Slowly the siege of Septimania tightened, becoming first inevitable, then evident, then acute. The prince of the city, Benjamin ha-Nasi, had refused to believe in it at first, confident that this quarrel forced upon him by mere strangers within his gates could be averted. If not averted, at least deflected, if necessary by the capture of the strangers and their surrender to the enraged Christian Emperor, or else by their forced expulsion, to take their chances with the Greeks and the Greek fire at sea.
He had been undeceived quickly. The Emperor, it became clear, in the grip of holy fury, would make no distinction between the Christian heretics who had hidden the Grail from him, the heathens who had helped them to steal it, and the Jews who had rejected Christ and crucified his Lord. The emissaries Benjamin sent were returned, their heads hurled over the wall one dawn. The rumor spread that they had been forcibly baptized before execution, to give the unbelieving dogs a last chance of salvation, or so the Emperor had said. A message shouted from a distance later that day announced the Emperor's terms: the Grail, first and foremost, the robbers of it led by their one-eyed king, second, and third, the surrender of all the garrison and the officers of the city, barefoot and in their shirts, with ropes round their necks, in token of their absolute submission to the will of God and of his viceroy.
But they had no Grail. Without it, the mercy of the Emperor would be nothing. Sadly, remembering Vespasian and the siege of Masada in their history long before, the Jews of Septimania prepared for desperate resistance. Messengers dropped down ropes or crept out along the seashore, to try to get word to their nominal overlord the Caliph of this Christian insurrection upon the Dar al-Islam, the house of Islam. Too often, shrieks and wailing in the night told that they had been intercepted. The Caliph would come, that was sure, in response to this provocation. How long he would take, how concerned he would be for those of his subjects not of his faith, what tales of treachery he might have been told already: that was another story.
With a better heart, the men of the Northern fleet bent themselves to assisting the defense. As soon as the watch-fires of the enemy began to twinkle in the night on the hills around, Cwicca set his mates to commandeering every scrap of cordage and balk of timber that could be taken from the city's stores or the scores of fishing-boats and larger vessels now lying blockaded in the harbor. With them, he set to making as many catapults as he could find material for or space for along the walls. The English and the Vikings now knew of three types.
First—though last to be used by them on the field of war—the mules, descendants of the Roman onagers, and reintroduced to the world by Erkenbert the deacon and his copy of Vegetius's De re militari. They threw stones, hard and flat, ship-destroyers, wall-breachers. Heavy and cumbersome, hard to make. Of little use against men, like trying to swat flies with a sledgehammer, as Brand remarked.
Second, what they called the twist-shooters. Torsion weapons, like the mules, and with torsion weapons' power, but shooting great darts or javelins, like giant crossbows. They would drive through almost any shield or mantlet, and had a terror effect out of proportion to the losses they caused. Hard to make also, and dangerous to use. No-one could tell for sure when such a weapon was likely to be overwound, and only those who had done it many times could even guess. Overwinding meant a snap, a sudden lash of broken rope and timber, a winder with no hand, no arm, or his ribs stove in. The English freed-slaves who had first been recruited to man them, years before, had learnt to put spring steel reinforcements on the wooden bow-arms, to save their own lives. There was no spring steel available in Septimania. But then, as Cwicca remarked under the cover of a language the inhabitants of Septimania could not follow, it ain't us that's going to wind them, is it? As long as they do more damage to the other bastards than they do to our lot, that's all right.
Third, the elementary and primitive weapons that Shef himself had invented personally, the pull-throwers as his men called them. Mere traction weapons, worked by a gang pulling in unison at one end of a beam, while the other end, the long arm, whipped up and whirled round a sling, to release its rock at the critical moment. Cheap to make, easy to build, capable of being worked by anyone with a minimum of instruction. Easy to aim for line, almost impossible to gauge for range. Throwing their stones up in the air and relying on gravity for their force, not the power of twisted rope. Used best against formed bodies of troops, who could not avoid them. Cwicca's gangs turned out dozens of them, sent them to every place they could think of along the walls, along with unlimited supplies of missiles dug out of the stony ground. After a while their operation was turned over to the women of the city, who could heave as well as men, and free men for the heavier work of close combat.
After the first few lunges by the Emperor's men, mere demonstrations or explorations—though each left its trail of casualties lying dead or broken on the stony ground—it became clear that the lie of the land would impose its own pattern on the fighting.
Like many towns along the coast, Septimania had sprung from a settlement along a cala, or creek-mouth, where a river ran down between high bluffs to the sea. The city had grown up on both hills and on the steep sides of the cala between, but as it had grown more and more populous the original single bridge across had multiplied, been made and remade in stone, so that in some stretches the river had become almost completely hidden. But in any case, in this, the growing heat of mid-summer, the river-bed was as good as dry. Where it ran was blocked now by a heavy iron grid or portcullis, lowered to the stony bed beneath.
Nevertheless the river-bed was a weak point, where men could enter under the walls, rather than over them. Brand, touring the defenses with Malachi, captain of the prince's guard, had said nothing when they reached it but told Cwicca to bring up his best twist-shooters and dig them in behind the iron grid.
Round the whole half-circuit towards the land ran the stone walls, beautifully made, fervently maintained and tended as Shef had seen. Assault on those was bound to be costly. At each end, where the walls met the sea, the road ran, the road along the coast that carried trade, and that carried it through the town where the traders must perforce pay toll. The gates at either end were as strong as could be made, of studded oak, with towers to protect them and cover the approaches with arrow-shot. Yet they too were a weak point.
And then the harbor itself. On the tideless Mediterranean there was no foreshore, and walls could be extended right down to the beach. Yet the sea was shallow. Anyone could wade or even paddle along it. As long as attackers faced nothing but wall, as forbidding as the landward one, no harm could be done. Yet as the sea-walls came into the harbor, there had to be a place of junction. To both the north and south of the harbor there ran long stone jetties, or moles, or staithes as the English and Norse called them, the northern one a good hundred yards long, the southern one half that length. They protected the mouth of the cala from the fierce sudden storms of the Inland Sea, had been built over the years as trade had increased and the size of the ships with it. Each jetty was six feet above the surface of the water—easy to reach from the deck of a ship, as they were intended to be. Their defense caused Brand anxious concern. They're long, they're low, if we were to defend them with swords and spears we'd need five, six hundred men, he estimated. And they'd all have to be better than the opposition as well, he added.
"Yeah," Cwicca replied, "so we don't defend them with swords and spears, nor axes neither. They're long, they're low, there's no cover on them or coming up to them. Crossbows for short range and mules for long. Shoot the shit out of them."
"At night?" Brand asked, pulling his beard. He and Malachi fell into careful consultation, counting their numbers and trying to allocate the men and women they had as best they could.
The final problem was the sea. The harbor mouth, a hundred feet across from jetty to jetty, was guarded from ship-borne entry by a boom of tree-trunks connected by massive bronze chains and rings. A galley sweeping in would smash its bow, tear its bottom out. Nevertheless, what men had made, men could unmake. No obstacle, as any veteran would know, seriously impedes assault unless it is backed by men and weapons, men with an advantage over the attacker. Brand carefully positioned the seven two-masters of the Wayman fleet where they could not be reached by flying stones from the raft offshore, but where they could bring their mules to bear on the sea approaches. Any ship or boat which tried to bring men to the attack would be sunk immediately. In theory. If everything went well. If no-one got distracted. If the other side didn't think of something clever too.
Brand had tried hard to think of something clever on his side, staring—from cover—at the raft offshore and the patrolling shapes of the fire-vessels usually further out. But nothing, came to mind. He had considered unshipping the metal plates carried as ballast in all the ships, armoring the Fafnisbane or the Hagena like a second Fearnought and sending her out to battle the armored raft. But even armor would not protect against the fire of the Greeks: Beowulf, for whom the Grendelsbane was named, took an iron shield to protect himself against the dragon but then, as Brand pointed out when the story was told him, Beowulf didn't have a wooden hull. An armored catapult ship could of course sink a fire-galley from a distance, if the wind was right, but not do that and fight an equally armored and much less sinkable floating fort at the same time. We might have to try it one day, Brand concluded to himself, but only if the situation on land turns really nasty. A spear in the heart was one thing, being burnt alive like Sumarrfugl was another. The Greeks' brief demonstrations against small trading craft trying their luck rubbed the point home.
"It's all very tricky," Brand concluded in a bass rumble to his cousin Styrr, his skippers, and the priests of the Way gathered in informal conclave. "But you never know how tricky it looks for the other side as well. What we've got to do is not make any mistakes until, maybe, they've had a sickener or two. After all, they have to think of something or go away. We just have to sit here."
"Till something turns up," said Hagbarth skeptically.
"Yes."
"Like what?"
"Maybe the Caliph will arrive with a hundred thousand men. Maybe someone will bring him the damned ladder, whatever it is. Maybe the gods will intervene on our side."
Chill disapproval met the last remark. "I'll tell you one thing," Brand said in an effort to seem more cheerful.
"What's that?"
"He's making it easy for us right now."
The first moves of the siege might indeed almost have been planned to give the besieged confidence without exposing them to overmuch strain. Some two days after the watch-fires of the advanced cavalry appeared, and the heads of the emissaries were hurled over the wall, the Emperor—if it was he who had ordered it—launched a simple attempted escalade, simultaneously against a stretch of the land wall and a stretch of the wall running down to the beach. At each point a thousand men rose from cover at dawn and ran forward with ladders and grapnels.
They had made too much noise preparing. The defenders were ready and alert. As the ladders reached the top, crutches pushed them away again. The grapnel-ropes were cut. Arrows and catapult stones whirled into the mass of men huddled at the foot of the walls. After a few moments, when it became clear that all was well in hand, Brand dragged an enthusiastic Jewish guardsman away from a ladder he was about to thrust off, kicked aside an English crossbowman anxious to shoot the man climbing it, and stepped back, hunkered down behind the stone battlement, shield raised against the arrows pelting over the wall.
A head appeared, teeth bared in panic and rage, a man swung himself over the parapet, beside himself with the honor of success, desperate to make a lodgement on the walls. Brand measured him, lifted his axe "Battle-troll," and struck once, splitting helmet and skull. He stepped back, waving to the crossbowman and guardsman. One shot, the other pushed, the ladder fell with its load of heavy-armed men into the growing pile below. Brand looked at the man he had killed, his equipment, his armor, such of his face as the axe had left.
"A Frank," he muttered. "And a rich one." He removed the dead man's purse from his belt, and faced down the cross-bowman's automatic glower. "Don't look like that, it all gets divided up in the end, fair shares, that's hermannalög, warriors' law. But I didn't let him up to take his money."
"What did you let him up for?" asked the surly crossbowman.
"I wanted to see who he was. And who he wasn't. And what he wasn't was one of those German monk bastards, never have a penny on them."
"What's that mean, then?"
"Means the Emperor isn't really trying. Just seeing if we're a pushover or not."
Ignoring the cheers of success from Jews and Northerners, guards and citizens alike seeing their enemies fall back in disorder, Brand shouldered his way along the walls, wondering where the real attack might come from.
Down the river-bed, as he had expected. For a day and a half after the failure of the first, almost perfunctory assault, onagers had hurled stones unavailingly against the walls, sometimes skimming over to cause broken tiles and shattered windows in the houses of the city, but bringing no threat to the defenders. Then, as the pace of the bombardment increased, a watcher saw a wall of shields advancing slowly down the dried-up riverbed that ran through the heart of Septimania. Not shields, in fact, but mantlets: heavy wooden frames that took two men to carry, proof against breast-bows, crossbows, even lobbed stones. A mule-stone would shatter one, and the men behind it, but there were no mules on the walls, too hard to train down. The mantlets inched forward, and after a while Brand, called from his command post, could see gangs furiously hurling stones and the rubble of the winter floods out of the center channel. Behind the mantlets, and following down the cleared center line, he could see another armored structure crawling. A wave ordered fire-arrows launched against it. They struck and fizzled on wet bull-hides. The structure crawled nearer.
"You see a thing like that before?" said Malachi to his giant colleague, in the fractured Arabic which was all that he could say and Brand understand.
"Yes."
"What is it?"
"A ram." Brand used the Norse word murrbrjotr, wall-breaker, backed with gestures.
"What we do?"
Carefully gauging the path of the approaching object with his eye, Brand ordered a gang to begin cutting away a section of stone from the bridgeway on the opposite side of the attack. They cut it away in one section, taking care not to break the mortar apart. An hour's work with chisels and picks and a mass of stone poised on the edge of the twenty-foot drop to the riverbed below. Thoughtfully, Brand supervised the setting of a massive iron ring into the top of the severed block, had men drag up the biggest iron chain the dockyard could supply. He noosed it, spread the noose wide with a wooden rod on a thin line. There was plenty of time. The mantlets crept closer, the ram followed them, both under a steady rain of rocks from the pull-throwers on the walls. Cheers rose as broken mantlets were withdrawn, from time to time an unwary or unlucky attacker caught stone or arrow, was left broken or bleeding in the channel. None of that made any difference. Behind the iron grid two of Cwicca's catapult gangs slowly trained round the sights of their twist-shooters, now facing the ram and the mantlets through the iron grid at unmissable range. Brand leaned over the rear battlement, careful not to touch the mass of stone swaying on the levers jammed beneath it, waved them into immobility.
Shouts from below, and the mantleteers fell thankfully back and to the sides, still holding their clumsy guards over their heads. Behind the ram, but well back out of shot, Brand could see what looked like heavy-armored infantry assembling for assault. They did look like the German monk-bastards. Maybe the Emperor was taking this move seriously. Pity he couldn't cut off a few of them and make them really pay for this one. But wisest not to take chances.
The ram, under its heavy protective frame, heaved on by a hundred men toiling at its ten massive cartwheels, edged into position. Its iron-shod head drew back, launched itself at the grill. A clang, a wrenching of iron. A hail of arrows suddenly sweeping inches over the top of the battlements, simultaneous double crash of onager stones from an unnoticed position further up the hillside. Brand grimaced, held his shield high, peered quickly and cautiously over. Arrows thudded into his shield, sprang back off the boss. One, hard-driven, broke through and gashed the back of his arm by the elbow-strap. Brand continued to wave his chain-men into position.
Another clang from below, Malachi staring worriedly at the twisting iron grid. Brand stepped back, raised a thumb. Four men in unison tossed the iron noose over. As they did so, the ram struck again. Through the noose.
Brand jerked the thin line, the rod fell away, the noose tightened with shrill iron screaming. Brand nodded once more to the men by the great mass of broken stone. They heaved in unison on the levers jammed into the base, the stone teetered on the edge of the drop into the river-bed below, they heaved again. Slowly at first, then all at once, the five-ton block swayed and disappeared over the edge in a cloud of stone-dust. The chain whirled after it, the noose tightened round the ram's iron head. Cwicca's twist-shooter gangs, poised underneath the bridge itself, only feet from the ram on the other side of the buckled iron grid, saw the ram jerked suddenly into the air by irresistible force, the whole protective structure going with it. Underneath, blinking like moles dragged into the light, or like snails whose shell had suddenly vanished, the haulers and ram-wielders gaped at their enemies, or at their machine now dangling from its iron chain feet above their heads.
"Shoot!" bellowed Brand. "Don't just stand there watching!"
The catapult-captains trained round the inches necessary to shoot through the grid, released their twisted ropes. One of the great darts, to a further bellow of rage from Brand, missed every man cleanly at a range of six feet, flew far on down the valley, buried itself in the ground at the feet of the waiting storming-party. The other, by luck far more than good management, drove its way into a whole file of wheel-pushers, spitting three in a row like larks on a stick, and driving on even to kill the man behind.
The ram-crew, Frankish knights and peasants alike, broke instantly and ran for the rear. Brand, waving forward Jewish bowmen and English crossbows, urged them on to shoot from the battlements, cursed as the arrows missed and the men ran on, swore discontentedly as he counted the bodies left sprawling.
"We turn them back," said Malachi to him in an attempt to conciliate the giant. "No good, kill men when no need."
Brand continued swearing in Norse, turned for an interpreter. "Tell him there is need. I don't want to drive them back, I want to sicken them. They have to know that every failure will be paid for in blood. Then they won't be so keen to come on."
He turned to organize the bringing up of buckets of pitch, to be lobbed out over the wreckage and set on fire with fire-arrows. Vital to leave no cover for a second assault, especially with the grid now buckled and damaged. The wet bull-hides would dry soon in the sun. Meanwhile the wooden frames and wheels were exposed, would burn to ashes once started.
When all was done Skaldfinn, interpreting, spoke to him again. "The captain and I have been talking. He says you know a lot about sieges, and feels more confident of resistance than he did a few days ago."
Brand looked down below the jutting eyebrow-ridges he had inherited from his marbendill ancestor. "I have fought in the front for thirty years, Skaldfinn, you know that. I have seen a lot of battles, a lot of forts taken and defended. But you know, Skaldfinn, that up in the North there are few stone walls. I saw Hamburg taken and York, I was not there when Paris fought off old Hairy-Breeks. What I know are only the obvious things—ladders and rams. What do we do if they bring up a siege-tower? No good asking me. And they may have many better ideas than that. No, sieges need more brain than brawn. I expect there are brains over there better than mine."
"He wants to know," said Skaldfinn after passing the message on, "if all that is true, why we do not see your master here on the walls, the one-eyed king. Is he not the wonder of the world for machines and inventions? So what do I tell him now?"
Brand shrugged massive shoulders. "You know the answer as well as I do, Skaldfinn. So tell him the truth. Tell him our master, whom we need more than ever before, is busy with something else. And you know what that is."
"I do," said Skaldfinn with resignation. "He's sitting down by the harbor with his girlfriend, reading a book."
Trying to read a book would have been nearer the truth. Shef himself was only barely literate. In his childhood he had the alphabet beaten into him by Father Andreas the village priest, more because he could not be parted from the education of his stepsister and half-brother than for any other reason. He could in the end spell out English written in Roman script, with difficulty, a difficulty that had not diminished much by what he had learnt as a king.
The book he had taken from the heretic sect caused him no difficulty as regards script. If Shef had known more, or indeed anything, about such things, he would have recognized it as written in Carolingian majuscule, handsomest of medieval scripts, as easy to read as print—and in itself proof positive that the book he held was a recent copy, no more than fifty or sixty years old. As it was, all that Shef realized was that he could read the handwriting well enough. Unfortunately he could not understand a word of the language it was written in: Latin, as it happened. Not good Latin, as Solomon the Jew saw instantly when the book was passed to him. The Latin of an uneducated person, far worse than the Latin of the Bible translated by Saint Jerome, and indeed, from the odd words scattered through it, the Latin of a native inhabitant of these hills. It had not been written in Latin to begin with, Solomon felt sure. Nor yet Greek or Hebrew. Some language he did not know.
Nevertheless Solomon could understand it well enough. At first he had simply read the book to Shef and the listening Svandis. But as the fascination of the story grew upon him, Shef had halted him, and with his usual fierce energy had organized a translating team. They clustered now, seven of them including auditors, in a shady courtyard close by the harbor. Wine and water stood in earthenware pitchers, wrapped in damp cloth to cool them by evaporation. If Shef stood up he could see over the white plastered wall to where the ships of his fleet swung at anchor, controlling their movement with ropes to the shore so as always to present their broadsides to the harbor mouth and the jetties. The catapult crews lay by their machines in the sun, lookouts watching for any sign of movement by the Greek galleys paddling up and down out of range, or from the floating fort which occasionally, and seemingly for practice, sent a rock skimming over the stone moles to splash harmlessly into the harbor. But Shef rarely stood up. His mind was intent on his task. A task, some inner calculator within him said, more vital even than the siege. Or the siege at this stage.
Solomon stood in the courtyard, book in hand. Slowly he translated the Latin he read, phrase by phrase, into the trade-Arabic that most of his hearers could follow. There the message broke into three separate strands. Shef himself translated Solomon's Arabic into the Anglo-Norse language of his fleet and court, to be written down by Thorvin in his own runic alphabet. A Christian priest whom Solomon had produced, and who had been defrocked by his bishop for some unknown crime, simultaneously translated the Arabic into the Latin-derived patois of the hills, which some called Catalan and some Occitan, or the language of Provence, and wrote it down in his own hand. With great difficulty, as he often complained, for whatever one called his native dialect it had never been written down before, and he had to decide continually how to spell each word. "The way to spell it is the way it's said," rumbled Thorvin, but was ignored by all. Finally, and with far more ease than the others, an apprentice of the learned Moishe translated the Arabic into Hebrew and wrote that down as well, in the complex vowel-less system of his native language. By the five men sat Svandis, listening intently and commenting on the story as it unfolded. In the shade, on a pallet, lay Tolman the kite-boy, still wrapped in bandages and staring out of swollen eyes. In the end one book would have become four, in four different languages, done with different levels of skill.
The master-copy itself was a strange work, whose weird-ness caused Solomon increasingly to raise his eyebrows and pluck at his beard. It began with an introduction of a kind:
These are the words of Jesus ben-Joseph, once dead and now returned to life. Not returned to life in the spirit, as some say, but returned to life in the body. For what is the spirit? There are some who say, the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life. But I say to you, neither does the letter kill nor the spirit give life, but the spirit is life and the life is the body. For who can say that the spirit and the body and the life are three? For who has seen a spirit without a body? Or a body without a life but with a spirit? And so the three are one but the one is not three. I say this, I Jesus ben-Joseph who was dead but am alive...
The narrative went on in a kind of disorganized ramble. But through the ramble, and clearer as the translation team spelled through the many pages, came a sort of an account, and an account that agreed with what Anselm the heretic had told Shef, and—though he hesitated still to tell it to Svandis—with the visions he had had himself of the Crucifixion of Christ.
Whoever told the story declared that he had himself been crucified, nailed to a cross and drunk bitter drink on it, he said again and again. He had been killed and taken down. He had come again to life, and his friends had taken him away, away from the cross and away from his home. Now he lived in a place he did not know, and tried to draw some meaning from all that had happened. The moral that he drew seemed to be a kind of bitter resentment. Again and again he would refer to something or other he had said in a former life, and would deny it, call it folly, take it back. Sometimes he would answer what seemed to have been his own rhetorical questions.
Once I said, "Who among you, if a father and his child asked him for bread, would give the child a stone?" So I asked in my folly, and did not know that many a father has only stone to give, and many have bread but yet give only stones. So it was with my father, when I called out to him...
Solomon hesitated here as he translated, for he recognized the phrase he was translating. Domne, domne, quare me tradidisti? it read in the barbarous Latin of the book. But in Aramaic it would have been Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani, as it is given still in the Gospel of Mark. Solomon made no remark on the corroboration, but translated on, his voice as even as he could make it.
It seemed though that the teller of the story had turned against all fathers, or at least fathers in heaven. He insisted that there was such a father. But he insisted also that such a father could not possibly be good. If he were good, why was the world as it was, full of pain and fear and disease and suffering? If all these were the result of the sin of Adam and of Eve, as the narrator knew was argued, was this not a case again of the fathers and mothers sinning, and the punishment being visited on the children? What kind of parents would so condemn their children to slavery and to death? That slavery and death were what must be escaped, said the heretics' book. But the way to escape it was not by paying a price, nor a ransom, for the slavemaster-father would take no price for release. Rather it was to release oneself. And the key to that release was to believe in no afterlife, or not one under the control of the God of this world, princeps huius mundi, as the narrator continually called him. It was to live your life in such a way as to gain most pleasure from it, for pleasure was the gift of the true God beyond this world, and the foe of the devil-God who ruled the world, the betraying Father. It was to bring no more slaves into the world for that Father to rule and tyrannize over, but to control one's spirit and one's seed.
