The jungle soon began anew. Here, however, were signs of the pa.s.sing of man^ lacking in the other forests through which he had hewn a laborious way. Narrow paths were beaten through the undergrowth, though it ma.s.sed as thickly as ever among the cl.u.s.tered bamboo stems on the sides. Vines festooned the trees; gay-feathered birds twittered. From far away came the snarl of a hunting leopard.
Conan slunk along the path like an animal born to jungle life. From the information he had gleaned from the Khitan slave freed after the sea fight on the Vilayet Sea, he deduced that he was now in the jungle bordering the city-state of Paikang. The Khitan had told him that it took eight days to cross this belt of forest. Conan counted on making it in four. Drawing upon his immense barbarian resources of vitality, he could undergo exertions unthinkable to other men.
Now his goal was to reach some settlement. The tale was that the forest folk lived in dread of Pai-kang"s cruel ruler. Therefore Conan counted on finding friends who could furnish him with directions for reaching the city.
The eerie atmosphere of the bamboo jungle pressed down upon him with almost physical force. Unbroken and unexplored for thousands of years, save for narrow paths and small clearings, it seemed to hold the answers to the mysteries of aeons. An enigmatic aura of brooding enveloped the glossy, naked stems of the bamboo, which rose on every hand in jutting profusion. The esoteric traditions of this land reached back before the first fire was lit in the West. Vast and ancient was the knowledge h.o.a.rded by its philosophers, artisans, and sorcerers.
Conan shrugged off the depressing influence and gripped the hilt of his tulwar more firmly. His feet trod silently on the matting of moldering leaves. His faculties were sharpened and alert, like those of a wolf raiding into the lands of a foreign pack. There was a rustle among the half-rotten leaves. A great snake, slate-gray with a flaming red zigzag along its back, reared its head from its hiding place. It struck viciously, with bared and dripping fangs. At that instant, the steel in Conan"s hand flashed. The tulwar"s keen edge severed the head of the reptile, which writhed and twisted in its death throes. Conan grimly cleaned his blade and pressed on.
Then he halted. Stock-still he stood, ears sharpened to the utmost, nostrils widened to catch the faintest scent. He had heard the clank of metal and now could catch the sound of voices.
Swiftly but cautiously he advanced. The path made a sudden turn a hundred paces further on. At this corner his sharp eyes sought the cause of the disturbance.
In a small clearing, two powerful yellow-skinned Khitans were trussing a saffron-hued girl to a tree. Unlike most of the Far Eastern folk, these men were tall and powerful. Their lacquered, laminated armor and flaring helmets gave them a sinister, exotic look. At their sides hung broad, curved swords in lacquered wooden scabbards. Cruelty and brutality were stamped on their features.
The girl twisted in their grip, uttering frantic pleas in the singsong, liquid Khitan tongue. Having learned more than a smattering of it in his youth, when he had served the king of Turan as a mercenary, Conan found he could understand the words. The captive"s slant-eyed face was of a startling oriental beauty.
Her pleading had no effect on her merciless captors, who continued their work. Conan felt his rage mounting. This was one of those cruel human sacrifices which he had tried to stamp out in the western world but which were still common in the East. His blood boiled at the sight of this manhandling of a defenseless girl. He broke from cover with a bull-like rush, sword out.
The crackling of the underbrush beneath the Cimmerian"s feet reached the ears of the Khitan soldiers. They swung round towards the sound, and their eyes widened with unfeigned surprise. Both whipped out their swords and prepared to meet the barbarian"s attack with arrogant confidence. They spoke no word, but the girl cried out:
"Flee! Do not try to save me! These are the best swordsmen in Khitai!
They belong to the bodyguard of Yah Chieng!"
The name of his foe brought a greater fury to Conan"s heart. With slitted eyes, he struck the Khitans like a charging lion.
Unequalled as swordsmen in Khitai they may have been, but before the wrath of Conan they were like straws in the wind. The barbarian"s blade whirled in a flashing dance of death before their astonished eyes. He feinted and struck, crushing armor and shoulder bone beneath the keen edge of his hard-driven tulwar. The first yellow man sank down, dying.
