Conan the Barbarian Page 2
It was soon over.
II
The Wheel
Now horsemen crested the rise and thundered down among the huts, their merciless swords cutting down all who resisted. Lighted torches wheeled through the icy air to thud upon the rush roofs of the defenceless houses and set them ablaze. Thus were flushed out into the open all who had taken refuge within their homes.
Whooping riders pounded along the rutted lane, spearing the young, the old, and the wounded. Maeve impaled one leering fellow who bent from his galloping horse to seize her. She smiled thinly as his tom body toppled from the saddle to lie sprawling in the mud. A sweep of the Cimmerian woman’s sword hamstrung another animal. As the beast fell kicking, Conan sprang upon the rider, writhing in agony beneath his steed, and sliced open his throat.
But the defenders were outnumbered. Their ranks thinned rapidly. Abruptly, their resistance ended. Dazed and dejected, all the survivors threw their weapons at the booted feet of their conquerors—all, that is, but Maeve, wife of Corin and mother of Conan. Eyes ablaze in a face drained of colour, she leaned on the pommel of her broadsword, stunned and struggling for breath, while her son stood beside her, his small knife held at the ready.
At last the mounted giant on the knoll moved. As spurs struck its glossy black flanks, the quivering stallion sprang into motion. With a measured control more terrible to witness than the careless speed of fury, the commander of the marauders picked his way down the slope and along the ruts of trampled snow stained with the blood of the dead or dying. Although his features were masked by his homed iron helm, to those who watched, he stood against the morning sky, a veritable demon-king borne on a steed that seemed no earthly horse at all but a creature from the very depths of Hell.
When the grim apparition passed them, the Vanir raiders bowed and gave voice to an orchestrated chant: “Hail to Commander Rexor! Hail to Rexor! And to Doom... Doom... Tulsa Doom....”
Their leader turned off the road and, for a moment, vanished from sight behind the soot-blackened wall of a burned-out hut. As if a cloud had lifted, the Vanir brightened and drifted nearer to the lone woman who, with her man-child, stood defiant still.
Jeering with coarse ribaldry and obscene suggestions, two of the raiders reached playful spears toward the breast of the half-naked woman. Maeve batted aside one weapon with the flat of her sword, and the Van dodged backwards, laughing. But his comrade was less fortunate. Swinging her long blade above her head, Maeve caught her tormentor across the back of his hand and inflicted a deep cut. As the man leaped aside, his spear fell from a hand that hung as limp as a dead thing. Cursing and baring his teeth in a snarl, he reached for his sword with his uninjured hand.
Just then the fur-cloaked figure of the commander, grim as death, emerged from the shadow of the hut. Not a word was spoken, but the wounded man wilted and withdrew. In response to a signal, another soldier sprang forward to grasp the bridle of the warhorse, while his master swung to the ground. With an imperious gesture, Rexor pointed back along the rutted roadway on which lay the smith, his inert hand a finger’s length away from the weapon that was his final masterpiece.
Eager to do the huge man’s bidding, another foot soldier sped between the two rows of smouldering huts, to the place where Corin the smith had made his stand. Lifting the blade, which no man could have wrested from Corin’s living grasp, he hastened to bring it to his leader. Maeve watched the man’s approach through slitted ice-blue eyes. Conan stared in fearful fascination; for it was borne in upon him with hideous certainty that his father lived no more.
When Rexor received the weapon, he raised it to study its splendid craftsmanship in the sun’s slanting rays. As the metal, uplifted, shimmered in the brighter light, Conan in vain fought back the sobs that choked him. His mother touched his shoulder. A soldier laughed.
A shudder suddenly erased the grins from the faces of those still ringed around the embattled pair. Conan looked up, as high against the rising sun a standard, set upon an ebon pole, came slowly into view. Suspended from a wooden frame adorned with the horns of beasts, the rich fabric of the standard hung immobile in the still air. Embroidered on the cloth, the boy saw once more the symbol that long would haunt his dreams—the ominous, emblazoned symbol of writhing serpents upholding the orb of a sable sun.
