Shadows in the Moonlight
He shook his head and shrugged his massive shoulders in puzzlement.
Olivia glanced timidly about the great silent hall. Only the ivy-grown
stones, the tendril-clasped pillars, with the dark figures brooding
between them, met her gaze. She shifted uneasily and wished to be gone,
but the images held a strange fascination for her companion. He examined
them in detail, and barbarian-like, tried to break off their limbs. But
their material resisted his best efforts. He could neither disfigure nor
dislodge from its niche a single image. At last he desisted, swearing in
his wonder.
'What manner of men were these copied from?' he inquired of the world at
large. 'These figures are black, yet they are not like negroes. I have
never seen their like.'
'Let us go into the sunlight,' urged Olivia, and he nodded, with a
baffled glance at the brooding shapes along the walls.
So they passed out of the dusky hall into the clear blaze of the summer
sun. She was surprized to note its position in the sky; they had spent
more time in the ruins than she had guessed.
'Let us take to the boat again,' she suggested. 'I am afraid here. It is
a strange evil place. We do not know when we may be attacked by whatever
cast the rock.'
'I think we're safe as long as we're not under the trees,' he answered.
'Come.'
The plateau, whose sides fell away toward the wooded shores on the east,
west and south, sloped upward toward the north to abut on a tangle of
rocky cliffs, the highest point of the island. Thither Conan took his
way, suiting his long stride to his companion's gait. From time to time
his glance rested inscrutably upon her, and she was aware of it.
They reached the northern extremity of the plateau, and stood gazing up
the steep pitch of the cliffs. Trees grew thickly along the rim of the
plateau east and west of the cliffs, and clung to the precipitous
incline. Conan glanced at these trees suspiciously, but he began the
ascent, helping his companion on the climb. The slope was not sheer, and
was broken by ledges and boulders. The Cimmerian, born in a hill
country, could have run up it like a cat, but Olivia found the going
difficult. Again and again she felt herself lifted lightly off her feet
and over some obstacle that would have taxed her strength to surmount,
and her wonder grew at the sheer physical power of the man. She no
longer found his touch repugnant. There was a promise of protection in
his iron clasp.
At last they stood on the ultimate pinnacle, their hair stirring in the
sea wind. From their feet the cliffs fell away sheerly three or four
hundred feet to a narrow tangle of woodlands bordering the beach.
Looking southward they saw the whole island lying like a great oval
mirror, its bevelled edges sloping down swiftly into a rim of green,
except where it broke in the pitch of the cliffs. As far as they could
see, on all sides stretched the blue waters, still, placid, fading into
dreamy hazes of distance.
'The sea is still,' sighed Olivia. 'Why should we not take up our
journey again?'
Conan, poised like a bronze statue on the cliffs, pointed northward.
Straining her eyes, Olivia saw a white fleck that seemed to hang
suspended in the aching haze.
'What is it?'
'A sail.'
'Hyrkanians?'
'Who can tell, at this distance?'
'They will anchor here--search the island for us!' she cried in quick
panic.
'I doubt it. They come from the north, so they can not be searching for
us. They may stop for some other reason, in which case we'll have to
hide as best we can. But I believe it's either pirate, or an Hyrkanian
galley returning from some northern raid. In the latter case they are
not likely to anchor here. But we can't put to sea until they've gone
out of sight, for they're coming from the direction in which we must go.
Doubtless they'll pass the island tonight, and at dawn we can go on our
way.'
'Then we must spend the night here?' she shivered.
'It's safest.'
'Then let us sleep here, on the crags,' she urged.
He shook his head, glancing at the stunted trees, at the marching woods
below, a green mass which seemed to send out tendrils straggling up the
sides of the cliffs.
'Here are too many trees. We'll sleep in the ruins.'
She cried out in protest.
'Nothing will harm you there,' he soothed. 'Whatever threw the stone at
us did not follow us out of the woods. There was nothing to show that
any wild thing lairs in the ruins. Besides, you are soft-skinned, and
used to shelter and dainties. I could sleep naked in the snow and feel
no discomfort, but the dew would give you cramps, were we to sleep in
the open.'
Olivia helplessly acquiesced, and they descended the cliffs, crossed the
plateau and once more approached the gloomy, age-haunted ruins. By this
time the sun was sinking below the plateau rim. They had found fruit in
the trees near the cliffs, and these formed their supper, both food and
drink.
The southern night swept down quickly, littering the dark blue sky with
great white stars, and Conan entered the shadowy ruins, drawing the
reluctant Olivia after him. She shivered at the sight of those tense
black shadows in their niches along the walls. In the darkness that the
starlight only faintly touched, she could not make out their outlines;
she could only sense their attitude of waiting--waiting as they had
waited for untold centuries.
Conan had brought a great armful of tender branches, well leafed. These
he heaped to make a couch for her, and she lay upon it, with a curious
sensation as of one lying down to sleep in a serpent's lair.
Whatever her forebodings, Conan did not share them. The Cimmerian sat
down near her, his back against a pillar, his sword across his knees.
His eyes gleamed like a panther's in the dusk.
'Sleep, girl,' said he. 'My slumber is light as a wolf's. Nothing can
enter this hall without awaking me.'
