It was Juma’s turn to laugh, and he did so heartily. “Stop, Conan. Can you hear what you are saying? How would you work these wonders, with every trooper and officer fighting you with all the ferocity they spare the Hwong? Not a one of them but has interests and prejudices running the other way! The food, for instance—what Turanian would touch the meal we have eaten tonight? They would call it unclean and spit on it—no offense to you, Sariya, but it is so.” He flashed an apologetic look at his hostess, who sat at ease beside them, watching and listening with an attitude of interest.
“Nay, Conan,” Juma continued, “there are some bad things in this world that can only make themselves worse. I fear this campaign is one of them. Instead of seeking fame, I caution you to be as small and invisible as you can while in Venjipur. Obey the rules and, less zealously, your orders. Never take chances, never volunteer.” The Kushite faced his host earnestly. “This is the sum of my experience here; now you have seen some of the cost of calling attention to yourself.” He shook his head. “Of all things, the worst thing to be in this war is a hero!”
Conan laughed, shaking his head good-naturedly. “Juma, Juma! If I thought that you yourself could live one moment by those craven rules, I would love you the less for it! But I know it is not so—and you know it, even though you mean me well in saying it.” He reached around the mat to lean heavily and confidingly on his friend’s shoulder. “For men like us, Juma, there are no limits. Tell me, have you ever played imperial draughts as the Stygians do?” He winked intimately at his fellow trooper. “In their version of the game, a pawn can advance to become a king!”
“Conan, I do not jest.” Juma glanced uneasily at the open doorway. “You know the danger of even speaking that way, so let us talk of other things. Do you not see that Venjipur’s hunger for human suffering is greater than all the armies of Yildiz can satisfy? We must take care not to be swallowed along with the others.”
They continued their conversation, failing to resolve many greater and lesser topics. During their talk, the afternoon rain fell. They laid their pans out in the yard to be scoured by heavy, pelting drops. They sat out on the porch enclosed by a dripping, transparent liquid curtain, watching rain-pitted water running and pooling across the yellow clay.
At length the shower retreated into a mountainous jumble of misty cloud, pink-tinged in sunset over the Gulf. Juma took leave of them and returned to the fort, treading on flat stones spaced across the muddy yard. Conan, passing inside the hut, bolted the tough bamboo door, then turned to follow Sariya through the curtained inner archway.
Their sleeping-room was bedecked with flowers. Twined into the palm thatching of the walls, braided between the rafters, gathered in clusters on the mat floor, the blossoms shone almost luminous in the dimming light of the bamboo-framed window. Their fragrance hung heavily in air already rich with the smell of rain-soaked earth. Conan knew that some of the flowers, like the drooping pink lotuses wound into the lashings of the room’s broad hammock, gave off fumes that were mildly narcotic. Their effect only increased the faint swimming of his senses as he watched Sariya unpin and unwind herself alluringly from her dusky-blue garment. Her body shone amber in the dusk, more radiant than the blossoms all around her, graceful as the slenderest lily.
When he moved to embrace her, she turned her face up to his. He saw that she had twined a pink lotus in her black tresses, above one delicate ear. The flower’s heady aroma mingled with her own subtle scent as he caressed her, then lifted her bodily onto the yielding canvas of the hammock. The swaying of the airborne bed merely added to the plunging, reeling exhilaration of his own senses, as the two joined in a consuming rush of passion.
Sariya, for her part, abandoned herself to the arduous labors and equally arduous pleasures of her new existence. Though little-traveled, secluded from the world throughout her youth, she guessed that no man could make her feel the fullness of life’s simple round better than Conan. She cherished their time together, using her well-learned skills to reward him and make things better, for however long it might last.
There were dangers, of course; but Sariya believed that Conan could cope with the immediate, tangible ones. She knew that by night in their hammock, even after exhausting bouts of lovemaking, he slept no more deeply than any panther draped across a forest limb. She often heard him waken in response to faint noises outside the hut, sometimes slipping from beside her and out the window with inhuman stealth and silence.
Once, on his return, she saw a gleam of steel as he wiped his dagger-blade clean, and smelled the coppery scent of blood when he crept back to her side. She sensed that his savage devotion would save her, or else it would call down forces too violent for either of them to control. Either way, she loved him.
