“A gloomier land never was — all of hills, darkly wooded, under skies nearly always gray, with winds moaning drearily down the valleys.”Arturos, son of Cornac, had had a day’s start in his flight, but he fled on foot and knew that the fox-tricks of hunting-craft he had acquired in his seventeen years would buy him little time from the experienced men of thirty and forty winters who pursued him on horseback. They had surely guessed the southern route he would take, for he had been careless passing a village at dawn and knew he had been seen by a young woman filling a cooking-pot from a stream. Indeed, he could sense that they were close behind him and already that morning he had mistaken the distant cry of an eagle for a war-whoop. He had spun in his tracks, clutching at his sword-hilt as he strained his eyes down the valley for the bobbing dots of his pursuers.Conan’s description of Cimmeria in “The Phoenix on the Sword” (1932).
“Crom!”
He had sworn in his relief to see the valley still empty, but sooner or later the war-whoop would sound in truth as they sighted him and urged their steeds on to overtake him. And then he would have to turn and stand, waiting to sell his life as dear as he might. He might flee another half-day, perhaps, but even the deep reserves of strength habitual to a Cimmerian youth would be drained by then and they would have an easy task in their slaughter. The thought of death did not dismay him, for he had already seen it come to many in his brief life, but the thought of dying cheaply, like a slave caught stealing and strung up without ceremony from the nearest pine, stung his soul like red-hot iron.
He swore aloud at the thought of it, brows knotting and chin jutting with pugnacious defiance. Aye, why he should he run till he was caught like an exhausted hare? Better to rest now and face his doom clear-eyed and steady-handed, and if they missed his tracks turning off and rode on by the place he lay, then he would stand and call to them when the hooves of their horses woke him. They would recall his courage, he knew, when they returned to their tribe with his head, and it would not be treated with dishonor.
Accordingly, he climbed the western valley-side and found a rough-and-ready couch among the needles fallen from a stand of ancient pine. But as he untied his sword-belt and laid his sword close at hand, a glimmer in the deeper shadow under the trees caught his eye and he moved closer. A nimbus of light seemed to be shimmering there and now he saw that it spilt from a patch of golden fungi of a kind unknown to him, with stems straight and true as spear-shafts and caps like the helmets of a company of Aquilonian mercenaries he had once seen on a raid across the southern border. Suddenly his belly rumbled: he had not eaten for more than a day and the light showed him that a large green beetle was gnawing at the stem of one of the fungi.
He hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and began to pluck the fungi from their bed of pine-needles, though leaving that at which the beetle gnawed. The creature deserved his thanks whether the fungi were edible or poisonous, for if it were edible, he would have new strength to fight his pursuers; and if poisonous he would meet death without the inconvenience of delay. But the beetle seemed to have guided him truly: the fungi were nutty and flavorsome, bringing rich saliva to his mouth and a glow to his grumbling belly, and he thanked the beetle unironically before returning to his sword and casting himself down on his rough-and-ready couch of pine-needles for sleep.
He woke thinking that his belly was grumbling again or that a thunderstorm was brewing overhead, then had these notions dashed from his head by sight of the true cause: a giant forest-bear, bristling with wrath, was glaring at him from between the trunks of two pines higher up the slope. Later he concluded that it had too had come for a meal of the golden fungi, which perhaps grew only in rare patches in the forest, but in that moment he had no time for thought. He snatched for his sword-hilt, missed it, and then was on his feet and running for his life down the valley-side, for the bear had charged, shouldering between the two pines like a black avalanche of fur and muscle. How long he had slept he had no idea, but the light filtering through the gray Cimmerian clouds seemed almost unchanged and perhaps it had been no more than an hour.
Yet that had sufficed for his pursuers, who had been closer than he had guessed: as he emerged from beneath the pines a genuine war-whoop reached his ears through the rumbling growls of the bear, and in a snatched glance down the valley he saw a horseman riding fast toward him through the shrub of the valley floor, sword aloft and swinging. Death by bear or death by blade, he thought, mad laughter bubbling up inside him; and with that he stumbled and fell headlong. Ah, so it was death by bear. He clutched for his knife, scrabbling to turn and face his nemesis and praying that Crom would grant him the chance of a single blow before a heavy paw crushed his skull or reeking jaws tore his face away.
