The Crystal Empire
Her father’s bearing was dignified, betraying no sign of his sense of humor. He wore another of those unadorned uniforms he had taken to wearing since war had been declared. He was sitting in his own chair, almost at attention. It was as if he were, for some as-yet-unspoken reason, hiding grief.
This frightened her very much. What had she done?
Marya curtsied. “The Princess Ayesha, Your Holiness, as you commanded.”
Abu Bakr Mohammed VII grunted, for a moment something of his true self showing through his stiff exterior.
“We did not command, girl, We requested. Even with a Caliph, there is a difference. Now We command you to be seated and be quiet. You are enjoying this too much, and We shall not forget it.”
He extended a broad hand, palm upward. “Our daughter We request to sit—Rabbi, kindly get her a chair, will you?—for We have consequential matters to discuss with her, nor do We relish watching her participate upon her feet.”
Stepping around Mochamet al Rotshild, David Shulieman brought her a straight-backed but comfortable wooden chair which her father himself had fashioned. He then returned to his original place, giving her no sign of what was about to happen.
The Caliph glanced at his senior wife, failed to suppress a sour expression, then turned back to Ayesha.
“Ayesha, you are an intelligent, farsighted individual. You have been educated all your life to anticipate what it might mean to be the Caliph’s daughter, to serve Almighty God, His Faithful, and their civilization as We serve them.”
Ayesha nodded, still not understanding. “Nanam, yes, Your Holiness, I have, indeed, been thus educated.”
“Jayyit, very well, then. There has, this past month, come to Our attention a unique opportunity for you to perform that service, an opportunity which could end this war we endure, impose a lasting peace upon the entire globe. Such is a worthy cause upon which to spend a life. Such is the cause upon which, in service of Almighty God, His Faithful, and their civilization, We now command you to spend yours.”
Afterward, she was never able to describe the feeling which started in the center of her being, spreading along her limbs into the tips of her extremities. It made her scalp prickle.
“Chanaa la chabhgham, I do not think I understand, Father. Am I to die, then?”
The look of anguish which swept across the Caliph’s face was undisguised. “Laa, daughter, no. Although you may very well risk death in performance of this service. That is sometimes the lot of a woman. You are—and We assure you We take no pleasure in decreeing that it should be so—to go away from Us, into a foreign land, there to be married to its ruler, that an alliance might be forged to overcome the Mughal. For such were you born, child, for such were you ordained.”
Ayesha wanted to ask her father, But what of my mind, can that be of no service to Almighty God, His Faithful, and their civilization, but she did not. She could not. She had known, as long as she could remember, that this might happen someday. She had not thought about it much. Ah, well, another court, another ruler, a loyal subordinate to her father. She would continue her studies, perhaps even travel back and forth, leaving Rome neither altogether nor forever.
“May I be permitted to ask, Your Holiness, to which ruler I am to be married? The Sultan of ’Inglitarrah has four wives and two male heirs, Faransaa’s ruler has taken a vow of celibacy. Hoolandaa—”
The Caliph stopped her with a hand.
“We do not know whom you are to wed, girl....”
There was a roughness in his voice which spoke of tears suppressed.
“You are to travel with Mochamet al Rotshild, here, also with your tutor, to the western coastline of the Savage Continent, there to be married to whomsoever rules there.”
A small voice shrilled within Ayesha’s mind. What am I supposed to feel at this moment? What am I supposed to feel? Her rigid posture suggested to the outer world what she did feel: nothing. Even one of her nightmares, she thought, was preferable to this numbness.
The Caliph turned his head, looking first at Mochamet al Rotshild, then at the Lady Jamela, his expression changing as he did so.
“Each of those who have labored so diligently to persuade Us of this course—shall it prove successful or otherwise—shall reap an appropriate reward. We shall begin with Marya. You, too, are to accompany Our daughter, never setting a treacherous foot in Our court again as long as you live!”
Marya gasped and closed her eyes.