A grisly fringe of scalps dangled from the frame, and gaunt skulls grinned mockingly from the spikes that adorned the upper reaches of the structure. Even Rexor bowed his head as that hideous standard entrapped the eastern light and was incarnadined thereby. Conan recoiled when he saw the bearer of the banner, a deformed thing, more beast than man, despite his iron helm and armoured leathern garments. The pride with which he raised aloft his fear-inspiring device declared his lack of all humanity.
Behind this misshapen offspring of the devil rode a magnificent figure, resplendent in armour of overlapping leaves, gleaming like the scales of a serpent in the opalescent light. A bejewelled helmet clung to his head and covered his nose and cheekbones, so that only his eyes, flaming with unholy fires, were visible.
The steed he rode was very like its master: lean, graceful, and aglitter with jewelled trappings. Its eyes, too, burned with the light of living coals. On such a steed, thought Conan, might devils from the nether parts of Hell come howling up to ravage the green hills of earth.
As the great beast paced the bloodstained snow, under the gloved guidance of its rider, all the Vanir bowed low, repeating one word like an incantation: “Doom... Doom... Doom!”
The giant Rexor leaped forward to hold the hell-steed’s bridle as his master dismounted. The two exchanged but a word or two, then turned to scrutinize the Cimmerian woman, who stood, tense and level-eyed, grasping her broadsword. As Maeve returned their gaze and sensed the menace in it, like a mother panther prepared to defend her cub, she raised her weapon and moved one foot into position for a strike.
The man in the jewelled helmet, still studying her with cool appraisal, drew off his glove and reached out one lean hand to accept from his lieutenant the sword of Corin the smith. Rexor bowed as he handed the weapon to his master.
“Doom... Doom... Doom!” intoned the Vanir once again; and as he listened, Conan perceived that this was no mere word of welcome that the raiders chanted. It was a portentous name—a name to conjure with, a name to fear.
Doom, a lithe figure in his serpentine mail, sauntered up to the embattled Cimmerians, mother and son. As he approached, his slitted eyes studied the sheer perfection of the weapon in his hands. Focusing his entire attention on the fine blade, or so it seemed, he turned it this way and that, admiring its razor edge, its flawless balance, its exquisite workmanship. Mirror-bright, the steel flashed in the low sun’s rays and immersed the waiting boy in a scintillating river of light.
As the ring of armed men parted, Maeve drew up her splendid body, raised her broadsword, and set her jaw. A swift intake of breath between parted lips served as a warning of her intention.
Suddenly Doom appeared to notice her. He doffed his jewelled helm, revealing a lean-jawed, darkly handsome face. A small smile flickered across his thin lips, and something akin to admiration flashed red in his coal-black eyes. The woman stood as if transfixed, fascinated yet repelled by his commanding presence and the overpowering aura of male sexuality that radiated from his person.
“Doom... Doom... Doom!” shouted the motionless Vanir warriors in unison.
For a long moment, Doom stared into the wide eyes of Conan’s mother. Her finely-sculpted breasts, kissed by the roseate light, rose and fell with rapid breathing. Then, careless of the woman’s upraised sword, he strolled past her, moving well within the range of her steel, but ignoring it, as if peril did not exist for such as he. The grace and bearing of his supple body, as he walked past the Cimmerian woman, was sensual, inviting, and vibrant with virility; but Maeve neither moved nor spoke. She remained utterly immobile, seemingly enthralled, as a partridge is fabled to be by the enticements of a serpent’s gaze.
Without a cry, or even a gasp, Maeve fell, as a tree falls before the axe of the forester. Dazed with horror, the boy Conan stared in disbelief as his mother’s severed head rolled in the mire at his feet. Her pale face displayed neither fear nor shock nor pain, only a dreamy-eyed look of fascination.
Then as the boy, hate-filled, whipped about and aimed his knife at the broad back of Doom, the Vanir were upon him, dragging him into a snowdrift, and wresting his knife from his grasp.
