King and Emperor thatc-3

by Harry Harrison

  There were two reasons why they were afraid. One, that none of them had yet borne a child. Since it could not be the case that their master's potency was waning, their barrenness must be their own defect, unless it were the result of deliberate child-murder in the womb. The other reason they were afraid was that the walls of no pavillion could keep out the constant screaming of their master's victims, still ordered to the block, the bastinado, or the impaling-post at the least whim or setback. They feared the change of er-Rahman's moods, on which no-one alive was more expert.

  “He listens still to that young fool, Mu'atiyah,” said the Englishwoman. “At his ear all the time, encouraging him. He is consumed with hate himself, and jealousy.”

  “Could Mu'atiyah eat something that would disagree with him?” suggested the Circassian.

  “The Caliph would know it was poison,” said the Frank. “Then who can say where his anger would fall? We have no-one who would not betray us. Not out here.”

  “Maybe it is best if he achieves his ends and we can all return home.”

  “Home?” said the Englishwoman. “You mean, to Cordova? Is that the best we can hope for all our lives? Waiting for him to tire of us and send the man with the strangling-cord? How many years have you got left, Berthe? Or you, Ouled? I am twenty-three already.”

  “What else is there?” asked Berthe, wide-eyed.

  The Englishwoman, Alfled, had taken part in many a harem plot. She did not look round or change her expression, but laughed and jingled her bracelets as if discussing some sexual exploit she had planned for the Caliph. “We are out here in the heat and the dust of the campaign. Bad news, and all we want is to return to comfort once the Caliph has won. But what if the Caliph loses? His armies and his fleets have lost before, that is why we are here. And in the confusion of a defeat…”

  “We would be taken and raped by half an army if we were free.”

  “Maybe. It depends on the army. You heard what the Dane-woman told us, in Cordova. One of the armies here does not take slaves, and it is led by one of my countrymen. Even the Emperor of the Romans' army is full of your countrymen, Berthe. If we made the cross sign and begged for release from the worshipers of Allah, their priests would be delighted.”

  “But once you have turned your back on Allah, revoked the shahada, there is no mercy for you,” pointed out the Circassian.

  “We cannot afford to fail, that is so.”

  “So what must we do?”

  “Press the Caliph to battle, but in such a way that he must lose.”

  “And how is that to be arranged? He has generals skilled in the art of war, to advise him much better than we ever could. We do not know even enough to say what is right and what would be wrong.”

  “We do not know war,” said Alfled grimly, “but we know men. Pick the biggest fool, and urge on his advice. And the biggest fool in this camp is Mu'atiyah. Let us add our voices to his. Our voices from the pillow to add to the fool's from the divan. One thing we should add. Our wish to see our master conquer: the strongest of men, the most warlike, the most manly.”

  Silence greeted her sarcasm. Finally the Frankish girl spoke. “And we agree, then, if we escape, that whichever of us is in most favor among the conquerors will speak up for the others? If that is so, then I am with you. But one more thing I would counsel, and that is, delay. The spirit of the Caliph's soldiery diminishes day by day. Let him show his madness more, and the rot will spread. Among the secret eaters of pork, the Christian converts, the mustaribs, then among those who favor the house of Tulun, among the readers of Greek and those who wish to reword the Koran. All those who know in their hearts what the Dane-woman told us.”

  “That there is no God, not even Allah,” said Alfled fiercely.

  “No one god,” contradicted the Circassian.

  Chapter Twenty

  Slowly the siege of Septimania tightened, becoming first inevitable, then evident, then acute. The prince of the city, Benjamin ha-Nasi, had refused to believe in it at first, confident that this quarrel forced upon him by mere strangers within his gates could be averted. If not averted, at least deflected, if necessary by the capture of the strangers and their surrender to the enraged Christian Emperor, or else by their forced expulsion, to take their chances with the Greeks and the Greek fire at sea.

