Conan the Great Read online

  I

  Victory

  The Tybor plain stretched level, its grass sheened a dewy, dazzling emerald in the morning sun. Set amid the Hyborian kingdoms of Aquilonia, Nemedia, and Ophir, ever had it made an easy, dangerous route between the three. Now its flatness formed a gentle, open vista broken at intervals by flowering thickets and lone, spreading trees.

  The lush greensward made a bright background for the armies that were swiftly deploying across it. Their neat ranks formed gaily coloured patterns on its surface, like painted playing-draughts dealt out upon a cloth of tufted green baize.

  The masses of troops marching into position, extending their formations and threatening to flank and double one another, were the fighting hosts of mighty nations. The blue-caped legions of imperial Ophir—striding footmen, wheeling chariots, and cantering knights- comprised the southern half of the line. Their polished spear blades and pointed steel caps made flowing, shimmering constellations of sparks in the early light. Taking their places to the shrilling of reed pipes, they moved close beside allies decked in earthier greys and browns.

  These regiments rattled more heavily with armour, and moved in more rigid patterns to the thump and rustle of drums. Crowded beneath the sable banners of Nemedia, the darker armies occupied a place in the battle line matching their kingdom’s position on the map, adjoining and to the north of Ophir. They raised serried rows of lances and halberds in a deadly-looking steel fence pointing westward, with the sun warming their backs. At their centre, surrounded by a phalanx of armoured knights bearing aloft black-draped lances, could be seen the grey-haired, grey-bearded figure of fierce old King Balt.

  Stocky in his worn, traditional jerkin of metal-studded leather, Balt bestrode a silver-grey charger, his polished helmet couched beneath one burly arm. At some time in his rise from service as a fighting officer in the Iron Legions of Imperial Nemedia, the grey metal of his helm and his armour-bosses had been reworked with purest gold. A mounted page beside him held aloft his huge shield, its battered old iron likewise leafed over with white and yellow gold. The two contrasting colours were inlaid skilfully in the shape of the royal Nemedian crest: a beaked, taloned gryphon. The shield’s polished surface flashed forth a blazing beacon wherever it caught the sun.

  King Balt’s entourage moved southward through the knee-high grass, centring well behind the foremost ranks of Nemedian spearmen. They moved toward a second plumed, bannered enclave of nobility, hedged in by gleaming knights and flanked by wheeling chariots. This gathering was the elite household guard of young Lord Malvin, mighty Ophir’s ablest general and self-declared despot.

  Malvin had not yet deigned to crown himself king-uncertain, perhaps, whether kingship might not be a downward step from lordship. But he laid frank claim to the whole vast Ophirean nation; also to sundry neighbouring lands, including a portion of these very fields on which the allied armies were massing. In his territorial ambition Malvin enjoyed the zealous support, or grudging acquiescence, of all the various dukes, barons, marchesses, and other Ophirean nobles whose family insignia could be seen adorning the shields and pennons of his host.

  Malvin lorded it astride a white stallion draped in silvery chain mail, its reins and harnesses adorned with fluttering blue streamers. The trim young ruler himself gleamed in a costly suit of steel plate; it was crafted well enough to allow him an unequalled range of movement, as his spirited waves and gestures to his massing troops showed. His armour was of pale, unadorned metal, free of any sculpture or embellishment—a costume well-suited to a commander whose force was becoming known as the swiftest and most efficient in the world.

  The young lord, in pressing his current territorial claim, had found common cause with his northern neighbour, Balt. Both rulers would enjoy carving off a slice of these western meadowlands as richly carpeted thresholds for their powerful domains. Malvin, now adjusting his visor to shade his eyes, watched the elder monarch approach. As the two noble households drew together he spurred his horse forward through the mob of knights and retainers, greeting his ally with a shout and a brotherly handclasp.

  Their meeting made a gala scene, the heraldry of the two great kingdoms converging and mingling like bright confetti. Lusty cheers sounded, weapons flourished in air, and the skirling of pipes and trumpets rose up festive beneath the blue dome of sky. The exuberance spread like a wave to the outer reaches of the horde, raising shouts from the ranks of Shemitish bowmen who marched in the pay of the allies, from mounted Zamoran mercenaries, and from motley crowds of spear-shaking peasants whose masses stretched off into the morning haze.

