The caravan master pulled his black Arabian alongside Gozzi. It was Gozzi’s caravan and Gozzi had hired him. The other merchants were lesser men who’d paid to join their wagons with Gozzi’s.
“Padrone,” he said, pointing toward the sun, “it is midday, and there’s a creek just ahead. It would be a good place to stop.”
Gozzi nodded and the man jogged his horse down the long train of wagons, calling instructions. When the first wagon reached the stream, the caravan stopped. Teamsters unhitched their horses and walked them in harness to drink below the trail. No fires were lit; they cooked at dawn and again at evening, but lunch was quick and cold.
The mercenaries ate together in a loose cluster of small groups, all but the outriders, joking and gibing in Anglic as best they could, for their own languages varied from Greek to Slovak, from Catalan to Croat. They believed themselves better than teamsters because they were more deadly and better paid. They considered themselves better than the merchants for half the same reasons, but kept it to themselves because they could not trust one another.
As they ate and talked, they paid little attention to what went on nearby. Vigilance was the duty of outriders; their own job was to discourage raiders by their presence, and to fight if need be.
Milio Gozzi, on the other hand, was alert by disposition and practice. As he chewed, his eyes in their creases followed a man trotting his horse toward them from the east. Nudging the caravan master, he motioned with his head.
“I haven’t seen that one before. Who is he?”
“I don’t know,” the man answered after a few seconds. “He’s not one of ours.”
The personal guards of the merchants rose to their feet.
A giant, thought Gozzi, and a resourceful one to have gotten past the outriders. The man dismounted four-score meters away, as if to reassure them, and led his horse, a stallion built to carry weight. Like a Turk, he wore only a breechclout in this season, though the merchant’s shrewd eyes knew he customarily wore more. His legs were tanned less deeply than his torso, and neither was as dark as his face, while his stubbly scalp was flaking from recent sunburn.
He looked as powerful as his horse.
The giant wasted no time. “I’m looking for hire as a fighting man.”
Gozzi wasn’t surprised. His eyes had noted the line of sword callus on the man’s right hand, like a ridge of horn from thumb to the end of the index finger, better developed than he had ever seen before. As for scars, he wore an ugly one on his left thigh, probably from an arrow, plus a trivial crease on the right bicep, but nothing more. Either he was inexperienced or very good, and the merchant was willing to bet that he was very good indeed.
“I’ve never heard that accent before,” Gozzi said. “Where are you from?”
“From Svealann, a country of broad forests and great fighters.” He grinned when he said it.
Gozzi sucked his upper lip thoughtfully. “Never heard of it,” he said. “Suppose I tell you I have all the men I need?”
“One seldom has too many really good men. And you have one less man than you broke camp with this morning.”
“You killed one of my men?”
The stranger shrugged. “He attacked when I only wanted to ask a question. And consider: I’ve saved you his pay and brought you a better man to replace him.”
“One of the others still should have spotted him before he got this far,” the caravan master said.
“And might have, if I’d been an armed band. But there are many low places where the grass grows tall, and my horse lies down on command. And perhaps your scouts were thinking about other things.”
“You’re hired,” Gozzi said abruptly. “But not as an outrider. Outriders must be men you trust.” He nodded to the caravan master. “He will ride beside the wagons.”
Except to water the horses, the caravan didn’t stop again until the sun was low in the west.
“Svealann? Never heard of it.” The speaker was a smallish sinewy man with a short brown beard parted on the left cheek and jaw by a scar. “They must grow them big there.”