"03 - King and Emperor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)
As he stepped forward out of the shadow to greet his guests, Shef creased his face into a welcoming smile. Even to those he greeted, it looked like a rictus of pain. Alfred controlled himself, managed not to shoot a glance at his wife. He had known for years that his co-king was not the boy-lover many whispered, was instead in love with his own wife. Sometimes he wished it was in him to hand her over, or to share her. But while it might be in him, it was not in her. For some reason, she seemed to hate her friend of childhood more deeply each passing year. Her resentment grew with his success: as she thought, perhaps, of what might have been.
"What have you to show us today?" asked Alfred with false-ringing good cheer.
Shef's face brightened, as it always did when he had some new thing to explain. "It is a horse-wain. But one to carry people."
"Wains have always carried people."
"Three miles to market and back. Bump into a pothole, crawl out of it. Going no faster than a walk, or the passengers would be hurled out. Even on the good stone roads we have had built, you and I"Чthe last three words were mere flattery, as everyone knewЧ"it would be torment to travel in it if the horses began to run.
"But not with this. See." Shef patted a stout post that led up from a frame above the axles. "This post holds a metal spring." He pointed to it.
"Like the steel you use for your crossbows."
"Yes. Over the spring we fit straps of the stoutest leather. And from the straps we hangЧthis." Shef patted the wickerwork body of the coach, setting it swaying gently. "Climb in."
Gingerly Alfred stepped up, sat on one of the two benches in the coach body, noting the way it bounced and swung like a hammock.
"Lady." Shef stood back a careful two paces to avoid any brush of hand or clothing, gestured Godive in after her husband. She climbed in, moved little Edward from the place he had seized by his father, and settled herself firmly next to Alfred. Shef climbed in too, picked up the wailing child, and sat him next to himself. He waved to the driver in front of them, who cracked his whip and set off with a dramatic jerk.
As the coach dashed at unheard-of speed down the road behind its four horses, Alfred leapt in his seat with surprise. From behind the coach there came a dismal screech, which turned into a violent noise like pigs being killed. A gap-toothed face rose grinning into view, face purple with the exertion of blowing on a bagpipe.
"My thane Cwicca. If they hear the bagpipe people know to clear the road."
And indeed the coach, swaying from side to side on its springs, was already racing for the outskirts of Stamford. Alfred realized that the road was lined with cheering churls and their wives, all caught up in the intoxication of speed. Behind them the royal escorts were stretching out their horses into a gallop, whooping like jaybirds with excitement. Godive clutched her baby daughter to her and looked anxiously at Edward, prevented from climbing out by King Shef's iron grip on his breeches.
Above the roar of the road Alfred yelled, "Is this the most useful new thing the Wisdom-House has brought you?"
"No," Shef shouted back. "There are many. Here is one coming up, I'll show you. Stop, Osmod," he bellowed to the driver, "stop for Christ's sake, I mean Thor's sake, stop, can't you, what's the matter?"
Another grinning face peered back. "Sorry, lord, the horses get excited, like, with the speed."
Alfred looked down doubtfully. The court of Stamford was a strange place. Men called Alfred esteadig, "the Gracious," for his kindness and his good humor. Just the same, his thanes and aldermen addressed him with something like respect. Even churls often spoke to his co-king as if they were both schoolboys engaged in stealing apples: and both Cwicca and Osmod, thanes though they might be called, still had the marks of slave-birth on their faces and bodies. Not long ago their only possible contact with a king would have been facing his doom on an execution-ground. It was true that Cwicca and Osmod were both survivors of the One King's strange journey to the North, and so allowed many liberties. Even so...
The One King had already sprung from the coach, leaving its door swinging open, and was setting off from the road to a group of churls knee-deep in mud not far away. They broke off from what they were doing, knuckled foreheads in respect. And yet they were grinning too.
"See what they're up to? What's the hardest work in clearing a new field? Not cutting the trees down. Any fool can do that with a broad-axe. No, getting the stumps out. They used to cut them off low down and then try and burn them out. Long job, and oak, or ash, or elm, they'll all grow back from almost anything."
