Conan the Outcast Page 15

  Khumanos reached the pillar, slowed, and circled it, halting at the side where Conan remembered seeing the carving of the many-headed tree. Likely the rune was visible in the pale starlight reflecting off the hard, glassy ground. The priest bent before the pillar, as if to look closer. Then—Conan swore he was not mistaken—Khumanos knelt before the monolith, bowing his head to the ground as if in abject worship.

  A shiver plucked at Conan’s shoulder blades while he watched. An ill thing, this seemed— but then, what did it really mean? Was the sar-sen-stone still regarded by pilgrims as a holy place? Perhaps he could learn more from Khumanos concerning the fate of this ancient city. He vowed to corner the priest and ask him at the first opportunity—but not tonight.

  Early next morning, true to Khumanos’s word, the procession was under way again, toiling over the low, blood-caked hills that separated the valley barrens from the dead sea floor. The band made the crossing under the day’s most intense sun; during the worst of it, Conan dismounted from his camel and lent a reluctant shoulder first to the rigorous uphill push, then to restraining the triple caisson from rolling too precipitously down the farther slope.

  The idol was even heavier and more unwieldy than he could have anticipated; its dusty, shrouded bulk had a way of collecting and radiating back the desert heat; and on top of it all, it steered badly. Even so, the descent was managed successfully, with only one man’s back crushed under the groaning wheels. Once they descended to the hard alkali floor of the ancient sea, the way was clear; with no detour for water necessary or possible, the track lay straight ahead, toward the notch between the red mountain range and the black one.

  Travel continued until sunset, when a blinding alkali storm blew up. Then the labourers crawled beneath their idol to gnaw a sparse dinner and sip their meagre ration of water. Conan, feeling less than gregarious, huddled in the lee of his camel. Covering his face against the rolling curtains of stinging grit, he dozed and dreamt once again of racing chariot wheels.

  Several times during the night he arose to gaze out on the desert, windless now, stretching white beneath a velvet canopy pricked by clear, cold stars. It was peaceful, deathly still. But by dawn’s faint light the demon-winds lashed up again, predictably, shrouding the world in a fuming pall of alkali dust. With their fury came yet again the eerie creak of wooden wheels.

  This time the wheels rattled closer at hand. Conan flinched and his camel snorted in outrage as a huge, rumbling shape hurtled past in the gale. The northerner's first thought was that one of the caissons had broken loose—but that was impossible; in any case, the wheel that nearly grazed him had been finely crafted, spoked, with metal rims.

  Was his wretched party under attack in the storm? If so, by what manner of inhuman warriors? As he squinted through tear-streaming eyes, another dim shape loomed up in the swirling dust.

  Snatching up his knife and, through long habit, a water bottle, Conan rolled to his feet. He crouched and leaped, hurling himself over the rail of the chariot as it bounded past. He would learn the mystery of these phantom raiders or die trying.

  The driver at the reins needed no killing. He was already dead—a leathern, grinning mummy in pitted armour., bound to the rail of the team-less car by his tangled rawhide traces. Overhead, a tattered sheepskin canopy caught the gale; it filled like a lateen sail, lashing the vehicle onward. The remains of the horses, and possibly of one or two passengers, rattled below in the dust; a tangle of harness, frayed hide, and worn old bones were all that depended from the chariot-tongue.

  The long pole, meant to be yoked to the horses’ necks, curved down smoothly under the fighting-platform and emerged at the chariot's rear in the form of a bronze-sheathed runner to keep the car from tipping over backward. Teamless now, the platform teetered between the tongue and the rear skid, which acted as a rudder. It was the wind and no other earthly force that propelled the car on its driver-less course. Here, then, was the phantom chariot told of in local legend. Conan only half-remembered the story; he had thought it a prank to be foisted on raw hands in the caravan trade, a lurid myth intended to widen eyes and vex dreams around dying camp fires.... But the next moment, brittle planks gave way underfoot; Conan, with his legs tangled in the harness trailing under the car, was forced to cling and struggle to regain his footing and keep from being dragged with the desiccated remains behind the hurtling car.

