Conan, reaching for an earthen decanter and sloshing it to gauge its reserve of date wine, raised it to his lips and swigged deeply of the syrupy liquid. "We are lucky Babrak sought us out," he said, passing the flask to Juma. "I wonder what he sees in us."
"Who can say? Perhaps that we accept his faith, yet do not proclaim it hollowly ourselves. He is a good man." Juma drank, then handed the decanter back to Conan. "Too good a man for Venjipur."
By the time Sariya called out that the meal was ready, the buzzing of the forest insects seemed distinctly louder in the men's ears. The graded clay floor of the porch did not seem so level either; Conan reeled slightly as
he arose to go to the fire. He burned his fingers carrying a hot kettle back to the house between dry palm fans, but did not drop it or reveal his discomfort to the others. They set the pots on a thick mat in the hut's front room, and Sariya opened them, releasing pungent steam clouds that rose like djinni of the eastern deserts.
"A fine feast!" Juma proclaimed. "Looks like something from my boyhood hearth in Kush."
Even so, Conan thought the black warrior eyed the food a little dubiously. "Smells sweeter than the boiled mule-meat and groats they serve us in the fort," he said heartily, himself kneeling down unsteadily at the mat. "What is it made of, girl?"
"The meat is marinated eel from the village market. Here are baked tsudu root and boiled swamp-thistle."
Sariya plied a bamboo spoon as she spoke, scooping the viands onto fresh banyan leaves. "And stuffed, steamed locusts! Very fresh, I bought them alive this morning."
"Mmm… unusual." Conan accepted a dripping, burdened leaf from his smiling housemate and set it down gingerly in front of him, to be observed awhile from a distance. "Are these all native foods of Venjipur?"
"Yes, part of the bounty of Mother Jungle. And very good for you. The eel-meat gives you the strength of the eel, and the locusts are an aid to"―she blushed slightly, averting her eyes―"male vigor."
"Well, then, I cannot pass them up," Juma proclaimed good-naturedly.
Accepting his own heaped banyan leaf and laying it on the mat before him, the Kushite reached into its midst to pluck forth one of the gray-green, bristling lumps. With a flash of eyes and teeth that bespoke either good humor or rash courage, he popped it into his mouth.
"Mmm―umf." A moment later, he was gulping steaming-hot tea from a clay cup. "Well-spiced, I will say, Sariya!" he coughed. "But tasty, girl, tasty."
"A rare treat it is, doubtless." Not to be outdone, Conan took up one of the pink-filled insects. He perused it just closely enough to see that the largest, toughest legs had been trimmed off. Then, shutting his eyes, he shoveled it into his mouth and chewed. The crunchy flesh reassuringly
resembled Vilayet Sea shrimp, only sweeter; but the filling was peppery, seasoned with some jungle herb or hot radish. Tears sprang to his eyes as he swallowed the morsel half-chewed, rinsing his mouth with wine that only seemed to scorch his tongue the more.
Sariya, meanwhile, had commenced eating in a methodical way, daintily spooning up her food with a small bamboo scoop. Conan and Juma imitated her, finding the other dishes more palatable. The eel was tender and candy-sweet, the vegetables soft-cooked and mildly flavored.
Conan even crunched more of his deviled locusts, squeezing out their hot stuffing first into an inconspicuous fold of his leaf-plate.
"Good, coarse, wholesome food," was Juma's comment. "Very like that of my home village on the seacoast of Kush, which I left so many years ago."
"Aye. Wild food was what we ate in Cimmeria." Conan sniffed the pungent fumes of his tea, sipping it tentatively. "Our Venji armies would be more mobile if they could live off the land and barter with the natives, instead of relying on unwieldy elephant trains for supplies."
"True, the supply lines are vulnerable to attack." Juma plucked a thistle-stem from between his teeth. "But just try, sometime, to make these northerners eat swamp-rice, the local mainstay―'tis a hopeless task.
Some spew it up or sicken on it; all revile it. I have no objection to it myself." He scraped up mashed yellow root-pulp from his wrinkled plate and sucked it from his bamboo spoon. "The main trouble is, these desert folk do not belong here in Venjipur. Their horses grow sluggish and sickly in the heat, their steel blades rot with rust, and they themselves fall and rave every summer with the quaking chills."
