CHAPTER I. Conan Joins the Pirates

    _Believe green buds awaken in the spring,
      That autumn paints the leaves with somber fire;
    Believe I held my heart inviolate
      To lavish on one man my hot desire._

    THE SONG OF BÊLIT

Hoofs drummed down the street that sloped to the wharfs. The folk that
yelled and scattered had only a fleeting glimpse of a mailed figure on a
black stallion, a wide scarlet cloak flowing out on the wind. Far up the
street came the shout and clatter of pursuit, but the horseman did not
look back. He swept out onto the wharfs and jerked the plunging stallion
back on its haunches at the very lip of the pier. Seamen gaped up at
him, as they stood to the sweep and striped sail of a high-prowed,
broad-waisted galley. The master, sturdy and black-bearded, stood in the
bows, easing her away from the piles with a boat-hook. He yelled angrily
as the horseman sprang from the saddle and with a long leap landed
squarely on the mid-deck.

'Who invited you aboard?'

'Get under way!' roared the intruder with a fierce gesture that
spattered red drops from his broadsword.

'But we're bound for the coasts of Kush!' expostulated the master.

'Then I'm for Kush! Push off, I tell you!' The other cast a quick glance
up the street, along which a squad of horsemen were galloping; far
behind them toiled a group of archers, crossbows on their shoulders.

'Can you pay for your passage?' demanded the master.

'I pay my way with steel!' roared the man in armor, brandishing the
great sword that glittered bluely in the sun. 'By Crom, man, if you
don't get under way, I'll drench this galley in the blood of its crew!'

The shipmaster was a good judge of men. One glance at the dark scarred
face of the swordsman, hardened with passion, and he shouted a quick
order, thrusting strongly against the piles. The galley wallowed out
into clear water, the oars began to clack rhythmically; then a puff of
wind filled the shimmering sail, the light ship heeled to the gust, then
took her course like a swan, gathering headway as she skimmed along.

On the wharfs the riders were shaking their swords and shouting threats
and commands that the ship put about, and yelling for the bowmen to
hasten before the craft was out of arbalest range.

'Let them rave,' grinned the swordsman hardily. 'Do you keep her on her
course, master steersman.'

The master descended from the small deck between the bows, made his way
between the rows of oarsmen, and mounted the mid-deck. The stranger
stood there with his back to the mast, eyes narrowed alertly, sword
ready. The shipman eyed him steadily, careful not to make any move
toward the long knife in his belt. He saw a tall powerfully built figure
in a black scale-mail hauberk, burnished greaves and a blue-steel helmet
from which jutted bull's horns highly polished. From the mailed
shoulders fell the scarlet cloak, blowing in the sea-wind. A broad
shagreen belt with a golden buckle held the scabbard of the broadsword
he bore. Under the horned helmet a square-cut black mane contrasted with
smoldering blue eyes.

'If we must travel together,' said the master, 'we may as well be at
peace with each other. My name is Tito, licensed master-shipman of the
ports of Argos. I am bound for Kush, to trade beads and silks and sugar
and brass-hilted swords to the black kings for ivory, copra, copper ore,
slaves and pearls.'

The swordsman glanced back at the rapidly receding docks, where the
figures still gesticulated helplessly, evidently having trouble in
finding a boat swift enough to overhaul the fast-sailing galley.

'I am Conan, a Cimmerian,' he answered. 'I came into Argos seeking
employment, but with no wars forward, there was nothing to which I might
turn my hand.'

'Why do the guardsmen pursue you?' asked Tito. 'Not that it's any of my
business, but I thought perhaps----'

'I've nothing to conceal,' replied the Cimmerian. 'By Crom, though I've
spent considerable time among you civilized peoples, your ways are still
beyond my comprehension.

'Well, last night in a tavern, a captain in the king's guard offered
violence to the sweetheart of a young soldier, who naturally ran him
through. But it seems there is some cursed law against killing
guardsmen, and the boy and his girl fled away. It was bruited about that
I was seen with them, and so today I was haled into court, and a judge
asked me where the lad had gone. I replied that since he was a friend of
mine, I could not betray him. Then the court waxed wrath, and the judge
talked a great deal about my duty to the state, and society, and other
things I did not understand, and bade me tell where my friend had flown.
By this time I was becoming wrathful myself, for I had explained my
position.

'But I choked my ire and held my peace, and the judge squalled that I
had shown contempt for the court, and that I should be hurled into a
dungeon to rot until I betrayed my friend. So then, seeing they were all
mad, I drew my sword and cleft the judge's skull; then I cut my way out
of the court, and seeing the high constable's stallion tied near by, I
rode for the wharfs, where I thought to find a ship bound for foreign
parts.'