  The story of the phantom chariot was an obscure one; but now Conan remembered that young Jabed had recited a version of it in the camp outside Qjara. Some two score years previously, so the boy had prattled, in the reign of King Semiarchos’s father Demiarchos, the old king’s younger brother Pronathos had set out on an expedition to enhance his family’s wealth and his city’s glory. With a hundred men-at-arms, assorted camels, horses, chariots and supply wagons, brave Pronathos rode off in search of the legendary Stone Ship, an unimaginably ancient vessel that was fabled to lie in a remote reach of desert, laden to its stone gunwales with golden coins, weapons and armour.

  An apocryphal story this, even less plausible than the phantom chariot tale itself, and only half-believed by the cultured citizens of Qjara. But in a desert outpost lacking near neighbours and foreign wars to occupy them, the hardy youth of the town were ever prey to such boisterous escapades, as they were to the violent lure of becoming temple warriors.

  So Pronathos and his hundred explorers rode off into legend. A fortnight after their departure a fierce dust storm blew up, blanketing the eastern desert for days and wiping out any trace of their passage. The expedition was never heard from again; nor was any evidence of their fate brought back with the searching parties dispatched by the grieving king.

  But in later years, it began to be whispered in Bedouin tents that the souls of the treasure-seekers had been captured by the storm, and now sought to lure other adventurers to share their doom. It was murmured that, during the fierce, flukish winds that so often raged through certain desert valleys at dusk and dawn, the faint creaking of chariot wheels could be heard. These, it was said, were the riders and wagons of Pronathos’s lost troop; hounded by gold-lust and the curse of the desert gods, they still combed the waste for the fabled treasure of the Stone Ship, all in vain.

  But here, as Conan could intimately tell from the splintered wood he so desperately clutched, and the racing wheels that rumbled and slewed on either side of him—here was the true source of the legend. The chariots and wagons of Pronathos’s band, driven like leaves before a gale and still carrying the grisly remains of their passengers, roamed the desert yet. By some strange whim of the gods the wagons regularly traversed the flat, dead sea—rolling forth at dusk, back at dawn with the freakish but predictable winds, shuttling to and fro on a cosmic errand no human mind could hope to understand.

  And the wilted skeleton on this fine old chariot—whom Conan clutched next to him with brotherly closeness as he clung to the vehicle's sparse, rattling frame—was it the lich of old Pronathos himself? The remaining crusts of silver inlay on the corpse’s split, flaking armour. seemed to suggest so. Seeing this, Conan mumbled a respectful greeting and tried to afford the venerable commander more room at the chariot rail.

  Knowing all this—or rather, surmising it as he strove to keep his balance on the wildly veering car—Conan was faced with a decision: whether to cling to his perch, or whether to fling himself off onto the desert floor, to find his way back to the camp in the blinding storm. He could jump clear, he judged, without great risk of bodily harm—providing that another vehicle in the ghostly caravan did not loom out of the haze to trundle him flat. Quite likely, once the wind abated, he could walk back to find his camel and him employer’s band. The water bottle that dangled beside him, pinned to a crevice of the chariot with his Ilbarsi knife, promised him a day or two’s survival.

  Even so, holding tight to the rail, he experienced a sense of velocity and surging adventure. Here was the key to a riddle that had vexed the desert folk for generations. He felt compelled to see the
mystery through to its source. If at the end of it lay a reward from King Semiarchos—or, as the legends hinted, a fabulous treasure—why, so much the better! For this one mad moment, it was the lure of adventure that drew him.

  Actually, as he had learned at sea, flying before the wind was easier than facing its fury with one’s feet solidly rooted on land. Its force seemed gentler and less parching, and it did not tug so fiercely at the cowl and skirts of his cloak. Overhead the chariot’s ragged canopy belled and shivered occasionally, but did not flutter in the gale; and around him the dust, which ground like a harsh torrent over desert wanderers, ghosted forward with him in tall, graceful curtains shot through with fleeting sunbeams. Only rarely did these vapours part enough to show him the dim outline of other vehicles in the train—such as, straight ahead, the high, swaying wagon that had first rolled so near him. But as he listened from moment to moment, catching on different sides the creak of wheels in varying notes, he sensed he was part of a swift and numerous host.

  The mad race thundered on for the better part of an hour—southward, to Conan’s judgement—before the wind showed any sign of abating. Then, abruptly, it ended. The wheels beneath him slowed and creaked to a halt; dust clouds melted and settled to earth like dying ghosts, leaving him in the midst of an eerie landscape.

