Pallantides chewed his beard. “You can’t ride those winged devils.”
Conan grinned. “I can try. I’ve ridden horses and camels and even, once, an elephant. So a mere dragon should not daunt me!”
TWO: A Flight of Dragons
Conan soon learned that there was much in what Pallantides had said. The giant pterodactyls, reared and trained by the warriors of Zembabwei, were not the most tractable steeds. They were bad-tempered, quarrelsome, and stupid. They had a dismaying tendency to forget their riders and swoop down to the surface of clearings and rivers in pursuit of prey. They also stank.
Conan had snorted indignantly when the grinning black beast-keepers had tied him securely to the high-backed saddle, a stout affair of tough leather stretched over a bamboo frame. But, on his first flight, his grisly mount abruptly tumbled into a headlong dive after a fleeing gazelle. Then Conan realized the need for the thongs that held him to his seat.
The Zembabwans carried stout teakwood clubs, fastened to a loop of the saddle, wherewith to beat the wyverns into obedience whenever their predatory instincts got the better of their training. Conan battered his flying dragon into groggy flight again. He would, he thought, prefer to take his chances afoot in the jungle, with the warriors of Nzinga and Mbega.
Still, there was no denying that the wyverns moved at a speed that left those on the ground far behind. While the black fighters hacked their way through the dense growth below, Conan and his scouting force ranged far ahead, spying out the best routes. Once they sighted a black army, posting itself for an ambush of the ground force. A simultaneous swoop of the wyverns close over the heads of the hostile spearmen sent them into headlong, screaming flight.
After a time, the jungle thinned out to parkland, and the ground force speeded up. Their progress was still snail-like compared to that of the wyvern squadron, which could travel at several times the speed of even a mounted man. And there were no horses in these parts. Conan was told that they were crossing a belt in which a wasting disease slew all horses. Now and then a cluster of black specks on the savanna indicated a herd of antelope, buffalo, or other grass-eaters.
Day after day, Conan soared far ahead of his army. Then he returned to meet his ground force: Nzinga’s Amazons, Mbega’s warriors under Count Trocero’s command, and a train of women bearing food and supplies on their heads. From his height, they looked like a column of black ants. Unable by reason of age to keep up with the brisk marching pace of the warriors, Trocero most of the time was carried in a litter borne on the shoulders of four stalwart blacks.
Each day Conan fumed with impatience when he saw how little ground the force had covered since dawn, although he well knew that these folk were marching at a rate that even his tough Aquilonian veterans would have had a hard time to keep up with.
The moon had been full the night when Conan and his son had overthrown Mbega’s usurping co-king Nenaunir, who had seized sole power for himself and imprisoned his twin brother. The moon had dwindled to a silver sliver when Conan and his little army had set out in pursuit of Thoth-Amon.
During this journey, the moon twice waxed to full and shrank again to a slim silver crescent. Now it was again broadening toward the full. To Conan’s right, in the west, the haze-reddened sun was sinking toward the jagged peaks that fenced the horizon. In the east, to his left, the pallid moon, in her first quarter, stood well up in the sky.
Five hundred feet below where Conan sat his wyvern, the land was rolling and rough, cut up by many ravines and gullies. It was clad in golden dry grass with patches of scrubby, thorny herbage and trees, now mostly dry, brown, leafless, and deadlooking because the country was in its dry season. Ahead, the hummocks swelled to a range of hills. From the information croaked out by old Rimush before his mysterious death, and from the words of natives queried along the way, he should be approaching the giant waterfall of which Rimush had spoken.
Ere long, his heart leaped with fierce joy as he sighted the misty plume that rose from a cleft in the hills ahead. A few more beats of the reptile’s ponderous wings brought him within sight of the white glitter of the fall itself. There a small river, winding out of the hills, plunged over an escarpment half as high as Conan’s own altitude.
Conan wondered whether he ought to return to the ground force, now far behind. No, he thought; he would make a cast of a few leagues eastward, as he had been directed by the Shemitish astrologer, and then swing north again. He should be able to rejoin his troops before dark.
So Conan tugged on his reins and turned the flapping monster to the left. Behind him, Prince Conn and Mbega’s guardsmen followed his lead.
Conan turned, the wind whipping his gray-shot mane across his face, and peered through watering eyes to where his son rode. Young Conn was grinning. His square-jawed face was eager and his fierce blue eyes were alive and sparkling. Conan, his hard face softening, growled an affectionate curse under his breath.
The lad was obviously having the time of his life. Since he had joined the expedition at Nebthu on the River Styx, he had been through desert warfare, a jungle trek, and the siege of Zembabwei. By now he ought to have learned a few things about the task of being a warrior-king. His experience on this hazardous march into the Far South could never have been gained from tutors or books. Conan decided that he had been right to ignore the advice of his councilors and bring his son on this expedition.
By late afternoon, the craggy hills rose into bleak plateaus and rugged mountains. This must be the Land of No Return of which old Rimush had spoken. Conan meant to fly briefly over the near side of the mountains, to scout the passes, and then to turn north to rejoin Nzinga, Count Trocero, and their armies. He whacked his wyvern to hasten its flight, since he did not wish to be caught aloft by darkness and perchance miss his rendezvous with the ground force.
The thunder of vast wings sounded on his left. He glanced about to see Conn, his face flushed with excitement, reining up beside him. The lad’s dragon, carrying less weight, was less fatigued than Conan’s. Conn pointed ahead and to the right.
Following his son’s indication, Conan peered through the haze and saw a curious thing. This was a mountain of chalkwhite stone, the lower slope of which had been rudely carved into the shape of an immense grinning death’s head.
Conan’s barbarian heritage of superstition rose within him, bringing a gasp of awe to his lips and a prickling of premonition to his skin. The Great Stone Skull, whereof Rimush had spoken!
Conan’s blazing blue eyes stabbed through the murk. Ahead, a flat, barren strip of dead earth stretched to the foot of the cliff. There, the black arch of a portal yawned. Its lintel was carved like the fanged upper jaw of a skull. From the upper works peered two round ports, like the eye sockets of a skull. It was an eerie thing to see.
Then terror struck!
A shock ran through Conan’s burly frame, leaving him gasping and trembling with unaccustomed weakness. His senses swam; his heart labored, as if he had flown into an invisible cloud of poisonous vapor.
The same weird force affected his reptilian mount. The wyvern staggered, slipped to one side, and hurtled toward the sterile plain below, where the white skull brooded starkly over a haunted, shadowy land.
THREE:Land of Illusions
Conan jerked back the reins with a heave that would have broken a horse’s jaw. The wyvern responded sluggishly, red eyes dimmed, snaky tail hanging limply. But respond it did, as its ribbed wings opened to catch the rushing wind and brake its headlong fall.