King and Emperor by Harry Harrison. Chapter 27, 28, 29, 30

“Nevertheless it shall be done,” said Solomon. “The One King will take many of them, to spread them round the Christian islands on which he means to cruise—his men are pirates by trade, I fear, and anxious to earn their living now the Christian army has withdrawn.”

“And the rest?”

“Those fall to me. To give where I think they will do most good.” Or most harm, he did not say. For these are books, but they are also anti-books, books to turn People of the Book from their Bible, which is their word for ‘book.’ I do not think I had better tell Moishe the learned that. It is a use of learning he will not learn to accept.

The One King, at sea already and heading for the island of Mallorca, his entire fleet spread out around him in cruising formation, was watching the kite-men struggle with the immensely unwieldy contraption he had had designed. Tolman stood to one side with an expression of deep disapproval on his face.

“Tell me again,” said Shef to the child, “what are the things to remember.”

“To begin with, keep the open end, the larger open end, pointed into the wind. Feel the wind in your eyes. If it shifts, you must shift with it.” The boy took the king’s hands with an air of authority. “If the wind is above you, roll the hands this way. If it is below, that way. The tail-flap moves like a rudder, that you will understand. The first thing is, if you think anything is going wrong, it is already too late. You have to move all the time, never stay still. Like a bird. It takes time to learn,” the boy added condescendingly. “I crashed into the sea time after time.”

Cwicca, listening, reflected to himself that a sixty-pound child crashed much lighter than a hundred-and-ninety-pound warrior. Long experience had taught him that the One King paid no attention to probabilities. At least he was a strong swimmer. Cwicca himself had sharpened the One King’s belt-knife to a more than razor edge, in case he needed to cut himself free in the water. Brand had selected a dozen of the strongest swimmers in the fleet, himself included, and put them in pairs round the rescue boats.

The experiment still seemed impossible. Guided by his abacus, Shef had ordered a new kite with four times the surface area of Tolman’s. So enormous was it that it overhung the deck of the Fafnisbane on all sides and over the stern as well. A first difficulty had been that the weight of the One King himself would snap the fragile struts suspended between the gunwales. Shef had ordered up trestles for him to lie on till, he hoped, the wind should take him.

At least there was plenty of wind. All the ships in the fleet, more than sixty of them now, were tearing along as fast as a man could run, or a horse canter, the wind on their port beam. The familiar cloudless blue of the sky was as cloudless as ever, but with a darker tinge. Ordlaf predicted a storm, though all agreed that a storm in this millpond of a sea could hardly be compared with a North Sea widow-maker. The One King had figured the strength of the wind into his calculations as well.

“Ready,” he said. He climbed up the short step-ladder—a proper ladder this, not a wretched graduale or kraki—slid feet-first into the holding leather sling. Wood creaked and flexed. Handlers looked anxiously at the stitching, linesmen tested their holds. The kite, which had strained at its ropes, took on an ominous immobility, lay there as if made of lead.

Shef gripped the controls, turned them this way and that. He too felt the kite’s lack of motion, wondered for a moment what would happen. Would he just lie there like bacon on a slab? Would they cast him over the side and see him simply go down like the fool who had leapt from the tower of the Wisdom-House in his Völund-suit months before?

Shef looked round at the anxious faces surrounding him. One thing he could be sure of. Success or failure, the idea that men could fly had at least been firmly planted. Round half of the necks of the kite-crews, half at least, dangled the new wing-pendants of Völund, or Wayland as the English called him. Men who were proud to call themselves fliers. They would not forget. He had created a new trade. More than one new trade.

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