King and Emperor

body on a ladder, and brought it back to life. When he was strong again, he fled and made a new life, and in that new life he took back many of the things he had said. Heaven is in this world, he said, and men should make it for themselves. Women too.

“Do you live in Heaven? Or in Hell? Ask your priest, ask him how he knows what he knows. Ask him, where is the Cross? Where is the ladder? Look in his eyes when you ask him, and think of selling the horse. If you do not believe him, think what you can do.”

“It was an interesting account,” remarked Moishe the scribe to Solomon as they walked away together, for the moment on friendly terms again. “Inept, of course.”

Solomon raised an eyebrow, but did not challenge the view. “I had trouble,” he agreed, “in translating some of it. His words for ‘baptize’ and ‘Resurrection’ are very simple, and I had to do the best I could. In what lies its ineptitude?”

“Oh, seven rhetorical questions in a row, like a schoolboy who has not felt the rod. Constant repetition, horses and hangmen and ladders and tithes all mixed in with life and death and the mysteries of faith. No grandeur. No idea of style. I would blush to have it known that I had written such a thing. But to your One King I am just the part of a machine, a machine for making many copies.”

I will pass that on, reflected Solomon. The thought of a machine for making many copies. And what does not please Moishe may nevertheless affect people of whom the learned Moishe knows nothing. The unlearned, to begin with. There are many of them, and not all are stupid.

“Where are you from?” asked Shef.

“I was taken from Kent,” the woman replied. She was dressed still in what remained of an all-enveloping Arab bur qa, but she wore no veil, and the hood was thrown back to reveal fair hair and blue eyes. She spoke English—old-fashioned English, Shef realized with a slight shock, better English in a way than his own, used as he now was to studding his language with words and tricks of speech that he had picked up from the Wayman Norse. Twice already he had seen her frown as she struggled to follow him.

“Kent. That is within the realm of my co-king, Alfred.”

“The king in my time was Ethelred. Before him, Ethelbert. I think I had heard of Alfred as their younger brother. There have been many changes. Still, I would like to go back. If I could. If I could find my kin, and if they would have me back, a disgraced woman.”

The woman sank her eyes, feigned to dab at them with the corner of her sleeve. She is playing for sympathy, Shef realized. Trying to look attractive while she does it, too. A long time since a woman has bothered to do that for me. But in her position, what else can she do?

“There will be a place for you in Kent, if that is where you wish to go,” said Shef. “King Alfred is a generous lord, and one of your beauty will never lack suitors. I can see to it that you have wealth enough to please your kin. England is a rich land now, you know. Nor is it afflicted by pirates any more, so you will be safe.”

He reacts to weakness, Solomon reflected, watching them, by trying to take the weakness away, not by exploiting it, as the woman expects him to. It is a good quality in a king, but I wonder if the woman understands it.

Shef patted Alfled's hand. His voice turned business-like. “There is something, though, that you can do for us, I believe, for you are one who knew many or all the secrets of the Caliph's court. Tell me, what is your belief in Allah?”

“I have made the shahada. The profession of faith,” Alfled added. “It goes La illaha il Allah, Muhammad rasul Allah, which is to say, ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet.’ But what could I do? It was that or die, or be one of the lowest slaves in a laborers' brothel.”

“You do not believe it?”

She shrugged. “As much as I believe anything. I was brought up to believe in God. He never helped me against the pagans who caught me, though I prayed to Him many a time. The only difference between the Christians' God and the Arabs' Allah that I can see is that the Arabs believe in Mohammed and in their Koran.”

“Different books, different faiths. Tell me, are there any in Cordova who take an interest in how books are made?”

Here it comes, thought Alfled. Perhaps he will ask me to whip him with a quill, or drain him onto parchment. There must be something his woman will not do for him. There always is. “There are shops that sell books,” she replied, “where copies are made to the order of the buyers. The love-poetry of bin-Firnas, say. Or the Book of a Thousand Pleasures, it might be.”

“That is not the kind of book the king meant,” cut in Svandis, observing watchfully. “He means, where do holy books, books of faith come from. Where does the Koran come from. Or the Bible come from. Because someone, some person, must have made them at some time, holy though they are. Made them with fingers and pen and ink.” She tapped the quill-pendant that hung now over her breast.

“The Koran was dictated by God to Mohammed,” said Alfled. “Or so they say. But there are some… yes. The Mu'tazilites, as they are called. Ishaq the Keeper of the Scrolls was one such.”

“And what do they believe?” The king's one eye was trained on her with fierce interest.

“They believe… They believe that the Koran is not eternal, even if it is the word of Allah. They say that it is the word of Allah as heard by Mohammed, but that there may be other words. They say that it is not enough merely to collect hadith, that is to say tradition, but that one must also apply to it one's reason, which is the gift of Allah.”

Moishe would not like to hear that, Solomon thought again. He thinks it is the first duty of a scholar to preserve the Torah, and the last to collect commentary on it. To reason from it, not reason about it.

Shef was nodding slowly. “They do not want to destroy books. That is good. But they are ready to think about them. That is better. If I could see a Mu'tazilite Caliph in Cordova, and a Pope in Rome without an army, then, I think, Ragnarok would be averted, and Loki put at rest. But at the root of it all is to have books in many hands. I do not suppose all the booksellers in Cordova, nor all the scribes in Septimania, could make as many books as we need. What was it you said, Solomon, that we need a machine to make many copies, faster than a man can write? I know no way to hitch up a millwheel to a scribe's arm, alas, though it may do the work of a smith.”

“The Caliph often had more documents to sign than his arm could manage,” ventured Alfled.

“What did he do?”

“He had a block made, of gold, with a handle of ivory. But on the base of the block was a copper plate, with his name on it standing out the depth of a finger-paring. The rest had been eaten away by cunning acids, I do not know how. He would put the plate on to cork with ink in it, and then stamp the block down on documents as fast as Ishaq could present them. Some said Ishaq would put documents in there that the Caliph never read, for a price. It was like putting a brand on cattle.”

“Like a brand,” Shef repeated. “Like a brand. But no-one can brand paper, or parchment.”

“And the end of it all is a false paper,” said Svandis, face twisted with disgust. “One that no-one read and no-one signed.”

“That is one way books might be made,” agreed Solomon.

Chapter Twenty-eight

The news of the disaster for Islam ran south faster, seemingly, than any horse could carry it. Than any single horse or horseman, certainly. As the first reports arrived in any town, carried by the cavalrymen who had fled first from the battle, each man was helped from his horse, carried to drink sherbet in the cool, pressed for further information. Meanwhile such information as could be gleaned was carried on by trusted messengers to those whom the local governor of a province or cadi of a city regarded as most in need of it. By the time the survivors rode on, their stories growing more elaborate and self-justifying each time they were repeated, the news was often ahead of them.

As the news was received, those in power under the Caliph-who-had-been thought carefully about their