“Good, very good. Now you are afraid. But you need be less so than some. Because I can use you, mannikin. You have brought me much service already. The Greeks burn men alive, the Arabs thrust poles up them till they die. But you have brought them fear from a distance. You have brought them fear from the sky.
“And you can bring them more yet. You with your strange salts and your strange machines. There is more there than you will ever learn. But you could set men on the right path. My path. And if you do, you can have my favor. I could not help my favorite whom you killed in the water, Ivar Bane-of-Women, for I was bound. But now I am free. Is there no revenge you wish for, like Ivar, like me?
“No,” said Shef, his voice like a thin bird's piping, a mouse's squeak in the cat's paw. He was not conscious of any courage. Loki had asked him a question. He knew the answer. It would do no good to lie.
The crazy face stared down at him. Shef found himself trying to imagine what it would have been like without the scars and pits of poison, the bitter marks of resentment. Like looking at a scarred and defeated old warrior, and wondering what he might have been like if his life had gone aright. The finger and thumb were pressing tight around him, but they had not squeezed yet.
“See there.” Shef found himself staring up an immense bridge, a bridge that was at the same time a rainbow, and at the end of it a cold glitter of blades. “The gods, my father and my brothers, they have gone back over Bifrost bridge, and Othin has called out his Einheriar to man it. They expect me to storm it, with my allies the giants and my children the monster-brood. Why should I not?”
“It was your home once, lord. Before you slew Balder.”
This time the thumb and finger were tightening, he could feel his ribs groan, ready to snap and send splinters through his heart.
“I did not mean to slay Balder. I meant them to see themselves for what they were.”
“I know that, lord. So does my father Rig. It was why he loosed you.”
The face had gone quiet, and a kind of reason was coming back into it.
“Are you trying to bargain with me, mannikin?”
“Yes, lord.”
“Then what is your offer?”
“I do not know yet, lord. To give you a footing again in Asgarth?”
“You cannot give me that,” said the voice of Loki. “But maybe you can give me something. Listen then to my offer. Do my wishes. Make more fire, make more machines, be my follower and not Rig's, turn your back on the Way and bring terror to the world. And in exchange I will give you more than my father Othin ever offered. He gives his favorites success till he chooses different, like Sigurth Snake-eye, whom you gave to death when his shoelace tripped him. I would give you success till you died, old and terrible. Think of the men at your command. Think of the women you can take. All that can be yours.
“Now here is my token. Above all else you want the fire. I will send it to you, and with it a hope beyond your hope. When it comes to you, say to the Greek: ‘It is best on a winter morning.’ See him grovel.
“Go now. But do not think you can escape me now I am loose. Or that your father can protect you, locked at the end of Bifrost bridge.”
Shef found himself suddenly tossed in the air, going up and further up like a stone from a catapult. He turned in the air, trying to get his feet under him, possessed with fear of where he might land, in the sea with the cold eyes and the teeth, on the land where the serpents crawled and struck.
There was a bed beneath his back, he was straggling to his feet, trying to draw his legs up from the fangs. Arms were pressing him down, he felt a soft breast on his naked skin. Svandis. For long moments he clung to her, shaking.
“Do you know what you were saying?” she said to him at last.
“No.”
“You called it out again and again, in Norse. Skal ek that eigi, skal ek that eigi, that skal ek eigi gera.”
Shef translated automatically, “I shall not that, I shall not that, that shall I not do.”
“What is ‘that’?” asked Svandis.
Shef realized he was clutching his pendant protectively. “Give up this,” he said, looking down at it. “Give up this and worship Loki in exchange for his favor. What is that noise outside?”
Chapter Twenty-five
The sun was already above the horizon—a night had passed by while Shef struggled in his dream with the god of chaos—and the noise was the noise of frenzied cheering. Ship after ship was nosing its way into the harbor, the first one challenged from a distance and then covered by alarmed and wary mule-crews. But as the ships' build became obvious even to the naked eye, and as shouts were exchanged backwards and forwards between the oncoming armada and the catapult crews, the tension vanished. The hastily-repaired boom was cast off, the covering artillery ceased to swing its trails round, tight-wound ropes were slacked off. As the news spread through the town all those who could be released from sentry-go ran down to the dockside, waving and shouting with the relief of tension.
