Free Conan The Hero by Leonard Carpenter Page A

cost of calling attention to yourself.” He shook his head. “Of all things, the worst thing to be in this war is a hero!”
    Conan laughed, shaking his head good-naturedly. “Juma, Juma! If I thought that you yourself could live one moment by those craven rules, I would love you the less for it! But I know it is not so—and you know it, even though you mean me well in saying it.” He reached around the mat to lean heavily and confidingly on his friend’s shoulder. “For men like us, Juma, there are no limits. Tell me, have you ever played imperial draughts as the Stygians do?” He winked intimately at his fellow trooper. “In their version of the game, a pawn can advance to become a king!”
    “Conan, I do not jest.” Juma glanced uneasily at the open doorway. “You know the danger of even speaking that way, so let us talk of other things. Do you not see that Venjipur’s hunger for human suffering is greater than all the armies of Yildiz can satisfy? We must take care not to be swallowed along with the others.”
    They continued their conversation, failing to resolve many greater and lesser topics. During their talk, the afternoon rain fell. They laid their pans out in the yard to be scoured by heavy, pelting drops. They sat out on the porch enclosed by a dripping, transparent liquid curtain, watching rain-pitted water running and pooling across the yellow clay.
    At length the shower retreated into a mountainous jumble of misty cloud, pink-tinged in sunset over the Gulf. Juma took leave of them and returned to the fort, treading on flat stones spaced across the muddy yard. Conan, passing inside the hut, bolted the tough bamboo door, then turned to follow Sariya through the curtained inner archway.
    Their sleeping-room was bedecked with flowers. Twined into the palm thatching of the walls, braided between the rafters, gathered in clusters on the mat floor, the blossoms shone almost luminous in the dimming light of the bamboo-framed window. Their fragrance hung heavily in air already rich with the smell of rain-soaked earth. Conan knew that some of the flowers, like the drooping pink lotuses wound into the lashings of the room’s broad hammock, gave off fumes that were mildly narcotic. Their effect only increased the faint swimming of his senses as he watched Sariya unpin and unwind herself alluringly from her dusky-blue garment. Her body shone amber in the dusk, more radiant than the blossoms all around her, graceful as the slenderest lily.
    When he moved to embrace her, she turned her face up to his. He saw that she had twined a pink lotus in her black tresses, above one delicate ear. The flower’s heady aroma mingled with her own subtle scent as he caressed her, then lifted her bodily onto the yielding canvas of the hammock. The swaying of the airborne bed merely added to the plunging, reeling exhilaration of his own senses, as the two joined in a consuming rush of passion.
    Sariya, for her part, abandoned herself to the arduous labors and equally arduous pleasures of her new existence. Though little-traveled, secluded from the world throughout her youth, she guessed that no man could make her feel the fullness of life’s simple round better than Conan. She cherished their time together, using her well-learned skills to reward him and make things better, for however long it might last.
    There were dangers, of course; but Sariya believed that Conan could cope with the immediate, tangible ones. She knew that by night in their hammock, even after exhausting bouts of lovemaking, he slept no more deeply than any panther draped across a forest limb. She often heard him waken in response to faint noises outside the hut, sometimes slipping from beside her and out the window with inhuman stealth and silence.
    Once, on his return, she saw a gleam of steel as he wiped his dagger-blade clean, and smelled the coppery scent of blood when he crept back to her side. She sensed that his savage devotion would save her, or else