Conan the Marauder (4 page)

Any time a higher chief visited her current master, Lakhme contrived to display herself to him. No Hyrkanian would surrender his woman to another, no matter what his rank, so inevitably there was a fight and Lakhme would follow her new master, always looking for the next.

By the end of her third year on the steppe, Lakhme was in the tent of Kuchlug, the chieftain of a great horde. This was a bitter time for her because there was no greater chief around than Kuchlug, and he was a brainless brute who would never amount to more than the savage leader of other savages. Then, one day, Bartatua called on Kuchlug.

Bartatua was the chief of a minor horde, the Ashkuz. She knew his story, knew of how as a boy he had become chief upon the death of his father and had gathered all the scattered families and clans of the Ashkuz into a unified army. By diplomacy, persuasion and force, he had caused several other small hordes to join his host. The moment she saw the still-young, auburn-haired lord of the Ashkuz, she knew that this was a man of power and destiny.

He would be her most brazen conquest of all. Through a long evening she listened as Bartatua tried to persuade Kuchlug to join his alliance and form a super-horde against which nothing could stand. Arrogantly Kuchlug laughed and cursed the younger man as an upstart. Condescendingly he said that he himself would assume leadership of such a horde and that Bartatua could take the position of sub-commander, after Kuchlug had given the best commands to his sons and nephews. In a rage, Bartatua stormed from the tent.

Lakhme found out where Bartatua would take his horses to water in the morning and was there when he arrived. The Hyrkanians bathed only in sweat lodges and had a taboo against polluting running water. Vendhyans had no such rule, and when Bartatua reached the stream, he was thunderstruck to see Lakhme knee-deep in the water, dressed only in her streaming black hair. Feigning surprise and embarrassment, she managed to gasp out her name and to whom she belonged.

That night the dispute between Kuchlug and Bartatua broke into violence. As a gesture of goodwill, Bartatua had arrived unarmed. In the midst of a roaring tirade, Kuchlug seized a sword from the tent wall and pursued the younger man outside, where Bartatua turned at bay.

The men of Bartatua were greatly outnumbered by Kuchlug's, but no Hyrkanian would interfere in a mortal combat between chiefs. After letting Kuchlug slash at him long enough to convince all witnesses that the older man was in no way incapacitated, Bartatua wrested the sword from him and broke his neck bare-handed.

All could see that the fight had been fair, and a council of Kuchlug's sub-chiefs agreed to the overlord-ship of Bartatua. Kuchlug's closest kinsmen fled while they still had their lives. Most important, Lakhme had the man she had dreamed of. He was ruthless and boundlessly ambitious. Best of all, he was intelligent enough to listen to good advice, even from his concubine. Within a year she was guiding him in nearly every aspect of his plan of conquest. And she had lied to Khondemir about Bartatua's feelings toward her. The chieftain of the Ashkuz loved her beyond all reason.

III

The little band led by Boria rode into the huge camp on the afternoon of the fifth day following Conan's capture. The Cimmerian was tightly bound, but at least he was riding instead of running. His arms were bound close to his sides and his ankles were tied together beneath his horse's belly. Torgut wanted him slain, but Boria refused to kill a valuable slave and Torgut was still in too much pain to wreak any harm by himself.

With his arm in a sling and his sides lashed with sticks and thongs to keep his broken ribs in place, Torgut looked poisonously at Conan. "This is where your soft treatment stops, ape," he hissed, wincing at the pain the words drew from his flanks.

Conan surveyed the camp. It stretched along a small stream for many leagues and was roughly divided into upstream and downstream halves. Upstream were the odd, humped tents of the Hyrkanians. Downstream were huge pens of horses and other livestock. He noted that the sheep and cattle were few, only enough to feed the camp. The real herds would be in summer pasture, tended by the women and boys. This was a war camp. As they rode in, they passed men shooting at incredibly distant targets. Some shot dismounted, but most shot from horseback. The most skilful shot at a full gallop, and some actually shot backward over the horse's rump while riding away from the target. Conan began to have second thoughts about his boast that he could master Hyrkanian archery within a month.

