Shef looked round the small inner circle of seven. “Very well. We will start our ride as soon as I have finished speaking to the others. We work down into the plain behind our scouts, and at dusk we start to ride round in a wide circle. To come out on the other side of the rock, of Puigpunyent, to the north-west. Then we leave our horses and follow Straw here through the Emperor's guard-ring.
“You know that is asking a lot. But I promise you this. The Emperor's guards will all be looking at quite something else. If they are still there.”
A mutter of assent, if not belief.
“Stand aside then and be ready to go.”
Shef turned to the larger group standing further back, by their machines. Cwicca and his gang had brought light winches with them, mere cylinders of wood with a turning handle, and had spent a long hour slowly pegging them into the stony ground without noise of hammers. By each winch stood half a dozen of the ships' catapulteers now turned kite-men, with by them the bulkier figures of the Vikings sent along to act as close-quarter guards.
In front of each of the three groups stood a kiteboy, Tolman in the middle, to either side Ubba and—Helmi, that was his name, a small pale boy little more than a child. A cousin of some crew-member's, left orphaned and homeless by the wars. All three boys looked unusually serious and alert.
“You know what to do as well. Stay here, rest, light no fires. At midnight, Cwicca, you can read the stars, fly off the kites. There will be a wind coming down from the mountains behind, or so they tell us.
“Then you, boys. When you are at the end of your ropes and flying smoothly, bring out your fires. Light each of your baskets in turn and then drop them. Make sure the cloths are unfolded before you start lighting. Drop them one at a time, counting one hundred between each. Count slowly.
“Steffi, you count the baskets as they are lit. Once you have seen them all dropped, haul the boys in. Don't stop to unpeg the winches, just leave everything and follow Messer Anselm wherever he says to go. In the morning we meet up and all head back to the ships. Any questions?”
There were none. Shef moved over once more and looked carefully at the gear they had spent the day assembling. The basic idea was to put together Steffi's invention of the fall-delaying cloth with the thing that the heretics had shown him, the colored fires of the saltpeter and the Arab alchemy. Bundles of dry twigs, impregnated with saltpeter and sealed roughly with wax. A cloth tied by four corners to each one, each of them hanging from bent nails in the canework frames of the kites. Each cloth had a small hole in its center now: Steffi, experimenting continually, had discovered this prevented the trapped air from spilling sideways, gave a smoother and even a slower fall. The most difficult bit had been giving the boys fires to carry. There could be no striking tinder and steel in mid-air. In the end they had borrowed a sailor's trick from the Vikings, who made long crossings in their undecked boats and could not always find dry tinder: tarred rope, lit and set to smolder inside a stiff canvas case.
The idea was good. Shef realized, as he looked at the flame-baskets, at the flimsy construction of the kites, quite how much was being expected of three twelve-year-olds, bobbing at the end of ropes high in the air above unyielding mountain-side. No need to remind them of the reward. Boys did not think far enough ahead to value money. They would do this for the praise and admiration of the men. Maybe, a little, out of respect for him. He nodded at them all, patted Helmi gently on the shoulder, and turned away.
“Time to move,” he said to his own party. As they filed away the English catapulteers and Viking guards looked after him with silent concern. Cwicca, at least, had seen this happen before, the One King going by himself to some uncertain fate. He had hoped not to see it happen again. From the place where she sat alone, arms wrapped round knees, Svandis too watched the retreating file. She could not go out, throw her arms round him, weep like a woman: her dignity forbade it. But she had seen many men go, few come back.
Hours later, as the sun finally crawled down to touch the flat horizon, the boy Straw led the seven horsemen into the rare shade of a clump of low and twisted trees. He whistled softly, and at the call figures appeared from the shadows to clutch bridles. Shef slowly levered himself off the horse's back and climbed stiffly to the ground, thigh muscles twinging and cramping.
