King and Emperor

Chapter Twenty-seven

From Hlithskjalf, the vantage-point of the gods, the Aesir deities looked down on earth. Far below they could see points of flame like spear-points on fire, could see the wolves and ravens gathering. Heimdall, who can hear the grass growing and the thoughts inside a man's head, or a god's, cocked his head and lifted an eyebrow towards his brother Rig. The thought inside the head of Othin was: “This is getting out of hand.” But All-Father would not speak his thought, and Heimdall kept silence.

“I wish I knew who broke his bonds,” said Othin finally.

Not even Heimdall knew that Rig had done so, for Rig could keep even his thoughts secret when he chose.

“All things weaken in time,” observed Rig.

It was not a tactful thought to express to one who admitted no limits to his power—though in truth those limits were clear enough. Rig tried the other half of the observation. “But seeds can grow in time as well.”

“What are you talking about?” snarled Othin. “Loki is loose, Heimdall is ready to blow his horn, the Last Battle of gods and men may begin at any moment, with weapons of fire and creatures in the air, and now our own followers are turning to Loki. Your follower is.”

“He has not changed his pendant yet,” said Rig. “I ask you, All-Father. Think back a few lifetimes. What were we then? Weak. The creatures of a few wood-runners and sea-thieves. Dwindling to being mere kobbolds or nixe. Now, we have grown strong. Not from the sacrifices at Uppsala, that terrified thousands for the belief of a score. From belief and devotion.”

“How is that helped by Loki loose? And men prepared to worship him?”

“Loki was not always bad.”

Othin turned on Rig a terrible eye. “He killed my son. He took the light out of the world and left it pale.”

Rig was not afraid, but the eye of Othin is hard to face. He turned his own eyes down, but spoke on. “He was a comrade once. If that had been recognized, he would not have felt the jealousy, the envy that made him use the mistletoe and betray Hod.”

“He said many ill things to us in our own hall,” said Heimdall. “Me he called ‘mudback,’ said I was the slave of the gods, never allowed to sleep.”

“You never do sleep,” replied Rig.

“This has to do with your own son,” said Othin. “Your own son and follower, whom you have made me spare once, twice. He is the one who has loosed Loki, is calling him back to the world. Though he does not seem to want what Loki wants. Say now, though, why I should spare him the third time.” He raised his spear Gungnir, pointed it down to the far blue Inner Sea.

“I do not ask for him to be spared,” said Rig.

All the gods, the dozen assembled, looked at their brother doubtfully.

“Take him if you wish. He will be an uneasy recruit for your Einheriar, Othin. Before Heithrun's mead-vat has been emptied ten times the heroes will be smithying new weapons to fight each other from a distance, and the weakest will be the strongest. But take him if you will. I say only this: wait and see. It may be that if he has his way, gods that are strong will grow weak, gods that once were weak—as we were, a few lifetimes ago, as I was, almost forgotten—they may grow strong.”

It was true, Heimdall reflected, that barely a lifetime ago, less than a lifetime ago as men count, Rig had been a mere shadow on the fringe of the gods' feasting, not important enough to be taunted by Loki or consulted by Othin. Now many wore his pendant, and his brothers made way for him. And how had that come about?

“Who do you think will grow weak?” asked Heimdall in the end.

“Those gods who cannot share power, or win the hearts of men without compulsion.”

“Do you mean me?” asked Othin threateningly.

“No, father. Say what Loki will about you, he cannot say some things with any truth. No-one has ever called you a jealous god.”

The Aesir reflected on the meaning of their brother's words. Some looked again at the scene below, at the broad Middle-earth on which their worshipers were a mere scattered fringe. Their faces set immobile like the faces of horse-copers who have seen an unnoticed bargain.

“But your son will not bring my son back.”

“The prophecy is that after Ragnarök, those who are spared will see a new age and the rebirth of Balder in a fairer world. But you will not be spared, father. Fenris-Wolf waits for you, as Surt for Frey. But if there is no Ragnarök, if there is no Ragnarök, can we say that Balder cannot just the same be reborn? Once even Loki is prepared to weep for him? If you wish to see your son again outside the halls of Hel, then you must take another turning.”

This time it was the face of Othin that changed to that of a man who sees advantage far off.

“How did you get away?” asked Svandis. Facing her sat the woman she had met and wept with in the fountain-court of the Caliph, Alfled the fair, once her enemy, now her colleague.

Alfled shrugged disdainfully, swept the hair back from a face that was reddened with sun. “The little black bastard told the bastard with the wide shoulders to turn us into nuns. Berthe—the Frankish girl you met, you remember—she was happy with the idea, she has never had much use for men. But Ouled has no mind to be a Christian, and I, I have no mind to be a nun. I saw little enough of men, or of any man, while I was in the harem of the Caliph. I have time to make up!”

