Conan the Barbarian

by Michael A. Stackpole

  At some point the sun sank below the horizon, leaving Conan in perfect darkness. His stomach growled but he couldn’t get anywhere near his grandfather’s larder. He heard nothing of the old man and the sounds he usually associated with the coming of night in the forest remained elusive and distant.

  He grabbed the chain and smashed it against the floor several times, relishing the din. He pulled at it some more, then slumped onto his side and curled up around his empty belly to sleep.

  He awoke in the middle of the night and looked around, but nothing had changed. His grandfather had not slipped into the hut to take his bunk. He’d not brought the boy a sleeping hide, or water, or any sort of food. Conan rubbed his hands together, as he might have done to work his grandfather’s salve into the scars. He grabbed the chain, intent on yanking it, but saw the futility of this and stopped. He let the chain slip from his hands and fell back to sleep.

  He awoke with the dawn and found a bowl of water within reach at the far side of the chain’s range. He leaped toward it, crouching, then watched, wary. The door flap had been pulled back. He imagined his grandfather waiting for him to begin drinking before he sprang in and beat him with a stick. Or maybe the water is not good water, and will make me sick. He waited, watchful, but burning thirst convinced him to hook the bowl with a finger and pull it within reach. He retreated to the hut’s rear wall and drank carefully. He made sure no water slopped down his chest.

  Before he knew it, the water was gone.

  He thought about smashing the bowl or hurling it out the doorway, but he didn’t give in to the impulse. His grandfather might not give him another bowl. Instead he placed it back on the spot where he’d found it, then returned to where he’d slept. He shook his bound leg a couple of times, but the chain had become no less strong, and he’d become weaker. He didn’t intend to doze, but he did, and awoke to see his grandfather sitting on a stool just inside the doorway.

  “Do you want to be free, boy?”

  Conan nodded.

  “I don’t mean free of the chain.”

  The young Cimmerian frowned. “What?”

  Connacht pointed at the chain. “That chain is revenge. It’s Klarzin. If your goal is to become the man who can destroy him, you might succeed. But he will destroy your life. Because the man who could defeat him needs to be the man who will learn to fight out in my yard there. The boy who remains trapped will never be that man.”

  “But he killed my father. He killed your son.”

  Connacht nodded. “I know. Blood calls for blood. But blood feuds never solve anything. You know why I live here, in the north, away from others, even though I’m from the tribes of the south, yes?”

  Conan shook his head.

  “A blood feud. Spirits, a spirited girl, and hot words led to blood flowing. I killed a few more of those who wanted revenge, but they would never stop coming. So I walked away.”

  “But Klarzin is not a Cimmerian. It won’t be like killing one of our own.”

  “But all you will become is the man who knows how to kill Klarzin, which means you have no use after you’ve done that.” His grandfather shook his head. “Since you were born, we knew you were destined for great things. I’d rather see you die here of starvation, chained to the floor, than for you to hobble yourself because of some idea that you will avenge your father. It won’t bring him back. It won’t bring any of them back. It won’t even make them feel better about dying. And you will have wasted your life.”

  Conan’s chin came up defiantly. “So the man who killed my father and destroyed my village is allowed to live as if he did nothing?”

  “You haven’t listened to me.” The old man glanced out toward the yard. “I told you, out there you will learn what it takes to kill this man. You will learn what it takes to kill any man—which makes you very useful. And in the big world, you will see many wonders, and have many adventures, that will make you forget Klarzin. Imagine that instead of him and his horde, it had been an avalanche that wiped out your village while you were hunting. Would you go to war against it? Would you look to slay avalanches or mountains?”

  “I will never forget him.”

  “And you would never forget the avalanche, but you wouldn’t spend your life hunting avalanches. You would learn to spot them, you would learn to deal with them, to survive them. You would make sure that an avalanche would never hurt you again. If you could, you would act to stop an avalanche from hurting others. But vengeance? Life is too vast to allow it to be focused on so tiny a thing. You want to live, to slay, to love; these are what you want, not to hunt down a single man who likely has no more memory of you and your village than you do of the first snowflake you ever caught on your tongue.”

