King and Emperor thatc-3 Page 8

  “He never enjoys anything,” Ordlaf confided later to his mates. “Thinking ahead all the time. Good for no-one, if you ask me.”

  But Ordlaf was wrong. Shef felt keen enjoyment at every detail as he stood, finally, on the after catapult-castle, watching the coast of England fade and hearing the terrible retching sounds of the Caliph's ambassador and his men coming to terms once more with the Atlantic swell. His eye noted the skillful way his dozen ships—seven catapult-craft, and five more conventional Viking-manned longships in company as scouts—spread out into an extended V, five miles from arm to arm, so as to keep each other in plain sight and at the same time extend the horizon of their own lookouts. He nodded approvingly too at the new “crows' nests” at every masthead. He would have liked to see in each of them a man armed with a far-seer like the one the Arab had shown him, but so far the secret of their manufacture had eluded him. Priests of the Way were busy at this moment in the Wisdom-House, blowing glass, making different shapes from it, trying to learn in the way they had learned to make better steel and better weapons: not by logic, but by deliberate random change. The man who succeeded could name his own reward.

  But meanwhile, the new ships had even a brick fireplace amidships, screened from the wind and the spray! Shef's nostrils flared to the smell of thick sausage soup, remembering again the terrible belly-pinch of his past. For all men say, he thought again, as he did many times, there is no virtue in hardship. Virtue in being able to endure it, maybe. But no-one gets better for practice.

  His comfortable reflections were cut short by sudden turmoil from the fore-castle: men's voices raised, and in the middle of them—impossible, at sea—what sounded like the shrieking of a woman. An angry woman by the sound of it, as well. Shef turned for the rail and headed swiftly along the ship's seventy-foot length.

  It was a woman, sure enough, but what caught Shef's eye in his first astonished instant was the sight of his childhood friend Hund the leech, standing in front of Ordlaf the skipper and bodily thrusting him back. Hund was among the slightest of men, and moreover quiet and gentle almost to a fault. To see him thrusting aside the burly Ordlaf was barely credible.

  Even less credible was the sight of the woman herself. For an instant Shef's eye caught the copper hair, flash of blue eyes—they brought back a memory of some kind—but then he could notice nothing beyond her dress.

  Slowly his brain took in what his eye had already registered. She wore what was certainly an imitation of the dress of a priest of the Way. White wool, bleached again and again. Round her neck a pendant, but not one he could readily recognize. Not a leech-apple, not a smith-hammer. A ski, for Ull? No: a feather, badly-crafted, but a quill nonetheless. And round her waist, certainly, a girdle of the sacred rowan-berries.

  Shef became conscious of Thorvin standing by his side. Realized too that the shouting and pushing had ceased, quelled by his appearance and his fixed stare.

  “Is she with you?” Shef asked Thorvin disbelievingly. “Do you have priestesses now?”

  “Not with me,” came a grim voice in reply. “She has no right to wear any of our marks or tokens. They should be stripped from her back, aye, shift and all.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then over the side with her,” cut in Ordlaf. “Who ever heard of a woman aboard ship?” He caught himself a moment later. “I mean to say, a distaff-bearer.”

  Shef had noted the spread of the haf-words among his seamen, even the English ones who had been brought up as Christians, like Ordlaf. Brand and his men were adamant that it was the worst of luck at sea to mention women, or cats, or Christian priests, except for the terrible luck that would be brought by sailing with one. They would not mention parts of their own ships in ordinary language either, but carefully used separate ritual terms. Now Ordlaf was doing it. But his reflections were interrupted again by a closer stare at the woman in front of him. Absently he waved to Hund, pushing forward protectively, to stand back and let him see her plain.

  “I have seen you before,” he remarked. “You hit me. You hurt me. I remember now. It was at Bedricsward, by—by the mighty one's camp. You were in the tent, the tent I cut open, the tent—” Shef hesitated. He could remember no ruling from Brand on this point, but something told him that Ivar the Boneless was a name as likely to annoy, or to attract, the sea-hags of Ran the goddess of the deep as any mention of women or cats. “The tent of the pale man,” he finished lamely.

  She nodded. “I remember you too. You had two eyes then. You slashed the tent open to rescue the English girl, and seized me because you thought I was her. I hit you and you let me go.” She spoke English with a thick Norse accent, Shef noted, as bad as Brand's. But she did not speak it quite like him, nor like so many of the followers of the Way, edging towards a language common to both Norse and English. She was a Dane. A pure Dane, he guessed. Where had she come from?

  “I brought her aboard,” said Hund, finally able to command attention. “I hid her below decks. Shef, you were Thorvin's apprentice. I was Ingulf's apprentice. Now Svandis here is my apprentice. I ask you to protect her—as Thorvin protected you when the dogs of Ivar would have killed you.”

  “If she is your apprentice why is she not wearing an apple, for Ithun, for leech-craft?” said Shef.

  “Women are not apprentices,” growled Thorvin at the same moment.

  “I can explain that,” said Hund. “But there are other things I need to explain too. Privately,” he added.