"What do you make of all this?" said Shef to Solomon as they paused to allow pens to be resharpened and throats to be moistened.
Solomon plucked at his beard, one eye on Elazar, the pupil and spy of Moishe, who blamed Solomon still for unleashing the Christians' fury on their city.
"It is badly told. That makes it the more interesting."
"Why so?"
"I have read my own holy books, the Torah of the Jews. I have read the Christian gospels also. And I have read the Koran of the followers of Mohammed. All are different. All tell us things their authors perhaps did not mean to."
Shef said nothing, let Solomon get round to the unspoken question.
"The Koran is said to be the word of God put into the mouth of Mohammed. It seems to me to be the work of a great poet, and a man of inspiration. Nevertheless it tells us nothing that might not be known by—say, a well-traveled merchant of Arabia, who longed above all for religious zeal and an end to the hair-splitting of the Greeks."
"It is the work of a man, not a God, you mean," said Svandis, with a triumphant look at Shef.
"The gospels?" Shef prompted.
Solomon smiled. "They are, to say the least, confused. Even the Christians have noticed that they contradict each other in detail, and adduce this as proof that they must be true: either true in some spiritual sense about which, in the end, there can be no argument for there is no proof, or true as different accounts of the same event may still all be true. It is clear to me that all were written many years after the story they claim to tell, and by men who knew the holy books of the Jews in great detail. You cannot tell what happened from what the writers wanted to have happened. And yet..." He paused, with a glance at Elazar.
"And yet I have to say that they contain a kind of truth, if a human truth. All seem to tell the story of an uncomfortable man, a preacher who would not say what they asked him to. He would not condemn adultery. He would not allow divorce. He told people to pay their taxes. He liked Gentiles, even Romans. His hearers were trying to twist what he said even as he was saying it. It is an odd story, and odd stories are the likelier to be true."
"You have said nothing about your own holy books," remarked Shef again. Solomon looked at Elazar again. They were talking in the Anglo-Norse of the foreigners, which Elazar surely could not follow. Yet he was suspicious, ears ready for anything he might understand. He would have to put this carefully.
Solomon bowed respectfully. "The holy books of my faith are the word of God, and I say nothing against that. Yet it is an odd thing that sometimes God uses two words. For instance in the account of our forefather Adam and his wife Eve"—he used, as far as he could, the English pronunciations of the names—"the name of God is sometimes one thing and sometimes another. It is as if—as if, I say—there were a writer who said, so to speak, metod for God, as you sometimes do, and another who preferred to say dryhten. As if the two words testified to two writers with different versions of one story."
"What would that mean?" said Thorvin.
Solomon shrugged politely. "It is a difficult text."
"You said that all these holy books contain things their authors did not mean to say," Shef pressed on, "and I understand what you mean. Now what does this one, this one that we have here, tell us that its author did not mean to say?"
"In my opinion," said Solomon, "this is the work of someone who has been through great pain and grief and so cannot think of anything else. You have perhaps met men like that."
Shef thought of his former follower, the gelded berserk Cuthred, and nodded.
"You cannot expect such men to tell a clear story. They are mad, and the author of this text was in a sense mad. But it may be that he was mad because he saw clearly."
"I will tell you something about him," said Svandis with sudden definiteness, "and it is something those fools in the hills got wrong. Like Thierry, who kidnapped me but did not rape me."
Eyes turned towards her. To his surprise Shef saw the beginnings of a blush spreading across Svandis's tanned face. She looked uneasily at Tolman, plunged on.
"When men lie with women—in the North anyway, I have heard that these Arabs are wiser—they think of nothing but spilling their seed deep inside her. But there is another way..."
Shef gaped incredulously, wondering what she meant. And how she knew.
"To go on till almost the end, and then to—well, withdraw. Spill the seed outside the womb. It is as good for the woman, better if the act lasts longer. As good for the man too. It makes no children, no more hungry mouths. It is a pity more men cannot practice it. But of course it would mean they had to think of the woman, which no man ever does when he is intent on his pleasure alone!
"But anyway, that is what this book is talking about. The man who wrote it must have known something. But Thierry and Anselm and Richier, they think it means that you must leave women alone, live like a monk! And yet all the time the book tells us to take pleasure in the world. If you cannot take pleasure from women—or from men either—then what pleasure is there? Men are such fools."
Shef was pleased to notice, sourly, that Thorvin and Solomon seemed as puzzled as himself. "So the book is a manual for pleasure in marriage," he remarked. "And we were thinking it was a lost gospel."
"Why can it not be both?" snapped Svandis.
The Emperor had had little hope of success from the scaling ladders: he had tried them out because he had plenty of men and one never knew the enemy's weaknesses. The ram had seemed more practicable. Watching from a distance he had made out the unmistakable figure of Brand on the ramparts, once his ally, never his friend. To lose to him had been galling. Now the time had come, he decided, for serious thought, and to help him he had called in the few men of his army he thought might be capable of it. Agilulf, his deputy, an experienced warrior. Georgios the admiral of the Greeks, with the proverbial subtlety of that race. Erkenbert the deacon, on whom he most relied. Once he and they had made their plan he would communicate it to the host of subordinate leaders who made up his army's contingents: none of them, in the Emperor's candid opinion, fit to lead anything more complicated than a charge or an ambush.
"Those in the city are not stupid," he concluded, "and their defenses are good. Also, we know the one-eye is there, and where he appears, strange things happen. Now, what can we do to puzzle them?"
Georgios replied, speaking slowly in his camp-Latin. "The harbor remains a weak point," he said. "I will not risk my galleys close in against their mule-stones, but at the same time we have proved that they dare not come out against the floating fort designed by the wise deacon here: I am glad to have seen it and will take careful note of it for my Emperor's uses in the future. Still, the stone jetties are only six feet above the water, and they run many stadia long. There is a chance there for an escalade, if we can get close enough."
"Many small boats, not a few large ones?" suggested Bruno.
"And, I would suggest, at night."
"What about the Greek fire? Can you not bring it close up to the jetties and burn all the defenders off as you did the Arab galleys?" asked Agilulf.
The admiral hesitated. He could not lie to Agilulf, who had seen the Greek fire used several times. Yet at the heart of the policy of the Byzantines was the need to keep their one great technical advantage secret. No barbarian—and barbarian included the servants of the Emperor of Rome, as far as the Greeks were concerned—was allowed to get too close to the projectors or the fuel tanks. The operators were the most highly paid men in the fleet, the admiral included, and all had moreover left hostages for their secrecy in Byzantium. Georgios felt that he had learnt much on this trip, including the details of the Roman and Northern catapults. He wanted to give nothing back in return. Yet he must answer.
"The Greek fire has certain limitations," he temporized. "It needs a large ship to carry it. I cannot put the devices into mere fishing boats. Nor can I take the risk of losing one to enemies who, as the Emperor says, are only too ready to learn new and strange devices. Yet at night, I might risk one galley close in." With trusted men aboard to burn and destroy the evidence if it might fall into the wrong hands, he did not say.
"We'll try it," said Bruno decisively. "Night after next, there'll be no more than a thin moon. Now, Erkenbert, where is the War-Wolf?"
"War-Wolf" was the name of the great engine that Erkenbert himself had designed, and that had battered down the gates of castle after castle in the Emperor's triumphant progress to Puigpunyent. It was, in a way, no more than a giant version of the simple traction catapults that Shef had designed and that even now were hurling rocks at every besieger who came within range of the city of Septimania. Yet it did not rely on mere feeble human muscles to give it power. Power came from the giant counterweight, the counterweight that was both its strength and its weakness: enabling massive boulders to be thrown, taking an age to empty and refill, demanding great weight and strength in its supporting timbers—timbers still crawling along the coast road to the siege.
"Two days' travel away still," Erkenbert replied.
"And where do you mean to use it once it has arrived?"
"We have little choice. It is coming down the coast road from the north. We cannot move it through the hills above the town, and if we were to load it on board ship we would need cranes and a stone jetty out into deep water. So we will have to attack the north gate of the town. It is a strong and stout gate, but only wooden. One boulder from 'War-Wolf' will beat it down."
"If it lands on the right place."
"Trust me for that," said Erkenbert definitely. "I am the arithmeticus."
The Emperor nodded. He knew that no-one in the world was more skilled than the puny deacon in the mind-numbing task of translating weight to distance in the number-system his world had inherited from the Romans.
"Harbor attack the night after next, then," he concluded. "If that fails, 'War-Wolf' breaks down the north gate the next morning."
"And if that fails?" enquired Georgios, always ready to disconcert his temporary allies.
The Emperor looked at him forbiddingly. "If that fails, we try again. Till the Holy graduale on which our Savior was borne is in my hands, along with the Lance by which he died. But I don't want to fail. Remember, all of you, we are dealing with clever heathens. Be alert for anything new. Expect the unexpected."
In silence, his advisers speculated on how this paradox might be achieved.
The bastards are too quiet, thought Brand, strolling along the harbor front in search of his master. There he was, still in the courtyard, all of them still reading, gabbling, scritch-scratching away with never a care in the world. He waited till Solomon noticed his looming presence and broke off his reading.
"Sorry to disturb you," he remarked ironically. "I thought I'd mention the siege."
"It's going well, isn't it?" asked Shef.
"Well enough. But I think it's time you did something."
"What?"
"What you're best at. Thinking. It's all gone quiet. But I've seen our friend Bruno through the far-seer. He won't give up. So—they're going to do something. I don't know what. You are the best person in the world for imagining new things. Time for you to do it again."
Slowly, bringing his mind back from the fascinating problems of the book, Shef realized the truth of what Brand had said. Realized too, with some subconscious calculation, that the breathing space he had counted on, and had been using on what he felt was the most vital if not the most urgent task, the task he alone could do—that that breathing space was over. Besides, he was getting bored with sitting. And the book was nearly done.
"Find Skaldfinn to take my place here," he ordered. "He can translate from Solomon for Thorvin to write down. Tolman, you come along too."
He stepped out into the sunlight with the gigantic Brand and the limping kite-boy at his heels, followed by a glower from Svandis. She wanted to listen to the end of the strange book. At the same time she resented the way her lover could turn his attention instantly to something new. Something without her.
"I brought two people to talk to you," added Brand once they were in the open. "Steffi and a native."
Shef turned his attention first to the native, as Brand called him, another dark-faced man of clear Arab descent: there were still many non-Jews in the town, traders caught by the unexpected closure of roads.
"You speak Arabic?" he asked.
"Of course." A slight sneer at the question: Shef's Arabic was no more than serviceable, far removed from the pure tongue of Cordova or Toledo.
"What is your news?"
"The Christian Emperor, your enemy and the enemy of my master the Caliph, has destroyed many walls and forts this summer. He has killed many of the faithful too, all along the sea-coast they once controlled. Do you wish to know how he did it?"
"We will pay gold for it," Shef replied.
"I would tell you anyway, as a service against the Nazarenes. He has a machine. Only one machine, and it is many times bigger than anything you have here. He uses it for only one thing, and that is to hurl great boulders on to his enemy's gates. Some say that it needs flat ground, that it can shoot only very slowly."
"Have you ever seen it?"
"No, but I have spoken with men who escaped with their lives when strongholds were taken."
Bit by bit Shef drew from the Arab what little accurate information he could provide, and began to realize the use of the counterweight. Absently he dismissed the man, thinking already of the problems of a pivot, of retention and release: above all, the central problem of all the traction engines, of how to control range. It depended on weight. There must be some way to tell, if you knew how much was in the counterweight and how much in the launching-sling, what you needed to add or to take out in order to throw a set distance. But a three-element calculation was beyond Shef, or any other man in his realm. Even working out how many water-barrels you needed, or what share of loot went to each ship or each man, was a trial-and-error business with the Northern counting-system. Shef wished in frustration that he too, like Bruno, had in his service an arithmeticus. Even someone who knew what arithmetic might be. As he pounded a fist into his palm he became aware that Steffi was standing on one foot, eying him nervously from his usual wide angle.
"Why did Brand send you here?"
"I was thinking. About the flares we used from the kites. And that time I jumped off the cliff, you remember? I was thinking, how would it be, at night like, if we had some flares ready to light, and threw them from a pull-thrower? We could put some cloth on so they'd open out, see, and come down slowly, with a hole in, like we've learned how to do..."
After a few further moments explanation Shef sent Steffi off to find a gang and practice attaching the cloth.
"Don't light anything, mind," he warned him. "Just figure out how they have to be rigged to open properly. Go easy with the saltpeter crystals, it'll take time to make more."
As the squint-eyed ex-slave went off, Shef's mind went back to the counterweight machine no doubt already approaching. His eye fell on the still-bandaged Tolman. The lad had been silent and downcast ever since he came round from his long unconsciousness, not surprising with his two comrades dead. Could another boy be used? No, there was no doubt that Tolman was the most experienced flyer, the most likely to succeed. Yet he would have to be persuaded.
Shef's face took on the reasonable and friendly air that his closest associates had come to dread, the expression that showed he was about to use someone.
"Well, Tolman," he began. "Like to try a flight over nice soft water this time? Get your nerve back before it goes, eh?"
The boy's lip trembled, he blinked back tears. Dumbly, obediently, he nodded. Shef patted him carefully on his deep-grazed shoulder, led him away, shouting as he went for Cwicca, Osmod, and the most skillful of the kitemen and catapulteers.
As he had been during the long northern winter seven years before, Shef was amazed at the speed with which—sometimes—an idea could become reality. Before the day was out the materials for the new-style siege catapult had been assembled, including the massive beam that would be its throwing arm, stripped without complaint from the keel of a coasting vessel still on the stocks. It helped, of course, that there was no ordinary work to be done. The entire population of Septimania was idle, and when they thought of what a sack by Imperial troops would mean, anxious to assist in any way. Skilled carpenters and smiths abounded for every task: cost was not considered. It helped too that Shef had skilled taskmasters ready and willing to drive men beyond their normal habits—as he watched Cwicca swinging a rope's end at a sweating gang working on the iron rim of one of the six huge cartwheels that would shift the monster when it was done. Shef observed that having been a slave perhaps gave some men a taste for authority.
Like himself? he wondered for an instant. No, he dismissed the thought. He did only what had to be done.
Besides, the critical thing, the thing that no other group in the world had in such abundance, was confidence. Confidence that to every problem, whether it was flying in the sky or launching huge boulders, there was a hard solution, if only one could work out all possible details. Cwicca and Osmod and even Steffi, like their now-missing comrade Udd, had seen kings collapse and armies break before them, all because of machines. They did nothing half-heartedly.
And that was all very well, but this time, this time they might be wrong! Shef plunged back into the problem that had preoccupied him ever since he had set the gangs working. He roved up and down the dock, muttering and counting, telling over the piles of white and black stones he had collected and stowed in every pocket he owned.
Cwicca, rope's end laid aside, nudged one of his mates. "He's getting in a rage," he muttered. "Someone'll cop it, you see."
"Us and all," his mate answered gloomily. "What's biting him?"
"Don't know. Something too clever for the likes of us."
Solomon the Jew, his translating labors completed, also saw the growing fury on the face of the strange king: the strange king he had grown to like, in spite of the dire fate he had brought to Septimania, for his constant curiosity. A mind more active than that of any Talmudist, he reflected. But in so many fields the mind of a child.
Rather more politely than Cwicca's mate, he moved to put the same question. "Something disturbs you, lord of the North?"
Shef glowered, caught his own fury and mastered it, made himself speak connectedly. Maybe, he thought, maybe saying the problem out loud would assist him. And after all, he had found out long ago, when you could not solve a problem, ask everybody. Someone always knew.
"It's like this," he said. "At some time or other I will need to know how far this thing will throw. Now, it ought to be easier with a machine of this sort than it is with the hand-pulled machines. For with them all you can say is 'pull hard,' or 'not so hard,' and 'not so hard' cannot be counted. But with this machine I can count everything! I have been thinking it out, what will happen when we try. Suppose I tell Cwicca to take ten hundred-pound bags and put them in the bucket, the bucket that drops the short arm. Now suppose I put a rock that weighs the same as three hundred-pound bags—if I could find one that would be so convenient, hah!—but suppose I did. Then suppose the ten hundred pounds threw the three hundred pounds one hundred paces. And I needed to make it throw one hundred and twenty paces. Then it is obvious, I would need more weight in the bucket. Or less weight to be thrown. And they have something to do with each other. But what?"
His voice rose to a strangled yell, he fought rage down again and continued with the thoughts that had buzzed round and round his head like weary bees. "Now, I am not a fool, Solomon. One hundred and twenty is to one hundred as six to five, is it not? So I must make the other things as six to five. Or is it five to six? No, lower the weight thrown. Lower the three hundred pounds as six to five. Or raise the weight throwing as five to six, the ten hundred pounds. Now how many fives are there in ten hundred? How many fives in ten, there are two. So two hundred, and then what do I do with that, I take six of them. Oh, I can find the answer, Solomon, in the end. But it takes me as long as it takes a slow ox to plow a furrow. And I end up doing it with these little stones for markers because I forget what I'm doing!"
Shef yelled with honest fury for a moment and hurled his handful of pebbles scattering into the blue water of the harbor. As if in answer, the fort floating almost a mile away beyond the stone jetties sent a rock at extreme range splashing into the dock. The laboring men averted their eyes, tried not to seem aware of what was happening.
"And all the time," Shef concluded, "I know that I am doing the whole thing with the simplest numbers. Because really any rock we use will weigh three hundred-pound bags and maybe twenty-seven over. And I will need to raise the range not twenty yards out of a hundred, but seventeen out of ninety-five."
He squatted by a patch of sand. "I wish I had learned the trick of numbers from some skilled Roman. See," he drew a V in the sand. "I know that is for five." He added a stroke to make a VI. "That is for six. Or the other side," he drew a IV, "that is for four. But how to make all this answer my question, that I do not know. Only the ancient folk of Rome were wise enough for that art."
Solomon pulled his beard, marveling internally. Fortunate that Moishe had not heard this. Or Elazar. Their remarks about barbarians would have become even more barbed. "I do not think," he said carefully, "I do not think it is the ancient Romans you should go to for an answer."
Shef looked up, eye gleaming. "You mean there is an answer?"
"Oh yes. They could have told you in Cordova, if you had asked. But even here, many men know the answer to what you seek. Every merchant, every astronomer. Even Mu'atiyah could have told you."
"What is the secret then?" Shef was on his feet.
"The secret?" Solomon had been speaking in Anglo-Norse, which he now spoke as familiarly as any man in the fleet. Now he shifted to Arabic. "The secret is al-sifr."
"Al-sifr? That means empty. That means nothing. How can nothing be the secret, are you mocking me, longbeard...?"
Solomon held up a hand. "There is no mockery. But look, this is not for prying eyes, see how everyone is staring. Come with me to the courtyard. I promise you, by the time men dowse their lamps you will be a greater arithmeticus than any Roman is or ever was. I will show you the devices of al-Khwarizmi the Great."
Solomon led a silent king towards the shaded court.
Little more than an hour later, Shef looked up from the table of fine white sand on which he and Solomon had been drawing. His one eye was wide with astonishment. Carefully he swept his hand over the sand-tray, obliterating all the markings on it except the column of ten signs which Solomon had showed him to begin with.
"Let's try it again," he said.
"Very well. Draw your lines."
Shef drew five vertical lines down the sand, making four columns. He drew two horizontal ones across the top, three more across the bottom.
"We will try to solve your range problem, only with harder numbers than the ones you told me. Let us say that you have thrown a boulder of two hundred and eighty pounds, and it has reached one hundred and twenty yards, six score in your language. But you need to reach one hundred and forty, seven score. Your throwing weight was eleven hundred and forty pounds. You must increase that in the proportion of seven to six. So, first, we must multiply eleven hundred and forty by seven and then divide by six."
Shef nodded: the words "multiply" and "divide" were strange to him, but he understood the ideas.
"First," Solomon went on, "write the numbers for eleven hundred and forty in their correct place."
Shef pondered for a moment. He had soon grasped the idea of a number-system based on position, but it still did not come easily to him.
"Try writing it the Roman way first," said Solomon gently. "Write it in the sand away from your table. The Romans wrote a thousand by 'M'."
Shef wrote a wavering "M" in the sand, followed by a dot. Then a "C" for one hundred. Then the familiar four "X"s for forty. His hand reached out to make the hole sign for al-sifr, nothing, but drew back. The Romans would have left such a number as M.C.XXXX.
"Now enter the Arabic signs at the head of your table," Solomon prompted. "Eleven hundred and forty at the top, seven at the bottom."
Shef hesitated again. This was the tricky part. Now. The right-most column was for numbers below ten. In the horizontal line one above the bottom, the line for the multiplier, he wrote the shaky hook of a '7': the multiplier. The topmost horizontal line was for the multiplied, as he could see from his Roman numerals, one thousand, one hundred and forty.
In the left-most column he wrote a '1,' corresponding to the 'M'. In the next, another one, corresponding to the 'C.' In the next, the more complex shape of a '4,' for the four 'X's. And finally, in the right-most column, the column for the ten numbers below ten—ten, not nine, as Solomon had proved to him—he drew the al-sifr hole.
Now to do the sum. The first thing, the most vital thing, was that seven noughts were nought. So write in the nought. Deliberately, watched by four pairs of eyes, Shef began to work his way through the calculation on the sand-table, primitive ancestor of the abacus. For long moments he thought of nothing else, lost in a sensation no man of his race had ever before experienced: the fascination of number. In the end, hardly aware of how he had come by it, he stared with surprise and deep satisfaction at the result written in the sand. Seven thousand nine hundred and eighty. He had never seen a number like that before—not because it was too large, not when every part of his realm was counted in hides, thirty thousand for a province, a hundred thousand for what had once been a kingdom. No, because of its exactness. Over a thousand, numbers to him were counted in scores, or tens, or hundreds, or half-hundreds: not sixes and sevens and eights and fours.
"Now you are to divide seven thousand nine hundred and eighty by six," went on the quiet voice of Solomon. "Make your table for divisions."
Shef's hand brushed the sand away, began another table. Prompted again and again by Solomon, he worked his way doggedly through.
"And so in the end," said Solomon finally, "you know that you would need to increase your throwing weight to..."
"Thirteen hundred and thirty pounds," said Shef.
"So you would add to your original weight..."
"Two hundreds less ten. One hundred and ninety pounds. Exactly."
"But by the time you'd set up your sand table and done all this," objected Skaldfinn, "your enemy would have buried you under a hail of boulders. Because he'd have been shooting while you'd been drawing!"
"Not with the new machine," said Shef flatly. "I could have done all this while they were still taking the weights out to winch the arm back up again. Then I could just tell them to put the same weight back in with a measured one hundred and ninety on top. And besides: I can see this is just like the far-seer."
"Like the far-seer?" asked Solomon.
