“Think you,” she gasped, “that I’ll lie with you after what has passed here? After you’ve struck me, called me strumpet, manhandled me … .” Her angry words gave way to protesting splutters.
“Mundara Khan is old,” Conan said softly. He trailed one finger down her spine to the swell that began her buttocks. “And fat.” He brought the finger up to toy with a strand of golden hair that lay on her cheek. “And he often leaves you alone, as now.” She sighed, and softened against him. Blue eyes peered into blue eyes, and he said quietly, “Speak, and I will go. Do you want me to go?”
Wordlessly she shook her head.
Smiling, Conan laid her on the couch.
X
Conan was still smiling when he strolled into the Blue Bull much later in the day. Davinia had been very lonely indeed. He knew it was madness to dally with the mistress of a general, but he knew his own weakness wher
e women were concerned, too. He was beginning to hope the army took Mundara Khan from Aghrapur often.
The common room was half-filled with the usual crowd of sailors, laborers and cutpurses. Sharak and Akeba shared a table in one corner, conversing with their heads close together, but instead of joining them, Conan went to the bar.
Ferian greeted him with a scowl, and began scrubbing the bar top even faster than before. “I’ve nothing for you yet, Cimmerian. And I want you to get that wench out of here.”
“Is she still secured in my room?” Conan demanded. Yasbet had become no more reasonable about being rescued for finding herself in a waterfront tavern.
“She’s there,” the innkeeper said sourly, “but I’d sacrifice in every temple in the city if she disappeared. She near screamed the roof off not a glass gone. Thank all the gods she’s been quiet since. That’s no trull or doxie, Cimmerian. Men are impaled for holding her sort against their will.”
“I’ll see to her,” Conan replied in a soothing tone. “You keep your eyes and ears open.”
He hurried upstairs, listening to what suddenly seemed an ominous silence from his room. The latch-cord on his door was still tied tightly to a stout stick. A man might break the cord and lift the latch inside, but for Yasbet it should have been as good as an iron lock. Unless she had managed to wriggle through the window. Surely that small opening was too narrow even for her, but … . Muttering oaths beneath his breath, Conan unfastened the cord and rushed in.
A clay mug, hurled by Yasbet’s hand, shattered against the door beside his head. He ducked beneath the pewter basin that followed and caught her around the waist. It was difficult to ignore what a pleasant armful she made, even while her small fists pounded at his head and shoulders. He caught her wrists, forcing them behind her back and holding them there with one hand.
“What’s gotten into you, girl? Did that cult addle your wits?”
“Addle my … .!” She quivered with supressed anger. “They thought I had worth. And they treated me well. You brought me here bound across a horse and imprisoned me without so much as word. Then you went off to see that strumpet.”
“Strumpet? What are you talking about?”
“Davinia.” She growled the name. “Isn’t that what she’s called? That old man—Sharak?—came up to try to quiet me. He told me you’d gone to see this … woman. And you have the same smug look on your face that my father wears when he’s just visited his zenana.”
Mentally Conan called down several afflictions, all of them painful, on Sharak’s head. Aloud he said, “Why should you care if I visit twenty women? Twice now I’ve saved your fool life, but there’s naught between us.”
“I did not say there was,” she said stoutly, but her shoulders sagged. Cautiously he released her wrists, and she sat down dejectedly on the roughly built bed, no more than straw ticking covered with a coarse blanket, with her hands folded in her lap. “You saved my life once,” she muttered. “Perhaps. But this other was naught but kidnap.”
“You did not see what I saw in that place, Yasbet. There was sorcery there, and evil.”
“Sorcery!” She frowned at him, then shook her head. “No, you lie to try to stop me from returning.”
He muttered under his breath, then asked, “How did you end up with them? When you ran away from me I thought you were going home.” He grinned in spite of himself. “You were going to climb over the garden wall.”
“I did,” she muttered, not meeting his eye.
“Fatima caught me atop the wall and locked me in my room.” She shifted her seat uncomfortably, and the remnants of an unpleasant memory flitted across her face.
Conan was suddenly willing to wager that locking her in her room was not all that the amah had done. Barely suppressing his chuckle, he said, “But that’s no reason to run away to something like this cult.”
“What do you know of it?” she demanded.
“Women labor on an equal footing with men there, and can rise equally, as well. There are no rich or poor in the cult, either.”
“But the cult itself is rich enough,” he said drily. “I’ve seen some of its treasures.”
“Because you went there to steal!”