by Roland Green
That march passed without hindrance, at least from the soldiers of Iskandrian the Eagle. Perhaps it was prudence on the part of the man, not to move a mighty host toward the border of Argos while the crown of Ophir still rested lightly on the youthful head of Moranthes II.
The Argosseans themselves had only their Guardians and their walls, but their friends in other lands had more, much more. They would not be slow to set soldiers marching and gold flowing, to discomfit the Ophireans—and perhaps to snatch some bits of land from Moranthes’s unseasoned hand.
Conan more than half wished that Iskandrian might be moved to such folly. Then the Argosseans might swallow their distaste for free lances, swallow it unsalted and raw. And their allies would surely give him a place in the host marching on Ophir.
Then he could pay a few blood debts, for fellow captains and comrades already impaled. Conan had few kind memories of the lordlings of Ophir, who had used free lances as pieces in their bloody games of intrigue. Half of them held the life of a free lance lower than one of their hunting dogs.
But Conan put his dream aside by nightfall on the third day, with the border in sight. At dawn of the fourth day, he ordered his men to make themselves fit to be seen, or at least to not frighten children into fits. They obeyed, with moderate success, and he led them down the hill on to the road toward the Great Khorotas Bridge.
The water dragon was neither the oldest nor the largest of its kind. But it was without doubt the hungriest.
When magic departed from Argos, the spells that vitalized it also departed, and it slept in the mud of the bottom of the Khorotas for two centuries.
Now the faintest of vitalizing influences from the spells Skiron cast so freely had crept down through the water to the resting place of the dragon. It woke, and found itself hungry. Fish satisfied the ache in its belly, but not the ache in its tiny mind.
There lay the memory of warm-blooded, two-legged prey, dragged down as they splashed across fords or leaned too far out of flimsy boats. That memory brought it upstream, to where it had once lain in wait.
Yet something was not as it had been. There was not so much prey afloat in boats, and hardly any at all fording the river. Where the prey had walked, a monstrous pile of stone rose, twisting the current in undreamt-of ways.
The dragon cast up and down the river, and from time to time it fed, on a child playing too close to the river or a woman washing clothes knee-deep in the water. But always it returned to the pile of stone, for it sensed that atop it lay what it sought.
It could not climb the stones. Not yet, at any rate. But it remembered how often the two-legs stumbled and fell, plummeting into the water. Then a single snap of fanged jaws would finish matters.
Unbreathing, unblinking, and infinitely patient, the dragon waited below the bridge.
“Who comes here?” one of the bridge guards shouted at Conan. The man wore a red tunic with breastplate and high-crested helmet of bronze, and held out a long spear with the point toward Conan.
The Cimmerian stepped forward until the spear point was a finger’s breadth from his chest. Then calmly he rested one large hand on the spear shaft and pushed it downward.
“Conan, Captain of Free Lances, and his company,” he said, as if he had been asking the price of a room at an inn.
Behind him, some of his men laughed at the look on the face of the guard. Conan silenced them with a glare. He could see more guards with a mounted captain leading them, approaching across the bridge.
The captain rode up, and Conan raised a hand in formal greeting. “Honour and glory to you, Captain. Whom have I the honour of meeting?”
“Helgios son of Aranthes, Bridge Captain in the Guardians of Ossertes, greets you—ah—?”
“He says his name is Conan,” the guard interjected. Conan’s black brows met and the guard took two steps backward from the sheer force of the look. “It is my custom to speak the truth, Captain Helgios.”
“As it is mine, Captain Conan,” the Guardian said. “Since this is so, I will tell you more of the truth. There is no place for free lances in Argos. Not when we are at peace, certainly, and seldom when we are at war. As long as the Guardians do their duty....”
By the time Helgios finished, Conan had learned nothing he did not already know and heard his men beginning to grumble behind him. He shrugged, then crossed his arms on his massive chest.
“Well, then, Captain Helgios,” he said. “Are we free to enter Argos in search of other work, lawful in the sight of gods and men?”
