The door at the low end of the Great Hall banged open. Hansen jumped when instinct tried to throw him under the table to cover.
"Lord Waldron!" bleated Cayley, the watchman from the gate in the stockade. "They're coming, the rover! He's got his armor, and he's got mebbe a dozen riders with him besides mammoths for baggage!"
Lord Waldron rose to his feet with a grim expression. "Silence!" he boomed, quashing the sudden jabber of nervousness throughout the big room.
Lady Amelia raised her knuckles to her lips; most of those in the hall stared raptly at their lord.
A mammoth tethered in the Peace Rock compound screamed welcome to the newcomers it scented.
"Cayley," Lord Waldron said, "go back to the gate and admit them with all honor. Do whatever they tell you to do."
"Right," said Arnor. "Don't argue about anything."
Several of the warriors nodded nervous agreement.
Hansen's face went blank. He didn't understand what was going on, so he watched and listened . . . and waited until he knew enough to act, or until he had to act anyway.
Cayley ducked out of the hall. The door missed the notch of its wooden latch. It slapped the post and swung open again.
A freeman on the lowest bench hopped up to close the panel, then froze in terrified awareness that all the normal rules had changed. He scuttled back to his seat, leaving the door ajar.
"Now for the rest of you," Waldron continued, "there's none of us going to make trouble, do you understand? He wouldn't be coming here unless he had a battlesuit that can mince ours like forcemeat. No matter what he says, we're going to agree with him!"
"He'll leave in a day or two if he can't get a duel out of any of us," Arnor said with a glum shake of his head. "It wouldn't do a bit of good to get killed."
Lady Amelia stood up. Her thin face had flushed; now it was white. "There's seven of you, aren't there?"
Her eyes swept the room, skimming across her husband and the other warriors before resting a moment on Hansen's expressionless visage. "Eight, now. This battlesuit isn't so good that eight of you can't cure him, is it?"
The squeals of the giant peccaries provided a jumbled warp through which baggage mammoths wove their louder, even shriller, calls.
"The Peace of Golsingh gives every man the right to travel through—" Lord Waldron said.
"He's coming here to kill you!" Amelia said.
Her control cracked. Hansen saw in her eyes love—and terror for her husband's life.
"He's coming here to fight a duel under the law!" Waldron said sharply. "If we give him the excuse. And we're not going to do that."
"Too right," muttered a young warrior. "I didn't hire on to here t' be outlawed for murder."
"Why did you promise to serve my husband?" Lady Amelia shouted. "To eat and drink and skulk when your lord is at risk?"
The old woman turned quickly to hide her tears.
Amelia and her husband sat on chairs, not benches. Her seat wobbled as she brushed past it, then rattled back onto its legs. She ran up the stairs to the chambers the lord's immediate family shared above the back of the Great Hall.
The warrior to whom Amelia had spoken hunched his shoulders and stared at the table in front of him.
"She's upset," said Lord Waldron to his retainers. His voice quavered.
He controlled it with an obvious effort and went on, "We're all upset. But remember: stay calm or it's your life. And it may be my life as well."
"We'll get out of this just fine if we all stay calm," Arnor added.
Hansen sucked at his lips. He drank the rest of the ale in his wooden masar, then toyed with the pewter mug again.
Cayley flung the door open. "All hail the noble lord Borley!" the watchman shouted in a voice pitched even higher than that with which he had warned of the rover's approach. "Come from far Solfygg to claim guest rights with Lord Waldron!"
To Hansen's surprise, when Borley entered—pushing Cayley aside with deliberate brutality—he was already wearing his battlesuit. "That's right!" boomed the warrior's voice through the speaker in the faceplate of his powered armor. "My name's Borley, Lord Borley to you lot unless you're willing to challenge me. Any of you man enough for that?"
No one answered. Most of those in the hall grimaced with downcast eyes. Hansen took a tiny sip of ale, just enough to sluice around in an attempt to moisten the dryness of his mouth.
Borley's retainers spilled into the hall behind him. The leader's face was familiar to Hansen: Abel, the black-bearded rider who had turned and run from Hansen's lance.
Abel carried his saber slung over his back where it wouldn't knock against objects when he was dismounted. Several of Borley's other retainers also brought edged weapons into the hall in defiance of custom and courtesy.
Hansen wondered if Abel would recognize him. Probably not. The fading sky had done a better job of lighting the horsemen than it did men on foot, a meter lower in the shadow of the pines.
Probably not.