  Bright was their array, glorious their purpose, and there remained but one obstacle to their mission. It lay in the red, black, and green tracings and massings of the army which opposed them.

  The force stretched across the plain to westward, their backs to the Tybor River. The assembled host of proud Aquilonia consisted of battle-hard legions from the royal garrisons at Shamar and Tarantia, tall Gundermen mustered at double-time from the chill northern marches, and Bossonians in their forest-green doublets, summoned eastward from the Pictish frontier. Numbering a mere thousand or two horsemen backed by a dozen thousand men afoot, their weapons seemed to add but little to the forests of spears and halberds, the meadows of feathery arrow-fletchings, and the razored thickets of swords which had sprouted overnight on the Tybor plain.

  The Aquilonian officers waited in their saddles, well forward in the ranks. Their mounts ranged about a single golden banner beneath which brooded their legendary commander, King Conan. No Aquilonian he by birth; rather, a burly, dark-maned northern savage who made an imposing figure astride Sheol, his coal-black Zamboulan charger. Man and horse alike glistened darkly in the ebon, gold-chased plate armour of the Black Dragons, his elite palace guard.

  Conan was not one, sober men said, to let a sizeable chunk of Aquilonian soil be wrested from him by the revival of an ill-remembered territorial claim—not even in the face of treacherous collusion by two eastern neighbours. His army, though smaller than his foe men’s, stood ready to fight. This was proven once and for all, as he chose that moment—the meeting of the two enemy kings—to raise high his broadsword and bellow forth the command, “Attack!”

  The trumpets’ angry blatting echoed his words and heralded the first stroke of war: a flight of arrows from the front of the Aquilonian line. The projectiles rose steeply together, flashing in unison as they arched beneath the sun, and stooped hungrily toward the foremost ranks of Ophirean and Nemedian pikemen.

  Some of the shafts may have fallen short, or glanced harmlessly from enemy shields; but the fabled, lethal accuracy of the Bossonian longbowmen was proven as ragged gaps opened miraculously in the foe men’s ranks. Among the survivors could be seen a backward cringing and a faint, murmured confusion at this sudden rain of feathered death.

  A second, less simultaneous volley of arrows flashed skyward, and a third. Then the first wave of Aquilonian knights charged, and the loosing abruptly ceased, lest the bowmen’s clothyard shafts strike their armoured backs. These warriors—seasoned horsemen from the province of Poitain, bounding and plunging alongside rakish, richly mounted Tarantian nobles—galloped through narrow openings in the archers’ line to bear down on the enemy. Heavy in their plate and mail, the horsemen gathered speed with a thunder of hoofbeats that tremored beneath the soles of every watcher.

  Now came the chance for the Shemitish archers, from their places in the Nemedian and Ophirean flanks, to strike at the charging Aquilonian cavalry. Their shorter, thicker bows and shafts were plied ably and swiftly, but could do little damage to the fast-moving armoured force. Here and there a mount stumbled, or a rider crumpled and fell; but most of the black-clad knights bore the razor-tipped rain
without scathe. Shrugging off arrows like tiresome gnats, they hunched lower in their saddles and couched their red-pennoned lances to a deadly horizontal.

  They smote the enemy line, the impact echoing down its length like the measured crash of an ocean wave striking a broad, stony beach. The gleaming fence of pikes, already broken and depopulated by arrow flights, cut and jabbed but a few riders out of their saddles. The charging knights, abandoning their lances in the crushed breasts of luckless defenders, quickly drew broadswords, maces and flails. With these they set about opening paths for the cheering Aquilonian footsoldiers, mostly red-jerkined Gundermen who came swarming and shouting up behind them.

  Again it was the turn of the Shemitish mercenaries to loose their arrows. This time their shafts had more effect against the half-armoured footmen. But of a sudden, their crossfire was obstructed. The hindrance was their own allied Nemedian and Ophirean cavalry, who spurred forward in the hope of wreaking bloodier revenge.

