Conan The Hero (22 page)

He found himself on a jungle trail that dropped steeply through a gap in the ruined wall. The basket-bearers, finally underway with their burdens, blocked the narrow path; Conan bowled them aside, pelting after the two who jogged with the litter between them a dozen paces ahead. The rearmost one heard Conan’s approach and looked back in fear, only to crumple helplessly beneath the Cimmerian’s ravaging sword, letting the foot of the stretcher drop to earth as he fell. When Conan stepped across the blood-streaming body, the passenger reclining on the rude conveyance looked up to him, raising one hand.

The old eyes crinkled without apparent fear; was it possible, even, that the myriad wrinkles of the yellow, ancient face mapped mild amusement? Conan stood, his sword dripping gore on the lush leaves by the trailside, watching the litter dragged pathetically forward by its single, toiling bearer. He made no move, but only stared, trying to decide whether or not an enchantment was being worked on his astonished brain. But it appeared to him that, strangely… it really seemed…

A moment later, the wizard was drawn out of sight in engulfing foliage, while hurried footsteps pounded at Conan’s back; it was the unarmed basket-bearers. Turning, he kicked them aside again and strode up the trail. A racing Hwong confronted him, receiving the point of the yataghan in his throat—a wound no lotus or tourniquet could soothe. Shoving past the gurgling soon-to-be corpse, Conan broke out of the jungle foliage and found Babrak.

His friend was on the trail at the center of a yelling rebel band. They danced furiously around him, hacking and piercing his slender half-armored body with knives and spears even as he rolled lifeless on the torn, bloody earth. Beyond him, a handful of battle-weary Turanians closed in, arriving too late to help. The rebels gave Babrak’s corpse a last kick, then turned to face their live enemies.

The harvest Conan’s blade wrought among them was ripe and red. His howling, tormented fury burned hot enough to sear away any remnant of pain or fatigue. Even so, as he smote and slew, one question scorched his brain, unquenched by blood or wrathful tears: had he been ensorcelled or slyly deceived, or was the wizened, smiling Mojurna really an aged woman?

Night stalked the jungle, crouching like a panther above its frightened prey. The few, rare sounds were hurried scuffs of footsteps, low hails or muttered curses, and the occasional meaty thud of weapon-strokes. Only a faint glimmer of moonlight penetrated the forest canopy, barely enough to reveal the glint of steel or the shiver of a glossy leaf marking the passage of something deadly.

“Troopers, to me! Here, by the water—we go downstream!” Moving three silent paces from where he had spoken, Conan waited, listening warily to the nearby footfalls to judge their intent. The ones he heard behind him sounded friendly, heavy with armor and fatigue; Hwong moved with faint rustlings that would scarcely be audible over the gurgling of the brook.

“Hsst, men! Stay close together, and beware of rebels in our midst! The land levels out here.” Even as he spoke, Conan heard the swish of a weapon swung against some real or imagined lurker on their flank. A moment later, a coughing moan told him someone had died, probably one of their own; the sound was followed by rapid steps and swishing blows as others struck blindly at the attacker.

Conan heard the men’s murmurs and curses as they resumed plodding; his own heart flagged with dismay. A dozen or so survivors, perhaps; surely not more than a score left of the twelvescore he had started with. That meant two hundred deaths like Babrak’s—and for what purpose? He himself had let the battle go to waste! His hand tightened spasmodically on the hilt of his sheathed sword.

“Who comes? Halt, and speak up!”

The hail, accompanied as it was by a flurry of skirmish-sounds and a Hwong war-whoop somewhere in the rear, caused some fugitives to freeze, and others to blunder into them in the dark. But the voice spoke Turanian familiarly, which reassured them all.

“Are you friend or foe?” Conan craned his neck, trying to fix the sources of the various sounds. “Be warned, we are pursued!”

“Turanians, be sure you kill only rebels!” The voice was muffled, as if turned away; then it came more strongly. “Sergeant, lead your troops to the sound of my voice.”

“Aye, watch for us! We are here by the stream!” Groping forward through the brushy gloom, Conan saw flickers of distant torches and heard the shouts of fresh troopers setting out after rebels. His own men jostled and panted close behind him, eager to avoid last-minute death when rescue was in sight. A moment later they faced the sudden, blinding beacon of an unveiled dark-lamp.

“Where are the rest? Is this all?” The gruff voice showed concern as it moved nearer. “Conan, your Venji reserve returned to the fort claiming they could not find you, but I did not believe the dogs! So we came hither, found the rebels, and followed them; we have been killing stray ones for an hour now.”

