The enemy fleet was hull-up before Shef's lookout saw or recognized it. The Greek admiral had chosen his time perfectly: a little after noon, with the combined fleet of Arabs and Northerners split into its three habitual divisions. The advance guard and main body keeping pace with the cloud of dust which meant horse and foot advancing along the coastline, but already with oars shipped and prepared for siesta. The Northerners two long miles behind, awake but hopelessly becalmed, the sails acting only as awnings against the fierce heat. Another mile behind them, the admiral with his escort ships, dropped back to take their siesta, confident of their ability to catch up on the lumbering sailing ships later in the day.
In any case all attention was fixed on the land. Just dimly, from where they lay on the blue water, Shef could hear a faint sound of screaming trumpets, high and shrill in the Arab mode. Was that an answering bellow? The hoarse war-horns of Germans, or of Franks? Everyone on the ships was crowded on to the landward rails, listening intently, trying to make out what might or might not be happening there on the shore. A dust cloud? Pinpricks of light? Weapons catching the sun, that was for sure.
Turning from the rail, Shef blinked his one eye, weary from straining across the dazzling water. Looked out to sea, into the noon haze. Fishing boats, creeping towards them, their three-cornered sails picking up what breaths of air there might be. A lot of them, Shef reflected. Had they found a school of tunny? They were using their oars as well, moving fast for fishermen in the heat. Too fast.
"Lookout!" he bellowed. "Out to sea. What can you see?"
"Fishing boats, lord," came the cry, a little puzzled. "A lot of them."
"How many?"
"I can see—twenty, thirty. No, there's more coming out of the haze, pulling hard."
"Do they have the grind here?" asked Thorvin, veteran of the journey to the far North. He meant the Halogaland custom of driving schools of whales ashore with a fleet of boats, to slaughter them in the shallows.
"That's no grind," snapped Shef. "Nor no fishermen either. That's the enemy fleet, and us all looking the wrong way. How long have those bastards been watching us, and us saying, 'Oh, they're only fishing boats'."
His voice rose to a shout, as he tried to pierce the sunny lethargy, move the gaping faces turned towards him. "Cwicca, Osmod, man the mules! Everyone to the crossbows. Hagbarth, can you get any way on at all? Thorvin, blow the signal horn, alert the rest of the fleet. For Thor's sake, move, all of you. They're ready and we aren't!"
An incoherent yell from the lookout, and a pointing finger. No need for either. Out of the heat-haze, hull-up already, moving at terrifying speed, Shef saw the red-painted galleys of the Greeks sweeping down in a broad wedge. Their banks of white-painted oars flashed and swept in the sun, each ship had a bone in her teeth, a white bow-wave cresting over the menace of the ram. Shef could see the black-lashed female eyes painted incongruously on the high fore-quarters, could see the armor of their marines flashing as they waved their weapons in defiance.
"How far off are they?" It was Hund asking, his eyes were weak.
"A mile maybe. But they're not making for us. They're making for the Arabs. Going to take them from flank and rear."
The Andalusian advance-guard hardly stood a chance at any time. Deep in siesta, awnings rigged, it took precious moments to strike them and man the oars once more. The faster and more alert ships turned devotedly to try to ward off the attack sweeping towards them at twenty miles an hour. As they tried to engage Shef saw spears and arrows flashing across the water from both sides. As if in reply, a thin trail of smoke on the air, a far-off unearthly whistling.
And then the flame. The watchers on the Fafnisbane cried out as one man as the orange flame licked across, seemed suddenly to explode. Not like a fire catching in the hearth, not like a tree blazing in a forest fire: instead a sudden ball of flame that seemed to spread out, hang in the air, hold in its heart a ship already disintegrating. Shef thought he could see tiny black shapes struggling in it, plunging already alight into the sea. But then the rest were in action.
The red galleys slowed as they reached the main body of enemy ships, picking their targets, flame snorting first from one then from another. First to die were the bold ones who steered to engage, the feeble missiles that flew from them ignored like midges harassing so many great red bulls. Then the unprepared ships who remained still. Then, as the red galleys accelerated once more to ramming stroke, the cowards who had turned to flee. In one pass the Greek flotilla left behind them more than a hundred blazing shapes. In their wake the fishing boats from the Christian villages, packed with men with injuries to avenge, and stiffened by Agilulf's detachments, closed in on those who had dodged the flame, eager to board, slaughter and take plunder.
"Very well done," remarked Georgios to the captain of his own flagship.
"That's them off the board. Now, let's see about the stone-throwers. Half-speed now, and watered wine to the rowers."
As the red galleys pulled round in a wide circle, Shef abandoned the attempt to make way under sail. Five minutes to furl the sails, prevent them from obstructing his catapult-crews. Then the giant sweeps over the side, only a dozen for each ship, each one pulled by four men, all that could be spared from the catapults. The men began to heave, drag their heavy, round-bellied ships through the water.
"If they don't want to fight they don't have to," said Hagbarth tensely. "They have five times our speed. Maybe ten."
Shef made no reply. He was watching for the range. Maybe the other side did not know what mule-stones could do. If they came on a little more—vital not to let them get close enough to use their fire-weapon. Its range a hundred yards at most. A mule-stone would fly true for half a mile. He might reach them now. Let them come on a little more—a little more yet. Better to get off a concerted volley. If all the ships shot at once they could sink half the fire-galleys in one shoot.
"Mule won't bear," shouted Cwicca from the forward catapult. An instant later Osmod echoed him from the rear. "Mule won't bear."
Shocked, Shef suddenly saw the trap. His ships were spread out in a long line ahead. None of them could shoot over the bow or the stern. A galley coming straight towards him could cover the distance from extreme mule-stone range to effective distance for their fire-weapon in—he did not know, maybe fifty strokes. And they were coming now. Or one of them was, picking up speed and leaving the others behind, oars threshing in perfect unison.
"Sweeps," he shouted, "starboard sweeps, start pulling, port sweeps back water."
Seconds of delay while the men at the sweeps worked out what was demanded, moved their cumbrous log-like oars into position. Then, slowly, the head of the Fafnisbane began to heave round, Cwicca, mule-captain on the bow catapult glaring tensely over its metal-plated shield, braced to lift his hand to show his sights were on.
As the bow of the Fafnisbane came round, so the galley heading towards them heeled over in the same direction. If that went on she would present her long fragile side to the waiting mule, no more than a quarter-mile off now, a certain hit and a certain sinking. But with beautiful speed and maneuverability she was keeping constantly in the Fafnisbane's blind spot. They knew exactly what they were doing.
Maybe one of the other ships could get in a shot? Shef looked behind him, realized that the furious roaring he had tuned out in his tension was coming from the captain of the Sigemund close behind. The Fafnisbane had steered right across him, was blocking his complete broadside. And the Greek galley had completed her turn, was sweeping back to safety, her first plunge beaten off.
But even while he was watching the whole situation had changed yet again. The other Greek galleys had not lain on their oars while their consort darted in. They had split, swung in two wide arcs just neatly out of mule-stone distance—someone had been observing them very closely as they took their practice shots—and were forming a ring round the Northern ships. Already one was swinging round to try to get behind the stern of the Hagena, last ship in the line, and the captain of the Hagena did not seem to have noticed. It would only take one fire-galley to get within range, and she could then cruise up the long straggling line of the English two-masters, setting each one alight and using it as cover from the stones of the one next in line.
They had to cover each other. Each ship had to have bow and stern approaches covered by the mules of another ship. What was the formation they needed for that? And while he thought, he had to signal the Hagena, still floating motionless, sweeps not even out, lookout and skipper still staring fixedly in the wrong directions. Shef began to shout to the skipper of the Sigemund, to see the danger and pass on the message.
Brand had caught on quicker. As the shouted messages passed down the line, Shef saw the Narwhal suddenly streak past his line of vision, oars beating faster even than those of the Greeks. Another of the Viking longships followed him. Shef realized that all five had closed in, clustered to seaward of the seven bigger sailing-ships for protection against the Greek fire. But Brand had realized that there was a weak spot for all of them. He was moving to buy time.
Heart in mouth, Shef ran to the stern, climbed nimbly up, stood on the barely-moving dragon-tail that rose six feet above the deck. Suddenly remembering, he pulled the far-seer from his belt—if they had had a dozen like it lookouts might have given better warning! No time for regrets. He pulled it open, tried to adjust the length of the sliding tube so he could see clearly.
Through the smoky and discoloring lens he saw the three ships, one Greek and two Viking, closing on each other at prodigious speed, far faster than any horse could run. The Greek was twice the size of either of the other craft, could ram and run them down without troubling to use her fire. But she had to be delayed. Shef saw what Brand and his consort were trying to do. They were aiming to steer their bows along the whole line of the Greek's oars, snapping them and killing the rowers with the backlash. Then, maybe, board and see how the Greek marines would face Viking axes.
But the fire, the fire. For the first time Shef could see something of the strange device that burnt ships like tinder. A copper dome midships, men clustered round it, two sweating at handles which they worked up and down like a suction-pump in the East Anglian fields...
Suddenly the pumping men were whisked away as if by a broom, and those clustered round to shield them. Shef turned the far-seer frantically, trying to make out what was going on. There was Brand's ship, and he could see Brand in the prow, waving an axe. And a dozen crossbows lining the side, all simultaneously dropping in the quarrels and heaving on their goat's-foot cocking handles. The Greeks had not expected the heavy armor-piercing missiles at close range.
But their captain knew all about oar-snapping. As Brand's Narwhal cruised past the far side of the galley Shef saw a wood of oars leap into sight. The rowers had heaved them up in well-rehearsed display. As they did so Shef, in the round field of the far-seer, saw men scrambling again to the handles of the Greek fire weapon. Caught a glimpse of a gleaming nozzle as it trained round to bear on the second Viking ship, fifty yards behind Brand's and on the near side. A man standing by it pushing forward what looked like a lit cord...
Shef thrust the far-seer from him just too late to avoid seeing the flame leap out, the ball of fire at its tip. And, centered in the midst of it, the skipper of the Marsvin, Sumarrfugl, who had stormed the walls of York with Shef and Brand years before, hurling a spear and yelling defiance at the doom about to take him.
A great groan rose from the decks of the Fafnisbane as they saw the Marsvin go, fire rising higher than her mast, shapes again hurled into the water, some of them still thrashing on a burning sea. All men they had known and drunk with.
Shef looked round again, constricted with terror at the thought that everyone was looking in the same direction again, not watching for the death that might be coming up on them at racing speed from any direction. He realized that twice already he had heard the twang and crash of the mules, twang as the rope was released, crash as the throwing arm hit its padded bar, making the whole firm-braced ship shake. There in the sea, not so far off, wrecked timbers and men swimming. Not the great galleys though. Just fishing boats. The Greek commander was sending them in to draw attention and increase the number of targets. Like playing fox-and-hens with too many foxes for the hens to keep track of.
They're not frightened of us, Shef thought. That's why this is going badly. We are terrified of the flame, have seen our mates go up in it, there are some of them still there dying in the burning water—how can water burn? But they're just fencing with us. Those men out there on the wrecked ships. It's just a swim for them, a little wait till they're rescued. Got to make them worry. Make them afraid.
But first, make us safe. We must form a square. No, seven ships, four sides, there would always be a weak side, they might decide to come in on that, lose a ship or two to take all of us. Get into as near a circle as we can, that way any approach will face at least two broadsides. If there was just a breath of air, we could get some steerage way.
He seized Hagbarth by the shoulder, told him what he wanted, left him to shout over the side to the skipper of the Sigemund and the Grendelsbane beyond. Turned back to see what new disaster had come upon the scene.
This whole battle seemed to progress in a series of flashes, unlike any other he had been in. He had always known what was supposed to happen before. He had no idea, even, how long the shouted conversation with Hagbarth had lasted. Somehow, in the meantime, the Hagena had managed to get into action. Delayed for vital seconds by the Narwhal and the Marsvin, the Greek galley had been too slow in dipping oars again and keeping in the blind spot. The Hagena had veered round, come broadside on, and shot simultaneously with both catapults, each one sending a thirty-pound rock skimming over the water at a bare quarter-mile range. Viking longships, clinker-built and locked to the prow and the tail, simply fell to bits when struck square on. The galley, for all Hagbarth's contempt for the strength of her construction, lasted a little better. Keel broken in two places, she was going down, but leaving a mass of wreckage like a raft, with rowers and marines clinging to it. Fishing boats were already closing in, maneuvering to keep in shelter of the wreck, to pick up survivors.
Shef's eye was caught beyond the scene being played out a few hundred yards off by the now-familiar gouts of flame a mile beyond. With the fatalistic courage of his creed—and spurred on by thoughts of the impaling-post that waited for cowards—the Arab admiral had decided to venture forward to engage the Greeks. Half a score of galleys had turned to meet him, leaving the rest of their number to watch and circle the Northern ships like wolves round a bogged elk. Again and again the flames licked out like dragon-breath, a ship exploding at the end of each tongue. Yet the crowd of Arab ships seemed to be making some impact, steering through the embers of their comrades. Shef could just see—he pulled out the far-seer again to make sure—grappling irons flying as the rear ranks of the admiral's squadron managed to close with some of their enemies. Too close now for the fire. Now it would be saber and scimitar against pike and shield.
Shef felt his heart slow its frantic pounding for the first time since they had seen the fishing boats and realized they were hostile. He lowered the far-seer. Became conscious of a deep hum of satisfaction rising from the decks of the Fafnisbane, a hum that broke into growls and fierce shouting.
Brand's Narwhal was cruising gently past the wreck of the Greek galley, her crossbowmen pouring volley after volley into the defenseless men clinging to her planks. Some were crossing themselves, others holding out their hands in a plea for mercy. A few had even swum towards the Narwhal, were trying to catch hold of the sweeping oars. Shef saw Brand himself, easily recognizable even at a furlong's distance, leaning over the side, slashing downwards with his axe "Battle-troll." Where the water was not black with ash and embers it was turning red with blood. The Hagena was joining in too, its crew making uninterrupted target-practice with their heavy gunwale-mounted steel crossbows.
Shef became aware of hands clinging to his arm, looked down. It was Hund. "Stop them!" shouted the little leech. "Those men aren't dangerous any more. They can't fight. This is butchery!"
"Better be butchered than roasted," snarled a voice behind him. It was one of the ship's boys, Tolman, a small incongruous figure clutching an axe bigger than himself.
Shef looked over the side. The Fafnisbane had swung in a half-circle as Hagbarth formed the protective ring Shef had demanded. That, and some barely detectable set of the current along the coast, had swung the Fafnisbane into the patch of water where the Marsvin had been torched. Still floating in the water there were what looked like broiled sides of meat at an ox-roasting. Shef pointed. "Some of them may be still alive, Hund. Get the boat. Do what you can for them."
