The Conan Chronicles: Volume 1: The People of the Black Circle Read online

  Conan moved with the abruptness of a jungle cat. Catching up his sword from where it lay in a stack of weapons near by, he lifted Olivia lightly from her feet and glided through an opening that gaped in the ivy-grown wall.

  No word passed between them. Lifting her in his arms he set off swiftly across the moon-bathed sward. Her arms about his iron neck, the Ophirean closed her eyes, cradling her dark curly head against his massive shoulder. A delicious sense of security stole over her.

  In spite of his burden, the Cimmerian crossed the plateau swiftly, and Olivia, opening her eyes, saw that they were passing under the shadow of the cliffs.

  ‘Something climbed the cliffs,’ she whispered. ‘I heard it scrambling behind me as I came down.’

  ‘We’ll have to chance it,’ he grunted.

  ‘I am not afraid - now,’ she sighed.

  ‘You were not afraid when you came to free me, either,’ he answered. ‘Crom, what a day it has been! Such haggling and wrangling I never heard. I’m nearly deaf. Aratus wished to cut out my heart, and Ivanos refused, to spite Aratus, whom he hates. All day long they snarled and spat at one another, and the crew quickly grew too drunk to vote either way--’

  He halted suddenly, an image of bronze in the moonlight. With a quick gesture he tossed the girl lightly to one side and behind him. Rising to her knees on the soft sward, she screamed at what she saw.

  Out of the shadows of the cliffs moved a monstrous shambling bulk - an anthropomorphic horror, a grotesque travesty of creation.

  In general outline it was not unlike a man. But its face, limned in the bright moonlight, was bestial, with close-set ears, flaring nostrils, and a great flabby-lipped mouth in which gleamed white tusk-like fangs. It was covered with shaggy grayish hair, shot with silver which shone in the moonlight, and its great misshapen paws hung nearly to the earth. Its bulk was tremendous; as it stood on its short bowed legs, its bullet-head rose above that of the man who faced it; the sweep of the hairy breast and giant shoulders was breathtaking; the huge arms were like knotted trees.

  The moonlight scene swam, to Olivia’s sight. This, then, was the end of the trail - for what human being could withstand the fury of that hairy mountain of thews and ferocity? Yet as she stared in wide-eyed horror at the bronzed figure facing the monster, she sensed a kinship in the antagonists that was almost appalling. This was less a struggle between man and beast than a conflict between two creatures of the wild, equally merciless and ferocious. With a flash of white tusks, the monster charged.

  The mighty arms spread wide as the beast plunged, stupefy-ingly quick for all his vast bulk and stunted legs.

  Conan’s action was a blur of speed Olivia’s eye could not follow. She only saw that he evaded that deadly grasp, and his sword, flashing like a jet of white lightning, sheared through one of those massive arms between shoulder and elbow. A great spout of blood deluged the sward as the severed member fell, twitching horribly, but even as the sword bit through, the other malformed hand locked in Conan’s black mane.

  Only the iron neck-muscles of the Cimmerian saved him from a broken neck that instant. His left hand darted out to clamp on the beast’s squat throat, his left knee was jammed hard against the brute’s hairy belly. Then began a terrific struggle, which lasted only seconds, but which seemed like ages to the paralyzed girl.

  The ape maintained his grasp in Conan’s hair, dragging him toward the tusks that glistened in the moonlight. The Cimmerian resisted this effort, with his left arm rigid as iron, while the sword in his right hand, wielded like a butcher-knife, sank again and again into the groin, breast and belly of his captor. The beast took its punishment in awful silence, apparently unweakened by the blood that gushed from its ghastly wounds. Swiftly the terrible strength of the anthropoid overcame the leverage of braced arm and knee. Inexorably Conan’s arm bent under the strain; nearer and nearer he was drawn to the slavering jaws that gaped for his life. Now the blazing eyes of the barbarian glared into the bloodshot eyes of the ape. But as Conan tugged vainly at his sword, wedged deep in the hairy body, the frothing jaws snapped spasmodically shut, an inch from the Cimmerian’s face, and he was hurled to the sward by the dying convulsions of the monster.

  Olivia, half fainting, saw the ape heaving, thrashing and writhing, gripping, manlike, the hilt that jutted from its body. A sickening instant of this, then the great bulk quivered and lay still.

