by Roland Green
Conan made a swift passage across the rooftops of the maze, but came to a halt at its edge. The gap between the roof where he crouched now (amid billows of reeking smoke from some shop far below, which smelled worse than a tannery) and the Golden Lion was too wide for even him to leap.
Also, it would be in plain sight of a score of passers-by below—and of two of the thief-catchers, who stood sentinel, one to either side of the inn’s door. A slight youth wearing a red tunic with the badge of the Thanza Rangers stood a little to one side, casting sour looks when he thought the armed men would not notice.
It seemed that Levites’s wits were as active as his body. No slipping down to the ground unseen and sauntering in to the recruiting sergeant for Conan.
But the huddled buildings and narrow alleys of the maze extended well to the north, to the rear of the Golden Lion. Keeping low, Conan made his way across roofs of timber and tiles, of slate and shingle, and even a few crumbling layers of brick that might once have been the floors of rooms in towers on the walls of ancient Shamar.
His weight nearly took him through one of those layers of brick, and he heard cries and curses from below, but no pursuit followed. He was dripping sweat by the time he finished his journey, but before the sun reached its zenith Conan had found a safe leap to the roof of the Golden Lion.
Without hesitating, the Cimmerian flung himself into space. He landed asprawl, fingers and toes scrabbling for purchase on the steeply pitched roof and not without bruises and grazes. But he had a safe perch on the roof of the Golden Lion, and now all that remained was to make his way downstairs and enlist in the Thanza Rangers.
He was prying open a dormer window when it opened from within and a maidservant stared out. She took one look at the apparition facing her, a giant in breeches and vest and wearing enough steel to arm a company, took one deep breath, and let out a scream that sent birds fluttering up for many streets around.
Who else the scream might have alarmed Conan did not wait to learn. He flung himself through the window, his broad shoulders splintering rotten wood from the frame. He landed rolling, sprang to his feet, drew his dagger, and gripped the maid by the shoulder.
“Oh, hush, girl,” he said with rough kindness. She could not be more than fifteen. “Be quiet, and say I put you in fear of your life. Then none will harm you.” From the look of the girl’s wide eyes and mouth, it would scarcely be a lie. Conan crossed the tiny chamber in three strides, listened for a moment at the door, then flung it open and started down the stairs, taking two steps at a time.
• If the maid’s scream had not warned the thief-takers, Conan’s thundering descent of the stairs certainly did. Doors flew open as he passed, servants scattered like chaff on the wind before him, and he heard voices shouting, “He’s in the Golden Lion! Head him off before the taproom!”
It was as well to learn from his enemies where he should go. It was not as pleasant to learn that they seemed to be thinking ahead of him. Conan had no illusions about his chances of enlisting in the Thanza Rangers if he shed Aquilonian blood beforehand.
So he came down the last flight of stairs with all steel sheathed and both hands ready to strike or merely push as necessary. One thief-taker had reached the second step from the bottom, and Conan was on him before he could bring his sword around, almost before he could shout.
One stout Cimmerian fist crashed into the man’s jaw, snatching him off his feet. Conan’s other hand caught the man by the collar and lifted him. With the thief-taker tucked under one arm and the other hand balled into a ready fist, Conan stepped lightly down the last of the stairs and out to the inn’s front hall.
He might have been skewered on half a dozen swords in the next moment, save that the thief-takers could not so use the Cimmerian without similarly slaughtering their comrade. Steel turned aside as Conan strode into the taproom, the thief-taker still under one arm.
“Sellus the Northerner reporting for duty,” Conan said, raising his free hand in the traditional Aquilonian salute.
Two men sat at a table near the far side of the taproom. Conan noticed that they were both armed and had their backs to a solid brick wall. The smaller of the two men was plainly some variety of clerk. The larger was not as easily dismissed.
He was nearly as tall as the Cimmerian, and if anything, broader across the shoulders. He wore a leather corselet with cast bronze fastenings and silvered mail shoulder guards, and his head was shaved to reveal a double handful of scars—nor were those the only marks of battle he showed.
