There had been fighting on Thunder River; fierce fighting before the
walls of Velitrium; ax and torch had been piled up and down the bank,
and many a settler's cabin lay in ashes before the painted horde was
rolled back.
A strange quiet followed the storm, in which people gathered and talked
in hushed voices, and men with red-stained bandages drank their ale
silently in the taverns along the river bank.
There, to Conan the Cimmerian, moodily quaffing from a great wine-glass,
came a gaunt forester with a bandage about his head and his arm in a
sling. He was the one survivor of Fort Tuscelan.
'You went with the soldiers to the ruins of the fort?'
Conan nodded.
'I wasn't able,' murmured the other. 'There was no fighting?'
'The Picts had fallen back across the Black River. Something must have
broken their nerve, though only the devil who made them knows what.'
The woodsman glanced at his bandaged arm and sighed.
'They say there were no bodies worth disposing of.'
Conan shook his head. 'Ashes. The Picts had piled them in the fort and
set fire to the fort before they crossed the river. Their own dead and
the men of Valannus.'
'Valannus was killed among the last--in the hand-to-hand fighting when
they broke the barriers. They tried to take him alive, but he made them
kill him. They took ten of the rest of us prisoners when we were so weak
from fighting we could fight no more. They butchered nine of us then and
there. It was when Zogar Sag died that I got my chance to break free and
run for it.'
'Zogar Sag's dead?' ejaculated Conan.
'Aye. I saw him die. That's why the Picts didn't press the fight against
Velitrium as fiercely as they did against the fort. It was strange. He
took no wounds in battle. He was dancing among the slain, waving an ax
with which he'd just brained the last of my comrades. He came at me,
howling like a wolf--and then he staggered and dropped the ax, and began
to reel in a circle screaming as I never heard a man or beast scream
before. He fell between me and the fire they'd built to roast me,
gagging and frothing at the mouth, and all at once he went rigid and the
Picts shouted that he was dead. It was during the confusion that I
slipped my cords and ran for the woods.
'I saw him lying in the firelight. No weapon had touched him. Yet there
were red marks like the wounds of a sword in the groin, belly and
neck--the last as if his head had been almost severed from his body.
What do you make of that?'
Conan made no reply, and the forester, aware of the reticence of
barbarians on certain matters, continued: 'He lived by magic, and
somehow, he died by magic. It was the mystery of his death that took the
heart out of the Picts. Not a man who saw it was in the fighting before
Velitrium. They hurried back across Black River. Those that struck
Thunder River were warriors who had come on before Zogar Sag died. They
were not enough to take the city by themselves.
'I came along the road, behind their main force, and I know none
followed me from the fort. I sneaked through their lines and got into
the town. You brought the settlers through all right, but their women
and children got into Velitrium just ahead of those painted devils. If
the youth Balthus and old Slasher hadn't held them up awhile, they'd
have butchered every woman and child in Conajohara. I passed the place
where Balthus and the dog made their last stand. They were lying amid a
heap of dead Picts--I counted seven, brained by his ax, or disemboweled
by the dog's fangs, and there were others in the road with arrows
sticking in them. Gods, what a fight that must have been!'
'He was a man,' said Conan. 'I drink to his shade, and to the shade of
the dog, who knew no fear.' He quaffed part of the wine, then emptied
the rest upon the floor, with a curious heathen gesture, and smashed the
goblet. 'The heads of ten Picts shall pay for his, and seven heads for
the dog, who was a better warrior than many a man.'
And the forester, staring into the moody, smoldering blue eyes, knew the
barbaric oath would be kept.
'They'll not rebuild the fort?'
'No; Conajohara is lost to Aquilonia. The frontier has been pushed back.
Thunder River will be the new border.'
The woodsman sighed and stared at his calloused hand, worn from contact
with ax-haft and sword-hilt. Conan reached his long arm for the
wine-jug. The forester stared at him, comparing him with the men about
them, the men who had died along the lost river, comparing him with
those other wild men over that river. Conan did not seem aware of his
gaze.
'Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,' the borderer said, still
staring somberly at the Cimmerian. 'Civilization is unnatural. It is a
whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.'