Crom!” Conan swore.
He was in the foothills of the forked mountain, skirting it to the west—where Gagooli had said he’d find the tracks of those he pursued.
Not if I’m pounded to mush first, he thought.
The rocky foothills were like brush-covered pimples on the savannah, with the mountain behind them in dense forest. The trees grew tallest right at the base of the hills, as well as along a river that ran away southwestward, which he could see running away for miles.
What he could also see was a disturbance in the brush just a hundred yards south, and the long, crooked nose-horn of a big rhino—the square-mouthed variety—poking out of it. It trotted out and stopped, raising its huge head and snuffling, flicking its long oval ears. The wind was directly north-south at that moment, carrying its scent to the animal. The horn went down. The beast walked… and then trotted…
…and then broke into a run.
Apparently there were limits to Derketa’s Arm. He’d come to recognize the signs of the Stygian priest’s curse. This rhinoceros wasn’t just losing its temper because he was too close, and it wouldn’t stop when its tiny mind lost interest or it got a little tired.
He pulled his horse’s head around and clapped his heels to its flank. It was a tall beast, fifteen hands, since the Darfari cavalry ran to big men, too. Jolted into a run with a long-legged speed, the two pack-horses followed with their heads and necks extended, laying back their ears and rolling their eyes in terror at the thud of feet behind them.
The rhino was three times a big horse’s weight, pushing four tons, and nearly Conan’s height at the hump. It could move fast when it wanted to—faster than a horse for a little while… and what it sought to do would only take a little while.
A high equine scream made him whip his head around. The long tip of the rhino’s horn had scored the rump of the last horse. It swiveled, trying to twist out of the big beast’s path, but the leading rein slowed it and it half-fell. Then the horn went into its belly with all the momentum of a four-ton weight of enchanted rhino behind it.
Conan had some idea of the strength of those massive shoulders and necks, but his eyes still went wide as the horse was thrown up and behind the rhino, bits and pieces flying from the pack saddle as it turned and then crashed down. There was a reason horses were terrified of falling; an animal that large smashed if it fell any distance, which this one now did, its panic-stricken cries cut abruptly short in a splash of blood and loud snap-crackle of breaking bone and neck.
Bad country for horses.
He drew his knife and slashed through the leading-rein. The first packhorse got away with nothing but a wound from a side-slash of the rhino’s horn. That also burst the girth of its saddle, which spilled off as the animal ran away into the savannah, occasionally bucking and kicking its heels in the air in hysteria.
“Good luck with the lions!” Conan snarled over his shoulder. He was starting to think that Set must really not like him, specifically. The feeling was mutual.
“But I’m not a god.”
The game-trail he was following dove into the riverside brush, rearing up on either side of him as his horse galloped, increasingly interspersed with real trees that grew taller. Branches threatened to sweep him out of the saddle, and he leaned forward over his mount. Its breathing was starting to sound labored, like a tired bellows in a foundry, and foam spattered at his face.
The trail wound downward toward the water. The breathing of the rhino, far too close behind, sounded labored too, but the unnatural purpose in its little piggy eyes kept it coming. Before long he would reach the river—a stream far too wide for his horse to jump, he decided. The beast was panicked and would plow into the current, and then its heavier pursuer would plow into it.
And him.
If I throw myself off on the downstream, I may be able to swim fast enough. There wasn’t anything else he could do. He bared his teeth in a fighting grin.
Further south, the sound of the horse’s hooves and the massive thudding impacts of the rhino’s three-toed feet changed their timber, growing softer despite the lung-straining effort both were putting forth. The water was getting near, and his surroundings grew darker and a trifle cooler as the trees closed their canopy overhead, dangling vines that slapped at him. The forest was loud with monkeys and birds fleeing in chattering, squawking terror at the onrush of the beasts.
The trail levelled out—
—and there was a near-naked, short brown man in the trail ahead of him, waving his arms and shouting.
In Stygian, though with a thick accent:
“Death! Death ahead! Pit, pit, pit!”
Then a wordless scream of terror as the fellow saw what was following the mounted man.
Conan only had seconds to react. He swerved the horse to the left, as much as he could given the narrow trail and the thick vegetation beside it. He leaned far down in the opposite direction, rightward, his weight coming onto that leg in the stirrup. The reins in his left hand, he extended his right arm like a sickle, and snatched up the person who’d warned him.
