I mounted, remembering how hardly Vertorix and I had gone up so many ages before, with the horde hissing and frothing at our heels. I found myself tense with dread as I approached the dark, gaping entrance through which the pack had sought to cut us off. I had snapped off the light when I came into the dim-lit corridor below, and now I glanced into the well of blackness which opened on the stair. And with a cry I started back, nearly losing my footing on the worn steps. Sweating in the semidarkness I switched on the light and directed its beam into the cryptic opening, revolver in hand.
I saw only the bare rounded sides of a small shaftlike tunnel and I laughed nervously. My imagination was running riot; I could have sworn that hideous yellow eyes glared terribly at me from the darkness, and that a crawling something had scuttered away down the tunnel. I was foolish to let these imaginings upset me. The Children had long vanished from these caverns; a nameless and abhorrent race closer to the serpent than the man, they had centuries ago faded back into the oblivion from which they had crawled in the black dawn ages of the earth.
I came out of the shaft into the winding corridor, which, as I remembered of old, was lighter. Here from the shadows a lurking thing had leaped on my back while my companions ran on, unknowing. What a brute of a man Conan had been, to keep going after receiving such savage wounds! Aye, in that age all men were iron.
I came to the place where the tunnel forked and as before I took the left-hand branch and came to the shaft that led down. Down this I went, listening for the roar of the river, but not hearing it. Again the darkness shut in about the shaft, so I was forced to have recourse to my electric torch again, lest I lose my footing and plunge to my death. Oh, I, John O’Brien, am not nearly so sure-footed as was I, Conan the reaver; no, nor as tigerishly powerful and quick, either.
I soon struck the dank lower level and felt again the dampness that denoted my position under the river-bed, but still I could not hear the rush of the water. And indeed I knew that whatever mighty river had rushed roaring to the sea in those ancient times, there was no such body of water among the hills today. I halted, flashing my light about. I was in a vast tunnel, not very high of roof, but broad. Other smaller tunnels branched off from it and I wondered at the network which apparently honeycombed the hills.
I cannot describe the grim, gloomy effect of those dark, low-roofed corridors far below the earth. Over all hung an overpowering sense of unspeakable antiquity. Why had the Little People carved out these mysterious crypts, and in which black age? Were these caverns their last refuge from the onrushing tides of humanity, or their castles since time immemorial? I shook my head in bewilderment; the bestiality of the Children I had seen, yet somehow they had been able to carve these tunnels and chambers that might balk modern engineers. Even supposing they had but completed a task begun by nature, still it was a stupendous work for a race of dwarfish aborigines.
Then I realized with a start that I was spending more time in these gloomy tunnels than I cared for, and began to hunt for the steps by which Conan had ascended. I found them and, following them up, breathed again deeply in relief as the sudden glow of daylight filled the shaft. I came out upon the ledge, now worn away until it was little more than a bump on the face of the cliff. And I saw the great river, which had roared like a prisoned monster between the sheer walls of its narrow canyon, had dwindled away with the passing eons until it was no more than a tiny stream, far beneath me, trickling soundlessly among the stones on its way to the sea.
Aye, the surface of the earth changes; the rivers swell or shrink, the mountains heave and topple, the lakes dry up, the continents alter; but under the earth the work of lost, mysterious hands slumbers untouched by the sweep of Time. Their work, aye, but what of the hands that reared that work? Did they, too, lurk beneath the bosoms of the hills?
How long I stood there, lost in dim speculations, I do not know, but suddenly, glancing across at the other ledge, crumbling and weathered, I shrank back into the entrance behind me. Two figures came out upon the ledge and I gasped to see that they were Richard Brent and Eleanor Bland. Now I remembered why I had come to the cavern and my hand instinctively sought the revolver in my pocket. They did not see me. But I could see them, and hear them plainly, too, since no roaring river now thundered between the ledges.
