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Authors: Leonard Carpenter

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BOOK: Conan the Savage
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Because it wound past hills, stone outcrops, sandbars and cascades, with its upstream reach curving sharply in Conan’s sight, it was difficult to say in what map direction this river flowed. Judging by the height of the sun and the angle of Conan’s shadow on the sand, the time was noon, more or less, and the trend of the channel at his feet was southward. That told him little of his relationship to the Kezankians or any other mountains, since the general course of most waterways in this part of the world should likely be toward east or west. Furthermore, there were no high peaks in sight whose snows might give birth to this freshet.

Crouching on the sand, after peering around him for beasts or lurking enemies, the Cimmerian dipped his face into the water, filled his parched mouth with its delicious coolth, and splashed water over his gritty head and chest. Shaking his wet mane and bending forward once again, he tasted. Did the water bear the chill astringency of the Hyperborean snows? The peaty redolence of tundra land, or the sulphur taint of the Kezankian Mountain springs? He could not say; the cool drafts were pristine, tasteless... as, come to think of it, had been the waters of the Brythunian quarry pit’s underground stream.

Where in the world was he, then? How far had he been carried, and from what mysterious source? If the mine’s location had not been such a hoarded secret, it would have been an easy guess—or a likely probability, at least—to surmise his whereabouts, since Conan’s knowledge of the Hyborian map-scape was the equal of any man’s, and a good deal more first-hand than most.

Yet his former slave-masters—by drugging him and carting him to an unknown quarter of their vast empire, and by keeping him there in cloistered ignorance—had posed for him an imponderable riddle. If, say, he should follow this watercourse downstream, would it lead him straight to the stately Danibos River that watered lush Sargossa, the Brythunian capital? Or would the stream dwindle and die somewhere in the trackless Zamoran desert, a hundred leagues short of Shadizar’s palmed oases? Or mayhap, would it lead him on a thousand-day trek eastward to the salty shallows of the northern Vilayet Sea? Or to Corinthia? There was no knowing.

To attack the problem another way... how far could he have been carried downstream? The river was swift, yes, as was the underground flume that must have fed him into it, but how long could he have been dragged down its rocky course before collapsing here in the sand? Not for an entire day, certainly; it had been late morning, after all, when he set forth on his desperate escape from the slave pit. Could he be very far now from the site of his former imprisonment?

As he crouched in the warm sun, his eyes came to rest on a wooden snag floating half-lodged against the sand! in front of him. More than man-sized it was, a thick tree of red-barked pine with a few stubs of branches still projecting. It was darkly damp all around, he saw; its expo surfaces were still drying in the day’s heat.

Did he not have some memory of clinging to those worn, blunt limbs amidst a watery chaos, after having been in a timeless, sightless rush through echoing subterranean gulfs? Was there not a faint recollection in his mind of clutching for the snag and clinging to it in a mad grasp at survival? Thoughtfully he probed a sore spot on his chest, a chafed bruise that may have matched the contours of th same log. Abruptly then he shook his black-maned head, more to banish the memory than to recapture it. If indeed, he had entangled himself in that jagged float, why then, h could have floated downstream for hours, even through a whole day and night.

For the moment, anyway, more pressing matters loomed He arose to his feet, hunger drawing into a sudden, insistent knot in his belly. As he straightened, he maintained a cautious watch around him, but the only untoward noise was the flap and whir of a startled peafowl, its flight curving away across the water. At this, his empty stomach twinged him; had he but known before of the bird’s nearness... He began to watch his surroundings more carefully.

All around him the day stretched still and warm, its passing seconds counted by the buzz of insects, the easy banter of falling water, the twitter of songbirds. Further along, the stream-side showed signs of other life: bird tracks, snake and turtle furrowings, and the lobed hoof-prints of antelope or goat. This latter sight gladdened Conan’s heart; yet he knew that where wild game abounded, flesh-eaters might also lurk. He was not equipped to deal with such, at least not yet; without steel, he was truly naked. He judged it unsafe to linger near the steep bank.