As the day faded, a weary column of captives, chained one to another, trudged across an endless expanse of pristine snow, shadowed by pines. The bedraggled line, a sad remnant of what had been a close-knit Cimmerian clan, were the sole survivors of the dawn raid on their village. Old men, women, and children, the ill-clad and the injured, slipped and slid their way over the ice-coated snows and rocky outcrops into slavery.
Far behind the captives, smoke still stained the sky. Having plundered the village, seizing weapons and food and furs and hides, the Vanir had put all buildings to the torch. Even the hot coals and ashes had been trampled under the horses’ hooves to scatter them, so that when spring thawed the earth, and new grass sprang up, there would exist no evidence that here had ever been a dwelling place of men.
The boy Conan staggered along, bent beneath the weight of his chain and chilled by the upland winds and the iron collar that clutched at his throat. He moved slowly, his mind a turmoil of half-memories and uncomprehending dread. He had witnessed too much bloodshed for his youthful reason to absorb. Despite his pounding heart, he felt nothing, his emotions numbed by the living nightmare of the day’s events.
That endless journey into Vanaheim would ever after remain a dreamlike horror in Conan’s memory, a blurred montage of startling images: fur-clad riders whirling past the bowed, staggering line of captives, scattering snow...the grisly standard uplifted against the sky, flaunting its emblem of tangled serpents and a black sun... an old man, unable to walk further, unchained from the line and speared with uncaring savagery... small red footprints left on the ice by the torn feet of barefoot children... the cold winds in the mountain passes... weariness and despair.
Conan never noticed when the giant Rexor and his mysterious master, Doom, parted company with the Vanir raiders. But there came a time when he realized that the two were no longer with the party; for suddenly the air seemed fresher and the sunlight brighter. Vaguely the boy wondered why those two dark, towering men, who so obviously were not men of Vanaheim, had led the attack on his village. When he dared to whisper the question to another captive, the man murmured, “I know not, boy. The Vanir doubtless paid well for the dark men’s services, but I did not see the money pass.”
The captives and their captors journeyed northward, winding a tortuous path through the broken hills of northern Cimmeria. Gaunt crags of naked rock thrust through their mantles of wind-piled snow, and the saw-toothed range of the Eiglophians loomed before them like a row of white-robed giants against the sapphire skies. In the pass, a late snow flurry swirled around the ill-clad slaves, stinging their eyes with bitter kisses. Then the feet of the children, chilled to insensibility, no longer felt the bite of rocks against half-frozen flesh.
Snow persisted as the Cimmerians crossed the mountains into Vanaheim, the realm of their enemies. The horsemen and their hounds were forced to range far afield to hunt game. Streams, fed by the melting snow in sheltered places, cut deep runnels in the lingering snowdrifts and supplied crystal-cold water to the captives’ camping sites. Thus they survived.
At last they began to descend the far side of the mountain range. Stunted trees clung precariously to the rough land, their twisted forms looking to the boy like crooked gnomes crouching beside their tunnels. Stretches of tundra bore raw wounds where herds of reindeer had pawed the snow aside to nibble on dead grasses. Long lines of marsh fowl, northward bound, flapped by; and the honking of their mournful cries echoed the despairing bitterness in Conan’s heart.
As the slaves straggled across the marshes, the boy noticed the heads of drowned tussocks emerging from water scummed with patches of floating ice; and on these tussocks he saw the first timid flowers of spring.
The journey seemed as endless as forever. But it ended at last.
One dusk, as the setting sun shot blood-red darts into the mist-veiled bosom of the land, Conan and the other captives were herded through the palisaded gateway of a Vanir town—a sizeable community, which they later came to know as Thrudvang.
The footsore thralls were driven like cattle through a clutter of stone houses, half-buried in turf and roofed with thatch. At length they reached a walled enclosure within which stood several sheds. Into one of these slave pens, which offered scant protection from the elements, the newcomers were hustled to spend the lonely night sleeping on hard clay sparsely strewn with dirty straw.
