Conan of Venarium Read online

  “Yes, Father.” Conan nodded. “Swords and spears and axes, the way you said, and helms, and mailshirts—”

  “Helms, aye,” said Mordec. “A helm can be forged of two pieces of iron and riveted up the center. But a byrnie is a different business. Making any mail is slow, and making good mail is slower. Each ring must be shaped, and joined to its neighbors, and riveted so it cannot slip its place. In the time I would need to finish one coat of mail, I could do so many other things, making the armor would not be worth my while. Would it were otherwise, but—” The blacksmith shrugged.

  When they walked into the smithy, they found Conan’s mother standing by the forge. Conan exclaimed in surprise; she seldom left her bed these days. Mordec might have been rooted in the doorway. Conan started toward Verina to help her back to the bedchamber. She held up a bony hand. “Wait,” she said. “Tell me more of the Aquilonians. I heard the shouting in the street, but I could not make out the words.”

  “They have come into our country,” said Mordec.

  Verina’s mouth narrowed. So did her eyes. “You will fight them.” It was no question; she might have been stating a law of nature.

  “We will all fight them: everyone from Duthil, everyone from the surrounding villages, everyone Who hears the news and can come against them with a weapon to hand,” said Mordec. Conan nodded, but his father paid him no heed.

  His mother’s long illness might have stolen her bodily vigor, but not that of her spirit. Her eyes flamed hotter than the fire inside the forge. “Good,” she said. “Slay them all, save for one you let live to flee back over the border to bring his folk word of their kinsmen’s ruin.”

  Conan smacked a fist into the callused palm of his other hand. “By Crom, we will!”

  Mordec chuckled grimly. “The rooks and ravens will feast soon enough, Verina. You would have watched them glut themselves on another field twelve years gone by, were you not busy birthing this one here.” He pointed to Conan.

  “Women fight their battles, too, though men know it not,” said Verina. Then she began to cough again; she had been fighting that battle for years, and would not win it. But she mastered the fit, even though, while it went on, she swayed on her feet.

  “Here, Mother, go back and rest,” said Conan. “The battle ahead is one for men.”

  He helped Verina to the bedchamber and helped her ease herself down into the bed. “Thank you, my son,” she whispered. “You are a good boy.”

  Conan, just then, was not thinking of being a good boy. Visions of blood and slaughter filled his head, of clashing swords and cloven flesh and spouting blood, of foes in flight before him, of black birds fluttering down to feast on bloated bodies, of battles and of heroes, and of men uncounted crying out his name.

  Granth son of Biemur swung an axe—not at some foeman’s neck but at the trunk of a spruce. The blade bit. A chunk of pale wood came free when he pulled out the axehead. He paused in the work for a moment, leaning on the long-handled axe and scowling down at his blistered palms. “If I’d wanted to be a carpenter, I could have gone to work for my uncle,” he grumbled.

  His cousin Vulth was attacking a pine not far away. “You go in for the soldier’s trade, you learn a bit of all the others with it,” he said. He gave the pine a couple of more strokes. It groaned and tottered and fell—in the open space between Vulth and Granth, just where he had planned it. He walked along the length of the trunk, trimming off the big branches with the axe.

  And Granth got to work again, too, for he had spied Sergeant Nopel coming their way. Looking busy when the sergeant was around was something all soldiers learned in a hurry—or, if they did not, they soon learned to be sorry. As Vulth’s pine had a moment before, the spruce dropped neatly to the ground. Granth started trimming branches. The spicy scent of spruce sap filled his nostrils.

  “Aye, keep at it, you dogs,” said Nopel. “We’ll be glad of a palisade one of these nights, and of wood for watchfires. Mitra, but I hate this gloomy forest.”

  “Where are the barbarians?” asked Vulth. “Since those herders by the stream a few days ago, we’ve hardly seen a stinking Cimmerian.”

  “Maybe they’ve run away.” Granth always liked to look on the bright side of things.

