Returning in triumph to the glittering Turanian capital of Aghrapur, Conan received, as a reward, a place in this honor guard. At first he had had to endure the gibes of his fellow troopers at his clumsy horsemanship and indifferent skill with the bow. But the gibes soon died away as the other guardsmen learned to avoid provoking a swing of Conan"s sledgehammer fists, and as his skill in riding and shooting improved with practice.
Now, Conan was beginning to wonder if this expedition could truly be called a reward. The light, leathern shield on his left arm was hacked into a shapeless ruin; he cast it aside. An arrow struck his horse"s rump. With a scream, the beast brought its head down and bucked, lashing out with its heels. Conan went flying over its head; the horse bolted and disappeared.
Shaken and battered, the Cimmerian scrambled to his feet and fought on afoot. The scimitars of his foes slashed away his cloak and opened rents in his hauberk of chain mail. They slit the leathern jerkin beneath, until Conan bled from a dozen little superficial wounds.
But he fought on, teeth bared in a mirthless grin and eyes blazing a volcanic blue in a flushed, congested face framed by a square-cut black mane. One by one his fellows were cut down, until only he and the gigantic black, Juma, stood back to back. The Kus.h.i.te howled wordlessly as he swung the b.u.t.t of his broken lance like a club.
Then it seemed as if a hammer came up out of the red mist of berserk fury that clouded Conan"s brain, as a heavy mace crashed against the side of his head, denting and cracking the spiked helm and driving the metal against his temple. His knees buckled and gave. The last thing he heard was the sharp, despairing cry of the princess as squat, grinning warriors tore her from the veiled palanquin down to the red snow that splotched the slope. Then, as he fell face down, he knew nothing.
2. The Cup of the G.o.ds
A thousand red devils were beating against Conan"s skull with red-hot hammers, and his cranium rang like a smitten anvil with every motion.
As he slowly clambered out of black insensibility, Conan found himself dangling over one mighty shoulder of his comrade Juma, who grinned to see him awaken and helped him to stand. Although his head hurt abominably, Conan found he was strong enough to stay on his feet.
Wondering, he looked about him.
Only he, Juma, and the girl Zosara had survived. The rest of the party-including Zosara"s maid, slain by an arrow-were food for the gaunt, gray wolves of the Hyrkanian steppe. They stood on the northern slopes of the Talakmas, several miles south of the site of the battle.
Stocky brown warriors in lacquered leather, many with bandaged wounds, surrounded them. Conan found that his wrists were stoutly manacled, and that ma.s.sive iron chains linked the manacles. The princess, in silken coat and trousers, was also fettered; but her chains and fetters were much lighter and seemed to be made of solid silver.
Juma was also chained, upon him most of the attention of their captors was focused. They crowded around the Kus.h.i.te, feeling his skin and then glancing at their fingers to see if his color had come off. One even moistened a piece of cloth in a patch of snow and then rubbed it against the back of Juma"s hand. Juma grinned broadly and chuckled.
"It must be they"ve never seen a man like me," he said to Conan.
The officer in command of the victors snapped a command. His men swung into their saddles. The princess was bundled back into her horse litter. To Conan and Juma the commander said, in broken Hyrkanian: "You two! You walk."
And walk they did, with the spears of the Azweri, as their captors were called, nudging them with frequent p.r.i.c.ks between their shoulders. The litter of the princess swayed between its two horses in the middle of the column. Conan noted that the commander of the Azweri troop treated Zosara with respect; she did not appear to have been physically harmed.
This chieftain did not seem to bear any grudge against Conan and Juma for the havoc they had wrought among his men, the death and wounds they had dealt.
"You d.a.m.n good fighters!" he said with a grin. On the other hand, he took no chances of letting his prisoners escape, or of letting them slow down the progress of his company by lagging. They were made to walk at a brisk pace from before dawn to after sunset, and any pause was countered by a prod with a lance. Conan set his jaw and obeyed for the moment.
