Conan the Savage

by Leonard Carpenter

  To attack the problem another way... how far could he have been carried downstream? The river was swift, yes, as was the underground flume that must have fed him into it, but how long could he have been dragged down its rocky course before collapsing here in the sand? Not for an entire day, certainly; it had been late morning, after all, when he set forth on his desperate escape from the slave pit. Could he be very far now from the site of his former imprisonment?

  As he crouched in the warm sun, his eyes came to rest on a wooden snag floating half-lodged against the sand! in front of him. More than man-sized it was, a thick tree of red-barked pine with a few stubs of branches still projecting. It was darkly damp all around, he saw; its expo surfaces were still drying in the day’s heat.

  Did he not have some memory of clinging to those worn, blunt limbs amidst a watery chaos, after having been in a timeless, sightless rush through echoing subterranean gulfs? Was there not a faint recollection in his mind of clutching for the snag and clinging to it in a mad grasp at survival? Thoughtfully he probed a sore spot on his chest, a chafed bruise that may have matched the contours of th same log. Abruptly then he shook his black-maned head, more to banish the memory than to recapture it. If indeed, he had entangled himself in that jagged float, why then, h could have floated downstream for hours, even through a whole day and night.

  For the moment, anyway, more pressing matters loomed He arose to his feet, hunger drawing into a sudden, insistent knot in his belly. As he straightened, he maintained a cautious watch around him, but the only untoward noise was the flap and whir of a startled peafowl, its flight curving away across the water. At this, his empty stomach twinged him; had he but known before of the bird’s nearness... He began to watch his surroundings more carefully.

  All around him the day stretched still and warm, its passing seconds counted by the buzz of insects, the easy banter of falling water, the twitter of songbirds. Further along, the stream-side showed signs of other life: bird tracks, snake and turtle furrowings, and the lobed hoof-prints of antelope or goat. This latter sight gladdened Conan’s heart; yet he knew that where wild game abounded, flesh-eaters might also lurk. He was not equipped to deal with such, at least not yet; without steel, he was truly naked. He judged it unsafe to linger near the steep bank.

  Wading into the shallows, he chose a place where a boulder diverted a clear channel of water against a broad, weedy sandbar. This stream had fish aplenty. Even as he watched, he saw a blue fisher-bird dart down near the far bank and pluck a gleaming titbit out of the water. Nearer at hand, almost underfoot, he could discern dim shapes hovering and flitting against the pale sand.

  Crouching waist-deep in the lazy current and choosing his place carefully, he extended one hand palm-up beneath the water’s surface. Getting used to the river’s chill, he let his feet settle into the soft bottom; then, gently, he began waving the fingers of his poised hand in a slow, undulating motion.

  The fish, he knew, liked to idle facing upstream, twitching their fins only occasionally as the water flowed past their gills. He watched them—or rather, their darker shadows on the bottom—keeping stock-still himself to let them forget his presence.

  In a matter of moments, there came a response. A silver-blue trout, full and supple, swam up out of the shadows and positioned itself over his hand, enjoying the tickling currents his fingers directed upward at its belly.

  After a brief, lulling moment, Conan moved. His arm arched strongly upward, its splash trailing a curve of sparkling drops in the sunlight. At its apex, the trout twisted and writhed, to fall flopping on the sandbar.

  In mere heartbeats, Conan was upon it, seizing its thrashing, wriggling form in two hands. He raised it to his mouth, teeth poised, then thought better of it and groped around him to find a stone. He took time to smash the creature’s feeble brain and end its suffering before tearing into its scaly back and devouring the raw, succulent flesh.

  Though sizeable, the fish only whetted Conan’s appetite. Returning to his place in die stream, he waited patiently, interminably. No more fish came to his beck.

  At length he sought out another spot, where, in the course of the afternoon, he enticed two more fish, the first and larger of which wriggled out of his too-eager grasp. When he finally finished wolfing down the second trout, he was cramped and shivering, his teeth a-chatter in th descending afternoon shadows.

