Stamford—March, Anno Domini 875
"Just a village," they said. "A few huts by the roadside. Capital of the North! It's not even Capital of the Fen. Never been anything, never will be."
The inhabitants of Stamford, both the old ones and the many more numerous incomers, bore the taunts of their neighbors easily. They could afford to. For whatever its history, whatever its native merit or lack of it, Stamford was now chief residence of the King of the North, once a co-king, once a jarl, before that a mere carl of the Great Army now destroyed, before that, almost, a thrall in a fenland village. Now they called him the One King, for so he had proved himself, and to his name and title, King Shef, his Norse subjects added the nick-name Sigrsaell, his English ones, with the same meaning and in almost the same word Sigesaelig: the Victorious. Truly he was a king who ruled by his word alone. If he declared humble Stamford the Capital of the North, then so it must be.
After his now-legendary defeat of the Ragnarsson brothers in the great battle of the Braethraborg in the year 868 of the Christians' count, that itself following on his defeat of the King of the Swedes in single combat at the Kingdom Oak of Uppsala, Shef the One King had received the submission of all the petty kings of the Scandinavian lands, of Denmark, Sweden and Norway as well. His fleets filled by levies from his under-kings, prominent among them Olaf of Norway and his own comrade Guthmund of Sweden, he had returned with massive force to the island of Britain, regaining power not only over the kingdom of the East and Middle Angles which he had been granted previously, but rapidly overawing also the petty rulers of Northumbria and the southern shires, and after them exacting submission further from the Scots, the Picts and Welsh. In the year 869 King Shef had launched the great circumnavigation of the island of Britain, which set out from the port of London, cruised to the north along the English and Scottish coasts, descended like a cloud on the disbelieving pirate-jarls of the Orkneys and Shetlands, left them chastened and afraid, and then turned south and west again through the many islands of the Scots and down the lawless western coasts to Land's End itself. Only there did it recognize friendly power, sheathe its talons, and sail east in company with the escort-ships of Alfred, King of the West Saxons, till it reached home harbor once more.
Since then the inhabitants of Stamford could boast that they sheltered a king whose power was uncontested from the westernmost isle of Scilly to the tip of the North Cape itself, two thousand miles north and east. Uncontested and—most said—shared only in theory with King Alfred, whose narrow boundaries King Shef persistently continued to honor, in obedience to the agreement of co-kingship the two had entered into in dark days of threat almost ten years before.
What the inhabitants of Stamford could not say, and did not care to think about, was why the greatest king the North had known since the times of the Caesars should make his home in the rural mud of Middle Anglia. The king's advisers had said the same thing, many times. Rule from Winchester, some said, to be frowned down by an angry one-eyed stare: for Winchester remained the capital of Alfred and the South. Rule from York, suggested others, from the stone walls that the king himself had stormed. London, said others, long a wretched backwater without a king or a court to fill it, but now increasingly the rich center of trade from the fur-lands of the North to the vineyards of the South, crowded with ships carrying hops, honey, grain, leather, tallow, wool, iron, grindstones and a thousand luxury goods: all paying toll to the officers of the co-kings, Shef's on the north bank and Alfred's on the south. No, said the many Danes among his counselors, rule from the ancient stronghold of the Skjöldung kings, from Hlethraborg itself, for it is the center of your dominions.
The king rejected them all. He would have chosen a town in the fenlands themselves if it had been possible, for he was a child of the fens. But much of the year Ely stood inaccessible in the swamp, and Cambridge little better. In Stamford he was at least on the Great North Road of the Romans, now relaid with hard stone on his own instructions. It was there, he declared, that he would set the Wisdom-hus, the House of Wisdom, that would be the central achievement of his rule: the new College of the Asgarth-Way, not replacing but overshadowing the old one at Kaupang in Norway. There all priests of the Way would be welcome, to teach their crafts, to learn crafts from others.
It was part of the Wayman law that all priests should pay their way by work, not living from tithes and soul-taxes like the priests of the Christians. Nevertheless the king had given to the College a skilled reckoner, once a Christian priest himself, Father Boniface, to give money to any Way-priest for his own support, such money to be repaid when convenient in work, in knowledge or in good silver. From all over the north priests came, now, to learn the craft of milling, by watermill or windmill, and dispersed again, taking with them the knowledge of how to grind corn, but also how to beat out iron with powered trip-hammers and draft-bellows, how to adapt the new power to many tasks once carried out by slave-muscles alone. Father Boniface, by the king's permission but without his direct knowledge, often lent money to such visitors in return for a share of the profits of some new mill for five, ten or twenty years into the future.
The silver that flowed into the coffers of the king, and the coffers of the Way, would once have brought ten thousand Vikings on the trail of loot. But across the North there were now not even many bearded corpses dangling on coastal gibbets as a warning to their kind. Royal warships patrolled the seas and the port-approaches, the few towns and fjords that kept to their old piratical customs were visited one after another by overwhelming fleets drawn from the powers of too many sub-kings to resist.
What Stamford did not know, did not wish to know, was that its very insignificance and lack of history had been a recommendation to the king. He had said in the end to the chief of his advisers, Thorvin priest of Thor, whom he had set over the College as its director: "Thorvin, the place for new knowledge is somewhere where there is no old history, no old tradition for people to imitate and follow and misunderstand. I have always said that as important as new knowledge is old knowledge which no-one has recognized. But worse than anything is old knowledge which has become holy, unquestioned, so well known to everybody that no-one thinks about it any more. We will begin again, you and I, somewhere that no-one has heard of. Where there will be no stink of ink and parchment in the air!"
"There is nothing wrong with ink and parchment," Thorvin had replied. "Or vellum for that matter. The Way has its books of holy songs. Even your steelmaster Udd has learnt to write down what he knows."
The King frowned, reconsidering what he meant. "I have nothing against books and writing, as a craft," he said. "But folk who study books alone come to think there is nothing in the world outside them. They make book into Bible, and that is old knowledge become old lore. I want new knowledge, or old knowledge recognized. So here in Stamford at the House of Wisdom we will establish this as a rule. Anyone, man or woman, Wayfolk or Christian, who brings us new knowledge or shows us some new and useful way to use old knowledge, will be better rewarded than they would be for years of toil. Or years of Viking robbery. I want no more Ragnarsson heroes. Let people show their courage some other way!"
By the year of Our Lord 875—for the chroniclers of the Asgarth Way kept to the Christian count while they rejected the Christian Lord—his capital was established, his policy bearing fruit: sometimes sweet, as often sour.
High in the sky, small white clouds scudded before the strong wind from the south-west. Their shadows raced across the bright green of new grass, across the strong rich brown of plow-furrows, the heavy horse teams drawing slow lines across the springtime fields. In between the sun shone, hot and welcome on England emerging from its winter sleep. Emerging too, many said, from the long dark into a new day and a new spring under its young ruler and his iconoclastic but fortunate rule.
In the market place of rustic Stamford maybe as many as two thousand people were gathered to witness the strange experiment that had been promised. The thanes and churls crowded in from the fields, wives and children with them, pushing back their hoods to take the sun, even shedding their cloaks with due caution against the return of the spring showers. The slow heavy faces showed pleasure, wonder, even excitement. For today someone would indeed show a new kind of courage that not even Ivar the Boneless or his brother Sigurth the Snake-eye might have matched. Today a man would leap from the great stone tower of the House of Wisdom itself. And fly!
Or so it was said. The crowd would be happy to see flight, to tell their children and grandchildren about it ever after. But they would be happy also to see dramatic fall. They munched bread and good blood-sausage in even-tempered expectation of either.
A blare of horns set the spectators moving slowly to either side of the square, as towards them from the king's great hall came the king himself and his guests and officers. At the head, walking with deliberate ceremonial just behind the troop of champions blasting challenge from their enormous, long-preserved aurochs horns, came the two kings themselves, Shef and his guest and partner Saxon Alfred. Those who had not seen them before stared uncertainly at the contrasting figures, wondering—till their better-informed neighbors hissed the truth in their ears—which was the mighty one, which the tolerated partner. Indeed it was Alfred who caught the eye, dressed like a king in scarlet cloak, sky-blue tunic, gold circlet on yellow hair, left hand resting easily on the gold hilt of an ancient sword.
The man beside him wore scarlet also, a cloak of wool woven so fine it seemed as soft as its magnificent silk lining. But the tunic and breeches beneath it were plain dark gray. The king carried no sword, indeed no weapon at all, stalking along with his thumbs in his belt like a churl coming home from the plow. And yet, if one looked closer, it seemed possible that this was after all the man the Norse-folk called Ivarsbani, Sigurtharbani, the man who had killed both Ivar the Boneless and Sigurth the Snake-eye with his own hands, and King Kjallak the Strong of the Swedes as well. Had overthrown too the power of Charles the Bald and his Frankish horsemen at Hastings, in the year of Our Lord 866.
The king was now in his late twenties, and he had the body of a swordsmith in his prime: broad shoulders, powerful hands, a stride that swung from the hips, a waist so narrow he might have traded belts with his wife—if he had had one. Yet his face was that of a man much older. The black hair was streaked, and more than streaked with gray over the temples. More gray showed in the short clipped beard. The king's right eye was covered with a plain black patch, but round it men could see the flesh drawn in, wasted, the one cheek hollow. Lines of care ran across his brow, an expression of constant pain. Or was it regret? Men said that he had returned from his duel with the last of the Ragnarssons friendless and alone, having bought his life and his victory with the loss of others. Some said he had left his luck behind on the battlefield with his dead friends. Others, better-informed, said that his luck was so great that he drained it from others, brought death to those who came too close.
Whatever the truth, the king felt no need to display wealth or rank or power. He wore no crown, no fine jewelry, gave no employment to cunning goldsmiths. Round his arms, though, there ran half a score of golden bracelets, plain and unworked: worn without show, as if they were merely money.
Behind the two kings came their retinues, chamberlains, bodyguards, Shef's swordbearer, Viking sub-kings and English aldermen of shires anxious to be near the center of power. Close on Shef's heels strode one man who brought murmurs of wonder to the rustics in from the fields, a man nearer seven foot than six, and one who would never see twenty stone again, nor twenty-five, a man head and shoulders above all but the mightiest even of the picked bodyguards: Brand the Viking, Champion now of all of Norway and not only of his native Halogaland, rumored in whispers even in the depths of England to be the relative of trolls and a kinsman of marbendills of the deep. Few knew the truth of what had happened when the king had been hunted into the farthest north, and few dared to enquire.
"But where is the man who is to fly?" whispered one anxious rustic to his town-dwelling cousin. "The man dressed like a bird?"
"Already in the Wisdom House with the priests," came the reply. "He feared his feather-hame, his coat of birds' feathers, might be crushed in the press. Follow the kings now, and we shall see."
Slowly the crowd closed in behind the royal procession, and trailed them down the hard stone of the Great North Road itself. Not to the town walls, for in demonstration of power Stamford had none: its defenses lay far out at sea, in the catapult-mounting battleships that had crushed Vikings and Franks alike. But to the edge of the wooden huts of the common folk, where beyond them in a meadow stood the great square of dormitories, workshops, forges, stables and storerooms that was the College of the Way in England, with lifting over it the tall sails of windmills. And at its center the stone tower Shef had ordered to outstrip the works of the Christian kings: sixty feet high and forty square, its blocks of stone so massive that visiting churls could not believe they had been raised by men with cranes and counterweights, but told strange tales of devils compelled by magic.
The kings and dignitaries entered the high iron-bound doorway. The common crowd spread itself round in an expectant semi-circle, gaping up.
As he reached the top of the staircase, Shef stepped ahead of his co-king for the first time and walked out onto the flat roof, surrounded by battlements. Thorvin was there to meet him, dressed as always in the plain but shining white of a priest of the Way, silver hammer round his neck as a sign of his devotion to Thor, a real double-headed hammer tucked into his belt as a reminder of his craft. Behind him, but surrounded by other priests, was the man who was to fly.
Shef walked thoughtfully towards him. The man was dressed in a woolen suit of the plainest homespun, but not the usual tunic and breeches. Instead what he wore seemed to have been cut and sewn as one piece, to fit as tightly as possible. But round him and disguising his body-suit was a cape. Shef looked closer, still unspeaking. Thousands upon thousands of feathers, not stuck into some other material, wool or linen, but sewn tightly, quill to quill. The cape was strapped with sinews to wrists and ankles, stitched also along the line of the shoulders and down the back. It hung loose, though, round the man's sides.
Suddenly the man, meeting the king's eye, threw his arms wide and straddled his legs. The cape took shape, like a web, like a sail. Shef nodded, recognizing what was intended.
"Where do you come from?"
The bird-man nodded respectfully towards Alfred, standing a pace behind Shef. "From the land of Alfred King, my lord. From Wiltshire."
Shef forbore to ask why he had come to the land of another king. Only one king paid silver for new knowledge, and at a rate that drew experimenters from all across the Northern lands.
"What gave you the idea?"
