Conan of Venarium Read online

  When one of the men noticed Conan, they all fell silent. He walked up to them, asking, “What is it?”

  No one answered right away. No one looked as if he wanted to answer at all. At last, a farmer called Nucator said, “Well, maybe you’d best hear it from your father, lad, and not from us.”

  Conan glowered, not least because he already stood taller than Nucator, who was a weedy little fellow. “Hear what?” he demanded.

  “Nucator is right,” said Balarg, his voice smooth as butter. “This is a business for men.” The rest of the Cimmerians in the knot nodded, plainly agreeing with the tailor.

  That they agreed only made Conan angrier. He wanted to fight them all. That would show them who was a man. But the beating his father had given him before going off to war remained too painfully fresh in his memory for him to snarl out the challenge right away. None of these villagers was a match for Mordec—but Conan had proved to be no match for the blacksmith, either.

  When he hesitated, nerving himself, a heavy hand fell on his shoulder from behind. “Here, what’s toward?” asked Mordec, who like his son had been drawn by the sight of that group of men with their heads together.

  Nucator beckoned the blacksmith forward. “We’ll gladly tell you,” he said, “though we were not sure if you would want your boy to hear of this.”

  “Stay here,” said Mordec to Conan. Fuming, Conan had to obey. His father joined the rest of the village men, towering over most of them by half a head or more. Again, they spoke in low voices. Again, Conan heard bits of what they said, but not enough to tell him what he wanted to know. Along with trying to listen, he kept an eye on his father. Mordec’s hard countenance soon darkened with anger. “This is known to be true?” he asked ominously.

  “It is,” said Nucator. The others nodded.

  “A foul business. A most foul business, without a doubt. And yes, my son may know. Better he should have some notion of what manner of men the occupiers are.” Mordec’s eyes speared Conan. “You remember the Aquilonian captain here warned us to ward our young women when his commander, Count Stercus, came to Duthil?”

  “I do, Father, yes,” said Conan.

  “Well, it would seem he spoke no less than the truth.” Mordec spat in disgust. “This Stercus, if the reports be true—”

  “As they are,” interrupted Balarg.

  “If these reports be true,” repeated Mordec, slightly stressing the first word, “this Stercus has taken for his own a Cimmerian girl of good family, using her for his pleasure and threatening to turn his Aquilonian dogs loose against the countryside if she does not yield to his desires.”

  Rage ripped through Conan. “Do you not see? We must slay him! We must slay all the invaders!” He took a step forward, then another, and more than one of the grown men in Duthil gave back a pace before the blood lust blazing in his blue eyes, so like his father’s.

  “The day will come,” said Mordec, stern certainty in his voice. “The day will come indeed. But it is not yet here.”

  Balarg nodded, as if in agreement. But he said, “If you had not been as hot as your forge to go to war when the Aquilonians first crossed our border, many men from this village now dead would yet walk under the light of the sun.”

  “By Crom, we had to have a go at driving the invaders out,” said Mordec. “We came close to winning, too. If not for their damned knights, I think we would have. Will you say the fighting did not cost us dear? Will you say we have the strength for another battle so soon after we lost the first?”

  “I have the stomach for it!” cried Conan, wishing a man’s sword swung at his hip.

  Neither Mordec nor Balarg paid any attention to him. Each seemed more interested in scoring points off the other than in anything else. Some of the men of Duthil ranged themselves behind the blacksmith, others behind the weaver. To them, the usual squabbles of village life seemed more immediate, more urgent, more important, than driving the men from the south out of Cimmeria.

  “What if it were a girl from Duthil?” cried Conan. “What if she came from here, not from some other place? Would you do more than stand and mumble then?”

  For all his fury, his voice remained a boy’s treble, and the men from Duthil would not heed him. The small arguments, the familiar arguments, were meat and drink to them. Those went on and on. Meanwhile, the camp full of Bossonians and Gundermen just out of bowshot of the village was becoming ever more familiar, too.

