Conan the adaptable, p.103
Conan the Adaptable, page 103
It was a lean, wiry man, young, with an ermine-edged khilat, a fur calpack, and silver-heeled boots. Sheathed knives were in his girdle, and a bow lay near his hand. He had been shot through the heart.
“Turanian,” muttered Conan. “Bandit, from his looks, out on a lone scout. I wonder how far he’s been trailing me.”
He knew the presence of the man implied two things: somewhere in the vicinity there was a band of Turanians; and somewhere, probably close by, there was a horse. A nomad never walked far, even when stalking a victim. He glanced up at the rise which rolled up from the copse. It was logical to believe that the man had sighted him from the crest of the low ridge, had tied his horse on the other side, and glided down into the thicket to waylay him while he stalked the antelope.
Conan went up the slope warily, though he did not believe there were any other tribesmen within earshot — else the reports of the bows would have brought them to the spot — and found the horse without trouble. It was a Turanian stallion with a red leather saddle with wide silver stirrups and a bridle heavy with goldwork. A scimitar hung from the saddle peak in an ornamented leather scabbard.
Swinging into the saddle, Conan studied all quarters of the compass from the summit of the ridge. In the south a faint ribbon of smoke stood against the evening. His black eyes were keen as a hawk’s; not many could have distinguished that filmy blue feather against the cerulean of the sky.
“Turanian means bandits,” he muttered. “Smoke means camp. They’re trailing us, sure as fate.”
Reining about, he headed for the camp. His hunt had carried him some miles east of the site, but he rode at a pace that ate up the distance. It was not yet twilight when he halted in the fringe of the larches and sat silently scanning the slope on which the camp had stood. It was bare. There was no sign of tents, men, or beasts.
His gaze sifted the surrounding ridges and clumps, but found nothing to rouse his alert suspicion. At last he walked his steed up the acclivity, carrying his bow at the ready. He saw a smear of blood on the ground where he knew Pemrir’s tent had stood, but there was no other sign of violence, and the grass was not trampled as it would have been by a charge of wild horsemen.
He read the evidence of a swift but orderly exodus. His companions had simply struck their tents, loaded the pack animals, and departed. But why? Sight of distant horsemen might have stampeded the Iranistani men, though neither had shown any sign of the white feather before; but certainly Ahmed would not have deserted his master and friend.
As he traced the course of the horses through the grass, his puzzlement increased; they had gone westward.
Their avowed destination lay beyond those mountains in the north. They knew that, as well as he. But there was no mistake about it. For some reason, shortly after he had left camp, as he read the signs, they had packed hurriedly and set off westward, toward the forbidden country identified by Mount Erlik.
Thinking that possibly they had a logical reason for shifting camp and had left him a note of some kind which he had failed to find, Conan rode back to the camp site and began casting about it in an ever-widening circle, studying the ground. And presently he saw sure signs that a heavy body had been dragged through the grass.
Men and horses had almost obliterated the dim track, but for years Conan’s life had depended upon the keenness of his faculties. He remembered the smear of blood on the ground where Pemrir’s tent had stood.
He followed the crushed grass down the south slope and into a thicket, and an instant later he was kneeling beside the body of a man. It was Ahmed, and at first glance Conan thought he was dead. Then he saw that the Shemite, though shot through the body and undoubtedly dying, still had a faint spark of life in him.
He lifted the turbaned head and set his canteen to the blue lips. Ahmed groaned, and into his glazed eyes came intelligence and recognition.
“Who did this, Ahmed?” Conan’s voice grated with the suppression of his emotions.
“Ormond,” gasped the Shemite. “I listened outside their tent, because I feared they planned treachery to you. I never trusted them. So they shot me and have gone away, leaving you to die alone in the hills.”
“But why?” Conan was more mystified than ever.
“They go to Yolgan,” panted Ahmed. “The Rasir we sought never existed. He was a lie they created to hoodwink you.”
“Why to Yolgan?” asked Conan.
