King and Emperor

Chapter Seventeen

The group on the deck of the Fafnisbane stared at Solomon with expressions ranging from doubt to horror. “Tell us again,” said Brand. “He wants us to dismantle the kite, take it and enough material for two more up into the hills, with a mile of rope, Tolman, and two more boys?”

Solomon bowed his head in agreement. “Such are the instructions of your master.”

The eyes shifted to Steffi, standing a pace behind with an air of deep embarrassment. He shuffled his feet, unable to meet the concentrated gaze of his superiors with more than one eye at once. “That's what he said,” he muttered in confirmation. “Enough for three kites and a guard, load 'em on mules, get it all up in the hills as fast as you can, only faster. That's what he said, right enough.”

There was no doubt about Steffi's loyalty, though there might be about his sense. At least these orders were not a trap. The eyes switched to each other, looked back in the end to Solomon.

“We don't doubt that's what he said,” offered Thorvin, “but things have happened here while he's been away. Things he doesn't know about.”

Solomon bowed again. “Well I know it. After all, my own master has given orders that all our outlying people, our traders and our farmers on the hillsides, are to come in to the city at once, for safety. We have known for weeks that the Emperor of the Romans is too close for comfort, though he seemed completely occupied with his army across the border. But now the Caliph is barely two days' march away—less for a fast rider. And the Arabs can move fast when they are so inclined, however slow the Caliph himself may be. We could have light cavalry at our gates in the morning. They may be in the hills already.”

“Light cavalry be buggered,” commented Hagbarth. “What frightened me was those red galleys. Just turned up, no warning. Like the Ragnarssons used to do. There we were, flying the kites off, half a dozen ships out there, and they came out of the haze as if they'd planned it. Not even hurrying, just paddling along at twelve strokes a minute. Nearly cut us all off from the harbor just the same. If Tolman hadn't seen them first we could all have been fried.”

“If we hadn't had to wind Tolman in and recover him we could have got out to the open sea and let them go by,” grunted Brand, continuing a long argument.

“Either way. They came up to the harbor just after we got inside, had a look in, burned off a fishing boat that hadn't seen them—just deviltry that was, to show us they could do it, and kept on paddling north. But they aren't far away. Could be here before nightfall.”

“We think it would be wiser,” Thorvin concluded, speaking for all of them, “if the king returned here and made preparations for departure.”

Solomon spread his arms wide. “I have given you his instructions. He is—or so you say—your king. I do not debate with my prince once he has said his word. Perhaps you Northerners are different.”

A long silence. Brand broke it. “Will your prince let us leave the city?”

“He will let you leave the city. You are not under his protection. He will let me guide you. I am out of favor now. I spoke my mind concerning the release of the young Arab, and he is prepared to lose me. None of his other people may go.”

“All right,” said Brand. “We'll have to do it. Thorvin, hand over some silver to Solomon so he can buy the mules, Steffi, start getting the stuff together and work out how many mules you'll need. Pick the kite crews.”

“Will you come with us, lord?” asked Steffi.

“No. I'm not very good at fast moving, and something tells me you're going to come down that mountain a great deal faster than you went up. If you're lucky. I'm going to stay here and think about how to guard this harbor. Against anything, flame included.”

Miles further up the mountain, Shef was repeating an experiment, in his usual painstaking and skeptical way. He was familiar enough with the white residue that the head of the perfecti had shown him. So was anyone who had ever mucked out a cowshed or a pig-sty. A white earth, that condensed from the animals' urine, or so they said.

What Shef had not seen before was the crystalline form derived from it. “How had they come upon that?” he had asked. The answer made a kind of sense. In English conditions, where earth was wet most of the time and earth from an animal-shed even more so, lighting a fire on the white earth was unlikely ever to happen. Here, in the cold, dry air of the mountain winter, where beasts were often stalled indoors, it was a natural event. Once the mountaineers had realized that the white earth made a blaze, someone, somewhere had put that knowledge together with the knowledge of the Arabs, familiar already with al-kimi, al-kuhl, al-qili, and other strange concepts. Now they knew that water trickled over the white earth from the animal sheds, the wood-ash from the fires, and the lime crushed from limestone, could be boiled to give these crystals.

