As the fleet completed its fast current-assisted run down the estuary of the Thames, and turned south for the longer haul down-Channel and across the Bay of Biscay, Shef wondered again at his own reviving good humor. The omens were bad. He did not trust his visions. His own friends, he sensed, were conspiring against him. Yet he had felt his heart lift with the first heel of the deck beneath his feet.
It might be, he considered, the continuous changes he became aware of every time he boarded a ship. It was as if the pace of change, obvious enough on land, or at least on his land, accelerated at sea. He could not help comparing this voyage with the one he had begun eight years before, when he had sailed far to the north, in the end to defeat the Ragnarssons and lose the Holy Lance to his rival Bruno. Then the ships he had taken with him had been experimental, capable of one thing only: mounting a catapult. Everything about them had been a struggle. The most expert crews in the world could not have prevented them sagging eternally to leeward. And his crews had been experimental too. Fishermen as captains and landsmen from the levies as crew. Too clumsy and uncertain even to allow fires to be lit, no matter what precautions everyone took, so that it was cold food and small beer day after day, and only the hope of finding an anchorage at night that made it worth carrying kindling.
A different story now. Shef's was not a large fleet. After anxious calculation it had been decided to leave the bulk of the new two-master catapult-armed vessels to watch the ever-dangerous mouth of the Elbe. Everyone knew that the Empire had ships continually manned, in the hope of slipping out to break the blockade, maybe even make a beachhead on English soil and carry over the feared, drilled, irresistible soldier-monks of the Lanzenorden—a far cry, indeed, from the poorly-disciplined knights of Charles the Bald, defeated at Hastings nine years before. So thirty ships remained on their continual rotation between the Elbe station, their home base of Norwich, and their short-stay ports on the Danish peninsula. Shef had only six with him, besides his own flagship, the Fafnisbane.
Yet what ships they were. They made nothing of the southwest wind that would have blocked their prototypes, tacking steadily down-Channel without difficulty, the crews handling the double sails without fuss or confusion. There was nothing, too, of the alarming swarming motion which had so terrified Shef and his dead companion Karli when they had first ridden as passengers in a true Viking longboat. Instead of swooping up and gliding down every wave, the bigger, heavier ships seemed to crush through them, stabilized by their heavy cargoes and ballast, taking the weight of the ton-and-a-quarter catapults mounted high up without strain. They had even—Brand had shaken his head in a mixture of envy and sorrow when he had first seen it—the entirely new luxury of decking. No longship had anything above its hull except the rowers' benches and the skin awnings they sometimes slung to keep off spray. Sleeping during a sea passage was a matter of rolling yourself in a blanket and lying in the bottom boards, between the thwarts if you were fortunate. Here the greater size and depth of the bronze-bolted hulls meant that permanent wooden decks could be built, with room beneath the shelter they gave to sling hammocks for the great ones, and above all for the king. Shef had grinned like a boy at the luxury of it when his skipper, Ordlaf, had shown him the new invention. And then, climbing out again, had remarked that it would improve the ships' ability to keep the sea for longer periods: valuable for the blockade detachments.
"He never enjoys anything," Ordlaf confided later to his mates. "Thinking ahead all the time. Good for no-one, if you ask me."
But Ordlaf was wrong. Shef felt keen enjoyment at every detail as he stood, finally, on the after catapult-castle, watching the coast of England fade and hearing the terrible retching sounds of the Caliph's ambassador and his men coming to terms once more with the Atlantic swell. His eye noted the skillful way his dozen ships—seven catapult-craft, and five more conventional Viking-manned longships in company as scouts—spread out into an extended V, five miles from arm to arm, so as to keep each other in plain sight and at the same time extend the horizon of their own lookouts. He nodded approvingly too at the new "crows' nests" at every masthead. He would have liked to see in each of them a man armed with a far-seer like the one the Arab had shown him, but so far the secret of their manufacture had eluded him. Priests of the Way were busy at this moment in the Wisdom-House, blowing glass, making different shapes from it, trying to learn in the way they had learned to make better steel and better weapons: not by logic, but by deliberate random change. The man who succeeded could name his own reward.
But meanwhile, the new ships had even a brick fireplace amidships, screened from the wind and the spray! Shef's nostrils flared to the smell of thick sausage soup, remembering again the terrible belly-pinch of his past. For all men say, he thought again, as he did many times, there is no virtue in hardship. Virtue in being able to endure it, maybe. But no-one gets better for practice.
His comfortable reflections were cut short by sudden turmoil from the fore-castle: men's voices raised, and in the middle of them—impossible, at sea—what sounded like the shrieking of a woman. An angry woman by the sound of it, as well. Shef turned for the rail and headed swiftly along the ship's seventy-foot length.
It was a woman, sure enough, but what caught Shef's eye in his first astonished instant was the sight of his childhood friend Hund the leech, standing in front of Ordlaf the skipper and bodily thrusting him back. Hund was among the slightest of men, and moreover quiet and gentle almost to a fault. To see him thrusting aside the burly Ordlaf was barely credible.
Even less credible was the sight of the woman herself. For an instant Shef's eye caught the copper hair, flash of blue eyes—they brought back a memory of some kind—but then he could notice nothing beyond her dress.
Slowly his brain took in what his eye had already registered. She wore what was certainly an imitation of the dress of a priest of the Way. White wool, bleached again and again. Round her neck a pendant, but not one he could readily recognize. Not a leech-apple, not a smith-hammer. A ski, for Ull? No: a feather, badly-crafted, but a quill nonetheless. And round her waist, certainly, a girdle of the sacred rowan-berries.
Shef became conscious of Thorvin standing by his side. Realized too that the shouting and pushing had ceased, quelled by his appearance and his fixed stare.
"Is she with you?" Shef asked Thorvin disbelievingly. "Do you have priestesses now?"
"Not with me," came a grim voice in reply. "She has no right to wear any of our marks or tokens. They should be stripped from her back, aye, shift and all."
"And then what?"
"And then over the side with her," cut in Ordlaf. "Who ever heard of a woman aboard ship?" He caught himself a moment later. "I mean to say, a distaff-bearer."
Shef had noted the spread of the haf-words among his seamen, even the English ones who had been brought up as Christians, like Ordlaf. Brand and his men were adamant that it was the worst of luck at sea to mention women, or cats, or Christian priests, except for the terrible luck that would be brought by sailing with one. They would not mention parts of their own ships in ordinary language either, but carefully used separate ritual terms. Now Ordlaf was doing it. But his reflections were interrupted again by a closer stare at the woman in front of him. Absently he waved to Hund, pushing forward protectively, to stand back and let him see her plain.
"I have seen you before," he remarked. "You hit me. You hurt me. I remember now. It was at Bedricsward, by—by the mighty one's camp. You were in the tent, the tent I cut open, the tent—" Shef hesitated. He could remember no ruling from Brand on this point, but something told him that Ivar the Boneless was a name as likely to annoy, or to attract, the sea-hags of Ran the goddess of the deep as any mention of women or cats. "The tent of the pale man," he finished lamely.
She nodded. "I remember you too. You had two eyes then. You slashed the tent open to rescue the English girl, and seized me because you thought I was her. I hit you and you let me go." She spoke English with a thick Norse accent, Shef noted, as bad as Brand's. But she did not speak it quite like him, nor like so many of the followers of the Way, edging towards a language common to both Norse and English. She was a Dane. A pure Dane, he guessed. Where had she come from?
"I brought her aboard," said Hund, finally able to command attention. "I hid her below decks. Shef, you were Thorvin's apprentice. I was Ingulf's apprentice. Now Svandis here is my apprentice. I ask you to protect her—as Thorvin protected you when the dogs of Ivar would have killed you."
"If she is your apprentice why is she not wearing an apple, for Ithun, for leech-craft?" said Shef.
"Women are not apprentices," growled Thorvin at the same moment.
"I can explain that," said Hund. "But there are other things I need to explain too. Privately," he added.
Shef nodded slowly. In all their experience he had never known Hund ask for anything for himself, not since the day Shef had pulled the slave-collar off his neck. Yet time and again he had done Shef service. He was owed a hearing. Silently Shef pointed forward to the closed space where they slung his hammock. He turned to Ordlaf, to Thorvin, to the watching crewmen and the dark-faced Arabs behind them.
"No more about stripping or putting over the side," he ordered. "Serve the food out, Ordlaf. And send some forward to Hund and me too. As for her, put her in the aft compartment with two of your mates to watch her. You are responsible for her safety.
"Lady," he added, "go where they show you." For an instant she looked at him as if she were likely to strike him again. A fierce face, a familiar face. As she relaxed and dropped her eyes, Shef realized with death at his heart where he had seen it before. Glaring at him over a gangplank. She was the female image of the Boneless One, whom he had killed and burned to ashes so his ghost would never walk again. What was it that Hund had brought back from the past? If she were a draugr or one of the twice-born, he would take Thorvin's advice after all. It would cheer the crew, dispersing sullenly now to their meal.
"Yes, she is Ivar's daughter," admitted Hund, in the dark, rocking privacy of the deck beneath the forward catapult-mount. "I realized that a while ago."
"But how could he have a daughter? or any child? He could do nothing with women, that's why they called him the Boneless One, he had no..."
"Oh yes he did," corrected Hund. "You should know. You killed him by crushing them in your hand,"
Shef fell silent, remembering the last moments of his duel with Ivar.
"By the time we knew him," Hund went on, "I think you are right, he could have no relations with women. But when he was younger, he could—if he hurt them a great deal first. He was one of those men—there are more of them than there should be, even in your kingdom—who are aroused by pain and fear. In the end the pain and fear were all he valued, and I believe that no woman given over to him could hope to survive. You saved Godive from that, you know," he added with a penetrating stare. "He treated her well for a while, but from what I have heard that was only to get the keener enjoyment as her trust turned to fear: when the moment came.
"But it seems that in earlier years his demands were not so great. Women survived what he did to them. He may even have found one or two who cooperated with him, who had some deformity corresponding to his."
"What, enjoyed being hurt?" grunted Shef disbelievingly. He had been hurt often himself. The man he was talking to had burned out his right eye with a red-hot needle, to prevent worse happening. He could not imagine any faint association of pleasure with pain.
Hund nodded, carrying on. "I think in the case of Svandis's mother there may even have been some affection between them. Anyway, the woman conceived his child and lived to bear it. Though she died not long after, as Ivar's needs grew stronger. Now Ivar valued Svandis extremely, maybe for her mother, maybe because she was living proof of his manhood. He took her with him in the great attack on England. But after the surprise at Bedricsward all the Ragnarssons sent their women, their real women, not the slave-lemmans they picked up, back to safety at the Braethraborg.
"What you need to realize, Shef, is this, and I speak now as a leech." Hund gripped his apple-pendant to show his gravity. "That young woman has three times been hurt by fear. Once, at Bedricsward. Most of the women in that tent were killed, you know. You dragged Godive away. Svandis seized a weapon and crawled between tent-ropes where the warriors could not easily reach her. But most of them were cut down by men so blind with rage they could hardly see. She collected the bodies in the morning.
"Again, at the Braethraborg, after you stormed it. Again she had been living in safety, as a princess, her every command obeyed. Then it was blood and fire all over again, and at the end of it she was a beggarwoman. No one would take in a Ragnarsson's daughter. If she showed gold someone would take it from her. All her kin were dead. How do you think she lived after that? By the time she found her way to me she had been through many men's hands. Like a nun taken by a Viking band and passed round the camp-fires."
"And the third time?" Shef asked.
"When her mother died. Who knows how that came about? Who knows how much the child saw, or heard, or guessed?"
"Is she your lemman now?" inquired Shef, trying to get to some decision.
Hund threw his hands up in disgust. "What I'm trying to tell you, you brain-sick pissabed, is that of all the women in the world she is the least likely to be anyone's lemman. As far as she knows, if women lie with men they are likely to be disemboweled slowly, and the only good reason for doing so is in exchange for food or money."
Shef sat back on his bench. Though his face could not be seen in the dark unlit 'tween-deck, he was grinning faintly. Hund was talking to him as he had done when they were boys, thrall's child and bastard together. Besides, a faint excitement stirred within him at the thought that the new woman was not Hund's lover. A Ragnarsson's daughter, he reflected. Now her father and uncles and cousins were all safely dead, it might be no bad thing to ally with the Ragnarsson blood. All admitted that they were of the seed of gods and heroes, however much they hated them. The Snake-eye claimed descent from Völsi and from his own namesake the Fafnisbane. There was no doubt the Danes and the Swedes and the Norwegians would respect a child sprung from that stock: even if she was a female Boneless.
He brought himself back to the moment. "If she is not your lover, why did you hide her on board?"
Hund leaned forward again, his voice dropping low. "I tell you, that young woman has more brains than anyone you or I have ever met."
"What, more than Udd?" Shef meant the puny, slave-born stray who had risen to become Shef's steelmaster and the most respected smith among priests of the Way: though he would never leave the House of Wisdom in Stamford again, his nerve broken for ever by the terrors he had undergone in the North.
