A kilometer from the outskirts of Frekka, ages of plodding caravans and grazing had turned the mammoth prairie into a barren waste: dusty now at high summer; muddy in season; and less depressing only in the depths of snow-swept winter because the whole continent was too bleak to contrast.
Part of the dust raised by the hooves of Hansen's pony had settled over him like a yellow drapery; much of the rest seemed to have clogged his throat. Messengers had run ahead when Hansen reached the bridge over the ditch protecting Golsingh's encampment. He was pleased to see that among the friends waiting for him at the flap of the king's tent was Malcolm—holding up a skin of beer.
Golsingh would have traveled in royal state, but Malcolm and Maharg must have had equally hard, dusty rides as they marshaled the other contingents from distant holdings. With luck, though, they'd've had less less difficulty than Hansen had, convincing lordlings to provide the warriors their oath to the king required.
Golsingh helped Hansen from his pony and tried to embrace him while Hansen slurped beer from the spout of Malcolm's flask.
"Any trouble?" Malcolm asked, as though the warchief would have been two days late—and ridden in alone—if there hadn't been trouble.
"The messenger arrived warning you'd been delayed, of course," Golsingh said. While the Lord of Thrasey pretended nonchalance, the king feigned reasoned coolness.
Hansen looked at the lowering sun. "The rest're two hours behind me," he said. "They'll be in before sunset."
He'd swallowed the first swig of beer. He rinsed his mouth with the second and spat it on the ground. Better late than never.
"Glockner held us up," he said.
"Said he wouldn't give you the men?" asked Maharg.
"Nothing that straight," Hansen explained. "You know Glockner. Took a day to round up enough baggage mammoths, and then some of them showed up lame. Third day, Glockner and about half the men I'd picked for his share of the muster, they came down with flu or something."
Malcolm shook his head angrily. "Well, we're probably as well off without that tricky bastard," he said. "But after we're done here, I'll go—"
"Oh, he's coming," Hansen said as he drank again. "He's back with the rest. Everybody got healthy faster'n you'd believe when I put my suit on and burned down Glockner's hall."
Maharg and Malcolm laughed. Golsingh's face blanked for a moment, and when he opened his mouth it was to say, "Rough work, Lord Hansen."
"Not as rough as hanging Glockner on a rope of his own guts," Hansen said flatly. "Which was the next step."
He met the king's eyes. "Peace is the desired end, milord . . . but for the moment, I'm your warchief."
Golsingh said nothing for a moment, then clasped Hansen's shoulder again. "Yes, I see that. It's a matter of knowing what to do. And you've proven already that you know better than—" he smiled his hard smile "—I did before our association."
"Figgered you had something like that in mind when you took Glockner fer yerself," Maharg said. "Hell, I coulda handled him."
Hansen grinned. "Yeah," he said, "but you would've made sure they all stayed inside when you burned the hall. This time I wanted his troops more 'n I wanted a lesson for the other barons. Matter of emphasis is all."
"They aren't proper warriors," Golsingh said suddenly. "Frekka's aren't."
He nodded westward, though the walls of Frekka were the better part of a kilometer away, out of sight beyond broken ground. "They wouldn't meet us mid-way for battle."
"They had scuts in armor shootin' bolts at us from the walls, too," Maharg put in. "Won't call 'em warriors."
Hansen's face stiffened. "That sort of game could get real expensive," he said.
"We need Frekka," Golsingh responded sharply, then tried to soften the words with a smile. "You convinced me of that, after all, Lord Hansen. Blasting the city to the ground won't do any good. And after all, we could simply move back out of range until you arrived."
He cleared his throat and smiled again. "Until we'd consolidated our forces."
"We've got warriors on guard at night," Malcolm said. "But I also thought maybe any freeman or slave kills a Frekka scout, then he should get a battlesuit and eat at the bench."
"They show they done it," added Maharg, "by bringin' us the ears."
Golsingh nodded. "That was Marshal Maharg's idea," he said. "And I approved both."
Hansen handed the beer to Malcolm. He kneaded first his buttocks, then his thighs, with his fingers. Hard to tell which parts hurt the most after he'd been in the saddle for most of three weeks, but at least a pony beat walking. A howdah on a mammoth, now . . . But that wasn't done; and anyway, he didn't feel comfortable around the huge beasts even when he was safe in his battlesuit.
"No reason not to go inside," the king said. "I'll have a meal prepared?"
"Sounds good to me," Hansen replied, taking Golsingh's gesture as a directive and ducking under the tent flap.
