Conan of the Red Brotherhood Page 9

The Imperial galleys followed the coast northward. Though they angled gradually toward shore, they showed no great eagerness to put in and search for food and water. The pirates eyed the swampy, uneven coast wistfully, yet knew better than to grouse to the captain about weariness or thirst. As night approached, a mist rose from the open sea, snaring and smothering the waning sun in rising grey tendrils. Before long, mists obscured the Imperial sails ahead; Conan slowed the oar stroke for fear of running onto rocks or passing their quarry unbeknownst. Losing sight of shore as well, the Vixen's crew soon found itself in a murky, echoing gallery of fog, which swiftly darkened into night.

  VII

  The Dead Land

  When dawn came, the pirates uncurled their wet, cramped bodies from the oar-benches and blinked about them into smothering whiteness. The fog was so dense that Conan, from his place astern, could not see his own galliot’s bows, nor indeed distinguish much beyond the sinister shrouded bulk of the catapult amidships. Waking at intervals during the previous night, he had glimpsed neither moon nor stars, nor heard any sound out of the emptiness. The waves passing under the keel were slack and listless, heaving themselves up and collapsing sluggishly in the sodden, windless air.

  The ship’s supply of drinking water was low. Some of the men, while gnawing their breakfast of hard biscuit, quenched their thirst by licking heavy droplets off the helves of their oars—but that source was impure, even if there had been some way of collecting it for later use. Lying here at anchor was eerie and troubling; it was also wasteful, and a dangerous spell of idleness for the men.

  So Conan resolved to search for drinking water. Ordering the anchor raised, he went forward into the bows with two lookouts to peer into the fog and make depth soundings. By finding the coast and working northward along it, he hoped to resupply the ship and take up the pursuit.

  He assigned two stout pirates to steer, instructing them to use the direction of the sea-swells as their guide. At his command, old Yorkin’s bone flute struck up a low, rasping cadence. The dirge’s sole accompaniment, as the crew began rowing, was the occasional creak of oars; its counterpoint was the slap of stray waves under the bow. The ship, lost in a universe that was the hue of corpse-windings, glided forward slowly toward an ever-receding wall of vapour.

  In time, diminished depth readings confirmed their course. After a grey, featureless hour or so, they drew near land: first a series of jagged, unseen reefs, where surf hissed and gurgled warningly, turning them further northward; then a low mud bank crested with high, thick grass, having scarcely any beach or shingle at its foot. The margin of sand at the water’s edge was too narrow to walk along, much less to draw up a ship on. The soundings here grew unreliable, even when done with poles; as the Vixen glided near enough inshore for them to examine the shoreline in the fog, Conan felt the keel baulk against soft, miry bottom.

  “The sea is dead calm,” he remarked to no one in particular. “We must have rowed ourselves into an estuary. Good then, there may be fresh water nearby. And land-dwellers as well. Belay that ghoulish piping,” he called to Yorkin in the stem. “We go in silence now. Steersman, ease off these mudbanks, but follow close along the shore.”

  Before their high fog-dripping keel, the grassy bank unfolded without much change. The dense grasses reared tall over Conan’s head, even when he raised himself up on the rail alongside the forestem. No matter, since the fog precluded seeing for any distance. There was little reason to send men ashore and risk their loss or desertion; and Conan could not go far from the ship himself, lest his surly crew seize the opportunity to strand him. Thus far, there was no inlet or sign of a stream. He gazed down at the water, which looked dull and murky in the fog.

  He jerked suddenly upright. “Avast rowing!” he hissed to his crew. “Quiet, all of you!”

  Silence prevailed, broken only by the squeak of a steering-oar and the lapping of waves as the ship slowed to a halt.

  “What is it, Captain?” one of the lookouts in the bow whispered.

  “See those waves?” Conan gestured down at ripples spreading toward the keel. “Something has just now crossed our course... just ahead there in the fog, I would swear to it! A ship or... something.”