"Aye. And not only the weapons rust." Conan sweetened his tea with wine before sipping more of it. "Men's toes drop off from wet-rot and leprosy, even without a festering wound to poison them. An arrow-nick alone is enough to do for a man in this clime. Lucky am I that this scratch of mine heals so well." He waved his poulticed hand before his companions. "This devil-blighted heat, rain, and mud sap a man's strength as surely as the sucking flies do! By the time he has been here two seasons, a civilized northerner is dull and slow-witted, unable to feel a thumb-sized yellow ant gnawing his neck."
"And what of you, Conan?" Juma asked him. "Will you still be hard and
keen after two years of Venjipur?" The Kushite eyed him bemusedly.
"What is your plan to preserve yourself from these dangers? A fast camel west to Iranistan?"
Conan laughed. "Nay, Juma, you and I will flourish here. Do you not see, the ills we have spoken of, each and every one, are equally our chances for betterment! The more amiss with this campaign, the more opportunity to advance oneself by setting it right." He crumpled his near-empty leaf plate and tucked it into one of the scraped, gaping pots. "What is needed here are bold, clear-sighted officers not too bound up in Turanian imperial claptrap―men like ourselves to take hold of things, thrash out victories, and gain rank and fame by them. That is what a war like this is all about, is it not?"
"So… suppose it is?" Juma belched amply and stroked his full belly, all the while eyeing his host with the cool skepticism of a career officer.
"What would you do to improve the running of the war?"
"What would I do? Why, many things!" Warming to his subject, Conan waved his cup airily beside his head, spattering tiny drops on his guest.
"As we were just now saying, I would use local foods in the army mess to make our force self-sufficient. Get the best native cooks, like Sariya here―and local healers, to find out how the Hwongs avoid the ills that beset our troops. Change the uniforms, first of all, and the drill! What place do cavalry tactics have in swamp and jungle, I ask you?" The Cimmerian knit his broad brow in a nearly comic attitude of concentration. "We could create a force that would not only win the war, but stay on afterward to enforce the peace, and even enjoy doing it! But those changes would only be a small part―"
It was Juma's turn to laugh, and he did so heartily. "Stop, Conan. Can you hear what you are saying? How would you work these wonders, with every trooper and officer fighting you with all the ferocity they spare the Hwong? Not a one of them but has interests and prejudices running the other way! The food, for instance―what Turanian would touch the meal we have eaten tonight? They would call it unclean and spit on it―no offense to you, Sariya, but it is so." He flashed an apologetic look at his hostess, who sat at ease beside them, watching and listening with an attitude of interest.
"Nay, Conan," Juma continued, "there are some bad things in this world that can only make themselves worse. I fear this campaign is one of
them. Instead of seeking fame, I caution you to be as small and invisible as you can while in Venjipur. Obey the rules and, less zealously, your orders.
Never take chances, never volunteer." The Kushite faced his host earnestly.
"This is the sum of my experience here; now you have seen some of the cost of calling attention to yourself." He shook his head. "Of all things, the worst thing to be in this war is a hero!"
Conan laughed, shaking his head good-naturedly. "Juma, Juma! If I thought that you yourself could live one moment by those craven rules, I would love you the less for it! But I know it is not so―and you know it, even though you mean me well in saying it.
" He reached around the mat to lean heavily and confidingly on his friend's shoulder. "For men like us, Juma, there are no limits. Tell me, have you ever played imperial draughts as the Stygians do?" He winked intimately at his fellow trooper. "In their version of the game, a pawn can advance to become a king!"
"Conan, I do not jest." Juma glanced uneasily at the open doorway.
"You know the danger of even speaking that way, so let us talk of other things. Do you not see that Venjipur's hunger for human suffering is greater than all the armies of Yildiz can satisfy? We must take care not to be swallowed along with the others."
They continued their conversation, failing to resolve many greater and lesser topics. During their talk, the afternoon rain fell. They laid their pans out in the yard to be scoured by heavy, pelting drops. They sat out on the porch enclosed by a dripping, transparent liquid curtain, watching rain-pitted water running and pooling across the yellow clay.
