A long considering pause, broken only by yells and splashings from close at hand. The Fafnisbane was now at a complete halt in the midday heat, sails hanging limply, providing only welcome shade. The crew had seized the chance to strip and hurl themselves into the welcome blue water. Shef noticed Svandis standing watching their nakedness by the rail, scratching absent-mindedly at her side under the long white wool dress. She looked as if she were about to strip and dive in too. That would cause some excitement at least, no matter what Brand might say about the wrath of the sea-hags and the marbendills of the deep. His authority on the subject had dwindled, paradoxically, once men knew that he was a quarter-marbendill himself.
“We'll stick to our plan, then,” said Shef. “Hagbarth, you and Suleiman talk to the admiral tonight about night guard-ships. Tomorrow I will ask him to send light ships forward to find and fix the enemy, so we can outflank them. Our secret weapon, besides the mule-stones, is that we do not fear the open sea nor running out of water for thirsty rowers. That's what we'll rely on.
“And there's one other good thing.”
“What's that?” asked Hagbarth.
“Old yoke-shoulders Bruno isn't there. The Emperor, I mean.”
“How do you know?”
Shef grinned yet again. “I'd have felt it if that bastard was nearby. Or had bad dreams about him.”
Much less than a day's sail away, the two commanders of the joint Roman-Greek expeditionary force were also making their plan for battle. Only the two men sat in the rear cabin of the great Greek galley, in the hot cedar-smelling half-light. Neither believed in consulting subordinates. Like their masters before them, the emperors Bruno and Basil, they had discovered that they could communicate well enough in Latin, the language native to neither of them but understood, after a fashion, by both. Neither liked to talk it: Georgios the Greek had learnt the Italian form of it from Neapolitan sailors, whom he despised as effeminates and heretics. Agilulf the German had learnt the French form of it from his neighbors across the Rhine, whom he too hated as ancestral enemies and arrogant would-be cultural superiors. Yet both had learned to do what was necessary to co-operate. Each had begun even to have a certain wary respect for the skills of the other, brought into being by months of successful skirmishing and victory.
“They are a day to the south and coming on slowly?” inquired Agilulf. “How do you know?”
Georgios waved a hand at the scene outside the small portholes fitted into the galley's sharp-ended stem. Among and around his own score of red-painted ships, each a hundred feet long, there lay a host of smaller craft of every size, the scourings of the Christian fishing villages of the northern Spanish coast and the islands, and of the borderlands between Spain and France.
“The Arabs are so used to the fishing boats that they take no notice of them. Nor can they tell Christian from Muslim, or from Jew. Our boats mix in with theirs. Every night one has steered out to sea and brought us a report. I have known exactly where every ship of theirs has been for days.”
“Maybe they've been doing the same to us.”
Georgios shook his head. “I am not as careless as the Arab admiral. No boat comes within fifty stadia of here without being boarded and inspected. If they are Muslims—” He chopped his hand down on the edge of the table.
“How come our spy boats are back here so long before their fleet. Are they faster?”
“Handier, certainly. You see the kind of sails they use?” Georgios waved a hand again at the cluster of boats alongside. One, slipping quietly across the water on some errand, had its sail up and rigged: a three-cornered sail on a sloping yard. “Round here they call it the Latin sail—lateeno in their language.” Both men let out a simultaneous sharp bark of contemptuous amusement at the foreigners. “They use lateeno to mean—” Georgios hesitated for a word. “Something like aptus, handy. And it is a handy rig, fast and useful in light airs.”
“Why don't you rig them, then?”
“If you were to look closely,” the admiral explained, “you'd see that if you want to turn the ship from side to side”—neither his Latin nor Agilulf's ran to the word for “tack”—“you can't do it by just turning the yard, the stick the sail is on. You have to lift the yard over the mast. Easy for a small boat. Harder and harder as the mast gets higher and the yard gets heavier. It's a rig for small boats. Or for ships full of seamen.”
