"03 - King and Emperor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)
"Well," he said, "they know some things, but they seem to have no great desire to learn any more. People of the Book, indeed, doing things because their master said so. You know what I think of that, Thorvin." Shef looked round at his advisers, aware that nothing he said could be understood by Suleiman or the others without further translation into Latin. "Is there any good reason why we should ally with them? It seems to me they need us more than we need them."
The demonstration had gone wrong, Ghaniya realized. He had thought little of their book. They had noticedЧor their king hadЧthat Mu'atiyah was a fool, for all the wisdom of his master. This was a moment when his mission hung in the balance. His voice hissed ominously as he whispered to Mu'atiyah and Suleiman together.
"Tell them of the glories of Cordova, you fools. Mu'atiyah, tell that king of theirs something about your master that even he will wonder at. And no tricks for children! He may be a savage, but he is not one to be deceived by toys!"
Both men hesitated. Suleiman was the quicker to respond. "You are a Christian priest?" he said to Boniface. "Yet you serve a king who is not of your faith? Tell your master, then, that so do I. Tell him that it would be wise for all those of us who serve masters like him and like my master to stand together. For whether we are all People of the Book or notЧand I do not think his book is like my Torah or your Bible or my master's KoranЧyet we are all people of the blessing. Our blessing is that we do not seek to make others share our belief by force. The Greeks burn or blind those who do not share their creed down to the last word and glossing. The Franks say to each other, 'Christians are right and pagans are wrong.' They accept no other book than their own Bible and their own reading of it. For your sake and mine, father, add your own words to what I have said, I beg you! We are the ones who will suffer first. They call me the crucifier of their Lord. What will they call you? A traitor to the Faith?"
Shef listened as Boniface, paraphrasing now rather than translating, repeated the substance of Suleiman's appeal. He noted the concern on the Jew's face. His own betrayed no response.
"Ask what the other has to say?"
Mu'atiyah had time to collect his thoughts, but they ran only to a repetition of the many virtues of his master: virtues in the Arab tradition. He had made a machine for counting out the beat of music, so that musicians might play their instruments in time. His courtyard was the glory of Cordova for the glass roof he had made over his fountain. He had found out how to make glass from ashes. His poetryЧMu'atiyah was grasping at straws by nowЧwas famous across the world.
Shef glanced round at his advisers, ready to draw the audience to a close. Ghaniya scowled furiously at the gabbling Mu'atiyah, now shaken by the lack of interest on all faces.
"Shall I sing the one-eyed king one of the poems of my master?" he suggested. "Or one of the poems about my master?"
Shef grunted as he heard the translation, rose to his feet, looked Ghaniya firmly in the eye. As he drew in his breath to terminate the hearing, Boniface broke in, his quiet voice cutting across the gabble of Arabic from the young scholar.
"Pardon, lord. He has said something interesting. He offers to sing you a poem about the time his master flew. Flew from the tallest tower in Cordova. And lived, it seems."
Shef looked at the young man with deep suspicion. "Ask him what feathers he used?"
Question and answer, and Boniface's reply. "He says no feathers. He says only a fool would think men can fly like birds. They have to fly like men."
"How then?"
"He will not say. His master orders him not to speak. He says, if you want to see, come to Cordova and look."
Hours later, after a closed meeting with his council and an extended feast for his own men and their visitors, Shef headed wearily for his bed. The feast had been a struggle. His visitors had queried every dish set before them, refused pork, ham, sausages, wine, mead, beer, cider and even the "burnt wine" that Udd had learnt to distil, sniffing it suspiciously and then rejecting it. In the end they had eaten little but bread and water. Shef feared for their health. In his world drinking plain water was a risk few cared to take. Water-drinkers died too often of the belly-ache and the running flux.
The meeting had been little better. All the way through he had been conscious of pressure, of being manipulated. What surprised him was that his advisers had been unanimous on wanting him to leave. In the past they had been anxious to hold him back from what they saw as rash expeditions. NowЧthough they had done so carefullyЧthey seemed united in wanting him away. A man more interested in politics than himself might have suspected a brewing rebellion.
First it had been Brand. "The Inner Sea," he had muttered. "It's been done before. I don't suppose you know this, but the Ragnarssons"Чhe had spat into the fire at the mention of their nameЧ"they tried it before ever you were on the scene. Fifteen years ago, maybe, when their father was still alive. Took a hundred ships down and stayed away two years. That was when there were five of them..."
"Five?" Shef had asked. He had known only four.