It had been a hellish ride. At the very start Shef had been shocked to find not the tiny mountain ponies they had been using to come down from the heretics' stronghold, but bigger animals, and not with the usual blanket slung over them but strange high-pommeled leather saddles, with iron stirrups dangling either side. “Bruno's baccalarii,” Richier explained briefly. “Cowboys from the country to the East. They are all over the place. Some of them rode too far and too few. From a distance, with these horses and this gear, we will seem just like some more of them. No-one asks where they go. They ride wherever they please.”
Shef had clambered into the high saddle, appreciating immediately the help and support it gave even an inexperienced rider. Then he had realized that like the others he was meant to carry in his right hand the long ten-foot ox-goad that every cowboy brandished, control the beast with left hand on reins alone. As he kicked his heels and tried to force his unaccustomed seaman's legs to clamp the horse's barrel, they moved out into the sun and the dust.
No-one had challenged them, indeed. As they rode across the broken foothills and into the plain beyond, they had seen again and again other mounted men in the distance, but often, on every path or road, groups of infantry watching the crossings. Straw and his fellows waved their lances at the horsemen, but took care not to ride to meet or cross them, veering away when they could. To the groups of foot-soldiers they called out in what was evidently some imitation of the language of the Camargue, the cowboys' country, but kept riding, not waiting to engage in gossip. Shef was surprised that no-one acted, moved across to block their path, but it looked as if everyone expected the irregular riders to go where they liked, without orders or plan. Surely someone would notice the inept riding of Shef and Richier, at least, see that there were men there too old or too big for a cowboy patrol. But even the shouts that came towards them seemed good-natured or simply derisive. The Emperor had made a mistake, Shef concluded. He had put too many men out on watch, and too few of them knew each other. They were used to seeing strangers riding towards, or round, Puigpunyent. If the Emperor had ordered a complete ban on movement, patrolled by a few selected outfits, strangers would have been challenged instantly.
The break in the copse of twisted trees did not last long enough. Time to take the skins of heavily-watered wine and drain down first one quart and then another, drinking till the demand in the throat was gone, and then drinking steadily on, a gulp at a time, till the sweat began to break out again and the body felt it could hold no more. Then Straw was counting them in the deep shade and arranging them in the order he wanted: himself in the lead, another stripling in the rear, Richier next to last and Shef just before him. The other three heretic youths followed Straw, one directly behind him and the other two a little to left and right. A last mutter between the youths and a soft exchange of signal whistles. Then Straw led them into the depth of the tangled and ground-cloaking scrub. The maquis of Occitania.
Very soon Shef began to wonder if they would ever reach their goal. The idea had always been clear enough. The thorn-bushes were a total obstacle to movement on foot or on horseback, as long as one kept upright. But the thorns started their sideways growth a foot or two off the ground. Beneath them there was always a clear space, enough for an active man or boy to creep through, completely hidden from any sentry, as long as one could keep any sense of direction.
The trouble was the creeping. Straw and his mates, light and young, could wriggle forward at an immense pace, keeping their bodies off the ground and pushing forward on hands and toes. Shef managed the same movement for no more than a hundred yards. Then his overtasked arm-muscles gave out and he began instead to crawl, belly on the ground, pulling himse
lf forward like a clumsy swimmer. Behind him grunts and gasps indicated that Richier was doing the same. In seconds the boy ahead of him had vanished, eeling along at three times Shef's speed. He ignored the disappearance and crawled on. Whistles from behind and then from in front, sounding like the calls of some night-bird. A shape wriggling back towards him, muttering some kind of appeal for more speed. It vanished again. Straw appeared, gabbling likewise. Shef ignored them all and continued to crawl through the roots, weaving from side to side to get round the thickest clumps, thorns catching in his hair, sticking in his fingers, dragging at his clothes. A hiss and a scurry on the bare ground brought him up short, jerking his hand away. One of the vipers of the plain, but hearing him coming long before his hand reached it. Shef's mouth began to clog with dust, his knees to bleed through the chafed wool trousers.