“You may enter, yes, if a citizen of Argos gives bond for each of you that you will not become beggars or thieves.”
“Captain,” Conan said, speaking as he would have to a small child, “few if any of my men have ever been in Argos before, let alone become known to its citizens.”
“At least known as men worthy of a bond,” Helgios amended. His gaze raked the company. “The men of Argos have better things to do with their gold than go bond for unbathed Cimmerians and their beggarly followers.”
Without turning, Conan silenced the angry growl behind him with gestures. He had seen the archers posted in all the towers of the bridge and on the far side of the Khorotas. At a word from him, this guardroom soldier and his men would feed the fishes of the Khorotas, but the victors would not live to enjoy their victory.
He was glad that he had posted four men in the bushes at the Ophirean end of the bridge. They could see and hear without being seen or heard, and would bear the tale of what happened to other free lances if they sought safety in Argos. This much at least Conan owed his fellow fugitives from the Eagle’s impaling squads.
“Of course, men such as yourselves, who have made a good life as free lances”—Helgios almost kept a straight face—“should not be so poor as you wish to seem. It is also lawful to post your own bond.”
“Indeed,” Conan said. He could smell a man seeking a bribe a league upwind. They always made a midden-pit smell sweet by comparison. But no harm ever came of asking a man’s price.
“What is the bond?”
“Two drachmas a man, and four for yourself, without the right to bear steel. If you wish to bear steel—”
“Do we look like hod-carriers?” someone shouted.
“Move your tongue faster, little captain, or by Erlik’s brass tool I’ll have it out of you!”
“Silence!” Conan roared, then looked at Helgios. “Without being so ill-spoken as that man, Captain Helgios—?”
“Seven drachmas a man. Five to the Treasury, two to the funds of the House of the Guardians. I have the right to collect for the House.”
Conan swallowed a laugh, which was more than some of his men could manage. “You must think the air of Argos is nectar and its water sweet wine, to ask so much for letting honest men into the land.”
“We think it is a peaceful land,” Helgios said stoutly. “We know we intend to keep it that way.”
“We have no quarrel, then,” Conan said.
He would also have small trouble meeting Helgios’ price or even a rather greater one. He had enough jewels from Karela’s loot to buy a small town. He also had enough knowledge of the world not to show them to Helgios. The captain would not be content with the customary bribe, if someone showed him a vision of more wealth easily gained.
He turned to his men. “Very well. It seems the Argosseans have lean purses and want to fatten them off ours. All of you should have a few coins put aside, if you’re worth the leather of your boots! I can spare a little from my own purse, to make up the bond of anyone who’s been truly unlucky.
“So step forward, men, and pay what you can. Finish with this, and we can be drinking decent wine under a real roof by nightfall.”
A few of the men hung back, more cursed by an astonishing variety of gods, and all shot black looks at Helgios. The Guardian sat his saddle with a careless grin as though all this was no more than water off a duck’s back. No doubt it was, to him.
Conan cast his gaze over his
men as one by one they came forward to offer their bond coins. A few he noted as men to be watched, lest they seek to slit Helgios’s throat some dark night. A few years ago he would have been among them, but those few years had shaped Conan into a very different man from the youth who joined a company of Turanian irregulars.
The pile of coins on the cobblestones at the feet of Helgios’s mount grew steadily. Conan began to think that he might have to show at most the smallest of the jewels, a rough-cut opal that Karela said once adorned an idol in Kush. (But then, Karela was almost as lively a tale-spinner as she was a bed partner.)
A man who called himself Trattis stepped forward, holding up an empty purse and patting his ragged clothes. Both man and clothes looked as if they had been used to scrub pigsties.
“Forgive me, my lords,” Trattis whined. “But my luck has been ill—”
“Bugger your luck!” shouted someone behind Conan. The shouter thrust the Cimmerian roughly aside as he advanced on Trattis. “I saw you counting those pearls, the night after you joined—”
“Pearls?” Helgios said. He looked down at Trattis and the man now looming over him, a stout-thewed axeman who called himself Raldos. Then the Guardian’s eyes widened, and in a single movement he drew his sword and shouted:
“Seize that man!”
