King and Emperor thatc-3 Page 10

  “Ver thik,” they shouted again and again, “her ek kom, guard yourself, here I come.” The Arabs will not understand it, Shef had pointed out, they will not think we are challenging them. Let's shout something else anyway, suggested one skipper. Anything more complicated than that, Brand had replied, and your lot will forget the words.

  The column moved on through the packed streets of the town with metal echoes clanging from the stone walls, preceded by wailing pipes and roaring voices. At the rear the crossbowmen had started to sing a song in praise of their own victories. As they moved on the excited crowds grew thicker so that the marching men began to mark time, stamping down on the spot with their hobnails. Out of the corner of his eye Shef saw a fascinated Arab watching Brand's enormous feet crashing up and down. First he looked down, at the boots half a yard long. Then he gaped up, trying to measure the seven-foot distance between them and the metal crest of Brand's helmet.

  Good, Shef thought, stepping forward again as the crowd was thrust back by the Caliph's escorts. Good, we've got them thinking first. They're thinking, is he human? It's not even a bad question.

  The Caliph heard the uproar of the crowd even within his shaded and enclosed hall of audience. He raised an eyebrow, listened while the news was poured into his ears by an attendant. As the noise came closer he could indeed distinguish the screeching of the ferengis' strange instruments, as lacking in beauty as the howling of so many cats. Could hear, too, the astonishing crash of metal on stone, the deep shouts of the barbarians. Are they trying to frighten me, he wondered, amazed. Or is that their custom at all times? I must speak to Ghaniya. If one does not understand the customs of the foreigner one cannot guess his thoughts.

  The noise ceased abruptly as Shef gave the signal to halt and the right-hand marker, by arrangement, waved his spear in a circle. Shef's men, Vikings and English, stood rigid in their ranks in the outside courtyard.

  “How many may enter for audience?” asked Shef. No more than ten besides yourself, came the answer. Shef nodded, pointed out those to come with him. Brand and Thorvin, Hagbarth and Skaldfinn. He hesitated over Hund. No-one in the North knew more of leech-craft, and Cordova was famous for it: he might be needed to judge or respond. Yet he would not be parted from the irritating, but still obediently veiled Svandis. Take them both, then. Finally he called forward two of the Viking skippers to flank Brand, both men who had fought their way to command in a score of single combats, nodded silently to his long-term companions Cwicca and Osmond, with their crossbows.

  The Caliph, sitting high on his dais, observed the strangers enter, listening now to muttered commentary from Ghaniya, who had come forward while the majus assembled outside. The king was the one-eyed one. Strange for the ferengis, who respected strength and size so much. The king should be the giant beside him. Though the one-eye had indeed the bearing of command. Abd er-Rahman noted the way he strode forward confidently to stand directly in front of him, looked round for his translators.

  He noted also the sweat by now pouring from under the hair and the gold circlet. What were these men wearing? Metal to hold the rays of the sun; leather underneath it to guard their skin; and beneath that, it seemed, sheep's wool? In the Andalusian summer men dressed like that would die of heat-stroke before noon. And yet the king and his men showed no awareness of it, felt no shame at the evidence of their own bodies' discomfort, did not even try to wipe their brows. My people think it dignified to withdraw from discomfort, the Caliph reflected. These think it dignified to ignore it, like a slave working in the sun.

  The Caliph asked the first and vital question: “Ask, are any of these men Christians?”

  He expected the question to go to Suleiman the Jew, who would speak in Latin, and be translated by some man of learning among the strangers. He was surprised to see, as Suleiman indeed began to translate, the king himself shake his head. He understood some Arabic, then. And the answer was already forthcoming. Skaldfinn had as his vocation the learning of languages and the understanding of peoples. He had spent the voyage learning from Suleiman, and teaching him Anglo-Norse in exchange. Shef too had sat listening much of the time. Skaldfinn spoke now in slow but passable Arabic, translating for his king.

  “No. None of us are Christians. We allow Christians to follow their faith, but we follow a different Way, and a different book. We fight only against those who deny that right.”

