People of the Dark Robert Ervin Howard Page 5

  Pressing upon him from three sides they had forced him slowly back up the steep gorge wall, and the crumpled bodies that stretched along his retreat showed how fiercely every foot of the way had been contested. Here on this steep it was task enough to keep one’s footing alone; yet these men at once climbed and fought. Kull’s shield and the huge mace were gone, and the great sword in his right hand was dyed crimson. His mail, wrought with a forgotten art, now hung in shreds, and blood streamed from a hundred wounds on limbs, head and body. But his eyes still blazed with the battle-joy and his wearied arm still drove the mighty blade in strokes of death.

  But Cormac saw that the end would come before they could reach him. Now at the very crest of the steep, a hedge of points menaced the strange king’s life, and even his iron strength was ebbing. Now he split the skull of a huge warrior and the backstroke shore through the neck-cords of another; reeling under a very rain of swords he struck again and his victim dropped at his feet, cleft to the breastbone. Then, even as a dozen swords rose above the staggering Atlantean for the death stroke, a strange thing happened. The sun was sinking into the western sea; all the heather swam red like an ocean of blood. Etched in the dying sun, as he had first appeared, Kull stood, and then, like a mist lifting, a mighty vista opened behind the reeling king. Cormac’s astounded eyes caught a fleeting gigantic glimpse of other climes and spheres — as if mirrored in summer clouds he saw, instead of the heather hills stretching away to the sea, a dim and mighty land of blue mountains and gleaming quiet lakes — the golden, purple and sapphirean spires and towering walls of a mighty city such as the earth has not known for many a drifting age.

  Then like the fading of a mirage it was gone, but the Gauls on the high slope had dropped their weapons and stared like men dazed — For the man called Kull had vanished and there was no trace of his going!

  As in a daze Cormac turned his steed and rode back across the trampled field. His horse’s hoofs splashed in lakes of blood and clanged against the helmets of dead men. Across the valley the shout of victory was thundering. Yet all seemed shadowy and strange. A shape was striding across the torn corpses and Cormac was dully aware that it was Bran. The Gael swung from his horse and fronted the king. Bran was weaponless and gory; blood trickled from gashes on brow, breast and limb; what armor he had worn was clean hacked away and a cut had shorn halfway through his iron crown. But the red jewel still gleamed unblemished like a star of slaughter.

  “It is in my mind to slay you,” said the Gael heavily and like a man speaking in a daze, “for the blood of brave men is on your head. Had you given the signal to charge sooner, some would have lived.”

  Bran folded his arms; his eyes were haunted. “Strike if you will; I am sick of slaughter. It is a cold mead, this kinging it. A king must gamble with men’s lives and naked swords. The lives of all my people were at stake; I sacrificed the Northmen — yes; and my heart is sore within me, for they were men! But had I given the order when you would have desired, all might have gone awry. The Romans were not yet massed in the narrow mouth of the gorge, and might have had time and space to form their ranks again and beat us off. I waited until the last moment — and the rovers died. A king belongs to his people, and can not let either his own feelings or the lives of men influence him. Now my people are saved; but my heart is cold in my breast.”

  Cormac wearily dropped his sword-point to the ground.

  “You are a born king of men, Bran,” said the Gaelic prince.

  Bran’s eyes roved the field. A mist of blood hovered over all, where the victorious barbarians were looting the dead, while those Romans who had escaped slaughter by throwing down their swords and now stood under guard, looked on with hot smoldering eyes.

  “My kingdom — my people — are saved,” said Bran wearily. “They will come from the heather by the thousands and when Rome moves against us again, she will meet a solid nation. But I am weary. What of Kull?”

  “My eyes and brain were mazed with battle,” answered Cormac. “I thought to see him vanish like a ghost into the sunset. I will seek his body.”

  “Seek not for him,” said Bran. “Out of the sunrise he came — into the sunset he has gone. Out of the mists of the ages he came to us, and back into the mists of the eons has he returned — to his own kingdom.”

  Cormac turned away; night was gathering. Gonar stood like a white specter before him.

  “To his own kingdom,” echoed the wizard. “Time and Space are naught. Kull has returned to his own kingdom — his own crown — his own age.”

  “Then he was a ghost?”

  “Did you not feel the grip of his solid hand? Did you not hear his voice — see him eat and drink, laugh and slay and bleed?”

  Still Cormac stood like one in a trance.

  “Then if it be possible for a man to pass from one age into one yet unborn, or come forth from a century dead and forgotten, whichever you will, with his flesh-and-blood body and his arms — then he is as mortal as he was in his own day. Is Kull dead, then?”

  “He died a hundred thousand years ago, as men reckon time,” answered the wizard, “but in his own age. He died not from the swords of the Gauls of this age. Have we not heard in legends how the king of Valusia traveled into a strange, timeless land of the misty future ages, and there fought in a great battle? Why, so he did! A hundred thousand years ago, or today!