  Nopel laughed in his face; sergeants got to be sergeants not least by forgetting there was or ever had been any such thing as a bright side. “They’re around. They’re barbarians, but they’re not cowards—oh, no, they’re not. I wish they were. They’re waiting and watching and gathering. They’ll strike when they’re ready—and when they think we’re not.”

  Granth grunted. “I still say building a little fort every time we camp for the night is more trouble than it’s worth.” He went back to the base of the trimmed trunk and began to shape it into a point.

  “It’s a craven’s way of fighting,” agreed Vulth, who was doing the same thing to the pine. The woods rang with the sound of axes. Vulth went on, “Count Stercus brought us up here to fight the Cimmerians. So why don’t we fight them, instead of chopping lumber for them to use once we’ve moved on?”

  “Count Stercus is no craven,” said Nopel. “There are some who’d name him this or that or the other thing, sure enough, but no one’s ever called him coward. And when we’re in the middle of enemy country, with wild men skulking all about, a fortified camp is a handy thing to have, whether you gents care for the notion or not.” He gave Granth and Vulth a mincing, mock-aristocratic bow, then growled, “So get on with it!” and stalked off to harry some other soldiers.

  After the cousins had shaped the felled trunks into several stakes sharpened at both ends and a little taller than they were, they hauled them back to the encampment. Archers and pikemen guarded the warriors who had set aside their weapons for spades and were digging a ditch around the camp. Inside the ditch, a palisade of stakes was already going up. The ones Granth and Vulth brought were tipped upright and placed in waiting postholes with the rest.

  “I wouldn’t want to attack a camp like this. I admit it,” said Vulth. “You’d have to be crazy to try.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” Granth did not want to admit any more than that—or, indeed, even so much. But he could hardly deny that the campsite looked more formidable every minute. He could not deny that it was well placed, either: on a rise, with a spring bubbling out of the ground inside the palisade. The axemen had cleared the dark Cimmerian forest back far enough from the ditch and the wall of stakes that the wild men lurking in the woods could not hope to take the army by surprise.

  But then a lanky Bossonian straightening the stakes of the palisade said, “I wouldn’t want to attack a camp like this, either, but that doesn’t mean the damned Cimmerians will leave us alone. The difference between them and us is, they really are crazy, and they’ll do crazy things.”

  “They’re barbarians, and we’re coming into their land,” said Granth. “They’re liable to try to kill without counting the cost.”

  “That’s what I just said, isn’t it?” The Bossonian paused in his work long enough to set hands on hips. “If trying to kill without worrying about whether you fall yourself isn’t crazy, Mitra smite me if I know what would be.”

  Another sergeant, also a Bossonian, set hands on hips, too. “If standing around talking without worrying about whether you work isn’t lazy, Mitra smite me if I know what would be. So work, you good-for-nothing dog!” The lanky man hastily got back to it. The sergeant rounded on Granth and Vulth. “You lugs were just rattling your teeth, too. If you’ve got more stakes, bring ‘em. If you don’t, go cut ’em. Don’t let me catch you standing around, though, or I’ll make you sorry you were ever born. You hear me?” His voice rose to an irascible roar.

  “Yes, Sergeant,” chorused the two Gundermen. They hurried off to collect more of the stakes they had already prepared, only to discover that their comrades had already hauled those back to the encampment. Granth swore; cutting trees down was harder work than carrying stakes already cut. “Can’t trust an
yone,” he complained, forgetting that only the day before he and Vulth had cheerfully absconded with three stakes someone else had trimmed.

  As darkness began to fall—impossible to say precisely when the sun set, for the clouds and mists of Cimmeria obscured both sunrise and sunset—a long, mournful note blown on the trumpet recalled the Aquilonian soldiers to the camp. Savory steam rose from big iron pots bubbling over cookfires. Rubbing their bellies to show how hungry they were, men lined up to get their suppers.

  “Mutton stew?” asked Granth, sniffing.

  “Mutton stew,” answered a Bossonian who had just had his tin panikin filled. He spoke with resignation. Mutton was what most of the army had eaten ever since crossing into Cimmeria. The forage here was not good enough to support many cattle. Even the sheep were small and scrawny.

