King and Emperor

Chapter Thirty

The Emperor gaped at the small book put into his hands.

He could read himself, if slowly, but this time he had no need to. The substance of the booklet had already been explained to him in careful detail by his trusty comrade.

“Where in Hell did it come from?” he asked finally. The Emperor never knowingly blasphemed, took the name of the Lord in vain, or used religious words in other than their literal meaning. This time too, Erkenbert realized, he meant that the book in front of him was literally diabolic. That was good. Answering the question was not so good. Erkenbert had realized some time ago that the sniveling heretic who had betrayed the Grail and earned death for it had not told the truth when he said that there were only two copies: he should have kept him alive. No need to confess that mistake now.

“A Brother found it in a priest's house. Oh yes,” he held up a warning hand, “the priest has already been dealt with. But I have heard these things are everywhere, produced with diabolic speed. And they are being believed too. Men say that the very graduale which you carry with you and proclaim to be the true ladder on which Our Lord was carried to the Sepulchre, they say that its appearance after so many centuries is proof that what these doctrines say are true. The Lance is death, men say, the Grail is life. It proves that Jesus came back to life in reality, never left this world rather than came back to it. So there is no resurrection, no after-life, no succession of Saint Peter, no Church or need for a Church. Some of those who say that are priests themselves.”

The Emperor's face was purpling rapidly, but he was no fool. He realized all this was being said to him for a purpose, not merely to enrage him. Or maybe enraging him was the purpose.

“Well,” he said with sudden mildness, “we can stop people saying these things out loud, I suppose. But we want to stop them even thinking about them. I am sure you have an idea how that might be done. Let me hear it.”

Erkenbert nodded. They were old allies now, working partners. It was still a relief to him to work for a clear-sighted ruler.

“Two ideas,” he said. “One is easy. We need a body of reliable men with no duty other than that of seeking out heresy. They will have to be given powers greater than present law allows. Powers of rope and rack, stake and pit. I suggest we call them the Inquisitio Imperialis, the Imperial Inquisition.”

“Agreed,” said Bruno immediately. “What's the hard idea?”

“Do you know when Church and Empire first came together? For the Empire of the Romans was at first a pagan one, you know, which persecuted Christians.”

Bruno nodded. He remembered the stories of Saint Paul, and how he went to Rome for trial before an Emperor who must have been hostile. It had not struck him that somewhere down the line the Empire must have changed religions, but now that Erkenbert mentioned it, he saw it must be so.

“The first Christian Emperor, you know, was Constantine, who was proclaimed Emperor in my own city of Eboracum—York, as the vile pagans who hold it now call it.”

“A good omen,” said Bruno confidently.

“It is to be hoped so. What happened was that he was beset by rebels—like you, Emperor—and in the night before a battle he dreamt a dream. In that dream an angel came to him and showed him the holy sign of the Cross, and told him, In hoc signo vinces: ‘In this sign thou shalt conquer.’ He did not know the meaning of the sign but the next day he ordered his men to put it on their shields, and fought and won the battle. Then, when wise men explained to him the meaning of the sign, he accepted it and the Christian religion, and imposed it on all the Empire. But he did one other thing, Emperor. He made the Donation of Constantine.

“On this document both Church and Empire are built. From it the Church receives authority in this world. From it the Empire receives legitimacy from the world above. That is why Emperors are the Lord's Anointed. And Popes should be the Emperor's creation.”

“It sounds a fine thing,” said Bruno with a certain skepticism, “but I make Popes without need of a document. And my authority comes from the relics I have recovered—we have recovered. Why do we need this Donation?”

“I think that as well as the Imperial Inquisition we need also a new Donation.”

The Emperor's eyebrows rose warningly. He had already seen that this conversation was urging him to put down the troublesome John by force, and lock the College of Cardinals up until they voted in the correct way for his own candidate. Though Erkenbert did not know it—Bruno did not wish the new Pope to have any hand in the disappearance of the old one—he had already sent a strong squadron to deal with Pope John, and firm messages to the wavering Cardinals of Germany that they had better see sense themselves, and bring their Italian colleagues to do the same. But he did not like the idea of donations. The Church was rich enough already.

