Conan of Venarium

by Harry Turtledove

  Conan had not thought of that. He watched the soldiers. Sure enough, one of the pikemen walked up to Treviranus and casually spoke to him in their language. The officer glanced at Mordec through narrowed eyes. He raised his hand as if about to give some order. Conan tensed, ready to hurl himself against the invaders. But, whatever Treviranus had been about to do, he seemed to think better of it. He spoke a single sentence, aimed at Mordec like an archer’s arrow.

  “He asks, do we understand?” said the blacksmith in Cimmerian.

  Slowly, reluctantly, the men of Duthil nodded. They had fought these fair-haired men from the south, fought them and been defeated. Remembering the loss helped the men submit without too much more shame. Their womenfolk were even slower and more reluctant to acknowledge that the Aquilonians had the upper hand for the time being. One by one, however, most of them did nod at last.

  Conan did not, would not. He could be beaten; the bruises he still had from his father’s hard hands proved as much. But submission was not in him, nor would it ever be. He glared daggers at the Aquilonian officer.

  Treviranus noticed that volcanic blue stare. He spoke to Mordec again: a question. The blacksmith set his free hand, the one not clenched on the spearshaft, on Conan’s shoulder. That was as much to hold him back as to identify him. Mordec answered in Aquilonian, then said, “He asked if you were my son. I told him aye,” in Cimmerian.

  “Tell him I hate him, too, and I’ll kill him if I can,” said Conan.

  “No,” said his father, and the hand on Conan’s shoulder suddenly gripped like a vise. Despite the pain shooting through Conan’s arm, not a sound came from him. Quietly, Mordec went on, “Remember what I said about watching your tongue. And remember what he said—if he dies, so do ten of ours. There is no striking them.” He added one more word, too low for the Cimmerian-speaking enemy soldier to catch: “Yet.” That Conan understood. Now his head did move up and down.

  Another stream of words meaningless to Conan came from the Aquilonian officer. “He says their commander is called Count Stercus,” said Mordec, pitching his words to carry not just to his son but to all the folk of Duthil. “He says this Stercus is a hard man and a harsh man, and warns us against angering him.” Treviranus hesitated, then said something else. Mordec frowned and translated that last sentence, too: “He says we would do better not to let Stercus’ gaze fall on any of our women, especially the younger ones.”

  That made the Cimmerians standing in the street mutter more among themselves. Several men put protective arms around the shoulders of wives or daughters. Their sense of chivalry was rude, as befit their material setting, but no less real for that.

  Conan’s eyes went to Tarla, the daughter of Balarg the weaver. She was still a girl, no more a woman than Conan was a man, but it was on her, after his mother, that his protective instinct centered. Just for a moment, his gaze and hers met. Then she looked modestly down to the ground.

  The Aquilonian officer spoke once more. “He says his people have come here to stay, and we had better get used to it,” said Mordec.

  Liar! Conan did not shout the word, but he wanted to. Looking at the faces of his fellow villagers, he knew he was not the only one in whose heart rebellion flamed. Oh, no—far from it.

  Granth and Vulth and a pair of Bossonian archers stood sentry outside the encampment the new garrison had made by the Cimmerian village. It was a little past noon, but Captain Treviranus had ordered sentries on alert at all hours of the day and night. Granth wasn’t the least bit sorry Treviranus had given that order, either.

  One of the Bossonians, a tall, rangy bowman named Benno, peered into the shadowed woods. “The captain said panthers lurk among those trees,” he said. “By Mitra, I should like to make a cape from the skin of a panther of my own killing.”

  Vulth pointed toward the village just above a bowshot away. “You want panthers, Benno, look that way first. Every house there holds ’em.”

  “That’s the truth!” exclaimed Granth. “Did you fellows spy that one brat, the son of the wounded fellow who was doing the translating for Treviranus? By the look in his eye, he wanted to murder the lot of us.”

  “Oh, that one,” said Benno. “Aye, I noted him—a face like a clenched fist. He’ll make a bigger man than his father, and his father’s far from small. Did you see his hands and feet? Too big for the rest of him, like a wolfhound pup’s before it gets its full growth.”

