Conan the Savage (7 page)

So the feral northman, shucking his past like a spent lizard skin, climbed down from his ledge.

His morning spoor he buried, to avoid drawing predators to his track. Again he tried fishing, before the river surface was clear of early shadows, and his luck was good; in a short time, he tickled up two trout, one small and one large, and crouched to gnaw these without ceremony. He followed with a vegetable course of bulrush roots and crisp water weeds dredged from the river bottom. Most congenial of all, he ended the repast with ripe berries that he found in a prickly hedge above the bank.

As he foraged, he kept his eyes sharp for usable rocks in exposed cuts and pebble bars along the watercourse. Flint, or a speckled bluish stone reasonably near to it, he soon found; this made him doubly curse his lack of a knife. With a steel shank to strike sparks from, he could have had fire by nightfall, and with it, new possibilities of food, warmth, and protection. Without it... well, even so, there were more urgent matters at hand.

Kneeling atop a flat rock, he struck at the flint pebble with a hammer stone of tough granite. The dark, heavy stone fractured easily with the blows. Its freckled blue proved to be superficial, concealing a uniform, glossy-dark interior that flaked away in rippled crescents with each careful, glancing blow of his hammer. Where two of these flaked edges intersected, they formed a blade edge sharper than any steel; it could easily scrape callused skin fro Conan’s thumb tip, he found, though it was more brittle than civilized metal.

Conan worked his way carefully around the end of the stone, chipping with gradually less force, trying to recall the deft movements he had seen the village grandsires make in his boyhood—wizened men whose youth extended into Cimmerian old-time, before steel and the art of smithing had come north from Aquilonia. They had worked with effortless skill, he remembered; in a trice they could freshen the surface of a worn tool, or fashion an adze or ax bit that would hew through bone or heavy hide.

His own labours were slower and far more painstaking. In their course, the lopsided butt of the flint pebble slid against the base rock, causing Conan to nick his hand and, incidentally, to shear away almost half of the keen working surface of the hand-ax he was shaping. With muttered curses against all the gods, yet with surer, swifter motions than before, he dressed down the angular, inadvertent break.

Then he examined the tool, hefting it in one hand. Somewhat unwieldy, to be sure, and now more of an adze than an ax—still, it might serve. Using it as a weapon, he would have to strike true with the first blow; the bulky base would be hard to grasp once slimed with blood. He looks I wistfully at the driftwood club he kept beside him; yet without any thong or ligature, he had no way of attaching his razor-sharp stone to a serviceable haft.

He took up his ax and his club; also a thumb-sized, curved chip of flint that might later serve as a knife. With only his two hands, this was all he could carry, a limitation that he hoped soon to correct.

Stalking downriver on the more open, grassy side, he met a variety of game. A large-footed rabbit cropping herbs near the meadow’s edge let him draw near, his approach covered by the noise of the stream. His club, propelled by hunger, was already hurtling through the air when the rodent disappeared with a series of leaps, leaving only weed tufts and petals drifting in its wake. Further down the meadow, a blue-plumed peafowl was less fortunate; its plump body, knocked from the air and battered into oblivion by Conan’s club, furnished a raw, succulent lunch for the slayer.

His hunt, however, was far from over. Proceeding to the lower edge of the meadow where lay a broad, muddy river-ford, he found along the bank many tracks and spoor indicating a miscellany of game: antelope and mountain buffalo, wolf and foraging bear; the hair-tufted, bone-filled droppings of small predators, and the blunt-padded prints of mountain cats. All seemed to pass here, so Conan made his way through the open swiftly and with careful alertness.

Then, in the forest margin beyond the beach, he found what he sought: a trail of animal droppings, dark-greenish pebbles still soft and warm to the touch, and fragrant to his nostrils. These signalled, not many moments before, the passing of good-sized deer or elk. Scanning the branch-littered turf, Conan picked out faint marks and disturbances there, as well as the subtle trending of a game path that any large animal unaware of danger might use.

Filling his lungs with mild forest air, Conan set off in pursuit. He started at a jog, slow enough to read the forest markings in front of him, but with no particular effort at stealth. A healthy man, he knew, could outrun any deer, but only by dint of a sustained effort, conserving his strength and relying on superior endurance. The deer would outpace the man time and again, expecting to lose its pursuer in rugged terrain—but it would flee in short bursts, exhausting itself and pausing long enough to let a determined hunter overtake and frighten it again. Eventually it would tire and fall, or turn at bay; then the hunter’s courage and weaponry would face a test.