The bird-man drew himself up, as if ready with a prepared speech. "I was born and baptized a Christian, lord, but years ago I heard the teachings of the Way. And I heard the story of the greatest of smiths, of Völund the Wise, whom we English call Wayland Smith. It came to me that if he could rise and fly from his enemies, then so might I. Since then I have spared no effort in making this garment, the last of many I have tried. For it says in the 'Lay of Völund', 'Laughing, he rose aloft, flew with feather-hame.' And I believe the words of the gods are true, truer than the Christians' stories. See, I have made myself a sign in token of my devotion."
Moving carefully, the man pulled forward a silver pair of wings, hanging from a chain round his neck.
In response Shef pulled from under his tunic the sign he himself bore, the kraki, the pole-ladder of his own patron and perhaps-father, the little-known god Rig.
"None have worn the wings of Völund before," Shef remarked to Thorvin.
"Few wore the ladder of Rig either."
Shef nodded. "Success changes many things. But tell me, devotee of Völund—what makes you think you can fly with this cape, besides the words of the lay."
The bird-man looked surprised. "Is it not obvious, lord? Birds fly. They have feathers. If men had feathers, they would fly."
"Why has it not been done before?"
"Other men have not my faith."
Shef nodded once more, leapt suddenly up to the top of the battlements, stood on the narrow stone lip. His bodyguards moved forward urgently, were met by the bulk of Brand. "Easy, easy," he growled. "The king is not a Halogalander, but he is something of a seaman now. He will not fall off a flat ledge in broad daylight."
Shef looked down, saw two thousand faces staring up. "Back," he shouted, waving his arms. "Back from under. Give the man room."
"Do you think I will fall, lord?" asked the bird-man. "Do you mean to test my faith?"
Shef's one eye looked past him, saw in the crowd behind Alfred the face of the one woman who had accompanied them to the top of the stair: Godive, Alfred's wife, now known to all as the Lady of Wessex. His own childhood sweetheart and first love, who had left him for a kinder man. One who did not look at others to use them. Her face reproached him.
He dropped his gaze, gripped the man by the arm, careful not to disturb or disarrange his feathers.
"No," he said. "Not at all. If they are too close to the tower they will not see well. I wish them to have something to tell their children and their children's children. Not just, 'he flew too fast for me to see.' I wish you the best of fortune."
The bird-man smiled proudly, stepped first onto a block, then, carefully, onto the wall where Shef had stood. A gasp of amazement came up from the crowd below. He stood, spread his cape widely in the strong wind. It blew from behind him, Shef noted, flattening the feathers against his back. He thinks the cape is a sail, then, which will sweep him on as if he were a ship. But what if it should instead be a...?
The man crouched, gathering his strength, and then suddenly leapt straight out, crying at the top of his voice, "Völund aid me!"
His arms beat the air, the cape flapping wildly. Once, and then as Shef craned forward, again, and then... A thud came up from the stone-flagged courtyard below, a long simultaneous groan from the crowd. Looking down, Shef saw the body lying perhaps sixteen feet from the base of the tower. Priests of the Way were already running towards him, priests of Ithun the Healer. Shef recognized among them the diminutive shape of another childhood friend, Hund the one-time slave, who shared a dog's name with himself, but was now thought the greatest leech and bone-setter of the island of Britain. Thorvin must have stationed them there. So he had shared his own misgivings.
They were looking up now, shouting. "He has broken both legs, badly smashed. But not his back."
Godive was looking over the wall now, next to her husband. "He was a brave man," she said, a note of accusation in her voice.
"He will get the best treatment we can give him," Shef replied.
"How much would you have given him if he had flown, say, a furlong?" asked Alfred.
"For a furlong? A hundred pounds of silver."
"Will you give him some now, as compensation for his injuries?"
Shef's lips tightened suddenly into a hard line, as he felt the pressure put on him, the pressure to show charity, respect good intentions. He knew Godive had left him for his ruthlessness. He did not see himself as ruthless. He did only what he needed to. He had many unknown subjects to protect as well as those who appeared before him.
"He was a brave man," he said, turning away. "But he was a fool as well. All he had to go on was words. But in the College of the Way it is works alone that count. Is that not so, Thorvin? He has taken your book of holy song and turned it into a Bible like the Christians' gospel. To be believed in, not thought about. No. I will send my leeches to him, but I will pay him nothing."
A voice drifted up from the courtyard again. "He has his wits back. He says his mistake was to use hen's feathers, and they are earth-scratchers. Next time he will try with gull-feathers alone."
"Don't forget," Shef said more loudly and to all, still answering an unspoken accusation. "I spend my subjects' silver for a purpose. All this could be snatched from us any summer. Think how many enemies we have over there." He pointed at right angles to the wind, out across the meadows to the south and east.
If some bird or bird-man could have followed the wave of the king across sea and land for a thousand miles, across the English Channel and then across the whole continent of Europe, it would have come in the end upon a meeting: a meeting long-prepared. For many weary months go-betweens had ridden down muddy roads and sailed stormy seas, to ask careful questions, in the languages of Byzantium and of Rome.
"If it might be that the Imperator, in his wisdom, might be prepared to consider thus and so; and might attempt to use such slight influence as he has with His Holiness the Pope to persuade him in his turn to reconsider such and such a formula; then (accepting the foregoing as a working possibility or if I may use your so-flexible tongue, a hypothesis) could it be so that in his turn the Basileus might turn his mind to the thoughts of so and thus?" So spoke the Romans.
"Esteemed colleague, leaving your interesting hypothesis to one side for the moment only, if it were so that the Basileus might—saving at all times his orthodoxy and the rights of the Patriarch—consider a working and perhaps temporary arrangement in such and such a field of interest, might we then enquire what the attitude of the Imperator would be to the vexed question of the Bulgarian embassy, and the unhappy attempts of previous administrations to detach our newly-baptized converts from their faith and attach them to the allegiance of Rome?" So replied the Greeks.
Slowly the emissaries had conversed, fenced, felt each other out, returned for further instructions. The emissaries had risen higher and higher in rank, from mere bishops and second secretaries to archbishops and influential abbots, drawing in military men, counts and strategists. Plenipotentiaries had been dispatched, only to discover that however full their powers might be, they did not dare to commit their emperors and churches on their word alone. Finally there had been no help for it but to arrange a meeting of the supreme powers, the four greatest authorities in Christendom: the Pope of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople, the Emperor of the Romans and the Emperor of the Greeks.
The meeting had been held up for months by the discovery that in his eyes the Basileus of the Greeks considered himself the true heir of the Caesars and so Emperor of the Romans as well, while the Pope bitterly resented the termination "of Rome" being added to his title, regarding himself as the heir of St. Peter and the Pope of all Christians everywhere. Carefully formulas had been arranged, agreements reached not only as to what might be said but what might not under any circumstances be said. Like mating hedgehogs the powers drew together: delicately, gingerly.
Even the place of meeting had required a dozen proposals and counterproposals. Yet now, at last, the negotiators might look out over a bluer sea than any the barbarian kings of the North would ever view: the Adriatic, looking west towards Italy, at the place where once the mightiest of Roman administrator-emperors had built his palace for retirement—Salonae of Diocletian, called already by the Slavs filtering into the region, Split.
In the end, and after days of exhausting ceremonial, the two military leaders had lost patience and dismissed all their retinues of advisers and translators and chiefs of protocol. They sat now on a balcony overlooking the sea, a pitcher of resined wine between them. All serious issues were settled, the agreements at this moment being embodied by relays of scribes writing a massive treaty in multiple copies in gold and purple ink. The only possible check now could come from the religious leaders, who had retired to talk between themselves. And each had been given the strictest and grimmest of warnings by his earthly colleague and paymaster, to cause no trouble. For there were worse things that could happen to the Church, as the Imperator Bruno had said to his creature Pope John, than a misunderstanding over the exact nature of the Nicene Creed.
The emperors sat quietly, then, each with an ear cocked for the return of the churchmen, discussing their personal problems, as one ultimate ruler to another. It was perhaps the first time either had talked freely and frankly of such matters. They spoke in Latin, native to neither of them, but at least allowing them to communicate without intermediaries.
"We are alike in several ways, then," mused the Emperor of the Greeks, the Basileus. The imperial name he had chosen, Basil I, showed a certain lack of imagination unsurprising in one with his history.
"Hoc ille," agreed the Imperator of the West, Bruno Emperor of the Romans as he claimed, but in reality of the Franks, the Italians and most of all of the Germans. "That's it. We are new men. Of course my family is old and distinguished. But I am not of the blood of Charlemagne."
"Nor I of the house of Leo," agreed the Basileus. "Tell me if I am wrong, but as I understand it there is none of the blood of Charlemagne left."
Bruno nodded. "None in the male line. Some were killed by their own vassals, like King Charles the Bald, on account of their failures in battle. I had to take measures against others myself."
"How many?" probed Basil.
"About ten. It was made easier for me in that they all seemed to have the same names. Lewis the Stammerer, Lewis the German. Three sons for each of them, and still with the same names, Charles and Lewis and Carloman. And some others of course. But it is not quite true that there is none of the blood of Charlemagne left. He has great-great-granddaughters left. One day, when all my tasks are done, I may ally myself with one."
"So your position will be stronger."
A yet fiercer look crossed Bruno's craggy, rock-hewn face. He straightened up in his chair, reached behind him for the thing that never left him, that no negotiators could persuade him to abandon. The lance with the leaf-shaped blade, its plain head now shining once more with inlaid gold crosses, set on a shaft of ash-wood barely visible beneath gold and silver wire. His ape-like shoulders stretched as he swung it before him, thumped its shaft on the marble floor.
"No! My position could not be stronger in any way. For I am the holder of the Holy Lance, the lance with which the German centurion Longinus split the heart of our blessed Savior. He who holds it, he is the heir of Charlemagne, by more than blood. I took it in battle with the heathen, brought it back to Christendom."
Reverently Bruno kissed the blade, laid the weapon down with tender care beside him. The bodyguards who had stiffened into readiness yards distant relaxed, smiled warily at each other.
The Basileus nodded, reflecting. He had learnt two things. That this strange count from the furthest extremity of the Franks believed his own fable. And that the stories they told of him were true. This man did not need a bodyguard, he was his own. How like the Franks to elect as their king the one the most formidable in single combat, not a strategos but a mere champion. And yet he might be a strategist too.
"And you," probed Bruno in his turn. "You... put from his throne your predecessor, Michael the Drunkard, as he was called. I take it he has left no seed behind to grow rebellion."
"None," replied Basil curtly, his pale face flushing over the dark beard.
Basil's supposed second son, Leo, is in reality the child of Michael, Bruno's spies had reported. Basil killed the Emperor his master for cuckolding him. But in any case the Greeks needed an Emperor who could stay sober long enough to marshal an army. They are pressed by the Slavs, the Bulgars, even by your own foes, the Vikings raiding down the great rivers of the east. Not twenty years ago a Viking fleet menaced Constantinople, which they call Byzantium. We do not know why Basil allowed Leo to live.
"So. We are new men, then. But neither of us has old men waiting to challenge us. And yet both of us know we have many challenges, many threats. We and Christendom at once. Tell me," Bruno asked, his face intent, "where do you see the greatest threat to us, to Christ, and to his Church? You yourself, I mean, not your generals and your advisers."
"An easy question, for me," Basil replied, "though I may not give the answer you expect. You know that your adversaries, the heathen of the North, the Vikings as you call them: you know that a generation ago they brought their ships up to Byzantium itself?"
Bruno nodded. "It surprised me when I learned it. I did not think that they could find their way across the Italian Sea. But then your secretary told me that they had not done so, had somehow brought their ships down the rivers of the East. You think they are your greatest danger? That is what I hoped..."
A lifted hand interrupted him. "No. I do not think that these men, fierce as they are, are the greatest menace. We bought them off, you know. The common folk say that it was the Virgin Mary who routed them, but no, I remember the negotiations. We paid them a little gold. We offered them unlimited use of the great municipal baths! They took it. To me they are fierce and greedy children. Not serious.
"No, the true danger comes not from them, mere pagani that they are, immature rustics. It comes from the followers of Muhammad." The Basileus paused for wine.
"I have never met one," Bruno prompted.
"They came from nowhere. Two hundred and fifty years ago these followers of their false Prophet came from out of the desert. Destroyed the Persian Empire. Took from us all our African provinces, and Jerusalem." The Basileus leaned forward. "Took the southern shore of the Italian Sea. Since then that sea has been our battleground. And on it we have been losing. You know why?"
Bruno shook his head.
"Galleys need water, all the time. Oarsmen drink faster than the fish. The side that controls the watering-grounds controls the sea. And that means the islands. Kypros they took, island of Venus. Then Crete. After they conquered Spain, they seized the Balearics. Now their fleets press again on Sicily. If they take that—where will Rome be? So you see, friend, they threaten you as well. How long since their armies were at the gates of your holy city?"
Opening doors, raised voices, a shuffle of feet, said that the conference of Pope and Patriarch had broken up, that the Emperors of East and West must turn their minds again to ceremonial and treaties. Bruno groped for a reply, amid several. The Basileus is an Easterner, he thought, like Pope Nicholas whom we killed. He does not realize that destiny lies in the West. He does not know that the Way-folk are not the greedy children bought off in his father's time. That they are worse than the followers of the Prophet, for they still have their prophet with them: the one-eye. I should have killed him when I had my sword at his throat.
