'There is a lady without the garden gate. Admit her and bring her hither immediately. Then fetch wine and refreshments.' The servant bowed profoundly and left. A few minutes later there was a scratching at the door. 'Enter.'
The servant bowed the woman into the room and departed. The instant the door was closed, she grasped the hem of her cloak and pulled off the garment, shaking a wealth of rich black hair over her bare shoulders.
'I thought I would suffocate in this thing!' she said. 'Greeting, Khondemir.'
'Greeting, Lakhme,' said the mage.
The woman thus addressed bore the features of the upper castes of northern Vendhya. Though small, her form had the voluptuousness of the temple sculptures of that land, and beneath the cloak she wore naught but a
narrow silken loincloth and knee-length boots. Her beauty was dazzling, but most striking of all was the perfect ivory whiteness of her skin, protected from sun and wind every day of her life and kept soft with scented oils.
'I have little time,' she said, stripping off her gloves. 'The great horde of Bartatua shall set forth this season, before the turning of another moon.'
'So I have already detected,' said Khondemir portentously. 'The stars have foretold it, as have certain spirits with whom I commune.'
Her beautiful eyes cast him a look of weary cynicism. 'You wizards always try to pretend that your powers give you knowledge of the future and of events far away. I would wager that your human spies are of far greater value to you. Else what use would you have for me?'
His thin lips turned up at their corners in the faintest of smiles. 'Truly, my human agents are of a certain value, to confirm that which I already know, you understand. As for having another use for you ...' He stepped forward and placed his arms around her.
She put a hand against his chest and looked up at him mockingly. 'Did your wizardly mentors not tell you that indulging your carnal nature would seriously sap your magical powers?'
'They did,' he said. 'It was one of several matters in which they spoke foolishly.' He released her as a discreet noise at the door announced the arrival of the servant. Lakhme stood behind the door as the man entered, set the tray on a low table and backed out.
The Vendhyan woman took the goblet of wine proffered by Khondemir and paced slowly about the room, admiring its furnishings. She was as unselfconscious in her near nudity as an infant. 'It is good,'
she said, 'to be among civilised things again. The Hyrkanians have no appreciation of the sensual pleasures of life save for a joy in good horses and bestial drunkenness.' She ran her fingers across a casket of fragrant sandalwood inlaid with mammoth ivory. ,
'Some of them,' Khondemir observed, 'have a taste for beautiful women.'
She shrugged her smooth shoulders, causing her alabaster breasts to quiver. 'As mere battle trophies. Bartatua values me highly because he took me from Kuchlug, the greatest of his enemies. When his followers see me, they are reminded that the great Bartatua slew Kuchlug with his own hands and took his woman.' She grasped a handful of embroidered drapery and drew it to her face, inhaling the scent of incense that clung to it. She began to rub the cloth languorously over her body. 'You have no idea of what it is like to live in the squalid tents of those savages, to have to do without the simplest pleasures of life.' She dropped the hanging and went to the tray, selecting a skewer of grilled meat rolled in herbs and wrapped in vine leaves.
Lakhme read the wizard's eyes and breathing far more accurately than he could read the stars. 'Bartatua's first prise is to be Sogaria. It has wealth and a strategic position between east and west. There are no cities nearby to offer assistance, and the city is soft and fat. It has not known war in a generation.'
With an effort of will, Khondemir dragged his thoughts away from her soft white body. 'It has walls, and granaries full of grain. Even if he can unite the tribes, how will men who know only how to shoot from horseback lay siege to such a city?'
'He is a savage,' she said, dropping the bare skewer and picking up a sugared date, 'but he is not stupid. He has plans for that eventuality. And a siege of Sogaria
will be good practice for other conquests. He has a mind to be a conqueror of nations.'
'Turan?' Khondemir asked.
'He wants to take Khitai first, before turning west.' Her kohl-rimmed eyes studied his every expression.
'That army,' Khondemir half-whispered, 'will take Turan ere I am done with it.'
