“Back up the crag, quick!” snapped Conan, thrusting the girl behind him. “That devil can’t climb, I hope, but he can stand on his hind-legs and reach us –”
With a snapping and crashing of underbrush and small trees the dragon charging and even as Conan predicted, reared up fearsomely on his short, massive hinder legs to fall with his front feet on the crag with a violence that made the rock vibrate. Hardly had the fugitives passed through the leafy screen than the huge head was darted through, and the mighty jaws snapped with a resounding clash of giant fangs. But they were out of its reach, and they stared down at the nightmare visage framed among the green leaves. Then the head was withdrawn, and a moment later, peering down through the branches that scraped against the rock, they saw it squatting on its haunches, staring unblinkingly up at them.
Valeria shuddered, unnerved.
“How long do you suppose he’ll squat there?”
Conan kicked the skull on the leaf-strewn shelf.
“This fellow must have climbed up here to escape him, or one like him. He died here of starvation. That thing never will leave here until we’re both dead. I’ve heard legends of these things from the black people, but I never believed them before.”
Valeria looked at him blankly, her resentment forgotten. She fought down a surge of panic. She had proved her reckless courage a thousand times in wild battles on sea and land, on the blood-slippery decks of war-ships, in the storming of walled cities, and on the trampled sandy beaches where the desperate men of the Red Brotherhood bathed their knives in each other’s blood in their struggles for supremacy. She had not faltered in her long flight southward from the camp on the Darfar border, over the rolling grasslands and through the hostile forests. But the prospect now confronting her congealed her blood. A cutlass stroke in the heat of battle was nothing; but to sit idle and helpless on a bare rock until starvation slew her, besieged by a monstrous survival of an elder age – the thought sent panic throbbing through her brain.
“He must leave to eat and drink,” she said helplessly.
“He won’t have to go far to do either,” Conan pointed out. “He can run like a deer; besides, he’s just gorged on our horses, and like a real snake, he can go for a long time without eating or drinking. But he doesn’t sleep like a real snake.”
Conan spoke imperturbably. He was a barbarian and the terrible patience of the wilderness and its children was a part of his soul. He could endure a situation like this as no civilized person could endure it.
“Can’t we get into the trees and get away, travelling through the branches?” she asked desperately.
He shook his head. “I thought of that. The branches scrape the crag down there, but they’re too light. Branches too light for spear handles and vines no thicker than cords. They’d break with our weight. Besides, I’ve got an idea that devil could tear up any tree around here by its roots.”
“Well, are we to sit here on our rumps until we starve?” she cried furiously. “I won’t do it! I’ll go down there and cut his damned head off –”
Conan had seated himself tranquilly on a rocky projection. He looked up admiringly at her blazing eyes and tense, quivering figure, but realizing that she was in just the mood for any madness, he let none of his admiration sound in his voice.
“Sit down,” he grunted, catching her by her wrist and pulling her down on his knee. Without meeting any resistance he took her sword away from her and shoved it back in its sheath. “Sit still and calm down. You’d only break your steel on his scales. We’ll get out of this jam some way. But we won’t do it by getting chewed up and swallowed.”
She made no reply, nor did she offer any resistance to his arm about her waist. She was frightened, and the sensation was new to Valeria of the Red Brotherhood. So she sat on her companion – or captor’s – knee with a docility that would have amazed Count Zarallo who had atrophised her as a she-devil out of hell’s seraglio.
Conan played idly with her curly yellow locks, seemingly intent only upon his conquest. Neither the skeleton at his feet nor the monster crouching below him disturbed his mind in the slightest.
The girl’s restless eyes, roving the leaves below them, rested on the darkly crimson fruit she had noticed when she first climbed the crag. They were similar to fruit she had found in the forest and eaten during her flight from Zarallo’s camp. She was aware of both thirst and hunger, though neither had bothered her until she knew she could not descend from the crag to find food and water.
“We need not starve,” she said. “There is fruit.”
Conan glanced where she pointed.
“If we ate that we wouldn’t need the bite of a dragon,” he grunted. “That’s what the black people of Kush call The Apples of Derketa. Derketa is the Queen of the Dead. Drink a little of the juice, or spill it on your flesh, and you’d be dead before you could climb to the foot of this crag.”
