The Crystal Empire

by L. Neil Smith

  For his part, Old Woeck seemed content to be patient. To be sure, the customary usages of the Helvetii were observed. He brought himself to frequent dinners at Hethri Parcifal’s house. He was at all times accompanied by his pair of bodyguards—or whatever they were. In discussion of this, Sedrich told her of a long-ago conversation overheard at his father’s forge. They’d been working, waiting as an order of leaf-springs slow-cooled in clay jackets.

  The customer had waited with them.

  “Aye,” Owaldsohn observed, testing the outer layer of clay with a bit of straw, “some Red Men be our friends. Others our foes.” He turned toward the customer, beetling his shaggy brows at the man. “’Tis a longevous fellow knows the difference.”

  There was a disbelieving snort.

  “There be but two sorts of Red Man, live ones and good ones,” insisted the customer, a captain-of-one-hundred from a village militia to the south. “The heathens believe not as we. Thus you’ve said of them yourself, son of Owald, red-handed Slayer of the Plains.”

  Owaldsohn grimaced. He’d never liked the titles given him in honor of his crimson deeds. Looking at Sedrich rather than the captain, the blacksmith observed, “Nor often do neighbors, such as our good friend Hethri Parcifal, nor e’en your mother and I, at times.”

  With a wink at his son, he turned to the other adult. “Yet we seem to get along, don’t we?”

  Sedrich had doubts, as always, about Parcifal. He ran a hand through Willi’s coat, the fingers coming away oily.

  Old Klem slumbered by the forge, snoring quietly.

  The captain said in answer, “They worship neither God nor Goddess!”

  The blacksmith mused. “Thus ’tis said—wrongly. We be the heathens in their eyes. Red Men worship powerful beings dwelling among the Great Blue Mountains, far to the west. I’ve not seen the like myself, mind you—the mountains I mean, for no one e’er sees any god—still, I’ve witnessed many a stranger sight.”

  The militiaman looked first to Sedrich, then his father, lowering his voice. “I’ve heard it said that among the Red devils, some are wont to couple with other men.”

  He gave an elaborate shiver, folding his arms as if this settled the matter of the Red Man’s fitness for extermination.

  Owaldsohn tossed his son a look of concern. Some months would pass yet before Owaldsohn would acknowledge knowing of his son’s first afternoon upon the estuary with Frae. Meanwhile, as with many fathers, even good ones like the son of Owald, his offspring’s readiness to hear about such things was a matter to him of embarrassed conjecture.

  “Aye, ’tis rumored,” he said at last, his voice soft, “as are many things.”

  Sedrich spoke up, his face reddening. “The same’s true among the Brotherhood, Father. Or thus I’ve heard whispered.”

  “Aye, boy,” replied the captain with a sour grin, glancing round to see if they were overheard. “Such things are best always whispered.”

  3

  Now, months later, Frae wondered still about that conversation. It had ceased, of late, being a matter of idle speculation, for her or Sedrich. If such whisperings about the Brotherhood—or at least its local leader—were truthful, then she was confused.

  There would come a day, no doubt, when Oln Woeck would be invited to bathe with the Parcifals. Later yet...

  Sedrich said he didn’t care if Oln Woeck buggered he-goats, observing that the old man certainly smelled as if he did. Frae would have agreed had she been clearer about the meaning of the word “bugger.” To be sure, the Cultist never walked out without his retinue of underwitted, overmuscled—yet somehow soft-looking—young men.

  But if men were what Oln Woeck preferred to bed, what did he want with her?

  Frae shuddered, imagining obscene rites in secret places.

  Between sweet stolen moments together, Frae watched Sedrich sharpen his knife. At nights she often glimpsed him keeping watch upon her from the house next door.

  Meantime, week by week, Sedrich’s land-boat began assuming its proper shape. He’d abandoned his experiments with the awkward dogcart, converting a rowboat contributed by his friend Old Roger the resiner, one considered by its former owner to be beyond repair. For his purpose, its parchment-thin translucent fiberglass hull was perfect.