Borley walked toward Lord Waldron at the crosstable at the far end of the room. The rover chose the aisle on the side opposite Hansen to make his deliberate progress. His battlesuit weighed over a hundred kilos. Every time his foot crashed down on the puncheons, sparks jumped from the sole to scar the wood.
The rover's battlesuit was of remarkably high quality, the sort of armor that a king might wear. Just as Lord Waldron had expected. . . . A wandering thug had no business owning equipment like that.
"What's the matter?" snarled Borley's amplified voice. "Dumb insolence, is it? Refusing to greet me with the honor I'm due?"
"Lord Borley," Waldron said promptly, "be welcome to my hall. Sit at my right hand, if you will—or in my own seat."
Arnor had been correct also. None of the warriors in a place like Peace Rock could afford armor that would last more than one swipe in a duel with a royal suit like Borley's.
Borley's retainers poured into the hall behind him. There were eight of them all told, not the dozen Cayley reported.
And not nine, either. Not since the ninth met Hansen.
The retainers split into two groups and pushed into the benches where the leading Peace Rock freemen sat. The locals scrambled to get out of the way, but Borley's men kicked and shoved them anyway.
"You don't mind accommodating my boys, do you, Waldron?" Borley demanded as he continued his slow progress toward the crosstable. "You don't think that maybe because they're the sons of thieves 'n whores that they aren't better than anybody in your lot?"
"Not at all, Lord Borley," Waldron said in a steady voice. "Your servants are welcome to sit wherever they choose in this hall."
Abel climbed into the seat at Hansen's left and jostled him. Hansen met his eyes.
The leader of Borley's retainers was young, smart, and fit, despite a certain puffiness of his features which suggested that drink would catch up with him soon—if a rope didn't. Abel's left thumb and forefinger were missing; the wound had been cauterized with hot iron that left a glistening pink scar.
He opened his mouth to snarl at Hansen but changed his mind. "Give me some room!" he grunted to the man on his own left.
Hansen sipped ale that tasted of metal and bile.
"You know," said the rover, "I'm kinda disappointed in you, Waldron. I'd heard you been telling folks that you're a tough bunch here at Peace Rock. Tougher than me, I'd heard. I figgered you guys'd like to try me in a duel so we could see who was really tough."
Servants were pouring ale into mugs for the newcomers. Holly put a tall jack of tarred leather in front of Abel.
"No, not here, Lord Borley," said Waldron. "There's nobody here as strong and brave as you."
Abel grabbed Holly's wrist as she set the jack down. He gripped the kerchief over her bodice and tore it loose.
Holly tried to stifle a scream.
"You don't mind my boys finding a little entertainment while they're here, do you?" the rover asked in a voice like that of a hog who had learned human speech.
Waldron swallowed. "If that's what pleases you, Lord Borley," he said.
Abel levered one of the woman's heavy breasts out of the dress with his three-fingered hand. Holly squeezed her eyes shut. She was murmuring a prayer.
Hansen's eyes watered. Microswitches in the powered armor must be arcing to leave a trail of ionized air.
"Some of 'em haven't had anything better than a mare t' stick their dick into fer weeks," Borley said. "Course, some of 'em like mares."
Hansen's wrist jerked, oversetting his pewter tankard. The half its contents remaining sluiced across the trestles and down over Abel's lap.
The retainer jumped backward with a shout. The bench and the fellow to Abel's left trapped him in the path of the stream.
Holly pulled away to stand in the ashes of the cold hearth, out of reach from either row of benches. Her arms were crossed over her chest; her head was bowed.
Abel stood at a twisted angle between the bench and the table, staring at Hansen.
"Sorry," Hansen said. "I've always been the clumsy sort." He spoke softly, and his voice trembled.
"Fucking moron's the sort you are," Abel muttered; but he sat down again and ostentatiously turned his back toward Hansen.
If Borley had noticed the incident, he made no comment.
"Well, what about you lot?" the rover demanded. He pointed to the warriors on his side of the hearth with the thumb and forefinger of his gauntlet spread—the gesture that would spread a blade of ravening electricity if Borley gave his battlesuit a verbal order to Cut! "Think you're as tough as me?"
"Oh, not me/not me/Nobody I know's as tough as you, Lord Borley," the three young warriors chorused. One of them stared at the table, one of them offered the rover a smile as false as a wax doll's, and the third warrior let his eyes dance across the sloping thatch roof of the hall as he spoke.
The tip of Hansen's right index finger traced the rim of his empty mug.
Borley strode across the back of the crosstable. "You've already told me you're a coward, haven't you, Waldron?" he said.
