Max Allan Collins Read online

  Max Allan Collins

  The King

  "With the noble poise of his handsome head upon those broad shoulders, and the fire of life and intelligence of those fine, clear eyes, he might readily have typified some demi-god of a wild and warlike bygone people."

  —Edgar Rice Burroughs

  SNOW BEAST

  L

  ord Memnon's outposts stretched from the desert to the snowpacked mountain ranges that marked the edge of the known world. Along the periphery of that craggy border, where winter winds whistled and ice embraced the bare branches of trees, a log fortress played home to a tribe of fierce warriors aligned with the great warlord. These men would one day be known as Copts; in these ancient times they were known only as murderers.

  Their stronghold—a formidable, ominous land­mark of barbarian-style civilization in the stark land­scape—was a windowless three floors where warriors plotted pillage, tortured the occasional pris­oner and even, between atrocities, partook of savage revelries.

  On this frigid afternoon, fires roared within the rustic walls and so did egos, as these bad men consumed good wine and pawed at the voluptuous har­lots who traveled from camp to camp—hard, soft beauties used to such vile-smelling, rat's-nest-bearded warriors as these, furs flung aside to reveal battle-scarred cuirasses. Here and there, spears, swords, and scimitars rested against rough-hewn ta­bles and log walls; now and then a fight broke out among the scruffy soldiers, over a woman or a spoil of war or just a he one of them had told that had gone down poorly, like a chunk of spoiled venison.

  Outside, in the howling, ice-flecked wind, one un­lucky warrior had been chosen to guard the only door on that side of the massive structure. Though he was only a single man, this was nonetheless a massive, intimidating guard, wearing the red turban of Memnon's guards, his beard and furs caked with ice, his face seemingly frozen in a vicious, ill-tempered expression.

  In reality, that expression had less to do with his temper than with his frustration at having been as­signed guard duty during a spree like the one going on within those timber walls. Now and then—as the squeals of women and the bellows of men indicated everyone having a fine time (except, of course, a poor bastard assigned guard duty in the bitter cold), he would turn toward the building, gaze longingly if angrily at the door, and then turn his eyes back to the barren vista where (it seemed to him) no fool was likely to show himself.

  Shrill feminine laughter pulled the guard's eyes toward that door once again, and he shook his head, cranky with the thought of three more hours of sen­try duty to stand in this cold, returning his perhaps less than watchful gaze to where it belonged ...

  ... just in time to receive a metal throwing star, which had come whirring, whirling toward him, to slam deadly deep into his forehead, between his eyes. His last action was to cross those eyes, to try to see what bug had stung him; but death took him before any cognizance could form.

  The guard keeled over and hands reached from a nearby snowbank to yank him to a waiting grave of white.

  Inside the fortress, the partying warriors knew nothing of this intrusion; they knew only of wenches doing belly dances—sometimes on the laps of the warriors—and food being gobbled and wine guz­zled, as the reflection of flames painted the brown walls a flickering orange.

  Right now a fight had erupted at one table, and— in true fashion for warriors of such high ethics— three of them were attacking one. The argument seemed to be over a woman—or was it over that platter of mutton? Hard to tell, when such a fine time was being had by all.

  Well, perhaps not by all: outside the fortress, an­other huge guard, also denied this party, traipsed through the snow, where no footprints or marks other than his own could be seen. Grumbling at pull­ing such duty during a feast, the bearded guard came to a stop—had he heard something, over the whistle of wind through dead vegetation?

  That was as far as the guard got with his thought process, before a bear-like claw shot up out of the snowbank between the warrior's legs and yanked him down by his ... well, for decorum's sake, we will merely figure that he was dragged down under the snow, where he vanished in a flurry of punches and exploding powdery white, bones snapping and cracking, before a deathly still ensued.

  No one was around to see the huge, white crea­ture rise up from out of the snow. Had anyone on the periphery witnessed this, however, the impres­sion would have been that a Yeti had just snagged its prey. The Yeti—that half ape, half human crea­ture some called the Abominable Snowman—was thought to be legendary by many; a few knew these creatures actually existed. One of those few was an Akkadian warrior called Mathayus, who had himself killed one.