  “I saw the lad, too, and I tell you he is no wolfhound.” Vulth spoke with great conviction. “He is a wolf.”

  “All these Cimmerians are wild wolves, and they bite hard.” Granth thought back to the fight by Fort Venarium. Those roaring, bellowing barbarians who kept coming, kept killing, despite wounds that would have slain a civilized man on the instant were enough to chill the blood. And, absent the Aquilonian cavalry, they might have—probably would have—won.

  And then, as if speaking of the boy were enough to conjure him up, he emerged from the woods only fifty yards or so from the sentries. A quiver of arrows was slung on his back. He had a bow in his right hand. In his left, he carried three long-beaked woodcocks by the feet. After a wary glance to make sure the Aquilonians were holding their place and not pursuing him, the young Cimmerian went on toward his village.

  Benno stared after him, jaw dropping in astonishment. “Did you see his bag?” whispered the Bossonian. “Did you see it?”

  “Woodcock make mighty fine eating,” said Granth. “Fry the breast in butter, do the legs the same way. If you feel like it, you can cook up the guts, too—fry ’em along with everything else.”

  “Oh, yes. Every word true,” said Benno nodding. “But they are easier to frighten into nets than to take with the bow. To bring home three like that—Mitra! I am glad the boy was not shooting at us in the battle.”

  “For all you know, he was,” said Vulth.

  Benno looked surprised in a different way. “It could be,” he admitted, “though I saw no children amongst our foes—or amongst the slain afterwards.”

  The other Bossonian bowman was a scarfaced veteran named Daverio. “Anyone who shoots like that is no child in my book—especially not if the dog is shooting at me,” he said.

  “True enough,” said Vulth. “He’d put a worshiper of Asura on a pilgrim boat for his last journey, sure as sure.”

  “A fat lot you know about that,” jeered Granth.

  “I don’t care to know anything about the people who worship Asura, and nobody who worships Mitra should,” answered his cousin. “People say it’s the same black slave who takes every one of those pilgrim boats down the river to the sea, or wherever they end up when all’s said and done. That’s not natural, you ask me.”

  Benno and Daverio both nodded. So did Granth. Benno turned to what was uppermost in his mind: “Mowing down woodcock like that isn’t natural, either. It’s closer to supernatural than a good many things I’ve seen sorcerers do.”

  “If he shoots one of us, we burn him and nine of his neighbors,” said Vulth. “Even barbarians understand that kind of arithmetic.”

  “I hope so,” said Granth. “Sometimes barbarians will kill without counting the cost. That’s what makes them barbarians.”

  Daverio shrugged cynically. “That will probably happen once or twice. Then we’ll kill ten or twenty Cimmerians, or however many it takes. Before long, the ones we leave alive will say, ‘Don’t do anything to King Numedides’ men. It hurts us worse than it hurts them.’”

  “And so it will—except for the poor Gunderman or Bossonian who gets it in the neck,” said Vulth.

  The four sentries looked at one another. The same thought filled all their minds—as long as it is not me.

  Conan got used to the presence of the invaders with a boy’s speed and ease. He soon came to take light-haired men walking through the village for granted, and learned to tell Bossonians from Gundermen by looks rather than by weapons of choice.

  And he began learning Aquilonian. Before long, he had picked
up almost as much of it as his father knew. That amused Mordec, in a grim way. “You’ve got a good ear, son,” he said. “I don’t suppose it will matter much, but it’s there.”

  “Why do so many people here have trouble with the other language?” asked Conan in puzzled tones. “It’s only more words.”

  “People seem to,” said Mordec. “You don’t notice the Gundermen learning Cimmerian, either, do you?”

  “I’ve seen one man trying,” answered Conan. “He was doing his best to talk with Derelei, the miller’s wife.”

  “Aye, and I know what he was doing his best to ask for, too,” said Mordec. “Derelei is a very pretty woman, and she knows it a little too well. But aside from that, the invaders don’t bother. Why should they? They beat us. We’re the ones who have to fit ourselves to them, not the other way around.”

  Why should they? They beat us. The words tolled in Conan’s mind like the mournful clangor of a brazen bell. “What can we do, Father?” he asked. “We have to do something. If we don’t, we might as well be so many sheep.”

