"At that moment my husband returned to our tent. Whether he had forgotten something or decided not to carouse with his friends I never learned. Not understanding, hearing only my laughter as he entered, he began to greet Rorik peaceably. Rorik spun around and when he faced my husband there was a dagger in his hand. In a fair fight Rorik would have had no chance against such a warrior as Rulf, but Rulf was taken completely unawares. Before he could so much as blink in amazement, the dagger of Rorik pierced his heart.
"I saw my husband lying dead upon the ground and his murderer standing over him. My hot anger was transformed to a cold rage. When Rorik approached me once more I pretended submission to him. In his haste to tear my garments off he neglected to remove his sword. I grasped it in one hand and shoved him from me with the other. Before he could comprehend what had happened, I hewed his head from his shoulders. It was poor compensation for the loss of my husband, but I took satisfaction in a task of vengeance accomplished so swiftly."
"Most commendable," Conan said. "So now this Atzel wants his own vengeance?"
"He does. He could do nothing at the time. He charged me with committing a crime of violence within the sacred precincts, but the chiefs judged that Rorik had already committed a sacrilege meriting death, and in any case he had murdered my husband and was the instigator of the bloodshed. Atzel tried to charge that Rulf and I had tried to murder his son, and that he had slain Rulf in self-defense. This the chiefs would not credit, for Rulf was loved by many of them, and they knew that he was no murderer. Besides, none would believe that the likes of Rorik could have killed Rulf when my husband was prepared for a fight. In the end I swore the truth of my story in the very presence of the King Bull. None doubted me after that.
"Since that day there has been unceasing war between my people and Atzel's. He has more men than I, but he does not dare open battle. Instead, he attacks villages such as the one you saw."
"Yours is a sad tale," Conan commiserated. "I wish you well in your struggle with Atzel, for you are clearly in the right." He cut a slab of bread and laid a slab of steaming venison upon it.
"I would like to have more than your good wishes, warrior, welcome as those are." She signaled to a boy to refill Conan's ale horn.
"How so, lady?" Conan asked warily.
"I know warriors when I see them, having been raised as one and married to the greatest in the Border Kingdom. I can see that you are a fighter better than any I have in my following, experienced at command as well. You live by hiring out your sword. Let me hire it. I would give you a place at the head of my warriors, second only to me. My final struggle with
Atzel must come soon. He has whittled and gnawed at my strength until he has now almost nerved himself for an all-out attack. I know that he wants to take me alive, to put me to death in some public and humiliating fashion. I shall not allow that, of course. I shall kill myself and my child before I would allow such a thing. But with you leading my men, I may still prevail. My men would follow one such as you into battle as a natural leader. Much as they love me," she said ruefully, "my warriors have never fully accepted the idea of a woman leading them in battle."
Conan stared moodily into his ale, his appetite suddenly fled. At any other time he would have accepted gladly. The woman had been wronged, and it is never unpleasant to take up a just cause, especially for a beautiful woman. War was his trade, and he did not doubt that he could fight her enemies to a standstill, or even gain a victory. He just did not have the time. He sought a face-saving way out.
"I am an outlander, lady," he demurred. "Would your men accept a foreigner as their war leader?"
"Certainly. As a foreigner you could have no ambitions of installing yourself as chieftain in my place, so that suspicion would be at rest. It is customary here for women whose menfolk are dead to appoint a champion to take care of whatever violence must be performed on their behalf. They would accept you naturally."
"I cannot accept," Conan said. "Believe me, it would delight me to take up your fight, but I am on a journey which I may not interrupt."
"Stay the fall and winter, at least," she urged. "Cimmeria will still be there in the spring."
"My journey is not merely a homefaring. I have a mission to perform, undertaken upon my most solemn oath. I must be in the very depths of Cimmeria by the autumnal equinox upon forfeit of my honor." It galled him to say this, but he felt that he owed the woman an explanation at the very least.
Her warm gaze turned cold. "Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you are not the warrior that I thought."
