The Crystal Empire

by L. Neil Smith

  Nanam, yes, well, I was appointed cooper’s helper, and spent much time thereafter making barrels. I believe I could still do it today, were there a need. Our squadron sailed about the Greater Ocean, from Attu down to Hawaii, thence to the Island Continent, doing a little trading and a deal of adventitious plundering, until a storm blew up one day, driving us hard upon the coast we spoke of earlier.”

  Mochamet al Rotshild shivered at his memories.

  “I swear to you the storm had cleared and skies were sparkling as we made for what we took to be an uninhabited island where we could lay up to patch our bodies and our boats. Of a sudden, we were struck by lightning—not a brief blue-yellow flash as one is used to, but a long, blood-colored stroke which carried yards away as a feather singes in the hearth. It sank every one of seven ships in our squadron, leaving me the sole survivor. The very ocean boiled about the place where our ships had gone down.”

  The merchant rose, pacing as he spoke.

  “I clung to a barrel I had hidden in during the onslaught. New white oak it was, lined with copper sheet for holding oil. Then I snagged a drifting lifeboat. I rigged a sail, making back for the last of those islands we had called upon. A long voyage it was, nor was I much welcomed when I got there, having helped to burn their largest town. I swore to them by God and by His Prophet that I had been a slave. Whereupon I found myself fashioning barrels for them until a Saracen vessel happened to call there. I eventually returned home.”

  These words had brought him to the window. He stood, his hands locked behind him, his back to the room, staring at the rain. Then he turned back to the Caliph and his wife.

  “No one believed me about scarlet lightning, but I saw it myself. I remember it as if it were yesterday. The barrel which saved my life was reduced to charcoal outside. What it did to a squadron it could have done to a fleet.

  “What was it, you ask? I have no idea. An act of God? Black magic? Forgive me, Your Holiness, Lady Jamela, but in all truth I do not believe in either one. A freak of a storm long past? I do not know. I have seen many other strange things, in my long life, but nothing like that before or since. I would like to know what it was.”

  The Caliph had arisen to join his friend. He placed a hand upon Mochamet al Rotshild’s shoulder. He turned his face, however, to Jamela.

  “Indeed, such a thing might end a war. This is our hope. And now Mochamet al Rotshild, old man that he has become in service to his Caliph since last seeing the western shore of the Savage Continent—yet not an old man in spirit—is about to serve Us once again by embarking upon another voyage, by sea and land, this time a diplomatic mission to the very center of that barbarian world.”

  To Mochamet al Rotshild: “For a subtle, multifaceted trader, this need not be an altruistic venture in entire. Nor, for the sake of its success, should it appear so.

  “You may leave Us, Jamela. You have heard that which We would have you hear. Doubtless you have errands of your own you wish to see to. We shall stay here a while, making plans. Send Ayesha to Us, will you? We believe her advice might prove helpful.”

  Jamela rose. “Massach chalhghayr, Your Holiness; good day, Mochamet al Rotshild.”

  “Massach chalhghayr, Lady Jamela; may God, most Merciful and Compassionate, go with you.”

  3

  As soon as she was able, Jamela returned to her own apartments, ticking liabilities and assets off upon her fingers as her slippers scuffed down the thick-carpeted hallway.

  Let old men worry themselves, she thought, about global politics. Scarlet lightning, indeed! Toys—fantasies of children. Her problem, as always, was a domestic one. Her husband had called her there for but one reason: to let her know he knew that for the sake of her son, his only legal heir, she schemed against his favorite Princess at the risk of his displeasure. Abu Bakr Mohammed might think he valued that crazy little brat of his for her strange visionary “wisdom.” Jamela knew better.

  Jamela always knew better.

  Ayesha was the very image of her absent mother. Shaatirah had not only been the Caliph’s first wife but his first love, as well. Retiring her, even in an elegance which she had refused—such had been a letter of the law to which a ruler is more subject than any of his citizens—had aged him by decades.

  Even the name of Malta, whither she had been sent, was, by mutual agreement among inhabitants of the palace, forbidden to be mentioned in the Caliph’s presence.

