“Why? Because it is the sign of life, of life after death. You hope to live in Paradise after you are dead because there was One who once came back and declared He had power over death and after death. On the Cross, and on the Resurrection, all your hope rests.
“What if there was no Resurrection? Where is your hope then, and what good are your tithes? What need have you then of a priest? Now who has told you the story of the Resurrection? Was it a priest? Would you buy a horse on the word of the man who took your money? If you never saw the horse? Listen to this story instead.
“There was a man called Jesus, and many years ago Pontius Pilate crucified him. But the hangmen bungled in haste, and he did not die. He did not die. Instead, his friends came and took away the body on a ladder, and brought it back to life. When he was strong again, he fled and made a new life, and in that new life he took back many of the things he had said. Heaven is in this world, he said, and men should make it for themselves. Women too.
“Do you live in Heaven? Or in Hell? Ask your priest, ask him how he knows what he knows. Ask him, where is the Cross? Where is the ladder? Look in his eyes when you ask him, and think of selling the horse. If you do not believe him, think what you can do.”
“It was an interesting account,” remarked Moishe the scribe to Solomon as they walked away together, for the moment on friendly terms again. “Inept, of course.”
Solomon raised an eyebrow, but did not challenge the view. “I had trouble,” he agreed, “in translating some of it. His words for ‘baptize’ and ‘Resurrection’ are very simple, and I had to do the best I could. In what lies its ineptitude?”
“Oh, seven rhetorical questions in a row, like a schoolboy who has not felt the rod. Constant repetition, horses and hangmen and ladders and tithes all mixed in with life and death and the mysteries of faith. No grandeur. No idea of style. I would blush to have it known that I had written such a thing. But to your One King I am just the part of a machine, a machine for making many copies.”
I will pass that on, reflected Solomon. The thought of a machine for making many copies. And what does not please Moishe may nevertheless affect people of whom the learned Moishe knows nothing. The unlearned, to begin with. There are many of them, and not all are stupid.
“Where are you from?” asked Shef.
“I was taken from Kent,” the woman replied. She was dressed still in what remained of an all-enveloping Arab bur qa, but she wore no veil, and the hood was thrown back to reveal fair hair and blue eyes. She spoke English—old-fashioned English, Shef realized with a slight shock, better English in a way than his own, used as he now was to studding his language with words and tricks of speech that he had picked up from the Wayman Norse. Twice already he had seen her frown as she struggled to follow him.
“Kent. That is within the realm of my co-king, Alfred.”
“The king in my time was Ethelred. Before him, Ethelbert. I think I had heard of Alfred as their younger brother. There have been many changes. Still, I would like to go back. If I could. If I could find my kin, and if they would have me back, a disgraced woman.”
The woman sank her eyes, feigned to dab at them with the corner of her sleeve. She is playing for sympathy, Shef realized. Trying to look attractive while she does it, too. A long time since a woman has bothered to do that for me. But in her position, what else can she do?
“There will be a place for you in Kent, if that is where you wish to go,” said Shef. “King Alfred is a generous lord, and one of your beauty will never lack suitors. I can see to it that you have wealth enough to please your kin. England is a rich land now, you know. Nor is it afflicted by pirates any more, so you will be safe.”
He reacts to weakness, Solomon reflected, watching them, by trying to take the weakness away, not by exploiting it, as the woman expects him to. It is a good quality in a king, but I wonder if the woman understands it.
Shef patted Alfled's hand. His voice turned business-like. “There is something, though, that you can do for us, I believe, for you are one who knew many or all the secrets of the Caliph's court. Tell me, what is your belief in Allah?”
“I have made the shahada. The profession of faith,” Alfled added. “It goes La illaha il Allah, Muhammad rasul Allah, which is to say, ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet.’ But what could I do? It was that or die, or be one of the lowest slaves in a laborers' brothel.”
“You do not believe it?”