Wet foliage slapped the riders’ faces, rubbery leaves shedding tepid drops that gathered in rivulets down the men’s necks and torsos. The wetness tickled like insect-tracks, unscratchable beneath breast and scapular armor; otherwise it scarcely mattered, for it neither cooled nor warmed their skin in the stifling jungle heat.
Meanwhile, beneath the troopers’ folded legs, the elephant’s thinly padded back rolled and rippled patiently like a living sea. From time to time the beast’s sinuous trunk snaked upward among the branches to tear off a tasty-looking limb, shaking the riven tree and showering brackish droplets on the passengers.
“Driver, more room overhead!” Irritably, Conan prodded the hunched shoulder of the elephant-guide Than. The small man sat low astride the elephant’s neck, and so he scarcely felt the turmoil of thrashing branches. “Steer the brute wider around the trees,” Conan admonished him, “or I’ll brain you!”
Just possibly, the northerner’s guttural rendering of the singsong Venji dialect was understood by the guide. If so, he showed it only by a shrug of his diminutive shoulders and a wave of his bronze-hooked elephant goad. The ponderous rhythm of the beast continued inexorably under them, and foliage continued to lash past their ears without any noticable improvement.
“There is little hope of change, Sergeant.” The archer Kalak, sitting beside Conan in the low-rimmed howdah, spoke in deep, well-modulated Turanian. “The elephants rove beneath the trees to cool themselves and to forage leaves for their ravenous bellies.” Peering from under bushy brows, he gazed knowingly at his commander. “Their drivers can scarcely change their ways; the venerable creatures have minds of their own.”
Conan scowled, peering ahead. “Good for them, but what about the enemy? How will we ever see their traps and ambushes?” He raised an arm to protect his face against lashing green fronds. “I would expect these all-knowing elephants to be concerned about that too!”
“They?” Kalak arched his black eyebrows. “Why, they pay no more heed to human strife than they do to wars waged by fleas across their leathery backs!” He laughed immoderately at his own fancy, with a third trooper, Muimur, joining in from the rear of the howdah. Gradually Kalak resumed his straight-faced demeanor. “Truly, Sergeant, traps are not to be feared here. As I said, the elephant has a mind of his own.”
Conan grunted acknowledgment, fixing a sidelong glance on the warrior. He respected Kalak, yet he knew the man to be a chewer of lotus-root. Sensing that some of the fellow’s levity was at his expense, he nevertheless saw little to be done about it, short of heaving the crack archer down their elephant’s steaming flank. So he settled back to watching the jungle, enduring the tension and discomfort of the journey.
The men wore a minimum in the heat, offering bare arms and legs to mercies of sting-flies and enemy darts, all for the sake of coolness and mobility. They trusted to helmets and chest armor to protect their vitals, relying too on the lofty bulk of their mammoth steed to intimidate the Hwong. Mounted at either side of the howdah were pivots for crossbows, which could be cocked and fired swiftly by means of long, overslung levers. Ivory clips kept the arrows from slipping out of their nock, so that the weapons might be pointed sharply downward to wreak death at ground level.
Their giant war-elephant was the first and largest of three, followed by Conan’s twoscore spear and sword-wielders slogging along on foot, followed in turn by four couriers leading horses probably half-dead by now with heat. If they encountered a sizeable enemy force, the plan was to hem them in with elephants and pin them down with infantry. Meanwhile, the horsemen would gallop back to Fort Sikander for reinforcements that would probably decide the battle.
But even the elephant riders, squatting behind the low wooden bastions of the howdahs and hedged in by points of sheathed spears and bundles of arrows, could scarcely feel safe. Conan briefly caught himself hoping that the enemy would not find them, and that no battle would be joined on these bizarre, unequal terms—particularly since there was no clear purpose to be served by it. A small body of Hwong might be slain or routed, true; but any small group of rebels could almost certainly elude them. The real function of this middling force was to scout the hills and show off the emperor’s strength in a few remote villages. Conan doubted even elephants’ ability to surround and pin down savage Hwong in a forest; rather, he feared the kind of sniping, strike-and-run attack that this ill-planned maneuver exposed them to.
