The blood of near-kin”or the blood of many victims. Would she have to choose between being the sacrifice herself or being wed to some bandy-legged Pictish chief so as to buy the blood of a score of his warriors, wives, and slaves?
The shivering passed. Now what the girl felt was an inner queasiness.
Also, deeper within, a firmer resolve than before to increase her knowledge of her fathers wizardry.
He had said little enough, one way or the other, about her learning magick. What she had learned, she had learned carefully, because even before the quest for the demon's gate began, she knew that magick gone awry was an unforgivable crime.
That care took its price, though. She had to snatch her time with the scrolls and phials from her other work, work that was entirely hers from the time her mother died. Years before the yeomen of the land came with bows and ropes in search of her father's life, no servant would spend a night under the Cave Wizard's roof. She cooked and cleaned, washed and mended, and by candlelight after all was done, scraped up knowledge of a few lesser spells.
That knowledge would no longer be enough. Use those lesser spells to heat the soup or to lure birds into the snares? Why not? Every moment, every drop of sweat, saved from her work meant freedom to spend increasing her own knowledge.
Her father would not notice how she did the work. He would notice only if she failed, as had been his way even before her mother died.
Mother, you could have saved both me and Father, by not dying. He might not have heeded you, but alive, you would not need the vengeance that has consumed him.
But that was a foolish girl's wish, and her time for being either a girl or foolish was rapidly nearing its end. Every day brought her closer to the time when she would be either woman-wise or dead¦ or wishing that she were.
***
Somehow, Kubwande was not surprised when the man who answered to both "Conan" and "Amra" brought the two Fish-Eater wenches with him on the trek to Dead Elephant Valley. Anyone who would risk a quarrel with Idosso over such women was hardly a man to leave them in the very village where Idosso had a dozen sworn friends who would avenge the slight to his honor by killing the women.
Of course, such friends would not have won through. It would have been their blood trailed on the dirt of the village paths, and their hyena-gnawed bodies found on the edge of the forest in the morning.
Some of those Idosso thought were his friends were sworn to Kubwande by still more potent oaths (and many good cows had it cost Kubwande to purchase the binding of those oaths from the wizards and wise-women).
Others were friends only to Kubwande and no other among the Bamulas. A man who feared the fate of those who stole from wizards or lay with their sisters would do far more than guard a pair of Fish-Eater women for the man who held their secret.
Shedding the blood of Idosso's friends to keep Conan among the Bamulas was gambling, of course. But since he first learned of the game of chance, Kubwande had never gambled save with bones he had carved or shells he had painted himself. Now his game-pieces were men, but he still took care that they were of his own making, unlikely to do anything to surprise him.
The only question, in the innermost recesses of his spirit, was whether the white warrior was not even more accustomed to gambling, and for higher stakes, than Kubwande or any other among the Bamulas.
Then, after two days' swift march, warriors and women alike came to Dead Elephant Valley, and there was no more time to play luck-games with men, or even to think about it.
Five
The village was a sight to daunt even the Cimmerian, who had looked on such more times than he had years, and sometimes when friends or allies lay stark and bloody in the ruins. This village at least was one of strangers.
Even from two long spear-casts away, one could tell that more than elephants now lay dead in the valley. Closer to hand, the stench rose like a wall, and the air seemed so thick with the reek of death that one could cut slices from it with a dagger.
Not all the huts were ashes, ruins, or the tombs of their inhabitants.
Some yet stood, and in their shadowed interiors Conan glimpsed still more shadowy figures, furtive and fleeting.
Emboldened by the coming of the Bamula war party, a few of the hardiest villagers crept out into the gray dawn light and began to move about.
They still avoided, as if it were the mouth of the underworld, the center of the village, for there the dead lay thickest.
As the sun climbed higher and burned off the mist, turning the sky from gray to blue, insects began to gather. One sight seared itself into Conan's memory: a babe who could not have seen out his first year, slashed open from throat to belly, and one leg ripped from its socket.
