Conan the Barbarian (2 page)

Now other Cimmerians ran to make a stand with Corin the smith. But the invaders were mounted and well armed, with breasts sheathed in bronze and iron, while the villagers were half-naked, and bore only the simple implements they had been able to snatch up. Some carried hoes and rakes; others had retrieved their weapons. A few were armed with shields of boiled hides stretched on wooden frames; but these afforded indifferent protection against the pounding weight of Vanir iron.

Unable to reach his father, Conan sought out his mother; but in the turmoil and cacophony of the battle, he could not find her. He ran and ducked and dodged as men and horses thundered past. On every side he beheld scenes of mayhem and slaughter. A freshly severed arm lay in the snow, trickling blood; while its fingers still gripped the shaft of a spear. A woman, bearing her babe to safety, hurried by. She stumbled and fell in the slippery mud. A heartbeat later, a hoof crushed her skull, and her puling infant fell into a bank of blood-stained snow.

An old man was arrested in mid-cry, as a bronze-tipped arrow transfixed his tongue. Another crouched in a pool of icy mud, pawing at his face. Conan realized dimly that one eyeball hung by a strand of tissue and that the man, crazed by pain, was trying to restore the eye to its proper resting place.

Over the crash and clamour, Conan heard his father’s uplifted voice: “The horses! Kill the horses!” So saying, the smith brought down a war horse, which screamed like a stallion beneath the gelding iron as his sword sheared through its spine.

Conan at last spied the lithe figure of his mother, standing barefoot in the snow. There was a majesty about her as she faced the enemy, her face flushed with fury, her hair cascading over her shoulders, and her hands clenched about the handle of a broadsword. Heaped before her lay the bloody remains of several Vanir and their merciless dogs. As the boy hurtled toward her, she glanced at her son’s tousled mane of coarse black hair, so like his father’s, and grasped her weapon with renewed determination.

Looking up, Conan glimpsed a gigantic figure bestriding a sable stallion, like a statue, dark and motionless. Horse and rider loomed above the brow of a hillock at the edge of the village and stared down upon the scene of carnage. The child could not discern the features of the giant form, but his frantic eye was arrested by the emblem that the horseman bore upon his armoured breast and iron-bound shield.

It was a strange device: two black serpents face to face, their tails so interwoven that they might be one, and between them, supported by their coils, the disk of a black sun. The symbol, unfamiliar as it was, filled Conan’s heart with fear and foreboding.

Not far away, most of the men and youths who had survived the charge and its resultant slaughter had formed a living shield about their smith. Towering above even the tallest of the other Cimmerians, Corin cried out his martial encouragements, as metal belled against metal and masked the screams of the dying. The Vanir fell back; when their horses, wild-eyed, wheeled and danced before the rude weapons of the defenders.

As caution stayed the raiders, from the swelling ground, the mailed figure raised one gloved hand in a gesture of command. Dawn fire flashed from his iron helmet, which, concealing his features, lent him an aura of terrible power.

“They’ll bring up their archers,” whispered Conan’s mother. “They’ll cut our menfolk down as they stand beyond the range of our Cimmerian steel.”

“Crom help us!” murmured the boy.

Conan’s mother gave him an icy glance. “Crom does not heed the prayers of men. He scarcely hears them. Crom is a god of frosts and stars and storms, not of humankind.”

Soon were the words of Maeve, the blacksmith’s wife, proven true. A hail of arrows whistled through the dawn, to thud against the wooden huts, to glance from shields, and to sink, feather-deep, into naked flesh. Again and again the deathly rain of Vanir arrows swept the cluster of defenders, until the shield-wall sagged and crumbled.

At last the gigantic figure upon the hillock spoke, his deep, unearthly voice tolling like an iron bell. “Loose the hounds!”

Snarling and snapping, the red-tongued dogs panted down the slope, their flying forms silhouetted against the vermilion dawn. One Cimmerian fell, gurgling, with a hound at his throat. Another speared one beast in mid-leap. A third yelled hoarsely as wolf-sharp fangs closed on the muscles of his upper arm. And the wall of shields came apart, as men turned to strike with notched and blunted swords at the vicious animals.

“Archers!” boomed the dark giant. “Let fly another round!”