It bothered him sometimes that he'd knocked his fellows—his friends—so off-balance that they became indecisive as soon as he was around. They—all three of these men, the marshals and the king; and a number of the others he'd trained at Peace Rock and Thrasey over the past six months—could handle the new style of war without difficulty.
They had done so; this camp was proof of the fact. But as soon as Hansen appeared, they all stood around with their fingers up their collective ass.
Hansen sat cautiously on a camp chair while slaves bustled with a meal of cold boiled chicken and vegetables.
There was no delaying the real question, because all the royal forces were mustered now. All the help Golsingh was going to get was camped around him at this moment.
"What sort of numbers are we looking at?" Hansen asked.
The king licked his lips. "Many," he said. "I think—perhaps a thousand."
"Shit," said Hansen quietly.
He held a chicken drumstick while he hacked at the thigh joint with his belt knife. The knife didn't hold an edge worth a damn. "Where'd they all come from?"
"There's ships in the harbor," said Maharg. "Pirates."
"They've allied with three or four sea-kings," Malcolm agreed. "The Syndics have equipped the pirates with better armor in exchange for helping defend Frekka."
"Then they're bughouse crazy," Hansen said as he took a mouthful of meat. "People with money always think they can buy people with—" he started to say 'guns' "—weapons. What they buy is masters, if they're not damn careful to pick folks with honor."
None of the other three were touching the food. Either they'd already eaten or something had spoiled their appetite.
The enemy numbers had sure-god spoiled Hansen's appetite, though he couldn't let it show. With luck, the royal forces amounted to two and a half, maybe three, hundred warriors.
"They have a number of, I suppose, sailors and craftsmen wearing partial armor," Golsingh said. "The suits cover only the torso and one arm, so they don't really provide any protection; but they still have arc weapons, and they can be turned out much faster than complete suits of even poor quality."
Hansen shrugged. "We didn't expect it'd be easy," he said. "They're crazy to arm the pirates who've been bleedin' them, and the poor working scuts they've been bleeding, or I miss my bet."
He tossed the chicken bones toward the tent flap. "Anyhow," he added, "crazy or not, they're going to lose."
Hansen said the words because he thought it would cheer up his friends. He found, to his surprise, that he meant them.
"Sir?" called a messenger from beyond the flap of the tent in which Hansen slept alone. "Marshal Malcolm says there's troops coming from the city."
Hansen rolled to his feet, dropping the pry-bar back on his cot. "Got it," he mumbled as he climbed into the golden battlesuit. His muscles ached, his mouth felt like a wiping rag, and his sinuses were packed with yellow dust and mucus.
And all of that started to clear again with the familiar surge of adrenalin through his body. There'd be plenty of time to hurt later, if he survived.
Hansen's armor latched over him; the world sharpened. He'd set the brightness default to display 100% of normal daylight. The night's waxing moon provided enough light to kill by, but the amplified images were better by several orders of magnitude.
He wondered if the Syndics of Frekka had realized the full potential of their battlesuits. There hadn't been any sign of that in previous clashes with Frekka's hirelings.
The merchants were willing to ignore the traditional disdain for fighting at night, but that didn't require so much intelligence as it did a willingness to change the rules when the rules didn't suit them.
The Syndics didn't operate under the morality of shopkeepers, who know their customers and know they have to do business with them tomorrow as well. The leaders of Frekka had graduated to an attitude that'd always been common among the higher reaches of business and finance, when merchants saw a path to heaven through monopoly.
But Golsingh was in the way of that apotheosis; Golsingh, and Golsingh's new warchief. . . .
"Upper quadrant, map display," Hansen ordered his artificial intelligence. "All powered suits."
At the scale of the map, the attackers were a worm of red dots creeping from the blur of the city. The royal camp was a blue sea which brightened as additional warriors scrambled into their armor.
"Camp, secure commo," Hansen said. "All royal elements, do not, I repeat do not, leave your positions. Camp Marshals, enforce my command by whatever means necessary."
Half a year hadn't been enough time to turn all the warriors of Golsingh's army into disciplined soldiers. Malcolm might have qualms about striking down over-eager types who threatened to get in the way of the warchief's planned response, but he'd do it.
Maharg wouldn't hesitate an instant before using his new rank and battlesuit on warriors who'd scorned him six months earlier.
"Suit, rank and number of attackers," Hansen asked.
