Ronan the Barbarian

by Bibby, James

  Behind them, Nekros watched impatiently. He wasn't used to being ignored. He liked to Make an Entrance, and see the fear in people's eyes. For a moment he looked round, then his eyes lit upon Glob. Grabbing the bottom of the baby-bouncer, he stretched it diagonally down past the table-edge almost to the floor, and then let go. There was a twang like a gigantic catapult, the sound of something large crashing through the thatched roof, and the wail of a baby fading into the distance. For a horrified moment Varg and Elen stood like statues, staring up at the baby-shaped hole in the roof, then their gaze switched to the menacing figure advancing towards them with raised sword. At once, Varg's natural optimism took over, and he held up the rat.

  "Care for a spot of dinner?" he asked.

  Outside, the donkey was just trying to work out some way of conning this large, black, and bone-headed horse out of the wonderful bag-full of hay that was strapped to its saddle when the big human came striding out of the hut. Pausing only to wipe his blood-stained sword on the donkey's mane, he leapt into the saddle and spurred his horse off at a gallop into the darkness.

  "Typical," thought the donkey. "Use you as a dish-cloth, then bugger off without so much as a hint of a carrot." Then, vaguely wondering whether the human had left something edible indoors, it ambled towards the entrance of the hut.

  Inside, however, it found no food. Just its master and mistress lying on the floor, rather still. In fact, very still. And there seemed to be an awful lot of sticky red liquid splashed around them both... and on the floor... and the walls... and even on the ceiling. It ambled across to where most of its master was lying, and sniffed him carefully. The red liquid was steaming gently, and had a sickly, cloying smell that was oddly attractive. A strange idea crossed the donkey's mind.

  "I wonder what he tastes like", it thought…

  VILLAGE

  Yet even as evil stalked the world, still were there havens of peace beyond the turmoil. Within one corner of the world yet overlooked lay the land of Tak, which in the Elder Tongue means "Haven of peace beyond the turmoil, within one corner of the World yet overlooked". Here was there a village small in size, where lived a youth called Ronan. Son of the Smith was he, and so the villagers called him Ronan Cook-son, for they were simple folk, and most were downright cretinous...

  THE PINK BOOK OF ULAY

  The blacksmith’s forge roared as the bellows pumped air through the burning charcoal. The long flat blade of steel glowed a fiery orange as the Smith pulled it from the furnace and rested it upon the anvil. Once again he set about the sword with a huge metal hammer. Deafening clangs reverberated around the walls until even the very shadows seemed to vibrate, and red-hot sparks skittered down to the ground like drunken fireflies. His muscles bulged with effort and his black skin gleamed in the eerie light as the sweat flowed down his face and arms. And then he paused and turned to the skinny youth working the bellows.

  "OK, Ronan. That's fine, son."

  Thankfully, Ronan dropped the bellows onto their rack and sat down on an old anvil in the shadows. He winced as the Smith set to work with the hammer again and shoved his fingers in his ears. He desperately wanted to please his father, but the roasting heat made him feel sick, the acrid smoke stung his eyes, and the reverberating clangs had given him a headache. He sighed, and moodily traced patterns in the metallic dust on the floor with his toe. He wasn't going to find it easy, following the family business.

  Again the Smith paused, and looked across at Ronan with concern. One of the main problems in this world, he had often thought, was that trades were passed down from father to son, just like haemophilia or baldness. It made no difference how unsuited your son was to the trade. It made no difference if he was a six-foot beanpole with less muscle than a malnourished earthworm. It made no difference if he was an intelligent and sensitive romantic who wanted to roam the world in search of adventure. If you were a Smith, and your father before you, then your son was supposed to forget all about being a Poet, or a Storyteller, or a Warrior. Tradition dictated that he was destined to spend the rest of his life banging bits of red-hot metal about. And somehow Ronan had never seemed able to raise any enthusiasm for this prospect.

