King and Emperor

Chapter Four

Ghaniya, half-brother to the Caliph of Cordova, well understood the importance of his mission to the North, to the savage, half-naked, fire-worshiping majus, the devil-people, as he thought of them. That did not prevent him from hating every moment of it. He was a man of certain and unquestioned loyalty. If he had not been, of course, he would not have survived his brother's succession to the divan, the cushioned throne of Cordova. His brother might be called, in honor of his great ancestor, Abd er-Rahman, the Servant of the Compassionate One, but there was no compassion in his nature. When he succeeded to his father, the sword and the bowstring had been busy. The male children of his father's harem had been considered carefully and attentively. The children of true Arabs, descendants of the Quraysh, had died soon: they might have been centers for future rebellion. The descendants of Christian slave-women had died also, if they seemed unusable: some of the best had been given posts in exile, under supervision, often on the frontier against the feeble Christian princedoms and dukedoms of the mountainous North of Spain. Ghaniya, however, had been the son of a Berber woman. His blood not pure enough to attract supporters, yet he was the child of no mustarib either, no would-be-Arab, as they contemptuously called the children of Christians who had converted to Islam for food, or advancement.

Ghaniya knew he was good enough to be used. Not good enough to be feared. It satisfied his ambition, at least for the time. He had no intention of risking once again the leather carpet that stood before the divan, with by it the giant slaves with their scimitars forever drawn.

It was a good sign also that he had been sent on this mission. He knew how seriously his half-brother took it, as he had taken the news from Mallorca and from Sicily. Not that a Caliph of Cordova could fear the activities of the Christians, whether Greek or Frank. The city of Cordova in the year 875 had fully half a million inhabitants: more than the villages of Rome and Byzantium and all the capitals of all the Franks put together. Every day three thousand minarets called the faithful to prayer. Every day a thousand carts rolled into the city with food for the citizens, drawn from the immensely fertile valley of the Guadalquivir, and all of Andalusia beyond it. The Christians could not reach Cordova if all the Faithful did was merely to stand before them to block their way.

And yet er-Rahman his brother had listened with great care to the account of Mu'atiyah, the pupil of bin-Firnas: as he had also to the reports of his merchants returning from Egypt and reporting on the panic and fear among the Tulunids there. He had condescended even to explain his thoughts to his half-brother.

“We need the islands,” he had said. “They guard our traders, they guard our shores. Also,” he went on, “a caliph must think of the future. For many years we have pressed back the unbelievers, from the day our ancestor landed on the shore at Jeb el-Tarik, and told his men the sea was behind them and the enemy in front, and there was nothing for them but victory or death. Now we come upon a check. Is it a check, or is it the moment when the balance tilts?” Er-Rahman, knowing only a tideless sea, had no idea of the image of the tide turning, but if he had he would have used it. “If our enemies even think the balance is tilting,” he concluded, “they will gain heart. We must thrust them back once more.

“And another thing. We have always known the Christians our inferiors in all the arts of civilization. Where have they such a man as bin-Firnas”—he stretched a hand to his listening pupil—“and yet now they come on our shores with weapons we cannot match. We must know more. Our enemies will not tell us. Yet our enemies have enemies too, or so we hear. The news came years ago of the defeat of a great host of the ferengis, the Franks, at the hands of those who were not Christians. Seek them out, my brother. Find what they know. Bring us help, or knowledge. Take with you the pupil of bin-Firnas, to report on whatever mechanic arts the savages have been able to learn.”

He had waved a hand. And by doing so he had sent Ghaniya with his guards and his companions, and his adviser the pupil of bin-Firnas, on this terrible expedition into the land of everlasting wind and cold.

It had begun ill, with the ship they had taken from the port of Malaga pronounced useless as soon as they were through the straits of Jeb el-Tarik themselves. The sea grew fiercer, the wind stronger, the rowers made no progress against the current sweeping in from the ocean to the central sea of the world, the Mediterranean. Ghaniya had transferred at Cadiz to a different vessel, a ship with sails, captained and crewed by men who showed the blood of the Christians in their faces and their actions. They had been willing enough to sail north, for gold, and their families remained as hostages for their loyalty. Yet Ghaniya had doubts about their respect from the start.

