CHAPTER 7: THE RENDING OF THE
VEIL
Conan knew his only chance of escape lay in speed.
He did not even consider hiding somewhere near Belverus until the chase passed
on; he was certain that the uncanny ally of Tarascus would be able to ferret
him out. Besides, he was not one to skulk and hide; an open fight or an open
chase, either suited his temperament better. He had a long start, he knew. He
would lead them a grinding race for the border.
Zenobia had chosen well to selecting the white
horse. His speed, toughness and endurance were obvious. The girl knew weapons
and horses, and, Conan reflected with some satisfaction, she knew men. He rode
westward at a gait that ate up the miles.
It was a sleeping land through which he rode, past
grove-sheltered villages and white-walled villas amid spacious fields and
orchards that grew sparser as he fared westward. As the villages thinned, the
land grew more rugged, and the keeps that frowned from eminences told of
centuries of border war. But none rode down from those castles to challenge or
halt him. The lords of the keeps were following the banner of Amalric; the
pennons that were wont to wave over these towers were now floating over the
Aquilonian plains.
When the last huddled village fell behind him,
Conan left the road, which was beginning to bend toward the northwest, toward
the distant passes. To keep to the road would mean to pass by border towers,
still garrisoned with armed men who would not allow him to pass unquestioned.
He knew there would be no patrols riding the border marches on either side, as
to ordinary times, but there were those towers, and with dawn there would
probably be cavalcades of returning soldiers with wounded men to ox-carts.
This road from Belverus was the only road that
crossed the border for fifty miles from north to south. It followed a series of
passes through the hills, and on either hand lay a wide expanse of a wild,
sparsely inhabited mountains. He maintained his due westerly direction,
intending to cross the border deep to the wilds of the hills that lay to the
south of the passes. It was a shorter route, more arduous, but safer for a
hunted fugitive. One man on a horse could traverse country an army would find
impassable.
But at dawn he had not reached the hills; they
were a long, low, blue rampart stretching along the horizon ahead of him. Here
there were neither farms nor villages, no white-walled villas looming among
clustering trees. The dawn wind stirred the tall stiff grass, and there was
nothing but the long rolling swells of brown earth, covered with dry grass, and
to the distance the gaunt walls of a stronghold on a low hill. Too many
Aquilonian raiders had crossed the mountains in not too-distant days for the
countryside to be thickly settled as it was farther to the east.
Dawn ran like a prairie fire across the
grasslands, and high overhead sounded a weird crying as a straggling wedge of
wild geese winged swiftly southward. In a grassy swale Conan halted and unsaddled
his mount. Its sides were heaving, its coat plastered with sweat. He had pushed
it unmercifully through the hours before dawn.
While it munched the brittle grass and rolled, he
lay at the crest of the low slope, staring eastward. Far away to the northward
he could see the road he had left, streaming like a white ribbon over a distant
rise. No black dots moved along that glistening ribbon. There was no sign about
the castle to the distance to indicate that the keepers had noticed the lone
wayfarer.
An hour later the land still stretched bare. The
only sign of life was a glint of steel on the far-off battlements, a raven to
the sky that wheeled backward and forth, dipping and rising as if seeking
something. Conan saddled and rode westward at a more leisurely gait.
As he topped the farther crest of the slope, a
raucous screaming burst out over his head, and looking up, he saw the raven
flapping high above him, cawing incessantly. As he rode on, it followed him,
maintaining its position and making the morning hideous with its strident
cries, heedless of his efforts to drive it away.
This kept up for hours, until Conan's teeth were
on edge, and he felt that he would give half his kingdom to be allowed to wring
that black neck.
"Devils of hell!" he roared to futile
rage, shaking his mailed fist at the frantic bird. "Why do you harry me
with your squawking? Begone, you black spawn of perdition, and peck for wheat
to the farmers' fields!"
He was ascending the first pitch of the hills, and
he seemed to hear an echo of the bird's clamor far behind him. Turning to his
saddle, he presently made out another black dot hanging in the blue. Beyond
that again he caught the glint of the afternoon sun on steel. That could mean
only one thing: armed men. And they were not riding along the beaten road,
which was out of his sight beyond the horizon. They were following him. His
face grew grim and he shivered slightly as he stared at the raven that wheeled
high above him.
"So it is more than the whim of a brainless
beast?" he muttered. "Those riders cannot see you, spawn of hell; but
the other bird can see you, and they can see him. You follow me, he follows
you, and they follow him. Are you only a craftily trained feathered creature,
or some devil in the form of a bird? Did Xaltotun set you on my trail? Are you
Xaltotun?"