  Conan snarled and kicked out. The chain rattled, but the weight and the grinding against his anklebones underscored the reality of his grandfather’s words. As much as he wanted to dismiss them as nonsense, the chain reminded him of how limited his goal really was.

  “What if I find him, Grandfather? What if our paths cross?”

  The old man smiled venomously. “Then the man who killed my son will admire the training I gave my grandson. Klarzin’s life will splash in red rivers from his rent body. You’ll kill his demon-spawn daughter, too . . . and the world will be better for it. To be able to make that all happen, Conan, you will have to learn some lessons. Very important lessons.”

  The boy frowned. I want Klarzin dead, but I am not yet the man who can kill him. He nodded slowly.

  Connacht stood. “That decision is the first you’ve made as a man.”

  Conan looked up. “How does a man get out of a shackle?”

  His grandfather laughed. “Depends on the shackle. Been caught by a few myself, never cared for it, especially when taken by slavers.” The old man tossed him a fist-size rock. “Now, that shackle there lets a tongue slide into the lock and catch in place. The key pulls the latch back.”

  The boy looked at the rock. “This is not a key.”

  “But the trick of this kind of shackle is that a small spring holds the latch in place. A sharp blow, right there beside the keyhole . . .”

  Conan scooted forward, pulled his ankle in, and hit the shackle where his grandfather indicated. It took three tries before the shackle slipped a little, and two more before it gave enough to free his foot.

  Connacht applauded. “If they do your wrists up with them, just slamming one shackle into the other usually works to have you out of them quickly.”

  The youth smiled. “So, I have learned my first lesson.”

  “No, Conan, that’s your second lesson.”

  The boy frowned. “Then what is the . . . Oh.” He smiled. “Never stick yourself in a situation unless you know how you’re going to get out of it.”

  “Very good, though I expect you’ll need to be reminded of that lesson from time to time.” Connacht stroked his own unshaven chin. “And there are more shackles I’ll teach you to escape from. I suspect you’ll find that information useful.”

  Steadying himself against the wall, Conan stood. “Fine. I will learn everything you would teach me. But please, out in the yard.” He brushed the chain aside with a foot. “I am done with children’s games.”

  CHAPTER 11

  IN THE THREE years Conan lived with his grandfather, the name Klarzin almost faded completely from his memory. The horrific acts that destroyed his village and slew his father did not. Sometimes they came back to him unbidden but consciously; in dreams and nightmares more often. The latter occurrences enhanced the surreal quality of that day and softened the sharpest of the memories. Had it not been for the traces of chain scars on his hands, he might have forgotten most all of it.

  Connacht did not give the boy time to remember much of anything. He worked Conan hard, both because he was proud of his grandson, and because he felt guilty about Corin’s death, guilty that his son had been slain by outsiders. He’d centered the blame on Lucius, the Aquilonian, only because Aquilonians were familiar e
nemies, and because of Aquilonia’s proximity, the chances of avenging Corin were far greater.

  Being men and Cimmerians, neither Conan nor Connacht spoke of their feelings, dreams, or fears. They would have denied having any of the latter, and barely acknowledged the existence of the others. Still, in the way Connacht watched him, Conan recognized his own father’s love, and assumed his grandfather saw the same emotion in him. Connacht’s guilt would flare up when the boy failed to grasp a lesson. When that happened, the old man would push and push until the boy mastered whatever skill his grandfather was teaching, at which point another lesson would begin.

  For another boy, this existence with a grandfather whom others shunned would have been a lonely one. Connacht’s swift punishments for failure would have had others howling in pain, or vowing to run or seek revenge. For Conan, these were not options simply because someone born on a battlefield would never run, and a Cimmerian would not acknowledge pain. Stripped of the family and life he had known, Conan redefined himself as the man of destiny others had supposed him to be. If he failed, their hopes and expectations would be invalidated. His father and mother’s wishes would never be realized. Conan, though given to the occasional bout of melancholy, did not dwell overlong on things introspective and instead occupied himself learning all he could of the killing arts.

