The harp crashed out like a sword-blade striking.
“Conan was a great fighter and a great lover. He was next under Faolan of the Ships, and Beudag loved him, and they were plighted. Then Conan was taken prisoner by the sea-folk during a skirmish, and Rann saw him—and Conan saw Rann.”
Hugh Starke had a fleeting memory of Rann’s face smiling, and her low voice saying, It’s a good body. I knew it, before…
Beudag’s eyes were two stones of blue vitriol under her narrow lids.
“Conan stayed a long time at Falga with Rann of the Red Sea. Then he came back to Crom Dhu, and said that he had escaped, and had discovered a way to take the longships into the harbor of Falga, at the back of Rann’s fleet; and from there it would be easy to take the city, and Rann with it. And Conan and Beudag were married.”
Starke’s yellow hawk eyes slid over Beudag, sprawled like a long lioness in power and beauty. A muscle began to twitch under his cheekbone. Beudag flushed, a slow deep color. Her gaze did not waver.
“So the longships went out from Crom Dhu, across the Red Sea. And Conan led them into a trap at Falga, and more than half of them were sunk. Conan thought his ship was free, that he had Rann and all she’d promised him, but Faolan saw what had happened and went after him. They fought, and Conan laid his sword across Faolan’s brow and blinded him; but Conan lost the fight. Beudag brought them home.
“Conan was chained naked in the market place. The people were careful not to kill him. From time to time other things were done to him. After a while his mind broke, and Faolan had him chained here in the hall, where he could hear him babble and play with his chain. It made darkness easier to bear.
“But since Falga, things have gone badly from Crom Dhu. Too many men were lost, too many ships. Now Rann’s people have us bottled up here. They can’t break in, we can’t break out. And so we stay, until…” The harp cried out a bitter question, and was still.
After a minute or two Starke said slowly, “Yeah, I get it. Stalemate for both of you. And Rann figured if I could kill off the leaders, your people might give up.” He began to curse. “What a lousy, dirty, sneaking trick!
And who told her she could use me…” He paused. After all, he’d be dead now. After all, a new body, and a cool million credits. Ah, the hell with Rann. He hadn’t asked her to do it. And he was nobody’s hired killer. Where did she get off, sneaking around his mind, trying to make him do things he didn’t even know about? Especially to someone like Beudag.
Still, Rann herself was nobody’s crud.
And just where was Hugh Starke supposed to cut in on this deal? Cut was right. Probably with a longsword, right through the belly. Swell spot he was in, and a good three strikes on him already.
He was beginning to wish he’d never seen the T-V Mines payroll ship, because then he might never have seen the Mountains of White Cloud.
He said, because everybody seemed to be waiting for him to say something, “Usually when there’s a deadlock like this, somebody calls in a third party. Isn’t there somebody you can yell for?”
Faolan shook his rough red head. “The slave people might rise, but they haven’t arms and they’re not used to fighting. They’d only get massacred, and it wouldn’t help us any.”
“What about those other—uh—people that live in the sea? And just what is that sea, anyhow? Some radiation from it wrecked my ship and got me into this bloody mess.”
Beudag said lazily, “I don’t know what it is. The seas our forefathers sailed on were water, but this is different. It will float a ship, if you know how to build the hull—very thin of a white metal we mine from the foothills.
But when you swim in it, it’s like being in a cloud of bubbles. It tingles, and the farther down you go in it the stranger it gets, dark and full of fire. I stay down for hours sometimes, hunting the beasts that live there.”
Starke said, “For hours? You have diving suits, then. What are they?”
She shook her head, laughing. “Why weigh yourself down that way? There’s no trouble to breathe in this ocean.”
“For cripesake,” said Starke. “Well I’ll be damned. Must be a heavy gas, then, radioactive, surface tension under atmospheric pressure, enough to float a light hull, and high oxygen content without any dangerous mixture. Well, well. Okay, why doesn’t somebody go down and see if the sea-people will help? They don’t like Rann’s branch of the family, you said.”
“They don’t like us, either,” said Faolan. “We stay out of the southern part of the sea. They wreck our ships, sometimes.” His bitter mouth twisted in a smile. “Did you want to go to them for help?”