Red holographic figures overlay the map, rating the attackers' armor from Class 3 down to Class 12—a startlingly low quality, presumably indicating the partial suits to which the king had referred. There were fifty-seven all told in the attacking party, with a majority of their equipment in Class 12.
Cold meat for troops who knew what they were doing.
Which most of the royal army didn't—but Hansen didn't need most of the army.
He'd thought of calling the twenty-man command he'd organized under Maharg 'the Guards,' 'the Special Unit,' or the like. . . . But that would have made it a prestige appointment and made it difficult for him to keep out the sort of headstrong champions who had neither aptitude nor interest in learning how to use the suits they wore. So instead—
"All elements," Hansen said. "Marshal Maharg and Unit Four will deal with the raid. I'll accompany them. Marshal Malcolm—ah, Malcolm under the guidance of the king—commands the camp until I return."
"Hansen, you're not leaving me here!" Malcolm snapped, identified by his voice, by the tiny purple number on Hansen's display, and by the fact he was speaking on the command channel to which only the king, the marshals, and Hansen himself had access.
"Right!" said Maharg brightly, a usage he'd picked up from Hansen.
"Lord Hansen," said Golsingh, "I must forbid you to go out there. It's quite unnecessary, and you shouldn't be hazarding yourself in the darkness."
"Malcolm," Hansen said, "shut up and do your job! Lord Golsingh, with all respect—shut up and let me do my job!"
Hansen was panting and his legs quivered. He hadn't moved his body since he closed his armor and got on with the business of organizing the defense.
If he survived, maybe he'd apologize to the friends he'd just insulted. More likely, he'd figure he'd done what needed to be done at the time; which was never grounds for an apology.
"Maharg," Hansen called as he stepped into the open, "have the men ready. I'm on the way."
He forgot to allow for the helmet's bulk when he ducked through the flap. His head pulled the tent down behind him. Hansen's servants scuttled about the wreckage, squealing in concern.
The twenty-man team and their leader knelt just outside the north gate of the encampment. "Suit, tag Unit Four white on all unit displays," Maharg said as Hansen crossed the ditch.
Good, the boy was learning.
"Unit, secure commo," Hansen said as he clasped Maharg's shoulder in recognition.
The map quadrant of Hansen's display showed the attackers several hundred meters to the west of Golsingh's camp, stumbling in single file over the broken terrain. Definitely not using their suits' light amplifiers.
"Right," said Hansen. "We're going to take them in the middle. That's where their top people are. Maharg, you take Red Team and push the leaders into the ditch around the camp. I'll chivvy the rear ranks back to Frekka with Blue Team. Everybody clear?"
The response was jumbled, but Hansen's AI threw a gratifying eighteen of twenty-one possible up in the corner of his display.
"And everybody on 100% normal daylight?"
Sixteen rogers, followed by five more in mumbled embarrassment.
"Remember, it's just like training," Hansen added. "Except these guys aren't fit to wipe the asses of the people you trained against. Right?"
Rogerrogerroger.
"Let's move!"
Unit Four moved fast in the night, but they had a considerable distance to cover in order to attack perpendicularly to the enemy's line of advance. The Frekka forces halted in a grove of birches two hundred meters from the royal camp. They were bunching up as troops farther back in line reached the leaders.
They really didn't see Death arriving on their left flank until Hansen, twenty meters from a pair of stragglers, said, "Cut!" and the bright snarl of his arc sent Unit Four in at a run.
The first two targets required no more skill than a bandsaw needs for boards. Only the chests of these Frekka personnel were armored. Their legs burned like torches when the surge of Hansen's arc boiled all the water out of them.
There was an incandescent crackling along Unit Four's line of advance. The least of the men in Hansen's unit wore armor as good as the best suit among the Frekka troops, and trained teamwork would finish what shock had begun.
The trees to the left were aflame. Because of the way the Frekka forces had bunched, Maharg's Red Team had more than a fair share of targets—but Hansen was on the far right of the line, and he wasn't about to screw up an attack plan himself because he got greedy.
A dozen Frekka warriors hesitated on either side of the gully they'd been crossing when Unit Four slaughtered the men marching ahead of them. They turned and ran when Hansen faced them.
"Blue Team," Hansen shouted as he strode after them—the golden suit had enough power to jump the gully rather than struggling down one side and up the other—
"Follow m—"
There were two Frekka warriors in the gully as Hansen started to leap it. Their suits were in a class with the first one Golsingh issued to Hansen. An arc slashed across Hansen's crotch as he rose for the jump.
Instead of clearing the obstacle, he crashed into the far bank like a turtle who'd tried to fly.
