by Roland Green
“We’re staying here,” Conan said. “We’ve drunk our fill and paid for it.”
The innkeeper wrung his hands. “But those who come in the morning—”
“—will have the place to themselves, if you give us. something to break our fast when you want us to leave. A few loaves of bread, a plate or two of sausages, any odd fowl you may have ready roasted—” The innkeeper promised a bountiful breakfast so quickly that his tongue kept tripping over itself, and Conan hardly understood what he and Rog had been promised. Nor, for the moment, did he particularly care.
Tomorrow they could return to the camp and begin working together to make the Thanza Rangers worthy of the name of soldier.
* * *
“Countess?”
The voice was Fergis’s. Lysinka rolled over and sat up to contemplate her comrade, who was squatting beside her sleeping cocoon. It was close enough to dawn that she could recognize his face as well as his voice.
“Have our folk voted?”
“Aye.”
“How did they vote?”
“We will follow you to join with Grolin.”
“That is as well. He will go questing for it, whether we join or not. Together, we will be more than twice as strong as either band. We may win further allies too.”
“Aye, and if those levies they are supposed to be raising in Shamar come calling, we’ll be better prepared to meet them.”
Fergis looked at his chieftain, and for the first time in years she was conscious that she was naked before him. She would not make matters worse by covering herself, however.
“Eh, Countess. Does he want to bed you?”
“You think it proves him a man of poor judgement if he does?”
“Proves him—?” Fergis began indignantly, then gave a short bark of laughter. “Countess, it is between him and you. I have not lost my senses.”
Nor, Lysinka suspected, the desire for her that glowed gently within him. This made his loyalty all the more perfect, so that she felt ashamed of baiting him.
“I have not lost mine either,” she said. “The Soul of Thanza is said to fight against death. It does not fight against common sense.”
V
Conan awoke in the blackness of the nighted forest with a toe prodding him in the ribs. He had reached for his sword when he saw that the toe belonged to Tharmis Rog.
“Is it time for me to relieve you?” he asked the master-at-arms.
“Not yet, but I hear movement in the mule lines.” “Not our people?”
“Too quiet to be any of our drunkards.”
“A deserter?”
“I think all such fools have already left. My wager is on bandits.”
“Then why haven’t you gone down to the lines to deal with them?” The Cimmerian had been sleeping in his clothes. To join Rog, all he had to do was grip his sword and stand up.
Rog chuckled. “Because I want to see if the lads on sentry duty remember aught of what we told them, back in Shamar. Then I’ll help them.”
“We’ll be in sorry shape if bandits take the mules.”
“Sellus—if that’s your name—they may not have mules in those benighted northern lands you hail from. Around here, a farm boy grows up ignorant of mules only if he’s a halfwit. I was a farm lad, and I joined the army as a mule driver.
“Between bandits and those pack mules, my money would be on the mules—”
Before Rog could finish or Conan reply, one of the sentries proved that he remembered at least part of his training.
“Help! Help! Somebody’s trying to steal the mules! Help!”
The sentry’s panicky squall was no proper alarm, but it did its work just as well. The camp of the Thanza Rangers came alive and awake around Conan and Tharmis Rog.
The two big men listened to the cries, the stumblings and fallings, the clatter and scrape of desperately snatched weapons, and the disordered footsteps of men hurrying toward the mules. When the two thought that enough men were awake and armed, they ran toward the now-braying mules, ready to guide the men of the Thanza Rangers into their first combat.
The Thanza Rangers had taken their time on the road from the camp outside Shamar to this dark camp in the forests near their namesake hills. Conan and Rog working together had wrought prodigies in barely ten days, but Klarnides was not yet much help and the new captains were an outright burden.
For some of them, it had been too long a journey. There were those who were eager for bandit loot, hoped-to show off their new-found skills and their loudly proclaimed courage, or merely expected to find desertion easier in the borderland.
