The Crystal Empire

by L. Neil Smith

  The servant whispered now.

  “Does it not look exactly like the eggs it lays?”

  Ayesha shook her head and whispered back.

  “Either this is not its egg-laying season, or it bears its cruel fate with more dignity than one would credit from its appearance. Look, can you see what’s happening over there?”

  Marya shielded her eyes, peered at the human figure which had discreetly placed a large rock upthrust between the ranch and himself. The brown-skinned man was dressed in a leather loin-wrapping, like most of these plains people, but, even at this distance of several hundred paces, seemed somewhat more familiar than that.

  Without waiting for an answer, Ayesha asked another question.

  “Is that not the sailor whom the captain hired just after we made landfall back upon the coast?”

  “No,” her servant argued, “it is the one they call Knife Thrower. The brother of Fireclaw’s woman.”

  “I think you are mistaken, Marya.”

  Marya shrugged, peered closely at the porcupine, then once again at the spiky object which she had folded in her kerchief for protection from its spikes.

  Ayesha rose slightly.

  “Stay here. I want to know what that fellow is up to.”

  “Mistress, what if he is simply relieving himself?”

  “Our host has better facilities than that. Stay here.”

  The girl nodded and went back to looking at the animal.

  It was a long while before Ayesha had made her stealthy way within a hundred paces of the native. She had been right; he was not one of the locals, but the man Mochamet al Rotshild had hired. She had always been somewhat suspicious of the man, of his intentions, caught him looking at her oddly when he thought she did not notice.

  Now he was doing something even stranger.

  He appeared to be speaking to a rock.

  “You will do exactly as you’re told,” he told the stone he was holding in his brown hand. When he had finished speaking this sentence—in Helvetian—he held the rock to his ear, presumably while it spoke back to him.

  “No, I’ll brook no disagreement. When we’ve left this blasted and forsaken place, they all must die, every one. ’Tis a bargain I have made. Moreover, they can’t be allowed to spread the contamination any further. Do you understand?”

  There was a pause.

  “Good.”

  The man tucked the stone into a pouch which he was carrying, stood, and walked back to the ranch.

  3

  And, back at the Helvetian ranch, in her snug, warm cabin bunk aboard the soon-to-be-abandoned land-ship, with Marya—who in the waking world had never yet been gifted with cockleburr or even a flamingo feather—snoring soundly in the adjoining room, with Sagheer safe and secure in his little cage, and with armed men—including the formidable Fireclaw, red-handed killer of five hundred—all around to protect her, the Princess Ayesha woke up shivering.

  She sat up and wrapped her arms about herself.

  “That was certainly an odd one.”

  “Princess?”

  That, and unintelligible muttering, came from the other room.

  “Go back to sleep, dear Marya. It still lacks several hours before the sun is up.”

  “Yes, Princess.”

  Looking out through the open porthole, Ayesha could see the piles, moon-silvered, of supplies around the ship. She found it difficult to believe that all of it, rough-hewn wooden boxes, furred and leather bundles, huge clay jars, rolls of fabric, everything, in fact, which had filled the land-ship’s single hold, plus all of that which the natives had brought with them, could be carried by the few of them who would be climbing into those mountains in just another day.

  One more day.

  Beyond the supplies, she saw Fireclaw’s sod ranch house.

  Lights still burned within it. Still shivering, she wondered for a moment whether Fireclaw, too—or perhaps his woman—found it difficult this night to sleep soundly.

  Certainly Dove Blossom had everything at risk, and little to gain, concerning this voyage. She would stay behind and take care of her husband’s house. The man she obviously loved would meanwhile be traveling to an uncertain fate in an unknown land which she believed was the dwelling-place of vengeful gods.

  She had, Ayesha understood, no other family.

  And her only brother, Knife Thrower, was going with him.

  SURA THE FOURTH: 1420 A.H.—

  The Voyageurs

  **

  “Now We have made it easy by thy tongue that thou mayest bear good tidings thereby to the godfearing, and warn a people stubborn.”

