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

as an enemy of Aquilonia, but as

a friend, to free the people from the tyranny of a usurper and a

foreigner.

 

If there were cynical smiles in certain quarters, and whispers

concerning the king’s good friend Amalric, whose vast personal wealth

seemed to be flowing into the rather depleted royal treasury, they

were unheeded in the general wave of fervor and zeal of Tarascus’s

popularity. If any shrewd individuals suspected that Amalric was the

real ruler of Nemedia, behind the scenes, they were careful not to

voice such heresy. And the war went forward with enthusiasm.

 

The king and his allies moved westward at the head of fifty thousand

men-knights in shining armor with their pennons streaming above their

helmets, pikemen in steel caps and brigandines, crossbowmen in

leather jerkins. They crossed the border, took a frontier castle and

burned three mountain villages, and then, in the valley of the Valkia,

ten miles west of the boundary line, they met the hosts of Conan, king

of Aquilonia-forty-five thousand knights, archers and men-at-arms, the

flower of Aquilonian strength and chivalry. Only the knights of

Poitain, under Prospero, had not yet arrived, for they had far to ride

up from the southwestern comer of the kingdom. Tarascus had struck

without warning. His invasion had come on the heels of his

proclamation, without formal declaration of war.

 

The two hosts confronted each other across a wide, shallow valley,

with rugged cliffs, and a shallow stream winding through masses of

reeds and willows down the middle of the vale. The camp-followers of

both hosts came down to this stream for water, and shouted insults and

hurled stones across at one another. The last glints of the sun shone

on the golden banner of Nemedia with the scarlet dragon, unfurled in

the breeze above the pavilion of King Tarascus on an eminence near the

eastern cliffs. But the shadow of the western cliffs fell like a vast

purple pall across the tents and the army of Aquilonia, and upon the

black banner with its golden lion that floated above King Conan’s

pavilion.

 

All night the fires flared the length of the valley, and the wind

brought the call of trumpets, the clangor of arms, and the sharp

challenges of the sentries who paced their horses along either edge of

the willow-grown stream.

 

It was in the darkness before dawn that King Conan stirred on his

couch, which was no more than a pile of silks and furs thrown on a

dais, and awakened. He started up, crying out sharply and clutching at

his sword. Pallantides, his commander, rushing in at the cry, saw his

king sitting upright, his hand on his hilt, and perspiration dripping

from his strangely pale face.

 

“Your Majesty!” exclaimed Pallantides. “Is aught amiss?”

 

“What of the camp?” demanded Conan. “Are the guards out?”

 

“Five hundred horsemen patrol the stream, Your Majesty,” answered the

general. “The Nemedians have not offered to move against us in the

night. They wait for dawn, even as we.”

 

“By Crom,” muttered Conan. “I awoke with a feeling that doom was

creeping on me in the night.”

 

He stared up at the great golden lamp which shed a soft glow over the

velvet hangings and carpets of the great tent. They were alone; not

even a slave or a page slept on the carpeted floor; but Conan’s eyes

blazed as they were wont to blaze in the teeth of great peril, and the

sword quivered in his hand. Pallantides watched him uneasily. Conan

seemed to be listening.

 

“Listen!” hissed the king. “Did you hear it? A furtive step!”

 

“Seven knights guard your tent, Your Majesty,” said Pallantides. “None

could approach it unchallenged.”

 

“Not outside,” growled Conan. “It seemed to sound inside the tent.”

 

Pallantides cast a swift, startled look around. The velvet hangings

merged with shadows in the comers, but if there had been anyone in the

pavilion besides themselves, the general would have seen him. Again he

shook his head.

 

“There is no one here, sure. You sleep in the midst of your host.”

 

“I have seen death strike a king in the midst of thousands,” muttered

Conan. “Something that walks on invisible feet and is not seen—”

 

“Perhaps you were dreaming. Your Majesty,” said Pallantides, somewhat

perturbed.

 

“So I was,” grunted Conan. “A devilish dream it was, too. I trod again

all the long, weary roads I traveled on my way to the kingship.”

 

He fell silent, and Pallantides stared at him unspeaking. The. king

was an enigma to the general, as to most of his civilized subjects.

Pallantides knew that Conan had walked many strange roads in his wild,

eventful life, and had been many things before a twist of Fate set him

on the throne of Aquilonia.

 

“I saw again in the battlefield whereon I was born,” said Conan,

resting his chin moodily on a massive fist. “I saw myself in a

pantherskin loin-clout, throwing my spear at the the mountain beasts.

I was a mercenary swordsman again, a het-man of the kozaki who dwell

along the Zaporoska River, a corsair looting the coasts of Kush, a

pirate of the Barachan Isles, a chief of the Himelian hillmen. All

these things I’ve been, and of all these things I dreamed; all the

shapes that have been I passed like an endless procession, and their

feet beat out a dirge in the sounding dust.

 

“But throughout my dreams moved strange, veiled figures and ghostly

shadows, and a far-away voice mocked me. And toward the last I seemed

to see myself lying on this dais in my tent, and a shape bent over me,

robed and hooded. I lay unable to move, and then the hood fell away

and a moldering skull grinned down at me. Then it was that I awoke.”

