Conan the Barbarian: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation E-Book

L. Sprague de Camp

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 306

Beschreibung

Two of the most famous contributors to the Conan legend write the official novel of CONAN THE BARBARIAN, the seminal fantasy film by John Milius. The official adaptation of CONAN THE BARBARIAN, the seminal film written by John Milius and Oliver Stone, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Earl Jones. In the novel by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, the Cimmerian youth Conan witnesses the death of his parents at the hands of Thulsa Doom, a priest of Set. Enslaved, he is trained as a gladiator. Gaining his freedom he allies with Subotai, a Hyrkanian archer, and a skilled swordswoman thief named Valeria. Together they raid the Tower of the Serpent, then Conan breaks away to seek the cult of Doom—and revenge on the sorcerer who leads it.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

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Copyright

Foreword

Prologue

I: The Sword

II: The Wheel

III: The Pit

IV: The Witch

V: The Priestess

VI: The Thief

VII: The Gem

VIII: The Mission

IX: The Road

X: The Mountain

XI: The Tree

XII: The Cleft

XIII: The Cavern

XIV: The Rescue

XV: The Parting

XVI: The Battle

XVII: The Avenging

About the Authors

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Conan the Barbarian: The Official Motion Picture AdaptationPrint Edition ISBN: 9781803365251E-Book Edition ISBN: 9781803365268

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UPwww.titanbooks.com

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

First Titan Edition: October 202310 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © 1982 Conan Properties International LLC (“CPI”). CONAN, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, CONAN THE CIMMERIAN, HYBORIA, THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN and related logos, characters, names, and distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks or registered trademarks of CPI.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

FOREWORD

Come with us, O readers, to a world where gleaming cities raise silver spires against the stars, sorcerers cast spells from subterranean lairs, baleful spirits stalk crumbling ruins, primeval monsters crash through jungle thickets, and the fate of kingdoms is balanced on the blades of broadswords brandished by heroes of preternatural might and valor. In this world men are mighty, women are beautiful, problems are simple, and life is adventurous, and nobody has even heard of inflation, the petroleum shortage, or atmospheric pollution!

Heroic fantasy, also called swordplay-and-sorcery fiction, traces its ancestry back to ancient epics and medieval romances. Modern heroic fantasy was invented—or, more accurately, re-invented—by William Morris in England in the 1880s. Lord Dunsany, Eric R. Eddison, and others in the United Kingdom further revitalized it, and in the United States, Robert E. Howard launched it with his stories of King Kull and Conan the Cimmerian.

Robert Ervin Howard (1906–36) was born in Peaster, Texas, and lived out his adult life in Cross Plains, a town of 1,500 at the center of the state. A shy and moody child, he became a voracious bookworm and a body-builder who enhanced his naturally powerful physique by boxing, weight-lifting, and riding. He was unconventional and hot-tempered, given to emotional extremes and violent likes and dislikes. After high school, several minor jobs, and some non-credit courses at a local college, he plunged into full-time pulp-magazine writing. By the 1930s he was making a respectable living as a prolific author of adventure, boxing, detective, fantasy, science-fiction, and Western stories.

Conan, who evolved from his earlier hero King Kull, took shape in 1932. As Howard put it, Conan “grew up in my mind… when I was stopping in a little border town on the lower Rio Grande… He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me to work recording the saga of his adventures… Some mechanism in my sub consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prize-fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I have come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian.”

Conan was not Robert Howard in a bearskin breech clout; neither was Howard a Conan in khakis and a cowboy hat. Conan was an idealization of the sort of person Howard thought he would have liked to be: an irresponsible, lawless, footloose, hell-raising, predatory adventurer, devoted to wine, women, and strife. Save for his quick temper and a chivalrous attitude toward women, Howard and Conan had virtually nothing in common. Whereas Conan is portrayed as a pure extrovert, a roughneck with few inhibitions and a rudimentary conscience, Howard was sensitive, courteous, puritanical, bookish, introverted, meticulously honest, and—though he denied it—intellectual. He was the victim of such an exaggerated devotion to his mother that, when she lay dying, he put into effect a long-held plan to die with her.

The Conan stories are laid in Howard’s imaginary Hyborian Age, 12,000 years ago between the sinking of Atlantis and the beginnings of recorded history. In that far-off time, Howard assumed, supernatural beings roamed the earth and magic worked. Eighteen Conan stories were published in Howard’s lifetime, and he left several others, ranging from complete manuscripts to mere synopses and fragments.