"Yes. You remember that fool Mu'atiyah. He could make the far-seer, he had been shown how the glass should be ground, something we might never have realized in a thousand years. But he never thought to go a step further. I swear, by the time we return to our own home my wise men will have learned more of glass and sight than Mu'atiyah, or even his master. Because they will not rest till they have! Now, this calculation you have shown me, this too I might never have learned for myself. But now I have learned it, I see it can be made quicker, much quicker. The sand table—it's not needed, nor the stones in my hand. I use them because I am not practiced. If I were, then I could put my counters on wire and carry it all with me, like a harp. Or I could do it without any columns at all. Ideas are hard to come by, easy to improve. I will improve this one yet. Improve it till—what was his name, Solomon, al-Khwarizmi?—till al-Khwarizmi himself would not recognize it. And I will use it for more than catapults! This is the anvil for a smith-craft on which the Way could beat out the world! Is that not right, Thorvin? Skaldfinn?"
Solomon fell silent, hand going up to his beard as if for comfort. He had forgotten the furious spirit of the Northerners, and of the One King in particular. Was it wise ever to tell them anything? Too late, now, to reconsider.
Dimitrios, senior siphonistos to the Greek fleet, listened to the orders of his admiral with doubt tinged with alarm. The orders were, of course, expressed with great care, somewhere between suggestion and persuasion. The siphonistoi were almost a law unto themselves, curators of the ultimate weapon of Byzantium, in their own opinion more important in the last resort even than emperors, let alone admirals. Dimitrios, if he chose, could make a fortune and live like a lord anywhere in the civilized world, Baghdad or Cordova or Rome, simply by selling the information in his head. A wife, a mistress, seven children and two thousand golden hyperpers in the banks of Byzantium stood forfeit to his treachery. But in any case the whole city knew that no siphonistos would ever reach mastery of his trade if there were the slightest doubt about his loyalty to the cause of Church and Empire: loyalty from principle, not compulsion.
That loyalty caused Dimitrios's doubt. One of his greatest compulsions was to preserving the secrecy of the fire. Better to lose a battle by destroying one's equipment, he had been told a thousand times, than to risk its capture for a purely temporary victory—all victories, for the beleaguered Empire of the Byzantines, had long been recognized as temporary. Now the admiral wanted him to risk a ship and a projector close inshore, in doubtful battle against Jews and strange heathens. Dimitrios was a brave man, who would take his chance of being sent to the bottom by the strange mule-stones, as the barbarians called them. Risking the fire and the secret were another thing.
"The small boats will go in first," repeated Georgios cajolingly. "Only if they make a lodgement will we bring up your galley."
"To do what?"
"If they can detach the booms you may be able to get into the harbor and burn out all the stone-thrower ships at once."
"They'd sink us as we came in."
"It will be black night, a thin moon, barely a hundred yards to row to the nearest. After that you can always keep an enemy ship between you and their catapults till you are close enough to pump the fire at them."
Dimitrios considered. He had indeed been enraged at the sinking of the galley and the butchery of its men in the inconclusive battle at sea weeks before: an act of defiance which had left him for the first time in his career feeling helpless. It would be a delight to avenge that shame by burning every enemy ship to the waterline, as all enemies of Byzantium deserved. To show the devil-worshipers the power of God and his Patriarch. And close range and at night were exactly the right conditions for the use of his weapon.
"What if they don't get the boom open?"
"You could pull along the stone jetty and sweep it of any resistance. That way you would have the jetty between you and the stone-throwers in the harbor. Clear the jetty and pull out to sea again in the darkness."
Dimitrios thought carefully. There were risks in this, he could see, but perhaps no more than were justifiable. He would take his own precautions, of course, as the admiral certainly knew he would. Men standing by to fire the tanks, boats in waiting to collect himself and his crew if they had to abandon ship. No need to repeat all that.
Seeing him waver, the admiral added a final dose of flattery to win his supposed subordinate over. "Of course we know that the most important thing in our fleet is yourself. You and the skill you have developed. We dare not lose that to any barbarian. I will myself stand by in the rescue boats, to come in for you if there is any sign of mischance."
Dimitrios smiled, a little mirthlessly. What the admiral said was true. But he had no idea how true. He himself, Dimitrios, knew the entire process of making the Greek fire from ground to nozzle, as the siphonistoi said. He had been beyond the Black Sea to far Tmutorakan, where the colored oils oozed from the ground. He had seen it in the winter, when the oil ran thin and clear, and in the stifling summer, when it came out like sludge from a foul farmyard. He knew how it was collected, he knew how it was stored. He himself had soldered the copper tanks with precious tin, to be sure there was no leak. He had built his own equipment with his own hands, lank and valves, brazier and bellows, pump and nozzle. Again and again, under the guidance of the old masters of the trade, he had fired up, pumped in the air, seen the flame flow. Three times his masters had made him pump on beyond the safe limit, using small and old devices and condemned criminals as pump-hands, so that he could hear the rising shrillness of the niglaros, the valved pressure-whistle, whose valve was opened to test the vapors within. He had looked with interest at the bodies of the condemned, to see what effect the bursting tanks had had upon them. Not one had ever survived, and Dimitrios thought they had chosen ill to take the siphonistos chance instead of sure but less painful death on the execution ground. He was acutely aware of every difficulty in the whole process, how much easier it was to have it go wrong than go right. Without him, he knew, mere knowledge would not be enough. It was his experience that was vital and precious. Good, at least, that the admiral had recognized it.
"With the proper safeguards, I consent," he said.
The admiral sank back in his chair with relief. While he knew how much less than biddable his corps of siphonistoi were, he would not have relished explaining the fact to the Emperor of the Romans: a man who, he thought, should be given a skilled Byzantine doctor as soon as possible, to ensure that he ate something that disagreed with him.
"Have one ship ready at nightfall," he said. "Take my own Carbonopsina."
The Black-Eyed Beauty, thought Dimitrios. Pity that there were none such in this far land of strangers. Only thin Moorish women and the ugly descendants of Goths, with their pale skin and discolored eyes. Ugly as the revolting Germans, their allies, though these insisted that their barbarian enemies were even worse for pallor and bulk and the size of their feet. Certainly all should be swept from the sea, the Inner Sea, the Sea of the Middle of the World become once more a Greek and Christian lake. Dimitrios rose, bowed sketchily, withdrew to make his preparations.
The first sign of the sea-borne assault came only as the patrolling squad of city guardsmen marching along the longer jetty saw faint shapes crowding in out of the blackness. They stood, gaped for an instant to make sure, then began to blow the alarm on their ram's horn trumpets. By then the sixty fishing boats which Bruno had commandeered were bare yards from the stone wall, men in them already swinging their grapnels to pull the boats alongside, others raising the short boarding-ladders which were all they would need for the six-foot climb. The guardsmen bent their bows, the short breast-bows which were all they carried, shot, shot again at the targets pouring towards them. Then, as the first grapnels clinked on stone, they realized they were alone on a long stone causeway, about to be cut off. They ceased shooting and ran for the harbor end of the jetty, cut down as they fled by javelins and arrows flying out of the blackness. Bruno's first wave reached the jetty almost without resistance, divided immediately into two groups, one turning to their left and racing for the seaward end with hammers, saws and chisels, to try to cut the boom and open the entrance for the reinforcements and the fire-ship. The other turned right and poured in an armed mob for the landward end, seeking to reach and hold it till the rest came up and drove either for the open harbor, or—just as disastrously for the defense—to seize a stretch of the main wall and open it for escalade. The rams' horns had done their work, though. While only a score of men at a time marched along the jetties, open as they were to the unpredictable shooting of the catapults on the offshore fort, many more stood to arms or slept by them at the vulnerable points where jetties met shore. The attackers charging along the stone strip, carried on with excitement at their easy landing, met a sudden rain of arrows at close range, with behind them a solid wall of spears and shields. Lightly-armed levies from the South, the men Bruno habitually sent in first as most dispensable, many of them went down even before the puny arrows of the breast-bows, shot at no more than ten yards' range. Those who pressed on found themselves hacking at a disciplined line behind a barricade. Slowly those who survived realized that the pressure of comrades from behind was slackening, had gone. Unsure why, or if they too were to be taken from behind in the darkness, they drew back, at first step by step behind their shields, then as the arrows lashed at their unprotected legs and sides, turning and running back into the protective dark.
Shef had started from sleep at the first horn-blast. He slept naked in the heat, seized tunic and boots, struggled into them in seconds, started for the door. Svandis was there before him, naked also but barring his way. Even in the almost pitch-black of the shuttered room Shef could feel the scowl on her face, hear the lash in her voice.
"Don't run out like a fool! Mail, helmet, weapons! What good will you be if the first stray slingstone cuts you down?"
Shef hesitated, full of counter-arguments, but Svandis carried on. "I am the child of warriors, even if you are not. Better ready and slow than early and dead. My father could have told you that. Who won the battle where I first saw you? You, or he?"
Well, he did not, Shef thought to say. But it was no use arguing. Quicker to obey than to try to thrust her aside. He turned to the mail-shirt which hung ready from a hook, thrust his arms through the heavy sleeves. Svandis was behind him, pulling the iron round, fastening it behind with the heavy rawhide laces. It was true at any rate that she was the child of warriors. He turned and embraced her, pulling her breasts on to the hard iron rings.
"If we live, when we return home I will make you a queen," he said.
She slapped his face sharply. "This is no time for love-whispers in the dark. Helmet. Shield. Take your Swedish sword and try to live up to it."
Shef found himself thrust out into the courtyard, could hear her behind him rummaging for her own clothes. Wherever the fighting was, she would appear, he knew. He began to run, heavy under the weight of thirty pounds of wood and iron, towards the command post where he would find Brand. Across the water came a clangor of metal, war-cries and cries of pain. They had come by sea.
As Shef puffed up, he saw Brand towering in the midst of a squad of Vikings, his gigantic cousin Styrr standing next to him, almost his equal in size. Brand seemed in no great hurry or alarm, was busy counting his men.
"They landed on the jetty," he remarked. "I never thought that would give them much trouble. They've got to get off it if they're going to be a nuisance, and they'll have to do it fast."
Shef's ears had picked out different noises from the immediate ones of battle, already dying away: smithy noises, metal on metal, axe on wood.
"What's happening at the far end?"
"They're trying to cut the boom. Now that we don't want. We'll have to clear them off. All right, boys, got your boots laced up? Let's stroll along and shoo these Christians back into the water. You stay at the back," he added to Shef. "Organize some crossbows, make sure the catapults shoot at the opposition, not us. This would be easier if we could see what was going on."
In a solid mass the Vikings, perhaps forty of them, tramped round the harbor towards the point of contact, the hobnails on their boots crashing on the stone. A few lamps gleamed along the harbor-front, casting a dim light out over the water. In it, as his eyes adjusted, Shef could see the enemy massing for a second attack. There was something going on in the ships in the harbor too, he could hear rope creaking and catapult-captains shouting orders. If the Emperor's men did not fight their way off the jetty in the next few minutes, they would be swept by mule-stones. But there was something ominous happening out there, Shef could hear harsh voices taking command, metal clashing and ringing, could see the faint lamp-light reflected back on metal points and rings. A fierce cheer and a wall of metal coming forward, spear points in a line.
"Fall your men back," said Brand without haste to the city guard commander. "I think this is our trade now."
The light-armed guardsmen slipped back through the ranks behind, and the Vikings moved forward, forming their customary blunt wedge. The flimsy barricade at the end of the jetty had been torn down in the first assault, now offered no shelter. The steady line of Lanzenbrüder, picked men, armored from head to foot, tramped down on the Viking wedge, as heavily armed, for once their equals in size and strength. Neither side knew anything of defeat, both stood confident in their ability to batter down anything and anyone that stood before them.
Standing at the rear of the Viking formation, ten men wide but no more than four deep, Shef heard the simultaneous crash as shield met shield, the clang and thud of spears and axes meeting wood or iron. A heartbeat later, to his surprise and horror, the man in front of him stepped back, pushed almost off his feet by a surge from his own retreating line. Shef heard Brand's voice raised in a bull bellow as he called on his men to stand their ground. Vikings retreating? he thought. They are falling back like the English used to, like they did the day my stepfather and I fought my father and his men on the causeway in Norfolk. That day I ran. But then I was only a nobody, little better than a thrall. Now I am a king, with gold on my arms and a sword of Swedish steel, made by my own steelmaster.
And still I am little more use than poor Karli. The line had steadied, was no longer falling back. From the front the clash of weapons was now continuous, both sides hacking and fencing rather than trying to force each off their feet. Shef sheathed his sword, turned abruptly and ran back along the harbor's edge, looking for something that would turn the tide.
The German warrior-monks had marched into the Viking line to try the tactics which had destroyed every Arab army that had come against them. Shield in one hand, shortened spear in the other. Ignore the man in front of you, stab at the man to your right as he lifts his arm for the sword-stroke. Rely on the comrade to your left to strike the man who threatens you. Stab with the right, strike out with the shield in your left, step forward with feet stamping. If the man in front goes down, trample him under foot, rely on the man behind to ensure he does not strike up from below. For an instant or two, the tactic worked.
But the men they now faced were not dressed in mere cotton or linen. Some spearpoints went home under the armpit, more skidded away from metal, were shrugged off brawny shoulders. The clubbing blows with the shields failed to knock heavy men off their balance. Some stepped back, shortened axe or sword, chopped at arms or helmets. Others saw the blows coming from their right-hand side, parried or blocked with their own blades, struck back at the unshielded sides of their enemies. Brand, having taken a pace back, to his own astonished rage, drove his axe "Battle-Troll" through neck and shoulder, widened the gap with a thrust of his massive shield, and stepped into the German ranks, cutting to either side at the point of the wedge. His cousin Styrr swung an underhand blow that swept an enemy off his feet, broke the man's windpipe with a deliberate stamp from hobnailed feet, jumped forward to his cousin's side. Germans began to throw down their spears, draw swords, fill the air with steel as they hacked at heads and linden-shields.
Agilulf, watching from his position a few yards in the rear, pursed his lips as he recognized the giant figure of Brand. The big bastard from the Braethraborg, he thought to himself. Son of a sea-troll. Some rumor about him losing his nerve. He seems to have got it back again. Someone is going to have to take him out before he breaks our nerve, and I suppose it will have to be me. There don't seem to be very many of them. He began to work his way through the ranks of men thrusting with their shields at the backs of their comrades, trying to regain impetus.
As he trotted through the darkness Shef saw familiar figures closing round him: small men, with the rimmed metal caps of his own standard issue. Englishmen, crossbows ready, running down from their various stations or from sleep. He stopped, looked back at the barely-visible scrimmage at the jetty end, a frieze of weapons lifting and flashing over swaying bodies.
"I want to start shooting them up," he said.
"We can't see who to shoot at," came a voice in the darkness. "Nor we ain't got a clear shot neither."
As Shef hesitated, light suddenly spread over the whole harbor, bright white light like a summer noon. The fighting ceased for an instant, men screwed up their eyes to shield them, the working party struggling with the boom paused, caught like rabbits in torch-light. Shef looked up, saw the light drifting down from the sky, suspended under kite-cloth.
Steffi, dismissed by his master to work out the problem of flares on his own, had spent the afternoon with a gang, attempting to solve the problem of both throwing a flare in such a way that it would drift down, and then of lighting it. Two hours of experiments had solved the first problem: not an easy one, for anything put in the sling of a traction catapult was whirled violently round before launching. Some of the wooden bundles he had prepared tangled ignominiously in the sling, others had their cloths open as soon as they were released, crashing to the ground twenty yards off. In the end they discovered how to fold the cloths under the round bundle so that they flew straight, caught the air only at the top of their trajectory, drifted slowly down.
Lighting them was another matter yet, and Steffi had been forbidden to experiment with genuine flares for fear of enemy observers. When the attack came, Steffi was standing by one of the many traction catapults set up round the harbor and along the walls, waiting for a chance to shoot. In moments he had loaded the first of the saltpeter-impregnated bundles he had prepared, lit the short fuse he had devised, steadied the sling in his two hands, and given the order to throw. The missile had sailed out over the harbor, fuse glowing, and drifted, fuse still glowing, harmlessly into the sea. And the next. The third, its fuse cut ruthlessly back, had gone out.
"This is no good," called one of his crew. "Let's start throwing rocks down there at those boats. Even if we can't see we might hit something."
Steffi ignored him, mind racing in the panic of the failed inventor. "Get ready," he ordered. He thrust another bundle into the sling, ignored the useless fuse, instead gripped the torch with one hand and thrust it into the flammable bundle, hauling down on the sling with the other.
As the flare of flame sprang up he shouted "Pull," and let go himself as the team heaved with a will. The flare shot out like a comet, trailing sparks. The team gaped after it, wondering if the trailing kite-cloth would catch, if the flare would go out. At the top of its arc the flare seemed to steady, drop underneath its cloth support, began to drift gently down. From their vantage suddenly everything below them came clear: the fighting men on the jetty, the party clustered round the end of the boom, the boats grapnelled to the outer wall.
The great galley hanging on its oars a bare fifty yards from the harbor entrance, smoke rising from its center, a crackle of flame amidships with men moving purposefully round it.
The crew yelled and pointed at the galley, anxious to train round and shoot. Steffi shouted them down, prepared another flare. "We'll keep throwing these," he bawled, " 'cos we're the only ones know how to do it. Let the others throw the rocks."
He thrust another flare into its place, ignoring the pain from already blistered fingers.
As he saw the flare drifting down, and remembered his own casual words earlier that day to Steffi, Shef's mind cleared from its near-panic. His voice dropped, he made himself breathe deeply and speak slowly, to spread calm and decision to those around him.
"Trimma," he said, recognizing one of those crowding round him. "Take twenty men, put them in the dinghies there by the shore, row off till you're level with the fighting there. Then shoot carefully at the rear ranks of the Germans. Not the ones at the front, understand? You're too likely to hit our own lot. See Brand there, and Styrr with him? Make sure you don't hit them. Once the Germans break, start clearing the causeway. Take your time, stay out of range of their bows. Right, off you go.
"The rest of you, stand fast. How many boats are there left? All right, load them up. Now row out to our ships in the harbor, all the two-masters, two of you to each one. Tell the mule-crews to clear those men off from round the boom. But leave the Fafnisbane to me!"
He looked round, suddenly alone. Foolish! He should have held one man back. All the boats were gone, and...
Svandis appeared suddenly from behind him. She was staring up at the light, then looking round, trying to make sense of what was happening. It had taken her longer than he expected to find her clothes. Or else everything had happened more quickly than he knew. She pointed to the fighting men on the causeway, a grim struggle that had turned now into conventional battle, the play of swords over the war-linden of which poets sang.
"There," she shouted, "there, why are you hanging back, child of a whore and a churl, stand in the front like my father, like a sea-king..."
Shef turned his back on her. "Undo those laces."
The snap in his voice seemed to work, he felt fingers pulling at the rawhide knots they had so recently done up, but continually a flow of insults poured out, coward, runaway, skulker in the darkness, user of better men. He paid no attention. As the mail dropped free he dropped his sword, tossed his helmet after it and ran out, plunging from the harbor wall in a racing dive.
The lights were still filling the sky. As he looked up from the plunging overarm stroke he could see two in the air at once, one almost down to the water, the other still high up. Fifty strokes through the milk-warm water and he was clutching at the Fafnisbane's anchor-cable, hauling himself up it arm over arm. A face gaped at him, recognized him, dragged him summarily inboard.
"How many men aboard, Ordlaf? Enough to man the sweeps? No? Enough to make sail? Do it. Cut the cable. Steer for the harbor entrance."
"But it's boomed closed, lord."
"Not now, it's not." Shef pointed out to sea. Just as the first mule-stones kicked up water round them or hummed ill-aimed overhead, the working parties round the far end of the jetty were scrambling back. They had battered their way through the stout iron rings holding chains and tree-trunks to the stone, or maybe sawed their way through the timber. But they had thrust the boom off, already its free end was floating inshore, opening the passage. And there was something out there, something beyond the harbor wall. A flicker of motion told Shef it was a line of oars, dropping from the upright, the rest position, to the row. A galley coming in. And with the galley, the fire.
The Fafnisbane was moving now, on the faint breeze of night, just beginning to slip through the water. Too slowly, and coming bows on to the unseen menace out there. Bows on, where the mule could not bear. In ten seconds, Shef knew, he could be a burnt but living corpse like Sumarrfugl. He remembered the crisp feeling of the burnt skin crumbling under his hand as he had sent the merciful dagger home. Only there would be no merciful dagger for him. Faintly, he registered the snap of crossbows somewhere to one side low down on the water, the thud of quarrels striking home through flesh and armor, noted another flare burst into life directly overhead. He paid no attention. Voice still quiet, he spoke to Ordlaf: "Steer more to starboard. Let the forward mule bear on the harbor entrance. We may only get one shot."
Behind the clash of steel and the war-cries, Shef could make out another noise. A strange roaring, familiar but unexpected. For a moment he could not remember what it might be. Ordlaf had heard it too.
"What's that?" he called. "What are the devils up to out there? Is it a beast they have tamed, or a magic gale out of Hel? Or is it the sound of a windmill turning?"
Shef smiled, the sound coming back to him. "No beast, nor gale, nor windmill turning," he called back. "That is a great bellows blowing. But I hear no hammers with it."
A hundred yards away, Dimitrios the siphonistos had seen the signal from the men sawing and chiseling at the boom. A white flag swung furiously from side to side, just visible in the blackness. He had nodded his consent to the Greek captain. The oars swung down, the galley began its eager plunge towards prey. And then suddenly, light in the sky and everything as bright as day. The rowers had checked, the captain turned back for further instructions, robbed of the cover of dark.
But Dimitrios had already nodded his assent to the bellows-crew. They were heaving with a will, and as they did so the burning flax beneath the copper tank had sprung into flame. Dimitrios's first assistant had taken the first thrust down on the piston, the heavy one against resistance, was beginning to force it up and down with growing ease, counting to himself in an undertone as he did so: "...seven, eight..."
The count forced itself into Dimitrios's mind, ever aware of the danger of his own weapon. If the pressure got too great, the tank would explode and he too would burn like a wretched condemned criminal. If they stopped once they had started he would lose his inner sense of the heat and the pressure. But if they rowed on against catapults warned and manned, in this devil-light... And the long slim galley was still sliding forward, oars poised for the next heave, almost within the harbor-mouth with the boom floating away almost touching their ram...
They could be sunk in a moment. Or boarded and taken intact. As he hesitated a thin whistle began to rise from the top of the copper dome by which his men were pumping, a whistle that grew stronger every moment. The niglaros signaling danger. Dimitrios's nerve, stretched thin by the flares above and the menacing dark of the harbormouth, reached snapping-point.
"Turn to starboard," he yelled frantically. "Starboard! Turn along the harbor wall! Don't go inside!"
Shouts, a flailing of rope's ends, even on the shoulders of the paid and pampered Greek rowers. A heave from the port oars, a thrust back from the starboard bank. The galley was gliding swiftly along the stone wall, on the outside of the harbor, port oars tossed high to avoid the crash. Dimitrios could see frightened faces staring at him from hardly ten feet away, survivors of the first storming party, looking as if they meant to jump. As he looked across at them a group were hurled aside, falling into the sea in a confusion of staved ribs and broken bones: one of the barbarian catapults striking home.
