“I have heard,” noted bin-Firnas, “that this business of the relic contains some terrible blow to the Christian faith. There is rumor of it among the traders from the north in the souk.”
Ishaq shrugged indifferently. “Such a faith hardly needs a blow. But let us agree that our faith shall be confirmed by reason. And that a Council of the Wise may be the way to do it.”
“We will speak to our friends in the morning,” agreed bin-Maymun. “Let Ghaniya the Berber follow Mu’atiyah the fool, and the matter can be arranged.”
The Way-fleet lay at anchor in the bay of Palma off the island of Mallorca, exactly where the Arab fleet had lain earlier the same year, before the Greek fire came to destroy it. Fishermen had already given a graphic account of what had happened then, and Shef had been concerned enough to order a standing kite to be raised, with Tolman and three or four of the others taking turns to spend an hour in the sky, not flying free—no-one had attempted that since the deaths of Ubba and Helmi—but strung out peacefully on their lines in the moderate breeze.
Shortly after Shef had tried his own flights, the Mediterranean had indeed proved that it could generate a storm, and the back-eddies of it were still with them. It had been a blessing in disguise, however, in that it had covered the approach of the Wayman fleet till they were almost at anchor. The raiding parties swarming eagerly ashore, led by Guthmund and full of experienced pirates, had immediately seized the Christian cathedral and found in it an accumulation of plunder. It had been first stored there by the Christian lords of the island, continued during the brief Islamic conquest, and stepped up to a higher power, it seemed, by the following conquest by the Emperor and his Greek allies, working in tandem. The troops left behind by the Emperor had fled into the interior. The Waymen, operating under strict orders of gentle conduct and supervised closely by their priests, reported that there was little chance of them acquiring allies from the natives, nominally Christian though they were. Solomon reported further that the booklets he carried in Occitan and in Latin were accepted readily, with great curiosity, by the Christian priests: the natives of the island, trapped in their own dialect of Mallorquin, had never seen a book that they could begin to read in their own language before, and the Occitan was close enough for them at least to try to make it out.
Solomon had not remained at hand, though, to watch the trials that Shef was now preparing. Thorvin too, intensely disapproving, had disappeared on his own errands, as had Hund and Hagbarth. For interpreting, Shef was now dependent on Skaldfinn. Farman too, the visionary priest, was prepared to observe.
The Greek fire apparatus had been unshipped bodily from the half-sunk galley, with immense care not to crack or bend any of its pipes, and had been carried carefully stowed in the hold of the Fafnisbane, a man watching it on Ordlaf’s orders day and night to warn of any leak or scrap of fire. When it came to a trial, though, Ordlaf had mutinied. Shef had in the end taken a small Mallorcan fishing boat, stowed the apparatus in it, and taken it a decent quarter-mile out to sea. For hours he and Steffi had brooded over it, examining every part of it, theorizing about their apparent functions, reminding each other of what they knew for certain. They were now at least of one mind.
The big tank found separate from the rest was a fuel reserve, they agreed. Its connecting hose clearly matched the smaller copper dome: but the only function of that connection was to transfer fuel once the operating tank was emptied. In operation the pipe at the upper end of the dome was connected not to the reserve tank but to the apparatus actually found in place. Careful removal of this had persuaded them that it was a sort of bellows: a piston forced down a cylinder which, however, did nothing but force air into the operating tank. “It seems,” muttered Steffi, “that air has weight.” Remembering the strength of the wind under his kite, Shef nodded. The thought was ridiculous, for how could anyone weigh air? But the fact that one could not weigh it clearly did not mean that it had no weight—a thought for the future.