The Hyborian Age | Page 7

calculated to seriously regard
teachings which bade him forgive his enemy and abandon the warpath
for the ways of honest drudgery. It has been said that he lacked artistic
sense; his whole nature led to war and slaughter. When the priest talked
of the glories of the civilized nations, his dark- skinned listeners were
intent, not on the ideals of his religion, but on the loot which he
unconsciously described in the narration of rich cities and shining lands.
When he told how Mitra aided certain kings to overcome their enemies,
they paid scant heed to the miracles of Mitra, but they hung on the
description of battle-lines, mounted knights, and maneuvers of archers
and spearmen. They harkened with keen dark eyes and inscrutable
countenances, and they went their ways without comment, and heeded
with flattering intent-ness his instructions as to the working of iron, and
kindred arts.
Before his coming they had filched steel weapons and armor from the
Bossonians and Zingarans, or had hammered out their own crude arms
from copper and bronze. Now a new world opened to them, and the
clang of sledges re-echoed throughout the land. And Gorm, by virtue of
this new craft, began to assert his dominance over other clans, partly by
war, partly by craft and diplomacy, in which latter art he excelled all
other barbarians.
Picts now came and went freely into Aquilonia, under safe-conduct,
and they returned with more information as to armor-forging and
sword- making. More, they entered Aquilonia's mercenary armies, to
the unspeakable disgust of the sturdy Bossonians. Aquilonia's kings
toyed with the idea of playing the Picts against the Cimmerians, and
possibly thus destroying both menaces, but they were too busy with
their policies of aggression in the south and east to pay much heed to
the vaguely known lands of the west, from which more and more
stocky warriors swarmed to take service among the mercenaries.

These warriors, their service completed, went back to their wilderness
with good ideas of civilized warfare, and that contempt for civilization
which arises from familiarity with it. Drums began to beat in the hills,
gathering-fires smoked on the heights, and savage sword-makers
hammered their steel on a thousand anvils. By intrigues and forays too
numerous and devious to enumerate, Gorm became chief of chiefs, the
nearest approach to a king the Picts had had in thousands of years. He
had waited long; he was past middle age. But now he moved against
the frontiers, not in trade, but in war.
Arus saw his mistake too late; he had not touched the soul of the pagan,
in which lurked the hard fierceness of all the ages. His persuasive
eloquence had not caused a ripple in the Pictish conscience. Gorm wore
a corselet of silvered mail now, instead of the tiger-skin, but underneath
he was unchanged--the everlasting barbarian, unmoved by theology or
philosophy, his instincts fixed unerringly on rapine and plunder.
The Picts burst on the Bossonian frontiers with fire and sword, not clad
in tiger-skins and brandishing copper axes as of yore, but in scale-mail,
wielding weapons of keen steel. As for Arus, he was brained by a
drunken Pict, while making a last effort to undo the work he had
unwittingly done. Gorm was not without gratitude; he caused the skull
of the slayer to be set on the top of the priest's cairn. And it is one of
the grim ironies of the universe that the stones which covered Arus's
body should have been adorned with that last touch of barbarity--above
a man to whom violence and blood-vengeance were revolting.
But the newer weapons and mail were not enough to break the lines.
For years the superior armaments and sturdy courage of the Bossonians
held the invaders at bay, aided, when necessary, by imperial Aquilonian
troops. During this time the Hyrkanians came and went, and Zamora
was added to the empire.
Then treachery from an unexpected source broke the Bossonian lines.
Before chronicling this treachery, it might be well to glance briefly at
the Aquilonian empire. Always a rich kingdom, untold wealth had been
rolled in by conquest, and sumptuous splendor had taken the place of
simple and hardy living. But degeneracy had not yet sapped the kings

and the people; though clad in silks and cloth-of-gold, they were still a
vital, virile race. But arrogance was supplanting their former simplicity.
They treated less powerful people with growing contempt, levying
more and more tributes on the conquered. Argos, Zingara, Ophir,
Zamora and the Shemite countries were treated as subjugated provinces,
which was especially galling to the proud Zingarans, who often
revolted, despite savage retaliations.
Koth was practically tributary, being under Aquilonia's 'protection'
against the Hyrkanians. But Nemedia the western empire had never
been able to subdue, although the latter's triumphs were