  —The Holy Koran, Sura XIX, Ta Ha

  XXV: The Great Blue Mountains

  “Some of you there are that desire this world, and some of you there are that desire the next world.”—The Koran, Sura III

  “A small blade,” Knife Thrower muttered, almost to himself. He measured the length of steel lying heavy and workmanlike in his palm. “No implement for fighting.”

  Nor was it broader, he observed, where it met the unguarded grip—itself a full fingerwidth longer than the blade—than the nail of his thumb.

  “Truly spoken,” his companion admitted, resting a hard fist upon his muscled thigh, “and ’tis but single-edged.” He pointed with a steel-capped wrist. “Yet see you how the back runs straight, trued to the handle’s taper, the edge curving at a leisurely rate to reach it at the point? ’Tis of such a hafty thickness”—he shook his shaggy head—“one might use it as a pry-bar in need.”

  “My own sister truly fashioned this thing?”

  Knife Thrower looked up at the bland-faced man, asking the question once again in wondering disbelief. That was indeed what Fireclaw had been telling him. And Fireclaw-whom-some-called-Sedrich never lied.

  Not without good reason.

  Fireclaw threw his head back, laughing at the consternation of his Comanche brother.

  The war chief sat upon his own rolled blanket, in a small, slant-bottomed clearing undistinguished from any of a hundred others they had passed by in this sparse-covered country. It lay beside a narrow trail of packed red earth no human feet had ever hammered out. Deer and rabbit tracks embossed its surface. Northeast, the land tipped toward the prairie floor from which they had started five days before.

  This long a pause so soon—the sun had just reached its midday apex—rankled both trail-wise warriors, but, upon examining the remainder of their company and conferring, they had decided little help could be found for it. Some, like the Saracen Princess and her servant, were unaccustomed to the exertions which this trek demanded of them. Two were elderly—although it was hard for the Comanche warrior to think of Oln Woeck and Mochamet al Rotshild as being the same sort of animal, let alone about the same age—and required more frequent respite than at least the red-bearded pirate was willing to confess. With each step forward, the situation would grow worse, the narrow trail steeper, the mountain air thinner, their companions from the level of the ocean shorter of breath. Let them gather strength now, while the gathering was easy.

  Knife Thrower gave the implement a small toss in his palm. “Know you, husband of a sister who knows not her place, that whatever name I am called by, I have never, neither in combat nor in play-practice, thrown a knife?”

  Fireclaw grunted, running a hand over his fresh-shaven scalp, ending with an absent tug at the war-lock he had left, hanging braided down the back of his neck. He let the braid slip through his fingers, then lay his fist back upon his thigh.

  Knife Thrower knew well that Fireclaw had heard the story before. Doubtless he would hear it many times again. With the Comanche warrior, meditating upon it constituted a means by which other matters were often contemplated.

  “A thrown knife seldom kills,” Knife Thrower asserted. “I see no purpose in handing my enemy a weapon. I am called as I am for no better reason than that once, close to my name-day, I cut myself on an unsharpened blade which skidded upon a cottonwood root I carved
. In temper, I threw the knife upon the ground, where it broke. For this, a war chief of the Comanche has a name which is a joke.”

  For a time, both men kept silent, thinking the same thoughts. Together, they watched the camp about them, paying particular attention to the younger of the pair of sailors—honing his own pair of outlandish daggers upon a smoothfaced stone he carried with him—whom Mochamet al Rotshild had hired to serve as guides and translators once the party reached the domain beyond the mountains.

  Somewhat slight of stature, the fellow was, nonetheless, broad-shouldered, like an athlete, with hard, sharply defined, and rippling muscles upon his arms and legs and torso, smooth, tanned, nearly hairless skin—there was a faint yellow-reddish cast beneath the tan—and capable-looking hands.

  His eyes were a deep brown, nearly black, above the arched and prominent nose. Somewhat narrow, pointed at their corners, they possessed the foldless lids which marked him, to the limited extent of what Knife Thrower knew or Fireclaw could tell him, as neither European nor Helvetian, but as a native of the New World. His straight hair, cut evenly round his well-shaped head at a level with the tops of his ears, was so black as almost to be blue where the sunlight glinted upon it.