"In a way. But in a different way. She is no smith, no metal-beater or machine-minder. She thinks deeply. Somewhere after she fled from the Braethraborg, someone explained to her the doctrines of the Way. She knows the holy poems and stories as well as Thorvin, and can read and write them. That is why she has chosen to wear a quill, though I do not know what god she wears it for."
Hund's voice was a whisper now. "I think she explains the stories better than Thorvin does. Their inner meaning, the true tale of Völund or of King Frothi and the giant-maids, the truth behind all our fables of gods and giants, of Othin and Loki and Ragnarök. She preaches strange doctrines to those who will listen, tells them there is no Valhalla for the good and Naströnd for the bad, no monsters beneath the earth and in the sea, no Loki and no Hel..."
Shef cut him off. "She can stay, if you wish it," he said. "She can preach her strange doctrines too, for all I care. But you can tell her this: if she wants to persuade anyone that Loki does not exist, she can start with me. I would give heavy gold to anyone who could show me that. Or tell me his chains were sound."
Not far, as the raven flies, from the track of the war-fleet down the French Atlantic coast, the new Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire prepared with relish for an afternoon's sport.
Returned from his meeting at Salonae, the Emperor had embarked with his usual furious energy on the next task he had set himself, the counterpart of the naval actions that his general Agilulf and the Greek admiral of the Red Fleet were carrying out at sea. It was time, Bruno had declared, to deal finally with the Moslem strongholds established a generation before on the South Frankish coast, permanent menace to pilgrims and officials traveling to Rome, disgrace to Christendom and to the heir of Charlemagne. Easier said than done, some had muttered. But not many. Their Emperor did nothing without a plan.
Now Bruno stood, relaxed and genial, explaining what would happen to a group of wary, mistrustful, but deeply interested nobles: minor dukes and barons of the Pyrenean mountains, in their way the counterpart to the Moslem brigands about to be extirpated, their own strongholds hanging on the edge of Moslem Spain as the present one did on the coast of Christian France. From time to time a dart or arrow swept out of the sky, shot from the stronghold towering on its peak two hundred feet above them. The nobles noted the total lack of concern of the Emperor, who from time to time raised his shield to deflect or intercept a missile, without breaking the flow of his talk. This was no chair-warrior talking. He had been shot at more times than he had passed water.
"They build high up, as you can see," he explained. "That was safe enough for a long time. Can't get scaling ladders up easily, they have plenty of bowmen—good bowmen too," he added, lifting his shield once more. "Build on stone, so it's no good mining. Even our onagers can't be raised high enough to beat their doors down.
"But the Mohammedan rogues did not have to deal with my good secretarius here!" The Emperor waved an arm at a figure the Spanish barons had till then ignored: a small, scrawny man in the undistinguished black robe of a deacon, standing by the side of the great machine drawn forward by two hundred men. Looking again, the barons noted that two men stood always by the deacon, fully armored, with shields of double size. The Emperor might take risks with his own life, but none with those of this deacon.
"That is Erkenbert the Englishman, Erkenbert arithmeticus." The barons nodded reflectively. Even they had heard of this man. All of Christendom had heard by now the story of how the great Emperor had traveled into the pagan lands and returned with the Holy Lance of Longinus. A major part of the story was the tale of how Erkenbert arithmeticus had destroyed the Kingdom Oak of the Swedes, the idol-worshipers.
The little deacon was calling shrill orders, had now a firebrand in his fist. He looked across at the Emperor, saw his nod, bent over his machine, straightened, and shouted a last word. An instant later, the Spaniards broke into a collective groan of amazement. The great arm of the machine had swept down, slowly, ponderously, dragged down by the huge bucket on its shorter arm. At the same instant the long arm had shot up, as fast as the short one was slow, and launched a trail of smoke into the air. But what had brought out the groan was the size of the missile it lobbed: bigger than any rock men could lift, bigger than a mule or a two-year-old bullock, it flew as if by magic up into the sky. Over the wall of the Moslem stronghold, vanishing deep inside. From high above they could hear yells of alarm and rage. Already the machine tenders were furiously busy round the bucket-arm, some of them jumping into it and hurling rock after rock out on to the dry ground.
"It's very slow," said Bruno conversationally, "but it can throw the weight of three men, oh, a hundred and fifty yards quite easily. And it throws it up, you see. Not flat like the onagers. So what we do with the villains is, first we set fire to the wooden buildings inside the holds—four hundred pounds of tarred straw is not put out by pissing on it—and then, well, you'll see. Once my secretarius has seen a shot or two, he will cut down the weight of the launcher—it is difficult, but he is the arithmeticus—and drop, not straw, but a boulder, right on top of the gateway there." He waved up at the iron-studded oak doorway.
"And then, as you can see"—Bruno waved again at the heavily-armed men waiting in ranks out of arrow-shot, "the heroes of the Lanzenorden stand ready to go in and finish the job."
"And us with them," said one of the Spanish barons, a scarred veteran.
"But certainly!" cried Bruno, "and me too! Why, it's all I come for!" He winked roguishly. "One decision we all have to make, though. My lads wear their mail, after all, they have to do this twice a week. But those of us who just have a chance now and then, why, we may think it better to go in light-armed. I only wear padded leather myself, it gives me a little more speed, and the Arabs wear no armor either. To tell the truth, I find it more like rat-catching than fighting a battle. But that is because we have found the trick of burning the rats out."
He beamed cheerfully at his secretarius, now supervising the winching up of the bucket-arm of his trebuchet, preparatory to filling it with its launch-weight once more.
"And do you take the Holy Lance into battle?" asked one of the Spaniards, greatly daring.
The Emperor nodded, the gold circlet welded to his plain steel helmet flashing in the sun. "It never leaves me. But I carry it in my shield-hand, and never strike a blow with it. What has once drunk the Holy Blood of our Savior cannot be polluted with the blood of some miscreant unbeliever. I defend it more than I do my own life."
The Spaniards stood silent. This assault, they knew perfectly well, was being staged as a demonstration to them as well as an extermination of the brigands. The Emperor meant to show them the futility of anything other than perfect alliance and obedience. Yet they relished it. For generations their ancestors had fought a losing struggle against the tide of Islam, seemingly forgotten by the Christians at their back. If now a strong king came with armies at his call, they were ready to show the way and share the profits. The relic in his hand was only one further proof of his power, yet a strong one. Finally one of the barons spoke, won over and ready to show his loyalty.
"All of us will follow the Lance," he said, in the mutilated Latin of the hill-folk. Murmurs of agreement came from his fellows. "It is in my mind that the holder of the Lance deserves to hold the other great relic of our Savior."
Bruno looked at him sharply, suspiciously. "What is that?"
The Spaniard smiled. "It is known to few. But in these hills, it is said, rests the third relic, besides Holy Cross and Holy Lance, known to have touched our Savior." He paused, pleased with the effect of his words.
"And that is?"
"The Holy Grail." In the border dialect the words came out as santo graale.
"And where and what is that?" Bruno asked very quietly.
"I cannot say. But somewhere in these hills, they say it is hidden. Has been hidden since the time of the long-haired kings."
The other barons looked at each other doubtfully, unsure of the wisdom of mentioning the old dynasty wiped out by the grandfather of Charlemagne. But Bruno cared nothing for the legitimacy or otherwise of the dynasty he had himself wiped out, his attention focused solely on what the baron was saying.
"Then who holds it, do we know that?"
"The heretics," the baron replied. "In these hills, they are everywhere. Not worshipers of Mohammed or Allah, worshipers, it is said, of the devil. The Grail fell into their hands many years ago, so men say, though no-one knows what such a thing may be. We do not know who the heretics are, they could be among us now. They preach, it is said, strange doctrine."
The machine behind them crashed again, a rock soared slowly into the air, fell ruinously upon the doorway behind which plumes of black smoke were rising. A hoarse cheer rose from the ranks of the Lanzenorden as they pressed forward to the breach. Their Emperor pulled his longsword free, turned to lead them, Holy Lance held with shield-grip in one brawny fist.
"Tell me more later," he shouted over the rising war-cries. "At dinner. Once the rats are dead."
The Caliph of Cordova, Abd er-Rahman, was troubled in his heart. He sat cross-legged on his favorite carpet in the smallest and most private courtyard of his palace, and allowed his mind to sort carefully through its troubles. Water ran continually from the fountain at his side, soothing his thoughts. In a hundred pots placed seemingly at random around the enclosed court, flowers bloomed. An awning defended him from the direct rays of the sun, already hot in the short Andalusia spring. All around, the word was passed in whispers, and servants fell silent, took their work elsewhere. On bare feet his bodyguards padded gently back into the shaded colonnades, watching but remaining unseen. A mustarib slave-girl of his harem, urgently summoned by his major-domo, began very gently to pluck out a faint tune on her zither, so low as to be almost inaudible, alert for the faintest sign of displeasure. None came, as the Caliph sank deeper and deeper into introspection.
The news from his traders was bad, he reflected. There was no question but that the Christians had seized every island that could conceivably be used as the base for a fleet: Malta, Sicily, Mallorca, Menorca, the other Balearics, even Formentera, all gone, and behind them—though this was none of his concern—the Greek islands of Crete and Cyprus. His traders reported that all ship movements even along the African shore were now subject to harassment from Christian raiders. It was strange that they had come so quickly, he mused.
There was a reason, though the Caliph did not know it. For all its size, the Mediterranean is in some ways more like a lake than an open sea. Because of its prevailing winds and the insistent current that pours in from the Atlantic to replace the constant evaporation of the almost land-locked sea, it is far easier in the Mediterranean to sail west to east than east to west; easier too to sail north to south than south to north. The first factor was to the Caliph's advantage, the second to that of his Christian foes. Once the block of the Arab fleets and bases in the north had been removed, the way was easy and open for every Christian village on the Mediterranean islands that could fit out a ship to send it south and try to reclaim their long losses from the traders of Egypt and Tunis, of Spain and Morocco.
No, thought the Caliph. The interruption of trade vexes me, but it is not the source of my trouble. Spain lacks for nothing. If trade is cut down, some men will become poor, others rich in their place as they supply what we used to buy from the Egyptians. As for the loss of fleets and men, that angers me, but it can be avenged. That is not what perturbs my soul.
The news from the Franks then? The Caliph had no personal feeling for the brigand strongholds that the new Emperor of the Franks was burning out. They paid him no taxes, contained none of his relatives. Many of them were men who had fled from his justice. Yet there was something there to irritate him, it was true. He could not forget the words of the prophet Muhammad: "O believers, fight against the unbelievers who are nearest to you." Could it be that he, Abd er-Rahman, had neglected his spiritual duty? Had not moved aggressively enough against the unbelievers on his northern border? Had not come to help of those of Islam who obeyed the Prophet? Abd er-Rahman knew why he had left the northern mountains alone: thin profits, heavy losses, and the removal of what was after all a screen between himself and the Franks the other side of the mountains. Christians, heretics, Jews, all mixed together, easier to tax than to rule, he had thought. Yet maybe he had done wrong.
No, the Caliph reflected again, this news angered him, and made him think of changing his policy in the future, but there was no danger in it. Leon and Navarre, Galicia and Roussillon and the other tiny kingdoms, they would fall whenever he put out his hand to them. Next year maybe. He must think deeper.
Could it be the reports passed to him by his Cadi, the mayor and chief justice of the city? There was indeed something in them that disturbed him deeply. For twenty years Cordova had been vexed by one foolish young man, or young woman, after another from the Christian minority. They thrust themselves forward. They abused the Prophet in the marketplace, they came to the Cadi and declared that they had been followers of the Prophet and had now turned to the true God, they tried every trick they could to earn death beneath the executioner's sword. Then their friends revered them as saints and sold their bones—if the Cadi did not order and supervise total cremation—as holy relics. The Caliph had read the holy books of the Christians and was well aware of the parallel with their account of the death of the prophet Yeshua: how the Rumi Pilate had done his best not to condemn the man before him, but in the end had been provoked into ordering his death. A sorrow for the world that he had not been firmer. And they were at it again, so the Cadi reported, stirring up their Moslem fellow-citizens to fury and creating riots in the city.
Yet even that was not the heart of the matter, the Caliph thought. His predecessor had seen the cure for that problem. The Christians were quick enough to embrace death for the glory of martyrdom. They were slower to endure public humiliation. The way to deal with them was what Pilate himself had suggested: strip them and flog them in public, using the bastinado. Then send them contemptuously home. It appeased the Moslem mob, it created neither relics nor martyrs. Some took their beatings well, some badly. Few returned for more. The key was not to react to the provocation. A real believer in Islam who became a Christian: such a one must die. Those who merely declared their conversion to gain death, they should be ignored.
But there was the heart of the matter, the Caliph realized. He shifted uncomfortably on his carpet, and the tinkling of the zither instantly ceased. He settled back again and, very tentatively, the music began once more.
The core of Islam was the shahada, the profession of faith. He or she who once made it before witnesses was then for ever and irrevocably a Moslem. All that was necessary was to say the words: I testify, that there is no God but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God. La illaha il Allah, Muhammad rasul Allah, muttered the Caliph to himself for perhaps the hundred thousandth time. That witness was ordained by the Prophet himself. It could not be taken back.