Conan refused to be drawn. "Judge as you will, lady. I have told you the truth. I give you this promise: When my mission is accomplished, I shall
immediately return here and take up your standard."
"If you did not leave until after the equinox," she said bitterly, "you would not be here until early winter, at least. Atzel is on the move now. It shall all be over by then, one way or the other. But go your way, Cimmerian, I'll not stand in your path." She turned from him and sipped her wine, glaring toward the far wall of the hall and seeing nothing.
Conan sat sullenly, mortified at having to appear the coward. He continued to eat and drink, fortifying himself against the hardships to come, but the food and the ale had lost their savor.
Aelfrith's manner was remote, but she took her duties as hostess seriously. In the morning she saw Conan on his way, after making sure that he had a good store of preserved food to sustain him. Once again she was dressed in her armor and little else. "Your path will take you north,"
she said, pointing to a distant notch in the nearest range of mountains.
"That is Ymir's Pass, and through it you must go if you would see your homeland before midwinter. Once you leave my land, you leave my protection."
"I have protected myself for many years now, lady," Conan said.
"You may well have need of your skill. Ymir's Pass lies in Atzel's land.
He has built a fortress directly across it, from cliff to cliff."
"I was born to the mountains," Conan maintained. "I'll have no trouble avoiding him."
"Afoot, perhaps," she said, "but it may not be so easy mounted. Take care."
"I shall. Good day, lady, and I thank you for your hospitality. I shall not forget it."
All day he rode through the little mountain vales. He saw no people and very few animals. It appeared that Atzel had been busy in this area, for he passed several burned-down villages and many overgrown fields and unpruned orchards. This had once been a prosperous, productive land, and it was being turned into a wilderness.
Well, it was not his problem. At least, so he kept trying to tell himself.
He rode befogged in sour thoughts, but he did not let his vigilance relax.
Once, a small troop of horsemen appeared on the road, far ahead of him.
Conan pulled off the road and led his horse well into the woods, where its sounds could not betray him. Cautiously, he made his way back to the road to observe the riders. He wanted to know whom he shared the road with, and he was mystified that they had not noticed him as soon as he had spotted them.
He found a substantial tree overlooking the road and climbed it. He lay along a great branch that would shield his form from observation and he waited. One passing below would have to look directly upward and be searching for watchers in order to notice him. Conan lay perfectly still, barely breathing. An ordinary man could not have held this pose more than a few minutes. Conan could maintain it for hours.
He heard the faint jingle of harness and clopping of hooves, and soon the first rider was passing beneath him. His eyes widened in wonderment, but he made no other motion. These were not local people, but Zamorans.
He recognized them by their dress and by their horse-trappings. They were small, furtive men with dark faces and beards. What were a party of Zamorans doing here? There were five of them, and they were headed in the direction from which he had come, toward Aelfrith's land. He did not like that, but the
re was little he could do about it. At least, now he knew why they had not seen him. Men bred to the plains and the bare rocky hills of Zamora, they were alien to the wood-clothed foothills of the Border Kingdom. When they were gone, Conan climbed carefully down and went to fetch his horse. He did not like the look of the Zamorans. They had the aspect of thieves. Almost, he turned to follow them. Then, remembering his oath and his mission, he turned back toward Ymir's Pass.
The sun of late afternoon-found Conan within a short distance of Atzel's fortress. The crude stone pile stretched across the valley as Aelfrith had described, and he was faced with the problem of finding a way around it. On foot he could have scaled the cliffs easily, but he could not be sure of finding a good horse on the other side. If he was to keep to his timetable, he would have to stay with the beast as long as possible. Darkness was coming on apace and he would have to stop and camp soon. He decided to find a good place to hide his mount and go on a reconnaissance of the fortress. He knew that it is never amiss for a man in danger to learn as much as possible about the nature and circumstances of his enemy.
