King and Emperor

balance. Cwicca glanced at his linesmen standing by the windward rail, almost crowded overboard by the immense spread of canvas facing into the wind, but each maintaining tension and ready to pay out line. He waited with the skill of much practice till he could see the wind beginning to catch the canvas, belly it out from underneath.

“Launch!”

The eight men swayed backwards like a catapult-arm bending, and then threw the kite forward and up, into the wind. Shef felt the shock, immediately felt the kite sweeping backwards as if from under him. The wind had caught him, but it was taking him down, down under the side of the Fafnisbane, to be trampled deep into the sea and drown there in a mess of broken cordage. He twirled a hand control at random, felt the kite dip alarmingly, faces on the leeward rail staring at him open-mouthed. Turn the other.

The side-vanes turned, the wind caught the great expanse of waxed cotton more fully, began to blow across the top. Struggling against the dead weight of its rider, the huge contrivance began to lift. The linesmen felt the tug, paid out line gently, carefully, each man striving to keep resistance without drag. They had had much practice.

Above, Shef tried to remember what Tolman had said, tried even more to put it into effect. The wind was below his eyes, turn that way. No, above, turn back. And all the time he was skidding sideways, work the tail-flap between his knees, no, no, other way.

For a brief instant all seemed to be in balance, and Shef could glance down. Below him the ships were strung out like children's toys on a pond, all of them lined with faces staring up. He could make the faces out clearly, could recognize Brand there in one of the rescue boats out to windward. Could he wave, shout to him?

The moment's loss of concentration was all that the wind needed. The kite began to turn up, the two linesmen controlling that began to try to edge the top frame down, at the same instant Shef worked his own correction.

The watchers saw the kite tip nose-down, bank suddenly to the right, seem to lose the wind and the lift altogether, and drop into the sea like a loose bundle of rags. The Fafnisbane slanted gently across, linesmen reeling in as she did so. Brand's Narwhal was already in front of them, swimmers diving over the side and threshing towards the bobbing contraption.

Shef met them in the water. “I didn't need to cut myself free,” he said. “Just slid out. Haul her out,” he shouted to Ordlaf in the approaching Fafnisbane, “and check her over for breaks.”

“Then what?” asked Cwicca, as the dripping king scrambled over the side.

“Then we'll try again, of course. How long did it take Tolman to learn the trick of it?”

“If Tolman has learnt the trick of it,” protested Cwicca, “why do you need to? Is this just for fun?”

Shef looked down at him. “Oh no,” he said. “We have to do the very best we can to get better. Better at everything. Because there are people over there who are also doing their very best. And not to make life easy for us, either.”

The Emperor looked carefully at the paper which Erkenbert had produced for him. It meant nothing to him. Skilled in the instant evaluation of land, river-lines, armor, the good and bad points of a horse or its harness, Bruno had never learned to translate lines on paper into reality.

“What does it do?” he asked.

“It cuts the reloading time of our new catapults by more than half. You see,” Erkenbert tapped the paper, “the difficulty was always dragging down the short arm, the arm which holds the counterweight. If we had been quicker—” He did not complete the sentence. If he had been quicker outside the wall of Septimania, he might have shot three times and smashed the gate down before the enemy could reply. Then the greatest of their troubles would have been over.

“Well,” he went on, “we tried different ways, and in the end I tried dragging the arm down by ropes over a roller. Now, what I have designed are two wheels, one each side of the frame. Men stand inside each one. They tread down with their feet, and the wheel turns, turns so that there is always another tread under their feet. The wheel that they turn operates a cogwheel, and the two cogs drag down an iron chain. That chain pulls down the counterweight.”

“Does it work?”

“I cannot tell while we march every day. I need time to find smiths and make the wheels, both the cogs and the tread-wheels. But it will work. There is a picture in Vegetius, to give us authority.” Though they were speaking German, he used the Latin word auctoritatem, that which comes from an author, a written work, a book accredited.

Bruno nodded. “The march will stop one day. Then I will need your new device. Not just one next time. Six, a dozen. I have to beat some sense into these Italian heads. Maybe some others too. Come now and see what Agilulf has devised for us.”

The two men left the tent and went out into the sprawling camp, tents pitched for the night but not yet at rest. Outside the marshal Agilulf waited. Erkenbert looked again with professional interest at the crusted blisters and dead skin that ran like the mark of a broad belt across his neck and the side of his face—the track of the Greek fire. Agilulf had lain in pain and fever for weeks after they had pulled him from the sea.

A surprise that he had lived. No surprise that he had become even more taciturn than ever before.

“What is our strength now?” asked Bruno.

“Much the same. Four thousand rabble.” By rabble Agilulf meant the levies called up from the districts Bruno was marching through, first the Spanish borderlands, then the coastline of southern France, then the plains of northern Italy. As the army moved towards Rome and the seat of Saint Peter, there was a constant stream of desertions, replaced by new levies. Few of them had any military value in a serious clash, and some Bruno had dismissed, like the half-Arab deserters, sent back to loot and cause dissension in their own countries.

“About five hundred of the cowboys. They stick around as long as they're allowed to loot and rape away from home.”

“Hang some of the rapists,” said Bruno without heat. “I'll hang them all when their use is over.”

“Five hundred Frankish knights, with a hundred Lanzenritter as stiffening. Seven hundred Lanzenbruder on foot. A dozen onagers in the battering-train, with a Lanzenbruder attached to each one to stop the crews running away. More to come when the Holy Father has time to make the designs.”

The “Holy Father” was Agilulf's only joke. He was one of those who most whole-heartedly approved the coming elevation of Erkenbert to the throne of Saint Peter. The little deacon had dressed his wound, given him feverfew for the fever. He was never far from the fighting, never showed fear. In the tight world of the Emperor's army, it was coming about that no one outside it, German, Italian or Frank, had any weight. Nationality was less important than comradeship.

“Are they good enough to beat the heathen, this time?” asked Bruno.

“I do not think anyone can stand against the charge of the Lanzenritter. But they can be shot down by machines from a distance. For close work—the Lanzenbruder are stout kerls. But those damned Danes—they are stout kerls too.”

“Better equipped?”

“Our shield-and-spear tactic does not work against them. They are too strong, they learn too quickly. No shield can keep out their axes if they use them. All we can do is keep a steady line, hope to use our horsemen.”

“And our machines,” said Erkenbert.

“Everything,” said Bruno. “All at once. To put down our enemies, to make Christendom one, without rival.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

The parish priest of Aups, a small village of southern France not far from Carcassonne, looked nervously out of the window of his tiny cottage, and then back at the coarsely-written pamphlet he held in his hand. It was made of paper, but the priest did not know that. It was printed rather than written, but the priest did not know that either. The priest only owned one book, and that was his Missal for conducting services. He knew the services by