Conan the Marauder Read Online Free PDF Page A

relaxed with skilled, compliant women.
    The trader had dreamed of making his fortune from Lakhme. He would take her to one of the great cities and sell her into the harem of a fine lord perhaps even that of a king. When he had decided that the time was right and that she had reached the peak of her beauty and desirability, he bundled her into a curtained, camel-borne palanquin and set out on a caravan to the king's summer court in the beautiful northern vale of Kangra. Still scarcely more than a girl, Lakhme had quickly grown bored with sitting in the airless conveyance, subject to the camel's ever-swaying gait. One afternoon, hearing an untoward noise from outside, she had parted the curtain to see what was happening. She found herself staring into the face of the captain of the caravan's guard: a fierce Hyrkanian warrior. The man's narrow eyes had widened at the vision of loveliness within the palanquin.
    That evening she had heard the sound of voices raised in argument. One of the voices was that of the trader, and it rose to an angry screech before it was cut off by the sound of a sickening blow. A moment later she was terrified when the curtain was jerked aside and the Hyrkanian stood framed in the opening. He was mounted, and a powerful arm around her waist hauled her from the palanquin and threw her over his saddle. As he galloped away, she saw the trader staring sightlessly at the sky, lying in a pool of his own blood.
    She felt no sorrow at the death of the trader. She had been nothing to him except prime livestock, no better than a blooded horse. But through him she had learned a valuable lesson: Men would kill to possess her. The brute power of the Hyrkanian warrior did not impress her. What she wanted was a man who commanded thousands of such warriors.
    Within the turning of a moon, the leader of a band of twenty nomads had slain her abductor and taken her for himself. She learned the language quickly and soon convinced him and her subsequent masters of how important it was that she preserve her beauty from the ravages of the sun and wind of the steppes. Wives and older concubines found themselves evicted to provide her with the finest of tents. In this way she earned hatred, but never for long. Among the arts she had learned from the courtesans was the brewing of potions to induce passion, sleep and death. When priests or learned men visited the camps, she conversed with them through a sheer curtain. Thus she learned how the powers of the world were distributed and the manner in which wars and royal marriages shifted borders and redistributed the influence of nations. But when the holy men and philosophers spoke of such things as compassion, pity or conscience, she dismissed all such irrelevancies from her mind.
    Any time a higher chief visited her current master, Lakhme contrived to display herself to him. No Hyrkanian would surrender his woman to another, no matter what his rank, so inevitably there was a fight and Lakhme would follow her new master, always looking for the next.
    By the end of her third year on the steppe, Lakhme was in the tent of Kuchlug, the chieftain of a great horde. This was a bitter time for her because there was no greater chief around than Kuchlug, and he was a brainless brute who would never amount to more than the savage leader of other savages. Then, one day, Bartatua called on Kuchlug.
    Bartatua was the chief of a minor horde, the Ashkuz. She knew his story, knew of how as a boy he had become chief upon the death of his father and had gathered all the scattered families and clans of the Ashkuz into a unified army. By diplomacy, persuasion and force, he had caused several other small hordes to join his host. The moment she saw the still-young, auburn-haired lord of the Ashkuz, she knew that this was a man of power and destiny.
    He would be her most brazen conquest of all. Through a long evening she listened as Bartatua tried to persuade Kuchlug to join his alliance and form a