In the steaming jungles of Venji, Conan of Cimmeria fights in a war against drug-crazed raiders and an implacable wizard. The intrigues of court eunuchs and generals of Imperial Aghrapur reach south as well, and even the conjurings of Conan's own mind will be turned against him.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Swath-cutting characters and blade-honed imaginings...."--Michael Shea
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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 most men impossible to scale, the more so without a rope and in total silence.
But Conan, only pausing at the angle of the slope to tie his sandals to his belt, assaulted the overhang fearlessly. He hauled himself up monkey-like, clutching with bare toes and fingers at carved niches and elbows of vine. Often his legs thrashed in empty air as he forced himself upward hand over hand; at other times, his lithe body clung close amid sculptured shapes both sacred and profane. He appeared almost to take part in their murderous and orgiastic writhings, as just another hero or godling carved in paler stone and deeper relief.
At long last he mounted to the balcony rail at the widest level of the shrine. Once there, he was free to hug the grainy stone, panting shallowly so as not to betray his presence by deep gasps. His climb had brought him up a few paces from the head of the stair, with the broad, gadrooned bulk of one ornate pillar standing between him and the shadowy roost of the guard he had seen.
Now he tried to verify the man's presence, first by peering through the gaps of the thick, carved railing, then by raising his head cautiously over its edge. From this distance, the interior gloom was easily penetrated, with nothing in sight but a lavishly decorated walkway strewn with rock fragments and plant debris. He stood up to lean inward over the rail; then, at the sound of feet shifting restlessly within, he jerked back to his precarious crouch outside. No one passed near, so Conan judged that the lone guard still loitered in his place at the stairhead. He stood upright, stretched himself prone on the rail, and eased across it on his belly.
Edging around the spiral-ridged curvature of the pillar, he spied the guard's arm, bare and muscular, banded with colored cords at shoulder and elbow in the style of the savage Hwong tribe. The man's bronze cutlass was stuck in his waistband, his hands resting on the rail as he watched the jungle.
Drawing a deep, silent breath, Conan moved up close behind him. His massive arms were poised, knife gripped tightly in one hand, ready to seize the sentry's face from behind and lay open his throat. His shoulders tightened for the gruesome d...
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 most men impossible to scale, the more so without a rope and in total silence.
But Conan, only pausing at the angle of the slope to tie his sandals to his belt, assaulted the overhang fearlessly. He hauled himself up monkey-like, clutching with bare toes and fingers at carved niches and elbows of vine. Often his legs thrashed in empty air as he forced himself upward hand over hand; at other times, his lithe body clung close amid sculptured shapes both sacred and profane. He appeared almost to take part in their murderous and orgiastic writhings, as just another hero or godling carved in paler stone and deeper relief.
At long last he mounted to the balcony rail at the widest level of the shrine. Once there, he was free to hug the grainy stone, panting shallowly so as not to betray his presence by deep gasps. His climb had brought him up a few paces from the head of the stair, with the broad, gadrooned bulk of one ornate pillar standing between him and the shadowy roost of the guard he had seen.
Now he tried to verify the man's presence, first by peering through the gaps of the thick, carved railing, then by raising his head cautiously over its edge. From this distance, the interior gloom was easily penetrated, with nothing in sight but a lavishly decorated walkway strewn with rock fragments and plant debris. He stood up to lean inward over the rail; then, at the sound of feet shifting restlessly within, he jerked back to his precarious crouch outside. No one passed near, so Conan judged that the lone guard still loitered in his place at the stairhead. He stood upright, stretched himself prone on the rail, and eased across it on his belly.
Edging around the spiral-ridged curvature of the pillar, he spied the guard's arm, bare and muscular, banded with colored cords at shoulder and elbow in the style of the savage Hwong tribe. The man's bronze cutlass was stuck in his waistband, his hands resting on the rail as he watched the jungle.
Drawing a deep, silent breath, Conan moved up close behind him. His massive arms were poised, knife gripped tightly in one hand, ready to seize the sentry's face from behind and lay open his throat. His shoulders tightened for the gruesome d...