 

“This is an evil dream. Your Majesty,” said Pallantides, suppressing a

shudder. “But no more.”

 

Conan shook his head, more in doubt than in denial. He came of a

barbaric race, and the superstitions and instincts of his heritage

lurked close beneath the surface of his consciousness.

 

“I’ve dreamed many evil dreams,” he said, “and most of them were

meaningless. But by Crom, this was not like most dreams! I wish this

battle were fought and won, for I’ve had a grisly premonition ever

since King Nimed died in the black plague. Why did it cease when he

died?”

 

“Men say he sinned—”

 

“Men are fools, as always,” grunted Conan. “If the plague struck all

who sinned, then by Crom there wouldn’t be enough left to count the

living! Why should the gods-who the priests tell me are just-slay five

hundred peasants and merchants and nobles before they slew the king,

if the whole pestilence were aimed at him? Were the gods smiting

blindly, like swordsmen in a fog? By Mitra, if I aimed my strokes no

straighter, Aquilonia would have ‘had a new king long ago.

 

“No! The black plague’s no common pestilence. It lurks in Stygian

tombs, and is called forth into being only by wizards. I was a

swordsman in Prince Almuric’s army that invaded Stygia, and of his

thirty thousand, fifteen thousand perished by Stygian arrows, and the

rest by the black plague that rolled on us like a wind out of the

south. I was the only man who lived.”

 

“Yet only five hundred died in Nemedia,” argued Pallantides.

 

“Whoever called it into being knew how to cut it short at will,”

answered Conan. “So I know there was something planned and diabolical

about it. Someone called it forth, someone banished it when the work

was completed-when Tarascus was safe on the throne and being hailed as

the deliverer of the people from the wrath of the gods. By Crom, I

sense a black, subtle brain behind all this. What of this stranger who

men say gives counsel to Tarascus?”

 

“He wears a veil,” answered Pallantides; “they say he is a foreigner;

a stranger from Stygia.”

 

“A stranger from Stygia!” repeated Conan scowling. “A stranger from

hell, more like!-Ha! What is that?”

 

“The trumpets of the Nemedians!” exclaimed Pallantides. “And hark, how

our own blare upon their heels! Dawn is breaking, and the captains are

marshaling the hosts for the onset! Mitra be with them, for many will

not see the sun go down behind the crags.”

 

“Send my squires to me!” exclaimed Conan, rising with alacrity and

casting off his velvet night-garment; he seemed to have forgotten his

forebodings at the prospect of action. “Go to the captains and see

that all is in readiness. I will be with you as soon as I don my

armor.”

 

Many of Conan’s ways were inexplicable to the civilized people he

ruled, and one of them was his insistence on sleeping alone in his

chamber or tent. Pallantides hastened from the pavilion, clanking in

the armor he had donned at midnight after a few hours’ sleep. He cast

a swift glance over the camp, which was beginning to swarm with

activity, mail clinking and men moving about dimly in the uncertain

light, among the long lines of tents. Stars still glimmered palely in

the western sky, but long pink streamers stretched along the eastern

horizon, and against them the dragon banner of Nemedia flung out its

billowing silken folds.

 

Pallantides turned toward a smaller tent near by, where slept the

royal squires. These were tumbling out already, roused by the

trumpets. And as Pallantides called to them to hasten, he was frozen

speechless by a deep fierce shout and the impact of a heavy blow

inside the king’s tent, followed by a heart-stopping crash of a

falling body. There sounded a low laugh that turned the general’s

blood to ice.

 

Echoing the cry, Pallantides wheeled and rushed back into the

pavilion. He cried out again as he saw Conan’s powerful frame

stretched out on the carpet. The king’s great two-handed sword lay

near his hand, and a shattered tent-pole seemed to show where his

sword had fallen. Pallantides’ sword was out, and he glared about the

tent, but nothing met his gaze. Save for the king and himself it was

empty, as it had been when he left it.

 

“Your Majesty!” Pallantides threw himself on his knee beside the

fallen giant.

 

Conan’s eyes were open; they blazed up at him with full intelligence

and recognition. His lips writhed, but no sound came forth. He seemed

unable to move.

 

Voices sounded without. Pallantides rose swiftly and stepped to the

door. The royal squires and one of the knights who guarded the tent

stood there. “We heard a sound within,” said the knight

apologetically. “Is all well with the king?”

 

Pallantides regarded him searchingly.

 

“None has entered or left the pavilion this night?”

 

“None save yourself, my lord,” answered the knight, and Pallantides

could not doubt his honesty.

 

“The king stumbled and dropped his sword,” said Pallantides briefly.

“Return to your post.”

 

As the knight turned away, the general covertly motioned to the five

royal squires, and when they had followed him in, he drew the flap

closely. They turned pale at the sight of the king stretched upon the

carpet, but Pallantides’ quick gesture checked their exclamations.

 

The general bent over him agan, and again Conan made an effort to

speak. The veins in his temples and the cords in his neck swelled with

his efforts, and he lifted his head clear off the ground. Voice came

at last, mumbling and half intelligible.

 

“The thing-the thing in the corner!”

 

Pallantides lifted his head and looked fearfully about him. He saw the

pale faces of the squires in the lamplight, the velvet shadows that

lurked along the walls of the pavilion. That was all.