Chapter Fifteen

Inside the cool stone basement of the best house in the tiny village, the perfecti discussed what must be done, in whispers.

"He does not speak our language. How can we put him to the test?"

"He has some Arabic, as do we. That will have to do."

"It is irregular. The test must be given in the words of the test."

"It is we who make the rules and we who can change them."

A third voice broke in to the exchange. "After all, he has already passed the one test. And he passed it without knowing he took it."

"You mean the water?"

"I mean the water. You saw the way his men came over the hill. They were blind with weariness and mad with thirst. They are Northerners from cold lands, and seamen who never walk. The big one was near to death. And the king himself was so dry—we saw it—that he could not speak. Yet he threw the water on the ground."

Another voice corroborated the third. "And before that, he took it in his mouth. Then he spat it out. That is one of the tests. To refuse the man water till he can think of nothing else, then to give him it. To see if he can take it into his mouth and yet reject it, as a sign of victory over the body. The temple of the Evil One, prince of this world. That is what the one-eye did."

The first voice continued to complain. "He had not had long enough! In our test the man is kept without water for a night and a day."

"Sitting motionless in the shade," replied one of his antagonists. "Our rule says the candidate must be kept till he thinks of nothing else but water. I have seen candidates in better shape than that one when he came over the hill."

"In any case," said a voice that till now had not spoken, but now spoke with the tones of one who gave a decision, "we will proceed with the test. For as we speak, the Emperor's men are tearing stone from stone. Over our holy things and the bodies of our fellows."

The gray cowls nodded slowly, in the end without dissent.

Outside, his feet dangling over the edge of the near-precipice that shut off the little village to the north, Shef sat with his far-seer in his hand. Once he and his men had drunk their fill, it had been possible to look around, to understand the lie of the land. The village perched high on a slope, in what was a mere terrace in a sweep of baking stone and scrub. From high up, more terraces could be seen here and there, each with its little plot of trees and crops. Shef could see how people could live almost at ease up here. His far-seer had caught dozens of scrawny sheep browsing the grass on far hillsides. Sheep meant mutton, and milk and cheese. And one thing the villagers might count on, and that was that they would not be bothered by tax-collectors. Only very tough and determined ones, and such would find far easier pickings elsewhere.

Yes. It was clear that almost any kind of authority could be resisted up here. King or Emperor. Or Church and Emperor.

In the coldly objective way his mind worked when he was left alone, Shef set himself to considering the information he had been given. One thing he had come to understand about himself during the years of his rule was this. Good or bad, he did not believe all that was told him, even all that he himself saw. But his disbelief meant that he did not need to lie to himself, as so many people, he knew, did all or some of the time. They believed what they needed to. He did not need to believe anything, and could see things the way they were.

So he did not need to believe Svandis. She had greeted him, and his men, with tears of relief. Then, as he had seen, she had grown ashamed of herself and talked harshly and fiercely to cover what had been her fear. He did not blame her. He had known veteran warriors do the same. And when she told him what had happened, Shef, piecing together what he knew of her history, had understood both her fear and her shame.

A woman, taken from both sides with her dress whirled over her head. No woman wore anything beneath her dress, whatever she wore over it. A woman with her arms trapped, naked from breast down, could think of nothing but rape. That was why it was an offense in all the Northern codes of law to raise a woman's clothing above her knee. But Svandis had not needed legal prompting to think of rape. She knew all about that. Shef was proud, but not amazed, that she had slashed herself free and killed a man: he had seen her grandfather do the same, starting unarmed and half-drowned against two men who held his arms. She had the blood of Ragnar indeed.

But the fear had struck deep into her. What she said about her captors was tinged by it. And she said that they were savages, worse than the deepest heathens among the Swedes, cold and heartless. She had heard tales of them from the women in Cordova, she said—and that at least must be true. That in the mountains lived the sect where the men hated all women and the women all men. Where every joy and delight in the world was rejected. "And that is how they are," Svandis said again and again. "You can see it when they look at you! I stood there when they set me free with my legs bare and my body displayed like a dancing girl. And they looked at me. And then they looked away, all of them, even the mule-drivers. I would rather have heard your men shouting the things they do at women they see. They rape women, and hurt them, but that is because they need them, at least. Here you can see the hate in their eyes."

Fear talking, Shef reflected as he sat at ease looking out over the mountains and the passes beneath. Yet there might be something in it. It had a kind of relation to what Solomon had said, after he had consoled Svandis and she had gone to sleep under guard and in the sun. After he had told Solomon what they had said about the test. Solomon had thought for a long time and then approached him, keeping his distance even from his colleague Skaldfinn.

"Something you should understand," he said. "Something few know. You may have thought these people are Christians."

Shef had nodded. He could see a crucifix on the wall of what seemed a rude church. Folk who walked past it knelt, crossed their breasts.

"They are not. Or if they are it is of a kind that has no dealings with others. Few even with my people. You see—the followers of Mohammed, the followers of Christ, my people the Jews. They fight each other, they may persecute each other, but they share many things. To Islam, Christ was one of the prophets, to the Christians, their God is also our God, only they have given him a Son. The Mohammedans believe in one Allah as we believe in one Jehovah, like us they will not eat pork or meat which has not been bled. You see? We are—we began—on the same side.

"These people here are different. They do not believe in our God at all. Or if they do, they reject him."

"How can you reject God and reverence the crucifix?"

"I do not know. But they say—they say that to these people the God of Abraham is the devil, and that they make images of him only to defile them. And they say also"—Solomon's voice dropped even more—"that since to them God is the devil, that they have made the devil himself their God. They are devil-worshipers. That is the talk of the hills. I do not know how they worship him or with what rites." Solomon could not be relied on, either, Shef reflected. It was the People of the Book again. At bottom the three great religions that had come out of the East were all religions of the Book. Different books, or the same book with different additions. They despised anyone who did not hold to their book. Called them devil-worshipers. They despised him for a start, he had seen the look in the eyes of the geonim, the scholars of the Law. If they despised him, and the Way, and they despised also this strange sect of the hills—then maybe he and they had something in common. Women-haters, said Svandis. Did he hate women? They had brought him no luck, and he had brought none to them.

His eye sweeping over far distances, as the haze cleared in the sun, and the far-seer let him probe out to the horizon, Shef saw again and again flashes of bright metal down on the roads, the roads through mountain passes. He remembered what Tolman had said of what he could see at the top of his flight. Metal moving, and on the edge of sight, Tolman said, a great pyre burning.

His mind emptied, his eye reaching far into space, Shef felt the strange blankness of the waking dream come over him: a better feeling than the last he had had, the dream of the shrouded corpse. This time his father was there.

"He's loose, you know." There was still the tone of mirth in his father's voice, of secret knowledge, of cleverness which he knew had no match. With it there was a new tone, of uncertainty, even of fear, as if the god Rig were realizing that he had set something in motion which even he with all his cleverness might not control.

Shef spoke back to his father, silently, in his mind alone. "I know. I saw you loose him. I saw him climbing the stair. He is mad. Thorvin says he is both father and mother of the monster-brood." In his new mood of disbelief and defiance, he did not bother to add the question, "Why did you do it?"

An image began to form before him, not with the usual fierce clarity, but blurred, as if through the poor glass and uneven lens of a far-seer. As it formed, his father's voice talked over it.

"The gods, you see, long long ago, in the time of your namesake, the first King Sheaf. That was when Balder was still in Asgarth. Balder the beautiful. So beautiful that all things on earth, except one, had taken the vow not to harm him. So what did the gods, my father and my brothers, what did they do to amuse themselves?"

Shef could see the answer. The god at the center, so bright-faced that it was impossible to look at him, a blaze of beauty. Tied to a stake. And around him, fierce shapes, mighty arms, hurling weapons at him with all their strength. An axe span away from the side of the god's head, a lance with deadly triangular point rebounded from his heart. And the gods laughed! Shef could see the familiar red-bearded face of Thor turned up to the sky, mouth open in an ecstasy of mirth, as he hurled his deadly hammer again and again at his brother's skull.

"Yes," said Rig. "Till Loki showed them."

Another god being brought forward to the throwing line, a blind god, Loki at his elbow. A different Loki, Shef noted. Same face, but without the marks of poison and of rage. Without the look of bitter injustice. Clever and shifty, still, even amused. The brother of Rig, there was no doubt.

Loki put a spear in the blind god's hand, the spear of mistletoe, the plant so weak and so young that the strong gods had not bothered to ask it for its vow not to harm Balder their brother. The gods laughed even louder at the sight of the blind man with the feeble twig lining up to throw, Shef could see Heimdall, Frey, even the grim one-eyed Othin, calling to each other and slapping their thighs in merriment.

Till the dart struck. The god fell. The light of the world dimmed.

"You know what happened then," said Rig. "You saw Hermoth ride to try to bring Balder back from Hel. You saw what they did to Loki in revenge. They forgot something. They forgot to ask why. But I remembered. I remembered Utgarthar-Loki."

Utgarthar-Loki? Shef wondered. He was used, now, to the vagaries of English and Norse, still so similar. That means "outyard-Loki." Where there is an outyard-Loki there should be an inyard-Loki.

"Utgarthar-Loki was the giant who challenged the gods to a contest. And they lost. Thor lost the wrestle against Old Age, failed to drink the ocean, failed to lift the Mithgarth-Serpent. His boy Thjalfi lost the race with Thought. Loki lost the eating-match with Fire."

In the background, as if through the far-seer again, Shef could see an immense hall, one greater even than Othin's Valhalla, and in it a table piled high with joints of beef and bear, man-meat and walrus: a table stocked from the smokehouse of Echegorgun. At one side of it a god sat gobbling, thrusting the food into his mouth with sweeping movements of the arms, not chewing but snapping like a wild wolf. Down the other side raced fire. Fast and deadly as the fire of the Greeks.

"Which Loki lost?" asked Shef.

"The god Loki. Not the giant Loki. You see, Loki was on our side once. Or at least half of him was. That was what I remembered and the gods forgot. But if you forget... he becomes the other Loki. The Loki outside the home-garth. The monster in the darkness."

I don't understand, thought Shef. If this all comes from my mind, as Svandis says, then it is some part I do not know. In-Loki and out-Loki? And Loki contesting with Fire? The word for "fire" is logi, though Rig did not say it. Loki against Loki against Logi? In-Logi and out-Logi too? And who is this first King Sheaf?

He shook his head in a kind of exasperation, and as he did so the vision cleared, he saw the far-off mountains beginning to thrust their peaks through the tatters of his dream, of the scene in the giants' hall, devouring god and devouring flame. A hand on his shoulder, pulling him back from the near-precipitous drop in front of him.

"Are you all right?" Svandis's copper hair and bright eyes looking into his own. Shef blinked once and again.

"Yes. I saw something. From a god or from my own mind, I do not know. Whichever it is, I will work it out for myself."

Shef rose to his feet, stretched. The rest had done him good. The rest and the exhaustion of the morning. He felt as if he had sweated out the soft living and the mental strain of the years of rule. He felt like a drengr again, like a carl of what had been the Great Army: young, strong and cruel.

"Cwicca," he hailed. "See that barn door over there? Think you can hit it? You and your mates, put four quarrels each into the middle of it, as fast as you can shoot."

Shef watched impassively as the crossbowmen, not understanding but ready to show their paces, sent iron bolt after iron bolt thudding deep into the middle of the door. The villagers who had been quietly watching, their own bows and spears never far from hand, stared uncertainly.

"Styrr," Shef shouted when they had finished. "Take your axe. Go chop those bolts out and give them back."

Grinning, Styrr walked over, axe swinging loosely. He was glad of a chance to show his mettle after the near-collapse of the morning. The axe whirled and struck like the hammer of the gods, chunks of old oak flying with every blow. Shef could see the villagers staring uncertainly at each other. Styrr did not look like a man who could be brought down by a collection of half-armed shepherds. Professional warriors in armor would filter to the rear rather than face his axe.

"They are poor people," whispered Svandis, "and wood is scarce up here. You are destroying their door."

"I thought you said they were savages and devil-worshipers? Well, whatever they are, I know this. Time for them to worry about us. Not just us worry about them."

Shef turned from the demonstration as Styrr walked back to Cwicca with a score of bolts in his enormous Brand-like hand. He patted Svandis gently, still less than decent in her rags. "I am going to sleep now. Come lie next to me."

The sun was no more than a hand's breadth from the horizon when the guide came for him: a burly man in the sweaty woolens of a mountain shepherd. Svandis snarled at him as he came towards the northerners. "That is the one Thierry," she muttered.

He looked down at Shef, sprawled on the grass, and said without expression, "Viens."

Shef rose, reached for his sword-belt standing propped against the barn wall. For this trip he had armed himself with one of the issue weapons of the Fafnisbane, a plain brass-hilted broadsword. The guide shook a finger from side to side. "Non." The rest of what he said made no sense to Shef, but the tone was unmistakable. Shef put the weapon back, straightened himself, made ready to follow. As the two men walked off, Shef heard a hail from Cwicca. The guide turned, alerted by the menace in the tone. Cwicca stared at him, pointed deliberately first at Shef, then with a sweeping gesture at the village around. He pointed again at Shef, jabbing a finger imperatively. Then swept his arm at the village, and drew the edge of his hand across his throat. "Bring him back," it meant. "Or else..."

The guide did not respond, but turned again and led Shef at a fast walk away across the little patch of land and immediately up a stony trail into the mountains. Shef followed, his legs stiff from the morning's climb, but working off their pain as he strode out to keep up.

The path, if it could be called a path, led them from stony outcrop to stony outcrop, climbing slightly, but mostly going across the side of the mountain, over patches of boulder, shifting scree, and again and again, round the head of craggy ravines. From time to time the mountain sheep, browsing everywhere as if they were goats, raised a head or bounded away at their passage. It reminded Shef of the path he had taken to the house of Echegorgun, years before. Only here the sun warmed the stone instead of merely casting a pale light on it, and the air was full of the scent of mountain thyme. The sun sank further, touched the horizon and crawled beneath it. Still there was light in the sky, but fading. If he were left alone on the slope, Shef decided, he would make no attempt to return. Find a flat stretch and wait for day. As he walked he began to mark possible resting-places near the path. Not a place for explorations in the dark.

His eye left Thierry the guide as he hurried on five or ten paces ahead. The path kinked abruptly left, round the side of yet another stony mass jutting out of the side of the mountain. Shef stepped round it. Found himself alone, on the edge of a steep fall down to dry rocks below. He halted, stood stiff and alert. Where had the man gone to? Was this a trap?

Too complex to be a trap. If Thierry had wanted to push him over an edge he had had a dozen chances already. And Thierry knew he had left hostages behind. Shef looked round carefully. A crack in the stone, a black line in the fading light. Of course, a cave-mouth. And Thierry standing just inside it, watching him. Shef walked over to him, gestured to him to lead on.

