Conan the Adaptable, page 41
“Out of here, quick!” muttered Conan, shaking Arlinna who seemed threatened with hysteria. “Up the alley in the other direction.”
She regained her poise in their groping flight up the darkened alley, as Conan muttered: “We’re in the clear now. Takkim can’t talk, with his head split, and that hatchetman’ll tell his pals Takkim shot their boss.”
“We’d better get out of town!” They had emerged into a narrow, lamp-lit street.
“Why? We’re safe from suspicion now.” A little tingle of pleasure ran through her as Conan turned into a doorway and spoke to a grinning old Chinaman who bowed them into a small neat room, with curtained windows and a couch.
As the door closed behind the old Khitain, Conan caught her hungrily to him, finding her red lips, now unresisting. Her arms went about his thick neck as he lifted her bodily from the floor. Willingly she yielded, responded to his eager caresses.
She had only exchanged masters, it was true, but this was different. There was a delicious sense of comfort and security in a strong man who could fight for her and protect her. There was pleasure in the dominance of his strong hands. With a blissful sigh she settled herself luxuriously in his powerful arms.
The Lost Valley of Iskander
(Originally Swords of the Hills)
Robert E. Howard & J.R. Karlsson
I
It was the stealthy clink of steel on stone that wakened Conan. In the dim starlight a shadowy bulk loomed over him and something glinted in the lifted hand. Conan went into action like a steel spring uncoiling. His left hand checked the descending wrist with its curved knife, and simultaneously he heaved upward and locked his right hand savagely on a hairy throat.
A gurgling gasp was strangled in that throat and Conan, resisting the other’s terrific plunges, hooked a leg about his knee and heaved him over and underneath. There was no sound except the rasp and thud of straining bodies. Conan fought, as always, in grim silence, and no sound came from the straining lips of the man beneath. His right hand writhed in Conan’s grip; his left tore futilely at the wrist whose iron fingers drove deeper and deeper into the throat they grasped. That wrist felt like a mass of woven steel wires to the weakening fingers that clawed at it. Grimly Conan maintained his position, driving all the power of his compact shoulders and corded arms into his throttling fingers. He knew it was his life or that of the man who had crept up to stab him in the dark. In that unmapped corner of the Afhugli mountains all fights were to the death. The tearing fingers relaxed. A convulsive shudder ran through the great body straining beneath the Cimmerian; then it went limp.
Conan slid off the corpse, in the deeper shadow of the great rocks among which he had been sleeping. Instinctively he felt under his arm to see if the precious package for which he had staked his life was still safe. Yes, it was there, that flat bundle of velum wrapped in oiled silk, that meant life or death to thousands. He listened. No sound broke the stillness. About him the slopes with their ledges and boulders rose gaunt and black in the starlight. It was the darkness before the dawn.
But he knew that men moved about him, out there among the rocks. His ears, whetted by years in wild places, caught stealthy sounds — the soft rasp of cloth over stones, the faint shuffle of sandalled feet. He could not see them, and he knew they could not see him, among the clustered boulders he had chosen for his sleeping site.
His left hand groped for his sword, and he drew his dagger with his right. That short, deadly fight had made no more noise than the silent knifing of a sleeping man might have made. Doubtless his stalkers out yonder were awaiting some signal from the man they had sent in to murder their victim.
Conan knew who these men were. He knew their leader was the man who had dogged him for hundreds of miles, determined he should not reach Vendhya with that silk-wrapped packet. Conan was known by repute from Turan to the Khitai; elsewhere he was called Amra, the Lion, and they feared and respected him. But in Hunyadi, renegade and international adventurer, Conan had met his match. And he knew that now Hunyadi, out there in the night, was lurking with his Turanian killers. They had ferreted him out, at last.
Conan glided out from among the boulders as silently as a great cat. No hillman, born and bred among those crags, could have avoided loose stones more skillfully or picked his way more carefully. He headed southward, because that was the direction in which lay his ultimate goal. Doubtless he was completely surrounded.