“It will be a Donation of Church to Empire,” said Erkenbert firmly. “Not of Empire to Church. A tenth of the Church's temporal possessions will be handed over, for set purposes. The defeat of the heathen. The stamping out of heresy. War against the followers of the Prophet. War against the schismatics of Byzantium. New warrior-orders to be founded in all the realms of Christendom, not Germany alone. The establishment of the Imperial Inquisition, against rebels and heretics. We will call it the Donation of Simon Peter.”

“Simon Peter?” said the Emperor, mind still racing at the implications of what had been said.

“I will take the Papal name of Peter,” said Erkenbert firmly. “It has been forbidden to all Popes throughout history since the first. But I will take it not in pride but in humility, as a sign that the Church needs to begin again, cleansed of its weakness and its surfeit. We will find a document in the vaults of the Vatican, in the Catacombs, written by Simon Peter himself and setting out his wish that the Church should be the loyal servant of a Christian Empire.”

“Find a document?” repeated Bruno. “But how can we find it if we don't know it's there?”

“I found the Grail, did I not?” said Erkenbert. “You can rely on me to find the Donation of Peter.”

He means he's going to fake it, thought Bruno suddenly. That is against every law of God and man. But a tenth of the Church's possessions… Fat monks and idle nuns evicted, their lands made over for the support of warriors… No more counting the Ritters and the Brüderschaft in hundreds… And surely, a pious end may justify impious means.

It's a fraud and he knows it's a fraud, thought Erkenbert. But he's going to go through with it. What he doesn't know is that the Donation of Constantine is a fraud too, any scholar can see it, the Latin is quite of the wrong period for what is claimed. It was written by a Frank, or I am an Italian. How many more documents, I wonder, are frauds? That is the true danger of things like this: he took the heretic booklet from the Emperor's hands, tore it across and threw it carefully into the glowing brazier. They start people thinking about whether books are true. We must stamp that out. Few books, and all those holy ones, that must be our goal. Whether they are true or not—that shall be for me to decide.

The plume of smoke leaking lazily into the air off the port bow held Shef's gaze like a fly struggling to escape the spider. The cruise had gone well, extraordinarily well. The islands of the Mediterranean had been much fought over, but did not seem to have been thoroughly plundered for many years. Perhaps the contestants had been eager only to change the religion of the islanders, not to leave with a profit. The ships in the fleet were low in the water now, not only with renewed food and water, but with church plate, brocades and cloth of unknown dyes.

Most important of all was the tribute exacted from Mallorca and Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera, then Corsica and Sardinia, tribute in gold and silver coins of the Arabs, of the Greeks, of the Franks and the Romans and countries of which Shef had never heard and whose script neither Skaldfinn nor Solomon could recognize. Sicily next, lying only a little to the south, below the island of Vulcan with its smoky mountain? A descent on the Italian mainland? Even Guthmund had been heard to talk of quitting while the going was good, and before the equinoctial gales set in on the long passage home.

Meanwhile there was Steffi to satisfy. He had taken his conversion to the fire-pendant and the Loki-god with great conviction. His conversation was now about nothing but fire, and he had grasped a principle that Shef himself had often stated. There was more knowledge in the world than people realized. Steffi had set himself to find out everything that anyone at all knew about fire and about things that burnt, or lit, or even glowed in the dark. Their Greek captive had been a disappointment. He knew his trade, it was true, and he had told them all he knew of the black oilfields beyond the Black Sea, of the process of draining and refining the stuff that oozed to the surface, fluid and light in the cold, sticky and tar-like in the heat. But though he knew how the trade was carried out he had little curiosity about substitutes, alternatives. They had concealed from him the fact that they had no oilfield in the West as the Greeks had in the East, but without such an alternative they had the half-tank of oil they had captured and no more.

Steffi was not discouraged. He talked to the Greek, to Solomon, to Brand, to Shef, to the fishing boat crews they intercepted, interrogated and released, to his own mates. His monologue continued as he stood in the bows watching the smoke like Shef, but watching it like a lover watching his mistress's window.

“Funny, you know,” he repeated. “Once I got asking them you'd think half the fleet knew that if you lit a fire on earth that had been cleaned out of a stable or a cave or whatever, then it burned real fierce. So I asked them what else did that, and they come up with all sorts. Solomon says the Arabs have some stuff like what our Greek calls naphtha, but the Greek says it's different. Solomon says the Arabs used to make fire-bundles out of their stuff, like our flares, but they used to throw them not launch them from a catapult. I'd like to get some of that naphtha, but meanwhile we got fish-oil, we got the saltpeter stuff, we got wax…

“And then one of the lads reminded me of what you get on rotten logs, that glows in the dark, though it doesn't burn. Solomon says that's called phosphor, and he says if you get the real stuff, it burns so hard water can't put it out, you have to scrape it off the skin. The Greek says he's heard of that and they tried mixing it with the oil they use, but it's not safe, they sometimes mix in a kind of resin.”

