King and Emperor

risk my galleys close in against their mule-stones, but at the same time we have proved that they dare not come out against the floating fort designed by the wise deacon here: I am glad to have seen it and will take careful note of it for my Emperor's uses in the future. Still, the stone jetties are only six feet above the water, and they run many stadia long. There is a chance there for an escalade, if we can get close enough.”

“Many small boats, not a few large ones?” suggested Bruno.

“And, I would suggest, at night.”

“What about the Greek fire? Can you not bring it close up to the jetties and burn all the defenders off as you did the Arab galleys?” asked Agilulf.

The admiral hesitated. He could not lie to Agilulf, who had seen the Greek fire used several times. Yet at the heart of the policy of the Byzantines was the need to keep their one great technical advantage secret. No barbarian—and barbarian included the servants of the Emperor of Rome, as far as the Greeks were concerned—was allowed to get too close to the projectors or the fuel tanks. The operators were the most highly paid men in the fleet, the admiral included, and all had moreover left hostages for their secrecy in Byzantium. Georgios felt that he had learnt much on this trip, including the details of the Roman and Northern catapults. He wanted to give nothing back in return. Yet he must answer.

“The Greek fire has certain limitations,” he temporized. “It needs a large ship to carry it. I cannot put the devices into mere fishing boats. Nor can I take the risk of losing one to enemies who, as the Emperor says, are only too ready to learn new and strange devices. Yet at night, I might risk one galley close in.” With trusted men aboard to burn and destroy the evidence if it might fall into the wrong hands, he did not say.

“We'll try it,” said Bruno decisively. “Night after next, there'll be no more than a thin moon. Now, Erkenbert, where is the War-Wolf?”

“War-Wolf” was the name of the great engine that Erkenbert himself had designed, and that had battered down the gates of castle after castle in the Emperor's triumphant progress to Puigpunyent. It was, in a way, no more than a giant version of the simple traction catapults that Shef had designed and that even now were hurling rocks at every besieger who came within range of the city of Septimania. Yet it did not rely on mere feeble human muscles to give it power. Power came from the giant counterweight, the counterweight that was both its strength and its weakness: enabling massive boulders to be thrown, taking an age to empty and refill, demanding great weight and strength in its supporting timbers—timbers still crawling along the coast road to the siege.

“Two days' travel away still,” Erkenbert replied.

“And where do you mean to use it once it has arrived?”

“We have little choice. It is coming down the coast road from the north. We cannot move it through the hills above the town, and if we were to load it on board ship we would need cranes and a stone jetty out into deep water. So we will have to attack the north gate of the town. It is a strong and stout gate, but only wooden. One boulder from ‘War-Wolf’ will beat it down.”

“If it lands on the right place.”

“Trust me for that,” said Erkenbert definitely. “I am the arithmeticus.”

The Emperor nodded. He knew that no-one in the world was more skilled than the puny deacon in the mind- numbing task of translating weight to distance in the number-system his world had inherited from the Romans.

“Harbor attack the night after next, then,” he concluded. “If that fails, ‘War-Wolf’ breaks down the north gate the next morning.”

“And if that fails?” enquired Georgios, always ready to disconcert his temporary allies.

The Emperor looked at him forbiddingly. “If that fails, we try again. Till the Holy graduale on which our Savior was borne is in my hands, along with the Lance by which he died. But I don't want to fail. Remember, all of you, we are dealing with clever heathens. Be alert for anything new. Expect the unexpected.”

In silence, his advisers speculated on how this paradox might be achieved.

The bastards are too quiet, thought Brand, strolling along the harbor front in search of his master. There he was, still in the courtyard, all of them still reading, gabbling, scritch-scratching away with never a care in the world. He waited till Solomon noticed his looming presence and broke off his reading.

“Sorry to disturb you,” he remarked ironically. “I thought I'd mention the siege.”

“It's going well, isn't it?” asked Shef.

“Well enough. But I think it's time you did something.”

“What?”

“What you're best at. Thinking. It's all gone quiet. But I've seen our friend Bruno through the far-seer. He won't give up. So—they're going to do something. I don't know what. You are the best person in the world for imagining new things. Time for you to do it again.”

Slowly, bringing his mind back from the fascinating problems of the book, Shef realized the truth of what Brand had said. Realized too, with some subconscious calculation, that the breathing space he had counted on, and had been using on what he felt was the most vital if not the most urgent task, the task he alone could do—that that breathing space was over. Besides, he was getting bored with sitting. And the book was nearly done.

“Find Skaldfinn to take my place here,” he ordered. “He can translate from Solomon for Thorvin to write down. Tolman, you come along too.”

He stepped out into the sunlight with the gigantic Brand and the limping kite-boy at his heels, followed by a glower from Svandis. She wanted to listen to the end of the strange book. At the same time she resented the way her lover could turn his attention instantly to something new. Something without her.

“I brought two people to talk to you,” added Brand once they were in the open. “Steffi and a native.”

Shef turned his attention first to the native, as Brand called him, another dark-faced man of clear Arab descent: there were still many non-Jews in the town, traders caught by the unexpected closure of roads.

“You speak Arabic?” he asked.

“Of course.” A slight sneer at the question: Shef's Arabic was no more than serviceable, far removed from the pure tongue of Cordova or Toledo.

“What is your news?”

“The Christian Emperor, your enemy and the enemy of my master the Caliph, has destroyed many walls and forts this summer. He has killed many of the faithful too, all along the sea-coast they once controlled. Do you wish to know how he did it?”

“We will pay gold for it,” Shef replied.

“I would tell you anyway, as a service against the Nazarenes. He has a machine. Only one machine, and it is many times bigger than anything you have here. He uses it for only one thing, and that is to hurl great boulders on to his enemy's gates. Some say that it needs flat ground, that it can shoot only very slowly.”

“Have you ever seen it?”

“No, but I have spoken with men who escaped with their lives when strongholds were taken.”

Bit by bit Shef drew from the Arab what little accurate information he could provide, and began to realize the use of the counterweight. Absently he dismissed the man, thinking already of the problems of a pivot, of retention and release: above all, the central problem of all the traction engines, of how to control range. It depended on weight. There must be some way to tell, if you knew how much was in the counterweight and how much in the launching-sling, what you needed to add or to take out in order to throw a set distance. But a three-element calculation was beyond Shef, or any other man in his realm. Even working out how many water-barrels you needed, or what share of loot went to each ship or each man, was a trial-and-error business with the Northern counting- system. Shef wished in frustration that he too, like Bruno, had in his service an arithmeticus. Even someone who knew what arithmetic might be. As he pounded a fist into his palm he became aware that Steffi was standing on one foot, eying him nervously from his usual wide angle.

“Why did Brand send you here?”

“I was thinking. About the flares we used from the kites. And that time I jumped off the cliff, you remember? I was thinking, how would it be, at night like, if we had some flares ready to light, and threw them from a pull- thrower? We could put some cloth on so they'd open out, see, and come down slowly, with a hole in, like we've learned how to do…”