Conan the Gladiator Page 6

  V

  The Arena

  Conan noticed a stirring of dust at one side of the enclosure, not far from the wagons. Low wooden gates in the curving wall were thrown open, and from the inner darkness came snorts, guttural commands, and the scuff of hooves on stone. Out onto the sand there issued a shaggy creature with two wide-curving horns—a wild Shemitish bull, lurching and galloping erratically into the open. He was followed by more of his kind—not cows, but bison-like males, broad-shouldered and massive, numbering ten at least by Conan’s count. They slowed to an ambling gait, half-blinded by the arena’s brightness and confused by the sudden clamour of cheering that poured down from the enthusiastic stadium crowd.

  The mules of Luddhew’s circus seeing the massive prong-headed animals stampeding forth and kicking up a storm of dust, shied away to one side and broke their gait.

  “What is it?” Bardolph yelled back from the front wagon, “a second animal act? They will upstage us!”

  “Is this a circus, then, or a cow pasture?” Dath, nimbly juggling his axes, turned in place aboard the moving wagon to take in the spectacle.

  “Whatever it is, it looks like trouble.” Conan, setting down his dumbbells, moved forward to help Roganthus with the team. He had seen the ferocity of wild bison before, and doubted that these could be very well tamed. “We’d all better stop making noise and capering about,” he announced. “Just stand quiet till this is cleared up.”

  “What, because of a few bulls?” Bardolph, lowering his flute, spoke up scornfully from the other wagon. “Mitra knows, we’ve seen enough cows in our travels, and in our camps and tents!”

  “Have you seen so many at once? Or such ill-favoured ones?” Conan, taking over from Roganthus, urged the mules forward as smoothly as he could, without snapping the reins or jingling the harness overmuch. Gazing back at the trailing herd of longhorns, he saw what to him were ill signs: the panting leader, quite literally, had blood in his eye. Red also oozed forth around his nostrils. The beast had been cruelly goaded and beaten, most likely to infuriate him; the other bulls likewise moved with a wary, aggressive gait. As Conan watched, the leader lowered its head and began pawing the sand of the arena with one hoof.

  “Hold onto the wagon,” Conan warned the others. “Be ready to run or fight if need be. They may charge us any moment.”

  “Well, then, we should call someone for help,” Sathilda sensibly proposed, looking around the blank stadium walls. “Or else threaten to leave outright and cancel our act. Why should they allow these animals to run wild and disrupt the show?” In answer, Conan gestured back toward the wooden entry doors, which were now shut tight. “The show, it should be obvious, is a bull-baiting,” he told her. “And we are the bait.”

  His answer was confirmed by a new surge of cheering from the watchers—for, even as he spoke, the foremost bull snorted a spray of blood onto the sand and trundled his great bulk forward in what looked like the beginning of a charge. The other animals, obedient to the law of the herd, began to straggle after him.

  Conan urged the mules along faster, turning them straight away from the mass of cattle. If he could keep their rear end toward the bulls, he thought, with the wagon’s bulk between them and the mules, all would be well... no easy prospect in a walled, semicircular space.

  Luddhew’s wagon had rolled to a stop, with some kind of argument going on in the driver’s seat. Now, at the approach of the bulls, the circus-master urged his team forward again, likewise turning them away from the menace. Their route diverged from Conan’s, straight toward the arena wall, so they would have to turn again sooner or later.

  Looking back, Conan saw the giant bull trotting along steadily behind his wagon and gaining ground, with four of his fellows following close. Three younger bulls had veered aside to follow the other wagon, while two others stood there angrily indecisive, blowing up arena sand with snorts of their broad nostrils.

  Ahead, Conan’s course intersected the stone wall; so he urged his team gradually aside, avoiding a sharp turn that might slow or topple the wagon. As he veered beneath the high barrier, he was aware of a tumult directly overhead and sensed a rain of small objects around him. Debris was being hurled down on him by the hostile crowd; but he scarcely paid attention, for at the same time, he heard and felt the heavy horned skull of the lead bull striking and scraping at the rear of the wagon, jolting it forward. There were gasps from the wagon-bed behind him, but all the circus players evidently managed to cling to their places on the wagon. The mules, nervous but well-trained, negotiated the turn smoothly. They came out in a brisk canter, heading for the sunken area in the middle of the arena, which Conan hoped might provide them refuge.