“They put that in the wine too,” put in Shef.

“Only because it's what they caulk the barrels with. But resin burns, and so does amber, one of the boys was telling me.”

“We can't afford amber flares,” said Shef.

Steffi frowned at the levity. “No. But I had another idea. You know that winter ale and winter wine they make at Stamford, where they steam it off and catch the steam? Well, one of the lads had a bit left and I bought it off him. That burns too, burns pretty well. Solomon came up and told me the Arabs did that too, they call it al-kuhl.”

“The Arabs can always do everything, if you hear them talk. Fly, make lenses, invent algorism, make fire devices, al-kuhl, al-jabr, al-kimiya, al-qili… Thing is, they never seem to do anything with it.” Shef too had listened to Solomon and grown rather tired of it.

“Well, I'd like to get all that stuff, whatever it is, the naphtha and the phosphor and the alcool and all, and the saltpeter, and start mixing it. See what happens. And charcoal too, we all use it, why does it burn better than wood? But most of all I want to see what they've got up there. A fire-mountain, they say. Burning rock. And the smell. Everyone says there's a strange smell comes from the mountain. Sulphur, they call it. But you know something, in the Fens where I come from…”

“Me too,” Shef reminded him.

“…we got this thing they call the will o' the wisp. Fires that light and lead you into the swamp. Comes from dead bodies, they say. Well, that smells too. I'm sure we got this saltpeter at home, in barns and piggeries and what not. Maybe we got this sulphur too. I want to see it. Start putting them together.”

A pillar of fire by night and a cloud of smoke by day. That was what he had been trying to think of. It was something to do with one of Father Andreas's lessons from the Bible. The Children of Israel escaping from bondage? Father Andreas had said it was an image of the Christian soul seeking heaven. Shef did not think the pillar of smoke they were steering for was the Promised Land, somehow. But Steffi did. Maybe Steffi was the one whose opinion would count.

For some time the fleet had been steering for a fishing-boat running easily under its light lateen sail. It had made no attempt to escape them, the word must have got round that the strangers did no harm to the poor, even paid for news. Indeed the boat was heading towards them, had now rounded and lay easily to leeward. Skaldfinn and Solomon were shouting back and forth, calling one of the fishermen on board. Shef waited for a translation to emerge in good time.

It seemed as if he had said something important. Skaldfinn was coming over with a strange expression on his face.

“He says there's a new Pope in Rome, though the old Pope is not dead. More than that: he says the new Pope is a stranger, an alien, a foreigner. He calls him an Anglus. That's when he spat on the deck and Ordlaf hit him.”

“An English Pope?” The word had been heard and was spreading through the crew, with general laughter and derision.

“A little man, not even a priest. The fisherman says he has proclaimed a state of holy war throughout the Empire against all heathen and heretics and unbelievers. Soon, the fisherman says, the Emperor will come with his fleet of fireships and his army of iron men and destroy all those who do not bend the knee to Saint Peter. Then Rome will rule the world.”

Fireships, thought Shef. Maybe they are not so far off after all. Nor is Rome now. He remembered unbidden the map his divine patron had shown him months before: the map that centered on Rome. Rig had told him that at Rome his troubles would cease. He had no wish to go there. Like Guthmund, his thoughts were for home.

“My grandfather Ragnar tried to sack Rome once,” said Svandis. “He sacked the wrong city by mistake, but believed it was Rome because the plunder was so great.”

“If Erkenbert is at Rome preaching holy war and another Crusade, it can only be against us,” said Thorvin slowly. “Better to fight in another man's country than in your own.”

We have not quite three thousand men in the fleet, thought Shef, the Emperor will have many more. But mine are all picked men, crossbows and catapults and flares and even the Greek fire. They want me to fight again. But I have made my peace with Loki, or so I thought. I want to avert Ragnarök, not bring it about.

“Let's hear what Brand has to say,” said Skaldfinn diplomatically.