And yet maybe there is no need to argue here. The Basileus needs my bases. I need his fleet. Not for the Arabs. Just to sweep the Channel so I can put my lancers across. But let him have his way first. For he has the one thing that the Way-folk do not...
The Emperors were on their feet, the churchmen approaching, all smiles. A cardinal spoke, bowing, the cardinal who had once been Archbishop Gunther of Cologne. He spoke in fluent Low German, his and Bruno's native dialect, which neither Pope nor Patriarch nor any Greek or Italian would follow. At the same time one of the Patriarch's staff broke out with a burst of demotic Greek, no doubt with the same intention.
"It's fixed. They have agreed that we may add the formula 'and the Son' to the Nicene Creed—much difference that makes—as long as we draw no conclusions about the Double Procession of the Holy Ghost from it. Our fool, the Italian, has been told he has to withdraw his bishops from the Bulgars and let Saint Cyril have a free hand teaching them to read and write. All sides have agreed in condemning the former Patriarch, Photius the bookworm, no problem there. It's fixed."
Bruno turned towards Basil as the latter heard his own secret briefing chatter to an end. The two men smiled, simultaneously, reached out their hands.
"My bases in Italy," said Bruno.
"My fleet to relieve Sicily. And then the whole Italian Sea," replied Basil.
And then the Atlantic, thought Bruno. But he held his tongue. After all he might have shed the Greeks and their Emperor before then. If he or his agents could find out the weapon that held Constantinople inviolable from the sea. The secret no Westerner knew, Roman or German or Way-man.
The secret of Greek fire.
Halim, amir of the fleet of the Fortunate of God, bin-Tulun, Caliph of Egypt, newly independent of the feeble Caliphate of Baghdad, felt no unease as his galley led its hundred fellows to sea in the darkest hour before dawn. In moments, when a keen eyesight could see sufficiently to distinguish a white thread from a black one, his muezzin would call the faithful to prayer with the traditional cry, the shahada:
God is most great!
I testify that there is no God but Allah.
I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.
Arid so on, in the invocation that Halim had heard and repeated and obeyed forty thousand times since he reached the estate of a man and a warrior. He and his men would stretch out their mats on the rolling decks and go through their rakat, the prescribed ritual of prayer. But the men at the oars would not, would carry on sweeping his fleet into battle. For they were Christians, the slaves of many a lost campaign. Halim had no doubt of the outcome of this one. His soldiers were fed and rested, his slaves watered and refreshed. By the end of the summer the disorganized resistance of the Rumi would have come to an end, as always. And this time the whole island of Sicily would be brought once more under the rule of his master, and beyond his master the rule of the Dar al-Islam, the House of Submission to the Will of God.
Halim heard the call of the lookout simultaneously with the start of the ritual prayer, the salat. "Ships to seaward of us! Ships with the light behind them!"
It angered him, but it did not surprise him or cause him uneasiness. Over the years the Christians, those who added gods to God, had learned the rituals of their enemies, and sought from time to time to make use of them. They were mistaken in thinking that an advantage. In combat for the Faith, to abstain from prayer was permissible, even meritorious. It could be made up later. If the Rumi were trying to take him by surprise, they only brought their own end so much the closer.
Halim called to his steersman to swing the ship towards the dawning light, heard the master of the slaves shout orders to the port oars to cease rowing, then to accelerate to ramming speed. Halim's vessel was one of the ancient pattern that had ruled the Mediterranean Sea, the Italian Sea as the foolish Rumi called it, since the days of the Greek philosophers before the son of the Lady Miriam came to trouble the world. Long, thin, with little freeboard, it was heavily reinforced forward to take an iron-shod ram, with catwalks above the oarsmen's benches for the fighting men to line either side.
Halim did not rely on his ram alone. His master, bin-Tulun, was no Arab by blood, but a Turk from the central steppe lands of Asia. He had supplied a dozen of his countrymen to each ship. As they lined the sides they began to string their bows: the composition bows of Central Asia, wood at the center, sinew on the outside, the side to which the bow bent before it was strung, hard horn on the inside, all glued and assembled with fanatic care. Again and again Halim had seen the Rumi shot down before ever they came to a handstroke, their own weak wooden bows outranged by a hundred yards, not able to pierce even good stout leather.
As the light grew across the water Halim realized that the ships now closing on him at ramming speed like his own were not the kind he expected. Their prows were painted red, were higher out of the water than any he had seen before, and from the warships' hulls he could see sprouting not the crucifixes of the Rumi, but gilded pictures, icons.
Not the fleet of the Sicilians then, or their holy father in Rome, but the Red Fleet of the Byzantines, of which Halim had only heard. He felt something at his heart—not fear, for that was impossible to the true believer, nor even surprise, but intellectual worry: how could the Byzantine fleet be here, five hundred miles from its bases, more days than it could row without exhaustion? Concern, as well, that this news and what it meant should be passed to his master.
But passed it would be. Halim signaled to his steersman not to meet the charging enemy bow to bow, but to swerve aside, trusting to greater handiness, to shave away one row of oars as they passed, and pour in a deadly volley from his bowmen, each of them able to shoot a shaft a second and never miss. He ran forward himself along the starboard catwalk, drawing his saber, not with the intention of striking a blow but to encourage his men.
There would be a moment of danger here. For as he turned aside, the Greek, if he were fast enough, could accelerate and strike bow to flank, driving through below the waterline, and reversing oars instantly to shake the smaller craft off and leave her crew struggling in the water, her chained slaves drowning desperate and trapped.
Yet the slaves knew that too. As the ship swung barely fifty yards from the white water of her enemy's prow, the starboard side braked with their oars as one man, the port side slaves swung with all the strength in their bodies. Then a concerted momentary glance from both sides at each other to pick up the time, and the ship leapt forward as if it were the first stroke that any man had made that day. The bowmen bent their bows and picked their targets among the faces crowding the rail.
There was something there in the middle of the boat. Halim could not see clearly what it was, but he could see some metal contrivance, like a copper dome, lit brilliantly not only by the rising sun but by some flare or flame beneath it. Across the water, over the hiss of the oars and the blare of trumpets, came a roaring noise like that of some great beast, cut by a high and eldritch whistle. He could see two men pumping desperately at a handle, two more leveling a nozzle over the side.
Greek ships and the Greek fire. Halim had heard of this weapon, but never seen it. Few men who saw it lived to say how it should be countered. Yet he had heard one thing, which was that if its crew could be killed or distracted while they prepared its action, then it became as dangerous to its own side as to the enemy.
Halim began to shout orders to the Turks in his own craft, wishing vainly as he did so that he could shout the same warning to the hundred ships streaming in his wake, to attack, he could now see, no more than a score of the Byzantines.
As the breath filled his lungs, and the first arrows began to fly, the whistle in Halim's ears rose to a shriek, a barked command came from the vessel lunging towards him. Halim saw the nozzle swing to face him, caught a strange reek in the air, saw a glow at the mouth of the nozzle. Then the air was full of fire, searing out his eyeballs, crisping his skin so that pain struck him like a club from all directions at once. Halim breathed in death as he tried to scream, his lungs filling instantly with flame. As he fell back into the blaze that was his flagship he heard the simultaneous agony of a hundred slaves, and took it with the last flick of consciousness as the tribute for the entry of a warrior into Paradise.
The Tulunid scout boats, creeping cautiously into the water where their fleet had been barely three days before, found nothing to explain its disappearance. Except charred timbers floating, the headless corpse of a circumcised believer who had survived the burning only to meet death for refusing baptism. And still chained to the timber he had pulled free from his sunken ship in a frenzy of fear, a slave half mad with thirst. The story he croaked out sent the scout boats racing without further delay for the Egyptian shore.
News of the disaster did not outsail the fleet that caused it. A bare fortnight later, Ma'mun bin-Khaldun, commander of the faithful on the new-conquered island of Mallorca, could only watch grimly from the shore as the Byzantine fleet brushed aside the attempts at interception by his own always-manned inshore squadron, and then cruised slowly along the ranks of his massed invasion fleet, moored a hundred feet offshore, pouring out their Iblis-flame. His army had debarked months before, to set about the conquest of the island, leaving their ships with no more than an anchor-watch and a guard against surprise by the natives. As the Greeks came into sight, his few boat-keepers had quickly abandoned their charges, pulling furiously for the shore in dinghies. He would lose few men, other than the ones he would execute for fleeing without orders. Nevertheless the ships were a major loss.
Yet Ma'mun felt no great concern. Behind him he had a large and fertile island, its native inhabitants by now thoroughly tamed. He had immense stores of grain, olives, wine and beef, and could if need be support himself and his army indefinitely on the products of Mallorca itself. He had something more important than that as well, the breath of life itself to any Arab: he had water. And while the Byzantines had fire at sea, they would soon need to come to land, for water. No fleet of galleys could last long without it. They must already be at the limit of their endurance, if they had made the long passage from their bases on the islands of the Greeks.
Though there was something wrong there, Ma'mun reflected silently. If the Byzantines had indeed made the long passage down the Mediterranean, they would not be at the limit of their endurance, they would have passed it days ago. Therefore, they had not. They had touched land somewhere much closer. On his information, that was impossible. Therefore, his information was wrong. That was the dangerous element in this situation, Ma'mun concluded. Where could the Greeks have watered? In Sicily? By his understanding, Sicily was closely invested by the forces of the Tulunids, the Caliph of Egypt. Ma'mun himself had nothing but contempt for Tulun and his followers, mere Turks, barbarians from nowhere, followers in any case—till they rebelled—of the treacherous successors of Abdullah. He himself was an Umayyad and a member of the tribe of Quraysh, related by blood to the Caliph of Cordova, both of them descendants of that Abd er-Rahman who had fled the massacre in Persia when Umayyad power was broken. Nevertheless, while the Egyptians had no more love for him than he for them, he was surprised that some information or other had not reached him if Sicily had been retaken: it was not like the pale followers of Yeshua whom they mistakenly called the Christ to act so swiftly.
He would have to gain further information. Yet whatever the true state of affairs, there could be no doubt that those boats out there in the calm bay of Palma would soon be trying to find some unguarded spring or other. No doubt they hoped that he, Ma'mun, would be unable to guard every foot of shore on this rugged island. Now it would be their turn to be mistaken.
As he turned dismissively from the last moments of the destruction of his fleet, he became aware of some disturbance on the outer fringes of his guard. A young man was struggling in the grip of two warriors, calling out angrily. Angrily, not fearfully. Ma'mun signed to his guard-captain to let the young man through. If he had a word to say, let him say it. If he wasted the time of the commander of the faithful, he could go to the impaling-post as a warning to others.
The young man fretfully pulling his clothes back into place had the face of a Qurayshi too, Ma'mun noticed. Most of his army now were the descendants of Berbers, converted Spaniards, even Goths. Ma'mun had been obliged to prohibit taunts of pork-eating, so sensitive were the sons of former Christians in his ranks. But this young man had no touch of the tow-brush about him, as lean and dark-faced as Ma'mun himself. He spoke, too, like a true Arab, without evasion or deference.
"Commander, the men on those ships are not Greeks, even if the ships throw out the Greek fire. Not all of them. Many are ferengis, Franks."
Ma'mun raised an eyebrow. "How has it been permitted to you to see this? I have not seen it, and my eyes are keen enough to pick out the Rider of the Stars." He meant the star in Orion's sword-belt which has, invisible to all but the keenest-sighted, a tiny companion sheltered by the light of its neighbor.
The young man smiled with irritating condescension. "I have that which enables me to see better even than that."
The guard-captain standing at the young man's elbow stepped forward, aware that his master was on the edge of ordering the impaling-post to be set up. "The young man here, lord, is Mu'atiyah. A pupil of bin-Firnas."
Ma'mun hesitated, pulling his beard. He himself had been named after the great Caliph of fifty years before, who had set up the great library and center of wisdom in Baghdad. He had the greatest respect for men of learning. And there was no doubt that Abu'l Qasim Abbas bin-Firnas was the glory of Cordova for his learning and his many experiments. With less impatience in his voice he said, "Show us then, the wisdom of your master."
Smiling once more, the young Mu'atiyah pulled from his sleeve an object like a stout bottle covered in leather.
"Know," he said, "that my master, being advanced in years, found a dimness coming upon his eyes, so that he could see only that which was further away than his own arm's reach. For many years he had studied the science of making glass, and the stones from which it might be made. So, by accident, one day he discovered that if one looked through stones of a certain kind and shape, that which was too close for his eyes became as it were far away, so that he might read it. And, not by accident but by design, he studied many hours till he could find a glass shape that would do likewise for him, and restore to him the liberty of his books."
"But that is to make the close far away," replied Ma'mun. "Here we have need of the opposite."
Again the young man smiled, again provoking Ma'mun with his display of confidence. "That is what I, Mu'atiyah, have discovered. That if one takes not one but two glasses, and looks first through one and then through the other, the far away comes close."
