Some whispered over flickering candles in southern taverns that a demon had taken possession.of the great duke, or a sorcerer had sent a spell of madness upon him, goading him into this foolhardy venture. For, as everyone knew, the leopards of Poitain crouched between the paws of the mighty lion of Aquilonia. King Conan, ruler of the mightiest kingdom of the West, had instantly hurled his iron legions against Pantho in retaliation for this breach of the border.
The armies had first clashed on the green plains of Poitain. The wild Zingaran charge had broken like surf against the stolid pikemen of Gunderland, while the shafts of the Bossonian archers mowed the Zingaran knights down, nailing helmet to head and thigh to horse. As Pantho withdrew his mounted knights to regroup for a second charge, Conan had unleashed his own cavalry. Conan’s own guard, the Black Dragons, had led the charge. Conan himself rode in the van, a warrior so heroic that a thousand legends clung like a cloak of glory about his towering frame.
The Zingarans faltered and broke. They fled in a mad scramble back across the marches of Poitain to Zingara. But Conan was angry, and his anger was such as to shake thrones and make princes turn pale. Leaving his foot to follow as best it could, Conan had hurled his horse across the Alimane in pursuit. On the desolate Place of Skulls, a few leagues south of the Alimane, Conan had caught up with the battered Zingaran host and cut it to ribbons. Many Zingarans died, some yielded. Few escaped. Pantho’s bright dream had drowned in a crimson sea.
On a knoll commanding a view of the desolate, corpse-strewn battlefield stood a great tent. Above it flew a black banner charged with a golden lion, the ensign of King Conan. About the base of this hillock stood the tents of the lesser nobility, including one surmounted by the banerole of Poitain. Here old Count Trocero of Poitain gulped wine and cursed his surgeons as they dressed his wounds.
The army itself camped on the plain roundabout. Weary warriors snored in their blanket rolls or squatted by guttering fires. They diced for prizes: gold-inlaid shields, plumed helms, swords with gems twinkling in their hilts. With dawn they would drive deeper into Zingara to set a puppet on Ferdrugo’s throne and end the dynastic squabbles that for years had roiled the peace of this contentious land.
Before the king’s tent, guardsmen of the Black Dragons stood with naked broadswords, guarding the rest of their lord. But there was little sleep for Conan that night. Inside the tent, lanterns glowed and flickered in their wrought-iron cages. Weary, battle scarred commanders sat or stood about. At a folding table inlaid with precious ivory from distant Vendhya, the great king brooded over maps of crackling parchment as he planned the morrow’s march.
Conan had seen over half a century of battle and bloodshed, and the years had left their mark on even so mighty a king. Time had laid its silver in the coarse black hair of his square-cut mane and had grizzled the heavy black mustache that swept out from either side of his long upper lip. Strange suns had burnt his flesh to a leathery hue, and weary years had etched furrows among the scars of war and conquest. But power still lay in the massive thews, and the vitality of his barbarian heritage still blazed in the deep-set eyes of volcanic blue that glared beneath scowling black brows.
Shifting his massive limbs and growling for wine, Conan stared at the maps. The sting of several small wounds annoyed him no more than the bite of a gnat, although a softer, city-bred man might have been stretched groaning on his pallet had he shed the blood that the Cimmerian had lost that day. While Conan pondered and consulted with his officers, his squires fussed about him, unbuckling the many straps of his harness, gently removing plate after plate, while the surgeon gingerly washed and bandaged his cuts and salved his bruises.
“This one needs must be sewn, sire,” said the surgeon.
“Ouch!” grunted Conan. “Go ahead, man, and pay no heed to my plaints. Pallantides, which were the quickest route hence to Stygia?”
“That one, sire,” said the general, drawing a forefinger across the parchment.
“Aye; I followed it to here when I fled from Xaltotun’s sorcery…”
Conan’s voice trailed off. With his chin on his massive fist, he stared unseeing into space and time. A shadow of suspicion crossed his brain, evoked by the memory of his struggle with the dread Acheronian sorcerer, Xaltotun, a decade and a half before.
There was something about this mad invasion by Duke Pantho that did not fit what he had heard of that astute and crafty adventurer. Only a fool or a madman would have hurled his army against one of Conan’s most loyal and warlike provinces. Conan, who had matched steel with Pantho that day and split the duke’s skull with one terrific stroke, did not think that the man had been either mad or foolish.
He suspected an unseen hand behind that addle-pated expedition, a shadowy figure lurking at Pantho’s back. He smelled a plot. In fact, he smelled sorcery.
TWO: Destiny in White
The captain of the king’s guard that night was one Amric, an adventurer out of Koth, drawn to golden Tarantia years before by the magic of Conan’s name and the legend of his prowess. “Amric the Bull,” his fellow Black Dragons called him—as much for his amatory prowess as for his headlong onset in battle. He was barrel chested and deep voiced. Like many Kothians, he was olive of skin, with perhaps a trace of Shemitish blood, as suggested by his thick, ringleted black beard. When a quiet little man in dirty white robes came gliding through the murk to the king’s tent, Amric alone knew him for what he was.
“Fires of Moloch!” Amric swore. “A druid out of Pictland, or I’m a eunuch!” He shifted his sword to his left hand so as to sketch a protective sign on the night air with his right.
The small man laughed and lurched; Amric suspected that he was drunk. “Your sins have found you out, Amric of Khorshemish!” he said.
Amric swore heartily, invoking the nether organs of several of the more disreputable eastern demon-gods. He paled, and sweat beaded his brow. His fellow guards looked curiously at him, for never in the fiercest battle had they seen their captain show fear. They eyed the little man with curiosity and suspicion.
He was a harmless-looking person, well past middle years. Save for a few straggling wisps of thin white hair, he was bald as an egg. He had watery blue eyes in a pale, loose-wattled face. His legs, where they showed beneath his robe, were as scrawny as a fowl’s. All in all, he was a most unlikely person to find on a battlefield.
“He knows you, Bull,” rumbled a blond Vanr. “Is’t a daughter, old man, with an unexpectedly black-avised babe, or an unpaid wineshop bill the size of a duke’s treasury?”
The others laughed loudly, but Amric scowled. “Keep civil tongues in your heads, you northern heathen,” he rumbled. Turning to the small man, who leaned on his staff with a faint, cherubic smile, he bowed and pulled off his dragon-crested helm.
“What can I do for you, Holy Father?” he asked with more civility than was his wont.
Amric had learned the wisdom of such politeness years before, when he had served on the Bossonian Marches. There he had seen the terrific power wielded by mild-seeming white-robed men like this, who walked with oaken staves and with golden sickles thrust through their girdles as emblems of their rank. For they were the druids, the priests of the Ligureans. The Ligureans, a race of light-skinned barbarians who dwelt in small clans in Pictland, intermingled with the shorter, darker, and more savage Picts. Those bloody savages, who feared neither god, man, beast, nor devil, still cowered before the authority of the druids.
“I am fain to see your king ere taking a bit of rest,” said the little man. Casually, he added: “I am Diviatix, chief druid of Pictland. Pray tell your king Conan that I am come from the Great Grove with a message. The Lords of Light have given me a command for their servant, Conan, and I bear his destiny in my hand.”