by Roland Green
He grinned. Apart from his oaths to Emwaya, which did not allow him another woman save with her permission, he doubted the wisdom of tumbling his betrothed's maidservant. He also knew a sure way of putting an end to her tricks.
"Ho! Woman of Emwaya, I have work for you." Seyganko heaved on the rope until the lionfish's tail was above water. "Come and help me haul this brute ashore!"
The girl took one look at the lionfish, another at Seyganko, then fled toward the mouth of the cave, still bare. Seyganko pulled the canoe ashore, sat down on the girl's waistcloth, and was whetting his trident with a piece of ironstone when Emwaya came down to him.
When he could free himself from her grip and let go of her, Seyganko held her at arm's length. He saw that she seemed paler and thinner than three days of any ordeal would warrant. Or at least any ordeal save one.
"Your father—"
"Dobanpu Spirit-Speaker lives. His sleep is now healthy, his dreams clean. I have fed him porridge and water, and they rest well in his belly."
She spoke as if still in a ritual, but he saw unaccustomed moisture in the corners of her eyes. He reached up to brush away the tears, and she gripped his wrists as if they were the last things between her and drowning.
"Seyganko, forgive my weakness. I did not mean you to see me this way—"
"No, you are not like that wench you have taken into your service. She meant me to see her as she was swimming."
"I thought as much when she came uphill bare. What did you say to her?"
Seyganko told the truth, and Emwaya rewarded him with a laugh that held some of her usual good cheer. "I will help you with the fish and then have words with Mokossa."
"Is that her name?"
"I think it is the name of her tribe, one living beyond the lands of the Kwanyi. She is not child-minded, but living among the Kwanyi frightened her out of most of the wits she had."
"Not so much that she cannot have eyes for a warrior, I warn you."
"Any woman with sense will have eyes for you, Seyganko. I have just told you that Mokossa is a woman of sense."
"Do you seek to flatter me, Emwaya?"
"I have done so often enough that I do not need to try again."
If she was able to banter like this, she could hardly have dire news. It was in Seyganko's mind to slip his hands under the waistcloth and undo its knot, and the spirits take the lionfish!
Yet something in her voice—
"Did your father learn anything from the servant of the God-Men?"
"I think I can do as well drawing lionfish ashore as Mokossa. Since I do not wish a sodden waist-cloth—"
"Emwaya." He held her by the shoulders, so tightly that he half feared she would slap him. "Your father brought strong spirits, and he is not one to do that lightly. What did he learn?"
Emwaya shuddered but did not weep or try to pull away. After a moment, she reached up and gently lifted Seyganko's hands from her bare shoulders.
"The spirits were angry at fighting the protection the God-Men put on their servants. Also, I think some of them were hurt."
Spirits could be injured, though not as easily or in the same way as men. Seyganko knew enough of Dobanpu's art to have learned that. If the God-Men had power to put that kind of guarding on their servants—
"Are they angry with your father?"
"He said he thought not. Some spirits are friends of the God-Men, others their enemies, or at least enemies of the spirits they command."
Tribal feuds among the spirits! Seyganko silently cursed the spirits, those who made them, those who served them—
"The God-Men have learned that Xuchotl the Accursed has fallen."
The words came out as if Emwaya were purging herself of something foul. Indeed, her face seemed more content, and she leaned against Seyganko and pressed her face into his shoulder. He rested an arm across her back, feeling the fine skin and the strength within, but not seeking anything further now.
"How did it fall?"
"It was hard to tell. It seems that a Kwanyi hunter was seeking game far to the east at the time the city fell. He entered unharmed, explored it, saw that all within were dead, then fled, fearing that its destroyers would come for him. The God-Men learned his tale and gave him to the Living Wind. They seek to hide this knowledge until they know what use to make of it."
If the God-Men had the wits of a leech, they would be asking Dobanpu to join his knowledge to theirs to fight whatever had the power to cast down the Accursed City. Any such being could eat the tribes of the forest as a lionfish ate fingerlings.