Thud.
The impact wasn’t quite as bad as he’d feared, though this technique often was used by the Turanians to pick up people running away from them—women, usually, on raids—and the Kossaki had copied it. Conan had learned it among them; those rogues of the steppe included broken men and wanderers from every land in their ranks. Anyone who wanted loot and to fight Turanians and wasn’t bothered by hardship or danger.
As it was, the effort very nearly tore him out of the saddle. His left foot came free, and he saved himself only by catching the horn of his saddle with his left heel, another Kossaki trick. The horse staggered as it ran along the left side of the track, the ground slipping out from under its right-side hooves.
It recovered with a wrenching effort that enabled Conan’s desperate lunge to come back upright. The trail that had looked as solid as earth was revealed to be a great hole covered only in a framework of woven branches and twigs, topped with a few inches of dirt.
That he saw in a flash as he dashed by. Behind him there was a crackling, a huge squeal of terror, and then a thud combined with a wet, meaty smacking sound. The squeal ended in a gurgling blubber and Conan reined in his mount.
The man he’d snatched up dropped back to the earth as Conan slugged his horse back on its haunches. It reared, flailing the air with its hooves, and then stopped after half a dozen more paces. The Cimmerian slid out of the saddle himself, holding it for a moment with his large hand on the bridle while it danced sideways around him, as if he were a hitching post.
Then something close to sanity returned to its eyes, which still rolled as Conan tied the animal off to a path-side tree. It stood with wide-spread feet, panting like a bellows, its head drooping and foam and slaver dropping from its champing jaws, the rank scent all around him of the sweat that soaked its hide.
He turned with quick wariness. The man—or boy?—had saved his life, but experience had taught him to trust no one until given good reason.
The figure rose and dusted himself off, or at least scraped the damp dirt off his torso. He walked back and picked up his gear. There wasn’t much of that. He was short—barely coming to a handspan over Conan’s belly, which accounted for the ninety pounds or so of weight the Cimmerian had hefted. His dress was a loinclout of leather, a flap falling before and behind, tucked through a belt of twisted leather thongs. That and a string of blue trade-beads around his neck were all his clothing.
His gear consisted of a pouch and one of the cheap trade knives that were currency around here, worn at his belt, and a short bow and quiver with a cap that he picked up from where he’d tossed them aside.
He grinned at Conan, an engaging expression showing very white teeth. His skin was brown, lighter than most folk in this region, but his short cap of hair was even more tightly-kinked, his cheekbones very high and his eyes slanted like those of a Hyrkanian out of the lands east beyond the Vilayet Sea. A little gray at the temples made Conan revise his age upward from the one his slightness and size had suggested. Despite his five feet of height, he looked strong in a wiry-muscular way that suggested endless endurance, with not an ounce of spare flesh on his body, and he was proportioned like an athlete.
Either he’s a dwarf, or his people are just short, Conan thought.
“You save me,” the man said.
“You save me,” Conan replied.
They both laughed the easy laugh of men to whom peril of life and limb was a regular thing.
“You no Stygian.”
“No, by gods.” Conan spat, then slapped a fist on his chest. “Conan, a Cimmerian.” As usual, he might as well have claimed to be from across the unknown reaches of the ocean. Instead of trying to explain, he jerked his chin at the slight man.
“Ich’keomon,” the local said in turn, pointing a thumb toward himself. “Sākhoen,” he added, which was probably the name of his people, since he did the thumb motion again toward himself, and then waved around. “Sākhoen,” he repeated, as if to say “we are here.”
The tribal name contained an odd clicking sound not like anything Conan had heard before, and which he was certain he couldn’t duplicate if he practiced for months. The same sort of sounds had been in the long call he gave. That made it a stroke of luck—
For a change, good luck.
—that the man spoke some Stygian, since it was the trade-language in these lands.
Conan walked over to the edge of the pit; it was about twelve feet long, which was why the rhino’s rump still was half-protruding at its northern end. Something else projected; a great sharp stake of ironwood which had run into the animal’s chest, a blood-wet foot of which came out its body just at the base of its neck. He thought there was another in its belly.
