; but instantly the cadaver of the grinning Witchman took its place.

  The Æsir chieftain fought mechanically but without hope. For when your foe can summon forth the very dead from hell to fight you, what victory can ensue?

  All along the line, men shouted in hoarse surprise and consternation as they found themselves fighting the walking corpses of their own dead comrades who had perished under the cruel knives of the Hyperboreans. But the host that swarmed against them numbered others in their hideous ranks. Side by side with Witchmen crushed beneath collapsing walls or burned in the day’s conflagration strode corpses long buried, from whose pale and tattered flesh grave worms wriggled or fell wetly to the ground. These hurled themselves, weaponless, upon the Æsir. The stench was sickening; and terror overwhelmed all but the hardiest.

  Even old Gorm felt the icy clutch of fear at his heart. His war song faltered and died.

  “May the gods help us all!” he muttered. “What hope have we when we pit our steel against the walking dead? Men cannot die twice!”

  The Æsir line crumbled as wave after wave of walking corpses swept the warriors down, one by one, and crushed them into the viscid earth. These attackers bore no weapons but fought with naked hands, tearing living men asunder with their frigid grip.

  The Cimmerian stood in the second rank. When the stout warrior before him fell, Conan, roaring with a voice as gusty as the north wind, leaped forward to fill the gap in the swaying line. With a sweep of the Hyperborean sword he bore, he severed the neck of a skeletal thing that was squeezing the life from the Northman at his feet. The skull-like head rolled grinning down the hill.

  Then Conan’s blood congealed with horror: for, headless or not, the long-dead cadaver rose and groped for him with its bony hands. With the nape of his neck tingling in primordial fear, Conan kicked out and stove in ribs that showed through the tattered flesh. The corpse staggered back, then came on again, talons clutching.

  Gripping his sword hilt with both hands, Conan put all his young strength into a mighty slash. The sword bit through the lean and fleshless waist, severed the half-exposed spinal column, and sent the divided cadaver tumbling earthward. For the moment, he had no opponent. Breathing hard, he shook back his raven mane.

  The Cimmerian glanced along the Æsir line. Njal had fallen, taking with him a dozen of the foe, hacked, like venison, into pieces. Howling like a wolf, old Gorm took his place in the wavering line, swinging a heavy axe with deadly skill. But now the line was breaking; the battle nearly done.

  “Do not slay all!” a cold voice rang in the stillness, borne upon the icy wind. “Take such as you can for the slave pens.”

  Peering through the murk, Conan spied the speaker. On a tall black stallion sat Queen Vammatar in her flowing snow-white robes. Trembling in every limb, he knew the legions of the walking dead obeyed her least command.

  Suddenly Rann appeared at Conan’s side, her face wet with tears but blue eyes unafraid. She had seen Gorm and her father fall before the onslaught of the ghastly enemy and had pushed her way through the press to the young Cimmerian. She snatched up a discarded sword and prepared to die fighting. Then, like a gift from Crom, an idea shaped itself in Conan’s despairing mind. The battle was already lost. He and the surviving Æsir were bound, as surely as day follows night, for the slave pens of Hyperborea. Something, however, might be saved from the wreck of all their hopes.

  Whirling, Conan lifted the girl in his arms and tossed her over his shoulder. Then he kicked and hacked a path through the foe, down the corpse-littered slope to the foot of the hill, where the queen sat on her steed awaiting the end, an evil smile on her half-parted lips.

  In the stable dark beneath the swirling coils of mist, the queen, eyes raised to watch the final struggle on the hilltop, failed to mark the noiseless approach of the Cimmerian. Nor did she see the girl he set upon the trampled snow. No premonition reached her senses until iron fingers closed about her forearm and thigh and hauled her, shrieking with dismay and fury, from her mount. With a mighty heave Conan hurled the queen from him, to fall with a splash into the chilly bosom of the bog. Then Conan lifted Rann and boosted her, protesting, into the vacant saddle.

  Before he could vault up behind her on the prancing animal, several of the living corpses, obeying the furious commands of their mistress, seized Conan from behind and clung, leechlike, to his left arm.

  With a superhuman effort, before he was dragged earthward by the putrid monsters, Conan struck the stallion’s rump with the flat of his sword. “Ride, girl, ride!” he shouted. “To Asgard and safety!”

  The black horse reared, neighing, and bolted across the foggy, snow-clad plain. Rann hugged the animal’s neck, pressing her tear-stained cheek against its warm hide, and her long blond hair mingled with its flying mane.

  As the steed swept around the base of the hill and off to the west, she cast one backward glance, just as the brave youth who twice had saved her life went down beneath a mound of fighting cadavers. Queen Vammatar, her white robes spattered with slime, stood in the frosty moonlight, smiling her evil smile. Then the loom of the hill and the rising fogs mercifully hid the scene of the carnage.

  Across the plain, a score of Æsir survivors trudged eastward in the pallid moonlight, their wrists bound behind their backs with rawhide thongs. The walking dead―those who had not been cut to pieces in the fray―surrounded the captives. At the head of the weird procession marched two figures: Conan and Queen Vammatar.

  With every step the queen, her handsome face twisted with fury, slashed at the Cimmerian youth with her riding whip. Red weals crisscrossed his face and body; but he walked with shoulders squared and head held high, although he knew that none returned from the slave pens of this accursed land. Easy it would have been to slay the queen when he threw her from her stallion, but in his natal land custom demanded chivalry toward women, and he could not forsake his childhood training.

  As the eastern fogs paled with the approach of dawn, Rann Njalsdatter reached the borders of Asgard. Her heart was heavy, but she remembered the last stanza of the song that Gorm had chanted beneath the fog-dimmed moon:

  You can cut us down; we can bleed and die,

  But men of the North are we:

  You can chain our flesh; you can blind our eye;

  You can break us under the iron sky,

  But our hearts are proud and free!

  The brave words of the song stiffened her back and lifted her spirits. With shoulders unbowed and bright head high, she rode home under the morning.

  The Thing in the Crypt

  The greatest hero of Hyborian times was not a Hyborian but a barbarian, Conan the Cimmerian, about whose name whole cycles of legend revolve.

  From the elder civilizations of Hyborian and Atlantean times, only a few fragmentary, half-legendary narratives survive. One of these, The Nemedian Chronicles, gives most of what is known about the career of Conan. The section concerning Conan begins:

  Know, O Prince, that between the years wh
en the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars―Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.

  In Conan's veins flowed the blood of ancient Atlantis, swallowed by the seas eight thousand years before his time. He was born into a clan that claimed an area in the northwest of Cimmeria. His grandfather was a member of a southern tribe who had fled from his own people because of a blood feud and, after long wandering, took refuge with the people of the North, Conan himself was born on a battlefield, during a fight between his tribe and a horde of raiding Vanir.

  There is no record of when the young Cimmerian got his first sight of civilization, but he was known as a fighter around the council fires before he had seen fifteen snows. In that year, the Cimmerian tribesmen forgot their feuds and joined forces to repel the Gundermen, who had pushed across the Aquilonian frontier, built the frontier post of Venarium, and begun to colonize the southern marches of Cimmeria. Conan was a member of the howling, blood-mad horde that swept out of the northern hills, stormed over the stockade with sword and torch, and drove the Aquilonians back across their frontiers.