  “Has it been explained to you that there is only one God, who is Allah, and that Muhammad is his Prophet? Believe that, and you can expect rich reward from me.”

  “It has been explained.”

  “You do not believe in Allah? You choose to believe in your own gods, whoever they are?”

  Tension and the note of the executioner in the Caliph's voice. Brand shifted his grip slightly on the axe “Battle-troll,” and marked the two men standing behind the Caliph, scimitars bared. Big men, he thought. Burnt blacker by the sun than I have ever seen before. But naked above the waist, no shields. Two blows and the third for the Arab in the chair.

  Realizing that he could follow the Arabic that the Caliph spoke, Shef replied for the first time without a translator. Pitching his voice high, and speaking the simplest Arabic that he could, he called out: “I have not seen Allah. I have seen my own gods. Maybe if I had two eyes I would see Allah too. One eye cannot see everything.”

  A buzz of comment ran round the courtyard. The Arabs, used to metaphorical language and the art of indirect reproof, understood the last sentence. He means that those who believe in one thing alone are half-blind. Blasphemer, thought some. Wise for a ferengi, thought others.

  This is not a man to fence with, thought the Caliph. Already he has shown he understands display. Now he is taking my own audience chamber away from me.

  “Why have you come to Cordova?” he said.

  Because you asked me, thought Shef, glancing slightly at Ghaniya standing between and to the side of both men. Aloud, he replied: “To fight your enemies. My enemies too. Ghaniya tells me the Franks have new weapons to fight on sea and on land. We men of the Way understand new weapons. We have brought new weapons and new ships to see if our enemies can stand against them.”

  The Caliph looked silently at Ghaniya, who began an excited account of the ships and the catapults of the Wayman fleet. As they sailed south Shef had several times encouraged the skippers to make raft-targets, drop them over the side, and then destroy them at half a mile with hurled rocks. The crews were skilled and practiced, and the results had amazed the envoy. Indeed no ship known to him could take more than a blow or two from the onagers: he had not seen the armored but virtually unsailable Fearnought of the Braethraborg battle.

  As Ghaniya came to an end, Abd er-Rahman looked thoughtfully once more at the God-defier. He is still not impressed, he thought, watching the grim impassive face. Nor his companions. He made a sign, and one of the huge executioners walked forward, bringing his scimitar from his shoulder. Another sign, and a slave-girl stepped out to join him. As she did so she peeled away the long filmy scarf that covered her upper body and stood, still veiled but with breasts bared before the men.

  “I hear much of your new weapons,” he said. “We have weapons too.”

  He flicked his hand. The girl tossed her scarf in the air. Slowly, gently, the thin silk floated down. The executioner turned his scimitar edge up and held it out beneath the drifting fabric. The scarf met the edge, divided, settled in two pieces to the ground.

  Brand grunted, muttered something to the skippers at his side. Now, the Caliph thought, the king will tell that giant to split something with his great clumsy axe.

  Shef turned, looked at Cwicca and Osmod. Neither of them the best shot in the world, he thought. Osmod is a bit more certain. He pointed silently at a marble vase holding bright purple flowers in a niche above the Caliph's head. Osmod gulped visibly, looked sideways at Cwicca, unslung his crossbow. Cocked it with one heave on the goat's-foot lever. Dropped in the short iron quarrel. Raised, aimed and pulled
trigger.

  Osmod had guessed right, aiming low to allow for the short-range rise. The armor-piercing bolt smashed into the stone, shattering it into pieces. Stone splinters hummed around the room, the bolt bounced back from the wall and clanged onto the floor. The flowers fell in a decorative trail. Earth from the shattered vase slowly pattered down.

  The Caliph stroked his beard in the silence. I threatened him with my executioners, he thought. But that Iblis-bolt would have split my heart before I could move. Ghaniya did not warn me enough.

  “You will fight our enemies,” he said finally, “and you say that is what you have come for. If our enemies are your enemies, that may be true. But no-one works only for another's good. There must be something else that has brought you here. Tell me what it is, and by Allah I shall do my best to see you have it.”

  For the third time the foreign king shocked him. In clear but simple Arabic he replied once more.