  In fact, the skin of that slain Yeti was the one Mathayus was wearing right now, a cape over his bare, bronzed chest, his massively muscled legs in leather breeches. Dark-eyed, with the heroic features of a carved statue, Mathayus breathed steam, mus­cles rippling; he might—for all his handsomeness— have been an evil beast. He was not; he is instead the hero of our tale.

  And he had come to this terrible place to rescue a brother Akkadian; for though he was as fearsome as any warrior in those days, Mathayus had the heart of a king—noble, compassionate, yet resolute.

  Within the fortress, the captain of this garrison—a monolith among these monstrous men—rose from the head of the main table and stepped in front of the massive stone fireplace whose flames licked as if they were as greedy as the reveling soldiers.

  His voice was an arrogant growl. "We have killed Babylonians!"

  Well-remembering, the crowd responded with drunken, enthusiastic glee.

  "We have killed Mesopotamians!" their leader re­minded them.

  And again they responded with brutal gaiety.

  "But.. . never before have we had the uncom­mon pleasure of killing an Akkadian."

  The captain gestured to their "guest": an Akka­dian—leanly muscular with a stoic, weathered face, his battle-scarred chest heaving—strapped spread-eagle on a cross beam. Almost smugly unflinching, the Akkadian—his name was Jesup—glared at his hosts with what might have been pity.

  "Let me go," Jesup said, "or face a wrath from which none of you shall survive."

  The disheveled warriors merely smiled at this, though the wenches—who had been around battle and strife as long as the soldiers—stared at the Ak­kadian with respectful fear.

  "You face a ruthless fury," Jesup warned them, as stern as a displeased parent, "... relentless . . . merciless ... such as even the gods would dare not provoke."

  The captain grunted a laugh. "For a man about to die ... slowly .. . you're awfully damned full of yourself."

  Now the drunken audience did dare to laugh— not the women, though, who were glancing about the chamber for a corner to hide in.

  "Oh," Jesup said, apparently amused, looking the captain square in the eyes, "I wasn't talking about me."

  The soldiers at the tables only laughed all the more, and even the women joined in, albeit ner­vously; but as their leader held the gaze of his pris­oner, the captain felt a sudden chill that had nothing to do with winter.

  Outside, another of the massive bearded sentries came up behind one of his brother soldiers, a fellow named Fydor, relieving himself, making yellow de­signs in the show.

  "Fydor! Why the hell have you left your post?"

  The guard grabbed Fydor by a shoulder and spun him around—only it wasn't Fydor after all.

  The Akkadian intruder had abandoned his Yeti cape for the furs of the sentry he'd killed—the late Fydor—and right now he was facing another of those guards, and rather rudely sending a stream of steaming urine at the man's legs.

  The put-upon, peed-upon guard reflexively looked down at his breeches, giving Mathayus just the moment he
needed to head-butt the bastard into unconsciousness. The crack of it echoed off the sur­rounding mountains like small thunder.

  The guard dropped into the snow like the dead weight he was, and Mathayus returned to his current mission—that is, finishing the piss he was taking. A man could not go into battle, after all, with any dis­tractions.

  Within the log fortress, the captain was removing from the flames of the fireplace his scimitar, which he had heated up until the steel glowed a pulsing red. Grasping the scimitar's hilt, the captain fought his growing discomfort with some braggadocio, slic­ing the air all around Jesup, tauntingly.

  "Which limb do I take first?" the captain said, not so much to the Akkadian as to the crowd, like a musician soliciting requests.

  "The right leg!" one drunken warrior cried.

  "The left!" yelled another.

  Others seemed to prefer the arms, with prefer­ences running (not surprisingly) to the right or the left.

  Throughout all of this, the prisoner remained un­moved. The captain, for all his boasting before his men, was wondering: What does the Akkadian know that we don't?