“By gad, Eleanor,” Brent was saying, “I’m glad you decided to come with me. Who would have guessed there was anything to those old tales about hidden tunnels leading from the cavern? I wonder how that section of wall came to collapse? I thought I heard a crash just as we entered the outer cave. Do you suppose some beggar was in the cavern ahead of us, and broke it in?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I remember–oh, I don’t know. It almost seems as if I’d been here before, or dreamed I had. I seem to faintly remember, like a far-off nightmare, running, running, running endlessly through these dark corridors with hideous creatures on my heels….”
“Was I there?” jokingly asked Brent.
“Yes, and John, too,” she answered. “But you were not Richard Brent, and John was not John O’Brien.
No, and I was not Eleanor Bland, either. Oh, it’s so dim and far-off I can’t describe it at all. It’s hazy and misty and terrible.”
“I understand, a little,” he said unexpectedly. “Ever since we came to the place where the wall had fallen and revealed the old tunnel, I’ve had a sense of familiarity with the place. There was horror and danger and battle–and love, too.”
He stepped nearer the edge to look down in the gorge, and Eleanor cried out sharply and suddenly, seizing him in a convulsive grasp.
“Don’t, Richard, don’t! Hold me, oh, hold me tight!”
He caught her in his arms. “Why, Eleanor, dear, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she faltered, but she clung closer to him and I saw she was trembling. “Just a strange feeling–rushing dizziness and fright, just as if I were falling from a great height. Don’t go near the edge, Dick; it scares me.”
“I won’t, dear,” he answered, drawing her closer to him, and continuing hesitantly: “Eleanor, there’s something I’ve wanted to ask you for a long time–well, I haven’t the knack of putting things in an elegant way. I love you, Eleanor; always have. You know that. But if you don’t love me, I’ll take myself off and won’t annoy you any more. Only please tell me one way or another, for I can’t stand it any longer. Is it I or the American?”
“You, Dick,” she answered, hiding her face on his shoulder. “It’s always been you, though I didn’t know it. I think a great deal of John O’Brien. I didn’t know which of you I really loved. But to-day as we came through those terrible tunnels and climbed those fearful stairs, and just now, when I thought for some strange reason we were falling from the ledge, I realized it was you I loved–that I always loved you, through more lives than this one. Always!”
Their lips met and I saw her golden head cradled on his shoulder. My lips were dry, my heart cold, yet my soul was at peace. They belonged to each other. Eons ago they lived and loved, and because of that love they suffered and died. And I, Conan, had driven them to that doom.
I saw them turn toward the cleft, their arms about each other, then I heard Tamera–I mean Eleanor–shriek; I saw them both recoil. And out of the cleft a horror came writhing, a loathsome, brain-shattering thing that blinked in the clean sunlight. Aye, I knew it of old–vestige of a forgotten age, it came writhing its horrid shape up out of the darkness of the Earth and the lost past to claim its own.
What three thousand years of retrogression can do to a race hideous in the beginning, I saw, and shuddered. And instinctively I knew that in all the world it was the only one of its kind, a monster that had lived on. God alone knows how many centuries, wallowing in the slime of its dank subterranean lairs.
Before the Children had vanished, the race must have lost all human semblance, living as they did the life of the reptile. This thing was more like a giant serpent than anything else, but it had aborte
d legs and snaky arms with hooked talons. It crawled on its belly, writhing back mottled lips to bare needlelike fangs, which I felt must drip with venom. It hissed as it reared up its ghastly head on a horribly long neck, while its yellow slanted eyes glittered with all the horror that is spawned in the black lairs under the earth.
I knew those eyes had blazed at me from the dark tunnel opening on the stair. For some reason the creature had fled from me, possibly because it feared my light, and it stood to reason that it was the only one remaining in the caverns, else I had been set upon in the darkness. But for it, the tunnels could be traversed in safety.
Now the reptilian thing writhed toward the humans trapped on the ledge. Brent had thrust Eleanor behind him and stood, face ashy, to guard her as best he could. And I gave thanks silently that I, John O’Brien, could pay the debt I, Conan the reaver, owed these lovers since long ago.
The monster reared up and Brent, with cold courage, sprang to meet it with his naked hands. Taking quick aim, I fired once. The shot echoed like the crack of doom between the towering cliffs, and the Horror, with a hideously human scream, staggered wildly, swayed and pitched headlong, knotting and writhing like a wounded python, to tumble from the sloping ledge and fall plummetlike to the rocks far below.
