Conan of the Isles Part 8

Once a day the captives were fed. Buckets of greasy, tepid stew were dumped into a long, foul, stone trough that ran along the wall behind them. The stuff was lumpy with cold grease and stretched out with some unpalatable meal. But hunger soon overcomes squeamishness, and Conan's crew came eagerly to await the feeding hour. It took all of Sigurd's authority to keep them from fighting over this unappetizing swill.

Immured in this dank place, far from a sight of the heavenly bodies^ the pirates lost all sense of time. Had they been here hours or days? They argued endlessly among themselves over this question, until Sigurd roared: 'Shut up, all of you! Ye'll drive me mad with your clack. We can be pretty sure they feed us at the same time every day, so each feeding marks one day. Yasunga, ye shall be our timekeeper. Find a place on the wall and make a scratch there for each serving of this slop.'

'But Sigurd,' complained a small Ophirean, 'we know not how many days have pa.s.sed up to now. Some say four, some five, some six or seven. How shall we know---'

He broke off as the Vanr, shaking huge fists in his face until his chains rattled, roared: 'Shut up, Ahriman blast you, or I'll wind a chain around your scrawny neck and tighten it until your lousy little head comes off! Every man can add his own guess to the number of days shown on Yasunga's tally, and it matters not a dam anyway!

And the next man who raises this question, I'll smash his skull like an egg!'

'Ah, eggs!' said Artanes the Zamorian, a stout-bellied bull of a man renowned among the pirates for his appet.i.te. 'What I could do with a couple of dozen fresh fowl's eggs...'

They grew matted with filth. Their untended wounds: either festered or scabbed and began to heal. Two died: a burly Shemite, who had taken a cracked skull in the battle, died screaming and fighting invisible foes. The other was a stolid black from the steaming jungles of southern Rush, whose tongue had been cut out by Stygian slavers before he had escaped to the Baracha Isles, and who perished from a fever. Both bodies were taken away by gla.s.s-mailed Antillian guards for some unknown disposal.

With the help of Yasunga the navigator, Milo the boatswain, and Yakov the bowmaster, Sigurd did his best to keep his men in order and their spirits up. This was not easy, for they were a motley lot, given to irrational grudges and hatreds, outbursts of violent pa.s.sion, superst.i.tious fears and crotchets, and sudden fits of gloom, despair, or quarrelsomeness. And Sigurd, while a mighty man whose name commanded respect among the Red Brotherhood, lacked the aura of invincible luck and supernatural power that accompanied Amra the Lion.

The best way to keep them interested and out of mischief, the Northman found, was to encourage them to talk about their exploits of the past. So they reminisced for hours, arguing point by point through battles, sieges, and forays in which they had taken part.

Again and again they recalled the deeds of Conan - or Amra the Lion, as most of them knew him. They told and retold how, at the sleek side of Belit, his first great love, he had plundered the Black Coast and ventured deeply into the unknown jungle rivers of the South, where the she-pirate had come to a grisly doom in a ruined city of stone. They told how, a decade later, he had reappeared out of nowhere to sail with the Barachan pirates, and how still later he had cut a swath as captain of a ship of Zingaran buccaneers. Again and again they recalled the fantastic career of their chief, the hero of a thousand perils and the victor of a thousand fights, from single duels to earthshaking battles.

At length, even Sigurd's spirit began to fail. The dark, dank dungeon with its silent stone walls, the pall of gloom that weighed down their spirits, and the threat of an unknown doom all spread a mood of sullen, hopeless depression heavy enough to bow down the brightest spirits.

Several times Sigurd, with the help of the strongest men in the company, tried to break the chains that bound them. The links were fashioned of what looked like fragile gla.s.s - but no gla.s.s he had ever seen was as tough as this transparent material. It was as strong and unyielding as bronze. No amount of pulling, pounding, stamping, twisting, or jerking did more than slightly mar its slick, iridescent surface.

No, escape appeared to be beyond their powers. They could only wait for doom to strike in its own good time. And, at last, strike it did.

