"It's customary after a battle, Lord Hansen . . . ," said Krita as she leaned forward to fill his cup.
The breasts wobbling beneath the scooped neckline of her blouse were fuller than the taut planes of her face and her muscular limbs had led him to expect.
". . . for a warrior to describe his own exploits. Not those of a—friend?"
"Shill was my friend, yes," Hansen said coldly.
"Maybe he didn't have any exploits to describe," suggested Unn. "Is that it, Lord Hansen?"
"Krita, girl," said Taddeusz from the opposite corner of the cross-table, "stop chattering while we're trying to plan. And leave him alone anyway."
Krita looked at Unn, balancing the beer pitcher on her hip. She was wearing red again, while Unn's dress was of linen dyed the same rich blue as Shill's eyes.
"I hear," said Krita, as though she hadn't heard her father speak, "that Hansen was one of Lord Malcolm's greatest champions. And we know what a hero Malcolm was—"
Krita bent again, this time filling Malcolm's mug.
Hansen thought the new Lord of Thrasey looked flushed, but with Malcolm's complexion it was hard to tell. Besides, the color might come from drink, the hearth, or the fact that Malcolm was now the man sitting to the King's immediate left.
"—don't we?"
She drew her index finger up the back of Malcolm's wrist. He jerked his hand back as though she'd touched him with a branding iron. Taddeusz clutched the arms of his chair.
"Lord Golsingh?" Hansen said loudly to cut through the woman's—the women's—deliberate provocation. "Have you given any thought to what I said about Frekka?"
"Have I realized that you were correct in what you told me before the battle?" Golsingh said with the trace of a smile. "Yes, I have."
He looked to his other side. "And you're of the same opinion now too, aren't you, foster father?"
"That Frekka needs to be put down?" Taddeusz said harshly. "Yes, I'll grant that. Burnt down and sown with salt, I say—but you've got your own notions there, too, don't you?"
He glared fiercely at Hansen. His daughter shifted so that her back was to the warchief and her mocking, enticing smile played over Malcolm, Hansen and Maharg.
"We need—" Hansen said.
"We need!" Taddeusz snarled.
"Lord Golsingh needs—" Hansen said, raising his voice to shout down the warchief if that were necessary, but Taddeusz was only interjecting "—the trade and manufacture of Frekka to succeed in his plan of unifying his kingdom. What he doesn't need are the present Syndics of Frekka and their games."
Taddeusz drained his goblet. "And Golsingh will take your advice, I suppose?" he said/asked bitterly.
"The king will do as seems good to the king, foster father," Golsingh said in his thin voice.
Taddeusz met his eyes for a moment, then blinked.
"More beer, girl," he growled as he thrust his goblet out to Krita. Unn filled it instead.
"I've looked over your suggestions of which warriors go to Thrasey with Lord Malcolm," Golsingh continued when he was sure his point had been taken.
"And your own requests, Lord Malcolm." He nodded toward Malcolm, who leaned closer in relief at the change of subject. "There are discrepancies." The king smiled. "Only discrepancies, I would say. Now. . . ."
The conversation turned to the merits—and otherwise—of warriors Hansen knew only as battlecolors, not names. He relaxed, glad not to have a fight just now. He was bruised and aching, and his eulogy on Shill had drained whatever energy the battle two days ago had left.
Shill died because he trusted Hansen farther than he should have.
Maharg got up from the table. He patted Hansen on the shoulder and said, "Thanks," as he left.
Maharg wasn't on watch tonight, and he'd made a female friend since he came back from the battle a hero. . . . Which was Maharg's doing, not Hansen's, not really; but the boy didn't see it that way.
A female friend. . . .
"We've been wondering, Lord Hansen," said Krita as she refilled the mug that he seemed to have emptied, to his surprise, "whether you're one of those men who don't like women?"
"What?" The question sobered him like a bucket of melt-water.
Unn's eyes were amused, Krita's were laughing.
"Since none of the girls say you've," Krita continued, "shall we say—given them the time. That's so, isn't it?"
"I haven't had the time!" Hansen snapped, flicking his eyes right and left—and right again, to the cross-table; but thank god the bitch had chosen to keep this conversation in a low voice.
