The Crystal Empire (22 page)

When at last she did, light fluttered harshly past the speed-blurred spokes of one of the great wind-driven wheels just outside. It was a strange and wonderful contrivance, this vessel she rode aboard, half ship, half sail-powered locomotive, superior in some way to its rail-bound European counterpart, since it was independent of all but the crudest of road-beds.

Bowing to Mochamet al Rotshild’s overprotective insistence that she sleep at night—while everyone else on board took their rest during the heat of the day—had been a mistake, not solely in that it made her feel that much more lonely. For Ayesha, loneliness was itself an old, familiar co
m
panion, whose presence depended not upon the absence of others. But it established an evil precedent, that of obedience—as if Mochamet al Ro
t
shild occupied her father’s place—to the pirate’s will.

Or to anyone’s save her own.

Then again, she corrected herself, that precedent had been well set long before this voyage had begun.

Letting the short, pleat-folded curtain fall back into place before the porthole, she summoned up the memory of a darker morning, several months before, at the quayside resting-place of a more conventional ve
s
sel, where her father had come, unexpectedly and incognito, to see her off. Out of a briny-odored Marseilles fog, his stout figure had materia
l
ized u
p
on the creaking gangway, spoken for a moment with a weapons-laden Se
r
geant Kabeer, then, coming aboard, turned aside at the rail to seek the cabin Mochamet al Rotshild had assigned her aboard his
Daghapy Wezza,
upon which bloody and famous ship the merchant prince had already thrice ci
r
cumnavigated the globe.

From the opposite end of the ship, Ayesha saw her father, immediat
e
ly recognizing him despite the common robe which he affected and the wrappings which concealed his broad and bearded face. She herself was better disguised by the weather, standing high upon the fog-shrouded foredeck, watching the hard-muscled laborers below her, reeking as they did of
tha
n
paah
and
ouiskeh,
loading cargo.

Now she hurried down a rope-railed flight of stairs, along the weat
h
er-dampened planking of the main deck, following, although he knew it not, the Caliph aft.

He knocked upon her door.

“Enter, Your Holiness.”

Startled, he turned to face her.

“One customarily says that from within doors, daughter.
Limaadaa,
why are you out upon deck, in this pestilential soup, among all these ru
f
fian sailors?”

“
Jayyit jittan, sghuhran,
Father, since you see fit to ask, I am very well, sir, no thanks to you. And yourself?”

He shook his head in resignation.

Sliding past him, she turned the fog-dewed brass handle, cold and slippery in her hand. Together, they stepped into the light and warmth of the owner’s cabin. The owner had displaced the captain, and the captain the first mate, and so on, down the ladder of authority, until she had specula
t
ed to herself that one of the stokers, pitiable fellow, would this night be forced to sling his hammock from the anchor-flukes.

She turned, pulled the shawl from around her shoulders, tossed it u
p
on the single bunk, sitting in one of two chairs bolted beside a small t
a
ble, b
e
gan asking questions of her own.

“Maadaa thureett, Siti?
Have you not left it a bit late to play prote
c
tive parent? Or do you worry that this western potentate, whoever he may be—if he indeed exists—might receive his little gift in damaged cond
i
tion?”

The Caliph stood without speaking, feeling the deck roll gently b
e
neath his feet, watching a green-shaded kerosene lamp swing gently back and forth from the rafter-beam, wondering why his heart conti
n
ued, in ind
e
cency, to beat.

Without awaiting answer, Ayesha added, “I have just this past hour overheard a sailor’s tale that the western coast of the Savage Continent is lorded over by women.” Savoring the dual salaciousness of this co
n
fession, she laughed, sarcasm carried in an undertone. “Of what good will be your offering then, Your Holiness?”

Turning to face his daughter, the Caliph thrust his hands deep within his pockets, looking at her over the folds of a patched and soiled muffler he had not yet removed. His eyes were those of a starveling. Even through the woolen windings, his sigh was audible.

“Our informants advise Us that he styles himself Sun King, scarcely an appellation for a female ruler.”

Taking a step toward her, he shook his head. “Ayesha, so well closed is his entire domain that there is precious little more Our informants
can
tell Us. We have spent many a life—which will join thousands of others to haunt Our conscience forever—merely learning that much.

“Our concern, daughter, is for you—although,
manlayagh,
you have scant reason at this moment to believe it.”

The girl just managed to suppress a snort of derision.

“Ayesha, child of my heart, I did not journey all this distance merely to give you tantalizing half-hints of your destiny.”

At last he discarded his shabby cloak, letting it fall in a soggy bundle to the polished floor, and with it the noble plural she had never heard him set aside before.

