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

and gaiety seemed not only thousands of miles but long ages away. Again she sought in vain for the reason that had caused a Count of Zingara to flee with his retainers to this wild coast, a thousand miles from the land that bore him, exchanging the castle of his ancestors for a hut of logs. Her eyes softened at the light patter of small bare feet across the sands. A young girl came running over the low sandy ridge, quite naked, her slight body dripping, and her flaxen hair plastered wetly on her small head. Her wistful eyes were wide with excitement. “Lady Belesa!” she cried, rendering the Zingaran words with a soft Ophirean accent. “Oh, Lady Belesa!” Breathless from her scamper, she stammered and made incoherent gestures with her hands. Belesa smiled and put an arm about the child, not minding that her silken dress came in contact with the damp, warm body. In her lonely, isolated life Belesa bestowed the tenderness of a naturally affectionate nature on the pitiful waif she had taken away from a brutal master encountered on that long voyage up from the southern coasts. “What are you trying to tell me, Tina? Get your breath, child.” “A ship!” cried the girl, pointing southward. “I was swimming in a pool that the sea-tide left in the sand, on the other side of the ridge, and I saw it! A ship sailing up out of the south!” She tugged timidly at Belesa’s hand, her slender body all a-quiver. And Belesa felt her own heart beat faster at the mere thought of an unknown visitor. They had seen no sail since coming to that barren shore. Tina flitted ahead of her over the yellow sands, skirting the tiny pools the out- going tide had left in shallow depressions. They mounted the low-undulating ridge, and Tina poised there, a slender white figure against the clearing sky, her wet flaxen hair blowing about her thin face, a frail quivering arm outstretched. “Look, my Lady!” Belesa had already seen it – a billowing white sail, filled with the freshening south wind, beating up along the coast, a few miles from the point. Her heart skipped a beat. A small thing can loom large in colorless and isolated lives; but Belesa felt a premonition of strange and violent events. She felt that it was not by chance that this sail was beating up this lonely coast. There was no harbor town to the north, though one sailed to the ultimate shores of ice; and the nearest port to the south was a thousand miles away. What brought this stranger to lonely Korvela Bay? Tina pressed close to her mistress, apprehension pinching her thin features. “Who can it be, my Lady?” she stammered, the wind whipping color to her pale cheeks. “Is it the man the Count fears?” Belesa looked down at her, her brow shadowed. “Why do you say that, child? How do you know my uncle fears any one?” Conan of Cimmeria Volume 3 110