The Conan Chronology

by J. R. Karlsson

  When Conan awoke upon his bed in Cragsfell he found himself unable to move. He felt, it seemed to him, very much like a man who has-accidentally fallen into a mill and has now emerged after spending an hour or two between the great grinding stones. After an hour of wakefulness he was able to raise his head on neck muscles that screamed with agony. His body, as he had suspected, was near as black as a Kushite's, a single, solid bruise from chest to toes. He let his head fall back and thought of other great battles he had fought. None had been more desperate, more demanding of strength, intelligence, and courage than this conflict with the King Bull.

  Later, a woman came in to feed him broth, and soon he was demanding stronger food. He asked after Aelfrith and the woman told him that the chieftainess was sleeping deeply, and might not wake that day.

  'And the child?' Conan asked.

  'Playing with her dolls as if nothing had happened,' the woman said.

  'Praise Ymir, she is too young to understand what happened, and she slept through the butchery you and the lads accomplished in rescuing her.

  It has passed like a bad dream for her, to be forgotten in the morning.

  Besides, she has the blood of warriors in her veins.'

  The next day Conan was able to stand and walk about his bedroom, and then into the great hall to take his place at the tables. All were amazed to see him on his feet so soon. He paid a visit to Aelfrith's chamber, and found her barely able to sit up in bed and speak.

  After four days of recuperation he was able to mount his horse and ride a mile or two, and he knew that very soon he would be hale. Increasingly, he cast his gaze northward. He had intended to be in Cimmeria by this time. By his calculation he was nearing the last day of departure upon which he might have some confidence of arriving at the slopes of Ben Morgh in time.

  On the eve of the day he had chosen for his departure, Conan took to his bed early, after a meal at which he had eaten hugely and drunk uncharacteristically little. He was about to snuff the candle when he heard a scratching at the door of his chamber. Aelfrith entered, still moving a little stiffly. This night she wore a long gown of green silk, bought from some Zamoran trader. She crossed to the side of his bed and looked down upon him.

  She did not waste words. 'Do not go, Conan. Stay with me. I will make you a king. Be my husband and we will breed children such as the northlands have never seen, strong and beautiful. Since Rulf was slain, I have desired no man, but you I will serve all my days.'

  If he could not be kind, at least he could be brief. 'No, Aelfrith.I must be away upon the rising of the sun. I have sworn my most solemn oath to complete my mission, and by now you know that I honour my given word.

  The days grow shorter already. I must be on my way on the morrow or violate my trust.'

  'Will you not return to me when your duty is done?' she asked despairingly.

  'I cannot. From boyhood I have been a wanderer, and I must wander all my days until I fulfil my destiny. That destiny does not lie here; I can feel it in my bones. I shall know what my destiny is when I meet it. I am sorry, Aelfrith. I have never met a worthier woman than you, but our fates are not linked after this night.'

  She drew herself to her full height. 'So be it. I am a chieftainess and you are a hero. I'll not beg and you'll not yield.' She leaned forward and

  pinched out the flame of the candle. In the sudden darkness Conan heard the faint rustle of silk as the green robe whispered to the floor. Then she slid into the bed and their arms were around each other.

  'I do not recover as swiftly as you, Conan,' she breathed. 'Be careful of my back.' Then they spoke no more.

  VI

  The Hand of Mist and Stone

  Two men sat upon an outcropping of stone, keeping watch over a small herd of shaggy, longhorned cattle. One man was middle-aged, with grizzled beard and hair, the other young and beardless, but there was a strong family resemblance in their craggy, powerful features.

  Their hair was black, hacked off crudely at shoulder length and square cut above their level brows. Their eyes were identical sapphire blue. Both men had rangy, muscular builds, and despite the biting wind they wore only brief tunics of rough homespun and short cloaks of wolfskin, with sheepskin wrappings on their feet, cross-gartered below the knee.

  They held spears, and each had a dirk and a long, heavy sword sheathed at his belt. These were Cimmerians, and no Cimmerian went unarmed after earliest childhood. These weapons were severely plain, but finely made, for weapon-smithing was the only craft practiced with devotion in Cimmeria.

