The greatest care was lavished on Conan’s hands. The blisters had long since burst and the infection had been defeated. His grandfather mixed up a foul-smelling unguent out of fish meat, bear grease, and a variety of dried roots and leaves, then had the boy work it into his palms. Conan continued to wrap his hands and don gloves for anything involving lifting. Connacht also forced him to flex his hands hundreds of times throughout the day.
“You’ll always carry scars from that day, Conan, but you can’t be crippled by them.”
The combat drills Conan hungered for came at last, but not in the way he’d been expecting. His grandfather still wouldn’t let him touch a sword. “Sword’s just a metal sting. A warrior’s weapon is his body. Can’t use that, doesn’t matter how sharp the sword.”
The old man then proceeded to teach his grandson every aspect of infighting that he’d learned from a lifetime of adventuring and brawling—and Conan suspected that he made up a few on the spot. Connacht, despite being four times his grandson’s age, tossed him around as if he were a raggedy doll. Conan vaguely remembered having accused his father of not fighting fairly, but Corin had been the soul of sportsmanship compared to his father. Kicks, punches, head butts, and elbow strikes knocked Conan all over the yard before the hut.
Connacht even bit him once!
Conan would have protested, but he remembered Klarzin parrying his sword cut, then kicking him full in the chest. Corin had been right. Fighters might talk about fighting fairly, but in their storytelling they left out certain details. He couldn’t remember a single of his grandfather’s stories that included his having bitten anyone, but the old man was a bit too practiced at it to even suggest that it had never happened.
Conan gave back as much as he could, and occasionally landed a fist or a kick on his grandfather. He never hurt him, though, but not because he pulled his punches. Connacht still moved quickly enough to slip most blows, and certainly knew enough to anticipate Conan’s next moves. Still, as the weeks wore on, Conan’s hits became more consistent than misses, and his ability to block attacks improved greatly.
One day Connacht called a sudden halt to their fighting. “Good. You’ve learned well.”
Conan, doubled over, catching his breath, glanced up. “Is this how you taught my father?”
“Corin, the size of him? No. I had a different way with him.” The old man straightened up. “I want you to haul twenty buckets of water from the river to fill the cistern, then I have one more thing for you. Accomplish that task, and tomorrow we begin working with a sword.”
Conan smiled and ran off. The sooner he perfected his sword fighting, the sooner he’d be able to avenge his village. While thoughts of revenge filled his mind, he hauled water and saw nothing of his grandfather. He did hear some pounding from within the hut, but attached no significance to it.
Finally the cistern brimmed over and Conan returned the buckets to their place near the small forge his grandfather maintained. The young Cimmerian stepped into the hut and found his grandfather sitting by the hearth. The meager furnishings had been cleared out of the center. An iron plate had been bolted to the floor and four feet of heavy chain attached to it. The chain ended in an iron shackle.
Connacht nodded to it. “Put your right ankle in there. Lock it shut.”
The young man sat on the floor and secured the shackle around his ankle.
His grandfather got up, took Conan’s sword from where it hung on the wall, and stood beside the doorway. “You’re a good fighter, Conan. You learn quickly. You’re determined to go after Klarzin, aren’t you?”
Conan nodded.
“There’s nothing anyone could do to stop you, is there?”
The boy shook his head.
Connacht tossed Conan’s sword out into the yard. “Go get your sword. When you get it, you’ll be ready to get Klarzin.”
CHAPTER 10
CONAN STARED AT his grandfather, waiting for an explanation.
Connacht walked out the doorway and let the hide flap slide across to eclipse the sun.
The young Cimmerian shook his leg. The heavy chain dragged at the shackle, digging into his ankle and grinding against bone. He grabbed the chain and tugged, hard, but it didn’t give at all. More importantly, the short chain didn’t allow him to move to where he could brace himself against something to use his legs in trying to pull free. The best he could do was to lay a foot on the eyebolt sunk into the middle of the plate, but unless he could snap the chain, that effort would be useless. And without some leverage, actually ripping the plate out of the floor wouldn’t work.
On hands and knees he crawled over and looked at the plate, chain, and eyebolt. All were solid steel and without being softened in the forge’s fire, they’d resist his efforts to break them. He examined each link in the chain, but could find no weak ones. He rubbed a link against the plate’s edge, but his grandfather had rounded off the edge, so wearing a link down would take days.
Even the shackle was stout enough to frustrate his attempts to pry it open. He had nothing with which he could force the lock. Conan instantly understood the desire of a trapped fox to gnaw its own foot off to escape a trap. Not only was he not flexible enough to do that, he had no desire to cripple himself.
There has to be a trick to it. Conan’s icy eyes narrowed. No, if my father had done this, there would have been a clever way out. Not so Connacht.
The boy yanked at the chain, then howled in frustration. He whipped the chain back and forth, hoping some hidden weakness would shear the bolt off, but no such luck. He wrapped the chain around the eyebolt and yanked, hoping to bend it. It resisted his best efforts. In no time he sat in a puddle of his own sweat, no closer to freedom than he’d been before.
Snarling, he pounded the chain against the floorboards and made some headway. He peeled away wood, biting out the splinters that lodged beneath his fingernails. He tore at the wood, hoping to rip the whole plate free. As he dug down, however, he discovered that his grandfather had secured it around one of the floor’s crossbeams.
Even this fact did not discourage Conan. He continued to rip away wood, hoping that he could loosen things enough that he could rotate the plate around the crossbeam. That would loop the chain around the crossbeam, and he could then haul back on it to use the chain to saw through the crossbeam. Large heavy links and seasoned hardwood would make the job difficult, but he’d get through.
Then he learned that his grandfather had bolted the plate to the crossbeam on the underside, which made the plate immobile and his plan irrelevant.
The boy tossed pieces of wood at the hide flap. He wanted to provoke a reaction from his grandfather. A laugh at his predicament, a curse at the destruction he was causing, a reproving stare and a comment he could think on. Anything. But all he got in return was silence. It was as if he was completely alone in the world.
That thought flushed frigid fear through his belly. What if he was alone. What if Klarzin had tracked him to his grandfather’s hut and sent an assassin after him? What if Lucius No Nose was coming to finish what Klarzin hadn’t let him do at the village? Conan grasped a piece of wood with a pointed end because he refused to think of himself as helpless, but with four feet of chain hobbling him, he’d be slaughtered, weapon or no weapon, in a heartbeat.
He moved around to the far side of the plate, let the chain play out, and sat with his shoulders and head against the wall, watching the doorway. The rattle of chains reminded him of Klarzin’s allies, and of the chain he’d failed to hold on to back at the village. He looked at his hands, the scars visible but the flesh pliable. There he sat, trapped by chains as his father had been, as vulnerable as his father had been, and the last seconds of his father’s life played through his mind over and over again.