He grimaced. "This is the first day since I've, I've been here, that I haven't been training in my battlesuit. You know how exhausting that is."
"Are you ashamed of your tastes?" Unn asked coolly. "Some of the male slaves quite like it, we're told. Not that it matters what a slave thinks."
Krita giggled. "Some of the warriors, too. And not the least of them, either. Would you like some names?"
"What I'd like—" said Hansen, standing as he downed the beer in his mug in three quick gulps. And he'd been wondering if Malcolm was flushing at this bitch's games! The low firelight was sufficient camouflage now, thank goodness.
"What I'd like is a piss and my bed."
He stamped out of the hall for the former; and, much later, having emptied the skin of beer he'd taken from a servant, he returned and found his bed.
Hansen was awakened by the sound of the bar sliding between the staples of his door, locking it from the inside. There was no light at all.
Hansen swung his body erect at the far end of the bed. He didn't get up because his legs were tangled with furs. He'd do himself more trouble than help by the noise he'd make trying to free them.
In Hansen's right hand was an iron pry-bar, half a meter long. He held his breath and the weapon, waiting for the intruder to make his move.
"Do you have the time now, Hansen?" whispered a woman's throaty voice. "Or should I send you one of the serving boys?"
A woman's voice, the smell of a woman. . . . Hansen's body began to shiver.
The plank bed trembled as she rested her hand on it, then sat down. "Are you afraid?" she murmured.
"No," Hansen lied. "Why are you—"
Her fingertips, then her palms, slid through the hairs of his bare chest.
You bet he was afraid of Krita. She was her father's daughter, headstrong and violent—and surely frustrated in a dozen different ways, ready to light a fuze in order to watch the explosion that would follow.
Taddeusz was out in the hall, slumped in drink over the table. If he even dreamed—
But it'd been too long since Hansen made love to a woman. He hooked the pry-bar over the edge of the bed and reached for Krita.
She wore a robe of thick, clinging material. He fumbled with it for a moment.
"Wait," she said, imperious in the darkness, and pushed Hansen's fingers out of the way. Ribbon-ends brushed him as she untied them; then her strong hands pulled his face down to her breasts. Despite her cool demeanor, Krita's heart was beating fiercely and her nipples were already erect.
They made love with a swift violence that embarrassed Hansen—it had been a long time—but thrilled the woman to the point that at climax she bit his shoulder to stifle her cries.
He continued to stroke into her, uncertain as to the etiquette of sex here on Northworld—and individuals were more different than cultures, besides.
Krita murmured in question, then fell into the rhythm again. Her head tossed and she moaned, "Oh Penny bless me . . . oh bless me . . . oh, oh. . . ."
She buried her face in his shoulder again, this time without biting, and began shuddering through a series of multiple climaxes while Hansen thought of Krita's father and the fact her breasts were flatter and broader than they had seemed when he glimpsed them beneath her dress.
"Oh, gods . . . ," she whispered as she let her body go limp. Her fine hair pooled over his hands. He imagined it in the light of the hearth, black with auburn streaks colored by the glowing coals.
"Why did you come here, Hansen?" she asked. Her fingers kneaded the great muscles over his shoulders, then traced down the knobs of his spine.
"Chance," Hansen said in the honesty of the moment.
He realized as he spoke that his honest statement was almost certainly untrue. North and the Consensus were playing a game, and Nils Hansen was one of their pawns.
But that truth wasn't one to speak here.
"But I'm probably the only person on this—" planet, but he wouldn't say that "—kingdom who can make Golsingh's dreams a reality. And that's what I'm going to do."
"Then you really intend to help the king?" Krita said. She chuckled. "Taddeusz hates you, you know?"
"Yeah, I'd figured that out."
"He thinks you're a deliberate troublemaker."
Her fingertips lightly massaged the place she'd bitten. Hansen felt it burning. She'd broken the skin for sure . . . but it wasn't anything that'd show with his clothes on. "He thinks you were sent by Frekka to bring down the kingdom."
Hansen snorted. "He wouldn't think that," he said, "if he'd been where the battle was being decided the other day instead of haring off on a private war of his own. Golsingh'd be cold meat today if it weren't for . . ."
"If it weren't for you?" Krita prompted, challenge in her tone.