  It so happened that the eastern allies, pressed back against their own ranks by the onslaught of mounted knights and foot-bourne harriers, found their avenues of attack closed. Their bravest riders, desperate to join the fight, tried the only possible expedient: the frenzied cavalry pushed through gaps in either flank to assault the enemy. Their only strategy was to engage Aquilonian foot and horse soldiers by the shortest possible route, from either side.

  But their rude plan failed to reckon with their enemies’ most murderous weapon, the Bossonian longbow. The lank northern archers, screened now by a row of spearmen crouching low along the Aquilonian line, were provided with tall, bulky targets moving straight across their vision at near range. The cruel-hearted northmen, thanking ice-eyed northern gods for their good luck, found themselves free to loose, and draw, and loose again at will. Their long-practised skills were put to a leisurely test; in meeting it, their questing shafts sought out every crease in the Ophireans’ armour, every slack, forgotten buckle, every Nemedian page-boy’s ill-polished, rusty scale. Or else—if the angle was perfect, the shaft well-turned and its tip properly squared and waxed—the arrow would drive straight through a sheet of steel forged thick as a knife blade, with enough force left to pierce a ribcage and a throbbing, straining heart.

  The jesting bowmen called each mark loudly. They wagered together as they fought, gaining or losing a purse or a wench on the twang of a bowstring. Pairing their skills, they let fly in teams; more than one eastern knight, feeling a rap on his hauberk, glanced carelessly aside just in time to see a second well-aimed shaft rushing into his eye through his helmet’s visor-slit. Some enemy riders galloped onward bristling arrows like bright-quilled hedgehogs, dead in the saddle; others lived, yet found themselves unable to fight with a hand pinned to a chest, a thigh to a screaming horse, or a tongue to a shattered jawbone.

  Of those heroic knights of Nemedia and Ophir who sallied forth from their embattled line, ’twas doubtful whether any would ultimately have survived the Bossonian barbs. But the next turn of battle freed them from their feathered torment. Fate left a few score of them alive—to face the charge of the elite Aquilonian cavalry reserve, led by the dreaded King Conan himself.

  The sullen western monarch, watching for an opening, saw his chance in the rash charge of the enemy horsemen. Now his splendidly mounted Black Dragons thundered out through the line of archers and spearmen and drove straight across the tattered remnants of enemy cavalry. The last few of those died obediently before his knights’ hurtling lances; onward then the king and his company galloped, past the rearmost ranks of cheering, ax-waving Gundermen, to exploit the temporary gap the enemy charge had created in the Ophirean right flank. Their goal, clearly, was to drive straight to the heart of the milling host and engage its commanders.

  That meant facing, first, regiments of Shemitish bowmen. The lean, sun-browned mercenaries, clad in belted sheepskins and brass-bound leather caps, sped a dense flight of arrows at the approaching wave of cavalry. Yet their bows and shafts, cut from brittle, short-limbed oak rather than the pliant yew of the northern forests, lacked force of penetration. On seeing how little effect their first arrows had against Tarantian steel, the Shemites aimed the second flight less truly, even though the range was growing shorter. Their third volley was a mere aimless convulsion, loosed in desperation as the flying cavalry smashed into their ranks.

  Men and weapons were ground beneath iron hooves; many an Aquilonian sword sheared away two or three mercenaries’ lives in a single, furious swath. Against the steel-clad frenzy, the southerners’ short, bronze blades were even more useless than their bows. And so the Shemites—those not slain in the first thundering heartbeats of close battle—turned to flee. Swiftly infecting the ranks behind them with their panic and confusion, they left only vacancy and chaos in the teeth of the Aquilonian onslaught.

  It made a noble picture: the wide-drawn sketchings of red and black sending forth a darkly gleaming crescent, a talon curving out to pierce deep into the blue formation. At its needle-like intrusion, die denser body of troops deformed as if in pain—not just the blue segment, but equally the grey-brown mass welded beside it against the grinding battlefront. Along the widening breach some masses of men, blue and brown alike, surged forward to fight; others recoiled more swiftly, their motion causing a swirling disruption of the once neat pattern.

