"Lord Waldron," announced the herdsman in a cracked attempt at grandiloquence, "here is the worthy stranger who saved me from attack by bandits. Ah, and saved your pigs."
In good light—illuminated by the fat-soaked rushes within the Great Hall of Peace Rock, at any rate—Peter was a squat man of sixty or so, twice Hansen's apparent age. He wore a peaked pigskin cap, bristle side in, which he snatched off belatedly as he spoke with his master. Despite the age obvious in the lines of Peter's face, his hair was as black and stiff as the peccary bristles.
"The other pigs, you mean," said the warrior seated to the right, just below Lord Waldron's crosstable. "Phew, man, don't stand so close."
"Arnor," said the lord. "Not now."
Lord Waldron was as old as Peter, though his hair was white. Standing, he would be half a head taller than Hansen. Waldron looked fit rather than active, and there was an aura of intelligent calculation in his eyes as they touched his visitor.
"What do you mean—" Waldron said to his herdsman, before breaking off and shifting his steady gaze to Hansen.
"If you're a traveling warrior who claims guest rights, sir," Waldron said, "then you must tell us your name."
The Great Hall was the same thatch-roofed structure it had been when it was the king's seat in past ages; but because all the circumstances had changed, the physical surroundings seemed different as well.
Most of the bed closets in which the lord's warriors slept had been removed from the long walls. The benches and trestle tables to either side of the central hearth were still occupied at dinner, but only because freemen now sat on the lower benches and ate with the lord and his warriors.
Lord Waldron sat at the crosstable with his wife, a woman as old as he who hennaed her hair. There were only three warriors on each of the parallel benches below them.
Hansen blinked away his memory of the long room filled with over a hundred drunken, shouting warriors. He liked this better, though the other was a more proper milieu for his sort.
"My name's Hansen," he said aloud. "And I would be grateful for a meal and a night's lodging, my lord."
"You do claim to be a warrior, don't you?" asked Arnor. He was a big man in his mid-thirties; running now to fat. Judging from where he sat below the lord, Arnor was probably Waldron's chief advisor and leading warrior . . . to the extent that Peace Rock in its present guise had military requirements.
Arnor spoke in a tone whose studious calm attempted to take the sting out of what could easily be construed as an insult; but it was a proper question to a stranger who appeared without a battlesuit or retinue. Arnor, as the lord's champion, had the duty of asking—at the risk of a challenge if Hansen turned out to be a hot-blooded spark who felt his honor had been impugned.
Enough fights had come Hansen's way already without him needing to look for another. He opened his mouth to make a suitably mild reply—
But before he could speak, Peter the herdsman cackled, "A warrior? You bet he is! He killed six bandits with his bare hands. And they had swords and lances!"
Everyone stared at the guest.
Hansen chuckled. "There were only three of them," he said. "Two—"
And he paused because his voice broke. All the humor of Peter's overstatement had drained from Nils Hansen's soul when his mind remembered fury as red and real as steel glinting in the dusk.
Something unmeant must have showed in Hansen's face. The lord's wife gasped. Waldron's sudden flatness showed that he too had known battle in his day.
Hansen clamped his palms together. He knew the sweat and trembling would pass in a moment. Just a memory of blood and terror, one of too many memories to count. Soon his mind would scab it over with the rest.
"Two of them rode away," Hansen resumed, forcing the corners of his mouth up into a smile. "Anyway, I wasn't bare handed after I took the lance from the first . . . but yes, my lord, I'm a warrior. Though I have no equipment."
Arnor laughed, breaking the ice around the table. "Even on your telling of it," he remarked, "I'd say your father chose right when he named you after the god Hansen."
He turned to the crosstable and added, "Milord, let's seat our friend with us now, and—"
"Yes, of course," said Waldron, nodding.
"And," Arnor continued, "since we've got some spare equipment that might fit him, I wouldn't mind trying him out on the practice field in the morning. For a regular place in your household."
"At least if he comes without armor of his own, we know he's not a rover," said a warrior on the other side of the hearth.
"Do be seated, Hansen," the lord said. His face clouded. "Armed riders like that, though . . . It means there probably is a rover about."
Lord Waldron hadn't assigned the guest a specific seat. There were gaps on the benches to separate warriors from the community's freemen. Hansen noted general relief as he chose to sit at the end of three warriors on his side of the hall.
