“Archers!” cried an officer directing the Turanian troopers. “Spread out, so the shafts shall strike from all sides.”
“They have us,” growled Rolf “Had we but stout coats of Asgardean mail …Ah, well, it was fun while it lasted.”
“Not quite,” said Conan. “See you that row of windows? Here is my plan …”
He whispered a few quick words to his comrade, who nodded. The two giants sprang forward, their blades flickering with the speed of striking snakes. Two guardsmen sank to the floor in their blood, and the others shrank back momentarily from the fury of the onslaught.
“Follow me, Rolf! We’ll fool these dogs yet!” barked the Cimmerian, striking right and left.
The swords of the barbarians cleared a bloody avenue. The big northerner wheeled, thrusting and cutting, his sword cutting down the Turanians like wheat stalks before the scythe as he guarded Conan’s back. As Conan rushed forward, Rolf followed in his wake, his sword widening the bloody path opened by the Cimmerian. His booming bass was casting forth the ringing tones of old northern battle songs, and the gleam of the berserk was in his gaze.
None could stand before their terrible attack. Turanian swords and spears sought their blood, but glanced harmlessly from the shields as the pantherish speed of the barbarians blurred the eyes of their adversaries. Conan bled from a score of wounds and Rolf’s garb was in tatters, but the bodies heaped upon the floor bespoke the violence of their attack.
They put their backs to one of the large windows. For a few seconds both barbarians exploded into maniacal fury, laying about them with blood-crusted blades and clearing a space of several feet around them.
The massed soldiers shrank back for a moment. It seemed to their superstitious minds as if these were not men but invincible ogres, hard as steel, risen from the darker realms to wreak terrible vengeance.
Conan utilized this moment with lightninglike speed. The stained glass of the window shattered into thousands of gleaming, many-colored shards under blows from his scimitar that tore a great gap in the leaded pane.
Hurling their swords and shields into the faces of their foes, the Cimmerian and the northerner sprang through in headlong dives toward the sea two hundred feet below. A taunting laugh lingered behind them in the air as the guardsmen closed in.
“Archers! An archer, quickly, to have at them!” The commanding officer’s voice was shrill with desperation.
Five men stood forward, each armed with the powerful, double-curved Hyrkanian war bow. The window niche was cleared, and soon the twang of cords was heard.
Then one of the bowmen shrugged his shoulders and turned to the officer, “The range is too great in this treacherous moonlight. We cannot even discern their heads, and probably they are swimming under water most of the time. The task is beyond us.”
Glaring, the general swung about and hurried to the king’s chamber.
Yezdigerd had recovered from his shock. The only sign of damage was a small bandage round his forehead, partly covered by his turban. The terse account of the incidents elapsed was interrupted by the crash of the king’s fist on a table, spilling vases and wine jugs to the floor.
“You have dared to fail! The red-handed barbarians have escaped and mocked the majesty of Turan! Are my soldiers sucklings, that they cannot lay two men low? Every tenth man among the guards shall die in the morning, to bolster the courage of the rest!”
He continued in a lower voice: “See that two war galleys are outfitted at once. The barbarians will surely try to steal a boat and make their way across the sea. We shall overtake them. See that the ships are well-provisioned and manned by my best seamen and soldiers. Take the sturdiest slaves for rowers. When I have caught these dogs, they shall suffer the agonies of a thousand deaths in the torture chambers of Aghrapur!”
He laughed, animated by the grisly prospect, and gestured imperiously to his general. The latter hurried out, threading his way through the throng in the courtroom to carry out his lord’s commands.
Khosru the fisherman sat patiently on the gunwale of his sloop, mending a net which had been broken by the thrashing of a giant sturgeon that afternoon. He cursed his misfortune, for this was a fine net. It had cost him two pieces of gold and the promise of fifty pounds of fish to the Shemite merchant from, whom he had bought it. But what could a poor, starving fisherman do? He must have nets to get his living from the sea.
Aye, if those were the only things necessary for him and his family!
But he must also strain and work to meet the taxes imposed by the king.
He looked up in venomous, furtive hatred at the palace, limned against the moonlit sky. It perched on the cliff like a giant vulture of gold and marble. The king’s taxgatherers had supple whips and no compunction about using them. Welts and old scars on Khosru’s back told of wrongs suffered when the shoals were empty of fish.
Suddenly the sloop heaved, almost unseating him. Khosru sprang up, his eyes starting from their sockets in terror. A huge, almost-naked man was climbing aboard, his black, square-cut hair disordered and dripping. He seemed to Khosru like some demon of the sea, an evil merman, come up from unknown deeps to blast his soul and devour his body.
For a moment the apparition simply sat on a thwart, breathing in deep gasps. Then it spoke in Hyrkanian, though with a barbarous accent.
Khosra took heart a little, for the tales depicted the demons as devoid of speech. Still he quavered before the smoldering eyes and ferocious mien of the giant. His terror increased as another figure, a huge, black-clad, golden-haired man with a broad-bladed dagger at his belt, followed the first over the gunwale.
“Fear not, sailor! ” boomed the black-haired giant “We don’t want your blood, only your ship. ” He drew a glittering diadem from the waistband of his loincloth and held it out. “Here is payment enough and more. You can buy ten such craft as this one with it. Agreed…or…?”
He flexed his thick fingers suggestively. Khosru, his head whirling, nodded and snatched the diadem. With the speed of a frightened mouse he scuttled into the dinghy moored to the stern of the sloop and rowed away at desperate speed.
His strange customers lost no time. The sail went swiftly up and billowed in the freshening breeze. The trim craft gathered speed as it steered out toward the east.
Khosru shrugged his shoulders, mystified. He paused to hold up the fabulous diadem, whose gems glittered in the moonlight like a cascade of splashing white fire.
CHAPTER 5: The Sea of Blood
The wind blew hard. Salt spray was tossed from the waves by the howling gusts. Conan the Cimmerian expanded his mighty chest in deep, joyous breaths, relishing the feel of freedom. Many memories crowded his mind from the earlier days when he, as chief of the pirates of Vilayet, had swept the sea with dripping sword blades and laid the Turanian seaports in smoking ruins.
Vilayet was still a Hyrkanian sea, dominated by the Turanian navy’s swift war galleys. Trade was carried on to some extent by daring merchants from the smaller countries on the northeastern shore, but a merchantman’s way across the turbulent waves was fraught with peril. No state of war was needed for a Turanian captain to board, plunder, and scuttle a foreign vessel if it pleased him. The excuse was simply “infringement upon the interests of the lord of the Turanian Empire.”
Besides the greedy Turanian navy, there lurked another danger as great: the pirates!