Conan of Venarium

by Harry Turtledove

  The Gunderman heaved himself to his feet. “I’d best get back to the camp,” he said. “I thank you again for your ale and for your company. You’re a good Cimmerian, you are.” Off he went, wobbling slightly as he walked.

  He might have called Mordec a good dog in the same tone of voice. The blacksmith’s great, hard hands folded into fists. “A good Cimmerian, am I?” he whispered. “One of these days, you will see how good I am.”

  Conan spent as much time as he could either in his father’s smithy or in the forests far from Duthil. If he did not wander the now dusty, now muddy streets of the village, he ran no risk of bumping into Tarla—and he did not have to see Count Stercus coming to Balarg’s house for yet another visit. Conan would cheerfully have murdered the Aquilonian noble. Fear of Stercus’ armor and weapons deterred him not at all. Not even the fear of his father held him back, for he sensed Mordec would not have minded in the least seeing Stercus stretched lifeless and bleeding in the dirt. Only fear of what the invaders would do to Duthil in reprisal stayed his hand.

  Every so often, while pumping the bellows or changing a quenching bath or doing such other work as his father set him, he would see Count Stercus riding past. Then he wanted nothing more than to take up Mordec’s heaviest hammer and smash Stercus’ skull as he had broken Hondren’s. When his father let him shape simple tools, he pounded at them in a perfect passion of fury.

  Escaping Duthil altogether suited him better. Then he did not have to boil with rage at spying Stercus or flinch with mortification and jealousy whenever he set eyes on the weaver’s daughter. In the woods he saw no one, spoke to no one. And if he looked back on his last unfortunate conversation with Tarla and wished that conversation might have gone otherwise—if he did that out there among the pines and fragrant spruces, who but he would know?

  He perched on a great gray granite boulder one noon, eating a frugal lunch of oatcakes and cheese, when a man said, “Might I share somewhat of that?”

  Conan started. He had neither seen nor heard the stranger approach, a fact that should have been impossible. His hand closed round the shaft of a javelin he had plunged into the ground by the boulder. “Who are you?” he demanded roughly. “What do you want?”

  “My name is mere rubbish. If you would have it, though, it is Rhiderch.” The stranger bowed. “A wandering seer, I.” He bowed again. He looked the part. He was about sixty, his hair gone gray, his beard—nearty white—reaching halfway down his chest. His garments were of colorless homespun set off by a necklace and bracelets of honey-gold amber. “As for what I want, well, after far travel a bite of food is welcome.”

  “Share what I have, then,” said Conan, and gave him some of the oatcakes and half the chunk of cheese. The old man ate with good appetite. Conan watched him for a while, then burst out, “How did you come upon me without my being the wiser? By Crom, you could have slit my throat and taken everything I had, and I would not have known you were there until too late.”

  Rhiderch’s eyes, gray as the granite upon which Conan sat, twinkled. “I am no robber, lad. I seek what’s free-given, and thank you for your kindness.”

  “You did not answer me. How did you come upon me unawares? I thought no wolf nor panther could do the like, let alone a man.”

  The seer chuckled. “There are ways, lad. Indeed there are. I know but the minor mysteries. Many others are wiser by far.”

  “Teach me!” said Conan.

  At that, the laughter faded from Rhiderch’s face. Now he had come upon something he took seriously. “Why, perhaps I shall, if it be your fate to learn such things. Give me your hand, that I may learn whether it is permitted me.”

  Conan held it out. Rhiderch clasped it in his own. The two hands were a study in contrasts: Conan’s square and scarred and callused, with short, grimy nails on thick, strong fingers; Rhiderch’s long and thin and pale and spidery, his palm narrow, his fingernails fastidiously groomed. Conan had seen palm readers before, but Rhiderch did not examine the lines on his hand. Instead, the seer closed his eyes and murmured a charm in a language whose cadences were like those of Cimmerian but which the blacksmith’s son could not understand.

