Conan of Venarium (25 page)

“I cannot seek Tarla’s hand, however much I might want to,” said Conan, and he went on to tell how he and Tarla had gone back to Duthil, and what they had seen there, and how Tarla had met her end. He looked at his father. “Had I known that you and Balarg were away from the village, I would have taken her north, not south, and then she might yet breathe.”

Mordec’s face might have been a mask of suffering cut from stone. “So she might. Not all my choices have turned out well, however much I wish they would have. I fear for your mother, lad.”

“So do I,” said Conan. “I came away for the sake of revenge alone, for Tarla and for her. Without that to think of, I would gladly have died there.”

“No. It is for the Aquilonians to die,” said Balarg in a voice like iron. Conan had never heard the like from him. “If they will slaughter innocents, they have sealed their fate. Blood and death and ruin to them!” Tears ran down his cheeks, though Conan did not think he knew he shed them.

Herth stepped forward and nodded to Conan. The clan chief and the blacksmith’s son were much of a height. Herth said, “Lead us to this Duthil place, boy, and you’ll have your vengeance. I promise you that.

“With my father and Balarg and Nectan, I would go back to Duthil whether you and your men come or not,” said Conan. “But come if you care to. The Aquilonians have a fortified camp beyond the village with enough archers and pikemen in it to glut you all on gore.”

“Forward, then,” said Herth, and forward they went.

Sickened by the sights and stinks of death all around him, Granth son of Biemur finally threw up his hands in disgust. “Enough!” he said. “Plundering a battlefield after a fight is one thing. Plundering a place like this — ” He shook his head. “If only these folk had a little more, we might be robbing the houses we grew up in. It makes me want to retch.”

“Then go away,” said Benno the archer, who had no such qualms. “More for the rest of us.”

Maybe he thought he would shame Granth into going after booty with the other soldiers from the garrison. If he did, he was wrong. Granth turned and strode back toward the palisaded camp just south of Duthil. Benno had been pulling the wool stuffing out of a mattress in the hopes the Cimmerians who had slept on it had also secreted some of their valuables inside it. So far, his hope looked likely to be disappointed.

Granth almost ran into Vulth, who came out of the blacksmith’s house carrying a heavy hammer. “What good is that?” demanded Granth.

“Not much, probably,” admitted his cousin. “You look sour enough to spit vinegar. What’s your trouble?”

“This.” Granth’s wave encompassed it all. “Are we a pack of ghouls out of the desert, to batten on the dead?”

“The Cimmerians won’t miss it any more,” said Vulth. “None of them left alive except maybe the blacksmith’s son.”

“He shouldn’t have got away, cither,” said Granth gloomily. “He’ll cause trouble for us.”

“What can one boy do?” asked Vulth with a dismissive shrug.

Before Granth could even begin to answer, the soldiers at the northern edge of the village, the edge closest to the endless forest, cried out in surprise and alarm. And other cries mingled with those of the Bossonians and Gundermen: fierce shouts in a language Granth had never bothered to learn. They filled the pikeman’s ears, and seemed to swell like approaching thunder.

“Cimmerians!” yelled someone, and then the storm fell on Captain Treviranus’ men.

More barbarians than Granth had imagined there were in the world came loping out of the woods. As had the northern men in the fight at Fort Venarium, they wielded a wild variety of weapons. Here, though, they took the Aquilonians altogether by surprise —and here, too, no knights would come to the rescue of the pikemen and archers. One of the barbarians brandished Stercus’ staring head.

“Form up, men! Form up!” shouted Treviranus desperately. “If we fight them all together, we still may win!”

But the Aquilonians never got the chance to follow their commander’s good advice. The enemy was upon them too suddenly and in numbers too great, while they themselves were scattered all through Duthil and not looking for battle. But whether they sought it or not, it found them, and they had to do what they could. Many of them, beset from front and rear and sides all at the same time, simply fell. Others gathered in struggling knots, islands in a sea of Cimmerians, islands bloodily overwhelmed one by one.

Granth and Vulth, near the southern edge of the village, had a few moments longer to ready themselves for the onslaught than most of their comrades. “Side by side and back to back to the palisade,” said Vulth. “It’s the only hope we’ve got, and it’s a long one.”

