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

class="calibre2">them rose bare, sandy hills. Streams poured into the sea, and along

their moist banks vegetation grew thick and of vast variety.

 

So at last they passed the mouth of a broad river that mingled its

flow with the ocean, and saw the great black walls and towers of Khemi

rise against the southern horizon.

 

The river was the Styx, the real border of Stygia. Khemi was Stygia’s

greatest port, and at the time her most important city. The king dwelt

at more ancient Luxur, but in Khemi reigned the priestcraft; though

men said the center of their dark religion lay far inland, in a

mysterious, deserted city near the bank of the Styx. This river,

springing from some nameless source far in the unknown lands south of

Stygia, ran northward for a thousand miles before it turned and flowed

westward for some hundreds of miles, to empty at last into the ocean.

 

The Venturer, showing no lights, stole past the port in the night, and

before dawn discovered her, anchored in a small bay a few miles south

of the city. It was surrounded by marsh, a green tangle of mangroves,

palms and lianas, swarming with crocodiles and serpents. Discovery was

extremely unlikely. Conan knew the place of old; he had hidden there

before, in his corsair days.

 

As they slid silently past the city whose great black bastions rose on

the jutting prongs of land, which locked the harbor, torches gleamed

and smoldered luridly, and to their ears came the low thunder of

drums. The port was not crowded with ships, as were the harbors of

Argos. The Stygians did not base their glory and power upon ships and

fleets. Trading-vessels and war-galleys, indeed, they had, but not in

proportion to their inland strength. Many of their craft plied up and

down the great river, rather than along the sea-coasts.

 

The Stygians were an ancient race, a dark, inscrutable people,

powerful and merciless. Long ago their rule had stretched far north of

the Styx, beyond the meadowlands of Shem, and into the fertile uplands

now inhabited ^ the peoples of Koth and Ophir and Argos. Their borders

had marched with those of ancient Acheron. But Acheron had fallen, and

the barbaric ancestors of the Hyborians had swept southward in

wolfskins and homed helmets, driving the ancient rulers of the land

before them. The Stygians had not forgotten.

 

All day the Venturer lay at anchor in the tiny bay, walled in with

green branches and tangled vines through which flitted gay-plumed,

harsh-voiced birds, and among which glided bright-scaled, silent

reptiles. Toward sundown a small boat crept out and down along the

shore, seeking and finding that which Conan desired-a Stygian

fisherman in his shallow, flat-prowed boat.

 

They brought him to the deck of the Venturer-a tall, dark, rangily

built man, ashy with fear of his captors, who were ogres of that

coast. He was naked except for his silken breeks, for, like the

Hyrkanians, even the commoners and slaves of Stygia wore silk; and in

his boat was a wide mantle such as these fishermen flung about their

shoulders against the chill of the night.

 

He fell to his knees before Conan, expecting torture and death. “Stand

on your legs, man, and quit trembling,” said the Cimmerian

impatiently, who found it difficult to understand abject terror, “You

won’t be harmed. Tell me but this: has a galley, a black racing-galley

returning from Argos, put into Khemi within the last few days?” “Aye,

my lord,” answered the fisherman. “Only yesterday at dawn the priest

Thutothmes returned from a voyage far to the north. Men say he has

been to Messantia.”

 

“What did he bring from Messantia?”

 

“Alas, my lord, I know not.”

 

“Why did he go to Messantia?” demanded Conan.

 

“Nay, my lord, I am but a common man. Who am I to know the minds of

the priests of Set? I can only speak what I have seen and what I have

heard men whisper along the wharves. Men say that news of great import

came southward, though of what none knows; and it is well known that

the lord Thutothmes put off in his black galley in great haste. Now he

is returned, but what he did in Argos, or what cargo he brought back,

none knows, not even the seamen who manned his galley. Men say that he

has opposed Thoth-Amon, who is the master of all priests of Set, and

dwells in Luxur, and that Thutothmes seeks hidden power to overthrow

the Great One. But who am I to say? When priests war with one another

a common man can but lie on his belly and hope neither treads upon

him.”

 

Conan snarled in nervous exasperation at this servile philosophy, and

turned to his men. “I’m going alone into Khemi to find this thief

Thutothmes. Keep this man prisoner, but see that you do him no hurt.

Crom’s devils, stop your yowling! Do you think we can sail into the

harbor and take the city by storm? I must go alone.”

 

Silencing the clamor of protests, he doffed his own garments and

donned the prisoner’s silk breeches and sandals, and the band from the

man’s hair, but scorned the short fisherman’s knife. The common men of

Stygia were not allowed to wear swords, and the mantle was not

voluminous enough to hide the Cimmerian’s long blade, but Conan

buckled to his hip a Ghanta knife, a weapon borne by the fierce desert

men who dwelt to the south of the Stygians, a broad, heavy, slightly

curved blade of fine steel, edged like a razor and long enough to

dismember a man.

 

Then, leaving the Stygian guarded by the corsairs, Conan climbed into

the fisherman’s boat.

