One of Hansen’s boots slipped. He dropped a step, then slid twenty meters in a half-controlled rush.
Hansen didn’t have to be watching to know what the vicious sizzle of an arc weapon meant. Because the captured warriors had no helmets to muffle their voices, their screams were clearly audible. Crows called in raucous answer.
Halfway down the slope, a fair-sized pine grew in a crevice. The bluff below that point was at a fairly safe angle. Hansen let himself slide, angling to catch the tree and hoping that Diamond hadn’t rotted the tough fabric of his coveralls the way it had his weapons.
It was a near thing in another way: he almost slid past the tree. The bark tore his palms as he grabbed and the shock strained his shoulder muscles, but those were small prices to pay for not fetching up against the granite outcrop twenty meters further down.
Bits of rock pattered as Hansen clung to the tree and panted. Golsingh had just mounted his pony. He said something to Taddeusz and pointed toward Hansen.
The pyre piled with the corpses of the winning side was ablaze and beginning to roar. The bodies of the captives smoldered on the snow. Birds were landing on them.
Taddeusz shouted a series of orders. A pair of lancers rode toward the warchief. The warrior who’d just acted as executioner halted in the process of getting out of his armor.
Hansen dropped to the plain in a series of calculated hops, knoll to rock to clump of trees stunted by periodic flooding.
He flexed feeling back into his hands, but he’d never been much good without weapons. Anyway, if it came to a real fight, he was more meat for the crows.
“Lord Taddeusz!” Hansen shouted. “Lord Golsingh, I’m a traveler from a far land, drawn to your excellence.”
He hoped the locals here spoke Standard. The colonists of course had . . . and the folk of Diamond, albeit accented . . . and the mouse/bird/squirrel that called itself Walker, for whatever that was worth.
The clear solidity of the sky and trees pressed in on Hansen. If all this was real, then what was he?
“Who are you, then?” Golsingh called in Standard, walking his pony a few strides closer to Hansen.
The beast sidled, presenting its left shoulder to Hansen as it advanced. The king frowned and tugged at the left rein, turning the pony’s head without straightening its approach.
Golsingh was of average height, though he looked small next to his warchief. Taddeusz might better have mounted a mammoth than the pony which struggled beneath his weight. The king’s neck and hands were well-muscled, but his swarthy face had a fine bone structure. Hansen got the impression of a slight man who had trained himself to athletic prowess.
Whereas Taddeusz was a bear . . . and Nils Hansen was a hound, with flat muscles and a hound’s utter disdain for the way cats play instead of killing.
Hansen smiled, and he probably shouldn’t have, because Taddeusz said brusquely to a freeman, “Kill him!”
The man lowered his lance and clucked to his pony. Hansen continued to walk forward. A short pine tree just ahead and to his right was the best shelter available. He’d run for it when the lancer charged, but until then—
“Stop!” Golsingh shouted to the freeman. Hansen halted also, unwilling to look as though he were disobeying a royal command.
“Taddeusz,” Golsingh continued, “remember that I am your king.”
“Excellency,” replied the big man, “I’m just—”
“The battle is over,” Golsingh snapped. “I am king, and I will give the orders now.”
Taddeusz nodded in contrition. “I apologize, my son,” he said. “I had only your safety in mind.”
Golsingh smiled. “As always, foster father,” he agreed, nodding back to the bigger man as a mark of honor.
Both men had enveloped themselves in fur cloaks and caps when they took off their armor, so it was hard for Hansen to judge their ages at twenty meters’ distance. Golsingh was probably in his mid twenties, Taddeusz two decades older. The warchief’s weathered complexion and grizzled russet hair would look much the same when the man was in his sixties, but the brutal force he’d displayed during the battle suggested a lower limit to his age.