Conan Snippet Inspired by Artwork
Serpent and Flowers
Black blood stained the blade of Conan’s sword with the red-jeweled hilt.
Several times he had slashed the body of the red-scaled serpent that had gotten within reach of his sword, a body as thick as his own muscled belly, and he raised his sword to deal the killing blow, that would loose the serpent’s head from its mighty coils.
He had followed a woman over the rise in the road, mesmerized by her, but when he got there, she was nowhere to be seen. Down the rise he had trod cautiously, into the scent of flowers: lilacs shaped into arrow heads, thrusting up from the ground, and pale peach roses, buds and full blossoms, in their thorny bushes. A lone tree with misshapen trunk and branches, dripping with snakes, was full of many-colored leaves, autumn colors though it was not autumn. The dry skulls of men littered the ground.
Conan’s keen hearing heard the rustle of the great serpent well before it attacked, and he had countered easily. But now the serpent was transforming, starting with the head, which became the head and then the naked torso, of the red-headed woman he had followed.
“Conan,” she said, with the voice like Apollo’s lute that had mesmerized him before. “Would you kill me?”
She slithered toward him and draped her arms around his shoulders. But her fingers ended in talons, and when they pierced his sword-arm, he came back to his senses.
His sword continued its downward arc, as he sliced the serpent in two. The two parts, snake and woman, fell apart, to the ground, and returned to their original form, neither serpent nor woman.
“Yes,” he said.
The Leaders of Warrior Wednesday/Sword & Saturday:
- The Brothers Krynn’s Newsletter;
- Tales of Calamity and Triumph