He turned away, heading for the foremast where he could scan the horizon and for the first time since the action began collect his thoughts. There was someone in his path, someone shrieking and clutching at him. Svandis. Everyone seemed to be shouting and shrieking today. He pushed her firmly aside and walked to the mast. A rule, he thought. There must be a rule. Don't speak to the man in charge until he speaks to you. Hagbarth, Skaldfinn and Thorvin were evidently of his mind. They had intercepted the still-shrieking woman, were hustling her away, waving others aside. To let him think.
Holding the mast as it swayed gently to the roll of the wavelets, he looked deliberately all round the further horizon. To the south: the Arab admiral's ships, burning, sinking, boarded, in flight. None still fighting. To seaward: four Greek galleys rowing in a gentle arc well outside his range. To the north: two more, and a great cluster of smaller boats, some of the latter sneaking casually closer, tacking to and fro with their strange, handy three-cornered sails.
To landward: three more galleys completing the circle. But beyond them? Shef aimed the far-seer, scanned carefully along. A dust-cloud. Men moving. Moving south, and in a hurry. Impossible to say what kind of men were making the dust. But... a scan further, and there, cresting a small hill, caught by some trick in clear outline in the far-seer's blurry lens, he could see them. Stiff ranks of men in metal. Helmets, chain-armor, metal flashing in the sun as their feet moved. Feet moved together. A slow, steady, disciplined line of armored men moving forward. The Lanzenorden had won its land battle without hindrance from the sea. That was the situation. It was clear what should be done.
Shef raised his voice in what had now become silence. "Hagbarth. How long till the wind gets up again? Half an hour? When we have enough wind to make steering speed, we will head south down the coast. We'll go in a wedge, fifty yards apart. If the galleys try to take the last ships from behind, we all turn and sink them—it'll be easy once we're under sail again. We'll make as much distance as we can before it's dark and then anchor for the night in some cove we can block off—I don't want fireships coming up on us in the dark.
"Cwicca. See those boats trying to sneak up on us? When there are four within range, see if you and Osmod can sink them all. They're getting too cheerful out there.
"Thorvin. Call over Brand. When Cwicca and Osmod have sunk the fishing boats, he's to take two of his ships over there and kill all the crews. No swimmers, no survivors. Make certain the Christians see him do it."
Thorvin opened his mouth to protest, hesitated, held his tongue. Shef stared him full in the face. "They're not frightened, Thorvin. That gives them the advantage. We have to take it away, see?"
He turned and walked over to the seaward rail. Hund and a few helpers were struggling to lift a man over the side. As his face came level with the gunwale, eyeless, hairless, burned down to the gleaming skull and cheekbones, Shef recognized him. Sumarrfugl, old comrade. He was whispering something, or husking it with what remained of his lungs.
"No hope for me, mates. It's in my lungs. If there's a mate there, give me the death. The warrior's death. If this goes on much longer, I shall scream. Let me go quiet, like a drengr. A mate there? Is there a mate there? I can't see."
Slowly Shef stepped over. He had seen Brand do this. He put an arm round Sumarrfugl's head, said firmly, "Shef here, fraendi. I'm your mate. Speak well of me in Valhalla." He drew his short knife, set the point behind what had been Sumarrfugl's ear, drove hard into the brain.
As the corpse fell to the floor he heard the woman behind him again. She must have got out from below-deck.
"Men! You men! The evil of the world is from men alone. Not gods. Men!"
Shef looked down at the charred skinless body at his feet, its genitals burned away. Over the side he could hear shouts and screaming as Brand's crew hunted another survivor from bits of wreckage, harpooned him in the water as they would have a seal.
"Men?" he replied, staring at her and through her with his one eye, as if to pierce down through the earth to the underworld. "Men, you think? Can you not feel Loki stirring?"
As the afternoon breeze off the sea strengthened, the Northern fleet picked up speed, the four remaining Viking ships swarming over the waves with their usual supple motion, the two-masters plowing through them, spray leaping up over the tall prows. The Greek galleys had feinted to bar their passage, then fallen back before the threat of the mules. Very soon they had given up their ominous shark-like pursuit and turned away into the haze. Fortunate for them, Shef remarked to Thorvin and Hagbarth. If they had held on longer he would have turned and tried to catch them, sink the entire fleet. Galleys held the advantage in a calm, sailing ships in the wind. Catapults trumped Greek fire in the light, and at distance. The other way round close up, and in the dark.
Well before the sun set Shef had marked a cove with high cliffs to either side and a narrow inlet, taken the whole fleet well inside. By the time the dark came he had taken every precaution he could think of. Brand's Vikings, experienced in the holding of beachheads, had set off immediately inland, reconnoitered the approaches, established a firm block on the one single footpath leading down. Four catapult ships were firmly moored broadside on to the cove entrance, so that any ship entering would face eight mules at a range well outside that of the fire projectors. Shef had sent two parties up to each of the cliffs on either side, with tar-soaked bundles of straw, and orders to light them and hurl them down at the first sign of any ship trying to enter. At the last moment one of the English crewmen detailed for the job had come over, asked uncertainly for some of the kite cloth. What for, Shef had demanded. Slowly the man, a stunted creature with a villainous squint, had fumbled out his idea. Attach some cloth, like a small sail, to each of the bundles. When they threw them over he thought the cloth would hold the air, like, like it did with the kites. Take longer for the bundles to fall. Shef stared, wondering if he had found another Udd. Clapped the man on the back, asked his name, told him to take the cloth and consider himself a kite-handler for the future.
It had all been done efficiently, under the driving force of the king's tongue and every single man's knowledge of what the Greek fire could do. Yet they had been slow, sluggish. Shef himself felt completely drained, exhausted, though he had not struck a blow or swung an oar. It was fear. The sense that he was for once facing a cleverer mind than his own, one that had made a plan and made him dance to it. Without Brand and Sumarrfugl's intervention every single ship and man in the fleet might have been at the sea-bottom, or floating like a charred log on the water for the gulls to peck.
Shef had ordered one of the fleet's last barrels of ale broached, a quart served out to every man. What's that for, someone had asked. "It is to drink the minni-öl, the remembrance ale for the men of the Marsvin," he replied. "Drink it and think where you would be without them." Now, guarded, warmed by a fire, his belly full of pork and biscuit, cooked careless of the defeated stragglers who might be wandering the shore, Shef sat brooding over his last pint. After a while he saw the pale eyes of Svandis fixed on him from across the fire. She seemed, for once and unusually—not contrite, but as if she might listen to another voice for a change. Shef crooked a finger, beckoned her over, ignoring the routine flash of anger in her eyes.
"Time you told us," he said, pointing out a stone for her to sit on. "Why do you think there are no gods, only wicked men? If that's what you think, why this mummery with white robes and rowan-berries like a Way-priest? Don't waste my time being angry. Tell me the answers."
Weariness and strain gave Shef's voice a chill that brooked no defiance. In the firelight behind Svandis Shef saw Thorvin squatting on the sand, hammer in belt, and the other Way-priests with him, Suleiman the Jew next to his colleague Skaldfinn. "Well. Do you need me to tell you why I think there are wicked men?"
"Don't be silly. I knew your father. I killed him, remember? The kindest thing you could say about him was that he was not of one skin, eigi einhamr, like a werewolf. Only he was a were-worm, I saw him on the other side. If you had to think of him as a man—well, what could you say? He cut women's living bowels out for pleasure, the only way he knew to put bone in his prick. Wicked?" Shef shook his head, without words. "No, tell us why you think there are no wicked gods. You're talking to a man who's seen them."
"In dreams! Only in dreams!"
Shef shrugged. "My mother saw one on a beach, like this, and felt him too, Thorvin says. Otherwise I wouldn't be here."
Svandis hesitated. She had explained her views often enough. Never in the face of such solid cast-iron certainty on the other side. Yet the fierce blood of Ragnar ran in her veins, only surging more strongly to opposition.
"Consider the gods that people believe in," she began. "The gods my father and his brothers sacrificed to, Othin god of the hanged, betrayer of warriors, prepared always for Ragnarök and the battle with Fenris-wolf. What are the words that Othin tells us in the holy Havamal, 'The Sayings of the High One.' " Her voice broke suddenly into the chant of the Way-priest:
"Early shall he rise, who will reft another's
Life or lands or woman."
"I know the sayings," said Shef. "What's the point?"
"The point is that the god is like the men who believed in him. He told them only what they wanted to know already. Othin—the High One as you call him—he is just a mouthpiece for the wisdom of a pirate, a murderer like my father.
"Think of another god. Think of the Christ-god—flogged, spat on, nailed to a cross and killed without a weapon in his hand. Who believes in him?"
"Those wicked bastards of monks," said an anonymous voice in the darkness. "Used to be my masters. They laid on the lash all right, but no one never flogged none of them."
"But where did the Christians start?" cried Svandis. "Among the slaves of the Rome-folk! They made a god in their own image, one who would rise again and bring them victory in another world, because they had no chance in this one."
"What about the monks?" said the skeptical voice again.
"Who did they preach their religion to? Their slaves! Did they believe it themselves, maybe, maybe not, but it was useful to them. What good would it have done them if their slaves had believed in Othin?
"And what of the followers of the Prophet here?" she went on, pressing an advantage. "They believe in the one clear way. Anyone can join it by saying a few words. No-one can leave it without facing death. Those who join pay no taxes, but their men-folk must forever fight the unbelievers. Two hundred years ago the Arabs were sand-rats, nobodies, feared by none! What is their religion but a way of gaining strength? They have made themselves a god who gives them power. As my uncles made a god who gave them courage and fearlessness, or the Christians one who gave obedience."
"Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's," said the skeptical voice again, followed by a comprehensive hawk and spit into the fire. "True enough. I heard them say it."
Shef placed the voice finally. Not Cwicca, but Trimma, one of his mates. Strange that he should speak so freely. It must be the ale.
Another voice breaking in, the quiet one of Suleiman the Jew, by now speaking the fleet's common Anglo-Norse mixed speech with barely a trace of accent.
"An interesting view, young lady. I wonder what you will have to say of the Lord whose name is not spoken." He added, as ignorance remained complete, "The god of my people. The god of the Jews."
"The Jews live in a corridor," said Svandis flatly. "At the far end of this inner sea. All the armies of the world have marched up and down it, Arabs, Greeks, Rome-folk, all of them. The Jews have been toads under the harrow since their history began, from what I have been told of it. Have you heard the toad shriek out as the harrow rakes it? It cries out, 'I will be revenged!' The Jews have made a god of total power, and total memory, who never forgets any injury to his people, and who will revenge it—sometime. When the Holy One comes. He has been a long time coming, and they say you crucified him when he did. But if you believe what you do, it does not matter that the Holy One never comes, because he is always coming. That is how the Jews live on."
Shef could see Suleiman's face in the firelight, watched it carefully for any grimace, any twist of anger. Nothing that he could see.
"An interesting view, young princess," said Suleiman carefully. "I see you have an answer for everything."
"Not for me," said Shef, draining his mug. "I have seen them, in dreams. And others have seen me in the same dreams, so it is not just my fantasy. They have shown me sights far off as well, and they have come true. As they have for Vigleik of the visions, for Farman priest of Frey, for others of the Way.
"And I tell you, those gods are not made in my image! What was it that bit me, Svandis, you saw the marks in my flesh? A pet of Loki's, a pet of Othin's? No pet of mine. I do not even like my father Rig, if he is my father. The world would be better with no gods, I say. If we all believed what we wanted, I would be a believer in Svandis. But I know better. It is the gods who are evil. Men are evil too, because they have to be. If it were a better world that the gods made, men would be better too."
"It will be a better world," rumbled Thorvin in his deep bass, "if we can escape the chains of Skuld."
"Keep thinking about it, Svandis," said Shef, standing up. He stopped as he walked towards his blanket on the sand. "I mean what I say, and not as a joke, nor an insult. You are wrong about the gods of the Way, or at least you have not explained to me what I know. Just the same, there may be new knowledge in there somewhere, knowledge of people if not of gods. That is what the Way is about. Knowledge, not preparing for Ragnarök."
Svandis dropped her eyes, for once silent, defenseless against praise.
The small Northern fleet, only eleven ships now, mustered next morning the moment the highest lookout saw the first streak of light in the sky. Many men had dreamt of fire in the night, none wished to be trapped against a hostile shore by the red galleys of the Greeks. Shef left the details of the withdrawal to be organized by Brand, who had rowed away from many a beachhead. The clumsier two-masters moved first, using their sweeps while they waited for the first puffs of the land breeze that blew from the cooled land towards the warmer sea every morning. The four remaining Viking longships lay on their oars close in, sterns just touching the beach. The party of sentries blocking the landward path ran down all together, their commander in the rear, shoved the boats out and scrambled aboard in the same moment, Brand counting carefully as they boarded. Ten strokes and the longships were out in the main channel, pulling easily past the Fafnisbane.
Two last groups to recover. On each of the headlands either side of the cove Shef had posted a dozen men, with their bundles of dried grass and pitch to illuminate any enemy trying to force the cove entrance. The Vikings had a routine for recovering such men too. On the hail, ropes appeared, men began to drop down like spiders on the end of their threads. The Vikings were lowering their more inexperienced English colleagues bodily, Shef realized. They touched ground, waded out into the water, seized outstretched oars, were hauled aboard.
Now the experts were doing it, at three times the speed, moving as if an enemy army were rushing up the other side of the hill. Ropes slung round firm-driven stakes, passed doubled round the waists, and the Vikings were walking swiftly backwards down the cliffs, bracing themselves against the pull. Into the water, the ropes jerked free.
And they'd left someone behind! As the last men scrambled for the waiting ships, Shef saw a head and a waving arm. He could even recognize the face, the squint. It was the innovator of the evening before, who had wanted to set kite-cloth to the flares. Shef knew his name now: Steffi, known familiarly as Cross-eye, said to be the worst shot with a crossbow in the whole fleet. He seemed unworried, was indeed grinning broadly. Shef caught the words floating down.
"I got a new way to come down! Watch this!"
Steffi moved to the highest point of the cliff, looked down into deep water, the boats moving gently across it a hundred feet below. He had something tied to him and trailing behind. Shef shut his eyes. Another one who thought he could fly. At least it was over water. If he didn't hit a rock. If he could stay afloat long enough to be rescued.
Steffi took a few steps backward, ran awkwardly forward again, and then leapt straight out. As he leapt, something billowed out behind him. Kitecloth. A square of it, eight feet across, fixed by cords to some kind of belt. As the small figure shot downwards it seemed to catch the air, form a kind of bell above him. For a few instants the figure slowed, hung marvelously in the air, Steffi's grin once again perfectly visible.
Then something seemed to go wrong, Steffi began to lurch from side to side in the air, his grin vanished, he hauled vainly on his cords, legs thrashing. A splash, barely twenty feet from the side. Two of Brand's men were in the water, swimming like seals. They resurfaced with Steffi between them, blood streaming from his nose, towed him to the Fafnisbane, heaved him up to waiting hands before stroking back to their own Narwhal.