Yet the Prophet, praised be his name, thought the Caliph to himself, had never had to deal with Christians hurling themselves to martyrdom! If he had, maybe he would have made the witness harder! The Caliph caught himself. There indeed was the heart of his trouble. He was on the point of criticizing the Prophet, of accepting change in Islam. He was becoming an unbeliever in his heart.
He raised a finger, made the gesture of one who unwinds a scroll. Bare minutes later the keeper of his library, the katib Ishaq, stood silently in front of him. The Caliph nodded to a cushion, to indicate that the katib should sit down, crooked a finger for sherbet and dates to be brought.
"Tell me," he said after a pause, "tell me of the Mu'tazilites."
Ishaq glanced at his master and employer warily, a chill at his heart. What suspicion prompted this question? How much did the Caliph want information, how much did he want reassurance? Information, he guessed. But unwise to neglect the appropriate disclaimers.
"The Mu'tazilites," he began, "were fostered by the unworthy followers of Abdullah, enemies of your house. Even in Baghdad, though, seat of the impure ones, they have now fallen into disgrace and been scattered."
A slight narrowing of the eyes told Ishaq to proceed more quickly to the information. "The seat of their belief," he went on, "was that faith should be subordinate, as the Greeks would have it, to reason. And the reason for their disgrace was that they argued that the teachings of the Koran were not eternal, but might be subject to change. Only Allah is eternal, they declared. Therefore the Koran is not."
Ishaq hesitated, unsure whether he dared press on. He himself, like so many of the learned of Cordova, sympathized heart and soul with those who offered free inquiry, a breaking of the chains of hadith, tradition. They had learned not to betray their sympathies. Yet he might venture to show the dilemma, as the wise thinkers of the Greeks, the falasifah, might put it.
"The Caliph will see that the Mu'tazilites provoke a hard choice," he continued. "For if we agree with them, we agree that the law of the shari'a, the clear path, may be altered. And then where is our clear path? But if we do not agree with them, we must believe that the Koran was there even before it was declared to the Prophet himself. And if we believe that, we take honor from the Prophet for finding it out and declaring it."
"What is your view, Ishaq? Speak freely. If I do not like what you say, I will not hear it nor ask you again."
The librarian drew a deep breath, sympathizing with that famous vizier of the Caliph Haroun, who said that every time he left the presence, he felt his own head to see if it were still on his shoulders. "I think the Mu'tazilites may have had some kernel of wisdom. The Prophet was a man, who lived and died as one. Some part of what he said was human, some part sent by God. It may be that the parts declared by his own human wisdom are subject to change, as are all the works of man."
"But we do not know which is which," summed up the Caliph. "And so the seed of doubt is sown."
Ishaq cast his eyes down, hearing the iron clang of finality, so often followed by the note of death. He had come to the end of toleration once again.
Outside the quiet courtyard there came a patter of feet, breaking the thin current of the slave-girl's song. The Caliph lifted his eyes, aware that he would not be disturbed save for something he had already indicated. The messenger who stood at the edge of the colonnade came forward, breathing deeply to show his diligence and the speed with which he had raced to his master. He bowed deeply.
"The deputation sent to the land of the majus has returned," he announced. "And not alone! They have come with the king of the majus and a fleet of strange ships."
"Where?"
"They have reached the mouth of the Guadalquivir, and are rowing up it in some of their ships, the smallest ones. They row swiftly, almost as swiftly as our horses. They will be here in Cordova in two days' time, in the morning."
The Caliph nodded, flicked fingers to his vizier to have the messenger rewarded, murmured orders to have guest-quarters prepared.
"A king," he said finally. "A king of the barbarians. It means nothing, but let us take particular care to impress him. Find out what his tastes are: girls, boys, horses, gold, mechanical toys. There is always something the children of the north desire."
"I want a good display," said Shef to his chief advisers. He was crouching awkwardly on the bottom boards of one of Brand's five longships. The seven catapult-mounting two-masters had proved, to the surprise of the Arabs, too deep-keeled to pass far up the river, and had been left behind with full crews and guards. Shef had gone on up river with just the five boats and as many men as could be conveniently fitted into them: just under two hundred all told. He had mixed his crews as well. Twenty men in each ship were Norsemen from their regular crews. The rest had been transferred to the catapult-ships, and replaced by a similar number of crossbowmen, all of them English. The English were taking their turn at rowing, amid much amusement. Nevertheless both sides were well aware of the extra protection the others gave them.
"How do we do that?" asked Brand. Like the others, he had been secretly shocked by the wealth and luxury visible all around them, and even more by the enormous numbers of people. From what they had been told, the city of Cordova alone contained as many people as the whole of Norway. All the way along the river they could see the roofs of mansions, water-wheels turning, villages and towns stretching out across the plains one after the other as far as the eye could see. "We can dress up, but it'll take more than a silk tunic to impress these people."
"Right. We don't try to look rich. They'll always beat us at that. We try to look strange. And frightening. I think we can do that. And it's not just look, right? It's sound..."
The quayside loungers drew back, muttering, as the Wayman fleet docked and began to unload its men. Shef's orders had been thoroughly digested, and his crews were playing their parts. First the Vikings poured off their boats, every man glittering in freshly-polished and sanded mail. Not a man was under six feet tall, spears bristled from behind the bright-painted shields, long-handled axes rested on shoulders. They had changed their seamen's goatskin shoes for heavy marching boots, studded with iron. They stamped heavily while Brand and his skippers roared orders in gale-force voices. Slowly they drew into a long line, four deep.
Another order, and the crossbowmen followed them: less impressive men physically, but more used to moving in unison. They ran to their places and also formed up, each one with his strange instrument sloped over his left shoulder. Shef saw them make their ranks, and then himself walked over the gangplank with careful ceremony. He too wore mail, a gold circlet on his head, as much gold as he could carry glinting from arm-rings and necklet. Brand followed him, with Thorvin and the two other Viking Way-priests who had joined the expedition, Skaldfinn the interpreter, priest of Heimdall, and Hagbarth the seaman, priest of Njörth. The four formed a rank at the head of the procession, immediately behind Shef himself, who walked alone. Behind them, and sheltered as much as possible by the bulk of Brand and Thorvin, walked Hund and his protégée Svandis. Under fierce orders from Shef, she had pulled a veil across her face, and was darting sharp looks from behind it.
Shef looked at the messenger who had been sent down to meet them, and gestured to him to lead on. As the man, puzzled and unsure at the odd behavior of the ferengis, began to walk away, continually glancing back, Shef gave a final wave. Cwicca, his most loyal companion and life-saver, stepped forward with three of his companions, crossbows slung across their backs. All four blew firmly into the bags of their bagpipes, reached full pressure, and began to march forward, blowing lustily in unison. The loungers fell back even further as the uncanny noise hit them.
The pipers marched forward behind the guide. Shef and his companions followed them, then the heavy-armed Vikings, their mail clashing, their boots stamping. Then came the crossbowmen, all stepping forward in time, a skill they had practiced on the new, level, hard stone roads of England. Every twenty paces the right-hand man of the front file raised his spear and the hundred Vikings behind him shouted together their approach-to-battle cry, which Shef had first heard rolling towards him from the army of Ivar the Boneless a decade before.
"Ver thik," they shouted again and again, "her ek kom, guard yourself, here I come." The Arabs will not understand it, Shef had pointed out, they will not think we are challenging them. Let's shout something else anyway, suggested one skipper. Anything more complicated than that, Brand had replied, and your lot will forget the words.
The column moved on through the packed streets of the town with metal echoes clanging from the stone walls, preceded by wailing pipes and roaring voices. At the rear the crossbowmen had started to sing a song in praise of their own victories. As they moved on the excited crowds grew thicker so that the marching men began to mark time, stamping down on the spot with their hobnails. Out of the corner of his eye Shef saw a fascinated Arab watching Brand's enormous feet crashing up and down. First he looked down, at the boots half a yard long. Then he gaped up, trying to measure the seven-foot distance between them and the metal crest of Brand's helmet.
Good, Shef thought, stepping forward again as the crowd was thrust back by the Caliph's escorts. Good, we've got them thinking first. They're thinking, is he human? It's not even a bad question.
The Caliph heard the uproar of the crowd even within his shaded and enclosed hall of audience. He raised an eyebrow, listened while the news was poured into his ears by an attendant. As the noise came closer he could indeed distinguish the screeching of the ferengis' strange instruments, as lacking in beauty as the howling of so many cats. Could hear, too, the astonishing crash of metal on stone, the deep shouts of the barbarians. Are they trying to frighten me, he wondered, amazed. Or is that their custom at all times? I must speak to Ghaniya. If one does not understand the customs of the foreigner one cannot guess his thoughts.
The noise ceased abruptly as Shef gave the signal to halt and the right-hand marker, by arrangement, waved his spear in a circle. Shef's men, Vikings and English, stood rigid in their ranks in the outside courtyard.
"How many may enter for audience?" asked Shef. No more than ten besides yourself, came the answer. Shef nodded, pointed out those to come with him. Brand and Thorvin, Hagbarth and Skaldfinn. He hesitated over Hund. No-one in the North knew more of leech-craft, and Cordova was famous for it: he might be needed to judge or respond. Yet he would not be parted from the irritating, but still obediently veiled Svandis. Take them both, then. Finally he called forward two of the Viking skippers to flank Brand, both men who had fought their way to command in a score of single combats, nodded silently to his long-term companions Cwicca and Osmond, with their crossbows.
The Caliph, sitting high on his dais, observed the strangers enter, listening now to muttered commentary from Ghaniya, who had come forward while the majus assembled outside. The king was the one-eyed one. Strange for the ferengis, who respected strength and size so much. The king should be the giant beside him. Though the one-eye had indeed the bearing of command. Abd er-Rahman noted the way he strode forward confidently to stand directly in front of him, looked round for his translators.
He noted also the sweat by now pouring from under the hair and the gold circlet. What were these men wearing? Metal to hold the rays of the sun; leather underneath it to guard their skin; and beneath that, it seemed, sheep's wool? In the Andalusian summer men dressed like that would die of heat-stroke before noon. And yet the king and his men showed no awareness of it, felt no shame at the evidence of their own bodies' discomfort, did not even try to wipe their brows. My people think it dignified to withdraw from discomfort, the Caliph reflected. These think it dignified to ignore it, like a slave working in the sun.
The Caliph asked the first and vital question: "Ask, are any of these men Christians?"
He expected the question to go to Suleiman the Jew, who would speak in Latin, and be translated by some man of learning among the strangers. He was surprised to see, as Suleiman indeed began to translate, the king himself shake his head. He understood some Arabic, then. And the answer was already forthcoming. Skaldfinn had as his vocation the learning of languages and the understanding of peoples. He had spent the voyage learning from Suleiman, and teaching him Anglo-Norse in exchange. Shef too had sat listening much of the time. Skaldfinn spoke now in slow but passable Arabic, translating for his king.
"No. None of us are Christians. We allow Christians to follow their faith, but we follow a different Way, and a different book. We fight only against those who deny that right."
"Has it been explained to you that there is only one God, who is Allah, and that Muhammad is his Prophet? Believe that, and you can expect rich reward from me."
"It has been explained."
"You do not believe in Allah? You choose to believe in your own gods, whoever they are?"
Tension and the note of the executioner in the Caliph's voice. Brand shifted his grip slightly on the axe "Battle-troll," and marked the two men standing behind the Caliph, scimitars bared. Big men, he thought. Burnt blacker by the sun than I have ever seen before. But naked above the waist, no shields. Two blows and the third for the Arab in the chair.
Realizing that he could follow the Arabic that the Caliph spoke, Shef replied for the first time without a translator. Pitching his voice high, and speaking the simplest Arabic that he could, he called out: "I have not seen Allah. I have seen my own gods. Maybe if I had two eyes I would see Allah too. One eye cannot see everything."
A buzz of comment ran round the courtyard. The Arabs, used to metaphorical language and the art of indirect reproof, understood the last sentence. He means that those who believe in one thing alone are half-blind. Blasphemer, thought some. Wise for a ferengi, thought others.
This is not a man to fence with, thought the Caliph. Already he has shown he understands display. Now he is taking my own audience chamber away from me.
"Why have you come to Cordova?" he said.
Because you asked me, thought Shef, glancing slightly at Ghaniya standing between and to the side of both men. Aloud, he replied: "To fight your enemies. My enemies too. Ghaniya tells me the Franks have new weapons to fight on sea and on land. We men of the Way understand new weapons. We have brought new weapons and new ships to see if our enemies can stand against them."
The Caliph looked silently at Ghaniya, who began an excited account of the ships and the catapults of the Wayman fleet. As they sailed south Shef had several times encouraged the skippers to make raft-targets, drop them over the side, and then destroy them at half a mile with hurled rocks. The crews were skilled and practiced, and the results had amazed the envoy. Indeed no ship known to him could take more than a blow or two from the onagers: he had not seen the armored but virtually unsailable Fearnought of the Braethraborg battle.