Agilulf grunted, not much interested. “So we know where they are but they don't know where we are. How does that help us?”
The Greek leaned back on his bench. “Well. Our weapon is fire. Theirs—as you have told me again and again—is stone. You tell me you have seen one ship of theirs, an iron one at that, sink a whole fleet in less time than it takes to say a Mass.”
Agilulf nodded. He had been at the battle of the Braethraborg, had seen the Ragnarsson fleet battered into wrecks by Shef's own Fearnought. It had impressed him greatly.
“I believe you. So they will want to fight at a distance, we want to fight up close. They may expect us to try to attack at night. I have a better idea. You see, my men on the spy boats are all unanimous on one thing. These Northern ships, they say, are sailers. They have never seen anyone even try to row them, and they look heavy and round-bellied.
“But in these waters the wind always fades round noon, as earth and water reach the same heat. No wind either way. That's when I am going to hit them.”
“They can shoot their stones without moving at all,” objected Agilulf.
“Not over bow or stern. In any case my plan is to drive off or burn their support ships, the Arabs. And then to have a good look at the Northerners. When I can move and they cannot. If the worst comes to the worst—we just row away. If they show a weakness—we'll take it.”
“So you drive off the fleet, leaving the Northerners becalmed if need be, and then come in with your marines and rowers, from the sea, on the rear of the Arab army. While I hold the Arab horse and foot from in front.”
Georgios nodded silently. Both men knew there were many permutations possible within their overall plan. Each knew, now, how the other thought and what the other could do. They had never lost a battle or a skirmish yet, had swept the northwest Mediterranean from coast to coast.
Agilulf rose. “Good enough. My detachments for your ships are already told off. I'll have them by the shore an hour before dawn, fully provisioned. Just have the boats ready to take them off.”
Georgios rose too. The two men shook hands. “I wish the emperor were here,” said Agilulf suddenly. “My emperor, that is.”
Georgios rolled his eyes with extravagant disbelief. “He is your emperor, not mine. Yet not even my emperor, not even the idiot before him, would go chasing relics at this stage of a war.”
“It worked for him last time,” said Agilulf, forcing as much loyalty into his voice as he could muster.
Chapter Nine
Tell me again about this God-damned—“
Bruno, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Protector of the Faith, scourge of the heretics, apostates and false believers, paused. It had been a bad day. Another bad day. Here in the broken country where France joined Spain and both were separated by the high Pyrenees, every village had a fortress on a peak, most of them seemingly called “Puigpunyent,” meaning “Sharp-point Peak.” That was why so many Muslim bandits had managed to establish themselves. No longer. He had cleared them out. But now, when he might have expected gratitude and co-operation from the Christians he had saved from their enemies, instead stubborn resistance, closed gates, flocks driven into the hills, people lodged in their high eyries. Not all of them. According to the barons who had come in and submitted to him, the people who were resisting him were now heretics, of some sect long established in the border country, with whom the Catholics had fought a bitter neighborly war in private for generations.
The trouble was, everyone agreed that it was the heretics who had the secret of the Holy Grail. If it existed—and Bruno believed passionately tha
t it did, just as the Holy Lance on which his rule rested had existed, hidden among the pagans—it was in some mountain peak or other, hidden among the heretics.
And so he had set himself to reduce them, to burn, batter, frighten, bribe or wheedle them out of their mountain lairs. Sometimes it went well, sometimes badly. Today had been a bad day. Fierce resistance, the gate untouched by the heavy catapult rocks, and twenty good brothers of the Lanzenorden dead, along with many more of the troops levied from the barons of Southern France.
Even so, he had almost committed a mortal sin, in speaking ill of the precious relic. Bruno paused, looked round deliberately. He set his own penances. In time past he had taken a handful of wooden splinters, set them alight, and let them burn on his open palm. Yet the blisters had impeded him in battle. He had no right to disqualify himself from God's work merely for his own sin. And in any case it was not the hand which had sinned. No. Drawing a dagger, he held its tip over a candle, waited till he saw it glow. Then, deliberately once more he thrust out his almost-sinful tongue, laid the red-hot tip to it. Held it for long seconds. A tear slowly trickled down through the dust caked thick on each cheek, but his hatchet-face otherwise did not change. The smell of scorching flesh came to his nostrils, a familiar one now in these days of siege and skirmish.
