Conan of Venarium

Chapter Nine For Stercus Sake?

Rhiderch the seer stayed in and around Duthil through the winter. He made himself useful now and again. Balarg's wife had lost a silver ring—work of the ^£sir—and Rhiderch told her to slaughter a certain hen. Sure enough, she found it in the bird's gizzard. It must have slipped from her finger while she was scattering grain for her chickens. She valued the ring enough to feed the seer for a week afterwards — and she was not one usually given to fits of generosity.

And Rhiderch also found four sheep that had wandered away from Nectan during a snowstorm that covered their tracks as fast as they were made. He told the shepherd to look by a red rock beneath a tall spruce. Nectan knew a reddish boulder just in from the edge of the forest that fit the bill. When he went to the rock, there were the sheep. He gave Nectan one of them, reckoning it better to have three back than to have lost them all.

The seer's powers came and went. They did not always serve him as he would have wished. He also did odd jobs to keep himself fed and sheltered. Except for his erratic gift, he did nothing better than everyone else. But he did a lot of things better than most people, and so found ways to make himself useful.

One morning in early spring, Conan came upon him repairing the wall of a neighbor's house. Wherever he had learned to work with wattle and daub, he took pains to do a proper job, using plenty of sticks and twigs to anchor the mud. Nodding to the blacksmith's son, he said, "A good day to you. Next I'll put more thatch on the roof, to keep the rain from dripping through and marring the wall again."

"That will keep the house sound, sure enough." Conan hesitated, then asked, "How do you see what you see?"

Rhiderch did him the courtesy of taking the question seriously. "I know not, lad," he answered. "All I know is that I see. Sometimes it will be as clear as if it were before my eyes, the way I see you now. Sometimes what I see will mean nothing or next to nothing to me, yet seem plain enough to the person to whom I tell it. And sometimes neither I nor he will know what a vision means."

"When you see something, are you ever wrong?" asked Conan.

"Wrong?" Again, Rhiderch paused to think before replying. "Well, as I say, there are times when I cannot tell you what will come from things I have seen. But that's not what you meant, is it?" Conan shook his head. Rhiderch thought a little longer, then said, "No, I don't believe I see falsely. If a meaning comes of it, it is the meaning I have seen."

"So it seemed to me," said Conan. "Tell me, then: what do you see about our folk and the Aquilonians?"

"So far, I have not seen anything, not in the way you mean," replied Rhiderch.

"Could you?" asked Conan eagerly.

"Could I bring on a vision instead of waiting for one to strike me?" The seer frowned. "I know not. I do not believe I have ever tried. For most visions, I would not try."

"But this one is important to all our people," protested Conan.

"Well, so it is," admitted Rhiderch. "All right, lad. I'll give it a go. Let no one say I fought shy of doing what we Cimmerians need."

He stood there at the edge of Duthil's main street: a lean old man with long, clever hands filthy from mud. His lips moved, at first silently and then in a soft, droning chant. Awe prickled through Conan. He realized the seer was gathering his mental powers to pierce the veil of the unknown as a sharp awl might pierce thick, resistant leather. Rhiderch's eyes met Conan's, but the blacksmith's son did not think the other man truly saw him. Whatever Rhiderch saw, it was not the little village where Conan had lived all his life.

The seer suddenly went stiff. His eyes opened very wide, so that white showed all around their irises. "Crom!" he muttered, whether calling on the grim northern god or simply in astonishment Conan could not have said. In a voice that might have come from the other side of the grave, Rhiderch went on, "Gore and guts and grief and glory! War and woe and fire and flame! Death and doom and dire deeds! War, aye, war to the knife, war without mercy, war without pity, battle till the last falls still fighting!"

Conan shuddered. He had got more in the way of a vision than he had bargained for. Rhiderch twitched like a man in the throes of an epileptic fit. Hoarsely, Conan asked, "But who will win?" Nothing else mattered to him. "Who will win?"

Now Rhiderch's gaze thrust through him like a sword. "War and woe!" repeated the seer. "Duthil dies a dismal death. The golden lion— ' He twitched again. "Aye, the golden lion flaps above your head."

