For another boy, this existence with a grandfather whom others shunned would have been a lonely one. Connacht’s swift punishments for failure would have had others howling in pain, or vowing to run or seek revenge. For Conan, these were not options simply because someone born on a battlefield would never run, and a Cimmerian would not acknowledge pain. Stripped of the family and life he had known, Conan redefined himself as the man of destiny others had supposed him to be. If he failed, their hopes and expectations would be invalidated. His father and mother’s wishes would never be realized. Conan, though given to the occasional bout of melancholy, did not dwell overlong on things introspective and instead occupied himself learning all he could of the killing arts.
In Connacht he had a willing and a superior teacher. Connacht the Freebooter, the Far-Traveled, had been isolated because of his past. In training his grandson, he could guarantee two things. First, his bloodline would not be extinguished easily. Second, those who had forgotten who and what he had been would learn the truth through his grandson’s exploits. While even the most casual of observers could have seen that Conan would be a great Cimmerian warrior, Connacht intended him to be the
greatest
Cimmerian warrior. He would be the man against whom all others would be measured.
More than once Connacht had told him that. The admission came late at night, when his grandfather finished some tale of how he’d escaped slavers or survived a battle. Conan would stare at him, wide-eyed, with the admiration and love that rewards all the trials of parenthood, and mutter, “Someday, Grandfather, I shall be as you were.”
“No, Conan, you will be greater. Men once remembered me as a Cimmerian. They will remember you as
the
Cimmerian.”
To Conan, that idea seemed, at first, ridiculous. And then, later on, it became a goal. It became fused with the destiny that had been thrust on him by his birth on a battlefield and by his parents’ desire that he know more than fire and blood. If he were to be
the
Cimmerian, he would have to do more than just be a warrior. He didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he was determined to find out.
And in his fourth summer with his grandfather, just after he turned fifteen, he gained his first opportunity to become
the
Cimmerian.
THE AQUILONIANS HAD
long coveted Cimmerian territory. With every generation, they conspired to steal as much as they could. They pushed into Cimmeria and established the hunting outpost known as Venarium. During the years when it had been little more than a trading post, the Cimmerians had tolerated it. When troops invested it, when stone walls replaced the wooden ones, and when punitive raiders sallied forth from its confines to hunt down Cimmerians who had gone raiding . . . then it became an open sore and could no longer be tolerated.
Cimmerian elders gathered and conferred. They summoned the tribes and clans. They even sent word to isolated villages and single homesteads, suggesting that all had been forgiven and that any animosities must be forgotten in the face of this greater threat to Cimmeria. So it was that Conan and Connacht left the homestead, and went to join the others in an encampment northeast of the Aquilonian settlement.
Conan had never much been given to considering how he had changed since coming to live with his grandfather. He measured his growth not in pounds or inches, but in skills mastered. Yet the way the other men looked at him, and the shock when they learned he was only fifteen years old, left no doubt that he had changed physically. Though he’d not yet attained his full height or weight, he’d gone from being a boy to a six-foot-tall man, lean as a wolf but well muscled, tipping the scales at over a hundred and eighty pounds. A few men said they could see his father in him, and this made him proud. He never smiled, however, and kept his own counsel, for, as both Corin and Connacht had told him, “ ’Tis better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt of it.”
While excited to be in the warrior camp, Conan also wanted to get far away from it. Though he was not the youngest there, the other youths had been grouped into support companies. They would be held in reserve, and went through daily drills to prepare them. Everyone knew that if the battle went so badly that the youngest warriors were called upon to fight, they would die. But such was Conan’s size and so well developed were his skills that he did not fit with his peers.
The companies of adult men wanted even less to do with him. While all was supposed to be forgiven, the southern tribesmen—whose coloration matched Conan’s most closely—were clearly wary of Connacht and anyone connected to him. The northern tribes seemed reluctant to trust Conan, both because he appeared to be a southerner
and
because of his youth.
