Conan The Road of Kings

One The Dancing Floor The morning sun was brighttoo bright for eyes that had looked upon no light save the torches of the prison guards for days unnumbered. A gray morning would have been kinder, but this was not a morning for kindness. The line of condemned prisoners pressed their eyes shut against the painful glare, stumbled blindly forward to the waiting scaffold. By the time they had crossed the prison yard, they were able to see the dangling nooses and the exuberant mob of onlookers. Conan squinted toward the gibbet, a black line against the climbing sun, seven coils of hemp trailing like sooty cobweb from the span overhead. To his nostrils came the acrid sweetness of carrionwafted from the rotting corpses of last week's condemned criminals, left to swing above the scaffold until seven new partners were brought to dance with death. It melded with the sweaty stench of the crowd's anticipation. A halbard spike dug into his back. "Get on there, ravenbait!" growled one of the prison guards. Conan snarled an obscenity and shuffled forward. Unkempt and unshaven, hobbled by the heavy chains that shackled his wrists and ankles, the Cimmerian nonetheless walked without a limp. A month in Kordava's dungeons had seen his wounds slowly heal, although that was due far more to his savage vitality than to any ministrations of his warders. That same vitality had brought him through the degradation of his captivity with spirit unbroken, head unbowed. like a captured wild thing, Conan had licked his wounds and awaited his chance to break free of his cage. Stealthily, so that the rasp should not alert his guards, he had crouched throughout the night hours rubbing the links of his fetters one against the other, scraping them against the stone, striving to break free of the heavy chains that shackled hand and foot. Once free of his chains, there remained the iron bars of his cell, the vigilant guards beyondthese must be dealt with in their time. Conan only asked for a chance to win free, to avenge himself upon his captorsany chance, however slim. That chance had never come. Now, even as he and his fellow prisoners walked to the gibbet, the Cimmerian's angry gaze studied the crowded square, while his brain searched desperately for some last instant means to cheat the hangman. The prison yardthe Dancing Floor, they called it here in Kordavawas rank with jostling humanity on this, the morning of market day. Each week they streamed into Zingara's capital city from the outlying towns and villages, to fill the marketplace with their wares and their cries: produce from the inland farms, merchandise from the city guilds, fish and exotic goods from the Western Ocean. What better way to add zest to a day of bargaining than the free spectacle of an execution on the Dancing Floor? An undulating sea of massed bodies, peering facesall eyes turned upon the seven doomed men who trudged through their press and toward the scaffold. Seven men, seemingly no different from the hundreds of their fellows who had come to enjoy their final moments. Seven to dance for them. The crowd was not hostile, but neither was it sympathetic. Its mood was one of expectancy, of impatience for the show to begin. The beast would not lift its thousand arms to wrest the condemned from their fate; if at all, it would howl in anger should its anticipated enjoyment be denied it. Moving throughout the milling throng, peddlers and mountebanks hawked their wares. Less open in their larceny, thieves and cutpurses prowled like wary jackals. Portable braziers spat fumes from grilling skewers of meat and vegetablesreminding Conan that he had not eaten since the day before. "We don't waste good food on gallowsbait!" a warder had sWagner, Karl Edward is the author of 'Conan The Road of Kings' with ISBN 9780765340207 and ISBN 0765340208.