The Cimmerian knew little about the dress and accoutrements of the Hyrkanian tribes, but he could see that many diverse peoples were gathered within the camp. Tribesmen whose clothing was predominantly Khitan, Vendhyan, Turanian or Iranistani obviously rode the borders of those nations. These nomads could make little for themselves, and only the thickly padded clothing of leather, felt and furs that they wore in winter was of native make. Woven cloth, most of the metal-work, even the bows and saddles, were made in the cities and villages bordering the steppes.

The western peoples tended to lighter complexions, fairer hair and blue eyes, and they favoured heavy and elaborate tattooing of their skin. The eastern tribes were more squat of build, with flat features, tilted eyes and thin beards. All had the bandy legs formed by a lifetime in the saddle. The Hyrkanians admired strength, but unlike other peoples, they did not prize height. They held that a man on horseback was as a giant to any man on foot, however tall he might be.

Boria halted to ask questions of several warriors, and they pointed upstream. Riding on, they eventually came to a pit that had been excavated near the centre of the camp of tents. The enclosure was perhaps twenty feet deep, with sheer sides and only a narrow ramp for access. Guards with strung bows paced their horses along its rim and conversed in bored tones. The floor of the pit was filled with men.

Boria turned Conan over to a scarred warrior who stood next to a Khitan scribe. The Khitan sat behind a folding desk, with brushes, blocks of dry ink, and paper rolls before him.

"Be careful of this one," Boria warned. "He is a fire-eater, for a village man."

The warrior looked Conan over contemptuously. "This place takes the fire out of the toughest prisoner." He glanced at the elaborate bindings that held the Cimmerian. "He must be tough. You've used three slaves' worth of rope on him."

Carefully Boria and his men retrieved their ropes from the Cimmerian's body. The cords had bitten deep, and Conan stretched his limbs to revive his circulation. He looked at the miserable mass of humanity in the pit below, then turned to the warrior in charge.

"It's a waste of time putting me in there. Take me to Bartatua."

The warrior stared at him in amazement, then turned to Boria. "You should have told me that he is mad as well as vicious."

"You are the slave master," Boria said, grinning. "Do with him what you will. But I advise you not to turn your back on him." Except for Torgut, they all laughed as they wheeled their horses and rode in search of their fellow tribesmen.

The slave master shook his head, frowning. "Those westerners are all crazy." He turned to Conan. "Tell the scribe your name and nation, slave."

"I am Conan of Cimmeria."

The shaven-headed Khitan picked up a brush, wet it and swirled it on a block of red ink. "Your name is a mere sound that I have no way in which to write, and I

have never heard of your nation." With a few quick, deft strokes, the Khitan sketched two complicated characters.

"What do they mean?" Conan asked.

"They say 'big, black-haired foreigner' in my language. Slaves who have so little time to live have no need of names in any case."

"Into the pit with you, slave," ordered the slave-master, rapping Conan on the arm with a coiled whip. The Cimmerian turned and glared, and the slave master backed off a step, his hand going to his sword hilt. Conan considered killing him. Horses abounded everywhere, and it would be but the work of a moment to seize the man's sword, cut him down, leap on a horse and ride away.

Had he been dealing with any other nation, he would have done exactly that. Here it would be futile. Such archers as these would riddle him with arrows before he reached the edge of the camp. And probably without damaging the horse, he thought as he turned and walked to the ramp.

Conan had been in slave pens before, and he knew what he would find when he reached the bottom. As he stepped off the ramp, few faces even turned his way. They were so defeated, so fatalistic or apathetic, that they neither knew nor cared what went on around them. Most of them sat motionless or lay staring at the ground vacantly. Conan was filled with contempt. Had this slave pen, like many others he had seen, been filled with helpless women and children, he might have been moved to pity. But these slaves were healthy, able-bodied men. Hardy specimens who were not rebellious, or even angry, were beneath his notice.

There would be others, though. There always were wherever slaves or prisoners were herded in large numbers. Somewhere, in some corner, would be congregated those who still had a spark of spirit and were not more dead than alive. He scanned the huge pit until he saw the place where a number of men were standing, some of them pacing, many waving their arms in animated discussion or argument. Men who would argue yet retained some life in them.

