Conan the Savage (4 page)

Tjai stood unmoving before him, weapon in hand. “You have three choices, Conan. Watch me go to the centre of the mine and scream out that you are plotting an escape, or slay me to prevent it, or else tell me your plan. Now, speak, and truthfully, without your false promises!”

Conan raised his pick in menace, but then cast it down to clatter sharply on the stones. “All right, then, Tjai, and curse you for a wheedling hillman! I’ll tell you, if you swear to say nothing of it to the others. Once I tell, you’ll see why I cannot take you along.”

“After you tell me,” Tjai put in, “I will be bound to go along—”

“Enough!” Conan rapped at him. “Ilbarsi hound, can you swim?”

That stopped the hillman flat. “Swim?” he marvelled after a moment. “What do I look like, Cimmerian, a man or a fish? What man can breathe underwater?”

The northman grunted. “I thought not,” he said. “Your folk are ignorant of the skill. I myself, when raiding Vanir trading-posts by canoe in the far north, picked up the knack of it. It comes in handy from time to time.”

Tjai shook his head. “Conan, be not a fool! If you are thinking of throwing yourself into this underground stream, I warn you, it means sure death. Legends say with certainty that it runs straight to Tartarus, the kingdom of the dead— the one place under heaven that is worse than here!” The convict folded his arms, accepting the story with total faith. “Anyway, there is no air beneath, so you will smother first in the black, boiling depths of the earth. Other miners, crazed with despair, have tried that route of escape, and none was ever heard from again.”

“And what does that prove? That they died, or that they had good sense?” Conan shook his head impatiently. “Nay, Tjai, I would not wish to persuade you of it, since you cannot accompany me. But I tell you so that you will have faith in my survival: there is air, caught in pockets in the roof of such water caves as this. And light too, for a little way at least, let in through crevices in the quarry wall above us.”

“How do you know that?” the Ilbarsi asked sullenly.

“I have explored downstream in secret—three, no, four times now, and each time I practised stretching my lungs to go without breath a little longer. I have swum to the extent of fifty paces or more. So far into the cave, one can still find air—enough for one man to fill his lungs, anyway, if he does not tarry too long and waste too many breaths. I know there would not be enough for two.” He laid his hand gravely onto his friend’s shoulder.

“Beyond the farthest point of my explorations, the fissure narrows, and the stream grows swift. I do not think I could make my way back against the current.” The hulking Cimmerian shook his head. “That is the spot I intend to pass today. A rope would be of little use, for eventually I will have to swim free and trust the river. So, likely you will not see me again—until I return with a band of cutthroats to free you,” he added to reassure his listener.

“Conan, take me with you!” the Ilbarsi pleaded, laying aside his pick. “Wait another few days, and teach me to swim and breathe underwater. I can learn too!”

“Not in this fish-bath, Tjai, and not in cramped darkness. It would be impossible. The chill of this water by itself is enough to knock most men senseless. Who here of the miners swims in this pool—or even bathes in it, I ask you.” Stepping into the pond knee-deep, he resumed the slow process of inuring his body to the cold. “No, my friend, you must wait and preserve yourself. I shall return, I swear it—only for your sake, since these others dogs mean nothing to me.”

“Conan, I must come along! Having once smelt freedom—”

“Nay, enough!” The Cimmerian slung a handful of water at Tjai, who shrank back in dread from its chilly touch. Meanwhile, Conan strode deeper into the pond until its lapping mirror-surface ringed his waist. “If I die, your death would be in vain. If I live, I can win your freedom. Either way, you will do better to wait and have faith.”

A moment later, Conan eased in deeper, letting the water lap around his chest and shoulders. He had to incline his head under the low overhang of the rock wall, and his voice echoed with the trickling water. “Wait here a while if you will,” he told Tjai, “and learn whether I am turned back by some unknown obstacle. If not, then farewell.” He took a deep breath and ducked his head underneath the water.

The cold was sharp enough to enforce brisk physical activity. It bored in at die nape of Conan’s neck and gripped the top of his skull like an icy helmet. Yet even as he cringed from it, his skin numbed. Kicking and breasting through the water in frog-fashion, he dove down under the hummock of stone that crowded the pool’s sandy bottom.

