King and Emperor

Chapter Twenty-nine

The parish priest of Aups, a small village of southern France not far from Carcassonne, looked nervously out of the window of his tiny cottage, and then back at the coarsely-written pamphlet he held in his hand. It was made of paper, but the priest did not know that. It was printed rather than written, but the priest did not know that either. The priest only owned one book, and that was his Missal for conducting services. He knew the services by heart in any case. Besides his services, the priest knew the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins. On these he preached to his parishioners.

And now this had come, brought to him by Gaston, the mule-driver who came and went between Aups and Carcassonne with loads of oil and wine, charcoal and cloth, trinkets and fripperies. Such few things as the village could not produce for itself and had the few coins to buy. He had brought it back and said it had been given to him—given not sold—by a man in the market. Gaston could not read. He had thought the priest might like it.

It was the priest's duty to denounce Gaston—for though he could not read, it was unlikely that he had taken something and not asked what it contained. Then the tormentors of the bishop would come, and torment Gaston, and draw from him the name, or the description, of the man he met in the market. And if that did not satisfy them, of some other man. And if that did not satisfy them—who knew what tale they would put in Gaston's mouth? Maybe that his parish priest had sent him for the book. The heretic book. Merely holding it put the priest in deadly peril.

Do not denounce him, then. Throw it away. The priest hesitated to throw away any piece of writing. They were too scarce, too precious. And besides: the tale this one told had about it a strange charm, a seduction. Maybe that seduction came from the devil, as the priest was continually telling his parishioners about the wiles of temptation. But then this book said that the devil was actually the one that the Church called God. The Father who had sent His Son to death. What kind of a father was that?

There was another reason the priest did not want to destroy this book. If he had read it correctly—and another strange thing about it was that it was written, if not in his own dialect, in a dialect very similar to his own and very different from the Church-Latin of which the priest had learnt some fragments in his ineffectual schooling years ago—if he had read it correctly, this book said that it was a part of Heaven to live happily on earth, man and woman together. The priest had been in trouble more than once with his bishop and his archdeacon, because of Marie, the housekeeper who lived with him and who consoled his middle age. Priests must be celibate, he had been told again and again. Or they bring bastard children into the world and spend the Church's good on them. But Marie was a widow, and past childbearing. What harm did it do, what she and he did between them when the nights were cold?

The bishop was wrong, thought the priest with the first flare of independence his life had ever known. He would keep the book. He would read it again. It might be a work of heresy, or so they might say. But it was not the heresy of the heretics beyond the mountains, with their evil denial of the flesh and their insistence that men and women became perfect only by not breeding children. Though this book did say that men and women were not condemned to breed children for ever and ever. That there were ways of taking pleasure in each other, going to the Paradise on earth, as the book called it, without running the risk of childbirth. Guiltily, but determinedly, the priest opened the little eight-page booklet again, started once more to spell his way through the passage which described, in terms as plain as Shef had been able to make them with the assistance of Svandis and Alfled, the technique of the carezza, the prolongation of pleasure for woman and for man.

The parish priest of Pontiac, not far away, did his duty and reported both book and the parishioner who had given it to him. Days later, as the bishop's agents attempted once again to force him to admit that he was part of the heretic conspiracy, he made a silent vow never to admit anything again. When he was released, bent and walking like an aged man, to return to his village under the strictest supervision, he said nothing. When his parishioners who had been called to the Emperor's army returned, however, and spread their stories of demons in the sky and the might of the pagan or heretic sorcerers, their priest made no attempt to contradict them.

The bishop of Carcassonne, who had made great efforts to collect all such material entering his diocese and root out all transmitters of it, finally sent all he could find together to his Archbishop in Lyons, and asked for help against the spread of heresy in writing. He was condemned severely for allowing such material to exist. No other bishopric had recorded so much, and most none at all, he was told. His see must be rotten with loss of faith. And if the sheep are poxed and scabby, railed the Archbishop, who shall we blame but their shepherd? Look to Besançon! You will find no heresy there.