These stories long moldered in the crumbling files of old pulp magazines and remained the private enthusiasm of a small circle of connoisseurs. In the 1940s and '50s, they began to reach a slightly larger audience through the publication of small hardcover editions by specialty publishers.

In 1951 I discovered a cartonful of Howard’s unpublished stories in the custody of the literary agent for his estate. Later, other unpublished stories turned up. With the help of a younger colleague, Lin Carter, I edited the stories, completed the unfinished ones, and added them to the saga. Together Carter and I have written a number of additional stories, including several novels, about the invincible barbarian hero. By 1980, twenty Conan paperbacks had been published.

Conan the Barbarian is the novelization of the script of the first motion picture about the giant barbarian adventurer. It was written by myself in collaboration with Lin Carter, with additional material by Catherine Crook de Camp.

Altogether, my wife Catherine and I have been involved with Conan for thirty years. It has been my great pleasure to have her collaborate with me on this work. We hope that readers not already aware of the Conan saga will so enjoy this work that they will seek out and read the other twenty books about the barbarian hero.

L. Sprague de Camp

PROLOGUE

Know, O Prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars. And thither came Conan, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, to tread the jewelled thrones of the Earth beneath his sandaled feet. And know yet further, O Prince, that in that half-forgotten age, the proudest kingdom in the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming West. And this same Conan ruled from the throne of Aquilonia as Conan the Great, the mightiest lord of his day. And many were the tales spun about him as he was in his youth, wherefore it is now difficult to perceive the truth amid the many legends.

THE NEMEDIAN CHRONICLES

I

THE SWORD

Privileged was I, Kallias of Shamar, above all my brethren amongst the scribes of Aquilonia, to have heard from the lips of my king, Conan the Great, the story of his travails and the high adventures that befell him along the way to the summit of his greatness. Here is the tale as he told it to me in the later days of his reign, when age had laid its fell hand upon him, albeit lightly.

On a rocky ridge swept clear of snow, a man and a boy braced themselves against the fury of the storm. All about them, like a demon, the night wind howled. Lightning rent the tortured sky, smiting rocks asunder and lashing the shuddering earth with a whip of fire. The man, burly and bearded like a troll, appeared in the fitful light to be of gigantic stature as he stood, legs apart, his massive frame wrapped in furs against the bite of the wind. The boy, likewise shielded from the cold, was perhaps nine years old.

Flinging back his cloak to float like a flag against the nighted sky, the man drew from its scabbard an enormous two-handed sword, the weapon of a god. As he chanted an ancient rune spell, compounded of strange words and an unearthly rhythm, he thrust the blade upward into the heart of the tempest. With mighty legs outspread against the buffetings of the wind, he brandished the splendid sword aloft, while the lowering clouds churned about him, as if the brand had pierced and wounded the very firmament.

“Harken, Conan!” shouted the man above the roar of the storm. “Fire and wind are born in the womb of the heavens, the children of the sky gods. And the mightiest of the gods is Father Crom, who ruleth earth and heaven and the broad and restless sea. Many secrets there be, whereof Crom is master; but the greatest of these is the secret of steel, a secret which the gods taught not to men but jealously guarded in their inmost hearts.”

The boy stared up into the huge man’s face, as stern in the inconstant light as the granite outcrop on which they stood. The man took the measure of his words, while the shrieking wind tore at his beard as if to silence him.

“Once,” the deep voice began again, “giants dwelt within the earth. Mayhap they dwell there still. Crafty and wise were they, the fashioners of stone and wood, the miners of gems and gold; and in the darkness of chaos, they be-fooled even Crom, the Father of Gods. By their wiles they stole from him the most precious possession of the immortals: the secret of the silvery metal that, when bent, springs into shape again.

“Greatly was Crom enraged. The earth trembled, and the mountains opened. With blasts of wind and bolts of fire, Crom smote the earth giants; and they fell down; and the earth swallowed them forever. Closing its rocky lips, the earth gulped them down into the bowels of the world, the unknown place where dark things creep and crawl, the place whereof man knoweth naught.”

The man’s eyes blazed like blue flames amid smouldering coals; and his thick black hair, caught by a fierce gust, spread out like the wings of an eagle. Young Conan shuddered.