But Ahmed’s eyes dilated with the imminence of death; in a racking convulsion he heaved up in Conan’s arms; then blood gushed from his lips and he died.
Conan rose, mechanically dusting his hands. Immobile as the deserts he haunted, he was not prone to display his emotions. Now he merely went about heaping stones over the body to make a cairn that wolves and jackals could not tear into. Ahmed had been his companion on many a dim road; less servant than friend.
But when he had lifted the last stone, Conan climbed into the saddle, and without a backward glance he rode westward. He was alone in a savage country, without food or proper equipage. Chance had given him a horse, and years of wandering on the raw edges of the world had given him experience and a greater familiarity with this unknown land than any other white man he knew. It was conceivable that he might live to win his way through to some civilized outpost.
But he did not even give that possibility a thought. Conan’s ideas of obligation, of debt and payment, were as direct and primitive as those of the barbarians among whom his lot had been cast for so many years. Ahmed had been his friend and had died in his service. Blood must pay for blood.
That was as certain in Conan’s mind as hunger is certain in the mind of a gray timber wolf. He did not know why the killers were going toward forbidden Yolgan, and he did not greatly care. His task was to follow them to hell if necessary and exact full payment for spilled blood. No other course suggested itself.
Darkness fell and the stars came out, but he did not slacken his pace. Even by starlight it was not hard to follow the trail of the caravan through the high grass. The Turanian horse proved a good one and fairly fresh. He felt certain of overtaking the laden pack ponies, in spite of their long start.
As the hours passed, however, he decided that the Iranistanis were determined to push on all night. They evidently meant to put so much distance between them and himself that he could never catch them, following on foot as they thought him to be. But why were they so anxious to keep from him the truth of their destination?
A sudden thought made his face grim, and after that he pushed his mount a bit harder. His hand instinctively sought the hilt of the broad scimitar slung from the high-peaked horn.
His gaze sought the white cap of Mount Erlik, ghostly in the starlight, then swung to the point where he knew Yolgan lay. He had been there before, himself, had heard the deep roar of the long bronze trumpets that shaven-headed priests blow from the mountains at sunrise.
It was past midnight when he sighted fires near the willow-massed banks of a stream. At first glance he knew it was not the camp of the men he followed. The fires were too many. It was an ordu of the nomadic Kirghiz who roam the country between Mount Erlik Khan and the loose boundaries of the local tribes. This camp lay full in the path of Yolgan and he wondered if the Iranistanis had known enough to avoid it. These fierce people hated strangers. He himself, when he visited Yolgan, had accomplished the feat disguised as a native.
Gaining the stream above the camp he moved closer, in the shelter of the willows, until he could make out the dim shapes of sentries on horseback in the light of the small fires. And he saw something else — three white tents inside the ring of round, gray felt kibitkas. He swore silently; if the Black Kirghiz had killed the Iranistani men, appropriating their belongings, it meant the end of his vengeance. He moved nearer.
It was a suspicious, slinking, wolf-like dog that betrayed him. Its frenzied clamour brought men swarming out of the felt tents, and a swarm of mounted sentinels raced toward the spot, stringing bows as they came.
Conan had no wish to be filled with arrows as he ran. He spurred out of the willows and was among the horsemen before they were aware of him, slashing silently right and left with the Turanian scimitar. Blades swung around him, but the men were more confused than he. He felt his edge grate against steel and glance down to split a broad skull; then he was through the cordon and racing into deeper darkness while the demoralized pack howled behind him.
A familiar voice shouting above the clamour told him that Ormond, at least, was not dead. He glanced back to see a tall figure cross the firelight and recognized Pemrir’s rangy frame. The fire gleamed on steel in his hands. That they were armed showed they were not prisoners, though this forbearance on the part of the fierce nomads was more than his store of Eastern lore could explain.
