The Battle of the Burial Mounds

The Battle of the Burial Mounds is the turning-point battle between Conan’s small band and Thulsa Doom’s armed followers. Fought among the tombs of ancient kings beneath the looming Mountain of Power, it converts Conan’s long captivity and pursuit into open resistance: the defenders use the dead landscape itself as a weapon, survive a mounted assault, and break the force sent to reclaim Yasimina. Its culminating duel ends with Rexor’s death, while the appearance of Valeria’s radiant spirit gives the victory an emotional and supernatural dimension.

Causes and Setting

The battle begins at sunset on the wasteland between the ancient burial mounds and the Mountain of Power, the center of Doom’s hidden empire. Conan, Subotai, and the wizard have taken positions of concealment and established defenses on a mound, while Yasimina remains bound to a stele nearby. They understand that the beast-men will attack once darkness covers the plain. The waiting is itself part of the ordeal: the defenders are exhausted by the day’s labor, and the quiet intensifies their awareness that the coming fight will be fought with limited resources against a stronger force.

Yasimina’s presence gives the battle its immediate human stake. She is not merely a captive being guarded by Conan’s party; she is also the priestess of Set and Doom’s intended bride, and her divided allegiance makes her vulnerable to every side. Her chant toward the mountain and setting sun momentarily makes her appear once more as a priestess and leader, despite her ragged condition. That image contrasts with the bound woman whom the approaching riders will treat as property to be recovered or destroyed.

The Mounted Assault

The attack bursts from the failing light when a score of riders materialize like figures from Conan’s nightmares. Their arrival is announced by trampling hooves and clanking armor, and above the standard-bearer rises the familiar banner of two writhing serpents supporting a ragged sun. The riders are faceless beneath ornate helmets, but their allegiance is unmistakable: they are minions of the snake god, advancing with spears and swords and howling beneath the gibbous moon.

The first defense is prepared beneath the ground. As the foremost riders charge, the earth opens under the horses’ hooves, dropping three horsemen and their mounts into a pit lined with spears. One beast-man escapes the trap and limps after his riderless horse, but the attack has already lost its momentum. Other riders leap the barricade or circle around it, forcing the battle onto the mound and preventing the defenses from becoming a complete victory by themselves.

Conan meets the next wave in the open. He steps out from behind a stele so that the attackers can see him, then throws a javelin into one rider and an axe into an armored chest. Another javelin brings down a horse; when its rider charges on foot, an arrow from Subotai pierces the attacker’s eye. A lancer then strikes Conan’s shield and spins him around, but Conan draws the Atlantean Sword and cuts the beast-man’s belly before severing his head with a second blow. The pattern is clear: Doom’s riders possess numbers, horses, and armor, while the defenders answer with terrain, precision, and Conan’s concentrated violence.

Subotai’s archery protects the mound’s weaker points. From behind a grave marker, he kills an advancing rider with an arrow and then drops another horseman as the enemy attempts to wheel downhill. The defeated rider is dragged by his stirrup across the rough ground. The burial field therefore becomes more than scenery: its stones conceal the defenders, its pits break the cavalry charge, and its uneven ground turns retreat into another hazard.

The Wizard and the Collapse of Doom’s Line

The wizard fights below the mound in polished armor, apparently exposed and vulnerable. Conan tries to leave him an avenue of escape, but the old man does not need ordinary protection. When three riders approach, the wizard throws his spear into the chest of the foremost horseman. The horse rears and falls backward, pinning its wounded rider beneath it.

The weapon’s return reveals the wizard’s supernatural power to the enemy. After the spear has struck, its shaft rocks as though pulled by an invisible hand, tears itself free from the dying man, and flies butt-first into the wizard’s waiting palm. The surviving guards lose their nerve and flee. The same magic is used again when Subotai is threatened: after the Hyrkanian is wounded in the calf and pinned by a spear, the wizard’s javelin crosses the darkness and kills the attacker. It then returns to its wielder, while another enemy falls into the stake-filled pit. The battle thus joins practical resistance to occult intervention, making Doom’s forces confront a power that their own master cannot control.

The defenders nevertheless pay for every advance. Conan suffers a wound in his left arm, Subotai loses the use of his leg temporarily, and the attackers continue to press forward after the first traps and volleys. When the beast-men draw off to reform on the level ground, the pause is tactical rather than conclusive. The enemy still has enough strength for a final assault, and one rider remains on the mound with a direct path to Yasimina.

