King and Emperor

Chapter Twenty-eight

The news of the disaster for Islam ran south faster, seemingly, than any horse could carry it. Than any single horse or horseman, certainly. As the first reports arrived in any town, carried by the cavalrymen who had fled first from the battle, each man was helped from his horse, carried to drink sherbet in the cool, pressed for further information. Meanwhile such information as could be gleaned was carried on by trusted messengers to those whom the local governor of a province or cadi of a city regarded as most in need of it. By the time the survivors rode on, their stories growing more elaborate and self-justifying each time they were repeated, the news was often ahead of them.

As the news was received, those in power under the Caliph-who-had-been thought carefully about their positions. Who was to succeed the Caliph? It was known that he had many children, but none designated, and none old and strong enough to survive the civil war that threatened. He had had many brothers, or half-brothers. Most dead, gone to the leather carpet or the bowstring. Many unacceptable, children of the mustaribs. Or were they, now, so unacceptable? Those who had been considered so, governors of the north for the most part, began to reflect on their own strength and on their alliances. Horsemen rode, troops were gathered, governors wondered how many of the levies they had sent north would return. As they trickled in, surprisingly many of them for a battle that according to the first runaways had been fought with great valor, governors reckoned their strength again. Almost all of them came to the same conclusion. Too soon to strike, or to give up hope. Do what is obviously right and you cannot come to harm. Protest loyalty to the Faith. Surround one's own person with every armed man that can be raised. And meanwhile, since the men are there and must be paid, there are private squabbles that may as well be taken care of. Old enmities between Alcala and Alicante, the coast and the mountains, disputes over water and land, flared into conflict.

In Cordova itself, as the news arrived, there was shock and horror. No alarm, since clearly the unbelievers could offer no threat to the established civilization of the south and of Andalusia, but fear at the judgment of Allah. The question of succession struck every listener at once. Within days the carts of market stuff and poultry, the herds of sheep and beef cattle, had ceased to stream through the gates, the peasants of the Guadalquivir valley fearing to enter what might be bloody civil war. The few half-Berber half-brothers of the Caliph vanished into their own strongholds, were known to be calling for men, for help from the kinsfolk of North Africa. At any moment a fleet might arrive from Algiers or Morocco, to sail up the river. Or, said the pessimists, the Tulunids of Egypt may take a hand: mere Turks from the steppe.

At that thought, the Christians of the city, and the Jews of the Juderia, the ghetto established for them, also began to reckon their strength. The rule of the previous Caliph had been cruel to those who renounced the shahada or who sought for martyrdom. It would be like a caress compared with the random and profitless cruelties of the Turks or the Berbers, anxious to show their loyalty to the faith because of their recent and doubtful conversion to it.

Better any Caliph than no Caliph, said the wiser heads of the city to each other. Best of all, a Caliph acceptable to all. But who? The young man, Mu'atiyah, pupil of bin-Firnas, had appeared from the wreck and ruin, ridden without ceasing all the way from the moment the Caliph fell back in his arms—or so he said. He called for Ghaniya, the Caliph's oldest half-brother and trusted emissary to the North, to succeed to the cushion. Ghaniya, he shouted in a score of marketplaces, Ghaniya could be trusted to take up the war. And not only the war against the Christians. Against the majus also, the heathen fire-worshipers who had deluded the Caliph into war and disaster. But most of all, the war against the faithless, the secret traitors. Had he not with his own eyes (and the invention of his master) seen men of the Caliph's army arrayed against him, eating roast pig between the battle-lines? How many more secret devourers of swine hid in the streets of Cordova? To be rooted out! Along with the Christians who sheltered them, under the mistaken kindness of the former Caliph. Enslave them, send them into exile, impale those who renounced their faith…

“Too much impaling already,” remarked bin-Maymun, once commander of the cavalry in the army of the Prophet, to his cousin bin-Firnas, as they ate grapes in the cool of the latter's riverbank mansion. “You can't expect men to fight if some of them are dragged off every day and heard screaming to their comrades every night. He is your pupil of course, son of my mother's brother…”

“But not a ready learner,” his cousin replied. “It seems to me—eager though I am for shari'a—that a little relaxation may be in order? Other learned men are with me on this, Ishaq, Keeper of the Caliph's Scrolls for one. Without wishing to go as far as the sect of the Sufi, he remembers that a House of Wisdom was once established in Baghdad, and flourished under the rule of Mu'tazilites. Why should Baghdad have had what Cordova cannot?”