"If it weren't for Shill," Hansen said. "And Malcolm. But yeah, I was there too. And your father wasn't."
Her body shifted. "Here," she said. "Lie beside me for a moment. Is there enough room?"
There was, so long as Hansen watched his head. The bed was almost as broad as the cubicle itself, but the sweep of the thatch lowered the ceiling on the outer edge.
She ran a hand down his chest to his groin. Hansen's belly muscles twitched. He was always ticklish, but particularly at times like these.
He was as relaxed as he'd ever been in his life. He began to play with the woman's groin.
"I've heard what happened during the battle," she said. Her vaginal muscles sucked greedily at his finger. "The real stories—oh—not just the boasting around the table tonight. Oh. Oh. Why do you. Blame yourself. For Shill dying?"
Hansen concentrated on what he was doing. Discipline had gotten him through a lot of bad moments, out of a lot of situations that he'd rather not have been in.
"Because he was my man," he said quietly. "Because he did what I ordered him to do and taught him to do, and doing that got him killed."
"And so he died cursing you?" the woman said. "That's not what I heard."
"He didn't know what he was saying at the end," Hansen said.
"Don't believe it!" Krita said harshly. She pulled his face down to her breasts again. "Yes," she murmured, "yessss. . . . Bite them—please, bite."
Her fingers were like oaken dowels on the back of his head and neck.
"Shill was sixty years old," she whispered into Hansen's ear. "He'd never been anything. He wouldn't even have had a job here if it weren't for Malcolm, and Taddeusz wanting to keep Malcolm happy even though he doesn't like him."
She'd been manipulating his prick as she spoke. Now she threw her legs over his. The ceiling was in the way. Hansen slid sideways, to where the thatch gave her enough room to mount him.
"You made Shill a warrior, Hansen," she said as she inserted him into herself. "You made him a man. If you were a god, you couldn't have served him better."
A fist pounded on the barred door. "Krita?" Taddeusz shouted. "Krita! Come out of there, you little bitch!"
Hansen's hand gripped the end of his pry-bar. "Your idea?" he asked softly.
"Gods no!" the woman gasped as she fumbled for her robe. "No, no. Oh, gods, I'm . . ."
"Hansen, open this door or I'll break it down!" Taddeusz demanded. His fist slammed the panel hard enough to spring the boards. A trickle of yellow lamplight entered the cubicle.
Hansen explored the ceiling with his hand. The thatch was on stringers at half-meter intervals, plenty of room to slip a body through—but there was a mesh of withies above the stringers, and that wouldn't pass anything larger than a clenched fist.
"Didn't I say open?" bellowed Taddeusz as the door slammed repeatedly. The bar held but the panel itself began to split.
"Into the suit!" Hansen whispered as he tucked his pry-bar under one of the stringers and lifted, putting his full strength into the motion.
The mass of thatch shifted, but only a few strands of the tough willow-wand netting popped despite his effort. Hansen moved the bar and tried again. Night air gushed through the temporary gaps.
Half a board smashed in from the door. Taddeusz' big hand reached through the rectangle of lamplight and raised the latch.
The woman was out of sight.
Hansen swung to his feet and pulled the door open. He wished he'd had time to dress, but he wished a lot of things right about now. He held the pry-bar loosely at his side.
"What's all this about?" he demanded as Taddeusz pushed him backward and Hansen slammed the heel of his foot down on Taddeusz' instep.
The warchief yelped and halted. The hall behind him was full of people. Nobody in the building could've been drunk enough to sleep through that hammering.
Taddeusz carried one of the freemen's lances, gripping it well ahead of the balance. An awkward weapon.
"Where is she?" he said. "I knew she was here as soon as I went up to the room and found her gone!"
"Look," Hansen said, "there's nobody here. Let's move back and discuss this—"
Taddeusz thrust the lance past Hansen, into the furs piled on the bed. The bed platform splintered. Taddeusz was a strong bastard, no mistake.
"Where is—" the warchief said as he stabbed again, a horizontal stroke that pinned the furs against the far wall of the cubicle.
"What's going on here?" Golsingh demanded from somewhere back in the crowd. "Taddeusz?"
"Keep back!" Taddeusz snapped. "This is for me."