"No!" howled Conan, a long wail of misery. Bitterly he repented of his own curiosity. Repentance, as usual, came too late. "No! Let it not be so! Tell me not that accursed Aquilonia triumphs."

Rhiderch blinked several times. Only after the fact did Conan notice the seer's eyes had stayed open every moment while he was prophesying. With reason on his face once more, Rhiderch inquired, "What said I?"

"You do not know?" exclaimed Conan. Rhiderch shook his head. Although he had manifestly returned to the mundane plane, he still seemed pale and drawn, as though he had just shaken off a nearly killing fever. As best Conan could, he recounted Rhiderch's baleful words.

The seer heard him out in silence. Rhiderch looked down at the daub on his hands as if it were dripping blood. "I know not what to say to you, lad," he said at last, "save this alone: the foretelling and the event are not the same. The event is the thing, the foretelling but a shadow. Like any shadow, it shifts and grows and shrinks in response to the light that casts it."

"Cold comfort, by Crom!" jeered Conan. "You have seen my village dead. How shall the shadow of that shift? You are nothing but a stinking carrion crow with corpse meat in your mouth!"

Rhiderch bowed his head. "If you blame the messenger for the message, strike now," he said.

Instead of striking, Conan swore. He spun on his heel and stormed out of Duthil. Slaying Rhiderch would solve nothing, for how could he slay the seer's words? They would echo inside him until the unfolding of time revealed their fulfillment—and he was all too sure it would. Rhiderch had been a man inspired; however shadowy his words might have been, he had spoken truth.

Air spicy with the sap of conifers surrounded Conan as he rushed into the woods. Leaving behind the stinks of Duthil — the dung, the animals, the smoke, the unbathed bodies, the tanning hides —was easy. Leaving behind Rhiderch's prophecy came harder. That followed Conan: indeed, try as he would, he took it with him. Escape was what he wanted most, and what he could not have.

A raven croaked at him from a tall spruce. He shook his fist at the big, black bird. "Begone, cruel corbie!" he cried. "You'll not take the flesh from my bones to feed your nestlings." He stooped to pick up a stone.

Wise and wary in the ways of men, the raven leaped into the air with a great rustle of wings. Conan hurled the stone anyway, as much from sheer rage as for any other reason. It just grazed the outermost feather on the raven's left wing. The bird gave another hoarse cry and vanished into the forest.

"And take your ill-luck with you, accursed thing!" shouted Conan after it. The woods seemed to swallow his words. He wondered if they reached the raven. He could only hope. Had curses stuck as readily as they were given, all the Aquilonians would long since have vanished from Cimmeria.

Conan realized he had only an eating knife at his belt, for he had rushed out of the village in a passion, with not the slightest thought for what he would do next. Now that his temper began to cool, he keenly felt the lack of either bow or javelin. A knife was no weapon to wield against wolf, let alone panther. He took two steps toward Duthil, but then abruptly checked himself. What would the villagers do if he came stumbling back after rushing away so furiously? Would they not laugh at him, whether to his face or behind his back? Of a certainty, they would.

Pride is a terrible thing. For pride's sake, the blacksmith's son would sooner have risked his life than risked the laughter of friends and neighbors. And, had any other man of Duthil stood where Conan stood, he would have made the same choice. What the Cimmerians lacked in material goods, they made up for in a superabundance of pride. If not for pride, they would have fought less amongst themselves, and would have made a harder nut for the Aquilonians to crack. None of that crossed Conan's mind. He knew only that he would rather have faced wolves than his fellow villagers.

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.

However reluctantly, Granth shook his head. "No," he admitted. "But half the Cimmerians in the world could be within fifty feet of us, and we'd never notice, not in woods like these."

"By Mitra, we would!" Benno laughed and mimed taking an arrow in the chest. "We'd notice pretty damned quick, too."

That had a horrid feeling of probability to Granth. It also made him stop, look, and listen again. But he saw nothing, heard nothing, sensed nothing — except the hair-prickling feeling at the nape of his neck that not all was as it should be. He muttered to himself.

"Still jumpy?" said Vulth.

"Not—jumpy." Granth tried to put the feeling into words: "More as though a goose just walked over my grave."

