The People of the Black Circle
tribal enemies. Now that Yar Afzal is dead, those damned Wazulis will be
on our heels. I'm surprized we haven't sighted them behind us already.'
'Who was that man you rode down?' she asked.
'I don't know. I never saw him before. He's no Ghuli, that's certain.
What the devil he was doing there is more than I can say. There was a
girl with him, too.'
'Yes.' Her gaze was shadowed. 'I can not understand that. That girl was
my maid, Gitara. Do you suppose she was coming to aid me? That the man
was a friend? If so, the Wazulis have captured them both.'
'Well,' he answered, 'there's nothing we can do. If we go back, they'll
skin us both. I can't understand how a girl like that could get this far
into the mountains with only one man--and he a robed scholar, for that's
what he looked like. There's something infernally queer in all this.
That fellow Yar Afzal beat and sent away--he moved like a man walking in
his sleep. I've seen the priests of Zamora perform their abominable
rituals in their forbidden temples, and their victims had a stare like
that man. The priests looked into their eyes and muttered incantations,
and then the people became the walking dead men, with glassy eyes, doing
as they were ordered.
'And then I saw what the fellow had in his hand, which Yar Afzal picked
up. It was like a big black jade bead, such as the temple girls of Yezud
wear when they dance before the black stone spider which is their god.
Yar Afzal held it in his hand, and he didn't pick up anything else. Yet
when he fell dead, a spider, like the god at Yezud, only smaller, ran
out of his fingers. And then, when the Wazulis stood uncertain there, a
voice cried out for them to kill me, and I know that voice didn't come
from any of the warriors, nor from the women who watched by the huts. It
seemed to come from _above_.'
Yasmina did not reply. She glanced at the stark outlines of the
mountains all about them and shuddered. Her soul shrank from their gaunt
brutality. This was a grim, naked land where anything might happen.
Age-old traditions invested it with shuddery horror for anyone born in
the hot, luxuriant southern plains.
The sun was high, beating down with fierce heat, yet the wind that blew
in fitful gusts seemed to sweep off slopes of ice. Once she heard a
strange rushing above them that was not the sweep of the wind, and from
the way Conan looked up, she knew it was not a common sound to him,
either. She thought that a strip of the cold blue sky was momentarily
blurred, as if some all but invisible object had swept between it and
herself, but she could not be sure. Neither made any comment, but Conan
loosened his knife in his scabbard.
They were following a faintly marked path dipping down into ravines so
deep the sun never struck bottom, laboring up steep slopes where loose
shale threatened to slide from beneath their feet, and following
knife-edge ridges with blue-hazed echoing depths on either hand.
The sun had passed its zenith when they crossed a narrow trail winding
among the crags. Conan reined the horse aside and followed it southward,
going almost at right angles to their former course.
'A Galzai village is at one end of this trail,' he explained. 'Their
women follow it to a well, for water. You need new garments.'
Glancing down at her filmy attire, Yasmina agreed with him. Her
cloth-of-gold slippers were in tatters, her robes and silken
under-garments torn to shreds that scarcely held together decently.
Garments meant for the streets of Peshkhauri were scarcely appropriate
for the crags of the Himelians.
Coming to a crook in the trail, Conan dismounted, helped Yasmina down
and waited. Presently he nodded, though she heard nothing.
'A woman coming along the trail,' he remarked. In sudden panic she
clutched his arm.
'You will not--not kill her?'
'I don't kill women ordinarily,' he grunted; 'though some of the
hill-women are she-wolves. No,' he grinned as at a huge jest. 'By Crom,
I'll _pay_ for her clothes! How is that?' He displayed a large handful
of gold coins, and replaced all but the largest. She nodded, much
relieved. It was perhaps natural for men to slay and die; her flesh
crawled at the thought of watching the butchery of a woman.
Presently a woman appeared around the crook of the trail--a tall, slim
Galzai girl, straight as a young sapling, bearing a great empty gourd.
She stopped short and the gourd fell from her hands when she saw them;
she wavered as though to run, then realized that Conan was too close to
her to allow her to escape, and so stood still, staring at them with a
mixed expression of fear and curiosity.
Conan displayed the gold coin.
'If you will give this woman your garments,' he said, 'I will give you
this money.'
The response was instant. The girl smiled broadly with surprize and
delight, and, with the disdain of a hill-woman for prudish conventions,
promptly yanked off her sleeveless embroidered vest, slipped down her
wide trousers and stepped out of them, twitched off her wide-sleeved
shirt, and kicked off her sandals. Bundling them all in a bunch, she
proffered them to Conan, who handed them to the astonished Devi.
'Get behind that rock and put these on,' he directed, further proving
himself no native hillman. 'Fold your robes up into a bundle and bring
them to me when you come out.'
'The money!' clamored the hill-girl, stretching out her hands eagerly.
'The gold you promised me!'
Conan flipped the coin to her, she caught it, bit, then thrust it into
her hair, bent and caught up the gourd and went on down the path, as
devoid of self-consciousness as of garments. Conan waited with some
impatience while the Devi, for the first time in her pampered life,
dressed herself. When she stepped from behind the rock he swore in
surprize, and she felt a curious rush of emotions at the unrestrained
admiration burning in his fierce blue eyes. She felt shame,
embarrassment, yet a stimulation of vanity she had never before
experienced, and a tingling when meeting the impact of his eyes. He laid
a heavy hand on her shoulder and turned her about, staring avidly at her
from all angles.