There were others who would gladly have been in the Shamar camp or even back in the city. A good half of the two hundred men the Rangers had raised were still there—the half whom Rog and Conan pronounced in need of further training, if they were not to be more dangerous to their comrades or themselves than to any enemy.
Even with a fraction of their intended strength, and that halved, the Rangers could not have delayed taking the field any longer. The word from their patron, Count Ralthon, as that they had to make a campaign this year, even if they numbered only ten.
So Klarnides took a hundred men and one Nestorinus, the least skilled of the, new captains, down to the wharves. There Rog and Conan loaded them aboard an Aquilonian river galley. Supplies, mules, packsaddles, and other gear went aboard a hired merchant vessel.
Somehow everything arrived more or less safely and in order two days later, at a small town whose name Conan could never afterward recall. Its only virtue was that it lay almost at the southern tip of the Border Range, with the summits of the Thanzas in plain sight at dawn once the mist burned off.
Klarnides, showing more judgement than Conan had expected, divided the Rangers into two bands of forty, one under Conan and the other under Tharmis Rog. The remaining twenty he gave to Nestorinus, although both men and captain usually marched directly under Klarnides’s eye. It was understood that their main task was to handle the pack train and the spare weapons— which, like the rations, were better and more abundant than Conan would have dared expect.
“Somewhere between us and Numedides is a man with both gold and sense,” Conan said. “Any notion who, friend Rog?”
“Notions aplenty, but no more,” the master-at-arms said. “Not to be talked about either, until we’ve done some serious work.”
By the time the Thanza Rangers had done serious work, Conan feared that few of them would still be alive to talk about anything. Had he been his own master in this campaign, he would have taken another month training the men. Some showed promise; none yet seemed truly battleworthy.
But Conan was not his own master, and the only way he could become so was to desert the Rangers the moment they reached country rough enough to hide his trail, which would, of course, be the very moment that seasoned war leaders became even more necessary than before.
As he would not slay men in cold blood, so did Conan refuse to abandon these Aquilonian innocents to the tender mercies of the bandits. So he was at the head of the column when it marched north from the river town. He also both ate and slept lightly during the seven days of the ensuing march.
The mules were making such a din that Conan could not have heard heavy cavalry over the shrill braying. With all his battle-honed senses alert, he still could not tell whether the intruders were one, few, or many.
They might even have been a night-spawned phantom of a nervous sentry’s untrained imagination—save that Tharmis Rog thought otherwise, and Conan trusted the Aquilonian’s ears and experience.
“Hold!” Rog bellowed from behind the Cimmerian. “Bear right and left, you dung-weaned calves! Don’t go charging straight into the lines, or the mules’ll have you if the bandits don’t!”
That shouting must have warned everyone within half a day’s journey of Rog’s tactics. But it was needed, for the men behind the two leaders were rushing forward like a mob.
Conan looked briefly behind him to see N
estorinus and Klarnides running with the others. Nestorinus looked as helpless as a chip of wood in a millrace. Klarnides at least seemed alert and had his sword drawn, as he raised the standard of the Rangers in his other hand.
He might even have achieved dignity, if he had taken the time to don more than a loinguard and a helmet before rushing out to lead his men into their first battle.
Looking behind him proved as unwise as all Conan’s teachers of warfare had ever told him. The ground suddenly dropped out from under him, and he toppled forward. He turned the topple into a somersault and came up on his feet. At once he collided with something hairy enough to be an ape and foul enough to be a midden pit, save that it howled and cursed in a human tongue.
Conan stopped the howling and cursing with a buffet to the bandit’s chest that caved in ribs, and finished the work with his dagger. This gave Nestorinus, Tharmis Rog, and several Rangers enough time to scramble down the slope behind Conan. Indeed, they nearly rushed Conan off his feet again and went on to trample the next bandit, so quickly did they enter the fight.
Conan felt more relief at this than over his own survival. If the Rangers had even a handful of men who would rush into the fray, they would likely enough draw most of their comrades after them. The Rangers might not clear the Thanzas of bandits, but they could at least leave the forest on their feet at the end of summer, instead of greeting the winter from shallow graves amid the trees.