His soft native sandals made no noise, and in his dark hillman’s garb he was all but invisible. In the pitch-black shadow of an overhanging cliff, he suddenly sensed a human presence ahead of him. A voice hissed, a northern tongue framing the Turanian words: “Ali! Is that you? Is the dog dead? Why did you not call me?”
Conan struck savagely in the direction of the voice. His scimitar crunched glancingly against a human skull, and a man groaned and crumpled. All about rose a sudden clamor of voices, the rasp of leather on rock. A stentorian voice began shouting, with a note of panic.
Conan cast stealth to the winds. With a bound he cleared the writhing body before him, and sped off down the slope. Behind him rose a chorus of yells as the men in hiding glimpsed his shadowy figure racing through the starlight. Jets of orange cut the darkness, but the arrows whined high and wide. Conan’s flying shape was sighted but an instant, then the shadowy gulfs of the night swallowed it up. His enemies raved like foiled wolves in their bewildered rage. Once again their prey had slipped like an eel through their fingers and was gone.
So thought Conan as he raced across the plateau beyond the clustering cliffs. They would be hot after him, with hillmen who could trail a wolf across naked rocks, but with the start he had — even with the thought the earth gaped blackly before him. Even his steel-trap quickness could not save him. His grasping hands caught only thin air as he plunged downward, to strike his head with stunning force at the bottom.
When he regained his senses a chill dawn was whitening the sky. He sat up groggily and felt his head, where a large lump was clotted with dried blood. It was only by chance that his neck was not broken. He had fallen into a ravine, and during the precious time he should have employed in flight, he was lying senseless among the rocks at the bottom.
Again he felt for the packet under his native shirt, though he knew it was fastened there securely. Those papers were his death-warrant, which only his skill and wit could prevent being executed. Men had laughed when Conan of Cimmeria had warned them that the devil’s own stew was bubbling in the East, where an adventurer was dreaming of an outlaw empire.
To prove his assertion, Conan had gone into Turan, in the guise of a wandering Afghul. Years spent in the East had given him the ability to pass himself for a native anywhere. He had secured proof no one could ignore or deny, but he had been recognized at last. He had fled for his life, and for more than his life, then, and Hunyadi, the renegade who plotted the destruction of nations, was hot on his heels, clear across the steppes, through the foothills, and up into the mountains where Conan had thought at last to throw him off. But he had failed. His foe was a human bloodhound. Wary, too, as shown by his sending his craftiest slayer in to strike a blow in the dark.
Conan found his weapon and began the climb out of the ravine. Under his left arm was proof that would make certain officials wake up and take steps to prevent the atrocious thing that Hunyadi planned. It was letters to various chiefs, signed and sealed with his foe's own hand, and it revealed his whole plot to embroil Easten Hyboria in a religious war and send howling hordes of fanatics against the Vendhyan border. It was a plan for plundering on a staggering scale. That package must reach Fort Ali Masjid! With all his iron will Conan of Cimmeria was determined it should; with equal resolution Hunyadi was determined it should not. In the clash of two such steely temperaments, kingdoms shake and Death reaps a red harvest.
Dirt crumbled and pebbles rattled down as Conan worked his way up the sloping side of the ravine, but presently he clambered over the edge and cast a quick look about him. He was on a narrow plateau, pitched among giant slopes which rose somberly above it. To the south showed the mouth of a narrow gorge, walled by rocky cliffs. In that direction he hurried.
He had not gone a dozen steps when the twang of a bow came from behind him. Even as the wind of the arrow fanned his cheek, Conan dropped flat behind a boulder, a sense of futility tugging at his heart. He could never escape Hunyadi. This chase would end only when one of them was dead. In the increasing light he saw figures moving among the boulders along the slopes to the northwest of the plateau. He had lost his chance of escaping under cover of darkness, and now it looked like a finish fight.
He thrust forward his own bow and loosed an arrow. Too much to hope that that blind blow in the dark had killed Hunyadi; the man had as many lives as a cat. An arrow clattered on the boulder close to his elbow. He had heard the twang of the weapon it had come from, marking the spot where the assailant lurked. He watched those rocks, and when a head and part of an arm and shoulder came up with a bow, Conan fired. It was a long shot, but the man reared upright and pitched forward across the rock that had sheltered him.