  Suddenly and without warning, Rhiderch’s hand closed tight on Conan’s. At the same time, the seer’s eyes opened very wide. Thinking it a trial of strength, Conan squeezed back as hard as he could. He was twice as thick through the shoulders and arms as the scrawny Rhiderch. But, for all the impression his grip made on the long-bearded wanderer, he might as well not have bothered responding to what he took to be the challenge. Rhiderch’s hand clenched tighter and tighter, at last with crushing force.

  As abruptly as the seer had begun to squeeze, he relaxed the pressure. Sweat poured down his forehead and cheeks; a drop dangled at the end of his long, pointed nose. He swiped a sleeve across his face. “Crom!” he muttered: the ejaculation of a man shaken to the core.

  “Well?” demanded Conan. “Am I fit to learn your tricks for sliding through the trees without a sound?”

  “You are fit for—” Rhiderch broke off and mopped his brow again. “What you are fit for, son of Mordec, is more than I can say. Never have I seen—” He stopped once more, shaking his head. “Truly, I wonder whether I read you aright.”

  “How do you know my father’s name?” asked Conan, for he was sure he had not spoken it.

  “I know a good many things,” said Rhiderch, but after a moment he shivered, though the day was mild. “One of the things I know is that yours is the strangest destiny of any ever to come into my ken.”

  “How so?” asked Conan, but the seer would not answer him. He tried a different question: “If you saw my destiny, did you see the Aquilonian called Stercus in it?” He did not say that Stercus commanded the Aquilonians in Cimmeria; this, from him, passed for cleverness and caution.

  Rhiderch looked at him—looked through him. “Speak not of slicing saplings when the tall tree towers. Speak not of slaying sparrows when the hawk hovers.”

  “I spoke of slicing nothing. I spoke of slaying no one.” Conan knew some of his countrymen collaborated with the invaders. He could not fathom it, but he knew it to be true. He would not admit his lust for Stercus’ gore to a man he had not met before this moment.

  But what he admitted, what he denied, seemed to mean nothing to Rhiderch. “Your mouth spoke no words,” said the seer. “Your spirit cried aloud—though the greater cry all but drowned the smaller.”

  “Will you speak sense?” asked Conan testily. “All your words go round and round, reflecting back on one another with no meaning left behind.”

  “If you will not hear, you shall surely see.” Rhiderch remained cryptic. “Like a migrating bird, your fate flies high and far. Where you will end your days, and in what estate, I cannot say, but no Cimmerian’s weird is stranger.”

  “Lies and foolishness. You make me sorry I fed you instead of driving you away,” said Conan.

  He hoped to anger Rhiderch, but the seer only smiled. “No mean feat for me, for few will ever make you sorry for anything you do.”

  That did it. Anger sparked in the blacksmith’s son. “Get you gone,” he growled. “Get you gone, or I shall not answer for what will come next.” Now he reached for the javelin he always kept close at hand.

  “As you say it, so shall it be.” Rhiderch vanished with the same unnerving speed and silence he had used in appearing. One instant, he stood beside Conan; the next, the blacksmith’s son might have been—was—alone on his boulder.

  Too late, Conan remembered that he had wanted Rhiderch to teach him that trick of silent appearances and disappearances. “Come back!” he shouted. “Come back, you stinking old fraud!” But Rhiderch, however obscure he might have been, was no fraud, not in the way Conan meant it. He did not come back, nor did Conan ever ask him about it again—and if the young Cimmerian ever mastered the art of silently and unexpectedly entering or leaving a scene, as many in times to come were to find he had done, he did it by himself and on his own. />
  For the time being, Conan sat there muttering curses and regretting the waste of the oatcakes and cheese. They could have kept him well fed for another meal out here in the woods, which meant they could have kept him away from Duthil for another half a day, maybe longer. Away from Duthil, and especially away from Balarg’s house, was where he most longed to be.

  But later that day he knocked down a stag. It was perhaps the cleanest kill he had ever made: his arrow pierced the stag’s heart, and the animal fell over dead after only a handful of stumbling steps. Conan wanted to roar in triumph like a great hunting cat. Only the knowledge that such a cry would surely draw scavengers, whether of the two-legged or four-legged sort, held him back.

