King and Emperor

Chapter Twenty-five

The sun was already above the horizon—a night had passed by while Shef struggled in his dream with the god of chaos—and the noise was the noise of frenzied cheering. Ship after ship was nosing its way into the harbor, the first one challenged from a distance and then covered by alarmed and wary mule-crews. But as the ships' build became obvious even to the naked eye, and as shouts were exchanged backwards and forwards between the oncoming armada and the catapult crews, the tension vanished. The hastily-repaired boom was cast off, the covering artillery ceased to swing its trails round, tight-wound ropes were slacked off. As the news spread through the town all those who could be released from sentry-go ran down to the dockside, waving and shouting with the relief of tension.

The fleet that Alfred had fitted out and sent to the rescue, warned by Farman's vision, had gathered slowly from its various stations in the Northern seas, and then probed its way cautiously south. Fishermen had often seen Shef's smaller fleet making its way down across Biscay and along the coast of Spain: no seaman who had seen them ever forgot the strange two-master design, and it was easy in any language to ask, “Have you seen ships like ours?” Information became harder to gather, or to understand, once they had rounded the narrow straits of Jeb el-Tarik and made their way into the Inland Sea, urged on by the steady current from the Atlantic. The ships of the majus had gone to Cordova. No, they had sailed against the Nazarenes. They were in alliance with the Caliph. No, the Caliph had denounced them as treacherous dogs. All ships fled from the spirits of the majus, who threw great stones at the order of their sorcerer-king. On the contrary, it was the Nazarenes who ruled the Inland Sea, with their tame dragons which burned the very sea with fire.

Hardred, the English fleet-commander appointed by Alfred, did his best to pick sense out of all he was told, assisted by Farman priest of Frey, the visionary who had brought them all on this expedition, and by Gold-Guthmund, once Shef's comrade, now king (under the One King) of Sveariki, land of the Swedes. One thing all three had grasped. The Greek galleys were everywhere feared, for reasons no-one was sure of: “Proves no-one's lived to report,” remarked Guthmund. As they probed up the coast, opinion also hardened on the fact that the Northerners were in harbor, and unable to escape.

Hardred had at bottom little fear of an encounter with any fleet. Twenty catapult-armed two-masters of the “Hero” class—every ship named for a hero of Northern legend—followed his flag, and round them skimmed a score and a half of conventional Viking longships, manned by the best that Guthmund's Swedes and the mercenary-market of London could provide. Yet the rumors gave him a little caution. He had spent the night his king had passed in dream lying well offshore, all lights dowsed, the two-masters grapnelled together, the longships rowing cautious, quiet patrol. With the sudden Mediterranean dawn he had come in on the harbor of Septimania, on a long slanting tack against the dawn breeze, all catapults wound and loaded, scouting ships out well ahead.

The first thing Guthmund had seen had been the floating fort: a formidable obstacle if attacked from the direction of the harbor it was meant to block. Attacked from the opposite direction it could offer no resistance. The first fifty Vikings scrambling on to it, axes in hand, met only raised hands and scared faces. Even the twenty Lanzenbrüder there to keep an eye on the Frankish levies, caught without warning in the midst of a peaceful breakfast, could do no more than eye their stacked armor, and join the surrender.

The Greek commander of the galley on standing patrol, who had done no more for many days than incinerate careless fishing boats, tried a little harder. He saw the strange vessels approaching, manned his oars, and screamed at his siphonistoi to make ready. It took time. The flax to be lit, the bellows manned, the pump to be shipped, the safety-checks of oil vessel and connecting pipes scrambled through. As the siphonistoi scrambled to their places, the commander manned his oars and tried to outrun pursuit. Two longships were already ahead of him, curving round under oars alone to take him from either side. As he shrieked at his fire-crew to make ready to shoot, regardless of their preparations, a mule-stone from the leading two-master knocked away his stern-post. The galley sank back in the water, the oarsmen immediately quitting their posts. As the siphonistoi gave up their impossible task, the commander, remembering his prime directive not to let the secret of the Greek fire fall to any enemy, ran towards the pressure tank with an axe, determined to hole it and let the oil run on to the blazing flax. One of the oarsmen, highly paid and valued as he was, had nevertheless seen too many fishermen screaming in agony in blazing water to accept the same fate for himself—regardless of the fate of Constantinople and the Empire. He tripped his commander, brained him with his own axe, and swept the uncertain siphonistoi aside. The longships closed, crews scrambling aboard and eyeing the copper dome and nozzles nervously. Hurriedly the Greek oarsmen and marines were thrust overboard, to cling to ropes and planking in the warm sea. Grapnelled between her two capturers, the Greek galley wallowed half-sinking in the water. As the two-masters came up, Hardred sent his most skilled men aboard to rope the shattered stern together, cover the gaping hole with tarred sailcloth, and drag the water-filled wreck to beach on the shore a bare half-mile away.

