The Crystal Empire

Turning to face his daughter, the Caliph thrust his hands deep within his pockets, looking at her over the folds of a patched and soiled muffler he had not yet removed. His eyes were those of a starveling. Even through the woolen windings, his sigh was audible.

  “Our informants advise Us that he styles himself Sun King, scarcely an appellation for a female ruler.”

  Taking a step toward her, he shook his head. “Ayesha, so well closed is his entire domain that there is precious little more Our informants can tell Us. We have spent many a life—which will join thousands of others to haunt Our conscience forever—merely learning that much.

  “Our concern, daughter, is for you—although, manlayagh, you have scant reason at this moment to believe it.”

  The girl just managed to suppress a snort of derision.

  “Ayesha, child of my heart, I did not journey all this distance merely to give you tantalizing half-hints of your destiny.”

  At last he discarded his shabby cloak, letting it fall in a soggy bundle to the polished floor, and with it the noble plural she had never heard him set aside before.

  “Nor shall I argue further with you over it. Nor make excuses for myself. I am required, God help me, to perform a Caliph’s deeds, albeit I am just a man. And, as with those agents whom I sent to certain death upon the Savage Continent, or that multitude slain elsewhere, there can be no excuse, not from your point of view, nor, speaking as a simple man and not a Caliph, from my own. If He will not help me, in his mercy and compassion, perhaps He will at least forgive, for He knows I cannot forgive myself. I came...”

  He stopped, having for the moment run out of voice. She saw that his eyes were sunk in blackened pits. Familiar furrows upon his face seemed vastly deeper this morning. Almost, she was tempted...almost...

  “I came, this morning, as a simple man, to wish man assalaamagh to the only living human being I love. May God’s peace go with you, dearest child, beloved daughter. May—”

  Ayesha stood, a sudden chill running up her back and down through her limbs. “The only living human being? Maa manna, what does that mean, Father, the only living human being?”

  He took a step and, turning, sank at last into the other chair beside the table. With one hand upon his knee, he rested his forehead in the palm of the other, keeping his eyes upon the floor as he spoke.

  “It means, my darling, that your mother, the Lady Shaatirah, the only woman, besides yourself, who ever meant a thing to me, has been dead and buried this fortnight past, the life impersonally smashed out of her by Mughal artillery in a surprise shelling of Malta.” And I, he thought, continue living. Where is the mercy and compassion in that?

  He looked up, raised a hand, then let it fall back to the chair-arm.

  “No one thought to tell me about it until this afternoon, when I received a coded wire aboard the train.”

  “But how?”

  For a moment, Ayesha’s voice had become that of a little girl again. A very frightened little girl. With a considerable effort, she regained some measure of control, so that she fell to her knees beside him as an act of volition. She placed a hand over his.

  “I thought we had this sea of ours locked up. Does our fight go that badly, Daddy?”

  For his favorite daughter Abu Bakr Mohammed, the Sword of God, Protector of the Faith, Caliph of Rome, summoned up a pained smile.

  “Laa, my darling, Inshallagh and the creek don’t rise, our ‘lock,’ as you have put it, remains intact. As these things are reckoned militarily, it was nothing more than a minor tactical escapade, a strategically pointless sally past the Gebr al Tarik of one cheerless, fogbound morning exactly such as this.”

  Eyes filled with sadness, he shook his head, returning it to the palm of his hand.

  “Those there are who, for a variety of reasons, might reckon otherwise. The Mughal, it would now appear, have found a way to plank-in a whaleboat, caulk its seams, weight it down with ingots of lead, and propel it a few feet beneath the water’s surface, whilst crew and engine suck the breath of their life through a tube.”

  The Caliph seemed to shake himself, to sit up straighter.

  “This boat carried a breech-loading mortar. Our own engineers advised Us some years ago that such a thing was possible, using hand-pumped tanks for rising and sinking. Now We fear we shall have to fashion such a terrible vessel to cope with theirs.”

