by Roland Green
When he had done this, he saw that the eyes of every other man in the room had marched with his.
The woman took no notice. She strode across the room with a grace that few dancers could have equalled. The men's eyes followed her, but they might have been the eyes of mice for all she seemed to care. Conan doubted that this woman would have broken stride crossing the room even if she had been as bare as a babe.
She reached the bar and said, in accented Turanian, "Honorable Motilal, I would have business with you." Bawdy laughter rippled around the room. She went on, as if blushing was beneath her. "I would buy a jug of wine, bread, cheese, and smoked meat. Any you have ready will do, even horse—"
"Do not insult Moti by thinking he serves horsemeat, good lady," Conan said. "If your purse is somewhat scant…"
The woman's smile did not reach her eyes. "And how am I to repay you?"
"By drinking some of that wine with me, no more."
This woman looked like a goddess in disguise, and could hardly be given to sporting with Cimmerian mercenary officers. She would give no pleasure save to his eyes, but that would be enough.
"If your purse is empty, girl, we can fill it before dawn," a bodyguard said. His comrades joined in the bawdy laughter. Few others did, least of all Conan. They saw the ice in the woman's eyes.
Moti struck the bar with the handle of his maul. The drummer pulled his drums into his lap and began pounding out a sensuous Zamoran beat. "Pyla! Zaria!" Moti shouted. "To work!"
The women whirled onto the floor. The shouting and clapping rose, until the drummer was sweating to make himself heard. First Pyla, then Zaria, threw off their robes. The man in green silk drew his sword and caught Zaria's on the point, without taking his eyes off the northern woman.
Conan considered the man anew. A fop he might be, but likely enough a dangerous one.
A kitchen girl appeared with a rush basket of food and a jug of fine Aquilonian wine. Moti handed them to the woman, counted the coins she drew from inside her belt, then slapped the girl on the rump.
"No more cooking tonight, Thebia. Dancers are what we need!"
In spite of the din, Conan heard in Moti's voice the tone of a man ordering a rearguard to stand and die. The tickling spider-legs of danger on Conan's spine became sharp hooves. Two years ago he would have drawn his sword.
Pyla cast aside her breast plates. They clattered to the floor amid cheers, as the northern woman turned for the door. Conan followed her with his eyes, and saw that the silk-clad man was doing the same. Pyla, Zaria,
and Thebia might have been carrion birds pecking at ox bones for all he saw of them.
The woman could avoid the dancers only by passing close to her watcher and his guards. The man saw that in the same moment as Conan. His fingers did a dance of their own. Conan had taken two steps when one of the guards thrust a thick leg into the woman's path.
In the next moment Conan knew she was a warrior. She dropped both jug and basket to free her hands and save her balance. When she knew that her balance was lost, she twisted in midair and crashed down with both hands free. Rolling, she drew a dagger from one boot and uncoiled like a snake.
The lordling leaped from his chair, one hand on his sword hilt and the other held out in what Conan much doubted was friendship. As his guards also rose, the woman gripped the lordling's hand, then held on as she twisted again. The man's pearl-sewn shoes were no aid on the wine-slick floor. He sat down with a thump.
Conan was now close enough to hear the woman say, "Forgive me, my lord. I only wished—" Two of the guards turned toward him. Conan's instinct to draw his sword seethed and bubbled beneath a skin of civilization.
The lordling contemplated the ruby stains on his clothes, then he contemplated the woman. His voice rose to a screech. "She attacked me! My clothes are ruined! Do your duty!"
The woman had her back to one of the guards. As his comrades drew swords, he drew a club. It came down to meet the flat of Conan's out-thrust sword. Conan's massive right arm easily .held the sword, as the club slid down to strike the woman a glancing blow to her shoulder, instead of a stunning one to her head.
The woman rolled again, giving Conan fighting room. For a moment he had no need of it. The lordling and his guards seemed bemused at being opposed. Conan shot a quick glance at Moti. Sweat streamed from the innkeeper, and his white-knuckled hands gripped the handle of the maul.