The bishop of Besançon, indeed, had obtained not only the Occitan but also the Latin version of the pamphlet, and had read both through with care, several times. The bishop was poor, by now, having had to pay a year's revenues into the Emperor's coffers for the brawl with the baron of Béziers. Besides that, his back still smarted from the days of scourging he had had to endure from a grinning German prior, till the money arrived, money acquired at a ruinous rate of interest to put an end to the scourgings. In any case the bishop had not one widow mistress, but a small stable of young women. Their constant pregnancies were almost a despair to him, so many children to be provided for, left for adoption in the church if the mother would agree, but so often she did not, found in food and clothing while they were young and furnished with dowries or apprentice-payments as they grew up. The thought that pleasure might not lead to children, even with young women, and that young women might be pleasured satisfactorily even by a man past the flush of youth, if that man knew the secrets of the carezza—this fascinated the bishop to a degree that no fear of heresy might quash. The fate of his brother of Carcassonne only rubbed the point home.

The truth was that in the whole of the Langue d'Oc, as in their kindred realm of Catalonia beyond the mountains, Christianity had shallow roots. At the first coming of the Faith in Roman limes, the Church had taken hold in the towns, where the urban classes followed the fashions of Rome and of the Empire, and where bishops could be appointed from noble families who saw the Church as another way of consolidating power over land, through its written leases, its acceptance of donations which paid no tax to the secular authorities but still might be kept within the family. Outside the towns were the pagani, in Latin, those who dwelt on the pagus, the land. In Italian the word became paesano, in French paysan—the peasant, the one who dwelt on the land, the one outside the Church. The three meanings were at bottom the same meaning. The Church meant little to the country-people, except as a force from the towns that from time to time disrupted their lives. In Northern France, in Germany, one might meet the enthusiasm of the convert or the Crusader. In the South, Mary was hard to tell from Minerva of ancient Rome or the three nameless Ladies the Celts had worshiped generations before, before the pagani were made to learn their poor and garbled Latin. Nor was the Easter procession easy to tell from the age-old weeping for Adonis, the legionary cult of sacrificing the ram, or lamb, to Mithras. In a land where written books were rare, and what they said was taken literally as gospel, there was little inherited resistance to the seeds that Shef and Solomon and Svandis had sown: but there was fertile soil in abundance.

In Andalusia, a different situation, but no more stable. Islam had not set foot in the Iberian peninsula till the year 711, when the Ummayads landed at Gibraltar, or Jeb el-Tarik in their tongue, burned their boats, and were told by their leader, “The sea is behind you and the unbelievers in front of you. Truly you shall conquer or die!” And conquer they did, overthrowing the short-lived rule of the Germanic Vandals who gave Andalusia its name and taking their place as rulers. Beneath the veneer of Vandal or Arab aristocracy, however, the mass of the Iberian population remained the same. Most of them were converted from the Christianity of the late Roman Empire without great difficulty, attracted by the benign rule of Islam, which remained free of the desperate and deadly theological squabbles of Rome and Byzantium and demanded no more than the shahada, the five daily prayers, abstention from wine and from pork.

Yet while there might be little to disagree with or provoke rebellion in the rule of the Caliphs, there was at the same time little charm. Little mystery. Under er-Rahman, less and less inquiry permitted. The surgery of Cordova would have been the wonder of the world if the world had known it, as would the discoveries of bin-Firnas, or the great work of al-Khwarizmi the mathematician, his Hisab al-Jabr wa'l Mugabala, or “Book of the bringing of unknowns to knowns.” But few did know of it, eagerly though its practical aspects might be seized by traders and bankers. The Wisdom House of Baghdad had been closed thirty years before by those who asserted there was no wisdom outside the Koran, and the Koran was to be memorized, not considered. To some, the intellectuals, the ceasing of inquiry was a pain. To others, the unpersecuted but taxed remnant of the Christians, every call from the muezzin was an offense. To most, religion mattered little. But if by any chance some restrictions might be eased, decision in the court of the cadis might relax from the strict interpretation of the Koran and of the desert asceticism that had created it—well, let the learned dispute over whether Allah or the Koran were more or equally eternal if they would. Peace, good governance, and a fair distribution of water through the irrigation channels were what they most demanded.

“I do not think Ghaniya will do,” said bin-Firnas one day to his cousin bin-Maymun. “He is half a Berber after all.”

“I do not think there is a pure-bred child of the Quraysh left to us,” replied his cousin.

“My pupil Mu'atiyah might have done,” ventured the philosopher. “He was of high birth, and easily guided by me, if by no other.”

“Too late,” replied the cavalryman. “We of the army of the Caliph-that-was accused him before the Cadi of bearing false witness. The fathers of many of those he sent to the impaling-poles brought their voices to the court. He was fortunate. Because he had been your pupil the Cadi adjudged him only to the leather carpet and the sword, not to the pole or the stoning-ground. He fought with the guards and died raging, without dignity.”