Straw had caught him by the shoulder, was pulling him to one side—out into a break in the cover, a path, only inches wide, but leading round the side of a hill. Shef climbed slowly onto his feet, feeling the relief in protesting thigh-muscles, wiped the hair out of his eye and looked at Straw with doubt and enquiry. On their feet? In the open? Better to crawl on than be seen.
“Too slow,” hissed Straw in trade-Arabic. “Friends gone ahead. If hear whistle, off path! Hide again!”
Slowly but relievedly Shef began to pad in the direction indicated, rustles in the brush indicating the scouts ahead. He spared a moment to glance at the stars, shining clear in the cloudless sky. Not too long to midnight.
He had gone maybe half a mile along the goat track as it wound through the small hills when the whistles came again from the hillside. Straw was at his side, gripping an arm and trying to force him back into the brush. Shef looked at the apparently solid wall of thorns, ducked and crawled under. Ten feet in and hardly a glimmer of light finding its way through, though more gasping and grunting told him that the exhausted perfectus was being hauled into safety too. Straw was still pulling at him to get further in, but Shef resisted. He was a veteran of many marches, many spells of sentry duty. Unlike Straw he could estimate a risk. In this kind of country, with no alarms and no immediate danger at hand, he did not think the Emperor's patrols would be at full alert. They would not see an eye peering from thick cover in the middle of a featureless hillside. Carefully he edged to his feet, held on to the base of a branch, carefully let it sink a few inches to give him a spyhole.
There they were indeed, not twenty feet away, edging along the narrow awkward path, too busy avoiding thorns to look around them. Shef caught a low grumble of conversation, an angry bark of command from the man in the lead. The grumbling did not stop. Low-grade troops, Shef thought. Local levies like his own county fyrds. Reluctant to take trouble, thoughts simply on getting home. Easy to avoid, as long as one did not actually fall over them in the dark. It was the silent men who did not move who were the danger.
Back to the path, another half-mile on, then into the scrub and once more the steady crawling round some obstacle or sentry-post. Another hundred yards on a goat-path, and crawl again. On and on. Shef lost sense of direction, ceased fatalistically to glance at the sky and reckon the time. The gasping of Richier diminished as he too seemed to settle to their uneven rhythm of movement. And then suddenly, they were at a halt, all seven of them in a clump, looking from the shadows across a patch of bare ground at glimmering fires. Behind them the great jagged mass of the peak, the Castle of the Graduale, Puigpunyent itself.
Straw pointed very gently at the fires. “Them,” he breathed. “Last men. Last ring. Los alemanos.”
Germans they were. Shef could see the iron glinting as they moved on their beats, shields and mail, helmets and gauntlets. In any case he would have recognized the bearing of the Lanzenbrüder, whom he had seen swarming to the assault in the battle of the Braethraborg years before. Then they had been on his side. Now… There was no chance of creeping past them. They had cut down the scrub to make a bare belt, woven the debris into a rough thorn fence. The sentries were not fifty yards apart, and they moved continually. They were watching, too, not like the discontented levies further out.
Suddenly, from the bulk of Puigpunyent, there came a great crash and a thunder of rock. Shef started, noticed the sentries looking too, then turning back to their duties. A cloud of dust rose barely visible against the black and Shef could hear faint shouting. The Emperor's gangs were working on through the night, in shifts, tearing down the whole mountainside with pick and lever and crane, to rip out the heart of the heretics' faith. To find the Emperor his relic.
Shef looked again at the sky, the position of the moon, still some way off full. It was midnight now. But it would take time, he knew, time to rig the kites and winch them out. Maybe they would have to wait for a wind, even up there on the mountain. Straw was pulling at him again, anxious and wanting an instant answer. He was only a boy. In war, everything took longer than you wanted, except when the other side did it. Shef looked round, motioned them all to the ground. If there was nothing else to do, rest. If his plan succeeded, he would know soon enough.
Stretched out underneath the bushes, Shef put his head down on his forearms, felt the weariness come over him. There was no risk where they were, and the boys would stay awake. He let his eyelids close, fell slowly into the pit of sleep.
