Conan the Barbarian (3 page)

As the day faded, a weary column of captives, chained one to another, trudged across an endless expanse of pristine snow, shadowed by pines. The bedraggled line, a sad remnant of what had been a close-knit Cimmerian clan, were the sole survivors of the dawn raid on their village. Old men, women, and children, the ill-clad and the injured, slipped and slid their way over the ice-coated snows and rocky outcrops into slavery.

Far behind the captives, smoke still stained the sky. Having plundered the village, seizing weapons and food and furs and hides, the Vanir had put all buildings to the torch. Even the hot coals and ashes had been trampled under the horses’ hooves to scatter them, so that when spring thawed the earth, and new grass sprang up, there would exist no evidence that here had ever been a dwelling place of men.

The boy Conan staggered along, bent beneath the weight of his chain and chilled by the upland winds and the iron collar that clutched at his throat. He moved slowly, his mind a turmoil of half-memories and uncomprehending dread. He had witnessed too much bloodshed for his youthful reason to absorb. Despite his pounding heart, he felt nothing, his emotions numbed by the living nightmare of the day’s events.

That endless journey into Vanaheim would ever after remain a dreamlike horror in Conan’s memory, a blurred montage of startling images: fur-clad riders whirling past the bowed, staggering line of captives, scattering snow...the grisly standard uplifted against the sky, flaunting its emblem of tangled serpents and a black sun... an old man, unable to walk further, unchained from the line and speared with uncaring savagery... small red footprints left on the ice by the torn feet of barefoot children... the cold winds in the mountain passes... weariness and despair.

Conan never noticed when the giant Rexor and his mysterious master, Doom, parted company with the Vanir raiders. But there came a time when he realized that the two were no longer with the party; for suddenly the air seemed fresher and the sunlight brighter. Vaguely the boy wondered why those two dark, towering men, who so obviously were not men of Vanaheim, had led the attack on his village. When he dared to whisper the question to another captive, the man murmured, “I know not, boy. The Vanir doubtless paid well for the dark men’s services, but I did not see the money pass.”

The captives and their captors journeyed northward, winding a tortuous path through the broken hills of northern Cimmeria. Gaunt crags of naked rock thrust through their mantles of wind-piled snow, and the saw-toothed range of the Eiglophians loomed before them like a row of white-robed giants against the sapphire skies. In the pass, a late snow flurry swirled around the ill-clad slaves, stinging their eyes with bitter kisses. Then the feet of the children, chilled to insensibility, no longer felt the bite of rocks against half-frozen flesh.

Snow persisted as the Cimmerians crossed the mountains into Vanaheim, the realm of their enemies. The horsemen and their hounds were forced to range far afield to hunt game. Streams, fed by the melting snow in sheltered places, cut deep runnels in the lingering snowdrifts and supplied crystal-cold water to the captives’ camping sites. Thus they survived.

At last they began to descend the far side of the mountain range. Stunted trees clung precariously to the rough land, their twisted forms looking to the boy like crooked gnomes crouching beside their tunnels. Stretches of tundra bore raw wounds where herds of reindeer had pawed the snow aside to nibble on dead grasses. Long lines of marsh fowl, northward bound, flapped by; and the honking of their mournful cries echoed the despairing bitterness in Conan’s heart.

As the slaves straggled across the marshes, the boy noticed the heads of drowned tussocks emerging from water scummed with patches of floating ice; and on these tussocks he saw the first timid flowers of spring.

The journey seemed as endless as forever. But it ended at last.

One dusk, as the setting sun shot blood-red darts into the mist-veiled bosom of the land, Conan and the other captives were herded through the palisaded gateway of a Vanir town—a sizeable community, which they later came to know as Thrudvang.

The footsore thralls were driven like cattle through a clutter of stone houses, half-buried in turf and roofed with thatch. At length they reached a walled enclosure within which stood several sheds. Into one of these slave pens, which offered scant protection from the elements, the newcomers were hustled to spend the lonely night sleeping on hard clay sparsely strewn with dirty straw.

At dawn, after receiving a small ration of bread and thin soup, the stronger and healthier among them were chained by rusty manacles to a massive wheel whose spokes were stout logs, polished smooth by the pressure of human hands. This wheel turned one enormous millstone upon another, grinding grain to powder beneath its ponderous weight. To this Wheel of Pain, as the slaves came to call it, Conan was chained beside other ragged, dull-eyed youths and men from lands unknown or rarely mentioned in Cimmeria. As for the captive women and girl-children of his village, they were led away to face a different, perhaps even uglier fate. Conan never heard of them again.

