Conan kept his face blank as he lifted the chest of gold ingots, let it thump down on the governor’s desk with a thud and muffled dull clank, and threw back the lid.
That blankness made him much less conspicuous than the elaborate expressions of virtuous ignorance that Valeria, Zarkabaal, and Gelete had pasted on their faces. Zarallo and the portly governor of Sukhmet and its surrounding lands—
Wenamun, that’s his name, Conan thought, dredging it out of his memory. And isn’t it just like a pudgy parasite to only show up when the gold is laid on the table?
—both glared at them with squint-eyed suspicion. Any man who was a leader would have done the same, since they had instinctively adopted expressions used to disguise guilt.
The governor was a thick-set Stygian in his late middle years, his dark eyes shrewd in a face rendered grotesque to the Cimmerian’s eyes by the kohl that ringed the source of that suspicious glare. Wenamun trailed his fingers down each side of a wrapped linen headdress, the tails of which dangled on his chest.
“This amount is insufficient,” he said. “You should have had the spearmen search the bottom of the ford after the attack by the crocodiles!”
Zarallo’s clerk translated what the Stygian bureaucrat and minor nobleman said, into the northern-based language the mercenaries used. By his scars, the clerk once had been a soldier, and he struggled to keep the scornful contempt out of his voice as he rendered the Stygian’s words. There was plenty of both in Wenamun’s gravelly voice, too, but Conan was quite confident they were directed at a different target.
Conan spread his large, battered hands.
“How… Sir?” he said. “They weren’t going to go back into the bloody water that consumed their comrades and so many camp followers, certainly on my say-so. I wasn’t in their chain of command—I commanded the company scouts, not the Stygian troops, acting as leader only because theirs were dead. They might have obeyed a Stygian leader who told them to do that. They wouldn’t obey me, and I had no way to compel them.” He gestured behind. “Scout Valeria here rescued the one chest on her own initiative—I didn’t tell her to do it.” He added, “Sir.”
“I agree with my scout commander,” Zarallo said smoothly. “He could not command the Stygian troops.”
Wenamun swelled, looking as if he’d burst at the end of the process. The cream of the jest was that he couldn’t disagree with what they said—Luxor would condemn any such disloyalty, and denigration of the divine superiority of Stygians.
The governor’s ire was in contrast to the smooth quiet opulence of their surroundings. The second-story chamber looked out on a courtyard of pools and lotus-flowers and bougainvillea trained over arched trellises. They could be seen clearly between slender stone pillars carved and painted to resemble bundles of papyrus reeds.
The rest of the big room was scattered low-lying furniture of carved and inlaid wood on a marble floor, with taller-than human figures carved and painted in the stylized Stygian fashion on the walls—the shoulders always faced outward, for starters, and the face was always in profile. Mostly they were engaged in hunting or ritual. On one wall there was a bronze serpent rearing its head, with water coming out of its fanged mouth and falling into a carved stone basin.
Being governor here isn’t a high-rank job, Conan thought, but it’s well paid. Not surprising, when gold’s the reason for this outpost.
Wenamun took one of the ingots out of the chest and pushed it across the table in front of him.
“Captain Zarallo,” he said. “It is my opinion that your men saved what could be saved. Take this as reward for them, and for you.”
He spoke as if the words hurt his mouth. Three shaven-headed Stygian clerks in kilts and sandals sat cross-legged on mats to one side of the governor’s chair. One used a reed pen to make a mark on the roll of papyrus he held, while the other two stood, emptied the chest, counted and weighed the ingots, re-packed them and tied the chest up with cords and wax seals bearing the governor’s stamp. Since it was being done in public, Wenamun would have to send it all to Luxor without the usual under-the-table deduction.
Behind him, three girls clad only in feathered headdresses, each with a string of beads around the waist, waved fans of snowy ostrich-plumes set in gold-and-turquoise triangles mounted on ebony shafts to cast a cooling breeze on Wenamun’s sweating corpulence. Conan’s eyes strayed to them. Two were local girls, jet-black and statuesque with more colored feathers in their hair, and the third was a blond northerner, passable in looks but an exotic rarity here, and probably very expensive.
Valeria saw him looking and raised a brow.
Conan shrugged very slightly.
Well, if you’re not interested…
She snorted slightly as they exited the governor’s mansion with his kohl-shadowed glare belying his flattering words. Zarallo preempted any banter as he walked a score of steps away and turned to confront them, his goatee and mustachios bristling as he glared into the blank bland innocence of their faces. The few locals in the vicinity formed a bubble of space around the dangerous-looking armed foreigners.
“How much?” he said.
They glanced at each other.
“Don’t try to diddle me on this,” he growled, keeping his voice low. “I’m not a Stygian who can’t make a fuss because he can’t afford to have his king’s inspectors arrive from Luxor to look at the books. How much did you hide?”
Gelete shrugged and took a step back, as if to say, my share is my share. Zarallo gave him a look of grudging respect along with a nod, and then turned back to his own employees. He crossed his arms on his breastplate.
“Well?”
Conan shared a glance with Valeria and Zarkabaal, and breathed deeply. Captain Zarallo was shrewd and wouldn’t be baffled by any story he could create. Making up things on the spot wasn’t one of his strengths, and he didn’t think Valeria would be any better. Zarkabaal would be better at it, but Zarallo knew that and would discount anything he said.