  Ayesha’s presence, then, the reminder she represented, weakened the power, not just of Jamela herself, but of others with whom she was engaged in a shifting complex of alliances. Ayesha, too, must be “retired,” some proper use found for her.

  Perhaps an advantageous marriage, or as a suitable token in the making of a treaty.

  Nodding to a hallway guard, Jamela entered her own door.

  Tea had been laid there by a servant, but this she ignored, going first to an adjoining room to look in upon her son.

  Twenty-year-old Ali sat in his pen, a diaper about his loins, playing with a carven butterfly suspended from the ceiling on a cord. At the sound of the door opening behind him, he twisted his fat neck around and favored her with a gummy, crooked smile.

  The ever-present nurse-servant sat knitting in a corner. Jamela walked across the carpet, leaned into the pen, and tousled Ali’s hair. His eyes were tiny, his ears very slightly pointed and carried low upon the sides of his overly broad head. He smiled again and reached for her. She leaned back beyond his grasp—he was immensely strong.

  She wondered if this thing she felt for Ali might be love. She had never felt the like for anyone else. A fierce protectiveness, mingled with the knowledge that, whatever else he might be, Ali was the Caliph’s only heir—had she not bribed and blackmailed enough midwives, and at terrible risk, to be sure of it?

  With an aged Caliph out of the way—he was an old man, after all, and could not last forever—Jamela would be Ali’s regent. These thoughts and feelings were so mixed in her, love, hate, greed and pity, that she examined them but seldom.

  She refused to do so now.

  Returning to the first room, she strode to a locked cabinet, whence, by means of a key suspended from a fine gold chain about her neck, she removed a small lacquered box.

  Throwing herself upon a pile of cushions, she took from the box a small packet of white papers, a pouch containing dried, shredded leaves of an illegal and unholy weed. With deft fingers she rolled both into a slender cylinder, placing it between her lips. She thrust its other end into a brazier beneath the teapot.

  The feel of nicotine surging through her blood was a benediction, after so many hours without it.

  Now she could think. Even an absolute ruler, Jamela reasoned, must bow to the necessity of keeping peace in his own household. The Caliph’s objections to a rational disposition of his bothersome girl-child should prove easy to overcome.

  Again she considered assets she could bring to bear upon her problem. Marya’s failure this morning was another reminder, one which could not have come too soon. Pretty little Shaabbah might serve, the Caliph’s wily and seductive youngest wife. She would do as her senior bade her. Perhaps not gladly—but she supposed Jamela alone knew of her affair with the Caliph’s guardsman.

  Other obstacles?

  Ayesha’s teacher, maa ismugh, what was his name again? Shulieman-something.

  “Shulieman counts for less than nothing,” she heard herself saying aloud. “He is only a hireling Jew.”

  Hirelings, she thought, often were required to travel with those they served. If he truly loved her, if a rigorous journey sapped him of resolve to conceal that love...Either way, he could be disposed of as easily as the girl.

  Ayesha’s own protests, should she be foolhardy enough to give voice to them, could lead to her more direct undoing.

  At long last, Jamela poured herself a cup of tea, settling back. Lighting her second seekaaragh, she began sorting through her mind for names of foreign dignitaries—thapnan, also their children,
of course—of a marriageable disposition.

  And the further away, the better.

  XV: By Arrangement of the Caliph

  “Whomsoever God will, He leads astray, and whomsoever He will, He sets him on a straight path.”—The Koran, Sura VI

  Prairie stretched in all directions, much like the south of Faransaa, infinitely emptier, A tireless wind bore the same rich spices. The sky had the same look: bleak where it was still clear, cloud-mountains clenched in towering fists, blue-black, seamed by lightning.

  She lay in soap-odored dirt, breathing hard from terror and exertion, trying—for her life—to keep still. Yellow flies buzzed about, drawing crusty patches of blood where they bit. Her clothes were drenched with the effort of doing nothing. Figures either side of her lay even more still, splintered war-shafts protruding from their bodies, scarlet mingling with alkali soil.

  High above, upon widespread fringe-tipped wings, scavengers circled, wary and patient. It was not yet their time. A random arrow thudded into the dirt, a finger’s width from her side. She lay still, trying to control her fear.