Delenda Est
“It’s no empire, I tell you! It’s only a sham. Empire? Pah! Pirates, that’s all we are!” It was Hunegais, of course, the ever moody and gloomy, with his braided black locks and drooping moustaches betraying his Slavonic blood. He sighed gustily, and the Falernian wine slopped over the rim of the jade goblet clenched in his brawny hand, to stain his purple, gilt-embroidered tunic. He drank noisily, after the manner of a horse, and returned with melancholy gusto to his original complaint.
“What have we done in Africa? Destroyed the big landholders and the priests, set ourselves up as landlords. Who works the land? Vandals? Not at all! The same men who worked it under the Romans.
We’ve merely stepped into Roman shoes. We levy taxes and rents, and are forced to defend the land from the accursed Berbers. Our weakness is in our numbers. We can’t amalgamate with the people; we’d be absorbed. We can’t make allies and subjects out of them; all we can do is maintain a sort of military prestige–we are a small body of aliens sitting in castles and for the present enforcing our rule over a big native population who, it’s true, hate us no worse than they hated the Romans, but–”
“Some of that hate could be done away with,” interrupted Athaulf. He was younger than Hunegais, clean shaven, and not unhandsome, and his manners were less primitive. He was a Suevi, whose youth had been spent as a hostage in the East Roman court. “They are orthodox; if we could bring ourselves to renounce Arian–”
“No! ” Hunegais’ heavy jaws came together with a snap that would have splintered lesser teeth than his.
His dark eyes flamed with the fanaticism that was, among all the Teutons, the exclusive possession of his race. “Never! We are the masters! It is theirs to submit–not ours. We know the truth of Arian; if the miserable Africans can not realize their mistake, they must be made to see it–by torch and sword and rack, if necessary!” Then his eyes dulled again, and with another gusty sigh from the depths of his belly, he groped for the wine jug.
“In a hundred years the Vandal kingdom will be a memory,” he predicted. “All that holds it together now is the will of Genseric.” He pronounced it Geiserich.
The individual so named laughed, leaned back in his carven ebony chair and stretched out his muscular legs before him. Those were the legs of a horseman, but their owner had exchanged the saddle for the deck of a war galley. Within a generation he had turned a race of horsemen into a race of sea-rovers. He was the king of a race whose name had already become a term for destruction, and he was the possessor of the finest brain in the known world.
Born on the banks of the Danube and grown to manhood on that long trek westward, when the drifts of the nations crushed over the Roman palisades, he had brought to the crown forged for him in Spain all the wild wisdom the times could teach, in the feasting of swords and the surge and crush of races. His wild riders had swept the spears of the Roman rulers of Spain into oblivion. When the Visigoths and the Romans joined hands and began to look southward, it was the intrigues of Genseric which brought Attila’s scarred Huns swarming westward, tusking the flaming horizons with their myriad lances. Attila was dead, now, and none knew where lay his bones and his treasures, guarded by the ghosts of five hundred slaughtered slaves; his name thundered around the world, but in his day he had been but one of the pawns moved resistlessly by the hand of the Vandal king.
And when, after Chalons, the Gothic hosts moved southward through the Pyrenees, Genseric had not waited to be crushed by superior numbers. Men still cursed the name of Boniface, who called on Genseric to aid him against his rival, Aetius, and opened the Vandal’s road to Africa. His reconciliation with Rome had been too late, vain as the courage with which he had sought to undo what he had done.
Boniface died on a Vandal spear, and a new kingdom rose in the south. And now Aetius, too, was dead, and the great war galleys of the Vandals were moving northward, the long oars dipping and flashing silver in the starlight, the great vessels heeling and rocking to the lift of the waves.