  Conan rose and limped over to the corpse. The Cimmerian breathed heavily, and walked like a man whose joints and muscles have been wrenched and twisted almost to their limit of endurance. He felt his bloody scalp and swore at the sight of the long black red-stained strands still grasped in the monster’s shaggy hand.

  ‘Crom!’ he panted. ‘I feel as if I’d been racked! I’d rather fight a dozen men. Another instant and he’d have bitten off my head. Blast him, he’s torn a handful of my hair out by the roots.’

  Gripping his hilt with both hands he tugged and worked it free. Olivia stole close to clasp his arm and stare down wide-eyed at the sprawling monster.

  ‘What - what is it?’ she whispered.

  ‘A gray man-ape,’ he grunted. ‘Dumb, and man-eating. They dwell in the hills that border the eastern shore of this sea. How this one got to this island, I can’t say. Maybe he floated here on driftwood, blown out from the mainland in a storm.’

  ‘And it was he that threw the stone?’

  ‘Yes; I suspected what it was when we stood in the thicket and I saw the boughs bending over our heads. These creatures always lurk in the deepest woods they can find, and seldom emerge. What brought him into the open, I can’t say, but it was lucky for us; I’d have had no chance with him among the trees.’

  ‘It followed me,’ she shivered. ‘I saw it climbing the cliffs.’

  ‘And following his instinct, he lurked in the shadow of the cliff, instead of following you out across the plateau. His kind are creatures of darkness and the silent places, haters of sun and moon.’

  ‘Do you suppose there are others?’

  ‘No, else the pirates had been attacked when they went through the woods. The gray ape is wary, for all his strength, as shown by his hesitancy in falling upon us in the thicket. His lust for you must have been great, to have driven him to attack us finally in the open. What--’

  He started and wheeled back toward the way they had come. The night had been split by an awful scream. It came from the ruins.

  Instantly there followed a mad medley of yells, shrieks and cries of blasphemous agony. Though accompanied by a ringing of steel, the sounds were of massacre rather than battle.

  Conan stood frozen, the girl clinging to him in a frenzy of terror. The clamor rose to a crescendo of madness, and then the Cimmerian turned and went swiftly toward the rim of the plateau, with its fringe of moon-limned trees. Olivia’s legs were trembling so that she could not walk; so he carried her, and her heart calmed its frantic pounding as she nestled into his cradling arms.

  They passed under the shadowy forest, but the clusters of blackness held no terrors, the rifts of silver discovered no grisly shape. Night-birds murmured slumberously. The yells of slaughter dwindled behind them, masked in the distance to a confused jumble of sound. Somewhere a parrot called, like an eery echo: ‘Yagkoolan yok tha, xuthalla? So they came to the tree-fringed water’s edge and saw the galley lying at anchor, her sail shining white in the moonlight. Already the stars were paling for dawn.

  In the ghastly whiteness of dawn a handful of tattered, bloodstained figures staggered through the trees and out on to the narrow beach. There were forty-four of them, and they were a cowed and demoralized band. With panting haste they plunged into the water and began to wade toward the galley, when a stern challenge brought them up standing.

  Etched against the whitening sky they saw Conan the Cimmerian standing in the bows, sword in hand, his black mane tossing in the dawn wind.

  ‘Stand!’ he ordered. ‘Come no nearer. What would you have, dogs?’

  ‘Let us
come aboard!’ croaked a hairy rogue fingering a bloody stump of ear. ‘We’d be gone from this devil’s island.’

  ‘The first man who tries to climb over the side, I’ll split his skull,’ promised Conan.

  They were forty-four to one, but he held the whip-hand. The fight had been hammered out of them.

  ‘Let us come aboard, good Conan,’ whined a red-sashed Zamorian, glancing fearfully over his shoulder at the silent woods. ‘We have been so mauled, bitten, scratched and rended, and are so weary from fighting and running, that not one of us can lift a sword.’

  ‘Where is that dog Aratus?’ demanded Conan.

  ‘Dead, with the others! It was devils fell upon us! They were rending us to pieces before we could awake - a dozen good rovers died in their sleep. The ruins were full of flame-eyed shadows, with tearing fangs and sharp talons.’