Thoughtfully, Ma'mun reached over and took the leather object from the young man's hand, disregarding a look of alarm and a sudden babble of explanation. He put it to his eye, looked a moment, lowered it.
"I see only the tiniest of images."
"Not like that, lord, mighty one." The young man was at least showing agitation for the first time. It was often so with the learned, Ma'mun conceded grimly. What upset them the most was not the threat of death but the fear that they would not be able to display their abilities. He allowed the young man to take the object from his hand, reverse it so that he looked through what appeared to be the neck.
"Yes, lord. On the deck of the lead ship I see a Greek, with a curled beard, standing by an image of the holy." Ma'mun's face twisted in disgust, and he spat ritually to avert the contamination created by any image of the divine. "But by him there is a fair-haired Frank, all in metal armor. They are arguing, pointing in different directions."
"What are they saying?"
"My art deals with sight, not sound."
"Very well." Ma'mun signed to the guard-captain. "Take the young man from his place in the ranks, keep him with yourself. If I have need of his art I will send for him. If I do not, the armies of Spain have more need of wise men than of brave ones. We must keep him safe. And, Mu'atiyah, if you tell me where the Greek amiral means to land for water before I can see myself, I will fill your mouth with gold. If you tell me wrong I will melt it first."
He turned away, calling to his commanders of divisions. Behind him the young man raised his spyglass again, seemed to be attempting to gain a clearer view by moving his eye in and out from the eyepiece.
From time to time in his babbling flow of talk, the Mallorcan villager cast a fearful glance sideways. He had reason to feel fear. The villager had seen the fleet of great red galleys pull round the point, having burned to the waterline the ships that had brought the circumcised to Mallorca long months before. He had realized they must be searching for water, and theorized that whoever they were, the enemies of Muhammad must be his friends. So, when they came ashore and began to set up their camp, and after he had crept close enough to see the crucifixes and the saints' images raised, he had come shyly and slowly forward to volunteer his services: hoping for some reward that might keep him from starvation. Hoping too for revenge on the fierce dark-faced raiders who had stolen from him wife and son and daughters.
Yet he had not reckoned on facing quite such strange and menacing allies. The villager had no language in common with the Greek sailors, or with the German soldiers whom they transported. He had been passed on, though, from guard-post to guard-post till they found a Latin-speaking chaplain. If he spoke slowly and listened carefully, he and the Mallorcan could understand each other, for the Mallorcan's peculiar dialect was no more than the Vulgar Latin of old time, spoken badly and without a schoolmaster for generation after forgotten generation. So much the Mallorcan had expected. He had not expected to find anyone like the man who stood with a scowl on his face next to the Christian priest and his wizened informant.
Agilulf, Ritter of the Lanzenorden, once companion of the great Emperor Bruno himself, and now commander of the expedition against the Moors, stood a foot taller than either priest or villager. His height was increased by the visored iron helmet he wore, and the black plume in it that marked his rank. Yet what the villager could not understand, or hardly believe, was not the man but his dress. From head to foot Agilulf seemed to be made of iron. He wore helmet, mail shirt hanging to his knees, greaves on his calves and beneath them iron-plated boots. Iron studded his gauntlets and rimmed the long kite-shaped shield he carried: a horseman's shield, drawn out in a kite shape to protect the lancer's left leg when he charged, but carried by Agilulf on foot as if weight meant nothing to him. Nor heat. Beneath the iron he wore leather to prevent links being beaten into his flesh, beneath the leather he wore hemp to soak up the sweat. In the late afternoon heat of the Balearics in spring time, the sweat sprang out from under the hairline and dripped steadily down into his beard. He took no notice, as if to notice discomfort was beneath his dignity. To the villager, who had never seen more iron in his life than it would take to sheathe the spike on his primitive plow, the German seemed a creature from another world. The cross painted on his shield was little comfort.
"What does he say?" demanded Agilulf, tiring of listening to slow exchanges in a language he could not follow.
"He says there is a good spring half a mile away, where we could fill as many water-barrels as we wish. But he says the Moslems know of it and use it too. They will have seen us already. The main army of the invaders is a bare ten miles off. They move with the speed of the wind, he says. That is how he lost his family: taken before anyone in his village knew raiders had landed."
Agilulf nodded. He showed none of the dismay that Pedro the villager had expected. "Does he know how many men the Moslems have?"
The priest shrugged. "He says ten thousand thousand. That could mean anything over a couple of hundred."
Agilulf nodded again. "Very well. Give him some grain and a flask of wine, and let him go. I expect there are many like him skulking in these hills. Tell him when the Moslems have broken there will be a reward for heads. They can round up the stragglers for us."
Agilulf turned away, shouting orders to his men to form up the watering-party. As usual, protest and expostulation from the Greek sailors, uneasy on land, convinced that at any moment a horde of ghazis would rush from the woods and overwhelm them. Agilulf paused for a moment to explain his plan to the Greek commander.
"Of course they'll rush us," he said. "At dawn. My cross-bowmen and your rowers will hold them in front for a few minutes. Then I and my knights and companions will take them from behind. I wish we had horses to make our charge swifter. But it will come to the same thing in the end."
The Greek looked after the iron man as he stalked on his way. The Franks, he thought. Clumsy, illiterate, heretical peasants. Why are they so confident so suddenly? They have swept out of the West like the followers of Muhammad from the East two hundred years ago. I wonder if we will find them any better than the wine-haters?
Ma'mun made no effort to conceal his dawn attack, once his men were in place. He had counted the ships of the enemy: a bare score. No matter how crowded with men they were, they could not hold more than two thousand at the very most. He had ten thousand. Now was the time to avenge the destruction of his ships. The Greek fire, he knew, could not be transported overland. He feared nothing else. He allowed his priests to call out the dawn salat, regardless of the warning it gave, and led his men in their ceremonial prayers. Then he drew his saber, and signaled to his commanders-of-a-thousand to lead the assault.
In full daylight the army of the faithful ran forward in the tactic that had led them to victory over army after army of Christians: in Spain, in France, in Sicily, at the gates of Rome itself. A loose wave of men with spears and swords, without the locked shields and heavy body-armor of the West, but driven on by contempt for death, assurance that those who died fighting the unbelievers would live for ever amid the houris of Paradise.
Ma'mun knew that the Christians would have some trick or other. Otherwise they would not have ventured to set up their camp on land. He had seen many tricks, seen them all fail. The sudden appearance of a row of helmeted heads, the leveled crossbows beneath them did not surprise him. He had not heard the metallic twang of the crossbows before, and watched with interest as his first wave of stormers fell or were hurled off their feet by the thump of crossbow quarrels at short range. Weapons to use against armor, he guessed, the besetting vice of Frankish tactics: eager to kill, reluctant to die. They would be slow to reload, whatever they were. The followers of Islam ran on undeterred, reached the low palisade, began to hack and stab at the defenders. Ma'mun could hear his priests calling ritual curses on those who added gods to God. He walked slowly forward, waiting for the resistance to break.
His guard-captain touched his arm, pointed silently behind him. Ma'mun frowned. Another trick, indeed! Coming out of a rocky gully to his left flank, already swinging round in a wide arc as if to cut off his retreat—his retreat!—was a line of men.
Iron men. Gray steel glittered from their weapons, their armor, their shields, their very hands and feet. Not many of them. They seemed barely two deep in file, their line a mere two hundred yards. They came on slowly. Why did they look so strange? Pulling his beard, Ma'mun realized that each carried the same weapreconisedons, carried them in the same way, even at the same angle: a short pike in the right hand, a kite-shaped shield on the left side. Had they no left-handed men in their ranks? What could make men walk together like that, as if they were a machine, as unvarying as the scoops on a noria, a water-wheel. With incredulity Ma'mun saw that each man was putting his foot forward at the same time, so that the line came on like a single animal, like the limbs of a crawling hundred-legged beast. He could hear a great voice shouting something in the barbarous tongue of the ferengi, the same word repeated again and again: "Links... links... links." At every word the feet came down again.
Ma'mun shook himself, sent runners to turn the rearmost of those attacking the palisade, called his guards round him and ran forward himself, saber drawn, to engage the iron men. A moment of delay and his men would turn, swarm round the Franks now out in the open, drag them down from all sides. Breathing hard, for he was a man of fifty winters, he reached the slowly advancing line, hacked at an iron figure with his saber of best Toledo steel.
The German facing him, no knight or Ritter but only a poor brother of the Lanzenorden, ignored the blow, merely ducking his helmet into it. He concentrated on keeping the step, keeping the line, following the battle-drill his sergeants had shouted into him. Left foot forward, thrust with the shield, lift the man in front of you back. Right foot forward, stab with the pike. Not at the man in front, ignore him. At the man to your right. Bruder Manfred to your left will kill the man in front of you, you kill the man in front of Bruder Wolfi to your right. Stab at the armpit as he raises his weapon.
Ma'mun struck one stroke against the unbelievers and died, killed by a blow he never saw. His guardsmen were cut down and trampled under foot by a line that did not even check its pace. The wave that turned back from the palisades and rushed at the iron men did not break and retire but was accepted and trodden under like stalks beneath a scythe. Their cries of encouragement and praise to God were answered only by the hoarse bellows of the sergeants: "Links... links. Straighten up there! Close up, close up! Second rank, keep your points down, stab him again, Hartman, he's only wounded. Right wheel, right shoulders there!"
As the dust rose over the churning battle, Mu'atiyah, who had not followed Ma'mun and his guards to glorious death, heard the strange machine-soldiers of the Franks grunting like laborers who have heavy loads to carry in the cornfields. From the palisades the Frankish bowmen were preparing a second volley, while the lightly-armed Greek oarsmen swarmed out, ready to drive a demoralized enemy onto the points of the iron line now fully behind them.
It was the duty of a learned man to learn, and to report his learning, Mu'atiyah reflected, dodging through the rocks and scattered scrub of the hillside. Some of the lower-born among the army were following his example, mere Berbers and Goths. He called a dozen of them round him, to act as a guard against the Christian peasants who would surely be out to avenge their stolen fields and children. They obeyed, recognizing his dress and the pure Arabic of a descendant of the Quraysh.
Somewhere on the island there would be a boat. He would take the news to his master bin-Firnas. And to the Caliph of Cordova himself. But best to speak to his master first. It would be wise to appear not as one who had fled from battle, but as one who had braved dangers to know the truth. At a safe distance Mu'atiyah turned, produced his spyglass, and looked again across the hillside to where Agilulf was directing the passionless slaughter of a mass of men trapped too close together by their enemies to lift a hand against the pikes and pole-axes.
Iron Franks, he thought. And Greek fire. It will take more than the courage of the ghazis to defeat those together.
Far away, in his sleep, the King of the North felt a pang of warning, a chill that seemed to strike up from the ground beneath his stout-timbered bed and down mattress. He tossed in his sleep, trying to wake up as a swimmer before sharks tries to throw himself out of the water. As unavailing. Over the years Shef had come to recognize the difference between one kind of vision and another.
This would be one of the worst kind: the kind that took him not across the surface of the earth, like a bird, or back into the old histories of men. One that took him down into the deep strongholds of the gods, the Helworld, past the Grind, the grating that separates the living from the dead.
He seemed now to be sinking deeper and deeper, unable to see anything but earth and rock, a stink of mold in his nostrils. Yet some sense warned him that he was going to a place he had seen before. Glimpsed before. Not a place for mere men to visit.
The darkness did not lift, but a feeling of space grew around him, as if he were in some enormous cavern. Light over there, or at least a glow. He did not think his father and patron would let him go without showing him something.
Suddenly the shadows turned into a shape. A shape that without warning struck at his face, slashing out of the dark with a hiss of hatred so fierce it was like a shriek. Shef jerked convulsively in his bed, his muscles trying to hurl him back. Too late, his eye recognized the head of a monstrous serpent glaring at him, striking again, the poison fangs jerking down bare yards from his face.
The serpent was fettered, he realized. It could not reach him. It struck again, but this time not at him. Again at a target it could not reach. Not quite reach.
Below him Shef could now make it an enormous human shape, stretched out in the darkness. It was chained down by great iron fetters to a table of stone. Shef's flesh crawled as he realized what he was seeing. For this could only be Loki, the bane of Balder, father of the monster-brood, enemy of gods and men. Chained here on the orders of his father Othin to live in everlasting torment till Doomsday. Till Ragnarök.
The harsh face twisted in agony as Shef watched. He could see that the snake, while it could not reach its chained enemy, could sweep its fangs within inches of his head. The venom from them ran out, splashed on the face that could not turn away, ate away skin and flesh, not like venom, like—something Shef could not name.
But while the face twisted, something about it did not change. A set purpose, an air of craft. Looking carefully round, Shef saw that the great body was concentrating its force, was heaving all the time, heaving on the seemingly unmovable, deep-anchored fetter on the right hand. He had seen this before, Shef remembered. And he had seen that the fetter was working loose.
Yes, there was his father now. Seemingly dwarfed by the shape of Loki, by the great serpent, but standing there with perfect self-possession, ignoring the fangs now striking hatefully at him.