  “Progress,” Ayesha answered, one portion of her mind wondering whether there was purpose in his telling her all this. Perhaps he sought to dedicate her more to the ending of this war her fate was shaped for. There had been a time when she believed him incapable of such a cynical usage with her. She rose and stood away from him. Did people ever truly know one another? Would her father use her, then, as he used soldiers? Would he expend her like a rifle cartridge? Well, she was here, wasn’t she?

  The Caliph shook his head again, as if in denial of her unspoken accusation.

  “Nanam. Yet truly We never intended to burden you needlessly with this news about your mother’s death. What We would say to you, instead, is this: should an alliance come about, as is Our fondest hope, some regular communication must be established, as one condition to the treaty which the Commodore carries with him.”

  He put out a hand, tacitly begging her, she thought, to place her own within it. Ignoring it, she stood where she was, realizing that, in this sudden and unwelcome perception of her father as an ordinary man, desperately in need of her approval and affection, she had at last—and perhaps it was not such a good thing as she had looked forward to these many years—grown up.

  He shrugged and dropped his hand to his side.

  “All of your life, my daughter, you have experienced terrible—and ofttimes revealing—visions. Your struggle to discern their meaning has given you command of such a knowledge of the science of the mind as We possess. Now We bid you, both as daughter and as subject, offer to interpret the dreams of this unknown ruler you are being given to, after the manner of Joseph in the Holy Koran—and afterward convey what you learn thus of him and his domain back to your own people.”

  Why did this suggestion of betrayal within betrayal abruptly fill her with an interest she had not found in life since learning of this voyage? Was she becoming like the rest of them at court, a cynical intriguer?

  Or was it something else, some hope she sensed in her father which had nothing to do with his official hopes of ending the war?

  “Mo will instruct you in the methods of enciphering information within innocent-sounding phrases. Keep Us informed. Perhaps, when a happier time shall come to pass, visits home will not be beyond thinking.

  “Do you serve Us, and in any case, your name will be remembered in every mosque, in every square and city within Islam, for as long as this Caliph reigns in Rome.”

  He placed his stubby hands upon the chair-arms, pushed himself to his feet with a grunt, then, clapping his hands together, rubbed the palms upon his chest.

  “Now, dear, min bhatlah, could you find it in your heart at least to offer an old man a hot cup of shaay before he once again must expose his poor dilapidated carcass to the cold?”

  3

  The ship struck some minor obstruction which sent a shudder through its keel.

  Wind flapped at her porthole curtain.

  Bitter memories giving way to an even more bitter reality, Ayesha rose at long last to her feet. This ship which bore her—no longer the pirate Commodore’s Daghapy Wezza but a different conveyance entirely, by previous arrangement fashioned for her party by a strange, barbaric people—now seemed in a terrible hurry.

  Outside, a wave-tossed ocean of man-high yellow grass rippled with its passing.

  What sets mankind apart, she thought, from all other organisms is that mankind seeks pain and avoids pleasure—and is proud of it. Now she herself was doing so at an unprecedented velocity. At this headlong speed, the great curved springs upon which each wheel’s axle rested failed to soften the roughness of the rutted road they rolled upon,
as they had at a more temperate pace.

  There was a hoarse shout of alarm just outside her louvered cabin door.

  A buzzing shadow passed by her window.

  In his swinging cage, little Sagheer chittered out his uneasiness. Ayesha crossed the small room in a single pace to comfort him. Through the space she had occupied just a heartbeat before, an arrow flashed through the open porthole above her bunk, burying itself with a dull thud in the wall across her tiny cabin.

  Outside, Mochamet al Rotshild shouted an order.

  The land-ship picked up even more speed.

  XVIII: The Pillar of Fire

  “But as for the ungodly, their refuge shall be the Fire; as often as they desire to come forth from it, they shall be restored into it, and it shall be said to them, ‘Taste the chastisement of the Fire....’”—The Koran, Sura XXXII

  “What is it, old fellow? What d’you hear?”

  For Fireclaw, it began that cloudless morning with a squirming animal, its whistle-whimpering protests just at the upper limits of human audibility, and the not-quite-sound of muffled explosions somewhere near the razor-straight horizon. They were followed soon after by an underlying thunder which pricked memories he’d thought long buried.