  'There's a man coming up the mountain,' said the younger man.

  The older shaded his eyes and looked down the slope. He saw a tiny figure making its way slowly up the rugged slant of rocky land. 'You've good eyes, lad. He'll be here before the sun's much lower.'

  'Enemy?' the young man asked. He drew his sword and tested its edge.

  'What enemy comes alone onto Canach land? He's a Cimmerian, anyway. No lowlander walks with that stride in the mountains.'

  This meant nothing in itself. The mountain clans fought unceasingly among themselves. The new arrival was still so far away that eyes

  untrained by the vast distances of the mountains would never have seen him, much less been able to judge his stride.

  'Who might it be?' the younger mused. 'I know of no clansman who has been away in the lowlands. Not in that direction, at any rate.'

  'Not since you can remember, lad, but I think I know who that one is.'

  Far below, the growing figure was leaping from one rocky outcrop to another rather than scrambling around them. 'Yes, that's Conan, the blacksmith's son.'

  'Conan?' the boy said. He knew the name. The smith's unruly son had made a name for himself before seeking his fortune in the lowlands. 'I'd thought him dead long ago.'

  'As did I,' agreed the elder. 'He was with us when we took Venarium.

  Only fifteen years old in those days, younger than you are now, but a proven warrior.'

  'Venarium,' breathed the younger enviously.

  The story of that great fight was sung around the fires throughout the mountains. The Aquilonians had pushed a settlement across the Bossonian Marches and on to land held by the mountain clans for a hundred generations. Settled by the Aquilonian's tame Gundermen and Bossonians, the frontier town of Venarium had reared its crude ramparts against the marauding raiders. But when the Cimmerians came, it was not as raiding clansmen, but as a whole race gone to war. Clan enmities were put aside for one screaming day and night of incredible ferocity, and the howling, blackhaired horde had swept aside the disciplined courage of the lowlands like chaff before the arctic wind.

  Prominent amid the struggling had been the young Conan. Envy grew bitter in the youth's heart. There had been no such notable battling in the few years since he had been old enough to go to war, and he could take little pleasure in the knowledge that Cimmerian cattle now grazed where the city of Venarium had stood. Besides, he had a deeper sorrow gnawing at his heart.

  Conan saw the cattle on the mountainside above him, and soon he spotted the two men keeping watch over them—and over him as well, he knew. He had left his horse in the keeping of a homesteader three days

  before. This steep, rocky land was death to a plains-bred horse. Only mountain goat and stag and the tough little Cimmerian cattle could live on these slopes. And, of course, the Cimmerians themselves. Mist blew in wisps and skeins across the fells, for it was almost always misty and drizzly in the Cimmerian uplands. The abundance of rock, the thin soil, and the great amounts of rain fathered many springs; since setting foot in the mountains he had never been out of earshoj of falling water. He had almost forgotten that.

  Conan wondered who the men above might be. Kinsmen, most likely.

  He was on land held by his own clan, if his clan had not been utterly destroyed.

  He had not yet found a village, but that was not unusual. The Cimmerians were semi-nomadic, wintering in a different mountain glen each year, r
eturning to the same site perhaps only one year in ten. Many such deserted sites lay behind him, with roofless walls of piled dry stone.

  The villagers took their precious roof poles with them when they moved from place to place, for Cimmeria was a treeless land.

  Conan drew his cloak closer about him. There was a cutting wind blowing out of Hyperborea; and unless he was much mistaken, they were in for an early snow tonight. He had found kinsmen none too soon. Now, at least, he could see that these were indeed his kin. Even at a distance the craggy features of the Canach were unmistakable. In these inbred upland valleys, each clan had a distinctive physiognomy, and the square jaw of the Murrogh was as recognizable as the high forehead of the Tunog or the long nose of the Raeda.

  'Greeting, Conan,' the older man said when he was close enough.

  'Greeting, Milach,' Conan said. For all the excitement the two showed, they might have parted days before. 'You've grown some silver in your hair since last we met. Who's the lad?'

  'I'm Chulainn, your kinsman, and I'm a grown man.' He said this not with the windy posturing of the city-bred adolescent, but as a simple statement of fact.