Fort and galley seized, the thirty-odd ships remaining sailed for the harbor wall behind which they could see already the distinctive masts of their fellow Northerners. Doubt and suspicion—were they in enemy hands? was there some trap laid behind the stone walls of the city?—dissolved as both sides saw identical catapults training round, as men recognized comrades and relatives, as hails of greeting began to echo back and forth. By the time Shef, rubbing his eyes, still gaping from his dream, had been forced into his clothes by Svandis, the relieving fleet was already squeezing into the crammed harbor in a storm of shouting in English, Norse, and both together.

Cwicca met him at the door of his lodging, gap teeth grinning broadly.

“It's that Hardred,” he announced. “Fellow who left you stuck on the Ditmarsh, I never trusted him. But he's come at the right time this time. Cleared them right off that old fort before they even saw him coming. And he's taken a galley too, they say, fire-machine and all.”

He waited, face alive with cheer, to see his gloomy king brighten at the news. Shef stared at the thronging harbor, and slowly Cwicca realized that yet again his expectations would be disappointed.

“Above all else you want the fire,” he remembered the voice saying. “I will send it to you. Tell the Greek—” What was it he said to tell the Greek?

“Did Hardred capture the Greek operators too?” Shef asked, almost absently.

“I don't know,” Cwicca replied. “I don't see why not.”

Shef turned to Svandis at his side. “You will have trouble explaining this last dream of mine,” he said. “For already I can see it has come true.”

The Emperor of the Romans had very little fear for the outcome of the battle he had provoked against the army of the Caliph. It was true that he was heavily outnumbered. True also that the Arabs had a centuries-long record of success against the Christians of the peninsula and the border mountains—sure proof, in the Emperor's view, of the heresy that had taken deep roots among them, for otherwise how would God allow His believers to be worsted? But against that, Bruno was well aware of the rotten state of morale among the enemy, if even a tenth of what the deserters said was true—and the fact that there were so many deserters was a proof in itself. His own troops, whether the reliable Lanzenbrüder on whom he depended, or the Frankish and German knights he had called from all over his Empire, or even the normally fickle and evasive local levies from the borderlands, were by contrast in good heart and accustomed to success, gained in the many small sieges and skirmishes he had fought to clear the Moslem bandits from his dominions. Some of the gloss had been taken off them by the failed siege of Septimania: but even that was not entirely a bad thing. He had noticed a definite lift in spirits as they had marched away, and broodingly put it down to the superstitious fear that some of them had gained of the man they called—if no superior officer was in hearing—the One King. They would have to be reassured when he turned back to deal with his real enemy. But fighting the Caliph seemed to some of them a virtual holiday by comparison. Less resistance, and a great deal more loot.

In any case there were two other factors the Emperor relied on. One was his faith in God. From time to time he still touched the tender but healing bridge of his nose, and smiled inwardly. A penance he had not inflicted on himself, he welcomed it. In his heart was a growing determination to set his trusty deacon, in minor orders alone though he might be, on the throne of Saint Peter. He was a little man, and a foreigner. But if he had had a confidant the Emperor would have confessed that the little man's heart was bigger than his own. And if he was not a German he was the next best thing. Not for the first time he had given the Emperor back his faith.

