Observing carefully out of the corner of his one eye, Shef watched the signs of tension grow in the captive Greek. He feared the fire perhaps more than they did. And he knew, as they did not, when the likely moment of disaster would be. Had he the resolution to face death unmoved? Shef felt sure that he would make some sign of betrayal. If he did, he and Steffi and the others would be over the side and into the water in a moment. But the Greek did not know that.
“Keep pumping,” he ordered.
Shef felt the warmth coming now not from the burning match beneath but from the dome itself. As the heat increased the Greek writhed in fear. The barbarians had no fear because they had no understanding! In the end he could not control himself. He seized up a rag, leaped forward and turned the valve on top of the tank. A shrill whistle sounded from the slotted length of pipe.
“The valve! You must open the valve at once!” he called, in suddenly-discovered English, backing the words with a frantic gesture.
Shef shouted “Turn!”
The last of Steffi's three-man gang turned firmly on the valve that led from the bottom of the copper dome—the valve that led to the nozzle. Shef felt an instant wave of something jetting through the brass nozzle in his hand, a reek of something stinging and acrid. He drew the lit slow-match from behind his back and at arm's length held it to the nozzle.
The dragon's breath flared out, belching flame fifty feet out over the sea, landing on it and blazing with clouds of black smoke even on the water itself. For long moments the sea itself seemed to be ablaze, Shef and the valve-hand stepped back, cringing automatically from the fierce heat.
Shef collected himself, shouted “Turn!” once again. The valve closed, the flame stopped. Instantly Steffi ceased to pump, the bellows-man pulled his bellows away, the brazier-hand pulled the charcoal flame away from under the dome. All five men fell back from the dome to the very edge of the ship's tiny deck and stared tensely at it. Had they pumped it too strongly? Would the flame come back from the sea and ignite some stray spill? After a while Shef felt them all releasing their breath together.
“It's a kind of oil,” he said.
“Not olive oil,” said Steffi. “I've tried lighting that and it doesn't work at all, hardly.”
“Might be whale-oil,” ventured Shef, remembering the way Queen Ragnhild's fire-arrows had lit up the harvest of the grind in far Halogaland.
“Doesn't smell like it,” said the valve-hand, once a fisherman in Ordlaf's village of Bridlington.
“I don't know what in Hel it is,” said Steffi. “But I bet we can't get no more of it once this is used up. But at least we know now when to open the valve. That whistle on top, it sounds the warning.”
“You may know how this work,” the Greek shouted angrily, still in the broken English he had till then refused to admit. “But there is one place on earth for naphtha and you never find it. Nor I tell you, no matter how you torture me.”
Shef looked down at him coldly. “There is no need of torture, and now I have the machine I know where to get the fuel. It is found best on a winter's morning, is that not so?”
The Greek's heart sank within him. They had mastered the siphon with ease. Now it seemed they had the oil as well. After all, in the barbarian West, who could say that there was no Tmutorakan, as there was in the barbarian East? And if they had both halves of the secret, how might Byzantium stand? And he could be sure he would find no welcome in Byzantium once it was known the secret was out. Any Greek should know there was a time to change sides, and this was it.
“Listen to me, one-eye,” he mumbled, “that for a price I correct your errors.”
Shef nodded calmly, as though he had expected this response, and fumbled for a moment in the pocket of his breeches. He had had these things made by a silversmith in Septimania, made secretly and paid for from his own purse.
“Steffi,” he said, “I want you and your men here to wear these.” He produced the silver pendants from his pocket.
“What, and give up what we got already?” asked Steffi, putting a hand up to the Thor-hammer round his neck.
“Yes. You have Thor, and so does one of your mates, and the other two have a Frey-phallus and a Rig-ladder like me. But they are just the signs that took your fancy, or that you copied from others. I must stay with my own kraki, for it is the mark of my father, but you should wear the signs of your trade, now you have a trade. It is a sign of honor too, for your courage.”
