King and Emperor

He could see nothing, hear only a faint whisk of bare feet on stone. That too died. Silence, and a faint smell of burning coming on the wind. And then, as Shef was almost ready to override his fears and lead the others forward, faint but clear, a crack like a stick breaking, a shrill shriek instantly muffled, a clang like a far-off gong being beaten. Metal bouncing on stone.

Shef heaved the stone shut once again, this time with total finality. “You heard,” he said. “They got him. Now they know we're here.”

“We're trapped,” gasped Richier. “With the graal which our elders died to save.”

“The stairway goes up as well as down,” said Shef.

“We cannot break the wall down from inside, they would hear.”

“But there must be a doorway up there, a secret one like the one by which we entered, only inside the castle.”

Richier swallowed. “It comes out in an angle of the tower. The tower that was burnt, where Marcabru died.”

“So we'll come out in a pile of rubble, that's good.”

“It is across the courtyard from the main gate. I do not think there is any other way out. The courtyard is full of the Emperor's men, he has made it into a hospital for those wounded in fighting or injured in the work. We cannot just walk out. Not with a ladder over our shoulders! And besides the boys might pass as workmen or helpers, and I too, but you…”

Too tall, he meant, like a German but without the armor. And too distinctive.

“Show me where the stair comes out,” said Shef, a plan forming in his mind. “It cannot be far from where the pickax-men broke through.”

Bruno, by the grace of God Emperor of the Romans, in his own mind vice-regent of God on earth, stood at the center of the main gateway of the castle of Puigpunyent and surveyed the scene in its milling courtyard. Everywhere his eye fell, men sprang to more frantic efforts. He took no pleasure in it. That was as it should be. Though his face was impassive, his body was filled with such furious excitement that it would barely obey him. Twice on his frantic gallop back from the scene by the crashed fire-machine his involuntary clenching on the reins had dragged his stallion back on its haunches, almost unseating him. But he had returned in time. He was sure of it. Sure too that the whole display of lights and flame and portents in the sky had been exactly what his puny deacon had said: a distraction. Certain proof that the treasure he sought was within his grasp. If only he could stretch out his hand to take it. As he stood there, clutching the new-shafted lance which never left him, the Emperor allowed himself to do something he did only in moments of greatest stress: he rested his cheek on the very metal that had drunk the blood of his Lord, to feel coming from it the power and the assurance that were his by right.

Inside the courtyard the turmoil was like the last square of the harvest, filled with trapped rats running in all directions to avoid the scythes and cudgels closing in on them. But only to the untrained eye. The Emperor could see order being reimposed on chaos. The men who worked day and night to dig down to the foundations of this heretics' nest were rushing back to work with their picks and barrows, reeving the ropes and pulleys once again to the great crane that lifted the stone blocks and hurled them into the gulleys outside. In one corner their overseer, who had allowed them to desert their toil as the lights in the sky appeared, was screaming at a triangle of pike- shafts while two of Bruno's Lanzenbruder sergeants methodically laid on the two hundred lashes which Bruno had ordered him. His deputy, new promoted, stood in the middle of the yard, pale with fear and shrieking orders.

What was causing the trouble was the hospital. Careful and solicitous of the welfare of those who served him properly, Bruno had ordered space made in the central courtyard for beds for the trickle of casualties who had come in from scuffles with the locals, and the greater trickle of men who had caught feet beneath blocks of stone or jammed their arms under moving ropes. Only in the castle was there pure water in abundance, from the well sunk deep into the living rock beneath. Water was what the sick needed more than anything. But now the fires and chaos outside were bringing in more than a trickle, a gush of casualties. Men burnt fire-fighting, men with broken bones from falls, fools who had tripped on their own weapons. He would have to countermand the order that injuries should be brought in, Bruno decided. Let them wait on the plain outside till daylight. They were beginning to impede the work-parties. There, in the angle, a stretcher-party rushing busily in entirely the wrong direction. He opened his mouth to hail them, then closed it, gestured grimly to Tasso to sort the fools out, turned and snarled his orders to the gasping Agilulf, who had finally caught up with him, to get the injured not already in their beds out of the way, and prevent any more entries.

As he turned back to watch the courtyard again, he saw a different group thrusting through the gateway. A group with a different look on their faces. Not fear, but glee and triumph. And as they entered, so too did the faithful Erkenbert, on foot, his mule abandoned at the base of the rock.

“What have you got there?” he asked.

“A rat,” said the Bruder in the lead, eyes gleaming in the red light. Wolfram, Bruno saw, a good brother from holy Echternach. “He came running out of the castle, right into the arms of Dietrich here.”

“Out of the castle? But you are posted out to the west, there is no gate there.”

“No gate we can see, herra. But out he came, down the ravine to the west like a little mouse. He had not climbed down the wall, or we would have seen him. He was running full pelt like someone scared out of his wits.”

“I tripped him with my lance-butt,” added the burly Dietrich. “His leg broke and he tried to squawk, but I gagged him. He has given no warning to anyone still inside.”

“And look, herra,” said Wolfram the sergeant, his face shining with pleasure and anticipation. “See what the rat had for his hoard.”

He tipped a makeshift sack out at the Emperor's feet. From it there rolled goblets and plates, a massive candlestick. The light of the fires still glowing out on the plain gave back glints of gold.

Bruno bent, picked up one of the plates, felt the unmistakable heft of it. Something engraved on it. He could not read it well. A letter “N” in flowing script?

“What do you make of that?” he asked, passing it to Erkenbert.

“Little enough,” said the deacon. “But this is no hedge-baron's hoard. More like the communion plate of the Holy Father in Rome. I fear we will have to ask the boy.”

Eyes turned to the captive. Boy he was, face screwed up in pain, one leg lifted to keep it from touching the ground. Dark face, ragged clothes. A native. After the sight of the crashed kite and its dead pilot Bruno had half- expected to see another damned Englishman.

“Have you tried to talk to him?”

Wolfram nodded. “Can't understand a word he says. Nor he us.”

“I will find an interpreter,” said Erkenbert. “Then we will do what needs to be done. Take him outside the gate.”

“One thing,” said Bruno. “I know you will not be over-kind. Nor will you hold back in any way from what I must have from him. But my advice is this. Never begin by hurting anyone just a little, and then working up. Courage grows with resistance. Hurt him very badly to begin with, more badly than he can bear. Then offer him the way out.”

“As soon as I can find a local priest to interpret for us,” promised Erkenbert.

The trapped youth looked from side to side. He had already seen what he needed to. What must he do now? Did he need to die like Marcabru and the garrison? He did not know.

A hundred yards down the path to safety, in a stream of evicted invalids and their helpers, Straw and his mates struggled with their burden: Shef, lashed firmly to the center-pole of the graduale itself, braced by the rungs that stuck out to either side as handholds for the bearers, his face with its betraying one eye covered like that of a burnt or dying man. Richier trotted behind them, face grey with fear, still clutching his precious pack of books. He had passed within twenty feet of the devil's incarnation on earth, the Emperor himself. Thank God, the true God whose power in this world had been usurped by the lying deity of the Christians, that all his attention had been on poor Maury. What would happen now to Maury—ah, that showed the power of the