The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume One: Crimson Shadows Page 28

  Bran dismounted and walked forward, dazed by bewilderment. The moat was filled in places by fallen stones and broken pieces of mortared wall. He crossed over and came among the ruins. Where, he knew, only a few hours before the flags had resounded to the martial tramp of iron-clad feet, and the walls had echoed to the clang of shields and the blast of the loud-throated trumpets, a horrific silence reigned.

  Almost under Bran’s feet, a broken shape writhed and groaned. The king bent down to the legionary who lay in a sticky red pool of his own blood. A single glance showed the Pict that the man, horribly crushed and shattered, was dying.

  Lifting the bloody head, Bran placed his flask to the pulped lips and the Roman instinctively drank deep, gulping through splintered teeth. In the dim starlight Bran saw his glazed eyes roll.

  “The walls fell,” muttered the dying man. “They crashed down like the skies falling on the day of doom. Ah Jove, the skies rained shards of granite and hailstones of marble!”

  “I have felt no earthquake shock,” Bran scowled, puzzled.

  “It was no earthquake,” muttered the Roman. “Before last dawn it began, the faint dim scratching and clawing far below the earth. We of the guard heard it–like rats burrowing, or like worms hollowing out the earth. Titus laughed at us, but all day long we heard it. Then at midnight the Tower quivered and seemed to settle–as if the foundations were being dug away–”

  A shudder shook Bran Mak Morn. The worms of the earth! Thousands of vermin digging like moles far below the castle, burrowing away the foundations–gods, the land must be honeycombed with tunnels and caverns–these creatures were even less human than he had thought–what ghastly shapes of darkness had he invoked to his aid?

  “What of Titus Sulla?” he asked, again holding the flask to the legionary’s lips; in that moment the dying Roman seemed to him almost like a brother.

  “Even as the Tower shuddered we heard a fearful scream from the governor’s chamber,” muttered the soldier. “We rushed there–as we broke down the door we heard his shrieks–they seemed to recede–into the bowels of the earth! We rushed in; the chamber was empty. His blood-stained sword lay on the floor; in the stone flags of the floor a black hole gaped. Then–the–towers–reeled–the–roof–broke;–through–a–storm–of–crashing–walls–I–crawled–”

  A strong convulsion shook the broken figure.

  “Lay me down, friend,” whispered the Roman. “I die.”

  He had ceased to breathe before Bran could comply. The Pict rose, mechanically cleansing his hands. He hastened from the spot, and as he galloped over the darkened fens, the weight of the accursed Black Stone under his cloak was as the weight of a foul nightmare on a mortal breast.

  As he approached the Ring, he saw an eery glow within, so that the gaunt stones stood etched like the ribs of a skeleton in which a witch-fire burns. The stallion snorted and reared as Bran tied him to one of the menhirs. Carrying the Stone he strode into the grisly circle and saw Atla standing beside the altar, one hand on her hip, her sinuous body swaying in a serpentine manner. The altar glowed all over with ghastly light and Bran knew some one, probably Atla, had rubbed it with phosphorus from some dank swamp or quagmire.

  He strode forward and whipping his cloak from about the Stone, flung the accursed thing on to the altar.

  “I have fulfilled my part of the contract,” he growled.

  “And They, theirs,” she retorted. “Look!–they come!”

  He wheeled, his hand instinctively dropping to his sword. Outside the Ring the great stallion screamed savagely and reared against his tether. The night wind moaned through the waving grass and an abhorrent soft hissing mingled with it. Between the menhirs flowed a dark tide of shadows, unstable and chaotic. The Ring filled with glittering eyes which hovered beyond the dim illusive circle of illumination cast by the phosphorescent altar. Somewhere in the darkness a human voice tittered and gibbered idiotically. Bran stiffened, the shadows of a horror clawing at his soul.

  He strained his eyes, trying to make out the shapes of those who ringed him. But he glimpsed only billowing masses of shadow which heaved and writhed and squirmed with almost fluid consistency.

  “Let them make good their bargain!” he exclaimed angrily.

  “Then see, oh king!” cried Atla in a voice of piercing mockery.

  There was a stir, a seething in the writhing shadows, and from the darkness crept, like a four-legged animal, a human shape that fell down and groveled at Bran’s feet and writhed and mowed, and lifting a death’s-head, howled like a dying dog. In the ghastly light, Bran, soul-shaken, saw the blank glassy eyes, the bloodless features, the loose, writhing, froth-covered lips of sheer lunacy–gods, was this Titus Sulla, the proud lord of life and death in Eboracum’s proud city?

  Bran bared his sword.

  “I had thought to give this stroke in vengeance,” he said somberly. “I give it in mercy–Vale Caesar!”