  Wheels she’d watched him fashion, taking the lightest, strongest design their people possessed—more trade secrets, this time from the wheelwright, Hillestadt—doubling the diameter, halving the thickness. This was necessary, he explained, determined by his boyhood experiences with the wheelbarrow in his mother’s garden. The bigger a wheel, the bigger the bumps it could get over. The roads round their village were nothing to brag of, having taken their courses from the sheep driven over them for hundreds of years.

  At the stern of the little craft, she helped him step his peculiar mast. Sedrich had fashioned it from resin-filled glass fabric, upon a long, greased hardwood mandrel. A hollow tube, in diameter the width of his palm and mounted in a block of laminated hardwood, he’d begun fashioning sails for it, using broad strips of cloth likewise stiffened with resin. These rode upon half a dozen booms, above and below, which, in turn, were fixed to lightweight steel rings encircling the mast.

  They’d spent many a day together—days she ought to have spent indoors with the housework—while he lathe-cut the cylindrical bearings which bore upon the mast, letting the rings turn without friction.

  The machinery wasn’t complicated. Sedrich’s genius lay, Frae realized, in having conceived such a thing in the first place. The lower ring sat upon a great hollow gear intermeshing with a worm—the middle section of the boat’s rear axle. The upper ring he raised and lowered by means of a line passing through the hollow mast.

  There came at last a day when all he wanted for a first ride was a good stiff breeze. Such were plentiful where they lived, courtesy, each dawning and sunset, of the great ocean upon whose shores their little village sat. That first morning, thinking Frae home asleep, Sedrich pushed his craft to a bluff where a sandy pathway tipped over toward the water. From behind a dune she watched as he raised sails, waiting for the wind to begin turning them, for the gear to move the worm which moved the wheels. He glanced about, obviously worrying about Oln Woeck—among others—hoping, at this time of the morning, no one would see him. But for Frae, concealed by sand and seaside plant growth, no one did. It was a good thing for his pride, if not his safety.

  Nothing happened.

  The sails filled, straining the mast, tautening the guyline running from a sprit aft, slacking that which ran to the bow. Nothing else came to pass. Humiliated, he furled his sails, pushed his useless craft back to the shed. He sat down to think. As much beyond her years, in her own way, as her lover, Frae crept home unseen.

  She never mentioned his first failure to him.

  Next morning, Sedrich and Frae were in the same places at the same time. Realizing the feature which allowed him to lower the upper set of booms also allowed him to raise the lower set, he’d contrived a lever, with a spare bearing at its end, to lift the hollow gear from engagement with the worm. Freed of their load, the sails began to turn. Round and round they turned, faster and faster, the ends of the booms they strained against becoming an indistinguishable blur.

  He let the lever rise in his hand to engage the gear.

  Disaster exploded round him as the course teeth struck the worm. Sedrich had expressed worries about the stresses his hollow gear would endure. He’d built well. It tore the worm from the gunwales, hurling it a hundred paces—just as Owaldsohn had once done with the boat-crank—showering splinters, metal-scrap, and fiberglass debris.

  “Sedrich!”

  This time, despite herself, Frae ran forward, driven by despair. He was too stunned to protest. Even together, they’d had to get his father’s help—Willi and Klem trotting along for the fun—to haul the ruin back to the shed.

  With greater patience than most children his age, and with the passage of much time, Sedrich improved upon his bo
at. Sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes afraid, Frae watched and helped. He learned that the lower and upper boom-rings must be somehow connected to keep the sails from twisting about the mast—which had been the second most obvious result of his most disastrous experiment. He contrived clever arrangements of gears, enabling him to engage the system without destroying it.

  In the next trial he acquired a scar across his back which he’d carry to the grave.

  Frae sewed him back together in the manner Ilse and the Sisterhood had taught her, stifling tears of sympathetic anguish and unfulfilled terror. This disaster taught him that he must redesign his steering system. Thus he abandoned the fifth wheel, learning to turn those upon each side of the craft at differing speeds.

  This led to inventing a way to move the boat backward. On one good, windy afternoon, he’d driven it into a thicket whose spines he’d to endure to push the boat back by hand.

  Frae watched all this with horrified fascination. As the machinery grew more reliable, she took rides with him as he labored to increase the land-boat’s speed.

