By the dawn of the third day Conan decided that the slave rebels weren’t dogging their tracks. It made the morning bowl of dull gritty mush and undercooked dried beans taste a little less of worry. He put it aside—a Stygian darted it to take it away for cleaning—rose from his squat and stretched, settling his sword-belt.
The day was dawning clear, hot, and damp, which wasn’t a surprise, since the season of rains was only just starting. They’d made slow progress yesterday and when a spate of thunderstorms doused them, they had been forced to stop for the afternoon. From what he’d heard, even when the rains were at their peak it was mostly a matter of an hour or two of heavy thunderstorms every day or two, like the gods dumping a huge bucket of water out of the sky. Not the endless dark, dank chill and drizzle Cimmerians endured for weeks on end, sometimes in late summer right when the grain was coming ripe.
The track shouldn’t become too muddy.
The joys of leading a war-band, he thought. All dash and fire and plunder and glory and bards chanting your name.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been a leader of men, but this was about the most mixed multitude he’d ever had at his tail, and its traveling village was by far the biggest. The camp-followers in particular thought they could come to him for everything up to and including marital advice and how to keep their toddlers from wandering off.
It’ll be lost pets next. At least I can see to feeding them. Good experience, too.
Conan had ambitions of his own—a little vague and formless right now, but they didn’t involve returning to his clan with nothing to show but scars and a sword, a few trinkets and some stories to tell the young around the fire on winter evenings.
Long cold dark winter evenings.
Cimmeria never lacked for those. Everything else, yes; chill and gloom, no.
Leading a charge was something he knew he could do well, and even managing an emergency retreat like the one they’d just endured. Men would follow him when the blades were out and Crom’s red wine flowed. They wouldn’t follow for long, however, if he bungled the other parts of a chief’s work, though. Starving men knew who to blame.
Now, the hunt.
There were ways to accomplish it that didn’t mean slowing the main convoy from its necessary pace, which reminded him of a glacier on a mountain near his birthplace, anyway. He walked over to where Gelete was finishing his bowl of mush and beans and jerky, conferring with his underlings. Along the way he collected Zarkabaal, with the Shemite still brushing crumbs out of his beard.
“We’ll do another drive hunt today,” he said, “but different.” At least he thought that was what he said. His Stygian was pretty bad, and Gelete’s only a bit better. As it was, Zarkabaal helped out, and Conan did his best to memorize the translations, learning how to speak Stygian with a thick accent from the northern coast of Shem. Cursing internally, he reminded himself that he was a fighting-man, not a scholar, and “understandable” would have to do.
With luck, he wouldn’t start a war.
“We’ll pick our next campsite while some are off scouting the game and your men are on rear guard,” he said. “When you reach it, leave the Stygians to put up the zariba.”
A few slashed bushes would do to make the trail unmistakable—the Nubakans were good trackers, as he’d expect from men who hunted for a big part of their living, and herded cattle in the savannah for much of the rest.
“I leave two-three men to boss that at campsite,” the Nubakan leader said. “Otherwise the Stygians—” He uttered a phrase in his native tongue. There were confused glances, but a little back-and-forth established that he meant “screw it up.” Although it seemed to more literally involve getting a goat pregnant.
Conan nodded.
“When you make the spot we’ve picked for the camp, take the rest of your men and fan out about half a mile past the camp; that far away the fire-scent won’t be close enough to spook the game we drive. This rabble is certain to kindle some as soon as they stop, unless we waste men to stand over them.”
They cast back and forth for the words that got the meaning across, and Gelete nodded. He wet his thumb and held it up, looked up at the brilliant blue sky and its scattering of white cloud, then consulted his subordinates again.
“Good plan,” he said. “Also, wind blow from northeast today.” He added a waggle of his hand to indicate probably.
“Even better,” Conan said. “You hide your men half a mile past the camp, then we drive the game in, and you shoot. Carefully!” he added, and Gelete grinned whitely.
“Good plan,” the Nubakan repeated—it seemed to be his favorite phrase. “Easier drive game with horses, we Nubakans got more bows. Work together, get more meat. No accidents with bad shot. Because you not Stygians.” Another smile, and a wagging finger. “Try not drive anything too big. No elephant, no rhino, no lions. Ivory too heavy now, anyway.”