  The depression, he saw in time, was filled mostly with water, representing some sort of artificial swamp. Its shallows and sandbars were decorated with stone-potted trees and shrubs, some of which stood up above the level of the main arena—though they did not reach as high as the rope walks and trapezes strung above the pit. The drop-off at the near and far ends of the pit was sheer, higher than a man; and at either side, the square-shaped depression ran straight up against the far higher stadium walls. There was no way for the wagons to get around it without leaving the arena.

  The purpose of the watery morass was all too clear. In it, sliding and squirming in the artificial muck, dwelt reptiles: giant Styx crocodiles, some with bodies thicker than a man could girdle with both arms. The quagmire had been dug here as an obstacle, a menace to any who tried to traverse the ropes and trapezes above it, seeking safety on the vacant sand at the far end of the arena. It was another snare, just a part of the trickery that characterized this whole devilish Circus.

  The trees, though... might they not provide refuge to any who fell into the pit? Gazing at them, Conan frowned in distaste—for, solid and well-tended as they looked, they leaned lopsided in places, sagging heavy with the weight of some strange fruit. It coiled around the trunks, gleaming in harsh daylight, and slid sinuously through the branches—snakes, tree-pythons sacred to Father Set. Any who escaped the crocodiles by taking refuge in those branches would nevertheless find themselves in a reptilian embrace—slower, perhaps, but just as deadly. Doubtless the ravening crowd would find the poor fools’ deaths even more gratifying.

  The pit’s drop-off, an ankle-high curb of granite, converged imminently with their route. And still the bull-herd thundered and bumped along behind, having found a tempting target for their wrath. So Conan urged his team into a sharper turn, which they managed in good order, curving back inward toward the centre of the semicircle.

  There waited another obstacle, in the form of two ambling bulls who had not joined in the pursuit. For their sake, Conan cut his turn short. He passed as close as he dared without running afoul of their long, curving horns or letting them terrify his team. If only the mules could keep up this pace a while more— say an hour or so—they might tire out both the bulls and the crowd and win their freedom.

  Yet disaster, ever in the offing, finally struck. Luddhew’s wagon, pursued just as closely as Conan’s and cramped between the free-roving bulls and the arena wall, essayed too sharp a turn. The vehicle did not over-topple but slowed abruptly, its front wheels skidding and furrowing the sand, its bed shuddering and jolting beneath its startled riders. The mules were dragged out of position, left straining and staggering to get the vehicle moving again at speed. As they laboured under Luddhew’s urgent whip cracks, the three young bulls charged around the side of the wagon. They attacked fiercely, driving their horns into the bellies of the helpless mules.

  The animals’ screams of agony and terror, hideous as they were, were all but drowned out by the roaring of the stadium crowd. At this first sight of carnage, the bloodlust of the city mob was shown by a frenzy of dancing, leaping, and waving arms in the stands. Meanwhile the surviving mules kicked and strained in their traces, dragging their gored, bleeding fellows after them and jerking the wagon-yoke precariously sideways.

  As Conan br
ought his team around in a broad circle, several bulls abandoned their pursuit of him and joined in the stationary fight. They ran blindly toward the beleaguered, limping wagon, rammed it, and finally succeeded in overturning it with tosses of their thick, powerful necks. The crash spilled Luddhew, a handful of circus players, and the bear Burudu out onto the sand, scrambling to avoid the churning hooves and spear-tipped horns of their attackers.

  The bear, however, did not cower meekly away. Turning and batting aside the horn of one of the bulls, it laid open the animal’s flank with a swipe of its mighty paw. The bull, scarcely daunted, ducked in low and tried to bring its rapier horn up in a belly-rending slash. But Burudu closed in behind the horn and grappled with the bison, tearing at the leathery hide with his powerful claws and slavering fangs. The struggle became a blur of churning, tossing sand, out of which enraged bellows and thunderous roars issued amid the tumult of the crowd.