  Meanwhile, she’d encountered less difficulty putting off Oln Woeck than she’d thought possible. Sedrich said the old man was loath to take a bath of any kind, ritual or aughtwise. Time passed, and it was upon one such ride across the back roads of the village, at the exhilarating speed of a doddering oldster, that she explained to the one man she loved how in the winter she’d give birth to his child.

  Sedrich slammed the clutch out, kicked the brake-lever, bringing the vehicle to a halt.

  “Out of the boat!” he ordered.

  Fear seized at the girl. “Sedrich, have I thus displeased you?”

  Seeing he’d frightened her, Sedrich placed a gentle hand upon her arm. “No, dearest, I’m not displeased. But riding in this contraption is too dangerous. I’ll not have you hurt yourself or lose our child.”

  Frae fumed aloud, protesting.

  Still, inside her was a warm glow—only partly because of their child-to-come.

  VII: The Sacred Heart

  “Is there not in Gehenna a lodging for those that are proud?”

  —The Koran, Sura XXXIX

  "With me”—Ilse laughed—“’twas sardines.”

  She folded the knitting in her lap and gazed up at the ceiling, her thoughts focused not upon flickering shadows thrown there by the great fireplace—where a kettle of sweet cider simmered—but seventeen years in her past.

  “I’d thought tales women told of such yearnings were mere jest. Yet, I trow, had Owaldsohn not found a fishmonger willing to be awakened many a night, methinks I’d have died of longing.”

  Beside her upon the divan, Frae laughed, taking another bite of the great red onion she’d just set upon an end-table.

  “Aye,” remembered Owaldsohn, “people roundabout’ve been saying e’er since there’s something fishy about me!”

  The blacksmith grinned, scratching black Klem between the ears. The dog turned blind adoring eyes upon his master. Owaldsohn, his legs outstretched before him, lounged in a broad-backed chair before the fire, doing nothing. It was for him a rare moment of relaxation. His long hair was nearly white, as was his furry chest, but muscles bulged with latent power where they were exposed by his sleeveless vest. Across the carved wooden arms of the chair lay Murderer in its wolfhide scabbard. He’d just finished oiling the great blade.

  Frae’s blue eyes twinkled in the firelight, dimples showing. She, too, had knitting in her lap. Both women were preparing tiny clothing, impelled, no doubt, by the sight of the blizzard piling up outside to the halfway point of the night-blackened window.

  “I don’t know what we’d have done, had we not come to you.” Sedrich nodded to his parents.

  Out of grudging self-protection, he, too, took a bite from Frae’s gigantic onion before returning to his work. Willi whimpered, wanting some as well.

  It was denied him.

  “Knowing all we know of such things, we’d have been in utter darkness about what was happening with her. I still am, half the time.”

  The young man sat cross-legged at the girl’s feet, a yard of thin, soft deerskin in his own lap. In his hands were a bit of dull-tipped antler and a fist-size lump of glassy stone. With the horn, he bore down hard upon a corner of the flint.

  There was a crackle.

  “Damn!” he shouted, throwing stone and horn down, sucking at a knuckle where dark blood welled from a small, straight-sided cut. “How do the Red Men do it?”

  “They don’t”—Owaldsohn guffawed—“Whene’er they can get steel trade-points from us. What make you there, anywise?”

  Sedrich gave the man a brief, peculiar look. “Why, naught of import, Father. Another experiment.”

  2

  Outside the snowbanked window, with little save his misery to keep him warm, Hethri Parcifal listened.

  Things were coming to a critical pass. He couldn’t pretend much longer that he didn’t know his daughter was with child. Already the village women were looking at him in the same wise as just before his wife, Frae’s mother, had...

  No use thinking about that.

  Nor could he pretend the fact that Frae spent all her time with the next-door neighbors—instead of with the man he’d chosen for her—had aught to do with her employment.

  Peering through the dense-steamed window, he watched Sedrich, intent upon his mysterious flint-knapping, wondering what vile mischief the young devil was preparing now, there in that same lap where he’d ruined Parcifal’s only child.

