EXTRACTS: The Complete Conan of Cimmeria Volume 3 © The Book Palace (416 PAGES in Full edition)

“They’re not likely to see it. After I hid you in the woods I crept back and saw them dragging barrels of wine and ale out of the storehouses. Already most of them were reeling. They’ll all be lying around too drunk to move by this time. If I had a hundred men I could wipe out the whole horde. Look! There goes a rocket from The Red Hand ! That means they’re coming to take us off!” Conan stamped out the fire, handed the cloak back to Belesa and stretched like a great lazy cat. Belesa watched him in wonder. His unperturbed manner was not assumed; the night of fire and blood and slaughter, and the flight through the black woods afterward had left his nerves untouched. He was as calm as if he had spent the night in feast and revel. Belesa did not fear him; she felt safer than she had felt since she landed on that wild coast. He was not like the freebooters, civilized men who had repudiated all standards of honor, and lived without any. Conan, on the other hand, lived according to the code of his people, which was barbaric and bloody, but at least upheld its own peculiar standards of honor. “Do you think he is dead?” she asked, with seeming irrelevancy. He did not ask her to whom she referred. “I believe so. Silver and fire are both deadly to evil spirits, and he got a belly- full of both.” Neither spoke of that subject again; Belesa’s mind shrank from the task of conjuring up the scene when a black figure skulked into the great hall and a long delayed vengeance was horribly consummated. “What will you do when you get back to Zingara?” Conan asked. She shook her head helplessly. “I do not know. I have neither money nor friends. I am not trained to earn my living. Perhaps it would have been better had one of those arrows struck my heart.” “Do not say that, my Lady!” begged Tina. “I will work for us both!” Conan drew a small leather bag from inside his girdle. “I didn’t get Tothmekri’s jewels,” he rumbled. “But here are some baubles I found in the chest where I got the clothes I’m wearing.” He spilled a handful of flaming rubies into his palm. “They’re worth a fortune, themselves.” He dumped them back into the bag and handed it to her. “But I can’t take these –” she began. “Of course you’ll take them. I might as well leave you for the Picts to scalp as to take you back to Zingara to starve,” said he. “I know what it is to be penniless in a Hyborian land. Now in my country sometimes there are famines; but people are hungry only when there’s no food in the land at all. But in civilized countries I’ve seen people sick of gluttony while others were starving. Aye, I’ve seen men fall and die of hunger against the walls of shops and storehouses crammed with food. “Sometimes I was hungry, too, but then I took what I wanted at sword’s-point. But you can’t do that. So you take these rubies. You can sell them and buy a castle, Conan of Cimmeria Volume 3 172