For two days they wended over a devious trail through the heart of the mountain range. They crossed pa.s.ses where they had to plow through deep snow, still unmelted from the previous winter. Here the breath came short from the alt.i.tude, and sudden storms whipped their ragged garments and drove stinging particles of snow and hail against their faces. Juma"s teeth chattered. The black man found the cold much harder to endure than Conan, who had been reared in a northerly clime.
They came forth on the southern slopes of the Talakmas at last, to look upon a fantastic sight-a vast, green valley that sloped down and away before them. It was as if they stood on the lip of a stupendous dish.
Below them, little clouds crept over leagues of dense, green jungle. In the midst of this jungle, a great lake or inland sea reflected the azure of the clear, bright sky.
Beyond this body of water, the green continued on until it was lost in a distant purple haze. And above the haze, jagged and white, standing out sharply against the blue, rose the peaks of the mighty Himelias, hundreds of miles further south. The Himelias formed the other lip of the dish, which was encircled by the vast crescent of the Talakmas to the north and the Himelias to the south.
Conan spoke to the officer: "What valley is this?"
"Meru," said the chief. "Men call it, Cup of G.o.ds."
"Are we going down there?"
"Aye. You go to great city, Shamballah."
"Then what?"
"That for rimpoche-for G.o.d-king to decide."
"Who"s he?"
"Jalung Thongpa, Terror of Men and Shadow of Heaven. You move along now, white-skinned dog. No time for talk."
Conan growled deep in his throat as a spear p.r.i.c.k urged him on, silently vowing some day to teach this G.o.d-king the meaning of terror.
He wondered if this ruler"s divinity were proof against a foot of steel in his guts... But any such happy moment was still in the future.
Down they went, into the stupendous depression. The air grew warmer; the vegetation, denser. By the end of the day they were slogging through a land of steaming jungle warmth and swampy forest, which overhung the road in dense ma.s.ses of somber dark green, relieved by the brilliant blossoms of flowering trees. Bright-hued birds sang and screeched. Monkeys chattered in the trees. Insects buzzed and bit.
Snakes and lizards slithered out of the path of the party.
It was Conan"s first acquaintance with a tropical jungle, and he did not like it. The insects bothered him, and the sweat ran off him in streams. Juma, on the other hand, grinned as he stretched and filled his huge lungs.
"It is like my homeland," he said.
Conan was struck silent with awe at the fantastic landscape of verdant jungle and steamy swamp. He could almost believe that this vast valley of Meru was, in truth, the home of the G.o.ds, where they had dwelt since the dawn of time. Never had he seen such trees as those colossal cycads and redwoods, which towered into the misty heavens. He wondered how such a tropical jungle could be surrounded by mountains clad in eternal snows.
Once an enormous tiger stepped noiselessly into the path before them-a monster nine feet long, with fangs like daggers. Princess Zosara, watching from her litter, gave a little scream. There was a quick motion among the Azweri and a rattle of accouterments as they readied their weapons. The tiger, evidently thinking the party too strong for it, slipped into the jungle as silently as it had come.
Later, the earth shook to a heavy tread. With a loud snort, a huge beast burst from the rhododendron thickets and thundered across their path. As gray and rounded as a mountainous boulder, it somewhat resembled an enormous pig, with thick hide folded into bands. From its snout, a stout, blunt, recurved horn, a foot in length, arose. It halted, staring stupidly at the cavalcade from dim little pig"s eyes; then, with another snort, it crashed off through the underbrush.
"Nose-horn," said Juma. "We have them in Kush."
The jungle gave way at length to the sh.o.r.es of the great blue lake or inland sea that Conan had seen from the heights. For a time, they followed the curve of this unknown body of water, which the Azweri called Sumeru Tso. At last, across a bay of this sea, they sighted the walls, domes, and spires of a city of rose-red stone, standing amid fields and paddies between the jungle and the sea.
"Shamballah!" cried the commander of the Azweri. As one man, their captors dismounted, knelt, and touched their foreheads to the damp earth, while Conan and Juma exchanged a mystified glance.