  Oh, he'd tried. The Smith had to admit that. The boy had waded through all the books he had given him, but titles such as "The Big Boy's Bumper Book of Blast Furnaces" or "A Hundred and One Things To Do With Ferruginous Clinker" had for some reason failed to grip him. He'd sat and listened as his father had expounded on the mysteries of metal malleability and tensile strength, but the Smith could always sense his attention wandering. And quite frankly, the Smith had to agree that the thought of spending the next fifty years knocking together ploughshares and pan lids in this tiny village miles from anywhere was enough to drive anyone out of their mind.

  The problem was that Ronan just didn't fit in. In fact, the whole family had never fitted in, not since the Smith's father had settled there thirty years before. It wasn't because they were black, while the local tribe, the Edmak, were white skinned. (In Midworld, the hue of a person's skin was immaterial, and Race Relations simply meant that you could have relations with anyone who you could out-race. It was always easy to tell the fleet of foot by the fact that they usually wore a lazy, satisfied smile... and little else, half the time. The terminally slow usually had a squint and a sore wrist.) No, it was the difference in intellect that set them apart from the rest.

  In such an isolated village, inbreeding had become something of a problem over the years. Not that the locals saw it that way. To them, it was just a delightful way of passing the long winter nights. Love thy neighbour... and thy other neighbour... and how about thy cousin... and gosh, thy sister is looking rather damn attractive these days... As a result, by the time the Smith's father moved in the average villager was about as rational as a duck but with only half the I.Q. And in a society where anyone who could count up to four without having to have a lie down afterwards was regarded as being positively rapier-brained, the Smith's family shone out like a beacon.

  The Smith had been proud of the fact that Ronan had always come top of his class at school. Mind you, this hadn't been difficult. The final maths exam had consisted of one question. "I have three potatoes. How many potatoes have I got?" Ronan had been the only scholar to get it right. But he had always been a bit of a loner. The other lads were friendly enough, but he seemed to get no enjoyment from games such as Gravity, where you toppled out of a tree and hit the ground head first, or North-south-east-west, where you belted a little kid on the back of the skull with a rock and tried to guess which way he'd fall. So while the other boys were all happily running around with concussion, Ronan could usually be found curled up with a book. And not books on Smith-craft, either. No, it was always books on myths and legends, epic battles and heroes. As a result he had developed an extremely highly-coloured and romantic view of the world. He had also developed a damn-fool idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to be a Warrior, and have Adventures. The Smith sighed. If the news that he was getting from every traveller who passed through the village was correct, then pretty soon the boy would have more adventures than he could cope with...

  The Smith's train of thought was interrupted as the door of the workshop swung open and one of the villagers entered. It was Thom, not the brightest person in the village, but a genius compared to some his neighbours. He was dressed in a soil-coloured jerkin and breeches, and had soil-coloured sandals on his feet and a soil-coloured hood slung over his head. They'd probably all been really bright and interesting colours initially, but Thom had this thing about soil. He liked to do things with it. Hold it, throw it, talk to it, roll in it.... the Smith winced. He had spent one awful night at Thom's house, looking at his soil collection. Please God this wasn't another dinner invitation.

  Thom advanced, grinning. "Hello!"

  "Hi, Thom," replied the Smith. "How ya doing, guy?"

  "Fine. Fine, fine. Fine, fine, fine..." Thom's voice died away as his brain searched in v
ain for a conversational gambit that wasn't too soil-related. He'd begun to suspect lately that perhaps other people didn't share in his fascination.

  "So. What can I do for you?"

  "Ermm..." Thom thought for a while, then remembered. "Oh, yeah. I know. I want to buy some of them.... oh, what are they called... you know the things. Round, and as hard as iron..."

  "Horse-shoes?" the Smith suggested, without much hope. "Shields?"

  "No... pork pies, that's it. I want to buy some of them pork pies!"

  "This is the smithy, Thom." The Smith's voice was patient. He'd got used to all this after thirty years. "The pie-shop is three doors away. You can't miss it. It's the one with the large picture of a pie hanging over the door."

  "Really?" Thom was delighted. "That's a bit of a lucky coincidence, isn't it? They sell pies, and they have a picture of a pie hanging over the door! Here, just wait until I tell my soil about this. It'll never believe me!"

