King and Emperor

Chapter Eight

What do you mean, you don't know where the Nithhögg-gnawed woman is? I told you not to let her out of your sight!“

Brand, never used to being spoken to in this way since the day his beard had first begun to grow, clenched his massive fists and started to rumble a reply. By his side, almost two feet shorter, stood Hund, his face anxious both at the disappearance of Svandis and at the growing confrontation between a guilty but unapologetic Brand and an angry, overburdened Shef.

All round them turmoil reigned. The Northerners had been assigned a whole courtyard, a kind of barracks by the banks of the Guadalquivir. Now men ran in and out of every door, the air was filled with shouts of rage and inquiry. Gear accumulated on the sanded courtyard floor, with men standing guard over it against comrades who might be inclined to remedy their deficiencies at the expense of someone more careless. Viking skippers and English captains of crossbow platoons counted their men and tried to work out who was missing.

“Look at the goats'-turd mess,” Shef shouted on. “Twelve men missing, Skarthi says some bastard's sold half the oars for his ship—the oars, for Christ's sake, I mean Thor's sake—and the towel-heads screaming at me all the time to get moving, get back down river, the Christians are coming with a fleet and an army and Loki knows what. We'll get back to the ships and find they've already been burnt to the waterline without throwing a rock because everyone's asleep. And now I have to stop and look for some useless woman because you couldn't keep your hands off the beer-bottle!”

Brand's rumble turned into a growl, he thrust both hands firmly into his belt in an attempt to keep from strangling his king, lord and former crew-carl, Hund ludicrously stepped between the two much bigger men in an attempt to hold them back: Shef realized that the grinning faces watching the confrontation were now looking over his shoulder. He turned.

Through the gates of the courtyard, still in the early morning shadow, stepped Svandis. Her veil was still discreetly pulled across her face. As she met fifty hostile stares, set in a growing silence, she stripped the veil back. The pale ice-water eyes glared out over a set jaw. Brand clutched his belly instinctively, with a low moan.

“Well, she's back,” said Hund soothingly.

“Yes, but where has she been?”

“Out tomcatting,” muttered Brand. “Out all night. Probably some Arab picked her up for his harem and then realized she wasn't worth the trouble. Don't blame him.”

Shef considered the angry face in front of him, looked sideways at Hund. In his culture every woman was the property of some man, husband, master, father, brother. For one to stray sexually was above all a matter of disgrace for the man. In this case, as far as he could see, if Svandis had an owner it was the man who had taken her as apprentice, Hund. If he seemed unaffected, or undisgraced, then no harm was done. In any case, Shef reflected, he had a strong feeling that Svandis had not seized an unwatched moment to find herself a new lover, whatever Brand thought. She seemed far more angry than flirtatious, for all her beauty. From what Hund had told him, or hinted to him, that was only natural.

Svandis braced herself for a torrent of abuse, and probably blows, the normal consequence of what she had done. Instead Shef started to turn away, turned back and remarked, “Well, as long as you're safe,” seized Brand by the arm and began to drag him away towards the pile of stacked oars which Hagbarth was counting once more in an attempt to get a definite answer.

The fury she had been hatching as a protection burst out. “Don't you want to know where I've been?” she shrieked. “What I've been doing?”

Shef looked over his shoulder. “No. Talk to Hund about it. One thing, though. What language were you talking? Skaldfinn was dead sure you wouldn't find an interpreter except for Latin, which you don't know.”

“English,” Svandis hissed. “How many Englishwomen do you think there are in Cordova? In the harems?”

Shef let go of Brand, walked back to look at her more carefully. Svandis realized that his face had once more turned grim. When he spoke, it seemed to be to himself, though he addressed the words to Hund.

“We might have known, eh? I saw them in Hedeby market, Vikings selling Wendish girls to Arabs. The guard told me the price of girls had gone up since the English trade stopped producing. But they must have been selling girls down here for fifty years. Everywhere we go, Hund, we find them. In backwoods Norway, in turf huts on Shetland, here in Spain. There doesn't seem to be a place in the world without its slave from Norfolk or Lincoln. Or Yorkshire,” he added, remembering the berserk Cuthred. “One day we must have a chat with an experienced slaver, I bet we have a few lying quiet in the ranks. Find out how they used to divide them up, price them for the market. Worn-out ones for the Swedish sacrifice, strong workers for the hill-farms. And the pretty ones down here, for gold not silver.”