The Master of the Wheel was a burly man, swarthy and heavy-featured, who seemed to the labouring children to be an ogre. Day after day, as they pushed the groaning wheel in an eternal circle, he stood on the incline above the shallow pit wherein the wheel was fixed, wrapped in his greasy furs. As grim and unspeaking as an idol of stone, he stood, with only his sharp, fierce eyes moving in his leather-framed face as he watched, hawk-like, to detect the laggard or the indolent.

Only when an exhausted boy fell to his knees, unable to work any longer, did he spring into action. Then a vicious rawhide whip sang its sibilant song, laying crimson welts on pitiful shoulders, until under its bite the whimpering wretch would stagger to his feet to toil once more.

So Conan and his fellows laboured day after day, month after month, until time lost all meaning for them. Faces slack, eyes dull, hearts emptied of emotion, time for them contracted to the present moment only. Yesterday was mercifully obliterated from their consciousness; tomorrow was a nightmare yet undreamed. When a wheel-slave fell and could rise to toil no more, the Master summoned the ever-present Vanir guards with a curt gesture to unshackle the gasping body and bear it off—no one knew where.

Conan dully wondered at times if that was how the Vanir fed their dogs.

The seasons changed; months stumbled into years. Wheel-slaves died, only to be replaced by other slaves, reaved by the Vanir raiders. Some of the new captives were youths and men of Cimmerian stock; others were golden-haired boys from Asgard: a few were gaunt Hyperboreans with limp, flaxen locks and, it was said, a knowledge of sorcery. Not that it seemed to do them any good.

For all, life became a dreary endurance of days of grinding toil and nights of deathlike slumber. Hope died like a candle in the wind. Despair dulled Conan’s senses until they became indifferent to discomfort. True, he and his fellows did receive some care, lest they become useless as draft animals. They had good food, a small fire in their quarters during winter storms, and a supply of cast-off clothing too ragged to be worth the mending. But that was all.

Ever there was the groaning Wheel of Pain, ever the pitiless blue sky above, ever the frozen slush of winter or the cracked, dry mud of summer beneath their feet. And ever the clank of the chain that bound them to the wheel.

Once and once only Conan wept, and it was but a single tear that trickled down his dirty cheek to freeze like a stone in the frigid wind. For a moment the boy • lumped against the wheel-spoke, slick from the pressure of his sweaty palms, and prayed for an end to the unending torture, even if the end was death. But the moment passed.

I le shook his unshorn black mane and dashed the tear away.

There is in every heart a threshold, a point beyond which hopelessness and resignation cannot penetrate: a moment in which life and death are equal forces. At this moment, a new kind of courage is born within the heart of even the dreariest slave. The emotion that took possession of Conan’s heart as he brushed away that tear was rage hot and unforgiving rage.

His lips drew back from his strong teeth in a savage snarl. Wordlessly, the young Cimmerian made a vow to his indifferent northern gods: Never again, he promised, shall lords or men or devils wring from my eyes a single tear.

And he made another vow in the silence of his heart: Men shall die for this!

Then with all his strength, he leaned against the spoke of the Wheel of Pain. The wheel groaned and creaked as it began again its endless circuit.

Nurtured by the fires of rage, a new-found pride, and the courage to endure, Conan grew into a man. The years of back-breaking labour that toughened his sinews and made his muscles bulge gave his body the strength and flexibility which soft iron gains when it is heated in the furnace and pounded by the hammer of the smith. And though his days were blurred by a monotony of crushing toil, and his body held in chains, Conan found that his mind was free—free to soar like the marsh fowl on wings of hope.

Whenever the harvest proved lean, disputes arose among the Vanir. Some wished to reduce the slaves’ rations; others argued that, if the slaves starved, they could not work the mill wheel, and the whole town would lack for bread. These debates often took place among the townsfolk who brought their corn to be ground; and no one thought to spare the wretched slaves the furious arguments, since they were deemed too dull or ignorant to understand the spoken word.

