The Crystal Empire

  This day, too, the older warriors, those scarred and weathered veterans who’d fought with him in the old days and lived, would, with tolerant amusement and affection, leave the young ones to their boasting and nod knowingly among themselves.

  All, that was, save perhaps the war chief Knife Thrower himself, Dove Blossom’s brother, his own good friend and brother-in-law. Later they’d speak of this and laugh together. His had been the first arrow planted between Fireclaw’s feet. The young ones had to learn their skill and bravado from someone.

  Fireclaw could think of many worse.

  No one aboard the land-ship had shot at him since Knife Thrower’s first whistling pass. Now the Comanche stopped their dusty circling, gathered in a line beyond what they imagined to be the range of the interloper’s rifles. They’d little experience with firearms. Looking at the length of those barrels, and judging from the crack which spoke of rifled bores, Fireclaw realized the strangers were restraining themselves more for want of ammunition than any lack of ranging power.

  Boom!

  As if to prove the Helvetian correct, a single shot blasted across the prairie, spanging off the fender of a cycle. In a cloud of wheel-spinnings, the warriors disappeared into a gully, reappeared one slanting hill-shoulder further away.

  The land-ship creaked to a stop, raising a cloud of its own. Silence filled the ranch yard like a thick fog. Fireclaw raised his one good hand and strode toward the vessel.

  Slapping the tiller aside, the orange-bearded figure in command lifted his fist, bellowed something in a strange, harsh-syllabled tongue. At his unsubtle urging, scurrying began elsewhere aboard the ship, other shouting voices, the sound of bare feet slapping hardwood.

  The gray bird squawked, perhaps in the same language, flapped, ruffled its plumage, then smoothed its wings and red tail feathers and sat quiet.

  Fireclaw paused a few paces off, left hand far from the curved butt of his pistol.

  He waited.

  Halfway down the curving, shingle-planked hull, a door popped open, hinged upon its lower edge. Fastened to its inboard side, a short, steep flight of stairs tipped groundward—he could see brown hands strain upon a pair of hawsers guiding the contraption toward gentle contact with the yellow soil.

  A stooped and feeble figure filled the doorway.

  “Good morrow, young Sedrich,” wheezed a voice from the distant past. “I’ve a favor I’d ask of thee, my boy.”

  It was the first time in two decades he’d heard the Helvetian language spoken at any great length. It sounded foreign to his ear. Down the flight of stairs, clinging to its hawser hand railings, labored a back-bent ancient in a filthy shift, supported each step of the way by the land-ship captain’s countryman behind him.

  Forgetting his pistol, Fireclaw jammed his prosthetic socket over the handle of the greatsword Murderer and swept it out. Bellowing, he charged the gangplank.

  “Oln Woeck, prepare yourself to die!”

  XXI: Delicate Negotiations

  “...thou art truly among the Envoys on a straight path...that thou mayest warn a people whose fathers were never warned....”—The Koran, Sura XXXVI

  From her rooftop guardpost, Dove Blossom watched her husband hurl himself toward the land-ship.

  Though he was by nature reticent, undisposed to talk about himself, in the fifteen winters she’d lived with Fireclaw, sharing with him his voluntary exile at foot of what he called the Great Blue Mountains, Dove Blossom had learned much which would have surprised the man.

  Her body tensed now, ready for the fight to come. Sunlight, glancing from an arm’s length of polished, hammer-hardened steel, slashed past her eyes. Yet her mind was filled with memories of a man whose back she thus defended. Fireclaw had killed before. He would kill again this day, perhaps, or be killed. She readied her bow, sweeping the crosshairs of its telescopic sight along the land-ship’s deck.

  In the tales of her people, Fireclaw loomed fully as terrible as whatever unknown majesty or horror lay beyond those ghostly peaks which fascinated him. Yet, with an unguarded utterance here, an unconscious gesture there, her legendary husband’s all-too-human past had, year by year, emerged. From such fragments had she pieced together the fabric of his personal tragedies, even—this last he’d taught her, that they might have means of controlling Ursi and the other dogs which no enemy might imitate—some smattering of his native tongue. Sometimes he babbled in this language, when emboldened by the darkness, the scavenger-spirits which, sniffing out the last despairing breath of human life, devour the soul, stalked his, as they did those of all men.