  Just like her faithless—no!

  Backing upon his frozen belly through the snowdrift, Parcifal was grateful to Owaldsohn for the oversolicitude the blacksmith was wont to show his dogs. He’d not leave them out upon a night like this, bred to it though they be. As they baked, indolent, before the fire, Parcifal could approach without risk of their fangs and listen.

  And plan.

  A prudent distance away, he rose, brushing wet, heavy snow from his clothing. Racing to his own house, cold and dark by contrast to the Owaldsohns’, lonely, he dragged his own dogs from the kennel, hitched them to their cart. They snarled and nipped at one another, tangling their traces. Seating himself in the cart, he whipped them to attention, drove them out into the road.

  Too far it was to trek this night afoot to the compound of the Brotherhood of Jesus in Hell.

  The ride, five minutes’ walk upon a summer’s day, took more than an hour, the dogs just able to haul the cart through the wind-drift, their master squinting through the driven flakes to steer them. He reached the village headquarters of the Cult sooner than he knew, however, passing between the gateposts without seeing them. Aside from the few candles the penurious flagellants allowed themselves, no other light was there to tell him he’d arrived.

  In the middle of the compound yard, he stopped, handing the reins to the sick-looking probationary in a dirty robe who’d unwittingly served as a milepost.

  The tattoos at the fellow’s temples were as yet seeping raw.

  “Take these animals somewhere. Let them warm up.” He indicated the cart. “There is food for them there. See you give it to them, instead of distributing it among your number.”

  “As always, Hethri Parcifal, thou’rt the soul of generosity,” a voice behind him wheezed in the darkness.

  Parcifal turned to see Oln Woeck watching him, soiled robe pulled up against the cold, a humorless half-smile upon the old man’s thin lips. Behind him, more shadow than substance, were his eternal pair of young, husky companions.

  “As always, Oln Woeck, your order pays as little as it can get away with for aught it takes. And that is plenty. I bear it—and you—few charitable thoughts.”

  “There we differ, dearest friend. In my heart, I’ve naught but the most cordial thoughts for thee and thine, good Hethri Parcifal, peacekeeper and paragon.”

  Parcifal shuddered in response, perhaps only with the cold.

  The sole illumination in the yard streamed from the open double doo
rs of the common central building, where a circle of Brothers knelt about the reclining form of one of their own number. The man rested upon a raised platform, the focal point of light from tallow candles resting in every niche and wall-projection visible. Even out here in the frozen air, the odor of putrefaction was unmistakable.

  Curious, Parcifal repressed an urge to retch and stepped closer. Inside, the victim gave a feeble moan, tossing his head. Clearly, he suffered from gangrene, the undressed fracture at his ankle swollen glossy black, bone fragments thrusting white through outraged flesh. Mumbled prayers rose from the group round him, slipping out the door like smoke, and drifting into the unseen overcast sky.

  Astonished, Parcifal realized he’d known men injured worse than this to recover with the proper care. Why didn’t the Brothers—that quick with the axe when they encountered “blasphemy”—do something? He turned to make some comment to Oln Woeck. He saw the leader’s face. Three hundred candles blazed inside the room. Not a flicker lit the compound yard. What it wouldn’t give to life, the Cult squandered upon death.

  Perhaps one fewer of them by daybreak might be a blessing.

  Oln Woeck beckoned Parcifal to the front of one of many huts surrounding the bleak establishment. His companions followed. In the tradition of the Brotherhood, the leader’s was no better than any of the other huts, being of rammed earth, not perhaps the best choice for this climate. It showed sign of continuous incompetent repair.

  As he shut the raw planked door, Oln Woeck began to fumble with a tinderbox, purposing to light a candle, while Parcifal clapped his hands upon his upper arms in vain attempt to keep them warm. Oln Woeck’s companions disposed themselves in the shadows at two corners of the room. As one sat cross-legged and vacant of expression, picking his nose, the other sprawled, rooting through the clothing at his loins. He commenced a crude rhythm, grunting in time with the motion of his cupped hands. “We believe—unh, unh—we believe—unh, unh—we believe in the Father, Maker of Heaven and earth, and in...”