The metallic clash of spears on shields aroused Sigurd from uneasy slumbers. He started up from the straw to see the room filled with small, flat-faced soldiers and to see his comrades being prodded into wakefulness and their hands being bound behind them.

'What is it, Captain?' muttered Goram Singh.

Sigurd shook his head, so that the unkempt, graying red beard wagged. 'Crom and Mitra know, shipmate!' he growled. Then he raised his voice: 'Look alive, lads! Straighten up and show these brown dogs we be men, even though kenneled here in our own filth like beasts. If it be the executioner's block, then by the green beard of Lir and the red heart of Nergal, we'll show these stinking pigs how men can die, eh lads? Be ye with old Sigurd to the last?'

His exhortations raised a ragged cheer from the pirates, who croaked: 'Ay, Redbeard!'

'Good lads, all! And mayhap 'twill be only the slave-dealer's mart, eh? With the luck of the Brotherhood, I think such l.u.s.ty lads as we will be purchased by high-born ladies, for special service in their boudoirs!' He gave an exaggerated wink.

The men responded with a chorus of catcalls and obscene jests. Sigurd grinned and chuckled, but it was all pretense. For he thought he could guess the terrible end that awaited them, here among the black-hearted heathen of these cursed islands at the edge of the world.

Sigurd was right. Blinking blearily in the unaccustomed sunlight, the pirates gazed around them, awestruck at the spectacle. Above soared the blue vault of heaven, like a sapphire dome in some palace of the G.o.ds. The sun stood almost overhead, blazing down upon them with a furnace-like heat that was welcome after the cool darkness of the stinking dungeon. They drank in the fresh sea breeze from the harbor, knowing that it might be their last chance in this world to draw a lungful of salt air.

They had issued from the portals of the grim, gray citadel called the Vestibule of the G.o.ds into the square of the great red-and-black pyramid. The pyramid towered up in front of them, over the heads of the thousands of An-tillians who thronged the square.

At the head of the line, Sigurd looked back upon his comrades. They were a sorry-looking lot, ragged and filthy, with long hair and matted beards. Ribs showed through the holes in their tattered shirts from the meager, unwholesome diet.

Ranks of soldiers kept a lane open through the throng from the Vestibule to the base of the pyramid., and along this lane the pirates' guards prodded their captives until they came to the tail of a tine of naked AntiUians.

Priests in feathered robes and stilted shoes, towering over the throng, bustled officiously about, while others stood in ranks at the base of the pyramid, holding up curious standards and banners.

The pyramid loomed above them now. Whips sang and cracked over the bedraggled pirates' shoulders as the soldiers herded them into place at the end of the file of naked AntiUians. The latter toiled slowly, silently, and unresistingly up the steep stone stair that climbed the near face of tiie ziggurat.

Sigurd tipped back his head, gazing through slitted, watering eyes at the top of the pyramid and trying to see what was happening there against the glare of the noonday subtropical sky. He made out a great black stone altar and, next to it, a tall throne on which sat a feather-robed figure.

One by one, the silent Antillians were led with bowed heads to the temple at the top. Sigurd could see beast-masked, feather-robed priests seizing them by the arms, cutting their bonds, and stretching them on their backs on the stone. Then another figure stepped forward in an even more fantastic costume of plumes and jewels, although it was too far to make these out clearly. He extended a gaunt, brown arm to trace some cryptic symbol on the naked chest of the supine Antillian. Then . ..

Sigurd's eyes suddenly watered, and he lowered his head to wipe them. When he could look up again, it was to see the arm of the high priest raised with something in its fist - a knife that glittered Like gla.s.s. The knife descended in a sharp arc. The figure on the stone gave a convulsive jerk. For an instant the hierarch bent over his victim, sawing with his knife and groping with his free hand.

Then the lean, crimsoned brown arms rose again, lifting agains the bright sky a dripping, crimson ma.s.s - the heart of the victim, cut from his body while he was still alive.