"You have come to gloat over my pain, Rig?" A hoarse whisper from Loki.
"No, I have come to look at your fetters."
The face of the tormented god closed, as if determined to show neither fear nor disappointment.
"No fetter can hold me for ever. Nor will my son Fenris-wolf be bound for ever by Gleipnir."
"I know. But I have come to speed things up."
Incredulously, Shef saw his father, the trickster-god, stoop, produce some metal instrument from his sleeve, begin to lever at the places where Loki's right wrist-manacle was set into the rock. The bound god seemed unable to believe what he saw either, watching motionless till the eating venom from above ran into his very eyes.
As he felt himself drawn away, returned to the world of men, Shef heard another hoarse whisper: "Why are you doing this, deceiver?"
"Think, if you wish, that I find Ragnarök too long in coming. Or that I desire freedom for Loki as well as for Thor. In any case, there is someone I mean you to meet..."
Shef crashed into wakefulness again, heart pounding. Me? he thought. Not me. Not me.
Shef eyed his royal guests broodingly as they emerged from the guest hall he had had built for them. The dread of the night was still on him. It had turned the whole world a darker shade. He found himself even walking more lightly, more warily, as if at any moment the earth might split and hurl him down to what he knew lay beneath.
And yet all seemed well enough. There was his friend and partner Alfred, turning on the steps and stretching his arms out encouragingly to the sturdy toddler behind him. Little Edward half-running, half-falling into his father's catch. Behind them both, stepping forward with pleased maternal smile and a second baby slung familiarly on her hip, the face Shef could not forget. His own love, long-lost to him now, Godive, once his childhood sweetheart from the marshes, now known and loved far and wide as the Lady of Wessex. They could not see him for a moment as he stood in the shadow of the strange contrivance he meant to show off that day. He could observe unobserved.
Unobserved by those he watched. Not by his own men, who shifted uneasily and glanced at each other as they saw his silent concentration.
He ought, he knew, to at least fear and resent them. To be making plans for—if not their death, their removal. For making them safe. Many would say, though they did not dare to say it to his face, that it was a king's first duty to think of his own successor. Years ago, in the dark days of the double invasion by Charles the Bald's Franks and Ivar the Boneless's pagans, Shef and Alfred had agreed to share their luck, and their kingdoms, if they should ever hold them again. They had agreed too that each would be the other's successor if either died without an heir, and that any heir of either would inherit from both in the same situation. The deal had not seemed important at the time. Neither had much chance of living to see another winter, let alone another spring. And Godive had slept in Shef's tent, if not in his bed. He had thought, if they lived, it would only be a matter of time till her love returned, and his desire.
He had been wrong. If he died now, his kingdom fell to Alfred. And after him to the laughing toddler now being carried towards him, baby Edward. The sub-kings would ignore the agreement, of course. There was no chance that the Scandinavian kings, Olaf or Guthmund or any of the dozen others, would agree to obey an English Christian. It was doubtful if even the Mercians or Northumbrian English would accept rule by a Wessex Saxon. The One King of the North was truly One King. No-one else would be accepted by the rest.
An unstable situation. Could this be the trigger for the Ragnarök his father wanted him to know of? He ought to take a wife and breed a son as fast as possible. Everyone thought so. The court was alive with jarls' daughters and princesses of the North, paraded in the hope of catching the king's feeble attention. Ragnarök or no, he would not do it. Could not do it.
As he stepped forward out of the shadow to greet his guests, Shef creased his face into a welcoming smile. Even to those he greeted, it looked like a rictus of pain. Alfred controlled himself, managed not to shoot a glance at his wife. He had known for years that his co-king was not the boy-lover many whispered, was instead in love with his own wife. Sometimes he wished it was in him to hand her over, or to share her. But while it might be in him, it was not in her. For some reason, she seemed to hate her friend of childhood more deeply each passing year. Her resentment grew with his success: as she thought, perhaps, of what might have been.
"What have you to show us today?" asked Alfred with false-ringing good cheer.
Shef's face brightened, as it always did when he had some new thing to explain. "It is a horse-wain. But one to carry people."
"Wains have always carried people."
"Three miles to market and back. Bump into a pothole, crawl out of it. Going no faster than a walk, or the passengers would be hurled out. Even on the good stone roads we have had built, you and I"—the last three words were mere flattery, as everyone knew—"it would be torment to travel in it if the horses began to run.
"But not with this. See." Shef patted a stout post that led up from a frame above the axles. "This post holds a metal spring." He pointed to it.
"Like the steel you use for your crossbows."
"Yes. Over the spring we fit straps of the stoutest leather. And from the straps we hang—this." Shef patted the wickerwork body of the coach, setting it swaying gently. "Climb in."
Gingerly Alfred stepped up, sat on one of the two benches in the coach body, noting the way it bounced and swung like a hammock.
"Lady." Shef stood back a careful two paces to avoid any brush of hand or clothing, gestured Godive in after her husband. She climbed in, moved little Edward from the place he had seized by his father, and settled herself firmly next to Alfred. Shef climbed in too, picked up the wailing child, and sat him next to himself. He waved to the driver in front of them, who cracked his whip and set off with a dramatic jerk.
As the coach dashed at unheard-of speed down the road behind its four horses, Alfred leapt in his seat with surprise. From behind the coach there came a dismal screech, which turned into a violent noise like pigs being killed. A gap-toothed face rose grinning into view, face purple with the exertion of blowing on a bagpipe.
"My thane Cwicca. If they hear the bagpipe people know to clear the road."
And indeed the coach, swaying from side to side on its springs, was already racing for the outskirts of Stamford. Alfred realized that the road was lined with cheering churls and their wives, all caught up in the intoxication of speed. Behind them the royal escorts were stretching out their horses into a gallop, whooping like jaybirds with excitement. Godive clutched her baby daughter to her and looked anxiously at Edward, prevented from climbing out by King Shef's iron grip on his breeches.
Above the roar of the road Alfred yelled, "Is this the most useful new thing the Wisdom-House has brought you?"
"No," Shef shouted back. "There are many. Here is one coming up, I'll show you. Stop, Osmod," he bellowed to the driver, "stop for Christ's sake, I mean Thor's sake, stop, can't you, what's the matter?"
Another grinning face peered back. "Sorry, lord, the horses get excited, like, with the speed."
Alfred looked down doubtfully. The court of Stamford was a strange place. Men called Alfred esteadig, "the Gracious," for his kindness and his good humor. Just the same, his thanes and aldermen addressed him with something like respect. Even churls often spoke to his co-king as if they were both schoolboys engaged in stealing apples: and both Cwicca and Osmod, thanes though they might be called, still had the marks of slave-birth on their faces and bodies. Not long ago their only possible contact with a king would have been facing his doom on an execution-ground. It was true that Cwicca and Osmod were both survivors of the One King's strange journey to the North, and so allowed many liberties. Even so...
The One King had already sprung from the coach, leaving its door swinging open, and was setting off from the road to a group of churls knee-deep in mud not far away. They broke off from what they were doing, knuckled foreheads in respect. And yet they were grinning too.
"See what they're up to? What's the hardest work in clearing a new field? Not cutting the trees down. Any fool can do that with a broad-axe. No, getting the stumps out. They used to cut them off low down and then try and burn them out. Long job, and oak, or ash, or elm, they'll all grow back from almost anything."
"But what we have here"—Shef seized a long staff standing up from a complex contrivance of iron wheels and pulley-blocks—"is ropes rigged to the stoutest stump in the field. Fit the other ends round a weaker stump. Throw your weight on it"—Shef suited his actions to the words, ratcheted the staff back, threw his weight forward again, and again. Twenty yards away, with cracking noises, a stump began to heave out of the earth. A churl sprang forward, added his weight to the king's. With heave after heave, the stump tore free, to loud cheering from churls and the watching escort.
The king wiped his muddy hands on the legs of his gray breeches, waved to the churls to drag the stump free and attach the ropes to the next victim.
"England is tree country. I am turning it into grain country. This pulley machine was made in the Wisdom-House by priests of Njörth—they are seamen, they know all about pulleys—and some of my catapulteers. They are used to cogwheels. My steelmaster, Udd, is in charge of making the wheels. They have to be small, but strong."
"And do you let anyone have the machine?"
Shef's turn to grin. "If they left it to me, maybe. But they don't. My fee-master in the House of Wisdom, Father Boniface, he rents them out to those with land to clear. They pay a fee for the machine. But cleared land is free for the clearers to keep. Not for ever. For three lives. Then the land reverts to the crown. I get rich from the rents of the machines. My successors"—Shef nodded at baby Edward. "They get rich when the land comes back to them."
He pointed across the flat fields of Stamfordshire to the now-familiar shape of a windmill, sails turning briskly in the breeze. "Another new thing over there. Not the windmill, you know about that. What it's attached to. Another way to make new land. Come along and I'll show you."
The horse-wain slowed dramatically as Osmod the driver turned it off the Great North Road with its stone-and-gravel surface, and took it down one of the old mud tracks. Shef seized the opportunity of relative quiet to speak again of the successes of the House of Wisdom.
"We're off to see a big thing," he went on, leaning forward in his seat towards Alfred, "but there have been some small ones that have made as much of a difference. I didn't show you how this is hitched up at the front, for instance. But when we learned from Brand and his men how to harness a horse so it could pull, we found after a while that the horse-pull can be too strong. When you turn them, they often break their traces, as the pull comes through one side or the other, not through both. Well, we kept on using thicker leather. But then some farm-churl realized—I gave him his own farm and full livestock for it—that you don't need to harness the horses to the cart. You harness them to two ends of a stout bar instead, and you harness the bar, in the middle, to the cart. That way the pull evens out.
"And that doesn't just save on leather! No. I did not realize straight away. But often the real change a machine brings is not the first good it does, but the second. The whipple-tree, we call it, means men can plow shorter lines, smaller fields, because they can turn their teams more easily. And that means that even poor men, with no more than an acre or two, can plow their own fields instead of depending on their lords."
"And they thank the king for it," Alfred replied thoughtfully. "They become your men, not their landlords'. It is another thing, like your machine-fees, that makes you strong."
Godive shifted in her seat. "That's why he did it. He does nothing without a reason. I learned that years ago."
Shef fell silent, stared at his muddied fingers. After a few moments Alfred broke the silence. "This new thing you are taking us to see. Tell us about it."
Shef replied in a flatter, duller tone. "Well. Round here, as you know, the land turns quickly to marsh. Some of it has always been marsh. Naturally, people try to drain it. But if you dig a channel you can't always tell which way the water will run, not down here, or if the water will even go into the channel.
"But we knew one thing." Slowly the animation was coming back into his voice. "Anyone who brews a lot of beer knows that to get it out you can either tap the barrel low down—and then you have to plug it carefully or it'll all go—or else you can suck some up through a tube and then put the end of the tube in your jug or bucket. The beer keeps on running, even though you aren't sucking any more."
"I never knew that. How?"
Shef shrugged. "No-one knows. Not yet. But once we knew that we knew what we needed. Big tubes, bigger than any man could get his mouth round. And something to suck the water through. Like a bellows in reverse. Then we could make the water run from a fen into a channel, even a channel some distance away."
The wain and its escort pulled up by the mill they had been making for, and Shef jumped out, leaving the door swinging wide once more. Round the mill ran a confusion of muddy ditches, with here and there a tube of tarred canvas leading, seemingly, simply from one drain to another.
"Again, you see, new land." Shef lowered his voice so only his royal guests could hear, not the escort. "I don't know how much. Sometimes I think there might be the worth of half a dozen shires lying waiting to be drained. And this land I do not give away. I make the mills, I pay the millers. What is gained remains royal land, to be leased out for the royal revenues."
"To your own profit again," cut in Godive, her voice like a whip. Alfred saw his scarred co-king flinch again. "Tell me, out of all this, what have you done for women?"
Shef hesitated, began to say something, checked himself. He was unsure what to name first. The mills themselves, which had released tens of thousands of female slaves from the everlasting chore of grinding grain with a hand-quern? The experiments being conducted in the Wisdom-House to find a better way to spin thread than the distaff, which almost every woman in the country still carried with her wherever she went, winding incessantly? No, Shef decided, the vital thing for women had been the soap-works he had set up, where they made a harsh and gritty soap out of ashes and animal fat: no new thing in itself, but one which, Hund the leech insisted, had halved the number of women dying of child-bed fever—once the king had issued an order that all midwives must take the soap and always wash their hands.
He took too long to decide. "I thought so," said Godive and whirled away, dragging her children with her. "Everything is for men. And everything for money."
She did not trouble to lower her voice. As she swept towards the wain, the two kings, Cwicca and Osmod, the miller and his wife, the two bands of royal escorts, all stared after her. Then all except Shef turned their eyes back to him.
He dropped his gaze. "It's not like that," he muttered, the same anger growing inside him that he had felt when the man crashed from the tower and they had asked him to pay for failure nonetheless. "You can't do everything. You have to do what you know how to, first, and then see where that leads you. Women get their share of what we have done. More land, more food, more wool."
