Conan uttered a bark of laughter. 'Not I! But being a king does spoil a man's taste for the pettier forms of thievery. Besides., Ariostro has never given me trouble, so why should I trouble him? Conn will have enough problems, guarding his frontiers against the neighboring kingdoms, without my stirring them up.'
'Then - do ye mean to take a crack at the Stygians, as I was for doing when we met in Messantia? They're a fell and hardy lot; but with this crew we might just—’
Conan shook his head. 'Not that, even. After all, I've been a pirate captain, and a bloody successful one, several times over. Why should I climb that same ladder once more?'
'Well, then,' growled Sigurd impatiently, 'what in all the flaming hells is it ye mean? Out with it, man!'
Conan flung out a long arm, and a gnarled forefinger stabbed toward the bow. ‘Away to westward, mate, there's something we know naught about. The Red Shadows are pan of it, too.' A deep laugh rumbled in Oman's chest. 'You can't imagine me as a scholar, now can you?’
'It were easier to think of one of Ariostro's pretty little dancing girls as a bloody-handed pirate.'
'Well, I can read a few different scripts. And in the royal library at Tarantia I found tales of the Cataclysm, when the ocean gulped down Atlantis, eight thousand years ago. They tell, these tales, how thousands of Atlan-teans fled to the Mainland - or Thuria, as they used to call it. And in the iron-bound Book of Skelos it said: "Others fled from sinking Atlantis to westward, and it is said that thither they came upon another continent, over against the Thurian continent and bounding the Western Ocean on the farther side. But what befell these refugees I know not, for with the destruction of Atlantis the track-less ocean became too wide for the ships of those days to maintain a regular commerce betwixt the lands we know and the unknown western land." That is all, but it may very well be connected with our present mission.’ 'Well?' said Sigurd. 'I've heard tales like that, too.' 'Well, if there be a land of mighty sorcery ahead of us, it will also be a land of wealth and power, ripe for enterprising rascals like us to pluck. Why fool around with the loot of a few ships when, with some luck and some guts, we can take an empire!’
Sigurd sighed and wiped his eyes with the backs of his hairy hands. "Ah, Amra, I might have knowed ye'd have some scheme in your thick skull, madder and wilder than anything any ordinary man could think up! 'Tis a fine old wolf ye are, my word upon it! Though they feed us to dragons when we get there, I'll ship with you as far as the sunset itself, by all the gods!'
He broke off to peer suspiciously at the sun. With a snort of anger, he waddled to the nearer of the quarter rudders, where a one-eyed Shemitish ruffian stood to the watch.
'Avast, ye hooknosed dogl Be ye blind or stinking drunk?' he roared, cuffing the startled seaman aside and seizing the tiller in capable paws. 'We're riding half a point off the course ye set last night, Amra! Curse and rot these lazy pigs - the scum of the Barachas,, by the bowels of Ahriman and the breasts of Ishtar!' He squinted ferociously at the sun and thrust the tiller over with a practiced heave. The Red Lion heeled slightly, responding like a well-trained steed.
Then a cry came ringing down from above. 'Sail ho!' Conan sprang to the rail and raked the gray, misty seas with keen eyes. But he could see nothing.
'Whither away?’ he boomed through cupped hands.
The reply floated down from the lookout at the foretop: 'Point and a half off the port bow!'
'I see her!' The old Northman was again at Conan's side, puffing like an asthmatic walrus having shoved the one-eyed sailor back to the tiller. There she be - and by all the gods, she looks like a galley!'
Conan shaded his eyes with one hand and followed Sigurd's pointing finger. There, looming out of the coiling morning haze, were two slender, bare masts. When the Red Lion rose on the long swell, those on her poop deck could glimpse the long, low hull of a galley beneath this rigging.