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Refreshingly different,
By A Customer
This review is from: Conan The Hero (Mass Market Paperback)
This book was fairly different from the other Conan books I have read because in those ones Conan was pretty much all by himself and minding his own business, eventually getting caught up in the action. However, in this story, Conan already has a friend (Juma) and is already involved in a conflict. I thought the setting was a nice change, too, from the standard grassy hills. I probably would've given this book 5 stars, but I think it goes downhill once Conan makes it to the capital. It seems like the author is trying to fit too much into the last chapters and I have to say I was very disappointed by the end. It was a bad surprise. I would recommend this book, however, maybe not very highly, but it is a good book.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Conan goes to Vietnam,
By raif10 "raif10" (Marina, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Conan The Hero (Mass Market Paperback)
Yep, the mighty Cimmerian is a grunt in the 'Nam. As is often the case, Conan has hired his sword, this time to the king of Turan. I forget which one. He's waaaay down south in a largely mercenary army, fighting in a jungle war of attrition alongside other guys who are there because their lives were otherwise hopeless. There's an incompetent officer corps, a very television-like sorcery that lets the king and his cronies micomanage the battles ineptly. There's bad guy special forces types. The serious soldiers get hamstrung by leadership. There's north and south locals, the southerners are friendly but corrupt, the northerners are guerillas who fight and slip away. At one point Conan even goes mech-infantry in a war elephant convoy that gets ambushed and wiped out because the leadership insists on using technology and tactics that are spectacularly illl-suited to the terrain. Oh, and the whole thing is actually being fought over control of a drug trade.Just about every single Vietnam war cliche is here, prominently featuring Conan. Occasional ally and drinking buddy Juma makes an appearance, but even that isn't enough to save this book. This was a first for me: I quit reading it halfway through. The cliches are overdone, the story is drenched in misery and hopelessness, and it just doesn't feel right. I like unorthodox Conan, but this is Conan in name only. The character's just poorly handled. Carpenter has written a couple of my all-time favorite Conan pastiches, but this book just flat out blows. Try Conan the Valorous, also by Carpenter. FAR better untraditional material: Conan Goes To Cimmeria. This one, sadly, is just wretched.
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First Sentence:
The jungle pond spread murky and stagnant, shaded by dense foliage. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Phang Loon, Ibn Uluthan, General Abolhassan, Jefar Sharif, Dashibt Bey, Emperor Yildiz, Fort Sikander, Court of Seers, Captain Murad, Captain Omar, Court of Protocols, Red Garrotes, Sergeant Juma, Gulf of Tarqheba, Ilbars River, Lady Irilya New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
The jungle pond spread murky and stagnant, shaded by dense foliage. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Phang Loon, Ibn Uluthan, General Abolhassan, Jefar Sharif, Dashibt Bey, Emperor Yildiz, Fort Sikander, Court of Seers, Captain Murad, Captain Omar, Court of Protocols, Red Garrotes, Sergeant Juma, Gulf of Tarqheba, Ilbars River, Lady Irilya New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 43
books:
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19
books
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- Conan The Bold by John Maddox Roberts in Front Matter
- Conan the Great by Leonard Carpenter in Front Matter
- Conan The Destroyer by Robert Jordan in Front Matter
- Conan and the Gods of the Mountain by Roland Green in Front Matter
- Conan The Fearless by Steve Perry in Front Matter
See all 43 books this book cites
- Conan and the Gods of the Mountain by Roland Green in Front Matter
- Conan: Road of Kings by Karl Edward Wagner in Front Matter
- Conan and the Manhunters (Conan (Tor)) by John Maddox Roberts in Front Matter
- Conan and the Grim Grey God (Conan & the Grim Grey God) by Sean A. Moore in Front Matter
- Conan: Sword of Skelos (Conan (Tor)) by Andrew Offutt in Front Matter
See all 19 books citing this book
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