“So, how?”

“Oh, men are easy to handle, you know. In the convoy that was taking us to some Allah-forsaken spot, I talked to one of the guards. Told him how unfair it was to be locked up half your life and then taken away to be locked up again. Looked at him till he looked at me, and then looked a second more before I dropped my eyes. Made him think I admired him. They are so vain, so weak.

“When he came to me in the night I let him loose the door-chain and sweep me into the bushes. He did not see Ouled behind him with the hairpin.” She laughed suddenly. “He was a brisk lover, I will say that for him. It may be that he died happy. Then Ouled and I made our way from one village to another, exchanging this and that for what we needed. You told me you had done it too.”

Svandis nodded. “And now, what do you want?”

“They say the king here is an Englishman, and a freer of slaves. Even the men here say they are freed slaves, those that speak English. Surely he will free me too, give me passage home.”

“Your kin will not be pleased to see you,” observed Svandis. “A dishonored woman. You have no husband, but you have not the right to wear your hair loose like a virgin.”

“I am a widow,” said Alfled firmly. “Widows have the right to remarry. And no husband can blame them if they know more about some things than a virgin. Ouled and I know a lot more than any virgin, or any wife in Christendom. I think I can find myself a man, here or in London or in Winchester. As for Ouled, she wants only passage to Cordova, for she thinks the same of herself as I do.”

“What do you think of the men here?” asked Svandis.

“Not much. The ones who speak English are the sons of slaves. When I was captured by the raiders no thane would speak to such without a whip in his hand. I cannot understand why they should have been freed. There is not one who looks like an atheling.”

“That one does,” said Svandis, pointing out of the window at Styrr walking by sucking an orange with his great horse-teeth.

“He looks like a warrior, at least. But those are the Norse-folk. Like you. Your people captured me, sold me down here. I could not live easily with one of you.”

“There are still plenty of thanes and thanes' sons in England,” said Svandis, “and I dare say you could capture one of them easily enough. You are your own dowry, and after a wedding-night with one of your experience, I expect you could ask whatever morning-gift you wished.”

Ouled the Circassian, sitting listening to a conversation in a language she could not follow, shifted and looked up at the unmistakable sound of two women beginning to scorn each other. In one of the private signs of the harem, she spread her fingers, looked at the nails. Don't fight, it said. Sheathe your claws. Alfled choked down a scornful answer, tried to look amused.

“I think you could do the One King a service,” said Svandis. “The One King, who has said he will make me his queen.”

Men say all sorts of things to get what they want, reflected Alfled, but did not say the words, only lifting her eyebrows in polite enquiry.

“He needs information about the state of things in Cordova now the Caliph is dead. He may need an emissary, too, one who speaks better Arabic than we do. One thing you can be sure of, he is a generous payer, a true ring-giver to those who serve him. And you are right, he has a soft spot in his heart for those who have been slaves, like you.”

I will see if he has not a hard spot for me somewhere else, reflected Alfled grimly. Copper hair, blue eyes, complexion like a Moorish laborer's. In the harem you would have been called once, out of curiosity, and never again. “I am at your mercy,” she replied, eyes prudently downcast. “What is the king's particular interest?”

“At the moment,” Svandis replied, “he is interested in the making of holy books, and how they come to be.”

Whips, poetry, little boys, scented oils, now holy books, thought Alfled. God, or Allah, or Jesus, send me a man one day with simple interests.

In a room deep within the Prince's private palace, Shef confronted a quadruple row of benches. In front of each bench ran a long table, on each bench sat six scribes. Their quills were in hand, pots of ink stood by each one, each one had a fresh sheet of the strange Oriental paper in front of him. The scratching of pen-knives had died away, the two dozen faces looked expectantly at the barbarian king who had driven off the Emperor of the Nazarenes.

Solomon addressed the scribes. “The king here,” he said, “has discovered a document. It is one which casts great doubt on the faith of the Christians, would tell them—if they knew of it—that their Messiah is as we well know already, a false one, a foreshadower of one who is yet to come. He wishes to have many copies made, to spread the knowledge widely in the Christian world. So we have called you together. He will dictate a version of what he has read to me, I will translate it into the trade-talk of Spain, the Arabic that we all know, and you will write it down. Later we will make more copies, and more, both in this language and in the Roman tongue of the south. Maybe also in Latin. But this is the beginning of it.”

A hand raised, a skeptical voice spoke. “How long will this account be, Solomon?”

“The king says, it must cover no more than a single page.”