"You're a goose —a silly one," said his cousin. Granth scowled; he might have known Vulth would make him pay for careless words like those.

"And if anything walks over your grave in this country, it's likelier to be a panther or a dragon —something with long, sharp claws, anyway — than a goose," added Benno. "Geese are the least of what we've got to worry about here."

That only served to reinforce Granth's feeling on unease. Try as he would, he could find no rational reason for it. Telling himself as much, though, did not make it go away. He leaned against the rough bark of a fir that might have sprouted before the kingdom of Aquilonia coalesced out of the wandering Hyborian tribes that had shattered the ancient, sorcery-steeped land of Acheron. Even then, this forest had belonged to Cimmeria.

Thinking of the land naturally made him think also of the dour folk who dwelt upon it. But thinking of the Cimmerians only added to his unease. Again, he groped for words: "They aren't acting so —so beaten as they did just after we came up here."

Neither Vulth nor Benno had to ask who they were. Frowning, Vulth said, "They've had a couple of years to lick their wounds and to take our measure. What's the old saw? Familiarity breeds contempt, that's it. They've seen us drinking ale and standing around scratching ourselves. They haven't seen us fight for a while."

"We should have gone on," said Benno. "We should have bitten off a bigger chunk of this cursed country than we did."

"If you ask me, we're lucky we bit off any—if you want to call it luck," said Granth. "They could have beaten us there by Fort Venarium. Hell, they almost did."

"And they know it, too," agreed Vulth. "You can see it in their faces when you go into Duthil. Like I said, they've licked their wounds. They're pretty much healed. Now they're getting to want another crack at us."

This time, Benno did pull an arrow from his quiver and set it to his bowstring. "If they want one, I'll give it to them."

"More of us now than there were when the army first came up into Cimmeria," observed Granth. "Every settler who's started a farm can wield a spear or a sword or a bow or an axe at a pinch."

"I still wish we'd conquered more of Cimmeria," said Benno stubbornly.

To Granth's annoyance, Vulth nodded. What was he doing, backing a Bossonian against his own cousin? But then he looked to the north and said, "So do I. How many Cimmerians are there that we didn't beat? How many of them can fight at a pinch? And how many of them are feeling the pinch now?

Yes, Granth had always hated the Cimmerian forests. They stretched across the landscape like a great mantling cloak. And just how many savage barbarians sheltered beneath that cloak? He did not know. He hoped he —and all the Aquilonians in these parts —would not have to find out.

A fireplace poker was one of the simplest bits of smithery Mordec did: a long iron bar with one end twisted back on itself to make a handle. It had neither edge nor temper, and needed neither. Taking the hot metal off the anvil with his tongs, the blacksmith simply set it aside to let it cool.

He set down the tongs, too, then walked back into his bedchamber to see how his wife fared. Verina had fallen into a fitful sleep. Her face was thinner and paler than it had been even when the Aquilonians invaded Cimmeria; the bluish cast to her lips was more pronounced. Mordec's great shoulders heaved in a hopeless sigh. How long could she go on? How could he go on —and, especially, how could Conan go on — when she lost her protracted struggle with mortality?

He sighed again, then straightened. For the time being, she did not need him. With Conan out hunting, he had wanted to be sure of that before stepping away from the smithy for a little while. Nodding to himself, he turned and walked out into Duthil's narrow, muddy main street.

Boys yelled and ran, kicking at their leather ball. Chickens clucked indignantly. They flapped their all but useless wings to help them scurry out of the way of the boys. Dogs, by contrast, ran joyously with the children. They might not know what the sport was, but they were ready to play. A brindled cat yawned from a doorway, every line of its sleek body declaring that it had better things to do with its energy than waste it so prodigally.

Mordec strode through the noisy chaos as if it did not exist. Boys and dogs and even chickens made way for him. The cat, unimpressed, yawned again, flipped the tip of its fluffy tail up over its eyes to keep out the sun, and fell asleep. Mordec had not far to go. He ducked his way into the house of Balarg the weaver.

Balarg was busy at the loom. He worked on for a few moments, then nodded to the blacksmith. "Good day," he said, civilly enough. "You look to have somewhat on your mind."

