The Crystal Empire

  This time, thanks to their man in the capital, her people would be upon the peaks to meet them, while others of her kind, far below, filled the front of the column with stolen rockets, its rear with sliding rocks started into motion by explosives already planted—and its middle with blazing death.

  This winter, their Enemy would starve.

  There was a shout. Someone heard a thud-thud-thud of an Enemy warship as it clawed itself peakward. She huddled between two rocks, waiting.

  The noise grew louder.

  Of a sudden, fluttering aircraft noise was replaced by an explosion as a helicopter fired rockets into their position, scattering flaming death. Had their man betrayed them, or was he himself betrayed? Screams, hurried footfalls, inevitable confusion. The Enemy was among them, wearing masks, spraying bullets. She turned, saw an old friend fall, another neighbor writhing upon the ground, his belly torn open. Not a whimper did he utter. He had been a weaver of carpets.

  A bullet spanged off rock beside her.

  Then she was up, returning shot for shot in measured cadence, using her remaining ammunition. An Enemy soldier, said to be of the best his country had to offer, fell, spilling his guts upon the same ground where partisan blood was running like a mountain freshet.

  Another fell, and another.

  Out of ammunition, she seized up one of the new weapons. With no place to hide, it was a matter of fight or die. Conscripts seemed to prefer the latter. Their mountaintop battlefield grew emptier while a handful of her neighbors still stood to hold it. The helicopter, unable to hover long at this altitude, had departed, stranding its former passengers, sentencing them to death.

  It would be back. By then she, with her people, would be gone.

  At last their final Enemy—at least in this place, at this time—was dead.

  With others, she began gathering up weapons of the Enemy. These new ones were lighter. She could carry four where she had managed three before. Down she climbed with her remaining comrades, from flat-topped peaks into a steep, brush-choked ravine which spilled itself into a barren, boulder-tumbled valley where they would, for a time, be safe. Dried branches crackled, snatching at her head-scarf.

  Safe.

  Again a thud-thud-thud, this time overhead.

  She screamed, threw up her arms in futile reflex as slow-rolling flying-machine wheels passed within touching distance. Tossing all but two captured weapons aside, she held their triggers back until they emptied themselves into its belly.

  It did not notice.

  She heard a plopping, hissing noise. A yellow fog, fanned by backwash of the departing helicopter, spread among them. She tried to run but found that her full skirt had become entangled in a sharp-thorned shrub. Too late, she knew that village tales she had heard were true.

  Deadly vapor reached her. She felt it burn her eyes, the insides of her mouth and nostrils. Blisters formed upon the backs of her hands. As blackness descended about her, she heard a comrade call to her, “Ayesha! Ayesha!”

  2

  As usual, she woke up screaming in the palace of her father. “Ayesha! Ayesha!” a voice from her dreams continued. “Manlayagh, all is well, my child, be hush!”

  The voice was softer now, empty of the despairing panic which her dream had given it. It was still a voice of someone she loved well.

  “David?”

  Her own voice was very different, a little one, that of a ten-year-old child, small for her age.

  “Nanam, Princess, it is I. Sit up a moment. See a firm familiar world about you. You have had another of your dreams.”

  Strong, articulate hands lifted her, propped her up with plump, colorful silken pillows. These same hands rearranged her golden brocade coverlet across her, brushing away sheer lavender bedcurtains in which she had become entangled. Through the pointed arch of a nearby window she heard nightwatchmen calling.

  Other hands turned a gilded valve inset beside a door, bringing gaslights up until Ayesha could see a concerned look becloud dark eyes, behind thick lenses, in a thin, dark-bearded face she knew belonged to her favorite tutor, David Shulieman, rabbi, scholar, counselor to her father. Behind him, framed in the doorway like a formal portrait-of-state, stood Marya, one her less favorite nurses.

  Rabbi David should not have been here, in family quarters, at this hour. Such was unseemly. Some recent wives of her father were quite orthodox and old-fashioned, yearning for the ancient niceties of purdah. Either there had been some trouble—requiring his presence and advice—or there would be.

  The little girl, in fact a Princess, firstborn of Shaatirah, retired consort to Abu Bakr Mohammed VII, Sword of God, Keeper of the Faith, His Pan-Islamic Holiness, Caliph-in-Rome, sat up to accept the glass of water David offered her.

