From sc.r.a.ps of the ensuing conversation, Conan further guessed that, by his magic, the shaman had seen the approach of the troop escorting the Princess Zosara to her Kuigar bridegroom and had shown this vision to the G.o.d-king. Filled with simple, human l.u.s.t for the slim Turanian girl, Jalung Thongpa had dispatched the troop of his Azweri hors.e.m.e.n to seize her and fetch her to his seraglio.
That was all that Conan wanted to know. For seven days, ever since his capture, he had been pushed and prodded and bedeviled. He had walked his feet off, and his temper was at the breaking point.
The two guards that flanked him were facing the throne with respectfully downcast eyes, giving their full attention to the rimpoche, who might at any instant issue a command. Conan gently helfted the chains that bound his wrists. They were too stout for him to break by main force; he had tried in the first days of this captivity and failed.
Quietly, he brought his wrists together, so that the length of chain hung down in a loop for a foot. Then, pivoting, he suddenly snapped his arms up past the head of the left-hand guard. The slack of the chain, swung like a whip, caught the guard across the face and sent him staggering back, blood gushing from a broken nose.
At Conan"s first violent movement, the other guard had whirled and brought down the head of his halberd to the guard position. As he did so, Conan caught the head of the halberd in the slack of the chain and jerked the pole arm out of the guard"s grasp.
A slash with the slack of the chain sent another guard reeling back, clutching the b.l.o.o.d.y ruin of his mouth and spitting a broken tooth.
Conan"s feet were chained too closely together to permit a full stride.
But from the floor in front of the dais he leaped with both feet together, like a frog. In two such grotesque bounds, Conan was up on the dais, and his hands were locked about the fat neck of the s...o...b..ring little G.o.d-king, squatting on his pile of skulls. The rimpoche"s good eye goggled in terror, and his face blackened from the pressure of Conan"s thumbs on his windpipe.
The guards and n.o.bles fluttered about, squealing with panic, or stood frozen with shock and terror at this strange giant who dared to lay violent hands upon their divinity.
"One move toward me, and I crush the life from this fat toad!" Conan growled.
Alone of the Meruvians in the room, the Grand Shaman had shown no sign of panic or surprise when the ragged youth had exploded in a whirlwind of fury. In perfect Hyrkanian, he asked:
"What is your will, barbarian?"
"Set free the girl and the black! Give us horses, and we will quit your accursed valley forever. Refuse-or try to trick us-and I"ll crush your little king to a pulp!"
The shaman nodded his skull-like head. His green eyes were as cold as ice in the masklike face of tight-stretched, saffron skin. With a commanding gesture, he raised his carven staff of ebony.
"Set free the princess Zosara and the black-skinned captive," he ordered calmly. Pale-faced servitors with frightened eyes scurried to do his bidding. Juma grunted, rubbing his wrists. Beside him, the princess shivered. Conan swung the limp form of the king in front of him and stepped from the dais.
"Conan!" bellowed Juma. "Beware!"
Conan whirled, but too late. As he had moved to the edge of the dais, the Grand Shaman acted. Nimble as a striking cobra, his ebony staff flicked out and lightly tapped Conan"s shoulder, where his naked skin bulged through the rents in his ragged clothing. Conan"s lunge toward his antagonist was never completed. Numbness spread through his body, like venom from a reptile"s fang. His mind clouded; his head, too heavy to hold up, fell forward on his chest. Limply, he collapsed. The half-strangled little G.o.d-king tore free from his grasp.
The last sound Conan heard was the thunderous bellow of the black as he went down under the wriggling swarm of brown bodies.
4. The Ship of Blood
Above all, it was hot and it stank. The dead, vitiated air of the dungeon was stale. It reeked with the stench of close-packed, sweating bodies. A score of naked men were crammed into one filthy hole, surrounded on all sides by huge blocks of stone weighing many tons.
