The Crystal Empire

by L. Neil Smith

  Before the Comanche and the Ute reached “Shrimp” and “Crab,” they passed by the Princess Ayesha, lying half-propped upon her elbows upon a blanket next to her maidservant, both women idly staring out over the mountain lip onto the prairie. David Shulieman sat not far away, writing something in a book he carried with him.

  Knife Thrower and Traveling Short Bear stopped.

  The latter appeared fascinated by Ayesha’s pet, Sagheer. Traveling Short Bear spoke a word in polite Comanche. Knife Thrower, possessing no command of Arabic, waved an arm at Fireclaw, who rose, grateful of distraction, and strode to meet them. In any case, he could always use another chance to try his week-old Arabic.

  Before he got there, Traveling Short Bear reached a blunt, curious hand out to Sagheer, who chittered at the man in fury, dashing his little face against the outstretched hand. The Ute jumped back with an exclamation—not quite as polite as before, and in his own tongue—held one injured hand in the other. He stepped forward again, bending, not to seize the little animal but to calm it.

  His fingers were arched backward in a patting gesture, his gravelly words were soft. Yet the words and gestures of one people are not always those of another, nor easily understood across the barriers of language and culture. From out of nowhere, Marya produced a long, slender, gleaming dagger. Her hand rose over the stooping Ute, fell—in a skewed arc as Knife Thrower’s own blade rose for her belly, where it had entered to the hilt, up to her breastbone, making ripping, sucking noises. The woman pitched forward upon the blanket.

  Ayesha screamed.

  The entire camp erupted as Fireclaw rushed toward the Saracen women. The blanket rapidly grew sodden, scarlet. He shouted at everyone—the sailors and the Saracens had weapons out, even Shulieman had dropped his writings to leap to his feet—to stay back. Fireclaw left his greatsword undrawn, but placed himself between his Comanche brother-in-law and Mochamet al Rotshild, who, despite his apparent age, had somehow appeared at Ayesha’s side, his tiny pistol nearly swallowed by his great fist, as if he’d been smoke carried upon the wind.

  His companion, Lishabha, was close beside him.

  Mochamet al Rotshild spoke.

  A cracked and whining voice intruded itself: “They want to know why this barbarian hath murdered one of their party.” Oln Woeck had also joined the group.

  “I know what he wants, old man,” Fireclaw answered. “Shut up. Stay out of this. ’Tis a bad enough situation.”

  And a bad beginning for a voyage, Fireclaw thought to himself. He ran a hand over his naked scalp, wondering whether he’d ever see the ending of all this and get back home.

  Oln Woeck stepped back for the moment, the fire always buried deep within his black-rimmed eyes threatening to blast forth furnace-white. An equally dangerous look from the younger Helvetian persuaded the old man to contain himself.

  Fireclaw turned to Knife Thrower.

  “What’s happened here, my brother?”

  “This,” the Comanche answered, nudging the dead woman with a disdainful toe, “attempted clumsily to skewer Traveling Short Bear. Let this be a lesson to us, husband-of-my-sister. It is what comes of letting women have their own way.” This time Fireclaw could see that the warrior’s words were not mere humorous banter. Momentarily he sensed the gulf that their friendship usually spanned. The Comanche looked down at the blade still dripping in his hands. “I had not time to treat the offense more gently.”

  Fireclaw nodded. “I see.”

  He switched to faltering Arabic. “Girl, why did your servant strike at this man?”

  David Shulieman, who had joined her, stiffened, and the Saracen Princess’ eyes widened at being addressed thus, but she swallowed it with better courtesy than Oln Woeck.

  “I—I think she feared for my life. She did not understand what...what this other man wanted with Sagheer.”

  Fireclaw nodded again, passing Ayesha’s words along to Knife Thrower.

  The Comanche warrior shook his head.

  “Stupid. Traveling Short Bear, have you been offended?”

  The Ute had risen, having been shoved out of harm’s way by the Comanche chief, and was dusting off his knees.

