Golsingh helped Hansen from his pony and tried to embrace him while Hansen slurped beer from the spout of Malcolm’s flask.
“Any trouble?” Malcolm asked, as though the warchief would have been two days late—and ridden in alone—if there hadn’t been trouble.
“The messenger arrived warning you’d been delayed, of course,” Golsingh said. While the Lord of Thrasey pretended nonchalance, the king feigned reasoned coolness.
Hansen looked at the lowering sun. “The rest’re two hours behind me,” he said. “They’ll be in before sunset.”
He’d swallowed the first swig of beer. He rinsed his mouth with the second and spat it on the ground. Better late than never.
“Glockner held us up,” he said.
“Said he wouldn’t give you the men?” asked Maharg.
“Nothing that straight,” Hansen explained. “You know Glockner. Took a day to round up enough baggage mammoths, and then some of them showed up lame. Third day, Glockner and about half the men I’d picked for his share of the muster, they came down with flu or something.”
Malcolm shook his head angrily. “Well, we’re probably as well off without that tricky bastard,” he said. “But after we’re done here, I’ll go—”
“Oh, he’s coming,” Hansen said as he drank again. “He’s back with the rest. Everybody got healthy faster’n you’d believe when I put my suit on and burned down Glockner’s hall.”
Maharg and Malcolm laughed. Golsingh’s face blanked for a moment, and when he opened his mouth it was to say, “Rough work, Lord Hansen.”
“Not as rough as hanging Glockner on a rope of his own guts,” Hansen said flatly. “Which was the next step.”
He met the king’s eyes. “Peace is the desired end, milord . . . but for the moment, I’m your warchief.”
Golsingh said nothing for a moment, then clasped Hansen’s shoulder again. “Yes, I see that. It’s a matter of knowing what to do. And you’ve proven already that you know better than—” he smiled his hard smile “—I did before our association.”
“Figgered you had something like that in mind when you took Glockner fer yerself,” Maharg said. “Hell, I coulda handled him.”
Hansen grinned. “Yeah,” he said, “but you would’ve made sure they all stayed inside when you burned the hall. This time I wanted his troops more ‘n I wanted a lesson for the other barons. Matter of emphasis is all.”
“They aren’t proper warriors,” Golsingh said suddenly. “Frekka’s aren’t.”
He nodded westward, though the walls of Frekka were the better part of a kilometer away, out of sight beyond broken ground. “They wouldn’t meet us mid-way for battle.”
“They had scuts in armor shootin’ bolts at us from the walls, too,” Maharg put in. “Won’t call ’em warriors.”
Hansen’s face stiffened. “That sort of game could get real expensive,” he said.
“We need Frekka,” Golsingh responded sharply, then tried to soften the words with a smile. “You convinced me of that, after all, Lord Hansen. Blasting the city to the ground won’t do any good. And after all, we could simply move back out of range until you arrived.”
He cleared his throat and smiled again. “Until we’d consolidated our forces.”
“We’ve got warriors on guard at night,” Malcolm said. “But I also thought maybe any freeman or slave kills a Frekka scout, then he should get a battlesuit and eat at the bench.”
“They show they done it,” added Maharg, “by bringin’ us the ears.”
Golsingh nodded. “That was Marshal Maharg’s idea,” he said. “And I approved both.”
Hansen handed the beer to Malcolm. He kneaded first his buttocks, then his thighs, with his fingers. Hard to tell which parts hurt the most after he’d been in the saddle for most of three weeks, but at least a pony beat walking. A howdah on a mammoth, now . . . But that wasn’t done; and anyway, he didn’t feel comfortable around the huge beasts even when he was safe in his battlesuit.
“No reason not to go inside,” the king said. “I’ll have a meal prepared?”
“Sounds good to me,” Hansen replied, taking Golsingh’s gesture as a directive and ducking under the tent flap.
It bothered him sometimes that he’d knocked his fellows—his friends—so off-balance that they became indecisive as soon as he was around. They—all three of these men, the marshals and the king; and a number of the others he’d trained at Peace Rock and Thrasey over the past six months—could handle the new style of war without difficulty.