Even his pork-eating crewmen had fallen silent, though, as they pressed further into the cold seas of the North. As they approached what they had heard should be their goal, the port of Lon ed-Din, gray shores beginning to show on either hand, a strange craft had sheered up to them out of the everlasting squalls of rain. A ship twice the size of theirs, with two masts made from tree-trunks, and sails towering up to the sky. High castles stood on poop and bow, with great machines on them and fierce bearded faces glowering over iron plates. The ship had not closed up, merely pulled alongside, and with deliberate routine launched a great rock into the sea ten yards ahead of Ghaniya's own bow. A long shouted exchange in some unknown language like the barking of dogs: then the ship had shifted its sails and swept leisurely away.

“They say go ahead,” the mustarib skipper translated. “They wanted to be sure only that we were not servants of the Franks, of the Empire with whom they are at eternal war.”

A good sign, Ghaniya had tried to think. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and these are enemies of the Franks, true enough. Yet he had not liked the careless ease with which a ship of Cordova had been weighed and dismissed. Nor had he liked the strange sight of the ship. Even the supercilious Mu'atiyah, he noticed, had stood gaping after it for too long.

Shef's shipwrights had had several years of peace in which to discard or perfect the desperate makeshifts of the 860s. Prodded on by their king, and by the expert advisers of the Way, Hagbarth priest of Njörth prominent among them, they had come up with new designs taking up the best features and solving the problems of the old. The idea of the catapult-mounting battleship had stayed, much improved by the ring mounting devised by steelmaster Udd. The problem of weight high up had been solved by broadening and ballasting the hull. The terrible sluggishness of Shef's first “Shire” class of battleships had been solved in part by developing and extending the two-mast design. The doubled sail area had meant that the fisherman's idea of the slanted and extended sail could be dropped. There were still problems, as Shef's skippers reported, sailing before the wind, for the rear sail robbed the wind of the foresail. If they could, such ships would always sail with wind on the beam. Some skippers were experimenting with a small extra sail on a topmast above the foremast, keeping half a dozen lithe lightweight boys in their crew to shin up and reef the sail when needed. Yet meanwhile one problem remained, which Brand at least had thought insoluble: weakness in the keel, now larger than any single tree-trunk could furnish.

Steelmaster Udd had dealt with that by insisting that metal could do what wood could not. Weak keels needed more bracing, that was all. In the end a combined system of bronze bolts—for even Udd had had to admit that salt water was death to the strongest steel—and massive riveted wooden ribs had strengthened the combination keels even to Atlantic levels. At last seaworthy, decked all over, mounting swiveling onagers fore and aft, with heavy crossbows lining each gunwale, the new ships of the navy of the co-kings had immediately closed the English Channel to all ships without their majesties' license. Trade from Frisia to the Loire moved only on their sufferance. Tolls on trade paid the ships' crews. And without a Viking ship at sea from end to end of the Atlantic coast, trade doubled and redoubled. The Andalusian ship, rowing slowly in the end into the port of London, found a scene of activity that might almost have been the Guadalquivir, for business if not in sheer population.

At least they had had no trouble in gaining attention. As soon as the port-reeve who came aboard had grasped that these men sought audience with his master, and that they could pay in bright gold dirhams, he had provided the embassy with horses—poor scrubs of animals, Ghaniya noticed with contempt and a certain relief—with a guide and escort, and set them firmly on their way up the road that led North to the king's capital of Stamford.

As the party rode on, Ghaniya's anxiety nevertheless increased. To a son of the Quraysh, nothing that barbarians did could seem wholly admirable, but Ghaniya was intelligent enough to read the signs. He would not exchange his own cotton for the animal fabrics that the natives wore. Yet he could feel soon enough how inadequate his cotton was for the continuous winds and the everlasting rain. He saw, too, how the mere peasants laboring in the fields did so in stout wool. The food they ate was such as the dogs of Cordova would turn from in disgust, black bread and pigs' fat, soured cows' milk and sharp biting vegetables that filled the breath. Yet they seemed to have plenty of it. He saw no pinched faces, no hands outstretched for alms.

