Conan of Venarium

by Harry Turtledove

  “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 blacksmith swung 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.

  One moment, the encampment and its surroundings were as quiet and calm as if they were back in Gunderland and not in the midst of enemy country. The next, after a horrible blast from a horn, a horde of bellowing barbarians burst from the trees and rushed toward the Aquilonians, brandishing every sort of weapon under the sun: swords, axes, spears, sickles, scythes, maces, morningstars, simple bludgeons, eating knives, even a pitchfork. Cimmerian archers sent shafts arcing over the heads of their onrushing comrades.

  “Mitra!” exclaimed Granth, and snatched up his pike from where he had laid it on the ground.

  “Mitra, watch over us,” echoed Vulth, grabbing his own weapon. “And the god had better, for we’re in trouble if he doesn’t.”

  “Fo
rm a line!” shouted Sergeant Nopel from somewhere not far away. “Form a line, protect your comrades, and fight hard. If they break us, we’re ruined. If we stand fast, though, we’ve got a chance.” He strode up to take his place among the men he led, using his example to buoy their courage.

  A captain was shouting, too: “You pikemen, ward the archers as you can. They aren’t worth so much at handstrokes.”

  Bossonians were already pouring shafts into the onrushing mob of barbarians. Here and there, a dark-haired Cimmerian would clap his hands to his chest or his neck or his face and fall. Taking a handful of drops from the ocean, however, left plenty more than enough to drown a man. And now the barbarian storm crashed into—crashed over—the Aquilonians outside the palisade.

  Any sensible man, Granth realized, would have been terrified. Maybe he was something less than sensible. More likely, he was so desperate, so busy fighting for his life, that he had no time for fear or any other distraction. Anything that took his attention away from simple survival would have meant him lying on the field, a hacked and gory corpse.

  As things were, he might have died a dozen times in the first minute of collision. A barbarian swinging a two-handed sword almost as tall as he was thundered toward him, shouting something in Cimmerian that Granth could not understand. But even a two-handed sword had less reach than a Gunderman’s pike. Granth spitted the foe before the Cimmerian could slash him.

  To his horror, the barbarian, though bellowing in anguish, tried to run up the spear so he could strike with the sword, but slumped over dead before he could. Granth had to clear the pike in a hurry; had he not, some other Cimmerian would have cut him down. At his right hand, Vulth speared an axe-wielding barbarian. With the enemy still on the pike, Granth’s cousin could not defend himself against another Cimmerian, this one swinging a wickedly spiked morningstar. Granth had no time to thrust, but used his pikestaff as if it were a cudgel, clouting the Cimmerian in the side of the head.

  The enemy warrior wore a leather cap strengthened with iron strips. That kept the shaft from smashing his skull like a melon. But, though the blow did not slay, it stunned, leaving the barbarian dazed and staggering and easy meat for Vulth’s newly freed pike.

  As the Cimmerian fell, Vulth bowed to Granth as if to an Aquilonian noble. “My thanks, cousin,” he said.

  “My pleasure, cousin,” replied Granth, as if he were such a noble. He looked over the field: a mad, irregular excuse for a battle if ever there was one. Everywhere he saw Cimmerians surging forward, Bossonians and Gundermen giving ground. Raising his voice above the din of the fight, he said, “Looks to me as if we’re in trouble, cousin.”

  “Looks to me as if you’re right,” agreed Vulth. Granth and he had to fall back several paces or be left behind by their retreating countrymen, which would have left them cut off, assailed from all directions at once, and doomed to quick destruction. Vulth risked a glance back over his shoulder. “Having a fortified camp behind us doesn’t seem so bad any more, does it?”

  “As a matter of fact, no,” said Granth, doing his best to preserve the grand manner. “All those men inside the camp look pretty good, too—or the rogues would, if they’d only come out and fight.”

  There he was not being fair to his fellow soldiers. As fast as they could arm themselves, they were rushing forward into the fray. But to Granth, as to the other men who bore the brunt of the savage Cimmerian onslaught, their friends entered the fight at what seemed a glacial pace.

  The barbarian who hurled himself at Granth had eyes that put the Gunderman in mind of flaming blue ice. He roared out a wordless bellow of hate and rage, his face contorted into a mask of fury that might have made any foe quail. His only weapon was a rusty scythe, but he swung it as if he had been reaping men for years. Granth jabbed with the pike to keep the warrior off him. The Cimmerian, who wore a wolfskin jacket over baggy woolen breeks, howled incomprehensible, oddly musical curses at him.

  That the Gunderman did not mind. When the barbarian reached out with his left hand to seize the pikestaff and shove it aside so he could close, however, Granth quickly jerked it back and then thrust forward again. He felt the soft, heavy resistance of flesh as the pike’s point pierced the man who sought to slay him. The Cimmerian howled. Granth twisted the pike to make sure the stroke was a killing one, then jerked it free. The barbarian fell, blood and bowels bursting from his belly.

