Conan the Outcast Read online

  “If you believe this day's outcome depends on what sword you use.. Zaius's face did not unbend even enough to form a sneer; his eyes scarcely rested on Conan. “I merely wanted to see that the proper forms were observed. You and the weapon you possess are as nothing to our city and our temple. You have no self-discipline, no honour, and no power in this contest.”

  “Insults from your purse are cheap coin, Zaius,” Conan spat back. "Do not attempt to awe me with them—it will not save your tawdry hide!”

  The temple champion almost deigned to shrug, meanwhile keeping his gaze aloof. "It matters not, barbarian—do you not see, you are already defeated! By the end of this match, you and everything you stand for will be utterly obliterated, washed away in a welter of purifying blood... but enough now, on with the combat!”

  Queen Regula, during the exchange of threats, had already begun drawing back; now the temple warriors moved protectively with her. The field was left to the combatants.

  As they retreated, Conan had an odd feeling about his rival’s assurances. The temple warrior had seen Conan fight—was Zaius then a madman to face this duel so confidently?—a true zealot, perhaps, or a sorcerer? Was his mistress Saditha, perhaps, that rare sort of goddess who enjoyed taking a direct, unambiguous hand in mortal struggles? Glancing up uneasily at the portico of the temple, Conan saw her graven face stare down on him, mask-like and inscrutable.

  The arrogant temple champion saluted, his gleaming sword held vertical in one hand before him; Conan made a similar gesture, understanding it to be part of the tradition. The distance between the fighters was still laughably wide, a half-dozen paces or more. Conan levelled his sword and began stalking forward on the balls of his feet.

  Zaius, meanwhile, made his opening moves. Raising his sabre high, he flexed both wrists agilely so that the sword described a flashing, difficult arc in the air above him. Then he lowered his stance and braced his square, rangy shoulders.

  Swinging the blade mightily, he sheared off his own head.

  The stroke was tightly and rigidly controlled, unlike anything Conan had ever seen. The slender sword, miraculously, retained enough force to slice cleanly through the taut column of flesh, sinew, and bone that was the warrior’s neck. Sword master Zaius’s head whirled high, borne up on a spraying, gushing fountain of copper-bright blood. Even as it tumbled to earth and rebounded, Zaius’s nerveless body crumpled with it, spasming with a few random twitches. The ghastly vacancy of his neck still spouted redly, and his sabre clattered loose on the stones of the Agora.

  This astounding sight was greeted with breathless silence from the onlookers—not with cries of horror, barely even a gasp of surprise. One moment, then two, the stillness lasted; it was finally broken when Conan barked a short, incredulous laugh.

  "Crom, what can this mean?” He turned for explanation to the nearest spectators. "What sort of low, clownish farce

  “Silence!” Queen Regula’s voice issued sharply from the front of the royal pavilion. "Foreigner, defile not this sacred moment! Enough of blasphemy and invoking your heathen gods!

  “Faithful of Saditha,” she now proclaimed, stepping forth into blazing sunlight, “I did not foresee this event. Our Goddess, all-knowing as she is, chooses to keep certain matters secret from mere mortals. But be assured, you are greatly privileged to stand here this day. You have experienced an act of supreme will, an expression of faith’s highest power! Citizens of Qjara, you have witnessed a miracle!”

  At her heartfelt words, a murmur of acclaim began to build from the dumbstruck watchers. Conan, clutching his sword in mute uncertainty, watched the crowd warily. Heads around him began to wag and mutter, considering the fate of the one detached head lying forlorn in its red puddle on the paves.

  “Not in three hundred years has a feat like this graced our temple ceremonies,” Regula went on. "And never in Qjara’s history has a sacrifice been made with such masterful skill. No living man could have achieved it, other than the great Zaius—none else possessed his skill, his discipline, and his single-minded devotion to temple doctrine. Saditha has seen her champion’s merit, and has favoured him for it. He has been allowed to offer himself in sacrifice. In so doing, he takes his place among the immortals!”