More arrows came, spattering Conan’s refuge. Up on the slopes, where the big boulders poised breathtakingly, he saw his enemies moving like ants, wriggling from ledge to ledge. They were spread out in a wide ragged semicircle, trying to surround him again, and he did not have enough ammunition to stop them. He dared shoot only when fairly certain of scoring a hit. He dared not make a break for the gorge behind him. He would be riddled before he could reach it. It looked like trail’s end for him, and while Conan had faced death too often to fear it greatly, the thought that those papers would never reach their destination filled him with black despair.
An arrow whining off his boulder from a new angle made him crouch lower, seeking the marksman. He glimpsed a white turban, high up on the slope, above the others. From that position the Turanian could shoot arrows directly into Conan’s covert.
The Cimmerian could not shift his position, because a dozen other bows nearer at hand were covering it; and he could not stay where he was. One of those dropping slugs would find him sooner or later. But the Ottoman decided that he saw a still better position, and risked a shift, trusting to the long uphill range. He did not know Conan as Hunyadi knew him.
The Nemedian, further down the slope, yelled a fierce command, but the Turanian was already in motion, headed for another ledge, his garments flapping about him. Conan’s arrow caught him in mid-stride. With a wild cry he staggered, fell headlong and crashed against a poised boulder. He was a heavy man, and the impact of his hurtling body toppled the rock from its unstable base. It rolled down the slope, dislodging others as it came. Dirt rattled in widening streams about it.
Men began recklessly to break cover. Conan saw Hunyadi spring up and run obliquely across the slope, out of the path of the sliding rocks. The tall supple figure was unmistakable, even in Turanian garb. Conan fired and missed, as he always seemed to miss the man, and then there was no time to fire again. The whole slope was in motion now, thundering down in a bellowing, grinding torrent of stones and dirt and boulders. The Turanians were fleeing after Hunyadi, screaming.
Conan sprang up and raced for the mouth of the gorge. He did not look back. He heard above the roaring the awful screams that marked the end of men caught and crushed and ground to bloody shreds under the rushing tons of shale and stone. He dropped his bow; every ounce of extra burden counted now. A deafening roar was in his ears as he gained the mouth of the gorge and flung himself about the beetling jut of the cliff. He crouched there, flattened against the wall, and through the gorge mouth roared a welter of dirt and rocks, boulders bouncing and tumbling, rebounding thunderously from the sides and hurtling on down the sloping gut. Yet, it was only a trickle of the avalanche which was diverted into the gorge. The main bulk of it thundered on down the mountain.
II
Conan pulled away from the cliff that had sheltered him. He stood knee deep in loose dirt and broken stones. A flying splinter of stone had cut his face. The roar of the landslide was followed by an unearthly silence. Looking back on to the plateau, he saw a vast litter of broken earth, shale and rocks. Here and there an arm or a leg protruded, bloody and twisted, to mark where a human victim had been caught by the torrent. Of Hunyadi and the survivors there was no sign.
But Conan was a fatalist where the satanic Nemedian was concerned. He felt quite sure that Hunyadi had survived, and would be upon his trail again as soon as he could collect his demoralized followers. It was likely that he would recruit the natives of these hills to his service. The man’s power was little short of marvelous.
So Conan turned hurriedly down the gorge. Bow, pack of supplies, all were lost. He had only the garments on his body and the sword at his hip. Starvation in these barren mountains was a haunting threat, if he escaped being butchered by the wild tribes which inhabited them. There was about one chance in ten thousand of his ever getting out alive. But he had known it was a desperate quest when he started, and long odds had never balked Conan of Cimmeria, for years soldier of fortune in the outlands of the world.
The gorge twisted and bent between tortuous walls. The split-off arm of the avalanche had quickly spent its force there, but Conan still saw the slanting floor littered with boulders which had tumbled down from the higher levels. And suddenly he stopped short, his weapon drawn.
