Isparana and Conan floundered and rolled in the sand. When they came to pause, she was atop him. She rose up, kneeling-sitting astride him in a flash of yellow-trousered knees, and her sword rushed up. Hate and kill-rage made her eyes ugly and the sun flashed fire from them as well as from her crescent blade.
Conan saw the glitter of those hating, mad eyes, though the flash of her sword was of far more immediate interest. His arms shot up, just as she struck.
Her wrist slammed down into his right hand like an oar into its groove. Her whole arm shivered with the impact, and was arrested as if she’d struck stone. Conan’s arm held, staying hers, and his hand closed. It tightened.
His other hand drew her dagger.
Isparana groaned and her scimitar fell away as her wristbones grated and her fingers flexed involuntarily open. She cried “NO!” on seeing her own dagger come flashing at her, and then he struck—to slash open her jallaba, all down the front.
Under the desert robe she wore naught but a cotton bandeau and the slashed, lowslung drawstring trousers. Both were of a bright yellow that contrasted beautifully with her tawny skin. Conan saw no scar on her bilobate chest. He tossed away the dagger, and pulled. She fell onto him and he rolled over once. He was atop her now, staring into her eyes. When she bit at his hand, he let go with the other long enough to slap her.
“NO, damn you!” she cried and she writhed wildly.
Khassek of Iranistan lay still, and Sarid, Turanian soldier of Samara lay still; and Isparana of Zamboula writhed and panted and soon Conan saw the ugly burn-scar on her hip. The uncaring desert sun smiled brightly down on them and soon sweat strained the sands and after a time Isparana’s curses became moans and little cries, and after another while they took on a different note, for she was no girl.
Southward on the desert rode a man and a woman. All about them rolled low dunes forming shallow ravines, and above the sun was an enemy that turned the sky into a brass cauldron. The horses they bestrode paced slowly, heads down. To the back of the woman’s saddle was attached the long lead-line of four more horses. Two were saddled in addition to being laden with packs; the other pair bore even larger packs.
The man was most definitely a man, though quite young. Tall and burly with massive shoulders straining the white burnoose he wore, he could have been a wrestler. None would have called him handsome—nor could he have been called ugly, with his face in repose. A sweatband of yellow cotton circled his head above his brows and confined his mane of black hair. His face was dark, as were his hands, though the long wedge of chest displayed by his robe’s slashed front was of a lighter hue. He had been riding with the legs of his loose desertman’s leggings drawn high up on his thighs; now, deciding he had taken enough sun on his muscular legs, he drew the dun-hued leggings down over his boots. The eyes that stared out of that sun-darkened face beneath the jet mop and garish sweat-band were strange, on this southern desert of Turan’s expanding empire; they glowed with a smoldering blue that imitated the sun-hot sky.
The day was hot, as every day was hot. Pale sand reflected the light of the snarling sun in a billion diamond-like flashes so that the world of the desert was both hotter and bright with glare. The horses plodded. Man and woman rode slumped, their lips compressed and their eyes fixed ahead. Clothing clung to sweat-filmed bodies.
The woman was most definitely a woman, and older than the man. Her face was longish, with molded cheekbones and staring dark eyes and a slightly curved nose above pronounced lips and a chin that was center-holed by a round dimple. None could call her truly beautiful; only another woman might call her less than pretty, and that not in truth. Her ballooning leggings or
sirwal
, a dirt- and sand-soiled yellow that was sweat-dark in patches, were both side-slit and torn. Sliced from her jallaba, her sand-hood lay across her thighs, for the dirty white robe had been raggedly slashed and torn across so that it ended well above her knees. The full-blousing sirwal vanished into red boots that rose above the considerable swell of her calves. A superb mass of waving black hair glinted blue and purplescent in the angry sunlight; it crowded her face with curls and toppled over the dirty old sweatband she wore; it had been the man’s. The unfettered halves of her bosom were as restless animals beneath her jallaba’s slashed front that displayed much of their curves; her confining bandeau had become a man’s sweat-band.
Her tawny skin, he had ruthlessly pointed out, was well adapted to the sun and would not burn. He had infuriated her with that and surprised her by aiding her in the renewal of the bandage on her hip. There, the saffron sirwal was sadly burned in a ragged, black-edged hole.