Meanwhile, Conan’s task was to stay on the scent, to watch for hazards, and above all, to keep from injuring his feet. Toughened as they were by roughshod travel and the jagged stone of the Brythunian quarry, they were yet vulnerable. The prospect of a barefoot chase headlong through branch-littered forest, rocky wilderness, bramble and slippery stream-course, posed a considerable risk. Every part of his mind that was not reviewing the broken twigs, crumpled blades, dark earth-turnings, and other signs of his quarry’s passage had to fix on where to place his feet and how best to negotiate the shrubs and fallen trunks that hindered his passage.

He heard his prey before he saw it. The deer must have sensed him as well, for the sudden cracking of twigs a thrashing of foliage in the forest glade ahead indicated sudden alarm. When Conan plunged through a stand of bush into the open, he found himself pursuing, not any visible animal, but a receding thrash of hooves and the twitching of foliage at the far side of the clearing. The scuff of the creature’s weight over roots and stems sounded reassuringly heavy.

He pressed on, keeping to the track. Some moments later, the beast paused to rest, looking backward as Conan ran into view. It was a fine four-point buck, broad and muscular in the neck and shoulders, standing framed between massive trees at the base of a forest slope. As the huntsman pelted forward, the prey started off again. It bolted up die hill, plunging with agile leaps through shallow undergrowth and over fallen logs. Conan, skirting the worst of the tangle and judging which way the animal would turn, followed as best he could.

At the hill’s rocky crest, he lost the trail. On a guess more than by any sign, he vaulted a gap between two stone hummocks and bounded down the far side. There, on the right, came the scrabble of cloven hooves over rock. He angled toward the sound, letting the downhill course speed him along. Then he had to slow and negotiate an expanse of jagged, broken scree.

At the bottom there was no clue. A broad, sunny glade spread before him, grass-tufted but without discernible track. The prey might have entered the trees at any point along the farther side; to search for traces would cost time, enabling his quarry to rest or lose itself. He scanned the bright, blinding forest edge in vain.

Then came sharp trillings. A pair of birds fluttered from the trees, scared up by his quarry, no doubt. Breaking into a run, he headed straight for the source.

When next the buck paused to rest, sweat dripped from Conan’s damp, tossing mane, streaming down his heaving chest and his long, unobstructed flanks. He was winded, his heart hurling itself at his ribs like a frantic prisoner trying to escape from a barred cage. But his quarry had weakened too. As it sprang yet again to flight, it caromed sideways against a sapling, and its leaps through the foliage were more deliberate and less tight-sprung than before.

To be sure, Conan had doubts about the eventual confrontation. The buck’s antlers were keen weapons. Its neck muscles were massive, not to mention its granite-honed hooves and goat-like teeth. He almost wished that his quarry were a less worthy one, or that he had somehow fashioned a spear with which to harry and cripple it before closing in for the kill. Yet he had downed such creatures in the past with little more than sword and hatchet; surely he could do the same now with a club, a hand-ax, and a far keener hunger.

The animal mounted a stone ridge just ahead; its hind legs faltered and scrabbled pathetically at the top of its lunge. Conan could smell its desperation now, the rank, musky scent of its fear. He almost flung his club at the creature’s slender shanks as he clambered up close behind, but was himself delayed by the steepness of the rock. He felt exultation overcoming fatigue as he hurled himself after the buck where it passed out of sight over the rise.

From just ahead came a crunching sound accompanied by a quick, bleating gasp. Something large passed, signalled by a stirring of foliage and a flurrying of scattered leaves. Conan thought he also sensed a faint tremor of the earth under his bare soles, as of some great weight shifting.

When he pelted into the open space at the crest, it was empty. There was no quarry, no sign of it at all—except, across the faint trail underfoot, a spattering of blood. Red and rich, it glistened from the grass blades and dark loam in sufficient quantity to tell him that he need not chase his prey any farther.