Many were small, brown Menivians, who sprawled about, listless and apathetic. There were a handful of the squat, slant-eyed little warriors who guarded the sacred valley, the Azweri. There were a couple of hawk-nosed Hyrkanians. And there were Conan the Cimmerian and his giant black comrade, Juma. When the Grand Shaman"s staff had struck him into insensibility and the warriors had pulled down the mighty Juma by weight of numbers, the infuriated rimpoche had commanded that they pay the ultimate penalty for their crime.
In Shamballah, however, the ultimate penalty was not death, which in Meruvian belief merely released the soul for its next incarnation.
Enslavement they considered worse, since it robbed a man of his humanity, his individuality. So to slavery they were summarily condemned.
Thinking of it, Conan growled deep in his throat, and his eyes blazed with smouldering fires out of his dark face, peering through the s.h.a.ggy, matted tangle of his uncut black mane. Chained beside him, Juma, sensing Conan"s frustration, chuckled. Conan glowered at his comrade; sometimes Juma"s invincible good humor irritated him. For a free-born Cimmerian, slavery was indeed an intolerable punishment.
To the Kus.h.i.te, however, slavery was nothing new. Slave raiders had torn Juma as a child from his mother"s arms and dragged him out of the sweltering jungles of Kush to the slave marts of Shem. For a while he had worked as a field hand on a Shemite farm. Then, as his great thews began to swell, he had been sold as an apprentice gladiator to the arenas of Argos.
For his victory in the games held to celebrate the victory of King Milo of Argos over King Ferdrugo of Zbgara, Juma was given his freedom. For a time he lived in various Hyborian nations by thieving and by odd jobs. Then he drifted east to Turan, where his mighty stature and skill in combat won him a place in the ranks of King Yildiz"s mercenaries.
There he had come to know the youthful Conan. He and the Cimmerian had struck it off from the first. They were the two tallest men among the mercenary troops, and both came from far, outlandish countries; they were the only members of their respective races among the Turanians.
Their comradeship had now led them to the slave pits of Shamballah and would shortly lead them to the ultimate indignity of the slave block.
There they would stand naked in the blinding sun, poked and prodded by prospective buyers while the slave dealer bellowed praises of their strength.
The days dragged slowly past, as crippled snakes drag their tails painfully through the dust. Conan, Juma, and the others slept and woke to receive wooden bowls of rice, stingily shared out by their overseers. They spent the long days fitfully dozing or languidly quarreling.
Conan was curious to learn more about these Meruvians, for in all his wanderings he had never encountered their like. They dwelt here in this strange valley as their ancestors had done since time began. They had no contact with the outside world and wanted none.
Conan became friendly with a Meruvian named Tashudang, from whom he learned something of their singsong language. When he asked why they called their king a G.o.d, Tashudang replied that the king had lived for ten thousand years, his spirit being reborn in a different body after each sojourn in mortal flesh. Conan was skeptical of this, for he knew the sort of lies that kings of other lands spread about themselves. But he prudently kept his opinion to himself. When Tashudang complained mildly and resignedly of the oppression of the king and his shamans, Conan asked:
"Why don"t you and your fellows get together and throw the whole lot into the Sumeru Tso, and rule yourselves? That"s what we would do in my country if anybody tried to tryannize over us."
Tashudang looked shocked. "You know not what you say, foreigner! Many centuries ago, the priests tell us, this land was much higher than it now is. It stretched from the tops of the Himelias to the tops of the Talakmas-one great, lofty plain, covered with snow and whipped by icy winds. The Roof of the World, it was called.
"Then Yama, the king of the demons, determined to create this valley for us, his chosen people, to dwell in. By a mighty spell, he caused the land to sink. The ground shook with the sound of ten thousand thunders, molten rock poured from cracks in the earth, mountains crumbled, ard forests went up in flame. When it was over, the land between the mountain chains was as you now see it. Because it was now a lowland, the climate wanned, and the plants and beasts of the warm countries came to dwell in it. Then Yama created the first Meruvians and placed them in the valley, to inhabit forever. And he appointed the shamans as leaders and enlighteners of the people.
"Sometimes the shamans forget their duties and oppress us, as if they were but greedy common men. But Yama"s command, for us to obey the shamans, still holds good. If we defy it, Yama"s great spell will be nullified, and this land will rise to the height of the mountain tops and again become a cold waste. So, no matter how they abuse us, we dare not revolt against the shamans."