  His words passed quickly aft, relayed in muted, feverish whispers; for once none of the pirates dared move or raise his voice. When the lapping under the bows subsided, Conan gave a silent signal; then the rowing resumed more furtively than before. Conan crouched high on the bow, ready to order a halt on an instant’s notice. Blank shoreline unfolded spectrally in the fog along the starboard rail, without any sign of human passage, or even of the presence of wild game. There was no vegetation except grass and sparse water-weed, and no audible sound of bird or insect.

  “If a ship passed here,” he muttered, “it was no heavy-hulled dromon. These waters are too shallow.” Conan climbed down from the rail but continued watching the channel, sensing the galliot’s progress through his bare soles. “There is current here,” he announced. “Test the water’s sweetness.”

  A lookout lowered a pewter noggin on a string, raised it up to his lips, and spat overside. “Not too salty, Captain, but brackish and foul.”

  “Hmm. Likely there is a pure source upstream.”

  “The fog is lifting, Captain.” The second lookout touched his arm, pointing. “There is land away to port... and more there, ahead!”

  Indeed, a subtle paling of the early light was accompanied by an expansion of the visible world. There across the water loomed more grass-choked shoreline, a narrow channel, and a low spit of sodden mud. “Bear in to starboard,” Conan called back to his steersmen, keeping his voice low-pitched, “and stay off that bar! We are amid a river’s islets and meanderings. Avast rowing now, dog-brothers. Use your oars to pole us along the deepest channel.” Taking a stout pole from along the bulwark, he waited ready to fend the ship off obstacles on either hand.

  The sea-fog gradually retreated overhead to a low, mottled vault of cloud, but remained too murky and dense to allow for judging the sun’s direction. The galliot’s crew faced successive choices of route, through what turned out to be a labyrinth of estuaries, mudbanks, and tongues of grassland. Conan kept to the starboard channel whenever it appeared deep enough; on the few occasions when the chosen course dwindled to a stagnant mire, he and his pirates were obliged to pole the ship backward to a junction and take another direction. The water’s current was but feeble in most places, far too inconsiderable to serve as a guide.

  At one spot where the bank overhung the channel, Conan stepped ashore from the rail and tried to part the thick grass. The blades were impassable: as lofty as two men, and too razory-tough to hack through with a sword. There was no way to see over the tops, so he returned to the ship. Later, at his order, spry Diccolo was raised up on the end of an oar to survey the terrain; he claimed to see no hills or forests, only a limitless expanse of curving, nodding grasstops. Conan wished he had brought along the galliot’s mast; from it, he might at least be able to spy the progress of another mast-top through the swampy wastes ahead.

  The water, viewed in pallid grey daylight, was jet-black. When one dipped a hand in or tipped some out of a cup, it appeared deep red, almost the hue of wine or blood—a colouring so intense that at any significant depth, it shaded to inky opacity, making it impossible to see more than a finger’s-width below the surface. One of the lookouts tasted it again, savouring a mouthful and swallowing it down, but said it left a vile after-reek on his palate.

  The sluggish watercourse sustained no fish, so far as Conan could tell. He heard no bird-cries either, nor gutturals of frogs, though he thought the slick mudbanks showed faint, sinuous tracings of worm or serpent. An eerie deadness overhung this country, whose watchful silence somehow breathed the uncanny. It set Conan on his guard, making hairs tickle behind his neck; also, perhaps fortunately, it oppressed the crew, silencing the tumult of complaints they might otherwise have raised.

  “Ahead there, Captain. A tree!”


  Conan, trailing his pole in the water, raised his eyes from the bank, where, for the first time, he had recently spied dents and pole-marks in the mud, made before their coming. “Aye, so it is,” he answered. “A tree.”

  The earnestness in the lookout’s cry was almost laughable, stirred as it was by such a trivial cause. Yet the tree was, in truth, the first living thing they had seen other than grass; it was a broad, angular, willow-like shrub leaning far out over the channel just ahead, its leafy fronds trailing to the water in places. The branches looked to be limber and pliant, yet the upper sturdy ones would undoubtedly make a better vantage point than anything the pirates might improvise.

  “Is there room to pass beneath?” the lookout nervously asked. “Mayhap we should take another channel.”

