The Barbarian Swordsmen, page 7
“A spider in the chamber above and a lion in the garden,” muttered Conan.
“You have slain a man too, this night,” answered the other. “And there is death in the tower above. I feel; I know.”
“Aye,” muttered Conan. “The prince of all thieves lies there dead from the bite of a vermin.”
“So – and so!” the strange inhuman voice rose in a sort of low chant. “A slaying in the tavern and a slaying on the roof – I know; I feel. And the third will make the magic of which not even Yara dreams – oh, magic of deliverance, green gods of Yag!”
Again tears fell as the tortured body was rocked to and fro in the grip of varied emotions. Conan looked on, bewildered.
Then the convulsions ceased; the soft, sightless eyes were turned toward the Cimmerian, the trunk beckoned.
“Oh man, listen,” said the strange being. “I am foul and monstrous to you, am I not? Nay, do not answer; I know. But you would seem as strange to me, could I see you. There are many worlds besides this earth, and life takes many shapes. I am neither god nor demon, but flesh and blood like yourself, though the substance differ in part, and the form be cast in different mold.
“I am very old, oh man of the waste countries; long and long ago I came to this planet with others of my world, from the green planet Yag, which circles for ever in the outer fringe of this universe. We swept through space on mighty wings that drove us through the cosmos quicker than light, because we had warred with the kings of Yag and were defeated and outcast. But we could never return, for on earth our wings withered from our shoulders. Here we abode apart from earthly life. We fought the strange and terrible forms of life which then walked the earth, so that we became feared, and were not molested in the dim jungles of the east, where we had our abode.
“We saw men grow from the ape and build the shining cities of Valusia, Kamelia, Commoria, and their sisters. We saw them reel before the thrusts of the heathen Atlanteans and Picts and Lemurians. We saw the oceans rise and engulf Atlantis and Lemuria, and the isles of the Picts, and the shining cities of civilization. We saw the survivors of Pictdom and Atlantis build their stone age empires, and go down to ruin, locked in bloody wars. We saw the Picts sink into abysmal savagery, the Atlanteans into apedom again. We saw new savages drift southward in conquering waves from the arctic circle to build a new civilization, with new kingdoms called Nemedia, and Koth, and Aquilonia and their sisters. We saw your people rise under a new name from the jungles of the apes that had been Atlanteans. We saw the descendants of the Lemurians who had survived the cataclysm, rise again through savagery and ride westward, as Hyrkanians. And we saw this race of devils, survivors of the ancient civilization that was before Atlantis sank, come once more into culture and power – this accursed kingdom of Zamora.
“All this we saw, neither aiding nor hindering the immutable cosmic law, and one by one we died; for we of Yag are not immortal, though our lives are as the lives of planets and constellations. At last I alone was left, dreaming of old times among the ruined temples of jungle-lost Khitai, worshipped as a god by an ancient yellow-skinned race. Then came Yara, versed in dark knowledge handed down through the days of barbarism, since before Atlantis sank.
“First he sat at my feet and learned wisdom. But he was not satisfied with what I taught him, for it was white magic, and he wished evil lore, to enslave kings and glut a fiendish ambition. I would teach him none of the black secrets I had gained, through no wish of mine, through the eons.
“But his wisdom was deeper than I had guessed; with guile gotten among the dusky tombs of dark Stygia, he trapped me into divulging a secret I had not intended to bare; and turning my own power upon me, he enslaved me. Ah, gods of Yag, my cup has been bitter since that hour!
“He brought me up from the lost jungles of Khitai where the gray apes danced to the pipes of the yellow priests, and offerings of fruit and wine heaped my broken altars. No more was I a god to kindly jungle-folk – I was slave to a devil in human form.”
Again tears stole from the unseeing eyes.
“He pent me in this tower which at his command I built for him in a single night. By fire and rack he mastered me, and by strange unearthly tortures you would not understand. In agony I would long ago have taken my own life, if I could. But he kept me alive – mangled, blinded, and broken – to do his foul bidding. And for three hundred years I have done his bidding, from this marble couch, blackening my soul with cosmic sins, and staining my wisdom with crimes, because I had no other choice. Yet not all my ancient secrets has he wrested from me, and my last gift shall be the sorcery of the Blood and the Jewel.
