One of the overseers had turned his back on the replacement slaves, staring with flushed face and open mouth at the grim drama of blood and sacrifice taking place beneath the towering statue. Two large slaves had crept closer to him, waiting for their moment—and then they leapt, looping the chain that linked their iron collars around the man’s neck.
A look of astonishment gave way to bulging-eyed horror. All he could do was gurgle wordlessly, then he died in a matter of seconds.
Conan’s eyes narrowed at what happened next. The other slaves in the coffles clawed at the overseers closest to them, and the two who’d killed the first snatched a hatchet and shortsword from the dead man. They laid the chain stretched over a rock, drawing it taut. A man from the next coffle over seized the weapons and struck a succession of hard blows. The soft wrought iron bent, spread, and snapped. Then the man cast down his own chain and the first two repeated the process.
A single break in the chain freed a whole coffle of forty men—a weakness in the design, Conan realized. Within seconds both coffles had thrown themselves on the nearest Stygians, and the process went rippling through the entire mass of five hundred men and women.
The shrieks of the dying Stygians were lost in the killing roar of the rebels.
More of the freed slaves went running upslope, away from the temple, carrying weapons in their hands. Not to flee, he thought, but heading for the slave barracks where two thousand others were held.
They had a plan, Conan thought. Every Set-damned Stygian fighting man is here in the square, in front of the temple, with their packs on their backs and their gear and womenfolk back in the carts.
“Dog-brothers!” he shouted, sweeping out his sword and using it to point. Still mounted, most of Zarallo’s detachment had been staring in revolted fascination at the sacrifices. Some had been deliberately looking down at the ground instead. Now they jumped, as if he’d thrown cold water in their faces. Several blanched.
Conan thought swiftly.
“Zarkabaal, there’s no room to fight here,” he said. “Get your men down to the gate.”
The Shemite understood instantly, nodded curtly, and called to his troop. They turned their mounts and moved off as quickly as they could, shouting. Their commander spoke fair Stygian, Conan knew, and most of his men could manage simple sentences. They whacked at cart-drivers and their teams, using bowstaves and riding-crops
A stream of carts—civilians, and some of the garrison—began bolting through the open gate.
Hundreds of slave rebels swarmed the temple of Set. The statue looked down in reptilian indifference as the acolytes were slaughtered. Conan spared a fractional instant to hope that the high priest had been, as well.
The same massed charge hit the two Stygian commanders in their chariots. Akhenset had sense enough to try to wheel his war-car back toward the ranks of his troops, but the wave of slaves was preceded by a cloud of flung rocks, picked up from the arid ground. Just as the two-horse team moved from a walk to a trot and began to wheel, one stone smacked into the Stygian’s face in a splash of red and flipped him backward to the ground.
The horses stopped and screamed, rearing and lashing out with their hooves, but many hands clutched at their harness. The slaves tore the half-naked driver from the car in a clutching frenzy that ripped out hanks of his hair even before he disappeared into the chaos of sweat-soaked limbs.
Where Akhenset had landed there was only a circle of naked bodies, feet stamping and rocks pounding down. The fat Stygian in the other chariot had time for two or three full-armed slashes with his kopesh sword before he and his driver met the same fate.
“Follow me!” Conan shouted, heeling his horse sharply. The overrunning of the temple had given the mercenary skirmishers a crucial few seconds to set themselves. Conan cut downward at a wild-eyed figure grabbing for his rein. To his left Valeria’s sword swung with scalpel precision.
Then they were past the front of the Stygian lancers. Overhead flights of arrows whistled past and landed among the slaves, making them recoil—the Nubakans had been taken by surprise, but with each cry from their officers, they responded like warriors, fanning out in front of the gate and shooting in volleys. A few of their number ran for the supply wagons, grabbing armfuls of bundled arrows.
The Stygian horsemen ignored the mercenaries. The young man who commanded them was a relation of Akhenset, Conan remembered. He drew his sword and cried out.
“Follow me!”
With that the young soldier booted his horse into motion. The forty lancers behind him did likewise, bringing their round shields around on their left arms and lowering the steel-tipped spears.
“Don’t!” Conan shouted, but it was too late.
The Nubakan archers stopped shooting as the Stygians blocked their field of fire. The lancers had barely enough time to get up to a trot; big horses carrying men in scale armor could be fast, but they needed at least a clear hundred yards or so to get up to speed. Here they didn’t have it.
In the first instant, the lancers still killed a fair number of slaves—naked bodies were terribly vulnerable to mounted men who knew what they were doing. Most of the lances were left in the bodies they struck, so the riders drew swords and lashed out as they drove forward. But the speed of the attack slowed… slowed… and then stopped. Though each armored man was vastly superior to a naked slave, soon their horses were bucking as knives and rocks and teeth and fists gouged into flesh.
The first riders went down soon after that.
There was a heaving as bodies buried them.
At least this gives us a little more time, Conan thought as the rest of the frenzied mob converged on the fight. Then he heard the sound of splintering wood.
Looking up, he watched as one of the skeletal guard towers toppled. Soon thousands of desperate rebels would be here, and once they were out they’d stop to smash open the huts that held their working tools. This would give them shovels and picks and rock-breaking hammers. Conan knew the inevitable when he saw it.