  Conan acknowledged it with a curt nod. Henceforth, he would treat Chulainn as a warrior.

  'My sister's son,' Milach said. 'And blooded in brushes with the Vanir and the Murrogh.'

  'That is good,' Gonan said. 'A young man needs exercise for his weapons.'

  He did not ask how many kills Chulainn had, for such things were irrelevant. Cimmerians did not take heads or hands or any of the other ghastly trophies prized by other northern peoples. When a clansman was old enough to bear arms for the clan, it was assumed that he would do what had to be done, and if an exceptional feat of arms drew praise around the council fires, yet it was assumed that every blooded man was a competent warrior. Proven cowards were rare in the mountains, and they were not tolerated.

  Now the faint drizzle was being replaced by huge flakes of snow. Conan looked up at the lowering clouds. 'First snow of the season. Is there shelter hereabout?'

  'There's a good place a short way from here,' Milach said. 'Plenty of shelter from a storm. Chulainn, let's drive the kine down into the Broken Leg Glen.'

  Conan helped the men drive the twenty or so shaggy, surefooted little cattle the mile separating them from the small valley. When the beasts were driven into the skimpy pasture, the men retired to Milach's 'shelter,'

  which turned out to be a mere rock overhang, which shielded them slightly from the snow that was falling ever thicker. They made no attempt to build a fire, for fuel was too precious to waste on the mere comfort of herdsmen in winter pasture.

  Conan drew his cloak more closely about him against the growing cold.

  The other two did no such thing, but they politely refrained from making any remark at this unwonted display of sensitivity.

  'Does my father's brother, Cuipach, still live?' Conan asked.

  'Dead in a Vanir ambush, these three years,' Milach said.

  'And my cousins Balyn and Turach?'

  'Dead in the feud with the Nachta,' Milach told him.

  'The Nachta?' Conan said. 'I thought we'd slain all their fighting men years agone.'

  'We did,' Milach confirmed. 'But the boys grew into more, and they're breeding another batch of them, last I heard.'

  Conan nodded. It was an old story in these mountains. In the fierce feuding many a clan had been pared down to a single male to carry the name. The Cimmerians married young and bred many children, though, and such a clan could be strong and numerous again in two or three generations.

  'How did you find the southern lands?' Chulainn asked.

  'I found them much to my taste,' Conan said. 'They glitter with gold and the folk wear silk instead of sheepskin. The food is rich and spicy, and the wine is sweet. The women are soft and smell of perfume instead of peat smoke and cattle.'

  'Men have no need of such things,' snorted Milach. 'Things like that soften a man.'

  'Best of all,' Conan pressed on, 'they fight all the time, and a man who's handy with his weapons can make something of himself.'

  'Fighting?' Milach said. 'Is that what you call it? I'll wager they've taught you to fight from the back of a horse, as if a man's legs were not good enough, and to wear armour into a fight instead of your own good skin.' His tone was one of unbounded contempt for such effete warmaking.

  'That's the way of it in the South,' Conan said. 'What do you know of it? I've been on battlefields swept with the thunder of ten thousand horsemen, when the drums beat and the trumpets snarl and the banners blind you, so bright are they. These mountains see nothing of real war. I've been on a sea full of burning ships and smashing oars and hulls split in twain by bronzen rams. That is real fighting.'

  Milach snorted his contempt again. 'Only fools and cowards need beasts to make themselves taller. And who would want to fight over a stretch of water? Once you've taken it, what do you have? Is not one bit of water much like another?'

  'You've seen the sea?' Chulainn said. 'I have always wanted to travel and see such marvels.'

  Conan was pleased to see Chulainn rouse from whatever melancholy held him, for he seemed to be gloomy even by Cimmerian standards.

  'Aye, I've seen sea and desert and steaming jungle. I've been in cities so huge that all the clans of Cimmeria would not fill one of the smaller quarters. There are temples of marble reared so high you'd think they were built by gods instead of men.' His eyes took on the faraway look of a man in a dream. 'It is there that a man can test himself. There you are not bound by clan and custom. A wanderer without a coin in his purse but with a good sword and a strong arm and a brave heart can win for himself a kingdom.'

