Conan of Venarium

Sickened by the sights and stinks of death all around him, Granth son of Biemur finally threw up his hands in disgust. "Enough!" he said. "Plundering a battlefield after a fight is one thing. Plundering a place like this — " He shook his head. "If only these folk had a little more, we might be robbing the houses we grew up in. It makes me want to retch."

"Then go away," said Benno the archer, who had no such qualms. "More for the rest of us."

Maybe he thought he would shame Granth into going after booty with the other soldiers from the garrison. If he did, he was wrong. Granth turned and strode back toward the palisaded camp just south of Duthil. Benno had been pulling the wool stuffing out of a mattress in the hopes the Cimmerians who had slept on it had also secreted some of their valuables inside it. So far, his hope looked likely to be disappointed.

Granth almost ran into Vulth, who came out of the blacksmith's house carrying a heavy hammer. "What good is that?" demanded Granth.

"Not much, probably," admitted his cousin. "You look sour enough to spit vinegar. What's your trouble?"

"This." Granth's wave encompassed it all. "Are we a pack of ghouls out of the desert, to batten on the dead?"

"The Cimmerians won't miss it any more," said Vulth. "None of them left alive except maybe the blacksmith's son."

"He shouldn't have got away, cither," said Granth gloomily. "He'll cause trouble for us."

"What can one boy do?" asked Vulth with a dismissive shrug.

Before Granth could even begin to answer, the soldiers at the northern edge of the village, the edge closest to the endless forest, cried out in surprise and alarm. And other cries mingled with those of the Bossonians and Gundermen: fierce shouts in a language Granth had never bothered to learn. They filled the pikeman's ears, and seemed to swell like approaching thunder.

"Cimmerians!" yelled someone, and then the storm fell on Captain Treviranus' men.

More barbarians than Granth had imagined there were in the world came loping out of the woods. As had the northern men in the fight at Fort Venarium, they wielded a wild variety of weapons. Here, though, they took the Aquilonians altogether by surprise —and here, too, no knights would come to the rescue of the pikemen and archers. One of the barbarians brandished Stercus' staring head.

"Form up, men! Form up!" shouted Treviranus desperately. "If we fight them all together, we still may win!"

But the Aquilonians never got the chance to follow their commander's good advice. The enemy was upon them too suddenly and in numbers too great, while they themselves were scattered all through Duthil and not looking for battle. But whether they sought it or not, it found them, and they had to do what they could. Many of them, beset from front and rear and sides all at the same time, simply fell. Others gathered in struggling knots, islands in a sea of Cimmerians, islands bloodily overwhelmed one by one.

Granth and Vulth, near the southern edge of the village, had a few moments longer to ready themselves for the onslaught than most of their comrades. "Side by side and back to back to the palisade," said Vulth. "It's the only hope we've got, and it's a long one."

Side by side and back to back it was: a savage business, but somehow less so than Granth had expected. In point of fact, he had never expected to reach the palisade at all. But after he and Vulth stretched a couple of Cimmerians lifeless on the grass of the meadow, most of the barbarians ran past them rather than attacking. Had they seemed cowards, they would have been quickly dragged down and killed. The appearance of courage meant they soon required less of the genuine article.

But by the time they reached the palisade, reaching it did them no good. Cimmerians were already boosting one another up to the top and dropping down into the fortress that had held down Duthil and the surrounding countryside for the past two years. With the whole garrison inside, the fortified encampment might have put up a stout defense. With only a few men within, it would not last long.

"What do we do? Where do we go?" asked Granth, seeing that the fortress would not save them.

"Into the woods," said Vulth. "They're our only hope. If we can get to a settler's farm, we may hold out against these howling devils."

Granth laughed wildly. "We'll make them pay for hunting us down, anyhow."

Into the woods they plunged.

Adore blood flooded Duthil's muddy main street. Here, though, Conan watched in delight, not horror, for these were Aquilonians who fell. And the blacksmith's son used Count Stercus' sword to wicked effect, bringing down a pair of Bossonian archers and a Gunderman who relied on the length of his pike to hold foes at bay but who fatally underestimated his foe's pantherish quickness.