“Grab what we need, what we carry easily,” Kern ordered.
Tahmat had chased after him and stood silent, as Garret and Wallach passed out a few fine blades and some of the better belts, shields, and scavenged food. Strom and Valerus also hurried over, leaving the third Aquilonian to hold their horses. Strom had obviously been a field warrior long enough to recognize a fast-breaking camp.
“Now? It is nearly full dark. Where do you hope to reach so fast?”
“Venarium,” Kern told him.
Tahmat shook his head. “That is two days’ travel. Bad ground, even once you are off the rock flow.”
Strom didn’t care as much about the time. But, “Hard on the horses, Wolf-Eye.”
“Leave them,” Kern suggested.
Gard had some idea of how valuable the trained mounts were to the southland warriors. Not many mounts could have stood up under a fast charge over such terrible ground as the black rock flow expanse. And Kern had made him responsible. For all of his fall from glory, there was still a measure of pride left.
“They can’t just leave the horses, Kern.”
“Leave them, sell them, or butcher them for food.” Kern tossed the flaming torch to Reave, who held it while Kern quickly tied a large hank of wrapped meat into his blanket, then wrapped the entire package in the felt mat he had taken from an early raid against the Vanir. A length of good rope tied each end of the roll. “Or follow at your best time. But we make use of the night.”
“Get the horses saddled and packed,” Strom all but growled to Valerus, who saluted with a clenched fist.
Tahmat shrugged and posted his chief of guards over the salvaged gear that Kern’s warriors would not be taking. “Suit yourself. But you are mad, you are.”
As might be, Gard knew. But Kern and the others had already jumped to the same conclusion as the caravaner, and to them it meant a great deal more.
If Grimnir had come south, to the ruins of Venarium, and collected a second war host, then he was likely to be more dangerous than any of them had thought. And, poised in the southwest corner of Cimmeria, below Ben Morgh and the Teeth, and with very few clans in strong enough shape to challenge him on their own, the way was open for him to charge up into Conall Valley.
Kern was in a hurry now, certainly.
He was running for home.
9
KERN CROUCHED ON the side of a muddy slope, hunkered down with Nahud’r and Daol within a small patch of second-year pine and bitter-smelling sword fern. Grabbing a new-growth branch that waved in front of his face, he bent it back and stripped the slender arm right off the side of the tree, dropped it to the ground, then pointed out what was left of one of Conan’s earliest, true, tales.
“Venarium.”
Built by Gunderman invaders when Conan had been a boy, its hilltop ruins looked ancient and brittle. Two sides of the once-formidable palisade stood even now, nearly thirty summers later, but one end leaned over precariously as time undermined the hardy construction and the great posts—sun-bleached to a deadwood gray—twisted in the ground. Bellberry brush grew thick around the base of the tilting wall. And even from a long arrow shot away, he smelled the old, rotting wood.
Of the rest of the fortress town, only a few rock foundations crouched in the shadow of the palisade walls where there had once been homes and lodge-style halls and likely a watchtower. Little else was left to the old buildings. Some half-charred, termite-eaten timber, perhaps. If it hadn’t all been chipped up for campfires over the years.
Nahud’r nodded. “Something in its day.”
He suspected the Shemite was being . . . that civilized word . . . polite. Nahud’r’s own people were nomadic, living in tent villages that picked up and moved as necessary. But the black-skinned man with the large, white teeth had been educated in Aquilonia and Nemedia among other places. He’d seen the grand cities of stone with their tall spires and polished streets. He’d seen the capital of King Conan. Tarantia. Viewed from afar the palace and royal hall and the towers of turquoise and gold.
And he had chosen not to go back to that life, those comforts, after Kern rescued him from the Vanir slave line.
“It was,” Daol promised, though this was his first time to gaze upon the legendary ruins as well. “Before the uprising.”
Where—legend had it—Conan slew his first (or among his first) enemy. Barely fifteen summers and already with a man’s growth and a man’s skill with a sword. The legendary warrior had been a part of a large war host to resist Gunderman invasion, rising up against the settlers and warriors who occupied the strong fortress town. They came with fire and swords and brawn. They left only when the last Gunderman settler was dead or fled.