At length the shower retreated into a mountainous jumble of misty cloud, pink-tinged in sunset over the Gulf. Juma took leave of them and returned to the fort, treading on flat stones spaced across the muddy yard.
Conan, passing inside the hut, bolted the tough bamboo door, then turned to follow Sariya through the curtained inner archway.
Their sleeping-room was bedecked with flowers. Twined into the palm thatching of the walls, braided between the rafters, gathered in clusters on the mat floor, the blossoms shone almost luminous in the dimming light of the bamboo-framed window. Their fragrance hung heavily in air already rich with the smell of rain-soaked earth. Conan knew that some of the flowers, like the drooping pink lotuses wound into the lashings of the room's broad hammock, gave off fumes that were mildly narcotic. Their effect only increased the faint swimming of his senses as he watched
Sariya unpin and unwind herself alluringly from her dusky-blue garment.
Her body shone amber in the dusk, more radiant than the blossoms all around her, graceful as the slenderest lily.
When he moved to embrace her, she turned her face up to his. He saw that she had twined a pink lotus in her black tresses, above one delicate ear. The flower's heady aroma mingled with her own subtle scent as he caressed her, then lifted her bodily onto the yielding canvas of the hammock. The swaying of the airborne bed merely added to the plunging, reeling exhilaration of his own senses, as the two joined in a consuming rush of passion.
Sariya, for her part, abandoned herself to the arduous labors and equally arduous pleasures of her new existence. Though little-traveled, secluded from the world throughout her youth, she guessed that no man could make her feel the fullness of life's simple round better than Conan.
She cherished their time together, using her well-learned skills to reward him and make things better, for however long it might last.
There were dangers, of course; but Sariya believed that Conan could cope with the immediate, tangible ones. She knew that by night in their hammock, even after exhausting bouts of lovemaking, he slept no more deeply than any panther draped across a forest limb. She often heard him waken in response to faint noises outside the hut, sometimes slipping from beside her and out the window with inhuman stealth and silence.
Once, on his return, she saw a gleam of steel as he wiped his dagger-blade clean, and smelled the coppery scent of blood when he crept back to her side. She sensed that his savage devotion would save her, or else it would call down forces too violent for either of them to control.
Either way, she loved him.
Chapter 6
The Elephant Patrol
Wet foliage slapped the riders' faces, rubbery leaves shedding tepid drops that gathered in rivulets down the men's necks and torsos. The wetness tickled like insect-tracks, unscratchable beneath breast and scapular armor; otherwise it scarcely mattered, for it neither cooled nor warmed their skin in the stifling jungle heat.
Meanwhile, beneath the troopers' folded legs, the elephant's thinly padded back rolled and rippled patiently like a living sea. From time to time the beast's sinuous trunk snaked upward among the branches to tear off a tasty-looking limb, shaking the riven tree and showering brackish droplets on the passengers.
"Driver, more room overhead!" Irritably, Conan prodded the hunched shoulder of the elephant-guide Than. The small man sat low astride the elephant's neck, and so he scarcely felt the turmoil of thrashing branches.
"Steer the brute wider around the trees," Conan admonished him, "or I'll brain you!"
Just possibly, the northerner's guttural rendering of the singsong Venji dialect was understood by the guide. If so, he showed it only by a shrug of his diminutive shoulders and a wave of his bronze-hooked elephant goad.
The ponderous rhythm of the beast continued inexorably under them, and foliage continued to lash past their ears without any noticable improvement.
"There is little hope of change, Sergeant." The archer Kalak, sitting beside Conan in the low-rimmed howdah, spoke in deep, well-modulated Turanian. "The elephants rove beneath the trees to cool themselves and to forage leaves for their ravenous bellies." Peering from under bushy brows, he gazed knowingly at his commander. "Their drivers can scarcely change their ways; the venerable creatures have minds of their own."
Conan scowled, peering ahead. "Good for them, but what about the enemy? How will we ever see their traps and ambushes?" He raised an arm to protect his face against lashing green fronds. "I would expect these all-knowing elephants to be concerned about that too!"