He wore two necklaces of lion teeth and claws around his neck, and had interesting scars on his chest and elsewhere that looked like they’d been caused by claws, as well as blades. Conan looked at the decorations.
“You have enough of those?”
Gelete’s face went grave. “This one—” He touched one of the necklaces, and then the lion-mane headdress that framed his face. “—from my manhood hunt. All Nubakan warriors must take lion when young, become warrior.”
Conan gestured agreement. There were many rites that turned youth to man, among many different folk, but that was a common one. Among Cimmerians it was less formal, but bringing home the skin of a panther would do. The head of a clan enemy was even better. Then when a serious fight came, you could be confident the man next to you wasn’t some fainting flower who’d leave your sword-side unguarded at the wrong moment.
“This one…” The archer-chief’s finger moved to the second necklace and he spoke with somber pride. “This one eat my brother. I hunt, just me, take his skin, put skull by fire, wear teeth and claws.”
Conan nodded again, acknowledging a deed worth doing. What were the bonds of kinship for, if not to have someone to stand by you in life and take vengeance if you fell?
I like these Nubakans, by Crom. They are indeed the sons of lions, he thought. Then he said, “Good. We drive, you shoot, everybody eats.”
He left the Nubakans discussing their role in the hunt and went back to his own fire, calling the skirmishers in and giving them his plan, with Zarkabaal translating into Shemitish this time instead of Stygian, since some of his men had nothing but their native tongue. Everyone seemed fairly pleased.
Valeria was scrubbing out her bowl with handfuls of sand and some water. They’d picked the campsite for a clear stream, and long experience had them keeping their eating gear clean. War-camps bred disease, and their movements spread it far and wide. Why and how, not even sorcerers knew, but there it was.
“I’m as fond of fresh meat as anyone,” Valeria said, “but is this worth the effort, if we want to get back to Sukhmet as fast as we can? If the local tribes get wind of the way the mine was overrun—”
“And they will,” Zarkabaal cut in.
She nodded. “They’re more likely to try and attack us. They don’t love the Stygians, I hear.”
“Nobody loves Stygians,” Conan said.
“Stygians must, or there wouldn’t be any little Stygians,” Zarkabaal said with a grin. “But apart from that, no. Nobody in Shem, certainly—not even the ones they’ve bought and paid for in the southern parts.”
Valeria’s bland glance told Conan that she knew he meant “whores and collaborators, if there’s a difference.” Yet Zarkabaal and his riders were working for Stygian gold, nonetheless.
“Yes, it’s worth it,” Conan asserted, “especially since it doesn’t slow down the convoy—at least not much. It’s not just about eating fresh meat because it tastes better than this cowdung mush. If we get enough that we can dry some, we can feed more of the grain and beans to the mules and horses. That cuts down on how long we have to let them graze, and it means they can work harder without foundering. They’ll have less to carry and pull.”
That got plenty of nods. Everyone was familiar with working-stock, most of them from childhoods spent in farming villages. A few looked surprised before they agreed, since the trade-off hadn’t occurred to all of them.
They stood and moved to saddle their horses.
“I’ve been too long at sea,” Valeria said to him, “and forgotten how important horses and mules are to everything ashore.” She cocked an eyebrow at him. “You’re not just big and fast, eh?”
“And you’re not just lithe and quick,” he said, giving her a glance.
“You’re better with a sword than flattery.”
That left him fuming a bit, but then he noticed an odd-scented smoke coming from the Stygian priest’s little closed cart as he rode past to the head of the long column. A pair of spearmen walked in front of it. They saluted him by banging the spears in their right hands against their long coffin-shaped shields, akin to the fist-to-chest gesture so many armies used.
“He’s making hunt-magic, captain,” one of them said to Conan, and he smacked his lips. “He had us collecting hair and scat to bespell them. Good eating! Not like back home in the north by the river, where you can be strung up by the gentry just for taking a duck from a marsh.”
Hunt-magic was familiar too—every shaman, chief and hedge-witch in Cimmeria did the like, and the individual hunters had their small private rites and gestures. He’d seen similar things everywhere he traveled. Still, Conan felt the back of his neck prickle a little at the thought and the smell, as he remembered the sacrifices committed under the reptilian gaze of Set.
