“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 Cheers rose as broken mantlets were withdrawn, from time to time an unwary or unlucky attacker caught stone or arrow, was left broken or bleeding in the channel.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 irresistible force, the whole protective structure going with it. Underneath, blinking like moles dragged into the light, or like snails whose shell had suddenly vanished, the haulers and ram-wielders gaped at their enemies, or at their machine now dangling from its iron chain feet above their heads.
“Shoot!” bellowed Brand. “Don't just stand there watching!”
The catapult-captains trained round the inches necessary to shoot through the grid, released their twisted ropes. One of the great darts, to a further bellow of rage from Brand, missed every man cleanly at a range of six feet, flew far on down the valley, buried itself in the ground at the feet of the waiting storming-party. The other, by luck far more than good management, drove its way into a whole file of wheel-pushers, spitting three in a row like larks on a stick, and driving on even to kill the man behind.
The ram-crew, Frankish knights and peasants alike, broke instantly and ran for the rear. Brand, waving forward Jewish bowmen and English crossbows, urged them on to shoot from the battlements, cursed as the arrows missed and the men ran on, swore discontentedly as he counted the bodies left sprawling.
“We turn them back,” said Malachi to him in an attempt to conciliate the giant. “No good, kill men when no need.”
Brand continued swearing in Norse, turned for an interpreter. “Tell him there is need. I don't want to drive them back, I want to sicken them. They have to know that every failure will be paid for in blood. Then they won't be so keen to come on.”
He turned to organize the bringing up of buckets of pitch, to be lobbed out over the wreckage and set on fire with fire-arrows. Vital to leave no cover for a second assault, especially with the grid now buckled and damaged. The wet bull-hides would dry soon in the sun. Meanwhile the wooden frames and wheels were exposed, would burn to ashes once started.
When all was done Skaldfinn, interpreting, spoke to him again. “The captain and I have been talking. He says you know a lot about sieges, and feels more confident of resistance than he did a few days ago.”
Brand looked down below the jutting eyebrow-ridges he had inherited from his marbendill ancestor. “I have fought in the front for thirty years, Skaldfinn, you know that. I have seen a lot of battles, a lot of forts taken and defended. But you know, Skaldfinn, that up in the North there are few stone walls. I saw Hamburg taken and York, I was not there when Paris fought off old Hairy-Breeks. What I know are only the obvious things—ladders and rams. What do we do if they bring up a siege-tower? No good asking me. And they may have many better ideas than that. No, sieges need more brain than brawn. I expect there are brains over there better than mine.”
“He wants to know,” said Skaldfinn after passing the message on, “if all that is true, why we do not see your master here on the walls, the one-eyed king. Is he not the wonder of the world for machines and inventions? So what do I tell him now?”
Brand shrugged massive shoulders. “You know the answer as well as I do, Skaldfinn. So tell him the truth. Tell him our master, whom we need more than ever before, is busy with something else. And you know what that is.”
“I do,” said Skaldfinn with resignation. “He's sitting down by the harbor with his girlfriend, reading a book.”
Trying to read a book would have been nearer the truth. Shef himself was only barely literate. In his childhood he had the alphabet beaten into him by Father Andreas the village priest, more because he could not be parted from the education of his stepsister and half-brother than for any other reason. He could in the end spell out English written in Roman script, with difficulty, a difficulty that had not diminished much by what he had learnt as a king.
The book he had taken from the heretic sect caused him no difficulty as regards script. If Shef had known more, or indeed anything, about such things, he would have recognized it as written in Carolingian majuscule, handsomest of medieval scripts, as easy to read as print—and in itself proof positive that the book he held was a recent copy, no more than fifty or sixty years old. As it was, all that Shef realized was that he could read the handwriting well enough. Unfortunately he could not understand a word of the language it was written in: Latin, as it happened. Not good Latin, as Solomon the Jew saw instantly when the book was passed to him. The Latin of an uneducated person, far worse than the Latin of the Bible translated by Saint Jerome, and indeed, from the odd words scattered through it, the Latin of a native inhabitant of these hills. It had not been written in Latin to begin with, Solomon felt sure. Nor yet Greek or Hebrew. Some language he did not know.