"That's right, Lord Borley," Waldron said. He faced the door at the far end of the room. His eyes looked like bits of glass. "You're welcome to sit here in my seat for the full three days of your guest rights."
"How about you, then?" Borley demanded as he paused in front of Arnor. "You're the champion of this shitpile, aren't you? Is that your name? Sir Shitpile?"
"That's right, Lord Borley, if you say it is," Arnor said in a choking voice.
"Hell take you all!" the man in armor grumbled in what might have been real disgust. "You really are a lot of dog-turds here, aren't you?"
Hansen hunched over his mug, staring at the pewter but not seeing even that.
"That's right," Arnor said as the two warriors seated below him bobbed agreement. "We're nothing but dog-turds compared to a hero like you, Lord Borley."
The stink of ozone was very close behind Hansen, now.
"Well, what about you, boy?" the rover asked. "Do you think I'm tough?"
Hansen neither moved nor spoke. Abel stared at him with a look of avid anticipation.
"I spoke to you, boy!" Borley thundered. Hansen's body twitched with the shock as a powered gauntlet gripped his shoulder and spun him to face the rover.
Close up, Hansen could see that the limbs of the battlesuit had been joined to the thorax by a smith less able than the one who constructed the component parts. The lustrous power of those components shone through the painted skulls with which Borley had ornamented the armor.
"I'm a stranger here myself," said Nils Hansen, "so I don't know how tough you are. Where I come from, though, we'd think you were just a blowhard."
The blat of noise from the battlesuit's speaker was inarticulate in its rage. Borley raised his right hand to smash Hansen where he sat.
Hansen grabbed the catch under the rover's armpit and pulled the suit open. For a moment, Borley's broad, droop-moustached face stared out of the unpowered coffin his armor had become as soon as it came unlatched.
Hansen slammed his pewter mug against the rover's forehead.
Abel bawled in surprise. He tried to snatch his saber from its sheath. Hansen backhanded the retainer across the temple, knocking him sprawling into his fellows.
Everyone in the hall was shouting. Arnor lifted himself from the bench with a smooth grace that belied his appearance of softness and vanished into the bed closet directly behind him.
Hansen's face was white and staring. He pounded the mug into Borley. Stiff joints kept the depowered battlesuit upright, but the man within slumped forward so that Hansen's fourth blow thudded against the suede which lined the armor.
Gasping with reaction, Hansen stepped back. He tried to survey the rest of what was going on in the Great Hall.
Borley's retainers stood back to back, a tiny clot on either side of the hearth. Those who were armed had drawn their weapons, but there was nothing but fear in their eyes.
Arnor strode out of his bed closet, wearing a tan-and-gray battlesuit. A blue-white arc snapped from his right gauntlet, fluctuating in length from a few centimeters to a meter and a half as Peace Rock's champion spread or closed the gap between his thumb and forefinger.
Extended, the arc quivered close enough to one of Borley's terrified men that his beard began to shrivel.
"All right, you slime!" Arnor shouted. The suit's external speaker gave his voice an eerie resemblance to that of Borley moments before. "Time for you to leave!"
The three retainers standing on Arnor's side of the hall rushed for the door; those across the room followed a half pace later. They paused on the threshold.
Torchlight wavered through the open doorway and winked on metal. The slaves of Peace Rock were gathered outside the hall. They carried hayforks, flails, and iron-shod staves.
Arnor's arc weapon sizzled into a thin ellipse almost four meters long. He crashed a massive step in the direction of Borley's men. They bolted through the door and began screaming as the farm implements landed their first blows.
Abel had knocked over one of the tables as he fell. His face was slack; there were dribbles of blood from his ear and nostrils. For a moment, the stertorous breathing of his master was the only sound to be heard within the Great Hall.
Hansen dropped his mug; it rang on the wooden floor. The metal was as distorted as though it had been hammered on an anvil.
He shouted to the staring faces, "He touched me as if I were a slave, not a warrior. He acted like a dog, and I treated him like a dog deserves."
"Oh, may the gods bless you!" Holly blurted in a high, clear voice.
Lord Waldron and his warriors crowded toward Hansen with their hands outstretched.
Hansen turned and gripped Borley beneath the arms. He dragged the rover out of the legs of his battlesuit, then let the man drop to the puncheons.
"Somebody get him outdoors," Hansen said in a throaty, terrible voice. "He'll void his bowels when he dies, and we don't need the smell in here."
"We didn't need the smell of him alive," said Lord Waldron as he embraced Nils Hansen.
Out in the courtyard, a mammoth screamed at the scent of fresh blood.