CHAPTER 11
IN THE THREE years Conan lived with his grandfather, the name Klarzin almost faded completely from his memory. The horrific acts that destroyed his village and slew his father did not. Sometimes they came back to him unbidden but consciously; in dreams and nightmares more often. The latter occurrences enhanced the surreal quality of that day and softened the sharpest of the memories. Had it not been for the traces of chain scars on his hands, he might have forgotten most all of it.
Connacht did not give the boy time to remember much of anything. He worked Conan hard, both because he was proud of his grandson, and because he felt guilty about Corin’s death, guilty that his son had been slain by outsiders. He’d centered the blame on Lucius, the Aquilonian, only because Aquilonians were familiar enemies, and because of Aquilonia’s proximity, the chances of avenging Corin were far greater.
Being men and Cimmerians, neither Conan nor Connacht spoke of their feelings, dreams, or fears. They would have denied having any of the latter, and barely acknowledged the existence of the others. Still, in the way Connacht watched him, Conan recognized his own father’s love, and assumed his grandfather saw the same emotion in him. Connacht’s guilt would flare up when the boy failed to grasp a lesson. When that happened, the old man would push and push until the boy mastered whatever skill his grandfather was teaching, at which point another lesson would begin.
For another boy, this existence with a grandfather whom others shunned would have been a lonely one. Connacht’s swift punishments for failure would have had others howling in pain, or vowing to run or seek revenge. For Conan, these were not options simply because someone born on a battlefield would never run, and a Cimmerian would not acknowledge pain. Stripped of the family and life he had known, Conan redefined himself as the man of destiny others had supposed him to be. If he failed, their hopes and expectations would be invalidated. His father and mother’s wishes would never be realized. Conan, though given to the occasional bout of melancholy, did not dwell overlong on things introspective and instead occupied himself learning all he could of the killing arts.
In Connacht he had a willing and a superior teacher. Connacht the Freebooter, the Far-Traveled, had been isolated because of his past. In training his grandson, he could guarantee two things. First, his bloodline would not be extinguished easily. Second, those who had forgotten who and what he had been would learn the truth through his grandson’s exploits. While even the most casual of observers could have seen that Conan would be a great Cimmerian warrior, Connacht intended him to be the greatest Cimmerian warrior. He would be the man against whom all others would be measured.
More than once Connacht had told him that. The admission came late at night, when his grandfather finished some tale of how he’d escaped slavers or survived a battle. Conan would stare at him, wide-eyed, with the admiration and love that rewards all the trials of parenthood, and mutter, “Someday, Grandfather, I shall be as you were.”
“No, Conan, you will be greater. Men once remembered me as a Cimmerian. They will remember you as the Cimmerian.”
To Conan, that idea seemed, at first, ridiculous. And then, later on, it became a goal. It became fused with the destiny that had been thrust on him by his birth on a battlefield and by his parents’ desire that he know more than fire and blood. If he were to be the Cimmerian, he would have to do more than just be a warrior. He didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he was determined to find out.
And in his fourth summer with his grandfather, just after he turned fifteen, he gained his first opportunity to become the Cimmerian.
THE AQUILONIANS HAD long coveted Cimmerian territory. With every generation, they conspired to steal as much as they could. They pushed into Cimmeria and established the hunting outpost known as Venarium. During the years when it had been little more than a trading post, the Cimmerians had tolerated it. When troops invested it, when stone walls replaced the wooden ones, and when punitive raiders sallied forth from its confines to hunt down Cimmerians who had gone raiding . . . then it became an open sore and could no longer be tolerated.
Cimmerian elders gathered and conferred. They summoned the tribes and clans. They even sent word to isolated villages and single homesteads, suggesting that all had been forgiven and that any animosities must be forgotten in the face of this greater threat to Cimmeria. So it was that Conan and Connacht left the homestead, and went to join the others in an encampment northeast of the Aquilonian settlement.
Conan had never much been given to considering how he had changed since coming to live with his grandfather. He measured his growth not in pounds or inches, but in skills mastered. Yet the way the other men looked at him, and the shock when they learned he was only fifteen years old, left no doubt that he had changed physically. Though he’d not yet attained his full height or weight, he’d gone from being a boy to a six-foot-tall man, lean as a wolf but well muscled, tipping the scales at over a hundred and eighty pounds. A few men said they could see his father in him, and this made him proud. He never smiled, however, and kept his own counsel, for, as both Corin and Connacht had told him, “ ’Tis better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt of it.”
While excited to be in the warrior camp, Conan also wanted to get far away from it. Though he was not the youngest there, the other youths had been grouped into support companies. They would be held in reserve, and went through daily drills to prepare them. Everyone knew that if the battle went so badly that the youngest warriors were called upon to fight, they would die. But such was Conan’s size and so well developed were his skills that he did not fit with his peers.
The companies of adult men wanted even less to do with him. While all was supposed to be forgiven, the southern tribesmen—whose coloration matched Conan’s most closely—were clearly wary of Connacht and anyone connected to him. The northern tribes seemed reluctant to trust Conan, both because he appeared to be a southerner and because of his youth.
He and his grandfather fell in with a motley collection of warriors that the others referred to as the “Outlanders.” While none of them knew Connacht, they knew of him. Like him, they had ventured well beyond the borders of Cimmeria. Their adventures had taken them to the same faraway places that Connacht’s had taken him. As Elders plotted and planned, the Outlanders shared stories. They bonded as men do who have known the same hardships—and as men do who are destined for more hardships. Not a one of them doubted that the Elders would form them into their own company and throw them into the most savage of the fighting—less because they valued them as warriors than because their loss would hurt the tribes the least.
Kiernan, the closest of the Outlanders in age to Conan, was a decade his senior. Though not nearly as tall as Conan, he had a whiplash quickness matched only by the swiftness with which he delivered wry comments. He carried a bow—an affectation he adopted while serving as a Shemite mercenary—and invited Conan along with him to take a look at Venarium before the tribes marched.
The two of them slipped over the ridgeline and found cover high above the valley in which Venarium had been built. The valley broadened toward the south. The river splitting it would eventually flow into the Shirki and water Aquilonia’s central plains. Already forests had been cleared around the settlement and fields planted with more than enough wheat and hay to sustain Venarium.
Though Connacht had taken great care in describing the cities of the south, his stories had not prepared Conan for his first view of Venarium. The trading settlements he’d visited before had been little more than villages, but Venarium towered above the plains. Stone walls girded it and a switchback causeway led up to the main gate. An inner set of walls warded a fortress at the town’s pinnacle, and the high tower, from which flew a half-dozen pennants, commanded a view of the entire valley.