Conan much doubted that he would drink again at the Red Falcon. The lordling had put Moti in such fear that he would see an honest customer attacked. Conan would call no man a coward without proof, but neither would he be bound by his host's fears.
"This woman no more attacked you than a she-mouse," Conan growled. "If we're to talk of attacks, what about that great barge of a foot I saw thrust at her?"
The woman unwisely turned to smile at Conan. One guard had recovered his wits. His sword rasped free, thrusting clumsily but hard at the woman. She whirled, enough so that steel intended to pierce her belly only raked her ribs. A red stain spread across the side of her tunic.
The guard nearest to Conan owed his life to the Cimmerian's scruples about cutting down a man who had not yet drawn. A stool, flung like a stone from a catapult, took the guard's legs out from under him. Conan's boot crashed into his ribs, then into his belly. The guard doubled up, trying to spew and breathe and scream all at the same time with precious little success.
By now, more than half of Moti's customers had recalled urgent business elsewhere. One guard retreated among the empty tables and benches. Two others and their master charged Conan, staying close together rather than spreading out. They also took their eyes off the woman.
Bloody ribs and all, the woman sprang onto a vacant table. The closest guard turned on her, his sword snaking toward her thigh.
"Don't kill her, you fool!" the lordling screamed.
The guard's reply was hardly respectful. Conan knew a moment's sympathy for the man. No order could be harder to obey than to take a she-lion alive. No man but a fool gave it, save for better cause than wounded vanity.
The woman drew a second dagger from her boot, then sprang down. She landed so close to the guard that he lacked room to use his sword. Before he could open the distance she locked his sword arm with one dagger, then thrust the point of the other up under his chin. His outraged scream turned into a gurgle as blood sprayed from his nose and mouth.
"Look out, woman! Behind you!"
The guard who had retreated was advancing as his dead comrade took all the woman's attention. Conan could only shout a warning. The lordling and one guard were coming at him. Both seemed to know the curved Turanian sword well enough to demand the Cimmerian's full attention. Greater speed and longer reach could too easily be set at naught by ill-luck.
His warning to the woman might still have been too late. By the gods' favor, the guard tried to obey his lord's orders to take the woman alive. He closed and grappled her from behind, one arm around her throat, one gripping her right arm. She wriggled like an eel, trying to stab backward. His mail turned away one dagger, and he hammered her wrist against the edge of a table until she dropped the other.
Conan's own fight of two against one would have been easier if the three women of the Red Falcon hadn't gone on dancing. They had no one to dance for now, or at least none with eyes to spare for them save for Moti behind the bar and the drummer on his stool. Pyla and Zaria were now wholly nude. The kitchen girl Thebia was bare to the waist Her skirt slid farther down her thighs with each wriggle of her hips. They had been commanded to dance, and would do so until the command came to stop.
"Crom, women! Either give me room or give me help!"
Suddenly the girl's skirt slipped its moorings, slid to the floor, and tangled around her feet. She stumbled and would have fallen, save that she stumbled against the lordling. He thrust her back savagely, forgetting that his free hand now held a dagger. The keen edge scored a long, bloody furrow across her thigh.
She gave a high,
shrill wail, clapping one hand to the wound while she cast the skirt wholly aside with the other. This drew the lordling's attention again, a mistake for which his guards paid dearly.
Conan closed with the first and slashed his arm off at the elbow. The second had the woman disarmed and was discovering that was only half the victory when Moti charged out from behind the bar. His maul swung, striking the guard with a glancing blow on the hip. That broke the guard's grip on the woman, freeing her to ram an elbow into his throat. The guard reeled back, clear of another swing of the maul, fell backward over a chair, and crashed to the floor at the feet of the drummer. The drummer lifted one of his drums—Kushite ebony bound with brass—and slammed it down on the fallen man's head. He lay still.
"Now, son of more fathers than you could count with your shoes on—" Conan began.
The lordling looked at Conan as he might have at a horde of demons, dropped his dagger, and bolted out the door. The northern woman stayed just long enough to retrieve her daggers, then also vanished into the night. Still nude, Pyla and Zaria set themselves to binding Thebia's wounds, then turned to the guards.
