Harry Turtledove - Conan of Venarium

Balarg nodded, as if in agreement. But he said, "If you had not been as hot as your forge to go to war when the Aquilonians first crossed our border, many men from this village now dead would yet walk under the light of the sun."

"By Crom, we had to have a go at driving the invaders out," said Mordec. "We came close to winning, too. If not for their damned knights, I think we would have. Will you say the fighting did not cost us dear? Will you say we have the strength for another battle so soon after we lost the first?"

"I have the stomach for it!" cried Conan, wishing a man's sword swung at his hip.

Neither Mordec nor Balarg paid any attention to him. Each seemed more interested in scoring points off the other than in anything else. Some of the men of Duthil ranged themselves behind the blacksmith, others behind the weaver. To them, the usual squabbles of village life seemed more immediate, more urgent, more important, than driving the men from the south out of Cimmeria.

"What if it were a girl from Duthil?" cried Conan. "What if she came from here, not from some other place? Would you do more than stand and mumble then?"

For all his fury, his voice remained a boy's treble, and the men from Duthil would not heed him. The small arguments, the familiar arguments, were meat and drink to them. Those went on and on. Meanwhile, the camp full of Bossonians and Gundermen just out of bowshot of the village was becoming ever more familiar, too.

Conan stormed off. No one else cared, not even his father, who was wagging a callused, burn-scarred finger under Balarg's nose. Conan stomped back into the smithy. He snatched up his quiver and bow. Only one arrow in the quiver was poisoned; he had set the rest aside for need more desperate than game. For now, if he could not slaughter Aquilonians, he wanted to kill something —indeed, almost anything—else.

Before he could make for the forest, his mother called, "Where are you going?"

"Out to the woods," he replied.

"Would you bring me some water first?" asked Verina. "And would you tell me what the men are arguing about this time?"

He took a mug of water into the bedchamber, helped support his mother with a strong arm, and held the mug to her lips. Then, in guarded terms, he told her of Count Stercus and the girl from Rosinish.

Verina drank again, then sighed. "She probably brought it on herself with forward ways," she said.

"That's not what the men say. They blame it on the Aquilonian count." Conan spoke hesitantly, for disagreeing with his mother made him uneasy.

In any case, she paid no more attention to him than had the men of Duthil. "Mark my words. It will turn out to be the way I said," she told him, and then began to cough. He eased her back down to the pillow. Slowly, the spasm ebbed. She sighed again, this time wearily. "You can go now. Just leave me be. I'll manage somehow," she said.

"Mother,!-"

"Go!" said Verina. Conan stood, irresolute: a posture into which no one but his mother could put him. Her gesture of dismissal might have come from a queen, not a sick woman lying in a bed behind a smithy. Biting his lip, Conan went.

He ran to the woods as if demons prowled his trail. He might have been glad to see demons, for they would have given him something he could oppose, something he could hope to defeat with arrows and knife and simple strength. But what chased him out of Duthil dwelt within him, and he could not bring it forth to slay it.

Melcer hacked at a pine with his axe as if the tree were a Cimmerian warrior. The farmer, newly come from Gunderland, struck again and again, with almost demoniac energy. The pine tottered, crackled, and began to fall. "Coming down!" Melcer shouted, though no one but him stood anywhere close to the tree that crashed to earth. He grunted in satisfaction and spat on his hands. One more tree down, one more tree towards a cabin in the woods, one more bit of open space in what would become a farm.

"It'll be a farm if I make it one," said Melcer, and methodically trimmed branches from the pine and tossed them onto a sledge. He dragged it back to the small clearing in which his wagon sat. The oxen were cropping grass not far from the wagon. They looked up with incurious brown eyes as he returned.

His wife, Evlea, had cleared a square of grass with a hoe and was planting seeds for what would be a vegetable garden. Tarnus, his son, was only six, but big enough to shoo away the chickens and keep them from eating the seeds as fast as Evlea planted them. Unlike his father and mother, Tarnus enjoyed his job. "Get away!" he yelled, and waved his arms. When the chickens did not move fast enough to suit him, he ran at them making horrible noises. They fled in clucking confusion.

"Don't drive them into the woods," warned Melcer. "If you do, the foxes and weasels will thank you for their supper— and I'll warm your backside."

"Can I tame the foxes?" asked Tarnus eagerly.

"Not with chickens," answered his father. "Where will we get more if they eat these? It's a long way back to Gunderland."

"A very long way," said Evlea, pausing in her labor to wipe her sweaty forehead with a sleeve. The endless work of setting up the farm left her and Melcer weary all the time. After a moment, she went on, "If I had known it was so very far, I don't know whether I would have wanted to come."

That made Melcer angry. "Here we have as much land as we can clear and hold," he said. "Down there, my father had six sons, so I was stuck on one sixth of the land he'd farmed. That made a miserable little plot, and you know it."

"It wasn't very big," admitted Evlea, "but it was safe. We're off the edge of nowhere here. If the barbarians rise up—

"They won't," said Melcer. "And even if they do, we have soldiers —and we have our own strong right arms." He took the axe off the sledge and flourished it. "And once we get the cabin built, we'll have a place we can defend, too."

In his mind's eye, he saw the farm he wanted to have, with plenty of room for grain and for grazing, with a barn full of cattle and sheep and horses near the cabin, with an apple orchard not too far away, and with the forest pushed back toward the horizon —but not too far, for he would still need firewood. He saw plenty of neighbors, to help defend the place against the wild Cimmerians — but none too near, for he wanted a big parcel of land for himself. He saw Evlea raising up not just Tarnus but three or four more sons, and all of them going on to take land for themselves, carving out homesteads from this gloomy wilderness. He smiled, liking those visions better than any he might have got from an opium pipe.

In between what he saw and where he was now lay an endless ocean of labor. Stolid as most Gundermen, he shrugged broad shoulders. Work had never fazed him. He said, "I'm going back to cut notches in that tree. It'll go into the cabin—the trunk's good and straight."

"All right. I have plenty to do here," said Evlea. "Keep your eyes open."

"And you," said Melcer. His wife nodded. He sharpened the blade of her hoe against a whetstone every few nights. It would make a wicked weapon in a pinch. So far, the barbarians had stayed away from the settlements around Fort Venarium. Melcer hoped the beating they had had at the hands of Count Stercus' Aquilonians would teach them to respect the power of King Numedides and those who followed him. If it did not—if it did not, he would fight as hard as he had to, and so would the rest of the settlers, men, women, and children.

Shouldering his axe as a soldier would shoulder a pike while on the march, Melcer followed the trail of the sledge back to the pine he had cut down. Once he had cut the notches in it, he would have the oxen drag it to the place where he intended to raise the cabin: not far from where the wagon stood now.