Conan opened his eyes, and swallowed against a rush of nausea.
The next pallet blurred in his vision as he blinked crusted lids, and the morning drum throbbed as if it were located directly between his abused ears. A trumpet squealed like red-hot needles thrust into his head. Waking naked, as usual, he heaved himself upright and staggered to the jakes to empty his painfully distended bladder.
As he went, the queasiness in his stomach emphasized how badly the long dim barracks room—a narrow rectangle of mud-brick walls and rammed-earth platforms with straw matting pallets—smelled. Not least because the rations were heavy on beans and lentils.
The jakes were worse, and he emptied his stomach into the trench as well. That made him feel marginally better after, and he was a little steadier still when he walked… carefully… into the ablutions room with its rough stone pavement.
Zarallo had seen that it had plenty of water, and there was enough to douse himself down thoroughly and then rinse, spit, and drink four dippers from a bucket specially brought from a spring outside the walls. For some reason that made men less likely to come down with belly-fevers, always a menace to troops garrisoned in a city.
He’d once squatted on his heels and listened to a philosopher in a city in Ophir talk learnedly about spirits that infested human waste and escaped into drinking water. That had left him shaking his head at the madness that afflicted civilized men. Everyone knew that the spirits concerned were little men with hobnailed boots and red caps—at least everyone back in his clan’s village knew. They put out bowls of blood to appease them, every time they killed a pig or steer.
Cities were unhealthy because they were unnatural, a perversion.
Washing made him feel well enough to walk back to his pallet, tie on a new loincloth, and don a spare pair of short breeks. It was still painful to walk outside into the bright hot sunlight as he buckled on his sword-belt and answered to the morning roll call. Then he walked over to the pells, picked up a double-weighted shield and double-weighted practice sword of some hard local wood, set himself, and found an opponent.
He felt not the slightest impulse to go for his bowl of porridge.
“Yaaaaah!” he shouted—and winced as the cry seemed to lift off the top of his head. Now I know what it will feel like to be seventy years old, he groaned inwardly. Not that there was a chance in a thousand he’d make it to old age like that. More likely I’ll become king of Aquilonia, he thought with a rueful grin.
* * *
An hour’s vigorous practice sweated most of the misery out of him. He was just stopping for another long drink of water—from the same source—when shouts and the clatter of hooves brought his head up with a jerk, sending his sweat-wet black hair flying. Through it he saw a horse galloping for the barracks-gate.
Valeria of the Red Brotherhood was bent over its neck, flogging behind her with the ends of her reins, and her face fixed in a fighter’s grin. She whipped past him with her long hair like a golden banner, then out through the portal and onto the streets.
Conan calmly finished the dipper of water and wiped his face on his forearm. This was going to take some thought.
He wasn’t the best man in the world to come up with a plot or a scheme or a tale on the spur of the moment. But a hunt… a hunt, now, that was a different matter.
* * *
Zarallo looked harassed when Conan walked into the room the commander used for meetings related to the Free Companions. A Stygian officer was standing before his desk, a man who looked vaguely familiar.
“I demand that you produce the unnatural bitch immediately, outlander!” the man said loudly. “We know for a fact that she has returned from Wedi Shebelli.”
“Lord Nebset,” Zarallo said, “I simply can’t. Despite my commands that she be confined to barracks awaiting charges for her crime, she fled. My men report she rode her horse out of the south city gate not long ago.”
“Then find her,” Nebset said. “Find her and bring her to me for gutting!”
“I assure you,” Zarallo said in what was probably intended to be a soothing tone, “every effort will be made to apprehend the criminal.”
“If you can’t, I will do it—I and my blood kin,” the Stygian officer said, his voice low and menacing. “Even the dead will take up vengeance.”
What does that mean?
He stormed out past Conan, snarling guttural curses, so angry that white showed all around the pupils of his dark eyes. Conan strolled up, left hand on the hilt of his broadsword, and thumped his right fist to his breast in salute.
“Ishtar in the Underworld,” Zarallo snarled, shuffling through his papers. “What do you want now? Get out of here… No, stay, I’m going to need the scouts. That bloody pirate bitch born from Hell’s arsehole has done it now! The turd’s in the soup.”
“What’s she done?” Conan said, hiding his smile. Whatever it is, it won’t be dull, he thought.
“You know that Stygian officer she kicked in the balls?” the mercenary commander said. “Named Khafset?” He spat out the word.
Conan laughed, and it didn’t even hurt much.
“I was there,” he said. “What a woman!”
“What a she-devil,” Zarallo ground out. “For reasons known only to the venom-addled brain of a Stygian noble, Khafset decided to have a second go at our Valeria.”
