King and Emperor

unshipping the metal plates carried as ballast in all the ships, armoring the Fafnisbane or the Hagena like a second Fearnought and sending her out to battle the armored raft. But even armor would not protect against the fire of the Greeks: Beowulf, for whom the Grendelsbane was named, took an iron shield to protect himself against the dragon but then, as Brand pointed out when the story was told him, Beowulf didn't have a wooden hull. An armored catapult ship could of course sink a fire-galley from a distance, if the wind was right, but not do that and fight an equally armored and much less sinkable floating fort at the same time. We might have to try it one day, Brand concluded to himself, but only if the situation on land turns really nasty. A spear in the heart was one thing, being burnt alive like Sumarrfugl was another. The Greeks' brief demonstrations against small trading craft trying their luck rubbed the point home.

“It's all very tricky,” Brand concluded in a bass rumble to his cousin Styrr, his skippers, and the priests of the Way gathered in informal conclave. “But you never know how tricky it looks for the other side as well. What we've got to do is not make any mistakes until, maybe, they've had a sickener or two. After all, they have to think of something or go away. We just have to sit here.”

“Till something turns up,” said Hagbarth skeptically.

“Yes.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe the Caliph will arrive with a hundred thousand men. Maybe someone will bring him the damned ladder, whatever it is. Maybe the gods will intervene on our side.”

Chill disapproval met the last remark. “I'll tell you one thing,” Brand said in an effort to seem more cheerful.

“What's that?”

“He's making it easy for us right now.”

The first moves of the siege might indeed almost have been planned to give the besieged confidence without exposing them to overmuch strain. Some two days after the watch-fires of the advanced cavalry appeared, and the heads of the emissaries were hurled over the wall, the Emperor—if it was he who had ordered it—launched a simple attempted escalade, simultaneously against a stretch of the land wall and a stretch of the wall running down to the beach. At each point a thousand men rose from cover at dawn and ran forward with ladders and grapnels.

They had made too much noise preparing. The defenders were ready and alert. As the ladders reached the top, crutches pushed them away again. The grapnel-ropes were cut. Arrows and catapult stones whirled into the mass of men huddled at the foot of the walls. After a few moments, when it became clear that all was well in hand, Brand dragged an enthusiastic Jewish guardsman away from a ladder he was about to thrust off, kicked aside an English crossbowman anxious to shoot the man climbing it, and stepped back, hunkered down behind the stone battlement, shield raised against the arrows pelting over the wall.

A head appeared, teeth bared in panic and rage, a man swung himself over the parapet, beside himself with the honor of success, desperate to make a lodgement on the walls. Brand measured him, lifted his axe “Battle- troll,” and struck once, splitting helmet and skull. He stepped back, waving to the crossbowman and guardsman. One shot, the other pushed, the ladder fell with its load of heavy-armed men into the growing pile below. Brand looked at the man he had killed, his equipment, his armor, such of his face as the axe had left.

“A Frank,” he muttered. “And a rich one.” He removed the dead man's purse from his belt, and faced down the cross-bowman's automatic glower. “Don't look like that, it all gets divided up in the end, fair shares, that's hermannalog, warriors' law. But I didn't let him up to take his money.”

“What did you let him up for?” asked the surly crossbowman.

“I wanted to see who he was. And who he wasn't. And what he wasn't was one of those German monk bastards, never have a penny on them.”

“What's that mean, then?”

“Means the Emperor isn't really trying. Just seeing if we're a pushover or not.”

Ignoring the cheers of success from Jews and Northerners, guards and citizens alike seeing their enemies fall back in disorder, Brand shouldered his way along the walls, wondering where the real attack might come from.

Down the river-bed, as he had expected. For a day and a half after the failure of the first, almost perfunctory assault, onagers had hurled stones unavailingly against the walls, sometimes skimming over to cause broken tiles and shattered windows in the houses of the city, but bringing no threat to the defenders. Then, as the pace of the bombardment increased, a watcher saw a wall of shields advancing slowly down the dried-up riverbed that ran through the heart of Septimania. Not shields, in fact, but mantlets: heavy wooden frames that took two men to carry, proof against breast-bows, crossbows, even lobbed stones. A mule-stone would shatter one, and the men behind it, but there were no mules on the walls, too hard to train down. The mantlets inched forward, and after a while Brand, called from his command post, could see gangs furiously hurling stones and the rubble of the winter floods out of the center channel. Behind the mantlets, and following down the cleared center line, he could see another armored structure crawling. A wave ordered fire-arrows launched against it. They struck and fizzled on wet bull-hides. The structure crawled nearer.

“You see a thing like that before?” said Malachi to his giant colleague, in the fractured Arabic which was all that he could say and Brand understand.

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“A ram.” Brand used the Norse word murrbrjotr, wall-breaker, backed with gestures.

“What we do?”

Carefully gauging the path of the approaching object with his eye, Brand ordered a gang to begin cutting away a section of stone from the bridgeway on the opposite side of the attack. They cut it away in one section, taking care not to break the mortar apart. An hour's work with chisels and picks and a mass of stone poised on the edge of the twenty-foot drop to the riverbed below. Thoughtfully, Brand supervised the setting of a massive iron ring into the top of the severed block, had men drag up the biggest iron chain the dockyard could supply. He noosed it, spread the noose wide with a wooden rod on a thin line. There was plenty of time. The mantlets crept closer, the ram followed them, both under a steady rain of rocks from the pull-throwers on the walls. Cheers rose as broken mantlets were withdrawn, from time to time an unwary or unlucky attacker caught stone or arrow, was left broken or bleeding in the channel. None of that made any difference. Behind the iron grid two of Cwicca's catapult gangs slowly trained round the sights of their twist-shooters, now facing the ram and the mantlets through the iron grid at unmissable range. Brand leaned over the rear battlement, careful not to touch the mass of stone swaying on the levers jammed beneath it, waved them into immobility.

Shouts from below, and the mantleteers fell thankfully back and to the sides, still holding their clumsy guards over their heads. Behind the ram, but well back out of shot, Brand could see what looked like heavy-armored infantry assembling for assault. They did look like the German monk-bastards. Maybe the Emperor was taking this move seriously. Pity he couldn't cut off a few of them and make them really pay for this one. But wisest not to take chances.

The ram, under its heavy protective frame, heaved on by a hundred men toiling at its ten massive cartwheels, edged into position. Its iron-shod head drew back, launched itself at the grill. A clang, a wrenching of iron. A hail of arrows suddenly sweeping inches over the top of the battlements, simultaneous double crash of onager stones from an unnoticed position further up the hillside. Brand grimaced, held his shield high, peered quickly and cautiously over. Arrows thudded into his shield, sprang back off the boss. One, hard-driven, broke through and gashed the back of his arm by the elbow-strap. Brand continued to wave his chain-men into position.

Another clang from below, Malachi staring worriedly at the twisting iron grid. Brand stepped back, raised a thumb. Four men in unison tossed the iron noose over. As they did so, the ram struck again. Through the noose.

Brand jerked the thin line, the rod fell away, the noose tightened with shrill iron screaming. Brand nodded once more to the men by the great mass of broken stone. They heaved in unison on the levers jammed into the base, the stone teetered on the edge of the drop into the river-bed below, they heaved again. Slowly at first, then all at once, the five-ton block swayed and disappeared over the edge in a cloud of stone-dust. The chain whirled after it, the noose tightened round the ram's iron head. Cwicca's twist-shooter gangs, poised underneath the bridge itself, only feet from the ram on the other side of the buckled iron grid, saw the ram jerked suddenly into the air by