Wading into the shallows, he chose a place where a boulder diverted a clear channel of water against a broad, weedy sandbar. This stream had fish aplenty. Even as he watched, he saw a blue fisher-bird dart down near the far bank and pluck a gleaming titbit out of the water. Nearer at hand, almost underfoot, he could discern dim shapes hovering and flitting against the pale sand.

Crouching waist-deep in the lazy current and choosing his place carefully, he extended one hand palm-up beneath the water’s surface. Getting used to the river’s chill, he let his feet settle into the soft bottom; then, gently, he began waving the fingers of his poised hand in a slow, undulating motion.

The fish, he knew, liked to idle facing upstream, twitching their fins only occasionally as the water flowed past their gills. He watched them—or rather, their darker shadows on the bottom—keeping stock-still himself to let them forget his presence.

In a matter of moments, there came a response. A silver-blue trout, full and supple, swam up out of the shadows and positioned itself over his hand, enjoying the tickling currents his fingers directed upward at its belly.

After a brief, lulling moment, Conan moved. His arm arched strongly upward, its splash trailing a curve of sparkling drops in the sunlight. At its apex, the trout twisted and writhed, to fall flopping on the sandbar.

In mere heartbeats, Conan was upon it, seizing its thrashing, wriggling form in two hands. He raised it to his mouth, teeth poised, then thought better of it and groped around him to find a stone. He took time to smash the creature’s feeble brain and end its suffering before tearing into its scaly back and devouring the raw, succulent flesh.

Though sizeable, the fish only whetted Conan’s appetite. Returning to his place in die stream, he waited patiently, interminably. No more fish came to his beck.

At length he sought out another spot, where, in the course of the afternoon, he enticed two more fish, the first and larger of which wriggled out of his too-eager grasp. When he finally finished wolfing down the second trout, he was cramped and shivering, his teeth a-chatter in th descending afternoon shadows.

Swamp onions grew in a muddy place near the side of the stream. Conan dug some of them out and, to warm himself, sat gnawing them in the cleft of a southwest-facing rock, partly in shadow but retaining plenty of heat from the day’s sun. Now that evening was nigh, he cursed himself and all the gods for having let his food quest become so miserably lengthy after his initial good luck. He had no way to make a fire with which to warm himself and fend off predators, and the approaching night would be the prowlers’ best stalking time.

Creeping downriver—wading, or traversing bare rock, where possible, to lessen his spoor—he at last found a crevice that looked defensible amid dry, jumbled boulders. It opened out through a man-sized notch at one end; jumbled rocks barred the other, and a steep cliff loomed above Tall firs stood nearby; their fronds, stretching overhead would keep out the dew. Any hunting creature that tried to approach him within the confines of the crevice would face a cornered and dangerous foe.

He tore pungent boughs from a nearby cypress shrub and spread them on the ground for a bed. Then he laid in a good supply of rocks for throwing and obtained from the riverbank a knotted club of dry, hard driftwood that would serve to punish any attack at close quarters.

On his last trip down to the water, he heard a rattle on the far bank and peered across to see, in the deepening gloom, a young stag emerging from the brush to take a drink. Conan crouched, selected a fist-sized pebble from the shallows, and with a smooth, supple motion, sent it arcing through the air. But it was an unlikely shot; it only glanced off the stooping animal’s antlers. The elk wheeled, and some moments’ crashings in the brush signalled that it ran far away. He could have swum the river and pursued it, but he saw little use in hunting the dangerous animal, wet and unarmed as he was.

Returning to his lair, he curled onto his scratchy heap of fronds, half-closed his eyes, and in moments was asleep.

His slumber was deep, scarcely interrupted by brief, nervous alerts at night sounds heard over the murmur of the stream: the hoot and flap of an owl nesting nearby, the forlorn howling of wolves or wild dogs somewhere downriver, and from an even farther and loftier remove, the mating roar of panther or hill tiger. Conan’s wilderness training was such that he could register these noises, identify them, and dismiss them as harmless to him without even fully awakening—whereas a civilized man in the same situation would have been shocked awake, to wait out the night in sweating fear.

