"03 - King and Emperor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

The Emperors were on their feet, the churchmen approaching, all smiles. A cardinal spoke, bowing, the cardinal who had once been Archbishop Gunther of Cologne. He spoke in fluent Low German, his and Bruno's native dialect, which neither Pope nor Patriarch nor any Greek or Italian would follow. At the same time one of the Patriarch's staff broke out with a burst of demotic Greek, no doubt with the same intention.
"It's fixed. They have agreed that we may add the formula 'and the Son' to the Nicene CreedЧmuch difference that makesЧas long as we draw no conclusions about the Double Procession of the Holy Ghost from it. Our fool, the Italian, has been told he has to withdraw his bishops from the Bulgars and let Saint Cyril have a free hand teaching them to read and write. All sides have agreed in condemning the former Patriarch, Photius the bookworm, no problem there. It's fixed."
Bruno turned towards Basil as the latter heard his own secret briefing chatter to an end. The two men smiled, simultaneously, reached out their hands.
"My bases in Italy," said Bruno.
"My fleet to relieve Sicily. And then the whole Italian Sea," replied Basil.
And then the Atlantic, thought Bruno. But he held his tongue. After all he might have shed the Greeks and their Emperor before then. If he or his agents could find out the weapon that held Constantinople inviolable from the sea. The secret no Westerner knew, Roman or German or Way-man.
The secret of Greek fire.

Chapter Two
Halim, amir of the fleet of the Fortunate of God, bin-Tulun, Caliph of Egypt, newly independent of the feeble Caliphate of Baghdad, felt no unease as his galley led its hundred fellows to sea in the darkest hour before dawn. In moments, when a keen eyesight could see sufficiently to distinguish a white thread from a black one, his muezzin would call the faithful to prayer with the traditional cry, the shahada:
God is most great!
I testify that there is no God but Allah.
I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.
Arid so on, in the invocation that Halim had heard and repeated and obeyed forty thousand times since he reached the estate of a man and a warrior. He and his men would stretch out their mats on the rolling decks and go through their rakat, the prescribed ritual of prayer. But the men at the oars would not, would carry on sweeping his fleet into battle. For they were Christians, the slaves of many a lost campaign. Halim had no doubt of the outcome of this one. His soldiers were fed and rested, his slaves watered and refreshed. By the end of the summer the disorganized resistance of the Rumi would have come to an end, as always. And this time the whole island of Sicily would be brought once more under the rule of his master, and beyond his master the rule of the Dar al-Islam, the House of Submission to the Will of God.
Halim heard the call of the lookout simultaneously with the start of the ritual prayer, the salat. "Ships to seaward of us! Ships with the light behind them!"
It angered him, but it did not surprise him or cause him uneasiness. Over the years the Christians, those who added gods to God, had learned the rituals of their enemies, and sought from time to time to make use of them. They were mistaken in thinking that an advantage. In combat for the Faith, to abstain from prayer was permissible, even meritorious. It could be made up later. If the Rumi were trying to take him by surprise, they only brought their own end so much the closer.
Halim called to his steersman to swing the ship towards the dawning light, heard the master of the slaves shout orders to the port oars to cease rowing, then to accelerate to ramming speed. Halim's vessel was one of the ancient pattern that had ruled the Mediterranean Sea, the Italian Sea as the foolish Rumi called it, since the days of the Greek philosophers before the son of the Lady Miriam came to trouble the world. Long, thin, with little freeboard, it was heavily reinforced forward to take an iron-shod ram, with catwalks above the oarsmen's benches for the fighting men to line either side.
Halim did not rely on his ram alone. His master, bin-Tulun, was no Arab by blood, but a Turk from the central steppe lands of Asia. He had supplied a dozen of his countrymen to each ship. As they lined the sides they began to string their bows: the composition bows of Central Asia, wood at the center, sinew on the outside, the side to which the bow bent before it was strung, hard horn on the inside, all glued and assembled with fanatic care. Again and again Halim had seen the Rumi shot down before ever they came to a handstroke, their own weak wooden bows outranged by a hundred yards, not able to pierce even good stout leather.
As the light grew across the water Halim realized that the ships now closing on him at ramming speed like his own were not the kind he expected. Their prows were painted red, were higher out of the water than any he had seen before, and from the warships' hulls he could see sprouting not the crucifixes of the Rumi, but gilded pictures, icons.
Not the fleet of the Sicilians then, or their holy father in Rome, but the Red Fleet of the Byzantines, of which Halim had only heard. He felt something at his heartЧnot fear, for that was impossible to the true believer, nor even surprise, but intellectual worry: how could the Byzantine fleet be here, five hundred miles from its bases, more days than it could row without exhaustion? Concern, as well, that this news and what it meant should be passed to his master.