Rexor’s Attack and Valeria’s Intervention

The surviving rider is Rexor, Doom’s lieutenant and the principal embodiment of the enemy’s personal vendetta against Conan. Yasimina recognizes him and believes he has come to free her and take her to the man she loves. She raises her bound wrists, expecting the axe to cut her ropes. Rexor instead aims at her neck. She drops to her knees, and the blade strikes the ancient gravestone, throwing sparks; Subotai’s arrow then clangs harmlessly against Rexor’s helmet. The attempted rescue is exposed as an execution, confirming that Yasimina’s position within Set’s order offers no protection once she has become inconvenient.

After Subotai announces that his last arrow is spent and the wizard climbs the slope with his recovered spear, Conan rushes the lone rider. His spear breaks against Rexor’s armor, and Rexor rides him down. Steel-shod hooves batter Conan, a sword stroke knocks his father’s sword away, and another blow tears off his helmet. Bleeding heavily, Conan can barely rise. Rexor rides away only far enough to turn his horse for a final charge, then reveals his face and savors the prospect of delivering the mortal blow.

At that instant Valeria appears beside Conan in a form of radiant armor. Her blonde hair floats beneath a winged helmet, and her tulwar shines with blue lightning. When Rexor raises his weapon, Valeria’s sword stops his arm and flashes across his unguarded eyes. The vision is not presented as a simple return to bodily life; it is a momentary supernatural presence, followed by a fading glory against the sky. Her earlier declaration that love would bring her back from Hell to fight beside Conan becomes action rather than sentiment. Her intervention restores Conan’s will at the precise moment when physical strength has failed.

Victory and Consequences

Strengthened by the memory of Valeria, Conan reaches Rexor’s horse, pulls the lieutenant from the saddle, and drives the animal into the darkness. Rexor lands on his feet and resumes the fight after his sight recovers. Conan deflects his blows and forces him backward with massive strokes before plunging the two-handed sword into his neck. Rexor remains upright for a moment, a tower of muscle held rigid by armor and momentum, then topples forward and lies still. His death gives the battle its most concrete reversal: the lieutenant who came to execute Yasimina becomes the defeated body among the tombs.

The remaining guards retreat toward the Mountain of Power, and night swallows them. The wizard explains that powerful spirits inhabit the area and fought for Conan, while Conan credits both the old man and Subotai with winning the day. The exchange preserves the battle’s dual nature. It is neither solely a miracle nor solely a feat of arms: preparation, companionship, magic, and Valeria’s love all contribute to the survival of the three defenders.

The immediate victory also prevents Doom from reclaiming Yasimina. When Thulsa Doom appears afterward and tries to persuade her to submit, he uses a viper transformed into a magical arrow against her. Subotai interposes his shield, the missile becomes a snake, and the Hyrkanian hacks it apart. Conan then places himself between Yasimina and Doom. Seeing the Atlantean blade and the barbarian’s determined face, Doom feels fear and rides away after his defeated guards. The battle therefore ends tactically before it ends symbolically: Rexor is dead, Yasimina is protected, and Doom has been forced to retreat, but the final confrontation remains ahead.

Narrative Significance

The battle compresses the larger story’s central oppositions into a single landscape. Doom’s riders arrive beneath a serpent banner and seek victory through numbers, armor, coercion, and the threatened sacrifice of a captive. Conan’s party possesses almost none of those institutional advantages. Their strength lies in chosen loyalty, improvisation, knowledge of terrain, and the refusal to accept the enemy’s definition of power.

The scene also reverses Doom’s doctrine that steel is secondary to the mind that commands it. His followers bring weapons and a rigid hierarchy to the mound, yet traps and courage turn those weapons against them. Conan survives not because his sword acts independently, but because he continues to rise after being disarmed, trampled, and nearly killed. The battle prepares the later beheading of Thulsa Doom by demonstrating that the cult’s spectacle of invulnerability can be broken by a human will reinforced by comradeship and love.

Its imagery gathers the book’s recurring traffic between death and resistance. The burial mounds are monuments to ancient mortality, the pits expose the earth as a hidden grave, and the night threatens to erase both the living and the dead. Yet the same tombs provide cover, weapons, and high ground. Death is everywhere in the setting and in Doom’s ideology, but the battle denies Doom the power to decide who must die. Rexor falls, Yasimina lives, Conan rises, and Valeria’s memory crosses the boundary that Doom treats as absolute.