  The steel flashed in the eery light and Sulla’s head rolled to the foot of the glowing altar, where it lay staring up at the shadowed sky.

  “They harmed him not!” Atla’s hateful laugh slashed the sick silence. “It was what he saw and came to know that broke his brain! Like all his heavy-footed race, he knew nothing of the secrets of this ancient land. This night he has been dragged through the deepest pits of Hell, where even you might have blenched!”

  “Well for the Romans that they know not the secrets of this accursed land!” Bran roared, maddened, “with its monster-haunted meres, its foul witch-women, and its lost caverns and subterranean realms where spawn in the darkness shapes of Hell!”

  “Are they more foul than a mortal who seeks their aid?” cried Atla with a shriek of fearful mirth. “Give them their Black Stone!”

  A cataclysmic loathing shook Bran’s soul with red fury.

  “Aye, take your cursed Stone!” he roared, snatching it from the altar and dashing it among the shadows with such savagery that bones snapped under its impact. A hurried babel of grisly tongues rose and the shadows heaved in turmoil. One segment of the mass detached itself for an instant and Bran cried out in fierce revulsion, though he caught only a fleeting glimpse of the thing, had only a brief impression of a broad strangely flattened head, pendulous writhing lips that bared curved pointed fangs, and a hideously misshapen, dwarfish body that seemed mottled–all set off by those unwinking reptilian eyes. Gods!–the myths had prepared him for horror in human aspect, horror induced by bestial visage and stunted deformity–but this was the horror of nightmare and the night.

  “Go back to Hell and take your idol with you!” he yelled, brandishing his clenched fists to the skies, as the thick shadows receded, flowing back and away from him like the foul waters of some black flood. “Your ancestors were men, though strange and monstrous–but gods, ye have become in ghastly fact what my people called ye in scorn! Worms of the earth, back into your holes and burrows! Ye foul the air and leave on the clean earth the slime of the serpents ye have become! Gonar was right–there are shapes too foul to use even against Rome!”

  He sprang from the Ring as a man flees the touch of a coiling snake, and tore the stallion free. At his elbow Atla was shrieking with fearful laughter, all human attributes dropped from her like a cloak in the night.

  “King of Pictland!” she cried, “King of fools! Do you blench at so small a thing? Stay and let me show you real fruits of the pits! Ha! ha! ha! Run, fool, run! But you are stained with the taint–you have called them forth and they will remember! And in their own time they will come to you again!”

  He yelled a wordless curse and struck her savagely in the mouth with his open hand. She staggered, blood starting from her lips, but her fiendish laughter only rose higher.

  Bran leaped into the saddle, wild for the clean heather and the cold blue hills of the north where he could plunge his sword into clean slaughter and his sickened soul into the red maelstrom of battle, and forget the horror which lurked below the fens of the west. He gave the frantic
stallion the rein, and rode through the night like a hunted ghost, until the hellish laughter of the howling were-woman died out in the darkness behind.

  An Echo from the Iron Harp

  Shadows and echoes haunt my dreams

  with dim and subtle pain,

  With the faded fire of a lost desire,

  like a ghost on a moonlit plain.

  In the pallid mist of death-like sleep

  she comes again to me:

  I see the gleam of her golden hair

  and her eyes like the deep grey sea.

  We came from the North as the spume is blown

  when the blue tide billows down;

  The kings of the South were overthrown

  in ruin of camp and town.

  Shrine and temple we dashed to dust,

  and roared in the dead gods’ ears;

  We saw the fall of the kings of Gaul,

  and shattered the Belgae spears.

  And South we rolled like a drifting cloud,

  like a wind that bends the grass,

  But we smote in vain on the gates of Spain

  for our own kin held the Pass.

  Then again we turned where the watch-fires burned

  to mark the lines of Rome,

  And fire and tower and standard sank

  as ships that die in foam.

  The legions came, hard hawk-eyed men,

  war-wise in march and fray,

  But we rushed like a whirlwind on their lines

  and swept their ranks away.

  Army and consul we overthrew,

  staining the trampled loam;

  Horror and fear like a lifted spear

  lay hard on the walls of Rome.

  Our mad desire was a flying fire

  that should burn the Appian Gate–

  But our day of doom lay hard on us,

  at a toss of the dice of Fate.

  There rose a man in the ranks of Rome–

  ill fall the cursed day!–

  Our German allies bit the dust

  and we turned hard at bay.

  And the raven came and the lean grey wolf,

  to follow the sword’s red play.

  Over the land like a ghostly hand

  the mists of morning lay,

  We smote their horsemen in the fog

  and hacked a bloody way.

  We smote their horsemen in the cloud

  and as the mists were cleared

  Right through the legion massed behind

  our headlong squadron sheared.