Bin-Firnas sighed, less at the young man's death than at the failure of what had been promised. “Who then?” he asked after a decent pause. “We cannot just pick one of the provincial governors, all the others would rebel immediately.”

Ishaq, Keeper of the Scrolls, drank from the cool water which was the greatest of refreshments in this, the tail-end of the scorching Spanish summer, and spoke into the thoughtful silence.

“It seems to me that there is no great need for a hasty decision. The Roman Emperor has turned away from our borders, having found his foolish relic of the Nazarenes, or so I hear. We do not need a single ruler. Why do we not send to Baghdad, and ask the descendant of Abdullah to send us a viceroy?”

“It would take forever!” said bin-Maymun. “Forever to send the message and longer for them to come to a decision. Nor would the governors accept whoever the Abbasid Caliph sent to us.”

“But during that time provisional arrangements might be put in place,” suggested Ishaq. “Rule by a Council. A Council of the Wise. Strictly temporary, of course. Still, during that temporary state institutions could be set up whose value would be so great that no later Caliph could overthrow them. A House of Surgeons. A House of Mathematics.”

“A Tower of Astronomers,” proposed bin-Firnas, “equipped with far-seers with larger and better lenses for study of the stars.”

“A new system of water-works, running down from the mountain springs to the coast,” put in bin-Maymun. “The landowners would pay for that—if they were certain that all would pay and all would share.”

“A library,” said Ishaq. “One which contained the works of the Greeks as well as of the hadith. Translated into Arabic for all to read. Or into Latin as well. If any doubted our aim, we could say that we wished to convert the Rumi to our faith with sound arguments as well as by the sword. And our cousins the Jews as well.”

“I have heard,” noted bin-Firnas, “that this business of the relic contains some terrible blow to the Christian faith. There is rumor of it among the traders from the north in the souk.”

Ishaq shrugged indifferently. “Such a faith hardly needs a blow. But let us agree that our faith shall be confirmed by reason. And that a Council of the Wise may be the way to do it.”

“We will speak to our friends in the morning,” agreed bin-Maymun. “Let Ghaniya the Berber follow Mu'atiyah the fool, and the matter can be arranged.”

The Way-fleet lay at anchor in the bay of Palma off the island of Mallorca, exactly where the Arab fleet had lain earlier the same year, before the Greek fire came to destroy it. Fishermen had already given a graphic account of what had happened then, and Shef had been concerned enough to order a standing kite to be raised, with Tolman and three or four of the others taking turns to spend an hour in the sky, not flying free—no-one had attempted that since the deaths of Ubba and Helmi—but strung out peacefully on their lines in the moderate breeze.

Shortly after Shef had tried his own flights, the Mediterranean had indeed proved that it could generate a storm, and the back-eddies of it were still with them. It had been a blessing in disguise, however, in that it had covered the approach of the Wayman fleet till they were almost at anchor. The raiding parties swarming eagerly ashore, led by Guthmund and full of experienced pirates, had immediately seized the Christian cathedral and found in it an accumulation of plunder. It had been first stored there by the Christian lords of the island, continued during the brief Islamic conquest, and stepped up to a higher power, it seemed, by the following conquest by the Emperor and his Greek allies, working in tandem. The troops left behind by the Emperor had fled into the interior. The Waymen, operating under strict orders of gentle conduct and supervised closely by their priests, reported that there was little chance of them acquiring allies from the natives, nominally Christian though they were. Solomon reported further that the booklets he carried in Occitan and in Latin were accepted readily, with great curiosity, by the Christian priests: the natives of the island, trapped in their own dialect of Mallorquin, had never seen a book that they could begin to read in their own language before, and the Occitan was close enough for them at least to try to make it out.

Solomon had not remained at hand, though, to watch the trials that Shef was now preparing. Thorvin too, intensely disapproving, had disappeared on his own errands, as had Hund and Hagbarth. For interpreting, Shef was now dependent on Skaldfinn. Farman too, the visionary priest, was prepared to observe.

The Greek fire apparatus had been unshipped bodily from the half-sunk galley, with immense care not to crack or bend any of its pipes, and had been carried carefully stowed in the hold of the Fafnisbane, a man watching it on Ordlaf's orders day and night to warn of any leak or scrap of fire. When it came to a trial, though, Ordlaf had mutinied. Shef had in the end taken a small Mallorcan fishing boat, stowed the apparatus in it, and taken it a decent quarter-mile out to sea. For hours he and Steffi had brooded over it, examining every part of it, theorizing about their apparent functions, reminding each other of what they knew for certain. They were now at least of one mind.

