Read Conan the Savage for Free Online

him there as best he could.
    But what, in Crom’s name, could he do? He could hardly tell the fool to breathe or, in that confined space, pummel him into doing so; neither could he breathe for him. It soon became obvious, from the bluish-pale hue of his flesh and the unchanging slackness of his limbs, that the hillman— having plunged after Conan in desperation and ventured too far in the paralysing chill—was already dead.
    Conan, leaving off his battle with the corpse and laying it aside, was close to being the same. Coughing, he tried to suck new air from the cavity, yet found his attempts unsatisfying, the air having been depleted of its vital power. Thrusting away, he found another remembered pocket, a shallow one that choked him with water droplets, barely justifying the effort of reaching it. At a third breathing place, lunging desperately to fill his lungs, he rammed his head against a stone outcrop and saw stars explode in the dimness. He must have drifted senseless for a moment; he wakened to the tickle of spent air bubbling upward from his slack mouth.
    Deprived of breath, sight, and direction, the Cimmerian began drowning in earnest. He lashed out blindly... and felt himself sucked by the accelerating current into light-less, airless depths.

III
     
    Dark Protectress
     
    “Tamsin, Tamsin! Freckle-nose, Tamsin!”
    The singsong noise of the children swirled and scattered through the house yard. Frequently it boiled over into the muddy lane adjoining the huddled stone cottages of the hamlet. The noise of the urchins rose and dwindled with their pell-mell scamper as they played in turn at being warriors, animals, or nobles. Only intermittently did they swarm at the back of the cottage and bedevil the young girl who sat alone on the kitchen stoop, quietly grooming her doll.
    “Tamsin, head of flax! Get the ax, Tamsin!”
    In truth, the little child was fairer-coloured than the rest, coming as she did from a family only remotely related to the village folk—a proud, standoffish family who had insisted on staking out a croft in the distant woods, to their sorrow. The children, mistrustful of outsiders and quick to seize on any visible difference, made common cause against this stranger who intruded on their sleeping space and supper table.
    “Don’t you mind their teasing, Ninga,” the little girl comforted her doll, ignoring the unruly stampede. “Your hair is the same colour as mine—I know, because it is mine! Papa saved some and used it when he made you. I think you are splendid, no matter what they say.”
    “Why do you always play with that stupid doll?” a brisk, boyish voice intruded. “You act as if you’re talking to it, but you never really make any sound!”
    The wave of children had changed direction and rushed back to the doorway, with nut-brown Arl leading the pack in his ragged, oversized shirt.
    “Why don’t you answer when I ask you things?” he demanded. “You used to talk when your parents were alive. What’s the matter, have you forgotten how?”
    To a chorus of laughter, small Ulva piped up: “Look at that doll, it’s so ugly! See, its head is falling off!”
    “The awful thing!” another girl-voice chimed in. “We ought to throw it in the well!”
    A small, mischievous boy, creeping from behind Arl, made as if to snatch the object from Tamsin; but her quick clutch of the doll to her bosom, combined with the look of utter terror on her face, made him veer away.
    “A plague on you urchins,” a strident, brassy voice overruled them all. “Must you do your prating and screeching here by the kitchen? Off with you! I won’t have you cluttering up my dooryard.” Quick sweeps of a broom sent dust and grit pelting at them from the threshold, scattering the mob—all except Tamsin, who remained hunched on the stoop.
    The broom-wielder was great old Gurda in her soiled, greasy bonnet and apron, her face as seamed and puffy as one of her overcooked turnip pies. In the fleeing