"Yes. Sigurth, Ivar, Halvdan, UbbiЧand their elder brother, BjЎrn. BjЎrn Ironside, they called him. I quite liked him," Brand reflected. "Not as crazy as the others. He was killed by a stray rock when they besieged Paris.
"Anyway, point is this: they went down there, came back two years later when everyone had got to thinking they were dead. Lost more than half their ships and two thirds of their men. But, Hel, did they come back rich! Start of the Ragnarssons' power, that was. They built the Braethraborg on it. Must be good pickings down there. You don't find gold anywhere else."
We don't need gold, we have silver enough, Shef had replied. But then it had been Hund, playing up the chances for new knowledge. A whole new science of the eye, he had suggested. And what of the flying man? No-one would give them any further details, but the way the story had slipped out, not intentionally, from a silly youth talking about poetry: that argued there was something in it. Something that none of them could even imagine. That was the most useful type of new knowledge. In any case, Hund had added, he had talked carefully to the Jew translator. It was clear that in the city of Cordova they had leeches who did not think twice about opening the body of their patients to cure them, something even Ingulf, Hund's master, had done only a few times, and Hund even fewer. And he had said besides, that there were men there who did not scruple to open the skull and search the brain. He would go south, Hund had declared. It was his duty to Ithun, his patron-deity, goddess of healing.
Thorvin had said little, though he too had offered to join any expedition that might sail. Who would direct the Wisdom-House for you, Shef had asked. Farman, said Thorvin without debate, a strange answer, for Farman shared none of Thorvin's interests in the crafts of the smith. His eyes had dwelt somberly on Shef all evening, as if wishing him to leave.
Shef stumbled into his room, dismissed the light-bearing attendants, stripped off his garments of state and threw them into a corner, rolled himself in his blankets, and wished for sleep. Even on the down mattress, so different from the boards and straw on which he had slept most of his life, sleep did not come easily. And it came haunted.
Shef's own maps were detailed towards the North and the West, fading rapidly into vagueness in the South and the East, where he refused to indicate what had not been confirmed by reliable sources. The map of his dream was neither Christian schematic nor local record. He knew intuitively that it was true. Too jagged, unexpected, and full of needless additions to be the work of imagination.
On the map, divisions were marked in colors. First Shef saw his own dominions, Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the islands between them, in a wash of brilliant red. Against them, other lands began to be marked out in blue. First the land of the Franks, facing Britain, then the whole interior of Europe, the German lands, then rippling down in a blue tide the boot-shape of Italy. The Empire of Charlemagne. Now owing allegiance again to the Holy Lance. Only carried in the hands of Charlemagne's true successor, though not his blood-successor. Bruno, new emperor.
Shef jerked as he heard a cold, quiet voice, too familiar to him now. "Easy," it said. "This is not a Hel-vision. No serpent, no Loki. Just look at the map. Look at the frontiers on it.
"See, you have only one land frontier with the Empire, at the base of Denmark. Fortified now by you from the Ditmarsh to the Baltic Sea, along the lines of the old Dannevirke, the Dane-work that King Guthfrith built. But Bruno has many frontiers. To the East..." and Shef saw the blue fade away to a near-colorless pallor, gently turning green. "The land of the steppe and the forest. From it any moment great armies can come. But they fade as fast as they appear. Bruno does not worry greatly about them.
"To the South-East." And suddenly Shef saw a blaze of gold sweep across from the Italian boot-top towards the depths of Asia. "The Greeks. With their great city of Byzantium, Micklegarth as Brand calls it, the Great Town. Not as rich, any more, as the lands of the Arabs. But the true heir of the Romans, and the Roman knowledge. Bruno does not fear them either, though he has plans for them. He wishes to bring them into a united Christendom, with the skill and subtlety of the Greeks and the energy and ferocity of his own Germans. Even the warriors of the steppe might quail before that. But now see the silver."
And it was there, washing across the map like a carpet unrolling, stretching over lands Shef could not imagine, far to the East of the Byzantines and deep into Africa as well. "The lands of Dar al-Islam, submission to the will of Allah," said the cold voice. "Allah the One God. No wonder that the hate is hottest between the two sides who believe alike in One God. Maybe the same god. But that neither side can agree.
"See now where lies the Dar al-Harb. The House of War." A glowing line began to thread between the silver and the blue, across the mountain-lands of northern SpainЧ"robber-dukedoms," said the voice, "but strengthened now by the Lanzenorden, the soldier-monks of Christ." A flicker across southern FranceЧ"robber-holds of the Mohammedans," said the voice, "but now under threat from the reviving Empire." And then a glow around island after island, Sicily, Malta, Sardinia, Mallorca, the remaining Balearics. "They are the key," said the voice. "They control the Inner Sea." Slowly Shef saw the silver change again and again to blue. Like pincers groping round the flank of Arab Spain.
