The Crystal Empire

by L. Neil Smith

  Later, when she thought his stomach capable of bearing it, she’d demonstrated for him what it was she’d accomplished, upon a chicken she was preparing for dinner. He almost smiled at the memory. She’d misjudged what he could bear to witness. Afterward, he’d been unable to choke down a bite of that chicken. Huddling with a wet and odorous Willi against a slight overhang in the rocks of a waist-high ridge—nothing resembling a cave—he wished he had it now, e’en without a fire.

  Of a sudden, Willi looked up, snuffling into the damp breeze. Rain still fell in stifling curtains all about them, limiting vision to a few paces in three directions. Sedrich kept his back to the rock, although it blinded him upon one side and sucked the heat out of his body. While he was wishing, he wished for flint and steel and tinder—e’en without the chicken. As he shivered and pulled the big dog closer, the pommel of his father’s greatsword scraped against the overhang.

  Abruptly a wiry hand thrust itself down over the blind lip of the rock, seizing Sedrich by the hair, dragging him upward against the slanting ceiling of the overhang.

  Out of boyhood reflex, he grabbed for Murderer’s handle with the hand that wasn’t there. By the time he’d overcome this impulse, it was too late to correct it. Instead, he took a firm grip upon the rain-slick wrist above his eyes and pulled.

  A youth, no older than himself, tumbled over the rock onto his back, twist-jerked himself into a crouching posture, and slashed at Sedrich with a rusted knife, deep-worn in the center of the blade from being honed upon random stones.

  The boy shouted something at him and spat.

  Sedrich kicked him in the crotch.

  The Red boy stumbled back, just retaining his balance, eyes filled with an agony he bore in stoic silence. The rage Sedrich had felt so long began to boil over within him. Oblivion stretched black and greedy talons up to drag him downward, into the depths. He did not resist. Instead, heedless and unconscious of what he was doing, he advanced, swatted at the knife with his pelt-covered forearm, seized the stranger by the throat with his one good hand. With unnatural strength he squeezed, letting his thumb and fingers find the thin, ribbed cartilage beneath the skin.

  Sweat stood out upon his forehead, mingling with the streaming rain.

  His opponent dropped his knife, tore frantically with both hands at Sedrich’s fingers, but to no avail. He squirmed, twisted, but couldn’t escape the energy of surprise he’d given Sedrich and which, within an instant, had turned to blood-haze.

  A few paces away, black Willi snarled and bristled. Sedrich was unaware that he was being watched. Indeed, he was unaware of anything at all. Half a dozen other boys, who’d by now forgotten both their weapons and their duty to a friend, were frozen by the terror of the moment and by Sedrich’s rage which appeared to them a palpable entity in itself. The dog’s growling threats were secondary. A killing, so ruthless as to defy description, so cruel as to stun the sensibilities of any decent warrior, was occurring before their horror-fascinated eyes. They were held as helpless by it as their companion, whose soul, stopped in its outward journey by Sedrich’s hand upon his throat, would be trapped within a dying body, never to escape.

  Only demons fought in this wise.

  Rain fell.

  Sedrich’s enemy had fallen limp, but it was long before the young Helvetian let the inert body slip onto the muddy ground. When he did, a tiny movement caught the attention of whatever it was that looked out through his eyes. Another leather-clad boy with black and braided hair was watching him, openmouthed.

  And another.

  Four, five, or maybe six of them altogether. Faithful Willi stood his ground between him and the enemy, fangs bared, muzzle pleated, eyes insane, keeping them at bay.

  Unsheathing Murderer left-handed, Sedrich stepped forward.

  The Red boys turned and, scattering their handheld possessions, fled screaming.

  Time passed.

  As his mind at last began to clear, Sedrich looked down at the dead one. Doubtless he would feel something about this—what little he remembered of it—later. At present, he felt nothing. Clothing—the boy’s loose-fitting buckskins covered him from collarbone to ankle. And new moccasins, if they fit. And he could always use an extra knife—

  What was this? A brassy oblong shimmered in the wet grass where it had fallen from the beaded pouch his enemy had worn. Picking it up, Sedrich turned his back to the rain to examine it, discovering that about a third of the rectangular object could be hinged away from the rest, exposing a perforated steel cylinder, a serried steel wheel—and a wick!