And faith or no faith, as the Emperor made a final survey of his dispositions, there was something he could count on even if he had been a mere devil-worshiper like the Waymen-Norse and their apostate English fellows. Constant warfare among the descendants of Pippin the Great and Charles Martel had made all Christian European armies, apart from the backward Anglo-Saxons, into modern fighting forces. On his flanks were planted the siege implements and catapults, both his own design and those copied from their Wayman enemies. Behind him waited the main striking force of five hundred heavy-armed and armored lancers, dismounted and in the shade. Platoons of the Lanzenbrüder dotted the hill slopes, ready to be bugled forward to form their irresistible infantry line. Really, the Emperor could see only one problem, and that was the penance Erkenbert had imposed on him. Not to fight in the front—he would have done that anyway. But to do so in the company of the most unreliable people in his army, the Christian or pseudo-Christian deserters.

And even that could be turned to account. The Emperor strolled up and down the nervous-looking ranks, still wearing no more than cotton or linen, equipped like the army from which they had deserted with only spears, scimitars and wicker shields. They could not understand a word he said, but they understood that he was there among them. Interpreters had pointed out to them the rewards of success, the impossibility of deserting back now that they had renounced Allah; the penalty of failure was vividly present in the memory of all of them, in bastinado and impaling-post. They would fight all right. And he had taken steps to see that they fought in good heart and even good humor. As the priests passed among them, extending the cups of wine and the wafers of the communion, Bruno set an example by kneeling himself and taking bread and wine humbly. Then he turned his attention to the fires set up in front of his position along the valley-bottom.

“Take communion fasting, then time to feast,” he called. “Translate that,” he added in an undertone. He stepped forward to the nearest fire, drew his belt-knife, cut away a long rasher, chewed it with exaggerated relish, waved the doubtful deserters forward to join in, to take meat, bread and watered wine from the barrels. Make a party of it, he thought. Cheer them up. Half of them look as if they outran their supplies a week ago. Or their officers steal it from them.

Further up the valley, Mu'atiyah looked through his own far-seer across the advancing cloud of Arab infantry. Proud though he was of his master, he had rejected the use of the sliding tube. What Allah had sent him, that he would retain.

“What are the infidels doing?” asked the Caliph behind him. He stood still in the shade of the awning of his great pavilion, which he had had erected on the very verge of battle, to show his confidence.

Mu'atiyah turned to him, allowing the indignation he felt to show in his face: rage was the safest emotion to have in the vicinity of the Caliph, as long as it was directed outwards. “Caliph, Successor of the Quraysh, the infidels are mocking God. They have set up fires in front of their line, and on each they have roasted a pig. Now those who deserted from our army, those who turned their back on the shahada, they are eating the unclean in the face of you and of the faithful.”

From inside the pavilion, unseen, there came a chorus of horror. Then female cries of encouragement. “Smite them, master. Let them feel your wrath.” Greatly daring, a voice called out the Caliph's own favorite saying, “ ‘You believers, fight those of the unbelievers who are nearest to you.’ Now they are near enough! Smite them! Oh, that I were a man.”

The Caliph nodded slowly, pulled from his belt the jewel-hilted scimitar that could slice drifting silk. Threw aside its scabbard. He walked ceremoniously forward, while his guards closed in around him and the trumpets blew for the advance. On the scrub-covered hillside the dozens of cavalry skirmishes going on between the Islamic cavalry and the goad-wielding bacheliers of the Camargue halted while both sides weighed the situation. Then the commander of the Caliph's cavalry, bin-Maymun, cousin of bin-Firnas, waved his men on while edging in the direction of the pavilion itself. The bacheliers began their practiced custom of feigning flight while remaining ready to turn it into real flight at a moment's notice. Bruno cut himself a last chop with a steaming kidney attached, used it to wave his men with elaborate unconcern into their rough and barely-disciplined line. The Arab infantry, looking over their shoulders for encouragement, found it in the spears of the Caliph's bodyguard, and broke into the chaotic charge that was their only tactic. At the front ran the ghazis among them, calling on Allah to witness their martyrdom and their faith.