The low galley was safe behind stone. And there ahead, not fifty yards away now, Dimitrios could see a target. Fighting men, men in armor struggling for the end of the jetty. He could row to the end, bear away at the last moment as the water shoaled, and launch the fire. Just in time, before the pressure built up. He could hear the whistle rising to one continuous shriek, could see out of the tail of his eye the two pump-men standing away from their handles, the bellows' crew looking fearfully up at him, all wondering when the dome would burst and the fire spring out at them.
But he, Dimitrios, was the master. He knew the strength of the pipes he had soldered with his own hands. He turned the gleaming brass nozzle, pushed forward the lit lamp to firing position. He would burn his own men as well as the enemy. But that was good tactics, and besides, they were Romans, Germans, heretics, schismatics. It would be a foretaste of the eternal fire they would all roast in. His lips drew back in a fierce grin.
Just behind him, the prow of the Fafnisbane nudged out beyond the harbor mouth. Shef had climbed out on to the very tip of the dragon-head, to see what was happening the instant his ship cleared the end of the jetty. He had seen the oars tossed up, had realized that the galley had turned away. His skin crawled for a moment as he wondered if the strange fire could be turned back upon him, then the thought vanished, dismissed by cold logic. Fire burnt everything, even Greek ships. They could not send it backwards over their own sterns. The zip of arrows plunging past him from the bowmen on the causeway meant nothing. His one eye strained for the target.
And there she was, stern on, gliding away, a lurid glow coming from somewhere amidships, by a strange red-gold dome, a high whistle trailing in her wake. They were going to shoot it, whatever it was. And Brand there was in their sights, he knew it. Would the mule never bear? Osmod was the catapult-captain, crouched behind his machine, swinging its trail round, round...
His hand flew up in the signal: sights on.
"Shoot!" Shef shouted.
The jerk of the lanyard, the vicious sweep and thwack of the arm, faster than a man could see, the even swifter lash of the sling, whirling round even before the ship could shudder from the smash of arm on padded crossbar. Shef's eye, almost in line with the flying rock, saw the familiar streak, rising and then falling...
No, too close to fall. The mule-stone missed its aim, the galley's curved stern, where it would have shattered stern-post and ribs and opened the entire ship like a gutted herring. Instead Shef's eye, half-blinded, caught only an after-image of the dark line flying straight into the mysterious red-gold dome, just as the dome itself released an ejaculation, a stream of glowing fire like the breath of Fafnir himself.
And then the fire was everywhere, exploding outwards with a thump that caught Shef fifty yards away like a blow in the chest. His dazzled eye for long moments could see nothing, then make sense of nothing it saw. Then he realized that the flaming mass was a ship rolling over, the torches in the water were men ablaze, the noise in his ears was tormented screaming.
He swung himself inboard. From the shore Steffi, hands now raw with pain, saw the Fafnisbane lit up in full view of the hostile offshore fort with its catapults, threw his torch aside, watched his last flare sing into the sea and go out. Darkness fell again on the harbor and the harbor wall, where dismayed combatants fell back groping, their only light the burning galley. His voice thick and fearful, Shef called to Ordlaf to turn the Fafnisbane and take her back.
And from his vantage point on the hillside a long half mile away, the Emperor Bruno grasped that his attack had failed, he knew not how. He turned to Erkenbert.
"Agilulf is gone, and the Greeks have let us down. It is up to you now."
"To me and to 'War-Wolf'," the Emperor's arithmeticus replied.
Shef looked down from the high seaward wall into the blue water below. The wreck of the Greek galley was there, he could see its outline maybe ten, maybe twenty feet below the surface, and no further out from the outer face of the jetty. He was sure that he himself could swim down, see what the fire and explosion had left, maybe attach ropes and drag what metal there was left into daylight. The floating fort was still there, still occasionally hurled a vindictive stone at any sign of movement, but he did not think they would hit a single man at that range.
No time, though. Not for mere curiosity. In any case he did not think that the wreckage would tell him very much more than he had worked out already. Most of the enemy storming party had got away in their boats before he could organize effective pursuit, but some had failed to find a place and remained in his hands: local levies for the most part, quite willing to talk out of fear or anger at being abandoned. They had confirmed much of what he had heard himself. Yes, the galley had had a fire amidships, a kind of brazier, fueled, one man had said very positively, by a kind of long match of burning flax. He himself had heard the bellows and others had seen it. So they had to burn, or maybe heat something before they could project it. Whatever it was, it was in the gleaming dome-shape which had exploded, and from its color that was almost certainly copper. Why copper, not iron or lead?
That was one clue. Another was the whistling noise. Shef had heard it himself, and so had many others. One of the Jewish levies closest to the Greek ship had also heard a voice counting, or so he had told Solomon. Counting in Greek numbers, for all the world, Shef reflected, like Cwicca's catapulteers in the old days counting the turns on a torsion catapult, counting carefully for fear of an overwind and a backlash. And finally there was the evidence from Brand's men. Two of his survivors had said with absolute certainty that at the very last moment they had seen a man point something at them, like a hose. The fire had come from that, come in a steady stream before the stone struck and everything blew up.
Brazier, match, bellows, dome, hose, whistle, and someone counting something. Shef felt sure that this would yet fall into place. Even the injured could tell him something. Or tell Hund something. Perhaps a dozen of the German Lanzenbrüder had survived the crossbows, Brand's axes and the final flame turned on them by their own allies, though most of them were horribly wounded. The flame had reached into the ranks of Brand's men as well, if only for an instant. Five of them had felt a lash of it, were lying now in the makeshift hospital with terrible burns. Hund could maybe tell him something about what had caused the burns.
If he was prepared to talk to him at all. Since the start of Shef's dealings with Svandis, the little man had been quiet and sullen. When Shef had gone to visit the burned men, and had seen the one who had been blinded, flame across both eyes, he had tapped the hilt of his dagger and looked at Hund with a question. It was normal enough for the Vikings to kill their hopelessly wounded, and both Brand and Shef had done it before. But Hund had flown at him like a terrier, hurled him bodily out of the ward. A while later Thorvin had emerged and said apologetically, in the words of one of the sacred songs of the Way.
"He told me to remember life is sacred. As it is said:
"A halt man can back a horse,
The one-hand herd sheep.
The deaf one duels and wins.
Better be blind than burnt.
Now what good's a corpse?"
"Better blind than burnt," Shef had replied. "But blind and burnt?" But it was no good arguing with the little leech. He might have something to tell another day. More than would be gained from the surviving monk-bastards, as Brand called them. None had surrendered willingly, all been taken burnt, crippled, or unconscious. They refused to say anything at all for any fear or inducement. Brand would cut their throats as soon as the priests of the Way ceased to protect them.
With a last reluctant stare at the wreckage lying deep in the water—was that a gleam of copper he could see deep down?—Shef turned away. The mystery would wait. So would Hund. So would Svandis, who had said nothing to him since her bitter words on the quayside, was now sitting with one of the desperately hurt Greek sailors who had survived both fire and water. There were more urgent things to do. The enemy had tried a probing raid at the south gate already this morning, as if to show they were not dismayed. Time to anticipate them for a change.
On the deck of the Fafnisbane they were already making ready to stream a kite in the strong morning breeze. Tolman was already being fitted into his harness. Shef patted him encouragingly on the head which was all that could be seen sticking out of the sling—why did he seem to shrink away? Still sore from his fall, probably. Then he looked again at the rig. The top surface was seven feet wide and four feet long, each side four feet long again and three feet deep. Now, how much cloth was that? Think of it as so many squares a foot each way. Turning to the sand tray which two men now carried round behind him ready for instant use, Shef began to move the counters and write the signs, muttering to himself. All round, eighty square feet of cloth. And Tolman, he knew, weighed sixty-eight pounds. He himself weighed one hundred and eighty-five. If, then, you needed a foot of surface to lift a pound of weight...
"The wind makes a difference," Hagbarth cut in on his mutterings. "The stronger the wind, the better the lift."
"We can figure that in too," Shef replied. "See what have we now..."
"Fresh breeze, enough to drive us at four knots under full sail."
"Call that four then. And how many knots would we be going when you had to reduce sail?"
"Maybe ten."
"Well that's ten. So if we multiply eighty by four we have a lift of... three hundred and twenty, but if we had a ten-knot breeze we would have a lift of... eight hundred."
"Enough to lift a walrus," countered Hagbarth skeptically. "Which it wouldn't."
"All right, we're allowing too much for the wind, but if you call a four-knot breeze one, and a ten-knot breeze two, or even one-and-a-half..."
Shef spoke eagerly, fascinated by the new experience of exact calculation. Ever since Solomon had shown him the basis of algorism, the methods of al-Khwarizmi, he had been seeking problems to turn it on. The answers might be wrong. To begin with. But he was sure this was the tool he had been searching for half his life.
A voice broke in, disapproving. Cwicca's. "He's up now. If you'd like to watch, that is. He is risking his neck." Cwicca growing sarcastic and Hund aggressive, Shef noted with a part of his attention. Time to think of that another day.
Tolman was high in the sky, not flying free but streaming on the end of his line, already two hundred, three hundred feet up, blown out across the harbor, higher than the topmost turret of the walled city. Like a watchtower in the sky. From the besiegers on the hillside someone shot an arrow, which looped hopelessly short. Shef licked his lips as he stared up at him. Now he had the basis of calculation, he was determined to make a kite with enough surface to lift him too. If it were a one-to-one relationship, he would need a kite maybe twelve foot by six by four. But how much did the kite itself weigh? There was an answer to everything.
Cwicca turned back from his place by the ropes. "He's pulled three times. He's seen something. And he's pointing north."
North. And the probing attack from the south. "Winch him in," Shef ordered. He had no doubt that this was the Emperor's famous machine approaching. The "War-Wolf."
The road which snaked along the coast towards the north wall of Septimania made its final turn some two hundred double paces short of the massive wooden gate, normally open for the passage of trade, now closed and barred, the towers either side of it bristling with breast-bows and crossbows, traction catapults and torsion dart-throwers. None of that could save the defenders once their gate was battered down. And reinforced oak though it was, criss-crossed with iron, one blow from "War-Wolf" would destroy it. This Erkenbert knew.
But the blow had to be in the right place. "War-Wolf" lobbed its missiles, like all traction weapons. A shot which fell five paces short was of no value, just another obstacle to the final attack. One five paces over was as useless. The boulder had to come whirling from the sky and crash exactly into the center of the gate, ideally just a fraction short of central, so that it would burst oak and iron backwards. It had always done its work in the past, sometimes after repeated trials. Erkenbert was well aware that the little hornets'-nest strongholds of the Moslem bandit-lords, even the citadel of the heretics' Puigpunyent, had offered no serious resistance, had merely stood still for undisturbed target practice. One could not count on the apostate Englishman and his diabolic crew to be so passive. And so Erkenbert had given serious thought to the two great deficiencies of "War-Wolf."
First, its appallingly slow reload time. The great counterweight-chamber, the size of a peasant's dwelling, was filled with stones. Its crash to earth was what provided the mighty power for the missile slung from the long arm. How was the weight to be lifted twenty feet into the air? Till now, Erkenbert had used the slow way, the safe way. Raise the counterweight chamber by pulling down the long arm. Bolt down the long arm. Send fifty laborers to mount ladders and fill the chamber while it hung above their heads. Once it was full, load the missile, pull the retainer-bolt. After it had shot, empty the chamber once more, raise it up against the lessened resistance, send the laborers back again to pour in their stones.
Too slow, Erkenbert knew. He had decided to solve the problem. Stout iron rings sunk into the rims of the counterweight-chamber. Ropes lashed firmly to them, leading over a new and massive wooden roller at the very top of the whole contrivance. Now the laborers could simply haul the weight up again, slowly and with horrible effort for those who had to dead-lift half a ton and more twenty feet in the air. But it saved all the emptying and filling.
The second problem was the old one, so vital for this machine, of estimating the range. But this was partly solved by the now invariant quality of the throwing weight. All that needed to be changed was the weight thrown. Erkenbert had selected a pile of boulders of graded weight. The idle peasants complained bitterly about dragging them along too, in carts pulled by mule and human power, but Erkenbert gave no heed to that. He was confident that once he had shot his sighting shot—and who knew, it might be dead on target too—one calculation and he could select a stone to finish the job. Two shots and the gate would be down. Three at the very worst. All that remained was to maneuver the great machine into position, ignoring the inevitable harassing shots from the enemies' lighter weapons.
At noon Erkenbert, having surveyed the ground, gave the order to advance. It was obeyed gingerly by the sweating exhausted men of his catapult-gang, with disciplined readiness by the Lanzenbrüder, as contemptuous as Erkenbert himself of the local noonday halts. With the Emperor himself at hand, there was no question of anyone disobeying.
Shef had had hours of warning from Tolman. Behind the barred gate, totally invisible to the besiegers, he had set up the answer of the Waymen to "War-Wolf": a counterweight-machine based on what the Arab had told him and on what his own imagination and experience with traction weapons had suggested. Now, from the wall, he watched "War-Wolf" creeping round the corner of the road with interest and alarm. It had been transported in pieces, assembled just short of its place of operation. It crept forward on twelve massive cartwheels. As it reached the flat place Erkenbert had selected, it stopped. Men began to set blocks under its frame, lever the wheels off. Why were they doing that, and how would they move the blocks once they were in place?
"Ready to shoot!" called a voice from the walls. Cwicca, crouched behind the sights of his favorite dart-thrower. He had a hundred men, two hundred, in front of him, clear targets. Shef waved impatiently for silence. Watching was more important than killing a few laborers. So the enemy must think too. More men were coming forward, staggering under the weight of giant mantlets, heavy wooden screens that would keep out a crossbow-bolt, even blunt the force of a torsion dart. The screens hid what he needed to see. But he had seen something. Something ominous.
"Shoot when you're ready," called Shef.
"Nothing to shoot at now," complained an anonymous voice. They began nonetheless to shoot at the mantlets, trying to aim for junction points. Something might get through. Some poor fool might be unnerved.
"What did you see?" asked Thorvin, the most interested of the Way-priests in mechanical contrivances.
"Theirs has two bracing timbers running out from the sides. Ours doesn't."
"What difference does that make?"
"We don't know. We've never shot ours."
The two men looked anxiously now at their machine, set up twenty paces behind the gate. It was nothing but a massively scaled-up version of their familiar old pull-thrower, the weapon that had won the Threefold Battle, as men now called it, the battle on two fronts against Mercians and against Ivar, Svandis's father. It had not won a battle since. Would its giant descendant work as simply as its ancestor?
"Start loading," said Shef. He too had seen the problem that Erkenbert had learnt from experience, could think with his more mechanical mind of two methods at least of solving it: had no time to make the necessary gears and ratchets, the great iron axle that would be needed for the better method. He too was thrown back on the simple way. Raise the bucket high and empty, then fill it while it was in the air. But his gang were not using stones. Each man had a stout sack full of sand, carefully and individually weighed. A hundred pounds a time. Thorvin counted the men off as they mounted the ladder, the burliest of Brand's Vikings, sweat pouring from them into their hemp shirts. Fifteen loads dumped in and the long arm bending visibly as it strained against its greased retainer bolt.
"Load the sling," Shef ordered. Another hard job. The sling itself lay along the ground like a gigantic empty scrotum. The boulder that went into it, Shef knew, weighed almost exactly a hundred and fifty pounds. A gang had dug it from the seashore, weighed it against sandbags over a steelyard, been told immediately to start chipping it round—and weigh the chips! Then they had been sent back to raise three more, carve them to a weight as near identical as care could make them. But now the first load had to be lifted into place. No great weight, for strong men, but round boulders are hard to lift from the ground. For a moment there was straining and cat-calls from the watchers, then as the two lifters turned angrily on their messmates, Brand and Styrr walked forward. They dug their fingers into the sand below the boulder, embraced it like two wrestlers, heaved it up and along into its double bullhide bag.
Now, when the weight dropped, the arm would rise. When the arm rose, the sling would whirl. When the sling whirled—the rock would come off and crash down on its own launcher and crew, unless the hook, the hook that was the free counterpart of the fixed ring on the sling's rope, unless that hook lifted off at precisely the right point. Shef stepped forward to check the angle of the nail it rested on. It was right.
As he stepped back, drawing a deep breath and looking at his old comrade Osmod, who had demanded the honor of first launch, he heard a great "Oh!" rise from the men on the walls, a gasp or groan of surprise that cut through the snapping of crossbows and twanging of ropes. Shef looked up, saw the moon coming down on him. Just as he had a decade before at the siege of York, he cringed, head sinking into shoulders like a turtle. Gigantic, weightless, the boulder sailed silently down from a point that seemed higher than ever Tolman had flown. Erkenbert and the Empire had shot first.
The boulder was almost a perfect hit first time. It cleared the top of the city gate by no more than six feet, shot past faster than eye could follow, crashed into the dry sandy ground almost equidistant between the foot of the gate and the place where Shef stood by the side of his own trebuchet. The earth shook beneath his feet, sand rose in a cloud. As it settled, in an awestruck silence, men stared at the rock that had appeared there, looking as if it had lain there since the dawn of time.
"It's bigger than ours," came a gloomy voice. Some friendly memory helped Shef to recognize it.
"Anything's bigger than yours, Odda," he replied. "What are you waiting for, Osmod? Pull the bolt."
As he saw Osmod turn, with a certain fear, to the bolt, Shef himself turned his back, ran up the stone steps to the parapet of the left-hand tower. Behind him he heard a squeak of protesting metal being drawn. Then a long scraping noise which ended in a great crash. He looked round just in time to see the sling release and the boulder that two mighty men had strained to lift fly into the sky like a pebble.
As it soared out on its long arc Shef followed it, ignoring the groans of protesting timber, the shouts and yells from the crew. The top of its arc, there, must be the midway point. He was sure it was on line for "War-Wolf." But the range?
Shef let the breath escape in a long sigh. He knew already it was going to be over, even well over. His shot had been far worse than the enemy's. The thump and cloud of dust had come down well over. How well over? He put down the far-seer with its cloudy lenses, strained his one eye to get a sure view. There were too many things in the way. At a guess he would say forty yards over. Consider. How many men, stretched head to foot, between what he could see of "War-Wolf" and the already settling dust-cloud. Shef counted, nodding his head unconsciously to each imaginary six feet. Maybe not forty yards. More like thirty-five. Under rather than over. Say thirty-four.
Now how far was it from "War-Wolf" to the gate? The guard captain Malachi was standing by him, saying nothing but looking anxious.
"Think carefully. You must have walked that road many times. How far is it from the gate to their machine? Think of it in double paces."
A long pause. "I would say one hundred and forty." And twenty, already paced out, from the center-line of his own machine to this side of the gate. A hundred and sixty, times five and a half feet, was the range he meant to shoot. That sum, plus thirty-four, times three, was what he had shot. He had to reduce the fifteen-hundred-pound throw weight in proportion to the reduced distance to get a hit with a boulder of the same weight. Two days ago he would have thrown his hands up, declared the sum impossible. Now...
Shef sprinted down the steps again to where his sand table waited. Osmod met him with a face of woe. "The machine. It's falling apart. The weight's too big for it. Needs side-braces, like what they've got..."
Shef pushed him aside. "Wedge everything back as best you can, use nails if you have to. It has to hold together for one more shot. Tell the men to unload, winch up, put in ten hundred pounds. Then wait."
He bent to his table, lines already drawn for the first of his sums. One hundred and sixty, times five, add on eighty—that was easy. Write "880" in the sand. Thirty-four, times three, add it on, write "982" in the sand.
Now, divide fifteen into 982 to find out how much distance to each hundred-pound bag. And then, divide that figure into the 880. Shef struggled on, absorbed. His own men watched him curiously. Solomon and Malachi exchanged glances. Either of them, they suspected, could have carried out the operation faster, as could any trader in the market. But then a market-trader would not have known what it was that the king of the barbarians was trying to do. He might be near-illiterate. But he had made the machine. The flares, the kites, the crossbows. Best to trust to what the Arabs would call his iqbal. The odor of success.
Shef straightened. He could not do quantities less than one, had had to double his numbers both sides to get a fair approximation, but he knew the answer.
"Ten hundred-pound bags in? Right, add three more. Open a fourth. Take half out. Exactly half."
Shef bent over the open bag. There should be fifty pounds in it. According to his figures he should now take out seven more. What difference could that possibly make to a boulder of the size they were throwing? Grimly he scrabbled out what seemed to him to be seven pounds of dirt, the same weight as two days' rations. He twisted the bag closed, stepped up the ladder, hurled it in on top of the pile.
"Ready to throw again? Have you checked the line?"
A shout from the parapet, where Thorvin had gone to watch. " 'War-Wolf' is ready! I can see the long arm raised!"
Shef looked at Osmod. There was no crash of metal here, no trumpets blaring and war-cries rising, but this was where the battle would be decided. All "War-Wolf" had to do was drop its range six feet. Unless they smashed it with this shot, the next act they would take would be to run for the harbor. To face the floating fort, the noon-day calm, and the Greek fire. In an hour they would all be burnt corpses floating in the sea.
Osmod shrugged like a farm-hand asked about the haymaking. "I checked her for line again. I can't say nothing about what happened to the timbers. You heard them start to come apart."
Shef took a deep breath, looked at the counterweight, the frame, the sling with its carefully-chipped boulder. It felt wrong. The figures said it was right.
"Stand by to shoot. Get back, everybody. All right, Osmod. Shoot!"
As he pulled back the bolt Shef was already in mid-leap for the steps and the parapet. Behind him he heard the scrape, the crash, and this time a chorus of yells of alarm as the hastily-wedged timber frame slowly, inexorably, sprang apart. The boulder was still in the air, still rising, as he reached his vantage-point. As he focused on his target he saw it, too, suddenly move. The great wooden counterweight-chamber dropped instantaneously behind the mantlets, he saw the long arm rise, the inconceivably powerful lash of the sling, like a giant's arm coming round. And then there were two boulders in the sky. One falling, one rising. For an instant he thought they would strike each other. Then all he could see out on the plain was dust. And out of the dust, the enemy's missile still climbing.
Erkenbert's weak eyes had not let him see the flight of his first missile. He had a Lanzenbrüder standing beside him to act as his observer, but the man had said only, "Very close, just over the top, drop it just a cat's hair, herra, and we are through!" Encouraging, but hard to count a cat's hair.
Erkenbert did his best. One thing he knew was that his throw-weight would not change, not now that he had the system in place for hauling the counterweight up again by main force. As the men struggled with it, heaving at unyielding ropes, he reflected on his problem. It was three hundred yards from machine to gate, more or less. He needed to shoot just a trifle less. So use the next boulder up in his graduated pile. But would that then fall short? What was the difference? If a stone of some two hundred pounds were to be thrown three hundred yards by the weight he had, whatever that weight was, how heavy a stone would be needed to travel just two hundred and ninety-five? Erkenbert knew how to find the answer. He needed to multiply three hundred by two hundred, and divide the answer by two hundred and ninety-five.