She stepped close to him and traced with a fingernail the outline of a dragon embroidered on the breast of his robe. 'But that is not Bartatua's plan,' she said.
'You and I shall take care of Bartatua,' said the wizard. Once more he sought to enfold her. This time she pushed him away forcefully.
'Not so soon, wizard! Bartatua killed my former master to possess me, and you must do the same. I'll be a conqueror's woman, but I yield to no lesser man. If you would have me, slay Bartatua and take control of Ms army.'
Khondemir took a deep, shuddering breath. 'You place a high value on yourself, woman. Be glad that you are of use to my plans.' He was dizzy with a combination of rage and lust.
'I must be away,' she said, gathering up her cloak and gloves. 'Bartatua believes that I need these ten days to myself every six moons for certain religious rites. I must be back in his tent within five days or face questions I would rather not have to answer. Swiftly now, tell me what you would have me do.'
As the lovely body disappeared beneath the cloak, the wizard found himself in better control of his thoughts. 'To advance our aims, I must first gain mastery of Bartatua's mind and soul. For that, there is no aid more powerful than substances recently taken from his person. These things give my spirit servants a
kind of ... focus, or route, by which they may invade his being and bend him to my will.'
'What sort of substances?' she asked.
'Hair, nail parings, bits of flesh, and,' he paused, 'those things that a concubine is in the best position to gather.'
'You shall have them,' she said, as simply as if he had asked her to bring him produce from the market. 'Now I must go. When we meet again, it shall be in the City of Mounds. Farewell.' She swept out in a whisper of rustling cloth.
Khondemir poured himself another goblet of wine. He reflected upon what a dangerous woman this one would be should he keep her near him after his plans came to fruition. That could wait. Soon he would have her. More important, he would have control of Bartatua's horde and would lead it against King Yezdigerd of Turan. The thought of that sweet vengeance made all the risk worthwhile.
As she walked back through the quiet streets, Lakhme had far different thoughts than those entertained by the wizard. Always she marvelled at how easy men were to control and manipulate. If a woman had beauty, intelligence and ruthlessness, she could bend the most powerful man in the world to her will. How simple it was to convince a strong man that by winning her, he became a hero beyond compare! Even children were not so foolish.
From the day her starving parents had sold her to an itinerant trader, Lakhme had learned the arts of transforming her helplessness into power. As she had ripened from a skinny child into a beautiful woman, she had learned what the basis of her strength was to be. The trader had pampered her, providing her with the
most expensive of beauty treatments and sending her to retired courtesans for lessons in the arts of pleasing men. She had been far more interested in the tales the courtesans told of the loose-tongued folly of wealthy and powerful men when they relaxed with skilled, compliant women.
The trader had dreamed of making his fortune from Lakhme. He would take her to one of the great cities and sell her into the harem of a fine lord perhaps even that of a king. When he had decided that the time was right and that she had reached the peak of her beauty and desirability, he bundled her into a curtained, camel-borne palanquin and set out on a caravan to the king's summer court in the beautiful northern vale of Kangra. Still scarcely more than a girl, Lakhme had quickly grown bored wit
h sitting in the airless conveyance, subject to the camel's ever-swaying gait. One afternoon, hearing an untoward noise from outside, she had parted the curtain to see what was happening. She found herself staring into the face of the captain of the caravan's guard: a fierce Hyrkanian warrior. The man's narrow eyes had widened at the vision of loveliness within the palanquin.
That evening she had heard the sound of voices raised in arguement. One of the voices was that of the trader, and it rose to an angry screech before it was cut off by the sound of a sickening blow. A moment later she was terrified when the curtain was jerked aside and the Hyrkanian stood framed in the opening. He was mounted, and a powerful arm around her waist hauled her from the palanquin and threw her over his saddle. As he galloped away, she saw the trader staring sightlessly at the sky, lying in a pool of his own blood.
She felt no sorrow at the death of the trader. She had been nothing to him except prime livestock, no better
than a blooded horse. But through him she had learned a valuable lesson: Men would kill to possess her. The brute power of the Hyrkanian warrior did not impress her. What she wanted was a man who commanded thousands of such warriors.
