The Crystal Empire (17 page)

“She often sees machines that fly, fan-bladed hoverers, slant-winged shiny screamers, bright-plumed little buzzers, disk-shaped glowing wa
r
blers—a veritable aviary of them. What of it? If flying machines could be made, they’d all look alike, wouldn’t they?”

He gave his head to a reluctant nodding which grew more vigorous with each cycle. “You are right, woman! I will not succumb to superst
i
tion! There was a chance, that is all, a chance, that something of interest to my principals might be happening with our Princess, perhaps a chance to test it, with war flaring southward. But it has come to nothing, as was to be rationally anticipated.”

He reached into his cloak, extracting a gold coin.

“There—go back to the palace. Keep your eyes and ears open. Let this be a lesson: there is much to learn, but just one way to learn it. The diff
i
cult, mundane way.”

The treacherous girl was gone before he had poured his last drink out upon the floor. Climbing the stone steps, passing through the guarded, slitted door himself, he wondered for a moment to whom she would r
e
port
this
conversation for a coin of gold.

Palace intrigue: always the weak of mind and spirit gathered around power, attempting to jog the elbow of anyone who held it in hopes of catching a little of it when it spilled. It was inevitably the tiniest dri
b
blings of power which produced the greatest betrayals. He himself, M
o
chamet al Rotshild, well-known adviser to the Caliph, pirate, merchant prince, and spy, ought to know!

As did a cloaked and veiled figure which detached itself from the criminal shadows, following him up the stairs and away from the Charles Ma
r
tel.

“Your Lord knows you very well; if He will, He will have mercy on you, or, if He will, He will chastise you.”—
The
Koran,
Sura XVII

Time passed, thought Rabbi David Shulieman, and with its passage, each man’s youthful hopes (yes, and his accumulated fears as well), leaving nothing in its turbid wake but dispassionate, useless knowledge—and ac
h
ing emptiness.

This morning’s lesson with Ayesha had not gone well at all. He had not been himself. She had been gracious, quite understanding and fo
r
giving, but he had felt too distant, too abstracted to concentrate, focused upon one particular moment in the past they shared.

Eight years had gone by in a twinkling, while war with the Mughal Empire had somehow swollen from what had been at best a moment of sti
r
ring adventure, enjoyed vicariously by all, at worst an equally to be borne annoyance—shortages, rationing, disrupted personal plans—into som
e
thing gray and terrible which had come to dominate the days, the nights, the entire lives of everyone within Islam’s embrace.

Men in the tens of thousands had been called to duty. Europe was b
e
coming a continent of women’s villages. Taxes had become unbearable, burdening, as all taxation must, whatever the intention or the mandate, those who could afford them least. Vaster, more potent battle fleets were launched southward. Sometimes they even returned. Link-treaded steam-chuffing titans roamed the lifeless central deserts of the Island Cont
i
nent—an invention which, at another time, might have filled him with e
n
thusiasm for the future—sinfully wasting any genius which had created them by hurling shells at one another.

Saracen surgeons were becoming most adept at pulling shards of steel and bronze and lead from the writhing, shrieking, blood and e
x
crement-smeared bodies of male children old enough to wear a uniform and carry guns. For that reason, if for no other, the cultivation of poppies was b
e
coming quite as important a war-industry as the mass production of expl
o
sive projectiles. Win or lose the war, they would not soon see an end to what this sort of agriculture portended.

The scholar shook his head.

He sat, now, upon the selfsame balustrade where, the best part of a weary decade ago, he had first received news of the war from the lips of the Caliph himself. Below, Islam’s Eternal City was fog-enshrouded. Invi
s
ible. Reflecting his mood, the sky was mournful today, a light fall of chilly moisture keeping the stone flagging slippery, muffling city noises, forcing the very birds into hiding. It made his spectacles opaque, then stream with condensation. Inside the palace, it would be warm and dry, approaching time for the midday meal. Shulieman, however, would not go inside. He drew his thin cloak about himself, listened to his sto
m
ach grumble, and continued thinking gloomy thoughts.

Had it been nighttime, the city below would have been invisible in any case, strict martial orders to snuff out street and window lighting having been issued. Thus, from the near-miracle of his boyhood, citywide gas lighting, civilization had returned once again to the di
m
ness and danger of candles and oil-lamps. Not that the capital of Islam was in peril—from Mughal artillery, sabotaged gas lines, or from an
y
thing else—but it must be seen by all the Faithful to share inconvenience with other of the Caliph’s cities which were.

Like ancient Romans before them, Saracens regarded the Mediterr
a
nean as “our sea,” fortified, impassable at Gebr al Tarik, likewise sealed at the Bosporus. The long, mountainous border shared with Mughals eastward was quiet. This, after all, was not a war for land—such a war had not been fought since the Mortality—but, in a sense, for the heart and mind of God. The Lesser Ocean had not seen much fighting—the Mughals’ lines of supply were too long to mount much of an effort there, their ships inferior to those of the Caliph.

If one could believe reports these days.

Thus the bitterest conflict centered upon the Island Continent, as if it had been chosen arbitrarily as a neutral battleground, a vacant lot selec
t
ed by two brawling schoolboys. If there were already a people there, primitive but wise, who knew—who cared—nothing for the dispute of foreign i
n
vaders which reshaped them into injured innocents, well, they were not of the Faithful, were they?

Of
anybody’s
Faithful?