  Again, though, he and Vulth had to retreat to keep from being surrounded and cut off. “How many damned Cimmerians are there?” he shouted.

  “By Mitra, they’re all damned,” answered his cousin. “But there are too many of them on the field here.”

  That there were. They forced the Gundermen and Bossonians back and back, until the men from the south were fighting desperately to hold the barbarians out of the fortified encampment. If the Cimmerians forced themselves into the camp, Count Stercus’ army was probably doomed. That seemed all too plain to Granth—and to the howling savages who forced their way ever forward despite the reinforcements issuing from the camp.

  A Gunderman to Granth’s left slumped to his knees, bleeding from a dozen wounds that would long since have slain a less vital man. “What are we going to do?” cried Granth. “What can we do?”

  “Fight,” said Vulth. “This is where we’ll win or lose, so we’d better win.”

  Granth fought, and fought hard. If the battle were to have a turning point, he and his comrades would have to make it here. If not—He shook his head. He would not think about that. It might befall him, but he would not think of it before it did.

  “Fight hard!” bellowed Mordec. “By Crom, we can break them here. We can, and we must! Fight hard!”

  Although he and his fellows had battled to the very gates of the Aquilonians’ camp, they could not force their way inside. For one thing, the pikemen and archers at the gates battled back with the careless fervor of men staring disaster in the face. For another, more men kept coming forth from the encampment to add their weight to the fray. And, for a third, archers galled the Cimmerians from behind the ditch and palisade surrounding the camp.

  Mordec smashed at the tip of a pike seeking to drink his blood. The iron head flew off. He roared in triumph. But the Gunderman he faced defended himself so fiercely, first with the pikestaff and then with his shortsword, that Mordec could not slay him. At last, balked of his intended prey, the blacksmith sought and soon found an easier victim.

  Inside the encampment, a bugler blew a long, complex call. The Aquilonians outside the gate that Mordec faced fell back into the camp. The foot soldiers who had been hurrying out to help defend the place parted to the left and to the right. A great shout of victory rose from the Cimmerians, who loped forward, ready to taste at last the sweet fruit for which they had struggled so long and hard.

  But they rejoiced too soon. The archers and pikemen had not given way from despair, but because they were clearing the path for their comrades. That sweet-voiced Aquilonian bugle cried out once more—and the armored knights who up until then had not joined the battle thundered forth against the Cimmerians.

  The horsemen had used the whole width of the encampment to go from walk to trot to gallop, and when they struck, they struck like an avalanche. Here in the hilly, heavily forested north, cavalry was not much used. Not only was there little room for horsemen to deploy, but most of the few horses in Cimmeria were mere ponies, ill-suited to carrying heavy men and their armor of iron.

  Shouting out the name of King Numedides as if it were a thing to conjure with and not that of a slavemaster, the Aquilonian knights slammed into the oncoming Cimmerians. Lances and slashing swords and cleverly aimed iron-shod hooves and the surging power of armored men and horses took their toll. The Cimmerians fought back as best they could, but their swords and spears would not bite on the knights’ thick plate, or on the iron scales the horses wore to protect their heads and breasts.

  Mordec’s axe was a different story. When he brought it down between a horse’s
eyes, the beast foundered as if it had run headlong into a stone wall. Agile even in his well-articulated armor, the rider tried to scramble free. The blacksmith’s countrymen swarmed over him. Their blades probed for every chink and joint in his suit of iron. He screamed, but not for long.

  Yet even as he died, his comrades spurred ahead, spearing and hacking, their great mounts whinnying fiercely and rising on command to their hind legs so they could lash out with their front hooves. Along with Numedides’ name, the knights cried out that of Count Stercus, and, whenever they did, one of the foremost riders gaily waved. His visor was down, so Mordec could not see his face, but he fought like a man who had no regard for his own life. Again and again, he urged his charger into the thickest part of the press. Again and again, the other Aquilonians followed to save him from his own folly—if folly it was, for even as he risked himself he routed the Cimmerians.

  Had they been used to facing armored horsemen, they surely would have acquitted themselves better. But the Aquilonian knights had, along with the advantages of armor and momentum, that of striking from above and, greatest of all, that of surprise. Never had any of their foes here, no matter how ferocious, tried to stand against such an onslaught.

  With the mercurial nature that marked the barbarian, the horde of Cimmerians who had been rampaging forward now suddenly turned to panic-stricken flight. Turning their backs to the knights who pressed them, they dashed for the safety of the woods.

  “Stand! Hold fast, you fools!” shouted Mordec. “You but give yourselves into the enemy’s hands if you run from him!” His was not the only voice raised trying to stem the rout, but all resounded in vain. Faster by far than they had advanced on the Aquilonians’ camp, the Cimmerians fled from it.

  And they paid the inevitable price for their folly. Laughing at the sport, the Aquilonian knights speared them down from behind, as if they were so many plump partridges. Bossonian archers sped the Cimmerians on their way with cleverly aimed shafts. More than a few bold warriors from those gloomy woodlands suffered the humiliation of taking their death wounds in the back.