  The buzzing, murmuring ferment continued to spread through the Agora, with the high priestess continuing to build and embellish on it. “Doubt not, faithful ones, the lesson of this feat is nothing less than a proof of immortality! You have seen it; the evidence is plain to your eyes. How else could mighty Zaius, having first cut himself to the core and slain his mortal husk, gone on to complete the sacrifice and finish dividing his lifeless body in twain? Only by a miraculous effort of will, such as pure faith in the One True Goddess can inspire—only by triumphing over death itself!

  "That, Qjarans, was his final lesson for us, the power of faith! That is what makes this a glorious, epochal hour! Hear and remember it, as you and your children worship Zaius down the centuries to come. Our city may have lost a future king, but we have gained an immortal hero!”

  Queen Regula had moved forward into the Agora, coming as near to Zaius’s body as she could without setting her richly sandalled foot in the darkening puddle of his blood. As she spoke, she beckoned forth attendants with one gracious hand; these knelt and began wrapping his gory remains in fresh white linen, one large bundle and one small, working quickly to keep the blood from soaking through. As they laboured, Conan took the opportunity to pose a question.

  “What of me, 0 Queen?” he demanded. "Zaius has cheated me of my chance to even things—”

  “Cheated!” Queen Regula flared at him. "Foreigner, in point of fact you were bested! Defeated, more surely than if it were your own head lying severed on the cobbles!” She pulled herself erect, a statue of granite dignity. "The ritual sacrifice was made, blood was shed for the Goddess... and Zaius’s was the hand that shed it! He is victor, and his victory shall live down the ages.”

  Standing apart from the Cimmerian across the fast-caking pool of blood, flanked now by temple warriors who moved forward to protect her, she turned the full, theatric effect of her voice and scathing finger against him. "As for your part in this... it was nothing, nay, worse than nothing! For it was you, a foreigner, hopelessly ignorant of our ways, who gaped at our hero’s demise! You it was who mocked him, and who defiled his most sacred moment with a rude guffaw and vile heathen curses!”

  Regula, with unerring priestly instinct, seemed to recognize that Zaius’s exaltation required somebody else’s damnation. Now she kindled the crowd’s resentment against Conan, fanning it mercilessly with high-flown rhetoric. He could feel it in their sullen looks and low murmurs, and he tightened his grip on the sabre-hilt, half convinced that he would be seized and rent apart in a religious frenzy.

  "The penalty for such boorishness—well, it is no more than the penalty for anyone who disgraces himself in a temple duel. From this hour you are as nothing to us, Conan of the Hinterlands. You have no longer any place in Qjara, nor in the sight of the One True Goddess.” "Wait, O Queen,” Conan protested, "whatever that means, it is unfair! I did nothing to deserve it, I harmed no one unjustly... I helped to save your city!” Turning from the stern faces of Regula and the crowd to the bearded visage of the king himself, Conan called out, "Semiarchos! You recognized my service to Qjara and placed me under the protection of the temple—”

  "From which you are expelled,” the king answered gruffly, "no differently than any Qjaran whose conduct breaches our code.” His gaze was turned sternly aside from the Cimmerian; Afriandra’s face, too, was averted with a fixed, tear-stained frown, where she sat beside her father under the royal canopy.

  "Come now, this is madness—Zaius was a fool, don’t you see...? He threw away his own life...” Impatiently, Conan turned back toward those who had come with him to the duel. The taverner Anax and his employees, Babeth and the rest, spoke no word of reassurance. These folk were themselves the pariahs of respectable Qjaran society; but n
ow, wearing looks of righteous, tragical piety, they kept their faces sullenly averted from Conan’s.

  “Before Crom, you are all hypocrites! How can this be.. Conan's gaze at last sought out the four ragged children, who dangled their spindly legs atop the nearby wall. They, too, failed to look his way, though Conan thought he caught the briefest, mournful glance from tiny Inos.

  "Very well, then,” the northerner grumbled at last, "I have no love for Qjara! I planned to leave soon, in any case. If this fine sword.. he held high the sabre the temple warrior had given him "... will pay the cost of a camel, and water bags and provisions, then I will be gone from this place and vex you no more.”

  "It may be so,” Queen Regula proclaimed, keeping her gaze fixed loftily above his head. “I charge you, foreigner, conduct any business you must, but quit our city by nightfall on pain of death. From that hour forward, by Saditha's holy law, you are outcast!”