Shef's hands seemed to grope for a weapon, but as usual he was not carrying one, not even a sword at his belt.

“All right, Svandis, tell me about it sometime. I don't blame you for what your father did, and he's paid his price. Now, as you can see, we're moving. Get some breakfast, get your things together. Hund, see if we have any sick.”

He moved off purposefully towards the oars, shouting for Skaldfinn to see if any could be ransomed from their new owners. Svandis glared uncertainly at his back. Brand too moved away, muttering into his beard. Hund looked up at his apprentice.

“Have you been talking to them about your beliefs?” he said quietly.

“The infidels are playing with their kites again,” remarked the master of the Cordovan flagship to the captain of marines.

The captain, a Cordovan, spat neatly into the sea to show disgust and contempt. “They are trying to catch up with the learned man, bin-Firnas, Allah be merciful to him. As if the sons of dogs from the far end of Barbary could match the deeds of a true philosopher! See, their kite sinks already, and it has no man or boy in it. It is going down like an old sheik's penis. A far cry from bin-Firnas, I saw his kite fly like a bird with a stout boy in its beak. I wish the infidels may perish in torment, for their pride and their folly.”

The master looked sideways at the captain, wondering if such fury was wise. “The curse of Allah on them,” he said placatingly. “And on all deniers of the Prophet. But may it not fall on these ones till we have seen them use their stone-machines.”

“Stone machines!” snarled the captain. “Better to meet the worshipers of Yeshua saber in hand, as we have always done before, and always defeated them.”

So that's it, reflected the master. He sees his trade taken away from him. “As you say,” he agreed again. “And if Allah wills we shall do so. But one thing, Osman, you will grant me. Let us keep these majus, these bookless pagans from the North, on our side at least until we have met the Greeks. Their stone machines can do what the bravest sabers can not. And I have no desire to meet the fire of the Greeks at sea.”

He turned from the rail before the disgruntled soldier could frame a reply.

Half a mile away, across the clear blue water of the coastal Mediterranean, gazing through the far-seer the Arab philosopher had given him, Shef watched the kite slowly rocking down the sky. He felt no particular irritation. As soon as the combined fleet of the Way and the men of Andalusia had cleared for sea, after a racing passage down the Guadalquivir, he had begun to experiment, eagerly seconded by Cwicca, Osmod and the catapult crews of the Fafnisbane. Shef had made certain large quantities of the poles and cloth that bin-Firnas used for his devices had been taken with them. He and his men now set to construct kites after any fashion that seemed likely. “We don't know what holds the things up,” Shef had told the eager attentive circle. “So we might as well try anything and see what works.”

Today they were trying the effect of an unbroken box of sailcloth, without air-gaps or panels. It appeared to be a total failure. Did that mean the panels were necessary, after all, and against what seemed to be common sense? Or was it the two control lines they were also trying today? The two catapulteers holding them were trying gently to work the kite back into the sky, with limited success.

It didn't matter. For one thing it was keeping the men amused. Shef looked up at the masthead and saw, as he suspected, that the lookout was gaping steadily at the kite instead of attending to his duty. A shout, a wave, and the lookout turned guiltily to stare at the horizon once more.

For another, in Shef's experience a great deal of any technological breakthrough came from random fiddling, while the men who had to work the machine got used to it, discovered its problems, worked out how to counter them. Nothing ever worked absolutely right first time. He was quite happy now to let the men amuse themselves, see if they could at least reach the standard bin-Firnas had demonstrated to them, learn the skills they would need when the time came to improve. One thing bin-Firnas had not realized, with the curious playful reluctance to push a theory to its limits which Shef had already noted as characteristic of this culture: experimenting with manned flight, or boyed flight, would be a good deal safer over a calm sea than a rocky ravine. Shef had already checked to find out how many of Ordlaf's lightweights could swim.

