That’s one tired horse,” Conan murmured to himself.
Speaking his thoughts aloud was one of the habits he’d acquired as a wandering man, when he spent much time alone or among people who didn’t know his language. He’d have to put it back in its bag for now.
He swung down from his own mount, with the jungle towering around him, knelt, and examined a track in the gray mud of the jungle path. The distinctly worn shoe on the right fore-hoof of the beast he was tracking still showed that distinctive nick, though it had worn down until it took a good eye to see it. That had been his easiest confirmation since the beginning.
Here Valeria had paused to dismount and water the bushes, which in various ways proved it was her on the horse, and he could see how the beast had stood with its legs braced wide, its head drooping enough to leave a thread of gold tassel-work from the red-leather bridle he remembered.
It had silver stirrups, and the saddle was gilt-worked, too, something she’d bought as soon as they got back from the expedition to the Wedi Shebelli gold mine, and she’d accumulated enough loot for some luxuries. Not that he objected; he liked to swank with his gear when he could, too. Most wandering fighters did, and with pirates it was virtually compulsory.
Valeria had a healthy vanity about her accoutrements.
Like me, she’s down to one horse, he thought. But it’s still the one she started with, while I’m on my third or fourth. She learned how to handle a beast before she took to the sea.
Conan frowned a little, looking around as he kept his mount to a mix of a quick walk and a slow trot, dismounting every half-hour or so to lead it at a jog for a short time. She rode much lighter than he did, but his horse was in better condition, so he ought to catch up sometime today.
“Between noon and sunset, with luck.”
What bothered him was how quiet the jungle was. He peered about, eyes flicking from one place to another. Yes, the same sort of trees—many towering two hundred feet or better high, closing in a rustling sea of green far overhead like a ceiling of multiple arches. Smaller trees made a secondary canopy, a patchier one, a hundred feet up. The boles of the giants were straight, mostly thicker through than his body, clear of branches except for the massive tufts at the top, but laced together with vines sometimes as thick as his calf.
There was little or no underbrush, except where a forest titan had fallen and let in bright sunlight, creating a riot of it, and it blazed with flowers. Drifts of butterflies as big as his palm went by in storms of color.
It was warm, but not as hot as it had been on the open savannah. It smelled of slow vegetable rot and the enormous flowers, including orchids, that starred the background with hanging tendrils of royal purple and bursts of crimson and white.
Just this last hour or so, though, the sounds had ceased.
Rustle and creak of vegetation, yes. The buzz and click and chirrup of insects, yes—and he’d just seen a column of driver ants paralleling the trail, a mile long and so numerous that the horde of thumb-sized little black-and-red killers was wearing a perceptible trench as deep as his ankle in the jungle’s duff-covered floor. He avoided them carefully, because the things could swarm even a buffalo and strip it to the bone if it couldn’t get away fast enough.
No flocks of parrots and parakeets, however, swarming and screeching like giant versions of the butterflies. No hooting, yodeling monkeys as big as a small child sporting among the branches. No grunting wild pig, no striped forest antelope, no forest buffalo with their sparse reddish hair, smaller and more solitary than their savannah cousins but just as savage in temper.
Not a trace of the forest elephants either, except for their distinctive trails through the jungle and the broken stripped branches that were evidence of their foraging. Judging from the dung they’d been gone for days.
Nor the scream of a hunting leopard, not since just after dawn.
Something’s scared them off, since I crossed that river this morning. Black and wide and slow-moving, but no crocodiles, thanks be to Lir and Manannán Mac Lir, and perhaps to Gagooli… though I think I shed the curse with my sword’s edge.
Whatever had frightened the jungle’s bigger denizens into silence or flight, he really didn’t want to meet it. He shrugged like a man shaking off an irritation, deciding he would meet whatever his fate decreed, neither more nor less.
Another hour’s quiet was broken only by the dull thock of hooves in the damp earth, or the softer fall of his own footsteps, and he saw a small pool ahead, of relatively clear water. Beside it a horse, tied to the fork of a sapling. It was adorned with a red-leather bridle with gold tassels, and a saddle with silver stirrups—looped up now—and elaborate tooling. And—
Valeria! All woman, for all her breeks and blade, and that she’s as tall as most men and stronger than many.
She wasn’t there, though. He pictured her dismounting and loosening the bridle so the exhausted horse could crop at the ferns and other greenery, which it was doing—while rolling a suspicious eye at him. It flared its nostrils at the unfamiliar scent of his mount. Against the background of somber, primitive forest his mental vision of her seemed bizarre and out of place… but then, she’d been out of place in Sukhmet, too, even more than most of Zarallo’s Free Companions.
A ship, that’s where she belongs. Clouds towering over a sunset ocean, painted crimson and gold, painted masts and wheeling gulls. And her eyes… the color of the sea in her wide eyes. Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, and soon mine!
Conan dismounted, loosened the girths, looped up the stirrups, slipped the bit out of his mount’s mouth, and tethered it on a long rein. As it snorted suspiciously at Valeria’s mare, he looked up at the canopy; not much light, but what there was showed that the sun was heading west.