  It was a remote, untravelled canyon of the Blood of Attalos mountains. On all sides the hills ran down red, their colour sanguine above the bony white of the dead sea floor. To the rear, the hills merged anonymously together, their slopes artfully overlapping to conceal the entry to this blind inlet; ahead, the tallest peaks of the range heaped up gorily to the sky. Around him, a fleet of derelict wagons and chariots stood bleaching in the sun. And a little beyond them, embayed in the broad inlet formed by the blood-red hills, rose a jagged stone outcrop in the rough form of a ship.

  Here, then, was the ghost caravan of Pronathos—a half-score sturdily built vehicles, decrepit now and rubbed bare of paint and gilt by desert winds, with pennants and awnings dangling in grey tatters and festoons, yet still capable of thundering through the desert on the wings of a gale and striking fear into the hearts of camel-drovers. Stepping down from his own chariot—which had stopped a hundred paces short of the others, probably because of the extra burden of his own weight—and taking up his knife and waterskin, he trudged to the others and looked into them one by one.

  Some few of them contained mortal remains—armoured skeletons still huddled where they had died, trying, presumably, to ride out the ferocity of that first great dust storm. Little else they contained; the wagon-bottoms were stove in with age, and all the sacking and harnesses trailed loose, dragged behind along with the bones of oxen and asses. The vehicles were reduced to mere trundling skeletons of their former selves—made light and bare as if by supernatural design, to fly before the demon-winds.

  And yet here, if only in death, they seemed to have found their goal—for the rock outcrop ahead, from its odd, fortuitous shape, could scarcely be anything but the Stone Ship of fable. Its prow reared high and sharp, a jutting wedge formed by layered sheaves of frothy, porous rock. Its gunwales sloped back about the length of a Turanian trireme, falling away at last to merge with the white-rimed soil near the stern. Even the stub of a mast was visible, along with herringbone ridges down the side that could have been oars—in all, a most astonishing mimicry in natural stone of a seagoing vessel founded in quaint, antique style.

  And yet, Conan decided, it could hardly have been a deliberate sculpture by the hand of man—for the adornments were too wild, with stone ridges and spires too wavy and fanciful to imitate any true vessel. It was as if the rough form of a ship had been laid down first, then frosted and embellished by a whimsical titan working in liquid stone, to create a shape that rose elfin and ornate even before the assault of countless years of gritty desert winds.

  Picking his way toward it, Conan was bemused by certain debris he saw jutting from the soil—bones, scraps of armour., the frame and wheel of a broken chariot. These proved to him that the expedition had, after all, found its way to this spot before meeting with extinction. A cruel irony it was indeed, if before dying they had found their goal, perhaps even seen the treasure it was said to contain.... Fired by these thoughts, Conan hastened his steps. He bounded up the final slope toward the stone monument, vaulted to the rail and cast his eyes within.

  He trod the stern of a true ship, of this he was sure. Stony and ancient as it was, and frosted and filigreed as well, the layout of the deck was unmistakable. Transom and tiller, windlass and oar-bench, all were disposed efficiently enough to set to sea on the first tide. A desert-bred man might have been uncertain about such things, but not Conan, with his experience on far-flung oceans. As he climbed the shallowly listing angle of the deck, an explanation came to him which, if bizarre, was at least possible.

  This desert basin was most certainly an ancient sea; from where he stood, gazing out over the crumbling rail, he could see faint lines and shelves high up on the slopes of the red hills. These, to his mind, represented the sea’s former waterlines and beaches, in times far past living memory. Since the valley had been a sea, he had to assume it had sailors, too—whether of the human breed or of an older race it scarcely mattered, for in any case the demands of shipbuilding would have been much the same. Judging from the look of the craft, its sailors must have been man-sized and fairly skilled in the ways of the sea.

  But even the most skilful sailors occasionally lose a ship—and that was where he now stood, on the deck of a ship sunk in some prehistoric gale or battle—an oared ship, by the look of it, possibly a man of war, with a complement of some two hundred men, or pre-men. Gazing closely at the oar-benches, he almost imagined he could see ancient bones protruding from the yellowish stone—was that a claw-curled hand there, and the bowl of a skull, brown and gnarled like an old bread crust...? If such they were, they were half-embedded and half worn away, the stone encroaching mercifully to obscure their shapes.

