The greatest care was lavished on Conan’s hands. The blisters had long since burst and the infection had been defeated. His grandfather mixed up a foul-smelling unguent out of fish meat, bear grease, and a variety of dried roots and leaves, then had the boy work it into his palms. Conan continued to wrap his hands and don gloves for anything involving lifting. Connacht also forced him to flex his hands hundreds of times throughout the day.
'You’ll always carry scars from that day, Conan, but you can’t be crippled by them.'
The combat drills Conan hungered for came at last, but not in the way he’d been expecting. His grandfather still wouldn’t let him touch a sword. 'Sword’s just a metal sting. A warrior’s weapon is his body. Can’t use that, doesn’t matter how sharp the sword.'
The old man then proceeded to teach his grandson every aspect of infighting that he’d learned from a lifetime of adventuring and brawling―and Conan suspected that he made up a few on the spot. Connacht, despite being four times his grandson’s age, tossed him around as if he were a raggedy doll. Conan vaguely remembered having accused his father of not fighting fairly, but Corin had been the soul of sportsmanship compared to his father. Kicks, punches, head butts, and elbow strikes knocked Conan all over the yard before the hut.
Connacht even bit him once!
Conan would have protested, but he remembered Klarzin parrying his sword cut, then kicking him full in the chest. Corin had been right. Fighters might talk about fighting fairly, but in their storytelling they left out certain details. He couldn’t remember a single of his grandfather’s stories that included his having bitten anyone, but the old man was a bit too practised at it to even suggest that it had never happened.
Conan gave back as much as he could, and occasionally landed a fist or a kick on his grandfather. He never hurt him, though, but not because he pulled his punches. Connacht still moved quickly enough to slip most blows, and certainly knew enough to anticipate Conan’s next moves. Still, as the weeks wore on, Conan’s hits became more consistent than misses, and his ability to block attacks improved greatly.
One day Connacht called a sudden halt to their fighting. 'Good. You’ve learned well.'
Conan, doubled over, catching his breath, glanced up. 'Is this how you taught my father?'
'Corin, the size of him? No. I had a different way with him.' The old man straightened up. 'I want you to haul twenty buckets of water from the river to fill the cistern, then I have one more thing for you. Accomplish that task, and tomorrow we begin working with a sword.'
Conan smiled and ran off. The sooner he perfected his sword fighting, the sooner he’d be able to avenge his village. While thoughts of revenge filled his mind, he hauled water and saw nothing of his grandfather. He did hear some pounding from within the hut, but attached no significance to it.
Finally the cistern brimmed over and Conan returned the buckets to their place near the small forge his grandfather maintained. The young Cimmerian stepped into the hut and found his grandfather sitting by the hearth. The meagre furnishings had been cleared out of the centre. An iron plate had been bolted to the floor and four feet of heavy chain attached to it. The chain ended in an iron shackle.
Connacht nodded to it. 'Put your right ankle in there. Lock it shut.'
The young man sat on the floor and secured the shackle around his ankle.
His grandfather got up, took Conan’s sword from where it hung on the wall, and stood beside the doorway. 'You’re a good fighter, Conan. You learn quickly. You’re determined to go after Klarzin, aren’t you?'
Conan nodded.
'There’s nothing anyone could do to stop you, is there?'
The boy shook his head.
Connacht tossed Conan’s sword out into the yard. 'Go get your sword. When you get it, you’ll be ready to get Klarzin.'
X
CONAN STARED AT his grandfather, waiting for an explanation.
Connacht walked out the doorway and let the hide flap slide across to eclipse the sun.
The young Cimmerian shook his leg. The heavy chain dragged at the shackle, digging into his ankle and grinding against bone. He grabbed the chain and tugged, hard, but it didn’t give at all. More importantly, the short chain didn’t allow him to move to where he could brace himself against something to use his legs in trying to pull free. The best he could do was to lay a foot on the eyebolt sunk into the middle of the plate, but unless he could snap the chain, that effort would be useless. And without some leverage, actually ripping the plate out of the floor wouldn’t work.
On hands and knees he crawled over and looked at the plate, chain, and eyebolt. All were solid steel and without being softened in the forge’s fire, they’d resist his efforts to break them. He examined each link in the chain, but could find no weak ones. He rubbed a link against the plate’s edge, but his grandfather had rounded off the edge, so wearing a link down would take days.
Even the shackle was stout enough to frustrate his attempts to pry it open. He had nothing with which he could force the lock. Conan instantly understood the desire of a trapped fox to gnaw its own foot off to escape a trap. Not only was he not flexible enough to do that, he had no desire to cripple himself.
There has to be a trick to it. Conan’s icy eyes narrowed. No, if my father had done this, there would have been a clever way out. Not so Connacht.
The boy yanked at the chain, then howled in frustration. He whipped the chain back and forth, hoping some hidden weakness would shear the bolt off, but no such luck. He wrapped the chain around the eyebolt and yanked, hoping to bend it. It resisted his best efforts. In no time he sat in a puddle of his own sweat, no closer to freedom than he’d been before.
Snarling, he pounded the chain against the floorboards and made some headway. He peeled away wood, biting out the splinters that lodged beneath his fingernails. He tore at the wood, hoping to rip the whole plate free. As he dug down, however, he discovered that his grandfather had secured it around one of the floor’s crossbeams.
Even this fact did not discourage Conan. He continued to rip away wood, hoping that he could loosen things enough that he could rotate the plate around the crossbeam. That would loop the chain around the crossbeam, and he could then haul back on it to use the chain to saw through the crossbeam. Large heavy links and seasoned hardwood would make the job difficult, but he’d get through.
Then he learned that his grandfather had bolted the plate to the crossbeam on the underside, which made the plate immobile and his plan irrelevant.
The boy tossed pieces of wood at the hide flap. He wanted to provoke a reaction from his grandfather. A laugh at his predicament, a curse at the destruction he was causing, a reproving stare and a comment he could think on. Anything. But all he got in return was silence. It was as if he was completely alone in the world.
That thought flushed frigid fear through his belly. What if he was alone. What if Klarzin had tracked him to his grandfather’s hut and sent an assassin after him? What if Lucius No Nose was coming to finish what Klarzin hadn’t let him do at the village? Conan grasped a piece of wood with a pointed end because he refused to think of himself as helpless, but with four feet of chain hobbling him, he’d be slaughtered, weapon or no weapon, in a heartbeat.
He moved around to the far side of the plate, let the chain play out, and sat with his shoulders and head against the wall, watching the doorway. The rattle of chains reminded him of Klarzin’s allies, and of the chain he’d failed to hold on to back at the village. He looked at his hands, the scars visible but the flesh pliable. There he sat, trapped by chains as his father had been, as vulnerable as his father had been, and the last seconds of his father’s life played through his mind over and over again.
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.'
XI
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 centred the blame on Lucius, the Aquilonian, only because Aquilonians were familiar enemies, 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 recognised 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 realised. Conan, though given to the occasional bout of melancholy, did not dwell over-long 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-travelled, 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.'
The Conan Chronology Page 8