As Ghaniya came to an end, Abd er-Rahman looked thoughtfully once more at the God-defier. He is still not impressed, he thought, watching the grim impassive face. Nor his companions. He made a sign, and one of the huge executioners walked forward, bringing his scimitar from his shoulder. Another sign, and a slave-girl stepped out to join him. As she did so she peeled away the long filmy scarf that covered her upper body and stood, still veiled but with breasts bared before the men.
"I hear much of your new weapons," he said. "We have weapons too."
He flicked his hand. The girl tossed her scarf in the air. Slowly, gently, the thin silk floated down. The executioner turned his scimitar edge up and held it out beneath the drifting fabric. The scarf met the edge, divided, settled in two pieces to the ground.
Brand grunted, muttered something to the skippers at his side. Now, the Caliph thought, the king will tell that giant to split something with his great clumsy axe.
Shef turned, looked at Cwicca and Osmod. Neither of them the best shot in the world, he thought. Osmod is a bit more certain. He pointed silently at a marble vase holding bright purple flowers in a niche above the Caliph's head. Osmod gulped visibly, looked sideways at Cwicca, unslung his crossbow. Cocked it with one heave on the goat's-foot lever. Dropped in the short iron quarrel. Raised, aimed and pulled trigger.
Osmod had guessed right, aiming low to allow for the short-range rise. The armor-piercing bolt smashed into the stone, shattering it into pieces. Stone splinters hummed around the room, the bolt bounced back from the wall and clanged onto the floor. The flowers fell in a decorative trail. Earth from the shattered vase slowly pattered down.
The Caliph stroked his beard in the silence. I threatened him with my executioners, he thought. But that Iblis-bolt would have split my heart before I could move. Ghaniya did not warn me enough.
"You will fight our enemies," he said finally, "and you say that is what you have come for. If our enemies are your enemies, that may be true. But no-one works only for another's good. There must be something else that has brought you here. Tell me what it is, and by Allah I shall do my best to see you have it."
For the third time the foreign king shocked him. In clear but simple Arabic he replied once more.
"We have come to see the flying man."
Shef pushed his way impatiently through the growing crowd, the pole-ladder emblem of his god dangling over his chest. As the days of waiting had gone by, he and his men had slowly discarded layers of clothing. First the mail armor. It had become clear that while Shef's two hundred men were indeed in the heart of a potentially hostile power, nevertheless they were so outnumbered as to make organized battle futile, while the streets of Cordova were guarded with such strictness that no man need fear private quarrel. Shef had put the Vikings' mail and the Englishmen's crossbows in a guardroom, less to keep them safe, he remarked, than to prevent them from selling their issued weapons for drink.
"There is no strong drink anywhere in Cordova," Hund had objected. "The orders of Muhammad forbid it."
"There's some somewhere," Shef had replied, and supervised the handover of weapons himself.
Then the jackets had gone. A couple of days wandering open-mouthed round the narrow, stone-walled streets of Cordova had convinced even the most conservative Northerners that leather was an encumbrance if not a risk to life. By now all the Waymen were down to hemp shirts and wool breeches, and those fortunate enough to retain a balance of their pay were sporting gaudy cotton. In the sun their silver pendants—no-one had yet been so rash or God-defying as to sell one—gleamed and jerked, marking their owners out yet again from the darker faces and gayer clothes around them.
Last, fear had gone. Shef had expected, given the importance of his mission, to be shown to the great bin-Firnas, the flying man, at once. It had taken days, not—so Suleiman the Jew assured them—out of desire for delay, still less deliberate insult, but because of the veneration here accorded to the wise. The Caliph might indeed have commanded an audience and a demonstration, but preferred instead to send messengers, present gifts, ask for the favor of the wise to be shown to the barbarians drawn from afar by rumor of him, and generally go through the established ritual of Andalusian diplomacy. Bin-Firnas too—Suleiman further assured them—was not making deliberate difficulties in his replies. He was anxious only not to disappoint, to be unable to live up to the doubtless exaggerated tales carried into far lands by hearsay; further, as messages traveled both ways, it transpired that he was waiting for a wind.
Shef and his men had spent the days of waiting wandering with increasing entrancement round the streets of Cordova, seeing for the first time for any of them the hundred thousand details of a developed commercial civilization: the carts coming in each dawn with produce, so many of them that those coming in had one side of the main streets, those going out the other, while there were men of the town Cadi who did nothing all day but ensure that such rules were maintained! The ever-turning water-wheels, or norias, which scooped water out of the river and transferred it to stone runnels, from which even the poor could fetch their water. The rigid regulations about sewage, which even the richest must obey. The houses for treatment of the sick; the public disputations where wise men spoke simultaneously of the Koran, the learning of the Jews, the wisdom of the Greeks; the surgeons, the mosques, the courts where the strict, even-handed justice of the shari'a was dispensed. Something there for everyone to stare at. In a while even the timidest lost their fear of the alien, even the fiercest and greediest ceased thinking of this world as merely another city to sack. If anything the feeling that had been created was one of awe: the word the Vikings used to mean, not fear, but a sense of being hopelessly outmatched. Could these people do everything?
Only a few rose above this to observe weaknesses, inadequacies. Shef, at least, strove to do so, conscious that it might be mere jealousy which drove him. And then the Caliph sent word that it was time to meet the impossible, the flying man.
This is going to be another disaster like the one with the hens'-feather man, Shef told himself as he neared the tower from which the launch had been promised, his companions shoving along behind him in the way they had grown used to in the continuous unbelievable swarm of the city. Probably another disaster. But it has to be said. There are two good things this time that were not so when King Alfred's man tried to fly from my tower. First, though there is this talk about the wind, as there was last time, no-one has mentioned birds or feathers.
And second: we have met men, truthful-seeming men if I and Skaldfinn can judge their words, who insist that they saw this man fly fifteen years ago. Not heard about it, not been nearby. Saw it themselves. And their stories, if they do not tally on what they saw, agree on when and where.
The tower door was before him now, guarded against the pushing spectators by men in the yellow and green of the Caliph's guard. The spears pulled aside as the guards recognized the eye-patch and emblem of the ferengi king, and the holy-man white of those behind him. Shef found himself blinking in the cool and dark at the base of the tower.
As his eyes adjusted from the glare outside, he became aware that the owner of the tower was in front of him, bowing slightly and holding clasped hands to his heart. He began to respond, bowing in his turn, jerking out a greeting in simple Arabic. But as he did so he realized with a shock that the man in front of him was a cripple. He could stand upright for a few moments, but then his hands went back to the wooden frame in front of him. When he moved, he pushed the frame forward and then dragged himself after it.
"Your legs," Shef managed to say. "How were they hurt? With flying?"
The Arab smiled, apparently unoffended. "With flying," he agreed. "The flight went well, the coming to earth less so. You see, I had forgotten something. I had forgotten that all flying creatures have tails."
As bin-Firnas, the cripple, began to shuffle his slow way to the stairs leading up the tower, Shef looked round at Thorvin, Hund, and his priest-companions, an expression of doubt and disappointment on his face.
"Another bird-man, after all," he muttered. "Wait till he shows us the cape of feathers."
But at the top of the tower, on the square airy platform overlooking the steep sides of the Guadalquivir, there was no sign of feathers, no preparation for a leap. Back in the bright daylight, Shef could see that bin-Firnas was flanked by aides and servants, among them the young man Mu'atiyah who had come on the embassy to the North and the ever-present factotum Suleiman. Some stood by what seemed to be a light winch or windlass, others held lengths of pole and canvas. Behind Shef mustered the priests of the Way, the only ones for whom he had been able to secure admission. Walking to the tower's lip, Shef looked down and saw most of his men in the crowd, staring up, the giant figure of Brand conspicuous even in the throng. The still-veiled Svandis was close by him, he noted, though neither turned to the other. Brand had accepted the charge of looking after her from his friend and curer Hund, but had refused to have more than absolutely necessary to do with her: the Ivar-face chilled him, he confided, right in his old belly-wound.
"The first thing we do is this," Shef realized bin-Firnas was saying. "If the king of the ferengis will condescend to notice? See—" He gave an order, the winchmen began to pay out cord. A kite lifted into the air, caught the wind, began to recede into the sky as the windlass handles span. Shef stared at it. It seemed a light box, four walls made of cloth between poles, open at both ends, with slats or vents cut here and there in the cloth.
"This of course is no more than a child's game," bin-Firnas continued. "The kite lifts no more than itself. See though that the cord keeps its open mouth pointing towards the wind. Control is much easier into the wind. Away from the wind, it seems easier to sail like a ship, but alas! then the wind is master, not the man. So I found. I would do it differently if I tried again."
Shef could hear the cries of the crowd from below as they saw the kite. They lined the riverbank, some of them almost on a level with the tower as the slope rose away towards the city's thousand minarets.
"You understand the kite, then?"
Shef nodded, waited for the word to haul in. Instead bin-Firnas hobbled two paces to the winch, produced a knife, laid edge to cord. The kite, released, leapt up, swooped, sailed away downwind in erratic spirals and flutterings. Two of the waiting servants jumped to their feet, raced down the stairs to pursue and recover it.
"Now we try a harder thing."
On a gesture four servants carried forward a different contrivance. Its shape was similar, the open-ended box of cloth between poles, but it was twice as large and clearly heavier in construction. Inside it, furthermore, was a sort of sling of rope and cloth. Short vanes projected from either side. Shef stared at it, puzzled.
A young boy wriggled between the other servants and stood serious-faced in front of the new kite. Bin-Firnas laid a hand on his head, spoke to him with a babble of Arabic too fast for Shef to follow. The boy replied, nodding. Quickly two of the big dark-colored servants lifted him up, dropped him into the mouth of the kite. Walking nearer, Shef saw that the sling was a harness into which the boy fitted. His head remained outside the box, his hands rested on handles. As he twisted them, the cloth vanes to either side of the box rotated.
Carefully, four servants lifted the box, held it up to the wind, walked to the edge of the tower. The winchmen heaved a trifle, took up a yard or two of slack. Shef heard a rising buzz of excitement from outside, which slowly stilled.
"Is this dangerous?" he said quietly to Suleiman, not trusting his own Arabic at this stage. "I do not want the boy killed on my account."
Suleiman spoke aside to bin-Firnas, while the serious-faced child remained poised on the edge of the tower, the wind tugging at him. He turned back. "Bin-Firnas says, of course, that all is at the will of Allah. But he says also that as long as the cord is retained, all may be safe enough. The danger would come if they released it, let the boy try to fly free."
Shef stepped back, nodding. Bin-Firnas saw the gesture, turned to feel the wind, and then in his turn made a gesture to his servants. With a grunt they heaved the box up to arm's length above their heads, felt the wind catch it, let go all together.
For an instant the kite sagged below the wall of the tower, then some updraft or eddy caught it and it rose again. The winchmen span their handles, let the cord out five fathoms, ten. Slowly the kite rose in the sky, the little face still framed in its open end. Shef saw the vanes twist and turn slightly, the box rotate upwards, turn, level off. It dipped and bucked in the wind, but the boy seemed able to control it, to keep the box facing the way he wanted. If it had swooped and plunged like the earlier one once they had cut it free, he might have been thrown out of his harness, Shef guessed. But no, it seemed to ride stably. No worse than a boat on a choppy sea.
Silently bin-Firnas passed to Shef a device like the one Mu'atiyah had demonstrated, a far-seer. Without words he showed that it was different from the last one: in two halves, one sliding over the other in a case of greased leather. It meant you could alter the length of the tube. Bin-Firnas made a squinting face, as he moved the bottom half in and out. Shef took the device from him, trained it on the kite and its flyer's face, gently moved the tube up and down till the image came into focus.
There it was. The boy's tongue stuck out between his teeth, he was concentrating grimly on managing his vanes, trying to hold the kite steadily into the wind. There was no doubt, anyway, that the kite could carry his weight.
"How far can you send him?" he asked.
"As far as the rope will run," reported Suleiman.
"And what if the rope is cut?"
"He says, does the ferengi king wish to see?"
Shef lowered the telescope from his eye, frowning. "No. If they've done it once already I'd like to hear about that."
He focused again as a long dialogue broke out. Finally Suleiman addressed him again.
"He says, fifteen years ago, first they let it fly free with a boy inside. When the boy survived he himself, bin-Firnas, risked the attempt He says he learned three things. First, it is much easier to control flight into the wind than before it. Second, there is a skill in controlling the vanes which the boy had, from many trial flights on the tether, but which he himself had not had time to learn. He says you must react with the body before the mind has time to issue an order, and that is a skill that only time can bring. Third, he learnt that he should also have fitted a vane to control flight side to side, as well as up and down. He says the kite turned on its side as he flew down the valley of the river, and he could not turn it back. So, instead of landing gracefully like a water-bird, he turned end over end in the rocks. Since then he has not walked without support, for all the surgeons of Cordova could do. He says, his legs were his gift to Allah, for knowledge."
"Winch the boy in," said Shef. "Tell the master of the house how grateful I am to him for showing me this, and how much I respect his readiness to try for himself. Say we would like to make careful drawings of his contrivance. We may be able to find a better place to test it than the banks of the Guadalquivir. And tell him also that we are amazed by his tubes of glass, and would like to know how to make them for ourselves. We wonder how he came upon the idea."