Inside the cave-mouth, a mere split in the rock barely three feet wide, someone had left a candle. Thierry struck sparks from flint, lit it, walked on, now moving more slowly. Shef followed the little patch of light. As he walked on he began to feel, through the worn leather soles of his shoes, that he was treading on loose rock. Loose rock with sharp edges. He bent, picked one up, studied it in the faint light of the candle a few feet ahead. It was flint, sure enough. Shaped flint, stone chipped and flaked to produce a kind of point, like a spear-point. Echegorgun had done the same. Only his points and implements were four times the size, made for the race of trolls. Shef threw it down, walked on.

The cave led on and on, with every now and then the black line of some branching passage showing momentarily in the light. Shef began to feel more anxiety than he had done so far. If he were abandoned now, in the dark, the chances were he would never find his way out. Retracing his steps in the dark might seem easy, but he would be feeling his way. Easy, indeed unavoidable, to take a wrong turning. Then he would wander in the blackness till thirst took him. His lips dried at the thought, remembering what thirst had felt like only that morning. Better than the sword would have been a water-skin and tinder-box.

Thierry had paused to let him catch up. In the candlelight Shef saw something else on the walls, signed to Thierry to move the light closer.

Paintings. All over the one flat wall on the left of the passage, paintings of animals, done with perfect fidelity, not like the half-abstract dragon- and beast-shapes of the North. A bull, Shef could see. The sheep of the mountains, just like the ones wandering outside. And there, on its hind legs, what seemed to be a massive bear, a black bear as big as the white ones of the Arctic. A spear jutted from its chest, and round it pranced tiny stick-like man-figures.

"Pintura," said Thierry in an echoing rumble. "Pintura de los vechios. Nostros padres." His voice contained in it a note of pride. He walked on. Stopped, at the end of the gallery, at what seemed to be a blank unbroken wall. He pointed at himself, shook his finger negatively. Pointed at Shef, made pushing gestures. "I stop. You go on."

Shef looked at the blank wall carefully. At its base there was again a black crack, an opening. It did not seem deep enough for a man. But that must be the way through. A crawl, not a walk. As he realized what was meant Thierry began suddenly to walk away, took five paces with Shef beginning to reach out after him, then blew out the candle and vanished.

Instantly Shef stopped dead. If he ran after Thierry in the dark he would lose his bearings, perhaps never come back to the wall and the gap. Yet there must be a way through there. That was safety, or at least the way through to the test. And if there was a test, there was a way to pass it. Better do that than struggle in the dark.

Slowly Shef turned, careful to retrace his movements exactly as he remembered them, groped his way back to the wall, felt till he could touch the edges of the crack. Very faintly he could feel air blowing through. So there was something on the other side. Dropping on to his belly he began to squeeze forward under the lip of rock.

Halfway through, his groping hands met hard rock. He felt to either side. Rock as well, and no opening below. The edge of the rock lip under which he had crawled ground painfully into the small of his back. He did not think he could push himself back now, his ribs would catch. If he did not find a way through he would lie here under the mountain till he moldered away.

But he had been in this situation before. The makers of the old king's barrow from which he had rescued treasure and scepter, they had used the same trick. Maybe all treasure guardians used it. He was in a bend like the shape of the U-rune, and there would be a passageway above his head. Sure enough, the groping hand he could thrust a few inches above him met no resistance. Yet he could not crawl through the way he had begun, or his back would break. He should have gone through on his back, not his belly.

The sweat of fear had begin to break out on him, fear at the thought of lying here trapped for eternity. That was an advantage. And underneath him was not rock but sand or shale. Methodically, Shef began to scrape what he could from underneath his belly, making a little hollow in which to turn. He drew in his breath to reduce his mid-section every inch it would go, rolled, tried to force himself over. Stone dug into his sides, his leather belt seemed to catch on some projection. He twisted with panic force, felt the belt tear and give, felt himself roll over.

After a few seconds he found a purchase with his feet, began to force his back up the rock face behind him. A few painful inches, another moment of seeming immobility. Then he managed to get one knee under the lip of the crawl-ledge, found a better foothold, thrust his head up into the clear.

There was a ledge behind him, breast-high. He turned once more, pushed himself up, got a knee over and crawled out of the pit. As he did so, perfectly clear in the still black air, he heard a long hiss. The scratch of scales on stone. He could see nothing, but somewhere close to him in the blackness, he knew, there was a serpent.

He shuddered involuntarily. The dream of Loki, and the serpent pursuing up the staircase was still with him, and the moment when he found himself in the orm-garth of the gods. Yes, Svandis had explained it. The marks in his flesh where the snake had seemed to strike, they were his own mind playing tricks on him like women believing themselves pregnant. The dream of the climbing feet and the orm-garth, they came from a memory of Brand and a mixture of guilt and fear at the death of Ragnar.

But Shef had seen the death of Ragnar, had seen the adders strike him and the face turn blue and swollen. That had been no dream, and this was no dream either. There was a real snake somewhere in the blackness. Snakes had senses humans did not. It could detect him, could strike before he could raise a hand to defend himself.

There was someone in the blackness close to him as well. Some one, not some beast. Shef's sensitive ears could catch a faint scuff of sole on stone. At the same instant Shef felt around his neck an embrace of cold scales. A snake as thick as his arm had been dropped round his neck.

It was the faint reek of sweat that saved him. If it had not been for that he might have shrieked, clutched unavailingly for the neck of the thing round him, been bitten again and again by the angry rat-snake, and perhaps run fruitlessly into the darkness, there to die, not of poison—for the rat-snake held no more in its fangs than was needed for its rodent prey—but of thirst and despair. But the sweat-stink was that of Thierry. Shef realized in the same instant that Thierry must have come round the rock-wall which he had been made to climb under, had no doubt seen or sensed his progress all the way, was here to administer the next stage of his test. Was waiting for the stranger to flee in panic.

Shef stood stock-still, felt a forked tongue flicker across his face as the snake got its bearings, felt the scales rasp slowly across neck and body and leg as it determined which way to go and slithered down to the ground and off about its business. After it had gone Shef stood for a while motionless. Not from fear. He was beginning to grow angry at the way he was always held at disadvantage, at the thought of Thierry laughing silently in the dark. He mastered the anger, considered what he had already learned.

These people were testing him. They did not mean to kill him, so much was clear. If they had meant to kill him, he would be dead already. They were testing him. And they wanted him to pass the test. If he did, they would want something from him once he had passed. That did not mean that they would not kill him if he failed.

The sensible thing was to walk slowly forward, and to be alert for the next test. They would try to surprise him. Do not react instantly, whatever they do. He stepped forward, feeling carefully for footing with each step, arms spread wide for balance and warning.

Someone gripped him round the body. Again, he could not repress the jump, the shudder of fear. But this was no hostile attack. The arms that closed round him from in front were warm and naked, an embrace not a grapple. Lips kissed him suddenly on the chest. Automatically he closed his own arms round the person who held him. A woman. He could feel her breasts push against him. A naked woman. He dropped his hands, felt her buttocks, felt her immediately respond and push close against him, moving her groin up and down against his.

A week before, sunk in the doubt of his own impotence, Shef might not have responded. Since then there had been Svandis. She had roused him, had proved to him that the fear and horror that had lain on him since the death of Queen Ragnhild were not of the body, only of the mind. She had shown it to him half a score of times since, his body was roused and full of repressed youth. Before he could so much as think of it, Shef's manhood had responded, was rising urgently. The woman felt it, seized it in her hands with a throaty chuckle of triumph, began to sink backwards. He could roll with her on to the stone, take his fill of her here in the dark, clasp her deep and spurt the seed into her here where the sun never came.

A test. Don't respond. The thought of the dark and the lost passages everywhere around bit cold into Shef's heart. The woman could not escape him now he had hands on her, but once he was done, what then? She would slide into the darkness like the snake, and he would be left, alone and a failure. While the testers, whoever they were, watched and mocked.

Shef straightened, gently pulled the woman's hand from him. She came back, pressing herself to him and moaning with passion. She was lying. Her moans were pretense. He unwound the arms from his body, pushed her to arm's length. As she twisted he turned her round, slapped her sharply low down, pushed her away.

He heard her bare feet on the stone for a pace or two. And then, almost dazzling to eyes long groping in the black, a candle-flame. She had lifted a hood from a candle, and for an instant he saw her, naked, squat and middle-aged, vanishing into a cleft in the rock.

Shef turned back in the direction he had been going, and this time, leapt instantly two yards backwards.

A corpse-face had looked into his from no more than a foot away, yellow, rotten, its teeth bared, the eyeballs sunk to mere shreds of leather.

It was hanging from the roof, with half a dozen more. He had been meant to see them at the same moment as the woman vanished, Shef realized. But the closest was on his blind eye, he had not seen it till he turned. Maybe he had been spared the first shock. And now the shock was over: it was a test. Don't respond. At least he now had light to see. Shef walked over and picked up the candle before doing anything else.

The corpses. He did not think these would be their own folk, used in a trial. They buried their dead in stone up here, so he had been told. Every village had its secret sarcophagi somewhere, as every English village had its churchyard and every Norse one its barrows and burning-grounds. No, they did not look like villagers. One there had the face of a Moor, another still on him the leather, but not the mail, of a Frankish lancer. Wayfarers, maybe tax-collectors, ambushed in the mountains and kept here for use. The bodies swung on their ropes like the smoked corpses in the house of Echegorgun the troll. But these were dry, dry as tinder, mummified in the dry cold of the high mountain caves. Shef took a piece of cloth between his fingers, felt it crumble. Yes, dry as tinder. He could not bury these folk. But whoever they were, they did not deserve to hang here for ever. He could give them a sort of burial.

Stepping on from one corpse to another, Shef held the candle at the rags of clothing, watched them catch and flare, begin to work on the dry withered flesh beneath. As he walked forward a red glow filled the cave, showed him its full extent to either side, more paintings on the walls.

In front of him another rock face, but no more than eight feet high. Propped against it as if in invitation, a pole-ladder, for all the world like the one he carried on his own breast.

Nothing surprising there, he thought as he walked towards it. A true ladder, with two supports and rungs between it, that is work for a carpenter, fitting rung to drilled hole. But anyone can make a pole ladder, whether in the North or the South, the mountains or the fens. Take a tree, a fir-tree for choice. Take its trunk and trim off the branches, leaving only those which grow at either side, alternately, first one for the right foot then one for the left. It takes balance to walk up it, but no skill in the making. Once upon a time all ladders must have been like that. Like the stone tools we have grown out of.

Shef walked to the foot of the ladder, began deliberately to climb it as the corpses flared and blazed behind him.

Chapter Sixteen

The man who faced Shef at the top of the ladder, youngest of the perfecti, hesitated as he saw the head of the barbarian king reach the level of the rock floor on which he stood and then continue mounting, rung by rung. He knew what he was supposed to do, had seen it done a dozen times before. If the candidate for election entered the Womb, passed the trials of the Serpent, the Woman, and Death, and climbed the graduale out of the Pit, then he should be met by the most junior of the Council, the one who had passed the trial himself most recently. And the junior should put a drawn sword to his breast and ask him the ritual question: How may an old man be born again? And enter again into the womb of his mother?

But it was supposed to happen in the dark! The candidate should have only the tiny candle-flame, symbol of the secret knowledge, and should see nothing till the sword was at his heart! It was only ritual by that stage, for every candidate, whether he was prepared or not for the trials, knew the question and the answer. But they were not supposed to see the tester or his sword till they were face to face.

In the lurid glow of the dry and burning corpses, Shef could see the man facing him perfectly clearly, could see the needle-pointed sword in his hand, could see too that he had no intention of using it. Behind the man at the front of the rock ledge sat a dozen more men in grey cowls, in a ring facing him. They too were supposed to be invisible until they spoke. As they realized they could be seen, the cowls looked this way and that, men shifted position, broke out in undignified whispers. To the tester and his comrades behind him Shef himself, rising out of the Pit with every stride, looked larger and larger, his shadow reaching out in front of him with a menace in it, as if the men murdered to outfit the trial chamber had sent a representative to take their revenge. The gold circlet on Shef's head and the gold bracelets on his biceps caught the red glow and sent angry glints across the secret chamber.

"Why did you do that?" hissed the tester. "I mean..." The test had already gone wrong. He stretched the sword forward, found his wrist grasped easily by a man far his superior in strength.

"Try again," said Shef.

"How may a man be born again? And enter again into the womb of his mother?"

The question of his dream, Shef thought. He had not known the answer then. But he had just undergone a test, and passed it. The answer to this must have something to do with the form of the test. Something Christian, or half-Christian at least. How would Father Andreas have answered? Thoughtfully, using the Arabic in which he had been addressed, the common speech of the border, Shef replied, "Cast aside fear. And lust. And the fear of death. And so climb out of the grave."

"That is not the answer! Not in the true words."

"It's near enough," said Shef. The wrist he was holding was thin, that of a hunter or a shepherd, or even a priest, not a plowman. With a sudden exertion of his smithy-hardened muscles he bent it backwards, heard a gasp of pain, and the sword ring on the stone floor. He released the wrist, stopped and picked the sword up. Slight curve, one edge, needle-point. A back-stabber's weapon. Holding it in his right hand he stepped towards the seated half-circle, stood looking grimly down at them.

"Why did you set the—the men on fire?" asked the cowl in the center.

"Because they were men. Like you and me. I do not mind killing people, but I will not have them mocked in death. Among the men of the North burning is as good as burial.

"Now. You brought me here by stealing my woman. You gave me a test and I have passed it. You must have something to say to me. Say it. I expect there is an easier way out of here than the way I came. Say your piece and then let us all go home. And for the love of all the gods, light some candles! I have no wish to speak in darkness or by the flames of a funeral pyre."

The leader of the perfecti hesitated, aware that the initiative had gone from him. Yet that might be good. It showed at least that this man, this king, was no common man. It might be, might well be, that he was the one they sought. To gain a moment's time he pulled his cowl back, raised a hand, waved for the lamps to be brought out of their hiding-places in the stone and lit.

"What is it that you wear round your neck?" he asked.

"It is a ladder, which I am told you call a graduale. It was the Emperor of Rome himself who told me that. Many years ago and many miles away. Sitting on a green hill, outside a city wall."

The perfectus licked his lips nervously. The conversation was getting away from him already. "It is the Holy Graduale," he insisted, "which we in our tongue call the Seint Graal. But before I tell you why it is that, you must swear to tell no one what is said here in this chamber. You must swear to be one of us. For if what I have to tell you were to come to the wrong ears, there would be in it..." He paused. "The death of Christianity.

"You must swear to silence! What will you swear by?"