The a.s.sembled thousands gasped. The priests set up a low-pitched chant, swaying in time to their slow, hypnotic song, which reminded Sigurd of the rhythmic murmur of the sea. The sacrificial fire next to the altar gushed dark smoke as the heart of the sacrifice was added to the many already heaped upon the glowing coals. The corpse was dragged away beyond Sigurd's vision by the crimson-splashed attendants, and the next silent victim was led forward. Numbly, Sigurd wondered how long this grisly rite had been going on.

The guards urged the line forward another step. The pirates behind Sigurd were as silent as he, struck dumb by the terror that lurked above them on the pyramid. The old freebooter felt nothing but a cold emptiness, as if time had stopped and the universe had shrunk to the dimensions of his own body. A few moments more and all would be over, the long voyage ended, the tale told. And what did it all matter? Was every human life as meaningless as his had proved to be ? And yet...

Within his bristling chest, Sigurd's stout old heart surged with abhorrence. His manhood revolted at this spineless submission to fate. Was he no better than these dwarfish islanders? By Thor's hammer, no! Death he did not fear. He and it were old shipmates. What, then, was the gust of revulsion that rose within him ? Pride! Aye, by Badb and Morrigan, that was it; sheer pride!

Sigurd gave a bark of laughter that brought looks of wonder and surprise to the faces of the pirates nearest to him in the slow-moving line. Aye, this was a h.e.l.l of a way for an old Vanr to die!

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

IN THE DRAGON'S LAIR.

He hears the sc.r.a.pe of scales on stone And Arnra learns he is not alone . . .

- The Voyage of Amra

At first he thought he was dead - that the sea of life had washed his waterlogged corpse up on the lightless sh.o.r.es of the afterworld. For a time he lay still, only blinking his eyes to clear them of the water that blurred his vision. Then, little by little., his senses awoke, and Conan knew he had somehow survived.

Incredibly, he still lived. By all odds he should.be a corpse, drowned by the weight of its mail shirt, rolling and b.u.mping along the bottom of the swift stream.

He levered himself up on one elbow and stared around him. He lay in another vast cavern; and, curiously enough, it was not altogether dark. As his vision cleared, he made out thousands of little points of glowing green light on the distant walls and ceiling of the cave. For a fleeting in-stant he thought he was lying out of doors, and that the green glows were stars; but then he realized that no stars would be all of the same brightness or so uniformly dis-tributed.

He lay in wet, gritty sand on the sh.o.r.e of the subter-ranean river into which he had fallen. The river entered this cavern from a low, arched entrance, which he could dimly discern across the rushing water. The channel made a sharp bend, angling off to the left to vanish through yet another dark portal. The abrupt change of direction must have thrown his nearly lifeless body against the slope on the outer side of the curve, and some lingering spark of animation within him had forced him to haul himself the few feet further up the slope necessary to drag him out of reach of the torrent. Then he had collapsed into complete unconsciousness.

He heaved himself into a sitting position and examined himself as well as he could in the faint, green glow of the cavern walls. No bones seemed to be broken, but he was covered with minor cuts and bruises, where the teeth of the giant rats or the stones of the river bottom had marked him. His breeches were in shreds, and his boots had been slashed and gouged by the rodents' teeth until his gnarled toes and ankles showed through the rents. Luckily, the cold water of the underground river had washed his wounds clean.

A fine film of rust had already formed on the links of his mail shirt, so that the garment emitted a faint squeak as he moved. He still had his dirk, but his sword he had lost when he fell into the flood.

He tottered to his feet, staggered, and recovered. Every muscle in his mighty body ached. His battle with the rats had strained even his iron stamina almost beyond the limits of endurance. He had almost gone into a trancelike, berserker state of insensibility. Then, while he was still exhausted, he had come within a hairsbreadth of drowning. No doubt he had slept a whole day and a night, and perhaps longer.

