EXTRACTS: The Complete Conan of Cimmeria Volume 3 © The Book Palace (416 PAGES in Full edition)

Wolves Beyond the Border Draft A C HAPTER 1 It was the mutter of a drum that awakened me. I lay still amongst the brush where I had taken refuge, straining my ears to locate it, for such sounds are illusive in the deep forest. In the dense woods about me there was no sound. Above me the tangled vines and brambles bent close to form a massed roof, and above them there loomed the higher, gloomier arch of the branches of the great trees. Not a star shone through that leafy vault. Low-hanging clouds seemed to press down upon the very tree-tops. There was no moon. The night was dark as a witch’s hate. The better for me. If I could not see my enemies, neither could they see me. But the whisper of that ominous drum stole through the night: thrum! thrum! thrum!: a steady monotone that seemed to hint at grisly secrets. I could not mistake the sound. Only one drum in the world makes just that deep, menacing, sullen thunder: the war-drum of the Picts, those wild painted savages who haunt the Wilderness beyond the borders of the Westermarck. And I was beyond that border, alone, and concealed in a brambly covert in the midst of the great forest where those naked fiends have reigned since Time’s earliest dawns. Now I located the sound; the drum was beating southwestward of my position, and I believed at no great distance. Quickly I girt my belt closer, settled war-axe and knife in their beaded sheaths, strung my heavy bow and saw that my buckskin quiver of arrows was in place at my left hip – groping with my fingers in the utter darkness – and then I crawled from the thicket and went warily in the direction of the drum. That it personally concerned me I did not believe. If the forest-men had discovered me, their discovery would have been announced by a sudden knife in my throat, not by a drum beating in the distance. But the throb of a war-drum had a significance no forest-runner could ignore. Its sullen pulsing was a warning and a threat, a promise of doom for those white-skinned invaders whose lonely cabins and axe-marked clearings menaced the immemorial solitude of the wilderness. It meant fire and death and torture, flaming arrows dropping like falling stars through the midnight sky, and the dripping axe crunching through skulls of men and women and children. So through the blackness of the nighted forest I went, feeling my way delicately among the mighty boles, sometimes creeping on hands and knees, and now and then my heart in my throat when a creeper brushed across my face or groping hand. For there are huge serpents in that forest which sometimes hang by their tails from 287