  Outside, another guard wore a pensive expres­sion, as if he too were pondering that question; this was, however, an illusion, as—despite his wide-open eyes—the man was quite dead, propped up to appear to still be on guard, despite the spear of an icicle stuck into the side of his turban, a little blood around the entry, frozen and black now.

  The man who had accomplished this, of course, was Mathayus, in a hooded cloak, who at the moment was climbing an exterior wall of the timber citadel, two ropes dragging behind him tied to a huge boulder that the Akkadian towed behind him. The weight of the boulder made the warrior's feat all the more difficult, as—two floors up now—he grasped for purchase between logs.

  At that moment, the spread-eagled Jesup was watching the captain approach him with that red-hot scimitar. Soon its sizzling blade was just under the prisoner's chin. The captain flashed rotten teeth in a sadistic smile, as if to say, "I don't fear you or your big talk."

  Jesup merely returned the smile.

  And said, "Maybe the gods will have pity on you ... because my brother will not."

  The captain tried to laugh at that, through his fetid smile; but the laugh caught in his throat—there was something deadly serious in the Akkadian's words that told the warrior this was no boast. And it was not.

  For on the roof, at that very moment, Mathayus sat on the lip of the black-billowing chimney; in his hands, the boulder was held high over his head, as if he were trying to impress small children with a strongman stunt.

  But it was not children he sought to impress— however childish the minds of these enemy warriors might be.

  Taking a deep breath, Mathayus scooted forward and dropped down into the chimney, still holding that massive stone over his head, so that as he disappeared down, the boulder stayed behind, and plugged up the chimney, blocking it until only the tiniest wips of smoke found escape.

  Almost immediately within the chamber below, thick black smoke began to plume outward from the fireplace. The captain forgot his prisoner, for the moment, and with everyone else in the room turned his attention to the massive stone fireplace and the gathering fumes.

  Despite the dark acrid clouds already swarming to engulf the room, the captain bravely stepped for­ward, toward the threat, and when the arrow came streaking out from the billowing smoke, it was as if the captain had sought the death that now hit him so hard he was hurled like a snowball across the room.

  Jesup smiled; the smoke smelled wonderful to him. He enjoyed the view from his place of honor, as three more warriors—standing at a counter drink­ing wine—were thrust off their feet by arrows from the fireplace, the smoke consuming air like ink in water.

  The other warriors were on their feet, drawing their swords—if they wore them—or scrambling for them, if the weapons had been resting somewhere. The women froze, all thought of finding hiding places banished out of fear.

  A quartet of warriors bravely charged into the blackness of the smoke, screaming war cries that got cut off in the clattering clash of steel on steel. Then the warriors stumbled out of the dark fumes; Jesup smiled wider, the wenches screamed, as the four men—headless!—pitched to the rough floor where blood spilled from their necks like knocked-over wine bottles.

  The other warriors—while brave—were under­standably unnerved by this, and in their moment of hesitation, Mathayus—his muscular frame cloaked in soot—stepped out of the puffing blackness, a massive bow in one hand, scimitar in the other. With the orangeness of flames glowing through the dark smoke, he was wreathed in a hellish aura, his pant-legs on fire, hood too, a demonic vision for these superstitituous fools to consider, along with the headless evidence of their fellow soldiers scattered on the floor before them.

  Out of his soot-covered face came wide white eyes and a wider white smile—seemingly crazed— and he said, "I... am ... death!"

  That was all it took.

  The rest of the warriors, the wenches too, went running for the door, the effect almost comic as they crawled over each other, squeezing out the passage. Few of them bothered grabbing their furs, and ran willingly into the freezing wilderness.

  "Hey!" Jesup said, struggling at his bindings. "Don't let them go!"

  Mathayus, patting out the flames on his legs and hood, ignored this.

  "I promised you'd kill them all," Jesup told him. "Don't make a damned liar out of me!"

  Mathayus sighed, and snarled in mock disgust. "Lucky for you we share the same mother."

  And the soot-covered Akkadian cut his brother's bonds.

