King and Emperor thatc-3

by Harry Harrison

  Finally Shef spoke. “He's certainly useless as regards knowledge. But I liked his master, bin-Firnas. We'll keep him. Maybe he can serve as an envoy one day. And he has done one thing for us.” He looked round, met Skaldfinn's eyes. “He's confirmed that what Suleiman here said was true. Otherwise we'd have no reason to believe it. A Jewish city, in Spain! Who would believe it? But it seems it must be true. I say that we should sail there. Find a base. Try to frustrate the plans of the Christians. Not the Christians, we have no quarrel with them. Of the Church and the Holy Empire it supports and the Emperor who supports it.”

  “And see what we can learn about the Greek fire,” amplified Thorvin.

  “And give Steffi there another chance to fly,” agreed Shef.

  Round the listening circle heads nodded, there was a growl of agreement. Suleiman's dark eyes took it in, showed a gleam of pleasure.

  From the mast-head there came a hail. “To the north there! A sail. Three-cornered one. Looks like a fishing boat, maybe four miles off. Steering west, might not have seen us yet.”

  Shef walked to the prow, clicked open his far-seer, tried to see if he could pick out the sail-tip nicking the horizon.

  “Do you think Narwhal would catch her, Brand, oars against the lateen sail?”

  “In this calm, easy.”

  “Go over there then, sink the boat, kill everyone aboard.”

  Brand hesitated. “I don't mind killing people, you know,” he said. “But they could be just fishermen making a living.”

  “And they could be spies for the Greeks. Or both at once. We can't take any chances on that. Just go over and do it. Use the crossbows if you're feeling squeamish.”

  Shef turned and walked away, obviously heading for his hammock, the conference as far as he was concerned at an end. Brand stared after him, his face perplexed.

  “That's the one who was always telling me to go easy on the looting, always fretting about the slaves.”

  “He still frets about slaves,” remarked Thorvin.

  “But he'll kill off innocent people for nothing, just because they might be a risk. Not even for amusement, like Ivar would have, or to make them talk, like old Hairy-Breeks.”

  “Maybe Loki is loose,” said Thorvin. “Better go do what he says.” He clutched his hammer pendant protectively.

  The same day, the same time, and no longer so many miles away, Bruno Emperor of the Franks, the Germans, the Italians and the Burgundians, slowly and reluctantly raised his shield, to protect his face not from the arrows that had flown at him all day, their snapped-off points studding the leather facing of his shield. No, only from the heat that surged and crackled from the blazing tower in front of him. He did not want to lose sight of the tower, hoping against hope that some last cry would rise from it, some turn of fortune would come to save the day. Yet, even for his ascetic frame, the heat was too much to be borne.

  It had been a bad day all along, yet another bad day. He had been sure the fortress would fall this time, and fall it had. Yet he had hoped, expected, after the trials of the days before, that the defenders would see sense, take his offer, accept the mercy that they could hardly have expected. His system for razing these mountain fortresses had been worked out again and again against the Moslems of the coast, and his men understood it. The first thing was to get the great counterweight-catapult that Erkenbert had built close enough to throw its one titanic rock on to the top of the gate. Smash the gate, take the fortress. But the catapult had terrible limitations. Unlike the lighter onagers, or the dart-shooters or man-powered weapons, the counterweight-machine had to be set up on the flat. On the flat, and close to its target, no more than two hundred double paces.

  Here, at Puigpunyent, there was no flat place anywhere near the gate, only a steep hillside. Grimly, the Brothers of the Order of the Holy Lance had driven back the defenders inside their walls, grimly they had hacked out a launch-platform from the living rock. The defenders had waited till all was done, then rolled boulder after boulder leaping down the hillside, hurled over the walls by the strength of twenty men at once. Grimly the brothers had driven deep piles into the rock, strengthened them with timbers, made a shelter for the precious catapult to cower behind. Hundreds of porters had struggled up the hill with the machine, with the rocks that were its counterweight. The great boulders it threw had been even more of a problem, carried up in the end on wooden platforms by relays of sweating, gasping men.

