Conan The Hero (7 page)

The captain and Jefar Sharif, nodding together and stepping back outside, regarded Conan solemnly. “Sergeant, here is our finding,” Murad announced at last. “Your punishment will be reflected in a harsher schedule of duties, beginning with a hill patrol tomorrow morning. That will benefit not only our beloved emperor but also, perhaps, your own unruly spirit.”

The sharif would not allow Murad the last word. “We would levy a harsher penalty on you, Sergeant, if we thought it could possibly satisfy the wrath of those you have offended by this ill-advised murder. But the Red Garrotes will seek vengeance regardless of our verdict. And I wager you’ll find their methods more discreet; learn from them if you can.”

“Jefar Sharif is right, Conan.” Murad nodded gravely from the porch. “We will issue a stern warning to the stranglers, but I cannot guarantee their obedience. Now go forth, give sober thought to the responsibilities of your command, and watch your back!”

With a nod and grunt of salute, Conan turned to exit the staff compound. The punishment had, indeed, been fiendishly cruel; at his side he felt his sword fist slowly unclenching. Passing the guard dozing at the gate, he slowed to take stock of those waiting outside.

There were loungers aplenty, ubiquitous idlers who guaranteed the fast spread of news through the fort. Gossip was the coin of the invading army, and betting was its commerce. As Conan watched, a pair of troopers detached themselves from fence-rails and strode off in opposite directions, doubtless to spread the word of his release. Others eyed him speculatively, whispering between themselves and probably setting stiff odds against his longevity. To Conan, the most welcome watcher proved to be Juma, who strode from beneath an awning, hailing him loudly and fearlessly before the watchers. In his enthusiasm, the black giant dragged along a couple of half-willing troopers to meet him.

“Conan! Well, Sergeant, how went the court-martial?” He relinquished one of his companions’ necks to clap Conan’s shoulder resoundingly. “If Sergeant is still your rank, after this affair?”

“Aye, it is.” Conan grinned back at him. “Extra duty and a few hill patrols, Murad has decreed. Nothing severe—at least not yet.”

“Sergeant, sir.” One of the troopers, a fresh-faced boy, interrupted them. “Will they really transfer you back to Aghrapur for punishment, as Sergeant Juma was telling us?”

Conan laughed resoundingly. “Nay, Hakim!—and do not spread that false rumor, lest half the garrison murder the other half in hope of suffering the same penalty!”

Their noisy gesticulating gathered a few more watchers to them, some even offering Conan guarded congratulations. But most seemed to shun him, aware that he now possessed dangerous enemies. And after a few moments of banter, the Cimmerian took his leave, drawing Juma along and promptly asking him about Sariya.

“I left her at the hut with Babrak, Conan. I came because there is surely more danger to you than to her. Now we must go back, so the child of Tarim can return to his camp duties.”

Together they headed for the main gate of the fort. Conan insisted on going by way of the mess tent, braving baleful stares and ironic whispers for the sake of openly advertising his freedom. They walked on to the main formation of troopers’ tents, stopping by the campfire of Conan’s detachment. Announcing the next morning’s patrol, he was greeted by anonymous groans and curses from beneath the bleaching canvas canopies. But it was not his practice to try to enforce morale. He and Juma passed on out the gate of the compound, heading for the unfortified village and the scatter of makeshift dwellings along the jungle’s fringe.

Two days of grumbling exertion by Conan’s and Juma’s troopers, aided and bullied by their sergeants’ burly arms, had raised a good-sized bungalow at the edge of the trees. Split hardwood timbers borrowed from the fort’s supply squared up its corners; the walls were lattices of bamboo and bough, interlaced with tough palm fronds. A frame of elbow-thick bamboo trunks formed a basis for the shaggy, palm-thatched roof. Sariya’s graceful fingers taught the resting troopers to weave mats of split bamboo for the floor; her simple jests and childish laughter even made them enjoy it.

While gathering bamboo in the jungle, the warriors scared up a wild pig. At cost of a deep gore to one man’s thigh, the raging sow was speared to provide a feast for the night of the hut’s completion. The wounded soldier, doctored and pampered by Sariya, lived to share the animal’s succulent flesh with the others; she made him eat its heart, so that its vengeful spirit would not haunt him and sicken his wound. Now the grimacing, razor-tusked skull bleached atop the roof-peak of the bungalow, warding off ghosts and other evils.