With his horse picketed inside the forest, well away from any villages, Conan set out for the fortress. He stayed off the road but paralleled it within the cover of the second-growth brush flanking it. He found the ashes of an old campfire and rubbed soot in patches and streaks over his face and body, breaking up its outline and dulling the bronzen sheen of his flesh, the better to avoid detection. As for sound, he made none at all.
Dressed only in loincloth and weapon belt, he glided through the woods as silently as a ghost.
It was fully dark when he reached the fortress. His eyes had adjusted to the dimming of the light, and the half-moon overhead cast plentiful light for a man with Conan's sharp senses. Most men would have floundered about near-blind in the forest obscurity, but Conan was as wood wise as a Pict, a people among whom he had lived, despite his nation's historic antipathy to that race.
Like Aelfrith's fort, this one was crudely constructed of roughly hewn stones, piled without benefit of mortar. The wall provided adequate finger and toe purchase for Conan, who had climbed walls that would have been rejected as too smooth by a Zamoran housebreaker. A childhood spent among rugged cliffs came in handy to a man like Conan, whose life had been devoted largely to breaking into or escaping from places specifically designed to discourage such activities.
Inside the fort, Atzel sat with his cronies, drinking ale by the light of a small fire built upon a stone hearth in the center of the arms room. The light glinted on the heads of spears ranked about the walls, each spear alternating with a short wooden bow and its attendant quiver of arrows.
Higher on the walls were hung axes and cheap swords, of the type bought by small rulers by the hundreds to arm their common soldiery. Such blades, sold in bundles by the merchants of Nemedia and Turan, though plain of design and ornament, would kill a man quite as sufficiently dead as the finest champion's sword made by a master smith.
Atzel was a huge man wrapped in a bearskin robe despite the warmth of the evening. His once-golden beard was shot with gray, and his face was deeply lined. Features formerly handsome were marred with purple blotches, and dark bags hung beneath his pale-blue eyes, their whites turned red and yellow. He was the ruined hulk of what had been a stalwart warrior, broken down by age and excesses of every kind. As his body had been destroyed by immoderation, his mind was bent by greed, hatred, and
lust for self-aggrandizement and vengeance.
Just now he was in a jubilant mood, swigging his ale with a gusto he had not felt in many years and laughing with his comrades. "We'll have that haughty bitch now!" the self-styled king proclaimed. "My bought Zamoran kidnappers will see to it. She'll pay for the murder of my Rorik at last! I'll have her stripped of every stitch and sacrificed to the King Bull for all to see. Then who will deny that Atzel is the greatest ruler of the North?"
"None, lord," said a follower with sycophantic zeal. The man grinned lasciviously at the mental picture of the chieftainess of Cragsfell stripped and bound for sacrifice.
"A masterstroke, my king," said another. "If we merely defeated her in warfare and slew her, as is our right in just vengeance for our beloved prince, still many would take up arms against us. But when the King Bull accepts her as a proper sacrifice, who can dispute with his divine will?"
"Who, indeed," Atzel chuckled. He turned to a cadaverous man who wore no weapons, his cattle master. "Are you sure that your Bossonians truly have the King Bull penned in that little valley?"
"It is he, lord," the man answered. "All has been done according to your wishes. The Bossonians are all master cattlemen, and to them he is merely another bull. None of them speaks our tongue, so no word will leak out that you now control the divine beast." Atzel was uncommonly astute in hiring foreigners to perform tasks his countrymen would have balked at.
"But will he attack?" Atzel urged. "He will attack another bull, as any bull will. He will attack a man trespassing into his herd. But it is important that the beast will gore and trample a tethered woman in front of the assembled people."
"All has been taken care of," the man assured him. "Each day a captive woman has been stripped and tied to a stake, and the bull has been tormented by men standing behind her. He has learned to attack them.
Now he will attack such a woman on sight."
"My lord," said a grizzled warrior uncomfortably, "is this right? Your demand for vengeance is just, but I mislike this handling of the sacred beast. All the folk hold him to be a god upon earth, and the embodiment of our luck, and the fertility of our flocks and herds."
