Navigator tt-3

by Stephen Baxter

  'Now all the letters save one have a different symbol.'

  'This is all very well,' Joan said, 'but we don't have a key, do we?'

  'Oh, but we do,' Bacon said. 'You gave it to me – or rather, to Thomas.'

  'I did? What key?'

  'It was in the letter you received. From your cousin in Spain. The phrase she was particularly interested in, that appeared to be left incomplete on the scrap of parchment you held.'

  'Incendium Dei,' Saladin said, wide-eyed.

  Joan stared at Bacon. 'Can it really be as simple as that?'

  Bacon grinned. He now had a full hold on their attention, Saladin thought, and he knew it. 'Shall we try it?' He wiped the table clean of chalk with his sleeve, and began to scribble again. The three of them bent over to see. 'We begin with the key,' Bacon said. He wrote, INCENDIVM DEI

  'The U replaced by V as you see. Next we eliminate duplicates.'

  INCEDVM

  'There is our key. So we construct our code. I tried out a forward substitution, but succeeded with a backward…' He scribbled rapidly.

  'Now we reconstruct our message. That first B becomes a P, the M becomes R…'

  BMQVK XESEF EBZKM BMHSM BGNSD DYEED OSMEM HPTVZ HESZS ZHVH PRGSL CVEVO VPALR PRMER PNYET TBVVT IERVR MHDSA MVEAE AMSM

  Saladin stared at the new string, unreasonably disappointed. 'It's still nonsense.'

  Bacon smiled, a magician with another trick to show. 'A simple transposition would be too easy. Our puzzle involves numbers as well as letters. Look at the "sentence" again. Nine "words" of five letters, and one of four. What sentence is as regular as that? What we have here is a simple string of letters, of length – how many, Thomas?'

  'I'm not one of your Parisian students,' Thomas growled.

  'Just answer,' Joan murmured.

  'Forty-nine, then.'

  'Good. What's significant about the number forty-nine?'

  'Seven sevens,' said Saladin immediately.

  'Very good!' said Bacon.

  Thomas looked surprised. Saladin said, 'Some of the villagers think it's a lucky number. Seven times seven. That's how I know.'

  'Seven squared,' Bacon said. 'That is surely a clue. So now, if we write out the decoded message again, not in these arbitrary blocks of five or four, but in a grid of seven by seven…'

  'It still means nothing to me,' Joan said.

  But Thomas was tracing the letters with a chalky fingertip. 'But if you read, not across, but down – else why put them in a grid at all? P – E – R… Give me that chalk, Roger.' He wrote out the letters, column by column, as a single line.

  PERNVMERVPYTHAGOREIDESVMTESALPETRAMCARBVM SVLPVRVM

  'Look at this string,' Thomas said, excited. 'Pythagorei – see it? Surely there is meaning here at last.'

  'Good, good,' Bacon said. 'You can imagine the variants I explored before I hit on this correct route through the maze. Now all we have to do is find the breaks between the words…'

  But Thomas was ahead of him, splitting the line with bold slashes.

  PER / NVMERV / PYTHAGOREI / DESVMTE / SALPETRAM / CARBVM / SVLPVRVM

  And there, for Saladin, the magic happened, a readable sentence emerging from a clamour of nonsense. He was the first to read it aloud: '"By Pythagoras's number take saltpetre, charcoal, sulphur."'

  'Almost there,' said Bacon. 'Almost there.'

  'But what does it mean?'Joan said.

  'Well, Pythagoras's number is obvious. It is six.'

  'It is?'

  'Six is the perfect number,' said Saladin.

  Thomas raised his eyebrows at him. 'And why is it perfect?'

  'Because if you take the numbers that divide into it evenly…' Saladin took the chalk now, and wrote out, 1,2,3. 'If you add them up you get six again.' 1+2+3=6.

  Bacon smiled. 'Once again you surprise us.'

  Saladin felt sheepish. 'Another lucky number for the villagers.'

  'In fact there are many perfect numbers,' Bacon said. 'Pythagoras did indeed study them. Twenty-eight is the next one. You see, it is divisible by-'

  'Never mind,' Joan said hastily. 'So now we have this: "By one, two, three take saltpetre, charcoal, sulphur."'

  'Or,' Bacon said, 'three, two, one. In fact those proportions aren't quite correct, but near enough the range that a little trial and error gives you the right product. The value of experimentation,' he said, smiling.

