Conan of Venarium (7 page)

That might have been the judgment of the wilderness, but it was not Conan’s. Defiantly, he pressed ahead. The path went past an enormous fir—easily the largest Conan had ever seen, and one he would surely have known well had it grown anywhere near Duthil — before turning sharply to the left. The blacksmith’s son followed it, but then stopped in his tracks in astonishment at the sight of what lay ahead.

The gray stone ruin might have sprung from the dawn of time. It was, without a doubt, a temple dedicated to some god, but which? Not Crom, surely; he had neither shrine nor priesthood. Perhaps some mystic convulsion has sent it spinning down the centuries from its own proper era to that in which Conan lived. It might have been a temple from the great vanished island of Atlantis, from whose few scattered survivors the Cimmerians drew their descent. Of that, however, Conan knew next to nothing.

He warily approached the fane. The immense stones from which it was made, albeit only crudely carven, were fitted together with consummate skill; not even the blade of a knife could have slipped between one and another. What had been an entryway still offered ingress of sorts, though the lintel stone had fallen and partially blocked the way in.

With a boy’s agility, Conan twisted past the fallen stone. No sooner had he done so than a strange, weird piping filled the air. He could not have said whether it came from a musical instrument or the throat of some curious bird. All he could have said was that it made the hair on his arms and at the nape of his neck rise with horror and dread at its intimations of ancient wickedness.

The entryway twisted left and then right before opening out on an immense courtyard paved with stones of the same dusky gray as the rest of the temple. They were joined as cunningly as all the other masonry, with the result that only a few bushes and saplings had managed to take root between them. In the center of the courtyard stood an altar of white marble made all the more dazzling and brilliant by contrast to its surroundings.

Strange figures and glyphs had been carved onto the altar; the pedestal of a statue rose from it. Only the feet and legs of that image now survived. One quick glance at them was enough to make Conan look away, dizzy and sick. If those remains did that to him, he shuddered to imagine what he would have felt had the statue survived in its entirety. Some things were well lost in the mists of time.

Behind the altar, one of the paving stones suddenly swung down on a clever pivot whose workings had defied the eons. Conan, intent on trying to make sense of the antediluvian carvings on the altar stone, did not notice the silent operation until a curious, hungry hiss forcibly brought it to his attention.

That sound sent him springing back. Even more than the roar of a hungry lion or panther, a serpent’s hiss screamed danger! to all around. And, as the great snake issued forth from the den where it had slept since some forgotten age of the world, Conan’s eyes went wide with dread. Serpents in Cimmeria were most of them small, slinking creatures that fed on frogs or mice. Even a viper that might steal a man’s life would be no longer than his forearm.

This snake, though, could have devoured the blacksmith’s son and scarcely shown the bulge he made. It had to be forty feet long, and broad in proportion. When it opened its mouth to taste the air, poison dripped from fangs longer than an index finger. Its lidless golden eyes held old, old knowledge and even older evil.

Those terrible eyes fixed on Conan. The snake hissed again, this time as if glad the opportunity to break its age-long fast was so thoughtfully provided. A tongue a foot and a half long flicked out—in the direction of the young Cimmerian. The fearsome serpent glided straight toward him.

With a cry of horror and abhorrence, a cry springing from the instinctive revulsion of warm-blooded life for the scaly, slimy primeval reptile, Conan let fly. His shaft struck the snake just to one side of a nostril, and bounced away after scraping an all but harmless scratch in the creature’s armored hide. The serpent hissed furiously and reared on high, as if to crush the life from the man-thing that had presumed to resent being devoured. Yet it was not primarily a constrictor. Faster than a springing panther, it struck.

Conan, with the tigerish instincts of the barbarian, leaped back out of harm’s way in the very nick of time. He was already fitting another arrow to his bow, and loosed again. This arrow stuck behind the snake’s head: a wound, yes, but one more likely to enrage than to cripple. The snake’s mouth gaped wider than ever. The sound that burst from it might have come from a bucket of water cast onto red-hot iron. It struck again, seeking to avenge itself with envenomed fangs.