The pursuers did not follow him far; drawing in under the shadows of a thicket he heard them shouting gutturally to each other as they rode back to the tent. There would be no more sleep in that ordu that night. Men with naked steel in their hands would pace their horses about the encampment until dawn. It would be difficult to steal back for a long shot at his enemies. But now, before he slew them, he wished to learn what took them to Yolgan.
Absently his hand caressed the hawk-headed pommel of the Turanian scimitar. Then he turned again eastward and rode back along the route he had come, as fast as he could push the wearying horse. It was not yet dawn when he came upon what he had hoped to find — a second camp, some ten miles west of the spot where Ahmed had been killed; dying fires reflected on one small tent and on the forms of men wrapped in cloaks on the ground.
He did not approach too near; when he could make out the lines of slowly moving shapes that were picketed horses and could see other shapes that were riders pacing about the camp, he drew back behind a thicketed ridge, dismounted and unsaddled his horse.
While it eagerly cropped the fresh grass, he sat cross-legged with his back to a tree trunk, his bow across his knees, as motionless as an image and as imbued with the vast patience of the East as the eternal hills themselves.
III
Dawn was little more than a hint of grayness in the sky when the camp that Conan watched was astir. Smoldering coals leaped up into flames again, and the scent of mutton stew filled the air. Wiry men in caps of fur and girdled caftans swaggered among the horse lines or squatted beside the cooking pots, questing after savory morsels with unwashed fingers. There were no women among them and scant luggage. The lightness with which they traveled could mean only one thing.
The sun was not yet up when they began saddling horses and belting on weapons. Conan chose that moment to appear, riding leisurely down the ridge toward them.
A yell went up, and instantly a score of bows covered him. The very boldness of his action stayed their fingers on the triggers. Conan wasted no time, though he did not appear hurried. Their chief had already mounted, and Conan reined up almost beside him. The Turanian glared — a hawk-nosed, evil-eyed ruffian with a henna-stained beard. Recognition grew like a red flame in his eyes, and, seeing this, his warriors made no move.
“Yusef Khan,” said Conan, “you dog, have I found you at last?”
Yusef Khan plucked his red beard and snarled like a wolf. “Are you mad, Conan?”
“It is Conan!” rose an excited murmur from the warriors, and that gained Conan another respite.
They crowded closer, their blood lust for the instant conquered by their curiosity. Conan was a name known from Asgard to Khitan and repeated in a hundred wild tales wherever the wolves of the desert gathered.
As for Yusef Khan, he was puzzled, and furtively eyed the slope down which Conan had ridden. He feared the white man’s cunning almost as much as he hated him, and in his suspicion, hate and fear that he was in a trap, the Turanian was as dangerous and uncertain as a wounded cobra.
“What do you here?” he demanded. “Speak quickly, before my warriors strip the skin from you a little at a time.”
“I came following an old feud.” Conan had come down the ridge with no set plan, but he was not surprised to find a personal enemy leading the Turanians. It was no unusual coincidence. Conan had blood-foes scattered all over Hyboria.
“You are a fool —”
In the midst of the chief’s sentence Conan leaned from his saddle and struck Yusef Khan across the face with his open hand. The blow cracked like a bull whip and Yusef reeled, almost losing his seat. He howled like a wolf and clawed at his girdle, so muddled with fury that he hesitated between knife and bow. Conan could have shot him down while he fumbled, but that was not the Cimmerian’s plan.
“Keep off!” he warned the warriors, yet not reaching for a weapon. “I have no quarrel with you. This concerns only your chief and me.”
With another man that would have had no effect; but another man would have been dead already. Even the wildest tribesman had a vague feeling that the rules governing action against ordinary men did not apply to Conan.
“Take him!” howled Yusef Khan. “He shall be flayed alive!”
They moved forward at that, and Conan laughed unpleasantly.
“Torture will not wipe out the shame I have put upon your chief,” he taunted. “Men will say ye are led by a khan who bears the mark of Conan’s hand in his beard. How is such shame to be wiped out? Lo, he calls on his warriors to avenge him! Is Yusef Khan a coward?”