  “Why should I be, friend Knife Thrower? It was an accident of judgment which certainly did me no lasting harm, all thanks to you. In any case it has been scrubbed away with the blood of the offender. I am sorry that it happened. Have Fireclaw tell that to the girl.”

  In due course these sentiments were relayed to the Princess, who, naturally enough, was little mollified, but took them in such dignity and understanding as she could impose upon herself. Her teacher spoke with her. Her eyes were large, her olive skin gone ashen. Later, Fireclaw thought, the reckoning tears would come, but not, if he understood Ayesha, in front of strangers.

  The camp began to settle into place again. He tended to the washing and bandaging of Traveling Short Bear’s injured hand himself. It was a deep and ragged wound, ugly, very much like the bite of a man—of which he’d suffered and delivered many in the heat of combat—and would surely fester if improperly cleansed.

  Oln Woeck sat beneath his gnarled tree again intent upon his thoughts as if, Fireclaw believed, calculating what might be made of this mishap the way a merchant might calculate the possible profits and losses of some enterprise.

  Mochamet al Rotshild, having ordered Kabeer and the sailors to prepare a cairn of stones—the ground was much too hard this high in the mountains to bury Marya—and asked the rabbi to prepare to say the words which were appropriate in the circumstances, observed Knife Thrower washing his gore-smeared weapon as Fireclaw washed the Ute chief’s hand.

  He turned to Lishabha.

  “Formidable fighters, these Red devils. I did not so much as see him draw the knife.”

  Fireclaw, who’d overheard the remark, turned to face the elderly Saracen captain.

  “Yes, ’twas what my brother had in mind when he acted. Had Traveling Short Bear been worse injured, or considered this mistake an insult, we would now be at their mercy.”

  Mochamet al Rotshild raised his eyebrows.

  “How so, mighty Fireclaw?”

  Fireclaw pointed at the blue-tinted apex of the next range of hills, across the canyon.

  Mochamet, squinting against distance and age, took in a deep breath.

  “My word, have they been with us the entire morning?”

  He pointed out what he’d seen.

  Lishabha started, snarled, placed a hand upon the hilt of the large dagger she carried, and tossed a glance toward her rifle, leaning against a tree too far away to be of any use.

  Mochamet put a large, hairy hand over her tiny smooth one.

  Fireclaw laughed as the entire crest of the next hill rippled, shortened itself by the height of the solid rank of Red Men who’d seen peace return to the Saracen camp and were now going away.

  “So close.” The Helvetian exhaled forcefully. “Too close.

  Tell me if I am saying this aright in your language, Mochamet al Rotshild: I think not well of a people who send little girls into such peril for reasons of politics.”

  The Saracen grinned and shook his head.

  “Well spoken indeed, Sedrich-called-Fireclaw. I could not have put it better. However, we have a proverb in my native land, ‘It is the water which cleanses, not the soap,’ meaning that one man cannot change the nature of society nor the times, only masses of people and great events can—and that one should not destroy oneself trying.”

  “My mother had a saying of her own,” Fireclaw countered, translating an old thought into new words. “’Tis the wave which moves, and not the water,’ meaning that the only source of change is the individual.”

  Mochamet al Rotshild looked surprised.

  “Yes, I had forgotten, Fireclaw, that you know the sea—and that, in effect, you invented the vessel upon which we came inland to your domain. I shall try to remember better in future.”

  With these words, the last of the Ute warriors had disappear
ed. Mochamet al Rotshild and Lishabha went to tend their own affairs.

  “A lucky resolution,” Knife Thrower offered in the special dialect private to the men of his tribe, “to what might have been a massacre.”

  Fireclaw grunted agreement, answering in the same language.

  “Never were truer words spoken. Daughters deserve better fathers, brother-of-my-wife. For the first time in a long while, I find myself caring whether we survive or not.”

  Knife Thrower was puzzled.

  “A peculiar thing to say, Fireclaw.”

  “Perhaps.”

  He brushed at the small knife swinging in its scabbard from the thong about his neck.

