Conan the Marauder (3 page)

The man wore the typical dress of the steppe nomad, although in the heat of summer he had stripped off all but his loose trousers and his high, soft boots. He was heavily armed, but only his dagger was belted directly upon him. Lance, bow and sword hung about his saddle. To a Hyrkanian, weapons borne on a mount were the same as those borne on the person.

The woman wore an all-enveloping garment that covered her from scalp to ankles, the black cloth pierced only by a pair of holes for the hands and a narrow slit for vision. The vision-slit was itself covered by a band of fine netting, so that nothing of the woman's face could be seen. Boots and gloves covered what little of her the cloak left exposed.

As they neared the city, they came into an area of pens and common pasture where the camels, horses and oxen of the visiting caravans were kept. Nearer the gates were the camp grounds occupied by those caravaneers who had arrived after the closing of the gates or by those who chose to sleep without the walls. Around the smoky fires were spoken a score of languages as men told tales in the cool of the evening, continuously switching their fly whisks against the night-flying insects.

The woman dismounted and handed her reins to Bajazet. "I will be back before the sun is up. Take the horses where they can find grass and water and be back here with them at first light. And stay sober." The

weakness of the steppe men for strong drink was legendary.

"As you command, my lady."

Bajazet led the beasts away and the woman began to make her way among the camp fires. The caravaneers paid her not the slightest attention. She might as well have been invisible. A veiled woman was another man's property and not to be acknowledged.

There were other women moving among the camp-fires, though, as well as boys and men who were plainly not from the caravans. The women were for the most part unveiled and engaged in selling a multitude of wares: food, wine, trinkets or, occasionally, themselves. There were fortune-tellers and letter-writers, musicians and mountebanks, all of them eager to provide weary caravaneers with goods and entertainment, as well as with a few items and services forbidden within the walls of the city.

The woman traced this colourful stream back to its source: a small, door-sized gate set into one of the great wooden gates of the city. Beneath a small lantern, a single guard leaned on a spear and passed through any who could show him a lead seal stamped with the mark of some magistrate's office. The veiled woman walked up to the guard as soon as there was no one else near him.

The man regarded her curiously. "May I help you, lady?" Surely only the woman of an important man would be veiled so heavily.

"I wish to enter the city," she said.

"Have you a license?"

The universal passport appeared in her gloved hand: a glint of gold in the light of the lantern. The guard looked about swiftly, assured himself that no one stood near. The gold disappeared into his belt and he jerked his head toward the city. The woman stepped through the gate and disappeared.

Khondemir stood upon his high balcony, studying the stars. On one of the marble rails rested a delicate, intricate device of brass and crystal. The mage peered silently through the artefact, his long, thin fingers making minute adjustments. Finally he straightened and crossed to a table where he dipped a quill in ink and noted upon fine parchment the exact day and hour when the carmine planet would enter the House of the Serpent.

Then a sound from below drew his attention and he looked over the railing and down into the street. He lived in an area of the most sumptuous homes, and it was rare that any walked abroad at night. In the light of the lanterns that hung from poles every twenty paces, he saw a black-swathed figure approaching the gate of his courtyard. He knew who it was by the confident stride and he returned to his study. At the tug of a bell pull, a servant appeared.

"There is a lady without the garden gate. Admit her and bring her hither immediately. Then fetch wine and refreshments." The servant bowed profoundly and left. A few minutes later there was a scratching at the door. "Enter."

The servant bowed the woman into the room and departed. The instant the door was closed, she grasped the hem of her cloak and pulled off the garment, shaking a wealth of rich black hair over her bare shoulders.

"I thought I would suffocate in this thing!" she said. "Greeting, Khondemir."

"Greeting, Lakhme," said the mage.

The woman thus addressed bore the features of the upper castes of northern Vendhya. Though small, her form had the voluptuousness of the temple sculptures of that land, and beneath the cloak she wore naught but a narrow silken loincloth and knee-length boots. Her beauty was dazzling, but most striking of all was the perfect ivory whiteness of her skin, protected from sun and wind every day of her life and kept soft with scented oils.