He pulled the dagger away, looked critically at its tip to see if he had affected its temper. Seemingly not. He looked up and met the disapproving gaze of his confidant and spiritual adviser, the deacon Erkenbert. Erkenbert did not like these ascetic practices, felt they led to spiritual pride.
“If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,” said Bruno, answering the unspoken accusation.
“Better to attend to the instructions of your confessor,” replied Erkenbert, “always assuming he has any.” Erkenbert had a grudge against Bruno's confessor Felix as well, for Felix, being a priest, could hear confessions and give absolution as Erkenbert, still only a deacon, could not.
Bruno dismissed the incipient argument with a gesture. “Now,” he repeated, “tell me again about the blessed Grail of Our Lord. My faith, alas, needs strengthening once more.”
Erkenbert began the story, still with an air of reluctant disapproval. In a sense he, Erkenbert, was a man trapped by success. He had been with the Emperor, when the latter, a mere Ritter of the Lanzenorden, went into the waste places of the North, to return with the Holy Lance which had once more unified the collapsing Empire of Charlemagne. And because he had been with the Emperor all that time, had done the research which had enabled them in the end to identify the Lance, and had furthermore consoled the despondent Emperor when he felt his search might never end, now he was considered to be an expert on relics and on searches. But the Lance had been proposed and authenticated by the holy Saint Rimbert, Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen. This story that the Emperor was now convinced of had a very different origin.
Nevertheless Erkenbert had studied what few documents could be brought to him: he knew the tale as well as anyone. Maybe it was best that it should be told by one who could not be in any way seduced by it.
“As you know,” he began, “the four gospellers do not all tell the same tale of the Crucifixion of Our Lord. And this of course is proof of their truth, for how often do we not see that four men who have seen the same thing happen will nevertheless tell it in different ways? Yet where they do agree—as they agreed about the centurion who pierced Christ's side with his lance, and venerated him forthwith as the Son of God—we may be sure that something great and holy is meant by it, for all four were inspired by the Holy Ghost to see and write the same thing.”
Bruno nodded, the satisfied expression on his bleak, hard face like that of a child who hears a well-known bedtime story unrolling.
“Yet there may also be great wisdom, or great knowledge, in something vouchsafed to only one witness. Now the Gospel of John tells us many things that are absent from the others. One thing he tells of is strange but not unlikely. I have read in other works that it was the custom of the Romans, a cruel and godless folk, when they crucified a man, to leave his body to be eaten by the birds.”
Bruno, whose gallows groaned all over Europe with un-buried dead, nodded again, perhaps with satisfaction, perhaps with imperial agreement on policy.
“But it was the law of the Jews that no dead thing might be exposed over their holy day of Passover. That is why men were sent to kill Christ and those crucified with him, not in mercy, but so that they might be taken down before sunset on Friday, when the Sabbath of the Jews begins.
“What happened then? Only John says this, but the story is not unlikely, nor need it have been known to all. He says that a rich Jew begged Pilate for the body, to have it wrapped in shroud and laid in a stone sepulchre—as is the custom in stony countries like this one, not laid in earth as we do. He gives the name of the Jew as Joseph of Arimathea. And then the story goes on to tell of the Resurrection, as all the gospellers in their different ways do.
“Now of this Joseph many other stories are told. My own people—not my Northumbrian people, but the English of the far West, have a story that this Joseph sailed from the shores of the Holy Land after the death of Jesus, and came in the end to England, not yet England but rather Britannia. And there, they say, he built a church at Glastonbury and performed many miracles. They say, too, that he brought with him the Holy Grail and that it still lies there.”
“But we do not believe that?” queried Bruno, though he had heard the answer at least a dozen times.