"It was going fine," muttered Steffi. "Then the air started to spill, like. Like a mug that's too full. I've still got the cloth," he added, hauling on the lines attached to the belt now in his hands. "I didn't lose nothing."
Shef patted him on the back. "Tell us before you do it next time. Birdman."
He turned, waved to Hagbarth. Slowly the fleet rowed and swept its way out to sea, every lookout scanning the horizon with far-seers for any trace of the galleys, any threatening scout of a lateen sail.
No sign. Hagbarth coughed, asked the vital question. "Lord? Which direction now? South and back to base?"
Shef shook his head. "Take us straight out to sea, as far from land as we can get before noon. When the wind dies and we are helpless again I want us to be so far away that the furthest Christian scout cannot pick us up. They will be sweeping the shore in line abreast before long. We must be over the horizon by then.
"Conference at noon," he added. "Tell Brand to come aboard then." He turned to sling his hammock. A night on the sand with the sand-mites had left most men weary. Those not detailed to handle the sails or keep lookout followed his example.
Hours later, an awning shading them from the noonday sun, Shef and his council met on the high deck of the Fafnisbane's forward catapult mounting. Shef himself sat on the frame of the mule. Round him, sitting or squatting on the deck, were the four Way-priests, Thorvin, Hagbarth, Skaldfinn and Hund, with Brand resting his great back against the dragon-prow. After thought, Shef had once more called Suleiman the Jew over to listen to them. A few feet away, permitted to listen but not intervene unless asked, squatted Cwicca and Osmod to relay word to the crewmen once a decision was reached. Between them, a sullen expression on his face, was the young Arab Mu'atiyah. He would understand little or nothing of what was discussed in the Anglo-Norse patois of the Way, none of which he had troubled to learn in his weeks with the fleet. Yet he might be needed to answer questions.
"All right," said Shef without formality, "only one question, where do we go?"
"Back to Cordova," said Hagbarth promptly. "Or back to the mouth of the Guadalquivir anyway. Tell the Caliph what happened. He'll know before we get there, some stragglers must have got away, but at least we can tell him we didn't run."
"We'll have to tell him we failed, though," Shef replied. "These Mohammedans are not patient with failures. Especially as we'd told him we would succeed."
"Nowhere else to go," rumbled Brand. "Go north, they'll find out about us, send word to the galleys. Go out to sea like we're doing, well, they say there's islands out here but all in Christian hands. They'd catch up with us. But I agree, no point in going back to the Caliph. Why don't we just go home? Maybe pick up a little something on the way. Go back through the straits into the open ocean, sail home, see if we can't find a few bits and pieces to make a profit on the trip. From the Christians on the Frankish coast," he added, his eye on the listening figure of Suleiman. "If we decide we're still in alliance with the Caliph, that is."
Shef shook his head. "No. Even if we made a profit, we'd be going home without what we came for.
"Just in case you've all forgotten, we came for knowledge. At least I did. Knowledge of flight. And now, knowledge of fire. Don't forget, if the Empire of the Christians has learnt that, the next time we meet it may be in the English Channel. Home isn't safe any more."
"Nowhere else to go," insisted Brand doggedly. "Only safe thing to do is keep moving. There are no safe harbors left. Not here in the Inner Sea."
A long pause, while the ship rocked gently on the halcyon water. The sun burned down above them, crewmen stretched out on the decks, luxuriating in idleness and warmth, new experiences for almost all of them. The ships' holds were stuffed still with food and full water barrels. No need for care, or no immediate need. Yet the weight of decision pressed down. Home was many miles away for English and Vikings alike, and between it and them lay only hosts of enemies: enemies and uncertain friends.
Suleiman broke the silence. As he did so he began to unwind the turban that he had never been seen to shed before.
"It is possible that I can find you a safe harbor," he said. "As you know, there are many of my people, the Jews, who live under the rule of the Caliph of Cordova. What I have not yet told you is that there are some—many—who live, well, not entirely under it."
"At the other end of the Inner Sea?" queried Shef. "In the land where Christ was crucified, whatever they call it?"
Suleiman completed the unwinding of the turban, shook out the long hair it had bound in. On his head now there was only a small round cap, fixed on seemingly with hairpins. Out of the corner of his eye Shef noticed that the young Mu'atiyah had half-risen to his feet, been dragged down again by Cwicca and Osmod, was being restrained none too gently. Something was going on that he did not understand.
"No," said Suleiman. "At this end. To the north, between the kingdom of the Franks and the Caliphate of Cordova. There, in the mountains, my people have lived, along with others of different religions, for many years. They pay a tax to the Caliph, but they do not always obey him. I think you will be welcome there."
"If it's north," said Brand, "it will be the Christians we have to fear now, not the Caliph."
Suleiman shook his head. "The mountain passes are difficult, and we have many strongholds. In any case, as the fair princess said last night, my people have much experience in—being a corridor. The troops of the Emperor marched through by permission, never entering a town. It would be a major campaign for him to take our princedom. Septimania we call it, though the Franks among us say Roussillon. Come to Septimania. There you can judge a new faith."
"Why do you make us this offer?" asked Shef.
Suleiman looked across at Svandis, standing out of earshot by the rail.
"For many years I have been a servant of the book, Torah or Talmud or even Koran. Now you—some of you—have shown me something different. Now I too share your desire for new knowledge. Knowledge outside the book."
Shef turned his one eye across to the still-struggling Mu'atiyah. "Let him go, Cwicca." He went on in his simple Arabic. "Mu'atiyah, what you have to say, say it. Say it with care."
The young man, released, rose instantly to his feet. One hand was on the hilt of the dagger in his belt, but both Cwicca and Osmod were crouched ready to drag him down again if he moved. Shef saw Thorvin slip the hammer he always carried in his belt free. But Mu'atiyah seemed too furious to care for threats. His voice shaking, he pointed to Suleiman.
"Dog of a Jew! For years you have eaten the bread of the Caliph, your people have taken his protection. Now you seek to break free, to leave the Shatt al-Islam, the path of submission to Allah. You will ally yourself with anyone, like some noseless whore in a kennel. Yet beware! If you seek to let the Christians into Andalusia, they will remember you for killing their god—may the curse of Allah rest on those who worship one born in a bed! And if you seek to ally with"—he swept an arm round—"with these, know that they are barbarians, who come and go as the wild sheep defecate, now in that place, now in this."
Faces turned to Shef and Skaldfinn, waiting for translation. "He's calling Suleiman a traitor," Shef observed. "He doesn't think much of us either."
"Why don't we just throw him overboard?" asked Brand.
Shef thought for a long minute before replying. Mu'atiyah, who had not understood the brief interchange, nevertheless sensed from Shef's immobile face and Brand's jerked thumb something of what was going on. His face paled, he began to speak, stopped and tried to draw himself up with an appearance of composure.
Finally Shef spoke. "He's certainly useless as regards knowledge. But I liked his master, bin-Firnas. We'll keep him. Maybe he can serve as an envoy one day. And he has done one thing for us." He looked round, met Skaldfinn's eyes. "He's confirmed that what Suleiman here said was true. Otherwise we'd have no reason to believe it. A Jewish city, in Spain! Who would believe it? But it seems it must be true. I say that we should sail there. Find a base. Try to frustrate the plans of the Christians. Not the Christians, we have no quarrel with them. Of the Church and the Holy Empire it supports and the Emperor who supports it."
"And see what we can learn about the Greek fire," amplified Thorvin.
"And give Steffi there another chance to fly," agreed Shef.
Round the listening circle heads nodded, there was a growl of agreement. Suleiman's dark eyes took it in, showed a gleam of pleasure.
From the mast-head there came a hail. "To the north there! A sail. Three-cornered one. Looks like a fishing boat, maybe four miles off. Steering west, might not have seen us yet."
Shef walked to the prow, clicked open his far-seer, tried to see if he could pick out the sail-tip nicking the horizon.
"Do you think Narwhal would catch her, Brand, oars against the lateen sail?"
"In this calm, easy."
"Go over there then, sink the boat, kill everyone aboard."
Brand hesitated. "I don't mind killing people, you know," he said. "But they could be just fishermen making a living."
"And they could be spies for the Greeks. Or both at once. We can't take any chances on that. Just go over and do it. Use the crossbows if you're feeling squeamish."
Shef turned and walked away, obviously heading for his hammock, the conference as far as he was concerned at an end. Brand stared after him, his face perplexed.
"That's the one who was always telling me to go easy on the looting, always fretting about the slaves."
"He still frets about slaves," remarked Thorvin.
"But he'll kill off innocent people for nothing, just because they might be a risk. Not even for amusement, like Ivar would have, or to make them talk, like old Hairy-Breeks."
"Maybe Loki is loose," said Thorvin. "Better go do what he says." He clutched his hammer pendant protectively.
The same day, the same time, and no longer so many miles away, Bruno Emperor of the Franks, the Germans, the Italians and the Burgundians, slowly and reluctantly raised his shield, to protect his face not from the arrows that had flown at him all day, their snapped-off points studding the leather facing of his shield. No, only from the heat that surged and crackled from the blazing tower in front of him. He did not want to lose sight of the tower, hoping against hope that some last cry would rise from it, some turn of fortune would come to save the day. Yet, even for his ascetic frame, the heat was too much to be borne.
It had been a bad day all along, yet another bad day. He had been sure the fortress would fall this time, and fall it had. Yet he had hoped, expected, after the trials of the days before, that the defenders would see sense, take his offer, accept the mercy that they could hardly have expected. His system for razing these mountain fortresses had been worked out again and again against the Moslems of the coast, and his men understood it. The first thing was to get the great counterweight-catapult that Erkenbert had built close enough to throw its one titanic rock on to the top of the gate. Smash the gate, take the fortress. But the catapult had terrible limitations. Unlike the lighter onagers, or the dart-shooters or man-powered weapons, the counterweight-machine had to be set up on the flat. On the flat, and close to its target, no more than two hundred double paces.
Here, at Puigpunyent, there was no flat place anywhere near the gate, only a steep hillside. Grimly, the Brothers of the Order of the Holy Lance had driven back the defenders inside their walls, grimly they had hacked out a launch-platform from the living rock. The defenders had waited till all was done, then rolled boulder after boulder leaping down the hillside, hurled over the walls by the strength of twenty men at once. Grimly the brothers had driven deep piles into the rock, strengthened them with timbers, made a shelter for the precious catapult to cower behind. Hundreds of porters had struggled up the hill with the machine, with the rocks that were its counterweight. The great boulders it threw had been even more of a problem, carried up in the end on wooden platforms by relays of sweating, gasping men.
They had done it: set up the machine, hurled a first boulder skimming over the top of the gate so that Erkenbert the deacon could make his strange reckonings and say how much weight should be removed for the next boulder to land exactly on top of the wooden structure. And then, the work done and the threat displayed, Bruno had sent forward one of his best men, Bruder Hartnit of Bremen, to make the offer. Life for all, and liberty. The contents of the castle only to be surrendered. Bruno had been sure, almost sure that they would take the offer, knowing as they must that once a breach was made, all the laws of God and man said that there could then be no mercy for man, woman or child who had put the attackers to so much toil and risk. The other brothers, even of the Lanzenorden, had looked sideways at their master as he had sent Hartnit forward, knowing the offer meant the loss of their traditional privileges, hard-earned with the sweat of all and the life-blood of too many: killing and plunder, vengeance and rape. The brothers were sworn celibates, could never marry any more than monks. Celibacy did not apply to what happened in a sack, however. After all, all their partners would be dead before morning. The brothers needed the outlet custom gave them.
Yet they had let Hartnit go forward, knowing their master had some driving design. They had heard him shout his offer in the bastard Latin most could understand. They had even, some of them, better aware of the defenders' temper than Bruno, expected the flights of arrows that were the traditional refusal of an offer to surrender. Hartnit, behind his oversized shield or mantlet, had half-expected it too.
No-one had expected the great marble column that jerked over the wall and came down like a bonding giant's club. One end of it had smashed the mantlet and broken Hartnit almost in half before it plunged on and down the hillside in a cloud of dust. Every man had heard the piteous whimperings of Hartnit the bold, his splintered hip-bones driven through his bladder, until the Emperor himself had stilled them with his misericorde, the long thin dagger that gave final release.
Grimly, then, they had launched the next boulder from the counterweighted catapult, smashed the gate, fought their way in and over the barricade they had known would be set up in the inner courtyard, set themselves to winkle out every last defender from tower and attic and stair and cellar.
Grimly the defenders had fought back, never leaving a man, killing their own wounded as they retreated, till they were penned into the one last tower. Only men inside. Bruno himself had seen, in the inner rooms of the fortress as they fought their way through, the ranks of women, old people, children, slumped over their benches or lying with arms crossed: poisoned, dead, not a survivor. Just the last twenty or so trapped in the last tower, which his men had fired.
He lowered the shield, cautiously, waiting for the instant arrow, stepped forward a hesitant pace. He risked looking foolish now, but it had to be done. Once again, he called out: "You in there! Heretics! If you feel the flame, come out, surrender. I give you my word, my word as a Ritter, as a Kaiser, you will not be harmed. No-one in the world could have fought better. You have done enough."
Only the crackle and stab of flame in reply, his brothers looking sideways at him once more, wondering if the Emperor was mad. And then, from the heart of the flame, a voice calling.
"Emperor, know this. I am Marcabru the captain, alas still an imperfectus. We care nothing for you, and nothing for the flame. Tonight, like the good thief, I will be with my master in Paradise. For God is kind. He will not let us burn both in this world and the next."
A crash from the tower as its roof-beams fell in, a waft of dust and smoke, and silence, long silence broken only by the slackening flames. None of the familiar dreadful sounds of sack, the screams and the tears and the deep shouts of release. Only the crackle of flame and the crash of falling stone.
Bruno backed away, shield still up. Erkenbert had appeared now that the fighting had died, his escorts standing a pace behind him. He saw, amazingly, a light of excitement and even good humor shining in the Emperor's bright blue eyes.
"Well, we know something now," he said to the scrawny Englishman.
"What's that?"
"The bastards must have had something to hide. All we have to do now is find it."
The Fafnisbane ghosted through the night, her consorts spread out behind her, sails carrying her on with barely a ripple. Shef sat near the prow, feet overboard, catching from time to time a faint spray from the bow. Like a pleasure-cruise, he thought. Nothing like the ice and hunger of his long voyage to the North. He remembered the burnt face and body of Sumarrfugl, the way the skin had crackled under his hand as he drove the dagger home.
A presence on his blind side. He whipped round, relaxed. Half-relaxed. It was Svandis in her white dress, settling herself beside him.
"Brand didn't kill those fishermen, you know," she began. "He sank their boat, but gave them time to make a raft and load water on it. They had a pair of oars. He said they should reach either the mainland or one of the islands in about a day and a half, time enough for us to be gone."
"Unless one of their friends picks them up," muttered Shef.
