Conan the Savage (15 page)

This combination made her countenance—demure and expressionless as she gazed down on him in the hazy light— an endlessly fascinating puzzle box of small surprises. She leaned further over him, and her various adornments, both handmade and naturally bestowed, dangled tantalizingly near his nerveless face and hands. He caught her scent, and again some faint memory whispered to him, as before in a half-remembered forest. A white heat kindled in his forehead, and a new tremor passed through his fever-ravaged body.

His exquisite agony was interrupted as the woman seized hold of his cheeks, pinched his mouth open, and forced something wet and bitter between his jaws. He jerked and struggled, mustering a feeble effort that barely dislodged her stubborn grip. Nevertheless, he managed to spit out whatever it was.

The woman recoiled, her face a kaleidoscope of foreign emotions. “Juwala!” she cried angrily.

Conan, in his fog of weakness, waited resignedly for some hulking male of that name to come charging through the hut’s open doorway. Instead, the woman turned impatiently and rummaged in a basket near the door. She produced a handful of limp, uprooted weeds and, turning back to her patient, shook their grey-green foliage in his face. “Juwala! Juwala!” she repeated insistently.

The plant, he vaguely recognized, was a flowering ditch-weed of a kind he had heard was useful as medicine. Its leaves, macerated and moistened, apparently were the stuff she had been putting into his mouth; it was nothing poisonous, just a folk remedy of dubious value. This time, when she picked up the damp ball out of the dust and shoved it between his lips, he chewed weakly and disconsolately, then did his best to swallow. His efforts were helped along by a choking draught of water the woman ladled into his mouth with a gourd spoon.

So he came to trust Songa’s good intentions—for such was her name, as he learned during the hours she spent overseeing his recovery. She was pleasant-natured, entirely matter-of-fact about his physical incapacity and his grisly, suppurating wounds, and amazingly tolerant of the little pats and prods he would venture as she bent over him and ministered to his needs. It was only when, in the flush of his rapidly returning strength and agility, he sought to catch and clasp her to him that she would rebuff him, with a deftly planted knee or elbow, or by dousing him with cold water from a nearby vessel, or perhaps by thumping him with the container itself.

Even this she managed good-naturedly. Songa seemed, on the whole, to enjoy her labours and trials, as proven by the long afternoons she spent sitting just outside Conan’s reach, resting on her shapely folded legs and haunches, patiently teaching him the correct names of everyday objects.

She respected his wounds, too, recognizing them as the work of a fearsome animal. In return, with a mixture of pensiveness and pride, she showed him the white parallel scars on her ankle and thigh that had been made by a mountain cat.

The others of her family or tribe seemed wholly tolerant of her efforts. Occasionally a tall, muscular, dark-limbed man—his face similar to Songa’s, if heavier and less benevolent-looking—would stoop down before the hut’s doorway and peer inside, but he never interrupted the two of them or did any more than grunt. From the inquiry Conan contrived to make, he gathered that the man’s name was Aklak.

There were others as well, a score of them at least, as Conan guessed from the occasional babble of voices and the varied sounds of chopping, chipping, scraping, and chanting that went on outside the hut in the course of a day. When he tried to ask how many, sketching stick-figures in the dust beside his pallet, Songa would obligingly rattle off an endless list of semi-pronounceable names—Orpa, Emda, Urga, Ekdus, Amawak, Piliwak, Fnan—but she seemed vague about numbers amounting to more than five.

It may have been deliberate, Conan knew, arising from a wish not to reveal too much about her kinsmen. When she had tried to question him about his own tribe, he must have seemed less than forthcoming; there was nothing he could do but wave his hands overhead to indicate someplace far, far away, beyond forests and mountains. He tried to explain further by making rushing, roaring sounds through his teeth and flowing motions with his hands.

“Targolian Songa understood, repeating her word for river. That became Conan’s second name to all her people: Targoka, river-man.

The language she taught him had no parallel in his experience. It was unlike the common eastern Hyborian dialects, and for that matter, the Turanian and Hyrkanian tongues, so it gave Conan no clue as to his whereabouts. Instead—and to his surprise, he found this gratifying— Songa’s speech seemed to prove that her tribe and her broader people, if any, lacked significant contact with the great world of his experience. As far as he could tell, these valley dwellers had no name for themselves other than Atupan, “people.” Songa herself showed little interest in the foreign words Conan tried to teach her, or even in his own birth-name. She may have assumed that no real human language existed other than Atupan, and that before learning her primitive tongue, Conan possessed only the vague gestures and grunts he resorted to in her presence.