“No. For a rich Jew to leave the Holy Land, if he had become an enemy of his own people, might be possible. But Britannia at the time of the death of Our Lord was not yet within the Empire. It must have been a wasteland inhabited by savage Welshmen. Who would wish to go there?”
“So why do we think there is a Holy Grail?”
Erkenbert managed to conceal a disapproving sniff. He at least did not think there was a Holy Grail; but he knew from experience that if he said as much, his pious but overbearing master would keep him arguing till he had confessed he might be wrong. “Mostly because so many people have believed it. Nevertheless,” Erkenbert hurried on before his master could press for a better answer, “looked at correctly, the accounts of the death of Our Lord do leave room for wonder.
“I have already said that only the Gospel of the holy John tells the story of Joseph of Arimathea. Only that gospel also mentions the Jew Nicodemus, and it mentions him three times: at the end, when Nicodemus and Joseph arrange for Jesus to be laid to rest. In the temple of the Jews, where Nicodemus calls out for a fair trial. And when Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night to ask him a question.
“And yet there is another gospel I have read.”
“Besides the four of the Bible?” prompted Bruno.
“Yes. It is the Gospel of Nicodemus. The fathers of the Church, in their wisdom, decided not to include it among those works called canonical. Yet it is clearly a work of great age. And what it tells us is the story of what happened after Christ died. And before he was resurrected.”
“When he went down into Hell,” breathed Bruno, face rapt.
“It is this gospel which allows us to have the words in the Creed, descendit ad infernos, he descended into Hell. So this Nicodemus saw Christ buried, knew of his Resurrection—and talked with those whom Christ released from Hell. How else could he know the story? He must have been a man far deep in the secrets of Our Lord. More so perhaps even than Joseph. Such men recognized Our Lord as the Son of God as soon, almost, as did the centurion Longinus, who kept his own lance as a relic. They had many chances to put by the things that the Son of God had touched, and one of them may have been the Grail. Some say it is the chalice of the Last Supper, some the jar in which the Holy Blood was collected after the Lance had shed it.”
“But that's because they're bloody French!” yelled Bruno suddenly, driving his dagger with his usual appalling speed and strength deep in and through the table in front of him. “They can't speak their own bloody lan
guage! Just gabble gabble Latin till it sounds like nothing on earth! Take aqua, turn it into eau, take caballerus, turn it into chevalier. I ask you. What might a graal have been before those miscegenated bastards got their tongues round it?”
Two bodyguards moved into the tent, weapons ready, saw their lord sitting unharmed by the table. Bruno grinned suddenly, waved at them, spoke in his usual familiar Low German. “All right, boys. Just saying what I think about the French.” His men returned his grin, withdrew. Brüder of the Lanzenorden, they shared their master's opinion: especially after today, when there had been Frenchmen on both sides, and when they felt their own had fought less whole-heartedly than the enemy's.
“Well,” said Erkenbert, trying to answer the question. “A graal can be a sort of flat plate or dish.”
“Couldn't keep blood in it, could you?”
“Maybe it is blood. Maybe when these people say sancto graale, or saint graal, Holy Grail, whatever the pronunciation, their ancestors were trying to say sang real, royal blood. It would be much the same in Latin, too. The one is sanctus graduale, the other sanguis regalis. Maybe the Grail is just the Holy Blood.”
For some time Bruno remained silent, meditatively touching the blister on his own tongue. Erkenbert watched his face with a growing interest. They had been over this ground several times, and what Erkenbert had not been able to understand was why Bruno seemed so sure of himself and his quest. There were indeed odd features in the Gospel of John and that of Nicodemus. There was nothing for the Grail, though, like the strong recent evidence there had been for the Holy Lance, possessed within living memory by Charlemagne. Nor was there anything like the centurion's letter that Erkenbert himself had seen. Erkenbert had suspected before that Bruno was hiding something.
“How do you get ‘dish’ or ‘chalice’ out of graduale?” asked Bruno finally.
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