Palliot pushed back, and Dafyd gave way, moving plausibly and unmistakably toward the border mark. Palliot shifted forward, bringing a heel down hard on Dafyd's foot. The sudden pain confused and surprised him, and he hesitated as Palliot got around his guard, pushing him back toward the center court like a sheep dog holding its flock.

Fear bloomed in Dafyd's breast, and he looked a question at his opponent. He might as well have asked it of stone. Palliot swung hard and fast; the edge of Dafyd's shield only pushed the blade aside from its target. He felt its point catch at his hip, and then a deeper pain. Leaping back, Dafyd saw a glimpse of red at the tip of Palliot's blade.

It is what my experience says, and it is what I fear he is thinking of you.

Dafyd felt a brief, shrill panic washing away grief and despair both. And then, a heartbeat later, his teeth ground against each other, his heart glowed with rage. He screamed wordlessly as he attacked.

Bent low, his shield forward, Dafyd pushed close, swinging hard, a blow more outrage than technique. Palliot blocked easily with his shield and struck back. He was hellishly strong. At the third blow, Dafyd's shield began to buckle, the metal cutting into the flesh of his arm. When he staggered back, Palliot loped around, cutting off the court's edge again.

There was glee in Palliot's face now. His dark eyes glittered, and the thin lips were pulled back into something between a smile and a threat. Dafyd's arm ached. His sword hand was nearly numb. He shouted again, pushed forward, and slammed Palliot with his breaking shield. Palliot fell back a step more from surprise than the attack itself, then roared and shifted again, keeping Dafyd from the border mark. Fight or die, Dafyd would not even be permitted surrender.

Palliot leaped forward with a high side swing. It felt like nothing more than a hard tap with a stick, and then it hurt much worse. Dafyd tried to fall back, but Palliot was on him. Fury or ecstasy fueled the man's arm, and he rained blows on Dafyd's shield and helmet, hammering him down. Dafyd cried out, his fear coming in sobs. His cut hip had been bleeding down his leg unnoticed until he slipped on the blood and fell to one knee.

Like a man swearing fealty, Dafyd knelt, a parody of the ending he hoped for. God's last joke. Palliot's eyes widened, enchanted by the image of his own victory. He lifted his blade, hewing down like an axeman splitting wood. Dafyd raised sword and shield together in a desperate block. Their blades met.

Dafyd felt his break.

Palliot staggered back, blood pouring down his face. A flap of pale skin open in his forehead showed where the flying sword point had slipped past the helmet's brim. Dafyd rose.

All through the court, men were on their feet, screaming and cheering like a storm wind.

Dafyd felt blood cooling on his leg. The pain in his side might have been burning or cold, but whichever it grew worse with each breath. The knuckles of his sword hand ached.

With a sinking, sick rage, Dafyd knew what he had to do if he was to live.

"You swore before God," Dafyd said, softly enough that only the pair of them could hear him. "Now, oathbreaker, you will surrender or you will die."

Palliot glanced around him, uncertain. Afraid.

And, his mother's son after all, Dafyd gathered his breath and spoke louder, his head high, declaiming with every ounce of theater that he could muster.

"Ursin Palliot, you have been tested by God! As His agent upon this earth, I bear witness to your failure. Kneel before me. Kneel before God and confess your sins, or else die here and die forever!"

Dafyd lifted his sad, shattered sword, and it might have been a blade of fire. Palliot took a step back.

"Look in my eyes," Dafyd said, softly again. He used the same tone Rosmund had in speaking of shaved dice and marked cards: sorrowful, sympathetic, and made terrible by its truth. "You cannot win."

For a moment, Dafyd thought Palliot would kneel, and then that the man would strike him down.

Ursin Palliot, Duke of Lakefell and Warden of the South, turned and fled. When he passed the border mark, every man and woman in the court drew in a breath, and then their voices rose as one-like breaking waves, thunder, a landslide of rock and stone-to bear witness to the trial's end.

Dafyd dropped his sword, turned, and spat. At the exultant Duchess's side, Rosmund smiled, and then shrugged, and then looked away. Only the two of them understood that in his victory, Dafyd had lost. Dafyd Laician, once Duke of Westford, and now-by the grace of God-King.

Yes We Have No Bananas by Paul Di Filippo

1. Invasion of the Shorebirds

Thirty years' worth of living, dumped out on the sidewalk, raw pickings for the nocturnal Street Gleaners tribe. Not literally yet, but it might just as well be-would be soon, given the damn rotten luck of Tug Gingerella. He was practically as dead as bananas. Extinct!

How was he going to manage this unwarranted, unexpected, inexorable eviction?

Goddamn greedy Godbout!

The space was nothing much. One small, well-used, five-room apartment in a building named The Wyandot. Bachelor's digs, save for those three tumultuous years with Olive. Crates of books, his parents' old Heywood-Wakefield furniture that he had inherited, cheaply framed but valuable vintage lobby poster featuring the happy image of Deanna Durbin warbling as Mary Poppins. Shabby clothes, mostly flannel and denim and Duofold, cargo shorts and Sandwich Island shirts; cast-iron cornbread skillets; favorite music on outmoded media: scratch slates, holo transects, grail packs, and their various stacked players, natch. Goodfaith Industries metal-topped kitchen table, Solace Army shelves, a painting by Karsh Swinehart (a storm-tossed sailboat just offshore from local Pleistocene Point, Turneresque by way of Thomas Cole).

All the beloved encumbering detritus of a life.

But a life lived to what purpose, fulfilling what early promise, juvenile dreams? All those years gone past so swiftly…

No. Maundering wouldn't cut it. No remedies to his problems in fruitless recriminations and regrets. Best to hit the streets of Carrollboro in search of some aid and comfort.

Tug shuffled into a plaid lumberjacket, red-and-black Kewbie castoff that had wandered south across the nearby border like some migrating avian apparel and onto the Solace Army Store racks, took the two poutine-redolent flights down to ground level at a mild trot, energized by his spontaneous and uncharacteristic determination to act, and emerged onto Patrician Street, an incongruously named grand-dame-gone-shabby avenue cutting south and north through the Squirrel Hills district, and full of gloriously decaying sister buildings to The Wyandot, all built post-War, circa 1939: The Lewis and Jonathan, The Onondowaga, The Canandaigua, The Lord Fitzhugh, and half a dozen others.

Mid-October in Carrollboro: sunlight sharp as honed ice-skate blades, big irregularly gusting winds off Lake Ondiara, one of the five Grands. Sidewalks host to generally maintaining citizens, everyday contentment or focus evident, yet both attitudes tempered with the global stresses of the Big Retreat, ultimate source of Tug's own malaise. (And yet, despite his unease, Tug invariably spared enough attention to appraise all the beautiful women-and they were all beautiful-fashionably bundled up just enough to tease at what was beneath.)

Normally Tug enjoyed the autumn season for its crisp air and sense of annual climax, prelude to all the big holidays. Samhain, Thanksgiving, the long festive stretch that began with Roger Williams' birthday on December 21 and extended through Christmas and La Fête des Rois…