King and Emperor

childhood sweetheart and first love, who had left him for a kinder man. One who did not look at others to use them. Her face reproached him.

He dropped his gaze, gripped the man by the arm, careful not to disturb or disarrange his feathers.

“No,” he said. “Not at all. If they are too close to the tower they will not see well. I wish them to have something to tell their children and their children's children. Not just, ‘he flew too fast for me to see.’ I wish you the best of fortune.”

The bird-man smiled proudly, stepped first onto a block, then, carefully, onto the wall where Shef had stood. A gasp of amazement came up from the crowd below. He stood, spread his cape widely in the strong wind. It blew from behind him, Shef noted, flattening the feathers against his back. He thinks the cape is a sail, then, which will sweep him on as if he were a ship. But what if it should instead be a…?

The man crouched, gathering his strength, and then suddenly leapt straight out, crying at the top of his voice, “Volund aid me!”

His arms beat the air, the cape flapping wildly. Once, and then as Shef craned forward, again, and then… A thud came up from the stone-flagged courtyard below, a long simultaneous groan from the crowd. Looking down, Shef saw the body lying perhaps sixteen feet from the base of the tower. Priests of the Way were already running towards him, priests of Ithun the Healer. Shef recognized among them the diminutive shape of another childhood friend, Hund the one-time slave, who shared a dog's name with himself, but was now thought the greatest leech and bone-setter of the island of Britain. Thorvin must have stationed them there. So he had shared his own misgivings.

They were looking up now, shouting. “He has broken both legs, badly smashed. But not his back.”

Godive was looking over the wall now, next to her husband. “He was a brave man,” she said, a note of accusation in her voice.

“He will get the best treatment we can give him,” Shef replied.

“How much would you have given him if he had flown, say, a furlong?” asked Alfred.

“For a furlong? A hundred pounds of silver.”

“Will you give him some now, as compensation for his injuries?”

Shef's lips tightened suddenly into a hard line, as he felt the pressure put on him, the pressure to show charity, respect good intentions. He knew Godive had left him for his ruthlessness. He did not see himself as ruthless. He did only what he needed to. He had many unknown subjects to protect as well as those who appeared before him.

“He was a brave man,” he said, turning away. “But he was a fool as well. All he had to go on was words. But in the College of the Way it is works alone that count. Is that not so, Thorvin? He has taken your book of holy song and turned it into a Bible like the Christians' gospel. To be believed in, not thought about. No. I will send my leeches to him, but I will pay him nothing.”

A voice drifted up from the courtyard again. “He has his wits back. He says his mistake was to use hen's feathers, and they are earth-scratchers. Next time he will try with gull-feathers alone.”

“Don't forget,” Shef said more loudly and to all, still answering an unspoken accusation. “I spend my subjects' silver for a purpose. All this could be snatched from us any summer. Think how many enemies we have over there.” He pointed at right angles to the wind, out across the meadows to the south and east.

If some bird or bird-man could have followed the wave of the king across sea and land for a thousand miles, across the English Channel and then across the whole continent of Europe, it would have come in the end upon a meeting: a meeting long-prepared. For many weary months go-betweens had ridden down muddy roads and sailed stormy seas, to ask careful questions, in the languages of Byzantium and of Rome.

“If it might be that the Imperator, in his wisdom, might be prepared to consider thus and so; and might attempt to use such slight influence as he has with His Holiness the Pope to persuade him in his turn to reconsider such and such a formula; then (accepting the foregoing as a working possibility or if I may use your so-flexible tongue, a hypothesis) could it be so that in his turn the Basileus might turn his mind to the thoughts of so and thus?” So spoke the Romans.

“Esteemed colleague, leaving your interesting hypothesis to one side for the moment only, if it were so that the Basileus might—saving at all times his orthodoxy and the rights of the Patriarch— consider a working and perhaps temporary arrangement in such and such a field of interest, might we then enquire what the attitude of the Imperator would be to the vexed question of the Bulgarian embassy, and the unhappy attempts of previous administrations to detach our newly-baptized converts from their faith and attach them to the allegiance of Rome?” So replied the Greeks.

Slowly the emissaries had conversed, fenced, felt each other out, returned for further instructions. The emissaries had risen higher and higher in rank, from mere bishops and second secretaries to archbishops and influential abbots, drawing in military men, counts and strategists. Plenipotentiaries had been dispatched, only to discover that however full their powers might be, they did not dare to commit their emperors and churches on their word alone. Finally there had been no help for it but to arrange a meeting of the supreme powers, the four greatest authorities in Christendom: the Pope of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople, the Emperor of the Romans and the Emperor of the Greeks.

The meeting had been held up for months by the discovery that in his eyes the Basileus of the Greeks considered himself the true heir of the Caesars and so Emperor of the Romans as well, while the Pope bitterly resented the termination “of Rome” being added to his title, regarding himself as the heir of St. Peter and the Pope of all Christians everywhere. Carefully formulas had been arranged, agreements reached not only as to what might be said but what might not under any circumstances be said. Like mating hedgehogs the powers drew together: delicately, gingerly.

Even the place of meeting had required a dozen proposals and counterproposals. Yet now, at last, the negotiators might look out over a bluer sea than any the barbarian kings of the North would ever view: the Adriatic, looking west towards Italy, at the place where once the mightiest of Roman administrator-emperors had built his palace for retirement—Salonae of Diocletian, called already by the Slavs filtering into the region, Split.

In the end, and after days of exhausting ceremonial, the two military leaders had lost patience and dismissed all their retinues of advisers and translators and chiefs of protocol. They sat now on a balcony overlooking the sea, a pitcher of resined wine between them. All serious issues were settled, the agreements at this moment being embodied by relays of scribes writing a massive treaty in multiple copies in gold and purple ink. The only possible check now could come from the religious leaders, who had retired to talk between themselves. And each had been given the strictest and grimmest of warnings by his earthly colleague and paymaster, to cause no trouble. For there were worse things that could happen to the Church, as the Imperator Bruno had said to his creature Pope John, than a misunderstanding over the exact nature of the Nicene Creed.

The emperors sat quietly, then, each with an ear cocked for the return of the churchmen, discussing their personal problems, as one ultimate ruler to another. It was perhaps the first time either had talked freely and frankly of such matters. They spoke in Latin, native to neither of them, but at least allowing them to communicate without intermediaries.

“We are alike in several ways, then,” mused the Emperor of the Greeks, the Basileus. The imperial name he had chosen, Basil I, showed a certain lack of imagination unsurprising in one with his history.

“Hoc ille,” agreed the Imperator of the West, Bruno Emperor of the Romans as he claimed, but in reality of the Franks, the Italians and most of all of the Germans. “That's it. We are new men. Of course my family is old and distinguished. But I am not of the blood of Charlemagne.”

“Nor I of the house of Leo,” agreed the Basileus. “Tell me if I am wrong, but as I understand it there is none of the blood of Charlemagne left.”

Bruno nodded. “None in the male line. Some were killed by their own vassals, like King Charles the Bald, on account of their failures in battle. I had to take measures against others myself.”

“How many?” probed Basil.

“About ten. It was made easier for me in that they all seemed to have the same names. Lewis the Stammerer, Lewis the German. Three sons for each of them, and still with the same names, Charles and Lewis and Carloman. And some others of course. But it is not quite true that there is none of the blood of Charlemagne left. He