“No duties for you today,” the man said. “Nor for your friend here.”
The thief-taker tried to bite Conan. Conan held him at a distance, making the gesture futile. He was aware of several pairs of hostile eyes gouging holes in his back, but doubted that they would attack in front of such a formidable witness as the shaven-headed soldier.
“Oh, he’s not at all fit for duty,” Conan said lightly. “He had a dizzy spell on the stairs and I brought him down to find some place where he can sleep it off. I’m here to enlist in the Thanza Rangers.”
“Sellus the Northerner, you call yourself?” the big soldier said. “Well, I’m Tharmis Rog, Master-at-Arms of the Rangers. You ever soldiered before?”
“Here and there,” Conan said. “I’ve been a sell-sword in—”
“He’s been a thief in—!” shouted someone from behind, then pandemonium erupted.
“Ho! You can’t go in—” began another, in a voice so high-pitched Conan was reminded of a eunuch.
“Take him!” a third voice shouted, and that voice the Cimmerian recognized as belonging to Levites. He dropped the thief-taker, snatching the man’s knife from his belt as he fell. Then Conan sprang over the table and whirled, his back to the wall and the table and the Ranger recruiting party between him and the thief-takers.
Fear of Levites or greed for Ophirean gold drove the thief-takers beyond the bounds of sense. Two charged forward, snatching short javelins from under their dirt-caked cloaks. Before anyone else could move or speak, they threw.
They underestimated both Conan and Tharmis Rog. The Cimmerian’s sword flicked out between the two Aquilonians, with the speed of a striking adder. It caught one javelin in mid-flight with an echoing clang and sent it flying vertically upward. It sank a hand’s breadth into an oak beam and hung there quivering.
The other javelin was a clean miss, harming no more than the soot-blackened panelling of the taproom. But Conan’s evasion of it allowed a bravo with a scarred face to get behind him.
The man was in easy reach of Tharmis Rog, but the master-at-arms might have been a granite monument.
He merely grinned as he watched Conan whirl just in time to see the long dagger stabbing toward his back and kick hard.
His boot thudded into the man’s belly. All his breath went out of him, as he flew over a table, shattering a dirty wine jug, and crashed to the floor amid a litter of overturned stools and benches.
Now Conan returned Tharmis Rog’s grin. His reply held no mirth, merely a promise that the matter would not be forgotten.
Whether it was the grin or perhaps satisfaction that Conan had survived some rite of testing, Tharmis Rog now stepped out from behind the table. He greeted a fresh javelin with a stool held out in front of him. The javelin drove completely through the woven cane of the stool’s seat but barely scratched the master-at-arms’ corselet. As deferentially as a steward presenting the latest vintage to a royal duke, he held out the newly decorated stool to the thief-taker.
“Pray take your weapon, sir—”
“I won’t—”
“Oh, you will, little man.” Suddenly the courtesy was gone and Tharmis Rog looked more like a bear about to attack. “Take that sticker back and keep it out of my sight. That, or choose between eating it at one end or wearing it at the other.”
The thief-taker turned as pale as his Stygian-dark complexion would allow and hastily obeyed.
“Now,” the eunuch-like voice said. “What
is all this brawling over one recruit? I think I have the right to an answer.”
The speaker was the youth who had stood outside, wearing the red tunic. Conan now noticed that he also wore white kid-skin boots, and a sword that must have been worth a year or mote of Tharmis Rog’s pay.
Levites looked at the youth and began to splutter. Tharmis Rog made a noise like a bear feeding and Levites was silent.
“Either explain or get out while we enlist our friend Sellus here,” Rog growled.
The danger of losing those crowns loosened Levites’s tongue. It also loosened Mikros’s. Both tried to talk at once until Rog drew his sword. It made only a faint rasp as it darted free of its scabbard, but he could not have gained more attention in less time if he’d blown a trumpet.
Tharmis Rog and the youth listened attentively to Levites telling the story of Conan’s crimes in Ophir and Aquilonia. Conan listened in silence. If he had not found an ally in Tharmis Rog, there would be time enough to do something about it when Levites ran out of wind.
