Conan and the Death Lord of Thanza (6 page)

“We’ll be warmer on the move than sitting and feeling sodden and sorry for ourselves,” Lysinka replied. “Also, for once we can move without fear of being heard by men or scented by beasts.”

“There is that,” Fergis said. He raised both fists, thumbs upward, the band’s salute to their chieftain. Then he turned away to begin the work of routing the laggards out of their blankets.

Many days’ travelling to the south and west of Lysinka’s hill camp, the sun shone on a rocky hillside not far from Shamar. At the foot of the hill lay the camp of the Thanza Rangers, but their work that day lay far above, toward the bare, sun-scorched crest of the hill.

The recruiting notice for the Thanza Rangers had asked for a thousand men. Conan had not as yet concerned himself with counting heads, but he would not have wagered a puddle of spilt beer that the camp held more than two hundred.

At least nine out of ten of these were more or less fit to fight. Or at least they would be, by the time Tharmis Rog was done with them.

“Fighters or corpses, that’s what you’ll be,” the master-at-arms had told the first men into the camp, and each new band as they came. “If you won’t shape yourself aright, you’ll die in the Thanzas. Die hard, too, and slow.

“If / kill you here, though, at least it’ll be quick and your bones will lie where the gods can find them. Unless you desert, and if I catch you after that, you’ll wish the bandits had flayed you alive or thrown you into a pit of quillpigs.

“Do you understand, you miserable whoresons?” Conan remembered a muttered chorus of assent. Then Tharmis Rog had bellowed:

“Was that men talking or piglets squealing? When I ask a question, I want to hear the answer.”

The next time and ever since, the “Yes” and the “Aye” had raised echoes.

Rog himself was raising echoes today, as he taught the Thanza Rangers to climb hills in something that one could almost call a line of battle. Conan did not think much of his teaching, but then Rog was plainly enough no hillman.

From his position well uphill from most of the line, Conan could see the better part of his comrades making heavy weather of the climb. Some had already dropped parts of their loads—and their hides would smoke for that, when Rog saw it. The master-at-arms was old enough to be grandfather to some of the recruits, but could best any two of them without working up a sweat.

The Cimmerian was the one exception to that rule. Thus far, the two big men had carefully avoided facing one another. This could not last forever, but both knew that when the fight did come what little discipline the Thanza Rangers had might be shaken to its shallow roots.

It would have helped had they possessed a more seasoned captain or at least one who remained in the camp. But “recruiting duty” kept Klarnides in Shamar, close to its comforts and far from the camp where people were beginning to remark on his absence. There were also rumours of other captains being appointed to the Rangers, even less war-seasoned than Klarnides.

This was no great matter to Conan. It there were no ways for soldiers to work around fumbling or foolish captains, he would have been dead 'half a dozen times over. Klarnides was at worst a louse in one’s breeches. Tharmis Rog might prove a wild boar.

Certainly he sounded like one now. He was bellowing curses to one slight youth, who looked even less fitted for soldiering than Klarnides.

“By Erlik’s brazen tool! Do I have to come up there and run my sword all the way up to your teeth before you climb?” And much more in like vein.

Conan strode back and forth across the slope with a tollman’s confidence, pointing out easy and hard ground whenever he could whisper, sometimes only using a gesture or his sword. His evident experience with soldiering had given him an under-captaincy with command over thirty men, but Rog did not care to see Conan dealing with anyone beyond that thirty.

Today, the Cimmerian would have gladly fed Rog and what he cared for to a Stygian temple serpent. The master-at-arms was using a loud voice in place of teaching a few simple tricks for climbing hills, tricks that Conan had known as soon as he could walk. Much more of this and men were going to be falling, rolling, and reaching the bottom of the hill in such condition that it would need a god, not a master-at-arms, to put them on their feet again.

As that thought passed through Conan’s mind, the slight youth finally lost his footing. He reeled backward, one foot waving in the air, hands clawing frantically at emptiness. His waving foot struck a boulder—and the boulder, lightly seated in the hard ground, came loose.