Flies hummed around the eyes of the tiny corpse, and other, less familiar insects crawled over the rest of the blackening body. Nor was the small corpse intact even apart from its wounds; other carrion-eaters had been there before the insects.
In the middle of the human corpses lay the body of one of the lizard-apes. Braving the stench, Conan strode forward to within a spear's length of the dead "demon" and studied it. Rather as he would have noted the armor and weapons of a dead foe from a host he had never met before, he noted the beasts apparent strengths and weaknesses.
It had an ape's long arms but longer legs than most apes Conan had met, as well as a stumpy tail. Short spines ran up its back from the base of the tail to the neck, then resumed on the head as a crest. With the butt of a spear, Conan prodded the scaly hide, more resistant to weapons than any ape's but clearly not impenetrable. Half a dozen spears, as many arrows, and a portion of skull crushed in deeply by a club swung with desperate strength, bore witness to that.
Conan shifted the spear-butt to the beast's mouth, prying open the jaws. Most of the teeth were caked black with dried blood and shreds of human flesh, but Conan saw that they were more like a leopard's than a gorillas. In their native land, these beasts ate flesh.
"But not in this land," the Cimmerian said to himself. "By Crom, not in this land! Not again."
"Eh?" Idosso asked, then covered his confusion with a bellowed war cry.
Carrion birds, feeding on corpses at the fringes of the village, flew up squawking and screaming. The villagers flinched as if Idosso himself had turned into one of the lizard-apes.
"Well, Amra, does all this sniffing and poking tell you anything?" he growled. "It is said you have more than a man's senses."
"Much is said, by those who know nothing," Conan replied. At Idosso's scowl, he added, "Wise men such as you and I do not listen to them."
The diplomacy acheived the effect the Cimmerian had hoped for. Idosso's scowl turned into nothing worse than the frown of a man trying to think what to do next. Conan already knew, and likewise was sure that Idosso would hardly welcome advice.
"The back, guard the women and bearers," the chief shouted. "Chest and belly, ring the village. Arms, to me." It was the Bamulas's custom to divide any large war party into four divisions, each named after a part of the human body. The arms were the vanguard, scouting ahead. The chest and belly were the main body, supposed to be the strongest and fiercest warriors. The back brought up the rear; its warriors were commonly either youths newly given their spears or older men not far from putting their spears into the roofbeams of their huts, the Bamula ritual for declaring oneself an elder.
It had not surprised the Cimmerian to learn that when both chiefs carried spears in another's band, Kubwande had marched with the arms and Idosso in the belly.
Conan held his tongue as the Bamulas moved to obey Idosso. He also stepped back from the center of the village, so that he would not have to hold his nose.
The Bamulas moved in obedience to Idosso. Some were clearly swift, skilled, and alert enough to please any captain. Others were merely trying to pretend the best they could. It was the same mixture that Conan had seen in other hosts, save those who were either handpicked from proven warriors or rabbles snatched from the streets and
farms by some lord's sergeants.
The Bamulas would hardly prevail against an equal force of seasoned troops from some civilized land, but then they wouldn't have to. Their warriors did well enough against rival tribes, and they held their own against the occasional slave-raider, darting in from the sea or across the Stygian frontier to pluck a village's worth of live merchandise. It remained to be seen whether they would be equal to the task they now faced, that of fighting demons, or at least creatures hurled into this land by sorcery as vile as any demon.
Conan strode over to Idosso. He made the greetings of one chief to another slightly higher in rank, as well as other gestures of respect he had learned from the Suba warriors aboard Tigress. He hoped that none of these were insults among the Bamula.
"Speak, Amra," Idosso said. He had command of his voice, but when the chief spoke, Conan could hear a hint of weariness”the result of the battle he had fought to become chief.
