Conan of Venarium

by Harry Turtledove

  Not all the Cimmerians were firmly under Herth’s control. Such was the way of life among the warriors of the north. So many of them did as they pleased, not as any chieftain told them. More than a few did as they pleased in despite of what any chieftain told them. Having fought to the outskirts of the Aquilonian stronghold, they saw no reason why they should not fight their way straight into it.

  The Aquilonians inside Venarium gave them such a reason. The defenders were not yet inclined to withdraw to the fortress. Archers lurked among the buildings at the outskirts of the town. As soon as Cimmerians drew within range, the archers began to shoot. They killed several men and wounded even more before the Cimmerians sullenly drew back.

  “Here is what we will do,” said Herth after fresh troop of black-haired barbarians came down from the north to augment his force. “We will all charge together at one signal. That way, the enemy cannot shoot many of us before we gain a lodgement in the town. Once we have done that, we can hunt down the bowmen—and any others who stand against us—because we have far more men than the Aquilonians. Wait for the signal, mind you, and then everyone forward together.”

  For once, no one quarreled, as often chanced when a war chief tried to impose his will on the men he more or less led. The bodies lying in front of Venarium spoke eloquently of the folly of every man’s going forward for himself. The Cimmerians gathered themselves, looking to their weapons and looking for their friends and kinsmen. They had never been in the habit of marching or attacking in neat lines, but they all moved up to where they could hear the signal.

  A bugle blared. The Cimmerians roared. They swarmed forward toward Venarium. A great excitement seized Conan, as if he had poured down too much ale. Here at last was the enemy’s great stronghold. If Venarium fell, the Aquilonian hold on southern Cimmeria would be broken forever. He looked at the host of his countrymen dashing along to either side of him. How could the town, how could the fortress, keep from falling under such a weight of warriors?

  Arrows arced out from the town toward the attackers. Here and there, a man fell, to lie thrashing or to lie still. But Herth had known what he was about. Too many men went forward for all, or even very many, of them to fall. On they came, roaring out their hatred of the foreigners who had tried to subject their land. And as soon as they got in among the homes and shops, the fight for the town of Venarium was as good as won.

  Not that the Aquilonians in the town believed as much. Archers kept shooting from inside buildings. Pikemen would rush out of doorways, spear passing Cimmerians, and then try to get back to defend the entrances before other Cimmerians could cut them down. Sometimes they succeeded; sometimes they fell. But Venarium had plenty of defenders, and they were stubborn enough to make it a tough nut to crack.

  Conan rapidly discovered that a sword did not make the ideal weapon with which to assail a pikeman. The soldiers who carried pikes had a longer reach than he did; he almost spitted himself on a pike, trying to get at the Gunderman who wielded it. But when another Cimmerian distracted the foe, Conan leaped close and drove the blade into his neck. He fell, blood spurting from the ghastly wound. Another Gunderman sprang forward to try to keep Conan’s countrymen out of a shop. Someone from the street flung a rock at the Gunderman. He shrieked and staggered, his face a gory mask. He did not suffer long; Conan’s thrust pierced his heart.

  Before long, a cry went up in both Cimmerian and Aquilonian: “Fire!” Conan wondered whether Herth was using the ploy he had suggested, or whether some Cimmerian had simply concluded that burning out Venarium’s defenders was the easiest and least costly way to flush them from the fine cover the buildings in the town afforded. He also wondered whether he would ever know, and doubted it very much.

  “Ha!” shouted a Cimmerian, savage glee filling his voice. “Here’s how we roast Numedides’ swine!”

  Smoke quickly thickened the air. Fighting fires was hard, even hopeless, work in the best of circumstances. Fighting fires in the middle of a desperate battle was impossible. As wooden buildings began to burn, the Aquilonian defenders came forth, either to fight in the streets or to flee back toward the fortress of Venarium.

  Open space separated the fortress from the town. Count Stercus had not permitted taverns and saddleries to encroach on the palisade. Whatever else he had been, he had made a competent military engineer. Bossonian archers on a walkway inside the palisade shot at any Cimmerian who ventured into the cleared area.