"But what we have here"ЧShef seized a long staff standing up from a complex contrivance of iron wheels and pulley-blocksЧ"is ropes rigged to the stoutest stump in the field. Fit the other ends round a weaker stump. Throw your weight on it"ЧShef suited his actions to the words, ratcheted the staff back, threw his weight forward again, and again. Twenty yards away, with cracking noises, a stump began to heave out of the earth. A churl sprang forward, added his weight to the king's. With heave after heave, the stump tore free, to loud cheering from churls and the watching escort.
The king wiped his muddy hands on the legs of his gray breeches, waved to the churls to drag the stump free and attach the ropes to the next victim.
"England is tree country. I am turning it into grain country. This pulley machine was made in the Wisdom-House by priests of NjЎrthЧthey are seamen, they know all about pulleysЧand some of my catapulteers. They are used to cogwheels. My steelmaster, Udd, is in charge of making the wheels. They have to be small, but strong."
"And do you let anyone have the machine?"
Shef's turn to grin. "If they left it to me, maybe. But they don't. My fee-master in the House of Wisdom, Father Boniface, he rents them out to those with land to clear. They pay a fee for the machine. But cleared land is free for the clearers to keep. Not for ever. For three lives. Then the land reverts to the crown. I get rich from the rents of the machines. My successors"ЧShef nodded at baby Edward. "They get rich when the land comes back to them."
The horse-wain slowed dramatically as Osmod the driver turned it off the Great North Road with its stone-and-gravel surface, and took it down one of the old mud tracks. Shef seized the opportunity of relative quiet to speak again of the successes of the House of Wisdom.
"We're off to see a big thing," he went on, leaning forward in his seat towards Alfred, "but there have been some small ones that have made as much of a difference. I didn't show you how this is hitched up at the front, for instance. But when we learned from Brand and his men how to harness a horse so it could pull, we found after a while that the horse-pull can be too strong. When you turn them, they often break their traces, as the pull comes through one side or the other, not through both. Well, we kept on using thicker leather. But then some farm-churl realizedЧI gave him his own farm and full livestock for itЧthat you don't need to harness the horses to the cart. You harness them to two ends of a stout bar instead, and you harness the bar, in the middle, to the cart. That way the pull evens out.
"And that doesn't just save on leather! No. I did not realize straight away. But often the real change a machine brings is not the first good it does, but the second. The whipple-tree, we call it, means men can plow shorter lines, smaller fields, because they can turn their teams more easily. And that means that even poor men, with no more than an acre or two, can plow their own fields instead of depending on their lords."
"And they thank the king for it," Alfred replied thoughtfully. "They become your men, not their landlords'. It is another thing, like your machine-fees, that makes you strong."
Godive shifted in her seat. "That's why he did it. He does nothing without a reason. I learned that years ago."
Shef fell silent, stared at his muddied fingers. After a few moments Alfred broke the silence. "This new thing you are taking us to see. Tell us about it."
Shef replied in a flatter, duller tone. "Well. Round here, as you know, the land turns quickly to marsh. Some of it has always been marsh. Naturally, people try to drain it. But if you dig a channel you can't always tell which way the water will run, not down here, or if the water will even go into the channel.
"But we knew one thing." Slowly the animation was coming back into his voice. "Anyone who brews a lot of beer knows that to get it out you can either tap the barrel low downЧand then you have to plug it carefully or it'll all goЧor else you can suck some up through a tube and then put the end of the tube in your jug or bucket. The beer keeps on running, even though you aren't sucking any more."
"I never knew that. How?"
Shef shrugged. "No-one knows. Not yet. But once we knew that we knew what we needed. Big tubes, bigger than any man could get his mouth round. And something to suck the water through. Like a bellows in reverse. Then we could make the water run from a fen into a channel, even a channel some distance away."
The wain and its escort pulled up by the mill they had been making for, and Shef jumped out, leaving the door swinging wide once more. Round the mill ran a confusion of muddy ditches, with here and there a tube of tarred canvas leading, seemingly, simply from one drain to another.
