The news of the disaster for Islam ran south faster, seemingly, than any horse could carry it. Than any single horse or horseman, certainly. As the first reports arrived in any town, carried by the cavalrymen who had fled first from the battle, each man was helped from his horse, carried to drink sherbet in the cool, pressed for further information. Meanwhile such information as could be gleaned was carried on by trusted messengers to those whom the local governor of a province or cadi of a city regarded as most in need of it. By the time the survivors rode on, their stories growing more elaborate and self-justifying each time they were repeated, the news was often ahead of them.
As the news was received, those in power under the Caliph-who-had-been thought carefully about their positions. Who was to succeed the Caliph? It was known that he had many children, but none designated, and none old and strong enough to survive the civil war that threatened. He had had many brothers, or half-brothers. Most dead, gone to the leather carpet or the bowstring. Many unacceptable, children of the mustaribs. Or were they, now, so unacceptable? Those who had been considered so, governors of the north for the most part, began to reflect on their own strength and on their alliances. Horsemen rode, troops were gathered, governors wondered how many of the levies they had sent north would return. As they trickled in, surprisingly many of them for a battle that according to the first runaways had been fought with great valor, governors reckoned their strength again. Almost all of them came to the same conclusion. Too soon to strike, or to give up hope. Do what is obviously right and you cannot come to harm. Protest loyalty to the Faith. Surround one's own person with every armed man that can be raised. And meanwhile, since the men are there and must be paid, there are private squabbles that may as well be taken care of. Old enmities between Alcala and Alicante, the coast and the mountains, disputes over water and land, flared into conflict.
In Cordova itself, as the news arrived, there was shock and horror. No alarm, since clearly the unbelievers could offer no threat to the established civilization of the south and of Andalusia, but fear at the judgment of Allah. The question of succession struck every listener at once. Within days the carts of market stuff and poultry, the herds of sheep and beef cattle, had ceased to stream through the gates, the peasants of the Guadalquivir valley fearing to enter what might be bloody civil war. The few half-Berber half-brothers of the Caliph vanished into their own strongholds, were known to be calling for men, for help from the kinsfolk of North Africa. At any moment a fleet might arrive from Algiers or Morocco, to sail up the river. Or, said the pessimists, the Tulunids of Egypt may take a hand: mere Turks from the steppe.
At that thought, the Christians of the city, and the Jews of the Juderia, the ghetto established for them, also began to reckon their strength. The rule of the previous Caliph had been cruel to those who renounced the shahada or who sought for martyrdom. It would be like a caress compared with the random and profitless cruelties of the Turks or the Berbers, anxious to show their loyalty to the faith because of their recent and doubtful conversion to it.
Better any Caliph than no Caliph, said the wiser heads of the city to each other. Best of all, a Caliph acceptable to all. But who? The young man, Mu'atiyah, pupil of bin-Firnas, had appeared from the wreck and ruin, ridden without ceasing all the way from the moment the Caliph fell back in his arms—or so he said. He called for Ghaniya, the Caliph's oldest half-brother and trusted emissary to the North, to succeed to the cushion. Ghaniya, he shouted in a score of marketplaces, Ghaniya could be trusted to take up the war. And not only the war against the Christians. Against the majus also, the heathen fire-worshipers who had deluded the Caliph into war and disaster. But most of all, the war against the faithless, the secret traitors. Had he not with his own eyes (and the invention of his master) seen men of the Caliph's army arrayed against him, eating roast pig between the battle-lines? How many more secret devourers of swine hid in the streets of Cordova? To be rooted out! Along with the Christians who sheltered them, under the mistaken kindness of the former Caliph. Enslave them, send them into exile, impale those who renounced their faith...
"Too much impaling already," remarked bin-Maymun, once commander of the cavalry in the army of the Prophet, to his cousin bin-Firnas, as they ate grapes in the cool of the latter's riverbank mansion. "You can't expect men to fight if some of them are dragged off every day and heard screaming to their comrades every night. He is your pupil of course, son of my mother's brother..."
"But not a ready learner," his cousin replied. "It seems to me—eager though I am for shari'a—that a little relaxation may be in order? Other learned men are with me on this, Ishaq, Keeper of the Caliph's Scrolls for one. Without wishing to go as far as the sect of the Sufi, he remembers that a House of Wisdom was once established in Baghdad, and flourished under the rule of Mu'tazilites. Why should Baghdad have had what Cordova cannot?"
"There are other reports, too, of what happened after the battle, after I and my men had been driven from the field," his cousin replied. "Some of the Caliph's women escaped from the Christians who seized them and found their way by ship and horse to Cordova. One a Christian by birth, so her loyalty cannot be doubted if she turned her back on her fathers' faith. I have taken another into my own harem, a delightful woman from Circassia. They too say that the Caliph's rigor was too great—a compensation, they say, for certain... inadequacies. They say also that he put too much faith in your pupil." Bin-Maymun cast a glance sideways to see how his hint was taken.
"He is my pupil no longer," declared bin-Firnas firmly. "I withdraw my protection from him." As bin-Maymun sank back, remembering threats and insults and considering which of his men to send to put a stop to Mu'atiyah's babble, bin-Firnas pressed on. "And will you join Ishaq and my learned Mends later on, for song and poetry, and perhaps, a little discussion?"
"I will," said bin-Maymun, paying the price for the freedom just granted to deal with Mu'atiyah. "And I will bring my friend the Cadi with me," he added, to show he was throwing his full weight into the struggle. "He is concerned about the state of the city. Your poetry will relax him. Within the walls, of course, only he has any great force of armed men."
With perfect understanding the two men listened to the song of a slave-girl and considered, the one revenge and power, the other freedom for reason and learning from illiterates and zealots.
In Rome the news of the battle was received with joy, the ringing of bells and singing of Te Deum. The news, a little after, of the Emperor's recovery of the holy relic of the graduale and his vow to elevate his personal adviser to the throne of Saint Peter, was taken differently. If all had gone well, the current Pope, John VIII, weak child of a powerful Tuscan family, would never have heard the news at all, his own fate outrunning it. But somewhere between the Emperor's camp and the Vatican Hill, word spread to someone still loyal. The Pope was informed, hurried immediately to gather his entourage and retire from the dangerous city to the estates of his family. When Gunther, once Archbishop of Cologne and now Cardinal in Rome, heard the news and moved instantly with his one-time chaplain Arno and a dozen German swordsmen of his own guard to reassure the Pope, and hold him incommunicado till the Emperor's wish became clearer, he found himself facing more than his own number of Italian nobles, relatives and adherents of John. The two sides exchanged polite greetings and arguments, while the guard commanders weighed each other up. Stilettos and perfumed hair, thought the German: back-stair back-stabbers. But we have no mail nor shields. Great blunt chopping-swords and onion-stinking breath, thought the Italian: but ready to use them. The two sides backed off from each other, protesting friendship and concern.
Despite the pleas not to desert his flock, the Pope made his way determinedly from minster and hill, from Rome itself. Despite the assurances of joy and congratulations at the Emperor's victory, Gunther seized control of the Curia, evicted Cardinals not of his own nation or faction, prepared for a disputed election. He would have gone further, but the news that the Emperor had fixed on the English deacon Erkenbert dismayed him even in his loyalty to Emperor and Lanzenorden, his own creation. Erkenbert had been a good comrade, he knew. But Pope? Gunther had had another and a more suitable candidate in mind for that office next time it should fall vacant, one who was already a Prince of the Church and no deacon. Yet a vacancy was definitely desirable, so much at least could be agreed...
It would take an army, now, to create one. Though the army of the Emperor was at least approaching, marching across the borderlands of southern France and northern Italy, hot-foot for Rome. Or so they said.
In the cool underground cave which had once been an olive-press, Shef examined carefully the rows and rows of tiny lead blocks wedged tightly into their steel frame. He made no attempt to read them. Still a poor reader of any script, the complexity of reading mirror-image letters, in blocks facing different ways, which were in any case in a language he did not understand, would have been far beyond him. Anything like that was entrusted to Solomon. All Shef was looking for was technical perfection. Letters fixed tight, none of uneven size, all letters of the same height. Shef finally nodded with satisfaction, passed them over.
With Alfled's image of a brand in their minds, the idea of branding on to paper had been fairly clear. But all a brand needs to convey is ownership. One sign is enough. It was soon evident that something like a brand with two hundred words on it would take years to make and be invalidated by a single change. Make a stamp, or a brand, or whatever it was to be called, for each word, suggested Solomon, as the Caliph er-Rahman used to. That too was soon seen to be a false trail, as the amount of work needed to make individual words, some of them in large numbers, became apparent. It was Shef who suggested making tiny dies for each letter, and once that was seen the job became easy. Deft jewelers had carved the individual letters from brass, pressed these into clay to make a mold. Baked the clay molds then filled them with molten lead. Over and over again until there were filled trays of the leaden letters.
Short trials pointed out the necessity of making the marks mirror-image instead of right-way round. Then came the problem of fitting them together. Of making the ink adhesive enough to stick to the lead and not run once pressed on to the paper. The easiest thing of all was finding a device that would fit the letters now locked into a chase, something that would hold the entire page-sized mass of type rather than the mere signature which er-Rahman had used. Presses were familiar objects to the whole Mediterranean seaboard, with their diet heavily dependent on wine and on olive oil, both of them needing to be pressed out. Shef had simply taken over an olive-press, inserted a flat steel bed for the letters to rest on.
Now for the full-scale trial. The carefully-set blocks of lead letters rested on the bed of the press. A cloth pad soaked in ink was patted over their surface, a sheet of white paper placed gently on top of them. Shef nodded to Solomon, who had claimed the honor of first trial. Solomon put the block on top of the paper, then pulled on the arm that exerted pressure on the block. Shef held up a warning hand. Too much weight pressed the blanks down on to the paper as well, smearing the result. He cut his hand through the air, Solomon released the pressure and removed the pressure block and Svandis slid the printed sheet out. Shef ignored the cries of wonder, thrust another sheet in, signed to Solomon again. And again. And again. And again. Only after ten trials did he stop, and turn to Svandis.
"We don't need to know, does it work?" he said. "We need to know, does it work faster? If it isn't faster than a team of scribes, then there's no point to all this. It isn't faster so far, when you think of all the time we've wasted."
Svandis passed him the sheet. He looked at it, passed it to Solomon, who examined it carefully. "It seems correct," said the Jew thoughtfully. "As for speed... We have just printed ten pages in a hundred heartbeats. A practiced scribe can write, maybe, forty pages in a day. A hundred heartbeats, and three people, and we have two hours' work from a skilled scribe. I cannot say..."
"I can," said Shef, turning to the apparatus of beads and wire which stood not far away. He flicked beads this way and that with the skill of continuous practice. "Three thousand heartbeats in an hour," he muttered. "Say twenty-five thousand in a day's work. Twenty-five thousand divided by one hundred multiplied by ten..." He straightened. "Three people can do the work of sixty scribes. Once the blocks have been set up. The blocks, is that the word?"
"Call it the press," said Svandis.
"Sixty scribes," repeated Solomon, marveling. "It will mean, at the very least, that every child can have his own Talmud. Who would have believed it?"
More Talmuds may not mean more faith, thought Shef, but he did not say it.
As he walked through the streets of Septimania later that day, a mule laden with printed paper following him, Solomon met Moishe the learned. Anything like a book could not escape Moishe's eye. He pulled one copy out, scanned it suspiciously. "This is not Hebrew writing," he said. "And whoever wrote it was a bungler. The letters are ill-formed and straggle from each other like a schoolboy's." He sniffed the paper. "It smells of lamp-black too."
Needed for adhesion, thought Solomon, but he made no reply.
"It is in the Romance tongue," added Moishe accusingly. "I can make out the Roman script, but this is not even Latin!" Ingrained respect for the written word prevented him from throwing the offending object to the ground, but he waved it contemptuously. "What does it say?"
"It is a longer version of what the One King dictated to you and the others some weeks ago. The attack on the Nazarenes' faith. I have five hundred of them here. Tomorrow I shall have five hundred more, in Latin, for the more educated believers."
Moishe snorted, torn between agreeing with attacks on Christianity and disapproving of attacks on faith. In his heart he believed that all should stay in the faith of their births, those who held the correct one reaping their destined reward, those who held false ones taking the punishment due to them and to their ancestors. "Five hundred?" he replied. "There are not scribes enough in Septimania to write all those."
"Nevertheless it shall be done," said Solomon. "The One King will take many of them, to spread them round the Christian islands on which he means to cruise—his men are pirates by trade, I fear, and anxious to earn their living now the Christian army has withdrawn."
"And the rest?"
"Those fall to me. To give where I think they will do most good." Or most harm, he did not say. For these are books, but they are also anti-books, books to turn People of the Book from their Bible, which is their word for 'book.' I do not think I had better tell Moishe the learned that. It is a use of learning he will not learn to accept.
The One King, at sea already and heading for the island of Mallorca, his entire fleet spread out around him in cruising formation, was watching the kite-men struggle with the immensely unwieldy contraption he had had designed. Tolman stood to one side with an expression of deep disapproval on his face.
"Tell me again," said Shef to the child, "what are the things to remember."
"To begin with, keep the open end, the larger open end, pointed into the wind. Feel the wind in your eyes. If it shifts, you must shift with it." The boy took the king's hands with an air of authority. "If the wind is above you, roll the hands this way. If it is below, that way. The tail-flap moves like a rudder, that you will understand. The first thing is, if you think anything is going wrong, it is already too late. You have to move all the time, never stay still. Like a bird. It takes time to learn," the boy added condescendingly. "I crashed into the sea time after time."
Cwicca, listening, reflected to himself that a sixty-pound child crashed much lighter than a hundred-and-ninety-pound warrior. Long experience had taught him that the One King paid no attention to probabilities. At least he was a strong swimmer. Cwicca himself had sharpened the One King's belt-knife to a more than razor edge, in case he needed to cut himself free in the water. Brand had selected a dozen of the strongest swimmers in the fleet, himself included, and put them in pairs round the rescue boats.
The experiment still seemed impossible. Guided by his abacus, Shef had ordered a new kite with four times the surface area of Tolman's. So enormous was it that it overhung the deck of the Fafnisbane on all sides and over the stern as well. A first difficulty had been that the weight of the One King himself would snap the fragile struts suspended between the gunwales. Shef had ordered up trestles for him to lie on till, he hoped, the wind should take him.
At least there was plenty of wind. All the ships in the fleet, more than sixty of them now, were tearing along as fast as a man could run, or a horse canter, the wind on their port beam. The familiar cloudless blue of the sky was as cloudless as ever, but with a darker tinge. Ordlaf predicted a storm, though all agreed that a storm in this millpond of a sea could hardly be compared with a North Sea widow-maker. The One King had figured the strength of the wind into his calculations as well.
"Ready," he said. He climbed up the short step-ladder—a proper ladder this, not a wretched graduale or kraki—slid feet-first into the holding leather sling. Wood creaked and flexed. Handlers looked anxiously at the stitching, linesmen tested their holds. The kite, which had strained at its ropes, took on an ominous immobility, lay there as if made of lead.
Shef gripped the controls, turned them this way and that. He too felt the kite's lack of motion, wondered for a moment what would happen. Would he just lie there like bacon on a slab? Would they cast him over the side and see him simply go down like the fool who had leapt from the tower of the Wisdom-House in his Völund-suit months before?
Shef looked round at the anxious faces surrounding him. One thing he could be sure of. Success or failure, the idea that men could fly had at least been firmly planted. Round half of the necks of the kite-crews, half at least, dangled the new wing-pendants of Völund, or Wayland as the English called him. Men who were proud to call themselves fliers. They would not forget. He had created a new trade. More than one new trade.
"Ready," he said.
The eight tallest men in the ship stepped to their places, each of them crouched on a block, gripping a part of the frame in two hands. Now Cwicca took over, as launchmaster.
"Lift," he shouted.
The eight men simultaneously straightened and thrust their arms high over their heads: no great weight, indeed two strong men might have done it, or Brand or Styrr on their own. But it was important to have even balance. Cwicca glanced at his linesmen standing by the windward rail, almost crowded overboard by the immense spread of canvas facing into the wind, but each maintaining tension and ready to pay out line. He waited with the skill of much practice till he could see the wind beginning to catch the canvas, belly it out from underneath.
"Launch!"
The eight men swayed backwards like a catapult-arm bending, and then threw the kite forward and up, into the wind. Shef felt the shock, immediately felt the kite sweeping backwards as if from under him. The wind had caught him, but it was taking him down, down under the side of the Fafnisbane, to be trampled deep into the sea and drown there in a mess of broken cordage. He twirled a hand control at random, felt the kite dip alarmingly, faces on the leeward rail staring at him open-mouthed. Turn the other.
The side-vanes turned, the wind caught the great expanse of waxed cotton more fully, began to blow across the top. Struggling against the dead weight of its rider, the huge contrivance began to lift. The linesmen felt the tug, paid out line gently, carefully, each man striving to keep resistance without drag. They had had much practice.
Above, Shef tried to remember what Tolman had said, tried even more to put it into effect. The wind was below his eyes, turn that way. No, above, turn back. And all the time he was skidding sideways, work the tail-flap between his knees, no, no, other way.
For a brief instant all seemed to be in balance, and Shef could glance down. Below him the ships were strung out like children's toys on a pond, all of them lined with faces staring up. He could make the faces out clearly, could recognize Brand there in one of the rescue boats out to windward. Could he wave, shout to him?
The moment's loss of concentration was all that the wind needed. The kite began to turn up, the two linesmen controlling that began to try to edge the top frame down, at the same instant Shef worked his own correction.
The watchers saw the kite tip nose-down, bank suddenly to the right, seem to lose the wind and the lift altogether, and drop into the sea like a loose bundle of rags. The Fafnisbane slanted gently across, linesmen reeling in as she did so. Brand's Narwhal was already in front of them, swimmers diving over the side and threshing towards the bobbing contraption.
Shef met them in the water. "I didn't need to cut myself free," he said. "Just slid out. Haul her out," he shouted to Ordlaf in the approaching Fafnisbane, "and check her over for breaks."
"Then what?" asked Cwicca, as the dripping king scrambled over the side.
"Then we'll try again, of course. How long did it take Tolman to learn the trick of it?"
"If Tolman has learnt the trick of it," protested Cwicca, "why do you need to? Is this just for fun?"
Shef looked down at him. "Oh no," he said. "We have to do the very best we can to get better. Better at everything. Because there are people over there who are also doing their very best. And not to make life easy for us, either."
The Emperor looked carefully at the paper which Erkenbert had produced for him. It meant nothing to him. Skilled in the instant evaluation of land, river-lines, armor, the good and bad points of a horse or its harness, Bruno had never learned to translate lines on paper into reality.
"What does it do?" he asked.
"It cuts the reloading time of our new catapults by more than half. You see," Erkenbert tapped the paper, "the difficulty was always dragging down the short arm, the arm which holds the counterweight. If we had been quicker—" He did not complete the sentence. If he had been quicker outside the wall of Septimania, he might have shot three times and smashed the gate down before the enemy could reply. Then the greatest of their troubles would have been over.