  ‘Aye! put in another corsair. ‘They were the demons of the isle, which took the forms of molten images, to befool us. Ishtar! We lay down to sleep among them. We are no cowards. We fought them as long as mortal man may strive against the powers of darkness. Then we broke away and left them tearing at the corpses like jackals. But surely they’ll pursue us.’

  ‘Aye, let us come aboard!’ clamored a lean Shemite. ‘Let us come in peace, or we must come sword in hand, and though we be so weary you will doubtless slay many of us, yet you can not prevail against us many.’

  ‘Then I’ll knock a hole in the planks and sink her,’ answered Conan grimly. A frantic chorus of expostulation rose, which Conan silenced with a lion-like roar.

  ‘Dogs! Must I aid my enemies? Shall I let you come aboard and cut out my heart?’

  ‘Nay, nay!’ they cried eagerly. ‘Friends - friends, Conan . We are thy comrades! We be all lusty rogues together. We hate the king of Turan, not each other.’

  Their gaze hung on his brown, frowning face.

  ‘Then if I am one of the Brotherhood,’ he grunted, ‘the laws of the Trade apply to me; and since I killed your chief in fair fight, then I am your captain!’

  There was no dissent. The pirates were too cowed and battered to have any thought except a desire to get away from that island of fear. Conan’s gaze sought out the bloodstained figure of the Corinthian.

  ‘How, Ivanos!’ he challenged. ‘You took my part, once. Will you uphold my claims again?’

  ‘Aye, by Mitra!’ The pirate, sensing the trend of feeling, was eager to ingratiate himself with the Cimmerian. ‘He is right, lads; he is our lawful captain!’

  A medley of acquiescence rose, lacking enthusiasm perhaps, but with sincerity accentuated by the feel of the silent woods behind them which might mask creeping ebony devils with red eyes and dripping talons.

  ‘Swear by the hilt,’ Conan demanded.

  Forty-four sword-hilts were lifted toward him, and forty-four voices blended in the corsair’s oath of allegiance.

  Conan grinned and sheathed his sword. ‘Come aboard, my bold swashbucklers, and take the oars.’

  He turned and lifted Olivia to her feet, from where she had crouched shielded by the gunwales.

  ‘And what of me, sir?’ she asked.

  ‘What would you?’ he countered, watching her narrowly.

  ‘To go with you, wherever your path may lie!’ she cried, throwing her white arms about his bronzed neck.

  The pirates, clambering over the rail, gasped in amazement.

  ‘To sail a road of blood and slaughter?’ he questioned. ‘This keel will stain the blue waves crimson wherever it plows.’

  ‘Aye, to sail with you on blue seas or red,’ she answered passionately. ‘You are a barbarian, and I am an outcast, denied by my people. We are both pariahs, wanderers of earth. Oh, take me with you!’

  With a gusty laugh he lifted her to his fierce lips.

  'I'll make you Queen of the Blue Sea! Cast off there, dogs! We’ll scorch King Yildiz’s pantaloons yet, by Crom!’

  A WITCH SHALL BE BORN

  1 THE BLOOD-RED CRESCENT

  Taramis, Queen of Khauran, awakened from a dream-haunted slumber to a silence that seemed more like the stillness of nighted catacombs than the normal quiet of a sleeping place. She lay staring into the darkness, wondering why the candles in their golden candelabra had gone out. A flecking of stars marked a gold-barred casement that lent no illumination to the interior of the chamber. But as Taramis lay there, she became aware of a spot of radiance glowing in the darkness before her. She watched, puzzled. It grew and its intensity deepened as it expanded, a widening disk of lurid light hovering against the dark velvet hangings of the opposite wall. Taramis caught her breath, starting up to a sitting position. A dark object was visible in that circle of light - a human bead.

  In a sudden panic the queen opened her lips to cry out for her maids; then she checked herself. The glow was more lurid, the head more vividly limned. It was a woman’s head, small, delicately molded, superbly poised, with a high-piled mass of lustrous black hair. The face grew distinct as she stared - and it was the sight of this face which froze the cry in Taramis’s throat. The features were her own! She might have been looking into a mirror which subtly altered her reflection, lending it a tigerish gleam of eye, a vindictive curl of lip.

  ‘Ishtar!’ gasped Taramis. ‘I am bewitched!’ Appallingly, the apparition spoke, and its voice was like honeyed venom.

