“We cannot take the risk. We must recover our treasures. By war. By stealth. With a bribe. If we need help from outside we must find it.”
“Outside?” came a query.
“The world is coming to us now. The Emperor, successor of Charlemagne, whom we drove off eighty years ago. But others too. Strange news from Cordova, as you know. We must guard above all against thinking like men, as if all that happens in this world were mere chance and mortal effort. For we know it is a battle-ground, between the One Above and the One Below. If all that happened, happened in this world, we know which one would win.”
“And yet He is the
“And so we must go outside. Outside our world, outside this world.”
Slowly the
The old man who sat in the shade of the vine-trellis looked at the King of the North sitting opposite him with doubt. He did not look like a king, still less like the subject of prophecy. He was not dressed in Bozrah purple. His men did not bow down before him. He was sitting on a small stool, and following the custom of the Northerners, sitting in full sunlight, as if he could not get enough of it. Sweat ran from his brow, dripped steadily on to the flagstones of the balcony built out to overlook sea and harbor far below.
“You are sure he is a king?” the old man asked Suleiman again. They spoke in Hebrew, Shef listening patiently but without understanding to the alien syllables, which no Englishman had ever heard before in the history of the world.
“I have seen him in his homeland, in his own hall. He rules a wide realm.”
“He was born a Christian, you tell me. He will understand this, then. Tell him…” The old man, Benjamin Prince of Septimania, Lion of Judah, Ruler of the Rock of Sion, spoke on. After a few moments Suleiman—or, in his own country, Solomon—began to interpret.
“My prince tells me that you will understand what it says in our holy book, which was your holy book also, in the days when you were of the Christian Church. In the Book of the Wisdom of ben-Shirach, which you call ‘Ecclesiasticus,’ it is said, ‘The conies are a feeble folk, but they dwell in the rocks.’ The Prince says that here—and I have told him what your strange woman said of the Jews—here the Jews are not a feeble folk. Yet still they dwell in the rocks, as you can see in all directions.” He waved a hand at the mountains looming not far off, at the sheer stone walls guarding harbor and town.
Shef stared at him blankly. The Jewish prince's assumption that a Christian was bound to know Old and New Testaments was completely wide of the mark. Shef had never heard of ‘Ecclesiasticus,’ never read a Bible, had indeed never seen a Bible in his life till he attended the wedding of his love Go-dive and his partner Alfred in the great cathedral at Winchester. The priest of his fenland village had owned only a service book, with extracts from the Bible for the different services of the Church year. All that Father Andreas had ever even tried to teach was respect for authority, whether that were the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the necessity for tithing, or social superiors. He had never seen a coney or rabbit either, though this did not matter since Solomon had translated the word as ‘hare,’ for want of a better.
“Hares don't live in the rocks,” he said. “They live in the open field.”
Solomon hesitated. “The point my prince wishes to make is that we have very strong natural and artificial defenses.”
Shef looked round. “Yes, I can see that.”
“He did not understand my remark,” cut in Benjamin.
“No. The fact is, prince, that these people receive almost no education, even if they are born Christians. Few of them can read and write. I believe the king here can, but he does not do so easily. I do not think he knows the Scriptures at all.”
“They are not People of the Book, then.”
Solomon hesitated. This was no time to explain the doctrines of the Way, its devotion to new knowledge. His prince and his people felt no loyalty to the Caliph, less to the Emperor, were ready for any new alliance that might bring change. There was no need to hinder their acceptance.
“I think they are trying to be,” he suggested. “With difficulty and by themselves. I have seen their own writing. It is developed from a way of cutting signs with knives on bits of wood.”
Slowly the prince pushed himself to his feet. “It is meritorious,” he said, “to assist those who desire to learn. Come. Let us show the king here what a school is like. A school for those who are truly People of the Book, not like the followers of Mohammed, for ever remembering without understanding, nor those of Yeshua, for ever hiding behind languages no one but their priests is allowed to know.”
Shef rose too, not unwilling to follow his hosts' demands, but increasingly bored with listening to conversations that no one troubled to translate. As Solomon explained the purpose of their visit his eye was drawn against his will to what was going on down in the crowded and sunlit harbor. By the outer mole, where the ships of the Northern fleet rode at anchor well away from shore and from the native craft, they were veering out the kites again. He glanced to see if the old prince was waiting for him, saw that he had gone a few steps inside into the cool dark. Pulled his far-seer from his belt and snatched a quick glance through it. The kite was lifting well in a fresh breeze, Steffi now confidently directing operations. And they'd got Tolman, smallest and lightest of the ships' boys, standing by the rail! Were the bastards going to try the next experiment without him? It was a good day for it, and Tolman, bred to a fisherman's family off Lowestoft, was known to be able to swim like a fish.
The Jews were waiting for him. Shef shut the far-seer up, followed Solomon, Skaldfinn, Prince Benjamin and the rest of the escorts and entourage glumly into the dark. To join the People of the Book.
As Shef was led firmly and unwaveringly round the stronghold of the Jewish enclave, planted long ago at the time of the fall of Rome, his sense of strangeness and oppression grew steadily. After the court of the Caliph, he had thought himself ready for any new experience, but the fortress town seemed arranged like no other he had seen in North or South. There was the same crowded and active life that he had grown familiar with in the streets and markets of Cordova, among people dressed in much the same way and talking languages in which he recognized the occasional snatch of Arabic or of some Latin tongue. Yet the sense of sprawl, of activities going on without license or control or physical boundary was missing. The prince led him first on a careful tour of the town's outer defenses, a stone wall cunningly linking natural cliff and precipice so as to shut in completely the bay and the harbor like a three-quarter circle. The strange thing was that in every other fortress city Shef had seen, whether York or London or Cordova, there was always and as if immune to regulation a second city, an outer huddle beyond the walls of huts and shacks, the dwellings of those not rich enough to come inside the protection of the city yet drawn there all the same by the wealth it grew and slowly dripped from its boundaries. Alert guard-captains were continually tearing them down, driving the inhabitants further away, trying to keep themselves a clear field of view and dart. It never worked. Always the whores and the hucksters and the beggars crawled back and remade their outer village.
Not here. Nothing obstructed the walls, not so much as a kennel for dogs or a private latrine. Nothing grew in their crevices either—Shef saw a party of men on one stretch lowering some of their number over the parapets to grub out weeds from the stone. Though he could see tilled fields and groves in the distance, he could see not so much as a shed for a watchman. The parties he saw moving to and from fields to city carried their tools with them: in both directions, he noted. They did not even leave their heavy plows and grain-baskets outside the walls.
“I understand what you mean to do,” he said finally to Solomon, still gravely interpreting the remarks of his ruler. “I do not see how you make people do it. I could not do that with my own people, even if they were slaves. There is always someone who will try to bend the rules, and ten more to follow him. Even if you flog and brand the way the black monks did, there will always be someone who does not understand what is he to do no matter how often you tell him. Those people out there, are they your slaves? Why do they obey so willingly?”
“We do not keep slaves,” replied Solomon. “Slavery is forbidden to us under our Law.” He translated the rest of Shef's comments, listened to the long reply, spoke again.
“Benjamin ha-Nasi says that you are right to ask these questions, and that he sees you are a ruler in truth. He says you are right also to say that knowing the law is more wonderful than obeying the law, and declares that it is his belief that it is the unlearned alone who bring trouble into the world.
