"Now, let me scout the lay of the land," Blood said, pausing at the edge of servants and retainers around King Wenceslas, "before you shoot your mouth off."
"Fine with me," Hansen agreed mildly. The sun was well up, but the king's tent had not yet been struck—and Wenceslas' contingent was farther along than were some of the others in the Confederate forces.
"A' course," Blood admitted, "I don't really understand the crap myself. But fuck it, I guess it's a good idea. Let's go."
The red-haired warrior strode forward, muscling servants aside. Two senior warriors, Garces and Hopewell, discussed with the king the prospects for hawking this close to Frekka. They, with Blood, were Wenceslas' chief aides—bodyguards—and drinking companions.
"Vince," Blood said to the king, "I need t' talk to you without all these chickenshits around, okay?"
"Who you calling chickenshit, buddy?" said Garces, a black-bearded man whose beer gut did not keep him from looking both powerful and dangerous.
"Hey, not you guys," Blood explained hastily. He pushed at Wenceslas' secretary, a freeman wearing a cloak trimmed with beaver fur. "You know, the other guys."
Wenceslas looked around the chaotic camp. The Simplain mercenaries under Lord Guest had marched off an hour earlier. Some of the smaller contingents had followed, in no particular order; though by this time in the invasion, an order of march had been established in practice if not by formal agreement.
"Oh, all right," the king said. "Go on, give us some room, you all!"
Hopewell looked hard at Hansen.
"Not him," Blood said. "Look, it's his idea. It's about—"
He looked around. The servants moved away, chattering among themselves. A few of the more cultured—the secretary among them—glared disdainfully at the crude warriors whose inferiority was a secret article of faith in the servants' hearts.
"Right," Blood said. "Look, Hansen, you understand it better 'n me, so you tell them. It's about winning the battle."
"Damn right we're going to win the battle!" Garces growled. "Assuming they come out 'n fight us, leastways."
"I don't think there'll be a problem with that," murmured Wenceslas.
It struck Hansen that the king was by no means a stupid man. It was even possible that he was smart enough to agree to Hansen's plan. . . .
"When we meet the imperial army, your majesty," Hansen said, "they'll be better disciplined than our troops. We'll have some edge in—"
Hopewell, a blond man in his twenties, built like a demigod, spat noisily to the side. "Discipline is a lot of bullshit," he said. "What wins battles is good armor and good men—and we got that. Venkatna's pussies, they have t' ask permission to wipe their ass. Fighting's for one man at a time—if he's a man."
Hansen remembered:
The Easterner's armor is dark green, with chevrons of lighter green across his back and chest. His battlesuit is of royal quality. It absorbs all the power Hansen can pour into it, while the Easterner forces his own arc inexorably down toward Malcolm's helmet.
Needles of ozone jab Hansen's lungs. He stretches out his left hand slowly, fighting the drag of his battlesuit's sticky joints. The stress of the duel has drawn all power away from the suit's servos. The soil under the combatants' feet has been cooked to brick.
Hansen's groping fingers jerk open the Easterner's suit latch. The armor switches off. Malcolm strikes upward with the fury of a man who saw his own death in an arc weapon approaching millimeters at a time. He burns away the chest of the opponent whom Hansen's trick has left defenseless.
The Easterner's intestines balloon for an instant before they burst. . . .
"You need men and armor, no argument . . . ," Hansen said softly. His eyes took a moment to refocus on the present. The king was looking at him in surprise, while Garces blinked with a new respect.
What the hell did his face look like when he lost himself in a past he'd rather have forgotten?
"Right, okay," he resumed. "I want to lead off a good chunk of Venkatna's army. Enough to give the rest of our people the margin they need to crush what's left. If you'll give me ten men, I think I can do it."
"Give you ten men?" Wenceslas said in puzzlement. "And why should I do anything like this?"
The king looked from Hansen to Blood. Blood grimaced fiercely as though he hoped by wrinkling his face to squeeze understanding of Hansen's lengthy explanation the night before back into his awareness.
"Me, because I know how to work the identification circuits in the battlesuits to give a false report," Hansen said. "I'll tell them that there's a hundred-man battalion working around their flank, and they'll send out a force to block us."
He raised a finger to forestall the question none of his listeners were sophisticated enough to ask.
"I know," he went on. "If Venkatna's people go beyond the IFF signals—which they can—then they'll realize it's a trick; but I'm betting that they don't understand their hardware, they'll just say, 'Mark hostiles,' and not check they're getting suit locations instead of just identification codes."
"But they'll see you," Hopewell said. "Can't they count?"