Within the turning of a moon, the leader of a band of twenty nomads had slain her abductor and taken her for himself. She learned the language quickly and soon convinced him and her subsequent masters of how important it was that she preserve her beauty from the ravages of the sun and wind of the steppes. Wives and older concubines found themselves evicted to provide her with the finest of tents. In this way she earned hatred, but never for long. Among the arts she had learned from the courtesans was the brewing of potions to induce passion, sleep and death. When priests or learned men visited the camps, she conversed with them through a sheer curtain. Thus she learned how the powers of the world were distributed and the manner in which wars and royal marriages shifted borders and redistributed the influence of nations. But when the holy men and philosophers spoke of such things as compassion, pity or conscience, she dismissed all such irrelevancies from her mind.
Any time a higher chief visited her current master, Lakhme contrived to display herself to him. No Hyrkanian would surrender his woman to another, no matter what his rank, so inevitably there was a fight and Lakhme would follow her new master, always looking for the next.
By the end of her third year on the steppe, Lakhme was in the tent of Kuchlug, the chieftain of a great horde. This was a bitter time for her because there was no greater chief around than Kuchlug, and he was a brainless brute who would never amount to more than
the savage leader of other savages. Then, one day, Bartatua called on Kuchlug.
Bartatua was the chief of a minor horde, the Ashkuz. She knew his story, knew of how as a boy he had become chief upon the death of his father and had gathered all the scattered families and clans of the Ashkuz into a unified army. By diplomacy, persuasion and force, he had caused several other small hordes to join his host. The moment she saw the still-young, auburn-haired lord of the Ashkuz, she knew that this was a man of power and destiny.
He would be her most brazen conquest of all. Through a long evening she listened as Bartatua tried to persuade Kuchlug to join his alliance and form a super-horde against which nothing could stand. Arrogantly Kuchlug laughed and cursed the younger man as an upstart. Condescendingly he said that he himself would assume leadership of such a horde and that Bartatua could take the position of sub-commander, after Kuchlug had given the best commands to his sons and nephews. In a rage, Bartatua stormed from the tent.
Lakhme found out where Bartatua would take his horses to water in the morning and was there when he arrived. The Hyrkanians bathed only in sweat lodges and had a taboo against polluting running water. Vendhyans had no such rule, and when Bartatua reached the stream, he was thunderstruck to see Lakhme knee-deep in the water, dressed only in her streaming black hair. Feigning surprise and embarrassment, she managed to gasp out her name and to whom she belonged.
That night the dispute between Kuchlug and Bartatua broke into violence. As a gesture of goodwill, Bartatua had arrived unarmed. In the midst of a roaring tirade, Kuchlug seized a sword from the tent wall and pursued the younger man outside, where Bartatua turned at bay.
The men of Bartatua were greatly outnumbered by Kuchlug's, but no Hyrkanian would interfere in a mortal combat between chiefs. After letting Kuchlug slash at him long enough to convince all witnesses that the older man was in no way incapacitated, Bartatua wrested the sword from him and broke his neck bare-handed.
All could see that the fight had been fair, and a council of Kuchlug's sub-chiefs agreed to the overlord-ship of Bartatua. Kuchlug's closest kinsmen fled while they still had their lives. Most important, Lakhme had the man she had dreamed of. He was ruthless and boundlessly ambitious. Best of all, he was intelligent enough to listen to good advice, even from his concubine. Within a year she was guiding him in nearly every aspect of his plan of conquest. And she had lied to Khondemir about Bartatua's feelings toward her. The chieftain of the Ashkuz loved her beyond all reason.
III
The little band led by Boria rode into the huge camp on the afternoon of the fifth day following Conan's capture. The Cimmerian was tightly bound, but at least he was riding instead of running. His arms were bound close to his sides and his ankles were tied together beneath his horse's belly. Torgut wanted him slain, but Boria refused to kill a valuable slave and Torgut was still in too much pain to wreak any harm by himself.
