King and Emperor

Chapter Thirty-one

Tolman was signaling frantically from the end of his five-hundred-foot line. Closing warily on Ostia, the port of Rome, in double line abreast, the Wayman fleet had developed the habit of keeping a kite always aloft and floating out to leeward. The hundred yards of extra height that Tolman had at the end of his line increased his horizon by miles, gave them needed reassurance. No one had managed however to work out a way by which Tolman could pass on what he saw, other than by waving colored cloth—white for any sail, blue for land, red for danger. Specifically, for the red galleys and the Greek fire. It was red this time.

The winchmen were hauling him in already, with no need for the order. No need to bring him all the way in, he would go aloft again as soon as he had spoken. Barely fifty feet above the Fafnisbane, the kiteboy hung in the wind, a stiff one-reef breeze with a hint of oncoming chill about it.

“The galleys!” he shouted.

“Where?”

“In the harbor. In a long line, other side of the right-hand harbor-wall. Moored.”

“How many of them?”

“All of them.”

Shef waved a hand, the kitemen reeled out, sent Tolman slanting back to his position. Shef looked round, calculated the distance to the wall that marked the entrance to the harbor of Ostia. Two miles, he thought. They were making seven knots by Ordlaf's log-line. Would that give the galleys time to man the oars, light their braziers, steer to meet him? If every man was ready in place already and they had seen him at the same time as Tolman saw them. He thought not. Shef looked at Hagbarth and Ordlaf waiting for orders in his own ship, looked across at Hardred in the Wada leading the parallel column fifty yards to windward, and pointed firmly to the harbor-mouth. The galleys had caught him by surprise once, in the open sea. Now he would reverse the roles.

As they raced in under sail, the ships shook into their attack formation. The mule-carriers in the lead, in a single file as close as seamanship could make it, the longships to the left of the line and to windward. If Shef had misjudged and the enemy met them with streams of fire, then the Vikings at least ought to be able to turn and escape. But the mules should have done the business before that was necessary.

“Wind Tolman in,” Shef ordered as the harbor-mouth opened up in front of them. Tolman was still pointing firmly to the right, relieving Shef of the fear of sudden attack from an unexpected quarter. Cwicca in the forward mule-emplacement was behind the sights, training his weapon round with every heave of the bows, keeping it fixed on the very lip of the harbor-wall. What was on the other side? A galley already heading for them? If there were, she would be sunk in moments. Her fire could be launched in less than moments. As the wall came up, close enough now to be reached by a stone-throw, Shef left his place by the steering-oar and walked forward to the mule-platform in the prow. If the fire was there, the king must face it first.

As the Fafnisbane's bow nudged through the fifty-yard gap Shef saw Cwicca drop his hand. The release-man jerked the lanyard, the mule-arm smashed up, as always too fast to see, the sling on its end whirling round like a demented bowler. Shef heard a crash of timber, waited for agonizing moments as the Fafnisbane cruised on and brought the inner wall of the harbor into his vision. Then, relief like cold water. The nearest galley was thirty yards away, still moored bow and stern. There were men aboard her, and arrows flicked from her as he watched, zipping into planking, one into a shield hastily thrust in front of him. But no smoke, no roaring of bellows. They had been taken by surprise.

The first galley was already settling by the head, moored as she was, prow and keel broken by the first mule-stone. Shef ran back hastily to the stern platform, pointed out the second ship, ordered Osmod to hold his release till the widening angle gave him a clean shot. As ship after ship of the Wayman fleet poured through the harbor entrance, they swung into a long curving line, headed by Fafnisbane and Wada, and poured a rain of mule-stones on to the galleys lined up as if for target-practice against the wall, just beyond weak arrow-shot.

Shef let them shoot on and on till his enemies were all but kindling wood, prows and sterns dangling from the mooring ropes but between them more smashed planking, with here and there a glint of copper. There was no resistance from the galleys. Shef saw men running from them—astonishingly few, he judged. Such opposition as there was came from Steffi, who seized his king's arm again and again, begging for the stones to stop, for permission to take a party ashore and seize the siphons and fuel-tanks of the enemy. Shef shook him off absently each time like a heifer shrugging off a horsefly. It was beginning to look as if the enemy fleet had simply not been manned. But he would take no risks for Steffi's curiosity.

