The Crystal Empire

by L. Neil Smith

  Survival then became a matter of avoiding the other fellow’s jagged stump as it flashed off the guard.

  Only half the blade was ground—the foible, Owaldsohn called it, a flimsy naming, Sedrich thought, for such a length of deadly steel as this—sharpened to the whispery keenness of a blade of grass along both edges all the way round its leaf-shaped point.

  Yet Owaldsohn’s truest genius lay in the fact that, the handwidth blade notwithstanding, Murderer balanced at the apex of the breaking-wedge. This miracle had he accomplished only in part by means of the weighted “four-hand” grip. The “fuller,” a broad, round-bottomed channel extending from a finger’s width behind the point the full length of the foible and halfway down the forte, was responsible. Where it was deepest, the blade felt parchment-thin. Yet in a single stroke (a more practiced stroke than Sedrich yet was capable of delivering), Murderer could hew down a tree the diameter of the boy’s head.

  After decades of war against the western savages, the weapon’s sheen betrayed neither nick nor scratch. Murderer was a perfect implement. Try as he might, Sedrich could think of no innovation, no alteration of form or fabrication—save perhaps in its monumental proportions—which might have improved it.

  This annoyed him.

  “Now the right hand for a while, and back to the left!”

  But not as much as his father’s persistence.

  3

  Afternoon found Sedrich at the village boatshed, where the weathered pier jutted into the estuary. Save for the young blacksmith, the place was deserted. It was too late in the day for any boats to be departing, too early for any to be coming home.

  His tools lay spread about him.

  At the request of some of the fishermen, Sedrich was attempting to determine whether it was practical to fit half a dozen of his devices to the steeply curved gunwales of a dory, presently hauled up for repairs. He wasn’t the only one, they’d told him, who could get new ideas. Each crank, forged wide for what came close to being a small ship, would be turned by two men, creating a craft which could run swift upon calm water as a whitetail through a forest clearing, keeping its bow into the nastiest swell if caught in unexpected storms.

  Sedrich had his doubts about the latter.

  Across the water, wading-birds called raucously.

  The young man had come to shoulder much responsibility for one of his short years, always busy, his few idle moments filled with sketches, acquiring scrap, altering its shape and composition, pursuing boyhood dreams his custom might have doubted, as he doubted theirs. Despite persistent clamor for more boat-cranks, there was idle time to fill. Ilse, making certain of it, pressed this wisdom upon her men: labor must give way to rest and play, else accomplish less and less. That her husband’s “rest” and her son’s “play” resembled what they did for a living, she could but shrug to herself about and live with.

  Thinking himself alone, he knelt beside the huge canted dory with his stick measurer. A shadow fell across the hull, startling him. He whirled, the stick becoming Murderer in his reflex-guided hands. This he acted to control before the newcomer could notice.

  “Good day, Sedrich, son of Sedrich,” a silvery voice commented. “Pray do not slice me with yon mighty weapon, warrior, for I assure you I mean no harm.”

  Frae smiled shyly and then laughed. Sedrich joined her, flinging the stick aside as he rose.

  “Good day, gentle neighbor. ’Tis no warrior I am”—he flexed his much-abused wrist, remembering the morning’s pointed comments to that effect from his father—“but tradesman and artisan.” He grinned. “Hast need of my talents?”

  A soft salted breeze lifted her unbound golden hair. Falling past her shoulders, it framed a smooth, well-boned and pink-cheeked face, full-lipped, with an upturned nose. Her teeth were white and even. Her eyes, beneath long lashes, reflected the glory of the afternoon sky. Improving upon it, Sedrich found himself thinking, and not only because there were storm clouds cluttering the seaward horizon.

  Frae’s shift was of blue-dyed cotton reaching to her knees, rope-fastened at the waist. A pair of ribbons tied in bows held the simple garment upon her shoulders. From her rope belt hung scissors, token that she was mistress of her father’s household. Sedrich had fashioned them himself, the first gift he’d given anyone outside his family.

