Conan the adaptable, p.54
Conan the Adaptable, page 54
Conan was a grim sight. He was red-stained by the blood both of himself and his foes, and from the gash in his scalp a crimson trickle seeped down to dry on his scarred face. But his wild beast vitality already asserted itself and there was no hint of a numbed brain in the cold eyes that returned Thorwald’s domineering stare.
“Ymir’s blood!” swore the sea-king. “I’m glad your comrade Wulfhere Hausakliufr—the Skull-splitter—was not with you. I have heard of your prowess as a killer, but to appreciate it, one must see for himself. In the last three minutes I have seen more weapon-play than I have seen in battles that lasted hours. By Ymir, you ranged through my carles like a hunger-maddened wolf through a flock of sheep! Are all your race like you?”
The Reaver deigned no reply.
“You are such a man as I would have for comrade,” said Thorwald frankly. “I will forget all old feuds if you will join me.” He spoke like a man who does not expect his wish to be granted.
Conan’s reply was merely a glimmer of cold scorn in his icy eyes.
“Well,” said Thorwald, “I did not expect you to accede to my demand, and that spells your doom, because I cannot let such a foe to my race go free.”
Then Thorwald laughed: “Your weapon-play has not been exaggerated but your craft has. You fool—to match wits with a Vanir! I knew you as soon as I laid eyes on you, though I had not seen you in years. Where on the North Seas is such a man as you, with your height, shoulder-breadth—and scarred face? I had all prepared for you, before you had ceased telling me your first lie. Bah! A chief of Cimmerian Reavers. Aye—once, years ago. But now I know you for Conan of Cimmeria, which is to say the Wolf, righthand man of Wulfhere Hausakliufr, a Vanir. Aye, Wulfhere Hausakliufr, hated of my race.
“You desired my prisoner Hrut to trade for your cousin! Bah! I know you of old, by reputation at least. And I saw you once, years ago—you came ashore with a lie on your lips to spy out my steading, to take report of my strength and weaknesses to Wulfhere, that you and he might steal upon me some night and burn the skalli over my head.
“Well, now you can tell me—how many ships has Wulfhere and where is he?”
Conan merely laughed, a remarkably hard contemptuous laugh that enraged Thorwald. The sea-king’s beard bristled and his eyes grew cruel.
“You will not answer me, eh?” he swore. “Well, it does not matter. Whether Wulfhere went on to Makki Head or not, three of my dragon ships will be waiting for him off the Point at dawn. Then mayhap when I carve the blood-eagle on Hrut I will have Wulfhere’s back also for my sport—and you may look on and see it well done, .ere I hang you from the highest tree on Golara. To the cell with him!”
As the carles dragged Conan away, the Cimmerian heard the querulous, uneasy voice of Grimm Snorri’s son raised in petulant dispute with his chief. Outside the door he noted, no limp body lay in the red-stained dust. Brulla had either recovered consciousness and staggered away, or been carried away by his tribesmen. These Picts were hard as cats to kill, Conan knew, having fought them many times. A beating such as Brulla had received would have left the average man a crippled wreck, but the Pict would probably be fully recovered in a few hours, if no bones had been broken.
Thorwald Shield-hewer’s steading fronted on a small bay, on the beach of which were drawn up six long, lean ships, shield-railed and dragon-beaked. As was usual, the steading consisted of a great hall—the skalli—about which were grouped smaller buildings—stables, storehouses and the huts of the carles. Around the whole stretched a high stockade, built, like the houses, of heavy logs. The logs of the stockade were some ten feet high, set deep in the earth and sharpened on the top. There were loopholes here and there for arrows and at regularly-spaced intervals, shelves on the inner side on which the defenders might stand and strike down over the wall at the attackers. Beyond the stockade the tall dark forest loomed menacingly.
The stockade was in the form of a horseshoe with the open side seaward. The horns ran out into the shallow bay, protecting the dragon ships drawn up on the beach. An inner stockade ran straight across in front of the steading, from one horn to the other, separating the beach from the skalli. Men might swim out around the ends of the main stockade and gain the beach but they would still be blocked from the steading itself.