"Well," he went on, "we tried different ways, and in the end I tried dragging the arm down by ropes over a roller. Now, what I have designed are two wheels, one each side of the frame. Men stand inside each one. They tread down with their feet, and the wheel turns, turns so that there is always another tread under their feet. The wheel that they turn operates a cogwheel, and the two cogs drag down an iron chain. That chain pulls down the counterweight."
"Does it work?"
"I cannot tell while we march every day. I need time to find smiths and make the wheels, both the cogs and the tread-wheels. But it will work. There is a picture in Vegetius, to give us authority." Though they were speaking German, he used the Latin word auctoritatem, that which comes from an author, a written work, a book accredited.
Bruno nodded. "The march will stop one day. Then I will need your new device. Not just one next time. Six, a dozen. I have to beat some sense into these Italian heads. Maybe some others too. Come now and see what Agilulf has devised for us."
The two men left the tent and went out into the sprawling camp, tents pitched for the night but not yet at rest. Outside the marshal Agilulf waited. Erkenbert looked again with professional interest at the crusted blisters and dead skin that ran like the mark of a broad belt across his neck and the side of his face—the track of the Greek fire. Agilulf had lain in pain and fever for weeks after they had pulled him from the sea.
A surprise that he had lived. No surprise that he had become even more taciturn than ever before.
"What is our strength now?" asked Bruno.
"Much the same. Four thousand rabble." By rabble Agilulf meant the levies called up from the districts Bruno was marching through, first the Spanish borderlands, then the coastline of southern France, then the plains of northern Italy. As the army moved towards Rome and the seat of Saint Peter, there was a constant stream of desertions, replaced by new levies. Few of them had any military value in a serious clash, and some Bruno had dismissed, like the half-Arab deserters, sent back to loot and cause dissension in their own countries.
"About five hundred of the cowboys. They stick around as long as they're allowed to loot and rape away from home."
"Hang some of the rapists," said Bruno without heat. "I'll hang them all when their use is over."
"Five hundred Frankish knights, with a hundred Lanzenritter as stiffening. Seven hundred Lanzenbrüder on foot. A dozen onagers in the battering-train, with a Lanzenbrüder attached to each one to stop the crews running away. More to come when the Holy Father has time to make the designs."
The "Holy Father" was Agilulf's only joke. He was one of those who most whole-heartedly approved the coming elevation of Erkenbert to the throne of Saint Peter. The little deacon had dressed his wound, given him feverfew for the fever. He was never far from the fighting, never showed fear. In the tight world of the Emperor's army, it was coming about that no one outside it, German, Italian or Frank, had any weight. Nationality was less important than comradeship.
"Are they good enough to beat the heathen, this time?" asked Bruno.
"I do not think anyone can stand against the charge of the Lanzenritter. But they can be shot down by machines from a distance. For close work—the Lanzenbrüder are stout kerls. But those damned Danes—they are stout kerls too."
"Better equipped?"
"Our shield-and-spear tactic does not work against them. They are too strong, they learn too quickly. No shield can keep out their axes if they use them. All we can do is keep a steady line, hope to use our horsemen."
"And our machines," said Erkenbert.
"Everything," said Bruno. "All at once. To put down our enemies, to make Christendom one, without rival."
The parish priest of Aups, a small village of southern France not far from Carcassonne, looked nervously out of the window of his tiny cottage, and then back at the coarsely-written pamphlet he held in his hand. It was made of paper, but the priest did not know that. It was printed rather than written, but the priest did not know that either. The priest only owned one book, and that was his Missal for conducting services. He knew the services by heart in any case. Besides his services, the priest knew the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins. On these he preached to his parishioners.
And now this had come, brought to him by Gaston, the mule-driver who came and went between Aups and Carcassonne with loads of oil and wine, charcoal and cloth, trinkets and fripperies. Such few things as the village could not produce for itself and had the few coins to buy. He had brought it back and said it had been given to him—given not sold—by a man in the market. Gaston could not read. He had thought the priest might like it.
It was the priest's duty to denounce Gaston—for though he could not read, it was unlikely that he had taken something and not asked what it contained. Then the tormentors of the bishop would come, and torment Gaston, and draw from him the name, or the description, of the man he met in the market. And if that did not satisfy them, of some other man. And if that did not satisfy them—who knew what tale they would put in Gaston's mouth? Maybe that his parish priest had sent him for the book. The heretic book. Merely holding it put the priest in deadly peril.
Do not denounce him, then. Throw it away. The priest hesitated to throw away any piece of writing. They were too scarce, too precious. And besides: the tale this one told had about it a strange charm, a seduction. Maybe that seduction came from the devil, as the priest was continually telling his parishioners about the wiles of temptation. But then this book said that the devil was actually the one that the Church called God. The Father who had sent His Son to death. What kind of a father was that?
There was another reason the priest did not want to destroy this book. If he had read it correctly—and another strange thing about it was that it was written, if not in his own dialect, in a dialect very similar to his own and very different from the Church-Latin of which the priest had learnt some fragments in his ineffectual schooling years ago—if he had read it correctly, this book said that it was a part of Heaven to live happily on earth, man and woman together. The priest had been in trouble more than once with his bishop and his archdeacon, because of Marie, the housekeeper who lived with him and who consoled his middle age. Priests must be celibate, he had been told again and again. Or they bring bastard children into the world and spend the Church's good on them. But Marie was a widow, and past childbearing. What harm did it do, what she and he did between them when the nights were cold?
The bishop was wrong, thought the priest with the first flare of independence his life had ever known. He would keep the book. He would read it again. It might be a work of heresy, or so they might say. But it was not the heresy of the heretics beyond the mountains, with their evil denial of the flesh and their insistence that men and women became perfect only by not breeding children. Though this book did say that men and women were not condemned to breed children for ever and ever. That there were ways of taking pleasure in each other, going to the Paradise on earth, as the book called it, without running the risk of childbirth. Guiltily, but determinedly, the priest opened the little eight-page booklet again, started once more to spell his way through the passage which described, in terms as plain as Shef had been able to make them with the assistance of Svandis and Alfled, the technique of the carezza, the prolongation of pleasure for woman and for man.
The parish priest of Pontiac, not far away, did his duty and reported both book and the parishioner who had given it to him. Days later, as the bishop's agents attempted once again to force him to admit that he was part of the heretic conspiracy, he made a silent vow never to admit anything again. When he was released, bent and walking like an aged man, to return to his village under the strictest supervision, he said nothing. When his parishioners who had been called to the Emperor's army returned, however, and spread their stories of demons in the sky and the might of the pagan or heretic sorcerers, their priest made no attempt to contradict them.
The bishop of Carcassonne, who had made great efforts to collect all such material entering his diocese and root out all transmitters of it, finally sent all he could find together to his Archbishop in Lyons, and asked for help against the spread of heresy in writing. He was condemned severely for allowing such material to exist. No other bishopric had recorded so much, and most none at all, he was told. His see must be rotten with loss of faith. And if the sheep are poxed and scabby, railed the Archbishop, who shall we blame but their shepherd? Look to Besançon! You will find no heresy there.
The bishop of Besançon, indeed, had obtained not only the Occitan but also the Latin version of the pamphlet, and had read both through with care, several times. The bishop was poor, by now, having had to pay a year's revenues into the Emperor's coffers for the brawl with the baron of Béziers. Besides that, his back still smarted from the days of scourging he had had to endure from a grinning German prior, till the money arrived, money acquired at a ruinous rate of interest to put an end to the scourgings. In any case the bishop had not one widow mistress, but a small stable of young women. Their constant pregnancies were almost a despair to him, so many children to be provided for, left for adoption in the church if the mother would agree, but so often she did not, found in food and clothing while they were young and furnished with dowries or apprentice-payments as they grew up. The thought that pleasure might not lead to children, even with young women, and that young women might be pleasured satisfactorily even by a man past the flush of youth, if that man knew the secrets of the carezza—this fascinated the bishop to a degree that no fear of heresy might quash. The fate of his brother of Carcassonne only rubbed the point home.
The truth was that in the whole of the Langue d'Oc, as in their kindred realm of Catalonia beyond the mountains, Christianity had shallow roots. At the first coming of the Faith in Roman limes, the Church had taken hold in the towns, where the urban classes followed the fashions of Rome and of the Empire, and where bishops could be appointed from noble families who saw the Church as another way of consolidating power over land, through its written leases, its acceptance of donations which paid no tax to the secular authorities but still might be kept within the family. Outside the towns were the pagani, in Latin, those who dwelt on the pagus, the land. In Italian the word became paesano, in French paysan—the peasant, the one who dwelt on the land, the one outside the Church. The three meanings were at bottom the same meaning. The Church meant little to the country-people, except as a force from the towns that from time to time disrupted their lives. In Northern France, in Germany, one might meet the enthusiasm of the convert or the Crusader. In the South, Mary was hard to tell from Minerva of ancient Rome or the three nameless Ladies the Celts had worshiped generations before, before the pagani were made to learn their poor and garbled Latin. Nor was the Easter procession easy to tell from the age-old weeping for Adonis, the legionary cult of sacrificing the ram, or lamb, to Mithras. In a land where written books were rare, and what they said was taken literally as gospel, there was little inherited resistance to the seeds that Shef and Solomon and Svandis had sown: but there was fertile soil in abundance.
In Andalusia, a different situation, but no more stable. Islam had not set foot in the Iberian peninsula till the year 711, when the Ummayads landed at Gibraltar, or Jeb el-Tarik in their tongue, burned their boats, and were told by their leader, "The sea is behind you and the unbelievers in front of you. Truly you shall conquer or die!" And conquer they did, overthrowing the short-lived rule of the Germanic Vandals who gave Andalusia its name and taking their place as rulers. Beneath the veneer of Vandal or Arab aristocracy, however, the mass of the Iberian population remained the same. Most of them were converted from the Christianity of the late Roman Empire without great difficulty, attracted by the benign rule of Islam, which remained free of the desperate and deadly theological squabbles of Rome and Byzantium and demanded no more than the shahada, the five daily prayers, abstention from wine and from pork.
Yet while there might be little to disagree with or provoke rebellion in the rule of the Caliphs, there was at the same time little charm. Little mystery. Under er-Rahman, less and less inquiry permitted. The surgery of Cordova would have been the wonder of the world if the world had known it, as would the discoveries of bin-Firnas, or the great work of al-Khwarizmi the mathematician, his Hisab al-Jabr wa'l Mugabala, or "Book of the bringing of unknowns to knowns." But few did know of it, eagerly though its practical aspects might be seized by traders and bankers. The Wisdom House of Baghdad had been closed thirty years before by those who asserted there was no wisdom outside the Koran, and the Koran was to be memorized, not considered. To some, the intellectuals, the ceasing of inquiry was a pain. To others, the unpersecuted but taxed remnant of the Christians, every call from the muezzin was an offense. To most, religion mattered little. But if by any chance some restrictions might be eased, decision in the court of the cadis might relax from the strict interpretation of the Koran and of the desert asceticism that had created it—well, let the learned dispute over whether Allah or the Koran were more or equally eternal if they would. Peace, good governance, and a fair distribution of water through the irrigation channels were what they most demanded.
"I do not think Ghaniya will do," said bin-Firnas one day to his cousin bin-Maymun. "He is half a Berber after all."
"I do not think there is a pure-bred child of the Quraysh left to us," replied his cousin.
"My pupil Mu'atiyah might have done," ventured the philosopher. "He was of high birth, and easily guided by me, if by no other."
"Too late," replied the cavalryman. "We of the army of the Caliph-that-was accused him before the Cadi of bearing false witness. The fathers of many of those he sent to the impaling-poles brought their voices to the court. He was fortunate. Because he had been your pupil the Cadi adjudged him only to the leather carpet and the sword, not to the pole or the stoning-ground. He fought with the guards and died raging, without dignity."
Bin-Firnas sighed, less at the young man's death than at the failure of what had been promised. "Who then?" he asked after a decent pause. "We cannot just pick one of the provincial governors, all the others would rebel immediately."
Ishaq, Keeper of the Scrolls, drank from the cool water which was the greatest of refreshments in this, the tail-end of the scorching Spanish summer, and spoke into the thoughtful silence.
"It seems to me that there is no great need for a hasty decision. The Roman Emperor has turned away from our borders, having found his foolish relic of the Nazarenes, or so I hear. We do not need a single ruler. Why do we not send to Baghdad, and ask the descendant of Abdullah to send us a viceroy?"
"It would take forever!" said bin-Maymun. "Forever to send the message and longer for them to come to a decision. Nor would the governors accept whoever the Abbasid Caliph sent to us."
"But during that time provisional arrangements might be put in place," suggested Ishaq. "Rule by a Council. A Council of the Wise. Strictly temporary, of course. Still, during that temporary state institutions could be set up whose value would be so great that no later Caliph could overthrow them. A House of Surgeons. A House of Mathematics."
"A Tower of Astronomers," proposed bin-Firnas, "equipped with far-seers with larger and better lenses for study of the stars."
"A new system of water-works, running down from the mountain springs to the coast," put in bin-Maymun. "The landowners would pay for that—if they were certain that all would pay and all would share."
"A library," said Ishaq. "One which contained the works of the Greeks as well as of the hadith. Translated into Arabic for all to read. Or into Latin as well. If any doubted our aim, we could say that we wished to convert the Rumi to our faith with sound arguments as well as by the sword. And our cousins the Jews as well."
"I have heard," noted bin-Firnas, "that this business of the relic contains some terrible blow to the Christian faith. There is rumor of it among the traders from the north in the souk."
Ishaq shrugged indifferently. "Such a faith hardly needs a blow. But let us agree that our faith shall be confirmed by reason. And that a Council of the Wise may be the way to do it."
"We will speak to our friends in the morning," agreed bin-Maymun. "Let Ghaniya the Berber follow Mu'atiyah the fool, and the matter can be arranged."
The Way-fleet lay at anchor in the bay of Palma off the island of Mallorca, exactly where the Arab fleet had lain earlier the same year, before the Greek fire came to destroy it. Fishermen had already given a graphic account of what had happened then, and Shef had been concerned enough to order a standing kite to be raised, with Tolman and three or four of the others taking turns to spend an hour in the sky, not flying free—no-one had attempted that since the deaths of Ubba and Helmi—but strung out peacefully on their lines in the moderate breeze.
Shortly after Shef had tried his own flights, the Mediterranean had indeed proved that it could generate a storm, and the back-eddies of it were still with them. It had been a blessing in disguise, however, in that it had covered the approach of the Wayman fleet till they were almost at anchor. The raiding parties swarming eagerly ashore, led by Guthmund and full of experienced pirates, had immediately seized the Christian cathedral and found in it an accumulation of plunder. It had been first stored there by the Christian lords of the island, continued during the brief Islamic conquest, and stepped up to a higher power, it seemed, by the following conquest by the Emperor and his Greek allies, working in tandem. The troops left behind by the Emperor had fled into the interior. The Waymen, operating under strict orders of gentle conduct and supervised closely by their priests, reported that there was little chance of them acquiring allies from the natives, nominally Christian though they were. Solomon reported further that the booklets he carried in Occitan and in Latin were accepted readily, with great curiosity, by the Christian priests: the natives of the island, trapped in their own dialect of Mallorquin, had never seen a book that they could begin to read in their own language before, and the Occitan was close enough for them at least to try to make it out.
Solomon had not remained at hand, though, to watch the trials that Shef was now preparing. Thorvin too, intensely disapproving, had disappeared on his own errands, as had Hund and Hagbarth. For interpreting, Shef was now dependent on Skaldfinn. Farman too, the visionary priest, was prepared to observe.
The Greek fire apparatus had been unshipped bodily from the half-sunk galley, with immense care not to crack or bend any of its pipes, and had been carried carefully stowed in the hold of the Fafnisbane, a man watching it on Ordlaf's orders day and night to warn of any leak or scrap of fire. When it came to a trial, though, Ordlaf had mutinied. Shef had in the end taken a small Mallorcan fishing boat, stowed the apparatus in it, and taken it a decent quarter-mile out to sea. For hours he and Steffi had brooded over it, examining every part of it, theorizing about their apparent functions, reminding each other of what they knew for certain. They were now at least of one mind.
The big tank found separate from the rest was a fuel reserve, they agreed. Its connecting hose clearly matched the smaller copper dome: but the only function of that connection was to transfer fuel once the operating tank was emptied. In operation the pipe at the upper end of the dome was connected not to the reserve tank but to the apparatus actually found in place. Careful removal of this had persuaded them that it was a sort of bellows: a piston forced down a cylinder which, however, did nothing but force air into the operating tank. "It seems," muttered Steffi, "that air has weight." Remembering the strength of the wind under his kite, Shef nodded. The thought was ridiculous, for how could anyone weigh air? But the fact that one could not weigh it clearly did not mean that it had no weight—a thought for the future.
Another mystery was the valve attached to a short length of pipe on top of the dome. The pipe was plugged at the end but had an opening cut in one side. It made no sense.
What, then, was the function of the brazier and the conventional bellows below the dome? Obviously, to heat the fuel in the dome to operating temperature. But why? Neither Shef nor Steffi had any word to express the concept "volatile," but they had seen water boil, had seen kettles boil dry. Shef, too, remembered the experiments of his former shipmate Udd with distilling a kind of winter ale. "Some things boil with less heat than water," he explained to Steffi. "It may be that this stuff in the tank is one of them. What comes out of the nozzle when you turn the valve, then, is the lighter stuff, like the drink that Udd makes out of the steam from ale."
"Isn't steam just water?" queried Steffi.
"Not if you heat ale or wine," said Shef: "The stronger stuff comes off first, before the water. The opposite of winter wine. Water freezes first in the cold, boils last in the heat." As he said the words he stiffened, the words of Loki coming back to him. What was it he had said, had offered him as a token? "It is best on a winter morning." He did not understand, but it had something to do with this problem. He would remember it. If it worked... Then he would owe Loki something. Put into practice the plan he had considered. It would be a fair test, a fair return.
All their actions had been watched with tight-lipped scorn by the Greek siphonistos taken from the captured galley.
"We're going to try it," said Shef to Skaldfinn. "All those who aren't necessary had better leave the boat." The Greek turned immediately, reached for the painter of their dinghy.
"He understands our language a bit, then," said Shef. "Ask him why he will not help us."
"He says you are barbarians."
"Tell him barbarians would lash him to the dome so that he would feel the fire first if anything went wrong. But we are not barbarians. He will see. He will stay with us, take the same chances that we do. The rest of you—over the side with you all, and lay off ten strokes. Now—" Shef turned back to Steffi and his three-man gang with a confidence he did not feel. "Light the match! Bellows-man, stand by and start when the flame is alight."
"It's this pump that worries me," muttered Steffi in an undertone. "I can see what it does, but I don't know what it's for."
"Me neither. We still have to try it. Start pumping on the handle."
The Greek edged away, watching the preparations with increasing fear. The very thought of the fire exploding made his bowels cringe within him. He had seen several demonstrations of what happened when an apparatus was overheated. They had turned the safety-valve closed, without realizing what it was for. He knew, if the barbarians did not, that they were not far enough off to be safe.
Competing with the personal fear was fear for his faith and his country. The barbarians seemed strangely sure about what they were doing. They had spent a long time observing, making simple trials, doing very little and nothing roughly—not like the barbarians of his imagination, but like skilled men. Could it be that they would solve the problem? Even if they did, a voice within him reminded him, there was one thing no ingenuity could find: the strange seepages of Tmutorakan far beyond the Black Sea, where the oil welled up out of the ground.
