When he answered her summons this morn, he had felt no such all-consuming desire. He wanted her, wanted her more than he had ever wanted any woman, more than he had wanted all the many women of his life together, but there had been a sense of restraint within him, strictures unnatural to his nature holding him in check. He did not lose control of himself with women—were his memories of the day before true?—but neither did he face them feeling bound with stout ropes.
And he had deferred to her! When, as haughty and regal as any queen, she commanded him as to how to order his men on the march, his urge had been to snort and tell her brusquely that such matters were his province. Instead he had found himself almost pleading with her, painfully convincing her that she should leave the command of his company to him. He had met kings and potentates and not acted so. How did this woman affect him in this manner? This time, he vowed, it would be different.
He stopped before Synelle’s curtained litter and bowed. “If it pleases my lady, we should be moving on.” Inwardly he snarled at himself. He was no man to break vows, and this had gone as swiftly as if it had never been made. What was the matter with him? Yet he could change nothing. “It is dangerous, my lady, to stay still so long with bandits and worse about.”
A delicate hand parted the mesh curtain, and Synelle looked out at him calmly, a small smile curling her full lips. Her traveling garb of cool linen clung to her, revealing the curves and shadows of her. Conan’s mouth went dry, and his palms dampened, at the sight.
“It would not be so dangerous,” she said, “had you obeyed me and brought your entire company.”
Conan gritted his teeth. Half of him wanted to tell this fool woman that she should leave the trade of arms to those who knew it; the other half wanted to stammer an apology. “We must be moving, my lady,” he said finally. It had been an effort to say only that, and he feared he did not want to know what else he might have said.
“Very well. You may see to it,” she said, letting the curtain fall.
Conan bowed again before turning away.
His stomach roiled as he strode back to his horse. Perhaps he was going mad. “To horse!” he roared, swinging into his saddle. “Mount and pre
pare to move! Oxdrivers to your animals!” Chattering men and giggling women darted along the row of carts. “Keep those maids off the carts!” he shouted. “We need what speed we can manage, and no extra weight for the animals! Move you!”
Harness creaked as massive beasts took up the strain; mercenaries scrambled to their mounts in a rattle of armor.
Conan raised his arm to signal the advance, and at that instant a mass of horsemen in chain-mail charged from the trees. Shrieks rose from terrified women, and the oxen, sensing the humans’ fear, bellowed mournfully. This was what the Cimmerian had feared since leaving Ianthe, but for that reason he was ready for it.
“Bows!” he commanded, and short, curved horse-bows came into thirty hands beside his own.
Those powerful bows, unknown in the west except for Conan’s Free-Company, could not be drawn as ordinary bows were. Nocking an arrow with a three-fingered grip on the bowstring, the huge Cimmerian placed those fingers against his cheek and thrust the bow out from him.
There were close to a hundred of them, he estimated as he drew, wearing the sign of no house and carrying no banners or pennons, yet armored too well for bandits. He loosed, and thirty more shafts flew after his. They were still too distant to pick individual targets, but the mass of them made target enough. Saddles emptied, but the onrushing men-at-arms, their wordless battle cries rising, came on. By the time Conan let his third arrow fly—the feathered shaft lanced through the eye-slit of the foremost horseman’s white-plumed helmet; the man threw his hands to his face and rolled backwards over the rump of his still racing horse—the enemy had closed too much for bows to be of further use.
“Out swords!” he called, thrusting his bow back into its lacquered wooden scabbard behind his saddle. As he drew sword and thrust his left arm through the leather straps of his round shield with its spiked boss, he realized his helm still hung from his pommel. Battle rage was on him; let them see who killed them, he thought. “Crom!” he shouted. “Crom and steel!”
At the pressure of his knees, the big Aquilonian black burst forward into a gallop. Conan caught sight of Synelle, standing by her litter with her mouth open in a scream he could not hear for the blood pounding in his ears, then his mount was smashing into another horse, riding the lighter animal down, trampling its armored rider beneath steel-shod hooves.
The huge Cimmerian caught a blade on his shield, and his answering stroke severed the arm wielding it at the shoulder. Immediately he reversed to a backslash that cut deep into the neck of another foe.
Dimly he was aware of others of his men about him in the frenzied melee, but such were of necessity a series of individual combats; only when the vagaries of battle drew two comrades together did men of one side or the other stand together against their enemy.
A chain-mailed man rode close with broadsword raised high to chop, and Conan drove the spike on his shield into the man’s chest, ripping him from the saddle with one jerk of a massive arm. War-trained, his big black lashed out with flashing fore-hooves at foemen’s horses as he hacked deeper into the press with his murderous steel.
From beyond the swirling frenzy of slashing, shouting, dying men came a cry. “Conan! For the Cimmerian!”
About time, a cool corner of Conan’s brain thought, and Narus, with twenty more mercenaries following, charged into the rear of the enemy. There was no time for more thought, for he was trading furious sword-strokes with a man whose chain-mail was splashed with blood not his own. He saw one of his men go down, head half-severed. The killer came galloping past, waving his gory blade and screaming a warcry. Conan kicked a foot free of its stirrup and booted the shouting man from his horse. The Cimmerian’s blade freed itself from his opponent’s and thrust under the other’s chin, shattering the steel links of his mail coif and bringing a scarlet gout from his ruined throat. The man Conan had kicked from his saddle scrambled to his feet as his fellow fell, but the young giant’s broadsword struck once, battering down his upraised steel, twice, and his headless corpse dropped across his comrade’s body.
“Crom and steel!”
“Conan! Conan!”
“For the Cimmerian!”
It was too much for the mailed attackers, embattled before and behind, a huge northland beserker in their midst and no knowing in the fog of battle how many it was they faced. First a single man fled the combat, then another. Panic rippled through them, and cohesion was gone. By twos and threes they fought to get away. As they scattered some of the mercenaries set out in pursuit, echoing the halloing cry of hunters riding down deer.
“Back, you fools!” Conan bellowed. “Back, Black Erlik rot you!”
Reluctantly the mercenaries gave over the chase, and in moments the last of the mailed men still able to flee had melted into the forest. The men of the company who had pursued trotted back, waving gory swords and rasing shouts of victory.
“A most excellent plan, Cimmerian,” Narus laughed as he galloped up, “having us trail behind as a surprise for unwelcome guests.” His jazeraint hauberk was splattered with blood, no drop of which was his. The gaunt-faced man, disease-riddled though he appeared, was equal to Machaon with a blade, and none but Conan was their master. “Ten to one in gold they never knew how many hit them.”
“A difficult wager to settle,” Conan said, but half his mind on the other. “Machaon,” he called, “what’s the butcher’s price?”