They were still within the ring of settled country around Sukhmet at dawn the next day. Ox-wagons just weren’t very fast, slower even than the trudging pace of the slaves. Each of whom carried a heavy basket on their backs or on their heads. The women were chained neck-and-neck but not manacled. All were loaded with the bags of meal that would feed them.
The weather was holding, with only a hint of ominous clouds on the western horizon. Valeria walked over from where her bedroll had been spread, with her saddle for a pillow and her horses hobbled nearby. Conan had donned his mail shirt and a cotton surcoat, she noted. Unlike the sentries outside Zarallo’s headquarters, his was just a plain brown-green.
“It’s time for that?”
“Aye,” he said, making a sweeping gesture: “Take a look at the houses.”
She did so as she returned to her own supplies and untied the leather thongs that held her rolled-up mesh vest. Outside Sukhmet there had been few villages, just a thick scattering of adobe cottages and the occasional courtyard-centered manor of a merchant or retired officer who’d decided to stay in the south and be a big fish in a small colonial pond.
Between them had been strips of plowland sprouting yams and millet, cotton and sorghum, vegetable patches with red, green, and yellow plants she couldn’t name. There were weedy fallow and cropped grass pastures for goats, cattle, pigs, and the odd horse. Orchards of citrus, palm, and mango, and shea-butter trees and vines grew here and there where a stream could be damned to water them, or a shadoof lift stood beside a shallow well.
The further out they went, the more the peasant huts were gathered into clumps that presented a blank-walled outside to the world, with heavy wooden gates and room enough inside to corral the stock in an emergency. The manors didn’t just look fortified; they were, and most had watchtowers rising thirty or forty feet high. All the Stygians in sight, even the peasants, carried bows or spears and had longer blades at their belts. This was unlike what she’d experienced in the valley of the Styx, up in Stygia proper, where common folk stopped and fell on their faces whenever soldiers went by.
“The native tribes raid the Stygian settlers here, sometimes,” Conan said.
Valeria nodded, putting the information away. “Why do they settle here in the first place, then?”
“They’re mostly paid-off soldiers or their children or grandchildren. A lot of them marry women from the local tribes, or buy slave girls and free them and marry them. Often they get a grant of land if they stay, with no tax for their lifetime and only half for their children. It’s not the rich black dirt you see in the valley of the Styx and the crops are different, but they don’t have to pay half their harvest to a landowner, either. Plenty think it’s worth the risk.”
“Would the natives go after a convoy with a strong escort?” she asked while settling her sword-belt back about her waist now that her mail was on.
He watched with clear interest the wiggling process necessary to don the armor. Conan had never seen a woman as unselfconsciously at home in her body as she was, she suspected. Or one as given to ignoring male glances. She had grown used to such behavior, though it still was irritating.
“I don’t know,” he said, “and when I don’t know, I’ll wear the mail and sweat. What I do know is that they may shoot arrows from ambush and run… which is another reason I’ll wear the mail.”
“An arrow through the brisket from behind a tree can ruin your whole day,” Valeria agreed gravely.
* * *
In the early morning light they strode off toward the mercenary campfires where chickens bought from the locals were roasting. Each took a healthy portion, juggling them from hand to hand until they were cool enough to rip apart and get their teeth into. The appetizing smell made Conan ready for the day—that and the scent of horses and sweat, the rattle of gear and clang of iron and the bright stretch before them, laden with possibility.
He relied on his unit to take their example from him—skirmishers needed to be able to think for themselves. A genial cuff to the back of the head knocked down one man who’d decided he didn’t yet need to gear up.
“Wear it and sweat in it and like it, Darcarus,” Conan said cheerfully. “Crom knows you’re not much use alive, but dead you’d just stink even worse.”
The man shook his head as he rose, grinned, and obeyed. The armor wasn’t heavy; skirmishers needed to be mobile, and not to overburden their horses when mounted. They checked their gear and that their canteens were full of the good spring-water from this campsite. Then Conan ordered them to fall in, and led them to the front of the column. He hadn’t yet put his helmet on, but that was for practicality, to be able to see and hear better.
The Stygian commander was in his chariot and talking to a priest—shaven-headed and without the strip of chin-beard Stygian nobles cultivated, dressed in a black-dyed linen robe with a python-skin over one shoulder like a bandolier and carrying a long ebony staff with an alarmingly realistic bronze-and-gold cobra-head rearing at its top. The cleric was about Conan’s age, gaunt in the manner of a man whose inner fires ate for and at him, his face like a starved vulture.