If so, the misconception did not trouble Conan; he had no wish to carry the scourge of civilization to these untrammelled innocents. Their way of life, from what he could gather of the sounds and activities going on outside the hut—and from the variety of mashed, boiled, and roasted foods that were brought to him, and from the array of proud male and giggling female faces that peered in at the door—their life seemed easy and congenial to him, almost like coming home to the Cimmerian camps and strongholds of his boyhood.

Having mastered the fundamental challenges to survival—as Conan himself thought he had been doing splendidly before his encounter with the cave-bear—these people lived a relatively comfortable life, in a relaxed harmony with nature that was only occasionally lethal. Their prosperity, primarily due to the lush, varied landscape around them, was even greater than that legended to the Cimmerian by his hill-grandsires in the age before the arrival of land-stealing southerners and steel weaponry set the Cimmerian race on a permanent course of war and destruction.

These notions, during the dim, lazy period of Conan’s convalescence, came to him not so much as thoughts and resolutions, but rather as feelings, smells, images. Following Songa’s example, he became less reflective of civilized ways, falling back to a more basic level of awareness. His senses were again renewed, particularly those of smell and fine hearing, which he had deliberately learned to repress in the raucous, reeking hive of the city. What he desired now was plain: the trenchers of honeyed, steaming pine-nut gruel brought in by his buxom nursemaid, the clumps of berries, pots of stewed greens, and hanks of smoked venison that he eventually mustered up adequate strength and spittle to masticate and swallow.

Once those immediate needs were satisfied, his next goals were already in sight: the soft contours and mystic recesses of Songa’s splendid body, accented rather than concealed by the flimsy trinkets, capes of soft animal fur, and drooping flower garlands that she adopted in lieu of clothing. The meaning of these natural promptings of his, their advisability in some abstract system or their ultimate consequences, Conan never paused to consider; he merely followed his urges as his returning strength allowed.

Unfortunately, his ability to secure this higher goal was hindered—first by abject weakness and the pain of his gaping wounds, and later by the subtle wiles and precautions of his intended prey. Songa, through some natural instinct of her own, continued to withhold the lushness of her charms from her admirer’s touch, if not from his vision. Conan’s strength returned rapidly; and at its best, his physical power was unequalled. Yet even so, it was not in his nature to feign weakness or to lie in wait for a woman as if he were some stalking flesh-eater. His amorous cravings demanded assurances of female readiness or complicity, which Songa always contrived to deny him—even after fervent preliminary nuzzlings and caresses—but without permanently closing off hope of agreement. In this tricky course, she seemed more adept than any civilized girl Conan had known.

“Songa,” he called to her across the hut as soon as his language skills permitted, “come and rest.” He patted the coarse reed mat beneath him. “You come by me and lie down, Songa. We rest and make happy-happy.”

“No, Targoka,” she told him absently, flicking a hand horizontally in the Atupan gesture of firm denial. She pronounced the words slowly and distinctly through habit, as if speaking to a child. “No lie down, no make happy- I happy. Targoka too sick.”

“Targoka not sick,” Conan insisted, half-arising from his pallet. “Targoka strong.” He gestured at his side, which had finally scabbed over into a thick crust with very few open, runny crevices. He tried to formulate the concept that he would be sick if he didn’t make happy-happy soon, but gave up for lack of words: “Songa come rest with Conan,” he finished lamely.

“No come, no lie down,” Songa repeated. “Targoka, too sick, no go out of hut.” She gestured to the doorway, which was now shadowed with early dusk. “Targoka no go out, Aklak no kill.” She pantomimed striking someone with an ax. “Later, Targoka not sick. Targoka go out of hut, Aklak kill. Then make happy-happy.”

“Uh?” Conan asked, feeling hairs stir at the back of his neck. He tried to fathom the various possibilities. “Aklak, kill Conan... Targoka?” he clarified.

“Yes, Aklak kill Conan.” The forest girl shrugged, as if the result was of little consequence. “Conan kill Aklak, then be happy-happy.”