"Aye," agreed Cwicca. "A few years ago, every winter you saw little bairns in rags and barefoot every winter, crying for cold and hunger. Now they've coats at least, and hot food inside them. Because the king protects them."
"That's right," said Shef, looking up, his face suddenly fierce. "Because all this"—his arms waved at the mill, the fields, the drainage channels, the waiting wain—"all this depends on one thing. And that is force. A few years ago, if any king, if good King Edmund or King Ella had done any wise thing, as soon as he had enough silver to use, the Vikings would have been on him, to take it away and turn the land to beggary again. To keep it like this we have to sink ships and break armies!"
A growl of immediate assent from his men and Alfred's, all of whom had won their way by battle alone.
"Yes," Shef went on, "all this is well enough. And I would be happy to see women take their part of it. But what I need most, what I would pay gold for, not silver, is not a new way of hitching horses, or of draining marshes, but a new way to defeat the Emperor out there. Bruno the German. For if we have forgotten him, here in the marsh, he has not forgotten us. Rig, my father"—Shef's voice rose to a shout, and he pulled from the breast of his tunic his silver ladder-emblem—"send me a new thing to bring victory in battle! A new sword, a new shield! New crossbows, new catapults. There is no other wisdom we need more. If Ragnarök is to come, let us fight it and win!"
Their king safely out of the way for a long morning, his closest advisers and friends had seized the opportunity to discuss him. They sat, the three of them, Brand, Thorvin and Hund, near the top of the great stone tower of the House of Wisdom, in Thorvin's private chamber, looking out over the busy and fertile countryside, the green fields divided by the long white strip of the Great North Road, riders and carts passing steadily along it. With them, though, and at Thorvin's insistence, sat a fourth man: Farman priest of Frey, one of the two great visionaries of the Way. An unimpressive figure, and one who had not shared the perils of the others, but deep in the secrets of the gods, or so Thorvin insisted.
Brand the giant Norwegian had looked askance at Farman for a while, but he had known the others, at least, long enough to speak frankly. "We've got to face it," he began. "If he goes, Shef I mean, then everything will go. There's people like Guthmund, owes everything to the One King, stone-cold reliable as far as he's concerned. But would Guthmund agree to co-operate with Olaf, or Gamli, or Arnodd, or any of the other kings in Denmark or Norway? He would not. His own jarls wouldn't let him if he did. As for obeying an Englishman... No, this is a one-man business. The trouble is, the man's mad."
"You've said that before," said Hund the leech reprovingly, "and been proved wrong."
"All right, all right," Brand conceded. "Maybe he's not mad, just strange, he always has been. But you know what I mean all the same. He has won many battles and survived many strange events. But each one seems to take something out of him. And it isn't put back."
The other three considered the matter: Hund the leech, priest of Ithun and Englishman, Thorvin the smith, priest of Thor and Dane, Farman the visionary, a man whose race was by now forgotten.
"He lost something when he killed Sigurth," volunteered Hund. "He lost that lance. None of us knows how he came by it, exactly, but he valued it for some reason or another. They say it is the lance the new Emperor always carries with him, and Hagbarth says he saw the two fight, and Bruno run off with it. Maybe it is the good luck sign that the Christians call it, and that is what he has lost."
Brand shook his head decisively. "No. We have experts on luck here, and he has not lost that. He is as lucky as he ever was. No, it is something else. Something to do with how he feels about himself."
"He lost friends that day at the Braethraborg also," Hund suggested again. "The young man from the Ditmarsh, and Cuthred the champion. Could he feel—guilty, maybe, because he lived and they did not?"
Brand, the veteran warrior, chewed on the thought, not much liking the taste of it. "I have known things like that," he conceded eventually. "But I don't think that's it. To tell the truth"—he looked round before going on. "I think it's to do with that damned woman."
"Godive, Alfred's wife?" said Hund, shocked. He had known them both since all three were small children.
"Yes, her. She talks to him as if he was a dog, and he flinches like one that has been beaten too often. But not just her. There was the other one too, Ragnhild, the queen in Norway. She took something from him. He did not kill her, but he caused her death, and her son's. If he feels guilty it is not about the men he has hurt, but about the women. That's why he will not take another one."
A silence. This time it was Hund's turn to chew on a thought and not relish the taste of it.
"Talks to him like a dog," he said in the end. "My name means 'dog,' as you know. My master, Shef's stepfather, thought that was all I would ever be to him. But he gave Shef a dog's name too, in hatred. We see new folk smile all the time when they hear us say 'King Shef,' as if we were saying 'King Bowlegs' or 'King Fang.' Norsemen cannot even pronounce it. You know Alfred has asked him several times to take another name, one that both English and Norse could say and honor: Offa or Atli, some hero-name from the past. Yet you say his is a hero-name, Thorvin? Perhaps it is time you explained that to us. For I feel whatever is happening here is the gods' business as well as ours. Tell us the whole story. And tell us why the Way has accepted him in the end, as the One who is to come. The three of us here, after all, know more of his story than anyone else in the world. And Farman is our guide to the gods. Maybe between the four of us we can judge it."
Thorvin nodded, but hesitated a while, to organize his thoughts.
"It's like this," he said in the end. "There is a very old story the Danes tell. It has never been turned into a poem, and it is not part of our holy books, or not one that all accept. I used to think little of it as well. But the more I reflect on it, the more it seems to me that it has a ring about it, a stink of old age. I believe it is a true story, and that it has meaning in the same way that the lays of Völund or of dead Balder do.
"One way that it is told is this. Many years ago—about the time that Christians say their Christ was born—the Danes found themselves without a king. They had driven out the last of their royal line, that Hermoth who is said to be the favorite warrior of Othin in Valhalla, for his cruelties. But without a king the cruelties grew even worse. It was an age when brother slew brother and no man's life was safe except when he had weapons in hand.
"Then one day, on the shore of the sea, they found a shield washed up, and in the shield there was a baby boy. His head was resting on a sheaf of barley, but other than that he had nothing. They took him in and reared him, and in time he became the mightiest king the North has ever known. He was so warlike that he made peace across the North. In his time, they say, a virgin could walk unescorted from one end of the North to the other, with gold on every finger and a bag of it at her girdle, and no man would stay her or offer her so much as a foul word. Danish kings still claim, some of them, to be of his line, the Skjöldungar, the Shieldings, for he was called Skjöld after the shield they found him in.
"That is one story," Thorvin went on, "and you can see it makes a kind of sense. The shield gives the name, the Shieldings. And because the boy came from nowhere men say that the gods sent him, because they saw the misery of the Danes and pitied it.
"But in other ways it does not make much sense, and that is why I think it is genuine. Yes, Brand, I see you raise your eyebrows, but what I am telling you is that the good sense of the gods is not the same as the good sense of men. Consider: the gods pitied the misery of the Danes? Since when do our gods pity anything? We would not worship them if they did. And anyway, what about this sheaf? It is always in the story, but no one knows why. I think that is the key to understanding.
"I think that the story as we have it has been told wrong, over the years. I think the name of the king was once heard as Skjöld Skjefing, or in English Scyld Sceafing. Some storyteller somewhere took the name and made a story out of it. He said the king was called 'Shield' because—why, because he had floated to land on a shield. And he was called 'Sheafing' because—because there must have been a sheaf with him. The names came from the things. Even the story about floating to land came from the idea of the hollow shield. Now, I do not think any of that was true.
"Instead I think there was a real king called 'Shield.' Many of us have names like that. Your name, Brand, means 'sword.' I have met men called Geirr, 'spear,' or Franki, 'battle-axe.' There was a king called Shield. He was called Sheafing not because of having his head on a sheaf, but because he was the son of Sheaf. Or Shef."
Thorvin seemed to think he had finished his explanation.
After a while Hund prompted him further. "But what does this story, this old story, mean?"
Thorvin fingered his hammer pendant. "In my view—and this is not shared by others of the College, indeed some would call me a heretic if they heard me say it, Farman, as well you know. In my view it means three things. One, these kings were remembered, or invented, for a reason. I think the reason is that they set our world on a track, a track it had not gone before. I think the war-king who made peace, Shield, he was the one who organized men into nations and gave the North law: law better than the strife of brother against brother that they had had before. I think the peace-king, Sheaf, gave us barley and crops and fields, and turned us from the ways of our ancestors, who lived like the Finns, hunting in the waste. Or like your cousins the Huldu-folk, Brand. Meat-eaters and wanderers.
"Two, I think the track they set us on was the right track, and men have never quite forgotten it. But since then we have climbed back onto the wrong track: the track of Hermoth, Othin's favorite. War and piracy. We give it proud names and call it drengskapr, the hermanna vegr, gallantry, the warriors' way. You do that, Brand, I know. But it comes down to the strong robbing the weak."
"I prefer to rob the strong," growled Brand, but Thorvin ignored him.
"I think King Shef has been sent here to return us to the right track. But that track is not the track of Hermoth, or of Othin. Indeed I think our king bears Othin's enmity. He will not sacrifice to him. He will not take his token.
"And now I come to what some would call heresy. I cannot help remembering that all this was supposed to happen at the same time as the Christians say their White Christ came. And why did he come? Why did Sheaf and Shield come? I can only say this, and it is the third opinion I hold.
"I think the world at some time endured some great maim, some great wound that could not be cured. Balder died, we say, and the light went out of the world. The Christians have their foolish story of an apple and a serpent, but it comes to the same point: the world was maimed, and it needed a healer.
A healer from outside. The Christians say the healer was the Christ and the healing is done, and so we can all sit on our backsides and wait for rescue. Hah! We say maybe—or we used to say—that two kings came, to start us on our way. Then we lost it. It is my view that the king we have, not called Shef by chance, has come to set us on the right way again, like his many times grandsire. For I think that both he and his ancient namesake are the begetting of a god, the god Rig. Not older, maybe, than Othin, but wiser."
After a pause Hund said, fingering his Ithun-pendant, "I cannot see where the heresy lies in that, Thorvin. Not that we are Christians in any case to tell men what to think."
Thorvin stared into the distance, out across road and fields. "I am beginning to suggest that the Way-stories and the Christ-story are of the same kind. Both false, both garbled. Or, it may be, both true. But true fragments of a greater whole."
Brand laughed, suddenly. "And you may be right, Thorvin! But while you may persuade me, and Hund here, and even the council of the priests of the Way if you talk to them long enough, I doubt you will get far in persuading the Pope of the Christians in Rome to go along with you. And agree that maybe the Way has some truth on its side too!"
Thorvin laughed with him. "No, I shall not go to Rome and ask for an audience to put my point of view. Nor will I forget that whatever one thinks of the Christians, the Church remains our deadly enemy. And the Empire now that supports it. They say our king had Bruno the German in the sights of his crossbow that day. He should have pulled trigger."
For the first time Farman spoke, the pale thin face unaffected by emotion. "The maim," he repeated. "The maim the world has suffered, that this second Shef, or second Savior, has been sent to heal. In our myth that is the death of Balder, brought about by the tricks of Loki. But we all know that Othin tried to have Balder released from Hel, and failed, and chained Loki beneath serpent-fangs in vengeance. Vengeance may be good, but how can one see any cure?"
"If there is a cure," said Thorvin, "it will come about through something mere sense cannot predict. But our friend Shef—he is wise, but often good sense is not in him."
"And so we are back to our real question," Hund concluded. "Whether he is man or half-god, crazy or driven, what are we to do with him?"
Farman looked out at the shape of a speeding coach on the road, trailed by a plume of dust and thirty galloping horses. "I cannot be sure," he said. "I have seen nothing in my dreams of this. But from all I have heard, I would say that this man has unfinished business with the gods. Maybe it is his destiny to regain the Holy Lance, maybe to burn the gates of Rome, I do not know. But while he sits here he is rejecting it, turning his gaze away."
"Fretting about women he left behind many years ago," agreed Brand.
"It may be he needed the chance to draw breath, even to grow to be a man," Farman went on. "But he will grow no more if he stays here playing muddy games with yokels."
"We must get him on board a ship," said Thorvin. "Maybe it will take him where the gods mean him to be, like the naked child floating on the shield in the story."
"But this time he must not go alone," said Farman. "You are his friends. You must go with him. As for me—I will wait for clearer guidance."
From outside the notes of the bagpipe squealed their discordant warning.
Ghaniya, half-brother to the Caliph of Cordova, well understood the importance of his mission to the North, to the savage, half-naked, fire-worshiping majus, the devil-people, as he thought of them. That did not prevent him from hating every moment of it. He was a man of certain and unquestioned loyalty. If he had not been, of course, he would not have survived his brother's succession to the divan, the cushioned throne of Cordova. His brother might be called, in honor of his great ancestor, Abd er-Rahman, the Servant of the Compassionate One, but there was no compassion in his nature. When he succeeded to his father, the sword and the bowstring had been busy. The male children of his father's harem had been considered carefully and attentively. The children of true Arabs, descendants of the Quraysh, had died soon: they might have been centers for future rebellion. The descendants of Christian slave-women had died also, if they seemed unusable: some of the best had been given posts in exile, under supervision, often on the frontier against the feeble Christian princedoms and dukedoms of the mountainous North of Spain. Ghaniya, however, had been the son of a Berber woman. His blood not pure enough to attract supporters, yet he was the child of no mustarib either, no would-be-Arab, as they contemptuously called the children of Christians who had converted to Islam for food, or advancement.
