‘But look! There is method in his madness! He swings wide of the Nemedian front, with five thousand knights, the pick of the army. The main host of the Nemedians is in confusion and look! Their flank is protected by the cliffs, but there is a defile left unguarded! It is like a great cleft in the wall that opens again behind the Nemedian lines. By Mitra, Valannus sees and seizes the opportunity! He has driven their wing before him, and he leads his knights toward that defile. They swing wide of the main battle; they cut through a line of spearmen, they charge into the defile!’
‘An ambush!’ cried Conan, striving to struggle upright.
‘No!’ shouted the squire exultantly. ‘The whole Nemedian host is in full sight! They have forgotten the defile! They never expected to be pushed back that far. Oh, fool, fool, Tarascus, to make such a blunder! Ah, I see lances and pennons pouring from the farther mouth of the defile, beyond the Neinedian lines. They will smite those ranks from the rear and crumple them. Mitra, what is this?’
He staggered as the walls of the tent swayed drunkenly. Afar over the thunder of the fight rose a deep bellowing roar, indescribably ominous.
‘The cliffs reel!’ shrieked the squire. ‘Ah, gods, what is this? The river foams out of its channel, and the peaks are crumbling!
The ground shakes and horses and riders in armor are overthrown! The cliffs! The cliffs are falling!’
With his words there came a grinding rumble and a thunderous concussion, and the ground trembled. Over the roar of the battle sounded screams of mad terror.
‘The cliffs have crumbled!’ cried the livid squire. ‘They have thundered down into the defile and crushed every living creature in it! I saw the lion banner wave an instant amid the dust and falling stones, and then it vanished! Ha, the Nemedians shout with triumph! Well may they shout, for the fall of the cliffs has wiped out five thousand of our bravest knights – Hark!’
To Conan’s ears came a vast torrent of sound, rising and rising in frenzy: ‘The king is dead! The king is dead! Flee! Flee! The king is dead!’
‘Liars!’ panted Conan. ‘Dogs! Knaves! Cowards! Oh, Crom, if I could but stand – but crawl to the river with my sword in my teeth! How, boy, do they flee?’
‘Aye!’ sobbed the squire. ‘They spur for the river; they are broken, hurled on like spume before a storm. I see Pallantides striving to stem the torrent – he is down, and the horses trample him! They rush into the river, knights, bowmen, pikemen, all mixed and mingled in one mad torrent of destruction. The Nemedians are on their heels, cutting them down like corn.’
‘But they will make a stand on this side of the river!’ cried the king. With an effort that brought the sweat dripping from his temples, he heaved himself up on his elbows.
‘Nay!’ cried the squire. ‘They cannot! They are broken! Routed! Oh gods, that I should live to see this day!’
Then he remembered his duty and shouted to the men-at-arms who stood stolidly watching the flight of their comrades. ‘Get a horse, swiftly, and help me lift the king upon it. We dare not bide here.’
But before they could do his bidding, the first drift of the storm was upon them. Knights and spearmen and archers fled among the tents, stumbling over ropes and baggage, and mingled with then were Nemedian riders, who smote right and left at all alien figures. Tent-ropes were cut, lire sprang up in a hundred places, and the plundering had already begun. The grim guardsmen about Conan’s tent died where they stood, smiting and thrusting, and over their mangled corpses beat the hoofs of the conquerors.
But the squire had drawn the flap close, and in the confused madness of the slaughter none realized that the pavilion held an occupant. So the flight and the pursuit swept past, and roared away up the valley, and the squire looked out presently to see a cluster of men approaching the royal tent with evident purpose.
‘Here comes the king of Nemedia with four companions and his squire,’ quoth he. ‘He will accept your surrender, my fair lord-‘
‘Surrender the devil’s heart!’ gritted the king.
He had forced himself up to a sitting posture. He swung his legs painfully off the dais, and staggered upright, reeling drunkenly. The squire ran to assist him, but Conan pushed him away.