Sal Petri, they called it, the salt of Saint Peter. Or did they mean rock-salt? Shef neither knew nor cared. He had realized soon enough that the Peter-salt could not be the secret of the Greek fire. But it was interesting just the same, as were the other ingredients that the Children of God had shown him. New knowledge once again.

He had built a pile of kindling, a sequence of piles, and poured the crystals over each one. Then to each he had made a separate addition from the materials the graybeard perfectus Anselm had given him. In normal life, each one would have to be lit painstakingly from kindling and blown into life with the care that children learnt from their parents. Some people could light fires, some people couldn't, so ran the folk wisdom: the former group were bound for Hell, where the devil would commandeer them. But these fires were not normal.

Shef whirled the half-rotted stick a few times round his head to make the punk glow brightly, leant forward and tossed the fire-brand a few feet on to the first pile of twigs. A soft ‘whump,’ a bright glare, and the fire was collapsing immediately into fierce embers.

He took another stick, stepped sideways three paces, repeated the process. This time the ‘whump’ was followed by an instant livid green. “Copper filings for green,” he muttered to himself. “Now, what makes the yellow one?”

“We call it orpiment, the golden color,” said Anselm at his side, the graybeard leader of the perfecti. “Though the Greeks give it some other name. Much of this our men learned from Greek traders. That is what made us think that it might be the secret of the Greek fire. Though the Arabs make colored flames like this too, when they light fires to honor their leaders and their Prophet. They have much learning in what they call al-kimi. The lore of burnings and distillations.”

“It is not the Greek fire,” replied Shef absently, working his way down the line of piles, and muttering a color and a substance for each one. “There is nothing pretty about that.”

“But you will not go back on your word to help us?”

“I will not go back on my word to try. But you have set me a hard task.”

“Our men saw you flying strange machines. We thought you might swoop down on Puigpunyent like an eagle and carry off our relics through the air.”

Shef lobbed the last torch, noted the result, turned and grinned down at the smaller, older man.

“Maybe one day we will know how to do that. But to land on a mountain? Not the kindly sea? And fly away again without the lines and the crew and the wind to lift you? Carrying Othin knows what as well as the boy? No, that would take the skill of Wayland the smith of the gods.”

“So what will you do instead?”

“That will take a great deal of work from all of us. From you, and from my men, once they come. Show me again, draw the map in the dirt, where the Christians' camp is and how they have their guard posts.”

Anselm whistled shrilly, and the shepherd boy who had been playing on his flute of oaten straw rushed over.

The next day, with the sun already beginning to sink, Shef called the whole of his party together—heretics, Northerners, and the kite-gangs brought hastily up by Solomon—and went over once again all the pieces of his plan.

The thirty men and three boys were on a grassy ledge on the last mountain slope looking out over the plains, the rock of Puigpunyent clearly visible, even without the far-seers. In the strong sun anyone could see, also, that the plain down there was alive with men: parties of riders moving one way and another, flashes of sunlight on weapons and armor from every gap in the scrub. It had been an uneasy ride to reach this place, with repeated halts and diversions: Anselm had turned out every man he could to act as a screen of scouts and spies. They were in their own country and close to their most secret fastnesses. Even so, reports had come back every few minutes of Christian riders out in the night, forcing Shef and Anselm and their men to fade from the paths into the rocks or the thorn scrub, till another soft call or whistle would lead them on again. They were safe enough where they were, or so Anselm thought. The ledge could be reached by only two paths, and both were by now heavily guarded. Just the same, it would be bad to attract attention. As he peered out all afternoon over the landscape, Shef had been careful to keep well back, to lie deep in the shadow of a bush.

He spoke, first, to the men of his own party, the snatchers as he thought of them. There were only seven including himself. The shepherd lad, whom Shef had privately dubbed “Straw,” from his endless thin piping: he was to be the guide. Four young men chosen for their agility and speed: they were to be the carriers of the holy things. Richier, youngest of the perfecti. Shef had eyed him askance when Anselm had brought him forward. He was the man who had challenged Shef as he climbed out of the pit, and Shef had no high opinion of his presence of mind or even his courage. Nor was he even much of a lightweight like the others. Youngest of the perfecti he might be, but he was at least forty, an old man by the measure of the mountains or for that matter of the fens, not one who ranged the hills all day or eeled through the brush in pursuit of game. Yet Anselm had said it must be so. Only the perfecti knew the way into their innermost sanctum. No, another could not be told how to find it. Apart from the breach of their strongest rules of secrecy, the way in was not something that could be described. Only shown. So a perfectus must go with the company, and Richier it would have to be.