Ghaniya knew he was good enough to be used. Not good enough to be feared. It satisfied his ambition, at least for the time. He had no intention of risking once again the leather carpet that stood before the divan, with by it the giant slaves with their scimitars forever drawn.
It was a good sign also that he had been sent on this mission. He knew how seriously his half-brother took it, as he had taken the news from Mallorca and from Sicily. Not that a Caliph of Cordova could fear the activities of the Christians, whether Greek or Frank. The city of Cordova in the year 875 had fully half a million inhabitants: more than the villages of Rome and Byzantium and all the capitals of all the Franks put together. Every day three thousand minarets called the faithful to prayer. Every day a thousand carts rolled into the city with food for the citizens, drawn from the immensely fertile valley of the Guadalquivir, and all of Andalusia beyond it. The Christians could not reach Cordova if all the Faithful did was merely to stand before them to block their way.
And yet er-Rahman his brother had listened with great care to the account of Mu'atiyah, the pupil of bin-Firnas: as he had also to the reports of his merchants returning from Egypt and reporting on the panic and fear among the Tulunids there. He had condescended even to explain his thoughts to his half-brother.
"We need the islands," he had said. "They guard our traders, they guard our shores. Also," he went on, "a caliph must think of the future. For many years we have pressed back the unbelievers, from the day our ancestor landed on the shore at Jeb el-Tarik, and told his men the sea was behind them and the enemy in front, and there was nothing for them but victory or death. Now we come upon a check. Is it a check, or is it the moment when the balance tilts?" Er-Rahman, knowing only a tideless sea, had no idea of the image of the tide turning, but if he had he would have used it. "If our enemies even think the balance is tilting," he concluded, "they will gain heart. We must thrust them back once more.
"And another thing. We have always known the Christians our inferiors in all the arts of civilization. Where have they such a man as bin-Firnas"—he stretched a hand to his listening pupil—"and yet now they come on our shores with weapons we cannot match. We must know more. Our enemies will not tell us. Yet our enemies have enemies too, or so we hear. The news came years ago of the defeat of a great host of the ferengis, the Franks, at the hands of those who were not Christians. Seek them out, my brother. Find what they know. Bring us help, or knowledge. Take with you the pupil of bin-Firnas, to report on whatever mechanic arts the savages have been able to learn."
He had waved a hand. And by doing so he had sent Ghaniya with his guards and his companions, and his adviser the pupil of bin-Firnas, on this terrible expedition into the land of everlasting wind and cold.
It had begun ill, with the ship they had taken from the port of Malaga pronounced useless as soon as they were through the straits of Jeb el-Tarik themselves. The sea grew fiercer, the wind stronger, the rowers made no progress against the current sweeping in from the ocean to the central sea of the world, the Mediterranean. Ghaniya had transferred at Cadiz to a different vessel, a ship with sails, captained and crewed by men who showed the blood of the Christians in their faces and their actions. They had been willing enough to sail north, for gold, and their families remained as hostages for their loyalty. Yet Ghaniya had doubts about their respect from the start.
Even his pork-eating crewmen had fallen silent, though, as they pressed further into the cold seas of the North. As they approached what they had heard should be their goal, the port of Lon ed-Din, gray shores beginning to show on either hand, a strange craft had sheered up to them out of the everlasting squalls of rain. A ship twice the size of theirs, with two masts made from tree-trunks, and sails towering up to the sky. High castles stood on poop and bow, with great machines on them and fierce bearded faces glowering over iron plates. The ship had not closed up, merely pulled alongside, and with deliberate routine launched a great rock into the sea ten yards ahead of Ghaniya's own bow. A long shouted exchange in some unknown language like the barking of dogs: then the ship had shifted its sails and swept leisurely away.
"They say go ahead," the mustarib skipper translated. "They wanted to be sure only that we were not servants of the Franks, of the Empire with whom they are at eternal war."
A good sign, Ghaniya had tried to think. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and these are enemies of the Franks, true enough. Yet he had not liked the careless ease with which a ship of Cordova had been weighed and dismissed. Nor had he liked the strange sight of the ship. Even the supercilious Mu'atiyah, he noticed, had stood gaping after it for too long.
Shef's shipwrights had had several years of peace in which to discard or perfect the desperate makeshifts of the 860s. Prodded on by their king, and by the expert advisers of the Way, Hagbarth priest of Njörth prominent among them, they had come up with new designs taking up the best features and solving the problems of the old. The idea of the catapult-mounting battleship had stayed, much improved by the ring mounting devised by steelmaster Udd. The problem of weight high up had been solved by broadening and ballasting the hull. The terrible sluggishness of Shef's first "Shire" class of battleships had been solved in part by developing and extending the two-mast design. The doubled sail area had meant that the fisherman's idea of the slanted and extended sail could be dropped. There were still problems, as Shef's skippers reported, sailing before the wind, for the rear sail robbed the wind of the foresail. If they could, such ships would always sail with wind on the beam. Some skippers were experimenting with a small extra sail on a topmast above the foremast, keeping half a dozen lithe lightweight boys in their crew to shin up and reef the sail when needed. Yet meanwhile one problem remained, which Brand at least had thought insoluble: weakness in the keel, now larger than any single tree-trunk could furnish.
Steelmaster Udd had dealt with that by insisting that metal could do what wood could not. Weak keels needed more bracing, that was all. In the end a combined system of bronze bolts—for even Udd had had to admit that salt water was death to the strongest steel—and massive riveted wooden ribs had strengthened the combination keels even to Atlantic levels. At last seaworthy, decked all over, mounting swiveling onagers fore and aft, with heavy crossbows lining each gunwale, the new ships of the navy of the co-kings had immediately closed the English Channel to all ships without their majesties' license. Trade from Frisia to the Loire moved only on their sufferance. Tolls on trade paid the ships' crews. And without a Viking ship at sea from end to end of the Atlantic coast, trade doubled and redoubled. The Andalusian ship, rowing slowly in the end into the port of London, found a scene of activity that might almost have been the Guadalquivir, for business if not in sheer population.
At least they had had no trouble in gaining attention. As soon as the port-reeve who came aboard had grasped that these men sought audience with his master, and that they could pay in bright gold dirhams, he had provided the embassy with horses—poor scrubs of animals, Ghaniya noticed with contempt and a certain relief—with a guide and escort, and set them firmly on their way up the road that led North to the king's capital of Stamford.
As the party rode on, Ghaniya's anxiety nevertheless increased. To a son of the Quraysh, nothing that barbarians did could seem wholly admirable, but Ghaniya was intelligent enough to read the signs. He would not exchange his own cotton for the animal fabrics that the natives wore. Yet he could feel soon enough how inadequate his cotton was for the continuous winds and the everlasting rain. He saw, too, how the mere peasants laboring in the fields did so in stout wool. The food they ate was such as the dogs of Cordova would turn from in disgust, black bread and pigs' fat, soured cows' milk and sharp biting vegetables that filled the breath. Yet they seemed to have plenty of it. He saw no pinched faces, no hands outstretched for alms.
By the side of the road, too, again and again he saw the wheels turning. The first two or three he came to, he turned from with a smile of patronage on his face. They were like the norias of his homeland, only the unfortunate barbarians used them not to lift water but to grind their corn; and they did so by putting the wheels in the slow-moving water and taking what force they could get from that. The fourth mill they saw, however, turned Ghaniya's smile to a frown. Here the natives had realized their error, had taken advantage of a slope to direct the water-channel above the wheel, so that it was driven by the full weight of falling water, not flowing water. And from inside the mill came not the harsh grinding of the corn-mill but the continuous Iblis-clash of a triphammer forging iron. It was not a thought Ghaniya could readily frame, but at the back of his mind lurked the suspicion that while the barbarians had clearly been no better than he thought them a short while ago, in a few years they seemed to have made more changes than had taken place under as many caliphs as could be remembered.
Nor did Ghaniya like the stories passed on to him about the strange king responsible for all this. It was good that he was no Christian. It was acceptable that he did not persecute Christians: no more did the great er-Rahman himself, preferring to tax them instead as he could not tax believers. It was impossible that any should believe that he was the Son of God, another Yeshua returned. Even worse, it might be, that he was not the son of the One God in whom Christian and Moslem alike believed, but of some barbarian godlet, one among many. Ghaniya felt the horror of the monotheist for the idol-worshiper.
Tempered still with fear: one day on the road they had heard terrible screeching coming towards them, and then seen on the road five hundred men marching together, bagpipers at their head and the banner floating over them of the smith's hammer. No Christian cross with it, for these were men of the Way, their alliance with the Christian Alfred no longer signaled. Ghaniya, drawing his horse aside, had marked their weapons: the usual metal-clad foot-soldiers of the ferengis, strong men with swords and axes, but pitifully slow to move, but with them others, small men mostly with strange heavy bows over their shoulders, and trailing the column a dozen contrivances pulled by mules, objects of rope and wood. Dart-throwers, his guide declared, or stone-throwers, catapults that could batter down any wall, pierce any armor or shielding. Ghaniya scowled most of all at the cheerful faces and the constant chatter from the marching men. These men possessed something he understood: iqbal, the expectation of success that breeds success.
And yet when he came to the town they called the capital, Ghaniya felt his sense of disdain and superiority rise again like the flesh of a caliph in his harem. The town would not have ranked as a suburb of Cordova. Its stone tower was new and well-made, but low and single. The marketplace itself had fewer men in it than a courtyard of his master. From one end of the town he could see the other! Instead of the crowd of suppliants being ranked and listed by chamberlains, one man came out to meet them, and made no pretense that his master was too busy to receive any visitor. Surely the master of such a place could feel only honor at being offered an alliance with the Caliph of Cordova, Successor of the Prophet, Deputy of Allah on Earth!
Ghaniya felt confidence again as he prepared for his audience with the master of the men and of the ships. He must impress them, he reflected, with his own wealth and with the learning of Mu'atiyah, neither of which, he was sure, the barbarians could match. It troubled him only that in this far land he must rely, for a translator, on the skills of Suleiman the Jew.
"What's a Jew?" muttered Shef out of the corner of his mouth. The embassy of strangers stood in front of him in his great chamber of audience, one of their party—not the leader, but the spokesman—standing in front of the others. He had just introduced himself, but the word he used meant nothing to Shef.
The advisers who stood behind him conferred briefly. Then, as Shef's own translator Father Boniface began again to put the other's credentials into English, Skaldfinn priest of Heimdall stepped forward. A linguist and interpreter, he knew all there was to be known in the North about foreign peoples.
"The Jews are the people from the East who crucified the Christian god," he said. "Apparently there are still some of them left."
"It was the Romans who crucified Christ," said Shef. "German soldiers from a Roman legion." He spoke with flat certainty, as if he had seen the event himself.
"The Christians prefer to blame the Jews."
"And these other folk, the ones in long thin robes. What do they believe?"
"We call them Mohammedans. They believe in a prophet who arose some time before ours. Their God and the Christian God seem much the same, but they do not believe in the Christ as divine, and the Christians will not accept their prophet even as a prophet. There is always war between the Mohammedan kingdoms and the Christian ones. Yet the Mohammedans accept Christian subjects, and Jewish subjects, and treat them fairly."
"Like us, then."
"Yes: except—"
"Except what?" Shef was still listening with half an ear to Boniface's long translation of what seemed the Jewish spokesman's excessively flowery string of opening compliments.
"Except that they regard all three, Mohammedan, Jew and Christian, as 'People of the Book.' They do not regard any others as sharing the same God, as these three religions do, even if they have different beliefs."
Shef pondered for a while as the double translation wandered on, the Arabic of Ghaniya heard and put into a kind of Latin by Suleiman the Jew; the Latin heard and put into the Norse-English dialect of Shef's court by Boniface. Eventually he raised a hand. The translation stopped at once.
"Tell him, Boniface, that I am told they do not consider us to be People of the Book. Now, Thorvin, show him one of our books. Show him your book of holy poems, written all in runes. Boniface, ask whether he will not say that we too are people of a book."
Ghaniya stroked his beard as the big man in white with a hammer in his belt came towards him, holding out a volume of some kind. He let Suleiman take it in case there was some sort of defilement lurking in it.
"What is it made of?" he muttered in Arabic.
"They say it is the skin of calves."
"Not pigs, then, praise Allah. They have no paper, then?"
"No. Neither paper nor scrolls."
Both men looked at the writing without comprehension. Suleiman peered closer.
"See, lord, there are no curves anywhere in this script. It is all straight lines. I think they have taken some system they have for scratching marks on wood with a knife, and made it into a kind of writing."
Shef's one sharp eye saw the very faint curl of contempt on Ghaniya's lip, and remarked to the men behind him, "They are not impressed. See, the spokesman will praise it politely and not answer our question."
"The emissary of the Caliph sees your book," tried Suleiman manfully, "and admires your penmanship. If you have no artisans skilled in the making of paper, he will send instruction. We too did not understand that art till it was shown to us by captives from a far Empire, whom we defeated in battle many years ago."
