Conan the Great Read online

  “Nay, Prospero, do not turn the reinforcements back yet.” Conan’s face was pensive as he gazed into the flames. “The country behind us is secure, and our border forts will hold now. But Aquilonia has suffered insult from these eastern kings. I will think on how best to conclude this matter, and secure our land against further trespass.”

  With the comfort of sour wine, watery forager’s stew, and undersized camp chairs, their council lasted late into the night. Meanwhile, spoiling troopers roved the Tybor plain, seeking treasure amid the hacked carcasses. They had no need of torches, for the moon glared down brightly over the field of their ghastly victory.

  III

  Homecoming

  The royal palace at Tarantia swarmed with torch-lit shadows. The vaultings of its banquet hall boomed like a basswood drum, echoing fierce jungle rhythms. At the centre of the great room, before King Conan’s broad, onyx table, cavorted lithe black dancers of Kush. Lissome females, lovely in their tall headdresses and tight waist-wraps, sat on folded knees with their shapely posteriors toward the feast tables; they watched as intently as did the royal guests, while the men of their troupe danced a mad gavotte of spears and billowing torches.

  The black southerners leaped and tumbled like demons, hurling themselves over and beneath scything spear blades and scorching plumes of yellow flame. They brandished high their blazing spears, twirled and exchanged them, and at last crossed their long, wicked points in a razored steel grid work. Atop this perch the most agile of the dancers leaped to balance himself— barefoot, arms aloft, his dark skin shining with the sweat of exertion and daring. When at last the pounding crescendo of wooden drums ceased, the room’s breathless silence filled with shouts and cheers from the audience. They stood applauding at their tables, raising foamy goblets high in sloshing salute.

  The lead dancer, to renewed applause, somersaulted nimbly down from his spear trellis. As the lamps were unveiled, King Conan himself arose from his demi-throne at the royal table. “A brave performance, men of Kush! —better than any I recall seeing, even in the days when I myself ruled as king over a part of your distant homeland. But one trick I remember which I did not see tonight.”

  Laying a hand on the red chalcedony inlay of the ornate table before him, he vaulted lightly over it. His soft-booted feet easily cleared the goblets and wine ewers to land smoothly on the marble paves at the farther side. Adjusting the gold circlet of his imperial crown on his scar-seamed forehead, he strode forward, making an imposing, broad-shouldered figure among the lean dancers.

  “Have you forgotten this?” He reached out, seized a pair of the long-bladed assegais from two of the tolerant Kushites, and began twirling them in his big hands, stepping nimbly backward to place any bystanders outside the flaring, slicing arcs. In a moment the blazing wick-ends of the spears, fanned by their swift motion through air, traced bright, interlinking circles of flame in the dim-lit hall. At this, watchers and dancers alike laughed and applauded.

  “And furthermore, lest you think the risks these warriors take are mere mummery”—the king deftly halted the spears’ flaring orbits and grasped their thick shafts one in either fist, spear blades downward. Then, bunching his mighty shoulders, arching his entire body and taking a great, plunging stride forward, he flung both assegais simultaneously—straight, it seemed, into the faces of the shocked onlookers. The spears raced flat across the hall, to embed themselves with a chunking double impact in the leather-finished back of the ornate chair the king had recently vacated. One flaming, oscillating spear butt knocked over a goblet on the banquet table; the other torch-end sagged lower, its flame sizzling in dregs of spilled wine.

  The guests applauded dutifully, amid murmurs of astonishment and relief. There was laughter, too, at the expense of the uneasy courtiers who had been sitting nearest the place targeted by their king—especially white-bearded Chancellor Publius, who had tumbled from his chair to the floor in panic. He arose now with a rueful grimace and dusted himself off, aided by a pair of similarly discomfited servants who had dropped their trays in fright.

  One seatmate of Conan’s appeared scarcely to have noticed—Zenobia, the stately queen sitting in her ivory chair immediately to the left of the throne. She only gave a toss of her long, lustrous black hair and adjusted her posture slightly. Another face that seemed wholly unruffled was that of the dwarf Delvyn, perched just beyond Publius on the king’s right hand—and yet a rather different demeanour on his part had been observed when the spears flew. Not only had he ducked beneath the rim of the table—which, in spite of the thick cushions placed in his seat, came up to his chin—but he had dropped from his chair and scuttled beneath its legs for protection, to the merriment of the company.