“But there are others well deserving of reward, Ayesha. As the future consort of a ruler—not to mention Our favorite child—We wish you to hear it meted out.”
He turned in his chair to look upon the Lady Shaabbah, who paled under his prolonged gaze.
After a time, he spoke. “We have not forgotten, for example, Our young, pretty, faithless junior wife, who helped Lady Jamela persuade Us of your disposition. She will be retired in disgrace—unless, within a year, she can provide Us with a healthy male heir, one she can prove beyond question was sired by Us. We leave it up to her to provide a method, satisfactory to Us, of guaranteeing its pedigree.”
Shaabbah blinked, a small and timid smile flirting about the corners of her mouth. She took a breath and straightened, a certain determination visible in her bearing, Ayesha thought, a certain pride. A glance at the amused twinkle—others might have called it a savage glitter—in Mochamet al Rotshild’s eye told the Princess that he shared her observation and opinion. Cast loose from Jamela, Shaabbah would make something of herself. Shaabbah would triumph.
Ayesha wondered why she cared.
“As for her lover,” Abu Bakr Mohammed went on, “guard-lieutenant Kabeer. You, sirrah, are to be reduced in rank and sent along to the Savage Continent, to serve another mistress. But ‘mistress’ in name alone, We are afraid, as you are first to be relieved by the executioner of those portions of your nether anatomy which got you into trouble. Performed under anesthesia in the Palace infirmary, the process should be relatively painless.”
Kabeer swayed, his face gone gray.
The Caliph grinned. “Now that you know where you stand, Kabeer, We shall rescind Our order for your castration upon grounds of Caliphitic mercy, to inspire you to more faithful service in future—also because you are too liable to worsen your situation by buying off Our executioner. That is, if We still kept an executioner around.
“Jamela—” Her eyes empty of fear or hope, the Caliph’s senior wife looked up again when her name was mentioned. He refused to look upon her, keeping his eyes instead upon Ayesha. “Jamela is to be retired, penniless, to that shabby Persian village whence she came.”
“But what of my son?” she demanded. Her voice was level, stripped of emotion. “Your son, Bu, your only legal heir?”
“Min bhatlah, David, will you please explain to the Lady Jamela, as once We heard you explain to the Princess, that, contrary to popular belief, there is no automatic inheritance of the Caliphate?”
Stunned by this swift turning of events, and by a certain hideous brilliance in the Caliph’s judgments which he found himself both loathing and admiring, the rabbi could but nod in confirmation.
“In any case, Our former dear,” the Caliph continued, turning to face his senior wife at last, “that point shall soon be moot. As We were at some pain explaining to Ayesha, there is a war. Everyone—even poor, mindless Ali—is expected to serve.”
He glanced up at the guard-lieutenant, his voice sharper. “Put that thing into a uniform. Have it sent out with tomorrow’s troop shipment to the Island Continent!”
XVI: A Party of Every Section
“It is not for the believers to go forth totally; but why should not a party of every section of them go forth, to become learned in religion, and to warn the people when they return to them, that haply they may beware?”—The Koran, Sura IX
In the dusty stillness of a service corridor behind the Caliph’s library, a young man, tanned and turbaned, carefully removed a slim metallic wand from a hole he had drilled
into the wall.
Daubing the aperture with a bit of spackling which he carried in his toolbox, now resting upon the floor, he gave the stuccoed wall an absent swipe to smooth it down. He played the hair-fine cord, leading from the wand into the box, back and forth into his palm until the elliptical hank could be fastened with another bit of wire and put away.
Glancing up the dimly gaslit hall, he stooped to the box.
There was a small, shrill squeal, then:
“...point shall soon be moot...”
A colorful miniature image of the Caliph was visible in a tiny window deep within the box.
“...As We were at some pain explaining to Ayesha, there is a war. Everyone—even poor, mindless Ali—is expected to serve. Put that thing into a uniform. Have it sent—”
There was a click. The young man arose once again, dusting his hands off upon one another.