Thorwald’s holdings seemed well protected, but vigilance was lax. Still, the Shetlands did not swarm with sea-rovers then as they did at a later date. The few Nordheim holdings there were like Thorwald’s—mere pirate camps from which the Vanir swooped down on the northern shores.
Thorwald did not ordinarily expect a raid from the sea and Conan had seen with what contempt the Vanir looked on the natives of the Shetlands. Wulfhere and his Hyperboreans were different; outlawed even among their own people, they ranged even farther than Thorwald himself, and they were keen-beaked birds of prey, whose talons tore all alike.
Conan was dragged to a small hut built against the stockade at a point some distance from the skalli, and in this he was chained. The door slammed behind him and he was left to his meditations.
The Cimmerian’s shallow cuts had ceased to bleed, and inured to wounds—an iron man in an Age of iron—he gave them hardly a thought. Stung vanity bothered him; how easily he had slipped into Thorwald’s trap, he whom kings had either cursed or blessed for his guile! Next time he would not be so over-confident, he mused; and a next time he was determined there should be. He did not worry overmuch about Wulfhere, even when he heard the shouts, scraping of slides, and later the clack of oars that announced that three of Thorwald’s longships were under way. Let them sneak to the Point and wait there till the dawn of Doom’s Day! Neither he nor Wulfhere had been such utter fools as to trust themselves in the power of Thorwald’s stronger force. Wulfhere had but one ship and some eighty men. They and the ship were even now hidden securely in a forest-screened cove on the other side of the island, which was less than a mile wide at this point. There was little chance of their being discovered by Thorwald’s men and the risk of being spied out by some Pict was a chance that must be taken. If Wulfhere had followed their plan, he had run in after dark, feeling his way; there was no real reason why either Pict or Nordheimer should be lurking about. The shore about the cove was mainly wild, high cliffs, rugged and uninviting; moreover Conan had heard that the Picts ordinarily avoided that part of the island because of some superstitious reason. There were ancient stone columns on the cliffs and a grim altar that hinted of ghastly rites in bygone ages.
Wulfhere would lurk there until Conan returned to him, or until a smoke drifting up from the Point assured him that Thorwald was on hand with the prisoner and meaning no treachery. Conan had carefully said nothing about the signal that was to bring Wulfhere, though he had not expected to be recognized for what he was. Thorwald had been wrong when he assumed that the prisoner had been used only for a blind. The Cimmerian had lied about himself and about his reason for wishing the custody of Hrut, but it was true when he had said that it was news of the Hyperborean’s captivity that brought him here.
Conan heard the cautious oars die away in silence. He heard the clash of arms and the shouts of the carles. Then these noises faded, all but the steady tramp of sentries, guarding against a night attack.
It must be nearly midnight, Conan decided, glancing up at the stars gleaming through his small heavily-barred window. He was chained close to the dirt floor and could not even rise to a sitting posture. His back was against the rear wall of the hut, which was formed by the stockade, and as he reclined there, he thought he heard a sound that was not of the sighing of the night-wind through the mighty trees without. Slowly he writhed about and found himself staring through a tiny aperture between two of the upright logs.
The moon had already set; in the dim starlight he could make out the vague outline of great, gently-waving branches against the black wall of the forest. Was there a subtle whispering and rustling among those shadows that was not of the wind and the leaves? Faint and intangible as the suggestion of nameless evil, the almost imperceptible noises ran the full length of the stockade. The whole night seemed full of ghostly murmurings—as if the midnight forest were stirring and moving its darksome self, like a shadowy monster coming to uncanny life. “When the forest comes to life,” the Pict had said—
Conan heard, within the stockade, one carle call to another. His rough voice reechoed in the whispering silence.
“Ymir’s blood, the trolls must be out tonight! How the wind whispers through the trees.”
