King and Emperor

Chapter Twenty-six

Erkenbert looked with doubt and suspicion at the aged wood held out to him. He had seen many relics: the bones of Saint Wilfrid and Saint Guthlac, of Saint Cuthbert and of the Venerable Bede, even, once, a fragment of the True Cross itself when it was exposed for adoration. He had never seen one entirely unadorned. This looked like something a peasant had left behind his wood-stack for twenty years, and never got round to burning. It was old, he conceded. It looked exactly like the device the one-eyed pagan wore round his neck.

“Are you sure this is it?” he demanded.

Richier the traitor began to babble pleas of assurance.

“Not you. You, Sieghart. Is this the holy thing itself that the Emperor seeks?”

“It was well-hidden,” said Sieghart stolidly. “Deep inside the mountain, traps all the way. Ambushes too. Lost a few men. But I kept the rat here on his leash, and had plenty of torches burning. We found it in the end. Strange place. Lot of burnt bones.”

“Answer my question!”

Sieghart screwed his face up with the effort of decision. “Yes, I think it is. I think they think it is, anyway. We found a lot of other stuff with it.”

He jerked a thumb and four men came forward. At another gesture they opened their sacks, tipped the contents on to the mud floor of the hovel Erkenbert had made his base. He drew in his breath at the sight of the gold plate, the cups, the incense burners, objects that he could see were there for divine service. No, service of idols, he corrected himself. But it was no secular hoard, not even a king's hoard. An idea began to stir. As it did so his eye caught unexpected objects amid the loot. Books. Two of them.

He picked one up, opened it. “What is this?” he demanded of the despairing Richier.

“They are the holy books of our—of the heretic faith. There are only two copies of them.” Richier had meant to say “two copies left,” but some mistaken instinct of self-preservation warned him.

“And what is holy about them?”

“They tell the story—they claim to tell the story of what happened after… after Christ was taken down from the Cross.”

“But that story is in the Gospel of Nicodemus. Not a work that the Church has admitted into the canon of the Bible, but a work worthy of reverence. There are many copies of it in the libraries of Christendom.”

“This tells a different story,” whispered Richier. He did not dare even to hint at what the story might be.

His face set, Erkenbert began to skim the book's pages. The Latin it was written in caused him no difficulty, though for an instant or two his lip curled in contempt of its barbaric style. Then his face seemed to set even harder and grimmer. He had come to the claim that Christ survived. Did not die. Did not rise again. Fled, married, raised children. Abjured his faith.

Abjured his faith.

“Have you read this book?” asked Erkenbert quietly.

“No. Never.”

“You are lying. You knew it told a different story. Sieghart! What have you done with the men who were hanged in the shed?”

“Dug a grave. Waiting for a priest to say the burial service over them. Some might have been good Catholics.”

“There will be no burial service. Some were assuredly heretics. Heretics so vile they deserve no burial, if it were not for the stench they leave in the nostrils. But the stench of these books is greater. Before you fill in the grave, Sieghart, throw these in. Let them not go to clean flame, but lie and corrupt with the corruption of their authors. And Sieghart…”

The two men's eyes met, a faint nod. Sieghart freed his dagger noiselessly, mouthed the word “Now?” Another nod. Catching some hint of what was meant, Richier struggled forward to the knees of the deacon, babbling still, “I brought you the graal, I deserve a reward…”

The dagger sank from behind into the base of his skull. “You have your reward,” said Erkenbert to the face-down sprawling figure. “I released you from fear. You did not deserve shrift and salvation. Worse than Pelagius, worse than Arius. They brought false belief, but you… you would have left Christians with no belief at all. Do not open that book, Sieghart, on your soul's salvation.”

“That's all right, magister,” said Sieghart amiably. “I can't read.”

“Reading is for the wise alone,” confirmed Erkenbert.

Two days later and thirty miles to the south across the mountain passes, Erkenbert timed his entry to the Emperor's banquet with precision. For three successive nights the Emperor had remained on the field of battle, resting his men, burying the dead, dividing the loot of the Caliph's baggage train, and hearing the priests of his army sing the Te Deum laudamus from behind an altar built of captured weapons. Now, inside the great pavilion, its inner hangings torn away so that all could banquet where once the Caliph's harem had been kept, he sat at the head of the high table.

Erkenbert walked slowly in to face him, six Lanzenritter pacing gravely behind him, their armor polished to an unearthly gleam. The Emperor's minstrels ceased their playing, the servers and wine-pourers, recognizing the gravity of the scene, stood back against the silken walls. The Emperor too caught the signs of ceremonial, of vital portent. His face paled as hope seized his heart. He rose to his feet, and all speech stopped instantly.

Erkenbert said nothing, continued walking forward. Then he stopped, turned away as if self-effacingly, an icon of Christian humility with his slight frame and dull black robe. He raised a hand to Sieghart.

Swelling with pride, the Ritter drew aside the elaborate altar-cloth with which he had hidden the graduale, passed it to his second-in-command. Silently he held the wooden pole-ladder at arm's length above his head, like a battle-standard.

“Is that it, is that the…” the Emperor began.

“It is the ladder of Joseph of Arimathea, on which our Lord's body was carried to the Holy Sepulchre,” cried out Erkenbert at the full force of his lungs. “From which He rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures! According to the Apostles' Creed! Let all see it and know their faith confirmed.”

The Emperor dropped instantly to one knee, followed in moments by every other man and woman in the pavilion, except for Sieghart, standing like a resplendent statue.

Finally Sieghart lowered the graduale gently to the earth, and as if by compensating machinery, the Emperor and his following rose. Bruno held out a hand. Sieghart stepped forward and placed the Grail in it. With his other hand Bruno brought Grail and Lance together.

“Death and life,” he muttered, tears running from his eyes. “Life in death. But Erkenbert… It is bare wood.”

Erkenbert waved to the four other Ritters, and as they had done before, they spilled the contents of their sacks on to the pavilion floor.

“The holy vessels of the heretics,” said Erkenbert. “Captured to the glory of God.”

“And God shall have them all,” said Bruno. “I swear that no man shall receive a pennyweight of what you have taken. I will compensate the army and the Lanzenorden from my own private purse. But every ounce of what you have taken shall be made into the greatest reliquarium of the West, to enshrine this relic for ever and ever.

“And I swear this too,” shouted Bruno, drawing his sword and holding it up like a cross in front of him. “In gratitude for the favor that God has sent me, I swear to conquer the whole of Spain for the Catholic Church, or die in the attempt. More! I will leave no-one alive within the old Empire who does not accept the sole authority of Saint Peter. Whether in Hispania or Mauretania or Dacia.”

“Or Anglia,” said Erkenbert.

“Or Anglia,” repeated Bruno. “And I further swear this. In gratitude for the faith that the deacon Erkenbert has brought me, the faith that I weakly doubted, not only will I bring his country back to the Church from its apostates, but I will make him the heir of Saint Peter, and set him on the Papal throne. And he and I will rule Church and Empire together. From Rome!”

The audience stirred slightly, did not dare to mutter. They had no doubt the Emperor had power to make a Pope. Had he the right? Some at least had no objections. Better an Englishman that they saw campaigning with them than some unknown Italian who never left the city walls.

“Now, Erkenbert,” Bruno's voice sank to its normal pitch. “Put the Grail in a place of honor, and tell me the story of how you won it. And I need your advice. I captured one of your countrywomen amid a batch of others, there she is, acting as a wine-bearer. Whores of the Caliph, God rot their faithless marriageless ways. Not her fault, though. What am I to do with her, with all of them?”

Erkenbert shot a glance at the beautiful woman listening intently to the conversation in the half-familiar Low German. A disapproving glance.

“Let her expiate her sin,” he rasped. “Her and the others. Found an order of the Grail, an order of nuns. A strict order, for penitents.” He thought of the evil wickedness in the books he had had destroyed, their accursed fable of Christ's marriage to the Magdalen. “Call it the Order of Saint Mary Magdalen. God knows there are enough whores in the world to fill it.”

Alfled's hands did not shake as she filled the cup. She had had long training in self-control.

Shef had spent long days in trying to make his entire fleet once more fit for sea: transferring supplies from the new arrivals to the old, reprovisioning all the ships with water and such preserved food as could be had in Septimania, organizing squads to find and chip replacement mule-stones from the shore, remounting those machines that had been taken from ships to battlements.

The work had got easier as time passed. Indeed it seemed to him sometimes as if some kind of watershed had been crossed with the unexpected arrival of reinforcements. Either that or—and this was what he feared in his heart—some new favor had been granted him by the gods. By a freed god.

The Emperor's forces, much weakened as soon as the Emperor himself had left to fight the Caliph, raised even their token siege one night and disappeared. Soon food and news began to trickle in as the mountaineers of the interior realized the roads were once more open. The kites flew gaily as Tolman and his fellows delightedly displayed their prowess to the new arrivals. In exchange Farman had produced a dozen far-seers made by glass-blowers in Stamford: the lenses inferior in clarity, and scratched by grinding even with the finest sand and chalk, but proof that Arab skills could be matched in time. Cwicca and his gang had carefully and leisurely built a replacement giant catapult, with proper side-bracing, and shot it in till they were confident of dismantling, storing and re-erecting it at any time. Steffi's flares illuminated day and night as he too practiced unhurried and unhindered. Solomon had found in the market-place a device of wires and beads which much improved on Shef's lines and columns in the sand.

Shef himself had closely examined every part of the Greek fire contrivance in the captured galley, noted its tank of fuel, sniffed and tried to taste the strange stuff inside it, examined slow-match, brazier and bellows, worked the handle of the strange pressure-pump that seemed to be vital for its operation. He had not ventured to test the device. I will send you fire, Loki had said, and he had. That did not mean Shef had to use it, or to pay Loki's price.

One day, perhaps, he would bend his energies to the task of forcing the skilled Greeks to break their oath of silence. Just now he was content to know that he had the strongest naval force on the Inner Sea, capable of driving off the Greek fleet even in a flat calm, and of bringing it to battle and sinking it at any other time. Besides, he reflected, the very sight of the copper dome on one of his ships, and the Greeks would hesitate to close. He had, once more, the technological lead which for a while had been threatened. In short, while the Emperor ruled the land, he ruled the sea. His escape-route was clear. Should he choose to take it.

It was other matters, now, which occupied him. Matters which seemed without urgency, mere questions for philosophers, but which his instinct told him must now be settled. Settled before he found himself taking the bait of Loki. He had thought long about the scene Rig had shown him, of Loki and Logi, of Loki the giant and Loki the god. In the priest-conclaves of the Way, the bale-fire always burned inside the circle. Should the fire-god not be inside the circle too?

He had called, then, a conclave, in the shaded court where he had had translated the heretics' book. To it were bidden the priests of the Way, the four who had sailed with him, Thorvin, Skaldfinn, Hagbarth and Hund, and with them Farman the visionary who had seen the need for the new fleet and brought it with him. His executive officers, Brand and Hardred, Guthmund and Ordlaf, two English and two Norse. And in addition Solomon the Jew, and Svandis, once again in the provocative display of Way-priest white. Of the eleven men and one woman present, all but two wore the pendants of the Way: Solomon the Jew, and Hardred, who like his master Alfred had never given up the Christianity in which he had been raised. With deliberate purpose, then, Shef had made the table at which they sat an oval one, like the oval in which Way-priests held their conclave. He had not ringed it round with the holy cords and the rowan-berries of life, nor had he lit the bale-fire by which the priests timed their meetings. But behind him, in the sand, he had planted a seven-foot battle-spear, in conscious appeal to the Othinic symbol of the Way. He saw the priests looking at each other as they caught the imitation—was it mockery, or challenge?—of their own ceremonial.

He rapped the table with a knuckle. “I have called you here to consider our future plans. But before we do that, we must draw some lessons from what has happened already.”

He looked round the table, fixed his eye on Svandis. “One thing we know now is that Svandis was wrong. She told me, she told us all, that there were no gods, that they were created by men out of the wickedness of their hearts, or their own weakness. And that the visions they have sent me were mere dreams, created by my own brain as a hungry man dreams of food, or a frightened one of what he fears. Now we know that the last, at least, is not true. Farman, thousands of miles away, saw our trouble and came to help us. His vision was true. But it was a frightening one. For what he saw was what I have seen, seen now three times. Loki loose. Loki unbound from his chains. Ready to loose Fenris-wolf from the bond of Greipnir and bring Ragnarök on the world.

“So we must think again about the gods. They do exist. And yet Svandis may not be wholly wrong. For the gods and their worshipers do have something to do with each other. I turn to Hund. Tell us all, Hund, not only those you have told already, what is your view of the gods.”

“I would say that Svandis is part right,” said Hund. He did not look up, did not look at her. “The gods are created by men. But once they are created, they become real. They are mind-creatures, born of our belief, but once they are born they have power even over those who do not believe. I too think they are evil, created from wickedness.”

“Even Ithun?” said Thorvin harshly, staring at Hund's apple-pendant, sign of the healer-goddess. Hund did not reply.

“But if Hund is right,” Shef went on, “then we have to accept another thing. That there are gods besides those of the Way. The Christian God. The God of the Jews. The Allah of the Arabs.”

“So why have they not blasted us?” asked Hagbarth. “Their worshipers hate us enough to wish it, to believe in it.”

“Hund has given a good answer to that. He reminds us how many of us there were—he and I among them—who were brought up as cradle-Christians, and had no faith at all. Only habit. It may be that the mind-stuff of which the gods are made is delicate and tricky, like the Greek fire. Perhaps some minds, most minds, do not produce it. And remember, the Christians have their saints and visionaries too.

“Besides, if the gods come from us, then they have our strengths, our weaknesses. Just as Svandis said. The Christian God does not act in this world. He takes his followers to another.” Shef remembered the awful vision he had seen once of King Edmund, martyred by the heathen, passing beyond him to some fate he could not even glimpse. “Our gods, the gods of the Way, work in the world, as do their priests and their worshipers. They believe in things made with hands.”

Brand laughed as he saw the strained faces round the table. “I am a man of the Way,” he called out. “I bearded the damned Ragnarssons for the Way, did I not? But the more I see and the more I hear, the less I believe in anything except three things. My ship, my gold, and ‘Battle-Troll’ here.” He lifted his silver-inlaid axe from where it lay beside him, flourished it, and drank again from the quart pitcher of beer that the new fleet had brought with it.

“So far we can follow you,” said Thorvin. “I do not like what you say about the Christian God, but I can accept it. After all, we have always said—you have always said, and you have proved it by your deeds, see Hardred here—that our quarrel is not with Christ nor with Christians, but with the Church that comes from Rome. Because while we listen to what you say, and consider it, if you said it to the Emperor and you were in his power, you would be lucky to earn death alone. The Christian Church brooks no rivals! Will not share power or the claim to truth. That is what our founder Duke Radbod saw and foresaw. That is why we preach the Way. So that everyone may choose their own way.”

“Everyone may choose their own way,” Shef repeated. “That is why we are here.” He drew a deep breath, for this was the moment of decision. “I think it is time for new ways.”

“New ways?”

“New pendants. New knowledge. Svandis has made a start, with her quill-pendant. It stands for the study of our minds, the writing down of all that has seemed to us most fleering. Mind-study, and mind-stuff. Who is the god that you have taken as your patron, Svandis?”

“No god,” Ivar's daughter replied. “No goddess either. A name in our myths. I wear the quill for Edda, that is to say ‘great-grandmother,’ for old tales and traditions.”

“Edo means ‘I write,’ in the Latin tongue,” observed Skaldfinn. “Svandis did not know that. It is the kind of accident the gods send. I think this is new knowledge we should accept.”

“Another pendant we need,” said Shef. “The sifr sign of the Arabs, the round hole that means ‘nothing.’ The powerful nothing. If I did not have my own sign I would take that one. It should be the sign for those who can reckon, and its god should be Forseti, who settles disputes and brings certainty.

“A third, the wings of Völund. For Tolman, and the fliers.” Shef looked round with his one eye, gauging support, trying to bend the uncertain to his will. So far they were with him. Völund-priests, priests of Forseti, they would be new but welcome. Way-priests always liked new trades, whether flying or lens-grinding or calculation. Now for the hard one.

“I say we need a fourth. For the likes of Steffi, who burned his hands to bring us light. We need men to wear a fire-sign. For Loki.”

Thorvin was on his feet immediately, hammer sliding from belt to hand, and there were looks of horror on the faces of Skaldfinn and Hagbarth, and Farman too.

“No man can take that sign! We let his fire burn, to remind us of what we face. We do not worship it, or him. Even if all that you said is true, about men creating gods, why should we create a god like him? The trickster, the father of monsters. The bane of Balder.”

“Why should we? We already have.” Shef looked round the room to see his words sink in. “If Hund is right, and he exists, then we made him. Made him out of fear and hatred. Made him kill the good and beautiful because we are jealous of it. Chained him so we did not need to blame ourselves. Drove him mad.

“He is loose now. I fear him more than you do. But what I am saying is this. Freedom for Loki as well as for Thor. For the bad as well as the good. If he attacks us, we will destroy him. But fire can be for us as well as against us.”

Thorvin looked round as if expecting thunder and a lightning-bolt from the cloudless sky. “Freedom for Loki as well as for Thor!” he repeated. “But he is the father of the monster-brood, you have seen them. You have met them.” His eye rested uncertainly on Svandis, as if unsure how far he could continue. Thorvin was convinced, Shef knew, that Ivar the Boneless, Svandis's father, had been a creature of Loki with a non-human shape in the other world of the gods. If it came to that, Shef believed it too. But then Loki was bound and crazed with pain.

“Freedom is not the same as lawlessness,” he said. “If a follower of Loki were to come and say that his worship forced him to sacrifice slaves at his barrow, or to cut women to pieces for his pleasure, we would tell him the penalty for morth-deeds is death. Under Wayman-law that is already true. It is what makes us different from the pagans. Now I do not know what made Loki kill Balder, what made men imagine a Loki and a Balder and imagine the one killing the other. But I do know that if we are to cure the maim of the world and bring back Balder, then we must believe in something other than eternal enmity.”

Farman stirred in his seat, and spoke in his quiet voice. He was an unimpressive man: the first time Shef had seen him, it had been in a Völund-vision, and there Shef had been the lame but mighty smith of the gods, Farman no more than a mouse-shape peeping up from the wainscoting. Shef still saw and heard him sometimes as a mouse, squeaking and peeping. Yet he was greatly respected. His visions, all agreed, were true ones. He and Vigleik were the far-seers of the Way.

“Tell us the story of the weeping for Balder,” he said, his eyes on Thorvin.

Thorvin looked uncertain, suspicious, sure that in some way his narrative would be challenged. Yet by the conventions of the Way he could not refuse to speak. “You know,” he began, “that after the death of Balder through the machinations of Loki Laufeyjarson, Othin built a pyre for his son and laid him on it. But before the fire was lit Othin sent his servant Hermoth, greatest hero of the Einheriar, into Hel to ask if there was any way by which Balder could be released. And Hermoth rode down over the Giallar bridge, and came to the gates of Hel, and leapt his horse over them.”

