King and Emperor

Chapter Nine

Tell me again about this God-damned—“

Bruno, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Protector of the Faith, scourge of the heretics, apostates and false believers, paused. It had been a bad day. Another bad day. Here in the broken country where France joined Spain and both were separated by the high Pyrenees, every village had a fortress on a peak, most of them seemingly called “Puigpunyent,” meaning “Sharp-point Peak.” That was why so many Muslim bandits had managed to establish themselves. No longer. He had cleared them out. But now, when he might have expected gratitude and co-operation from the Christians he had saved from their enemies, instead stubborn resistance, closed gates, flocks driven into the hills, people lodged in their high eyries. Not all of them. According to the barons who had come in and submitted to him, the people who were resisting him were now heretics, of some sect long established in the border country, with whom the Catholics had fought a bitter neighborly war in private for generations.

The trouble was, everyone agreed that it was the heretics who had the secret of the Holy Grail. If it existed—and Bruno believed passionately that it did, just as the Holy Lance on which his rule rested had existed, hidden among the pagans—it was in some mountain peak or other, hidden among the heretics.

And so he had set himself to reduce them, to burn, batter, frighten, bribe or wheedle them out of their mountain lairs. Sometimes it went well, sometimes badly. Today had been a bad day. Fierce resistance, the gate untouched by the heavy catapult rocks, and twenty good brothers of the Lanzenorden dead, along with many more of the troops levied from the barons of Southern France.

Even so, he had almost committed a mortal sin, in speaking ill of the precious relic. Bruno paused, looked round deliberately. He set his own penances. In time past he had taken a handful of wooden splinters, set them alight, and let them burn on his open palm. Yet the blisters had impeded him in battle. He had no right to disqualify himself from God's work merely for his own sin. And in any case it was not the hand which had sinned. No. Drawing a dagger, he held its tip over a candle, waited till he saw it glow. Then, deliberately once more he thrust out his almost-sinful tongue, laid the red-hot tip to it. Held it for long seconds. A tear slowly trickled down through the dust caked thick on each cheek, but his hatchet-face otherwise did not change. The smell of scorching flesh came to his nostrils, a familiar one now in these days of siege and skirmish.

He pulled the dagger away, looked critically at its tip to see if he had affected its temper. Seemingly not. He looked up and met the disapproving gaze of his confidant and spiritual adviser, the deacon Erkenbert. Erkenbert did not like these ascetic practices, felt they led to spiritual pride.

“If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,” said Bruno, answering the unspoken accusation.

“Better to attend to the instructions of your confessor,” replied Erkenbert, “always assuming he has any.” Erkenbert had a grudge against Bruno's confessor Felix as well, for Felix, being a priest, could hear confessions and give absolution as Erkenbert, still only a deacon, could not.

Bruno dismissed the incipient argument with a gesture. “Now,” he repeated, “tell me again about the blessed Grail of Our Lord. My faith, alas, needs strengthening once more.”

Erkenbert began the story, still with an air of reluctant disapproval. In a sense he, Erkenbert, was a man trapped by success. He had been with the Emperor, when the latter, a mere Ritter of the Lanzenorden, went into the waste places of the North, to return with the Holy Lance which had once more unified the collapsing Empire of Charlemagne. And because he had been with the Emperor all that time, had done the research which had enabled them in the end to identify the Lance, and had furthermore consoled the despondent Emperor when he felt his search might never end, now he was considered to be an expert on relics and on searches. But the Lance had been proposed and authenticated by the holy Saint Rimbert, Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen. This story that the Emperor was now convinced of had a very different origin.

Nevertheless Erkenbert had studied what few documents could be brought to him: he knew the tale as well as anyone. Maybe it was best that it should be told by one who could not be in any way seduced by it.

“As you know,” he began, “the four gospellers do not all tell the same tale of the Crucifixion of Our Lord. And this of course is proof of their truth, for how often do we not see that four men who have seen the same thing happen will nevertheless tell it in different ways? Yet where they do agree—as they agreed about the centurion who pierced Christ's side with his lance, and venerated him forthwith as the Son of God—we may be sure that something great and holy is meant by it, for all four were inspired by the Holy Ghost to see and write the same thing.”

