To Conan, that idea seemed, at first, ridiculous. And then, later on, it became a goal. It became fused with the destiny that had been thrust on him by his birth on a battlefield and by his parents’ desire that he know more than fire and blood. If he were to be the Cimmerian, he would have to do more than just be a warrior. He didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he was determined to find out.
And in his fourth summer with his grandfather, just after he turned fifteen, he gained his first opportunity to become the Cimmerian.
THE AQUILONIANS HAD long coveted Cimmerian territory. With every generation, they conspired to steal as much as they could. They pushed into Cimmeria and established the hunting outpost known as Venarium. During the years when it had been little more than a trading post, the Cimmerians had tolerated it. When troops invested it, when stone walls replaced the wooden ones, and when punitive raiders sallied forth from its confines to hunt down Cimmerians who had gone raiding . . . then it became an open sore and could no longer be tolerated.
Cimmerian elders gathered and conferred. They summoned the tribes and clans. They even sent word to isolated villages and single homesteads, suggesting that all had been forgiven and that any animosities must be forgotten in the face of this greater threat to Cimmeria. So it was that Conan and Connacht left the homestead, and went to join the others in an encampment northeast of the Aquilonian settlement.
Conan had never much been given to considering how he had changed since coming to live with his grandfather. He measured his growth not in pounds or inches, but in skills mastered. Yet the way the other men looked at him, and the shock when they learned he was only fifteen years old, left no doubt that he had changed physically. Though he’d not yet attained his full height or weight, he’d gone from being a boy to a six-foot-tall man, lean as a wolf but well muscled, tipping the scales at over a hundred and eighty pounds. A few men said they could see his father in him, and this made him proud. He never smiled, however, and kept his own counsel, for, as both Corin and Connacht had told him, ' ’Tis better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt of it.'
While excited to be in the warrior camp, Conan also wanted to get far away from it. Though he was not the youngest there, the other youths had been grouped into support companies. They would be held in reserve, and went through daily drills to prepare them. Everyone knew that if the battle went so badly that the youngest warriors were called upon to fight, they would die. But such was Conan’s size and so well developed were his skills that he did not fit with his peers.
The companies of adult men wanted even less to do with him. While all was supposed to be forgiven, the southern tribesmen―whose coloration matched Conan’s most closely―were clearly wary of Connacht and anyone connected to him. The northern tribes seemed reluctant to trust Conan, both because he appeared to be a southerner and because of his youth.
He and his grandfather fell in with a motley collection of warriors that the others referred to as the 'Outlanders.' While none of them knew Connacht, they knew of him. Like him, they had ventured well beyond the borders of Cimmeria. Their adventures had taken them to the same faraway places that Connacht’s had taken him. As Elders plotted and planned, the Outlanders shared stories. They bonded as men do who have known the same hardships―and as men do who are destined for more hardships. Not a one of them doubted that the Elders would form them into their own company and throw them into the most savage of the fighting―less because they valued them as warriors than because their loss would hurt the tribes the least.
Kiernan, the closest of the Outlanders in age to Conan, was a decade his senior. Though not nearly as tall as Conan, he had a whiplash quickness matched only by the swiftness with which he delivered wry comments. He carried a bow―an affectation he adopted while serving as a Shemite mercenary―and invited Conan along with him to take a look at Venarium before the tribes marched.
The two of them slipped over the ridge-line and found cover high above the valley in which Venarium had been built. The valley broadened toward the south. The river splitting it would eventually flow into the Shirki and water Aquilonia’s central plains. Already forests had been cleared around the settlement and fields planted with more than enough wheat and hay to sustain Venarium.
Though Connacht had taken great care in describing the cities of the south, his stories had not prepared Conan for his first view of Venarium. The trading settlements he’d visited before had been little more than villages, but Venarium towered above the plains. Stone walls girded it and a switchback causeway led up to the main gate. An inner set of walls warded a fortress at the town’s pinnacle, and the high tower, from which flew a half-dozen pennants, commanded a view of the entire valley.