  ‘Bewitched? No, sweet sister! Here is no sorcery.’ ‘Sister?’ stammered the bewildered girl. ‘I have no sister.’ ‘You never had a sister?’ came the sweet, poisonously mocking voice. ‘Never a twin sister whose flesh was as soft as yours to caress or hurt?’

  ‘Why, once I had a sister,’ answered Taramis, still convinced that she was in the grip of some sort of nightmare. ‘But she died.’

  The beautiful face in the disk was convulsed with the aspect of a fury; so hellish became its expression that Taramis, cowering back, half expected to see snaky locks writhe hissing about the ivory brow.

  ‘You lie!’ The accusation was spat from between the snarling red lips. ‘She did not die! Fool! Oh, enough of this mummery! Look - and let your sight be blasted!’

  Light ran suddenly along the hangings like flaming serpents, and incredibly the candles in the golden sticks flared up again. Taramis crouched on her velvet couch, her lithe legs flexed beneath her, staring wide-eyed at the pantherish figure which posed mockingly before her. It was as if she gazed upon another Taramis, identical with herself in every contour of feature and limb, yet animated by an alien and evil personality. The face of this stranger waif reflected the opposite of every characteristic the countenance of the queen denoted. Lust and mystery sparkled in her scintillant eyes, cruelty lurked in the curl of her full red lips. Each movement of her supple body was subtly suggestive. Her coiffure imitated that of the queen’s, on her feet were gilded sandals such as Taramis wore in her boudoir. The sleeveless, low-necked silk tunic, girdled at the waist with a cloth-of-gold cincture, was a duplicate of the queen’s night-garment.

  ‘Who are you?’ gasped Taramis, an icy chill she could not explain creeping along her spine. ‘Explain your presence before I call my ladies-in-waiting to summon the guard!’

  ‘Scream until the roof beams crack,’ callously answered the stranger. ‘Your sluts will not wake till dawn, though the palace spring into flames about them. Your guardsmen will not hear your squeals; they have been sent out of this wing of the palace.’

  ‘What!’ exclaimed Taramis, stiffening with outraged majesty. ‘Who dared give my guardsmen such a command?’

  ‘I did, sweet sister,’ sneered the other girl. ‘A little while ago, before I entered. They thought it was their darling adored queen. Ha! How beautifully I acted the part! With what imperious dignity, softened by womanly sweetness, did I address the great louts who knelt in their armor and plumed helmets!’

  Taramis felt as if a stifling net of bewilderment were being drawn about her.

  ‘Who are you?’ she cried desperately. ‘What madness is this? Why do you come here?’r />
  ‘Who am I?’ There was the spite of a she-cobra’s hiss in the soft response. The girl stepped to the edge of the couch, grasped the queen’s white shoulders with fierce fingers, and bent to glare full into the startled eyes of Taramis. And under the spell of that hypnotic glare, the queen forgot to resent the unprecedented outrage of violent hands laid on regal flesh.

  ‘Fool!’ gritted the girl between her teeth. ‘Can you ask? Can you wonder? I am Salome!’

  ‘Salome!’ Taramis breathed the word, and the hairs prickled on her scalp as she realized the incredible, numbing truth of the statement. ‘I thought you died within the hour of your birth,’ she said feebly.

  ‘So thought many,’ answered the woman who called herself Salome. ‘They carried me into the desert to die, damn them! I, a mewing, puling babe whose life was so young it was scarcely the flicker of a candle. And do you know why they bore me forth to die?’

  ‘I - I have heard the story--’ faltered Taramis.

  Salome laughed fiercely, and slapped her bosom. The low-necked tunic left the upper parts of her firm breasts bare, and between them there shone a curious mark - a crescent, red as blood.

  ‘The mark of the witch!’ cried Taramis, recoiling.

  ‘Aye!’ Salome’s laughter was dagger-edged with hate. ‘The curse of the kings of Khauran! Aye, they tell the tale in the market-places, with wagging beards and rolling eyes, the pious fools! They tell how the first queen of our line had traffic with a fiend of darkness and bore him a daughter who lives in foul legendry to this day. And thereafter in each century a girl baby was born into the Askhaurian dynasty, with a scarlet half-moon between her breasts, that signified her destiny.