  “No,” Conan growled. “We can clear it.” Intent on the idea of catching the ship that must be somewhere ahead, he screened his face with a raised arm as the galliot’s prow glided in under the hanging fronds. “Once we are well inside, we can send a man up aloft to have a look at the country—ahoy there, port lookout, fend us off that limb!”

  Hurrying to lift his pole across the forestem, Conan jostled against the crewman. The lookout slid down open-mouthed against the rail, rigid and lifeless—the same man who had swallowed the red-tainted water of the slough. “Set’s biting devils!” the Cimmerian cried. “Crom!” He redoubled his oath as his pole-end caught in overhanging foliage. An instant later, the galliot’s stem caught against the low-hanging bough. The ship turned and lost way, then came to an uneasy halt in the water.

  The impact of the high prow caused a shiver in the branches overhead, from whence small objects began pattering down among the rowers. Dark, curled pods, Conan thought at first. But no, these pods moved... they must be grubs or insects of some sort. A pirate screamed in agony, clutching at his bare shoulder where one had fastened itself to his skin. He strained and tugged to pull it away, even two-handed; when he succeeded, a red rivulet of blood coursed down his bare chest from the wound it had made. At once there came more screams, stampings, and mad flailings as pirates tried to shake off and kill the vicious pests. Centipedes, the things were, with hard, segmented bodies, scores of scrabbling legs, and fierce, pinching mandibles. There was no telling whether the creatures were poisonous.

  “Push ahead, rogues!” Conan thundered over the chaos. “Pole on through this greenery ere we are lost!” To set an example, he drove his pole into the river-muck and hove against it mightily. With muscles straining and tendons cracking, he felt the ship begin to edge forward beneath his taut legs, which were clenched hard against the crossbraces; he saw other pirates follow suit with poles and oars. Then a writhing weight struck his shoulder, and pincers sank into his skin with a fiery pain.

  He brushed and smote frantically at his attacker as its mandibles flexed to bite deeper. It fell away into the bilge; though it writhed there slick with his blood, Conan could trouble over it no further. Instead, he lunged astern to recover his pole and resume labouring.

  After endless, hellish moments, the ship’s prow broke through the dangling fronds. The Vixen glided forth in pale daylight, into the broad pool that lay beyond the tree. There the pirates drifted while grubs were hunted out from under benches and carefully smashed; if flung overside alive, they merely swam away in a flurry of limbs, to re-climb the oars or the tree’s trailing branches. The pirates’ deep, ragged lacerations could not be cleansed, pure water being scarce at hand. But it appeared that, unlike the river beneath them, the tree-centipedes’ bites were not fatal.

  Only one pirate died of their attack, of blood leakage because the keen mandibles had nipped through an artery at the side of his neck.

  The stream channel curved away ahead and, for the first time, a breeze stirred, ruffling the grasstops along the banks at either side. The pirates, though gory and shaken from the recent skirmish, were eager to pole forward out of the vicinity of the hell-tree and, amid this swampy maze, find a new route back to open sea. They toiled in earnest silence; it was some minutes before the former air of sombre menace closed in again, sharpened by the uncertainty of ever finding their way.

  Their captain, however, had a notion of what he sought; always Conan’s eye scanned the stream-side mud for marks of an earlier ship’s passing. His terse commandments took them up long, devious channels, past more of the hellish trees hulking inland, and one overhanging the stream. Luckily, though, the channel beneath was broad, and they were able to skirt it, beating a score or more of the tree-grubs out of its remotest branches as they brushed past.

  At length their winding course brought them to an uncanny sight. It loomed ahead for some while above the grassy banks, then unfolded massively before them as the ship nudged around a muddy promontory. There stood a great dead tree, stark and eldritch against the cloud-ribbed sky, its base as broad across as half the length of their galley, its branches bare and angular as the limbs of a bleached-white skeleton.

  The enormous, monstrous shape was rooted in an islet at the centre of a broad lagoon. The isle rose as white as the tree, covered over with what at first looked like fallen branches. But on closer view, as the galliot poled out onto the black pond—whose dark mirror threw back the vast, crazed webwork of the tree’s pale branchings—its true composition became clear. The island consisted of bones, nothing else; large ones and small ones, human bones and greater-than-human, and lesser ones as well. They lay in furrows and heaps trailing away into the dark water, rising up in a sinister, mounded landscape around the vast, gnarled trunk and the pale, saurian knottings of its deep-sunk roots.