But, having an aptitude for languages, Conan knew what was being said. He had learned to speak fluent, if accented, Vannish and had picked up a smattering of Aquilonian and Nemedian from his fellow captives. Otherwise his mind slept, save when it gnawed like a hungry wolf on the thought of revenge. He might have learned more had he drawn out his shed-mates; but he was a taciturn youth, who asked for no companionship and offered none.

“It was an error on my part," King Conan told me in the fullness of his years. “They might have taught me to write their tongues, had I encouraged them. I did not dream that some day I should need that skill; for we knew naught of letters in Cimmeria. Knowledge should be grasped wherever it lies, for it is a jewel beyond price, as now I know.”

During one famine, a plague descended on Thrudvang. Many died; and all the drumming and chanting of the shaman did nothing to stay the disaster. The pestilence spread to the mill. Underfed and overworked, the slaves proved an easy prey. One by one, they took to coughing, suffered bloody fluxes, and succumbed.

At last the day came when Conan stood alone at the Wheel of Pain. When the Master descended to the walkway to drag out the final corpse, he said in tones of honest perplexity, “I do not know what to do with you, Cimmerian. We must have flour ere we starve; but one man cannot turn the mill alone.”

“Hah!” grunted Conan. “Think you so? Place me at the outer end of the boom, and I’ll show you that I can.” “Well, you shall have your chance. May your Cimmerian gods be with you!”

With his manacle relocked at the out-most position on I lie pole, Conan took a deep breath, strained every muscle, mid pushed. The mill revolved.

For many days before new slaves were found, the young giant turned the wheel alone. Vanir from surrounding villages, bringing their meagre supplies of grain to be milled, marvelled at the sight. They took the measure of his magnificent shoulders and the powerful muscles in his arms and thighs. And the word spread....

One day there came a break in the endless drudgery and a visitor. Labouring at the wheel, Conan glimpsed the Master in earnest conversation with a mounted stranger, whose five attendants, with due decorum, sat their shaggy ponies at the far side of the mill enclosure. While the Master of the Wheel was dark-complected, the newcomer represented a different breed of humanity, one the young Cimmerian had never seen before.

The horseman appeared squat and bow-legged, as from a lifetime spent with legs clamped about the barrel of his head. His fine cloak was made of unfamiliar furs, the skins of beasts unknown to the Cimmerian; and his peculiar armour was composed of plates of lacquered, overlapping leather. His eyes were narrow and slitted, his cheekbones wide, and he wore his thick red hair and ruddy beard trimmed in a fashion that seemed foreign. A pin of blue and topaz stones winked from his velvet cap, and a heavy gold chain encircled his neck.

Through eyes as black as chips of obsidian, the red-haired horseman studied the Cimmerian youth with the cool appraisal of a horse trader. As Conan, still pushing the wheel, watched indifferently, the man nodded in apparent satisfaction, dug one gloved hand into his girdle, and withdrew several small, flat squares of gold. These he handed to the Master of the Wheel, then kneed his mount forward to the edge of the mill works. The Master hurried down the ramp to stop the mill. Conan stood, docile and unresisting, as his manacle was unlocked, and a heavy wooden collar was fitted around his neck. He waited patiently, flexing his hard and callused fingers, while the Master locked the collar and handed the end of the chain to the mounted man.

The foreigner licked his lips with a pointed tongue. Then, speaking Vannish in hard gutturals, he said, “I am Toghrul. I own you now. You come.”

For emphasis, he tugged on the chain as one tugs on a dog’s leash. Conan stumbled forward. Recovering his balance, he looked up to find the man grinning down at him. Resentment flared in the Cimmerian’s sullen eyes; a growl rumbled deep in his chest. With a burst of rage, he snatched a link and jerked it back, tearing the chain from Toghrul’s grasp.

For a moment, Conan stood free, legs apart, shoulders arched, eyes blazing, as the hot breath of freedom awoke wild memories in his barbaric heart. Surprise immobilized the others. Then sharp steel rasped against leather as the Wheel-master and Toghrul’s men-at-arms rushed to encircle the recalcitrant slave.

Conan’s eyes glowed a volcanic blue as he glared at the ring of naked blades. Then he glanced at the Wheel of Pain, at the pole polished from its long contact with his sweaty palms, at the empty manacle that had bound his wrist in servitude. Whatever might lie ahead in the womb of time, at least he was free of the Wheel.