Their martyrdom came quickly. As they ran forward over the quarter-mile between them and the deserters who faced them, the forgotten of God, the stones and arrows began to rain down. Bruno had a dozen traction catapults placed to either side of the valley in which he had made his stand, inaccurate weapons, but capable of doing great execution against a crowd. The breast-bows which made no impact on mailed men sent their arrows sleeting through cotton and wicker. Standing unafraid in the center of his own line, Bruno reflected that only ultimate belief and a religion which exalted suicide would have driven men on through the storm they faced. It did not drive them all on, he noticed. His experienced and professional eye saw men slowing to a walk, men drawing to one side, men who did not seem to have been touched throwing themselves to the ground and remaining there. There was a disciplined body following up, he observed, but too few and in too short a line. The disaffected could leak away to one flank or the other. A hundred breaths, he reflected, the time it would take a slovenly clerk to gabble a Mass. Then his penance would be over. He hoped God would grant it to him to shed his blood for the faith, in expiation of his fault.

He would not shed it needlessly. As a knot of ghazis drove for the mail-clad ferengi beneath the eagle banner of Rome, Bruno kissed once more the Lance which he held secure behind his shield, ducked under the first sweep of a scimitar and neatly thrust his man through the breast-bone. Four inches, no more, twist and recover and ready to parry the next slash with his blade. For fifty of his hundred breaths Bruno stood firm amid the whirling single combats between desperate ghazi and confident deserters, Jopp, Tasso, and the rest of his bodyguard protecting his back. Like a machine he parried high, cut low, twisted his shield to deflect a point or curled it to take a blade flat across its face. Every few seconds the snake-tongue blade licked out and another enemy fell back. Then, as one man desperate for glory swung a clumsy blow directly downwards, Bruno parried it automatically, thick edge against blade-tip. The scimitar snapped, the point flew on, its razor edge gashing open the Emperor's left eyebrow. As he saw the blood flow down, and felt it half-blind him, Bruno relaxed. He thrust the man off with his shield, split his skull with a backhand twist, and took his first pace backwards into the protecting line behind him.

“Sound the trumpet,” he remarked.

The platoons of Lanzenbrüder on foot were moving even before they heard the signal, clumping down the hillside, forming into two lines that converged from either side of the confused battle in front of them. As they met resistance they started their harsh mechanical shouting, trying to keep in step on the stony hillside, always thrusting to the right and guarding to the left. There were no ghazis left, only the demoralized. As he saw the battle clear, the commander of the mounted knights eased his men forward in a careful trot, trying to work his way round his own infantry and get space for the one climactic charge which would carry all before it.

The Caliph, striding forward at the head of his personal guard, saw the shredding away of his attack with incredulity. Never before had his wishes been ignored. But all over the valley men were slinking to the flank or rear, getting up from the ground and retreating; ignoring the battle as if they were so many secret Christians. He looked round, not so much to find space for flight as to see if there were further supports he could call up. Behind him there was only his pavilion. Between it and him, the figure of his commander of cavalry, mounted on his famous mare. Er-Rahman cleared a throat to call to him, to wave him indignantly to the battle. Bin-Maymun saw him first. Across the battlefield he too waved, an insolent gesture of farewell. And then he too was off, accompanied by a cloud of his men withdrawn from their pointless skirmishing with the Christian light horse. The Caliph saw suddenly the eagle-banner of the Rumi in front of him, with beneath it the one who must be the Caliph of the Christians. He raised his scimitar and ran forward, bounding over the rocks with a cry, “Cursed be those who add gods to God!”

Jopp, who had made his way into the front rank to shield his Emperor while they patched his eye, took the scimitar slash on the flat of his shield—the matchless blade cut through wood and leather till the shield hung only by its iron rim—and stabbed the unarmored man neatly through ribs and heart, the triangular blade driving on till it snapped the spine. As he dropped his point the Caliph, Falcon of the Quraysh, rolled off it to lie on the hillside. The delicate blade of Cordova snapped beneath a hobnailed boot.

With the fall of the Caliph and the precipitate retreat even of his bodyguard, the battle focused suddenly on the Caliph's pavilion of green silk, most obvious piece of loot on the hillside. The bacheliers of the Camargue reached it first, on their half-wild ponies. Eunuch guards were speared on ten-foot goads, the wild cowherds sprang from their barebacked ponies, ran screeching inside.