The big tank found separate from the rest was a fuel reserve, they agreed. Its connecting hose clearly matched the smaller copper dome: but the only function of that connection was to transfer fuel once the operating tank was emptied. In operation the pipe at the upper end of the dome was connected not to the reserve tank but to the apparatus actually found in place. Careful removal of this had persuaded them that it was a sort of bellows: a piston forced down a cylinder which, however, did nothing but force air into the operating tank. “It seems,” muttered Steffi, “that air has weight.” Remembering the strength of the wind under his kite, Shef nodded. The thought was ridiculous, for how could anyone weigh air? But the fact that one could not weigh it clearly did not mean that it had no weight—a thought for the future.

Another mystery was the valve attached to a short length of pipe on top of the dome. The pipe was plugged at the end but had an opening cut in one side. It made no sense.

What, then, was the function of the brazier and the conventional bellows below the dome? Obviously, to heat the fuel in the dome to operating temperature. But why? Neither Shef nor Steffi had any word to express the concept “volatile,” but they had seen water boil, had seen kettles boil dry. Shef, too, remembered the experiments of his former shipmate Udd with distilling a kind of winter ale. “Some things boil with less heat than water,” he explained to Steffi. “It may be that this stuff in the tank is one of them. What comes out of the nozzle when you turn the valve, then, is the lighter stuff, like the drink that Udd makes out of the steam from ale.”

“Isn't steam just water?” queried Steffi.

“Not if you heat ale or wine,” said Shef: “The stronger stuff comes off first, before the water. The opposite of winter wine. Water freezes first in the cold, boils last in the heat.” As he said the words he stiffened, the words of Loki coming back to him. What was it he had said, had offered him as a token? “It is best on a winter morning.” He did not understand, but it had something to do with this problem. He would remember it. If it worked… Then he would owe Loki something. Put into practice the plan he had considered. It would be a fair test, a fair return.

All their actions had been watched with tight-lipped scorn by the Greek siphonistos taken from the captured galley.

“We're going to try it,” said Shef to Skaldfinn. “All those who aren't necessary had better leave the boat.” The Greek turned immediately, reached for the painter of their dinghy.

“He understands our language a bit, then,” said Shef. “Ask him why he will not help us.”

“He says you are barbarians.”

“Tell him barbarians would lash him to the dome so that he would feel the fire first if anything went wrong. But we are not barbarians. He will see. He will stay with us, take the same chances that we do. The rest of you—over the side with you all, and lay off ten strokes. Now—” Shef turned back to Steffi and his three-man gang with a confidence he did not feel. “Light the match! Bellows-man, stand by and start when the flame is alight.”

“It's this pump that worries me,” muttered Steffi in an undertone. “I can see what it does, but I don't know what it's for.”

“Me neither. We still have to try it. Start pumping on the handle.”

The Greek edged away, watching the preparations with increasing fear. The very thought of the fire exploding made his bowels cringe within him. He had seen several demonstrations of what happened when an apparatus was overheated. They had turned the safety-valve closed, without realizing what it was for. He knew, if the barbarians did not, that they were not far enough off to be safe.

Competing with the personal fear was fear for his faith and his country. The barbarians seemed strangely sure about what they were doing. They had spent a long time observing, making simple trials, doing very little and nothing roughly—not like the barbarians of his imagination, but like skilled men. Could it be that they would solve the problem? Even if they did, a voice within him reminded him, there was one thing no ingenuity could find: the strange seepages of Tmutorakan far beyond the Black Sea, where the oil welled up out of the ground.

The fire was burning, the pump was operating, the barbarian with the squint sweating as he worked. In his bones the siphonistos could feel the pressure increasing, building up. It had to build up, it must not be allowed to grow too great, heat and pressure had to be balanced just so.

Observing carefully out of the corner of his one eye, Shef watched the signs of tension grow in the captive Greek. He feared the fire perhaps more than they did. And he knew, as they did not, when the likely moment of disaster would be. Had he the resolution to face death unmoved? Shef felt sure that he would make some sign of betrayal. If he did, he and Steffi and the others would be over the side and into the water in a moment. But the Greek did not know that.

