Part 21 (1/2)

”I'll sail with you,” he grunted, shaking the red drops from his blade.

”Ho, N'Yaga!” her voice tw.a.n.ged like a bowstring. ”Fetch herbs and dress your master's wounds! The rest of you bring aboard the plunder and cast off.”

As Conan sat with his back against the p.o.o.p-rail, while the old shaman attended to the cuts on his hands and limbs, the cargo of the ill-fated Argus was quickly s.h.i.+fted aboard the Tigress and stored in small cabins below deck. Bodies of the crew and of fallen pirates were cast overboard to the swarming sharks, while wounded blacks were laid in the waist to be bandaged. Then the grappling-irons were cast off, and as the Argus sank silently into the blood-flecked waters, the Tigress moved off southward to the rhythmic clack of the oars.

As they moved out over the gla.s.sy blue deep, Belit came to the p.o.o.p. Her eyes were burning like those of a she-panther in the dark as she tore off her ornaments, her sandals and her silken

128.girdle and cast them at his feet. Rising on tiptoe, arms stretched upward, a quivering line of naked white, she cried to the desperate horde: ”Wolves of the blue sea, behold ye now the dance the mating-dance of Belit, whose fathers were kings of Askalon!”

And she danced, like the spin of a desert whirlwind, like the leaping of a quenchless flame, like the urge of creation and the urge of death. Her white feet spurned the blood-stained deck and dying men forgot death as they gazed frozen at her. Then, as the white stars glimmered through the blue velvet dusk, making her whirling body a blur of ivory fire, with a wild cry she threw herself at Conan's feet, and the blind flood of the Cimmerian's desire swept all else away as he crushed her panting form against the black plates of his corseleted breast.

THE BLACK LOTUS.

In that dead citadel of crumbling stone Her eyes were snared by that unholy sheen,

And curious madness took me by the throat, As of a rival lover thrust between.

The Song of Belit.

TheTigress ranged the sea, and the black villages shuddered. Tom-toms beat in the night, with a tale that the she-devil of the sea had found a mate, an iron man whose wrath was as that of a wounded lion. And survivors of butchered Stygian s.h.i.+ps named Belit with curse, and a white warrior with fierce blue eyes; so the Stygian princes remembered this man long and long, and their memory was a bitter tree which bore crimson fruit in the years to come.

But heedless as a vagrant wind, the Tigress cruised the southern coasts, until she anch.o.r.ed at the mouth of a broad sullen river, whose banks were jungle-clouded walls of mystery.

”This is the river Zarkheba, which is Death,” said Belit. ”Its waters are poisonous. See how dark and murky they run? Only venomous reptiles live in that river. The black people shun it.

Once a Stygian galley, fleeing from me, fled up the river and vanished. I anch.o.r.ed in this very spot, and days later, the galley came floating down the dark waters, its decks blood-stained and deserted. Only one man was on board, and he was mad and died gibbering. The cargo was intact, but the crew had vanished into silence and mystery.

”My lover, I believe there is a city somewhere on that river. I have heard tales of giant towers

129.and walls glimpsed afar off by sailors who dared go part-way up the river. We fear nothing: Conan, let us go and sack that city!”

Conan agreed. He generally agreed to her plans. Hers was the mind that directed their raids, his the arm that carried out her ideas. It mattered little to him where they sailed or whom they fought, so long as they sailed and fought. He found the life good.

Battle and raid had thinned their crew; only some eighty spearmen remained, scarcely enough to work the long galley. But Belit would not take the time to make the long cruise southward to the island kingdoms where she recruited her buccaneers. She was afire with eagerness for her latest venture; so the Tigress swung into the river-mouth, the oarsmen pulling strongly as she breasted the broad current.

They rounded the mysterious bend that shut out the sight of the sea, and sunset found them forging steadily against the sluggish flow, avoiding sand bars where strange reptiles coiled. Not even a crocodile did they see, nor any four-legged beast or winged bird coming down to the water's edge to drink. On through the blackness that preceded moonrise they drove, between banks that were solid palisades of darkness, whence came mysterious rustlings and stealthy footfalls, and the gleam of grim eyes. And once an inhuman voice was lifted in awful mockery

the cry of an ape, Belit said, adding that the souls of evil men were imprisoned in these manlike animals as punishment for past crimes. But Conan doubted, for once, in a gold-barred cage in an Hyrkanian city, he had seen an abysmal sad-eyed beast which men told him was an ape, and there had been about it naught of the demoniac malevolence which vibrated in the shrieking laughter that echoed from the black jungle.

Then the moon rose, a splash of blood, ebony-barred, and the jungle awoke in horrific bedlam to greet it. Roars and howls and yells set the black warriors to trembling, but all this noise, Conan noted, came from farther back in the jungle, as if the beasts no less than men shunned the black waters of Zarkheba.

Rising above the black denseness of the trees and above the waving fronds, the moon silvered the river, and their wake became a rippling scintillation of phosph.o.r.escent bubbles that widened like a s.h.i.+ning road of bursting jewels. The oars dipped into the s.h.i.+ning water and came up sheathed in frosty silver. The plumes on the warriors' head-pieces nodded in the wind, and the gems on sword-hilts and harness sparkled frostily.

The cold light struck icy fire from the jewels in Belit's cl.u.s.tered black locks as she stretched her lithe figure on a leopardskin thrown on the deck. Supported on her elbows, her chin resting on her slim hands, she gazed up into the face of Conan, who lounged beside her, his black mane stirring in the faint breeze. Belit's eyes were dark jewels burning in the moonlight.

”Mystery and terror are about us, Conan, and we glide into the realm of horror and death,” she

130.said. ”Are you afraid?”

A shrug of his mailed shoulders was his only answer.

”I am not afraid either,” she said meditatively. ”I was never afraid. I have looked into the naked fangs of Death too often. Conan, do you fear the G.o.ds?”