  Conan stormed off. No one else cared, not even his father, who was wagging a callused, burn-scarred finger under Balarg’s nose. Conan stomped back into the smithy. He snatched up his quiver and bow. Only one arrow in the quiver was poisoned; he had set the rest aside for need more desperate than game. For now, if he could not slaughter Aquilonians, he wanted to kill something—indeed, almost anything—else.

  Before he could make for the forest, his mother called, “Where are you going?”

  “Out to the woods,” he replied.

  “Would you bring me some water first?” asked Verina. “And would you tell me what the men are arguing about this time?”

  He took a mug of water into the bedchamber, helped support his mother with a strong arm, and held the mug to her lips. Then, in guarded terms, he told her of Count Stercus and the girl from Rosinish.

  Verina drank again, then sighed. “She probably brought it on herself with forward ways,” she said.

  “That’s not what the men say. They blame it on the Aquilonian count.” Conan spoke hesitantly, for disagreeing with his mother made him uneasy.

  In any case, she paid no more attention to him than had the men of Duthil. “Mark my words. It will turn out to be the way I said,” she told him, and then began to cough. He eased her back down to the pillow. Slowly, the spasm ebbed. She sighed again, this time wearily. “You can go now. Just leave me be. I’ll manage somehow,” she said.

  “Mother, I—”

  “Go!” said Verina. Conan stood, irresolute: a posture into which no one but his mother could put him. Her gesture of dismissal might have come from a queen, not a sick woman lying in a bed behind a smithy. Biting his lip, Conan went.

  He ran to the woods as if demons prowled his trail. He might have been glad to see demons, for they would have given him something he could oppose, something he could hope to defeat with arrows and knife and simple strength. But what chased him out of Duthil dwelt within him, and he could not bring it forth to slay it.

  Melcer hacked at a pine with his axe as if the tree were a Cimmerian warrior. The farmer, newly come from Gunderland, struck again and again, with almost demoniac energy. The pine tottered, crackled, and began to fall. “Coming down!” Melcer shouted, though no one but him stood anywhere close to the tree that crashed to earth. He grunted in satisfaction and spat on his hands. One more tree down, one more tree towards a cabin in the woods, one more bit of open space in what would become a farm.

  “It’ll be a farm if I make it one,” said Melcer, and methodically trimmed branches from the pine and tossed them onto a sledge. He dragged it back to the small clearing in which his wagon sat. The oxen were cropping grass not far from the wagon. They looked up with incurious brown eyes as he returned.

  His wife, Evlea, had cleared a square of grass with a hoe and was planting seeds for what would be a vegetable garden. Tarnus, his son, was only six, but big enough to shoo away the chickens and keep them from eating the seeds as fast as Evlea planted them. Unlike his father and mother, Tarnus enjoyed his job. “Get away!” he yelled, and waved his arms. When the chickens did not move fast enough to suit him, he ran at them making horrible noises. They fled in clucking confusion.

  “Don’t drive them into the woods,” warned Melcer. “If you do, the foxes and weasels will thank you for their supper—and I’ll warm your backside.”

  “Can I tame the foxes?” asked Tarnus eagerly.

  “Not with chickens,” answered his father. “Where will we get more if they eat these? It’s a long way back to Gunderland.”
r />   “A very long way,” said Evlea, pausing in her labor to wipe her sweaty forehead with a sleeve. The endless work of setting up the farm left her and Melcer weary all the time. After a moment, she went on, “If I had known it was so very far, I don’t know whether I would have wanted to come.”

  That made Melcer angry. “Here we have as much land as we can clear and hold,” he said. “Down there, my father had six sons, so I was stuck on one sixth of the land he’d farmed. That made a miserable little plot, and you know it.”

  “It wasn’t very big,” admitted Evlea, “but it was safe. We’re off the edge of nowhere here. If the barbarians rise up—”

  “They won’t,” said Melcer. “And even if they do, we have soldiers—and we have our own strong right arms.” He took the axe off the sledge and flourished it. “And once we get the cabin built, we’ll have a place we can defend, too.”