  Shef nodded slowly. In all their experience he had never known Hund ask for anything for himself, not since the day Shef had pulled the slave-collar off his neck. Yet time and again he had done Shef service. He was owed a hearing. Silently Shef pointed forward to the closed space where they slung his hammock. He turned to Ordlaf, to Thorvin, to the watching crewmen and the dark-faced Arabs behind them.

  “No more about stripping or putting over the side,” he ordered. “Serve the food out, Ordlaf. And send some forward to Hund and me too. As for her, put her in the aft compartment with two of your mates to watch her. You are responsible for her safety.

  “Lady,” he added, “go where they show you.” For an instant she looked at him as if she were likely to strike him again. A fierce face, a familiar face. As she relaxed and dropped her eyes, Shef realized with death at his heart where he had seen it before. Glaring at him over a gangplank. She was the female image of the Boneless One, whom he had killed and burned to ashes so his ghost would never walk again. What was it that Hund had brought back from the past? If she were a draugr or one of the twice-born, he would take Thorvin's advice after all. It would cheer the crew, dispersing sullenly now to their meal.

  “Yes, she is Ivar's daughter,” admitted Hund, in the dark, rocking privacy of the deck beneath the forward catapult-mount. “I realized that a while ago.”

  “But how could he have a daughter? or any child? He could do nothing with women, that's why they called him the Boneless One, he had no…”

  “Oh yes he did,” corrected Hund. “You should know. You killed him by crushing them in your hand,”

  Shef fell silent, remembering the last moments of his duel with Ivar.

  “By the time we knew him,” Hund went on, “I think you are right, he could have no relations with women. But when he was younger, he could—if he hurt them a great deal first. He was one of those men—there are more of them than there should be, even in your kingdom—who are aroused by pain and fear. In the end the pain and fear were all he valued, and I believe that no woman given over to him could hope to survive. You saved Godive from that, you know,” he added with a penetrating stare. “He treated her well for a while, but from what I have heard that was only to get the keener enjoyment as her trust turned to fear: when the moment came.

  “But it seems that in earlier years his demands were not so great. Women survived what he did to them. He may even have found one or two who cooperated with him, who had some deformity corresponding to his.”

  “What,
enjoyed being hurt?” grunted Shef disbelievingly. He had been hurt often himself. The man he was talking to had burned out his right eye with a red-hot needle, to prevent worse happening. He could not imagine any faint association of pleasure with pain.

  Hund nodded, carrying on. “I think in the case of Svandis's mother there may even have been some affection between them. Anyway, the woman conceived his child and lived to bear it. Though she died not long after, as Ivar's needs grew stronger. Now Ivar valued Svandis extremely, maybe for her mother, maybe because she was living proof of his manhood. He took her with him in the great attack on England. But after the surprise at Bedricsward all the Ragnarssons sent their women, their real women, not the slave-lemmans they picked up, back to safety at the Braethraborg.

  “What you need to realize, Shef, is this, and I speak now as a leech.” Hund gripped his apple-pendant to show his gravity. “That young woman has three times been hurt by fear. Once, at Bedricsward. Most of the women in that tent were killed, you know. You dragged Godive away. Svandis seized a weapon and crawled between tent-ropes where the warriors could not easily reach her. But most of them were cut down by men so blind with rage they could hardly see. She collected the bodies in the morning.

  “Again, at the Braethraborg, after you stormed it. Again she had been living in safety, as a princess, her every command obeyed. Then it was blood and fire all over again, and at the end of it she was a beggarwoman. No one would take in a Ragnarsson's daughter. If she showed gold someone would take it from her. All her kin were dead. How do you think she lived after that? By the time she found her way to me she had been through many men's hands. Like a nun taken by a Viking band and passed round the camp-fires.”

  “And the third time?” Shef asked.

  “When her mother died. Who knows how that came about? Who knows how much the child saw, or heard, or guessed?”

  “Is she your lemman now?” inquired Shef, trying to get to some decision.

  Hund threw his hands up in disgust. “What I'm trying to tell you, you brain-sick pissabed, is that of all the women in the world she is the least likely to be anyone's lemman. As far as she knows, if women lie with men they are likely to be disemboweled slowly, and the only good reason for doing so is in exchange for food or money.”

  Shef sat back on his bench. Though his face could not be seen in the dark unlit 'tween-deck, he was grinning faintly. Hund was talking to him as he had done when they were boys, thrall's child and bastard together. Besides, a faint excitement stirred within him at the thought that the new woman was not Hund's lover. A Ragnarsson's daughter, he reflected. Now her father and uncles and cousins were all safely dead, it might be no bad thing to ally with the Ragnarsson blood. All admitted that they were of the seed of gods and heroes, however much they hated them. The Snake-eye claimed descent from Völsi and from his own namesake the Fafnisbane. There was no doubt the Danes and the Swedes and the Norwegians would respect a child sprung from that stock: even if she was a female Boneless.

  He brought himself back to the moment. “If she is not your lover, why did you hide her on board?”

  Hund leaned forward again, his voice dropping low. “I tell you, that young woman has more brains than anyone you or I have ever met.”