He and his grandfather fell in with a motley collection of warriors that the others referred to as the “Outlanders.” While none of them knew Connacht, they knew of him. Like him, they had ventured well beyond the borders of Cimmeria. Their adventures had taken them to the same faraway places that Connacht’s had taken him. As Elders plotted and planned, the Outlanders shared stories. They bonded as men do who have known the same hardships—and as men do who are destined for more hardships. Not a one of them doubted that the Elders would form them into their own company and throw them into the most savage of the fighting—less because they valued them as warriors than because their loss would hurt the tribes the least.
Kiernan, the closest of the Outlanders in age to Conan, was a decade his senior. Though not nearly as tall as Conan, he had a whiplash quickness matched only by the swiftness with which he delivered wry comments. He carried a bow—an affectation he adopted while serving as a Shemite mercenary—and invited Conan along with him to take a look at Venarium before the tribes marched.
The two of them slipped over the ridgeline and found cover high above the valley in which Venarium had been built. The valley broadened toward the south. The river splitting it would eventually flow into the Shirki and water Aquilonia’s central plains. Already forests had been cleared around the settlement and fields planted with more than enough wheat and hay to sustain Venarium.
Though Connacht had taken great care in describing the cities of the south, his stories had not prepared Conan for his first view of Venarium. The trading settlements he’d visited before had been little more than villages, but Venarium towered above the plains. Stone walls girded it and a switchback causeway led up to the main gate. An inner set of walls warded a fortress at the town’s pinnacle, and the high tower, from which flew a half-dozen pennants, commanded a view of the entire valley.
Kiernan pointed toward the fortress. “See there, Conan, how the fort’s gate faces south, but the main gate faces east?”
The youth nodded.
“That’s so when we breach the main gate, we have to fight our way along and around to the south. The gutters will run with Cimmerian blood.”
“And Aquilonian.”
“True enough.” The smaller warrior ran a hand over his chin. “The Elders will be wanting the Aquilonians to come out and fight like men, but they won’t. So we’ll prove how brave we are by beating on their doors while they shoot us full of arrows or boil us in oil.”
“Connacht has told of siege machines.”
“Oh, aye, there are such.” Kiernan smiled. “Like as not, we’ll soon be chopping wood and lashing things together to form a few, but getting them close enough to work is the trick. On the walls there, on top of the towers, they have their own catapults and onagers. Behind the walls they have trebuchets. All of them will range on what we have.”
Conan nodded grimly.
“Now, if the Elders had destroyed Venarium when putting it to the torch was all that was required, we’d not be facing the problem we now are. But the Aquilonians figured to use greed to soften our resolve. Now that stone walls are up, it’s a steeper price we’re to pay.”
“Better to pay in fire than blood.” Conan looked at his scarred palms. “This is a huge blood debt.”
Kiernan smiled. “There’s other coin for reckoning the debt, lad. You always have to assume your enemy is smart. But you get to remember he’s a man. And he has men under his command, some of whom won’t be so smart. You can use that against them. In this case, if we don’t, even the smartest men among us will be dead . . . and Cimmeria will die with them.”
The Cimmerian youth frowned. “We cannot do nothing.”
“Agreed. But what we’ll have to do, in the minds of some, isn’t work for warriors, and isn’t work for Cimmerians.” The older warrior shrugged. “Though I suspect, when recounting tales of victory, some details will go unmentioned, become forgotten, and few will think to complain.”
KIERNAN AND CONAN
returned to the Cimmerian camp and spoke with the other Outlanders. While no one doubted the courage of any Cimmerian warrior, the Outlanders had all engaged in battles and sieges, whereas their average companion’s greatest victory had been a cattle raid. The Outlanders, choosing Kiernan and Connacht as their spokesmen, offered a plan to the Elders. Conan attended his grandfather as the plan was presented, and the Elders accepted it less because it was the wisest plan than because it absolved them of responsibility if it failed.