  “You accused me of being sentimental. Well, learn this morning what I learned five days ago, from the lips of your own sister. In some respects she knows her place well enough e’en to suit your prejudices.”

  Knife Thrower shook his head.

  “The mystery only grows deeper with this kind of explanation, my brother.”

  “No mystery at all. In the spring Dove Blossom will at last bear me a child.”

  On the Helvetian’s face, Knife Thrower realized, he saw an expression he had never seen on the man’s face before.

  It was embarrassment.

  “I find,” he told his woman’s brother, “that I wish more than anything to live long enough to see that child born.”

  David Shulieman began an eerie, alien chanting. Westward, yellow-white lightning lashed the overhanging clouds of indigo, and muted thunder rolled about them where they stood.

  Oln Woeck sat beneath his tree and watched.

  XXVIII: Factions of the Ancients

  “Certainly the dwellers in the Thicket were evildoers, and We took vengeance

  on them.”—The Koran, Sura XV

  Overhead, the sky itself was a pale, luminous frosty gray, so full was it of stars.

  For each solitary point of light that punctuated the blackness upon ordinary nights, this night perhaps a thousand scintillated above, perhaps a hundred thousand. They glowed. Each pulsing gray-green droplet in the misty horizon-filling canopy was enveloped in a pearlescent halo of its own: star-vapor, composed, perhaps, of still yet other stars, too far away, too tiny, to be seen.

  And this mist of stars which filled the heavens—was alive.

  Every moment, every quarter of the sky, was filled with motion. Stars stirred and writhed, here and there forming short-lived patterns which faded or yet formed another. Here, a single star traversed half of heaven’s arc, leaving behind a tracery of itself, like dewdrops upon the invisible webwork of some celestial eight-legged spinner. There, a spindle coalesced of star-glow, reeling, throbbing with a pent-up energy which sent it dancing with a dozen other of its kind before it shattered without sound, into the mist from which it had condensed.

  Ships there were, translucent sky-vessels, woven of phosphorescent luster, hurrying about incomprehensible errands. Now and then, vague silhouettes of sky-beasts hinted at a manlike form before dissolving into vapor once again.

  And every bit of this, and more, transpired all at once, each fraction of a second showering down more fresh wonders upon the stunned beholder than he might take in within a lifetime’s span of years. It was a profligate display, wasted a thousand times over upon anyone who possessed but a single pair of eyes to see it, a single mouth to gasp each time some new miracle flared, danced, transformed itself into yet another, or a single mind to batter into some pitiable semblance of awed appreciation.

  It was the antithesis of nightmare—in its own way, far worse—a spectacle so wordlessly wonderful that awakening from it became punishment for some terrible sin no mere human being could ever have committed. It was one dream of which she never had told anyone. Words were powerless to convey more than a millionth of the whirling grandeur she beheld upon those three or four occasions in her remembrance when it had come to her.

  Using words, she feared—and the fear somehow, was for her life—even attempting to, might drive this dream away forever.

  It was quite dark when, exhausted yet now unable to sleep, Ayesha covered her own rich traveling clothes with a plain cloak borrowed from poor dead Marya’s bundle. Taking Sagheer with her, she followed the bend of a dry streambed to see the ordinary stars.

  In the west, half the sky had surrendered to a featureless blackness which defined the coming storm. Occasional lightning underlit mountainous blue-gray billows, silhouetting the peaks they towered over. The air was still and heavy and expectant, warm for the altitude and for an hour this late.

  The Saracen expeditionary party had not yet climbed far into the Great Blue Mountains. This had been but the first week of a journey of many months. Yet the daughter of the Caliph-in-Rome felt she had been journeying all of her life.

  More than anything, at this moment, she wanted to be alone to think about what had happened to her servant woman, lifted off the ground where she had knelt by a brutal thrust from a savage chieftain’s knife. This was all she wished for, to be alone to think, free of her keepers, guardians, and mentor, free of the savages and barbarians who surrounded her, free of the malign presence which was Oln Woeck, free of Fireclaw, the very sight of whom stirred and disturbed her. She wished for nothing more than to grieve and to wonder, to look up at the stars, chips of diamond, hard and fierce in thin-aired brilliance. Yet she had been forced to sneak away, like a criminal, for they would not let her alone.