  “What, more than Udd?” Shef meant the puny, slave-born stray who had risen to become Shef's steelmaster and the most respected smith among priests of the Way: though he would never leave the House of Wisdom in Stamford again, his nerve broken for ever by the terrors he had undergone in the North.

  “In a way. But in a different way. She is no smith, no metal-beater or machine-minder. She thinks deeply. Somewhere after she fled from the Braethraborg, someone explained to her the doctrines of the Way. She knows the holy poems and stories as well as Thorvin, and can read and write them. That is why she has chosen to wear a quill, though I do not know what god she wears it for.”

  Hund's voice was a whisper now. “I think she explains the stories better than Thorvin does. Their inner meaning, the true tale of Völund or of King Frothi and the giant-maids, the truth behind all our fables of gods and giants, of Othin and Loki and Ragnarök. She preaches strange doctrines to those who will listen, tells them there is no Valhalla for the good and Naströnd for the bad, no monsters beneath the earth and in the sea, no Loki and no Hel…”

  Shef cut him off. “She can stay, if you wish it,” he said. “She can preach her strange doctrines too, for all I care. But you can tell her this: if she wants to persuade anyone that Loki does not exist, she can start with me. I would give heavy gold to anyone who could show me that. Or tell me his chains were sound.”

  Not far, as the raven flies, from the track of the war-fleet down the French Atlantic coast, the new Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire prepared with relish for an afternoon's sport.

  Returned from his meeting at Salonae, the Emperor had embarked with his usual furious energy on the next task he had set himself, the counterpart of the naval actions that his general Agilulf and the Greek admiral of the Red Fleet were carrying out at sea. It was time, Bruno had declared, to deal finally with the Moslem strongholds established a generation before on the South Frankish coast, permanent menace to pilgrims and officials traveling to Rome, disgrace to Christendom and to the heir of Charlemagne. Easier said than done, some had muttered. But not many. Their Emperor did nothing without a plan.

  Now Bruno stood, relaxed and genial, explaining what would happen to a group of wary, mistrustful, but deeply interested nobles: minor dukes and barons of the Pyrenean mountains, in their way the counterpart to the Moslem brigands about to be extirpated, their own strongholds hanging on the edge of Moslem Spain as the present one did on the coast of Christian France. From time to time a dart or arrow swept out of the sky, shot from the stronghold towering on its peak two hundred feet above them. The nobles noted the total lack of concern of the Emperor, who from time to time raised his shield to deflect or intercept a missile, without breaking the flow of his talk. This was no chair-warrior talking. He had been shot at more times than he had passed water.

  “They build high up, as you can see,” he explained. “That was safe enough for a long time. Can't get scaling ladders up easily, they have plenty of bowmen—good bowmen too,” he added, lifting his shield once more. “Build on stone, so it's no good mining. Even our onagers can't be raised high enough to beat their doors down.

  “But the Mohammedan rogues did not have to deal with my good secretarius here!” The Emperor waved an arm at a figure the Spanish barons had till then ignored: a small, scrawny man in the undistinguished black robe of a deacon, standing by the side of the great machine drawn forward by two hundred men. Looking again, the barons noted that two men stood always by the deacon, fully armored, with shields of double size. The Emperor might take risks with his own life, but none with those of this deacon.

  “That is Erkenbert the Englishman, Erkenbert arithmeticus.” The barons nodded reflectively. Even they had heard of this man. All of Christendom had heard by now the story of how the great Emperor had traveled into the pagan lands and returned with the Holy Lance of Longinus. A major part of the story was the tale of how Erkenbert arithmeticus had destroyed the Kingdom Oak of the Swedes, the idol-worshipers.

  The little deacon was calling shrill orders, had now a firebrand in his fist. He looked across at the Emperor, saw his nod, bent over his machine, straightened, and shouted a last word. An instant later, the Spaniards broke into a collective groan of amazement. The great arm of the machine had swept down, slowly, ponderously, dragged down by the huge bucket on its shorter arm. At the same instant the long arm had shot up, as fast as the short one was slow, and launched a trail of smoke into the air. But what had brought out the groan was the size of the missile it lobbed: bigger than any rock men could lift, bigger than a mule or a two-year-old bullock, it flew as if by magic up into the sky. Over the wall of the Moslem stronghold, vanishing deep inside. From high above they could hear yells of alarm and rage. Already the machi
ne tenders were furiously busy round the bucket-arm, some of them jumping into it and hurling rock after rock out on to the dry ground.

  “It's very slow,” said Bruno conversationally, “but it can throw the weight of three men, oh, a hundred and fifty yards quite easily. And it throws it up, you see. Not flat like the onagers. So what we do with the villains is, first we set fire to the wooden buildings inside the holds—four hundred pounds of tarred straw is not put out by pissing on it—and then, well, you'll see. Once my secretarius has seen a shot or two, he will cut down the weight of the launcher—it is difficult, but he is the arithmeticus—and drop, not straw, but a boulder, right on top of the gateway there.” He waved up at the iron-studded oak doorway.

  “And then, as you can see”—Bruno waved again at the heavily-armed men waiting in ranks out of arrow-shot, “the heroes of the Lanzenorden stand ready to go in and finish the job.”