  They had done it: set up the machine, hurled a first boulder skimming over the top of the gate so that Erkenbert the deacon could make his strange reckonings and say how much weight should be removed for the next boulder to land exactly on top of the wooden structure. And then, the work done and the threat displayed, Bruno had sent forward one of his best men, Bruder Hartnit of Bremen, to make the offer. Life for all, and liberty. The contents of the castle only to be surrendered. Bruno had been sure, almost sure that they would take the offer, knowing as they must that once a breach was made, all the laws of God and man said that there could then be no mercy for man, woman or child who had put the attackers to so much toil and risk. The other brothers, even of the Lanzenorden, had looked sideways at their master as he had sent Hartnit forward, knowing the offer meant the loss of their traditional privileges, hard-earned with the sweat of all and the life-blood of too many: killing and plunder, vengeance and rape. The brothers were sworn celibates, could never marry any more than monks. Celibacy did not apply to what happened in a sack, however. After all, all their partners would be dead before morning. The brothers needed the outlet custom gave them.

  Yet they had let Hartnit go forward, knowing their master had some driving design. They had heard him shout his offer in the bastard Latin most could understand. They had even, some of them, better aware of the defenders' temper than Bruno, expected the flights of arrows that were the traditional refusal of an offer to surrender. Hartnit, behind his oversized shield or mantlet, had half-expected it too.

  No-one had expected the great marble column that jerked over the wall and came down like a bonding giant's club. One end of it had smashed the mantlet and broken Hartnit almost in half before it plunged on and down the hillside in a cloud of dust. Every man had heard the piteous whimperings of Hartnit the bold, his splintered hip-bones driven through his bladder, until the Emperor himself had stilled them with his misericorde, the long thin dagger that gave final release.

  Grimly, then, they had launched the next boulder from the counterweighted catapult, smashed the gate, fought their way in and over the barricade they had known would be set up in the inner courtyard, set themselves to winkle out every last defender from tower and attic and stair and cellar.

  Grimly the defenders had fought back, never leaving a man, killing their own wounded as they retreated, till they were penned into the one last tower. Only men inside. Bruno himself had seen, in the inner rooms of the fortress as they fought their way through, the ranks of women, old people, children, slumped over their benches or lying with arms crossed: poisoned, dead, not a survivor. Just the last twenty or so trapped in the last tower, which his men had fired.

  He lowered the shield, cautiously, waiting for the instant arrow, stepped forward a hesitant pace. He risked looking foolish now, but it had to be done. Once again, he called out: “You in there! Heretics! If you feel the flame, come out, surrender. I give you my word, my word as a Ritter, as a Kaiser, you will not be harmed. No-one in the world could have fought better. You have done enough.”

  Only the crackle and stab of flame in reply, his brothers looking sideways at him once more, wondering if the Emperor was mad. And then, from the heart of the flame, a voice calling.

  “Emperor, know this. I am Marcabru the captain, alas still an imperfectus. We care nothing for you, and nothing for the flame. Tonight, like the good thief, I will be with my master in Paradise. For God is kind. He will not let us burn both in this world and the next.”

  A crash from the tower as its roof-beams fell in, a waft of du
st and smoke, and silence, long silence broken only by the slackening flames. None of the familiar dreadful sounds of sack, the screams and the tears and the deep shouts of release. Only the crackle of flame and the crash of falling stone.

  Bruno backed away, shield still up. Erkenbert had appeared now that the fighting had died, his escorts standing a pace behind him. He saw, amazingly, a light of excitement and even good humor shining in the Emperor's bright blue eyes.

  “Well, we know something now,” he said to the scrawny Englishman.

  “What's that?”

  “The bastards must have had something to hide. All we have to do now is find it.”