“What is it?” said the valve-hand, face glowing with pride. He had been a slave most of his life. Now the One King was speaking to him as if he were a great warrior.
“It is a fire-sign, for the men who trade in fire, in flares, in the marks of war.”
The men took the pendants in silence, removed their own, put the new ones round their necks.
“What god is the patron of us fire-warriors?” asked the bellows-hand.
“It is Loki the fire-god, once chained, now free.”
Skaldfinn, coming back over the side, froze with horror as he heard the words, saw the fire-sign displayed openly for the first time. He looked back at Farman just behind him for support, saw the visionary pause, and then nod slowly in acquiescence. Steffi and his gang, all English and all former Christians with the scantiest knowledge of the holy myths of the Way, heard the name without alarm.
“Loki,” Steffi muttered, fixing the name in his mind. “Loki the fire-god. Good to have a god of our own. We will be his faithful servants.”
Chapter Thirty
The Emperor gaped at the small book put into his hands.
He could read himself, if slowly, but this time he had no need to. The substance of the booklet had already been explained to him in careful detail by his trusty comrade.
“Where in Hell did it come from?” he asked finally. The Emperor never knowingly blasphemed, took the name of the Lord in vain, or used religious words in other than their literal meaning. This time too, Erkenbert realized, he meant that the book in front of him was literally diabolic. That was good. Answering the question was not so good. Erkenbert had realized some time ago that the sniveling heretic who had betrayed the Grail and earned death for it had not told the truth when he said that there were only two copies: he should have kept him alive. No need to confess that mistake now.
“A Brother found it in a priest's house. Oh yes,” he held up a warning hand, “the priest has already been dealt with. But I have heard these things are everywhere, produced with diabolic speed. And they are being believed too. Men say that the very graduale which you carry with you and proclaim to be the true ladder on which Our Lord was carried to the Sepulchre, they say that its appearance after so many centuries is proof that what these doctrines say are true. The Lance is death, men say, the Grail is life. It proves that Jesus came back to life in reality, never left this world rather than came back to it. So there is no resurrection, no after-life, no succession of Saint Peter, no Church or need for a Church. Some of those who say that are priests themselves.”
The Emperor's face was purpling rapidly, but he was no fool. He realized all this was being said to him for a purpose, not merely to enrage him. Or maybe enraging him was the purpose.
“Well,” he said with sudden mildness, “we can stop people saying these things out loud, I suppose. But we want to stop them even thinking about them. I am sure you have an idea how that might be done. Let me hear it.”
Erkenbert nodded. They were old allies now, working partners. It was still a relief to him to work for a clear-sighted ruler.
“Two ideas,” he said. “One is easy. We need a body of reliable men with no duty other than that of seeking out heresy. They will have to be given powers greater than present law allows. Powers of rope and rack, stake and pit. I suggest we call them the Inquisitio Imperialis, the Imperial Inquisition.”
“Agreed,” said Bruno immediately. “What's the hard idea?”
“Do you know when Church and Empire first came together? For the Empire of the Romans was
at first a pagan one, you know, which persecuted Christians.”
Bruno nodded. He remembered the stories of Saint Paul, and how he went to Rome for trial before an Emperor who must have been hostile. It had not struck him that somewhere down the line the Empire must have changed religions, but now that Erkenbert mentioned it, he saw it must be so.
“The first Christian Emperor, you know, was Constantine, who was proclaimed Emperor in my own city of Eboracum—York, as the vile pagans who hold it now call it.”
“A good omen,” said Bruno confidently.
“It is to be hoped so. What happened was that he was beset by rebels—like you, Emperor—and in the night before a battle he dreamt a dream. In that dream an angel came to him and showed him the holy sign of the Cross, and told him, In hoc signo vinces: ‘In this sign thou shalt conquer.’ He did not know the meaning of the sign but the next day he ordered his men to put it on their shields, and fought and won the battle. Then, when wise men explained to him the meaning of the sign, he accepted it and the Christian religion, and imposed it on all the Empire. But he did one other thing, Emperor. He made the Donation of Constantine.