"Negative," Hansen explained. "We'll keep behind cover with a good screen of horsemen. They'll have to hit us with warriors to learn that there's nothing there to hit."
He grinned. He saw in the king's eyes the realization that when fifty or a hundred imperial warriors realized they'd been duped by a handful of the enemy, it was going to be very hard on that handful.
"And it's you," Hansen went on, "because you're my liege . . . and because you're smart enough to make a decision. If I tried to bring this up to the Confederation council, nobody'd listen. And there's not a snowball's chance in Hell that word wouldn't get out to Venkatna besides."
Only Hell wasn't hot on Northworld . . . and it wasn't just a theological concept. Not to someone like Nils Hansen, who had seen the damned souls frozen to the ice of Plane Four. . . .
"We never done this sorta crap," said Garces. He wasn't so much hostile to the idea as baffled by it.
"No, it's a ruse," Wenceslas said with a frown of concentration. "Ruses are proper. Only—"
He stared very hard at Hansen. "You can make ten men look like a hundred?"
"Yes," said Hansen. He'd qualified his statement before. Now it was time to state probabilities as facts.
A female mammoth began to bleat in high, piteous notes. She'd made a friend among the baggage train of another princeling. She was not yet loaded, but her friend was padding out of the camp, carrying heavy battlesuits in rope slings on either flank.
. . . good night, Irene, Hansen thought inanely, I'll see you in my dreams. . . .
Maybe not so inane.
"Then why don't other people do it?" Wenceslas pressed.
Because I didn't teach them how when I put the West Kingdom army together four generations ago. "Because nobody thinks about it," Hansen said aloud. "But I do."
"Look, is he just trying to stay outa the fight?" Hopewell said to the king in genuine puzzlement.
"Are you questioning my honor, friend . . . ?" Hansen heard his voice lilt, as lightly as a nightingale calling from a distant hedge.
Hopewell turned and looked at him. Hopewell was the larger man by 10% in height, 20% in bulk; and Hopewell's bulk was muscle also. But a duel in battlesuits wasn't muscle against muscle; and anyway, Hansen wasn't the sort of fellow you chose to fight under any circumstances.
"Naw, that's not what I meant," the bigger warrior said. "Look, I just don't figure it, all right? Why don't we just, you know, fight 'em? That's what we come t' do."
"What about five?" the king asked. "All told."
Kingship, business—and love, however you defined it. They all required trade-offs, and you never had all the data that you needed for a decision. Like Dowson had said in another district of All Times. . . .
"Five should work," Hansen said aloud. "Ten would work better, and it wouldn't be much degradation of the Mirala main force."
"But it would degrade my contingent, Lord Hansen," Wenceslas said with a tone of equality that the king would never have used to address one of his bodyguards on a point of strategy. "I've brought seventy-three warriors to the fight . . . counting yourself."
Hansen understood the implication. "As you are right to do, your majesty," he said.
His mind spun in a montage of kings and slashing arcs and the way the Lord of Thrasey's battlesuit lost its gleam an instant before Golsingh's weapon ripped off the head in bubbles of glass and blazing metal and blood, blood flashing up as steam.
"If you so order," Hansen's voice continued, "I will stand by you as I have sworn; and fight in such a way that when Venkatna's men put us both down, as they surely will, you will say with your last breath that never did a warrior die better for his liege. . . ."
King Wenceslas touched the back of Hansen's wrist. When he saw that Hansen was alert in the present again, he said, "You're sure of yourself, aren't you, Hansen?"
Hansen managed a poor smile. "Of nothing else, your majesty," he replied. "But of that, yeah. I'm—all I've got."
"All right," Wenceslas said. "I'll give you three men, they won't be much but that shouldn't matter for your purpose."
He raised an eyebrow in query. Hansen nodded agreement.
"And I'll give you Blood," the king continued. "You'll need somebody that the back-rankers'll take orders from. They know Blood, and Blood knows you—"
The king grinned harshly. "As I hope that I know you, Lord Hansen."
The lovesick mammoth, laden at last, jingled past at a pace in advance of what the mahout on the beast's humped neck desired. He cursed, but the mammoth gurgled and strode on.
Hard to quantify emotional factors; hard to identify emotional factors. But they were what made the world work like it did, not the hardware and not even skill.
"You know the important part, your majesty," Hansen said. You know as much as I do; and what the hell, it might work. Surely nothing else could possibly work.
Blood clapped Hansen on the shoulder. "I told you he'd explain it!" the bodyguard caroled to his king and companions.
Blood didn't understand a thing about Hansen's plan or the necessity for it in the coming battle . . . but as King Wenceslas had said, Blood knew his man, and nothing else mattered.