Shef considered a moment. These people seemed to have no clear idea of how to deal with him. The death of Christianity—that was nothing to him. They should have understood that. Yet he did not believe in swearing false oaths. It might bring bad luck.

"I will swear by this," he said, laying his hand on his pendant. His father-in-heaven, or in his own mind, whichever it might be, would not worry about a false oath, or an oath honored only to the letter. "I swear by my own emblem and by your holy graduale to reveal nothing of what I am told in this chamber."

Tension began to drain out of the seated men, out of the one face he could now see: an elderly man with a face of shrewd cunning, the face of a successful trader among peasants.

"Good. The story has come to us that you gave the Emperor the Holy Lance he bears. You must know, then, why it is the Holy Lance. It was the weapon of the centurion who stabbed Our Lord on the Cross."

Shef nodded.

"Why should there be a ladder to go with a lance? I will tell you. After the centurion stabbed Our Lord, and the blood and water gushed over his hands, pious men prayed the Romans for Our Lord's body. They were Joseph of Arimathea and his cousin, Nicodemus."

At the last name all the seated men moved together, making a zigzag sign across their bodies.

"They took the body down from the cross. And, of course, they used a ladder. That ladder is the graduale. They lashed the body to the ladder to carry it to the stone grave that Joseph had reserved for the man he accepted as a prophet.

"Now, king, I must ask you this. They tell me you were baptized, brought up as a follower of Christ. So, tell me this: what is it that the Christians offer to those who believe?"

Shef considered. This did not have the ring of ritual, seemed an honest question. He did not know the answer. As far as he remembered Father Andreas had said that Christians should be Christians or go to Hell with the heathen. Hell? Or heaven? Perhaps that was the answer.

"They offer life," he said. "Eternal life."

"And how can they offer it? How dare they offer it? They offer it because, they say, Christ Himself rose from the grave. But I can tell you. He did not rise from the grave of Joseph. Because he did not die on the cross! He lived."

The perfectus sank back on his chair, to see the effect of his words. Not what he expected. Shef shook his head emphatically.

"A German centurion stabbed him. He called himself Longinus. Stabbed him with an infantry issue javelin, a pilum. I have held the weapon, I saw the blow."

"The blow was struck. It went astray." The perfectus considered the strange certainty of the man who faced him, went on, "It may be that crucified men, men kept upright with their arms above their heads, that they stand oddly, their hearts shift. It is strange that water ran out of the wound. Maybe Longinus pierced some other vessel. But when Joseph and Nicodemus went after the Passover to the tomb they had made, to embalm the body: they found the Christ alive. Still wrapped in his shroud."

It was Shef's turn to think, to recognize a kind of truth. Ten nights before he had dreamed another dream, of the man waking from the dead with his arms bound to his sides and pain in his heart, a dream of horror. But it could have happened. He had known men to recover on the battlefield as their comrades prepared to throw them in the pit, it had happened to Brand himself. And Brand too had recovered from a deep belly wound. It did not happen often, but it could.

"What happened then?"

"They told a trusted few the truth. But soon the story spread that they find in the Gospels, that the tomb was empty, that an angel had appeared. That Christ had gone down to Hell to rescue the patriarchs and the prophets. The Christians say that story came from Nicodemus, for he was known to have had speech with Christ after his taking down from the cross. They read that story to this day in their false gospel of Nicodemus. But it is not true.

"The Christ did not die. Nor did he go back to his followers. They nursed him back to life, Joseph and Nicodemus and the woman they call Mary Magdalene. Then, secretly, Nicodemus the rich sold his goods, as did Joseph of Arimathea, and they and Jesus and Mary came here to this country. They left Palestine to the Jews and the Romans to fight over and came to the other end of the Inner Sea, but still within the old imperium of the Romans.

"Here they lived. Here they died. Here they bore their children, Jesus's children by Mary. And their seed is not yet dead. For we here, the people of the mountains, we can trace our blood back to him. And that is why we are the Sons of God!"

His voice rose in triumph on the last words, and the men sitting round him echoed them.

Yes, Shef thought. That is a tale the Christians would not like told. There is a great gap in it, for if the Jesus they claim descent from was merely another mortal, why should they call themselves the Sons of God, or believe in him? They have good reason not to. But they will have an explanation for that, just like Thorvin or Farman. Believers always do.

"What then do you want from me?" he asked quietly.

"The Graal. We kept it. It is in the deepest depths of Puigpunyent. But the Emperor knows it is there, has men digging for it every day. Soon, we fear, he will find it, and our holy treasures and testaments with it. And he will destroy them utterly, and the proof of our knowledge with them. We have to get them out. The Grail and the writings. Or drive the Emperor away. You—you came into our country with our holy sign around your neck, you passed the tests of our mystery without aid or prompting, some of us say that you are the holy Nicodemus risen again! We ask you to aid us."

Shef scratched his beard. It was an interesting story. More interesting would be the way out. He was still in the power of these fanatics. "I am no Nicodemus," he said. "But tell me. If I can do what you ask—and I see no way to—then what can you do for me? Your beliefs are not my beliefs, and your fear is not my fear. What is the price? And you must know that I am already a rich man."

"Rich in gold. They tell us though that you search continually for knowledge, that you and your men try continually to fly, to do what has never been done before. They tell us that you search for the secret of the Greek fire."

Shef straightened, his interest immediately caught.

"You know the secret of the Greek fire?"

"No. That is something we cannot claim. We believe that no one knows that save some few of the Greeks, and even they, it may be, only one small piece each. But we know something of fire, and what we know we will tell you. If you rescue for us our holy relics."

The red fires behind them had burned themselves out, the room was now lit only by the clear light of half a score of lamps, like any other room in which men might do business, apart from the stone walls all around. "I will do what I can," said Shef.

The Emperor of the Romans was learning what so many harassed leaders have learnt throughout history: that the number of helpers in a large and difficult task increases the number of problems, unless those helpers are so disciplined that they never act for themselves or for their own interest. Those who knew him noticed the whitening knuckles and the tension in his neck. Those who did not noticed only his quiet voice and the care with which he appeared to listen.

The baron of Béziers was at odds, it seemed, with the bishop of Besançon. Both contingents were about the same size, a hundred men or six score, and both were rated as middling in loyalty and care. They were not locals, and so would contain no secret heretics in their ranks, but they were not men of Bruno's own blood either. Both contingents had been sent to the middle ring of the three that Bruno had drawn round Puigpunyent, there to patrol the near-impassable scrub in the days and spend their nights sweltering in the heat that baked up from the scorched ground. They were arguing about water, as was everyone in the army. The baron thought the bishop's men were calling off their patrols early in order to get there first with their horses and mules, and leave his men only foul water to drink. Not that there was any water for ten miles round that was not fouled by now.

And all the time, Bruno knew, his diggers and pick-axe men pressed closer and closer to the secret. Only this day they had opened up a secret passage within the stone wall they were demolishing, one that led from a hidden garderobe in the walls down to the very foundations of the castle, to emerge in the depth of a ravine—an escape-route when the castle might seem to be surrounded. Bruno was confident no one had taken it. If they had, the garrison would not have needed to fight to the last. But where there was one hidden way, there would be another. From time to time a great crash cut across the noise of the giant encampment, as another stone was lifted from its bed by a hundred men with a sheer-legs, and hurled into the choked gullies far below. Bruno's head hurt, and the sweat crawled down his neck, and he yearned furiously inside to return to the demolition, spur on the teams and gangs. Instead he had to listen to two fools arguing in a language he could barely follow.

The baron jumped to his feet suddenly, cursing in his own dialect. The bishop shrugged elaborately, affected to misunderstand the gesture, took it as a request to leave. Yawning, he stretched his hand across the table, the episcopal ring glinting upon his finger: kiss my ring and depart, he pantomimed.

The baron, furious, slapped the hand aside. The bishop, sprung like the baron from ten generations of warriors, leapt to his feet in his turn, hand groping for the weapon he did not carry. In an instant the baron had his own dagger out, the long misericorde designed for stabbing through armor-joint or eye-hole.

Far quicker than the baron, quicker than the eye could see, the Emperor's own hand shot out, seized the baron's wrist. The ape-like shoulders moved beneath the patched leather jacket the Emperor still wore, a twist, a snap of bone, and the baron was huddled against the flap of the tent. The guards drew their broadswords as a matter of form, but barely changed position. They knew from many battles and skirmishes that the Emperor needed no protection. He was more dangerous with his bare hands than a skilled knight in full armor. Tasso the Bavarian raised an eyebrow inquiringly.

"Take him out," said the Emperor briefly. "He drew a weapon in the presence of his Emperor. Let him see a priest and hang him. Tell the Count of his county to recommend to me on the succession to Béziers. Send his men home."

He reflected a moment longer. "They will be rebellious. Take ten of them, cut off left hand and right foot, tell them it is the Emperor's mercy. You, your grace," he added to the bishop. "You provoked him. I fine you a year's income of your see. Till it is paid you have our permission to undergo the discipline which your hot blood needs. Ten strokes a day with a choirmaster's scourge. My chaplain will see to it."

He stared across the table at the whitening face, the face which after a very brief interval decided not to provoke the Emperor a moment further. The baron vanished, on his way to the already loaded gibbets on the edge of the camp. The bishop backed out, bowing and wondering how rapidly he could possibly raise a thousand solidi in gold.

"What's that noise?" asked the Emperor.

Tasso the Lanzenbrüder looked carefully out across the lines of tents and pavilions.

"Agilulf," he replied. "Come at last."

The Emperor's face broke into its unexpected charming smile. "Agilulf! He took his time getting here. But that means a thousand men, good Germans with Lanzenorden officers to control them. We can pull out those rascals we have guarding the west face and put some reliable fellows in their place. And I dare say Agilulf can find a couple of dozen good men with ropes' ends to keep those lazy devils on the rocks working. Ha, they have had a nice holiday by the sea, they will be ready for some real work."

Tasso nodded. The Emperor seemed to have cheered up, his moods Swung a good deal these days. If the idiots in the tent had watched him carefully they would have seen it was no time to provoke him. Now, there might be a chance.

"Those men, you told me to cut their hands and feet off," he ventured. "Ten, did you say? Or five? Hands and feet, was it?"

The Emperor's smile vanished, he was across the tent before Tasso could blink or think of protecting himself. Not that he would have tried.

"I know what you're up to, Tasso," he said, looking up from his little more than average height to the eyes of his strapping captain. "You think I'm getting too tough with these bastards. Well, I'm getting tough because things are getting tough. There is no room for failure any more. Not with the devil loose. Not with the devil loose."

"Is the devil loose?" broke in another voice, the harsh and hostile one of Erkenbert the deacon, reporting to his master from the ground where he labored continually at perfecting his siege catapults. "When that happens we can expect signs and wonders in the sky."

In the Caliph's camp too, the bodyguards were uneasy. Every dusk, as the army camped, the impaling-posts were set up, every night was made hideous by the shrieks of men who felt the spike driving up through their bowels, as they fought to keep their footing on the iron ring that held them from death. A brave man, it was said, could sink down and let the spike tear out his bowels and his liver from inside. It was a long way from rectum to heart, though: too long for any normal courage. The Caliph was in a black mood, perturbed by the continuous defeats to which the followers of the Prophet were little used. His navies burned, or fled, his armies were trampled underfoot, or hesitated, came on slowly and reluctantly as now. There would be more screams and deaths unless good news came soon. Maybe even among the bodyguards. As they spread out the leather carpet and poised their scimitars, they prayed for distraction.

The captain of the cavalry patrols approached, dust matting his clothes. A young man dragged behind him by the wrists, struggling to get to his feet and shrieking imprecations. The bodyguards eyed each other with relief, waved the cavalryman through. A sacrifice for this evening already. Perhaps it would ease the master's mood.

Mu'atiyah did not notice the Caliph's baleful stare as he recovered his footing and angrily straightened his torn clothes.

"You are the pupil of bin-Firnas," he said slowly. "We sent you to escort and guide the ferengis of the North, the fleet with its strange machines that was to sink the red galleys of the Greeks. They did not sink the galleys, but fled, or so the survivors told me before they were led to execution. What story is it that you have to tell me?"

"Treachery," hissed Mu'atiyah. "My story is of treachery."

No word could better have suited the Caliph's mood. He settled back on his cushions as Mu'atiyah, fury chafed by days of silence and contempt at sea, days of idleness and imprisonment among the Jews, told his tale: the Northerners' abandonment of the Arab cause, their cowardly reluctance to close with the Greeks, their ignorant sporting with the secrets of the wise. Most of all, the betrayal of the Prophet and his servants by the treacherous Jews, protected against the Christians by the favor of the Caliph, repaying it only by making common cause with pork-eaters and wine-drinkers. Mu'atiyah's sincerity was patent. Unlike anyone the Caliph had heard speak for weeks, he gave not a thought to his own safety. His urge was only, so much was evident, to fall upon the enemies of the Shatt al-Islam and exterminate them. Again and again his words veered towards criticism of the Caliph: he had been too lenient, he had let his secret enemies gain courage from his forbearance. It was criticism the Caliph was prepared to hear. The words of an honest man.

"When did you last drink?" he said finally.

Mu'atiyah goggled, became aware through his rage of his own thirst. "Before noon," he said huskily. "I rode through the heat of the day."

The Caliph waved a hand. "Bring sherbet for this faithful one. And let others mark his zeal. When he has drunk, let his mouth be filled with gold and a dress of honor prepared. And now, send for my generals and my admirals and the keepers of my maps. Let all be prepared to turn our march against the Jews. First the Jews, then the Christians. The enemy within the gate and then the enemy without."

Marking the Caliph's good humor, those who held prisoners to be brought in and condemned to lighten the master's mood silently withdrew them. They would do, after all, for another day.

Chapter Seventeen

The group on the deck of the Fafnisbane stared at Solomon with expressions ranging from doubt to horror. "Tell us again," said Brand. "He wants us to dismantle the kite, take it and enough material for two more up into the hills, with a mile of rope, Tolman, and two more boys?"

Solomon bowed his head in agreement. "Such are the instructions of your master."

The eyes shifted to Steffi, standing a pace behind with an air of deep embarrassment. He shuffled his feet, unable to meet the concentrated gaze of his superiors with more than one eye at once. "That's what he said," he muttered in confirmation. "Enough for three kites and a guard, load 'em on mules, get it all up in the hills as fast as you can, only faster. That's what he said, right enough."

There was no doubt about Steffi's loyalty, though there might be about his sense. At least these orders were not a trap. The eyes switched to each other, looked back in the end to Solomon.

"We don't doubt that's what he said," offered Thorvin, "but things have happened here while he's been away. Things he doesn't know about."

