Conan the Savage (5 page)

By a desperate lunge, Tamsin managed to pull free and escape, running with her doll clutched to her chest. Gurda stumped a few paces after her, shaking her broom threateningly and hurling oaths. Then, muttering under her breath, she went back around the shed and returned to the task of stoking the fire under the great copper vat of steaming entrails.

Tamsin, meanwhile, ran around the side of the house. When she saw that she was not pursued, she crouched down beside the trunk of a great gnarled oak, breathing heavily, yet neither crying nor whimpering. Her pale-glazed blue eyes stared out unfocused over the farm fields... until a soft voice caught her attention.

“Got a beating, didn’t you?” It was young Arl; he asked the question almost shyly, keeping both hands out of sight behind his back. “I am sorry, really. Gurda is an old she-bear. My father would make it hard on her if she ever touched me! But I guess you have no one to protect you.” Slowly he moved nearer—walking alone, though the rest of the children stood behind him in a giggling row at the comer of the house.

“I shouldn’t have teased you before,” he told her with boyish earnestness. “I have something for you... to make it up. Here, look. It is a bracelet.”

Stopping a few paces from the crouching girl, he took out from behind his back something that glinted dully in the noon sun. The small band of scalloped and speckled beads turned and twisted, its baubles clicking together in his careful fingers.

“They are seashells, look—from the Vilayet Sea, far away from here. The small creatures that live in them die, and then they wash up on the beaches. But they contain the magic of the southern lands. If you have a bone chill, or the ague, they will cure it.” He thrust the bracelet toward the girl. “Here, Tamsin, take it. It’s for you.”

He held out the trinket toward her, patiently waiting. The young girl gazed on it with obvious fascination; she turned the face of her tightly clutched doll toward it as well, in an unthinking gesture.

At length she straightened from her crouch, careless of the nervous giggles of the waiting children... and yet she hesitated, watching the charm. Then at last she came forward and reached out, her fingers closing on the dangling beads.

“Now! Grab it!” His hand snaring hers in a taut grip, Arl lunged against her to seize her doll—but Tamsin twisted away from him, shrinking and cringing to escape his one-handed clutch.

“Get it, throw it in the well!” the rest of the children cried as they swarmed around Tamsin. They darted at her, trying to pluck the toy from her stubborn grip. At last the small, mischievous boy-child Asa succeeded. He hurled the flailing effigy overhead to Arl, who bore it toward the stone-curbed well.

“Aha, run, Arl! Keep it away from her!”

“Drown it, the ugly thing!”

“Maybe when we drop it in, she’ll finally talk to us!”

Tamsin, by some miracle of acceleration, darted across the hard-packed earth to converge with the older boy as he reached the well. Seeing the taut, silent determination in her lunge, he tossed the doll out of reach, back to the elfin boy.

“Now, throw it in!”

As he spoke, the gourd doll whirled overhead, to bounce with a hissing rattle off the angular wooden crane of the well. The agile lad leaped up and seized it in mid-air. At the same moment, Tamsin spun and launched herself at the boy, both hands extended to clutch the doll. She collided with Asa and knocked him over backward; an instant later, boy and doll disappeared from sight over the high curb of the well.

The children froze in their play. Mere instants later they were roused by raucous, frantic screams echoing from the mouth of the well.

Running to the curb, they found the boy-child caught a mere arm’s reach below the rim. Through luck, the heavy wooden bucket had been left in its raised position, and the rickety crane had jammed tight instead of unwinding. The boy’s arm, caught in the vessel’s metal strap, appeared broken. Yet he lived and still bellowed loudly. Promptly Arl and the other children hauled him out, trying to calm his moans and cries.

Tamsin, meanwhile, retrieved her doll, which had landed in the dry bucket. Plucking it out, disregarded by the others, she darted off around the house... only to run straight into the wet, smelly apron of Gurda, who was just leaving her fire to see what the tumult was about. “Here, now, my little hellion! What new mischief have you been stirring up? What happened, tell me—no, don’t try to pull away from me, or this gutting-fork will play a serenade on your hard little skull! Just what are you up to, missy? Get back here—no, ah, aieeee!”