  Jest still twinkling in her eye, she began, “Methinks—”

  Never knowing whence the impulse came, in a swift and certain gesture he seized her by the wrist, pulled her close, kissed her upon the mouth, feeling her body pliant against his, back straight and slender, hips rounded. To his bewilderment, she didn’t return the kiss—the first for both—but stood as if nailed to the spot, then burst into tears. Confused, Sedrich stepped back awkwardly, catching his heel upon the dory.

  He all but fell.

  Frae advanced, placing a white hand upon his forearm. Wiping her eyes, she smiled, the truest smile, Sedrich would have sworn, he’d ever seen of her, unreserved and gay.

  “I’m this night to be inducted into the Sisterhood. Your mother will perform the ceremony. It means I’m a woman grown.”

  Laying his brown hand over hers, Sedrich scowled at the gray pier-planking, then looked into her eyes. Enormous they seemed, and infinitely trusting. Induction might mean naught but that she was another childless woman—were she not being groomed to succeed Ilse.

  Aloud, he answered, “Frae, I’m glad for you. Were men permitted, I’d stand witness myself.”

  “Dear my Sedrich, I’d in mind another ceremony. ’Tis said among women it’s bad luck to be inducted as a...as a virgin.”

  She reached for the rope at her waist, pulling it free.

  He caught her scissors before they slid to the ground.

  “Bad luck?” he croaked, watching his fingers, living their own life, pull the knot from one of the ribbons which held her shift up. The hair stood out upon the back of his neck as a wash of prickly weakness coursed through his body. A corner of the fabric fell in a diagonal, exposing a soft, small, rounded breast. She kept her eyes on his, blushed as he touched the nipple with a trembling finger and it came erect. With a tremor, her flesh reclothed itself in goosebumps.

  Frae had indeed become a woman.

  With clumsy hands, Sedrich pushed the shoulder of her shift back into place, casting his eye about to see if they were watched.

  “My own boat’s at the end of the pier. We won’t be noticed upon the estuary.”

  A few minutes later, Frae sat in the bow, a hand upon her undone shoulder—for she refused to tie it up again—while Sedrich labored at the paddles. He was glad of the work, as he couldn’t will his hands to stop shaking. All of his strength seemed concentrated in one lone embarrassing place. Moments later—what seemed hours to the youth—the spun glass of the hull brushed through upthrust vegetation near a sandbar a hundred yards from the pier. The far shore was unoccupied by man or beast.

  The wading-birds had long since fled at their approach.

  “The trouble with your invention,” the girl observed, taking the end of the other shoulder-ribbon between forefinger and thumb, “is that we can’t lie down in this boat.” She sighed, smiling up at him from beneath her lashes. “Thus progress claims its price.”

  He’d been thinking through this problem himself. “I, er, brought some tools. I can unship it.”

  “Stay, good blacksmith, I’ve a better idea.”

  Pulling at the ribbon, she stood, letting the shift drop to the floor, and, after a single delicious instant before the boy’s widened eyes, vanished over the side with a salty splash.

  Sedrich followed her.

  The water was deeper than their toes could reach. They played about for a time, at last treading together in the pale shadow beneath the translucent boat, out of the glare of the sun. Sedrich had his right hand upon the gunwale, she her left. Once again, an arm about her waist, he pulled her close.

  Her nipples brushed his chest.

  This time she didn’t weep but
returned his probing kiss. This time there was no shift, however sheer, to prevent him knowing the woman she’d become. As she hung before him, his free hand roved with a demanding and joyful will of its own.

  His wrist no longer pained him.

  For her own part, in their first magic hour together, Frae wasn’t shy. She began to know him as he knew her, taking the same delight in the learning. When he pulled her body against his, guided only by a boyhood knowledge of animals and what he’d seen in books, she tried to help.

  “This isn’t going to work,” he acknowledged in frustration as they hung from the side of the boat. “Not with one hand apiece. I think we’re supposed to be lying down.”

  Frae touched his cheek and giggled. “I’ve an idea,” she told him. “You hold on to the boat for both of us, and I’ll hold on to you.”

  So she did, lowering her body, wrapping both her arms about his neck, her legs about his waist. She gasped, surprised less by the pain she had awaited than by its absence. For some while, Sedrich was quiet, shocked at new sensations coursing through him, reflexes of lower back and thigh he’d not known he possessed. Frae closed her eyes, brushing her mouth upon his, upon his cheeks, his neck, his shoulders, sighing.

