Evening the First

As told by Hjalti One-Eye in the Broken Tusk, a wine-sink in Sepermeru, the City of the Relic Hunters — and written down, cup by cup, by a hand that stayed sober longer than he did.

Draw close, and put a cup in my hand, for the throat is a dry road and the tale is long.

You want the Cimmerian. Aye — I thought you might. They are a grim folk, the sons of Crom, born on grey hills under a god who gives a man nothing at his birth but the strength in his arms and the will to spend it. Crom keeps no hall of songs. He does not love, he does not listen, and when a Cimmerian dies his deeds go down into the dust with him and are not spoken of again — for that folk will not boast, not even of themselves.

So someone must. That someone, tonight, for the price of this cup, is me.

His name was Strabo Nagi, and when this tale begins he was young — strong as a green tree is strong, and as untested. No scars yet to read him by. The making of him is the whole of the song.

The First Telling — The Cross and the First Stones

They had nailed him to the wood at the edge of the Exiled Lands, where the sun comes down like a smith's hammer and the sand drinks men whole and leaves only the belt-buckles.

When the beam gave and he fell, he did not feel his knees strike the ground. He felt a coolness slide across his back — the shadow of a vulture, wheeling, patient — and that was the thing that woke him, for a man does not become carrion while he can still be angry about it. He got his feet under him. Among Crom's people that is the only prayer there is: a man stands, or he does not.

The wilds came to take his measure that first day. Squat red things out of the rocks — imps, the relic-hunters call them, leather-winged and grinning, and one fat kind that runs at you and bursts like a dropped wineskin of fire. Pale frog-backed creatures in the shallows, the kappa, green as old copper, that watch you with a drowned man's eyes. Seven beasts he put down before the light failed, and his hands learned what they had not known that morning: the particular weight of a thing that wishes to kill you.

He did not run. He chose ground instead — in the southern reaches, hard by the standing stones the wanderers call the Sentinels — and there he set his first stones upon the earth. Not a hold yet. The promise of one. A man telling the desert: I am staying.

The Second Telling — He Frees the Bound

(Another night, this — the fire was low and the room full of thieves, and a Shemite at the back kept very quiet while I told it.)

Hear now the thing that sets this Cimmerian apart, for it is not strength; many have strength.

He had worn the rope himself. He remembered it.

So when he came upon the bound — the slaves of the camps, the chained and the collared — he did not do what conquerors do. He came upon a Shemite bowman of the Exiles, a lean desert-born with quick eyes, and Strabo struck the irons from him and said no word of kneel. He set the man's own bow back into his hands — which is a louder thing than any oath — and the bowman looked at the open road, and at the Cimmerian, and chose the Cimmerian.

It became his way. A jester of the Black Hand, a Zingarian with a clown's tongue and a coward's good sense, who I'll wager talked the whole way to freedom and has not stopped since. A Zamorian cook, sly and round, whom Strabo set to a fire in his own hold — and so the young hold got the smell of bread, which is the smell that turns a heap of stones into a home. Later a smith of the Dogs of the Desert, a Shemite with soot in the creases of him, to wake an anvil.

He freed them, and they stayed. Crom does not teach this. Strabo learned it on the cross.

The Third Telling — The Monstrous Crocodile

Now the river by his new-laid stones was a black and breathing thing, and out of it, one evening, came the first of his dread foes.

You have seen the small crocodiles, the ones a man can wrestle and curse and survive. This was not that. This was a great-grandfather of crocodiles, long as a war-canoe, hide like a wall of green shields, and when it came up the bank the water ran off it in sheets and the ground took its weight like a struck drum. A monstrous crocodile, and it had decided the Cimmerian's stones were within its country.

He met it there, in the southern reaches, within sight of his own roof. It is one thing to kill a beast in the wilds; it is another to kill it on your own threshold, where losing means you have nowhere left to bleed. He did not give ground. When it was done his arms shook so he could not lift the cup — but the threshold was his, and the river learned his name, and on that day the green tree began to harden into a spear.

(He passed days, too, that no song needs — bent to the earth, drawing stone and wood and ore, raising walls, the slow grey work that no skald sings and every hold is built on. A man's saga is mostly that. I leave it out so you will keep buying me drink.)

The Fourth Telling — The Swamp King

(I came back when the moon was a thin knife, and they remembered where I'd left off, which is more than most rooms manage.)

Then he went looking. That is the change in a man — the day he stops waiting for the wilds to come to his door and goes to their door instead. He went south and east, to where the land rots and the water goes still and breathing, to the mouth of a cave the locals will only point at — the Executioner's Cave, they name it, and they spit after.

The marsh gave up its host to try him: the boulder-backed rocknoses that look like walking stone until the stone turns and bites; the laughing striped hyenas; the grey spiders, big as hounds, that drop without a sound. A dozen beasts he cut a road through. And at the end of that road stood the Swamp King.

What is a Swamp King? A thing the bog made when it wanted a champion — crowned in its own filth, vast, patient, certain. It had never been refused. The young Cimmerian refused it. And the marsh got a new and quieter king, which was no one, which was the way the marsh had been before kings.

The Fifth Telling — The Executioner

Hear the last of it for tonight, and it is the darkest, so drink first.

He went back into that cursed cave, down where the air is old and the dead do not lie still. Bone walked there. Skeletal warriors with rusted iron, bowmen of bone loosing shafts from the dark — the unburied, set to guard a thing that should have stayed buried. Fifty of the wretched things he broke that day. Fifty. I do not say it to flatter him; I say it because my own arm aches to think of it.

And the thing they guarded was the Executioner — a deathless lizard-man of the marsh, a horror that had done murder so long that death itself had given up on collecting him. It came on without hurry, the way only the truly old and the truly dead can, certain that the boy before it was simply the next.

I was not in that dark. No skald was. But he came out, and the Executioner did not, and a man who walks out of the Executioner's own cave with the Executioner's silence behind him is no longer young in the way he was. Even down in the soot he found a chained smith and struck off his irons — at the bottom of a tomb, with his arms full of slaughter, he still stopped to free a man. That, more than the fifty, is the measure of him.

Coda

So stands Strabo Nagi tonight — eight-and-forty winters of hard-won strength in his arms, a hold with bread-smell and an anvil's ring, a freed people who chose him, a river and a marsh and a tomb that all learned to be quiet when he passed. The green tree is a spear now. Crom, who watches nothing, would grant him nothing — but Crom made him strong, and he has spent it well, and that is the only worship that grim god understands.

The tale is not done. It is only as far as I have heard.

Come back when the cup is full again, and I will tell you what he did next.

— Hjalti One-Eye