Conan laughed again. “Some men don’t learn what no means, even with a boot to the balls and a swordpoint to the nose,” he said. “How badly did she beat him this time?”
“She didn’t,” Zarallo ground out. “He waited until she was… what’s the sailor’s expression for having a skinful?”
“Until she was three sheets to the wind,” Conan said, frowning in concern, and then he remembered Valeria’s expression as she thundered past. That hadn’t been the look of someone running from defeat—not at all.
“Until she was three sheets to the wind and went out into an alley to find a spot to water the gutter. Caught her while her breeks were still around her ankles, came up behind her and tried to stick it in.” He had to suppress a smile. “Instead she stuck it in.”
Conan frowned again, and then his brow cleared, and his teeth showed in a grin of snarling approval, like a happy wolf’s.
“By Crom. You mean she knifed him this time?”
“Twice, with that foot-long duelist’s dagger she carries. Stabbed behind herself once, and got him in the inside of the thigh, probably aiming for his balls.” Conan nodded, picturing in his mind where the hilt of the dagger would have been when her breeks were down.
As close to her left hand as it is when they’re up—and the inside of the thigh… that’s a vulnerable spot, full of essential things and on the way to the crotch.
“Then when he let her go and bent over to grab at the wound, she turned and slashed him across the eyes. He bled like a stuck pig.”
They were both silent for a moment, playing the scene out in their minds with the long experience of veteran fighting-men… and veteran brawlers in taverns and back-alleys. Zarallo’s irritation held a grudging respect. That move would work… if she was quick as a snake, and if she didn’t hesitate at all but struck like a cobra herself.
“Then what?”
“Then she hoisted her breeks, went back to the tavern and finished getting drunk!” Zarallo’s big battered black-haired hands clamped on the desk-table in front of him. “She turned up for morning parade yawning and scratching, just about when the city watch found his bled-out corpse in the alley.”
Conan made a noncommittal grunt. “He fell on his own deeds,” he said. “Back in Cimmeria, any woman who did that would have a song sung in her honor. Though it might start a blood-feud,” he admitted. “Or maybe not. Forcing a free Cimmerian woman is a nithing deed, so you can’t complain if she cuts you. It doesn’t bind your kin to vengeance, either, especially if they don’t like the man to begin with.”
Zarallo went purple.
“Wenamun doesn’t think so!” he bellowed. “Khafset’s donkey-diddling brother Nebset doesn’t think so!”
Ah, that’s why he looked familiar, Conan thought, raising a brow and jerking a thumb over his shoulder in the direction the Stygian officer had gone.
“The very same,” Zarallo growled, “and he’s not in disgrace in Luxor—he was just visiting. Khafset was his brother, and there may be another sibling here. I’m not sure. These Stygian lords breed like rabbits. Between wives and concubines, twenty offspring are nothing to them. Nebset told me, in so many words, that if it doesn’t look like we’re doing what we can to find Valeria, his masters in Luxor may dismiss us. It would be ‘unfortunate,’ he said, if we met a bloody end as we departed Sukhmet.”
Conan grunted thoughtfully.
“You want me to take the scouts out?”
“For a start,” Zarallo said. “I’m going to have to send a dozen patrols to beat the bushes.” Then he paused for a moment, and one eyelid drooped very slightly. Conan was puzzled for an instant, then inclined his head, also very slightly indeed.
Zarallo went on in a blustering tone.
“You don’t have a problem with that?” he questioned loudly. “I thought you wanted to put her on her back yourself? Me, I’d rather bed a rabid fox-bitch, but no accounting for tastes.”
“I wouldn’t have minded,” Conan said, keeping his voice casual. “She’s stuck-up, though, and you’re right, the company’s in danger.”
“Well, get to it, then!” Zarallo said, then he turned: “Gavrillo!” he shouted. “Get me that roster!” Conan saluted again—Zarallo ignored it—and turned to go, strolling out while he tapped one thick thumb on his chin.
If there’s one thing that would get me where I want to be, it’s rescuing her from this, he thought, and his grin grew wider. Besides, I’m bored to tears with this running pustule on Stygia’s stinking unwashed buttocks, anyway.
For all his bluster, Zarallo hadn’t tried to put Valeria in the guardhouse before she made a break for it.
He doesn’t want to catch her, he mused. Zarallo just wants to make the Stygians think he wants to catch her. Have everyone running around looking busy and beating the bushes and making a lot of noise.
Speaking of that…
He walked out into the courtyard of the barracks-square, roaring for the scouts and Zarkabaal. The Shemite turned up a few minutes later, looking about as seedy as Conan had felt when he woke up. Nevertheless, his grin was sincere.