She shrugged. “As much as I believe anything. I was brought up to believe in God. He never helped me against the pagans who caught me, though I prayed to Him many a time. The only difference between the Christians' God and the Arabs' Allah that I can see is that the Arabs believe in Mohammed and in their Koran.”
“Different books, different faiths. Tell me, are there any in Cordova who take an interest in how books are made?”
Here it comes, thought Alfled. Perhaps he will ask me to whip him with a quill, or drain him onto parchment. There must be something his woman will not do for him. There always is. “There are shops that sell books,” she replied, “where copies are made to the order of the buyers. The love-poetry of bin-Firnas, say. Or the Book of a Thousand Pleasures, it might be.”
“That is not the kind of book the king meant,” cut in Svandis, observing watchfully. “He means, where do holy books, books of faith come from. Where does the Koran come from. Or the Bible come from. Because someone, some person, must have made them at some time, holy though they are. Made them with fingers and pen and ink.” She tapped the quill-pendant that hung now over her breast.
“The Koran was dictated by God to Mohammed,” said Alfled. “Or so they say. But there are some… yes. The Mu'tazilites, as they are called. Ishaq the Keeper of the Scrolls was one such.”
“And what do they believe?” The king's one eye was trained on her with fierce interest.
“They believe… They believe that the Koran is not eternal, even if it is the word of Allah. They say that it is the word of Allah as heard by Mohammed, but that there may be other words. They say that it is not enough merely to collect hadith, that is to say tradition, but that one must also apply to it one's reason, which is the gift of Allah.”
Moishe would not like to hear that, Solomon thought again. He thinks it is the first duty of a scholar to preserve the Torah, and the last to collect commentary on it. To reason from it, not reason about it.
Shef was nodding slowly. “They do not want to destroy books. That is good. But they are ready to think about them. That is better. If I could see a Mu'tazilite Caliph in Cordova, and a Pope in Rome without an army, then, I think, Ragnarök would be averted, and Loki put at rest. But at the root of it all is to have books in many hands. I do not suppose all the booksellers in Cordova, nor all the scribes in Septimania, could make as many books as we need. What was it you said, Solomon, that we need a machine to make many copies, faster than a man can write? I know no way to hitch up a millwheel to a scribe's arm, alas, though it may do the work of a smith.”
“The Caliph often had more documents to sign than his arm could manage,” ventured Alfled.
“What did he do?”
“He had a block made, of gold, with a handle of ivory. But on the base of the block was a copper plate, with his name on it standing out the depth of a finger-paring. The rest had been eaten away by cunning acids, I do not know how. He would put the plate on to cork with ink in it, and then stamp the block down on documents as fast as Ishaq could present them. Some said Ishaq would put documents in there that the Caliph never read, for a price. It was like putting a brand on cattle.”
“Like a brand,” Shef repeated. “Like a brand. But no-one can brand paper, or parchment.”
“And the end of it all is a false paper,” said Svandis, face twisted with disgust. “One that no-one read and no-one signed.”
“That is one way books might be made,” agreed Solomon.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The news of the disast
er for Islam ran south faster, seemingly, than any horse could carry it. Than any single horse or horseman, certainly. As the first reports arrived in any town, carried by the cavalrymen who had fled first from the battle, each man was helped from his horse, carried to drink sherbet in the cool, pressed for further information. Meanwhile such information as could be gleaned was carried on by trusted messengers to those whom the local governor of a province or cadi of a city regarded as most in need of it. By the time the survivors rode on, their stories growing more elaborate and self-justifying each time they were repeated, the news was often ahead of them.
As the news was received, those in power under the Caliph-who-had-been thought carefully about their positions. Who was to succeed the Caliph? It was known that he had many children, but none designated, and none old and strong enough to survive the civil war that threatened. He had had many brothers, or half-brothers. Most dead, gone to the leather carpet or the bowstring. Many unacceptable, children of the mustaribs. Or were they, now, so unacceptable? Those who had been considered so, governors of the north for the most part, began to reflect on their own strength and on their alliances. Horsemen rode, troops were gathered, governors wondered how many of the levies they had sent north would return. As they trickled in, surprisingly many of them for a battle that according to the first runaways had been fought with great valor, governors reckoned their strength again. Almost all of them came to the same conclusion. Too soon to strike, or to give up hope. Do what is obviously right and you cannot come to harm. Protest loyalty to the Faith. Surround one's own person with every armed man that can be raised. And meanwhile, since the men are there and must be paid, there are private squabbles that may as well be taken care of. Old enmities between Alcala and Alicante, the coast and the mountains, disputes over water and land, flared into conflict.