“The battle won,” the man went on, “the gods departed for their celestial realm; but, wrathful still, they overlooked the secret of the beaten metal and left it upon the battlefield. There the first men found it, the Atlanteans of legend, our ancestors before the dawn of history.”

Conan began to speak; but the man lifted a warning hand. “We, who are men, now hold the secret of steel. But we are not gods; neither are we giants. We are but mortals, weak and foolish; and our days are numbered. Be wary of steel, my son, and hold it in respect; for it carries within it a mystery and a power.”

“I do not understand, Father,” faltered the boy.

The man shook his black mane. “You will in time, Conan. Before a man is worthy to bear a sword of steel in battle—a weapon such as the gods once bore against the giants—he must learn its riddle. He must understand the ways of steel. Know that in all the world you can trust no one, neither man nor woman nor beast, neither spirit nor demon nor god. But you can trust a blade of well-forged steel.”

The man cupped his son’s small hands within his own and, curling the boy’s fingers about the hilt of the great sword, said; “The heart of a man is like a piece of unworked iron. It must be hammered by adversity and forged by suffering and the challenges flung by the thoughtless gods, nigh unto the point of breaking. It must be purged and hardened in the fires of conflict. It must be purified and shaped on the anvil of despair and loss.

“Only when your heart has become as steel will you be worthy to wield a keen-edged sword in battle and win against your enemies, as did the gods when they conquered the dark giants. When you have mastered the mysteries of steel, my son, your sword will be your very soul.”

* * *

All his life, Conan remembered those words, spoken by his sire on that lightning-riddled night. In time he began to comprehend the cryptic phrases, to understand the message that his father had striven to impart: out of suffering is born strength; only through pain and deprivation does a human heart become as strong as steel. But many and long were the years that passed before this wisdom became fully his.

* * *

Conan likewise remembered another night, a fortnight earlier, when the moon was an opalescent disk hung in the clear black sky like a silver skull on a sable shroud. The snow glistened in the eerie light, and a chill wind moaned through the snow-tipped pines as he walked through the sleeping village, down the rough road that led to his father’s smithy. There a fire blazed red, beating back the darkness. The firelight splashed with shifting hues of gold and crimson the smith’s leathern apron and cinder-scorched trousers. It gleamed on his sweat-beaded brow and flickered across the face of the boy, who watched, open-mouthed, from the doorway.

Tirelessly, the smith drove the bellows. Then, grasping a pair of long-handled tongs, he drew forth from the heart of the furnace a dazzling length of white-hot iron, flattened and glowing. As he placed it on the anvil and began to hammer it into shape, each ringing blow sprayed a shower of sparks into the ruddy gloom of the forge.

When the cooling core of iron had turned from white to yellow to dusty red, the smith replaced it in the furnace and resumed his pushing on the bellows. At last he glanced toward the door and saw the boy. His stern gaze gentled.

“What are you doing here, son? It’s time you were abed.”

“You told me I could watch you turn the iron into steel, Father.”

“Aye, so I did. With luck, the forging will be done tonight. The folk hereabouts think Corin the smith something of a warlock, turning iron into steel; and I would not disappoint them.”

In truth, the smith was something of a godling to his neighbours; he had come out of the south lands, bearing within his breast an arcane art—the secret of steel—that precious inheritance from the ancient Atlanteans, believed lost and forgotten by all who lived in this darkling age.

As the boy approached, the smith again withdrew the iron from the furnace. “Stand back, Conan; for the sparks fly high. I would not see you harmed.”

The anvil rang like a bronzen bell, giant-smitten. Fountains of sparks rose and fell before the toiling smith. Slowly the glowing length of iron assumed the shape of a mighty sword blade. Raising the metal in the tongs, he squinted along the edge, detected a curvature, and pounded it out with a few deft strokes.

After a final heating and inspection, Corin thrust the glowing brand into a vat of water, to temper the malleable metal before its final transformation into steel. The core hissed like a serpent, and a cloud of steam swirled up to invest the smith—for a moment only—in the diaphane garments of a god.