  She bit gently at his lips.

  Abruptly, an explosion in his loins disminded him, wiping away memory and ego, the very instinct for survival. With an openmouthed exclamation, he lost his purchase on the boat-edge, plunging them both into the water over their heads.

  The next he knew, he was back in the air, both hands locked under one of hers upon the gunwale, while she pounded his back.

  “Sedrich! Sedrich!” Frae demanded, fear filling her voice. “Are you all right?”

  He coughed, freeing one of his hands, then turned to gaze upon the loveliest face the world had ever seen.

  “Love,” he told her, caressing a wet strand of hair back into place at her temple, “I misdoubt that e’er I’ll be all right again!”

  4

  That night, a sleepless Sedrich followed his mooncast shadow out into the smithy. The rent in the cloud-cluttered sky was temporary. A few stars twinkled through, but it would rain again before morning.

  They’d made love again that afternoon, he and Frae, a second, third, and indescribable fourth time under his upturned rowboat, beached across the estuary from the village while a summer deluge hammered upon its keel. The third time, Frae found out what had almost drowned her Sedrich and was grateful to be lying upon her back upon solid, if somewhat sandy, ground.

  Thunder grumbled to the west.

  Lighting a candle, Sedrich inspected the “tiller” of his vehicle: a fifth wheel trailing a man’s height behind the other four, controlled by a bar stretching from the bow of the machine. As with his rowboats, he’d given up the idea of independent gearing. It had proven beyond his mechanical capability to produce such a system which didn’t suffer fragility.

  Outside, lightning flickered.

  As he crawled beneath the hull, he espied, at the shed-front, a pair of small, moccasin-shod feet. For an instant, his heart leapt within his chest. Then he saw they were not Frae’s.

  “Sedrich?”

  “Yes, Mother? I’ll be out in just a moment.”

  He’d have to do something about the pinion gear. One thump from a rock or tree-stump as the machine traveled across country, he’d be afoot again.

  Ilse didn’t wait. “Dear, your father and I discussed this. We decided I should be the one to tell you....”

  Sedrich seized the front axle, hauled himself from beneath his machine and rose, wiping imaginary grime upon his breechclout.

  “Mother, I know the village disapproves of my land-boat. Give them time. They came round where my rowboat was—”

  Ilse set her glass-paned hurricane lantern upon a bench, strode into the shed. She took Sedrich’s right hand in both of hers.

  “My son, this does not concern your work. Naught wouldn’t I give to avoid telling you this. I wish now I’d listened to your father. He’s courageous. He argued with me o’er it.”

  The wind had quickened, driving rain-spatter a few paces into the shed. Sedrich shook his head in confusion, unnamed fear beginning to creep within him. Was there something amiss with his father’s health? Owaldsohn was slowing down a little. Natural, but—

  “’Tis about Frae, Sedrich.” Ilse’s face contorted with the pain she imagined her son was about to feel. “We inducted her into the Sisterhood tonight, as you know. Then...” She looked away from the youth’s questioning expression, saying forcefully, “You must forget her, Sedrich. Leave her be. There are other girls—”

  “What are you talking about, Mother? Not in this village, none of them Frae!”

  “All right, in other villages. You’re young, dear, there’s plenty of time.”

  Sedrich’s fear was turning into a hard, fiery knot in his midsection. He would, in future time, come to think of this moment as that in which a lifelong fury had begun.

  “But, Mother, I thought you and—”

  “We do, dear, we love her as much as you do. In a sense, I brought her up, right alongside you. She was practically my daughter already. In the eyes of the Sisterhood, she is my daughter.”

  Dread etched its acid pathway through him. Had they—had he injured her in some manner?

  “What’s amiss? She isn’t sick, or—”

  “No, Sedrich, naught such. We’ve but just heard, dear. Oh, my poor, darling Sedrich, Hethri’s been ‘keeping the peace’ again. He’s promised Frae in marriage—to Oln Woeck!”