  XI: Rumors of War

  “Gross rivalry diverts you, even till you visit the tombs.”—The Koran, Sura CII

  “Sapaagh chalhghayr, good morning, Da—Your Holiness!”

  “Sapaagh chalhghayr, Ayesha. Is it The Day, then?”

  Ayesha closed her book over a finger, shaded her eyes with a small hand. Sitting under a bright sky, upon a stone balustrade overlooking the Tiber and six hills of the ancient capital, she smiled, sensing one of her father’s frequent jests in the offing.

  “‘The Day,’ Your Holiness?”

  In the gloom of a point-arched doorway leading from the palace, displacing the nurse Marya, who normally played chaperon to her small charge, a pair of grim-faced uniformed guards, shortswords and stubby pistols ready, kept watch over their Caliph, awaiting his will—or the suicidal foolishness of some assassin.

  Far at the other end of the balcony, a dozen pigeons, startled by some sudden noise or passing shadow, fluttered heavenward.

  “Nanam, the Dreaded Day upon which Our favorite daughter ceases calling Us ‘Daddy’—”

  The Caliph strode across the sun-warmed geometric flagging of the balcony. He poured himself a cup of fragrant coffee from a silver service standing upon a table beside a wall.

  “—and Our desire to walk the surface of this trouble-weary planet is at an end.”

  Aside: “Sapaagh chalhghayr, David.”

  Many floors below, in some unseen courtyard, palace guardsmen were changing shifts with what seemed to Shulieman something more than their usual military enthusiasm. There were hoarse shouts, followed by jingle-stamping from booted feet, a clack-clack-clack of inspected breech-loading chambers slamming shut, then the clattering thunder of rifle-buttstocks hitting pavement.

  The young rabbi set his own cup down, annoyed a bit by this interruption of the lessons of his only pupil. At another court he might have been an old man, dressed in formal vestments for the morning tutoring of the favorite daughter of the Caliph—and afraid to feel annoyed. In this one, brilliant, Byzantine, sometimes bizarre, renowned the world over for its respect of knowledge, exploration, and innovation—without any of the empty trappings of pedantry or piety—his thin form was adorned in sturdy blue-dyed cotton trousers, a short-tailed tunic open at the throat, untucked into his belt. His curly hair and beard were clean but, as usual, unkempt.

  His thick spectacles gave back twin miniature images of the Caliph.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  Abu Bakr Mohammed VII, Sword of God, Keeper of the Faith, was a tall man, yet he gave everyone he met the opposite impression. Twinkling of eye, jocular of temperament, rotund of form, he possessed hard, capable hands, not those of a king or philosopher but of a potter or stonemason. In fact, following a dictum of the Prophet—may his name be blessed—that a man should have a manual trade, whatever his official station in life, he dabbled, in what had once been palace dungeons, at carpentry. Family quarters were filled with the furniture he had constructed with those hands—while listening to reports from agents, advice from counselors, over the rasping buzz of saw and scraper.

  For one so great of girth, he trod very lightly upon an earth whose surface he now threatened to depart. His voice was that of a singer-of-tales,
a bit higher than most individuals remembered of him, rich and clear. Though he was nominal ruler of half the world, the broad, blue-black-bearded face he wore adorned no coin, no plaque, no statue. Yet his word went everywhere, and, being heard, was heeded.

  “Ayesha.” The Caliph addressed himself more to David Shulieman than to his daughter. He had taken a sip of dark, sweet coffee, finding, beside the pair, a place upon the broad stone railing for his even broader fundament. “Marya informs Us that you had another bad one last night. Did you not take your medicine?”

  “Why, thapnan, of course, Your—Daddy!” Ayesha shuddered in undimmed memory of her dream—likewise of a time not long ago when, for lack of extracts from a certain obscure desert plant her doctors had later compounded, nightmares had threatened to destroy her young mind altogether.

  Her voice an octave lower, she nodded, “I always do.”

  “Very well,” Abu Bakr Mohammed answered. “We shall speak again to Our physicians—provided that you add a big hug to that ‘Daddy.’”