“He's not just loose now, he's out,” said the voice, the familiar voice, his father's voice. “Out in the open.”
Even in his dream Shef felt a surge of resentment, disbelief. “You're not there,” he told himself, himself talking to himself. “Svandis explained all that. You're just a part of my mind, the same way all the gods are part of people's minds.”
“All right, all right,” the voice went on with weary tolerance. “Believe what you like. Believe what your girlfriend likes. But believe this. He's out. I have no hold over him. Things could go any way now. Ragnarök—that's what Othin wants, what Loki wants. What they think they want.”
“You don't want it?”
“I don't want what would come after it. Church all-powerful, Way all-powerful, whichever. There's a better way—back to where we were before, before Sheaf became Shield. Maybe with something added, something new.”
“What's that?”
“You're going to see. You're going to show them. The priests have it inside their holy circle, but they see it only as a warning, not a blessing. Can be either.”
Shef had lost the thread, could not follow the hints. “What are you talking about?”
“What Loki lost to. What you are bringing back for him. His namesake, his near namesake. Logi.”
“Fire,” Shef translated automatically.
“Fire it is. Wake and see what you are bringing to the world.”
Shef's head snapped upright, his eyes instantly wide open. He realized that he had already been half-woken by a rising babble of voices, from the ring of sentries in front of him. But all over the guarded plain were coming shouts and calls, the blast of a trumpet as some panicker decided to alert his men to what they had seen already. Fire drifting down out of the sky. After a few seconds Shef's eye and mind adjusted to what he was seeing. Immediately before him, a white flare drifting down, as brilliant as a sun, throwing flickering shadows over the thorn below. Above it, a green one. Not far away, Shef could see a third and a fourth beginning to drift down, thought for a second he could even see the tiny glow of the slow-match. But any such light was killed instantly by the lurid colors spreading across the sky. Violet, yellow, red. More and more flares seemed to spring into life every moment, though Shef knew that could not be so. It was just that each one took moments for the mind to recognize it. By the time it had been taken in, there were others in being to focus on. All three kites must be aloft and working. The boy-flyers were doing their duty better than he could have believed.
To the troops on the ground, local levies, bishops' men, half-heretics and Lanzenbrüder alike, every man deeply superstitious and steeped from birth in a culture of demons and miracles, d
ragons and portents, the flares in the sky were even harder to take in. Men do not see what they see. They see the nearest fit between what they see and what they expect. All across the plain beneath the rock of Puigpunyent, cries rose up as men tried to fit a meaning to something that defied all experience.
“A comet! The tailed star! God's judgment on those who overthrew the long-haired kings,” wailed a chaplain, starting an instant panic.
“Dragons in the sky,” shouted a Lanzenritter from the Drachenberg country, where belief in dragons was ingrained. “Shoot for its soft spot! Shoot before the damned things get on the ground!” A rain of arrows poured into the air from those who heard him, relieved at hearing an order of any kind. The arrows landed among the horses of a cavalry unit corralled two hundred yards off, starting a stampede.
“It is Judgment Day and the dead rising to meet their God in the sky,” lamented a bishop with much on his conscience which he had hoped to do timely penance for. His cry would have carried little conviction, since the lights were falling rather than rising, if falling more slowly than could possibly be natural. But as he called out some sharp-sighted man caught the vague shape of one of the gliding kites banking above the light it had just released, and shrieked hysterically, “Wings! I can see their wings! They are the angels of the Lord come to scourge sinners!”
Within moments a roar spread across the plain, of ten thousand men shouting their explanations. The cowboys of the Camargue, lightest of cavalry, reacted first, were in their saddles in moments and heading purposefully for safety. Panicked sentries abandoned their positions in the brush and began to draw together, hoping for comfort in numbers. As they saw the infection spreading, the disciplined Germans of the Lanzenorden, scattered here and there to officer and stiffen the more doubtful Frankish troops, began to seize the runners, knock men down with their lance-butts, try to drive them back to their posts.
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