As he gingerly flexed his stiff muscles, he became aware of the p.r.i.c.kly pains of returning circulation. At the same time, renewed vigor surged back into his battered hulk. As he stalked back and forth on the crescent-shaped beach, his limbs Umbered up. He cast off the empty scabbard of his broadsword; too light to make an effective weapon, it would only enc.u.mber him.

He was, he realized,- hungry and thirsty. The thirst he quenched at the marge of the stream, but there was no way to satisfy his ravenous hunger. If only he had carried one of the giant rats down with him to devour ...

A pale blur of motion beneath the surface of the stream caught his attention. Then he saw another and perceived that there were fish in the river. He found an outcrop of rock that would serve as a convenient platform and settled himself upon it, watching the water with the patience of an old hunter.

Time pa.s.sed. Then a sudden lunge of Conan's long arms, and his hands came out of the black water clutching a wriggling fish by the gills. He brained the fish against the rock, sc.r.a.ped off the scales with his dirk, and ate the firm, white flesh raw. When he had finished, he washed the blood and scales from his face and hands in the stream and set about exploring.

First he headed for the nearest wall of the cavern, moving cautiously and peering ahead of him warily, lest he step into some trench or pit, or fall down a shaft leading to a lower level of caves. Although the light was dim, many hours in darkness had made Conan's eyes sensitive to the faintest illumination.

Arriving at the place where the cavern floor curved up to join the wall, he looked at the nearest of the green glows that spangled the cavern walls. It seemed to come from some luminous object about the size and shape of a child's finger. Too cautious to touch unknown objects with his bare flesh, Conan drew his dirk and prodded the glow with the point. The green thing squirmed and fell from the wall, rolled past his feet, and set off at a brisk crawl across the floor of the cavern. A closer look showed Conan that the source of the light was a luminous grub or caterpillar of some sort. Hundreds of thousands of the creatures clung to walls and ceiling.

Conan gave a grunt of satisfaction. Instantly, hundreds of the glowworms nearest to him on the cavern wall went out, leaving a large patch of blackness. Conan remained quiet, staring, and presently the hundreds of little green glows returned, faintly at first and then brightening to their normal luminosity. Sudden sounds evidently frightened the worms into turning off their lamps.

The light was convenient, but Conan realized that by now he must be far off the track he had originally set himself. While fleeing from the rats, he had taken whatever path seemed to offer the fewest obstacles, heedless of the route he had so carefully memorized with the help of Metemphoc the master thief. There seemed to be no hope of retracing his steps and again picking up the thread of his original route. Even if he could somehow get back up the underground river, he might find the horde of giant rats still lingering where he had left them. And now he did not even have a sword to fight them off with.

He explored the vast cavern further. t.i.tanic stalagmites rose here and there from the rocky floor to approach and sometimes to join with stalact.i.tes descending from above. These natural pillars reminded Conan of the columns of primitive temples to the G.o.ds of the underworld. Their immensity dwarfed even his giant form.

Now that his hunger was somewhat appeased, he gave thought to procuring a more effective weapon than the dirk. Although this was a stout and formidable dagger, he felt he needed something with more reach, for there was no telling what other nameless denizens of the underworld he might meet in his subterranean wanderings.

Stalagmites, he observed, were all rounded and blunt at the upper end. Wanting something he could use as a spear, he chose a slender stalact.i.te instead. He picked up a loose lump of limestone, weighing perhaps twenty pounds, and swung it against the tapering shaft. The stalact.i.te broke off; Conan dropped the piece of limestone and caught the falling stalact.i.te. At the boom of the falling lump, half the glowworms went out and then slowly returned to their normal brightness.

He hefted his new weapon. It was a four-foot shaft of stone, as thick as his wrist at one end and tapering to a point at the other. While the point was not so sharp as that of a real spear, it would still pierce the body of a foe when backed by Conan's still-powerful muscles. It could also be grasped by the small end and swung as a club, although Conan entertained doubts of the strength of the material. It could even be thrown as a javelin for a short distance.