  Still, to the hunter went the rewards. Conan kindled a small, almost smokeless fire and roasted the stag’s kidneys and mountain oysters and slices of its liver over the flames. Eaten with mushrooms he found nearby and washed down with pure, cold water from a chuckling brook, the repast was as fine as any he had ever enjoyed. He buried the offal and wedged the rest of the meat, wrapped in the deer’s hide, in the crutch of two branches, too high up for wolves to reach. He slept nearby; also up a tree.

  Waking before sunrise the next morning, he hurried back to the pine where he had secured the meat. He found wolf tracks in the soft ground by the base of the tree and claw marks in the bark on the tree trunk as high as his head. The beasts had done all they could to despoil him, but their best had not been good enough.

  After starting up the fire again, he breakfasted on more liver and a chunk of the stag’s heart. He wished he could keep the rest of the meat fresh longer. Since he could not, he put the remainder of the carcass on his back and started off to Duthil.

  Count Stercus rode out of Fort Venarium and through the brawling streets of the little town that had come to bear the same name. Many Aquilonians took the existence of the town of Venarium to mean that civilization had come to southern Cimmeria. To Stercus’ way of thinking, by contrast, the town of Venarium was proof that civilization would never come here.

  He escaped the smells and the clamor of the place with a sigh of relief. Once out in the countryside, he was at least in territory honestly barbarous: Venarium wore a tawdry mask and aped its betters. He tried to imagine King Numedides or some other truly cultured man finding pleasure here on the wild frontier, tried and felt himself failing. A truly sophisticated taste would recoil in horror from what was available hereabouts.

  “But even so—” murmured Stercus, and urged his horse up from a walk to a trot. Some of the raw material to be found here, though often very raw indeed, did hold a certain promise. That girl in that stinking Cimmerian village might prove very enjoyable indeed, once he broke her to his will—and breaking her would be enjoyable, too, in its way.

  He wondered if he simply ought to take her back to the fortress and get on with the business of turning her into his pliant slave. Some of the barbarians had grumbled about the other girl with whom he had so amused himself, but that was not his principal reason for holding back here. Showing himself too eager had ended up disgracing him down in Tarantia; if not for that, he never would have had to come to this accursed frontier at the edge of the world. Restraint, then, might serve better—and might also be amusing.

  In one way, though, Stercus showed no restraint whatever. He rode with his sword naked across his knees, ready to use at a heartbeat’s notice. It would be years before Aquilonians could travel through this country without a weapon to hand. Stercus muttered to himself, wishing his officers had not persuaded him to refrain from avenging the disappearance of that Gunderman near Duthil. He remained convinced the man had not vanished all on his own. If he had, would his body—or at least his bones—not have come to light? Stercus thought so.

  The road was narrow, not a great deal broader than the game track it had been before the Aquilonians first came to this miserable land. Dark, frowning firs pressed close on either side. It made ideal country for an ambush. Much of Cimmeria, in fact, made ideal country for an ambush. That was another reason why Stercus doubted whether the soldier named Hondren had gone missing all on his own. “Damned skulking barbarians,” he muttered.

  But the barbarian he met when he guided his horse around the next bend in the road did not skulk. The fellow strode along boldly, as if he had as much right to the roadway as any civilized man. His hair and beard had gone gray. The only ornaments he wore were a necklace and bracelets of amber.

  Stercus nearly rode him down then and there. In truth, the nobleman could hardly have said what held him back. He reined in and pointed an accusing finger at the Cimmerian, saying, “Stand aside, you!” He did not bother with Cimmerian. He had no idea whether the other man knew Aquilonian, nor did he care: that pointing finger and a loud, commanding voice more than sufficed to make his meaning plain.

  As it happened, the barbarian proved to understand his language, and even to speak it himself. “Soon, soon,” he said soothingly. “First I would know something of the manner of man you are.”

  “By Mitra, I will tell you what manner of man I am,” snapped Stercus, brandishing his blade. “I am a man with scant patience for any who would let or hinder me.”

