Conan of Venarium

Easy or not, though, they and the rest of the Cimmerians cleared the stairway of Bossonians and Gundermen one hard-fought step at a time. "Forward!" bellowed Mordec again and again. Forward the men of the north went, over the hacked and bleeding bodies of those who would stand in their way— and over not a few of the bodies of their own countrymen. With a deep-throated roar of triumph, Mordec leaped from the last stair down to the ground within the fortress. He shouted again, this time with words in the cry: "Venarium is fallen! Venarium is ours!"

An arrow smote him, just to the left of the middle of his chest.

He stood there for a moment, a look of absurd surprise on his face. Then he turned to Conan, as if remembering something important he needed to say. Whatever it was, it never passed his lips. His eyes rolled up in his head. Like a toppling tree, he crumpled, the axe falling from fingers that suddenly would not hold it.

"Noooo!" shouted Conan, a long howl of despair and fury. That his father should fall in the moment of victory— "Curse you, Crom!" he cried, and threw Stercus' sword in a startled Gunderman's face. Then he snatched up the axe Mordec had wielded so well.

He swung that axe with a madman's fury. No Aquilonian could stand against him. No one could come close enough even to engage him. And he wounded more than one Cimmerian he did not recognize as a countryman because of his berserk grief. The men with whom he had fought his way into Fort Venarium grew as wary of him as the Gundermen and Bossonians they opposed.

"He is fey," said one Cimmerian to another, and his comrade nodded, for it did seem as if Conan willfully sought his own death on the battlefield.

But whether he sought it or not, it did not meet him at Venarium. Others died there, Aquilonians and Cimmerians alike. A handful of Bossonians and Gundermen managed to escape the falling fortress by scrambling down over the south wall of the palisade and fleeing across the river, but most fell either in the courtyard or defending one barracks hall or another until the Cimmerians either battered down a door and forced an entrance or burned the building over their enemies' heads.

At last, as the sun sank in the northwest, the fighting dragged to a stop, for no more Aquilonians remained alive and unwounded to carry on. Cimmerians tended to their own injured men and cut the throats of the Bossonians and Gundermen who lay on the ground. "They did the same to us after the last fight here," said Nectan the shepherd, leaning wearily on a pikestaff. "As often as not, it's a kindness of sorts, putting somebody who won't live out of his pain."

Conan heard him as if from very far away. The blacksmith's son looked down at his hands, which still clutched his father's axe. When he took them off the axe handle, the place where his father and he had clenched it was the only part not drenched in gore. And his palms seemed the only part of him not soaked in it. His arms were crimson up past the elbows. Blood dyed his tunic and breeks in colors Balarg the weaver had never intended.

Balarg himself had come through the battle apparently unwounded. He stirred bodies not so much to see if they yet lived as to find out what sort of wealth they carried.

"How can you think of loot when everything that matters to us is dead or in ruins?" demanded Conan.

"I am not dead," answered Balarg. "I am not dead, and I am well and truly avenged on my foes. I shall have to find a home in a new village. I would sooner do that as a man with riches than as a man with none. You will face the same trouble. You should plunder, too."

"I have no stomach for it, not now. What I have won, I have bought too dear," said Conan. He looked around and shook his head. "I have no stomach for Cimmeria, not any more. My father is dead. My mother is dead, and I have not had time to mourn her." That was a knife of shame, twisting in his gut. He looked Balarg in the eye. "And Tarla is dead. What do I have left to hold me here?"

"Where would you go?" asked the weaver.

"I know not." Conan's shoulders ached when he shrugged. How many times had he swung Stercus' sword and his father's axe in battle? More than he could count. With another shrug, he went on, "Let those who still have something worth holding here dwell in this land. As for me — " He spat and shook his head.

Chapter Thirteen

Aquilonia

Even the wild rush of the Cimmerians from the north faltered after the fight at Fort Venarium. Before moving south of the river, they paused to treat their wounded, to put their dead in the ground, and to take what plunder they could from the ruined fortress and from the gutted town around it.