"Do you want to turn into a man like my father?" Svandis hesitated for a few moments. "After all, they say you too are elgi einhamr, not a man of one skin. Because of what you see in dreams. Will you tell me about them? What was it that gave you those marks on your thigh the other night? They looked like the bite of a poison-adder. But you did not swell up and die. And the marks have gone now."
Shef hitched his tunic, stared at the place on his own thigh in the faint starlight. There was nothing there now, nothing that could be seen anyway. Perhaps he should tell her. He could feel the warmth of her body, comforting in the cool of the night, could catch the faint scent of woman, making him wonder for an instant what it would be like to hold her, plunge his face between her breasts. Shef had never in his life known comfort from a woman, held at arm's length by his mother, deprived by fate of his one love Godive. He felt a temptation to relax into it. Shrugged the temptation aside immediately. Eyes watched them, to put his head down and appeal for an embrace like a crying child would not be drengiligr, warriorly. Still, he could talk.
Quietly he began to tell her the details of his last dream. The stair. Feeling like a mouse among humans. The giant coming up the stair, his boots stamping. The monstrous serpent that came up after him, following the god Loki, as he was sure the giant had been. The orm-garth of the gods, with the snakes underfoot and the one that struck at him.
"That is why I believe in the gods," he ended. "I have seen them, I have felt them. That is why I know Loki is loose and set on vengeance. As if I needed to know, after Sumarrfugl."
Svandis was silent a while, for which he was grateful. She seemed to be thinking about what he said, instead of merely shouting it down. "Tell me," she asked finally, "was there anything in the dream that reminded you of something you had seen before? Something you might have been thinking about before you slept. The boots, for instance. The boots of the god coming up the stair. You said you saw them."
"The boots? They were like Brand's boots." Shef laughed, told her how as they marched through Cordova he had seen an amazed Arab looking Brand up and down, from his enormous feet to the helmet on his head. How he had barely been able to believe that such feet belonged to a human.
"So you had a picture like that already in your head? What about the snakes? Have you seen an orm-garth?"
Shef felt a prickle of doubt and suspicion once more. This was the daughter of Ivar, after all, the grand-daughter of Ragnar himself.
"I saw your grandfather die in the snake-pit," he said briefly. "Did no one ever tell you? I heard him sing his death-song."
"He used to hold me on his knee and sing to me," said Svandis.
"He used to grow his thumb-nail long to gouge men's eyes out with," replied Shef. "My friend Cuthred tore it out with pliers."
"So you have seen a snake-pit too," Svandis went on, "and seen a man die in it. Were you very frightened then? Did you imagine yourself in the pit?"
Shef thought for a while. "What you are trying to tell me," he said, "is that these visions of mine—I do not call them dreams—do not come from the gods at all. They are made up in my own head out of things I have seen, or been frightened by. They are like a story, a saga. One told by a fool, with no beginning or end and only bits of connections to each other. They do not feel like that. They feel—much bigger than that."
"Because you are asleep," said Svandis. "You are not thinking correctly."
"Anyway, the visions I see—they are visions of the gods! They tell the stories that I have heard from Thorvin, of Völund and Skirnir and Hermoth and Balder."
"Because you have heard them from Thorvin," said Svandis. "If you dreamt stories that Thorvin had not told you, that might mean something. Maybe only that you had made them up out of things you yourself have seen and felt. But do you not think that Arabs dream of Allah, Christians of their own stories of saints? Your visions are like the gods themselves. People make both of them up out of their own needs and beliefs. If we stopped believing—then we would be free."
Shef examined the idea with care and doubt. It seemed to him that sometimes he had seen the vision before he knew the story. Svandis would say that he had forgotten something, got the story backwards. Certainly he had no way of proving different. And she might be correct. Everyone knew that sometimes dreams were caused by the events of the day, or even by sounds that men heard in their sleep and turned into a story. The stoutest Viking had dreams of fear, often he had heard men muttering in their sleep.
"So there may be no Ragnarök," he wondered. "No Loki loose. I have been deceiving myself all along. If I could believe that, things would be much easier for me. And there would be no truth in visions."
"There is no truth in visions," Svandis said forcefully, determined to carry her point and make a convert. "Gods and visions are nothing but illusions, which we create to make ourselves slaves." She pressed closer in the cool night, leant forward to look up into Shef's one eye, her breast nudging against his arm.
Far to the north, at the Wisdom-House of Stamford in the English midlands, night had not yet fallen. Instead the stone tower with its many outbuildings lay in the long gray twilight of an English early summer. From the hedged fields nearby the heavy scent of flowering hawthorn drifted. Faint laughter came from the outskirts of the town where farm-churls and craftsmen, milking and ditching and trading done for the day, sat for the last hour before full dark with pint pots in their hands. Children played around their fathers in the dusk, and younger folk, men and women, exchanged glances and faded sometimes into the dark of the comforting fields.
At the Wisdom-House itself, the forges had fallen silent, though red light came still from banked fires. A priest strode across the central courtyard, intending to call on his friends, draw them out to drink mulled ale and discuss their experiments and their discoveries. As he turned the corner by the stone tower he stopped short.
On a bench in front of him sat Farman priest of Frey, most famous of the priests in England for the number of his god-visions, rivaled in the world only by Vigleik the Norwegian. Farman sat easily. His eyes were open, but he seemed unseeing. Cautiously the priest who had come upon him moved closer, saw that Farman's eyes did not move from their fixed unblinking stare. He stepped back quietly, went to the corner again, waved urgently for others to join him. After a while a score of Way-priests stood in a semi-circle round their un-moving colleague, apprentices and laymen chased away. They waited unspeaking for him to move.
His eyes blinked, he stirred on the bench, became aware of those around him.
"What did you see, brother?" asked one of them.
"At the end—at the end I saw a tree, and a serpent in it. Before the tree there stood a woman, one of great beauty. She was holding out an apple to a man, and he—he was stretching his hand out to it. And all the while the serpent watched, and its forked tongue flickered out and in."
No reaction from the Way-priests. None of them had read the Christian books, they knew nothing of Satan, of Adam and Eve and the Fall of Man.
"But before that, before that I saw something of more mark. Something the king must hear of."
"The One King is not here, brother," a priest reminded gently, knowing that those coming out of the vision needed time to recover themselves.
"His deputy. His partner."
"King Alfred is his partner. He presides over the council of aldermen. There is no deputy."
Farman rubbed his eyes. "I must write down what I saw before it fades, and then the news must go to the king."
"Can you tell us anything of what you saw?"
"Danger and destruction. Fire and venom—and the bane of Balder loose."
The priests stiffened, knowing who it was that Farman would not name, the god they remembered by the bale-fire in their holy circle.
"If the bane of Balder is loose," one of them asked slowly, "what is it that the English king Alfred can do? Council of aldermen or no?"
"He can turn out the fleet," replied Farman. "Send every man and every ship to the place of danger. And that is not the mouth of the Elbe now, no, nor the Dannevirke. The bane of Balder is loose everywhere, but he will show himself first in the south, where the sons of Muspell ride on the day of Ragnarök."
He stood up, like a man unutterably weary from an immense journey. "I did wrong, brothers. I should have gone with the One King when he went to seek his destiny. For his destiny affects us all."
From the hitherto barely-known rock of Puigpunyent the riders spurred in all directions. Some at the best speed their horses could make: they had little distance to travel, were under orders to go directly to every baron's hold and rock-based tower in the borderlands, to demand every man that could ride to join their Emperor. They would not get them, for in the complex local politics of the mountain marches, where Frank faced Spaniard and Christian faced heretic, where the Moors raided continually and Jewish levies watched the passes and the toll-roads, no baron, not even those whom Bruno's informants had selected for loyalty to Holy Church, would think of leaving himself defenseless. Nor would Bruno trust them if they did. But they would provide the first ring, till they were replaced by better men, at this moment when the Empire and the Emperor needed above all numbers.
Other messengers paced themselves more carefully, riding in small groups with a tail of spare horses behind them. They had further to go: some many hundreds of miles further, but all of them knowing that it would be days of riding before they reached the secure parts of the Empire, where remounts were to be had at the display of the Emperor's tokens. Those who had furthest to go were the ones selected to ride for the strongholds of the Lanzenorden, all of them in the German-speaking realms far to the east and north, through the mountains or across the Rhine: Freiburg and Worms, Trier and Zurich and even Bern high in the Alps. From there would come the men in whom Bruno had most trust, every last warrior-monk of the Order, the men he needed to fight his war and pursue his quest to the finish. There would be no hesitation or calculation there. But they could not come immediately, would never come in the numbers he needed.
In between were the riders heading for every bishop's seat in the marches of Southern France and Italy: Massilia and Vercelli, Lyons and Turin and Carcassonne and Dax. Their message was the simplest. Every man you can spare. No need for knights, no need for the heavy-armed and aristocratic, though they must come too, to officer the rest. Send every man who has a pair of eyes and a hunting bow. Send the poachers and the huntsmen, the falconeers and the charcoal-burners. The confessors of every village must know who are the men who can find their way in the dark, who can chase the deer across the hills and into the maquis. Offer forgiveness and remission of sins to all who will take service now, for Church and Cross and Empire. Above all, Bruno had pointed out, I must have your bacheliers: the men who in proper Latin, if the Latin of the degenerating Empire, would have been vaccalarii, the men of the vaches. The cowboys, who rode the marshes of the Camargue on their rough horses, armed with the ten-foot ox-goads that were their trade-tool, strips of jerked beef wound round their hats, watchful at all times for the attacks of the stalking, furious-tempered wild bulls. Too flighty and light-armed for battle, but capable of scouring a countryside like a kitchen-maid sanding rust out of a kettle.
"I want this place sealed off tighter than an abbess's—tighter than a convent dormitory," Bruno had said, forgetting his usual careful respectfulness to every form of religious life. "We haven't the men now, but as soon as they start to come in, assign them and place them. Till then, Tasso," he added to his Lanzenorden guard-commander, "you can tell our lads that no one goes to sleep. Me neither. Get them out and watching every rock."
"What for?" said Tasso.
"You saw the way they all killed themselves. Why? Because they didn't want anyone to tell us something. Tell us where something was. So it must be here. And you can be sure someone will try to get it out. So we'll seal the place off."
"That won't find anything," said Tasso, an old comrade allowed to speak freely to a brother of the order, even if that brother was his Kaiser and commander.
Bruno seized him with both hands by the beard. "It won't lose anything either! And now we know it's here, once we're all sealed off, all we have to do is look."
"We've looked already."
"Not under every stone we haven't. And we're going to take every last stone of this hill down and throw it in the sea if we have to! Erkenbert!" Bruno shouted to his deacon, busily giving messengers their directions. "Tell the bishops to send pickaxes too! And men to use them."
Released, Tasso tramped off to survey the ground and set up his too-scanty sentry-posts. As the day wore on his expression grew more and more troubled. A Bavarian himself, from the vineyards of the south, he found the ravines and dense scrub of the sharp, steep Pyrenean foothills baffling.
"Need a thousand men to do this job," he muttered to himself. "Two thousand. And where's the food coming from? Or the water? Still: Befehl ist Befehl. Helmbrecht, Siegnot, Hartmut, guard this path here. And remember, no one sleeps till reliefs are sent. Kaiserbefehl, understand?"
He tramped on in the heat, scattering detachments here and there. He did not know that keeping pace with him a quarter of a mile outside the ring he was setting up, sliding through the dense thorny scrub as low to the ground as a weasel, eyes watched his every move.
The shepherd lad had expected fear and strangeness as he came in to make his report, but even so he gulped and swallowed convulsively as his eyes adapted to the dim light. Facing him behind a rough table sat a semi-circle of men. At least, they might be men. Every figure was dressed in long grey robes, and each one had a cowl over his head, pulled so far forward that the faces could not be seen. If he had seen them, he might have recognized them. For no one could be sure who the perfecti might be, though among the heretic villages rumors and evaluations ran continually: he refused mutton the other day, maybe he eats no meat, his wife and he sleep together but speak to each other like brother and sister, she has not given birth for three years though her child was weaned last spring. All might be indicators of having passed into the central mystery. But in the heretic villages all strove to live like perfecti even though they might never reach that grade: so fasting or celibacy might indicate only ambition, not achievement. The cowled men could be anyone.
The shepherd boy knelt clumsily, straightened again. A voice came from the semi-circle, not from the middle. It might be that a spokesman had been selected because his voice would not be recognized. In any case he spoke in no more than a whisper.
"What did you see at Puigpunyent?"
The lad considered. "I went close up to the rock, from all sides except the east, where the road is. The gate is battered down, the towers are burnt and much of the stone has fallen in. The Emperor's men swarm over the castle as thick as fleas on an old dog."
"What of the outside?"
"The Christians have placed men all round the rock, as close to the base of it as they can get, in a ring on all sides. They are heavy men in armor, and walk about very little in the heat. Food and water is brought out to them. I cannot understand what they say to each other, but they do not sleep and they seem not to complain. Much of the time they sing their heathen hymns and prayers."
The perfecti ignored the lad's equation of Christian and heathen: it was what they thought themselves. The interrogating voice dropped even lower.
"Were you not afraid that they would catch you?"
The lad smiled. "Men in armor? Catch me on the hillside, or in the maquis? No, lords. If they saw me they could not catch me. But they have never seen me."
"Well then, tell us this. Could you—you and some of your fellows, it might be—could you pierce their ring and get over the wall and inside the castle? Perhaps take one of us with you. A mountain man, but not a swift boy such as yourself?"
The boy's face grew more hesitant. If he said yes, would they ask him to do it? He had no wish to join the corpses he had seen carried out and laid on the green plain below the castle entrance. Yet above all he wished for the good opinion of the men whom all respected, the men of honor.
"Their posts are badly placed, and the sentries start and shoot if so much as a fox rustles in the thickets. Yes, I could make my way through them. And maybe three or four of my friends. An older man... The spines on the scrub grow high, you see, maybe a foot, two feet from the ground. I do not walk, I slide on my belly, fast as another man walks. A heavier man, a man who does not stoop, who says 'Oh, my back' "—for a moment the lad imitated the priest of his village, a heretic like the rest but one who remained in communion with the Church and the bishop, to throw off suspicion—"he could not get through. He would be caught."
The cowled heads nodded almost imperceptibly as they registered the finality of his statement.
"And caught he must not be," observed the whispering voice. "Thank you, lad, you have done us a service. Your village shall know of it. Our blessing to you, and may it grow as you grow older. Outside, talk to the men you will find there. Show them the sentry-posts as you have seen them."
After he had gone out, nothing was said for a while. "Bad news," said one of the cowls after a while. "He knows there is something there."
"It was the defiance of Marcabru that alerted him. If they had surrendered and walked out, he would have thought it was just another siege and gone his way. It is best not to attract attention. To surrender, to deny our faith, to vow obedience to the Pope as we have always done. Then return to what we know after they have gone."
"Marcabru fought to the last because he feared someone would talk. And who knows? They might have done. Maybe he had his orders. After all, we do not know what happened inside the castle. Maybe there were signs of treason."