On the ground before him lay a man such as he had never seen in the Afghuli mountains or elsewhere. He was young, but tall and strong, clad in short silk breeches, tunic and sandals, and girdled with a broad belt which supported a curved sword.
His hair caught Conan’s attention. Blue eyes, such as the youth had, were not uncommon in the hills; but his hair was yellow, bound about his temples with a band of red cloth, and falling in a square-cut mane nearly to his shoulders. He was clearly no Afghuli. Conan remembered tales he had heard of a tribe living in these mountains somewhere who were not Afhuglis. Had he stumbled upon a member of that legendary race?
The youth was vainly trying to draw his sword. He was pinned down by a boulder which had evidently caught him as he raced for the shelter of the cliff.
“Slay me and be done with it, you dog!” he gritted.
“I won’t harm you,” answered Conan. “I’m no Afghuli. Lie still. I’ll help you if I can. I have no quarrel with you.”
The heavy stone lay across the youth’s leg in such a way that he could not extricate the member.
“Is your leg broken?” Conan asked.
“I think not. But if you move the stone it will grind it to shreds.”
Conan saw that he spoke the truth. A depression on the under side of the stone had saved the youth’s limb, while imprisoning it. If he rolled the boulder either way, it would crush the member.
“I’ll have to lift it straight up,” he grunted.
“You can never do it,” said the youth despairingly. “Ptolemy himself could scarcely lift it, and you are not nearly so big as he.”
Conan did not pause to inquire who Ptolemy might be, nor to explain that strength is not altogether a matter of size alone. His own thews were like masses of knit steel wires.
Yet he was not at all sure that he could lift that boulder, which, while not so large as many which had rolled down the gorge, was yet bulky enough to make the task look dubious. Straddling the prisoner’s body, he braced his legs wide, spread his arms and gripped the big stone. Putting all his corded sinews and his scientific knowledge of weight-lifting into his effort, he uncoiled his strength in a smooth, mighty expansion of power.
His heels dug into the dirt, the veins in his temples swelled, and unexpected knots of muscles sprang out on his straining arms. But the great stone came up steadily without a jerk or waver, and the man on the ground drew his leg clear and rolled away.
Conan let the stone fall and stepped back, shaking the perspiration from his face. The other worked his skinned, bruised leg gingerly, then looked up and extended his hand in a curiously un-Oriental gesture.
“I am Bardylis of Attalus,” he said. “My life is yours!”
“Men call me Conan,” answered Conan, taking his hand. They made a strong contrast: the tall, rangy youth in his strange garb, with his white skin and yellow hair, and the Cimmerian, taller still, and broader, in his tattered Afghuli garments, and his sun-darkened skin. Conan’s hair was straight and black, and his eyes smouldered with blue fire.
“I was hunting on the cliffs,” said Bardylis. “I heard shots and was going to investigate them, when I heard the roar of the avalanche and the gorge was filled with flying rocks. You are no Afghuli, despite your name. Come to my village. You look like a man who is weary and has lost his way.”
“Where is your village?”
“Yonder, down the gorge and beyond the cliffs.” Bardylis pointed southward. Then, looking over Conan’s shoulder, he cried out. Conan wheeled. High up on the beetling gorge wall, a turbaned head was poked from behind a ledge. A dark face stared down wildly. Conan turned with a snarl, but the face vanished and he heard a frantic voice yelling in guttural Turanian. Other voices answered, among which the Cimmerian recognized the strident accents of Hunyadi. The pack was at his heels again. Undoubtedly they had seen Conan take refuge in the gorge, and as soon as the boulders ceased tumbling, had traversed the torn slope and followed the cliffs where they would have the advantage of the man below.
But Conan did not pause to ruminate. Even as the turbaned head vanished, he wheeled with a word to his companion, and darted around the next bend in the canyon. Bardylis followed without question, limping on his bruised leg, but moving with sufficient alacrity. Conan heard his pursuers shouting on the cliff above and behind him, heard them crashing recklessly through stunted bushes, dislodging pebbles as they ran, heedless of everything except their desire to sight their quarry.
