They searched until sunset, when the villagers led them back and filled empty stomachs with porridge, roasted yams, and beer. They asked no payment and were given none; the band had sworn itself to silence about their treasure until they were closer to home.
It was then that Bowenu came over to Conan and made a confession.
"Kubwande, I think, had the notion of going back to the chiefs of the Bamulas before the rest of us. At least he said he was going to put in his mind the picture of their Great Hall."
"The fool!" Conan swore. "Scyra told me, and I told all of you
"Ah, but Kubwande always thought he was wiser than other men. He wanted me to go with him, and put himself ahead of me in the line. But at the last moment, I stepped forward, so that he was last. Wherever he has gone, he has gone alone."
Bowenu poured himself more beer and wandered off.
After a moment, Vuona rose gracefully and followed him. Govindue watched her go.
"Perhaps I do not want her as a wife after all."
"Perhaps you don't," Conan said. "Perhaps you too need more beer."
Govindue drank, but his eyes were old in his young face. "Do you think we will ever see Kubwande again?"
"No, nor Scyra. She”curse it, one of the few witches who's honest enough to pay for her mistakes, and it had to be her!" Although she had probably not begrudged the price, with her father dead. Conan had seldom seen more acceptance of death in anyone's eyes than he had seen with his last look into Scyra's.
"Honesty in women is like a strong will," Govindue said. He stared as solemnly as a temple image at the smoke swirling in the hut. "It lets them do wonders."
"The only wonder I care about right now is more beer!"
"I will have some more brought," Govindue said solemnly. "But there is a price."
"What?"
"You must allow us to call you by the name of Amra."
Conan looked into the smoke. Belit was becoming a fond, warm memory rather than a pain he felt every day. The name no longer felt strange, and these folk meant its use as an honor.
"As you like."
Govindue wasted no time. He leapt to his feet, snatched a gourd of beer from a girl, and raised it high.
"Hear me, warriors who followed Conan! Tonight and afterward, we name him”Amra! Ohbe Amra!"
"Ohbe Amra!" The other warriors took up the chant, then the villagers, first those inside the hut, then those outside, until the jungle night seemed to throb with it.
Conan looked into the smoke and saw a dark-haired woman welcoming an auburn-haired one into the shadows. He wondered what Belit would tell Scyra, not that he would ever have much chance of knowing¦ and here was good beer going to waste!
"Ohbe."
Epilogue
The Pictish Wilderness, many years later:
We listened to Vasilios's tale right through to the end, in a silence broken only by the beat of the rain outside. The last Pictish drums were stilled; the drummers were most likely sheltering from the rain, as much as one wished to believe they had departed.
"How certain is it that the warrior leading the demon-men was Conan?"
someone asked. I thought it was Sarabos, but the Black Dragon was sitting as silent as the statue.
Vasilios shrugged. "My mother said that some of the Picts who saw him survived the casting of the demon's gate. A few lived long enough to fight again at Velitrium, and recognized the Aquilonian general."
It would be a very few. Apart from wars, the life of a Pict had always been harsh and short, perhaps more so since Aquilonia had begun pushing hard through the Marches into the wilderness. Also, memories could play tricks on anyone, Hyborian, Stygian, or Pict.
But it made a good story.
It was not the only story we listened to during the two days we spent in the cave. There was little to do except keep watch for a Pictish attack that never came and search the cave as far as a rope and our scant supply of torches would allow. We found water just beyond the chamber of the statue, so we had little need and less curiosity to know about what might lie beyond in the bowels of the hill.
We were more curious about how soon help would come. Doubtless our company would send for reinforcements when the watering party did not return; we prayed that they would not try to rescue us unaided and fall prey to the Picts.
It was well on into the afternoon of the second day when we heard the Picts drumming again. Then the drums faded, bird and animal calls rose as warriors passed messages back and forth, and the sentries said they could see Picts moving about in the fringes of the trees. (If the story was true, the second growth must have come back thick and fast after the virgin timber was magicked away.)