  In his mind’s eye, he saw the farm he wanted to have, with plenty of room for grain and for grazing, with a barn full of cattle and sheep and horses near the cabin, with an apple orchard not too far away, and with the forest pushed back toward the horizon—but not too far, for he would still need firewood. He saw plenty of neighbors, to help defend the place against the wild Cimmerians—but none too near, for he wanted a big parcel of land for himself. He saw Evlea raising up not just Tarnus but three or four more sons, and all of them going on to take land for themselves, carving out homesteads from this gloomy wilderness. He smiled, liking those visions better than any he might have got from an opium pipe.

  In between what he saw and where he was now lay an endless ocean of labor. Stolid as most Gundermen, he shrugged broad shoulders. Work had never fazed him. He said, “I’m going back to cut notches in that tree. It’ll go into the cabin—the trunk’s good and straight.”

  “All right. I have plenty to do here,” said Evlea. “Keep your eyes open.”

  “And you,” said Melcer. His wife nodded. He sharpened the blade of her hoe against a whetstone every few nights. It would make a wicked weapon in a pinch. So far, the barbarians had stayed away from the settlements around Fort Venarium. Melcer hoped the beating they had had at the hands of Count Stercus’ Aquilonians would teach them to respect the power of King Numedides and those who followed him. If it did not—if it did not, he would fight as hard as he had to, and so would the rest of the settlers, men, women, and children.

  Shouldering his axe as a soldier would shoulder a pike while on the march, Melcer followed the trail of the sledge back to the pine he had cut down. Once he had cut the notches in it, he would have the oxen drag it to the place where he intended to raise the cabin: not far from where the wagon stood now.

  He set to work with skillful strokes. He was good with the axe. He could have been a lumberjack if he had not taken a love for the land and for growing things from his father. He had cut one notch and was walking down to the far end of the tree to do the other when a Cimmerian with a bow came out of the woods.

  Like most Gundermen and Bossonians, Melcer made a good woodsman. Here, though, he knew he had met his match and more. He was a civilized man who had learned woodscraft as he had learned axework. The barbarian who eyed him from under a mop of hair black as midnight might have sprung from nowhere, so silently did he appear. He had not needed to learn woodscraft; he might have imbibed its lessons with his mother’s milk.

  Only little by little did Melcer realize the barbarian had drunk of his mother’s milk not so very long before. He was man-tall, and handled his bow with the unconscious ease of an experienced archer, but his features, though promising harshness, were not yet fully molded into the form they would one day possess, and no beard darkened his cheeks.

  Melcer did not raise his axe in any threatening way, but he did not take his hands off it, either. The young Cimmerian had an arrow nocked, but it pointed at the ground, not at Melcer. Three plump grouse hung by their feet from the barbarian’s belt: he was out hunting game, not hunting men. With luck, this would not have to end in blood.

  Taking his right hand from the handle of the axe, Melcer held it up, palm out, in a sign. “Do you speak my language?” he asked.

  Somewhat to his surprise, the youngster nodded. “Little bit,” he said, his accent foul but comprehensible. He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Conan.”

  “I am Melcer,” said the farmer. Now he held out his right hand. The Cimmerian hesitated, then strode forward and took it. When he did, Melcer got another surprise, for, though Conan was unquestionably a boy, his grip had a man’s strength. When Melcer told him, “I have no quarrel with you,” he sounded more sincere than he might have expected.

  Conan said something in Cimmerian, then stopped and kicked at the dirt, realizing Melcer could not follow him. He dropped back into his fragmentary Aquilonian: “Why you here? What you do?”

  “I have come here to make a farm and to raise my family,” answered Melcer.

  Another spate of Cimmerian. Again, Conan checked himself. Again, he spoke in what bits of Melcer’s language he had: “Not your land. You go home.”

  “No.” The Gunderman shook his head. “I will stay here. We have won this land with the sword. We will keep it.”

  He did not know how much the barbarian boy understood of that, though his shaken head left little room for doubt. Scowling, Conan repeated, “Not your land.”

  “I say it is.” Melcer remembered that when he had said he had no quarrel with Conan, the Cimmerian had not told him anything of the sort. Yet Conan had taken his hand, and showed no sign of going to war on the instant. Melcer pointed straight at him. “Peace between us?”