  Saladin was mystified again. 'What product?'

  'Why, it's obvious – black powder. Haven't you heard of it? The Chinese have studied it for centuries, we're told. They call it the "fire drug". It's said they found it looking for an elixir of life! I had been hoping to obtain samples via the trade routes opened up by the Mongol empire, in order to verify its properties for myself. Now I can begin to experiment with its very manufacture.'

  'The manufacture of what?' Joan demanded. 'What does this stuff do, you infuriating monk?'

  He didn't seem insulted. 'Well, if you set fire to it-'

  'Yes?'

  'It explodes.'

  XXII

  They sat around the low table, heaped with Bacon's papers and covered with chalk scribbles.

  'Explodes,' Joan said.

  'Somebody,' Bacon said, 'your Weaver of the tapestry of time, Thomas, wants you to make explosions. Incendium Dei indeed. I wonder why.'

  Joan glanced at Thomas. 'Have you told him of the engines?'

  Thomas closed his eyes. 'No. Because I did not have your permission. And because, frankly, I was frightened where it might lead, if he knew.'

  Bacon's eyes were wide. 'What engines? You must tell me.'

  Thomas glanced at Joan. 'You see what I mean?'

  Joan said, 'Well, we are committed. And perhaps this strange monk of yours can help us.' She described succinctly the legend of Sihtric and his machines of war, the plans now believed lost beneath the floor of the great mosque of Seville, in faraway al-Andalus.

  'But you must retrieve this Codex,' Bacon said. 'You must!'

  'Why?'

  'Can't you see? Combine these engines of war, engines that roll and swim and even fly, with the black powder, with the Fire of God, and no man could stand before you. Think of it – a miniature Vesuvius loaded on each arrow!…'

  Saladin's experience of explosions was limited. But once he had seen a forge blow itself apart. He tried to imagine such energies harnessed, launched, and used against the flesh of enemies.

  'He's right,' he said reluctantly. 'You told us, Thomas, that Sihtric was dissatisfied with the engines he made. Perhaps this black powder will provide the potency they always lacked.'

  Thomas looked pale. 'If it can be made to work – but what a horrible vision of destruction! What man is this Weaver to scatter the seeds of such carnage in our age?'

  Roger Bacon seemed to care nothing for that. Saladin saw he was fired only by his curiosity, by the scent of fresh knowledge in his nostrils. 'You must retrieve these designs,' he said rapidly. 'And you must bring them to me. What you need to make all this work is a dominus experimentorum. Such as myself, or an assistant. I can see it now. A scheme of work designed around two elevating principles. First, the verification of the designs, and the physical principles on which they have been based, perhaps principles hitherto unknown to mankind and therefore an everlasting gift to scholarship. Second, the use to which the new understanding may be put, which is the protection of Christendom, and thereby the spiritual welfare of all mankind and the greater glory of God.'

  Thomas said, 'You would think, brother, from what you say, that you were being asked to make cathedrals, not weapons.'

  'There is no sin in using the power of the mind to build weapons to fight a just war. Why, your Weaver must be a Christian, or he would not have put these engines into the hands of Christians. How can this not be God's work?'

  'I know very little about the Weaver, and you know less,' Thomas said sternly. 'You must ensure you discuss this work with your confessor, brother. Fully and regularly.'

 
; 'Yes, yes.' Bacon leaned towards Joan, eyes bright, like the cat's into which he had spent long hours staring, Saladin thought. 'Bring me your plans, lady. By God's bones, there is no other way – indeed it must be divine providence that brought you to me.

  'Give me your plans,' said Roger Bacon, 'and I will build the Engines of God for you.'

  XXIII

  AD 1248

  The guard brought the two of them to Ibrahim's office: the accuser, a middle-aged man, and the accused, a scared-looking girl with a baby in her arms.

  Ibn Shaprut sat silently at Ibrahim's side, plucking at his shabby robes. The doctor was a big man who had been a lot bigger before this dreadful summer of siege. Now his grimy, much-patched clothes didn't fit him properly, and Ibrahim sometimes thought his very skin hung loose, drained of fat. However Ibrahim was glad of his steady company and hard-headed advice.

  It was an August afternoon in Seville, a city under siege and hot as a furnace. Distantly the muezzins called for prayer. Ibrahim was too busy for prayers. He tried to concentrate on the case.