Beneath its protection, they found Babrak studying one of his many scrolls of Tarim’s teachings. As Conan and Juma approached from the fort road, they could see him lounging in the shade of the open porch, which was already more lived in than either of the hut’s two rooms. Sariya, wrapped in a length of blue cloth from the village market, knelt over a smoking fire in the middle of the yard. She arose to greet her protectors with eager embraces. Upon Conan she lavished kisses, but no questions.

“You walk proudly, and I see no stripes of the lash. Well enough, then!” Babrak, leaving the porch, pressed up beside Sariya to administer a stiff, formal embrace to Conan, though his field-green turban barely brushed the taller man’s chin. “You have weathered your court-martial well, by grace of the One God.”

“And by sufferance of them all, it would seem.” Conan returned his friend’s clasp wholeheartedly, making Babrak grunt. “My officers have resolved to leave my punishment to the Red Garrotes.”

“Fear not, Conan,” Babrak told him. “If need be, I will stand with you against a whole regiment of those assassins! Tarim teaches us to protect the righteous.”

“I do not ask it. I can protect myself.” Conan moved with them into the shade of the porch. “But if aught happens to me, I leave it to you, my friends, to care for Sariya. She has no family and no other home than this, so she tells me.”

“Is that so, lass?” Juma asked, showing frank concern. “What of your tribe and your clan?”

“I have none.” The maid seated herself beside the hut’s bamboo door, doubling her trim knees on the rough matting before her. “Since earliest memory, I have been raised in jungle camps of Mojurna’s devotees. Mere months ago I learned, to my horror, that I was destined for sacrifice.” She told the story with affecting frankness. “Now that I have escaped my ordained fate, my old teachers and sister acolytes would only mock or revile me.”

“Even so,” Conan said, “‘tis a good thing you were spared.” He settled down beside her, his bandaged hand finding its way around her waist.

“Oh, yes, Conan! It is far better to live!” She twined against him, pressing a kiss on the side of his neck. “I have seen so little of life! There is much more I want to see, much good that I can do.” She fell silent abruptly, glancing at the fire; then she arose and left the porch, kneeling to tend the covered copper and clay pots steaming on smokeless coals.

“A fine girl,” Juma said, gazing after her with the others.

“Truly, she must have put an enchantment on me,” Conan whispered earnestly. “Already she has emptied my purse, and I do not even mind! The trifles she buys for the hut are of use, or at least pretty. She has a way of making life comfortable.”

“Aye, yours is a house blest by heaven, I can see.” Babrak arose from his cross-legged crouch. “But forgive me, I must return to my duty. The half-bell struck long since, and I dare not be late for drill. I leave you to your repast.” He turned away, smiling. “I trust you will enjoy it, or at least pretend to your woman that you do.” With a passing farewell to Sariya, he left the yard.

Conan, reaching for an earthen decanter and sloshing it to gauge its reserve of date wine, raised it to his lips and swigged deeply of the syrupy liquid. “We are lucky Babrak sought us out,” he said, passing the flask to Juma. “I wonder what he sees in us.”

“Who can say? Perhaps that we accept his faith, yet do not proclaim it hollowly ourselves. He is a good man.” Juma drank, then handed the decanter back to Conan. “Too good a man for Venjipur.”

By the time Sariya called out that the meal was ready, the buzzing of the forest insects seemed distinctly louder in the men’s ears. The graded clay floor of the porch did not seem so level either; Conan reeled slightly as he arose to go to the fire. He burned his fingers carrying a hot kettle back to the house between dry palm fans, but did not drop it or reveal his discomfort to the others. They set the pots on a thick mat in the hut’s front room, and Sariya opened them, releasing pungent steam clouds that rose like djinni of the eastern deserts.

“A fine feast!” Juma proclaimed. “Looks like something from my boyhood hearth in Kush.”

Even so, Conan thought the black warrior eyed the food a little dubiously. “Smells sweeter than the boiled mule-meat and groats they serve us in the fort,” he said heartily, himself kneeling down unsteadily at the mat. “What is it made of, girl?”

“The meat is marinated eel from the village market. Here are baked tsudu root and boiled swamp-thistle.”

Sariya plied a bamboo spoon as she spoke, scooping the viands onto fresh banyan leaves. “And stuffed, steamed locusts! Very fresh, I bought them alive this morning.”

“Mmm… unusual.” Conan accepted a dripping, burdened leaf from his smiling housemate and set it down gingerly in front of him, to be observed awhile from a distance. “Are these all native foods of Venjipur?”

“Yes, part of the bounty of Mother Jungle. And very good for you. The eel-meat gives you the strength of the eel, and the locusts are an aid to”—she blushed slightly, averting her eyes—“male vigor.”