  In Connacht he had a willing and a superior teacher. Connacht the Freebooter, the Far-Traveled, had been isolated because of his past. In training his grandson, he could guarantee two things. First, his bloodline would not be extinguished easily. Second, those who had forgotten who and what he had been would learn the truth through his grandson’s exploits. While even the most casual of observers could have seen that Conan would be a great Cimmerian warrior, Connacht intended him to be the greatest Cimmerian warrior. He would be the man against whom all others would be measured.

  More than once Connacht had told him that. The admission came late at night, when his grandfather finished some tale of how he’d escaped slavers or survived a battle. Conan would stare at him, wide-eyed, with the admiration and love that rewards all the trials of parenthood, and mutter, “Someday, Grandfather, I shall be as you were.”

  “No, Conan, you will be greater. Men once remembered me as a Cimmerian. They will remember you as the Cimmerian.”

  To Conan, that idea seemed, at first, ridiculous. And then, later on, it became a goal. It became fused with the destiny that had been thrust on him by his birth on a battlefield and by his parents’ desire that he know more than fire and blood. If he were to be the Cimmerian, he would have to do more than just be a warrior. He didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he was determined to find out.

  And in his fourth summer with his grandfather, just after he turned fifteen, he gained his first opportunity to become the Cimmerian.

  THE AQUILONIANS HAD long coveted Cimmerian territory. With every generation, they conspired to steal as much as they could. They pushed into Cimmeria and established the hunting outpost known as Venarium. During the years when it had been little more than a trading post, the Cimmerians had tolerated it. When troops invested it, when stone walls replaced the wooden ones, and when punitive raiders sallied forth from its confines to hunt down Cimmerians who had gone raiding . . . then it became an open sore and could no longer be tolerated.

  Cimmerian elders gathered and conferred. They summoned the tribes and clans. They even sent word to isolated villages and single homesteads, suggesting that all had been forgiven and that any animosities must be forgotten in the face of this greater threat to Cimmeria. So it was that Conan and Connacht left the homestead, and went to join the others in an encampment northeast of the Aquilonian settlement.

  Conan had never much been given to considering how he had changed since coming to live with his grandfather. He measured his growth not in pounds or inches, but in skills mastered. Yet the way the other men looked at him, and the shock when they learned he was only fifteen years old, left no doubt that he had changed physically. Though he’d not yet attained his full height or weight, he’d gone from being a boy to a six-foot-tall man, lean as a wolf but well muscled, tipping the scales at over a hundred and eighty pounds. A few men said they could see his father in him, and this made him proud. He never smiled, however, and kept his own counsel, for, as both Corin and Connacht had told him, “ ’Tis better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt of it.”

  While excited to be in the warrior camp, Conan also wanted to get far away from it. Though he was not the youngest there, the other youths had been grouped into support companies. They would be held in reserve, and went through daily drills to prepare them. Everyone knew that if the battle went so badly that the youngest warriors were called upon to fight, they would die. But such was Conan’s size and so well developed were his skills that he did not fit with his peers.

  The companies of adult men wanted even less to do with him. While all was supposed to be forgiven, the southern tribesmen—whose coloration matched Conan’s most closely—were clearly wary of Connacht and anyone connected to him. The northern tribes seemed reluctant to trust Conan, both because he appeared to be a southerner and because of his youth.

  He and his grandfather fell in with a motley collection of warriors that the others referred to as the “Outlanders.” While none of them knew Connacht, they knew of him. Like him, they had ventured well beyond the borders of Cimmeria. Their adventures had taken them to the same faraway places that Connacht’s had taken him. As Elders plotted and planned, the Outlanders shared stories. They bonded as men do who have known the same hardships—and as men do who are destined for more hardships. Not a one of them doubted that the Elders would form them into their own company and throw them into the most savage of the fighting—less because they valued them as warriors than because their loss would hurt the tribes the least.