Hansen's ears rang. The unexpected pain of his nose was as stunning as being struck by a thunderbolt. All around him was a roaring that fused clay into bubbling glass in a blue glare. Over the sound of the arc weapons he could hear men shouting.
Hansen's display turned fuzzy. The upper right quadrant still showed the red dots running toward his own white marker like flies headed for fresh carrion.
The pain of almost-blocked electrical discharges stopped abruptly. Hansen could smell the hair crisped over most of his body, but now the blazing arcs surrounded him at a slight distance. It was as though he rode a bottle through the heart of a tornado.
The red dots vanished. Hansen's display sharpened, but his eyes were too blurred with pain to focus on anything.
"Sir?" called one of the pair of his own men who were trying to lift Hansen upright. "Are you all right? Are you all right?"
Hansen managed to pat one of the men on the back; but it was almost a minute before he felt able to speak again.
Hansen assumed it was another slave entering the tent. He continued sponging at his face, treasuring the sting of cold water, until he heard Golsingh's voice say, "You all may leave. I'll take care of any needs the warchief may have."
Hansen opened his eyes. The slaves scurried out, setting the flames of the oil lamps dancing.
The king wore a sequin-patterned shawl over a pair of light coveralls. His face was serious.
Hansen dabbed at his face again. His nose hurt like hell itself, but he didn't think it was broken.
"I'm all right," he said. It struck him that the king's coveralls were modeled on Hansen's own pair.
Golsingh dipped a finger in the basin of water. "Wouldn't you like it heated?" he asked.
"It's okay."
Hansen wrung out the rag and met the king's eyes as well as his swollen nose would permit. "Lord Golsingh," he said, "I fucked up. I'm sorry."
Golsingh nodded. "Yes," he said, "you did."
The king sat down on the cot, blinked, and moved the pry-bar out from under him.
"Peace is very important to me, Lord Hansen," he said. Hansen went back to mopping his bruised face so that he wouldn't have to meet Golsingh's eyes. "The most important thing in my life."
Golsingh cleared his throat. "The—dream, if you will, that one day the men of this whole continent will be free of the necessity of fighting these interminable, useless wars.
"I suppose," he went on with a rising inflection which indicated he supposed no such thing, "you as a fighting man find that as—unpleasant as Taddeusz did?"
Hansen looked at the king out of the corner of his eyes. "No," he said, "I don't. If I can work myself out of a job here, then . . . then I'll have accomplished something. Something."
He shrugged, then barked a laugh. "Anyway," he said, wondering if Golsingh would understand just what he was admitting, "the job I'm doing at the moment's always been the only important thing to me. That hasn't changed since I wound up here."
"Yes, well . . . ," Golsingh said to his warchief's back. "In a duel, skill and the quality of one's armor are the important; but in a battle, a melee . . . often the better man falls to the lesser."
"I said I fucked up," Hansen said. "That doesn't mean I shouldn't've been out there tonight, it just means that I don't know everything. Yet."
"You've trained the men very well," Golsingh said. "And the Thrasey contingent, of course. We miss your company when you're in Thrasey, you know."
He cleared his throat again. "Unn often asks when you'll be returning. When you're at Thrasey or . . . just away from Peace Rock."
Hansen looked at the king. "Krita's still missing?" he asked.
Golsingh nodded. "Yes," he said. He toyed with his moustache before resuming, "Unn—we—would be very upset if something happened because you'd put yourself in a position that someone else could have handled just as well."
Hansen held the rag over his face and eyes. He wondered if the hot, prickling flush he felt crawling over his skin was visible to the man sitting behind him.
"You see," Golsingh continued softly, "I need you if my—dream of peace is to succeed. And that's more important to me than anything."
"You don't need me," Hansen replied in a thick voice.
He dropped the cloth into the basin and faced the king. "You've learned the important part," he said. "Strike for the head and never mind the little shit, that'll come when the head falls."
Golsingh opened his mouth to speak, but Hansen chopped him off with an abrupt motion of his hand.
"Tactics?" Hansen continued. "Malcolm and Maharg can handle that now. Maybe there's still some tricks they haven't got yet, but they've learned how to learn, and that's the important thing.
"You don't need me anymore."
The king stood up. His face wore a quiet smile. "Be careful tomorrow," he said. "That's all I ask. We ask."
He walked to the flap, then looked over his shoulder again at Hansen. "After all," he said, "you're also my friend."
Hansen continued to stare at the tent flap long after it had closed behind Golsingh.