Yes, I saw her,” the farmer’s wife said.
The roadside farmstead enabled them to water the horses from the well with its shadoof—a tall, pivoted pole next to the low wall that made it easier to draw up the wooden bucket when it had filled. Conan’s eyes flicked over to make sure his horses were getting their share, and then back to the fat farmwife.
There was something odd in her tone.
They were getting close to the border of Stygian control, and the mud-brick huts had pitched thatch roofs that protected them from the heavy seasonal rains. Already a couple of heavy showers had slowed their progress. The air was thick with moisture and at times the roads were so muddy as to be nearly impassable. Conan didn’t regret the delays, though, and in this region rains dried off quickly.
The dwellings were surrounded by a yard-high earth berm overgrown with straggly grass and weeds. On top of that were arm-thick poles ten feet long driven into the dirt and woven together with the branches of dried thorn-trees, iron-hard and studded with hooked needle-sharp thorns as long as a big man’s fingers.
Through it he could see villagers going about their tasks, a round dozen dealing with a swarm of chickens who spent the night in woven coops hung from the branches of a big baobab tree. Others using pots with many small holes to water rows of plants in a kitchen-garden, pounding something in mortars—probably grain, and keeping a swarm of toddlers from committing suicide in the many ways to which children that age were given.
Under the white sun of midmorning it all smelled of hot dust and acrid cooking-smoke, and powerfully of cow-dung; there were other thorn enclosures nearby to hold livestock, and it looked as if the farmer spent as much time with his animals as he did on the fields of millet, sorghum, cassava, and cotton. Men and some women were hoeing as the weeds took heart with the rains and tried to outrace the crops for the sun’s light.
“A tall, white-skinned woman with yellow hair?” Conan asked again, and she nodded fervently. Then, astonishingly, she burst into tears that rained down on the basket she was carrying, her broad dark face contorting in grief. She had a fair amount of local blood, as well as Stygian.
“The poor, poor woman,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I wouldn’t take her money for the eggs I gave her, though I put the basket down and skipped back.” Conan reflected that given her heft she probably skipped like a hippo, and she jiggled a little as she unconsciously matched action to words.
“What was wrong with her?” Conan asked, a little worried.
She gave him a dubious glance, seeming to find his blue-eyed gaze unpleasant.
“Leprosy, of course!” she said. “What else could make a human being so pale? The poor thing, she’ll be dead soon, rotting alive. So ugly—and those strange eyes, blind-looking as if they were covered in cataracts… though she could see at least a little.”
Zarkabaal, olive-skinned to start with and sun-darkened, chortled. Conan silenced him with a look. The Shemite pinched the bridge of his hooked nose hard, to keep the chuckle from growing into a full-throated guffaw.
The peasant had mistaken a northern complexion for a lethal skin disease. Conan supposed she’d have thought the same of him, if it weren’t for the way he’d bronzed under these southern suns. She probably thought his eye color meant he was half-blind, too, or suffering from cataracts.
While Zarkabaal fought laughter, Conan frowned in thought.
“Has anyone else of note passed through recently?” he said, handing her a coin. “That for a shoat.” The woman looked at the copper piece, and her expression turned to delight. It was a good price for a young pig, this far from town.
“Of course, noble sir—we have one just ready for the knife, a fine plump little pigboy.” Then she concentrated. “Anyone else… anyone else passing through…” She frowned.
Zarkabaal took the hint and passed her another copper coin for the basket of peanuts, which was gross overpayment. He put the basket across his saddlebow and began shelling them, then popping them into his mouth. Conan reached over for a handful and followed suit, enjoying the oily richness that crunched between his strong white teeth. Foods like this were one of the good things about being a wandering man.
They’d be just the thing for sitting around the hearth on a winter’s day back home, he thought, with mead mulling and the snow coming down.
Mind, I miss walnuts.
The farmwife hesitated a moment longer, then spoke with obvious care.