Finally, Shef himself. Shef had seen Straw looking at him with much the same expression that he used when he looked at Richier, and he knew why. Among the lightly-built people of the hills, Shef stood out like Styrr among ordinary folk. He was head and shoulders taller than any other man in the company, Richier included. He outweighed Richier by fifty pounds and every other man or boy by seventy at least. Could he keep up when it came to speed? Could he creep undetected below the cover? Straw obviously thought not. Shef himself was more confident. It was not so many years since he and Hund had stalked the wild pigs together in the marsh, or snaked on their bellies to take fish from some thane's private pond. He had grown bigger and stronger since then, but little of the weight, he knew, was fat. If anyone could elude the scouts and sentries, he could.

He had no fear, indeed, of being seen and killed in the night. He had a good chance, and death, if it came, would come cleanly, not as it had come to Sumarrfugl.

What did set a weight in his bowels and a chill at his heart was the thought of capture. For capture meant facing the Emperor. Shef had seen him close, drunk with him, felt no fear even when he stood with Bruno's sword-point at his throat. Something told him now, though, that if they met again the genial side of his old comrade would be gone, replaced by the fanatic. He would not spare a heathen and a rival a second time.

Shef looked round the small inner circle of seven. “Very well. We will start our ride as soon as I have finished speaking to the others. We work down into the plain behind our scouts, and at dusk we start to ride round in a wide circle. To come out on the other side of the rock, of Puigpunyent, to the north-west. Then we leave our horses and follow Straw here through the Emperor's guard-ring.

“You know that is asking a lot. But I promise you this. The Emperor's guards will all be looking at quite something else. If they are still there.”

A mutter of assent, if not belief.

“Stand aside then and be ready to go.”

Shef turned to the larger group standing further back, by their machines. Cwicca and his gang had brought light winches with them, mere cylinders of wood with a turning handle, and had spent a long hour slowly pegging them into the stony ground without noise of hammers. By each winch stood half a dozen of the ships' catapulteers now turned kite-men, with by them the bulkier figures of the Vikings sent along to act as close-quarter guards.

In front of each of the three groups stood a kiteboy, Tolman in the middle, to either side Ubba and—Helmi, that was his name, a small pale boy little more than a child. A cousin of some crew-member's, left orphaned and homeless by the wars. All three boys looked unusually serious and alert.

“You know what to do as well. Stay here, rest, light no fires. At midnight, Cwicca, you can read the stars, fly off the kites. There will be a wind coming down from the mountains behind, or so they tell us.

“Then you, boys. When you are at the end of your ropes and flying smoothly, bring out your fires. Light each of your baskets in turn and then drop them. Make sure the cloths are unfolded before you start lighting. Drop them one at a time, counting one hundred between each. Count slowly.

“Steffi, you count the baskets as they are lit. Once you have seen them all dropped, haul the boys in. Don't stop to unpeg the winches, just leave everything and follow Messer Anselm wherever he says to go. In the morning we meet up and all head back to the ships. Any questions?”

There were none. Shef moved over once more and looked carefully at the gear they had spent the day assembling. The basic idea was to put together Steffi's invention of the fall-delaying cloth with the thing that the heretics had shown him, the colored fires of the saltpeter and the Arab alchemy. Bundles of dry twigs, impregnated with saltpeter and sealed roughly with wax. A cloth tied by four corners to each one, each of them hanging from bent nails in the canework frames of the kites. Each cloth had a small hole in its center now: Steffi, experimenting continually, had discovered this prevented the trapped air from spilling sideways, gave a smoother and even a slower fall. The most difficult bit had been giving the boys fires to carry. There could be no striking tinder and steel in mid-air. In the end they had borrowed a sailor's trick from the Vikings, who made long crossings in their undecked boats and could not always find dry tinder: tarred rope, lit and set to smolder inside a stiff canvas case.