  He had been undeceived quickly. The Emperor, it became clear, in the grip of holy fury, would make no distinction between the Christian heretics who had hidden the Grail from him, the heathens who had helped them to steal it, and the Jews who had rejected Christ and crucified his Lord. The emissaries Benjamin sent were returned, their heads hurled over the wall one dawn. The rumor spread that they had been forcibly baptized before execution, to give the unbelieving dogs a last chance of salvation, or so the Emperor had said. A message shouted from a distance later that day announced the Emperor's terms: the Grail, first and foremost, the robbers of it led by their one-eyed king, second, and third, the surrender of all the garrison and the officers of the city, barefoot and in their shirts, with ropes round their necks, in token of their absolute submission to the will of God and of his viceroy.

  But they had no Grail. Without it, the mercy of the Emperor would be nothing. Sadly, remembering Vespasian and the siege of Masada in their history long before, the Jews of Septimania prepared for desperate resistance. Messengers dropped down ropes or crept out along the seashore, to try to get word to their nominal overlord the Caliph of this Christian insurrection upon the Dar al-Islam, the house of Islam. Too often, shrieks and wailing in the night told that they had been intercepted. The Caliph would come, that was sure, in response to this provocation. How long he would take, how concerned he would be for those of his subjects not of his faith, what tales of treachery he might have been told already: that was another story.

  With a better heart, the men of the Northern fleet bent themselves to assisting the defense. As soon as the watch-fires of the enemy began to twinkle in the night on the hills around, Cwicca set his mates to commandeering every scrap of cordage and balk of timber that could be taken from the city's stores or the scores of fishing-boats and larger vessels now lying blockaded in the harbor. With them, he set to making as many catapults as he could find material for or space for along the walls. The English and the Vikings now knew of three types.

  First—though last to be used by them on the field of war—the mules, descendants of the Roman onagers, and reintroduced to the world by Erkenbert the deacon and his copy of Vegetius's De re militari. They threw stones, hard and flat, ship-destroyers, wall-breachers. Heavy and cumbersome, hard to make. Of little use against men, like trying to swat flies with a sledgehammer, as Brand remarked.

  Second, what they called the twist-shooters. Torsion weapons, like the mules, and with torsion weapons' power, but shooting great darts or javelins, like giant crossbows. They would drive through almost any shield or mantlet, and had a terror effect out of proportion to the losses they caused. Hard to make also, and dangerous to use. No-one could tell for sure when such a weapon was likely to be overwound, and only those who had done it many times could even guess. Overwinding meant a snap, a sudden lash of broken rope and timber, a winder with no hand, no arm, or his ribs stove in. The English freed-slaves who had first been recruited to man them, years before, had learnt to put spring steel reinforcements on the wooden bow-arms, to save their own lives. There was no spring steel available in Septimania. But then, as Cwicca remarked under the cover of a language the inhabitants of Septimania could not follow, it ain't us that's going to wind them, is it? As long as they do more damage to the other bastards than they do to our lot, that's all right.

  Third, the elementary and primitive weapons that Shef himself had invented personally, the pull-throwers as his men called them. Mere traction weapons, worked by a gang pulling in unison at one end of a beam, while the other end, the long arm, whipped up and whirled round a sling, to release its rock at the critical moment. Cheap to make, easy to build, capable of being
worked by anyone with a minimum of instruction. Easy to aim for line, almost impossible to gauge for range. Throwing their stones up in the air and relying on gravity for their force, not the power of twisted rope. Used best against formed bodies of troops, who could not avoid them. Cwicca's gangs turned out dozens of them, sent them to every place they could think of along the walls, along with unlimited supplies of missiles dug out of the stony ground. After a while their operation was turned over to the women of the city, who could heave as well as men, and free men for the heavier work of close combat.

  After the first few lunges by the Emperor's men, mere demonstrations or explorations—though each left its trail of casualties lying dead or broken on the stony ground—it became clear that the lie of the land would impose its own pattern on the fighting.