"I have little time," she said, stripping off her gloves. "The great horde of Bartatua shall set forth this season, before the turning of another moon."

"So I have already detected," said Khondemir portentously. "The stars have foretold it, as have certain spirits with whom I commune."

Her beautiful eyes cast him a look of weary cynicism. "You wizards always try to pretend that your powers give you knowledge of the future and of events far away. I would wager that your human spies are of far greater value to you. Else what use would you have for me?"

His thin lips turned up at their corners in the faintest of smiles. "Truly, my human agents are of a certain value, to confirm that which I already know, you understand. As for having another use for you..." He stepped forward and placed his arms around her.

She put a hand against his chest and looked up at him mockingly. "Did your wizardly mentors not tell you that indulging your carnal nature would seriously sap your magical powers?"

"They did," he said. "It was one of several matters in which they spoke foolishly." He released her as a discreet noise at the door announced the arrival of the servant. Lakhme stood behind the door as the man entered, set the tray on a low table and backed out.

The Vendhyan woman took the goblet of wine proffered by Khondemir and paced slowly about the room, admiring its furnishings. She was as unselfconscious in her near nudity as an infant. "It is good," she said, "to be among civilized things again. The Hyrkanians have no appreciation of the sensual pleasures of life save for a joy in good horses and bestial drunkenness." She ran her fingers across a casket of fragrant sandalwood inlaid with mammoth ivory.

"Some of them," Khondemir observed, "have a taste for beautiful women."

She shrugged her smooth shoulders, causing her alabaster breasts to quiver. "As mere battle trophies. Bartatua values me highly because he took me from Kuchlug, the greatest of his enemies. When his followers see me, they are reminded that the great Bartatua slew Kuchlug with his own hands and took his woman." She grasped a handful of embroidered drapery and drew it to her face, inhaling the scent of incense that clung to it. She began to rub the cloth languorously over her body. "You have no idea of what it is like to live in the squalid tents of those savages, to have to do without the simplest pleasures of life." She dropped the hanging and went to the tray, selecting a skewer of grilled meat rolled in herbs and wrapped in vine leaves.

Lakhme read the wizard's eyes and breathing far more accurately than he could read the stars. "Bartatua's first prize is to be Sogaria. It has wealth and a strategic position between east and west. There are no cities nearby to offer assistance, and the city is soft and fat. It has not known war in a generation."

With an effort of will, Khondemir dragged his thoughts away from her soft white body. "It has walls, and granaries full of grain. Even if he can unite the tribes, how will men who know only how to shoot from horseback lay siege to such a city?"

"He is a savage," she said, dropping the bare skewer and picking up a sugared date, "but he is not stupid. He has plans for that eventuality. And a siege of Sogaria

will be good practice for other conquests. He has a mind to be a conqueror of nations."

"Turan?" Khondemir asked.

"He wants to take Khitai first, before turning west." Her kohl-rimmed eyes studied his every expression.

"That army," Khondemir half-whispered, "will take Turan ere I am done with it."

She stepped close to him and traced with a fingernail the outline of a dragon embroidered on the breast of his robe. "But that is not Bartatua's plan," she said.

"You and I shall take care of Bartatua," said the wizard. Once more he sought to enfold her. This time she pushed him away forcefully.

"Not so soon, wizard! Bartatua killed my former master to possess me, and you must do the same. I'll be a conqueror's woman, but I yield to no lesser man. If you would have me, slay Bartatua and take control of Ms army."

Khondemir took a deep, shuddering breath. "You place a high value on yourself, woman. Be glad that you are of use to my plans." He was dizzy with a combination of rage and lust.

"I must be away," she said, gathering up her cloak and gloves. "Bartatua believes that I need these ten days to myself every six moons for certain religious rites. I must be back in his tent within five days or face questions I would rather not have to answer. Swiftly now, tell me what you would have me do."