‘Give me that bow!’ he gritted, indicating a longbow and quiver that hung from a tentpole.
‘But Your Majesty!’ cried the squire in great perturbation. ‘The battle is lost! It were the part of majesty to yield with the dignity becoming one of royal blood!’
‘I have no royal blood,’ ground Conan. ‘I am a barbarian and the son of a blacksmith.’
Wrenching away the bow and an arrow he staggered toward the opening of the pavilion. So formidable was his appearance, naked but for short leather breeks and sleeveless shirt, open to reveal his great, hairy chest, with his huge limbs and his blue eyes blazing under his tangled black mane, that the squire shrank back, more afraid of his king than of the whole Nemedian host.
Reeling on wide-braced legs Conan drunkenly tore the doorflap open and staggered out under the canopy. The king of Nemedia and his companions had dismounted, and they halted short, staring in wonder at the apparition confronting them.
‘Here I am, you jackals!’ roared the Cimmerian. ‘I am the king! Death to you, dog-brothers!’
He jerked the arrow to its head and loosed, and the shaft feathered itself in the breast of the knight who stood beside Tarascus. Conan hurled the bow at the king of Nemedia.
‘Curse my shaky hand! Come in and take me if you dare!’
Reeling backward on unsteady legs, he fell with his shoulders against a tentpole, and propped upright, he lifted his great sword with both hands.
‘By Mitra, it is the king!’ swore Tarascus. He cast a swift look about him, and laughed. ‘That other was a jackal in his harness! In, dogs, and take his head!’
The three soldiers – men-at-arms wearing the emblem of the royal guards – rushed at the king, and one felled the squire with a blow of a mace. The other two fared less well. As the first rushed in, lifting his sword, Conan met him with a sweeping stroke that severed mail-links like cloth, and sheared the Nemedian’s arm and shoulder clean from his body. His corpse, pitching backward, fell across his companion’s legs. The man stumbled, and before he could recover, the great sword was through him.
Conan wrenched out his steel with a racking gasp, and staggered back against the tentpole. His great limbs trembled, his chest heaved, and sweat poured down his face and neck. But his eyes flamed with exultant savagery and he panted: ‘Why do you stand afar off, dog of Belverus? I can’t reach you; come in and die!’
Tarascus hesitated, glanced at the remaining man-at-arms, and his squire, a gaunt, saturnine man in black mail, and took a step forward. He was far inferior in size and strength to the giant Cimmerian, but he was in full armor, and was famed in all the western nations as a swordsman. But his squire caught his arm.
‘Nay, Your Majesty, do not throw away your life. I will summon archers to shoot this barbarian, as we shoot lions.’
Neither of them had noticed that a chariot had approached while the fight was going on, and now came to a halt before them. But Conan saw, looking over their shoulders, and a queer chill sensation crawled along his spine. There was something vaguely unnatural about the appearance of the black horses that drew the vehicle, but it was the occupant of the chariot that arrested the king’s attention.
He was a tall man, superbly built, clad in a long unadorned silk robe. He wore a Shemitish headdress, and its lower folds hid his features, except for the dark, magnetic eyes. The hands that grasped the reins, pulling the rearing horses back on their haunches, were white but strong. Conan glared at the stranger, all his primitive instincts roused. Ile sensed an aura of menace and power that exuded from this veiled figure, a menace as definite as the windless waving of tall grass that marks the path of the serpent.
‘Hail, Xaltotun!’ exclaimed Tarascus. ‘Here is the king of Aquilonia! He did not die in the landslide as we thought.’
‘I know,’ answered the other, without bothering to say how he knew. ‘What is your present intention?’
‘I will summon the archers to slay him,’ answered the Nemedian. ‘As long as he lives he will be dangerous to us.’
‘Yet even a dog has uses,’ answered Xaltotun. ‘Take him alive.’
Conan laughed raspingly. ‘Come in and try!’ he challenged. ‘But for my treacherous legs I’d hew you out of that chariot like a woodman hewing a tree. But you’ll never take me alive, damn you!’