Conan the Savage (19 page)

Tamsin, for her part, addressed the goddess at her side. “Oh my, what a pretty crown... is it not, Ninga?” With girlish grace, she strode forward and stepped up onto the dais. Stooping there gracefully, she picked up the gemmed diadem and placed it, not upon her doll’s wizened brow, but upon her own fair, youthful one.

X

The Eater of Trees

Living among the Atupans, Conan soon forgot that he had known any other existence. He had always been footloose, a wanderer. So were these people, moving from site to site as dictated by season and the strayings of the game herds. Seldom had Conan lingered in any civilized country or outpost long enough to feel drawn back by homesickness. But now, making his way among the quirky, congenial personalities of Songa’s tribe, he felt that he was home again, once more enjoying the closeness of his youthful clan fellowships.

He was brought before the lodge fire of the Elder Council. That fire, a bed of glowing embers laid in the middle of a long house, was stoked with heady, aromatic herbs to enhance the council’s wisdom. Around it sat the elder hunters and storytellers of the tribe, who were regarded as wise.

Among them was Songa’s mother Nuna, who had been a tamed huntress in her youth.

These wise folk viewed Conan’s fitness and his scars with nods and grunts of approval. But when they questioned him, their laughter at his floundering answers was uproarious. He flushed at their ridicule, yet somehow bore it, perhaps because his Cimmerian fathers would have treated a stranger no better—or perhaps because Songa was there, laying pliant hands on his shoulders to calm him. He bore the interrogation stoically, agreeing to learn more about the Atupans’ sacred sky-demons, and of the animal spirits who had created the forest and earth.

Conan was drawn with his mate into other areas of the tribe’s life as well: the pranks and teasing rhymes of young camp girls not yet mated, who viewed Songa as a sister and who doted over her muscular man-catch with half-feigned covetousness and half-concealed fear; the pestering of the small children, who swarmed through the camp in shrill terror raids or, alternately, sat rapt and silent around some wizened oldster who droned a legend; the patient labour of mothers and aged men over flint work, hides, baskets, and pottery; and the continual weapon trials and rough housing games of the young hunters, both male and female, including some new wives recently stolen from neighbouring tribes.

The Atupans, in return, good-naturedly tolerated Conan’s foreign looks and his doting, proprietary interest in Songa. They watched the pair’s cuddling and skirmishings about the camp with frank interest—though Conan, perhaps accustomed to sturdier and more discreet Cimmerian timber lodges, or else spoiled by his years among civilized men, felt somewhat constrained against venting the full energy of his passion before a dozen prying eyes. Fortunately, his new kinsfolk. were tolerant; they smiled, uncomplaining, when he took his mate off on long hunting treks in the forest. From such trips they would return at dusk, weathered and weary but happy-looking, with only a few small fish or a brace of squirrels to show for their day-long exertions.

In each of the tribe’s interlinking worlds, Conan was able to win grudging acceptance, even respect. His native strength and keenness of perception allowed him to catch on quickly at most activities and discussions. In the course of it, he gained vital knowledge of local stones, earths, herbs, and animal varieties. In day-long hunts and wanderings about the countryside, the canny tribe folk showed him how and where to obtain salt, flint, pot-clay, pigments, hardwoods, barks, fibres, scores of game species, and hundreds of edible or medicinal plants. He learned new and ingenious snares, bird calls, hut- and fire-building techniques, and tactics useful in hunting and tracking. The more he learned, the more he was impressed by the richness and diversity of the Atupans’ life.

Just once, aware of a gap in his instruction, he asked about something that had troubled him now and again. What animal or demon was it, he wanted to know, that could snatch away a full-grown forest antelope, frenzied and alert in the heat of pursuit, without leaving behind spoor, carcass, or even the slightest track or sign?

Aklak, who led their small hunting band, grunted deeply where he sat cradling his spear in the shade of a split boulder, but made no answer. The others present, Songa and a pair of lean-limbed youngsters, Glubal and Jad, deferred to their hunt-leader with uneasy looks. Arising, Aklak turned and carefully scanned the broken forest fringe around them, meanwhile flaring his nostrils to sniff the air. At length he spoke.

