Belesa, who had hurried down from the manor, confronted Zarono. “Where is Conan?”
The buccaneer jerked a thumb toward the blackening woods. His chest heaved; sweat poured down his face.
“Their scouts were at our heels ere we gained the beach. He paused to slay a few and give us time to get away.”
He staggered away to take his place on the footwalk, whither Strombanni had already mounted. Valenso stood there, a somber, cloak-wrapped figure, strangely silent and aloof. He was like a man bewitched.
“Look!” yelped a pirate, above the deafening howling of the yet unseen horde. A man emerged from the forest and raced fleetly across the open belt.
“Conan!” Zarono grinned wolfishly. “We’re safe in the stockade; we know where the treasure is. No reason why we shouldn’t feather him with arrows now.”
“Nay!” Strombanni caught his arm. “We shall need his sword. Look!”
Behind the fleet-footed Cimmerian, a wild horde burst from the forest, howling as they ran …naked Picts, hundred and hundreds of them. Their arrows rained about the Cimmerian. A few strides more, and Conan reached the eastern wall of the stockade, bounded high, seized the points of the logs, and heaved himself up and over, his cutlass in his teeth. Arrows thudded venomously into the logs where his body had just been. His resplendent coat was gone, his white shirt torn and blood-stained.
“Stop them!” he roared as his feet hit the ledge inside. “If they get on the wall, we’re done for!”
Pirates, buccaneers, and men-at-arms responded instantly, and a storm of arrows and quarrels tore into the oncoming horde. Conan saw Belesa with Tina clinging to her hand, and his language was picturesque.
“Get into the manor,” he commanded in conclusion. “Their shafts will arch over the wall …what did I tell you?” A black shaft cut into the earth at Belesa’s feet and quivered like a serpent’s head. Conan caught up a longbow and leaped to the footwalk. “Some of you fellows prepare torches!” he roared, above the clamor of battle. “We can’t find them in the dark!”
The sun had sunk in a welter of blood. Out in the bay, the men aboard the carack had cut the anchor chain, and the Red Hand was rapidly receding on the crimson horizon.
SEVEN: Men of the Woods
Night had fallen, but torches streamed across the strand, casting the mad scene into lurid revealment. Naked men in paint swarmed the beach; like waves they came against the palisade, bared teeth and blazing eyes gleaming in the glare of the torches thrust over the wall. Horn-bill feathers waved in black manes, and the feathers of the cormorant and the sea-falcon. A few warriors, the wildest and most barbaric of them all, wore sharks’ teeth woven in their tangled locks. The sea-land tribes had gathered from up and down the coast in all directions to rid their country of the white-skinned invaders.
They surged against the palisade, driving a storm of arrows before them, fighting into the teeth of the shafts and bolts that tore into their masses from the stockade. Sometimes they came so close to the wall that they were hewing at the gate with their war-axes and thrusting their spears through the loopholes.
But each time the tide ebbed back without flowing over the palisade, leaving its drift of dead. At this kind of fighting, the freebooters of the sea were at their stoutest. Their arrows and bolts tore holes in the charging horde; their cutlasses hewed the wild men from the palisades they strove to scale.
Yet again and again, the men of the woods returned to the onslaught with all the stubborn ferocity that had been roused in their fierce hearts.
“They are like mad dogs!” gasped Zarono, hacking downward at the dark hands that grasped the palisade points and the dark faces that snarled up at him.
“If we can hold the fort until dawn, they’ll lose heart,” grunted Conan, splitting a feathered skull with professional precision. “They won’t maintain a long siege. Look, they’re falling back.”
The charge rolled back. The men on the wall shook the sweat out of their eyes, counted their dead, and took a fresh grip on the blood-slippery hilts of their swords. Like blood-hungry wolves, grudgingly driven from a cornered prey, the Picts skulked back beyond the ring of torches. Only the bodies of the slain lay before the palisade.
“Have they gone?” Strombanni shook back his wet, tawny locks. The cutlass in his fist was notched and red; his brawny arm was splashed with blood.
“They’re still out there.” Conan nodded toward the outer darkness that ringed the circle of torches, made more intense by their light. He glimpsed movements in the shadows, the glitter of eyes and the red glint of copper weapons.
“They’ve drawn off for a bit, though,” he said. “Put sentries on the walk and let the rest eat and drink. ’Tis past midnight, and we’ve been fighting for hours without respite. Ha, Valenso, how goes the battle with you?”
The count, in dented, blood-splashed helmet and cuirass, moved somberly up to where Conan and the captains stood. For answer, he muttered something inaudible under his breath. And then out of the darkness a voice spoke: a loud, clear voice that rang through the entire fort.
“Count Valenso! Count Valenso of Korzetta! Do you hear me?” It spoke with a Stygian accent.
Conan heard the count gasp as if he had been stricken with a mortal wound.
Valenso reeled and grasped the tops of the logs of the stockade, his face pale in the torchlight. The voice resumed:
“It is I, Thoth-Amon of the Ring! Did you think to flee me once more? It is too late for that! All your schemes shall avail you naught, for tonight I shall send a messenger to you. It is the demon that guarded the treasure of Tranicos, whom I have released from his cave and bound to my service. He will inflict upon you the doom that you, you dog, have earned: a death at once slow, hard, and disgraceful. Let us see you buy your way out of that!”
The speech ended in a peal of musical laughter. Valenso gave a scream of terror, jumped down from the footwalk, and ran staggering up the slope toward the manor.
When the lull came in the fighting, Tina had crept to their window, from which they had been driven by the danger of flying arrows. Silently she watched the men gather about the fire. Belesa was reading a letter that had been delivered by a serving-woman to her door. It read:
Count Valenso of Korzetta to his niece Belesa, greeting: My doom has come upon me at last. Now that I am resigned if not reconciled to it, I would have you know that I am not insensible of the fact that I have used you in a manner not consistent with the honor of the Korzettas. I did so because circumstances left me no other choice. Although it is late for apologies, I ask that you think not too hardly of me; and, if you can bring yourself to do so, and by some chance you survive this night of doom, that you pray to Mitra for the soiled soul of your father’s brother. Meanwhile, I advise that you remain away from the great hall, lest the same fate that awaits me encompass you also. Farewell.
Belesa’s hands shook as she read. Although she could never love her uncle, this was still the most human action she had ever known him to take.
At the window, Tina said: “There ought to be more men on the wall;. Suppose the black man came back?”
Belesa, going over beside her to look out, shuddered at the thought.
“I am afraid,” murmured Tina. “I hope Strombanni and Zarono are killed.”
“And not Conan?” asked Belesa curiously.
“Conan would not harm us,” said the child confidently. “He lives up to his barbaric code of honor, but they are men who have lost all honor.”
“You are wise beyond your years, Tina,” said Belesa, with the vague uneasiness that the precocity of the child often aroused in her.