'Now what in the scarlet Hells of the Stygian Set-worshippers,' rumbled Conan, 'is a galley doing out here? We must be fairly close to land. No skipper with all his wits would sail far out into the Western Ocean in such a craft. If the long swells didn't swamp her, the crew would collapse from lack of food and water and from not having a place to lie down.'
The galley was now closer, so that they could see the sleek lines of her low, sea-green hull. White foam flashed along her sides, and Conan saw the twinkle of sunlight on dripping water from her double bank of oars - a bireme, with a high, curved prow carved of brass into the likeness of a dragon's head. Below this figurehead, level with the waterline, a long, viciously pointed bronze ram, green with verdigris and spotted with barnacles, cut through the waves.
'Hm, that's cursed odd, Amra!' grumbled Sigurd. 'She flies no banner. Well, you said we were to look for oddities.'
Conan shrugged. 'What's that painted on her bow?'
Sigurd peered. 'Looks like a black cloud with a red center, or is it a black starfish ?'
Conan glowered on the strange green galley. 'Well, she's no merchantman but a war galley, with that ram in her stem and double banks of oars. Let's let her pass; she'd give us hard knocks and no loot..,'
Still, he thought, it was strange to find such a ship hovering about these untraveled waters. Could it be that which they sought? Throwing back his gray mane, Conan called out to the watchman on the foretop.
'Ahoy there! Can you make out the marking on her prow?'
'Aye, Captain. Tis a black thing like a devilfish, with a fringe of tentacles around a burning eye—’
Conan's voice rose in a mighty bellow: 'Helmsman! Two points to port; head straight for that galley. All hands on deck! Swords, pikes, and defenses! Stand by to trim sail. Archers, to the forecastle deck, with your gear! Yasunga, make up a boarding party. Hop to it, swabs! Here's the fight you've been spoiling for.'
Sigurd peered at him, baffled. 'What in the name of Mitra?''
'The sign of the Black Kraken, you red dog of Vana-heim! Does that mean naught to you? Stir your befuddled wits!' growled Conan.
Sigurd followed Conan about the poop and halted when the Cimmerian did to let the cabin boy lace him into his coat of mail and settle the horned helmet on his head. The Northman's brow was knotted in thought. Then his frown relaxed, but his face paled.
'Do ye mean,' he said slowly, 'that old tale about the emblem of the Witch Kings of Atlantis ?’
'I do. Now get your cuirass on, before they spill those fat guts of yours all over the deck.'
'Gods of the sea!' said Sigurd, turning slowly away. 'The Kraken of the Atlanteans, that should all have been decently drowned eight thousand years agone . . . Crom, Badb,andlshtar! Canitbe?'
Although she was clearly no merchantman bearing loot, the green galley turned and fled before the Red Lion on the morning wind. On each of her two masts, a high-peaked, triangular sail bloomed and filled with the following breeze. The Red Lion followed close upon her foaming track.
Conan had clambered into the rigging and clung with one bronzed hand while the other shaded his eyes.
'Odd - cursed odd!' he muttered. 'All oars in motion, yet I'm damned for a Stygian if I can see a single oarsman on the benches. She seems bare of fighting men as well; none on her poop or forecastle deck, and not a hand aloft in her rigging.'
He lowered himself to the deck, where Sigurd and the giant black, Yasunga, stood,
'Cursed odd indeed, Amra,' said the old Northerner. 'And look at the cut of her hull! I've never seen such a ship in all me days.'
'Green ship of Hell,' muttered Yasunga in his deep, musical bass. 'Ship of ghosts, Amra!’
'Belay that!' barked Conan. 'Ship of Hell or ship of earth, she's running free as if she bore the Empress of Khitai and all her treasure! Look at that stem slice the swells!' He raised his voice. 'Milo! Hoist the raffee tops'l! And if you get the lines fouled I'll skin you.' He spoke to Sigurd and Yasunga again: 'She's fast, with both oars and sails; but with our greater spread of sail we may run her down yet. Wherever she's from, she's in a hurry to shake us off her tail!'