  There was a noise below.

  At the end of the out-tilted gangplank, the ancient white man, head shaven, body draped in soiled clothing—she wondered what the dark blue markings at his temples meant—gave a feeble shout of dismay and threw himself at the feet of his fellow Helvetian. A single snarl from Ursi was enough to hold the other foreigners back.

  “I beg thee,” Dove Blossom heard the old one scream into the dirt where he’d buried his pinched and shrunken nose—she comprehended perhaps four words in five—“do thou not injure me, Sedrich, son of Owaldsohn, called Fireclaw! I’m prostrate before thee! I come hither upon a mission of uttermost importance to our people! I—”

  A sharp report from the land-ship’s center deck ripped through both the shimmering curtain of Fireclaw’s rising blood-haze and the paralysis of contemplation which had held his woman uncharacteristically motionless behind him. An ugly-smelling puff of smoke, looking like a dandelion blown to seed, blossomed upon the deck amidships. Impact kicked a yellow spurt of dust into the air between his feet. Fireclaw shook his head, unaccustomed to being awakened thus from his murderous trance.

  Not quite aware of what she did, Dove Blossom sent first one arrow, then another, streaking toward that cloud. Almost as one, they thunked into the cover of a cargo hatch, less than a hand’s width either side of the shooter’s head.

  Dove Blossom was astonished.

  She’d missed!

  Blinking as if waking from her own bad dream, she watched Fireclaw lift his face to the rail. Perhaps the thick, foul-smelling smoke had blurred her usually unerring aim. Then again, perhaps it had been ordinary simple-minded anger: yon round-eyed young woman had discharged yet another shot at her man. A thin blue curl drifted from the muzzle of the woman’s weapon.

  In echo, further forward, came the thwack of a shoulder-bow. This time, Dove Blossom was ready. Her answering arrow, aimed for the heart, missed again, but it pinned the shooter’s intervening hand to the stock of his shoulder-bow, burying itself in resin-impregnated hardwood. Meanwhile, with an almost negligent twitch of his greatsword, Fireclaw grinned and swatted the foreigner’s feather-fletched bolt from its path ere it could reach his own otherwise unprotected breast.

  He whistled, gave a series of commands. There was movement behind Dove Blossom as well as below as her rear guard leapt from the roof to join the rest of the great pack Fireclaw had summoned. Instantly two dozen giant, snarling, coal-black dogs, their eyes lit with the insane fire of canine ferocity unleashed, formed a half-circle about him, an arc of death, defying anyone to come and touch their master.

  Dove Blossom chuckled to herself. The fabulous Murderer might be an object of respect, even veneration, among her people, the Comanche woman thought to herself. But without the mighty Fireclaw behind it, and the magic he brought to everything he touched, ’twas just another billet of hammered steel.

  “Chinthazir taqeeqagh! Maa ghaadaa!”

  The brawny red-haired figure at the tiller shouted something in a language which she couldn’t follow—to her it sounded like a curse. Upon his shoulder, the strange red-tailed bird—it had mustard yellow eyes and a beak which might have been carved of jet—squawked and whistled, grimacing a different way with each new noise it made.

  No one fired another shot.

  Silence descended over the scene, broken when Fireclaw spat, missing the scabrous nape of the old man’s bowed a
nd dirty neck by not more than a finger’s length.

  He turned and glanced toward Dove Blossom, his brief look conveying, as such will between well-married couples, many minutes’ worth of conversation.

  Dove Blossom relaxed minutely, tension turning into curiosity.

  Bending his elbow high above his head, Fireclaw sheathed his mighty blade, unlocked his wrist from off the grip—a display, his wife knew well, of contempt for an unworthy enemy—and pointed his good hand toward the rise, a thousand paces westward, where Knife Thrower’s braves watched and waited upon their idling machines.

  “Our people?” Fireclaw snarled in Helvetian. “Take a good look, old man; those are my people!”

  Obediently the old man raised a trembling, tear-streaked face. He peered at the horizon, whimpered, and slumped back into the dirt.