He scowled, then brightened with surmise. "In the armor, is—"
Hansen stood with his back against the battlesuit. "If you touch my armor without permission, warrior," he said with terrible distinctness, "I will kill you here and now."
He pointed the end of the pry-bar between Taddeusz' eyes, only a hand's breadth away.
Malcolm forced his way through the doorway. He gripped the warchief's right elbow with both hands. Taddeusz shook himself free with contemptuous ease.
"I'll break your neck anyway," Taddeusz snarled.
His muscles bunched, then froze as a voice crackled from the hollow of the hall saying, "Father! What's the matter with you? Are you mad?"
"Look," said the freeman holding the lamp. He pointed toward the thatch that Hansen's desperate efforts had torn.
Taddeusz turned slowly, then burst out of the bed cubicle like a boar charging hounds.
Malcolm exhaled in relief. Hansen was too focused to feel anything. He pushed his friend from the cubicle behind Taddeusz and followed, pulling the broken door closed behind him.
A dozen animal-fat lamps supplemented the dull glow of the hearth. Krita stood near Golsingh. She wore boots and a fur cape on which the snow was melting.
"Where were you, you whore?" Taddeusz demanded in a thick voice.
"Outside, walking with Unn," his daughter blazed. "If it's any concern to a drunken pig like you!"
"You were not, you slut!" Taddeusz roar as he lurched forward.
Golsingh stepped between father and daughter, saying, "Fos—" and Taddeusz stiff-armed him out of the way.
Never hit a man with your bare hand, a man had once told Hansen. An old man, too old to live but too tough to die.
Hansen raised the pry-bar, measuring the distance to the back of the warchief's skull which wasn't as hard as iron whatever he might think—
A figure in a battlesuit stepped into Taddeusz' path. The warchief crashed into the armor, bounced back, and raised his fist in a gesture so vain that even he understood its absurdity.
Taddeusz twined the fingers of both hands around themselves. He squeezed as though choking a dragon.
The battlesuit was Hansen's own.
Had been Hansen's. He'd claimed Tooley's armor after the battle, and his own suit went to—
Maharg's voice boomed from the battlesuit's amplifier, "Excellency? Are you all right?"
The suit's great steel arm extended toward Golsingh, who was already picking himself up from the floor.
If Krita was here, fully dressed—and she was—then who in hell had he been fucking?
Taddeusz knelt before Golsingh.
"Excellency," he said in a voice choked by emotion. "I don't deserve to live. Slay me, but grant my spirit forgiveness for the insult to which my whore of a daughter drove me."
"Don't—here, get up, foster father," Golsingh said uncomfortably. "Come on, we've all been drinking, and we've imagined things tonight, I'm sure."
The warchief arose. He looked even more like a bear when the lamps woke amber highlights from his beard and moustache. "No imagining, Excellency," he said.
Taddeusz turned and pointed to Hansen. "A joke for you, was it? Drag my name through the cesspit?"
"Father!"
"I wish you no disrespect, Lord Taddeusz," Hansen said carefully. The warchief had lost his lance at some time during the scuffling, but he could still break a man's neck with his hands.
"You'll do me none after tomorrow," Taddeusz said heavily. "Lord Hansen, I challenge you. We'll meet tomorrow at midday."
"Foster father, this is not a thing I wish!" the king said sharply.
The big man glanced at him.
"I regret that, Excellency," he said. "But it happens nonetheless. It's a matter of my honor."
Taddeusz glared past Golsingh toward his daughter. She looked away angrily.
Golsingh shrugged. "So be it, then," he said without raising his voice. "But—if you do this thing, against my express will, Lord Taddeusz . . . you will leave Peace Rock and never return. I swear it."
Taddeusz nodded. "So be it, then," he said.
An opening at warchief—just the kind of move that Hansen needed for his reorganization to work, though a bit early, three months later after Malcolm proved himself, that'd be better. . . .
Except that everybody was assuming Hansen, the catalyst of the change, would be dead after tomorrow's duel.
Golsingh looked around the hall bleakly. "Go to your beds," he ordered. "There's been enough harm done this night."
