"None of that, thank you," the Ranger said. He reached under the man's chin and Horace realized that he had the smaller of his two knives in his hand. For a moment, the horrified boy was convinced that Halt meant to cut the man's throat. Then, with a deft stroke, Halt severed the leather chin strap holding the helmet on the other man's head. Once the strap was cut, Halt dragged the helmet off and tossed it into the bushes at the roadside. The knight let out a small mew of pain as his mustache ends tugged free of the still-closed visor.
Horace sheathed his sword, finally sure that there was no further threat from the knight. For his part, the vanquished warrior peered owlishly at Halt and at the figure towering over them both on horseback. His eyes still wouldn't focus.
"We shell continue the cermbet ern foot," he declared shakily.
Halt slapped him heartily on the back, setting his eyes spinning once more.
"The hell you will. You're beaten, my friend. Toppled fair and square. Sir Horace, knight of the Order de la Feuille du Chene, has agreed to spare your life."
"Oh:thenk you," said the unsteady one, making a vague, saluting gesture in Horace's direction.
"However," Halt went on, allowing a grim tone of amusement to creep into his voice, "under the rules of chivalry, your arms, armor, horse and other belongings are forfeit to Sir Horace."
"They are?" Horace asked, a little incredulously.
Halt nodded.
"They are."
The knight tried once more to stand but, as before, Halt held him down.
"But, sirrah:," he protested weakly. "My erms and ermor? Surely not?"
"Surely so," Halt replied. The other man's face, already shaken and pale, now looked even paler as he realized the full import of what the gray-cloaked stranger was saying.
"Halt," Horace interrupted, "won't he be a little helpless without his weapons-and his horse?"
"Yes, he certainly will," was the satisfied reply. "Which will make it a great deal harder for him to prey on innocent travelers who want to cross this bridge."
Realization dawned on Horace. "Oh," he said thoughtfully. "I see."
"Exactly," Halt said, looking meaningfully at him. "You've done a good day's work here, Horace. Mind you," he added, "it took you barely two minutes to do it. But you'll keep this predator out of business and make the road a little bit safer for the locals. And of course, we will now have a quite expensive suit of chain mail, a sword, a shield and a pretty good-looking horse to sell in the next village we come to."
"You're sure that's in the rules?" Horace asked, and Halt smiled broadly at him.
"Oh yes. It's all fair and aboveboard. He knew it. He simply should have looked more carefully when he challenged us. Now, my beauty," he said to the crestfallen knight sitting at his feet, "let's have that mail shirt off you."
Grudgingly, the dazed knight began to comply. Halt beamed at his young companion.
"I'm starting to enjoy Gallica a lot more than I expected," he said.
17
T WO DAYS LATER, W OLFWIND LEFT S KORGHIJL H ARBOR AND turned northeast for Skandia. Slagor and his men remained behind, facing the task of making temporary repairs to their ship, before limping back to their home port. The ship was too badly damaged to continue west for the raiding season. Slagor's decision to leave port early was proving to be a costly one.
The wind, which for weeks had blown out of the north, now shifted to the west, allowing the Skandians to set the big mainsail. Wolfwind surged easily over the gray sea, her wake stretching behind her. The motion was exhilarating and liberating as the kilometers reeled off under her keel and the spirits of the crew lifted as they came closer to their homeland.
Only Will and Evanlyn failed to share in the general lightening of mood. Skorghijl had been a miserable place, barren and unfriendly. But at least the months there had postponed the time when they might be separated. They knew they were to be sold as slaves in Hallasholm and there was every chance they would go to different masters.
Will had tried once to cheer Evanlyn about their possible separation.
"They say Hallasholm isn't a big place," he said, "so even if we are split up, we may still be able to see each other. After all, they can't expect us to work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week."
Evanlyn hadn't replied. Her experience of Skandians so far told her that was exactly what they would expect.
Erak noticed their silence and the melancholy mood that had settled upon them and felt a twinge of sympathy. He wondered if there was some way he could make sure they stayed together.
Of course, he could always keep them as slaves himself, he reasoned. But he had no real need for personal slaves. As a war leader of the Skandians, he lived in the officers' barracks, where his needs were tended by orderlies. If he kept the two Araluens as his own, he'd have to pay to feed and clothe them. And he'd have to be responsible for them as well. He discarded the idea with an irritated shake of his head.
"To hell with them," he muttered fiercely, driving them from his mind and concentrating on keeping the ship perfectly on course, frowning fiercely as he watched the pole stone needle floating in its gimballed bowl by the steering blade.
On the twelfth day of the crossing, they made a landfall with the Skandian coast-exactly where Erak had predicted they would fetch up.
From the admiring glances the men cast at the Jarl, Will could tell that this was a considerable feat.
Throughout the following days, they edged closer to the shore, until Will and Evanlyn could make out more detail. High cliffs and snow-covered mountains seemed to be the dominant features of Skandia.
"He's caught Loka's current perfectly," Svengal told them as he prepared to climb to the lookout position on the mast's crosstrees.
The cheerful second in command had developed a certain fondness for Will and Evanlyn. He knew their lives would be hard and pitiless as slaves, and he tried to compensate with a few friendly words whenever possible. Unfortunately, his next comment, meant in a kindly fashion, was little comfort to either Will or Evanlyn.
"Ah well," he said, seizing hold of a halyard to haul himself to the top of the mast, "we should reach home in two or three hours."
As it turned out, he was mistaken. The wolfship, finally under oars again, ghosted through the thick fog that shrouded the Hallasholm harbor mouth barely an hour and a quarter later. Will and Evanlyn stood silently in the waist of the ship as the town of Hallasholm loomed out of the fog.
It was not a large place. Nestled at the foot of towering pine-clad mountains, Hallasholm consisted of perhaps fifty buildings-all of them single story and all, apparently, built from pine logs and roofed with a mixture of thatch and turf.
The buildings huddled around the edge of the harbor, where a dozen or more wolfships were moored at jetties or drawn up on the land, canted on their sides as men worked on the hulls, fighting a never-ending battle against the attacks of the marine parasites that constantly ate away at the wooden planks. Smoke curled up from most of the chimneys and the cold air was redolent of the heady smell of burning pine logs.
The principal building, Ragnak's Great Hall, was built from the same logs as the rest of the houses in the town. But it was larger, longer and wider, and with a pitched roof that let it tower above its neighbors. It stood in the center of the town, dominating the scene, surrounded by a dry ditch and a stockade-more pine logs, Will noticed.