King and Emperor

“Easy, easy,” muttered Thorvin. “All right, the rest of you, go back to sleep. Just a dream. Just a nightmare.”

He propped Shef on the seaward rail, let him look round in the starlight and get his bearings.

“What did you see this time?”

Shef caught his breath, felt the sweat drying on him. His tunic was drenched, as wet as if he had been in the sea. The salt stung his empty eye-socket.

“I saw Loki. Loki loose. Then I was in the orm-garth, like Ragnar.” Shef began to rub his thigh where he had felt the strike of the fangs.

“If you have seen Loki loose, the College must know,” muttered Thorvin. “Maybe Farman in Stamford, or even Vigleik of the visions in Kaupang might have some counsel. For if Loki is loose we are that much closer to the doom of the gods and the coming of the Skuld-world. Maybe it is we who have stirred it up.”

“Loki is not loose,” came a cold angry voice from behind them. “There is no such thing as Loki. Or as the gods. The evil in the world comes from men alone.”

In the starlight Shef pulled up the hem of his tunic, stared down at his bare thigh. On it, there, two purple marks: Puncture wounds. Svandis stared, reached out a hand, drew it back. For once found nothing to say.

Two hundred miles from the Fafnisbane floating on the placid sea, a group of other men sat huddled at the foot of another dark stairway, deep inside a mountain.

“He is likely to break in tomorrow,” said one of them.

General nods, murmurs of agreement. “We caused them many casualties today. Tomorrow they will bring that great catapult up a little closer, start earlier with our outer defenses down, find the range. Then it will be a rock on top of the main gate and their stormers will come through. Of course we will make barricades inside, but…” A Gallic shrug, barely visible in the candlelight.

“If we surrender tomorrow at dawn they may give us terms, the Emperor Bruno is said to be merciful, they will ask only for an oath which we can in conscience give falsely, then…”

The gabbling frightened voice was cut off by another fierce gesture. “What happens to us is of no moment,” said the first voice. “We may get terms, we may live, we may die. What counts is the holy relics. And if the Emperor thinks they are here—and he already thinks they are here, that is why he is besieging us—anyone who lives tomorrow will be tortured till they tell all they know.”

“Try to get them out? They have sentries. But in the crannies of the Puig, our mountain men could crawl out.”

“With the books and the records, maybe. With the graduale”—the speaker's Occitan accent had turned the word to graal—“I don't think so.”

“Get the other things out that way. Just drop the holy relic outside the wall. It has no gold on it, no marks of worship like the Catholics would give it. They won't know. Our brothers will pick it up later.”

A long pause. “Too risky,” said the first voice. “It could be lost in the rubble. Whoever we told to recognize it later might die, might be tortured, might confess.

“No. What we must do is leave it here, under the mountain. The entry to this place is known only to us, and to the perfecti among us outside the walls. The Emperor cannot tear down the mountain. He will never find the entrance—unless someone tells him.”

“And none of us will tell him,” answered one of his fellows.

A sudden flash in the candlelight, a thud, a choked-off gasp. Two men eased a body to the floor, that of the speaker who had suggested terms.

“Go to God, brother,” said one of the killers. “I love you as a brother still. I would not have you put to a test you could not bear.”

The first voice continued. “So that is clear. The relic must stay. All those of us who know the secret stair must die. For no-one can be sure what he will say at the last end of pain.”

“Are we allowed to die in battle?” queried one of the dark shapes.

“No. A blow on the head, a crippled arm. Anyone may be captured without consenting to it. We would die later of the endura, but that might be too late. And alas, we have no time for the endura. One of us will go up the stair, and tell Marcabru the captain to make the best terms he can tomorrow morning for our poor brothers, the imperfecti. Then that brother will return. And we will take the holy draught together from the chalice of Joseph.”

A hum of satisfaction and agreement, hands shaken across the table in the dark.

An hour later, as the silent perfect ones heard the step of their brother coming again down the stairs to share the poison draught with his brothers, a final voice in the dimness.

“Rejoice, brothers, for we are old. And what was the question that our founder Nicodemus asked of the Son of God?”

Voices answered him in chorus, garbling the Latin words in their own strange dialect. “Quomodo potest homo nasci, cum senex sit! How can a man be born when he is old? Or can he enter again into the womb of his mother?”

Chapter Ten

The enemy fleet was hull-up before Shef's lookout saw or recognized it. The Greek admiral had chosen his time perfectly: a little after noon, with the combined fleet of Arabs and Northerners split into its three habitual divisions. The advance guard and main body keeping pace with the cloud of dust which meant horse and foot advancing along the coastline, but already with oars shipped and prepared for siesta. The Northerners two long miles behind, awake but hopelessly becalmed, the sails acting only as awnings against the fierce heat. Another mile behind them, the admiral with his escort ships, dropped back to take their siesta, confident of their ability to catch up on the lumbering sailing ships later in the day.

In any case all attention was fixed on the land. Just dimly, from where they lay on the blue water, Shef could hear a faint sound of screaming trumpets, high and shrill in the Arab mode. Was that an answering bellow? The hoarse war-horns of Germans, or of Franks? Everyone on the ships was crowded on to the landward rails, listening intently, trying to make out what might or might not be happening there on the shore. A dust cloud? Pinpricks of light? Weapons catching the sun, that was for sure.

Turning from the rail, Shef blinked his one eye, weary from straining across the dazzling water. Looked out to sea, into the noon haze. Fishing boats, creeping towards them, their three-cornered sails picking up what breaths of air there might be. A lot of them, Shef reflected. Had they found a school of tunny? They were using their oars as well, moving fast for fishermen in the heat. Too fast.

“Lookout!” he bellowed. “Out to sea. What can you see?”

“Fishing boats, lord,” came the cry, a little puzzled. “A lot of them.”

“How many?”

“I can see—twenty, thirty. No, there's more coming out of the haze, pulling hard.”

“Do they have the grind here?” asked Thorvin, veteran of the journey to the far North. He meant the Halogaland custom of driving schools of whales ashore with a fleet of boats, to slaughter them in the shallows.

“That's no grind,” snapped Shef. “Nor no fishermen either. That's the enemy fleet, and us all looking the wrong way. How long have those bastards been watching us, and us saying, ‘Oh, they're only fishing boats’.”

His voice rose to a shout, as he tried to pierce the sunny lethargy, move the gaping faces turned towards him. “Cwicca, Osmod, man the mules! Everyone to the crossbows. Hagbarth, can you get any way on at all? Thorvin, blow the signal horn, alert the rest of the fleet. For Thor's sake, move, all of you. They're ready and we aren't!”

An incoherent yell from the lookout, and a pointing finger. No need for either. Out of the heat-haze, hull-up already, moving at terrifying speed, Shef saw the red-painted galleys of the Greeks sweeping down in a broad wedge. Their banks of white-painted oars flashed and swept in the sun, each ship had a bone in her teeth, a white bow-wave cresting over the menace of the ram. Shef could see the black-lashed female eyes painted incongruously on the high fore-quarters, could see the armor of their marines flashing as they waved their weapons in