  Saddle to saddle we chained our ranks

  for naught of war we knew

  But to charge in the wild old Celtic way–

  and die or slash straight through.

  We left red ruin in our wake,

  dead men in ghastly ranks–

  When fresh unwearied Roman arms

  smote hard upon our flanks.

  Baffled and weary, red with wounds,

  leaguered on every side,

  Chained to our doom we smote in vain,

  slaughtered and sank and died.

  Writhing among the horses’ hoofs,

  torn and slashed and gored,

  Gripping still with a bloody hand,

  a notched and broken sword,

  I heard the war-cry growing faint,

  drowned by the trumpet’s call,

  And the roar of “Marius! Marius!”

  triumphant over all.

  Through the bloody dust and the swirling fog

  as I strove in vain to rise

  I saw the last of the warriors fall,

  and swift as a falcon flies

  The Romans rush to the barricades

  where the women watched the fight–

  I heard the screams and I saw steel flash

  and naked arms toss white.

  The ravisher died as he gripped his prey,

  by the dagger fiercely driven–

  By the next stroke with her own hand

  the heart of the girl was riven.

  Brown fingers grasped white wrists in vain–

  blood flecked the gasping loam–

  The Cimbri yield no virgin-slaves

  to glut the gods of Rome!

  And I saw as I crawled like a crippled snake

  to slay before I died,

  Unruly golden hair that tossed

  in wild and untamed pride.

  Her slim foot pressed a dead man’s breast,

  her proud head back was thrown,

  Matching the steel she held on high,

  her eyes in glory shone.

  I saw the gleam of her golden hair

  and her eyes like the deep grey sea–

  And the love in the gaze that sought me out,

  barbaric, fierce and free–

  The the dagger fell

  and the skies fell and the mists closed over me.

  Like phantoms into the ages lost

  has the Cimbrian nation passed;

  Destiny shifts like summer clouds

  on Grecian hill-tops massed.

  Untold centuries glide away,

  Marius long is dust;

  Even eternal Rome has passed

  in days of decay and rust.

  But memories live in the ghosts of dreams,

  and dreams still come to me,

  And I see the gleam of her golden hair

  and her eyes like the deep grey sea.

  Lord of the Dead

  The onslaught was as unexpected as the stroke of an unseen cobra. One second Steve Harrison was plodding profanely but prosaically through the darkness of the alley–the next, he was fighting for his life with the snarling, mouthing fury that had fallen on him, talon and tooth. The thing was obviously a man, though in the first few dazed seconds Harrison doubted even this fact. The attacker’s style of fighting was appallingly vicious and beast-like, even to Harrison who was accustomed to the foul battling of the underworld.

  The detective felt the other’s teeth in his flesh, and yelped profanely. But there was a knife, too; it ribboned his coat and shirt, and drew blood, and only blind chance that locked his fingers about a sinewy wrist, kept the point from his vitals. It was dark as the backdoor of Erebus. Harrison saw his assailant only as a slightly darker chunk in the blackness. The muscles under his grasping fingers were taut and steely as piano wire, and there was a terrifying suppleness about the frame writhing against his which filled Harrison with panic. The big detective had seldom met a man his equal in strength; this denizen of the dark not only was as strong as he, but was lither and quicker and tougher than a civilized man ought to be.

  They rolled over into the mud of the alley, biting, kicking and slugging, and though the unseen enemy grunted each time one of Harrison’s maul-like fists thudded against him, he showed no signs of weakening. His wrist was like a woven mass of steel wires, threatening momentarily to writhe out of Harrison’s clutch. His flesh crawling with fear of the cold steel, the detective grasped that wrist with both his own hands, and tried to break it. A bloodthirsty howl acknowledged this futile attempt, and a voice, which had been mouthing in an unknown tongue, hissed in Harrison’s ear: “Dog! You shall die in the mud, as I died in the sand! You gave my body to the vultures! I give yours to the rats of the alley! Wellah!”

  A grimy thumb was feeling for Harrison’s eye, and fired to desperation, the detective heaved his body backward, bringing up his knee with bone-crushing force. The unknown gasped and rolled clear, squalling like a cat. Harrison staggered up, lost his balance, caromed against a wall. With a scream and a rush, the other was up and at him. Harrison heard the knife whistle and chunk into the wall beside him, and he lashed out blindly with all the power of his massive shoulders. He landed solidly, felt his victim shoot off his feet backward, and heard him crash headlong into the mud. Then Steve Harrison, for the first time in his life, turned his back on a single foe and ran lumberingly but swiftly up the alley.

  His breath came pantingly; his feet sp
lashed through refuse and clanged over rusty cans. Momentarily he expected a knife in his back. “Hogan!” he bawled desperately. Behind him sounded the quick lethal patter of flying feet.