Conan and the Gods of the Mountain Part 13

"Conan, you have too cursed many ways of making a woman wish to keep you alive!"

FIVE.

Conan led the way down the tunnel. If danger should arise, it would most likely come from another beast, drawn by the din of the first one's death. It could also come with the Cimmerian's blessing, if it waited until he and Valeria were safely out of its path!

The tunnel sloped steadily downward, and the air grew damper. It was not as foul as one would have expected, though, as far underground as it lay, and with so much death and rottenness about.

Conan found small relief in that. Ancient magic must be all about them here, shedding light, cleansing the air, and giving life to who-knew-what monstrosities besides those they had already met. A sword and the untamed jungle before him would be his choice, but every step they took seemed to take them farther into the bowels of this warren.

Clearly, the beast and its kin had pa.s.sed this way many times. Even the hardest rock of walls and floor was scored by claws and scales. Loose scales in half a score of hues had drifted like autumn leaves into crannies and windings of the tunnel. In one place, a bronze post the thickness of Conan's arm had bent almost double under the onrush of something swift, strong, and ma.s.sive.

Once the tunnel branched, and Conan thought he saw a slight upward slope in the floor of the branch, at the very limits of his vision.

This proved no trick of the light, but fifty paces farther on came a bend, and just beyond that, a dead end.

Nor was the dead end a natural rockfall. An enormous door of stone slabs set in what seemed to be a frame of gilded bronze blocked the way. Conan saw that it slid to and fro in bronze grooves that led into niches on either side of the tunnel.

The least of the slabs had to weigh more than the Cimmerian, and the thinnest metal rods of the frames were thicker than Valeria's legs.

Some of the rods were wrought in the shape of serpents, and more serpents writhed across the slabs, some of them painted in tiny jewels, others cunningly carved.

Conan did not care to think what spells might be needed to move this door. Spells, or perhaps some device that would rival those of drowned Atlantis and make a siege-engine of Khitai seem a child's toy.

"Some of those serpents have green eyes," Valeria whispered. The awe of this place and its ancient works was in her, too. "Are they meant to be the Golden Serpents?"

Conan studied the shapes. The gilding was worn in places and tarnished in more, but, in truth, the eyes of all the serpents, carved or painted, were tiny green jewels. Studying them yet more closely, he saw that the jewels seemed to glow from within like the fire-stones they had seen in Xuchotl.

"Ha! Perhaps we've found where the Golden Serpents laired in ancient times," he said. "They would be cause enough for a door like this. It would stop a galley's ram."

"Then let us hope it does its work until we are out of these caves,"

Valeria said.

"Woman, where is a true pirate's heart?" Conan scoffed. He thrust a forefinger against Valeria's ribs.

She lightly batted his hand away. "Down in her boots, I confess, although I'll geld you if you breathe a word of it." She rubbed her stomach. "Her stomach's about to follow." She looked at the fungi under her arm. "Are these really fit to eat?"

"They haven't killed me yet."

"Just let me eat my fill, and no doubt you will writhe and die the moment afterward."

The bronze door would have guarded their backs nicely, but who could say what lay on the other side? Also, if one of the beasts should catch their scent and come down the branch tunnel, they would be trapped.

So they returned to the junction of the tunnels to eat. "Tastes like raw sea slugs," Valeria said after a few mouthfuls.

"And how are they? I've heard of them, but also that they're poison if not cooked."

"It's not the cooking that takes out the poison. There's a spot in the head that needs cutting out, or one slug can kill a ship's crew. A cunning hand with a knife can do the work, though, and then the slug's called a rare treat in some lands. Mostly farther south than we've sailed, but during one hot summer, the slugs sp.a.w.ned farther north than usual."

They finished as much fungus as seemed wise, in a silence that was almost companionable. Conan vowed that if he and Valeria lived to reach a land with civilized eating-houses, he would buy her a meal she would not soon forget.