“Fetch me yonder bucket of charcoal,” said Corin to his awe-struck son. “To make steel strong yet flexible, the blade must now be baked at a constant temperature, as in a charcoal bed. This is the secret possessed of the folk of Atlantis; this is the knowledge I brought hither from the south when I fled my former clan. See, thus I let the fire cool…”

* * *

As the blade lay for days buried beneath a blanket of hot coals, Conan watched his father toil over the remaining tasks. The cross-guard he fashioned with cunning into the form of a stag’s antlers. The two-handed grip he wrapped with string made from the gut of forest tigers. The pommel itself, of steel weighted to crush the skulls of foes, he cast in the likeness of the hooves of elk.

When at last the weapon was assembled, it was a thing of bright enchantments, of memorable beauty. The polished blade flashed like a mirror, reflecting sunshine and thunderclouds, as if the very fabric of the metal were somehow imbued with the spirits of the air.

“Is it done at last, Father?” asked the boy one evening.

“All but one thing,” rumbled the smith. “Come, and you shall see.”

In after years, Conan remembered how rolling thunder-heads blotted out the stars as his father led him from the village of log dwellings into the upper reaches of the snow-clad mountain. As they clambered upward, the wind rose, biting the furs that sheltered them. They traversed white-lipped crevices, rough, flinty slopes, and bald outcrops where scarcely a toehold could be found. Thunder rumbled as they reached the summit. Then the storm broke.

Thus, in the fury of the elements, was the mystic rite performed to render the sword invincible.

* * *

Even upon the heels of that wild night of storm and incantation, Conan came to learn his first lesson in suffering. Cruel that lesson was, and far too early for so young a child. But the north lands are bleak; life therein is harsh; and the hand of every stranger is lifted in enmity against his fellows.

Night shambled off before the silent footfalls of a frozen dawn. The waning moon, disconsolate, draped her face in a drifting veil of clouds. Only a tired wind stirred the silence as it whispered through the branches of the leafless trees.

Suddenly, the quiet was fractured by the clamour of horsemen who crashed through the bushes. Their horses, shod in iron, shattered the thin ice of the stream that paralleled the village. Dark and grim, wearing leather armour scaled with iron, and holding axes, spears, and swords in their gloved hands, the raiders swept down upon the hamlet.

Men and women, startled from their slumbers, awoke to find the rutted road between their huts blocked by mounted strangers. Confused and disorganized, the villagers emerged from their homes, clutching their coarse woollens about them and shouting at the invaders. One woman shrieked as she snatched a toddler from beneath a horse’s prancing hooves. With a roar of triumph, the rider leaned from his saddle to thrust his lance between the shoulders of the fleeing mother. She staggered as the spearhead burst into view between her breasts; then, limp as a rag doll, she was borne along, until the soldier, with an oath, tore the shaft loose from her mangled flesh.

“The Vanir!” roared Corin the smith as, swinging his blacksmith’s hammer, he plunged from the mouth of his hut.

Standing on his doorstep, the boy Conan stared in bewilderment, searching for order in the chaos all about him. But there was no order. A young girl darted past him, white with terror. Behind her sped a lean black hound, its jaws agape, its red tongue flapping. An instant later, the beast had pulled her down and worried her throat to crimson ribbons. Before Conan’s unbelieving eyes, one of her hands flopped like a beached fish on the mud-spattered snow.

A naked Cimmerian hunter, armed with a huge axe, sprang howling into the turmoil and swung his weapon like a wheel of death. It caught one raider on the thigh, hewing his leg away. Shrieking, the Van fell from his saddle, his blood spurting a scarlet arc across the snow. Above the clatter of hooves, the clank of iron, and the war cries of the Vanir, Conan heard the shrill wails of women and the screams of the maimed and dying.

Conan’s father pushed past his son, vanished into his hut, and reappeared with the great sword. The ensorcelled blade, which glittered like frozen lightning against the morning sky, swept all before it. Van after Van fell from his mount with entrails spilling out across the trampled, muddy snow.

Shaking off the paralysis of fear, Conan snatched up a fallen knife and dove into the fray, determined to stand beside his sire. Although the press of struggling men was too thick for the boy to hack through, his blade hamstrung one towering dark warrior, who stumbled into the path of the blacksmith’s sweeping sword. The invader’s head, sheared cleanly off, spun through the air like a well-tossed ball, to plop into the mud at Conan’s feet. The boy leaped back, nape-hairs astir, eyes almost starting from their sockets.