Only a strident screech answered him, a screech
vibrating with harsh mockery.
Conan wasted no more breath on his dusky betrayer.
Grimly he settled to the long grind of the hills, but dared not push the horse
too hard; the rest he had allowed it had not been enough to freshen it. He was
still far ahead of his pursuers, but they would cut down that lead steadily. It
was almost a certainty that their horses were fresher than his, for they had
undoubtedly changed mounts at that castle he had passed.
The going grew rougher, the scenery more rugged,
steep grassy slopes pitching up to densely timbered mountainsides. Here, he
knew, he might elude his hunters, but for that hellish bird that squalled
incessantly above him. He could no longer see them in this broken country, but
he was certain that they still followed him, guided unerringly by their
feathered allies. That black shape became like a demoniac incubus, hounding him
through measureless hells. The stones he hurled with a curse went wide or fell
harmless, though in his youth he had felled hawks on the wing.
The horse was tiring fast. Conan recognized the
grim finality of his position. He sensed an inexorable driving fate behind all
this. He could not escape. He was as much a captive as he had been in the pits
of Belverus. But he was no son of the Orient to yield passively to what seemed
inevitable. If he could not escape, he would at least take some of his foes
into eternity with him. He turned into a wide thicket of larches that masked a
slope, looking for a place to turn at bay.
Then ahead of him there rang a strange, shrill
scream, human yet weirdly timbred. An instant later he had pushed through a
screen of branches, and saw the source of that eldritch cry. In a small glade
below him four soldiers in Nemedian chain-mail were binding a noose about the
neck of a gaunt old woman in peasant garb. A heap of fagots, bound with cord on
the ground near by, showed what her occupation had been when surprized by these
stragglers.
Conan felt slow fury swell his heart as he looked
silently down and saw the ruffians dragging her toward a tree whose
low-spreading branches were obviously intended to act as a gibbet. He had
crossed the frontier an hour ago. He was standing on his own soil, watching the
murder of one of his own subjects. The old woman was struggling with surprizing
strength and energy, and as he watched, she lifted her head and voiced again
the strange, weird, far-carrying call he had heard before. It was echoed as if
in mockery by the raven flapping above the trees. The soldiers laughed roughly,
and one struck her in the mouth.
Conan swung from his weary steed and dropped down
the face of the rocks, landing with a clang of mail on the grass. The four men
wheeled at the sound and drew their swords, gaping at the mailed giant who
faced them, sword in hand.
Conan laughed harshly. His eyes were bleak as
flint.
"Dogs!" he said without passion and
without mercy. "Do Nemedian jackals set themselves up as executioners and
hang my subjects at will? First you must take the head of their king. Here I
stand, awaiting your lordly pleasure!"
The soldiers stared at him uncertainly as he
strode toward them.
"Who is this madman?" growled a bearded
ruffian. "He wears Nemedian mail, but speaks with an Aquilonian
accent."
"No matter," quoth another. "Cut
him down, and then we'll hang the old hag."
And so saying he ran at Conan, lifting his sword.
But before he could strike, the king's great blade lashed down, splitting
helmet and skull. The man fell before him, but the others were hardy rogues.
They gave tongue like wolves and surged about the lone figure in the gray mail,
and the clamor and din of steel drowned the cries of the circling raven.
Conan did not shout. His eyes coals of blue fire
and his lips smiling bleakly, he lashed right and left with his two-handed
sword. For all his size he was quick as a cat on his feet, and he was
constantly in motion, presenting a moving target so that thrusts and swings cut
empty air oftener than not. Yet when he struck he was perfectly balanced, and
his blows fell with devastating power. Three of the four were down, dying in
their own blood, and the fourth was bleeding from half a dozen wounds,
stumbling in headlong retreat as he parried frantically, when Conan's spur
caught in the surcoat of one of the fallen men.
The king stumbled, and before he could catch
himself the Nemedian, with the frenzy of desperation, rushed him so savagely
that Conan staggered and fell sprawling over the corpse. The Nemedian croaked
in triumph and sprang forward, lifting his great sword with both hands over his
right shoulder, as he braced his legs wide for the stroke -- and then, over the
prostrate king, something huge and hairy shot like a thunderbolt full on the
soldier's breast, and his yelp of triumph changed to a shriek of death.
Conan, scrambling up, saw the man lying dead with
his throat torn out, and a great gray wolf stood over him, head sunk as it
smelt the blood that formed a pool on the grass.