  “Well enough, then, Aquilonians,” the king decreed as he waved away the dancers and strode back to his place, “we can continue feasting for the nonce.” Vaulting the table once again, he lent assistance to the servants who were trying to unstick the heavy spears from the seatback. At length the still-smoking weapons were carried out; the king, resuming his seat, exerted himself to catch up with any banquet courses he may have missed.

  “What think you, Zenobia?” he asked of his queen, between bites from a joint of beef which he plied aloft in one greasy fist. “Is this not a jolly triumph and homecoming feast? Too many months have passed, me-thinks, since our gloomy palace saw its like.”

  “Yes, Conan, ’tis a splendid affair—though not as gala as it might have been with more preparation. And not a real homecoming, since so many of our lords and officers remain posted with their troops at the eastern border. But your dancers from Kush were an inspired choice—truly a... barbaric spectacle.”

  “Indeed.” The king nodded innocently, reaching for his wine flagon. “And my double spear-cast was almost a success—not quite perfect, by Crom’s thorny cudgel! But it pleases me to see that you, my love, did not fear that your king meant to make a flaming kebab out of you—unlike some others I could name.”

  The last was spoken with a reproachful look at Chancellor Publius, whose thin, silk-clad shoulders stirred in protest. “Your Majesty, I apologize for my lack of faith.” A pout ruffled the chancellor’s neatly trimmed white beard. “But I remind you, such weapon-play is hardly a custom in the stately court of Aquilonia, and so I was unprepared. I did not fear your intent, Sire, only that you might miss your target—”

  “You mean,” Conan said irritably, “to suggest that my arms have grown weak and unsteady with age.” He barked out a curt laugh. “You think the years have made me as feeble and unsure, perhaps, as your own frail self?” Though the king’s questions were made patently in jest, it was clear that he bristled underneath, due perhaps to cloying wine or other distemper. “In that you err, old man—”

  “Now, now, Conan, do not rave on so!” Queen Zenobia leaned to her husband’s side and placed soothing, restraining hands on his shoulders. “Publius meant no offence, my darling! He knows as well as I do how much you enjoy your strongman tricks, and how of late you feel you must prove to all that your strength is supreme and unfailing.”

  Under her gentle touch, the monarch eased back against the pierced leather of his chair. He smiled at last and waved his beef haunch forgivingly at his companions. Meanwhile, from beyond Publius, a throaty voice piped up.

  “As for my own sudden departure during your athletic display, Noble King”—the dwarf Delvyn arose to his feet upon the seat of his capacious chair—“though some might brand it cowardice, a charge for which I would most assuredly trounce them flat—I assure you, fine sir, ’twas only to fetch 'my lute from beneath the chair, that I might pluck you a song of tribute.”

  “A song, then!” Conan proclaimed, sitting up to hail the company. “How fitting for this victory feast! Attend his words and chords, merrymakers, for the little man is a skilled and famous fool!”

  At this introduction and the ensuing laughter, Delvyn produced from beside him an oval-bellied instrument. He struck the strings, and sounded a chord
that bore an eerie tone to it, like the mournful airs of the western coast. He called out the name of his song in a loud, squeaky voice, strummed a less plaintive chord, and then launched in with a comically bouncy rhythm.

  The Ox-Bone Sceptre

  A reaver there came from the blustering north

  Who throttled a monarch to fatten his worth.

  Now he rules Aquilonia, a royal brigand

  More suited to Kush than a civilized land.

  Brave Conan the Clouter he’s called through the realm

  For the play of his sceptre ’gainst enemy helm.

  He clouts them with bronze and he clouts them with steel.

  Better, give him an ox-bone, his full strength to feel.

  His reign shall prevail in a wide, gruesome swath

  So remember to duck when the king waxes wroth.

  If you’re wishing his statecraft and skill to reveal,

  Why, give him an ox-bone, nor mutton nor veal.