  Now Conan did not hesitate. “No,” he said at once. “No peace. You go, then peace.”

  Melcer might have lacked money and high birth, but he did not lack for pride. “I will not go,” he said. “I have come here to make my home. That is what I aim to do.”

  “You pay.” The barbarian nodded emphatically. “Oh, yes. You pay.”

  “Anyone who tries to drive me off this land will pay,” said Melcer.

  He had to say it again before the barbarian followed. When Conan finally did, he studied Melcer, showing surprise of his own. Maybe he had not realized the Aquilonians had pride of their own. He undid the rawhide thong that held one of the grouse on his belt, then tossed the bird at Melcer’s feet. He pointed first to himself, then to the Gunderman. “Enemies,” he said, and loped off into the woods.

  Slowly, Melcer stooped to pick up the grouse. He wondered whether the barbarian had meant to say he wanted them to be friends but had been undone by his imperfect knowledge of Aquilonian. A moment later, an arrow hissed through the air and buried itself in the soil less than a yard from Melcer’s boot. He hopped back in alarm. If Conan wanted to kill him from ambush, he probably could.

  But no more arrows flew from the forest. “Enemies,” the Cimmerian called once more, and then everything was still.

  After a couple of minutes of wary, watchful waiting, Melcer decided Conan had gone away. The Gunderman thoughtfully hefted the grouse. He would not have given an enemy a gift. Did Conan reckon it an insult, or was it a token of respect? Melcer shrugged. However the Cimmerian had meant it, it would make a tasty supper.

  Up went the axe. Melcer brought it down with all his strength. Regardless of whether the Cimmerian fancied the notion, he had a cabin to build, a farm to make, and he aimed to do just that.

  Loarn was a wandering peddler and tinker who came to Duthil every year or two. When he did, he guested with Mordec. The blacksmith did tinker’s work now and again, soldering patches onto saucepans and the like, but Loarn was a master at it. He also repaired broken or cracked crockery, which Mordec did not attempt. Loarn had a tiny drill and a set of lead rivets so fine, they were almost sutures. By the time he was done fixing a pot and had daubed his repairs with pitch, it would hold water or ale as well as it ever had. He also paid his way with gossip and news and songs and jokes.

  Some of the news of southern Cimmeria had no
t reached him until just before he came into Duthil. When he led his donkey up the lane toward Mordec’s smithy, he was fuming. “Aquilonian soldiers, by Crom!” he cried as he came in. “Aquilonian soldiers! What are they doing here? Why didn’t you cast them out?” He sounded as if he blamed the blacksmith personally.

  Mordec looked up from the nail—almost a spike—whose point he was sharpening. “What are they doing here?” he echoed, his voice half an octave deeper than Loam’s. “Whatever they please, worse luck. Why didn’t we cast them forth? We tried. They beat us, which is why they can do as they please for now.”

  “Disgraceful business,” said Loarn, a small, skinny man with a drooping gray mustache. “Disgraceful, I tell you. They stopped me and searched my goods as if I were a thief. They could have robbed me and murdered me, too, and who would have been the wiser? News of the invasion still hasn’t spread up to the north, where my clan dwells.”

  “You can take it with you, then, when you travel that way again,” said Mordec, and Loarn nodded his agreement. “Conan!” called the blacksmith, and then again, louder: “Conan! Where has the boy got to, anyhow? Oh, there you are. About time. Here’s Loarn, just in off the road. Fetch him a mug of ale and something to eat.”

  “Aye, Father,” said Conan. “Welcome, Loarn.” He hurried into the back of the house.

  Loarn’s eyes followed him. “He’s as tall as I am already, and he has how many years behind him? Fifteen?”

  “Twelve,” answered Mordec.

  “Crom!” said the peddler. “He’ll have your inches before he’s done, then, and maybe two or three more besides.”

  “I know.” Mordec lowered his voice: “I had a demon of a time keeping him from joining the army that fought the invaders. He thinks he’s a man now.”