The king turned as the old woman spoke to him. She
stood straight and tall before him, and in spite of her ragged garb, her features,
clear-cut and aquiline, and her keen black eyes, were not those of a common
peasant woman. She called to the wolf and it trotted to her side like a great
dog and rubbed its giant shoulder against her knee, while it gazed at Conan
with great green lambent eyes. Absently she laid her hand upon its mighty neck,
and so the two stood regarding the king of Aquilonia. He found their steady
gaze disquieting, though there was no hostility in it.
"Men say King Conan died beneath the stones
and dirt when the cliffs crumbled by Valkia," she said in a deep, strong,
resonant voice.
"So they say," he growled. He was in no
mood for controversy, and he thought of those armored riders who were pushing
nearer every moment. The raven above him cawed stridently, and he cast an
involuntary glare upward, grinding his teeth in a spasm of nervous irritation.
Up on the ledge the white horse stood with
drooping head. The old woman looked at it, and then at the raven; and then she
lifted a strange weird cry as she had before. As if recognizing the call, the
raven wheeled, suddenly mute, and raced eastward. But before it had got out of
sight, the shadow of mighty wings fell across it. An eagle soared up from the
tangle of trees, and rising above it, swooped and struck the black messenger to
the earth. The strident voice of betrayal was stilled for ever.
"Crom!" muttered Conan, staring at the
old woman. "Are you a magician, too?"
"I am Zelata," she said. "The
people of the valleys call me a witch. Was that child of the night guiding
armed men on your trail?"
"Aye." She did not seem to think the
answer fantastic. "They cannot be far behind me."
"Lead your horse and follow me, King
Conan," she said briefly.
Without comment he mounted the rocks and brought
his horse down to the glade by a circuitous path. As he came he saw the eagle
reappear, dropping lazily down from the sky, and rest an instant on Zelata's
shoulder, spreading its great wings lightly so as not to crush her with its
weight.
Without a word she led the way, the great wolf
trotting at her side, the eagle soaring above her. Through deep thickets and
along tortuous ledges poised over deep ravines she led him, and finally along a
narrow precipice-edged path to a curious dwelling of stone, half hut, half
cavern, beneath a cliff hidden among the gorges and crags. The eagle flew to
the pinnacle of this cliff, and perched there like a motionless sentinel.
Still silent, Zelata stabled the horse in a
near-by cave, with leaves and grass piled high for provender, and a tiny spring
bubbling in the dim recesses.
In the hut she seated the king on a rude,
hide-covered bench, and she herself sat upon a low stool before the tiny fireplace,
while she made a fire of tamarisk chunks and prepared a frugal meal. The great
wolf drowsed beside her, facing the fire, his huge head sunk on his paws, his
ears twitching in his dreams.
"You do not fear to sit in the hut of a
witch?" she asked, breaking her silence at last.
An impatient shrug of his gray-mailed shoulders
was her guest's only reply. She gave into his hands a wooden dish heaped with
dried fruits, cheese and barley bread, and a great pot of the heady upland
beer, brewed from barley grown in the high valleys.
"I have found the brooding silence of the
glens more pleasing than the babble of city streets," she said. "The
children of the wild are kinder than the children of men." Her hand
briefly stroked the ruff of the sleeping wolf. "My children were afar from
me today, or I had not needed your sword, my king. They were coming at my
call."
"What grudge had those Nemedian dogs against
you?" Conan demanded.
"Skulkers from the invading army straggle all
over the countryside, from the frontier to Tarantia," she answered.
"The foolish villagers in the valleys told them that I had a store of gold
hidden away, so as to divert their attentions from their villages. They
demanded treasure from me, and my answers angered them. But neither skulkers nor
the men who pursue you, nor any raven will find you here."
He shook his head, eating ravenously.
"I'm for Tarantia."
She shook her head.
"You thrust your head into the dragon's jaws.
Best seek refuge abroad. The heart is gone from your kingdom."
"What do you mean?" he demanded.
"Battles have been lost before, yet wars won. A kingdom is not lost by a
single defeat."
"And you will go to Tarantia?"
"Aye. Prospero will be holding it against
Amalric."
"Are you sure?"
"Hell's devils, woman!" he exclaimed
wrathfully. "What else?"
She shook her head. "I feel that it is
otherwise. Let us see. Not lightly is the veil rent; yet I will rend it a
little, and show you your capital city."
Conan did not see what she cast upon the fire, but
the wolf whimpered in his dreams, and a green smoke gathered and billowed up
into the hut. And as he watched, the walls and ceiling of the hut seemed to
widen, to grow remote and vanish, merging with infinite immensities; the smoke
rolled about him, blotting out everything. And in it forms moved and faded, and
stood out in startling clarity.
