Beyond the Black River
Copyright© 2016 by Robert E. Howard
Chapter 8: Conajohara No More
There had been fighting on Thunder River; fierce fighting before the walls of Velitrium; ax and torch had been piled up and down the bank, and many a settler’s cabin lay in ashes before the painted horde was rolled back.
A strange quiet followed the storm, in which people gathered and talked in hushed voices, and men with red-stained bandages drank their ale silently in the taverns along the river bank.
There, to Conan the Cimmerian, moodily quaffing from a great wine-glass, came a gaunt forester with a bandage about his head and his arm in a sling. He was the one survivor of Fort Tuscelan.
‘You went with the soldiers to the ruins of the fort?’
Conan nodded.
‘I wasn’t able, ‘ murmured the other. ‘There was no fighting?’
‘The Picts had fallen back across the Black River. Something must have broken their nerve, though only the devil who made them knows what.’
The woodsman glanced at his bandaged arm and sighed.
‘They say there were no bodies worth disposing of.’
Conan shook his head. ‘Ashes. The Picts had piled them in the fort and set fire to the fort before they crossed the river. Their own dead and the men of Valannus.’
‘Valannus was killed among the last--in the hand-to-hand fighting when they broke the barriers. They tried to take him alive, but he made them kill him. They took ten of the rest of us prisoners when we were so weak from fighting we could fight no more. They butchered nine of us then and there. It was when Zogar Sag died that I got my chance to break free and run for it.’
‘Zogar Sag’s dead?’ ejaculated Conan.
‘Aye. I saw him die. That’s why the Picts didn’t press the fight against Velitrium as fiercely as they did against the fort. It was strange. He took no wounds in battle. He was dancing among the slain, waving an ax with which he’d just brained the last of my comrades. He came at me, howling like a wolf--and then he staggered and dropped the ax, and began to reel in a circle screaming as I never heard a man or beast scream before. He fell between me and the fire they’d built to roast me, gagging and frothing at the mouth, and all at once he went rigid and the Picts shouted that he was dead. It was during the confusion that I slipped my cords and ran for the woods.
‘I saw him lying in the firelight. No weapon had touched him. Yet there were red marks like the wounds of a sword in the groin, belly and neck--the last as if his head had been almost severed from his body. What do you make of that?’