"No doubt the watch will catch him, if she does not," Conan said.
Moti shook his head. He was now as pale as the Iranistani. The maul thudded to the floor, his hands suddenly unable to grip it.
Conan frowned. The expression had made new recruits tremble. Moti turned paler, if such was possible. "Or is our departed friend in the green silk a royal prince or some such?"
"He—he is not far from that," Moti stammered. "He is the son of Lord Houma."
That name was not altogether unknown to Conan. Houma was one of the Seventeen Attendants, a proven soldier and a great partisan of a larger army and an expanded Turanian empire.
"Then he needs to thrash some manners into that little cockerel. That, or else geld him and sell him for a eunuch, to get some profit from him."
"Conan, I had to be sure the matter was past settling peacefully. It—"
"It was past settling peacefully the moment they laid hands on that woman!" Conan growled. "I'll say so to the watch and anyone else who'll listen, up to King Yildiz himself! If Thebia hadn't been attacked, I might be chasing Houma's pretty pimp of a son through the streets now, hoping to finish him off before the woman did!"
Moti drew in breath like a frog. "That was no attack," he said slowly. "She deliberately drew that stroke, so that I would have to fight.
"By Hanuman's stones, girl, I'll have you out on the streets with a name to make you stay there! And you, Pyla! She'd never have thought of it without you. You're no longer—gkkkhhhh!"
Conan lifted Moti to the top of the bar, picked up the maul, and held the handle in front of the innkeeper's nose.
"Moti, my former friend and host, you have two choices. I can ram this up your arse sideways and leave you that way to explain tonight's matters to the watch. I can also leave you intact and help explain them, in return for a few favors."
Moti licked his lips. "Favors?"
"Your best room free whenever I want it, with food and wine as well. Not the best wine, I'll allow, but enough for me and any company I keep. Oh, yes—and any woman I entertain doesn't have to pay you a single brass piece!"
Moti squalled as if he were already being impaled. Conan's frown and the women's giggles silenced him. He tried to throw up his hands in disgust, but they were shaking too hard to make the gesture convincing.
"Well?"
"As you wish, miner of my name and destroyer of my house. May you have much joy in it, before Lord Houma's men burn it over your head."
"Lord Houma may have fewer but wiser men if he tries that," Conan said. "Now, I want a room tonight, and food and wine for—" He looked at the women.
"One," with a nod to Pyla.
"Two," smiling at Zaria.
Thebia grinned and put her hands behind her back. Her young breasts rose, quivering. Conan pointed at her bandaged thigh. "You want to be the third, with that? Oh, very well. I'm no great hand at arguing with women."
"Just as well, then, that our northern friend took herself off," Pyla said. "Otherwise, she might be joining us. I much doubt that even a Cimmerian can do justice to four!"
Two
"THAT'S A BOW in your hands, you son of a cull!" Conan snapped. "It's not a snake. It won't bite you. Even if it did, that's not half of what I'll do to you if you don't string it now!"
The gangling youth turned the color of the dust underfoot. He looked at the cerulean sky overhead, as if imploring the gods for mercy. Conan drew breath for more advice. The youth swallowed, gripped the bow, and managed to string it, gracelessly but without dropping it again.
One by one, Conan took his recruits through the art of stringing the powerful curved Turanian horsebow. Certainly, some were destined to be midden-sweepers. Others already knew everything that Conan proposed to teach them.
He would not ask how they had learned the bow. Among the mercenaries of Turan, the life of a soldier began the day he took the copper coin of enlistment. What he had been before, no one asked. It was a custom that Conan thought wise, and not only because his own past would not have borne the weight of too much curiosity.
At last Conan spat into the dust and scowled at the men. "Why the gods addled your wits, making you think you could be soldiers, they only know. I don't. So I have to do what King Yildiz pays me for. That's turning you into soldiers, whether you like it or not. Sergeant Garsim! Take them on a run, ten times around the range!"