The idea was good. Shef realized, as he looked at the flame-baskets, at the flimsy construction of the kites, quite how much was being expected of three twelve-year-olds, bobbing at the end of ropes high in the air above unyielding mountain-side. No need to remind them of the reward. Boys did not think far enough ahead to value money. They would do this for the praise and admiration of the men. Maybe, a little, out of respect for him. He nodded at them all, patted Helmi gently on the shoulder, and turned away.

“Time to move,” he said to his own party. As they filed away the English catapulteers and Viking guards looked after him with silent concern. Cwicca, at least, had seen this happen before, the One King going by himself to some uncertain fate. He had hoped not to see it happen again. From the place where she sat alone, arms wrapped round knees, Svandis too watched the retreating file. She could not go out, throw her arms round him, weep like a woman: her dignity forbade it. But she had seen many men go, few come back.

Hours later, as the sun finally crawled down to touch the flat horizon, the boy Straw led the seven horsemen into the rare shade of a clump of low and twisted trees. He whistled softly, and at the call figures appeared from the shadows to clutch bridles. Shef slowly levered himself off the horse's back and climbed stiffly to the ground, thigh muscles twinging and cramping.

It had been a hellish ride. At the very start Shef had been shocked to find not the tiny mountain ponies they had been using to come down from the heretics' stronghold, but bigger animals, and not with the usual blanket slung over them but strange high-pommeled leather saddles, with iron stirrups dangling either side. “Bruno's baccalarii,” Richier explained briefly. “Cowboys from the country to the East. They are all over the place. Some of them rode too far and too few. From a distance, with these horses and this gear, we will seem just like some more of them. No-one asks where they go. They ride wherever they please.”

Shef had clambered into the high saddle, appreciating immediately the help and support it gave even an inexperienced rider. Then he had realized that like the others he was meant to carry in his right hand the long ten-foot ox-goad that every cowboy brandished, control the beast with left hand on reins alone. As he kicked his heels and tried to force his unaccustomed seaman's legs to clamp the horse's barrel, they moved out into the sun and the dust.

No-one had challenged them, indeed. As they rode across the broken foothills and into the plain beyond, they had seen again and again other mounted men in the distance, but often, on every path or road, groups of infantry watching the crossings. Straw and his fellows waved their lances at the horsemen, but took care not to ride to meet or cross them, veering away when they could. To the groups of foot-soldiers they called out in what was evidently some imitation of the language of the Camargue, the cowboys' country, but kept riding, not waiting to engage in gossip. Shef was surprised that no-one acted, moved across to block their path, but it looked as if everyone expected the irregular riders to go where they liked, without orders or plan. Surely someone would notice the inept riding of Shef and Richier, at least, see that there were men there too old or too big for a cowboy patrol. But even the shouts that came towards them seemed good-natured or simply derisive. The Emperor had made a mistake, Shef concluded. He had put too many men out on watch, and too few of them knew each other. They were used to seeing strangers riding towards, or round, Puigpunyent. If the Emperor had ordered a complete ban on movement, patrolled by a few selected outfits, strangers would have been challenged instantly.

The break in the copse of twisted trees did not last long enough. Time to take the skins of heavily-watered wine and drain down first one quart and then another, drinking till the demand in the throat was gone, and then drinking steadily on, a gulp at a time, till the sweat began to break out again and the body felt it could hold no more. Then Straw was counting them in the deep shade and arranging them in the order he wanted: himself in the lead, another stripling in the rear, Richier next to last and Shef just before him. The other three heretic youths followed Straw, one directly behind him and the other two a little to left and right. A last mutter between the youths and a soft exchange of signal whistles. Then Straw led them into the depth of the tangled and ground-cloaking scrub. The maquis of Occitania.

Very soon Shef began to wonder if they would ever reach their goal. The idea had always been clear enough. The thorn-bushes were a total obstacle to movement on foot or on horseback, as long as one kept upright. But the thorns started their sideways growth a foot or two off the ground. Beneath them there was always a clear space, enough for an active man or boy to creep through, completely hidden from any sentry, as long as one could keep any sense of direction.

