The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard (37 page)

“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.

“The folk of the city have some cause of complaint against us,” said he, “but the looting and destruction was not by my orders; even then it was my intention to make Carthage my capital. If you suffered loss by the sack, why–”

“Not from your wolves,” grimly answered the other. “Sack of the city? I have seen such a sack as not even you, barbarian, have dreamed of! They called you barbaric. I have seen what civilized Romans can do.”

“Romans have not plundered Carthage in my memory,” muttered Genseric, frowning in some perplexity.

“Poetic justice!” cried the stranger, his hand emerging from his cloak to strike down on the table.

Genseric noted the hand was muscular yet white, the hand of an aristocrat. “Roman greed and treachery destroyed Carthage; trade rebuilt her, in another guise. Now you, barbarian, sail from her harbors to humble her conqueror! Is it any wonder that old dreams silver the cords of your ships and creep amidst the holds, and that forgotten ghosts burst their immemorial tombs to glide upon your decks?”

“Who said anything of humbling Rome?” uneasily demanded Genseric. “I merely sail to arbitrate a dispute as to succession–”

“Pah!” Again the hand slammed down on the table. “If you knew what I know, you would sweep that accursed city clean of life before you turn your prows southward again. Even now those you sail to aid plot your ruin–and a traitor is on board your ship!”

“What do you mean?” Still there was neither excitement nor passion in the Vandal’s voice.

“Suppose I gave you proof that your most trusted companion and vassal plots your ruin with those to whose aid you lift your sails?”

“Give me that proof; then ask what you will,” answered Genseric with a touch of grimness.

“Take this in token of faith!” The stranger rang a coin on the table, and caught up a silken girdle which Genseric himself had carelessly thrown down.

“Follow me to the cabin of your counsellor and scribe, the handsomest man among the barbarians–”

“Athaulf?” In spite of himself Genseric started. “I trust him beyond all others.”

“Then you are not as wise as I deemed you,” grimly answered the other. “The traitor within is to be feared more than the foe without. It was not the legions of Rome which conquered
me
–it was the traitors within my gates. Not alone in swords and ships does Rome deal, but with the souls of men. I have come from a far land to save your empire and your life. In return I ask but one thing: drench Rome in blood!”

For an instant the stranger stood transfigured, mighty arm lifted, fist clenched, dark eyes flashing fire. An aura of terrific power emanated from him, awing even the wild Vandal. Then sweeping his purple cloak about him with a kingly gesture, the man stalked to the door and passed through it, despite Genseric’s exclamation and effort to detain him.

Swearing in bewilderment, the king limped to the door, opened it, and glared out on the deck. A lamp burned on the poop. A reek of unwashed bodies came up from the hold where the weary rowers toiled at their oars. The rhythmic clack vied with a dwindling chorus from the ships which followed in a long ghostly line. The moon struck silver from the waves, shone white on the deck. A single warrior stood on guard outside Genseric’s door, the moonlight sparkling on his crested golden helmet and Roman corselet.

He lifted his javelin in salute.

“Where did he go?” demanded the king.

“Who, my lord?” inquired the warrior stupidly.

“The tall man, dolt,” exclaimed Genseric impatiently. “The man in the purple cloak who just left my cabin.”

“None has left your cabin since the lord Hunegais and the others went forth, my lord,” replied the Vandal in bewilderment.

“Liar!” Genseric’s sword was a ripple of silver in his hand as it slid from its sheath. The warrior paled and shrank back.

“As God is my witness, king,” he swore, “no such man have I seen this night.”

Genseric glared at him; the Vandal king was a judge of men and he knew this one was not lying. He felt a peculiar twitching of his scalp, and turning without a word, limped hurriedly to Athaulf ’s cabin. There he hesitated, then threw open the door.

Athaulf lay sprawled across a table in an attitude which needed no second glance to classify. His face was purple, his glassy eyes distended, and his tongue lolled out blackly. About his neck, knotted in such a knot as seamen make, was Genseric’s silken girdle. Near one hand lay a quill, near the other ink and a piece of parchment. Catching it up, Genseric read laboriously.