Smiling, he slung the toolbox over his naked shoulder and proceeded at a brisk pace down the corridor, satisfied that, at long last, he had something of substance for the evening transmission homeward.
SURA THE THIRD: 1420 A.H.—
Sedrich Fireclaw
**
“The evildoers shall have their portion, like the portion of
their fellows; so let them not hasten Me!”
—The Holy Koran, Sura LI, The Scatterers
XVII: The Silver Chest
“...We shall roll up heaven as a scroll is rolled for the writings....”
—The Koran, Sura XXI
She sat waiting in a sidewalk restaurant in the busy heart of Rome, sharing a stained composition-covered table with three shabby foreigners. Young black men they were, perhaps students. They were of a correct age, speaking with heavy accents. One had brought a book-sized silver-colored chest. From twin, mysteriously screened apertures upon its face there issued a barbaric chant:
“Dancin’ in the dark, to the radio of love...”
This dubious miracle she took for granted. For her, at least at this particular moment, it was a common, sometimes pleasant, often irritating phenomenon. At this particular moment, she did not mind it. To her left, heavy traffic squeezed by through a self-consciously quaint and cobbled street inadequate to handle it properly. There was a rumbling hiss of rubber-tired wheels, a not totally unpleasant odor of burning petroleum fractions inefficiently consumed.
Facing south, toward the Eternal City’s largest and most famous mosque, she realized that mounted sets of crossed bars, exactly like those worshipped by the ancient Christians, defiled the building. Moreover, people walked through its high-arched portals without so much as leaving their shoes upon the steps outside.
Any indignation she felt at the sacrilege seemed unreal, far away from her immediate concerns.
One of these was that she was about to meet David. Bored with waiting, with the present randomly acquired company and location, she was looking forward to seeing him. All around her hung an atmosphere of stagnant poverty, of a depression in which she was somewhat better off than the average. Absently she wondered what it was she did for a living. No Caliph’s daughter would brazen unescorted into the streets of this strange, transformed city. David, she felt, was off somewhere, not very far away, in a general southeasterly direction.
The silver box continued pouring primitive music into the air.
She saw a police officer approaching from her right, a fortyish, pale blonde, almost plump woman, with rather short, curly hair. Not even the impossible phenomenon of a female law-enforcer surprised the girl. The woman wore a black cap with a short, highly polished visor extending halfway around her head, a light blue, epauletted tunic of cotton, a dark blue skirt, wool and scandalously short. Wrapped about her waist was a black leather pistol belt, stamp-tooled to resemble basket-weaving. There was no buckle—nor did Ayesha notice any other insignia.
Ayesha recalled having shared a casual word with the policewoman fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, upon her arrival at the cafe. Now she worried, not so much about the weapon the woman carried as about her own—a gray-black boxy little implement of death, rapid-fire, illegal in the extreme, slung by a black webbed nylon strap from one shoulder and concealed beneath her baggy overcoat.
Her right hand slipped through a hole cut in her coat pocket, tightening about its plastic-paneled grip,
Nearing Ayesha, the policewoman drew her own weapon, a short, heavy-barreled revolver, very dark and therefore new, As its barrel rose, Ayesha could see its stubby front sight, its convex muzzle crown, even the faint, annular tool-markings about its bore. Thinking that perhaps the woman planned to arrest her, Ayesha felt frustration rather than fear. The Cause—whatever cause that might happen to be—was too urgent to be thus inconvenienced,
As the woman reached Ayesha’s side, she pressed the cold muzzle of her revolver to the girl’s right temple, Ayesha felt a gentle bounce before it made firm contact. To her utter surprise, just as the mysterious silver chest shouted “Lights out!”, the woman spat, “Goodbye, terrorist!”
She pulled the trigger.
Ayesha heard the explosion in the center of her brain, not particularly loud. There was no pain. Her vision blacked abruptly—with some lingering granularity. More than anything, it was this loss of vision which made her angry,
She had time for two other thoughts; “Now I shall find out for certain” and “I was having such a good time with David. I am not yet ready to leave him.”