The other, hissing like a snake, exploded into a fierce attack. Neither fighter would give way. Their blades crashed ringingly together. Then the inferior steel of Khitai broke before the supple strength of the tulwar, forged from matchless Himelian ore by a Khirguli smith. Conan"s blade ripped through the armor plate into the Khitan"s heart.
With muted fear, the captive girl had followed the fight with widened eyes. When Conan broke from cover, she thought him one of her friends or relatives, bent upon a mad attempt to rescue her.
Now she saw that he was a cheng-li, a white-skinned foreigner from the legendary lands west of the Great Wall and the Wuhuan Desert. Would he devour her alive, as legends averred? Or would he drag her back to his homeland as slave, to work chained in a filthy dungeon the rest of her life?
Her fears were soon allayed by Conan"s friendly grin as he swiftly cut her bonds. His appreciative glance ran over her limbs, not with the air of a captor sizing up the value of a captive, but with the glance of a free man looking upon a free woman. Her cheeks were suffused with blood before his frank admiration.
"By Macha" he said, "I did not know they bred women this beautiful in the yellow lands! It seems I should have visited these parts long ago!"
His accent was far from perfect, but she had no difficulty in following the words.
"Seldom do white strangers come to Khitai," she answered. "Your arrival and victory were timed by the G.o.ds. But for you, those two" (she indicated the corpses) "would have left me helpless prey to the terror Yah Chieng has let loose in the jungle."
"I have sworn to settle my debt with that scoundrel," growled Conan.
"It seems I have to settle yours at the same time. What is this jungle terror you speak of?"
"None has met it and lived to tell. Men say the arch wizard has conjured up a monster out of forgotten ages, when fire-breathing beasts walked the earth and the crust shook with earthquakes and eruptions. He holds the land in abject terror of it, and human sacrifices are often demanded. The fairest women and ablest men are taken by his soldiers to feed the maw of the beast of terror."
"Meseems this is no healthy neighborhood," said Conan. "Though I fear not this monster of yours, I"d as lief not be hindered by it on my way to Paikang. Is your village far?"
Before she could answer, there was a heavy crashing in the undergrowth.
The bamboo stems shook and swayed, and a hoa.r.s.e bellow reached their startled ears. Conan gripped his hilt, a grim smile on his lips. The girl shrank behind his mighty frame. Tense as a tiger, the Cimmerian waited.
With a croaking growl, a giant, scaly form crashed through the undergrowth at the fringe of the clearing. Dimly seen in the darkness of the forest, the sunlight of the glade revealed its terrible form in full. Forty feet it measured from snout to spiked tail. Its short, bowed legs were armed with sharp, curved claws. Its jaws were gigantic, set with teeth beside which a sabertooth"s fangs were puny. Mighty swellings at the sides of its head told of the great muscles that worked this awful engine of destruction. Its scaly hide was of a repellant leaden hue, and its fetid breath stank of moldering corpses.
It stopped for a moment in the sunlight, blinking. Conan used the time for swift action.
"Climb that tree! He can"t reach you there!" he thundered to the terror-frozen girl.
Stung to action, the girl followed his command, while the Cimmerian"s attention was again engaged by the giant lizard. This was one of the most formidable antagonists he had ever faced. Armored knights, sword-swinging warriors, blood thirsty carnivores, and skulking poisoners-all were dwarfed by the menace of this giant engine of destruction rushing upon him.
But the foremost hunter of the Cimmerian hills, the jungles of Kush, and the Turanian steppes was not to be taken in one gulp. Conan stood his ground, lest, if he fled or climbed a tree, the dragon should turn its attention to the girl. Then, an instant before the mighty jaws would have closed about him, he sprang to one side. The impetus of the dragon"s charge carried it crashing into the undergrowth, while Conan ran to a clump of bamboos.
More quickly than he expected, the monster, roaring and crashing, untangled itself from the thickets and returned to the attack. Conan saw that he could not hope to reach the tree in which the girl had taken refuge in time to escape those frightful jaws. The glossy tubes of the bamboo afforded no holds for climbing, and their stems would be snapped by a jerk of the monster"s head. No safety lay that way.
