THE FROST GIANT'S DAUGHTER
L. Sprague de Camp and Robert E. Howard
The clangor of sword and ax had died away; the shouting of the slaughter was hushed; silence lay on the red-stained snow. The bleak, pale sun that glittered so blindlingly from the ice fields and the snow-covered plains struck sheens of sflver from rent corselet and broken blade where the dead lay as they had fallen. The nerveless hand yet gripped the broken hilt; helmeted heads, drawn back in their death throes, tilted red beards and golden beards grimly upward, as if in a last invocation to Ymir the frost giant, god of a warrior race.
Across the reddened drifts and the mail-clad forms, two figures glared at each other. In all that utter desolation, they alone moved- The frosty sky was over them, the white illimitable plain around them, the dead men at their feet.
Slowly through the corpses they came, as ghosts might come to a tryst through the shambles of a dead world. In the brooding silence, they stood face to face. Both were tall men, built as powerfully as tigers. Their shields were gone, their corselets battered and dented. Blood dried on their mail; their swords were stained red. Their horned helmets showed the marks of fierce strokes. One was beardless and black-maned; the locks and beard of the other were as red as the blood on the sunlit snow.
“Man,” said the latter, “tell me your name, so that my brothers in Vanaheim may know who was the last of Wulfhere's band to fall before the sword of Heimdul.”
“Not in Vanaheim,” growled the black-haired warrior, “but in Valhalla shall you tell your brothers that you met Conan of Cimmeria!”
Heimdul roared and leaped, his sword flashing in a deadly arc. As the singing blade crashed on his helmet, shivering into bits of blue fire, Conan staggered, and his vision was filled with red sparks. But, as he reeled, he thrust with all the power of his broad shoulders behind the blade. The sharp point tore through brass scales and bones and heart, and the red-haired warrior died at Conan's feet.
The Cimmerian stood upright, trailing his sword, a sudden sick weariness assailing him. The glare of the sun on the snow cut his eyes like a knife, and the sky seemed shrunken and strangely apart. He turned away from the trampled expanse, where yellow-bearded warriors lay locked with red-haired slayers in the embrace of death. A few steps he took, and the glare of the snow fields was suddenly dimmed. A rushing wave of blindness engulfed him, and he sank down into the snow, supporting himself on one mailed arm and seeking to shake the blindness out of his eyes as a lion might shake his mane.
A silvery laugh cut through his dizziness, and his sight slowly cleared. He looked up; there was a strangeness about all the landscape that he could not place or define ... an unfamiliar tinge to earth and sky. But he did not think long of this. Before him, swaying like a sapling in the wind, stood a woman. To his dazed eyes her body was like ivory, and, save for a light veil of gossamer, she was naked as the day. Her slender feet were whiter than the snow they spurned. She laughed down at the bewildered warrior with a laughter that was sweeter than the rippling of silvery fountains and poisonous with cruel mockery.
“Who are you?” asked the Cimmerian. “Whence come you?”
“What matter?” Her voice was more musical than a silver-stringed harp, but edged with cruelty.
“Call up your men,” said he grasping his sword. “Though my strength fail me, yet they shall not take me alive. I see that you are of the Vanir.”
“Have I said so?”
His gaze went again to her unruly locks, which at first glance he had thought to be ted. Now he saw that they were neither red nor yellow but a glorious compound of both colors. He gazed spellbound. Her hair was like elfin gold; the sun struck it so dazzlingly that he could scarcely bear to look upon it. Her eyes were likewise neither wholly blue nor wholly gray, but of shifting colors and dancing lights and clouds of colors he could not have named. Her full red lips smiled, and from her slender feet to the blinding crown of her billowy hair, her ivory body was as perfect as the dream of a god. Conan's pulse hammered in his temples.
“I cannot tell” said he, “whether you are of Vanaheim and mine enemy, or of Asgard and my friend. Far have I wandered, but a woman like you I have never seen. Your locks blind me with their brightness. Never have I seen such hair, not even among the fairest daughters of the Aesir. By Ymir—”
“Who are you to swear by Ymir?” she mocked. “What know you of the gods of ice and snow, you who have come up from the South to adventure among an alien people?”
“By the dark gods of my own race!” he cried in anger. “Though I am not of the golden-haired Aesir, none has been more forward in swordplay! This day I have seen fourscore men fall, and I alone have survived the field where Wulfhere's reavers met the wolves of Bragi. Tell me, woman, have you seen the flash of mail out across the snow plains, or seen armed men moving upon the ice?”
“I have seen the hoarfrost glittering in the sun” she answered, “I have heard the wind whispering across the everlasting snows.”
He shook his head with a sigh. “Niord should have come up with us before the battle joined. I fear he and his fighting men have been ambushed. Wulfhere and his warriors lie dead... I had thought there was no village within many leagues of this spot, for the war carried us far; but you cannot have come a great distance over these snows, naked as you are. Lead me to your tribe, if you are of Asgard, for I am faint with blows and the weariness of strife.”
“My village is further than you can walk, Conan of Cimmeria,” she laughed. Spreading her arms wide, she swayed before him, her golden head lolling sensuously and her scintillant eyes half shadowed beneath their long silken lashes. “Am I not beautiful, О man?”
“Like dawn running naked on the snows,” he muttered, his eyes burning like those of a wolf.
“Then why do you not rise and follow me? Who is the strong warrior who falls down before me?” she chanted in maddening mockery. “Lie down and die in the snow with the other fools, Conan of the black hair. You cannot follow where I would lead.”
With an oath, the Cimmerian heaved himself up on his feet, his blue eyes blazing, his dark scarred face contorted. Rage shook his soul, but desire for the taunting figure before him hammered at his temples and drove his wild blood fiercely through his veins. Passion fierce as physical agony flooded his whole being, so that earth and sky swam red to his dizzy gaze. In the madness that swept upon him, weariness and faintness were swept away.
He spoke no word as he sheathed his bloody sword and drove at her, fingers spread to grip her soft flesh. With a shriek of laughter she leaped back and ran, laughing at him over her white shoulder. With a low growl, Conan followed. He had forgotten the fight, forgotten the mailed warriors who lay in their blood, forgotten Niord and the reavers who failed to reach the battie. He thought only of the slender white shape, which seemed to float rather than run before him.
Out across the blinding-white plain the chase led. The trampled red field fell out of sight behind him, but still Conan kept on with the silent tenacity of his race. His mailed feet broke through the frozen crust; he sank deep in the drifts and forged through them by sheer brute strength. But the girl danced across the snow, light as a feather floating on a pool; her naked feet barely left their imprint on the hoarfrost that overlaid the crust. Despite the fire in his veins, the cold bit through the warrior's mail and fur-lined tunic; but the girl in her gossamer veil ran as lightly and as gaily as if she danced through me palms and rose gardens of Poitain.
On and on she led, and Conan followed. Black curses drooled through the Cimmerian's parched lips. The great veins in his temples swelled and throbbed, and his teeth gnashed.