  He hoped to put the barbarian in fear, but found himself disappointed. The man came up to him and said, “But give me your hand for a moment, and I will speak to what lies ahead for you.”

  That piqued Count Stercus’ interest. “A seer, are you?” he asked, and the Cimmerian nodded. Stercus lowered the sword, but only partway. He held out his left hand, at the same time saying, “Come ahead, then. But I warn you, dog, any treachery and you die the death.”

  “You may trust me as you would your own father,” said the barbarian, at which Stercus laughed raucously. He would not have trusted his father with his gold, nor with his wine, nor with any woman he chanced to meet. He thought that meant the barbarian knew not the first thing whereof he spoke. That the man might have known more than Stercus guessed never once crossed his mind.

  “Here,” said Stercus, extending his hand farther yet in a gesture he copied from King Numedides.

  The Cimmerian took it. His own grip was warm and hard. He nodded to himself, once, twice, three times. “You are measured,” he said. “You are measured, and you are found wanting. You shall not endure. Twist as you will, turn as you will, nothing you do shall stand. The old serpent dies. The young wolf endures.”

  “Take your lies and nonsense elsewhere,” snarled Stercus, snatching his hand away. “Not even one word of truth do you speak, and you should praise Mitra in his mercy that I do not take your life.”

  “You laugh now. You jeer now,” said the Cimmerian. “Come the day, see who laughs. Come the time, see who jeers.”

  “Get you gone, or I will stretch your carcass lifeless in the dust,” said Stercus. “I have slain stouter men for smaller insults.”

  “I go,” said the barbarian. “I go, but I know what I am talking about. I have seen the wolf. I have counted his teeth. You are but a morsel, if you draw consolation from that.”

  Stercus swung up the sword with a shout of rage. The Cimmerian who called himself a seer skipped back between two tree trunks that grew too close together to let Stercus follow unless he dismounted. Not reckoning the barbarian worth his while to pursue, he rode on toward Duthil.

  By the time the Aquilonian got to the village, he had all but forgotten the warning, if that was what it was, the barbarian had given him. He looked ahead, toward seeing Tarla, toward tempting her into wanting for herself all the things he wanted for her. He sometimes thought the temptation the greatest sport of all, even finer than the fulfillment.

  When Stercus came into Duthil, he saw the blacksmith’s son walking up the street with the evidence of a successful hunt on his shoulders. The Aquilonian noble reined in and waved. “Hail, Conan,” he called. “How are you today?”

  The boy’s face flushed with anger. Stercus knew Conan loved him not; that knowledge only piqued his desire to annoy
the young Cimmerian. He suspected that Conan held some childish affection of his own for Tarla, which would do him no good at all when set against the full-blooded and refined passion of a sensual adult.

  “How are you, I say?” Stercus’ voice grew sharper.

  “Well, till now,” answered Conan in thickly accented Aquilonian—though somewhat less so than when Stercus began coming to Duthil. Like a parrot, the boy could mimic the sounds his betters made.

  And, as Stercus realized after a moment, Conan could also ape, or try to ape, the studied insults a grown man might offer. Had a grown man, one of his own countrymen, offered Stercus such an insult, he would have wiped it clean with blood. The code duello was ancient and much revered in Aquilonia. Dirtying his sword with the blood of a barbarous blacksmith’s boy never once occurred to Stercus. But he did suddenly spur his horse forward, and the destrier would have trampled Conan if the youngster had not sprung to one side with an agility that belied his loutish size. Laughing, Stercus rode on to the house of Balarg the weaver, the house of Tarla, the house of what he conceived to be his affection.

  Conan found his mother up and about, filling a pot from a great water jar and hanging it to boil above the hearth. “You should rest,” he told her reproachfully.

  “Oh? And if I rest, who will cook our food? I see no slave in the house,” replied Verina. “And what’s the point of rest? When your father begins to hammer, every stroke seems to go straight through my head.” She raised a hand to press it to her temple.

  “I’m sorry,” said Conan, who could have slept sound and undisturbed were Mordec beating a sword blade into shape six inches from his ear. He set down the burden he had brought from the forest. “See the fine venison we’ll have?”