"They?" Kalak arched his black eyebrows. "Why, they pay no more heed to human strife than they do to wars waged by fleas across their leathery backs!" He laughed immoderately at his own fancy, with a third trooper, Muimur, joining in from the rear of the howdah. Gradually Kalak resumed his straight-faced demeanor. "Truly, Sergeant, traps are not to be feared here. As I said, the elephant has a mind of his own."
Conan grunted acknowledgment, fixing a sidelong glance on the warrior. He respected Kalak, yet he knew the man to be a chewer of lotus-root. Sensing that some of the fellow's levity was at his expense, he nevertheless saw little to be done about it, short of heaving the crack
archer down their elephant's steaming flank. So he settled back to watching the jungle, enduring the tension and discomfort of the journey.
The men wore a minimum in the heat, offering bare arms and legs to mercies of sting-flies and enemy darts, all for the sake of coolness and mobility. They trusted to helmets and chest armor to protect their vitals, relying too on the lofty bulk of their mammoth steed to intimidate the Hwong. Mounted at either side of the howdah were pivots for crossbows, which could be cocked and fired swiftly by means of long, overslung levers.
Ivory clips kept the arrows from slipping out of their nock, so that the weapons might be pointed sharply downward to wreak death at ground level.
Their giant war-elephant was the first and largest of three, followed by Conan's twoscore spear and sword-wielders slogging along on foot, followed in turn by four couriers leading horses probably half-dead by now with heat. If they encountered a sizeable enemy force, the plan was to hem them in with elephants and pin them down with infantry. Meanwhile, the horsemen would gallop back to Fort Sikander for reinforcements that would probably decide the battle.
But even the elephant riders, squatting behind the low wooden bastions of the howdahs and hedged in by points of sheathed spears and bundles of arrows, could scarcely feel safe. Conan briefly caught himself hoping that the enemy would not find them, and that no battle would be joined on these bizarre, unequal terms―particularly since there was no clear purpose to be served by it. A small body of Hwong might be slain or routed, true; but any small group of rebels could almost certainly elude them. The real function of this middling force was to scout the hills and show off the emperor's strength in a few remote villages. Conan doubted even elephants' ability to surround and pin down savage Hwong in a forest; rather, he feared the kind of sniping, strike-and-run attack that this ill-planned maneuver exposed them to.
/> And yet so far the jungle had shown them no hostility. Forested hillsides and stream-gushing hollows rolled steadily beneath their steed's trundling stumps. The blinding smother of bamboo, brush, and tree-fronds occasionally parted to reveal steamy jungle vistas, flower-carpeted galleries ablaze with sloping sunrays. The patrol passed villages too―clusters of straw shanties dozing amid rice-fields in the marshy valleys. The yellow-brown farm folk observed their passing with
sullen stares from beneath their wide-tented straw hats.
The troopers had been directed to follow a network of jungle trails in a curving radius north of the fort. Lacking bearings, Conan trusted his elephant driver to find the way, occasionally and vainly checking a scrolled map furnished by the captain. At times he could discern a trodden path winding ahead of them through the jungle; at other times not. At one place, he peered downward to see the inlaid stones of an ancient, overgrown highway passing underfoot; ahead in the brush, grouped like blind sentinels, stood crumbling columns of ancient statuary. Conan glanced around suspiciously, reassuring himself that this was nowhere near the jungle temple he had previously assaulted.
As the column arrived at a turning in the antique road, the foremost elephant halted. Its long trunk probed at a carved monolith heavily shrouded by vines. The driver made no effort to goad the beast forward, but sat patiently; meanwhile the second elephant in the column drew up behind them, glowering like a jungle demon in its giant mask of quilted, copper-bossed armor. Its pink nostrils craned forward to probe curiously at the lead animal's hindquarters.
"What are these creatures up to? Why have we stopped?" Casting around suspiciously, Conan switched his guttural queries from the Turanian tongue to the Venji one. Meanwhile, the lead elephant brushed aside pendulous vines to reveal symbols graven deeply in the weathered stone of the monolith. The Cimmerian watched as the moist finger at the end of the trunk carefully traced one of the carvings, a looping, three-lobed figure with down-trailing ends.
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