The Hammer and The Cross

Vegetius. And have built this machine. The onager it is named: that is, in your tongue, ‘the wild ass.’ ”

A slave placed a ten-pound rock in the sling, signed to Erkenbert.

Again the deacon passed a thong to Ivar. “Pull the bolt,” he said.

Ivar jerked the string. Faster than sight the great rod leapt forward like a great swinging arm.

Stopping with a crash against a padded beam, the entire weighted frame jumped from the ground. The sling whirled round far faster than Shef's self-designed stone-throwers. Like a streak the rock flashed across the minster-yard, never rising—not lobbed but hurled. The straw target billowed into the air, slowly collapsed on its slings. The slaves cheered once in triumph.

Slowly Ivar turned to Erkenbert. “That is not it,” he said. “The machines that rained death on my army, they threw high in the sky.” He lobbed a pebble upward. “Not like this.” He hurled another at a pecking sparrow.

“You have made the wrong machine.”

“Impossible,” said Erkenbert. “There is the great machine for sieges. And this one for men. None other is described in Vegetius.”

“Then those bastards of the Way have made a new thing. One not described in—in your book.”

Erkenbert shrugged his shoulders, unconvinced. Who cared what this pirate said? He could not even read, still less read Latin.

“And how fast does it shoot?” Ivar glared at the slaves twirling their levers. “I tell you, I saw the stone- throwers hurl another while the first was still in the air. This one is too slow.”

“But it strikes hard. No man can resist it.”

Ivar stared thoughtfully at the fallen target. Suddenly he whirled, yelled orders in Norse. Hamal and a handful of companions sprang forward, pushed the slaves out of the way, and heaved the cumbrous, tense-wound machine round.

“No,” shouted Erkenbert, pushing forward. Ivar's arm clamped irresistibly round his throat, a wire-muscled hand forced his mouth shut.

Ivar's men pushed the machine round another foot, hauled it back a trifle as their leader ordered. One hand still effortlessly holding the limp deacon off the ground, Ivar jerked the string a third time.

The giant door of the minster—oak beams nailed across each other in double-ply, held fast over all with iron bands—exploded in all directions, splinters flying in slow arcs across the yard. From inside came a chorus of wails, monks leaping out, darting back, shrieking in terror.

They all stared in fascination at the great hole the boulder had smashed.

“You see,” said Erkenbert. “This is the true stone-thrower. It strikes hard. No man can resist it.”

Ivar turned, eyes fixed on the little monk in contempt. “It is not the true stone-thrower. There is another kind in the world of which you know nothing. But strike hard it does. You must make me many.”

Across the narrow sea to the land of the Franks beyond, a thousand miles away in the land of the Romans, there within the gates of a minster greater than Winchester, greater even than York, deep silence lay. Popes had had many troubles, many failures, since the time of their great founder. Some had met martyrdom, some been forced to flee for their lives. Not thirty years before, Saracen pirates had made their way to the very gates of Rome, and had sacked the holy basilica of St. Peter himself which was then outside the wall.

It would not happen again. He who was now the equal of the Apostles, the successor of Peter, the holder of the keys of Heaven, he had set his face above all toward power. Virtue was great: humility, chastity, poverty. But without power none of those could survive. It was his duty to the humble, the chaste and the poor, to seek power. In pursuit of it he had put down many mighty ones from their high seats on their thrones—he, Nicholas I, Pope of Rome, Servant of the servants of God.

Slowly the hawk-faced old man stroked his cat, his secretaries and attendants sitting round him in silence. The foolish archbishop from the town in England, the town with the strange outlandish name— Eboracum, evidently, though hard to tell with his barbarous pronunciation—he had been dismissed with courtesy, and a cardinal deputed to show him all honor and provide him with amusement. What he had said had been nonsense: a new religion, a challenge to the authority of the Church, the barbarians of the North developing intellect. Panic and terror-stories.

Yet it corroborated his other information from England: Robbery of the Church. Alienation of land. Willing apostasy. There was a word for it. Dispossession. That was striking at the base of power itself. If that were to become known, there might be too many ready to imitate, yes, even in the lands of the Empire. Even here in Italy. Something would have to be done.

And yet the Pope and the Church had other problems, many more pressing ones, more immediate than this matter of English barbarians and Northern barbarians fighting over land and silver in a country he would never see. At their heart lay the partition of the Empire, the great Empire founded by Charlemagne, king of the Franks, crowned emperor in this very cathedral on Christmas Day 800, a lifetime before. For twenty years now, that Empire had been in pieces, and its enemies ever encouraged. First the grandsons of Charlemagne had fought against each other, till they had hacked out peace and partition. Germany to one, France to another, the great, long, ungovernable strip from Italy to the Rhine to a third. And now that third was dead and his third of the Empire divided once again among three, the emperor himself, eldest son of the eldest son, holding a bare ninth of what his grandfather had ruled. And what did that emperor, Louis II, care about it? Nothing. He could not even drive back the Saracens. What about his brother Lothar? Whose only interest in life was to divorce his barren wife and marry his fertile mistress—a thing he, Nicholas, would never permit.

Lothar, Louis, Charles. The Saracens and the Norsemen. Land, power, dispossession. The Pope stroked his cat and considered them all. Something told him that here, here in this trivial, far-off squabble brought by a foolish archbishop running from his duty, might be the solution to all his problems at once.

Or was the prickle he felt one of fear? An alert to the tiny black cloud that would grow and grow?

The Pope cleared his dry old throat with a noise like a cricket creaking. The first of his secretaries dipped his pen instantly.

“ ‘To our servants Charles the Bald, king of the Franks. To Louis, king of the Germans. Louis, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Lothar, king of Lotharingia. Charles, king of Provence’—you know their titles, Theophanus. To all these Christian kings, then, we write in the same way… ” ‘Know, beloved, that we, Pope Nicholas, have taken thought for the greater security and the greater prosperity of all our Christian people. And therefore we direct you, as you will have our love in the future, to work together with your brothers and your kinsmen the Christian kings of this Empire, to this effect…’ ”

Slowly the Pope outlined his plans. Plans for common action. For unity. For a distraction from civil war and the tearing apart of the Empire. For the salvation of the Church and the destruction of its enemies, even—if what Archbishop Wulfhere had said were true—its rivals.

“ ‘…and it is our wish,’ ” the dry, creaky voice concluded, “ ‘that in recognition of their service to Mother Church, each man of your armies who shall join this blessed and sanctified expedition shall wear the sign of the Cross upon his clothing over his armor’.

“Finish the letters in proper form, Theophanus. I'll sign and seal them tomorrow. Pick appropriate messengers.”

The old man rose, clutching his cat, and left the office without haste for his private quarters.

“Nice touch about the cross,” remarked one of the secretaries busily drafting copies in the Pope's own purple ink.

“Yes. He got it from what the Englishman said, about the pagans wearing a hammer in mockery of the cross.”

“The touch they'll really like,” said the senior secretary, sanding vigorously, “is the bit about prosperity. He's telling them if they do what they're told they can loot all Anglia. Or Britannia. Whatever it's called.”

“Alfred wants missionaries?” said Shef incredulously.

“His very word. Missionarii.” In his excitement Thorvin betrayed what Shef had come to suspect, that for all his scorn of Christian learning he knew something of their sacred tongue, the Latin. “It is the word they have long used for the men they send to us, to turn us to the worship of their God. I have never before heard of a Christian king asking for men to be sent to his country, to turn them to the worship of our