  The archers also shot at Aquilonians who ventured into the cleared area. By then, the town’s attackers and defenders were inextricably mixed. Realizing as much, the Aquilonian officer in command ordered the gates shut against his countrymen outside, lest those gates also admit Cimmerians who would bring ruin with them.

  Forced to fight out in the open in front of the fortress, the Gundermen and Bossonians who had been defending the town of Venarium realized only one thing was left to them: to sell their lives as dearly as they could. They turned at bay against the Cimmerians, fighting with the. mad courage of men with nothing left to lose. Wild to crush the invaders, the Cimmerians battled back as ferociously.

  Quarter was neither asked nor given in that wild struggle. Little by little, the Cimmerians fought their way toward the palisade. They did not have greater courage than their foes. They did have more men to throw into the fight. In the end, that sufficed.

  Not far from Conan, Mordec’s axe rose and fell, rose and fell. Red drops flew from it as he cut down one Aquilonian after another. “To me!” he roared again and again. “To me, you wolves of the north!”

  And then, to Conan’s surprise, the gates of the fortress flew open once more. Out stormed the knights of Aquilonia, of whom he had heard so much. He had seen how fearsome Stercus seemed, riding into Duthil on his great horse in his helmet—the very helmet now topping Conan’s head—and back-and-breast. Twoscore knights thundered forth now, their lances couched, their faces—what could be seen of them—grim. “Numedides!” they cried, and, “Aquilonia!”

  But their charge now proved less than it might have. For one thing, many of the men in front of the gates were Gundermen and Bossonians; the knights had to ride them down or force them aside before they could get to the Cimmerians. And, for another, the open space in front of the fortress of Venarium was so tightly packed with men, any charge quickly lost its momentum.

  That left the knights an armored island in the midst of a Cimmerian sea. Many of them quickly threw aside their lances. They drew their swords and slashed away at the barbarians hemming them in on every side. But they could not keep all the Cimmerians away from them and their horses. Stallions screamed as they were stabbed. Knights were dragged from the saddle. Swords and daggers found the joints in their armor. The Aquilonians exacted a fearful toll from their foes, but more Cimmerians kept coming forward. The knights were irreplaceable. Once they went down to death, the men inside the fortress could send out no other such force.

  Conan hurled a rock at an archer up on the wall. His aim had been true against Stercus, and his aim was true now. The Bossonian clapped both hands to his left eye. He screamed loud enough to be heard above the din of battle. Screaming still, he staggered backward and fell off the walkway.

  Not far from him, another Bossonian also went down, struck in the chest by a shaft from a Cimmerian bow. That left a gap in the defense, a gap the Aquilonians, beset everywhere, could not set right at once. “Come on!” cried Conan. “Boost me up, you men! If we once gain the palisade, Venarium’s ours!”

  Willing hands heaved him aloft. His own hands gained a purchase at the top of the palisade. He pulled himself up. He pulled himself over. He swung down onto the walkway, the first Cimmerian inside the Aquilonian stronghold. Soldiers rushed toward him, desperate to cut him down. At their van came a skinny little Bossonian. He shot at Conan. The arrow kissed the sleeve of the Cimmerian’s tunic and flew harmlessly past.

  As the archer nocked another shaft, Conan sprang forward. With tigerish quickness, he seized the
little man and used his body as a shield and a flail, battering other Aquilonians and knocking several of them to the ground a dozen feet below. Then, roaring, he flung the luckless Bossonian down with them.

  He was not the only Cimmerian on the walkway for long. Where he had gone, his countrymen were quick to follow. Soon a knot of northern warriors stood up there, hacking and smiting. More Gundermen and Bossonians came to try to slay them. The enemy knew what would happen if they held their ground.

  “Stand aside, by Crom!” That great bass roar could only have come from Mordec. The blacksmith shouldered his way forward, to stand side by side with Conan once more. The blade of his axe was dented and all over blood. A wider smile than Conan had ever seen on him wreathed his usually somber features. He pointed to the foe. “At them!” he shouted, and Conan was not slow to join his charge.