  The thing reeked of alcohol.

  Minutes later, a warmly clad Sedrich Sedrichsohn huddled against the stony outcrop once more, considerably more watchful than he’d been ere now, basking in the joyous radiation of a fire which raised steam from Willi’s wet, crinkly coat.

  The big dog’s eyes twinkled merrily, and he drooled: he’d found a brace of arrow-punctured ruffled grouse one of the boys had dropped. Both birds were gutted, plucked, and roasting now, upon green sticks cantilevered over the fire.

  Elsewhere, frightened children spoke to their temporarily unbelieving parents of giant demon-dogs and invincible strangling spirits. Sedrich’s one step forward hadn’t merely saved his life.

  It had begun a legend.

  3

  “Who kills a dozen of us is our enemy,” Knife Thrower had told Fireclaw long ago, making him a peace-gift of the four-limbed longbow after five scarlet-stained years of continuous warfare between a single crippled stranger and the best fighters of an entire warrior nation. Grinning, the young Comanche war chief had added, “Who kills a hundred of us must become our friend.”

  Fireclaw had by that time dispatched five hundred.

  Now the legendary killer strode between his ranch buildings toward the front gate of a broad, well-swept, foot-hardened yard, delineated by a low fence of the same stacked sod the buildings were constructed of. In cool prairie stillness, the first breath of morning rippled their close-trimmed grassy coverings.

  Eastward, an orange sun hung low over dew-damp plains. The Great Blue Mountains, showing a more gentle, violet hue this time of day, at sunset would stand against the flame-colored western sky in blackened silhouette, like the jagged teeth of some unimaginable monster.

  At times, Fireclaw wondered still what lay beyond them, although for some years, for the most part, he’d been content with wondering, nothing more. Now, a bit ashamed at his abated curiosity, he wondered about something else: whether he was growing old.

  Ursi, joined by some of the other dogs, came with him. Sniffing the air, the great beast uttered a low, threatening mutter which was taken up by the rest of the pack. Tucking bow and quiver beneath his sword-arm, Fireclaw reached down, took one of creature’s ragged, oily ears between left thumb and forefinger, massaged it with absent affection until the animal was quiet again.

  The pillar of fire drew nearer.

  A series of all-too-familiar whoops and shrieks could be heard now above the less frequent explosive pops and low thundering. The former sounds had filled a thousand sleepless nights when he’d first come to this place; they’d echoed all round him as he later fought the enemies of his adopted tribe. He himself fought in an icy silence punctuated only by the drumming of his heart, the sizzle of frozen fire through his veins. Comanche tales marked this silence—and nothing of what Sedrich felt within it—another legend born of naught more than his own unselfconscious nature, the grim, unvarnished necessities of survival. Whate’er he did, breathe in this wise, move a weapon-bearing hand thus, legend seemed to stalk him like his own shadow.

  He spat.

  Far away, the thundering continued.

  Concentration wrinkling his weathered features, Fireclaw strained to recall where he’d heard yon latter noise ere now, that headlong clattering rumble. ’Twas something like unto the echoes from a nearby canyon when he “shot the anvil”—set off a charge of black powder beneath it, flinging it high into the air each Midsumm
er’s Day to the delighted terror of the children of Dove Blossom’s tribe.

  Out of long proprietary reflex, he glanced toward his powder mill, two thousand measured paces from the ranch, of deliberately flimsy construction. Each loose-driven nail, every tool within, was fashioned out of beaten, sparkless copper. He’d lost the first two such buildings before learning to grind and sift the sun-dried cakes from a safe distance, employing braided ropes running about lathe-turned wooden pulleys. Each accident had added to his many scars. He felt grateful that was all they’d added—or carried away. This mill had stood some seven years, thus far, but was a source, for him, of constant apprehension.

  He shook his head. This new noise came not from the mill but from the opposite direction, far to the eastward, rolling on and on, unlike a powder accident, being felt now, even through the soles of his knee-length moccasins.

  The memory, however, wouldn’t come. Wondering about his age again, he acknowledged failure with a shrug, shielding his eyes with his left hand against the bright morning sky.