  Dove Blossom’s heart swelled within her, she who’d been named for the blue and yellow flowers of her native high plains. She was thrilled to hear her husband’s words. She’d always understood that she could never replace the lost love of his youth. Indeed, she’d been too wise to try. Instead, she’d become a willing token—numb with fear upon that first day as the gift-bride to a monster—a token of the peace which had become necessary between the Comanche and their Destroyer.

  She heard Knife Thrower and his followers give a shout in answer to her husband’s gesture.

  Like the bow her brother had also given Fireclaw on that day—an extension upon the handle of the powerful, quadruple-limbed weapon fit his prosthetic, as was the case with Murderer—identical to that which she held ready now, with its magical bright-lensed sight (this came in trade from somewhere beyond the mountains), she’d served him faithfully, in the thousand ways of a wife, lived beside him, slept beside him, fed him, washed both his clothing and his wounds, at all times striving within herself to lose hold of her terror of him. Nor could she name the moment when at last she had succeeded.

  Shouts from the land-ship’s deck took the tone of questions now. The old man gave a muffled reply, asking something of Fireclaw. Fireclaw nodded, replying affirmatively.

  The old man rose to his bare, bony knees and cuffed the nose-runnings from his chin.

  Shedding fear of Fireclaw hadn’t been an impossible task. Far from it. He’d shown her as much kindness and gentleness as it had been in him to show. She snorted—more than any Comanche husband would have! Nor can any woman live long with a man retaining, for good or for evil, all of her illusions about him. And Fireclaw, whate’er legend said of him—and all of it, and more, was true—was still a man.

  For his part, he’d come, in his own wise, to love her; upon that she was well satisfied and certain.

  The old man upon the ground grimaced, muttering something to her husband that she couldn’t hear.

  As for her people, they who’d at first borne the consequences of the mad Helvetian’s insane rage, they’d at last surrendered to his grim determination to dwell unmolested in this place which was otherwise forbidden to his kind. Now they’d peace—

  —or had until this ship arrived.

  If Fireclaw was displeased, upon occasion, with certain aspects of his life with her, if she could never be for him his long-dead, pale-haired, gentle Frae—it was, perhaps, the greatest measure of that benign departed spirit’s power that, over the years, and even in death, Dove Blossom herself had come to feel toward Frae something akin to sisterly love—if he felt her and her kin to be uncivilized, if sometimes he must overlook the grisly trophies of continuous slaughter—though he’d done much slaughtering himself in early days—draped in decoration upon the machinery he repaired, he never complained of it.

  Not once in all of those fifteen years.

  The supplicant before her husband uttered a few more whining words. Keeping his own peace, Fireclaw looked up toward the deck again, sweeping it with his gaze. Someone beside the figure Dove Blossom had shot pulled the arrow from his hand. This untender ministration was received in stoic silence, even without the grimace Dove Blossom might have expected. Both men stood up, unarmed. The woman who was with them stood as well.

  The red-haired shouter took a step away from the tiller of his ship, drew pistol and dagger from his waistband—Dove Blossom tensed, centering her crosshairs upon his broad chest—then set his weapons upon the deck at his feet. His two companions followed his example.

  More talk followed, three-sided, among the old man, the redheaded man, and the man who was her husband.

  These weren’t, of course, the first strangers they’d suffered to visit them a while. Neighboring tribes, bearing Comanche tokens of peace and safe passage, had sometimes stopped at their ranch for water, carrying with them trade-goods, and fair-haired, blue-eyed, broad-shouldered slaves who might have been of Fireclaw’s own kind.

  This Fireclaw did naught about, as he did naught, for the most part, to wreak other changes to the world he found about him. From his face and eyes, the set and movement of his shoulders, she knew full well he found many such usages barbaric. Acknowledging no gods, he worshiped freedom—or he breathed it. Either expression would have served to describe him.

  Nor, she knew, was his reluctance to act born out of fear. He seemed ignorant of that emotion, and would have been capable of shaping any change he wished.

  Instead, he played his own game of life, seeming to want no more than to be left alone to dwell with wife and animals in peace in this place by the mountains. That there was something more to this game he played Dove Blossom never doubted, nor had she ever come to understand just what that something more might be.

  Perhaps until this day.

  Below, there seemed to be some argument, no longer between Fireclaw and the strangers but among the passengers themselves, who, having for the most part cast their weapons aside, took turns shouting at that one among their number who refused to do so.

