A glance back showed Conan another swarm of brylukas rushing upon him with outstretched claws. Conan bolted through the sheet of water in his turn and found himself looking down upon the scene of the recent battle with the Turanians. The general and the rest of his escort were standing about, shouting and gesticulating as their fellows emerged from the water and ran down the ledge to the ground. When Conan appeared right after the last of these, the yammer continued without a break until a louder shout from the general cut through it:
"It is one of the pirates! Shoot!"
Conan, running down the ledge, was already halfway to the ladder shaft. Those in front of him, who had just reached the floor of the gorge, turned to stare as he raced past them with such tremendous strides that the archers, misjudging his speed, sent a flight of arrows clattering against the rocks behind him. Before they had nocked their second arrows, he had reached the vertical groove in the cliff face.
The Cimmerian slipped into the shaft, whose concavity protected him momentarily from the arrows of the Turanians standing near the general. He caught at the indentations with hands and toes and went up like a monkey. By the time the Turanians had recovered their wits enough to run up the gorge to a position in front of the groove, where they could see him to shoot at, Conan was fifteen paces up and rising fast
Another storm of arrows whistled about him, clattering as they glanced from the rock. A couple struck his body but were prevented from piercing his flesh by his mail shirt. A couple of others struck his clothing and caught in the cloth. One hit his right arm, the point passing shallowly under the skin and then out again.
With a fearful oath Conan tore the arrow out of the wound point-first, threw it from him, and continued his climb. Blood from the flesh wound soaked up his arm and down his body. By the next volley, he was so high that the arrows had little force left when they reached him. One struck his boot but failed to penetrate.
Up and up he went, the Turanians becoming small beneath him. When their arrows no longer reached him, they ceased shooting. Snatches of argument floated up. The general wanted his men to climb the shaft after Co-nan, and the men protested that this would be futile, as he would simply wait at the top of the cliff and cut their heads off one by one as they emerged. Conan smiled grimly.
Then he reached the top. He sat gasping on the edge with his feet hanging down into the shaft while he bandaged his wounds with strips torn from his clothing, meantime looking about him. Glancing ahead over the rock wall into the valley of the Akrim, he saw sheepskin-clad Hyrkanians riding hard for the hills, pursued by horsemen in glittering mail—Turanian soldiers. Below him, the Turanians and Zaporoskans milled around like ants and finally set off up the gorge to the castle, leaving a few of their number on watch in case Conan should come back down the groove.
Some time later Conan rose, stretched his great muscles, and turned to look eastward toward the Sea of Vilayet. He started as his keen vision picked up a ship, and shading his eyes with his hand he made out a galley of the Turanian navy crawling away from the mouth of the creek where Artaban had left his ship.
"Crom!" he muttered. "So the cowards piled aboard and pulled out without waiting!"
He struck his palm with his fist, growling deep in his 170
throat like an angry bear. Then he relaxed and laughed shortly. It was no more than he should have expected. Anyway, he was getting tired of the Hyrkanian lands, and there were still many countries in the West that he had never visited.
He started to hunt for the precarious route down from the ridge that Vinashko had shown him.
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CONAN THE FREEBOOTER
Copyright © 1968 by L. Sprague de Camp. All rights reserved.
Hawks over Shem was rewritten by L. Sprague de Camp from an original story by Robert E. Howard called Hawks over Egypt, laid in 11th-century Egypt. Hawks over Shem was first published in Fantastic Universe Science Fiction for October, 1955; copyright © 1955 by King-Size Publications, Inc. It was reprinted in Tales of Conan. N.Y.: Gnome Press, Inc., 1955.
Black Colossus was first published in Weird Tales for June, 1933; copyright 1933 by Popular Fiction Publishing Co. It was reprinted in Conan the Barbarian, N.Y.; Gnome Press, Inc., 1954.
Shadows in the Moonlight was first published in Weird Tales for April, 1934; copyright 1934 by Popular Fiction Publishing Co. It was reprinted in Conan the Barbarian and in Swords and Sorcery, ed. by L. Sprague de Camp, N.Y.: Pyramid Publications, Inc., 1963.
The Road of the Eagles was rewritten by L. Sprague de Camp from an original story by Robert E. Howard of the same title, but laid in the 16th century Turkish Empire. It was published in Fantastic Universe Science Fiction for December, 1955, under the title Conan, Man of Destiny; copyright © 1955 by King-Size Publications, Inc. It was reprinted under its present title in Tales of Conan.
A Witch Shall Be Born was first published in Weird Tales for December, 1934; copyright 1934 by Popular Fiction Publishing Co. It was reprinted in Avon Fantasy Reader No. 10, 1949, and in Conan the Barbarian.
The biographical paragraphs between the stories are based upon A Probable Outline of Conan's Career, by P. Schuyler Miller and Dr. John D. Clark, published in The Hyborian Age (1938), and on the expanded version of this essay, An Informal Biography of Conan the Cimmerian, by P. Schuyler Miller, John D. Clark, and L. Sprague de Camp, published in Amra, Vol. 2, No. 4, copyright © 1959 by G. H. Scithers; used by permission of G. H. Scithers.
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