In Cordova itself, as the news arrived, there was shock and horror. No alarm, since clearly the unbelievers could offer no threat to the established civilization of the south and of Andalusia, but fear at the judgment of Allah. The question of succession struck every listener at once. Within days the carts of market stuff and poultry, the herds of sheep and beef cattle, had ceased to stream through the gates, the peasants of the Guadalquivir valley fearing to enter what might be bloody civil war. The few half-Berber half-brothers of the Caliph vanished into their own strongholds, were known to be calling for men, for help from the kinsfolk of North Africa. At any moment a fleet might arrive from Algiers or Morocco, to sail up the river. Or, said the pessimists, the Tulunids of Egypt may take a hand: mere Turks from the steppe.
At that thought, the Christians of the city, and the Jews of the Juderia, the ghetto established for them, also began to reckon their strength. The rule of the previous Caliph had been cruel to those who renounced the shahada or who sought for martyrdom. It would be like a caress compared with the random and profitless cruelties of the Turks or the Berbers, anxious to show their loyalty to the faith because of their recent and doubtful conversion to it.
Better any Caliph than no Caliph, said the wiser heads of the city to each other. Best of all, a Caliph acceptable to all. But who? The young man, Mu'atiyah, pupil of bin-Firnas, had appeared from the wreck and ruin, ridden without ceasing all the way from the moment the Caliph fell back in his arms—or so he said. He called for Ghaniya, the Caliph's oldest half-brother and trusted emissary to the North, to succeed to the cushion. Ghaniya, he shouted in a score of marketplaces, Ghaniya could be trusted to take up the war. And not only the war against the Christians. Against the majus also, the heathen fire-worshipers who had deluded the Caliph into war and disaster. But most of all, the war against the faithless, the secret traitors. Had he not with his own eyes (and the invention of his master) seen men of the Caliph's army arrayed against him, eating roast pig between the battle-lines? How many more secret devourers of swine hid in the streets of Cordova? To be rooted out! Along with the Christians who sheltered them, under the mistaken kindness of the former Caliph. Enslave them, send them into exile, impale those who renounced their faith…
“Too much impaling already,” remarked bin-Maymun, once commander of the cavalry in the army of the Prophet, to his cousin bin-Firnas, as they ate grapes in the cool of the latter's riverbank mansion. “You can't expect men to fight if some of them are dragged off every day and heard screaming to their comrades every night. He is your pupil of course, son of my mother's brother…”
“But not a ready learner,” his cousin replied. “It seems to me—eager though I am for shari'a—that a little relaxation may be in order? Other learned men are with me on this, Ishaq, Keeper of the Caliph's Scrolls for one. Without wishing to go as far as the sect of the Sufi, he remembers that a House of Wisdom was once established in Baghdad, and flourished under the rule of Mu'tazilites. Why should Baghdad have had what Cordova cannot?”
“There are other reports, too, of what happened after the battle, after I and my men had been driven from the field,” his cousin replied. “Some of the Caliph's women escaped from the Christians who seized them and found their way by ship and horse to Cordova. One a Christian by birth, so her loyalty cannot be doubted if she turned her back on her fathers' faith. I have taken another into my own harem, a delightful woman from Circassia. They too say that the Caliph's rigor was too great—a compensation, they say, for certain… inadequacies. They say also that he put too much faith in your pupil.” Bin-Maymun cast a glance sideways to see how his hint was taken.