  Like many towns along the coast, Septimania had sprung from a settlement along a cala, or creek-mouth, where a river ran down between high bluffs to the sea. The city had grown up on both hills and on the steep sides of the cala between, but as it had grown more and more populous the original single bridge across had multiplied, been made and remade in stone, so that in some stretches the river had become almost completely hidden. But in any case, in this, the growing heat of mid-summer, the river-bed was as good as dry. Where it ran was blocked now by a heavy iron grid or portcullis, lowered to the stony bed beneath.

  Nevertheless the river-bed was a weak point, where men could enter under the walls, rather than over them. Brand, touring the defenses with Malachi, captain of the prince's guard, had said nothing when they reached it but told Cwicca to bring up his best twist-shooters and dig them in behind the iron grid.

  Round the whole half-circuit towards the land ran the stone walls, beautifully made, fervently maintained and tended as Shef had seen. Assault on those was bound to be costly. At each end, where the walls met the sea, the road ran, the road along the coast that carried trade, and that carried it through the town where the traders must perforce pay toll. The gates at either end were as strong as could be made, of studded oak, with towers to protect them and cover the approaches with arrow-shot. Yet they too were a weak point.

  And then the harbor itself. On the tideless Mediterranean there was no foreshore, and walls could be extended right down to the beach. Yet the sea was shallow. Anyone could wade or even paddle along it. As long as attackers faced nothing but wall, as forbidding as the landward one, no harm could be done. Yet as the sea-walls came into the harbor, there had to be a place of junction. To both the north and south of the harbor there ran long stone jetties, or moles, or staithes as the English and Norse called them, the northern one a good hundred yards long, the southern one half that length. They protected the mouth of the cala from the fierce sudden storms of the Inland Sea, had been built over the years as trade had increased and the size of the ships with it. Each jetty was six feet above the surface of the water—easy to reach from the deck of a ship, as they were intended to be. Their defense caused Brand anxious concern. They're long, they're low, if we were to defend them with swords and spears we'd need five, six hundred men, he estimated. And they'd all have to be better than the opposition as well, he added.

  “Yeah,” Cwicca replied, “so we don't defend them with swords and spears, nor axes neither. They're long, they're low, there's no cover on them or coming up to them. Crossbows for short range and mules for long. Shoot the shit out of them.”

  “At night?” Brand asked, pulling his beard. He and Malachi fell into careful consultation, counting their numbers and trying to allocate the men and women they had as best they could.

  The final problem was the sea. The harbor mouth, a hundred feet across from jetty to jetty, was guarded from ship-borne entry by a boom of tree-trunks connected by massive bronze chains and rings. A galley sweeping in would smash its bow, tear its bottom out. Nevertheless, what men had made, men could unmake. No obstacle, as any veteran would know, seriously impedes assault unless it is backed by men and weapons, men with an advantage over the attacker. Brand carefully positioned the seven two-masters of the Wayman fleet where they could not be reached by flying stones from the raft offshore, but where they could bring their mules to bear on the sea approaches. Any ship or boat which tried to bring men to the attack would be sunk immediately. In theory. If everything went well. If no-one got distracted. If the other side didn't think of something clever too.

  Brand had tried hard to think of something clever on his side, staring—from cover—at the raft offshore and the patrolling shapes of the fire-vessels usually further out. But nothing, came to mind. He had considered unshipping the metal plates carried as ballast in all the ships, armoring the Fafnisbane or the Hagena like a second Fearnought and sending her out to battle the armored raft. But even armor would not protect against the fire of the Greeks: Beowulf, for whom the Grendelsbane was named, took an iron shield to protect himself against the dragon but then, as Brand pointed out when the story was told him, Beowulf didn't have a wooden hull. An armored catapult ship could of course sink a fire-galley from a distance, if the wind was right, but not do that and fight an equally armored and much less sinkable floating fort at the same time. We might have to try it one day, Brand concluded to himself, but only if the situation on land turns really nasty. A spear in the heart was one thing, being burnt alive like Sumarrfugl was another. The Greeks' brief demonstrations against small trading craft trying their luck rubbed the point home.

