King and Emperor

Chapter Twelve

From the hitherto barely-known rock of Puigpunyent the riders spurred in all directions. Some at the best speed their horses could make: they had little distance to travel, were under orders to go directly to every baron's hold and rock-based tower in the borderlands, to demand every man that could ride to join their Emperor. They would not get them, for in the complex local politics of the mountain marches, where Frank faced Spaniard and Christian faced heretic, where the Moors raided continually and Jewish levies watched the passes and the toll-roads, no baron, not even those whom Bruno's informants had selected for loyalty to Holy Church, would think of leaving himself defenseless. Nor would Bruno trust them if they did. But they would provide the first ring, till they were replaced by better men, at this moment when the Empire and the Emperor needed above all numbers.

Other messengers paced themselves more carefully, riding in small groups with a tail of spare horses behind them. They had further to go: some many hundreds of miles further, but all of them knowing that it would be days of riding before they reached the secure parts of the Empire, where remounts were to be had at the display of the Emperor's tokens. Those who had furthest to go were the ones selected to ride for the strongholds of the Lanzenorden, all of them in the German-speaking realms far to the east and north, through the mountains or across the Rhine: Freiburg and Worms, Trier and Zurich and even Bern high in the Alps. From there would come the men in whom Bruno had most trust, every last warrior-monk of the Order, the men he needed to fight his war and pursue his quest to the finish. There would be no hesitation or calculation there. But they could not come immediately, would never come in the numbers he needed.

In between were the riders heading for every bishop's seat in the marches of Southern France and Italy: Massilia and Vercelli, Lyons and Turin and Carcassonne and Dax. Their message was the simplest. Every man you can spare. No need for knights, no need for the heavy-armed and aristocratic, though they must come too, to officer the rest. Send every man who has a pair of eyes and a hunting bow. Send the poachers and the huntsmen, the falconeers and the charcoal-burners. The confessors of every village must know who are the men who can find their way in the dark, who can chase the deer across the hills and into the maquis. Offer forgiveness and remission of sins to all who will take service now, for Church and Cross and Empire. Above all, Bruno had pointed out, I must have your bacheliers: the men who in proper Latin, if the Latin of the degenerating Empire, would have been vaccalarii, the men of the vaches. The cowboys, who rode the marshes of the Camargue on their rough horses, armed with the ten-foot ox-goads that were their trade-tool, strips of jerked beef wound round their hats, watchful at all times for the attacks of the stalking, furious-tempered wild bulls. Too flighty and light-armed for battle, but capable of scouring a countryside like a kitchen-maid sanding rust out of a kettle.

“I want this place sealed off tighter than an abbess's—tighter than a convent dormitory,” Bruno had said, forgetting his usual careful respectfulness to every form of religious life. “We haven't the men now, but as soon as they start to come in, assign them and place them. Till then, Tasso,” he added to his Lanzenorden guard-commander, “you can tell our lads that no one goes to sleep. Me neither. Get them out and watching every rock.”

“What for?” said Tasso.

“You saw the way they all killed themselves. Why? Because they didn't want anyone to tell us something. Tell us where something was. So it must be here. And you can be sure someone will try to get it out. So we'll seal the place off.”

“That won't find anything,” said Tasso, an old comrade allowed to speak freely to a brother of the order, even if that brother was his Kaiser and commander.

Bruno seized him with both hands by the beard. “It won't lose anything either! And now we know it's here, once we're all sealed off, all we have to do is look.”

“We've looked already.”

“Not under every stone we haven't. And we're going to take every last stone of this hill down and throw it in the sea if we have to! Erkenbert!” Bruno shouted to his deacon, busily giving messengers their directions. “Tell the bishops to send pickaxes too! And men to use them.”

Released, Tasso tramped off to survey the ground and set up his too-scanty sentry-posts. As the day wore on his expression grew more and more troubled. A Bavarian himself, from the vineyards of the south, he found the ravines and dense scrub of the sharp, steep Pyrenean foothills baffling.