  She did not blame them.

  Or at least not very much.

  Save for her own murderous traveling companions, no one else at all in this deserted wilderness existed to harm her. Yet they who “protected” her would have bidden her take an escort, even so. What they most feared, naturally enough, was losing her father’s gift to some unknown ruler who waited for her like a spider at the end of the months of footsore toil and unknown peril which lay ahead.

  Now, her eyesight dimmed by the smoky firelight she had left behind, in a borrowed cloak too large for her small frame, and upon stolen time, she was free. For a little while. And, as always—as she had always believed she preferred—very much alone.

  Where the sky was still clear, a sudden blackness blotted out the stars, ovoid in shape, Ayesha thought, somewhat elongated. Before she could see more, it merged into the greater blackness to the west, and disappeared. A gust of damp wind fluttered the hem of her cloak. Sagheer chittered upon her shoulder.

  “What—maa chalhghapar?”

  There was a sudden noise behind her. The sound of gravel gritting underfoot started her heart hammering in her chest. She had stopped breathing. Almost afraid to see what lay behind her in the moonless darkness, she turned.

  And felt little relief.

  It was a savage—a different savage from those horrible friends of Fireclaw’s—whose name meant Small-Bear-Who-Travels. This, she had first thought upon hearing it, was a good calling, for he indeed looked like a bear, short, and very broad. He had followed her as she slipped out of camp to this isolated unlit spot, a place where, if she needed it, there could be no help until it was too late.

  The wind blew, rattling dry leaves underfoot. Sagheer jostled, nervous beside her ear.

  What did this savage want of her?

  The fat little man laid both hands—the right one thickly bandaged from the damage which Sagheer had done it—over his heart, then raised them to his lips, thrust them outward, curving down. At first, she was frightened at such an intimate gesture, then realized that he was saying something with his hands—with his pleading eyes—about speaking to her from a heart filled with pain.

  She turned, nodded her head.

  “Nanam, please go on,” she told him in Arabic, stroking her frightened marmoset a bit to calm it. “Chanaa chabhgham. I will listen—if that is the word for it.”

  The savage pointed backward, toward camp, or back down the trail they had followed these five days, then placed his injured hand upon the side of his head, as if combing long hair with his cloth-wrap
ped fingers.

  He made an abrupt gesture which could mean nothing else but a stabbing at his belly. Ruthless, he continued the imaginary cut upward until Ayesha thought she would faint or vomit from the sight of it. Then he placed both hands either side of his head, rocking it side to side as if he had a toothache.

  “Maa manna? Are you saying, Bear-Who-Travels, that you regret that Marya was murdered upon your account?”

  “Mar-ya,” he echoed, repeating his dolorous gesture, then, in broken, faltering Arabic: “Cha-naa muth-ach-as-sibh.”

  I am very sorry.

  Ayesha turned her back upon the Ute chieftain, hot tears seeming to boil from beneath her tight-shut eyelids. The little man must have asked someone, perhaps Sedrich-called-Fireclaw, for words in which to make this apology, carefully memorizing the otherwise meaningless syllables that they might be carried to her now.

  Taking a deep, painful breath, she struggled to regain control, began speaking before she turned.

  “Sghuhran jazeelan. Thank you, Siti Bear-Who-Travels, ghaadaa min luthbhah, there is nothing about you which is small at all. And let me never utter such words as ‘savage’ or ‘infidel’ again, for in this God-forsaken wilderness, you are an uncommonly decent—”

  She had heard a thumping noise, a grunt, and whirled.

  Yet another something thumped behind her. A rough-callused, foul-smelling hand tore Sagheer, screaming, from her shoulder, tossed him away like trash, then clamped itself upon her face, bruising the mouth and nose they sealed off. A loop, thrust over her from behind, tightened about her unprotected throat.