The Crystal Empire

by L. Neil Smith

  “Among my own people,” Fireclaw told him, “a woman can’t think of being wed until she’s first conceived a child. How great an asset can virginity be”—this he asked much like a well-trained scholar of the ways of men, dispassionate, as if he were discussing weather or the price of grain—“in the household of a Caliph whose wives—”

  “Or at least”—the scholar had gathered the direction the Helvetian was headed—“those of our present Caliph’s historic predecessors...”

  Fireclaw completed his thought: “—sometimes number, to my limited understanding, among the thousands?”

  David did not reply, nor did Mochamet al Rotshild. For this, of course, as with all contradictory customs of a species which, in aggregate, seldom did things logically, there could be no ready answer, whether from a scholar or a pirate.

  The Helvetian then expressed his deduction that the usual reasons for rape had nothing to do with what had happened to Ayesha in the creekbed. Otherwise, he asked Mochamet al Rotshild and the rabbi, what did Kabeer’s taunt, which he had overheard, about the Lady Jamela mean? Why was so much money found upon the three? David, more acquainted with conflicting factions and palace intrigues, was in private thought inclined to agree with Fireclaw, although, following the crafty Commodore’s lead, he offered no word of support.

  It was at this moment that the boy-sailor Hraytis, wearing nothing but his customary loincloth, a pair of odd-handled daggers in its waist, interrupted them with more words, in the Saracens’ recollection, than he had used upon the rest of the journey thus far. Suspicious by association, everyone had watched him since the well-deserved death of his companion, Crab. That loss, or fear of his being connected with events leading up to it, had affected him. He had spent the night huddled in his blankets, apparently mumbling to himself, or sobbing.

  “Children of my tribe”—Shrimp volunteered that he had been born into another primitive tributary to the Sun King’s domain; he spoke in creditable, albeit thick-accented, Arabic—“pursue such practices as render the matter of virginity unimportant by the time a girl is of an age to marry.”

  Knife Thrower and Fireclaw nodded to one another, saying they themselves knew tribes of which the same was true.

  “I understand the present dilemma my noble Saracen lords find yourselves in, if only that, unlike most of my people, I have left my native land, traveled the world, encountering people with different feelings about these and other matters.”

  “Charjooh, min bhatlah,” Mochamet al Rotshild asked, “can you make no guess as to the feelings of this Sun King?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Although my home is closer than this place to the seat of the Sun King, we know less of him even than the Comanches or the Utes.”

  He eyed the Saracen chief. “It seems the further away one starts, the more one is likely to know. Strange, but do you not find it so?”

  Mochamet al Rotshild did not reply, but offered that, upon the contrary, his experience was that the closer two peoples were, the more similar their customs, although this sometimes, paradoxically, made them fiercer enemies.

  The men spoke further, each expressing his opinion, realizing it was nothing more than that. Thus upon this unsatisfying basis was it decided: their voyage westward would continue, the voyageurs somewhat diminished in number, until they encountered further reason—no one added, perhaps a fatal one—not to do so.

  Late the previous night, Ayesha had learned that her visions had not abandoned her. David and Mochamet al Rotshild’s girl, Lishabha, their weapons across their knees, had sat up with her through them. They were worse than ever, filled with fire and bloodshed, the stench of woodsmoke and death. They seemed to center—to Fireclaw’s concern and consternation—upon her rescuer and the renewed hopes David had this morning learned the Helvetian had left back upon the plains.

  Morning offered no better in this regard, the Princess now insisting, just before the assault, that she had glimpsed the dark shape of a soaring god-ship such as Knife Thrower had spoken of round the campfire at Fireclaw’s ranch.

  “I think, despite considerable respect I feel for my pupil’s powers of observation, I would dismiss this measure of her tale,” David told Fireclaw later. “It is a well-known phenomenon, how terrifying events insinuate themselves backward into an imaginative memory, altering the record of what has already come to pass.”