Unite the blue and gold, Shef thought. Cut off the silver and turn it blue. There will then be a great block across the world. His own red came back into focusЧa thin line, an edge drawn around one corner of the block. His dominion ran from Scilly to North Cape. It seemed no more than a pencil line for thinness.
"Now there is the hinge," said the voice, already seeming to come from further away, as if it was withdrawing. The maps of the Christians showed Jerusalem, always, as the world-center, the pivot, the axle-tree of destiny. As Shef looked at it, one center spot seemed to glow, to stand out against the fading colors of his dream, to swell towards him. A spot at the heart of the Inner Sea, balancing north against south, east against west. But he did not know where it was. His thought reached out after his fading mentor, calling:
"Where? Where?" And the voice came back, from a chill and hostile distance.
"Rome," it called. "Go to Rome, my son. And there you will find your peace..."
Shef woke with a start and a clenching of muscles that made his bed-frame creak and brought the sleepy guard in the hallway outside to his feet. He means me to go, he thought. That was my father Rig calling.
He called me "my son." From a father like him, that bodes nothing but ill.
Chapter Five
As the fleet completed its fast current-assisted run down the estuary of the Thames, and turned south for the longer haul down-Channel and across the Bay of Biscay, Shef wondered again at his own reviving good humor. The omens were bad. He did not trust his visions. His own friends, he sensed, were conspiring against him. Yet he had felt his heart lift with the first heel of the deck beneath his feet.
It might be, he considered, the continuous changes he became aware of every time he boarded a ship. It was as if the pace of change, obvious enough on land, or at least on his land, accelerated at sea. He could not help comparing this voyage with the one he had begun eight years before, when he had sailed far to the north, in the end to defeat the Ragnarssons and lose the Holy Lance to his rival Bruno. Then the ships he had taken with him had been experimental, capable of one thing only: mounting a catapult. Everything about them had been a struggle. The most expert crews in the world could not have prevented them sagging eternally to leeward. And his crews had been experimental too. Fishermen as captains and landsmen from the levies as crew. Too clumsy and uncertain even to allow fires to be lit, no matter what precautions everyone took, so that it was cold food and small beer day after day, and only the hope of finding an anchorage at night that made it worth carrying kindling.
A different story now. Shef's was not a large fleet. After anxious calculation it had been decided to leave the bulk of the new two-master catapult-armed vessels to watch the ever-dangerous mouth of the Elbe. Everyone knew that the Empire had ships continually manned, in the hope of slipping out to break the blockade, maybe even make a beachhead on English soil and carry over the feared, drilled, irresistible soldier-monks of the LanzenordenЧa far cry, indeed, from the poorly-disciplined knights of Charles the Bald, defeated at Hastings nine years before. So thirty ships remained on their continual rotation between the Elbe station, their home base of Norwich, and their short-stay ports on the Danish peninsula. Shef had only six with him, besides his own flagship, the Fafnisbane.
Yet what ships they were. They made nothing of the southwest wind that would have blocked their prototypes, tacking steadily down-Channel without difficulty, the crews handling the double sails without fuss or confusion. There was nothing, too, of the alarming swarming motion which had so terrified Shef and his dead companion Karli when they had first ridden as passengers in a true Viking longboat. Instead of swooping up and gliding down every wave, the bigger, heavier ships seemed to crush through them, stabilized by their heavy cargoes and ballast, taking the weight of the ton-and-a-quarter catapults mounted high up without strain. They had evenЧBrand had shaken his head in a mixture of envy and sorrow when he had first seen itЧthe entirely new luxury of decking. No longship had anything above its hull except the rowers' benches and the skin awnings they sometimes slung to keep off spray. Sleeping during a sea passage was a matter of rolling yourself in a blanket and lying in the bottom boards, between the thwarts if you were fortunate. Here the greater size and depth of the bronze-bolted hulls meant that permanent wooden decks could be built, with room beneath the shelter they gave to sling hammocks for the great ones, and above all for the king. Shef had grinned like a boy at the luxury of it when his skipper, Ordlaf, had shown him the new invention. And then, climbing out again, had remarked that it would improve the ships' ability to keep the sea for longer periods: valuable for the blockade detachments.
"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 shipsЧseven catapult-craft, and five more conventional Viking-manned longships in company as scoutsЧspread 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 themЧimpossible, at seaЧwhat 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.
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