All this might have heralded an attack, and taboos be cursed, but those with more experience in wilderness fighting said it sounded like the Picts were assembling the warriors for a march. Certainly the noise died away soon enough, and as the silence drew on, the sentries reported that the Picts were gone.
I had just come out to see this for myself when the silence ended in Bossonian war horns. Three times more they sounded, each time closer.
Then half a dozen scouts in their green tunics and trousers scampered out of the trees and raced up the hill to us.
We were saved. With our company and those who had joined it, three hundred men were on the way, a force much larger than the Picts usually cared to face at this time of year. We would need to move on swiftly, and there was no more time for investigating the cave, no matter how many torches our rescuers brought, but that was a small loss.
Not so small was the mystery of how the commander at Fort Nyaro”who had sent our rescuers”had heard we needed rescuing. Scouts, sergeants, and captains all said the same thing: a messenger had come in reporting our party beseiged by the Picts at a place he so carefully described that a child could have found it.
No one, however, had actually seen the messenger. A few said they had seen a man who might have been he, but no two descriptions of the man agreed. Also, all did agree that the message had come during the first night of heavy rain”the very evening we found the cave!
A bird could hardly have flown in that rain. Even if it had, it could scarcely have traveled so fast. Nothing on legs”and above all, nothing human”could have carried a message to Fort Nyaro in a single hour.
After a while, I came to realize that I was raising more questions than receiving answers. I was already uneasy; it seemed futile to make others so. I left gathering the wounded and the remaining supplies for the march to the sergeants and walked back to the statue.
Sarabos was already there, sitting cross-legged on the floor, looking at nothing in particular. I stood beside him, and before either of us found words, Vasilios joined us.
"Ah¦ I thought you might be here, Captains. I was hearing of the messenger who wasn't."
"I think the less said about that, the better," I admonished him.
"Well, sir, it's a cat out of the bag and not to be put back in without more trouble than it's worth."
"Judge trouble after I see how much I can make for loose tongues," I said. I wanted to be alone, but Sarabos raised a hand.
"Let him speak his mind."
One did not argue with a Black Dragon of Sarabos's blood, as much as I wished it. "Speak, then, Vasilios, but briefly."
"Oh, it's nothing long. Just that I'm sure I'm not the only one who knows who Captain Sarabos's father is. Others might know, and I didn't want to get their hopes up. I wasn't any too sure myself about that part of the story."
"Which part?" I snapped. "Something you left out?"
"Aye. The story goes that the statue”the statue will come to help when the warrior's blood-kin need it."
I looked at the statue. It showed no signs of having moved a hair'sbreadth, let alone being fully animated. No charred Pictish corpses lay about the cave.
But would it show any traces if all it had done was to send a message that Conan's son Sarabos needed rescuing? That was help, in any se
nse of the word that gods or men might use.
"I stand by what I said before: the less this is noised about, the better," I said.
"True," Sarabos agreed, rising. "The priests of Mitra are grown rigid and fusty in recent years, not liking magickal mysteries. They might ask us to either cast the statue down or bring it out of the wilderness to one of their temples."
The statue had to weigh as much as two or three warhorses. The idea of hauling that deadweight through the Pictish Wilderness was too appalling to contemplate. I thought impious thoughts about the priesthood of Mitra.
"Except”what if the Picts learn to command it?" I asked.
"If it is bonded to a certain blood, that blood alone commands itself.
It and the other children of my”of that blood. And that includes Conan the Second, a good steward of what he inherited, but one who may need some help to hold it."
We looked at one another and at the statue, standing there as we were in the darkness broken only by Sarabos's single candle and my torch.
Perhaps it was only a trick of that uncertain light, but I thought I saw that the statue's face had changed its expression. Before, it had shown a grim mask to the world. Now I could have sworn it wore a wry smile, not unlike one so often seen on the face of Sarabos's father-who-could-not-be-named.
That was enough for me. "I repeat, let there be silence about this. It is our duty to the House of Conan."
"Our duty," the others intoned, almost keeping their faces blank. We turned and walked away from the statue, out of the chamber, and up the tunnel to the fading daylight of the outer cave.