  Kiernan, the closest of the Outlanders in age to Conan, was a decade his senior. Though not nearly as tall as Conan, he had a whiplash quickness matched only by the swiftness with which he delivered wry comments. He carried a bow—an affectation he adopted while serving as a Shemite mercenary—and invited Conan along with him to take a look at Venarium before the tribes marched.

  The two of them slipped over the ridgeline and found cover high above the valley in which Venarium had been built. The valley broadened toward the south. The river splitting it would eventually flow into the Shirki and water Aquilonia’s central plains. Already forests had been cleared around the settlement and fields planted with more than enough wheat and hay to sustain Venarium.

  Though Connacht had taken great care in describing the cities of the south, his stories had not prepared Conan for his first view of Venarium. The trading settlements he’d visited before had been little more than villages, but Venarium towered above the plains. Stone walls girded it and a switchback causeway led up to the main gate. An inner set of walls warded a fortress at the town’s pinnacle, and the high tower, from which flew a half-dozen pennants, commanded a view of the entire valley.

  Kiernan pointed toward the fortress. “See there, Conan, how the fort’s gate faces south, but the main gate faces east?”

  The youth nodded.

  “That’s so when we breach the main gate, we have to fight our way along and around to the south. The gutters will run with Cimmerian blood.”

  “And Aquilonian.”

  “True enough.” The smaller warrior ran a hand over his chin. “The Elders will be wanting the Aquilonians to come out and fight like men, but they won’t. So we’ll prove how brave we are by beating on their doors while they shoot us full of arrows or boil us in oil.”

  “Connacht has told of siege machines.”

  “Oh, aye, there are such.” Kiernan smiled. “Like as not, we’ll soon be chopping wood and lashing things together to form a few, but getting them close enough to work is the trick. On the walls there, on top of the towers, they have their own catapults and onagers. Behind the walls they have trebu
chets. All of them will range on what we have.”

  Conan nodded grimly.

  “Now, if the Elders had destroyed Venarium when putting it to the torch was all that was required, we’d not be facing the problem we now are. But the Aquilonians figured to use greed to soften our resolve. Now that stone walls are up, it’s a steeper price we’re to pay.”

  “Better to pay in fire than blood.” Conan looked at his scarred palms. “This is a huge blood debt.”

  Kiernan smiled. “There’s other coin for reckoning the debt, lad. You always have to assume your enemy is smart. But you get to remember he’s a man. And he has men under his command, some of whom won’t be so smart. You can use that against them. In this case, if we don’t, even the smartest men among us will be dead . . . and Cimmeria will die with them.”

  The Cimmerian youth frowned. “We cannot do nothing.”

  “Agreed. But what we’ll have to do, in the minds of some, isn’t work for warriors, and isn’t work for Cimmerians.” The older warrior shrugged. “Though I suspect, when recounting tales of victory, some details will go unmentioned, become forgotten, and few will think to complain.”

  KIERNAN AND CONAN returned to the Cimmerian camp and spoke with the other Outlanders. While no one doubted the courage of any Cimmerian warrior, the Outlanders had all engaged in battles and sieges, whereas their average companion’s greatest victory had been a cattle raid. The Outlanders, choosing Kiernan and Connacht as their spokesmen, offered a plan to the Elders. Conan attended his grandfather as the plan was presented, and the Elders accepted it less because it was the wisest plan than because it absolved them of responsibility if it failed.

  The Cimmerian host advanced in two wings. One was composed of northerners and invested itself in the valley directly opposite Venarium’s main gate. The southern contingent came in from the north and placed itself beside the northern force, with a gap of three hundred yards between them. The Cimmerians made no attempt to surround the city. They posted a few pickets well outside the range of Aquilonian archers and siege machines. The camps showed little organization and less discipline, with fights regularly breaking out in the gap between forces.