“Tell them, Berthe,” snarled Alfled, crouched behind the inner curtain. “They must be Franks.”

“On est français,” began Berthe uncertainly, her Frankish rusty after ten years of captivity. The cowboys spoke only their native Occitan, saw in front of them only half a score of veiled but bare-legged women, the trulls and whores of the Prophet-worshipers who had oppressed them so long. Calling to each other, they strode greasily forward.

Alfled elbowed her fool of a comrade aside, dropped on her knees, tore away her veil and made the sign of the cross. The cowboys checked, uncertain. As they did so bigger shapes blocked the light. Armored men, the Ritters of the Lanzenorden.

“We beoth cristene,” tried Alfled, fear edging her voice. “Theowenne on ellorlande.”

“Ellorland,” repeated the leading Ritter, himself a man of Alsace, in his Germanic tongue Ellorsetz. “Good. Guard the women well. Let the Emperor decide their guilt. And guard the loot too,” he added, looking round at silk and finery with a professional eye. “Go on, kick those cowboys out of here.”

A hundred paces behind him the Emperor, still on foot, his eye roughly stitched together, strode across the battlefield, noting the small number of corpses. Few had stayed to fight, he noted. He hoped no army he commanded would ever shred away like that. What it showed was how few people had faith, true faith, in their cause and in their god. But faith that was only mouth-deep could have no value. He must put the matter to the wise and learned Erkenbert.

The mouth of Richier the junior perfectus was completely dry as the soldiers marched him up to the long black shed in which, only days before, Tartarin the wool-merchant had stored his fells and fleeces. No longer was it just a part of the local economy. In less than half a month it had become part of the local mythology. Those who went in did not come out, unless they were servants of the Emperor. Even the servants of the Emperor, however much wine was poured into them, said nothing of what had become of the others. The most that any of them would say was, “Ask the deacon.” But no-one dared even to approach the small black-robed man who pored over his papers, called man after man, and woman after woman, and child after child, to answer his questions. There had never been any doubt that he was in league with the devil, since he proclaimed himself the servant of God, whom all the heretic believers knew was the devil. But if there had been any doubt, it would have vanished as the little man, who knew nothing of the country, spoke not a word of their language, nevertheless detected falsehood after falsehood, punishing each one immediately and mercilessly with whip or brand, block or rope, according to the sex and age of the offender.

Richier still did not know what answer had condemned him to the final walk, the walk that none returned from. He could not even guess what kind of lie would serve. And the black deacon had not even bothered to accompany him to the shed—The Shed, as it was now pronounced. In his dreams he had often been permitted to endure martyrdom for his faith: but the martyrdom had been gallant, public, a profession of faith, or done in company like the deaths of the suicides of Puigpunyent. This, this seemed more like the sheep trooping into the slaughterhouse, with as little concern. He tried again to moisten his lips with a cracked tongue as the two soldier-monks jerked on the rope that held him and guided him to the very door of the windowless building.

In his search for the Holy graduale Erkenbert was following the principle that had led him in the end to the Holy Lance, or at least to its last human owner. Somebody knew. The number of those somebodies could be narrowed down. It was somebody within, say twenty miles from south-east to south-west of Puigpunyent. True, the inhabitants of the mountain villages were hard to catch. The least hard, though, were the most senior and most important, and most likely to know. Begin with them.

But before beginning the actual questioning of the major targets, build up the background. Write the lists. Erkenbert began to list the villages. Then the people in them, their trades, spouses, children and relations. Proven heresy was of interest, but not the major matter. Erkenbert assumed that all were heretics, including the village priests, if there were any. What was important was to determine the truth, so that any deviation from it, any lie, stood out and proved the speaker a liar. So, one with something to lie about.