  'Do not listen to him, nephew,' Milach said. 'There's nothing for one of us down there. A man should stay by his kinsmen. Where is your kingdom, Conan? To my eye you have little more than when you left to go live with the Æsir years ago.'

  'I've won fortunes and lost them,' Conan said. 'And I'll win more.

  Perhaps one day I'll sit on a throne, if it suits me. Meantime, there's much of the world still left for me to see.'

  'Is the South not full of sorcery?' Chulainn asked. 'I have heard there are magicians thick as a ram's fleece down there.'

  'Aye, there are a plagued lot of them,' Conan admitted uncomfortably.

  'Never content to leave men to their own follies and always stirring up some mischief with gods and demons and such.'

  'You see?' Milach said.

  'Still,' Conan went on imperturbably, 'I'll accept them as part of the price of a life that's worth living. I'd rather be dodging some wizard's spells than watching cattle and sheep, or breeding a pack of brats and huddling around peat fires for the rest of my life.' Conan lay down on the stony ground and rolled into his cloak. After a moment he sat up and reached out a long arm to scoop up an armload of snow, which he packed into a large, hard ball. When its shape suited him he lay back, rested his head on the snowball, and was soon asleep.

  Milach watched Conan gloomily. 'You see?' he said to Chulainn in a voice of great sadness. 'This is what living in foreign parts can do to a man. This was once a mighty warrior, but so soft has he grown that now he must have a pillow to sleep!'

  The woman stepped from the doorway of her peat-roofed stone hut to see the three men coming down the hillside, driving the cattle before them. A layer of white coated the higher slopes, but the snow had not reached this lower glen. She was curious to know who the third man might be, for only two of her men had gone up days before to give the kine the last of their summer pasturing before being taken down to the winter's village.

  'Wife,' Milach said as they drew near, 'we've brought a kinsman to visit.'

  'So I've seen,' she said. 'Good day, Conan. You've grown since I saw you last, but you still favour your father.' She was a tall, gaunt woman, as grey and hard as the stone of her native mountains.

  'Greeting, Dietra. Your grey hairs do you honour.' This was a compliment in a land where
the great bulk of the people died young.

  'Come inside. There's food on the hearth.' She pushed aside the hide curtain, and Conan followed her in.

  The hut was full of peat smoke, and there was a pot steaming on the hearthstone. His mouth watered. So famished was he that his stomach was drawn into a tight knot. The eve before, he and his two kinsmen had shared a few lumps of hard cheese, and he had brought out the last shreds of dried meat from his pouch.

  The clansmen found this no hardship. On the contrary, they found the dried meat a veritable feast. Conan, on the other hand, had become accustomed to gorging himself frequently. He had eyed the cattle hungrily, but slaughtering beeves before killing time was unthinkable, unless they be stolen from an enemy.

  'Are you home for good now?' Dietra asked. 'It's long past time you wed and increased the clan. Jacha Onehand has a pair of strong, unwed

  daughters not far from here.'

  'Nay, I only visit this time. I've much left to do, and I want no wife or child to slow me.'

  'Then I see the years have not improved you,' she said.

  She took some crockery bowls and began spooning food into them with a long-handled wooden ladle. She passed the steaming bowls to the men, who scooped the mush into their mouths with their fingers. Conan made a wry face. It was oat porridge, almost tasteless. He had forgotten about oat porridge.

  Dietra caught the look. 'Surely you did not expect wheaten bread?

  Wheat grows in the lowlands, oats in the mountains. In hard years we live on naught else.'

  'Do not be too hard on our kinsman,' Milach said innocently. 'He's grown accustomed to better things down in the soft lands.'

  Conan glowered at him. 'You'd have gone there, too, years ago, had you the spirit.'

  Dietra cracked him across the back of the head with her ladle. 'Have you forgotten the manners you were raised with, that you insult your kin beneath his own roof?'

  Conan rubbed the back of his head and wiped off the spattered porridge. 'Nay, I've not forgotten,' he said ruefully, 'but I am beginning to remember why I left.'