  As the verses ended and the last chord was strummed, there came a moment of breathless doubt as to how the listeners would respond. Then a guffaw of mirth from the king himself decided them all, precipitating an avalanche of titters, hoots, and table thumps. It was clear that Conan had decided not to take offence, at least not for the moment. The scurrilous ditty had not, after all, pushed beyond propriety, and so the tension was released. The applause was too scattered to drown out critical comments, such as:

  “A truly execrable rhyme, that!”

  “Yes, but not bad for the prong of the moment. And it took gall!”

  Publius’s judgement was delivered over the undersized minstrel’s head to his seatmates at large. “Hardly in keeping with the dignity of the crown, I would say. And scarcely a fit tribute to our recent victory on the field of battle! I would have expected a more inspirational sort of ballad or anthem celebrating our triumph.” “But is the victory yet certain?” put in Count Trocero, leaning toward Conan and his chancellor from his chair beyond Delvyn’s. “We have received no pledge of armistice from the offending kings, nor any offer of terms.” “Terms!” Conan snorted from his half-throne, making Publius flinch. “I know what terms I’d offer them: the term of a pike through their rotty gizzards—” “Now, Your Majesty,” the chancellor chided dutifully, “in diplomacy, ’tis not always wise to press quarrels to the death. ’Tis better to allow your adversary some means of escape, the better to profit yourself by reducing his will to fight.” The elder counsellor shook his long, lustrous grey locks. “Our recent enemy Lord Malvin, for instance, was probably driven to attack Aquilonia by the increasing pressure he felt on his kingdom from the east.”

  “The east?” Conan queried. “You mean from Koth?”

  “Yes, truly, my king.” Publius nodded patiently. “If you wouldst but recall, we spoke of it a fortnight ago, before the hue and cry of the invasion. Young Prince Armiro, Koth’s new satrap out of Khoraja, has for some time now been whittling away at Malvin’s eastern lands in a deft series of campaigns.”

  “Aye, ’tis so,” slim-moustached Prospero put in, craning into the conversation across Queen Zenobia’s shapely bosom. “Young Armiro is a deft intriguer, and a military commander of considerable grasp. Not content to rule Khoraja, he jockeyed himself into control of the entire Kothian Empire. Now he strains even at those vast borders to badger Ophir. A real firebrand, he!”

  “I know of Armiro.” Conan nodded thoughtfully. “But I assumed, Publius, that your talk of border skirmishes between Ophir and Koth was exaggerated.” The regent frowned in perplexity. “For can it make any sense that Lord Malvin, embattled on his eastern border, would open up a second battlefront to the west with an enemy as powerful as ourselves?”

  “That,” a sharp voice proclaimed, “was my former master’s doing.” Delvyn’s words, rising up fife-pitched in their midst, came as an evident surprise to most of the speakers. “King Balt, Regent of High Nemedia and the Subject Domains, said he desired a further partition of western territories as a buffer to guard the vulnerable lowlands of the Tybor Gap.” The dwarf gazed placidly around at the eyebrows his intelligences raised.

  “As you know,” he went on authoritatively, “Nemedia is protected by mountain ranges to the west and south, but not toward the Tybor Valley. ‘Rectifying his borders,’ the old scoundrel called it. Balt made it a condition of his alliance, in undertaking to aid Ophir against Koth, that Lord Malvin would help him first in an incursion against your kingdom. Ophir was to share in the spoils, of course, but crusty old Balt was the instigator.”

  “Aha, so that’s how it stood!” Conan’s fist smote the table a blow that rippled the wine, even in its heavy crystal vessels on the massive tabletop. “Curse that vile curmudgeon Balt and the spineless dandy Malvin! ’Tis well that we bloodied their prying noses!”

  “The Kothian Armiro thinks so, Sire,” Publius answered levelly. “His armies are even now engaged in hounding the Ophirean stag that was crippled by our Bossonian archers.”

  “Already? You know this?” Conan turned a gimlet gaze on his chancellor. “I know, Publius, you receive news here in the capital sooner than our spies on the eastern border!”