Bruno nodded, the satisfied expression on his bleak, hard face like that of a child who hears a well-known bedtime story unrolling.

“Yet there may also be great wisdom, or great knowledge, in something vouchsafed to only one witness. Now the Gospel of John tells us many things that are absent from the others. One thing he tells of is strange but not unlikely. I have read in other works that it was the custom of the Romans, a cruel and godless folk, when they crucified a man, to leave his body to be eaten by the birds.”

Bruno, whose gallows groaned all over Europe with un-buried dead, nodded again, perhaps with satisfaction, perhaps with imperial agreement on policy.

“But it was the law of the Jews that no dead thing might be exposed over their holy day of Passover. That is why men were sent to kill Christ and those crucified with him, not in mercy, but so that they might be taken down before sunset on Friday, when the Sabbath of the Jews begins.

“What happened then? Only John says this, but the story is not unlikely, nor need it have been known to all. He says that a rich Jew begged Pilate for the body, to have it wrapped in shroud and laid in a stone sepulchre—as is the custom in stony countries like this one, not laid in earth as we do. He gives the name of the Jew as Joseph of Arimathea. And then the story goes on to tell of the Resurrection, as all the gospellers in their different ways do.

“Now of this Joseph many other stories are told. My own people—not my Northumbrian people, but the English of the far West, have a story that this Joseph sailed from the shores of the Holy Land after the death of Jesus, and came in the end to England, not yet England but rather Britannia. And there, they say, he built a church at Glastonbury and performed many miracles. They say, too, that he brought with him the Holy Grail and that it still lies there.”

“But we do not believe that?” queried Bruno, though he had heard the answer at least a dozen times.

“No. For a rich Jew to leave the Holy Land, if he had become an enemy of his own people, might be possible. But Britannia at the time of the death of Our Lord was not yet within the Empire. It must have been a wasteland inhabited by savage Welshmen. Who would wish to go there?”

“So why do we think there is a Holy Grail?”

Erkenbert managed to conceal a disapproving sniff. He at least did not think there was a Holy Grail; but he knew from experience that if he said as much, his pious but overbearing master would keep him arguing till he had confessed he might be wrong. “Mostly because so many people have believed it. Nevertheless,” Erkenbert hurried on before his master could press for a better answer, “looked at correctly, the accounts of the death of Our Lord do leave room for wonder.

“I have already said that only the Gospel of the holy John tells the story of Joseph of Arimathea. Only that gospel also mentions the Jew Nicodemus, and it mentions him three times: at the end, when Nicodemus and Joseph arrange for Jesus to be laid to rest. In the temple of the Jews, where Nicodemus calls out for a fair trial. And when Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night to ask him a question.

“And yet there is another gospel I have read.”

“Besides the four of the Bible?” prompted Bruno.

“Yes. It is the Gospel of Nicodemus. The fathers of the Church, in their wisdom, decided not to include it among those works called canonical. Yet it is clearly a work of great age. And what it tells us is the story of what happened after Christ died. And before he was resurrected.”

“When he went down into Hell,” breathed Bruno, face rapt.

“It is this gospel which allows us to have the words in the Creed, descendit ad infernos, he descended into Hell. So this Nicodemus saw Christ buried, knew of his Resurrection—and talked with those whom Christ released from Hell. How else could he know the story? He must have been a man far deep in the secrets of Our Lord. More so perhaps even than Joseph. Such men recognized Our Lord as the Son of God as soon, almost, as did the centurion Longinus, who kept his own lance as a relic. They had many chances to put by the things that the Son of God had touched, and one of them may have been the Grail. Some say it is the chalice of the Last Supper, some the jar in which the Holy Blood was collected after the Lance had shed it.”

“But that's because they're bloody French!” yelled Bruno suddenly, driving his dagger with his usual appalling speed and strength deep in and through the table in front of him. “They can't speak their own bloody language! Just gabble gabble Latin till it sounds like nothing on earth! Take aqua, turn it into eau, take caballerus, turn it into chevalier. I ask you. What might a graal have been before those miscegenated bastards got their tongues round it?”