The kite settled into the water, to a general groan of disappointment. One of the five Viking longships which they had taken up the Guadalquivir to Cordova cruised over towards it, oars sweeping in leisurely time, began to retrieve kite and rope and bring them back.

That was a weakness of the two-masters, one that no-one had ever noticed out in the Atlantic for which they had been designed. They were true sailing-craft, fast, sturdy, capable of mounting onagers and crossbows and carrying scores of tons of food and water. In British or Scandinavian waters, where the wind literally never ceased, and was more often too rough than too gentle, they had swept the seas against Frankish cogs or Viking longships, the first too slow, the second too fragile to contest with them.

But no-one had ever tried to row them for more than a few hundred yards working out of harbor, and that was done with massive four-man sweeps capable of reaching bare crawling pace. Here in the Inner Sea, as today, the wind often seemed to die away altogether. With both sails spread and what wind there was blowing directly from the sea, the Fafnisbane and her “Hero” class consorts—Grendelsbane, Sigemund, Wada, Theodric, Hagena and Hildebrand—were barely making steerage way. By contrast the five Viking boats were keeping pace under oars at a mere paddling stroke on the placid sea, their crews happy to work off some surplus energy by fetching and carrying the kites. The Cordovan galleys, meanwhile, after repeated angry outbursts from their admiral, had seemingly accepted the situation. The routine now was for their main body to row on ahead during the morning, take their long siesta at midday, and then row on again as the sun declined to find a place to camp and water overnight. The infidels made up lost distance during the siesta, and caught up finally in the evening. Meanwhile contact was maintained between the advance body and the laggards by a string of intermediary ships. Seemingly out of courtesy—or more likely because he did not trust them—the admiral himself hung back in his own green-painted galley, with a double score of his larger ships: enough to board and envelop Shef's own fleet at need. There was no way of guarding against that other than making them keep their distance, to give time for the onagers to work. After thought, Shef had accepted the situation. If the Arabs had not overwhelmed him and his men in the streets of Cordova, they were unlikely to do so here and now, steering to meet a dangerous common enemy.

Hagbarth was preparing for the noon ceremony, at which he measured the height of the sun with his seaman's staff, and considered the results against a set of tables he was compiling. It was of little practical value. The answer might tell you—if Shef understood the theory—how far north or south you were, but all that meant in practice was that Hagbarth could say which spot on the Atlantic shore they were now level with. What would be more interesting would be to combine these results, one day, with a good map. Such information, Shef recognized, would have saved him and his companions much trouble during their long walk across the Keel of Norway from Atlantic shore to Jarnberaland.

Shef unrolled the map he had been given by his Arab hosts, one, he conceded, far better than any he had seen in his life before. They had watered the night before at Denia, a good protected harbor with smooth beaches either side for the shallow-draft ships to draw up on. There the commander of the local garrison had reported that the Christian warships, and in particular the feared Red Fleet of the Greeks, had made landings less than a hundred miles to the north within the last two weeks. They could, then, be just over the horizon at this moment.

At the thought, Shef raised his head and called to the lookout.

“Anything to see?”

“Nothing, lord. The admiral's spread his awnings and stopped rowing, dropping behind us now. A few fishing boats out to sea. All of them got those funny three-corner sails. The skyline's bare as a whore's—”

A yell from Hagbarth cut short the lookout's simile. For some reason Hagbarth had decided that the purity of their one female passenger had to be guarded from contamination. All the Vikings, Shef had noted, much as they might dislike her, were unable entirely to resist the awe they felt for the Ragnarsson blood.

Hagbarth sat down cross-legged on the deck next to Shef and the map, followed by Hund and Thorvin, who settled himself more deliberately on a canvas folding stool. Shef looked round for a moment, wondering who else might be invited to join the impromptu council. Brand was not aboard, had insisted on returning to his own ship, the Narwhal, built to replace the much-lamented Walrus. His excuse was that he felt impatient aboard the stately Fafnisbane, preferred the maneuverability of his own smaller ship. Shef suspected that he simply could not bear the presence of Svandis, for her father's sake or her own. Skaldfinn was standing in plain sight by the rail. Why did he not come over? Shef realized that Skaldfinn had with him Suleiman the Jew, did not want to abandon him, was not sure that Suleiman would be welcome at a conference which he could, by now, very well understand.