“For I feel the end of time draw near. You are the hand of Fate. I beg of you, take the gem you will find on yonder altar.”
Conan turned to the gold and ivory altar indicated, and took up a great round jewel, clear as crimson crystal; and he knew that this was the Heart of the Elephant.
“Now for the great magic, the mighty magic, such as earth has not seen before, and shall not see again, through a million million of millenniums. By my life-blood I conjure it, by blood born on the green breast of Yag, dreaming far-poised in the great blue vastness of Space.
“Take your sword, man, and cut out my heart; then squeeze it so that the blood will flow over the red stone. Then go you down these stairs and enter the ebony chamber where Yara sits wrapped in lotus-dreams of evil. Speak his name and he will awaken. Then lay this gem before him, and say, ‘Yag-kosha gives you a last gift and a last enchantment.’ Then get you from the tower quickly; fear not, your way shall be made clear. The life of man is not the life of Yag, nor is human death the death of Yag. Let me be free of this cage of broken blind flesh, and I will once more be Yogah of Yag, morning-crowned and shining, with wings to fly, and feet to dance, and eyes to see, and hands to break.”
Uncertainly Conan approached, and Yag-kosha, or Yogah, as if sensing his uncertainty, indicated where he should strike. Conan set his teeth and drove the sword deep. Blood streamed over the blade and his hand, and the monster started convulsively, then lay back quite still. Sure that life had fled, at least life as he understood it, Conan set to work on his grisly task and quickly brought forth something that he felt must be the strange being’s heart, though it differed curiously from any he had ever seen. Holding the still pulsing organ over the blazing jewel, he pressed it with both hands, and a rain of blood fell on the stone. To his surprize, it did not run off, but soaked into the gem, as water is absorbed by a sponge.
Holding the jewel gingerly, he went out of the fantastic chamber and came upon the silver steps. He did not look back; he instinctively felt that some sort of transmutation was taking place in the body on the marble couch, and he further felt that it was of a sort not to be witnessed by human eyes.
He closed the ivory door behind him and without hesitation descended the silver steps. It did not occur to him to ignore the instructions given him. He halted at an ebony door, in the center of which was a grinning silver skull, and pushed it open. He looked into a chamber of ebony and jet, and saw, on a black silken couch, a tall, spare form reclining. Yara the priest and sorcerer lay before him, his eyes open and dilated with the fumes of the yellow lotus, far-staring, as if fixed on gulfs and nighted abysses beyond human ken.
“Yara!” said Conan, like a judge pronouncing doom. “Awaken!”
The eyes cleared instantly and became cold and cruel as a vulture’s. The tall silken-clad form lifted erect, and towered gauntly above the Cimmerian.
“Dog!” His hiss was like the voice of a cobra. “What do you here?”
Conan laid the jewel on the great ebony table.
“He who sent this gem bade me say, ‘Yag-kosha gives a last gift and a last enchantment.’”
Yara recoiled, his dark face ashy. The jewel was no longer crystal-clear; its murky depths pulsed and throbbed, and curious smoky waves of changing color passed over its smooth surface. As if drawn hypnotically, Yara bent over the table and gripped the gem in his hands, staring into its shadowed depths, as if it were a magnet to draw the shuddering soul from his body. And as Conan looked, he thought that his eyes must be playing him tricks. For when Yara had risen up from his couch, the priest had seemed gigantically tall; yet now he saw that Yara’s head would scarcely come to his shoulder. He blinked, puzzled, and for the first time that night, doubted his own senses. Then with a shock he realized that the priest was shrinking in stature – was growing smaller before his very gaze.
With a detached feeling he watched, as a man might watch a play; immersed in a feeling of overpowering unreality, the Cimmerian was no longer sure of his own identity; he only knew that he was looking upon the external evidences of the unseen play of vast Outer forces, beyond his understanding.
Now Yara was no bigger than a child; now like an infant he sprawled on the table, still grasping the jewel. And now the sorcerer suddenly realized his fate, and he sprang up, releasing the gem. But still he dwindled, and Conan saw a tiny, pigmy figure rushing wildly about the ebony table-top, waving tiny arms and shrieking in a voice that was like the squeak of an insect.