 

“Wait for me until dawn,” he said. “If I haven’t come then, I’ll never

come, so hasten southward to your own homes.”

 

As he clambered over the rail, they set up a doleful wail at his

going, until he thrust his head back into sight to curse them into

silence. Then, dropping into the boat, he grasped the oars and sent

the tiny craft shooting over the waves more swiftly than its owner had

ever propelled it.

 

Chapter 17: “He Has Slain the Sacred Son of Set!”

 

THE HARBOR OF Khemi lay between two great jutting points of land that

ran into the ocean. He rounded the southern point, where the great

black castles rose like a man-made hill, and entered the harbor just

at dusk, when there was still enough light for the watchers to

recognize the fisherman’s boat and mantle, but not enough to permit

recognition of betraying details. Unchallenged he threaded his way

among the great black war galleys lying silent and unlighted at

anchor, and drew up to a flight of wide stone steps which mounted up

from the water’s edge. There he made his boat fast to an iron ring set

in the stone, as numerous similar craft were tied. There was nothing

strange in a fisherman leaving his boat there. None but a fisherman

could find a use for such a craft, and they did not steal from one

another.

 

No one cast him more than a casual glance as he mounted the long

steps, unobtrusively avoiding the torches that flared at intervals

above the lapping black water. He seemed but an ordinary, empty-handed

fisherman, returning after a fruitless day along the coast. If one had

observed him closely, it might have seemed that his step was somewhat

too springy and sure, his carriage somewhat too erect and confident

for a lowly fisherman. But he passed quickly, keeping in the shadows,

and the commoners of Stygia were no more given to analysis than were

the commoners of the less exotic races.

 

In build he was not unlike the warrior castes of the Stygians, who

were a tall, muscular race. Bronzed by the sun, he was nearly as dark

as many of them. His black hair, square-cut and confined by a copper

band, increased the resemblance. The characteristics which set him

apart from them were the subtle difference in his walk, and his alien

features and blue eyes.

 

But the mantle was a good disguise, and he kept as much in the shadow

as possible, turning away his head when a native passed him too

closely.

 

But it was a desperate game, and he knew he could not long keep up the

deception. Khemi was not like the seaports of the Hyborians, where

types of every race swarmed. The only aliens here were negro and

Shemite slaves; and he resembled neither even as much as he resembled

the Stygians themselves. Strangers were not welcome in the cities of

Stygia; tolerated only when they came as ambassadors or licensed

traders. But even then the latter were not allowed ashore after dark.

And now there were no Hyborian ships in the harbor at all. A strange

restlessness ran through the city, a stirring of ancient ambitions, a

whispering none could define except those who whispered. This Conan

felt rather than knew, his whetted primitive instincts sensing unrest

about him.

 

If he were discovered his fate would be ghastly. They would slay him

merely for being a stranger; if he were recognized as Amra, the

corsair chief who had swept their coasts with steel and flame-an

involuntary shudder twitched Conan’s broad shoulders. Human foes he

did not fear, nor any death by steel or fire. But this was a black

land of sorcery and nameless horror. Set the Old Serpent, men said,

banished long ago from the Hyborian races, yet lurked in the shadows

of the cryptic temples, and awful and mysterious were the deeds done

in the nighted shrines.

 

He had drawn away from the waterfront streets with their broad steps

leading down to the water, and was entering the long shadowy streets

of the main part of the city. There was no such scene as was offered

by any Hyborian city-no blaze of lamps and cressets, with gay-clad

people laughing and strolling along the pavements, and shops and

stalls wide open and displaying their wares.

 

Here the stalls were closed at dusk. The only lights along the streets

were torches, flaring smokily at wide intervals. People walking the

streets were comparatively few; they went hurriedly and unspeaking,

and their numbers decreased with the lateness of the hour. Conan found

the scene gloomy and unreal; the silence of the people, their furtive

haste, the great black stone walls that rose on each side of the

streets. There was a grim massiveness about Stygian architecture that

was overpowering and oppressive.

 

Few lights showed anywhere except in the upper parts of the buildings.

Conan knew that most of the people lay on the flat roofs, among the

palms of artificial gardens under the stars. There was a murmur of

weird music from somewhere. Occasionally a bronze chariot rumbled

along the flags, and there was a brief glimpse of a tall, hawk-faced

noble, with a silk cloak wrapped about him, and a gold band with a

rearing serpent-head emblem confining his black mane; of the ebon,

naked charioteer bracing his knotty legs against the straining of the

fierce Stygian horses.

 

But the people who yet traversed the streets on foot were commoners,

slaves, tradesmen, harlots, toilers, and they became fewer as he

progressed. He was making toward the temple of Set, where he knew he

would be likely to find the priest he sought. He believed he would

know Thutothmes if he saw him, though his one glance had been in the

semi-darkness of the Messantian alley. That the man he had seen there

had been the priest he was certain. Only occultists high in the mazes

of the hideous Black Ring possessed the power of the black hand that

dealt death by