“The skin of my breasts stings, dog!”
“It won’t burn,” he said, riding placidly at her right. “Not much, anyhow,” he added, and she compressed her full lips.
“Why take me along at all? Why not leave me to die on the desert, used and ill-clothed and helpless,
barbarian?
“
“After all we’ve been through together? Isparana, Isparana! I feel responsible for you, woman! Beside… your outlook is to get the Eye of Erlik to Zamboula, isn’t it?”
She stared at him bright-eyed, and her sweat-sheened, partially bared chest heaved. She almost whispered, “Ye-esss…”
“Right.” Conan shrugged. “Khassek—whom I liked, damn you—is gone. Zamboula is a lot closer than Iranistan, and I owe nothing to that far land. You will have accomplished your task, ‘sparana. You and the amulet return to Zamboula together. It is just that I will be carrying the Eye, not you. Do you comport yourself in manner friendly and I shall be glad to tell your employer that you persuaded me to bring it home to him, in your company.”
Blinking, staring, Isparana said nothing. Her tonguetip emerged to wet her lips while she considered, reflected, surely puzzled over his words and his accursed hillman’s unpredictability. Wisely, Isparana said nothing. The big dog of a barbarian was obviously a survivor, and a worthy fighter as well as fair companion—and, damn him, a worthy lover at that.
Besides, they
were
headed for Zamboula, and he had assured her that he had the amulet, though all he seemed to be wearing was that ugly, cheap clay thing hanging from its thong around his neck.
That afternoon she essayed a few complaints about the scant attire allowed her. She received a friendly slap on the thigh and assurance that this way she was less dangerous. Again he repeated that as she was hardly white to begin with, she was in no danger of suffering sunburn.
“If we are attacked,” she said, “I don’t even have a weapon!”
Conan gave her a dark and very serious look. “If we are attacked,” he said “you will not need a weapon.”
Warmth rose in her, and she did not welcome the reaction. Isparana maintained her wise silence, compressing her lips and facing front. They rode south toward Zamboula.
“I do not like your presence here when I am at my work,” Zafra said. “Also I do not care for that decadent incense you insist on burning, or the scented candles. This is my place of work. It also adjoins the throneroom. I do not like your presence here at all! Should he find out—”
“
Him
!” the woman spewed forth the word as if it were an epithet. “How can he find out? Balad has our poor little Akter
frightened
! Balad wants the throne and I think he will have it, Zafra! Akter nervously keeps his son under constant close guard—the closest. Meanwhile our lord khan is afraid to order troops openly against the challenger Balad—least the people favor Balad!”
She walked from the couch to Zafra’s scrying table, slinking in her few ounces of silk and a pound of gems and pearls. She was sinuous as a lithe slinking cat, this woman of Argos whom Akter Khan called Tigress. Well he might. Chia was a magnificently if economically constructed woman with a catlike speed and grace and an aura of sensuality to arouse an octagenarian. Wild tawny hair sprayed out over broad shoulders the color of amber and her eyes, large and surrounded by kohl with blued eyelids, were a disconcerting gray. A slave from far Aquilonia brushed that mane daily for many minutes, measured by the time required to move the sundial’s shadow half the distance between two-hour points. Once she had done, her mistress deliberately disarranged it to maintain her careless, sensuously tousled appearance.
For all that he knew her well, for all their hours together, Zafra still watched her movements in fascination and appreciation and was aroused merely by the sight of her, walking.
She was born to tempt, he mused; a woman worthy of an emperor—or a mage who would in years to come
rule
, and rule a broader domain than little Zamboula of the desert. Trustworthy as her predatory jungle namesake was Chia of Argos, and her morals were those of a cat in heat. She was effete and she was estheticism and decadence personified, and it pleased Zafra that he had made her his, who had been Akter Khan’s. Not that the khan knew she was no longer his!
Only last night Akter had called for her and of course she had gone, while Zafra ground his teeth and plotted darkly a future dominated by sorcery; dominated by Zafra who would be Zafra Khan.
Lounging, her eyes on Zafra scintillant as with flashes of mica in their deeps, she spoke on, scornfully. “Through that young priest, Totrasmek, hardly more than an acolyte, Akter believes that he keeps watch on Balad who would be Balad Khan… and Balad pays Totrasmek the boy-priest and tells him what to report to our noble khan!”
