“Yes, Fireclaw,” the Sun Incarnate continued. “Ere leaving the ranch, he used some poison stolen from your shop to contaminate your wells, killing Dove Blossom and the dogs, as he tells me in some pride he did your father in his time.”
Great pain swept through Fireclaw’s body as the words sank in. He trembled in the grip of rage.
“We’re afraid, b’time Our copper-kilts arrived, ’twas far too late to save them. They’d all spent many days in the process of a lingering and painful death. Our guardsmen gave the evil work a decent finish—cremation, one might call it. E’er they were through with the Comanche, they burned your establishment to the ground.”
Blood-haze replaced all pain and struggle in a single, blessed wave. Filled with blackness, his body thinking for him, Fireclaw whirled, drew his mighty greatsword with a joyous ringing shout.
He leapt toward Oln Woeck.
A snuffling sound came from the pistol-bearing guard standing over the Saracens.
Fireclaw knew a different sort of blackness.
XXXVI: Ship of the Cloud-Tops
“They say, “Why does he not bring a sign from his Lord?”...Had We destroyed them with a chastisement aforetime, they would have said, ‘Our Lord, why didst Thou not send a Messenger, so that we might have followed Thy signs before that we were humiliated and degraded?’”—The Koran, Sura XX
Whatever medicament was in the pistol-dart, Ayesha thought, it could make no claim to harmlessness.
She mopped at the unconscious Fireclaw’s sweat-sheened face with a dampened bit of toweling from the cabin’s little lavatory. In the hammock, slung between a pair of steel hooks embedded in smooth-painted walls, he swung back and forth as if in nightmare, weeping, grimacing, muttering in several languages incomprehensible syllables.
His perspiration reeked of something evil.
At her knee, the bear-dog Ursi lay uneasy, eyes closed at the moment, his square jaw resting upon giant overlapping paws, seeming to take some heart himself in her ministrations to his master. The pygmy marmoset Sagheer groomed himself upon one arm of Ayesha’s low chair, nipping at imaginary tangles in his pristine fur,
He smelled of disinfectant.
Almost as if in imitation, Po ran his short, curved ebon beak through overlapping gray-white belly-feathers, ducked his head beneath his wings in short thrusts, combed his long black flight-plumes with an uncomfortable-looking stretch of the neck, twisted round in comic wise to pay similar attentions to his scarlet-orange tail.
He shook himself, wings flapping, shrieked, and filled the air with an annoying blizzard of preening-powder and little floating clots of lacy down. Sagheer sneezed, a tiny chiff of a noise, then glared at the parrot in resentment.
The room throbbed, as it had each second since Ayesha had awakened, with the deeper sound of engines.
It appeared proper to Ayesha that, at least in recompense for his rescuing her, it was now her turn to comfort Sedrich, in his injury if not in his grief. But, as she had already had sufficient opportunity to observe, life was seldom that symmetrical a thing. Fireclaw would recover, with or without her help.
It was Mochamet al Rotshild who was in a state of shock, and not only in reaction to the death of Lishabha.
Nearby, the much-subdued Commodore had puzzled out the secret of the golden sun-disks which decorated each of the staterooms—or cells—they had been given. The obscene tongue was a latch. Once released, it had gently lifted of its own accord upon a spring-loaded hinge. Now the reddish sunlight of a late afternoon streamed through the thick glazed porthole it had concealed.
Photographs framed and hung upon the walls of this room, hers, were of Mediterranean fisherfolk and their colorful, triangular-sailed boats, although where this “Sun Incarnate” might have come by them, she could not quite bring herself to guess.
Mochamet al Rotshild leaned against the wall beside the window, staring down and outward, as absent from the little room as he could be and still yet remain. Ayesha imagined she could discern a whiter cast to his hair and beard, more wrinkles about his eyes. Such was not possible, she knew. It required more than a single day to write the traces of tragedy, however unbearable, upon a man’s face. Yet she often forgot how old a man he was, perhaps because he never seemed to remember it himself. The sudden killing of Lishabha appeared to have reminded him.
