The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume One: Crimson Shadows Page 36

  The impact must have splintered half the bones in my frame, for when I sought to grasp my sword again and crawl anew to the combat, I could not move hand or foot, could only writhe helplessly with my broken back. But I could see the monster and I knew that I had won, even in defeat. The mountainous bulk was heaving and billowing, the tentacles were lashing madly, the antennæ writhing and knotting, and the nauseous whiteness had changed to a pale and grisly green. It turned ponderously and lurched back toward the temple, rolling like a crippled ship in a heavy swell. Trees crashed and splintered as it lumbered against them.

  I wept with pure fury because I could not catch up my sword and rush in to die glutting my berserk madness in mighty strokes. But the worm-god was death-stricken and needed not my futile sword. The demon pipes on the ground kept up their infernal tune, and it was like the fiend’s death-dirge. Then as the monster veered and floundered, I saw it catch up the corpse of its hairy slave. For an instant the apish form dangled in midair, gripped round by the trunk-like proboscis, then was dashed against the temple wall with a force that reduced the hairy body to a mere shapeless pulp. At that the pipes screamed out horribly, and fell silent for ever.

  The titan staggered on the brink of the shaft; then another change came over it–a frightful transfiguration the nature of which I can not yet describe. Even now when I try to think of it clearly, I am only chaotically conscious of a blasphemous, unnatural transmutation of form and substance, shocking and indescribable. Then the strangely altered bulk tumbled into the shaft to roll down into the ultimate darkness from whence it came, and I knew that it was dead. And as it vanished into the well, with a rending, grinding groan the ruined walls quivered from dome to base. They bent inward and buckled with deafening reverberation, the columns splintered, and with a cataclysmic crash the dome itself came thundering down. For an instant the air seemed veiled with flying debris and stone-dust, through which the treetops lashed madly as in a storm or an earthquake convulsion. Then all was clear again and I stared, shaking the blood from my eyes. Where the temple had stood there lay only a colossal pile of shattered masonry and broken stones, and every column in the valley had fallen, to lie in crumbling shards.

  In the silence that followed I heard Grom wailing a dirge over me. I bade him lay my sword in my hand, and he did so, and bent close to hear what I had to say, for I was passing swiftly.

  “Let my tribe remember,” I said, speaking slowly. “Let the tale be told from village to village, from camp to camp, from tribe to tribe, so that men may know that not man nor beast nor devil may prey in safety on the golden-haired people of Asgard. Let them build me a cairn where I lie and lay me therein with my bow and sword at hand, to guard this valley for ever; so if the ghost of the god I slew comes up from below, my ghost will ever be ready to give it battle.”

  And while Grom howled and beat his hairy breast, death came to me in the Valley of the Worm.

  The Dust Dance

  Selections, Version II

  The sin and jest of the times am I

  Since destiny’s dance began,

  When the weary gods from the dews and sods

  Made me and named me man.

  Ah, it’s little they knew when they molded me

  For a pawn of their cosmic chess,

  What a mummer wild, what an insane child

  They fashioned from nothingness!

  For I with the shape of my kin the ape

  And the soul of a soaring hawk,

  I fought my way from the jungles grey

  Where the hunting creatures stalk.

  I champ my tusks o’er beetles and husks,

  I tear red meat for my feast;

  The pulse of the earth is in my mirth

  And the roar of the primal beast.

  By a freak of fate through the whirling spate

  Of the uncouth roaring years,

  Red taloned I came from the tribal flame

  And the trails beside the meres.

  Back of my eyes a tiger lies,

  Savage of claw and tooth;

  Close at my heels the baboon steals

  Barren of pity and ruth.

  And, ah, I know as I bellow so

  With my foolish bloody mirth,

  That the soul of the tree is the soul of me

  And things of the physical earth.

  For I was made from the dust and the dew,

  The dawns, the dusk and the rain,

  The snow and the grass and when I pass

  I’ll fade to the dust again.

  For I know that all of the platitudes

  That we hear from birth to youth

  Slink from the backs of the brazen facts,

  The reign of talon and tooth.

  From the ghostly gleam of a vagrant dream,

  From the shade of a wheeling bat,

  From a passion-haunted vision told

  In the huts where the women sat,

  I wove the skein of a Hell aflame–

  And it passed from breath to breath–

  And paradise beyond the skies

  Against the day of my death.

  I roared my glee to the sullen sea

  When Abel’s blood was shed;

  My jeer was loud in the gory crowd

  That stoned St. Stephen dead.

  I laughed when Nero’s minions sent

  Fire-tortured souls to the sky;

  Without the walls of Pilate’s halls

  I shouted “Crucify!”

  Sin of Adam was brother to me,

  My zeal is passion shod,

  Bearing red brands in the heathen lands

  To teach them the word of God.

  Sages speak of my brother love,

  No love, in truth, I lack

  As I hang them free from the gallows tree

  And shatter them on the rack.