  It was the dark-eyed, dark-haired girl who’d shot at Fireclaw.

  Beside her, yet another foreign woman rose into view—somewhat painfully, it appeared. There was blood upon her garments. She wore a hastily wrapped bandage where one of Knife Thrower’s arrows, or that of one of his braves, had found a resting-place in the muscles of her upper leg. This woman looked soft and terrified. She, too, argued with the stubborn, rifle-bearing female.

  Dove Blossom allowed herself another snort, this of amused contempt.

  Almost, however, she admired the stubborn one. Already she perceived that Comanche women were of better stuff than these soft foreign women. She understood, despite her manner of being brought to Fireclaw, that he’d chosen her—having rejected others—only in part to establish kinship with the tribe she belonged to. There were also qualities that he admired in her, individual qualities which she, unique among her sisters and tribeswomen, had possessed. Grateful for this recognition, she placidly (though she’d never been considered such while dwelling in her mother’s lodge, being considered argumentative and one who thought too much) had made a home for him.

  For all concerned, the arrangement had worked well.

  She’d hoped bearing him children might establish something stronger between them in time, but children hadn’t been forthcoming. They’d built the ranch, establishing their machine shop, raised their dogs together, hunted side by side in the nearby hills, kept extensive gardens in the wise he’d taught her of his people.

  His were strange and foreign ways, yet he’d brought much useful knowledge with him, and, better yet, a means of gaining more, a manner of looking at things which served to increase knowledge almost daily, and which he taught to anyone who asked it of him.

  Always, for example, within the living memory of her people, and in tales ancient with the telling, had they received their weapons and machinery from the west, wonderful things far beyond the capabilities of the Comanche to imitiate. Now, at the least, and thanks alone to Fireclaw, had they achieved a measure of independence and understood the fashioning and operation of their bows (although the sights remained a myster
y, even yet to him). Thanks to skills he’d brought with him from the east, resinous adhesives and spun-glass fibers were in general use among the tribes.

  The argument below continued. Now another face appeared beside the unyielding girl, the pale, half-conscious visage of another man, propping himself against the cargo hatch not far from the spot where Dove Blossom’s first arrows still stood quivering. He, too, seemed to want to argue with the stubborn one.

  For the first time, she spoke.

  Curtly.

  The wounded man bit his lip and uttered not another word.

  Dove Blossom shook her head more in sadness than disgust. E’en the men were soft and pliant among these foreigners!

  Once again she looked toward her husband. With her assistance, Fireclaw maintained the machines of scattered tribes whose gods, for unprecedented reasons of their own, seemed to tolerate his presence in this land. Although the Comanche and their kind had access to many more sophisticated devices than Fireclaw’s people had (so he himself had told her), the gods, it was insisted by the shamans—who ought to know—didn’t trust anybody with such weapons as the pistol Fireclaw had fashioned for himself, not even, it was whispered, the manlike demon servants which, in times long past, had acted as their divine armies, wiping out families, prairie villages, whole nations who’d dared dabble in the wizardry Fireclaw made practice of each day.

  Yet even the gods left Fireclaw alone.

  Perhaps they knew something of the awful circumstances of his disfigurement and exile. Perhaps even they—was this thought blasphemy?—held him in awe.

  The gods, laughed the irreverent Helvetian—while she cowered deep inside herself, waiting for the lightning to strike—seemed to be a trifle sloppy about supplying parts and skilled labor. Ironically, his laughter at such moments, deeply as it shook what she believed in, was also the reed through which her sanity and courage drew breath. Many men she knew—her brother, Knife Thrower, was often one such—held their feelings in stringent check; their only visible emotion was wrath uncontrollable. Excepting moments such as this one she was living through, Fireclaw’s most usual breach was laughter. Each time he worked upon the machinery, he told her, he learned things. The gods mightn’t be human, and they might be powerful, but they were not the best of artisans. It was as if—he’d said this only once to her, although it had impressed her fully as much as anything he’d said to her a hundred times—it was as if they’d copied what they wrought from someone else whose lifelong dream the first fashioning had been. The gods knew much which he didn’t—but naught which he couldn’t learn, if time enough were left to him. Someday he’d puzzle out the lenses, and beyond that, who could tell?