"Wait," said Malcolm. The veteran was wearing boots and a linen nightshift, damp with the snow that had fallen on him when he ran to the hall at the sound of trouble. His body, from chest through hips, was a solid tube of muscle. "You can't set the meeting so soon."
Taddeusz looked from Malcolm to Hansen and snorted dismissively. The big man was no longer angry, just determined. "What's the matter?" he said. "Is your friend afraid to die?"
Hansen smiled. He wasn't sure what the answer to that one was. Too much had happened. Been happening.
"He'll meet you in a tennight," Malcolm insisted. "You can wait that long."
Krita had disappeared, but most of the others in the hall, warriors and servants alike, were listening with interest. Golsingh waited with a hard, emotionless expression which Hansen suspected was a mirror of his own.
Taddeusz shook his head. "The challenged has three days by custom to settle his affairs," he said. "Three days and a half day, then."
Taddeusz looked at Hansen. His visage was that of a man glaring at the turd onto which he'd just stepped. "Or he can run. He can go farther in that time than I'd be willing to chase him."
Malcolm looked at Golsingh. "Excellency? A tennight would—"
The king shook his head. "Lord Taddeusz will have what custom dictates during his remaining stay at Peace Rock," he said coldly. "In three days and a half day, then."
He and the warchief both turned and strode toward the ladder to their chambers above the far end of the hall. They didn't look at one another. When the crowd didn't part quite fast enough, a thrust of Taddeusz' arm slammed a number of people into the wall.
Golsingh turned at the base of the ladder and shouted, "Go to your beds, damn you!"
The crowd scattered to side-chambers and the entrance, murmuring in voices as dim as the glow of the long hearth.
Hansen let out his breath. He was stark naked and the hall was cold. Malcolm stood beside him, and Maharg was returning from having stripped off his armor in his own chamber.
Now that the lamps were gone, the hall was dark. Its framework creaked mournfully as wind pressed the roof.
"Just a second," Hansen said, slipping into his cubicle. He closed the remains of the door before he started exploring the darkness with his hands.
His battlesuit stood ajar. There was no one within the armor, no one hidden in the pile of bedding. The tear in the thatch Hansen had made as camouflage was wider and a real gap, now that somebody with a sharp blade had slashed through the mesh of withies.
The knife must've been in her robe, because it sure wasn't hidden in what she was wearing when Taddeusz started banging on the door. . . .
Hansen started pulling on his coveralls. "Come on in here, then," he said as he reopened the door. It wasn't much privacy, but with Malcolm's cubicle to one side and Maharg's to the other, it would do about as well as anything available.
He couldn't see Malcolm's expression in the darkness, but there was a combination of wonder and regret in the veteran's voice as he fingered the torn thatch and said, "Well, laddie, you've got expensive tastes, haven't you? This time it's your life they've cost you."
"I appreciate your confidence," Hansen snapped.
Maharg was standing like a fireplug in front of the door.
"You did a smart thing, putting your armor on," Hansen said to him. He grimaced. "A lot smarter than anything I did tonight, Malcolm. I know that. Question is, where to we go from here?"
"Your only chance was getting the Thrasey armor," Malcolm said, impressively calm and matter-of-fact. "It's a royal suit, and with a good enough repair job, it might stand up to Taddeusz."
Hansen had seen too many officers flustered when the news they had to report was very bad. That got in the way of solutions . . . and damage limitation, when there were no solutions. But as for what Malcolm was saying—
"I've got armor," Hansen said. "And I wouldn't take Shill's suit if it were that or go naked."
"Shill doesn't need it—"
"I don't need a suit!" Hansen snapped. "I've got Tooley's suit. And what's Shill's is Shill's!"
"Oh, it's a good suit, is Tooley's," Malcolm said reasonably, as though unaware of the hard edge glinting from Hansen's tone. "As I know to my cost, having been put down by it—and out, it would have been, without you, laddie—and Maharg here; and without Shill, to whom I owe my life as surely as Golsingh does, I think, but he's still dead."
"There isn't time," said Maharg. "To get to the mound and get back, mebbe. But not to get it fixed, no way. That's a three-day job with the head off, you bet."
"Look—" said Hansen, his anger past.
"No, laddie," said Malcolm, patting his shoulder in the darkness. "You listen, because it's as you said: you're a warrior, but not with battlesuits."