For once, the huge Bamula had the Cimmerian's sympathy. Conan's own early battles as a captain were not forgotten, nor the indescribable pleasure of facing the unknown and pretending that it was neither frightening nor confusing.
As a pleasure, it ranked just ahead of drinking bad wine or embracing aged serving wenches. It was also quite as common a part of the warrior's life, and Idosso was just going to have to take it as one more of the gods' favorite jests.
"I doubt that I've anything to say that you haven't long since thought of yourself," Conan said. "Have any of the folk of the village come forward to tell the tale of their slaying the beast?"
"No, but what can they teach our warriors?"
Conan almost forgave Idosso's arrogance for his saying "our." Being soft-spoken to pale-skinned strangers was clearly no pleasure to Idosso, but it was an art he was prepared to master if called upon.
If Kubwande thought the big man was too witless to be other than the smaller man's puppet, he might have a rude awakening in store for him.
Probably in the last moments of his life.
"The gods only know, but I cannot help wondering," the Cimmerian said.
"These lizard-apes look like natural creatures, the same as the boar and the bear. Warriors' weapons can take their life. But how many warriors will die in so doing?"
"Do you think Bamula warriors fear death?" Idosso did not raise a weapon. His voice made such a gesture needless.
"Less even than I," Conan said. "But even a Bamula warrior might think twice about dying before all the demons were slain. If we trade our lives for the lives of this band of lizard-apes, what happens when the next band comes through the demon's gate?"
Idosso looked as close to uneasy as his face allowed. Conan pressed his advantage.
"Any man might fear seeing his village used as this one has been”his women carried off, his sons gutted like that babe there."
Idosso looked, and his face worked. "Then let us find the demon's gate and close it."
"Aye, and with our own living flesh if need be. But we shall hunt it with more knowledge if we speak to the villagers first."
Idosso stood like a vast ebony image. Then his head jerked, hard enough to make the crimson feathers of his headdress dance like branches in a gale.
"Let the arms search the village," he shouted. "Bring all fit, to speak to me! At once!"
The warriors of the arms thumped their fists on the earth at Idosso's feet. He spat where they had thumped. They struck their foreheads with their open palms, formed into pairs, and ran off, spears in hand and shields on their arms.
"Am I permitted”?" Kubwande asked. He seemed to have sprung from the earth, but Conan was hardly surprised. The gift of silent movement was one a man like Kubwande would surely need.
"Not alone," Idosso growled. "You have no lizard-scales with which to keep a spear out of your unguarded back."
Conan neither smiled nor shouted for joy. He only said, "Would I be good enough to guard it?"
"Am I worthy of being guarded by Amra”?" Kubwande began, to be interrupted by the Cimmerian.
"Flatter one who will listen to it," Conan said.
The Bamula looked as though he had been slapped. The Cimmerian wondered if he had spoken too plainly, or perhaps said something he had not meant. His command of the Black Kingdoms' tongues grew almost daily, but it was far from perfect.
"I have been a warrior in many lands, and on the seas," Conan said. "I have not been a warrior in this land nearly as long as you have. You must know things I do not, if you are not a babe in arms."
"If he is, then a stranger babe was never born of women," Idosso said.
"Go and seek what you may find, unless you both think I need nursing?"
Neither Conan nor Kubwande stayed to answer that question.
***
Conan and Kubwande found less to do than they had expected, until they reached the farther edge of the village. The folk from the nearer huts had taken the brunt of the lizard-apes' assault, and those who had not died had mostly taken to their heels. Those left were mainly the aged, the young, or those caring for them.
These the other Bamula warrior-pairs were vigorously seizing, dragging out of their huts, and all but beating with clubs to learn what had happened. Kubwande admonished a few warriors who seemed sure to attract more fear than knowledge, just before Conan would have done the same.
That was as well, the Cimmerian knew. The villagers were Lesser Bamulas, whose dialect was somewhat apart from that of the Greater Bamulas whom he had met first. The villagers could have offered to guide him to the demon's gate, and he might have been slow to understand. Also, it was too soon to put to the test the willingness of Bamula warriors to obey his commands.