Fireclaw stirred, thrashing, his steel-and-fiberglass prosthetic all but knocking her to the floor from the arm of the chair where she sat beside the low-slung sailor’s-bed. She understood but little of Helvetian, a word here, another there, recognizable from her studies of dead European languages. But the name Frae often recurred, as did fragmentary utterances addressed to the warrior’s mother and father.
How very odd, she thought, considering the terrible events which had placed this warrior in her care, that Fireclaw never once uttered the name Oln Woeck.
That unpleasant individual—a premeditated murderer, if she had understood the boy-ruler’s words aright—was absent altogether, having been dragged away somewhere by the copper-kilt guardsmen after Fireclaw had been rendered unconscious. They reminded her of the Roman legionnaires pictured in her history textbooks. She knew she ought to wonder what would now become of the old man.
But could not bring herself to care.
The rest of them had been brought back to this place—the animals, well tended, had been brought here then, as well—where, in one of the adjoining rooms, its round-arched door now lying open so that Ayesha could shuffle back and forth to care for recuperating occupants in each, the Rabbi David Shulieman lay in sleep induced, not by a dart-borne poison, but by wounds she feared were mortal, despite the fact that they had awakened to find him bathed and bandaged by some expert who had entered while they slept, upon first being brought aboard, and while their clothing and belongings had been likewise cleaned.
And searched.
Unlike Fireclaw, they had not been left their weapons.
She wondered which of them was being insulted by this gesture. Or was it yet another of Zhu Yuan-Coyotl’s experiments? Her first, unguarded thought had startled her: that it would be a strange death for a gentle scholar to die, should, despite her most fervent wishes, David’s injuries claim him. Then she remembered Archimedes—and was proud in a way that David had not fallen, a helpless victim of someone else’s battle, but with a singed beard and hands blackened by burnt powder, in the exultant midst of striking down her enemies.
Barbaric!
This menacing conceit she again pushed away from herself before it had opportunity to take further shape, spreading warmth, as it did so, to recesses of her mind and body whose existence she was attempting to forget. Or at least to disregard. Scarce time had she to regain her sensibilities more than to that extent, when the beast-helmeted guards had taken them away to Zhu Yuan-Coyotl’s audience chamber.
“Oln Woeck!”
Ursi’s ears pricked.
He lifted his head from his paws.
Fireclaw stopped stirring, opened his eyes, and sat up, all in a single swift moment, his left arm crossing his naked chest, seizing Ayesha by the shoulder.
Mochamet al Rotshild turned from the window, blinking, then went back to gazing downward at whatever alien landscape this vast ship-of-the-air traveled over at the moment.
“Girl, where is Oln Woeck?”
Sagheer chittered a warning.
Ignoring the marmoset, the flushed and sweaty Fireclaw repeated his demand in Arabic. Ayesha clamped her jaw, determined not to cry out against the pain the warrior’s clenching fingers inflicted upon her collarbone without intention.
“I do not know, Fireclaw.”
Realizing he was hurting her, he released her shoulder, swung hard-muscled legs across the hammock-edge, and tipped himself onto the floor, landing with a sure-footed bounce. He put a hand to his brow, shook his head, spoke some phrase in his native language.
“He says,” Mochamet al Rotshild uttered with a dispirited sigh, “that he has had nothing but one
headache after another since entering this land. He makes a jest, I think.”
The Saracen shook his own head.
“It is difficult to tell. He is a strange man.”
“No jest,” Fireclaw answered in Arabic, a twinge of humor in his voice nonetheless, “the simple truth.”
He patted Ursi upon the head, picked up his pistol-belt and dagger from the back of the chair where Ayesha had laid them, wrapped them about his middle. He slung the greatsword Murderer over his back, then turned to Mochamet al Rotshild.
“Where are we? Chayn...ham chassaanagh?”
The Commodore stepped back from the window, weariness in his every motion, and offered the view to Fireclaw.
“I have never seen such country. It looks like the surface of the moon. I confess that it would not surprise me if it were. I had thought we Judaeo-Saracens were the richest, most progressive and advanced people in the world. I am stunned, however, at the artifices we have only thus far discovered here.”
