I can explain what that meant to me, but it would take forever. Leave it at this. I was still scared. I still expected to die. But, well ... no more piglet. No point to it. Never was.

“Bah!” rasped Greydon. “You and your foolish Swordsman rituals. What good will they do you now?”

Smada’s voice was dead-cold: “Watch.”

He turned his back on them and looked at us. “Now, lads

“Now what?” we answered in sloppy unison.

“Now I’m going to retrieve your weapons,” he said softly with a gesture to the bar, where they lay now unguarded. “And the fight will commence.” He looked back at the rest of the room and spoke so all could hear: “I shall kill the three on the right. You get the rest.”

I couldn’t believe he just said that out loud. Neither could anybody else. We didn’t have a prayer and everybody knew it. So did Smada.

But he was saying: “Screw it!”

Lanny gulped and asked: “When?”

Smada smiled and looked at us and said, “Right now.” And then Smada was spinning impossibly fast around to the bar and the swords were flying toward us and we caught ’em somehow and managed to grip them and I spun around and a black guard slammed into me full-face and we went over the table together smashing it flat with splinters flying up into the air and seeming to hang above us while we grappled and he tried shoving the edge of his blade into my temple despite my grip on his wrist and his on mine. I got him over and got on top of him—I don’t know how—and smashed at him with my hilt and kneed him in the thighs and then the stomach. His grip slid on my sword arm and 1 twisted my hand and popped free and drug my edge across his face, shedding sparks from the edge of his helm and blood from the underside of his chin. He gurgled and spat and I shrugged halfway up and shouted with triumph or bloodlust or something and two-handed my point into his chest and then screamed as a dagger ripped through my tunic and waist between chain mail and belt.

I spun about, still screaming, and saw the bloody face of the guard upon me, his helmet long gone and he long dead from a gaping thigh wound (Lanny’s trademark) but not knowing it yet and maybe not caring. He threw himself at me again, his dagger blade flinging drops of my blood into my eyes. I dropped underneath his wide swing and drove upward with my point, but 1 skittered off to the side and suddenly the two of us were down, arms around each other and hissing hate and fear into each other’s face.

He butted me with his forehead. It broke my nose and hurt like hell, but something else, too—it so, I dunno, offended me that I started doing it back to him and kept doing it until long after he was still.

“Brad!” Lanny shouted out and woke me up. I lurched up from the still form below me and there was Lanny, blood-soaked and swaying but alive. Smada was there, too, dragging a blade from another guard.

There were bodies everywhere and blood everywhere else and the women and the others were cowering in a comer whimpering and we’d done it! We had by God done it!

I had just noticed that Greydon was nowhere in sight when he burst back through the open front door.

He was leading the other guards. Six more.

We did pretty well, considering.

Smada was nothing short of spectacular. Lord, he was strong! Once, during a pause in my own struggles, 1 saw him backhand his blade at a guard’s throat, miss the man when he ducked, but still manage to literally behead the guard behind the first with his off-balance follow-through. He was fast as hell, too. And he knew how to use all that weight. Even

without all of that wrist speed of his, he could have bludgeoned through almost anything.

My own lot was a blurring mist of terror and rage and exhaustion, of swords sparkling slippery through the air and grunts of pain and many, many wounds from dagger edges and sword edges but never again from points. 1 just hacked and drove ahead and kicked and punched and screamed in pain and fury and fear. I never fought so well. I never did anything so well. I needed to. I had three ribs smashed right through the chain mail when a guard slammed his hilt at my groin and missed. I broke my own left wrist hacking downward with my dagger against the side of a helmet but still managed to punch it in there through the space caused by knocking it askew. Once I plunged my blade in so deep I was too tired to draw it back out until somebody slammed into me and popped it loose.

All was confusion. And horror. And heartsick misery at what just goddam would not ever seem to be finished.

I saw a lot of what Lanny did. He was something to see. He skewered them and stabbed them and carved at them. He threw punches and furniture and karate kicks, of all things. I saw a lot of his fight. It was wonderful. He was wonderful. Once 1 saw him make a move 1 didn’t know the human body could make at all, much less with power. I saw a lot of his ~ fight, like I said. 1 even saw him kill Greydon.

I didn’t know Greydon had already killed him.

Nothing in my life had ever been so horrible. Nothing hurt so badly, it was over, goddammit, and we had wonl But Lanny’s wound wouldn’t stop pulsing. The life just kept throbbing out, and 1 remember thinking that any decent paramedic unit could have saved him. Saved him at the scene and, using the siren, have him at the hospital within seconds.

But there were no hospitals there and Lanny died. He died.

In my arms, his body shivering, his face white and dying, too weak to speak.

I could not stop crying. I could not stop wailing. I couldn’t stop. 1 couldn’t do anything except catch my breath and wail some more. But it did no good. They wouldn’t take me instead. Lanny never moved again.

Smada, tears of pity running pink down his own face, held me in his lap and rocked me and rocked me for what seemed

like days. Then, exhausted from fatigue and loss of blood and heart, I fell asleep in his arms.

And 1 had the most incredible dream. I knew it was a dream. And 1 also knew it was real. It was incredibly fast but also incredibly detailed. It was . . . hell, I don’t know what it was.

Smada and I rode together, in that dream, for twenty years. It was awful. It was also wonderful. I mean, there were some wonderful moments. Some truly amazing parties, for example, with some truly amazing women. Lots of women, Smada being as he was. And lots of friendships and lots of swordly triumphs plus times of great but temporary wealth. But the money got spent and the friends all seemed to die, one after another. Some of them badly and dearly. It was like Lanny all over again with three of them, one of them for Smada.

It was such a grinding tragedy of a life. Flashing glory only meant more aching scars and bloody wounds and long lines of dirt-poor trudging peasants to pass on the roadway. And the whole time the thought of the wondrous age I had left behind.

When I awoke I was still on Smada’s lap and Lanny was still dead in front of me and I began to whimper some more. Smada was infinitely caring. He rocked me until I stopped whining. He spoke to me in a dull but reassuring monotone. He wiped my bloody forehead with his glove and once, tenderly, with his damp soft beard. I just stared, mostly, not thinking of anything for a long, long time.

When I came partly out of it and looked up into his eyes he smiled lovingly at me and said: “Time to go home, son.”

I began to cry. “I don’t know how,” I whispered plaintively. “I don’t know how!”

But he just rocked me and said, “Sure you do.”

And, of course, I did. I looked upon him one last time, teacher, father, brother-in-arms, and then I closed my eyes and slept again.

When I woke up it was night and 1 was back in the forest and the SCA party was still going on by the campfire and the tequila bottle was empty and Lanny was alive beside me.