  Fireclaw nodded, but resettled the revolver in his holster, loosened his dagger in its scabbard, checked the position of the sword across his back. Despite any reassurances he had offered the Helvetian, the rest of the morning David caught himself—and others who had overheard Ayesha’s protestations—peering more than once into the dismal overcast. Oln Woeck practiced a silence uncharacteristic of him, although whether this arose from monkish contemplation, the stern rebuff his moralizing had received, or from concealed fear, no one offered a guess.

  At Knife Thrower’s suggestion, they had bundled up poor Traveling Short Bear’s mutilated body as best they could, in visible token of respectful sorrow, leaving it behind with the most opulent grave-goods the party could afford to part with—the carcasses of his murderers staked out upon the ground about him.

  All eyes upon trail, sky, forest, and surrounding hills—too many objects to watch for too few eyes—they had at last reached the summit of the foothills and started downward once again. The greater heights still loomed before them like an impassable wall. It was upon the gentle slope at the end of the alpine meadow that Fireclaw stopped them, taking David ahead with him for a look at the meadow-end.

  “If it happens, it will happen here.”

  Fumbling with his still-unfamiliar holster-flap, David thumbed the breech-catch of his massive four-barreled pistol, tipped the long, heavy cluster forward, took some courage from the sight of the brass heads of the thumb-sized cartridges there. From the beginning, he thought, even to his own myopic and uneducated view, this place had looked like a trap—a trap they had no choice but enter.

  To their left, their freedom of movement was confined by a low, crumbling cliff-face, not higher than three men standing upon one another’s shoulders, but underslung, worse than vertical, the back of one of the sloping upthrusts where they had camped the previous evening.

  To their right, a pair of soft-contoured finger-shaped hills—sagebrush-covered leavings of great rivers of ancient ice, David explained to a skeptical Fireclaw—pointed toward the cliff. That nearest them was broken into a pair of little round-topped hillocks with a low brush-filled dip making a gap between them.

  At the end of the farther finger-hill stood a small copse, perhaps two dozen trees, of white-barked aspen. Their wet leaves trembled in the wind like the palsied hands of senile old women. Between this and the cliff was a broad gray gravel-wash which, a few weeks earlier, with melting snowpack, would have been a healthy stream. At present, it was nothing more than a muddy tumble of boulders, averaging Ursi’s size.

  Lying among these scattered rocks, the shriveled carcass of a large deerlike animal Fireclaw called Wapiti thrust weather-whitened antlers toward the empty sky. Ahead of them rose a naked-crowned mountain, mantled upon its flanks by a dense stand of evergreens.

  David snapped his pistol shut but did not replace it in its holster.

  “This we’ll avoid,” Fireclaw told the party, “swinging to the right round the far side of the unbroken finger-hill, down into the next valley, behind the front range of the Great Blue Mountains. Thus, we’ll have accomplished our first passage through the barrier, no epic feat—doubtless there’re many higher, more difficult passes ahead—but something of a milestone, nonetheless.”

  Well back in the meadow center, where they could see aught approach for a thousand paces, the rest of the party sat awhile, preparing their weapons, battling with bold yellow deerflies for their first meal of the morning, jerked antelope and cornmeal, taken cold. But for their color, the insects resembled houseflies. There were not many of them, but their bites drew blo
od. Their buzzing in the mountain stillness seemed alarming, almost painful in itself.

  Fireclaw—and Ursi—had by this time moved with David into the wash, where a steady breeze blew at their backs. Given the Saracen group’s small size, its consequent vulnerability, the Helvetian believed he could not afford to precede it by any great distance.

  “If danger comes—as ’twill, I know—they’ll need my sword and pistol, Ursi’s fangs and claws.”

  He and David and the black animal made irregular progress toward the base of the round-top nearest the cliffside, moving whenever a damp wind arose to whisper through the grass, clatter through the aspen, covering faint noises of their passage.

  Between times, they waited and watched, David laying his pistol across his thighs, removing, cleaning, replacing his lenses as they steamed to near-opacity in the damp, miserable weather.

  “Look!” Fireclaw’s voice was a harsh whisper.