  “One day, the time will be ripe,” said Mordec. “One day, but not yet. Patience, lad—patience. For now, we mourn and we heal. The time will come, though. Sooner or later, it will. And when it does, we will know it, and we will seize it.”

  Patience came hard for the boy, even harder than it would have for a man. Days came when Conan dared not look at an Aquilonian, for fear he would hurl himself against the foeman to his folk and bring disaster down on Duthil. When such fits took him, he would flee the village as if it lay in the grip of a deadly pestilence, and would go alone to hunt in the forests and on the hillsides nearby.

  Mordec said never a word to him about those jaunts. The blacksmith could have used his son’s help in the day-to-day work of the smithy, but seemed to sense how Conan needed to escape that which had become intolerable for him. While the boy stalked woodcock and grouse, squirrel and rabbit, he imagined he went after bigger game: Gundermen and Bossonians and the fearsome armored Aquilonian knights he had heard of but not yet seen. And hunting for the pot, though he did not fully realize it, helped him gain some of the arts he would use in war.

  Spring slowly moved into summer. In that northern land, days grew long and almost warm. The sun rose in the far northeast and set many hours later in the far northwest. Some of Cimmeria’s perpetual mist burned away. The sky was a watery, grayish blue, but blue it was nonetheless. Even the conifer-filled forests seemed—less dour, at any rate. Ferns growing by the bases of the tree trunks added splashes of brighter green to the scenery.

  Silent as the beasts he stalked, Conan slipped through the woods. When he came to the edge of a small clearing, he froze into immobility. His eyes scanned the open space ahead to make sure he disturbed nothing before he ventured out from the concealment a pair of pines gave him. Not even a savage Pict from the rugged country west of Cimmeria could have walked more lightly on the land.

  Once out in the clearing, Conan froze again, watching, listening, waiting. Something seemed to call him, but not in a way to which he could set words. He frowned, then went on. Whatever it was, he would find it.

  He frowned again on the far side of the clearing. He had been through these woods many times, yet he did not recall this particular track. Shrugging, he silently strode along it. It took him in the direction he wanted to go. That it might also take him in the direction it wanted him to go never entered his mind.

  Some little distance down the trail, he stopped, his head turning this way and that. The frown that harshened and aged his features grew deeper. Birdsongs were scarcer now than they had been in springtime, when returning migrants vied for mates. Still, he had been able to hear the calls of doves and finches and the occasional distant, strident shriek of a hunting hawk.

  Not here, not now. Silence had settled over him, soft as snowfall. His eyes flicked now to the left, now to the right, now up, now down. The forest looked no different from the way it had before he set foot on this treacherous track. It looked no different, but somehow it was. That muffling drift of silence lay thick upon the land. Even the buzz of flies and the hum of gnats were softly swallowed up and gone.

  “Crom!” muttered Conan, as much to hear his own voice—to hear anything at all—as for any other reason. The grim god’s name seemed to reverberate through the trees, carrying farther than it had any business doing. But Crom would not help him if he came to grief. He knew that only too well. The god might have helped breathe life into him, but, now that he had it, keeping it was his own lookout.

  He nocked an arrow before pressing on down the trail. He could not have said why, save that the unnatural silence oppressed him. Against silence, what could an arrow do? Nothing Conan could think of, yet having a weapon instantly ready to use heartened him.

  On he went, his perplexity mounting at every stride. These woods felt more ancient than the ones with which he was so intimately familiar, as if the trees had been brooding here since the dawn of time. He scratched his head, wondering why and how such certainty filled him. Again, he could not have said, but fill him it did, more so with each step he took.

  That feeling of age immemorial soon began to oppress him worse than the silence, to raise in his breast a dread nothing natural could have caused. He needed a distinct effort of will to halt, and another, greater, one to turn around and seek to go back. When he did, ice walked along his spine. The track that had led him forward vanished behind him. It might never have been there at all. When he turned again, though, it still ran straight ahead of him.

  “I’ll go on, then,” he said. This time, the tree trunks and branches might have drunk up his words; he barely heard them himself. Crom might have held some power in this primordial wilderness, but Conan himself had none, or so it seemed.