Far beneath them, the land was, indeed, barren.
To Fireclaw it resembled a burnt-off field following a cloudburst—sand-choked, washed over, deep-gullied, without a trace of greenery or a single rounded contour. Its color ranged from yellow-red to yellow-brown. It seemed to go on forever.
He pushed his face against the glass.
The flanks of the vessel in which they traveled could not be seen from so small a window.
Mochamet al Rotshild explained to the Helvetian what had transpired from the time the pistol-dart had taken him—Oln Woeck’s absence, David Shulieman’s condition—adding that the Princess Ayesha (who became embarrassed at this mention of her name) had for several hours watched over him, speaking to him, soothing him through his convulsions, bathing his sweat-streaked face.
Leaving the window, Fireclaw smiled, reached out, and patted the girl’s blushing cheek—this liberty Sagheer also permitted, this time without a noise—with a hand whose gentleness came to her as a shock. The attention, she realized with unsortable feelings, was much as he might have given one of his animals.
“Shguhran jazeelan,” he told her, searching awkwardly for words. “I am sorry I hurt your shoulder. You are a good person.”
Without another syllable, the Helvetian strode across the stateroom, Ursi padding after him, toward the wounded rabbi’s quarters, while Ayesha struggled once again with feelings she dare not examine, and thus could never come to an accommodation with.
Po made noises which sounded to the Princess like mocking laughter.
By the time she had gathered her wits—and her pygmy marmoset—in sufficient degree to follow the man, she received yet another surprise. David Shulieman—who had but a few hours ago lain unconscious, feverish, and weak within the netting of his own hammock—was sitting up conversing with Fireclaw.
“...by those who experiment with kites and suchlike,” she heard the rabbi tell the warrior in Helvetian, filling gaps with specialized vocabulary from scientific Arabic.
“Nanam chanaa chabhgham, I see,” Fireclaw replied. “Some kite we have here!”
Shulieman smiled.
“It is true that heated gases, trapped within a large, lightweight container—tissue-paper sacking works quite well—can be made to carry it upward and away. I myself have tried that—in the process almost setting fire to the rooftops of the unfortunate neighborhood nearest the gymnasium where I was educated.”
Fireclaw laughed, the pain-lines around his eyes disappearing for a moment.
He sat upon one arm of a chair, his moccasined feet flat upon its seat. No one of the Saracen party seemed willing to use the furniture here in the correct fashion, the girl thought as she watched the men. Not even herself. Perhaps this betrayed in them an unwillingness to acknowledge the permanence of their incarceration.
As if in answer to her unspoken thought, the warrior nodded, rising to his feet.
“I misdoubt,” he told Shulieman, “whether the same principle’s in application here. ’Twould take a walloping lot of hot air!”
The rabbi chuckled, then grimaced as a twinge shot through his body. Ayesha’s first thought—for in those characteristics that we most detested in them, we are the children of our parents—was to rush between him and the warrior, ordering the latter out of the room, the former to lie once again flat upon his back.
She controlled the urge.
“Hydrogen gas,” she offered instead, at which words both men looked toward her, Fireclaw turning upon his heel.
“Recall, David, how you showed me that the hydrogenic and oxygenic humors might be separated from the water they comprise by electrical current? The hydrogen rose from the receiving vessel, once we turned it right side up, burning with an all-but-invisible blue flame, well above the candle we ignited it with.”
Shulieman nodded.
“So it did, Ayesha, so it did.”
He turned to Fireclaw.
“Well, then, here is one Jew grateful that he has always acted in accordance with the injunctions against tobacco to which his Moslem brothers subscribe. I trust this Zhu fellow of whom Fireclaw speaks has seen to similar precautionary measures aboard his mighty vessel. To paraphrase our large friend here, it would burn with a walloping lot of invisible blue flame!”
There was a puzzled expression upon the Helvetian’s face.
“Hydrogen?”
