Conan of Venarium

A twig breaking underfoot froze him into animal immobility. The oaths that followed were in Aquilonian. Conan would not be laughed at, but he mocked the shortcomings of others readily enough. The invaders blundering along the trail there could hardly have made more noise had they been a herd of cattle.

As Conan had amused himself by doing before, he began to trail these Aquilonians. The closer he could come to them without their being aware he was anywhere nearby, the happier he would be. They ambled along, loudly announcing their presence to anyone with ears to hear. Conan almost gave himself away at their antics; only by biting down hard on the inside of his lower lip did he defeat the urge to guffaw.

Someone else stepped on a stick. "You clumsy idiot," said a Bossonian. "How are we supposed to catch anything when you do that?"

"Oh, and it wasn't you the last time, eh?" retorted a Gunderman. "You walk like you've got rocks in your boots."

"And you talk like you've got rocks in your head, so devils eat you," said the Bossonian. He cupped a hand behind his ears. "And if you listen, you can hear all the animals in the forest running away from us."

"Not in this forest." The Gunderman shook his head. "Half the things in this forest want to kill us."

Conan nodded. He wanted to kill all the invaders who tramped through the woods that had been his ever since he grew old enough to venture into them for the first time. He was close enough to smash in a couple of the hunters' skulls with hurled rocks, too. But he did not think he could slay every one of them, and even if he did he would only bring a savage vengeance down on Duthil. He cast no stones, then, but hung close to the Aquilonians and listened.

Another Gunderman spoke for the first time: "Everything in this whole country wants to kill us." Conan nodded again; so did the Gunderman's hunting companions. The yellow-haired soldier continued, "I'll tell you something else, too — our beloved count isn't making things any better for us, the way he's prowling around that girl in the village."

That astonished Conan. Even the Aquilonians realized Stercus had no business doing what he was doing? The blacksmith's son had not dreamt that could be so. Why did they not restrain him, then?

The Bossonian archer laughed. "And if you tell him so, Vulth, you'll get it in the neck. In fact, if you even talk about it with anybody you can't trust, you're liable to get it in the neck anyway. Stercus doesn't like people telling him what he can do and what he can't."

"King Numedides told him," said the Gunderman who wasn't Vulth: a younger man, with a merry smile. "That's why he's up here, not still down in the capital prowling after young girls there."

"Ah, but there's a difference," the Bossonian replied. "Numedides can tell anybody anything. That's what being king is all about. You damned well can't. You're just a miserable, no-account pikeman with dung on your boots. Nobody wants to hear what you've got to say."

Had anyone spoken so to Conan, the blacksmith's son would have done his best to murder the offender. No Cimmerian would stand for the notion that his word was not as good as any other man's. Clan chiefs won their places not thanks to their fancy bloodlines but by virtue of the strength and wisdom they displayed. Anyone might challenge them, and men frequently did. If being frozen in place from fear of a wicked nobleman's status was what went into civilization, then Conan wanted no part of it, vastly preferring the barbarism in which he had been raised. His father had seen that benefits also accrued from a social system more highly structured than Cimmeria's, but he was blind to those.

The Gunderman, instead of taking the archer's words as a deadly insult, only laughed. "And you've got dung on your tongue, Benno," he said. "That's why everybody loves you so much."

Benno's reply taught Conan several new Aquilonian curses. He was not completely sure what all of them meant, but they sounded splendid, rolling off the Bossonian's tongue with a fine, sonorous obscenity. The Gunderman at whom they were aimed laughed some more. That Conan did understand. Friends could take such liberties.

For a little while, he forgot about murdering all the invaders. Following them, spying on them, made sport enough.

Granth hated the Cimmerian forest. Even with comrades along, he always felt like a flea making its way through the matted fur of the biggest, shaggiest dog in the world. He did not offer up that conceit to Vulth and Benno. He knew too well that his cousin and the Bossonian would make the most of it.

When he stopped for a moment, the other two soldiers also halted. "What is it?" asked Vulth. "Did you see something? Did you hear something?" He sounded edgier than usual himself; perhaps the damp, silent immensity of the woods had begun to get under his skin, too.