'By Crom!' said he. 'In those smoky, mystic robes you were aloof and
cold and far off as a star! Now you are a woman of warm flesh and blood!
You went behind that rock as the Devi of Vendhya; you come out as a
hill-girl--though a thousand times more beautiful than any wench of the
Zhaibar! You were a goddess--now you are real!'
He spanked her resoundingly, and she, recognizing this as merely another
expression of admiration, did not feel outraged. It was indeed as if the
changing of her garments had wrought a change in her personality. The
feelings and sensations she had suppressed rose to domination in her
now, as if the queenly robes she had cast off had been material shackles
and inhibitions.
But Conan, in his renewed admiration, did not forget that peril lurked
all about them. The farther they drew away from the region of the
Zhaibar, the less likely he was to encounter any Kshatriya troops. On
the other hand he had been listening all throughout their flight for
sounds that would tell him the vengeful Wazulis of Khurum were on their
heels.
Swinging the Devi up, he followed her into the saddle and again reined
the stallion westward. The bundle of garments she had given him, he
hurled over a cliff, to fall into the depths of a thousand-foot gorge.
'Why did you do that?' she asked. 'Why did you not give them to the
girl?'
'The riders from Peshkhauri are combing these hills,' he said. 'They'll
be ambushed and harried at every turn, and by way of reprisal they'll
destroy every village they can take. They may turn westward any time. If
they found a girl wearing your garments, they'd torture her into
talking, and she might put them on my trail.'
'What will she do?' asked Yasmina.
'Go back to her village and tell her people that a stranger attacked
her,' he answered. 'She'll have them on our track, all right. But she
had to go on and get the water first; if she dared go back without it,
they'd whip the skin off her. That gives us a long start. They'll never
catch us. By nightfall we'll cross the Afghuli border.'
'There are no paths or signs of human habitation in these parts,' she
commented. 'Even for the Himelians this region seems singularly
deserted. We have not seen a trail since we left the one where we met
the Galzai woman.'
For answer he pointed to the northwest, where she glimpsed a peak in a
notch of the crags.
'Yimsha,' grunted Conan. 'The tribes build their villages as far from
the mountain as they can.'
She was instantly rigid with attention.
'Yimsha!' she whispered. 'The mountain of the Black Seers!'
'So they say,' he answered. 'This is as near as I ever approached it. I
have swung north to avoid any Kshatriya troops that might be prowling
through the hills. The regular trail from Khurum to Afghulistan lies
farther south. This is an ancient one, and seldom used.'
She was staring intently at the distant peak. Her nails bit into her
pink palms.
'How long would it take to reach Yimsha from this point?'
'All the rest of the day, and all night,' he answered, and grinned. 'Do
you want to go there? By Crom, it's no place for an ordinary human, from
what the hill-people say.'
'Why do they not gather and destroy the devils that inhabit it?' she
demanded.
'Wipe out wizards with swords? Anyway, they never interfere with people,
unless the people interfere with them. I never saw one of them, though
I've talked with men who swore they had. They say they've glimpsed
people from the tower among the crags at sunset or sunrise--tall, silent
men in black robes.'
'Would you be afraid to attack them?'
'I?' The idea seemed a new one to him. 'Why, if they imposed upon me, it
would be my life or theirs. But I have nothing to do with them. I came
to these mountains to raise a following of human beings, not to war with
wizards.'
Yasmina did not at once reply. She stared at the peak as at a human
enemy, feeling all her anger and hatred stir in her bosom anew. And
another feeling began to take dim shape. She had plotted to hurl against
the masters of Yimsha the man in whose arms she was now carried. Perhaps
there was another way, besides the method she had planned, to accomplish
her purpose. She could not mistake the look that was beginning to dawn
in this wild man's eyes as they rested on her. Kingdoms have fallen when
a woman's slim white hands pulled the strings of destiny. Suddenly she
stiffened, pointing.
'Look!'
Just visible on the distant peak there hung a cloud of peculiar aspect.
It was a frosty crimson in color, veined with sparkling gold. This cloud
was in motion; it rotated, and as it whirled it contracted. It dwindled
to a spinning taper that flashed in the sun. And suddenly it detached
itself from the snow-tipped peak, floated out over the void like a
gay-hued feather, and became invisible against the cerulean sky.
'What could that have been?' asked the girl uneasily, as a shoulder of
rock shut the distant mountain from view; the phenomenon had been
disturbing, even in its beauty.
'The hill-men call it Yimsha's Carpet, whatever that means,' answered
Conan. 'I've seen five hundred of them running as if the devil were at
their heels, to hide themselves in caves and crags, because they saw
that crimson cloud float up from the peak. What in--'
They had advanced through a narrow, knife-cut gash between turreted
walls and emerged upon a broad ledge, flanked by a series of rugged
slopes on one hand, and a gigantic precipice on the other. The dim trail
followed this ledge, bent around a shoulder and reappeared at intervals
far below, working a tedious way downward. And emerging from the cut