That took a good while, and Rog was again imitating a bear when the merchant at last fell silent. Then he turned to Conan.
“What have you to say to this?”
“It’s the way Levites and Mikros see it, no doubt. But they didn’t tell you everything.”
Conan added a few details, such as his saving Sirdis from the pirates, Mikros’s treatment of his women, and other matters. As the Cimmerian spoke, the two Aquilonian soldiers both took on a predatory look.
“Mikros,” the youth said at last. “You have no place before the law. Hold your tongue or the watch will learn of this.” His voice sounded much less like a eunuch’s now.
“Master Levites,” he went on. “Aquilonia and Argos have no quarrels, and I would be loathe to make one.”
“Then I thank you for your honourably returning Conan to—” Levities blurted.
“I am returning no one to you,” the youth said. “He may not even be the man you seek. Also, if he did save your ship, it will be known on the waterfront. Our sailors and dockhands will not be happy to handle your cargoes, if you show such ingratitude. Or do you call him a liar in the matter of the pirates?”
Conan threw Levites a look, which said plainly that if the merchant named the Cimmerian a liar, those would be the last words he ever spoke. Levites swallowed and wiped sweat from his brow, for all that the taproom was cooler than the streets.
“He did fight, much as he says.”
“Then go back to Messantia and meditate upon ingratitude,” the youth said.
Levites looked ready to argue yet again, but Tharmis Rog growled. “Go back, or what’ll happen to you and your ships will cost a deal more than a thousand crowns,” he said. “There’ve even been rumours of Argossean merchants buying the pirates’ aid against rivals. Now, would you like that noised about among the men who’ve lost shipmates to the pirates?”
The speed with which Levites withdrew showed what he thought of that.
With the taproom at last empty of thief-takers and other unwanted bystanders, Conan swore his oath of enlistment in the Thanza Rangers. To strengthen it, he repeated the whole oath, instead of merely saying, “I so swear” at the end of each sentence. That would prove him willing to be bound more tightly to the Rangers and also prove that he was no witling.
“Now, you’re well enough off for boots and weapons,” Rog said. “But you turn over all your money. To me, here, now.”
Conan’s curses rattled jugs and bottles on the taproom’s shelves. Finally Rog held up a hand. “It’s a lawful order, which you swore to obey. Hand it over, or I’ll strike you off the books and you go take your chances with the thief-takers. We’ll need most of it to pay for the damage to the Golden Lion.”
Conan undid his purse from his belt and flung it down on the table. His look at Tharmis Rog was that of one wolf to another, when intending to challenge the leadership of the pack. Rog returned the look.
“Captain, will you sign for this?” Rog said, turning to the youth. Conan kept his mouth shut as the youth stepped forward and with a quill signed the name “Klarnides” under Conan’s name in the ledger.
A collection of street sweepings under a master-at-arms with-an itchy palm, who had the boy-captain in his pocket as well. It was not the way Conan would have chosen to leave Aquilonia. But anything else would put a price on his head in the mightiest of the Hyborian kingdoms.
Also, the Cimmerian knew that he could face anything the Thanza Rangers might fling at him, Tharmis Rog included, in exchange for the few days he would need to find a way of deserting. It might even be worth staying with them all the way to the mountains, where a born hillman could cover his tracks from city-bred pursuers as easily as a babe sucked in its mother’s milk!
But before he departed, both Captain Klarnides and Master-at-Arms Tharmis Rog would have cause to remember “Sellus the Northerner.”
III
“Here, Countess. Something to warm you.”
The speaker not only woke Lysinka; his use of the pet name told her that he was one of the handful of old comrades entitled to use it. No one else had ever died for calling Lysinka the “Countess,” but cracked pates and broken arms were not unknown.
She unwrapped herself from the layers of oiled leather cloaks and woollen blankets in which she had slept cocooned from the mountain weather. She wore nothing within her sleep cocoon, but the man holding the bowl of porridge did not look away as she emerged nude into the grey morning.
That was the law among her band—a woman might be bare without being willing. Men—even one woman—had died for breaking the law.
