King and Emperor

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The Jew was a strange, dignified, withdrawn figure.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 protegee 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