  “And a hundred thousand years ago — or a moment agone! — Kull, king of Valusia, roused himself on the silken couch in his secret chamber and laughing, spoke to the first Gonar, saying: ‘Ha, wizard, I have in truth dreamed strangely, for I went into a far clime and a far time in my visions, and fought for the king of a strange shadow-people!’ And the great sorcerer smiled and pointed silently at the red, notched sword, and the torn mail and the many wounds that the king carried. And Kull, fully woken from his ‘vision’ and feeling the sting and the weakness of these yet bleeding wounds, fell silent and mazed, and all life and time and space seemed like a dream of ghosts to him, and he wondered thereat all the rest of his life. For the wisdom of the Eternities is denied even unto princes and Kull could no more understand what Gonar told him than you can understand my words.”

  “And then Kull lived despite his many wounds,” said Cormac, “and has returned to the mists of silence and the centuries. Well — he thought us a dream; we thought him a ghost. And sure, life is but a web spun of ghosts and dreams and illusion, and it is in my mind that the kingdom which has this day been born of swords and slaughter in this howling valley is a thing no more solid than the foam of the bright sea.”

  THE SONG OF THE MAD MINSTREL

  Weird Tales, February-March 1931

  I am the thorn in the foot, I am the blur in the sight;

  I am the worm at the root, I am the thief in the night.

  I am the rat in the wall, the leper that leers at the gate;

  I am the ghost in the hall, herald of horror and hate.

  I am the rust on the corn, I am the smut on the wheat,

  Laughing man’s labor to scorn, weaving a web for his feet.

  I am canker and mildew and blight, danger and death and decay;

  The rot of the rain by night, the blast of the sun by day.

  I warp and wither with drought, I work in the swamp’s foul yeast;

  I bring the black plague from the south and the leprosy in from the east.

  I rend from the hemlock boughs wine steeped in the petals of dooms;

  Where the fat black serpents drowse I gather the Upas blooms.

  I have plumbed the northern ice for a spell like frozen lead;

  In lost gray fields of rice, I have learned from Mongol dead.

  Where a bleak black mountain stands I have looted grisly caves;

  I have digged in the desert sands to plunder terrible graves.

  Never the sun goes forth, never the moon glows red,

  But out of the south or the north, I come with the slavering dead.

  I come with hideous spells,
black chants and ghastly tunes;

  I have looted the hidden hells and plundered the lost black moons.

  There was never a king or priest to cheer me by word or look,

  There was never a man or beast in the blood-black ways I took.

  There were crimson gulfs unplumbed, there were black wings over a sea;

  There were pits where mad things drummed, and foaming blasphemy.

  There were vast ungodly tombs where slimy monsters dreamed;

  There were clouds like blood-drenched plumes where unborn demons screamed.

  There were ages dead to Time, and lands lost out of Space;

  There were adders in the slime, and a dim unholy Face.

  Oh, the heart in my breast turned stone, and the brain froze in my skull —

  But I won through, I alone, and poured my chalice full

  Of horrors and dooms and spells, black buds and bitter roots —

  From the hells beneath the hells, I bring you my deathly fruits.

  THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT

  Weird Tales, April-May 1931

  There were, I remember, six of us in Conrad’s bizarrely fashioned study, with its queer relics from all over the world and its long rows of books which ranged from the Mandrake Press edition of Boccaccio to a Missale Romanum, bound in clasped oak boards and printed in Venice, 1740. Clemants and Professor Kirowan had just engaged in a somewhat testy anthropological argument: Clemants upholding the theory of a separate, distinct Alpine race, while the professor maintained that this so-called race was merely a deviation from an original Aryan stock — possibly the result of an admixture between the southern or Mediterranean races and the Nordic people.

  “And how,” asked Clemants, “do you account for their brachycephalicism? The Mediterraneans were as long-headed as the Aryans: would admixture between these dolichocephalic peoples produce a broad-headed intermediate type?”

  “Special conditions might bring about a change in an originally long-headed race,” snapped Kirowan. “Boaz has demonstrated, for instance, that in the case of immigrants to America, skull formations often change in one generation. And Flinders Petrie has shown that the Lombards changed from a long-headed to a round-headed race in a few centuries.”

  “But what caused these changes?”

  “Much is yet unknown to science,” answered Kirowan, “and we need not be dogmatic. No one knows, as yet, why people of British and Irish ancestry tend to grow unusually tall in the Darling district of Australia — Cornstalks, as they are called — or why people of such descent generally have thinner jaw-structures after a few generations in New England. The universe is full of the unexplainable.”

  “And therefore the uninteresting, according to Machen,” laughed Taverel.

  Conrad shook his head. “I must disagree. To me, the unknowable is most tantalizingly fascinating.”

  “Which accounts, no doubt, for all the works on witchcraft and demonology I see on your shelves,” said Ketrick, with a wave of his hand toward the rows of books.

  And let me speak of Ketrick. Each of the six of us was of the same breed — that is to say, a Briton or an American of British descent. By British, I include all natural inhabitants of the British Isles. We represented various strains of English and Celtic blood, but basically, these strains are the same after all. But Ketrick: to me the man always seemed strangely alien. It was in his eyes that this difference showed externally. They were a sort of amber, almost yellow, and slightly oblique. At times, when one looked at his face from certain angles, they seemed to slant like a Chinaman’s.