  XI

  The Outcast

  Along one side of the desert basin loomed the Mountains of Desperation. Opposite them, nearer the lone rider, reared the crimson flanks of the Blood of Attalos range, while farther ahead and to westward the bone-pale Fangs of Zhafur took a jagged bite out of the hot blue sky. Jagged, fanciful shapes they bore, as sketched to Conan by desert-wise Shemites in the dust of camp fires; the names and the ill legends associated with them probably varied from tribe to tribe among the local nomads. ’Twas a near certainty that no reliable map of these barren scarps existed, except the ones seared into the brains of seasoned raiders and caravan scouts by years of scorching desert sun.

  Between the fantastic peaks, a dusty reddish plain shimmered like the bottom of a vast copper kettle. Travellers passing this way, on top of the hardships and dangers they already faced, were vexed further with a thankless choice: whether to skirt the desolate basin’s edge and keep to the less scorching, less blinding parts of it, often in the misguided hope of finding water; or whether to cut straight across its centre and save time. Conan, alone atop his two-humped Turanian mount, had chosen the more direct course.

  Knowing well the harsh, carelessly lethal disposition of the deserts of eastern Shem and their inhabitants, he had not intended to come this far west—rather to swing northward toward Shadizar, via the lower passes of the Desperation chain and the border kingdoms of eastern Koth. But fate had paid him in false coin, decreeing that the first watering place along his route—an oasis well spoken of by camel-drovers and judged especially trustworthy this year in view of the water-wealth of nearby Qjara—lay bone-dry. Its palm trees browned and curled in the bleak sun, and its salt-rimmed bottom lay pitted with holes dug in vain quest for the vanished water.

  Conan, for his part, had not been so dangerously short of the precious essence as some recent travellers to the oasis. Their plight was evidenced by the mummies left parching in the sand nearby: camels there were, slain for the few last drams of cloying fluid left in their wilting humps, and human carcasses as well with throats laid open in fights over water, and half their stringy flesh gnawed away by starving jackals.

  So far, the Cimmerian had been fortunate enough not to meet any survivors. Thus he was spared the difficult choice between depleting his own reserve of water and putting the maddened supplicants out of their misery. He dreaded such encounters as a cruel, unmanly sort of battle—just one more of the many reasons he had intended to wait in Qjara for a plush northward caravan. One with plenty of extra stock, basket-covered carboys of wine, and possibly even a share of pay or cargo due him at the end of the trek.

  So much for his plans. The events that had expelled him from Qjara in defeat and disgust continued to vex his mind. For the warrior-priest Zaius to perform such a bizarre act of self-annihilation... why, even allowing for the peculiar beliefs of priestly fanatics in isolated desert lands, the deed hardly seemed to square with the man’s arrogant, opportunistic nature. Reflecting further on it, Conan decided it must have hinged on Princess Afriandra.

  But not on Zaius’s love of her—for the stiff-necked temple fighter seemed incapable of love as another man would experience it. Rather, it must have stemmed from his entitlement and possession of her, and the promise that had been made by her parents of marriage into the royal family and eventual kingship.

  Intensely ambitious, Zaius had nerved and honed himself to assume that highly public office, and practically laid claim to the role already. But on seeing that Afriandra would never submit to him—in particular on finding her in Conan's arms, and realizing that she would cling to and even flaunt the freedoms granted by her long lineage of kings and independent-minded priestesses—he had come to dread the union. He foresaw and feared the public humiliation that would inevitably follow, when word of her sexual and political independence became the meat of gossip.

  In spite of his lifelong submission to a female god, Conan guessed—or perhaps because of it— Zaius could never force himself to bow to a woman as his superior, or even his equal in everyday life. Nor would his stubborn pride allow him to back down from the high destiny ordained for him. This put the templar in an impossible trap.

  Fortunately—from Zaius’s desperate standpoint—his priesthood and the obscure traditions of Saditha’s warrior caste showed him the way out. Evidently, ritual suicide was respected and even exalted among temple warriors of old. By trading kingship for the even prouder and more public roles of martyrdom and godhood—by steeling his mind and body further, and resorting to a peculiarly apt form of physical discipline—the temple champion had salvaged his pride, which was after all more sacred to him than life itself.

