They snapped open in what nose and eyes said was the gray just before dawn. The eastern horizon was behind the cliff and the range of hills beyond it, but there was a little light leaking from that direction into what was otherwise absolute blackness, since clouds had covered the stars.
There was a scent of cooling ash from the banked embers of his fire. The horses looked up from their drowsing on the picket line he’d rigged, snorting and shifting.
For long instants that noise covered the sound that had woken him. Then he heard it again, the unmistakable slap of feet on dirt, someone running… and running toward him, the harsh rasping breath of exhaustion. An odd high chirring woow-woow-meeroo sound came behind it, the thud of paws. Behind that, two horses just breaking into a gallop.
Conan slid his broadsword out of its sheath and ghosted forward. Just then the first fingers of real light came over the summit of the rocky heights behind him and he could see a human figure running toward him. Black—a local—tall and long-limbed, running like someone who knew how but was nearly at the end of their tether.
A woman, or I’m a Pict! he thought.
From behind her came two animals moving very fast; cats, leopard-sized and spotted but longer-legged and with smaller heads.
Cheetahs! Conan thought.
Those were curious hunting cats of the savannahs, faster than any game, and unlike any other species of feline—they had odd doglike paws with dull claws that could not be retracted. Stygian nobles used them for sport, trained from kittenhood and carrying them on pads behind their saddles like ground-running hawks that they loosed at antelope. Probably the upper classes of other kingdoms did, too, since the beasts were native here but not in the valley of the Styx to the northward.
The woman was heading straight for the cliff, perhaps to get a place where her back would be covered. She wasn’t going to make it, not quite. Evidently she thought so, too, for she turned and crouched, snatching up a fallen bough to use as a club.
Perhaps it was that which tipped Conan into action; or perhaps the glint of metal on several horsemen following along behind the hunting-cats. Cheetahs didn’t grip their prey with claws and jaws like other big cats. Instead they ran into them at speed, knocking them over and stunning them, and only then went for the throat. It wasn’t a subtle strategy, but from what he’d heard they were stupid to a degree that made a household moggie look like a Corinthian philosopher by comparison.
The cheetahs ignored him as he dashed forward, pinpoint-focused on the woman they’d been chasing. As she turned they went from very fast to blurred streaks traveling at twice the best pace of a fast horse, faster than anything that didn’t have wings. They couldn’t keep that up for long, but they didn’t need to.
The woman threw herself aside at the last possible instant, swinging her improvised club. There was a thud of impact, and then both cheetahs were past her as she rolled over and over on the grassy slope.
Then they noticed him. They must have been specially trained to hunt human game because they didn’t try to slow down and go back for a kill. They came right at him in their turn.
Conan decided to strike earlier than the woman had. To anticipate an enemy’s actions made you effectively half again as quick as you normally were, and these beasts seemed to have only one tactic—a headlong rush, a leap, strike, and run on past.
He stood erect as the cheetahs came on. Then when they were committed to their attack sprint, he dropped abruptly to one knee even as his sword sang in a hiss of cloven air.
Crack!
The heavy blade of the broadsword met the lead cheetah’s forelimbs just below where they joined its greyhound-like body. Hitting a lion had been like carving into living hardwood; this was much lighter, as of a body more fragile than a man’s because it was built for extreme speed.
He would have sworn there was a look of imbecile astonishment on the cheetah’s face as it flipped head-over-arse in midair with both its front legs sliced through. It landed five paces behind him, gave a squall and a final squeal as it thrashed in a puddle of its own blood, and died.
The other cat hit him.
Like a sixty-pound furry boulder flung from a catapult.
Conan went over backward with a grunt, then another as his back hit the ground. He didn’t let the near-winding stop him from twisting frantically and bringing the sword up, with the point presented in the direction the cheetah had gone. As he’d expected it came at him out of the dying gloom, lunging for his throat where it should be waiting on the ground after the stunning impact.
The point of the sword went in under the base of its skull and its own impetus and the rock-hard brace of the Cimmerian’s bent legs drove the steel home all the way to the hilt. The cheetah bit savagely at the cross-guard of the weapon, and then it, too, died.