By the side of the road, too, again and again he saw the wheels turning. The first two or three he came to, he turned from with a smile of patronage on his face. They were like the norias of his homeland, only the unfortunate barbarians used them not to lift water but to grind their corn; and they did so by putting the wheels in the slow-moving water and taking what force they could get from that. The fourth mill they saw, however, turned Ghaniya's smile to a frown. Here the natives had realized their error, had taken advantage of a slope to direct the water-channel above the wheel, so that it was driven by the full weight of falling water, not flowing water. And from inside the mill came not the harsh grinding of the corn-mill but the continuous Iblis-clash of a triphammer forging iron. It was not a thought Ghaniya could readily frame, but at the back of his mind lurked the suspicion that while the barbarians had clearly been no better than he thought them a short while ago, in a few years they seemed to have made more changes than had taken place under as many caliphs as could be remembered.

Nor did Ghaniya like the stories passed on to him about the strange king responsible for all this. It was good that he was no Christian. It was acceptable that he did not persecute Christians: no more did the great er-Rahman himself, preferring to tax them instead as he could not tax believers. It was impossible that any should believe that he was the Son of God, another Yeshua returned. Even worse, it might be, that he was not the son of the One God in whom Christian and Moslem alike believed, but of some barbarian godlet, one among many. Ghaniya felt the horror of the monotheist for the idol-worshiper.

Tempered still with fear: one day on the road they had heard terrible screeching coming towards them, and then seen on the road five hundred men marching together, bagpipers at their head and the banner floating over them of the smith's hammer. No Christian cross with it, for these were men of the Way, their alliance with the Christian Alfred no longer signaled. Ghaniya, drawing his horse aside, had marked their weapons: the usual metal-clad foot-soldiers of the ferengis, strong men with swords and axes, but pitifully slow to move, but with them others, small men mostly with strange heavy bows over their shoulders, and trailing the column a dozen contrivances pulled by mules, objects of rope and wood. Dart-throwers, his guide declared, or stone-throwers, catapults that could batter down any wall, pierce any armor or shielding. Ghaniya scowled most of all at the cheerful faces and the constant chatter from the marching men. These men possessed something he understood: iqbal, the expectation of success that breeds success.

And yet when he came to the town they called the capital, Ghaniya felt his sense of disdain and superiority rise again like the flesh of a caliph in his harem. The town would not have ranked as a suburb of Cordova. Its stone tower was new and well-made, but low and single. The marketplace itself had fewer men in it than a courtyard of his master. From one end of the town he could see the other! Instead of the crowd of suppliants being ranked and listed by chamberlains, one man came out to meet them, and made no pretense that his master was too busy to receive any visitor. Surely the master of such a place could feel only honor at being offered an alliance with the Caliph of Cordova, Successor of the Prophet, Deputy of Allah on Earth!

Ghaniya felt confidence again as he prepared for his audience with the master of the men and of the ships. He must impress them, he reflected, with his own wealth and with the learning of Mu'atiyah, neither of which, he was sure, the barbarians could match. It troubled him only that in this far land he must rely, for a translator, on the skills of Suleiman the Jew.

“What's a Jew?” muttered Shef out of the corner of his mouth. The embassy of strangers stood in front of him in his great chamber of audience, one of their party—not the leader, but the spokesman—standing in front of the others. He had just introduced himself, but the word he used meant nothing to Shef.

The advisers who stood behind him conferred briefly. Then, as Shef's own translator Father Boniface began again to put the other's credentials into English, Skaldfinn priest of Heimdall stepped forward. A linguist and interpreter, he knew all there was to be known in the North about foreign peoples.

“The Jews are the people from the East who crucified the Christian god,” he said. “Apparently there are still some of them left.”