A hissing hail of death fell on the surviving few. Bodies writhed in the trampled snow, as their fellow villagers staggered back, their hide shields pierced by the flying shafts. For a moment Conan saw his father standing alone, his shield bristling with arrows. Then a shaft caught the blacksmith in the leg, piercing the muscle of his upper thigh. The injured limb gave way beneath him. With a choked curse, he fell and lay on his back in the frozen slush. One hand crawled across the ice, inching toward the hilt of the great steel sword. An arrow pinned his hand to the ground. Then the dogs were at him.

It was soon over.

II

The Wheel

Now horsemen crested the rise and thundered down among the huts, their merciless swords cutting down all who resisted. Lighted torches wheeled through the icy air to thud upon the rush roofs of the defenceless houses and set them ablaze. Thus were flushed out into the open all who had taken refuge within their homes.

Whooping riders pounded along the rutted lane, spearing the young, the old, and the wounded. Maeve impaled one leering fellow who bent from his galloping horse to seize her. She smiled thinly as his tom body toppled from the saddle to lie sprawling in the mud. A sweep of the Cimmerian woman’s sword hamstrung another animal. As the beast fell kicking, Conan sprang upon the rider, writhing in agony beneath his steed, and sliced open his throat.

But the defenders were outnumbered. Their ranks thinned rapidly. Abruptly, their resistance ended. Dazed and dejected, all the survivors threw their weapons at the booted feet of their conquerors—all, that is, but Maeve, wife of Corin and mother of Conan. Eyes ablaze in a face drained of colour, she leaned on the pommel of her broadsword, stunned and struggling for breath, while her son stood beside her, his small knife held at the ready.

At last the mounted giant on the knoll moved. As spurs struck its glossy black flanks, the quivering stallion sprang into motion. With a measured control more terrible to witness than the careless speed of fury, the commander of the marauders picked his way down the slope and along the ruts of trampled snow stained with the blood of the dead or dying. Although his features were masked by his homed iron helm, to those who watched, he stood against the morning sky, a veritable demon-king borne on a steed that seemed no earthly horse at all but a creature from the very depths of Hell.

When the grim apparition passed them, the Vanir raiders bowed and gave voice to an orchestrated chant: “Hail to Commander Rexor! Hail to Rexor! And to Doom... Doom... Tulsa Doom....”

Their leader turned off the road and, for a moment, vanished from sight behind the soot-blackened wall of a burned-out hut. As if a cloud had lifted, the Vanir brightened and drifted nearer to the lone woman who, with her man-child, stood defiant still.

Jeering with coarse ribaldry and obscene suggestions, two of the raiders reached playful spears toward the breast of the half-naked woman. Maeve batted aside one weapon with the flat of her sword, and the Van dodged backwards, laughing. But his comrade was less fortunate. Swinging her long blade above her head, Maeve caught her tormentor across the back of his hand and inflicted a deep cut. As the man leaped aside, his spear fell from a hand that hung as limp as a dead thing. Cursing and baring his teeth in a snarl, he reached for his sword with his uninjured hand.

Just then the fur-cloaked figure of the commander, grim as death, emerged from the shadow of the hut. Not a word was spoken, but the wounded man wilted and withdrew. In response to a signal, another soldier sprang forward to grasp the bridle of the warhorse, while his master swung to the ground. With an imperious gesture, Rexor pointed back along the rutted roadway on which lay the smith, his inert hand a finger’s length away from the weapon that was his final masterpiece.

Eager to do the huge man’s bidding, another foot soldier sped between the two rows of smouldering huts, to the place where Corin the smith had made his stand. Lifting the blade, which no man could have wrested from Corin’s living grasp, he hastened to bring it to his leader. Maeve watched the man’s approach through slitted ice-blue eyes. Conan stared in fearful fascination; for it was borne in upon him with hideous certainty that his father lived no more.

When Rexor received the weapon, he raised it to study its splendid craftsmanship in the sun’s slanting rays. As the metal, uplifted, shimmered in the brighter light, Conan in vain fought back the sobs that choked him. His mother touched his shoulder. A soldier laughed.

A shudder suddenly erased the grins from the faces of those still ringed around the embattled pair. Conan looked up, as high against the rising sun a standard, set upon an ebon pole, came slowly into view. Suspended from a wooden frame adorned with the horns of beasts, the rich fabric of the standard hung immobile in the still air. Embroidered on the cloth, the boy saw once more the symbol that long would haunt his dreams—the ominous, emblazoned symbol of writhing serpents upholding the orb of a sable sun.