Conan turned in a three-quarter circle and flung it off his steel with a motion like the hammer-throw at the harvest-fair games back home. Like the hammer, the cheetah flew off his sword to thump down a dozen paces away with a smoothness lubricated by its own blood.
Then the two mounted handlers were on him.
Or on them, for the woman was back on her feet. They were using light pad saddles, with a blanket strapped behind for the cheetahs, and were lightly equipped themselves with steel-strapped leather helmets, hide vests, and short leather breeks. They were mounted on rangy, rawboned beasts that looked fast though not fancy, But they had swords as well, point-heavy slashers. They drew them and bored in; perhaps they were enraged by the death of their charges.
Conan rolled to his feet and pivoted to face the first, sword held two-handed and point-down to his right, his panting breath slowing. The rider was as rangy as his mount, his dark skin sheening with sweat barely visible in the early light. His mouth contorted in a snarl as he held his blade ready for a slashing chop with the weight of man and mount behind it.
Balanced on the balls of his feet, the Cimmerian was still as a statue for an instant as his would-be killer clapped bare heels into his horse’s ribs and charged with a shriek of rage. Conan waited until the blade’s swing began.
Then he ducked and let his right knee go slack at the same time. The steel whisked over his head with a malignant hiss. His knee touched the ground, but his weight was still on the ball of that foot, and the power of his calf and thigh drove behind the cut he delivered to the hock of the horse. Its own weight and speed added to the force of the cut that slammed through hands and wrists and arms to shove his body around.
Which was fine, since that was the way he wanted to face. The horse went over with an earsplitting scream of pain, and then its ribs slammed into the rocky dirt. Under them was the rider’s right leg, and he screamed himself. Then again with his face contorted in terror as Conan leapt and pounced, driving the point of his own heavy blade completely through his target’s torso from left to right and into the ground below, then wrenching it free in a shower-gout of blood. He wheeled with frantic haste to face where the other horseman would be.
Needn’t have bothered, he thought.
That move was just in time to see the other man go back over the crupper of his saddle as a fist-sized rock smashed into his face. The woman who’d thrown it followed with another in her hands, a bigger one. She landed knees-first on his chest with a force that by itself would have broken bones, and her hands pounded up and down like someone grinding grain with a mortar and pestle, slamming the bigger rock into his face half a dozen times.
The man sprattled and died as his skull cracked and his face turned into a gruesome mush with two detached eyeballs hanging out of it. Then she rose, tossed aside the rock, and looked at Conan. Her eyes were blazing, but her voice was level and calm as she spoke through the heaving breath of life-and-death action.
“More come,” she said, pointing westward. “Darfari lancers—a dozen. More footmen. Here soon.” She spoke Stygian, which was the common tongue around here, with about the same elementary command as he had.
“Can’t run,” she continued. “More cheetahs, faster than horse. Hide-hide. This way!”
She dashed off toward the cliff, and he followed. He’d killed the man, the Darfari man, more-or-less from reflex. That wouldn’t mean anything at all to the man’s comrades, of course. For all Conan knew the woman could be some sort of vile criminal, a poisoner or kidnapper, but he was on her side now, like it or not.
Evidently she knew something he didn’t.
She snatched the sword, dagger, and belt from the huntsman she’d killed, and she slashed out to cut the picket-line holding Conan’s horses. It was the right move; the pursuers would think that they’d ridden off on them, and waste time running them down while they hid. If there was a place to hide.
There was.
With swift care, the woman nudged aside a curtain of flowering vines that hid the rock in a riot of purple and pale yellow. Then she dropped to her belly and, pushing her weapons in front of her, wiggled through an opening that looked like a lopsided triangle below. Conan bent sideways to snatch up his groundsheet and breeks, then dove into the narrow entryway.
He followed, but not without some uncomplimentary references to the bowels, nether regions, and love-lives of various deities. His shoulders made passage a lot less comfortable, and in passing he had to leave some skin on the coarse sandstone rock. It helped that it was wet with seepage, and hence slimy slick.
The light quickly disappeared. He could see the slightly paler soles of his chance-met comrade’s feet ahead of him. Then there was nothing but the sound of her breath, the passage of their bodies over the bottom of the tunnel, and the slightly musky scent of her sweat and his. Abruptly there was sand beneath him—he judged they’d come a dozen times the length of his body, and felt more than saw the space opening out around them.