Now other Cimmerians ran to make a stand with Corin the smith. But the invaders were mounted and well armed, with breasts sheathed in bronze and iron, while the villagers were half-naked, and bore only the simple implements they had been able to snatch up. Some carried hoes and rakes; others had retrieved their weapons. A few were armed with shields of boiled hides stretched on wooden frames; but these afforded indifferent protection against the pounding weight of Vanir iron.

Unable to reach his father, Conan sought out his mother; but in the turmoil and cacophony of the battle, he could not find her. He ran and ducked and dodged as men and horses thundered past. On every side he beheld scenes of mayhem and slaughter. A freshly severed arm lay in the snow, trickling blood, while its fingers still gripped the shaft of a spear. A woman, bearing her babe to safety, hurried by. She stumbled and fell in the slippery mud. A heartbeat later, a hoof crushed her skull, and her puling infant fell into a bank of blood-stained snow.

An old man was arrested in mid-cry, as a bronze-tipped arrow transfixed his tongue. Another crouched in a pool of icy mud, pawing at his face. Conan realized dimly that one eyeball hung by a strand of tissue and that the man, crazed by pain, was trying to restore the eye to its proper resting place.

Over the crash and clamour, Conan heard his father’s uplifted voice: “The horses! Kill the horses!” So saying, the smith brought down a war horse, which screamed like a stallion beneath the gelding iron as his sword sheared through its spine.

Conan at last spied the lithe figure of his mother, standing barefoot in the snow. There was a majesty about her as she faced the enemy, her face flushed with fury, her hair cascading over her shoulders, and her hands clenched about the handle of a broadsword. Heaped before her lay the bloody remains of several Vanir and their merciless dogs. As the boy hurtled toward her, she glanced at her son’s tousled mane of coarse black hair, so like his father’s, and grasped her weapon with renewed determination.

Looking up, Conan glimpsed a gigantic figure bestriding a sable stallion, like a statue, dark and motionless. Horse and rider loomed above the brow of a hillock at the edge of the village and stared down upon the scene of carnage. The child could not discern the features of the giant form, but his frantic eye was arrested by the emblem that the horseman bore upon his armoured breast and iron-bound shield.

It was a strange device: two black serpents face to face, their tails so interwoven that they might be one, and between them, supported by their coils, the disk of a black sun. The symbol, unfamiliar as it was, filled Conan’s heart with fear and foreboding.

* * *

Not far away, most of the men and youths who had survived the charge and its resultant slaughter had formed a living shield about their smith. Towering above even the tallest of the other Cimmerians, Corin cried out his martial encouragements, as metal belled against metal and masked the screams of the dying. The Vanir fell back; their horses, wild-eyed, wheeled and danced before the rude weapons of the defenders.

As caution stayed the raiders, from the swelling ground, the mailed figure raised one gloved hand in a gesture of command. Dawn fire flashed from his iron helmet, which, concealing his features, lent him an aura of terrible power.

“They’ll bring up their archers,” whispered Conan’s mother. “They’ll cut our menfolk down as they stand beyond the range of our Cimmerian steel.”

“Crom help us!” murmured the boy.

Conan’s mother gave him an icy glance. “Crom does not heed the prayers of men. He scarcely hears them. Crom is a god of frosts and stars and storms, not of humankind.”

Soon were the words of Maeve, the blacksmith’s wife, proven true. A hail of arrows whistled through the dawn, to thud against the wooden huts, to glance from shields, and to sink, feather-deep, into naked flesh. Again and again the deathly rain of Vanir arrows swept the cluster of defenders, until the shield-wall sagged and crumbled.

At last the gigantic figure upon the hillock spoke, his deep, unearthly voice tolling like an iron bell. “Loose the hounds!”

Snarling and snapping, the red-tongued dogs panted down the slope, their flying forms silhouetted against the vermilion dawn. One Cimmerian fell, gurgling, with a hound at his throat. Another speared one beast in mid-leap. A third yelled hoarsely as wolf-sharp fangs closed on the muscles of his upper arm. And the wall of shields came apart, as men turned to strike with notched and blunted swords at the vicious animals.

“Archers!” boomed the dark giant. “Let fly another round!”

A hissing hail of death fell on the surviving few. Bodies writhed in the trampled snow, as their fellow villagers staggered back, their hide shields pierced by the flying shafts. For a moment Conan saw his father standing alone, his shield bristling with arrows. Then a shaft caught the blacksmith in the leg, piercing the muscle of his upper thigh. The injured limb gave way beneath him. With a choked curse, he fell and lay on his back in the frozen slush. One hand crawled across the ice, inching toward the hilt of the great steel sword. An arrow pinned his hand to the ground. Then the dogs were at him.