Atzel snorted past his moustache. "He is just a bull like any other. In time, the King Bull is always killed by a younger bull, or by the worshippers at the Festival when his virility flags. Then there is a new King Bull. Is this any different? So what if I decide to use the King Bull for my own purposes? Am I not a king, and may I not do as I wish? Besides, it may take a divine beast to kill this witch." His eyes grew wild and his voice strident as spittle flecked his lips. "For that is what she is, mark me. She cast her spell upon my Rorik and caused him to conceive an unnatural lust for her. She bewitched the council of chiefs to find against Rorik after his murder! Surely the gods themselves must crave vengeance against the sorceress! It is only justice that the King Bull should execute her, since she defiled his Festival with her plot to destroy my son!" His voice had risen to a shriek.
"As you say, lord," said the grizzled warrior, who now regretted having brought up the subject.
"That will all be set aright soon, master," soothed a courtier. "The witch will die with the great bull's horn buried in her belly, and his hoofs trampling upon her face. The Zamoran woman-stealers will bring her to you. Soon your son's spirit will be at rest, lord."
"I trust so," said Atzel, his good humor restored somewhat. He sat back in his chair and drank from a beaker of southern wine. "Sometimes, his spirit appears to me, in dreams. He is all covered with blood, as he was when the witch murdered him. Sometimes, he carries his head beneath his arm. He demands vengeance, and by Ymir, he shall have it! He was my only legitimate son." His followers affected not to notice the great tears that rolled down the drink-blotched cheeks. In a life of utmost depravity, Atzel had experienced only one of the redeeming virtues common to most men: the great love which he had borne for his unworthy son. They all considered it to be his only weakness.
"I shall have her!" he went on triumphantly, the tears still streaking his cheeks. "As this first moon of autumn moves into its waxing phase, it is proper for any chief to call for a sacrifice to the King Bull. Already, my messengers have summoned my fellow chiefs from all over the west of the Border Kingdom. All of them shall witness the humiliation and death of Aelfrith, and who among them shall protest?"
"Her men might pursue," said a senior warrior. "There might be a rescue attempt."
Atzel snorted laughter through his nose. "Ancient custom forbids that any man shall raise weapon a
gainst the King Bull. After proper tedious ceremony, an old King Bull may have his throat cut with the old flint knife, but what man will face the current King Bull with no weapon? He is in his prime, and fierce beyond all measure. If a few of Aelfrith's men decide to try the task out of misguided loyalty, what of it? He will make short work of them and whet all our appetites for the main event, which shall be the death of Aelfrith!" He laughed uproariously at the prospect, and his men joined him in chorus.
High above them all, Conan perched motionlessly in the rafters. He had heard enough. Carefully, he began to make his way out of the fortress. His thoughts were in turmoil as he exited the stone pile. He had been tempted to simply cast his dirk into the heart of Atzel and end matters right there.
However, the angle and distance would have made such a cast difficult. In any case, by now Conan was wise enough in the ways of men to realize that wars and other great matters were seldom averted by the mere killing of a single man. Atzel was surrounded by men whose importance was linked to his, and who would undoubtedly carry out his plans in order to legitimize their own succession to his power.
In addition to all this, he wanted to get to Cimmeria as soon as possible. His honor was at stake. He trekked through the woods in silence, watching for enemies, making no sound but carrying on a furious, internal argument.
He found his horse placidly munching grass where he had left it. As he reached for the picket rope, a voice spoke behind him: "What kind of painted savage has blundered into our trap, Ulf?"
Conan whirled to see two armored men advancing upon him.
"When a thrall told us that he had found an unattended horse," said the one called Ulf, "we had hoped to catch a sneak-thief. I think that we have found one of Aelfrith's spies instead."
"Tell us who sent you, fellow," said the first. He held his sword extended, its point leveled at Conan's belly. "If you spill all you know, we may be merciful and kill you swiftly."
"Aye," said Ulf, "you would not like to be turned over to our master. He has never questioned a prisoner who did not talk in time, be he never so
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