Not far from him, another Bossonian also went down, struck in the chest by a shaft from a Cimmerian bow. That left a gap in the defense, a gap the Aquilonians, beset everywhere, could not set right at once. "Come on!" cried Conan. "Boost me up, you men! If we once gain the palisade, Venarium's ours!"
Willing hands heaved him aloft. His own hands gained a purchase at the top of the palisade. He pulled himself up. He pulled himself over. He swung down onto the walkway, the first Cimmerian inside the Aquilonian stronghold. Soldiers rushed toward him, desperate to cut him down. At their van came a skinny little Bossonian. He shot at Conan. The arrow kissed the sleeve of the Cimmerian's tunic and flew harmlessly past.
As the archer nocked another shaft, Conan sprang forward. With tigerish quickness, he seized the little man and used his body as a shield and a flail, battering other Aquilonians and knocking several of them to the ground a dozen feet below. Then, roaring, he flung the luckless Bossonian down with them.
He was not the only Cimmerian on the walkway for long. Where he had gone, his countrymen were quick to follow. Soon a knot of northern warriors stood up there, hacking and smiting. More Gundermen and Bossonians came to try to slay them. The enemy knew what would happen if they held their ground.
"Stand aside, by Crom!" That great bass roar could only have come from Mordec. The blacksmith shouldered his way forward, to stand side by side with Conan once more. The blade of his axe was dented and all over blood. A wider smile than Conan had ever seen on him wreathed his usually somber features. He pointed to the foe. "At them!" he shouted, and Conan was not slow to join his charge.
As they had outside the fortress, the Aquilonians on the walkway fought with desperate bravery. Conan had doubted their courage before this uprising broke out. He doubted it no more. What flesh and blood could do, the Gundermen and Bossonians did. But flesh and blood could do only so much. He and Mordec, fighting side by side, were a host in themselves. And they had ever-growing weight behind them. The top of a ladder cleared the palisade. Cimmerians swarmed up it and onto the walkway.
"There's a stair." Mordec pointed with his axe. "We'll get down into the courtyard. Then this whole fortress will be ours."
A Gunderman lunged at him with a pike. Light on his feet despite his bulk, he sidestepped. Conan's sword bit into the Gunderman's wrist. The soldier's severed hand fell to the planks of the walkway with his spear. The Gunderman screamed. Mordec pushed him off the walkway, then surged forward once more.
Conan hacked and slashed and thrust. He was bigger and stronger and quicker than most of the men he faced, even if only down grew on his cheeks. Step by gory step, the head of the stairs grew closer. An arrow shot from the ground hissed past him and thudded into the logs of the palisade. Another shaft struck a Cimmerian behind him. His countryman's yells of anguish differed little from those of the Gunderman he had mutilated.
More of Numedides' soldiers rushed up the stairs to try to stem the Cimmerian tide. Mordec's axe swept the head from a Bossonian's shoulders, then took off a Gunderman's arm above the elbow. "Come on!" shouted the blacksmith in Aquilonian. "Who's next to die?"
However brave the enemy soldiers were, such carnage could not help but daunt them, at least momentarily. Conan still at his right hand, Mordec set foot on the first step leading down into the fortress of Venarium. A moment later, they gained another step, and then another. After that, their foes recovered some of their spirit, and nothing came easy any more.
Easy or not, though, they and the rest of the Cimmerians cleared the stairway of Bossonians and Gundermen one hard-fought step at a time. "Forward!" bellowed Mordec again and again. Forward the men of the north went, over the hacked and bleeding bodies of those who would stand in their way— and over not a few of the bodies of their own countrymen. With a deep-throated roar of triumph, Mordec leaped from the last stair down to the ground within the fortress. He shouted again, this time with words in the cry: "Venarium is fallen! Venarium is ours!"
An arrow smote him, just to the left of the middle of his chest.
He stood there for a moment, a look of absurd surprise on his face. Then he turned to Conan, as if remembering something important he needed to say. Whatever it was, it never passed his lips. His eyes rolled up in his head. Like a toppling tree, he crumpled, the axe falling from fingers that suddenly would not hold it.
"Noooo!" shouted Conan, a long howl of despair and fury. That his father should fall in the moment of victory— "Curse you, Crom!" he cried, and threw Stercus' sword in a startled Gunderman's face. Then he snatched up the axe Mordec had wielded so well.
He swung that axe with a madman's fury. No Aquilonian could stand against him. No one could come close enough even to engage him. And he wounded more than one Cimmerian he did not recognize as a countryman because of his berserk grief. The men with whom he had fought his way into Fort Venarium grew as wary of him as the Gundermen and Bossonians they opposed.
"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.