  The accuser was a man called Ali Gurdu. Aged about fifty, his face round as the moon, he looked sleek and prosperous in the middle of a famine that even reached inside the emir's palace, though in August's heat sweat stained his turban a grimy yellow. This man looked suspiciously at Ibn Shaprut. 'Who's he? A lawyer, a magistrate?'

  'I'm a doctor,' said Ibn Shaprut.

  'What's a doctor got to do with it? This is a case of theft, pure and simple.'

  'I rely on his judgement,' said Ibrahim, 'so you will be respectful, Ali Gurdu.'

  Ibn Shaprut was watching the girl. 'Your baby is very quiet.'

  She smiled thinly. 'He's clever. He's learned not to waste energy crying.' Her voice was scratchy, like an old woman's. Her robe was filthy and torn, her eyes huge in a shrunken face, and the baby in her arms was wrapped in rags. She was called Obona. Ibrahim had had to confirm her age, which was sixteen; he had learned that hunger made you look young, even giving some a kind of ethereal beauty, before it turned you very old indeed.

  'You brought him here today,' said Ibn Shaprut. 'You have no family who could have taken him?'

  'My parents fled to Granada before the Christian armies came to the walls.'

  'Without you?'

  'They were ashamed of me. My grandmother stayed, though, and helped me. But she died in the spring.'

  'Now you're alone,' said Ibrahim.

  'Yes, sir.'

  Ali Gurdu clenched a podgy fist. 'You'll be offering her a sugared apricot next. Enough of these questions! She's a thief! That's what this is all about, never mind her baby and her grandmother. She stole from me!'

  Ibrahim glanced at his notes. Ali Gurdu described himself as a food merchant. He was steadily selling off a hoard of dried fruit and salted meat and rice. That wasn't quite against the law, even at the exorbitant prices he no doubt charged. But Ibrahim thought there was a stink about the man that was more than just a layer of greasy sweat.

  'She came to you as a customer,' he said. 'She bought a bit of salted meat.'

  'What meat was that?' Ibn Shaprut asked the girl.

  She shrugged. 'Rat, I think. Or cat. What else is there?'

  The flesh of a rat, which had no doubt gorged itself on the bodies in the communal graves. 'So you took your bit of rat-'

  'She took two sticks,' Ali Gurdu insisted. 'More than she'd paid for.'

  'One wasn't enough,' the girl said miserably. 'The baby – I still feed him.'

  'That is draining for your body,' Ibn Shaprut said gently. 'I understand.'

  'She ran away with the meat she stole.'

  'But you didn't chase her,' Ibn Shaprut said. 'She was only caught because she was unlucky enough to run straight into one of Ibrahim's bailiffs. If not for that you'd have said nothing about it.'

  Ali Gurdu blustered, 'I was simply slow about it. Shocked. Distressed! I'm not used to such blatant thievery, from a very young girl too. What's the world coming to?'

  Ibrahim raised a hand to silence him. 'Obona, how did you pay for this meat? Do you have money?'

  She shook her head. 'My parents took what we had. My grandmother had a few coins, but when she was dying I spent the last of those on a bit of water.'

  'Yet you must eat,' Ibrahim said. 'Yet you must drink. How did you pay him?'

  She glanced at Ali Gurdu, and looked down at her baby, clearly ashamed.

  'Well, I think that's clear enough,' Ibrahim said, not bothering to hide his disgust. 'Food for sex, Ali Gurdu? Is that the game?'

  Ali Gurdu looked defiant. 'You could call it pity. I mean, look at her. Skin and bone. Who would want her?' He slammed one fat fist into another. 'But it's still theft, that's the top and bottom of it. So what are you going to do about it, "vizier to the vizier"?'

  Ibrahim's thirst raged, though there were hours to endure before his next sip of his water ration. He felt fouled by this grubby case, like so many others he had had to deal with.

  It was all the fault of the Christians. The Castilians had lain siege around the city in the spring, when King Fernando had assembled a fleet of ships from the coastal waters, forced his way up the Guadalquivir and rammed the pontoon bridge. Thus, after years of pressure, Fernando had at last bottled the city up. As spring gave way to the usual ferocious summer, disease, famine, and worst of all drought had afflicted the city. Fernando seemed content to wait it out, even as his own men dropped of drought and fever. Once there had been rumours of a relieving force coming from Granada. But that taifa's ruler Muhammad Abu Alahmar, concerned above all to secure his own position, submitted to King Fernando and actually joined in the siege against his fellow Muslims in Seville.

