Harry Turtledove - Conan of Venarium

"Wirp!" cried Tarla. But Wirp would never answer.

The rest of the barbarians in the street roared. They ran not away from Stercus but toward him, intent on pulling him from the saddle. He set spurs to the destrier. Snorting, the great horse sprang forward. Lashing out with its hooves, it stretched another boy dead in the street, his skull smashed. Left arm encircling Tarla's supple waist, Stercus thundered out of Duthil and into the woods.

Granth son of Biemur knelt on one knee in a soldiers' hut. The dice had been going his way—he was up twelve lunas, and hoped to make it more on his next cast. Before he could throw, though, a trumpeter blew the assembly call. "Damnation!" he said, scooping up the silver he had won. "Why did the captain have to decide to hold a drill now?"

"We'll get back to the game soon enough," said Vulth, "and then I'll clean you out."

"Ha!" said Granth. He got to his feet. "Come on —let's get it over with."

Gundermen and Bossonians hurried out to the open space between huts and palisade. They clapped helms on their heads, fastened mailshirts, and had pikes and bows ready. If by some accident this were no drill, they were ready for war.

"Foolishness," grumbled Benno. But his bow was strung and his quiver full.

"No doubt," said Granth. Then Captain Treviranus strode out in front of the Aquilonians. Seeing his grim countenance, Granth began to wonder how foolish the horn call was.

"Something's gone wrong in Duthil," said Treviranus bluntly. "Count Stercus rode into the village a while ago, and he hasn't come out—at least, not this way. And the barbarians in there have been whooping and hollering ever since he did ride in. We'd better find out why they're in an uproar and calm them down —if we can."

"What if we can't?" called someone. Granth could not see who it was, but the same question had crossed his mind. What would he and his friends have to do to pull Stercus' chestnuts out of the fire?

Treviranus faced the question squarely. "If they want trouble, we'll give them all they want and more. We can't let them think they can rise up against us. If they do, the whole countryside is liable to boil over." He waited to see if any more questions would come. When none did, he nodded. "All right, then. Let's go."

He led the Bossonians and Gundermen — the whole garrison except for a handful of men left behind to hold the camp —toward Duthil. That he led made the archers and pikemen follow willingly. Some officers would simply have sent the soldiers forth, but Treviranus was not one of that stripe.

Even before leaving the fortified encampment, Granth could hear the Cimmerians shouting and their women keening. A man came out of Duthil and strode straight at the oncoming Aquilonians. One man against a company of soldiers—but such was his fury that Granth almost halted and did tighten his grip on his pikestaff.

"Two!" shouted the Cimmerian in bad but understandable Aquilonian. "He kill two boys, steal girl. He pay! You all pay!"

"Count Stercus did this?" demanded Treviranus.

"Aye, he do! Dog and son of dog!" the Cimmerian said. "We catch, we kill."

Granth knew Captain Treviranus had no more love for Stercus than any other Aquilonian did. Treviranus might have been able to soothe the villagers — except that they did not want to be soothed. The man who had advanced on the soldiers stopped, picked up a stone, and flung it at them.

The stone thudded off a pikeman's buckler. The response of the Bossonian archers was altogether automatic. Bowstrings thrummed. Half a dozen shafts whistled through the air. They all pierced the Cimmerian. He took a couple of staggering steps toward the men from the south, as if still intending to assail them, then slowly crumpled.

"Damnation," said Treviranus quietly. "I wish that hadn't happened. Well, no help for it now. Forward, men. Battle line —pikemen in front of the archers. We're likely going to have a fight on our hands now."

He proved a good prophet. No sooner had the Cimmerian fallen than more stones began flying at the Aquilonians from Duthil. At least two archers also began shooting from the village. A Bossonian cried out and sat down hard with an arrow through his thigh.

Vulth reached up and settled his conical helm more firmly on his head. "We're going to have to clean the place out now," he said, "and the barbarians in there are going to try to clean us out, too." Granth nodded. His cousin struck him as a good prophet, too.

Along with his comrades, Granth pressed on into Duthil. He saw no one on the street—but, down at the far end of it, two bodies sprawled in ugly death. The Cimmerian had not lied. Granth had not really thought he had.

A door flew open. A barbarian charged out swinging an axe. He chopped down one Bossonian and left another bowman pouring blood from a great gash in his leg. The pikemen turned on the barbarian then and stretched him lifeless in the mud, but not before he had taken more from the Aquilonians than they could ever take from him.

An arrow from the house next to the blacksmith's caught a pikeman three soldiers down from Granth in the throat. The other Gunderman clawed at the shaft that drank his life. He fell to his knees and then over on to his side. "Dever!" cried Granth, but Dever would never hear him again.

"Now we have to crush them," Captain Treviranus said. "One house at a time, if we must, but crush them we will!"

Even after the battle in front of Fort Venarium, Granth had never imagined work like this. Men fought to the death with whatever weapons they had. Women snatched up kitchen knives and flung themselves at pikemen and archers. More often than not, they would plunge the blades into their own breasts rather than risk capture. The Aquilonians spared children —until a boy who could not have been eight years old stabbed a Bossonian in the back. He had to reach up to get the knife between the bowman's ribs, but it found his heart. After that, the soldiers behaved as if they were destroying a nest of serpents.

Serpents, though, never stung back so savagely. Granth was one of the Gundermen who used a log to batter down the door to the smithy. The only person they found inside was a skeletally skinny woman whose gray eyes blazed in a face ghost-pale. She came at them not with a kitchen knife but with a long, heavy sword. She wounded two men, one of them badly, and fought with such ferocity that she made the Gundermen slay her.

"Mitra!" said Granth. "These aren't barbarians — they're demons, demons straight from hell!"

"Mitra carry Count Stercus straight down to hell," panted Vulth. "If not for him, everything would be quiet here. Now-"

Now the Cimmerians of Duthil, making their final stand, thought of nothing but taking as many of their foes with them as they could. Wounded barbarians feigned death, lying quiet until they could spring up and strike one last telling blow. The shrieks of the sorely hurt and the dying on both sides rose up into the uncaring sky.

At last, all the Cimmerians in Duthil above the age of five or so lay unmoving. Granth's pikestaff was scarlet along half its length. Gore splashed his mailshirt. He no longer hesitated about spearing Cimmerians on the ground to make sure they would not rise again —he had seen too many of them do just that. Vulth had a bandage on his right arm. Benno had taken an arrow through his left hand. Daverio was dead, his head smashed in by a Cimmerian despite his helm.

Captain Treviranus limped with a leg wound. "You're bleeding," he told Granth.

"Am I?" said Granth foolishly. He found he was, and that a chunk was missing from his left earlobe. He had no memory of getting hurt. Waving at the carnage all around, he asked, "What now, Captain?"

"Now I'd like to roast Stercus over a slow fire," answered Treviranus. "The whole countryside will rise up against us on account of this —and for nothing! Nothing!"