The two men stalked onward. Each kept his eyes roving over the huts, livestock enclosures, and fields. Out here, the huts were mostly intact, if empty, but too many of the enclosures and fields showed the passage of the lizard-apes. Where the cattle and goats did not lie gutted and fly-blown in patches of dried mud mixed from blood and soil, the fences lay smashed flat and the freshly sprouted grain and yams trampled into the earth.
A few villagers peered out of huts, more boldly than Conan had seen before. Some of them were young women. He thought of sending back to the baggage train for his two maidservants. Perhaps they could get some sense, or even knowledge, out of these village wenches.
No warriors appeared, not even the graybearded or newly fledged. The bodies strewn on blood-hued earth doubtless accounted for a good many of them, and others had surely stayed with the fugitives. But Conan wondered if that was all the warriors that Dead Elephant Valley had boasted on the morning the lizard-apes came.
He said nothing and indeed put the matter almost out of his innermost thoughts. But his eyes now searched the huts with more care than ever.
Also, when he thought the head Bamula was not looking his way, he cast an eye on Kubwande.
***
In the Pictish lands, Lycenius's wrath had long since taken him past cursing, into a morose silence. Before the silence came, however, Scyra had learned that he had a new problem with the world-walker.
Once the problem had been to keep it open. Now it was open at both ends and would not close. The gate ran from a remote part of the jungles south of Khitai to somewhere in the Black Kingdoms. Though this was more knowledge than he had usually possessed before, it was useless as a midwife's pain-charm for closing the gate.
It was not that Scyra cared much for the fate of the jungles and their remnant of a race from before the dawn of man. She cared hardly more for the Black Kingdoms, full (or so she had heard) of fierce warriors to whom a score of monsters could hardly be more than a brisk day's martial exercise.
She did care very greatly that frustration and failure could drive her father ever closer to the edge of madness, or even over it. Nor was there a great deal she could do to prevent it. She might try to heal him if he slipped beyond that edge, or at least care for him, but to do either, she would have to be alive.
It w
as the knowledge that she might soon be at the mercy of her own resources, which were small, or of the Picts, among whom "mercy" was near-kin to a curse, that kept her at work. The hides were easily filched from the store in the cave; the spells she had largely fixed in her memory.
It was the herbs and unguents that gave her the trouble now. Neither could be easily filched from her father's stores in sufficient quantity without his being warned. Later in the year, if the peace with the Owl Picts held, she might gather the herbs herself, but now the Owls did not guard Lysenius's lands, which were just awakening to the new spring.
With the gods' favor (she had invoked all save Set), she would be apt for a short time of shape-changing. If that short time was not enough, she would face the choice of remaining in animal form forever or turning back to face her father's wrath.
She might even be driven to praying and sacrificing to Set, if she thought the Lord of Serpents could spare her that choice.
***
In time, Conan began to wonder if the "village" of Dead Elephant Valley stretched all the way to the Suba lands, or perhaps to the sea.
Certainly he and Kubwande had already covered ground enough to hold some of Turan's smaller cities, or a merchant prince's estate in Argos.
At least they were leaving the slaughterhouse stench behind, which must be growing riper as the sun climbed higher. Now the orb blazed from above all but the highest treetops, stripping the last shreds of mist from the jungle and awakening those birds and beasts of daylight, who had slumbered until dawn. They added their sounds to the rising din of the jungle, until Conan could no longer hear his own footsteps and had to raise his voice for Kubwande to hear him.
He had noticed that no other Bamula searchers were in sight, and even their footprints were few and sparse. One could tell the Bamula warriors' prints from the villagers'”the villagers wore footgear that spread the great toe wide apart from the other four toes. Kubwande and the Cimmerian were some distance from friends, whom they might need should they meet enemies.
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