At dawn, after receiving a small ration of bread and thin soup, the stronger and healthier among them were chained by rusty manacles to a massive wheel whose spokes were stout logs, polished smooth by the pressure of human hands. This wheel turned one enormous millstone upon another, grinding grain to powder beneath its ponderous weight. To this Wheel of Pain, as the slaves came to call it, Conan was chained beside other ragged, dull-eyed youths and men from lands unknown or rarely mentioned in Cimmeria. As for the captive women and girl-children of his village, they were led away to face a different, perhaps even uglier fate. Conan never heard of them again.
The Master of the Wheel was a burly man, swarthy and heavy-featured, who seemed to the labouring children to be an ogre. Day after day, as they pushed the groaning wheel in an eternal circle, he stood on the incline above the shallow pit wherein the wheel was fixed, wrapped in his greasy furs. As grim and unspeaking as an idol of stone, he stood, with only his sharp, fierce eyes moving in his leather-framed face as he watched, hawk-like, to detect the laggard or the indolent.
Only when an exhausted boy fell to his knees, unable to work any longer, did he spring into action. Then a vicious rawhide whip sang its sibilant song, laying crimson welts on pitiful shoulders, until under its bite the whimpering wretch would stagger to his feet to toil once more.
So Conan and his fellows laboured day after day, month after month, until time lost all meaning for them. Faces slack, eyes dull, hearts emptied of emotion, time for them contracted to the present moment only. Yesterday was mercifully obliterated from their consciousness; tomorrow was a nightmare yet undreamed. When a wheel-slave fell and could rise to toil no more, the Master summoned the ever-present Vanir guards with a curt gesture to unshackle the gasping body and bear it off—no one knew where.
Conan dully wondered at times if that was how the Vanir fed their dogs.
The seasons changed; months stumbled into years. Wheel-slaves died, only to be replaced by other slaves, reaved by the Vanir raiders. Some of the new captives were youths and men of Cimmerian stock; others were golden-haired boys from Asgard: a few were gaunt Hyperboreans with limp, flaxen locks and, it was said, a knowledge of sorcery. Not that it seemed to do them any good.
For all, life became a dreary endurance of days of grinding toil and nights of deathlike slumber. Hope died like a candle in the wind. Despair dulled Conan’s senses until they became indifferent to discomfort. True, he and his fellows did receive some care, lest they become useless as draft animals. They had good food, a small fire in their quarters during winter storms, and a supply of cast-off clothing too ragged to be worth the mending. But that was all.
Ever there was the groaning Wheel of Pain, ever the pitiless blue sky above, ever the frozen slush of winter or the cracked, dry mud of summer beneath their feet. And ever the clank of the chain that bound them to the wheel.
Once and once only Conan wept, and it was but a single tear that trickled down
his dirty cheek to freeze like a stone in the frigid wind. For a moment the boy • lumped against the wheel-spoke, slick from the pressure of his sweaty palms, and prayed for an end to the unending torture, even if the end was death. But the moment passed.
I le shook his unshorn black mane and dashed the tear away.
There is in every heart a threshold, a point beyond which hopelessness and resignation cannot penetrate: a moment in which life and death are equal forces. At this moment, a new kind of courage is born within the heart of even the dreariest slave. The emotion that took possession of Conan’s heart as he brushed away that tear was rage hot and unforgiving rage.
His lips drew back from his strong teeth in a savage snarl. Wordlessly, the young Cimmerian made a vow to his indifferent northern gods: Never again, he promised, shall lords or men or devils wring from my eyes a single tear.
And he made another vow in the silence of his heart: Men shall die for this!
Then with all his strength, he leaned against the spoke of the Wheel of Pain. The wheel groaned and creaked as it began again its endless circuit.
Nurtured by the fires of rage, a new-found pride, and the courage to endure, Conan grew into a man. The years of back-breaking labour that toughened his sinews and made his muscles bulge gave his body the strength and flexibility which soft iron gains when it is heated in the furnace and pounded by the hammer of the smith. And though his days were blurred by a monotony of crushing toil, and his body held in chains, Conan found that his mind was free—free to soar like the marsh fowl on wings of hope.