The Vale of Lost Women
1
The thunder of the drums and the great elephant-tusk horns was deafening, but in Livia's ears the clamor seemed but a confused muttering dull and far away. As she lay on the angareb in the great hut, her state bordered between delirium and semiunconsciousness. Outward sounds and movements scarcely impinged upon her senses. Her whole mental vision, though dazed and chaotic, was yet centered with hideous certitude on the naked, writhing figure of her brother, blood streaming down his quivering thighs. Against a dim nightmare background of dusky interweaving shapes and shadows that white form was limned in merciless and awful clarity. The air seemed still to pulsate with an agonized screaming, mingled and interwoven obscenely with a rustle of fiendish laughter.
She was not conscious of sensation as an individual, separate and distinct from the rest of the cosmos. She was drowned in a great gulf of pain - was herself but pain crystalized and manifested in flesh. So she lay without conscious thought or motion, while outside the drums bellowed, the horns clamored, and barbaric voices lifted hideous chants, keeping time to naked feet slapping the hard earth and open palms smiting one another softly.
But through her frozen mentality individual consciousness at last began to seep. A dull wonder that she was still bodily unharmed first made itself manifest. She accepted the miracle without thanksgiving. The matter seemed meaningless. Acting mechanically, she sat up on the angareb and stared dully about her. Her extremities made feeble beginnings of motions, as if responding to blindly awakening nerve centers. Her naked feet scruffed nervously at the hard-beaten dirt floor. Her fingers twitched convulsively at the skirt of the scanty undertunic which constituted her only garment. Impersonally she remembered that once, it seemed long, long ago, rude hands had torn her other garments from her body, and she had wept with fright and shame. It seemed strange, now, that so small a wrong should have caused her so much woe. The magnitude of outrage and indignity was only relative, after all, like everything else.
The but door opened, and a black woman entered - a lithe pantherish creature, whose supple body gleamed like polished ebony, adorned only by a wisp of silk twisted about her strutting loins. The white of her eyeballs reflected the firelight outside, as she rolled them with wicked meaning.
She bore a bamboo dish of food - smoking meat, roasted yams, mealies, unwieldy ingots of native bread - and a vessel of hammered gold, filled with yarati beer. These she set down on the angareb, but Livia paid no heed; she sat staring dully at the opposite wall, hung with mats woven of bamboo shoots. The young black woman laughed evilly, with a flash of dark eyes and white teeth, and with a hiss of spiteful obscenity and a mocking caress that was more gross than her language, she turned and swaggered out of the hut, expressing more taunting insolence with the motions of her hips than any civilized woman could with spoken insults.
Neither the wench's words nor her actions had stirred the surface of Livia's consciousness. All her sensations were still turned inward. Still the vividness of her mental pictures made the visible world seem like an unreal panorama of ghosts and shadows. Mechanically she ate the food and drank the liquor without tasting either.
It was still mechanically that at last she rose and walked unsteadily across the hut, to peer out through a crack between the bamboos. It was an abrupt change in the timbre of the drums and horns that reacted upon some obscure part of her mind and made her seek the cause, without sensible volition.
At first she could make out nothing of what she saw; all was chaotic and shadowy, shapes moving and mingling, writhing and twisting, black formless blocks hewed out starkly against a setting of blood-red that dulled and glowed. Then actions and objects assumed their proper proportions, and she made out men and women moving about the fires. The red light glinted on silver and ivory ornaments; white plumes nodded against the glare; naked black figures strutted and posed, silhouettes carved out of darkness and limned in crimson.
On an ivory stool, flanked by giants in plumed headpieces and leopardskin girdles, sat a fat, squat shape, abysmal, repulsive, a toad-like chunk of blackness, reeking of the dank rotting jungle and the nighted swamps. The creature's pudgy hands rested on the sleek arch of his belly; his nape was a roll of sooty fat that seemed to thrust his bullethead forward. His eyes gleamed in the firelight, like live coals in a dead black stump. Their appalling vitality belied the inert suggestion of the gross body.
