King and Emperor

“What he wishes you to understand is that we Jews are different from your people, as from the Caliph's. It is our custom to permit open debate of any matter—your lady Svandis might stand up in our debating chamber and say all that she pleases, and no one would interrupt her. But it is our custom also that once a decision has been made, a rule passed, then all must obey it, even those who argued most strongly against it. We do not punish for disagreement. We punish for not obeying the will of the community. That is why people obey all the rules willingly. Because we are the People not only of the Book, but of the Law.”

“And how do you all know the Law?”

“You will see.”

Turning from the battlements, the party retraced its steps into the center of the crowded forty-acre site, full of houses of stone and plaster connected by alley ways no wider than two men, winding up and down flights of steps that sometimes seemed to reach the gradient of ladders.

“See there,” said Solomon, pointing inside a narrow courtyard. There in the shade sat a man dressed in black, solemnly intoning a long unvarying drone to a dozen boys of different ages squatting on the ground. “That is one of the prince's geonim. The prince maintains a dozen such, scholars who instruct youth without pay, for the love of learning. See, he will not desist even though he sees the prince his master pass by. For learning is more important than princes.”

“What is he teaching them?”

Solomon listened for a while to the steady drone, and then nodded. “He is reciting to them points of halakhah. That is; part of the Mishnah. The Mishnah is the law of our people, based first on our holy books, which the Christians call the Old Testament. But the Mishnah is all that has been thought and said on these books since we first made our Covenant with God. In the halakhot we learn particular decisions which have been made on particular points.”

“Such as what?”

“At present the gaon is explaining why, though saving a man's life takes precedence over saving a woman's, it is proper to cover the nakedness of a woman before that of a man.”

Shef nodded, walked on broodingly, following the prince's unostentatious and unheralded tour. Another thing was beginning to catch his eye. Books in the crowd. He had seen several being carried, one man sitting short- sightedly with his nose almost buried between the covers of one. In one of the markets he thought he had caught a glimpse of a stall with a dozen or more laid out as if for sale. Shef had never heard of a book being sold. The Vikings stole them and ransomed them back, when they could, to their owners. The monks of Saint Benedict made them for themselves and their priest-dependents. No-one ever sold one. They were too valuable. Thorvin would have died in his boots before selling his collection of the holy songs, written down with difficulty in the jagged runic script. How many books did these people have? Where did they come from?

They paused again at what Shef identified as a church, if a Jewish one. In it men and women were praying, bending to the ground like Mohammedans, but somewhere in the dark interior Shef saw a candle burning, and in its light a man reading from another book, seemingly to two separated groups of men and women. Further on a square, and in it two men debating. Each listened impassively to the other, then, at intervals of perhaps five hundred words, spoke in his turn. From the ring of their voices it seemed to Shef that each would begin by quoting words not his own, and would then go on to explain them and fit them against the arguments of the other. A crowd surrounded them, intent and silent but for grunts of agreement, moans of rejection.

“The one says, ‘Take thou no usury’,” clarified Solomon. “The other replies, ‘To a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury.’ Now they are disputing as to the meaning of the word ‘stranger’.”

Shef nodded, reflecting. He knew of rule by the sword, like his own and that of the Viking rulers he had overthrown. He knew of rule by fear and slavery, like that of the monks and the Christian kings. It seemed that this was rule by book and by law, and by law which was put down in book form, not decided by the doom of king or jarl or alderman. The law of the book seemed, however, no wiser than that of the immediate judgment of his own courts. There was something he did not understand.

“Do your people study anything but law?” he asked.

Solomon translated, heard the reply from the prince still leading the way before them. “He says, all learning is either a code or a commentary.” Solomon struggled to find expression for either idea in Shef's Anglo-Norse, fixing in the end on “book of laws,” “book of decisions.”

Shef nodded again, his face imperturbable. Was this new knowledge? Or just old knowledge continually chewed over, the thing he had set his face against in his own land and his own capital?

“See,” Solomon said, pointing the way finally to a small building down almost by the harbor-front once again. In the background, between the alley-walls, Shef caught a momentary glimpse of a kite swooping in the air, gaped at it convulsively. They had flown off without him! And he was almost sure from the glimpse that they had sent Tolman aloft after all: the kite had not been moving freely in the air, had been under control.

“See,” said Solomon again, more firmly. “This at least you will find new knowledge.”

Reluctantly, still craning his neck upwards, Shef followed his hosts into the building. Inside, tables set round a central space. Men behind the tables, and from them a continuous scritch-scritch sound as their hands moved, seemingly all in time like the feet of the Emperor's marching soldiers or Shef's own troops. A man in the midst of them all, standing up, holding a book and reading from it. Reading, whatever the language, very slowly, a pause every few words.

They were copying, Shef realized. He had heard of such places even among the Christians. One man read slowly, the others wrote down his words, at the end, depending on how many copiers you had, six, even ten books where there had only been one. Impressive, and showing once again how the People of the Law knew their law. Yet this too was hardly new knowledge.

A word from the prince, and the reading stopped, the reader and the copiers turning to their ruler and bowing gravely. “It is not the copying that is new,” said Solomon, “nor, the Holy One forbid, the copied. Rather that which they copy on to.”

At a word the reader held his book, his master copy, out towards Shef. He took it clumsily, unsure for a moment at which side it might open. His hands were used to hammers and tongs, rope and wood, not these little thin sheets of skin.

Skin? If it was skin, he did not know what kind of a beast it came from. He raised the book, sniffed carefully. Felt the leaf between his fingers, twisting it as he would have a sheet of vellum. Not vellum. Not even the other thing, papyrus, made from strange reeds. The thin stuff parted, the reader stepped forward again with a look and cry of anger. Shef paused, held the book carefully, returned it, staring into the man's angry eyes without hint of expression or apology. Only a fool thinks everyone knows what he knows.

“I do not understand,” he said to Solomon. “It is not the calf-skin we use. It has no flesh side, no hair side. Can it be bark?”

“Neither. But it is made from wood. The Latins call it papyrium, from some Egyptian plant or other. But we do not make our papyrium from that plant, only from wood, crushed and felted. We add other things to it, a kind of clay that prevents the ink from running. Knowledge of it came from very far away, from the other end of the Arabs' empire. There, at Samarkand, they fought a battle with soldiers from another empire far across the desert and mountain lands. The Arabs were victorious and brought back many captives from the land of Chin. They, it is said, taught the Arabs the secret of paper. But the Arabs put little value in it, preferring to teach their boys only enough for them to remember sections of the Koran by heart. It is we who have made the books. With new knowledge.”

New knowledge to make the books, thought Shef. Not new knowledge—Solomon prayed to the Holy One to forbid it—not new knowledge in the books. Yet this explained something. It explained why there were so many books, so many readers. To make a book of vellum might take the skins of twenty calves, even more, for not the whole skin could be used. Not one man in a thousand could expect to own the skins of twenty calves.

“What is the price of a book?” he asked.

Solomon passed on the question to Benjamin, standing watching, his guards and scholars behind him.

“He says, the price of wisdom is above that of rubies.”

“I didn't mean the price of the wisdom. I meant the price of the paper.”

As Solomon translated again, the look of scorn on the face of the angry reader, still smoothing over his torn page, deepened into open contempt.