Starke didn’t quite like the way Faolan sounded. “It was just a suggestion,” he said.
Beudag rose, stretching, wincing as the stiffened wounds pulled her flesh. “Come on, Faolan. Let’s sleep.”
He rose and laid his hand on her shoulder. Romna’s harpstrings breathed a subtle little mockery of sound. The bard’s eyes were veiled and sleepy. Beudag did not look at Starke, called Conan.
Starke said, “What about me?”
“You stay chained,” said Faolan. “There’s plenty of time to think. As long as we have food—and the sea feeds us.”
He followed Beudag, through a curtained entrance to the left. Romna got up, slowly, slinging the harp over one white shoulder. He stood looking steadily into Starke’s eyes in the dying light of the fires.
“I don’t know,” he murmured.
Starke waited, not speaking. His face was without expression.
“Conan we knew. Starke we don’t know. Perhaps it would have been better if Conan had come back.” He ran his thumb absently over the hilt of the knife in his girdle. “I don’t know. Perhaps it would have been better for all of us if I’d cut your throat before Beudag came in.”
Starke’s mouth twitched. It was not exactly a smile.
“You see,” said the bard seriously, “to you, from outside, none of this is important, except as it touches you. But we live in this little world. We die in it. To us, it’s important.”
The knife was in his hand now. It leaped up glittering into the dregs of the firelight, and fell, and leaped again.
“You fight for yourself, Hugh Starke. Rann also fights through you. I don’t know.”
Starke’s gaze did not waver.
Romna shrugged and put away the knife. “It is written of the gods,” he said, sighing. “I hope they haven’t done a bad job of the writing.”
He went out. Starke began to shiver slightly. It was completely quiet in the hall. He examined his collar, the rivets, every separate link of the chain, the staple to which it was fixed. Then he sat down on the fur rug provided for him in place of the straw.
He put his face in his hands and cursed, steadily, for several minutes, and then struck his fists down hard on the floor. After that he lay down and was quiet. He thought Rann would speak to him. She did not.
The silent black hours that walked across his heart were worse than any he had spent in the Luna crypts.
She came soft-shod, bearing a candle. Beudag, the Dagger-in-the-Sheath. Starke was not asleep. He rose and stood waiting. She set the candle on the table and came, not quite to him, and stopped. She wore a length of thin white cloth twisted loosely at the waist and dropping to her ankles. Her body rose out of it straight and lovely, touched mystically with shadows in the little wavering light.
“Who are you?” she whispered. “What are you?”
“A man. Not Conan. Maybe not Hugh Starke any more. Just a man.”
“I loved the man called Conan, until…” She caught her breath, and moved closer. She put her hand on Starke’s arm. The touch went through him like white fire. The warm clean healthy fragrance of her tasted sweet in his throat. Her eyes searched his.
“If Rann has such great powers, couldn’t it be that Conan was forced to do what he did? Couldn’t it be that Rann took his mind and molded it her way, perhaps without his knowing it?”
“It could be.”
“Conan was hot-tempered and quarrelsome, but he…”
Starke said slowly, “I don’t think you could have loved him if he hadn’t been straight.”
Her hand lay still on his forearm. She stood looking at him, and then her hand began to tremble, and in a moment she was crying, making no noise about it. Starke drew her gently to him. His eyes blazed yellowly in the candlelight.
“Woman’s tears,” she said impatiently, after a bit. She tried to draw away. “I’ve been fighting too long, and losing, and I’m tired.”
He let her step back, not far. “Do all the women of Crom Dhu fight like men?”
“If they want to. There have always been shield-maidens. And since Falga, I would have had to fight anyway, to keep from thinking.” She touched the collar on Starke’s neck. “And from seeing.”
He thought of Conan in the market square, and Conan shaking his chain and gibbering in Faolan’s hall, and Beudag watching it. Starke’s fingers tightened. He slid his palms upward along the smooth muscles of her arms, across the straight, broad planes of her shoulders, onto her neck, the proud strength of it pulsing under his hands. Her