The trouble was the creeping. Straw and his mates, light and young, could wriggle forward at an immense pace, keeping their bodies off the ground and pushing forward on hands and toes. Shef managed the same movement for no more than a hundred yards. Then his overtasked arm-muscles gave out and he began instead to crawl, belly on the ground, pulling himself forward like a clumsy swimmer. Behind him grunts and gasps indicated that Richier was doing the same. In seconds the boy ahead of him had vanished, eeling along at three times Shef's speed. He ignored the disappearance and crawled on. Whistles from behind and then from in front, sounding like the calls of some night-bird. A shape wriggling back towards him, muttering some kind of appeal for more speed. It vanished again. Straw appeared, gabbling likewise. Shef ignored them all and continued to crawl through the roots, weaving from side to side to get round the thickest clumps, thorns catching in his hair, sticking in his fingers, dragging at his clothes. A hiss and a scurry on the bare ground brought him up short, jerking his hand away. One of the vipers of the plain, but hearing him coming long before his hand reached it. Shef's mouth began to clog with dust, his knees to bleed through the chafed wool trousers.

Straw had caught him by the shoulder, was pulling him to one side—out into a break in the cover, a path, only inches wide, but leading round the side of a hill. Shef climbed slowly onto his feet, feeling the relief in protesting thigh-muscles, wiped the hair out of his eye and looked at Straw with doubt and enquiry. On their feet? In the open? Better to crawl on than be seen.

“Too slow,” hissed Straw in trade-Arabic. “Friends gone ahead. If hear whistle, off path! Hide again!”

Slowly but relievedly Shef began to pad in the direction indicated, rustles in the brush indicating the scouts ahead. He spared a moment to glance at the stars, shining clear in the cloudless sky. Not too long to midnight.

He had gone maybe half a mile along the goat track as it wound through the small hills when the whistles came again from the hillside. Straw was at his side, gripping an arm and trying to force him back into the brush. Shef looked at the apparently solid wall of thorns, ducked and crawled under. Ten feet in and hardly a glimmer of light finding its way through, though more gasping and grunting told him that the exhausted perfectus was being hauled into safety too. Straw was still pulling at him to get further in, but Shef resisted. He was a veteran of many marches, many spells of sentry duty. Unlike Straw he could estimate a risk. In this kind of country, with no alarms and no immediate danger at hand, he did not think the Emperor's patrols would be at full alert. They would not see an eye peering from thick cover in the middle of a featureless hillside. Carefully he edged to his feet, held on to the base of a branch, carefully let it sink a few inches to give him a spyhole.

There they were indeed, not twenty feet away, edging along the narrow awkward path, too busy avoiding thorns to look around them. Shef caught a low grumble of conversation, an angry bark of command from the man in the lead. The grumbling did not stop. Low-grade troops, Shef thought. Local levies like his own county fyrds. Reluctant to take trouble, thoughts simply on getting home. Easy to avoid, as long as one did not actually fall over them in the dark. It was the silent men who did not move who were the danger.

Back to the path, another half-mile on, then into the scrub and once more the steady crawling round some obstacle or sentry-post. Another hundred yards on a goat-path, and crawl again. On and on. Shef lost sense of direction, ceased fatalistically to glance at the sky and reckon the time. The gasping of Richier diminished as he too seemed to settle to their uneven rhythm of movement. And then suddenly, they were at a halt, all seven of them in a clump, looking from the shadows across a patch of bare ground at glimmering fires. Behind them the great jagged mass of the peak, the Castle of the Graduale, Puigpunyent itself.

Straw pointed very gently at the fires. “Them,” he breathed. “Last men. Last ring. Los alemanos.”

Germans they were. Shef could see the iron glinting as they moved on their beats, shields and mail, helmets and gauntlets. In any case he would have recognized the bearing of the Lanzenbrüder, whom he had seen swarming to the assault in the battle of the Braethraborg years before. Then they had been on his side. Now… There was no chance of creeping past them. They had cut down the scrub to make a bare belt, woven the debris into a rough thorn fence. The sentries were not fifty yards apart, and they moved continually. They were watching, too, not like the discontented levies further out.

Suddenly, from the bulk of Puigpunyent, there came a great crash and a thunder of rock. Shef started, noticed the sentries looking too, then turning back to their duties. A cloud of dust rose barely visible against the black and Shef could hear faint shouting. The Emperor's gangs were working on through the night, in shifts, tearing down the whole mountainside with pick and lever and crane, to rip out the heart of the heretics' faith. To find the Emperor his relic.