Solomon bowed again. "Well I know it. After all, my own master has given orders that all our outlying people, our traders and our farmers on the hillsides, are to come in to the city at once, for safety. We have known for weeks that the Emperor of the Romans is too close for comfort, though he seemed completely occupied with his army across the border. But now the Caliph is barely two days' march away—less for a fast rider. And the Arabs can move fast when they are so inclined, however slow the Caliph himself may be. We could have light cavalry at our gates in the morning. They may be in the hills already."

"Light cavalry be buggered," commented Hagbarth. "What frightened me was those red galleys. Just turned up, no warning. Like the Ragnarssons used to do. There we were, flying the kites off, half a dozen ships out there, and they came out of the haze as if they'd planned it. Not even hurrying, just paddling along at twelve strokes a minute. Nearly cut us all off from the harbor just the same. If Tolman hadn't seen them first we could all have been fried."

"If we hadn't had to wind Tolman in and recover him we could have got out to the open sea and let them go by," grunted Brand, continuing a long argument.

"Either way. They came up to the harbor just after we got inside, had a look in, burned off a fishing boat that hadn't seen them—just deviltry that was, to show us they could do it, and kept on paddling north. But they aren't far away. Could be here before nightfall."

"We think it would be wiser," Thorvin concluded, speaking for all of them, "if the king returned here and made preparations for departure."

Solomon spread his arms wide. "I have given you his instructions. He is—or so you say—your king. I do not debate with my prince once he has said his word. Perhaps you Northerners are different."

A long silence. Brand broke it. "Will your prince let us leave the city?"

"He will let you leave the city. You are not under his protection. He will let me guide you. I am out of favor now. I spoke my mind concerning the release of the young Arab, and he is prepared to lose me. None of his other people may go."

"All right," said Brand. "We'll have to do it. Thorvin, hand over some silver to Solomon so he can buy the mules, Steffi, start getting the stuff together and work out how many mules you'll need. Pick the kite crews."

"Will you come with us, lord?" asked Steffi.

"No. I'm not very good at fast moving, and something tells me you're going to come down that mountain a great deal faster than you went up. If you're lucky. I'm going to stay here and think about how to guard this harbor. Against anything, flame included."

Miles further up the mountain, Shef was repeating an experiment, in his usual painstaking and skeptical way. He was familiar enough with the white residue that the head of the perfecti had shown him. So was anyone who had ever mucked out a cowshed or a pig-sty. A white earth, that condensed from the animals' urine, or so they said.

What Shef had not seen before was the crystalline form derived from it. "How had they come upon that?" he had asked. The answer made a kind of sense. In English conditions, where earth was wet most of the time and earth from an animal-shed even more so, lighting a fire on the white earth was unlikely ever to happen. Here, in the cold, dry air of the mountain winter, where beasts were often stalled indoors, it was a natural event. Once the mountaineers had realized that the white earth made a blaze, someone, somewhere had put that knowledge together with the knowledge of the Arabs, familiar already with al-kimi, al-kuhl, al-qili, and other strange concepts. Now they knew that water trickled over the white earth from the animal sheds, the wood-ash from the fires, and the lime crushed from limestone, could be boiled to give these crystals.

Sal Petri, they called it, the salt of Saint Peter. Or did they mean rock-salt? Shef neither knew nor cared. He had realized soon enough that the Peter-salt could not be the secret of the Greek fire. But it was interesting just the same, as were the other ingredients that the Children of God had shown him. New knowledge once again.

He had built a pile of kindling, a sequence of piles, and poured the crystals over each one. Then to each he had made a separate addition from the materials the graybeard perfectus Anselm had given him. In normal life, each one would have to be lit painstakingly from kindling and blown into life with the care that children learnt from their parents. Some people could light fires, some people couldn't, so ran the folk wisdom: the former group were bound for Hell, where the devil would commandeer them. But these fires were not normal.

Shef whirled the half-rotted stick a few times round his head to make the punk glow brightly, leant forward and tossed the fire-brand a few feet on to the first pile of twigs. A soft 'whump,' a bright glare, and the fire was collapsing immediately into fierce embers.

He took another stick, stepped sideways three paces, repeated the process. This time the 'whump' was followed by an instant livid green. "Copper filings for green," he muttered to himself. "Now, what makes the yellow one?"

"We call it orpiment, the golden color," said Anselm at his side, the graybeard leader of the perfecti. "Though the Greeks give it some other name. Much of this our men learned from Greek traders. That is what made us think that it might be the secret of the Greek fire. Though the Arabs make colored flames like this too, when they light fires to honor their leaders and their Prophet. They have much learning in what they call al-kimi. The lore of burnings and distillations."

"It is not the Greek fire," replied Shef absently, working his way down the line of piles, and muttering a color and a substance for each one. "There is nothing pretty about that."

"But you will not go back on your word to help us?"

"I will not go back on my word to try. But you have set me a hard task."

"Our men saw you flying strange machines. We thought you might swoop down on Puigpunyent like an eagle and carry off our relics through the air."

Shef lobbed the last torch, noted the result, turned and grinned down at the smaller, older man.

"Maybe one day we will know how to do that. But to land on a mountain? Not the kindly sea? And fly away again without the lines and the crew and the wind to lift you? Carrying Othin knows what as well as the boy? No, that would take the skill of Wayland the smith of the gods."

"So what will you do instead?"

"That will take a great deal of work from all of us. From you, and from my men, once they come. Show me again, draw the map in the dirt, where the Christians' camp is and how they have their guard posts."

Anselm whistled shrilly, and the shepherd boy who had been playing on his flute of oaten straw rushed over.

The next day, with the sun already beginning to sink, Shef called the whole of his party together—heretics, Northerners, and the kite-gangs brought hastily up by Solomon—and went over once again all the pieces of his plan.

The thirty men and three boys were on a grassy ledge on the last mountain slope looking out over the plains, the rock of Puigpunyent clearly visible, even without the far-seers. In the strong sun anyone could see, also, that the plain down there was alive with men: parties of riders moving one way and another, flashes of sunlight on weapons and armor from every gap in the scrub. It had been an uneasy ride to reach this place, with repeated halts and diversions: Anselm had turned out every man he could to act as a screen of scouts and spies. They were in their own country and close to their most secret fastnesses. Even so, reports had come back every few minutes of Christian riders out in the night, forcing Shef and Anselm and their men to fade from the paths into the rocks or the thorn scrub, till another soft call or whistle would lead them on again. They were safe enough where they were, or so Anselm thought. The ledge could be reached by only two paths, and both were by now heavily guarded. Just the same, it would be bad to attract attention. As he peered out all afternoon over the landscape, Shef had been careful to keep well back, to lie deep in the shadow of a bush.

He spoke, first, to the men of his own party, the snatchers as he thought of them. There were only seven including himself. The shepherd lad, whom Shef had privately dubbed "Straw," from his endless thin piping: he was to be the guide. Four young men chosen for their agility and speed: they were to be the carriers of the holy things. Richier, youngest of the perfecti. Shef had eyed him askance when Anselm had brought him forward. He was the man who had challenged Shef as he climbed out of the pit, and Shef had no high opinion of his presence of mind or even his courage. Nor was he even much of a lightweight like the others. Youngest of the perfecti he might be, but he was at least forty, an old man by the measure of the mountains or for that matter of the fens, not one who ranged the hills all day or eeled through the brush in pursuit of game. Yet Anselm had said it must be so. Only the perfecti knew the way into their innermost sanctum. No, another could not be told how to find it. Apart from the breach of their strongest rules of secrecy, the way in was not something that could be described. Only shown. So a perfectus must go with the company, and Richier it would have to be.

Finally, Shef himself. Shef had seen Straw looking at him with much the same expression that he used when he looked at Richier, and he knew why. Among the lightly-built people of the hills, Shef stood out like Styrr among ordinary folk. He was head and shoulders taller than any other man in the company, Richier included. He outweighed Richier by fifty pounds and every other man or boy by seventy at least. Could he keep up when it came to speed? Could he creep undetected below the cover? Straw obviously thought not. Shef himself was more confident. It was not so many years since he and Hund had stalked the wild pigs together in the marsh, or snaked on their bellies to take fish from some thane's private pond. He had grown bigger and stronger since then, but little of the weight, he knew, was fat. If anyone could elude the scouts and sentries, he could.

He had no fear, indeed, of being seen and killed in the night. He had a good chance, and death, if it came, would come cleanly, not as it had come to Sumarrfugl.

What did set a weight in his bowels and a chill at his heart was the thought of capture. For capture meant facing the Emperor. Shef had seen him close, drunk with him, felt no fear even when he stood with Bruno's sword-point at his throat. Something told him now, though, that if they met again the genial side of his old comrade would be gone, replaced by the fanatic. He would not spare a heathen and a rival a second time.

Shef looked round the small inner circle of seven. "Very well. We will start our ride as soon as I have finished speaking to the others. We work down into the plain behind our scouts, and at dusk we start to ride round in a wide circle. To come out on the other side of the rock, of Puigpunyent, to the north-west. Then we leave our horses and follow Straw here through the Emperor's guard-ring.

"You know that is asking a lot. But I promise you this. The Emperor's guards will all be looking at quite something else. If they are still there."

A mutter of assent, if not belief.

"Stand aside then and be ready to go."

Shef turned to the larger group standing further back, by their machines. Cwicca and his gang had brought light winches with them, mere cylinders of wood with a turning handle, and had spent a long hour slowly pegging them into the stony ground without noise of hammers. By each winch stood half a dozen of the ships' catapulteers now turned kite-men, with by them the bulkier figures of the Vikings sent along to act as close-quarter guards.

In front of each of the three groups stood a kiteboy, Tolman in the middle, to either side Ubba and—Helmi, that was his name, a small pale boy little more than a child. A cousin of some crew-member's, left orphaned and homeless by the wars. All three boys looked unusually serious and alert.

"You know what to do as well. Stay here, rest, light no fires. At midnight, Cwicca, you can read the stars, fly off the kites. There will be a wind coming down from the mountains behind, or so they tell us.

"Then you, boys. When you are at the end of your ropes and flying smoothly, bring out your fires. Light each of your baskets in turn and then drop them. Make sure the cloths are unfolded before you start lighting. Drop them one at a time, counting one hundred between each. Count slowly.

"Steffi, you count the baskets as they are lit. Once you have seen them all dropped, haul the boys in. Don't stop to unpeg the winches, just leave everything and follow Messer Anselm wherever he says to go. In the morning we meet up and all head back to the ships. Any questions?"

There were none. Shef moved over once more and looked carefully at the gear they had spent the day assembling. The basic idea was to put together Steffi's invention of the fall-delaying cloth with the thing that the heretics had shown him, the colored fires of the saltpeter and the Arab alchemy. Bundles of dry twigs, impregnated with saltpeter and sealed roughly with wax. A cloth tied by four corners to each one, each of them hanging from bent nails in the canework frames of the kites. Each cloth had a small hole in its center now: Steffi, experimenting continually, had discovered this prevented the trapped air from spilling sideways, gave a smoother and even a slower fall. The most difficult bit had been giving the boys fires to carry. There could be no striking tinder and steel in mid-air. In the end they had borrowed a sailor's trick from the Vikings, who made long crossings in their undecked boats and could not always find dry tinder: tarred rope, lit and set to smolder inside a stiff canvas case.

The idea was good. Shef realized, as he looked at the flame-baskets, at the flimsy construction of the kites, quite how much was being expected of three twelve-year-olds, bobbing at the end of ropes high in the air above unyielding mountain-side. No need to remind them of the reward. Boys did not think far enough ahead to value money. They would do this for the praise and admiration of the men. Maybe, a little, out of respect for him. He nodded at them all, patted Helmi gently on the shoulder, and turned away.

"Time to move," he said to his own party. As they filed away the English catapulteers and Viking guards looked after him with silent concern. Cwicca, at least, had seen this happen before, the One King going by himself to some uncertain fate. He had hoped not to see it happen again. From the place where she sat alone, arms wrapped round knees, Svandis too watched the retreating file. She could not go out, throw her arms round him, weep like a woman: her dignity forbade it. But she had seen many men go, few come back.

Hours later, as the sun finally crawled down to touch the flat horizon, the boy Straw led the seven horsemen into the rare shade of a clump of low and twisted trees. He whistled softly, and at the call figures appeared from the shadows to clutch bridles. Shef slowly levered himself off the horse's back and climbed stiffly to the ground, thigh muscles twinging and cramping.

It had been a hellish ride. At the very start Shef had been shocked to find not the tiny mountain ponies they had been using to come down from the heretics' stronghold, but bigger animals, and not with the usual blanket slung over them but strange high-pommeled leather saddles, with iron stirrups dangling either side. "Bruno's baccalarii," Richier explained briefly. "Cowboys from the country to the East. They are all over the place. Some of them rode too far and too few. From a distance, with these horses and this gear, we will seem just like some more of them. No-one asks where they go. They ride wherever they please."

Shef had clambered into the high saddle, appreciating immediately the help and support it gave even an inexperienced rider. Then he had realized that like the others he was meant to carry in his right hand the long ten-foot ox-goad that every cowboy brandished, control the beast with left hand on reins alone. As he kicked his heels and tried to force his unaccustomed seaman's legs to clamp the horse's barrel, they moved out into the sun and the dust.

No-one had challenged them, indeed. As they rode across the broken foothills and into the plain beyond, they had seen again and again other mounted men in the distance, but often, on every path or road, groups of infantry watching the crossings. Straw and his fellows waved their lances at the horsemen, but took care not to ride to meet or cross them, veering away when they could. To the groups of foot-soldiers they called out in what was evidently some imitation of the language of the Camargue, the cowboys' country, but kept riding, not waiting to engage in gossip. Shef was surprised that no-one acted, moved across to block their path, but it looked as if everyone expected the irregular riders to go where they liked, without orders or plan. Surely someone would notice the inept riding of Shef and Richier, at least, see that there were men there too old or too big for a cowboy patrol. But even the shouts that came towards them seemed good-natured or simply derisive. The Emperor had made a mistake, Shef concluded. He had put too many men out on watch, and too few of them knew each other. They were used to seeing strangers riding towards, or round, Puigpunyent. If the Emperor had ordered a complete ban on movement, patrolled by a few selected outfits, strangers would have been challenged instantly.

The break in the copse of twisted trees did not last long enough. Time to take the skins of heavily-watered wine and drain down first one quart and then another, drinking till the demand in the throat was gone, and then drinking steadily on, a gulp at a time, till the sweat began to break out again and the body felt it could hold no more. Then Straw was counting them in the deep shade and arranging them in the order he wanted: himself in the lead, another stripling in the rear, Richier next to last and Shef just before him. The other three heretic youths followed Straw, one directly behind him and the other two a little to left and right. A last mutter between the youths and a soft exchange of signal whistles. Then Straw led them into the depth of the tangled and ground-cloaking scrub. The maquis of Occitania.