“How long was the first document?”

“As long as the Book of Judith.”

“It will take skill, then, to reduce it to one folium.”

“The king knows his mind,” said Solomon firmly.

Shef listened without understanding to the interchange in Hebrew, waited for the rustling and gentle mirth to die down. Solomon nodded, to show that the scribes were ready. Shef stepped forward, the heretics' book, in its Anglo-Norse translation, open in his hand—not for him to read, for his grip on the runes was still shaky, but as a prompt.

As he looked at the rows of faces, at the blank sheets in front of them, his mind seemed to dowse itself, like a fire which has had a wet blanket dropped over it. There was nothing there. A few moments before he had been ready to speak, to tell the story of the rescue and escape of Jesus from the Cross in words that any man or woman might understand. Now there was nothing there. Stray phrases wandered through his mind: “They call me Jesus… What you have been told is not true… Have you ever thought about death?” None of them seemed to lead anywhere. He realized his mouth was hanging open, in what must seem an idiot's gape, became aware of the slight sneers, the dawnings of contempt on the faces that looked up at him.

He cast his eye down. He was trying, he told himself, to instruct these men at their own speciality, which was books and the making of books. How would they fare if they came into his camp and told Cwicca how to wind a catapult? The thought of the furious bawdry with which a learned scribe would be received round the camp-fires amused him momentarily, seemed to break a hole in the barrier of silence. Remember, he told himself again. What you have to do is to take a story, the story that was written down, and make it into an appeal. You have to change it from an I-story into a you-story. Start with that. If you do not know where to start, start with the beginning.

He raised his head and his one eye again, stared at the room full of men, beginning to exchange glances and pass remarks at the immobility of the barbarian. As the glare passed over them, the glare of a man who had stood face to face with Ivar, Champion of the North, and killed Kjallak the Strong on the King's Stone of the Swedes, the scribes fell silent again. Shef began to speak in a tone of suppressed fury. As he spoke, phrase by phrase and sentence by sentence, Solomon's voice pattered out the quiet accompaniment, and the scratch of many quills on paper followed it.

“Followers of Christ,” Shef declaimed, “you have heard of the joys of Heaven and the fires of Hell. In hope of one and in fear of the other, you give your children to be baptized, you confess your sins, you pay the tithe. You wear the Cross. On Easter Sunday you crawl to the Cross on your knees, the priest holds it in front of your dying eyes.

“Why? Because it is the sign of life, of life after death. You hope to live in Paradise after you are dead because there was One who once came back and declared He had power over death and after death. On the Cross, and on the Resurrection, all your hope rests.

“What if there was no Resurrection? Where is your hope then, and what good are your tithes? What need have you then of a priest? Now who has told you the story of the Resurrection? Was it a priest? Would you buy a horse on the word of the man who took your money? If you never saw the horse? Listen to this story instead.

“There was a man called Jesus, and many years ago Pontius Pilate crucified him. But the hangmen bungled in haste, and he did not die. He did not die. Instead, his friends came and took away the body on a ladder, and brought it back to life. When he was strong again, he fled and made a new life, and in that new life he took back many of the things he had said. Heaven is in this world, he said, and men should make it for themselves. Women too.

“Do you live in Heaven? Or in Hell? Ask your priest, ask him how he knows what he knows. Ask him, where is the Cross? Where is the ladder? Look in his eyes when you ask him, and think of selling the horse. If you do not believe him, think what you can do.”

“It was an interesting account,” remarked Moishe the scribe to Solomon as they walked away together, for the moment on friendly terms again. “Inept, of course.”

Solomon raised an eyebrow, but did not challenge the view. “I had trouble,” he agreed, “in translating some of it. His words for ‘baptize’ and ‘Resurrection’ are very simple, and I had to do the best I could. In what lies its ineptitude?”

“Oh, seven rhetorical questions in a row, like a schoolboy who has not felt the rod. Constant repetition, horses and hangmen and ladders and tithes all mixed in with life and death and the mysteries of faith. No grandeur. No idea of style. I would blush to have it known that I had written such a thing. But to your One King I am just the part of a machine, a machine for making many copies.”

I will pass that on, reflected Solomon. The thought of a machine for making many copies. And what does not please Moishe may nevertheless affect people of whom the learned Moishe knows nothing. The unlearned, to begin with. There are many of them, and not all are stupid.

“Where are you from?” asked Shef.

“I was taken from Kent,” the woman replied. She was dressed still in what remained of an all-enveloping Arab bur qa, but she wore no veil, and the hood was thrown back to reveal fair hair and blue eyes. She spoke English—old-fashioned English, Shef realized with a slight shock, better English in a way than his own, used as he now was to studding his language with words and tricks of speech that he had picked up from the Wayman Norse. Twice already he had seen her frown as she struggled to follow him.