But to Erkenbert, product of the great and famous school of Latin learning at York, the school that in its time had produced such men as Alcuin the deacon, the minister of Charlemagne, preserver of manuscripts, poet, editor and commentator on the Bible, the problem did not present itself like that. To him, three hundred was CCC, two hundred CC. III times II was VI, C by C—but there common sense would have to step in, not calculation, and give an answer as XM. Erkenbert had plenty of common sense, he could soon, if not immediately, deduce that CCC multiplied by CC must be VIXM. But VIXM—six-ten-thousand—was more like a word or a phrase than a number. What VIXM divided by CCXCV might be—that, hardly the wisest man could tell, and even he not on a battlefield.
Erkenbert considered, ordered forward the next size of boulder up from the one he had just hurled. According to the number painted on its side, it should be perhaps five, perhaps ten pounds heavier than the last one—more or less, like the three hundred yards Erkenbert had estimated for the range. Arithmeticus though he was, absolute precision in numbers was no part of his world-view, except perhaps for calculating rents, the symbolism of Bible numbers, and the date of Easter. And "War-Wolf" had never before faced a reply. The stone that had crashed into the ground forty yards away had angered Erkenbert with its proof of hostile and inventive minds resisting him, and his Emperor, and their Savior's will. Its wild miss had cheered him as well: what better could one expect from illiterates imitating their betters, without so much as a copy of Vegetius to instruct them? Nor would they have had the ingenuity to match his roller and his ropes. Why were the laborers taking so long to haul the weight back into place? He waved forward the Lanzenbrüder to flog the idle levies on.
One of the men heaving at a rope, his feet slipping in the soft dust, dared to snarl a comment in the ear of the man next to him.
"I'm a sailor, I am. We shift our lateeno-yards over the mast all the time, just like this. But what we use is pulleys. Ain't this lot ever heard of pulleys?"
A slash of leather opened a weal across his back and shut his mouth at the same time. As the retainer-bolt finally slid home and the gasping men let go of their ropes, he looped his line unnoticed round the side frame, twisted it into a half-hitch, walked away. What it would do he did not know. He did not know what they were supposed to be doing, drafted here on the orders of his bishop and taken from his boat just as there was a chance of a successful voyage. But if there was anything he could do to obstruct, he would.
Erkenbert viewed the cocked and prepared machine with a grim pleasure, looked round at his Emperor watching from the hillside, within cover or out of range of the weapons still shooting from the wall. Behind him the two thousand stormers ready to pour through the gate, headed by Tasso the Bavarian and the Emperor's own elite guard.
He turned back. Saw with sudden incredulity the boulder already rising from behind the enemy's gate. In an immediate reflex of rage shrieked the order: "Shoot!" Saw his own missile drag along the ground in its sling, whirl round, climb into the sky almost into the very path of the other.
And then the great crash, the rending of timbers and ropes and iron all together.
Shef's exactly calculated rock came down precisely as intended, the various errors of calculation balancing out, as so often happens when each part is done as nearly as humanly possible. Range a little over-estimated, air-resistance never considered at all, the creep of strained timbers incalculable: but the answer correct. In one moment "War-Wolf" sprang apart, struck just at the pivot point and square on, shattering arm and side-frame and rending out the side of the counterweight. The great machine lay in fragments, timbers slowly, creakily falling to the earth, like a stricken hero's limbs sinking in death. Gently, through the dust, earth began to patter out of the counterweight-chamber, falling on to the boulder that had shattered it as if to hide it from view, pretend that nothing had happened. Numbly, Erkenbert stalked forward to inspect the damage. Then caught himself, looked out across the plain to see where his shot had landed. Called on his eyes to report for him.
"Just short," reported Godschalk the Brüder with stolid unconcern. "Up just half a cat's hair and you've got it."
From the wall, Shef looked at the boulder lying now four feet short of the gate, looked across at the cloud of dust which marked where his shot had gone home, with surely an instant ago a glimpse of broken pieces whirling end over end out of it, and reflected on the value of calculation. A deep sense of satisfaction rose within him. He had the answer. Not just to this problem alone, but to many problems.
Not, perhaps, to his most pressing one. As the cries of glee and triumph began at last to die down, he turned into the exultant face of Brand, almost a foot above his own.
"We beat off the fire, we beat off the stones," shouted Brand.
"We have to do more than beat them off," replied Shef.
Brand sobered. "Right. We have to sicken them of it, I always said so. Now how are we going to do that?"
Shef hesitated. He had a feeling as of one who reaches out for a familiar tool, the hilt of a sword that has hung at his belt for ten years, and finds nothing there. He reached inside himself for a source of inspiration. Advice. The voice of his father-god.
Nothing there. He had the knowledge of al-Khwarizmi now. The wisdom of Rig had gone.
The Emperor of the Romans sagged back on to his camp-stool, his face drawn and weary. "Total failure," he said. He reached out an arm, picked up the Holy Lance which never left him, cradled it to his cheek. After a few moments he put it reverently, but still wearily, back in its place.
"Even the Lance brings me no comfort," he went on. "The virtue has gone out of me. I have angered God."
The two bodyguards standing at the entrance to the tent, stifling at the end of the long Catalan summer's day, looked at each other uneasily, then at the fourth man in the room, the deacon Erkenbert, mixing wine and water with his face turned down.
"Angered God, herra?" asked Jopp uncertainly, the bolder and duller of the two. "You eat fish on Fridays. God knows—I mean we know you don't have no women in here, though if you wanted to there's plenty..."
His comrade trod firmly on his foot with a hobnailed boot, and Jopp's voice trailed into silence.
Bruno's face showed not even amusement, his voice continued wearily. "The Greek fire failed. Forty good brothers dead or missing, and Agilulf pulled out of the sea half-roasted." A spark of animation showed, he straightened for a moment. "It's my belief those Greek bastards flamed him with the rest, because he was in the way. But still," he sank back again, "we lost. The admiral won't try again, keeps wailing about his lost projector.
"And 'War-Wolf' smashed. The gate not down. I do not blame you, Erkenbert, but you have to admit, there was something devilish about the way they hit with the second shot. You would have thought God would send His servants something. If they were His true servants. I fear I am not. Not any more."
Erkenbert did not look up, continued to pour one flask into another as if absorbed. "Are there any other signs, O imperator, that God has turned his back on you?"
"Too many. Deserters keep coming in. Men who say they were Christians, converted to the worship of Mohammed by force. We make them eat the bacon, then test what they say. They all say the same. The Arab army barely the other side of the hill, led by the Caliph in person, er-Rahman. Tens of thousands, they say. Hundreds of thousands, they say. All those who resist the will of the Caliph are impaled.
"And the worst of all you know, O deacon. No word of the Holy Grail, the ladder of life to go with the lance of the holy death. How many men have we sent to death in the search for it? Sometimes their screams come to me in my sleep. That boy, the one who had seen it, you tortured him till he died. And the child, the fair child who fell in flame from the skies. They should have lived many years yet, but they died. And for nothing. For nothing..."
The Emperor sagged back further, his long arms trailing on the ground, his eyes closed.
His metal gauntlets lay on the table in front of him. Moving carefully, Erkenbert the deacon stepped across, seized one of them, weighed it in his hand, and then swung it with all his scrawny force across the face of the defenseless Emperor. Blood spurted instantly from the broken nose. As the bodyguards reached reflexively for their hilts, Erkenbert found himself whirled off his feet, back stretched over the table, a forearm like oak and wire cutting off the breath in his throat, and a dagger-tip already poised an inch from his eyeball.
Slowly the pressure relaxed, the Emperor straightened up, hauling his counselor with him.
"Stay back, boys. Now, what the Hell did you do that for?"
No glimpse of fear showed in the pale face glaring up at him. "I struck you because you are a traitor to God. God has sent you to carry out His purposes. Whatever those purposes may be! And you, you fall into the sin of despair! You are no better than a suicide, who kills himself because he fears what God may send. Except in one way. You have time yet to make amends. Down on your knees, Emperor that should be, and beg forgiveness from the All-Highest!"
Slowly the Emperor sank down, dagger falling from his hand, and began to mutter the Lord's Prayer through the flow of blood from his nose. Erkenbert let him finish.
"Enough! For now. Confess this to your confessor. Now hold still." The deacon stepped forward, took careful hold of the broken septum, aligned it carefully, ran a finger along the top to check. The Emperor remained motionless, as he did under his own many private penances.
"Very well. You will look none the worse in a day or two. Here, drink." The deacon thrust forward an unspilled tankard.
"Now, listen to what I have to say. Yes, the Greek fire failed. Yes, 'War-Wolf' is destroyed. No, the Grail has not been found. But think: these deserters, these secret eaters of pork who have come to you. They are apostates and the children of apostates, traitors many times over. Would they have come to you if they had thought the Caliph of the Christ-rejecters were going to win? No. They fled in fear of his defeat. So, put them in the front rank of your army, remind them of the fate that comes to those who are captured having renounced the false prophet. But smite the Caliph as Samson smote the Philistines, strong in the Lord."
The Emperor rubbed a blood-stained chin. "It sounds as if we are well outnumbered..."
"Smite them in the mountain passes, then. Take revenge for the dead Roland. What is it the minstrels sing in his song, in the Rolandslied?"
Surprisingly, the stolid Jopp replied. "They say, the Franks, Chrestiens unt dreit et paiens unt tort. 'Christians are right and pagans are wrong.' I heard it sung back in Leuven market. That's what made me join up."
" 'Christians are right and pagans are wrong.' That is all you need to know. But I will tell you another tale, to strengthen your faith. When the blessed Gregory, the Pope, sent his emissaries to England to bring my countrymen the holy gospel, they would not listen, just as they have turned heretic today. And Paulinus the Archbishop of that time, his heart failed him and he made ready to flee, to return to Rome in faintness of heart. But in his sleep the Apostle Peter, the first Pope, from whom all Popes take their power, he came to Paulinus in a dream and scourged him savagely with knotted cords, and told him to return to his post. And when the Archbishop woke the marks of the cords were still to be seen on his body where the holy Peter had flogged him. So Paulinus turned again, and conquered. Do you now likewise, Emperor! And as penance for your weakness, though I am not your confessor, I appoint you this: stand in the forefront, fight for the Holy Church."
The Emperor rose to his feet, stood looking down. "And what of your penance, little man? For you have struck the Lord's anointed."
The deacon stared up at him. "I will find you the Grail, or die."
A hand gripped his shoulder. "Find me the Grail, and I swear it. If I overthrow the infidels I will make you, not Archbishop, not Cardinal, but Pope. We have had too many Italian weaklings, who never pass the walls of Rome. We need a Gregory. A true descendant of Peter."
"The Papacy is not vacant," whispered Erkenbert, struck almost dumb by the immensity of the prospect suddenly revealed to him.
"That can be arranged," said Bruno. "As it has been before."
In the camp of the Caliph, the Successor of the Prophet, no such drama. As was the custom, the leaders of the divisions of the army came to make their reports at the hour of sunset, one by one entering the great pavilion, pitched hours before—its extent and the time needed for pitching it and striking it were a main reason for the army's slow progress across the northern peninsula. They came to stand before the divan of the Caliph, between it and them the notorious leather carpet, the executioners standing to either side of it, scimitars drawn, the strangling bowstrings twisted round their waists. At the side of the Caliph, as always now, his favorite counselor, the young savant Mu'atiyah. The generals let their eyes pass over him without sign. His advice was wild, his opinions foolish. One day the Caliph would tire of him. They looked also without expression at the curtains behind the Caliph's divan: by law and tradition the Caliph's women might not appear in formal audience, yet they had long been allowed to watch and listen unseen. Some said that they too had found favor with the Caliph, were leading him further down his present path of folly. No-one was going to report it.
"Tell me of the deserters," said the Caliph abruptly. "How many more secret eaters of pork have you allowed to escape us? How many have been in the army unseen for so many years, bringing us defeat and disgrace?"
The general of the cavalry replied. "Some have tried to escape, Caliph. My horsemen ride them down. They wait only for your sentence. None have escaped."
Only some fractions of this were true. The general had no idea how many fewer men the army had today than yesterday. He knew it was a good many, and many of that many from his own elite cavalry units. He would not confess it as he might have done once. In the first place he was the third commander of cavalry the army had had since it marched from Cordova, and the others had not died easily. In the second place, where once he might have been betrayed by an ambitious subordinate or rival, like the general of the infantry, they now made common cause: rivals could betray each other too easily, subordinates had no wish to come to prominence.
The Caliph turned to the general of the advance guard. "Is this true?"
Only a bow in assent. The Caliph pondered. Something was wrong, he knew. Someone was betraying him. But who? Mu'atiyah bent and whispered in his ear. The Caliph nodded.
"Those units which have sheltered the pork-eaters, the defiers of shahada. Let them be placed foremost in the battle." His tone sharpened. "Do not think I do not know which they are! My faithful associates have kept record. If my orders are not obeyed—I will know who still shelters traitors. The impaling poles are not yet tired. Go now, fill them again. Further off this time! The traitors' shrieks disturb my household."
Dismissed, the generals withdrew. They did not look at each other as they dispersed. All knew the orders were foolish. Putting the unreliable units, the northerners, the converts and the mustaribs in the front was merely to blunt the attack. But even to hint as much was treason. All one could do now was trust in Allah, for some, prepare one's own way out, for others. The commander of the cavalry reflected on the speed of his favorite mare, wondered if he could transfer some part of his regimental pay-chest to his saddle-bags without remark. Decided, regretfully, that life was the only burden he might manage to carry.
Behind, in the harem behind the curtains, the three conspirators spoke quietly in their impenetrable woman's talk.
"We have two chances still. To reach the Franks, for Berthe, to reach the pagan sailors, for Alfled."
"A third," corrected the Circassian.
The others looked at her with surprise. No Circassian army existed in the West of the world.
"There must be a successor to the Successor."
"All successors are the same."
"Not if there is a change of faith."
"Cordova will eat pork and believe in Yeshua the son of the Bibi Miriam? Or learn Hebrew and reject the Prophet?"
"There is another way," corrected the Circassian quietly. "If the Successor of the Prophet himself is defeated in battle by the infidel, faith will be shaken. Those who say that reason is a surer guide will grow stronger. Ishaq, Keeper of the Scrolls, is one of them. So is bin-Firnas, in secret. His cousin, bin-Maymun, now commands the cavalry. They say that even al-Khwarizmi, the glory of Cordova, was of the Mu'tazilah: those who stand apart. Such men would listen even to the copper-haired princess of the North, if there was reason in her words. I would rather live with such men to rule in Cordova than go to live in furs and fleas in the north."
"If we could find such men," agreed Berthe.
"Any man would be a change from a tenth part of one," said Alfled. She stretched her long body discontentedly.
In a secluded court in the city of Septimania, faith and reason were also under discussion. For the first time in months, Thorvin had insisted that the priests of the Way should form their holy circle. There were only four of them, Thorvin for Thor, Skaldfinn for Tyr, Hagbarth for Njörth, and Hund the leech for Ithun. Nevertheless, with their holy oval drawn and marked out, the bale-fire burning at one end and the spear of Othin All-Father planted upright at the other, they could hope for divine guidance in their talk. For human guidance, as was their occasional custom, they had allowed both Brand the champion and Solomon the Jew to sit outside the oval as observers, to listen but only to speak if called on.
"He says his visions have gone," began Thorvin without preamble. "He says he can no longer feel his father within him. Isn't sure he ever had a father, or a god-father. He's talking about throwing his pendant away."
Skaldfinn the interpreter replied, speaking in tones of gentle reason. "There's a simple explanation, isn't there, Thorvin? It's the woman. Svandis. She's been telling him for weeks that there are no gods, that they're just some disorder of the brain. She explains his dreams to him and shows him how they're just warped memories of things that have happened, buried fears. Now he believes her. So the visions have gone."
"If you say that," cut in Hagbarth, "you're accepting that what she says is true. The visions come from inside. He's convinced inside that he shouldn't have any, so he doesn't. But we've always thought that the visions come from outside. And I've seen it proved. I've seen Vigleik the priest come out of a vision and tell us things he could not know. They've been proved later on. It's the same with Farman the Frey-priest, and many others. The woman's wrong! If she's wrong, then your simple explanation won't work."
"And there's another simple explanation," Thorvin went on. "That what he says and has been saying is all true. That Loki is loose and Ragnarök is upon us. His father, Rig, cannot speak to him because he has been—imprisoned? silenced? whatever happens to gods who are defeated. There is war in the sky. And our side has lost already."
A long silence, while the priests and their observers considered the options. Thorvin pulled his hammer from his belt, began to thump it gently and rhythmically into the palm of his left hand while he considered. At the center of his feeling was a deep belief that his considered opinion was right. The One King, Shef, whom he had first met as a runaway English thrall-boy, was the destined one: the One who would come from the North, in the deep belief of the Way. The peace-king who would replace the war-kings of old, who would set the world on its true path and away from the horrors of the Skuld-world of the Christians. Thorvin had not wanted to believe it in the beginning, had shared the prejudice of his people and his religion against the English, against all those who did not speak Norse. Slowly he had been brought round. The visions. The evidence of Farman. The old tale of King Sheaf. The overthrow of kings. He remembered the testimony of Olaf the Norwegian king, himself a seer and a prophet, who had accepted the death and displacement of his own bloodline as the will of the gods. He remembered the death of Valgrim the Wise, who had not been wise enough to cease his resistance to the truth, even when tests had proved it.
The thing that made Thorvin believe most strongly, in the end, was the unpredictable nature of it. The boy Shef, even when grown to a man, had not behaved like one sent by the gods. He had almost no interest in the will of the gods at all, had taken a pendant only with reluctance, and seemed most of the time on bad terms even with his own father and patron. He had no love for Othin, and little patience with sacred story. His interests were fixed on machines and devices. It was not what any wise priest of the Way would have expected. And yet again and again, it seemed to Thorvin, what the gods sent was what no man expected, and no woman either, for all that Svandis might say. What they sent, what they did, had about it a peculiar feeling—a taste, almost. It could not be missed once you were familiar with it. Thorvin had heard Solomon the Jew discourse on the peculiar quality of the Christians' gospels, how even in disagreement they seemed to bear witness to some real event. That was how he felt about Shef and his visions. They were awkward, often unhelpful, even unwanted. That was what proved them true.
Finally Thorvin summed up. "It is like this. If the visions are not true, then we have no witness for the existence of our gods. We might as well get rid of our clothes, our pendants, our holy emblems, and go back to working at our trades—as we do anyway. Either the visions are from inside, mere dreams, disorders of the brain and the belly. Or they are from outside, from a world where our gods exist, independent of us. But I see no way to test this."
A fourth voice came from inside the circle, a thin and tired one: the voice of Hund the leech. For weeks now, ever since the first joining of his friend Shef and his supposed-pupil Svandis, the little man had been withdrawn, sullen, even angry. Jealous, they all supposed, of the taking of the woman he loved by the one man who seemed least likely to. Now he spoke decisively.
"I can test it for you."
"How?" asked Hagbarth.
"I have known for a long time—since Shef and I drank the potion of the Finns—that I can create visions, with a potion. I think it likely that all his visions spring from the same root. Not a root, a fungus. You all know that if the rye gets wet when it is harvested, a kind of black spur grows on it. You Norsemen call it the rugulfr, the wolf in the rye. We all know to scrape it off, dry it out, not eat it. But it is hard to get rid of completely. It brings visions, brings madness in large doses. I think our friend is especially subject to it, as some are. His visions come on after eating rye-bread or rye-porridge. What have we been eating since we have been here, since we finished our own stores? Wheat-bread, from well-dried grain. But I have decoction of the ergot-fungus in my stores. I can bring on his visions at any time."
"But if you say that," said Hagbarth, "you are agreeing with Skaldfinn, and Svandis. The visions are just a disorder of the belly. Not a message from the gods. So there are no gods."
Hund looked round bleakly, without excitement or urge to make a point. "No. I have considered all this. You are all victims of a kind of thinking I know. Either this or that. Either inside or outside. Either truth or falsehood. It works with simple things. Not with the gods.
"I am a leech. I have learned to look at the whole of my patients before I decide what may be wrong with them. Sometimes it is not just one thing. So I look at the whole of our beliefs about the gods. If we—we priests of the Way—were to put our beliefs into words, we would say that the gods are somewhere outside us, somewhere in the sky, it may be, and that they were there before us. They made us. As for the gods of other people, like the Christians who brought me up, or the Jews we have met here, they are just mistakes, they do not exist at all. But they say the same of ours! Why should we be right and they wrong? Or they right and we wrong? Maybe we are all right.
"And all wrong. Right to think the gods exist. Wrong to think they made us. Maybe we made them. What I think is that our minds are strange, beyond our understanding. They work in ways we do not know and cannot reach. Maybe they work in places we cannot reach, places that are beyond our space and our time—for the visions of Vigleik, and Shef too, they reach where their bodies could not go. In those strange places I think the gods are made. From mind-stuff. From belief. They grow strong on belief. Wither on disbelief, or oblivion. So you see, Thorvin, Skaldfinn, Shef's visions could be a true guide to the gods. But sprung from rye-wolf, or from my potions, just the same. They need not be either/or."
Hagbarth licked his lips, spoke hesitantly, in face of the little man's certainty and composure. "Hund, I do not see how that can be true. If it were true that the gods spring from belief, think: how many Way-folk are there, how many Christians are there? If the Christ-god draws on the belief of thousands of thousands, our gods only on the belief of a tenth that number—surely our gods would be crushed like a nut under a war-hammer."
Hund laughed, mirthlessly. "I was a Christian once. How much do you think I believed? I believed that if I did not pay tithes to the Church my father's hut would be burned down. There are Christians in the world, I know. King Alfred is one of them. Shef told me once of the old woman he and Alfred met, grieving for her man. She was another. But Church-folk are not Christians. Nor do all those who say the shahada believe in Allah. They believe in nothing, or they believe in the shari'a, as your people, Solomon, believe in their books. I do not think that kind of belief will do. For if the gods are our creation, then they cannot be deceived, as we deceive ourselves."
"And if the One King has ceased to believe in his gods?" asked Thorvin, "That need not mean they have ceased to believe in him. For they come from other minds besides his. Let me try my potion. But one thing first. The woman—keep her out of the way. It comes to me that she too has power on the other side, like her father, the boneless one, the were-dragon."
The priests looked at each other, looked at the dying fire, nodded in wordless agreement.
Shef took the cup that Hund handed to him, looked not at its contents but into the eyes of his friend—his childhood friend, now perhaps his rival or his enemy.
"This will make me dream of my father?"
"It will make you dream the way you used to."
"What if my father has no message for me?"
"Then you will know that, at least!"
Shef hesitated, drained the cup. It tasted musty, old. "Now I am not sure I want to sleep."
"Stay awake then. The visions will come either way." Hund took the cup, walked away without another word. Shef felt deserted, alone. Svandis had vanished, no-one knew where. Brand and the others were avoiding him. He sat in a small room by the dockside, hearing dim whoops and cheering as the catapult crews celebrated their victory over the Greeks and over the "War-Wolf." He wished he could join them.
After a while the room faded from his eyes, began to be overlaid with strange sweeps and spirals of color. He found himself examining them with manic attention: as if, by doing so, he could prevent himself from being pulled on to what he knew was waiting.