  Seek me not in the drawing rooms

  For music and light are there,

  And I cloak the lusts of my blood-red soul

  With culture’s gossamer.

  Look for me by the gibbet tree

  Where a saintly hero dies,

  And the jeer of each knave that he sought to save

  Goes up to the naked skies.

  Seek my face in a shadowy place

  Where the evil torches gleam

  And flesh with flesh in Satan’s mesh

  Mingles in lurid dream.

  Let sages speak, I know the reek

  Of the battlefields of earth,

  The musk of the jungle is in my breath,

  The tiger roar in my mirth.

  The brazen realities are mine

  And I laugh at dreams and rime,

  For I am a man of the primal years

  And a laughing slave of Time.

  The People of the Black Circle

  I

  DEATH STRIKES A KING

  The king of Vendhya was dying. Through the hot, stifling night the temple gongs boomed and the conchs roared. Their clamor was a faint echo in the gold-domed chamber where Bunda Chand struggled on the velvet-cushioned dais. Beads of sweat glistened on his dark skin; his fingers twisted the gold-worked fabric beneath him. He was young; no spear had touched him, no poison lurked in his wine. But his veins stood out like blue cords on his temples, and his eyes dilated with the nearness of death. Trembling slave-girls knelt at the foot of the dais, and leaning down to him, watching him with passionate intensity, was his sister, the Devi Yasmina. With her was the wazam, a noble grown old in the royal court.

  She threw up her head in a gusty gesture of wrath and despair as the thunder of the distant drums reached her ears.

  “The priests and their clamor!” she exclaimed. “They are no wiser than the leeches who are helpless! Nay, he dies and none can say why. He is dying now–and I stand here helpless, who would burn the whole city and spill the blood of thousands to save him.”

  “Not a man of Ayodhya but would die in his place, if it might be, Devi,” answered the wazam. “This poison–
”

  “I tell you it is not poison!” she cried. “Since his birth he has been guarded so closely that the cleverest poisoners of the East could not reach him. Five skulls bleaching on the Tower of the Kites can testify to attempts which were made–and which failed. As you well know, there are ten men and ten women whose sole duty is to taste his food and wine, and fifty armed warriors guard his chamber as they guard it now. No, it is not poison; it is sorcery–black, ghastly magic–”

  She ceased as the king spoke; his livid lips did not move, and there was no recognition in his glassy eyes. But his voice rose in an eery call, indistinct and far away, as if he called to her from beyond vast, wind-blown gulfs.

  “Yasmina! Yasmina! My sister, where are you? I can not find you. All is darkness, and the roaring of great winds!”

  “Brother!” cried Yasmina, catching his limp hand in a convulsive grasp. “I am here! Do you not know me–”

  Her voice died at the utter vacancy of his face. A low confused moaning waned from his mouth. The slave-girls at the foot of the dais whimpered with fear, and Yasmina beat her breast in her anguish.

  In another part of the city a man stood in a latticed balcony overlooking a long street in which torches tossed luridly, smokily revealing upturned dark faces and the whites of gleaming eyes. A long-drawn wailing rose from the multitude.

  The man shrugged his broad shoulders and turned back into the arabesqued chamber. He was a tall man, compactly built, and richly clad.

  “The king is not yet dead, but the dirge is sounded,” he said to another man who sat cross-legged on a mat in a corner. This man was clad in a brown camel-hair robe and sandals, and a green turban was on his head. His expression was tranquil, his gaze impersonal.

  “The people know he will never see another dawn,” this man answered.

  The first speaker favored him with a long, searching stare.

  “What I can not understand,” he said, “is why I have had to wait so long for your masters to strike. If they have slain the king now, why could they not have slain him months ago?”

  “Even the arts you call sorcery are governed by cosmic laws,” answered the man in the green turban. “The stars direct these actions, as in other affairs. Not even my masters can alter the stars. Not until the heavens were in the proper order could they perform this necromancy.” With a long, stained finger-nail he mapped the constellations on the marble-tiled floor. “The slant of the moon presaged evil for the king of Vendhya; the stars are in turmoil, the Serpent in the House of the Elephant. During such juxtaposition, the invisible guardians are removed from the spirit of Bhunda Chand. A path is opened in the unseen realms, and once a point of contact was established, mighty powers were put in play along that path.”

  “Point of contact?” inquired the other. “Do you mean that lock of Bhunda Chand’s hair?”

  “Yes. All discarded portions of the human body still remain part of it, attached to it by intangible connections. The priests of Asura have a dim inkling of this truth, and so all nail-trimmings, hair and other waste products of the persons of the royal family are carefully reduced to ashes and the ashes hidden. But at the urgent entreaty of the princess of Khosala, who loved Bhunda Chand vainly, he gave her a lock of his long black hair as a token of remembrance. When my masters decided upon his doom, the lock, in its golden, jewel-crusted case, was stolen from under her pillow while she slept, and another substituted, so like the first that she never knew the difference. Then the genuine lock travelled by camel-caravan up the long, long road to Peshkhauri, thence up the Zhaibar Pass, until it reached the hands of those for whom it was intended.”