“It was the Romans who crucified Christ,” said Shef. “German soldiers from a Roman legion.” He spoke with flat certainty, as if he had seen the event himself.

“The Christians prefer to blame the Jews.”

“And these other folk, the ones in long thin robes. What do they believe?”

“We call them Mohammedans. They believe in a prophet who arose some time before ours. Their God and the Christian God seem much the same, but they do not believe in the Christ as divine, and the Christians will not accept their prophet even as a prophet. There is always war between the Mohammedan kingdoms and the Christian ones. Yet the Mohammedans accept Christian subjects, and Jewish subjects, and treat them fairly.”

“Like us, then.”

“Yes: except—”

“Except what?” Shef was still listening with half an ear to Boniface's long translation of what seemed the Jewish spokesman's excessively flowery string of opening compliments.

“Except that they regard all three, Mohammedan, Jew and Christian, as ‘People of the Book.’ They do not regard any others as sharing the same God, as these three religions do, even if they have different beliefs.”

Shef pondered for a while as the double translation wandered on, the Arabic of Ghaniya heard and put into a kind of Latin by Suleiman the Jew; the Latin heard and put into the Norse-English dialect of Shef's court by Boniface. Eventually he raised a hand. The translation stopped at once.

“Tell him, Boniface, that I am told they do not consider us to be People of the Book. Now, Thorvin, show him one of our books. Show him your book of holy poems, written all in runes. Boniface, ask whether he will not say that we too are people of a book.”

Ghaniya stroked his beard as the big man in white with a hammer in his belt came towards him, holding out a volume of some kind. He let Suleiman take it in case there was some sort of defilement lurking in it.

“What is it made of?” he muttered in Arabic.

“They say it is the skin of calves.”

“Not pigs, then, praise Allah. They have no paper, then?”

“No. Neither paper nor scrolls.”

Both men looked at the writing without comprehension. Suleiman peered closer.

“See, lord, there are no curves anywhere in this script. It is all straight lines. I think they have taken some system they have for scratching marks on wood with a knife, and made it into a kind of writing.”

Shef's one sharp eye saw the very faint curl of contempt on Ghaniya's lip, and remarked to the men behind him, “They are not impressed. See, the spokesman will praise it politely and not answer our question.”

“The emissary of the Caliph sees your book,” tried Suleiman manfully, “and admires your penmanship. If you have no artisans skilled in the making of paper, he will send instruction. We too did not understand that art till it was shown to us by captives from a far Empire, whom we defeated in battle many years ago.”

Suleiman found no Latin word for “paper” other than papyrium, papyrus, known to Boniface already, though he used “vellum?” By the time translation reached Shef it had become “calf-hide,” neither new nor interesting.

“Accept his offer politely and ask what brings him here.”

All the advisers, English and Norse, Christians and Way-men alike, listened attentively as the story rolled out, of attacks on one island after another, of the Greek fleet and the Frankish soldiers, of the iron men and the Greek fire. As Suleiman reached the last point, Shef intervened again to ask if there was anyone in the embassy who had seen it for himself. Their group parted and a young man was urged forward: a young man with the dark aquiline face of his leader, but on it, Shef could only say, an expression of smug superiority he was not diplomat enough to conceal.

Slowly the young man was led through his tale.

“You have sharp eyes,” said Shef at the end.

Mu'atiyah looked sideways at Ghaniya, received a nod, and slowly produced his spyglass.

“My master, bin-Firnas,” he said, “is the wisest man in the world. First he learned to correct the weakness of his eyes, by the use of a reading-glass of the correct shape. Then one day, by his direction and the will of Allah, I discovered that two glasses will make the far-off close.” He trained the stout leather-covered lens out of the open window, seemed as always to have difficulty finding the right focus.

“There,” he said finally, “an unveiled maiden bends over the well, winding up water in a bucket. She is of great beauty, fit for a caliph's harem, and her arms are bare. Round her neck she wears—she wears a silver phallus, by Allah!” The young man's laugh brought a frown of disapproval from his own leader: wiser not to mock the savages, even if their women had no shame.