“Keep pumping,” he ordered.

Shef felt the warmth coming now not from the burning match beneath but from the dome itself. As the heat increased the Greek writhed in fear. The barbarians had no fear because they had no understanding! In the end he could not control himself. He seized up a rag, leaped forward and turned the valve on top of the tank. A shrill whistle sounded from the slotted length of pipe.

“The valve! You must open the valve at once!” he called, in suddenly-discovered English, backing the words with a frantic gesture.

Shef shouted “Turn!”

The last of Steffi's three-man gang turned firmly on the valve that led from the bottom of the copper dome—the valve that led to the nozzle. Shef felt an instant wave of something jetting through the brass nozzle in his hand, a reek of something stinging and acrid. He drew the lit slow-match from behind his back and at arm's length held it to the nozzle.

The dragon's breath flared out, belching flame fifty feet out over the sea, landing on it and blazing with clouds of black smoke even on the water itself. For long moments the sea itself seemed to be ablaze, Shef and the valve-hand stepped back, cringing automatically from the fierce heat.

Shef collected himself, shouted “Turn!” once again. The valve closed, the flame stopped. Instantly Steffi ceased to pump, the bellows-man pulled his bellows away, the brazier-hand pulled the charcoal flame away from under the dome. All five men fell back from the dome to the very edge of the ship's tiny deck and stared tensely at it. Had they pumped it too strongly? Would the flame come back from the sea and ignite some stray spill? After a while Shef felt them all releasing their breath together.

“It's a kind of oil,” he said.

“Not olive oil,” said Steffi. “I've tried lighting that and it doesn't work at all, hardly.”

“Might be whale-oil,” ventured Shef, remembering the way Queen Ragnhild's fire-arrows had lit up the harvest of the grind in far Halogaland.

“Doesn't smell like it,” said the valve-hand, once a fisherman in Ordlaf's village of Bridlington.

“I don't know what in Hel it is,” said Steffi. “But I bet we can't get no more of it once this is used up. But at least we know now when to open the valve. That whistle on top, it sounds the warning.”

“You may know how this work,” the Greek shouted angrily, still in the broken English he had till then refused to admit. “But there is one place on earth for naphtha and you never find it. Nor I tell you, no matter how you torture me.”

Shef looked down at him coldly. “There is no need of torture, and now I have the machine I know where to get the fuel. It is found best on a winter's morning, is that not so?”

The Greek's heart sank within him. They had mastered the siphon with ease. Now it seemed they had the oil as well. After all, in the barbarian West, who could say that there was no Tmutorakan, as there was in the barbarian East? And if they had both halves of the secret, how might Byzantium stand? And he could be sure he would find no welcome in Byzantium once it was known the secret was out. Any Greek should know there was a time to change sides, and this was it.

“Listen to me, one-eye,” he mumbled, “that for a price I correct your errors.”

Shef nodded calmly, as though he had expected this response, and fumbled for a moment in the pocket of his breeches. He had had these things made by a silversmith in Septimania, made secretly and paid for from his own purse.

“Steffi,” he said, “I want you and your men here to wear these.” He produced the silver pendants from his pocket.

“What, and give up what we got already?” asked Steffi, putting a hand up to the Thor-hammer round his neck.

“Yes. You have Thor, and so does one of your mates, and the other two have a Frey-phallus and a Rig-ladder like me. But they are just the signs that took your fancy, or that you copied from others. I must stay with my own kraki, for it is the mark of my father, but you should wear the signs of your trade, now you have a trade. It is a sign of honor too, for your courage.”

“What is it?” said the valve-hand, face glowing with pride. He had been a slave most of his life. Now the One King was speaking to him as if he were a great warrior.

“It is a fire-sign, for the men who trade in fire, in flares, in the marks of war.”

The men took the pendants in silence, removed their own, put the new ones round their necks.

“What god is the patron of us fire-warriors?” asked the bellows-hand.

“It is Loki the fire-god, once chained, now free.”

Skaldfinn, coming back over the side, froze with horror as he heard the words, saw the fire-sign displayed openly for the first time. He looked back at Farman just behind him for support, saw the visionary pause, and then nod slowly in acquiescence. Steffi and his gang, all English and all former Christians with the scantiest knowledge of the holy myths of the Way, heard the name without alarm.

“Loki,” Steffi muttered, fixing the name in his mind. “Loki the fire-god. Good to have a god of our own. We will be his faithful servants.”