  “Only a lock of hair,” murmured the nobleman.

  “By which a soul is drawn from its body and across gulfs of echoing space,” returned the man on the mat.

  The nobleman studied him curiously.

  “I do not know if you are a man or a demon, Khemsa,” he said at last. “Few of us are what we seem. I, whom the Kshatriyas know as Kerim Shah, a prince from Iranistan, am no greater a masquerader than most men. They are all traitors in one way or another, and half of them know not whom they serve. There at least I have no doubts; for I serve King Yezdigerd of Turan.”

  “And I the Black Seers of Yimsha,” said Khemsa; “and my masters are greater than yours, for they have accomplished by their arts what Yezdigerd could not with a hundred thousand swords.”

  Outside, the moan of the tortured thousands shuddered up to the stars which crusted the sweating Vendhyan night, and the conchs bellowed like oxen in pain.

  In the gardens of the palace the torches glinted on polished helmets and curved swords and gold-chased corselets. All the noble-born fighting-men of Ayodhya were gathered in the great palace or about it, and at each broad-arched gate and door fifty archers stood on guard, with bows in their hands. But Death stalked through the royal palace and none could stay his ghostly tread.

  On the dais under the golden dome the king cried out again, racked by awful paroxysms. Again his voice came faintly and far away, and again the Devi bent to him, trembling with a fear that was darker than the terror of death.

  “Yasmina!” Again that far, weirdly dreeing cry, from realms immeasurable. “Aid me! I am far from my mortal house! Wizards have drawn my soul through the wind-blown darkness. They seek to snap the silver cord that binds me to my dying body. They cluster around me; their hands are taloned, their eyes are red like flame burning in darkness. Aie, save me, my sister! Their fingers sear me like fire! They would slay my body and damn my soul! What is this they bring before me?–Aie!”

  At the terror in his hopeless cry Yasmina screamed uncontrollably and threw herself bodily upon him in the abandon of her anguish. He was torn by a terrible convulsion; foam flew from his contorted lips and his writhing fingers left their marks on the girl’s shoulders. But the glassy blankness passed from his eyes like smoke blown from a fire, and he looked up at his sister with recognition.

  “Brother!” she sobbed. “Brother–”

  “Swift!” he gasped, and his weakening voice was rational. “I know now what brings me to the pyre. I have been on a far journey and I understand. I have been ensorceled by the wizards of the Himelians. They drew my soul out of my body and far away, into a stone room. There they strove to break the silver cord of life, and thrust my soul into the body of a foul night-weird their sorcery summoned up from hell. Ah! I feel their pull upon me now! Your cry and the grip of your fingers brought me back, but I am going fast. My soul clings to my body, but its hold weakens. Quick–kill me, before they can trap my soul for ever!”

  “I can not!” she wailed, smiting her naked breasts.

  “Swiftly, I command you!” There was the old imperious note in his failing whisper. “You have never disobeyed me–obey my last command! Send my soul clean to Asura! Haste, lest you damn me to spend eternity as a filthy gaunt of darkness. Strike, I command you! Strike!”

  Sobbing wildly, Yasmina plucked a jeweled dagger from her girdle and plunged it to the hilt in his breast. He stiffened and then went limp, a grim smile curving his dead lips. Yasmina hurled herself face-down on the rush-covered floor, beating the reeds with her clenched hands. Outside, the gongs and conchs brayed and thundered and the priests gashed themselves with copper knives.

  II

  A BARBARIAN FROM THE HILLS

  Chunder Shan, governor of Peshkhauri, laid down his golden pen and carefully scanned that which he had written on parchment that bore his official seal. He had ruled Peshkhauri so long only because he weighed his every word, spoken or written. Danger breeds caution, and only a wary man lives long in that wild country where the hot Vendhyan plains meet the crags of the Himelians. An hour’s ride westward or northward and one crossed the border and was among the hills where men lived by the law of the knife.

  The governor was alone in his chamber, seated at his ornately-carven table of inlaid ebony. Through the wide window, open for the coolness, he could see a square of the blue Himelian night, do
tted with great white stars. An adjacent parapet was a shadowy line, and further crenelles and embrasures were barely hinted at in the dim starlight. The governor’s fortress was strong, and situated outside the walls of the city it guarded. The breeze that stirred the tapestries on the wall brought faint noises from the streets of Peshkhauri–occasional snatches of wailing song, or the thrum of a cithern.

  The governor read what he had written, slowly, with his open hand shading his eyes from the bronze butter-lamp, his lips moving. Absently, as he read, he heard the drum of horses’ hoofs outside the barbican, the sharp staccato of the guards’ challenge. He did not heed, intent upon his letter. It was addressed to the wazam of Vendhya, at the royal court of Ayodhya, and it stated, after the customary salutations: