Conan the Savage (25 page)

“I, too, will come with you,” Jad chimed in. “I have run too far to turn back now. Well, Aklak, what say you? Are you afraid your spear will miss again?”

Aklak frowned, contemplating. “No, I will come,” he declared with sudden resolution. “Let us put an end to this mystery.”

Conan, stalking ahead, reached the edge of the amphitheatre before the others. He looked out on a level shelf of stone with few bushes and trees, open to the sky. There his gaze settled on a harrowing sight.

A gigantic mountain cat—grey-speckled on silver, with hunched, massive shoulders that made it taller and broader than the elk itself—tore hungrily at the prey’s slack body, which it must have caught up in its monstrous jaws and dragged to this spot in a few mighty bounds of its pantherish frame. The bulbous feline head, with its tufted ears, arching eyebrow ridges, gory whiskers, and red-slavering, under-slung jaw, bristled with devilish menace. Every feature was vastly oversized, and all centred on a pair of fangs as long and evilly curved as the blades of Zamoran tulwars. The great animal used its huge feline teeth methodically, scissoring away slabs of glistening flesh from the elk’s haunches and spilling forth entrails in quivering heaps.

At Conan’s arrival, the cat scarcely glanced up from its butchery. Only a horripilation of coarse bristles along the hump of its spine and a slight shift in its feral crouch signalled its awareness of being observed. The creature was not likely to take much interest in humans, after all, since they were too small to make a satisfactory meal or to pose a substantial threat.

Faced with such a vast and godlike... or demon-like... being, Conan was uncertain of how to proceed. His awe and superstitious dread lasted for several moments— until a spear, deftly and forcefully driven, streaked over his

shoulder toward the beast. It was a perfect cast, aimed level and straight at the heart—if the monster, with devilishly quick reflexes, had not flicked up a huge paw and batted the spear shaft aside before it struck.

Hefting his ax, Conan glanced over his shoulder at Aklak, who watched expressionless as his spear shattered to splinters against a boulder. There was something fatalistic in his gaze—and the three younger hunters, who had raised their weapons to cheer, now clutched them defensively, two-handed.

An instant later, the time for reflection was past. The great cat, letting its gory kill fall aside, was among them.

Conan struck first, darting in from the flank, his ax hurtling down on the huge, hideous head. Because of the cat’s devilish speed, his weapon struck only glancingly; it sheared away a few tough whiskers but failed to crack, or even to stun, the heavy, bone-ridged skull. Conan was bowled over, his wind knocked out of him, and skin was scraped from his chest and back by the animal’s coarse pelt and by rough, bare granite.

As he rolled to his feet, his gut-muscles spasming to recover breath, he saw a demonstration of the monster’s fighting prowess. Instead of launching itself through the air to grapple with its prey, rending it with teeth and talons as most cats would do, the beast sidled menacingly into combat. It stalked delicately, ponderously, then lunged with lethal suddenness. Its first adversary—the bold young huntress—it dispatched with one mighty forepaw, brushing aside her spear and catapulting her over backward. The blow undoubtedly broke her neck, leaving her crumpled body lying blood-streaked across a boulder.

The next hunter, Jad, drove in yelling from the side with a vicious spear-thrust at the silver-furred neck. But the giant creature, uncannily swift and supple, ducked beneath the spear. The big cat seemed merely to brush up against its attacker with a toss of its shaggy head; Jad staggered back, dropping his weapon and using both hands, vainly, to try to close the terrible rift in his belly opened by the monster’s scything sabre-fang.

While Jad shrieked and fell to his knees, the other young hunter met the same fate. Before he could plant his spear, the cat lunged sideward with a flick of its great head, hardly even troubling to open its jaws. Its long, curved incisor laid the youth open more efficiently than a Hyrkanian cavalry knife could have done. It must have struck his heart, for unlike Jad, who knelt sobbing in pain, he crumpled silently in a shower of blood.

Conan, regaining wind and strength, hacked savagely at the nearest part of the cat, the hind leg, lower to earth and less imposing than its massively muscled forepaws. He felt his ax rebound from the tough hamstring, yet the blow must have caused pain; the rough tail lashed his neck almost hard enough to knock him over. As he edged away, the beast turned to swipe at him. Its hooked claws tore through his trailing mane of hair, jerking his neck cruelly and smearing him with gore, which it was hard to be certain was not his own.

As he stumbled in recoil, Jad’s gasping screams abruptly halted. Aklak had ended his hunt-brother’s hopeless agony, using his heavy stone hatchet, as a good Atupan was sworn to do. He now turned and raised his weapon to meet the sabre-cat's rush. There was no feinting or sidling this time, just a straightforward charge. The huntsman’s ax flashed high in the sun, chopping down hard on one of the sabre-cat's ears. The next moment Aklak’s neck was seized in jaws that gaped impossibly wide, They closed, and his head was nipped clean from his body by the huge scissor-fangs.

Conan, half-blind with blood, rage, and anguish, never thought to turn and run. Survival was no eventuality; death was foregone. His only intent as he sprang forward was to do the greatest injury to his foe. He raised the ax two-handed to hew at the cat’s lower backbone—but before he could complete the swing, the monster wheeled to confront him with its full, dreadful snarl.

The visage before him gaped terrible, a spectre of rage and hideous hunger. Those devil eyes, the bristling, bulging features, and the red-smeared fangs held his soul in a grip as tight and dreadful as the creature’s bone-crunching bite. The sabre-cat's musty stench engulfed him; its guttural roar beat against his face, while its hot, blood-sweet carrion breath washed over him. As it loomed nearer-intent, as it seemed, on paralysing and killing him with a mere look—his arm shot out by its own volition, driving his stone axhead upright between the sabre-fangs into the beast’s bloody, gaping jaws.

The roar became a sputtering cough of rage as the cat tried unsuccessfully to close its mouth. The jaws, wedged open at their widest extent, could not bring their full, terrible strength to bear; the flint ax dug into the ridged pink gums, splintering razor-edged teeth, but did not give. The giant cat raised a paw to swipe at the object lodged in its mouth, but the long fangs at either side were in the way.

The creature shook its massive head, its huge rough tongue bulging and probing to clear away the obstruction.

Conan, meanwhile, groped beside him and found a weapon: his own blood-slimed spear, which had fallen from the gutted carcass of the elk. The haft was slick and difficult to hold, yet he raised it before him just as the sabre-cat finally spewed out the axhead, turned, and lunged at him with a shattering roar.

Any retreat was blocked by a boulder—as was the butt of the spear, which caught against its base. The cat, surging forward, took the bloody point in the fur of its chest. Conan slid his grip back down the haft, shrinking low to avoid the fierce, hooking talons; yet he braced the spear-point steady as the monster’s weight bore down on it.

The pole bent and twisted in his grasp. Then it snapped, and the cat was upon him. Its writhing, clawing weight crushed him against hard stone, and he felt himself dying.

By the time Conan managed to drag himself from beneath the sabre-cat, the sun was low. Once his chest was partially free, enabling him to breathe deeply, his efforts were more successful. Inching clear of the carcass, he saw that the point of his spear must have been driven to the animal’s heart as it fell; the broken stub end was flush with the coarse, silvery chest fur.

He found that he could walk, or at least limp. So he did not linger at the site of the carnage to count the dead, or to drive away the circling, feasting vultures, or to determine how much of the gore encrusting his body was his own. If he himself had died, the tragedy could scarcely be greater, and it might have been more just. He was responsible, after all... having goaded the others into a foolhardy attack, and disobeyed his hunt-chief. How could he confess to Songa that he, Conan, had brought about the death of her adored brother?

The way back to camp was hard. He would not stop lest he lose daylight, or find himself unable to crawl back to his feet after a rest. Even so, night set in before he was in familiar territory, and he lost the trail repeatedly between sunset and moonrise. His pain and hardship and the blackness around him were matched by dark broodings all the way—less dark, however, than what awaited him at camp.

As he approached across the sandy meadow, he saw no fires. The only light was from the half-moon high above the lake, which rippled softly in the chill night-breeze. There was smoke aplenty, though, and the acrid smell of charred wood, hides, and hair. Huts still smouldered dimly, and the avenues between them were strewn with bodies— those of his tribe mates, pierced through with small, tell-tale wounds.

In one of the bodies, that of an elder, the death weapon was broken and had not been retrieved. Conan removed it and examined its two halves in the dim moonlight—a long arrow of passing good craftsmanship. Its fletching was tied on with spun thread, its tip forged of sharp, gleaming steel.