  Like his older, fatter companion, he wore a thin pair of moustaches which began nearly at the corners of his mouth, drooped around them, and tapered practically to his chin.

  All in all, the outward aspect Hraytis, as he was called by the Saracens, offered the world to contemplate might have been as sinister as his plump companion’s, had it not been for the obvious youth he could not disguise—he could not have been eighteen, by anybody’s measure—and his open good humor. He smiled and laughed, not foolishly, nor frequently, but upon occasion with a full throat, and a rounded, self-deprecating warmth which compensated for his tonguelessness among them, the Comanche, Saracens, and Helvetians he traveled with. The women of the party apparently found him charming, for all that he looked like a little boy with whiskers painted on—and for all that he had proven a skilled and merciless exterminator of the enemies of those who had befriended him.

  By preference and custom, both he and his companion dressed themselves only in breechclouts of a rough and heavy fabric they could have acquired anywhere. In the cool of dawn, when the sun fell, or when the weather warranted it, they added a peculiar garment of the same material, like a small undecorated blanket with a slotted hole in its center for the head. Once donned, it draped itself from the back of the knee to a similar height in front, and, when the weather was especially inclement, would be belted about the waist.

  “They say they are from the ‘Isle of the Pelicans,’ upon the western coastline.” Fireclaw spoke at last, then finding it necessary to explain to the landlocked Comanche what a pelican was.

  He had spent more time with the strange pair over the last several days than had his brother-in-law. “’Tis the center for a people and a way of life which require remaining at sea, sometimes for decades, individuals and families being born, growing up, living out their lives, and dying aboard ship.”

  Knife Thrower nodded. He knew that, caught by a storm, the pair had been driven down the western coast until, at the pointed cape of a southern continent of the New World which Mochamet al Rotshild had shown Fireclaw with his maps—and which neither man had ever known before existed—their ship had been destroyed by even more powerful storms which seemed never to abate in that region.

  Whenever it was requested of them, Fireclaw explained, they cheerfully recounted the adventure at great length (though in despicable Arabic), naming places they had been, people they had met, ships upon which they had labored in an effort to return home—a home they apparently knew as little of, owing to a way of life which seemed natural to them, if to no one else, as the Saracens. From Mochamet al Rotshild’s perspective, the sailors simply happened to be the only representatives available to the Saracens as guides to the mysterious western domain.

  Knife Thrower turned his gaze from his odd traveling companions to the land they traveled through.

  To the south lay the canyon, slashing east and westward through the foothills, along whose steep-sloped, sagebrush-littered sides they were making their first climb toward the ice-tipped peaks lying ominous before them. The sky was a mind-emptying blue. A needle-scented breeze made sighing noises among the branches of twisted, winter-stunted pines which gave it its aroma. Long ago they had forgotten how to bend with it, but they had never broken. Chipmunks scolded the intruders. A meadowlark sang in a grove of aspen. The air was clear and cold, the sun hot and bright.

  A good day to be alive in.

  Nearby, Fireclaw half-sat against a weather-rotted stone thrusting through the thin, acidic soil. Great Ursi lolled panting at his moccasined feet.

  Young Hraytis was not alone in using this resting time to good purpose, both men observed with approval. Not far away, Mochamet al Rotshild ran a stiff brush and a cleaning patch down the barrels of the four pistols he carried with him, finishing with the tiny fifth weapon he kept hidden somewhere on his person.

  Beside him, his girl companion followed his example with her rifle. Knife Thrower found it interesting—if somewhat scandalous—to watch her labor at this manly task, the many rings she wore upon her fingers glittering as she moved her hands, the bangles in her dainty earlobes chiming softly, flashing in the sunlight.

  For a dozenth time, Knife Thrower frowned, turning the little hand-forged blade in his fingers. The Helvetian grinned at his brother-in-law, prouder than if he himself had fashioned the weapon he was displaying to the Comanche.

