Turning, he set his shoulder against the tree that had attempted to make a morsel of him. This tree was now writhing and flopping its broken fronds as if in pain, making no more effort to seize Conan. The trunk had a flimsy, fibrous look and perhaps was no stronger than the stem of a plantain tree, which it resembled.
Conan hurled his weight against the trunk and felt it give slightly, with a ripping sound. Another heave, and the trunk tore out of the ground, the loose-packed sand of which gave little purchase to the network of white tendrils that served the cannibal tree as roots.
A howl of unholy outrage roared from the stands as Conan broke down the tree. He hefted it under his arm like a battering ram. It was about ten feet long from roots to mouth, a foot or so thick, and surprisingly light for so bulky an object.
Conan charged the women warriors, using the tree as a ram. They broke and fled squealing from his advance. He laughed exultantly. The Amazons evidently had a horror of their own sacred tree and sought to escape its proximity. He spun about, knocking down two of the guards with a swing of the trunk. The others fled back to the stands.
Now javelins began to fall about him in a deadly rain. One went thunk into the trunk a hand's breadth from his arm. Several angular throwing-knives whirled past his head like boomerangs.
"Chabela!'' he roared. "Grab one of those spears and follow me!"
The pair of them ran to the stands, Conan in the lead. A knot of Amazons in front of him broke and scattered as he swung the upper end of the tree among them, spattering drops of corrosive sap. The two climbed nimbly up the benches to the level of the square and loped for the street leading to the West Gate.
When he emerged from the pit, Conan fully expected to see half the female army of Gamburu assembled to attack him. Instead, a strangely different vista met his eyes as he clambered out of the arena. Fire arrows flickered through the air; nearby roofs blazed. A dozen corpses sprawled in puddles of gore, with shafts protruding from their bodies. A chorus of booming war cries rang through the air. The city of the Amazons was under attack.
A mass of black warriors, indisputably male, had poured out of the street to the West Gate. They formed disciplined ranks and advanced smartly, shooting sheets of arrows and cutting down the clusters of Amazons who charged their line.
Over the heads of the archers, Conan sighted his old comrade Juma and yelled his name. Juma saw him, grinned, and roared a command in the tongue of his own people. The ranks broke, and the archers rushed to surround and shelter Conan, who cast aside his tree, and the Zingaran girl. Then the force began to defile back out of the square the way they had come, fighting a cool rear-guard action.
Conan laughed and clouted Juma on the shoulder. "I wondered if you were coming," he said. "You got here just in time!"
Juma laughed and caught an Amazonian arrow on his long shield of tough rhinoceros hide. "I don't know, Conan; you seemed to be doing all right."
As they worked their way back to the West Gate, Juma explained that his men had finally tracked the slavers here to Gamburu.
Then he had assembled a levy of his black warriors and marched on the Amazonian capital.
"I feared we should never find you alive," he concluded. "I ought to have realized that, being Conan, you'd be found in the midst of a fight as usual and taking on the whole Amazon city single-handed."
As they reached the gate, Conan sighted the red-gold beard and blue eyes of Sigurd, who had been left there with a squad of armed sailors to keep the black army's line or retreat open. Conan and Sigurd shouted and waved but had no time for explanations.
Emerging from the gate, Conan smiled, happy to see the last of Queen Nzinga's city. The queen was a magnificent woman and had been a spectacular bedmate, but Conan was never one to be satisfied with the role of "Mister Queen," and he suspected that more than one former lover of the black queen had preceded him into the maws of the man-eating trees whenever the fickle and headstrong Nzinga had tired of their embraces.
"I see what you mean about training your archers in Turanian style," he said to Juma. A rabble of Amazons rushed out of the gate in pursuit; but Juma's men deployed, closed ranks, and sent volleys of arrows into the throng until the survivors broke and fled back into their city.
Soon they reached the shelter of the trees. Then, while the force paused for breath, Conan and Sigurd greeted each other lustily. Sigurd cast an eye on Chabela and dropped to one knee.
"Princess!'' he said in a scandalized voice. "By Ishtar's teats and Moloch's fiery belly, you should ought to get some clothes on! What would your royal sire think? Here, take this!"
The Vanir stripped off his shirt and pressed it upon the girl, who put it on and rolled up the sleeves. Because of Sigurd's great size, the shirt was long enough to cover Chabela's well-rounded body.
"My thanks, Master Sigurd," said she. "You are right, of course; but I have been compelled to go naked among naked folk for so long that I had become used to it."
"Whither now, Conan?" said Sigurd. "I know not about you, but I've had enough of this sweltering jungle land. If the mosquitoes and leeches don't eat you alive, the lions are happy to finish what's left."
"Back to Kulalo," said Conan, "and then aboard the Wastrel without delay. If the men left behind have sailed off and left us, I'll skin them alive."
"Surely you will share our victory feast!" protested Juma. "Now that my warriors have bested the Amazons of Gamburu, my empire is certain to dominate all this land. My men are eager to drink themselves into a stupor on good banana wine…"
Conan shook his head. "I thank you, but I fear we cannot spare the time, old friend. We have our work cut out for us back in Zingara. There's some plot against the Princess Chabela's sire, King Ferdrugo, and we must get her home at once. It seems that half the magicians of Stygia are joined in the scheme, so the victory feast will have to wait. Our victory, you see, has yet to be won."
Chapter Seventeen: THE WRECK OF THE WASTREL
The trip through the jungles from Gamburu to King Juma's capital of KulaJo, and thence to the mouth of the Zikamba, where they had left the Wastrel, consumed a number of days. Chabela was too exhausted to make the journey on foot, so Juma's blacks quickly built a rude litter of bamboo and rough cloth, in which the princess made the trip in relative comfort.
As for Conan, a few hours of rest, half a goatskin of strong wine, and a huge slab of roast meat rendered him fit again. Not for the first time, the magnificent animal vitality of Conan's barbarian heritage had shown him superior to the weaker, softer men of the countries through which he wandered and adventured. He took no special pride in this physical preeminence, reasoning that it was the doing of his forebears or of the gods and hence no cause for self-conceit.
It was sundown when they reached the palmy fringes of the Zikamba. The moon was rising like a copper shield by the time they came to the mouth of the river.
There the stream spread out in an estuary. The sluggish flood mingled its fresh water, dark with sediment, with the booming sea. And there, a shocking sight awaited them.
Sigurd gasped, recovered, and gave voice to a sulfurous sequence of oaths.
Conan said nothing, but the impassive bronze mask of his face darkened wit fury.
For the Wastrel lay half sunk in the shallows, her decks awash. Her masts were mere charred stumps, for fire had swept her deck. From these facts and the dozen burial mounds of heaped earth that stood along the edge of the jungle, the Cimmerian grimly surmised that there had been a battle and that the Wastrel had lost.