Kiernan pointed toward the fortress. 'See there, Conan, how the fort’s gate faces south, but the main gate faces east?'
The youth nodded.
'That’s so when we breach the main gate, we have to fight our way along and around to the south. The gutters will run with Cimmerian blood.'
'And Aquilonian.'
'True enough.' The smaller warrior ran a hand over his chin. 'The Elders will be wanting the Aquilonians to come out and fight like men, but they won’t. So we’ll prove how brave we are by beating on their doors while they shoot us full of arrows or boil us in oil.'
'Connacht has told of siege machines.'
'Oh, aye, there are such.' Kiernan smiled. 'Like as not, we’ll soon be chopping wood and lashing things together to form a few, but getting them close enough to work is the trick. On the walls there, on top of the towers, they have their own catapults and onagers. Behind the walls they have trebuchets. All of them will range on what we have.'
Conan nodded grimly.
'Now, if the Elders had destroyed Venarium when putting it to the torch was all that was required, we’d not be facing the problem we now are. But the Aquilonians figured to use greed to soften our resolve. Now that stone walls are up, it’s a steeper price we’re to pay.'
'Better to pay in fire than blood.' Conan looked at his scarred palms. 'This is a huge blood debt.'
Kiernan smiled. 'There’s other coin for reckoning the debt, lad. You always have to assume your enemy is smart. But you get to remember he’s a man. And he has men under his command, some of whom won’t be so smart. You can use that against them. In this case, if we don’t, even the smartest men among us will be dead . . . and Cimmeria will die with them.'
The Cimmerian youth frowned. 'We cannot do nothing.'
'Agreed. But what we’ll have to do, in the minds of some, isn’t work for warriors, and isn’t work for Cimmerians.' The older warrior shrugged. 'Though I suspect, when recounting tales of victory, some details will go unmentioned, become forgotten, and few will think to complain.'
KIERNAN AND CONAN returned to the Cimmerian camp and spoke with the other Outlanders. While no one doubted the courage of any Cimmerian warrior, the Outlanders had all engaged in battles and sieges, whereas their average companion’s greatest victory had been a cattle raid. The Outlanders, choosing Kiernan and Connacht as their spokesmen, offered a plan to the Elders. Conan attended his grandfather as the plan was presented, and the Elders accepted it less because it was the wisest plan than because it absolved them of responsibility if it failed.
The Cimmerian host advanced in two wings. One was composed of northerners and invested itself in the valley directly opposite Venarium’s main gate. The southern contingent came in from the north and placed itself beside the northern force, with a gap of three hundred yards between them. The Cimmerians made no attempt to surround the city. They posted a few pickets well outside the range of Aquilonian archers and siege machines. The camps showed little organization and less discipline, with fights regularly breaking out in the gap between forces.
A contingent of Elders from the northern force approached the city and met with an Aquilonian envoy. Among the many things they demanded, including the dismantling of the walls were rental fees and
three hundred cats. Not to be outdone, a southern party of leaders demanded four hundred rats and five hundred bats. The Aquilonians, who sent messengers south to summon reinforcements, agreed to meet these requests and within a week delivered the tribute to the Cimmerians.
Many of the Cimmerians viewed all of the talking as nonsense, but Conan benefited from his association with Connacht and Kiernan. The Aquilonian commander could look out from his tower and see two Cimmerian forces split down the middle. If the southern troops wished to go home, they would have to go through the northerners. The battles in the gap proved there was little love lost between the two groups. While the Cimmerians were creating some siege machines, they were too small to effectively batter the city into submission before reinforcements could arrive from the south. As far as the Aquilonian commander was concerned, all he had to do was keep a watchful eye on the barbarians and wait for others to rid him of his problem.
Then came the night of no moon.
Venarium depended upon wells to draw water in, and sewers to drain waste away. The sewers flowed together toward the south, into a series of irrigation canals that used water from the river to flood the fields with night soil as fertilizer. The Aquilonians had barred and gated the sewers, but only to keep men out. Their preparations could not stop cats or rats or bats, especially when those creatures were released with burning embers lashed to their tails and legs in woven, green-grass baskets.
