King and Emperor

Chapter Twenty-three

Shef looked down from the high seaward wall into the blue water below. The wreck of the Greek galley was there, he could see its outline maybe ten, maybe twenty feet below the surface, and no further out from the outer face of the jetty. He was sure that he himself could swim down, see what the fire and explosion had left, maybe attach ropes and drag what metal there was left into daylight. The floating fort was still there, still occasionally hurled a vindictive stone at any sign of movement, but he did not think they would hit a single man at that range.

No time, though. Not for mere curiosity. In any case he did not think that the wreckage would tell him very much more than he had worked out already. Most of the enemy storming party had got away in their boats before he could organize effective pursuit, but some had failed to find a place and remained in his hands: local levies for the most part, quite willing to talk out of fear or anger at being abandoned. They had confirmed much of what he had heard himself. Yes, the galley had had a fire amidships, a kind of brazier, fueled, one man had said very positively, by a kind of long match of burning flax. He himself had heard the bellows and others had seen it. So they had to burn, or maybe heat something before they could project it. Whatever it was, it was in the gleaming dome-shape which had exploded, and from its color that was almost certainly copper. Why copper, not iron or lead?

That was one clue. Another was the whistling noise. Shef had heard it himself, and so had many others. One of the Jewish levies closest to the Greek ship had also heard a voice counting, or so he had told Solomon. Counting in Greek numbers, for all the world, Shef reflected, like Cwicca's catapulteers in the old days counting the turns on a torsion catapult, counting carefully for fear of an overwind and a backlash. And finally there was the evidence from Brand's men. Two of his survivors had said with absolute certainty that at the very last moment they had seen a man point something at them, like a hose. The fire had come from that, come in a steady stream before the stone struck and everything blew up.

Brazier, match, bellows, dome, hose, whistle, and someone counting something. Shef felt sure that this would yet fall into place. Even the injured could tell him something. Or tell Hund something. Perhaps a dozen of the German Lanzenbrüder had survived the crossbows, Brand's axes and the final flame turned on them by their own allies, though most of them were horribly wounded. The flame had reached into the ranks of Brand's men as well, if only for an instant. Five of them had felt a lash of it, were lying now in the makeshift hospital with terrible burns. Hund could maybe tell him something about what had caused the burns.

If he was prepared to talk to him at all. Since the start of Shef's dealings with Svandis, the little man had been quiet and sullen. When Shef had gone to visit the burned men, and had seen the one who had been blinded, flame across both eyes, he had tapped the hilt of his dagger and looked at Hund with a question. It was normal enough for the Vikings to kill their hopelessly wounded, and both Brand and Shef had done it before. But Hund had flown at him like a terrier, hurled him bodily out of the ward. A while later Thorvin had emerged and said apologetically, in the words of one of the sacred songs of the Way.

“He told me to remember life is sacred. As it is said:

“Better blind than burnt,” Shef had replied. “But blind and burnt?” But it was no good arguing with the little leech. He might have something to tell another day. More than would be gained from the surviving monk-bastards, as Brand called them. None had surrendered willingly, all been taken burnt, crippled, or unconscious. They refused to say anything at all for any fear or inducement. Brand would cut their throats as soon as the priests of the Way ceased to protect them.

With a last reluctant stare at the wreckage lying deep in the water—was that a gleam of copper he could see deep down?—Shef turned away. The mystery would wait. So would Hund. So would Svandis, who had said nothing to him since her bitter words on the quayside, was now sitting with one of the desperately hurt Greek sailors who had survived both fire and water. There were more urgent things to do. The enemy had tried a probing raid at the south gate already this morning, as if to show they were not dismayed. Time to anticipate them for a change.

On the deck of the Fafnisbane they were already making ready to stream a kite in the strong morning breeze. Tolman was already being fitted into his harness. Shef patted him encouragingly on the head which was all that could be seen sticking out of the sling—why did he seem to shrink away? Still sore from his fall, probably. Then he looked again at the rig. The top surface was seven feet wide and four feet long, each side four feet long again and three feet deep. Now, how much cloth was that? Think of it as so many squares a foot each way. Turning to the sand tray which two men now carried round behind him ready for instant use, Shef began to move the counters and write the signs, muttering to himself. All round, eighty square feet of cloth. And Tolman, he knew, weighed sixty-eight pounds. He himself weighed one hundred and eighty-five. If, then, you needed a foot of surface to lift a pound of weight…

“The wind makes a difference,” Hagbarth cut in on his mutterings. “The stronger the wind, the better the lift.”