“To her majesty the empress of Rome:

“I, thy faithful servant, have done thy bidding, and am prepared to persuade the barbarian I serve to delay his onset on the imperial city until the aid you expect from Byzantium has arrived. Then I will guide him into the bay I mentioned, where he can be caught as in a vise and destroyed with his whole fleet, and–”

The writing ceased with an erratic scrawl. Genseric glared down at him, and again the short hairs lifted on his scalp. There was no sign of the tall stranger, and the Vandal knew he would never be seen again.

“Rome shall pay for this,” he muttered; the mask he wore in public had fallen away; the Vandal’s face was that of a hungry wolf. In his glare, in the knotting of his mighty hand, it took no sage to read the doom of Rome. He suddenly remembered that he still clutched in his hand the coin the stranger had dropped on his table. He glanced at it, and his breath hissed between his teeth, as he recognized the characters of an old, forgotten language, the features of a man which he had often seen carved in ancient marble in old Carthage, preserved from Roman hate.

“Hannibal!” muttered Genseric.

The Cairn on the Headland

“This is the cairn you seek,” I said, laying my hand gingerly on one of the rough stones which composed the strangely symmetrical heap.

An avid interest burned in Ortali’s dark eyes. His gaze swept the landscape and came back to rest on the great pile of massive weather-worn boulders.

“What a wild, weird, desolate place!” he said. “Who would have thought to find such a spot in this vicinity? Except for the smoke rising yonder, one would scarcely dream that beyond that headland lies a great city! Here there is scarcely even a fisherman’s hut within sight.”

“The people shun the cairn as they have shunned it for centuries,” I replied.

“Why?”

“You’ve asked me that before,” I replied impatiently. “I can only answer that they now avoid by habit what their ancestors avoided through knowledge.”

“Knowledge!” he laughed derisively. “Superstition!”

I looked at him somberly with unveiled hate. Two men could scarcely have been of more opposite types.

He was slender, self-possessed, unmistakably Latin with his dark eyes and sophisticated air. I am massive, clumsy and bear-like, with cold blue eyes and tousled red hair. We were countrymen in that we were born in the same land; but the homelands of our ancestors were as far apart as South from North.

“Nordic superstition,” he repeated. “I cannot imagine a Latin people allowing such a mystery as this to go unexplored all these years. The Latins are too practical–too prosaic, if you will. Are you sure of the date of this pile?”

“I find no mention of it in any manuscript prior to 1014 A. D.,” I growled, “and I’ve read all such manuscripts extant, in the original. MacLiag, King Brian Boru’s poet, speaks of the rearing of the cairn immediately after the battle, and there can be little doubt but that this is the pile referred to. It is mentioned briefly in the later chronicles of the Four Masters, also in the Book of Leinster, compiled in the late 1150s, and again in the Book of Lecan, compiled by the MacFirbis about 1416. All connect it with the battle of Clontarf, without mentioning why it was built.”

“Well, what is the mystery about it?” he queried. “What more natural than that the defeated Norsemen should rear a cairn above the body of some great chief who had fallen in the battle?”

“In the first place,” I answered, “there is a mystery concerning the existence of it. The building of cairns above the dead was a Norse, not an Irish, custom. Yet according to the chroniclers, it was not Norsemen who reared this heap. How could they have built it immediately after the battle, in which they had been cut to pieces and driven in headlong flight through the gates of Dublin? Their chieftains lay where they had fallen and the ravens picked their bones. It was Irish hands that heaped these stones.”

“Well, was that so strange?” persisted Ortali. “In old times the Irish heaped up stones before they went into battle, each man putting a stone in place; after the battle the living removed their stones, leaving in that manner a simple tally of the slain for any who wished to count the remaining stones.”

I shook my head.

“That was in more ancient times; not in the battle of Clontarf. In the first place, there were more than twenty thousand warriors, and four thousand fell here; this cairn is not large enough to have served as a tally of the men killed in battle. And it is too symmetrically built. Hardly a stone has fallen away in all these centuries. No, it was reared to cover something.”