Two bodyguards moved into the tent, weapons ready, saw their lord sitting unharmed by the table. Bruno grinned suddenly, waved at them, spoke in his usual familiar Low German. “All right, boys. Just saying what I think about the French.” His men returned his grin, withdrew. Brüder of the Lanzenorden, they shared their master's opinion: especially after today, when there had been Frenchmen on both sides, and when they felt their own had fought less whole-heartedly than the enemy's.

“Well,” said Erkenbert, trying to answer the question. “A graal can be a sort of flat plate or dish.”

“Couldn't keep blood in it, could you?”

“Maybe it is blood. Maybe when these people say sancto graale, or saint graal, Holy Grail, whatever the pronunciation, their ancestors were trying to say sang real, royal blood. It would be much the same in Latin, too. The one is sanctus graduale, the other sanguis regalis. Maybe the Grail is just the Holy Blood.”

For some time Bruno remained silent, meditatively touching the blister on his own tongue. Erkenbert watched his face with a growing interest. They had been over this ground several times, and what Erkenbert had not been able to understand was why Bruno seemed so sure of himself and his quest. There were indeed odd features in the Gospel of John and that of Nicodemus. There was nothing for the Grail, though, like the strong recent evidence there had been for the Holy Lance, possessed within living memory by Charlemagne. Nor was there anything like the centurion's letter that Erkenbert himself had seen. Erkenbert had suspected before that Bruno was hiding something.

“How do you get ‘dish’ or ‘chalice’ out of graduale?” asked Bruno finally.

“It is from gradus, a—a stage,” replied Erkenbert. “So it comes to mean a course at dinner, and then what the course is served on.”

, “But gradus doesn't mean a bloody stage,” snarled Bruno. “You're just saying that. It means a bloody step. It means something you step on. And a graduale is something with a lot of graduses on it. And you and I both call that the same thing, whether we talk my German or your English. Same word both languages. I checked. You know what it is! It's a bloody…”

“Ladder,” completed Erkenbert, his voice low and cold. For the first time he saw where his master's thought was leading.

“Ladder it is. Like you-know-who wears round his neck.”

“But how could that become a holy thing? Like the chalice of the Last Supper.”

“Have you ever thought,” inquired Bruno, leaning back in his camp-chair, “what happened after the Crucifixion?”

Erkenbert shook his head dumbly.

“Well, the Romans didn't take Our Lord, did they? I expect my ancestor Longinus”—Erkenbert noted silently the promotion of Longinus from predecessor to ancestor—“he marched off back to barracks, looking at his lance and wondering, I should think. But the body, the body of Our Lord—well, you just said it, it was handed over to the Jews. The friendly ones, that is, not the ones who had him crucified. But if you wanted to know what happened next, you'd have to ask the Jews. Not the Romans, they'd all marched off, not the Christians, they were all hiding. And what do you think was the first thing they'd do?”

Erkenbert shook his head mutely. He had a terrifying sensation that something was building up here, something stemming from the past, from Bruno's own past, with terrible ramifications for the future. He had no idea what it was.

Bruno poured two large goblets of wine from the handy pitcher and pushed one over to Erkenbert. “Thirsty work, talking,” he remarked, his face taking on once more its unexpected glow of amiability and good fellowship.

“Now, have you ever really thought seriously about how to crucify someone? And how you de-crucify them? Eh?”

Shef lay in his hammock slung between the rail and the forward catapult mounting. A faint breeze moderated the heat still rising from the wooden decks, and the ship rocked gently on an almost motionless sea. Round him seventy men slept also, some in hammocks, some stretched out on deck. Above them the stars burned brightly in a clearer sky than any they had seen before.

In his dream, Shef knew he was far, far below earth, or sea, or sky. He was on some kind of gigantic stairway. A stairway so huge that he could only just reach the top of the next step with his fingertips. He might be able to jump, haul himself up, get a knee over the edge and scramble on to the next step. How often could he do that before weariness took him?

