Kern recalled his surprise. But then, he hadn’t understood what made the cavalrymen stay as long as they had.
Strom had set some of that clear.
“We almost turned south after Venarium. It would have been faster, yea. But you accepted our company when you had no reason to want us along. Some of your men bled in place of mine on the rock flow. I’d hoped to see you safely back to the valley in payment.”
“And now?” Kern had asked.
“Now I can’t say there is safety anywhere in Cimmeria. And it’s time I passed that word along.”
“To King Conan?”
Kern wasn’t certain how his warriors would feel about that. Conan’s name was still spat upon in many places, among many clans. Outcast by choice, but his heroics the stuff of legend still. A man whose actions you might admire, but still could not completely trust. He could send troops against the Vanir, establish more em-bassies, and some would simply call it another type of occupation. His judgment, and deeds, would always be suspect.
Kern knew that as well as anyone.
Strom merely shrugged. “We don’t march up to our own leaders so easily as you visit a rival chieftain, Kern Wolf-Eye. I’ve never laid eyes on King Conan, and I doubt I will before I die. But he may hear.” Another shrug. “What he will do, I can’t say. Aquilonia has its own problems.”
“You will backtrack toward the Hardpans.”
“Nay. Niuss and I will risk the Guralian Hills. After travel through Cimmeria, the bandits of Atzel will seem hardly a nuisance.”
“Niuss and you?”
Which was when Strom broached the subject of Valerus. That he had asked to remain as the band traveled over the Snowy River passes and into eastern Cimmeria. “He can learn a great deal more that would be good for us to know. If you’ll accept him.”
He had. Though it still amazed him that men like Valerus, like Nahud’r, could live so comfortably outside their own lands. Kern no longer had a home. Hadn’t since the day Cul cast him from the Gaud. But to exile oneself by choice?
“Part of what made you stay,” Kern said now, as Valerus picked himself up and set himself toward where his horse was kept tethered.
The Aquilonian looked back. His eyes were a muddy green, like the brackish water of a still pond, but were still sharp and alive. “Part of . . . ?” he asked.
“Learning.” Kern chose his words carefully, struggling around the fluid Aquilonian language. “You said that is only part of what made you stay.” He waited for Valerus to nod. “What was the rest?”
For a moment, he thought that Valerus would not answer. A man’s choice, to keep his decisions to himself. The soldier, who had tucked his gloves into his belt, pulled them out, and brushed them against each other, shaking the tight mesh of metal ringlets and wire free of any dust or debris. These he pulled on with short, quick tugs. He shrugged one shoulder.
“Ashul,” he said, then trudged on to collect his mount.
It was an answer Kern respected.
He made a point, in fact, of including Valerus in the forced banter of the morning, whenever the Cimmerians rested by slowing down to an easy jog, or, at their slowest, a quick-paced walk. Nahud’r warmed easiest to the young cavalryman. They shared some experiences, after all, with the Shemite’s years spent in Nemedian and Aquilonian employ. And Ehmish was young enough to be enthralled by the man’s stories. So often they sounded like tall tales to be spun around a campfire. The creatures of elemental earth that had marched off Mount Golamira to batter down the walls of Galparan. And even if one did believe the descriptions of large buildings crowded together in huge southland cities, it seemed a far stretch to think that such a city could be “lost,” even in the dark forest jungles of the Black Kingdoms.
The talking brought Valerus into the pack.
It also helped pass the day.
But by midday conversation had given way to ragged breathing and desperate swigs of leathery water. The cold mountain air tasted thinner with each passing league, rasping the throat raw and dry. Sweat stood out on faces, on chests.
Kern’s warriors wandered their gazes along the trail ahead, the slopes, the trees, as if searching for the hidden eyes that watched them. They passed from a cliffside trail, over a ridge, then down into a long, shallow canyon with a sheer face at one side and a steep, wooded slope the other. Everyone alert for danger. Reaching into their strength to keep one foot moving ahead of the other, eating up the Black Mountains one long stride at a time.
Small tendrils of ice-crusted snow nested inside of cracks, on the shadowed side of boulders, of ridges and trees. The giant, frozen webs of mountain spiders glistened back in the deeper clefts, some of them spreading out a net that would have laid over Gaud’s lodge hall. These ones, at least, long abandoned. Occasionally an old strand of webbing, thick as Kern’s forefinger, stretched across the trail, encased in ice, connecting boulders or scraggly, stunted fir, and pine.