But where had it gone? Wary, scanning the broken slopes around him, he saw no more blood on the nearby rocks, and no scuffs or drag marks across the turf. Could the buck have been carried off by some huge bird, he wondered? If a predator, how far had it stalked the prey—and, presumably, him?

Or was this the work of man? Some tree-sprung snare perhaps, that whisked its victim far out of sight? No. Sorcery? Mayhap.

No prey, no marks, not even a scent... except for the faint, coppery tincture of blood. And, of course, the smell of his own runneling sweat, mingled now with a faint odour, rank and distinctive, that he soon recognized: the smell of fear—his own, wholly in keeping with the sudden change of his status from hunter to hunted.

Fear. It would not do to let any stalking creature smell that scent on him, and mark it, and remember- it. He scanned the tree line carefully, wondering if something lurking in the forest might have paused to watch. Then he turned and jogged resolutely back toward the stream, to bathe himself.

V

Divinations

It was in the fourth year of her stay in Sodgrum hamlet, at the farmstead of Amulf the Good, that the child Tamsin regained her speech. Most fittingly, it occurred on her Naming Day, a high holy observance of the Sargossan church. Likely it would have been considered a sacred boon of Amalias, chief god of the Brythunians, if things had worked out differently.

In the years following her parents’ death, Tamsin had grown taller and straighter, but not yet ripe in a womanly way. She was exempted from day-long labours in bam, kitchen, and farm field that the other village children inured themselves to; doubtless this exemption was because of the kindliness of her foster father. Further, she was hardly of a temperament to ride, hunt, or play childish games during her long, idle days.

Thus she was spared the callused, sunburnt skin of most rural maidens, as well as their shambling, clog-footed gait. In her twelfth year, the child Tamsin remained a slim, ascetic-seeming maid whose flaxen hair had darkened to the deep-auburn hue of clotted blood. She dressed most often in long, flower-painted robes and flimsy slippers handed down from her stepmother. The latter parent remained during all those years a nervous invalid who seldom touched her foot to the floor.

“That wife of Amulf’s is not truly ill, but drunk on lotus potions,” some of the villagers would whisper. “Aye, and the fool is too deathly afraid of that little slut Tamsin to give her chores,” others agreed. Yet even so, it was seen that those who spoke against Amulf’s household tended to be stricken by neck boils and stomach cramps, and so the whispering was stilled.

Inherited garments, and coarse ribbons for binding up her long hair, remained Tamsin’s only affectations. All other adornments that came her way were lavished on the doll she carried unfailingly at her side. Oft-times the quaint effigy would make its appearance draped in garlands of herb and thistle, strings of beads carved from stone, wood, and bone, and more costly ornaments borrowed from the dowry chest of her ailing stepmother. Though others in the village at first ridiculed the doll, experience taught them to regard it with acceptance and subtle fear.

Lucky it was for young Tamsin, residing in such a remote, uncultured district, that she was not of a stolid or idle disposition. In spite of her lack of speech, she took a lively interest in the world around her—in the growth and uses of plants, the lore of animals both domestic and wild, the origins and mystic significance of stars, seasons, and elements, and the devious will of the gods as expressed in the daily affairs of mortals.

The child’s dearth of words was more than made up by her increased powers of observation. Scarcely an hour passed when she could not be found standing at a window or a doorway, before the fire, or in the cool shadow of some forest oak, her blank-faced doll clutched at her side. Mutely she would observe the unfolding patterns of natural life or the coarser rhythms of human play and work, and solemnly eavesdrop on the conversations of her elders. In time, the village folk accepted the slim orphan’s watchful habits; they even welcomed her presence, largely for the sobering, intimidating effect it had on their unruly children.

Tamsin’s principal ally in her quest for knowledge was old Urm, the local physician and spell-caster who attended the community’s needs. From her first days in the hamlet, the child was drawn to him, watching as he ministered to Amulf’s wife and paying frequent visits to his thatched hut at the bottom of the town path. Faintly, for hours on end, he could be heard muttering to her his magic lore, cantrips, and mnemonic rhymes, until it seemed that she must have absorbed every bit of his supernatural knowledge. The two of them—or rather the three, if one counted the child’s doll—often seemed inseparable, brewing up strange-hued fires in old Urm’s oven, catching odd fish and insects from streams and swamp-holes, and ranging the countryside to gather potent earths, herbs, and bones for his spells.