  Setting aside the puzzling yet undeniable fact that a woman had transcended her natural limitations to create it—Fireclaw had that manner with everyone he met, stirring remarkable ideas into their brains as if they were so much porridge boiling over a cooking fire—the little knife was not without other distinctions. Even its handle was unique, spun as it was from lye-washed bear-dog combings, impregnated with hardening resin. When they returned again to the yellow plains, Fireclaw told him, he would investigate other uses for this clever substance. Might not war-shields or longbows be fashioned from the stuff? Even Knife Thrower found himself in this wise wondering.

  At that, it was better than wondering what his own wives might be learning in his absence from the kinswoman he had given to this strange-thinking outlander long ago.

  Heavy caps at each end of the handle were of needle-filed and polished trade-brass, that between the blade and handle cunningly fitted from three soldered pieces—Fireclaw pointed out the hair-fine dull silver-colored lines—supporting the blade, that the pommel cap upon the end of the handle might be twisted off to reveal a hidden compartment for small necessities such as tinder, fishing line, or hooks.

  “At present, as you see, ’tis filled with the dried petals of the flower your sister takes her name from.”

  It was time for Knife Thrower to laugh. “As if her husband required any such reminder of the secret, loving manner in which she forged this clever implement to surprise him.”

  Fireclaw shook his head. “She thought it her parting gift, ne’er thinking how another, spoke in casual words, might o’ershadow such a pridesome thing as a present of one’s first-forged—”

  “Sedrich!”

  It was the filthy oldster, Oln Woeck, shouting across the clearing as if the great Helvetian warrior were his bondservant. Knowing something of what had passed between the two Helvetians years ago, Knife Thrower wondered why the younger of them didn’t simply stake the older over an anthill and be done with him. Looking over his shoulder, Fireclaw took the last, wistful sight of the prairie he would enjoy until they were higher in the mountains. He inserted the gift-knife into its wet-fitted scabbard, tucked it into the rough-spun shirt he wore, where it hung by a thong about his neck.

  “I mean to put yon unwashed murderous cur-spawn down for good ere this journey’s o’er,” he told Knife Thrower. “Today I’ll be content to give him another painful and humiliating
lesson in deportment.”

  He tapped the knife concealed at his bosom.

  “Though I’d ne’er consider telling Dove Blossom, I don’t hold the idea of a hollow-handled knife too practical. Weakens the tool at the very place it should be stoutest. I’ll leave her blossoms there. In this wise, she’ll travel with us.”

  Knife Thrower grunted. “You are sentimental for a blooded warrior.”

  Fireclaw laughed. “Only such can sentiment afford. I go now, with a different sentiment, to render Oln Woeck’s day less pleasant.”

  XXVI: Traveling Short Bear

  “Thou art not responsible for guiding them; but God guides whomsoever

  He will.”—The Koran, Sura II

  Nodding, Knife Thrower remained where he was, turning his back toward the prairie. At another time, he might have enjoyed watching whatever it was Fireclaw planned doing to the old Helvetian shaman.

  Instead, he watched the others lying about the clearing. The foreigners were exhausted. Soon they would have to rest for more than just the few minutes Fireclaw had thus far allowed them.

  Ah, well, the war chief thought, the journey would harden them by stages. His brother Fireclaw would be a bit more demanding of them every day until they were accustomed to the trail. He himself would aid in that. It would not take—

  “They are a soft lot, these,” came a gruff, rasping voice, echoing yet interrupting his thoughts, “but for the most part determined of mind and, in their spirit, courageous.”

  Knife Thrower looked up into the broad, flat-nosed face of Traveling Short Bear, no Comanche, this one, but a Ute, upon whose tribal territory the party of Fireclaw were now trespassing. He had big ears. And thinning hair, which was unusual among his people.

  Knife Thrower nodded.

  “For a company of only nine to cross the world entire requires mind and spirit, courage and determination—or extreme stupidity.”

  Traveling Short Bear rested his ample fundament upon the same rock where Fireclaw had sat.