“We can figure that in too,” Shef replied. “See what have we now…”

“Fresh breeze, enough to drive us at four knots under full sail.”

“Call that four then. And how many knots would we be going when you had to reduce sail?”

“Maybe ten.”

“Well that's ten. So if we multiply eighty by four we have a lift of… three hundred and twenty, but if we had a ten-knot breeze we would have a lift of… eight hundred.”

“Enough to lift a walrus,” countered Hagbarth skeptically. “Which it wouldn't.”

“All right, we're allowing too much for the wind, but if you call a four-knot breeze one, and a ten-knot breeze two, or even one-and-a-half…”

Shef spoke eagerly, fascinated by the new experience of exact calculation. Ever since Solomon had shown him the basis of algorism, the methods of al-Khwarizmi, he had been seeking problems to turn it on. The answers might be wrong. To begin with. But he was sure this was the tool he had been searching for half his life.

A voice broke in, disapproving. Cwicca's. “He's up now. If you'd like to watch, that is. He is risking his neck.” Cwicca growing sarcastic and Hund aggressive, Shef noted with a part of his attention. Time to think of that another day.

Tolman was high in the sky, not flying free but streaming on the end of his line, already two hundred, three hundred feet up, blown out across the harbor, higher than the topmost turret of the walled city. Like a watchtower in the sky. From the besiegers on the hillside someone shot an arrow, which looped hopelessly short. Shef licked his lips as he stared up at him. Now he had the basis of calculation, he was determined to make a kite with enough surface to lift him too. If it were a one-to-one relationship, he would need a kite maybe twelve foot by six by four. But how much did the kite itself weigh? There was an answer to everything.

Cwicca turned back from his place by the ropes. “He's pulled three times. He's seen something. And he's pointing north.”

North. And the probing attack from the south. “Winch him in,” Shef ordered. He had no doubt that this was the Emperor's famous machine approaching. The “War-Wolf.”

The road which snaked along the coast towards the north wall of Septimania made its final turn some two hundred double paces short of the massive wooden gate, normally open for the passage of trade, now closed and barred, the towers either side of it bristling with breast-bows and crossbows, traction catapults and torsion dart-throwers. None of that could save the defenders once their gate was battered down. And reinforced oak though it was, criss-crossed with iron, one blow from “War-Wolf” would destroy it. This Erkenbert knew.

But the blow had to be in the right place. “War-Wolf” lobbed its missiles, like all traction weapons. A shot which fell five paces short was of no value, just another obstacle to the final attack. One five paces over was as useless. The boulder had to come whirling from the sky and crash exactly into the center of the gate, ideally just a fraction short of central, so that it would burst oak and iron backwards. It had always done its work in the past, sometimes after repeated trials. Erkenbert was well aware that the little hornets'-nest strongholds of the Moslem bandit-lords, even the citadel of the heretics' Puigpunyent, had offered no serious resistance, had merely stood still for undisturbed target practice. One could not count on the apostate Englishman and his diabolic crew to be so passive. And so Erkenbert had given serious thought to the two great deficiencies of “War-Wolf.”

First, its appallingly slow reload time. The great counterweight-chamber, the size of a peasant's dwelling, was filled with stones. Its crash to earth was what provided the mighty power for the missile slung from the long arm. How was the weight to be lifted twenty feet into the air? Till now, Erkenbert had used the slow way, the safe way. Raise the counterweight chamber by pulling down the long arm. Bolt down the long arm. Send fifty laborers to mount ladders and fill the chamber while it hung above their heads. Once it was full, load the missile, pull the retainer-bolt. After it had shot, empty the chamber once more, raise it up against the lessened resistance, send the laborers back again to pour in their stones.