  Before long even the central pageant—the cluster of many-coloured flags surrounding the eastern commanders—seemed to falter. The bright-hued assemblage drifted aimlessly, jostled and eroded by the rushing currents of fugitives on all sides; then, as the flailing axes and maces of charging Aquilonian horsemen clove nearer, the elite formation began to melt and recede. There remained no longer a bright bubble for the darting steel pinprick to pierce; only gaudy, scattering shreds, the retinues of fleeing nobles and officers.

  Their disintegration joined that of the broader formation and became a general, disorderly retreat. Whole sections of the pattern collapsed and flowed rearward, leaving other masses dangerously exposed. These were promptly encircled and obliterated by the lines of red and black which now, to the shriek of trumpets, surged forward all along the front.

  II

  The Stricken Field

  At long last the grim priestess Night obscured the Tybor plain. Stealing across it like death’s dark nursemaid, she shaded the staring eyes of the dead and trailed her discreet veil across grisly scenes left in battle’s wake. From behind her in the east crept forth a swollen, prurient moon, whose prying eye sought to reveal all in lurid brightness. But its gaze had thus far been foiled by clouds; also by the smoke of burning farmsteads low down near the horizon, where its gloating visage cast a fitful yellow gleam.

  From the east likewise came a bulky shambling figure, picking its way between the heaped-up remains of men and horses. It was a primal sight: a man, possibly—else a weary god or imp of battle, walking slumped and unsteady from fatigue and wounds. Yet he moved resolutely westward with a hint of unguessed strength held in reserve.

  The shambler was mottled and blackened with gore, some of it drily crusted, some still oozing dark wetness. Girdled by the hacked, ragged remnants of a battle-suit with nearly every plate of armour cut or cast away, he bulked otherwise naked under a lank, clotted mane of hair. Helmet-less, he bore in one hand a longsword, fine and costly in its manufacture. The sword of a king it was, but notched now, and foul with the blood and excrement of battle. Its point he let drag carelessly behind him in the trampled, gory grass as he trudged doggedly onward, avoiding the more impassable drifts of corpses by the gloom of the half-shrouded moon.

  Of a sudden he paused, watchful, at the sound of a human cry from one of corpse piles. It came again: a low, throaty moan, seeming to issue from somewhere in the deep shadow of a fallen horse, the dead beast already bloating in the spring warmth. He shambled near, gazing sombrely down to pierce the gloom. At length he distinguished the outline of a dark-caped footman, a soldier of Ophir by his garb.

  The man was pinned
face-down to earth by a broken cavalry lance. Its point had passed through his vitals into the ground, where it held firm, its long splinters still blossoming palely upward from his back. The man’s peaked helm was now cast aside, his hair tousled, the grass within his reach uprooted or pounded flat by his day-long struggles. As he feebly raised his head from the soil to call out yet again, the moonlight showed off his blondish beard and moustache darkly crusted with the blood that had streamed down from his mouth and nostrils.

  “God’s mercy, please! In Mitra’s name, a balm... aah-agk!” His throaty plaint was cut short as the warrior’s sword hacked deep into his neck near the nape.

  It was not a clean blow, yet it did its merciful work. When the body fell slack, the swordsman dragged his weapon free and turned wearily to shamble onward.

  He had not gone far when he glimpsed another feeble motion amid the corpses. With steps growing heavy and reluctant, he turned aside once again to investigate. Here lay a giant Gunderman, sorely wounded but alive. His face shone ashen; his eye and tooth gleamed yellowly in a stray shard of moonlight. He made no sound except steady, ragged gasps, and yet he struggled mightily, dragging himself onward through the grass. The wound to his belly was plainly mortal, and must have been agonizing. But the man’s blood trail showed that he had crept a long distance, snail-like, greasing his way with his own entrails.

  The longsword arched high and made a heavy clank, striking the rim of the wounded man’s bronze helm as it chopped into his skull. Its notched edge caught in the bone, and proved devilish hard to withdraw. Tugging at it, murmuring oaths of blood and fire, the lone warrior paused for breath. An ill fancy caused him to eye the windrows of slain around him, and he shuddered with guilty, superstitious dread. He wondered how many more of these, his fallen subjects and butchered foes, might yet live, gasping unseen in darkness, buried alive under mountains of corpses—or whether every one of them might return to life this night, his loyal friends and enemies alike, to come groping after him with vengeful, claw-like hands....