It had taken time, but Erkenbert had noticed before too long that his answers corroborated each other and came freely for some areas. Contradicted each other in others. Then the business was to find someone from a reliable area who could give reliable information about the unreliable areas. Then find out the core, the center, of the unreliability. Even the names of the villages had helped him. Once he knew the name of every village in the area, furnished where possible by outsiders such as wandering peddlers and muleteers, it was striking how often three of them were omitted by people who must have known them well: the Hidden Villages, he called them privately. Then within the villages, when he called the roll of their inhabitants, how often were prominent men strangely forgotten, sometimes by their close kin. They were the men he could not find or hunt down. But the attempts to deny their existence by the amateur liars of their kin, they told him whom he should hunt down. Even when their lies were unimportant, liars were punished, to deter further lying. Those who came under Erkenbert's suspicion, they went, in the end, to the Shed. Erkenbert did not believe in torture except where, as with the boy Maury, you knew the victim knew something and you knew what he knew. It was too time-consuming, and the tortured invented too much that might be true but could not be checked. The Shed was a better answer.

Richier's self-control broke as the two soldiers heaved the door open. “What is inside?” he croaked.

“Come see,” replied the Lanzenbrüder.

The secret was very simple, and Richier took it in at a glance. Along the whole length of the building ran a central timber. Over the timber ran a line of a dozen thin cords. From every cord dangled one of the men who had been taken inside, noose round the neck, hands tied, toes sometimes almost brushing the floor. Some of the corpses, in the stifling heat of the closed room, were swollen and unrecognizable. Others, there only a day or two, showed the terror and pain of their deaths on their faces. There were two perfecti among them that Richier could recognize. The last and most recent man on the line was one whom Richier knew to be a fierce enemy of the heretics, a devout Catholic, though of a heretic family. He too dangled from the strangling cord.

The monks had produced a three-legged stool, lifted Richier, hands tied, onto it. Seconds later the thin rope was round his neck. Richier could feel it cutting already into his flesh, could imagine all too vividly how it would cut further. And there would be no neck-break. He would die slowly, and alone.

One of the monks had turned to him, the face of the big man almost on a level with Richier's even though he stood on the stool.

“Listen,” he said. “Listen good.” The German could hardly be understood, his accent was so thick. There was something terrifying in the fact that the Christians had not even sent an interpreter, as if they did not really mind whether anyone spoke or not. The German did not care whether Richier lived or died. He was following his orders, and would turn the key on the shed and walk into the sunshine without a thought.

“You know where this graal is, you tell me, I bring deacon. You don't tell me, I kick the stool away. You don't know, I kick the stool away. Someone tell me in the end. We got plenty rope, plenty space on timber.”

The man grinned. “Only need one stool.”

His mate guffawed, said something incomprehensible in their own language. They both laughed again. Deciding that he had spent enough time on this chore, the first one drew back his foot for the kick as the second began to walk already towards the door. He did not mean even to wait while his victim strangled.

“I know,” gasped Richier.

The German paused in mid-kick. “You know?” He called something over his shoulder. His mate returned. A brief colloquy.

“You know where graal is?”

“I know where graal is. I tell.”

The two executioners, for the first time, seemed uncertain, as if they had not been briefed for this eventuality, or as if they had forgotten the briefing.

“We get deacon,” said the first eventually. “You. You stay here.”

The humor of the remark struck him as he turned away, and he repeated it to his mate with a second roar of laughter. Richier stood on the stool, trying to keep his legs from fainting under him, in the dark, in the stinking shed. By the time the light came back, and he saw the implacable face of the little deacon staring up into his own, even the deacon could see that his nerve had cracked for ever.

“Lift him down,” ordered Erkenbert. “Give him water. Now, you. Tell me at once what you know.”

The story babbled out. Location. Need for a guide, a guide, himself, if he were dead they would never find it. How he had rescued the precious thing. The one-eyed man they thought a new Messiah. His falsity, his treachery. Erkenbert let it all pour out, confident that a man so broken would never try to go back on his ignoble bargain. At the end Richier risked a word that was not relevant.

“The men you killed here,” he husked. “Some were of us, some were not. Will you not answer to your God—to the true God—for the Catholics you have killed?”

Erkenbert looked at him strangely. “What can it matter?” he asked. “God granted it to them to die in His service, and their reward is sure. Do you think God will not know His own?”