The Hyborian Age | Page 9

a great chief,
who came riding from the very shores of the eastern ocean. With no
Aquilonian armies to oppose them, they were invincible. They swept
over and subjugated Brythunia, and devastated southern Hyperborea,
and Corinthia. They swept into the Cimmerian hills, driving the
black-haired barbarians before them, but among the hills, where cavalry
was less effectual, the Cimmerians turned on them, and only a
disorderly retreat, at the end of a whole day of bloody fighting, saved
the Hyrkanian hosts from complete annihilation.
While these events had been transpiring, the kingdoms of Shem had
conquered their ancient master, Koth, and had been defeated in an
attempted invasion of Stygia. But scarcely had they completed their
degradation of Koth, when they were overrun by the Hyrkanians, and
found themselves subjugated by sterner masters than the Hyborians had
ever been. Meanwhile the Picts had made themselves complete masters
of Aquilonia, practically blotting out the inhabitants. They had broken
over the borders of Zingara, and thousands of Zingarans, fleeing the

slaughter into Argos, threw themselves on the mercy of the westward-
sweeping Hyrkanians, who settled them in Zamora as subjects. Behind
them as they fled, Argos was enveloped in the flame and slaughter of
Pictish conquest, and the slayers swept into Ophir and clashed with the
westward-riding Hyrkanians. The latter, after their conquest of Shem,
had overthrown a Stygian army at the Nilus and over-run the country as
far south as the black kingdom of Amazon, of whose people they
brought back thousands as captives, settling them among the Shemites.
Possibly they would have completed their conquests in Stygia, adding
it to their widening empire, but for the fierce thrusts of the Picts against
their western conquests.
Nemedia, unconquerable by Hyborians, reeled between the riders of the
east and the swordsmen of the west, when a tribe of AEsir, wandering
down from their snowy lands, came into the kingdom, and were
engaged as mercenaries; they proved such able warriors that they not
only beat off the Hyrkanians, but halted the eastward advance of the
Picts.
The world at that time presents some such picture: a vast Pictish empire,
wild, rude and barbaric, stretches from the coasts of Vanaheim in the
north to the southern-most shores of Zingara. It stretches east to include
all Aquilonia except Gunder-land, the northern-most province, which,
as a separate kingdom in the hills, survived the fall of the empire, and
still maintains its independence. The Pictish empire also includes Argos,
Ophir, the western part of Koth, and the western-most lands of Shem.
Opposed to this barbaric empire is the empire of the Hyrkanians, of
which the northern boundaries are the ravaged lines of Hyperborea, and
the southern, the deserts south of the lands of Shem. Zamora, Brythunia,
the Border Kingdom, Corinthia, most of Koth, and all the eastern lands
of Shem are included in this empire. The borders of Cimmeria are
intact; neither Pict nor Hyrkanian has been able to subdue these warlike
barbarians. Nemedia, dominated by the AEsir mercenaries, resists all
invasions. In the north Nordheim, Cimmeria and Nemedia separate the
conquering races, but in the south, Koth has become a battle-ground
where Picts and Hyrkanians war incessantly. Sometimes the eastern
warriors expel the barbarians from the kingdom entirely; again the

plains and cities are in the hands of the western invaders. In the far
south, Stygia, shaken by the Hyrkanian invasion, is being encroached
upon by the great black kingdoms. And in the far north, the Nordic
tribes are restless, warring continually with the Cimmerians, and
sweeping the Hyperborean frontiers.
Gorm was slain by Hialmar, a chief of the Nemedian ALsir. He was a
very old man, nearly a hundred years old. In the seventy-five years
which had elapsed since he first heard the tale of empires from the lips
of Arus--a long time in the life of a man, but a brief space in the tale of
nations--he had welded an empire from straying savage clans, he had
overthrown a civilization. He who had been born in a mud-walled,
wattle-roofed hut, in his old age sat on golden thrones, and gnawed
joints of beef presented to him on golden dishes by naked slave-girls
who were the daughters of kings. Conquest and the acquiring of wealth
altered not the Pict; out of the ruins of the crushed civilization no new
culture arose phoenix-like. The dark hands which shattered the artistic
glories of the conquered never tried to copy them. Though he sat
among the glittering ruins of shattered palaces and clad his hard body
in the silks of vanquished kings, the Pict remained the eternal barbarian,
ferocious, elemental, interested only in the naked primal principles of
life, unchanging, unerring in his instincts which were all for war and
plunder, and in which arts and the cultured progress of