Worms of the Earth - Robert E. Howard (best novels for beginners txt) 📗

Chapter Three

Into the dim fens of the west came Bran Mak Morn. A cold wind

breathed across the gloomy waste and against the gray sky a few herons

flapped heavily. The long reeds and marsh-grass waved in broken

undulations and out across the desolation of the wastes a few still

meres reflected the dull light. Here and there rose curiously regular

hillocks above the general levels, and gaunt against the somber sky

Bran saw a marching line of upright monoliths—menhirs, reared by what

nameless hands?

 

As a faint blue line to the west lay the foothills that beyond the

horizon grew to the wild mountains of Wales where dwelt still wild

Celtic tribes—fierce blue-eyed men that knew not the yoke of Rome. A

row of well-garrisoned watchtowers held them in check. Even now, far

away across the moors, Bran glimpsed the unassailable keep men called

the Tower of Trajan.

 

These barren wastes seemed the dreary accomplishment of

desolation, yet human life was not utterly lacking. Bran met the

silent men of the fen, reticent, dark of eye and hair, speaking a

strange mixed tongue whose long-blended elements had forgotten their

pristine separate sources. Bran recognized a certain kinship in these

people to himself, but he looked on them with the scorn of a pure-blooded patrician for men of mixed strains.

 

Not that the common people of Caledonia were altogether pure-blooded; they got their stocky bodies and massive limbs from a

primitive Teutonic race which had found its way into the northern tip

of the isle even before the Celtic conquest of Britain was completed,

and had been absorbed by the Picts. But the chiefs of Bran’s folk had

kept their blood from foreign taint since the beginnings of time, and

he himself was a pure-bred Pict of the Old Race. But these fenmen,

overrun repeatedly by British, Gaelic and Roman conquerors, had

assimilated blood of each, and in the process almost forgotten their

original language and lineage.

 

For Bran came of a race that was very old, which had spread over

western Europe in one vast Dark Empire, before the coming of the

Aryans, when the ancestors of the Celts, the Hellenes and the Germans

were one primal people, before the days of tribal splitting-off and

westward drift.

 

Only in Caledonia, Bran brooded, had his people resisted the flood

of Aryan conquest. He had heard of a Pictish people called Basques,

who in the crags of the Pyrenees called themselves an unconquered

race; but he knew that they had paid tribute for centuries to the

ancestors of the Gaels, before these Celtic conquerors abandoned their

mountain-realm and set sail for Ireland. Only the Picts of Caledonia

had remained free, and they had been scattered into small feuding

tribes—he was the first acknowledged king in five hundred years—the

beginning of a new dynasty—no, a revival of an ancient dynasty under

a new name. In the very teeth of Rome he dreamed his dreams of empire.

 

He wandered through the fens, seeking a Door. Of his quest he said

nothing to the dark-eyed fenmen. They told him news that drifted from

mouth to mouth—a tale of war in the north, the skirl of war-pipes

along the winding Wall, of gathering-fires in the heather, of flame

and smoke and rapine and the glutting of Gaelic swords in the crimson

sea of slaughter. The eagles of the legions were moving northward and

the ancient road resounded to the measured tramp of the iron-clad

feet. And Bran, in the fens of the west, laughed, well pleased.

 

In Eboracum, Titus Sulla gave secret word to seek out the Pictish

emissary with the Gaelic name who had been under suspicion, and who

had vanished the night young Valerius was found dead in his cell with

his throat ripped out. Sulla felt that this sudden bursting flame of

war on the Wall was connected closely with his execution of a

condemned Pictish criminal, and he set his spy system to work, though

he felt sure that Partha Mac Othna was by this time far beyond his

reach. He prepared to march from Eboracum, but he did not accompany

the considerable force of legionaries which he sent north. Sulla was a

brave man, but each man has his own dread, and Sulla’s was Cormac na

Connacht, the black-haired prince of the Gaels, who had sworn to cut

out the governor’s heart and eat it raw. So Sulla rode with his ever-present bodyguard, westward, where lay the Tower of Trajan with its

warlike commander, Caius Camillus, who enjoyed nothing more than

taking his superior’s place when the red waves of war washed at the

foot of the Wall. Devious politics, but the legate of Rome seldom

visited this far isle, and what of his wealth and intrigues, Titus

Sulla was the highest power in Britain.

 

And Bran, knowing all this, patiently waited his coming, in the

deserted hut in which he had taken up his abode.

 

One gray evening he strode on foot across the moors, a stark

figure, blackly etched against the dim crimson fire of the sunset. He

felt the incredible antiquity of the slumbering land, as he walked

like the last man on the day after the end of the world. Yet at last

he saw a token of human life—a drab hut of wattle and mud, set in the

reedy breast of the fen.

 

A woman greeted him from the open door and Bran’s somber eyes

narrowed with a dark suspicion. The woman was not old, yet the evil

wisdom of ages was in her eyes; her garments were ragged and scanty,

her black locks tangled and unkempt, lending her an aspect of wildness

well in keeping with her grim surroundings. Her red lips laughed but

there was no mirth in her laughter, only a hint of mockery, and under

the lips her teeth showed sharp and pointed like fangs.

 

“Enter, master,” said she, “if you do not fear to share the roof

of the witch-woman of Dagon-moor!”

 

Bran entered silently and sat him down on a broken bench while the

woman busied herself with the scanty meal cooking over an open fire on

the squalid hearth. He studied her lithe, almost serpentine motions,

the ears which were almost pointed, the yellow eyes which slanted

curiously.

 

“What do you seek in the fens, my lord?” she asked, turning toward

him with a supple twist of her whole body.

 

“I seek a Door,” he answered, chin resting on his fist. “I have a

song to sing to the worms of the earth!”

 

She started upright, a jar falling from her hands to shatter on

the hearth.

 

“This is an ill saying, even spoken in chance,” she stammered.

 

“I speak not by chance but by intent,” he answered.

 

She shook her head. “I know not what you mean.”

 

“Well you know,” he returned. “Aye, you know well! My race is very

old—they reigned in Britain before the nations of the Celts and the

Hellenes were born out of the womb of peoples. But my people were not

first in Britain. By the mottles on your skin, by the slanting of your

eyes, by the taint in your veins, I speak with full knowledge and

meaning.”

 

Awhile she stood silent, her lips smiling but her face

inscrutable.

 

“Man, are you mad,” she asked, “that in your madness you come

seeking that from which strong men fled screaming in old times?”

 

“I seek a vengeance,” he answered, “that can be accomplished only

by Them I seek.”

 

She shook her head.

 

“You have listened to a bird singing; you have