  A cook spooned stew into Granth’s panikin. He stepped aside to let the cook feed the next soldier, then dug in with his horn spoon. The meat was tough and stringy and gamy. The barley that went with it had come up from the Aquilonian side of the border in supply wagons. Cimmeria’s scanty fields held mostly rye and oats; the short growing season did not always allow barley, let alone wheat, to ripen.

  Had Granth got a supper like this at an inn down in Gunderland, he would have snarled at the innkeeper. On campaign, he was glad he had enough to fill his belly. Anything more than that was better than a bonus; it came near enough to being a miracle.

  Someone asked, “What are we calling this camp?” Count Stercus had named each successive encampment after an estate that belonged to him or to one of his friends. Granth supposed it made as good a way as any other to remember which was which.

  “Venarium,” answered another soldier. “This one’s Camp Venarium.”

  Mordec methodically set his iron cap on his head. He wore a long knife—almost a shortsword—on his belt. A long-handled war axe and a round wooden shield faced with leather and bossed with iron leaned against the brickwork of the forge. A leather wallet carried enough oatcakes and smoked meat to feed him for several days.

  Conan was anything but methodical. He sprang into the air in frustration and fury. “Take me with you!” he shouted, not for the first time. “Take me with you, Father!”

  “No,” growled Mordec.

  But the one word, which would usually have silenced his son, had no effect here. “Take me with you!” cried Conan once more. “I can fight. By Crom, I can! I’m bigger than a lot of the men in Duthil, and stronger, too!”

  “No,” said Mordec once again, deeper and more menacingly than before. Again, though, Conan shook his head, desperate to accompany his father against the invading Aquilonians. Mordec shook his head, too, as if bedeviled by gnats rather than by a boy who truly was bigger and stronger than many of the grown men in the village. Reluctantly, Mordec spoke further: “You were born on a battlefield, son. I don’t care to see you die on one.”

  “I wouldn’t die!” The idea did not seem real to Conan. “I’d make the southrons go down like grain before the scythe.”

  And so he might—for a while. Mordec knew it. But no untried boy would last long against a veteran who had practiced his bloody trade twice as long as his foe had lived. And no one, boy or veteran, was surely safe against flying arrows and javelins. “When I say no, I mean no. You’re too young. You’ll stay here in Duthil where you belong, and you’ll take care of your mother.”

  That struck home; the blacksmith saw as much. But Conan was too wild to go to war to heed even such a potent command. “I won’t!” he said shrilly. “I won’t, and you can’t make me. After you leave, I’ll run off and join the army, too.”

  The next thing he knew, he was lying on the ground by the forge. His head spun. His ears rang. His father stood over him, breathing hard, ready to hit him again if he had to. “You will do no such thing,” declared Mordec. “You will do what I tell you, and nothing else. Do you hear me?”

  Instead of answering in words, Conan sprang up and grabbed for his father’s axe. For the moment, he was ready to do murder for the sake of going to war. But even as his hand closed on the axe handle, Mordec’s larger, stronger hand closed on his wrist. Conan tried to twist free, tried and failed. Then he hit his father. He had told the truth—he did have the strength of an ordinary man. The blacksmith, however, was no ordinary man. He took his son’s buffet without changing expression.

  “So you want to see what it’s really like, do you?” asked Mordec. “All right, by Crom. I’ll let you have a taste.”

  He had hit Conan before; as often as not, nothing but his hand would gain and hold the boy’s attention. But he had never given him such a cold-blooded, thorough, methodical beating as he did now. Conan tried to fight back for as long as he could. Mordec kept hitting him until he had no more fight left in him. The blacksmith aimed to make the boy cry out for mercy, but Conan set his jaw and suffered in silence, plainly as intent on dying before he showed weakness as Mordec was on breaking him.

  And Conan might have died then, for his father, afraid he would fall to an enemy’s weapons, was not at all afraid to kill him for pride’s sake. After the beating had gone on for some long and painful time, though, Verina came out of the bedchamber. “Hold!” she croaked. “Would you slay what’s most like you?”