Her scornful laughter was not pretty. Nor was her face when she made the throaty sounds that emerged from a full-lipped, wide and sensuous mouth that contrived to wear a little lift of contemptuous superiority even when she smiled—one-sidedly, for she was not perfect; she had a bad tooth on the left.
Zafra turned for another look into his scrying glass, and he smiled a smile as imperfect as hers; in his, the eyes never entered. Aye, the two still came on, ever closer to Zamboula though still far out on the desert.
“As for Akter,” Chia said on; “well you know of
him
, Zafra! He is sleepy with wine ere he has finished his dinner each night, and drunk within an hour of his finishing. Every night. His pot belly grows visibly by the day! He is no khan! He is a fearful sot, Akter the Sot… or the Gored Ox, as more and more of the soldiers call him.”
Bending over his table of paraphernalia, Zafra twisted his neck to fix her with a look across his shoulder. “Chia… you have contact with Totrasmek?”
She gave him a look. “I? Am I the sort to have do with those who give their manhoods to
gods
?”
Almost, Zafra smiled. “Well… find a way to let him wonder whether that girl of the Shanki, that gift to our lord Khan… to let him and thus Balad wonder whether she
really
died of illness, or… otherwise?”
“Oh! Did she?”
“How should a mere mage know, Chia, and him so young? Just see that the concept is imparted to those who will carry it to Balad.”
“Oh, well, it is simpler than having to deal with that ambitious little priest, my love. My own dear Mitralia is a spy for Balad!”
“Your slave? That pretty blond Aquilonian? Why have you not told me this before?”
Chia tilted her head on one side and gave him a look from beneath heavy lashes. “I just have. Do you tell me everything you know, my sorcerous and ambitious love?”
Smiling, deliberately she yawned and stretched, lengthening and tautening her coppery form for the vision of the man she knew loved that body. She was fascinated with this strange anomaly of a man in his strange hat. The khan’s favorite and most trusted man in the sprawling city; a mage, and him neither aged nor bald; a young man with knowledge of the Book of Skelos, and more knowledge than the Picts possessed of their own abominable Children of Jhil, and knowledge too of the evil-reeking tomes of Sabatea of the golden peacock; as much knowledge, surely, as was possessed by the sorcerous Stygians in their nighted vaults.
In a year or less, did Akter retain his throne, Zafra might well rule here, Chia knew. And did Balad succeed—well, she had her own little plans going along that line.
He was fascinated with her, she knew, as if it were she who was the mage, not he. Yet she was fascinated with him as well, for his differentness and his daring… and his power and the prospect of more. And of course Chia of Argos knew that eventually she must tire of him—unless perhaps he retained and consolidated his power, and gained more!
“Balad is hardly without support,” she said, arching her brows while lowering her lashes heavy with kohl applied to perfumed salve. “And his… talkative supporters, up in Aghrapur, the capital.”
She always referred to that city not only by its name, but as “Aghrapur, the capital,” and Zafra knew that she lusted for it; the seat of Empire. “Add ‘of Turan, of which our Zamboula is a satrapy,’” he said, “and I shall wring your lovely neck.”
Smiling lazily, deliberately disarranging what clothing she wore, she said it.
“Ah witch,” Zafra said, “witch!” And on the instant he decided to raise a wart on her cheek. Just a little one, to give her something to think about.
“What better consort for a mage,” she said, smiling lazily, “mage; intimate of demons!”
“Hardly. Now look you, Chia—”
She stretched, lithely postured for him with a rippling of magnificent tigerine musculature beneath amber skin taut as the head of drum. “Call me Tigress, Zafra, Tiger!”
“
He
calls you that, Chia. Listen, or I shall show you some of my powers! Do you know that I have but to do this and that, and you will drop to your knees, to your belly, to grovel and crawl like a snake?”
She gripped the edge of a table lined with aludels and athanors, and jars and phials of strange content. She arched her back, thrust out her backside, and wagged her hips while she stared cat-eyed at him.
“Oh? Would you like that? Would you like me so, mage? I will do it, if you but ask, my sorcerous love! No need to waste your spells!”