The animals fled to safety in Venarium, pouring into the city through the sewers or winging their way above the walls and into towers and attics. As the first fires ignited, after the animals had chewed their way free of their fiery cargo, alarms sounded. Troops tasked with guarding the sewers―a duty never given to the most elite of troops―fled to other posts to fight the fires. It took very little for the Outlanders to crash through the sewer gates and pour into the city, all but unnoticed in the chaos.
And once they reached the main gates and opened them, Cimmerian rage consumed the town more swiftly than the flames.
The Aquilonian leader was not a stupid man, nor did he lack courage. Whether from his tower he saw the Cimmerian Outlanders advancing on the gate, or he assumed that the gate would be a target, he donned his armour and led his personal cohort through Venarium’s smoky streets. His force hidden behind tall shields, bristling with spears, slammed into the Outlanders’ flank and drove them back against the gates they so desperately wished to open.
Many of the Outlanders drew together and back, hoping to buy time for the others to come to their rescue, but Conan was not among them. Clad in a blackened mail surcoat, he burst from the Outlanders’ midst and, with one, double-handed blow, split a shield and took the arm of the Aquilonian holding it. As that man looked down, terror on his face, his lifeblood pumping in black jets from his severed limb, Conan struck off his head.
Conan waded into the Aquilonians’ midst, perhaps for a heartbeat transported back to his village, imagining himself there, destroying those who had killed his people and slain his father. Good Cimmerian steel clove Aquilonian bone, spraying blood and brains. Aborted screams and cries for mercy filled the night, rising and falling within the din of metal clashing with metal. Conan moved with the battle and through it, Connacht’s training allowing him to understand it and master it. Spear points caught on mail, short swords split rings and tore flesh, but never enough to slow the Cimmerian youth. Every cut he returned a hundredfold, every drop of blood he reaped in gallons.
And then the other Cimmerians boiled through the gates and over the walls.
Venarium fell screaming beneath a cold, unfeeling sky and stars that glittered as ice.
THAT NEXT MORNING Conan stood beside Kiernan and Connacht at the vantage point from which he’d first seen Venarium. What had once been grand and imposing was now nothing more than a smoking ruin―home to ravens and other consumers of carrion. Cimmerians still occupied the plains, filling carts with loot, chaining slaves into long strings, making mounds of skulls toward the south to chasten and taunt the Aquilonians.
And not a single Outlander was among them.
Conan frowned. 'Do they not see that they invite the Aquilonians to invade?'
Connacht shrugged. 'They do not wish to see.'
The other Outlander nodded. 'That is the Outlander curse, Conan. Having seen the world, we see a future others cannot imagine. They think Cimmeria is immortal, but it is no more so than Atlantis or Acheron or any of the nameless empires that slumber beneath distant sands. Cimmeria may always be remembered―I know it will be thus―but that is not the same as being immortal.'
Conan nodded, leaning heavily on the sword that had drunk deeply of Aquilonian blood. He loved his nation. He loved his people. But his destiny lay far from the snowcapped Cimmerian mountains, and once he left his homeland, his return would be a long time coming.
Legions of the Dead
L. Sprague de Camp & Lin Carpenter
I
Blood on the Snow
A deer paused at the brink of the shallow stream and raised its head, sniffing the frosty air. Water dripped from its muzzle like beads of crystal. The lingering sun gleamed on its tawny hide and glistened on the tines of its branching antlers.
Whatever faint sound or scent had disturbed the animal was not repeated. Presently it bent to drink again from the frigid water, which rushed and bubbled amid crusts of broken ice.
On either side of the stream, steep banks of earth lay mantled in the new-fallen snow of early winter. Thickets of leafless bush grew close together under the sombre boughs of the neighbouring pines; and from the forest beyond, nothing could be heard but the ceaseless drip, drip of melting snow. The featureless leaden sky of the dying day scarcely seemed to clear the tops of the trees.