Beyond, the cavern widened into dim reaches that offered the faint glimmer of light to his wide-open eyes. Pacing himself, Conan added the force of his kicks to the smooth trending of the current. He covered the distance efficiently but unhurriedly, only occasionally scraping his back against the cave ceiling and the pointed-stone icicles that hung fang-like from above.

Below him, blurred and barely discernible in the dimness, was the eerie show-place Conan had forborne to mention to Tjai, lest the hillman’s supernatural imaginings be goaded to madness. Tangled and half-buried in the dimness it lay—an underwater garden of bones, with here and there the gape of a hollow-eyed skull or the sparkle of gold and gems from a rotted purse. These were the remains of convicts who, over the centuries of the mine’s operation, had flung themselves, well-ballasted with treasure, into the underground stream, vainly questing freedom or oblivion. Presumably, having made it only this far, they lacked the skill of swimming, or of finding air; in any event, Conan hoped for better luck than had been vouchsafed them.

Ahead, a thin screen of flowstone jutted down toward the thicket of bones, presenting a difficult obstacle; just beyond it, Conan remembered, lay a large air pocket where he could thrust up his face and fill his lungs decently. A little way farther ahead was the place where the light entered: a mere crevice, alas, and one so narrow it didn’t afford a likely breath, much less a potential exit.

He bellied down toward the cave floor, feeling a superstitious reluctance to brush against any of the algae-slimed bones. His head nudged the lower fringe of the stone curtain, more felt than seen. Then of a sudden, he felt real, corpse-like fingers brush him as a sodden bulk bore up against his nether parts.

In a flurry of panicked motion, expelling most of his hoarded, near-depleted breath, Conan turned to face the menace—and saw only a dark, looming form, spectral and man-sized, pressing forward against him in the gloom. Its pallid fingers did not clutch or tear; in fact, the attacker appeared driven onto him mainly by the current, its gestures slack and random-seeming as it groped for his face.

Kicking out again in dread, and ramming the back of his head against the stone outcrop, Conan struggled beneath the overhang. Then he dragged himself upward, scraping his face in the open stone cavity as he gulped air. A moment later he ducked down again, laying hold of the slender, drifting shape—which he now identified in the brighter cave light as Tjai’s. He dragged the Ilbarsi upward, to thrust his face into a pocket of precious air and hold him there as best he could.

But what, in Crom’s name, could he do? He could hardly tell the fool to breathe or, in that confined space, pummel him into doing so; neither could he breathe for him. It soon became obvious, from the bluish-pale hue of his flesh and the unchanging slackness of his limbs, that the hillman— having plunged after Conan in desperation and ventured too far in the paralysing chill—was already dead.

Conan, leaving off his battle with the corpse and laying it aside, was close to being the same. Coughing, he tried to suck new air from the cavity, yet found his attempts unsatisfying, the air having been depleted of its vital power. Thrusting away, he found another remembered pocket, a shallow one that choked him with water droplets, barely justifying the effort of reaching it. At a third breathing place, lunging desperately to fill his lungs, he rammed his head against a stone outcrop and saw stars explode in the dimness. He must have drifted senseless for a moment; he wakened to the tickle of spent air bubbling upward from his slack mouth.

Deprived of breath, sight, and direction, the Cimmerian began drowning in earnest. He lashed out blindly... and felt himself sucked by the accelerating current into light-less, airless depths.

III

Dark Protectress

“Tamsin, Tamsin! Freckle-nose, Tamsin!”

The singsong noise of the children swirled and scattered through the house yard. Frequently it boiled over into the muddy lane adjoining the huddled stone cottages of the hamlet. The noise of the urchins rose and dwindled with their pell-mell scamper as they played in turn at being warriors, animals, or nobles. Only intermittently did they swarm at the back of the cottage and bedevil the young girl who sat alone on the kitchen stoop, quietly grooming her doll.

“Tamsin, head of flax! Get the ax, Tamsin!”

In truth, the little child was fairer-coloured than the rest, coming as she did from a family only remotely related to the village folk—a proud, standoffish family who had insisted on staking out a croft in the distant woods, to their sorrow. The children, mistrustful of outsiders and quick to seize on any visible difference, made common cause against this stranger who intruded on their sleeping space and supper table.