The fire was burning, the pump was operating, the barbarian with the squint sweating as he worked. In his bones the siphonistos could feel the pressure increasing, building up. It had to build up, it must not be allowed to grow too great, heat and pressure had to be balanced just so.
Observing carefully out of the corner of his one eye, Shef watched the signs of tension grow in the captive Greek. He feared the fire perhaps more than they did. And he knew, as they did not, when the likely moment of disaster would be. Had he the resolution to face death unmoved? Shef felt sure that he would make some sign of betrayal. If he did, he and Steffi and the others would be over the side and into the water in a moment. But the Greek did not know that.
"Keep pumping," he ordered.
Shef felt the warmth coming now not from the burning match beneath but from the dome itself. As the heat increased the Greek writhed in fear. The barbarians had no fear because they had no understanding! In the end he could not control himself. He seized up a rag, leaped forward and turned the valve on top of the tank. A shrill whistle sounded from the slotted length of pipe.
"The valve! You must open the valve at once!" he called, in suddenly-discovered English, backing the words with a frantic gesture.
Shef shouted "Turn!"
The last of Steffi's three-man gang turned firmly on the valve that led from the bottom of the copper dome—the valve that led to the nozzle. Shef felt an instant wave of something jetting through the brass nozzle in his hand, a reek of something stinging and acrid. He drew the lit slow-match from behind his back and at arm's length held it to the nozzle.
The dragon's breath flared out, belching flame fifty feet out over the sea, landing on it and blazing with clouds of black smoke even on the water itself. For long moments the sea itself seemed to be ablaze, Shef and the valve-hand stepped back, cringing automatically from the fierce heat.
Shef collected himself, shouted "Turn!" once again. The valve closed, the flame stopped. Instantly Steffi ceased to pump, the bellows-man pulled his bellows away, the brazier-hand pulled the charcoal flame away from under the dome. All five men fell back from the dome to the very edge of the ship's tiny deck and stared tensely at it. Had they pumped it too strongly? Would the flame come back from the sea and ignite some stray spill? After a while Shef felt them all releasing their breath together.
"It's a kind of oil," he said.
"Not olive oil," said Steffi. "I've tried lighting that and it doesn't work at all, hardly."
"Might be whale-oil," ventured Shef, remembering the way Queen Ragnhild's fire-arrows had lit up the harvest of the grind in far Halogaland.
"Doesn't smell like it," said the valve-hand, once a fisherman in Ordlaf's village of Bridlington.
"I don't know what in Hel it is," said Steffi. "But I bet we can't get no more of it once this is used up. But at least we know now when to open the valve. That whistle on top, it sounds the warning."
"You may know how this work," the Greek shouted angrily, still in the broken English he had till then refused to admit. "But there is one place on earth for naphtha and you never find it. Nor I tell you, no matter how you torture me."
Shef looked down at him coldly. "There is no need of torture, and now I have the machine I know where to get the fuel. It is found best on a winter's morning, is that not so?"
The Greek's heart sank within him. They had mastered the siphon with ease. Now it seemed they had the oil as well. After all, in the barbarian West, who could say that there was no Tmutorakan, as there was in the barbarian East? And if they had both halves of the secret, how might Byzantium stand? And he could be sure he would find no welcome in Byzantium once it was known the secret was out. Any Greek should know there was a time to change sides, and this was it.
"Listen to me, one-eye," he mumbled, "that for a price I correct your errors."
Shef nodded calmly, as though he had expected this response, and fumbled for a moment in the pocket of his breeches. He had had these things made by a silversmith in Septimania, made secretly and paid for from his own purse.
"Steffi," he said, "I want you and your men here to wear these." He produced the silver pendants from his pocket.
"What, and give up what we got already?" asked Steffi, putting a hand up to the Thor-hammer round his neck.
"Yes. You have Thor, and so does one of your mates, and the other two have a Frey-phallus and a Rig-ladder like me. But they are just the signs that took your fancy, or that you copied from others. I must stay with my own kraki, for it is the mark of my father, but you should wear the signs of your trade, now you have a trade. It is a sign of honor too, for your courage."
"What is it?" said the valve-hand, face glowing with pride. He had been a slave most of his life. Now the One King was speaking to him as if he were a great warrior.
"It is a fire-sign, for the men who trade in fire, in flares, in the marks of war."
The men took the pendants in silence, removed their own, put the new ones round their necks.
"What god is the patron of us fire-warriors?" asked the bellows-hand.
"It is Loki the fire-god, once chained, now free."
Skaldfinn, coming back over the side, froze with horror as he heard the words, saw the fire-sign displayed openly for the first time. He looked back at Farman just behind him for support, saw the visionary pause, and then nod slowly in acquiescence. Steffi and his gang, all English and all former Christians with the scantiest knowledge of the holy myths of the Way, heard the name without alarm.
"Loki," Steffi muttered, fixing the name in his mind. "Loki the fire-god. Good to have a god of our own. We will be his faithful servants."
The Emperor gaped at the small book put into his hands.
He could read himself, if slowly, but this time he had no need to. The substance of the booklet had already been explained to him in careful detail by his trusty comrade.
"Where in Hell did it come from?" he asked finally. The Emperor never knowingly blasphemed, took the name of the Lord in vain, or used religious words in other than their literal meaning. This time too, Erkenbert realized, he meant that the book in front of him was literally diabolic. That was good. Answering the question was not so good. Erkenbert had realized some time ago that the sniveling heretic who had betrayed the Grail and earned death for it had not told the truth when he said that there were only two copies: he should have kept him alive. No need to confess that mistake now.
"A Brother found it in a priest's house. Oh yes," he held up a warning hand, "the priest has already been dealt with. But I have heard these things are everywhere, produced with diabolic speed. And they are being believed too. Men say that the very graduale which you carry with you and proclaim to be the true ladder on which Our Lord was carried to the Sepulchre, they say that its appearance after so many centuries is proof that what these doctrines say are true. The Lance is death, men say, the Grail is life. It proves that Jesus came back to life in reality, never left this world rather than came back to it. So there is no resurrection, no after-life, no succession of Saint Peter, no Church or need for a Church. Some of those who say that are priests themselves."
The Emperor's face was purpling rapidly, but he was no fool. He realized all this was being said to him for a purpose, not merely to enrage him. Or maybe enraging him was the purpose.
"Well," he said with sudden mildness, "we can stop people saying these things out loud, I suppose. But we want to stop them even thinking about them. I am sure you have an idea how that might be done. Let me hear it."
Erkenbert nodded. They were old allies now, working partners. It was still a relief to him to work for a clear-sighted ruler.
"Two ideas," he said. "One is easy. We need a body of reliable men with no duty other than that of seeking out heresy. They will have to be given powers greater than present law allows. Powers of rope and rack, stake and pit. I suggest we call them the Inquisitio Imperialis, the Imperial Inquisition."
"Agreed," said Bruno immediately. "What's the hard idea?"
"Do you know when Church and Empire first came together? For the Empire of the Romans was at first a pagan one, you know, which persecuted Christians."
Bruno nodded. He remembered the stories of Saint Paul, and how he went to Rome for trial before an Emperor who must have been hostile. It had not struck him that somewhere down the line the Empire must have changed religions, but now that Erkenbert mentioned it, he saw it must be so.
"The first Christian Emperor, you know, was Constantine, who was proclaimed Emperor in my own city of Eboracum—York, as the vile pagans who hold it now call it."
"A good omen," said Bruno confidently.
"It is to be hoped so. What happened was that he was beset by rebels—like you, Emperor—and in the night before a battle he dreamt a dream. In that dream an angel came to him and showed him the holy sign of the Cross, and told him, In hoc signo vinces: 'In this sign thou shalt conquer.' He did not know the meaning of the sign but the next day he ordered his men to put it on their shields, and fought and won the battle. Then, when wise men explained to him the meaning of the sign, he accepted it and the Christian religion, and imposed it on all the Empire. But he did one other thing, Emperor. He made the Donation of Constantine.
"On this document both Church and Empire are built. From it the Church receives authority in this world. From it the Empire receives legitimacy from the world above. That is why Emperors are the Lord's Anointed. And Popes should be the Emperor's creation."
"It sounds a fine thing," said Bruno with a certain skepticism, "but I make Popes without need of a document. And my authority comes from the relics I have recovered—we have recovered. Why do we need this Donation?"
"I think that as well as the Imperial Inquisition we need also a new Donation."
The Emperor's eyebrows rose warningly. He had already seen that this conversation was urging him to put down the troublesome John by force, and lock the College of Cardinals up until they voted in the correct way for his own candidate. Though Erkenbert did not know it—Bruno did not wish the new Pope to have any hand in the disappearance of the old one—he had already sent a strong squadron to deal with Pope John, and firm messages to the wavering Cardinals of Germany that they had better see sense themselves, and bring their Italian colleagues to do the same. But he did not like the idea of donations. The Church was rich enough already.
"It will be a Donation of Church to Empire," said Erkenbert firmly. "Not of Empire to Church. A tenth of the Church's temporal possessions will be handed over, for set purposes. The defeat of the heathen. The stamping out of heresy. War against the followers of the Prophet. War against the schismatics of Byzantium. New warrior-orders to be founded in all the realms of Christendom, not Germany alone. The establishment of the Imperial Inquisition, against rebels and heretics. We will call it the Donation of Simon Peter."
"Simon Peter?" said the Emperor, mind still racing at the implications of what had been said.
"I will take the Papal name of Peter," said Erkenbert firmly. "It has been forbidden to all Popes throughout history since the first. But I will take it not in pride but in humility, as a sign that the Church needs to begin again, cleansed of its weakness and its surfeit. We will find a document in the vaults of the Vatican, in the Catacombs, written by Simon Peter himself and setting out his wish that the Church should be the loyal servant of a Christian Empire."
"Find a document?" repeated Bruno. "But how can we find it if we don't know it's there?"
"I found the Grail, did I not?" said Erkenbert. "You can rely on me to find the Donation of Peter."
He means he's going to fake it, thought Bruno suddenly. That is against every law of God and man. But a tenth of the Church's possessions... Fat monks and idle nuns evicted, their lands made over for the support of warriors... No more counting the Ritters and the Brüderschaft in hundreds... And surely, a pious end may justify impious means.
It's a fraud and he knows it's a fraud, thought Erkenbert. But he's going to go through with it. What he doesn't know is that the Donation of Constantine is a fraud too, any scholar can see it, the Latin is quite of the wrong period for what is claimed. It was written by a Frank, or I am an Italian. How many more documents, I wonder, are frauds? That is the true danger of things like this: he took the heretic booklet from the Emperor's hands, tore it across and threw it carefully into the glowing brazier. They start people thinking about whether books are true. We must stamp that out. Few books, and all those holy ones, that must be our goal. Whether they are true or not—that shall be for me to decide.
The plume of smoke leaking lazily into the air off the port bow held Shef's gaze like a fly struggling to escape the spider. The cruise had gone well, extraordinarily well. The islands of the Mediterranean had been much fought over, but did not seem to have been thoroughly plundered for many years. Perhaps the contestants had been eager only to change the religion of the islanders, not to leave with a profit. The ships in the fleet were low in the water now, not only with renewed food and water, but with church plate, brocades and cloth of unknown dyes.
Most important of all was the tribute exacted from Mallorca and Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera, then Corsica and Sardinia, tribute in gold and silver coins of the Arabs, of the Greeks, of the Franks and the Romans and countries of which Shef had never heard and whose script neither Skaldfinn nor Solomon could recognize. Sicily next, lying only a little to the south, below the island of Vulcan with its smoky mountain? A descent on the Italian mainland? Even Guthmund had been heard to talk of quitting while the going was good, and before the equinoctial gales set in on the long passage home.
Meanwhile there was Steffi to satisfy. He had taken his conversion to the fire-pendant and the Loki-god with great conviction. His conversation was now about nothing but fire, and he had grasped a principle that Shef himself had often stated. There was more knowledge in the world than people realized. Steffi had set himself to find out everything that anyone at all knew about fire and about things that burnt, or lit, or even glowed in the dark. Their Greek captive had been a disappointment. He knew his trade, it was true, and he had told them all he knew of the black oilfields beyond the Black Sea, of the process of draining and refining the stuff that oozed to the surface, fluid and light in the cold, sticky and tar-like in the heat. But though he knew how the trade was carried out he had little curiosity about substitutes, alternatives. They had concealed from him the fact that they had no oilfield in the West as the Greeks had in the East, but without such an alternative they had the half-tank of oil they had captured and no more.
Steffi was not discouraged. He talked to the Greek, to Solomon, to Brand, to Shef, to the fishing boat crews they intercepted, interrogated and released, to his own mates. His monologue continued as he stood in the bows watching the smoke like Shef, but watching it like a lover watching his mistress's window.
"Funny, you know," he repeated. "Once I got asking them you'd think half the fleet knew that if you lit a fire on earth that had been cleaned out of a stable or a cave or whatever, then it burned real fierce. So I asked them what else did that, and they come up with all sorts. Solomon says the Arabs have some stuff like what our Greek calls naphtha, but the Greek says it's different. Solomon says the Arabs used to make fire-bundles out of their stuff, like our flares, but they used to throw them not launch them from a catapult. I'd like to get some of that naphtha, but meanwhile we got fish-oil, we got the saltpeter stuff, we got wax...
"And then one of the lads reminded me of what you get on rotten logs, that glows in the dark, though it doesn't burn. Solomon says that's called phosphor, and he says if you get the real stuff, it burns so hard water can't put it out, you have to scrape it off the skin. The Greek says he's heard of that and they tried mixing it with the oil they use, but it's not safe, they sometimes mix in a kind of resin."
"They put that in the wine too," put in Shef.
"Only because it's what they caulk the barrels with. But resin burns, and so does amber, one of the boys was telling me."
"We can't afford amber flares," said Shef.
Steffi frowned at the levity. "No. But I had another idea. You know that winter ale and winter wine they make at Stamford, where they steam it off and catch the steam? Well, one of the lads had a bit left and I bought it off him. That burns too, burns pretty well. Solomon came up and told me the Arabs did that too, they call it al-kuhl."
"The Arabs can always do everything, if you hear them talk. Fly, make lenses, invent algorism, make fire devices, al-kuhl, al-jabr, al-kimiya, al-qili... Thing is, they never seem to do anything with it." Shef too had listened to Solomon and grown rather tired of it.
"Well, I'd like to get all that stuff, whatever it is, the naphtha and the phosphor and the alcool and all, and the saltpeter, and start mixing it. See what happens. And charcoal too, we all use it, why does it burn better than wood? But most of all I want to see what they've got up there. A fire-mountain, they say. Burning rock. And the smell. Everyone says there's a strange smell comes from the mountain. Sulphur, they call it. But you know something, in the Fens where I come from..."
"Me too," Shef reminded him.
"...we got this thing they call the will o' the wisp. Fires that light and lead you into the swamp. Comes from dead bodies, they say. Well, that smells too. I'm sure we got this saltpeter at home, in barns and piggeries and what not. Maybe we got this sulphur too. I want to see it. Start putting them together."
A pillar of fire by night and a cloud of smoke by day. That was what he had been trying to think of. It was something to do with one of Father Andreas's lessons from the Bible. The Children of Israel escaping from bondage? Father Andreas had said it was an image of the Christian soul seeking heaven. Shef did not think the pillar of smoke they were steering for was the Promised Land, somehow. But Steffi did. Maybe Steffi was the one whose opinion would count.
For some time the fleet had been steering for a fishing-boat running easily under its light lateen sail. It had made no attempt to escape them, the word must have got round that the strangers did no harm to the poor, even paid for news. Indeed the boat was heading towards them, had now rounded and lay easily to leeward. Skaldfinn and Solomon were shouting back and forth, calling one of the fishermen on board. Shef waited for a translation to emerge in good time.
It seemed as if he had said something important. Skaldfinn was coming over with a strange expression on his face.
"He says there's a new Pope in Rome, though the old Pope is not dead. More than that: he says the new Pope is a stranger, an alien, a foreigner. He calls him an Anglus. That's when he spat on the deck and Ordlaf hit him."
"An English Pope?" The word had been heard and was spreading through the crew, with general laughter and derision.
"A little man, not even a priest. The fisherman says he has proclaimed a state of holy war throughout the Empire against all heathen and heretics and unbelievers. Soon, the fisherman says, the Emperor will come with his fleet of fireships and his army of iron men and destroy all those who do not bend the knee to Saint Peter. Then Rome will rule the world."
Fireships, thought Shef. Maybe they are not so far off after all. Nor is Rome now. He remembered unbidden the map his divine patron had shown him months before: the map that centered on Rome. Rig had told him that at Rome his troubles would cease. He had no wish to go there. Like Guthmund, his thoughts were for home.
"My grandfather Ragnar tried to sack Rome once," said Svandis. "He sacked the wrong city by mistake, but believed it was Rome because the plunder was so great."
"If Erkenbert is at Rome preaching holy war and another Crusade, it can only be against us," said Thorvin slowly. "Better to fight in another man's country than in your own."
We have not quite three thousand men in the fleet, thought Shef, the Emperor will have many more. But mine are all picked men, crossbows and catapults and flares and even the Greek fire. They want me to fight again. But I have made my peace with Loki, or so I thought. I want to avert Ragnarök, not bring it about.
"Let's hear what Brand has to say," said Skaldfinn diplomatically.
"All right," Shef replied. "But keep heading for the fire-mountain, for the Vulcan-isle. We'll anchor off it tonight."
Shef lay that night in his hammock in the gently-heaving cabin of the Fafnisbane. He felt as he had felt when the decision was taken to come on this journey to the center of the world, that opinion was against him, was pressing on him. He was being manipulated. They wanted him to find and fight the Emperor. He was not going to do it. He was going to go home, set his land in order, wait for fate and death to come to him in their proper season. Svandis, who lay in a hammock touching his, was pregnant with his child, he felt sure. The glow on her face and in her eyes was not merely that of sun and sea-air, it was the glow of new birth. He had seen it on Godive years before. This time he would see the child born and know it was his.
They would try to persuade him otherwise, he knew. Not just men, but gods. He was braced for the dream that would come, and whether it came from the gods, or his own mind, or from the wolf that grew amid the rye, he did not care. The night was his enemy, and he would face it.
The dream began abruptly, directly. A man hurrying through city streets, in the dark. The man was afraid, bitter afraid, and ashamed at the same time. He was afraid of something he had seen done before. He was ashamed not just because he was afraid, but because he had been afraid before, and given in before, and vowed never to do so again—and yet here he was, scuttling through the streets to get into the open country, to lose himself, to change his name. His name was Peter. Peter who had once been Simon.
As he came to the walls of the city tension increased. There was a gate, and inset in the gate a little door, one that could be slipped open without the ponderous process of lifting the great bars and thrusting back the gates on their rollers. The little door was ajar. But where was the sentry? There. Asleep, head thrown back. His spear, the Roman infantry weapon that Shef had held in his hands as the Holy Lance, was propped between his thighs. No one else around, the guard-hut shut and lightless. Creeping forward like a shadow, Peter who had been Simon and longed to be Simon again set hands on the door, inched it open waiting for the betraying creak. None came. He was through, the walls behind him, life and safety ahead of him. Just like me, thought the Shef-mind.