But what was this? He had turned and was looking up the valley-side, but the bear was no longer pursuing him: it had left his track and was bounding at the on-coming horseman, who did not seem to have seen it, so fiercely was his attention fixed on the youth he had hunted. Arturos could see the horseman’s face now and the merciless grin that sprang to it as their eyes met in a flash of recognition, with the lips twisting to hurl a taunt. But then the eyes swung to the right and the triumph in the face was dashed away by surprise and fear. The horseman had seen the bear, which must have been concealed behind saplings and bushes till that moment but was now rearing up to its full and awesome height.
The crack of its left paw meeting the skull of the rider came distinct even through the scream of the frightened horse, and Arturos even thought he heard the snap of his enemy’s neck. Riderless now, for the blow had emptied the saddle like a strong wind meeting smoke, the horse galloped on, its reins swinging loose. Arturos scrambled to his feet, hope flaring again in his breast for the first time since he had run from his father’s burning homestead. If he could just... aye, aye, he could! With a desperate dash he had come close enough to the bolting horse to clutch at the reins and then, though the jerk almost tore his left arm from its socket, drag its head around and seize its mane in his right hand.
It whinnied in protest, kicking out at him with a foreleg, but with a spring he was in the saddle and locking his legs to its flanks with new-found strength. The horse, acknowledging the force of his will and mastery, calmed almost at once, and he had to hammer a renewed gallop out of it with his heels, for a glance over his shoulder told him that the bear was coming after him. An arrowsflight up the valley he looked over his shoulder again and saw with a sardonic grunt that the bear had returned to the corpse that a minute before had warmed the saddle beneath him as a living man. If the bear was still at work when more of his pursuers rode up the valley — Crom grant it be so! — it would not take kindly to being disturbed, and might claim another life or two or even three, for the hunters had come equipped to deal with a fleeing youth, not with an angry bear.
The thought of his abandoned sword struck him now, but he could not linger and the bear might stay hours, frustrating his attempts to climb to the stand of pine. With a shrug, he dismissed his loss from his mind and rode on, trusting in his knife and his native wit. Some hours later, having crossed the ill-defined border between Cimmeria and the Marches of Gunderland, he chanced across three Nemedian wolfsheads, who, having summed him up in a glance and decided he owned nothing worth cutting his throat for, invited him with menacing politeness to join their band where it encamped near the Shirki river. He accepted, reasoning that no better offer was likely to come his way, but several times on the journey thither their jokes at the thickness of his accent and his ignorance of the world made him grind his teeth in fury, and if he had still had his sword it would have been out and swinging. But he had no sword and was forced to swallow his pride, for which, when he saw the sword-play of the three in later days, he heartily thanked the bear. His sword would have been flicked from his hand in an instant and his head lopped from his shoulders in the next, before the three Nemedians, laughing over their sport, rode on their way.
A Nemedian or Aquilonian youth, however low-born, would likely not have survived the next year in the outlaw camp, but Arturos was Cimmerian and bred to toughness and survival, being quick to learn to use his wits where his brawn and swiftness of eye and hand could not avail him. He rose steadily through the ranks and in mid-summer was the youngest chosen to join a raid on Gunderland proper. Here was the moment he had waited for: at last a good sword was placed in his hand and a sturdy steed between his legs, and at the Shirki ford he hung to the rear, waiting for the bulk of his companions to make the difficult crossing. Then he slipped off his horse and led it quietly off southward through a thicket of cliff-willow. After five minutes he sprang back to the saddle and spurred his mount to a canter. He had learned three new languages and picked up the rudiments of two more in the camp, a sinkhole for the rogues and vagabonds of half the west, and acquired a much wider knowledge of the geography and culture of the lands south of Cimmeria. Rightly or wrongly, he believed he was now equipped to set up on his own account.
A shout went up behind him as he pondered where to head first, but he laughed and urged his horse on no faster. With most of the raiding party already across the swift-flowing river, he judged that they would spare neither the time nor the men to pursue him. More shouts sounded and he laughed again, confident in the judgment he had made. Rarely among his own folk, he was a gambler and in the camp he had regularly lost or doubled his share of spoils. But where his life was concerned, he took care that the odds were heavily in his favor before he threw. Here he had thrown and here, as the re-fallen silence behind him now told him, he had won.
Over the next year he worked his way steadily south, matching his still growing strength with ever-sharpening wits and working in half-a-dozen occupations regular and irregular. By autumn he was comfortable in the barracks of an Aquilonian border regiment; but a month of relative comfort proved enough for him and one midnight, having drugged the wine of the night-guard, he ransacked the regimental treasury and deserted with a stolen horse. Two days later he sold the regiment’s eagle in Poitain to a soft-bellied merchant whose eyes he did not trust; and when he slipped back and concealed himself under the window of the merchant’s chamber his suspicions were confirmed, for he heard the merchant wheezily order a note to be taken to the Aquilonian ambassador. He waylaid the messenger, terrified the note out of him at sword-point, puzzled out its contents, and returned to offer the merchant his literary critique.