  Mordec stared at her. Rage suddenly rivered out of him, pouring away like ale from a cracked cup. He knelt by his bruised and bloodied son. “You will stay here,” he said, half commanding, half pleading.

  Conan did not say no. Conan, then, could not have said anything, for his father had beaten him all but senseless. He saw the smithy through a red haze of anguish.

  Taking his silence for acquiescence, Mordec filled a dipper with cold water and held it to his battered lips. Conan took a mouthful. He wanted to spit it in his father’s face, but animal instinct made him swallow instead. Mordec did not take the dipper away. Conan drained it dry.

  “You are as hard on your son as you are on everything else,” said Verina with a bubbling sigh.

  “Life is hard,” answered Mordec. “Anyone who will not see that is a fool: no, worse than a fool—a blind man.”

  “Life is hard, aye,” agreed his wife. “I am not blind; I can see that, too. But I can also see that you are blind, blind to the way you make it harder than it need be.”

  With a grunt, the blacksmith got to his feet. He towered over Verina. Scowling, he replied, “I am not the only one in this home of whom that might be said.”

  “And if I fight you, will you beat me as you beat the boy?” asked Verina. “What point to that? All you have to do is wait; before long the sickness in my lungs will slay me and set you free.”

  “You twist everything I say, everything I do,” muttered Mordec, at least as much to himself as to her. Fighting the Aquilonians would seem simple when set against the long, quiet (but no less deadly for being quiet) war he had waged with his wife.

  “All you want to do is spill blood,” said Verina. “You would be as happy slaying Cimmerians as you are going off to battle Aquilonians.”

  “Not so,” said Mordec. “These are thieves who come into our land. You know that yourself. They would take what little we have and send it south to add to their own riches. They would, but they will not. I go to join the muster of the clans.” He strode forward, snatched up his axe and shield and wallet, and stormed forth from the smithy, a thunderstorm of fury on his face.

  “No good will come of this!” called Verina, but the blacksmith paid no heed.

  Conan heard his father and mother quarrel as if from very far away. The pain of the beating made everything else seem small and unimportant. He tried to get to his feet, but found he lacked the strength. He lay in the dirt, even his ardor to go forth to battle quelled for the moment.

  Verina stooped beside him. His mother held a bowl full of water and a scrap of cloth. She wet the cloth and gently scrubbed at his face. The rag, which had been the brownish gray of undyed wool, came away crimson. She soaked it in the bowl, wrung it nea
rly dry, and went back to what she was doing. “There,” she said at last. “You’re young—you’ll heal.”

  With an effort, Conan managed to sit up. “I still want to go and fight, no matter what Father says,” he mumbled through cut and swollen lips.

  But his mother shook her head. “Mordec was right.” She made a sour face. “Not words I often say, but true. However great you’ve grown, you are yet too young to go to war.” And Conan, who would have and nearly had fought to the death against his father, accepted Verina’s words without a murmur.

  chapter ii

  THE FIGHT BY THE FORT

  Granth son of Biemur looked out toward the woods beyond Fort Venarium. A dirt track led farther north, but the Aquilonian army had not taken it. Instead, Count Stercus seemed content to linger here and let the Cimmerians hurl themselves against his men if they would.

  Whatever Granth hoped to see escaped his eyes. One tall, dark-needled tree merged with another until he wished for color, wished for motion, wished for anything but the endless forest stretching out and out to infinity.

  Vulth looked out toward the woods, too. Granth’s cousin realized that what he was not seeing might be there nonetheless. He said, “Mitra smite ’em, the Cimmerians could be hiding an army amongst those trees, and we’d never be the wiser till they rushed out howling like maniacs.”

  That made Granth cast another worried glance in the direction of the forest. After a moment, he realized he was foolish to peer ever to the north. Although that was the direction in which the Aquilonians had been going, the barbarians who dwelt in gloomy Cimmeria might as readily come at them from east or west or south.

  A harsh chattering came from the woods. Granth’s hand leaped to the hilt of the shortsword on his belt. “What was that?” he said.

  “A bird,” said Vulth.

  “What kind of bird?” asked Granth. “I’ve never heard a bird that sounded like that before.”