Harry Turtledove - Conan of Venarium

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Conan of Venarium by Harry Turtledove (v12.0) (html)

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Conan of Venarium by

Harry Turtledove

Chapter One

The Coming of the Aquilonians

Wagon wheels groaned. Horses' hooves drummed. Above and behind and through

all the other sounds came the endless thump of heavy boots in the roadway. Lithe

Bossonian archers and the broad-shouldered spearmen of Gunderland made up

the bulk of Count Stercus' army. They eyed the small number of heavily

caparisoned Aquilonian knights who rode with Stercus with the amused scorn

freeborn foot soldiers often accorded their so-called social betters.

"What do they suppose they're going to do with those horses when we get up into

Cimmeria?" asked Granth son of Biemur. The Gunderman coughed. He marched

near the middle of the long column, and the road dust coated his broad, friendly

face and left his teeth gritty.

His cousin Vulth snorted. "Same as they always do," he answered.

"And what's that?" demanded Granth. He and Vulth squabbled all the time,

sometimes in a friendly way, sometimes in earnest. Vulth was older—he had to

be close to thirty—and taller, but deep-chested, big-boned Granth owned a bull's

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Conan of Venarium by Harry Turtledove (v12.0) (html)

strength his cousin had trouble matching.

Here, though, Vulth was more interested in sniping at the Aquilonian aristocrats

than in scoring points off Granth. "Why, they use 'em to flee, of course," he

replied. "They can run from the wild men faster and farther than us poor foot

sloggers."

Granth laughed. So did several other soldiers in their company. But their sergeant,

a scarred, grizzled veteran named Nopel, growled, "Shut your fool's mouth,

Vulth. If the count hears you talking like that, you'll be lucky if he just puts

stripes on your back."

"I'm not afraid of him," said Vulth, but his wobbling voice gave the words the lie.

Count Stercus hated everyone in his own army with a fierce and rancorous

passion. Granth had yet to hear what he had done down in Tarantia, the capital, to

be relegated to the gloom of the northern frontier, but it must have been

something dreadful.

But, however much Stercus despised his own men, he reserved his most savage

loathing for the Cimmerians. How many times had he harangued the army about

the barbarous savages they were going to face? More often than Granth could

easily remember; that was certain. If Stercus had his way, he would wipe every

Cimmerian off the face of the earth.

Peering through the dust as best he could, Granth looked north toward the hills of

Cimmeria. Dark forests of pine and fir and spruce robed those hillsides, making

them even more somber than if they were of bare rock. Mist clung to the hills,

gray clouds scudded low above them.

"Mitra!" muttered Granth. "Why do we want that miserable country, anyway?

Why would anybody in his right mind want it?"

Nopel grunted. "Plain you didn't grow up on the border, the way I did. You ever

had a pack of those wild wolves come howling down on your farm or village to

steal and burn and kill, you wouldn't ask stupid questions like that." The sergeant

spat in the roadway.

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Conan of Venarium by Harry Turtledove (v12.0) (html)

Abashed, Granth marched along in silence for a while. But his was not an easy

spirit to quell, and before long he said, "You can't even see if anybody lives in

those woods."

"Oh, no —you can't see the Cimmerians there," said Nopel. "Don't you worry

about it, though. Whether you see them or not, they see you."

More silence followed. More often than not, Gundermen and Bossonians, good-

natured men close to the land, would sing as they marched: ferocious songs of

what they intended to do to their foes and bawdy ballads about the wenches they'd

left behind and the others they expected to find after they beat the enemy. No one

in the whole long column seemed to feel like singing today.

Granth looked toward the huge Aquilonian flag a standard-bearer carried at the

head of the column. The great gold lion on black heartened him. Aye, the

Cimmerians were wolves, but when faced with a lion wolves slunk away.

Granth's hand tightened on the shaft of his pike. Let the wolves howl! When the

fight came to close quarters, he would make them howl on a different note.

A stream no different from any of the others the army had forded wound down

out of the darkly wooded hills and through a verdant meadow. Pioneers ran

forward, seeking a ford, and soon found one. The standard-bearer splashed across,

the water rising no deeper than his thighs. The Aquilonian knights forded the

stream next. Most of them urged their horses forward to form a protective wall to

shield the rest of the army against any possible onslaught from the north. Count

Stercus and a few of his henchmen, however, reined in just on the far side of the

stream.

"You see?" muttered Vulth. "He hasn't the stomach to advance himself."