Arnor shrugged. "They've missed us so far," he said. He lifted a drumstick. It had been stewed so long that the meat fell back on Arnor's plate before it reached his mouth.
A buxom serving woman handed Arnor a torn wedge of bread. He shoveled meat onto the wedge with the fingers of his other hand. "Maybe the reception they got from Lord Hansen here'll make them . . ."
The remainder of the comment was lost in the wad of bread and chicken.
The two warriors seated down-bench from Arnor were middle-aged and even less imposing than their leader. They nodded cautiously to Hansen. The serving woman handed him a plate of meat and vegetables and a massive pewter tankard of beer.
The fire on the central hearth had been allowed to go out as soon as the meal was cooked, but woodsmoke lingered to spice the air which entered through the open gables and chinks in the low log walls. There were walkways for servants between the hearth and the lines of tables to either side of it.
The warriors opposite Hansen were much the same as those beside him, though the trio across the hearth appeared to be somewhat younger. Peace Rock wasn't the place a warrior went if he hoped for action.
Hansen drank. The beer was surprisingly good, but the tankard gave it a metallic undertaste.
"Lord Hansen," said Waldron's wife, "was it your parents who named you after the god, or is it a name you chose when you decided to travel?"
"Amelia," said her husband, "we don't quiz strangers."
But Lord Waldron wasn't frowning; and of course the folk here did quiz strangers. Anybody who lived in a community as isolated as present-day Peace Rock sought all the entertainment they could get when someone came in from the outer world.
"No, it's the name my parents gave me, lady," Hansen said, carefully limiting himself to a truth he could tell without causing a furor. He added, "I come from far away, and there's no one in this whole kingdom likely to know me."
Arnor leaned forward to look past his two fellows to glare at Hansen.
"Do you come from Solfygg, then?" Peace Rock's champion asked. His voice was harder than Hansen had thought him capable of using.
"I do not," Hansen said flatly. He met Arnor's eyes. "I come from much farther away than that."
To break the discussion, Hansen raised his tankard, drank, and found to his surprise that he had emptied the vessel. Killing was a dry business, but he never remembered that at the times in between.
Lady Amelia's sex and position made her arbiter of when to pry and when to ease off on the stranger. Now she said to her husband, "The king should do something about these rovers."
Waldron responded promptly, "If they stay within the law . . . ," and the conversation involved the members of the household while Hansen devoted himself to his meal.
The woman serving on this end of the table was older than Hansen had first thought, somewhere in her mid-thirties. She set a wedge of bread on Hansen's plate and gave him another of the bright-cheeked smiles that had caused him to underestimate her age.
"My name's Holly, sir," she said. "Will you have more ale?"
Hansen grinned and held out his tankard. "You wouldn't have another wooden masar in the cupboard for me to drink out of, would you?" he asked the big woman as she poured.
Holly paused in surprise. She wore a dress of dark material, cut very low in the bodice. For modesty a handkerchief was pinned to the shoulders of the dress, but the show she provided when she lifted the kerchief to mop her face, as now, was almost professionally intriguing.
"You want to drink from wood like a freeman, milord?" she asked in puzzlement.
"A whim," Hansen said. He grinned over the rim of his mug as he drank.
"Of course, sir!" said the servant as she turned.
Hansen sipped his ale, noting again the bitterness which alcohol leached from the metal. This wasn't the only society in which the wealthy and powerful proved their status by being more conspicuously uncomfortable than lesser folk.
For all that, Peace Rock seemed a happy place now that it had become a backwater. There'd been affection rather than fear in Peter's voice when he addressed his lord, and the muted chatter along the benches at dinner was generally cheerful.
Hansen mopped stewed chicken onto his bread and let the bland dullness of Peace Rock drift around him.
"A masar, milord," said the serving woman, giving Hansen another of her brilliant smiles. She set down a broad elm cup and filled it with a flourish of her pitcher.
They were willing to take him in, Waldron and Arnor and Holly, clearly Holly.
"Call me Hansen," he said, "or I'll start calling you Lady Holly."
Holly giggled and covered her mouth with the lower edge of her pinned kerchief.
Hansen knew he didn't belong here, of course.
But then, Nils Hansen didn't belong much of anywhere; and for the moment, at least, it was good to spend time with people who found their lives happy.