L. Camp - Conan Of The Isles

His eyes searched the faces of his crew. They were battered and bloody, and a couple bore bad wounds. But nearly all of them seemed to be present and alive, even if prisoners in the hands of the Antillians.

A pang went through the old freebooter's heart. Anxiously he searched the faces of his men again – but where was Conan? The familiar scarred, frowning face under the iron-gray mane was not to be seen.

Sigurd's heart sank as a doleful expression clouded his ruddy features. He well knew the iron courage of the old Cimmerian; few men during Conan's long life, could boast of having taken him alive. Fiercely attached to his freedom, the old gray wolf might well have preferred to go down fighting rather than to be taken prisoner by these doll-like little brown men. And, if Conan were indeed among the slain, then upon Sigurd's bowed head devolved the awesome responsibility of command.

'Courage, my hearties!' he rumbled. 'Belike we be free men no more, but we still live. And whilst we draw breath, sink me for a lubber, but there's always a chance of fighting our way to freedom!'

Goram Singh probed him with large, somber black eyes. 'Where is the lord Amra, O Sigurd? Why is he not amongst us?' the Vendhyan demanded.

Sigurd slowly wagged his graying red beard. 'By Shai-tan's tail and the star of Ningal, comrade, I know not. Mayhap he is in another part of this cursed galley ...'

The Vendhyan silently nodded, but he bowed his tur-baned head and avoided Sigurd's eye. He knew as well as the Vanr that Conan would probably not have been chained apart from the rest. More likely, the mighty Cimmerian had gone down to the cold halls of the restless dead with an Antillian glass sword in his vitals.

The voyage to the harbor of Ptahuacan took them nearly an hour, what with the extra weight of half a hundred burly pirates in the hold. Sigurd blinked in the sunlight as they were led out of the gold-sheathed dragonship in heavy glass chains. Curiously, he peered at the vista of the ancient city of weathered stone and gaudily painted stucco, rising tier upon tier up the slope of the mountain. Never in all his days had Sigurd of Vanaheim seen so strange a metropolis, whose every building was covered with sculptured friezes of monster-headed gods and animal-headed men, with monolithic gateways of solid stone and strange pylons climbing into the bright morning sky. Over all, the cryptic and ominous shadow of the vast, black-and-crimson pyramid shed a pall of gloom. Rising from the temple on its top, a perpetual plume of smoke streamed from the structure as from a man-made volcano.

The pirates, however, caught only a brief glimpse of the ancient Atlantean city. Their guards led them briskly through the city streets, up the stupendous ramps from tier to tier, and through the bronze gates of the gray citadel adjoining the square of the great pyramid. When those mighty gates clanged to behind their backs, the pirates saw their last of open air and blue skies for many a long day.

Guards herded them down endless stone stairs, which coiled deeply into the bowels of the mountain on .whose side Ptahuacan was built. When their knees, aching from the interminable descent, seemed ready to collapse under them, they came at length into a tremendous chamber cut from the solid stone. Here their shackles were unlocked while they stood, guarded by alert wardens with leveled., glass-headed pikes.

Next, their ankles were secured to a long chain of glass, which ran through looped rings set into the stone wall. Although they had a little slack - enough to move about and lie down - for practical purposes they were confined to an area extending a few feet from the wall.

Then the guards filed out, and the captives were left in solitude.

In this huge room, vast stone columns, like the trunks of gigantic trees, rose to support the roof. They seemed to be part of the natural rock and to have been left standing when the rest of the chamber was excavated, to provide support for the roof.

Far above their heads, plates of shiny metal were set in the ceiling. By some forgotten Atlantean science or wizardry, these plates glowed with a soft, ruddy light, shedding a wan illumination upon the chamber beneath. Sigurd wondered for an instant whether these plates were made of the rumored Atlantean metal, orichalcum, but he had too many other things of more urgency to spend much time with this surmise.

Once a day the captives were fed. Buckets of greasy, tepid stew were dumped into a long, foul, stone trough that ran along the wall behind them. The stuff was lumpy with cold grease and stretched out with some unpalatable meal. But hunger soon overcomes squeamishness, and Conan's crew came eagerly to await the feeding hour. It took all of Sigurd's authority to keep them from fighting over this unappetizing swill.

Immured in this dank place, far from a sight of the heavenly bodies^ the pirates lost all sense of time. Had they been here hours or days? They argued endlessly among themselves over this question, until Sigurd roared: 'Shut up, all of you! Ye'll drive me mad with your clack. We can be pretty sure they feed us at the same time every day, so each feeding marks one day. Yasunga, ye shall be our timekeeper. Find a place on the wall and make a scratch there for each serving of this slop.'

'But Sigurd,' complained a small Ophirean, 'we know not how many days have passed up to now. Some say four, some five, some six or seven. How shall we know-—'

He broke off as the Vanr, shaking huge fists in his face until his chains rattled, roared: 'Shut up, Ahriman blast you, or I'll wind a chain around your scrawny neck and tighten it until your lousy little head comes off! Every man can add his own guess to the number of days shown on Yasunga's tally, and it matters not a dam anyway!

And the next man who raises this question, I'll smash his skull like an egg!'

‘Ah, eggs!' said Artanes the Zamorian, a stout-bellied bull of a man renowned among the pirates for his appetite. 'What I could do with a couple of dozen fresh fowl's eggs...'

They grew matted with filth. Their untended wounds: either festered or scabbed and began to heal. Two died: a burly Shemite, who had taken a cracked skull in the battle, died screaming and fighting invisible foes. The other was a stolid black from the steaming jungles of southern Rush, whose tongue had been cut out by Stygian slavers before he had escaped to the Baracha Isles, and who perished from a fever. Both bodies were taken away by glass-mailed Antillian guards for some unknown disposal.

With the help of Yasunga the navigator, Milo the boatswain, and Yakov the bowmaster, Sigurd did his best to keep his men in order and their spirits up. This was not easy, for they were a motley lot, given to irrational grudges and hatreds, outbursts of violent passion, superstitious fears and crotchets, and sudden fits of gloom, despair, or quarrelsomeness. And Sigurd, while a mighty man whose name commanded respect among the Red Brotherhood, lacked the aura of invincible luck and supernatural power that accompanied Amra the Lion.

The best way to keep them interested and out of mischief, the Northman found, was to encourage them to talk about their exploits of the past. So they reminisced for hours, arguing point by point through battles, sieges, and forays in which they had taken part.

Again and again they recalled the deeds of Conan - or Amra the Lion, as most of them knew him. They told and retold how, at the sleek side of Belit, his first great love, he had plundered the Black Coast and ventured deeply into the unknown jungle rivers of the South, where the she-pirate had come to a grisly doom in a ruined city of stone. They told how, a decade later, he had reappeared out of nowhere to sail with the Barachan pirates, and how still later he had cut a swath as captain of a ship of Zingaran buccaneers. Again and again they recalled the fantastic career of their chief, the hero of a thousand perils and the victor of a thousand fights, from single duels to earthshaking battles.