Thus armed, Conan felt fit to challenge even the nameless terrors of this dark realm. Cautiously, he began exploring again, in the direction in which the cave seemed to extend the farthest.

As he walked, the cavern narrowed and the ceiling became lower. The glowworms became fewer, so that in the increasing gloom Conan was forced to move warily, probing ahead of him with the stalact.i.te lest he fall into some hole. His position was hazardous enough as it was, without the additional discomfiture of suddenly finding himself plunging down some well or shaft hundreds of feet deep.

As it was, he stumbled over an irregularity in the cavern floor and b.u.mped into a stalagmite about his own height. The slender stone column broke off and toppled over with a loud boom, which reverberated in the confined s.p.a.ce. Instantly every nearby glowworm winked out, leaving Conan in virtually complete darkness.

'Ahriman eat these accursed caves!' he growled. He continued in the direction in which he had been headed, feeling ahead with his feet and with the point of the stalact.i.te.

Then his outstretched club touched something that moved. Conan froze motionless., straining his eyes and ears for some clue to the nature of the invisible being in his path.

A loud hiss came from the darkness before him, tike the hiss of a serpent but magnified many times over. A rank, reptilian odor filled his nostrils. He would have noticed it sooner but for the faint breeze that blew against his back and hence wafted the stench away from him until he was almost upon its source.

Sweat started on Conan's brow. Had he stumbled into a nest of snakes? Like most northern barbarians, he detested the snakes that swarmed the jungles of hot southern lands. Several times in his career he had experienced close calls with serpents far larger than any of the common species - monsters over fifty feet long, with heads as big as those of horses.

Thinking silently to withdraw, he took a step backwards. Then came a sc.r.a.ping sound, as if some heavy weight were being dragged across the stone before him. Conan halted and held his breath lest the slightest sound betray his presence.

Then the glowworms began to light up again. As their faint, greenish radiance suffused the tunnel, a well of cold, green light appeared in front of Conan, on a level with his own eyes. It was a huge eye. Then it swung to one side, and Conan saw that it was one of a pair.

As the glowworms again reached their normal level of illumination, Conan saw that he had encountered a dragon - a reptile similar in general outlines to one of the large, edible lizards he had seen on display in the butcher shops of Ptahuacan. But this was a fifty-footer. Its jaws opened slightly, revealing the gleaming sabers of its curved white fangs. From the tip of the tapering head, a forked, snake-like tongue flicked out, wavered in the air, and was withdrawn, testing for the scent of the being who had aroused it.

Conan whirled and ran headlong through the gloom, seeking a way around the giant reptile. The dragon raised its scaly body off the rock where it had been resting and started after Conan, its bowed legs swiveling outward in an awkward, mechanical-looking gait that nevertheless covered the ground with ominous speed.

In trying to circle around the dragon, Conan found himself headed down a side pa.s.sage. The glowworms were fewer here, forcing the Cimmerian to proceed cautiously; but far ahead appeared a stronger light. Moreover, its color was not the emerald green of the glowworms but the neutral shades of ordinary daylight.

Behind him, the dragon's claws sc.r.a.ped loudly on the stone with each stride, while the scales on the lower side of its tail hissed as the member was dragged along over the rough stone floor. In the open, Conan thought he could outrun one of these reptiles; but here he had to watch his every step lest he take a tumble and be snapped up by his pursuer before he could rise again.

The tunnel he was traversing widened into another chamber, and the light from up ahead waxed a little stronger. It was strong enough for him to see, in plain sight, two more dragons, one on either side. One was asleep, while the other was finishing a meal. A quick glance showed Conan the nature of the meal: a pair of human legs dangled from the creature's jaws.

As Conan dashed between the two monsters, the sleeping one opened its eyes. The other made a gulping motion, whereupon the human legs slid a little further into its jaws and out of sight. Had both reptiles been alert and unenc.u.mbered, they could easily have caught the Cimmerian by a quick sideways lunge of their huge, scaly heads as he pa.s.sed.

