Conan Of The Isles

As day followed day across the endless waste of waters, Conan came almost to long for some desperate action to break the eternal monotony. But alas, if sea monsters there were, they gave the Red Lion a wide berth. To keep his shipload of bloody-handed rogues from getting restless with the inactivity, he kept them busy swabbing the decks, fletching new arrows to replace those expended in the brief battle with the green galley, and toiling at a multitude of other make-work tasks. As an old Hyborian saying had it, Nergal finds work for idle hands.

From time to time, the old Cimmerian found himself wondering what was happening in far-off Aquilonia. He thought of his stalwart son and wondered how the young buck liked the weight of a crown-on his pate. He thought of his old friends at court, what few of them still lived. Conan thought, too, of the palace where he had spent so many happy years with his dead wife, Zenobia. She had been a slave in Nemedia, but he had made her sole queen over the green hills and golden fields of sunny Aquilonia. While she lived, he had - save for a few lapses while traveling afar - been faithful to her, no small feat for a rough, red-blooded warrior of Cimmerian lineage.

Since she had died in childbirth, he had resumed the habits of his days as a bachelor king, by keeping a harem of shapely concubines. The acquisition of these presented no difficulty. Conan's peculiar, highly individualistic sense of honor had kept him from ever in his life compelling a woman to submit to his embraces. On the other hand, there had always been plenty who were willing and eager to encounter this fate. But he had wedded no more wives; no woman had taken Zenobia's place.

Now that she was gone, he found himself often thinking of her, in moods of black depression that were unlike him. While she lived, he had taken her devotion as his due and thought little of it, as is the way of the barbarian. Now he regretted the words he had not said to her and the favors he had not done for her.

He found himself, too, thinking of old times and old friends. Faces out of the past thronged his mind: Belit, the pantherine, languorous pirate queen of the Black Coast, his first great love ... Taurus of Nemedia, the fat old thief with whom he had sought to plunder the fabulous Tower of the Elephant... the enigmatic Stygian sorcerer, Thoth-Amon, whose trail had crossed his so often before that final, fatal confrontation ... loyal, grinning Juba, the giant black from Kush with whom he had fought the men of the lost valley of Mem in the distant East. . . Count Trocero of Poitain, the shrewd banker Publius, the gallant soldiers Prospero and Pallantides - all friends who had come to his aid when the jealousy of King Numedides of Aquilonia had driven Conan into exile, and who had rallied to him when he led a revolt against the degenerate monarch ...

Thus the faces of friends, lovers, comrades, and foes of his long past, which he would never look upon in this life, crowded upon him. The memories came back to him with increasingly poignant intensity, now that the bold, bright days of his reckless youth were long since over and gone and the Long Night was fast approaching. Well, he mused, age comes to every man if he lives long enough. And, by Crom, Conan would see one last sunset go down on a field of bloody corpses before the final hour of his life came upon him!

'Land ho!'

Sunk deep in melancholy, Conan had been leaning moodily against the rail of the poop deck, watching the morning sun climb out of the ocean through the eastern cloud banks. This cry brought him about, with the blood leaping in his veins.

'Whither away?' he thundered.

Three points off the starboard bow, Captain! ‘ replied the lookout from the foretop.

Conan clambered the shrouds to the maintop and searched the horizon ahead of the Red Lion with a fierce hawk's gaze. The West was still dark; but beneath the bands of cloud, to the right of the bow, a strip of more solid darkness lay along the horizon. Land. Pirates crowded the forecastle rail below, pointing and exclaiming as the shadowy bulk of hills loomed out of the morning mist. As Conan returned to the poop deck, Sigurd stamped up to join him.

'What is it, mate?' said the Vanr. 'The Antilles at last? By the sun disc of Shamash and the silver crescent of Demetrial! Action at last! Gold and loot for all, and hot blood for sauce, by all the gods! ‘

Conan grinned. ‘Aye. Two moons aboard this craft, with naught but sea and sky around, seems like two centuries. But the voyage is over!'

Then came a wild cry from the lookout: 'Dragon off the starboard bow! Coming toward us!'

Dragon? Conan felt a chill at the word. Then he froze, staring ahead to starboard.