Shef looked again at the sky, the position of the moon, still some way off full. It was midnight now. But it would take time, he knew, time to rig the kites and winch them out. Maybe they would have to wait for a wind, even up there on the mountain. Straw was pulling at him again, anxious and wanting an instant answer. He was only a boy. In war, everything took longer than you wanted, except when the other side did it. Shef looked round, motioned them all to the ground. If there was nothing else to do, rest. If his plan succeeded, he would know soon enough.

Stretched out underneath the bushes, Shef put his head down on his forearms, felt the weariness come over him. There was no risk where they were, and the boys would stay awake. He let his eyelids close, fell slowly into the pit of sleep.

“He's not just loose now, he's out,” said the voice, the familiar voice, his father's voice. “Out in the open.”

Even in his dream Shef felt a surge of resentment, disbelief. “You're not there,” he told himself, himself talking to himself. “Svandis explained all that. You're just a part of my mind, the same way all the gods are part of people's minds.”

“All right, all right,” the voice went on with weary tolerance. “Believe what you like. Believe what your girlfriend likes. But believe this. He's out. I have no hold over him. Things could go any way now. Ragnarök—that's what Othin wants, what Loki wants. What they think they want.”

“You don't want it?”

“I don't want what would come after it. Church all-powerful, Way all-powerful, whichever. There's a better way—back to where we were before, before Sheaf became Shield. Maybe with something added, something new.”

“What's that?”

“You're going to see. You're going to show them. The priests have it inside their holy circle, but they see it only as a warning, not a blessing. Can be either.”

Shef had lost the thread, could not follow the hints. “What are you talking about?”

“What Loki lost to. What you are bringing back for him. His namesake, his near namesake. Logi.”

“Fire,” Shef translated automatically.

“Fire it is. Wake and see what you are bringing to the world.”

Shef's head snapped upright, his eyes instantly wide open. He realized that he had already been half-woken by a rising babble of voices, from the ring of sentries in front of him. But all over the guarded plain were coming shouts and calls, the blast of a trumpet as some panicker decided to alert his men to what they had seen already. Fire drifting down out of the sky. After a few seconds Shef's eye and mind adjusted to what he was seeing. Immediately before him, a white flare drifting down, as brilliant as a sun, throwing flickering shadows over the thorn below. Above it, a green one. Not far away, Shef could see a third and a fourth beginning to drift down, thought for a second he could even see the tiny glow of the slow-match. But any such light was killed instantly by the lurid colors spreading across the sky. Violet, yellow, red. More and more flares seemed to spring into life every moment, though Shef knew that could not be so. It was just that each one took moments for the mind to recognize it. By the time it had been taken in, there were others in being to focus on. All three kites must be aloft and working. The boy-flyers were doing their duty better than he could have believed.

To the troops on the ground, local levies, bishops' men, half-heretics and Lanzenbrüder alike, every man deeply superstitious and steeped from birth in a culture of demons and miracles, dragons and portents, the flares in the sky were even harder to take in. Men do not see what they see. They see the nearest fit between what they see and what they expect. All across the plain beneath the rock of Puigpunyent, cries rose up as men tried to fit a meaning to something that defied all experience.

“A comet! The tailed star! God's judgment on those who overthrew the long-haired kings,” wailed a chaplain, starting an instant panic.

“Dragons in the sky,” shouted a Lanzenritter from the Drachenberg country, where belief in dragons was ingrained. “Shoot for its soft spot! Shoot before the damned things get on the ground!” A rain of arrows poured into the air from those who heard him, relieved at hearing an order of any kind. The arrows landed among the horses of a cavalry unit corralled two hundred yards off, starting a stampede.

“It is Judgment Day and the dead rising to meet their God in the sky,” lamented a bishop with much on his conscience which he had hoped to do timely penance for. His cry would have carried little conviction, since the lights were falling rather than rising, if falling more slowly than could possibly be natural. But as he called out some sharp-sighted man caught the vague shape of one of the gliding kites banking above the light it had just released, and shrieked hysterically, “Wings! I can see their wings! They are the angels of the Lord come to scourge sinners!”