He glared with open hostility.
That turned to hatred, complete with a sneer, as his eyes lit on Valeria. Then he turned on his heel and walked away toward the open-topped two-wheel wagon he and his servant occupied. It had a staff standing up next to the seat. What flew from it wasn’t a flag like those the Stygian military carried, triangular sections of cloth dangling point-down from a horizontal crosspiece. Instead it was a silk tube in the form of a serpent, mounted in a bronze ring atop the wood and sewn with a pattern of thin gold and silver scales.
A gust of hot wind coming from the south caught it and it hissed with alarming realism as it filled and writhed.
“What the demons was that about?” Valeria said with a growl. “I’ve never met the man before, but he looks like he’d be happy to see me flayed and salted.”
“I don’t know, but you’d best watch your back,” Conan answered, “lest you wake to find a dagger in it.”
The Stygian officer in his chariot, with his plumed bronze helm under one arm, finished off a chicken-leg. He tossed it aside for the big black ants that swarmed there. Then he licked his fingers and turned an unfriendly but not overtly hostile eye on Conan. Apart from a quick glance, he ignored Valeria completely.
“Yes, outlander?” His name was Akhenset, which meant “Strong for Set.”
Conan saluted with right fist to chest. He needed the man’s cooperation to perform the task Zarallo had entrusted to him, and Zarallo was his chosen war-chief, to whom he owed loyal service as long as he was with the Free Companions. As long as its captain kept up his end of the bargain. The Cimmerian had a craftsman’s approach to war. This created an aversion to sloppiness or wasted effort.
“Sir,” he said in Stygian, “we are scouts. To let us go ahead, please? Danger here, we find. Get shot at first.”
The officer opened his mouth to speak, and Conan half expected him to say, “No, go eat our dust in the rear, accursed demon-worshipping foreigner.” Then he paused, and visibly reconsidered when he thought of what it would look like if he was ambushed while his scouts trailed behind at his order. Then he nodded.
Good choice, Conan mused.
“Keep in touch,” the commander said, amplifying the simple Stygian phrase with gestures. “Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Conan replied. “Must can tell you what we find, eh?”
“Good. Be off and get about it, devil worshipper.”
When they were out of earshot, Valeria spoke in a low voice.
“Are all Stygian officers that arrogant?”
“No. Most are worse,” Conan said. “Crom alone knows why.” Then he added, “You’ll work under my eye. Today and tomorrow, at least.”
“Why?” she asked bluntly.
“Because I’m in charge of this detachment,” he said with equal straightforwardness, “and I know the others but I haven’t seen you work before. I know you can fight, woman—that I saw with my own eyes.”
And I saw more of it than you know, he added to himself before he went on, remembering how she’d demolished the street-toughs and then skipped away over the rooftop. “I need to see how you work as part of a band. Whether you can take orders and do what’s needful fast, and how good you are at using ground and spotting things on land, not sea. I don’t want to find out when our lives are at stake.”
Her lips firmed, but she nodded briskly. It was an honest answer, and he could see she appreciated that, rather than honeyed words or flattery.
The villages grew fewer, then ceased, and so did their plowed fields. There were cattle under the guard of armed herdsmen now, and one last small fort. Then only endless rolling grass, stirrup-high or higher, green with the recent start of the rains rather than its usual straw color.
Wherever they looked was a steady scatter of flat-topped thorny trees usually not more than twenty or thirty feet high, singly or in clumps or short lines where some underground feature watered their roots. Sometimes the termite-mounds were almost as tall, miniature steep cliffs twice the height of a man, made of red dirt packed together with their sticky extrusions.
Trees and brush grew thicker on the occasional rocky hill, often growing in cracks in cliffs of reddish stone. Troops of baboons swarmed in many of those, leaping and screeching as the humans passed, sending skyward flights of long-tailed, vividly colored birds.
“See those?” Conan said to Valeria.
“The baboons? Like big mean dogs, only smarter and with hands,” she said. “Saw plenty on my way to Sukhmet, but I never saw one I liked much.”
“They hate men, because farmers kill them whenever they can,” Conan said. “But around here… about a day’s journey further south, really… there’s a flat-country type that’s bigger.”
“How much bigger?”
“Four feet at the shoulder,” Conan said, and she made a small involuntary sound like yeee. “Heavier than I am, the weight of a small lioness, fast, and just as smart and mean. They hunt, and they do it in packs. Scarce, but bad news when you see them.”
“Sounds interesting,” she said stoutly.