“He is my pupil no longer,” declared bin-Firnas firmly. “I withdraw my protection from him.” As bin-Maymun sank back, remembering threats and insults and considering which of his men to send to put a stop to Mu'atiyah's babble, bin-Firnas pressed on. “And will you join Ishaq and my learned Mends later on, for song and poetry, and perhaps, a little discussion?”
“I will,” said bin-Maymun, paying the price for the freedom just granted to deal with Mu'atiyah. “And I will bring my friend the Cadi with me,” he added, to show he was throwing his full weight into the struggle. “He is concerned about the state of the city. Your poetry will relax him. Within the walls, of course, only he has any great force of armed men.”
With perfect understanding the two men listened to the song of a slave-girl and considered, the one revenge and power, the other freedom for reason and learning from illiterates and zealots.
In Rome the news of the battle was received with joy, the ringing of bells and singing of Te Deum. The news, a little after, of the Emperor's recovery of the holy relic of the graduale and his vow to elevate his personal adviser to the throne of Saint Peter, was taken differently. If all had gone well, the current Pope, John VIII, weak child of a powerful Tuscan family, would never have heard the news at all, his own fate outrunning it. But somewhere between the Emperor's camp and the Vatican Hill, word spread to someone still loyal. The Pope was informed, hurried immediately to gather his entourage and retire from the dangerous city to the estates of his family. When Gunther, once Archbishop of Cologne and now Cardinal in Rome, heard the news and moved instantly with his one-time chaplain Arno and a dozen German swordsmen of his own guard to reassure the Pope, and hold him incommunicado till the Emperor's wish became clearer, he found himself facing more than his own number of Italian nobles, relatives and adherents of John. The two sides exchanged polite greetings and arguments, while the guard commanders weighed each other up. Stilettos and perfumed hair, thought the German: back-stair back-stabbers. But we have no mail nor shields. Great blunt chopping-swords and onion-stinking breath, thought the Italian: but ready to use them. The two sides backed off from each other, protesting friendship and concern.
Despite the pleas not to desert his flock, the Pope made his way determinedly from minster and hill, from Rome itself. Despite the assurances of joy and congratulations at the Emperor's victory, Gunther seized control of the Curia, evicted Cardinals not of his own nation or faction, prepared for a disputed election. He would have gone further, but the news that the Emperor had fixed
on the English deacon Erkenbert dismayed him even in his loyalty to Emperor and Lanzenorden, his own creation. Erkenbert had been a good comrade, he knew. But Pope? Gunther had had another and a more suitable candidate in mind for that office next time it should fall vacant, one who was already a Prince of the Church and no deacon. Yet a vacancy was definitely desirable, so much at least could be agreed…
It would take an army, now, to create one. Though the army of the Emperor was at least approaching, marching across the borderlands of southern France and northern Italy, hot-foot for Rome. Or so they said.
In the cool underground cave which had once been an olive-press, Shef examined carefully the rows and rows of tiny lead blocks wedged tightly into their steel frame. He made no attempt to read them. Still a poor reader of any script, the complexity of reading mirror-image letters, in blocks facing different ways, which were in any case in a language he did not understand, would have been far beyond him. Anything like that was entrusted to Solomon. All Shef was looking for was technical perfection. Letters fixed tight, none of uneven size, all letters of the same height. Shef finally nodded with satisfaction, passed them over.
With Alfled's image of a brand in their minds, the idea of branding on to paper had been fairly clear. But all a brand needs to convey is ownership. One sign is enough. It was soon evident that something like a brand with two hundred words on it would take years to make and be invalidated by a single change. Make a stamp, or a brand, or whatever it was to be called, for each word, suggested Solomon, as the Caliph er-Rahman used to. That too was soon seen to be a false trail, as the amount of work needed to make individual words, some of them in large numbers, became apparent. It was Shef who suggested making tiny dies for each letter, and once that was seen the job became easy. Deft jewelers had carved the individual letters from brass, pressed these into clay to make a mold. Baked the clay molds then filled them with molten lead. Over and over again until there were filled trays of the leaden letters.
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