Aye, hunt if you will,” Akhenset said. “Once we’ve reached our campsite for the day.”
Conan followed his thoughts. The noisy passage of the convoy moved most of the game frustratingly out of reach. Yet the Stygian didn’t dare let his Nubakan archers disperse to forage for fear of guerilla attack or slave escapes or even an uprising while his forces were scattered.
Moving more than five hundred mouths across this much distance was a pain in the fundament, much like carrying a chunk of ice in hot weather, but it was the food stocks that melted. Only the abundant grazing made it possible at all.
Thus, if Conan’s troop brought in meat, all the better. If they didn’t, the blame and shame would be on them. In either case they took all the risks, and if something went very wrong… well, dead mercenaries didn’t draw pay.
Conan saluted and wheeled his horse about, moved a ways off, and then gathered his skirmishers.
“We’ve got Akhen’s permission—”
There was a wave of snickers as Valeria made a vulgar pun on the man’s name.
“—to hunt.” Several started to move, and he shouted, “Hold!”
Half the troop were ready to explode in a dozen directions, with game visible all round and men driven to distraction by the monotony.
“You fools, if we scatter, so do our kills.”
Gahonre the Pict muttered something in his own language. Probably something on the order of, “you buffalo will spook the game—better I go on my own.”
Conan gave them all a hard look.
“This isn’t like hunting in a forest, especially by yourself.” He singled out the Pict. “This is grassland, and your prey will be large. If you go by ones and twos, even if you make a kill you’ll spend most of the time before dark getting each carcass back, most likely fighting off lions, leopards, hyenas, and baboons. Or native skulkers pleased to catch us unawares. Remember, it isn’t our home range.”
Gahonre was looking thoughtful.
Pict or no, he was nobody’s fool.
“If we go in force,” one of the men said, “won’t that many horses and men together spook ’em, too?”
“Not if we do it right,” Conan replied. “I’ve hunted on horseback before this in big open grassland. First we ride in column southeastward. Looks like there’s plenty of game in that direction, and it’s where we’re going.” The Shemites, who came from dry grassland country themselves, nodded as he went on.
“The game will just move aside to let us pass—they see men go by every month or so, always on this track. Then, on my signal—”
* * *
An hour later, a mob of grass-eaters fled in front of Conan’s party, sending up a choking cloud of dust that dropped and thickened to a coat of thin mud when mixed with the hunters’ sweat, and made their horses look like earth statues. Then the creatures stopped. Zarallo’s skirmishers had moved as a column, then spread out into a sickle-shaped line and turned north again toward the Stygian convoy, whooping and bellowing and pushing ahead of them any animals caught unawares.
Now the mass of beasts—by this time numbering in the hundreds—saw and scented the Stygian camp. The alarming smell of woodsmoke, coupled with as many humans as would populate a small town, brought the beasts up short. All they could do was mill about in confusion.
The first in sight were the line of Stygian lancers on picket duty, but there were clumps of Nubakan archers among them, and the whole camp would be buzzing with the word.
“Go! Go! Go!” Conan shouted.
Fresh whoops rose and, from the Shemites, loud invocations to Ishtar the huntress, one of the many faces of that versatile deity. She had plenty of worshippers in Stygia, too. The lancers heeled their mounts into a loping hand-gallop, and Conan let his knotted reins fall on the horse’s neck, giving it the heel again when it took that for a signal to halt.
Caught between two fears, the mass of animals, mostly leaf-eaters, whipped themselves into a panic. Conan leaned to one side and pressed a knee to loop his mount around a knot of savannah buffalo—enormous black creatures with horns that started thick in a great cob of wrinkled bone over their foreheads and then curved up into wicked points. Sometimes that breed attacked lions on impulse, and would wait around for a day or more, bent on trampling and goring. Anyone who wanted to tackle those was welcome to them.
One of the skirmishers didn’t know the stories, or hadn’t believed them. He ventured too close. Suddenly a head went down and a tail up, and the beast charged.
He’d been going to say “fool.” The man proved that he was one by halting to aim his crossbow, realizing at the last moment that it was far too late. The bolt from the crossbow banged off the boss of bone across the beast’s forehead even as it made impact.
The horse went over with a scream. The man hit the ground rolling and tried to run. He might as well have been standing still when the ton-weight of enraged animal struck, tossing him high and then goring him with a curve-tipped horn that went under his ribs like a pike point.
Another toss and the man’s body struck the ground like a broken doll.
Nobody else dared to come close to the buffalo after that.
The meat of the grown ones was shoe-sole tough anyway.
Conan headed for a knot of eland, big handsome beasts with long spiral horns, dewlaps, and huge meaty bodies fawn-colored above and white below. Some would yield as much as a third of a ton of meat, and he’d hunted them several times since he arrived in Sukhmet. They tasted very much like beef—very good beef. Just then they were making good speed, eyes bulging in panic, their horns laid to the rear along their backs.
At twenty yards he stood in the stirrups, using the flexing of his knees to even out the movements of the horse beneath him. Lifting his bow he drew to the ear and loosed.
The powerful war-bow had a draw of more than a hundred pounds, much more than was needed for ordinary hunting. Most of the arrows in his quiver were broad-heads, razor-edged triangles more deadly against unarmored foes than the narrow bodkins designed to punch through mail and—by a fortunate non-coincidence—just right for hunting. Men or beasts, bodies were bodies and blood was blood.
The arrow flashed out in a blurred flat arc. It hit the big eland bull behind the shoulder with a flat wet thwack sound and blood shot out in a fan from both its gasping nostrils, once and twice and again before it collapsed.