Very soon Shef began to wonder if they would ever reach their goal. The idea had always been clear enough. The thorn-bushes were a total obstacle to movement on foot or on horseback, as long as one kept upright. But the thorns started their sideways growth a foot or two off the ground. Beneath them there was always a clear space, enough for an active man or boy to creep through, completely hidden from any sentry, as long as one could keep any sense of direction.

The trouble was the creeping. Straw and his mates, light and young, could wriggle forward at an immense pace, keeping their bodies off the ground and pushing forward on hands and toes. Shef managed the same movement for no more than a hundred yards. Then his overtasked arm-muscles gave out and he began instead to crawl, belly on the ground, pulling himself forward like a clumsy swimmer. Behind him grunts and gasps indicated that Richier was doing the same. In seconds the boy ahead of him had vanished, eeling along at three times Shef's speed. He ignored the disappearance and crawled on. Whistles from behind and then from in front, sounding like the calls of some night-bird. A shape wriggling back towards him, muttering some kind of appeal for more speed. It vanished again. Straw appeared, gabbling likewise. Shef ignored them all and continued to crawl through the roots, weaving from side to side to get round the thickest clumps, thorns catching in his hair, sticking in his fingers, dragging at his clothes. A hiss and a scurry on the bare ground brought him up short, jerking his hand away. One of the vipers of the plain, but hearing him coming long before his hand reached it. Shef's mouth began to clog with dust, his knees to bleed through the chafed wool trousers.

Straw had caught him by the shoulder, was pulling him to one side—out into a break in the cover, a path, only inches wide, but leading round the side of a hill. Shef climbed slowly onto his feet, feeling the relief in protesting thigh-muscles, wiped the hair out of his eye and looked at Straw with doubt and enquiry. On their feet? In the open? Better to crawl on than be seen.

"Too slow," hissed Straw in trade-Arabic. "Friends gone ahead. If hear whistle, off path! Hide again!"

Slowly but relievedly Shef began to pad in the direction indicated, rustles in the brush indicating the scouts ahead. He spared a moment to glance at the stars, shining clear in the cloudless sky. Not too long to midnight.

He had gone maybe half a mile along the goat track as it wound through the small hills when the whistles came again from the hillside. Straw was at his side, gripping an arm and trying to force him back into the brush. Shef looked at the apparently solid wall of thorns, ducked and crawled under. Ten feet in and hardly a glimmer of light finding its way through, though more gasping and grunting told him that the exhausted perfectus was being hauled into safety too. Straw was still pulling at him to get further in, but Shef resisted. He was a veteran of many marches, many spells of sentry duty. Unlike Straw he could estimate a risk. In this kind of country, with no alarms and no immediate danger at hand, he did not think the Emperor's patrols would be at full alert. They would not see an eye peering from thick cover in the middle of a featureless hillside. Carefully he edged to his feet, held on to the base of a branch, carefully let it sink a few inches to give him a spyhole.

There they were indeed, not twenty feet away, edging along the narrow awkward path, too busy avoiding thorns to look around them. Shef caught a low grumble of conversation, an angry bark of command from the man in the lead. The grumbling did not stop. Low-grade troops, Shef thought. Local levies like his own county fyrds. Reluctant to take trouble, thoughts simply on getting home. Easy to avoid, as long as one did not actually fall over them in the dark. It was the silent men who did not move who were the danger.

Back to the path, another half-mile on, then into the scrub and once more the steady crawling round some obstacle or sentry-post. Another hundred yards on a goat-path, and crawl again. On and on. Shef lost sense of direction, ceased fatalistically to glance at the sky and reckon the time. The gasping of Richier diminished as he too seemed to settle to their uneven rhythm of movement. And then suddenly, they were at a halt, all seven of them in a clump, looking from the shadows across a patch of bare ground at glimmering fires. Behind them the great jagged mass of the peak, the Castle of the Graduale, Puigpunyent itself.

Straw pointed very gently at the fires. "Them," he breathed. "Last men. Last ring. Los alemanos."

Germans they were. Shef could see the iron glinting as they moved on their beats, shields and mail, helmets and gauntlets. In any case he would have recognized the bearing of the Lanzenbrüder, whom he had seen swarming to the assault in the battle of the Braethraborg years before. Then they had been on his side. Now... There was no chance of creeping past them. They had cut down the scrub to make a bare belt, woven the debris into a rough thorn fence. The sentries were not fifty yards apart, and they moved continually. They were watching, too, not like the discontented levies further out.

Suddenly, from the bulk of Puigpunyent, there came a great crash and a thunder of rock. Shef started, noticed the sentries looking too, then turning back to their duties. A cloud of dust rose barely visible against the black and Shef could hear faint shouting. The Emperor's gangs were working on through the night, in shifts, tearing down the whole mountainside with pick and lever and crane, to rip out the heart of the heretics' faith. To find the Emperor his relic.

Shef looked again at the sky, the position of the moon, still some way off full. It was midnight now. But it would take time, he knew, time to rig the kites and winch them out. Maybe they would have to wait for a wind, even up there on the mountain. Straw was pulling at him again, anxious and wanting an instant answer. He was only a boy. In war, everything took longer than you wanted, except when the other side did it. Shef looked round, motioned them all to the ground. If there was nothing else to do, rest. If his plan succeeded, he would know soon enough.

Stretched out underneath the bushes, Shef put his head down on his forearms, felt the weariness come over him. There was no risk where they were, and the boys would stay awake. He let his eyelids close, fell slowly into the pit of sleep.

"He's not just loose now, he's out," said the voice, the familiar voice, his father's voice. "Out in the open."

Even in his dream Shef felt a surge of resentment, disbelief. "You're not there," he told himself, himself talking to himself. "Svandis explained all that. You're just a part of my mind, the same way all the gods are part of people's minds."

"All right, all right," the voice went on with weary tolerance. "Believe what you like. Believe what your girlfriend likes. But believe this. He's out. I have no hold over him. Things could go any way now. Ragnarök—that's what Othin wants, what Loki wants. What they think they want."

"You don't want it?"

"I don't want what would come after it. Church all-powerful, Way all-powerful, whichever. There's a better way—back to where we were before, before Sheaf became Shield. Maybe with something added, something new."

"What's that?"

"You're going to see. You're going to show them. The priests have it inside their holy circle, but they see it only as a warning, not a blessing. Can be either."

Shef had lost the thread, could not follow the hints. "What are you talking about?"

"What Loki lost to. What you are bringing back for him. His namesake, his near namesake. Logi."

"Fire," Shef translated automatically.

"Fire it is. Wake and see what you are bringing to the world."

Shef's head snapped upright, his eyes instantly wide open. He realized that he had already been half-woken by a rising babble of voices, from the ring of sentries in front of him. But all over the guarded plain were coming shouts and calls, the blast of a trumpet as some panicker decided to alert his men to what they had seen already. Fire drifting down out of the sky. After a few seconds Shef's eye and mind adjusted to what he was seeing. Immediately before him, a white flare drifting down, as brilliant as a sun, throwing flickering shadows over the thorn below. Above it, a green one. Not far away, Shef could see a third and a fourth beginning to drift down, thought for a second he could even see the tiny glow of the slow-match. But any such light was killed instantly by the lurid colors spreading across the sky. Violet, yellow, red. More and more flares seemed to spring into life every moment, though Shef knew that could not be so. It was just that each one took moments for the mind to recognize it. By the time it had been taken in, there were others in being to focus on. All three kites must be aloft and working. The boy-flyers were doing their duty better than he could have believed.

To the troops on the ground, local levies, bishops' men, half-heretics and Lanzenbrüder alike, every man deeply superstitious and steeped from birth in a culture of demons and miracles, dragons and portents, the flares in the sky were even harder to take in. Men do not see what they see. They see the nearest fit between what they see and what they expect. All across the plain beneath the rock of Puigpunyent, cries rose up as men tried to fit a meaning to something that defied all experience.

"A comet! The tailed star! God's judgment on those who overthrew the long-haired kings," wailed a chaplain, starting an instant panic.

"Dragons in the sky," shouted a Lanzenritter from the Drachenberg country, where belief in dragons was ingrained. "Shoot for its soft spot! Shoot before the damned things get on the ground!" A rain of arrows poured into the air from those who heard him, relieved at hearing an order of any kind. The arrows landed among the horses of a cavalry unit corralled two hundred yards off, starting a stampede.

"It is Judgment Day and the dead rising to meet their God in the sky," lamented a bishop with much on his conscience which he had hoped to do timely penance for. His cry would have carried little conviction, since the lights were falling rather than rising, if falling more slowly than could possibly be natural. But as he called out some sharp-sighted man caught the vague shape of one of the gliding kites banking above the light it had just released, and shrieked hysterically, "Wings! I can see their wings! They are the angels of the Lord come to scourge sinners!"

Within moments a roar spread across the plain, of ten thousand men shouting their explanations. The cowboys of the Camargue, lightest of cavalry, reacted first, were in their saddles in moments and heading purposefully for safety. Panicked sentries abandoned their positions in the brush and began to draw together, hoping for comfort in numbers. As they saw the infection spreading, the disciplined Germans of the Lanzenorden, scattered here and there to officer and stiffen the more doubtful Frankish troops, began to seize the runners, knock men down with their lance-butts, try to drive them back to their posts.

Spying from the cover of the thorns, Shef watched intently for an opportunity. One thing he had forgotten. While the men down there, the inner ring of the Emperor's guard, had certainly been distracted—they were clumped together now, abandoning their set watch-pattern, pointing into the sky—the flares themselves were making the whole landscape almost as bright as day. If he tried to move forward now, across the bare strip that the guards had made, they would certainly see him. If not as he moved forward, then in the seconds it would take to force a way through the barricade of cut-down trees. He needed cover to reach that point. Then the time to cut a way through, and to crawl a hundred yards through the masking scrub on the other side. Then they would be on the edge of one of the deep ravines that led up to the rock and the castle itself, the ravine that Richier said they must follow. In the deep dark of that they might be safe. But how to reach it?

There was something else in the sky now, not the steady light of the flares with their mixed colors. A flickering light, a red light. A red that was growing, beginning to put out the competing white and yellow and green. Not flares but fire. Shef realized that the flares had burnt all the way to the ground, landed in the dense, thick, tinder-dry scrub through which he had crawled. Set it instantly aflame. The shouts coming from all around now had an added edge of fear. All those who lived in this land knew the dangers of fire during the grande chaleur, the great heat of the southern summer. Their own villages lived protected by fire-breaks, carefully cleared and renewed every spring. Now they were out in the open, fire spreading all around them. To the noise of shouting was added the drumming of hooves, the patter of running feet.

From the goat-path in the scrub, fifty yards from where Shef and the others lay, a dozen men burst out, running determinedly towards the bare rock of the castle, where nothing could burn. As they reached the ring, now a clump, of sentries, Shef saw spear-points flash, heard an angry shout. The head of the German sentries barring their way. Shouts in reply, arms waving, pointing behind them at the flames. More men running from different directions. Shef rose to a crouch beneath the bushes.

"Come on."

They gaped at him.

"Come on. Look like horse-boys who've got lost. Run as if you're frightened."

He writhed once more through the bushes, burst through a final tangle, and ran out on to the cleared space, looking round and shouting out in a gabble of Arabic mixed with Norse. The rest followed him, hesitant from the long hours of hiding. Shef seized Straw, lifted him in the air and shook him as if hysterical with fear, turned and ran the wrong way, not towards the gap where the other refugees clustered but round the side of the hill. German eyes saw him, saw only another damned local out of control.

Rounding a turn, Shef halted, pushed aside the youth who had cannoned into his back, stared at the tangle of thorn trees with which the Germans had made their abatis. A weak place, there. He stepped forward, drawing the short single-edged sword slung from the back of his belt. For a few seconds he cut and tugged, then plunged forward, disregarding the scratches that came through wool and hemp. The others followed him, Straw and his mates disappearing at once into the bushes on the other side, Richier gasping again and holding his side. Shef seized him, bent him by force to the ground, thrust him bodily in under the branches. Followed him, this time using all his hoarded strength in one last burst of lizard-like motion. Through to the ravine and the dark rocks below.

As the noise behind died and Shef saw at last the black unguarded cleft that led to the very base of the rock of Puigpunyent, something again made him look up.

There, in the sky, for the first time, he saw a kite wheeling above him and above the flares it had sown. It was silhouetted by flame. Flame running along the cloth of the square kite shape, along the vanes of the controls. In the middle, like a fat-bodied spider in its web, what must be the shape of the flyer, Tolman or Helmi or Ubba. His own match must have caught the cloth. Or perhaps a flare had not fallen properly from its release. But now the kite was swooping down, first in a crazy spiral, then as its lift surfaces burned away, seeming to fold its wings like a gannet and plunge towards the rocks, a meteor trailing flame.

Shef closed his eye, turned away. Thrust Richier to the fore.

"Someone died for your relic," he hissed. "Now take us to it! Or I will cut your throat in sacrifice to my boy's ghost."

The perfectus began to run clumsily across the dark rock to the entrance only he could find.

Chapter Eighteen

His face tight-lipped with fury, the Emperor Bruno whirled his horse on the narrow flame-lit path, the great stallion rearing up and striking out automatically with its steel-shod hooves. A fleeing trooper struggling to get by took one of them on the temple and fell sideways into the brush, there to lie unnoticed till the fire took him. Behind their enraged Emperor his guards and officers lashed out with fist and whip, trying to force panicked soldiers to stand firm, obey their orders, begin to spread out and make a fire-break along the line of the path. Bruno himself ignored the struggle and the confusion.

"Agilulf," he bellowed. "Find one of these bastards who can speak a proper language. I have to know where that damned thing came down!"

Agilulf swung from his horse, obedient but doubtful. He seized the nearest man and began to shout into his face in the camp-Latin he used to the Greeks. The man he had seized, who spoke nothing but his native dialect of Occitan, and had never met anyone who spoke anything else; gaped at him uselessly.

Surveying the scene from his humble mule, Erkenbert the deacon intervened. In the swarm of runaways now being beaten into a standstill he caught the whisk of a priest's black robe. Some hedge-priest no doubt, called out with his parishioners. Erkenbert urged his mule towards him, extricated the man from the grip of one of Agilulf's yelling sergeants.

"Presbyter es," he began. "Nonne cognoscis linguam Latinam? Nobis fas est..." Slowly the priest's fear died, he began to recognize Erkenbert's strange English pronunciation, he recovered himself enough to take in the sense of the question and to reply. Yes, they had seen the lights in the sky, they had taken them for signs of coming doom and the resurrection of the dead, the souls rising to meet their Master in the sky. Then someone had seen the flash of angel wings and his whole troop had fled in terror, urged on by the forest fire they could see beginning. And yes, he had seen the burning shape which had come swooping down.