Moments later, when others, came hurrying from house and yard, it was clear what must have happened. One of the cornerstones of the broad hearth, sustaining the weight of the great copper kettle, had split in two from the heat, allowing the vessel to topple and empty out its boiling contents. At the same time, one of Gurda’s wooden clogs must have turned under her, throwing her to the earth in the path of the foaming torrent.

The entire village was soon gathered round the cottage, puzzling over what might be done. It was exceedingly difficult to speak or think, they all agreed—because of the noise made by the scalded victim, who did not scream her last hoarse, agonized scream until late the following morning.

Amulf the Good returned home from the groat fields with a slow, weary step, slower and wearier than normal. Thoughts weighed heavy on his mind, thoughts far heavier than the weight of the soil-caked hoe propped over his bone-weary shoulder.

It was a hard thing running a farm, he told himself. There was the seed, the furrowing, and the planting—things that should never be done too late, or too early, for that matter—the rain, the crow-chasing, the weeding, the harvesting, the threshing and tithing and selling, and then the seed all over again! And it was all upon him. His elder son Arl was but a child; it would be years before he could lend a hand. Meanwhile, there was the question of farm helpers, of getting them but not giving them too much for their grudging labour. And on top of it all, the household.

The household was in its way the hardest thing of all. This new problem, now... it had been coming on for some time, ever since the death of old Gurda. For a month, two months, or more, it had been working its way into his awareness. But now it was time; he had to talk to the girl, had to tell her something. Things couldn’t be allowed to go on this way. He must talk to her; there was nothing else to be done about it.

Scuffing his dusty boots on the doorstep, he was careful not to knock the drying earth from his hoe as he set it inside the door. Keep the soil, that brought good luck. He grunted to the new housekeeper, Ina. She was a young, shy neighbour girl, too bashful to look at him, much less to reply. His boots shuffled on the bare dirt floor as he went to the sleeping closet and paid his respects to his ailing wife. Then, shutting the door behind him, he went into the Great Room.

There before a low-guttering fire were his children, the four of them, two boys and two girls. Three sat in a quiet circle on the hearth, playing jack-straws or some such game. The other girl, Tamsin, sat in the chimney comer, watching them but not taking part.

“Children, you must go outside now. No, not you, Tamsin. You can stay behind. But you others, go and find some new game. Go and play with the neighbour children—you never seem to do that any more. Ina will call when it is time for supper.”

The flock obeyed him wordlessly, banging the plank door shut after them. They were strangely subdued, he realized. Normally they would have been wild and restless, would have squirmed and protested at such an order, and crept hack in a dozen times to eavesdrop. He recalled the joyous, contentious uproar that used to greet him when he returned from the fields.

“Tamsin, stand here by the fire. I came home early today, before dusk, so that the other children could play outside and I could talk to you alone.” Seating himself on the rough-hewn chair that he favoured, the one draped with doe hide, he waited until the little girl came and stood silent before him.

“Tamsin, I have wanted to talk to you because... things have not been the same lately. Not as they once were, and not as they are in the other houses of the village. I know you never talk, but you seem to understand what we say. So I will tell you, and you can answer in words or by sign, as you wish.” He shook his rumpled head with the awkwardness of it all.

“It has been hard on everyone, I know. You, coming here after that awful thing...” Amulf’s timid soul hardly dared to mention the murder of Tamsin’s parents. “Pray the gods nothing like that will ever happen in this village!” He shook his head devoutly, humbly.

“And now, since that terrible affair with Gurda, Amalias rest her, things are even more changed. It has been very hard on my wife—your stepmother. She was never healthy, and now with all the kitchen work since Gurda died, it is much more to handle. Thank Amalias we have Ina. And that terrible screaming at the end...’’ He turned his gaze away from the patiently watching girl, casting a heavy sigh. “Since it happened, your stepmother has hardly come out of her bed, as you have seen. She is so unwell that we have had to treble her dose of lotus elixir on the instructions of old Urm the physician. That medicine is not cheap to come by in these parts, nor was the cost of his services to mend Asa’s bent arm easily met.”

