Conan the Barbarian by Michael A. Stackpole Page A

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