  As they skirted the hill, they saw a fat, glossy doe among the trees, nibbling at silver-colored bark, despite the fact she was downwind of them and should have been alerted. Perhaps it was the steady drizzle which masked their approach. A spotted fawn grazed beside her. Fireclaw took this as a good omen. The animals’ unfrightened demeanor caused him to decide their path ahead was clear.

  “At least for the moment,” David offered with a growing understanding of their peril.

  Fireclaw gave a snort which might have been an ironic chuckle. He rose, signaling to Mochamet al Rotshild to let the party move ahead. The pirate chieftain and his companion met them halfway back to the meadow-verge. They squatted together in sparse high grass, their clothing water-dark from passing through it, their voices still low for no reason either might have been able to name.

  Pointing toward the gravel bed, Mochamet al Rotshild exercised his improving Helvetian. “Yon stone-littery would be a good place for an ambush.” He loosened a pistol in his sash.

  Beside him, Lishabha inspected the breech of her long-barreled rifle.

  “Nanam chanaa chabhgham,” Fireclaw replied in Arabic. “So I thought, as well.”

  The men grinned at one another.

  “When we’ve reached the bend, we’ll be subject to attack at all times, for the next several leagues beyond, from those woods yonder and the flanking hill.”

  Mochamet al Rotshild assumed a pious expression. “Be thou valorous, Sedrich-called-Fireclaw. The All-merciful, Compassionate God loves martyred warriors well.”

  Fireclaw scrutinized the man’s weathered face. “The Goddess despises idiots.”

  The pirate laughed. “Nanam, I am curious to discover which of the two prevails in this realm.” He grunted an old man’s grunt as he arose. “From the look of it, neither. No matter, laa thaghthaam, how would you have us dispose ourselves?”

  For some time, Fireclaw informed the older man, he had been thinking about little else. The Princess Ayesha, the reason they were here, should be protected at the center of the group. She was handy enough with the rifle she carried. Her little pet, Sagheer, was a fury unto himself. But Fireclaw was unsure how her present, brutalized condition would affect her fighting abilities. Rising, with a scratch at Ursi’s head behind the ears, he spoke more of his thoughts.

  “You and I,” he told Mochamet al Rotshild, “will precede the party by several dozen paces.”

  The Helvetian and his mighty warrior-dog would take the right side, until they reached the evergreens.

  “’Tween us and the party’s center I’ll place Rabbi Schulieman, here, whose loyalty to his Princess, I think, is unquestionable, but whose battle skills are untested.”

  David did not know whether to be pleased or otherwise in this judgment, above all when the sea-captain concurred. He covered his embarrassment by removing his spectacles, rubbing the spots upon his nose which they irritated, and said nothing.

  Fireclaw went on.

  “Flanking the Princess I’d have your girl Lishabha upon the right. Oln Woeck”—useless, he could be seen thinking to himself, but not yet expendable—“upon the left. Our rear will be guarded by my war-brother Knife Thrower and Shrimp—but here I’ll reverse order, placing the sailor, of whom we’re both uncertain ....”

  “Considering the events of last night,” Mochamet al Rotshild suggested.

  “Indeed...upon the right.”

  The rabbi stroked his weather-kinked beard.

  “Where he will be first to die, should such come to pass. Nabhwan thismaghly, you are a hard man, Fireclaw.”

  The Helvetian ignored David’s appraisal.

  “In any event, his abilities and trustworthiness haven’t yet been tried. Should he survive—should any of us survive—at the least we’ll have taken his measure.”

  David, Mochamet al Rotshild, and Lishabha returned to the others, passing along Fireclaw’s orders. In this formation they waded through the last sodden grass, placing a toe upon the margin of the gravel-wash.

  They passed the round-topped hillock without event, making toward the left of the aspen grove. It, in itself, was little threat: David could see through it. It concealed no Ute warriors.

  He was less sure of the longer hill behind it.

  As they drew even with the overgrown gully between the two lines of the hills, disaster struck, as Fireclaw had suspected, from behind.

  XXXII: The Breath of God

  “O if the evildoers might see...that the power altogether belongs to God, and that God is terrible in chastisement.”—The Koran, Sura II

  A mind-numbing shrieking filled the air.