“All right,” Shef replied. “But keep heading for the fire-mountain, for the Vulcan-isle. We'll anchor off it tonight.”

Shef lay that night in his hammock in the gently-heaving cabin of the Fafnisbane. He felt as he had felt when the decision was taken to come on this journey to the center of the world, that opinion was against him, was pressing on him. He was being manipulated. They wanted him to find and fight the Emperor. He was not going to do it. He was going to go home, set his land in order, wait for fate and death to come to him in their proper season. Svandis, who lay in a hammock touching his, was pregnant with his child, he felt sure. The glow on her face and in her eyes was not merely that of sun and sea-air, it was the glow of new birth. He had seen it on Godive years before. This time he would see the child born and know it was his.

They would try to persuade him otherwise, he knew. Not just men, but gods. He was braced for the dream that would come, and whether it came from the gods, or his own mind, or from the wolf that grew amid the rye, he did not care. The night was his enemy, and he would face it.

The dream began abruptly, directly. A man hurrying through city streets, in the dark. The man was afraid, bitter afraid, and ashamed at the same time. He was afraid of something he had seen done before. He was ashamed not just because he was afraid, but because he had been afraid before, and given in before, and vowed never to do so again—and yet here he was, scuttling through the streets to get into the open country, to lose himself, to change his name. His name was Peter. Peter who had once been Simon.

As he came to the walls of the city tension increased. There was a gate, and inset in the gate a little door, one that could be slipped open without the ponderous process of lifting the great bars and thrusting back the gates on their rollers. The little door was ajar. But where was the sentry? There. Asleep, head thrown back. His spear, the Roman infantry weapon that Shef had held in his hands as the Holy Lance, was propped between his thighs. No one else around, the guard-hut shut and lightless. Creeping forward like a shadow, Peter who had been Simon and longed to be Simon again set hands on the door, inched it open waiting for the betraying creak. None came. He was through, the walls behind him, life and safety ahead of him. Just like me, thought the Shef-mind.

There was a shape in front of him. He had known there would be. A human shape, but round its head a crown of thorns. It moved forward, shedding a pale corpse-light around it. Its eyes looked down on the cringing disciple. “Petre, quo vadis?” it said. Peter, where are you going?

Tell him, the Shef-mind urged. Tell him you're escaping! Tell him he isn't even dead, the whole thing's a mistake, he's alive and well and living with Mary Magdalene in the mountains! Writing a book!

The Peter-figure had fallen back, was returning to the door, shoulders drooped. Going back to the city, to Rome, to arrest and death and crucifixion. He would ask to be crucified upside-down, Shef recalled, as unworthy of the same death as the Savior he had betrayed. That won't work, Shef thought. You can say quo vadis? to me as long as you like.

Another picture, flicked into shape like a screen being thrust in front of the eyes. Another man set on flight, but asleep this time. In his dream he saw, not the Christ-figure of the previous vision but the Peter-figure. But not shamefaced and drooping this time, rather stern, majestic, a grim look in his eyes. He was shouting, though Shef could not hear what he said. In his hand he held a scourge, the monastic disciplina, a whip with many cords and knots tied into every one. He stepped forward, knocked the sleeping man's eidolon down with one bony fist, tore his robe from his back, began to strike again and again with the disciplina, blood springing out as the man rebuked struggled and cried out.

The scene vanished and Shef found himself once more looking into the eyes of his patron. Clever, foxy eyes.

“I don't do that kind of thing,” remarked Rig. “If you want to shirk your duty, go ahead. I will not deceive you into obedience, or beat you into it. I just want you to see what shirking will mean.”

“So show me. You're going to anyway.”

Shef was braced for immediate horror, but it did not come. He saw his own city, his own foundation of Stamford. There was the Wisdom House, there its accumulation of workshops and forges and storehouses. Bigger than he remembered them, older, lichen encrusted on the grey stones. Silently, without explanation, the Wisdom House sprang apart. A flash, a crack that he knew would have been ear-splitting if there had not been some barrier between him and the substance of the dream, a cloud of smoke rising and in the smoke stones arcing up into the sky.

As they came down Shef saw what was going on in the ruins. Soldiers everywhere, wearing white surcoat and red cross: Crusaders, such as King Charles and Pope Nicholas had once brought against him. But these soldiers were not wearing the heavy mail and horsemen's boots of the Frankish knights, or the Emperor's Lanzenritter. They were lightly dressed, moved quickly, carried only long tubes in their hands.