  He turned and wandered through the door, burbling happily. The Smith raised the newly forged, still-glowing sword from the anvil and plunged it into a barrel of cold water. Steam hissed up like an ethereal snake, and he lifted the sword and studied its blade for a moment. Then handing it to Ronan he crossed to the door that Thom had gone through and jerked it open. Grabbing him by the arm he pulled Thom out of the storeroom and propelled him across the forge and out through the door to the street.

  Thom ambled happily off in the wrong direction, and the Smith leaned against the doorpost and took a deep breath. Evening was falling, and a steady drizzle had set in, adding to the general dankness that always seemed to pervade the village. On the other side of the muddy, dung-covered track that they laughingly called the main street, Warty Baker was attempting to repair a gaping hole in the roof of the filthy rat-infested hovel that served as the village bakery. The Smith watched as Warty laboriously hammered the slate tiles into place. He seemed to be having a great deal of trouble getting them to stay there, but this was probably because it was a thatched roof. Several tiles slid down to the eaves and fell off, and Warty appeared to lose his temper and stamped on the remainder. They splintered, and with a surprised yell and a loud crash he disappeared through the roof. Flour fountained out through the hole along with a few of the smaller rats, and then with a tired creaking sound the rest of the roof gave way.

  The Smith shook his head and turned to go back inside. He could tell from the muffled cursing that the baker was all right, and anyway he knew from years of experience that it took more than a roof falling on top of him to stop Warty. He would be up and baking next morning, although tomorrow's bread would probably be full of pieces of rotting thatch. Still, it would make a nice change from rat droppings.

  He shut the door behind him and smiled at the sight that met his eyes. Ronan, lost in some fantasy of his own, was waggling and stabbing the sword about, and was giving some imaginary opponent a really hard time. The Smith watched tolerantly as his son parried, riposted, and then fluently tripped over. Leaping up, he banged his shin on the anvil, and then raising the sword he delivered a slashing cut that would have been quite impressive if the blade of the sword had not flown off the handle. The Smith ducked, and the blade whizzed over his head and stuck quivering in the doorpost behind him.

  Ronan stared in horror, but his father seemed more resigned than annoyed. Taking the handle from Ronan he forced it back onto the blade, and then he twisted the sword free and rested it next to the others he'd recently made. Ronan gazed round the forge curiously. There was something he'd been meaning to ask for a while. Piled in the shadows against the walls were items made by his father... ploughshares, railings, cauldrons, stacks of horse-shoes... all made months ago, and all gathering dust. And in front of them were piled his father's recent preoccupations. Stacks of swords (mostly with handles, many of which were loose), piles of arrow-heads and lance-tips, large flat shields, and a host of irregularly-shaped objects that looked like distorted buckets with eye-holes, and were apparently called "helms". (The Smith freely admitted that he hadn't quite mastered helms yet.) Ronan watched as his father moodily picked up and examined one bulging and misshapen specimen that would have been a perfect fit for a troll with a hyperactive pituitary gland.

  "Father?"

  "Hmm?"

  "Why do we make nothing but weapons these days? No-one in our village is interested in them. The only thing we've sold was a helm to Thom, and he just uses it to carry soil round in."

  "These are evil times, Ronan." Wearily the Smith dropped the helm back on the pile and laid his arm about his son's shoulders. "Every traveller who has visited our village in the past few months has told the same tale, the tale of a tribe of savage horsemen riding out of the east and falling upon quiet villages like ours. A tribe led by an invincible warrior with dark powers, who burn and loot and kill without mercy. The Tribe of Fallon."

  Ronan shook his head in disbelief. "No-one in the village has said anything about this!"

  "Of course they haven't!" The Smith began pacing up and down, and Ronan stared. He'd never seen his father so agitated. "They don't know! They never talk to travellers. Not about what's going on in the real world, anyway. Oh, they'll happily chat for hours about soil, or whether you can stand on one leg and eat fish at the same time. But they don't realise what's going on out there!" The Smith looked up, and Ronan was horrified to see the depth of sadness in his eyes. "I've talked of this with Brenno the Shaman. He's been having visions again. He says that you and I are bound to this invincible warrior in death."