Looking up again, encountering the mute girl’s gaze, he felt compelled to look back at the fire.

“Relating to that, there is the matter of the seashell bracelet. I know how you came by it. It was a foolish prank, and I see that it has made a fine necklace for your doll.” Looking up again, he nodded at the brightly clad effigy that rested in the crook of Tamsin’s arm, adorned with the beach shells and other odd trinkets. “But you know, it belonged to... belongs to... my wife. If ever she should miss it, I fear she would be greatly upset. So, if you could return it...’’He stopped short of extending his hand for the bauble. “I know you will... but enough of that for now.” He cleared his throat awkwardly.

“We took you in out of kindness, you know, because of family duty to my wife’s cousin. If the gods had not decided to strike your parents such a terrible blow...’’ He shook his head again, the anxious words clotting in his throat. “But they did, for whatever reason. There is no knowing, and certainly we would not hold it against you.” He sighed deeply. “It must have been a very hard thing for you. You have not spoken a word since that day, except for mumbling to your doll, which is the only thing you have left...” He shook his head again, his eyes roving furiously about the room.

“You must know, we all pity you so.” He managed to look at her at last. He extended one gritty hand for a vague pat on Tamsin’s shoulder, which she twisted away from.

“But you know,” he went on, “this silence of yours is not right. I don’t know why you persist in it, since it does no one any good. The neighbours do not like it—it makes rumours, and rumours can be a very hard thing in a small village like this.

“There are rumours about the doll, too.” He looked up again doggedly at her. “And you know, it could be that the doll and the silence are connected. It seems to me that something is very wrong here. With all the terrible things that have happened—and the doll, the silence, and the children—” he kept his gaze on hers “—a curse has fallen over this household. It is not right.

“So I think you should give me the doll,” he told her at last. “It is from before, a reminder of everything you have lost, which ought to be put behind you. Give it to me, and then maybe you can play and speak like a normal child.” He extended one open hand toward her. “I will not hurt it, do not fear. I will bury it in the fields where we put our offerings for the blessings of the gods. Give it to me, and everything will be right again.” He leaned forward in his seat to take the fetish from her grasp.

The child did not flinch away from him; she did not relinquish the doll, either. Instead, she grasped it in one hand, darting it to arm’s length and shaking it a mere hands-breadth from his face.

“Touch me not,” the voice came forth. To Amulf the Good, it seemed to issue from the doll, though in fact it may have been a combination of the hissing rattle of seeds in the leering gourd head and the cracked, rasping notes of the girl’s rusty voice.

“Profane me not,” the voice spoke on, “lest your bloody bones be laid in the fields as an offering for the blessings of your gods!”

Returning the doll to its place in the crook of her arm, little Tamsin looked calm and unshaken, as if waiting for a reply.

Her stepfather had fallen back into his chair, one hand visibly trembling. “I see,” Amulf the Good managed to choke out, sweating and pale-stricken. “As you wish.”

IV

Escape to Nowhere

Conan came to awareness in warm sun, on a beach of coarse sand lapped by wavelets of a talking, gurgling river. His nether limbs trailed in the tepid waters of a slow, shallow eddy, and he lay naked, divested of breech clout, treasure pouch, all.

Between the weight of the sun and the damp sand in which he lay, he felt both scorched and chilled, a discomfort that he sought to correct by turning over. His joints felt strained, bruised, and scuffed... but intact. As he tried out his stiff, abraded limbs and rolled himself to a sitting position, he noticed furrows behind him in the sandy bottom of the clear pond; there he must have staggered or crawled ashore. Hours ago, it felt like, though he had no recollection of it.

His surroundings were unfamiliar and primal, without sign of human presence. Immediately beside him was a tangle of driftwood, baric, and other flotsam lodged by some recent flood in the bare, undercut roots of a tall evergreen. Beyond this, atop the chest-high embankment, stretched a slope of scattered trees and brushy undergrowth. Before him, the rocky river cut through forest, bare stone ridges, and patches of coarse meadowland some way upstream. Where he sat, the course of the stream levelled and pooled to a middling-sized river, too deep to be forded easily, and broad and swift enough to carry a weakened swimmer far downstream.