The Hour of the Dragon - Robert E. Howard (great reads .TXT) 📗

mocking laugh brought him about, glaring.

 

A dully glinting, mail-clad figure moved out of the shadows into the

starlight. This was no plumed and burnished palace guardsman. It was a

tall man in morion and gray chain-mail-one of the Adventurers, a class

of warriors peculiar to Nemedia; men who had not attained to the

wealth and position of knighthood, or had fallen from that estate;

hardbitten fighters, dedicating their lives to war and adventure.

They constituted a class of their own, sometimes commanding troops,

but themselves accountable to no man but the king. Conan knew that he

could have been discovered by no more dangerous a foeman.

 

A quick glance among the shadows convinced him that the man was alone,

and he expanded his great chest slightly, digging his toes into the

turf, as his thews coiled tensely.

 

“I was riding for Belverus on Amalric’s business,” said the

Adventurer, advancing warily. The starlight was a long sheen on the

great two-handed sword he bore naked in his hand. “A horse whinnied to

mine from the thicket. I investigated and thought it strange a steed

should be tethered here. I waited-and lo, I have caught a rare prize!”

 

The Adventurers lived by their swords.

 

“I know you,” muttered the Nemedian. “You are Conan, king of

Aquilonia. I thought I saw you die in the valley of the Valkia, but—”

Conan sprang as a dying tiger springs. Practised fighter though the

Adventurer was, he did not realize the desperate quickness that lurks

in barbaric sinews. He was caught off guard, his heavy sword half

lifted. Before he could either strike or parry, the king’s poniard

sheathed itself in his throat, above the gorget, slanting downward

into his heart. With a choked gurgle he reeled and went down, and

Conan ruthlessly tore his blade free as his victim fell. The white

horse snorted violently and shied at the sight and scent of blood on

the sword.

 

Glaring down at his lifeless enemy, dripping poniard in hand, sweat

glistening on his broad breast, Conan poised like a statue, listening

intently. In the woods about there was no sound, save for the sleepy

cheep of awakened birds. But in the city, a mile away, he heard the

strident blare of a trumpet.

 

Hastily he bent over the fallen man. A few seconds’ search convinced

him that whatever message the man might have borne was intended to be

conveyed by word of mouth. But he did not pause in his task. It was

not many hours until dawn. A few minutes later the white horse was

galloping westward along the white road, and the rider wore the gray

mail of a Nemedian Adventurer.

 

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 loom-tog 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 to

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 hangtoa to 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, fee 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