There was a shape in front of him. He had known there would be. A human shape, but round its head a crown of thorns. It moved forward, shedding a pale corpse-light around it. Its eyes looked down on the cringing disciple. "Petre, quo vadis?" it said. Peter, where are you going?
Tell him, the Shef-mind urged. Tell him you're escaping! Tell him he isn't even dead, the whole thing's a mistake, he's alive and well and living with Mary Magdalene in the mountains! Writing a book!
The Peter-figure had fallen back, was returning to the door, shoulders drooped. Going back to the city, to Rome, to arrest and death and crucifixion. He would ask to be crucified upside-down, Shef recalled, as unworthy of the same death as the Savior he had betrayed. That won't work, Shef thought. You can say quo vadis? to me as long as you like.
Another picture, flicked into shape like a screen being thrust in front of the eyes. Another man set on flight, but asleep this time. In his dream he saw, not the Christ-figure of the previous vision but the Peter-figure. But not shamefaced and drooping this time, rather stern, majestic, a grim look in his eyes. He was shouting, though Shef could not hear what he said. In his hand he held a scourge, the monastic disciplina, a whip with many cords and knots tied into every one. He stepped forward, knocked the sleeping man's eidolon down with one bony fist, tore his robe from his back, began to strike again and again with the disciplina, blood springing out as the man rebuked struggled and cried out.
The scene vanished and Shef found himself once more looking into the eyes of his patron. Clever, foxy eyes.
"I don't do that kind of thing," remarked Rig. "If you want to shirk your duty, go ahead. I will not deceive you into obedience, or beat you into it. I just want you to see what shirking will mean."
"So show me. You're going to anyway."
Shef was braced for immediate horror, but it did not come. He saw his own city, his own foundation of Stamford. There was the Wisdom House, there its accumulation of workshops and forges and storehouses. Bigger than he remembered them, older, lichen encrusted on the grey stones. Silently, without explanation, the Wisdom House sprang apart. A flash, a crack that he knew would have been ear-splitting if there had not been some barrier between him and the substance of the dream, a cloud of smoke rising and in the smoke stones arcing up into the sky.
As they came down Shef saw what was going on in the ruins. Soldiers everywhere, wearing white surcoat and red cross: Crusaders, such as King Charles and Pope Nicholas had once brought against him. But these soldiers were not wearing the heavy mail and horsemen's boots of the Frankish knights, or the Emperor's Lanzenritter. They were lightly dressed, moved quickly, carried only long tubes in their hands.
"Freedom for Loki as well as for Thor," said Rig. "Well and good. But whose side will Loki be on? Or stay on? Naphtha and phosphor, sulphur and saltpeter, alcohol and charcoal. Others besides Steffi can put two and two together. Or one and one and one. In the end Church and Empire united will win. Not in your time. But you will live your life knowing it will happen—and that you could have averted it. I will see to that."
Shef lay dumb and defiant. "Let me show you some more," the clever voice continued. "Here is the new city."
A marvel slowly opened before Shef's closed eyes. A white city, with shining walls, and in the heart of it a cluster of spires reaching towards heaven. On every spire a banner, on every banner a device of holiness: Crossed Keys, Closed Book, Saint Sebastian and his arrows, Saint Lawrence and his gridiron. Beneath the spires, Shef knew, lay a multitude of men whose duty it was to praise the Lord and study the Bible. It was not his Bible, but the yearning for such a life, of contemplation and study, of peace and tranquility, swept over him like hunger. Tears began to spill from his shut eyelids, at what he did not have.
"Look closer," said the voice.
In the lecture-rooms stood men reading from their books. The students listened. They wrote nothing. Their duty was to remember. As the lectures finished the lecturers went to a central room, handed over their books. They were counted, checked against a list, placed in an iron chest, the key turned. Safely stored, till next time. In the whole city no man owned a book for himself alone. No man wrote a new word, or thought a new thought. The smiths beat out what they were told to, as their ancestors had done before them. The itch Shef so often felt, to hold a hammer, to beat out an answer for a question in his brain: that itch would remain unappeased for ever.
"It is the Skuld-world," said Rig. "Where Loki is freed at last to serve the Church, and then cast into ever stricter bonds, till he too withers away from starvation. And the world remains the same, from one eon to the next. Ever-holy, never-changing. Every book become a Bible. Your monument, your legacy.
"And if I fight?" asked Shef. "Will Loki be with me instead? Will he weep for Balder and release his brother from Hel? What will that look like?"
In an instant the limited sight of a single city faded, expanded to become an image of the Nine Worlds of which Middle-earth is only one. Shef could see the dark-elves below the earth and the light-elves above it, could see Bifrost bridge that leads to Asgarth and the Giallar-bridge that takes the souls down to Hel. All was—not dark, but weathered, stained somehow, as if all seen through a dusty glass. Somewhere deep down Shef could hear a massive creaking, a noise of rusty machinery forced open, forced into life.
It was the Grind opening. The Grind-gate that separates the dead from the living, the metal lattice through which Shef had once seen the shapes of the child and the women whose bane he had been. Through which the slave-woman Edtheow had urged him to go on. The Grind was opening for Balder. And not just Balder. Once it was open, Shef knew, the souls might come back. Be born again in their descendants, live the happy lives that had been robbed from them. The slave-girls he had found in the old king's mound, buried alive with their backs broken. The old woman whose death he had once shared, as she strove above all to die unnoticed. Edtheow who had died in the wolf-waste, and the poor slave dying of cancer in the Norse village far from her home. Cuthred. Karli. The child Harold.
As the gate opened something leaked from it. Not light, not color, but something that seemed to wipe the dust away, to restore to the world the light and the color that it should have had. There was a noise inside, a noise of laughter and a great clear voice calling others to share new life with him. Balder the Beautiful. Coming to make the new world, the new world that should always have been, Shef was aware from the corner of one eye that all the Asgarth gods were staring at him, Thor with his red beard and fierce face, Othin with the face like a calving glacier. And standing next to Othin, Loki the traitor-god, the exile-god, now standing once again next to his father. Waiting for his brother to be released from Hel. Released by a victory. And by a sacrifice.
Shef was awake once more and lying in his hammock, tears still wet on his face. He did not come round with the familiar heart-wrenching shock and outcry, rather with one deep indrawn breath. I'll have to do it, he thought. There are too many lives on my soul already. To have them out, to give them another chance. Not much chance for me, though. Will I be released as well? Or am I the sacrifice for the others? He put a hand out, rested it on Svandis's warm hip. That is what I am giving up. In the dark night he knew with complete certainty that no-one would make the sacrifice for him, remembered with wry fellow-feeling the cry he had once heard from Christ on his cross: Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani.
My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?
Tolman was signaling frantically from the end of his five-hundred-foot line. Closing warily on Ostia, the port of Rome, in double line abreast, the Wayman fleet had developed the habit of keeping a kite always aloft and floating out to leeward. The hundred yards of extra height that Tolman had at the end of his line increased his horizon by miles, gave them needed reassurance. No one had managed however to work out a way by which Tolman could pass on what he saw, other than by waving colored cloth—white for any sail, blue for land, red for danger. Specifically, for the red galleys and the Greek fire. It was red this time.
The winchmen were hauling him in already, with no need for the order. No need to bring him all the way in, he would go aloft again as soon as he had spoken. Barely fifty feet above the Fafnisbane, the kiteboy hung in the wind, a stiff one-reef breeze with a hint of oncoming chill about it.
"The galleys!" he shouted.
"Where?"
"In the harbor. In a long line, other side of the right-hand harbor-wall. Moored."
"How many of them?"
"All of them."
Shef waved a hand, the kitemen reeled out, sent Tolman slanting back to his position. Shef looked round, calculated the distance to the wall that marked the entrance to the harbor of Ostia. Two miles, he thought. They were making seven knots by Ordlaf's log-line. Would that give the galleys time to man the oars, light their braziers, steer to meet him? If every man was ready in place already and they had seen him at the same time as Tolman saw them. He thought not. Shef looked at Hagbarth and Ordlaf waiting for orders in his own ship, looked across at Hardred in the Wada leading the parallel column fifty yards to windward, and pointed firmly to the harbor-mouth. The galleys had caught him by surprise once, in the open sea. Now he would reverse the roles.
As they raced in under sail, the ships shook into their attack formation. The mule-carriers in the lead, in a single file as close as seamanship could make it, the longships to the left of the line and to windward. If Shef had misjudged and the enemy met them with streams of fire, then the Vikings at least ought to be able to turn and escape. But the mules should have done the business before that was necessary.
"Wind Tolman in," Shef ordered as the harbor-mouth opened up in front of them. Tolman was still pointing firmly to the right, relieving Shef of the fear of sudden attack from an unexpected quarter. Cwicca in the forward mule-emplacement was behind the sights, training his weapon round with every heave of the bows, keeping it fixed on the very lip of the harbor-wall. What was on the other side? A galley already heading for them? If there were, she would be sunk in moments. Her fire could be launched in less than moments. As the wall came up, close enough now to be reached by a stone-throw, Shef left his place by the steering-oar and walked forward to the mule-platform in the prow. If the fire was there, the king must face it first.
As the Fafnisbane's bow nudged through the fifty-yard gap Shef saw Cwicca drop his hand. The release-man jerked the lanyard, the mule-arm smashed up, as always too fast to see, the sling on its end whirling round like a demented bowler. Shef heard a crash of timber, waited for agonizing moments as the Fafnisbane cruised on and brought the inner wall of the harbor into his vision. Then, relief like cold water. The nearest galley was thirty yards away, still moored bow and stern. There were men aboard her, and arrows flicked from her as he watched, zipping into planking, one into a shield hastily thrust in front of him. But no smoke, no roaring of bellows. They had been taken by surprise.
The first galley was already settling by the head, moored as she was, prow and keel broken by the first mule-stone. Shef ran back hastily to the stern platform, pointed out the second ship, ordered Osmod to hold his release till the widening angle gave him a clean shot. As ship after ship of the Wayman fleet poured through the harbor entrance, they swung into a long curving line, headed by Fafnisbane and Wada, and poured a rain of mule-stones on to the galleys lined up as if for target-practice against the wall, just beyond weak arrow-shot.
Shef let them shoot on and on till his enemies were all but kindling wood, prows and sterns dangling from the mooring ropes but between them more smashed planking, with here and there a glint of copper. There was no resistance from the galleys. Shef saw men running from them—astonishingly few, he judged. Such opposition as there was came from Steffi, who seized his king's arm again and again, begging for the stones to stop, for permission to take a party ashore and seize the siphons and fuel-tanks of the enemy. Shef shook him off absently each time like a heifer shrugging off a horsefly. It was beginning to look as if the enemy fleet had simply not been manned. But he would take no risks for Steffi's curiosity.
He raised both hands finally in the "Cease shooting" order, turned to Ordlaf. "We'll moor over there, by the wall, where it's clear. Four ships abreast. Then we can start getting the men and the supplies off. Well, Steffi?"
Steffi's eyes were genuinely full of tears, he was begging now, imploring. "Only twenty men, lord king, twenty men for the time it'll take to moor and unload. That's all I ask. They're sunk now, but there may be something we can salvage, one tank of oil full and not split by those stones, that would do for me."
A memory came back to Shef of himself on the walls of York, begging Brand in similar style for twenty men to retrieve a catapult, to see how it worked. Brand had refused him, ordered him to join in the sack of the city instead. There had been no sack, but now he was the incurious one, fixed on his own purposes.
"Twenty men," he agreed. "But have them ready to march as soon as the others."
Farman was by his side, eyes wide and unblinking as if he saw something far off. "Will you take every man with you?" he asked.
"I will leave a guard on the ships, naturally."
"I will stay with them, then," said the seer. "You have men of war enough."
No time to argue or enquire. Shef nodded agreement, turned his attention to the problem of getting his army ashore and his fleet secured. There seemed to be almost no-one at Ostia, certainly no hint of resistance. The few Greeks that had been with the fleet had fled. Shef removed the gold bracelets from one arm, held them temptingly in his hand, called Cwicca and three crossbows up as bodyguards, and walked towards the nearest huddle of huts by the dockside. Surely greed would bring him news. Not that he needed to know much about his goal. This was Ostia, and fifteen miles off was Rome. Reach it, sack it, kill the English Pope. Even trying to do that would bring down on him the Emperor, and then their long dispute would be settled. The strange thing was that Shef could not bring his imagination to think of the charismatic Bruno losing. Perhaps he was already fey, as the English said, already gripped by the paralysis of approaching death. He walked towards the huts, waving the gold and a plucked-up weed in sign of peace.
The Emperor of the Romans received the news of his ally's fleet's destruction in a Rome bearing the marks of his own heavy hand. Smoke rose in a plume into the sky behind the Capitoline Hill, was blown away on the rising wind. Bodies lay unburied in the streets: the loafers and gutter-rats of Rome had been able to put up little resistance to his heavy-armed troopers. They had their bludgeons and cobblestones and cart-barricades, and they had tried, defending their Pope against an alien interloper, and they had paid the price. Neither the City nor the Church of Rome had gained anything so far from the Emperor of Rome sworn to their protection.
Just for the time being, thought Bruno. "Cheer up, man," he added to the Greek admiral Georgios as he saw the latter's stunned expression. "Time to rebuild your fleet this winter. Your Emperor will not lose by it, you have my word."
Cheer up? thought Georgios. All my galleys sunk in one morning, destroyed like so many Arab fleets. My marines committed to street-fighting against guttersnipes for an alien Emperor. And the secret of the Greek fire—surely that is not lost. Yet it might be. The man is mad.
The best of his advisers looked thoughtful, Bruno realized. For Georgios there might be reason enough. But Agilulf too... His spirits rose in perverse opposition to their mood.
"All right," he said. "They caught us unawares down at Ostia. We are still having a little trouble with the city scum. Pope John keeps escaping my hand. Now, listen. None of that matters. Does it, Erkenbert, Your Holiness? Remember what Arno the chaplain used to say. You have to find the Schwerpunkt in any campaign, the bit that is important. There is only one thing important here, only one thing that has ever been important now that we have the Grail. That is to defeat my enemy the One King once and for all. If we do that, everything becomes easy. The city will be under control in a week. John will be brought in by some traitor. The fleet can be rebuilt. But if we don't do it..."
"All the others will be on our backs," summed up Agilulf, "and we will fall apart too." He said the last words with a sideways squint at Georgios. Agilulf had not forgotten who had lashed him and his men with fire, nor believed Georgios's explanation of an unfortunate accident.
"But we will do it," said Erkenbert. Pope Peter II, as he now styled himself. He had not yet shed his faded black robe, traded it for Papal robes. The true regalia had not been recovered, nor had his accession to the apostolic throne been anything but a rushed and irregular affair, attended by a bare third of the College of Cardinals. Yet the Emperor was right. The Cardinals could be convened again, the regalia recovered or remade. Given victory.
"I am ready to put the papacy aside and return to my duties as comrade in the army of the Emperor," Erkenbert went on. "War-wolf's successors are ready. They will take the field as soon as ordered."
"How can we use a siege-train against a marching army?" asked Agilulf.
"Who knows?" replied the Emperor. "We are not facing an ordinary man, never forget that, any of you. He has tricked every enemy he has faced. Tricked me, even. But he did not trick me out of the Grail, in the end. We must be as tricky as he is. Thank you, Your Holiness. If every man in my army had your heart, victory would be assured."
"Victory is assured," said Erkenbert. "In hoc signo vinces, in this sign you will conquer." Through the broken window of the plundered villa he pointed to the banner with its device of the graduale worked on it, planted above the golden reliquary that now housed the Grail itself. Four Ritters stood forever around it, fully armed, swords drawn, emblems of the new Church Militant and the Donation of Peter.
That is the enemy's sign too, thought Agilulf. Two sides with the same sign. Two clever leaders. Two, maybe three thousand real men on each side, and God knows how many dross as well on ours. This is a battle it will take very little to decide.
The Wayman army tramped steadily along the great stone road that led from the port to the City of Rome itself, center of the world. The men's cries of mirth and astonishment had died as the march continued, their spirits dashed by the immense size of the stone blocks that lined the road, the stone houses on every hillside, the air that the country wore of great age and strength long gone by. They had seen Stamford, and it was a mere village in comparison. They had seen Cordova too, and it was no village but a metropolis that dwarfed even Rome for numbers and trade and wealth. Cordova, though, had been a village while Rome ruled the world. There was a sense that every spade turned in this land would bring up the dust of greatness.
The men were bunching in their nervousness, Shef thought. He had sent a hundred Vikings forward under Guthmund, always eager to be first to any chance of loot. He had meant them to keep off the road, investigate the side ways for ambush. There were too many hedges, too many walls. In the strong sunlight they had reverted to the middle of the road, were walking along in an armed gaggle a mere hundred yards before the crossbows escorting his catapult-train. When the sun had moved another hand's breadth he would call a rest halt, change the formation.
On the hill to his right, trumpets blew. Others answered from the left. An ambush, on the long winding trail of men and machines? He hoped so. Any ambush from the flanks would have to cross furlongs of rough ground under five hundred ready crossbows.
The light horsemen burst instead from an olive grove a bare fifty yards in front of the Viking advance guard. Shef had barely time to see them, to note the wide-brimmed hats, the long ten-foot goads of the Camargue cowboys, dragged from home by the Emperor's edict, when the goads dropped from the vertical to the charge, and all vanished in an instant pall of dust.
The Vikings were surprised but not dismayed. In instants swords were drawn, axes shifted to the striking hand. Automatically the loose straggle of the march shifted to a narrow front of raised shields and poised javelins. The cowboys made no effort to charge home but swerved and pounded down each flank. From the column of barebacked horses the goads darted, flicking at face or throat. Men screamed, reeled back into their messmates. The two columns of horses swerved round behind the footmen in a bewildering criss-cross, darted back, goads stabbing again at the weak points in the shaken line, at men still facing the wrong way, shaking their weapons and crying their war-cries to defy an enemy to stand foot to foot.
Crossbowmen had cocked their weapons, were running forward to find a place to shoot, running forward further in the hope of getting through the dust. Shef saw one kneel, take careful aim at a horseman curvetting twenty yards in front of him. The horseman slipped from his seat—he had no saddle—hung to the other side of his horse by mane and ankle. As the crossbowman shifted aim to bring down horse if not rider, another screaming Centaur burst from the dust, speared him between the shoulders, dipped the goad to clear the point and swept away, clearing a wall like a hunted stag and disappearing among the trees.
The trumpets blared again from either side, and men faced hastily in all directions. Nothing happened. Through the silence Shef could hear the wheezing noise of a man speared through the lungs. The dust settled on bodies lying in the road. Not many, a dozen, and as many more with their mates bending over them assessing the depth of a thrust. No sign of the enemy. Not a man or a horse left behind, and hardly a bolt shot at them or a blow struck. They could do it again any time. Shef began to shout orders to rally and re-organize his formations.