  By now, Dove Blossom was ensconced, with two of the dogs, upon the grassy roof of their home, well armed with a split-limbed bow of her own, a full cache of arrows they kept beneath cover there. Glancing away from the troubled horizon, he waved at her. She could kill a rabbit at a hundred paces, urging one and all to name which eye the arrow entered. She’d be safe upon the roof, well-trained, fierce retainers at her back, but no intruder would be safe from her.

  In the east, about where a rutted native road crossed the skyline, curving from its ancient, original course toward their ranch, Fireclaw could see that the pillar was in fact a squat, rapid-moving cloud.

  At least there could be no mistaking it, he thought with some relief, for the twist-storm it had at first resembled. This was the wrong time of year for them. They seldom struck this watershed in any case. And the weather wasn’t right.

  ’Twas the rising sun had given it the appearance of a column of flame.

  A troop of his brother-in-law’s warriors, pursuing an antelope or a foolhardy trespasser from a rival tribe, might well produce such a cloud, but it would have been much smaller, colored brown or yellow.

  This, at its heart, flash-danced with fire.

  Without being able to say why, the long-suppressed image of tall, rotating sails came into his mind, as he’d seen them upon the sea-horizon of his boyhood home.

  Memory flooded back into him.

  Of a sudden, he knew strangers were traveling this direction in the greatest of haste.

  And they were under attack.

  XIX: The Ship of the Desert

  “And of His signs are the ships that run on the sea like landmarks; and if He wills, He stills the wind...or He wrecks them for what they have earned....”

  —The Koran, Sura XLII

  Ayesha blinked at the unfamiliar-looking arrow quivering in the paneled wall before her face. For the most fleeting of instants, for reasons she could never afterward discover, it struck her as funny. Then indignation filled her heart, and, close upon that, curiosity. She felt little fear: those who have already died a thousand times—and have nothing left to live for—do not fear death.

  Outside, above the steady rumble of the land-ship’s giant wheels, she could hear the erratic pop and crackle of Saracen gunfire, the demented, murderous shriek of savages.

  Through the open door to the adjoining tiny cabin, she could see that it was empty.

  She wondered where Marya was.

  Assuring herself that Sagheer was secure in his little cage, she opened the outside door a cautious crack—only to find herself become the immediate target of several arrows which whistled past her eyes, rattling off the doorframe or sprouting in the wall behind her.

  One flailed sideways against the cage bars with a peculiar thrumming ring. Unhurt, the huge-eyed pygmy marmoset chittered fear and anger at the world.

  Ayesha threw herself to the floor, crawled out the door, along the short, narrow deck of the land-ship.

  Above her head, the very air seemed streaked, thick with missiles whispering of death. Peeking over the arrow-studded rail, she saw that the land-ship was rolling swiftly—if not as smoothly as before—across an endless mustard-colored prairie which reminded her of the south of Faransaa. Its twelve tall, white-bellied sails, six to a mast, flashed round and round almost indistinguishable from one another. Its four great steel-shod wheels left a spark-punctuated, impenetrable cloud of dust billowing behind for leagues to dim the morning sunlight.

  In the greater distance, edging the broad prairie to the west, tree-clad foothills shouldered one another in blurred and purple humps before a still-shadowed horizon serried by pale blue, insubstantial-looking peaks. Ayesha thought that they appeared somehow less real than the mountains painted in the background of a palace mural.

  “May your children call your worst enemy Father!”

  “Father! Father!”

  Grinning into the wind, orange-maned Mochamet al Rotshild stood upright, exposing himself to peril at the land-ship’s tiller, one freckled, broad and hairy hand upon the gear lever, laughing and cursing at their assailants as his parrot flapped upon his shoulder, echoing his vile language. His loose, bright-colored clothing snapped and crackled, like the sounds of gunfire all around him.

  “May your mother find a treatment for the disease she contracted conceiving you!”

  “Mother!” came the parrot’s raucous squawking. “Mother!”

  One brown-skinned native guide, the skinny one Mochamet al Rotshild had hired in a grimy tavern shortly before departing the eastern shore, huddled at the pirate’s knee beside the binnacle, pointing and shouting advice. The captain shouted back and nodded, hauled upon the tiller or pushed it away from him as was appropriate. Against the wind and sounds of warfare, Ayesha could not hear a word they uttered.