The silence descended again. Another voice volunteered information. "They say that after the Emperor took the castle he had all the bodies inside it carried out on to the plain by the river, and there had them burnt. But before he did that his men stripped and searched all the dead. Searched their bellies with knives, even, to be sure they had hidden nothing. After they were burnt his men sifted the ash once more. And everything inside the castle, every stick of chair or table, was carried out and laid out to be inspected by the Emperor and his black deacon. He had them burnt too, before people of the nearby villages, while he watched their faces. He thought they would betray it if they saw a holy relic burnt."
"He does not know what he is looking for, then."
"No. Nor does he know how to find the entrance to the place of the Grail."
"But he is demolishing the castle stone by stone. How long will it take before some pick-stroke lays bare the door, or the staircase?"
"Not for a long time," said one of the voices, with certainty in its tone.
"But if he digs down to very bedrock?"
For a third time the silence fell. At length, as the sun threw shadows further and further aslant across the dim-windowed room, the most certain of the voices spoke again.
"We cannot take the risk. We must recover our treasures. By war. By stealth. With a bribe. If we need help from outside we must find it."
"Outside?" came a query.
"The world is coming to us now. The Emperor, successor of Charlemagne, whom we drove off eighty years ago. But others too. Strange news from Cordova, as you know. We must guard above all against thinking like men, as if all that happens in this world were mere chance and mortal effort. For we know it is a battle-ground, between the One Above and the One Below. If all that happened, happened in this world, we know which one would win."
"And yet He is the princeps huius mundi, the Great Prince of the World."
"And so we must go outside. Outside our world, outside this world."
Slowly the perfecti, the men who believed the God of the Christians was indeed the Devil, to be overthrown when time came into its fullness, began to evolve their plan for bringing that fullness forward.
The old man who sat in the shade of the vine-trellis looked at the King of the North sitting opposite him with doubt. He did not look like a king, still less like the subject of prophecy. He was not dressed in Bozrah purple. His men did not bow down before him. He was sitting on a small stool, and following the custom of the Northerners, sitting in full sunlight, as if he could not get enough of it. Sweat ran from his brow, dripped steadily on to the flagstones of the balcony built out to overlook sea and harbor far below.
"You are sure he is a king?" the old man asked Suleiman again. They spoke in Hebrew, Shef listening patiently but without understanding to the alien syllables, which no Englishman had ever heard before in the history of the world.
"I have seen him in his homeland, in his own hall. He rules a wide realm."
"He was born a Christian, you tell me. He will understand this, then. Tell him..." The old man, Benjamin Prince of Septimania, Lion of Judah, Ruler of the Rock of Sion, spoke on. After a few moments Suleiman—or, in his own country, Solomon—began to interpret.
"My prince tells me that you will understand what it says in our holy book, which was your holy book also, in the days when you were of the Christian Church. In the Book of the Wisdom of ben-Shirach, which you call 'Ecclesiasticus,' it is said, 'The conies are a feeble folk, but they dwell in the rocks.' The Prince says that here—and I have told him what your strange woman said of the Jews—here the Jews are not a feeble folk. Yet still they dwell in the rocks, as you can see in all directions." He waved a hand at the mountains looming not far off, at the sheer stone walls guarding harbor and town.
Shef stared at him blankly. The Jewish prince's assumption that a Christian was bound to know Old and New Testaments was completely wide of the mark. Shef had never heard of 'Ecclesiasticus,' never read a Bible, had indeed never seen a Bible in his life till he attended the wedding of his love Go-dive and his partner Alfred in the great cathedral at Winchester. The priest of his fenland village had owned only a service book, with extracts from the Bible for the different services of the Church year. All that Father Andreas had ever even tried to teach was respect for authority, whether that were the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the necessity for tithing, or social superiors. He had never seen a coney or rabbit either, though this did not matter since Solomon had translated the word as 'hare,' for want of a better.
"Hares don't live in the rocks," he said. "They live in the open field."
Solomon hesitated. "The point my prince wishes to make is that we have very strong natural and artificial defenses."
Shef looked round. "Yes, I can see that."
"He did not understand my remark," cut in Benjamin.
"No. The fact is, prince, that these people receive almost no education, even if they are born Christians. Few of them can read and write. I believe the king here can, but he does not do so easily. I do not think he knows the Scriptures at all."
"They are not People of the Book, then."
Solomon hesitated. This was no time to explain the doctrines of the Way, its devotion to new knowledge. His prince and his people felt no loyalty to the Caliph, less to the Emperor, were ready for any new alliance that might bring change. There was no need to hinder their acceptance.
"I think they are trying to be," he suggested. "With difficulty and by themselves. I have seen their own writing. It is developed from a way of cutting signs with knives on bits of wood."
Slowly the prince pushed himself to his feet. "It is meritorious," he said, "to assist those who desire to learn. Come. Let us show the king here what a school is like. A school for those who are truly People of the Book, not like the followers of Mohammed, for ever remembering without understanding, nor those of Yeshua, for ever hiding behind languages no one but their priests is allowed to know."
Shef rose too, not unwilling to follow his hosts' demands, but increasingly bored with listening to conversations that no one troubled to translate. As Solomon explained the purpose of their visit his eye was drawn against his will to what was going on down in the crowded and sunlit harbor. By the outer mole, where the ships of the Northern fleet rode at anchor well away from shore and from the native craft, they were veering out the kites again. He glanced to see if the old prince was waiting for him, saw that he had gone a few steps inside into the cool dark. Pulled his far-seer from his belt and snatched a quick glance through it. The kite was lifting well in a fresh breeze, Steffi now confidently directing operations. And they'd got Tolman, smallest and lightest of the ships' boys, standing by the rail! Were the bastards going to try the next experiment without him? It was a good day for it, and Tolman, bred to a fisherman's family off Lowestoft, was known to be able to swim like a fish.
The Jews were waiting for him. Shef shut the far-seer up, followed Solomon, Skaldfinn, Prince Benjamin and the rest of the escorts and entourage glumly into the dark. To join the People of the Book.
As Shef was led firmly and unwaveringly round the stronghold of the Jewish enclave, planted long ago at the time of the fall of Rome, his sense of strangeness and oppression grew steadily. After the court of the Caliph, he had thought himself ready for any new experience, but the fortress town seemed arranged like no other he had seen in North or South. There was the same crowded and active life that he had grown familiar with in the streets and markets of Cordova, among people dressed in much the same way and talking languages in which he recognized the occasional snatch of Arabic or of some Latin tongue. Yet the sense of sprawl, of activities going on without license or control or physical boundary was missing. The prince led him first on a careful tour of the town's outer defenses, a stone wall cunningly linking natural cliff and precipice so as to shut in completely the bay and the harbor like a three-quarter circle. The strange thing was that in every other fortress city Shef had seen, whether York or London or Cordova, there was always and as if immune to regulation a second city, an outer huddle beyond the walls of huts and shacks, the dwellings of those not rich enough to come inside the protection of the city yet drawn there all the same by the wealth it grew and slowly dripped from its boundaries. Alert guard-captains were continually tearing them down, driving the inhabitants further away, trying to keep themselves a clear field of view and dart. It never worked. Always the whores and the hucksters and the beggars crawled back and remade their outer village.
Not here. Nothing obstructed the walls, not so much as a kennel for dogs or a private latrine. Nothing grew in their crevices either—Shef saw a party of men on one stretch lowering some of their number over the parapets to grub out weeds from the stone. Though he could see tilled fields and groves in the distance, he could see not so much as a shed for a watchman. The parties he saw moving to and from fields to city carried their tools with them: in both directions, he noted. They did not even leave their heavy plows and grain-baskets outside the walls.
"I understand what you mean to do," he said finally to Solomon, still gravely interpreting the remarks of his ruler. "I do not see how you make people do it. I could not do that with my own people, even if they were slaves. There is always someone who will try to bend the rules, and ten more to follow him. Even if you flog and brand the way the black monks did, there will always be someone who does not understand what is he to do no matter how often you tell him. Those people out there, are they your slaves? Why do they obey so willingly?"
"We do not keep slaves," replied Solomon. "Slavery is forbidden to us under our Law." He translated the rest of Shef's comments, listened to the long reply, spoke again.
"Benjamin ha-Nasi says that you are right to ask these questions, and that he sees you are a ruler in truth. He says you are right also to say that knowing the law is more wonderful than obeying the law, and declares that it is his belief that it is the unlearned alone who bring trouble into the world.
"What he wishes you to understand is that we Jews are different from your people, as from the Caliph's. It is our custom to permit open debate of any matter—your lady Svandis might stand up in our debating chamber and say all that she pleases, and no one would interrupt her. But it is our custom also that once a decision has been made, a rule passed, then all must obey it, even those who argued most strongly against it. We do not punish for disagreement. We punish for not obeying the will of the community. That is why people obey all the rules willingly. Because we are the People not only of the Book, but of the Law."
"And how do you all know the Law?"
"You will see."
Turning from the battlements, the party retraced its steps into the center of the crowded forty-acre site, full of houses of stone and plaster connected by alley ways no wider than two men, winding up and down flights of steps that sometimes seemed to reach the gradient of ladders.
"See there," said Solomon, pointing inside a narrow courtyard. There in the shade sat a man dressed in black, solemnly intoning a long unvarying drone to a dozen boys of different ages squatting on the ground. "That is one of the prince's geonim. The prince maintains a dozen such, scholars who instruct youth without pay, for the love of learning. See, he will not desist even though he sees the prince his master pass by. For learning is more important than princes."
"What is he teaching them?"
Solomon listened for a while to the steady drone, and then nodded. "He is reciting to them points of halakhah. That is; part of the Mishnah. The Mishnah is the law of our people, based first on our holy books, which the Christians call the Old Testament. But the Mishnah is all that has been thought and said on these books since we first made our Covenant with God. In the halakhot we learn particular decisions which have been made on particular points."
"Such as what?"
"At present the gaon is explaining why, though saving a man's life takes precedence over saving a woman's, it is proper to cover the nakedness of a woman before that of a man."
Shef nodded, walked on broodingly, following the prince's unostentatious and unheralded tour. Another thing was beginning to catch his eye. Books in the crowd. He had seen several being carried, one man sitting short-sightedly with his nose almost buried between the covers of one. In one of the markets he thought he had caught a glimpse of a stall with a dozen or more laid out as if for sale. Shef had never heard of a book being sold. The Vikings stole them and ransomed them back, when they could, to their owners. The monks of Saint Benedict made them for themselves and their priest-dependents. No-one ever sold one. They were too valuable. Thorvin would have died in his boots before selling his collection of the holy songs, written down with difficulty in the jagged runic script. How many books did these people have? Where did they come from?
They paused again at what Shef identified as a church, if a Jewish one. In it men and women were praying, bending to the ground like Mohammedans, but somewhere in the dark interior Shef saw a candle burning, and in its light a man reading from another book, seemingly to two separated groups of men and women. Further on a square, and in it two men debating. Each listened impassively to the other, then, at intervals of perhaps five hundred words, spoke in his turn. From the ring of their voices it seemed to Shef that each would begin by quoting words not his own, and would then go on to explain them and fit them against the arguments of the other. A crowd surrounded them, intent and silent but for grunts of agreement, moans of rejection.
"The one says, 'Take thou no usury'," clarified Solomon. "The other replies, 'To a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury.' Now they are disputing as to the meaning of the word 'stranger'."
Shef nodded, reflecting. He knew of rule by the sword, like his own and that of the Viking rulers he had overthrown. He knew of rule by fear and slavery, like that of the monks and the Christian kings. It seemed that this was rule by book and by law, and by law which was put down in book form, not decided by the doom of king or jarl or alderman. The law of the book seemed, however, no wiser than that of the immediate judgment of his own courts. There was something he did not understand.
"Do your people study anything but law?" he asked.
Solomon translated, heard the reply from the prince still leading the way before them. "He says, all learning is either a code or a commentary." Solomon struggled to find expression for either idea in Shef's Anglo-Norse, fixing in the end on "book of laws," "book of decisions."
Shef nodded again, his face imperturbable. Was this new knowledge? Or just old knowledge continually chewed over, the thing he had set his face against in his own land and his own capital?
"See," Solomon said, pointing the way finally to a small building down almost by the harbor-front once again. In the background, between the alley-walls, Shef caught a momentary glimpse of a kite swooping in the air, gaped at it convulsively. They had flown off without him! And he was almost sure from the glimpse that they had sent Tolman aloft after all: the kite had not been moving freely in the air, had been under control.
"See," said Solomon again, more firmly. "This at least you will find new knowledge."
Reluctantly, still craning his neck upwards, Shef followed his hosts into the building. Inside, tables set round a central space. Men behind the tables, and from them a continuous scritch-scritch sound as their hands moved, seemingly all in time like the feet of the Emperor's marching soldiers or Shef's own troops. A man in the midst of them all, standing up, holding a book and reading from it. Reading, whatever the language, very slowly, a pause every few words.
They were copying, Shef realized. He had heard of such places even among the Christians. One man read slowly, the others wrote down his words, at the end, depending on how many copiers you had, six, even ten books where there had only been one. Impressive, and showing once again how the People of the Law knew their law. Yet this too was hardly new knowledge.
A word from the prince, and the reading stopped, the reader and the copiers turning to their ruler and bowing gravely. "It is not the copying that is new," said Solomon, "nor, the Holy One forbid, the copied. Rather that which they copy on to."
At a word the reader held his book, his master copy, out towards Shef. He took it clumsily, unsure for a moment at which side it might open. His hands were used to hammers and tongs, rope and wood, not these little thin sheets of skin.
Skin? If it was skin, he did not know what kind of a beast it came from. He raised the book, sniffed carefully. Felt the leaf between his fingers, twisting it as he would have a sheet of vellum. Not vellum. Not even the other thing, papyrus, made from strange reeds. The thin stuff parted, the reader stepped forward again with a look and cry of anger. Shef paused, held the book carefully, returned it, staring into the man's angry eyes without hint of expression or apology. Only a fool thinks everyone knows what he knows.
"I do not understand," he said to Solomon. "It is not the calf-skin we use. It has no flesh side, no hair side. Can it be bark?"
"Neither. But it is made from wood. The Latins call it papyrium, from some Egyptian plant or other. But we do not make our papyrium from that plant, only from wood, crushed and felted. We add other things to it, a kind of clay that prevents the ink from running. Knowledge of it came from very far away, from the other end of the Arabs' empire. There, at Samarkand, they fought a battle with soldiers from another empire far across the desert and mountain lands. The Arabs were victorious and brought back many captives from the land of Chin. They, it is said, taught the Arabs the secret of paper. But the Arabs put little value in it, preferring to teach their boys only enough for them to remember sections of the Koran by heart. It is we who have made the books. With new knowledge."
New knowledge to make the books, thought Shef. Not new knowledge—Solomon prayed to the Holy One to forbid it—not new knowledge in the books. Yet this explained something. It explained why there were so many books, so many readers. To make a book of vellum might take the skins of twenty calves, even more, for not the whole skin could be used. Not one man in a thousand could expect to own the skins of twenty calves.