He raised both hands finally in the “Cease shooting” order, turned to Ordlaf. “We'll moor over there, by the wall, where it's clear. Four ships abreast. Then we can start getting the men and the supplies off. Well, Steffi?”

Steffi's eyes were genuinely full of tears, he was begging now, imploring. “Only twenty men, lord king, twenty men for the time it'll take to moor and unload. That's all I ask. They're sunk now, but there may be something we can salvage, one tank of oil full and not split by those stones, that would do for me.”

A memory came back to Shef of himself on the walls of York, begging Brand in similar style for twenty men to retrieve a catapult, to see how it worked. Brand had refused him, ordered him to join in the sack of the city instead. There had been no sack, but now he was the incurious one, fixed on his own purposes.

“Twenty men,” he agreed. “But have them ready to march as soon as the others.”

Farman was by his side, eyes wide and unblinking as if he saw something far off. “Will you take every man with you?” he asked.

“I will leave a guard on the ships, naturally.”

“I will stay with them, then,” said the seer. “You have men of war enough.”

No time to argue or enquire. Shef nodded agreement, turned his attention to the problem of getting his army ashore and his fleet secured. There seemed to be almost no-one at Ostia, certainly no hint of resistance. The few Greeks that had been with the fleet had fled. Shef removed the gold bracelets from one arm, held them temptingly in his hand, called Cwicca and three crossbows up as bodyguards, and walked towards the nearest huddle of huts by the dockside. Surely greed would bring him news. Not that he needed to know much about his goal. This was Ostia, and fifteen miles off was Rome. Reach it, sack it, kill the English Pope. Even trying to do that would bring down on him the Emperor, and then their long dispute would be settled. The strange thing was that Shef could not bring his imagination to think of the charismatic Bruno losing. Perhaps he was already fey, as the English said, already gripped by the paralysis of approaching death. He walked towards the huts, waving the gold and a plucked-up weed in sign of peace.

The Emperor of the Romans received the news of his ally's fleet's destruction in a Rome bearing the marks of his own heavy hand. Smoke rose in a plume into the sky behind the Capitoline Hill, was blown away on the rising wind. Bodies lay unburied in the streets: the loafers and gutter-rats of Rome had been able to put up little resistance to his heavy-armed troopers. They had their bludgeons and cobblestones and cart-barricades, and they had tried, defending their Pope against an alien interloper, and they had paid the price. Neither the City nor the Church of Rome had gained anything so far from the Emperor of Rome sworn to their protection.

Just for the time being, thought Bruno. “Cheer up, man,” he added to the Greek admiral Georgios as he saw the latter's stunned expression. “Time to rebuild your fleet this winter. Your Emperor will not lose by it, you have my word.”

Cheer up? thought Georgios. All my galleys sunk in one morning, destroyed like so many Arab fleets. My marines committed to street-fighting against guttersnipes for an alien Emperor. And the secret of the Greek fire—surely that is not lost. Yet it might be. The man is mad.

The best of his advisers looked thoughtful, Bruno realized. For Georgios there might be reason enough. But Agilulf too… His spirits rose in perverse opposition to their mood.

“All right,” he said. “They caught us unawares down at Ostia. We are still having a little trouble with the city scum. Pope John keeps escaping my hand. Now, listen. None of that matters. Does it, Erkenbert, Your Holiness? Remember what Arno the chaplain used to say. You have to find the Schwerpunkt in any campaign, the bit that is important. There is only one thing important here, only one thing that has ever been important now that we have the Grail. That is to defeat my enemy the One King once and for all. If we do that, everything becomes easy. The city will be under control in a week. John will be brought in by some traitor. The fleet can be rebuilt. But if we don't do it…”

“All the others will be on our backs,” summed up Agilulf, “and we will fall apart too.” He said the last words with a sideways squint at Georgios. Agilulf had not forgotten who had lashed him and his men with fire, nor believed Georgios's explanation of an unfortunate accident.

“But we will do it,” said Erkenbert. Pope Peter II, as he now styled himself. He had not yet shed his faded black robe, traded it for Papal robes. The true regalia had not been recovered, nor had his accession to the apostolic throne been anything but a rushed and irregular affair, attended by a bare third of the College of Cardinals. Yet the Emperor was right. The Cardinals could be convened again, the regalia recovered or remade. Given victory.