  VI: The Twisted Sails

  “I see you are prospering and I fear for you the chastisement of an encompassing day.”—The Koran, Sura XI

  "Dear my Sedrich,” Frae pleaded, “calm yourself.”

  A dozen gulls played catch-me with each other, diving, tilting in their awkward, stiffened way as they turned.

  “’Tis but for a little time, and then...”

  “Then what?” he responded bitterly.

  She watched him test the edge of his dagger upon the fine golden hairs of his left forearm. It always made her nervous. He frowned, returned to honing it upon a pair of angled stone rods he’d brought with him, set into a block of walnut.

  “Dagger” was a relative expression. The blade was a model Sedrich’s father had made before the forging of the greatsword Murderer. It stretched from the tip of the young man’s middle finger to his elbow, in form a perfect miniature of the fabled weapon.

  Frae twisted both slim hands in the loose fabric of her shift, lifting the hem in the front, an unconscious gesture she’d brought with her from childhood.

  If only she could make him understand!

  “I’ll stave Oln Woeck off, beloved, I promise. I’ll delay him, make excuses. I’ll not be fourteen for a month yet, perhaps ’twill serve. You’ll see...”

  He turned toward her, his face colored and distorted with hatred. “I’ll see his rat’s blood covering this blade e’er he touches you!” Once again he ran the sharpened foible between the stones. “If that old tattoo thinks he can...”

  The pair were at their favorite meeting-place along the estuary, across the brackish water from the village, well away from observation by their neighbors. Above, the sky was sullen-looking, but it wouldn’t rain today, nor even yet tomorrow—save perhaps in Sedrich’s heart, Frae thought. Why was it aught he loved, aught he desired of life, was denied him by the beliefs of their kind? Why couldn’t people leave him, and his dreams, alone? Why couldn’t they...

  But it was useless.

  ’Twas like reasoning with the Red savages Owaldsohn’s sword had been created for. Some men—on both sides of any argument—comprehended naught but steel. If she couldn’t reason her man out of it, she was certain that he’d kill Oln Woeck, believing they could escape to another village. Perhaps even to his beloved, mysterious west. That wouldn’t be the end of it, however. Wherever they went, whatever they did, they’d finish hating one another for the evil they
’d each taken part in. Aught they’d fought for would be lost. This she knew.

  Or at least felt she knew.

  Sedrich slammed the dagger back into the brass-throated scabbard at his waist, disassembled the sharpener, tucked it in its quilted deerskin bag, and tossed it into the boat which they’d drawn up on the beach. Frae sat down beside the boat, legs folded beneath her, drawing meaningless lines in the sand with her slim fingers.

  “Sedrich.” She looked up at him, his gaze striking her with what felt like physical force, somewhere just below her navel.

  Her voice she kept mild as always, but she could feel that she was blushing.

  “Aye, love?” he answered, despite their troubles breaking into a grin at the sight of her—or perhaps at the sound of her voice. He really did love her, then, she thought to herself. She’d grown up beside this...this miraculous creature, seen him daily, always adored him, and yet each day he was like a new and wonderful stranger to her. Sometimes, as now, a frightening one. “What?”

  She gathered courage. “I’ve a way for us. And ’tis a matter of giving life, not, as you contemplate, taking it.”

  He scowled at her, then, seeing its effect upon her, softened his expression, explaining, “’Tis more from puzzlement than irritation, dearest. I can feel no irritation where you’re concerned—even when I ought—but I can feel puzzlement.”

  “I often do.”

  “Silly,” she laughed, “we could make our own child! No one could part us afterward, for we’d have proven our love.”

  Sedrich reacted in mock astonishment, clapping a hand to his forehead. “Of course! Why hasn’t this occurred to me?”

  He joined her in laughter, blushing as well, then reached across the small distance separating them. In a moment her shift fell away.

  He began assisting her with her plan.

  2

  Thus passed many happy months for Frae Hethristochter and Sedrich Sedrichsohn, yet with a cloud hovering over them. She turned fourteen, he sixteen soon after. Together they labored with a loving will to escape her father’s intentions—and the foul-smelling clutches of yellow-eyed Oln Woeck.