Another bandit went down, then two more leaped on mules they had cut loose. The mules neither threw them off at once nor carried them to safety. Instead they trotted around in circles, braying even louder than before.
The Thanza Rangers had few archers—or rather, few men whom even a green captain like Klarnides would trust with a bow (at least with Conan and Tharmis Rog to advise him). One of these archers must have nocked and shot, because an arrow whistled so close over Conan’s head that had he been a hand’s breadth taller it would have pierced his skull.
Instead it flew on, to skewer one of the stolen mules. Now the mule did rear, flinging its rider to the ground. The second mule broke into a gallop, but by this time a useful number of Rangers stood across its path. A man thrust with a spear at the rider as he leaned aside, a club cracked him across the head, and he toppled to the ground. A single scream marked his passing, aided by spears, knives, clubs, and boots.
The rider who had been thrown was now back on his feet. Nestorinus dashed to meet him, then halted abruptly as the man drew a sword. Conan had his own weapon drawn, and the captain backed up so abruptly that he nearly impaled himself on the Cimmerian’s point.
“Watch that, you fool!” Nestorinus snarled.
It was on the tip of Conan’s tongue to say that a coward should take care whom he called a fool. But Klarnides brushed past both men and stepped up to the bandit.
“Do you—?” Klarnides began, his voice hitting a high pitch.
The word “yield” never reached his lips. The bandit screamed a singularly vile obscenity and moved straight into a thrust.
Klarnides had been raising his sword in the manner prescribed by formal duelling customs and had to jump aside. He nearly went down, and Conan swore that at the youth’s next blunder he was going to take matters into his own hands.
Klarnides had only modest gifts for war. But he doubtless had powerful friends, who would not be grateful to those who allowed him to die on a bandit’s rusty sword. Conan did not much worry about his future in Aquilonia, but it was home to Tharmis Rog and his daughter, who should not have reason to flee.
Before Conan could take a step, Klarnides’s sword swept down into fighting position. The clanging of steel on steel was worthy of a blacksmith’s forge. Sparks flew as the bandit fell back, at once on the defence and hard-pressed at that.
Then the bandit’s arm lay open and bloody, as did his shoulder a moment later.
“First blood!” Klarnides shouted. “You can still yield.”
The bandit’s second reply was even coarser than the first. Then he hurled himself forward. If he reached close quarters—
Again, Klarnides needed no help. He sidestepped and thrust in a single controlled movement, and his sword sank deep between the bandit’s ribs. The dead man stood for a moment, then collapsed as Klarnides jerked his sword free.
“My thanks for your thoughts as if they were deeds,” Klarnides said, bowing as if he and Conan had been meeting in a palace garden. He nearly fell forward, and Conan saw that the captain’s face was pale and his hands, covered with the bandit’s blood, were shaking.
Klarnides took a deep breath and straightened. “Rally the men and kill any wounded the bandits left behind.”
Nestorinus looked so willing to play butcher that Conan nearly ran him through on the spot. Tharmis Rog coughed.
“Er, Captain?”
“What?”
“We need a prisoner. Dead men can’t tell us about this band.”
“Oh, of course.”
Behind Klarnides’s back, Conan and Tharmis Rog exchanged brief smiles. It needed more than swordsmanship to make a captain, but perhaps there was hope for Klarnides after all.
Lysinka awoke to see Fergis crouched between her and the fire. That also kept him between her and Lord Grolin. The outlaw baron had invited her three times to sleep on the same side of the fire with him. He had also accepted her three polite refusals with good grace. So far he had not invited her to sleep in the same blankets, perhaps because he feared a somewhat less polite refusal.
“There’s a fight not too far off,” Fergis said. He kept his voice low, in order not to wake the whole camp.