  Looking up from his work—one of Ursi’s great yellow-gray talons, too long unwatched, had curled upward into the pad, cruelly splitting it and causing the black woolly beast considerable pain—Fireclaw patted the animal upon its shaggy head and ducked out of the low earthen shed they occupied to see what the commotion was about.

  Ursi barked, struggled to his feet, and limped to his master’s knee.

  Upon the eastern skyline, brushed into crimson brilliance by the rising sun, there stood a pillar of fire.

  “Husband?”

  At the same moment, Fireclaw’s wife, Dove Blossom, drying her brown, capable hands upon a homespun apron, appeared in the kitchen doorway across the yard, drawn by the same disturbances as her husband. Her ears were, at most times, much sharper than his. The noise of running water at the kitchen sink must have given him the advantage.

  She stood upon her moccasined toes—a small woman, she needed all the height she could obtain thus—one hand resting upon the large, scabbarded knife at her waist, the other shading her eyes, straining to watch the apparition upon the flat, grass-covered prairie.

  “Best we take the usual precautions,” was his only answer to her unasked question, yet his tone and posture spoke to her—as such things are communicated, man to woman—of an inward excitement less stoic than his countenance.

  Bending under the low wooden lintel once again, Fireclaw stepped back into the machine shed, his mind considering at once the rare occurrence of visitors—unwelcome, dangerous ones in all possibility—and the everyday pragmatics of ranch life which those visitors, and that possibility, had just interrupted.

  He swept his proud, proprietary gaze across the clutter of machinery: wire-spoked wheels and rubber tires, disembodied drive-trains shimmering with lubricant, small dismantled engines, the gleaming rustless and dust-free forms of metal lathe and horizontal mill, compound vise and drill-press, all of which he’d fashioned for himself, one square and clean-edged component at a time. The loving labor of twenty good years.

  He thought of visitors to come, and of how much easier—and quicker—it was to destroy than to build.

  Ursi would be fine, although for a few days he and Dove Blossom would have to be watchful for infection. One of her mother’s herbal drawing poultices, applied this night ere bedtime—whenever that turned out to be—would solve that problem for a while.

  He was their most valuable and prolific breeder, in his own right something of a legend among Dove Blossom’s people, and almost a full partner in the couple’s various enterprises. His own sire, gray about the ears and muzzle, and very nearly toothless, had gone down valiantly—before a pack of timber wolves wintering one harsh season upon the frozen plains—defending the very litter from which Ursi himself had sprung. ’Twas a good line, Fireclaw thought now, as he had often thought, and Ursi, just like his father before him, well trained and eager.

  Ursi growled uncertainly, sensing changes in his master’s mood, his own brown, liquid eyes too poor to make out what the man had just seen, many miles away.

  Fireclaw patted the animal, ran five stub-nailed and callused fingers through his own graying mop.

  He was a big man in his middle years, his great strength and unrelenting character the subject of many a harrowing tale among the translucent resined hides and spun-glass lodgepoles of his adopted prairie tribe. Ever was he accompanied, in real life as well as in the tales, by Ursi (or another who, from countless retellings by a myriad of tongues, now bore the same name), his huge black, curly-pelted “bear-dog.”

  Snapping the plier-like toenail-cutters into their socket with his left hand, Fireclaw reached for the great double-edged blade he’d leaned in its scabbard against the cluttered workbench. This he slung over his shoulder where it would hang ready—although its chiefest value nowadays lay in its powers of intimidation—for the thrust-twist which would lock it to his right wrist. More than aught else about Fireclaw, this gleaming and terrible weapon, his skill in wielding it, and the grisly work to which, in years gone by, he’d put both, were the focus of his reputation among a hundred tribes of native plains-dwellers.