Side by side and back to back it was: a savage business, but somehow less so than Granth had expected. In point of fact, he had never expected to reach the palisade at all. But after he and Vulth stretched a couple of Cimmerians lifeless on the grass of the meadow, most of the barbarians ran past them rather than attacking. Had they seemed cowards, they would have been quickly dragged down and killed. The appearance of courage meant they soon required less of the genuine article.

But by the time they reached the palisade, reaching it did them no good. Cimmerians were already boosting one another up to the top and dropping down into the fortress that had held down Duthil and the surrounding countryside for the past two years. With the whole garrison inside, the fortified encampment might have put up a stout defense. With only a few men within, it would not last long.

“What do we do? Where do we go?” asked Granth, seeing that the fortress would not save them.

“Into the woods,” said Vulth. “They’re our only hope. If we can get to a settler’s farm, we may hold out against these howling devils.”

Granth laughed wildly. “We’ll make them pay for hunting us down, anyhow.”

Into the woods they plunged.

Adore blood flooded Duthil’s muddy main street. Here, though, Conan watched in delight, not horror, for these were Aquilonians who fell. And the blacksmith’s son used Count Stercus’ sword to wicked effect, bringing down a pair of Bossonian archers and a Gunderman who relied on the length of his pike to hold foes at bay but who fatally underestimated his foe’s pantherish quickness.

Before long, the only Aquilonians left in Duthil lay dead in the street. Few of the invaders had tried to surrender; none had succeeded. Cimmerians plundered the corpses, taking for their own weapons and armor finer than what they had brought south with them.

Herth strode along the street. The clan chief bled from a cut on his forehead and another on his leg. He said, “They are men after all. When I saw they’d put a village to the sword, I took them for cowards and murderers and nothing more. But they are warriors as well, and they did not flee.”

“They are brave enough,” said Mordec. “They beat us in battle once. And belike the village was roused against them after Stercus stole Balarg’s daughter.”

“He paid with his life, as he deserved to,” said Conan.

Balarg nodded. “He did indeed. And yet I would have let him live, if only that would bring back Tarla with him.”

“And I.” Conan nodded, too.

“That cannot be now,” said Herth. “Now there is vengeance, a great glut of vengeance, to take.”

Mordec went into the smithy. When he came out, grief etched his harsh-featured face. His great shoulders slumped. As he strode toward Conan, fear suddenly filled the youth’s heart—fear not of danger, nor of foes, but of the news he was about to hear. That fear must have shown on his face, for Mordec nodded heavily. “She’s dead, boy. Your mother’s dead,” he said hoarsely. But a somber admiration also filled his voice: “She took up a sword and made them earn what they took. And there’s blood on the blade, so they paid a price for it.”

Herth set a hand on the blacksmith’s shoulder. “Any warrior can take pride in such a wife.”

“I do,” said Mordec. He turned to Conan. “And so should you.”

“Pride?” Conan shook his head. “After today, what care I for pride? After today, with my mother dead” —he did not misspeak of Tarla, who was Balarg’s to mourn, and whose place in his affections was more recent—“what care I if I live or die?”

“I will tell you, if you truly need telling,” answered his father. “Herth had the right of it: to be sure she did not die for nothing, and to be sure the accursed Aquilonians will pay dearly for robbing us of what they had no right to touch. Do you suppose Crom would care to hear you snivel? You know better, and so do I. We still have a job of work to do before we can die content.”

Conan considered. He looked down at the gold-chased, gold-hiked blade he held in his hand. Slowly, he nodded. Stercus’ sword had not yet slaked its full thirst for Aquilonian blood. “Let it be as you say, Father. For vengeance’s sake, I will live. I will live, and the invaders shall die.”

“Why else do you think I still walk and breathe?” returned Mordec.

“Come, then.” Herth pointed ahead. The gate to the palisaded Aquilonian encampment had come open. Cimmerians poured in, although the mere fact that those gates had opened argued that there was no need for more fighting men within the palisade. The clan chief saw as much, saying, “Let us go south. And wherever we meet them, death to the Aquilonians.”

There was a war cry Conan would eagerly shout. He went into the smithy. Mordec took a step toward him and reached out as if to halt his progress, but Conan twisted past. The blacksmith started to go after him, then checked himself. To Herth, he said, “Best he should see, I suppose.”