Conan plunged down the slope as if his feet had grown wings. With one hand he clutched the youth’s hand, as he slammed the other hard against the boulder. It was too heavy for even the Cimmerian’s giant strength to hold single-handed, but he delayed its fall long enough.

Only when the youth was safely out of the boulder’s path did Conan let it go. It thundered down the hill, striking sparks from other rocks as it flew, trailing a comet’s tail of dust and pebbles, crushing bushes as if they were blades of grass, and finally ending not a spear’s length from Tharmis Rog.

Rog’s bellow made all that had gone before it seem like a hush. “Sellus! Bring your arse down here at once, if you know what’s good for you!”

Conan looked about him, as if he thought the voice was coming from the ground or the sky. One man within easy hearing range whispered, “Best do it, Northerner. Rog’s a bad man to cross.”

“And my ears are bad, when people tell me what’s good for me,” Conan replied. Rog’s voice had the note of a man who has made up his mind to settle a matter for once and for all.

Then the Cimmerian began his descent. He started slowly, almost ambling until Rog let out another roar, this time laced with such splendid curses that Conan stopped to listen in admiration. He would have to remember some of those ripe Aquilonian phrases if he ever needed to drill Aquilonian street sweepings into soldiers.

For now, what he needed was to speak' to Rog before the man worked himself into such a rage that the fight would come at once, in front of all the men.

Discipline might survive a private battle. It would hardly survive Rog’s public humiliation.

Also, while Conan did not doubt for a moment the outcome of the fight, he doubted that he could win without word of it being noised about in Shamar. Then others might come seeking Ophirean gold, before the Thanza Rangers marched out of Shamar to some place where Conan could vanish from their ranks without anyone the wiser.

So Conan did not finish his descent at his earlier amble. He came down the rest of the way at a dead run, slanting back and forth across the slope to avoid building up too much speed, leaping over boulders, and reaching the level at a pace that would have done I credit to an antelope.

He dashed up to Rog, threw the man a mocking parody of the Aquilonian salute, and snapped:

“Sellus the Northerner reporting as ordered, Master-at-Arms!”

One of Rog’s white-knuckled hands was on the hilt of his sword. The other was balled into a fist. His eyes I told of his being ready to wield one weapon or the other against the Cimmerian if the other man so much as blinked.

Instead, he said, in a voice shaking with forced moderation:

“Was that boulder an accident?”

Conan replied, with a wintry smile, “Will anything I say matter to you?”

“Are you saying that I’m ready to start a fight?”

“If you’re ready to call me a liar, and in front of the men, are you not?”

The phrase “in front of the men” seemed to reach through Rog’s fury to touch his soldierly good sense. “We’d best meet tonight quietly, to see who is lying,” he said, in a voice that no longer shook with rage.

“I can meet at your pleasure,” Conan said. “That little stretch of meadow north of the oak grove?”

“Fair enough,” Rog said, and started to turn away. Then he stopped, and without facing the Cimmerian, said, “Oh, and I hadn’t planned on killing you.”

“Accidents can happen, but I take your meaning. I thought much the same.”

Like two wolves who have given and accepted a challenge, the two big men turned away from each other and walked off to rejoin their soldiers.

* * *

Lysinka knew when it reached her that the message spoke the truth about human tracks. Scouting for the band were the twins known only as the Village Brothers. They might have many reasons for not wishing their names known in the band, but they had also given Lysinka any number of reasons for being glad to have them.

They hardly ever missed the track of humans or the spoor of any natural beast. When commanded to conceal Lysinka’s trail, they used equal skill to remove the slightest trace of the band’s passage. If they said humans had passed this way, Lysinka knew her band was no longer alone in the pines at the foot of a crag-studded hill with no name.

Hand signals brought her comrades to alertness, and they needed no further orders to array themselves to meet an attack from any direction. Any human attack, at least—Lysinka had thrice rejected the services of those who claimed mastery of magic, for she distrusted all such. Yet for two days this forest had held the smell of a place where there might lurk dangers against which steel would contend in vain.

The rain covered even the slight noise the woods-wise bandits made in arraying themselves. When a little while had passed and no one had come against them, Lysinka made another signal. The band was to move on, with more scouts thrown out to the flanks, and all weapons ready.