A long, hot delay on the dusty road while the wounded were loaded onto mules or carts, and the column began to move forward again. Shef had thought a little harder about the ambush problem. He had eight hundred crossbows, mixed in with another three hundred English halberdiers as close support, more trusted by the crossbowmen than their Viking allies. There were perhaps a thousand of the Vikings, heavy infantry of the sort that had decided so many battlefields before the coming of the Way to England. All the mules had been left aboard ship, their ton-and-a-quarter weight making Shef reluctant to move them unknown distances. Instead a dozen of the torsion dart-throwers, the weapons the Waymen called twist-shooters, trundled along behind their mule pairs, crews marching alongside. And then there was Steffi's gang. Shef was no longer sure what they had with them, for they seemed to have become more and more secretive with the establishment of their own pendant and trade. They certainly had half a dozen catapults of the old lobbing traction type, knocked down into beams and rope for easy transport. No use on the march, but they had to be protected just the same.
The column moved forward now with a solid body of crossbowmen at the front, interspersed with halberdiers. More crossbows moved to the flanks, causing continual halts as they negotiated the walls of private villas and the gullies that occasionally ran in culverts under the stone road. In the center of the column, marching rather sullenly under the unwonted slur of needing protection, the Viking sword- and axe-men straggled along either side of the mule-train. If the cowboys came again, Shef reckoned, the crossbows would empty a few saddles as they charged and many more as they retreated. The halberds would hold off light horse, at least.
The cowboys did not come again. The column breasted a slight slope, began to move down at a quicker pace: and there, in the middle distance, Shef saw the shining walls of the Eternal City, a cluster of hills seemingly covered with stone buildings, spires and domes catching the sun. As he gaped into the distance, his eye caught the sudden, familiar, rising and falling streak of an onager stone. No time to guess where it was going. Shef threw himself instantly sideways off the road, rolling painfully on stone, straightening up on bleeding knees to see where the stone had gone. A puff of dust still hanging in the air thirty yards ahead of him, stone chips flying where the rock had broken up on the stone surface of the road. But in front of it, a lane beaten through the marching crossbows, five deep, men lying to either side of it, one struggling to look down at a caved-in chest which would kill him in moments. As the survivors stared in shock at the men smashed down, Shef saw another lane open, and another, men going down like stalks before the sickle. And still they were staring around, some of them cocking crossbows uncertainly against an unseen foe. Shef ran towards them, shrieking at them to spread out, move off the road, lie down, get behind walls. As they did so another flying twenty-pound rock shattered the road surface, sending splinters flying. Twenty, thirty men down already and still no-one had seen the enemy. But there they were, Shef could see the battery set up half a mile off on the side of the hill, the men moving unconcernedly round their machines, winding ropes and training round. They would shoot again in a moment. Shef ducked as another boulder hummed by, pitched well up this time. Behind him the mule teams were scattering off the road, Vikings were crouched in undignified positions behind trees and walls.
There they were all right. Shef focused his far-seer, caught a clear image of the men round the machines. He could not see Erkenbert, as he had half-expected. But he must have trained many men by now to take his place. How to get to them? His only weapons with the range to reach them were the twist-shooters. They would do, better against men than against machines. Shef shouted back, saw the catapult-teams unharness the mules, run their weapons, round, start the slow business of winding and aiming. And while they were doing that... As stones hummed over his head, the onagers concentrating now on the dart-throwers, Shef ran forward to his shaken crossbows, shouting.
For long moments they would not move, obeying the instinctive fear of missiles flying from a distance. Get down, don't move, crawl away. Shef shouted, kicked a man to his feet, appealed to their honor and their pride. The sight of one man on his feet without being instantly knocked down restored some sense, reminded them of the mules' doubtful accuracy against single person targets. In a shambling run the crossbows began to move forward. Shef shouted at them not to keep running. Run ten steps, twenty, get down while another ran, when he took cover run forward again. Don't run straight. Make it impossible for anyone to take a steady aim.
From the hillside to one side of the onagers, Erkenbert and his Emperor watched the hastily-organized attack. To them it looked as if the slope facing them was covered with swarming ants, no one of them moving steadily onward, but the whole mass continually edging closer. Meanwhile the missiles of the catapults flew backward and forward. One of Erkenbert's crew was hurled backwards, spine shattered by the five-foot flying dart. A twist-thrower, hit square on by a mule-stone, flew to pieces, its overwound ropes lashing at arms and faces.
"I saw him there for a moment or two," commented Bruno. "Pity he didn't stand long enough for your men to get a shot at him. That would settle this immediately."
"As would your death," replied Erkenbert.
"He hasn't even seen me yet."
Crossbow bolts at extreme range were beginning to clatter among the rocks round the onager battery. The winders were flinching, looking behind them. No way to hitch up a ton-weight onager and drive it out of trouble, Shef thought, not in a hurry. If he pressed on he could capture the whole battery, maybe they had not expected instant attack.
Or maybe they had. They had determined everything else about this battle so far. With a fear so deep it was like a spasm in his breast, Shef remembered King Charles the Bald and how he had pressed on and on in an attempt to capture machines temptingly waved in front of him. Now he was doing the same. But it was his enemy, this time, who knew the ground and had a plan, he who was thrusting forward confident in superior weaponry.
"Hold it," he shouted, "steady, close up and shoot. Stop running!" His voice reached only those nearest to him, the rest saw their enemies wavering, rushed on to close with them and take revenge for their fear.
"That'll do," remarked Bruno, and nodded to his trumpeter. Out of the dead ground between crossbows and onagers, from behind olive groves and villa walls, came the heavy horse which were the glory of the Imperial army, mail gleaming, steel hooves striking sparks from the stone, lance-points lowered. Each group drove straight for their enemies, making no attempt to form a concerted line. Their charge came home from no more than fifty yards, five terrified heartbeats to an unarmored man charged by war-stallions.
Shef, a little behind the rashest of the crossbows, saw them stop, hesitate, and then almost to a man turn and run, leaping from side to side on the stony hillside to avoid the lances behind them. One man dropped to one knee, swung up his crossbow. As he pulled trigger a lance struck him, lifted him off the ground, the bolt flying straight up in the sky. The lancers came on with the skill of men in the saddle from childhood, lances driving, then as they broke or remained fixed in sprawling bodies, whirling broadswords from the scabbards on their saddles. Shef realized suddenly that one rider had singled him out as a target. Their eyes met, and then the horse was leaping towards him, foam flecking its muzzle as the rider drove home the long spiked spurs. Shef groped for a crossbow, reached towards his belt, realized that he was once again unarmed except for a belt-knife. Running was a disgrace, he would be hacked down from behind, a laughingstock to the future. Try to dodge the blow?
An arm thrust him stumbling aside, a broad metal-clad back filled his view. It was Styrr, run gasping up in the heat from the Viking column behind. The Frank—he did not wear the Lance of a Lanzenritter on his shield—swerved his charger with knee-pressure alone to pass Styrr on his right, sword high for the downstroke. As he did so Styrr's own right arm swung with terrible force, the axe-blow with all a man's weight concentrated and flung with hatred behind the iron head. Aimed at the horse—not the rider. The chunk of cleaver on butcher's block and the lancer was falling forwards over his horse's head, rolling in a ball and coming up at Shef's very feet. Without thought Shef hit him with clenched fist on the side of the jaw, as the long-dead Karli had shown him in the swamps of the Ditmarsh. As the lancer staggered back Styrr freed a blade, stabbed him in the back of the neck, turned instantly to face any new foe.
The hillside was clear again, horsemen vanished as if they had been sorcerers' illusions. Back into cover. As Shef looked around to see what had happened an onager stone passed his head so close the displaced air snapped his neck back. All too fast, he thought dazedly. Before one thing's settled another's started.
Styrr grunted as he tried to free his axe from where it was buried deep in the war-horse's skull, grunted again, worked a corner free and dragged it loose. He looked at the blade with concern, then grinned.
"Never done that before," he said. "What's next?" The Vikings, Shef remembered, could be beaten but never panicked. He looked round, began once more to call out orders. One thing was clear. He would advance no further into a maze of traps. The question was, could he now disengage?
The well is poisoned," said Hund.
Shef stared at him, stared down into the bucket Hund had just examined. Green slime caked the bucket, the water was filthy. That did not matter, he could drink it. He had thought he was about to die of thirst when he reached the village of the heretics, had refused to drink. This was worse. There was no pride involved, it was water, it looked all right...
Hund dashed the bucket from his hands, looked at him with bitter enmity. "Poisoned, I said! And if it is bad for you, what about my wounded?"
Shef passed a tongue over dry lips. It was night already. The whole long afternoon and short evening had been a struggle over baking dust and stone, they had rallied round a hilltop villa which must have its own well. As had happened every time that day, the enemy had thought quicker. He did not know if it was a dead man down the well or something more certain, poison berries maybe. He had to take Hund's word. He had to have water. There was a train of wounded lying ominously quiet. Styrr, who had saved his life, was looking at him in silence. Styrr could resist heat and thirst less well than most men. Outside the night was filled with a deafening chorus of crickets from the olive trees: sound enough to cover any ambush. That was what the enemy wanted.
Brand was propelling someone forward, an old man, a greybeard. There was always someone, Shef remembered Brand telling him, who decided to stay put no matter what threat was coming.
"Ask him where the nearest water is," he ordered. "Skaldfinn, translate."
The chatter that followed sounded like Church Latin to Shef. These were, he supposed, the degenerate descendants of the ancient Romans, still speaking their language, but badly, if not as badly as the French.
"He says, in the aqueduct at the bottom of the hill. It comes from Rome, which is fed by its own aqueducts."
"What's an aqueduct?"
"Like a canal, only made of brick or stone."
Did the greybeard stay behind out of folly or weakness, Shef wondered, or was he left to tell me just that? He will lie. I need to know the truth. Ragnar, Ivar's father, Svandis's grandfather, he knew how to deal with people like this, Cuthred once told me. I wonder if I can do it myself?
He stepped over to the old man, jerked him to his knees, shoved a thumb firmly into the corner of one eye. Ragnar used to grow his right thumb-nail long for just this purpose, he remembered dully. Must have made the job easier. He used to gouge one out before he asked a question, just to show he meant it. I can't quite do that.
"Tell him I will have his eyes unless he can tell me why I should trust him," he said, voice flat.
"How can he make you believe that?" answered Skaldfinn.
"I don't know. That's for him to work out."
The old man was weeping now, he could feel the tears under his thumb, tightened his grip a fraction to compensate as the gabble went on. Hund was staring at him, face twisted with hatred, hand ready for a grab to save the old man, but unable to do it without risking a slip. Svandis was there too, looking uncertain—she boasted often enough about her grandfather, let her see what it was really like. Brand's eyebrows were raised. Styrr was grinning.
"He says there is no better place, but the Emperor's soldiers will be waiting, he heard them talking, not all are Germans. I think he's telling the truth," Skaldfinn added. "He's not trying to lay a trap. He's telling us the trap's there."
Shef let the old man drop to the floor. Today he had done everything wrong. Time to make up for it.
"We'll get the water," he said. "Find Steffi, and Cwicca, and Osmod."
"Nothing for us Norsemen to do?" asked Styrr huskily.
"Business for Loki," Shef replied.
"What have you got that we can use?" Shef demanded. No-one spoke more words than they had to now. Their throats were too dry.
"Plenty of flares," replied Steffi. "We improved them. The last lot, I had to light them and then hold them, you remember. Now we know that rope soaked in a solution of that saltpeter stuff burns well and doesn't go out in flight."
"What else?"
"I've been trying to make kind of—Greek fire balls, that we can throw, not squirt."
"Do they work?"
"I can't get them to spray out when they land. But they'll set anything on fire, and water doesn't put them out, just spreads the flame. They're made of bark, with sulphur and saltpeter, and soaked in the Greek oil. All sewn into waxed cotton. Fuses to set them off."
"That'll do." Shef coughed again as the dust settled on his throat. Outside the slope leading down to the aqueduct was pitch dark, no moon as yet. Trees and walls and the shacks of the poor gave cover. He had no doubt the enemy were waiting there for their break out. Shef started to husk out his instructions.
As the wounded were assembled, walking or on stretchers, the sentries watching the other sides of the camp called back, Cwicca's catapult teams set to work. No need for silence, but little wish to talk. The twist-shooters were set up in a rough arc facing downslope and angled right, towards the sea. Behind them Steffi had set up his pull-throwers. On the word his men began to lob the prepared fireballs down the hill, down the hill and to the right. On Shef's instructions, only every third missile was a fireball, the other two rocks from the supply train or from the villa's rock garden.
"We won't hit anyone except by accident," Steffi protested.
"They don't know that."
"We'll have none left to throw later."
"We're leaving them behind in any case."
Steffi protested no longer. His teams hurled the stones out into the blackness, to crash and clatter away down the hill. Amongst them the fireballs made no noise, emitting just the faint red streak of the glowing fuse as they flew away. As the barrage continued and nothing happened, no response from the dark, no cries or orders or counter-missiles, the watching crossbowmen began to mutter nervously.
Behind a wall Agilulf listened to the stones whistling down around him. None had so far come within twenty yards of where he stood. He did not understand what was happening. That, he knew now, was the dangerous time. What were those glints of light through the air? Fireflies? He could face steel, but not flame again. The Emperor should have remembered that.
Steffi nudged Shef and indicated a sudden crackle of fire a hundred yards off. The first fuse had reached the fireball-core. In the light of the flames a tree sprang out, looking as if it were leaning over to the blaze. A branch caught, fire beginning to run back from its twigs to the main trunk. There were more sparkles of fire here and there in the dark now, and they were springing up faster than they could be counted. Such wind as there was was blowing up the valley. Anyone between the fire and the Waymen would have to retreat in their direction.
Suddenly a black shape moved, the first time they had seen a sign of life out there. His Ritter helmet showed up clearly in silhouette. Then it was gone, and Shef shouted angrily at the twist-shooter teams for missing a target. But just as the flames had appeared out of nothing, so all at once the hillside was beginning to crawl with movement. Men forced out of their ambush places, men trying to duck through the gaps in the fire to reach the other side, even men, Shef saw, stepping forward to try to beat out the blazes before they got established. Beating them and scattering them, not putting them out.
To the crackle of flame and the noise of the crickets were added the sharp snap of crossbow releases, the heavier twang of the torsion dart-throwers shooting off their heavy missiles at what was for them point-blank range. Shef could see men falling now, or writhing, but some trick of the air kept him from hearing any human noise above the increasing roar of flame. The men dying and twisting were like a shadow play on the walls of a hut.
Shef tapped Brand sharply on the shoulder, jerked a thumb. Move now. Brand led his sixty men, two ships' crews, sharply and directly down the hill. A squad of crossbows followed immediately, then another body of Vikings, all the contingents told off to follow in set order. It was tempting to angle left, away from the flames. Shef had ordered them not to do it. Head into the flames as near as you can. The ones who should stop you will have moved and been shot or fled. Get downhill as fast as you can before you too are silhouetted against the fire.
The men were pouring down slope now, even the stretcher bearers moving at a jolting run over the uneven ground. It was the thought of water, Shef realized, more than any new obedience. Steffi's men had shot off their missiles, stood uncertainly by their catapults.
"Take them apart and carry them?" Steffi pleaded. "Just two of them?"
Shef shoved him on his way. "Leave the catapults. Carry your fire-gear if you can. Move."
The twist-shooters were still keeping up good practice, as the flames lit up a wider and wider area. The easy targets had gone, fallen to the crossbows, but there were still men moving. Did they think they were out of range? They were trying to help their own wounded, Shef realized, running to them to drag them out of the path of the spreading fires. Shef stepped to a machine, pointed to a man trying to crawl out of a tangle of scrub already alight. Sure enough, two men ran in to help him, he could see white faces turning towards him. They were not losing many men down there, Shef thought, but they were being hit out of the dark by men they could not see. A slight movement of the trail, another thick twang, one of the rescuers was hurled aside as if by a giant's finger, the other stumbled grotesquely and turned sideways for an instant. The watchers could see the giant dart driven clean through both thighs. The would-be rescuer fell back into the blaze just as it reached the man he had been trying to rescue.
Shef felt a fierce joy. He slapped Cwicca on the back, jerked a thumb to say "Move." No time to harness up the mules, but the wheeled twist-shooters were easier to handle than Steffi's machines. Without orders Cwicca's gangs seized them by the trails, ran them jolting and bouncing down the hill. With them ran the last squad of crossbows and halberdiers assigned as rearguard. All of them running at full pelt down the slope, Shef in their midst, weapons ready for someone to try to spring the ambush. The ambush that had already been sprung.
A clash of blows in the dark as a few Lanzenbrüder closed with their enemies instead of falling back behind the flame. They were coming out of the light into the dark, never saw the bolts or blades that cut them down. And then there was the aqueduct, a long line of stone four feet high, with behind it the blessed smell of water. Shef's men poured over the wall, their chief among them, and ignored pursuit as they buried their faces in the cold and gently-running stream.
As he pulled his face up at long last, Shef saw Brand looming over him. "Which way?" he said curtly.
Shef looked for the first time at the aqueduct. The stream itself, built to supply the rich merchants' villas along the Ostia road with purer water than the polluted Tiber, was no more than six feet broad, much of it roofed over with slabs of stone to cut evaporation in the heat. Not all of it, though. He could not take the wheeled machines along it. There was a walkway either side, but barely wide enough for two men, no room again for carts or machines. What Shef wanted above all was to get back to his ships, abandon this failed attack.
Something told him that would not work, the same fighting instinct that had made him keep them shooting down wounded men. This fight would be to a finish now. If he fell back they would pursue him and destroy him. One end of the aqueduct led to Rome, about the other he had no idea. The god had told him—what was it? He would find his peace in Rome. Peace in death, maybe. So be it.
"That way," he said, pointing left. "Get them moving fast. Cwicca, ditch those machines."
Cwicca had nursed his machines over a thousand miles of travel. The machines were what had raised him from slavery. He began automatically to argue with his master, as he had done, to the astonishment of King Alfred, so many times before. This time Shef was past the point of tolerance. As the gap-toothed man began to expostulate, Shef, afraid and overstrained, stepped forward and hit him squarely in the mouth.
"Move," he shouted. "Or I'll have you back in a collar like you were before." His old comrade spat blood, pulled loose another tooth, gaped at it incredulously. Turned to obey the order.
"All masters are the same in the end," remarked one of his mates, hacking at the ropes to make the dart-thrower at least temporarily useless. Cwicca did not reply. In the darkness Tolman and the three boys with him hesitated over their bundles of cloth and canes and rope. Light enough for boys to carry, but a burden just the same. Cwicca seized two bundles from them, slung one over each shoulder.
"I'll carry thothe," he said, lisping badly. Tolman eyed the tears rolling down his face, said nothing.
Hours later the weary column struggled up the aqueduct to the walls of the Eternal City itself. They had run through the night like travelers chased by wolves. Their long thin column had been attacked again and again by men coming in from either side, men who had ridden ahead of them and then swerved in to a line which could not be missed. The crossbows had taken heavy toll of the attackers, but several times the column had been cut in two and there had been fierce work with blades in the dark before it could be reunited. Every time men had been left behind, lost or crippled or unconscious. Their comrades threw the dead into the running water, and as time went on threw in those they were not sure of as well. Few of the wounded were being carried now. In the hot night death by drowning seemed a delight to the sweating and exhausted men who were left. Shef was aware several times of Hund raging and struggling in the darkness as his charges were abandoned or given the warrior's death. He had no time or strength to intervene.