  Swamp onions grew in a muddy place near the side of the stream. Conan dug some of them out and, to warm himself, sat gnawing them in the cleft of a southwest-facing rock, partly in shadow but retaining plenty of heat from the day’s sun. Now that evening was nigh, he cursed himself and all the gods for having let his food quest become so miserably lengthy after his initial good luck. He had no way to make a fire with which to warm himself and fend off predators, and the approaching night would be the prowlers’ best stalking time.

  Creeping downriver—wading, or traversing bare rock, where possible, to lessen his spoor—he at last found a crevice that looked defensible amid dry, jumbled boulders. It opened out through a man-sized notch at one end; jumbled rocks barred the other, and a steep cliff loomed above Tall firs stood nearby; their fronds, stretching overhead would keep out the dew. Any hunting creature that tried to approach him within the confines of the crevice would face a cornered and dangerous foe.

  He tore pungent boughs from a nearby cypress shrub and spread them on the ground for a bed. Then he laid in a good supply of rocks for throwing and obtained from the riverbank a knotted club of dry, hard driftwood that would serve to punish any attack at close quarters.

  On his last trip down to the water, he heard a rattle on the far bank and peered across to see, in the deepening gloom, a young stag emerging from the brush to take a drink. Conan crouched, selected a fist-sized pebble from the shallows, and with a smooth, supple motion, sent it arcing through the air. But it was an unlikely shot; it only glanced off the stooping animal’s antlers. The elk wheeled, and some moments’ crashings in the brush signalled that it ran far away. He could have swum the river and pursued it, but he saw little use in hunting the dangerous animal, wet and unarmed as he was.

  Returning to his lair, he curled onto his scratchy heap of fronds, half-closed his eyes, and in moments was asleep.

  His slumber was deep, scarcely interrupted by brief, nervous alerts at night sounds heard over the murmur of the stream: the hoot and flap of an owl nesting nearby, the forlorn howling of wolves or wild dogs somewhere downriver, and from an even farther and loftier remove, the mating roar of panther or hill tiger. Conan’s wilderness training was such that he could register these noises, identify them, and dismiss them as harmless to him without even fully awakening—whereas a civilized man in the same situation would have been shocked awake, to wait out the night in sweating fear.

  This night, however, it was smaller things—the river damp, the night chill, and the prickling creep of insects across Conan’s bare skin—that caused him to stir and thrash himself awake in darkness after the heaviness of his first sleep had passed. His stony den, he realized, was damp and unhealthy, colder than a Hyperborean tomb. Through the dank crevices formed by the tumbled rocks at its head there poured drafts as chill as the currents of the river in the canyon bottom. Weakened as he was by enslavement and near drowning, not to consider his more recent exposure, Conan had no wish to arise in the morning sluggish, stiff, and feeble from night-long shivering. It was difficult t summon thought, much less to move. Nevertheless, gathering himself into a crouch, he ransacked his numb brain for tricks of woodcraft. Then, taking up his club from beside him, he set his bare, half-numbed feet on the tumbled rocks and began climbing.

  In mere moments, he was out into the open, where the light of a crescent moon dusted the cliffs and treetops with silver. Already the faint breeze that tingled across his shanks and back felt feather-dry and warm.

  Finding footholds was easy with the aid of the moon’s stark light. Soon, following a crevice that angled up the fractured slope
, Conan came to a shallow ledge screened by the boughs of one of the tall pines standing close underneath.

  Here, instead of the dank drafts of the canyon floor, mild air from the sun-warmed slopes yet lingered and drifted. The aerie appeared safe and afforded adequate room.

  Brushing aside the rocks and small, barbed pine cones, but conserving the softer, decaying needles that carpeted the ledge, Conan curled himself behind the screening boughs and returned to sleep.

  Morning brought a warming dazzle of sun, a twittering chorus of newly awakened birds, and an insistent pelting of pine cone teeth from a chipmunk breakfasting high overhead. Conan sat up and stretched, brushing embedded grit and tree needles from his scalp and hide. Edging into the warm, golden rays, he surveyed the dawn-shaded landscape visible from his perch.

