Solomon hesitated here as he translated, for he recognized the phrase he was translating.
It seemed though that the teller of the story had turned against all fathers, or at least fathers in heaven. He insisted that there was such a father. But he insisted also that such a father could not possibly be good. If he were good, why was the world as it was, full of pain and fear and disease and suffering? If all these were the result of the sin of Adam and of Eve, as the narrator knew was argued, was this not a case again of the fathers and mothers sinning, and the punishment being visited on the children? What kind of parents would so condemn their children to slavery and to death? That slavery and death were what must be escaped, said the heretics' book. But the way to escape it was not by paying a price, nor a ransom, for the slavemaster-father would take no price for release. Rather it was to release oneself. And the key to that release was to believe in no afterlife, or not one under the control of the God of this world,
“What do you make of all this?” said Shef to Solomon as they paused to allow pens to be resharpened and throats to be moistened.
Solomon plucked at his beard, one eye on Elazar, the pupil and spy of Moishe, who blamed Solomon still for unleashing the Christians' fury on their city.
“It is badly told. That makes it the more interesting.”
“Why so?”
“I have read my own holy books, the Torah of the Jews. I have read the Christian gospels also. And I have read the Koran of the followers of Mohammed. All are different. All tell us things their authors perhaps did not mean to.”
Shef said nothing, let Solomon get round to the unspoken question.
“The Koran is said to be the word of God put into the mouth of Mohammed. It seems to me to be the work of a great poet, and a man of inspiration. Nevertheless it tells us nothing that might not be known by—say, a well- traveled merchant of Arabia, who longed above all for religious zeal and an end to the hair-splitting of the Greeks.”
“It is the work of a man, not a God, you mean,” said Svandis, with a triumphant look at Shef.
“The gospels?” Shef prompted.
Solomon smiled. “They are, to say the least, confused. Even the Christians have noticed that they contradict each other in detail, and adduce this as proof that they must be true: either true in some spiritual sense about which, in the end, there can be no argument for there is no proof, or true as different accounts of the same event may still all be true. It is clear to me that all were written many years after the story they claim to tell, and by men who knew the holy books of the Jews in great detail. You cannot tell what happened from what the writers wanted to have happened. And yet…” He paused, with a glance at Elazar.
“And yet I have to say that they contain a kind of truth, if a human truth. All seem to tell the story of an uncomfortable man, a preacher who would not say what they asked him to. He would not condemn adultery. He would not allow divorce. He told people to pay their taxes. He liked Gentiles, even Romans. His hearers were trying to twist what he said even as he was saying it. It is an odd story, and odd stories are the likelier to be true.”
“You have said nothing about your own holy books,” remarked Shef again. Solomon looked at Elazar again. They were talking in the Anglo-Norse of the foreigners, which Elazar surely could not follow. Yet he was suspicious, ears ready for anything he might understand. He would have to put this carefully.
Solomon bowed respectfully. “The holy books of my faith are the word of God, and I say nothing against that. Yet it is an odd thing that sometimes God uses two words. For instance in the account of our forefather Adam and his wife Eve”—he used, as far as he could, the English pronunciations of the names—“the name of God is sometimes one thing and sometimes another. It is as if—as if, I say—there were a writer who said, so to speak,
“What would that mean?” said Thorvin.
Solomon shrugged politely. “It is a difficult text.”
“You said that all these holy books contain things their authors did not mean to say,” Shef pressed on, “and I understand what you mean. Now what does this one, this one that we have here, tell us that its author did not mean to say?”
“In my opinion,” said Solomon, “this is the work of someone who has been through great pain and grief and so cannot think of anything else. You have perhaps met men like that.”
Shef thought of his former follower, the gelded berserk Cuthred, and nodded.
“You cannot expect such men to tell a clear story. They are mad, and the author of this text was in a sense mad. But it may be that he was mad because he saw clearly.”
“I will tell you something about him,” said Svandis with sudden definiteness, “and it is something those fools in the hills got wrong. Like Thierry, who kidnapped me but did not rape me.”
Eyes turned towards her. To his surprise Shef saw the beginnings of a blush spreading across Svandis's tanned face. She looked uneasily at Tolman, plunged on.
“When men lie with women—in the North anyway, I have heard that these Arabs are wiser—they think of nothing but spilling their seed deep inside her. But there is another way…”
Shef gaped incredulously, wondering what she meant. And how she knew.
“To go on till almost the end, and then to—well, withdraw. Spill the seed outside the womb. It is as good for the woman, better if the act lasts longer. As good for the man too. It makes no children, no more hungry mouths. It is a pity more men cannot practice it. But of course it would mean they had to think of the woman, which no man ever does when he is intent on his pleasure alone!
“But anyway, that is what this book is talking about. The man who wrote it must have known something. But Thierry and Anselm and Richier, they think it means that you must leave women alone, live like a monk! And yet all the time the book tells us to take pleasure in the world. If you cannot take pleasure from women—or from men either—then what pleasure is there? Men are such fools.”
Shef was pleased to notice, sourly, that Thorvin and Solomon seemed as puzzled as himself. “So the book is a manual for pleasure in marriage,” he remarked. “And we were thinking it was a lost gospel.”
“Why can it not be both?” snapped Svandis.
Chapter Twenty-one
The Emperor had had little hope of success from the scaling ladders: he had tried them out because he had plenty of men and one never knew the enemy's weaknesses. The ram had seemed more practicable. Watching from a distance he had made out the unmistakable figure of Brand on the ramparts, once his ally, never his friend. To lose to him had been galling. Now the time had come, he decided, for serious thought, and to help him he had called in the few men of his army he thought might be capable of it. Agilulf, his deputy, an experienced warrior. Georgios the admiral of the Greeks, with the proverbial subtlety of that race. Erkenbert the deacon, on whom he most relied. Once he and they had made their plan he would communicate it to the host of subordinate leaders who made up his army's contingents: none of them, in the Emperor's candid opinion, fit to lead anything more complicated than a charge or an ambush.
“Those in the city are not stupid,” he concluded, “and their defenses are good. Also, we know the one-eye is there, and where he appears, strange things happen. Now, what can we do to puzzle them?”
Georgios replied, speaking slowly in his camp-Latin. “The harbor remains a weak point,” he said. “I will not