Whipping out his Zhaibar knife, Conan chopped through the base of a slim stem of bamboo. Another cut, slantwise, sheared off its crown of leaves and left a gla.s.sy-sharp rounded point. With this improvised ten-foot lance, Conan charged his oncoming adversary.
He rammed the point between the gaping jaws and down the darkness of the gullet. With a mighty heave of his straining muscles, Conan drove the bamboo deeper and deeper into the soft internal tissues of the dragon. Then the jaws slammed shut, biting off the shaft a foot from Oman"s hand, and a sidewise lunge of the head hurled Conan into a thicket twenty feet away.
The grisly reptile writhed in agony, uttering shrieks of pain. Conan dragged himself to his feet, feeling as if every muscle in his body had been torn loose from its moorings. His arm ached as he drew his tulwar, yet by sheer will power he forced his battered body into service. He stumbled forward, half-blinded by dust, but avoiding the thrashing tail and snapping jaws.
Grimly, he put his whole strength into one desperate lunge for the monster"s eye. The blade went in like a knife through b.u.t.ter. The hilt was s.n.a.t.c.hed from his grasp by the last convulsions of the dying beast.
Again he was thrown to the ground, but with a final tremor, the hulk of his terrible foe subsided.
Conan gasped the dust-laden air, picked himself up, and limped toward the tree where huddled the girl.
"I must be growing old," he muttered between gasps "A little fight like that wouldn"t have bothered me at all in the old days."
This was but the barbarian"s naive way of belittling his feat. He knew that no other man could have done what he had just accomplished; nor could he have succeeded but for luck and the ways of fate. He roared hoa.r.s.ely:
"Come down, la.s.s! The dragon ate more bamboo than was good for him. Now lead me to your village. I shall need help from you in return."
9. The Dance of the Lions -------------------------.
Smoke of the yellow lotus spiraled wispily upward in the dim-lit bamboo hut. Like clutching tentacles, it writhed in fragrant streamers toward the chimney-hole in the ceiling, curling from the mouthpiece of carven jade ending the silken hose of the elaborate, gold-bowled water-pipe on the floor and from the pursed and wrinkled lips of an old Khitan, sitting cross-legged on a reed mat.
His face was like yellowed parchment. Nearly fourscore years must have weighed upon his shoulders. Yet there was an air of youthful energy and command about him, coupled with calm and serenity of thought. He held the mouthpiece in his left hand, puffing slowly in sybaritic enjoyment of the narcotic fumes. Meanwhile, his sharp black eyes studied the big, black-haired, white-skinned man in front of him, who sat upon a low stool and wolfed down the shi-la rice stew placed before him by the girl he had saved.
She was now clad in a chastely high-necked jacket and embroidered trousers, which set off her golden complexion and large, deep, slanted eyes to advantage. With her l.u.s.trous hair combed into a complex coiffure, it was a startling transformation from the tousle-headed, half-naked, frightened girl whom he had rescued from men and monster.
But he recalled the clasp of her hot arms during an hour of rest in the jungle, when she had given him a woman"s reward, freely and willingly, in a burst of Oriental pa.s.sion that needed no torch to inflame his desires.
One day and one night they had journeyed, resting only when the girl needed it. When she was utterly spent, he flung her across his broad shoulders, while his untiring legs pounded along. At last the path widened into a clearing. A dozen bamboo huts with shingled roofs were grouped near a brook, where fish splashed in silvery abundance.
Wooden-featured, yellow-skinned men emerged with swords and bows at the intrusion, only to utter cries of Joy and shouts of welcome to this savior of a daughter of their village.
For it seemed that these people were outcasts of n.o.ble blood, who had fled from the tyranny of Yah Chieng the Terrible. Now they dwelt on the edge of life, fearing every moment to be wiped out by a cohort of the sorcerer"s dreaded swordsmen.
Wiping his mouth with the appearance of surfeit and taking a last draft from the bowl of yellow rice wine, Conan listened to the words of his host.
"Aye, mighty was the clan of Kang, of which I, Kang Hsiu, am the head,"