Nevertheless Solomon could understand it well enough. At first he had simply read the book to Shef and the
listening Svandis. But as the fascination of the story grew upon him, Shef had halted him, and with his usual fierce energy had organized a translating team. They clustered now, seven of them including auditors, in a shady courtyard close by the harbor. Wine and water stood in earthenware pitchers, wrapped in damp cloth to cool them by evaporation. If Shef stood up he could see over the white plastered wall to where the ships of his fleet swung at anchor, controlling their movement with ropes to the shore so as always to present their broadsides to the harbor mouth and the jetties. The catapult crews lay by their machines in the sun, lookouts watching for any sign of movement by the Greek galleys paddling up and down out of range, or from the floating fort which occasionally, and seemingly for practice, sent a rock skimming over the stone moles to splash harmlessly into the harbor. But Shef rarely stood up. His mind was intent on his task. A task, some inner calculator within him said, more vital even than the siege. Or the siege at this stage.
Solomon stood in the courtyard, book in hand. Slowly he translated the Latin he read, phrase by phrase, into the trade-Arabic that most of his hearers could follow. There the message broke into three separate strands. Shef himself translated Solomon's Arabic into the Anglo-Norse language of his fleet and court, to be written down by Thorvin in his own runic alphabet. A Christian priest whom Solomon had produced, and who had been defrocked by his bishop for some unknown crime, simultaneously translated the Arabic into the Latin-derived patois of the hills, which some called Catalan and some Occitan, or the language of Provence, and wrote it down in his own hand. With great difficulty, as he often complained, for whatever one called his native dialect it had never been written down before, and he had to decide continually how to spell each word. “The way to spell it is the way it's said,” rumbled Thorvin, but was ignored by all. Finally, and with far more ease than the others, an apprentice of the learned Moishe translated the Arabic into Hebrew and wrote that down as well, in the complex vowel-less system of his native language. By the five men sat Svandis, listening intently and commenting on the story as it unfolded. In the shade, on a pallet, lay Tolman the kite-boy, still wrapped in bandages and staring out of swollen eyes. In the end one book would have become four, in four different languages, done with different levels of skill.
The master-copy itself was a strange work, whose weird-ness caused Solomon increasingly to raise his eyebrows and pluck at his beard. It began with an introduction of a kind:
These are the words of Jesus ben-Joseph, once dead and now returned to life. Not returned to life in the spirit, as some say, but returned to life in the body. For what is the spirit? There are some who say, the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life. But I say to you, neither does the letter kill nor the spirit give life, but the spirit is life and the life is the body. For who can say that the spirit and the body and the life are three? For who has seen a spirit without a body? Or a body without a life but with a spirit? And so the three are one but the one is not three. I say this, I Jesus ben-Joseph who was dead but am alive…
The narrative went on in a kind of disorganized ramble. But through the ramble, and clearer as the translation team spelled through the many pages, came a sort of an account, and an account that agreed with what Anselm the heretic had told Shef, and—though he hesitated still to tell it to Svandis—with the visions he had had himself of the Crucifixion of Christ.
Whoever told the story declared that he had himself been crucified, nailed to a cross and drunk bitter drink on it, he said again and again. He had been killed and taken down. He had come again to life, and his friends had taken him away, away from the cross and away from his home. Now he lived in a place he did not know, and tried to draw some meaning from all that had happened. The moral that he drew seemed to be a kind of bitter resentment. Again and again he would refer to something or other he had said in a former life, and would deny it, call it folly, take it back. Sometimes he would answer what seemed to have been his own rhetorical questions.
Once I said, “Who among you, if a father and his child asked him for bread, would give the child a stone?” So I asked in my folly, and did not know that many a father has only stone to give, and many have bread but yet give only stones. So it was with my father, when I called out to him…
Solomon hesitated here as he translated, for he recognized the phrase he was translating. Domne, domne, quare me tradidisti? it read in the barbarous Latin of the book. But in Aramaic it would have been Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani, as it is given still in the Gospel of Mark. Solomon made no remark on the corroboration, but translated on, his voice as even as he could make it.
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, princeps huius mundi, as the narrator continually called him. It was to live your life in such a way as to gain most pleasure from it, for pleasure was the gift of the true God beyond this world, and the foe of the devil-God who ruled the world, the betraying Father. It was to bring no more slaves into the world for that Father to rule and tyrannize over, but to control one's spirit and one's seed.
“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, metod for God, as you sometimes do, and another who preferred to say dryhten. As if the two words testified to two writers with different versions of one story.”
“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.”
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