  Soon they were on horseback with the fortress in flames at their back—the logs burnt well. Jesup, poised to gallop to freedom, glanced at his brother, who had hesitated for some reason, those dark, piercing eyes studying the sky.

  "What is it?" Jesup asked.

  Slowly scanning the faded blue above, Mathayus said, softly, "I feel.. . like I am being ... watched."

  "Well, if you are," Jesup said, "perhaps we should leave."

  Mathayus shrugged, cracked the reins, and they pulled away, dragging behind them a wooden sleigh-like apparatus piled with dead warriors. They were mercenaries, after all, and had a bounty to col­lect.

  And far away, in the fabled city of Gomorrah, a sorcerer in a winged collar, lost in a vision, indeed watched the Akkadian warrior called Mathayus.

  Watched, and waited.

  T

  oday, many centuries after our tale was lived, the Middle East remains a cauldron of hate, fear and turmoil. How little has changed: before the civilizing time of the Pharaohs, centuries prior to Genghis Khan cutting his bloody swath, long preceding the conquests of Alexander, these barren lands some­how inspired conflict, a wasteland where a score of warring tribes sought dominion.

  Imagine, then, a golden papyrus map of that re­gion—at that ancient time, three thousand years be­fore Christ, such a map would depict the entire known world—encompassing the fabulous storied kingdoms of Babylon, Mesopotamia and those most infamous of cities, Sodom and Gomorrah. Such realms seem the stuff of legend, yet ancient books of truth—the Bible is but one—say different; these were places as real as the world around us, and just as dangerous.

  Picture now that map stained with blood, and fol­low a glistening red trail of destruction, whose path leaches out, soaking up everything in its way. Look deeper and imagine the hordes of charging horsemen, a horizon lined with archers sending ar­rows streaking into the sky, and multitudes of foot soldiers, marching inexorably onward.

  The warlord who commanded these armies was called "Teacher of Men "—Memnon, in their ancient tongue—but the lessons he taught were strict indeed... how destruction could pave the way for conquest, how death could vanquish one people and make way for another, invading one. Memnon im­parted his wisdom by taking male prisoners only to put them to death, to "liberate" females for purpose of ravishment and slavery... the sword and c
hains were his teaching tools.

  The populace all across those bleak lands took these lessons to heart—men of every race and color and creed gathered their wives and children and fled their homes, running in panic, in terror, and some­times escaping. Sometimes. Other men stayed to fight, as soldiers, in defense of their homes, their land... and were defeated.

  And those soldiers who did not die in battle—and were not officers, earmarked for execution—would line the roadside beyond their burned, looted vil­lage, waiting under a scorching sun for the victors to pronounce sentence. Trembling, terrified, their bravery beaten out of them, they would stand wea­ponless, smoke and flames rising from the ruins to lick the sky, as if hungry for more conquest.

  And among them would move a giant on a snort­ing steed, a human nightmare with a scarred battle-shield of a face, his red turban signaling his allegiance to the invading army.

  His name was Thorak, and he had long since lost count of the men he had killed. And to the van­quished army he would bellow, "Kneel before Lord Memnon!"

  As if presenting an actor on a stage, Thorak would gesture behind him as the warlord himself, astride a regal black Arabian, seemed to materialize among them, clip-clopping through the smoke of combat. Not the brute that his second-in-command was, Lord Memnon—glittering in gold chain mail— looked no less fearsome, a muscular man with carved handsome features, sides of his head shaved, a shock of dark hair riding a fine skull, a beautiful man, yet virile. Around him, some on horseback, some on foot, a phalanx of red-turbaned guards, each man a vicious exemplar of fighting prowess, provided protection; yet somehow Memnon seemed above them ...as if he could fend for himself, and only put up with the armed guard for purposes of ceremony.

  Inevitably, the defeated soldiers would drop to their knees—better to pay obeisance to Lord Mem­non, better to join his fearsome ranks, than to stay here in the charred ruins of a home that was theirs no longer, and douse the land uselessly with their blood.