“Too many!” he shouted in Stygian to the leader of the archers. “Too close!”
The Nubakan leader had patterned scars on his forehead and gray in his tuft of a beard. The black eyes framed by the headdress made from the mane of a lion were cold and unafraid as he looked up to the Cimmerian’s mounted figure.
“Get out, stop, shoot in the gate!” Conan said, making gestures that he hoped would direct the archers to the entry, where they could form up to counter any massed rush.
The Nubakan gave him a crisp nod and shouted orders in his own tongue. The archers turned and sprinted out of the gate in good order. Reaching the carts filled with panicked, screaming civilians, they thinned down to single file to pass through the crowded portal.
It’s a miracle they’re not jamming the gate, Conan thought. A horse and a sheep to you for that, Lir and Manannán mac Lir. The two blocks of Stygian spearmen were still in shock, and some of them were visibly wavering. If they bolted, the gate would be blocked, and the slaves would swarm them all, tearing them to pieces.
A rock went by Conan’s head. He whipped around and spotted Valeria trotting back, blood running from her sword and a slave slumped to the ground, sprattling as he bled out from a neat downward stab over the collarbone.
“Thanks!” he called.
“Put on your buggering helmet, you Cimmerian maniac!” she shouted, clapping her own in place, yellow hair billowing past the steel cap. Conan followed her example as he rode up to the Stygian ranks. He used his sword to point toward the gate.
“We fight. Step back when I shout!” Then he swung out of his saddle, dropped to the ground, and slid his round shield onto his arm. He stood before the serpent banner. “Remember the women and children!”
The ranks stiffened. They might be peasant conscripts, but they’d all been in the southern borderlands long enough to know what to expect if they were taken by the rebel slaves. Many of them would have wives—or women, at least—and children among the crush pushing its way through the gate.
That fact would strengthen the spine of even the weakest.
“Valeria!” Conan called. She came up and took the reins of his horse. “Get the skirmishers on our flanks and clear any abandoned carts. I’m not going to be able to look behind me much to see where I’m stepping.”
The Stygian infantry rallied and their drummer beat a complex rhythm. They formed in ranks three-deep, their big coffin-shaped shields under their eyes. The first rank held their spears low for the gutting stroke. The next two held them overarm to stab past the shoulders of those in front, and would be ready to step forward if someone fell. That bristling rank spanned more than the width of the gate. Conan looked over his shoulder and judged how long it would take for the mob to get out.
“Hold!” he shouted again in his limited Stygian. He knew a fair number of military commands, as well as essential phrases like give me drink and how much for the night? The spearmen braced themselves, muttering prayers or snarling or licking pale lips.
Their first impetus spent, the freed men and women lost momentum. More and more joined their ranks, however, pushing ahead and stooping for rocks. One woman ran forward to power a throw, and from behind Conan Valeria’s crossbow went twang. The slave pitched onto her back with a short bolt standing in her breastbone.
That raised new fury in the slaves, who unleashed a flurry of rocks. Most rattled off shields and helmets, and with a stroke of his shield he batted one aside. The hard quartz rang on the layers of laminated hide stretched across a stout wood frame.
The shadows lengthened as night approached.
The sounds of chaos increased.
Voices shouted in half a dozen languages, and the slaves poured forward again, but they hit as a spray, not a solid baulk in formation. It was individuals against a machine—naked, poorly armed individuals. Spears stabbed, voices screamed and wailed, steel struck flesh and brought that special raw shriek. When the attackers finally recoiled, a dozen slaves lay dead before the line of leather and metal. More were moaning and dragging themselves off, bleeding and crippled.
The Stygian formation shifted to replace its own casualties. Over his shoulder Conan watched Valeria and several others drag the wounded to an abandoned cart that someone had left with its two mules still harnessed. With a farm-girl’s efficiency she quieted the spooked beasts.
“Two step back!” Conan shouted in rough Stygian. “Two step, and hold. Hold!” The formation obeyed, and not too raggedly.
As they did the roar rose again. Another rush. Snarling brabbles of close-quarter savagery, without a thought of mercy or quarter on either side. Sometimes slaves would throw themselves on the spearpoints and hug the shaft that was killing them so those behind could grapple with the soldiers. Men cut, shoved, smashed, heaved a step forward or back, bled, and died.
More steps backward, and Conan’s sword ran red from the trail of bodies he was leaving as he retreated—that heartened the Stygian spearmen, too. Another glance revealed that the gate was empty except for a few unconscious bodies and mounted skirmishers shooting over the infantry’s heads.
“Left side, right side, fall in behind!”
He only had to say it twice. The formation changed, becoming six deep and just wide enough to back out the gate, along the path cleared by the skirmishers. The slaves were forming up again and this time their front rank was armed. Spears, swords, shields and helmets, daggers and hatchets taken from the dead soldiers.
There was a growing knot of thinner, wilder-looking attackers armed with miner’s tools, the first of the overwhelming mass that would be pouring from the slave barracks. There were plenty who’d fought in wars of their own between the tribes and kingdoms south of Stygia; battle-captives were a prime source for the slavers. These pushed and shoved, sometimes slapping faces and kicking buttocks and screeching commands.
