King and Emperor

was doing today, perhaps the greatest he had ever done. While the Lance was with him he was invincible. He stepped forward from the massed ranks at the foot of the stair.

Brand recognized him instantly by the breadth of his shoulders, that made his medium height seem squat, ape-like. He felt a shock of cold through his belly, where Ivar's sword had driven through it. Fear, the fear he had not felt in skirmishes against lesser men. But now a real champion had come. Perhaps Styrr was the man to face him. He had the strength of their shared marbendill ancestry, the blood of Barn Troll's-son. He had never felt a serious wound, was young and confident as Brand himself was not.

Bruno went up the stairs like a leopard, taking them two at a time at first, then springing up them, leaping from side to side between the corpses as if he were on flat ground and his armor had no weight. Styrr took two steps down to meet him, his supporters hanging back to let him face the challenge alone. As the Emperor sprang up and up, Styrr whirled his axe and struck for the shield. Too soon, thought Brand, too hurried. He began to force his way through the block of watching Vikings to come to the help of his kinsman.

Bruno took the axe-blow on his shield, but the shield was already slanted, knocking the blow away instead of letting it sink in. Before Styrr could recover Bruno's own stroke was launched, parried with the iron shield-boss, the backhand recover already in motion. For ten heartbeats the axe and sword flashed back and forth, while the shields rang accompaniment. Already Styrr was bleeding from gashes on arm and shin, each time he had beaten the stroke off before it could sever bone, but in moments he would be overpowered. He stepped back to a groan from the Vikings behind him, Brand now almost at their head, the Emperor followed before he could take the breathing-space he needed…

Steffi, busy since dawn with his laboriously-hauled fire-gear and the clay pots and tankards he had rifled from the guard house, flung his first fire-ball at the Emperor's head. Without thought the Emperor blocked it with his shield, it bounced off the leather facing, struck a corpse, rolled harmlessly down the stone steps. Steffi gaped disbelievingly. If he had merely dropped it on the ground it would have shattered, the lit fuse would have caught the contents… Now, when he needed it to shatter, it behaved as if made of iron.

Styrr threw his round shield in the Emperor's face and followed it with a disemboweling stroke from below. His enemy stepped sideways like a dancer on the narrow stairs, let the axe-blow go wide, stabbed the overbalancing giant neatly in the mouth, through teeth and palate and brain, stepped back to steer the falling body past him down the stair with a twist of the wrist.

A moment's silence while both sides took in what they saw, and then a roar as the Lance-knights came on, jostling each other in their eagerness. Beside himself with rage, Brand thrust his way through and swept up “Battle-troll” to avenge his kinsman.

Steffi, ignoring the combats and their unwritten laws of honor, tried again. This time he hurled the clay tankard, its top stuffed with cloth, not at the man but at the stone steps in front of him. The clay shattered, the glowing fuse fell into the mixture of sulphur, saltpeter and oil. A flash and a gout of flame beneath the Emperor's feet. He sprang through it, aimed a blow at Brand, took a return stroke. Suddenly fell back, dropping his sword, leapt back again, beating with gauntleted hands at the flame running up his legs. Brand followed, axe raised and thoughts of drengskapr cast aside. Another tankard burst, this time at his feet, then another and another as Steffi's gang, delighted with their success, showered down the clay firepots at every strip of stone they could see on both flights.

The Lance-knights had the Emperor among them now, were stifling his burning clothes with gloves and bare hands. On the other stair Agilulf, who had come forward like his Emperor to deal with Guthmund, had frankly turned his back and fled, hurling a dozen men in front of him down the stair, panicked by the flame that had already marked him to his grave. The Vikings surged forward, met the flame underfoot themselves, hesitated.

Both sides continued to draw back, the only sound now the roar of flame on stone, an eerie flame that poured black smoke and seemed to burn on nothing. A crossbowman who had spent the morning straightening and filing a damaged quarrel lifted his weapon and sent its last shot deep through shield and body of one of the Lanzenbruder.

“Put me down,” gasped the Emperor to the men who were hustling him out of bowshot, “put me down, throw water on me, we must try again.”

“No luck this time, Kaiser,” said Tasso the Bavarian. “You got the big bastard but they were ready for us. That's enough for now.”

There was a man pushing his way through the storming-party. One of the knights left to guard the Grail, he would not have left his post except in dire emergency. But he was smiling.

“Erkenbert, I mean His Holiness, says to come to him at once. He has something you want to see. Or someone.”

The numbness in his ankle had gone now, and pain was coming up from it in steady throbs, each beat of his heart seeming to jar the swollen joint. His bare foot was red and puffed. He had held it off the ground till his leg muscles were on the point of failing, but the thought of it touching anything filled him with nausea. He was still trying to stand up and look composed, as a drengr should when facing death, but his body was beginning to tremble with shock and pain and weariness. They would say it was fear. What was it Brand said? “A man should not limp while his legs are the same length.” He would try not to.

The muttering of the guards ceased, and Shef, left leaning against a wall, his hands lashed to a bracket above him, tried to straighten up.

Then the Emperor was there in front of him, Erkenbert at his side.

They had not seen each other since the Braethraborg, though each had thought of the other every intervening day. Now they stared, to check their memories, to see what time had done.

The Emperor was hurt too, Shef realized, his harsh bleak face twitching from time to time with an involuntary pulse of pain. He smelled of blood and of burning, and the grooves in his face were deeper. The Emperor saw a man not yet thirty, with the white hair over the temples and the care-lines round the eyes of one twenty years older. Round his missing eyeball the flesh was shrunken, indrawn. He seemed in the last throes of weariness, held up only by the rope round his hands. Each man had spared the other's life, once. Each recognized in the other the marks of decision and responsibility.

“You are an apostate and a rebel against God,” said Bruno.

“Not against God, your God or any other. Only against your Church. No priest is persecuted in England, no Christian harmed for being Christian.”

The Emperor's voice sharpened. “You hid from me the Holy Grail. Tricked it from under my eyes.”

“I found you the Holy Lance. It would never have come to you without me.”

The Emperor seemed unsure what to say. The voice of Erkenbert the fanatic cut across his uncertainty.

“You have made false books and false gospels and sent them out across Christendom!”

“How do you know they are false?”

“You see!” said Erkenbert to his Emperor. “You are minded to forgive him even now, in your kindness. Think of this. Other heretics sin against the Faith, but this man—if man he is—he casts doubts on all faiths together. If he had his way all books would become mere words, to be turned this way and that. Treated like the oaths of a horse-dealer or the promises of a harlot.”

“Books are mere words,” said Shef faintly, his senses beginning to leave him. “Only you cannot ask a writer if he is telling the truth. Cannot look into his eyes.”

“He doubts the Word of God,” said Bruno firmly. “It is the sin against the Holy Ghost. How shall he die, Your Holiness?”

“This is Rome. Let us do as the Romans did and crucify him.”

“Does he deserve Our Savior's death?”

“Saint Peter was crucified upside down, because he was not worthy to imitate his Lord. Nail this one with his hands over his head.”

Just don't touch my foot, thought Shef. A futile thought. They would nail that too. He was putting more and more weight on the rope now, less and less on his one good leg. The sooner he fainted the better.

“Shall we do it where his men can see?” asked a voice somewhere off in the blackness that was closing in.

“No. No. Better that there is no story of this, that he should just disappear. Take him into a garden somewhere. Use the Grail-knights to guard him till he is dead.”