Suleiman found no Latin word for "paper" other than papyrium, papyrus, known to Boniface already, though he used "vellum?" By the time translation reached Shef it had become "calf-hide," neither new nor interesting.
"Accept his offer politely and ask what brings him here."
All the advisers, English and Norse, Christians and Way-men alike, listened attentively as the story rolled out, of attacks on one island after another, of the Greek fleet and the Frankish soldiers, of the iron men and the Greek fire. As Suleiman reached the last point, Shef intervened again to ask if there was anyone in the embassy who had seen it for himself. Their group parted and a young man was urged forward: a young man with the dark aquiline face of his leader, but on it, Shef could only say, an expression of smug superiority he was not diplomat enough to conceal.
Slowly the young man was led through his tale.
"You have sharp eyes," said Shef at the end.
Mu'atiyah looked sideways at Ghaniya, received a nod, and slowly produced his spyglass.
"My master, bin-Firnas," he said, "is the wisest man in the world. First he learned to correct the weakness of his eyes, by the use of a reading-glass of the correct shape. Then one day, by his direction and the will of Allah, I discovered that two glasses will make the far-off close." He trained the stout leather-covered lens out of the open window, seemed as always to have difficulty finding the right focus.
"There," he said finally, "an unveiled maiden bends over the well, winding up water in a bucket. She is of great beauty, fit for a caliph's harem, and her arms are bare. Round her neck she wears—she wears a silver phallus, by Allah!" The young man's laugh brought a frown of disapproval from his own leader: wiser not to mock the savages, even if their women had no shame.
Shef looked at Ghaniya, received the nod of permission, took the strange object from the young man's hands, ignoring his frown of discontent. He looked at the larger end, took a cloth from a table and rubbed the lens gently, feeling its shape. Did the same at the smaller end. He had noticed before, looking through the thick bottle-glass which was the best his own world could produce for windows and that only for the greatest, how shapes were distorted by it. So that could be useful as well as a hindrance.
"Ask him why one end has to be smaller than the other."
A mutter of translation. The answer: he does not know.
"The shape at the large end bulges out. What would happen if it curved in?"
Again the mutter, again the answer.
"What happens if the tube is longer or shorter?"
This time the answer was evidently angry, the Jew's translation shorter, as if diplomatically altered. "He says it is enough that it works," came the filtered reply from Boniface.
Finally Shef put the tube to his one eye, looked where the young Arab had. "Yes," he remarked. "It is Alfwyn daughter of Edgar the groom." He inverted the tube, looked through the large end as Ma'mun had done before him, to a grunt of impatience from the Arab, handed it back without further comment.
"Well," he said, "they know some things, but they seem to have no great desire to learn any more. People of the Book, indeed, doing things because their master said so. You know what I think of that, Thorvin." Shef looked round at his advisers, aware that nothing he said could be understood by Suleiman or the others without further translation into Latin. "Is there any good reason why we should ally with them? It seems to me they need us more than we need them."
The demonstration had gone wrong, Ghaniya realized. He had thought little of their book. They had noticed—or their king had—that Mu'atiyah was a fool, for all the wisdom of his master. This was a moment when his mission hung in the balance. His voice hissed ominously as he whispered to Mu'atiyah and Suleiman together.
"Tell them of the glories of Cordova, you fools. Mu'atiyah, tell that king of theirs something about your master that even he will wonder at. And no tricks for children! He may be a savage, but he is not one to be deceived by toys!"
Both men hesitated. Suleiman was the quicker to respond. "You are a Christian priest?" he said to Boniface. "Yet you serve a king who is not of your faith? Tell your master, then, that so do I. Tell him that it would be wise for all those of us who serve masters like him and like my master to stand together. For whether we are all People of the Book or not—and I do not think his book is like my Torah or your Bible or my master's Koran—yet we are all people of the blessing. Our blessing is that we do not seek to make others share our belief by force. The Greeks burn or blind those who do not share their creed down to the last word and glossing. The Franks say to each other, 'Christians are right and pagans are wrong.' They accept no other book than their own Bible and their own reading of it. For your sake and mine, father, add your own words to what I have said, I beg you! We are the ones who will suffer first. They call me the crucifier of their Lord. What will they call you? A traitor to the Faith?"
Shef listened as Boniface, paraphrasing now rather than translating, repeated the substance of Suleiman's appeal. He noted the concern on the Jew's face. His own betrayed no response.
"Ask what the other has to say?"
Mu'atiyah had time to collect his thoughts, but they ran only to a repetition of the many virtues of his master: virtues in the Arab tradition. He had made a machine for counting out the beat of music, so that musicians might play their instruments in time. His courtyard was the glory of Cordova for the glass roof he had made over his fountain. He had found out how to make glass from ashes. His poetry—Mu'atiyah was grasping at straws by now—was famous across the world.
Shef glanced round at his advisers, ready to draw the audience to a close. Ghaniya scowled furiously at the gabbling Mu'atiyah, now shaken by the lack of interest on all faces.
"Shall I sing the one-eyed king one of the poems of my master?" he suggested. "Or one of the poems about my master?"
Shef grunted as he heard the translation, rose to his feet, looked Ghaniya firmly in the eye. As he drew in his breath to terminate the hearing, Boniface broke in, his quiet voice cutting across the gabble of Arabic from the young scholar.
"Pardon, lord. He has said something interesting. He offers to sing you a poem about the time his master flew. Flew from the tallest tower in Cordova. And lived, it seems."
Shef looked at the young man with deep suspicion. "Ask him what feathers he used?"
Question and answer, and Boniface's reply. "He says no feathers. He says only a fool would think men can fly like birds. They have to fly like men."
"How then?"
"He will not say. His master orders him not to speak. He says, if you want to see, come to Cordova and look."
Hours later, after a closed meeting with his council and an extended feast for his own men and their visitors, Shef headed wearily for his bed. The feast had been a struggle. His visitors had queried every dish set before them, refused pork, ham, sausages, wine, mead, beer, cider and even the "burnt wine" that Udd had learnt to distil, sniffing it suspiciously and then rejecting it. In the end they had eaten little but bread and water. Shef feared for their health. In his world drinking plain water was a risk few cared to take. Water-drinkers died too often of the belly-ache and the running flux.
The meeting had been little better. All the way through he had been conscious of pressure, of being manipulated. What surprised him was that his advisers had been unanimous on wanting him to leave. In the past they had been anxious to hold him back from what they saw as rash expeditions. Now—though they had done so carefully—they seemed united in wanting him away. A man more interested in politics than himself might have suspected a brewing rebellion.
First it had been Brand. "The Inner Sea," he had muttered. "It's been done before. I don't suppose you know this, but the Ragnarssons"—he had spat into the fire at the mention of their name—"they tried it before ever you were on the scene. Fifteen years ago, maybe, when their father was still alive. Took a hundred ships down and stayed away two years. That was when there were five of them..."
"Five?" Shef had asked. He had known only four.
"Yes. Sigurth, Ivar, Halvdan, Ubbi—and their elder brother, Björn. Björn Ironside, they called him. I quite liked him," Brand reflected. "Not as crazy as the others. He was killed by a stray rock when they besieged Paris.
"Anyway, point is this: they went down there, came back two years later when everyone had got to thinking they were dead. Lost more than half their ships and two thirds of their men. But, Hel, did they come back rich! Start of the Ragnarssons' power, that was. They built the Braethraborg on it. Must be good pickings down there. You don't find gold anywhere else."
We don't need gold, we have silver enough, Shef had replied. But then it had been Hund, playing up the chances for new knowledge. A whole new science of the eye, he had suggested. And what of the flying man? No-one would give them any further details, but the way the story had slipped out, not intentionally, from a silly youth talking about poetry: that argued there was something in it. Something that none of them could even imagine. That was the most useful type of new knowledge. In any case, Hund had added, he had talked carefully to the Jew translator. It was clear that in the city of Cordova they had leeches who did not think twice about opening the body of their patients to cure them, something even Ingulf, Hund's master, had done only a few times, and Hund even fewer. And he had said besides, that there were men there who did not scruple to open the skull and search the brain. He would go south, Hund had declared. It was his duty to Ithun, his patron-deity, goddess of healing.
Thorvin had said little, though he too had offered to join any expedition that might sail. Who would direct the Wisdom-House for you, Shef had asked. Farman, said Thorvin without debate, a strange answer, for Farman shared none of Thorvin's interests in the crafts of the smith. His eyes had dwelt somberly on Shef all evening, as if wishing him to leave.
Shef stumbled into his room, dismissed the light-bearing attendants, stripped off his garments of state and threw them into a corner, rolled himself in his blankets, and wished for sleep. Even on the down mattress, so different from the boards and straw on which he had slept most of his life, sleep did not come easily. And it came haunted.
In his dream, he was looking down at a mappa. But a true mappa, different immediately from the one he himself had hanging on the wall of his great study-chamber. Even more different from the many he had seen and collected from the Christian world. Most Christian maps presented the world as a T-shape, with the unknown land of Africa as the vertical beam, with Europe as one of the crossbeams and Asia as the other, the two equal in size. And the junction-point, the pivot of the world, invariably marked as Jerusalem.
Shef's own maps were detailed towards the North and the West, fading rapidly into vagueness in the South and the East, where he refused to indicate what had not been confirmed by reliable sources. The map of his dream was neither Christian schematic nor local record. He knew intuitively that it was true. Too jagged, unexpected, and full of needless additions to be the work of imagination.
On the map, divisions were marked in colors. First Shef saw his own dominions, Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the islands between them, in a wash of brilliant red. Against them, other lands began to be marked out in blue. First the land of the Franks, facing Britain, then the whole interior of Europe, the German lands, then rippling down in a blue tide the boot-shape of Italy. The Empire of Charlemagne. Now owing allegiance again to the Holy Lance. Only carried in the hands of Charlemagne's true successor, though not his blood-successor. Bruno, new emperor.
Shef jerked as he heard a cold, quiet voice, too familiar to him now. "Easy," it said. "This is not a Hel-vision. No serpent, no Loki. Just look at the map. Look at the frontiers on it.
"See, you have only one land frontier with the Empire, at the base of Denmark. Fortified now by you from the Ditmarsh to the Baltic Sea, along the lines of the old Dannevirke, the Dane-work that King Guthfrith built. But Bruno has many frontiers. To the East..." and Shef saw the blue fade away to a near-colorless pallor, gently turning green. "The land of the steppe and the forest. From it any moment great armies can come. But they fade as fast as they appear. Bruno does not worry greatly about them.
"To the South-East." And suddenly Shef saw a blaze of gold sweep across from the Italian boot-top towards the depths of Asia. "The Greeks. With their great city of Byzantium, Micklegarth as Brand calls it, the Great Town. Not as rich, any more, as the lands of the Arabs. But the true heir of the Romans, and the Roman knowledge. Bruno does not fear them either, though he has plans for them. He wishes to bring them into a united Christendom, with the skill and subtlety of the Greeks and the energy and ferocity of his own Germans. Even the warriors of the steppe might quail before that. But now see the silver."
And it was there, washing across the map like a carpet unrolling, stretching over lands Shef could not imagine, far to the East of the Byzantines and deep into Africa as well. "The lands of Dar al-Islam, submission to the will of Allah," said the cold voice. "Allah the One God. No wonder that the hate is hottest between the two sides who believe alike in One God. Maybe the same god. But that neither side can agree.
"See now where lies the Dar al-Harb. The House of War." A glowing line began to thread between the silver and the blue, across the mountain-lands of northern Spain—"robber-dukedoms," said the voice, "but strengthened now by the Lanzenorden, the soldier-monks of Christ." A flicker across southern France—"robber-holds of the Mohammedans," said the voice, "but now under threat from the reviving Empire." And then a glow around island after island, Sicily, Malta, Sardinia, Mallorca, the remaining Balearics. "They are the key," said the voice. "They control the Inner Sea." Slowly Shef saw the silver change again and again to blue. Like pincers groping round the flank of Arab Spain.
Unite the blue and gold, Shef thought. Cut off the silver and turn it blue. There will then be a great block across the world. His own red came back into focus—a thin line, an edge drawn around one corner of the block. His dominion ran from Scilly to North Cape. It seemed no more than a pencil line for thinness.
"Now there is the hinge," said the voice, already seeming to come from further away, as if it was withdrawing. The maps of the Christians showed Jerusalem, always, as the world-center, the pivot, the axle-tree of destiny. As Shef looked at it, one center spot seemed to glow, to stand out against the fading colors of his dream, to swell towards him. A spot at the heart of the Inner Sea, balancing north against south, east against west. But he did not know where it was. His thought reached out after his fading mentor, calling:
"Where? Where?" And the voice came back, from a chill and hostile distance.
"Rome," it called. "Go to Rome, my son. And there you will find your peace..."
Shef woke with a start and a clenching of muscles that made his bed-frame creak and brought the sleepy guard in the hallway outside to his feet. He means me to go, he thought. That was my father Rig calling.
He called me "my son." From a father like him, that bodes nothing but ill.