Conan the Hero

Chapter 1 The Shikhara The jungle pond spread murky and stagnant, shaded by dense foliage. A few ripples glided across its green-scummed surface to lap against the slimy shoreline. Then, close above the black water, the tangled thicket of rushes parted and a face peered through. Dark it was, shadowed and obscure as the muzzle of a stalking beast. Yet from its dimness glinted eyes blue as brooding northern skies, a color seldom seen in these rank jungle depths. The pale, foreign eyes searched the tree-filtered daylight of the pond bank. Seeing no exceptional danger, the watcher parted the reeds and eased out from between them: a massive man, sword-bearing and grotesquely painted, wading thigh-deep in the stagnant water. He moved topheavy with a sun-darkened breadth of chest and shoulder, supple as an acrobat poised for swift, forceful action. The colors on his face were muddy tones of lampblack and umber; for further concealment, his headband and lank black mane trailed fern fronds, leafy stems, and other spoor of the forest. The remainder of his costume was sparse, a brief leather breech-wrap anchoring knifebelt and swordbelt crisscrossed on his bare chest and back. Except for the sheen of his fine steel weapons and their bronze-studded fittings, he might have passed for a savage child of the jungle. He paused in the pond scum, extending the long, double-curved blade of his yataghan to redirect the course of a yellow-green water serpent away from his naked thigh. Then he glided forward, his muscle-corded legs and sandaled feet draining the slime and yellow bottom-muck of the pool. Once ashore he paused, bending to pluck red leeches from the glistening calves of his legs. Straightening, he beckoned behind him with his sword to others yet unseen. The next man to emerge from the reeds needed no lampblack, since his skin was already dark as jungle night. His face had been daubed instead with white clay to break up its full-featured symmetry. He stood fully as large as the first warrior, armed and armored with light mail and an identical S-curved blade. And he might have moved just as gracefully through the mire, if his attention had not been taken up by others toiling behind him. The half-dozen who followed were less grandly-sized men, with the olive skins and hawk noses of Turanians evident beneath their daubed makeup. They wore bewildering variations of Turanian military garb, with here a spiked metal cap, there a short purple tunic or chain-mail vest. In further defiance of common uniform, their outfits were threaded with jungle fronds, bright blossoms, and long, iridescent plumes of tropical birds. The blades they bristled with clanked often, and their progress through the marsh occasioned low splashes and muttered curses. These sounds invariably caused the black officer to wheel on them, hissing fiercely for silence. Their pale-skinned scout, meanwhile, moved higher up the pond's steepening bank. He sank in places to all fours, his yataghan sheathed now on his back. From a distance, his progress was visible only by the faint play of jungle light on flexing limbs and the occasional flicker of a disturbed branch or a frightened, upward-spiraling moth. There was no larger animal life to be seen; though one might expect the dense overgrowth to be alive with the rustlings and twitterings of small creatures, a watchful silence reigned. From the creeping warrior's own vantage, the way was by no means effortless. His course lay through clinging, dripping foliage, beneath and around slack vines whose thorns could gouge and poison the skin. Yet he dared not stop long to find his way, lest the hovering flies and blood-seeking gnats should settle on his skin to bite and suck their fill. Near the crest above the pond, the foliage opened out. The creeper braced his hands on the littered earth to haul himself up and peer over the top. TheCarpenter, Leonard is the author of 'Conan the Hero' with ISBN 9780812519075 and ISBN 0812519078.