“What you ask is forbidden.” His voice had in it a gruff edge of resignation. “Tb speak of it, or to try to name it, would only bring down the doom itself, swift and final. Nothing can be done. So say no more.”

Conan, having adapted to a simple existence among these straightforward people, had relearned the habit of simple obedience. So he shrugged and followed the others as they threaded their way, more cautiously now, among the rocks and trees of the rugged slope.

Their goal this morning, as his companions had hinted to him, was a special one. In the course of their walk so far, they had paused to take game birds and squirrels that could be slung from their belts. But they had bypassed larger antelope that, if slain, would have to be manhandled immediately back to camp and prepared as food, lest the carcass spoil or be stolen by scavengers. With the wealth of game in the valley, such chances for kills were hardly rare; even so, for a hunting band to let one pass meant that the other business at hand must be serious indeed.

Their route angled through shallow ravines and across low ridges that crouched as foothills to the taller, steeper crests rising to eastward. The forest was dense in places, mainly along the ridges and valley bottoms; in other places, jutting rocks and loose shale hindered the growth of trees. But in all parts, the way was rugged; the forests were choked with fallen limbs, trunks, and underbrush, while the stony outcrops rose abrupt and jagged. Fortunately, a faint but definite trace left by game and by previous human parties lay unobstructed in most places.

Maintaining the habitual silence and physical economy of trackers, the band proceeded at a swift, steady pace. In time, they found themselves skirting the edge of a broad talus slope that rose eastward toward the craggy palisades of a beetling cliff face—which evidently tended to crumble away and slather downhill, forming the shaley rubble at their feet. The debris lay in blocky, regular-shaped sections, heavy enough to scar or flatten those few trees rooted near it. To Conan’s eye, the six-sided basalt pieces looked suspiciously uniform, as if shaped by human tools... or by inhuman ones, considering the size and hardness of the chunks. He glanced up periodically at the darkly etched cliff face, half-expecting to discover in it the ports and battlements of a mountain fortress reared high by gods or devils.

Then, as the party rounded the rotting stump of a great tree that must have given way before some avalanche, Conan spied a monument that he knew could never have been hewn by raw nature.

It was the jagged cylinder of a tower—a narrow, windowless spire jutting tall out of the thicket near the base of the slope. It appeared to be fashioned of a paler, softer stone than the dark cliff, and banded with carvings of some kind; their patterns were visible under cables and sprays of flowering vines, which used the tower’s height to drag themselves beyond the forest shadows and overlook the sunny treetops.

“Crom!” On spying the structure, Conan murmured the foreign oath. An instant later, recognizing the thing as a hoary ruin most likely unrelated to the eerie geometry of the cliff, he felt less at peril. Looking to his companions, he found them unimpressed; they already knew of the tower’s presence, obviously, and were mainly interested in his reaction.

“Look and marvel, river-man!” Aklak said with a proprietary smile to his brother-in-law. “It is the great Stone Tree,” he explained further, “made by the squirrel-spirit Chukchee to store the nuts he stole from Twik the badger. In revenge, Twik burrowed underneath and dug out all the nuts. He made the cliffs tumble, too, and ordered Chukchee to live in the treetops forever. But he left the nut-tree standing as a reminder. And there are other things here, too. Come along, come closer.”

Wending their way through the damp, tangled logs and undergrowth, following a trail faint enough to prove that few men or animals ever visited the place, they approached the spire, which rose well above the treetops. The cliff rubble, overgrown by weedy tussocks, forest mould, and the knotted roots of bush and tree, covered any other ruins that might exist nearby. Indeed, Conan realized, it was difficult to tell how high the tower might truly stand, since one or more levels of its original height could easily lie underground, heaped over with rubble. Most likely the entrance, if it ever had one, was buried, since the rubble-choked, vine-knotted base did not reveal any means of ingress.

“Do you see this wall?” Aklak demanded as they came up to the base, gaining an almost clear view of the massive spire. “A hunter can scale it—any true, daring hunter of the Atupans.”

Looking up the monument’s side, Conan merely grunted. Though its height was impressive, he did not doubt his clan mate’s words. The seams and carved recesses in the stone, as well as the woody robustness of the vines, should make the task somewhat easier than climbing a tree of comparable height.

