Conan of Venarium (3 page)

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 nearly 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.

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.”

“Who knows?” said his cousin. “They have funny birds here, birds that won’t live where it’s warmer and sunnier. One of those.”

“They have other things, too,” said Granth. Vulth waved impatiently, as if to say he could not bother to worry about the Cimmerians. That angered Granth, who snapped, “If this was going to be an easy conquest, Count Stercus wouldn’t have needed to bring an army into the north. He could have come by himself, and the barbarians would have run away before him.”

Vulth looked back toward the camp. Stercus’ silk pavilion towered over the other officers’ shelters, which in turn dwarfed the canvas tents in which ordinary soldiers slept. “Count Stercus thinks he could have driven the barbarians away all by himself,” said Vulth.

Before answering, Granth looked around for Nopel. Not seeing the sergeant, he said, “We all think a lot of things that aren’t so. Half the time, for instance, I think you make sense.” Vulth stuck his tongue out at him. Before either of them could say anything more, that chattering bird call again resounded from the woods. Granth peered in the direction from which the sound had come. Though he saw nothing untoward, he frowned. “And I don’t think that’s any natural bird.”

“Where are the Cimmerians, then?” asked Vulth.

Granth shrugged. “I don’t know, but we’re liable to find out before very long.”

Mordec slid forward through the forest with the speed and silence that marked the true barbarian. Not a single twig crackled under the soles of his boots; not a single branch swayed to mark his passage. He might have been a ghost in Crom’s grim underworld for all he impinged on the world of the living. Nor was he the only Cimmerian gliding toward the invaders’ encampment; far from it. The Aquilonians seemed unaware the woods around them swarmed with warriors.

From in back of the trunk of a fat spruce, Mordec loosed a bird call to let his fellow know where he was. Another Cimmerian answered him a moment later. He looked out from behind the trunk. Most of the soldiers who fought under the gold lion on black went about their business, oblivious to the calls. A handful of the enemy—mostly yellow-headed Gundermen who had some small store of woodscraft—looked up at the sounds, but even they seemed more curious than truly alarmed.

A soundless laugh passed Mordec’s lips. Soon now, very soon, the Aquilonians would find reason to be alarmed. They had come into Cimmeria before, never yet learning the lesson of how unwelcome they were here. The blacksmith tightened his grip on the axe handle. They would have to find out once more, then.

More bird calls resounded, all around the encampment. Some of them said the Cimmerians were in position, others that the Aquilonian scouts and sentries were silenced. Mordec smiled grimly. The men in the clearing would get no warning before the attack.

Not far from Mordec, a clan chief raised a trumpet to his lips. The discordant blast he blew would have made any arrogant Aquilonian bugler double up with laughter. But the signal did not need to be beautiful. It only needed to be heard from one side of the clearing to the other, and heard it was.

Yelling like demons, the Cimmerians burst from concealment and thundered toward the enemy. Mordec swung up the axe. For most men, it would have been a two-handed weapon. The great-thewed blacksmithswung it effortlessly in one. That let him carry the shield as well.

When the Cimmerians swarmed from the woods at them, the Gundermen and Bossonians yelled, too, in horrified dismay. But they did not break and flee, as Mordec hoped they might. Had they done so, their destruction would have been certain. Other Aquilonian hosts, taken by surprise in the — seemingly—trackless forests of Cimmeria, had come to grief in just that way.

These men, though, however much Mordec despised them both as invaders and as willing subjects—willing slaves —to a king, were warriors, too. The Bossonians might have cried out in alarm, but they began shooting even before their cries had fully faded. And the Gundermen snatched up their pikes and hurried to form lines to protect their archers and companies to protect themselves. True, sweet bugle notes resounded from within the palisade.

Before the Bossonians and Gundermen outside the encampment were fully formed to face the Cimmerian tidal wave, it swept onto them. A blond Gunderman thrust at Mordec. He knocked the spearhead aside with his shield as his axe came down on the shaft and cut it in two. Cursing, the Gunderman grabbed for his shortsword. Too late, for Mordec’s next stroke clove his skull to the teeth. Blood sprayed and spurted; several hot drops splashed Mordec in the face. Roaring in triumph, the blacksmith pressed on.

He might have been hewing firewood in the forest rather than men on the battlefield. One after another, Aquilonians fell before him. They wore chainmail, aye, but it did them little good; his axe, propelled by the power of his mighty arm, hewed through the links as if they were made of linen.

When Mordec paused for a moment to snatch a breath and look down at himself, he was surprised to discover a cut on his forearm and another on his left leg. He had no memory of receiving the wounds, nor had he felt them until he knew he had them. He shrugged. They would not impede him. Even if they had impeded him, he would have gone on anyway. Resistless momentum was the Cimmerians’ friend; if ever they should falter, if ever the Aquilonians should rally, the superior discipline the men from the south knew could swing the fight their way.

Forward, then—ever forward. Mordec plunged back into the press. An arrow thudded into his shield and stood thrilling; had he not carried the target of wood and leather, the shaft might have found his heart.

He hewed a Bossonian’s sword from his hand. “Mercy!” gasped the man, turning pale and falling to his knees. “Mercy, friend!”

“Mercy?” Mordec laughed. He knew some of the Aquilonian tongue, having learned it from traders who now and again dared venture north after amber or wax or furs. But that word had scant meaning in Cimmeria, regardless of the language in which it was spoken. The axe fell. With a groan, the Bossonian crumpled. Mordec kicked the corpse aside, saying, “I am no friend of yours, southern dog.”

He hewed through the chaos toward one of the gateways in the palisade. If the Cimmerians could break in with their foes still in disorder, the day and the campaign were both theirs for the taking. They had no general, no single mind moving them hither and yon in accordance with his will, yet most of them sensed that same need. On they came, smiting and shouting.

The foemen in front of them gave ground. A few archers and pikemen ran for their lives, forgetting in their fear they would find no safety in flight. Most, though, put up the best fight they could. And, to take the place of the fled and fallen, more and more soldiers came forth from the camp.

In the red rage of battle, Mordec cared nothing for that. More enemies before him meant more men he could murder. He chopped down another Bossonian. Only a handful of stubborn blond pikemen from Gunderland stood between him and the gate. Countrymen at his side, he stormed against them.

Like any man who grew up among rough neighbors, Granth had done his share of brawling. He had also helped clear out a nest of bandits from hill country near his farmhouse. This mad encounter in southern Cimmeria, though, was his first taste of true battle. If he lived, he knew he would have its measure forevermore. Whether he lived, though, seemed very much up in the air.