“Freedom for Loki as well as for Thor,” said Rig. “Well and good. But whose side will Loki be on? Or stay on? Naphtha and phosphor, sulphur and saltpeter, alcohol and charcoal. Others besides Steffi can put two and two together. Or one and one and one. In the end Church and Empire united will win. Not in your time. But you will live your life knowing it will happen—and that you could have averted it. I will see to that.”

Shef lay dumb and defiant. “Let me show you some more,” the clever voice continued. “Here is the new city.”

A marvel slowly opened before Shef's closed eyes. A white city, with shining walls, and in the heart of it a cluster of spires reaching towards heaven. On every spire a banner, on every banner a device of holiness: Crossed Keys, Closed Book, Saint Sebastian and his arrows, Saint Lawrence and his gridiron. Beneath the spires, Shef knew, lay a multitude of men whose duty it was to praise the Lord and study the Bible. It was not his Bible, but the yearning for such a life, of contemplation and study, of peace and tranquility, swept over him like hunger. Tears began to spill from his shut eyelids, at what he did not have.

“Look closer,” said the voice.

In the lecture-rooms stood men reading from their books. The students listened. They wrote nothing. Their duty was to remember. As the lectures finished the lecturers went to a central room, handed over their books. They were counted, checked against a list, placed in an iron chest, the key turned. Safely stored, till next time. In the whole city no man owned a book for himself alone. No man wrote a new word, or thought a new thought. The smiths beat out what they were told to, as their ancestors had done before them. The itch Shef so often felt, to hold a hammer, to beat out an answer for a question in his brain: that itch would remain unappeased for ever.

“It is the Skuld-world,” said Rig. “Where Loki is freed at last to serve the Church, and then cast into ever stricter bonds, till he too withers away from starvation. And the world remains the same, from one eon to the next. Ever-holy, never-changing. Every book become a Bible. Your monument, your legacy.

“And if I fight?” asked Shef. “Will Loki be with me instead? Will he weep for Balder and release his brother from Hel? What will that look like?”

In an instant the limited sight of a single city faded, expanded to become an image of the Nine Worlds of which Middle-earth is only one. Shef could see the dark-elves below the earth and the light-elves above it, could see Bifrost bridge that leads to Asgarth and the Giallar-bridge that takes the souls down to Hel. All was—not dark, but weathered, stained somehow, as if all seen through a dusty glass. Somewhere deep down Shef could hear a massive creaking, a noise of rusty machinery forced open, forced into life.

It was the Grind opening. The Grind-gate that separates the dead from the living, the metal lattice through which Shef had once seen the shapes of the child and the women whose bane he had been. Through which the slave-woman Edtheow had urged him to go on. The Grind was opening for Balder. And not just Balder. Once it was open, Shef knew, the souls might come back. Be born again in their descendants, live the happy lives that had been robbed from them. The slave-girls he had found in the old king's mound, buried alive with their backs broken. The old woman whose death he had once shared, as she strove above all to die unnoticed. Edtheow who had died in the wolf-waste, and the poor slave dying of cancer in the Norse village far from her home. Cuthred. Karli. The child Harold.

As the gate opened something leaked from it. Not light, not color, but something that seemed to wipe the dust away, to restore to the world the light and the color that it should have had. There was a noise inside, a noise of laughter and a great clear voice calling others to share new life with him. Balder the Beautiful. Coming to make the new world, the new world that should always have been, Shef was aware from the corner of one eye that all the Asgarth gods were staring at him, Thor with his red beard and fierce face, Othin with the face like a calving glacier. And standing next to Othin, Loki the traitor-god, the exile-god, now standing once again next to his father. Waiting for his brother to be released from Hel. Released by a victory. And by a sacrifice.

Shef was awake once more and lying in his hammock, tears still wet on his face. He did not come round with the familiar heart-wrenching shock and outcry, rather with one deep indrawn breath. I'll have to do it, he thought. There are too many lives on my soul already. To have them out, to give them another chance. Not much chance for me, though. Will I be released as well? Or am I the sacrifice for the others? He put a hand out, rested it on Svandis's warm hip. That is what I am giving up. In the dark night he knew with complete certainty that no-one would make the sacrifice for him, remembered with wry fellow-feeling the cry he had once heard from Christ on his cross: Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani.

My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?