Lysinka’s band stalked forward through the dripping forest with the silent intent of wolves on the hunt. Little rain fell on them through the canopy of interwoven branches. From time to time thunder rolled above the treetops, echoing off the cliffs, which they had only glimpsed briefly through the trees.

After a further while spent in this stalking, muscles cramped and necks stiffened with the constant struggle to look in all directions at once. Lysinka felt an urge to sneeze, and saw Fergis nearly strangle himself in a desperate effort to silence a cough.

The last thing the chieftain had expected was to find a clearing flanking the trail. In that clearing stood a black-clad man, arms folded across his broad chest.

“Welcome to my lordship of Thanza, Lysinka of Mertyos.”

Lysinka was so flustered by the warmth and formality of the greeting that she replied in a much less amiable tone.

“If Thanza was ever a lordship, its lords have been extinct for more centuries than you could count without taking off your boots. Who are you to claim it?”

“One who could claim much more, but is content with Thanza.” Then he raised one hand, palm outward.

“The tree to her left. The big knothole.”

Wsssshttt. The shaft from a Bossonian longbow quivered in a fir tree an arm’s length to Lysinka’s left. It had split a reddish-brown knothole at about the height of her breasts.

The message was plain. My archers hold your life in their hands.

Lysinka did not know if her own gesture would be her last. She was certain that such a threat could not go unanswered.

She coughed loudly—and an arrow sprouted from the turf just to the right of the man. Instead of a knothole, this shaft split a round, pale-yellow mushroom.

The man’s eyebrows rose. They were bushy and more grey than black. Then he smiled. Lysinka had once seen an otter baring its teeth just so, before it bit a crayfish in half.

“Well spoken,” he said. Then he threw the hood back from his head and shook out his beard. His beard was thick and more black than grey, while his hair was so scant that it was hard to judge its colour. He spoke and stood, however, like a man still in full vigour.

All this told Lysinka nothing whatever about what business he might have with her, and whether she would live to see another sunrise. She forced down her anger. She felt as though she were being dangled over an abyss like a doll in the hand of a petulant child.

The man now thrust his hand into the pouch at his belt. Lysinka forced her own hand away from the hilt of her throwing knife. It would be in the man’s throat before he could complete any treachery, even if she died in the next moment.

Instead, the man drew out a piece of iron. Lysinka looked, then stared. It was unmistakably a piece of iron strapping from the flying chest. She recognized some of the runes, even though the iron now seemed grey and brittle, as if it had been fiercely heated, then swiftly and rudely quenched.

“Ah, I see you recognize this,” the man said.

Lysinka chided herself for being so transparent. She thought she had retained more of the self-command of her younger days, when she had been adept in the intrigues among the concubines.

“Perhaps I do,” she said, inclining her head gracefully. “But I am as a guest to your host. I would not insult you by asking more about it than you are willing to tell, nor accuse you of dark plots merely because you possess something tainted with magic.”

“It has been said that you have the manners of a great lady—when you choose,” the man said with a grin. “Now hear me, Lysinka of Mertyos. I am willing to tell you a great deal about this chest. We both seek it, and neither of us has much hope of finding it without the other’s aid.

“However, I do not propose to tell you here in the presence of your men, in the wild and wet forest. Come with me to my seat”—he jerked a thumb toward the cliff, invisible behind the trees—“and hear of a rare quest.”

“I will come well-guarded,” Lysinka said, testing the man.

“Come with all your band,” was the reply. “I do not fear treachery.”

“Nor do I, but I would be a poor guest if I brought that many. Have you a palace atop the cliff?”

“Perhaps it once deserved the name. Certainly it keeps me and mine warm and dry. If you do not wish to bring all your folk, may I at least send down guest gifts to them?”

Lysinka saw that Fergis was now in sight, but standing so that she could converse with him without the black-clad man seeing her face. The “conversation” was swift, a matter of raising eyebrows, touching fingers to mouth and nose, pulling at cheeks, hair, or beards, and so on.