  Gathering her yellow silks about her, the little girl jumped up giggling and complied, almost upsetting the cup her father held. For a moment or two, he shared her smile, as she shared his dark complexion and darker eyes. From the beginning, she had been an unusual child, he thought, sweet, affectionate, her waking hours marked by quiet study and reflection, rather than boisterous play as with her brother and her many sisters.

  She was pretty and would one day be beautiful.

  She was clever and would one day be brilliant.

  When she stepped away, he asked, “What is David having you study this morning?”

  “History, Daddy. The Consultation of 878 A.H.”

  The Caliph nodded, then looked gravely at Shulieman. “Incidentally, while Our female household may raise Gehenna about your presence in their quarters last night, We Ourselves thank you. Sghuhran jazeelan. We should have been there Ourselves, had not Commodore Mochamet al Rotshild, arriving late from—”

  It was at this moment Shulieman first noticed that the Caliph wore military garb, rough-tailored trousers, save in coloring not unlike those Shulieman himself wore, a long, many-pocketed tunic the color of wet sand, knee-length high-heeled cavalry boots. Pistol and dagger swung from his broad leather belt.

  “But, then,” the Caliph continued, “that is none of your concern. You know what is, which is why We overpay you so well. Get yourself more coffee, boy, relax!”

  Shulieman, incapable of obeying the latter of his sovereign’s commands, obeyed the former. Save upon occasions of marksmanship practice—the Caliph had insisted that his daughter learn to shoot both rifle and pistol—he had never seen Abu Bakr Mohammed armed before, nor shadowed quite so closely by guards. His was a happy reign, an enlightened one, if Shulieman were any judge of history—and he had best be, for this was his chief value both to the Caliph and to his daughter.

  He wondered what had happened in the night.

  To Ayesha, the Caliph said, “The Consultation, eh? Always been rather fond of that period, Ourselves. One of a very few demonstrable instances of reason defeating stupidity. Humph. Or at least fighting it to a draw. Or maybe it is just that its hero—one of them—shared Our name: Abu Bakr Mohammed III.

  “Tell Us, then, about the Consultation.”

  Having taken her place atop the rail, Ayesha sat up, back straight, hands folded in her silk-draped lap. She closed her eyes, taking her lower lip between her teeth.

  “That Abu Bakr Mohammed was a mighty Sunnite Caliph who worried a lot, for Moslems could not seem to get along with one another, even though they shared the same faith.”

  Pigeons began drifting back to the other end of the balcony. The present Caliph laughed, driving them away again.

  “Darling daughter, as you will learn all too soon, it is often far more difficult to obtain peace within your own family than with foreigners, even in these troubled times. Nevertheless, you are quite correct: in those days there were long-standing factional disputes within Islam between Sunnite and Shiite (which was in essence a simple family argument over inheritance), Fatimite and Druse.”

  He gave David Shulieman a questioning look before continuing, wondering whether the palace tutor, discontent with answers expected to be satisfying in the public schools, had taken his little girl to the next level of analytic sophistication.

  “Also he worried that one particular tenet of his denomination—that the Nazarene Carpenter was the Mahdi foretold to return at the end of time—had been discredited and would destroy his own people, even as the ancient Christians were destroyed.”

  “Nanam, Daddy, that is just what David has told me. So he wisely persuaded all the leaders of all the other sects, under the Doctrine of...of...”

  “Ijma,” the rabbi provided, sipping coffee, “‘Agreement of Islam,’ in which that which is believed by most of the Faithful is to be believed by all.”

  Ayesha nodded. “Ijma. Abu Bakr argued that neutral referees should be obtained to resolve their disputes.”

  “The Consultation with Rabbis,” Shulieman offered, “marked the beginnings of a new, vigorous, hybrid culture, more progressive and humane than any our world has ever known heretofore.”

  “Never overlooking that a little blood got spilled along the path toward establishing our Great Consensus,” added the Caliph with a wry expression. “We would not have Our daughter tutored in anything other than the plain, unvarnished truth. But it built a dually Semitic civilization which came to span our globe from Irland to the Steppes, from Skandinavia to the Cape at World’s End.”

  “And you are boss.” Ayesha beamed up at her father.