'Well,' said Tito hardily, 'the courts have fleeced me too often in
suits with rich merchants for me to owe them any love. I'll have
questions to answer if I ever anchor in that port again, but I can prove
I acted under compulsion. You may as well put up your sword. We're
peaceable sailors, and have nothing against you. Besides, it's as well
to have a fighting-man like yourself on board. Come up to the poop-deck
and we'll have a tankard of ale.'

'Good enough,' readily responded the Cimmerian, sheathing his sword.

The _Argus_ was a small sturdy ship, typical of those trading-craft
which ply between the ports of Zingara and Argos and the southern
coasts, hugging the shoreline and seldom venturing far into the open
ocean. It was high of stern, with a tall curving prow; broad in the
waist, sloping beautifully to stem and stern. It was guided by the long
sweep from the poop, and propulsion was furnished mainly by the broad
striped silk sail, aided by a jibsail. The oars were for use in tacking
out of creeks and bays, and during calms. There were ten to the side,
five fore and five aft of the small mid-deck. The most precious part of
the cargo was lashed under this deck, and under the fore-deck. The men
slept on deck or between the rowers' benches, protected in bad weather
by canopies. With twenty men at the oars, three at the sweep, and the
shipmaster, the crew was complete.

So the _Argus_ pushed steadily southward, with consistently fair
weather. The sun beat down from day to day with fiercer heat, and the
canopies were run up--striped silken cloths that matched the shimmering
sail and the shining goldwork on the prow and along the gunwales.

They sighted the coast of Shem--long rolling meadowlands with the white
crowns of the towers of cities in the distance, and horsemen with
blue-black beards and hooked noses, who sat their steeds along the shore
and eyed the galley with suspicion. She did not put in; there was scant
profit in trade with the sons of Shem.

Nor did master Tito pull into the broad bay where the Styx river emptied
its gigantic flood into the ocean, and the massive black castles of
Khemi loomed over the blue waters. Ships did not put unasked into this
port, where dusky sorcerers wove awful spells in the murk of sacrificial
smoke mounting eternally from blood-stained altars where naked women
screamed, and where Set, the Old Serpent, arch-demon of the Hyborians
but god of the Stygians, was said to writhe his shining coils among his
worshippers.

Master Tito gave that dreamy glass-floored bay a wide berth, even when a
serpent-prowed gondola shot from behind a castellated point of land, and
naked dusky women, with great red blossoms in their hair, stood and
called to his sailors, and posed and postured brazenly.

Now no more shining towers rose inland. They had passed the southern
borders of Stygia and were cruising along the coasts of Kush. The sea
and the ways of the sea were never-ending mysteries to Conan, whose
homeland was among the high hills of the northern uplands. The wanderer
was no less of interest to the sturdy seamen, few of whom had ever seen
one of his race.

They were characteristic Argosean sailors, short and stockily built.
Conan towered above them, and no two of them could match his strength.
They were hardy and robust, but his was the endurance and vitality of a
wolf, his thews steeled and his nerves whetted by the hardness of his
life in the world's wastelands. He was quick to laugh, quick and
terrible in his wrath. He was a valiant trencherman, and strong drink
was a passion and a weakness with him. Naïve as a child in many ways,
unfamiliar with the sophistry of civilization, he was naturally
intelligent, jealous of his rights, and dangerous as a hungry tiger.
Young in years, he was hardened in warfare and wandering, and his
sojourns in many lands were evident in his apparel. His horned helmet
was such as was worn by the golden-haired Æsir of Nordheim; his hauberk
and greaves were of the finest workmanship of Koth; the fine ring-mail
which sheathed his arms and legs was of Nemedia; the blade at his girdle
was a great Aquilonian broadsword; and his gorgeous scarlet cloak could
have been spun nowhere but in Ophir.

So they beat southward, and master Tito began to look for the
high-walled villages of the black people. But they found only smoking
ruins on the shore of a bay, littered with naked black bodies. Tito
swore.

'I had good trade here, aforetime. This is the work of pirates.'

'And if we meet them?' Conan loosened his great blade in its scabbard.

'Mine is no warship. We run, not fight. Yet if it came to a pinch, we
have beaten off reavers before, and might do it again; unless it were
Bêlit's _Tigress_.'

'Who is Bêlit?'

'The wildest she-devil unhanged. Unless I read the signs a-wrong, it was
her butchers who destroyed that village on the bay. May I some day see
her dangling from the yard-arm! She is called the queen of the black
coast. She is a Shemite woman, who leads black raiders. They harry the
shipping and have sent many a good tradesman to the bottom.'

From under the poop-deck Tito brought out quilted jerkins, steel caps,
bows and arrows.

'Little use to resist if we're run down,' he grunted. 'But it rasps the
soul to give up life without a struggle.'