Conan temporarily dismissed the problem of how he could make happy-happy with her once he was killed. Instead, he asked, “Songa make happy-happy with Aklak?” “No!” The forest girl had been mashing ground nuts in a calabash with a heavy wooden pestle. Now, straightening without warning, she flung the pestle at Conan, striking him smartly on the shoulder. “No make happy-happy with oonka! Targoka no say bad-bad!”

“What is oonka?" Conan asked, wary. Even so, he left the pestle lying on the mat, hoping Songa would come to retrieve it and let him snare her in his embrace.

"Oonka—oonka!” Songa said impatiently. Leaning forward, she sketched four stick-figures in the dirt beside the fire, two large and two small. Then, to clarify further, she pantomimed removing an infant from her loins and holding it to her breast. Then she removed another shadow-infant and held it to the other breast. “Oonka,” she said, wiggling a finger to denote the gender of the second baby.

“Oh, oonka, brother!” Conan interpreted aloud in his native Cimmerian, which was the most rudimentary tongue he knew. “Aklak is oonka. No make happy-happy with Songa.” Nodding heartily to signify agreement with the fundamental taboo, he remembered to flap his hand up and down at chin level in the Atupan fashion. But the main issue still troubled him. “Oonka kill Conan?”

“Yes, kill.” Songa made snatching and grappling gestures between her hands in the air before her.

Relaxing somewhat, Conan eased back on his mat. From Songa’s performance, he guessed that the word he interpreted as “kill” might only mean “fight.” There was no difficulty there; the prospect even sounded appealing.

“Aklak kill Targoka,” Songa was continuing. “Get rid of bad-bad. Targoka make steal Songa.” She now affected a righteous, wronged look. “Targoka look Songa naked, too much bad-bad,” she finished, primly straightening the charm that dangled across her bare belly.

Conan lacked the strength just then to pursue such intricacies, but their meaning became clear over the next few days of language lessons. Evidently the Atupan tribes relied heavily on the practice of woman-stealing—a virtual necessity, given the small size of their tribe and their firm prohibition against incest. Conan heartily approved. Having seen countless clans and villages living in remote places, he sensed that the Atupans could never produce individuals as sturdy and splendid as Aklak and Songa if they resorted to inbreeding. Woman-raiding had been an honoured Cimmerian custom, he was told, though in his early days, a good part of the raiding and ravishing had involved the sleek, perfumed females of the southern invaders.

In any case, the theft of women among the several Atupan tribes that roved these forests and meadowlands was openly accepted. Marriageable girls would be left unguarded by the men during long ritual baths—preferably in groups, Conan gathered, since they preferred to be abducted along with friends so as to ease the pangs of separation from their families. The rapine was mutual among neighbouring tribes, and usually limited to girls as yet unmated, so that it seldom resulted in war or violent retaliation. Since harems and slavery were unknown among these primitives, the other obvious abuses did not occur.

Songa’s case, Conan learned, was somewhat singular, she lacked any age-mates as mature as herself, and she was also reluctant to be carried off because of her attachment to Aklak and to her ageing mother, Nuna. Her father Tubuhan, a distinguished man of the tribe, had perished years before in a bison stampede, making the old woman dependent on her offspring.

Songa, at the time of her encounter with Conan, had not been expecting a strange male to burst out of the forest and carry her away—certainly not an outlandish one who looked half-dead with grisly wounds. Their current encampment lay far from any known tribe’s territory, but her male kinsmen were in easy reach and had helped her carry the foreigner’s bulky, senseless body to the hut. Part of the mirth of the young women who now peered in on him, he realized, was at the notion of him—a strapping hunter of some foreign tribe—having been abducted by Songa.

One further aspect of their meeting that served to complicate matters was the issue of Songa’s nakedness at the time. Ritual nudity, he understood; it was a distinction that would scarcely have mattered between a tribesman and his properly stolen mate. Rather, it seemed here to be some odd elaboration of the Atupans’ incest taboo.

And a ludicrous one at that. The notion that some dangling copper gewgaw, along with a few jiggling strands of buckskin thong, could make Songa’s lush, ripe nakedness any less pure or prurient was a comical one. Conan would have laughed long and deep if it had not threatened to burst open the partly knit wound in his side. But Songa’s complaint—though, so to speak, transparent—nevertheless served as a barrier. Beside giving her one more reason to fend off his advances, it raised the prospect of a duel of vengeance, driven by what seemed like mere jealousy and perverse brotherly pride on Aklak’s part.