Olivia did not reply. From her bed of leaves she watched the immobile
figure, indistinct in the soft darkness. How strange, to move in
fellowship with a barbarian, to be cared for and protected by one of a
race, tales of which had frightened her as a child! He came of a people
bloody, grim and ferocious. His kinship to the wild was apparent in his
every action; it burned in his smoldering eyes. Yet he had not harmed
her, and her worst oppressor had been a man the world called civilized.
As a delicious languor stole over her relaxing limbs and she sank into
foamy billows of slumber, her last waking thought was a drowsy
recollection of the firm touch of Conan's fingers on her soft flesh.
2
Olivia dreamed, and through her dreams crawled a suggestion of lurking
evil, like a black serpent writhing through flower gardens. Her dreams
were fragmentary and colorful, exotic shards of a broken, unknown
pattern, until they crystalized into a scene of horror and madness,
etched against a background of cyclopean stones and pillars.
She saw a great hall, whose lofty ceiling was upheld by stone columns
marching in even rows along the massive walls. Among these pillars
fluttered great green and scarlet parrots, and the hall was thronged
with black-skinned, hawk-faced warriors. They were not negroes. Neither
they nor their garments nor weapons resembled anything of the world the
dreamer knew.
They were pressing about one bound to a pillar: a slender white-skinned
youth, with a cluster of golden curls about his alabaster brow. His
beauty was not altogether human--like the dream of a god, chiseled out
of living marble.
The black warriors laughed at him, jeered and taunted in a strange
tongue. The lithe naked form writhed beneath their cruel hands. Blood
trickled down the ivory thighs to spatter on the polished floor. The
screams of the victim echoed through the hall; then lifting his head
toward the ceiling and the skies beyond, he cried out a name in an awful
voice. A dagger in an ebon hand cut short his cry, and the golden head
rolled on the ivory breast.
As if in answer to that desperate cry, there was a rolling thunder as of
celestial chariot-wheels, and a figure stood before the slayers, as if
materialized out of empty air. The form was of a man, but no mortal man
ever wore such an aspect of inhuman beauty. There was an unmistakable
resemblance between him and the youth who dropped lifeless in his
chains, but the alloy of humanity that softened the godliness of the
youth was lacking in the features of the stranger, awful and immobile in
their beauty.
The blacks shrank back before him, their eyes slits of fire. Lifting a
hand, he spoke, and his tones echoed through the silent halls in deep
rich waves of sound. Like men in a trance the black warriors fell back
until they were ranged along the walls in regular lines. Then from the
stranger's chiseled lips rang a terrible invocation and command:
'_Yagkoolan yok tha, xuthalla!_'
At the blast of that awful cry, the black figures stiffened and froze.
Over their limbs crept a curious rigidity, an unnatural petrification.
The stranger touched the limp body of the youth, and the chains fell
away from it. He lifted the corpse in his arms; then ere he turned away,
his tranquil gaze swept again over the silent rows of ebony figures, and
he pointed to the moon, which gleamed in through the casements. And they
understood, those tense, waiting statues that had been men....
Olivia awoke, starting up on her couch of branches, a cold sweat beading
her skin. Her heart pounded loud in the silence. She glanced wildly
about. Conan slept against his pillar, his head fallen upon his massive
breast. The silvery radiance of the late moon crept through the gaping
roof, throwing long white lines along the dusty floor. She could see the
images dimly, black, tense--waiting. Fighting down a rising hysteria,
she saw the moonbeams rest lightly on the pillars and the shapes
between.
What was that? A tremor among the shadows where the moonlight fell. A
paralysis of horror gripped her, for where there should have been the
immobility of death, there was movement: a slow twitching, a flexing and
writhing of ebon limbs--an awful scream burst from her lips as she broke
the bonds that held her mute and motionless. At her shriek Conan shot
erect, teeth gleaming, sword lifted.
'The statues! The statues!--_Oh my God, the statues are coming to
life!_'
And with the cry she sprang through a crevice in the wall, burst madly
through the hindering vines, and ran, ran, ran--blind, screaming,
witless--until a grasp on her arm brought her up short and she shrieked
and fought against the arms that caught her, until a familiar voice
penetrated the mists of her terror, and she saw Conan's face, a mask of
bewilderment in the moonlight.
'What in Crom's name, girl? Did you have a nightmare?' His voice sounded
strange and far away. With a sobbing gasp she threw her arms about his
thick neck and clung to him convulsively, crying in panting catches.
'Where are they? Did they follow us?'
'Nobody followed us,' he answered.
She sat up, still clinging to him, and looked fearfully about. Her blind
flight had carried her to the southern edge of the plateau. Just below
them was the slope, its foot masked in the thick shadows of the woods.
Behind them she saw the ruins looming in the high-swinging moon.
'Did you not see them?--The statues, moving, lifting their hands, their
eyes glaring in the shadows?'
'I saw nothing,' answered the barbarian uneasily. 'I slept more soundly
than usual, because it has been so long since I have slumbered the night
through; yet I don't think anything could have entered the hall without
waking me.'
'Nothing entered,' a laugh of hysteria escaped her. 'It was something
there already. Ah, Mitra, we lay down to sleep among them, like sheep
making their bed in the shambles!'