We will be too, soon, he thought. A long trek, but I have friends along the way. And then the ocean, and a ship! Back to the rover’s life. Then let fat Argossean merchantmen know fear, gold-laden Shemites curse, and Zingaran slavers rue the day they left their home ports, when they hear that Conan and Valeria are abroad and a-loose.
The Cimmerian cast around for the distinctive prints of the woman’s sea boots. There they were… two wide-spread, and he grinned again to imagine her standing with her fists on her hips, feet braced as if on a heaving deck as she peered about. Then they led off toward the east; he could tell she was glancing back toward the pool from time to time, in order to fix her route in her mind, and now and then breaking off a twig or making an inconspicuous scuffmark.
Even through his eagerness, the silence of the jungle prickled at his wilderness-bred senses. Still no birds sang or squawked in the lofty boughs, nor did any rustling in the bushes indicate the presence of any small animals. He was not used to the sound of his own passage being the only thing to be heard.
He plucked a sweet-sour pod of monkey-fruit nuts, slitting the green rinds with his thumb and popping them into his mouth. From the spat-out seeds and bits of peel Valeria had been doing that, too, and taking advantage of the mangosteens that seemed to be abundant. He grunted thoughtfully as he took a few himself, ripping off the purple-black rinds and eating the sweet segments within.
Mangosteen grew in hot wet places, but they were always thickest near settlements, current or abandoned. So there might be natives near here. There were guavas, too, the type with a soft sweet rind and a taste like a mixture of strawberry and lemon.
The fruit’s good in these southlands, he thought. Mind you, it’s no substitute for a haunch of beef, or venison or a roast pig.
Cimmerians had a belief that eating too much vegetable food was likely to make you soft and cowardly. Conan wasn’t sure about that; he’d seen plenty of places that seemed to prove it wasn’t so… but his youth had settled a lot of his tastes, if not always the beliefs that went with them.
Valeria hadn’t tried to hide her passage. On the contrary, she was leaving a clear trail by which she could backtrack, which was clever of her given that she didn’t have anything like his experience. He made himself go cautiously, as well—she was perfectly capable of an ambush, using that blinding-fast lunge-thrust he’d seen her use, only from behind a bush or tree instead of a brawl in tavern or alley.
Conan sensed the ground rising before he could see that it was, a subtle thing that was as much the way your feet and calves and thighs felt as anything. Then the forest changed. Trees shorter, and more undergrowth. Here and there he could see where Valeria had slashed at it to clear a passage.
He didn’t, simply bending and dipping as he went.
Then an upthrust ridge of rock, dark and flint-like, glimpsed through a gap in the canopy. He grunted thoughtfully. That was a good idea. It looked to be taller than the trees, and might offer a clearer view of what lay ahead. The jungle was harder travel than the savannah, less game, and poor fodder for horses, but just backtracking…
His skin crawled at the thought.
The track he was following ended where a narrow ridge formed a natural ramp that led up the steep face of the crag. Fifty feet up would put him above the level of the jungle’s top, and he slowed to proceed carefully. He held his sword-scabbard up in his left hand so that it wouldn’t clank against stone. The trees didn’t come close to the rock, but their tops were broad enough that the ends of their lower branches extended around it, veiling it with their foliage.
Where the leafy maze met the rock, he halted for a few moments to let his eyes adjust. Peering through them, he could see that the crag flattened out into a broad shelf which was about even with the tree-tops, and from there it rose a spire-like jut that was the ultimate peak of the crag.
His smile grew broader.
Valeria was there on the peak, carefully scanning north, east, west, and south. Something interesting was to the southward, from the way she started and then moved her lips in a ripe sea-oath.
On the bench below was the skeleton of a man—he could see where she’d kicked the duff aside, but the bones looked otherwise little disturbed, and there were none of the cuts and splintering that indicated violent death. Someone could have just stabbed him in the belly, of course.
Valeria turned to come back down to the ledge. Conan pushed forward, not trying to hide his passage, throat a little tight with eagerness.
She wheeled cat-like at the sound, snatched at her sword, and then froze motionless, staring wide-eyed at him.
“Conan, the Cimmerian!” she said. “What are you doing on my trail?”
“Don’t you know?” he laughed. “Haven’t I made my admiration for you plain ever since I first saw you?”
She made an unflattering reference to his resemblance to a male horse, or part thereof. The conversation went downhill from there, the frustration of the long peril-filled journey filling him as she sneered. It ended with her drawing her blade—which he knew no man could try to take from her bare-handed, and live to tell the tale.
“Blast your soul, you hussy!” he exclaimed. “I’m going to take off your—”
Back in the forest below, an appalling medley of screams arose, the screams of horses in terror and agony. Mingled with their screams there came the snap of splintering bone.
“Lions are slaying the horses!” Valeria cried.
“Lions, nothing!” Conan snorted, his eyes blazing. “Did you hear a lion roar?” No one could spend time in these lands without becoming all too familiar with that sound.
She paused in thought.
“Neither did I,” he said. “Listen to those bones snap—not even a lion could make that much noise killing a horse.”
Side by side, blades in hand, they hurried back down the natural ramp.