By his count, all, or nearly all, the members of his tribe lay dead, slain by arrow shafts and by keen metal knives. They had been surrounded or tricked, undoubtedly, and massacred with weapons they had never before seen. There lay his mother-in-law, a cudgel still clutched in her slack fist—and lame Glubal, fallen across his hunting-spear, along with two score other men, women, and babes. The Atupans had fought bravely, or tried to... but without success. Markedly absent were any dead attackers or any further hint of their identity.

Also missing was any sign of Songa.

In spite of its dread urgency, the full, gruesome inventory had to wait for morning light, as did any tracking. For the time, he crept with renewed watchfulness into the forest. There he rested, chill and wakeful, bedevilled by grim, silent ghosts.

By dawn’s faint light, Songa had not returned, and none lived to answer his calls. Surveying the butchery, he discovered one further, critical fact. Nothing had been taken from the village, except the single possession proudly worn by most adults: scavenged out of the ruined tower, the odd, ancient amulets that Atupans received on becoming hunters—like the ornament that now girdled Conan’s waist, gritty and blood-grimed.

For these worthless trinkets, so it seemed, Songa’s people and his own had been wiped out. If so, there was no question of where to seek her.

Even if he had not guessed which direction to take, he knew it was impossible to move such a body of men without leaving signs. This was true of men afoot, and especially of civilized ones. In the faint light, their trail was easy to find.

The track they left was slovenly, an insult to the forest and its spirits. They scuffed and dragged their feet, idly defaced trees and plants with their steel, trod carelessly in one another’s wastes and tracked them into the wilderness. He could read their callowness in their footsteps; worse, he could smell them, and their stench of civilization soured his nostrils.

Before setting out, he bathed himself in the lake, swiftly and determinedly, washing from his abraded skin the blood of the sabre-cat, of his hunt-mates, and of murdered innocents. He daubed himself quickly with coloured clay, in the ritual face and chest stripes for a high hunt, and set out at a lope in the sparse costume of his tribe, bearing Songa’s stone ax and a heavy, hand-thrown spear. The ruined village, fly-buzzing bodies, and circling carrion birds were best left behind as a warning to other tribes.

The invaders’ track led north and west, along ridges flanking the river, toward the Atupans’ summer hunting ground. The slayers’ progress was rapid and forced, without rests; obviously they guessed they were in danger from survivors or neighbouring tribes. The band had a mission, clearly, and a leader’s discipline. They gnawed dry figs and oat-cakes as they walked, strewing stems and crumbs in their path. They also hunted along the way—with small success, since the bones cast into their previous night’s campfire were few and tiny, the remains of mere vermin.

At a stream crossing, Conan found something more valuable than any diadem: pressed into the damp clay of the bank was a single footprint, shapely and unbloodied. It told him that Songa was alive, that she was being used as guide, as he had hoped, to lead them to the treasure.

Thereafter Conan redoubled his pace. He did not stop to hunt or to glean food, and he forgot his bruises and gashes, sprinting to make up the single day’s lead. He sought out short cuts, pausing only to scale vantage points and scan the country ahead. His speed of overtaking them was aided by several false branches in the trail, where Songa had tried to lead the marchers back upon themselves in a circle.

Their leader was watchful, Conan judged. Doubtless he maltreated Songa to make her obey. Still, she resisted, knowing Conan would follow, and expecting Aklak too, no doubt, along with the rest of the party. Again Conan cursed the fate, or the folly, that had ended his hunt-mates’ lives.

At any rate, if he could creep near and rescue his mate, it might be wise to let the rest of the slayers live... for a time at least, while he and Songa made good their escape. Songa had friends among the other Atupan tribes; they could raise a war party, obtain their revenge, and then resume their lives together.

But the first need was to overtake her. This unseen commander pressed his murderers harshly indeed, leading them on a cruel forced march. Many of their footprints began to show lameness, and some were blood-spotted by the time Conan overtook the band—near dusk, at the ruined tower that was their goal. The tower’s vines now hung dead and brown, rattling dryly in autumn gusts. Brittle fallen leaves lay underfoot, making Conan’s approach all the more difficult as he crept toward the low crevice that served as an entry.