  The stone, the growing, enfolding stone, that was the key. Gazing about him, he knew now that the jagged, frothy stuff was coral. For, in the warm, shallow reaches of the Vilayet, had he not seen even objects shaped by man in recent years—anchor-stones, amphorae and the keels of scuttled vessels—encrusted and cemented firmly to the bottom by hungry, swift-growing coral?

  Such was the case here, most obviously. This ancient ship had foundered, to become the crown of a coral reef that grew up around it. In time the living stone filled in the hollows of the rotting timbers, until nothing remained but a ship’s living statue. Then, when the sea melted away, the hard, obdurate coral outlived it, enduring over centuries or aeons to the present day. A prank of the gods, indeed, Conan thought—one to make the legend of the phantom chariots seem like the most fleeting, transient jest!

  Coming to the midships part of the vessel, Conan drew a further conclusion: whatever cargo the stone ship may have contained, Pronathos's men had found and rifled. For here, in the broadest, deepest part of the hull, an excavation had been made in recent years. Coral timbers had been cut and hacked away, opening an oblong cavity whose size was not explained by the small amount of stony debris that lay about. Vacancy now yawned down to the bed of hard, round pebbles that Conan easily recognized as ballast-stones.

  As to the fate of the treasure, a glance around the derelict provided no clue. It might have been buried elsewhere for safekeeping; or again, it might have been carted any distance on the finders’ ill-fated journey into the desert. There stood the great wagons, four surviving ones standing tall and sturdy, their rent sheepskin canopies hanging slack in the scorching stillness. The staved-in boards of their beds seemed to imply that their loads could have been dropped anywhere in the waste—and if it was heavy gold, why, be-like it still remained there in the dust, waiting to be found by some half-mad desert rider... who would think it a mirage, most likely, or go the rest of the way mad with excitement.

  Jape upon jape, irony piled on irony—t
he gods were in a droll mood today! Conan strode onward and upward, meaning to take in the view from the ship’s bow. It rose high above the desert, ending in a jagged, coral-webbed fragment of jib.

  Stepping onto the broad expanse of the foredeck, he imagined that the rough, crusted planking resounded hollowly under his weight. Breathing the parched air, he scanned the vast, desolate canyon around him for any glint of yellow metal. Then came a sharp, grating crack; the hoary planks yielded underfoot, and the lone explorer plunged into darkness.

  Late the following day, at a point not much further along their route, the solemn procession of Exalted Priest Khumanos was joined by a cloaked, hooded wanderer. It was their scout Conan, returning from his unexplained foray in the desert. Having travelled all night and day, and the last dozen hours of his trek without water, he moved heavily to their eyes, swaying as he walked and evidently near to collapse.

  Khumanos did not question him, and he volunteered nothing of his adventure; but he drank greedily and seemed happy to regain his camel, food, and blankets. One night’s rest, even with the howling wind storms., seemed enough to restore him. By early next morning he had set out again to the oasis of Tal’ib to draw more water for their party's trek to Qjara.

  XIV

  Convocation

  In the shimmering heat of desert noon a lone rider approached the walls of Qjara. His mount was in good trim, but heavily laden; the rider himself was a tall, massive man. The muscles of his broad shoulders rippled under sun-bronzed, sweat-sheened skin as he hauled the beast out of its smooth, loping run. He reined it to a halt before the caravan gate.

  "It is the outcast heretic Conan!” the guard before the gate called immediately to his fellows atop the wall. His announcement brought down their derisive laughter.

  "Well,” he then demanded of the traveller, "what do you want here, northling? Was our eastern desert too harsh for you?” The gatekeeper’s courage was evidently pricked to the fore by the lances and barbed arrows of the city guards on the wall above him. "If it’s drink you want, now,” he ventured, "there is water aplenty in yon river! And if you need a place to rest... why, lay your head in the weeds of its bank, as you formerly did! Ungrounding his pike-butt as he spoke, the guard laid its shaft diagonally across the gate to bar the way. “For, once proscribed by the temple of the One True Goddess, you may nevermore enter these walls!”