"I do. I do indeed." Mordec had little lightness in him at any time. His nod now was as somber and jerky as if he were made of the iron he worked.

"Say your say, then," Balarg told him. The weaver gestured toward another stool. "And sit, if you care to."

"I'd sooner stand," said Mordec. Shrugging, Balarg got to his feet, too. He was not so thick through the shoulders and chest as the blacksmith, but came closer than any other man in Duthil to matching him in height. By rising, he might as well have warned Mordec he would not suffer himself to be loomed over. Ignoring such subtleties, Mordec bulled ahead: "This has to do with your daughter."

"With Tarla?" Balarg's eyebrows rose in surprise or a good simulation of it. "We've walked this track before, but you look bound and determined to do it again, so go on, by all means."

"She draws that accursed Aquilonian noble the way spilled honey draws flies," said Mordec bluntly. "We'd all be better off if he stopped coming to Duthil, and you know it as well as I do."

Now the weaver's brows came down, though even frowning he lacked Mordec's gloomy Now the weaver’s brows came down, though even frowning he lacked Mordec’s gloomy intensity. Still, his voice had no give in it as he replied, "Tell me just what you mean. You need to be careful about what you say, too. If you claim she has done anything improper with the Aquilonian — anything at all, mind you —then we can step out into the street and settle that directly. You once said our quarrels could wait while the men from the south were in our country, and I thought that fair enough. Still, Mordec, some things cannot be borne."

The blacksmith exhaled angrily. "I do not say she has done anything—not the way you mean. But when that stinking Stercus comes to call on her, she —she smiles at him."

Balarg threw back his head and laughed. "Plain to see you have a son and not a daughter. That is the way of girls — the way of women — and has been for as long as they have had to try to deal with us men."

"Oh, I know a girl's smiles are sweet, and I know the sweetest of smiles need not mean a thing. I am not a fool, Balarg, and you make a mistake if you reckon me one," said Mordec. "But I also know some things you seem to forget. Does the tale of poor Ugaine mean nothing to you?"

"Ugaine was Stercus' plaything, in the town the Aquilonians have built," said Balarg. "Tarla stays here in Duthil, and Stercus has not laid a finger—not so much as a finger —upon her. Do you deny it? Do you, damn your stiff neck?"

"I do not," said Mordec. "But do you deny that even his own officer warned us against Stercus? Do you deny he has given her more attention than is her due? What he has done is no guide to what he will do, or to what he would do. And you will also have heard the stories the Aquilonian soldiers tell, that he was cast forth from their capital, cast forth from their kingdom, for liking young girls too well? He has done these things, Balarg. Given the chance, he will do them again."

"You are the one who speaks Aquilonian, so you would know better than I," said Balarg. Mordec glowered and flushed; the weaver might have accused him of friendship with the invaders. Sensing his advantage, Balarg went on, "Besides, if we listened to everything the soldiers said, we would never have time for anything else. I think your quibbles spring from a different seed, myself."

"What nonsense are you spewing now?" rumbled Mordec irritably.

"Nonsense? I doubt it." Balarg was a clever man, and, like most clever men, pleased with his own cleverness, and with showing it off. "You complain about the Aquilonian because you aim to match Tarla with your own great gowk of a son. I've seen him casting sheep's eyes at her often enough."

Mordec scowled, for at least part of what the weaver said was true. "He'd make a better match for her than any other you'd find in Duthil, and you know it."

"In Duthil? Aye, likely enough." But Balarg spoke as if Duthil were a very small place indeed. "Tarla, though, Tarla might find a match in any of the villages of Cimmeria, and pick and choose from among her suitors."

"What if- " But Mordec broke off with that question unspoken. If he asked Balarg whether Tarla would entertain a suitor from Venarium, he would mortally insult the other villager, and their feud would burst into flame whether he wanted it to or not. Or, worse, Balarg might make it plain that he would entertain a suit from Stercus, in which case Mordec did not see how he could keep from inflaming the feud himself.

Being a clever man, Balarg saw much of that, if not all, regardless of whether Mordec finished the question. "I think you have said enough," growled the weaver. "I think you have said too much. And I think you had better go, or one of our wives will be a widow before the sun sets tonight."