"What is the price of a book?" he asked.
Solomon passed on the question to Benjamin, standing watching, his guards and scholars behind him.
"He says, the price of wisdom is above that of rubies."
"I didn't mean the price of the wisdom. I meant the price of the paper."
As Solomon translated again, the look of scorn on the face of the angry reader, still smoothing over his torn page, deepened into open contempt.
"I do not think there is much hope in them," said Shef to his counselors that evening, watching the sun go down behind the sharp and jagged mountains. Much the same, had he known it, was being said about him among the scholars and learned men who dominated the Jewish court. "They know a lot. But the knowledge is all about rules, either about their God or about themselves. Yet they collect what they need from far afield. They know some things that we do not, like this paper stuff. But when it comes to Greek fire..." He shook his head. "Solomon said we could enquire among the Arab and Christian merchants of the aliens' quarter. Tell me more about the flying. You should have waited for me."
"The men said they might be at sea again in a day's time, and the wind was just high enough without being a danger. So they put Tolman in the harness and let the wind lift him. But they did two things that bin-Firnas did not do..." Earnestly Thorvin went through the details of the day's launch, when the young boy, still moored but trying to maneuver his great box-kite, had flown out to the end of the longest rope they had been able to splice together, five hundred feet of it. At the far end of the ship Tolman was boasting of his prowess to the other boys and the crewmen, his treble pipe lifting from time to time over Thorvin's rumble. As the night came down the voices died, men turned to their hammocks or stretched out on the warm sun-retaining decks.
Usually, in his dreams, Shef knew that he was dreaming, could feel the presence of his instructor. This time he did not. Did not know, even, who he was.
He was lying on stone, he could feel the cold of it running into his back. There was pain all around him too, back and sides and feet, and something deep and tearing in his chest. He ignored it as if it were happening to someone else.
What frightened him, brought out the chill sweat racing down his face, was that he could not move. Not an arm, not a finger. He was wrapped round and round in folds of some stuff or other, binding arms to sides and legs together. Was it a shroud? Was he buried, still alive? If it were, he could struggle upward, would strike his head against the coffin. For long moments he lay afraid to make the trial. For if he were buried, he could not move, could not cry out. Surely he would go mad.
Convulsively he lunged upward, felt the tearing pain again near his heart. But there was nothing there. Why then could he not see? There was a band under his chin, binding his jaw up. He was buried. Or at least he had been taken for dead.
But he could see! Or at least there was a light, no, a patch of darkness less dark than the rest. Shef stared at it, willing it to increase. And there were movements coming towards him. In the terror of live burial, fear of other men had dissolved. Shef thought of nothing but attracting their attention, whoever they were, begging to be cut free. He opened his mouth, let out a faint croak.
But whoever it was had no fear of the dead, or the dead coming to life. There was a sharp point on his throat-ball, a face looking down at him. The face said, slowly and distinctly,
"How shall a man be born when he is old? Or enter again into the womb of his mother?"
Shef gaped up, terrified. He did not know the answer.
He realized he was gaping up into a face, a face lit by starlight. In the same instant he knew once again who he was, and where he was: in his hammock, slung at the very bow of the Fafnisbane for the cool rising off the water. And the face above him was that of Svandis.
"Were you dreaming?" she asked quietly. "I heard you croaking as if your throat had dried up."
Shef nodded, relief flooding through him. He sat up carefully, feeling the cold sweat soaking his tunic. There was no one else nearby. The crew granted him the small privacy of the space beyond the catapult platform.
"What was it about?" she whispered. He could smell her hair very close to his face. "Tell me your dream."
Shef rolled soundlessly from his hammock, crouched face to face with the girl, the daughter of Ivar whom he had killed. He felt the awareness of her as a woman growing stronger every second, as if the years of sorrow and impotence had never visited him.
"I will tell you," he whispered with sudden confidence, "and you shall interpret it for me. But I will do it with my arms round you."
He embraced her gently, felt an instant resistance, continued to hold her as she felt the sweat of fear on him. Her rigid stance seemed to thaw, she let him draw her down on to the deck.
"I was lying on my back," he whispered, "wrapped in a shroud. And I thought that I had been buried somewhere and left. I was terrified..." As he spoke, Shef slowly drew up the hem of her dress, pulled her warm thigh close to his own cold body. She seemed to feel his need for comfort, began to co-operate, to press closer to him. He pulled the dress higher, the white dress of a priestess corded round with red berries, pulled it higher yet, still whispering.
From all directions the levies converged on the rock of Puigpunyent, where a tense and raging Emperor directed them as they came in, either to strengthening the ring upon ring of sentry-posts set in the ravines and thorny scrub all around, or to the ever-growing gangs of pickax-men who, stone by stone, were dismantling the towers and walls of the heretics' fortress.
A hundred miles to the south, admiral Georgios and general Agilulf stared puzzledly at each other as they digested the order to halt, return, cease the pressure on the Arab forces, abandon the search for the vanished Northern fleet: return at once with every man and every ship.
Little further to the south, the Caliph himself, taking the field in the service of the Prophet for the first time for many years, pressed forward at the head of the greatest army Cordova had sent out since the days when the forces of Islam had tried to conquer France and the lands beyond it, to be turned back by Charles whom the Franks called "the Hammer," Martel.
And crossing the Bay of Biscay came a force small in comparison with the others in numbers of ships and men, but their superior in the new qualities of range and weight of missile: the fleet of the One King, of England and the North, drawn from all its blockade stations against the Empire and sent south on the word of Farman the seer. Twenty mule-armed two-masters, thirty longships pacing them, packed with the unemployed and impatient warriors of the North, all laden as deep as they could be pressed with beef and beer and biscuit for the appetites of more than two thousand men. Alfred had accepted Farman's vision-warning, but refused the expedition command, saying England must not be left kingless: the fleet sailed under the orders of Gold-Guthmund, sub-king of the Swedes, once known (and still well-remembered) as Guthmund the Greedy.
Even in Rome, even in Byzantium, attention was falling on the remote borderlands where the Emperor of the Romans searched for the Grail-relic that would complete his empire, and where the Shatt al-Islam had suffered its first turning-back in more than a hundred years.
But the One King himself sat in the sunlight and linked fingers with his mistress, smiling foolishly.
"Completely slit-struck," snarled Brand to the rest of the king's council, watching the pair at their table by the harbor from a decent distance. "Always happens to him. Treats women as if they all had snakes up their skirts for years on end, then one of them does something or other to him, can't think how, and bang! You can't even get his attention. Behaves like a fourteen-year-old who's just been taken behind the barn by a milkmaid."
"There may be no harm in it," offered Thorvin. "After all, better that he has a woman than that he doesn't. Who knows, he may get her with child..."
"The way they're going on they should have triplets already, whole ship shakes half the night..."
"...and if that were to happen, it might make the King—take his responsibilities more seriously. And she is who she is. Daughter of Ivar, granddaughter of Ragnar. She can trace her line back to Völsi himself, and through him to Othin." Thorvin pointed to the ship moored a furlong off on the still water. "Fafnisbane, Sigurth the dragon-slayer, his blood runs in her veins. No-one was more pleased than I when her father and uncles were killed. But there was no-one alive who did not in some way respect them. She is one of the god-born, and of a family favored by Othin. Maybe that will avert some of the anger of the god, which some of us have feared for him."
The council pondered his words. On the whole the Vikings among them, Hagbarth and Skaldfinn, even Brand despite himself, were impressed. Cwicca and Osmod looked at each other silently: their memories of Ivar the Boneless had not faded. Only Hund allowed trouble to show on his face. Brand, with the champion's sensitivity to matters of honor and precedence, noticed it.
"She was never your woman," he remarked with as near kindness as his voice could manage. "Do you feel he owes you a debt because she was your apprentice?"
"No," he said. "I wish them well, if they have chosen each other. But what is all this about the god-born and the blood of heroes?" Bitterness tinged his voice. "Look at them over there! Who are they? A pirate's bastard who spent most of his youth in a wattle hut. And a woman who has been a drab to half of Denmark. And that is the One King and the One Queen-to-be!"
He rose abruptly and stalked away across the bright and crowded quayside. The others watched him go.
"What he says is true," muttered Hagbarth.
"Yes, but he worked his way up, didn't he?" contradicted Cwicca, aflame with anger at any criticism of his master. "And I expect she only done what she had to, too. I think that's as important as kings' blood anyway. Me and Osmod should know: how many kings have we been at the death of, Osmod?"
"Six," said Osmod briefly. "If you count the Frankish king, that is, we didn't kill him but his men did it for us once we beat him."
"The trouble is," said Thorvin, "the more you kill, the more power goes into the hands of the ones you don't."
Only a few yards away from the Northerners on the crowded quayside, a different group watched the pair of lovers. They squatted in the shade of an awning where a tailor advertised his wares, the tailor himself crouched on a tiny stool, passing cloth through his hands while he stitched with the speed of a serpent. As his feigned customers felt material and from time to time called out the cries of surprise and outrage which were part of normal negotiation, tradesman and clients exchanged muttered comments.
"That is him for sure," said one in the thick and sweaty homespun of a mountain shepherd. "The one eye. The gold circlet. The charm round his neck."
"The graduale," corrected a better-dressed man, grey-haired and grey-bearded. The others looked sideways at him, corrected themselves and returned their eyes to the cloth.
"Two days ago he went all through the city with ha-Nasi," said the tailor, voice and eyes never rising. "At the librarium he tore a book and asked what was the price of wisdom. The geonim think him an idiot and have asked ha-Nasi to send him away. Yesterday and today he has been with the woman. His eyes never leave her. He cannot keep his hands from her body, or only with difficulty."
The grey-haired man looked first disbelieving, then sad. "It may be that he is still bound in service to the Evil One. But who is not, when he is born? It is from that that we have to climb. Thierry, do you think he would come freely, if we asked him?"
"No. He knows nothing of us."
"Can we bribe him?"
"He is a rich man. His clothes would disgrace an onion-grower, but see the gold he wears. They say..."
"What do they say?"
"They say he asks always for new knowledge. His men talk of the Greek fire in the taverns, say openly they seek a way to match it. Every day, when the wind rises, they fly strange kites with boys in them from the decks of their ships. If you could tell him how to make Greek fire he might go with you. Or send another."
"I know no way to make Greek fire," said the greybeard slowly.
The shepherd spoke again. "Then it will have to be the woman."
To cover the silence that fell, the tailor raised his voice in a cry of approval of his own wares and amazement at his prices.
"It will have to be the woman," said the greybeard heavily. "So it is with men. Their own desires lead them to danger and to death. Their loins urge them to give life. But every life they give is another hostage to the Evil One. God the Father of the Christians."
"Jehovah of the Jews," added the shepherd.
"The Prince of this World," said all the men in the booth together. Ritualistically, each man spat briefly and secretly into his palm.
Shef, the object of so much hidden scrutiny, rose finally from the table where he had been sitting, throwing down a silver penny with his own head on it as payment for the strong resined wine: the Jews had no such prohibition as the Mohammedans against strong drink, though they did not consume it in the everyday fashion of the Latins or the determined drunkenness of the Way-folk.
"Let's go back to the ship," he said.
Svandis shook her head. "I want to walk round. Talk to people."
Shef's face showed surprise, dismay, alarm. "You did that before. In Cordova. You were away all night. You won't..."
She smiled. "I won't treat you the way I did poor Hund."
"There are no slaves here, you know. What language will you speak?"
"If I can't find anyone to talk to I'll come back." Shef continued to stare down at her. Since they had mated on the deck of the Fafnisbane a bare day and a half before, he had thought of nothing but her. It seemed to be part of his nature that once he was attached to a woman, no other would do, no other thought could enter him. Except what had to be done. Now there was nothing to be done. Yet something told him that this was a woman who could not be held, who would rebel at the suggestion of it. And soon the wind would rise. "Come soon," he said, and walked away, waving already for the boat and the rowers that would take him back to the Fafnisbane.
As the afternoon breeze began to rise, the kite-handlers prepared for yet another trial flight. A small elite of them had grown up. Cwicca and Osmod had places as of right: they had been companions of the One King in all his exploits. Even more important, both of them now had ground into them the deep belief that there was a technical solution to every problem. Technical solutions had raised both of them from slavery to wealth—first the catapult, then the crossbow, then case-hardened steel, then water-wheels, windmills, the cam, the trip-hammer and the mill-driven bellows. They were used to the immense difficulties of putting ideas into practice, turning imagination into technology. They knew it could be done. Perhaps most significantly, they knew it had to be done by trial and error, by combining the knowledge of many. Failure one day did not deter them the next. Their conviction was contagious.
Another member of the gang was Steffi, the squinter. He too had belief—belief enough, as the others recognized, to throw himself off a cliff and expect to live. Hama and Trimma were the line-handlers, Godrich and Balla cut and stitched the precious kite-cloth given by bin-Firnas. All the half-dozen ships' boys of the Fafnisbane, recruited originally by Ordlaf the skipper to man his yards, were eager contenders to be flown aloft, watched with bitter envy by their counterparts on the other six two-masters. All the kite-handlers were English, all except the boys were men rescued by the Way from slavery. The Vikings from Brand's ships showed a certain curiosity, and were ready enough to man their oars and act as retrieval or rescue ships. Their own sense of dignity, though, seemed to hold them back from the manic jostling try-it-and-see activity of the experimenters.
Most important member of the elite was the king himself, too often forced to worry about other matters, always returning like a hungry bee to the nectar of flight. Hagbarth, priest of Njörth, while half-disapproving of the whole project as a threat to seamanship, nevertheless saw it as his duty to the Way to record the experiments. He often found it difficult to get close enough to the apparatus to see what changes the stitchers or the line-handlers were making.
"See," said Cwicca finally as the preparations reached completion. "We think we got it rigged absolutely right now. And we had to make two changes that the Arab fellow in Cordova didn't know about."
"You took out all the hen-feathers," suggested Shef, remembering the total failure of the dive from Stamford tower.
"No feathers at all. Like the old Arab said, you got to fly like a man, not like a bird. And the old Arab was right about another thing. You got to stop thinking 'sail.' You don't want the wind to push you. You want it to hold you up. So you got to rig this kite here—" Cwicca struggled with the concept of "asymmetry," settled in the end for, "different at both ends. Wider upwind, narrower downwind.
"Right, now the two things we've figured out are these. First, he launched with the boy in the sling facing upwind. Good idea, for staying up. Not so good if you ever decide to try to fly free."
The twelve-year-old Tolman, most favored and practiced of the apprentice flyers, bounced on his feet with eagerness as Cwicca said the words, was immediately kidney-punched by a jealous rival. The king unwound the two boys with the ease of practice and held them apart at arm's length.
"Go on," he said.
"It's kind of—" Cwicca again struggled with an idea, this time what a later age would call "counter-intuitive," settled for "not the way you'd expect, but we've tried launching with the boy facing downwind. It means he doesn't keep his eye on the ship..."
