Conan: Blood of the Serpent by Stirling S. M

Author:Stirling, S. M. [Stirling, S. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags:  , Adventure, Fantasy
ISBN: 9781803361833
Amazon: 1803361832
Goodreads: 60715892
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2022-12-06T08:00:00+00:00

* * *

After a while they turned again, and Conan followed his chance-met companion. She tapped him with a signal when it was safe to stand and walk—though when they did he stooped and kept a hand in front of and above his head.

The woman was tall, but not a giant. She seemed to know where she was going, never hesitating when they came to a branching. He felt around the turns they took and nodded—unseen—to himself when he found a pattern of three horizontal chips taken out of the rock on the side to which they turned. These caves were marked.

“Your name?” he said after a while, in his basic Stygian. “Where from?”

“Name Irawagbon,” she said. There was a grin in her voice when she added, “Means… ‘Enemy Tried to Kill Her and Failed.’”

He laughed outright, and the sound echoed. That was a good name for someone with the spirit and skills he’d seen in the brief savage fight.

“I from Ahasu, means King… Osakwe—which name is ‘the Lord Agrees.’”

Ah, Abomey, he thought. That was a neighbor to Darfar’s southeast, smaller but by repute fierce and unafraid of a fight.

“King Osakwe wife, me,” she added. “King’s spear wife.” This puzzled him until he remembered the Abomean king’s amazon guard regiment and its legal fiction of marriage to their overlord.

“Is this Abomey?” he asked, slapping his foot on a patch of rock to show what he meant. This time she laughed.

“Thing which many wise men crack their heads for,” she said, “and warriors crack each other’s heads for.” That took a moment to get across. Talking in a language foreign to both was a problem he was familiar with.

“This Abomey, this Punt, this Darfar, this Stygia,” she said. “All say, my-land, my-land, but no men here, no farms—only beasts. Maybe kingdom of lion, of hyena, of elephant.”

He nodded, then grunted agreement because she couldn’t see him. From what he heard, many of the black kingdoms south of Stygia were big—in area and folk both—but their populations were islands in a vast sea of wilderness, separated by great stretches where only nomads, hunters, and raiders went.

“Who you? Where from?”

“Conan,” he said, “a Cimmerian.” Then had to explain that Cimmeria lay far north of the great western kingdoms, which amazed her—Argos and Koth and the rest were realms of myth to her.

“A friend of mine was in the same warband as I,” he said, “but a Stygian tried to take her by force.”

Irawagbon snorted with the air of someone unsurprised.

“She killed him and fled, with his brother chasing her, heading south.”

“Run south, past here?” This time he could hear surprise in her voice.

“Yes. Is that strange?”

“Much south here, forest… jungle, we say. Bad to travel. Then lands cursed. Go there, get eaten by—” They had to hunt back and forth before he understood she meant something reptilian and enormous, or “taller than four men, heavy as elephant, eat people,” as she put it. After his encounters with crocodiles Conan wasn’t eager to meet such a dragon-beast.

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