Conan of Venarium

Sergeant Nopel cuffed him, hard enough to stagger him and make him swear. "I don't care what your granddad used to maunder on about," snapped Nopel. "What I say is, you talk too cursed much."

By then, the company had almost reached the stream. Granth drew his sword and held it high so the blade would not get wet and rust. When he crossed, his boots crunched on gravel in the streambed. Cold water poured down over his boot tops and soaked his feet. He cursed resignedly; he had known that would happen. He would have to sit close by the fire tonight—and every other man in the company would have wet feet, too. There would be a lot of pushing and jostling before that got sorted out.

He squelched up onto the north bank of the stream. "Welcome to Cimmeria!" Count Stercus called from horseback, not to Granth in particular but to all the men who were coming up onto dry land just then. "Welcome, I say, for we are going to take this land away from the barbarians and make it ours."

Stercus sounded very sure, though his voice was higher and thinner than Granth would have liked in a commander. He wanted a man who could bellow like a bull and make himself heard across a mile of battlefield. Stercus was young to have a command like this, too, for he could not have had more years than Vulth. His lean, hawk-nosed, pallid face would have been handsome but for dark eyes set too close together and a chin whose weakness the thin fringe of beard he wore could not disguise.

"The savages shall surely flee before us," declared Stercus.

"I hope he's right," said Granth.

"If the Cimmerians ran whenever somebody poked them, Aquilonia would have taken this country hundreds of years ago," said Vulth. "We'll have plenty of fighting to do yet. Don't you worry about that."

Granth looked to see if Sergeant Nopel would tell Vulth to shut up again. Nopel said not a word, from which Granth concluded the sergeant thought his cousin was right. The Aquilonians trudged north, deeper into Cimmeria.

Iron belled on iron. Sparks flew. Mordec struck again, harder than ever. The blacksmith grunted in satisfaction and, hammer still clenched in his great right hand, lifted the red-hot sword blade from the anvil with the tongs in his left. Nodding, he watched the color slowly fade from the iron. "I'll not need to thrust it back into the fire, Conan," he said. "You can rest easy at the bellows."

"All right, Father." Conan was not sorry to step back from the forge. Sweat ran down his bare chest. Though the day was not warm —few days in Cimmeria were warm —hard work by the forge made a man or a boy forget the weather outside. At twelve, the blacksmith's son stood on the border of manhood. He was already as tall as some of the men in the village of Duthil, and his own labor at Mordec's side had given him thews some of those men might envy.

Yet next to his father, Conan's beardless cheeks were not all that marked him as a stripling. For Mordec was a giant of a man, well over six feet, but so thick through the shoulders and chest that he did not seem so tall. A square-cut mane of thick black hair, now streaked with gray, almost covered the blacksmith's volcanic blue eyes. Mordec's close-trimmed beard was also beginning to go gray, and had one long white streak marking the continuation of a scar that showed on his cheek. His voice was a deep bass rumble, which made Conan's unbroken treble all the shriller by comparison.

From the back of the smithy, from the rooms where the blacksmith and his family lived, a woman called, "Mordec! Come here. I need you."

Mordec's face twisted with a pain he never would have shown if wounded by sword or spear or arrow. "Go tend to your mother, son," he said roughly. "It's really you Verina wants to see, anyhow. "

"But she called you," said Conan.

"Go, I said." Mordec set down the blacksmith's hammer and folded his hand into a fist. "Go, or you'll be sorry."

Conan hurried away. A buffet from his father might stretch him senseless on the rammed-earth floor of the smithy, for Mordec did not always know his own strength. And Conan dimly understood that his father did not want to see his mother in her present state; Verina was slowly and lingeringly dying of some ailment of the lungs that neither healers nor wizards had been able to reverse. But Mordec, lost in his own torment, did not grasp how watching Conan's mother fail by inches flayed the boy.

As usual, Verina lay in bed, covered and warmed by the cured hides of panthers and wolves Mordec had slain on hunting trips. "Oh," she said. "Conan." She smiled, though her lips had a faint bluish cast that had been absent even a few weeks before.

"What do you need, Mother?" he asked.

"Some water, please," said Verina. "I didn't want to trouble you." Her voice held the last word an instant longer than it might have.