"And what did it look like?" Erkenbert asked tensely.

"Certainly it was an angel flung from the sky in flames, no doubt for disobedience. It is a terrible thing that the Fall of the Angels should come again..."

"And where did the angel fall?" asked Erkenbert, before the man could start his lamentations again.

The priest pointed into the scrub to the north. "There," he said. "There, where a small flame has started."

Erkenbert looked round. The major fire was coming towards them out of the south. It looked as if the Emperor's men would be able to halt that along the line of the break they were cutting. They had hundreds of men at work already, and order was spreading out like oil on water. To the north, a small fire, blown on by the wind out of the south. It did not look dangerous, for it seemed to be on a barer patch of hillside. He nodded to the priest, turned his mule and rode it past the still-shouting Emperor, his sword now drawn.

"Follow me," he called over his shoulder.

After a hundred paces the Emperor realized what Erkenbert was making for and forced his warhorse past the mule, charging into the scrub careless of thorns and tangles. Erkenbert followed the trampled path at a more sedate speed. When he came to the source of the fire, the Emperor was dismounted, standing with the reins over one arm, looking down at something on the ground.

It was the body of a child, lying crumpled amid the stones. There was no doubt the child was dead. His skull was cracked, and leg-bones stuck out through the flesh of his thighs. Slowly the Emperor reached down, picked the child up in one hand by the front of his tunic. The body dangled like a bag of chicken bones.

"He must have broken every bone in his body," said Bruno.

Erkenbert spat in his palm and traced the sign of the cross on the split forehead in spittle. "It may have been a mercy," he said. "See, the fire had caught him before he died. There are the marks of the burning."

"But what set him on fire? And how did he fall? What did he fall from?" Bruno stared up into the sky as if to find an answer in the stars.

Erkenbert began to poke around amid the scraps and pieces lying on the ground, well lit by the fire now burning steadily away from them before the wind. Pieces of stick. Light stick, made from some kind of hollow plant, like an alder but tougher. And a few charred pieces of cloth. Erkenbert crumbled one in his hand. It was not wool, nor linen. The strange plant of the south, he thought. Cotton. Very fine-woven. Fine-woven to hold the wind, like a sail.

"It was some sort of machine," he concluded. "A machine to hold a man in the air. But not a man. A boy. A small boy. There is nothing supernatural about this, nothing of the ars magica. It was not even a very good machine. But it was a new machine.

"I will tell you something else," he went on, looking down again at the dead child, his fair hair, his eyes that might have been blue before the fire caught them. "That boy is one of my countrymen, I can tell from his face. Like a choirboy. It is an English face."

"An English child flying in a new machine," whispered Bruno. "That can only mean one man, and we both know who it is. But what has he done it for?"

Agilulf had caught up with them, heard the Emperor's question. "Who can tell?" he replied. "Who can fathom the plan of that fiend? I remember the strange ship at the battle in Denmark, I rowed past it at twenty feet and I still did not know what it was for till the battle was over."

"The simplest way to understand a plan," said Erkenbert, speaking now in the Emperor's native Low German so like his own Northumbrian English. "The simplest way to understand a plan is to assume that it's worked."

"What do you mean?" snapped the Emperor.

"Well, here is the Emperor of the Romans standing round in a dark thorn-wood at night, with his advisers, none of them knowing what is happening or what to do. Perhaps that is what our enemy intended. Just that we should be standing here."

The Emperor's anxious face cleared suddenly. He bent forward, gripped Erkenbert's scrawny shoulder with his usual delicate care, as if afraid to crush it.

"I will make you an Archbishop for this," he said. "I understand. This is a distraction, to make us look the wrong way. Like a night attack on the side away from the real one. And it has worked! And all the time the bastards are heading for what we had shut up tight as a mouse's larder a few hours ago."

He swung effortlessly back into the saddle. "Agilulf, as soon as the fire-break is made I want you to withdraw all the Lanzenbrüder from the line and send them back to the castle, at the double. And send six men round the inner ring to tell them to face about and watch both ways, inside and out."

He paused a further instant before driving in the spurs. "And send a man back to pick up this child's body. He died like a hero and he shall be buried like one."

The spurs drove home, the stallion crashed away down the rocky hillside. Agilulf followed to carry out his orders. Erkenbert, left alone, remounted his mule and trotted at a far slower pace in their wake.

Archbishop, he thought. The Emperor always fulfills his promises. And there is an Archbishopric free, in York. If the Church can once more extend her wing over the heretics and the apostates. Who would have thought that I would be the heir of Wulfhere, he of a great family and I the child of a country priest and his concubine? Strange what happened to Wulfhere. Dead of a stroke in his bath, they said. I wonder how long they had to hold him under. The Emperor is generous, and can pardon failure. Never idleness, though. All his dogs have to bark. And bite as well.

Light showed brightly along the edge of the rocky ravine along which Shef, Richier, Straw and the others were climbing, illuminating the forbidding mass of the stone castle above them. In the ravine, though, only black shadow. For a few moments they were shielded from sight. Shouts echoed into the darkness both from behind them, where the guards were still watching the lights in the sky, and from the castle walls above, where gaping sentries were being pushed and kicked back to their posts. Better be out of sight soon, Shef thought.

Richier pushed past him as they came up to the base of the wall, seeming to grow out of the native rock like a cliff. He turned, spoke harshly in his dialect. Shef saw Straw and the other youths turn their backs, hide their faces. Richier repeated his order, gesturing fiercely at Shef. Turn. Do not look. Slowly Shef obeyed.

For a few moments. He knew that Richier would look back once, twice, then carry on with whatever it was that he had to do. It was like playing the game they called "Grandmother's Footsteps," where the child approaching had to guess when the child being stalked would turn round to look. Shef turned his head alone, watched Richier in the blackness.

He seemed to have pulled something slung round his neck from under his tunic. Was scraping at the wall, fitting the object to it. A key, an iron key. Shef looked back at Straw and the others an instant before Richier began to turn, waited, looked again. This time he heard the click. Something engaging. Now Richier reached up, seemed to be counting stones. He fixed on one, got fingers over its rough edge, pulled. The stone came out of the wall, projecting a good foot from the surface.

Nothing happened. Interested, Shef padded gently over to within arm's reach, met Richier's blazing indignant eyes as he turned round again. Ignored them.

"What now?" he whispered softly.

Richier gulped, then whistled gently. The five youths crept stealthily up out of the gloom of the ravine. Richier looked in all directions, as if expecting sudden discovery, then made his mind up. Bent and pushed at one of the massive unyielding stones of the base of the wall.

With hardly a sound the stone moved outwards. Outwards and inwards at once. On a pivot, Shef realized. Prevented from pivoting by the stone Richier had pulled out of the wall. That stone itself held in place by some contrivance the key had unlocked. And the keyhole? He looked at it more closely. Covered in moss, the moss just this moment scraped aside.

Richier had bent, was crawling through the gap. Shef followed immediately, twisting his broad shoulders to get through what could be only a two-foot gap. Inside, he put a foot down on stone, felt that he was on a narrow ledge. A ledge that narrowed in one direction. He stretched out a hand, felt stone wall ahead of him. He was on a staircase, a spiral staircase twisting down to the left. Carefully he edged past Richier in the dark, went up a step or two, heard the youths come rustling through. A heave, a grunt, and the stone slowly closing, cutting out even the faint glimmer of light from the ravine outside. In the dark, frightened breathing all around him, he could smell the stench of death, coming up from below. Coming up on a faint, barely perceptible current of air.

There were sparks in the blackness as Richier tried to strike a light, Straw holding out a bed of dried tinder for the sparks to fall on, one of the other boys clutching candles. Shef ignored them, began slowly and silently to climb the staircase. A call from below, first in dialect, then in Arabic. "Don't go up! We must go down." Shef ignored it.

As he climbed the steps, the draught increased, and so did the other thing his straining senses had noted: noise. Noise coming through the stone. Through the stone?

No. As he gripped the iron handrail Shef realized that he could see a faint something, not light but a paler darkness. And he could hear now, quite clearly. Voices shouting, the whack of a rope or a belt across someone's back. Order being restored. Yes, and there indeed was the hole in the stone, smaller than a man's hand, but there just the same. Shef put his eye to it, peered out.

He could see almost nothing, just a red glow in the sky, and in front of him legs scurrying. First bare ones, and then metal greaves over heavy leather boots. And that was German they were shouting, Shef could almost understand it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw and recognized something else. A pickax left lying on the ground. The Emperor's miners were through to the secret place. Only they had not realized yet, had been distracted just at the vital moment.

There was Richier at his elbow, candle lit. Shef reached out, ground out the flame between finger and smithy-callused thumb. As Richier began to gabble he closed a hand over his mouth, pulled him forward, whispered, "Look. See the hole. See the pickax?"

As he took in the meaning of what he had seen Richier began to shake in Shef's fist. Shef whispered again, "Go down."

A few turns of the stair and the boys were there, candles lit but unmoving, waiting for orders.

"We have only a short time," Shef said in a more normal voice. "Lead on quickly."

Richier took a candle, began to hurry down what seemed almost an endless stair, winding down into the heart of the mountain. After two hundred counted steps he stopped, and Shef realized that he was at last standing on level floor. In front of him was a stout door, its top rounded, of oak reinforced with iron. Richier had another key out. Before he inserted it he turned to the youths behind him and muttered something. All of them fell to their knees, made the strange zig-zag sign of their sect.

"This is our holiest place," said Richier. "None but the perfecti may enter."

Shef shrugged. "Better go in, bring everything out then."

Richier looked at the forbidding figure of the man who had disarmed him, shook his head in exasperation. "Come in, you must. But remember this is holy."

Straw and the others seemed to need no reminder. They hung back, let Shef follow Richier through the door. Looking round in the candlelight, Shef reflected that they had reason for their shyness.

It was a place of death. The stench he had detected was stronger here. And yet he had known worse, much worse, on the battlefields of England. Here the dry air seemed to quell corruption. In front of him, round the circular table, a dozen men—a dozen corpses—sprawled in their seats, some face down with skulls on arms, some fallen to the floor. Richier made his zigzag sign again, and childhood habit made Shef begin to make the sign of the cross. He corrected himself, turned it into a hammer. Thor, or Thunor, between me and evil.

"They died rather than take the chance of capture and torment," said Richier. "They took the poison together."

"It is for us to see they did not die in vain, then," prompted Shef.

Richier nodded, braced himself, walked across the room, skirting the fallen bodies, till he came to a further door on the other side. Unlocked it, pushed it open.

"The place of the Graal," he said.

Moving into the last room, Richier took on a sudden assurance, like one who knew every detail of the place, and was anxious to show his mastery. Candle in hand, he moved round the small circular room, lighting candle after candle in turn as they stood in great candlesticks. Golden candlesticks, Shef saw immediately. The light that shone from them lit up more gold, on the walls and on the furnishings of what seemed a Christian chapel. But in the place of honor there was no altar.

Instead, a coffin, a sarcophagus of stone, placed almost next to the far wall. And rising out of it, incongruous in the gleam of wealth, a plain wooden pole-ladder, three rungs on one side and two the other, its ends untrimmed, bark still showing here and there on the pale peeled wood.

"That is it," said Richier. "The graduale on which our Lord was carried from Calvary. Rising from the coffin to show how we can rise again."

"I thought Anselm said that Christ had not risen. That he died like an ordinary man. Is his body not here?"

"Not here. Not anywhere! For we do not rise as the Christians say, by the favor of the Church, mother of iniquities. We rise by denying the body. By becoming spirit alone! 'How can an old man become young? And enter again into the womb of his mother?' There is only one way—"

A moan of superstitious fear came from behind Shef as the listening boys heard the great question of their faith emerge in Richier's clumsy Arabic, which they too only half-understood. Richier gazed angrily round, realized he had said too much before the uninitiate, realized too that in this holiest of holies, about to be defiled, mere words meant little.

"Do not enter into the womb! Do not spill the seed! Pay no more tribute to him, to the Father who sent his Son to die, to the Prince of this world, the God who is rightly a devil! Die and leave no child as hostage to the enemy."

No wonder Svandis wasn't raped, Shef thought, looking down at the working face, the angry eyes. Though it is not much of an answer. He glanced down into the empty coffin.

"Tell me. What is it we have to save? Besides the graduale."

Richier nodded, collected himself. "There is the gold, of course." He waved a hand round at the blaze of red metal surrounding them. "More important, much more important, are the books."

"The books?"

"The holy testimonies of our faith. The true gospels, written by men who had spoken with the Son of God face to face. The Son of God grown to wisdom, no longer in the folly of his youth."

Interesting books they must be, thought Shef. If they are not forgeries. "What do they weigh?" he asked.

"A few pounds, no more. And then... Then we must take with us the graduale."

Shef looked at the ladder rising out of the coffin more doubtfully, stepped across to handle it. Behind him, breath hissed in fear and muted anger that an unbeliever should touch the relic. But that was what they were here for. That was why the unbeliever had been sent. And he had passed the ordeal of the perfecti, Richier told himself, even if his faith was not sound.

No more than seven feet long, thought Shef. He lifted it gently. Old wood, dry wood, wood eight centuries old and more if what they said was true. Yet it had been seasoned to begin with, never exposed to the weather. In the old legionary buildings of York Shef had been shown stairs and galleries that men swore dated from the time of the ancient Romans. There was no reason to think the graduale was false just because it seemed still sound. No doubt it fitted the doctrines of the sect not to have adorned it with gold and jewels as the Christians did with all the many fragments of the True Cross. The thing was light enough, anyway, to lift one-handed. Awkward to carry up a spiral staircase. As for the thorns and the brush outside...

"Very well," said Shef, lifting the ladder from its place. "Richier, get your books, make a pack of them, you carry them. You boys, take the gold candlesticks, the plates, everything gold you can see, wrap each piece in cloth, divide them between you so you can carry them easily."

"Cloth, master?" asked Straw.

"The gentlemen next door will not grudge you their robes. Not for this purpose," added Shef, trying to shift the look of terror and awe. "If they were alive, they would tell you to do it. Their ghosts are with you."

Reluctantly the boys turned and went to their macabre task. Still holding the ladder, Shef went back through the antechamber of death and stood in the stairwell, listening. In the silence deep underground he could still hear shouting from above. Not a good sign.

As they scuffed heavy-laden up the stairs, the sound was still with them, coming louder and clearer over the deep breathing of tired men. Shef tramped up and up, in the lead, no longer aware of how far they had gone or where the exit of the pivoting stone might be. He held the holy ladder in his left hand, to keep it away from the central pillar. Every time he knocked it against a tread or the outside wall he could feel Richier wince behind him, sometimes hear a suppressed complaint. If there were light enough the man would be collecting together every splinter of bark that fell from it.

