Conan The Hero

Chapter 1
The Shikhara
 
 
The jungle pond spread murky and stagnant, shaded by dense foliage. A few ripples glided across its green-scummed surface to lap against the slimy shoreline. Then, close above the black water, the tangled thicket of rushes parted and a face peered through.
Dark it was, shadowed and obscure as the muzzle of a stalking beast. Yet from its dimness glinted eyes blue as brooding northern skies, a color seldom seen in these rank jungle depths.
The pale, foreign eyes searched the tree-filtered daylight of the pond bank. Seeing no exceptional danger, the watcher parted the reeds and eased out from between them: a massive man, sword-bearing and grotesquely painted, wading thigh-deep in the stagnant water.
He moved topheavy with a sun-darkened breadth of chest and shoulder, supple as an acrobat poised for swift, forceful action. The colors on his face were muddy tones of lampblack and umber; for further concealment, his headband and lank black mane trailed fern fronds, leafy stems, and other spoor of the forest. The remainder of his costume was sparse, a brief leather breech-wrap anchoring knifebelt and swordbelt crisscrossed on his bare chest and back. Except for the sheen of his fine steel weapons and their bronze-studded fittings, he might have passed for a savage child of the jungle.
He paused in the pond scum, extending the long, double-curved blade of his yataghan to redirect the course of a yellow-green water serpent away from his naked thigh. Then he glided forward, his muscle-corded legs and sandaled feet draining the slime and yellow bottom-muck of the pool. Once ashore he paused, bending to pluck red leeches from the glistening calves of his legs. Straightening, he beckoned behind him with his sword to others yet unseen.
The next man to emerge from the reeds needed no lampblack, since his skin was already dark as jungle night. His face had been daubed instead with white clay to break up its full-featured symmetry. He stood fully as large as the first warrior, armed and armored with light mail and an identical S-curved blade. And he might have moved just as gracefully through the mire, if his attention had not been taken up by others toiling behind him.
The half-dozen who followed were less grandly-sized men, with the olive skins and hawk noses of Turanians evident beneath their daubed makeup. They wore bewildering variations of Turanian military garb, with here a spiked metal cap, there a short purple tunic or chain-mail vest. In further defiance of common uniform, their outfits were threaded with jungle fronds, bright blossoms, and long, iridescent plumes of tropical birds. The blades they bristled with clanked often, and their progress through the marsh occasioned low splashes and muttered curses. These sounds invariably caused the black officer to wheel on them, hissing fiercely for silence.
Their pale-skinned scout, meanwhile, moved higher up the pond's steepening bank. He sank in places to all fours, his yataghan sheathed now on his back. From a distance, his progress was visible only by the faint play of jungle light on flexing limbs and the occasional flicker of a disturbed branch or a frightened, upward-spiraling moth. There was no larger animal life to be seen; though one might expect the dense overgrowth to be alive with the rustlings and twitterings of small creatures, a watchful silence reigned.
From the creeping warrior's own vantage, the way was by no means effortless. His course lay through clinging, dripping foliage, beneath and around slack vines whose thorns could gouge and poison the skin. Yet he dared not stop long to find his way, lest the hovering flies and blood-seeking gnats should settle on his skin to bite and suck their fill.
Near the crest above the pond, the foliage opened out. The creeper braced his hands on the littered earth to haul himself up and peer over the top. Then, with a sudden twist and a muttered oath, he wrenched his hand back and rolled away to one side. Squinting in the green dimness, he stared at what he had touched: the face of a fanged, snarling monkey carved from stone, its round head furred over with damp moss.
"Conan, are you all right?" Feather-soft, the whisper drifted up to him from where the black man crouched a few man-lengths downslope.
"Aye, Juma," the scout mouthed in response, raising a hand to silence the mutters and thrashings that were occurring along the line of men behind him. "Tis nothing."
"Good. But Conan, thrice-curse it!" The black officer's hiss was faint but intense. "Next patrol I scout ahead, and you take charge of these unruly louts!"
Grimly smiling, Conan nodded and turned back to the evil-looking carving. Considering it, he judged it part of a railing or a free-standing statue buried by jungle growth across the course of centuries; probably it meant that their goal was near. Renewing his grip on the carven monkey's furry pate, he dragged himself upward to peer across the brushy crest, into the leafy void beyond.
The monument rising there was too vast for even the greedy jungle to swallow completely. Hewn from solid stone, formed of what must have been a towering natural monolith, the great shrine tapered onionlike from its broad, swelling base to a slender, lofty pinnacle. Conan could see the pointed shikhara gleaming in hazy daylight high above, piercing to the sky through the many layers of dense foliage. And every cubit of the temple's surface was decorated with intricate carvings--from the wide, porched galleries overhanging the jungle cauldron where Conan lay, to delicate friezes that chased each other in bands around its distant spire.
The subject matter of those carvings was difficult to make out, even from this short remove. Seen through the screening branches, a few tangles of life-sized human shapes seemed to Conan to resemble fierce combats; other twinings of bodies looked more amorous and sensuous. He guessed that, like most sculptures he had seen, the statues depicted the diverse cruelties and pleasures of kings and humanlike gods. Tracing these forms was especially hard, because everywhere the jungle's greedy green tentacles invaded and obscured them. Many of the heroic forms looked bound or strangled by parasitic vines, and often it was impossible to tell the carved human contours from the monstrous windings and swellings of ancient roots.
But the shrine was still habitable…and inhabited, it would seem. Ahead and a little to one side rose a curving entry stair, weed-choked and crumbling. In the thick-pillared shadows of the terrace at its end, Conan glimpsed a single pale flicker: the play of daylight, surely, on a burnished metal blade. Peering closer, he made out above it the round paleness of a face scanning the temple's surroundings. To confirm the impression, there came to his jungle-keen nostrils a faint scent of smoke sweetened by ceremonial incense, drifting unquestionably from the direction of the shrine.
To Juma and the Turanians who crept up close behind him, Conan spoke in whispers and quick gestures. He dispatched them toward the base of the stair, indicating that they should await his signal before overcoming any guards there. Then, writhing snakelike, he was off through the roots and stems of the downward slope.
For long moments his progress was stealthy and swift, measured only by the shiver of a branch or the momentary deepening of a green shadow. Then at the base of the temple he emerged into plain view, nimbly mounting the side of the stone edifice. At first there was little challenge apparent in the climb, for the building's massive base shelved inward, with plenty of handholds and footholds in its ornamentation. But he soon enough faced the overhang of the shrine's main body, where its bulbous shape swelled out overhead. Though just as deeply carved and ribboned with vines, this out-jutting face would have been judged by...