This night, however, it was smaller things—the river damp, the night chill, and the prickling creep of insects across Conan’s bare skin—that caused him to stir and thrash himself awake in darkness after the heaviness of his first sleep had passed. His stony den, he realized, was damp and unhealthy, colder than a Hyperborean tomb. Through the dank crevices formed by the tumbled rocks at its head there poured drafts as chill as the currents of the river in the canyon bottom. Weakened as he was by enslavement and near drowning, not to consider his more recent exposure, Conan had no wish to arise in the morning sluggish, stiff, and feeble from night-long shivering. It was difficult t summon thought, much less to move. Nevertheless, gathering himself into a crouch, he ransacked his numb brain for tricks of woodcraft. Then, taking up his club from beside him, he set his bare, half-numbed feet on the tumbled rocks and began climbing.

In mere moments, he was out into the open, where the light of a crescent moon dusted the cliffs and treetops with silver. Already the faint breeze that tingled across his shanks and back felt feather-dry and warm.

Finding footholds was easy with the aid of the moon’s stark light. Soon, following a crevice that angled up the fractured slope, Conan came to a shallow ledge screened by the boughs of one of the tall pines standing close underneath.

Here, instead of the dank drafts of the canyon floor, mild air from the sun-warmed slopes yet lingered and drifted. The aerie appeared safe and afforded adequate room.

Brushing aside the rocks and small, barbed pine cones, but conserving the softer, decaying needles that carpeted the ledge, Conan curled himself behind the screening boughs and returned to sleep.

Morning brought a warming dazzle of sun, a twittering chorus of newly awakened birds, and an insistent pelting of pine cone teeth from a chipmunk breakfasting high overhead. Conan sat up and stretched, brushing embedded grit and tree needles from his scalp and hide. Edging into the warm, golden rays, he surveyed the dawn-shaded landscape visible from his perch.

The river here emerged from its broad canyon to continue roughly southward, as the station of the sun at his left showed. The land before him was gentler, rising toward low, rolling hills to the eastward; there lush meadowlands stretched between belts of dense-shadowed forest. The routes of tributary streams could be picked out as trails of dissipating vapour, along with the occasional pale gleam of sky on ponds and lakes. He saw no glimpse of any or habitation—ho smokes, ploughed fields, or other signs of settlement.

All the better, some part of Conan’s feral nature whispered to him. Survival should be possible here, perhaps even more congenial without the interference of civilization.

To the right, across the murmuring river, the land rose rocky and steep. Cliffs were in view, yet there were no

true mountains, none that could be identified with any prickings on the war maps and caravan maps he had seen. As he pondered this, one question rose uppermost in his mind: had he, then, crossed over the jagged barrier of the Kezankian Mountains? Had his captors, or the lightless torrents of the underground river, somehow borne him to the eastern watershed of those high, snow-crested peaks?

If not, then he was still in the Hyborian world as he envisioned it, albeit in some wild, untamed fringe of its charted and settled lands. But if so—if these streams and valleys before him ultimately spilled eastward—why then, they opened on fates stranger and more diverse than anything he had known in the past. It might be years, or even a lifetime, before he could make his way back to any place he had heretofore seen.

As he sat there on the cliff, basking like a lizard in the morning rays, the question began to fade in importance. Where had he been, after all, that he so longed to revisit? Where would he be welcomed, not hunted as a black sheep, a foreigner guilty of past nonconformities? The boon friends he had made in his wanderings were, most of them, as footloose as he. Had he not, during his few and turbulent years, oft-times started life afresh?—though hardly as naked and misplaced as he now was. But was there anything worthwhile in his past that carried over to this lean, desperate present?

Thinking of friends, his last sure memory was of Tjai, of his drowned face, thick-tongued and bulbous-eyed, floating in the ghost light of the skeleton garden. The grim fact of Tjai’s death was certain... and with the little toll man gone, why look back to his recent captivity at all? The mine was there somewhere, to be sure; he might forfeit his life seeking it, or suffer a worse fate once he found it. Why trouble over it at all, then? For some petty revenge or the promise of riches? In this new land of urgent necessities, he could neither sup revenge nor gnaw riches.

Nay, to mount any such project, or to find his way to any place scrawled on a mortal map, would require long, careful preparation. Greater adventures, he guessed, lay nearer at hand, and to face them, his mind must be clear.

BOOK: Conan the Savage
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