The fleet that Alfred had fitted out and sent to the rescue, warned by Farman's vision, had gathered slowly from its various stations in the Northern seas, and then probed its way cautiously south. Fishermen had often seen Shef's smaller fleet making its way down across Biscay and along the coast of Spain: no seaman who had seen them ever forgot the strange two-master design, and it was easy in any language to ask, “Have you seen ships like ours?” Information became harder to gather, or to understand, once they had rounded the narrow straits of Jeb el-Tarik and made their way into the Inland Sea, urged on by the steady current from the Atlantic. The ships of the majus had gone to Cordova. No, they had sailed against the Nazarenes. They were in alliance with the Caliph. No, the Caliph had denounced them as treacherous dogs. All ships fled from the spirits of the majus, who threw great stones at the order of their sorcerer-king. On the contrary, it was the Nazarenes who ruled the Inland Sea, with their tame dragons which burned the very sea with fire.
Hardred, the English fleet-commander appointed by Alfred, did his best to pick sense out of all he was told, assisted by Farman priest of Frey, the visionary who had brought them all on this expedition, and by Gold-Guthmund, once Shef's comrade, now king (under the One King) of Sveariki, land of the Swedes. One thing all three had grasped. The Greek galleys were everywhere feared, for reasons no-one was sure of: “Proves no-one's lived to report,” remarked Guthmund. As they probed up the coast, opinion also hardened on the fact that the Northerners were in harbor, and unable to escape.
Hardred had at bottom little fear of an encounter with any fleet. Twenty catapult-armed two-masters of the “Hero” class—every ship named for a hero of Northern legend—followed his flag, and round them skimmed a score and a half of conventional Viking longships, manned by the best that Guthmund's Swedes and the mercenary-market of London could provide. Yet the rumors gave him a little caution. He had spent the night his king had passed in dream lying well offshore, all lights dowsed, the two-masters grapnelled together, the longships rowing cautious, quiet patrol. With the sudden Mediterranean dawn he had come in on the harbor of Septimania, on a long slanting tack against the dawn breeze, all catapults wound and loaded, scouting ships out well ahead.
The first thing Guthmund had seen had been the floating fort: a formidable obstacle if attacked from the direction of the harbor it was meant to block. Attacked from the opposite direction it could offer no resistance. The first fifty Vikings scrambling on to it, axes in hand, met only raised hands and scared faces. Even the twenty Lanzenbrüder there to keep an eye on the Frankish levies, caught without warning in the midst of a peaceful breakfast, could do no more than eye their stacked armor, and join the surrender.
The Greek commander of the galley on standing patrol, who had done no more for many days than incinerate careless fishing boats, tried a little harder. He saw the strange vessels approaching, manned his oars, and screamed at his siphonistoi to make ready. It took time. The flax to be lit, the bellows manned, the pump to b
e shipped, the safety-checks of oil vessel and connecting pipes scrambled through. As the siphonistoi scrambled to their places, the commander manned his oars and tried to outrun pursuit. Two longships were already ahead of him, curving round under oars alone to take him from either side. As he shrieked at his fire-crew to make ready to shoot, regardless of their preparations, a mule-stone from the leading two-master knocked away his stern-post. The galley sank back in the water, the oarsmen immediately quitting their posts. As the siphonistoi gave up their impossible task, the commander, remembering his prime directive not to let the secret of the Greek fire fall to any enemy, ran towards the pressure tank with an axe, determined to hole it and let the oil run on to the blazing flax. One of the oarsmen, highly paid and valued as he was, had nevertheless seen too many fishermen screaming in agony in blazing water to accept the same fate for himself—regardless of the fate of Constantinople and the Empire. He tripped his commander, brained him with his own axe, and swept the uncertain siphonistoi aside. The longships closed, crews scrambling aboard and eyeing the copper dome and nozzles nervously. Hurriedly the Greek oarsmen and marines were thrust overboard, to cling to ropes and planking in the warm sea. Grapnelled between her two capturers, the Greek galley wallowed half-sinking in the water. As the two-masters came up, Hardred sent his most skilled men aboard to rope the shattered stern together, cover the gaping hole with tarred sailcloth, and drag the water-filled wreck to beach on the shore a bare half-mile away.