“Need a thousand men to do this job,” he muttered to himself. “Two thousand. And where's the food coming from? Or the water? Still: Befehl ist Befehl. Helmbrecht, Siegnot, Hartmut, guard this path here. And remember, no one sleeps till reliefs are sent. Kaiserbefehl, understand?”

He tramped on in the heat, scattering detachments here and there. He did not know that keeping pace with him a quarter of a mile outside the ring he was setting up, sliding through the dense thorny scrub as low to the ground as a weasel, eyes watched his every move.

The shepherd lad had expected fear and strangeness as he came in to make his report, but even so he gulped and swallowed convulsively as his eyes adapted to the dim light. Facing him behind a rough table sat a semi-circle of men. At least, they might be men. Every figure was dressed in long grey robes, and each one had a cowl over his head, pulled so far forward that the faces could not be seen. If he had seen them, he might have recognized them. For no one could be sure who the perfecti might be, though among the heretic villages rumors and evaluations ran continually: he refused mutton the other day, maybe he eats no meat, his wife and he sleep together but speak to each other like brother and sister, she has not given birth for three years though her child was weaned last spring. All might be indicators of having passed into the central mystery. But in the heretic villages all strove to live like perfecti even though they might never reach that grade: so fasting or celibacy might indicate only ambition, not achievement. The cowled men could be anyone.

The shepherd boy knelt clumsily, straightened again. A voice came from the semi-circle, not from the middle. It might be that a spokesman had been selected because his voice would not be recognized. In any case he spoke in no more than a whisper.

“What did you see at Puigpunyent?”

The lad considered. “I went close up to the rock, from all sides except the east, where the road is. The gate is battered down, the towers are burnt and much of the stone has fallen in. The Emperor's men swarm over the castle as thick as fleas on an old dog.”

“What of the outside?”

“The Christians have placed men all round the rock, as close to the base of it as they can get, in a ring on all sides. They are heavy men in armor, and walk about very little in the heat. Food and water is brought out to them. I cannot understand what they say to each other, but they do not sleep and they seem not to complain. Much of the time they sing their heathen hymns and prayers.”

The perfecti ignored the lad's equation of Christian and heathen: it was what they thought themselves. The interrogating voice dropped even lower.

“Were you not afraid that they would catch you?”

The lad smiled. “Men in armor? Catch me on the hillside, or in the maquis? No, lords. If they saw me they could not catch me. But they have never seen me.”

“Well then, tell us this. Could you—you and some of your fellows, it might be—could you pierce their ring and get over the wall and inside the castle? Perhaps take one of us with you. A mountain man, but not a swift boy such as yourself?”

The boy's face grew more hesitant. If he said yes, would they ask him to do it? He had no wish to join the corpses he had seen carried out and laid on the green plain below the castle entrance. Yet above all he wished for the good opinion of the men whom all respected, the men of honor.

“Their posts are badly placed, and the sentries start and shoot if so much as a fox rustles in the thickets. Yes, I could make my way through them. And maybe three or four of my friends. An older man… The spines on the scrub grow high, you see, maybe a foot, two feet from the ground. I do not walk, I slide on my belly, fast as another man walks. A heavier man, a man who does not stoop, who says ‘Oh, my back’ ”—for a moment the lad imitated the priest of his village, a heretic like the rest but one who remained in communion with the Church and the bishop, to throw off suspicion—“he could not get through. He would be caught.”

The cowled heads nodded almost imperceptibly as they registered the finality of his statement.

“And caught he must not be,” observed the whispering voice. “Thank you, lad, you have done us a service. Your village shall know of it. Our blessing to you, and may it grow as you grow older. Outside, talk to the men you will find there. Show them the sentry-posts as you have seen them.”

After he had gone out, nothing was said for a while. “Bad news,” said one of the cowls after a while. “He knows there is something there.”

“It was the defiance of Marcabru that alerted him. If they had surrendered and walked out, he would have thought it was just another siege and gone his way. It is best not to attract attention. To surrender, to deny our faith, to vow obedience to the Pope as we have always done. Then return to what we know after they have gone.”