“A nobleman came through, not long after the poor, poor leper. We loyal subjects gave him all he wanted and did not presume to question him, of course. None can doubt our loyalty to the Anointed of Set!” She drew a sinuous line through the air and hissed. It didn’t seem terribly sincere.
Other deities—such as Derketa, the local avatar of Ishtar, goddess of passion and fertility—often attracted more fervent devotees among commoners in Stygia than did the remote and terrible serpent god of the clergy, nobles, and generals and the far-off divine king in Luxor.
“He didn’t stay?”
“No sir,” she replied. “Rode through quickly, with two horses on a leading string, just picked up a chicken and some mangoes.”
Conan nodded thanks as two of the scouts brought out the protesting, doomed piglet, prodding its ribs and grinning as they tied its limbs and slung it over a packhorse.
* * *
The column was much further south by nightfall. Conan was pushing them, and there was some grumbling at the sudden turn from holiday jaunt to serious business. He got sidelong glances, from the Pict for example, because they’d understood out that their search for Valeria was for form’s sake.
They were wondering why he’d changed his mind.
Before I knew Nebset was on her track, it didn’t matter where I came up with Valeria, as long as she was in a good mood when I did. Now it’s a matter of getting to her before he does, because he’s out to avenge his brother’s blood.
They got three more confirmations of the yellow-haired woman moving south during the day, and fast, though nobody else wept for her leprosy. Most just thought she looked strange and ugly, though a few of the men were enthusiastic for her strangeness. None of them thought an armed woman was anything of note.
Warrior women were vanishingly rare among Stygians, even rarer than among the northern kingdoms and much rarer than for Cimmerians or Picts, but the customs of some of the black kingdoms around here were different. In one of them, Abomey, the king’s elite bodyguard regiment were all women, theoretically his wives and in truth a corps of celibate amazons.
Only two of the peasants were willing to say anything about Nebset. Smart commoners didn’t dwell on the habits or doings of their betters—certainly not with strangers, though locally it would be gossip to be spread for months. Their caution was even more common here than up in the valley of the Styx, where the Serpent-born were much thicker on the ground. Most likely that scarcity was one of the reasons ordinary Stygians settled here, and the aristocracy shunned places like this whenever they could.
On the morning of the third day they were still moving directly south from Sukhmet, and the road petered out into a game-trail. There were no sign of humans, except a slew of cow-pats and an abandoned thornbrush enclosure where someone had corralled cattle for the night. The game was thickening, though—there were a couple of hundred of the lyre-horned antelope with white blazons on their foreheads, grouped around a seasonal pond. They raised their muzzles from the green new grass to gaze warily at the humans, and other herds scattered into the distance.
“Scouts!” Conan rose in his stirrups. “You’re under file-leader Zarkabaal for now. I’m doing a one-man swing myself, to cover more ground.”
He waved his saddlebow and grinned. They grinned back, assuming he wanted to do some hunting unencumbered by company, and were willing enough to eat the results.
Zarkabaal cantered over.
“We will see you at sundown, Conan,” he said loudly. Then he leaned closer and spoke quietly. “Or in the afterlife. Or in Dan-Marcah, where you will be welcome in my family’s house, if you come visiting. I will keep your share of the gold for you.”
Conan laughed, feeling a great weight lifting from his shoulders at the thought of being on his own again.
“Don’t bother,” he replied. “Keep it for yourself—I probably won’t be by that way. After I find Valeria I’ll be heading for the coast, and then it’s a ship and the Red Brotherhood for me, or the Zingaran privateers. And more gold.”
Zarkabaal shrugged. “I’ll keep it anyway. I can use it as security for loans, so the money won’t be idle, or I’ll have my cousin the banker put it out at interest. It will be ready for you if you come or send for it.” A flash of a grin. “Though I will keep the interest, my friend. There are limits to what I can do, even for a comrade. But the drinks will be on me, if you come!”
Conan sat his mount with his three horses on a leading rein, waving while Zarkabaal took what were his men now off to the northwestward. They dwindled and vanished, and he was alone.