Читать книгу Amra, Vol 2 No 59 - George H. Scithers - Страница 7

by John Boardman

Captain Cassio Nepos, commander of the border fort of Thendarium, was a hard-bitten realist. He did not expect a let-up in the continual Cimmerian attacks on the northern marches of Aquilonia, even though the King of Aquilonia had for the past nine years been a Cimmerian, an adventurer named Conan. The same haughty independence which made the Cimmerians less likely than the Picts to enter into widespread leagues for the plundering of civilized lands ensured that they would not remit their continual warfare against the frontiers of Aquilonian civilization.

As he stood on the northernmost point of the five-pointed wall of Thendarium, Cassio Nepos peered out over the dark Cimmerian hills. These hills, he knew, rolled on and on into the North, until the pine-forested glens of Cimmeria gave way to the icy wastes of Nordheim. In their depths lurked the most feared of all the barbarian races who surrounded the northern and western frontiers of Aquilonia -- the tall, brawny, black-haired, grim Cimmerians, who seemed to delight only in warfare with anyone they met. Thendarium was the absolute northernmost point which Aquilonia could defend, and then only at the cost of maintaining a garrison of hundreds of men within the frowning walls of the greatest fort ever built north of Tarantia. Twenty miles to the North, Cassio Nepos knew, were the bat-haunted ruins of Venarium, where in his youth Aquilonia had attempted to probe further into the Cimmerian forests. Venarium had gone down in a howling tide of Cimmerian savages, when Cassio Nepos had been stationed there as a raw young graduate of the Royal Aquilonian Military Academy.

At the memory, the captain growled and spat over the battlements. Thirty feet away, a young guardsman grinned behind his shield and guessed correctly that Cassio Nepos was thinking about the humiliating defeat which he had suffered. The fall of Venarium had been the young officer’s first campaign, and he had been on watch at the time. At the head of a squad of soldiers he had met the howling charge of the barbarians, and had broken and run as the first Cimmerian, a youth even younger than himself, was within ten feet of him. Thirty years of honorable and heroic service against Picts, Kothians, Zingarians, and Nemedians had not wiped out the memory of this humiliation from the soul of the captain.

Now, beneath the controlled and rugged face of the commander of Thendarium, his soul seethed for revenge against Cimmeria. A new Cimmerian attack was brewing. Two nights previously, a badly wounded Pict gasped for admission to the fort’s gates. He told the Aquilonians that he was the sole survivor of a band of Picts who had been taken prisoner by their hereditary Cimmerian enemies and forced to run the gauntlet. Only he had survived this brutal application of Cimmerian humor, and he died a few hours after he had gasped out his story to Cassio Nepos and his officers.

“But as I awaited my turn,” he had said, “I heard the Cimmerian brutes boast that they would treat you as they treated us, on the eve of the next new moon.”

That night would be upon Thendarium when the sun set. Cassio Nepos had made his plans. An additional regiment of soldiers had been hastily summoned from Gunderland. Three different officers had made three separate inspections of the outer and inner walls. Lead had been melted in the huge siege kettle, and Pictish arrow poison had been purchased from a friendly tribe to anoint the Aquilonians’ weapons.

It did not occur to Cassio Nepos that he was in an equivocal position, defending the Cimmerian king of a Hyborian kingdom against the attacks of his Cimmerian kinsmen. The captain was a pure soldier, Conan was his king, and Aquilonia his country; and he defended them with all the considerable resources of a body hardened and a brain sharpened by three decades of almost continual border warfare.

“Alvio!” he called to the nearest guardsman.

“Yes, sir!” the man replied.

“Look you at that gap between those two oak trees!” the captain ordered. “See you a man with a bow?”

“No, sir. Ah -- Yes, just barely. But surely, sir, a bowman cannot be dangerous at that range?”

“No Shemitish or Kothic bowman, soldier,” said the captain. “But these are Cim—”

The air hissed, and suddenly Alvio lay dead, a long Cimmerian arrow through his throat. Simultaneously a long, ululating cry came from the edge of the darkening forest.

“The Cimmerians!” cried men from within Thendarium. Aquilonian soldiers poured out of the barracks as the unearthly cry continued, and hundreds of towering Cimmerians emerged from the forest. With deliberate slowness, Cassio Nepos strode to his place of command atop the fort’s keep.

At that period in Hyborean history, the Kingdom of Aquilonia stood at the pinnacle of military success. Its armies, under the inspired military leadership of King Conan, Count Trocero, and the Generals Prospero and Pallantides, had smashed challenges to Aquilonian hegemony from almost every other nation between the Western Ocean and the Sea of Vilayet. But the Cimmerians practiced no military science and ignored its refinements among their enemies. Without regard for enfiladed fire, poisoned spears, or two catapults which poured caltrops into their horde, they swept over the open field around the fort, down to the base of the walls, and up the steep battlements.

As Cassio Nepos watched in growing horror, two Cimmerians planted their heels at the base of the northwest wall and raised a third to their shoulders. An Aquilonian soldier thrust a halberd into the man’s face, turning it into a great bleeding gash. But before the Cimmerian toppled to the ground, he wrenched the weapon from his slayer’s hands and smashed his skull with the butt of it. Another barbarian took his place, balanced on his mates’ shoulders. Yet another swarmed up this human tower as a panther might climb a tree, and planted his hands on the edge of the battlement. An Aquilonian chopped off one hand with an axe; but with the other the Cimmerian grabbed him by the elbow and dashed him to the ground below, where other Cimmerians quickly smashed the soldier’s skull.