“Marcabru fought to the last because he feared someone would talk. And who knows? They might have done. Maybe he had his orders. After all, we do not know what happened inside the castle. Maybe there were signs of treason.”

The silence descended again. Another voice volunteered information. “They say that after the Emperor took the castle he had all the bodies inside it carried out on to the plain by the river, and there had them burnt. But before he did that his men stripped and searched all the dead. Searched their bellies with knives, even, to be sure they had hidden nothing. After they were burnt his men sifted the ash once more. And everything inside the castle, every stick of chair or table, was carried out and laid out to be inspected by the Emperor and his black deacon. He had them burnt too, before people of the nearby villages, while he watched their faces. He thought they would betray it if they saw a holy relic burnt.”

“He does not know what he is looking for, then.”

“No. Nor does he know how to find the entrance to the place of the Grail.”

“But he is demolishing the castle stone by stone. How long will it take before some pick-stroke lays bare the door, or the staircase?”

“Not for a long time,” said one of the voices, with certainty in its tone.

“But if he digs down to very bedrock?”

For a third time the silence fell. At length, as the sun threw shadows further and further aslant across the dim-windowed room, the most certain of the voices spoke again.

“We cannot take the risk. We must recover our treasures. By war. By stealth. With a bribe. If we need help from outside we must find it.”

“Outside?” came a query.

“The world is coming to us now. The Emperor, successor of Charlemagne, whom we drove off eighty years ago. But others too. Strange news from Cordova, as you know. We must guard above all against thinking like men, as if all that happens in this world were mere chance and mortal effort. For we know it is a battle-ground, between the One Above and the One Below. If all that happened, happened in this world, we know which one would win.”

“And yet He is the princeps huius mundi, the Great Prince of the World.”

“And so we must go outside. Outside our world, outside this world.”

Slowly the perfecti, the men who believed the God of the Christians was indeed the Devil, to be overthrown when time came into its fullness, began to evolve their plan for bringing that fullness forward.

The old man who sat in the shade of the vine-trellis looked at the King of the North sitting opposite him with doubt. He did not look like a king, still less like the subject of prophecy. He was not dressed in Bozrah purple. His men did not bow down before him. He was sitting on a small stool, and following the custom of the Northerners, sitting in full sunlight, as if he could not get enough of it. Sweat ran from his brow, dripped steadily on to the flagstones of the balcony built out to overlook sea and harbor far below.

“You are sure he is a king?” the old man asked Suleiman again. They spoke in Hebrew, Shef listening patiently but without understanding to the alien syllables, which no Englishman had ever heard before in the history of the world.

“I have seen him in his homeland, in his own hall. He rules a wide realm.”

“He was born a Christian, you tell me. He will understand this, then. Tell him…” The old man, Benjamin Prince of Septimania, Lion of Judah, Ruler of the Rock of Sion, spoke on. After a few moments Suleiman—or, in his own country, Solomon—began to interpret.

“My prince tells me that you will understand what it says in our holy book, which was your holy book also, in the days when you were of the Christian Church. In the Book of the Wisdom of ben-Shirach, which you call ‘Ecclesiasticus,’ it is said, ‘The conies are a feeble folk, but they dwell in the rocks.’ The Prince says that here—and I have told him what your strange woman said of the Jews—here the Jews are not a feeble folk. Yet still they dwell in the rocks, as you can see in all directions.” He waved a hand at the mountains looming not far off, at the sheer stone walls guarding harbor and town.

Shef stared at him blankly. The Jewish prince's assumption that a Christian was bound to know Old and New Testaments was completely wide of the mark. Shef had never heard of ‘Ecclesiasticus,’ never read a Bible, had indeed never seen a Bible in his life till he attended the wedding of his love Go-dive and his partner Alfred in the great cathedral at Winchester. The priest of his fenland village had owned only a service book, with extracts from the Bible for the different services of the Church year. All that Father Andreas had ever even tried to teach was respect for authority, whether that were the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the necessity for tithing, or social superiors. He had never seen a coney or rabbit either, though this did not matter since Solomon had translated the word as ‘hare,’ for want of a better.