Too slow, Erkenbert knew. He had decided to solve the problem. Stout iron rings sunk into the rims of the counterweight-chamber. Ropes lashed firmly to them, leading over a new and massive wooden roller at the very top of the whole contrivance. Now the laborers could simply haul the weight up again, slowly and with horrible effort for those who had to dead-lift half a ton and more twenty feet in the air. But it saved all the emptying and filling.

The second problem was the old one, so vital for this machine, of estimating the range. But this was partly solved by the now invariant quality of the throwing weight. All that needed to be changed was the weight thrown. Erkenbert had selected a pile of boulders of graded weight. The idle peasants complained bitterly about dragging them along too, in carts pulled by mule and human power, but Erkenbert gave no heed to that. He was confident that once he had shot his sighting shot—and who knew, it might be dead on target too—one calculation and he could select a stone to finish the job. Two shots and the gate would be down. Three at the very worst. All that remained was to maneuver the great machine into position, ignoring the inevitable harassing shots from the enemies' lighter weapons.

At noon Erkenbert, having surveyed the ground, gave the order to advance. It was obeyed gingerly by the sweating exhausted men of his catapult-gang, with disciplined readiness by the Lanzenbrüder, as contemptuous as Erkenbert himself of the local noonday halts. With the Emperor himself at hand, there was no question of anyone disobeying.

Shef had had hours of warning from Tolman. Behind the barred gate, totally invisible to the besiegers, he had set up the answer of the Waymen to “War-Wolf”: a counterweight-machine based on what the Arab had told him and on what his own imagination and experience with traction weapons had suggested. Now, from the wall, he watched “War-Wolf” creeping round the corner of the road with interest and alarm. It had been transported in pieces, assembled just short of its place of operation. It crept forward on twelve massive cartwheels. As it reached the flat place Erkenbert had selected, it stopped. Men began to set blocks under its frame, lever the wheels off. Why were they doing that, and how would they move the blocks once they were in place?

“Ready to shoot!” called a voice from the walls. Cwicca, crouched behind the sights of his favorite dart-thrower. He had a hundred men, two hundred, in front of him, clear targets. Shef waved impatiently for silence. Watching was more important than killing a few laborers. So the enemy must think too. More men were coming forward, staggering under the weight of giant mantlets, heavy wooden screens that would keep out a crossbow-bolt, even blunt the force of a torsion dart. The screens hid what he needed to see. But he had seen something. Something ominous.

“Shoot when you're ready,” called Shef.

“Nothing to shoot at now,” complained an anonymous voice. They began nonetheless to shoot at the mantlets, trying to aim for junction points. Something might get through. Some poor fool might be unnerved.

“What did you see?” asked Thorvin, the most interested of the Way-priests in mechanical contrivances.

“Theirs has two bracing timbers running out from the sides. Ours doesn't.”

“What difference does that make?”

“We don't know. We've never shot ours.”

The two men looked anxiously now at their machine, set up twenty paces behind the gate. It was nothing but a massively scaled-up version of their familiar old pull-thrower, the weapon that had won the Threefold Battle, as men now called it, the battle on two fronts against Mercians and against Ivar, Svandis's father. It had not won a battle since. Would its giant descendant work as simply as its ancestor?

“Start loading,” said Shef. He too had seen the problem that Erkenbert had learnt from experience, could think with his more mechanical mind of two methods at least of solving it: had no time to make the necessary gears and ratchets, the great iron axle that would be needed for the better method. He too was thrown back on the simple way. Raise the bucket high and empty, then fill it while it was in the air. But his gang were not using stones. Each man had a stout sack full of sand, carefully and individually weighed. A hundred pounds a time. Thorvin counted the men off as they mounted the ladder, the burliest of Brand's Vikings, sweat pouring from them into their hemp shirts. Fifteen loads dumped in and the long arm bending visibly as it strained against its greased retainer bolt.

“Load the sling,” Shef ordered. Another hard job. The sling itself lay along the ground like a gigantic empty scrotum. The boulder that went into it, Shef knew, weighed almost exactly a hundred and fifty pounds. A gang had dug it from the seashore, weighed it against sandbags over a steelyard, been told immediately to start chipping it round—and weigh the chips! Then they had been sent back to raise three more, carve them to a weight as near identical as care could make them. But now the first load had to be lifted into place. No great weight, for strong men, but round boulders are hard to lift from the ground. For a moment there was straining and cat-calls from the watchers, then as the two lifters turned angrily on their messmates, Brand and Styrr walked forward. They dug their fingers into the sand below the boulder, embraced it like two wrestlers, heaved it up and along into its double bullhide bag.