"Oh, I'll leave," said Mordec. "But I will tell you one thing more, Balarg: you are no blacksmith, and you know nothing of the fire you play with." He turned on his heel and tramped out into the street.

The boys' ball came bounding toward him. Before he thought, he drew back his foot, then shot it forward. His toe met the ball squarely and sent it flying over the houses of Duthil and far out into the fields beyond. The boys skidded to a stop, their necks craning comically as they turned in unison to follow the flight of the ball. When at last it thudded to earth, some of them ran after it. Others stared in awe at Mordec.

"Nobody can kick like that," said one.

"He just did, Wirp," said another. Wirp shook his head, manifestly disbelieving what he had just seen.

Mordec said not a word. He slowly walked back to the smithy, wishing he could boot sense into Balarg as readily as he had vented his spleen on a harmless ball.

On sentry-go outside the Aquilonian camp by Duthil, Granth son of Biemur watched Count Stercus ride south toward Venarium. Turning to his cousin, he said, "I wish he'd find some other village to visit."

Nodding, Vulth answered, "You aren't the only one. The more he comes here, the more trouble I see down the road."

Out of the side of his mouth, Benno said, "Here comes trouble closer than down the road."

Sergeant Nopel emerged from the fortified encampment and bore down on the sentries. Granth tried to straighten up, and also tried not to be too noticeable as he straightened: that might have made Nopel see he'd been slouching. Nopel noticed almost everything; noticing was part of what made him a sergeant. But he only waved now, a world-weary flap of the arm that said he had larger things to fret about than whether his sentries slouched. "As you were, boys," he called.

Despite that, Granth did not relax from the brace he had taken. "What's up, Sergeant?" he asked.

Nopel did not answer right away. He looked toward Duthil. After a moment, Granth realized he was looking beyond Duthil toward the trackless wilderness still inhabited by wild, unsubdued Cimmerians. He said, "The tribes are stirring."

Granth and Vulth and Benno and Daverio stared at one another in consternation. "How do you know that?" asked Daverio.

"How do I know?" said Nopel. "How do I know? By Mi-tra, I'll tell you how I know. I've just come from talking with Captain Treviranus, and he told me. That's how I know." By the way he spoke, he might have had the news from the gods themselves.

Granth was not prepared to disagree with him. As far as the Gunderman was concerned, Treviranus made as good a garrison commander as anyone could want. If he said a thing was so, so it was likely to be. But cynical Daverio asked the question that had barely occurred to Granth: "Well, how does the captain know?"

"How does he know?" Sergeant Nopel sounded as if he could not believe his ears. But the Bossonian bowman nodded. Nopel's frown was fearsome. "Why, because he's heard, that's how."

"Well, who told him?" persisted Daverio. "It wasn't anybody from here, or we'd all have heard about it by now."

And Granth could hardly disagree with that, either. Anything anyone in the garrison knew, everyone in the garrison knew in a matter of minutes. The Gundermen and Bossonians, a tiny island in a vast, hostile sea, had no secrets from one another.

"I don't know who told him. I only know what he told me," said Nopel. He fixed Daverio with a challenging stare. "You want to go tell him he's wrong? You want to tell him you know better, and we can all relax? He'll be glad to hear that. You bet he will."

Daverio was a hard and stubborn man, but no common soldier would have been so rash as to beard Captain Treviranus in his den. He shook his head now, saying, "I'm trying to find out what's going on, that's all. If the tribes are stirring out there somewhere, what are we supposed to do about it?"

Exactly how vast was Cimmeria? Granth did not know, not in any detail; he knew only that the corner of it Count Stercus' army had worried off was just that—a corner. Countless clans of barbarians — clans assuredly uncounted by any Aquilonian, at all odds —still prowled the dark woods in squalid freedom. If they were to band together against the soldiers and settlers from the south— "Aye, Sergeant," said Granth. "What are we supposed to do about it?"

"I was coming to that," said Nopel portentously. "Did you think I wasn't? We've got to push scouts up to the north and see with our own eyes what the damned barbarians are up to."

"We can send scouts north, all right," said Vulth. "We can send 'em, but will we ever see 'em again if we do?"