  Conan, meanwhile, brought his wagon around the less embattled side of the toppled hulk— angling in close enough, he hoped, to keep any bulls from charging in between the wagons. He did not dare bring his team to a halt, but slowed them to a trot, letting the still-pursuing bisons bump and batter at the rear of the bed and try to gore the turning wheels. At his urgent shouts, the riders from the overturned wagon came running. They dodged past the circling, lunging bulls to clamber aboard, drawn up by eager hands.

  Most of them seemed to have escaped unscathed—a blessing and a handicap, since Conan’s mules now had to labour under a double weight of human bodies. They were helped along by the bulls who rammed and jostled from behind—but the wagon drays were tiring, too, and were piteously distracted from their work by the slaughter of the stalled team, which still went on with great violence and cacophony.

  All at once the shaggy lead bull grew tired of battering the tail-boards. Snorting lustily, and perhaps smelling the scent of the team through his blood-dripping nostrils, he lunged. His great body drove past the comer of the wagon to attack the front.

  This move was evidently resented by one watcher—Qwamba, who crouched at the centre of the wagon-bed under Sathilda’s comforting arm. Without any audible command, propelling herself in a powerful leap that rocked the conveyance on its wheels, the great tiger launched itself through the air straight onto the old bull’s back.

  In her pounce, the jungle cat was like a black shard of midnight crashing through pallid daylight. The cat struck the bison’s broad shoulders and clung there, her mighty claws clenched in the tough hide, her fangs ravening and tearing at the hairy, humped back. The bull arched and twisted, vainly trying to throw off its devilish rider. Sand fountained high; from within the dust cloud, the night-tiger’s pelt shimmered and flashed like a glimpse down a bottomless well.

  The crowd went wild.

  The wagon, meanwhile, pulled free of the thickest part of the fray. But they were by no means clear. Angry bulls circling the carnage and wreckage were now drawn toward the furious movements of humans and mules. From either side, outriders closed in to menace wagon passengers, mule team, and wheels. Dath lashed out with first one ax, then the other, retrieving them by means of thongs looped over his wrists; but the weapons were too light to break the heavy horn-pates of the lunging behemoths. He had to content himself with wounding them and driving them back from the wagon tail and wheels.

  Conan, seeing several bison closing in on the team, gave the reins over to Bardolph and climbed back into the wagon-bed. Taking his leaden bar and bending it through the ring of one of his iron weights, he formed a mace of sorts, massive and square-headed. He dragged it forward and, bracing his legs against the wagon-bench, swung it over his head at the nearest bull that harried the team.

  The force of the blow almost toppled him from the wagon; he had to let go his weapon and grab the foot board for safety. The mace, striking the bison on the nape, made the animal stagger against the front wheel, nearly tumbling beneath it and causing a wreck. But the bull kept its footing, slowing abruptly and falling away behind the wagon in a broken gait.

  Again the edge of the crocodile-pit loomed ahead. Conan shouted at Luddhew, telling him to turn the wagon short... toward the centre, near the ropes and beams of the aerial riggings. With the bulls closing in, there might lie their best chance for safety.

  But the team would not turn. Hemmed in by wild bison on either side, with hot breath on their fetlocks and sharp horns goading their flanks, the mules raced mindlessly on toward the precipice. Luddhew lashed his whip, and Conan took his turn hauling on the reins, all to no avail. In moments they would reach the stone edge and be flung into a seething morass of flesh-eaters, fanged monsters that made their present pursuers look benign.

  Conan dropped to his belly in desperation and, leaning down between the mules’ lashing tails, groped for the harness chain. Shading his face against sand churned up by flying hooves, he found the chains’ taut connection and, with a well-timed turn of his wrist, unhitched it.

  The effect was immediate. The wagon, its wheels lagging in the soft sand, hung back... while the mules, pulling forward steadily as the chain worked free of its eyelets, broke loose from the wagon-tongue in pairs and ran free.