The God-Men lacked such wisdom, however. Even if they found it now, Chabano of the Kwanyi would not let them spoil his dreams of conquest. And Dobanpu would most likely refuse to trust the God-Men even if they and Chabano both asked for his aid. Sey-ganko hoped he would not have to say the last in Emwaya's hearing. She knew her father could be proud and obstinate, but she had not granted her betrothed the right to say so.
"Who else knows of this among the common folk of either tribe?"
"That, my father could not learn. Do you think the God-Men might try to keep this knowledge from Chabano?"
"It might serve them well if they could," Seyganko answered. "It is said that Chabano is jealous of the power of the God-Men and seeks to wage his wars without them. If the God-Men joined with the power that destroyed Xuchotl, Chabano would be a babe against them."
"They would be mad to think that such a power could serve them!"
"I know that a shaman can do only so much. You know that as well. Both of us learned it from your father, who was born with the knowledge." Seyganko shrugged. "The God-Men were not so fortunate."
"Curse the God-Men!" Emwaya said fervently. Then it was her hands that danced down Seyganko's back and under his garments, so that it was not she who was the first of them unclothed.
Sun-curing would be needed to finish the work on the monkey's hide to make it a fit garment. Conan held out no great hope of that much sun and offered Valeria his shirt.
She held it against her, then laughed. "As a night-shift, I might accept it."
"My hide's thicker than yours, Valeria, and not bred in Aquilonia."
"If I've survived the sun and salt wind at sea, I'll not broil before this hide cures."
"Or rots."
"Does Crom tell you to look always for the worst, Conan?"
"Groin's not a god to tell anyone anything, at least not for the asking," Conan replied. His grim Cimmerian god was not a jesting matter for him, or for anyone else born in the Northlands, where the name was mighty.
"Is that why you're so often closemouthed?" Valeria asked. Seeing no answer forthcoming, she threw up her hands and fell in behind the Cimmerian.
They had not gone far from their night's camp before a brief but heavy shower soaked them both and left pools of clean water everywhere. They drank, then cut still-green branches from a fallen tree with which to make staffs. With these aiding them, especially the sore-footed Valeria, they made good progress the rest of the morning.
Noon brought them hungry to the bank of a river too deep to wade. Conan studied its surface, eyeing the swirls in the murky water. He studied with equal care the banks of the river, including places where animal tracks ended in patches of churned mud and scattered leaves.
"Crocodiles," he said briefly.
Valeria glowered at the water. "I was thinking we could make a raft and let the river do the work."
"It flows south and west, which is the way we want to go. But we've no tools, and the crocs would have us off a floating log before we'd gone half a league." Conan looked beyond the banks, seeing fallen tree trunks. He saw too few for a raft, and some of those too large for even his strength to roll to the water.
"No, I was thinking we should be hunting for a meal, anyway. Share a beast with the crocodiles, and they may give us safe passage."
Valeria shrugged. "If it works with sharks, it may work with crocodiles. But, oh, that I'd ever be ready to sell my soul
for a canoe."
"Sell your body for an ax, and we'd have the canoe," Conan said, then ducked as Valeria lashed at him with a length of vine.
Hunger and the need for silence ended the banter. They found hiding places that commanded two of the low spots on the bank, where the jungle creatures came to drink. Conan suspected they might well have a long wait, as the pools of rainwater would doubtless content the beasts as well as themselves. It might be dark before the animals came, and Conan did not care to match wits with a crocodile after dark.
As a prophet, Conan failed. It was not yet mid-afternoon when a family of wild pigs came huffling and snorting through the bushes. There were five in all: an old boar, a sow, and three piglets following in the wake of their elders.
Using the hand signals of the Barachan pirates, Conan told Valeria to take the sow, or failing that, a piglet. That would do for their own food. He himself would face the boar—and any crocodile not sated with that much raw pork was no creature of nature.
Conan thrust that thought aside with the same distaste he felt for all wizardry. Yet he could not forget last night. Had he sensed powerful magic at work not far off ?