Now, when the weight dropped, the arm would rise. When the arm rose, the sling would whirl. When the sling whirled—the rock would come off and crash down on its own launcher and crew, unless the hook, the hook that was the free counterpart of the fixed ring on the sling's rope, unless that hook lifted off at precisely the right point. Shef stepped forward to check the angle of the nail it rested on. It was right.

As he stepped back, drawing a deep breath and looking at his old comrade Osmod, who had demanded the honor of first launch, he heard a great “Oh!” rise from the men on the walls, a gasp or groan of surprise that cut through the snapping of crossbows and twanging of ropes. Shef looked up, saw the moon coming down on him. Just as he had a decade before at the siege of York, he cringed, head sinking into shoulders like a turtle. Gigantic, weightless, the boulder sailed silently down from a point that seemed higher than ever Tolman had flown. Erkenbert and the Empire had shot first.

The boulder was almost a perfect hit first time. It cleared the top of the city gate by no more than six feet, shot past faster than eye could follow, crashed into the dry sandy ground almost equidistant between the foot of the gate and the place where Shef stood by the side of his own trebuchet. The earth shook beneath his feet, sand rose in a cloud. As it settled, in an awestruck silence, men stared at the rock that had appeared there, looking as if it had lain there since the dawn of time.

“It's bigger than ours,” came a gloomy voice. Some friendly memory helped Shef to recognize it.

“Anything's bigger than yours, Odda,” he replied. “What are you waiting for, Osmod? Pull the bolt.”

As he saw Osmod turn, with a certain fear, to the bolt, Shef himself turned his back, ran up the stone steps to the parapet of the left-hand tower. Behind him he heard a squeak of protesting metal being drawn. Then a long scraping noise which ended in a great crash. He looked round just in time to see the sling release and the boulder that two mighty men had strained to lift fly into the sky like a pebble.

As it soared out on its long arc Shef followed it, ignoring the groans of protesting timber, the shouts and yells from the crew. The top of its arc, there, must be the midway point. He was sure it was on line for “War-Wolf.” But the range?

Shef let the breath escape in a long sigh. He knew already it was going to be over, even well over. His shot had been far worse than the enemy's. The thump and cloud of dust had come down well over. How well over? He put down the far-seer with its cloudy lenses, strained his one eye to get a sure view. There were too many things in the way. At a guess he would say forty yards over. Consider. How many men, stretched head to foot, between what he could see of “War-Wolf” and the already settling dust-cloud. Shef counted, nodding his head unconsciously to each imaginary six feet. Maybe not forty yards. More like thirty-five. Under rather than over. Say thirty-four.

Now how far was it from “War-Wolf” to the gate? The guard captain Malachi was standing by him, saying nothing but looking anxious.

“Think carefully. You must have walked that road many times. How far is it from the gate to their machine? Think of it in double paces.”

A long pause. “I would say one hundred and forty.” And twenty, already paced out, from the center-line of his own machine to this side of the gate. A hundred and sixty, times five and a half feet, was the range he meant to shoot. That sum, plus thirty-four, times three, was what he had shot. He had to reduce the fifteen-hundred-pound throw weight in proportion to the reduced distance to get a hit with a boulder of the same weight. Two days ago he would have thrown his hands up, declared the sum impossible. Now…

Shef sprinted down the steps again to where his sand table waited. Osmod met him with a face of woe. “The machine. It's falling apart. The weight's too big for it. Needs side-braces, like what they've got…”

Shef pushed him aside. “Wedge everything back as best you can, use nails if you have to. It has to hold together for one more shot. Tell the men to unload, winch up, put in ten hundred pounds. Then wait.”

He bent to his table, lines already drawn for the first of his sums. One hundred and sixty, times five, add on eighty—that was easy. Write “880” in the sand. Thirty-four, times three, add it on, write “982” in the sand.