"And why wouldn't we?" demanded Nopel.

All the sentries laughed. The laughs were not pleasant. "Why, Sergeant?" said Granth. "On account of the damned Cimmerians will do for them, that's why. Do you think we can kill ten for one for what happens up there?"

Nopel grunted. He turned and tramped away without answering. Vulth clapped Granth on the back. "Well done, cousin," said Vulth. "You made the sergeant shut up, and not everybody can boast of that."

Benno had a more practical way of congratulating Granth. He took his water bottle off his belt and offered it to him. When Granth tilted back his head and drank, he wasn't too surprised to find sweet, strong wine running down his throat. He took another pull at the bottle, and then another, until at last Benno snatched it out of his hand.

Granth wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Benno glowered. Vulth chuckled. "You see?" he said to the archer. "He's figuring out what it's all about."

"It's about him being greedy, that's what," said Benno. But even the touchy Bossonian seemed not too put out.

For his part, Granth looked to the north. He had seen one swarm of Cimmerians bearing down on the army of which he was a small part. In his mind's eye, he saw another, this one bigger, fiercer, more ferocious. Until that moment, he had not imagined anything more ferocious than the onslaught he and his countrymen had so narrowly survived. Now he discovered his imagination was stronger than he had thought possible.

"What do we do if the barbarians come down on us, the way Nopel and the captain say they might?" he asked, worn' in his voice.

"Kill 'em," Vulth answered stolidly. "Kill 'em till they're piled so high, they have to climb over their cousins to jump down onto our pikes."

When Granth looked toward the village of Duthil, everything seemed tranquil enough. Women carried water from the stream back to their homes. Wood smoke rose from the smoke holes in their roofs. A couple of men stood talking. Neither of them paid the least attention to the Aquilonian encampment. Two years after the fight at Fort Venarium — now the citadel at the heart of the town of Venarium — the villagers might have accepted the camp as part of the landscape. A dog nosed at a mound of garbage. He ignored the encampment, too. He might have been sincere. Granth had his doubts about the Cimmerians.

If more barbarians swarmed down out of the north, what would the folk of Duthil do? Would they take up arms and fight alongside the Aquilonians against the new invaders? Would they sit quietly and wait to see how the other Cimmerians fared against the men from the south? Or would they grab whatever weapon came to hand and try to murder every Gunderman and Bossonian they could find?

Granth did not know, of course. Only a god could know the future. But the pikeman had a good idea which way he would bet.

He said, "We ought to haul some of the villagers out of that place and squeeze them. To hell with me if they don't know more than they're letting on."

"Not a bad notion," agreed Vulth. "Some of the women seem plenty squeezable — or they would, if you didn't think they'd knife you for touching them."

"They act that way when others are around to see, sure enough," said Benno. "But some of them are friendly enough if you can get them off by themselves."

"Braggart," said Granth. Benno preened.

"Braggart and liar both," said Vulth. "Before I believe a word he says, I want to know who he means, and I want to know how he knows."

"Who? The miller's wife, for one." Benno looked toward Duthil and licked his chops. "And how do I know? When the millstones start grinding, the Cimmerian who runs them has to make sure they behave, and then he can't make sure his lady behaves. And the stones are so noisy, he can't hear a thing that goes on anywhere close by."

After looking at each other, Granth and his cousin both shook their heads. "Braggart," said the one. "Liar," said the other. Benno protested, but not, Granth judged, in the way he would have it he really had done the things he claimed to have done. Soldiers, of course, had been telling lies about women ever since Mitra first let there be soldiers and women.

Then something else occurred to Granth. "Maybe the young one Count Stercus keeps coming back for will stick a knife in him one of these days, and maybe we'll all be better off if she does."

"No." Vulth shook his head. "Think of the vengeance we'd have to wreak. Have you got the stomach for massacring a whole village?"

"For Stercus' sake? For him doing what he's got no business doing, with somebody he's got no business doing it with?" Granth did not need to think that over; he knew the answer at once. "Not a bit of it." But then he hesitated. "To save our own necks, though? That's a different story." None of the other Aquilonian soldiers argued with him.