“We kept half,” Conan said. “There were two chests. We discovered them after we got out of the Wedi Shebelli mine, in the mine commandant’s wagon. The plan was to divide them between us and the Nubakans, and then divide our half according to Red Brotherhood rules.”
“Except for me,” Valeria said, setting her fists on her hips. “I’m the one who dived into the river at the ford of the crocodiles and got them back, while Conan was hauling Stygian brats—”
Wisely, she didn’t mention the priest of Set.
Not while they were in Stygia.
“—so I get a captain’s share!”
“That’s fair,” Zarallo said, pursing his lips judiciously.
She brightened. Then he went on. “A double share of half what you kept, after Gelete gets his. The rest goes to the Free Companions, into the common pot.”
None of them spoke, and none were happy—certainly Conan wasn’t. But that was the rule for plunder. Once you got beyond the level of stealing the shoes and belt-purses off the dead and grabbing a bottle of wine.
Zarallo’s voice turned genial, in fact almost apologetic.
“The Stygians are cursed slow with the money they promised for our services—and they’re always short after Wenamun finishes skimming.”
Conan grunted, and the others offered equivalents. Late pay or clipped coin was a depressingly universal feature of a mercenary’s life. That was one reason most preferred service in time of war. Employers tended to come closer to paying on time, then, to avoid riots, desertion, and switching to the other side. In war there was more prospect of wholesale plunder, too. Zarallo might like a quiet life, by mercenary standards, but he was conscientious in looking after his men’s interests. That wasn’t something a soldier could count on with every captain.
A tenth of the company’s official ranks were “ghost warriors”—names on the rolls without bodies attached, and their pay went to the captain. That was long-standing custom, accepted by all. Zarallo didn’t try stretching it, much, which made him a paragon.
“Now, where is it?” Zarallo said.
Another long pause and the commander tapped the fingers of his gauntleted hand on the steel armor.
“Be sensible,” he said. “You can’t turn ingots into coin—that needs moneylenders, bankers, and any you found who’d deal with you, they’d skin you alive. If you could get it out of Stygia in the first place, which isn’t likely.”
Conan and Valeria developed identical sour expressions. They’d both been pirates, and privateers lost half or more of the value of loot when they fenced it with merchants willing to engage in under-the-table deals.
“One of my cousins is a banker,” Zarkabaal said. “He’d deal honestly, for family’s sake, and take no more than a fair commission. He’d ask two-tenths, and settle for say, half or three-quarters of that.”
Given the ruthless ferocity of Zarkabaal’s expression and the hard muscular body beneath it, Conan found that hard to believe that one of his close kin spent his time behind a counting-board, but it might be true. The Shemite cities were famous hives of trade and manufacture, and the cunning of their merchants was legendary.
“Your banker is three months’ travel away,” Zarallo said. “I can cut the gold into smaller pieces, unrecognizable, and mix it with other gold and silver in a bag with a fair amount already there. Move it through suppliers and moneylenders so it can’t be traced. You’ll get your share… now, and without awkward questions from the Stygians. If you could manage it at all.”
His clerk nodded thoughtfully, with his fingers making involuntary twitching movements as if he was writing.
Conan shrugged agreement—albeit unwillingly. He didn’t like tricks with counting-boards and seals and stamps. Striking his opponent over the head and grabbing the spoils was more to his taste.
Not that long ago, he wouldn’t have grasped any of what the mercenary officer was talking about. More likely, he would have thought it a scheme to cheat him—the sort of thing men in civilized lands did as often as they drew breath. Being a wandering man, however, he had picked things up.
A lot of southerners had learned a painful lesson—that he wasn’t a brainless brute from the backwoods. Some had survived the education. Others had not.
“You fix our share for us?” Gelete said.
“Half and half,” Zarallo said, and spat on his palm. The head of the Free Companions and the leader of the Nubakan archers slapped their palms together and shook.
“You honest man,” Gelete said, and then grinned whitely. “Besides, I know how much gold… and where you live.”
And I have scores of archers who can hit a bird on the wing at a hundred paces, Conan added in. The Cimmerian could appreciate the cleverness of that. Trying to learn precisely where the gold was would look suspicious—what reason could he have, except a plan to go get the whole of it himself? He did know, however, the amount he was due.
The Nubakan turned and walked off.
Zarallo turned to the rest of them. Conan bent his head and gave a quick, accurate description of where it was. He also told them of the dead king and his tomb. Zarallo pursed his lips at the description.
“Uncanny,” he said, “but what isn’t, in Stygia?” He went silent for a moment. “We’ll be putting out patrols south of here, to make sure that the neighbors don’t take advantage of the uprising at Wedi Shebelli. The rest… the rest will take time.”
The commander and his clerk strode off.
Conan stretched. “I’m for a drink and a game of dice,” he said. “Care to join me?” he said to Valeria.
“No,” she said bluntly. She turned and followed Zarallo.
Conan ground his jaw. Zarkabaal grinned, his teeth snaggle-shaped but white in his curled black beard.
“I could use some wine and a few throws, Cimmerian,” he said, making a dice-casting motion with his cupped right hand.
“You’re not nearly as pretty,” Conan said sourly. Then he gave a grin. “And not if we’re using your dice.”
“Ah, but I know a place run by a Shemite woman where the wine’s actually not bad,” the Shemite said. “And there are girls; clean, and not too expensive.”
“Lead on,” Conan said, but his eyes were on the diminishing sight of Valeria’s shapely figure. It seemed to taunt him with every motion.