"Again, you see, new land." Shef lowered his voice so only his royal guests could hear, not the escort. "I don't know how much. Sometimes I think there might be the worth of half a dozen shires lying waiting to be drained. And this land I do not give away. I make the mills, I pay the millers. What is gained remains royal land, to be leased out for the royal revenues."
"To your own profit again," cut in Godive, her voice like a whip. Alfred saw his scarred co-king flinch again. "Tell me, out of all this, what have you done for women?"
Shef hesitated, began to say something, checked himself. He was unsure what to name first. The mills themselves, which had released tens of thousands of female slaves from the everlasting chore of grinding grain with a hand-quern? The experiments being conducted in the Wisdom-House to find a better way to spin thread than the distaff, which almost every woman in the country still carried with her wherever she went, winding incessantly? No, Shef decided, the vital thing for women had been the soap-works he had set up, where they made a harsh and gritty soap out of ashes and animal fat: no new thing in itself, but one which, Hund the leech insisted, had halved the number of women dying of child-bed feverЧonce the king had issued an order that all midwives must take the soap and always wash their hands.
He took too long to decide. "I thought so," said Godive and whirled away, dragging her children with her. "Everything is for men. And everything for money."
She did not trouble to lower her voice. As she swept towards the wain, the two kings, Cwicca and Osmod, the miller and his wife, the two bands of royal escorts, all stared after her. Then all except Shef turned their eyes back to him.
He dropped his gaze. "It's not like that," he muttered, the same anger growing inside him that he had felt when the man crashed from the tower and they had asked him to pay for failure nonetheless. "You can't do everything. You have to do what you know how to, first, and then see where that leads you. Women get their share of what we have done. More land, more food, more wool."
"Aye," agreed Cwicca. "A few years ago, every winter you saw little bairns in rags and barefoot every winter, crying for cold and hunger. Now they've coats at least, and hot food inside them. Because the king protects them."
"That's right," said Shef, looking up, his face suddenly fierce. "Because all this"Чhis arms waved at the mill, the fields, the drainage channels, the waiting wainЧ"all this depends on one thing. And that is force. A few years ago, if any king, if good King Edmund or King Ella had done any wise thing, as soon as he had enough silver to use, the Vikings would have been on him, to take it away and turn the land to beggary again. To keep it like this we have to sink ships and break armies!"
A growl of immediate assent from his men and Alfred's, all of whom had won their way by battle alone.
"Yes," Shef went on, "all this is well enough. And I would be happy to see women take their part of it. But what I need most, what I would pay gold for, not silver, is not a new way of hitching horses, or of draining marshes, but a new way to defeat the Emperor out there. Bruno the German. For if we have forgotten him, here in the marsh, he has not forgotten us. Rig, my father"ЧShef's voice rose to a shout, and he pulled from the breast of his tunic his silver ladder-emblemЧ"send me a new thing to bring victory in battle! A new sword, a new shield! New crossbows, new catapults. There is no other wisdom we need more. If RagnarЎk is to come, let us fight it and win!"
Their king safely out of the way for a long morning, his closest advisers and friends had seized the opportunity to discuss him. They sat, the three of them, Brand, Thorvin and Hund, near the top of the great stone tower of the House of Wisdom, in Thorvin's private chamber, looking out over the busy and fertile countryside, the green fields divided by the long white strip of the Great North Road, riders and carts passing steadily along it. With them, though, and at Thorvin's insistence, sat a fourth man: Farman priest of Frey, one of the two great visionaries of the Way. An unimpressive figure, and one who had not shared the perils of the others, but deep in the secrets of the gods, or so Thorvin insisted.
Brand the giant Norwegian had looked askance at Farman for a while, but he had known the others, at least, long enough to speak frankly. "We've got to face it," he began. "If he goes, Shef I mean, then everything will go. There's people like Guthmund, owes everything to the One King, stone-cold reliable as far as he's concerned. But would Guthmund agree to co-operate with Olaf, or Gamli, or Arnodd, or any of the other kings in Denmark or Norway? He would not. His own jarls wouldn't let him if he did. As for obeying an Englishman... No, this is a one-man business. The trouble is, the man's mad."
"You've said that before," said Hund the leech reprovingly, "and been proved wrong."
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |