For the first time Farman spoke, the pale thin face unaffected by emotion. “The maim,” he repeated. “The maim the world has suffered, that this second Shef, or second Savior, has been sent to heal. In our myth that is the death of Balder, brought about by the tricks of Loki. But we all know that Othin tried to have Balder released from Hel, and failed, and chained Loki beneath serpent-fangs in vengeance. Vengeance may be good, but how can one see any cure?”
“If there is a cure,” said Thorvin, “it will come about through something mere sense cannot predict. But our friend Shef—he is wise, but often good sense is not in him.”
“And so we are back to our real question,” Hund concluded. “Whether he is man or half-god, crazy or driven, what are we to do with him?”
Farman looked out at the shape of a speeding coach on the road, trailed by a plume of dust and thirty galloping horses. “I cannot be sure,” he said. “I have seen nothing in my dreams of this. But from all I have heard, I would say that this man has unfinished business with the gods. Maybe it is his destiny to regain the Holy Lance, maybe to burn the gates of Rome, I do not know. But while he sits here he is rejecting it, turning his gaze away.”
“Fretting about women he left behind many years ago,” agreed Brand.
“It may be he needed the chance to draw breath, even to grow to be a man,” Farman went on. “But he will grow no more if he stays here playing muddy games with yokels.”
“We must get him on board a ship,” said Thorvin. “Maybe it will take him where the gods mean him to be, like the naked child floating on the shield in the story.”
“But this time he must not go alone,” said Farman. “You are his friends. You must go with him. As for me—I will wait for clearer guidance.”
From outside the notes of the bagpipe squealed their discordant warning.
Chapter Four
Ghaniya, half-brother to the Caliph of Cordova, well understood the importance of his mission to the North, to the savage, half-naked, fire-worshiping majus, the devil-people, as he thought of them. That did not prevent him from hating every moment of it. He was a man of certain and unquestioned loyalty. If he had not been, of course, he would not have survived his brother's succession to the divan, the cushioned throne of Cordova. His brother might be called, in honor of his great ancestor, Abd er-Rahman, the Servant of the Compassionate One, but there was no compassion in his nature. When he succeeded to his father, the sword and the bowstring had been busy. The male children of his father's harem had been considered carefully and attentively. The children of true Arabs, descendants of the Quraysh, had died soon: they might have been centers for future rebellion. The descendants of Christian slave-women had died also, if they seemed unusable: some of the best had been given posts in exile, under supervision, often on the frontier against the feeble Christian princedoms and dukedoms of the mountainous North of Spain. Ghaniya, however, had been the son of a Berber woman. His blood not pure enough to attract supporters, yet he was the child of no mustarib either, no would-be-Arab, as they contemptuously called the children of Christians who had converted to Islam for food, or advancement.
Ghaniya knew he was good enough to be used. Not good enough to be feared. It satisfied his ambition, at least for the time. He had no intention of risking once again the leather carpet that stood before the divan, with by it the giant slaves with their scimitars forever drawn.
It was a good sign also that he had been sent on this mission. He knew how seriously his half-brother took it, as he had taken the news from Mallorca and from Sicily. Not that a Caliph of Cordova could fear the activities of the Christians, whether Greek or Frank. The city of Cordova in the year 875 had fully half a million inhabitants: more than the villages of Rome and Byzantium and all the capitals of all the Franks put together. Every day three thousand minarets called the faithful to prayer. Every day a thousand carts rolled into the city with food for the citizens, drawn from the immensely fertile valley of the Guadalquivir, and all of Andalusia beyond it. The Christians could not reach Cordova if all the Faithful did was merely to stand before them to block their way.
And yet er-Rahman his brother had listened with great care to the account of Mu'atiyah, the pupil of bin-Firnas: as he had also to the reports of his merchants returning from Egypt and reporting on the panic and fear among the Tulunids there. He had condescended even to explain his thoughts to his half-brother.
“We need the islands,” he had said. “They guard our traders, they guard our shores. Also,” he went on, “a caliph must think of the future. For many years we have pressed back the unbelievers, from the day our ancestor landed on the shore at Jeb el-Tarik, and told his men the sea was behind them and the enemy in front, and there was nothing for them but victory or death. Now we come upon a check. Is it a check, or is it the moment when the balance tilts?” Er-Rahman, knowing only a tideless sea, had no idea of the image of the tide turning, but if he had he would have used it. “If our enemies even think the balance is tilting,” he concluded, “they will gain heart. We must thrust them back once more.
“And another thing. We have always known the Christians our inferiors in all the arts of civilization. Where have they such a man as bin-Firnas”—he stretched a hand to his listening pupil—“and yet now they come on our shores with weapons we cannot match. We must know more. Our enemies will not tell us. Yet our enemies have enemies too, or so we hear. The news came years ago of the defeat of a great host of the ferengis, the Franks, at the hands of those who were not Christians. Seek them out, my brother. Find what they know. Bring us help, or knowledge. Take with you the pupil of bin-Firnas, to report on whatever mechanic arts the savages have been able to learn.”
He had waved a hand. And by doing so he had sent Ghaniya with his guards and his companions, and his adviser the pupil of bin-Firnas, on this terrible expedition into the land of everlasting wind and cold.
It had begun ill, with the ship they had taken from the port of Malaga pronounced useless as soon as they were through the straits of Jeb el-Tarik themselves. The sea grew fiercer, the wind stronger, the rowers made no progress against the current sweeping in from the ocean to the central sea of the world, the Mediterranean. Ghaniya had transferred at Cadiz to a different vessel, a ship with sails, captained and crewed by men who showed the blood of the Christians in their faces and their actions. They had been willing enough to sail north, for gold, and their families remained as hostages for their loyalty. Yet Ghaniya had doubts about their respect from the start.
Even his pork-eating crewmen had fallen silent, though, as they pressed further into the cold seas of the North. As they approached what they had heard should be their goal, the port of Lon ed-Din, gray shores beginning to show on either hand, a strange craft had sheered up to them out of the everlasting squalls of rain. A ship twice the size of theirs, with two masts made from tree-trunks, and sails towering up to the sky. High castles stood on poop and bow, with great machines on them and fierce bearded faces glowering over iron plates. The ship had not closed up, merely pulled alongside, and with deliberate routine launched a great rock into the sea ten yards ahead of Ghaniya's own bow. A long shouted exchange in some unknown language like the barking of dogs: then the ship had shifted its sails and swept leisurely away.
“They say go ahead,” the mustarib skipper translated. “They wanted to be sure only that we were not servants of the Franks, of the Empire with whom they are at eternal war.”
A good sign, Ghaniya had tried to think. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and these are enemies of the Franks, true enough. Yet he had not liked the careless ease with which a ship of Cordova had been weighed and dismissed. Nor had he liked the strange sight of the ship. Even the supercilious Mu'atiyah, he noticed, had stood gaping after it for too long.
Shef's shipwrights had had several years of peace in which to discard or perfect the desperate makeshifts of the 860s. Prodded on by their king, and by the expert advisers of the Way, Hagbarth priest of Njörth promin
ent among them, they had come up with new designs taking up the best features and solving the problems of the old. The idea of the catapult-mounting battleship had stayed, much improved by the ring mounting devised by steelmaster Udd. The problem of weight high up had been solved by broadening and ballasting the hull. The terrible sluggishness of Shef's first “Shire” class of battleships had been solved in part by developing and extending the two-mast design. The doubled sail area had meant that the fisherman's idea of the slanted and extended sail could be dropped. There were still problems, as Shef's skippers reported, sailing before the wind, for the rear sail robbed the wind of the foresail. If they could, such ships would always sail with wind on the beam. Some skippers were experimenting with a small extra sail on a topmast above the foremast, keeping half a dozen lithe lightweight boys in their crew to shin up and reef the sail when needed. Yet meanwhile one problem remained, which Brand at least had thought insoluble: weakness in the keel, now larger than any single tree-trunk could furnish.
Steelmaster Udd had dealt with that by insisting that metal could do what wood could not. Weak keels needed more bracing, that was all. In the end a combined system of bronze bolts—for even Udd had had to admit that salt water was death to the strongest steel—and massive riveted wooden ribs had strengthened the combination keels even to Atlantic levels. At last seaworthy, decked all over, mounting swiveling onagers fore and aft, with heavy crossbows lining each gunwale, the new ships of the navy of the co-kings had immediately closed the English Channel to all ships without their majesties' license. Trade from Frisia to the Loire moved only on their sufferance. Tolls on trade paid the ships' crews. And without a Viking ship at sea from end to end of the Atlantic coast, trade doubled and redoubled. The Andalusian ship, rowing slowly in the end into the port of London, found a scene of activity that might almost have been the Guadalquivir, for business if not in sheer population.
At least they had had no trouble in gaining attention. As soon as the port-reeve who came aboard had grasped that these men sought audience with his master, and that they could pay in bright gold dirhams, he had provided the embassy with horses—poor scrubs of animals, Ghaniya noticed with contempt and a certain relief—with a guide and escort, and set them firmly on their way up the road that led North to the king's capital of Stamford.
As the party rode on, Ghaniya's anxiety nevertheless increased. To a son of the Quraysh, nothing that barbarians did could seem wholly admirable, but Ghaniya was intelligent enough to read the signs. He would not exchange his own cotton for the animal fabrics that the natives wore. Yet he could feel soon enough how inadequate his cotton was for the continuous winds and the everlasting rain. He saw, too, how the mere peasants laboring in the fields did so in stout wool. The food they ate was such as the dogs of Cordova would turn from in disgust, black bread and pigs' fat, soured cows' milk and sharp biting vegetables that filled the breath. Yet they seemed to have plenty of it. He saw no pinched faces, no hands outstretched for alms.
By the side of the road, too, again and again he saw the wheels turning. The first two or three he came to, he turned from with a smile of patronage on his face. They were like the norias of his homeland, only the unfortunate barbarians used them not to lift water but to grind their corn; and they did so by putting the wheels in the slow-moving water and taking what force they could get from that. The fourth mill they saw, however, turned Ghaniya's smile to a frown. Here the natives had realized their error, had taken advantage of a slope to direct the water-channel above the wheel, so that it was driven by the full weight of falling water, not flowing water. And from inside the mill came not the harsh grinding of the corn-mill but the continuous Iblis-clash of a triphammer forging iron. It was not a thought Ghaniya could readily frame, but at the back of his mind lurked the suspicion that while the barbarians had clearly been no better than he thought them a short while ago, in a few years they seemed to have made more changes than had taken place under as many caliphs as could be remembered.
Nor did Ghaniya like the stories passed on to him about the strange king responsible for all this. It was good that he was no Christian. It was acceptable that he did not persecute Christians: no more did the great er-Rahman himself, preferring to tax them instead as he could not tax believers. It was impossible that any should believe that he was the Son of God, another Yeshua returned. Even worse, it might be, that he was not the son of the One God in whom Christian and Moslem alike believed, but of some barbarian godlet, one among many. Ghaniya felt the horror of the monotheist for the idol-worshiper.
Tempered still with fear: one day on the road they had heard terrible screeching coming towards them, and then seen on the road five hundred men marching together, bagpipers at their head and the banner floating over them of the smith's hammer. No Christian cross with it, for these were men of the Way, their alliance with the Christian Alfred no longer signaled. Ghaniya, drawing his horse aside, had marked their weapons: the usual metal-clad foot-soldiers of the ferengis, strong men with swords and axes, but pitifully slow to move, but with them others, small men mostly with strange heavy bows over their shoulders, and trailing the column a dozen contrivances pulled by mules, objects of rope and wood. Dart-throwers, his guide declared, or stone-throwers, catapults that could batter down any wall, pierce any armor or shielding. Ghaniya scowled most of all at the cheerful faces and the constant chatter from the marching men. These men possessed something he understood: iqbal, the expectation of success that breeds success.