The light was beginning to show in the east as Shef led the rearguard up the final gentle slope to the lodgement that the advance guard had made on the walls of Rome itself, on the very slopes of the Aventine Hill. Light, he thought. And shelter. A chance to see what was happening. To seize the initiative, control the battle instead of reacting to it. He yearned for time more than for food or rest or water. He needed it as an outmatched wrestler needs a foothold.
As he reached the wall, saw the remains of his command spread out along the inner, undefended battlements, he turned and looked out, stepped on to the parapet to feel the dawn wind on his sweat-soaked tunic.
Two hundred yards away Erkenbert said with vindictive relish to his catapult captain, "Launch." The short arm dropped, the long arm shot up, the sling dragged along the ground and then whipped round in its vicious swing. Its load shot into the sky, not neatly but in a confusion of twisted limbs.
Shef, on the parapet, saw nothing except a momentary glimpse of movement coming towards him. He threw up an arm, felt a body-shaking thud, found himself sprawled on the ground, a weight on top of him. He tried to thrust it off, found his hands caught in something tough and sticky, clawed at it in desperation. It was off him and men were lifting him to his feet. He realized his hands were caught in human entrails, from a burst-open body at his feet. It was Trimma the cross-bowman, his dead face set in a rictus of torment.
"They're shooting our own dead at us," explained Brand. "They must have known where we were headed and brought the big catapults round to meet us. These are men who were killed in the night."
Ahead of us again, thought Shef. Ahead of us again. I do not know what to do next.
"They're all round us," Brand added. "I doubt there's more than half of us left."
"The worship of Loki has brought us little good, then," said Thorvin. His tone was bitter, his white clothing torn and blood-stained. He had fought with his hammer in the night. He had not been able to save Skaldfinn, cut down by the aqueduct. Solomon the Jew had vanished, no-one knew how. Of Shef's immediate council only six remained: he and Thorvin, Brand and Hagbarth. Hund was there, his face cast down. Svandis too. He should have given her a thought at least during the night, Shef reflected, but he had not. The blood of Ragnar could usually look after itself. But she had within her now the blood of himself and of Rig. Why had he not stayed by her? He had had other duties.
And he had them now. Every now and then the battlements beneath them shook as another boulder landed from the counterweight machines Erkenbert was using: he had improved them, Shef had seen through the one remaining unbroken far-seer. He had hardly needed to, for there was nothing to oppose them with. Shef's council appeared sunk in apathy or despair. Even Brand had his heart set, it seemed, on making a noble end, no more.
Wrong, something said inside Shef's heart. They knew what they were suffering. They did not know what the other side was suffering. They must have lost heavily in the night as well, from fire and shot, in the innumerable scrimmages in the dark. It was an axiom that heavy horsemen should not be used at close quarters and at night, where valuable and highly-trained men could be brought down by mere kitchen-boys. Yet that was what the Emperor had been doing. The Wayman army had lost its machines, that was all. It had once known how to fight without them. Nor had they lost everything.
Shef's eye fell on the long bundles someone had stacked against the parapet. He had not known anyone had carried them, would have forbidden it if he had seen them. But now they were here... Yes, there was Tolman, lurking in the lee of a buttress, ducking his head incongruously every time the stonework shook to a new blow.
Shef got to his feet, setting his face into a mask of good cheer and encouragement. He walked over towards the frightened boy.
"Fancy a flight?" he remarked. "Safer up there than down here. Get aloft and let's see what the other side is planning. Cwicca! Unpack the gear and assemble a kite. What happened to your tooth, did you bite someone tough?"
The freedmen eyed each other as they began to assemble canes and cloth. Their experience of slavery was longer than their years of freedom, the habits came back to them readily. "He's forgotten he hit you already," muttered one out of the corner of his mouth to Cwicca. "And the bairn's terrified."
"Shut up and fix that line," Cwicca replied. Were all masters the same in the end, he wondered. He looked down at his wing-pendant, now the mark of the flier-caste. Master or no master, he had done things that no other man ever had.
Within minutes Tolman was in his familiar harness, held by six men just inside the wall. The wind was strengthening and they were a good forty feet up on the battered ramparts of Rome. It would take him out over the semi-circle of machines and men hemming them in from the outside, but Shef wanted him to use his eyes on what he could not see, the forces surely gathering for an assault within the walls.
"We'll reel you out quickly, pull you in as soon as you wave," he repeated. "Be as quick as you can."
The scared face nodded, the launchers held him aloft to take the wind, waited an instant, threw him up and out all together. For a moment he seemed to drop, and Shef noted that the wind eddied round the walls. Then he was reeling away backwards, on the stout mooring line and the cluster of thinner control lines—control lines the boy hardly needed now, so expert had he grown at working the vanes. Shef admired his skill as he swept upwards and outwards. His own best flight had lasted bare minutes. One day, when the world was at peace, he would do better.
"They're still up to their tricks," said the Emperor Bruno to his new-appointed Pope, Peter-that-was-once-Erkenbert. The two stood in the cover of a sacristy outside the walls, wrecked years before by the Moors. The Holy Lance was still by Bruno's left hand, in its holder beside the shield-grip. Behind him the four knights of the Grail stood round their relic and its banner. All had been held back from the fighting, not from personal fear but from the Emperor's fear that the precious relics might fall into enemy hands. He could not hold back much longer, the Emperor thought. Rage at the enemy's defiance was beginning to overcome him. They were defying not only him but their Savior, His Church and His relics on earth. The heathen had penetrated to Rome itself, were in catapult distance, almost, of the Leonine Wall and Saint Peter's Basilica, heart of the Faith. It must be finished today.
"If they try it again, I will have a trick too," replied Erkenbert. "But they are reeling him in. Lucky for him."
"What did you see?" asked Shef.
The boy spoke from his harness, not bothering to climb out. "Inside the walls, there are men on foot, in armor, on that side there," he pointed. "About two or three hundred. There were none in sight the other way."
No more than that, Shef thought. There will be more out of sight, of course. But they have lost heavily.
"No horsemen anywhere?"
"No. I saw the Emperor. Behind me, near that ruined building with a bit of white dome left. I think it was him. There was a man in black standing next to him, and a banner by his side."
"What emblem was on the banner?"
"It was yours, lord." Tolman jerked his chin at the ladder-pendant dangling now outside Shef's torn tunic.
If only we could shoot from the skies, Shef told himself. Or rain down fire from Steffi's mixtures. Then the Emperor would be dead and the war over. All wars would be over.
The trouble with machine wars, something within him replied, is that both sides end up with machines. The same machines. That is the true meaning of the Song of the Giantesses, which Farman once sang for me.
"Go up again," he said. "See if there is a door in these walls anywhere near the Emperor, a door we might reach. We could try a sally out."
The small scared face nodded, the launchers moved back to their places. Two hundred yards away Erkenbert exclaimed with satisfaction as he saw the kite appear again on the parapet. From the shade of the ruined sacristy men came out, hammered a stout five-foot post into the ground, set on it a device like an upturned iron stirrup, and on that a crossbow. A giant crossbow, six feet from tip to tip.
"It is yew-wood," said Erkenbert. "Vegetius does not explain the secret of the steel the heathen make their bows from. But nor does he explain this. I had it made when we saw the kites fly from the Jewish city. But this shall be its first trial, in defense of Saint Peter and Saint Peter's city."
Tolman had seen arrows curve up at him before, shot hopefully by the besiegers of Septimania. He knew that the range of an arrow shot straight up is far less than one shot along the ground. He had no fear of breast-bows, even of the heavy crossbow quarrels of his own side. When the first yard-long shaft zipped past his side and tore through a side-vane he did not understand what it was. Then, almost directly underneath him, he saw the bow bent again and his danger with it.
"He's signaling to be hauled in," Shef said, watching through the far-seer. The man at the mooring-line began to haul in, coiling the rope round his elbow for want of the winch.
"Something's wrong." The second arrow had driven through the body of the kite, all the archers could see to aim at. It had caught Tolman through the knee. His first start and twist of agony had almost turned the kite away from the wind. Then he had recovered himself, was trying to spill the wind enough to help the hauler, but keep it under the top of the box-shaped kite to keep him aloft. As they hauled him in, the elevation fell, the range for the heavy yew bow shortened. It was slower to reload than a goat's foot crossbow, as the two men operating it heaved the cord back by main strength and fitted it over the releasing ratchet. They still had time enough for the third shot.
Tolman was barely ten feet from the wall and safety when the men reaching out to seize him heard the whistle of the arrow, saw the small face contort and the small body jerk to the blow. They still could not see what had hit him. As they hauled him over the battlement, hands reached to pull him from his sling. He could not move, seemed wedged. Then Shef, reaching inside to cut the obstruction free, saw the great arrow driven through sling and body and out the other side. With four ripping slashes he cut away the material and the cords, pulled the boy and the harness and the arrow together all free. It was impossible to lay him down, the arrow would have been driven further through. He stood clutching the boy as blood ran down over his tunic.
"Where is Hund?" he called.
The little leech was already there. He took the boy from Shef's arms, laid him down carefully on his side, cut quickly at the sling and the clothes inside.
He sat back on his heels, patted the boy's face reassuringly. Shef had seen him do that before. It was a death sentence.
"No need to talk," he murmured soothingly. But the boy's face showed worry now, more than pain. He was trying to say something, face turned towards Shef. The king bent forward, trying to pick out the dying words. Something to do with the Emperor...
"What? What was that?" he said.
The boy's head turned sideways and Hund let it fall, rolling down the eyelids with professional hand. He looked up at his lord and one-time friend with the disgust and hatred that had come upon him again and again on this voyage. Shef paid no attention.
"He saw something. He tried to tell me something. Something vital. Have we another kite? Someone else to go aloft?"
"They dragged your kite along, the big one," said one voice.
"You could look for yourself," said another.
"Unless you want to thend another bairn," said a third. It was Cwicca, still lisping through his broken front teeth. Shef remembered suddenly that he had struck him in the night, threatened to send him back to slavery. But he could not remember why. All the faces turned towards him betrayed anger, even contempt. He had never seen that before, not from his own men, whom he had freed from their masters. No, he had seen such a look once. In the face of Godive. It was what had sent him on this expedition.
"Rig my kite then and put me in it," he said, his voice sounding in his own ears as if it came from far away.
Moments later, it seemed, he was in his harness, held up by a dozen men, lines attached. His face was a bare foot from Cwicca's just below.
"I'm sorry," he said.
They launched him into the rising wind.
As had happened with Tolman, he dropped instantly below the wall. For seconds he could see nothing but the great squared stones flashing past in front of him, while he thought of the man who had jumped from the tower of the Wisdom House, jumped and gone straight down. Then there was the feeling of lift again, and he felt the wind take him. They were reeling him out as fast as they could, he was beginning to climb, already he could see over the wall. He could see Brand shouting and lashing out at the men who had launched him, could see crossbows lining the wall and starting to shoot down, to kill or distract the men who had shot Tolman. Time to look round and see what it was that Tolman had died for. There, yes, the troops of the enemy forming up for the attack. Not where Tolman had said the first time, but massing behind a villa from which two flights of steps led up to the city-wall where his remaining command was strung out. He leant forward as far as he could without tipping the whole flimsy contrivance into a downward swoop, shouted at the top of his voice, far stronger than Tolman's pipe.
"There! There!" He struggled a hand free and pointed. Brand at least had caught his meaning, was off in the right direction. Steffi was on the wall too, doing something with his gear and an armful of earthenware pots.
"Burn the bastards alive," said Steffi gleefully as he poured his deadly mixture into the pots he had taken from the nearest guardhouse kitchen.
"Let 'em get halfway up before you shoot," bellowed Brand, arranging his defenses. "Don't shoot to kill, shoot 'em in the belly. Frightens the rest of 'em."
Hund stood up from his crouch beside the dead boy, thought of his patients lost in the night, thought of the burned and scalded men he had treated all through, thought of the death and chaos and the worship of Loki. He twitched the heavy sax-knife from Cwicca's belt, stepped over and hacked through the mooring-line. The kite on the end of it jerked, began to rise and drift away. One of the men on the handling-lines tried to jerk it in, over-compensated, instantly let go before he pulled the kite into a dive. Hund slashed out at the other lines, men ducked, tried to avoid him. In moments only one line held, at one corner, it was tugging the kite over with no pressure from other lines to resist it. The man let go.
Trailing rope, the kite stood on its tail, banked clumsily, turned away from them, drifted off across the open country, losing height all the way as its unskilled operator tried to bring it under control.
With a blare of trumpets the Emperor's stormers surged forward towards the stairways, the stairways held now by axe and sword alone.
As the lines jerked and parted to the struggle below, Shef felt the kite lurch unpredictably this way and that, felt the instinctive bowel-loosening fear of falling, of empty space beneath him. Then the last line went, and the air was under his canvas again, holding him up like the warm sea under a swimmer. At the same time Shef realized that he was being blown backwards and upwards, the walls of Rome receding, already too far for him to see more than white dots of faces following him from the wall.
To fly free, he remembered, you had to turn away from the wind, not into it. Tolman could do it—Tolman had been able to do it. His nerve quailed at the idea of trying it. Better just to sag backwards, let the wind take him, perhaps bring him down far from the war and the everlasting pain.
It wouldn't happen like that. The wind would change, dash him on stone or drop him into some ravine, to die with a broken back of thirst. He had to turn now. Tolman had said it was like a ship turning fast under oars. Raise one side-vane, lower the other, roll your body as the kite rolled and go round in a bank, just far enough to straighten up. Before his fear had a chance to stop him, Shef worked the controls, trying to do both smoothly and at once. The kite rolled immediately, his body automatically trying to tip the other way, to correct the sickening heave. Override it. Do what Tolman said. Shef tried to point with his back and belly-muscles in the way he wanted to go. He was diving now, still tipped over to one side. Correct it, work the side-vanes, swing the tail with his ankles. For a few moments he was swooping down like a hawk over the villa-dotted slope, his shadow running ahead of him away from the city and the rising sun. Flight! He was the flying man, the Völund escaped from his enemies, the smith who hung in the air while those who had tormented him lamented below. In a moment of ecstasy Shef shouted out the lines from the Völund Lay that Thorvin had often sung, the despairing lines of the evil king Nithhad unable to reach his crippled but escaping enemy:
"No man knows how to knock you from your horse,
Nor has wit so sharp as to shoot you down,
There where you hang high in the sky.
Sporting like a salmon in spawning-season."
The ground was coming up fast, much too fast, his dive had given him speed, he knew no way to brake it. Tip the nose of the kite up like a skier in soft snow? He worked both vanes, felt the nose lift, cut off his view of the ground. Was he rising again? Or sliding along in the air, belly exposed to the rocks?
The kite's tail kicked upwards as it hit the ground, Shef saw the rocky wall of a terraced field hurtling towards him, tried to...
The crash smashed the breath out of his body, he felt himself sliding over something in a tangle of cloth and broken frames, tried to jerk his hands free to protect his head. Something slammed him in the face. Then all movement stopped.
For several moments he lay perfectly still, not unconscious but dazed. He was down anyway. And alive. How badly hurt was he? Slowly Shef ran a tongue over his mouth, counting his teeth. Got his left hand free to feel if his nose was broken. All well so far. Both hands free now, and he groped for the razor-sharp belt-knife. Cut the cords, cut through the leather harness, at least he knew now which way was up, he was lying on his face behind a wall over which he must have somersaulted. Now try to crawl free.
Shef looked down at his left ankle, knew it was broken. The foot stuck out at an impossible angle. No pain there, no feeling at all, but he knew not to damage it further before the pain-warnings came back. He rolled onto his right side, edged free of the jumble of canvas, careful not to knock the damaged foot on any projection, rolled onto his back.
Now. He had seen Hund do this. Set a bone quickly and firmly before the patient had a chance to scream or set his muscles. It was easier if you did not have to bend forward. Legs straight out in front of him, Shef bent forward, feeling an immediate pain in his ribs that told of further fractures, seized the foot sticking out at right angles to one side, and pulled foot and leg firmly straight.
Still no pain, but he felt a terrible grinding deep inside the joint. If Hund were here he would cut me open, set the bones straight with his fingers, cleanse the wound with Udd's spirit that the Arabs call al-kuhl. Maybe I would walk again. Now I have to crawl from this hillside. At least I am alive.
Shef pushed himself up with his arms. He would reach the wall and hobble along beside it till he could tear down a branch from an olive tree. Make a crutch. Try to get back to the road, find a mount or a cart. And head back to the ships in the harbor, where Farman waited with the rearguard. His fight was over.
As Shef got his hands on the wall, faces appeared on the other side of it. Helmets. Mail. Two men vaulted the wall, came in on either side of him, swords drawn. There was no chance of resistance, he could not even let go of the wall to stand unaided. Perhaps they were Italians, friends of the deposed Pope, he could bribe them with his gold armlets...
"Wi habben den Heidenkuning gefangen," said one of the men, "den Einooger."
Close enough to Shef's own native English for him to follow. We've caught the heathen king, the one-eye. Low Germans. Lance-brothers.
They would take him to their Emperor.
If their Emperor were still alive. Shef had been right to think that one side's weakness is rarely known to the other side. As the day dawned and the Emperor counted his losses, he had realized that while his enemies were in a position that would soon be untenable, he himself had barely enough force left to make his advantage tell. He had begun the battle with three thousand men as the core of his army. Now he had less than two—not all the result of casualties, but also of secret desertion in the night.
Yet he had been clear enough what to do. While the giant catapults of Erkenbert harassed his foe, he had spread out his lower-grade troops in a rough semi-circle outside the wall, Greek marines and French archers, the cowboys of the Camargue. If the Waymen came out they would be decimated again by ambush and charge in the broken ground.
His high-grade troops he had sent inside the wall. Some to form strong barricaded blocks either side of the enemy, on the high walkways. He did not want them escaping to left or right. The rest massed out of sight and in cover, where there was best opportunity for what he meant to be a final escalade, up the broad steps to where the Wayman remnants clung to their parapets. There to finish them for good, and their apostate king with them. The Lanzenbrüder and Lanzenritter were all there, except for the small guard set on the Holy Grail and on His Holiness outside the walls. Such of the Frankish knights as were left alive and still prepared to fight grouped behind them. Perhaps six hundred men all told. The last reserve of the army of Christendom, Bruno thought. But he was prepared to use up his last reserve in what would be the last struggle. He walked through the ranks, dressed in his own fighting gear. The Holy Lance was still inside the cover of his shield, strapped next to the central grip. The Lance-brothers and Lance-knights reached out to touch its projecting head as he passed between them, and he granted them the favor smilingly. At the sound of a bell his entire force fell to its knees, each man took into his mouth a piece of grass, or straw, or even dirt, and swallowed it as a last communion before death while the priests pronounced a general absolution of their sins, gave them the penance of fighting bravely, promised the delights of Paradise to those who fell in battle against the heathen.
Then the army rose and split into its two columns, each one to assault a flight of stone steps, eight feet wide, thirty feet high. Bruno's remaining archers formed line and began to shoot up at the walkways with their weak breast-bows. Their duty was only to hinder the crossbowmen, prevent them from shooting down the armored men making the foot-assault. For a few moments arrows and quarrels went to and fro, then the answering shot died down: most of the cross-bowmen had used up their missiles in the night, could not fit the enemy's arrows into their specialized weapons. Bruno's trumpets blew for the charge.
