Magnus was tempted to split the man’s head with the same agony he felt—but he couldn’t be sure of his telepathic abilities until the concussion healed. He turned to shuffle toward the field, fighting dizziness and nausea.
The prod whacked him across the back of the knees. Magnus cried out as he fell.
“What do you say when an overseer speaks to you, boy?” Kawsa growled.
“My mother taught me not to say such things,” Magnus groaned.
The stick cracked into his buttock. Magnus managed to strangle the shout of pain.
“You say, ‘yes, sir!’ ” Kawsa bellowed. “No smart talk to me, boy! And it doesn’t matter what I say, the only answer is ‘yes, sir!’ You understand that now?”
“Gotcha,” Magnus affirmed.
The stick cracked across his buttocks again. “What?” Magnus steeled himself to the degradation and reminded himself that he needed to study these people up close, witnessing how badly they oppressed their slaves and how they chose who was to be a slave and who free. “Yes, sir.” He nearly choked on the words, but he got them out.
“That’s better. Into that field with you, now, and grub weeds!”
Magnus tried to push himself to his feet, but his leg nerves hadn’t recovered yet.
“Aw, can’t get up?” the overseer crooned, than snapped, “Crawl, then! That will remind you what a worm you really are!”
Magnus told himself that the slaves needed the kind of sympathy that can only come from shared suffering, and crawled into the field. Other slaves glanced up at him, then quickly glanced away.
“Well, you’re close enough to the ground that you don’t need a hoe,” Kawsa told him. “Grub with your hands!”
He watched while Magnus pulled a dozen weeds, then walked on down the row, but glanced back frequently.
A very short man in the next row spoke out of the side of his mouth, carefully not looking at Magnus. “Whatever possessed you to go marching down the high road dressed like a freeman in broad daylight, poor lad?”
“I’m from far away,” Magnus told him, “very far, beyond the borders of this land. I didn’t know.”
“From the North Country?” The man looked up, surprised, then remembered the overseer and turned his gaze back to his hoe. “Then your parents must have been slaves who escaped, and should have told you what it was like here! I thought everyone knew how things were in Midgard!”
“I’m from farther than that,” Magnus told him, but registered the name of the country well, to remember it. Midgard? Well, it did go with the horned helmets…
Again the man stared at him, but only for a second. Then studying his hoe blade, he muttered, “Didn’t know there were people farther away.”
“I’m real,” Magnus assured him. “I didn’t know what I was getting into.”
And that, he decided, was nothing but the honest truth. At least he had expected to see dwarves, too. He had seen them in the pictures from orbit, after he and Herkimer had explored Midgard’s eastern border.
“Let’s see how the western border compares with this one, Herkimer.”
“Initiating acceleration,” the computer replied, but the artificial gravity within the ship was so excellent that Magnus felt no change. “Should we examine the northern border on the way?”
“No point,” Magnus said. “Your photographs show it to be a wasteland with only a few small settlements.” He looked down at the pictures on the table before him, aerial photos of the planet’s one inhabited continent.
Some were large-scale, some small; some showed the country as a whole, some only single villages, some even close-ups of just a few people. “Wattle and daub huts, thatched roofs, wooden wheels on their wagons, clothing limited to tunics and bias-hosen for the men, blouses and skirts for the women, hooded cloaks for both … yes, it looks very much like the Scandinavian Middle Ages.”
“Too much so?” the computer supplied.
“Definitely. Someone set about a deliberate imitation, but wasn’t a stickler for historical accuracy.” Magnus couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that he was looking at a gigantic stage set.
“We have come to the dawn line,” Herkimer reported. “Good.” Magnus turned back to the viewscreens. “Is there a natural border?”
“Yes, a river, and the land beyond it is thickly forested.”
“Scan it for signs of battle—there!”
The view on the screen steadied, showing a bird’s-eye view of two straggling lines of dots facing three rings of other dots, smooth with geometric precision. Behind and between the circles were lines of dots, again straight as though drawn with a ruler. The two sets of lines faced one another between the river and the forest.
“Hold this view on one screen and have the other zoom in,” Magnus directed.
On the right-hand screen, the dots swam closer. The ends of the lines swept out, and the dots resolved themselves into Vikings on one side, charging with waving axes and mouths open to shout. Across from them were three circles of armored warriors with crossbows, marching around and around. The ones in front aimed and discharged their weapons as they paced along the front arc, then wound back their bows and reloaded as they marched along the back arc. Between them stood other warriors with long shields and short swords. Long spears thrust out between sword-wielders from the second line of warriors.
As the Vikings came closer, the crossbowmen kept up a continuous field of fire. The Vikings charged straight into their storm, horn-helmeted men falling left and right, but the rest running on, shouting. Half their number survived to reach the striding warriors. They pushed the spears up with their shields so that they could chop at the swordsmen—whose heads were scarcely waist high.
Magnus stared in amazement. “The spearmen are dwarves!”
“Relative to the Vikings, yes,” Herkimer agreed.
Looking more closely, Magnus could see that the warriors in the formation had legs and arms that were shorter in proportion to their bodies than those of the. Vikings—but their shoulders were almost as wide, and their heads almost as large, as those of their bigger opponents.
Magnus gave a long, low whistle. “No wonder they’re fighting with such iron discipline! It’s the only way they can stand against men twice their size!”
“And who outnumber them,” Herkimer pointed out. There did seem to be twice as many Vikings as dwarves—but that appearance changed as the taller men tried an outflanking maneuver. On the left-hand screen, the overview of the battle, Magnus saw the ends of the second line of Vikings split and swing out, to try to catch the circles of dwarves from the flanks—but as they did, archers rose from the bushes at the sides and filled the air with arrows. A number of Vikings fell, and the rest retreated back to the battle line. They found themselves racing the center, who were fleeing from the crossbow fire. The dwarves, apparently moved by a chivalrous impulse their larger foes lacked, held their fire. They seemed to feel no need to kill as long as their enemies were retreating.
“Reserves hidden in ambush.” Magnus stared. “Some of them are almost as big as the Vikings!”
“They would seem to be traitors,” Herkimer commented. “They must certainly seem that way to the Vikings! Of course, I suppose they could be fugitives given sanctuary by the dwarves—or even political dissidents.” Magnus compared the two screens. “Still, the Vikings outnumber them by half.”
“At least,” Herkimer agreed.
The dwarves held their ground, not taking the bait to chase—but a final flight of crossbow bolts filled the air, hurtling toward the fleeing Vikings. Several more of them fell. Their comrades scooped them up and carried them back to the river. There, they slowed to cross a bridge made up of low boats with decking laid across their centers. The Vikings tramped over those decks, carrying their dead and wounded, and as soon as the last one passed, the sections of bridge broke away and began rowing back to the eastern bank of the river. The water was indeed a border.