It would not have surprised the Cimmerian to learn of such magic. The tales he had heard in Xuchotl suggested that those who built the city might have left magic, as well as stones, behind. Old, evil, tainted magic, perhaps drawing on the lore of the nightmare empire of Acheron. Even legends did not agree on how far that lore had spread, how long it had lasted, or how deep it had sunk roots into the minds of men.
Nor did legends agree on how a man became a spell-smeller—the name in the north for those who had some further sense beyond the common five— allowing him to discover the working of magic. They did not even agree that such men existed. Some said that it was only a matter of recognizing subtle changes in the natural world, changes that any spell always made.
Conan had never thought much of such arguments, and less than most of that one. If such talk could have made sorcerers forsake their craft and turn into honest men, he would have gladly joined it until his throat was dry. As matters were, he chose not to let his throat dry out in the first place!
Now the boar was sniffing the air with the care of the scout of a host seeking an ambush. It scented nothing. The scant breeze was flowing from it toward the hunters, and both Conan and Valeria had been in the jungle long enough for its smell to partly disguise theirs.
Conan nodded, and Valeria drew her sword. It caught briefly in the scabbard, and the faint scraping as it came free made the boar raise its head. Again it sniffed the wind, and this time the sow moved to stand between her piglets and danger.
The danger that struck first was not the human hunters. Conan did not see the ripple in the stream, but he saw the dripping, tooth-studded jaws burst from the water and close on the sow.
Her squeals raised echoes and sent birds flying and monkeys leaping from every tree within a long bowshot. Valeria leaped from cover, heedless of the boar, sword slashing down at one of the piglets as they scattered.
The boar paid her no attention at first as it lowered its head and tried to gore the crocodile. The reptile, a patriarch of the breed, had flung itself so far up the bank that it could not return at once to the water. Its claws gouged mud, and its tail lashed as it tried to fend off the boar, hold on to the dying sow, and reach the refuge of the river.
At last it succeeded in all three. A bloody swirl in the water marked its escape. Valeria had just sheathed her sword in the neck of a second piglet when the boar turned on her.
Had the boar been a little quicker, the songs sung in later days about Valeria of the Red Brotherhood would have been rather shorter. But she turned, freeing her sword, drawing her dagger, and leaping aside from the boar's rush with a speed that rivaled Conan's. The Cimmerian remembered how deadly she had been in the battles in Xuchotl as her dagger slashed the boar's muzzle.
The great pig squealed in rage and pain and drew back. Its hooves churned up almost as much mud as the crocodile had. It tried to gain footing on the slippery bank for launching a charge, but again it was a trifle too slow. Conan was within sword's reach before the boar could charge. There was no subtlety or art in the way his sword came down on the boar's thick neck. Swordmasters from Zingara to Vanaheim would have cringed at the brutal strength of the blow, more suited to an executioner than a swordsman.
It did not matter to Conan who struck the blow, or to the boar, who fell dead, or to Valeria, who found the boar lying at her feet.
Valeria turned, the battle-light in her eyes, and brushed her hair from her face. The movement of her arm lifted her breasts. Altogether she was a sight to make a man's blood seethe in his veins, the huntress among her prey, silhouetted against the sun-dappled river.
She stood so that once again Conan did not see the warning ripples in the stream. The second crocodile was as large as the first, but not as swift. Also, it exhaled a great, foul, hissing breath as it slid up the bank.
Valeria jumped to safety as the jaws thudded shut an arm's length from her leg. Not watching where she leaped, she landed on a slippery patch, reeled, and staggered hard against the Cimmerian. He clutched at her, drawing her backward with him.
His back came up hard against a red-barked tree. The tree shook and made a rumbling sound like a mill wheel. Instantly sensing a new danger, Conan stepped away from the tree, turning and loosing his grip on Valeria as he did so.