  The chancellor shrugged. “’Tis nothing, Your Majesty. The Corinthian legatee receives dispatches via carrier pigeon; his messengers occasionally find their way into my stew-pot instead. The brief we intercepted this morning states that Kothian troops are on the march in southern Ophir, extending a flank toward the capital at Ianthe. The Nemedian king’s force remains in the southern realm, but the allied kings do not seem very active in the field.”

  “Stalled at Ianthe, most likely.” Delvyn’s laugh was shrilly vindictive. “Unsure whether to flee east or west, or sit and wait for a siege! That would be just like the two of them, simpering Malvin and my fuddled old master.”

  “By Crom,” Conan exclaimed, “slow down, all of you! Am I to understand that even as we sit here, Ophir, the kingdom we bested in the field, is being gobbled up from its farther side? —and largely as a result of our victory, but by another invader? —and this a greedy, energetic princeling who bodes to become an even worse neighbour than the present king of Ophir?”

  Faced with slow, reticent nods from his counsellors, Conan frowned and shook his regally maned head. “If true, ’tis a sobering thought... more sobering, I fear, than Queen Zenobia and I would wish to entertain on this night of gaiety and mirth. Therefore I shall wait until tomorrow midday before considering a plan. Wine bearers!”

  The king snapped his fingers to hurry the servants, and so the feasting proceeded. As the flow of banquet courses from the kitchen gradually trickled to an end, a new troupe of dancers and musicians was summoned forth. These were more familiar to the courtiers, being all female, recruited by the king as public entertainers from what, before the advent of Queen Zenobia, had been his harem. Their skills were well-practiced, their dances and adornments painstakingly selected for freshness and originality.

  In the course of the entertainment, however, their costumes tended to dwindle and fall away, while the repertoire inevitably narrowed to certain favourite, earthy steps. Before long, to the thumping of timbrels and tweeting of pipes, they performed independently about the hall, some dancing on tables, others almost in the laps of their enthusiastic admirers.

  The king himself sat hemmed into his demi-throne by two of the most energetic dancers. They pranced and whirled, trailing shawls across his face and through his playfully grasping fingers. They flounced their skirts and ruffled their loose bodices before him, the better to commend the marvels of their supple, undulating bodies to the royal sight. The king watched dry-lipped, patting or clutching at elusive, flying forms where he might, otherwise lounging in his chair and praising their skills aloud to the company.

  “Splendid, Mora, wherever did you learn that trick? You are keeping yourself in fine feather, girl! But Lilith, do not overwork yourself so—come here, wench, and rest on my lap! It has been long since we had an intimate talk.”
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br />   But the pale-haired temptresses, with a glance aside to the patiently watching queen, continued spinning and writhing just beyond their monarch’s reach. Not long afterward, at the discreet wave of a red-nailed hand, both dancers flitted off to tantalize other lingerers at the emptying tables. It was Zenobia who at last hoisted the wine-bleary king up from his gilded chair—as it was her silk-gowned body his greedy fingers finally closed on, and her kisses and coaxings that drew him away across the banquet hall, toward the winding stairway to the bed chambers above.

  As the intensity of the dances heightened, many of the revellers had departed—in pairs, mostly, for the sake of greater propriety or greater ardour. Conan’s high counsellors had gone their way some time before. That left the feast tables in the possession of a few hardy guests, bachelors or lone travellers, whom the entertainers lingered late to tease and console. One of the dancers, the shortest and plumpest of them all, rested near Delvyn where he sat dwarfed in his chair. But when she made cautious overtures of friendship, he hopped down from his seat with a look of loathing, shaking his lute at her as if it were a weapon. He retreated to the shadows of the chimney comer, whence his green eyes could be seen glinting throughout the remainder of the night.

  “The folk of the court are saying that we are an unlikely pair, little man.”

  Conan sat at his writing-table in the east tower, listening to Delvyn strum his lute. A casement window, standing open on a vista of blue sky and leaf-shimmering treetops, threw morning sunlight onto the scrolls and parchments arrayed before the king. As he worked, writing and signing proclamations and military orders with a black-dipped ostrich plume and sealing them with drops of red beeswax from a candle-heated urn, chords of eerie melody drifted from the shadows where his companion sat.