As if his eyes had cleared, Shef found himself staring into an enormous face. The nose alone was bigger than he was, the eyes were like black pools, the lips curled back to reveal monstrous teeth. The face was laughing at him. With a crash sound came to his ears, and he staggered beneath the gale of laughter that blew towards him. He was like a mouse, Shef felt. Like a mouse caught on a table-top when the owner of the kitchen returned. He span round, crouched, looked for a point of hiding, began to move.
A slam, and something was over him. A hand. Light gleamed at the bottom of it, and as he moved towards the opening, two fingers came through, a thumb and finger, and picked him off the table-top as if he had been a cherry. The thumb and finger closed round him, not forcefully, not yet. They only had to squeeze, he knew, and his guts would force their way out of his mouth and anus like a man crushed between a launched longship and its rollers.
The face was looking at him, still with manic glee. Shef could see, even from this terrible vantage, that the face was mad. Not mad, but crazy. It was the face of the man he had seen staked out for the serpent to spit its venom on. The man his father had loosed, and whom he had avoided on the giant stairway by the gods' orm-garth. It was the face of Loki. Loki unbound. Loki as the gods had made him.
"My brother's little favorite," teased the voice in a bass rumble so low he could barely hear it. "He loosed me, but I do not think he meant me to catch you. Shall I squeeze you now and end his plans? You do not believe in me, I know, but you will die in your sleep just the same. And some part of you will stay here with me, for ever."
Shef could make no reply, kept looking round. His father Rig? The other gods? Surely Loki had many enemies.
"Or I could throw you to my pets," the voice went on. The hand tipped Shef so he could see down, to what lay beneath the table. A crawling mass of serpents, that twined round the mad god's legs. From time to time they struck at him, he could see the fangs bared, smell the poison. "I have swallowed so much venom I feel it no more," laughed the voice. "And there are my other pets, you have seen some of them before."
A tilt, and Shef could see out into the open sea, where backs rose and fell. Some of them were the orcas, the killer whales who had nearly taken Cuthred and himself, had destroyed Valgrim the Wise and all his men at Hrafnsey. But they were warm-blooded beasts, almost human in their cunning and their converse. Shef could see others, mere cold eyes above monstrous teeth, and worse things below. The fear of being dragged down, of ending his life in the jaws of a thing that did not even know what it was doing came over him. He could feel the cold sweat break out on his body.
"Good, very good. Now you are afraid. But you need be less so than some. Because I can use you, mannikin. You have brought me much service already. The Greeks burn men alive, the Arabs thrust poles up them till they die. But you have brought them fear from a distance. You have brought them fear from the sky.
"And you can bring them more yet. You with your strange salts and your strange machines. There is more there than you will ever learn. But you could set men on the right path. My path. And if you do, you can have my favor. I could not help my favorite whom you killed in the water, Ivar Bane-of-Women, for I was bound. But now I am free. Is there no revenge you wish for, like Ivar, like me?
"No," said Shef, his voice like a thin bird's piping, a mouse's squeak in the cat's paw. He was not conscious of any courage. Loki had asked him a question. He knew the answer. It would do no good to lie.
The crazy face stared down at him. Shef found himself trying to imagine what it would have been like without the scars and pits of poison, the bitter marks of resentment. Like looking at a scarred and defeated old warrior, and wondering what he might have been like if his life had gone aright. The finger and thumb were pressing tight around him, but they had not squeezed yet.
"See there." Shef found himself staring up an immense bridge, a bridge that was at the same time a rainbow, and at the end of it a cold glitter of blades. "The gods, my father and my brothers, they have gone back over Bifrost bridge, and Othin has called out his Einheriar to man it. They expect me to storm it, with my allies the giants and my children the monster-brood. Why should I not?"
"It was your home once, lord. Before you slew Balder."
This time the thumb and finger were tightening, he could feel his ribs groan, ready to snap and send splinters through his heart.
"I did not mean to slay Balder. I meant them to see themselves for what they were."
"I know that, lord. So does my father Rig. It was why he loosed you."
The face had gone quiet, and a kind of reason was coming back into it.
"Are you trying to bargain with me, mannikin?"
"Yes, lord."
"Then what is your offer?"
"I do not know yet, lord. To give you a footing again in Asgarth?"
"You cannot give me that," said the voice of Loki. "But maybe you can give me something. Listen then to my offer. Do my wishes. Make more fire, make more machines, be my follower and not Rig's, turn your back on the Way and bring terror to the world. And in exchange I will give you more than my father Othin ever offered. He gives his favorites success till he chooses different, like Sigurth Snake-eye, whom you gave to death when his shoelace tripped him. I would give you success till you died, old and terrible. Think of the men at your command. Think of the women you can take. All that can be yours.
"Now here is my token. Above all else you want the fire. I will send it to you, and with it a hope beyond your hope. When it comes to you, say to the Greek: 'It is best on a winter morning.' See him grovel.
"Go now. But do not think you can escape me now I am loose. Or that your father can protect you, locked at the end of Bifrost bridge."
Shef found himself suddenly tossed in the air, going up and further up like a stone from a catapult. He turned in the air, trying to get his feet under him, possessed with fear of where he might land, in the sea with the cold eyes and the teeth, on the land where the serpents crawled and struck.
There was a bed beneath his back, he was straggling to his feet, trying to draw his legs up from the fangs. Arms were pressing him down, he felt a soft breast on his naked skin. Svandis. For long moments he clung to her, shaking.
"Do you know what you were saying?" she said to him at last.
"No."
"You called it out again and again, in Norse. Skal ek that eigi, skal ek that eigi, that skal ek eigi gera."
Shef translated automatically, "I shall not that, I shall not that, that shall I not do."
"What is 'that'?" asked Svandis.
Shef realized he was clutching his pendant protectively. "Give up this," he said, looking down at it. "Give up this and worship Loki in exchange for his favor. What is that noise outside?"
The sun was already above the horizon—a night had passed by while Shef struggled in his dream with the god of chaos—and the noise was the noise of frenzied cheering. Ship after ship was nosing its way into the harbor, the first one challenged from a distance and then covered by alarmed and wary mule-crews. But as the ships' build became obvious even to the naked eye, and as shouts were exchanged backwards and forwards between the oncoming armada and the catapult crews, the tension vanished. The hastily-repaired boom was cast off, the covering artillery ceased to swing its trails round, tight-wound ropes were slacked off. As the news spread through the town all those who could be released from sentry-go ran down to the dockside, waving and shouting with the relief of tension.
The fleet that Alfred had fitted out and sent to the rescue, warned by Farman's vision, had gathered slowly from its various stations in the Northern seas, and then probed its way cautiously south. Fishermen had often seen Shef's smaller fleet making its way down across Biscay and along the coast of Spain: no seaman who had seen them ever forgot the strange two-master design, and it was easy in any language to ask, "Have you seen ships like ours?" Information became harder to gather, or to understand, once they had rounded the narrow straits of Jeb el-Tarik and made their way into the Inland Sea, urged on by the steady current from the Atlantic. The ships of the majus had gone to Cordova. No, they had sailed against the Nazarenes. They were in alliance with the Caliph. No, the Caliph had denounced them as treacherous dogs. All ships fled from the spirits of the majus, who threw great stones at the order of their sorcerer-king. On the contrary, it was the Nazarenes who ruled the Inland Sea, with their tame dragons which burned the very sea with fire.
Hardred, the English fleet-commander appointed by Alfred, did his best to pick sense out of all he was told, assisted by Farman priest of Frey, the visionary who had brought them all on this expedition, and by Gold-Guthmund, once Shef's comrade, now king (under the One King) of Sveariki, land of the Swedes. One thing all three had grasped. The Greek galleys were everywhere feared, for reasons no-one was sure of: "Proves no-one's lived to report," remarked Guthmund. As they probed up the coast, opinion also hardened on the fact that the Northerners were in harbor, and unable to escape.
Hardred had at bottom little fear of an encounter with any fleet. Twenty catapult-armed two-masters of the "Hero" class—every ship named for a hero of Northern legend—followed his flag, and round them skimmed a score and a half of conventional Viking longships, manned by the best that Guthmund's Swedes and the mercenary-market of London could provide. Yet the rumors gave him a little caution. He had spent the night his king had passed in dream lying well offshore, all lights dowsed, the two-masters grapnelled together, the longships rowing cautious, quiet patrol. With the sudden Mediterranean dawn he had come in on the harbor of Septimania, on a long slanting tack against the dawn breeze, all catapults wound and loaded, scouting ships out well ahead.
The first thing Guthmund had seen had been the floating fort: a formidable obstacle if attacked from the direction of the harbor it was meant to block. Attacked from the opposite direction it could offer no resistance. The first fifty Vikings scrambling on to it, axes in hand, met only raised hands and scared faces. Even the twenty Lanzenbrüder there to keep an eye on the Frankish levies, caught without warning in the midst of a peaceful breakfast, could do no more than eye their stacked armor, and join the surrender.
The Greek commander of the galley on standing patrol, who had done no more for many days than incinerate careless fishing boats, tried a little harder. He saw the strange vessels approaching, manned his oars, and screamed at his siphonistoi to make ready. It took time. The flax to be lit, the bellows manned, the pump to be shipped, the safety-checks of oil vessel and connecting pipes scrambled through. As the siphonistoi scrambled to their places, the commander manned his oars and tried to outrun pursuit. Two longships were already ahead of him, curving round under oars alone to take him from either side. As he shrieked at his fire-crew to make ready to shoot, regardless of their preparations, a mule-stone from the leading two-master knocked away his stern-post. The galley sank back in the water, the oarsmen immediately quitting their posts. As the siphonistoi gave up their impossible task, the commander, remembering his prime directive not to let the secret of the Greek fire fall to any enemy, ran towards the pressure tank with an axe, determined to hole it and let the oil run on to the blazing flax. One of the oarsmen, highly paid and valued as he was, had nevertheless seen too many fishermen screaming in agony in blazing water to accept the same fate for himself—regardless of the fate of Constantinople and the Empire. He tripped his commander, brained him with his own axe, and swept the uncertain siphonistoi aside. The longships closed, crews scrambling aboard and eyeing the copper dome and nozzles nervously. Hurriedly the Greek oarsmen and marines were thrust overboard, to cling to ropes and planking in the warm sea. Grapnelled between her two capturers, the Greek galley wallowed half-sinking in the water. As the two-masters came up, Hardred sent his most skilled men aboard to rope the shattered stern together, cover the gaping hole with tarred sailcloth, and drag the water-filled wreck to beach on the shore a bare half-mile away.
Fort and galley seized, the thirty-odd ships remaining sailed for the harbor wall behind which they could see already the distinctive masts of their fellow Northerners. Doubt and suspicion—were they in enemy hands? was there some trap laid behind the stone walls of the city?—dissolved as both sides saw identical catapults training round, as men recognized comrades and relatives, as hails of greeting began to echo back and forth. By the time Shef, rubbing his eyes, still gaping from his dream, had been forced into his clothes by Svandis, the relieving fleet was already squeezing into the crammed harbor in a storm of shouting in English, Norse, and both together.
Cwicca met him at the door of his lodging, gap teeth grinning broadly.
"It's that Hardred," he announced. "Fellow who left you stuck on the Ditmarsh, I never trusted him. But he's come at the right time this time. Cleared them right off that old fort before they even saw him coming. And he's taken a galley too, they say, fire-machine and all."
He waited, face alive with cheer, to see his gloomy king brighten at the news. Shef stared at the thronging harbor, and slowly Cwicca realized that yet again his expectations would be disappointed.
"Above all else you want the fire," he remembered the voice saying. "I will send it to you. Tell the Greek—" What was it he said to tell the Greek?
"Did Hardred capture the Greek operators too?" Shef asked, almost absently.
"I don't know," Cwicca replied. "I don't see why not."
Shef turned to Svandis at his side. "You will have trouble explaining this last dream of mine," he said. "For already I can see it has come true."
The Emperor of the Romans had very little fear for the outcome of the battle he had provoked against the army of the Caliph. It was true that he was heavily outnumbered. True also that the Arabs had a centuries-long record of success against the Christians of the peninsula and the border mountains—sure proof, in the Emperor's view, of the heresy that had taken deep roots among them, for otherwise how would God allow His believers to be worsted? But against that, Bruno was well aware of the rotten state of morale among the enemy, if even a tenth of what the deserters said was true—and the fact that there were so many deserters was a proof in itself. His own troops, whether the reliable Lanzenbrüder on whom he depended, or the Frankish and German knights he had called from all over his Empire, or even the normally fickle and evasive local levies from the borderlands, were by contrast in good heart and accustomed to success, gained in the many small sieges and skirmishes he had fought to clear the Moslem bandits from his dominions. Some of the gloss had been taken off them by the failed siege of Septimania: but even that was not entirely a bad thing. He had noticed a definite lift in spirits as they had marched away, and broodingly put it down to the superstitious fear that some of them had gained of the man they called—if no superior officer was in hearing—the One King. They would have to be reassured when he turned back to deal with his real enemy. But fighting the Caliph seemed to some of them a virtual holiday by comparison. Less resistance, and a great deal more loot.
In any case there were two other factors the Emperor relied on. One was his faith in God. From time to time he still touched the tender but healing bridge of his nose, and smiled inwardly. A penance he had not inflicted on himself, he welcomed it. In his heart was a growing determination to set his trusty deacon, in minor orders alone though he might be, on the throne of Saint Peter. He was a little man, and a foreigner. But if he had had a confidant the Emperor would have confessed that the little man's heart was bigger than his own. And if he was not a German he was the next best thing. Not for the first time he had given the Emperor back his faith.
And faith or no faith, as the Emperor made a final survey of his dispositions, there was something he could count on even if he had been a mere devil-worshiper like the Waymen-Norse and their apostate English fellows. Constant warfare among the descendants of Pippin the Great and Charles Martel had made all Christian European armies, apart from the backward Anglo-Saxons, into modern fighting forces. On his flanks were planted the siege implements and catapults, both his own design and those copied from their Wayman enemies. Behind him waited the main striking force of five hundred heavy-armed and armored lancers, dismounted and in the shade. Platoons of the Lanzenbrüder dotted the hill slopes, ready to be bugled forward to form their irresistible infantry line. Really, the Emperor could see only one problem, and that was the penance Erkenbert had imposed on him. Not to fight in the front—he would have done that anyway. But to do so in the company of the most unreliable people in his army, the Christian or pseudo-Christian deserters.
And even that could be turned to account. The Emperor strolled up and down the nervous-looking ranks, still wearing no more than cotton or linen, equipped like the army from which they had deserted with only spears, scimitars and wicker shields. They could not understand a word he said, but they understood that he was there among them. Interpreters had pointed out to them the rewards of success, the impossibility of deserting back now that they had renounced Allah; the penalty of failure was vividly present in the memory of all of them, in bastinado and impaling-post. They would fight all right. And he had taken steps to see that they fought in good heart and even good humor. As the priests passed among them, extending the cups of wine and the wafers of the communion, Bruno set an example by kneeling himself and taking bread and wine humbly. Then he turned his attention to the fires set up in front of his position along the valley-bottom.
"Take communion fasting, then time to feast," he called. "Translate that," he added in an undertone. He stepped forward to the nearest fire, drew his belt-knife, cut away a long rasher, chewed it with exaggerated relish, waved the doubtful deserters forward to join in, to take meat, bread and watered wine from the barrels. Make a party of it, he thought. Cheer them up. Half of them look as if they outran their supplies a week ago. Or their officers steal it from them.
Further up the valley, Mu'atiyah looked through his own far-seer across the advancing cloud of Arab infantry. Proud though he was of his master, he had rejected the use of the sliding tube. What Allah had sent him, that he would retain.
"What are the infidels doing?" asked the Caliph behind him. He stood still in the shade of the awning of his great pavilion, which he had had erected on the very verge of battle, to show his confidence.
Mu'atiyah turned to him, allowing the indignation he felt to show in his face: rage was the safest emotion to have in the vicinity of the Caliph, as long as it was directed outwards. "Caliph, Successor of the Quraysh, the infidels are mocking God. They have set up fires in front of their line, and on each they have roasted a pig. Now those who deserted from our army, those who turned their back on the shahada, they are eating the unclean in the face of you and of the faithful."
From inside the pavilion, unseen, there came a chorus of horror. Then female cries of encouragement. "Smite them, master. Let them feel your wrath." Greatly daring, a voice called out the Caliph's own favorite saying, " 'You believers, fight those of the unbelievers who are nearest to you.' Now they are near enough! Smite them! Oh, that I were a man."
The Caliph nodded slowly, pulled from his belt the jewel-hilted scimitar that could slice drifting silk. Threw aside its scabbard. He walked ceremoniously forward, while his guards closed in around him and the trumpets blew for the advance. On the scrub-covered hillside the dozens of cavalry skirmishes going on between the Islamic cavalry and the goad-wielding bacheliers of the Camargue halted while both sides weighed the situation. Then the commander of the Caliph's cavalry, bin-Maymun, cousin of bin-Firnas, waved his men on while edging in the direction of the pavilion itself. The bacheliers began their practiced custom of feigning flight while remaining ready to turn it into real flight at a moment's notice. Bruno cut himself a last chop with a steaming kidney attached, used it to wave his men with elaborate unconcern into their rough and barely-disciplined line. The Arab infantry, looking over their shoulders for encouragement, found it in the spears of the Caliph's bodyguard, and broke into the chaotic charge that was their only tactic. At the front ran the ghazis among them, calling on Allah to witness their martyrdom and their faith.
Their martyrdom came quickly. As they ran forward over the quarter-mile between them and the deserters who faced them, the forgotten of God, the stones and arrows began to rain down. Bruno had a dozen traction catapults placed to either side of the valley in which he had made his stand, inaccurate weapons, but capable of doing great execution against a crowd. The breast-bows which made no impact on mailed men sent their arrows sleeting through cotton and wicker. Standing unafraid in the center of his own line, Bruno reflected that only ultimate belief and a religion which exalted suicide would have driven men on through the storm they faced. It did not drive them all on, he noticed. His experienced and professional eye saw men slowing to a walk, men drawing to one side, men who did not seem to have been touched throwing themselves to the ground and remaining there. There was a disciplined body following up, he observed, but too few and in too short a line. The disaffected could leak away to one flank or the other. A hundred breaths, he reflected, the time it would take a slovenly clerk to gabble a Mass. Then his penance would be over. He hoped God would grant it to him to shed his blood for the faith, in expiation of his fault.
He would not shed it needlessly. As a knot of ghazis drove for the mail-clad ferengi beneath the eagle banner of Rome, Bruno kissed once more the Lance which he held secure behind his shield, ducked under the first sweep of a scimitar and neatly thrust his man through the breast-bone. Four inches, no more, twist and recover and ready to parry the next slash with his blade. For fifty of his hundred breaths Bruno stood firm amid the whirling single combats between desperate ghazi and confident deserters, Jopp, Tasso, and the rest of his bodyguard protecting his back. Like a machine he parried high, cut low, twisted his shield to deflect a point or curled it to take a blade flat across its face. Every few seconds the snake-tongue blade licked out and another enemy fell back. Then, as one man desperate for glory swung a clumsy blow directly downwards, Bruno parried it automatically, thick edge against blade-tip. The scimitar snapped, the point flew on, its razor edge gashing open the Emperor's left eyebrow. As he saw the blood flow down, and felt it half-blind him, Bruno relaxed. He thrust the man off with his shield, split his skull with a backhand twist, and took his first pace backwards into the protecting line behind him.
"Sound the trumpet," he remarked.
The platoons of Lanzenbrüder on foot were moving even before they heard the signal, clumping down the hillside, forming into two lines that converged from either side of the confused battle in front of them. As they met resistance they started their harsh mechanical shouting, trying to keep in step on the stony hillside, always thrusting to the right and guarding to the left. There were no ghazis left, only the demoralized. As he saw the battle clear, the commander of the mounted knights eased his men forward in a careful trot, trying to work his way round his own infantry and get space for the one climactic charge which would carry all before it.
The Caliph, striding forward at the head of his personal guard, saw the shredding away of his attack with incredulity. Never before had his wishes been ignored. But all over the valley men were slinking to the flank or rear, getting up from the ground and retreating; ignoring the battle as if they were so many secret Christians. He looked round, not so much to find space for flight as to see if there were further supports he could call up. Behind him there was only his pavilion. Between it and him, the figure of his commander of cavalry, mounted on his famous mare. Er-Rahman cleared a throat to call to him, to wave him indignantly to the battle. Bin-Maymun saw him first. Across the battlefield he too waved, an insolent gesture of farewell. And then he too was off, accompanied by a cloud of his men withdrawn from their pointless skirmishing with the Christian light horse. The Caliph saw suddenly the eagle-banner of the Rumi in front of him, with beneath it the one who must be the Caliph of the Christians. He raised his scimitar and ran forward, bounding over the rocks with a cry, "Cursed be those who add gods to God!"
Jopp, who had made his way into the front rank to shield his Emperor while they patched his eye, took the scimitar slash on the flat of his shield—the matchless blade cut through wood and leather till the shield hung only by its iron rim—and stabbed the unarmored man neatly through ribs and heart, the triangular blade driving on till it snapped the spine. As he dropped his point the Caliph, Falcon of the Quraysh, rolled off it to lie on the hillside. The delicate blade of Cordova snapped beneath a hobnailed boot.
With the fall of the Caliph and the precipitate retreat even of his bodyguard, the battle focused suddenly on the Caliph's pavilion of green silk, most obvious piece of loot on the hillside. The bacheliers of the Camargue reached it first, on their half-wild ponies. Eunuch guards were speared on ten-foot goads, the wild cowherds sprang from their barebacked ponies, ran screeching inside.
"Tell them, Berthe," snarled Alfled, crouched behind the inner curtain. "They must be Franks."
"On est français," began Berthe uncertainly, her Frankish rusty after ten years of captivity. The cowboys spoke only their native Occitan, saw in front of them only half a score of veiled but bare-legged women, the trulls and whores of the Prophet-worshipers who had oppressed them so long. Calling to each other, they strode greasily forward.
Alfled elbowed her fool of a comrade aside, dropped on her knees, tore away her veil and made the sign of the cross. The cowboys checked, uncertain. As they did so bigger shapes blocked the light. Armored men, the Ritters of the Lanzenorden.
"We beoth cristene," tried Alfled, fear edging her voice. "Theowenne on ellorlande."
"Ellorland," repeated the leading Ritter, himself a man of Alsace, in his Germanic tongue Ellorsetz. "Good. Guard the women well. Let the Emperor decide their guilt. And guard the loot too," he added, looking round at silk and finery with a professional eye. "Go on, kick those cowboys out of here."
A hundred paces behind him the Emperor, still on foot, his eye roughly stitched together, strode across the battlefield, noting the small number of corpses. Few had stayed to fight, he noted. He hoped no army he commanded would ever shred away like that. What it showed was how few people had faith, true faith, in their cause and in their god. But faith that was only mouth-deep could have no value. He must put the matter to the wise and learned Erkenbert.