She laid a hand on his arm and spoke in a low hiss.
“Turn. Listen. Kill, if any come after.”
He turned, conscious of her beside him. Then he felt at the rock, and strained his eyes to catch the ghost-dim light that he could see, now that his eyes were accustomed. The tunnel they’d come through was ahead of them, just barely wide enough for a man to crawl, but not for his arms to move much. An intruder might be able to use a spear a little, but they’d have to bring a lantern, too. From here they could strike at men as helpless as a fish in a barrel.
Conan let his breathing slow at last and had time to start feeling his scrapes and the itches where his sweat was drying. There also were the welcome coolness and the smell of damp rock and sand. That reminded him to redon his breeks, which would be essential if he didn’t want to leave valued pieces of himself abraded away on the rock. That required some contortions, but he kept it silent.
There was a very slight rustle from beside him. Right on its heels came the sounds from outside, oddly muffled and distorted as they traveled down the narrow twisting cleft in the rock. The beat of hooves, and high-pitched chirruping and what sounded for all the world like a cat’s enquiring meow-row-meow, but magnified ten or twenty times. Voices, in a liquid gurgling language of which he understood not a word, but he did hear the universal disgust of men who’d hoped to come up with a foe, and found him gone.
Or her gone, Conan thought.
There was a shrill protest from a cheetah, which he guessed was prompted by the toe of a boot, and then a very human snarled order. The massed clatter of hooves, and silence fell again.
He grinned in darkness.
On the one hand, he’d lost three horses and his supplies. On the other, he hadn’t been stabbed by half a dozen hallooing lancers, or knocked out of the saddle and fanged by a pursuing cheetah that could do twice the speed of a horse. More than twice the speed of any horse Conan was riding, given what his weight did to a mount.
The woman tapped him on the arm again, then touched a finger to his lips and ears. He took the meaning. The smart thing for the Darfari pursuers was to ostentatiously ride off, and leave some warriors to ambush whoever emerged, helpless as a half-born babe while they wiggled out of the rock.
* * *
After a while they turned again, and Conan followed his chance-met companion. She tapped him with a signal when it was safe to stand and walk—though when they did he stooped and kept a hand in front of and above his head.
The woman was tall, but not a giant. She seemed to know where she was going, never hesitating when they came to a branching. He felt around the turns they took and nodded—unseen—to himself when he found a pattern of three horizontal chips taken out of the rock on the side to which they turned. These caves were marked.
“Your name?” he said after a while, in his basic Stygian. “Where from?”
“Name Irawagbon,” she said. There was a grin in her voice when she added, “Means… ‘Enemy Tried to Kill Her and Failed.’”
He laughed outright, and the sound echoed. That was a good name for someone with the spirit and skills he’d seen in the brief savage fight.
“I from Ahasu, means King… Osakwe—which name is ‘the Lord Agrees.’”
Ah, Abomey, he thought. That was a neighbor to Darfar’s southeast, smaller but by repute fierce and unafraid of a fight.
“King Osakwe wife, me,” she added. “King’s spear wife.” This puzzled him until he remembered the Abomean king’s amazon guard regiment and its legal fiction of marriage to their overlord.
“Is this Abomey?” he asked, slapping his foot on a patch of rock to show what he meant. This time she laughed.
“Thing which many wise men crack their heads for,” she said, “and warriors crack each other’s heads for.” That took a moment to get across. Talking in a language foreign to both was a problem he was familiar with.
“This Abomey, this Punt, this Darfar, this Stygia,” she said. “All say, my-land, my-land, but no men here, no farms—only beasts. Maybe kingdom of lion, of hyena, of elephant.”
He nodded, then grunted agreement because she couldn’t see him. From what he heard, many of the black kingdoms south of Stygia were big—in area and folk both—but their populations were islands in a vast sea of wilderness, separated by great stretches where only nomads, hunters, and raiders went.
“Who you? Where from?”
“Conan,” he said, “a Cimmerian.” Then had to explain that Cimmeria lay far north of the great western kingdoms, which amazed her—Argos and Koth and the rest were realms of myth to her.
“A friend of mine was in the same warband as I,” he said, “but a Stygian tried to take her by force.”
