King and Emperor

Chapter Nineteen

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

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

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

“Two? We only saw one go down.”

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

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

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

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

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

Shef nodded. It was an achievement of sorts.

“What do we do now?” Cwicca went on.

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

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

“We are high in the mountains, they do not know the paths…”

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

Anselm nodded reluctantly. “The caves, the bat caves, we can hide there for…”

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

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

“And once we get to the ships?”

“Out to sea as fast as Hagbarth can rig sail.”

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

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

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

“You saved our relic and we should give you our thanks.”

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

Anselm hesitated. “Gold?”

Shef shook his head. “Knowledge.”

“We have told you everything we know about fire.”

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

“We believe knowledge is only for the wise.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All right. Tell me the worst.”

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

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

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

“How did they get out?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Georgios is on the watch.”

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

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

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

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

“Where are you going?” shouted Erkenbert.

“To the funeral.”

“Of the men who died last night?”

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

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

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

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

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

“The sea,” he croaked.

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

“What about the sea?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Keep looking,” said Brand.

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

“I can't see what it is.”

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

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

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

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

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

“How many did we lose?” said Shef tensely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We cannot afford to fail, that is so.”

“So what must we do?”

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

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

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

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

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

“No one god,” contradicted the Circassian.