Even the dull-witted carle felt a hint of evil in the darkness and shadows. Gluing his eye to the crack, Conan strove to pierce the darkness. The Cimmerianic pirate’s faculties were as much keener than the average man’s as a wolf’s are keener than a hog’s; his eyes were like a cat’s in the dark. But in that utter blackness he could see nothing but the vague forms of the first fringe of trees. Wait!
Something took shape in the shadows. A long line of figures moved like ghosts just under the shadows of the trees; a shiver passed along Conan’s spine. Surely these creatures were elves, evil demons of the forest. Short and mightily built, half stooping, one behind the other, they passed in almost utter silence. In the shadows their silence and their crouching positions made them monstrous travesties on men. Racial memories, half lost in the misty gulfs of consciousness, came stealing back to claw with icy fingers at Conan’s heart. He did not fear them as a man fears a human foe; it was the horror of world-old, ancestral memories that gripped him—dim felt, chaotic dream-recollections of darker Ages and grimmer days when primitive men battled for supremacy in a new world.
For these Picts were a remnant of a lost tribe—the survivals of an elder epoch—last outposts of a dark Stone Age empire that crumbled before the bronze swords of the first Celts. Now these survivors, thrust out on the naked edges of the world they had once ruled, battled grimly for their existence.
There could be no accurate counting of them because of the darkness and the swiftness of their slinking gait, but Conan reckoned that at least four hundred passed his line of vision. That band alone was equal to Thorwald’s full strength and far outnumbered the men left in the steading now, since Thorwald had sent out three of his ships. The skulking figures passed as they had come, soundless, leaving no trace behind, like ghosts of the night.
Conan waited in a silence that had become suddenly tense. Then without warning the night was shattered by one fearful death-yell! Pandemonium broke loose and a mad hell of sound burst on the air. And now the forest came to life! From all sides stocky figures broke cover and swarmed on the barricades. A lurid glare shed a ghastly light over all and Conan tore savagely at his chains, wild with excitement. Monstrous events were occurring without, and here he was, chained like a sheep for the slaughter! He cursed incredibly.
The Nordheimers were holding the wall; the clash of steel rose deafeningly in the night, the hum of arrows filled the air, and the deep fierce shouts of the Vanir vied with the hellish wolf-howling of the Picts. Conan could not see, but he sensed the surging of human waves against the stockade, the plying of spears and axes, the reeling retreat and the renewed onset. The Picts, he knew, were without mail and indifferently armed. It was very possible that the limited force of Vanir could hold the stockade until Thorwald returned with the rest, as he would assuredly do when he saw the. flame—but whence came the flame?
Someone was fumbling at the door. It swung open and Conan saw the lean shambling frame and livid bearded face of Grimm Snorri’s son limned against the red glare. In one hand he held a helmet and a sword Conan recognized as his own, in the other a bunch of keys which jangled as his hand shook.
“We are all dead men!” squawked the old Vanir, “I warned Thorwald! The woods are alive with Picts! There are thousands of them! We can never hold the stockade until Thorwald returns! He is doomed too, for the Picts will cut him off when he comes into the bay and feather his men with arrows before they can come to grips! They have swum around the outer horns of the stockade and set the three remaining galleys on fire! Osric would run like a fool with a dozen carles to save the ships and he had scarcely gotten outside the gates before he was down with a score of black shafts through him and his men were cut off and hemmed in by a hundred howling demons! Not a man of them escaped, and we barely had time to shut the gates when the whole screaming mob was battering at them!
“We have slain them by the scores, but for every one that drops, three spring to take his place. I have seen more Picts tonight than I knew were here—or in all of Hyboria. Conan, you are a bold man; you have a ship somewhere off the isle—swear to save me and I will set you free! Mayhap the Picts will not harm you—that devil Brulla did not name you in his death rune.
“If any man can save me it is you! I will show you where Hrut is hidden and we’ll take him with us—” he threw a quick glance over his shoulder toward the roar of battle beachward, and went white. “Ymir’s blood!” he screamed, “The gates have given way and the Picts are inside the inner, stockade!”
The howling rose to a crescendo of demoniac passion and fiendish exultation.