The Cimmerian host advanced in two wings. One was composed of northerners and invested itself in the valley directly opposite Venarium’s main gate. The southern contingent came in from the north and placed itself beside the northern force, with a gap of three hundred yards between them. The Cimmerians made no attempt to surround the city. They posted a few pickets well outside the range of Aquilonian archers and siege machines. The camps showed little organization and less discipline, with fights regularly breaking out in the gap between forces.
A contingent of Elders from the northern force approached the city and met with an Aquilonian envoy. Among the many things they demanded, including the dismantling of the walls were rental fees and three hundred cats. Not to be outdone, a southern party of leaders demanded four hundred rats and five hundred bats. The Aquilonians, who sent messengers south to summon reinforcements, agreed to meet these requests and within a week delivered the tribute to the Cimmerians.
Many of the Cimmerians viewed all of the talking as nonsense, but Conan benefited from his association with Connacht and Kiernan. The Aquilonian commander could look out from his tower and see two Cimmerian forces split down the middle. If the southern troops wished to go home, they would have to go through the northerners. The battles in the gap proved there was little love lost between the two groups. While the Cimmerians were creating some siege machines, they were too small to effectively batter the city into submission before reinforcements could arrive from the south. As far as the Aquilonian commander was concerned, all he had to do was keep a watchful eye on the barbarians and wait for others to rid him of his problem.
Then came the night of no moon.
Venarium depended upon wells to draw water in, and sewers to drain waste away. The sewers flowed together toward the south, into a series of irrigation canals that used water from the river to flood the fields with night soil as fertilizer. The Aquilonians had barred and gated the sewers, but only to keep men out. Their preparations could not stop cats or rats or bats, especially when those creatures were released with burning embers lashed to their tails and legs in woven, green-grass baskets.
The animals fled to safety in Venarium, pouring into the city through the sewers or winging their way above the walls and into towers and attics. As the first fires ignited, after the animals had chewed their way free of their fiery cargo, alarums sounded. Troops tasked with guarding the sewers—a duty never given to the most elite of troops—fled to other posts to fight the fires. It took very little for the Outlanders to crash through the sewer gates and pour into the city, all but unnoticed in the chaos.
And once they reached the main gates and opened them, Cimmerian rage consumed the town more swiftly than the flames.
The Aquilonian leader was not a stupid man, nor did he lack courage. Whether from his tower he saw the Cimmerian Outlanders advancing on the gate, or he assumed that the gate would be a target, he donned his armor and led his personal cohort through Venarium’s smoky streets. His force hidden behind tall shields, bristling with spears, slammed into the Outlanders’ flank and drove them back against the gates they so desperately wished to open.
Many of the Outlanders drew together and back, hoping to buy time for the others to come to their rescue, but Conan was not among them. Clad in a blackened mail surcoat, he burst from the Outlanders’ midst and, with one, doublehanded blow, split a shield and took the arm of the Aquilonian holding it. As that man looked down, terror on his face, his lifeblood pumping in black jets from his severed limb, Conan struck off his head.
Conan waded into the Aquilonians’ midst, perhaps for a heartbeat transported back to his village, imagining himself there, destroying those who had killed his people and slain his father. Good Cimmerian steel clove Aquilonian bone, spraying blood and brains. Aborted screams and cries for mercy filled the night, rising and falling within the din of metal clashing with metal. Conan moved with the battle and through it, Connacht’s training allowing him to understand it and master it. Spear points caught on mail, short swords split rings and tore flesh, but never enough to slow the Cimmerian youth. Every cut he returned a hundredfold, every drop of blood he reaped in gallons.
And then the other Cimmerians boiled through the gates and over the walls.
Venarium fell screaming beneath a cold, unfeeling sky and stars that glittered as ice.
THAT NEXT MORNING
Conan stood beside Kiernan and Connacht at the vantage point from which he’d first seen Venarium. What had once been grand and imposing was now nothing more than a smoking ruin—home to ravens and other consumers of carrion. Cimmerians still occupied the plains, filling carts with loot, chaining slaves into long strings, making mounds of skulls toward the south to chasten and taunt the Aquilonians.