  Sometimes Ibrahim wondered grimly how it would be if the siege never lifted. Would Ibrahim and those like him be forced to administer the death of an entire city, down to the last man, the last child, the last dog and cat?

  But meanwhile, today, he had Ali Gurdu and this child-mother Obona to deal with. He glanced at Ibn Shaprut's stern face, seeking guidance.

  'Here is my decision. Ali Gurdu, you have a certain usefulness. Men like you, with your grafting and your greed, actually enforce the rationing. You're dribbling out your stock, bit by bit. If you gave it all away there would be a riot, it would be gone in a day, and we'd be a lot worse off.'

  'You need me, do you?' Ali Gurdu scoffed.

  'But there are limits. We are not like the Christians. We are civilised people, despite the emergency. And if I find you step beyond those limits again, I will impound whatever stock you have left, and I will punish you as I see fit.' He leaned forward. 'Have a care, Ali Gurdu. It will be a different story for men like you when the siege is lifted.'

  But Ibrahim thought the worst irony was that if the Christians did take the city, Ali Gurdu might have made himself wealthy enough from the misery of others to be able to buy his way to safety.

  'And,' Ali Gurdu said, 'what of her?'

  Ibrahim glanced at the wretched girl. 'How would it help anybody if this child was punished?'

  'She is a thief!'

  Ibrahim said to the girl, 'Well, he's right. You must pay this man back.'

  'How can I do that?'

  'Catch a rat,' Ibrahim said. 'And don't go to him again, next time you're hungry. Try these people. They are kinder.' He took his wooden pen and scribbled an address on a scrap of old paper and gave it to her. 'Now get out of my sight, both of you.'

  He scratched his pen across the case notes and put the parchment aside. Then he stood, stretched, and glanced out of the window at a sky like an oven. He longed for the blessed cool of evening – at least nature lifted its siege, once a day. But Ibrahim's own long day was not done yet.

  'Right. That's that. Who's next?'

  XXIV

  On the parched plain before the walls of Seville, Saladin woke inside his leather tent.

  Hanse had died during the night. It had been the fever, of course. Hanse had fallen asleep coughing and puking. Now he wa
s a shapeless, unmoving lump under his sweat-sodden cloak.

  And Saladin had slept in a tent with a dead man. With a sudden terror he pushed his way out into the open air, panting.

  The sun was still low, but Saladin could already feel its heat on his face. The camp of the Christian army stretched away all around him. Horses wandered apathetically between the rows of tents, and cross-bearing pennants hung limply over a land long stripped of anything edible.

  Inside Seville, the muezzins were calling. The pinkish light of day, scattered through the dust rising from the desiccated landscape, reflected from the city walls.

  Near the tent, Michael sat cross-legged before the remnants of the night's fire, resting his back on a heap of weapons and chain-mail coats. He was sipping a cup of water and eating dry rice. 'This isn't so bad for soldiering,' Michael said in his coarse shopkeeper's Latin. 'Not so bad.'

  Saladin sat heavily beside him. 'What do you mean, not so bad? Hanse's dead. Is that his rice?'

  Michael grinned and finished off the food. 'Well, he won't be needing it, will he?'

  Saladin reached for the flask that contained the last of yesterday's water. There was hardly any left. He felt unreasonably resentful that a third of it had been wasted on a man now dead.

  They sat without speaking.

  When he had taken the Cross – he wore it proudly on his sleeve even now – and volunteered for Fernando's army, Saladin had joined a company formed from many nations, Christian warriors drawn here from across Europe by the Pope's granting of crusader indulgences – that and the chance to liven up your life by cracking a few Muslim heads. Hanse and Michael were typical, Hanse, blond and a bit frail, from the Low Countries, Michael from England.

  It had been curious for Saladin to come up against the Moorish armies, the elite warriors with their quilted light armour, the hard-eyed horsemen from the desert. They were not much like the Saracen troops he had witnessed in the Outremer. Brother Thomas had told him that the Moors of Spain had absorbed the traditions of those who went before them; there were echoes of the post-Roman Visigoths in their cavalry and their colour.