He did not take a front-rank place himself, had ordered Agilulf to hang back likewise in the second, parallel column. The charge was spearheaded by the youngest of his Ritters, anxious for glory, afire with devotion to Savior and Emperor. As the armored men strode swiftly up the steps, the Viking swordsmen moved to block them, five men against five men on each of the two flights. Guthmund sub-king of the Swedes headed one blunt wedge, Brand's cousin Styrr the other. As the Lance-knights came on, Styrr faced them, ignoring the arrows that skipped on the stones around him, took his axe in two hands by the handle, held it horizontally with his hands shoulder-width apart. He leapt suddenly through the hoop he had made with his knees up to his chin, held the axe behind him and leapt back again. His men laughed and cheered, Styrr threw the axe gleefully high in the air, caught it as it came glinting down.
The leading Ritter sprinted the last few steps to try to catch the bearded fool while he was in mid-gambol. His sword licked out in a stab from below, aimed at the thigh. Styrr, two steps above, leapt high into the air again, above the blade, came down on his feet and swung with all his force. The Ritter caught it on the shield, as Styrr had known he would, but the axe's upper horn drove through wood and leather and metal and deep into the arm behind. Styrr was ripping back almost before the stroke had landed, too great a follow-through would leave it embedded in a shield. He parried a slash with his axe-handle against the flat of the blade, swung again backhand, saw another gash open up along the young knight's shoulder. A feint, another feint, and the third blow went home between shield and sword, splitting his enemy's breastbone.
Watching critically, Brand nodded in approval. He had spent a long time showing his cousin how to fight with axe against sword, trading the weaker wood handle against the heavier final blow. He had learned well. In a clangor of metal the Vikings heaved forward, pushed their enemies back down the upper steps, fell back again to leave a space between them, encumbered now by the dead and the wounded crawling back to each side.
Bruno looked from one side to the other. Both columns blocked, he saw, and the archers making no impact against armored men well above them. Time to take a hand himself, render his own service to God. He reached across to remove the Holy Lance from its holder, changed his mind and left it where it was. It was God's service he was doing today, perhaps the greatest he had ever done. While the Lance was with him he was invincible. He stepped forward from the massed ranks at the foot of the stair.
Brand recognized him instantly by the breadth of his shoulders, that made his medium height seem squat, ape-like. He felt a shock of cold through his belly, where Ivar's sword had driven through it. Fear, the fear he had not felt in skirmishes against lesser men. But now a real champion had come. Perhaps Styrr was the man to face him. He had the strength of their shared marbendill ancestry, the blood of Barn Troll's-son. He had never felt a serious wound, was young and confident as Brand himself was not.
Bruno went up the stairs like a leopard, taking them two at a time at first, then springing up them, leaping from side to side between the corpses as if he were on flat ground and his armor had no weight. Styrr took two steps down to meet him, his supporters hanging back to let him face the challenge alone. As the Emperor sprang up and up, Styrr whirled his axe and struck for the shield. Too soon, thought Brand, too hurried. He began to force his way through the block of watching Vikings to come to the help of his kinsman.
Bruno took the axe-blow on his shield, but the shield was already slanted, knocking the blow away instead of letting it sink in. Before Styrr could recover Bruno's own stroke was launched, parried with the iron shield-boss, the backhand recover already in motion. For ten heartbeats the axe and sword flashed back and forth, while the shields rang accompaniment. Already Styrr was bleeding from gashes on arm and shin, each time he had beaten the stroke off before it could sever bone, but in moments he would be overpowered. He stepped back to a groan from the Vikings behind him, Brand now almost at their head, the Emperor followed before he could take the breathing-space he needed...
Steffi, busy since dawn with his laboriously-hauled fire-gear and the clay pots and tankards he had rifled from the guard house, flung his first fire-ball at the Emperor's head. Without thought the Emperor blocked it with his shield, it bounced off the leather facing, struck a corpse, rolled harmlessly down the stone steps. Steffi gaped disbelievingly. If he had merely dropped it on the ground it would have shattered, the lit fuse would have caught the contents... Now, when he needed it to shatter, it behaved as if made of iron.
Styrr threw his round shield in the Emperor's face and followed it with a disemboweling stroke from below. His enemy stepped sideways like a dancer on the narrow stairs, let the axe-blow go wide, stabbed the overbalancing giant neatly in the mouth, through teeth and palate and brain, stepped back to steer the falling body past him down the stair with a twist of the wrist.
A moment's silence while both sides took in what they saw, and then a roar as the Lance-knights came on, jostling each other in their eagerness. Beside himself with rage, Brand thrust his way through and swept up "Battle-troll" to avenge his kinsman.
Steffi, ignoring the combats and their unwritten laws of honor, tried again. This time he hurled the clay tankard, its top stuffed with cloth, not at the man but at the stone steps in front of him. The clay shattered, the glowing fuse fell into the mixture of sulphur, saltpeter and oil. A flash and a gout of flame beneath the Emperor's feet. He sprang through it, aimed a blow at Brand, took a return stroke. Suddenly fell back, dropping his sword, leapt back again, beating with gauntleted hands at the flame running up his legs. Brand followed, axe raised and thoughts of drengskapr cast aside. Another tankard burst, this time at his feet, then another and another as Steffi's gang, delighted with their success, showered down the clay firepots at every strip of stone they could see on both flights.
The Lance-knights had the Emperor among them now, were stifling his burning clothes with gloves and bare hands. On the other stair Agilulf, who had come forward like his Emperor to deal with Guthmund, had frankly turned his back and fled, hurling a dozen men in front of him down the stair, panicked by the flame that had already marked him to his grave. The Vikings surged forward, met the flame underfoot themselves, hesitated.
Both sides continued to draw back, the only sound now the roar of flame on stone, an eerie flame that poured black smoke and seemed to burn on nothing. A crossbowman who had spent the morning straightening and filing a damaged quarrel lifted his weapon and sent its last shot deep through shield and body of one of the Lanzenbrüder.
"Put me down," gasped the Emperor to the men who were hustling him out of bowshot, "put me down, throw water on me, we must try again."
"No luck this time, Kaiser," said Tasso the Bavarian. "You got the big bastard but they were ready for us. That's enough for now."
There was a man pushing his way through the storming-party. One of the knights left to guard the Grail, he would not have left his post except in dire emergency. But he was smiling.
"Erkenbert, I mean His Holiness, says to come to him at once. He has something you want to see. Or someone."
The numbness in his ankle had gone now, and pain was coming up from it in steady throbs, each beat of his heart seeming to jar the swollen joint. His bare foot was red and puffed. He had held it off the ground till his leg muscles were on the point of failing, but the thought of it touching anything filled him with nausea. He was still trying to stand up and look composed, as a drengr should when facing death, but his body was beginning to tremble with shock and pain and weariness. They would say it was fear. What was it Brand said? "A man should not limp while his legs are the same length." He would try not to.
The muttering of the guards ceased, and Shef, left leaning against a wall, his hands lashed to a bracket above him, tried to straighten up.
Then the Emperor was there in front of him, Erkenbert at his side.
They had not seen each other since the Braethraborg, though each had thought of the other every intervening day. Now they stared, to check their memories, to see what time had done.
The Emperor was hurt too, Shef realized, his harsh bleak face twitching from time to time with an involuntary pulse of pain. He smelled of blood and of burning, and the grooves in his face were deeper. The Emperor saw a man not yet thirty, with the white hair over the temples and the care-lines round the eyes of one twenty years older. Round his missing eyeball the flesh was shrunken, indrawn. He seemed in the last throes of weariness, held up only by the rope round his hands. Each man had spared the other's life, once. Each recognized in the other the marks of decision and responsibility.
"You are an apostate and a rebel against God," said Bruno.
"Not against God, your God or any other. Only against your Church. No priest is persecuted in England, no Christian harmed for being Christian."
The Emperor's voice sharpened. "You hid from me the Holy Grail. Tricked it from under my eyes."
"I found you the Holy Lance. It would never have come to you without me."
The Emperor seemed unsure what to say. The voice of Erkenbert the fanatic cut across his uncertainty.
"You have made false books and false gospels and sent them out across Christendom!"
"How do you know they are false?"
"You see!" said Erkenbert to his Emperor. "You are minded to forgive him even now, in your kindness. Think of this. Other heretics sin against the Faith, but this man—if man he is—he casts doubts on all faiths together. If he had his way all books would become mere words, to be turned this way and that. Treated like the oaths of a horse-dealer or the promises of a harlot."
"Books are mere words," said Shef faintly, his senses beginning to leave him. "Only you cannot ask a writer if he is telling the truth. Cannot look into his eyes."
"He doubts the Word of God," said Bruno firmly. "It is the sin against the Holy Ghost. How shall he die, Your Holiness?"
"This is Rome. Let us do as the Romans did and crucify him."
"Does he deserve Our Savior's death?"
"Saint Peter was crucified upside down, because he was not worthy to imitate his Lord. Nail this one with his hands over his head."
Just don't touch my foot, thought Shef. A futile thought. They would nail that too. He was putting more and more weight on the rope now, less and less on his one good leg. The sooner he fainted the better.
"Shall we do it where his men can see?" asked a voice somewhere off in the blackness that was closing in.
"No. No. Better that there is no story of this, that he should just disappear. Take him into a garden somewhere. Use the Grail-knights to guard him till he is dead."
The rope round his wrists was slashed free, he stumbled, came down on his injured foot, and fell headlong. The Emperor looked after him as the knights dragged him away. "He might have been a great warrior for the Lord," he said.
"Satan was once Lucifer, brightest angel in Heaven," replied Erkenbert.
His hands were stretched out above him, his feet stretched out below. He had not felt the nail driven through both wrists. As soon as the iron point had touched his shattered ankle he had bitten deep into his lip to keep from screaming, but after the first blow he had felt nothing at all. The cunning soldiers had fixed a tiny ledge below his feet, no more than three inches out from the tree-trunk to which he was fastened, and on this he could rest his weight. Much of his weight. When his one foot would support him no more he would sag again from his wrists, feel the stifling pressure on his ribs. When he fainted the weight would fall again on his ankle, the pain stab him awake once more. As the sun rose towards noon, Shef drifted in and out of consciousness.
The gods were looking down at him from Asgarth, without pity or concern, but with interest and calculation. There was his father Rig, fox-face and cunning eyes. Völund, the lame smith whose place Shef had once taken, once a man but taken to Asgarth for his skills. In front of them all, the one-eyed Othin, who had been Shef's enemy and the supporter of his enemies. The one standing next to him: yes, he could tell the marks of pain and poison on his face, but they seemed smoothed out, half-healed. Of all the faces he could see, Loki's was the one least hostile. Least human, too. Not for nothing was he the father, and the mother also, of the monster-brood. Shef had brought monsters into the world as well.
"He hangs as you once did, father," said Loki. "You hung for nine days, to gain wisdom. It is too late for him to gain it."
"He may not gain it," replied Rig. "He has bred it in others."
"As you did when you bred from Edda and Amma and Mothir, mother and grandmother and great-grandmother," said Loki, truthful but sharp-tongued. "You cuckolded their husbands, made a better breed. But this one's seed dies with him. What good is that?"
"Not quite with him, it may be," said Rig.
"In any case," growled Völund the hamstrung, inventor of flight, "his true seed is not of the body, Loki. His sons are the slaves become men. Udd the steelmaster and Ordlaf the seaman. Cwicca the kitemaster, who wears my token now. Steffi with the squint who wears yours. You should thank him, Loki. You are freed and growing strong, and you will grow stronger, but you would still be mad beneath the serpent's fangs if he had not given men a reason to believe in you."
"There will still be no sons of Shef, no Sheafings, as there have been sons of Shield, Shieldings," said Othin.
Rig said nothing, but Heimdall heard his thought, and the dying man heard it too. Your Shieldings failed when Sigurth died, thought Rig. My son has set the world on the Sheafing path. Not of peace alone, nor war alone, but a path where our sons and daughters will be free to make themselves, and make gods in their own likeness. For good or ill, as they choose.
Maybe Völund will keep a place for me in his smithy, thought Shef, ignoring Rig's silent thought. That would be a better place for me than the kennels of Rig my father.
The vision faded, Shef came back to the world of hot sun and pain. The sun was no longer in his eyes, it was over his head, seeming to burn even through his thick whitened hair. Would they give me water? he wondered. The Roman soldiers gave it to Jesus, I saw them do it. What of the White Christ then? I do not believe in him, but he must be my enemy now.
It was his sometime king, King Edmund of East Anglia, who came to him the next time. They had waited for death together one summer's night ten years before. The king had gone before him, died under the knife and chisel of Ivar and his blood-eagle. He had come to Shef as he too lay in pain from his half-blinding, imagining then that he hung from Hlithskjalf with a spike through his eye, as he hung now in reality spiked through wrists and ankles. But where had the king gone? He had fought and died for his Christian faith, refused to abjure it under torture. If the White Christ could save anyone, surely it would have been him?
The king no longer held his backbone in his hand. He seemed to be looking down from far away, far further than Hlithskjalf, where the Asgarth gods watched the affairs of men with keen interest. Edmund King and Martyr had no such interest, no longer. He had gone elsewhere.
"In the beginning was the Word," he said, his voice drifting down like ash-seeds on a breeze. "And the Word was with God." His voice changed. "But the Word was not God. The Word was made by men. Bible, Testament, Talmud, Torah, hadith, Koran, commentary. They are the works of men. It is men who made the works of men into the words of God."
"Greater is work than the naked word," replied Shef in his mind, quoting the English proverb.
"That is true. And so you may be forgiven. What you have done may make the words pass away, lose their authority, the authority no-one would grant their authors, mere men as they were. The authority that comes from faith—that may remain. Those who wish to believe in the salvation of the Christians, in the shari'a of Islam, in the Law of the Jews—that is still open to them. But they may not tell people that their words are holy, not to be challenged. Every interpretation may be challenged. You showed your friend Thorvin that. Your friend Svandis showed you that. There is truth in the Word, but not a single truth."
"Can I believe in your word?" Shef tried to say to the fading figure. "Is there truth in my visions?"
"Ask Farman," said the king's voice in a shrill receding pipe. "Ask Farman."
He's by the ships, Shef thought. By the water. Is there any water here? The sun is on the side of my face now. He tried to call to the knights guarding him, for water or for death, but his voice came out only as a rusty croak like a crow's.
The knights were talking, they did not hear him.
"If he does not break them this time, they will break him."
"He will break them."
"The Italians are gathering to defend their anti-Pope."
A bark of laughter. "The Italians!"
"They say an Arab fleet has been sighted..."
"The Greeks will sink it. Where is your faith?"
A silence. The doubtful voice said, "I wish we could fight with the Emperor."
"We are here to guard the Grail. And this heretic here."
"Who from?" muttered the doubter.
Shef knew he was near death now, and thirst had ceased to bother him. What did he wish? That he could see Godive again? No, she would live and die happily, as far away from him as King Edmund. That he might see the child he and Svandis would have? If the child was born, with such a mother it needed no father to protect it. He wished he had not struck Cwicca. He wished he could see the Wisdom House again, and what Udd had made in another peaceful summer.
He could not see the Wisdom House, but he could see the Head of it, Farman Frey's priest. Strange. He had seen other men he knew before in visions, but only one man had ever seen him, responded to him as if he had been there, and that had been Farman in the smithy of the gods. Now he was there again, talking urgently.
"Where are you?"
"I don't know. In a garden somewhere."
"Rome is to the east of you," said Farman. "The aqueduct is to the south. Look at the shadows.
Shef opened his eye, saw the shadow of the tree he hung on stretching away, quite long now. If he had his beads and wire he could calculate, could calculate...
"That will do. That will do.
Shef's foot slipped from the little ledge, provided not in mercy but to prolong the agony of dying. His weight came on his wrists, on his ruined ankle. This time the pain did not wake him but sent him mercifully down below any level of consciousness at all.
The Emperor massed his remaining troops beneath the stair from which he had been pulled earlier that day. There was no attempt at concealment or surprise this time. It was like the game the soldiers played. Two men sat each side of a table, gripped hands, and each tried to push the other's arm down. A test of strength, a test, between evenly-matched men, of will. When the soldiers did it and they were drunk enough, they hammered nails up through the table to impale the wrist of the loser. That was a great improver of the will. And that was how things stood now. The whole day had been full of rumors and sudden panics: the Italians had risen, there was an Arab fleet at the coast, the pagan king had escaped with magic wings to bring up a new army. None of that mattered. The pagan king was dead, or soon would be. His army would be destroyed before sundown. After that Bruno was ready to fall back into the hills, retreat all the way to Germany before he gathered strength and returned. But he would leave no unfinished business, no center to grow a legend of victory.
Brand had spent the afternoon polishing his armor and considering his weapons. He was of the same mind as the Emperor. Most of his army, such of it as was left, was reduced to spectator status by wounds or loss of ammunition. Most of the opposing army, he reckoned, was much the same. He had seen the guard-posts outside the wall shrink all day, from desertion, from call-up of the reliable units to face the immediate danger inside the wall. It would turn, now, on a clash of a few men. Maybe, he thought, two men.
The question was, what to fight the bastard with. Brand did not think the Emperor was as quick as Ivar, or as strong as himself. But he was certainly quicker than Styrr, or Brand, and stronger than Ivar. Brand had decided to abandon his axe "Battle-troll." Against a really good swordsman, rather than a fair or moderate one, it was a disadvantage. He had borrowed a sword from Guthmund, flexed it a few times, rejected it. In the end he had decided to rely on main strength, in which he was every man's master. He had taken one of the English pygmies' halberds, sawn off half the shaft, and constructed for himself an axe of massive proportions. No other man could wield something like this one-handed. That would be his advantage. The axe one side, the spike the other, the lance-head on top of the shaft. Three weapons in one, and all of them clumsy. He had abandoned his shield as well, taken instead a dead man's and cut it down to half the diameter, strapped it immovably on his left forearm, leaving his left hand free. Round his waist and over his mail he had strapped another dead man's leather jacket, doubled over on the left side to cover more of the area that a proper shield would have protected.
As the enemy trumpets rang out again, Brand slouched to the head of the stair. He was hot, he was thirsty—they had blocked the aqueduct earlier on. He had ceased to be afraid.
The Emperor was at the head of his usual troop of heavy-armed German foot. Mixed in with them were strange contrivances. "What are they?" he muttered to Steffi, standing by him holding one of his three remaining firepots.
"I can see the hoses," said Steffi. "I think they're for water. Some way of pumping water. To put out fires, maybe." They were indeed the municipal fire-guardians of the City of Rome, dragged from their hiding by Bruno's agents.
"No need for them," called out Brand in Norse. He knew Bruno understood it from his long wanderings in quest of the Holy Lance. He turned Steffi round, shoved him gently away.
"Let me come up and fight, big man," shouted Bruno.
"I'll come down."
"Will your men surrender if I win?"
"If you win, you can ask them. If I win I'll ask yours."
The mailed Germans fell back a little from the foot of the stair as Brand walked down it, to leave a space twenty feet across.
Not all eyes were fixed on the scene. On the parapet, high up, Cwicca and Osmod whispered together.
"What do you reckon happened to the boss?"
"He crashed. They'll have picked him up."
"Dead, do you reckon?"
