A few centuries before, she said, a mighty king in Vendhya had sent forth a fleet on a trading mission to Iranistan. A typhoon had blown this fleet far off its course across the Southern Ocean, and the battered survivors had made landfall not many leagues from where they now were. They had found a race of small, yellow-skinned aborigines, whom they had enslaved and who now served them as serfs. The men of the expedition had wedded the slave girls who had been sent from Vendhya as part of the cargo. These folk and their descendants had carved Yanyoga out of the soft, chalky rock of this cliff face.
The palace, Conan thought, was really too ostentatious and exotic for his taste, for he preferred a more austere style of: life. The royal palace in Tarantia, built on a magnificent scale by his unlamented predecessor Numedides, was itself too showy for his liking. From his private apartments in the palace he had long ago banished the silken draperies and carpets and the bejewled sculptures, preferring bare stonewalls and rush-strewn floors like those he had known as a boy in his rugged Cimmerian homeland.
This place savored of those he had known in his early manhood: the palace of King Yildiz of Turan, whom he had served as a mercenary, at Aghrapur; that at Shamballah, the capital of the mysterious valley of Meru, beyond the lonely steppes of Hyrkania; and that of King Shu of Kusan, in far Khitai. Here, too, were lavishly ornamented, fantastically carven walls, columns, and lintels. Remembering his brief enslavement in Shamballah, the City of Skulls, Conan lost himself in a reverie over old times and lost comrades and distant wars. Or was the honey-flavored wine befuddling his wits?
He fell into a light doze. Thus he did not notice when Conn, after stealing a quick glance at his nodding sire, slipped from his place and quietly left the hall.
Nor did he see the gaunt, grim-faced, swarthy man who observed all with gloating eyes from the shadow of a column. This man’s wasted form was swathed in faded emerald green. Although this man had, to the eye of the beholder, aged by decades since their last meeting, Conan would have known him at once as his ancient foe Thoth-Amon.
Conn was young and lusty, and his blood ran hot. One dancing girl in particular had caught his eyes. She was some years older than he, with full breasts like golden fruit and red lips ripe for kissing. Her jewel-bright gaze held his, and her gliding body was all warm animal flesh. When the dance ended, the boy observed how the girl lingered, looking back at him from the shadow of a distant pillar. Catching his eye from across the hall, she had licked her lips and run her hand over her belly and thighs in a suggestive manner.
Inwardly trembling, Conn wove through the feasters after the dancing girl. It was now or never, he thought.
He was not altogether ignorant of women. Back in Aquilonia, more than one buxom kitchen maid or serving girl had sought to catch the eye of the king’s son. Beyond a few inexpert caresses and flustered kisses, however, none of these liaisons had culminated in what Conn, like most boys, regarded as the ultimate test of manhood. Well, this was his chance to prove his masculinity at last!
The girl was still standing in the shadow of the column.
He slid his strong young arm around her slender waist and drew her to him, trying to plant a kiss, but she laughed and eluded his efforts.
“Not here!” she breathed. “The queen…”
“Where, then?”
“Come …”
Slipping out of his embrace but sliding her fingers into his, the girl led Conn through the entrance of the hall into the dim wilderness of corridors and chambers beyond. Without even thinking of a possible trap, since his brain teemed with images of quite another sort, the boy followed her into the darkness.
One by one, the other feasters also rose and departed, leaving Conan dozing alone on his cushions. The honey wine made a puddle on the marble floor where the great buffalo horn had fallen from his lax fingers.
Slender, swarthy serving men appeared in the almost empty hall. On silent feet they glided among the cushions abandoned by the absent feasters. The black guardsmen had left their spears and bronze battle-axes and hardwood clubs behind, not thinking to need these in the amorous encounters they expected. One by one, the serving men gathered these up, passing them out of the hall. Two went to where Conan lay snoring on his cushions. Supple hands relieved him, too, of his Aquilonian longsword and dagger.
The serving men glanced up to where Queen Lilit sat enthroned, observing all with a small; secret smile. In a sibilant, whispering language very different from that wherein they had conversed with their guests, the queen and her servants spoke. They and Conan were the only persons left in the hall.
Lilit rose and glided gracefully down the steps to where Conan sprawled, drunkenly snoring. From the servant who held the Cimmerian’s weapons, she selected the long poniard. Drawing the weapon from its sheath, she smiled down at the oblivious Cimmerian.
Then, quick as the flick of a serpent’s tongue, the blade flashed towards his heart.
FIVE: Children of the Serpent
In the dimness of a secluded apartment, lit by a pair of flickering rushlights, Conn caught the slave girl in his arms. His hot panting kisses fell on her neck and shoulders as he forced her down upon a divan draped with silken stuffs.
Pausing above the reclining dancer, the prince cast off his girdle and tugged impatiently at the fastenings of his cuirass. This armor was a back-and-breast of highly polished steel. It was a little tight, since Conn had grown in the twelvemonth since the royal armorer had hammered it out to his measure. It was the first piece of plate armor that Conan had owned. His pride in that cuirass had led him to spend many hours, when the rest of the Aquilonian force was resting from its arduous trek, in polishing it free of any trace of rust.
While the naked girl writhed languidly, purring, on the divan, Conn at last got the straps unbuckled. He squirmed out of the cuirass. Too fond of the armor to drop it carelessly on the floor and mar its silvery surface, even in this moment of passion, he set it down carefully.
As he did, in the feeble illumination of the rushlights, he saw the reflection of the girl in the polished surface of the breastplate. And in this mirror he saw the girl as she really was.
The girl’s body was still human—though less so than it had appeared to his direct vision. But atop that body, where a smiling face should have been, was a mask of spine-chilling horror. For the head of the girl was the scaled, slope-browed, wedge-shaped head of a snake, with lidless, slit-pupiled eyes, fanged jaws, and flickering, forked tongue.
Conn acted without thought. Millions of years of primitive instinct lay in the deeper, dormant layers of his mind. One look into those soulless eyes, and a thousand aeons of primordial instinct were triggered into life.
The boy sprang away from the couch to where his girdle lay. Steel rasped against leather as he tore his sword from the scabbard and sprang forward again. Light winked on the gleaming steel as Conn, white-faced with horror, drove the blade between the soft, round breasts of the serpent-woman.
He drew the sword out, dripping blood, and drove it in again and again.
The girl died, but not easily. She died in long, writhing spasms. As life ebbed, her body lost much of the human semblance it had worn. Dull gray scales took the place of warm brown skin. Conn turned his eyes away, revolted, before the final revelation. Dropping his sword with a clatter, he stumbled to a corner and was suddenly sick, in an uncontrollable spasm of revulsion.
When it was over, he felt weak but purged. His mind cleared. Now he knew what it was all about. The girl-thing had lured him outside, as others of its kind had doubtless lured away Mbega’s blacks and perhaps his father as well. They had lured them into an amorous embrace, in order to open their serpentine jaws and sink envenomed fangs into their deluded would-be lovers.