“Belike,” said the clan chief. “If he needs one more reason to fight, what better?” After a moment, as if reminding himself, Herth added, “I’m sorry, Mordec.”

“So am I,” answered Conan’s father. “She did not fear death, not when she’d been battling it for years. This might have been quicker and cleaner than she would have got in the natural course of things. Still, though, the invaders will pay for robbing her of the time she would have had left.”

When Conan came out into the street once more, his face was as set and grim as Mordec’s. His eyes burned with a dry, terrible fire. “Death to the Aquilonians,” he said. In his mouth, it was not a war cry after all. It was simply a promise.

Two men burst out of the woods at the edge of Melcer’s field of barley. The farmer threw down his hoe and snatched up his pike. The men were so ragged and haggard and dim’, he thought they had to be Cimmerians. But the hair peeping out from under their helmets was as blond as his own, which meant they were Gundermen like himself. He did not set down the pike even so. Gundermen too could be robbers and brigands.

“Who are you?” he asked sharply. “What are you doing on my land? Answer me right this minute, or by Mitra I’ll run you off it.”

They could not answer him immediately. They both stood there panting, as if they had run a long, long way. At last, the younger one, a fellow with formidably wide shoulders and a face friendly despite its weariness, managed to gasp out, “The Cimmerians are over the border.”

To Melcer, that was the worst news in the world. “Are you sure?” he said. “How many of them?”

The newcomers carried pikes, too, the pikes of foot soldiers. They held them out, not threateningly but so that Melcer could see the fresh bloodstains on the spearshafts. “We’re sure, all right,” said the older one. “How many?” He turned to his comrade. “How many do you suppose, Granth?”

“Oh, about a million,” answered Granth, the broad-shouldered one. “Maybe more.”

“They ran us out of Duthil,” added the other Gunderman. “To hell with me if I know whether anybody else from the garrison is left alive. Stercus is dead, not that he’s any great loss. And those barbarian devils have been baying at our heels ever since. If you’re going to save yourself, you’d better do it now, or you’re a dead man. You may be a dead man anyhow.”

Melcer looked around his farm. He saw all the work of the past two years: stout cabin, barn, garden, fields. Then he looked to the north. He knew where he was likely to see smoke rising, and how much. More fires were burning than could be accounted for by the settlers’ usual business, and some of the columns of smoke rising from the accustomed places were thicker and blacker than they should have been, as if rising from buildings rather than chimneys. Melcer was not afraid to make a stand if that stand had some hope of success. Dying to no purpose was something else again.

He nodded to the two pikemen. “My thanks. Go on and warn more folk.” Even as the words left his mouth, a southbound horseman galloped past winding a horn and shouting out danger to all who would heed him. Melcer nodded again. Now he had confirmation, not that he truly needed it. “Aye, go on, both of you. I’ll tend to my business here.”

On the very edge of hearing came howls that might have burst from wolves’ throats —that might have, but had not. Those were the war cries of barbarians, barbarians on the loose, such swarms of savages had no business running loose within the bounds of the province. They had no business running loose, but here they came.

“We’re off, then,” said the older pikeman. “We’ll make for Fort Venarium, I expect. If we can throw back the Cimmerians anywhere, that will be the place. And what of you?”

“If things go ill, perhaps I’ll see you there,” said Melcer. Above the uproar of the barbarians, a bell began to ring, loudly and insistently. “That is the signal for the yeomen of the countryside to gather. You only garrisoned this land. We live on it, and we will not give it up.”

“They’ll smash you,” said Granth. “You don’t know their numbers.”

Melcer answered with a shrug. “If they do, then they do. But if they take us down to hell, you had best believe we’ll have a fine Cimmerian escort to lead the way.”

The two pikemen began arguing. Melcer had no time for them. He ran back toward the farmhouse — and met his wife hurrying his way, with their baby daughter on one hip and Tarnus, their son, hurrying beside her. “The alarm bell!” exclaimed Evlea.

“Sure enough,” said Melcer. “The Cimmerians are over the border—over the border in a great horde, all too likely. We can flee or we can fight. I aim to fight.”

“What are the odds?” asked Evlea.