And there was something coming up the steps towards him. Something enormous, that dwarfed him as he would dwarf a mouse. He could feel vibrations through the cold wet stone, a thump—thump—thump of enormous feet climbing the stair. A waft of malice and malevolence crept up the stair ahead of the feet. If the thing that was climbing saw him it would stamp down on him as surely as he would crush a poison-spider. A faint light was beginning to glow from down below as well. The thing that was coming would see him.

Shef glanced around, already imagining his own flesh and blood spattered across the stone. No way up that did not lead to being overtaken. No point in going down. To the side. He sprang across, began to grope in the dim light across the side of the stairway. There was something there, a wooden strip or lining. And he was like a mouse. From years before Shef remembered his own vision of himself as Völund the lame smith, and Farman priest of Frey peering up at him from the floor like a mouse from the wainscoting. Now he was the mouse, and Farman—the thumping feet on the stair called Shef back from thoughts of the quiet Wisdom-House to his immediate reality.

A crack in the wood. Shef began to squeeze himself into it, first headfirst, then realizing that that might leave him unable to see the menace behind, pulling out and reversing in, careless of splinters tearing his tunic and digging into the skin.

He was back, covered at least from direct vision. He pulled his head back even further, knowing that nothing shows up so well in the dark as pale skin. There was still a line of sight. As the thump—thump—thump of feet became deafening, Shef saw a face cross his limited vision.

A set, cruel face, marked and pitted with poison. The face of Loki Baldersbane, free from his eternal prison, from the snake ever-dripping venom into his eyes when his loyal wife did not intercept it. The face of someone set on vengeance. Vengeance for unforgivable injustice.

The face passed by, the feet continued their steady climb. And then they stopped. Stopped level with Shef's head. He held his breath, conscious suddenly of the beating of his heart, that seemed to pound like a drum inside the echo-chamber of the little wooden crack. He remembered Brand's huge feet, stamping up and down while the baffled Arab watched. Loki could surely smash in his fragile hiding-place with a kick.

The feet moved on, began to climb once more up towards the light. As Shef breathed again, he heard a second noise. This time it was a slither. The slither of scales across stone. He remembered the awful sight he had seen of the great head striking at him, striking and falling short before it returned to its endless task of torment. Endlessly frustrated by the gods who had tethered it just out of fang-reach. The monster-viper that was climbing now after the one who had so long escaped it had had centuries in the dark to grow in rage. And its eyes were closer to the ground than a god's. And vipers had other senses than sight. Senses designed for catching mice in the dark. Shef remembered the blue swelling face of Ragnar Lothbrok, Ivar's father and Sigurth's too, as he died in the snake-pit, the orm-garth of York.

In panic he forced himself round to try to wriggle deeper into concealment. The crack was widening, he jerked his shoulder through, wondering what might be on the other side. All light had faded, but the slither behind him was coming closer and closer.

He was through. Through what he did not know, but now he was standing in a pit, and looking up. And there, far above him, was a full pale moon with markings on it like a ghastly skull. He could see a wall, a wall facing him, far lower than the cliff behind. But still far too high for him to jump and catch the edge, climb out as he might have done on to the next step of the stairway behind. In a panic now Shef began to run towards it, careless of what might see him. But as he moved there came from all around him, not just from behind, a piercing and universal hiss.

He stopped dead, aware of slithering all around him. He had escaped from Loki and the viper that pursued him. But now he was in a crawling carpet of snake-bodies. He was in the orm-garth of the gods. And there was no way to climb out.

As he stood stock-still he felt a thud striking his thigh, felt the first deep bite of the fangs, the poison spreading into his veins.

Shef sprang from his hammock in one convulsive movement, caught a foot in a cord and crashed to the deck. He was on his feet again instantly, ready to lash out in any direction, a great yell bubbling from his throat. As men around him cursed and scrambled also to their feet, groping for their weapons, he felt a brawny arm close round him, was swung momentarily off his feet.

“Easy, easy,” muttered Thorvin. “All right, the rest of you, go back to sleep. Just a dream. Just a nightmare.”

He propped Shef on the seaward rail, let him look round in the starlight and get his bearings.