“You Cimmerians are men of iron,” he said admiringly. “Half the girls at Madam Jetzabaal’s will sing your praises—”
“The wicked woman Valeria has treacherously knifed and slain the great Stygian noble Khafset,” Conan said loudly. “Because he deigned to take notice of her, the bitch!”
Zarkabaal gazed at him blankly for a moment, and began to say something. Conan winked obviously. The Shemite threw off the wine-fumes and his usual shrewdness returned.
“Abomination,” he proclaimed with an ostentatious look of horrified outrage, clapping a hand to his forehead and wincing at the impact. “She should be flogged with scorpions!”
Conan winced, as well.
“We must prepare the scouts to pursue her,” he said. “Prepare them thoroughly.”
“Yes, yes, this is a task of great importance,” Zarkabaal agreed. “We must avenge the noble Khafset. No effort will be too great”
For Zarkabaal, Conan knew, preparing thoroughly would involve a bath, breakfast, and a trip to have his hair and beard trimmed and curled with hot irons in best Shemite style.
* * *
Conan spent the morning seeing to the horses—he selected three for himself—and getting the pack saddles stuffed with supplies, all charged to the company’s account. It was just short of noon when Zarkabaal rejoined him, gnawing at the leg of a roast chicken.
“Is all in order?” Conan said—again loudly. Zarkabaal belched—also loudly—tossed the stripped chicken-leg aside, and as if in thought stroked his newly curled beard with its light coating of scented oil. Then his eyes went wide.
“Aha! By the great god Chusor, patron of metalsmiths, we have neglected to have the horses reshod. Bless Chusor’s wisdom. It would be ill to have them cast shoes while we pursue the criminal Valeria, a true child of Lamashtu’s wickedness.”
The Shemite intoned it piously and bent to touch the earth and mark his forehead.
“To the blacksmith!”
Now that is clever, Conan thought. Just enough truth in it to look good on a report. All well-wishing spirits, remind me never to try to win a contest in sneaky with my good friend Zarkabaal.
As in most places, the smithy nearest the barracks was where the locals gathered to exchange gossip and tall tales. The hearth was in the open courtyard of a building, surrounded by thatched galleries, and folk stood back from the charcoal.
The smith was delighted to have two dozen new horses to shoe, and he and his apprentices set to with a will. They were naked save for leather aprons and sweating as they worked the bellows and hammered blanks amid an odor of scorched metal and sizzling oil, a hiss from the quenching bath, and a tink-tink-tink and clang as nails were driven home and crimped.
After an hour, the blacksmith stood straight. “That’s all the ones that need doing,” he said. “Most of the others are nearly new-done.”
Conan shook his head and wore a grave face.
“We have an important mission,” he said. “We can’t take chances. Do them all.”
The blacksmith shot him a look, but he had done what honesty required. Gathering his workers he set to with a will on the other beasts. A vendor brought beer, and Conan paid him to hand a mug to all the scouts.
Zarkabaal did the same for his horse-archers.
* * *
The sun was heading west as they rode out the southern gate, and a haze of dust hung over the dirt of the rutted road that led south to the savannah and the mines.
One less mine now, of course, Conan thought.
He had no doubt whatsoever a Stygian expeditionary force would arrive in a year or two. They would retake the mine, execute any rebels they could catch, in suitably drawn-out fashion, and round up enough new slaves to put it back into production. Stygians weren’t always swift; in their rigidity; the organs of their state were like moss overgrowing a statue, product of a history that stretched back beyond the time of legends.
However, they were always very, very patient.
All mounted and leading at least one spare horse per rider, the column of two dozen scouts made ten miles before they camped for the night. That was good time, especially since they left enough margin of time to buy two sheep from a Stygian farmer, along with vegetables and goat-cheese and unwieldy loaves of bread.
Roasting the sheep then was a pleasant change from rations in Sukhmet, and made Conan grin at how like a nice, leisurely hunting trip this was—especially without buffalo or rhinoceros. He inhaled the savory smell.
Zarkabaal came over and sat, using his snaggle teeth to strip meat off a rib.
“I notice you brought three remounts with you, and enough supplies to keep a man for a month,” he said quietly. The men at the next campfire were making the night hideous with attempts at song.
“You’re a smart one, when you’re not drunk or hung-over,” Conan replied in a similar quiet tone. “If for some reason I weren’t to return to Sukhmet, would you be willing to see that my scouts get their share of the gold? Even,” he added grudgingly, “that damned Pict.”
Zarkabaal leaned over and extended his hand. Conan took it, a hard quick pump.
“I will,” the Shemite said earnestly. “By Ishtar who loves faithfulness and Melquart Lord of Battles, who prizes a warrior’s honor I swear it—may they turn their faces from me if I do not.”