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?"
"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.