“I am ready to put the papacy aside and return to my duties as comrade in the army of the Emperor,” Erkenbert went on. “War-wolf's successors are ready. They will take the field as soon as ordered.”

“How can we use a siege-train against a marching army?” asked Agilulf.

“Who knows?” replied the Emperor. “We are not facing an ordinary man, never forget that, any of you. He has tricked every enemy he has faced. Tricked me, even. But he did not trick me out of the Grail, in the end. We must be as tricky as he is. Thank you, Your Holiness. If every man in my army had your heart, victory would be assured.”

“Victory is assured,” said Erkenbert. “In hoc signo vinces, in this sign you will conquer.” Through the broken window of the plundered villa he pointed to the banner with its device of the graduale worked on it, planted above the golden reliquary that now housed the Grail itself. Four Ritters stood forever around it, fully armed, swords drawn, emblems of the new Church Militant and the Donation of Peter.

That is the enemy's sign too, thought Agilulf. Two sides with the same sign. Two clever leaders. Two, maybe three thousand real men on each side, and God knows how many dross as well on ours. This is a battle it will take very little to decide.

The Wayman army tramped steadily along the great stone road that led from the port to the City of Rome itself, center of the world. The men's cries of mirth and astonishment had died as the march continued, their spirits dashed by the immense size of the stone blocks that lined the road, the stone houses on every hillside, the air that the country wore of great age and strength long gone by. They had seen Stamford, and it was a mere village in comparison. They had seen Cordova too, and it was no village but a metropolis that dwarfed even Rome for numbers and trade and wealth. Cordova, though, had been a village while Rome ruled the world. There was a sense that every spade turned in this land would bring up the dust of greatness.

The men were bunching in their nervousness, Shef thought. He had sent a hundred Vikings forward under Guthmund, always eager to be first to any chance of loot. He had meant them to keep off the road, investigate the side ways for ambush. There were too many hedges, too many walls. In the strong sunlight they had reverted to the middle of the road, were walking along in an armed gaggle a mere hundred yards before the crossbows escorting his catapult-train. When the sun had moved another hand's breadth he would call a rest halt, change the formation.

On the hill to his right, trumpets blew. Others answered from the left. An ambush, on the long winding trail of men and machines? He hoped so. Any ambush from the flanks would have to cross furlongs of rough ground under five hundred ready crossbows.

The light horsemen burst instead from an olive grove a bare fifty yards in front of the Viking advance guard. Shef had barely time to see them, to note the wide-brimmed hats, the long ten-foot goads of the Camargue cowboys, dragged from home by the Emperor's edict, when the goads dropped from the vertical to the charge, and all vanished in an instant pall of dust.

The Vikings were surprised but not dismayed. In instants swords were drawn, axes shifted to the striking hand. Automatically the loose straggle of the march shifted to a narrow front of raised shields and poised javelins. The cowboys made no effort to charge home but swerved and pounded down each flank. From the column of barebacked horses the goads darted, flicking at face or throat. Men screamed, reeled back into their messmates. The two columns of horses swerved round behind the footmen in a bewildering criss-cross, darted back, goads stabbing again at the weak points in the shaken line, at men still facing the wrong way, shaking their weapons and crying their war-cries to defy an enemy to stand foot to foot.

Crossbowmen had cocked their weapons, were running forward to find a place to shoot, running forward further in the hope of getting through the dust. Shef saw one kneel, take careful aim at a horseman curvetting twenty yards in front of him. The horseman slipped from his seat—he had no saddle—hung to the other side of his horse by mane and ankle. As the crossbowman shifted aim to bring down horse if not rider, another screaming Centaur burst from the dust, speared him between the shoulders, dipped the goad to clear the point and swept away, clearing a wall like a hunted stag and disappearing among the trees.

The trumpets blared again from either side, and men faced hastily in all directions. Nothing happened. Through the silence Shef could hear the wheezing noise of a man speared through the lungs. The dust settled on bodies lying in the road. Not many, a dozen, and as many more with their mates bending over them assessing the depth of a thrust. No sign of the enemy. Not a man or a horse left behind, and hardly a bolt shot at them or a blow struck. They could do it again any time. Shef began to shout orders to rally and re-organize his formations.