The mouth of Richier the junior perfectus was completely dry as the soldiers marched him up to the long black shed in which, only days before, Tartarin the wool-merchant had stored his fells and fleeces. No longer was it just a part of the local economy. In less than half a month it had become part of the local mythology. Those who went in did not come out, unless they were servants of the Emperor. Even the servants of the Emperor, however much wine was poured into them, said nothing of what had become of the others. The most that any of them would say was, "Ask the deacon." But no-one dared even to approach the small black-robed man who pored over his papers, called man after man, and woman after woman, and child after child, to answer his questions. There had never been any doubt that he was in league with the devil, since he proclaimed himself the servant of God, whom all the heretic believers knew was the devil. But if there had been any doubt, it would have vanished as the little man, who knew nothing of the country, spoke not a word of their language, nevertheless detected falsehood after falsehood, punishing each one immediately and mercilessly with whip or brand, block or rope, according to the sex and age of the offender.
Richier still did not know what answer had condemned him to the final walk, the walk that none returned from. He could not even guess what kind of lie would serve. And the black deacon had not even bothered to accompany him to the shed—The Shed, as it was now pronounced. In his dreams he had often been permitted to endure martyrdom for his faith: but the martyrdom had been gallant, public, a profession of faith, or done in company like the deaths of the suicides of Puigpunyent. This, this seemed more like the sheep trooping into the slaughterhouse, with as little concern. He tried again to moisten his lips with a cracked tongue as the two soldier-monks jerked on the rope that held him and guided him to the very door of the windowless building.
In his search for the Holy graduale Erkenbert was following the principle that had led him in the end to the Holy Lance, or at least to its last human owner. Somebody knew. The number of those somebodies could be narrowed down. It was somebody within, say twenty miles from south-east to south-west of Puigpunyent. True, the inhabitants of the mountain villages were hard to catch. The least hard, though, were the most senior and most important, and most likely to know. Begin with them.
But before beginning the actual questioning of the major targets, build up the background. Write the lists. Erkenbert began to list the villages. Then the people in them, their trades, spouses, children and relations. Proven heresy was of interest, but not the major matter. Erkenbert assumed that all were heretics, including the village priests, if there were any. What was important was to determine the truth, so that any deviation from it, any lie, stood out and proved the speaker a liar. So, one with something to lie about.
It had taken time, but Erkenbert had noticed before too long that his answers corroborated each other and came freely for some areas. Contradicted each other in others. Then the business was to find someone from a reliable area who could give reliable information about the unreliable areas. Then find out the core, the center, of the unreliability. Even the names of the villages had helped him. Once he knew the name of every village in the area, furnished where possible by outsiders such as wandering peddlers and muleteers, it was striking how often three of them were omitted by people who must have known them well: the Hidden Villages, he called them privately. Then within the villages, when he called the roll of their inhabitants, how often were prominent men strangely forgotten, sometimes by their close kin. They were the men he could not find or hunt down. But the attempts to deny their existence by the amateur liars of their kin, they told him whom he should hunt down. Even when their lies were unimportant, liars were punished, to deter further lying. Those who came under Erkenbert's suspicion, they went, in the end, to the Shed. Erkenbert did not believe in torture except where, as with the boy Maury, you knew the victim knew something and you knew what he knew. It was too time-consuming, and the tortured invented too much that might be true but could not be checked. The Shed was a better answer.
Richier's self-control broke as the two soldiers heaved the door open. "What is inside?" he croaked.
"Come see," replied the Lanzenbrüder.
The secret was very simple, and Richier took it in at a glance. Along the whole length of the building ran a central timber. Over the timber ran a line of a dozen thin cords. From every cord dangled one of the men who had been taken inside, noose round the neck, hands tied, toes sometimes almost brushing the floor. Some of the corpses, in the stifling heat of the closed room, were swollen and unrecognizable. Others, there only a day or two, showed the terror and pain of their deaths on their faces. There were two perfecti among them that Richier could recognize. The last and most recent man on the line was one whom Richier knew to be a fierce enemy of the heretics, a devout Catholic, though of a heretic family. He too dangled from the strangling cord.
The monks had produced a three-legged stool, lifted Richier, hands tied, onto it. Seconds later the thin rope was round his neck. Richier could feel it cutting already into his flesh, could imagine all too vividly how it would cut further. And there would be no neck-break. He would die slowly, and alone.
One of the monks had turned to him, the face of the big man almost on a level with Richier's even though he stood on the stool.
"Listen," he said. "Listen good." The German could hardly be understood, his accent was so thick. There was something terrifying in the fact that the Christians had not even sent an interpreter, as if they did not really mind whether anyone spoke or not. The German did not care whether Richier lived or died. He was following his orders, and would turn the key on the shed and walk into the sunshine without a thought.
"You know where this graal is, you tell me, I bring deacon. You don't tell me, I kick the stool away. You don't know, I kick the stool away. Someone tell me in the end. We got plenty rope, plenty space on timber."
The man grinned. "Only need one stool."
His mate guffawed, said something incomprehensible in their own language. They both laughed again. Deciding that he had spent enough time on this chore, the first one drew back his foot for the kick as the second began to walk already towards the door. He did not mean even to wait while his victim strangled.
"I know," gasped Richier.
The German paused in mid-kick. "You know?" He called something over his shoulder. His mate returned. A brief colloquy.
"You know where graal is?"
"I know where graal is. I tell."
The two executioners, for the first time, seemed uncertain, as if they had not been briefed for this eventuality, or as if they had forgotten the briefing.
"We get deacon," said the first eventually. "You. You stay here."
The humor of the remark struck him as he turned away, and he repeated it to his mate with a second roar of laughter. Richier stood on the stool, trying to keep his legs from fainting under him, in the dark, in the stinking shed. By the time the light came back, and he saw the implacable face of the little deacon staring up into his own, even the deacon could see that his nerve had cracked for ever.
"Lift him down," ordered Erkenbert. "Give him water. Now, you. Tell me at once what you know."
The story babbled out. Location. Need for a guide, a guide, himself, if he were dead they would never find it. How he had rescued the precious thing. The one-eyed man they thought a new Messiah. His falsity, his treachery. Erkenbert let it all pour out, confident that a man so broken would never try to go back on his ignoble bargain. At the end Richier risked a word that was not relevant.
"The men you killed here," he husked. "Some were of us, some were not. Will you not answer to your God—to the true God—for the Catholics you have killed?"
Erkenbert looked at him strangely. "What can it matter?" he asked. "God granted it to them to die in His service, and their reward is sure. Do you think God will not know His own?"
Erkenbert looked with doubt and suspicion at the aged wood held out to him. He had seen many relics: the bones of Saint Wilfrid and Saint Guthlac, of Saint Cuthbert and of the Venerable Bede, even, once, a fragment of the True Cross itself when it was exposed for adoration. He had never seen one entirely unadorned. This looked like something a peasant had left behind his wood-stack for twenty years, and never got round to burning. It was old, he conceded. It looked exactly like the device the one-eyed pagan wore round his neck.
"Are you sure this is it?" he demanded.
Richier the traitor began to babble pleas of assurance.
"Not you. You, Sieghart. Is this the holy thing itself that the Emperor seeks?"
"It was well-hidden," said Sieghart stolidly. "Deep inside the mountain, traps all the way. Ambushes too. Lost a few men. But I kept the rat here on his leash, and had plenty of torches burning. We found it in the end. Strange place. Lot of burnt bones."
"Answer my question!"
Sieghart screwed his face up with the effort of decision. "Yes, I think it is. I think they think it is, anyway. We found a lot of other stuff with it."
He jerked a thumb and four men came forward. At another gesture they opened their sacks, tipped the contents on to the mud floor of the hovel Erkenbert had made his base. He drew in his breath at the sight of the gold plate, the cups, the incense burners, objects that he could see were there for divine service. No, service of idols, he corrected himself. But it was no secular hoard, not even a king's hoard. An idea began to stir. As it did so his eye caught unexpected objects amid the loot. Books. Two of them.
He picked one up, opened it. "What is this?" he demanded of the despairing Richier.
"They are the holy books of our—of the heretic faith. There are only two copies of them." Richier had meant to say "two copies left," but some mistaken instinct of self-preservation warned him.
"And what is holy about them?"
"They tell the story—they claim to tell the story of what happened after... after Christ was taken down from the Cross."
"But that story is in the Gospel of Nicodemus. Not a work that the Church has admitted into the canon of the Bible, but a work worthy of reverence. There are many copies of it in the libraries of Christendom."
"This tells a different story," whispered Richier. He did not dare even to hint at what the story might be.
His face set, Erkenbert began to skim the book's pages. The Latin it was written in caused him no difficulty, though for an instant or two his lip curled in contempt of its barbaric style. Then his face seemed to set even harder and grimmer. He had come to the claim that Christ survived. Did not die. Did not rise again. Fled, married, raised children. Abjured his faith.
Abjured his faith.
"Have you read this book?" asked Erkenbert quietly.
"No. Never."
"You are lying. You knew it told a different story. Sieghart! What have you done with the men who were hanged in the shed?"
"Dug a grave. Waiting for a priest to say the burial service over them. Some might have been good Catholics."
"There will be no burial service. Some were assuredly heretics. Heretics so vile they deserve no burial, if it were not for the stench they leave in the nostrils. But the stench of these books is greater. Before you fill in the grave, Sieghart, throw these in. Let them not go to clean flame, but lie and corrupt with the corruption of their authors. And Sieghart..."
The two men's eyes met, a faint nod. Sieghart freed his dagger noiselessly, mouthed the word "Now?" Another nod. Catching some hint of what was meant, Richier struggled forward to the knees of the deacon, babbling still, "I brought you the graal, I deserve a reward..."
The dagger sank from behind into the base of his skull. "You have your reward," said Erkenbert to the face-down sprawling figure. "I released you from fear. You did not deserve shrift and salvation. Worse than Pelagius, worse than Arius. They brought false belief, but you... you would have left Christians with no belief at all. Do not open that book, Sieghart, on your soul's salvation."
"That's all right, magister," said Sieghart amiably. "I can't read."
"Reading is for the wise alone," confirmed Erkenbert.
Two days later and thirty miles to the south across the mountain passes, Erkenbert timed his entry to the Emperor's banquet with precision. For three successive nights the Emperor had remained on the field of battle, resting his men, burying the dead, dividing the loot of the Caliph's baggage train, and hearing the priests of his army sing the Te Deum laudamus from behind an altar built of captured weapons. Now, inside the great pavilion, its inner hangings torn away so that all could banquet where once the Caliph's harem had been kept, he sat at the head of the high table.
Erkenbert walked slowly in to face him, six Lanzenritter pacing gravely behind him, their armor polished to an unearthly gleam. The Emperor's minstrels ceased their playing, the servers and wine-pourers, recognizing the gravity of the scene, stood back against the silken walls. The Emperor too caught the signs of ceremonial, of vital portent. His face paled as hope seized his heart. He rose to his feet, and all speech stopped instantly.
Erkenbert said nothing, continued walking forward. Then he stopped, turned away as if self-effacingly, an icon of Christian humility with his slight frame and dull black robe. He raised a hand to Sieghart.
Swelling with pride, the Ritter drew aside the elaborate altar-cloth with which he had hidden the graduale, passed it to his second-in-command. Silently he held the wooden pole-ladder at arm's length above his head, like a battle-standard.
"Is that it, is that the..." the Emperor began.
"It is the ladder of Joseph of Arimathea, on which our Lord's body was carried to the Holy Sepulchre," cried out Erkenbert at the full force of his lungs. "From which He rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures! According to the Apostles' Creed! Let all see it and know their faith confirmed."
The Emperor dropped instantly to one knee, followed in moments by every other man and woman in the pavilion, except for Sieghart, standing like a resplendent statue.
Finally Sieghart lowered the graduale gently to the earth, and as if by compensating machinery, the Emperor and his following rose. Bruno held out a hand. Sieghart stepped forward and placed the Grail in it. With his other hand Bruno brought Grail and Lance together.
"Death and life," he muttered, tears running from his eyes. "Life in death. But Erkenbert... It is bare wood."
Erkenbert waved to the four other Ritters, and as they had done before, they spilled the contents of their sacks on to the pavilion floor.
"The holy vessels of the heretics," said Erkenbert. "Captured to the glory of God."
"And God shall have them all," said Bruno. "I swear that no man shall receive a pennyweight of what you have taken. I will compensate the army and the Lanzenorden from my own private purse. But every ounce of what you have taken shall be made into the greatest reliquarium of the West, to enshrine this relic for ever and ever.
"And I swear this too," shouted Bruno, drawing his sword and holding it up like a cross in front of him. "In gratitude for the favor that God has sent me, I swear to conquer the whole of Spain for the Catholic Church, or die in the attempt. More! I will leave no-one alive within the old Empire who does not accept the sole authority of Saint Peter. Whether in Hispania or Mauretania or Dacia."
"Or Anglia," said Erkenbert.
"Or Anglia," repeated Bruno. "And I further swear this. In gratitude for the faith that the deacon Erkenbert has brought me, the faith that I weakly doubted, not only will I bring his country back to the Church from its apostates, but I will make him the heir of Saint Peter, and set him on the Papal throne. And he and I will rule Church and Empire together. From Rome!"
The audience stirred slightly, did not dare to mutter. They had no doubt the Emperor had power to make a Pope. Had he the right? Some at least had no objections. Better an Englishman that they saw campaigning with them than some unknown Italian who never left the city walls.
"Now, Erkenbert," Bruno's voice sank to its normal pitch. "Put the Grail in a place of honor, and tell me the story of how you won it. And I need your advice. I captured one of your countrywomen amid a batch of others, there she is, acting as a wine-bearer. Whores of the Caliph, God rot their faithless marriageless ways. Not her fault, though. What am I to do with her, with all of them?"
Erkenbert shot a glance at the beautiful woman listening intently to the conversation in the half-familiar Low German. A disapproving glance.
"Let her expiate her sin," he rasped. "Her and the others. Found an order of the Grail, an order of nuns. A strict order, for penitents." He thought of the evil wickedness in the books he had had destroyed, their accursed fable of Christ's marriage to the Magdalen. "Call it the Order of Saint Mary Magdalen. God knows there are enough whores in the world to fill it."
Alfled's hands did not shake as she filled the cup. She had had long training in self-control.
Shef had spent long days in trying to make his entire fleet once more fit for sea: transferring supplies from the new arrivals to the old, reprovisioning all the ships with water and such preserved food as could be had in Septimania, organizing squads to find and chip replacement mule-stones from the shore, remounting those machines that had been taken from ships to battlements.
The work had got easier as time passed. Indeed it seemed to him sometimes as if some kind of watershed had been crossed with the unexpected arrival of reinforcements. Either that or—and this was what he feared in his heart—some new favor had been granted him by the gods. By a freed god.
The Emperor's forces, much weakened as soon as the Emperor himself had left to fight the Caliph, raised even their token siege one night and disappeared. Soon food and news began to trickle in as the mountaineers of the interior realized the roads were once more open. The kites flew gaily as Tolman and his fellows delightedly displayed their prowess to the new arrivals. In exchange Farman had produced a dozen far-seers made by glass-blowers in Stamford: the lenses inferior in clarity, and scratched by grinding even with the finest sand and chalk, but proof that Arab skills could be matched in time. Cwicca and his gang had carefully and leisurely built a replacement giant catapult, with proper side-bracing, and shot it in till they were confident of dismantling, storing and re-erecting it at any time. Steffi's flares illuminated day and night as he too practiced unhurried and unhindered. Solomon had found in the market-place a device of wires and beads which much improved on Shef's lines and columns in the sand.
Shef himself had closely examined every part of the Greek fire contrivance in the captured galley, noted its tank of fuel, sniffed and tried to taste the strange stuff inside it, examined slow-match, brazier and bellows, worked the handle of the strange pressure-pump that seemed to be vital for its operation. He had not ventured to test the device. I will send you fire, Loki had said, and he had. That did not mean Shef had to use it, or to pay Loki's price.
One day, perhaps, he would bend his energies to the task of forcing the skilled Greeks to break their oath of silence. Just now he was content to know that he had the strongest naval force on the Inner Sea, capable of driving off the Greek fleet even in a flat calm, and of bringing it to battle and sinking it at any other time. Besides, he reflected, the very sight of the copper dome on one of his ships, and the Greeks would hesitate to close. He had, once more, the technological lead which for a while had been threatened. In short, while the Emperor ruled the land, he ruled the sea. His escape-route was clear. Should he choose to take it.
It was other matters, now, which occupied him. Matters which seemed without urgency, mere questions for philosophers, but which his instinct told him must now be settled. Settled before he found himself taking the bait of Loki. He had thought long about the scene Rig had shown him, of Loki and Logi, of Loki the giant and Loki the god. In the priest-conclaves of the Way, the bale-fire always burned inside the circle. Should the fire-god not be inside the circle too?
He had called, then, a conclave, in the shaded court where he had had translated the heretics' book. To it were bidden the priests of the Way, the four who had sailed with him, Thorvin, Skaldfinn, Hagbarth and Hund, and with them Farman the visionary who had seen the need for the new fleet and brought it with him. His executive officers, Brand and Hardred, Guthmund and Ordlaf, two English and two Norse. And in addition Solomon the Jew, and Svandis, once again in the provocative display of Way-priest white. Of the eleven men and one woman present, all but two wore the pendants of the Way: Solomon the Jew, and Hardred, who like his master Alfred had never given up the Christianity in which he had been raised. With deliberate purpose, then, Shef had made the table at which they sat an oval one, like the oval in which Way-priests held their conclave. He had not ringed it round with the holy cords and the rowan-berries of life, nor had he lit the bale-fire by which the priests timed their meetings. But behind him, in the sand, he had planted a seven-foot battle-spear, in conscious appeal to the Othinic symbol of the Way. He saw the priests looking at each other as they caught the imitation—was it mockery, or challenge?—of their own ceremonial.
He rapped the table with a knuckle. "I have called you here to consider our future plans. But before we do that, we must draw some lessons from what has happened already."
He looked round the table, fixed his eye on Svandis. "One thing we know now is that Svandis was wrong. She told me, she told us all, that there were no gods, that they were created by men out of the wickedness of their hearts, or their own weakness. And that the visions they have sent me were mere dreams, created by my own brain as a hungry man dreams of food, or a frightened one of what he fears. Now we know that the last, at least, is not true. Farman, thousands of miles away, saw our trouble and came to help us. His vision was true. But it was a frightening one. For what he saw was what I have seen, seen now three times. Loki loose. Loki unbound from his chains. Ready to loose Fenris-wolf from the bond of Greipnir and bring Ragnarök on the world.
"So we must think again about the gods. They do exist. And yet Svandis may not be wholly wrong. For the gods and their worshipers do have something to do with each other. I turn to Hund. Tell us all, Hund, not only those you have told already, what is your view of the gods."
"I would say that Svandis is part right," said Hund. He did not look up, did not look at her. "The gods are created by men. But once they are created, they become real. They are mind-creatures, born of our belief, but once they are born they have power even over those who do not believe. I too think they are evil, created from wickedness."
"Even Ithun?" said Thorvin harshly, staring at Hund's apple-pendant, sign of the healer-goddess. Hund did not reply.
"But if Hund is right," Shef went on, "then we have to accept another thing. That there are gods besides those of the Way. The Christian God. The God of the Jews. The Allah of the Arabs."
"So why have they not blasted us?" asked Hagbarth. "Their worshipers hate us enough to wish it, to believe in it."
"Hund has given a good answer to that. He reminds us how many of us there were—he and I among them—who were brought up as cradle-Christians, and had no faith at all. Only habit. It may be that the mind-stuff of which the gods are made is delicate and tricky, like the Greek fire. Perhaps some minds, most minds, do not produce it. And remember, the Christians have their saints and visionaries too.
"Besides, if the gods come from us, then they have our strengths, our weaknesses. Just as Svandis said. The Christian God does not act in this world. He takes his followers to another." Shef remembered the awful vision he had seen once of King Edmund, martyred by the heathen, passing beyond him to some fate he could not even glimpse. "Our gods, the gods of the Way, work in the world, as do their priests and their worshipers. They believe in things made with hands."
Brand laughed as he saw the strained faces round the table. "I am a man of the Way," he called out. "I bearded the damned Ragnarssons for the Way, did I not? But the more I see and the more I hear, the less I believe in anything except three things. My ship, my gold, and 'Battle-Troll' here." He lifted his silver-inlaid axe from where it lay beside him, flourished it, and drank again from the quart pitcher of beer that the new fleet had brought with it.
"So far we can follow you," said Thorvin. "I do not like what you say about the Christian God, but I can accept it. After all, we have always said—you have always said, and you have proved it by your deeds, see Hardred here—that our quarrel is not with Christ nor with Christians, but with the Church that comes from Rome. Because while we listen to what you say, and consider it, if you said it to the Emperor and you were in his power, you would be lucky to earn death alone. The Christian Church brooks no rivals! Will not share power or the claim to truth. That is what our founder Duke Radbod saw and foresaw. That is why we preach the Way. So that everyone may choose their own way."
"Everyone may choose their own way," Shef repeated. "That is why we are here." He drew a deep breath, for this was the moment of decision. "I think it is time for new ways."
"New ways?"
"New pendants. New knowledge. Svandis has made a start, with her quill-pendant. It stands for the study of our minds, the writing down of all that has seemed to us most fleering. Mind-study, and mind-stuff. Who is the god that you have taken as your patron, Svandis?"
"No god," Ivar's daughter replied. "No goddess either. A name in our myths. I wear the quill for Edda, that is to say 'great-grandmother,' for old tales and traditions."
"Edo means 'I write,' in the Latin tongue," observed Skaldfinn. "Svandis did not know that. It is the kind of accident the gods send. I think this is new knowledge we should accept."
"Another pendant we need," said Shef. "The sifr sign of the Arabs, the round hole that means 'nothing.' The powerful nothing. If I did not have my own sign I would take that one. It should be the sign for those who can reckon, and its god should be Forseti, who settles disputes and brings certainty.
"A third, the wings of Völund. For Tolman, and the fliers." Shef looked round with his one eye, gauging support, trying to bend the uncertain to his will. So far they were with him. Völund-priests, priests of Forseti, they would be new but welcome. Way-priests always liked new trades, whether flying or lens-grinding or calculation. Now for the hard one.
"I say we need a fourth. For the likes of Steffi, who burned his hands to bring us light. We need men to wear a fire-sign. For Loki."
Thorvin was on his feet immediately, hammer sliding from belt to hand, and there were looks of horror on the faces of Skaldfinn and Hagbarth, and Farman too.
"No man can take that sign! We let his fire burn, to remind us of what we face. We do not worship it, or him. Even if all that you said is true, about men creating gods, why should we create a god like him? The trickster, the father of monsters. The bane of Balder."
"Why should we? We already have." Shef looked round the room to see his words sink in. "If Hund is right, and he exists, then we made him. Made him out of fear and hatred. Made him kill the good and beautiful because we are jealous of it. Chained him so we did not need to blame ourselves. Drove him mad.
"He is loose now. I fear him more than you do. But what I am saying is this. Freedom for Loki as well as for Thor. For the bad as well as the good. If he attacks us, we will destroy him. But fire can be for us as well as against us."
Thorvin looked round as if expecting thunder and a lightning-bolt from the cloudless sky. "Freedom for Loki as well as for Thor!" he repeated. "But he is the father of the monster-brood, you have seen them. You have met them." His eye rested uncertainly on Svandis, as if unsure how far he could continue. Thorvin was convinced, Shef knew, that Ivar the Boneless, Svandis's father, had been a creature of Loki with a non-human shape in the other world of the gods. If it came to that, Shef believed it too. But then Loki was bound and crazed with pain.