And in the cabin of the foremost galley, Genseric listened to the conversation of his captains, and smiled gently as he combed his unruly yellow beard with his muscular fingers. There was in his veins no trace of the Scythic blood which set his race somewhat aside from the other Teutons, from the long ago when scattered steppes-riders, drifting westward before the conquering Sarmatians, had come among the people dwelling on the upper reaches of the Elbe. Genseric was pure German; of medium height, with a magnificent sweep of shoulders and chest, and a massive corded neck, his frame promised as much of physical vitality as his wide blue eyes reflected mental vigor.
He was the strongest man in the known world, and he was a pirate–the first of the Teutonic sea-raiders whom men later called Vikings; but his domain of conquest was not the Baltic nor the blue North Sea, but the sunlit shores of the Mediterranean.
“And the will of Genseric,” he laughed, in reply to Hunegais’ last remark, “is that we drink and feast and let tomorrow take care of itself.”
“So you say!” snorted Hunegais, with the freedom that still existed among the barbarians. “When did you ever let a tomorrow take care of itself? You plot and plot, not for tomorrow alone, but for a thousand tomorrows to come! You need not masquerade with us! We are not Romans to be fooled into thinking you a fool–as Boniface was!”
“Aetius was no fool,” muttered Thrasamund.
“But he’s dead, and we are sailing on Rome,” answered Hunegais, with the first sign of satisfaction he had yet evinced. “Alaric didn’t get all the loot, thank God! And I’m glad Attila lost his nerve at the last minute–the more plunder for us.”
“Attila remembered Chalons,” drawled Athaulf. “There is something about Rome that lives–by the saints, it is strange. Even when the empire seems most ruined–torn, befouled and tattered–some part of it springs into life again. Stilicho, Theodosius, Aetius–who can tell? Tonight in Rome there may be a man sleeping who will overthrow us all.”
Hunegais snorted and hammered on the wine-stained board.
“Rome is as dead as the white mare I rode at the taking of Carthage! We have but to stretch our hands and grasp the plunder of her!”
“There was a great general once who thought as much,” said Thrasamund drowsily. “A Carthaginian, too, by God! I have forgotten his name. But he beat the Romans at every turn. Cut, slash, that was his way!”
“Well,” remarked Hunegais, “he must have lost at last, or he would have destroyed Rome.”
“That’s so!” ejaculated Thrasamund.
“We are not Carthaginians,” laughed Genseric. “And who said aught of plundering Rome? Are we not merely sailing to the imperial city in answer to the appeal of the Empress who is bese
t by jealous foes?
And now, get out of here, all of you. I want to sleep.”
The cabin door slammed on the morose predictions of Hunegais, the witty retorts of Athaulf, the mumble of the others. Genseric rose and moved over to the table, to pour himself a last glass of wine. He walked with a limp; a Frankish spear had girded him in the leg long years ago.
He lifted the jeweled goblet to his lips–wheeled with a startled oath. He had not heard the cabin door open, but a man was standing across the table from him.
“By Odin!” Genseric’s Arianism was scarcely skin-deep. “What do you in my cabin?”
The voice was calm, almost placid, after the first startled oath. The king was too shrewd often to evince his real emotions. His hand stealthily closed on the hilt of his sword. A sudden and unexpected stroke–
But the stranger made no hostile movement. He was a stranger to Genseric, and the Vandal knew he was neither Teuton nor Roman. He was tall, dark, with a stately head, his dark flowing locks confined by a dark crimson band. A curling black patriarchal beard swept his breast. A dim, misplaced familiarity twitched at the Vandal’s mind as he looked.
“I have not come to harm you!” The voice was deep, strong and resonant. Genseric could tell little of his attire, since he was masked in a wide dark cloak. The Vandal wondered if he grasped a weapon under that cloak.
“Who are you, and how did you get into my cabin?” he demanded.
“Who I am, it matters not,” returned the other. “I have been on this ship since you sailed from Carthage.
You sailed at night; I came aboard then.”
“I never saw you in Carthage,” muttered Genseric. “And you are a man who would stand out in a crowd.”
“I dwell in Carthage,” the stranger replied. “I have dwelt there for many years. I was born there, and all my fathers before me. Carthage is my life!” The last sentence was uttered in a voice so passionate and fierce that Genseric involuntarily stepped back, his eyes narrowing.