“There are other reports, too, of what happened after the battle, after I and my men had been driven from the field,” his cousin replied. “Some of the Caliph's women escaped from the Christians who seized them and found their way by ship and horse to Cordova. One a Christian by birth, so her loyalty cannot be doubted if she turned her back on her fathers' faith. I have taken another into my own harem, a delightful woman from Circassia. They too say that the Caliph's rigor was too great—a compensation, they say, for certain… inadequacies. They say also that he put too much faith in your pupil.” Bin-Maymun cast a glance sideways to see how his hint was taken.

“He is my pupil no longer,” declared bin-Firnas firmly. “I withdraw my protection from him.” As bin-Maymun sank back, remembering threats and insults and considering which of his men to send to put a stop to Mu'atiyah's babble, bin-Firnas pressed on. “And will you join Ishaq and my learned Mends later on, for song and poetry, and perhaps, a little discussion?”

“I will,” said bin-Maymun, paying the price for the freedom just granted to deal with Mu'atiyah. “And I will bring my friend the Cadi with me,” he added, to show he was throwing his full weight into the struggle. “He is concerned about the state of the city. Your poetry will relax him. Within the walls, of course, only he has any great force of armed men.”

With perfect understanding the two men listened to the song of a slave-girl and considered, the one revenge and power, the other freedom for reason and learning from illiterates and zealots.

In Rome the news of the battle was received with joy, the ringing of bells and singing of Te Deum. The news, a little after, of the Emperor's recovery of the holy relic of the graduale and his vow to elevate his personal adviser to the throne of Saint Peter, was taken differently. If all had gone well, the current Pope, John VIII, weak child of a powerful Tuscan family, would never have heard the news at all, his own fate outrunning it. But somewhere between the Emperor's camp and the Vatican Hill, word spread to someone still loyal. The Pope was informed, hurried immediately to gather his entourage and retire from the dangerous city to the estates of his family. When Gunther, once Archbishop of Cologne and now Cardinal in Rome, heard the news and moved instantly with his one-time chaplain Arno and a dozen German swordsmen of his own guard to reassure the Pope, and hold him incommunicado till the Emperor's wish became clearer, he found himself facing more than his own number of Italian nobles, relatives and adherents of John. The two sides exchanged polite greetings and arguments, while the guard commanders weighed each other up. Stilettos and perfumed hair, thought the German: back-stair back-stabbers. But we have no mail nor shields. Great blunt chopping-swords and onion-stinking breath, thought the Italian: but ready to use them. The two sides backed off from each other, protesting friendship and concern.

Despite the pleas not to desert his flock, the Pope made his way determinedly from minster and hill, from Rome itself. Despite the assurances of joy and congratulations at the Emperor's victory, Gunther seized control of the Curia, evicted Cardinals not of his own nation or faction, prepared for a disputed election. He would have gone further, but the news that the Emperor had fixed on the English deacon Erkenbert dismayed him even in his loyalty to Emperor and Lanzenorden, his own creation. Erkenbert had been a good comrade, he knew. But Pope? Gunther had had another and a more suitable candidate in mind for that office next time it should fall vacant, one who was already a Prince of the Church and no deacon. Yet a vacancy was definitely desirable, so much at least could be agreed…

It would take an army, now, to create one. Though the army of the Emperor was at least approaching, marching across the borderlands of southern France and northern Italy, hot-foot for Rome. Or so they said.

In the cool underground cave which had once been an olive-press, Shef examined carefully the rows and rows of tiny lead blocks wedged tightly into their steel frame. He made no attempt to read them. Still a poor reader of any script, the complexity of reading mirror-image letters, in blocks facing different ways, which were in any case in a language he did not understand, would have been far beyond him. Anything like that was entrusted to Solomon. All Shef was looking for was technical perfection. Letters fixed tight, none of uneven size, all letters of the same height. Shef finally nodded with satisfaction, passed them over.

With Alfled's image of a brand in their minds, the idea of branding on to paper had been fairly clear. But all a brand needs to convey is ownership. One sign is enough. It was soon evident that something like a brand with two hundred words on it would take years to make and be invalidated by a single change. Make a stamp, or a brand, or whatever it was to be called, for each word, suggested Solomon, as the Caliph er-Rahman used to. That too was soon seen to be a false trail, as the amount of work needed to make individual words, some of them in large numbers, became apparent. It was Shef who suggested making tiny dies for each letter, and once that was seen the job became easy. Deft jewelers had carved the individual letters from brass, pressed these into clay to make a mold. Baked the clay molds then filled them with molten lead. Over and over again until there were filled trays of the leaden letters.