“Hares don't live in the rocks,” he said. “They live in the open field.”

Solomon hesitated. “The point my prince wishes to make is that we have very strong natural and artificial defenses.”

Shef looked round. “Yes, I can see that.”

“He did not understand my remark,” cut in Benjamin.

“No. The fact is, prince, that these people receive almost no education, even if they are born Christians. Few of them can read and write. I believe the king here can, but he does not do so easily. I do not think he knows the Scriptures at all.”

“They are not People of the Book, then.”

Solomon hesitated. This was no time to explain the doctrines of the Way, its devotion to new knowledge. His prince and his people felt no loyalty to the Caliph, less to the Emperor, were ready for any new alliance that might bring change. There was no need to hinder their acceptance.

“I think they are trying to be,” he suggested. “With difficulty and by themselves. I have seen their own writing. It is developed from a way of cutting signs with knives on bits of wood.”

Slowly the prince pushed himself to his feet. “It is meritorious,” he said, “to assist those who desire to learn. Come. Let us show the king here what a school is like. A school for those who are truly People of the Book, not like the followers of Mohammed, for ever remembering without understanding, nor those of Yeshua, for ever hiding behind languages no one but their priests is allowed to know.”

Shef rose too, not unwilling to follow his hosts' demands, but increasingly bored with listening to conversations that no one troubled to translate. As Solomon explained the purpose of their visit his eye was drawn against his will to what was going on down in the crowded and sunlit harbor. By the outer mole, where the ships of the Northern fleet rode at anchor well away from shore and from the native craft, they were veering out the kites again. He glanced to see if the old prince was waiting for him, saw that he had gone a few steps inside into the cool dark. Pulled his far-seer from his belt and snatched a quick glance through it. The kite was lifting well in a fresh breeze, Steffi now confidently directing operations. And they'd got Tolman, smallest and lightest of the ships' boys, standing by the rail! Were the bastards going to try the next experiment without him? It was a good day for it, and Tolman, bred to a fisherman's family off Lowestoft, was known to be able to swim like a fish.

The Jews were waiting for him. Shef shut the far-seer up, followed Solomon, Skaldfinn, Prince Benjamin and the rest of the escorts and entourage glumly into the dark. To join the People of the Book.

As Shef was led firmly and unwaveringly round the stronghold of the Jewish enclave, planted long ago at the time of the fall of Rome, his sense of strangeness and oppression grew steadily. After the court of the Caliph, he had thought himself ready for any new experience, but the fortress town seemed arranged like no other he had seen in North or South. There was the same crowded and active life that he had grown familiar with in the streets and markets of Cordova, among people dressed in much the same way and talking languages in which he recognized the occasional snatch of Arabic or of some Latin tongue. Yet the sense of sprawl, of activities going on without license or control or physical boundary was missing. The prince led him first on a careful tour of the town's outer defenses, a stone wall cunningly linking natural cliff and precipice so as to shut in completely the bay and the harbor like a three-quarter circle. The strange thing was that in every other fortress city Shef had seen, whether York or London or Cordova, there was always and as if immune to regulation a second city, an outer huddle beyond the walls of huts and shacks, the dwellings of those not rich enough to come inside the protection of the city yet drawn there all the same by the wealth it grew and slowly dripped from its boundaries. Alert guard-captains were continually tearing them down, driving the inhabitants further away, trying to keep themselves a clear field of view and dart. It never worked. Always the whores and the hucksters and the beggars crawled back and remade their outer village.

Not here. Nothing obstructed the walls, not so much as a kennel for dogs or a private latrine. Nothing grew in their crevices either—Shef saw a party of men on one stretch lowering some of their number over the parapets to grub out weeds from the stone. Though he could see tilled fields and groves in the distance, he could see not so much as a shed for a watchman. The parties he saw moving to and from fields to city carried their tools with them: in both directions, he noted. They did not even leave their heavy plows and grain-baskets outside the walls.