Irawagbon snorted with the air of someone unsurprised.
“She killed him and fled, with his brother chasing her, heading south.”
“Run south, past here?” This time he could hear surprise in her voice.
“Yes. Is that strange?”
“Much south here, forest… jungle, we say. Bad to travel. Then lands cursed. Go there, get eaten by—” They had to hunt back and forth before he understood she meant something reptilian and enormous, or “taller than four men, heavy as elephant, eat people,” as she put it. After his encounters with crocodiles Conan wasn’t eager to meet such a dragon-beast. On the other hand, it might just be a myth, and was certainly hearsay. The jungle-forest he believed, however, since he’d seen the land grow bigger and more plentiful trees steadily as his pursuit ate the miles.
Conan shrugged. Whatever was to the south, he’d follow.
“I am sick of Stygia,” he offered.
She chuckled. “Hyenas of gods puke up stinky snake-meat Stygian souls.” He wasn’t surprised. Nobody much liked Stygians, except other Stygians—and that not always.
“I followed them to kill the Stygian,” he continued, “and travel with her back to our lands. Why are you here? Were you caught on a raid?”
“No,” she said. “On a—”
The curse of limited vocabulary struck again. Eventually he grasped that she and some others of her regiment had come to visit a long-forsaken shrine of Derketa—who was a queen of battle and the underworld, as well as a goddess of love and fertility—where the Darfari had come upon them while they slept the sleep of the Black Lotus, seeking visions. Attacking pilgrims was as frowned-upon here as anywhere, but they hadn’t been able to resist finding the hated spear-wives helpless.
“Derketa tell me to wake, but I slow with juice, get caught,” she said. “Then later, knife one… knife get stuck…” That brought a mutter of what were probably curses in her native tongue. “… then I run-run. Old talk tell of these caves—lead to shrine.”
They came into a larger cavern, one with a crack high up that opened to the outside. The light it let in was dim, overshadowed by thick brush and trees, and long tendrils of vine that hung through into the cave, growing more bleached as they descended almost to the sandy, rock-studded floor. After nearly an hour in pitch-darkness, even meager light seemed like a blaze.
The Cimmerian and his new companion took a long look at each other, the first time they’d had the leisure to do so.
“Big men, in Cimmeria,” she said, giving him a frank once-over.
“Fierce women, in Abomey,” he replied.
She looked it, too—as much a big she-leopard as Valeria and with a similar build, allowing for the difference between pale blond and midnight-black. Her wiry hair was cropped close into a sable cap, her features high-cheeked, full-lipped, and with a slight arch to her broad nose and a chevron of scars on each cheek.
That face had a look he knew as well; someone who recently had been beaten with fists, and the rest of her was comparably battered, though bruises didn’t show as well against her complexion as they would have on a Northerner. She was utterly unconcerned with her complete nakedness.
Well, people in these lands go naked a fair bit, or with only a loincloth, he thought. With their weather, I’m not surprised, and their skins are better guards against the sun than a Cimmerian’s. He had learned that through harsh experience.
“Where now?” he asked. “What?”
“Rescue my sisters of the spear,” she said. “Then we help you with you chasing Stygian—horse, gear, help along way until we must turn for home.”
Conan hesitated. He hated the thought of giving up any of the time he’d gained by pushing so hard, but he couldn’t just go back the way he’d come, carefully though he’d memorized the turns in the darkness. And even if he did, he had no horses.
The Darfari were far too likely to slice him as he came out, unless he waited a long time… a long time without food, because there was nothing edible in these caves. Even if they didn’t, heading straight south would be far too likely to be heading straight into their arms. Which would mean straight onto the points of their lances.
“By Crom, why not?” he said. “They were blasphemers to attack pilgrims to a shrine, anyway—the Gods will hate them.”
He held out his hand. That required explaining, then she shook, and he went through her people’s version of the gesture.
“So, where?” he asked.
Irawagbon pointed up. “Follow.” Then she tied her captured sword and dagger to the end of a carefully chosen vine and leapt to grab one of the thicker ones, swinging up hand-over-hand, which was an impressive feat of athletic strength.
I don’t think I’ll tell Valeria about this when I catch up, he thought. He spat on his hands and went up in his turn.