And yet when he came to the town they called the capital, Ghaniya felt his sense of disdain and superiority rise again like the flesh of a caliph in his harem. The town would not have ranked as a suburb of Cordova. Its stone tower was new and well-made, but low and single. The marketplace itself had fewer men in it than a courtyard of his master. From one end of the town he could see the other! Instead of the crowd of suppliants being ranked and listed by chamberlains, one man came out to meet them, and made no pretense that his master was too busy to receive any visitor. Surely the master of such a place could feel only honor at being offered an alliance with the Caliph of Cordova, Successor of the Prophet, Deputy of Allah on Earth!
Ghaniya felt confidence again as he prepared for his audience with the master of the men and of the ships. He must impress them, he reflected, with his own wealth and with the learning of Mu'atiyah, neither of which, he was sure, the barbarians could match. It troubled him only that in this far land he must rely, for a translator, on the skills of Suleiman the Jew.
“What's a Jew?” muttered Shef out of the corner of his mouth. The embassy of strangers stood in front of him in his great chamber of audience, one of their party—not the leader, but the spokesman—standing in front of the others. He had just introduced himself, but the word he used meant nothing to Shef.
The advisers who stood behind him conferred briefly. Then, as Shef's own translator Father Boniface began again to put the other's credentials into English, Skaldfinn priest of Heimdall stepped forward. A linguist and interpreter, he knew all there was to be known in the North about foreign peoples.
“The Jews are the people from the East who crucified the Christian god,” he said. “Apparently there are still some of them left.”
“It was the Romans who crucified Christ,” said Shef. “German soldiers from a Roman legion.” He spoke with flat certainty, as if he had seen the event himself.
“The Christians prefer to blame the Jews.”
“And these other folk, the ones in long thin robes. What do they believe?”
“We call them Mohammedans. They believe in a prophet who arose some time before ours. Their God and the Christian God seem much the same, but they do not believe in the Christ as divine, and the Christians will not accept their prophet even as a prophet. There is always war between the Mohammedan kingdoms and the Christian ones. Yet the Mohammedans accept Christian subjects, and Jewish subjects, and treat them fairly.”
“Like us, then.”
“Yes
: except—”
“Except what?” Shef was still listening with half an ear to Boniface's long translation of what seemed the Jewish spokesman's excessively flowery string of opening compliments.
“Except that they regard all three, Mohammedan, Jew and Christian, as ‘People of the Book.’ They do not regard any others as sharing the same God, as these three religions do, even if they have different beliefs.”
Shef pondered for a while as the double translation wandered on, the Arabic of Ghaniya heard and put into a kind of Latin by Suleiman the Jew; the Latin heard and put into the Norse-English dialect of Shef's court by Boniface. Eventually he raised a hand. The translation stopped at once.
“Tell him, Boniface, that I am told they do not consider us to be People of the Book. Now, Thorvin, show him one of our books. Show him your book of holy poems, written all in runes. Boniface, ask whether he will not say that we too are people of a book.”
Ghaniya stroked his beard as the big man in white with a hammer in his belt came towards him, holding out a volume of some kind. He let Suleiman take it in case there was some sort of defilement lurking in it.
“What is it made of?” he muttered in Arabic.
“They say it is the skin of calves.”
“Not pigs, then, praise Allah. They have no paper, then?”
“No. Neither paper nor scrolls.”
Both men looked at the writing without comprehension. Suleiman peered closer.
“See, lord, there are no curves anywhere in this script. It is all straight lines. I think they have taken some system they have for scratching marks on wood with a knife, and made it into a kind of writing.”
Shef's one sharp eye saw the very faint curl of contempt on Ghaniya's lip, and remarked to the men behind him, “They are not impressed. See, the spokesman will praise it politely and not answer our question.”
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