Now he had shrunk until the great jewel towered above him like a hill, and Conan saw him cover his eyes with his hands, as if to shield them from the glare, as he staggered about like a madman. Conan sensed that some unseen magnetic force was pulling Yara to the gem. Thrice he raced wildly about it in a narrowing circle, thrice he strove to turn and run out across the table; then with a scream that echoed faintly in the ears of the watcher, the priest threw up his arms and ran straight toward the blazing globe.
Bending close, Conan saw Yara clamber up the smooth, curving surface, impossibly, like a man climbing a glass mountain. Now the priest stood on the top, still with tossing arms, invoking what grisly names only the gods know. And suddenly he sank into the very heart of the jewel, as a man sinks into a sea, and Conan saw the smoky waves close over his head. Now he saw him in the crimson heart of the jewel, once more crystal-clear, as a man sees a scene far away, tiny with great distance. And into the heart came a green, shining winged figure with the body of a man and the head of an elephant – no longer blind or crippled. Yara threw up his arms and fled as a madman flees, and on his heels came the avenger. Then, like the bursting of a bubble, the great jewel vanished in a rainbow burst of iridescent gleams, and the ebony table-top lay bare and deserted – as bare, Conan somehow knew, as the marble couch in the chamber above, where the body of that strange transcosmic being called Yag-kosha and Yogah had lain.
The Cimmerian turned and fled from the chamber, down the silver stairs. So mazed was he that it did not occur to him to escape from the tower by the way he had entered it. Down that winding, shadowy silver well he ran, and came into a large chamber at the foot of the gleaming stairs. There he halted for an instant; he had come into the room of the soldiers. He saw the glitter of their silver corselets, the sheen of their jeweled sword-hilts. They sat slumped at the banquet board, their dusky plumes waving somberly above their drooping helmeted heads; they lay among their dice and fallen goblets on the wine-stained lapis-lazuli floor. And he knew that they were dead. The promise had been made, the word kept; whether sorcery or magic or the falling shadow of great green wings had stilled the revelry, Conan could not know, but his way had been made clear. And a silver door stood open, framed in the whiteness of dawn.
Into the waving green gardens came the Cimmerian, and as the dawn wind blew upon him with the cool fragrance of luxuriant growths, he started like a man waking from a dream. He turned back uncertainly, to stare at the cryptic tower he had just left. Was he bewitched and enchanted? Had he dreamed all that had seemed to have passed? As he looked he saw the gleaming tower sway against the crimson dawn, its jewel-crusted rim sparkling in the growing light, and crash into shining shards.
Brachan of Amelia in:
Brachan The Kelt
By Robert E. Howard
Once I was Brachan the Kelt…
If you ask me how I know, I can only retort by asking you in turn how you know that you were you yesterday or last month or last year. And if you cannot tell me how you know, why you remember, the fact remains unchanged; and because I cannot tell you how I remember the myriad shapes that have borne my spirit down the long chain of reincarnations, that memory is none the less vital and existent. I am James Allison, and I was Brachan. Let that suffice.
It was long ago. That statement is indefinite, but it cannot be improved upon. How many milleniums have passed since Brachan walked the world I do not know, because there are no landmarks in my memory of Brachan’s life to fix his century. I can only say that it was long ago, in the youth of the world as ire know it.
I was Brachan, tall, yellow-haired, blue-eyed, magnificently thewed, member of one of the great basic races, now extinct. I say extinct, because there lives in the world today no single pure-blooded Aryan. But in Brachan’s day the race was as yet unmixed. It was Brachan, perhaps, who began that mixing and mingling of races *, Brachan, the mate of Taramis, from whose loins sprang tribes and nations.
I was bom far to the east of the land in which I grew to manhood, on the open steppes by the shores of that great inland sea which in those dim times stretched from the Arctic Ocean to the Indian Sea, separating the primitive Aryans from the primitive Mongolians. There on the western shores of that great sea my people dwelt in great numbers, already, following the grass north by summer and south by winter. But we had no herds then; it was the great droves of grass-eaters we followed
—the wild cattle, the bison and the horses which as yet no man had ridden. We were hunters, fishers, and plunderers.! And already we were splitting off in tribes that wandered west and south in century-long hegiras.