  Ronan felt dizzy and a little sick. It was almost as though someone had chosen him as a target during North-south-east-west.

  "You always said that Brenno Goat-bane is at least three incantations short of a charm!" he stammered.

  "Oh, he's as bad as the rest," answered his father. "But he was having one of his lucid moments. His magic is pretty damn effective when he's like that. Remember how he got his name?

  Ronan nodded. Two years ago, one of the village goats had charged and butted Brenno, and in a fit of anger the Shaman had managed to cast a spell that should have been well beyond his capabilities and had transformed the entire herd into tulips. The Smith had been furious, but most of the other villagers had been pleased, as firstly the goats didn't wander off and get lost any more, secondly they smelt one hell of a lot better, and thirdly it wasn't anything like as messy when you cut their heads off and stuck them in a vase. Admittedly, the milk yield had gone right down, but then you couldn't have everything.

  "Is this why you've called the meeting in the village hall tonight?" Ronan asked.

  "That's right. We've got to get through to our folk. We've got to teach them how to defend themselves." The Smith pushed open the door. Outside it was nearly dark. Muffled curses could still be heard coming from the bakery. "We'd better get moving. Help me carry a few samples across. We're going to give a little demonstration tonight."

  With arms full of weapons, the Smith and his son staggered out into the street. At first, as they emerged, everything was quiet, and the cool dung-scented air came almost as a relief after the heat of the forge. And then all at once the air was rent by the sound of crowing, as the village cocks heralded the arrival of night. Inbreeding hadn't done much for the intellect of the local chicken population, either.

  An hour later they were set up in the village hall. Calling it a hall was a little on the optimistic side. It was more like a village shed... and a shed built hastily by a very bad D-I-Y enthusiast using a cut-price wattle-and daub flat-pack bought in a very cheap home improvements warehouse. But it was all they had. It might be cold, draughty, and with a roof that had more holes than Ronan's underwear, but holding a meeting here gave them some vestige of authority.

  The Smith had pinned a large map to one wall. It showed the whole of the Ancient Realm of Frundor, from the Northern Mountains down to the Great River Leno, and from the Nevacom Plains in the east to the coastal ports of the west. Forbidding black arrows had been
inked on, sweeping across from the east to show the reported raids of the Tribe of Fallon. Some of them reached almost as far as Tak.

  In front of the map was a small table, on which were various examples of home-forged weaponry, and beside this was a series of flip-charts on an easel, demonstrating how the weapons were to be used. The flip-chart was a new idea of the Smith's. The only way to guarantee holding the undivided attention of the average villager for more than a few seconds was to grip him by the neck with one hand and shake him forcibly, while gently but firmly clutching his testicles with the other. As this wasn't feasible with a crowd, the Smith had vague hopes that his new flip-charts might be some help. Now he was standing at the door, desperately hoping that not too many villagers would forget about the meeting, or go to the wrong place, or get distracted on the way by interesting bits of soil....

  Ronan was staring at the map wistfully. Tak was merely a speck in the middle of Frundor, and wherever he looked, there were place-names redolent of adventure and romance. Port Raid, on the west coast, the nearest city to Tak. The Great River Leno, with its twin ports of Unch Haven and Dol Dupp, where corsairs and pirates mingled with warriors, elves, and dwarves, and life was as cheap as a flagon of Isle B'Ibaq wine. And far upriver, the city of Minas Tryk, gateway to the east, which, generations before, had been nearly destroyed when the great dragon Flarg had held his legendary stag-night there. Ronan felt a sudden urge to travel to far-off lands, to drink with fellow-travellers in rough hostelries, to swap jests with warrior and merchant, elf and man... With a sigh, he tore his eyes away. He was enough of a realist to know he'd probably be mugged before he'd gone fifty paces.

  At the door, people were starting to arrive. His father was greeting them as they entered, shaking hands, ushering them in.

  "Good evening... thanks for coming..... hi there!.... glad you could make it.... Tobold! Nice to see you.... why, Thom, thank you! That's very kind of you!"