As he watched the gigantic beast gave a final twitch and died, its blood seeping out to make mud of the damp bottom of the hole in the ground.
Without warning or sound, more folk came out of either side of the trail. Six men like Ich’keomon, and eight or so women with a family likeness—yet unlike the slimly muscular men, with backsides of spectacular proportions. All of the females except one wrinkled white-haired crone carried or led at least one child whose ages ranged from babes in arms to a boy nearly old enough to be a warrior.
They all moved with casual ease through the brush, even the toddlers, and in near-perfect silence, as good as Cimmerians and Picts back home. That seconded Conan’s guess: these people hunted and gathered for their living, and were no farmers—not even farmers who hunted a good deal, like his own people.
The women wore broader loincloths and carried woven baskets over their backs, many of them full of greens and wild fruits. They also carried digging sticks of skillfully shaped hardwood, and had stuck in their belts what were probably throwing sticks for small game. Every adult had a knife; eight of the same trade-staple iron type that Ich’keomon bore, the rest of worked flint or volcanic glass.
All of them looked warily at him, until Ich’keomon gave a short speech, full of arm-waving and much of it with a finger pointed toward Conan.
That brought friendly smiles.
Then they stripped off their scanty clothing, swarmed down into the pit, and began butchering the huge animal. Long swaths of the thick hide were stripped off and laid on the dirt of the trail, and then the meat and organs on that. Children waved to keep off the flies. Men and women popped morsels into their mouths as they worked, particularly of special treats like the liver or tongue.
Conan didn’t join in the butchery—not from squeamishness, since from the time he could walk he’d attended at the funeral disassembly of everything from chickens to elk—but simply because there wasn’t room for someone his size among the little folk in the tight confines of the pit.
At the last, Ich’keomon emerged, bearing the horn of the beast, itself two-thirds his height. He was a glistening statue of blood but stood proudly as he presented the horn across his palms.
“You for, save me,” he said. “Stygian trader want—pay knives, beads.”
Rhino horns were in great demand. In Shem and Stygia they were used by magicians to help men harden themselves, and polished to an amber glow with colorful striations they made valuable ornaments—things like knife-handles and fancy cups. Weight for weight, it was worth much more than ivory.
He couldn’t lug it around, of course… Then again, if there was a way he could use it to ram up some Stygian officer’s arse…
“How much merchant give for horn?”
The little man frowned, and listed various things his people wanted from the northerners. He noted how much rhino horn they’d need. As Conan had assumed, they were being royally screwed, even given the dangers and costs of getting merchandise from here back to Sukhmet or one of the other border outposts.
He gave the Sākhoen chief a rundown on exactly what rhino horn would fetch when the Stygian or Darfari merchant sold it on in Sukhmet. He didn’t mention what it cost in Stygia proper, or Shem, much less Tarantia or Zingara. From Sukhmet to the northern markets, the mark-ups were ordinary enough. The big profit lay in getting the stuff from these children of the forest and bush.
Ich’keomon’s face grew grimmer as Conan spoke, and he turned and translated for his band. They all stamped and did what was probably cursing in their clicking tongue. He turned back to the Cimmerian.
“What they get for—?” he began, and what followed took a little time, during which the butchering went on. Fires were lit and the women started smoking the meat, as well as grilling choice bits. He accepted a skewer of liver, enjoying the strong-tasting juices as they ran into his mouth, nearly burning his lips.
It turned out that the Sākhoen sold ivory, too—they had no other use for it, except for tools—and the feathers of exotic birds, plus herbs like the dried petals and pollen of the black lotus. Conan didn’t know precisely what some of them would fetch, but he had more of an idea than his new friends did.
“Stygian dogs!” Ich’keomon cursed. “Lickers of dung!”
Conan nodded agreement. Many ordinary Stygians weren’t that bad, but he thought it was a fair description of their nobles, priests, and merchants. Of course, those categories were loathsome enough in most civilized lands, but Stygia’s upper castes took the cake as far as he knew—and his experience was wide and varied.
Ich’keomon’s face fell a little when Conan turned down the horn, but he struggled to explain what he was about. The Sākhoen all nodded in sympathy as their leader translated. Pursuing an enemy was perfectly understandable to them, and curses, and rescuing a woman.
“I come, help you track. For days—”
He opened one hand, conveying five.