  As they had outside the fortress, the Aquilonians on the walkway fought with desperate bravery. Conan had doubted their courage before this uprising broke out. He doubted it no more. What flesh and blood could do, the Gundermen and Bossonians did. But flesh and blood could do only so much. He and Mordec, fighting side by side, were a host in themselves. And they had ever-growing weight behind them. The top of a ladder cleared the palisade. Cimmerians swarmed up it and onto the walkway.

  “There’s a stair.” Mordec pointed with his axe. “We’ll get down into the courtyard. Then this whole fortress will be ours.”

  A Gunderman lunged at him with a pike. Light on his feet despite his bulk, he sidestepped. Conan’s sword bit into the Gunderman’s wrist. The soldier’s severed hand fell to the planks of the walkway with his spear. The Gunderman screamed. Mordec pushed him off the walkway, then surged forward once more.

  Conan hacked and slashed and thrust. He was bigger and stronger and quicker than most of the men he faced, even if only down grew on his cheeks. Step by gory step, the head of the stairs grew closer. An arrow shot from the ground hissed past him and thudded into the logs of the palisade. Another shaft struck a Cimmerian behind him. His countryman’s yells of anguish differed little from those of the Gunderman he had mutilated.

  More of Numedides’ soldiers rushed up the stairs to try to stem the Cimmerian tide. Mordec’s axe swept the head from a Bossonian’s shoulders, then took off a Gunderman’s arm above the elbow. “Come on!” shouted the blacksmith in Aquilonian. “Who’s next to die?”

  However brave the enemy soldiers were, such carnage could not help but daunt them, at least momentarily. Conan still at his right hand, Mordec set foot on the first step leading down into the fortress of Venarium. A moment later, they gained another step, and then another. After that, their foes recovered some of their spirit, and nothing came easy any more.

  Easy or not, though, they and the rest of the Cimmerians cleared the stairway of Bossonians and Gundermen one hard-fought step at a time. “Forward!” bellowed Mordec again and again. Forward the men of the north went, over the hacked and bleeding bodies of those who would stand in their way—and over not a few of the bodies of their own countrymen. With a deep-throated roar of triumph, Mordec leaped from the last stair down to the ground within the fortress. He shouted again, this time with words in the cry: “Venarium is fallen! Venarium is ours!”

  An arrow smote him, just to the left of the middle of his chest.

  He stood there for a moment, a look of absurd surprise on his face. Then he turned to Conan, as if remembering something important he needed to say. Whatever it was, it never passed his lips. His eyes rolled up in his head. Like a toppling tree, he crumpled, the axe falling from fingers that suddenly would not hold it.

  “Noooo!” shouted Conan, a long howl of despair and fury. That his father should fall in the moment of victory—“Curse you, Crom!” he cried, and threw Stercus’ sword in a startled Gunderman’s face. Then he snatched up the axe Mordec had wielded so well.

  He swung that axe with a madman’s fury. No Aquilonian could stand against him. No one could come close enough even to engage him. And he wounded more than one Cimmerian he did not recognize as a countryman because of his berserk grief. The men with whom he had fought his way into Fort Venarium grew as wary of him as the Gundermen and Bossonians they opposed.

  “He is fey,” said one Cimmerian to another, and his comrade nodded, for it did seem as if Conan willfully sought his own death on the battlefield.

  But whether he sought it or not, it did not meet him at Venarium. Others died there, Aquilonians and Cimmerians alike. A handful of Bossonians and Gundermen managed to escape the falling fortress by scrambling down over the south wall of the palisade and fleeing across the river, but most fell either in the courtyard or defending one barracks hall or another until the Cimmerians either battered down a door and forced an entrance or burned the building over their enemies’ heads.

  At last, as the sun sank in the northwest, the fighting dragged to a stop, for no more Aquilonians remained alive and unwounded to carry on. Cimmerians tended to their own injured men and cut the throats of the Bossonians and Gundermen who lay on the ground. “They did the same to us after the last fight here,” said Nectan the shepherd, leaning wearily on a pikestaff. “As often as not, it’s a kindness of sorts, putting somebody who won’t live out of his pain.”