"He says," the translation came back, "that the lens which makes small writing large has been known here for many years. After that, it was only a matter of mechanical skill and many tests."
"Making old knowledge new," said Shef with a beam of pleasure. "This is a wiser man than his pupil."
In one of the innumerable tiny tenements of the city, a man sat cross-legged in front of an open window. His hands moved continually as he stitched, the seam he worked on moving through his hands as if it were a living serpent. His eyes never looked down, never left the street. Everything that went by was observed. In the corner to one side of him sat another man, out of sight from outside.
"You got a close look at it?" asked the tailor.
"I did. They walk through the city all the time, gaping like monkeys. They wear no more than a tight tunic on their upper bodies, and many of them not even that. They would walk naked as apes in the sun if the Cadi allowed it. It is easy to see what they wear round their necks. And I have stood as close to the ferengi king as I am to you."
"What did you see, then? And what did you hear?"
"All the strangers wear a silver charm round their necks. Often it is a hammer, many times a horn, or a phallus, or a boat. There are some signs that only a few wear: an apple, a bow, a pair of strange sticks. Usually these are worn by the bigger strangers, the ones who entered the city wearing mail, but the apple is worn only by the very small one in white, whom they say is a leech."
"And what does the king wear?"
"He wears a graduale. There is no doubt of that. I have peered so close I could smell the sweat of his shirt. It is a graduale. It has three steps on the right and two steps on the left."
"Which is uppermost?"
"Two are level at the top, like a cross. Below that, the right as we see it." The left as he wears it, the tailor reflected, still sewing.
"Tell me what you have found out about these signs."
The other man hitched his stool conspiratorially closer. "We found soon that all these men are very eager to find strong drink of the sort forbidden by the Prophet, more eager for it than for women or for music. We approached some of them, said that we were Christians for whom this was not forbidden, that we had a store of wine for the service of our God. We found then that the bigger ones were shocked, looked askance, wanted the drink but cared nothing for the Christ. Some of the smaller ones, though, said easily that they had been Christians too, knew all about the mass and the holy wine. These we drew aside."
"Had been Christians?" muttered the tailor. "So they are apostates now?"
"That is so. But they told a clear story, as far as our interpreters could follow. They said that their whole kingdom had been Christian once, but they spoke with horror of the practices of their Church. Some of them had been slaves to abbot or bishop, and showed us stripes to prove it. Then they had been freed by the one-eyed king, who had converted the land to what they call 'the Way.' It means much the same as shari'a. The sign of this is the pendant they wear, one sign for each of the many gods they have."
"And the graduale?"
"All agree that it too is the sign of a god, but none was very sure what god it might be. The name they gave was 'Rig,' which I think is one of their words for 'king.' It is like our word mis, or the Spaniards' reje. All say without exception that no other man wears it, except some of the slaves rescued by the one-eye, who wear it as a sign of their gratitude to him. If he did not wear it, the sign would never be used at all."
Both men fell into a reflective silence. Eventually the tailor, putting his pile of clothing aside, rose stiffly to his feet.
"I think we may have to return home, brother. This is news that we must share. A strange king, wearing a sign personal to him alone, the same as our holy graduale, though with rungs reversed, as a token of devotion to the King. Surely this must have some meaning."
The other man nodded, more doubtfully. "At least we can get the stink of the lowlands out of our nostrils, and breathe cool air again. And wake without the salat ringing in our ears."
He paused. "As they became drunk, the small Northerners said again and again that to them this man is not just their king. They call him 'the One King.' " He spat neatly through the window. "Whatever he may be, they are apostates and idolaters."
"To the Church," the tailor replied, "so are we."
Brand settled his massive shoulders back against the walls of the room with a contented sigh. He had been sure that the English, at least, had managed to get hold of strong drink somehow. But every time he had approached one of the pygmies, they had gone into their usual state of glassy-eyed denial. Finally, pocketing his pride, he had edged over to Cwicca and Osmod, and appealed to them as former companions, guests, and shipmates to let him in on the secret.
"Just you, then," Cwicca had finally said.
"And you can bring Skaldfinn," Osmod had added. "We have trouble understanding them most of the time. Maybe he can get a bit more out of them."
They had been guided deftly out of the crowd leaving the flying demonstration and taken into a little shabby room: where, Brand had to admit, they had been given, cheerfully and without a word of payment, surprising amounts of good red wine—good as far as Brand could tell, since he had not drunk wine a dozen times in his life. He emptied his pint pot and passed it forward for more.
"Aren't you supposed to be looking after that priestess-female?" inquired Cwicca.
Skaldfinn scowled. "Don't call her that. She just says she is. She hasn't been accepted."
Brand looked round as if surprised to note that Svandis was not present. "I suppose so," he muttered. "She makes me feel cold just looking at her. Daughter of the Boneless One! I knew she existed all right, there was a good deal of talk about it. I just hoped the whole Hel-spawn family was dead."
"But you are supposed to be looking after her," pressed on Cwicca. He and Hund, born and bred within twenty miles of each other, had a strong fellow-feeling. If Hund and his master Shef accepted the woman, the rules and rituals of the Way would not count for much with him.
"She's safe enough," said Osmod. "Find her own way back, I dare say." He too waved his mug at their smiling hosts for a refill. "In some towns, I know, woman wanders off, she'll end up raped in an alley with a sack over her head. Not here! Chop your hand off as soon as look at you, and other bits too. And the Cadi's men everywhere."
"Cursed noisy woman," grumbled Brand. "Not sure six drunken sailors isn't what she needs."
Skaldfinn retrieved Brand's mug and tipped half the contents of it into his own. "I don't like the woman," he said, "but you're wrong there. Six drunken sailors isn't a tenth of what she's met already. And it hasn't done her any good at all.
"But she'll make her own way back to our quarters right enough," he added pacifically. "She's got no choice. Doesn't speak a word of the language. Any language they speak here." He turned and called out to their hosts in the bastard Latin, studded with Arab words, which he had already recognized as their native dialect.
In a cool courtyard not far from the hot shut-in room where the men were sitting, Svandis sat on a bench eying the circle of women who sat with her, round the fountain. Slowly she put a hand up to her veil, pulled it away from her face, threw back her hood. Her copper hair spilled down, framing the pale ice-water eyes. Some of the women around her drew in deep breaths. Others did not.
"You speak English, then," said one of them. She too dropped her veil, as the others did. Svandis looked at the one who had spoken: realized she was almost as fair as herself, with hair the color of pale ash-wood and green eyes. Realized too that she was a woman of amazing beauty. Since she had grown past childhood Svandis had been used to being the center of all eyes. If this woman were in the room, she admitted to herself, that might not be so.
"Yes," she replied, in English also. "But not well. I am a Dane."
The women looked at each other. "Danes took many of us from our homes," said the first one. "Sold us to the harems of the powerful. Some of us did well—those who knew how to use their bodies. Others not so well. We have no reason to love Danes." As she spoke there was a continual patter of translation from English into Arabic. Svandis realized that those around her were of mixed race and language. All, though, young and beautiful.
"I know," she said. "My father was Ivar Ragnarsson."
This time the expressions moved from fear to rage. Hands moved inside the all-covering cloaks. The ash-blonde girl thoughtfully pulled a long steel needle from her hair.
"I know what my father was. I know what he did. It happened to me too—and worse to my mother."
"How could such a thing happen to you? A princess of the Danes? Of the Viking woman-stealers?"
"I will tell you. But let me make it a condition." Svandis looked round the circle of a dozen women, trying to estimate their age and race. Half of them Northerners, she could see, but some olive-skinned like the men of Cordova, one almost yellow-skinned, others—she could not tell. "The condition is that each of us shall tell the others what is the worst thing that has happened to her. Then we will all know we are on the same side. Not English, or Danes, or Arabs. All women."
The women looked sidelong at each other as the translation pattered out. "And I will begin. And I will tell you not of the day I lost my virginity for a crust of stale bread. Not of the day I buried all my friends at once, in one grave. No, I will tell you of the day my mother died..."
By the time the last woman had finished speaking, the sun had moved off the central courtyard and the shadows were lengthening. The ash-blonde girl wiped the tears from her face, not for the first time, and waved imperiously at the cloisters round the fountain. Silently slave-bodyguards appeared, setting out small tables with dishes of fruit, jars of cool water and sherbet, faded back into the shadows to watch their masters' property.
"Very well," she said. "So we are all the same. Even if you are a Dane and the daughter of a madman. But now, tell us what we want to know. What brought you here? Who is the one-eyed king? Are you his woman? And why do you wear the strange robes, like the priests they talk about? Have they made you a priestess, and of which God?"
"There is something I have to tell you first," said Svandis, her voice dropping even though she was sure none of the men in the shadows could understand her tongue.
"There is no God. Not even Allah."
For the first time the mutter of translation ceased. The women looked at each other, unsure how to put what she had said into other words. So close to the shahada: there is no God but God. So far apart. And if saying the shahada made man or woman irrevocably a Muslim, saying its opposite—that must mean death at the least.
"Let me explain."
What do you mean, you don't know where the Nithhögg-gnawed woman is? I told you not to let her out of your sight!"
Brand, never used to being spoken to in this way since the day his beard had first begun to grow, clenched his massive fists and started to rumble a reply. By his side, almost two feet shorter, stood Hund, his face anxious both at the disappearance of Svandis and at the growing confrontation between a guilty but unapologetic Brand and an angry, overburdened Shef.
All round them turmoil reigned. The Northerners had been assigned a whole courtyard, a kind of barracks by the banks of the Guadalquivir. Now men ran in and out of every door, the air was filled with shouts of rage and inquiry. Gear accumulated on the sanded courtyard floor, with men standing guard over it against comrades who might be inclined to remedy their deficiencies at the expense of someone more careless. Viking skippers and English captains of crossbow platoons counted their men and tried to work out who was missing.
"Look at the goats'-turd mess," Shef shouted on. "Twelve men missing, Skarthi says some bastard's sold half the oars for his ship—the oars, for Christ's sake, I mean Thor's sake—and the towel-heads screaming at me all the time to get moving, get back down river, the Christians are coming with a fleet and an army and Loki knows what. We'll get back to the ships and find they've already been burnt to the waterline without throwing a rock because everyone's asleep. And now I have to stop and look for some useless woman because you couldn't keep your hands off the beer-bottle!"
Brand's rumble turned into a growl, he thrust both hands firmly into his belt in an attempt to keep from strangling his king, lord and former crew-carl, Hund ludicrously stepped between the two much bigger men in an attempt to hold them back: Shef realized that the grinning faces watching the confrontation were now looking over his shoulder. He turned.
Through the gates of the courtyard, still in the early morning shadow, stepped Svandis. Her veil was still discreetly pulled across her face. As she met fifty hostile stares, set in a growing silence, she stripped the veil back. The pale ice-water eyes glared out over a set jaw. Brand clutched his belly instinctively, with a low moan.
"Well, she's back," said Hund soothingly.
"Yes, but where has she been?"
"Out tomcatting," muttered Brand. "Out all night. Probably some Arab picked her up for his harem and then realized she wasn't worth the trouble. Don't blame him."
Shef considered the angry face in front of him, looked sideways at Hund. In his culture every woman was the property of some man, husband, master, father, brother. For one to stray sexually was above all a matter of disgrace for the man. In this case, as far as he could see, if Svandis had an owner it was the man who had taken her as apprentice, Hund. If he seemed unaffected, or undisgraced, then no harm was done. In any case, Shef reflected, he had a strong feeling that Svandis had not seized an unwatched moment to find herself a new lover, whatever Brand thought. She seemed far more angry than flirtatious, for all her beauty. From what Hund had told him, or hinted to him, that was only natural.
Svandis braced herself for a torrent of abuse, and probably blows, the normal consequence of what she had done. Instead Shef started to turn away, turned back and remarked, "Well, as long as you're safe," seized Brand by the arm and began to drag him away towards the pile of stacked oars which Hagbarth was counting once more in an attempt to get a definite answer.
The fury she had been hatching as a protection burst out. "Don't you want to know where I've been?" she shrieked. "What I've been doing?"
Shef looked over his shoulder. "No. Talk to Hund about it. One thing, though. What language were you talking? Skaldfinn was dead sure you wouldn't find an interpreter except for Latin, which you don't know."
"English," Svandis hissed. "How many Englishwomen do you think there are in Cordova? In the harems?"
Shef let go of Brand, walked back to look at her more carefully. Svandis realized that his face had once more turned grim. When he spoke, it seemed to be to himself, though he addressed the words to Hund.
"We might have known, eh? I saw them in Hedeby market, Vikings selling Wendish girls to Arabs. The guard told me the price of girls had gone up since the English trade stopped producing. But they must have been selling girls down here for fifty years. Everywhere we go, Hund, we find them. In backwoods Norway, in turf huts on Shetland, here in Spain. There doesn't seem to be a place in the world without its slave from Norfolk or Lincoln. Or Yorkshire," he added, remembering the berserk Cuthred. "One day we must have a chat with an experienced slaver, I bet we have a few lying quiet in the ranks. Find out how they used to divide them up, price them for the market. Worn-out ones for the Swedish sacrifice, strong workers for the hill-farms. And the pretty ones down here, for gold not silver."
