The seer heard him out in silence. Rhiderch looked down at the daub on his hands as if it were dripping blood. "I know not what to say to you, lad," he said at last, "save this alone: the foretelling and the event are not the same. The event is the thing, the foretelling but a shadow. Like any shadow, it shifts and grows and shrinks in response to the light that casts it."
"Cold comfort, by Crom!" jeered Conan. "You have seen my village dead. How shall the shadow of that shift? You are nothing but a stinking carrion crow with corpse meat in your mouth!"
Rhiderch bowed his head. "If you blame the messenger for the message, strike now," he said.
Instead of striking, Conan swore. He spun on his heel and stormed out of Duthil. Slaying Rhiderch would solve nothing, for how could he slay the seer's words? They would echo inside him until the unfolding of time revealed their fulfillment—and he was all too sure it would. Rhiderch had been a man inspired; however shadowy his words might have been, he had spoken truth.
Air spicy with the sap of conifers surrounded Conan as he rushed into the woods. Leaving behind the stinks of Duthil — the dung, the animals, the smoke, the unbathed bodies, the tanning hides —was easy. Leaving behind Rhiderch's prophecy came harder. That followed Conan: indeed, try as he would, he took it with him. Escape was what he wanted most, and what he could not have.
A raven croaked at him from a tall spruce. He shook his fist at the big, black bird. "Begone, cruel corbie!" he cried. "You'll not take the flesh from my bones to feed your nestlings." He stooped to pick up a stone.
Wise and wary in the ways of men, the raven leaped into the air with a great rustle of wings. Conan hurled the stone anyway, as much from sheer rage as for any other reason. It just grazed the outermost feather on the raven's left wing. The bird gave another hoarse cry and vanished into the forest.
"And take your ill-luck with you, accursed thing!" shouted Conan after it. The woods seemed to swallow his words. He wondered if they reached the raven. He could only hope. Had curses stuck as readily as they were given, all the Aquilonians would long since have vanished from Cimmeria.
Conan realized he had only an eating knife at his belt, for he had rushed out of the village in a passion, with not the slightest thought for what he would do next. Now that his temper began to cool, he keenly felt the lack of either bow or javelin. A knife was no weapon to wield against wolf, let alone panther. He took two steps toward Duthil, but then abruptly checked himself. What would the villagers do if he came stumbling back after rushing away so furiously? Would they not laugh at him, whether to his face or behind his back? Of a certainty, they would.
Pride is a terrible thing. For pride's sake, the blacksmith's son would sooner have risked his life than risked the laughter of friends and neighbors. And, had any other man of Duthil stood where Conan stood, he would have made the same choice. What the Cimmerians lacked in material goods, they made up for in a superabundance of pride. If not for pride, they would have fought less amongst themselves, and would have made a harder nut for the Aquilonians to crack. None of that crossed Conan's mind. He knew only that he would rather have faced wolves than his fellow villagers.
A twig breaking underfoot froze him into animal immobility. The oaths that followed were in Aquilonian. Conan would not be laughed at, but he mocked the shortcomings of others readily enough. The invaders blundering along the trail there could hardly have made more noise had they been a herd of cattle.
As Conan had amused himself by doing before, he began to trail these Aquilonians. The closer he could come to them without their being aware he was anywhere nearby, the happier he would be. They ambled along, loudly announcing their presence to anyone with ears to hear. Conan almost gave himself away at their antics; only by biting down hard on the inside of his lower lip did he defeat the urge to guffaw.
Someone else stepped on a stick. "You clumsy idiot," said a Bossonian. "How are we supposed to catch anything when you do that?"
"Oh, and it wasn't you the last time, eh?" retorted a Gunderman. "You walk like you've got rocks in your boots."
"And you talk like you've got rocks in your head, so devils eat you," said the Bossonian. He cupped a hand behind his ears. "And if you listen, you can hear all the animals in the forest running away from us."
"Not in this forest." The Gunderman shook his head. "Half the things in this forest want to kill us."
Conan nodded. He wanted to kill all the invaders who tramped through the woods that had been his ever since he grew old enough to venture into them for the first time. He was close enough to smash in a couple of the hunters' skulls with hurled rocks, too. But he did not think he could slay every one of them, and even if he did he would only bring a savage vengeance down on Duthil. He cast no stones, then, but hung close to the Aquilonians and listened.
Another Gunderman spoke for the first time: "Everything in this whole country wants to kill us." Conan nodded again; so did the Gunderman's hunting companions. The yellow-haired soldier continued, "I'll tell you something else, too — our beloved count isn't making things any better for us, the way he's prowling around that girl in the village."
That astonished Conan. Even the Aquilonians realized Stercus had no business doing what he was doing? The blacksmith's son had not dreamt that could be so. Why did they not restrain him, then?
The Bossonian archer laughed. "And if you tell him so, Vulth, you'll get it in the neck. In fact, if you even talk about it with anybody you can't trust, you're liable to get it in the neck anyway. Stercus doesn't like people telling him what he can do and what he can't."
"King Numedides told him," said the Gunderman who wasn't Vulth: a younger man, with a merry smile. "That's why he's up here, not still down in the capital prowling after young girls there."
"Ah, but there's a difference," the Bossonian replied. "Numedides can tell anybody anything. That's what being king is all about. You damned well can't. You're just a miserable, no-account pikeman with dung on your boots. Nobody wants to hear what you've got to say."
Had anyone spoken so to Conan, the blacksmith's son would have done his best to murder the offender. No Cimmerian would stand for the notion that his word was not as good as any other man's. Clan chiefs won their places not thanks to their fancy bloodlines but by virtue of the strength and wisdom they displayed. Anyone might challenge them, and men frequently did. If being frozen in place from fear of a wicked nobleman's status was what went into civilization, then Conan wanted no part of it, vastly preferring the barbarism in which he had been raised. His father had seen that benefits also accrued from a social system more highly structured than Cimmeria's, but he was blind to those.
The Gunderman, instead of taking the archer's words as a deadly insult, only laughed. "And you've got dung on your tongue, Benno," he said. "That's why everybody loves you so much."
Benno's reply taught Conan several new Aquilonian curses. He was not completely sure what all of them meant, but they sounded splendid, rolling off the Bossonian's tongue with a fine, sonorous obscenity. The Gunderman at whom they were aimed laughed some more. That Conan did understand. Friends could take such liberties.
For a little while, he forgot about murdering all the invaders. Following them, spying on them, made sport enough.
Granth hated the Cimmerian forest. Even with comrades along, he always felt like a flea making its way through the matted fur of the biggest, shaggiest dog in the world. He did not offer up that conceit to Vulth and Benno. He knew too well that his cousin and the Bossonian would make the most of it.
When he stopped for a moment, the other two soldiers also halted. "What is it?" asked Vulth. "Did you see something? Did you hear something?" He sounded edgier than usual himself; perhaps the damp, silent immensity of the woods had begun to get under his skin, too.