“Speak up,” Lysinka said, uncoiling from her sleeping cocoon. She wore tunic and trousers, not trusting Grolin’s men to follow the rules of her own band concerning lack of clothing.
“Oh, of course,” Fergis said. He shot her a look which said plainly that he did not care if Grolin thought the report was not for his ears.
Sometimes Lysinka wished likewise. But as long as the Soul of Thanza was a prize that only the united bands could seek, she had to be gracious toward Grolin. It was the only way she could repay the debt she owed to her band, for having given her life, honour, reputation, and such wealth as she possessed.
Grolin was not fully awake until Fergis had finished his tale, so the baron naturally insisted on the bandit repeating himself. Fergis looked as if he would rather have wrestled a she-bear but obeyed Grolin’s request and the look in his chieftain’s eyes.
When Fergis was done for the second time, Grolin was sitting up.
“Can I believe this? Who sent this tale?”
“The Village Brothers,” Fergis said. “And what they tell, you can take as if sent by the gods.”
“The gods send more lies than truths, in my experience,” Grolin snapped, which made the pious Fergis look pleadingly at Lysinka. She motioned him to silence.
“In truth, Lord Grolin, the Village Brothers are soul-kin, I think, to the forest spirits. What can be seen, they see. What can be heard, they hear. And if they were blind, deaf, and still in the forest, they might tell you much by what they scented.”
Unexpectedly, Grolin made a gesture of aversion. “Wolf blood?”
Lysinka had not thought of that old tale. She shook her head. “Only being wood-wise since first they could walk, or perhaps while their mother carried them. They are twins only she could tell apart, so perhaps that gives them some power.”
“As long as it gives them no power that will anger the Soul of Thanza,” Grolin said. “Otherwise, you might do well to send them away.”
Lysinka bristled like a wet cat. “We none of us know what will please or anger the Soul of Thanza. We do know that the Village Brothers are the best among us at finding common foes before they find us.
I will abandon this quest before I abandon them.”
“I have heard better ideas,” Grolin muttered.
“So have we,” Fergis said. “What if the brothers have found the Aquilonian levie
s—those who dare call themselves the ‘Thanza Rangers’—before the levies found us? Where I came from, lords gave silver to such men!”
“Plainly they gave none to you or you would not be here in the Thanzas following Lysinka,” Grolin said.
Lysinka put a hand on Fergis’s shoulder. Her companion looked ready to leap over the campfire and drag Grolin back through it, feet first and facedown.
“Enough insults,” Lysinka said to both men. “With the Village Brothers watching, no enemy can move against us without our being fully warned. I suggest the best use for the rest of the night is sleep. The closer the foe, the sooner the battle, and the better rested we must be.”
Grolin and Fergis both grumbled but saw Lysinka’s. wisdom clearly enough to take her counsel.
The Thanza Rangers spent the remainder of the night in untroubled sleep, save for those whom duty or restlessness kept awake.
Conan was not among the sleepers. He was making the rounds of the sentry posts, while Tharmis Rog saw to the healing of the injured mules.
The Cimmerian had just left the last sentry post and was returning to his sleeping place when he saw a slim shadow leaning against a tree on the path. Enough moonlight crept through the branches above to reveal Klarnides’s features.
“Hail, Sellus,” the captain said. “That was well done at the mule lines.”
“You mean my tumble arse over ear?” Conan said with a guffaw. “A carnival dancer can do better than that, believe me.” He trusted that Klarnides would take no offence at his light tone. If the man did, he was captain over the wrong men in the wrong place.
Klarnides laughed. “I wasn’t thinking of that, but I admit it was also well done. I feared you were going to dash out your brains against a tree trunk.”
Conan snorted with laughter. “Captain, don’t you know I’m a northerner? We’re solid bone from the neck up!”
“So the tales ran, I admit,” Klarnides said. “But I wonder how much truth they hold. My uncle was with the Gundermen who founded Venarium. He was not among those who came home, after the Cimmerians burned it. They made it plain that we were not welcome in the northland, let me tell you.”