Then, wanted in Aquilonia for desertion and theft and in Poitain for murder, he had ridden cheerfully south into Zingara, where, like the rogue he was, he had prospered mightily for the next ten years. A failed palace coup in which, for once, he had misjudged the life-odds for which he threw, sent him galloping east just ahead of the squad of soldiers dispatched to arrest him for high treason, but Argos and its much-vaunted women disappointed him and he lingered there no longer than was required to polish his proficiency in two of the more widely spoken Argosean dialects. Then it was south to Shem, where he hired himself as a mercenary to one of the desert princes, and was soon general of one of the prince’s armies. He stayed here two years, before boredom and the imminent uncovering of an affaire de cœur with the prince’s youngest daughter convinced him that it was time to move on.
Elsewhere he might have tossed a coin to decide whether to strike north again or south, but he had long heard tales of the dark empire of Stygia to the south, none of them good and fewer of them wholesome. Accordingly he shaved his beard and headed north, riding a stolen horse of but middling quality, lest the prince be provoked into hunting him down; but he soon had occasion to regret his choice, for the prince’s ostlers had neglected their charge and it threw a shoe on the stony desert pavement he traveled. All might still have been well, had it not been for the three-day sand-storm which now blew up, toward the end of which a slave-caravan stumbled across him where he sheltered with the horse in the lee of an abandoned desert-shrine. Thirst and sleeplessness consequent on the incessant shriek of the wind had made him careless, and he accepted an offer to join the caravan as outrider, his horse having been re-shod at its portable forge. He was courteously offered wine as he watched the bellows worked; accepted with equal courtesy; and knew nothing more till he awoke in chains with a whip-lash burning on his back.
He had rejected Stygia, but Stygia, it seemed, had not rejected him, for this was where he now was trafficked and where, for the first time in his life, he learned the true meaning of hate. He was sold on from his first master, who tired of ordering him to the whipping-post for disobedience, but his second owner proved no better able to control him, nor his third or fourth, and within three months he was being chained to a oar-bench in a Stygian galley. Even his mighty strength had been drained by now and after a day of labor that might have prostrated a lesser man, for he worked alone at an oar normally reserved for three men, he knew he had to act swiftly or decline inevitably to weakness and death.
So, careless of pain as he worked his wrist raw, he freed a chained hand free during the brief rest-period and waited his chance to strike. When an overseer roused the oarsmen at dawn, he seized the man by the wrist and wrenched him to his knees, breaking his jaw with a single blow as he struggled to rise. Seizing the man’s sword, he cut his other hand free of its block in two strokes and set to work freeing his companions. Armed with the chains dangling around their wrists, they rushed from the oar-benches, Arturos roaring at their head; and such was the unexpectedness of the mutiny that the ship’s Stygian crew were were fatally slow to react. Every moment of delay meant another slave freed from an oar, and every slave freed tipped the balance further in favor of the mutineers.
In half-an-hour the last Stygian corpses were being flung from the blood-and-brain-stained deck to the sharks now swarming in the water around the ship, and Arturos was shouting his plans for the immediate future to the men he had freed. They would turn pirate, by Crom!, and express their gratitude to the empire whose whipstrokes they all bore on their backs and flanks. A roar of approval went up before he had even finished speaking, and he was elected captain by popular acclaim. For the next two years he and his ship, re-christened Northern Wolf and the flagship of a soon-assembled fleet, was a steel thorn in the side of the Stygians, sinking their trade-ships and raiding their cities incessantly. The price in gold placed on his head by the enraged Stygians mounted to a knee-high pyramid; but, cunning as the creature after which he had named his ship, he sensed the net tightening around him and sailed south out of their waters to take up an offer of alliance with the king of a rising black kingdom.
Six months later, already sick of the sight and stink of black flesh, he returned north in Wolf with a skeleton crew, carrying all the treasure he had garnered in his pirate days, for he intended to try his luck again in the northern kingdoms. In civil-war-racked Koth, with his cunning and generalship perfected by years of combat and hardship, he prospered mightily and soon carved out a principality. Year on year thereafter his power and wealth waxed greater, as though his war on the devil-worshiping Stygians had brought him the favor of the gods, and his forty-third birthday saw him lead the combined armies of the south into battle with the king of Aquilonia. Three days later, with dust and blood still staining his armor, he rode into the Aquilonian capital with the sychophantic cheers of the populace ringing in his ears. He was crowned in the temple of Mitra and waited two years, consolidating his power with a patience once unknown to him, before making the final move in his plan of conquest.
