Harry Turtledove - Conan of Venarium

Even' so often, while pumping the bellows or changing a quenching bath or doing such other work as his father set him, he would see Count Stercus riding past. Then he wanted nothing more than to take up Mordec's heaviest hammer and smash Stercus' skull as he had broken Hondren's. When his father let him shape simple tools, he pounded at them in a perfect passion of fury.

Escaping Duthil altogether suited him better. Then he did not have to boil with rage at spying Stercus or flinch with mortification and jealousy whenever he set eyes on the weaver's daughter. In the woods he saw no one, spoke to no one. And if he looked back on his last unfortunate conversation with Tarla and wished that conversation might have gone otherwise —if he did that out there among the pines and fragrant spruces, who but he would know?

He perched on a great gray granite boulder one noon, eating a frugal lunch of oatcakes and cheese, when a man said, "Might I share somewhat of that?"

Conan started. He had neither seen nor heard the stranger approach, a fact that should have been impossible. His hand closed round the shaft of a javelin he had plunged into the ground by the boulder. "Who are you?" he demanded roughly. "What do you want?"

"My name is mere rubbish. If you would have it, though, it is Rhiderch." The stranger bowed. "A wandering seer, I." He bowed again. He looked the part. He was about sixty, his hair gone gray, his beard —nearly white —reaching halfway down his chest. His garments were of colorless homespun set off by a necklace and bracelets of honey-gold amber. "As for what I want, well, after far travel a bite of food is welcome."

"Share what I have, then," said Conan, and gave him some of the oatcakes and half the chunk of cheese. The old man ate with good appetite. Conan watched him for a while, then burst out, "How did you come upon me without my being the wiser? By Crom, you could have slit my throat and taken everythingI had, and I would not have known you were there until too late."

Rhiderch's eyes, gray as the granite upon which Conan sat, twinkled. "I am no robber, lad. I seek what's free-given, and thank you for your kindness."

"You did not answer me. How did you come upon me unawares? I thought no wolf nor panther could do the like, let alone a man."

The seer chuckled. "There are ways, lad. Indeed there are. I know but the minor mysteries. Many others are wiser by far."

"Teach me!" said Conan.

At that, the laughter faded from Rhiderch's face. Now he had come upon something he took seriously. "Why, perhaps I shall, if it be your fate to learn such things. Give me your hand, that I may learn whether it is permitted me."

Conan held it out. Rhiderch clasped it in his own. The two hands were a study in contrasts: Conan's square and scarred and callused, with short, grimy nails on thick, strong fingers; Rhiderch's long and thin and pale and spidery, his palm narrow, his fingernails fastidiously groomed. Conan had seen palm readers before, but Rhiderch did not examine the lines on his hand. Instead, the seer closed his eyes and murmured a charm in a language whose cadences were like those of Cimmerian but which the blacksmith's son could not understand.

Suddenly and without warning, Rhiderch's hand closed tight on Conan's. At the same time, the seer's eyes opened very wide. Thinking it a trial of strength, Conan squeezed back as hard as he could. He was twice as thick through the shoulders and arms as the scrawny Rhiderch. But, for all the impression his grip made on the long-bearded wanderer, he might as well not have bothered responding to what he took to be the challenge. Rhiderch's hand clenched tighter and tighter, at last with crushing force.

As abruptly as the seer had begun to squeeze, he relaxed the pressure. Sweat poured down his forehead and cheeks; a drop dangled at the end of his long, pointed nose. He swiped a sleeve across his face. "Crom!" he muttered: the ejaculation of a man shaken to the core.

"Well?" demanded Conan. "Am I fit to learn your tricks for sliding through the trees without a sound?"

"You are fit for— " Rhiderch broke off and mopped his brow again. "What you are fit for, son of Mordec, is more than I can say. Never have I seen — " He stopped once more, shaking his head. "Truly, I wonder whether I read you aright."

"How do you know my father's name?" asked Conan, for he was sure he had not spoken it.

"I know a good many things," said Rhiderch, but after a moment he shivered, though the day was mild. "One of the things I know is that yours is the strangest destiny of any ever to come into my ken."

"How so?" asked Conan, but the seer would not answer him. He tried a different question: "If you saw my destiny, did you see the Aquilonian called Stercus in it?" He did not say that Stercus commanded the Aquilonians in Cimmeria; this, from him, passed for cleverness and caution.

Rhiderch looked at him —looked through him. "Speak not of slicing saplings when the tall tree towers. Speak not of slaying sparrows when the hawk hovers."

"I spoke of slicing nothing. I spoke of slaying no one." Conan knew some of his countrymen collaborated with the invaders. He could not fathom it, but he knew it to be true. He would not admit his lust for Stercus' gore to a man he had not met before this moment.

But what he admitted, what he denied, seemed to mean nothing to Rhiderch. "Your mouth spoke no words," said the seer. "Your spirit cried aloud —though the greater cry all but drowned the smaller."

"Will you speak sense?" asked Conan testily. "All your words go round and round, reflecting back on one another with no meaning left behind."

"If you will not hear, you shall surely see." Rhiderch remained cryptic. "Like a migrating bird, your fate flies high and far. Where you will end your days, and in what estate, I cannot say, but no Cimmerian's weird is stranger."

"Lies and foolishness. You make me sorry I fed you instead of driving you away," said Conan.

He hoped to anger Rhiderch, but the seer only smiled. "No mean feat for me, for few will ever make you sorry for anything you do."

That did it. Anger sparked in the blacksmith's son. "Get you gone," he growled. "Get you gone, or I shall not answer for what will come next." Now he reached for the javelin he always kept close at hand.

"As you say it, so shall it be." Rhiderch vanished with the same unnerving speed and silence he had used in appearing. One instant, he stood beside Conan; the next, the blacksmith's son might have been — was — alone on his boulder.

Too late, Conan remembered that he had wanted Rhiderch to teach him that trick of silent appearances and disappearances. "Come back!" he shouted. "Come back, you stinking old fraud!" But Rhiderch, however obscure he might have been, was no fraud, not in the way Conan meant it. He did not come back, nor did Conan ever ask him about it again — and if the young Cimmerian ever mastered the art of silently and unexpectedly entering or leaving a scene, as many in times to come were to find he had done, he did it by himself and on his own.

For the time being, Conan sat there muttering curses and regretting the waste of the oatcakes and cheese. They could have kept him well fed for another meal out here in the woods, which meant they could have kept him away from Duthil for another half a day, maybe longer. Away from Duthil, and especially away from Balarg's house, was where he most longed to be.

But later that day he knocked down a stag. It was perhaps the cleanest kill he had ever made: his arrow pierced the stag's heart, and the animal fell over dead after only a handful of stumbling steps. Conan wanted to roar in triumph like a great hunting cat. Only the knowledge that such a cry would surely draw scavengers, whether of the two-legged or four-legged sort, held him back.