His next shot wasn’t as good—as he’d told Valeria, he was no Turanian, no horse-archer born to saddle and bow. Every tribe of steppe nomads did this sort of hunt three or four times per summer, as training for war as well as for meat and horn and hides. But the arrow did take another eland through the paunch, and crippling was as good as killing just then, even if it offended his sense of workmanship.
True to his word, mass hunting in open country like this was different from stalking game one by one in the woods. They could double back and finish off the wounded at leisure, or the men from the camp could do it.
Reminded of the pirate woman, he glanced around. She wasn’t far away; on the other side of the clump of eland, in fact. He couldn’t hear her over the sound of many hundreds of hooves and the excited screams of a mob that included wild horses—odd-looking ones with black-and-white stripes and bristly manes like a Pictish haircut. Her mouth was stretched wide in an exultant shout as she rode close enough to shoot one-handed with her crossbow. An eland went down with the bolt in its left foreleg, and that was another heavy load of meat. Then she slung the weapon; it was too awkward to reload on horseback, much less at a gallop.
Instead she drew her sword, plunging it through another animal’s spine and leaving it crippled. Someone had been listening to his little talk on the workings of a mass hunt. The Shemites were killing with a will, emptying their quivers and the extras they’d slung over the saddle. They had been born to the saddle and the bow, being recruited on the edges between the desert and the sown up north of Stygia.
The northern riders were mostly emulating Valeria’s hocking draw-cuts and stabs with their swords.
Conan finished the last of the forty arrows in his quiver and started to draw his own longsword, when suddenly there was nothing in front of him but a spray of mounted Stygians, work details, and carts from the camp. The lancers were stabbing everything they could reach, and the Nubakans were loosing arrows fast, and with a fine disregard for Zarallo’s skirmishers.
“Hold up!” Conan bellowed. “Hold up, Crom curse you, don’t ride into bowshot of those Nubakan bastards!” Nevertheless, one of them already shot an incautious Stygian’s mount in the rump. It threw the rider to the hard ground, where he lay groaning as it bucked and jumped. The Nubakans grinned and nudged one another as they watched.
Conan turned in the saddle and looked back. Scores of dead animals were scattered in their wake, and more were limping about, helpless as the hunters returned to finish them off. Even the slaves would have meat with their swill tonight, albeit it would be tripe and brains cooked into the porridge.
He thought about joining in killing the wounded beasts, but the rest seemed to have it well in hand. Instead he made sure that his hunters got the choice cuts to carry back to their fires, not something he could count on in a large mixed band like this. By custom in every nation it was the right of the ones who corralled and took the game. Even the most boastful Stygians knew to respect those who would stand at their backs in a fight. These were his followers—Zarallo had placed him in charge, and that made him responsible for their rights.
* * *
Valeria led two mules straining against the dead weight of big bucks slung over their backs. Conan had stripped to his loincloth, was liberally bedaubed with blood, and tossed a nicely plump eland liver onto a stretch of rawhide just stripped off the same beast. Certain she must be appreciating his long, muscled form, he hid his smile and nodded toward the pile of organ-meat.
“The best part.”
“If it’s fresh and roasted on a fire before it can go bad,” she replied. “Mind you, chops and roasts and steaks are fine, too—almost anything is, when compared to biscuit and jerky.”
“That they are,” he agreed, silently considering other things that made life worth living. His task completed, he headed over to a spring just outside camp to sluice down. This was a regular stop for any convoys destined for the mines, and the stream had been blocked by a crude earth-and-rock dam to make a pond where buckets could be filled. The spot for washing was downstream of that, and the stock watered further along.
* * *
The camp that night was more festive than most, with the scent of roasting meat and the hissing and spitting of drops of fat falling on the embers of dozens of cookfires. Everyone was able to gorge their fill. The Stygian commander had the sense to break out more beer than usual, and in return Conan sent him a gift of prime livers.
A collection of bones grew around him as he leaned against his saddle and ate, a pot of the beer standing beside him. Across from him Valeria was doing the same, though she was working on a long skewer with chunks of liver, mixed with bits of onion and fat. Cimmerian game meat was very lean, and the beasts here weren’t any different.
He threw the bone into the fire and leaned back on one elbow.
“Good sport I promised, eh?” he said casually.
She swallowed and wiped her lips on a twist of grass before she threw it into the fire.
“Good sport indeed,” she replied. “Not like anything I’ve had before, though hunting boar is most like it.”
Boar hunting was done in groups, with nets and dogs, because wild pig traveled in groups. It could be suicide to face a half-dozen black bristly masses of gristle and hide bigger and heavier than the hunter, with tusks like curved knives.
“Hunting from a galloping horse…” she continued. “That’s new.”
“Sport’s good, in its place,” he said. Then he caught her eye and with a flick of his eyes looked out toward the darkness.
She laughed.
Conan felt a moment’s surprise, and he fought down a scowl. For a single instant he felt for Khafset, before his mind revolted at it.
“I’m among the few free women in this camp,” she said in a not unkindly tone, “and the only unattached one if you consider the camp followers and some of the Stygian soldiers’ wives.” She kept the words quiet enough that they were drowned by the laughter, the mercenaries’ hideous attempts at song, and the remarkably good singing and stamping dance of the Nubakans.
She was right. The only other women in camp were in the slave coffles, and the slave overseers sold time with them for a few coppers. Conan had never considered that; he didn’t find imprisoned, unwilling women arousing.
“D’you take me for a fool, Cimmerian?” she continued. “To have every man in camp deciding he deserves seconds?”
Now he did scowl. He rose and strode away, though he didn’t seek the slave women. Instead he borrowed an axe and spent an hour reducing tough thornwood to kindling.