  The river here emerged from its broad canyon to continue roughly southward, as the station of the sun at his left showed. The land before him was gentler, rising toward low, rolling hills to the eastward; there lush meadowlands stretched between belts of dense-shadowed forest. The routes of tributary streams could be picked out as trails of dissipating vapour, along with the occasional pale gleam of sky on ponds and lakes. He saw no glimpse of any or habitation—ho smokes, ploughed fields, or other signs of settlement.

  All the better, some part of Conan’s feral nature whispered to him. Survival should be possible here, perhaps even more congenial without the interference of civilization.

  To the right, across the murmuring river, the land rose rocky and steep. Cliffs were in view, yet there were no

  true mountains, none that could be identified with any prickings on the war maps and caravan maps he had seen. As he pondered this, one question rose uppermost in his mind: had he, then, crossed over the jagged barrier of the Kezankian Mountains? Had his captors, or the lightless torrents of the underground river, somehow borne him to the eastern watershed of those high, snow-crested peaks?

  If not, then he was still in the Hyborian world as he envisioned it, albeit in some wild, untamed fringe of its charted and settled lands. But if so—if these streams and valleys before him ultimately spilled eastward—why then, they opened on fates stranger and more diverse than anything he had known in the past. It might be years, or even a lifetime, before he could make his way back to any place he had heretofore seen.

  As he sat there on the cliff, basking like a lizard in the morning rays, the question began to fade in importance. Where had he been, after all, that he so longed to revisit? Where would he be welcomed, not hunted as a black sheep, a foreigner guilty of past nonconformities? The boon friends he had made in his wanderings were, most of them, as footloose as he. Had he not, during his few and turbulent years, oft-times started life afresh?—though hardly as naked and misplaced as he now was. But was there anything worthwhile in his past that carried over to this lean, desperate present?

  Thinking of friends, his last sure memory was of Tjai, of his drowned face, thick-tongued and bulbous-eyed, floating in the ghost light of the skeleton garden. The grim fact of Tjai’s death was certain... and with the little toll man gone, why look back to his recent captivity at all? The mine was there somewhere, to be sure; he might forfeit his life seeking it, or suffer a worse fate once he found it. Why trouble over it at all, then? For some petty revenge or the promise of riches? In this new land of urgent necessities, he could neither sup revenge nor gnaw riches.

  Nay, to mount any such project, or to find his way to any place scrawled on a mortal map, would require long, careful preparation. Greater adventures, he guessed, lay nearer at hand, and to face them, his mind must be clear.

  So the feral northman, shucking his past like a spent lizard skin, climbed down from his ledge.

  His morning spoor he buried, to avoid drawing predators to his track. Again he tried fishing, before the river surface was clear of early shadows, and his luck was good; in a short time, he tickled up two trout, one small and one large, and crouched to gnaw these without ceremony. He followed with a vegetable course of bulrush roots and crisp water weeds dredged from the river bottom. Most congenial of all, he ended the repast with ripe berries that he found in a prickly hedge above the bank.

  As he foraged, he kept his eyes sharp for usable rocks in exposed cuts and pebble bars along the watercourse. Flint, or a speckled bluish stone reasonably near to it, he soon found; this made him doubly curse his lack of a knife. With a steel shank to strike sparks from, he could have had fire by nightfall, and with it, new possibilities of food, warmth, and protection. Without it... well, even so, there were more urgent matters at hand.

  Kneeling atop a flat rock, he struck at the flint pebble with a hammer stone of tough granite. The dark, heavy stone fractured easily with the blows. Its freckled blue proved to be superficial, concealing a uniform, glossy-dark interior that flaked away in rippled crescents with each careful, glancing blow of his hammer. Where two of these flaked edges intersected, they formed a blade edge sharper than any steel; it could easily scrape callused skin fro Conan’s thumb tip, he found, though it was more brittle than civilized metal.

  Conan worked his way carefully around the end of the stone, chipping with gradually less force, trying to recall the deft movements he had seen the village grandsires make in his boyhood—wizened men whose youth extended into Cimmerian old-time, before steel and the art of smithing had come north from Aquilonia. They had worked with effortless skill, he remembered; in a trice they could freshen the surface of a worn tool, or fashion an adze or ax bit that would hew through bone or heavy hide.