“Oh!” She lapsed into dismayed silence. There seemed no way out of their predicament. She thought of something and called Conan’s attention to the view eastward. He stood on the pinnacle and stared out over the forest roof.
“That’s a city, right enough,” he muttered. “Was that where you were going, when you tried to send me off alone to the coast?”
She nodded.
“Well, who’d have thought to find a city here? So far as I know the Stygians never penetrated this far. Could it be black people? I see no herds on the plain, no sign of cultivation, or people moving about.”
“How could you hope to see all that, at that distance?” she demanded.
He shrugged his shoulders and stepped down from the pinnacle. Suddenly he swore. “Why in Crom’s name didn’t I think of it before?”
Without answering her question, he descended to the belt of leaves and stared down through them. The great brute squatted below, watching the the crag with the frightful patience of the reptile folk. Conan spat a curse at him, and then began cutting branches. Presently he had three long slender shafts, about seven feet long, but each no larger than his thumb.
“Branches too light for spear handles, and creepers no thicker than cords,” he repeated a previous statement. “But there’s strength in union – that’s what the Aquilonian renegades used to tell us Cimmerians when they came into the hills to raise an army to invade their own country. But we fight by clans and tribes.”
“What the devil has that got to do with those sticks?” she demanded.
“You wait and see.” Cutting lengths of vines he placed the sticks together, and drawing his poniard, wedged the hilt between them at one end. Then with the vines he bound them into a compact bundle, and when he had completed, he had a spear of no small strength, with a sturdy haft seven in length.
“What good will that do?” she demanded. “You told me that a blade couldn’t pierce his scales –”
“He doesn’t have scales all over him,” answered Conan. “There’s more than one way of skinning a panther.”
Moving down to the edge of the leafy belt he reached the spear up and carefully thrust it through one of the Apples of Derketa, drawing carefully aside to avoid the darkly purple drops that dripped from the pierced fruit. Presently he withdrew the blade and showed her the blue steel stained a dull purplish crimson.
“I don’t know whether it will do the job or not,” quoth he. “There’s enough poison there to kill an elephant almost instantly but – well, we’ll see.”
Valeria was close behind him as he let himself down among the leaves. Cautiously holding the poisoned pike away from him, he thrust his head through the leaves and addressed the monster.
“What are you waiting down there for, you misbegotten offspring of a parent of questionable morals?” was one of his more printable inquiries. “Stick your ugly head up here again, you long-necked bastard – or do you want me to come down there and kick you loose from your illegitimate spine?”
There was more of it – some of it couched in eloquence that made Valeria stare, in spite of her profane education among the sea-farers. And it had its effect on the monster. Just as the incessant yapping of a dog worries and enrages more constitutionally silent animals, so the clamorous voice of a man rouses fear in some bestial bosoms and insane rage in others. Suddenly, and with appalling quickness the mastodonic brute reared itself on its mighty hind legs and elongated its neck and body in an effort to reach this vociferous pigmy whose clamor was disturbing the primeval silence of its horrible realm.
But Conan had judged his distance precisely. Some five feet below Conan the mighty head crashed terribly but futiley through the leaves. And as the monstrous mouth gaped like that of a great snake, Conan drove his spear into the red angle of the hinge of the jawbone. He struck down ward with all the strength of both arms, driving the long poniard blade deep into flesh bone and muscle.
Instantly the jaws clashed together, severing the triple-woven shaft and almost precipitating Conan from his perch. In fact he would have fallen but for the girl behind him, who caught his sword-belt in a desperate grasp. He clutched at a rocky projection and grinned his thanks back at her.
Down on the ground the monster was wallowing like a dog with pepper in its eyes. He shook his head from side to side, pawed at it, and opened his mouth to its fullest extent, again and again. Presently he got a huge front foot on the stump of the shaft, and managed to tear the blade out. Realizing who was the author of his annoyance, he threw up his head, jaws wide and spouting blood and glared up at the crag with such concentrated and intelligent fury that Valeria trembled and drew her sword.