Shef's hands seemed to grope for a weapon, but as usual he was not carrying one, not even a sword at his belt.
"All right, Svandis, tell me about it sometime. I don't blame you for what your father did, and he's paid his price. Now, as you can see, we're moving. Get some breakfast, get your things together. Hund, see if we have any sick."
He moved off purposefully towards the oars, shouting for Skaldfinn to see if any could be ransomed from their new owners. Svandis glared uncertainly at his back. Brand too moved away, muttering into his beard. Hund looked up at his apprentice.
"Have you been talking to them about your beliefs?" he said quietly.
"The infidels are playing with their kites again," remarked the master of the Cordovan flagship to the captain of marines.
The captain, a Cordovan, spat neatly into the sea to show disgust and contempt. "They are trying to catch up with the learned man, bin-Firnas, Allah be merciful to him. As if the sons of dogs from the far end of Barbary could match the deeds of a true philosopher! See, their kite sinks already, and it has no man or boy in it. It is going down like an old sheik's penis. A far cry from bin-Firnas, I saw his kite fly like a bird with a stout boy in its beak. I wish the infidels may perish in torment, for their pride and their folly."
The master looked sideways at the captain, wondering if such fury was wise. "The curse of Allah on them," he said placatingly. "And on all deniers of the Prophet. But may it not fall on these ones till we have seen them use their stone-machines."
"Stone machines!" snarled the captain. "Better to meet the worshipers of Yeshua saber in hand, as we have always done before, and always defeated them."
So that's it, reflected the master. He sees his trade taken away from him. "As you say," he agreed again. "And if Allah wills we shall do so. But one thing, Osman, you will grant me. Let us keep these majus, these bookless pagans from the North, on our side at least until we have met the Greeks. Their stone machines can do what the bravest sabers can not. And I have no desire to meet the fire of the Greeks at sea."
He turned from the rail before the disgruntled soldier could frame a reply.
Half a mile away, across the clear blue water of the coastal Mediterranean, gazing through the far-seer the Arab philosopher had given him, Shef watched the kite slowly rocking down the sky. He felt no particular irritation. As soon as the combined fleet of the Way and the men of Andalusia had cleared for sea, after a racing passage down the Guadalquivir, he had begun to experiment, eagerly seconded by Cwicca, Osmod and the catapult crews of the Fafnisbane. Shef had made certain large quantities of the poles and cloth that bin-Firnas used for his devices had been taken with them. He and his men now set to construct kites after any fashion that seemed likely. "We don't know what holds the things up," Shef had told the eager attentive circle. "So we might as well try anything and see what works."
Today they were trying the effect of an unbroken box of sailcloth, without air-gaps or panels. It appeared to be a total failure. Did that mean the panels were necessary, after all, and against what seemed to be common sense? Or was it the two control lines they were also trying today? The two catapulteers holding them were trying gently to work the kite back into the sky, with limited success.
It didn't matter. For one thing it was keeping the men amused. Shef looked up at the masthead and saw, as he suspected, that the lookout was gaping steadily at the kite instead of attending to his duty. A shout, a wave, and the lookout turned guiltily to stare at the horizon once more.
For another, in Shef's experience a great deal of any technological breakthrough came from random fiddling, while the men who had to work the machine got used to it, discovered its problems, worked out how to counter them. Nothing ever worked absolutely right first time. He was quite happy now to let the men amuse themselves, see if they could at least reach the standard bin-Firnas had demonstrated to them, learn the skills they would need when the time came to improve. One thing bin-Firnas had not realized, with the curious playful reluctance to push a theory to its limits which Shef had already noted as characteristic of this culture: experimenting with manned flight, or boyed flight, would be a good deal safer over a calm sea than a rocky ravine. Shef had already checked to find out how many of Ordlaf's lightweights could swim.
The kite settled into the water, to a general groan of disappointment. One of the five Viking longships which they had taken up the Guadalquivir to Cordova cruised over towards it, oars sweeping in leisurely time, began to retrieve kite and rope and bring them back.
That was a weakness of the two-masters, one that no-one had ever noticed out in the Atlantic for which they had been designed. They were true sailing-craft, fast, sturdy, capable of mounting onagers and crossbows and carrying scores of tons of food and water. In British or Scandinavian waters, where the wind literally never ceased, and was more often too rough than too gentle, they had swept the seas against Frankish cogs or Viking longships, the first too slow, the second too fragile to contest with them.
But no-one had ever tried to row them for more than a few hundred yards working out of harbor, and that was done with massive four-man sweeps capable of reaching bare crawling pace. Here in the Inner Sea, as today, the wind often seemed to die away altogether. With both sails spread and what wind there was blowing directly from the sea, the Fafnisbane and her "Hero" class consorts—Grendelsbane, Sigemund, Wada, Theodric, Hagena and Hildebrand—were barely making steerage way. By contrast the five Viking boats were keeping pace under oars at a mere paddling stroke on the placid sea, their crews happy to work off some surplus energy by fetching and carrying the kites. The Cordovan galleys, meanwhile, after repeated angry outbursts from their admiral, had seemingly accepted the situation. The routine now was for their main body to row on ahead during the morning, take their long siesta at midday, and then row on again as the sun declined to find a place to camp and water overnight. The infidels made up lost distance during the siesta, and caught up finally in the evening. Meanwhile contact was maintained between the advance body and the laggards by a string of intermediary ships. Seemingly out of courtesy—or more likely because he did not trust them—the admiral himself hung back in his own green-painted galley, with a double score of his larger ships: enough to board and envelop Shef's own fleet at need. There was no way of guarding against that other than making them keep their distance, to give time for the onagers to work. After thought, Shef had accepted the situation. If the Arabs had not overwhelmed him and his men in the streets of Cordova, they were unlikely to do so here and now, steering to meet a dangerous common enemy.
Hagbarth was preparing for the noon ceremony, at which he measured the height of the sun with his seaman's staff, and considered the results against a set of tables he was compiling. It was of little practical value. The answer might tell you—if Shef understood the theory—how far north or south you were, but all that meant in practice was that Hagbarth could say which spot on the Atlantic shore they were now level with. What would be more interesting would be to combine these results, one day, with a good map. Such information, Shef recognized, would have saved him and his companions much trouble during their long walk across the Keel of Norway from Atlantic shore to Jarnberaland.
Shef unrolled the map he had been given by his Arab hosts, one, he conceded, far better than any he had seen in his life before. They had watered the night before at Denia, a good protected harbor with smooth beaches either side for the shallow-draft ships to draw up on. There the commander of the local garrison had reported that the Christian warships, and in particular the feared Red Fleet of the Greeks, had made landings less than a hundred miles to the north within the last two weeks. They could, then, be just over the horizon at this moment.
At the thought, Shef raised his head and called to the lookout.
"Anything to see?"
"Nothing, lord. The admiral's spread his awnings and stopped rowing, dropping behind us now. A few fishing boats out to sea. All of them got those funny three-corner sails. The skyline's bare as a whore's—"
A yell from Hagbarth cut short the lookout's simile. For some reason Hagbarth had decided that the purity of their one female passenger had to be guarded from contamination. All the Vikings, Shef had noted, much as they might dislike her, were unable entirely to resist the awe they felt for the Ragnarsson blood.
Hagbarth sat down cross-legged on the deck next to Shef and the map, followed by Hund and Thorvin, who settled himself more deliberately on a canvas folding stool. Shef looked round for a moment, wondering who else might be invited to join the impromptu council. Brand was not aboard, had insisted on returning to his own ship, the Narwhal, built to replace the much-lamented Walrus. His excuse was that he felt impatient aboard the stately Fafnisbane, preferred the maneuverability of his own smaller ship. Shef suspected that he simply could not bear the presence of Svandis, for her father's sake or her own. Skaldfinn was standing in plain sight by the rail. Why did he not come over? Shef realized that Skaldfinn had with him Suleiman the Jew, did not want to abandon him, was not sure that Suleiman would be welcome at a conference which he could, by now, very well understand.
The Jew was a strange, dignified, withdrawn figure. For weeks Shef had been unable to imagine him as anything but a machine for translating, yet learning a language from someone gives many insights. Shef had begun to think that, for all his professed loyalty to Abd er-Rahman and his Muslim masters, Suleiman was—not quite to be trusted? Capable of being won over? One thing that had emerged was that in the Muslim world, Jews paid taxes, and Christians, while Muslims did not. That was bound to be a source of discontent, if not disaffection. Shef waved to Skaldfinn, indicated that Suleiman was welcome to join them too.
"Well," said Hagbarth. "Tell us again, lord, what's the plan? We launch kites into the air, steal Greek fire from the Christians, and rain it down from the sky."
Shef grinned. "Don't tell Mu'atiyah. He'll say his master thought of it first. All right. We're about here." He tapped the map with a grubby, nail-bitten finger. "The Christians can't be far away, and all we hear says they're coming for us just as we're going for them. We should expect a straight head-on clash. So that's what we won't get. They know something we don't know, we know something they don't know."
"So do the easy part," said Hagbarth, youngest and most careless of the Way-priests. "Tell us what we know."
Shef grinned again. "One thing we know is that none of these people, Christian or Arab, know how to fight a sea-battle."
Silence and looks exchanged. Finally Suleiman, looking round first to see if anyone else would take the bait, ventured the query. "Lord king? The fleets of Andalus have fought many battles. And so have the Greeks. Do you mean—they have not fought them correctly?"
"No. I mean they weren't sea-battles. It's obvious from the way old admiral what's-his-name works"—Shef jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the awning-rigged galleys taking their siesta two miles off upon the glassy sea. "His main idea is to fight a land-battle in which his ships form one wing. Ever since we made contact back wherever it was—Alicante?—he's just tried to keep pace with the land army marching up the coast. It's true our ships hold him back, but we could make better speed if we sailed all night, which is all right by us. But he camps every night in touch with his land-colleague. They expect to clash on the coast, army to army and fleet to fleet. They never go far from their water—they can't, with all those rowers on board in this heat—and they never go far from the army, horse and foot together."
"What advantage does that give us?" asked Thorvin carefully. What his one-time protégée said sounded very much like lunatic over-confidence, but no-one dared say that of the victor at Hastings and at the Braethraborg.
"What I'd like to do is locate the enemy, then swing out to sea on the land breeze we get every morning, come in on their flank and rear from the open sea in the afternoon. Then we could get the catapults to work in daylight with them trapped between us and the coast."
"You only have seven ships with—what do you call them?—mules," observed Suleiman delicately. "Are seven enough to determine a great battle?"
"The admiral here has hundreds of ships," Shef replied. "So, we're told, did the admirals of both fleets the Greeks have destroyed already. But those fleets were helpless against the Greek fire. We hope the Christian fleets will be helpless against our mule-stones."
"It will take a long time to sink hundreds of ships by shooting," said Thorvin skeptically.
"That's the point. I only want to hit the ships with the Greek fire. The red galleys, they say. Maybe twenty of them. In this battle, all that will count will be their twenty with the fire and our seven with the mules. The one of those that gets into action first will be the winner. All the other ships, once that's decided, will be porkers for the slaughter. Lambs for the slaughter, I mean," corrected Shef hastily, remembering the strange dietary customs of Muslim and Jew together.
"I see," said Skaldfinn. "Now, the other question: what do they know that we don't?"
"I don't know," said Shef quickly, before anyone else could make the obvious answer. All the Northerners laughed, while Suleiman watched them impassively, stroking his beard. They were like children, he thought, just as Abd er-Rahman had said. They would laugh at anything. Always mirth, always horseplay, the men hiding each other's food, tying each other's shoelaces together. The king himself would fly kites all day and never mind if they fell into the sea. They had no dignity. Or was it that they felt their dignity was so great that it could not be diminished by anything to which they consented? Mu'atiyah talked till he was hoarse about how stupid and untaught they were. Yet they learned with terrible speed, and Mu'atiyah would learn nothing that did not come to him on the authority of a great man or, better still, a great book. What, he wondered, did the one-eye really think?
"I'm hoping they don't know we're here," said Shef finally. "No-one in the southern sea has seen a mule shoot from a ship. They may be expecting to meet another overconfident Muslim fleet, all numbers and bravery. In that case we've probably got them. But if they do know we're here, I would expect them to try an attack at night. The exact opposite of what we want. We need light to shoot at a distance, and we want to spread out. They want to get up close and meet a packed enemy at close range, where light doesn't matter. In any case they'll make their own.
"The answer to that's pretty obvious."
"Right," agreed Hagbarth. "We lie inshore, with a screen of other ships. If they set light to them, we'll have light to shoot at them and time to wind the machines."
"Maybe there's something else we don't know," repeated Thorvin.
"I know. Could they have built a Fearnought, like we did?"
Hagbarth shook his head, still with a faint touch of sadness. The unwieldy, steel-plated, barely sailable Fearnought which had literally broken the back of the Ragnarsson fleet seven years before had once been his own Aurvendill, fastest sailer in the North, he had claimed, before her total rebuilding. But she too had had her back broken by catapult-stones, had never sailed again after the battle. Chopped up for firewood long since.