  Conan heard him as if from very far away. The blacksmith’s son looked down at his hands, which still clutched his father’s axe. When he took them off the axe handle, the place where his father and he had clenched it was the only part not drenched in gore. And his palms seemed the only part of him not soaked in it. His arms were crimson up past the elbows. Blood dyed his tunic and breeks in colors Balarg the weaver had never intended.

  Balarg himself had come through the battle apparently unwounded. He stirred bodies not so much to see if they yet lived as to find out what sort of wealth they carried.

  “How can you think of loot when everything that matters to us is dead or in ruins?” demanded Conan.

  “I am not dead,” answered Balarg. “I am not dead, and I am well and truly avenged on my foes. I shall have to find a home in a new village. I would sooner do that as a man with riches than as a man with none. You will face the same trouble. You should plunder, too.”

  “I have no stomach for it, not now. What I have won, I have bought too dear,” said Conan. He looked around and shook his head. “I have no stomach for Cimmeria, not any more. My father is dead. My mother is dead, and I have not had time to mourn her.” That was a knife of shame, twisting in his gut. He looked Balarg in the eye. “And Tarla is dead. What do I have left to hold me here?”

  “Where would you go?” asked the weaver.

  “I know not.” Conan’s shoulders ached when he shrugged. How many times had he swung Stercus’ sword and his father’s axe in battle? More than he could count. With another shrug, he went on, “Let those who still have something worth holding here dwell in this land. As for me—” He spat and shook his head.

  chapter xiii

  AQUILONIA

  Even the wild rush of the Cimmerians from the north faltered after the fight at Fort Venarium. Before moving south of the river, they paused to treat their wounded, to put their dead in the ground, and to take what plunder they could from the ruined fortress and from the gutted town around it.

  Conan was among the first to cross the river, two or three days after the battle. All that had kept him from going south sooner, going south by himself, was the desire for a vengeance greater than he could hope to wreak alone. He had already punished the Aquilonians for his mother’s murder, and for Tarla’s. Now he owed them for his father, too.

  Revenge for Mordec proved harder to come by than he had hoped. The pause in the Cimmerians’ reconquest of their stolen land allowed word of their onslaught to spread widely among the Aquilonians who had settled south of Venarium. By the time the Cimmerians pushed on, they found many farms abandoned. Some of the folk from Gunderland had driven their livestock along with their wagons. Some had even burned the farmhouses they were abandoning,
to make sure their foes got no use from them.

  Gundermen and Bossonians also left most of the fortified garrisons they had built to keep watch on nearby Cimmerian villages. Here and there, though, the soldiers who fought under Aquilonia’s gold lion on black fought rear-guard actions to slow the Cimmerians’ advance and to help the settlers escape.

  They picked the best places to defend that they could: mostly valley mouths, where the attackers had to come straight at them on a narrow front. Conan hurled himself into one of those savage little fights after another. Stercus’ fine blade was gone; on his hip, Conan now wore a shortsword he had taken from the corpse of a blond pikeman of Gunderland. For his principal weapon, however, he still carried his father’s axe. He did not try to dean the handle of the bloodstains that marked it. As far as he was concerned, they were a badge of honor.

  He eyed a line of pikemen posted across the road, and a squad of Bossonian bowmen behind them. He had begun to see what Mordec meant about the Aquilonians’ order and discipline. Because Numedides’ men knew their places and their roles, they hurt the Cimmerians worse than they would have otherwise. The barbarians gathering with Conan had no sort of order whatever.

  But they did have a driving ferocity alien to the Aquilonians. When Herth shouted, “At them!” they went forward at an eager, ground-eating lope that said they wanted nothing more than to close with their foes. Their shouts were fierce and wordless. They might have been hunters pursuing a stag.

  Unlike stags, the Bossonians and Gundermen fought back. Arrows, flight after flight, felled poorly armored invaders before they could close. But the archers could not kill all the barbarians, and the ones who lived came on. The pikemen set themselves. Conan, running toward them, readied his axe.