Cimmeria, his long-deserted homeland, had never owed fealty to a realm lying to its south: its loosely united folk were reckoned too fierce, too independent, too barbaric, to bow the neck to any king. Well, he, Arturos, son of Cornac, would test the truth of that unwritten law. He gathered an army larger than any yet seen in the west and rode north, timing his crossing of the border to coincide with the mid-summer during which, so long ago, he had ridden south, fleeing that blood-feud in his youth. The Cimmerian sun shone with uncharacteristic splendor on the returning prodigal, and he drove the border tribes before him like chaff in a strong wind. His repeated offers of peace in exchange for submission, blared by heralds from the hill-tops, would in time bear fruit even in the stubborn hearts of his kinsfolk, he believed, and soon he would bring more of Cimmeria under southern sway than the most ambitious of his predecessors on the Aquilonian throne had ever dared dream, let alone attempt.
On the second day, with the sun still blazing in a sky of unwonted blue, he rode at the head of his army into a valley whose slopes pricked his memory with spurs of déjà vu. And suddenly he crashed his mailed fist down the pommel of his saddle with an oath in his nine-tenths-forgotten Cimmerian. This was the valley of the bear whose image flapped on the banners of his army — and of the beetle whose image he wore carved in the priceless gem of the ring on his forefinger. He reined up, to the puzzlement of his bodyguard, and looked up the valley-side to the west. There, he was sure, beneath that stand of pine, he had eaten that meal of golden fungi and laid himself to sleep beside his sword.
Aye, the sword that he had abandoned in flight from the bear and that might yet lie, rusted but whole, beneath the pine-needles. With a barbaric impetuosity he thought he had cast aside for good long ago, he dragged at the reins of his horse and spurred it up the valley-side along the route already taken by his eyes, disdaining the shouted warnings of his knights against ambush.
“Leave me be!” he ordered them roughly over his shoulder. “Do you think I could not smell the presence of my own folk, were they within twenty leagues of us?”
And so his knights hung back, watching in wonder as he forced his horse up the slope to the pines. Here he dismounted with a clank of heavy armor and strode forward, his iron-clad feet sinking deep into the soft layer of needles, and began to cast about for the spot where he had lain. But his eyes were unadjusted from the sun and it was his foot that made the first discovery, stumbling against a hard shape. He stooped to examine the place and then looked up in surprise as thunder rumbled down the valley, whose sun-lanced air was dimming swiftly beneath clouds rolling in from the north.
When he looked again at the ground, his eyes had sharpened and he saw clearly what he stumbled against: a naked skull grinned up at him with fleshless jaws, kicked free of the mould by his foot. And aye, he now saw that there was a whole skeleton here, its outline dimly traceable beneath the pine-needles that had fallen upon it in the long years it had lain forgotten. Compelled by a dark whisper in his brain he kicked out at a patch of needles beside the skeleton, uncovering with tightened throat and hammering heart the almost-disintegrated blade of a sword. Thunder rumbled again, and rain was suddenly falling through the darkened air behind him.
He swung on his heel, turning from the skeleton to stride to his horse and ride back to his knights with an order to encamp where they stood, that he might drown his unease with wine and love-play with his concubines. But the strides carrying him from the spot were arrested before they began, and he stood staring in disbelief.
“Crom!”
His horse was gone and the valley wherein his army had marched under bright sunshine was dark and empty under pelting rain-shafts. He swung back on his heel, thinking he had heard his name spoken behind him, and his heart bounded in his chest to see a vast shape facing him beneath the pines. For a moment he thought it was the bear, resurrected to confront him again, but then he saw it had the outline of a man, with ice-bright eyes glittering in the shadow of a deep hood. Rage and love-of-life surged up within him as he finally understood the truth, and his hand flashed to the hilt of his sword.
“Nay!” he roared in Aquilonian. He wrenched the sword forth and struck at the giant hand that stretched for him, meaning to sever it at the wrist — but his voice was the whisper of an insect’s wings among the pines and his sword-blade was as insubstantial as a wisp of smoke, dissolving like his own body on the cloud-gloomed Cimmerian air.
© 2006 Simon Whitechapel