So the steppes with their rolling expanses of waving grass and the horse-hide tents along the shores of the inland sea remain but as dim memories in my mind. For as a child I was carried in the long trek westward that brought the culture of bronze to the shores of the distant Atlantic…I can hear the rising clamour of the historians who would rise to refute me.
I am well aware of the curious mistake they make in dating the invasion of the first Aryans into western Europe, and the advent of the Bronze Age. We came, they said, in clumsy wagons drawn by oxen. We had already tamed and domesticated dogs, and were horsemen. By that time, say the historians, the beginnings of civilisation were evident along the shores of the Mediterranean and the valleys of the great southern rivers. »
1 can only state facts. I was a child in the first Aryan clan to come into western Europe, then a great empty land of forests and rivers inhabited only by scattered tribes of dark-skinned aborigines. We were called Kelts, which was merely the designation of our clan. Neither in appearance nor in language did we at that time differ from our kinsman of the far east. We had not learned to domesticate dogs, nor ride horses, nor shape a wagon wheel. We marched on foot, and we were ten years on the road. Yet we bore weapons and implements of bronze, and understood the an of weaving rushes into baskets, and of manufacturing flax into cloth.
If these facts tend to upset established conceptions and scientific theories, I am sorry, but I do not see what I can do about it. The historians undoubtedly confuse that first Aryan invasion with the migration of the Gauls, which occurred centuries later. They were out Aryan kin, and they found the formerly not too extensive Keltic clan grown into many tribes, and spread over many lands. Our language differed only as Saxon differs from modern English, and we intermarried and intmermingled until we became as one race, and the terms Kelt and Gaul were synonymous.
But the Keltic clan was the first of all Aryans to set foot in Europe. My clearest memories are of rolling hills covered with oaks and firs, with rich grassy valleys between, stretching to cliffs where the blue sea broke in incessant surges—there I grew from childhood to early manhood, and it was as a young nan that I finally drifted away from the range of my clan and rendered southward to where, far beyond the dreaming blue tills that rimmed the hazy horizon there awaited the love of Taramis and the horror of the Shaggy One.
Why I left the homelands of my clan I do not know; perhaps stronger in me than in my tribesmen burned the restless urge of wandering. Southward I went…It was a strange, fierce world in those dim days. On a nameless island n the Mediterranean a group of swart skin-clad fishermen dwelt in a cluster of rude mud huts that was to grow centuries later into lion-gated Knossos. But where the Mediterranean rolls now, there were only great lakes and rivers. There were m eastern and a western lake, and a high rim of land kept the distant ocean from bursting over into the vast valley that was he Mediterranean basin in those days. Already the sea was growing at that rim, and when it burst—but it did not burst in Brachan’s lifetime, though in another, later life I witnessed hat cataclysm that wiped out a thriving civilisation and gave rise to a cycle of tales wherein the world is destroyed by God…
But forgive my meanderings. My memories throng so thick upon me, of so many lives, that I am prone to digress, to wander into irrelevant channels. It is hard to follow the course >f one life among the multitudes that I remember as you remember the days that throng thick on your heels.
Oh, it was a long wandering that led me at last to the village of the Amelians. I travelled on foot and alone, hunting and being hunted, slaying and battling the slayers. It was no easy path I trod, nor one unopposed. Lions roamed through what low is Europe, gigantic brutes, huger and fiercer than any today existent. There were cave-bears, sabre-toothed tigers, giant buffalo and elk, panthers…but as always, the grimmest hunter, the fiercest beast of prey, was man.
Yet in the village of Amelia, with its wooden huts and their thatches rising above the points of the stockade, I found a welcome. I do not know what possessed King Jogah of Amelia to welcome me, a stranger, or why he did not order his warriors to feather me with arrows from the loopholes as I strode from the forest, across the fields of barley, toward the heavy gate. Perhaps it was curiosity. No man of Amelia had ever seen a man like me, nor had they dreamed that such men j dwelt in the world, for the Keltic drift had not yet reached those southern valleys.