"Freedom is not the same as lawlessness," he said. "If a follower of Loki were to come and say that his worship forced him to sacrifice slaves at his barrow, or to cut women to pieces for his pleasure, we would tell him the penalty for morth-deeds is death. Under Wayman-law that is already true. It is what makes us different from the pagans. Now I do not know what made Loki kill Balder, what made men imagine a Loki and a Balder and imagine the one killing the other. But I do know that if we are to cure the maim of the world and bring back Balder, then we must believe in something other than eternal enmity."
Farman stirred in his seat, and spoke in his quiet voice. He was an unimpressive man: the first time Shef had seen him, it had been in a Völund-vision, and there Shef had been the lame but mighty smith of the gods, Farman no more than a mouse-shape peeping up from the wainscoting. Shef still saw and heard him sometimes as a mouse, squeaking and peeping. Yet he was greatly respected. His visions, all agreed, were true ones. He and Vigleik were the far-seers of the Way.
"Tell us the story of the weeping for Balder," he said, his eyes on Thorvin.
Thorvin looked uncertain, suspicious, sure that in some way his narrative would be challenged. Yet by the conventions of the Way he could not refuse to speak. "You know," he began, "that after the death of Balder through the machinations of Loki Laufeyjarson, Othin built a pyre for his son and laid him on it. But before the fire was lit Othin sent his servant Hermoth, greatest hero of the Einheriar, into Hel to ask if there was any way by which Balder could be released. And Hermoth rode down over the Giallar bridge, and came to the gates of Hel, and leapt his horse over them."
Shef too stirred in his seat, for though this was a story he had heard, it was not the one he had seen.
"He went on, and begged the goddess Hel to release Balder, but she refused, saying that Balder could only leave Hel if everything in the world, alive or dead, would weep for him. If any creature refused, then he must stay.
"So Hermoth rode back, and the gods instructed every creature in the world to weep for what had been lost, and so they did, people and animals and earth and stone and trees. But in the end the gods' messengers came upon a giantess sitting in a cave, and she said"—Thorvin's voice turned to the deep chant he reserved for holy song:
"No tears will Thökk trail on her cheeks for
Balder's burial. Bane alone got she
from the one-eyed one, wise though he be.
Let Hel hold what she has.
"And so the demand of Hel was not fulfilled, and Balder was not released. Instead he was burnt on the pyre, and with him his wife Nanna, who died of sorrow. Most men think that the giantess was Loki Laufeyjarson in another shape."
"Well and truly told, Thorvin," said Farman softly, "but there are questions to ask. You know that the spittle that runs from the mouth of Fenris-wolf is called Von, which is to say Hope, and that is to show us that to trust in hope, as the Christians do, and cease to struggle when there is no hope, is below the dignity of a warrior. But what then is the meaning of the giantess's name, Thökk—which means 'thanks' just as Von means 'hope'?"
Thorvin shook his head.
"Could it not mean that the price of Balder back is no more than thanks?"
"Thanks for what?" rambled Thorvin.
"Thanks for whatever Loki may have done in time past."
"The stories say that he was a good comrade when Thor went to Utgarth-Loki, to wrestle with Old Age and try to lift the Mithgarth-Serpent," Hagbarth corroborated.
"Loki was a good comrade against Loki, then," said Farman. "But when that comradeship was not recognized, and thanks given for it, he became what we have made him. Is the king's proposal not to thank and recognize the good Loki? To enlist him against the mad one?"
"Hermoth did not get into Hel," Shef added with the crushing certainty that came from vision. "He was stopped by the gates. He cut a cock's head off and threw it over Grind-gate, and rode back. But before he rode back he heard the cock crowing on the other side."
"So there is life even in the place of death," concluded Farman. "Even where Balder is. So there is a chance... A chance of curing the world's maim and bringing back beauty to it." He looked at Shef, aiming his words at him alone. "And that is how the old become young. Not like dragons, by clinging on to what is theirs. Like adders, by shedding their skin. The skin of worn-out belief. Old knowledge gone dead."
He has shared more than one of my visions, Shef thought, even if I did not know it.
Thorvin looked round the table, conscious that the argument was slipping away from him, seeing faces that ranged from Hardred's stupor to Skaldfinn's dawning interest, angry conviction from Svandis.
"It would have to go to the full Council of priests," he temporized.
"In the end," Farman agreed.
"But how does this affect our plans? Our plans for here and now?"
"I will tell you that," said Shef. "It seems to me that there are many things we could do. We could go home, brushing the Greeks out of our way."
"Perhaps making a little profit as we go," suggested Guthmund.
"We could sail our ships to the Guadalquivir and march on Cordova. It has no Caliph now, if what we hear is true. Our support might make a difference to the next one. It is in my mind that we might demand the right to preach the Way. It would have been denied by the last Caliph, by any Caliph securely in power. Just now—well, who knows?"
"We could make quite a big profit out of Cordova," Brand said to Guthmund. "You haven't seen the place, but I'm telling you, that raid by the Ragnarssons fifteen years ago can't have scratched the surface."
"But if what we have been saying is true," Shef went on, "I think we should do something else. For what we have been saying, what Hund and Svandis and even Farman have been saying, is that strength in this world comes from belief. So we must strengthen ours, and that of those who are friendly to us, or at least tolerant of us.
"And we must destroy the faith of those who give no space to others. Who allow freedom neither to Loki nor to Thor. Nor to any other than their own One God."
"And how is that to be done?" asked Solomon the Jew, with deliberate politeness.
"With paper on the one hand. And with emissaries on the other. I will explain..."
From Hlithskjalf, the vantage-point of the gods, the Aesir deities looked down on earth. Far below they could see points of flame like spear-points on fire, could see the wolves and ravens gathering. Heimdall, who can hear the grass growing and the thoughts inside a man's head, or a god's, cocked his head and lifted an eyebrow towards his brother Rig. The thought inside the head of Othin was: "This is getting out of hand." But All-Father would not speak his thought, and Heimdall kept silence.
"I wish I knew who broke his bonds," said Othin finally.
Not even Heimdall knew that Rig had done so, for Rig could keep even his thoughts secret when he chose.
"All things weaken in time," observed Rig.
It was not a tactful thought to express to one who admitted no limits to his power—though in truth those limits were clear enough. Rig tried the other half of the observation. "But seeds can grow in time as well."
"What are you talking about?" snarled Othin. "Loki is loose, Heimdall is ready to blow his horn, the Last Battle of gods and men may begin at any moment, with weapons of fire and creatures in the air, and now our own followers are turning to Loki. Your follower is."
"He has not changed his pendant yet," said Rig. "I ask you, All-Father. Think back a few lifetimes. What were we then? Weak. The creatures of a few wood-runners and sea-thieves. Dwindling to being mere kobbolds or nixe. Now, we have grown strong. Not from the sacrifices at Uppsala, that terrified thousands for the belief of a score. From belief and devotion."
"How is that helped by Loki loose? And men prepared to worship him?"
"Loki was not always bad."
Othin turned on Rig a terrible eye. "He killed my son. He took the light out of the world and left it pale."
Rig was not afraid, but the eye of Othin is hard to face. He turned his own eyes down, but spoke on. "He was a comrade once. If that had been recognized, he would not have felt the jealousy, the envy that made him use the mistletoe and betray Hod."
"He said many ill things to us in our own hall," said Heimdall. "Me he called 'mudback,' said I was the slave of the gods, never allowed to sleep."
"You never do sleep," replied Rig.
"This has to do with your own son," said Othin. "Your own son and follower, whom you have made me spare once, twice. He is the one who has loosed Loki, is calling him back to the world. Though he does not seem to want what Loki wants. Say now, though, why I should spare him the third time." He raised his spear Gungnir, pointed it down to the far blue Inner Sea.
"I do not ask for him to be spared," said Rig.
All the gods, the dozen assembled, looked at their brother doubtfully.
"Take him if you wish. He will be an uneasy recruit for your Einheriar, Othin. Before Heithrun's mead-vat has been emptied ten times the heroes will be smithying new weapons to fight each other from a distance, and the weakest will be the strongest. But take him if you will. I say only this: wait and see. It may be that if he has his way, gods that are strong will grow weak, gods that once were weak—as we were, a few lifetimes ago, as I was, almost forgotten—they may grow strong."
It was true, Heimdall reflected, that barely a lifetime ago, less than a lifetime ago as men count, Rig had been a mere shadow on the fringe of the gods' feasting, not important enough to be taunted by Loki or consulted by Othin. Now many wore his pendant, and his brothers made way for him. And how had that come about?
"Who do you think will grow weak?" asked Heimdall in the end.
"Those gods who cannot share power, or win the hearts of men without compulsion."
"Do you mean me?" asked Othin threateningly.
"No, father. Say what Loki will about you, he cannot say some things with any truth. No-one has ever called you a jealous god."
The Aesir reflected on the meaning of their brother's words. Some looked again at the scene below, at the broad Middle-earth on which their worshipers were a mere scattered fringe. Their faces set immobile like the faces of horse-copers who have seen an unnoticed bargain.
"But your son will not bring my son back."
"The prophecy is that after Ragnarök, those who are spared will see a new age and the rebirth of Balder in a fairer world. But you will not be spared, father. Fenris-Wolf waits for you, as Surt for Frey. But if there is no Ragnarök, if there is no Ragnarök, can we say that Balder cannot just the same be reborn? Once even Loki is prepared to weep for him? If you wish to see your son again outside the halls of Hel, then you must take another turning."
This time it was the face of Othin that changed to that of a man who sees advantage far off.
"How did you get away?" asked Svandis. Facing her sat the woman she had met and wept with in the fountain-court of the Caliph, Alfled the fair, once her enemy, now her colleague.
Alfled shrugged disdainfully, swept the hair back from a face that was reddened with sun. "The little black bastard told the bastard with the wide shoulders to turn us into nuns. Berthe—the Frankish girl you met, you remember—she was happy with the idea, she has never had much use for men. But Ouled has no mind to be a Christian, and I, I have no mind to be a nun. I saw little enough of men, or of any man, while I was in the harem of the Caliph. I have time to make up!"
"So, how?"
"Oh, men are easy to handle, you know. In the convoy that was taking us to some Allah-forsaken spot, I talked to one of the guards. Told him how unfair it was to be locked up half your life and then taken away to be locked up again. Looked at him till he looked at me, and then looked a second more before I dropped my eyes. Made him think I admired him. They are so vain, so weak.
"When he came to me in the night I let him loose the door-chain and sweep me into the bushes. He did not see Ouled behind him with the hairpin." She laughed suddenly. "He was a brisk lover, I will say that for him. It may be that he died happy. Then Ouled and I made our way from one village to another, exchanging this and that for what we needed. You told me you had done it too."
Svandis nodded. "And now, what do you want?"
"They say the king here is an Englishman, and a freer of slaves. Even the men here say they are freed slaves, those that speak English. Surely he will free me too, give me passage home."
"Your kin will not be pleased to see you," observed Svandis. "A dishonored woman. You have no husband, but you have not the right to wear your hair loose like a virgin."
"I am a widow," said Alfled firmly. "Widows have the right to remarry. And no husband can blame them if they know more about some things than a virgin. Ouled and I know a lot more than any virgin, or any wife in Christendom. I think I can find myself a man, here or in London or in Winchester. As for Ouled, she wants only passage to Cordova, for she thinks the same of herself as I do."
"What do you think of the men here?" asked Svandis.
"Not much. The ones who speak English are the sons of slaves. When I was captured by the raiders no thane would speak to such without a whip in his hand. I cannot understand why they should have been freed. There is not one who looks like an atheling."
"That one does," said Svandis, pointing out of the window at Styrr walking by sucking an orange with his great horse-teeth.
"He looks like a warrior, at least. But those are the Norse-folk. Like you. Your people captured me, sold me down here. I could not live easily with one of you."
"There are still plenty of thanes and thanes' sons in England," said Svandis, "and I dare say you could capture one of them easily enough. You are your own dowry, and after a wedding-night with one of your experience, I expect you could ask whatever morning-gift you wished."
Ouled the Circassian, sitting listening to a conversation in a language she could not follow, shifted and looked up at the unmistakable sound of two women beginning to scorn each other. In one of the private signs of the harem, she spread her fingers, looked at the nails. Don't fight, it said. Sheathe your claws. Alfled choked down a scornful answer, tried to look amused.
"I think you could do the One King a service," said Svandis. "The One King, who has said he will make me his queen."
Men say all sorts of things to get what they want, reflected Alfled, but did not say the words, only lifting her eyebrows in polite enquiry.
"He needs information about the state of things in Cordova now the Caliph is dead. He may need an emissary, too, one who speaks better Arabic than we do. One thing you can be sure of, he is a generous payer, a true ring-giver to those who serve him. And you are right, he has a soft spot in his heart for those who have been slaves, like you."
I will see if he has not a hard spot for me somewhere else, reflected Alfled grimly. Copper hair, blue eyes, complexion like a Moorish laborer's. In the harem you would have been called once, out of curiosity, and never again. "I am at your mercy," she replied, eyes prudently downcast. "What is the king's particular interest?"
"At the moment," Svandis replied, "he is interested in the making of holy books, and how they come to be."
Whips, poetry, little boys, scented oils, now holy books, thought Alfled. God, or Allah, or Jesus, send me a man one day with simple interests.
In a room deep within the Prince's private palace, Shef confronted a quadruple row of benches. In front of each bench ran a long table, on each bench sat six scribes. Their quills were in hand, pots of ink stood by each one, each one had a fresh sheet of the strange Oriental paper in front of him. The scratching of pen-knives had died away, the two dozen faces looked expectantly at the barbarian king who had driven off the Emperor of the Nazarenes.
Solomon addressed the scribes. "The king here," he said, "has discovered a document. It is one which casts great doubt on the faith of the Christians, would tell them—if they knew of it—that their Messiah is as we well know already, a false one, a foreshadower of one who is yet to come. He wishes to have many copies made, to spread the knowledge widely in the Christian world. So we have called you together. He will dictate a version of what he has read to me, I will translate it into the trade-talk of Spain, the Arabic that we all know, and you will write it down. Later we will make more copies, and more, both in this language and in the Roman tongue of the south. Maybe also in Latin. But this is the beginning of it."
A hand raised, a skeptical voice spoke. "How long will this account be, Solomon?"
"The king says, it must cover no more than a single page."
"How long was the first document?"
"As long as the Book of Judith."
"It will take skill, then, to reduce it to one folium."
"The king knows his mind," said Solomon firmly.
Shef listened without understanding to the interchange in Hebrew, waited for the rustling and gentle mirth to die down. Solomon nodded, to show that the scribes were ready. Shef stepped forward, the heretics' book, in its Anglo-Norse translation, open in his hand—not for him to read, for his grip on the runes was still shaky, but as a prompt.
As he looked at the rows of faces, at the blank sheets in front of them, his mind seemed to dowse itself, like a fire which has had a wet blanket dropped over it. There was nothing there. A few moments before he had been ready to speak, to tell the story of the rescue and escape of Jesus from the Cross in words that any man or woman might understand. Now there was nothing there. Stray phrases wandered through his mind: "They call me Jesus... What you have been told is not true... Have you ever thought about death?" None of them seemed to lead anywhere. He realized his mouth was hanging open, in what must seem an idiot's gape, became aware of the slight sneers, the dawnings of contempt on the faces that looked up at him.
He cast his eye down. He was trying, he told himself, to instruct these men at their own speciality, which was books and the making of books. How would they fare if they came into his camp and told Cwicca how to wind a catapult? The thought of the furious bawdry with which a learned scribe would be received round the camp-fires amused him momentarily, seemed to break a hole in the barrier of silence. Remember, he told himself again. What you have to do is to take a story, the story that was written down, and make it into an appeal. You have to change it from an I-story into a you-story. Start with that. If you do not know where to start, start with the beginning.
He raised his head and his one eye again, stared at the room full of men, beginning to exchange glances and pass remarks at the immobility of the barbarian. As the glare passed over them, the glare of a man who had stood face to face with Ivar, Champion of the North, and killed Kjallak the Strong on the King's Stone of the Swedes, the scribes fell silent again. Shef began to speak in a tone of suppressed fury. As he spoke, phrase by phrase and sentence by sentence, Solomon's voice pattered out the quiet accompaniment, and the scratch of many quills on paper followed it.
"Followers of Christ," Shef declaimed, "you have heard of the joys of Heaven and the fires of Hell. In hope of one and in fear of the other, you give your children to be baptized, you confess your sins, you pay the tithe. You wear the Cross. On Easter Sunday you crawl to the Cross on your knees, the priest holds it in front of your dying eyes.
"Why? Because it is the sign of life, of life after death. You hope to live in Paradise after you are dead because there was One who once came back and declared He had power over death and after death. On the Cross, and on the Resurrection, all your hope rests.
"What if there was no Resurrection? Where is your hope then, and what good are your tithes? What need have you then of a priest? Now who has told you the story of the Resurrection? Was it a priest? Would you buy a horse on the word of the man who took your money? If you never saw the horse? Listen to this story instead.
"There was a man called Jesus, and many years ago Pontius Pilate crucified him. But the hangmen bungled in haste, and he did not die. He did not die. Instead, his friends came and took away the body on a ladder, and brought it back to life. When he was strong again, he fled and made a new life, and in that new life he took back many of the things he had said. Heaven is in this world, he said, and men should make it for themselves. Women too.
"Do you live in Heaven? Or in Hell? Ask your priest, ask him how he knows what he knows. Ask him, where is the Cross? Where is the ladder? Look in his eyes when you ask him, and think of selling the horse. If you do not believe him, think what you can do."
"It was an interesting account," remarked Moishe the scribe to Solomon as they walked away together, for the moment on friendly terms again. "Inept, of course."
Solomon raised an eyebrow, but did not challenge the view. "I had trouble," he agreed, "in translating some of it. His words for 'baptize' and 'Resurrection' are very simple, and I had to do the best I could. In what lies its ineptitude?"
"Oh, seven rhetorical questions in a row, like a schoolboy who has not felt the rod. Constant repetition, horses and hangmen and ladders and tithes all mixed in with life and death and the mysteries of faith. No grandeur. No idea of style. I would blush to have it known that I had written such a thing. But to your One King I am just the part of a machine, a machine for making many copies."
I will pass that on, reflected Solomon. The thought of a machine for making many copies. And what does not please Moishe may nevertheless affect people of whom the learned Moishe knows nothing. The unlearned, to begin with. There are many of them, and not all are stupid.
"Where are you from?" asked Shef.
"I was taken from Kent," the woman replied. She was dressed still in what remained of an all-enveloping Arab bur qa, but she wore no veil, and the hood was thrown back to reveal fair hair and blue eyes. She spoke English—old-fashioned English, Shef realized with a slight shock, better English in a way than his own, used as he now was to studding his language with words and tricks of speech that he had picked up from the Wayman Norse. Twice already he had seen her frown as she struggled to follow him.
"Kent. That is within the realm of my co-king, Alfred."
"The king in my time was Ethelred. Before him, Ethelbert. I think I had heard of Alfred as their younger brother. There have been many changes. Still, I would like to go back. If I could. If I could find my kin, and if they would have me back, a disgraced woman."
The woman sank her eyes, feigned to dab at them with the corner of her sleeve. She is playing for sympathy, Shef realized. Trying to look attractive while she does it, too. A long time since a woman has bothered to do that for me. But in her position, what else can she do?
"There will be a place for you in Kent, if that is where you wish to go," said Shef. "King Alfred is a generous lord, and one of your beauty will never lack suitors. I can see to it that you have wealth enough to please your kin. England is a rich land now, you know. Nor is it afflicted by pirates any more, so you will be safe."
He reacts to weakness, Solomon reflected, watching them, by trying to take the weakness away, not by exploiting it, as the woman expects him to. It is a good quality in a king, but I wonder if the woman understands it.
Shef patted Alfled's hand. His voice turned business-like. "There is something, though, that you can do for us, I believe, for you are one who knew many or all the secrets of the Caliph's court. Tell me, what is your belief in Allah?"
"I have made the shahada. The profession of faith," Alfled added. "It goes La illaha il Allah, Muhammad rasul Allah, which is to say, 'There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet.' But what could I do? It was that or die, or be one of the lowest slaves in a laborers' brothel."
"You do not believe it?"
She shrugged. "As much as I believe anything. I was brought up to believe in God. He never helped me against the pagans who caught me, though I prayed to Him many a time. The only difference between the Christians' God and the Arabs' Allah that I can see is that the Arabs believe in Mohammed and in their Koran."
"Different books, different faiths. Tell me, are there any in Cordova who take an interest in how books are made?"
Here it comes, thought Alfled. Perhaps he will ask me to whip him with a quill, or drain him onto parchment. There must be something his woman will not do for him. There always is. "There are shops that sell books," she replied, "where copies are made to the order of the buyers. The love-poetry of bin-Firnas, say. Or the Book of a Thousand Pleasures, it might be."
"That is not the kind of book the king meant," cut in Svandis, observing watchfully. "He means, where do holy books, books of faith come from. Where does the Koran come from. Or the Bible come from. Because someone, some person, must have made them at some time, holy though they are. Made them with fingers and pen and ink." She tapped the quill-pendant that hung now over her breast.
"The Koran was dictated by God to Mohammed," said Alfled. "Or so they say. But there are some... yes. The Mu'tazilites, as they are called. Ishaq the Keeper of the Scrolls was one such."
"And what do they believe?" The king's one eye was trained on her with fierce interest.
"They believe... They believe that the Koran is not eternal, even if it is the word of Allah. They say that it is the word of Allah as heard by Mohammed, but that there may be other words. They say that it is not enough merely to collect hadith, that is to say tradition, but that one must also apply to it one's reason, which is the gift of Allah."
Moishe would not like to hear that, Solomon thought again. He thinks it is the first duty of a scholar to preserve the Torah, and the last to collect commentary on it. To reason from it, not reason about it.
Shef was nodding slowly. "They do not want to destroy books. That is good. But they are ready to think about them. That is better. If I could see a Mu'tazilite Caliph in Cordova, and a Pope in Rome without an army, then, I think, Ragnarök would be averted, and Loki put at rest. But at the root of it all is to have books in many hands. I do not suppose all the booksellers in Cordova, nor all the scribes in Septimania, could make as many books as we need. What was it you said, Solomon, that we need a machine to make many copies, faster than a man can write? I know no way to hitch up a millwheel to a scribe's arm, alas, though it may do the work of a smith."
"The Caliph often had more documents to sign than his arm could manage," ventured Alfled.
"What did he do?"
"He had a block made, of gold, with a handle of ivory. But on the base of the block was a copper plate, with his name on it standing out the depth of a finger-paring. The rest had been eaten away by cunning acids, I do not know how. He would put the plate on to cork with ink in it, and then stamp the block down on documents as fast as Ishaq could present them. Some said Ishaq would put documents in there that the Caliph never read, for a price. It was like putting a brand on cattle."
"Like a brand," Shef repeated. "Like a brand. But no-one can brand paper, or parchment."
"And the end of it all is a false paper," said Svandis, face twisted with disgust. "One that no-one read and no-one signed."
"That is one way books might be made," agreed Solomon.