"They can't do it," he said flatly. "I've looked at these galleys of the Inner Sea, seen how they build them. They've been building them the same way for a thousand years, they say, and the Greek ships will be just the same. They lay the planks edge to edge, not clinker-fashion like we do. And they just fit plank to plank till it's ready, no frame to build on. Weak keel, very weak ribs. Strengthened fore and aft to take the ram, but even that's not much. Doesn't take much to punch a hole in one of these. I'm not saying their shipwrights are stupid, mind. Just that they build for a shallow sea with no tides and no swell. I am saying that you couldn't make a Fearnought out of any of these galleys. They haven't the strength in the frame. I'm sure about that."
A long considering pause, broken only by yells and splashings from close at hand. The Fafnisbane was now at a complete halt in the midday heat, sails hanging limply, providing only welcome shade. The crew had seized the chance to strip and hurl themselves into the welcome blue water. Shef noticed Svandis standing watching their nakedness by the rail, scratching absent-mindedly at her side under the long white wool dress. She looked as if she were about to strip and dive in too. That would cause some excitement at least, no matter what Brand might say about the wrath of the sea-hags and the marbendills of the deep. His authority on the subject had dwindled, paradoxically, once men knew that he was a quarter-marbendill himself.
"We'll stick to our plan, then," said Shef. "Hagbarth, you and Suleiman talk to the admiral tonight about night guard-ships. Tomorrow I will ask him to send light ships forward to find and fix the enemy, so we can outflank them. Our secret weapon, besides the mule-stones, is that we do not fear the open sea nor running out of water for thirsty rowers. That's what we'll rely on.
"And there's one other good thing."
"What's that?" asked Hagbarth.
"Old yoke-shoulders Bruno isn't there. The Emperor, I mean."
"How do you know?"
Shef grinned yet again. "I'd have felt it if that bastard was nearby. Or had bad dreams about him."
Much less than a day's sail away, the two commanders of the joint Roman-Greek expeditionary force were also making their plan for battle. Only the two men sat in the rear cabin of the great Greek galley, in the hot cedar-smelling half-light. Neither believed in consulting subordinates. Like their masters before them, the emperors Bruno and Basil, they had discovered that they could communicate well enough in Latin, the language native to neither of them but understood, after a fashion, by both. Neither liked to talk it: Georgios the Greek had learnt the Italian form of it from Neapolitan sailors, whom he despised as effeminates and heretics. Agilulf the German had learnt the French form of it from his neighbors across the Rhine, whom he too hated as ancestral enemies and arrogant would-be cultural superiors. Yet both had learned to do what was necessary to co-operate. Each had begun even to have a certain wary respect for the skills of the other, brought into being by months of successful skirmishing and victory.
"They are a day to the south and coming on slowly?" inquired Agilulf. "How do you know?"
Georgios waved a hand at the scene outside the small portholes fitted into the galley's sharp-ended stem. Among and around his own score of red-painted ships, each a hundred feet long, there lay a host of smaller craft of every size, the scourings of the Christian fishing villages of the northern Spanish coast and the islands, and of the borderlands between Spain and France.
"The Arabs are so used to the fishing boats that they take no notice of them. Nor can they tell Christian from Muslim, or from Jew. Our boats mix in with theirs. Every night one has steered out to sea and brought us a report. I have known exactly where every ship of theirs has been for days."
"Maybe they've been doing the same to us."
Georgios shook his head. "I am not as careless as the Arab admiral. No boat comes within fifty stadia of here without being boarded and inspected. If they are Muslims—" He chopped his hand down on the edge of the table.
"How come our spy boats are back here so long before their fleet. Are they faster?"
"Handier, certainly. You see the kind of sails they use?" Georgios waved a hand again at the cluster of boats alongside. One, slipping quietly across the water on some errand, had its sail up and rigged: a three-cornered sail on a sloping yard. "Round here they call it the Latin sail—lateeno in their language." Both men let out a simultaneous sharp bark of contemptuous amusement at the foreigners. "They use lateeno to mean—" Georgios hesitated for a word. "Something like aptus, handy. And it is a handy rig, fast and useful in light airs."
"Why don't you rig them, then?"
"If you were to look closely," the admiral explained, "you'd see that if you want to turn the ship from side to side"—neither his Latin nor Agilulf's ran to the word for "tack"—"you can't do it by just turning the yard, the stick the sail is on. You have to lift the yard over the mast. Easy for a small boat. Harder and harder as the mast gets higher and the yard gets heavier. It's a rig for small boats. Or for ships full of seamen."
Agilulf grunted, not much interested. "So we know where they are but they don't know where we are. How does that help us?"
The Greek leaned back on his bench. "Well. Our weapon is fire. Theirs—as you have told me again and again—is stone. You tell me you have seen one ship of theirs, an iron one at that, sink a whole fleet in less time than it takes to say a Mass."
Agilulf nodded. He had been at the battle of the Braethraborg, had seen the Ragnarsson fleet battered into wrecks by Shef's own Fearnought. It had impressed him greatly.
"I believe you. So they will want to fight at a distance, we want to fight up close. They may expect us to try to attack at night. I have a better idea. You see, my men on the spy boats are all unanimous on one thing. These Northern ships, they say, are sailers. They have never seen anyone even try to row them, and they look heavy and round-bellied.
"But in these waters the wind always fades round noon, as earth and water reach the same heat. No wind either way. That's when I am going to hit them."
"They can shoot their stones without moving at all," objected Agilulf.
"Not over bow or stern. In any case my plan is to drive off or burn their support ships, the Arabs. And then to have a good look at the Northerners. When I can move and they cannot. If the worst comes to the worst—we just row away. If they show a weakness—we'll take it."
"So you drive off the fleet, leaving the Northerners becalmed if need be, and then come in with your marines and rowers, from the sea, on the rear of the Arab army. While I hold the Arab horse and foot from in front."
Georgios nodded silently. Both men knew there were many permutations possible within their overall plan. Each knew, now, how the other thought and what the other could do. They had never lost a battle or a skirmish yet, had swept the northwest Mediterranean from coast to coast.
Agilulf rose. "Good enough. My detachments for your ships are already told off. I'll have them by the shore an hour before dawn, fully provisioned. Just have the boats ready to take them off."
Georgios rose too. The two men shook hands. "I wish the emperor were here," said Agilulf suddenly. "My emperor, that is."
Georgios rolled his eyes with extravagant disbelief. "He is your emperor, not mine. Yet not even my emperor, not even the idiot before him, would go chasing relics at this stage of a war."
"It worked for him last time," said Agilulf, forcing as much loyalty into his voice as he could muster.
Tell me again about this God-damned—"
Bruno, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Protector of the Faith, scourge of the heretics, apostates and false believers, paused. It had been a bad day. Another bad day. Here in the broken country where France joined Spain and both were separated by the high Pyrenees, every village had a fortress on a peak, most of them seemingly called "Puigpunyent," meaning "Sharp-point Peak." That was why so many Muslim bandits had managed to establish themselves. No longer. He had cleared them out. But now, when he might have expected gratitude and co-operation from the Christians he had saved from their enemies, instead stubborn resistance, closed gates, flocks driven into the hills, people lodged in their high eyries. Not all of them. According to the barons who had come in and submitted to him, the people who were resisting him were now heretics, of some sect long established in the border country, with whom the Catholics had fought a bitter neighborly war in private for generations.
The trouble was, everyone agreed that it was the heretics who had the secret of the Holy Grail. If it existed—and Bruno believed passionately that it did, just as the Holy Lance on which his rule rested had existed, hidden among the pagans—it was in some mountain peak or other, hidden among the heretics.
And so he had set himself to reduce them, to burn, batter, frighten, bribe or wheedle them out of their mountain lairs. Sometimes it went well, sometimes badly. Today had been a bad day. Fierce resistance, the gate untouched by the heavy catapult rocks, and twenty good brothers of the Lanzenorden dead, along with many more of the troops levied from the barons of Southern France.
Even so, he had almost committed a mortal sin, in speaking ill of the precious relic. Bruno paused, looked round deliberately. He set his own penances. In time past he had taken a handful of wooden splinters, set them alight, and let them burn on his open palm. Yet the blisters had impeded him in battle. He had no right to disqualify himself from God's work merely for his own sin. And in any case it was not the hand which had sinned. No. Drawing a dagger, he held its tip over a candle, waited till he saw it glow. Then, deliberately once more he thrust out his almost-sinful tongue, laid the red-hot tip to it. Held it for long seconds. A tear slowly trickled down through the dust caked thick on each cheek, but his hatchet-face otherwise did not change. The smell of scorching flesh came to his nostrils, a familiar one now in these days of siege and skirmish.
He pulled the dagger away, looked critically at its tip to see if he had affected its temper. Seemingly not. He looked up and met the disapproving gaze of his confidant and spiritual adviser, the deacon Erkenbert. Erkenbert did not like these ascetic practices, felt they led to spiritual pride.
"If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out," said Bruno, answering the unspoken accusation.
"Better to attend to the instructions of your confessor," replied Erkenbert, "always assuming he has any." Erkenbert had a grudge against Bruno's confessor Felix as well, for Felix, being a priest, could hear confessions and give absolution as Erkenbert, still only a deacon, could not.
Bruno dismissed the incipient argument with a gesture. "Now," he repeated, "tell me again about the blessed Grail of Our Lord. My faith, alas, needs strengthening once more."
Erkenbert began the story, still with an air of reluctant disapproval. In a sense he, Erkenbert, was a man trapped by success. He had been with the Emperor, when the latter, a mere Ritter of the Lanzenorden, went into the waste places of the North, to return with the Holy Lance which had once more unified the collapsing Empire of Charlemagne. And because he had been with the Emperor all that time, had done the research which had enabled them in the end to identify the Lance, and had furthermore consoled the despondent Emperor when he felt his search might never end, now he was considered to be an expert on relics and on searches. But the Lance had been proposed and authenticated by the holy Saint Rimbert, Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen. This story that the Emperor was now convinced of had a very different origin.
Nevertheless Erkenbert had studied what few documents could be brought to him: he knew the tale as well as anyone. Maybe it was best that it should be told by one who could not be in any way seduced by it.
"As you know," he began, "the four gospellers do not all tell the same tale of the Crucifixion of Our Lord. And this of course is proof of their truth, for how often do we not see that four men who have seen the same thing happen will nevertheless tell it in different ways? Yet where they do agree—as they agreed about the centurion who pierced Christ's side with his lance, and venerated him forthwith as the Son of God—we may be sure that something great and holy is meant by it, for all four were inspired by the Holy Ghost to see and write the same thing."
Bruno nodded, the satisfied expression on his bleak, hard face like that of a child who hears a well-known bedtime story unrolling.
"Yet there may also be great wisdom, or great knowledge, in something vouchsafed to only one witness. Now the Gospel of John tells us many things that are absent from the others. One thing he tells of is strange but not unlikely. I have read in other works that it was the custom of the Romans, a cruel and godless folk, when they crucified a man, to leave his body to be eaten by the birds."
Bruno, whose gallows groaned all over Europe with un-buried dead, nodded again, perhaps with satisfaction, perhaps with imperial agreement on policy.
"But it was the law of the Jews that no dead thing might be exposed over their holy day of Passover. That is why men were sent to kill Christ and those crucified with him, not in mercy, but so that they might be taken down before sunset on Friday, when the Sabbath of the Jews begins.
"What happened then? Only John says this, but the story is not unlikely, nor need it have been known to all. He says that a rich Jew begged Pilate for the body, to have it wrapped in shroud and laid in a stone sepulchre—as is the custom in stony countries like this one, not laid in earth as we do. He gives the name of the Jew as Joseph of Arimathea. And then the story goes on to tell of the Resurrection, as all the gospellers in their different ways do.
"Now of this Joseph many other stories are told. My own people—not my Northumbrian people, but the English of the far West, have a story that this Joseph sailed from the shores of the Holy Land after the death of Jesus, and came in the end to England, not yet England but rather Britannia. And there, they say, he built a church at Glastonbury and performed many miracles. They say, too, that he brought with him the Holy Grail and that it still lies there."
"But we do not believe that?" queried Bruno, though he had heard the answer at least a dozen times.
"No. For a rich Jew to leave the Holy Land, if he had become an enemy of his own people, might be possible. But Britannia at the time of the death of Our Lord was not yet within the Empire. It must have been a wasteland inhabited by savage Welshmen. Who would wish to go there?"
"So why do we think there is a Holy Grail?"
Erkenbert managed to conceal a disapproving sniff. He at least did not think there was a Holy Grail; but he knew from experience that if he said as much, his pious but overbearing master would keep him arguing till he had confessed he might be wrong. "Mostly because so many people have believed it. Nevertheless," Erkenbert hurried on before his master could press for a better answer, "looked at correctly, the accounts of the death of Our Lord do leave room for wonder.
"I have already said that only the Gospel of the holy John tells the story of Joseph of Arimathea. Only that gospel also mentions the Jew Nicodemus, and it mentions him three times: at the end, when Nicodemus and Joseph arrange for Jesus to be laid to rest. In the temple of the Jews, where Nicodemus calls out for a fair trial. And when Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night to ask him a question.