“Don’t you mind their teasing, Ninga,” the little girl comforted her doll, ignoring the unruly stampede. “Your hair is the same colour as mine—I know, because it is mine! Papa saved some and used it when he made you. I think you are splendid, no matter what they say.”

“Why do you always play with that stupid doll?” a brisk, boyish voice intruded. “You act as if you’re talking to it, but you never really make any sound!”

The wave of children had changed direction and rushed back to the doorway, with nut-brown Arl leading the pack in his ragged, oversized shirt.

“Why don’t you answer when I ask you things?” he demanded. “You used to talk when your parents were alive. What’s the matter, have you forgotten how?”

To a chorus of laughter, small Ulva piped up: “Look at that doll, it’s so ugly! See, its head is falling off!”

“The awful thing!” another girl-voice chimed in. “We ought to throw it in the well!”

A small, mischievous boy, creeping from behind Arl, made as if to snatch the object from Tamsin; but her quick clutch of the doll to her bosom, combined with the look of utter terror on her face, made him veer away.

“A plague on you urchins,” a strident, brassy voice overruled them all. “Must you do your prating and screeching here by the kitchen? Off with you! I won’t have you cluttering up my dooryard.” Quick sweeps of a broom sent dust and grit pelting at them from the threshold, scattering the mob—all except Tamsin, who remained hunched on the stoop.

The broom-wielder was great old Gurda in her soiled, greasy bonnet and apron, her face as seamed and puffy as one of her overcooked turnip pies. In the fleeing children’s wake, she stood muttering distractedly. “Enough it is that I must feed you, boil your foul laundry, and cater to your mother’s idle vanity,” she declared. “I will not be your wet nurse too!” Indignantly she turned back toward the kitchen.

“As for you, young missy...” The clumping slattern abruptly paused, looming over Tamsin. “You hold no privileged place in this household—what, you rascal, have you been into my rag bin, stealing brightly coloured scraps for that hideous doll of yours? Take care, my girl, or you will have your fingers seared as a thief!” The beldame made a perfunctory snatch at the doll, though her middle was too thick to allow her to bend over far enough.

“All right, then,” she declared at last to the crouching child. “If these whelps will have no part of you, why then, you can be my playmate. Go find an old shingle and scrape the ashes out of yon fire grate—” she pointed to a scorched heap in the middle of the yard “—so that when I render down the pork guts this noon, the fire will flare up crisp and bright. Off to work now,” she goaded, aiming raps with her knotty broom handle at the door jamb near the child’s head. “You can begin earning your keep around here!”

Later that morning, Tamsin huddled behind the tanning shed, dressing and primping her doll. Using a bone needle she had taken from the dry chest, and purple threads laboriously unravelled from a berry-stained fabric remnant, she attached a collar and sleeves to a small, crude shirt she had already fashioned from the same cloth. It did not occur to her, perhaps, to remove the garment from the doll; as she worked, the figure sat bobbing in her lap like a real, gnomish creature whom she mentally addressed in her silent, crooning way.

“There now, Ninga, you will have no more chilly drafts on your neck. And your sleeves are elegant! When I am finished, you will have the finest suit of clothes in the village. Only the best for Ninga, my one true friend!”

The pinkish-grey gourd that formed the doll’s head had dried rock-hard; as it lolled, the loose seeds within rattled and shivered with a sound almost like a whispered rejoinder. Its shape was bulbous and somewhat tapering for a human head, it was true—but the inked scratchings that sketched in the eyes, nose, and mouth gave it a convincingly sombre and only slightly fish-eyed expression, while its rag body was stuffed and seamed so as to dangle realistically where it sat, like a slack human form.

“So, little missy, this is how you repay the kindness of your cousin’s household!” From around the comer of the shed, old Gurda was suddenly upon Tamsin, striking and swatting at her with the rough, bristling end of her broom. “For shame, ingrate! Instead of doing the one simple chore I ask of you, you sit here playing and idling the hours away!”

Tamsin bolted, but the housekeeper planted a heavy-clogged, wooden-soled foot on the hem of the girl’s out-sized dress, pinning her to the spot as she tugged and struggled to escape. Switching her grip on the broom, Gurda belaboured her victim’s head and scrawny back with its knotty handle, striking hard enough to produce audible thwacks. “Believe it, missy, that hearth will be well-cleaned by you—if not today, then tomorrow or the day after!”