The Jew was a strange, dignified, withdrawn figure. For weeks Shef had been unable to imagine him as anything but a machine for translating, yet learning a language from someone gives many insights. Shef had begun to think that, for all his professed loyalty to Abd er-Rahman and his Muslim masters, Suleiman was—not quite to be trusted? Capable of being won over? One thing that had emerged was that in the Muslim world, Jews paid taxes, and Christians, while Muslims did not. That was bound to be a source of discontent, if not disaffection. Shef waved to Skaldfinn, indicated that Suleiman was welcome to join them too.

“Well,” said Hagbarth. “Tell us again, lord, what's the plan? We launch kites into the air, steal Greek fire from the Christians, and rain it down from the sky.”

Shef grinned. “Don't tell Mu'atiyah. He'll say his master thought of it first. All right. We're about here.” He tapped the map with a grubby, nail-bitten finger. “The Christians can't be far away, and all we hear says they're coming for us just as we're going for them. We should expect a straight head-on clash. So that's what we won't get. They know something we don't know, we know something they don't know.”

“So do the easy part,” said Hagbarth, youngest and most careless of the Way-priests. “Tell us what we know.”

Shef grinned again. “One thing we know is that none of these people, Christian or Arab, know how to fight a sea-battle.”

Silence and looks exchanged. Finally Suleiman, looking round first to see if anyone else would take the bait, ventured the query. “Lord king? The fleets of Andalus have fought many battles. And so have the Greeks. Do you mean—they have not fought them correctly?”

“No. I mean they weren't sea-battles. It's obvious from the way old admiral what's-his-name works”—Shef jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the awning-rigged galleys taking their siesta two miles off upon the glassy sea. “His main idea is to fight a land-battle in which his ships form one wing. Ever since we made contact back wherever it was—Alicante?—he's just tried to keep pace with the land army marching up the coast. It's true our ships hold him back, but we could make better speed if we sailed all night, which is all right by us. But he camps every night in touch with his land-colleague. They expect to clash on the coast, army to army and fleet to fleet. They never go far from their water—they can't, with all those rowers on board in this heat—and they never go far from the army, horse and foot together.”

“What advantage does that give us?” asked Thorvin carefully. What his one-time protégée said sounded very much like lunatic over-confidence, but no-one dared say that of the victor at Hastings and at the Braethraborg.

“What I'd like to do is locate the enemy, then swing out to sea on the land breeze we get every morning, come in on their flank and rear from the open sea in the afternoon. Then we could get the catapults to work in daylight with them trapped between us and the coast.”

“You only have seven ships with—what do you call them?—mules,” observed Suleiman delicately. “Are seven enough to determine a great battle?”

“The admiral here has hundreds of ships,” Shef replied. “So, we're told, did the admirals of both fleets the Greeks have destroyed already. But those fleets were helpless against the Greek fire. We hope the Christian fleets will be helpless against our mule-stones.”

“It will take a long time to sink hundreds of ships by shooting,” said Thorvin skeptically.

“That's the point. I only want to hit the ships with the Greek fire. The red galleys, they say. Maybe twenty of them. In this battle, all that will count will be their twenty with the fire and our seven with the mules. The one of those that gets into action first will be the winner. All the other ships, once that's decided, will be porkers for the slaughter. Lambs for the slaughter, I mean,” corrected Shef hastily, remembering the strange dietary customs of Muslim and Jew together.

“I see,” said Skaldfinn. “Now, the other question: what do they know that we don't?”

“I don't know,” said Shef quickly, before anyone else could make the obvious answer. All the Northerners laughed, while Suleiman watched them impassively, stroking his beard. They were like children, he thought, just as Abd er-Rahman had said. They would laugh at anything. Always mirth, always horseplay, the men hiding each other's food, tying each other's shoelaces together. The king himself would fly kites all day and never mind if they fell into the sea. They had no dignity. Or was it that they felt their dignity was so great that it could not be diminished by anything to which they consented? Mu'atiyah talked till he was hoarse about how stupid and untaught they were. Yet they learned with terrible speed, and Mu'atiyah would learn nothing that did not come to him on the authority of a great man or, better still, a great book. What, he wondered, did the one-eye really think?