Unfortunately for Helgios, but fortunately for Trattis, this command gave the other Guardians no clue as to which man they should seize. While they looked from one to another of the free lances before them, Trattis drew a knife and leaped backward. Raldos lunged for him, and met the knife in his belly. Helgios slashed wildly downward, but his dress sword was ill-suited for mounted work; it cut only the empty air.
Trattis dashed to the railing of the bridge, leaped on it, and sprang out into the air. Conan reached the railing just in time to see the man cut the water cleanly and vanish. He unbuckled his sword belt and started unclasping his mail shirt, while watching for Trattis to surface. No man could hold his breath forever, or swim upstream against the current of the Khorotas.
By the time Conan had his boots off, he knew the breath in Trattis’s lungs must be near its end. Had he plunged straight to the bottom and buried himself in the mud like an anvil? Or was it not entirely Conan’s fancy, that shadow in the water under the bridge, and a ripple as if something large was moving just below the surface?
Fancy or no, the Khorotas would not have those pearls. Conan sprang on to the railing, aimed just downstream of where Trattis had gone in, and dove.
The water dragon was startled for a moment when the falling body broke the surface almost on top of it. The sensation passed as swiftly as anything could in the creature’s sluggish mind. One leg of the body brushed its crest, and it recognized what it had almost within its grasp.
The first of the two-legs to fall off the bridge had come. The dragon rolled on its back, opened its mouth, and lunged.
Trattis had little breath left in his lungs, having knocked most of it out of himself when he struck the water. He still tried to scream as the jaws came out of the murky water to close on his chest. He only inhaled water, so that he was already drowning when the finger-long teeth pierced his heart and lungs.
The dragon shook the two-legger’s body hard, several times. Nothing tore loose. It seemed that this two-legger was not ready to eat. The dragon remembered, however, that time would solve this problem. Now to find a place to hide the two-leg, and leave him for the time needed—
The water above the dragon burst again, as another two-leg plunged into the river. Water dragons were not keen-sighted save with magical assistance, but it took no very keen sight to make out limbs churning the water.
This two-leg was surely alive. If allowed to stay that way, he might escape. The thought of enough flesh to truly fill his empty belly drove everything else from the dragon’s mind.
The dragon opened his mouth, Trattis floated free. Then the scaly jaws turned toward Conan.
Unlike Trattis, Conan entered the Khorotas with breath to spare and his wits about him. A moment later he wished he had also entered it with his sword in hand.
What came out of the brown-green murk of the river was nothing worse than he had fought in Vendhya, Khitai, and more other lands than he could count on his two hands. But it was huge, and he had no doubt it would be very tenacious of its life, natural or otherwise. It had this much at least in common with a Cimmerian.
Conan bent double to draw his dagger. Then he kicked hard at the scaly nose, to distract the beast and push himself clear of it. The nose must have been a sensitive area; the water churned as the beast writhed. Conan saw it roll over on its back.
This exposed an area that looked not only sensitive but vulnerable, a broad stretch of wrinkled white skin under the throat. Conan’s dagger tore through the skin into the flesh beneath, dark blood misted the water, and the beast writhed again.
Conan could not deny the speed of its turn, as it rolled upright and lunged at him again. Teeth ripped at his clothes and grazed his skin, without tearing his flesh.
The beast’s lunge allowed the Cimmerian to grip the crest on the great head with one hand. With the other hand, he thrust the dagger deep into the red eye that glared at him from below the crest.
He might have been caught in the eruption of an undersea volcano. The beast’s death throes battered at every part of his body. He gripped the crest and the dagger’s hilt, knowing that if he parted company with the beast he would be shattered by flailing limbs or tail.