A hiss from below. Shef halted, realized he had gone past the stone. Richier, careless now of secrecy, was fumbling with a projecting knob of rock. He pulled it out, and the seemingly solid wall shifted slightly, pivoting freely again. Shef hesitated, stacked the ladder carefully against the wall on a higher tread, stepped three steps down. As Richier pushed the upper half of the stone outwards, Shef evaded the slow rise of the lower half inside the stairwell, and peered out into the dark.

A dark still light. Fires burning out there, though they were red now, not the strange colors of the Arab flares. Had anyone seen the stone move? There were no cries, no shouts of alarm. In fact, outside the castle, everything was still. Shef could see the circle of thorn through which they had struggled, could see the hillside beyond. There were no men running in panic, no visible sentries, no sign of movement at all. It was light out there, Shef told himself, though where he was he was still hidden in the shadow of the castle wall and the ravine below.

His skin prickled. He ducked back inside, put his shoulder under the stone, heaved up till the stone sighed its way back into place. In the glimmering light of the one candle he had allowed, Richier looked at him, appalled.

"Too quiet," said Shef briefly. "I've heard that quiet before. Means they're watching. Maybe both ways. Maybe they know we're inside."

"We cannot stay here."

"No. No." A voice Shef had not heard before broke in, one of the youths with the packs. He was gabbling in the local dialect which Shef could not understand, but he could catch the unmistakable note in his voice. The boy's nerve had cracked, from the secret crawl, the fear of the holy place, the horror of robbing the dead, the chill of dark stone.

"Laissetz, laissetz me parti." He was pushing at the stone, swinging it open again, only part-way, enough to find a crack and wriggle through it like a weasel, pack still slung on his back. Shef grasped at him, caught only a rag of tunic which tore in his hand. Then the boy was out. Shef left the stone open half a foot, bent and peered one-eyed through the crack.

He could see nothing, hear only a faint whisk of bare feet on stone. That too died. Silence, and a faint smell of burning coming on the wind. And then, as Shef was almost ready to override his fears and lead the others forward, faint but clear, a crack like a stick breaking, a shrill shriek instantly muffled, a clang like a far-off gong being beaten. Metal bouncing on stone.

Shef heaved the stone shut once again, this time with total finality. "You heard," he said. "They got him. Now they know we're here."

"We're trapped," gasped Richier. "With the graal which our elders died to save."

"The stairway goes up as well as down," said Shef.

"We cannot break the wall down from inside, they would hear."

"But there must be a doorway up there, a secret one like the one by which we entered, only inside the castle."

Richier swallowed. "It comes out in an angle of the tower. The tower that was burnt, where Marcabru died."

"So we'll come out in a pile of rubble, that's good."

"It is across the courtyard from the main gate. I do not think there is any other way out. The courtyard is full of the Emperor's men, he has made it into a hospital for those wounded in fighting or injured in the work. We cannot just walk out. Not with a ladder over our shoulders! And besides the boys might pass as workmen or helpers, and I too, but you..."

Too tall, he meant, like a German but without the armor. And too distinctive.

"Show me where the stair comes out," said Shef, a plan forming in his mind. "It cannot be far from where the pickax-men broke through."

Bruno, by the grace of God Emperor of the Romans, in his own mind vice-regent of God on earth, stood at the center of the main gateway of the castle of Puigpunyent and surveyed the scene in its milling courtyard. Everywhere his eye fell, men sprang to more frantic efforts. He took no pleasure in it. That was as it should be. Though his face was impassive, his body was filled with such furious excitement that it would barely obey him. Twice on his frantic gallop back from the scene by the crashed fire-machine his involuntary clenching on the reins had dragged his stallion back on its haunches, almost unseating him. But he had returned in time. He was sure of it. Sure too that the whole display of lights and flame and portents in the sky had been exactly what his puny deacon had said: a distraction. Certain proof that the treasure he sought was within his grasp. If only he could stretch out his hand to take it. As he stood there, clutching the new-shafted lance which never left him, the Emperor allowed himself to do something he did only in moments of greatest stress: he rested his cheek on the very metal that had drunk the blood of his Lord, to feel coming from it the power and the assurance that were his by right.

Inside the courtyard the turmoil was like the last square of the harvest, filled with trapped rats running in all directions to avoid the scythes and cudgels closing in on them. But only to the untrained eye. The Emperor could see order being reimposed on chaos. The men who worked day and night to dig down to the foundations of this heretics' nest were rushing back to work with their picks and barrows, reeving the ropes and pulleys once again to the great crane that lifted the stone blocks and hurled them into the gulleys outside. In one corner their overseer, who had allowed them to desert their toil as the lights in the sky appeared, was screaming at a triangle of pike-shafts while two of Bruno's Lanzenbrüder sergeants methodically laid on the two hundred lashes which Bruno had ordered him. His deputy, new promoted, stood in the middle of the yard, pale with fear and shrieking orders.

What was causing the trouble was the hospital. Careful and solicitous of the welfare of those who served him properly, Bruno had ordered space made in the central courtyard for beds for the trickle of casualties who had come in from scuffles with the locals, and the greater trickle of men who had caught feet beneath blocks of stone or jammed their arms under moving ropes. Only in the castle was there pure water in abundance, from the well sunk deep into the living rock beneath. Water was what the sick needed more than anything. But now the fires and chaos outside were bringing in more than a trickle, a gush of casualties. Men burnt fire-fighting, men with broken bones from falls, fools who had tripped on their own weapons. He would have to countermand the order that injuries should be brought in, Bruno decided. Let them wait on the plain outside till daylight. They were beginning to impede the work-parties. There, in the angle, a stretcher-party rushing busily in entirely the wrong direction. He opened his mouth to hail them, then closed it, gestured grimly to Tasso to sort the fools out, turned and snarled his orders to the gasping Agilulf, who had finally caught up with him, to get the injured not already in their beds out of the way, and prevent any more entries.

As he turned back to watch the courtyard again, he saw a different group thrusting through the gateway. A group with a different look on their faces. Not fear, but glee and triumph. And as they entered, so too did the faithful Erkenbert, on foot, his mule abandoned at the base of the rock.

"What have you got there?" he asked.

"A rat," said the Brüder in the lead, eyes gleaming in the red light. Wolfram, Bruno saw, a good brother from holy Echternach. "He came running out of the castle, right into the arms of Dietrich here."

"Out of the castle? But you are posted out to the west, there is no gate there."

"No gate we can see, herra. But out he came, down the ravine to the west like a little mouse. He had not climbed down the wall, or we would have seen him. He was running full pelt like someone scared out of his wits."

"I tripped him with my lance-butt," added the burly Dietrich. "His leg broke and he tried to squawk, but I gagged him. He has given no warning to anyone still inside."

"And look, herra," said Wolfram the sergeant, his face shining with pleasure and anticipation. "See what the rat had for his hoard."

He tipped a makeshift sack out at the Emperor's feet. From it there rolled goblets and plates, a massive candlestick. The light of the fires still glowing out on the plain gave back glints of gold.

Bruno bent, picked up one of the plates, felt the unmistakable heft of it. Something engraved on it. He could not read it well. A letter "N" in flowing script?

"What do you make of that?" he asked, passing it to Erkenbert.

"Little enough," said the deacon. "But this is no hedge-baron's hoard. More like the communion plate of the Holy Father in Rome. I fear we will have to ask the boy."

Eyes turned to the captive. Boy he was, face screwed up in pain, one leg lifted to keep it from touching the ground. Dark face, ragged clothes. A native. After the sight of the crashed kite and its dead pilot Bruno had half-expected to see another damned Englishman.

"Have you tried to talk to him?"

Wolfram nodded. "Can't understand a word he says. Nor he us."

"I will find an interpreter," said Erkenbert. "Then we will do what needs to be done. Take him outside the gate."

"One thing," said Bruno. "I know you will not be over-kind. Nor will you hold back in any way from what I must have from him. But my advice is this. Never begin by hurting anyone just a little, and then working up. Courage grows with resistance. Hurt him very badly to begin with, more badly than he can bear. Then offer him the way out."

"As soon as I can find a local priest to interpret for us," promised Erkenbert.

The trapped youth looked from side to side. He had already seen what he needed to. What must he do now? Did he need to die like Marcabru and the garrison? He did not know.

A hundred yards down the path to safety, in a stream of evicted invalids and their helpers, Straw and his mates struggled with their burden: Shef, lashed firmly to the center-pole of the graduale itself, braced by the rungs that stuck out to either side as handholds for the bearers, his face with its betraying one eye covered like that of a burnt or dying man. Richier trotted behind them, face grey with fear, still clutching his precious pack of books. He had passed within twenty feet of the devil's incarnation on earth, the Emperor himself. Thank God, the true God whose power in this world had been usurped by the lying deity of the Christians, that all his attention had been on poor Maury. What would happen now to Maury—ah, that showed the power of the princeps huius mundi, whom even the true God could not entirely set aside in this his proper realm.

As they hurried down the hillside the terrible screams that began from behind them urged them on. Screams in a voice familiar to the other boys, even in its agony.

Chapter Nineteen

So we lost Maury," Richier concluded. A wail of grief broke from one of the women in the listening ring: his mother, it must be. Anselm made no reply, still staring uncertainly at the emblem and holiest relic of his faith, now displayed in the open for the lay-folk and the heathen to stare at. He seemed to have begun to realize that rescuing his graduale was only the start of his problems, Shef thought grimly. He slid with the familiar pain in his thigh-muscles from the back of the horse he had stolen.

"Who did you lose?" he asked, staring at Cwicca, at the front of the Wayman gang. "We saw someone go down."

"We lost two of them. Tolman got back, but he's hurt."

"Two? We only saw one go down."

"That were Ubba," broke in Steffi. "We don't know what happened, but before they gave Tolman the poppy to knock him out he said it was very hard lighting the flares and dropping them without them catching on something, with the kites pitching and all. Ubba must have set fire to himself. He didn't have a chance after that."

"And the other one, what was his name? Helmi?" Helmi the orphan, the small pale child.

"He came back well enough, but he was going too fast, much too fast. Slammed into the rock ledge below where we were. Kite broke up and he fell two hundred feet. We couldn't find the body."

Depression began to settle on Shef, together with weariness and delayed shock from fear too long suppressed. He had come to save Svandis, and save her he had—but from what? These people had had no intention of killing her. If he had not followed they would have turned her loose. And in saving one he had killed two. Two of his own. As for the graduale or the graal or whatever they wanted to call it, maybe Maury had died willingly to save it, but it seemed little enough to buy at such a price. Still clutching the old wooden pole, Shef tossed it absently to Anselm, who caught it automatically, and then stared as if he had clutched a viper. They had sought to bribe him with knowledge of the Greek fire too, but what had he learnt after all? That saltpeter made a fire burn more brightly, that flame could be colored. None of that was Greek fire.

"Tolman ain't too bad," put in Cwicca, seeing the look on his master's face. "He just came down a bit hard, rolled over and over on the rock. We put him to sleep till the cuts start to heal." He hesitated. "But he flew, master. Even over land and at night. No silly feathers nor nothing, either."

Shef nodded. It was an achievement of sorts.

"What do we do now?" Cwicca went on.

"I'll tell you." Shef looked round at the ring of listening people, Waymen and heretics mixed up together, in the tiny central square of the mountain village.

"First, Anselm. The Emperor is bound to have found out where Maury came from and even who he is. And what we took. You can be sure that his whole army will move from Puigpunyent and come after you."

"We are high in the mountains, they do not know the paths..."

Shef cut him off. "You do not know the Emperor. Whatever are your safest places, take everyone to them. You will lose your animals and your houses." He kicked one of the packs of gold lying ignored on the ground. "If I were you I would use these to replace them once the Emperor has left."

Anselm nodded reluctantly. "The caves, the bat caves, we can hide there for..."

"Start soon." Shef pointed at the wooden grail. "Take that. Your Grail was bought with a life, with three lives, I hope you find it worthwhile."

Shef changed direction, changed speech as well. "As for us, Cwicca, remember what Brand said about coming down the mountain faster than we went up? Get our animals together, load 'em up, don't forget Tolman, and we're heading back to the ships as fast as ever we can go. He'll have cavalry out already, and I want to outdistance them."

"And once we get to the ships?"

"Out to sea as fast as Hagbarth can rig sail."

The groups dissolved as Anselm and Cwicca began to call orders. Shef walked over, sat wearily by the edge of the village well, groping for the dipper he had thrown to the ground only two days before. After a few moments he found Svandis, her ragged white dress now stitched into respectability, by his side.

"So," she said. "What has the heretic God given you for the boys' lives? A wooden ladder? Or have you and the old fool just thrown them away for nothing?"

Shef wondered dimly why people felt they were helping by asking that kind of question. As if he had not thought of it already. For if there was no such thing as a god, as Svandis insistently proclaimed, yes, the whole thing had been pointless. Anselm was approaching, having given his instructions. He knelt down before the younger man.

"You saved our relic and we should give you our thanks."

"I saved it because you stole her. I think you still owe me something."

Anselm hesitated. "Gold?"

Shef shook his head. "Knowledge."

"We have told you everything we know about fire."

"Besides the gold, and the Grail, we brought out books. The true gospels, Richier said. Why have you not given them to the world, as the Christians do with theirs?"

"We believe knowledge is only for the wise."

"Well, maybe I am wise enough. Give me one of your books. The Jews, and the Christians, and the Mohammedans, they all laugh at us Waymen and say we are not People of the Book. So give me one of your books, the one with the true teaching of Jesus in it. Maybe after that people will take us more seriously."

It is only for initiates, Anselm thought. The teaching not only must be read, it must be explained so that the ignorant do not understand it wrongly. We have only three copies, and are forbidden by our law to make any more. The barbarian king has thirty men here, armed with strange weapons. He could take them all and the graal as well, if he had a mind. We killed his boys. Best not to provoke him.

"I will bring you a copy," said Anselm reluctantly. "But will you be able to read it?"

"If I cannot, Solomon can. Or Skaldfinn." Shef thought of a saying in his own tongue. "Truth can make itself known."

What is truth? thought Anselm, remembering the saying of Pilate in the gospel of the Christians. But he did not dare to speak the words.

"So we lost the da—the holy thing, when it was right under our noses," snarled the Emperor. He had passed a tense night, disturbed not by the screaming from the tent where Erkenbert did his work, but by his own thoughts. All the morning after he had been pursued by reports of failure and desertion, his levies scattered half way across the county by fear and confusion.

"Yes," replied the black deacon. He did not fear the Emperor's moods. He knew that even in the worst of them the Emperor retained an ability to see things fairly. That was why his men loved him.