“I understand what you mean to do,” he said finally to Solomon, still gravely interpreting the remarks of his ruler. “I do not see how you make people do it. I could not do that with my own people, even if they were slaves. There is always someone who will try to bend the rules, and ten more to follow him. Even if you flog and brand the way the black monks did, there will always be someone who does not understand what is he to do no matter how often you tell him. Those people out there, are they your slaves? Why do they obey so willingly?”

“We do not keep slaves,” replied Solomon. “Slavery is forbidden to us under our Law.” He translated the rest of Shef's comments, listened to the long reply, spoke again.

“Benjamin ha-Nasi says that you are right to ask these questions, and that he sees you are a ruler in truth. He says you are right also to say that knowing the law is more wonderful than obeying the law, and declares that it is his belief that it is the unlearned alone who bring trouble into the world.

“What he wishes you to understand is that we Jews are different from your people, as from the Caliph's. It is our custom to permit open debate of any matter—your lady Svandis might stand up in our debating chamber and say all that she pleases, and no one would interrupt her. But it is our custom also that once a decision has been made, a rule passed, then all must obey it, even those who argued most strongly against it. We do not punish for disagreement. We punish for not obeying the will of the community. That is why people obey all the rules willingly. Because we are the People not only of the Book, but of the Law.”

“And how do you all know the Law?”

“You will see.”

Turning from the battlements, the party retraced its steps into the center of the crowded forty-acre site, full of houses of stone and plaster connected by alley ways no wider than two men, winding up and down flights of steps that sometimes seemed to reach the gradient of ladders.

“See there,” said Solomon, pointing inside a narrow courtyard. There in the shade sat a man dressed in black, solemnly intoning a long unvarying drone to a dozen boys of different ages squatting on the ground. “That is one of the prince's geonim. The prince maintains a dozen such, scholars who instruct youth without pay, for the love of learning. See, he will not desist even though he sees the prince his master pass by. For learning is more important than princes.”

“What is he teaching them?”

Solomon listened for a while to the steady drone, and then nodded. “He is reciting to them points of halakhah. That is; part of the Mishnah. The Mishnah is the law of our people, based first on our holy books, which the Christians call the Old Testament. But the Mishnah is all that has been thought and said on these books since we first made our Covenant with God. In the halakhot we learn particular decisions which have been made on particular points.”

“Such as what?”

“At present the gaon is explaining why, though saving a man's life takes precedence over saving a woman's, it is proper to cover the nakedness of a woman before that of a man.”

Shef nodded, walked on broodingly, following the prince's unostentatious and unheralded tour. Another thing was beginning to catch his eye. Books in the crowd. He had seen several being carried, one man sitting short-sightedly with his nose almost buried between the covers of one. In one of the markets he thought he had caught a glimpse of a stall with a dozen or more laid out as if for sale. Shef had never heard of a book being sold. The Vikings stole them and ransomed them back, when they could, to their owners. The monks of Saint Benedict made them for themselves and their priest-dependents. No-one ever sold one. They were too valuable. Thorvin would have died in his boots before selling his collection of the holy songs, written down with difficulty in the jagged runic script. How many books did these people have? Where did they come from?

They paused again at what Shef identified as a church, if a Jewish one. In it men and women were praying, bending to the ground like Mohammedans, but somewhere in the dark interior Shef saw a candle burning, and in its light a man reading from another book, seemingly to two separated groups of men and women. Further on a square, and in it two men debating. Each listened impassively to the other, then, at intervals of perhaps five hundred words, spoke in his turn. From the ring of their voices it seemed to Shef that each would begin by quoting words not his own, and would then go on to explain them and fit them against the arguments of the other. A crowd surrounded them, intent and silent but for grunts of agreement, moans of rejection.

“The one says, ‘Take thou no usury’,” clarified Solomon. “The other replies, ‘To a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury.’ Now they are disputing as to the meaning of the word ‘stranger’.”

Shef nodded, reflecting. He knew of rule by the sword, like his own and that of the Viking rulers he had overthrown. He knew of rule by fear and slavery, like that of the monks and the Christian kings. It seemed that this was rule by book and by law, and by law which was put down in book form, not decided by the doom of king or jarl or alderman. The law of the book seemed, however, no wiser than that of the immediate judgment of his own courts. There was something he did not understand.