"No, look," answered Granth. "He's speaking to the foot soldiers as they cross."

"Well, so he is," said Vulth. "Still, actions talk louder than words, or so our

grandsire always used to say."

Sergeant Nopel cuffed him, hard enough to stagger him and make him swear. "I

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don't care what your granddad used to maunder on about," snapped Nopel. "What

I say is, you talk too cursed much."

By then, the company had almost reached the stream. Granth drew his sword and

held it high so the blade would not get wet and rust. When he crossed, his boots

crunched on gravel in the streambed. Cold water poured down over his boot tops

and soaked his feet. He cursed resignedly; he had known that would happen. He

would have to sit close by the fire tonight—and every other man in the company

would have wet feet, too. There would be a lot of pushing and jostling before that

got sorted out.

He squelched up onto the north bank of the stream. "Welcome to Cimmeria!"

Count Stercus called from horseback, not to Granth in particular but to all the

men who were coming up onto dry land just then. "Welcome, I say, for we are

going to take this land away from the barbarians and make it ours."

Stercus sounded very sure, though his voice was higher and thinner than Granth

would have liked in a commander. He wanted a man who could bellow like a bull

and make himself heard across a mile of battlefield. Stercus was young to have a

command like this, too, for he could not have had more years than Vulth. His

lean, hawk-nosed, pallid face would have been handsome but for dark eyes set too

close together and a chin whose weakness the thin fringe of beard he wore could

not disguise.

"The savages shall surely flee before us," declared Stercus.

"I hope he's right," said Granth.

"If the Cimmerians ran whenever somebody poked them, Aquilonia would have

taken this country hundreds of years ago," said Vulth. "We'll have plenty of

fighting to do yet. Don't you worry about that."

Granth looked to see if Sergeant Nopel would tell Vulth to shut up again. Nopel

said not a word, from which Granth concluded the sergeant thought his cousin

was right. The Aquilonians trudged north, deeper into Cimmeria.

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Conan of Venarium by Harry Turtledove (v12.0) (html)

Iron belled on iron. Sparks flew. Mordec struck again, harder than ever. The

blacksmith grunted in satisfaction and, hammer still clenched in his great right

hand, lifted the red-hot sword blade from the anvil with the tongs in his left.

Nodding, he watched the color slowly fade from the iron. "I'll not need to thrust it

back into the fire, Conan," he said. "You can rest easy at the bellows."

"All right, Father." Conan was not sorry to step back from the forge. Sweat ran

down his bare chest. Though the day was not warm —few days in Cimmeria were

warm —hard work by the forge made a man or a boy forget the weather outside.

At twelve, the blacksmith's son stood on the border of manhood. He was already

as tall as some of the men in the village of Duthil, and his own labor at Mordec's

side had given him thews some of those men might envy.

Yet next to his father, Conan's beardless cheeks were not all that marked him as a

stripling. For Mordec was a giant of a man, well over six feet, but so thick

through the shoulders and chest that he did not seem so tall. A square-cut mane of

thick black hair, now streaked with gray, almost covered the blacksmith's

volcanic blue eyes. Mordec's close-trimmed beard was also beginning to go gray,

and had one long white streak marking the continuation of a scar that showed on

his cheek. His voice was a deep bass rumble, which made Conan's unbroken

treble all the shriller by comparison.

From the back of the smithy, from the rooms where the blacksmith and his family

lived, a woman called, "Mordec! Come here. I need you."

Mordec's face twisted with a pain he never would have shown if wounded by

sword or spear or arrow. "Go tend to your mother, son," he said roughly. "It's

really you Verina wants to see, anyhow. "

"But she called you," said Conan.

"Go, I said." Mordec set down the blacksmith's hammer and folded his hand into

a fist. "Go, or you'll be sorry."

Conan hurried away. A buffet from his father might stretch him senseless on the

rammed-earth floor of the smithy, for Mordec did not always know his own

strength. And Conan dimly understood that his father did not want to see his

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ConanofVenariumbyHarryTurtledove(v12.0)(html)ScannedbyHighroller.ProofedmoreorlessbyHighroller.MadeprettierbyuseofEBookDesignGroupStylesheet.ConanofVenariumbyHarryTurtledoveChapterOneTheComingoftheAquiloniansWagonwheelsgroaned.Horses'hoovesdrummed.Aboveandbehindandthrou\ghalltheothersoundscametheend...

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