The dirt road turned into a track, with only the occasional patch of wheel-rut to show that caravans came this way. Distant herds of game replaced the livestock, antelope of a dozen kinds from shin-high shy darters with miniature spike-horns, through bouncing-ball types that swarmed past like manic dancers, to calm-eyed eland bigger than cattle, towering giraffes in small groups or alone, and once the hulking menace of a rhinoceros. Word went back not to stare at it or make too much noise, since they charged at any provocation—or none—and could be as fast as a galloping horse for short distances.
Several times lions stood on hilltops or the edge of a belt of bush, watching as the caravan went by.
That one licked its chops, by Crom!
They approached a river, flanked by a wide belt of taller trees and thick brush. Conan sent a messenger back instructing the convoy to halt. He dismounted half his skirmishers and led the way, sword in hand, into the riverside brush while the others kept guard. Valeria accompanied him and blinked at how fast visibility closed in. The undergrowth was denser than in the forests of the Tauran hills where she would have hunted deer and wild boar. Conan ghosted through thickets that caught at her with thorns like barbed fishhooks, and could move in armor without the rustling, clinking sound that others would find inescapable.
“How do you do that?” she asked. “Be so quiet in war-harness?”
Conan shrugged. He’d been pleasantly surprised at how well she did in the thickets, and reminded himself that she hadn’t grown to womanhood in a seaside town or fishing-village like so many sailors. Or stuck to the home-hearth all the time, weaving and kneading bread and keeping toddlers from falling into the fire.
“Practice,” he said, “and wearing soft leather under it. My mail is wired to the backing every inch, up and down, and I keep it well-oiled.” He added, “There’d be fewer dead men on the Cimmerian frontier and the Pictish marches if you folk weren’t so loud. You’re better than some of your breed, woman, but it still needs work.”
Before she could respond, his head jerked up at a faint sound, and Valeria’s an instant later. The tattooed Pict slid down a dangling liana from a branch not far ahead of them, agile and landing lightly.
“Cimmerians move like buffalo,” he said, grinning through sweat and the devil-mask of his tattoos and making heavy stomping motions with his feet. “Aquilonians like a herd of buffalo, if buffalo are drunk.” He added a stagger to the mime. “People further away even worse.”
Conan scowled; the feud between his folk and the Picts was older than any recorded history and vanished into the mists of time and legend. He’d journeyed to the western marches of Cimmeria to fight in it, as had many youths in his homeland. By custom clans at generations-long blood feuds with each other still welcomed such volunteers. When compared to the fight with the Picts, the bitterest feud was just a falling-out among family.
Nevertheless, the man was useful, and thousands of miles of distance gave Conan a new perspective.
“Anything, Gahonre?” he asked the Pict.
“Man-sign, but old. Days.” He held up his right hand—his black bow was in his left—with four fingers spread and the thumb folded down. “Little more, little less,” he said, waggling the thumb to indicate a small difference. “Small fires, bare feet, few cooked bones, fish heads.”
“Good,” Conan grunted. “Go back and tell the Stygian commander we can march to the river and cross.”
“Feathers-on-helmet in the little horse wagon?” Gahonre replied. “I go.”
He trotted off, running in a tireless springy trot toward where his pony was tethered, wearing only a loincloth and a quiver of arrows and a belt bearing knives and a long-handled hatchet. Two colored feathers were stuck in his own braided black hair. As he did, more of the Free Companions caught up with them.
“This would be a good place for an ambush, wouldn’t it?” Valeria said, looking around.
“Not bad,” Conan agreed. “Best if you could catch the convoy halfway across the ford, but there’s not much room near the trail in this riverside brush—it’s too narrow. If you had too many men it would be easy to spot. From the way the birds and beasts fled or went quiet, if nothing else.”
“Right. The point of an ambush is to swarm the ones you’re attacking, fast, before they get their feet back under them.”
He nodded and turned to the leader of the squad of Shemite horse-archers who’d halted at the edge of the brush.
“Zarkabaal, fan your men out on the other side.”
“How far?” the Shemite asked, stroking his carefully curled beard.
“Long bowshot.”
Then to his skirmishers. “Fan out on the other side, too, but close to the edge of the brush—ten yard intervals either side of the path. Yell out if you see anything, and if it looks like it walks on two legs, shoot fast. There aren’t any friendlies hereabouts, don’t worry about that.”
Not that they would anyway, he thought as one tapped his crossbow and snorted quietly. Being hired men, they didn’t much care about things like the Stygian government’s standing with the locals. We won’t be back here, at least not until the return trip.