A long, hot delay on the dusty road while the wounded were loaded onto mules or carts, and the column began to move forward again. Shef had thought a little harder about the ambush problem. He had eight hundred crossbows, mixed in with another three hundred English halberdiers as close support, more trusted by the crossbowmen than their Viking allies. There were perhaps a thousand of the Vikings, heavy infantry of the sort that had decided so many battlefields before the coming of the Way to England. All the mules had been left aboard ship, their ton-and-a-quarter weight making Shef reluctant to move them unknown distances. Instead a dozen of the torsion dart-throwers, the weapons the Waymen called twist-shooters, trundled along behind their mule pairs, crews marching alongside. And then there was Steffi's gang. Shef was no longer sure what they had with them, for they seemed to have become more and more secretive with the establishment of their own pendant and trade. They certainly had half a dozen catapults of the old lobbing traction type, knocked down into beams and rope for easy transport. No use on the march, but they had to be protected just the same.

The column moved forward now with a solid body of crossbowmen at the front, interspersed with halberdiers. More crossbows moved to the flanks, causing continual halts as they negotiated the walls of private villas and the gullies that occasionally ran in culverts under the stone road. In the center of the column, marching rather sullenly under the unwonted slur of needing protection, the Viking sword- and axe-men straggled along either side of the mule-train. If the cowboys came again, Shef reckoned, the crossbows would empty a few saddles as they charged and many more as they retreated. The halberds would hold off light horse, at least.

The cowboys did not come again. The column breasted a slight slope, began to move down at a quicker pace: and there, in the middle distance, Shef saw the shining walls of the Eternal City, a cluster of hills seemingly covered with stone buildings, spires and domes catching the sun. As he gaped into the distance, his eye caught the sudden, familiar, rising and falling streak of an onager stone. No time to guess where it was going. Shef threw himself instantly sideways off the road, rolling painfully on stone, straightening up on bleeding knees to see where the stone had gone. A puff of dust still hanging in the air thirty yards ahead of him, stone chips flying where the rock had broken up on the stone surface of the road. But in front of it, a lane beaten through the marching crossbows, five deep, men lying to either side of it, one struggling to look down at a caved-in chest which would kill him in moments. As the survivors stared in shock at the men smashed down, Shef saw another lane open, and another, men going down like stalks before the sickle. And still they were staring around, some of them cocking crossbows uncertainly against an unseen foe. Shef ran towards them, shrieking at them to spread out, move off the road, lie down, get behind walls. As they did so another flying twenty-pound rock shattered the road surface, sending splinters flying. Twenty, thirty men down already and still no-one had seen the enemy. But there they were, Shef could see the battery set up half a mile off on the side of the hill, the men moving unconcernedly round their machines, winding ropes and training round. They would shoot again in a moment. Shef ducked as another boulder hummed by, pitched well up this time. Behind him the mule teams were scattering off the road, Vikings were crouched in undignified positions behind trees and walls.

There they were all right. Shef focused his far-seer, caught a clear image of the men round the machines. He could not see Erkenbert, as he had half-expected. But he must have trained many men by now to take his place. How to get to them? His only weapons with the range to reach them were the twist-shooters. They would do, better against men than against machines. Shef shouted back, saw the catapult-teams unharness the mules, run their weapons, round, start the slow business of winding and aiming. And while they were doing that… As stones hummed over his head, the onagers concentrating now on the dart-throwers, Shef ran forward to his shaken crossbows, shouting.

For long moments they would not move, obeying the instinctive fear of missiles flying from a distance. Get down, don't move, crawl away. Shef shouted, kicked a man to his feet, appealed to their honor and their pride. The sight of one man on his feet without being instantly knocked down restored some sense, reminded them of the mules' doubtful accuracy against single person targets. In a shambling run the crossbows began to move forward. Shef shouted at them not to keep running. Run ten steps, twenty, get down while another ran, when he took cover run forward again. Don't run straight. Make it impossible for anyone to take a steady aim.