“Hullo, Fergis,” she said. “Anything happen during the night?”
“Not a cursed thing. You did well to sleep the night through.”
“I slept the night through because several strong-willed folk—a red-bearded Bossonian among them— would give me no peace unless I did.” She drew an ivory comb from her sleeping gear with one hand and a tunic and breeches with the other.
Fergis had the grace to flush, as far as she could judge under the dirt that now clung to him as to all of the band. Ten days’ march into the Thanzas, with no baths save what they could snatch in icy streams, had made them all as grimy as charcoal-burners or chimney sweeps.
More than one of the men had dared to wonder aloud if this chase after the flying chest would lead anywhere save to blisters and bear-clawings. Lysinka hid her own doubts, but let the men grumble. She knew that she need not worry unless the grumbling stopped and the men marched in sullen silence.
As Lysinka pulled on her clothes, she felt a drop of rain on her shoulder. A moment later she felt another. Hastily she snatched for the porridge, knowing it might be her last chance at hot food this day.
She had just finished scraping the wooden bowl empty when the skies opened and the camp seemed to be plunged under a waterfall. Fergis cursed, and from the trees around them other voices echoed his curses.
“Have our people ready to move out,” Lysinka said. Her lilting command cut through the curses and somehow even rose above the rain.
Fergis’s bushy eyebrows rose. “In this?” he muttered, reluctant to question any of her orders but concerned as always that she should give none the band would not obey.
“We’ll be warmer on the move than sitting and feeling sodden and sorry for ourselves,” Lysinka replied. “Also, for once we can move without fear of being heard by men or scented by beasts.”
“There is that,” Fergis said. He raised both fists, thumbs upward, the band’s salute to their chieftain. Then he turned away to begin the work of routing the laggards out of their blankets.
Many days’ travelling to the south and west of Lysinka’s hill camp, the sun shone on a rocky hillside not far from Shamar. At the foot of the hill lay the camp of the Thanza Rangers, but their work that day lay far above, toward the bare, sun-scorched crest of the hill.
The recruiting notice for the Thanza Rangers had asked for a thousand
men. Conan had not as yet concerned himself with counting heads, but he would not have wagered a puddle of spilt beer that the camp held more than two hundred.
At least nine out of ten of these were more or less fit to fight. Or at least they would be, by the time Tharmis Rog was done with them.
“Fighters or corpses, that’s what you’ll be,” the master-at-arms had told the first men into the camp, and each new band as they came. “If you won’t shape yourself aright, you’ll die in the Thanzas. Die hard, too, and slow.
“If / kill you here, though, at least it’ll be quick and your bones will lie where the gods can find them. Unless you desert, and if I catch you after that, you’ll wish the bandits had flayed you alive or thrown you into a pit of quillpigs.
“Do you understand, you miserable whoresons?” Conan remembered a muttered chorus of assent. Then Tharmis Rog had bellowed:
“Was that men talking or piglets squealing? When I ask a question, I want to hear the answer.”
The next time and ever since, the “Yes” and the “Aye” had raised echoes.
Rog himself was raising echoes today, as he taught the Thanza Rangers to climb hills in something that one could almost call a line of battle. Conan did not think much of his teaching, but then Rog was plainly enough no hillman.
From his position well uphill from most of the line, Conan could see the better part of his comrades making heavy weather of the climb. Some had already dropped parts of their loads—and their hides would smoke for that, when Rog saw it. The master-at-arms was old enough to be grandfather to some of the recruits, but could best any two of them without working up a sweat.
The Cimmerian was the one exception to that rule. Thus far, the two big men had carefully avoided facing one another. This could not last forever, but both knew that when the fight did come what little discipline the Thanza Rangers had might be shaken to its shallow roots.
It would have helped had they possessed a more seasoned captain or at least one who remained in the camp. But “recruiting duty” kept Klarnides in Shamar, close to its comforts and far from the camp where people were beginning to remark on his absence. There were also rumours of other captains being appointed to the Rangers, even less war-seasoned than Klarnides.