"Well," said Conan, "if that filthy little toad is your idea of a G.o.d-"
"Oh, no!" said Tashudang, his eyeb.a.l.l.s glistening white in the dimness with fear. "Say it not! He is the only begotten son of the great G.o.d, Yama himself. And when he calls his father, the G.o.d comes!" Tashudang buried his face in his hands, and Conan could get no more words out of him that day.
The Meruvians were an odd race. Theirs was a peculiar la.s.situde of spirit-a somnolent fatalism that bade them bow to everything that came upon them as a predestined visitation from their cruel, enigmatic G.o.ds.
Any resistance to fate on their part, they believed, would be punished, if not immediately, then in their next incarnation.
It was not easy to drag information out of them, but the Cimmerian youth kept doggedly at it. For one thing, it helped to pa.s.s the unending days. For another, he did not intend to remain in slavery long, and every bit of information that he could gather about this hidden kingdom and its peculiar people would be of value when he and Juma came to try for freedom. And finally, he knew how important it was in traveling through a strange country, to command at least a smattering of the local language. Although not at all a scholar by temperament, Conan picked up languages easily. He had already mastered several and could even read and write some of them a little.
At last came the fateful day when the overseers in black leather strode amongst the slaves, wielding heavy whips and herding their charges out the door. "Now," sneered one, "we shall see what prices the princes of the Sacred Land will pay for your unwieldy carca.s.ses, outland swine!"
And his whip raised a long weal across Conan"s back.
Hot sun beat down on Conan"s back like whips of fire. After being so long in darkness, he was dazzled by the brightness of day. After the slave auction, they led him up the gangplank to the deck of a great galley, which lay moored to the long, stone quays of Shamballah. He squinted against the sun and cursed in a growling undertone. This, then, was the doom to which they had sentenced him-to drudge at the oars until death took him.
"Get down in the hold, you dogs!" spat the ship"s overseer, cuffing Conan"s jaw with the back of his hand. "Only the children of Yama may stride the deck!"
Without thinking, the Cimmerian youth exploded into action. He drove his balled fist into the burly overseer"s bulging belly. As the breath hissed from the man"s lungs, Conan followed the blow with a hammerlike right to the jaw, which stretched the shipman on the deck. Behind him, Juma howled with joy and struggled to get up the line to stand beside him.
The commander of the ship"s guard rapped out an order. In a flash, the points of a dozen pikes, in the hands of wiry little Meruvian marines, were leveled at Conan. The Cimmerian stood in the circle of them, a menacing growl rising to his lips. But he belatedly controlled his rage, knowing that any move would bring instant death.
It took a bucket of water to revive the overseer. He laboriously climbed to his feet, blowing like a walrus, while water ran down his bruised face into his spa.r.s.e black beard. His eyes glared into Conan"s with insane rage, then cooled to icy venom.
The officer began to issue a command to the marines: "Slay the-" but the overseer interrupted:
"Nay, slay him not. Death were too easy for the dog. Ill make him whimper to be put out of his misery ere I"ve done with him."
"Well, Gorthangpo?" said the officer.
The overseer stared over the oar pit, meeting the cowed gaze of a hundred-odd naked brown men. They were starved and scrawny, and their bent backs were criss-crossed by a thousand whip scars. The ship carried a single bank of long oars on each side. Some oars were manned by two rowers, some by three, depending upon the size and strength of the slaves. The overseer pointed to an oar in the waist, to which three gray-haired, skeletal old men were chained.
"Chain him to yonder oar! Those walking corpses are played out; they are of no more use to us. Clear the oar of them. This foreign lad needs to stretch his arms a bit; well give him all the room he needs. And if he follow not the pace, I"ll open his back to the spine!"
As Conan watched impa.s.sively, the sailors unlocked the manacles that connected the wrist chains of the three old men to rings on the oar itself. The old men screamed with terror as brawny arms heaved them over the rail. They hit the water with a great splash and sank without a trace, save for the bubbles that rose one by one to the surface and burst.