They'd see a big man, a little over six feet and broad shouldered, with a pleasant enough face despite a scar on his forehead and a nose that had been broken and healed very slightly crooked; his close cropped beard and bowl-cut hair were light brown, his eyes dark blue, and his skin had the ruddy weathered look of someone who spent his time out-of-doors in all weather.

His gear was likewise plain and serviceable; a thigh length shirt of chain mail under his long leather duster, a yard of point-heavy curved shete hung from his belt, and a ten inch knife balancing it on the other side. A horseman's short horn-and-sinew bow was cased at his left knee; his kettle helmet hung by the right, and a quiver was slung over his back, covered right now with a round shield painted dark brown with an orange wedge; a tomahawk had its three-foot handle through a loop at the back of his belt.

There was no glitter of gold or gems on hilt and buckle; unlike some fighting men he didn't boast by wearing his portable wealth.

While he let them look he studied them in turn. Two of the six guards were women, in fact. They were dressed like the others, in pleated knee length skirts of wool tartan-checked in brown and dark green divided by slivers of dull orange, with boots and knee socks and an odd blanketlike stretch of the same material wrapped diago nally across their torsos and pinned over one shoulder with a brooch. Everyone here seemed to wear their hair shoulder-length or better, braided or loose, and the men sported mustaches; one example dangled down below the chin on either side.

Short swords and bucklers and long daggers rode at their waists. Four had yew longbows in their hands and quivers over their backs, and two held polearms: a seven-foot spear and an ugly thing like a great ax on a six-foot shaft whose blade tapered upward into a point, with a spike-hook on the rear. The man who held it was taller than Ingolf, and broader, and wore a beard the color of rust halfway down his chest. The spear and ax thing slanted crosswise to bar his way; behind them were the open leaves of massive metal-clad gates, and a raised portcullis. There were murder-holes in the arched ceil ing of the gate passage, and another set of gates on the inner side.