  “We have come to see the flying man.”

  Chapter Seven

  Shef pushed his way impatiently through the growing crowd, the pole-ladder emblem of his god dangling over his chest. As the days of waiting had gone by, he and his men had slowly discarded layers of clothing. First the mail armor. It had become clear that while Shef's two hundred men were indeed in the heart of a potentially hostile power, nevertheless they were so outnumbered as to make organized battle futile, while the streets of Cordova were guarded with such strictness that no man need fear private quarrel. Shef had put the Vikings' mail and the Englishmen's crossbows in a guardroom, less to keep them safe, he remarked, than to prevent them from selling their issued weapons for drink.

  “There is no strong drink anywhere in Cordova,” Hund had objected. “The orders of Muhammad forbid it.”

  “There's some somewhere,” Shef had replied, and supervised the handover of weapons himself.

  Then the jackets had gone. A couple of days wandering open-mouthed round the narrow, stone-walled streets of Cordova had convinced even the most conservative Northerners that leather was an encumbrance if not a risk to life. By now all the Waymen were down to hemp shirts and wool breeches, and those fortunate enough to retain a balance of their pay were sporting gaudy cotton. In the sun their silver pendants—no-one had yet been so rash or God-defying as to sell one—gleamed and jerked, marking their owners out yet again from the darker faces and gayer clothes around them.

  Last, fear had gone. Shef had expected, given the importance of his mission, to be shown to the great bin-Firnas, the flying man, at once. It had taken days, not—so Suleiman the Jew assured them—out of desire for delay, still less deliberate insult, but because of the veneration here accorded to the wise. The Caliph might indeed have commanded an audience and a demonstration, but preferred instead to send messengers, present gifts, ask for the favor of the wise to be shown to the barbarians drawn from afar by rumor of him, and generally go through the established ritual of Andalusian diplomacy. Bin-Firnas too—Suleiman further assured them—was not making deliberate difficulties in his replies. He was anxious only not to disappoint, to be unable to live up to the doubtless exaggerated tales carried into far lands by hearsay; further, as messages traveled both ways, it transpired that he was waiting for a wind.

  Shef and his men had spent the days of waiting wandering with increasing entrancement round the streets of Cordova, seeing for the first time for any of them the hundred thousand details of a developed commercial civilization: the carts coming in each dawn with produce, so many of them that those coming in had one side of the main streets, those going out the other, while there were men of the town Cadi who did nothing all day but ensure that such rules were maintained! The ever-turning water-wheels, or norias, which scooped water out of the river and transferred it to stone runnels, from which even the poor could fetch their water. The rigid regulations about sewage, which even the richest must obey. The houses for treatment of the sick; the public disputations where wise men spoke simultaneously of the Koran, the learning of the Jews, the wisdom of the Greeks; the surgeons, the mosques, the courts where the strict, even-handed justice of the shari'a was dispensed. Something there for everyone to stare at. In a while even the timidest lost their fear of the alien, even the fiercest and greediest ceased thinking of this world as merely another city to sack. If anything the feeling that had been created was one of awe: the word the Vikings used to mean, not fear, but a sense of being hopelessly outmatched. Could these people do everything?

  Only a few rose above this to observe weaknesses, inadequacies. Shef, at least, strove to do so, conscious that it might be mere jealousy which drove him. And then the Caliph sent word that it was time to meet the impossible, the flying man.

  This is going to be another disaster like the one with the hens'-feather man, Shef told himself as he neared the tower from which the launch had been promised, his companions shoving along behind him in the way they had grown used to in the continuous unbelievable swarm of the city. Probably another disaster. But it has to be said. There are two good things this time that were not so when King Alfred's man tried to fly from my tower. First, though there is this talk about the wind, as there was last time, no-one has mentioned birds or feathers.

  And second: we have met men, truthful-seeming men if I and Skaldfinn can judge their words, who insist that they saw this man fly fifteen years ago. Not heard about it, not been nearby. Saw it themselves. And their stories, if they do not tally on what they saw, agree on when and where.