It was just at sunrise when the lookout shouted a warning. Around the
long point of an island off the starboard bow glided a long lethal
shape, a slender serpentine galley, with a raised deck that ran from
stem to stern. Forty oars on each side drove her swiftly through the
water, and the low rail swarmed with naked blacks that chanted and
clashed spears on oval shields. From the masthead floated a long crimson
pennon.

'Bêlit!' yelled Tito, paling. 'Yare! Put her about! Into that
creek-mouth! If we can beach her before they run us down, we have a
chance to escape with our lives!'

So, veering sharply, the _Argus_ ran for the line of surf that boomed
along the palm-fringed shore, Tito striding back and forth, exhorting
the panting rowers to greater efforts. The master's black beard
bristled, his eyes glared.

'Give me a bow,' requested Conan. 'It's not my idea of a manly weapon,
but I learned archery among the Hyrkanians, and it will go hard if I
can't feather a man or so on yonder deck.'

Standing on the poop, he watched the serpent-like ship skimming lightly
over the waters, and landsman though he was, it was evident to him that
the _Argus_ would never win that race. Already arrows, arching from the
pirate's deck, were falling with a hiss into the sea, not twenty paces
astern.

'We'd best stand to it,' growled the Cimmerian; 'else we'll all die with
shafts in our backs, and not a blow dealt.'

'Bend to it, dogs!' roared Tito with a passionate gesture of his brawny
fist. The bearded rowers grunted, heaved at the oars, while their
muscles coiled and knotted, and sweat started out on their hides. The
timbers of the stout little galley creaked and groaned as the men fairly
ripped her through the water. The wind had fallen; the sail hung limp.
Nearer crept the inexorable raiders, and they were still a good mile
from the surf when one of the steersmen fell gagging across a sweep, a
long arrow through his neck. Tito sprang to take his place, and Conan,
bracing his feet wide on the heaving poop-deck, lifted his bow. He could
see the details of the pirate plainly now. The rowers were protected by
a line of raised mantelets along the sides, but the warriors dancing on
the narrow deck were in full view. These were painted and plumed, and
mostly naked, brandishing spears and spotted shields.

On the raised platform in the bows stood a slim figure whose white skin
glistened in dazzling contrast to the glossy ebon hides about it. Bêlit,
without a doubt. Conan drew the shaft to his ear--then some whim or
qualm stayed his hand and sent the arrow through the body of a tall
plumed spearman beside her.

Hand over hand the pirate galley was overhauling the lighter ship.
Arrows fell in a rain about the _Argus_, and men cried out. All the
steersmen were down, pincushioned, and Tito was handling the massive
sweep alone, gasping black curses, his braced legs knots of straining
thews. Then with a sob he sank down, a long shaft quivering in his
sturdy heart. The _Argus_ lost headway and rolled in the swell. The men
shouted in confusion, and Conan took command in characteristic fashion.

'Up, lads!' he roared, loosing with a vicious twang of cord. 'Grab your
steel and give these dogs a few knocks before they cut our throats!
Useless to bend your backs any more: they'll board us ere we can row
another fifty paces!'

In desperation the sailors abandoned their oars and snatched up their
weapons. It was valiant, but useless. They had time for one flight of
arrows before the pirate was upon them. With no one at the sweep, the
_Argus_ rolled broadside, and the steel-baked prow of the raider crashed
into her amidships. Grappling-irons crunched into the side. From the
lofty gunwales, the black pirates drove down a volley of shafts that
tore through the quilted jackets of the doomed sailormen, then sprang
down spear in hand to complete the slaughter. On the deck of the pirate
lay half a dozen bodies, an earnest of Conan's archery.

The fight on the _Argus_ was short and bloody. The stocky sailors, no
match for the tall barbarians, were cut down to a man. Elsewhere the
battle had taken a peculiar turn. Conan, on the high-pitched poop, was
on a level with the pirate's deck. As the steel prow slashed into the
_Argus_, he braced himself and kept his feet under the shock, casting
away his bow. A tall corsair, bounding over the rail, was met in midair
by the Cimmerian's great sword, which sheared him cleanly through the
torso, so that his body fell one way and his legs another. Then, with a
burst of fury that left a heap of mangled corpses along the gunwales,
Conan was over the rail and on the deck of the _Tigress_.

In an instant he was the center of a hurricane of stabbing spears and
lashing clubs. But he moved in a blinding blur of steel. Spears bent on
his armor or swished empty air, and his sword sang its death-song. The
fighting-madness of his race was upon him, and with a red mist of
unreasoning fury wavering before his blazing eyes, he cleft skulls,
smashed breasts, severed limbs, ripped out entrails, and littered the
deck like a shambles with a ghastly harvest of brains and blood.

Invulnerable in his armor, his back against the mast, he heaped mangled
corpses at his feet until his enemies gave back panting in rage and
fear. Then as they lifted their spears to cast them, and he tensed
himself to leap and die in the midst of them, a shrill cry froze the
lifted arms. They stood like statues, the black giants poised for the
spear-casts, the mailed swordsman with his dripping blade.