  The native’s squat, scar-faced companion lay upon his belly at the opposite end of the hurtling craft, high upon the foredeck, loading and discharging a crossbow into the tormenting pack. These two were, in appearance, quite unlike the fair-skinned east coast villagers of the Savage Continent—they much more closely resembled the attacking horde surrounding them—but had been stranded sailors whom the Commodore had picked up along the way.

  She could not see the third man, the old one, they had recruited from among the villagers, but she knew enough of him by now to be assured that he had seen to his own safety.

  Rabbi David Shulieman, as well, knelt close by the tiller, struggling in tight-lipped silence to reload the enormous four-barreled pistol he had seen fit to acquire in Rome, and to learn to use, and bring along. All the deadly while, he made the same frequent, unconscious stabs with a forefinger at the bridge of his spectacles as he had while conducting lessons all her life, shoving them back into place before his eyes.

  Once again Ayesha was tempted to laugh, and wondered if this was what people meant by hysteria.

  Traveling even faster than the land-ship they harried, uncounted red-skinned naked men, faces painted up in hideous colored patterns, each straddled the saddle of a small, two-wheeled machine, decorated as garishly as its rider.

  They zoomed past the land-ship’s bow, flashing aft to cut behind its stern, then forward once again to complete the circle, shouting, as they rode, in high, bloodcurdling voices, bouncing across the road-ruts, steering with their knees as they launched a sleet-storm of deadly missiles into the land-ship and those aboard her.

  Ayesha caught a glimpse of a blood-red handprint slapped upon the flank of one such machine, a flash of unclothed flesh, a flurry of streaming coal-black hair and eagle feathers, just before a sudden volley of arrows forced her to duck behind the rail.

  Amidships, Abu and Ali, the retainers her father had sent along, fired back with issue military-rifles, trying, as they did so, to avoid the land-ship’s whirling lower sail-booms as they whistled overhead. They were aided by Mochamet al Rotshild’s young female...what? Body-servant? Traveling companion? In any c
ase, she was an endless subject of scandalized indignant muttering upon Marya’s part, who, with Sagheer and the parrot, completed their expeditionary party of thirteen.

  Not far from Ayesha’s cabin door—she had not noticed him before—Sergeant Kabeer lay face down upon the hardwood decking, his lifeblood staining the well-scrubbed planks.

  Disregarding the hail of lethal objects showering all about her, Ayesha crawled toward the fallen man. The land-ship pitched and wallowed over uneven ground, slowing her progress, tossing her from side to side, and bruising her elbows.

  Kabeer groaned as she approached, trying to turn over. The long, ugly protruding shaft of an arrow, one end tangled in a basket-sized coil of rope beside the gunwale, stopped the motion.

  The other end was buried in his chest.

  Ayesha freed the arrow-end from the rope pile. It was a strange artifact, quite without the feathering she was used to. Its hollow rear length was filled with tiny drill-holes which lightened it, providing stabilizing resistance to the air. The front, almost half its length, was shod in metal.

  The deadly implement had passed through Kabeer’s leather ammunition bandoleer, the heavy woolen layers of his tunic, into his body, and out again just above the shoulder blade, exposing a broad, sharp-edged, spade-shaped tip, much like the point of a dagger, save for the outward-curving barbs at its rear corners.

  Both entry wound and exit welled scarlet about the intruding shaft in short, regular surges. The tubular, perforated rear half of the shaft encouraged the flow. The sergeant groaned again, relieved of some part of his pain, then closed his eyes.

  With trembling fingers, Ayesha broke the arrow where it entered. Odd, how she could feel fear for someone else but not herself. Opening his tunic, she stuffed the corner of a sheer and beautiful silk handkerchief from her sleeve into the open end of the projectile, and the rest of it about the entry wound, trusting to his heavy coat to hold it. She was afraid to do more, afraid that she had done too much. The shaft was solid where it left his back, the bleeding not quite so profuse there. She put her face near his, feeling his breath, warmly even upon the sensitive skin between her nose and upper lip.