With harsh grating roars, the monster hurled himself at the crag that was the citadel of his enemies. Again and again his mighty head crashed upward through the leaves, snapping vainly on empty air. He hurled his full weight again and again against the rock, until it vibrated from base to crest. And rearing upright he gripped it with his front legs like a man and tried the impossible feat of tearing it from the ground bodily.
This exhibition of primordial fury chilled the blood in Valeria’s veins, but Conan was too close to the primitive himself to feel anything but a fascinated interest. To the barbarian, no such gulf existed between himself and other men, and the animals, as existed in the conception of Valeria. The monster below them, to Conan, was merely a form of life differing from himself mainly in shape. He attributed to it characteristics similar to his own, and believed its roars and bellowings were merely counterparts of the curses he had bestowed upon it. Feeling a kinship with all wild things, even dragons, it was impossible for him to experience the sick horror that assailed Valeria at the sight of the monster’s wrath.
He watched it tranquilly and pointed out the various changes that were taking place in its voice and its actions.
“The poison’s taking hold,” he said with conviction.
“I don’t believe it.” To Valeria it seemed preposterous to suppose that any lethal thing could have any effect on that mountain of muscle and ferocity.
“There’s pain in his voice,” declared Conan. “First he was merely angry because of the stinging in his jaw. Now he feels the bite of the poison. Look! He’s staggering! He’ll be blind in a few more minutes. What did I tell you?”
For suddenly the dragon had lurched about and went crashing off through the underbrush.
“Is he running away?” inquired Valeria uneasily.
“He’s making for the pool. The poison makes him thirsty. Come on! He’ll be blind when he gets back, if he does get back. But if he can make his way back to the foot of the crag, and smell us, he’ll sit there until he dies, and others of his kind may come at his cries. Let’s go!”
“Down there?” Valeria was aghast.
“Sure! We’ll make for the city! We may run into a thousand of the brutes, but it’s sure death to stay here. Down with you, in a hurry! Follow me!”
He went down swiftly, like an ape, pausing only to aid his slower companion, who, until she saw the Cimmerian climb, had fancied herself the equal of any man in the rigging of a ship, or on the sheer of a cliff.
They slid silently to the ground, though Valeria felt as if the beating of her heart must surely be heard for miles. No sound came from the forest, except the gurgling and lapping that indicated that the dragon was drinking at the spring.
“As soon as his belly is full he’ll be back,” muttered Conan. “It may take hours for the poison to work.”
Somewhere beyond the forest the sun was sinking to the horizon. The forest was a misty twilight place of black shadows and dim vistas. Conan gripped Valeria’s wrist and glided away from the crag’s foot. He made less noise than a breeze blowing among the tree-trunks, but Valeria felt as if her soft boots spoke of their flight to all the forest.
“I don’t think he can follow a trail,” muttered Conan. “No wind blowing. He could get our body-scent if it blew toward him.”
“Mitra grant that the wind blow not,” she breathed. She gripped her sword in her free hand, but the feel of the shagreen-bound hilt inspired only a feeling of helplessnes in her.
It was little over a mile to the edge of the forest. They had covered most of the distance when they heard a snapping and crashing behind them. Valeria bit her lip to check a cry.
“He’s on our trail!” she whispered fiercely, galvanized.
Conan shook his head.
“He didn’t smell us at the rock, and he’s blundering about through the forest, trying to pick up our scent. Come on! There’s no safety for us in this forest. He could tear down any tree we’d climb. Make for the plain! If he doesn’t catch our scent, we’ll make it! The city is our only chance!”
They stole on until the trees began to thin out. Behind them the forest was a black impenetrable ocean of shadows. The ominous crackling still sounded behind them, as the dragon blundered in his erratic course.
“There’s the plain ahead,” breathed Valeria. “A little more and we’ll –”
“Crom!” swore Conan.
“Mitra!” whispered Valeria.
Out of the east a wind had sprung up.
It blew over them directly into the black forest behind them. Instantly a horrible roar shook the woods. The aimless snapping and crackling of the bushes changed to a purposeful crashing as the dragon came like a hurricane straight toward the spot from which the scent wafted.