“Nordic superstitions!” the man sneered again.

“Aye, superstitions if you will!” Fired by his scorn, I exclaimed so savagely that he involuntarily stepped back, his hand slipping inside his coat. “We of North Europe had gods and demons before which the pallid mythologies of the South fade to childishness. At a time when your ancestors were lolling on silken cushions among the crumbling marble pillars of a decaying civilization, my ancestors were building their own civilization in hardships and gigantic battles against foes human and inhuman.

“Here on this very plain the Dark Ages came to an end and the light of a new era dawned faintly on a world of hate and anarchy. Here, as even you know, in the year 1014, Brian Boru and his Dalcassian ax-wielders broke the power of the heathen Norsemen forever–those grim anarchistic plunderers who had held back the progress of civilization for centuries.

“It was more than a struggle between Gael and Dane for the crown of Ireland. It was a war between the White Christ and Odin, between Christian and pagan. It was the last stand of the heathen–of the people of the old, grim ways. For three hundred years the world had writhed beneath the heel of the Viking, and here on Clontarf that scourge was lifted forever.”

“Then, as now, the importance of that battle was underestimated by polite Latin and Latinized writers and historians. The polished sophisticates of the civilized cities of the South were not interested in the battles of barbarians in the remote northwestern corner of the world–a place and peoples of whose very names they were only vaguely aware. They only knew that suddenly the terrible raids of the sea kings ceased to sweep along their coasts, and in another century the wild age of plunder and slaughter had almost been forgotten–all because a rude, half-civilized people who scantily covered their nakedness with wolf hides rose up against the conquerors.

“Here was Ragnarok, the fall of the gods! Here in very truth Odin fell, for his religion was given its death blow. He was last of all the heathen gods to stand before Christianity, and it looked for a time as if his children might prevail and plunge the world back into darkness and savagery. Before Clontarf, legends say, he often appeared on earth to his worshipers, dimly seen in the smoke of the sacrifices where naked human victims died screaming, or riding the wind-torn clouds, his wild locks flying in the gale, or, appareled like a Norse warrior, dealing thunderous blows in the forefront of nameless battles. But after Clontarf he was seen no more; his worshipers called on him in vain with wild chants and grim sacrifices.

They lost faith in him, who had failed them in their wildest hour; his altars crumbled, his priests turned gray and died, and men turned to his conqueror, the White Christ. The reign of blood and iron was forgotten; the age of the red-handed sea kings passed. The rising sun slowly, dimly, lighted the night of the Dark Ages, and men forgot Odin, who came no more on earth.

“Aye, laugh if you will! But who knows what shapes of horror have had birth in the darkness, the cold gloom, and the whistling black gulfs of the North? In the southern lands the sun shines and flowers blow; under the soft skies men laugh at demons. But in the North who can say what elemental spirits of evil dwell in the fierce storms and the darkness? Well may it be that from such fiends of the night men evolved the worship of the grim ones, Odin and Thor, and their terrible kin.”

Ortali was silent for an instant, as if taken aback by my vehemence; then he laughed. “Well said, my Northern philosopher! We will argue these questions another time. I could hardly expect a descendant of Nordic barbarians to escape some trace of the dreams and mysticism of his race. But you cannot expect me to be moved by your imaginings, either. I still believe that this cairn covers no grimmer secret than a Norse chief who fell in the battle–and really your ravings concerning Nordic devils have no bearing on the matter. Will you help me tear into this cairn?”

“No,” I answered shortly.

“A few hours’ work will suffice to lay bare whatever it may hide,” he continued as if he had not heard.

“By the way, speaking of superstitions, is there not some wild tale concerning holly connected with this heap?”

“An old legend says that all trees bearing holly were cut down for a league in all directions, for some mysterious reason,” I answered sullenly. “That’s another mystery. Holly was an important part of Norse magic-making. The Four Masters tell of a Norseman–a white-bearded ancient of wild aspect, and apparently a priest of Odin–who was slain by the natives while attempting to lay a branch of holly on the cairn, a year after the battle.”