Conan was sure that the beast’s death throes lasted long enough for him to drown several times over, if not indeed for the world to end in the march of the Frost Giants. He was vaguely surprised when the writhings ended and he still had breath in his lungs. Powerful kicks drove him to the surface and an even greater surprise—warmth and sunlight. He took a great gasping breath, then another, then reached for his dagger’s sheath.
“Crom!”
The sheath was gone. So was what was sewn into the back of it—the jewels from the sceptre of Ophir. The jewels, which would have bought entry into Argos for an entire host of free lances, let alone a single company!
Conan invoked several other gods besides Crom, then gave over cursing. Crom gave a man the wits to devise plans and the courage to carry them out if luck was with him. He did not give a man the right to whimper if the world did not always go as he wished it.
The jewels were gone. But if Trattis really had pearls—and from the way he fled for his life from Raldos’s accusation it seemed that he might—the next best thing to find would be Trattis’s body.
That took a while, and when Conan found the body it was neither intact nor alone. The current had washed it up on a gravel beach some hundreds of paces downstream from the bridge. What seemed like half a village’s worth of farmers was standing on the beach, gaping at it.
When Conan rose out of the Khorotas like some sea god, the gapers took flight almost as one farmer. The only folk left behind were a small boy, who stumbled and fell, and a girl somewhat older, who ran back to help him up.
As Conan loomed over them, the girl scooped up gravel in one grubby hand and bared her teeth.
“If you touch my brother or me, you’ll be—”
Conan smiled. “I’ll be what?”
“You’ll be picking gravel out of your eyes, you big—” What followed suggested that Conan’s ancestry included quite a variety of beasts, mostly unclean.
Conan finally laughed out loud, which brought the girl to an abrupt silence. “My lady, this is poor thanks I get for wrestling with river monsters.”
The girl’s mouth gaped. She looked from Conan, with his bruised side, to Trattis’s mangled corpse. Then she looked at the river.
“You fought—you fought the river demon? You— alone?”
Conan jerked a thumb at Trattis. “No fault of his, but he was in no condition to be much help. As for the demon, I not only fought it, I’d wager a good sword I killed it. If you want to doubt my word and go diving
for the body, it’s just downstream from the Great Bridge—”
The girl ended the discussion by fainting. Her brother set up a howl like a lost soul. Several villagers came rushing down the bank, waving scythes and pitchforks, ready to rescue the children from whatever the river had thrown up.
Conan had to spend a tedious time explaining that yes, he had slain the creature they called the river demon, and no, he was not a sorcerer nor had he used magic.
“All I used was a knife in the beast’s eye,” he growled. “Magical or not, that’ll do for any beast with its eyes anywhere close to its brain. Which makes you witlings safe enough, for Crom only knows if you have brains.”
After a while, Conan realized that the villagers were not witlings, merely stunned at the sudden end of the menace of the river demon. Also, perhaps, doubting that it could have been ended without sorcery—which meant that the “demon” itself must be a creature of magic.
Which would be neither here nor there, except that Conan loathed and distrusted sorcery. Part of Argos’s charm for him was that it was a land where magic was scarcely known, let alone practised. In this as in other matters, it began to seem that he had more to learn about Argos.
It took another while to persuade the villagers to let him examine Trattis’s body. As a victim of the river demon, it seemed the thief needed to have some hedge-wizard’s ritual muttered over him, then be burned with herbs gathered by the dark of the moon by a seventh son of a seventh son or some such nonsense. Conan didn’t care if they roasted Trattis’s body for a village feast, as long as they let him search it for the pearls first.
About the time the villagers let Conan near the body, Helgios rode up with a score of his Guardians, Conan’s own men following at a little distance. Conan met them at the top of the beach, and briefly recounted his adventures in the Khorotas.
As one man, the Guardians drew back. All except Helgios, who would not let the villagers see a Captain of the Guardians showing fear. But Conan noticed that the captain’s face was pale under its tan, he was sweating more in the riverside shade than he had on the sunlit bridge, and one hand was moving in rites of aversion.