"You heard the Captain," shouted Garsim, in a voice that could have been heard in King Yildiz's palace. "Run!" He flourished his stick until it whistled, then fell in behind the recruits with a wink to Conan. Although Garsim could have been grandfather to some of the recruits, he could easily outrun any of them.
As the recruits vanished through the gate, Conan sensed someone behind him. Before he could turn, he heard Khadjar's voice.
"You talk to those men as though you have heard your own words from others."
"I have. Captain. Sergeant Nikar said much the same when he was teaching me archery."
"So old Nikar was your instructor? I thought I saw his touch in your draw. What happened to him, by the way?"
"He went home on leave, and never reached it. A band of robbers disappeared that same month. I'd wager Nikar won a fine escort."
"Would you wager on your archery against mine? Five arrows a turn, three turns?"
"Well, Captain—"
"Come, come, oh defender of dancing girls. Did I not hear of your winning free hospitality at the Red Falcon two nights ago? Your purse should be ready to burst with the weight of unspent coin!"
Conan was ready to burst with curiosity, as to how the Captain had learned so much so soon. He only said, "It was no dancing girl I defended, at least at the start. It was a northern woman, and a fine fighter if a trifle overmatched against four."
Khadjar laughed. "Most would be, save yourself. I trust the lady was grateful?"
"Not so a man would notice it," Conan said. He grinned. "The dancing girls were, though. So grateful that I much doubt I am fit to shoot against you."
"Conan, you say a mere three dancing girls have drained your strength? Go back to your hills, then, for Turan is making you old before your time!"
"Take a bow, Captain. Then we shall see who may call whom 'old'."
"As you—Mitra! Who let her in?"
Conan whirled at Khadjar's words. The woman from the Red Falcon was striding toward them from the gate. She walked as she had that night, although the gate guards were openly stripping her with their eyes. If her wound hurt, none could have told it from her gait
She wore the same cut of tunic and trousers, in fine blue linen with vines and trees embroidered in red at the wrists and throat. She also wore a well-sheathed broadsword and a dagger just too short to be called a second sword. A headdress of white silk in the Turanian manner shielded her northern fairness from the sun.
"You look as if you know th
e wench, Conan," Khadjar said
"No wench she, Captain. That's the woman from the Red Falcon."
"Oho! Well and good. You learn what brought her here. I shall learn why those camels' bastards at the gate let her in!"
Conan unstrung his bow and waited impassively for the woman's arrival. By the time she was within speaking distance, Khadjar was shouting at the guards.
"He will learn that I showed them this," the woman said calmly. Dark against her freckled palm and long fingers lay an ancient gold coin, cast in the reign of King Ibram two centuries ago. Over Ibram's fork-bearded face were stamped three letters in the Zamoran script.
Such stamped coins were the mark of Mishrak, lord of King Yildiz's spies, and those who went about his business. It did not occur to Conan to doubt the sign, curious as it might be for this woman to be carrying it. Those who disobeyed the command of Mishrak were wise to be far from Aghrapur by sunrise of the next day.
"So Mishrak sent you. Why?"
"To bring you, Captain Conan."
"To bring me where?"
"To Mishrak, of course."
"I see your tongue is as well guarded as ever."
"Give me one reason why it should be otherwise."
Perhaps this woman knew little, which would be much like Mishrak. The spy lord never told any of his servants enough to let them piece together any of his secrets. Whether she knew much of little, she would clearly tell Conan nothing.
At this moment Khadjar returned, in an evil temper. A look at the coin did nothing to soothe him. He growled like a winter-waked bear and jerked a hand toward the gate.
"Go, Conan. Neither of us is the kind of fool to quarrel with Mishrak. I'll have Garsim finish the day's drill."
"As you wish, Captain. Now, woman, if you'll let me wash and arm myself—"
"Arm yourself as you wish, Captain Conan. Otherwise, Mishrak says that you will lack nothing if you make haste."
"Nothing?" Conan said with a laugh. His eyes ran lightly over a figure that lacked only garb fit to display it properly. Or perhaps lacking all garb would display it best?