"I watch the sea and the sky," shrieked Tolman. "I watch where they meet. As long as that's straight, and beneath my chin, I stay up."
"And the other thing we've found out," continued Cwicca determinedly, "pretty much like the Arab said, is you need two sets of controls. One for up and down. Those are the wing-things, that the boy works with his arms. But it stands to reason, you have to have left and right as well. So we fitted, like, a tail-vane, like they have on weather-cocks. He works that between his feet."
Hagbarth, watching, looked carefully at the double square of sail-cloth fitted now on the wider upwind mouth of the great kite. Hagbarth, skilled seaman as he was, had never seen a rudder. All Northern ships used the traditional steering-oar instead. Nevertheless, it was clear the idea could be adapted to water.
"And today's the day we're going to try free flight," remarked Shef. "Are any of the boys prepared to risk it?"
As the kidney-punching broke out again, the men of the kite-crew secured a boy each and held them firmly.
"We better stick with Tolman," said Cwicca. "He's skinniest and he's had most goes aloft."
"And he's worthless," added Osmod, Tolman's second cousin.
"Right. Now look, you men. Is there any risk in this? I don't want to lose even Tolman, even if he is worthless."
"Bound to be a bit of a risk," said Cwicca. "After all, he's going up five hundred feet. No-one can fall that far and just walk away. But it's over water. Warm sea. Recovery boats well downwind and watching. We've never had a kite just crash into the water. Worst they do is settle slowly."
"All right," said Shef. "Now show me the line release."
Cwicca showed him the single thick mooring-line, led forward to a place by the flyer's right hand. Showed him the dog-lead clip that held it, the neat contrivance that ensured a few inches slack even when the kite was tugged by the wind.
"When he hits the water he'll have to get out of the sling. Make sure he has a sharp knife. In a sheath, round his neck on a lanyard. All right, Tolman, you're going to be the first man from Norfolk to fly."
Struck by a sudden thought, Shef looked round. "That Arab, Mu'atiyah, where's he gone? I'd like him to see this, so he can tell his master."
"Him." Cwicca shrugged. "He used to hang around saying things. We never understood him, but we could guess. One of those 'it'll never work' people, you get them everywhere. Anyway, we got fed up with him, and Suleiman, Solomon, whatever we're supposed to call him, he took him on shore and locked him up. Said he didn't want him running off to Cordova too soon with some story about treacherous Jews."
Shef shrugged in his turn, went to stand by the rail while Hagbarth took command of the now-practiced routine of launch. The Fafnisbane tacking out against the on-shore breeze a good mile from the wall that guarded the outer harbor. Two of the fast and manageable Viking longships positioned close in, a mile downwind, ready to row for the point of splashdown. Two mule-armed consorts, the Hagena and the Grendelsbane a further half-mile out, spread wide north and south. Not to observe the launch. To watch and ward against red galleys sweeping out of the haze, sharp-eyed boys with far-seers at every masthead.
"They are playing their games again," said ha-Nasi the prince disapprovingly to the silent Solomon.
"It will never work," snarled Mu'atiyah to himself as he watched from a barred window overlooking the sea. "How can barbarians compete with my master, the glory of Cordova? They speak Arabic no better than monkeys even yet."
"The woman is by the well," reported Thierry the shepherd to Anselm, the grey-bearded perfectus. "She tries to talk to the women who come down to draw water, but in no language they know."
The ships cruised out across calm water, only ruffled by the rising breeze.
As the moment of launch approached, everyone aboard the Fafnisbane went into a now-practiced routine. Tolman wriggled into his sling. Four of the strongest men aboard lifted the whole frame of the kite to the rear larboard rail. Hagbarth, at the steering-oar, judged the breeze. At the right moment, the Fafnisbane moving at her best pace with the wind abeam, he yelled one order. Instantly the hands at the ropes hauled up both sails. The two-masted ship, still under way, swung bow into the breeze. The kite filled with air, started to lift from its handlers.
Cwicca nudged Shef. "Say the word, lord. This is the big moment, like."
"You say it. You know the right moment."
Cwicca, judging breeze and ship's movement, hesitated. Then called sharply, "Let her go!"
The kite lifted sharply away from the slowing ship. The handlers had begun by paying out line from a coil round palm and elbow. They knew now that that was too slow. Instead their lines ran almost freely from neat coils on the deck, slowed every now and then by horny palms closing. Just keeping enough tension to pull the kite back against the wind, gain another trifle of lift.
The box of cloth and cane soared gently into the sky, watched by a thousand eyes. "Line almost all out," called the handlers.
"What's the signal for him to release?"
"Two tugs."
"Give them."
High in the sky Tolman, son of a quern-slave by an eel-trapper, felt the two sudden checks on his rise. Felt for the dog-lead clip, jerked it free, dropped it carefully behind him. Another check while the metal clip struck the loop through which the line ran—they had carefully made that bigger so there would be no jam.
And now he was free, hanging in the sky on nothing but the wind. Slowly, with a caution belied by his normal behavior on the ground, Tolman began to test his controls. He was still rising. Could he level out? Alert to every shift of the frail frame, he tried the arm controls, to catch the wind and bring him down. Tolman had no theory about how anything worked. His decisions were based on trial and response. The lack of preconceptions of a twelve-year-old combined with quick responses to teach him basic aerodynamics.
Now he had the horizon level again. There was a moment to look down. Far ahead he could see the mountains, rising high out of the narrow coastal plain. Here and there his eye was even caught by movement, by flashes of light that must be metal. And far off to the north, in the distance, a smudge that must be burning. Where was the harbor?
With a slight catch at the heart Tolman realized that free flight had one major difference from dangling on a line. He was being blown steadily away from the Fafnisbane and from the recovery ships. Already the Viking boats were almost directly below him, a bare furlong from the land. He would be over the land himself in minutes, could see himself being carried miles away into the mountains.
He must turn back. But how? Could a kite turn into the wind? If a ship could... If he could make it point down, surely the speed of descent would counterbalance the tug of the wind. As long as he did not dive directly into the wind...
Gently, alert all the time for the first twinge of an unbalanced response, Tolman worked his foot controls, felt his craft heel away to the right, found himself automatically working the arm controls to lift the left side and lower the right.
A mile astern, Shef and Steffi and the rest of the watchers saw the seemingly runaway kite turn into a slow and gentle bank. Oars threshed as the recovery ships prepared to race after it, now that it was turning back towards the sea. Hagbarth prepared to shout orders, make sail, head in the same direction.
"Wait," said Shef, head fixed upwards. "I think he knows what he's doing. I think he's going to try to turn and come back to us."
"Well, one thing's sure," said Steffi with a defiant glare round for contradiction, made more defiant by his squint. "There ain't no doubt we can fly. And not with no feathers neither."
In the last moments of his flight, Tolman, like Steffi before him, seemed to lose control of his craft and come down hard and fast. He hit the water with a splash and a cracking of canes barely a hundred feet from the Fafnisbane itself, the recovery ships well astern of him. Shef, who had shed his gold circlet and bracelets minutes before, dived and swam over, knife trailing from his wrist, ready to cut the lad free if need be. In the warm water he and half-a-dozen other swimmers surged round the still-floating kite. But Tolman had wriggled loose already, was treading water like a frog, holding his craft protectively. "Did you see?" he shouted. "Did you see?"
"I saw," Shef replied, kicking gleefully in the bright sunlight. The anxiety and depression that had grown on him with the years had vanished. Nothing so pleasurable as splashing in the warm Inner Sea, far from the freezing waters of England. And the problem of flight was solved, or at least well begun. And he was the lover of Svandis.
"I owe you a reward," he said. "The promised reward for new knowledge. But you will have to share it with Cwicca and Steffi and the gang. Maybe the other boys too."
"I should get most," shrilled Tolman. "I took it up and flew it!"
On the shore, by one of the gates out of the fortress-city of the Jews, Anselm the perfectus eyed the little convoy of mules and donkeys.
"You have her?" he asked.
"Wrapped up in a carpet, slung over the black mule. You can't see her because we've packed other bales round her. The gate-guards won't notice." Thierry the shepherd hesitated. "One bad thing, mi dons."
"What's that?"
"We lost Guillem. She killed him."
"One woman against six of you?"
"We thought we had her. One each side of her, coming up from behind, grab the bottom of her dress, lift it right over her head like a bag. You'd expect a woman to start shrieking 'rape' and be too frightened to fight, arms trapped and her legs bare."
"So?"
"She had some kind of gutting knife in her belt. Slashed her own dress right open, stabbed Guillem right through the heart while he was trying to grab her arm. Then I hit her one and she went down. Kept on fighting, though, while we gagged her. We did it in an alley behind the well, only women around and I don't think anyone saw. I hope she has no brothers. I wouldn't want to have to fight one of them, if that's what the women are like."
"Guillem has earned his release," said the perfectus. "May we all leave the world as well, and earn the right to pass out of it. Go on, Thierry. I will leave the message and then follow."
The mule-train passed through the guarded gate, headed across the plain and up into the nearby mountains, Svandis slung bound, gagged, near-naked but conscious over the lead-beast.
As the dinghy approached the quayside, Shef realized that there was a considerable reception committee waiting for him. He could not see the prince himself, Benjamin ha-Nasi. But Solomon was there, and men he recognized as members of the prince's entourage, the captain of his guards. Their faces were grave. Trouble of some sort. Could it be that the flight that they must have seen went against one of their religious rules? Were they about to tell him to take the fleet and go? They seemed to have no aggressive intention. Shef composed his face into a mask of rigid severity. As the boat was pulled up to the steps he leapt nimbly out, straightened, marched up, Skaldfinn the interpreter at his heels.
Solomon did not waste words. "We have found a man dead in the city," he said.
"My men cannot have done it. They were at sea, or on their ships in harbor."
"Your woman might have done it. But she is gone."
Shef's face paled, for all his forced composure. "Gone?" he said. It came out as a croak. "Gone?" he repeated, more firmly. "If she has gone, it was not of her own free will."
Solomon nodded. "That may be. This letter was left with a boy from the Christian quarter. He was paid to deliver it to the captain of the city guard, and to say it was for the one-eyed foreign king."
Presentiment hanging over him, Shef took the paper—paper indeed, he noted—unfolded it. He could read Latin letters, with some difficulty, as a result of his childhood education, ineffective though that had been. Yet he could make little of what he read.
"Nullum malum contra te nec contra mulierem tuam intendimus," he spelled out carefully. "Skaldfinn, what does this say?"
Skaldfinn also took the letter, read through it, brow furrowed. "It says, 'We mean no harm against you or your woman. But if you wish to have her back, come at the second hour of the day following this to the tenth milestone on the road to Razes. There we will tell you what we would have of you. Come alone.' It adds, in different writing—poor writing, it seems to me, and worse Latin—'She killed a man when we took her. Her blood is forfeit.' "
Shef looked round at what seemed suddenly to be an immense crowd, all silent, all watching him. The hubbub of the market had ceased. His own men had come up from the dinghy and were close behind him. He knew, somehow, that the men on his ships lying at anchor had realized something was wrong and were lining the sides as well and watching him. Years ago he had decided on impulse to rescue one woman, Godive, from the slavers. But then no one had seen him do it, except Hund, and the thane Edrich, dead long since. He had no doubt in his mind that he had to rescue Svandis now. But this time he had to persuade people that what he was doing was right. He was less free as a king than he had been as a thrall.
Two things he was sure of. First, Brand and Thorvin and the others would not let him go alone. They had seen him vanish too often before. If he did not go alone, would the kidnappers kill their hostage? The other thing he was sure of was that there, in the crowd, there would be agents of the men who had taken her. What he said now would be reported. He had to make it look reasonable to them. Acceptable to Brand and Thorvin.
He turned, looked behind him. As he suspected, other boats had followed him over. Brand was climbing the steps, looking baleful and angry and bigger even than ever. Hund looking puny and anxious. Cwicca and Osmod too. They had cocked their crossbows, had the air of men picking their targets. Some he could rely on. Some to be swayed.
Shef aimed his voice at Brand, but pitched his voice high, to carry if it could even across the water to the watching ship-crews.
"You heard the letter Skaldfinn read, Brand?"
Brand twitched his silver-mounted axe "Battle-troll" in reply.
"Years ago, Brand, you taught me the way of the drengr, when we marched to York and took it. Does the drengr abandon his comrades?"
Brand saw in an instant which way the questions were going, and who they were aimed at. He himself, Shef knew, would cheerfully have dropped Svandis overside as a sacrifice to Ran, goddess of the deeps. Nor did he consider her a comrade, but a stowaway. But once she was considered as a comrade, a shipmate, however junior, then public opinion among both Vikings and English alike was utterly solid against any desertion or sacrifice, and most solid among the most junior, the rank and file, the oar-pullers and shield-carriers.
Before Brand could frame a temporizing reply, Shef went on, "For how many comrades must an army march?"
Brand had no choice in answering this question. "One," he answered. An automatic pride straightened his shoulders, made him glare round at the watching southerners.
"And for that one must the leaders too risk their lives?"
"All right," he said. "You're going after her. But not alone! Take the fleet. And if these pigs' fry try to stop you..." He stepped forward, axe half-raised, anger at being out-maneuvered translated instantly to anger at any show of resistance. The guard captain's hand dropped to his hilt, spears snapped forward from the crowd.
Solomon lifted a hand and walked between the two groups. "We did not take the woman," he said. "The killing and the rape took place inside our city, and we too have an injury to avenge. If you have need of our assistance, it will be granted. But what do you intend to do?"
Shef knew by now. This time, as he raised his voice, it was aimed at the listener in the crowd who must be there, the one left behind to report on how the message was taken. He spoke in his simple Arabic, the lingua franca of this coast. It would be understood.
"I will go to the milestone, if someone will show me the way. But not alone! I will go one of thirteen."
As Skaldfinn translated, Shef realized Hund was at his elbow. "Who will you take?" asked the little leech, his voice strained.
Shef put an arm round him. "You, old friend. Cwicca and Osmod. Skaldfinn must come. I will leave Hagbarth and Thorvin to command the fleet. And Brand must stay too, he is too heavy on his feet for the mountain roads. But I will ask him and Cwicca to pick the best axemen and bowmen in the fleet."
Solomon too was close beside him. "If you are prepared to trust me, I would come too. I have at least an idea of what this may be about."
"I'm glad someone does," said Shef.
They filed out of the city the next morning, as the first streaks of light crept into the sky and the birds in the fields began their eager song. The men were at least well fed and rested, even Shef, though he had hardly slept at all the night before. The long weeks of sailing with hardly a hand needing to be raised, and with the burdens of rule necessarily far away, had left him a layer of endurance that had not yet been touched.
Solomon and Skaldfinn followed him, with Hund, who had hardly said a word since the news of Svandis's abduction, by his side. Behind the four of them came nine others, five of them crossbowmen selected from the English crews. Cwicca and Osmod led them, as was their right. As he checked the men's gear before the start Shef had been surprised to see the villainous squint of Steffi among the picked men.