"All right. Tell me the worst."

"The thing, the holy graal as the boy calls it, was here, deep down. We had almost reached it. Your rival the One King was here as well. The boy described him unmistakably. The lights in the sky—they were as I said, a distraction only."

The Emperor nodded. "I have not forgotten my promise, and Wulfhere's see is still vacant. Go on."

"They worked. While the sentries were engaged with frightened Frenchmen they got in through some secret passage. Retrieved the relics of their heretic faith, including the graduale—and it is a ladder, just as you supposed. The boy does not know why it is holy."

"How did they get out?"

"The boy did not, of course. He panicked, was caught by our alerted sentries."

The Emperor nodded again, resolving internally not to punish Wolfram and his men, as he had originally intended. The distraction was not their fault, for it was not they who had responded to it, or at least no more than he had himself. And they had been alert enough on the return.

"He cannot say how the rest got out. But there was one thing he tried not to tell us. It came out in the end." Erkenbert hesitated. The Emperor was a fair man, but this was humiliation. "In the end the boy was persuaded to talk because he realized that his talking made no difference. The others were out already. He saw them walk past us."

The Emperor blinked, straightened out of his cavalryman's slouch on the camp stool. "He didn't walk past me. No one-eyed man ever does without me having a very close look at him."

Erkenbert looked at the ground. "They had tied him to the graduale, so it looked like a stretcher. You told Tasso to kick them through the gate yourself."

A long silence. Eventually Erkenbert looked up. Was the Emperor meditating one of his own brutal self-imposed penances? He was staring at the point of his sword. "I had him there," he muttered. "On the end of it like a virgin about to squawk. All I had to do was push it home. And I didn't. I tell you, Erkenbert, this kind heart of mine will be the ruin of me yet, my mother always used to say so."

He grinned. "So they got past us. Up into the hills, no doubt. We shall just have to chase them. And all the damned cavalry deserted, or lost, or gone off to water their damned horses or something. But I'll have it yet. All right, Erkenbert, go find me someone with local knowledge."

The little deacon sat unmoving. "Your pardon, lord, but think again. The graduale, no doubt that is deep in the hills and it may take a deal of finding. But is that the most important thing now? Your countryman, the chaplain Arno, now in service with the Pope, he taught me always in a campaign to look for the Schwerpunkt, the vital point of attack or defense. I do not think it is in the mountains. I think it is where the One King is. Or where he will be."

He keeps using that title today, mused Bruno. Trying to needle me, I have no doubt. It's working too. "All right. Where is he, then, King Shef, the Victorious? As they call him. When they think I'm not listening."

Erkenbert shrugged. "Where all pirates always are. With his ships. In the port of Septimania. In the city of the Jews."

Bruno's eyes glittered a little more dangerously. "Heretics and Jews. Heathens and apostates. God sent his Son to bleed and die for them and they cannot so much as say 'thank you.' I prefer the damned Moors, at least they believe in something. And we know the ships are in Septimania, because Georgios saw them. Can we be sure they will stay there?"

"Georgios is on the watch."

"But if they have a wind he can't stop them, they'll just batter his galleys to pieces at long range, he said so himself."

Erkenbert looked down. "I have—taken certain steps to change that situation, lord. I gave the orders in your name, to save time. I was not asleep, after all, at the battle at the Braethraborg, against the heathen Danes."

The Emperor reached out, patted the little man on the shoulder with careful affection. "Don't do too much for me, comrade, or I shall have to make you Pope. And the damned Italian's not dead yet. Though that can be arranged."

Without seeming to move he was on his feet, yelling for his horse, his helmet, and Agilulf. In seconds he was outside, hand on the pommel of the high Frankish saddle of his war-horse. Without touching the stirrup he vaulted into the saddle, jerked his long sword into a more comfortable position, caught the helmet tossed to him and slung it over his saddlebow.

"Where are you going?" shouted Erkenbert.

"To the funeral."

"Of the men who died last night?"

"No. Of the child who fell from the skies. He had a hammer round his neck, so he cannot go in a consecrated grave, but I have had one dug for him. And a stone cut in the night. It says, Der erste Luftreiter, 'first rider of the skies.' That is a great honor, is it not?"

He was away, in a shower of sparks where his horse's metal hooves struck the rock. The sergeant standing by the doorway of the tent, a stolid Brüder from Burgundy with a name like Jopp, smiled fondly after the departing figure, displaying a mouthful of broken teeth.

"He is a Ritter," he said. "He honors courage even in his enemies."

The boy Maury was still alive, Erkenbert reflected. He might have recovered enough to talk a little more. Probably the mere sight of his questioner would do the trick by now.

Yet again Shef slid from a horse, this time feeling less stiff, sore and cramped, than certain that his legs would no longer support him. The level flagstones of the Septimania dock met him. After a few moments he straightened, looked past the heads of the crowd.

"The sea," he croaked.

Brand passed him a flask of the diluted wine they had fallen back on once the ale ran out, stood with thumbs in belt while his leader drained it down.

"What about the sea?"

"I love it. Because it's flat. All right." By now there were a hundred men gathered round, dockside loafers, Jewish traders, but most of them Waymen skippers and sailors. Tell them quick and the word would spread. No need for secrecy. "All right. We got Svandis back. I'm afraid we lost two of the boys, Ubba and Helmi. Tell you about that later. But the main thing is, we twisted the Emperor's nose. Twisted it very badly. He's looking for us and I bet he knows we're here. So clear for sea and let's get going. That's best for everyone, right, Solomon? He turns up, we've gone, everyone very sorry, no harm done. Why are you all still standing here? Clear for sea, I said, what's the matter..."

. Brand put a vast arm round his leader's shoulder, lifted him companionably off his feet, and began to walk along the dock, the crowd parting to let them through, but showing no sign of wanting to follow.

"Come for a little walk along the staithe," he suggested. After a few paces he allowed Shef's feet to touch the ground again but did not release his grip. They walked carefully round the crowded harbor, on to the base of the long stone mole which sprang out from the very heart of the fortified city, began to walk along its hundred-yard extent, stepping over the iron rings to which the small craft were made fast, the larger ones lying out at anchor in the harbor, like the Wayman fleet. Half way along Brand stopped, gestured out to sea.

"What can you see out there?" He plucked the far-seer from Shef's belt, held it out to him.

Shef took it, put it to his eye, moved the lower half in and out on its sliding case as he had learned to, stared into the noonday haze. Nothing that he could see, the haze was difficult, scan round a bit. Oh.

"The galleys," he said. "The red galleys. Three of them out there, no, four."

"That's right. They were there at dawn, fried a couple of fishing boats, pulled back off shore. Just showing us they were watching."

"All right," said Shef, "it's noon now, no wind, they have the advantage. In a few hours, as the sun starts to sink, we'll get the breeze off the sea, regular as a mule's bowels. Then it's our turn. We'll put out, if any of them get in the way we'll sink them. And then have some harpoon practice, right, for Sumarrfugl," he added savagely.

"Keep looking," said Brand.

Puzzled, Shef took up the far-seer again. The haze was irritating, he could see almost nothing in some places, it was thickest down by the surface of the sea. There. There was something there, closer than he expected, closer than the galleys. But he could not make out what it was. It was gray, and low, barely projecting above the flat sea, not a ship at all, more like a long low island. He moved the far-seer in and out, trying to get the blurry image to become clearer.

"I can't see what it is."

"Nor could I. Try counting the ships in the harbor, you'll find that easier."

Shef looked round, a chill growing near his heart. The two-masters, they were still there, moored line astern, all seven of them. The longships of the Vikings, he had begun with five of them, they had lost Sumarrfugl's Marsvin, how many were there now? Three. He counted again. Three.

"When the galleys turned up later in the day they were towing that thing. I couldn't make it out either, so I sent Skarthi out in his Sea-snake, with a double crew of rowers. He said he could outdistance any Greek, wind or no wind. I told him to be very careful of the fire, and he said he'd make a point of it. But it wasn't the fire this time."

Shef was staring once more at the raft, at the humps he could now see rising from it. There was something familiar about them. Very familiar.

"Skarthi got out there," said Brand, "started rowing towards the raft. They let him get half way, and then—whack. Mule-stones all in the air at once. The Sea-snake fell apart in the water, the Greeks came rushing in in the galleys..."

"How many did we lose?" said Shef tensely.

"No-one. All Skarthi's lot come from Gotland, swim like dolphins. And they swam hard, with the fire coming down on them! But Hagbarth was awake, he put a couple of rocks into the water ahead of the galleys, they sheered off."

Yes, even in the haze he could make out the mule-shapes, Shef realized. At least four of them. Maybe more. On a flat raft with no masts to get in the way, no ribs to fall apart from the recoil, you could put as many catapults as you liked. And he was not the inventor of the catapult, not of the mule-version anyway. Before it had been a mule it had been an onager: the work of the Rome-folk, brought back to life by the Emperor's deacon, Erkenbert. He had not forgotten them. And they had not forgotten him. And now Shef realized why he had not recognized them before, and why they were yet familiar.

They were armored. With steel plates like the ones he had put on the old Fearnought.

And there was something else familiar about what they were doing. Shef looked round the flat expanse of the mole, six feet above the water, should they just jump in the water and dignity be damned, was there a ladder to cling to...

A rushing noise in the air, a great crash of stone on stone, chips and splinters flying, Brand wiping blood from his forehead in amazement. A short, that had crashed into the far side of the stone wall. But aimed to kill, and aimed to kill them. And they had at least four in their battery.

Without ceremony Shef pushed Brand firmly off the mole and into the sheltered water of the harbor, jumped immediately after him. As they bobbed up and down in the warm sea, stones sighed over their heads, plumped among the scattered boats. Shouts from skippers, frantic attempts to man the sweeps, to come in closer under the protection of the wall.

"So we can't force our way out," said Shef. "We can shoot our way past the galleys, but the raft is like a Fearnought to us. It can't move, but we can't sink it. Now what are they doing that for? Brand, what's going on?"

"Well," said Brand. "I always thought you were supposed to be the clever one. But if you ask me, this looks uncommonly like what the Hel-spawn foreigners call a siege."

In the camp of the Caliph, moving slowly but inexorably towards confrontation with the traitorous Jews and the polytheistic rabble of Northern pirates, three women talked quietly, their faces together. One was English: ash-blonde, with green eyes, a beauty in her own land, a curiosity among the tents of the faithful. She had been taken by the Danes years before and sold as a virgin for a hundred dirhams in gold. Another was a Frank, from the border country: the child of a serf, she had been sold in infancy by a master anxious to raise capital. The third was a Circassian, from the far eastern border of Islam, from a nation which survived by the export of its women, famous for their beauty and their sexual skills. The women were talking in the strange argot of their multilingual harem, Arabic studded with words from many tongues. The women had invented it to keep some matters private from the ever-watchful eunuch slaves who guarded them.

All three women were discontented, and afraid. Discontented because they had been plucked from the comfort of Cordova and brought out on campaign, with barely half a score of others, to ease the tedium of their master. True, they were carried every step of the way in litters filled with silk and down. True, fans waved over them at night, continually worked by relays of slaves. Yet the hard hot ground of the camp could not be made into the fountains and courtyards of Cordova. Their master might rejoice in the hardships—the very modified hardships—of those who trod dusty ways to fight the unbelievers, but they drew no consolation from that. One had been brought up a Christian, one converted to Islam at the age of ten, one came from a race whose beliefs were so strange that no outsider had ever troubled to learn them. Nothing creates atheism as well as a profusion of contradictory beliefs.

There were two reasons why they were afraid. One, that none of them had yet borne a child. Since it could not be the case that their master's potency was waning, their barrenness must be their own defect, unless it were the result of deliberate child-murder in the womb. The other reason they were afraid was that the walls of no pavillion could keep out the constant screaming of their master's victims, still ordered to the block, the bastinado, or the impaling-post at the least whim or setback. They feared the change of er-Rahman's moods, on which no-one alive was more expert.

"He listens still to that young fool, Mu'atiyah," said the Englishwoman. "At his ear all the time, encouraging him. He is consumed with hate himself, and jealousy."

"Could Mu'atiyah eat something that would disagree with him?" suggested the Circassian.

"The Caliph would know it was poison," said the Frank. "Then who can say where his anger would fall? We have no-one who would not betray us. Not out here."

"Maybe it is best if he achieves his ends and we can all return home."

"Home?" said the Englishwoman. "You mean, to Cordova? Is that the best we can hope for all our lives? Waiting for him to tire of us and send the man with the strangling-cord? How many years have you got left, Berthe? Or you, Ouled? I am twenty-three already."

"What else is there?" asked Berthe, wide-eyed.

The Englishwoman, Alfled, had taken part in many a harem plot. She did not look round or change her expression, but laughed and jingled her bracelets as if discussing some sexual exploit she had planned for the Caliph. "We are out here in the heat and the dust of the campaign. Bad news, and all we want is to return to comfort once the Caliph has won. But what if the Caliph loses? His armies and his fleets have lost before, that is why we are here. And in the confusion of a defeat..."

"We would be taken and raped by half an army if we were free."

"Maybe. It depends on the army. You heard what the Dane-woman told us, in Cordova. One of the armies here does not take slaves, and it is led by one of my countrymen. Even the Emperor of the Romans' army is full of your countrymen, Berthe. If we made the cross sign and begged for release from the worshipers of Allah, their priests would be delighted."

"But once you have turned your back on Allah, revoked the shahada, there is no mercy for you," pointed out the Circassian.

"We cannot afford to fail, that is so."

"So what must we do?"

"Press the Caliph to battle, but in such a way that he must lose."

"And how is that to be arranged? He has generals skilled in the art of war, to advise him much better than we ever could. We do not know even enough to say what is right and what would be wrong."

"We do not know war," said Alfled grimly, "but we know men. Pick the biggest fool, and urge on his advice. And the biggest fool in this camp is Mu'atiyah. Let us add our voices to his. Our voices from the pillow to add to the fool's from the divan. One thing we should add. Our wish to see our master conquer: the strongest of men, the most warlike, the most manly."

Silence greeted her sarcasm. Finally the Frankish girl spoke. "And we agree, then, if we escape, that whichever of us is in most favor among the conquerors will speak up for the others? If that is so, then I am with you. But one more thing I would counsel, and that is, delay. The spirit of the Caliph's soldiery diminishes day by day. Let him show his madness more, and the rot will spread. Among the secret eaters of pork, the Christian converts, the mustaribs, then among those who favor the house of Tulun, among the readers of Greek and those who wish to reword the Koran. All those who know in their hearts what the Dane-woman told us."

"That there is no God, not even Allah," said Alfled fiercely.

"No one god," contradicted the Circassian.