Within moments a roar spread across the plain, of ten thousand men shouting their explanations. The cowboys of the Camargue, lightest of cavalry, reacted first, were in their saddles in moments and heading purposefully for safety. Panicked sentries abandoned their positions in the brush and began to draw together, hoping for comfort in numbers. As they saw the infection spreading, the disciplined Germans of the Lanzenorden, scattered here and there to officer and stiffen the more doubtful Frankish troops, began to seize the runners, knock men down with their lance-butts, try to drive them back to their posts.

Spying from the cover of the thorns, Shef watched intently for an opportunity. One thing he had forgotten. While the men down there, the inner ring of the Emperor's guard, had certainly been distracted—they were clumped together now, abandoning their set watch-pattern, pointing into the sky—the flares themselves were making the whole landscape almost as bright as day. If he tried to move forward now, across the bare strip that the guards had made, they would certainly see him. If not as he moved forward, then in the seconds it would take to force a way through the barricade of cut-down trees. He needed cover to reach that point. Then the time to cut a way through, and to crawl a hundred yards through the masking scrub on the other side. Then they would be on the edge of one of the deep ravines that led up to the rock and the castle itself, the ravine that Richier said they must follow. In the deep dark of that they might be safe. But how to reach it?

There was something else in the sky now, not the steady light of the flares with their mixed colors. A flickering light, a red light. A red that was growing, beginning to put out the competing white and yellow and green. Not flares but fire. Shef realized that the flares had burnt all the way to the ground, landed in the dense, thick, tinder-dry scrub through which he had crawled. Set it instantly aflame. The shouts coming from all around now had an added edge of fear. All those who lived in this land knew the dangers of fire during the grande chaleur, the great heat of the southern summer. Their own villages lived protected by fire-breaks, carefully cleared and renewed every spring. Now they were out in the open, fire spreading all around them. To the noise of shouting was added the drumming of hooves, the patter of running feet.

From the goat-path in the scrub, fifty yards from where Shef and the others lay, a dozen men burst out, running determinedly towards the bare rock of the castle, where nothing could burn. As they reached the ring, now a clump, of sentries, Shef saw spear-points flash, heard an angry shout. The head of the German sentries barring their way. Shouts in reply, arms waving, pointing behind them at the flames. More men running from different directions. Shef rose to a crouch beneath the bushes.

“Come on.”

They gaped at him.

“Come on. Look like horse-boys who've got lost. Run as if you're frightened.”

He writhed once more through the bushes, burst through a final tangle, and ran out on to the cleared space, looking round and shouting out in a gabble of Arabic mixed with Norse. The rest followed him, hesitant from the long hours of hiding. Shef seized Straw, lifted him in the air and shook him as if hysterical with fear, turned and ran the wrong way, not towards the gap where the other refugees clustered but round the side of the hill. German eyes saw him, saw only another damned local out of control.

Rounding a turn, Shef halted, pushed aside the youth who had cannoned into his back, stared at the tangle of thorn trees with which the Germans had made their abatis. A weak place, there. He stepped forward, drawing the short single-edged sword slung from the back of his belt. For a few seconds he cut and tugged, then plunged forward, disregarding the scratches that came through wool and hemp. The others followed him, Straw and his mates disappearing at once into the bushes on the other side, Richier gasping again and holding his side. Shef seized him, bent him by force to the ground, thrust him bodily in under the branches. Followed him, this time using all his hoarded strength in one last burst of lizard-like motion. Through to the ravine and the dark rocks below.

As the noise behind died and Shef saw at last the black unguarded cleft that led to the very base of the rock of Puigpunyent, something again made him look up.

There, in the sky, for the first time, he saw a kite wheeling above him and above the flares it had sown. It was silhouetted by flame. Flame running along the cloth of the square kite shape, along the vanes of the controls. In the middle, like a fat-bodied spider in its web, what must be the shape of the flyer, Tolman or Helmi or Ubba. His own match must have caught the cloth. Or perhaps a flare had not fallen properly from its release. But now the kite was swooping down, first in a crazy spiral, then as its lift surfaces burned away, seeming to fold its wings like a gannet and plunge towards the rocks, a meteor trailing flame.

Shef closed his eye, turned away. Thrust Richier to the fore.

“Someone died for your relic,” he hissed. “Now take us to it! Or I will cut your throat in sacrifice to my boy's ghost.”

The perfectus began to run clumsily across the dark rock to the entrance only he could find.