Shef too stirred in his seat, for though this was a story he had heard, it was not the one he had seen.

“He went on, and begged the goddess Hel to release Balder, but she refused, saying that Balder could only leave Hel if everything in the world, alive or dead, would weep for him. If any creature refused, then he must stay.

“So Hermoth rode back, and the gods instructed every creature in the world to weep for what had been lost, and so they did, people and animals and earth and stone and trees. But in the end the gods' messengers came upon a giantess sitting in a cave, and she said”—Thorvin's voice turned to the deep chant he reserved for holy song:

“And so the demand of Hel was not fulfilled, and Balder was not released. Instead he was burnt on the pyre, and with him his wife Nanna, who died of sorrow. Most men think that the giantess was Loki Laufeyjarson in another shape.”

“Well and truly told, Thorvin,” said Farman softly, “but there are questions to ask. You know that the spittle that runs from the mouth of Fenris-wolf is called Von, which is to say Hope, and that is to show us that to trust in hope, as the Christians do, and cease to struggle when there is no hope, is below the dignity of a warrior. But what then is the meaning of the giantess's name, Thökk—which means ‘thanks’ just as Von means ‘hope’?”

Thorvin shook his head.

“Could it not mean that the price of Balder back is no more than thanks?”

“Thanks for what?” rambled Thorvin.

“Thanks for whatever Loki may have done in time past.”

“The stories say that he was a good comrade when Thor went to Utgarth-Loki, to wrestle with Old Age and try to lift the Mithgarth-Serpent,” Hagbarth corroborated.

“Loki was a good comrade against Loki, then,” said Farman. “But when that comradeship was not recognized, and thanks given for it, he became what we have made him. Is the king's proposal not to thank and recognize the good Loki? To enlist him against the mad one?”

“Hermoth did not get into Hel,” Shef added with the crushing certainty that came from vision. “He was stopped by the gates. He cut a cock's head off and threw it over Grind-gate, and rode back. But before he rode back he heard the cock crowing on the other side.”

“So there is life even in the place of death,” concluded Farman. “Even where Balder is. So there is a chance… A chance of curing the world's maim and bringing back beauty to it.” He looked at Shef, aiming his words at him alone. “And that is how the old become young. Not like dragons, by clinging on to what is theirs. Like adders, by shedding their skin. The skin of worn-out belief. Old knowledge gone dead.”

He has shared more than one of my visions, Shef thought, even if I did not know it.

Thorvin looked round the table, conscious that the argument was slipping away from him, seeing faces that ranged from Hardred's stupor to Skaldfinn's dawning interest, angry conviction from Svandis.

“It would have to go to the full Council of priests,” he temporized.

“In the end,” Farman agreed.

“But how does this affect our plans? Our plans for here and now?”

“I will tell you that,” said Shef. “It seems to me that there are many things we could do. We could go home, brushing the Greeks out of our way.”

“Perhaps making a little profit as we go,” suggested Guthmund.

“We could sail our ships to the Guadalquivir and march on Cordova. It has no Caliph now, if what we hear is true. Our support might make a difference to the next one. It is in my mind that we might demand the right to preach the Way. It would have been denied by the last Caliph, by any Caliph securely in power. Just now—well, who knows?”

“We could make quite a big profit out of Cordova,” Brand said to Guthmund. “You haven't seen the place, but I'm telling you, that raid by the Ragnarssons fifteen years ago can't have scratched the surface.”

“But if what we have been saying is true,” Shef went on, “I think we should do something else. For what we have been saying, what Hund and Svandis and even Farman have been saying, is that strength in this world comes from belief. So we must strengthen ours, and that of those who are friendly to us, or at least tolerant of us.

“And we must destroy the faith of those who give no space to others. Who allow freedom neither to Loki nor to Thor. Nor to any other than their own One God.”

“And how is that to be done?” asked Solomon the Jew, with deliberate politeness.

“With paper on the one hand. And with emissaries on the other. I will explain…”