  The Fafnisbane ghosted through the night, her consorts spread out behind her, sails carrying her on with barely a ripple. Shef sat near the prow, feet overboard, catching from time to time a faint spray from the bow. Like a pleasure-cruise, he thought. Nothing like the ice and hunger of his long voyage to the North. He remembered the burnt face and body of Sumarrfugl, the way the skin had crackled under his hand as he drove the dagger home.

  A presence on his blind side. He whipped round, relaxed. Half-relaxed. It was Svandis in her white dress, settling herself beside him.

  “Brand didn't kill those fishermen, you know,” she began. “He sank their boat, but gave them time to make a raft and load water on it. They had a pair of oars. He said they should reach either the mainland or one of the islands in about a day and a half, time enough for us to be gone.”

  “Unless one of their friends picks them up,” muttered Shef.

  “Do you want to turn into a man like my father?” Svandis hesitated for a few moments. “After all, they say you too are elgi einhamr, not a man of one skin. Because of what you see in dreams. Will you tell me about them? What was it that gave you those marks on your thigh the other night? They looked like the bite of a poison-adder. But you did not swell up and die. And the marks have gone now.”

  Shef hitched his tunic, stared at the place on his own thigh in the faint starlight. There was nothing there now, nothing that could be seen anyway. Perhaps he should tell her. He could feel the warmth of her body, comforting in the cool of the night, could catch the faint scent of woman, making him wonder for an instant what it would be like to hold her, plunge his face between her breasts. Shef had never in his life known comfort from a woman, held at arm's length by his mother, deprived by fate of his one love Godive. He felt a temptation to relax into it. Shrugged the temptation aside immediately. Eyes watched them, to put his head down and appeal for an embrace like a crying child would not be drengiligr, warriorly. Still, he could talk.

  Quietly he began to tell her the details of his last dream. The stair. Feeling like a mouse among humans. The giant coming up the stair, his boots stamping. The monstrous serpent that came up after him, following the god Loki, as he was sure the giant had been. The orm-garth of the gods, with the snakes underfoot and the one that struck at him.

  “That is why I believe in the gods,” he ended. “I have seen them, I have felt them. That is why I know Loki is loose and set on vengeance. As if I needed to know, after Sumarrfugl.”

  Svandis was silent a while, for which he was grateful. She seemed to be thinking about what he said, instead of merely shouting it down. “Tell me,” she asked finally, “was there anything in the dream that reminded you of something you had seen before? Something you might have been thinking about before you slept. The boots, for instance. The boots of the god coming up the stair. You said you saw them.”

  “The boots? They were like Brand's boots.” Shef laughed, told her how as they marched through Cordova he had seen an amazed Arab looking Brand up and down, from his enormous feet to the helmet on his head. How he had barely been able to believe that such feet belonged to a human.

  “So you had a picture like that already in your head? What about the snakes? Have you seen an orm-garth?”

  Shef felt a prickle of doubt and suspicion once more. This was the daughter of Ivar, after all, the grand-daughter of Ragnar himself.

  “I saw your grandfather die in the snake-pit,” he said briefly. “Did no one ever tell you? I heard him sing his death-song.”

  “He used to hold me on his knee and sing to me,” said Svandis.

  “He used to grow his thumb-nail long to gouge men's eyes out with,” replied Shef. “My friend Cuthred tore it out with pliers.”

  “So you have seen a snake-pit too,” Svandis went on, “and seen a man die in it. Were you very frightened then? Did you imagine yourself in the pit?”

  Shef thought for a while. “What you are trying to tell me,” he said, “is that these visions of mine—I do not call them dreams—do not come from the gods at all. They are made up in my own head out of things I have seen, or been frightened by. They are like a story, a saga. One told by a fool, with no beginning or end and only bits of connections to each other. They do not feel like that. They feel—much bigger than that.”

  “Because you are asleep,” said Svandis. “You are not thinking correctly.”

  “Anyway, the visions I see—they are visions of the gods! They tell the stories that I have heard from Thorvin, of Völund and Skirnir and Hermoth and Balder.”