“On this document both Church and Empire are built. From it the Church receives authority in this world. From it the Empire receives legitimacy from the world above. That is why Emperors are the Lord's Anointed. And Popes should be the Emperor's creation.”
“It sounds a fine thing,” said Bruno with a certain skepticism, “but I make Popes without need of a document. And my authority comes from the relics I have recovered—we have recovered. Why do we need this Donation?”
“I think that as well as the Imperial Inquisition we need also a new Donation.”
The Emperor's eyebrows rose warningly. He had already seen that this conversation was urging him to put down the troublesome John by force, and lock the College of Cardinals up until they voted in the correct way for his own candidate. Though Erkenbert did not know it—Bruno did not wish the new Pope to have any hand in the disappearance of the old one—he had already sent a strong squadron to deal with Pope John, and firm messages to the wavering Cardinals of Germany that they had better see sense themselves, and bring their Italian colleagues to do the same. But he did not like the idea of donations. The Church was rich enough already.
“It will be a Donation of Church to Empire,” said Erkenbert firmly. “Not of Empire to Church. A tenth of the Church's temporal possessions will be handed over, for set purposes. The defeat of the heathen. The stamping out of heresy. War against the followers of the Prophet. War against the schismatics of Byzantium. New warrior-orders to be founded in all the realms of Christendom, not Germany alone. The establishment of the Imperial Inquisition, against rebels and heretics. We will call it the Donation of Simon Peter.”
“Simon Peter?” said the Emperor, mind still racing at the implications of what had been said.
“I will take the Papal name of Peter,” said Erkenbert firmly. “It has been forbidden to all Popes throughout history since the first. But I will take it not in pride but in humility, as a sign that the Church needs to begin again, cleansed of its weakness and its surfeit. We will find a document in the vaults of the Vatican, in the Catacombs, written by Simon Peter himself and setting out his wish that the Church should be the loyal servant of a Christian Empire.”
“Find a document?” repeated Bruno. “But how can we find it if we don't know it's there?”
“I found the Grail, did I not?” said Erkenbert. “You can rely on me to find the Donation of Peter.”
He means he's going to fake it, thought Bruno suddenly. That is against every law of God and man. But a tenth of the Church's possessions… Fat monks and idle nuns evicted, their lands made over for the support of warriors… No more counting the Ritters and the Brüderschaft in hundreds… And surely, a pious end may justify impious means.
It's a fraud and he knows it's a fraud, thought Erkenbert. But he's going to go through with it. What he doesn't know is that the Donation of Constantine is a fraud too, any scholar can see it, the Latin is quite of the wrong period for what is claimed. It was written by a Frank, or I am an Italian. How many more documents, I wonder, are frauds? That is the true danger of things like this: he took the heretic booklet from the Emperor's hands, tore it across and threw it carefully into the glowing brazier. They start people thinking about whether books are true. We must stamp that out. Few books, and all those holy ones, that must be our goal. Whether they are true or not—that shall be for me to decide.
The plume of smoke leaking lazily into the air off the port bow held Shef's gaze like a fly struggling to escape the spider. The cruise had gone well, extraordinarily well. The islands of the Mediterranean had been much fought over, but did not seem to have been thoroughly plundered for many years. Perhaps the contestants had been eager only to change the religion of the islanders, not to leave with a profit. The ships in the fleet were low in the water now, not only with renewed food and water, but with church plate, brocades and cloth of unknown dyes.
Most important of all was the tribute exacted from Mallorca and Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera, then Corsica and Sardinia, tribute in gold and silver coins of the Arabs, of the Greeks, of the Franks and the Romans and countries of which Shef had never heard and whose script neither Skaldfinn nor Solomon could recognize. Sicily next, lying only a little to the south, below the island of Vulcan with its smoky mountain? A descent on the Italian mainland? Even Guthmund had been heard to talk of quitting while the going was good, and before the equinoctial gales set in on the long passage home.