As the lovely body disappeared beneath the cloak, the wizard found himself in better control of his thoughts. "To advance our aims, I must first gain mastery of Bartatua's mind and soul. For that, there is no aid more powerful than substances recently taken from his person. These things give my spirit servants a

kind of... focus, or route, by which they may invade his being and bend him to my will."

"What sort of substances?" she asked.

"Hair, nail parings, bits of flesh, and," he paused, "those things that a concubine is in the best position to gather."

"You shall have them," she said, as simply as if he had asked her to bring him produce from the market. "Now I must go. When we meet again, it shall be in the City of Mounds. Farewell." She swept out in a whisper of rustling cloth.

Khondemir poured himself another goblet of wine. He reflected upon what a dangerous woman this one would be should he keep her near him after his plans came to fruition. That could wait. Soon he would have her. More important, he would have control of Bartatua's horde and would lead it against King Yezdigerd of Turan. The thought of that sweet vengeance made all the risk worthwhile.

As she walked back through the quiet streets, Lakhme had far different thoughts than those entertained by the wizard. Always she marvelled at how easy men were to control and manipulate. If a woman had beauty, intelligence and ruthlessness, she could bend the most powerful man in the world to her will. How simple it was to convince a strong man that by winning her, he became a hero beyond compare! Even children were not so foolish.

From the day her starving parents had sold her to an itinerant trader, Lakhme had learned the arts of transforming her helplessness into power. As she had ripened from a skinny child into a beautiful woman, she had learned what the basis of her strength was to be. The trader had pampered her, providing her with the most expensive of beauty treatments and sending her to retired courtesans for lessons in the arts of pleasing men. She had been far more interested in the tales the courtesans told of the loose-tongued folly of wealthy and powerful men when they relaxed with skilled, compliant women.

The trader had dreamed of making his fortune from Lakhme. He would take her to one of the great cities and sell her into the harem of a fine lord perhaps even that of a king. When he had decided that the time was right and that she had reached the peak of her beauty and desirability, he bundled her into a curtained, camel-borne palanquin and set out on a caravan to the king's summer court in the beautiful northern vale of Kangra. Still scarcely more than a girl, Lakhme had quickly grown bored with sitting in the airless conveyance, subject to the camel's ever-swaying gait. One afternoon, hearing an untoward noise from outside, she had parted the curtain to see what was happening. She found herself staring into the face of the captain of the caravan's guard: a fierce Hyrkanian warrior. The man's narrow eyes had widened at the vision of loveliness within the palanquin.

That evening she had heard the sound of voices raised in argument. One of the voices was that of the trader, and it rose to an angry screech before it was cut off by the sound of a sickening blow. A moment later she was terrified when the curtain was jerked aside and the Hyrkanian stood framed in the opening. He was mounted, and a powerful arm around her waist hauled her from the palanquin and threw her over his saddle. As he galloped away, she saw the trader staring sightlessly at the sky, lying in a pool of his own blood.

She felt no sorrow at the death of the trader. She had been nothing to him except prime livestock, no better than a blooded horse. But through him she had learned a valuable lesson: Men would kill to possess her. The brute power of the Hyrkanian warrior did not impress her. What she wanted was a man who commanded thousands of such warriors.

Within the turning of a moon, the leader of a band of twenty nomads had slain her abductor and taken her for himself. She learned the language quickly and soon convinced him and her subsequent masters of how important it was that she preserve her beauty from the ravages of the sun and wind of the steppes. Wives and older concubines found themselves evicted to provide her with the finest of tents. In this way she earned hatred, but never for long. Among the arts she had learned from the courtesans was the brewing of potions to induce passion, sleep and death. When priests or learned men visited the camps, she conversed with them through a sheer curtain. Thus she learned how the powers of the world were distributed and the manner in which wars and royal marriages shifted borders and redistributed the influence of nations. But when the holy men and philosophers spoke of such things as compassion, pity or conscience, she dismissed all such irrelevancies from her mind.