King and Emperor

has great-great-granddaughters left. One day, when all my tasks are done, I may ally myself with one.”

“So your position will be stronger.”

A yet fiercer look crossed Bruno's craggy, rock-hewn face. He straightened up in his chair, reached behind him for the thing that never left him, that no negotiators could persuade him to abandon. The lance with the leaf- shaped blade, its plain head now shining once more with inlaid gold crosses, set on a shaft of ash-wood barely visible beneath gold and silver wire. His ape-like shoulders stretched as he swung it before him, thumped its shaft on the marble floor.

“No! My position could not be stronger in any way. For I am the holder of the Holy Lance, the lance with which the German centurion Longinus split the heart of our blessed Savior. He who holds it, he is the heir of Charlemagne, by more than blood. I took it in battle with the heathen, brought it back to Christendom.”

Reverently Bruno kissed the blade, laid the weapon down with tender care beside him. The bodyguards who had stiffened into readiness yards distant relaxed, smiled warily at each other.

The Basileus nodded, reflecting. He had learnt two things. That this strange count from the furthest extremity of the Franks believed his own fable. And that the stories they told of him were true. This man did not need a bodyguard, he was his own. How like the Franks to elect as their king the one the most formidable in single combat, not a strategos but a mere champion. And yet he might be a strategist too.

“And you,” probed Bruno in his turn. “You… put from his throne your predecessor, Michael the Drunkard, as he was called. I take it he has left no seed behind to grow rebellion.”

“None,” replied Basil curtly, his pale face flushing over the dark beard.

Basil's supposed second son, Leo, is in reality the child of Michael, Bruno's spies had reported. Basil killed the Emperor his master for cuckolding him. But in any case the Greeks needed an Emperor who could stay sober long enough to marshal an army. They are pressed by the Slavs, the Bulgars, even by your own foes, the Vikings raiding down the great rivers of the east. Not twenty years ago a Viking fleet menaced Constantinople, which they call Byzantium. We do not know why Basil allowed Leo to live.

“So. We are new men, then. But neither of us has old men waiting to challenge us. And yet both of us know we have many challenges, many threats. We and Christendom at once. Tell me,” Bruno asked, his face intent, “where do you see the greatest threat to us, to Christ, and to his Church? You yourself, I mean, not your generals and your advisers.”

“An easy question, for me,” Basil replied, “though I may not give the answer you expect. You know that your adversaries, the heathen of the North, the Vikings as you call them: you know that a generation ago they brought their ships up to Byzantium itself?”

Bruno nodded. “It surprised me when I learned it. I did not think that they could find their way across the Italian Sea. But then your secretary told me that they had not done so, had somehow brought their ships down the rivers of the East. You think they are your greatest danger? That is what I hoped…”

A lifted hand interrupted him. “No. I do not think that these men, fierce as they are, are the greatest menace. We bought them off, you know. The common folk say that it was the Virgin Mary who routed them, but no, I remember the negotiations. We paid them a little gold. We offered them unlimited use of the great municipal baths! They took it. To me they are fierce and greedy children. Not serious.

“No, the true danger comes not from them, mere pagani that they are, immature rustics. It comes from the followers of Muhammad.” The Basileus paused for wine.

“I have never met one,” Bruno prompted.

“They came from nowhere. Two hundred and fifty years ago these followers of their false Prophet came from out of the desert. Destroyed the Persian Empire. Took from us all our African provinces, and Jerusalem.” The Basileus leaned forward. “Took the southern shore of the Italian Sea. Since then that sea has been our battleground. And on it we have been losing. You know why?”

Bruno shook his head.

“Galleys need water, all the time. Oarsmen drink faster than the fish. The side that controls the watering- grounds controls the sea. And that means the islands. Kypros they took, island of Venus. Then Crete. After they conquered Spain, they seized the Balearics. Now their fleets press again on Sicily. If they take that—where will Rome be? So you see, friend, they threaten you as well. How long since their armies were at the gates of your holy city?”

Opening doors, raised voices, a shuffle of feet, said that the conference of Pope and Patriarch had broken up, that the Emperors of East and West must turn their minds again to ceremonial and treaties. Bruno groped for a reply, amid several. The Basileus is an Easterner, he thought, like Pope Nicholas whom we killed. He does not realize that destiny lies in the West. He does not know that the Way-folk are not the greedy children bought off in his father's time. That they are worse than the followers of the Prophet, for they still have their prophet with them: the one-eye. I should have killed him when I had my sword at his throat.

And yet maybe there is no need to argue here. The Basileus needs my bases. I need his fleet. Not for the Arabs. Just to sweep the Channel so I can put my lancers across. But let him have his way first. For he has the one thing that the Way-folk do not…

The Emperors were on their feet, the churchmen approaching, all smiles. A cardinal spoke, bowing, the cardinal who had once been Archbishop Gunther of Cologne. He spoke in fluent Low German, his and Bruno's native dialect, which neither Pope nor Patriarch nor any Greek or Italian would follow. At the same time one of the Patriarch's staff broke out with a burst of demotic Greek, no doubt with the same intention.

“It's fixed. They have agreed that we may add the formula ‘and the Son’ to the Nicene Creed—much difference that makes—as long as we draw no conclusions about the Double Procession of the Holy Ghost from it. Our fool, the Italian, has been told he has to withdraw his bishops from the Bulgars and let Saint Cyril have a free hand teaching them to read and write. All sides have agreed in condemning the former Patriarch, Photius the bookworm, no problem there. It's fixed.”

Bruno turned towards Basil as the latter heard his own secret briefing chatter to an end. The two men smiled, simultaneously, reached out their hands.

“My bases in Italy,” said Bruno.

“My fleet to relieve Sicily. And then the whole Italian Sea,” replied Basil.

And then the Atlantic, thought Bruno. But he held his tongue. After all he might have shed the Greeks and their Emperor before then. If he or his agents could find out the weapon that held Constantinople inviolable from the sea. The secret no Westerner knew, Roman or German or Way-man.

The secret of Greek fire.

Chapter Two

Halim, amir of the fleet of the Fortunate of God, bin-Tulun, Caliph of Egypt, newly independent of the feeble Caliphate of Baghdad, felt no unease as his galley led its hundred fellows to sea in the darkest hour before dawn. In moments, when a keen eyesight could see sufficiently to distinguish a white thread from a black one, his muezzin would call the faithful to prayer with the traditional cry, the shahada:

God is most great!
I testify that there is no God but Allah.
I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.

Arid so on, in the invocation that Halim had heard and repeated and obeyed forty thousand times since he reached the estate of a man and a warrior. He and his men would stretch out their mats on the rolling decks and go through their rakat, the prescribed ritual of prayer. But the men at the oars would not, would carry on sweeping his fleet into battle. For they were Christians, the slaves of many a lost campaign. Halim