As the girl's gaze rested on that repellant figure her body stiffened and tensed as frantic life surged through her again. From a mindless automaton, she changed suddenly to a sentient mold of live, quivering flesh, stinging and burning. Pain was drowned in hate, so intense it in turn became pain; she felt hard and brittle, as if her body were turning to steel. She felt her hate flow almost tangibly out along the line of her vision; so it seemed to her that the object of her emotion should fall dead from his carven stool because of its force.
But if Bajujh, king of Bakalah, felt any psychic discomfort because of the concentration of his captive, he did not show it. He continued to cram his frog-like mouth to capacity with handfuls of mealies scooped up from a vessel held up to him by a kneeling woman, and to stare down a broad lane which was being formed by the action of his subjects in pressing back on either hand.
Down this lane, walled with sweaty black humanity, Livia vaguely realized some important personage would come, judging from the strident clamor of drum and horn. And as she watched, one came.
A column of fighting-men, marching three abreast, advanced toward the ivory stool, a thick line of waving plumes and glinting spears meandering through the motley crowd. At the head of the ebon spearmen strode a figure at the sight of which Livia started violently; her heart seemed to stop, then began to pound again, suffocatingly. Against that dusky background, this man stood out with vivid distinctness. He was clad like his followers in leopardskin loin-cloth and plumed headpiece, but he was a white man.
It was not in the manner of a supplicant or a subordinate that he strode up to the ivory stool, and sudden silence fell over the throng as he halted before the squatting figure. Livia felt the tenseness, though she only dimly knew what it portended. For a moment Bajujh sat, craning his short neck upward, like a great frog; then, as if pulled against his will by the other's steady glare, he shambled up off his stool, and stood grotesquely bobbing his shaven head.
Instantly the te
nsion was broken. A tremendous shout went up from the massed villagers, and at a gesture from the stranger, his warriors lifted their spears and boomed a salute royale for King Bajujh. Whoever he was, Livia knew the man must indeed be powerful in that wild land, if Bajujh of Bakalah rose to greet him. And power meant military prestige - violence was the only thing respected by those ferocious races.
Thereafter Livia stood with her eyes glued to the crack in the hut wall, watching the white stranger. His warriors mingled with the Bakalas, dancing, feasting, swigging beer. He himself, with a few of his chiefs, sat with Bajujh and the headmen of Bakalah, cross-legged on mats, gorging and guzzling. She saw his hands dipped deep into the cooking-pots with the others, saw his muzzle thrust into the beer vessel out of which Bajujh also drank. But she noticed, nevertheless, that he was accorded the respect due to a king. Since he had no stool, Bajujh renounced his also, and sat on the mats with his guest. When a new pot of beer was brought, the king of Bakalah barely sipped it before he passed it to the white man. Power! All this ceremonial courtesy pointed to power - strength - prestige! Livia trembled in excitement as a breathless plan began to form in her mind.
So she watched the white man with painful intensity, noting every detail of his appearance. He was tall; neither in height nor in massiveness was he exceeded by many of the giant blacks. He moved with the lithe suppleness of a great panther. When the firelight caught his eyes, they burned like blue fire. High-strapped sandals guarded his feet, and from his broad girdle hung a sword in a leather scabbard. His appearance was alien and unfamiliar. Livia had never seen his like, but she made no effort to classify his position among the races of mankind. It was enough that his skin was white.
The hours passed, and gradually the roar of revelry lessened, as men and women sank into drunken sleep. At last Bajujh rose tottering, and lifted his hands, less a sign to end the feast, than a token of surrender in the contest of gorging and guzzling, and stumbling, was caught by his warriors, who bore him to his hut. The white man rose, apparently none the worse for the incredible amount of beer he had quaffed, and was escorted to the guest but by such of the Bakalah headmen as were able to reel along. He disappeared into the hut, and Livia noticed that a dozen of his own spearmen took their places about the structure, spears ready. Evidently the stranger was taking no chances on Bajujh's friendship.
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