It was soon over.

II

THE WHEEL

Now horsemen crested the rise and thundered down among the huts, their merciless swords cutting down all who resisted. Lighted torches wheeled through the icy air to thud upon the rush roofs of the defenceless houses and set them ablaze. Thus were flushed out into the open all who had taken refuge within their homes.

Whooping riders pounded along the rutted lane, spearing the young, the old, and the wounded. Maeve impaled one leering fellow who bent from his galloping horse to seize her. She smiled thinly as his torn body toppled from the saddle to lie sprawling in the mud. A sweep of the Cimmerian woman’s sword hamstrung another animal. As the beast fell kicking, Conan sprang upon the rider, writhing in agony beneath his steed, and sliced open his throat.

But the defenders were outnumbered. Their ranks thinned rapidly. Abruptly, their resistance ended. Dazed and dejected, all the survivors threw their weapons at the booted feet of their conquerors—all, that is, but Maeve, wife of Corin and mother of Conan. Eyes ablaze in a face drained of colour, she leaned on the pommel of her broadsword, stunned and struggling for breath, while her son stood beside her, his small knife held at the ready.

At last the mounted giant on the knoll moved. As spurs struck its glossy black flanks, the quivering stallion sprang into motion. With a measured control more terrible to witness than the careless speed of fury, the commander of the marauders picked his way down the slope and along the ruts of trampled snow stained with the blood of the dead or dying. Although his features were masked by his homed iron helm, to those who watched, he stood against the morning sky, a veritable demon-king borne on a steed that seemed no earthly horse at all but a creature from the very depths of Hell.

When the grim apparition passed them, the Vanir raiders bowed and gave voice to an orchestrated chant: “Hail to Commander Rexor! Hail to Rexor! And to Doom… Doom… ThulsaDoom….”

Their leader turned off the road and, for a moment, vanished from sight behind the soot-blackened wall of a burned-out hut. As if a cloud had lifted, the Vanir brightened and drifted nearer to the lone woman who, with her man-child, stood defiant still.

Jeering with coarse ribaldry and obscene suggestions, two of the raiders reached playful spears toward the breast of the half-naked woman. Maeve batted aside one weapon with the flat of her sword, and the Van dodged backwards, laughing. But his comrade was less fortunate. Swinging her long blade above her head, Maeve caught her tormentor across the back of his hand and inflicted a deep cut. As the man leaped aside, his spear fell from a hand that hung as limp as a dead thing. Cursing and baring his teeth in a snarl, he reached for his sword with his uninjured hand.

Just then the fur-cloaked figure of the commander, grim as death, emerged from the shadow of the hut. Not a word was spoken, but the wounded man wilted and withdrew. In response to a signal, another soldier sprang forward to grasp the bridle of the warhorse, while his master swung to the ground. With an imperious gesture, Rexor pointed back along the rutted roadway on which lay the smith, his inert hand a finger’s length away from the weapon that was his final masterpiece.

Eager to do the huge man’s bidding, another foot soldier sped between the two rows of smouldering huts, to the place where Corin the smith had made his stand. Lifting the blade, which no man could have wrested from Corin’s living grasp, he hastened to bring it to his leader. Maeve watched the man’s approach through slitted ice-blue eyes. Conan stared in fearful fascination; for it was borne in upon him with hideous certainty that his father lived no more.

When Rexor received the weapon, he raised it to study its splendid craftsmanship in the sun’s slanting rays. As the metal, uplifted, shimmered in the brighter light, Conan in vain fought back the sobs that choked him. His mother touched his shoulder. A soldier laughed.

A shudder suddenly erased the grins from the faces of those still ringed around the embattled pair. Conan looked up, as high against the rising sun a standard, set upon an ebon pole, came slowly into view. Suspended from a wooden frame adorned with the horns of beasts, the rich fabric of the standard hung immobile in the still air. Embroidered on the cloth, the boy saw once more the symbol that long would haunt his dreams—the ominous, emblazoned symbol of writhing serpents upholding the orb of a sable sun.