The ford was a space about twenty yards wide where the banks were naturally low, and decades of passing convoys had broken them down further. They’d also thrown gravel and small rocks into the water, and the hundred yards between the banks sparkled with sun-bright blinks where the current broke over them. Since the rains were only starting, it wasn’t very deep at this time of year, but every year the floods carved new channels or scoured out deep spots that could swallow a man whole.
The Shemites took the water at a fast walk, standing in the stirrups and holding their bows and quivers and their sheathed curved shamshir swords high as the water crested and broke on their horses’ chests. Occasionally one would hit a deep spot and the horse would vanish save for its head and neck. Even then they kept their weapons dry.
Then one reached a hole and went off his horse with a shout of alarm. He might not have made it to shore if two of the others hadn’t tossed him one of the ropes they kept coiled at their saddlebows. Reaching the edge of the river he sat aside and dried off his gear—cursing all the while and glowering at his comrades’ gibes, even though they’d saved his life.
When the rest surged out of the river on the other side they broke into a canter, opening out until there was a hundred yards between each and four times that between them and the river. That put them along the crest of a low rise, and Zarkabaal turned in the saddle to carefully survey the area. After a long look and a bit of shouted consultation among his men, he gave an exaggerated wave.
“Here, give me a hand with this,” Conan said to Valeria.
He took a long bundle of wrist-thick rope slung across the back of his remount and began knotting it around a tree at the water’s edge on the downstream side of the ford. It was a straight tree as thick through as his waist and with huge roots buried deep in fractured rock.
Valeria responded without wasted words, taking the other end of the rope, heeling her horse across the water. For a brief moment he lost sight of her at the deepest point, but she came back into sight, climbed out of the water and halted beside a similar tree on the other bank.
“This?” she shouted with a broad gesture.
“Aye!” he bellowed back.
She ran a running loop around the tree and a one-way slipknot that let her hitch one end to the horn of her saddle. The beast backed up while she took in the slack with quick jerks of her other hand. The thick rope rose out of the water, little jets squeezing out of it as it came taut, and then when it could be tightened no further she did a quick clinching-knot.
Well, she’s a sailor, Conan thought, with a slight nod to himself. She had to know rope in that trade, merchant or pirate, and how to work with someone else to manipulate it. Even a galley had a lot of rigging, and the deep-sea three-masters the Barachans used had miles of the stuff.
Sending his own horse across the stream, he saw for himself how deep it got—concerning but manageable as long as they were wary. That was one reason convoys went out before the rains began; some idiot must have blundered. Joining her on the other bank he looked over her work from the saddle and gave a few testing tugs while she sat on a rock and poured the water out of her sea-boots.
“Solid,” he said approvingly, and he ignored the glare she shot him. “That’ll help keep the carts from getting lost if they start to float downstream. They can bump against it while they’re hauled to the south shore. Plenty of men, plenty of beasts to do the pulling.”
“Float?” she said. “As laden as they are?”
He shook his head. “They’d bog down if we took them over laden, or tip over if they hit a hole or a boulder and spill everything. The Stygians will have the slaves cart most of it over and pile it up, or put it across the mules’ backs, then reload on the other side. They’ll only use the strong ones, since they need to hold whatever they’re carrying over their heads.”
“Moving like greased lightning, aren’t we?” she snorted, obviously thinking of how long that would all take.
“Oh, this is the easy part of the journey.”
* * *
Conan kept the skirmishers fanned out for the whole of the crossing. This meant that the Stygians had to do all the heavy lifting, a fact that gave him a warm satisfaction. This wasn’t going to make their employers love the mercenaries any more than they had before, something that left Conan profoundly unmoved.
He napped beneath a tree with a hat over his face, but rose when the slaves were unshackled to carry the barrels and bales and bundles and sacks across the ford. He had ordered the deep spots marked with poles, but the way was still treacherous.
The Stygian commander must have been thinking along the same lines. His hundred-odd infantry spearmen were tallying on lines, ready to help drag the wagons over, and his lancers were on picket duty along a wide-thrown perimeter, but the Nubakan archers he had standing by with arrows on their strings, in two equal parties on each side.
The archers answered to their own commander and two lesser officers who were marked by bursts of ostrich feathers tucked into their matts of frizzy hair. Every few minutes they plucked up handfuls of grass and tossed them into the air, a practical way of keeping them all conscious of what the air was doing.
Despite the risk, one of the slaves made a break for it as soon as the chain was pulled through the loop on his iron collar and the shackles on his wrists removed, springing forward and buffeting aside an overseer. The man was tall, long-legged, and well-muscled, and he jinked agilely from side to side as he sprinted for the bush. The others in the coffle began to move uneasily, darting glances to either side.