"Here G.o.ds dwell!" said the chief. "You walk fast, now. If you make us late, they skin you alive. Hurry!"
3. The City of Skulls
The gates of the city were fashioned of bronze, green with age and cast in the likeness of a gigantic, horned human skull. Square, barred windows above the portal made the skulls"s eye sockets, while below them the barred grill of the portcullis grinned at them like the teeth in fleshless jaws. The leader of the little warriors winded his twisted bronze trumpet, and the portcullis rose. They entered the unknown city.
Here, everything was hewn and carved from rose-pink stone. The architecture was ornate, cluttered with sculp ture and friezes swarming with demons and monsters and many-armed G.o.ds. Gigantic faces of red stone glared down from the sides of towers, which dwindled tier upon tier into tapering spires.
Every where he looked, Conan saw carvings in the form of human skulls.
They were set into the lintels over doorways. They hung on golden chains about the yellow-brown necks of the Meruvians, whose only other garment, both for men and for women, was a short skirt. They appeared on the bosses of the shields of the guards at the gate and were riveted to the fronts of their bronze helmets.
Through the broad, well-planned avenues of this fantastic city the troop pursued its course. The half-naked Meruvians stepped out of their way, casting brief, incurious glances at the two stalwart prisoners and at the horse litter containing the princess. Among the throngs of bare-breasted city-dwellers moved, like crimson shadows, the forms of shaven-headed priests, swathed from neck to ankle in voluminous robes of gauzy red stuff.
Amid groves of trees, covered with flowers of scarlet, azure, and gold, the palace of the G.o.d-king loomed up before them. It consisted of one gigantic cone or spire, tapering up from a squat, circular base. Made entirely of red stone, the round tower wall climbed upwards in a spiral, like that of some curious, conical sea-sh.e.l.l. On each stone of the spiral parapet was graved the likeness of a human skull. The palace gave the impression of a tremendous tower made of death"s heads. Zosara could scarcely repress a shudder at this sinister ornamentation, and even Conan set his jaw grimly.
They entered through another skull-gate and thence through ma.s.sive stone walls and huge rooms into the throne-room of the G.o.d-king. The Azweri, dirty and travel-stained, remained in the rear, while a pair of gilded guardsmen, each armed with an ornate halberd, took the arms of each of the three prisoners and led them to the throne.
The throne, which rested atop a dais of black marble, was all of one huge piece of pale jade, carven into the likeness of ropes and chains of skulls, fantastically looped and interwoven. Upon this greenish-white chair of death sat the half-divine monarch, who had summoned the prisoners into this unknown world.
For all the seriousness of his plight, Conan could not repress a grin.
For the rimpoche Jalung Thongpa was very short and fat, with scrawny bow legs that scarcely reached the floor. His huge belly was swathed in a sash of cloth-of-gold, which blazed with gems. His naked arms, swollen with flabby fat, were clasped by a dozen golden armlets, and jeweled rings flashed and winked on his pudgy fingers. The bald head that lolled on top of his misshapen body was notably ugly, with dangling dewlaps, pendulous lips, and crooked, discolored teeth. The head was topped by a spired helmet or crown of solid gold, blazing with rubies. Its weight seemed to bow its wearer beneath it.
As Conan looked more closely at the G.o.d-king, he saw that Jalung Thongpa was peculiarly deformed. One side of his face did not match the other. It hung slackly from the bone and bore a blank, filmed eye, while the other eye was bright with the glint of malicious intelligence.
The rimpoche"s good eye was now fixed upon Zosara, ignoring the two gigantic warriors who accompanied her. Beside the throne stood a tall, gaunt man in the scarlet robes of a Meruvian priest. Beneath his shaven pate, cold green eyes looked out upon the scene with icy contempt. To him the G.o.d-king turned and spoke in a high, squeaky voice. From the few words of Meruvian that Conan had picked up from the Azweri, he pieced together enough to understand that the tall priest was the king"s chief wizard, the Grand Shaman, Tanzong Tengri.