From the hillside to one side of the onagers, Erkenbert and his Emperor watched the hastily-organized attack. To them it looked as if the slope facing them was covered with swarming ants, no one of them moving steadily onward, but the whole mass continually edging closer. Meanwhile the missiles of the catapults flew backward and forward. One of Erkenbert's crew was hurled backwards, spine shattered by the five-foot flying dart. A twist-thrower, hit square on by a mule-stone, flew to pieces, its overwound ropes lashing at arms and faces.

“I saw him there for a moment or two,” commented Bruno. “Pity he didn't stand long enough for your men to get a shot at him. That would settle this immediately.”

“As would your death,” replied Erkenbert.

“He hasn't even seen me yet.”

Crossbow bolts at extreme range were beginning to clatter among the rocks round the onager battery. The winders were flinching, looking behind them. No way to hitch up a ton-weight onager and drive it out of trouble, Shef thought, not in a hurry. If he pressed on he could capture the whole battery, maybe they had not expected instant attack.

Or maybe they had. They had determined everything else about this battle so far. With a fear so deep it was like a spasm in his breast, Shef remembered King Charles the Bald and how he had pressed on and on in an attempt to capture machines temptingly waved in front of him. Now he was doing the same. But it was his enemy, this time, who knew the ground and had a plan, he who was thrusting forward confident in superior weaponry.

“Hold it,” he shouted, “steady, close up and shoot. Stop running!” His voice reached only those nearest to him, the rest saw their enemies wavering, rushed on to close with them and take revenge for their fear.

“That'll do,” remarked Bruno, and nodded to his trumpeter. Out of the dead ground between crossbows and onagers, from behind olive groves and villa walls, came the heavy horse which were the glory of the Imperial army, mail gleaming, steel hooves striking sparks from the stone, lance-points lowered. Each group drove straight for their enemies, making no attempt to form a concerted line. Their charge came home from no more than fifty yards, five terrified heartbeats to an unarmored man charged by war-stallions.

Shef, a little behind the rashest of the crossbows, saw them stop, hesitate, and then almost to a man turn and run, leaping from side to side on the stony hillside to avoid the lances behind them. One man dropped to one knee, swung up his crossbow. As he pulled trigger a lance struck him, lifted him off the ground, the bolt flying straight up in the sky. The lancers came on with the skill of men in the saddle from childhood, lances driving, then as they broke or remained fixed in sprawling bodies, whirling broadswords from the scabbards on their saddles. Shef realized suddenly that one rider had singled him out as a target. Their eyes met, and then the horse was leaping towards him, foam flecking its muzzle as the rider drove home the long spiked spurs. Shef groped for a crossbow, reached towards his belt, realized that he was once again unarmed except for a belt-knife. Running was a disgrace, he would be hacked down from behind, a laughingstock to the future. Try to dodge the blow?

An arm thrust him stumbling aside, a broad metal-clad back filled his view. It was Styrr, run gasping up in the heat from the Viking column behind. The Frank—he did not wear the Lance of a Lanzenritter on his shield—swerved his charger with knee-pressure alone to pass Styrr on his right, sword high for the downstroke. As he did so Styrr's own right arm swung with terrible force, the axe-blow with all a man's weight concentrated and flung with hatred behind the iron head. Aimed at the horse—not the rider. The chunk of cleaver on butcher's block and the lancer was falling forwards over his horse's head, rolling in a ball and coming up at Shef's very feet. Without thought Shef hit him with clenched fist on the side of the jaw, as the long-dead Karli had shown him in the swamps of the Ditmarsh. As the lancer staggered back Styrr freed a blade, stabbed him in the back of the neck, turned instantly to face any new foe.

The hillside was clear again, horsemen vanished as if they had been sorcerers' illusions. Back into cover. As Shef looked around to see what had happened an onager stone passed his head so close the displaced air snapped his neck back. All too fast, he thought dazedly. Before one thing's settled another's started.

Styrr grunted as he tried to free his axe from where it was buried deep in the war-horse's skull, grunted again, worked a corner free and dragged it loose. He looked at the blade with concern, then grinned.

“Never done that before,” he said. “What's next?” The Vikings, Shef remembered, could be beaten but never panicked. He looked round, began once more to call out orders. One thing was clear. He would advance no further into a maze of traps. The question was, could he now disengage?