A grisly fringe of scalps dangled from the frame, and gaunt skulls grinned mockingly from the spikes that adorned the upper reaches of the structure. Even Rexor bowed his head as that hideous standard entrapped the eastern light and was incarnadined thereby. Conan recoiled when he saw the bearer of the banner, a deformed thing, more beast than man, despite his iron helm and armoured leathern garments. The pride with which he raised aloft his fear-inspiring device declared his lack of all humanity.

Behind this misshapen offspring of the devil rode a magnificent figure, resplendent in armour of overlapping leaves, gleaming like the scales of a serpent in the opalescent light. A bejewelled helmet clung to his head and covered his nose and cheekbones, so that only his eyes, flaming with unholy fires, were visible.

The steed he rode was very like its master: lean, graceful, and aglitter with jewelled trappings. Its eyes, too, burned with the light of living coals. On such a steed, thought Conan, might devils from the nether parts of Hell come howling up to ravage the green hills of earth.

As the great beast paced the bloodstained snow, under the gloved guidance of its rider, all the Vanir bowed low, repeating one word like an incantation: “Doom… Doom… Doom!”

* * *

The giant Rexor leaped forward to hold the hell-steed’s bridle as his master dismounted. The two exchanged but a word or two, then turned to scrutinize the Cimmerian woman, who stood, tense and level-eyed, grasping her broadsword. As Maeve returned their gaze and sensed the menace in it, like a mother panther prepared to defend her cub, she raised her weapon and moved one foot into position for a strike.

The man in the jewelled helmet, still studying her with cool appraisal, drew off his glove and reached out one lean hand to accept from his lieutenant the sword of Corin the smith. Rexor bowed as he handed the weapon to his master.

“Doom… Doom… Doom!” intoned the Vanir once again; and as he listened, Conan perceived that this was no mere word of welcome that the raiders chanted. It was a portentous name—a name to conjure with, a name to fear.

Doom, a lithe figure in his serpentine mail, sauntered up to the embattled Cimmerians, mother and son. As he approached, his slitted eyes studied the sheer perfection of the weapon in his hands. Focusing his entire attention on the fine blade, or so it seemed, he turned it this way and that, admiring its razor edge, its flawless balance, its exquisite workmanship. Mirror-bright, the steel flashed in the low sun’s rays and immersed the waiting boy in a scintillating river of light.

As the ring of armed men parted, Maeve drew up her splendid body, raised her broadsword, and set her jaw. A swift intake of breath between parted lips served as a warning of her intention.

Suddenly Doom appeared to notice her. He doffed his jewelled helm, revealing a lean-jawed, darkly handsome face. A small smile flickered across his thin lips, and something akin to admiration flashed red in his coal-black eyes. The woman stood as if transfixed, fascinated yet repelled by his commanding presence and the overpowering aura of male sexuality that radiated from his person.

“Doom… Doom… Doom!” shouted the motionless Vanir warriors in unison.

For a long moment, Doom stared into the wide eyes of Conan’s mother. Her finely sculpted breasts, kissed by the roseate light, rose and fell with rapid breathing. Then, careless of the woman’s upraised sword, he strolled past her, moving well within the range of her steel, but ignoring it, as if peril did not exist for such as he. The grace and bearing of his supple body, as he walked past the Cimmerian woman, was sensual, inviting, and vibrant with virility; but Maeve neither moved nor spoke. She remained utterly immobile, seemingly enthralled, as a partridge is fabled to be by the enticements of a serpent’s gaze.

Once past her, with a gesture so casual as to look effortless, Doom swept the great sword upward with incredible skill and strength. The ugly sound the blade made as it struck rang loudly in the chill silence.

Without a cry, or even a gasp, Maeve fell, as a tree falls before the axe of the forester. Dazed with horror, the boy Conan stared in disbelief as his mother’s severed head rolled in the mire at his feet. Her pale face displayed neither fear nor shock nor pain: only a dreamy-eyed look of fascination.

Then as the boy, hate-filled, whipped about and aimed his knife at the broad back of Doom, the Vanir were upon him, dragging him into a snowdrift, and wresting his knife from his grasp.

* * *

As the day faded, a weary column of captives, chained one to another, trudged across an endless expanse of pristine snow, shadowed by pines. The bedraggled line, a sad remnant of what had been a close-knit Cimmerian clan, were the sole survivors of the dawn raid on their village. Old men, women, and children, the ill-clad and the injured, slipped and slid their way over the ice-coated snows and rocky outcrops into slavery.