Conan turned to watch the blood-caked, ghastly faces of his men as they staggered into the light. He felt his voice growling deep in his chest. “We were sore outmanned; the officers must have meant us to die! Someone will pay for this.”

“Whom do you mean, Sergeant?” The gray figure, visible as he set down his light, was Captain Murad, flanked by two veteran troopers. In his free hand he held a blooded yataghan. “If you mean Jefar Sharif, Conan, then let me warn you, it goes much higher than that.”

Conan, helping a wounded trooper climb over a log, regarded the captain grimly. “It was you I meant, Murad—had you not come to aid us. And know, blackguard, you should have come sooner than this!” His pale, blood-smudged stare wavered away from the elder officer. “But thanks for the warning; I will heed it.”

Murad nodded, looking sour and rueful in the lamp’s steady light. “There is evil afoot in Venjipur, too much evil for one man to mend.”

“Aye, sir.” The wounded soldier at Conan’s side spoke up unexpectedly, clutching at his sergeant’s arm. His pale, hollow-eyed face looked close to the brink of death. “But promise one thing, Conan—that when you go to Aghrapur, you will tell them what it is really like here!”

“Curse the benighted Turanian army!” Conan shifted wearily on his bench in the jolting wagon. “Why must the quartermasters assign us sickly horses and a creaking wain, instead of elephants? Two or three long-noses would carry us in good comfort. They’d hardly mind these few paltry wares.” The Cimmerian gestured behind to the wagon’s cargo: a potted dwarf tree, a few bundles of wicker furniture, and some chests of provisions and assorted rarities, most sent northward as gifts for the emperor and his courtiers in Aghrapur. “This Turanian passion for horses in tropic climes must be a physical thing, like a Kothian’s love of sheep!”

“Ah, well,” Juma replied from beside him, “as they say, the expeditionary legion sucks hind teat on a gelded mule!” He shook his head stoically. “Only lately, at great cost in lives, have our fighting officers learned an elephant’s value in battle. It may take years for their usefulness to get through the thick skulls of the supply staff. Count yourself lucky that they haven’t given you an ostrich to ride through this foreign waste.”

Juma’s gesture swept wide enough to take in the populous, irrigated valley about them. The main road north from Venjipur followed the broadest river fork, meandering between curtain-like jungle ridges toward the lofty Colchian Mountains and oft-snowy Kasmar Pass.

Beyond the peaks lay high, arid hinterlands of Turan and Iranistan; the travelers’ way would be grueling until they left their wagon and dray team in the hill fort of Tamrish. There they would board riverboats for a descent down the swift-flowing Ilbars River, to the very dock of the royal palace in Aghrapur.

As yet, however, the riders had not left the Venji heartland. Their road was little more than a grassy dike between flooded rice-swamps, wherein the flow of the stream was dammed again and again, re-used a thousand times before seeping its way wearily to the Gulf of Tarqheba. Each field was tended patiently by a half-dozen or more peasants: men, women, and children stooping bare-legged to their toil beneath wide straw hats. Arising in turn to watch the wagon as it trundled past, they made no obeisance, nor waved any encouragement to their conquerors and protectors; they merely watched in silent resignation.

“Ah, well, we will soon be clear of all this!” Conan swung his gaze over the slouched shoulders of their Venji driver and the sway-backs of his wagon team along the road ahead—to Jefar Sharif, astride his white charger in the midst of the four-horse cavalry guard. “Not every so-called fighting officer is quick of wit either,” Conan observed. Glowering darkly to where jungle slopes pressed down near the road, he added, “Soon we shall escape these endless farm fields and prying eyes, and enter remote, desolate country.”

“You will fight him, then…?” Juma began, only to be silenced by Conan’s abrupt gesture, as the Cimmerian inclined a meaningful nod toward the hunched form of the wagon-driver on the bench in front of them. The shaven-headed Venji had professed to understand, beyond his unintelligible native dialect, only pidgin trade-talk; nevertheless, Conan was understandably reluctant to blurt secrets out before him in Turanian, the one language he held in common with Juma.

“This driver of ours,” the Cimmerian proclaimed at last, “is not a man, but a stinking heap of elephant-flops! The elephant negligently dropped him in his mother’s lap—whereupon she, being an imbecile, thought him a human child and raised him up thus!”