  That might have been the judgment of the wilderness, but it was not Conan’s. Defiantly, he pressed ahead. The path went past an enormous fir—easily the largest Conan had ever seen, and one he would surely have known well had it grown anywhere near Duthil—before turning sharply to the left. The blacksmith’s son followed it, but then stopped in his tracks in astonishment at the sight of what lay ahead.

  The gray stone ruin might have sprung from the dawn of time. It was, without a doubt, a temple dedicated to some god, but which? Not Crom, surely; he had neither shrine nor priesthood. Perhaps some mystic convulsion has sent it spinning down the centuries from its own proper era to that in which Conan lived. It might have been a temple from the great vanished island of Atlantis, from whose few scattered survivors the Cimmerians drew their descent. Of that, however, Conan knew next to nothing.

  He warily approached the fane. The immense stones from which it was made, albeit only crudely carven, were fitted together with consummate skill; not even the blade of a knife could have slipped between one and another. What had been an entryway still offered ingress of sorts, though the lintel stone had fallen and partially blocked the way in.

  With a boy’s agility, Conan twisted past the fallen stone. No sooner had he done so than a strange, weird piping filled the air. He could not have said whether it came from a musical instrument or the throat of some curious bird. All he could have said was that it made the hair on his arms and at the nape of his neck rise with horror and dread at its intimations of ancient wickedness.

  The entryway twisted left and then right before opening out on an immense courtyard paved with stones of the same dusky gray as the rest of the temple. They were joined as cunningly as all the other masonry, with the result that only a few bushes and saplings had managed to take root between them. In the center of the courtyard stood an altar of white marble made all the more dazzling and brilliant by contrast to its surroundings.

  Strange figures and glyphs had been carved onto the altar; the pedestal of a statue rose from it. Only the feet and legs of that image now survived. One quick glance at them was enough to make Conan look away, dizzy and sick. If those remains did that to him, he shuddered to imagine what he wou
ld have felt had the statue survived in its entirety. Some things were well lost in the mists of time.

  Behind the altar, one of the paving stones suddenly swung down on a clever pivot whose workings had defied the eons. Conan, intent on trying to make sense of the antediluvian carvings on the altar stone, did not notice the silent operation until a curious, hungry hiss forcibly brought it to his attention.

  That sound sent him springing back. Even more than the roar of a hungry lion or panther, a serpent’s hiss screamed danger! to all around. And, as the great snake issued forth from the den where it had slept since some forgotten age of the world, Conan’s eyes went wide with dread. Serpents in Cimmeria were most of them small, slinking creatures that fed on frogs or mice. Even a viper that might steal a man’s life would be no longer than his forearm.

  This snake, though, could have devoured the blacksmith’s son and scarcely shown the bulge he made. It had to be forty feet long, and broad in proportion. When it opened its mouth to taste the air, poison dripped from fangs longer than an index finger. Its lidless golden eyes held old, old knowledge and even older evil.

  Those terrible eyes fixed on Conan. The snake hissed again, this time as if glad the opportunity to break its age-long fast was so thoughtfully provided. A tongue a foot and a half long flicked out—in the direction of the young Cimmerian. The fearsome serpent glided straight toward him.

  With a cry of horror and abhorrence, a cry springing from the instinctive revulsion of warm-blooded life for the scaly, slimy primeval reptile, Conan let fly. His shaft struck the snake just to one side of a nostril, and bounced away after scraping an all but harmless scratch in the creature’s armored hide. The serpent hissed furiously and reared on high, as if to crush the life from the man-thing that had presumed to resent being devoured. Yet it was not primarily a constrictor. Faster than a springing panther, it struck.

  Conan, with the tigerish instincts of the barbarian, leaped back out of harm’s way in the very nick of time. He was already fitting another arrow to his bow, and loosed again. This arrow stuck behind the snake’s head: a wound, yes, but one more likely to enrage than to cripple. The snake’s mouth gaped wider than ever. The sound that burst from it might have come from a bucket of water cast onto red-hot iron. It struck again, seeking to avenge itself with envenomed fangs.