Smitty was his friend, or as close to a friend as a blond could have among Detinans. They’d fought shoulder to shoulder. They’d saved each other a couple of times. But Rollant didn’t dare take a challenge like that lightly, and he wasn’t sure whether or how much Smitty was joking.

I have to be twice as good, twice as tough, as an ordinary Detinan to get myself reckoned half as good, half as tough. Rollant had had that thought so many times, it hardly sparked resentment in him any more. It was part of what being a blond in a black-haired land meant.

A lot of Detinans thought blonds couldn’t, wouldn’t, fight for beans. The Detinans’ ancestors had crossed the Western Ocean centuries before, and promptly subjected the kingdoms full of blonds they found in the north of this new land-and the more scattered hunters and farmers who lived farther south. The campaigns were monotonously one-sided, from which the Detinans inferred that blonds were and always would be a pack of spineless cowards.

They had iron weapons. We had bronze. They rode unicorns. We’d never seen them before-we had ass-drawn chariots. They knew how to make fancy siege engines. We didn’t. Their mages were stronger than ours. Their gods were stronger than ours. No wonder we went down like barley under the scythe.

Like almost all blonds in the Kingdom of Detina these days, Rollant reverenced the Thunderer and the Lion God and the rest of the Detinan pantheon. He knew the names of the gods his own ancestors had worshipped-or of some of them, anyhow. He still believed in those gods. He believed in them, but he didn’t reverence them. What point to that? The blonds’ gods had been as thoroughly beaten as their former votaries.

“Never mind,” Smitty said, and started blatting out the royal hymn himself.

Rollant howled like a wolf. “You’re worse than I am-to the seven hells with me if you’re not.”

“To the seven hells with you anyway,” Smitty said cheerfully. He kept on singing.