A grisly fringe of scalps dangled from the frame, and gaunt skulls grinned mockingly from the spikes that adorned the upper reaches of the structure. Even Rexor bowed his head as that hideous standard entrapped the eastern light and was incarnadined thereby. Conan recoiled when he saw the bearer of the banner, a deformed thing, more beast than man, despite his iron helm and armoured leathern garments. The pride with which he raised aloft his fear-inspiring device declared his lack of all humanity.

Behind this misshapen offspring of the devil rode a magnificent figure, resplendent in armour of overlapping leaves, gleaming like the scales of a serpent in the opalescent light. A bejewelled helmet clung to his head and covered his nose and cheekbones, so that only his eyes, flaming with unholy fires, were visible.

The steed he rode was very like its master: lean, graceful, and aglitter with jewelled trappings. Its eyes, too, burned with the light of living coals. On such a steed, thought Conan, might devils from the nether parts of Hell come howling up to ravage the green hills of earth.

As the great beast paced the bloodstained snow, under the gloved guidance of its rider, all the Vanir bowed low, repeating one word like an incantation: “Doom... Doom... Doom!”

The giant Rexor leaped forward to hold the hell-steed’s bridle as his master dismounted. The two exchanged but a word or two, then turned to scrutinize the Cimmerian woman, who stood, tense and level-eyed, grasping her broadsword. As Maeve returned their gaze and sensed the menace in it, like a mother panther prepared to defend her cub, she raised her weapon and moved one foot into position for a strike.

The man in the jewelled helmet, still studying her with cool appraisal, drew off his glove and reached out one lean hand to accept from his lieutenant the sword of Corin the smith. Rexor bowed as he handed the weapon to his master.

“Doom... Doom... Doom!” intoned the Vanir once again; and as he listened, Conan perceived that this was no mere word of welcome that the raiders chanted. It was a portentous name—a name to conjure with, a name to fear.

Doom, a lithe figure in his serpentine mail, sauntered up to the embattled Cimmerians, mother and son. As he approached, his slitted eyes studied the sheer perfection of the weapon in his hands. Focusing his entire attention on the fine blade, or so it seemed, he turned it this way and that, admiring its razor edge, its flawless balance, its exquisite workmanship. Mirror-bright, the steel flashed in the low sun’s rays and immersed the waiting boy in a scintillating river of light.

As the ring of armed men parted, Maeve drew up her splendid body, raised her broadsword, and set her jaw. A swift intake of breath between parted lips served as a warning of her intention.

Suddenly Doom appeared to notice her. He doffed his jewelled helm, revealing a lean-jawed, darkly handsome face. A small smile flickered across his thin lips, and something akin to admiration flashed red in his coal-black eyes. The woman stood as if transfixed, fascinated yet repelled by his commanding presence and the overpowering aura of male sexuality that radiated from his person.

“Doom... Doom... Doom!” shouted the motionless Vanir warriors in unison.

For a long moment, Doom stared into the wide eyes of Conan’s mother. Her finely-sculpted breasts, kissed by the roseate light, rose and fell with rapid breathing. Then, careless of the woman’s upraised sword, he strolled past her, moving well within the range of her steel, but ignoring it, as if peril did not exist for such as he. The grace and bearing of his supple body, as he walked past the Cimmerian woman, was sensual, inviting, and vibrant with virility; but Maeve neither moved nor spoke. She remained utterly immobile, seemingly enthralled, as a partridge is fabled to be by the enticements of a serpent’s gaze.

Once past her, with a gesture so casual as to look effortless, Doom swept the great sword upward with incredible skill and strength. The ugly sound the blade made as it struck rang loudly in the chill silence.

Without a cry, or even a gasp, Maeve fell, as a tree falls before the axe of the forester. Dazed with horror, the boy Conan stared in disbelief as his mother’s severed head rolled in the mire at his feet. Her pale face displayed neither fear nor shock nor pain, only a dreamy-eyed look of fascination.

Then as the boy, hate-filled, whipped about and aimed his knife at the broad back of Doom, the Vanir were upon him, dragging him into a snowdrift, and wresting his knife from his grasp.