Now, divide fifteen into 982 to find out how much distance to each hundred-pound bag. And then, divide that figure into the 880. Shef struggled on, absorbed. His own men watched him curiously. Solomon and Malachi exchanged glances. Either of them, they suspected, could have carried out the operation faster, as could any trader in the market. But then a market-trader would not have known what it was that the king of the barbarians was trying to do. He might be near-illiterate. But he had made the machine. The flares, the kites, the crossbows. Best to trust to what the Arabs would call his iqbal. The odor of success.

Shef straightened. He could not do quantities less than one, had had to double his numbers both sides to get a fair approximation, but he knew the answer.

“Ten hundred-pound bags in? Right, add three more. Open a fourth. Take half out. Exactly half.”

Shef bent over the open bag. There should be fifty pounds in it. According to his figures he should now take out seven more. What difference could that possibly make to a boulder of the size they were throwing? Grimly he scrabbled out what seemed to him to be seven pounds of dirt, the same weight as two days' rations. He twisted the bag closed, stepped up the ladder, hurled it in on top of the pile.

“Ready to throw again? Have you checked the line?”

A shout from the parapet, where Thorvin had gone to watch. “ ‘War-Wolf’ is ready! I can see the long arm raised!”

Shef looked at Osmod. There was no crash of metal here, no trumpets blaring and war-cries rising, but this was where the battle would be decided. All “War-Wolf” had to do was drop its range six feet. Unless they smashed it with this shot, the next act they would take would be to run for the harbor. To face the floating fort, the noon-day calm, and the Greek fire. In an hour they would all be burnt corpses floating in the sea.

Osmod shrugged like a farm-hand asked about the haymaking. “I checked her for line again. I can't say nothing about what happened to the timbers. You heard them start to come apart.”

Shef took a deep breath, looked at the counterweight, the frame, the sling with its carefully-chipped boulder. It felt wrong. The figures said it was right.

“Stand by to shoot. Get back, everybody. All right, Osmod. Shoot!”

As he pulled back the bolt Shef was already in mid-leap for the steps and the parapet. Behind him he heard the scrape, the crash, and this time a chorus of yells of alarm as the hastily-wedged timber frame slowly, inexorably, sprang apart. The boulder was still in the air, still rising, as he reached his vantage-point. As he focused on his target he saw it, too, suddenly move. The great wooden counterweight-chamber dropped instantaneously behind the mantlets, he saw the long arm rise, the inconceivably powerful lash of the sling, like a giant's arm coming round. And then there were two boulders in the sky. One falling, one rising. For an instant he thought they would strike each other. Then all he could see out on the plain was dust. And out of the dust, the enemy's missile still climbing.

Erkenbert's weak eyes had not let him see the flight of his first missile. He had a Lanzenbrüder standing beside him to act as his observer, but the man had said only, “Very close, just over the top, drop it just a cat's hair, herra, and we are through!” Encouraging, but hard to count a cat's hair.

Erkenbert did his best. One thing he knew was that his throw-weight would not change, not now that he had the system in place for hauling the counterweight up again by main force. As the men struggled with it, heaving at unyielding ropes, he reflected on his problem. It was three hundred yards from machine to gate, more or less. He needed to shoot just a trifle less. So use the next boulder up in his graduated pile. But would that then fall short? What was the difference? If a stone of some two hundred pounds were to be thrown three hundred yards by the weight he had, whatever that weight was, how heavy a stone would be needed to travel just two hundred and ninety-five? Erkenbert knew how to find the answer. He needed to multiply three hundred by two hundred, and divide the answer by two hundred and ninety-five.

But to Erkenbert, product of the great and famous school of Latin learning at York, the school that in its time had produced such men as Alcuin the deacon, the minister of Charlemagne, preserver of manuscripts, poet, editor and commentator on the Bible, the problem did not present itself like that. To him, three hundred was CCC, two hundred CC. III times II was VI, C by C—but there common sense would have to step in, not calculation, and give an answer as XM. Erkenbert had plenty of common sense, he could soon, if not immediately, deduce that CCC multiplied by CC must be VIXM. But VIXM—six-ten-thousand—was more like a word or a phrase than a number. What VIXM divided by CCXCV might be—that, hardly the wisest man could tell, and even he not on a battlefield.