  “Ayeeeah!”

  Her world filled with an idiot screaming for the fifth time that afternoon, the gloating whoop of victory-to-come, savage voices raised into falsetto. Through the earth at her ear, she heard the pounding of many feet. She lay with her arms beneath her body, something small and hard folded in her hands.

  With deliberate care—and both thumbs—she turned back the hammer of a small, two-barreled pistol. It was difficult. The thing had been made for a strong man. Trying not to think, she bent its muzzle upward, beneath her jaw, remembering at the last moment to put it in her mouth to avoid half-measures too hideous to contemplate. She tightened both index fingers upon the trigger.

  Almost too late, she heard the screams cut off.

  Pulling the gun away from her face, she risked rising upon an elbow. Bodies—those of friends and enemies alike (including the man who had given her his pistol as a desperate last resort)—lay everywhere in the dry prairie grass. Others, a pitiful few, strained with her to see what had stopped the attack.

  A cloud of yellow dust boiled upon the horizon with a thundering which might have come from the angry clouds overhead. In seconds, she could hear something else, a caterwauling whine, like musicians tuning up in the bazaars of Rome—a paralyzing wave of homesickness chose that moment to wash over her—then she saw them.

  In form, they were like brown helmet-crabs she had played with upon girlhood trips to the beach, they of the many tiny legs and long-barbed tail. These monsters were a hundred times larger. There were a score of them, skimming across the plain.

  Heedless of broken gunfire coming from the few survivors they had left, the savages fled. One archer screamed as the leading creature drew him beneath its advancing carapace, then fell as silent as his own victims.

  He disappeared.

  2

  As usual, Ayesha awoke with a start.

  “Merciful God,” she sighed to herself, “that was a strange one!”

  Placing her small feet upon a parqueted floor beside the divan, she ran a hand across her forehead. One might believe, she thought, that a person would get used to waking up like this. She never had. For some reason, it was worse when she slept during the daytime, her dreams more alien and vivid, her awakening a hot and dizzy one.

  She arose, tucking her day-robe about her, and, barefoot, crossed the comfortable study which was a part of her personal suite. Not waiting for a servant, she drew back draperies from windows which comprised one wall of the room. She was startled for a moment by the sight of one of the palace handymen outside, half naked, the skirt of a burnoose wound about his face, scrubbing at her window-framing with a dry brush. Removing old paint, she assumed. His box of cleaning supplies hung suspended by a strap over his shoulder.

  She waved and smiled, a habit she was certain all of her father’s wives would have disapproved, then crossed to a huge brass-barred cage suspended upon a gilt-threaded rope from the high ceiling. She tapped one of its bars with a dainty, short-trimmed fingernail.

  “Sagheer, are you ready to come out now, little one?”

  There was a stirring inside the cage.

  Taking a key from the drawer of a nearby stand of ebony and inlaid mother-of-pearl, she unfastened a padlock hanging from the small cage door. It had been necessary to resort to this. Sagheer could unfasten every other sort of closure she had tried.

  Inside, a brown, furry form reached tiny fingers toward her. Its eyes glistened in the shadows of a quilted satin cozy which covered half the cage. The animal leaped off its swinging perch, rushed to the door, forcing it open with sheer weight as soon as Ayesha could remove the lock. No larger than her two fists put together, it jumped into her arms.

  “Sagheer, Sagheer!” she crooned, smoothing the small, round head between rounded ears. The creature’s great eyes regarded her as it twined its fingers in her hair. From the drawer she took a peanut, offering it to him. He slapped it from her fingers. It hit the floor, skidding beneath the stand. Most times, he took it in both hands, dismembered its hull with his teeth, which were tiny and pointed.

  “Chanaa muthachassibh. I only meant it to be a little nap, Sagheer. Studying for examinations I shall never take is a stern test of one’s resolve. I hope Father and David appreciate it.”

  Sagheer looked up at her, almost, she thought, as if he could understand what she was saying. A second offering he accepted. She laughed, then crossed the book-lined room in a different direction, passing a great globe of the world, a beloved and battered rocking-dog she refused to let them put into storage, to an enormous well-lighted desk, weighted down with volumes and implements of writing.

