Eodan paused before his tent. Tjorr, who had just left him, returned quickly. A slave bent his knee to him. "Master, the great king would see the Cimbrian at once."
"What?" Eodan looked down at his mail, flowing trousers, spurred boots and flapping red cloak—all dulled with dust. Well, Mithradates was a soldier, too. "I come."
"What might it be?" asked Tjorr, pacing him as he hurried back under the grassy earth wall. "Has something happened?"
"Surely it has," said Eodan, "or the king would allow me a rest and a bite to eat first."
"Maybe a new war has begun somewhere?"
Eodan grinned with a sour humor. "We're not so important, you and I, that we're summoned in person to plan the royal strategy. I think this concerns us—me, at least—alone."
He paused at the castle gate to surrender his longsword. Tjorr scowled unhappily. "I shall wait here," he said. "Perhaps my hammer will fend off bad luck."
Eodan said, with the bleakness of wind and treeless uplands taking him, "I think our luck has already passed these doors and is waiting inside."
He crossed a flagged courtyard, where guardsmen drilled among the lesser buildings. The keep was a gloomy stone hall, sod-roofed and galleried. Beyond its entryroom was a long feasting chamber, where Mithradates had established his court. Fires burning in pits along the rush-strewn dirt floor gave some warmth, though not all their fumes went out the smokeholes. The king had added charcoal braziers and had hung his lamps from captured swords thrust into wooden pillars carved with gods. He sat in the canton chief's high seat, which was shaped like the lap of stag-horned Cernunnos. A robe of Sarmatian sable and African leopard warmed Mithradates' huge frame; his golden chaplet caught the unsure light like a looted halo. Around the room gleamed his unmoving hoplites; a few courtiers and some mustached Gauls huddled at one end, where a boy plucked an unheeded lyre.
Eodan put his helmet under his arm, strode to the king and bowed to one knee—a special favor, granted for his blood of Boierik. "What does My Lord wish from his servant?"