  “It's all very tricky,” Brand concluded in a bass rumble to his cousin Styrr, his skippers, and the priests of the Way gathered in informal conclave. “But you never know how tricky it looks for the other side as well. What we've got to do is not make any mistakes until, maybe, they've had a sickener or two. After all, they have to think of something or go away. We just have to sit here.”

  “Till something turns up,” said Hagbarth skeptically.

  “Yes.”

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe the Caliph will arrive with a hundred thousand men. Maybe someone will bring him the damned ladder, whatever it is. Maybe the gods will intervene on our side.”

  Chill disapproval met the last remark. “I'll tell you one thing,” Brand said in an effort to seem more cheerful.

  “What's that?”

  “He's making it easy for us right now.”

  The first moves of the siege might indeed almost have been planned to give the besieged confidence without exposing them to overmuch strain. Some two days after the watch-fires of the advanced cavalry appeared, and the heads of the emissaries were hurled over the wall, the Emperor—if it was he who had ordered it—launched a simple attempted escalade, simultaneously against a stretch of the land wall and a stretch of the wall running down to the beach. At each point a thousand men rose from cover at dawn and ran forward with ladders and grapnels.

  They had made too much noise preparing. The defenders were ready and alert. As the ladders reached the top, crutches pushed them away again. The grapnel-ropes were cut. Arrows and catapult stones whirled into the mass of men huddled at the foot of the walls. After a few moments, when it became clear that all was well in hand, Brand dragged an enthusiastic Jewish guardsman away from a ladder he was about to thrust off, kicked aside an English crossbowman anxious to shoot the man climbing it, and stepped back, hunkered down behind the stone battlement, shield raised against the arrows pelting over the wall.

  A head appeared, teeth bared in panic and rage, a man swung himself over the parapet, beside himself with the honor of success, desperate to make a lodgement on the walls. Brand measured him, lifted his axe “Battle-troll,” and struck once, splitting helmet and skull. He stepped back, waving to the crossbowman and guardsman. One shot, the other pushed, the ladder fell with its load of heavy-armed men into the growing pile below. Brand looked at the man he had killed, his equipment, his armor, such of his face as the axe had left.

  “A Frank,” he muttered. “And a rich one.” He removed the dead man's purse from his belt, and faced down the cros
s-bowman's automatic glower. “Don't look like that, it all gets divided up in the end, fair shares, that's hermannalög, warriors' law. But I didn't let him up to take his money.”

  “What did you let him up for?” asked the surly crossbowman.

  “I wanted to see who he was. And who he wasn't. And what he wasn't was one of those German monk bastards, never have a penny on them.”

  “What's that mean, then?”

  “Means the Emperor isn't really trying. Just seeing if we're a pushover or not.”

  Ignoring the cheers of success from Jews and Northerners, guards and citizens alike seeing their enemies fall back in disorder, Brand shouldered his way along the walls, wondering where the real attack might come from.

  Down the river-bed, as he had expected. For a day and a half after the failure of the first, almost perfunctory assault, onagers had hurled stones unavailingly against the walls, sometimes skimming over to cause broken tiles and shattered windows in the houses of the city, but bringing no threat to the defenders. Then, as the pace of the bombardment increased, a watcher saw a wall of shields advancing slowly down the dried-up riverbed that ran through the heart of Septimania. Not shields, in fact, but mantlets: heavy wooden frames that took two men to carry, proof against breast-bows, crossbows, even lobbed stones. A mule-stone would shatter one, and the men behind it, but there were no mules on the walls, too hard to train down. The mantlets inched forward, and after a while Brand, called from his command post, could see gangs furiously hurling stones and the rubble of the winter floods out of the center channel. Behind the mantlets, and following down the cleared center line, he could see another armored structure crawling. A wave ordered fire-arrows launched against it. They struck and fizzled on wet bull-hides. The structure crawled nearer.