He stared at the familiar towers and streets of
Tarantia, where a mob seethed and screamed, and at the same time he was somehow
able to see the banners of Nemedia moving inexorably westward through the smoke
and flame of a pillaged land. In the great square of Tarantia the frantic
throng milled and yammered, screaming that the king was dead, that the barons
were girding themselves to divide the land between them, and that the rule of a
king, even of Valerius, was better than anarchy. Prospero, shining in his
armor, rode among them, trying to pacify them, bidding them trust Count
Trocero, urging them to man the wall and aid his knights in defending the city.
They turned on him, shrieking with fear and unreasoning rage, howling that he
was Trocero's butcher, a more evil foe than Amalric himself. Offal and stones
were hurled at his knights.
A slight blurring of the picture, that might have
denoted a passing of tune, and then Conan saw Prospero and his knights filing
out of the gates and spurring southward. Behind him the city was in an uproar.
"Fools!" muttered Conan thickly.
"Fools! Why could they not trust Prospero? Zelata, if you are making game
of me, with some trickery -- "
"This has passed," answered Zelata
imperturbably, though somberly. "It was the evening of the day that has
passed when Prospero rode out of Tarantia, with the hosts of Amalric almost
within sight. From the walls men saw the flame of their pillaging. So I read it
in the smoke. At sunset the Nemedians rode into Tarantia, unopposed. Look! Even
now, in the royal hall of Tarantia -- "
Abruptly Conan was looking into the great
coronation hall. Valerius stood on the regal dais, clad in ermine robes, and
Amalric, still in his dusty, blood-stained armor, placed a rich and gleaming
circlet on his yellow locks -- the crown of Aquilonia! The people cheered; long
lines of steel-clad Nemedian warriors looked grimly on, and nobles long in
disfavor at Conan's court strutted and swaggered with the emblem of Valerius on
their sleeves.
"Crom!" It was an explosive imprecation
from Conan's lips as he started up, his great fists clenched into hammers, his
veins on his temples knotting, his features convulsed. "A Nemedian placing
the crown of Aquilonia on that renegade -- in the royal hall of Tarantia!"
As if dispelled by his violence, the smoke faded,
and he saw Zelata's black eyes gleaming at him through the mist.
"You have seen -- the people of your capital
have forfeited the freedom you won for them by sweat and blood; they have sold
themselves to the slavers and the butchers. They have shown that they do not
trust their destiny. Can you rely upon them for the winning back of your
kingdom?"
"They thought I was dead," he grunted,
recovering some of his poise. "I have no son. Men can't be governed by a
memory. What if the Nemedians have taken Tarantia? There still remain the
provinces, the barons, and the people of the countrysides. Valerius has won an
empty glory."
"You are stubborn, as befits a fighter. I
cannot show you the future, I cannot show you all the past. Nay, I show you
nothing. I merely make you see windows opened in the veil by powers un-guessed.
Would you look into the past for a clue of the present?"
"Aye." He seated himself abruptly.
Again the green smoke rose and billowed. Again
images unfolded before him, this time alien and seemingly irrelevant. He saw
great towering black walls, pedestals half hidden in the shadows upholding
images of hideous, half-bestial gods. Men moved in the shadows, dark, wiry men,
clad in red, silken loincloths. They were bearing a green jade sarcophagus
along a gigantic black corridor. But before he could tell much about what he
saw, the scene shifted. He saw a cavern, dim, shadowy and haunted with a
strange intangible horror. On an altar of black stone stood a curious golden
vessel, shaped like the shell of a scallop. Into this cavern came some of the
same dark, wiry men who had borne the mummy-case. They seized the golden
vessel, and then the shadows swirled around them and what happened he could not
say. But he saw a glimmer in a whorl of darkness, like a ball of living fire.
Then the smoke was only smoke, drifting up from the fire of tamarisk chunks,
thinning and fading.
"But what does this portend?" he
demanded, bewildered. "What I saw in Tarantia I can understand. But what
means this glimpse of Zamorian thieves sneaking through a subterranean temple
of Set, in Stygia? And that cavern -- I've never seen or heard of anything like
it, in all my wanderings. If you can show me that much, these shreds of vision
which mean nothing, disjointed, why can you not show me all that is to
occur?"
Zelata stirred the fire without replying.
"These things are governed by immutable
laws," she said at last. "I can not make you understand; I do not
altogether understand myself, though I have sought wisdom in the silences of
the high places for more years than I can remember. I cannot save you, though I
would if I might. Man must, at last, work out his own salvation. Yet perhaps
wisdom may come to me in dreams, and in the morn I may be able to give you the
clue to the enigma."