“Kent. That is within the realm of my co-king, Alfred.”

“The king in my time was Ethelred. Before him, Ethelbert. I think I had heard of Alfred as their younger brother. There have been many changes. Still, I would like to go back. If I could. If I could find my kin, and if they would have me back, a disgraced woman.”

The woman sank her eyes, feigned to dab at them with the corner of her sleeve. She is playing for sympathy, Shef realized. Trying to look attractive while she does it, too. A long time since a woman has bothered to do that for me. But in her position, what else can she do?

“There will be a place for you in Kent, if that is where you wish to go,” said Shef. “King Alfred is a generous lord, and one of your beauty will never lack suitors. I can see to it that you have wealth enough to please your kin. England is a rich land now, you know. Nor is it afflicted by pirates any more, so you will be safe.”

He reacts to weakness, Solomon reflected, watching them, by trying to take the weakness away, not by exploiting it, as the woman expects him to. It is a good quality in a king, but I wonder if the woman understands it.

Shef patted Alfled's hand. His voice turned business-like. “There is something, though, that you can do for us, I believe, for you are one who knew many or all the secrets of the Caliph's court. Tell me, what is your belief in Allah?”

“I have made the shahada. The profession of faith,” Alfled added. “It goes La illaha il Allah, Muhammad rasul Allah, which is to say, ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet.’ But what could I do? It was that or die, or be one of the lowest slaves in a laborers' brothel.”

“You do not believe it?”

She shrugged. “As much as I believe anything. I was brought up to believe in God. He never helped me against the pagans who caught me, though I prayed to Him many a time. The only difference between the Christians' God and the Arabs' Allah that I can see is that the Arabs believe in Mohammed and in their Koran.”

“Different books, different faiths. Tell me, are there any in Cordova who take an interest in how books are made?”

Here it comes, thought Alfled. Perhaps he will ask me to whip him with a quill, or drain him onto parchment. There must be something his woman will not do for him. There always is. “There are shops that sell books,” she replied, “where copies are made to the order of the buyers. The love-poetry of bin-Firnas, say. Or the Book of a Thousand Pleasures, it might be.”

“That is not the kind of book the king meant,” cut in Svandis, observing watchfully. “He means, where do holy books, books of faith come from. Where does the Koran come from. Or the Bible come from. Because someone, some person, must have made them at some time, holy though they are. Made them with fingers and pen and ink.” She tapped the quill-pendant that hung now over her breast.

“The Koran was dictated by God to Mohammed,” said Alfled. “Or so they say. But there are some… yes. The Mu'tazilites, as they are called. Ishaq the Keeper of the Scrolls was one such.”

“And what do they believe?” The king's one eye was trained on her with fierce interest.

“They believe… They believe that the Koran is not eternal, even if it is the word of Allah. They say that it is the word of Allah as heard by Mohammed, but that there may be other words. They say that it is not enough merely to collect hadith, that is to say tradition, but that one must also apply to it one's reason, which is the gift of Allah.”

Moishe would not like to hear that, Solomon thought again. He thinks it is the first duty of a scholar to preserve the Torah, and the last to collect commentary on it. To reason from it, not reason about it.

Shef was nodding slowly. “They do not want to destroy books. That is good. But they are ready to think about them. That is better. If I could see a Mu'tazilite Caliph in Cordova, and a Pope in Rome without an army, then, I think, Ragnarök would be averted, and Loki put at rest. But at the root of it all is to have books in many hands. I do not suppose all the booksellers in Cordova, nor all the scribes in Septimania, could make as many books as we need. What was it you said, Solomon, that we need a machine to make many copies, faster than a man can write? I know no way to hitch up a millwheel to a scribe's arm, alas, though it may do the work of a smith.”

“The Caliph often had more documents to sign than his arm could manage,” ventured Alfled.

“What did he do?”

“He had a block made, of gold, with a handle of ivory. But on the base of the block was a copper plate, with his name on it standing out the depth of a finger-paring. The rest had been eaten away by cunning acids, I do not know how. He would put the plate on to cork with ink in it, and then stamp the block down on documents as fast as Ishaq could present them. Some said Ishaq would put documents in there that the Caliph never read, for a price. It was like putting a brand on cattle.”

“Like a brand,” Shef repeated. “Like a brand. But no-one can brand paper, or parchment.”

“And the end of it all is a false paper,” said Svandis, face twisted with disgust. “One that no-one read and no-one signed.”

“That is one way books might be made,” agreed Solomon.