Conan the Barbarian Read Free Page A

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... Tulsa Doom....”
    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,