"Yes, your lordship," Nils answered.

Jorgen Stennaeve turned to the white-bearded man. "We can't have a mere man-at-arms who can defeat our best knights; such a man should be instructed in manners and knighted. But I have never heard of knighting foreigners, and especially not barbarians. What do you say, Raadgiver?"

The white-bearded counselor smiled at Nils Jarnhann. "What is your rank among your own people?"

"I am a warrior."

"And how did you come to be a warrior?"

"I was chosen in my thirteenth summer and trained for six years as a sword apprentice. Then my hair was braided and I was given my warrior name, and I became a warrior."

Raadgiver turned to the greve. "Your lordship," he said, "it seems that his people, in their barbaric way, have something rather like squires, which they call sword apprentices. And in due course they are made warriors, somewhat equivalent to knights, although uncouth. It is my thought that he need be called neither man-at-arms nor knight, but simply warrior. Let him live in the barracks with the men-at-arms, for he is a barbarian, but let him go into battle with the knights, for that is his training and skill."

At this construction, a smile actually played around the scarred lips of the grizzled Oskar Tunghand, and Jorgen Stennaeve, too, looked pleased. The greve rose again. "So be it," he said. "Let Nils Savage, barbarian, remain simply 'warrior,' housed with the men-at-arms but riding with the knights. What do you say to that, warrior?"

"Willingly, your lordship."

"Then return him to the barracks, Tunghand, and have him instructed in his duties."

Outside, dim moonlight filtered through the overcast, but in the hut it was very dark. His senses strained for something, something he could not hear but faintly sensed. His scalp crawled. Dogs began to bark. And then there was a sound, a hooting that repeated-deep, toneless, directionless-and repeated again nearer. The barking became more shrill, then cut off, and a mindless terror that was not his but that he felt, a paralyzing terror, made them cower in their bed and pull the covers up so that they would not see what was coming for them. And the hooting was very near, in the lane outside, and he saw the door burst from the frame. Something huge and stooped filled the doorway, lurched toward the bed, and he yelled at the figures humped beneath the blankets and yelled…

"Nils, wake up, wake up!" And Nils, trembling, clawed upright in bed, his heart pounding, eyes wild. "Wake up, you fool. You were roaring like a bear."

It was Kuusta, and other men-at-arms stood near, looking shocked and angry in their nightclothes.

"My blood, what a dream," Nils whispered. "What a dream." He sat clutching a twist of blanket in one huge fist, his breath deep and irregular. "What a terrible dream."

And for the rest of the night his sleep was troubled.

Surprisingly, when he awoke next morning, he could remember it clearly, although the terror was only an after-image, a shadow, remembered but no longer felt. Under Kuusta's coaxing he described it in the barracks, but by daylight it was not especially frightening. Peder paa Kverno suggested that the fish at supper had seemed more overripe than usual.

Nils and Kuusta sat alone on a bench outside the barracks, digesting their breakfast of porridge and cheese. They talked in Anglic so far as Nils was able, which was considerable, for he grasped syntax almost instinctively, learned readily from context, and never forgot a word he had learned. And when he had trouble, Kuusta helped him. It was known that Jorgen Stennaeve planned to attack Slesvig, Denmark's southern province. Forces would be mustered from all his fiefs as soon as the harvest was over. If he forced the Greve of Slesvig to acknowledge his suzerainty, the Greve of Sjaelland would have to follow, and there would be a king again in Denmark.

"They don't prepare very seriously for war," Nils remarked. "At home each warrior has to make his living himself, yet he spends a lot more time practicing with weapons than most knights do. Sword apprentices in their sixteenth summer are more skilled than most knights. No wonder it was easy for me to beat one of their best. At home even freeholders have weapons and practice with birch swords, though more from tradition and in sport than from need. Almost everyone races and wrestles and shoots at marks, and everyone hunts. Children act out famous raids or make up their own. But here the knights and men-at-arms would rather drink or throw dice, and they don't practice with weapons nearly enough, most of them. Danes may be bold fighters, but they are not skilled fighters."

"They're as skilled as those I've seen in other lands," Kuusta replied. "I believe the big differences between these people and ours come partly from the land itself and partly from the laws. At home a man is his own master, to make a living or starve. In Suomi we do not even have thralls. There is all the land and all the game and a man can come and go as he pleases. He is free, and takes pleasure in contests. But in Suomi we don't have sword apprenticeship or a warrior class as your tribes do, and we make much less of raids and war."

"But there's another difference between the tribes and the Danes," Nils pointed out. "Here men can have only one wife, and the sons of knights become knights, while a thrall's son can only be a thrall unless he runs away to the free towns. At home a warrior can have three wives and many sons if he lives long enough. But his sons aren't necessarily chosen to become warriors, while the sons of thralls are chosen fairly often. Our tradition calls it the law of positive selection. And our people increase; they have spread northward below the mountains as far as… "

Galloping hooves sounded from the drawbridge, and a constable on a lathered horse pounded through the gate and across the courtyard. Every eye followed him. He dropped from the saddle and ran up the stone steps of the great hold, speaking hurriedly to the guards, one of whom went in with him.

"I wonder what that's all about," Kuusta said, rising. They walked toward the hold in case anything might be overheard there.

"My dream," said Nils.

"Your dream? What do you mean?"

"It has to do with my dream."

"How could your…? I don't understand."

"I dreamed of something that happened last night, kilometers away," Nils explained. "That one just brought the report of it."

Before the sun approached midday the troop of mounted men-at-arms were well away from the castle, under the command of a knight, with Nils as his second. They had been told only that a large and dangerous beast had killed some peasants in a village and that they were to destroy it.

They found the villagers in a state of shock. A family of four had been killed. It wasn't possible to determine how completely they had been eaten; remains had been scattered about with sickening ferocity, inside and out. But the fear among the villagers was out of proportion even to such savagery. Some were fitting stout bars on their doors; a few had fled to a nearby woods; still others only sat and waited for another night to come. The tracks of the beast had been obliterated in the lane through the village, but Nils and Kuusta were experienced trackers and found where the beast had struck the lane. They followed the trail on foot, leading their mounts, the troop following on horseback. Where the tracks crossed the soft ground of potato field, they got a clearer idea of what the animal was like. It walked upright on two oblong feet that were as long as Kuusta's forearm from elbow to knuckles. The toes were somewhat like a man's, but clawed.

"A troll!" said one of the men in an awed voice.

The knight spurred his horse up to the man and almost knocked him from the saddle with a fist blow. "There are no trolls," he snapped, "except in the stories grandfathers tell." The men sat sullenly. "Who has seen a troll?" he demanded. There was no answer. "Who has even heard of a troll except in fairy tales?"