"And yet there is another gospel I have read."
"Besides the four of the Bible?" prompted Bruno.
"Yes. It is the Gospel of Nicodemus. The fathers of the Church, in their wisdom, decided not to include it among those works called canonical. Yet it is clearly a work of great age. And what it tells us is the story of what happened after Christ died. And before he was resurrected."
"When he went down into Hell," breathed Bruno, face rapt.
"It is this gospel which allows us to have the words in the Creed, descendit ad infernos, he descended into Hell. So this Nicodemus saw Christ buried, knew of his Resurrection—and talked with those whom Christ released from Hell. How else could he know the story? He must have been a man far deep in the secrets of Our Lord. More so perhaps even than Joseph. Such men recognized Our Lord as the Son of God as soon, almost, as did the centurion Longinus, who kept his own lance as a relic. They had many chances to put by the things that the Son of God had touched, and one of them may have been the Grail. Some say it is the chalice of the Last Supper, some the jar in which the Holy Blood was collected after the Lance had shed it."
"But that's because they're bloody French!" yelled Bruno suddenly, driving his dagger with his usual appalling speed and strength deep in and through the table in front of him. "They can't speak their own bloody language! Just gabble gabble Latin till it sounds like nothing on earth! Take aqua, turn it into eau, take caballerus, turn it into chevalier. I ask you. What might a graal have been before those miscegenated bastards got their tongues round it?"
Two bodyguards moved into the tent, weapons ready, saw their lord sitting unharmed by the table. Bruno grinned suddenly, waved at them, spoke in his usual familiar Low German. "All right, boys. Just saying what I think about the French." His men returned his grin, withdrew. Brüder of the Lanzenorden, they shared their master's opinion: especially after today, when there had been Frenchmen on both sides, and when they felt their own had fought less whole-heartedly than the enemy's.
"Well," said Erkenbert, trying to answer the question. "A graal can be a sort of flat plate or dish."
"Couldn't keep blood in it, could you?"
"Maybe it is blood. Maybe when these people say sancto graale, or saint graal, Holy Grail, whatever the pronunciation, their ancestors were trying to say sang real, royal blood. It would be much the same in Latin, too. The one is sanctus graduale, the other sanguis regalis. Maybe the Grail is just the Holy Blood."
For some time Bruno remained silent, meditatively touching the blister on his own tongue. Erkenbert watched his face with a growing interest. They had been over this ground several times, and what Erkenbert had not been able to understand was why Bruno seemed so sure of himself and his quest. There were indeed odd features in the Gospel of John and that of Nicodemus. There was nothing for the Grail, though, like the strong recent evidence there had been for the Holy Lance, possessed within living memory by Charlemagne. Nor was there anything like the centurion's letter that Erkenbert himself had seen. Erkenbert had suspected before that Bruno was hiding something.
"How do you get 'dish' or 'chalice' out of graduale?" asked Bruno finally.
"It is from gradus, a—a stage," replied Erkenbert. "So it comes to mean a course at dinner, and then what the course is served on."
, "But gradus doesn't mean a bloody stage," snarled Bruno. "You're just saying that. It means a bloody step. It means something you step on. And a graduale is something with a lot of graduses on it. And you and I both call that the same thing, whether we talk my German or your English. Same word both languages. I checked. You know what it is! It's a bloody..."
"Ladder," completed Erkenbert, his voice low and cold. For the first time he saw where his master's thought was leading.
"Ladder it is. Like you-know-who wears round his neck."
"But how could that become a holy thing? Like the chalice of the Last Supper."
"Have you ever thought," inquired Bruno, leaning back in his camp-chair, "what happened after the Crucifixion?"
Erkenbert shook his head dumbly.
"Well, the Romans didn't take Our Lord, did they? I expect my ancestor Longinus"—Erkenbert noted silently the promotion of Longinus from predecessor to ancestor—"he marched off back to barracks, looking at his lance and wondering, I should think. But the body, the body of Our Lord—well, you just said it, it was handed over to the Jews. The friendly ones, that is, not the ones who had him crucified. But if you wanted to know what happened next, you'd have to ask the Jews. Not the Romans, they'd all marched off, not the Christians, they were all hiding. And what do you think was the first thing they'd do?"
Erkenbert shook his head mutely. He had a terrifying sensation that something was building up here, something stemming from the past, from Bruno's own past, with terrible ramifications for the future. He had no idea what it was.
Bruno poured two large goblets of wine from the handy pitcher and pushed one over to Erkenbert. "Thirsty work, talking," he remarked, his face taking on once more its unexpected glow of amiability and good fellowship.
"Now, have you ever really thought seriously about how to crucify someone? And how you de-crucify them? Eh?"
Shef lay in his hammock slung between the rail and the forward catapult mounting. A faint breeze moderated the heat still rising from the wooden decks, and the ship rocked gently on an almost motionless sea. Round him seventy men slept also, some in hammocks, some stretched out on deck. Above them the stars burned brightly in a clearer sky than any they had seen before.
In his dream, Shef knew he was far, far below earth, or sea, or sky. He was on some kind of gigantic stairway. A stairway so huge that he could only just reach the top of the next step with his fingertips. He might be able to jump, haul himself up, get a knee over the edge and scramble on to the next step. How often could he do that before weariness took him?
And there was something coming up the steps towards him. Something enormous, that dwarfed him as he would dwarf a mouse. He could feel vibrations through the cold wet stone, a thump—thump—thump of enormous feet climbing the stair. A waft of malice and malevolence crept up the stair ahead of the feet. If the thing that was climbing saw him it would stamp down on him as surely as he would crush a poison-spider. A faint light was beginning to glow from down below as well. The thing that was coming would see him.
Shef glanced around, already imagining his own flesh and blood spattered across the stone. No way up that did not lead to being overtaken. No point in going down. To the side. He sprang across, began to grope in the dim light across the side of the stairway. There was something there, a wooden strip or lining. And he was like a mouse. From years before Shef remembered his own vision of himself as Völund the lame smith, and Farman priest of Frey peering up at him from the floor like a mouse from the wainscoting. Now he was the mouse, and Farman—the thumping feet on the stair called Shef back from thoughts of the quiet Wisdom-House to his immediate reality.
A crack in the wood. Shef began to squeeze himself into it, first headfirst, then realizing that that might leave him unable to see the menace behind, pulling out and reversing in, careless of splinters tearing his tunic and digging into the skin.
He was back, covered at least from direct vision. He pulled his head back even further, knowing that nothing shows up so well in the dark as pale skin. There was still a line of sight. As the thump—thump—thump of feet became deafening, Shef saw a face cross his limited vision.
A set, cruel face, marked and pitted with poison. The face of Loki Baldersbane, free from his eternal prison, from the snake ever-dripping venom into his eyes when his loyal wife did not intercept it. The face of someone set on vengeance. Vengeance for unforgivable injustice.
The face passed by, the feet continued their steady climb. And then they stopped. Stopped level with Shef's head. He held his breath, conscious suddenly of the beating of his heart, that seemed to pound like a drum inside the echo-chamber of the little wooden crack. He remembered Brand's huge feet, stamping up and down while the baffled Arab watched. Loki could surely smash in his fragile hiding-place with a kick.
The feet moved on, began to climb once more up towards the light. As Shef breathed again, he heard a second noise. This time it was a slither. The slither of scales across stone. He remembered the awful sight he had seen of the great head striking at him, striking and falling short before it returned to its endless task of torment. Endlessly frustrated by the gods who had tethered it just out of fang-reach. The monster-viper that was climbing now after the one who had so long escaped it had had centuries in the dark to grow in rage. And its eyes were closer to the ground than a god's. And vipers had other senses than sight. Senses designed for catching mice in the dark. Shef remembered the blue swelling face of Ragnar Lothbrok, Ivar's father and Sigurth's too, as he died in the snake-pit, the orm-garth of York.
In panic he forced himself round to try to wriggle deeper into concealment. The crack was widening, he jerked his shoulder through, wondering what might be on the other side. All light had faded, but the slither behind him was coming closer and closer.
He was through. Through what he did not know, but now he was standing in a pit, and looking up. And there, far above him, was a full pale moon with markings on it like a ghastly skull. He could see a wall, a wall facing him, far lower than the cliff behind. But still far too high for him to jump and catch the edge, climb out as he might have done on to the next step of the stairway behind. In a panic now Shef began to run towards it, careless of what might see him. But as he moved there came from all around him, not just from behind, a piercing and universal hiss.
He stopped dead, aware of slithering all around him. He had escaped from Loki and the viper that pursued him. But now he was in a crawling carpet of snake-bodies. He was in the orm-garth of the gods. And there was no way to climb out.
As he stood stock-still he felt a thud striking his thigh, felt the first deep bite of the fangs, the poison spreading into his veins.
Shef sprang from his hammock in one convulsive movement, caught a foot in a cord and crashed to the deck. He was on his feet again instantly, ready to lash out in any direction, a great yell bubbling from his throat. As men around him cursed and scrambled also to their feet, groping for their weapons, he felt a brawny arm close round him, was swung momentarily off his feet.
"Easy, easy," muttered Thorvin. "All right, the rest of you, go back to sleep. Just a dream. Just a nightmare."
He propped Shef on the seaward rail, let him look round in the starlight and get his bearings.
"What did you see this time?"
Shef caught his breath, felt the sweat drying on him. His tunic was drenched, as wet as if he had been in the sea. The salt stung his empty eye-socket.
"I saw Loki. Loki loose. Then I was in the orm-garth, like Ragnar." Shef began to rub his thigh where he had felt the strike of the fangs.
"If you have seen Loki loose, the College must know," muttered Thorvin. "Maybe Farman in Stamford, or even Vigleik of the visions in Kaupang might have some counsel. For if Loki is loose we are that much closer to the doom of the gods and the coming of the Skuld-world. Maybe it is we who have stirred it up."
"Loki is not loose," came a cold angry voice from behind them. "There is no such thing as Loki. Or as the gods. The evil in the world comes from men alone."
In the starlight Shef pulled up the hem of his tunic, stared down at his bare thigh. On it, there, two purple marks: Puncture wounds. Svandis stared, reached out a hand, drew it back. For once found nothing to say.
Two hundred miles from the Fafnisbane floating on the placid sea, a group of other men sat huddled at the foot of another dark stairway, deep inside a mountain.
"He is likely to break in tomorrow," said one of them.
General nods, murmurs of agreement. "We caused them many casualties today. Tomorrow they will bring that great catapult up a little closer, start earlier with our outer defenses down, find the range. Then it will be a rock on top of the main gate and their stormers will come through. Of course we will make barricades inside, but..." A Gallic shrug, barely visible in the candlelight.
"If we surrender tomorrow at dawn they may give us terms, the Emperor Bruno is said to be merciful, they will ask only for an oath which we can in conscience give falsely, then..."
The gabbling frightened voice was cut off by another fierce gesture. "What happens to us is of no moment," said the first voice. "We may get terms, we may live, we may die. What counts is the holy relics. And if the Emperor thinks they are here—and he already thinks they are here, that is why he is besieging us—anyone who lives tomorrow will be tortured till they tell all they know."
"Try to get them out? They have sentries. But in the crannies of the Puig, our mountain men could crawl out."
"With the books and the records, maybe. With the graduale"—the speaker's Occitan accent had turned the word to graal—"I don't think so."
"Get the other things out that way. Just drop the holy relic outside the wall. It has no gold on it, no marks of worship like the Catholics would give it. They won't know. Our brothers will pick it up later."
A long pause. "Too risky," said the first voice. "It could be lost in the rubble. Whoever we told to recognize it later might die, might be tortured, might confess.
"No. What we must do is leave it here, under the mountain. The entry to this place is known only to us, and to the perfecti among us outside the walls. The Emperor cannot tear down the mountain. He will never find the entrance—unless someone tells him."
"And none of us will tell him," answered one of his fellows.
A sudden flash in the candlelight, a thud, a choked-off gasp. Two men eased a body to the floor, that of the speaker who had suggested terms.
"Go to God, brother," said one of the killers. "I love you as a brother still. I would not have you put to a test you could not bear."
The first voice continued. "So that is clear. The relic must stay. All those of us who know the secret stair must die. For no-one can be sure what he will say at the last end of pain."
"Are we allowed to die in battle?" queried one of the dark shapes.
"No. A blow on the head, a crippled arm. Anyone may be captured without consenting to it. We would die later of the endura, but that might be too late. And alas, we have no time for the endura. One of us will go up the stair, and tell Marcabru the captain to make the best terms he can tomorrow morning for our poor brothers, the imperfecti. Then that brother will return. And we will take the holy draught together from the chalice of Joseph."
A hum of satisfaction and agreement, hands shaken across the table in the dark.
An hour later, as the silent perfect ones heard the step of their brother coming again down the stairs to share the poison draught with his brothers, a final voice in the dimness.
"Rejoice, brothers, for we are old. And what was the question that our founder Nicodemus asked of the Son of God?"
Voices answered him in chorus, garbling the Latin words in their own strange dialect. "Quomodo potest homo nasci, cum senex sit! How can a man be born when he is old? Or can he enter again into the womb of his mother?"