“Loose me, you gibbering fool!” raged Conan, tearing at his chains. “You’ve time enough for babbling when—”
Chattering with fear, Grimm Snorri’s son stepped inside the hut, fumbling with the keys—even as his foot crossed the threshold a lean shape raced swift and silent as a wolf out of the flame-shot shadows. A dark arm hooked about the old Vanir’s withered neck, jerking his chin up. One fearful shriek burst from his writhing lips to break short in a ghastly gurgle as a keen edge whipped across his leathery throat.
Over the twitching corpse of his victim, the Pict eyed Conan of Cimmeria, and the Cimmerian stared back, expecting death, but unafraid. Then in the glare of the burning ships, that made the cell-hut as light as day, Conan saw that the slayer was the chief, Brulla.
“You are he who slew Aslaf and Hordi. I watched through the door of the skalli before I dragged myself away to the forests,” said the Pict, as calmly as though no inferno of combat was raging without, “I told my people of you and warned them not to harm you, if you still lived. You hate Thorwald as well as I. I will free you; glut your vengeance; soon will Thorwald return in his ships and we will cut his throat. There shall be no more Nordheim or Golara. All the free people of the isles here-abouts are gathering to aid us, and Thorwald is doomed!”
He bent over the Cimmerian and released him. Conan sprang erect, a fresh fire of confidence surging through his veins. He snatched his helmet with its flowing horsehair crest, and his long straight sword. He also took the keys from Brulla.
“Know you where was prisoned the Hyperborean called Hrut?” he asked, as they stepped through the door. Brulla pointed across a seething whirlpool of flame and hacking swords.
“The smoke obscures the hut at present, but it lies next the storehouse on that side.”
Conan nodded and set off at a run. Where Brulla went he neither knew nor cared. The Picts had fired stable, storehouse and skalli, as well as the ships on the beach outside the inner stockade. About the skalli and here and there close to the stockade which was also burning in a score of places, stubborn fighting went on, as the handful of survivors sold their lives with all the desperate ferocity of their breed. There were, indeed, thousands of the short, dark men, who swarmed about each tall blond warrior in a slashing, hammering mass. The heavy swords of the mailed Vanir took fearful toll, but the smaller men lashed in with a wild beast frenzy that made naught of wounds, and pulled down their giant foes by sheet weight of numbers. Once on the ground, the stabbing swords of the dark men did their work. Screams of death and yells of fury rent the flame-reddened skies, but as Conan ran swiftly toward the storehouse, he heard no pleas for mercy. Driven to madness by countless outrages, the Picts were glutting their vengeance to the uttermost, and the Nordheim people neither looked nor asked for mercy.
Blond-haired women, cursing and spitting in the faces of their killers, felt the knife jerked across their white throats, and Nordheim babes were butchered with no more compunction than their sires had shown in the slaughter—for sport—of Pictish infants.
Conan took no part in this holocaust. None of these people was his friend—either race would cut his throat if the chance arose. As he ran he used his sword merely to parry chance cuts that fell on him from Pict and Nordheimer alike, and so swiftly he moved between staggering clumps of gasping, slashing men, that he ran his way across the open space without serious opposition. He reached the hut and a few seconds’ work with the lock opened the heavy door. He had not come too soon; sparks from the burning storehouse nearby had caught on the hut thatch and already the interior was full of smoke. Through this Conan groped his way toward a figure he could barely make out in the corner. There was a jangling of chains and a voice with a Vanir accent spoke: “Slay me, in the name of Loki; better a sword thrust than this accursed smoke!”
Conan knelt and fumbled at his chains. “I come to free you, oh Hrut,” he gasped. A moment later he dragged the astonished warrior to his feet and together they staggered out of the hut, just as the roof fell in. Drawing in great draughts of air, Conan turned and stared curiously at his companion—a splendid, red maned giant of a man, with the bearing of a noble. He was half-naked, ragged and unkempt from weeks of captivity, but his eyes gleamed with an unconquerable light.