  The bones, so it seemed from a distance, represented every sort of bird, beast, fish, and reptile in creation—or any that could conceivably have flown, walked, swum, or crawled to this forlorn place, to die and bleach under the evil tree’s influence. It was a horror beyond understanding. The galliot’s crew would have drowned sooner than row their craft under the loom of that baneful, skeletal tree—yet neither could they keep from craning their necks toward it in awe and dread. So they floated rapt, their brains becoming snared in the labyrinth of the great snag’s twisted branches.

  Conan, for his part, eyed the lone habitation that was in sight, made of the sole building material ready to hand: a low hut or shrine on the near side of the island, constructed crudely of bleaching bones. There was no sign of movement about the place; yet the presence of a bone raft, hauled up on the white-littered beach nearby, and the smudge of dark ashes raked around the dormant fire-midden heaped before the door, suggested that the place might even now be occupied.

  “Oarsmen.” The Cimmerian’s voice was low and even, quietly certain of obedience. “You can ply oars here, for the lagoon is broad enough and deep. Row forward to yon beach. Then reverse seats so that you face the bows, and stand ready to pull clear again on my order.”

  The crew obeyed wordlessly, as if their turbulent pirate souls had already been drawn out of them by the sinister lure of the great tree. The ship glided on beneath the arching branches, the prow grated on the lagoon’s unseen bottom, and Conan sprang down onto the islet with little fear of being marooned. Feeling loose bones crunch and shift under his boots, he strode toward the leaning, macabre pile of the hut. Sure enough, a pale wisp of smoke yet rose from the bone fire smouldering before its entry.

  Within, however, the quaint tabernacle of ancient death enshrined death of a newer sort. The white, powdery floor was stained deep red, which flowed from the chest of an aged man who had propped himself up against one bone wall. A sword-wound had pierced into his side; he lived, yet could not remain alive much longer.

  “Old hermit, who has done you this injury?” Kneeling by the victim’s side, Conan peeled open the man’s bloodstained robe to see the extent of the wound, then let the garment fall closed. “It could not have been many moments ago.”

  “Nay, ’twas not long ago,” the old man gasped in a Hyrkanian dialect. “Turanian infidels, a ship full of them! They have gone off ’
round the lake to steal the Tears of Thorus... some spell-caster has put them up to it, ’tis sure.” The old, watery eyes focused on Conan’s face. “You are a pirate, are you not? A Hyrkanian? Keep them from it if you can, son... the gems belong to us!” “What gems?” Conan urged him, supporting his sagging, bony shoulder. “What is this strange place?”

  “This is the mouth of the sacred river Yldrys, where all the dead of Hyrkania are swept, man and beast, in the hope of paradise! The bones come to rest here, beneath the great ancient tree. With them comes power.”

  “And the gems? What of those?”

  “They are all-powerful, and sacred to this shrine.” The old man reached up, his bone-thin fingers clutching at Conan’s forearm. “Keep them from the Turanians. Flee with them, if need be, and a great reward will be yours! But beware the Guardians...”

  “What Guardians? Old man, what do you mean?” Conan braced up the hermit’s lolling head, but it was too late. A red foam drooled from the elder’s lips, and his yellow eyes rolled blankly in their sockets.

  So be it. Lifting the frail old body and carrying it outside, Conan strode to the pond’s edge, flung it in, and watched it sink swiftly from sight. That, presumably, would gain the old codger paradise. He walked to the galliot, still grounded on the bones, and sprang up into the bow.

  “Ahoy, you craven rogues,” he grated at them. “Push off and row! We have Turanians to fight and treasures to win!”

  It would take diligent goading and abuse to knock the men free of the slack-jawed spell the giant tree seemed to have cast over them. On the other hand, he did not want to raise his voice, and their mute obedience was an advantage as long as enemies were present. By grunts and fierce gestures, Conan got them to pull free of the bone beach; then, shifting to the stern and stamping out an oar-rhythm with one booted foot on the deck, he steered the vessel around toward the back of the island.