Priests of Set still like fresh meat, akin to other men, he told himself. Even if they don’t cut out its heart on the altar.
* * *
“This is a good place for the camp,” he said the next afternoon. “I’ll check it over, then we leave the Stygians here and go on ahead.”
They were in an area of rolling hills, though the one ahead of them was cut off as if broken. Its eastern edge rose at a gentle slope to a triangle of land, but on the northwestern side there was an abrupt, rubble-strewn drop-off almost like a cliff, particularly right at the top. It was the perfect location, and as an added bonus, three-quarters of the way down the steep side was a pool fed by a fast-flowing spring. That had probably been what undermined the rock in the first place, eating away at it until it collapsed.
The overflow from the pool splashed down the rocks amid flowering bushes and butterflies and bright swooping birds with implausibly long tails. Some of them built bulbous communal nests dangling from the branches of trees. Those were like nothing he’d seen anywhere else, astonishing constructions of woven grass and twigs with multiple entrances and birds coming and going like the dwellers in one of the big buildings that filled some of the crowded cities in Shem.
Conan looked at them and grinned, shaking his head. If he spoke of them back in Cimmeria, listeners over the age of six would just snort and walk away. He’d have done the same himself.
It’s good to travel far and see strange sights.
As he dismounted at the base of the west-facing incline he looped his reins around the limb of a bush. Then he clambered up the loose crumbled rock of the slope with the casual ease of someone who’d played cliff-climbing games all his youth, when he’d collected eggs from some birds that nested on sheer rock-faces for his family.
Sniffing, he scooped up a handful of the water that ran out and down the steep rock, tasted cautiously, then stuck his head in and gulped. It was good, cold from the depths of the rock, and crisp… and he was thirsty. The spring area smelled clean, too, of wet greenery and coolness and damp rock. That meant nothing had crawled into the water and died, at least not lately, though he could see the clean white skull of something with fangs lying on the sand at the bottom of the pool.
He came up blowing and shook his head like a wolf. When traveling with hundreds of companions, good water was about the first thing to locate at a night’s bivouac.
No wonder I’m thirsty, when I sweat so much, he thought, throwing handfuls over his bare torso. It makes you crave salt, too.
“Go around the hill and bring my horse to the top,” he called back over his shoulder. “I’m going to check the approaches on this side!”
Slipping his sword around until it hung down from the small of his back, he traced a path with his eyes and jumped. The first part of the climb was only a bit more difficult than the lower slope, but the last three man-lengths were nearly straight up and down. Once, a bit of the coarse pale stone studded with what looked like seashells broke beneath his fingers. With most of his weight on that hand he had to drop half his height and grab quickly, hanging for a moment over empty space before he swung back into motion.
“Good climbing,” Valeria said after he hoisted himself up to the top. She was already there, and handed him the reins of his horse. He looked back over his shoulder at the long snake of the caravan.
“That’s nothing!” Conan said, flush with exhilaration. “Try doing it with a deer-carcass lashed to your back.”
“In midwinter, with a snowstorm blowing, ten Picts waiting at the top and a pack of hungry wolves down below, and…” she said, trailing off. “I thought Cimmerians were men of few words.”
“Only when we don’t have anything to say.”
The sun behind his back, Conan scanned the area ahead. The ground was on an upward slope, but not steep enough to be difficult on this east-facing side. It was mostly covered in thigh-high grass that was a mixture of old straw-color and fresh green, with the occasional blushing-red termite mound. There were enough trees and scrub for the zariba and for firewood. Up here sentries could keep everything in sight for miles, and a few pacing along the edge of the steeper western side would be ample security.
“This is almost good enough for a game-jump,” he said. She shot him an enquiring look and Zarkabaal mirrored it. “Where you drive the herd of game off a cliff. Then there’s nothing but skinning and butchering.”
Zarkabaal’s eyes took in the slope. “Too wide at the base for that,” he said, “and too steep. They’d see and recoil, or break to left and right.”
“Almost, I said.” He looked at the sun. “It’s getting on. Let’s leave the marker for Gelete and get out there to round up some meat. The Stygians can begin setting up camp while we’re off—the Nubakans will be here shortly.”