  Unburdened, they gained instant speed and left the pursuing bison in their dust. Three of the four sets of mules veered aside, kicking up their hooves in brisk flight. Only the last pair—held back too long, and goaded too urgently by bulls on either flank—failed to win clear. Lunging desperately, they ran straight forward into the pit. One of the enraged bulls followed straight after them, disappearing in a din of bellows and shrieks.

  As the wagon lost way, the bounding wagon-tongue caught and furrowed sand, causing the front wheels to veer sharply aside. With its last lurch of forward motion, the vehicle tipped over and spilled its riders into the open arena.

  This time, the whole troupe found themselves staggering and scrabbling for any available safety. There was precious little of it to be had, for the overturned wagon was already gouged and battered by the angry horns of pursuing bulls. From the level sand, above the stone curbing at the edge of the pit, two wooden tripods stood up tall and fragile. These offered scant protection from the bulls; from each apex trailed but a single knotted rope, offering a precarious way to the top.

  The first tripod, which had appeared from a distance to anchor a stout cable, actually supported a slender balance-beam—a wrist-thin plank of wood mounted to the tripod with its narrow side facing up, for strength. Even so, it was so frail that it sagged visibly in the middle. It stretched unsupported from the timber apex overhead to another tripod on the far side of the pit... some two-score paces distant, farther than a man might fling a stone.

  Atop the second of the tripods was a narrow perch, barely wide enough for two people to stand side by side. To it was tied a trapeze, the first of several that hung down from overhead cables, leading across the pit at regular intervals to the farther side. Provision had been made, then, for the acrobats of Luddhew’s circus—if they were willing to perform for a crowd over a pit full of voracious monsters.

  Between the two sets of tripods, a third way across the pit existed—a bridge made of thin planks, laid transversely across two ropes that were bolted into the stone curbing scarcely a half-stride apart. The laths looked frail and loose, bound in place only by coarse twine. Worse, there were no railings or guide-ropes alongside the sagging span. In the middle, the bridge hung down almost to the waters of the artificial swamp—shallow waters that roiled and surged with the passing of reptilian bodies.

  The clamour from the nearer edge of the pit soon ceased—the terrified braying of the mules and the fallen bull’s bellowings replaced by coarser grunts and tail-thrashings as the carnivores fought and tore at the carcasses. Along the sand rim of the arena, too, things had grown quieter. Some of the bulls yet lingered near the first abandoned wagon and its slaughtered team, while others charged off in pursuit of the free-running mules. For the moment, only three bulls bedevilled the fugitives, making
short charges across the sand and hooking their long horns at human targets who dodged and scurried before them.

  “Up, then, and make your way across!” Conan called to those who swarmed behind him. “Onto the ropes and trapezes, if you can, or else across the bridge! We fighters can hold off these brutes yet awhile.” He turned to swipe a sandalled foot at the head of a bull that had moved in menacingly close. “Dath, fellow, over here... can you spare me one of your axes?”

  Before the ax-fighter could reply, he was set on by one of the bulls, a red-eyed behemoth that lumbered belligerently forward and drove him back toward the edge of the pit. The Sendajan cut and hacked at the scything horns without visible result; then he scored a good cast with one of his tethered axes. It smote the animal between the eyes and made it stop in its tracks, shaking its head dazedly.

  “Good, lad!” Conan shouted. “Now, in for the kill!”

  But even as Dath moved, the beast regained its wits and lunged forward, swiping its horns beneath its attacker’s legs and knocking him prone. But as the bull capered forward to trample the youth, Dath rolled clear, escaping injury from the thrashing hooves and his own ax-blades.

  From just behind Conan came an outraged, frightened yell; turning, he saw the limping Roganthus caught on the horns of a second charging bull. The bison gave a heave of its mighty neck and shoulders, and Roganthus was flung through the air, to come down on the stone curbing at the very edge of the pit. Striking with an audible thud, he lay groaning, and barely kept himself from rolling over the side.

  “Crom and Mannanan!” With an angry oath, Conan ran at the bull and seized it by the horns. The animal drove its hard-plated head at his midsection, but the growling Cimmerian leaned forward and thrust back, his feet sliding in the loose sand. He used the long horns for leverage, twisting the massive head down and aside and forcing the beast to stagger sideways to keep its balance.