Harry Turtledove - Conan of Venarium

"If you measure vengeance by killing alone, I do not see what other choice you have," said Herth. "But Aquilonians did not only kill here. They ruled here as well, and that is as hateful to freeborn Cimmerians. I know you are determined to quit your homeland."

"I could be more determined about nothing else," agreed Conan.

"Well and good," said Herth. "I have no quarrel with you there. Perhaps one day you will make a mercenary soldier down in the south, a sergeant or even a captain. Then you may well come to have Aquilonians under your command, and you will rule them as they have ruled here. If anything can, that may complete your revenge."

"By— " But Conan broke off with the oath incomplete, saying, "So it may. Time will tell."

"Time always tells. As you come to have more years, you will begin to wish it held its peace," said Herth. "You do not swear by Crom?"

"Not now," answered Conan. "One of these days, I daresay, I will once more. For now, though, I am as angry at the god as he has shown himself angry at me. If he has robbed me of my nearest and dearest, I will rob him of his name in my mouth. It is the only thing of his I can take."

Before replying, Herth glanced again at the Aquilonian corpses all around. "I am glad I am not your foe," he said. "Even were I a god myself, I should be glad I was not your foe."

"I know not what you mean," said Conan. Where Herth had looked to the north, he hungrily stared southward. "We should be off. The longer we delay, the more of our foes escape." He kicked at the dirt. "I wish I would have kept Stercus' head, that I might have thrown it across the border into Aquilonia as token of the reason for our rising. But it would have begun to rot and stink by now, and we had no chance to pack it in salt, so I flung it to the swine instead, before we got to Venarium."

"A good enough fate for the Aquilonian," said Herth. Conan grudged a nod, although fury still seethed in him. The chief went on, "A pity, what befell Duthil. Otherwise, you could have salt-cured the Aquilonian's head and hung it over your doorway."

"This past little while has seen the end of all I held dear," answered Conan. "My family, my village, her I would have loved —all gone, all dead. Do you wonder I would quit this accursed land?"

Herth shook his head. "I have already told you no. And the more I see of you, son of Mordec, the less I wonder at anything you might do."

"Onward, then," said Conan, and onward he went. If the war chief who, as much as any Cimmerian, had mustered the northern tribes and clans for war against King Numedides' men chose to follow, Conan did not mind. And if Herth and the other Cimmerians chose to stop where they were, Conan did not mind that, either. He would go on alone against Aquilonia, an army of one.

Herth did order his men forward once more. He wanted to do the Aquilonians as much harm as he could, and he had little time in which to do it. The summer campaigning season was brief in the north; before long, his men would begin drifting back toward their homes to help in the harvest. In the meantime — in the meantime, the Aquilonians would pay, and pay, and pay.

Horncalls and fire beacons sent word of danger all along the border. It had been a generation since the Cimmerians invaded Aquilonia, but men whose hair and beards were now grizzled told tales of the last war to those who would fight the next: such has been the way of it since time began.

Melcer escaped the fall of the Aquilonian province in southern Cimmeria only to be dragooned into the army that would try to withstand the barbarians. Since he already had a pike, they did not bother to issue him one. The shortsword they gave him was pitted with rust; the helm they clapped on his head seemed hardly sturdier. When he asked for a coat of mail, they laughed in his face.

"Mitra! You'll want a charger and his caparison next!" said a fat sergeant. "What have you done to deserve iron rings?"

"I have fought the Cimmerians, up in the north," answered Melcer. "What have you done, that you say me nay?"

The sergeant's face darkened with anger. "Speak not so to me, dunghill clod, or you'll wear stripes on your back in place of chainmail."

"If you use all your soldiers this way, you are a fool to trust them in the field behind you," said Melcer. "Any number of ways a fellow who makes his men hate him can find an end."

He did not get the mailshirt, but the sergeant troubled him no more. And he did see Evlea and his children off to the south. The more ground they put between themselves and the barbarian irruption, the happier he was.

Looking north, back into the province he'd had to leave, made Melcer's blood boil. Whenever he did, he saw fresh fires going up. He knew too well what they meant: more farms and settlements burning. What had been civilization was going back to barbarism as fast as it could. Remembering the time and effort he had put into his own farm, knowing how many other settlers had worked just as hard, Melcer cursed both the Cimmerians and Count Stercus, whose brutality had fired their rebellion.

From what the Gunderman had heard, the Aquilonian army had crossed into Cimmeria in one place, had advanced together until it ran into the wild men, and then had beaten them, opening the southern part of the land to settlement. The barbarians' entry into Aquilonian territory was a different business. They slipped across the river by ones and twos, by tens and twenties, and soon Melcer was seeing new fires not in Cimmeria alone, but also in the land Kings of Aquilonia had ruled for generations.

The hastily mustered defense forces rushed this way and that, trying to run the barbarians to earth before they did too much damage. Sometimes they succeeded. More often, the Cimmerians escaped to burn and plunder and kill somewhere else.

Melcer slept very little. His pikestaff acquired sinister red-brown stains. He found himself wearing a mailshirt before too long. The underofficer who had had the shirt would never need it again. Of that Melcer was sure. It did not fit him very well, but he stopped grumbling after it stopped an arrow that might have pierced his heart. He soon found himself doing a sergeant's job. He did not get a sergeant's pay—he got no pay at all, only food, and not enough of that—but men recruited after him, men who had not seen what he had seen or done what he had done, listened to what he said and obeyed his commands.

He wondered what he would do if he and his men hunted down Conan and his father. The Cimmerians could have slain him. Conan had not called letting him go an act of friendship or mercy or anything of the sort. But whether he had used the name or not, that was what it amounted to.

Maybe the boy —the youth, now —and the great, hulking man who had sired him had perished in the fight at Fort Venarium or one of the smaller skirmishes between Sciliax's farm and the border between Cimmeria and Aquilonia. For the sake of his own conscience, Melcer hoped they had.

He soon had other things to worry about. As more and more barbarians came over the border, the defenders had to split themselves up into smaller and smaller bands to try to deal with all of them. Sometimes a larger swarm of Cimmerians would fall on one of those bands, in which case the result would be massacre, but not massacre of the sort King Numedides' followers wanted.

Melcer and his men and some other soldiers from Gunderland had to clean up the results of one such miscalculation. For a little while, things went better than they had any business doing, for they found some of the Cimmerian sentries drunk asleep, got past them, and assailed the main body of enemy warriors before the barbarians knew they were anywhere close by. But the Cimmerians fought back with a grim, implacable ferocity that stalled the Aquilonian attack at the edge of an orchard.