Conan of Venarium

"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?"