With his arm in a sling and his sides lashed with sticks and thongs to keep his broken ribs in place, Torgut looked poisonously at Conan. 'This is where your soft treatment stops, ape,' he hissed, wincing at the pain the words drew from his flanks.
Conan surveyed the camp. It stretched along a small stream for many leagues and was roughly divided into upstream and downstream halves. Upstream were the odd, humped tents of the Hyrkanians. Downstream were huge pens of horses and other livestock. He noted that the sheep and cattle were few, only enough to feed the camp. The real herds would be in summer pasture, tended by the women and boys. This was a war camp. As they rode in, they passed men shooting at incredibly distant targets. Some shot dismounted, but most shot from horseback. The most skilful shot at a full gallop, and some actually shot backward over the horse's rump while riding away from the target. Conan began to have second thoughts about his boast that he could master Hyrkanian archery within a month.
The Cimmerian knew little about the dress and accoutrements of the Hyrkanian tribes, but he could see that many diverse peoples were gathered within the camp. Tribesmen whose clothing was predominantly Khitan, Vendhyan, Turanian or Iranistani obviously rode the borders of those nations. These nomads could make little for themselves, and only the thickly padded clothing of leather, felt and furs that they wore in winter was of native make. Woven cloth, most of the metal-work, even the bows and saddles, were made in the cities and villages bordering the steppes.
The western peoples tended to lighter complexions, fairer hair and blue eyes, and they favoured heavy and elaborate tattooing of their skin. The eastern tribes were more squat of build, with flat features, tilted eyes and thin beards. All had the bandy legs formed by a lifetime in the saddle. The Hyrkanians admired strength, but unlike other peoples, they did not prise height. They held that a man on horseback was as a giant to any man on foot, however tall he might be.
Boria halted to ask questions of several warriors, and they pointed upstream. Riding on, they eventually came to a pit that had been excavated near the centre of the camp of tents. The enclosure was perhaps twenty feet deep, with sheer sides and only a narrow ramp for access. Guards with strung bows paced their horses
along its rim and conversed in bored tones. The floor of the pit was filled with men.
Boria turned Conan over to a scarred warrior who stood next to a Khitan scribe. The Khitan sat behind a folding desk, with brushes, blocks of dry ink, and paper rolls before him.
'Be careful of this one,' B
oria warned. 'He is a fire-eater, for a village man.'
The warrior looked Conan over contemptuously. 'This place takes the fire out of the toughest prisoner.' He glanced at the elaborate bindings that held the Cimmerian. 'He must be tough. You've used three slaves' worth of rope on him.'
Carefully Boria and his men retrieved their ropes from the Cimmerian's body. The cords had bitten deep, and Conan stretched his limbs to revive his circulation. He looked at the miserable mass of humanity in the pit below, then turned to the warrior in charge.
'It's a waste of time putting me in there. Take me to Bartatua.'
The warrior stared at him in amazement, then turned to Boria. 'You should have told me that he is mad as well as vicious.'
'You are the slave master,' Boria said, grinning. 'Do with him what you will. But I advise you not to turn your back on him.' Except for Torgut, they all laughed as they wheeled their horses and rode in search of their fellow tribesmen.
The slave master shook his head, frowning. 'Those westerners are all crazy.' He turned to Conan. 'Tell the scribe your name and nation, slave.'
'I am Conan of Cimmeria.'
The shaven-headed Khitan picked up a brush, wet it and swirled it on a block of red ink. 'Your name is a mere sound that I have no way in which to write, and I
have never heard of your nation.' With a few quick, deft strokes, the Khitan sketched two complicated characters.
'What do they mean?' Conan asked.
'They say 'big, black-haired foreigner' in my language. Slaves who have so little time to live have no need of names in any case.'
'Into the pit with you, slave,' ordered the slave-master, rapping Conan on the arm with a coiled whip. The Cimmerian turned and glared, and the slave master backed off a step, his hand going to his sword hilt. Conan considered killing him. Horses abounded everywhere, and it would be but the work of a moment to seize the man's sword, cut him down, leap on a horse and ride away.
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