Feeling damp, he shivered. Not enough sense to go in out of the rain. Perhaps this was the essence of all human folly, he thought. Mankind lacked sense to go in out of the rain, be it a harmless urban drizzle or a torrent of lethal machinery hurled by an anonymous enemy who su
f
fered an identical shortcoming.

Unbidden, almost unwelcome in his present mood, came a more comforting thought that these eight joyless years had produced one thing of uncompromised preciousness. The Princess Ayesha had grown into young womanhood, even-tempered, graceful-limbed, beautiful by any standard of any time or any civilization.

Thanks to himself, to other of her teachers—no less than to her own innate intelligence—she had come to grasp each of the sciences, theol
o
gy, and mathematics. August visitors to the Roman court, even resident artists, philosophers, rabbis, holy men, were upon frequent occasion dumbfoun
d
ed by the girl’s astute observations—offered gravely, in the beginning with a childish lisp. Most were not aware that her sleeping hours were punctuated by nightmares. Her screaming, however, still awakened the entire palace at times. Awake, she chorded her oud, ha
n
dled animals and se
r
vants well. If her nightmares had endowed her with any talent for soothsaying, ho
w
ever, it was an erratic, useless one.

He ought to know.

For some time, now, he had been keeping a compendium of his young charge’s dreams, in an attempt to sort them out, make some sense of them. In her visions, she often glimpsed people of extinct races, in alien array, many curious beasts, impossible machines, fantastic cities that could never have existed.

Only last week, for example, “she”—from the viewpoint of her dream—had been chauffeured about in a wheelless vehicle, one of a myriad skimming grass-covered big-city thoroughfares at ridiculous v
e
locities—guided by a shaggy, manlike animal of some variety in colo
r
ful attire.

Sometimes she dreamed of horses.

In a more recent dream, she had been married to a humble scholar, much like himself—bury that thought deep, old friend!—suffering with his fellow citizens through a widespread economic dislocation, who was neve
r
theless gifted by some patron with a double-breeched pistol, its barrels fashioned of glass, muzzles molded together into the shape of a roaring lion’s head.

This odd weapon she had seen in much detail, even to twisted rifling in its pentagon-sectioned bores. That she could retain her dreams with such vivid clarity was thanks, in the main, to efficacious medicines compounded for her by her father’s physicians from, if one could credit it, dried hearts of the common artichoke.

Scientific efforts to determine what it was in artichokes that did the work had been interrupted by the war—so much for any thesis that war is good for progress—but the same medicine was being given now to soldiers who had survived the conflict southward, but whose experien
c
es had left them shambling mental wrecks.

It seemed to help.

There was a certain aptness here. Thus far, Shulieman had found no pattern to Ayesha’s dreams which made sense of them. Upon occasion, she predicted future events with startling accuracy. Yet her strongest-felt premonitions in most instances proved groundless. It was as if she po
s
sessed a private peephole upon what-might-be, as if the universe itself r
e
sembled that artichoke of which her medicine was compounded, the real world in which she spent her waking hours one slender threadlike leaf, deep inside its very heart, surrounded by near-identical leaves which grew larger, coarser, more
different
from the original as they grew further from the familiar core, until, at its outer circumference, they were unrecognizable distortions of what had been begun with.

Universe as artichoke. You are a poet, Rabbi Shulieman, or a ma
d
man. Perhaps both: a Jewish Sufi.

“Do you think thoughts too deep for me, David, or can you share them with a humble nursemaid?”

Shulieman took off his spectacles, polished them upon his robe, r
e
placed them, then looked up with annoyance. It was Marya, Ayesha’s companion, dressed for warmth, veiled more against dampness than against the lustful eyes of men.

“I ramble in my thoughts as if overnight I had become an old man. What in the name of the Merciful and Compassionate are you doing out here in this drizzle, Marya?”

She curtsied. “It was my intention, sir, to ask the same of you.”

She came closer. Unfastening the veil at one side of her face, she let it drop. The years had given to the corners of her eyes a faint network of fine lines.

“There is a fire upon the hearth in my quarters, also sweet tea laid, hot and thick. Will you not join me?”

Within himself, Shulieman smiled a rueful smile. This was not the first time, over the years he had known Marya, that she had approached him thus. Always he’d had better things to do, and insufficient time to do them in: his own studies, his duties to the Caliph, to Ayesha. Always he had rebuffed Marya, as he made a habit of rejecting others, in gentl
e
ness, and not because she was unattractive—she was not, even now—nor even owing to any sort of scandal he might fear. At heart, he thought, he was a romantic. The fear of scandal would not have stopped him had he been so inclined.

In plain truth—he cursed himself for a foolish pickishness which had cost him many another such opportunity he might well regret when he r
e
ally had become an old man—she appeared to be rather stupid, and this spoiled her for him, although what the quality of her intellect might have to do with casual flirtation, something less causal, or even a hot cup of tea before a blazing fire upon a cold, rainy afternoon, he was himself uncertain. Was it her fault she could not measure up to a stan
d
ard he had set, despite himself, long ago and far too high?

Resolving that he could not be a fool all the time, he rose. “Yes, thank you, Marya, I believe I shall.”

2

She invited Shulieman to sit upon a low, cushioned divan before the fire. Marya stirred coals in the small grate, poured them each a colorful porcelain cup from the matching pot which sat upon a worked-brass end-table, then reclined upon a silken cushion at his feet.

She looked up at him.

“Scholar Shulieman, always thinking. What are you thinking about this miserable morning, Scholar Shulieman?”