The next moment, the ground vanished from under his feet. He plunged into darkness, taking with him one memory and one hope. The memory was of Valeria's horror-stricken face staring after him. The hope was that she would remember the crocodile at her back rather than fret herself about him.
Geyrus, first among the God-Men—or First Speaker to the Living Wind, as he was named in ritual—shook his staff. That was not enough to ease his wrath, so he struck the rod hard upon the silver-shot rock at his feet.
The three Cobra Clan warriors cringed, as if they expected the rock to open up at Geyrus's command and swallow them. Their eyes showed only whites, and they held their shaking hands over their mouths in the ritual gesture of supplication.
They would find no mercy from Geyrus, and deserved none.
"Six slain, three taken, and one of my handmaids as well!" he roared. He could make his voice as loud as a lion's if he chose, though not as easily as he had done in his youth. Then he could have brought Cha-bano himself to his knees with mouth-magic!
"Forgive—" muttered one of the warriors.
"There is no forgiveness for such folly!" Geyrus stormed. "Folly enough in taking her on such a journey at all. Folly ten times worse in losing her to the lake-swimmers!"
He did not use the lion-voice this time. He needed to save his strength, and also, he did not wish all he said to be overheard.
Even in the very house of the Speakers to the Living Wind, there were those whose hearts lay first with Chabano of the Kwanyi. They would not hesitate to tell him any secret of the Servants if they thought it would earn them his goodwill.
"You are dead men," he said more softly. "Yet I am disposed to grant you as much mercy as you deserve. You may choose your death. Shall I give you to the Living Wind? Or shall I give you some other death, of my own choosing?"
The mere mention of the Living Wind made one warrior drop to his knees, a posture he would rather have died than have assumed before a human foe. Geyrus smiled tightly so as to reveal only those of his teeth that still shone white and perfect.
Geyrus understood the warriors' terror. The Living Wind played with those who came to it with unclouded minds, harassing them like a cat with a mouse. Madness and agony came swiftly, and lasted long enough to make death a craved release.
"So be it. You shall meet the fate of any cobra when it crawls too close to the leopard's cubs."
Geyrus did not produce a thunderclap as he completed the spell. The first sound the men heard was the growl as the spell-borne leopards scented prey. Then claws struck golden
sparks from the stone as the leopards hurled themselves upon the warriors.
Geyrus had kept his promise. The leopards killed more swiftly than the Living Wind commonly did. Fangs tore out throats, claws ripped bellies, and screams of fear and agony echoed only briefly about the tunnels. The leopards were feeding lustily on the corpses as Geyrus dropped the stout net across the tunnel.
A time had been when he could have raised a barrier against the leopards entirely by magic. That time of youthful strength was gone, and would not come again. His best now was bringing the leopards when they were needed, and returning them when they slept, sated on human flesh.
Geyrus did not pray to any god who had a name among living men. Nor did he pray to the Living Wind—it was no god; that had been plain from the earliest days of its Servants.
Instead, he hoped that his not keeping the secret of Xuchotl's fall would do no harm. It was probably a vain hope, inasmuch as neither Chabano nor Dobanpu were fools. Geyrus consoled himself with the thought that if they had been, there would be no challenge, no pride for him in besting them. Both a man's first battles and his last should be against worthy foes.
But that girl—lost! She alone would earn Seyganko the slowest death any man had ever suffered, after he had watched Emwaya die just as slowly. Or would it be better to make Dobanpu's unnatural daughter watch her betrothed's death before her own?
Time to decide when he had them both in his hands. Either way would ensure the girl's obedience for the rest of his days. The First Speaker to the Living Wind would sleep in a well-warmed bed, as befitted a victor.
The disappearance of Valeria's Cimmerian companion was swift and silent. One moment, Valeria sensed him at her back; the next moment, her fine-honed battle instincts told her that he was not.
She leaped again, nearly losing her last garment. The crocodile hissed like a pot of stew overflowing into a cook fire and wriggled forward. Its jaws—as long as a child of twelve—gaped, then shut again with a clang as if made of iron instead of bone.