“Every hunter of the Atupan race has done so,” Aklak went on. “It is our test of fitness before the great animal-lords, who will decide if the candidate lives or dies.” Conan looked from his stepbrother to the two younger braves. Then he turned to Songa, who nodded and chin-waved to him in the affirmative. “I have done it,” she assured him. “My mother, too,” she gratuitously added.

Aklak resumed, “You must scale the tower, climb down inside, and bring out something you find there as proof. We will wait for you and carry home your bones if you fell.”

This time Conan did not even grunt. Laying down spear and ax and kicking off his sandals, he stepped forward across the stony forest litter to tug at one of the vines, testing its strength. For the ascent, he trusted his expert, mountain-honed climbing skills to stand him in good stead. Yet at the same time, he did not doubt that his companions had completed this test when they were mere children, as light and nimble as monkeys. His own full-grown warrior’s weight could only increase the risk of a vine pulling loose, or a ledge of rotten stone breaking away. Nevertheless, he set his foot on one of the sculptured reliefs and started upward.

Climbing briskly, stretching and groping for ledges and footholds, he felt no great worry about the tower itself toppling under him. If the weight of centuries and the mallet-blows of temperate seasons had not yet levelled it, his puny mortal bulk certainly would not. The stones felt massive and skilfully hewn under his grasp, their weathered joints resisting even the intrusion of his tensed fingertips; formed of some hard, pale rock, they clearly pre-dated the basalt tumbled down from the cliffs. In some places, the carved surface—even to his tentative, sweat-damp touch—retained its original smooth-streaked polish; yet this did not deceive him into believing it was not old. Something in the tower’s obdurate stubbornness—jutting up here between forest and cliff as it did, with no apparent relation to the present-day landscape or its inhabitants, except for the fanciful, childish tale Aklak had recounted—told him that the obelisk must be very old indeed.

Further, the style of its carvings brought to mind no Hyborian kingdom, current or ancient, that he had encountered in his civilized wanderings. At least not as far as he could discern eyeball-close, through screening lichen and vine fronds, with his face drawn back a couple of hand-spans at most from the carved surface.

The subject matter of the sculpture, even so, was surprisingly standard. The tower was evidently a victory monument, the panels near the bottom depicting massed armies and navies, flaming forts, and city walls under attack by rams and siege machines, much as might be seen engraved in the main gate or palace wall of any modem Hyborian capital. The images now seemed oddly discordant and even repellent to Conan, who had been living so recently and so intensely in the raw world of nature.

He wondered what his fellow Atupans might think of the carvings, if indeed their unschooled eyes could distinguish them at all. It might be that in all this civilized panoply of power and destruction, no single image would be recognizable to an innocent savage; the straight and sharp-angled lines of battlements and troop formations would lack any basis for recognition, certainly. The ships, engines, and contrivances of mass death would look hopelessly complex and purposeless, and the plumed, heavily armoured and often mounted warriors would seem like blind insects or monsters. Indeed, it was hard for Conan himself to tell surely from the carvings whether their subjects were men and horses, or what other, older faces might lie behind the cruel-slitted helms and ribbed carapaces of both soldier and steed.

As he climbed higher, far from the view of any ground-level spectators, the carvings changed to coarse abstractions. Coincidentally, as the vine ropes spread and thinned, Conan regarded the designs less critically as artworks and more so as hand grips and toeholds. The shouts of encouragement from his friends below grew thinner and fainter; he tried to glance down only with the merest edge of his vision to avert dizziness. Lit now by bright sunlight, and stirred by sky-breezes, the vine’s leaves and blossoms flapped in his face, bathing him in a wash of heady perfume.

Edging his way upward into a vertical pasture of yellow trumpet-flowers, he realized that he was surrounded by droning, hovering bees. Drunk on pollen, they did not seem prone to attack, though his bare skin jumped and crawled with anticipation of their stings. He continued, trying not to think of the prospect of climbing down later.

The view over forest tree-spires opened out, revealing no other ruins nearby; and not long afterward, the broken, angling rim of the tower lay in Conan’s reach. Establishing a triple purchase first, with two feet and one hand braced against outcrops, Conan raised his free hand up to the edge, then clapped on the other hand and pulled, preparing to haul himself up. But stone scraped dryly against stone, making a sickening noise as it began to pull loose.