Child of her culture, child of many cultures, she somehow expected to begin drifting heavenward.
2
Instead, she awakened feeling depressed and shaken—something to which she was accustomed—with the blood vessels throbbing in the right side of her head.
Usually, when she had dreams like this one, she awoke just before she died. It was a long, long time before she felt like sitting up, longer still before she thought to brush her porthole curtain aside to see where this odd vehicle had brought her upon this new and sunny day.
When at last she did, light fluttered harshly past the speed-blurred spokes of one of the great wind-driven wheels just outside. It was a strange and wonderful contrivance, this vessel she rode aboard, half ship, half sail-powered locomotive, superior in some way to its rail-bound European counterpart, since it was independent of all but the crudest of road-beds.
Bowing to Mochamet al Rotshild’s overprotective insistence that she sleep at night—while everyone else on board took their rest during the heat of the day—had been a mistake, not solely in that it made her feel that much more lonely. For Ayesha, loneliness was itself an old, familiar companion, whose presence depended not upon the absence of others. But it established an evil precedent, that of obedience—as if Mochamet al Rotshild occupied her father’s place—to the pirate’s will.
Or to anyone’s save her own.
Then again, she corrected herself, that precedent had been well set long before this voyage had begun.
Letting the short, pleat-folded curtain fall back into place before the porthole, she summoned up the memory of a darker morning, several months before, at the quayside resting-place of a more conventional vessel, where her father had come, unexpectedly and incognito, to see her off. Out of a briny-odored Marseilles fog, his stout figure had materialized upon the creaking gangway, spoken for a moment with a weapons-laden Sergeant Kabeer, then, coming aboard, turned aside at the rail to seek the cabin Mochamet al Rotshild had assigned her aboard his Daghapy Wezza, upon which bloody and famous ship the merchant prince had already thrice circumnavigated the globe.
From the opposite end of the ship, Ayesha saw her father, immediately recognizing him despite the common robe which he affected and the wrappings which concealed his broad and bearded face. She herself was better disguised by the weather, standing high upon the fog-shrouded foredeck, watching the hard-muscled laborers below her, reeking as they did of thanpaah and ouiskeh, loading cargo.
Now she hurried down a rope-railed flight of stairs, along the weather-dampened p
lanking of the main deck, following, although he knew it not, the Caliph aft.
He knocked upon her door.
“Enter, Your Holiness.”
Startled, he turned to face her.
“One customarily says that from within doors, daughter. Limaadaa, why are you out upon deck, in this pestilential soup, among all these ruffian sailors?”
“Jayyit jittan, sghuhran, Father, since you see fit to ask, I am very well, sir, no thanks to you. And yourself?”
He shook his head in resignation.
Sliding past him, she turned the fog-dewed brass handle, cold and slippery in her hand. Together, they stepped into the light and warmth of the owner’s cabin. The owner had displaced the captain, and the captain the first mate, and so on, down the ladder of authority, until she had speculated to herself that one of the stokers, pitiable fellow, would this night be forced to sling his hammock from the anchor-flukes.
She turned, pulled the shawl from around her shoulders, tossed it upon the single bunk, sitting in one of two chairs bolted beside a small table, began asking questions of her own.
“Maadaa thureett, Siti? Have you not left it a bit late to play protective parent? Or do you worry that this western potentate, whoever he may be—if he indeed exists—might receive his little gift in damaged condition?”
The Caliph stood without speaking, feeling the deck roll gently beneath his feet, watching a green-shaded kerosene lamp swing gently back and forth from the rafter-beam, wondering why his heart continued, in indecency, to beat.
Without awaiting answer, Ayesha added, “I have just this past hour overheard a sailor’s tale that the western coast of the Savage Continent is lorded over by women.” Savoring the dual salaciousness of this confession, she laughed, sarcasm carried in an undertone. “Of what good will be your offering then, Your Holiness?”