  These things Conan had vaguely sensed about Zaius; his fate was not, in hindsight, so unaccountable. What rankled the northerner more was the fatuous, sheeplike reaction of the people of Qjara. It was a city he had loved—at least well enough to hold himself back from it—and had ultimately fought and bled for. He had risked greatly for the sake of its royal family; he had even considered biding there—fleetingly considered it, anyway, while entwined in the supple limbs of its fair young princess. There lay the rub:' Afriandra’s reaction, above all, struck Conan as supremely unfair.

  The folk of Qjara having been gulled by Zaius for years, with the formidable help of his high priestess, it was no surprise that they should fall for his final, outrageous imposture—carried out as it was under the guise of a just and solemn rite—nor that they should exalt him to heaven at the expense of a foreigner. Conan accepted all this, knowing the blinkered dullness of tame civilized folk.

  But Afriandra had seen through Zaius, or claimed to; she even viewed the high priestess Regula with a daughter’s scepticism. She first drew Conan into palace intrigues as a tool to shape her own future and her dynasty’s; then, when faced with the bloody consequences of her scheming, she joined the hue and cry of denunciation against him. That, to Conan, seemed at best thoughtless and at worst cynical, when a word or sign from her, even in secret, might have made him more inclined to linger and defend his reputation. She could at least have sent him on his way more tranquilly.

  Of course there was nothing new about it. Here he was for what seemed the hundredth time, embarked on a gruelling and dangerous journey because of a female. Whether trudging toward a woman, or off on a quest decreed by one, or fleeing one’s jealous wrath, the way was always hard.

  And now, because of the blighted oasis, his camel lacked the reserves of moisture and stamina needed to face the steeps of the Desperation range. He knew the animal must first be allowed to rest and replenish itself at a well-watered camp.

  Rather than turning back to Qjara, where he was unwanted, Conan chose to seek out a more westerly watering place he had heard whispers of—called by the nomads Tal’ib, or the City in the Waste. The site, though said to be a reliable source of water, was shunned as a topic of gossip by the desert riders he had diced with in Qjara's caravan quarter. Either they wished to give the place an ill repute to keep others away, or else they genuinely feared it.

  The latter mot
ive seemed more likely. If they wanted to keep strangers away, they need not mention it at all—yet rumours of water in the desert were hard to kill. On the other hand, what menace could possibly hover about the place to keep a man from the fluid he needed to survive? Wild animals, forbidding terrain, hostile tribes, all tended to be taken in stride and dealt with summarily if they came between the tough, clannish desert riders and the free use of an oasis.

  These hardy Bedouins feared only one thing: the supernatural. Reflecting on it, Conan realized that nothing else would account for their tone of dull avoidance and their mute resistance to further questioning about the City in the Waste.

  Even so, he found himself guiding his camel westward across the valley’s desolation. Oft-times ill spirits guarded a charm or treasure, after all. The taste of his stock of dates and figs had not yet grown cloying to his dusty mouth; his waterskins, though lighter now, sloshed reassuringly from his saddle bows; and the unknown threat of Tal'ib was still offset in his imagination by the faint lure of some unguessed prize.

  Late that afternoon a hot wind arose, rushing toward the slopes of the mountains to northward. Conan had spied what looked like the end of the valley ahead, lying under the glare of the declining sun; but now the wind raised clouds of fine dust and stinging alkali, making further travel impossible. He prepared for a gusty night. But around sunset the wind abruptly ceased, leaving the desert cool and tranquil under a canopy of black velvet spangled with countless stars.

  Such nights as this would have been perfect for travel; but then it would have been too hot to rest during the day, and in either case the sun would take its merciless toll. So he lay himself down to savour the night’s chill.

  Next morning, toward dawn, the wind returned. This time it roared southward, brisk and icy from the mountain canyons. With it came an odd impression. It may have been just a half-delirious dream; in any case, once Conan had unrolled from his blankets, the roiling dust and darkness were too thick to permit vision. But amid the soughing of the gale, he thought he heard heavy wheels trundling and creaking, like the wagons of an army rolling past in the night.