Harry Turtledove - Conan of Venarium

And he began learning Aquilonian. Before long, he had picked up almost as much of it as his father knew. That amused Mordec, in a grim way. "You've got a good ear, son," he said. "I don't suppose it will matter much, but it's there."

"Why do so many people here have trouble with the other language?" asked Conan in puzzled tones. "It's only more words."

"People seem to," said Mordec. "You don't notice the Gundermen learning Cimmerian, either, do you?"

"I've seen one man trying," answered Conan. "He was doing his best to talk with Derelei, the miller's wife."

"Aye, and I know what he was doing his best to ask for, too," said Mordec. "Derelei is a very pretty woman, and she knows it a little too well. But aside from that, the invaders don't bother. Why should they? They beat us. We're the ones who have to fit ourselves to them, not the other way around."

Why should they? They beat us. The words tolled in Conan's mind like the mournful clangor of a brazen bell. "What can we do, Father?" he asked. "We have to do something. If we don't, we might as well be so many sheep."

"One day, the time will be ripe," said Mordec. "One day, but not yet. Patience, lad —patience. For now, we mourn and we heal. The time will come, though. Sooner or later, it will. And when it does, we will know it, and we will seize it."

Patience came hard for the boy, even harder than it would have for a man. Days came when Conan dared not look at an Aquilonian, for fear he would hurl himself against the foeman to his folk and bring disaster down on Duthil. When such fits took him, he would flee the village as if it lay in the grip of a deadly pestilence, and would go alone to hunt in the forests and on the hillsides nearby.

Mordec said never a word to him about those jaunts. The blacksmith could have used his son's help in the day-to-day work of the smithy, but seemed to sense how Conan needed to escape that which had become intolerable for him. While the boy stalked woodcock and grouse, squirrel and rabbit, he imagined he went after bigger game: Gundermen and Bossonians and the fearsome armored Aquilonian knights he had heard of but not yet seen. And hunting for the pot, though he did not fully realize it, helped him gain some of the arts he would use in war.

Spring slowly moved into summer. In that northern land, days grew long and almost warm. The sun rose in the far northeast and set many hours later in the far northwest. Some of Cimmeria's perpetual mist burned away. The sky was a water)', grayish blue, but blue it was nonetheless. Even the conifer-filled forests seemed—less dour, at any rate. Ferns growing by the bases of the tree trunks added splashes of brighter green to the scenery.

Silent as the beasts he stalked, Conan slipped through the woods. When he came to the edge of a small clearing, he froze into immobility. His eyes scanned the open space ahead to make sure he disturbed nothing before he ventured out from the concealment a pair of pines gave him. Not even a savage Pict from the rugged country west of Cimmeria could have walked more lightly on the land.

Once out in the clearing, Conan froze again, watching, listening, waiting. Something seemed to call him, but not in a way to which he could set words. He frowned, then went on. Whatever it was, he would find it.

He frowned again on the far side of the clearing. He had been through these woods many times, yet he did not recall this particular track. Shrugging, he silently strode along it. It took him in the direction he wanted to go. That it might also take him in the direction it wanted him to go never entered his mind.

Some little distance down the trail, he stopped, his head turning this way and that. The frown that harshened and aged his features grew deeper. Birdsongs were scarcer now than they had been in springtime, when returning migrants vied for mates. Still, he had been able to hear the calls of doves and finches and the occasional distant, strident shriek of a hunting hawk.

Not here, not now. Silence had settled over him, soft as snowfall. His eyes flicked now to the left, now to the right, now up, now down. The forest looked no different from the way it had before he set foot on this treacherous track. It looked no different, but somehow it was. That muffling drift of silence lay thick upon the land. Even the buzz of flies and the hum of gnats were softly swallowed up and gone.

"Crom!" muttered Conan, as much to hear his own voice— to hear anything at all —as for any other reason. The grim god's name seemed to reverberate through the trees, carrying farther than it had any business doing. But Crom would not help him if he came to grief. He knew that only too well. The god might have helped breathe life into him, but, now that he had it, keeping it was his own lookout.

He nocked an arrow before pressing on down the trail. He could not have said why, save that the unnatural silence oppressed him. Against silence, what could an arrow do? Nothing Conan could think of, yet having a weapon instantly ready to use heartened him.

On he went, his perplexity mounting at ever}' stride. These woods felt more ancient than the ones with which he was so intimately familiar, as if the trees had been brooding here since the dawn of time. He scratched his head, wondering why and how such certainty filled him. Again, he could not have said, but fill him it did, more so with each step he took.

That feeling of age immemorial soon began to oppress him worse than the silence, to raise in his breast a dread nothing natural could have caused. He needed a distinct effort of will to halt, and another, greater, one to turn around and seek to go back. When he did, ice walked along his spine. The track that had led him forward vanished behind him. It might never have been there at all. When he turned again, though, it still ran straight ahead of him.

"I'll go on, then," he said. This time, the tree trunks and branches might have drunk up his words; he barely heard them himself. Crom might have held some power in this primordial wilderness, but Conan himself had none, or so it seemed.

That might have been the judgment of the wilderness, but it was not Conan's. Defiantly, he pressed ahead. The path went past an enormous fir—easily the largest Conan had ever seen, and one he would surely have known well had it grown anywhere near Duthil — before turning sharply to the left. The blacksmith's son followed it, but then stopped in his tracks in astonishment at the sight of what lay ahead.

The gray stone ruin might have sprung from the dawn of time. It was, without a doubt, a temple dedicated to some god, but which? Not Crom, surely; he had neither shrine nor priesthood. Perhaps some mystic convulsion has sent it spinning down the centuries from its own proper era to that in which Conan lived. It might have been a temple from the great vanished island of Atlantis, from whose few scattered survivors the Cimmerians drew their descent. Of that, however, Conan knew next to nothing.

He warily approached the fane. The immense stones from which it was made, albeit only crudely carven, were fitted together with consummate skill; not even the blade of a knife could have slipped between one and another. What had been an entryway still offered ingress of sorts, though the lintel stone had fallen and partially blocked the way in.

With a boy's agility, Conan twisted past the fallen stone. No sooner had he done so than a strange, weird piping filled the air. He could not have said whether it came from a musical instrument or the throat of some curious bird. All he could have said was that it made the hair on his arms and at the nape of his neck rise with horror and dread at its intimations of ancient wickedness.

The entryway twisted left and then right before opening out on an immense courtyard paved with stones of the same dusky gray as the rest of the temple. They were joined as cunningly as all the other masonry, with the result that only a few bushes and saplings had managed to take root between them. In the center of the courtyard stood an altar of white marble made all the more dazzling and brilliant by contrast to its surroundings.