But passed it would be. Halim signaled to his steersman not to meet the charging enemy bow to bow, but to swerve aside, trusting to greater handiness, to shave away one row of oars as they passed, and pour in a deadly volley from his bowmen, each of them able to shoot a shaft a second and never miss. He ran forward himself along the starboard catwalk, drawing his saber, not with the intention of striking a blow but to encourage his men.
There would be a moment of danger here. For as he turned aside, the Greek, if he were fast enough, could accelerate and strike bow to flank, driving through below the waterline, and reversing oars instantly to shake the smaller craft off and leave her crew struggling in the water, her chained slaves drowning desperate and trapped.
Yet the slaves knew that too. As the ship swung barely fifty yards from the white water of her enemy's prow, the starboard side braked with their oars as one man, the port side slaves swung with all the strength in their bodies. Then a concerted momentary glance from both sides at each other to pick up the time, and the ship leapt forward as if it were the first stroke that any man had made that day. The bowmen bent their bows and picked their targets among the faces crowding the rail.
There was something there in the middle of the boat. Halim could not see clearly what it was, but he could see some metal contrivance, like a copper dome, lit brilliantly not only by the rising sun but by some flare or flame beneath it. Across the water, over the hiss of the oars and the blare of trumpets, came a roaring noise like that of some great beast, cut by a high and eldritch whistle. He could see two men pumping desperately at a handle, two more leveling a nozzle over the side.
Greek ships and the Greek fire. Halim had heard of this weapon, but never seen it. Few men who saw it lived to say how it should be countered. Yet he had heard one thing, which was that if its crew could be killed or distracted while they prepared its action, then it became as dangerous to its own side as to the enemy.
Halim began to shout orders to the Turks in his own craft, wishing vainly as he did so that he could shout the same warning to the hundred ships streaming in his wake, to attack, he could now see, no more than a score of the Byzantines.
As the breath filled his lungs, and the first arrows began to fly, the whistle in Halim's ears rose to a shriek, a barked command came from the vessel lunging towards him. Halim saw the nozzle swing to face him, caught a strange reek in the air, saw a glow at the mouth of the nozzle. Then the air was full of fire, searing out his eyeballs, crisping his skin so that pain struck him like a club from all directions at once. Halim breathed in death as he tried to scream, his lungs filling instantly with flame. As he fell back into the blaze that was his flagship he heard the simultaneous agony of a hundred slaves, and took it with the last flick of consciousness as the tribute for the entry of a warrior into Paradise.
The Tulunid scout boats, creeping cautiously into the water where their fleet had been barely three days before, found nothing to explain its disappearance. Except charred timbers floating, the headless corpse of a circumcised believer who had survived the burning only to meet death for refusing baptism. And still chained to the timber he had pulled free from his sunken ship in a frenzy of fear, a slave half mad with thirst. The story he croaked out sent the scout boats racing without further delay for the Egyptian shore.
News of the disaster did not outsail the fleet that caused it. A bare fortnight later, Ma'mun bin-Khaldun, commander of the faithful on the new-conquered island of Mallorca, could only watch grimly from the shore as the Byzantine fleet brushed aside the attempts at interception by his own always-manned inshore squadron, and then cruised slowly along the ranks of his massed invasion fleet, moored a hundred feet offshore, pouring out their Iblis-flame. His army had debarked months before, to set about the conquest of the island, leaving their ships with no more than an anchor-watch and a guard against surprise by the natives. As the Greeks came into sight, his few boat-keepers had quickly abandoned their charges, pulling furiously for the shore in dinghies. He would lose few men, other than the ones he would execute for fleeing without orders. Nevertheless the ships were a major loss.
Yet Ma'mun felt no great concern. Behind him he had a large and fertile island, its native inhabitants by now thoroughly tamed. He had immense stores of grain, olives, wine and beef, and could if need be support himself and his army indefinitely on the products of Mallorca itself. He had something more important than that as well, the breath of life itself to any Arab: he had water. And while the Byzantines had fire at sea, they would soon need to come to land, for water. No fleet of galleys could last long without it. They must already be at the limit of their endurance, if they had made the long passage from their bases on the islands of the Greeks.
Though there was something wrong there, Ma'mun reflected silently. If the Byzantines had indeed made the long passage down the Mediterranean, they would not be at the limit of their endurance, they would have passed it days ago. Therefore, they had not. They had touched land somewhere much closer. On his information, that was impossible. Therefore, his information was wrong. That was the dangerous element in this situation, Ma'mun concluded. Where could the Greeks have watered? In Sicily? By his understanding, Sicily was closely invested by the forces of the Tulunids, the Caliph of Egypt. Ma'mun himself had nothing but contempt for Tulun and his followers, mere Turks, barbarians from nowhere, followers in any caseЧtill they rebelledЧof the treacherous successors of Abdullah. He himself was an Umayyad and a member of the tribe of Quraysh, related by blood to the Caliph of Cordova, both of them descendants of that Abd er-Rahman who had fled the massacre in Persia when Umayyad power was broken. Nevertheless, while the Egyptians had no more love for him than he for them, he was surprised that some information or other had not reached him if Sicily had been retaken: it was not like the pale followers of Yeshua whom they mistakenly called the Christ to act so swiftly.
