Harry Turtledove - Conan of Venarium

"He is fey," said one Cimmerian to another, and his comrade nodded, for it did seem as if Conan willfully sought his own death on the battlefield.

But whether he sought it or not, it did not meet him at Venarium. Others died there, Aquilonians and Cimmerians alike. A handful of Bossonians and Gundermen managed to escape the falling fortress by scrambling down over the south wall of the palisade and fleeing across the river, but most fell either in the courtyard or defending one barracks hall or another until the Cimmerians either battered down a door and forced an entrance or burned the building over their enemies' heads.

At last, as the sun sank in the northwest, the fighting dragged to a stop, for no more Aquilonians remained alive and unwounded to carry on. Cimmerians tended to their own injured men and cut the throats of the Bossonians and Gundermen who lay on the ground. "They did the same to us after the last fight here," said Nectan the shepherd, leaning wearily on a pikestaff. "As often as not, it's a kindness of sorts, putting somebody who won't live out of his pain."

Conan heard him as if from very far away. The blacksmith's son looked down at his hands, which still clutched his father's axe. When he took them off the axe handle, the place where his father and he had clenched it was the only part not drenched in gore. And his palms seemed the only part of him not soaked in it. His arms were crimson up past the elbows. Blood dyed his tunic and breeks in colors Balarg the weaver had never intended.

Balarg himself had come through the battle apparently unwounded. He stirred bodies not so much to see if they yet lived as to find out what sort of wealth they carried.

"How can you think of loot when everything that matters to us is dead or in ruins?" demanded Conan.

"I am not dead," answered Balarg. "I am not dead, and I am well and truly avenged on my foes. I shall have to find a home in a new village. I would sooner do that as a man with riches than as a man with none. You will face the same trouble. You should plunder, too."

"I have no stomach for it, not now. What I have won, I have bought too dear," said Conan. He looked around and shook his head. "I have no stomach for Cimmeria, not any more. My father is dead. My mother is dead, and I have not had time to mourn her." That was a knife of shame, twisting in his gut. He looked Balarg in the eye. "And Tarla is dead. What do I have left to hold me here?"

"Where would you go?" asked the weaver.

"I know not." Conan's shoulders ached when he shrugged. How many times had he swung Stercus' sword and his father's axe in battle? More than he could count. With another shrug, he went on, "Let those who still have something worth holding here dwell in this land. As for me — " He spat and shook his head.

Chapter Thirteen

Aquilonia

Even the wild rush of the Cimmerians from the north faltered after the fight at Fort Venarium. Before moving south of the river, they paused to treat their wounded, to put their dead in the ground, and to take what plunder they could from the ruined fortress and from the gutted town around it.

Conan was among the first to cross the river, two or three days after the battle. All that had kept him from going south sooner, going south by himself, was the desire for a vengeance greater than he could hope to wreak alone. He had already punished the Aquilonians for his mother's murder, and for Tarla's. Now he owed them for his father, too.

Revenge for Mordec proved harder to come by than he had hoped. The pause in the Cimmerians' reconquest of their stolen land allowed word of their onslaught to spread widely among the Aquilonians who had settled south of Venarium. By the time the Cimmerians pushed on, they found many farms abandoned. Some of the folk from Gunderland had driven their livestock along with their wagons. Some had even burned the farmhouses they were abandoning, to make sure their foes got no use from them.

Gundermen and Bossonians also left most of the fortified garrisons they had built to keep watch on nearby Cimmerian villages. Here and there, though, the soldiers who fought under Aquilonia's gold lion on black fought rear-guard actions to slow the Cimmerians' advance and to help the settlers escape.

They picked the best places to defend that they could: mostly valley mouths, where the attackers had to come straight at them on a narrow front. Conan hurled himself into one of those savage little fights after another. Stercus' fine blade was gone; on his hip, Conan now wore a shortsword he had taken from the corpse of a blond pikeman of Gunderland. For his principal weapon, however, he still carried his father's axe. He did not try to clean the handle of the bloodstains that marked it. As far as he was concerned, they were a badge of honor.

He eyed a line of pikemen posted across the road, and a squad of Bossonian bowmen behind them. He had begun to see what Mordec meant about the Aquilonians' order and discipline. Because Numedides’ men knew their places and their roles, they hurt the Cimmerians worse than they would have otherwise. The barbarians gathering with Conan had no sort of order whatever.

But they did have a driving ferocity alien to the Aquilonians. When Herth shouted, "At them!'" they went forward at an eager, ground-eating lope that said they wanted nothing more than to close with their foes. Their shouts were fierce and wordless. They might have been hunters pursuing a stag.

Unlike stags, the Bossonians and Gundermen fought back. Arrows, flight after flight, felled poorly armored invaders before they could close. But the archers could not kill all the barbarians, and the ones who lived came on. The pikemen set themselves. Conan, running toward them, readied his axe.

A Gunderman thrust at him. A lithe twist meant he slid past the spearpoint. "Oh, no, you don't!" cried the pikeman, and drew hack his weapon for another jab. Too late —Conan's axe split his skull from crown to teeth. The Gunderman crashed to the ground, dead before he realized what had hit him.

The blacksmith's son slew the soldier beside him, too. "Come on!" called Conan to his countrymen. "Here's a gap I've made for you!" Cimmerians rushed forward and poured through it. They suffered one more volley of Bossonian arrows. But then the archers, protected no more from the warriors they had tormented, needed to turn and run if they were to survive. Some saved their gore by flight. The Cimmerians cut down others from behind. Most of the pikemen from Gunderland died where they stood, trying to the last to slow the barbarians' advance.

"Boldly done, son of Mordec," said Herth when the slaying stopped.

With a broad-shouldered shrug, Conan replied, "I could slaughter every Aquilonian soldier in the world, and it would hardly seem vengeance enough."

Herth eyed the crumpled bodies on the sward. He knew how many of them had gone down before Conan's axe. He looked back toward Venarium and Duthil, recalling how many soldiers the blacksmith's son had slain in the fights farther north. "Son of Mordec, I am not a soft man," he said at last. "I have seen wars and battles aplenty, against the AEsir and Vanir, against the Picts, aye, and among our own folk as well. This I tell you, and I speak truly: in the matter of vengeance, those who bore you can have naught over which to complain."

"It is not enough, I tell you." Conan stubbornly set his jaw.

"You could kill and kill and kill, and still you would say the same," observed the clan chief from the north, and Conan nodded, for he knew he could not deny the other man's words. Herth continued, "Killing alone will never sate you."

Nodding again, Conan said, "Like as not, you speak the truth once more. What then? Shall I reckon myself forever unavenged?"