King and Emperor

there was no-one alive who did not in some way respect them. She is one of the god-born, and of a family favored by Othin. Maybe that will avert some of the anger of the god, which some of us have feared for him.”

The council pondered his words. On the whole the Vikings among them, Hagbarth and Skaldfinn, even Brand despite himself, were impressed. Cwicca and Osmod looked at each other silently: their memories of Ivar the Boneless had not faded. Only Hund allowed trouble to show on his face. Brand, with the champion's sensitivity to matters of honor and precedence, noticed it.

“She was never your woman,” he remarked with as near kindness as his voice could manage. “Do you feel he owes you a debt because she was your apprentice?”

“No,” he said. “I wish them well, if they have chosen each other. But what is all this about the god-born and the blood of heroes?” Bitterness tinged his voice. “Look at them over there! Who are they? A pirate's bastard who spent most of his youth in a wattle hut. And a woman who has been a drab to half of Denmark. And that is the One King and the One Queen-to-be!”

He rose abruptly and stalked away across the bright and crowded quayside. The others watched him go.

“What he says is true,” muttered Hagbarth.

“Yes, but he worked his way up, didn't he?” contradicted Cwicca, aflame with anger at any criticism of his master. “And I expect she only done what she had to, too. I think that's as important as kings' blood anyway. Me and Osmod should know: how many kings have we been at the death of, Osmod?”

“Six,” said Osmod briefly. “If you count the Frankish king, that is, we didn't kill him but his men did it for us once we beat him.”

“The trouble is,” said Thorvin, “the more you kill, the more power goes into the hands of the ones you don't.”

Only a few yards away from the Northerners on the crowded quayside, a different group watched the pair of lovers. They squatted in the shade of an awning where a tailor advertised his wares, the tailor himself crouched on a tiny stool, passing cloth through his hands while he stitched with the speed of a serpent. As his feigned customers felt material and from time to time called out the cries of surprise and outrage which were part of normal negotiation, tradesman and clients exchanged muttered comments.

“That is him for sure,” said one in the thick and sweaty homespun of a mountain shepherd. “The one eye. The gold circlet. The charm round his neck.”

“The graduale,” corrected a better-dressed man, grey-haired and grey-bearded. The others looked sideways at him, corrected themselves and returned their eyes to the cloth.

“Two days ago he went all through the city with ha-Nasi,” said the tailor, voice and eyes never rising. “At the librarium he tore a book and asked what was the price of wisdom. The geonim think him an idiot and have asked ha-Nasi to send him away. Yesterday and today he has been with the woman. His eyes never leave her. He cannot keep his hands from her body, or only with difficulty.”

The grey-haired man looked first disbelieving, then sad. “It may be that he is still bound in service to the Evil One. But who is not, when he is born? It is from that that we have to climb. Thierry, do you think he would come freely, if we asked him?”

“No. He knows nothing of us.”

“Can we bribe him?”

“He is a rich man. His clothes would disgrace an onion-grower, but see the gold he wears. They say…”

“What do they say?”

“They say he asks always for new knowledge. His men talk of the Greek fire in the taverns, say openly they seek a way to match it. Every day, when the wind rises, they fly strange kites with boys in them from the decks of their ships. If you could tell him how to make Greek fire he might go with you. Or send another.”

“I know no way to make Greek fire,” said the greybeard slowly.

The shepherd spoke again. “Then it will have to be the woman.”

To cover the silence that fell, the tailor raised his voice in a cry of approval of his own wares and amazement at his prices.

“It will have to be the woman,” said the greybeard heavily. “So it is with men. Their own desires lead them to danger and to death. Their loins urge them to give life. But every life they give is another hostage to the Evil One. God the Father of the Christians.”

“Jehovah of the Jews,” added the shepherd.

“The Prince of this World,” said all the men in the booth together. Ritualistically, each man spat briefly and secretly into his palm.

Shef, the object of so much hidden scrutiny, rose finally from the table where he had been sitting, throwing down a silver penny with his own head on it as payment for the strong resined wine: the Jews had no such prohibition as the Mohammedans against strong drink, though they did not consume it in the everyday fashion of the Latins or the determined drunkenness of the Way-folk.

“Let's go back to the ship,” he said.

Svandis shook her head. “I want to walk round. Talk to people.”

Shef's face showed surprise, dismay, alarm. “You did that before. In Cordova. You were away all night. You won't…”

She smiled. “I won't treat you the way I did poor Hund.”

“There are no slaves here, you know. What language will you speak?”

“If I can't find anyone to talk to I'll come back.” Shef continued to stare down at her. Since they had mated on the deck of the Fafnisbane a bare day and a half before, he had thought of nothing but her. It seemed to be part of his nature that once he was attached to a woman, no other would do, no other thought could enter him. Except what had to be done. Now there was nothing to be done. Yet something told him that this was a woman who could not be held, who would rebel at the suggestion of it. And soon the wind would rise. “Come soon,” he said, and walked away, waving already for the boat and the rowers that would take him back to the Fafnisbane.

As the afternoon breeze began to rise, the kite-handlers prepared for yet another trial flight. A small elite of them had grown up. Cwicca and Osmod had places as of right: they had been companions of the One King in all his exploits. Even more important, both of them now had ground into them the deep belief that there was a technical solution to every problem. Technical solutions had raised both of them from slavery to wealth—first the catapult, then the crossbow, then case-hardened steel, then water-wheels, windmills, the cam, the trip-hammer and the mill-driven bellows. They were used to the immense difficulties of putting ideas into practice, turning imagination into technology. They knew it could be done. Perhaps most significantly, they knew it had to be done by trial and error, by combining the knowledge of many. Failure one day did not deter them the next. Their conviction was contagious.

Another member of the gang was Steffi, the squinter. He too had belief—belief enough, as the others recognized, to throw himself off a cliff and expect to live. Hama and Trimma were the line-handlers, Godrich and Balla cut and stitched the precious kite-cloth given by bin-Firnas. All the half-dozen ships' boys of the Fafnisbane, recruited originally by Ordlaf the skipper to man his yards, were eager contenders to be flown aloft, watched with bitter envy by their counterparts on the other six two-masters. All the kite-handlers were English, all except the boys were men rescued by the Way from slavery. The Vikings from Brand's ships showed a certain curiosity, and were ready enough to man their oars and act as retrieval or rescue ships. Their own sense of dignity, though, seemed to hold them back from the manic jostling try-it-and-see activity of the experimenters.

Most important member of the elite was the king himself, too often forced to worry about other matters, always returning like a hungry bee to the nectar of flight. Hagbarth, priest of Njorth, while half-disapproving of the whole project as a threat to seamanship, nevertheless saw it as his duty to the Way to record the experiments. He often found it difficult to get close enough to the apparatus to see what changes the stitchers or the line-handlers were making.

“See,” said Cwicca finally as the preparations reached completion. “We think we got it rigged absolutely right