The driver never looked back; his hunched shoulders did not stir, nor did the wrinkles on the back of his bald dome even twitch. It was evident to both passengers that he did not understand Turanian.

“You will challenge Jefar Sharif, then?” Juma glanced warily to the backs of the cavalry riding ahead. “What of his horse-guard?”

“Yes, I will challenge him, the moment there are no more watching peasants to bear the tale. When he refuses, as you know he will, I will shame him and then kill him anyway.” Conan patted his sheathed sword, which was propped on the bench beside him. “The guards are seasoned jungle hands; they will allow a fair duel. If not, I leave them to you.”

“A thousand thanks for your faith in me!” Juma glanced up at the jungled hillside, which encroached ever nearer the river channel and the road. “You are sure, then, it was Jefar Sharif who ordered the fatal mission?”

“Aye. He suborned false scout reports, acting on secret orders from some staff officer named Abolhassan. Captain Murad is a whipped old dog, I know, but he was once a good officer; he would not knowingly throw away Turanian lives.” Conan shook his head, scowling in grim perplexity. “It would seem, truly, that the sole aim of the mission was to have me killed!”

Juma nodded, unsurprised. “Remember, I warned you of the danger of playing hero. Now they are letting me accompany you to the capital; perhaps it means that I too am marked for death.”

“Likely so, the both of us! Mayhap ‘tis best that Sariya chose not to come.” Conan’s scowl deepened, unpleasant to behold. “Even so, I will ensure that my friendship is healthier for you than it was for Babrak.”

Juma’s melancholy silence showed respect for the dead, but after a time he resumed speech. “What puzzled me about it all was the presence of the priest Mojurna so far down-country. Are you sure it was he that you saw?” The Kushite frowned. “When last we found him, it was at a remote shrine in enemy territory; and even then, he had come down but briefly from the hills for some unholy ritual. What murky business brought him so near Fort Sikander this time? I wonder.”

Conan sat pensive a moment. “Juma, I must tell you, I learned something about Mojurna… that is, I cannot be sure I learned it… but I thought it was so at the time. It made me waste my chance to strike a fatal blow, the one I had risked… everything for—”

“There, now, Conan,” Juma broke in solicitously and a little uncomfortably, “you are bound to be confused! I have seen men mazed by wizards many times before in my native Kush. There is no shame in it, though it may take months for the spell to lift entirely. But say, by Otumbe—who approaches?”

A flurry of splashes had arisen in a swamp paddy beside the road, a field strangely devoid of peasant laborers. From behind a fringe of jungle trees, a rank of horsemen advanced—seven riders, clad in Venji armor of an antique kind rarely seen except in curio stalls.

Above the centermost warrior fluttered the black and yellow tiger-striped banner of the Venji resistance. The mounts, hock-deep in water, kicked up a foaming, spraying tide that approached across the paddy like a supernatural ocean wave. But as the wagon-riders watched, the body of horsemen split up—three to engage the cavalry, who had halted some fifty paces ahead, and four veering back toward the wagon.

“Tarim strike me a eunuch if these be rebels!” Conan said, unsheathing his sword. “I have never yet seen a Venji rebel who could afford more armor than a rice-pot helmet, much less a rebel straddling a horse!” As he spoke, he worked the empty sheath into the belt of his tunic and tied it in place. “See how they split their force; these weary nags and this potted tree must be highly valued prizes to them! Nay, teamster, do not lash your sluggish jades, stop the wagon! Angle it across the road, here, and make it hard for them to gallop past. Good, now hold the team quiet!” Conan had switched to the rough Venji patois to command the driver. The latter, having obeyed him, sank down to the wagon bed, there to cower beneath the plank seat.

Swiftly the attackers were upon them. Juma and Conan leaped to the threatened side of the wagon, the Kushite wielding a long-staved ax he had procured from beneath the bench, Conan swinging his sword. There rang forth at once the din of a farrier’s shop as clanging metal strokes, shouts, whinnies, and the stamping of hooves surged about the wagon.

The riders veered by in quick succession, crossing weapons smartly with the defenders, yet suffering some disadvantage due to the height and stability of the wagon platform. The first attacker was knocked half out of his saddle by an ax-stroke from Juma, the second was fended off and belabored by Conan’s lashing blade. One marauder leaped aboard the plank bed of the wagon, only to be knocked back over the side by chiming, concerted blows from both defenders. The mounted standard-bearer, obviously the leader, hung back from the fight at first, rallying his troops to fresh efforts with arm-waving and gruff shouts.