They hesitated again and looked at their chief whose beard was clotted with foam. They all knew that to wipe out such an insult the aggressor must be slain by the victim in single combat. In that wolf pack even a suspicion of cowardice was tantamount to a death sentence.
If Yusef Khan failed to accept Conan’s challenge, his men might obey him and torture the Cimmerian to death at his pleasure, but they would not forget, and from that moment he was doomed.
Yusef Khan knew this; knew that Conan had tricked him into a personal duel, but he was too drunk with fury to care. His eyes were red as those of a rabid wolf, and he had forgotten his suspicions that Conan had bowmen hidden up on the ridge. He had forgotten everything except his frenzied passion to wipe out forever the glitter in those savage black eyes that mocked him.
“Dog!” he screamed, ripping out his broad scimitar. “Die at the hands of a chief!”
He came like a typhoon, his cloak whipping out in the wind behind him, his scimitar flaming above his head. Conan met him in the center of the space the warriors left suddenly clear.
Yusef Khan rode a magnificent horse as if it were part of him, and it was fresh. But Conan’s mount had rested, and it was well-trained in the game of war. Both horses responded instantly to the will of their riders.
The fighters revolved about each other in swift curvets and gambados, their blades flashing and grating without the slightest pause, turned red by the rising sun. It was less like two men fighting on horseback than like a pair of centaurs, half man and half beast, striking for one another’s life.
“Dog!” panted Yusef Khan, hacking and hewing like a man possessed of devils. “I’ll nail your head to my tent pole — ahhhh!”
Not a dozen of the hundred men watching saw the stroke, except as a dazzling flash of steel before their eyes, but all heard its crunching impact. Yusef Khan’s charger screamed and reared, throwing a dead man from the saddle with a split skull.
A wordless wolfish yell that was neither anger nor applause went up, and Conan wheeled, whirling his scimitar about his head so that the red drops flew in a shower.
“Yusef Khan is dead!” he roared. “Is there one to take up his quarrel?”
They gaped at him, not sure of his intention, and before they could recover from the surprise of seeing their invincible chief fall, Conan thrust his scimitar back in its sheath with a certain air of finality and said:
“And now who will follow me to plunder greater than any of ye ever dreamed?”
That struck an instant spark, but their eagerness was qualified by suspicion.
“Show us!” demanded one. “Show us the plunder before we slay thee.”
Without answering, Conan swung off his horse and cast the reins to a mustached rider to hold, who was so astonished that he accepted the indignity without protest. Conan strove over to a cooking pot, squatted beside it and began to eat ravenously. He had not tasted food in many hours.
“Shall I show you the stars by daylight?” he demanded, scooping out handfuls of stewed mutton. “Yet the stars are there, and men see them in the proper time. If I had the loot would I come asking you to share it? Neither of us can win it without the other’s aid.”
“He lies,” said one whom his comrades addressed as Uzun Beg. “Let us slay him and continue to follow the caravan we have been tracking.”
“Who will lead you?” asked Conan pointedly.
They scowled at him, and various ruffians who considered themselves logical candidates glanced furtively at one another. Then all looked back at Conan, unconcernedly wolfing down mutton stew five minutes after having slain the most dangerous swordsman of the black tents.
His attitude of indifference deceived nobody. They knew he was dangerous as a cobra that could strike like lightning in any direction. They knew they could not kill him so quickly that he would not kill some of them and naturally none wanted to be first to die.
That alone would not have stopped them. But that was combined with curiosity, avarice roused by his mention of plunder, vague suspicion that he would not have put himself in a trap unless he held some sort of a winning hand, and jealousy of the leaders of each other.
Uzun Beg, who had been examining Conan’s mount, exclaimed angrily: “He rides Ali Khan’s steed!”
“Aye,” Conan assented tranquilly. “Moreover this is Ali Khan’s sword. He shot at me from ambush, so he lies dead.”