That was a problem with sending men to a certain, prolonged, and agonizing death in the mines, Conan thought silently, watching the drama unfold. They really didn’t have much reason not to try any desperate ploy, no matter how futile.
One of the plumed officers shouted.
Two archers rose and stepped forward from their squatting ranks.
They moved without any particular haste, and the first drew his long shaft past the angle of his jaw, muscles knotting in his arms and writhing beneath the ebony skin of his broad shoulders. The arrow flew the thirty yards in a flat blurred streak and lanced through the fleeing slave’s calf.
Valeria’s face registered surprise. “I’d think they were better shots than that,” she said. “Rumor has it they hunt elephants with those bows.”
“They do,” Conan said, keeping disgust out of his voice. They had to kill the man, if only to keep the others under control, but there was no reason to toy with him. “Watch for a bit.”
The slave struggled to his feet and went on in a hobbling parody of his original swift speed. Then the second archer’s bow snapped, and the arrow skewered the slave’s other calf. He went over with a shriek.
“Oh,” she said with a grimace.
“That’s it,” Conan said.
“Making an example?”
“That and having some fun. They’re bored, too.”
The slave managed to get to his feet again, though with loud whimpers of pain and biting his lip until blood flowed to mix with the sweat and drool on his chin. This time the Nubakan archers drew and shot with smooth speed, so that four arrows were in the air at the same time. Conan heard the wet thumping thack of the impacts, one after another, sound treading on sound. Two plunged into the fugitive’s hipbones and two more went through his shoulders, making him flex like a branch in a high wind before he pitched forward and lay jerking and moaning on the riverbank.
Tall plants with flowers of red and blue waved over his prostrate form, cruelly bright.
Two of the Stygian overseers ran forward and dragged him back by his wrists, his eyes white and rolled upward in his contorted face. The archers strolled over, wrenched their shafts free, and watched with idle interest as the slave drivers sank wooden hooks into his armpits, threw ropes over a branch, and hoisted him up to swing there, bleeding and moaning.
There was the flap of large wings as curious vultures gathered, along with a flock of something like carrion crows with raven beaks and white markings from shoulders to breast interrupting the black. When the humans stepped back they closed in, squabbling among themselves.
A long shriek split the air.
Crows always go for the eyes first, Conan thought. Juicy, I suppose.
The work proceeded. Cargos were piled up on the dry ground on the south side of the river, the ox and mule-teams brought over, and then the hundred spearmen hauled each wagon across, before the whole caravan was reassembled and the convoy set out once more.
“Well, this is more fun than watching mud dry,” Valeria muttered.
“Or watching the horizon for a ship that never appears,” Conan said, speaking from piratical experience.
“No, that’s better,” Valeria said. “You may not get a fight and a rich prize, but you can always expect one. If not that day, then the next. Or a warship, and some danger to spice up the season.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “There’s danger here and a dozen different kinds of it. You just haven’t met them yet.” He looked up at the sun. There was little variation between the seasons in the time of sunset here. It was something he’d found disconcerting at first.
It was well into winter back home. The sun would appear late, make a brief arc across the southern horizon, and then sink out of sight… and that was assuming the day hadn’t been occupied by a black blizzard.
“Just the right time to hunt deer, back in the Tauran,” Valeria said. “We’d have the wheat threshed and in the bins by now. The deer aren’t skinny yet, and they gang up in places where they’ve trampled the snow down. Any venison we got, we could pull it back on sleds and put in the cold-pantry, and it kept fine till spring. Or wild pig, nice and fat with the fall acorns. My mother used to mince both, mix the meat with spices and salt and chopped onions and bake it into lots of little pies about the size of your fist—”
She gave a glance at his hand where it rested on the pommel of his saddle.
“—well, of my fist, and we’d put them in the cold pantry, too. Just take one out when you wanted it and put it on a plate in the kitchen hearth near the embers, and come back when hot gravy’s bubbling out of the holes in the top of the crust. Just the thing to sit down to with a pot of mulled ale, when it’s snowing outside.”
Despite the heat of the day. Conan almost groaned at the thought—though for him it included a naked blond woman sitting on his lap as he tilted a mug of the hot drink and the shutters rattled with the storm.
Still…
“We may have some sport today, if we’re lucky. I got the idea from how the Kozaki hunt wild aurochs near the south shore of the Vilayet Sea. Meat goes off fast here, but there are plenty of mouths.”