"I said the best shots in the fleet," he snapped to Cwicca. "Steffi's the worst. Send him back and get another one."
Cwicca's face shifted to the glassy obstinacy he used when confronted by a direct order he did not like. "Steffi's all right," he muttered. "He was mad keen to come. He won't let you down."
"Crossbowman! He couldn't hit a cow's backside with the butt-end of one," snarled Shef. But he did not persist with his order. Loyalty worked both ways.
Shef was happier with the close-combat bodyguards picked by Brand: all Scandinavians, two Danes, a Swede and a Norwegian, all men with long records of success against men as big and strong as themselves. The Norwegian was a cousin of Brand himself. Looking at him, Shef could see the marbendill strain in him, the mark of the sea-troll, in his eyebrow-ridges and the flat-set teeth. He did not remark at it. Styrr, as he was called, had killed two men already in England for laughing at the way he ate, and been exonerated. One of the Danes acted as the leader of the little group, his experience showing in his expensive jewelry and the scars on his forearms. Shef had asked him his name.
"Bersi," he replied. "They call me Holmgang-Bersi. I've been out five times."
"I only one," said Shef.
"I know. I saw it."
"What did you think?"
Bersi rolled his eyes. Shef had won his holmgang outside the gates of York, and against two men, but hardly in classic style. "I have seen better contests."
"And I have killed greater champions," replied Shef, not ready to concede advantage. But Bersi and Styrr and their mates were a reassurance to him. There was no doubt of the courage of the warriors here in the southern lands, but Shef could not see the slightly-built, cotton- and linen-garbed Spaniards, whether Jew or Moor or Christian, holding their own for more than seconds against the barbed axes and iron-shod javelins tramping along behind him. He was safe at least from casual murder. And he bore with him at least a threat of revenge for Svandis.
By the end of the second hour the heat of the day was rising and Shef's troop looked less formidable than it had. The men were puffing, as they had been hurried along at a steady five miles an hour since dawn, taking turns to ride or trot alongside the overburdened mules that Solomon had provided. Sweat trickled from their hair and into the thick beards. Soon the sun would be shining directly on the mail of the Vikings. They would have to decide whether to shed it or roast. But at least the milestone was in sight, and not too far from the time set. Shef looked round. If there were to be an ambush, this was the most certain place for it. Cwicca and his men had dismounted and were walking more easily now, heads up, crossbows cocked, alert for the first flash of lance or arrow.
From the scrub came a trill of sound. Like a bird-call, but less artless. The sound of a flute. Hair rising on the back of his neck, Shef swiveled his one good eye to see where it came from. A boy standing there. He had not been there a moment before. Was this some creature of the mountains, some half-god, like the marbendills of the northern waste or the Finnish sorcerers from the snow? Five crossbows were covering the lad now. Three too many for security. Shef turned and looked deliberately in a circle. If the boy was a distraction, there would be an attack coming from some other point. Holmgang-Bersi had got the idea at least, had moved off the track, javelin poised.
But there was no-one else. The boy stood motionless till he was sure no-one would shoot from fear, then trilled his flute again, called out to Solomon. Shef understood not a word.
"He says, follow him."
"Where to?"
Grimly, Solomon pointed up the side of the mountain.
Hours later, Shef began to wonder whether the boy with the oatstraw flute were not some particularly devilish trap sent to kill them slowly. They had abandoned the mules and set off up the hillside grumbling. Now, the sun directly overhead, not a word was spoken. It had been an unremitting climb up a slope as steep as the thatched roof of a house, but covered in thorn scrub and sliding stone. The thorns held you back, caught in every scrap of clothing, where the boy seemed to glide beneath them like an eel.
But they were not as bad as the stone. After a while Shef realized he and all his men were making detours, going out of their way to avoid the scorching heat of the stone in full sunlight, burning bare hands and starting to sting through leather shoe-soles.
Even the stone was not as bad as the slope. None of the Northerners were fit for walking after weeks at sea, but even a Finn from the moors would have struggled to keep climbing after the thigh muscles had long since gone past pain, after everyone had given up the thought of walking ever again, concentrating only on hauling themselves up the hillside with arms and legs together.
But it was thirst that would kill them. Thirst and heatstroke. Dust rose off the ground, into nostrils often only a foot from it, coated the mouth and choked the throat. All had carried skins of water at the start. The first halt had come after less than a mile. They had become steadily more frequent as the climb went on. At the third halt Shef, already croaking, had told the Vikings peremptorily to strip off their mail and leather, make bundles and carry it on their backs. Now he was carrying one man's for him. Styrr, he saw, Brand's cousin, had gone steadily redder and redder until he was the shade of bilberry-juice. But new he was death-pale. The water was gone. And still the wretched boy kept vanishing, returning, whistling them in this direction or that. Shef turned to Cwicca, keeping up a trifle better than the others, also carrying other men's gear besides his own.
"Next time that little bastard comes back," Shef rasped. "If he takes off again, shoot him. Solomon"—the Jewish interpreter seemed less troubled at least by heat and thirst than the others, though he too was gasping and staggering with fatigue. "Tell him. Rest and water. Or he's dead."
Solomon seemed to say something in reply, but Shef ignored him. The little bastard was back. Shef reached painfully to grab his one garment, but he twisted aside, swept an arm impatiently, started to scuttle forward. Cwicca had him in wavering sights. And there, just above, there seemed to be a crest with the boy disappearing fast over it.
With his last strength Shef struggled over it. Saw in front of him a small, mean village of a dozen houses, of stone that looked as if it had grown from the rock all around. More important than the houses, the flat green in front of it. By the side of it, trickling from the rock, a spring running into a stone cistern. Suddenly and clearly through the relentless noise of the cicadas in the scrub, Shef could hear the tinkle of water running.
He turned back, saw his men straggled out for a hundred yards down the hillside. He tried to call out to them, "Water!" found the word stick in his throat. The nearest saw it in his eyes, came on with renewed energy. Far down the slope Styrr and Bersi, Thorgils and Ogmund crawled hopelessly on.
Shef slid down the hill, seized the nearest, muttered "Water," in his ear, pointed him to the crest-line. Slid on to the next. Styrr had to be half-pulled the last fifty feet, and when he reached the top, even with Shef's shoulder under his arm he staggered like a drunk on the level ground.
They were making a bad show, Shef realized, whoever was watching. They looked less like a king and his bodyguard than they did a troop of beggars with a dancing bear. He heaved Styrr more firmly upright and snarled at him to pull himself together, look like a drengr. Styrr simply tottered towards the water, was met by Bersi with a bucket. He threw half of it over the gasping giant, thrust the rest into his hand.
"He will die if he swills cold water in that state," remarked Solomon, holding an empty dipper. Shef nodded, looked round. The rest had drunk, seemed able to think of something other than their thirst. He himself could smell the water, felt the urge to throw himself at it and into it as the others had clearly done.
They were being watched. If this had been a trap it would have worked. For long minutes there his men would have offered no resistance to sword or spear or arrow, unless it had been between them and the water. Shef stiffened himself pridefully, took the dipper full of water that Cwicca passed him, forced himself to hold it without apparent awareness. He walked towards the ring of watching men with his head up.
They had bows and axes, but they did not look formidable. Mere working and hunting tools, and the men who held them, some thirty or so, looking like shepherds or fowlers, not warriors. No signs of rank were visible, but Shef had learnt to watch men's bearing. That one there, the greybeard with no weapon: he was the chief.
He walked towards him, tried to speak sardonically, to say, "You brought us by a weary road." The words would not come out. He lifted the dipper, rinsed the dust from his mouth, felt it swirl across his throat. The urge to swallow, constricting, almost overpowering. He would show them who was master, of himself at least. He spat the water on the ground, spoke his piece.
No understanding. The eyes had widened when he spat out the water, but just a furrowed brow when he spoke. He was speaking the wrong language. Shef tried again in his simple Arabic.
"You took our woman."
The greybeard nodded.
"Now you must give her up."
"First you must tell me something. Do you not need water?"
Shef lifted the dipper, looked at the water in it, threw it on the ground. "I drink when I choose. Not when my body chooses."
A slight ripple from the listening men. "Tell me then. What is that you wear on your breast?"
Shef looked down at the sign of his god, the pole-ladder of Rig. This was like the scene he had undergone long ago when first he met Thorvin. More was meant than was being said.
"In my language it is a ladder. In the language of my god and the Way I follow, it is a kraki. I met a man once who called it a graduale."
They were listening now, very intently. Solomon was at his side, ready to translate. Shef waved him back. He must not lose the intimate contact, even if all the two could speak was mangled Arabic.
"Who called it that?"
"It was the emperor Bruno."
"You were close to him? He was your friend?"
"I was as close to him as I am to you. But he was not my friend. I have had his sword at my throat. They tell me he is close to me again, now."
"He knows about the graduale." The greybeard seemed to be talking to himself. He looked up again. "Stranger, do you know of the Lance he carries?"
"I gave it to him. Or he took it from me."
"Maybe, then, you would take something from him?"
"Willingly."
The tension in the air seemed to drain. Shef turned and saw that his men were on their feet again, weapons raised, looking as if they might be able to resist attack, or even, as they reckoned the limited odds against them, begin one.
"We will return your woman. And feed you and your men. But before you return"—Shef's flesh shrank at the thought of retracing their steps, downhill or up—"first you must pass a test. Or fail it. Either is the same to me. But to pass it might be good for you, and for the world. Tell me, your god, whose sign you bear: do you love him?"
Shef could not help the grin from spreading across his face. "Only an idiot would love the gods of my people. They are there, that is all I know. If I could escape them, I would." His grin faded. "There are some gods I hate and fear."
"Wise," said the greybeard. "Wiser than your woman. Wiser than the Jew at your side."
He called an order, men began to bring out bread, cheese, what looked like skins of wine. Slowly Shef's men sheathed or uncocked their weapons, looked questioningly at their lord. But Shef had seen Svandis coming limpingly towards him, wearing only the slashed and blood-stained tatters of her white dress.
To the Jewish scholars and counselors of the city-state of Septimania, the departure of their colleague Solomon—off in the mountains somewhere, escorting the king of the barbarians on some pointless chase—came as a relief. Doubt was already strong as to whether Solomon had been wise in bringing the strangers to them. Yet it could be represented as a service to the Caliph, their nominal overlord, to revictual and resupply men who had once been his allies, and who were at any rate enemies of the Christians now pressing so close. Nevertheless one matter at least was outstanding, a worry to both prince and council.
The affair of the young Arab Mu'atiyah. It was clear that he was a subject of the Caliph Abd er-Rahman: as indeed were they, the Jews of Septimania, at least in theory. Did they not pay to the Caliph the kharaj and the jizya, the land-tax and the poll-tax? And did they not guard their gates against his enemies and those of his Faith, the Christians and the Franks? It was true that that guard did not extend in any way to limiting trade with their near-neighbors, true too that the tax payments were made according to calculations done by the council itself, which would not have passed muster with the Caliph's own tax-collectors, none of whom any longer courted embarrassment by appearing in the city. Nevertheless—so said the majority on the council—there was no precedent for imprisoning the young man merely to prevent his return to his master.
As the council debated, the old prince watched his learned men, stroking his beard. He knew what Solomon would have said, had he been here. That the Arab would immediately flee to his master and report that the Jews had made common cause with the barbarians, the polytheists, that they were providing a base for a hostile fleet which had fled from contact with the Greeks and now planned its own attacks on the peaceful countryside. Little of that was true, but that was how it would be presented, and how it would be believed.
In any of the Christian dukedoms or princedoms of the border country, such a matter would have been the simplest thing in the world. Ten words, and the Arab would disappear. If he ever were inquired about, polite regret and ignorance would be expressed. And the baron or duke or prince would have thought no more about it than about pruning his roses.
In a Jewish community, that was not possible. Not even desirable. Benjamin ha-Nasi approved of what his wise men would decide, though he knew it would be a mistake. A mistake in the short term. In the long term the fortress of the Jews, the place where they had kept their identity in the long centuries of flight and persecution, was the Torah and the Law. As long as they held to that, history had taught them, they would survive—as a people if not as individuals. If they abandoned it, they might thrive for a while. Then they would merge with the sea around them, become indistinguishable from the lawless, unprincipled, superstitious believers in Christ, their false Messiah.
Tranquilly the prince listened to the arguments, conducted as much to allow all members of the council to show their learning as to affect the final decision. Those who were putting the case for continued detention, in the way that Solomon might have done, were doing so passionately but insincerely, according to a convention understood by all. Against them was the deep reluctance of any Jewish community to order imprisonment as a punishment. Freedom to go as one pleased was one of the inheritances from the desert which they shared with the Arabs their cousins. It was the other side of the horror of exile from the community which was the council's ultimate threat against their own.
The learned Moishe was summing up, and preparing his final peroration. He was the Amoraim, the interpreter of the Mishnah. "And so," he said, looking round fiercely, "I will now speak of the Halakhah, which is the ultimate conclusion of this matter debated. First it was spoken and passed on from generation to generation, now it is written and fixed for ever. 'Treat the stranger within your gates as you would your brother, for this you will be thrice blessed.' "
He ended, looking round. If his audience had not been constrained by the dignity of their place and cause, they would have applauded.
"Well spoken," said the prince finally. "Truly is it said that the learning of the wise is a wall to the city. And that it is the folly of the unlearned that brings woe upon it."
He paused. "And yet, alas, this young man is unlearned, is he not?"
Moishe spoke up. "By his own account, prince, he is the wonder of the world for learning. In his own way and his own country. And who should condemn the customs of another country, or its wisdom?"
Just what you were doing this morning, thought Benjamin to himself. When you gave us your opinions on the follies of the ship-barbarians, with their king who tears a book to find out what it is, and asks the price of the paper not of the contents. Nevertheless...
"I shall do as the feeling of the council directs," said Benjamin formally. He crooked a finger to his guard-captain. "Release the young man. Give him a mount and the food he needs to reach the Caliph, and escort him to our boundaries. Charge the cost against our next payment of the land-tax to his master."
The young Arab, who had squatted at the side of the room listening without understanding to the Hebrew exchanges that would determine his fate, recognized at last the tone and the gesture. He sprang to his feet, eyes blazing. Seemed for a moment as if he meant to burst out in complaint and accusation—as he had done fifty times already in his short captivity—but then thrusting it back in a transparent rush of policy. It was obvious what he meant to do: rush off to make every bitter denunciation to which he could lay his tongue. Revenge himself with words for every slight that had been put upon him, real or fancied, by the barbarians of whom he was so jealous. Jealous of their flying of kites.
The prince turned his attention to the next case. It was true about the learned, he reflected. They were a strength. And the unlearned were a plague. But worse than both, alas, were the class to whom both the Arab Mu'atiyah and Moishe the learned belonged. The class of clever fools.