  Scattering bits of broken shell behind him, Sagheer rode upon her shoulder as he had since Ayesha had been eleven. The pygmy marmoset had been a gift from her father’s friend, that fabulous merchant captain (some whispered pirate) Mochamet al Rotshild.

  He himself preferred (as pirates were wont to do, she imagined) a parrot, a gray-white roc of a bird with yellow eyes, a shiny black beak, and a bright orange tail, which he sometimes brought with him when he came to the palace. It rode upon his shoulder, expressing sentiments, in its harsh, raucous voice, which would have embarrassed anyone else (save perhaps the captain, who must have taught him) even to think about.

  Still, Ayesha’s one regret about Sagheer was that he could not talk to her. She loved her father, and he her. Yet he was the most important man in the world, not to her alone, but to every one of the Faithful. He had little time to spare her. For a like reason, her father’s power, nobody offered open friendship to her, untainted with ulterior designs, nor could she have accepted if they had.

  Even David, she had understood since she was a very little girl indeed, must be careful to maintain a professional attitude toward her. He was a good friend, seeming unimpressed with anyone’s power, social importance, or wealth. What mattered to him was one’s intelligence, perhaps even more, one’s ethics. This made him even lonelier than she was, she supposed (he had never married), and—for different reasons than any lack of intelligence or ethics she might have suffered—kept the two of them at more than arm’s length.

  3

  “Princess?”

  Late that afternoon, as outdoor light had begun to fail her, Ayesha was surprised by a timid rapping at the arched frame of the open door between her study and the sitting-room connecting with the family-quarters corridors outside her suite. She turned from her book to see Marya standing in the doorway.

  “Princess,” the woman offered with uncharacteristic diffidence—she had never bothered to knock before, either—“your presence is requested in the Caliph’s library as soon as is convenient. I am instructed to accompany you there.”

  What was that odd look in Marya’s eyes, Ayesha wondered. Smugness, perhaps, mingled with what...fear? Perhaps it came from being commanded by too many high-placed masters. Marya was her servant, to be ordered abou
t by no one else. She had exchanged well-measured words with Lady Jamela over this very topic not many days ago. In any event, it was certainly an unattractive combination of expressions.

  Ayesha arose from her desk, brushing at her robe, which had become wrinkled from long hours of sitting, cupped a palm over the chimney of a reading lamp she had just lit, blowing it out.

  “Have I time to change, Marya?”

  The woman swallowed. “Princess, I have relayed to you all the message I was charged with.”

  Ayesha nodded. “Jayyit, let us assume, then, that good manners are still called for. Min bhatlah, please lay out my green velvet with gilt at the shoulders. Perhaps Father has company. In any case, I should want to look my best for him.”

  Through the curtain Ayesha had redrawn when night began to fall, neither of them noticed the turbaned handyman, removing something from the glass, making minute adjustments within his shoulder-slung toolbox. Satisfied, he climbed down from the window, leaving the vicinity of the Princess’ quarters as they did.

  4

  When she arrived at her father’s library, not more than half an hour later, Ayesha saw that her guess had been correct. In addition to herself and Marya, and a lieutenant-of-the-guard, there were His Holiness himself, the Lady Jamela, the Lady Shaabbah, Rabbi David, and the “Commodore,” Mochamet al Rotshild.

  He had not brought his parrot.

  Curtsying, Ayesha glanced at each person in the room, attempting to divine from their expressions why she had been called here. Observing Mochamet al Rotshild, whom she knew least well of all those here, she would have described his expression as studiedly neutral. He was seated in a high-backed chair beside her father’s, a steaming mug of coffee in his enormous, freckled hand.

  David stood behind the old pirate, not leaning against the bookcases. There was an odd look upon his face which she could not interpret, but the gloating in Jamela’s eyes was unmistakable. Seated upon a hassock by the Caliph’s right knee, she had broken all precedent by bringing Ali with her, dressed in his finest, which he had soiled sometime in the last few minutes. He sat upon the carpet at Jamela’s feet, sucking a finger and whimpering a little around it.