Short trials pointed out the necessity of making the marks mirror-image instead of right-way round. Then came the problem of fitting them together. Of making the ink adhesive enough to stick to the lead and not run once pressed on to the paper. The easiest thing of all was finding a device that would fit the letters now locked into a chase, something that would hold the entire page-sized mass of type rather than the mere signature which er-Rahman had used. Presses were familiar objects to the whole Mediterranean seaboard, with their diet heavily dependent on wine and on olive oil, both of them needing to be pressed out. Shef had simply taken over an olive-press, inserted a flat steel bed for the letters to rest on.

Now for the full-scale trial. The carefully-set blocks of lead letters rested on the bed of the press. A cloth pad soaked in ink was patted over their surface, a sheet of white paper placed gently on top of them. Shef nodded to Solomon, who had claimed the honor of first trial. Solomon put the block on top of the paper, then pulled on the arm that exerted pressure on the block. Shef held up a warning hand. Too much weight pressed the blanks down on to the paper as well, smearing the result. He cut his hand through the air, Solomon released the pressure and removed the pressure block and Svandis slid the printed sheet out. Shef ignored the cries of wonder, thrust another sheet in, signed to Solomon again. And again. And again. And again. Only after ten trials did he stop, and turn to Svandis.

“We don't need to know, does it work?” he said. “We need to know, does it work faster? If it isn't faster than a team of scribes, then there's no point to all this. It isn't faster so far, when you think of all the time we've wasted.”

Svandis passed him the sheet. He looked at it, passed it to Solomon, who examined it carefully. “It seems correct,” said the Jew thoughtfully. “As for speed… We have just printed ten pages in a hundred heartbeats. A practiced scribe can write, maybe, forty pages in a day. A hundred heartbeats, and three people, and we have two hours' work from a skilled scribe. I cannot say…”

“I can,” said Shef, turning to the apparatus of beads and wire which stood not far away. He flicked beads this way and that with the skill of continuous practice. “Three thousand heartbeats in an hour,” he muttered. “Say twenty-five thousand in a day's work. Twenty-five thousand divided by one hundred multiplied by ten…” He straightened. “Three people can do the work of sixty scribes. Once the blocks have been set up. The blocks, is that the word?”

“Call it the press,” said Svandis.

“Sixty scribes,” repeated Solomon, marveling. “It will mean, at the very least, that every child can have his own Talmud. Who would have believed it?”

More Talmuds may not mean more faith, thought Shef, but he did not say it.

As he walked through the streets of Septimania later that day, a mule laden with printed paper following him, Solomon met Moishe the learned. Anything like a book could not escape Moishe's eye. He pulled one copy out, scanned it suspiciously. “This is not Hebrew writing,” he said. “And whoever wrote it was a bungler. The letters are ill-formed and straggle from each other like a schoolboy's.” He sniffed the paper. “It smells of lamp-black too.”

Needed for adhesion, thought Solomon, but he made no reply.

“It is in the Romance tongue,” added Moishe accusingly. “I can make out the Roman script, but this is not even Latin!” Ingrained respect for the written word prevented him from throwing the offending object to the ground, but he waved it contemptuously. “What does it say?”

“It is a longer version of what the One King dictated to you and the others some weeks ago. The attack on the Nazarenes' faith. I have five hundred of them here. Tomorrow I shall have five hundred more, in Latin, for the more educated believers.”

Moishe snorted, torn between agreeing with attacks on Christianity and disapproving of attacks on faith. In his heart he believed that all should stay in the faith of their births, those who held the correct one reaping their destined reward, those who held false ones taking the punishment due to them and to their ancestors. “Five hundred?” he replied. “There are not scribes enough in Septimania to write all those.”

“Nevertheless it shall be done,” said Solomon. “The One King will take many of them, to spread them round the Christian islands on which he means to cruise—his men are pirates by trade, I fear, and anxious to earn their living now the Christian army has withdrawn.”

“And the rest?”

“Those fall to me. To give where I think they will do most good.” Or most harm, he did not say. For these are books, but they are also anti-books, books to turn People of the Book from their Bible, which is their word for ‘book.’ I do not think I had better tell Moishe the learned that. It is a use of learning he will not learn to accept.

The One King, at sea already and heading for the island of Mallorca, his entire fleet spread out around him in cruising formation, was watching the kite-men struggle with the immensely unwieldy contraption he had had designed. Tolman stood to one side with an expression of deep disapproval on his face.

“Tell me again,” said Shef to the child, “what are the things to remember.”

“To begin with, keep the open end, the larger open end, pointed into the wind. Feel the wind in your eyes. If it shifts, you must shift with it.” The boy took the king's hands with an air of authority. “If the wind is above you, roll the hands this way. If it is below, that way. The tail-flap moves like a rudder, that you will understand. The first thing is, if you think anything is going wrong, it is already too late. You have to move all the time, never stay still. Like a bird. It takes time to learn,” the boy added condescendingly. “I crashed into the sea time after time.”