Malcolm sat on the bed, drawing Hansen down beside him. "You think Tooley's armor is good," he continued, "and so it is; but Taddeusz wears a royal suit, and that's to yours as my armor was to Tooley that day that would've been my last without your help. And there will be no help in a duel."
"He took Zieborn down wearing crap," Maharg said. "Villiers' suit, that was crap aginst my old one, even."
"You tricked Zieborn," Malcolm said reasonably, "and very clever it was, laddie; but you won't trick Taddeusz. He watched you then, and for all that he's a bastard, our Taddeusz is as fell and canny a warrior as we'll any of us meet."
"Musta killed more folks 'n bunk in the hall, he must," Maharg agreed sadly.
"So for you to face him . . . ," Malcolm continued. "Remember what it was like for you when Krita matched herself against you—and you wound up wrestling—the first time? Now, think what that'll be like with her father and the weapons at full bore."
Maharg snorted with laughter. "Taddeusz's gonna fuck you good!" he quipped.
Hansen found his face grinning even as his mind wondered sourly whether Maharg would think the joke as funny were it his neck on the chopping block.
It also occurred to him that he, and Taddeusz' daughter, and one other woman, were the only people in Peace Rock who didn't believe that Krita had been in Hansen's bed this night.
There was no way Krita could have cut her way through the willow mesh soon enough to reenter the hall fully dressed at the time Hansen saw her. Which might mean his plans and his life were about to end because of half an hour with some slut from the scullery. . . . But he didn't believe that either.
"All right," he said coldly. "What do you see as the options?"
"Run," said Malcolm flatly. "Or die, laddie. Because you're too big to wear her suit—"
"If she'd let me borrow it," Hansen said.
"As she might, women being as they are," Malcolm continued. "And too big as well for Golsingh's, or I think he'd have offered it from what I saw on his face. He's a smart man, our king . . . and a hard one, which is much the same at times."
"Thrasey ain't far enough," Maharg said, dropping the words into a silence. "Nowhere Taddeusz might hear. Nowhere in the kingdom."
"And the kingdom will be the worse for it, laddie," Malcolm said softly, "and we'll all be the worse. But that's not so much to bear when you're alive, isn't it?"
Hansen barked out a laugh. "You don't think I owe it to honor to meet the challenge, then?" he asked.
"Taddeusz would think that," said the veteran very carefully. "And it might be that I would think that, were it me whom Taddeusz challenged. But just as being a warrior is different where you come from, laddie . . . I think honor is different as well. Not so?"
Hansen looked at him. There was no light and no expression at all. Maharg drew in his breath.
"Which is not to say," said Malcolm, "that I ever doubted you were a warrior either, you must see."
Hansen relaxed. "Yeah, I guess I do," he said.
He laughed harshly again. "Look," he added, "the main thing I see is that there'll be time after a night's sleep for anything we can figure out to do. And I'll be in better shape to deal with it then."
Malcolm squeezed his shoulder again. He and Maharg went to their own cubicles.
Dawn streamed through the hole in the roof. The weather had finally broken, and the sky was clear.
Hansen raised his head from the cocoon of furs—blinked—snatched up the pry-bar. There was a meter-long snake, probably disturbed from its winter burrow in the thatch, coiled in the open front of his battlesuit.
He got stealthily to his feet. The snake turned its head.
It had one bright eye and a milky globe for the other.
"Well, Hansssen . . . ," Walker said. "Are you ready to be my man for a battlesssuit? For a sssuit that a god would envy, to be my man . . . ?"
Walker's forked tongue flicked and toyed with something scarcely visible, caught in the latch of the armor.
"I'd need it in three days," Hansen said. "Otherwise—"
He took a deep breath and made the decision that his mind had waited till dawn to confirm. "Otherwise I'll fight him with what I've got."
"In no time at all, Hansssen," the snake replied. "I have told you that you musssn't think of duration here, you musssn't. . . ."
Hansen tossed the pry-bar onto his bed. It rang on the planks. "All right," he said. "What do I have to do?"
A ray of sunlight caught the thing Walker was playing with and turned it to a wire of gold. It was a strand of blond hair, long blond hair—
The hair of Golsingh's wife Unn.