  The Caliph frowned, skeptical of any naïveté his precocious daughter displayed, wondering, with a small, anticipatory ache, whether this was a cynical ploy of a kind he had never seen her exercise before or just a subtle joke.

  He motioned David Shulieman to answer.

  Shulieman, the consternation of the Caliph visible to him, suppressed a grin. “It is a little-appreciated fact that your father is leader of half the Moslem world only through his wise and continuing moral example. He is not a king, such as ancient Christians had.”

  They all sat silent with that eloquent phrase a moment, “half the Moslem world,” Abu Bakr Mohammed thinking about the other half, of the ironic term “consensus,” and of young men dying at this moment in faraway places at his express command.

  Rabbi David Shulieman thought about the historic place of his own people in the scheme of things.

  “Or your people,” Ayesha thought to say at last.

  “What?” Shulieman laughed. He knew more about the unholy talents which held this little girl in their clutches than anyone. Still, she managed to startle even him with embarrassing frequency. “Yes, well, I suspect they should best have listened to their prophet Samuel, who tried very hard to warn them about kings.”

  Little Ayesha, slyly or not, was far from finished asking unexpected, difficult questions of her elders. “But limaadaa, why only half, Daddy? I thought that—”

  “Once upon a time,” the Caliph answered, taking fond revenge by talking down to her, “far away eastward, all of Great Asia was ruled by a wily Mongol fellow by the name of Kublai Khan. Grandson of the mightiest of conquerors, Genghis, he possessed the mind of a philosopher, the heart of a desert chieftain. His passing might be regretted even by a civilized folk such as ourselves. The world of today contains no remnant of his once-vast empire, which must have been swept away in the same disaster which removed the ancient Christians from Europe.”

  The rabbi added, “Just as Sunnites came to dominate Europe, so Afghan inheritors of Zahirud-din Mohammed Babar, claiming descent from mighty Tamerlane, launched a dynasty which soon—in Mongol absence—dominated the largest continent of the earth.”

  Abu Bakr Mohammed nodded. “His people, calling themselves Mughals, do not recognize unitarian reforms wrought by us Moslems here in Europe with Judaic advice. Perhaps they wish to re-create the
splendor of ancient Khans. Perhaps—”

  Far off, near an unseen ocean horizon, came a rolling boom which was not that of thunder, for the sky remained bright. The Caliph, knowing what it was, sighed.

  “Well, laa thaghthaam, never mind. We do not believe they understand it any longer, themselves. When God’s proper time arrives, they always say to themselves, generation after generation, this heresy—we, child—will be wiped out.”

  He fell silent.

  Shulieman continued. “Until this moment, however, ruling a myriad intransigent people of Asia has been sufficient to keep Mughal overlords occupied for centuries. They have a saying: Time enough for housecleaning later.’”

  He looked up at his sovereign.

  “If I understand your father aright, that dreaded time has at long last arrived.”

  “Nanam, yes, Rabbi, that is what We came to tell Ayesha. And you. We received word from Our Admiralty yesternight that Mughal forces have fallen upon our colonies in the Island Continent, destroying them. They pressed the survivors into slavery. We have just dispatched our mighty Pan-Semitic Fleet. Those were their guns we heard just now, performing departure drills. We are to have war, perhaps the greatest and the cruelest war our world has ever witnessed.”

  Far away, the thin voice of a muezzin rose above the lower rumble of the city.

  “And may God,” said the Caliph, “have mercy upon all the Faithful.”

  XII: Mochamet al Rotshild

  “Were it a gain near at hand, and an easy journey, they would have followed thee; but the distance was too far for them. Still they swear by God, “Had we been able, we would have gone out with you”...and God knows that they are truly liars.”—The Koran, Sura IX

  A man with a gun in his hand sat near the stairs, as far away from the bar as possible.

  Mochamet al Rotshild tightened his grip upon the small two-barreled breech-loader he always carried in his pocket, grateful for the darkness of this damp and dirty place. One could not see the vermin certain to be crawling underneath the tables. He sat, waiting, listening to the music, watching women dance, pretending to drink his drink. The music was raucous, off pitch. The women (he was inclined to shout out “Put it back on!”) were almost as old as he was. When he left this place—if he were allowed to leave alive—he intended donating his drink to those vermin he was glad he could not see.