Meanwhile, they had traveled long enough and far enough to be weary.

They tossed a piece of fungus for who kept first watch, and Conan won the honor.

"Need we keep watches at all?" Valeria asked. She pressed a hand lightly against the Cimmerian's battered ribs. He drew a deep breath, but not from any pain her touch gave him.

"I've no wish to end up in the belly of one of those beasts, or to be trampled by one, either. And they may not be all that roam down here."

"Now you have made it certain that I will not sleep for the waking nightmares you just gave me!" Her pouting, though, was largely pretense.

Conan gripped Valeria's hand and gently thrust it away. "Lose no sleep over me, at least. I've had worse hurts as a boy, falling off a roof my father and I were thatching."

"As you wish, Conan," Valeria said. She turned and settled down from where she could watch in all directions. Conan allowed himself a moment to admire the fine, straight back that plunged down from the long neck to the well-rounded hips. Then he placed his steel ready to hand, kicked off his boots, and lay down to seek as much slumber as a man might win from a cold stone floor with magic all about him.

The hut where Dobanpu Spirit-Speaker slept when he visited the largest Ichiribu village was a place of shadows and subtle odors. It almost seemed to Seyganko that a tame spirit lurked in the gra.s.s of the roof, driving out the light.

The odors mingled gra.s.s, cooking smoke, the smoke of fires made with herbs, and the oil that Emwaya rubbed into her skin. Seyganko remembered the first time she had allowed him the honor of rubbing it in. His body tautened with remembered and antic.i.p.ated desire.

In her corner of the hut, Emwaya sat like a carved image. She wore the plainest of waistcloths and only a single bone ornament in her hair, and her face was somber as she shifted her gaze from her father to her betrothed.

"You asked what we must do, Father?" she asked.

"In plain words," Dobanpu replied. His voice was the strongest part of him remaining, although he had not wholly lost the stout thews and broad shoulders of his youth. He had seen nearly sixty turns of the seasons and outlived all the children of his first wives, and all but Emwaya from his second family.

Some said he had suffered these losses as the price of all the time he had spent in the spirit world. Even those who said this whispered it.

When they spoke aloud, they praised the courage with which he had borne his losses. They did doubt aloud the wisdom of his teaching his daughter the art of Spirit-Speaking, but only when Emwaya was not in hearing. Some called her tongue the deadliest weapon among the Ichiribu.

Dobanpu rose, stretching limbs cramped by long sitting. "Very surely, I want to know your thoughts as to what we must do," he said. "I did not go against all custom in teaching you my arts to have you sit as mute as the frog-queen in the tale of Myosta!"

"You asked, I answer," Emwaya said. "We must watch Aondo. Or better yet, find a way to take his weapons."

"Aondo is needed among the warriors," Seyganko said.

"Even at your back?"

"Properly watched, even at my back," the warrior a.s.serted. "We can do nothing against him without dishonor and insult."

"If he feels insult, he can challenge you. That will be the end of him."

Dobanpu laughed softly. "Daughter, you have more faith in your betrothed's prowess than is wise. Aondo is so strong that it might not matter if he is as slow as a mired hippopotamus. Remember that when the great-jawed one reaches its victim, it is certain death."

"Indeed," Seyganko said. "Also, any man's foot may slip if his luck is out and the spirits not with him. They might well desert me if I dishonored a proven warrior like Aondo by trapping him into a death-duel."

"You speak of what the spirits might do?" Emwaya snapped.

"Yes, and if it is not to your liking, you may ask your father to end his teaching of me!"

Warrior and woman glared at each other for a moment, while Dobanpu raised his eyes to the shadowed ceiling and seemed to be asking the spirits for a brief moment of deafness, that he might not hear two whom he loved making fools of themselves. At last it was Emwaya who lowered her eyes.

That, Seyganko knew, was as much of an apology as he was likely to receive. But Emwaya was now of a mind to listen, and he could speak more freely.