From the shelter of the woods, a slender javelin darted with deadly precision; and at the end of its arc, the long shaft caught the stag off guard and sank behind its shoulder. The stricken creature bolted for the far side of the creek; then staggered, coughed blood, and fell. For a moment or two it lay on its side, kicking and struggling. Then its eyes glazed, its head hung limply, and its heaving flanks grew still. Blood, mixed with froth and foam, dribbled from its sagging jaws to stain the virgin snow a brilliant crimson.
Two men emerged from the trees and studied the snowy landscape with searching eyes. The larger and older, plainly in command, was a giant of a man with massive shoulders and long, heavily muscled arms. The swell of his mighty chest and shoulders was visible beneath the cloak of fur that enveloped his stalwart figure and the coarse, baggy woollens he wore beneath the cloak. A broad belt of rawhide with a golden buckle held his garments around him, and a hood of wolf fur, forming part of the cloak, obscured his face.
Now pushing back the hood to peer about, he revealed a head of curling golden hair, slightly streaked with grey. A short, roughly trimmed beard of the same hue clothed his broad cheeks and heavy jaw. The colour of his hair, his fair skin and ruddy cheeks, and his bold blue eyes marked him as one of the Æsir.
The youth beside him differed from him in many ways. Scarcely more than a boy, he was tall and brawny for his age―almost as tall as the full-grown Northman beside him―but lean and wiry rather than massive. He was dark and sullen, with straight, coarse black hair hacked off at the nape, and the skin of his sombre visage was either naturally swarthy or heavily tanned. Under heavy black brows, his eyes were as blue as those of the giant at his elbow; but whereas the golden warrior’s eyes sparkled with the joy of the hunt and zest for the kill, those of the dark youth glowered like the eyes of some wild and hungry predator. Unlike his bearded companion, the young man’s beard was shaven clean, although a dark stubble shadowed his square jaw.
The bearded man was Njal, a jarl or chieftain of the Æsir and leader of a band of raiders known and feared on the wintry borders between Asgard and Hyperborea. The youth was Conan, a renegade from the rugged, cloud-haunted hills of Cimmeria to the south.
Satisfied that they were unobserved, the t
wo emerged from cover, descended the bank, and waded the icy current to the place where their kill lay lifeless on the blood-spotted snow. Weighing almost as much as the two men together, the stag was too heavy and, with its branching antlers, too cumbersome to bear back to their camp. So, while the youth watched broodingly, the chieftain bent and, with a long knife, swiftly butchered the beast, peeling back the hide and separating the shoulders, haunches, and ribs from the rest of the carcass.
'Dig a hole, boy, and make it deep,' grunted the man.
The youth cut into the frozen slope of the bank, using the blade of the long-handled axe that had been strapped to his back. By the time that Njal had finished dressing the stag, Conan had hacked out a pit capacious enough to hide the offal. While the Northman cleaned the bloody quarters in the rushing stream, the youth buried all that was left of the carcass, and scraped the crimson snow into the pit along with the loosened soil. Then untying his fur cloak, the Cimmerian dragged it back and forth, obliterating the traces of his handiwork.
Njal wrapped the flesh of the deer in the freshly flayed hide of the beast and tied the mouth of the improvised sack with a thong brought along for the purpose. Conan cut a sapling with his axe and trimmed it down to a pole as long as a man, while the jarl cleansed his javelin by thrusting it into the sand in the bed of the stream. Njal tied the bag to the middle of the pole, which the two then hoisted to their shoulders. Dragging Conan’s cloak behind them to erase their footprints, they climbed the farther slope and re-entered the woods.
Here along the Hyperborean border, the pines grew tall, thick, and dark. Wherever a break in the forest afforded a vista, the ridges could be seen to roll endlessly away, covered with snowcapped pines of a green as dark as sable. Wolves skulked along the nighted forest trails, their burning eyes lambent green coals, while above floated great white owls on silent wings.
The Conan Chronology Page 9