“Do your people study anything but law?” he asked.

Solomon translated, heard the reply from the prince still leading the way before them. “He says, all learning is either a code or a commentary.” Solomon struggled to find expression for either idea in Shef's Anglo-Norse, fixing in the end on “book of laws,” “book of decisions.”

Shef nodded again, his face imperturbable. Was this new knowledge? Or just old knowledge continually chewed over, the thing he had set his face against in his own land and his own capital?

“See,” Solomon said, pointing the way finally to a small building down almost by the harbor-front once again. In the background, between the alley-walls, Shef caught a momentary glimpse of a kite swooping in the air, gaped at it convulsively. They had flown off without him! And he was almost sure from the glimpse that they had sent Tolman aloft after all: the kite had not been moving freely in the air, had been under control.

“See,” said Solomon again, more firmly. “This at least you will find new knowledge.”

Reluctantly, still craning his neck upwards, Shef followed his hosts into the building. Inside, tables set round a central space. Men behind the tables, and from them a continuous scritch-scritch sound as their hands moved, seemingly all in time like the feet of the Emperor's marching soldiers or Shef's own troops. A man in the midst of them all, standing up, holding a book and reading from it. Reading, whatever the language, very slowly, a pause every few words.

They were copying, Shef realized. He had heard of such places even among the Christians. One man read slowly, the others wrote down his words, at the end, depending on how many copiers you had, six, even ten books where there had only been one. Impressive, and showing once again how the People of the Law knew their law. Yet this too was hardly new knowledge.

A word from the prince, and the reading stopped, the reader and the copiers turning to their ruler and bowing gravely. “It is not the copying that is new,” said Solomon, “nor, the Holy One forbid, the copied. Rather that which they copy on to.”

At a word the reader held his book, his master copy, out towards Shef. He took it clumsily, unsure for a moment at which side it might open. His hands were used to hammers and tongs, rope and wood, not these little thin sheets of skin.

Skin? If it was skin, he did not know what kind of a beast it came from. He raised the book, sniffed carefully. Felt the leaf between his fingers, twisting it as he would have a sheet of vellum. Not vellum. Not even the other thing, papyrus, made from strange reeds. The thin stuff parted, the reader stepped forward again with a look and cry of anger. Shef paused, held the book carefully, returned it, staring into the man's angry eyes without hint of expression or apology. Only a fool thinks everyone knows what he knows.

“I do not understand,” he said to Solomon. “It is not the calf-skin we use. It has no flesh side, no hair side. Can it be bark?”

“Neither. But it is made from wood. The Latins call it papyrium, from some Egyptian plant or other. But we do not make our papyrium from that plant, only from wood, crushed and felted. We add other things to it, a kind of clay that prevents the ink from running. Knowledge of it came from very far away, from the other end of the Arabs' empire. There, at Samarkand, they fought a battle with soldiers from another empire far across the desert and mountain lands. The Arabs were victorious and brought back many captives from the land of Chin. They, it is said, taught the Arabs the secret of paper. But the Arabs put little value in it, preferring to teach their boys only enough for them to remember sections of the Koran by heart. It is we who have made the books. With new knowledge.”

New knowledge to make the books, thought Shef. Not new knowledge—Solomon prayed to the Holy One to forbid it—not new knowledge in the books. Yet this explained something. It explained why there were so many books, so many readers. To make a book of vellum might take the skins of twenty calves, even more, for not the whole skin could be used. Not one man in a thousand could expect to own the skins of twenty calves.

“What is the price of a book?” he asked.

Solomon passed on the question to Benjamin, standing watching, his guards and scholars behind him.

“He says, the price of wisdom is above that of rubies.”

“I didn't mean the price of the wisdom. I meant the price of the paper.”

As Solomon translated again, the look of scorn on the face of the angry reader, still smoothing over his torn page, deepened into open contempt.