Shef looked at Ghaniya, received the nod of permission, took the strange object from the young man's hands, ignoring his frown of discontent. He looked at the larger end, took a cloth from a table and rubbed the lens gently, feeling its shape. Did the same at the smaller end. He had noticed before, looking through the thick bottle-glass which was the best his own world could produce for windows and that only for the greatest, how shapes were distorted by it. So that could be useful as well as a hindrance.

“Ask him why one end has to be smaller than the other.”

A mutter of translation. The answer: he does not know.

“The shape at the large end bulges out. What would happen if it curved in?”

Again the mutter, again the answer.

“What happens if the tube is longer or shorter?”

This time the answer was evidently angry, the Jew's translation shorter, as if diplomatically altered. “He says it is enough that it works,” came the filtered reply from Boniface.

Finally Shef put the tube to his one eye, looked where the young Arab had. “Yes,” he remarked. “It is Alfwyn daughter of Edgar the groom.” He inverted the tube, looked through the large end as Ma'mun had done before him, to a grunt of impatience from the Arab, handed it back without further comment.

“Well,” he said, “they know some things, but they seem to have no great desire to learn any more. People of the Book, indeed, doing things because their master said so. You know what I think of that, Thorvin.” Shef looked round at his advisers, aware that nothing he said could be understood by Suleiman or the others without further translation into Latin. “Is there any good reason why we should ally with them? It seems to me they need us more than we need them.”

The demonstration had gone wrong, Ghaniya realized. He had thought little of their book. They had noticed—or their king had—that Mu'atiyah was a fool, for all the wisdom of his master. This was a moment when his mission hung in the balance. His voice hissed ominously as he whispered to Mu'atiyah and Suleiman together.

“Tell them of the glories of Cordova, you fools. Mu'atiyah, tell that king of theirs something about your master that even he will wonder at. And no tricks for children! He may be a savage, but he is not one to be deceived by toys!”

Both men hesitated. Suleiman was the quicker to respond. “You are a Christian priest?” he said to Boniface. “Yet you serve a king who is not of your faith? Tell your master, then, that so do I. Tell him that it would be wise for all those of us who serve masters like him and like my master to stand together. For whether we are all People of the Book or not—and I do not think his book is like my Torah or your Bible or my master's Koran—yet we are all people of the blessing. Our blessing is that we do not seek to make others share our belief by force. The Greeks burn or blind those who do not share their creed down to the last word and glossing. The Franks say to each other, ‘Christians are right and pagans are wrong.’ They accept no other book than their own Bible and their own reading of it. For your sake and mine, father, add your own words to what I have said, I beg you! We are the ones who will suffer first. They call me the crucifier of their Lord. What will they call you? A traitor to the Faith?”

Shef listened as Boniface, paraphrasing now rather than translating, repeated the substance of Suleiman's appeal. He noted the concern on the Jew's face. His own betrayed no response.

“Ask what the other has to say?”

Mu'atiyah had time to collect his thoughts, but they ran only to a repetition of the many virtues of his master: virtues in the Arab tradition. He had made a machine for counting out the beat of music, so that musicians might play their instruments in time. His courtyard was the glory of Cordova for the glass roof he had made over his fountain. He had found out how to make glass from ashes. His poetry—Mu'atiyah was grasping at straws by now—was famous across the world.

Shef glanced round at his advisers, ready to draw the audience to a close. Ghaniya scowled furiously at the gabbling Mu'atiyah, now shaken by the lack of interest on all faces.

“Shall I sing the one-eyed king one of the poems of my master?” he suggested. “Or one of the poems about my master?”

Shef grunted as he heard the translation, rose to his feet, looked Ghaniya firmly in the eye. As he drew in his breath to terminate the hearing, Boniface broke in, his quiet voice cutting across the gabble of Arabic from the young scholar.