Cwicca, listening, reflected to himself that a sixty-pound child crashed much lighter than a hundred-and-ninety-pound warrior. Long experience had taught him that the One King paid no attention to probabilities. At least he was a strong swimmer. Cwicca himself had sharpened the One King's belt-knife to a more than razor edge, in case he needed to cut himself free in the water. Brand had selected a dozen of the strongest swimmers in the fleet, himself included, and put them in pairs round the rescue boats.

The experiment still seemed impossible. Guided by his abacus, Shef had ordered a new kite with four times the surface area of Tolman's. So enormous was it that it overhung the deck of the Fafnisbane on all sides and over the stern as well. A first difficulty had been that the weight of the One King himself would snap the fragile struts suspended between the gunwales. Shef had ordered up trestles for him to lie on till, he hoped, the wind should take him.

At least there was plenty of wind. All the ships in the fleet, more than sixty of them now, were tearing along as fast as a man could run, or a horse canter, the wind on their port beam. The familiar cloudless blue of the sky was as cloudless as ever, but with a darker tinge. Ordlaf predicted a storm, though all agreed that a storm in this millpond of a sea could hardly be compared with a North Sea widow-maker. The One King had figured the strength of the wind into his calculations as well.

“Ready,” he said. He climbed up the short step-ladder—a proper ladder this, not a wretched graduale or kraki—slid feet-first into the holding leather sling. Wood creaked and flexed. Handlers looked anxiously at the stitching, linesmen tested their holds. The kite, which had strained at its ropes, took on an ominous immobility, lay there as if made of lead.

Shef gripped the controls, turned them this way and that. He too felt the kite's lack of motion, wondered for a moment what would happen. Would he just lie there like bacon on a slab? Would they cast him over the side and see him simply go down like the fool who had leapt from the tower of the Wisdom-House in his Völund-suit months before?

Shef looked round at the anxious faces surrounding him. One thing he could be sure of. Success or failure, the idea that men could fly had at least been firmly planted. Round half of the necks of the kite-crews, half at least, dangled the new wing-pendants of Völund, or Wayland as the English called him. Men who were proud to call themselves fliers. They would not forget. He had created a new trade. More than one new trade.

“Ready,” he said.

The eight tallest men in the ship stepped to their places, each of them crouched on a block, gripping a part of the frame in two hands. Now Cwicca took over, as launchmaster.

“Lift,” he shouted.

The eight men simultaneously straightened and thrust their arms high over their heads: no great weight, indeed two strong men might have done it, or Brand or Styrr on their own. But it was important to have even balance. Cwicca glanced at his linesmen standing by the windward rail, almost crowded overboard by the immense spread of canvas facing into the wind, but each maintaining tension and ready to pay out line. He waited with the skill of much practice till he could see the wind beginning to catch the canvas, belly it out from underneath.

“Launch!”

The eight men swayed backwards like a catapult-arm bending, and then threw the kite forward and up, into the wind. Shef felt the shock, immediately felt the kite sweeping backwards as if from under him. The wind had caught him, but it was taking him down, down under the side of the Fafnisbane, to be trampled deep into the sea and drown there in a mess of broken cordage. He twirled a hand control at random, felt the kite dip alarmingly, faces on the leeward rail staring at him open-mouthed. Turn the other.

The side-vanes turned, the wind caught the great expanse of waxed cotton more fully, began to blow across the top. Struggling against the dead weight of its rider, the huge contrivance began to lift. The linesmen felt the tug, paid out line gently, carefully, each man striving to keep resistance without drag. They had had much practice.

Above, Shef tried to remember what Tolman had said, tried even more to put it into effect. The wind was below his eyes, turn that way. No, above, turn back. And all the time he was skidding sideways, work the tail-flap between his knees, no, no, other way.

For a brief instant all seemed to be in balance, and Shef could glance down. Below him the ships were strung out like children's toys on a pond, all of them lined with faces staring up. He could make the faces out clearly, could recognize Brand there in one of the rescue boats out to windward. Could he wave, shout to him?

The moment's loss of concentration was all that the wind needed. The kite began to turn up, the two linesmen controlling that began to try to edge the top frame down, at the same instant Shef worked his own correction.

The watchers saw the kite tip nose-down, bank suddenly to the right, seem to lose the wind and the lift altogether, and drop into the sea like a loose bundle of rags. The Fafnisbane slanted gently across, linesmen reeling in as she did so. Brand's Narwhal was already in front of them, swimmers diving over the side and threshing towards the bobbing contraption.

