Weighing the spear in his hand, Conan suddenly moved. Powerful legs drove him forward, his arm went back, and the spear arched high into the air. The hawk-faced huntsman stared open-mouthed at the spear arcing toward him, then screamed and hurled himself aside. Dust lifted from the butt as the spear slashed into the straw beside the two already there.
Telades ran forward, peering in disbelief, then whirled to throw his arms high. “By all the gods, he hit cloth! You who call yourselves spearmen, acknowledge your master! At a hundred paces he hit the cloth!”
A throng of hunters crowded around Conan, shouting their approval of his feat, striving to clasp his hand.
Abruptly the shouts faded as Jondra strode up. The hunters parted before her, waiting expectantly for what she would say. For a moment, though, she stood, strangely diffident, before speaking.
“You asked me a question, Cimmerian,” she said at la
st, looking over his shoulder rather than at him. ‘‘I do not give reasons for what I do, but you did save my life, and your cast was magnificent, so I will tell you alone. But in private. Come.” Back rigid and looking neither to left nor right, she turned and walked to her scarlet tent.
Conan followed more slowly. When he ducked through the tent flap, the well-curved noblewoman stood with her back to the entrance, toying with the laces of her leather jerkin. Fine Iranistani carpets, dotted with silken pillows, made a floor, and golden lamps stood on low, brass tables.
“Why, then?” he said.
She started, but did not turn around. “If the army is out in such force,” she said distractedly, “they must expect trouble of some sort. They would surely try to turn back a hunting party, and I do not want the trouble of convincing some general that I will not be ordered about by the army.”
“And you keep this secret?” Conan said, frowning. “Do you think your hunters have not reasoned some of this out themselves?”
“Is Lyana as you said?” she asked. “Pleasing to look on? More pleasing than I?”
“She is lovely.” Conan smiled at the stiffening of her back, and added judiciously, “But not so lovely as you.” He was young, but he knew enough of women to take care in speaking of one woman’s beauty to another.
“I will pay Arvaneus’s wager,” Jondra said abruptly. “He does not have five hundred pieces of silver.”
The tall Cimmerian blinked, taken aback by her sudden shift. “I will not take it from you. The wager was with him.”
Her head bowed, and she muttered, seemingly unaware that she spoke aloud. “Why is he always the same in my mind? Why must he be a barbarian?” Suddenly she turned, and Conan gasped. She had worked the laces from her jerkin, and the supple leather gaped open to bare heavy, round breasts and erect, pink nipples. “Did you think I brought you to my tent merely to answer your questions?” she cried. “I’ve allowed no man to touch me, but you will not even stretch out a hand. Will you make me be as shameless as—”
The young noblewoman’s words cut off as Conan pulled her to him. His big hands slid beneath her jerkin, fingers spreading on the smooth skin of her back, to press her full breasts against him. “I stretch out both hands,” he said, working the leather from her shoulders to fall to the carpets.
Clutching at him, she laid her head against his broad chest. “My hunters will know … they will guess what I … what you … .” She shivered and held to him harder.
Gently he tipped her head back and peered into her eyes, as gray as the clouds of a mountain morning. “If you fear what they think,” he said, “then why?”
The tip of her small pink tongue wet her lips. “I could never have made that spear cast,” she murmured, and pulled him down to the silken cushions.
Chapter 10
Conan tossed aside the fur coverlet and got to his feet with an appreciative look at Jondra’s nude form. She sighed in her sleep, and threw her arms over her head, tightening the domes of her breasts in such a way as to make him consider not dressing after all. Chuckling, he reached for his tunic instead. The locked iron chests containing her gems got not a wit of his attention.
Three days since the spear casting, he reflected, and for all her fears of what her hunters might think, it would take a man both blind and deaf to be still unaware of what occurred between Jondra and him. She had not let him leave her tent that first night, not even to eat, and the past two had been the same. Each morning, seemingly oblivious of the hunters’ smiles and Arvaneus’s glares, she insisted that Conan “guide” her while she hunted, a hunt that lasted only until she found a spot well away from the line of march where there was shade and a level surface large enough for two. The chaste, noble Lady Jondra had found that she liked lying with a man, and she was making up for lost opportunities.
Not that her absorbtion in the flesh was total. That first day she had been unsatisfied on their return with how far the column had traveled. Up and down the line she galloped, scoring men with her tongue till they were as shaken as if she had used her quirt. Arvaneus she took aside, and what she said to him no one heard, but when he galloped back his lips were a tight, pale line, and his black eyes smouldered. There had not been another day when the progress of the column failed to satisfy her.
Settling his black Khauranian cloak around his shoulders, Conan stepped out into the cool morning. He was pleased to see that the cookfires had at last been made with dried ox dung, as he had suggested. No smoke rose to draw eyes to them, and that was more important than ever, now. A day to the north of where they camped, at most two days amid the now steep-sloped hills, lay the towering ranges of the Kezankian, dark and jagged against the horizon.
The camp itself squatted atop a hill amidst trees twisted and stunted by arid, rocky soil. Every man wore his mail shirt and spiked helm at all times, now, and none went so far as the privy trenches without spear or bow.
A sweating Tamira, dodging from fire to fire under the watchful eye of the fat cook, gave Conan a grimace as she twisted a meat-laden spit half a turn. Arvaneus, sitting cross-legged near the fires, sullenly buried his face in a mug of wine when he saw the Cimmerian.
Conan ignored them both. His ears strained for the sound he thought he had heard. There. He grabbed Tamira’s arm. “Go wake J … your mistress,” he told her. Hands on hips, Tamira stared at him wryly. “Go,” he growled. “There are horsemen coming from the south.” A look of startlement passed over her face, then she darted for the big scarlet tent.
“What offal do you spout now?” Arvaneus demanded. “I see nothing.”
Telades came running across the camp to the hawkfaced man’s side. “Mardak claims he hears horses to the south, Arvaneus.”
With an oath the huntsman tossed his mug to the ground and scrambled to his feet. A worried frown creased his face. “Hillmen?” he asked Telades, and the shaven-headed man shrugged.