He would have to gain further information. Yet whatever the true state of affairs, there could be no doubt that those boats out there in the calm bay of Palma would soon be trying to find some unguarded spring or other. No doubt they hoped that he, Ma'mun, would be unable to guard every foot of shore on this rugged island. Now it would be their turn to be mistaken.
As he turned dismissively from the last moments of the destruction of his fleet, he became aware of some disturbance on the outer fringes of his guard. A young man was struggling in the grip of two warriors, calling out angrily. Angrily, not fearfully. Ma'mun signed to his guard-captain to let the young man through. If he had a word to say, let him say it. If he wasted the time of the commander of the faithful, he could go to the impaling-post as a warning to others.
The young man fretfully pulling his clothes back into place had the face of a Qurayshi too, Ma'mun noticed. Most of his army now were the descendants of Berbers, converted Spaniards, even Goths. Ma'mun had been obliged to prohibit taunts of pork-eating, so sensitive were the sons of former Christians in his ranks. But this young man had no touch of the tow-brush about him, as lean and dark-faced as Ma'mun himself. He spoke, too, like a true Arab, without evasion or deference.
"Commander, the men on those ships are not Greeks, even if the ships throw out the Greek fire. Not all of them. Many are ferengis, Franks."
Ma'mun raised an eyebrow. "How has it been permitted to you to see this? I have not seen it, and my eyes are keen enough to pick out the Rider of the Stars." He meant the star in Orion's sword-belt which has, invisible to all but the keenest-sighted, a tiny companion sheltered by the light of its neighbor.
The young man smiled with irritating condescension. "I have that which enables me to see better even than that."
The guard-captain standing at the young man's elbow stepped forward, aware that his master was on the edge of ordering the impaling-post to be set up. "The young man here, lord, is Mu'atiyah. A pupil of bin-Firnas."
Ma'mun hesitated, pulling his beard. He himself had been named after the great Caliph of fifty years before, who had set up the great library and center of wisdom in Baghdad. He had the greatest respect for men of learning. And there was no doubt that Abu'l Qasim Abbas bin-Firnas was the glory of Cordova for his learning and his many experiments. With less impatience in his voice he said, "Show us then, the wisdom of your master."
Smiling once more, the young Mu'atiyah pulled from his sleeve an object like a stout bottle covered in leather.
"Know," he said, "that my master, being advanced in years, found a dimness coming upon his eyes, so that he could see only that which was further away than his own arm's reach. For many years he had studied the science of making glass, and the stones from which it might be made. So, by accident, one day he discovered that if one looked through stones of a certain kind and shape, that which was too close for his eyes became as it were far away, so that he might read it. And, not by accident but by design, he studied many hours till he could find a glass shape that would do likewise for him, and restore to him the liberty of his books."
"But that is to make the close far away," replied Ma'mun. "Here we have need of the opposite."
Again the young man smiled, again provoking Ma'mun with his display of confidence. "That is what I, Mu'atiyah, have discovered. That if one takes not one but two glasses, and looks first through one and then through the other, the far away comes close."
Thoughtfully, Ma'mun reached over and took the leather object from the young man's hand, disregarding a look of alarm and a sudden babble of explanation. He put it to his eye, looked a moment, lowered it.
"I see only the tiniest of images."
"Not like that, lord, mighty one." The young man was at least showing agitation for the first time. It was often so with the learned, Ma'mun conceded grimly. What upset them the most was not the threat of death but the fear that they would not be able to display their abilities. He allowed the young man to take the object from his hand, reverse it so that he looked through what appeared to be the neck.
"Yes, lord. On the deck of the lead ship I see a Greek, with a curled beard, standing by an image of the holy." Ma'mun's face twisted in disgust, and he spat ritually to avert the contamination created by any image of the divine. "But by him there is a fair-haired Frank, all in metal armor. They are arguing, pointing in different directions."
"What are they saying?"
"My art deals with sight, not sound."
"Very well." Ma'mun signed to the guard-captain. "Take the young man from his place in the ranks, keep him with yourself. If I have need of his art I will send for him. If I do not, the armies of Spain have more need of wise men than of brave ones. We must keep him safe. And, Mu'atiyah, if you tell me where the Greek amiral means to land for water before I can see myself, I will fill your mouth with gold. If you tell me wrong I will melt it first."