“What did you see this time?”

Shef caught his breath, felt the sweat drying on him. His tunic was drenched, as wet as if he had been in the sea. The salt stung his empty eye-socket.

“I saw Loki. Loki loose. Then I was in the orm-garth, like Ragnar.” Shef began to rub his thigh where he had felt the strike of the fangs.

“If you have seen Loki loose, the College must know,” muttered Thorvin. “Maybe Farman in Stamford, or even Vigleik of the visions in Kaupang might have some counsel. For if Loki is loose we are that much closer to the doom of the gods and the coming of the Skuld-world. Maybe it is we who have stirred it up.”

“Loki is not loose,” came a cold angry voice from behind them. “There is no such thing as Loki. Or as the gods. The evil in the world comes from men alone.”

In the starlight Shef pulled up the hem of his tunic, stared down at his bare thigh. On it, there, two purple marks: Puncture wounds. Svandis stared, reached out a hand, drew it back. For once found nothing to say.

Two hundred miles from the Fafnisbane floating on the placid sea, a group of other men sat huddled at the foot of another dark stairway, deep inside a mountain.

“He is likely to break in tomorrow,” said one of them.

General nods, murmurs of agreement. “We caused them many casualties today. Tomorrow they will bring that great catapult up a little closer, start earlier with our outer defenses down, find the range. Then it will be a rock on top of the main gate and their stormers will come through. Of course we will make barricades inside, but…” A Gallic shrug, barely visible in the candlelight.

“If we surrender tomorrow at dawn they may give us terms, the Emperor Bruno is said to be merciful, they will ask only for an oath which we can in conscience give falsely, then…”

The gabbling frightened voice was cut off by another fierce gesture. “What happens to us is of no moment,” said the first voice. “We may get terms, we may live, we may die. What counts is the holy relics. And if the Emperor thinks they are here—and he already thinks they are here, that is why he is besieging us—anyone who lives tomorrow will be tortured till they tell all they know.”

“Try to get them out? They have sentries. But in the crannies of the Puig, our mountain men could crawl out.”

“With the books and the records, maybe. With the graduale”—the speaker's Occitan accent had turned the word to graal—“I don't think so.”

“Get the other things out that way. Just drop the holy relic outside the wall. It has no gold on it, no marks of worship like the Catholics would give it. They won't know. Our brothers will pick it up later.”

A long pause. “Too risky,” said the first voice. “It could be lost in the rubble. Whoever we told to recognize it later might die, might be tortured, might confess.

“No. What we must do is leave it here, under the mountain. The entry to this place is known only to us, and to the perfecti among us outside the walls. The Emperor cannot tear down the mountain. He will never find the entrance—unless someone tells him.”

“And none of us will tell him,” answered one of his fellows.

A sudden flash in the candlelight, a thud, a choked-off gasp. Two men eased a body to the floor, that of the speaker who had suggested terms.

“Go to God, brother,” said one of the killers. “I love you as a brother still. I would not have you put to a test you could not bear.”

The first voice continued. “So that is clear. The relic must stay. All those of us who know the secret stair must die. For no-one can be sure what he will say at the last end of pain.”

“Are we allowed to die in battle?” queried one of the dark shapes.

“No. A blow on the head, a crippled arm. Anyone may be captured without consenting to it. We would die later of the endura, but that might be too late. And alas, we have no time for the endura. One of us will go up the stair, and tell Marcabru the captain to make the best terms he can tomorrow morning for our poor brothers, the imperfecti. Then that brother will return. And we will take the holy draught together from the chalice of Joseph.”

A hum of satisfaction and agreement, hands shaken across the table in the dark.

An hour later, as the silent perfect ones heard the step of their brother coming again down the stairs to share the poison draught with his brothers, a final voice in the dimness.

“Rejoice, brothers, for we are old. And what was the question that our founder Nicodemus asked of the Son of God?”

Voices answered him in chorus, garbling the Latin words in their own strange dialect. “Quomodo potest homo nasci, cum senex sit! How can a man be born when he is old? Or can he enter again into the womb of his mother?”