“Pardon, lord. He has said something interesting. He offers to sing you a poem about the time his master flew. Flew from the tallest tower in Cordova. And lived, it seems.”

Shef looked at the young man with deep suspicion. “Ask him what feathers he used?”

Question and answer, and Boniface's reply. “He says no feathers. He says only a fool would think men can fly like birds. They have to fly like men.”

“How then?”

“He will not say. His master orders him not to speak. He says, if you want to see, come to Cordova and look.”

Hours later, after a closed meeting with his council and an extended feast for his own men and their visitors, Shef headed wearily for his bed. The feast had been a struggle. His visitors had queried every dish set before them, refused pork, ham, sausages, wine, mead, beer, cider and even the “burnt wine” that Udd had learnt to distil, sniffing it suspiciously and then rejecting it. In the end they had eaten little but bread and water. Shef feared for their health. In his world drinking plain water was a risk few cared to take. Water-drinkers died too often of the belly-ache and the running flux.

The meeting had been little better. All the way through he had been conscious of pressure, of being manipulated. What surprised him was that his advisers had been unanimous on wanting him to leave. In the past they had been anxious to hold him back from what they saw as rash expeditions. Now—though they had done so carefully—they seemed united in wanting him away. A man more interested in politics than himself might have suspected a brewing rebellion.

First it had been Brand. “The Inner Sea,” he had muttered. “It's been done before. I don't suppose you know this, but the Ragnarssons”—he had spat into the fire at the mention of their name—“they tried it before ever you were on the scene. Fifteen years ago, maybe, when their father was still alive. Took a hundred ships down and stayed away two years. That was when there were five of them…”

“Five?” Shef had asked. He had known only four.

“Yes. Sigurth, Ivar, Halvdan, Ubbi—and their elder brother, Björn. Björn Ironside, they called him. I quite liked him,” Brand reflected. “Not as crazy as the others. He was killed by a stray rock when they besieged Paris.

“Anyway, point is this: they went down there, came back two years later when everyone had got to thinking they were dead. Lost more than half their ships and two thirds of their men. But, Hel, did they come back rich! Start of the Ragnarssons' power, that was. They built the Braethraborg on it. Must be good pickings down there. You don't find gold anywhere else.”

We don't need gold, we have silver enough, Shef had replied. But then it had been Hund, playing up the chances for new knowledge. A whole new science of the eye, he had suggested. And what of the flying man? No-one would give them any further details, but the way the story had slipped out, not intentionally, from a silly youth talking about poetry: that argued there was something in it. Something that none of them could even imagine. That was the most useful type of new knowledge. In any case, Hund had added, he had talked carefully to the Jew translator. It was clear that in the city of Cordova they had leeches who did not think twice about opening the body of their patients to cure them, something even Ingulf, Hund's master, had done only a few times, and Hund even fewer. And he had said besides, that there were men there who did not scruple to open the skull and search the brain. He would go south, Hund had declared. It was his duty to Ithun, his patron-deity, goddess of healing.

Thorvin had said little, though he too had offered to join any expedition that might sail. Who would direct the Wisdom-House for you, Shef had asked. Farman, said Thorvin without debate, a strange answer, for Farman shared none of Thorvin's interests in the crafts of the smith. His eyes had dwelt somberly on Shef all evening, as if wishing him to leave.

Shef stumbled into his room, dismissed the light-bearing attendants, stripped off his garments of state and threw them into a corner, rolled himself in his blankets, and wished for sleep. Even on the down mattress, so different from the boards and straw on which he had slept most of his life, sleep did not come easily. And it came haunted.

In his dream, he was looking down at a mappa. But a true mappa, different immediately from the one he himself had hanging on the wall of his great study-chamber. Even more different from the many he had seen and collected from the Christian world. Most Christian maps presented the world as a T-shape, with the unknown land of Africa as the vertical beam, with Europe as one of the crossbeams and Asia as the other, the two equal in size. And the junction-point, the pivot of the world, invariably marked as Jerusalem.