Bêlit sprang before the blacks, beating down their spears. She turned
toward Conan, her bosom heaving, her eyes flashing. Fierce fingers of
wonder caught at his heart. She was slender, yet formed like a goddess:
at once lithe and voluptuous. Her only garment was a broad silken
girdle. Her white ivory limbs and the ivory globes of her breasts drove
a beat of fierce passion through the Cimmerian's pulse, even in the
panting fury of battle. Her rich black hair, black as a Stygian night,
fell in rippling burnished clusters down her supple back. Her dark eyes
burned on the Cimmerian.

She was untamed as a desert wind, supple and dangerous as a she-panther.
She came close to him, heedless of his great blade, dripping with blood
of her warriors. Her supple thigh brushed against it, so close she came
to the tall warrior. Her red lips parted as she stared up into his
somber menacing eyes.

'Who are you?' she demanded. 'By Ishtar, I have never seen your like,
though I have ranged the sea from the coasts of Zingara to the fires of
the ultimate south. Whence come you?'

'From Argos,' he answered shortly, alert for treachery. Let her slim
hand move toward the jeweled dagger in her girdle, and a buffet of his
open hand would stretch her senseless on the deck. Yet in his heart he
did not fear; he had held too many women, civilized or barbaric, in his
iron-thewed arms, not to recognize the light that burned in the eyes of
this one.

'You are no soft Hyborian!' she exclaimed. 'You are fierce and hard as a
gray wolf. Those eyes were never dimmed by city lights; those thews were
never softened by life amid marble walls.'

'I am Conan, a Cimmerian,' he answered.

To the people of the exotic climes, the north was a mazy half-mythical
realm, peopled with ferocious blue-eyed giants who occasionally
descended from their icy fastnesses with torch and sword. Their raids
had never taken them as far south as Shem, and this daughter of Shem
made no distinction between Æsir, Vanir or Cimmerian. With the unerring
instinct of the elemental feminine, she knew she had found her lover,
and his race meant naught, save as it invested him with the glamor of
far lands.

'And I am Bêlit,' she cried, as one might say, 'I am queen.'

'Look at me, Conan!' She threw wide her arms. 'I am Bêlit, queen of the
black coast. Oh, tiger of the North, you are cold as the snowy mountains
which bred you. Take me and crush me with your fierce love! Go with me
to the ends of the earth and the ends of the sea! I am a queen by fire
and steel and slaughter--be thou my king!'

His eyes swept the blood-stained ranks, seeking expressions of wrath or
jealousy. He saw none. The fury was gone from the ebon faces. He
realized that to these men Bêlit was more than a woman: a goddess whose
will was unquestioned. He glanced at the _Argus_, wallowing in the
crimson sea-wash, heeling far over, her decks awash, held up by the
grappling-irons. He glanced at the blue-fringed shore, at the far green
hazes of the ocean, at the vibrant figure which stood before him; and
his barbaric soul stirred within him. To quest these shining blue realms
with that white-skinned young tiger-cat--to love, laugh, wander and
pillage--

'I'll sail with you,' he grunted, shaking the red drops from his blade.

'Ho, N'Yaga!' her voice twanged like a bowstring. 'Fetch herbs and dress
your master's wounds! The rest of you bring aboard the plunder and cast
off.'

As Conan sat with his back against the poop-rail, while the old shaman
attended to the cuts on his hands and limbs, the cargo of the ill-fated
_Argus_ was quickly shifted aboard the _Tigress_ and stored in small
cabins below deck. Bodies of the crew and of fallen pirates were cast
overboard to the swarming sharks, while wounded blacks were laid in the
waist to be bandaged. Then the grappling-irons were cast off, and as the
_Argus_ sank silently into the blood-flecked waters, the _Tigress_ moved
off southward to the rhythmic clack of the oars.

As they moved out over the glassy blue deep, Bêlit came to the poop. Her
eyes were burning like those of a she-panther in the dark as she tore
off her ornaments, her sandals and her silken girdle and cast them at
his feet. Rising on tiptoe, arms stretched upward, a quivering line of
naked white, she cried to the desperate horde: 'Wolves of the blue sea,
behold ye now the dance--the mating-dance of Bêlit, whose fathers were
kings of Askalon!'

And she danced, like the spin of a desert whirlwind, like the leaping of
a quenchless flame, like the urge of creation and the urge of death. Her
white feet spurned the blood-stained deck and dying men forgot death as
they gazed frozen at her. Then, as the white stars glimmered through the
blue velvet dusk, making her whirling body a blur of ivory fire, with a
wild cry she threw herself at Conan's feet, and the blind flood of the
Cimmerian's desire swept all else away as he crushed her panting form
against the black plates of his corseleted breast.