When the slaves started forward again they had some semblance of order, more even than in some Vanir war-bands Conan had seen. On either side some of the rebels clambered up the ladders to the fighting platform that stood behind the wall’s parapet. There were heavy stones stored all along the wall. If they got over the gate, they could hurl these over the edge and break the infantry phalanx.
“Back into gate!” he shouted, and everyone sidled to the rear, stepping cautiously and keeping their points up. Another flurry of flung rocks, and then the crash of impact. He cut at a man carrying a Stygian kopesh, and the blades sparked. An instant later the metal edge of Conan’s shield took the man under the jaw, shattering bone. Spearheads drove past him on both sides…
“Step back!”
They stepped.
Conan followed suit and felt an ugly wind as a block of stone fell past his face, close enough to take a tiny fleck of skin off his nose. The sting made him swear mildly. Then there was screaming from above, frustration and rage clear where meaning wasn’t. As more stones fell the slaves surged again, so most of the projectiles struck them, rather than the Stygians.
He had to seize the moment…
“Retreat!” he bellowed.
When he’d told them to, the Stygian spearmen had stood. Now he told them to run, and they did that, too. Out through the gate and into the curve of Nubakan archers waiting with arrows on their strings. The spearmen broke to either side, screaming curses at the sudden glitter of arrowheads. Conan had been expecting—or hoping, at least—for just this. He fell flat and swiveled on his belly to watch the results, grinning like a happy wolf.
The rebel slaves packed the gate worse than the Stygian refugees had, gripped in a killing rage that could be more powerful than fear. The Nubakan chief barked an order and dozens of bows were drawn to the ear…
At the sight, howls of hate-filled bloodlust turned to screams of well-founded panic. The leading spray of rebels turned and tried to push their way back through the throng. Those who hadn’t seen what was waiting, however, kept trying to push forward. An inextricable mass of heaving human flesh.
The long Nubakan bows were as powerful as any Conan had seen, even those of the Bossonian archers who had guarded Aquilonia’s borders so long and so well. At barely thirty feet, shafts made to hunt elephant drove through human bodies, sometimes through two at a time. Three volleys flashed out, and then half the bowmen shifted to raking the parapets instead.
Conan came erect with a lithe movement and ran at a crouch. Once he was through the Nubakans he reached Valeria, took his reins, and vaulted into the saddle, wiping and sheathing his sword. A swift glance revealed that the Stygian refugees, their carts and baggage animals were—mostly—heading northwest along the trail, shepherded by Zarkabaal’s mounted archers.
A few ran witlessly in various directions, and he mentally dismissed them to the deaths their stupidity would surely bring. It would be night soon, and even with the full moon, they wouldn’t survive alone.
“Valeria, take the rest of the skirmishers—”
Instantly the warrior woman gave him her full attention. Conan wasn’t surprised. She was sharp-witted, could fight, and had commanded ships and men in her time with the Red Brotherhood. Blood ran down her sword, and there was a long scratch on her steel cap where something had hit, hard.
The mercenaries would follow her.
“—and find us a defensible campsite. Within one hour’s travel. The distance this witless rabble we’ve been saddled with can make in an hour. Go!”
She did.
Conan turned to see that the archers had advanced a little, mostly collecting arrows from the ground and the bodies of the fallen, while some kept the mob of slave rebels at bay on the parapet. As he watched the archers retreated, and their commander formed them up.
Gelete, that’s his name.
They started after the Stygian spearmen, who were trotting to catch up to the refugee convoy. Conan cantered over to the archers and leaned down to offer his hand. Gelete was puzzled for an instant, then recognized the northern custom and shook.
“Good work,” Conan said. “Brave men, they fight well—fight smart.”
Gelete nodded with somber pride. He said something in his native tongue, then stopped and translated. “We sons of lion. Fight elephant, fight rhino, fight lion, fight men.” Then he smiled, teeth white except for a few gaps. “You too. Smart! Not like—”
He made a wiggling gesture, like a snake, obviously meant for the late and unlamented Akhenset.
“He fool, fool, fool,” the Nubakan archer continued. “You command now?”
Conan shrugged. “Need command, bad, we do.”
“That is—what word—necessary, yes. All die if no…” He extended a hand with fingers spread and then clenched it into a fist. It was frustrating to talk in a language neither man spoke well, but the thoughts Conan had to express were simple.
“March north, make camp, guard,” the Cimmerian said. He hesitated, then pulled out the Stygian word he knew that fit at all. “Guard tight. In case—” He pointed to the fortified mining camp, and then made a gesture with his hand palm-down and fingers wiggling to mimic many legs running.
Pillars of smoke were rising over the camp. He would bet that the slaves were burning down their barracks, and a good deal more. Understandable, but short-sighted. They’d be starving in a few days, and fighting among themselves in a week, he judged. Most would strike out in doomed efforts to return to their scattered homes. But for the moment they were still dangerous, and their blood would still be up from the thrill of revenge.
I’d have done the same thing in their place.