Fort and galley seized, the thirty-odd ships remaining sailed for the harbor wall behind which they could see already the distinctive masts of their fellow Northerners. Doubt and suspicion—were they in enemy hands? was there some trap laid behind the stone walls of the city?—dissolved as both sides saw identical catapults training round, as men recognized comrades and relatives, as hails of greeting began to echo back and forth. By the time Shef, rubbing his eyes, still gaping from his dream, had been forced into his clothes by Svandis, the relieving fleet was already squeezing into the crammed harbor in a storm of shouting in English, Norse, and both together.
Cwicca met him at the door of his lodging, gap teeth grinning broadly.
“It's that Hardred,” he announced. “Fellow who left you stuck on the Ditmarsh, I never trusted him. But he's come at the right time this time. Cleared them right off that old fort before they even saw him coming. And he's taken a galley too, they say, fire-machine and all.”
He waited, face alive with cheer, to see his gloomy king brighten at the news. Shef stared at the thronging harbor, and slowly Cwicca realized that yet again his expectations would be disappointed.
“Above all else you want the fire,” he remembered the voice saying. “I will send it to you. Tell the Greek—” What was it he said to tell the Greek?
“Did Hardred capture the Greek operators too?” Shef asked, almost absently.
“I don't know,” Cwicca replied. “I don't see why not.”
Shef turned to Svandis at his side. “You will have trouble explaining this last dream of mine,” he said. “For already I can see it has come true.”
The Emperor of the Romans had very little fear for the outcome of the battle he had provoked against the army of the Caliph. It was true that he was heavily outnumbered. True also that the Arabs had a centuries-long record of success against the Christians of the peninsula and the border mountains—sure proof, in the Emperor's view, of the heresy that had taken deep roots among them, for otherwise how would God allow His believers to be worsted? But against that, Bruno was well aware of the rotten state of morale among the enemy, if even a tenth of what the deserters said was true—and the fact that there were so many deserters was a proof in itself. His own troops, whether the reliable Lanzenbrüder on whom he depended, or the Frankish and German knights he had called from all over his Empire, or even the normally fickle and evasive local levies from the borderlands, were by contrast in good heart and accustomed to success, gained in the many small sieges and skirmishes he had fought to clear the Moslem bandits from his dominions. Some of the gloss had been taken off them by the failed siege of Septimania: but even that was not entirely a bad thing. He had noticed a definite lift in spirits as they had marched away, and broodingly put it down to the superstitious fear that some of them had gained of the man they called—if no superior officer was in hearing—the One King. They would have to be reassured when he turned back to deal with his real enemy. But fighting the Caliph seemed to some of them a virtual holiday by comparison. Less resistance, and a great deal more loot.
In any case there were two other factors the Emperor relied on. One was his faith in God. From time to time he still touched the tender but healing bridge of his nose, and smiled inwardly. A penance he had not inflicted on himself, he welcomed it. In his heart was a growing determination to set his trusty deacon, in minor orders alone though he might be, on the throne of Saint Peter. He was a little man, and a foreigner. But if he had had a confidant the Emperor would have confessed that the little man's heart was bigger than his own. And if he was not a German he was the next best thing. Not for the first time he had given the Emperor back his faith.
And faith or no faith, as the Emperor made a final survey of his dispositions, there was something he could count on even if he had been a mere devil-worshiper like the Waymen-Norse and their apostate English fellows. Constant warfare among the descendants of Pippin the Great and Charles Martel had made all Christian European armies, apart from the backward Anglo-Saxons, into modern fighting forces. On his flanks were planted the siege implements and catapults, both his own design and those copied from their Wayman enemies. Behind him waited the main striking force of five hundred heavy-armed and armored lancers, dismounted and in the shade. Platoons of the Lanzenbrüder dotted the hill slopes, ready to be bugled forward to form their irresistible infantry line. Really, the Emperor could see only one problem, and that was the penance Erkenbert had imposed on him. Not to fight in the front—he would have done that anyway. But to do so in the company of the most unreliable people in his army, the Christian or pseudo-Christian deserters.