  His own labours were slower and far more painstaking. In their course, the lopsided butt of the flint pebble slid against the base rock, causing Conan to nick his hand and, incidentally, to shear away almost half of the keen working surface of the hand-ax he was shaping. With muttered curses against all the gods, yet with surer, swifter motions than before, he dressed down the angular, inadvertent break.

  Then he examined the tool, hefting it in one hand. Somewhat unwieldy, to be sure, and now more of an adze than an ax—still, it might serve. Using it as a weapon, he would have to strike true with the first blow; the bulky base would be hard to grasp once slimed with blood. He looks I wistfully at the driftwood club he kept beside him; yet without any thong or ligature, he had no way of attaching his razor-sharp stone to a serviceable haft.

  He took up his ax and his club; also a thumb-sized, curved chip of flint that might later serve as a knife. With only his two hands, this was all he could carry, a limitation that he hoped soon to correct.

  Stalking downriver on the more open, grassy side, he met a variety of game. A large-footed rabbit cropping herbs near the meadow’s edge let him draw near, his approach covered by the noise of the stream. His club, propelled by hunger, was already hurtling through the air when the rodent disappeared with a series of leaps, leaving only weed tufts and petals drifting in its wake. Further down the meadow, a blue-plumed peafowl was less fortunate; its plump body, knocked from the air and battered into oblivion by Conan’s club, furnished a raw, succulent lunch for the slayer.

  His hunt, however, was far from over. Proceeding to the lower edge of the meadow where lay a broad, muddy river-ford, he found along the bank many tracks and spoor indicating a miscellany of game: antelope and mountain buffalo, wolf and foraging bear; the hair-tufted, bone-filled droppings of small predators, and the blunt-padded prints of mountain cats. All seemed to pass here, so Conan made his way through the open swiftly and with careful alertness.

  Then, in the forest margin beyond the beach, he found what he sought: a trail of animal droppings, dark-greenish pebbles still soft and warm to the touch, and fragrant to his nostrils. These signalled, not many moments before, the passing of good-sized deer or elk. Scanning the branch-littered turf, Conan picked out faint marks and disturbances there, as well as the subtle trending of a game path that any large animal unaware of danger might use.

  Filling his lungs with mild forest air, Conan set off in pursuit. He starte
d at a jog, slow enough to read the forest markings in front of him, but with no particular effort at stealth. A healthy man, he knew, could outrun any deer, but only by dint of a sustained effort, conserving his strength and relying on superior endurance. The deer would outpace the man time and again, expecting to lose its pursuer in rugged terrain—but it would flee in short bursts, exhausting itself and pausing long enough to let a determined hunter overtake and frighten it again. Eventually it would tire and fall, or turn at bay; then the hunter’s courage and weaponry would face a test.

  Meanwhile, Conan’s task was to stay on the scent, to watch for hazards, and above all, to keep from injuring his feet. Toughened as they were by roughshod travel and the jagged stone of the Brythunian quarry, they were yet vulnerable. The prospect of a barefoot chase headlong through branch-littered forest, rocky wilderness, bramble and slippery stream-course, posed a considerable risk. Every part of his mind that was not reviewing the broken twigs, crumpled blades, dark earth-turnings, and other signs of his quarry’s passage had to fix on where to place his feet and how best to negotiate the shrubs and fallen trunks that hindered his passage.

  He heard his prey before he saw it. The deer must have sensed him as well, for the sudden cracking of twigs a thrashing of foliage in the forest glade ahead indicated sudden alarm. When Conan plunged through a stand of bush into the open, he found himself pursuing, not any visible animal, but a receding thrash of hooves and the twitching of foliage at the far side of the clearing. The scuff of the creature’s weight over roots and stems sounded reassuringly heavy.

  He pressed on, keeping to the track. Some moments later, the beast paused to rest, looking backward as Conan ran into view. It was a fine four-point buck, broad and muscular in the neck and shoulders, standing framed between massive trees at the base of a forest slope. As the huntsman pelted forward, the prey started off again. It bolted up die hill, plunging with agile leaps through shallow undergrowth and over fallen logs. Conan, skirting the worst of the tangle and judging which way the animal would turn, followed as best he could.