Some explaining was required then, during which Fireclaw, of whom they had at first meeting shared the opinion of the Sun Incarnate’s guards, again surprised both Saracens with the depth of his knowledge of the sciences—all of it wrested out of nature’s jealous grasp by his own continuous, stubborn experimentation—and with the quickness of his mind where his own discoveries failed him.
If in no other wise, the boy-king to whom she had been in wedlock promised (and who had given them such a name to call him by that Ayesha decided to keep calling him “Shrimp”—at least within the privacy of her own mind—for the sake of keeping her impressions of her future husband to manageable proportion) had been correct in his assessment of the Helvetian’s genius.
Had great Archimedes himself been more like Fireclaw, she thought, one more anonymous Roman soldier’s blood would have been mingled with the sand, doing no great injury to the course of history, while the ancient Greek philosopher, his studies interrupted but a moment, would have returned to the contemplation of his geometric diagrams.
Perhaps the world would have turned out a better place.
Not feeling this a proper setting in which to give such thoughts a voice, Ayesha opened her mouth, intending to add another word or two concerning her experiments with hydrogen. She was interrupted, before she could begin, by an earsplitting shriek from the next room. It was Po, the parrot, making noises they had never heard from him before.
“What in the name of God or Goddess was that?”
The question could have come from any of them, thinking in Helvetian as they were. Before any of the three reacted, the parrot’s shriek was followed by a meaty thump. David Shulieman began struggling to remove himself from the hammock.
Fireclaw laid a broad, work-callused hand upon the wounded rabbi’s chest, pushing him backward.
“Spare yourself, friend Saracen, lest you renew your injuries.”
He turned toward the door. Together, he and the Princess rushed into the adjoining cabin. Upon the carpeted floor, they discovered the inert form of Mochamet al Rotshild, still near the opened porthole, lying upon his face, his parrot perched upon his shoulder blades, tugging at the man’s clothing with his beak.
As she had often seen the captain do, Ayesha thrust an outstretched hand against Po’s gray-scaled legs. The bird climbed, stiff-limbed and comical despite the circumstances, upon her finger, let her carry him across the room to a steel hammock-hook.
There he perched, his feathers ruffled, his white-rimmed black-in-yellow eyes dilating.
With all the gentleness he was capable of, Fireclaw turned Mochamet al Rotshild over, surpri
sed to find that the man yet lived. The deep-set eyes, shut tight against some inner agony, forced themselves open to behold the younger man.
“I will be damned...I had not looked for something like this to happen to me for a few more years yet...it is difficult to breathe,” he complained with a wheeze which underlined his words. “The pain within my left arm is nigh unbearable.”
Fireclaw nodded, his good hand massaging the fallen man’s arm which was curled up in a cramp. After a few short, gasping breaths, the Commodore spoke also of a feeling that steel bands were crushing his chest. This speech seemed to exhaust him.
He shut his eyes again.
“This thing,” Fireclaw offered, thinking of his father’s death, “I’ve seen ere now.”
He looked up into the dark, widened eyes of the girl who knelt upon the floor beside him.
“Ayesha, I greatly fear—”
A noise came at another door.
The louvered panel swung aside.
From the corridor beyond, a single guardsman, like his fellows copper-kilt and helmeted, entered their stateroom, one gauntleted hand upon the pommel of an all-too-familiar holstered pistol, the other pounding once upon his breastplate in salute.
“Sir!” he announced with military briskness, in flawless, if somewhat overloud, Helvetian. “As chief commander of the personal bodyguard of the Sun Incarnate, Zhu Yuan-Coyotl, I...”
The man’s voice tapered off as he beheld the scene he had interrupted within the suite.
“I take it”—Fireclaw looked up with a bitter expression at the black-helmeted figure—“that your child-tyrant wants to summon one of us again. If so, he’ll have to wait.”
The guardsman shook his head.
“Uh, no, sir, in truth it is not the ruler of the Han-Meshika who seeks you.”
He removed his helmet, revealing to them a fair-complected face, surrounded by a shaggy mane of red-blond hair.
The eyes within that face were icy blue.
“It is I myself who request leave to speak with you, Sedrich Sedrichsohn, first to apologize for having shot you. Also to inform you that I am your son, Owald.”
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