"What enigma?" he demanded.
"The mystery that confronts you, whereby you
have lost a kingdom," she answered. And then she spread a sheepskin upon
the floor before the hearth. "Sleep," she said briefly. Without a
word he stretched himself upon it, and sank into restless but deep sleep
through which phantoms moved silently and monstrous shapeless shadows crept.
Once, limned against a purple sunless horizon, he saw the mighty walls and
towers of a great city of such as rose nowhere on the waking earth he knew. Its
colossal pylons and purple minarets lifted toward the stars, and over it,
floating like a giant mirage, hovered the bearded countenance of the man
Xaltotun.
Conan woke in the chill whiteness of early dawn,
to see Zelata crouched beside the tiny fire. He had not awakened once in the
night, and the sound of the great wolf leaving or entering should have roused
him. Yet the wolf was there, beside the hearth, with its shaggy coat wet with
dew, and with more than dew. Blood glistened wetly amid the thick fell, and
there was a cut upon his shoulder.
Zelata nodded, without looking around, as if
reading the thoughts of her royal guest.
"He has hunted before dawn, and red was the
hunting. I think the man who hunted a king will hunt no more, neither man nor
beast."
Conan stared at the great beast with strange
fascination as he moved to take the food Zelata offered him.
"When I come to my throne again I won't
forget," he said briefly. "You've befriended me -- by Crom, I can't
remember when I've lain down and slept at the mercy of man or woman as I did
last night. But what of the riddle you would read me this morn?"
A long silence ensued, in which the crackle of the
tamarisks was loud on the hearth.
"Find the heart of your kingdom," she
said at last. "There lies your defeat and your power. You fight more than
mortal man. You will not press the throne again unless you find the heart of
your kingdom."
"Do you mean the city of Tarantia?"
She shook her head. "I am but an oracle,
through whose lips the gods speak. My lips are sealed by them lest I speak too
much. You must find the heart of your kingdom. I can say no more. My lips are
opened and sealed by the gods."
Dawn was still white on the peaks when Conan rode
westward. A glance back showed him Zelata standing in the door of her hut,
inscrutable as ever, the great wolf beside her.
A gray sky arched overhead, and a moaning wind was
chill with a promise of winter. Brown leaves fluttered slowly down from the
bare branches, sifting upon his mailed shoulders.
All day he pushed through the hills, avoiding
roads and villages. Toward nightfall he began to drop down from the heights,
tier by tier, and saw the broad plains of Aquilonia spread out beneath him.
Villages and farms lay close to the foot of the
hills on the western side of the mountains for, half a century, most of the
raiding across the frontier had been done by the Aquilonians. But now only
embers and ashes showed where farm huts and villas had stood.
In the gathering darkness Conan rode slowly on.
There was little fear of discovery, which he dreaded from friend as well as
from foe. The Nemedians had remembered old scores on their westward drive, and
Valerius had made no attempt to restrain his allies. He did not count on
winning the love of the common people. A vast swath of desolation had been cut
through the country from the foothills westward. Conan cursed as he rode over
blackened expanses that had been rich fields, and saw the gaunt gable-ends of
burned houses jutting against the sky. He moved through an empty and deserted
land, like a ghost out of a forgotten and outworn past.
The speed with which the army had traversed the
land showed what little resistance it had encountered. Yet had Conan been
leading his Aquilonians the invading army would have been forced to buy every
foot they gained with their blood. The bitter realization permeated his soul;
he was not the representative of a dynasty. He was only a lone adventurer. Even
the drop of dynastic blood Valerius boasted had more hold on the minds of men
than the memory of Conan and the freedom and power he had given the kingdom.
No pursuers followed him down out of the hills. He
watched for wandering or returning Nemedian troops, but met none. Skulkers gave
him a wide path, supposing him to be one of the conquerors, what of his
harness. Groves and rivers were far more plentiful on the western side of the
mountains, and coverts for concealment were not lacking.
So he moved across the pillaged land, halting only
to rest his horse, eating frugally of the food Zelata had given him, until, on
a dawn when he lay hidden on a river bank where willows and oaks grew thickly,
he glimpsed, afar, across the rolling plains dotted with rich groves, the blue
and golden towers of Tarantia.
He was no longer in a deserted land, but one
teeming with varied life. His progress thenceforth was slow and cautious,
through thick woods and unfrequented byways. It was dusk when he reached the
plantation of Servius Galannus.