Meanwhile there was Steffi to satisfy. He had taken his conversion to the fire-pendant and the Loki-god with great conviction. His conversation was now about nothing but fire, and he had grasped a principle that Shef himself had often stated. There was more knowledge in the world than people realized. Steffi had set himself to find out everything that anyone at all knew about fire and about things that burnt, or lit, or even glowed in the dark. Their Greek captive had been a disappointment. He knew his trade, it was true, and he had told them all he knew of the black oilfields beyond the Black Sea, of the process of draining and refining the stuff that oozed to the surface, fluid and light in the cold, sticky and tar-like in the heat. But though he knew how the trade was carried out he had little curiosity about substitutes, alternatives. They had concealed from him the fact that they had no oilfield in the West as the Greeks had in the East, but without such an alternative they had the half-tank of oil they had captured and no more.
Steffi was not discouraged. He talked to the Greek, to Solomon, to Brand, to Shef, to the fishing boat crews they intercepted, interrogated and released, to his own mates. His monologue continued as he stood in the bows watching the smoke like Shef, but watching it like a lover watching his mistress's window.
“Funny, you know,” he repeated. “Once I got asking them you'd think half the fleet knew that if you lit a fire on earth that had been cleaned out of a stable or a cave or whatever, then it burned real fierce. So I asked them what else did that, and they come up with all sorts. Solomon says the Arabs have some stuff like what our Greek calls naphtha, but the Greek says it's different. Solomon says the Arabs used to make fire-bundles out of their stuff, like our flares, but they used to throw them not launch them from a catapult. I'd like to get some of that naphtha, but meanwhile we got fish-oil, we got the saltpeter stuff, we got wax…
“And then one of the lads reminded me of what you get on rotten logs, that glows in the dark, though it doesn't burn. Solomon says that's called phosphor, and he says if you get the real stuff, it burns so hard water can't put it out, you have to scrape it off the skin. The Greek says he's heard of that and they tried mixing it with the oil they use, but it's not safe, they sometimes mix in a kind of resin.”
“They put that in the wine too,” put in Shef.
“Only because it's what they caulk the barrels with. But resin burns, and so does amber, one of the boys was telling me.”
Steffi frowned at the levity. “No. But I had another idea. You know that winter ale and winter wine they make at Stamford, where they steam it off and catch the steam? Well, one of the lads had a bit left and I bought it off him. That burns too, burns pretty well. Solomon came up and told me the Arabs did that too, they call it al-kuhl.”
“The Arabs can always do everything, if you hear them talk. Fly, make lenses, invent algorism, make fire devices, al-kuhl, al-jabr, al-kimiya, al-qili… Thing is, they never seem to do anything with it.” Shef too had listened to Solomon and grown rather tired of it.
“Well, I'd like to get all that stuff, whatever it is, the naphtha and the phosphor and the alcool and all, and the saltpeter, and start mixing it. See what happens. And charcoal too, we all use it, why does it burn better than wood? But most of all I want to see what they've got up there. A fire-mountain, they say. Burning rock. And the smell. Everyone says there's a strange smell comes from the mountain. Sulphur, they call it. But you know something, in the Fens where I come from…”
“Me too,” Shef reminded him.
“…we got this thing they call the will o' the wisp. Fires that light and lead you into the swamp. Comes from dead bodies, they say. Well, that smells too. I'm sure we got this saltpeter at home, in barns and piggeries and what not. Maybe we got this sulphur too. I want to see it. Start putting them together.”
A pillar of fire by night and a cloud of smoke by day. That was what he had been trying to think of. It was something to do with one of Father Andreas's lessons from the Bible. The Children of Israel escaping from bondage? Father Andreas had said it was an image of the Christian soul seeking heaven. Shef did not think the pillar of smoke they were steering for was the Promised Land, somehow. But Steffi did. Maybe Steffi was the one whose opinion would count.
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