"Up to us to see," said Cwicca, still lisping through his broken teeth. "Whether it's win or lose down there, I reckon as soon as it starts to get dark we throw the lines over the wall—I've made half a dozen strong ones from the kite stuff—and we all go down it. All us English, anyway. Then we can butht out and look for him."
"They'll cut us to bits on the flat. The crossbows are useless now."
"They're like us, a lot of 'em have had enough. Three hundred of us, whatever it is, with knives and bad tempers—we'll go right through 'em. Head for where those damned machines were, till they gave up, and see who we can catch."
"I heard you," said Svandis, breaking in on the whispers. "I'm coming too."
Behind them there came the sudden clash of metal.
The usual formal swordfight turned on cut and parry, use of sword and shield together, on speed of reaction and strength of wrist. Brand did not mean to fight like that. If he did, he would lose.
The first clash came as the Emperor, without salute or warning, sprang across the space between the duelers and cut low at the unshielded side. Brand met the blow barely in time with the iron head of his halberd, and ducked his head under the instant vicious back-stroke. Then he too was in motion, on his toes, moving round always to the right, away from the Emperor's sword and towards his shield, the Lance-head once more showing above it. After the first blow Brand made no attempt to parry, only to avoid the stroke, keep out of range. Even against the long-armed and ape-shouldered Emperor he had the advantage in reach. He kept back, feinting every few seconds with his ponderous weapon. As the Emperor braced for another forward spring he stepped forward and lashed out. He flicked the twenty-pound iron head with its sharp-filed edge like a boy sweeping a switch at the head of a thistle. The Emperor took it full on his shield, was beaten sideways, stumbled and recovered. He glanced for an instant anxiously at the inside of his shield, where the Holy Lance rested in its holder. Still there, though Bruno's own blood was running down it now from a gashed arm. It ran where his Savior's had eight hundred years before.
"Relics don't help you now," grunted Brand, his breath beginning to come hard. He was still moving lightly, but the spike of the halberd rested now on his right shoulder, ready to strike again.
"Blasphemer!" replied the Emperor, and stabbed low for the groin.
Brand twisted away from the thrust, slashed at the face, was blocked again. But the Emperor's shield had taken two monstrous blows, was cut deep and splintered. Two more and he would be unprotected. Unprotected both by shield and by relic. The Emperor's left hand was free of its shield-grip, groping across to seize the Lance, to hold on to that even if the shield should be cut away. Brand saw his uncertainty, stepped forward swinging forehand and backhand, high and low, the massive steel head singing through the air as he used the full strength in his forearms, thick as a bear's. The Emperor's turn to dodge away, raising his arms high as a cut hissed past his belly. He was back almost among his own supporters now and Brand backed away, taunting him with his retreat, urging him back into the center of the cleared space.
Not all eyes were on the fight. As the short Italian dusk began to fall, Hund had been seeking his opportunity. He too had heard the whispered exchange of Cwicca and Osmod. Stealthily he took one of the lines Cwicca had prepared. Svandis, looking down at the fight from the edge of the crowd of men on the battlements, felt a hand on her shoulder. Hund beckoned to her, and she turned silently away. In the growing twilight the two padded soft-footed away, reached the aqueduct up which they had come the night before. It was unguarded, the watching sentries turned the other way. Hund motioned to Svandis to drop on all fours. At a scuttling run the little man made off down the line of the channel, hidden from view by the four-foot walls. A few yards down she caught up and whispered to him, "There are guards at the other end!"
Hund showed her the line. "We will go over the side before it reaches the ground. In the shadow of a buttress. They may not see us. The Emperor's best men are with him now inside the wall."
The dropping sun was affecting both combatants now, but the Emperor more. Brand had the sun behind him in the west, only just above the city wall. His head and shoulders were in the light, his body already shadowed. He was striking sometimes out of the shadow, sometimes out of the sun, and the Emperor's shield was a fragment, one strap cut through, the Holy Lance itself hanging loose. But Brand was tiring visibly, while the Emperor seemed as quick and deft as ever. The watchers had been silent at first, anxious and unsure on both sides, but now they were beginning to call out in their excitement, in a medley of tongues.
"Use your own shield, Brand!"
"Use the point, herra!"
"Keep moving!"
"Stab him with the Lance!"
Erkenbert too thought that the moment of decision had come. In his own mind it was he who had determined the outcome on the day of the destruction of the Kingdom Oak at Uppsala, by his timely attack with the axe. When the time came for his hagiography to be written there must be something to mark his presence on this second day of the heathen's destruction. Seizing the Grail banner from its holder, he stepped a pace forward from the crowd, lifted it high and shouted with all the force of his lungs, "In hoc signo vinces!"
Brand saw the Emperor respond to the cry, and for the first time caught his halberd-shaft in two hands. He blocked the blow at his head with a furious upward drive, took two paces forward at his retreating enemy, now backed once more almost to the enclosing ring, and unleashed a full-armed swing backhand at the body. Too high to jump, too low to duck, no room to dodge.
The Emperor stepped inside the blow and swung his razor-edged sword of finest Spanish steel not at the halberd, but at the wrist. For an instant the blow seemed to continue, the halberd-head met the Emperor's shattered shield, knocked it and the Lance with it from his grasp. Then it was spinning on the ground, still clutched in a severed hand. Blood spouted instantly from Brand's wrist, a deep groan rose from his supporters.
The Emperor dropped his sword-point, realized the shield was gone from his grip, turned anxiously to where the Holy Lance lay next to the severed hand. As he did so Brand stepped forward again, right arm trailing helplessly. On his left he still had the small shield strapped, the shield he had never yet used. Fist clenched, he swept the left arm down in a chopping blow. The thick edge of the shield met the Emperor's neck as he stooped to pick up his talisman. The snap of breaking bone echoed clearly between the walls. Then, in dead silence, the Emperor fell forward on his face, his head at an impossible angle.
Brand stooped instantly, twitched the Holy Lance away from the dead left hand. A dozen Lanzenritter moved forward automatically, hands groping for their holy relic. Brand stepped away as his own men crowded forward, turned towards them and with his left hand threw the Lance up and over the wall, the dropping sun catching its gold-inlaid crosses with a last flash of light.
"Your God has failed you!" he shouted as hands gripped his arm, began to twist a cord round the wrist.
Some of the Ritters understood the words, some did not. All felt the same superstitious horror. They would not fight now. They needed to understand first. Knights and brothers alike, they fell back into the alleyways up which they had come, meaning only to retrieve their horses and flee the ill-omened city.
Two of them, Tasso the Bavarian and Jopp the Burgundian, delayed long enough to seize their Emperor's body from the ground. Tasso slung it over his shoulder, Jopp drew his sword and backed away as a rearguard against any rush from the enemy. As he backed away he saw the Grail banner still stuck in the ground. Where is the little deacon, the one our master made Pope? he thought in rage and despair. He has deserted him, he and his false sign! He hacked at the banner's shaft, sent it tumbling with the last light to earth.
Shef knew he was dying now, the dark was all around him. He did not know if it was night or his one eye failing him. He could hear still. There was a voice calling out of the darkness, a voice he had heard first many years before, in York, the day of Ragnar's death when his own true life had started. It was Erkenbert's voice, and it was calling out, "The Emperor is dead!" Now how could that have happened?
A confusion of voices below him. His mind was perfectly clear now at the last, and he could understand what they said, but he paid little attention. The Grail-knights were arguing, unable to believe that their holy cause and leader had failed. Then there were accusations of treachery and betrayal, a scuffle over the golden case in which the Grail had been kept, blows struck. He did not know who won.
Some time later he realized that the clearing, now perfectly dark, was empty. His guards had gone. They should have stabbed him before they left, shouldn't they? Not quite empty. He opened his eye, saw a figure standing at the foot of his tree-trunk. Somehow he had got his foot back on the little ledge that had kept him alive so long, he could see and think. It was Erkenbert the deacon, he recognized the tonsure and the black robe. The little man had found a spear from somewhere, was poising it inexpertly, about to stab him under the ribs as the German centurion had done to Christ, long ago in his vision by the Norwegian fjord.
"False prophet!" hissed the voice from below. "False Messiah!"
There were other shapes behind Erkenbert in the gloom. Hund and Svandis, well ahead of the rest of the Waymen now grouping and marching out of the city under Cwicca's urgings to rescue their leader, had heard the commotion round the Grail and crept up through the groves and gardens to see what it was. Hund carried no weapon, Svandis only the long pin that fastened up her hair. It was enough for a descendant of Ragnar and of Ivar. As the sometime-deacon braced for a two-handed thrust, the thin point drove between his vertebrae. He fell forward at the foot of the tree.
"How do we get him down?" asked Hund.
She pointed silently at the old wooden graduale, used long before for a similar purpose, now thrown aside as a betrayal by the furious knights who had looted its casings.
Hund propped it against the tree, climbed up, struggled with the long nail through both wrists, well above Shef's head and his own.
"I need tools," he said. "Thorvin will have some."
"I have what you need," said another voice. Svandis sprang round, pin out. Two more figures had drifted out of the gloom. To her surprise she recognized Farman the visionary-priest, whom she had thought still at the ships, and Solomon the Jew, who had vanished in the fighting the previous night.
"I met Solomon on the road," said Farman. "He saw much of what happened today from hiding. But I already knew your man was here, and what they had done to him. Not all vision comes from the mind, Svandis. Here, I have pliers ready."
After a few minutes of grunting struggle Shef was stretched on the ground, Hund listening to his heartbeat, pouring water onto the cracked lips. Sniffing at the blackened wounds in the crushed and swollen feet.
"I will go for Thorvin and the others," said Svandis. "He needs shelter and protection."
Farman blocked her with a raised hand. "He does. But not from Thorvin. Not from the Way. If he were nursed back to power and kingship now, think what they would say. The one-eyed king, crucified outside the city wall, the lame smith, brought back from the dead. They would make him a god.
"No. Let him go into the dark now, and let the world have rest. He has set the world on its new path, and that is enough."
"You mean to leave him to die?"
"Let me have him," said Hund from the ground. "We were friends long ago. He often spoke of having a hut somewhere in the fen, where he could trap eels and grow barley and live in peace. If he lives, I will take him back to the fen. I do not think he will live through what I shall have to do, but he may."
"Norfolk fens are a thousand miles away!" cried Svandis.
"Septimania is not so far," said Solomon. "I can hide him there, for a while. My people have no wish for any more Messiahs to trouble the world."
"The three of you, take him," said Farman. "He has the gold on his arms still, and here is more from the ships." He dropped a bag on the ground. "Hide here till the Emperor's men are all gone, and ours, and the natives of the place return. If he lives, take him home, but do not let him be seen again. The Way needs him no more."
He bent down over the body, pulled the Rig-pendant from round its neck. "I will leave this to be found somewhere. Then men will think he is dead."
"But they won't know," said Svandis.
"So they will tell tales instead. Of how his faithful friends took him away from the battlefield and were never seen again. Went to Asgarth, to Valhalla, to Thruthvangar. Were taken by the gods, for him to be a god. Not a god who became a man, but a man who became a god. That will be a good belief for men to have, in time to come."
Farman turned and faded without more words into the gloom. Not far away shouts could be heard, torches were flaring. The Waymen, with Cwicca and Thorvin at their head, searching for their lost leader.
"We must go," said Solomon.
"How shall we carry him?"
"Use the graduale again. It can perform one last service, and then we will burn it tonight for firewood, before it kills more men."
As the two men strapped the still-unmoving Shef on the old ladder, the body stirred, spoke.
"What did he say?" asked Svandis.
"I couldn't hear," said Solomon.
"I could," said Hund. "His mind is wandering in far places."
"What did he say, then?"
"He said, 'Up the ladder and into the light.' But I do not know from what prison he thinks he is escaping."
The two men and the woman carried their burden away from the searching torches and into the dark.
The slow wheel of the seasons turned. Five winters passed; now hard frost gave way to slow thaw. An early spring. The plowmen were drawing their furrows across the green fields of an English spring: white hawthorn blossom bloomed from every hedge.
The King of the West Saxons, Alfred esteadig, walked with his wife in their private garden, their children playing under the eye of nursemaids not far off. "The Embassy today," he said abruptly. "It was from the Pope. Finally."
"The Pope?" said Godive, surprised and a little anxious. "Which one?"
"The real one. John VIII, I think he is. The one they tried to depose in favor of the Englishman. Restored at last, the eternal squabbling of the eternal city finally over, at least for now. The last pretender Pope banned—or murdered. It is hard to tell. The new Pope's first official act was to offer to repeal the interdict England has lain under. To bring us back into community with the Church."
"Will you refuse?"
"I will tell him we will pay no taxes, we will restore no Church property, the Way will still have the right to preach here and make conversions. If after that he chooses to say we are once more in communion, it will make no difference to us. I think it is a good sign. The Church has learnt humility. I think it will learn more yet."
"What do you mean?"
"I think power has shifted for good, now. All the reports for the past years say that there is no Empire left, or even the thought of one. Christendom is breaking up into smaller states, under local rulers. No more threat in the south from the followers of the Prophet. The Greeks are no danger. There is no need for great empires, armies of conquest."
"But our Empire too, such as it was, it is breaking up. Since we lost..."
"Since we lost the One King," Alfred agreed. "It is true, the old agreement he and I made, it cannot stand. Guthmund and the others would not submit to me, nor I to them. Yet we have learned to work together these last few years. I think that that will endure. There will be no war, or the Vikings back on our shores again. We know each other's strength too well. Besides, the veterans of the One King's army, they would not fight each other. They speak the same language now, no-one else understands them. They will keep the peace, and make others keep it too. In loyalty to their master."
A long pause, while Godive considered the name they had not spoken.
"Do you think he is dead?" she asked. "They never found the body."
"I think so. So many were never found. The kite fell to earth, he was dragged away and killed defenseless, in a field somewhere. They found his pendant, with the chain broken. You have asked these questions far too often," he added gently. "Now let the dead lie in peace."
She did not hear him—or perhaps did not want to hear what he said. She still worried at her memories like a tongue worrying a sore tooth. "Hund never came back either," said Godive. She, more than anyone else, knew the bond between the two men.
"We have talked of this too often before. They say that he fled over the wall, perhaps from remorse. I expect some straggler killed him too. They looked hard for him, you know, Brand and Cwicca and the others, for they felt remorse as well. When Cwicca refused the reeveship I offered him, he said he would never serve another master. He has gone back to his farm, like so many of the others."
"And Brand holds York for you as jarl of Northumbria."
"Better him than the descendant of one of their old kings. It will take a while for the northern parts to accept rule from me. I like this new capital of London. It is nearer the center of England than Winchester was. But Stamford was Shef's city and like Cwicca will take no other king. It will always be the town for the Way. The Way that grows ever stronger. No wonder the Pope feels he needs to make an alliance!"
Godive did not answer. She was thinking of Cwicca, refusing to take another master. An old saying came to her mind, "First love is last love." It was true of Cwicca. Would it be true of her?
"I hope he is dead," she said barely audibly. "Not poor and lost, wandering alone somewhere or begging his bread."
Spring. A spring morning far more gentle than the cold bluster of an English one. The night's storm had almost died away, and the storm-raised waves breaking against the cliff below were already losing their strength in this shallow sea. The tall man, wrapped in a cloak against the last warm showers of rain, sat on the base of a broken stone column looking out to sea. His left leg was stretched out before him to ease the pressure of the wooden stake against his flesh; the leg ended just below the knee. The shower died away and sunlight burnt through. An arching rainbow cut across the bay, seemingly ending near the summit of the smoking volcano. The man pulled the sodden hood from his head, pushed back into place the dislodged patch that covered his empty eye socket.
With a warrior's reactions he turned instantly when he heard the snap of a twig behind him. Smiled when he saw the graceful figure coming towards him through the pines.
"The boy is asleep," Svandis said. "If he wakes Hund is there."
"Come, sit beside me," Shef said. "It was a storm like this that brought our little boat here, almost wrecked us on these cliffs."
"Five years past. Don't you... think ever of leaving?"
"Yes, in the beginning. Now, very rarely."
"Every day when I wake I think of the North. Of the sharp frost and the white snow—"
"Do you want to go back?"
"Sometimes. Then I think about how happy we were that first winter, when we sheltered with Solomon. Happier than we had ever been before, once we knew you could be healed."
"Maybe we should have tried harder to follow Solomon to his homeland."
"Maybe." Svandis hesitated. She had not lost her convictions about the gods. Yet she had begun to believe, too, in luck, in some kind of direction from elsewhere. "But I think it was a fortunate wind that blew us to this isle of goats. The people, the peasants, at times I am so angry at them. But it is warm, the wine is good and—you are happy."
"I think that I am. When I work with my hands again, I know that I would rather be a smith than a king. And if I beat out something else that is strange and new—well, we will find someone else to take the credit. No one asks what happened to Völund after he made his wings and flew. Maybe he got back his swan-maiden wife, his own Svandis, and lived happily in secret."
"If he did that, you know what I think his great pleasure would have been, after all the pain and blood and triumph?"
"His craft?" suggested Shef.
"His children," said Svandis.
"Yes to both. But also think of him watching what others did with his legacy. Watching from the fireside, from the forge or the ingle-corner. I have said it before. Let others deal now with Loki and Othin, with Balder and Christ and Rig."
"But you have had the power and have ruled from the seat of power."
"That is finished—nor do I miss it." He pointed at the stumps of the broken row of columns, the traces of the mosaic floor between them. "Did you know that this was once a palace built by an old Emperor of the Rome-folk? One of twelve he built on this island because he loved it so. That was over eight hundred years ago and the people here still talk about him as though it were yesterday. Hund says his real name was Tiberius, but here they call him Timberio, like a member of their family."
"Is that the way you wish to be remembered?"
"Perhaps. But it doesn't really matter, does it? If the world is set on a better path, as Farman said, a path that leads away from the Skuld-world of the Christians, then I am happy. But most of all—" He patted his rough tunic. "I am happy because I wear no pendant now. No slave-collar, no king's crown, no god's token. And that is enough for me."
"For me as well." She held his arm, leaned closely to him. "Even Hund seems at peace. His reputation as a leech has spread, to Napoli and beyond. They come to see him and seek his cures. He writes everything down now. Says that he is writing a book recording all his knowledge. He wants to see it printed one day."
Shef reached inside his cloak, reminded by the mention of printing, took out a folded paper.
"Hund asks always for news of the world, prefers these printed papers to payment in gold. So far all have been in the Latin dialect that he puzzles over. But now, look at this."
She smiled, touched the quill-pendant of Edda, the great-grandmother, which she still wore. "Old tales are my study. Not news from Rome or rumors from Napoli."
"But this is in English—printed in London. It tells of grave doings, great events..."
"Does it speak of war?"
"No. The peace holds."
"Then that is enough to know. And we are at peace here as well. Our son grows straight and strong. Peace now after a lifetime of war. That is enough for me. But is it enough for you?"
Shef did not answer. Perhaps he could not answer. He looked at the trail of smoke from Vesuvio, now flattening and stretching out in the wind. Then nodded his head.
Below them, flying with steady grace above the sea, the first storks from Africa returned to Europe at winter's end.
Copyright © 1996 by Harry Harrison and John Holm
Cover art by Gary Ruddell
ISBN: 0-812-53646-0