Conan of Venarium

"It'll be a farm if I make it one," said Melcer, and methodically trimmed branches from the pine and tossed them onto a sledge. He dragged it back to the small clearing in which his wagon sat. The oxen were cropping grass not far from the wagon. They looked up with incurious brown eyes as he returned.

His wife, Evlea, had cleared a square of grass with a hoe and was planting seeds for what would be a vegetable garden. Tarnus, his son, was only six, but big enough to shoo away the chickens and keep them from eating the seeds as fast as Evlea planted them. Unlike his father and mother, Tarnus enjoyed his job. "Get away!" he yelled, and waved his arms. When the chickens did not move fast enough to suit him, he ran at them making horrible noises. They fled in clucking confusion.

"Don't drive them into the woods," warned Melcer. "If you do, the foxes and weasels will thank you for their supper— and I'll warm your backside."

"Can I tame the foxes?" asked Tarnus eagerly.

"Not with chickens," answered his father. "Where will we get more if they eat these? It's a long way back to Gunderland."

"A very long way," said Evlea, pausing in her labor to wipe her sweaty forehead with a sleeve. The endless work of setting up the farm left her and Melcer weary all the time. After a moment, she went on, "If I had known it was so very far, I don't know whether I would have wanted to come."

That made Melcer angry. "Here we have as much land as we can clear and hold," he said. "Down there, my father had six sons, so I was stuck on one sixth of the land he'd farmed. That made a miserable little plot, and you know it."

"It wasn't very big," admitted Evlea, "but it was safe. We're off the edge of nowhere here. If the barbarians rise up—

"They won't," said Melcer. "And even if they do, we have soldiers —and we have our own strong right arms." He took the axe off the sledge and flourished it. "And once we get the cabin built, we'll have a place we can defend, too."

In his mind's eye, he saw the farm he wanted to have, with plenty of room for grain and for grazing, with a barn full of cattle and sheep and horses near the cabin, with an apple orchard not too far away, and with the forest pushed back toward the horizon —but not too far, for he would still need firewood. He saw plenty of neighbors, to help defend the place against the wild Cimmerians — but none too near, for he wanted a big parcel of land for himself. He saw Evlea raising up not just Tarnus but three or four more sons, and all of them going on to take land for themselves, carving out homesteads from this gloomy wilderness. He smiled, liking those visions better than any he might have got from an opium pipe.

In between what he saw and where he was now lay an endless ocean of labor. Stolid as most Gundermen, he shrugged broad shoulders. Work had never fazed him. He said, "I'm going back to cut notches in that tree. It'll go into the cabin—the trunk's good and straight."

"All right. I have plenty to do here," said Evlea. "Keep your eyes open."

"And you," said Melcer. His wife nodded. He sharpened the blade of her hoe against a whetstone every few nights. It would make a wicked weapon in a pinch. So far, the barbarians had stayed away from the settlements around Fort Venarium. Melcer hoped the beating they had had at the hands of Count Stercus' Aquilonians would teach them to respect the power of King Numedides and those who followed him. If it did not—if it did not, he would fight as hard as he had to, and so would the rest of the settlers, men, women, and children.

Shouldering his axe as a soldier would shoulder a pike while on the march, Melcer followed the trail of the sledge back to the pine he had cut down. Once he had cut the notches in it, he would have the oxen drag it to the place where he intended to raise the cabin: not far from where the wagon stood now.

He set to work with skillful strokes. He was good with the axe. He could have been a lumberjack if he had not taken a love for the land and for growing things from his father. He had cut one notch and was walking down to the far end of the tree to do the other when a Cimmerian with a bow came out of the woods.

Like most Gundermen and Bossonians, Melcer made a good woodsman. Here, though, he knew he had met his match and more. He was a civilized man who had learned woodscraft as he had learned axework. The barbarian who eyed him from under a mop of hair black as midnight might have sprung from nowhere, so silently did he appear. He hadnot needed to learn woodscraft; he might have imbibed its lessons with his mother's milk.

Only little by little did Melcer realize the barbarian had drunk of his mother's milk not so very long before. He was man-tall, and handled his bow with the unconscious ease of an experienced archer, but his features, though promising harshness, were not yet fully molded into the form they would one day possess, and no beard darkened his cheeks.