Shef's own maps were detailed towards the North and the West, fading rapidly into vagueness in the South and the East, where he refused to indicate what had not been confirmed by reliable sources. The map of his dream was neither Christian schematic nor local record. He knew intuitively that it was true. Too jagged, unexpected, and full of needless additions to be the work of imagination.

On the map, divisions were marked in colors. First Shef saw his own dominions, Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the islands between them, in a wash of brilliant red. Against them, other lands began to be marked out in blue. First the land of the Franks, facing Britain, then the whole interior of Europe, the German lands, then rippling down in a blue tide the boot-shape of Italy. The Empire of Charlemagne. Now owing allegiance again to the Holy Lance. Only carried in the hands of Charlemagne's true successor, though not his blood-successor. Bruno, new emperor.

Shef jerked as he heard a cold, quiet voice, too familiar to him now. “Easy,” it said. “This is not a Hel-vision. No serpent, no Loki. Just look at the map. Look at the frontiers on it.

“See, you have only one land frontier with the Empire, at the base of Denmark. Fortified now by you from the Ditmarsh to the Baltic Sea, along the lines of the old Dannevirke, the Dane-work that King Guthfrith built. But Bruno has many frontiers. To the East…” and Shef saw the blue fade away to a near-colorless pallor, gently turning green. “The land of the steppe and the forest. From it any moment great armies can come. But they fade as fast as they appear. Bruno does not worry greatly about them.

“To the South-East.” And suddenly Shef saw a blaze of gold sweep across from the Italian boot-top towards the depths of Asia. “The Greeks. With their great city of Byzantium, Micklegarth as Brand calls it, the Great Town. Not as rich, any more, as the lands of the Arabs. But the true heir of the Romans, and the Roman knowledge. Bruno does not fear them either, though he has plans for them. He wishes to bring them into a united Christendom, with the skill and subtlety of the Greeks and the energy and ferocity of his own Germans. Even the warriors of the steppe might quail before that. But now see the silver.”

And it was there, washing across the map like a carpet unrolling, stretching over lands Shef could not imagine, far to the East of the Byzantines and deep into Africa as well. “The lands of Dar al-Islam, submission to the will of Allah,” said the cold voice. “Allah the One God. No wonder that the hate is hottest between the two sides who believe alike in One God. Maybe the same god. But that neither side can agree.

“See now where lies the Dar al-Harb. The House of War.” A glowing line began to thread between the silver and the blue, across the mountain-lands of northern Spain—“robber-dukedoms,” said the voice, “but strengthened now by the Lanzenorden, the soldier-monks of Christ.” A flicker across southern France—“robber-holds of the Mohammedans,” said the voice, “but now under threat from the reviving Empire.” And then a glow around island after island, Sicily, Malta, Sardinia, Mallorca, the remaining Balearics. “They are the key,” said the voice. “They control the Inner Sea.” Slowly Shef saw the silver change again and again to blue. Like pincers groping round the flank of Arab Spain.

Unite the blue and gold, Shef thought. Cut off the silver and turn it blue. There will then be a great block across the world. His own red came back into focus—a thin line, an edge drawn around one corner of the block. His dominion ran from Scilly to North Cape. It seemed no more than a pencil line for thinness.

“Now there is the hinge,” said the voice, already seeming to come from further away, as if it was withdrawing. The maps of the Christians showed Jerusalem, always, as the world-center, the pivot, the axle-tree of destiny. As Shef looked at it, one center spot seemed to glow, to stand out against the fading colors of his dream, to swell towards him. A spot at the heart of the Inner Sea, balancing north against south, east against west. But he did not know where it was. His thought reached out after his fading mentor, calling:

“Where? Where?” And the voice came back, from a chill and hostile distance.

“Rome,” it called. “Go to Rome, my son. And there you will find your peace…”

Shef woke with a start and a clenching of muscles that made his bed-frame creak and brought the sleepy guard in the hallway outside to his feet. He means me to go, he thought. That was my father Rig calling.

He called me “my son.” From a father like him, that bodes nothing but ill.