  All vision limited by the heavy drizzle, Knife Thrower hurled a blunt, guttural Comanche exclamation at his brother-in-law. Both warriors realized the high-pitched noise was intended to panic them, to bunch the Saracen party up, drive it like a herd of frightened deer into the teeth of an opposing group certain to be ahead.

  “Make left!” Fireclaw shouted, drawing his revolver. “Make left!”

  A spear-throwing stick rattled in release. Its missile struck with a hollow, meaty thump. Shrimp had counted his first coup. Fireclaw would worry about the boy no longer.

  With some semblance of deliberation, and before the Utes could reach them from behind, the party drifted leftward, toward the base of the cliff, into a clutter of boulders which afforded some protection. Here, Shrimp sent another Ute into oblivion with a spear in the solar plexus, stooped to gather up the shoulder-bow he’d also carried, discharged a projectile into the approaching Ute ranks once again.

  A second party of mountain savages rounded the aspen copse, running toward where the Saracen group might have been caught had they continued for the evergreens. A storm of arrows preceded them, though all of this first volley fell short or missed. A war chief upon the mist-shrouded hill shouted orders in falsetto, raised his feather-fringed lance, demonstrating the next angle of fire to be taken.

  A rifle-shot cracked, lifting the chief from his feet, rolling him down the back side of the hill. The Helvetian had no time to see who’d fired it. He found himself hoping it had been Ayesha, but it had likelier been the warrior-girl, Lishabha.

  The dull bellow of David Shulieman’s four-barreled pistol followed as an echo, a single load of roundshot tearing into the cluster of Utes, bloodying the lot. While they stood cursing, the rabbi killed three of them with the shots remaining to him. He removed his glasses, polished them, commenced the process of reloading.

  To Fireclaw’s surprise, a third party, hiding somewhere in the gully perpendicular to the wash, charged out in what would have been a well-timed rush from the side—had he permitted his own group to stay within the arms of the Ute pincer. He saw, now, how it was that he’d been fooled. As the Utes rushed by, their voices raised, the mule-doe decoy struggled in terror at the end of a long braided tether.

  Her fawn danced frantically beneath her feet.

  A second gun banged, without visible effect.

  Knife Thrower and young Shrimp now stood side by side, blades flashing, guarding each other�
��s flanks as a dozen enemy warriors circled them and screamed.

  The younger of the two had cast aside his shoulder-bow, drawing instead the odd pair of knives he carried, fighting with them as if he were fighting with his fists. At each punch and twist, an overconfident Ute died or backed away with something of himself missing.

  Knife Thrower had seized an eagle-feathered lance from a fallen Ute, fending and thrusting with his left hand while he wielded his own much shorter dagger in his right.

  Fireclaw holstered his still-unfired revolver, locked his double-limbed Comanche longbow into his prosthetic, nocked an arrow, sent it flying into the face of the young sally-chief leading the Utes from the gully. The Ute stumbled, fell, lay writhing for a longer time than the Helvetian would have imagined possible.

  A second yard-length arrow was upon its way—this shaft struck a warrior from the frontal assault—as Saracen firearms began to go off all around him.

  The crack of Lishabha’s long-barreled military rifle was distinctive, followed as it was each time by the scream or grunt of a dying opponent. A momentary glitter caught the corner of Sedrich’s eye as she unsheathed the long, narrow knife she carried, affixing it with a mechanical clank to the end of the single-shot weapon. This—“bayonet” he remembered hearing it called—didn’t impede her shooting, but it kept the enemy away from her when she’d opened the breech of her rifle or was reaching for more ammunition.

  Mochamet al Rotshild had a large-bored pistol in each hand. When he’d discharged these to good effect—the Utes had slowed their charge now, having discovered the party wasn’t the easy pickings they’d anticipated—he reached for smaller weapons in his boot-tops, accounting for another pair of Utes.

  His parrot screamed, echoing the joyous war-cries of its master.

  The Princess Ayesha wasn’t in evidence. The mist had thickened. Fireclaw couldn’t spare the time to do more than glance about for her, then go on fighting.