Erkenbert considered, ordered forward the next size of boulder up from the one he had just hurled. According to the number painted on its side, it should be perhaps five, perhaps ten pounds heavier than the last one—more or less, like the three hundred yards Erkenbert had estimated for the range. Arithmeticus though he was, absolute precision in numbers was no part of his world-view, except perhaps for calculating rents, the symbolism of Bible numbers, and the date of Easter. And “War-Wolf” had never before faced a reply. The stone that had crashed into the ground forty yards away had angered Erkenbert with its proof of hostile and inventive minds resisting him, and his Emperor, and their Savior's will. Its wild miss had cheered him as well: what better could one expect from illiterates imitating their betters, without so much as a copy of Vegetius to instruct them? Nor would they have had the ingenuity to match his roller and his ropes. Why were the laborers taking so long to haul the weight back into place? He waved forward the Lanzenbrüder to flog the idle levies on.

One of the men heaving at a rope, his feet slipping in the soft dust, dared to snarl a comment in the ear of the man next to him.

“I'm a sailor, I am. We shift our lateeno-yards over the mast all the time, just like this. But what we use is pulleys. Ain't this lot ever heard of pulleys?”

A slash of leather opened a weal across his back and shut his mouth at the same time. As the retainer-bolt finally slid home and the gasping men let go of their ropes, he looped his line unnoticed round the side frame, twisted it into a half-hitch, walked away. What it would do he did not know. He did not know what they were supposed to be doing, drafted here on the orders of his bishop and taken from his boat just as there was a chance of a successful voyage. But if there was anything he could do to obstruct, he would.

Erkenbert viewed the cocked and prepared machine with a grim pleasure, looked round at his Emperor watching from the hillside, within cover or out of range of the weapons still shooting from the wall. Behind him the two thousand stormers ready to pour through the gate, headed by Tasso the Bavarian and the Emperor's own elite guard.

He turned back. Saw with sudden incredulity the boulder already rising from behind the enemy's gate. In an immediate reflex of rage shrieked the order: “Shoot!” Saw his own missile drag along the ground in its sling, whirl round, climb into the sky almost into the very path of the other.

And then the great crash, the rending of timbers and ropes and iron all together.

Shef's exactly calculated rock came down precisely as intended, the various errors of calculation balancing out, as so often happens when each part is done as nearly as humanly possible. Range a little over-estimated, air-resistance never considered at all, the creep of strained timbers incalculable: but the answer correct. In one moment “War-Wolf” sprang apart, struck just at the pivot point and square on, shattering arm and side-frame and rending out the side of the counterweight. The great machine lay in fragments, timbers slowly, creakily falling to the earth, like a stricken hero's limbs sinking in death. Gently, through the dust, earth began to patter out of the counterweight-chamber, falling on to the boulder that had shattered it as if to hide it from view, pretend that nothing had happened. Numbly, Erkenbert stalked forward to inspect the damage. Then caught himself, looked out across the plain to see where his shot had landed. Called on his eyes to report for him.

“Just short,” reported Godschalk the Brüder with stolid unconcern. “Up just half a cat's hair and you've got it.”

From the wall, Shef looked at the boulder lying now four feet short of the gate, looked across at the cloud of dust which marked where his shot had gone home, with surely an instant ago a glimpse of broken pieces whirling end over end out of it, and reflected on the value of calculation. A deep sense of satisfaction rose within him. He had the answer. Not just to this problem alone, but to many problems.

Not, perhaps, to his most pressing one. As the cries of glee and triumph began at last to die down, he turned into the exultant face of Brand, almost a foot above his own.

“We beat off the fire, we beat off the stones,” shouted Brand.

“We have to do more than beat them off,” replied Shef.

Brand sobered. “Right. We have to sicken them of it, I always said so. Now how are we going to do that?”

Shef hesitated. He had a feeling as of one who reaches out for a familiar tool, the hilt of a sword that has hung at his belt for ten years, and finds nothing there. He reached inside himself for a source of inspiration. Advice. The voice of his father-god.

Nothing there. He had the knowledge of al-Khwarizmi now. The wisdom of Rig had gone.