  Others than I had noticed this feature, so unusual in a man of pure Anglo-Saxon descent. The usual myths ascribing his slanted eyes to some pre-natal influence had been mooted about, and I remember Professor Hendrik Brooler once remarked that Ketrick was undoubtedly an atavism, representing a reversion of type to some dim and distant ancestor of Mongolian blood — a sort of freak reversion, since none of his family showed such traces.

  But Ketrick comes of the Welsh branch of the Cetrics of Sussex, and his lineage is set down in the Book of Peers. There you may read the line of his ancestry, which extends unbroken to the days of Canute. No slightest trace of Mongoloid intermixture appears in the genealogy, and how could there have been such intermixture in old Saxon England? For Ketrick is the modern form of Cedric, and though that branch fled into Wales before the invasion of the Danes, its male heirs consistently married with English families on the border marches, and it remains a pure line of the powerful Sussex Cedrics — almost pure Saxon. As for the man himself, this defect of his eyes, if it can be called a defect, is his only abnormality, except for a slight and occasional lisping of speech. He is highly intellectual and a good companion except for a slight aloofness and a rather callous indifference which may serve to mask an extremely sensitive nature.

  Referring to his remark, I said with a laugh: “Conrad pursues the obscure and mystic as some men pursue romance; his shelves throng with delightful nightmares of every variety.”

  Our host nodded. “You’ll find there a number of delectable dishes — Machen, Poe, Blackwood, Maturin — look, there’s a rare feast — Horrid Mysteries, by the Marquis of Grosse — the real Eighteenth Century edition.”

  Taverel scanned the shelves. “Weird fiction seems to vie with works on witchcraft, voodoo and dark magic.”

  True; historians and chronicles are often dull; tale-weavers never — the masters, I mean. A voodoo sacrifice can be described in such a dull manner as to take all the real fantasy out of it, and leave it merely a sordid murder. I will admit that few writers of fiction touch the true heights of horror — most of their stuff is too concrete, given too much earthly shape and dimensions. But in such tales as Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, Machen’s Black Seal and Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu — the three master horror-tales, to my mind — the reader is borne into dark and outer realms of imagination.

  “But look there,” he continued, “there, sandwiched between that nightmare of Huysmans’, and Walpole’s Castle of Otranto — Von Junzt’s Nameless Cults. There’s a book to keep you awake at night!”

  “I’ve read it,” said Taverel, “and I’m convinced the man is mad. His work is like the conversation of a maniac — it runs with startling clarity for awhile, then suddenly merges into vagueness and disconnected ramblings.”

  Conrad shook his head. “Have you ever thought that perhaps it is his very sanity that causes him to write in that fashion? What if he dares not put on paper all he knows? What if his vague suppositions are dark and mysterious hints, keys to the puzzle, to those who know?”

  “Bosh!” This from Kirowan. “Are you intimating that any of the nightmare cults referred to by Von Junzt survive to this day — if they ever existed save in the hag-ridden brain of a lunatic poet and philosopher?”

  “Not he alone used hidden meanings,” answered Conrad. “If you will scan various works of certain great poets you may find double meanings. Men have stumbled onto cosmic secrets in the past and given a hint of them to the world in cryptic words. Do you remember Von Junzt’s hints of ‘a city in the waste’? What do you think of Flecker’s line:

  “‘Pass not beneath! Men say there blows in stony deserts still a rose

  But with no scarlet to her leaf — and from whose heart no perfume flows.’

  “Men may stumble upon secret things, but Von Junzt dipped deep into forbidden mysteries. He was one of the few men, for instance, who could read the Necronomicon in the original Greek translation.”

  Taverel shrugged his shoulders, and Professor Kirowan, though he snorted and puffed viciously at his pipe, made no direct reply; for he, as well as Conrad, had delved into the Latin version of the book, and had found there things not even a cold-blooded scientist could answer or refute.

  “Well,” he said presently, “suppose we admit the former existence of cults revolving about such nameless and ghastly gods and entities as Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Tsathoggua, Gol-goroth, and the like,
I can not find it in my mind to believe that survivals of such cults lurk in the dark corners of the world today.”

  To our surprise Clemants answered. He was a tall, lean man, silent almost to the point of taciturnity, and his fierce struggles with poverty in his youth had lined his face beyond his years. Like many another artist, he lived a distinctly dual literary life, his swashbuckling novels furnishing him a generous income, and his editorial position on The Cloven Hoof affording him full artistic expression. The Cloven Hoof was a poetry magazine whose bizarre contents had often aroused the shocked interest of the conservative critics.

  “You remember Von Junzt makes mention of a so-called Bran cult,” said Clemants, stuffing his pipe-bowl with a peculiarly villainous brand of shag tobacco. “I think I heard you and Taverel discussing it once.”

  “As I gather from his hints,” snapped Kirowan, “Von Junzt includes this particular cult among those still in existence. Absurd.”

  Again Clemants shook his head. “When I was a boy working my way through a certain university, I had for roommate a lad as poor and ambitious as I. If I told you his name, it would startle you. Though he came of an old Scotch line of Galloway, he was obviously of a non-Aryan type.