  “Because you have heard them from Thorvin,” said Svandis. “If you dreamt stories that Thorvin had not told you, that might mean something. Maybe only that you had made them up out of things you yourself have seen and felt. But do you not think that Arabs dream of Allah, Christians of their own stories of saints? Your visions are like the gods themselves. People make both of them up out of their own needs and beliefs. If we stopped believing—then we would be free.”

  Shef examined the idea with care and doubt. It seemed to him that sometimes he had seen the vision before he knew the story. Svandis would say that he had forgotten something, got the story backwards. Certainly he had no way of proving different. And she might be correct. Everyone knew that sometimes dreams were caused by the events of the day, or even by sounds that men heard in their sleep and turned into a story. The stoutest Viking had dreams of fear, often he had heard men muttering in their sleep.

  “So there may be no Ragnarök,” he wondered. “No Loki loose. I have been deceiving myself all along. If I could believe that, things would be much easier for me. And there would be no truth in visions.”

  “There is no truth in visions,” Svandis said forcefully, determined to carry her point and make a convert. “Gods and visions are nothing but illusions, which we create to make ourselves slaves.” She pressed closer in the cool night, leant forward to look up into Shef's one eye, her breast nudging against his arm.

  Far to the north, at the Wisdom-House of Stamford in the English midlands, night had not yet fallen. Instead the stone tower with its many outbuildings lay in the long gray twilight of an English early summer. From the hedged fields nearby the heavy scent of flowering hawthorn drifted. Faint laughter came from the outskirts of the town where farm-churls and craftsmen, milking and ditching and trading done for the day, sat for the last hour before full dark with pint pots in their hands. Children played around their fathers in the dusk, and younger folk, men and women, exchanged glances and faded sometimes into the dark of the comforting fields.

  At the Wisdom-House itself, the forges had fallen silent, though red light came still from banked fires. A priest strode across the central courtyard, intending to call on his friends, draw them out to drink mulled ale and discuss their experiments and their discoveries. As he turned the corner by the stone tower he stopped short.

  On a bench in front of him sat Farman priest of Frey, most famous of the priests in England for the number of his god-visions, rivaled in the world only by Vigleik the Norwegian. Farman sat easily. His eyes were open, but he seemed unseeing. Cautiously the priest who had come upon him moved closer, saw that Farman's eyes did not move from their fixed unblinking stare. He stepped back quietly, went to the corner again, waved urgently for others to join him. After a while a score of Way-priests stood in a semi-cir
cle round their un-moving colleague, apprentices and laymen chased away. They waited unspeaking for him to move.

  His eyes blinked, he stirred on the bench, became aware of those around him.

  “What did you see, brother?” asked one of them.

  “At the end—at the end I saw a tree, and a serpent in it. Before the tree there stood a woman, one of great beauty. She was holding out an apple to a man, and he—he was stretching his hand out to it. And all the while the serpent watched, and its forked tongue flickered out and in.”

  No reaction from the Way-priests. None of them had read the Christian books, they knew nothing of Satan, of Adam and Eve and the Fall of Man.

  “But before that, before that I saw something of more mark. Something the king must hear of.”

  “The One King is not here, brother,” a priest reminded gently, knowing that those coming out of the vision needed time to recover themselves.

  “His deputy. His partner.”

  “King Alfred is his partner. He presides over the council of aldermen. There is no deputy.”

  Farman rubbed his eyes. “I must write down what I saw before it fades, and then the news must go to the king.”

  “Can you tell us anything of what you saw?”

  “Danger and destruction. Fire and venom—and the bane of Balder loose.”

  The priests stiffened, knowing who it was that Farman would not name, the god they remembered by the bale-fire in their holy circle.

  “If the bane of Balder is loose,” one of them asked slowly, “what is it that the English king Alfred can do? Council of aldermen or no?”

  “He can turn out the fleet,” replied Farman. “Send every man and every ship to the place of danger. And that is not the mouth of the Elbe now, no, nor the Dannevirke. The bane of Balder is loose everywhere, but he will show himself first in the south, where the sons of Muspell ride on the day of Ragnarök.”