There were perhaps a hundred men gathered in the shade of one of the walls. Heads swivelled to scan the newcomer as he approached, and Conan discerned the features of a dozen or more races. Some he recognized, most he did not.

"I am Conan, a Cimmerian by birth and a warrior by trade. Who among you knows why these dogs want so many prisoners?"

A huge, burly man came forward. His expression was truculent and contemptuous. Conan was familiar with this situation as well. Men in such degraded conditions became pack animals, like dogs. And as with dogs, a newcomer had to learn immediately who was top dog.

"What gives you the right to ask, foreigner?" the brute challenged. He wore rags of brown homespun, and Conan read him for an Iranistani serf who had run to the hills and turned bandit.

The Cimmerian placed his fists on his hips, leaned back and laughed for the first time in days. "Foreigner? I don't see a dozen men here of any one nation. Who here is not a foreigner?"

Like any other petty bully whose dominance is based on instilling awe and fear in those weaker than himself, the Iranistani could not bear to be laughed at. With an inarticulate howl, he reached for the Cimmerian with huge furry hands.

Conan stepped straight in between the reaching hands.

His left fist sank to the wrist in the other's capacious belly as his right looped over and down, smashing into the brute's jaw and dropping him like a steer under the slaughterer's hammer.

He stepped over the motionless body and spoke as if nothing had happened. "Now, some of you good fellows tell me why these half-horse Hyrkanians want so many slaves all of a sudden."

"We are not sure," said a Vendhyan, whose ears still bled where rings of gold and silver had been torn from their piercings. "There is talk that the dogs want to besiege a city and we are to do the digging and carry the ladders."

"Aye, that would make sense," Conan said. "Else why would they want only able-bodied men?''

Surely these nomads could have little use for huge slave gangs unless it were for purposes of war. Conan had been present at a number of sieges and he knew that there was much digging and carrying to be done, tasks that the lordly horse-archers would never deign to perform. There was also a great deal of dying. He had known only a few of the most-civilized armies to have regular sappers, those who worked beneath enemy defences and were protected by armour, shields and mantlets. Most often the work was performed by huge drafts of slaves or peasants, who were slain in droves as they toiled to undermine walls, push siege towers or carry scaling-ladders.

"There is little future in such work," Conan said. "Not one in a hundred of us would survive, and once they had no more use for us, the Hyrkanians would kill such as were left, to be spared having to feed them." Nods and growls of assent told him that he was not the first to have such thoughts.

"You have the truth of it," said a man who wore a Kozak scalp-lock. "The Hyrkanians have little use for slaves, and none for prisoners. Such slaves as they want, they take as children so that they can raise them properly. Comely women they will sometimes take for concubines. Grown men, especially if they are warriors, are simply slain. They do not want to rule over conquered peoples, but over great pastures."

Conan stroked his bristly chin. He had not been able to shave in many days. "This man Bartatua must be different. He wants to take a city, and it must be a great city if he needs so many slaves for the siege works. If he wanted only tribute, he would ride around the walls with his army and make his demands. But these are serious preparations. I suspect that he plans to move soon, within half a moon."

"Why do you say that?" asked the Vendhyan.

"I observed the land as I was brought here. They are running short of pasture. This is a great horde assembled, and there are at least five horses for every warrior. I will wager that the wealthy ones have twenty or more. The grass will not last and it has been a dry summer. They must march soon or the beasts will begin to deteriorate."

"You did not lie about being a warrior," said the Kozak He straightened from where he had been squatting, drawing designs in the dirt. "I am Rustuf, of the Dniri Kozaki." He held forth a gnarled, filthy hand and Conan took it. The man grinned, exposing a gap an inch wide between his front teeth. He retained a wide, nail-studded leather belt and the rags of a pair of baggy trousers, but his feet were bare.

"I have ridden with the Zaporoska," Conan said, "and have been a hetman among them."

"The Zaporoska are worthless dogs," Rustuf said,

"but any Kozak is a hundred times better than the lesser breeds of men."