“I'm hoping they don't know we're here,” said Shef finally. “No-one in the southern sea has seen a mule shoot from a ship. They may be expecting to meet another overconfident Muslim fleet, all numbers and bravery. In that case we've probably got them. But if they do know we're here, I would expect them to try an attack at night. The exact opposite of what we want. We need light to shoot at a distance, and we want to spread out. They want to get up close and meet a packed enemy at close range, where light doesn't matter. In any case they'll make their own.

“The answer to that's pretty obvious.”

“Right,” agreed Hagbarth. “We lie inshore, with a screen of other ships. If they set light to them, we'll have light to shoot at them and time to wind the machines.”

“Maybe there's something else we don't know,” repeated Thorvin.

“I know. Could they have built a Fearnought, like we did?”

Hagbarth shook his head, still with a faint touch of sadness. The unwieldy, steel-plated, barely sailable Fearnought which had literally broken the back of the Ragnarsson fleet seven years before had once been his own Aurvendill, fastest sailer in the North, he had claimed, before her total rebuilding. But she too had had her back broken by catapult-stones, had never sailed again after the battle. Chopped up for firewood long since.

“They can't do it,” he said flatly. “I've looked at these galleys of the Inner Sea, seen how they build them. They've been building them the same way for a thousand years, they say, and the Greek ships will be just the same. They lay the planks edge to edge, not clinker-fashion like we do. And they just fit plank to plank till it's ready, no frame to build on. Weak keel, very weak ribs. Strengthened fore and aft to take the ram, but even that's not much. Doesn't take much to punch a hole in one of these. I'm not saying their shipwrights are stupid, mind. Just that they build for a shallow sea with no tides and no swell. I am saying that you couldn't make a Fearnought out of any of these galleys. They haven't the strength in the frame. I'm sure about that.”

A long considering pause, broken only by yells and splashings from close at hand. The Fafnisbane was now at a complete halt in the midday heat, sails hanging limply, providing only welcome shade. The crew had seized the chance to strip and hurl themselves into the welcome blue water. Shef noticed Svandis standing watching their nakedness by the rail, scratching absent-mindedly at her side under the long white wool dress. She looked as if she were about to strip and dive in too. That would cause some excitement at least, no matter what Brand might say about the wrath of the sea-hags and the marbendills of the deep. His authority on the subject had dwindled, paradoxically, once men knew that he was a quarter-marbendill himself.

“We'll stick to our plan, then,” said Shef. “Hagbarth, you and Suleiman talk to the admiral tonight about night guard-ships. Tomorrow I will ask him to send light ships forward to find and fix the enemy, so we can outflank them. Our secret weapon, besides the mule-stones, is that we do not fear the open sea nor running out of water for thirsty rowers. That's what we'll rely on.

“And there's one other good thing.”

“What's that?” asked Hagbarth.

“Old yoke-shoulders Bruno isn't there. The Emperor, I mean.”

“How do you know?”

Shef grinned yet again. “I'd have felt it if that bastard was nearby. Or had bad dreams about him.”

Much less than a day's sail away, the two commanders of the joint Roman-Greek expeditionary force were also making their plan for battle. Only the two men sat in the rear cabin of the great Greek galley, in the hot cedar-smelling half-light. Neither believed in consulting subordinates. Like their masters before them, the emperors Bruno and Basil, they had discovered that they could communicate well enough in Latin, the language native to neither of them but understood, after a fashion, by both. Neither liked to talk it: Georgios the Greek had learnt the Italian form of it from Neapolitan sailors, whom he despised as effeminates and heretics. Agilulf the German had learnt the French form of it from his neighbors across the Rhine, whom he too hated as ancestral enemies and arrogant would-be cultural superiors. Yet both had learned to do what was necessary to co-operate. Each had begun even to have a certain wary respect for the skills of the other, brought into being by months of successful skirmishing and victory.