  The tower door was before him now, guarded against the pushing spectators by men in the yellow and green of the Caliph's guard. The spears pulled aside as the guards recognized the eye-patch and emblem of the ferengi king, and the holy-man white of those behind him. Shef found himself blinking in the cool and dark at the base of the tower.

  As his eyes adjusted from the glare outside, he became aware that the owner of the tower was in front of him, bowing slightly and holding clasped hands to his heart. He began to respond, bowing in his turn, jerking out a greeting in simple Arabic. But as he did so he realized with a shock that the man in front of him was a cripple. He could stand upright for a few moments, but then his hands went back to the wooden frame in front of him. When he moved, he pushed the frame forward and then dragged himself after it.

  “Your legs,” Shef managed to say. “How were they hurt? With flying?”

  The Arab smiled, apparently unoffended. “With flying,” he agreed. “The flight went well, the coming to earth less so. You see, I had forgotten something. I had forgotten that all flying creatures have tails.”

  As bin-Firnas, the cripple, began to shuffle his slow way to the stairs leading up the tower, Shef looked round at Thorvin, Hund, and his priest-companions, an expression of doubt and disappointment on his face.

  “Another bird-man, after all,” he muttered. “Wait till he shows us the cape of feathers.”

  But at the top of the tower, on the square airy platform overlooking the steep sides of the Guadalquivir, there was no sign of feathers, no preparation for a leap. Back in the bright daylight, Shef could see that bin-Firnas was flanked by aides and servants, among them the young man Mu'atiyah who had come on the embassy to the North and the ever-present factotum Suleiman. Some stood by what seemed to be a light winch or windlass, others held lengths of pole and canvas. Behind Shef mustered the priests of the Way, the only ones for whom he had been able to secure admission. Walking to the tower's lip, Shef looked down and saw most of his men in the crowd, staring up, the giant figure of Brand conspicuous even in the throng. The still-veiled Svandis was close by him, he noted, though neither turned to the other. Brand had accepted the charge of looking after her from his friend and curer Hund, but had refused to have more than absolutely necessary to do with her: the Ivar-face chilled him, he confided, right in his old belly-wound.

  “The first thing we do is this,” Shef realized bin-Firnas was saying. “If the king of the ferengis will condescend to notice? See—” He gave an order, the winc
hmen began to pay out cord. A kite lifted into the air, caught the wind, began to recede into the sky as the windlass handles span. Shef stared at it. It seemed a light box, four walls made of cloth between poles, open at both ends, with slats or vents cut here and there in the cloth.

  “This of course is no more than a child's game,” bin-Firnas continued. “The kite lifts no more than itself. See though that the cord keeps its open mouth pointing towards the wind. Control is much easier into the wind. Away from the wind, it seems easier to sail like a ship, but alas! then the wind is master, not the man. So I found. I would do it differently if I tried again.”

  Shef could hear the cries of the crowd from below as they saw the kite. They lined the riverbank, some of them almost on a level with the tower as the slope rose away towards the city's thousand minarets.

  “You understand the kite, then?”

  Shef nodded, waited for the word to haul in. Instead bin-Firnas hobbled two paces to the winch, produced a knife, laid edge to cord. The kite, released, leapt up, swooped, sailed away downwind in erratic spirals and flutterings. Two of the waiting servants jumped to their feet, raced down the stairs to pursue and recover it.

  “Now we try a harder thing.”

  On a gesture four servants carried forward a different contrivance. Its shape was similar, the open-ended box of cloth between poles, but it was twice as large and clearly heavier in construction. Inside it, furthermore, was a sort of sling of rope and cloth. Short vanes projected from either side. Shef stared at it, puzzled.

  A young boy wriggled between the other servants and stood serious-faced in front of the new kite. Bin-Firnas laid a hand on his head, spoke to him with a babble of Arabic too fast for Shef to follow. The boy replied, nodding. Quickly two of the big dark-colored servants lifted him up, dropped him into the mouth of the kite. Walking nearer, Shef saw that the sling was a harness into which the boy fitted. His head remained outside the box, his hands rested on handles. As he twisted them, the cloth vanes to either side of the box rotated.