And yet so far the jungle had shown them no hostility. Forested hillsides and stream-gushing hollows rolled steadily beneath their steed’s trundling stumps. The blinding smother of bamboo, brush, and tree-fronds occasionally parted to reveal steamy jungle vistas, flower-carpeted galleries ablaze with sloping sunrays. The patrol passed villages too—clusters of straw shanties dozing amid rice-fields in the marshy valleys. The yellow-brown farm folk observed their passing with sullen stares from beneath their wide-tented straw hats.
The troopers had been directed to follow a network of jungle trails in a curving radius north of the fort. Lacking bearings, Conan trusted his elephant driver to find the way, occasionally and vainly checking a scrolled map furnished by the captain. At times he could discern a trodden path winding ahead of them through the jungle; at other times not. At one place, he peered downward to see the inlaid stones of an ancient, overgrown highway passing underfoot; ahead in the brush, grouped like blind sentinels, stood crumbling columns of ancient statuary. Conan glanced around suspiciously, reassuring himself that this was nowhere near the jungle temple he had previously assaulted.
As the column arrived at a turning in the antique road, the foremost elephant halted. Its long trunk probed at a carved monolith heavily shrouded by vines. The driver made no effort to goad the beast forward, but sat patiently; meanwhile the second elephant in the column drew up behind them, glowering like a jungle demon in its giant mask of quilted, copper-bossed armor. Its pink nostrils craned forward to probe curiously at the lead animal’s hindquarters.
“What are these creatures up to? Why have we stopped?” Casting around suspiciously, Conan switched his guttural queries from the Turanian tongue to the Venji one. Meanwhile, the lead elephant brushed aside pendulous vines to reveal symbols graven deeply in the weathered stone of the monolith. The Cimmerian watched as the moist finger at the end of the trunk carefully traced one of the carvings, a looping, three-lobed figure with down-trailing ends.
“Remember, Sergeant, this beast is probably many times older than you or I,” Kalak’s voice whispered solemnly at Conan’s side, without apparent irony. “The elephant folk too have their gods, and they remember the ways of past dwellers in this forest. Best to let them pay their ancient homages.”
Uncertain whether he was being made a fool of, Conan posed no further questions. In a while, his elephant turned to shuffle onward along the ancient track—if such it still was, for the pavement was no longer visible. Conan glanced back to see the next elephant take its place before the pillar, raising its trunk to snuffle at the same carved sign.
He bade his driver stop their beast and wait, lest the column be dangerously scattered by the delay. He knew his foot soldiers would welcome the rest, for the elephants, even heavily armed and armored, set a brisk pace. He stood up in the padded howdah to stretch his own cramped limbs—and with instant watchfulness saw motion ahead: a line of burdened Venji natives winding toward them, their heads and pack-baskets barely visible a hundred paces further up the jungle path.
Instantly Conan clasped each of his companions on the shoulder in silent warning and commenced whispering orders. He sent Muimur clambering down the elephant’s armored side, with orders for the other pachyderms to move forward on both flanks of the trail, and for the spear phalanx to fill in the center. Muimur’s final order would be to the horsemen, dispatching two of them to alert the fort. The others would follow as closely behind the elephants as their skittish steeds might be induced to go, awaiting further messages.
Kalak mounted and primed the crossbows, while Conan kept up a tense vigil forward; he urged Than to trundle their beast off the trail, closer underneath the damp, concealing foliage. But it did little good—for even as the front of the approaching party came into open view, the crashing of the elephants in the jungle on either hand alerted them.
Rebels they were—naked Hwong tribesmen guiding armed peasants in jungle-green jerkins. With surprised shouts they threw down their burdens and drew weapons, falling back along the trail in practiced order. At their rear sounded the fluting of a shrill-toned pipe, doubtless a warning signal.
“Forward, men of Turan! Kill our enemies!” Conan’s shouts were cut off by foliage lashing in his face as Than urged the elephant ahead; nevertheless the spearmen along the trail heard and broke into a charge, answering with spirited cries. Goaded by their drivers, the striding elephants began to trumpet with deafening effect. The brassy tones vibrated palpably under Conan’s doubled knees and ripped through jungle galleries, the very trees seeming to wilt and tremble in their blast. At the shock of the din, many of the retreating bearers dropped their weapons and began to claw away through the forest in panic.