  Briefly he inspected the smaller but more potent article of hand-wrought weaponry slapping, handle forward, at his left thigh. Unlike the gleaming greatsword and the matching dagger which had been his father’s only tangible legacy, this he never laid aside. The dagger, too, he loosened in its scabbard, then gathered up, from the pegs upon which they hung above a tool-covered bench, a quiver of stout, featherless arrows and his four-limbed longbow, a peace-offering from Knife Thrower, his former mortal foe, now trusted ally and good friend, Dove Blossom’s brother.

  And this, too, brought certain memories to his mind.

  2

  Cold and exhausted as he was, young Sedrich Sedrichsohn shook his head in wonder, staring, as he’d done a thousand times thus far, at the scar-ridged stump of his right hand.

  Many weeks had passed—he wasn’t exactly certain how many—still, whene’er he willed it, and often when he willed it least, he could feel the fingers of the hand he’d left lying on the bloody sill-stone of his dead father’s doorway curl themselves into a fist, even flex his nonexistent thumb toward the intangibly tangible palm.

  Perhaps ’twould e’er be thus, he thought. Perhaps he’d e’er be haunted by the ghost of a hand severed from his body to no good purpose, for the gain of naught and to the loss of everything he loved.

  He shook his weary head again—sprinkling his already white and shivering shoulders with rainwater—as if to rid himself of such thoughts. Painful they were, and of no more use to him than was the phantom hand which continued to mystify him. At this particular moment they were a distraction and a danger to his life.

  Spring was surging northward onto the Forbidden Plains, bringing with it sudden storms which transformed arid gullies into rivers, rivers into swollen, deadly seas. A gust-lashed rain was falling now, and he’d been caught out in the open.

  The rabbit Willi had managed to kill for them—he himself couldn’t have drawn and aimed a shoulder-bow if he’d brought one, nor even thrown a rock in any reasonable hope of hitting something with his left hand—was two days gone, and they were both hungry. That Willi, well trained as he was, had shared it with him—they’d been as hungry as this at the time—had been surprising and a stroke of luck.

  The rabbit’s untanned pelt now cushioned Sedrich’s bleeding feet within his travel-worn moccasins and covered the end of his right wrist. Willi’s pads were bruised and bleeding as well, but the dog had chewed off every dressing Sedrich had applied. The rotting skin wouldn’t last long. What clothing Sedrich still retained, after a river crossing which had cost him most of his possessions, hung in shreds.

  His only other luck had come
upon the second—or had it been the third?—day after leaving home. Outside a neighboring settlement, a former member of the local Sisterhood, rejected by her husband after losing her one child to some feverish illness, and refusing to rejoin the compound of the Sisterhood, had found him wandering in delirium near her hermitage, instinctively avoiding villages upon a back trail, headed ever west.

  He didn’t remember that part very well.

  She had cared for him, in the way of her training cleansed and sewn his burned and bleeding stump. She had fed him, sheltered him, begged him afterward to stay with her. He could not. He was of an age which made it unclear what it was she wished of him, to take the place of her dead child or that of her unfeeling mate. Perhaps she hadn’t known, herself.

  Why begin again in a village no different from the one which had, in its complacence, witnessed the destruction of everything he loved? Would the Cult of Jesus shrink from persecuting unbelievers in this place? Would the Sisterhood defend him here, as it had failed to do at home?

  And if he stayed here, something told him he would never learn the secret of what lay to westward of Helvetia. That secret, the curiosity it still piqued in him, was all that remained to animate him now.

  Making good his escape from her woods-hidden cottage hadn’t been easily accomplished. One thing he did owe Ursula Karlstochter: following a practice held by but a few among the Sisterhood, she’d given him a sleeping potion. He’d scarcely needed it (although he still shuddered at the chance of having awakened prematurely in the middle of her ministrations). Before sealing his flesh, free now of the stinking black and yellow discharge which had itself come near to killing him, she’d pulled the ravaged muscle-ends into place and sewn them to the bones where they belonged, using a tiny hand-driven brace and drill he or his father might have fashioned for the trade. This had restored the normal tensions and relationships among the parts of what remained of his right forearm, speeding the healing of it, allowing him greater use of the limb than might have otherwise been possible.