Shef met them in the water. “I didn't need to cut myself free,” he said. “Just slid out. Haul her out,” he shouted to Ordlaf in the approaching Fafnisbane, “and check her over for breaks.”

“Then what?” asked Cwicca, as the dripping king scrambled over the side.

“Then we'll try again, of course. How long did it take Tolman to learn the trick of it?”

“If Tolman has learnt the trick of it,” protested Cwicca, “why do you need to? Is this just for fun?”

Shef looked down at him. “Oh no,” he said. “We have to do the very best we can to get better. Better at everything. Because there are people over there who are also doing their very best. And not to make life easy for us, either.”

The Emperor looked carefully at the paper which Erkenbert had produced for him. It meant nothing to him. Skilled in the instant evaluation of land, river-lines, armor, the good and bad points of a horse or its harness, Bruno had never learned to translate lines on paper into reality.

“What does it do?” he asked.

“It cuts the reloading time of our new catapults by more than half. You see,” Erkenbert tapped the paper, “the difficulty was always dragging down the short arm, the arm which holds the counterweight. If we had been quicker—” He did not complete the sentence. If he had been quicker outside the wall of Septimania, he might have shot three times and smashed the gate down before the enemy could reply. Then the greatest of their troubles would have been over.

“Well,” he went on, “we tried different ways, and in the end I tried dragging the arm down by ropes over a roller. Now, what I have designed are two wheels, one each side of the frame. Men stand inside each one. They tread down with their feet, and the wheel turns, turns so that there is always another tread under their feet. The wheel that they turn operates a cogwheel, and the two cogs drag down an iron chain. That chain pulls down the counterweight.”

“Does it work?”

“I cannot tell while we march every day. I need time to find smiths and make the wheels, both the cogs and the tread-wheels. But it will work. There is a picture in Vegetius, to give us authority.” Though they were speaking German, he used the Latin word auctoritatem, that which comes from an author, a written work, a book accredited.

Bruno nodded. “The march will stop one day. Then I will need your new device. Not just one next time. Six, a dozen. I have to beat some sense into these Italian heads. Maybe some others too. Come now and see what Agilulf has devised for us.”

The two men left the tent and went out into the sprawling camp, tents pitched for the night but not yet at rest. Outside the marshal Agilulf waited. Erkenbert looked again with professional interest at the crusted blisters and dead skin that ran like the mark of a broad belt across his neck and the side of his face—the track of the Greek fire. Agilulf had lain in pain and fever for weeks after they had pulled him from the sea.

A surprise that he had lived. No surprise that he had become even more taciturn than ever before.

“What is our strength now?” asked Bruno.

“Much the same. Four thousand rabble.” By rabble Agilulf meant the levies called up from the districts Bruno was marching through, first the Spanish borderlands, then the coastline of southern France, then the plains of northern Italy. As the army moved towards Rome and the seat of Saint Peter, there was a constant stream of desertions, replaced by new levies. Few of them had any military value in a serious clash, and some Bruno had dismissed, like the half-Arab deserters, sent back to loot and cause dissension in their own countries.

“About five hundred of the cowboys. They stick around as long as they're allowed to loot and rape away from home.”

“Hang some of the rapists,” said Bruno without heat. “I'll hang them all when their use is over.”

“Five hundred Frankish knights, with a hundred Lanzenritter as stiffening. Seven hundred Lanzenbrüder on foot. A dozen onagers in the battering-train, with a Lanzenbrüder attached to each one to stop the crews running away. More to come when the Holy Father has time to make the designs.”

The “Holy Father” was Agilulf's only joke. He was one of those who most whole-heartedly approved the coming elevation of Erkenbert to the throne of Saint Peter. The little deacon had dressed his wound, given him feverfew for the fever. He was never far from the fighting, never showed fear. In the tight world of the Emperor's army, it was coming about that no one outside it, German, Italian or Frank, had any weight. Nationality was less important than comradeship.

“Are they good enough to beat the heathen, this time?” asked Bruno.

“I do not think anyone can stand against the charge of the Lanzenritter. But they can be shot down by machines from a distance. For close work—the Lanzenbrüder are stout kerls. But those damned Danes—they are stout kerls too.”

“Better equipped?”

“Our shield-and-spear tactic does not work against them. They are too strong, they learn too quickly. No shield can keep out their axes if they use them. All we can do is keep a steady line, hope to use our horsemen.”

“And our machines,” said Erkenbert.

“Everything,” said Bruno. “All at once. To put down our enemies, to make Christendom one, without rival.”