Again, though, the stroke fell short. Conan had another arrow ready, too. This one pinned the serpent’s tongue to its lower jaw, piercing the soft flesh that wide-spread maw had exposed. Now the snake’s hiss came muffled, but its rage, if anything, redoubled. It slithered after the Cimmerian. If it could not strike him, it would smash him to jelly in its monstrous coils.

He drew back the bowstring to the ear and let fly once more — and at last found a vital spot, for the shaft pierced the serpent’s left eye and penetrated deep into its tiny, savage brain.

The serpent’s death throes went on for the next quarter of an hour, and came closer to killing Conan than anything it had done while alive. In its tormented thrashing, it overturned and smashed the ancient altar and everything that remained of the dreadful statue atop it. Whatever the creature depicted might have been, it was only shards of marble now.

At long last, the serpent lay still. Conan approached the great corpse with a hunter’s caution, for he knew that even a seemingly dead snake often had one final bite left to give. He tapped the snake’s snout with the end of his bow, held out at arm’s length before him. And sure enough, the serpent snapped convulsively, but only on empty air.

When he was sure it would in fact move no more, Conan drew his knife from his belt and used it to pry the snake’s mouth open. Then, stoically ignoring the fetid reptilian musk that rose from the creature, he dipped the heads and upper shafts of the arrows remaining in his quiver in the greenish venom still dribbling from its fangs. That done, he cut out one of the fangs and, handling it with the greatest of care lest he be poisoned himself, dropped it into the quiver.

He peered down into the chamber whence the serpent had crawled, wondering whether another of its fearsome breed still lingered there. But of that there was no sign; only the one, it appeared, had come through the ages with this ancient shrine. Shaking his head in wonder, Conan left by the twisting pathway he had used to enter.

Once outside the temple, he followed the track past the enormous fir. Then he stopped, suddenly wishing he had taken both fangs instead of the one. He turned around.

The fir was not there.

Conan took several steps back toward where it had stood. He still saw no sign of it, and rubbed his eyes in disbelief. A tree like that could not simply have vanished off the face of the earth —except that it had. He rubbed his eyes again, which did nothing to make it reappear. Instead of leading back toward the temple from forgotten days, the track took him to a part of the woods he knew well.

He rubbed his eyes again and scratched his head, wondering whether he had somehow imagined the entire episode. But when he unslung his quiver and examined the arrows it held, he saw that their heads and the upper inches of their shafts were discolored by the venom of the titanic serpent’s needlelike fang. Whatever his experience had been, a dream it was not.

He decided to set those arrows aside, not to take them on ordinary hunting trips but to save them for panthers, wolves, bears, Aquilonians, and other dangerous game. Now he had no trouble retracing his steps to Duthil. His return journey took him past the encampment Count Stercus’ Gundermen and Bossonians had set up near the village. As always, the invaders —the occupiers, now—were alert, with sentries posted all around the palisade. Conan snarled a soft curse he had heard from his father. No one could hope to surprise them.

He had nearly reached his home village when he suddenly stopped in his tracks. “No one could hope to surprise them by day!” he exclaimed, as if someone had claimed otherwise. “But by night-“

From then on, he ran as if his heels had sprouted wings. “What is it, Conan?” called Tarla as he dashed past Balarg’s house. He did not stop—did not so much as slow—even for her, which proved if anything could how important he thought his idea was.

“Father!” he panted, skidding to a stop in the smithy’s doorway.

Mordec was giving a new axehead an edge with a foot-powered grinding wheel. As he took his foot off the pedal, the shower of sparks from the axehead died away. “What is it?” he asked, unconsciously echoing Balarg’s daughter. “Whatever it is, it must be a thought of weight, to have you running through Duthil as if demons dogged your tracks.”

That took Conan’s mind back to the fane from out of time, but only for a moment. The present and what might lie ahead were more important to him. “If we were to strike the Aquilonian camp at night, we could take the foe by surprise,” he burst out, his voice cracking with excitement.

“We could, aye, but what would happen if we did?” asked Mordec.

“Why, we’d be free of them,” answered Conan. How could his father not see that?

As he soon discovered, though, Mordec saw further than he did. “Duthil would be free of them —for a little while,” said the blacksmith. “Cimmeria would not. And when the rest of the Aquilonians learned what we had done, they would come back in force and work a fearful vengeance on us.”