As it was, the pursuing dragon, uttering a deep, sonorous grunt or beUoWj clattered into the cavern between the two others. Soon all three were in pursuit of Conan. The one with the man in its jaws gulped frantically to down its morsel so as to have its gullet free for another one.

This cavern was a kind of anteroom to a still larger chamber, illuminated by a narrow shaft of daylight that came down from a hole in the ceiling. The chamber, which had apparently been enlarged by the hand of man, was roughly square. At one side rose a pair of huge bronze doors, like those which Conan had seen on the front of the great stepped pyramid in the main square.

On the other side, a set of spikes had been driven into the stone wall, forming a kind of ladder that extended up from the floor to a height of thirty feet. Here was a small platform, which opened into a tunnel. Conan had a fleeting impression of an armed Antillian lounging on the platform, but he had no time to observe the man more closely now.

His main attention was on the six slate-gray dragons, ranging from a mere pup ten feet long to a h.o.a.ry old sixty-footer, in the middle of the cavern floor. They squatted in a circle, with their heads inward and directly under the shaft overhead. Their heads were raised, each scaly muzzle pointing upward toward the opening through which the daylight filtered, as if engaged in some mysterious reptilian worship of the ancestor of all dragons. Jagged crests of keeled scales ran down their backs from behind their heads to the ends of their scaly tails.

Now Conan's lungs were filled with the stifling musty reek of the reptiles' bodies. Amid the filth that covered the floor of the chamber, Conan glimpsed the leathery surfaces of half-buried reptilian eggs, bigger even than the eggs of the ostriches of Kush. There were also what appeared to be undigested human bones - here a skull., there a jawbone., elsewhere a pelvis.

As Conan dashed into the chamber, followed by the three pursuing dragons, the six in the wheel formation in the center broke off their vigil to lower their heads and stare with eyes like great, green jewels. As their sluggish reptilian brains registered the fact that here was more meat, they turned and started toward the Cimmerian, the claws on the ends of their long-toed, splayed feet sc.r.a.ping over the floor with each lurching stride, and their huge tails swishing from side to side.

To Conan's right gaped the mouth of another tunnel. He ran toward it, but as he reached it the sight of two pairs of great green eyes and the slither of scales on stone halted him. He perceived that two more dragons, aroused by the noise, were coming to investigate. And this tunnel was not wide enough for him to dodge past them.

Next, he made a dash for the bronze doors. But these proved to have no latch or handle on the inside, ,nor did they yield to his pushing.

The dragons were pouring down upon him, now. He found himself facing a semicircle of the brutes. Sweat ran down his forehead and stung his eyes.

This was worse than the rats. They at least were warmblooded mammals - his remote kin, according to some philosophers - but these t.i.tanic, sluggish saurians were at the opposite end of the scale from man. They were slithering monsters from the primal slime, leftovers from the youth of the world, when the earth had shaken to the tread of their even mightier forebears, millions of years before the first man thought to stand erect on his hindiegs and fight for a dominating place in Nature's world.

On they came^ like living nightmares from some hideous h.e.l.l.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

A DAY OF BLOOD AND FIRE.

The gla.s.sy knife bestrews a rain of blood to slake the ghoulish thirst, Yet still It hastens on the curst and gory ministers of pain.

- The Visions of Ep&mitreus

Under the blazing noonday sun, the line of silent men shuffled slowly toward the mighty pyramid of black-and-scarlet stone. In the fierce heat, Sigurd felt the trickle of sweat down his face and torso.

He had never thought that his end would come in such a scene of barbaric grandeur. On some burning deck, slippery with the blood of the fallen, perhaps - or in the rubble-choked alleys of a seaport under sack, where the flames of burning temples painted the skies with crimson. Or perchance in a desperate duel with some swaggering freebooter in red, roaring Tortage - the cold kiss of a blade against his flesh, the steel sliding in between his ribs, a swart, bearded face grinning into his as red mists rose to drown his vision. But nothing like this!