And even that could be turned to account. The Emperor strolled up and down the nervous-looking ranks, still wearing no more than cotton or linen, equipped like the army from which they had deserted with only spears, scimitars and wicker shields. They could not understand a word he said, but they understood that he was there among them. Interpreters had pointed out to them the rewards of success, the impossibility of deserting back now that they had renounced Allah; the penalty of failure was vividly present in the memory of all of them, in bastinado and impaling-post. They would fight all right. And he had taken steps to see that they fought in good heart and even good humor. As the priests passed among them, extending the cups of wine and the wafers of the communion, Bruno set an example by kneeling himself and taking bread and wine humbly. Then he turned his attention to the fires set up in front of his position along the valley-bottom.
“Take communion fasting, then time to feast,” he called. “Translate that,” he added in an undertone. He stepped forward to the nearest fire, drew his belt-knife, cut away a long rasher, chewed it with exaggerated relish, waved the doubtful deserters forward to join in, to take meat, bread and watered wine from the barrels. Make a party of it, he thought. Cheer them up. Half of them look as if they outran their supplies a week ago. Or their officers steal it from them.
Further up the valley, Mu'atiyah looked through his own far-seer across the advancing cloud of Arab infantry. Proud though he was of his master, he had rejected the use of the sliding tube. What Allah had sent him, that he would retain.
“What are the infidels doing?” asked the Caliph behind him. He stood still in the shade of the awning of his great pavilion, which he had had erected on the very verge of battle, to show his confidence.
Mu'atiyah turned to him, allowing the indignation he felt to show in his face: rage was the safest emotion to have in the vicinity of the Caliph, as long as it was direct
ed outwards. “Caliph, Successor of the Quraysh, the infidels are mocking God. They have set up fires in front of their line, and on each they have roasted a pig. Now those who deserted from our army, those who turned their back on the shahada, they are eating the unclean in the face of you and of the faithful.”
From inside the pavilion, unseen, there came a chorus of horror. Then female cries of encouragement. “Smite them, master. Let them feel your wrath.” Greatly daring, a voice called out the Caliph's own favorite saying, “ ‘You believers, fight those of the unbelievers who are nearest to you.’ Now they are near enough! Smite them! Oh, that I were a man.”
The Caliph nodded slowly, pulled from his belt the jewel-hilted scimitar that could slice drifting silk. Threw aside its scabbard. He walked ceremoniously forward, while his guards closed in around him and the trumpets blew for the advance. On the scrub-covered hillside the dozens of cavalry skirmishes going on between the Islamic cavalry and the goad-wielding bacheliers of the Camargue halted while both sides weighed the situation. Then the commander of the Caliph's cavalry, bin-Maymun, cousin of bin-Firnas, waved his men on while edging in the direction of the pavilion itself. The bacheliers began their practiced custom of feigning flight while remaining ready to turn it into real flight at a moment's notice. Bruno cut himself a last chop with a steaming kidney attached, used it to wave his men with elaborate unconcern into their rough and barely-disciplined line. The Arab infantry, looking over their shoulders for encouragement, found it in the spears of the Caliph's bodyguard, and broke into the chaotic charge that was their only tactic. At the front ran the ghazis among them, calling on Allah to witness their martyrdom and their faith.
Their martyrdom came quickly. As they ran forward over the quarter-mile between them and the deserters who faced them, the forgotten of God, the stones and arrows began to rain down. Bruno had a dozen traction catapults placed to either side of the valley in which he had made his stand, inaccurate weapons, but capable of doing great execution against a crowd. The breast-bows which made no impact on mailed men sent their arrows sleeting through cotton and wicker. Standing unafraid in the center of his own line, Bruno reflected that only ultimate belief and a religion which exalted suicide would have driven men on through the storm they faced. It did not drive them all on, he noticed. His experienced and professional eye saw men slowing to a walk, men drawing to one side, men who did not seem to have been touched throwing themselves to the ground and remaining there. There was a disciplined body following up, he observed, but too few and in too short a line. The disaffected could leak away to one flank or the other. A hundred breaths, he reflected, the time it would take a slovenly clerk to gabble a Mass. Then his penance would be over. He hoped God would grant it to him to shed his blood for the faith, in expiation of his fault.
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