“They are a day to the south and coming on slowly?” inquired Agilulf. “How do you know?”

Georgios waved a hand at the scene outside the small portholes fitted into the galley's sharp-ended stem. Among and around his own score of red-painted ships, each a hundred feet long, there lay a host of smaller craft of every size, the scourings of the Christian fishing villages of the northern Spanish coast and the islands, and of the borderlands between Spain and France.

“The Arabs are so used to the fishing boats that they take no notice of them. Nor can they tell Christian from Muslim, or from Jew. Our boats mix in with theirs. Every night one has steered out to sea and brought us a report. I have known exactly where every ship of theirs has been for days.”

“Maybe they've been doing the same to us.”

Georgios shook his head. “I am not as careless as the Arab admiral. No boat comes within fifty stadia of here without being boarded and inspected. If they are Muslims—” He chopped his hand down on the edge of the table.

“How come our spy boats are back here so long before their fleet. Are they faster?”

“Handier, certainly. You see the kind of sails they use?” Georgios waved a hand again at the cluster of boats alongside. One, slipping quietly across the water on some errand, had its sail up and rigged: a three-cornered sail on a sloping yard. “Round here they call it the Latin sail—lateeno in their language.” Both men let out a simultaneous sharp bark of contemptuous amusement at the foreigners. “They use lateeno to mean—” Georgios hesitated for a word. “Something like aptus, handy. And it is a handy rig, fast and useful in light airs.”

“Why don't you rig them, then?”

“If you were to look closely,” the admiral explained, “you'd see that if you want to turn the ship from side to side”—neither his Latin nor Agilulf's ran to the word for “tack”—“you can't do it by just turning the yard, the stick the sail is on. You have to lift the yard over the mast. Easy for a small boat. Harder and harder as the mast gets higher and the yard gets heavier. It's a rig for small boats. Or for ships full of seamen.”

Agilulf grunted, not much interested. “So we know where they are but they don't know where we are. How does that help us?”

The Greek leaned back on his bench. “Well. Our weapon is fire. Theirs—as you have told me again and again—is stone. You tell me you have seen one ship of theirs, an iron one at that, sink a whole fleet in less time than it takes to say a Mass.”

Agilulf nodded. He had been at the battle of the Braethraborg, had seen the Ragnarsson fleet battered into wrecks by Shef's own Fearnought. It had impressed him greatly.

“I believe you. So they will want to fight at a distance, we want to fight up close. They may expect us to try to attack at night. I have a better idea. You see, my men on the spy boats are all unanimous on one thing. These Northern ships, they say, are sailers. They have never seen anyone even try to row them, and they look heavy and round-bellied.

“But in these waters the wind always fades round noon, as earth and water reach the same heat. No wind either way. That's when I am going to hit them.”

“They can shoot their stones without moving at all,” objected Agilulf.

“Not over bow or stern. In any case my plan is to drive off or burn their support ships, the Arabs. And then to have a good look at the Northerners. When I can move and they cannot. If the worst comes to the worst—we just row away. If they show a weakness—we'll take it.”

“So you drive off the fleet, leaving the Northerners becalmed if need be, and then come in with your marines and rowers, from the sea, on the rear of the Arab army. While I hold the Arab horse and foot from in front.”

Georgios nodded silently. Both men knew there were many permutations possible within their overall plan. Each knew, now, how the other thought and what the other could do. They had never lost a battle or a skirmish yet, had swept the northwest Mediterranean from coast to coast.

Agilulf rose. “Good enough. My detachments for your ships are already told off. I'll have them by the shore an hour before dawn, fully provisioned. Just have the boats ready to take them off.”

Georgios rose too. The two men shook hands. “I wish the emperor were here,” said Agilulf suddenly. “My emperor, that is.”

Georgios rolled his eyes with extravagant disbelief. “He is your emperor, not mine. Yet not even my emperor, not even the idiot before him, would go chasing relics at this stage of a war.”

“It worked for him last time,” said Agilulf, forcing as much loyalty into his voice as he could muster.