“Well, then, I cannot pass them up,” Juma proclaimed good-naturedly. Accepting his own heaped banyan leaf and laying it on the mat before him, the Kushite reached into its midst to pluck forth one of the gray-green, bristling lumps. With a flash of eyes and teeth that bespoke either good humor or rash courage, he popped it into his mouth. “Mmm—umf.” A moment later, he was gulping steaming-hot tea from a clay cup. “Well-spiced, I will say, Sariya!” he coughed. “But tasty, girl, tasty.”

“A rare treat it is, doubtless.” Not to be outdone, Conan took up one of the pink-filled insects. He perused it just closely enough to see that the largest, toughest legs had been trimmed off. Then, shutting his eyes, he shoveled it into his mouth and chewed. The crunchy flesh reassuringly resembled Vilayet Sea shrimp, only sweeter; but the filling was peppery, seasoned with some jungle herb or hot radish. Tears sprang to his eyes as he swallowed the morsel half-chewed, rinsing his mouth with wine that only seemed to scorch his tongue the more.

Sariya, meanwhile, had commenced eating in a methodical way, daintily spooning up her food with a small bamboo scoop. Conan and Juma imitated her, finding the other dishes more palatable. The eel was tender and candy-sweet, the vegetables soft-cooked and mildly flavored. Conan even crunched more of his deviled locusts, squeezing out their hot stuffing first into an inconspicuous fold of his leaf-plate.

“Good, coarse, wholesome food,” was Juma’s comment. “Very like that of my home village on the seacoast of Kush, which I left so many years ago.”

“Aye. Wild food was what we ate in Cimmeria.” Conan sniffed the pungent fumes of his tea, sipping it tentatively. “Our Venji armies would be more mobile if they could live off the land and barter with the natives, instead of relying on unwieldy elephant trains for supplies.”

“True, the supply lines are vulnerable to attack.” Juma plucked a thistle-stem from between his teeth. “But just try, sometime, to make these northerners eat swamp-rice, the local mainstay—‘tis a hopeless task. Some spew it up or sicken on it; all revile it. I have no objection to it myself.” He scraped up mashed yellow root-pulp from his wrinkled plate and sucked it from his bamboo spoon. “The main trouble is, these desert folk do not belong here in Venjipur. Their horses grow sluggish and sickly in the heat, their steel blades rot with rust, and they themselves fall and rave every summer with the quaking chills.”

“Aye. And not only the weapons rust.” Conan sweetened his tea with wine before sipping more of it. “Men’s toes drop off from wet-rot and leprosy, even without a festering wound to poison them. An arrow-nick alone is enough to do for a man in this clime. Lucky am I that this scratch of mine heals so well.” He waved his poulticed hand before his companions. “This devil-blighted heat, rain, and mud sap a man’s strength as surely as the sucking flies do! By the time he has been here two seasons, a civilized northerner is dull and slow-witted, unable to feel a thumb-sized yellow ant gnawing his neck.”

“And what of you, Conan?” Juma asked him. “Will you still be hard and keen after two years of Venjipur?” The Kushite eyed him bemusedly. “What is your plan to preserve yourself from these dangers? A fast camel west to Iranistan?”

Conan laughed. “Nay, Juma, you and I will flourish here. Do you not see, the ills we have spoken of, each and every one, are equally our chances for betterment! The more amiss with this campaign, the more opportunity to advance oneself by setting it right.” He crumpled his near-empty leaf plate and tucked it into one of the scraped, gaping pots. “What is needed here are bold, clear-sighted officers not too bound up in Turanian imperial claptrap—men like ourselves to take hold of things, thrash out victories, and gain rank and fame by them. That is what a war like this is all about, is it not?”

“So… suppose it is?” Juma belched amply and stroked his full belly, all the while eyeing his host with the cool skepticism of a career officer. “What would you do to improve the running of the war?”

“What would I do? Why, many things!” Warming to his subject, Conan waved his cup airily beside his head, spattering tiny drops on his guest. “As we were just now saying, I would use local foods in the army mess to make our force self-sufficient. Get the best native cooks, like Sariya here—and local healers, to find out how the Hwongs avoid the ills that beset our troops. Change the uniforms, first of all, and the drill! What place do cavalry tactics have in swamp and jungle, I ask you?” The Cimmerian knit his broad brow in a nearly comic attitude of concentration. “We could create a force that would not only win the war, but stay on afterward to enforce the peace, and even enjoy doing it! But those changes would only be a small part—”