“I do not think there is much hope in them,” said Shef to his counselors that evening, watching the sun go down behind the sharp and jagged mountains. Much the same, had he known it, was being said about him among the scholars and learned men who dominated the Jewish court. “They know a lot. But the knowledge is all about rules, either about their God or about themselves. Yet they collect what they need from far afield. They know some things that we do not, like this paper stuff. But when it comes to Greek fire…” He shook his head. “Solomon said we could enquire among the Arab and Christian merchants of the aliens' quarter. Tell me more about the flying. You should have waited for me.”

“The men said they might be at sea again in a day's time, and the wind was just high enough without being a danger. So they put Tolman in the harness and let the wind lift him. But they did two things that bin-Firnas did not do…” Earnestly Thorvin went through the details of the day's launch, when the young boy, still moored but trying to maneuver his great box-kite, had flown out to the end of the longest rope they had been able to splice together, five hundred feet of it. At the far end of the ship Tolman was boasting of his prowess to the other boys and the crewmen, his treble pipe lifting from time to time over Thorvin's rumble. As the night came down the voices died, men turned to their hammocks or stretched out on the warm sun-retaining decks.

Usually, in his dreams, Shef knew that he was dreaming, could feel the presence of his instructor. This time he did not. Did not know, even, who he was.

He was lying on stone, he could feel the cold of it running into his back. There was pain all around him too, back and sides and feet, and something deep and tearing in his chest. He ignored it as if it were happening to someone else.

What frightened him, brought out the chill sweat racing down his face, was that he could not move. Not an arm, not a finger. He was wrapped round and round in folds of some stuff or other, binding arms to sides and legs together. Was it a shroud? Was he buried, still alive? If it were, he could struggle upward, would strike his head against the coffin. For long moments he lay afraid to make the trial. For if he were buried, he could not move, could not cry out. Surely he would go mad.

Convulsively he lunged upward, felt the tearing pain again near his heart. But there was nothing there. Why then could he not see? There was a band under his chin, binding his jaw up. He was buried. Or at least he had been taken for dead.

But he could see! Or at least there was a light, no, a patch of darkness less dark than the rest. Shef stared at it, willing it to increase. And there were movements coming towards him. In the terror of live burial, fear of other men had dissolved. Shef thought of nothing but attracting their attention, whoever they were, begging to be cut free. He opened his mouth, let out a faint croak.

But whoever it was had no fear of the dead, or the dead coming to life. There was a sharp point on his throat-ball, a face looking down at him. The face said, slowly and distinctly,

“How shall a man be born when he is old? Or enter again into the womb of his mother?”

Shef gaped up, terrified. He did not know the answer.

He realized he was gaping up into a face, a face lit by starlight. In the same instant he knew once again who he was, and where he was: in his hammock, slung at the very bow of the Fafnisbane for the cool rising off the water. And the face above him was that of Svandis.

“Were you dreaming?” she asked quietly. “I heard you croaking as if your throat had dried up.”

Shef nodded, relief flooding through him. He sat up carefully, feeling the cold sweat soaking his tunic. There was no one else nearby. The crew granted him the small privacy of the space beyond the catapult platform.

“What was it about?” she whispered. He could smell her hair very close to his face. “Tell me your dream.”

Shef rolled soundlessly from his hammock, crouched face to face with the girl, the daughter of Ivar whom he had killed. He felt the awareness of her as a woman growing stronger every second, as if the years of sorrow and impotence had never visited him.

“I will tell you,” he whispered with sudden confidence, “and you shall interpret it for me. But I will do it with my arms round you.”

He embraced her gently, felt an instant resistance, continued to hold her as she felt the sweat of fear on him. Her rigid stance seemed to thaw, she let him draw her down on to the deck.

“I was lying on my back,” he whispered, “wrapped in a shroud. And I thought that I had been buried somewhere and left. I was terrified…” As he spoke, Shef slowly drew up the hem of her dress, pulled her warm thigh close to his own cold body. She seemed to feel his need for comfort, began to co-operate, to press closer to him. He pulled the dress higher, the white dress of a priestess corded round with red berries, pulled it higher yet, still whispering.