“Then we need to strike all their camps on the same night,” declared Conan. “If we do, they would be gone forever.”

“If we could, they would be gone forever,” said Mordec. “How do you propose to bring it off?”

“Send men to all the villages,” answered Conan. “Tell them to attack on such and such a night. When that night comes, the Aquilonians go.” He made a fist to show exactly what he meant.

But Mordec shook his head, which made his square-cut mane of graying hair flip back and forth in front of his eyes. “The Aquilonians might go,” he said. “But some of the villagers would say they lost too many men in the first fight, and they will stay home. And some would promise the sun and moon and stars —and then stay home, too. And some would attack, but in a halfhearted way, and be defeated. And King Numedides would send more soldiers, to punish us for our rebellion. And what’s an uprising worth when all that’s likely to lie at the other end of it?”

Such bitter cynicism took Conan’s breath away. “Why did you fight the invaders in the first place, if you felt like that?” he asked. “Why not bend the knee straightaway?”

“If we could have beaten them at once, they likely would have given up the campaign as a bad job and gone home,” said Mordec. “They’ve done that before. Now they’ve won, though. Now they’re settled on the land.”

“All the more reason to drive them away,” said Conan.

“All the more reason for them to stay,” returned Mordec.

They eyed each other in perfect mutual incomprehension. “I never thought you’d turn coward,” said Conan.

His father cuffed him, not as prelude to a beating like the one he’d had when he tried to go off to fight with the defeated Cimmerian host but simply as a warning to watch his tongue. “You have no call to use that word for me,” said Mordec. “After you have fought in war, you may say what you please, and I will bear it. Until then, you are only bleating out things you do not understand.”

“You would not let me fight in war,” said Conan sulkily. “Now you blame me because I have not.” He did not speak of his exploit with the serpent. He was not sure his father would believe him. He was not altogether sure he believed it himself, and that despite the sinister stains on the shafts in his quiver.

“I do not blame you,” answered Mordec. “I say that you are a boy, and I say that war is not a sport for boys.”

That dismissal felt like a slight to the younger Cimmerian. Conan decided he would speak of what he had done after all, if only to show his father he was someone to be reckoned with. He asked, “Do you know of an ancient temple lost in the woods not far from Duthil?”

Mordec, though, only shook his head. “No. There is none,” he said positively. “If there were, someone would have found it.” His eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask? Do the Aquilonians search for such a place?”

“Not that I know of,” answered Conan.

“Well, what nonsense are you spouting, then?” demanded his father.

“Nothing. Never mind,” said Conan. No, the blacksmith would not believe him. Since that was so, no point to going on. Mordec would but thrash him for telling fables, and he had had enough of his father’s hard hands on him.

When Conan kept silence, Mordec nodded in dour approval. “All right,” he rumbled. “If you’re going to settle down and be sensible, you can finish grinding this axehead. I have a great plenty of other work to do. Get busy!”

From the bedchamber came Verina’s weak voice: “Are you nagging the boy again, Mordec? Can’t you leave him in peace?”

Muttering under his breath, Mordec answered, “There is no peace in this land, nor will there be until the invaders are gone.”

“That’s not what you told me just now,” exclaimed Conan.

“By Crom, it is,” said his father. “I tell you it is useless to strike too soon, and it is. But we shall have a day of reckoning with the foe. Oh, yes—we shall have a day of reckoning indeed.” None of the Gundermen or Bossonians in the camp near Duthil would have cared to hear Mordec’s voice when the blacksmith made that vow. Conan’s father went on, “Meanwhile, though, there’s work to be done. Get on with it.”

“Don’t carp endlessly at Conan,” said Verina. “He’s a good boy.”

Such praise Conan could have done without. More than anything else, he wanted to be reckoned a man, a warrior, a hero. After his battle with the serpent in the temple from out of time, he thought he had earned the right to be so reckoned. But his father would not even hear of the fight. And hearing his mother call him a good boy made him feel as if he peeked out from behind her skirts. He knew she loved him, but it was a love that simultaneously satisfied and suffocated.