sheep's wool? In the Andalusian summer men dressed like that would die of heat-stroke before noon. And yet the king and his men showed no awareness of it, felt no shame at the evidence of their own bodies' discomfort, did not even try to wipe their brows. My people think it dignified to withdraw from discomfort, the Caliph reflected. These think it dignified to ignore it, like a slave working in the sun.
The Caliph asked the first and vital question: “Ask, are any of these men Christians?”
He expected the question to go to Suleiman the Jew, who would speak in Latin, and be translated by some man of learning among the strangers. He was surprised to see, as Suleiman indeed began to translate, the king himself shake his head. He understood some Arabic, then. And the answer was already forthcoming. Skaldfinn had as his vocation the learning of languages and the understanding of peoples. He had spent the voyage learning from Suleiman, and teaching him Anglo-Norse in exchange. Shef too had sat listening much of the time. Skaldfinn spoke now in slow but passable Arabic, translating for his king.
“No. None of us are Christians. We allow Christians to follow their faith, but we follow a different Way, and a different book. We fight only against those who deny that right.”
“Has it been explained to you that there is only one God, who is Allah, and that Muhammad is his Prophet? Believe that, and you can expect rich reward from me.”
“It has been explained.”
“You do not believe in Allah? You choose to believe in your own gods, whoever they are?”
Tension and the note of the executioner in the Caliph's voice. Brand shifted his grip slightly on the axe “Battle-troll,” and marked the two men standing behind the Caliph, scimitars bared. Big men, he thought. Burnt blacker by the sun than I have ever seen before. But naked above the waist, no shields. Two blows and the third for the Arab in the chair.
Realizing that he could follow the Arabic that the Caliph spoke, Shef replied for the first time without a translator. Pitching his voice high, and speaking the simplest Arabic that he could, he called out: “I have not seen Allah. I have seen my own gods. Maybe if I had two eyes I would see Allah too. One eye cannot see everything.”
A buzz of comment ran round the courtyard. The Arabs, used to metaphorical language and the art of indirect reproof, understood the last sentence. He means that those who believe in one thing alone are half-blind. Blasphemer, thought some. Wise for a
This is not a man to fence with, thought the Caliph. Already he has shown he understands display. Now he is taking my own audience chamber away from me.
“Why have you come to Cordova?” he said.
Because you asked me, thought Shef, glancing slightly at Ghaniya standing between and to the side of both men. Aloud, he replied: “To fight your enemies. My enemies too. Ghaniya tells me the Franks have new weapons to fight on sea and on land. We men of the Way understand new weapons. We have brought new weapons and new ships to see if our enemies can stand against them.”
The Caliph looked silently at Ghaniya, who began an excited account of the ships and the catapults of the Wayman fleet. As they sailed south Shef had several times encouraged the skippers to make raft-targets, drop them over the side, and then destroy them at half a mile with hurled rocks. The crews were skilled and practiced, and the results had amazed the envoy. Indeed no ship known to him could take more than a blow or two from the onagers: he had not seen the armored but virtually unsailable
As Ghaniya came to an end, Abd er-Rahman looked thoughtfully once more at the God-defier. He is still not impressed, he thought, watching the grim impassive face. Nor his companions. He made a sign, and one of the huge executioners walked forward, bringing his scimitar from his shoulder. Another sign, and a slave-girl stepped out to join him. As she did so she peeled away the long filmy scarf that covered her upper body and stood, still veiled but with breasts bared before the men.
“I hear much of your new weapons,” he said. “We have weapons too.”
He flicked his hand. The girl tossed her scarf in the air. Slowly, gently, the thin silk floated down. The executioner turned his scimitar edge up and held it out beneath the drifting fabric. The scarf met the edge, divided, settled in two pieces to the ground.
Brand grunted, muttered something to the skippers at his side. Now, the Caliph thought, the king will tell that giant to split something with his great clumsy axe.
Shef turned, looked at Cwicca and Osmod. Neither of them the best shot in the world, he thought. Osmod is a bit more certain. He pointed silently at a marble vase holding bright purple flowers in a niche above the Caliph's head. Osmod gulped visibly, looked sideways at Cwicca, unslung his crossbow. Cocked it with one heave on the goat's-foot lever. Dropped in the short iron quarrel. Raised, aimed and pulled trigger.
Osmod had guessed right, aiming low to allow for the short-range rise. The armor-piercing bolt smashed into the stone, shattering it into pieces. Stone splinters hummed around the room, the bolt bounced back from the wall and clanged onto the floor. The flowers fell in a decorative trail. Earth from the shattered vase slowly pattered down.
The Caliph stroked his beard in the silence. I threatened him with my executioners, he thought. But that Iblis-bolt would have split my heart before I could move. Ghaniya did not warn me enough.
“You will fight our enemies,” he said finally, “and you say that is what you have come for. If our enemies are your enemies, that may be true. But no-one works only for another's good. There must be something else that has brought you here. Tell me what it is, and by Allah I shall do my best to see you have it.”
For the third time the foreign king shocked him. In clear but simple Arabic he replied once more.
“We have come to see the flying man.”
Chapter Seven
Shef pushed his way impatiently through the growing crowd, the pole-ladder emblem of his god dangling over his chest. As the days of waiting had gone by, he and his men had slowly discarded layers of clothing. First the mail armor. It had become clear that while Shef's two hundred men were indeed in the heart of a potentially hostile power, nevertheless they were so outnumbered as to make organized battle futile, while the streets of Cordova were guarded with such strictness that no man need fear private quarrel. Shef had put the Vikings' mail and the Englishmen's crossbows in a guardroom, less to keep them safe, he remarked, than to prevent them from selling their issued weapons for drink.
“There is no strong drink anywhere in Cordova,” Hund had objected. “The orders of Muhammad forbid it.”
“There's some somewhere,” Shef had replied, and supervised the handover of weapons himself.
Then the jackets had gone. A couple of days wandering open-mouthed round the narrow, stone-walled streets of Cordova had convinced even the most conservative Northerners that leather was an encumbrance if not a risk to life. By now all the Waymen were down to hemp shirts and wool breeches, and those fortunate enough to retain a balance of their pay were sporting gaudy cotton. In the sun their silver pendants—no-one had yet been so rash or God-defying as to sell one—gleamed and jerked, marking their owners out yet again from the darker faces and gayer clothes around them.
Last, fear had gone. Shef had expected, given the importance of his mission, to be shown to the great bin- Firnas, the flying man, at once. It had taken days, not—so Suleiman the Jew assured them—out of desire for delay, still less deliberate insult, but because of the veneration here accorded to the wise. The Caliph might indeed have commanded an audience and a demonstration, but preferred instead to send messengers, present gifts, ask for the favor of the wise to be shown to the barbarians drawn from afar by rumor of him, and generally go through the established ritual of Andalusian diplomacy. Bin-Firnas too—Suleiman further assured them—was not making deliberate difficulties in his replies. He was anxious only not to disappoint, to be unable to live up to the doubtless exaggerated tales carried into far lands by hearsay; further, as messages traveled both ways, it transpired that he was waiting for a wind.
Shef and his men had spent the days of waiting wandering with increasing entrancement round the streets of Cordova, seeing for the first time for any of them the hundred thousand details of a developed commercial