“Nor shall I argue further with you over it. Nor make excuses for myself. I am required, God help me, to perform a Caliph’s deeds, albeit I am just a man. And, as with those agents whom I sent to certain death upon the Savage Continent, or that multitude slain elsewhere, there can be no excuse, not from your point of view, nor, speaking as a simple man and not a Caliph, from my own. If He will not help me, in his me
r
cy and compassion, perhaps He will at least forgive, for He knows I cannot forgive myself. I came...”

He stopped, having for the moment run out of voice. She saw that his eyes were sunk in blackened pits. Familiar furrows upon his face seemed vastly deeper this morning. Almost, she was tempted...almost...

“I came, this morning, as a simple man, to wish
man assalaamagh
to the only living human being I love. May God’s peace go with you, dea
r
est child, beloved daughter. May—”

Ayesha stood, a sudden chill running up her back and down through her limbs. “The only
living
human being?
Maa manna,
what does that mean, Father, the only
living
human being?”

He took a step and, turning, sank at last into the other chair beside the table. With one hand upon his knee, he rested his forehead in the palm of the other, keeping his eyes upon the floor as he spoke.

“It means, my darling, that your mother, the Lady Shaatirah, the only woman, besides yourself, who ever meant a thing to me, has been dead and buried this fortnight past, the life impersonally smashed out of her by Mughal artillery in a surprise shelling of Malta.” And I, he thought, conti
n
ue living. Where is the mercy and compassion in that?

He looked up, raised a hand, then let it fall back to the chair-arm.

“No one thought to tell me about it until this afternoon, when I r
e
ceived a coded wire aboard the train.”

“But how?”

For a moment, Ayesha’s voice had become that of a little girl again. A very frightened little girl. With a considerable effort, she regained some measure of control, so that she fell to her knees beside him as an act of vol
i
tion. She placed a hand over his.

“I thought we had this sea of ours locked up. Does our fight go that badly, Daddy?”

For his favorite daughter Abu Bakr Mohammed, the Sword of God, Protector of the Faith, Caliph of Rome, summoned up a pained smile.

“
Laa,
my darling,
Inshallagh
and the creek don’t rise, our ‘lock,’ as you have put it, remains intact. As these things are reckoned militarily, it was nothing more than a minor tactical escapade, a strategically poin
t
less sally past the Gebr al Tarik of one cheerless, fogbound morning e
x
actly such as this.”

Eyes filled with sadness, he shook his head, returning it to the palm of his hand.

“Those there are who, for a variety of reasons, might reckon othe
r
wise. The Mughal, it would now appear, have found a way to plank-in a whaleboat, caulk its seams, weight it down with ingots of lead, and pr
o
pel it a few feet beneath the water’s surface, whilst crew and engine suck the breath of their life through a tube.”

The Caliph seemed to shake himself, to sit up straighter.

“This boat carried a breech-loading mortar. Our own engineers a
d
vised Us some years ago that such a thing was possible, using hand-pumped tanks for rising and sinking. Now We fear we shall have to fashion such a terrible vessel to cope with theirs.”

“Progress,” Ayesha answered, one portion of her mind wondering whether there was purpose in his telling her all this. Perhaps he sought to dedicate her more to the ending of this war her fate was shaped for. There had been a time when she believed him incapable of such a cyn
i
cal usage with her. She rose and stood away from him. Did people ever truly know one another? Would her father use her, then, as he used so
l
diers? Would he expend her like a rifle cartridge? Well, she was here, wasn’t she?

The Caliph shook his head again, as if in denial of her unspoken a
c
cus
a
tion.

“
Nanam.
Yet truly We never intended to burden you needlessly with this news about your mother’s death. What We would say to you, i
n
stead, is this: should an alliance come about, as is Our fondest hope, some regular communication must be established, as one condition to the treaty which the Commodore carries with him.”

He put out a hand, tacitly begging her, she thought, to place her own within it. Ignoring it, she stood where she was, realizing that, in this sudden and unwelcome perception of her father as an ordinary man, desp
e
rately in need of her approval and affection, she had at last—and perhaps it was not such a good thing as she had looked forward to these many years—grown up.

He shrugged and dropped his hand to his side.

“All of your life, my daughter, you have experienced terrible—and ofttimes revealing—visions. Your struggle to discern their meaning has given you command of such a knowledge of the science of the mind as We po
s
sess. Now We bid you, both as daughter and as subject, offer to interpret the dreams of this unknown ruler you are being given to, after the manner of Joseph in the Holy Koran—and afterward convey what you learn thus of him and his domain back to your own people.”

Why did this suggestion of betrayal within betrayal abruptly fill her with an interest she had not found in life since learning of this voyage? Was she becoming like the rest of them at court, a cynical intriguer?

Or was it something else, some hope she sensed in her father which had nothing to do with his official hopes of ending the war?

“Mo will instruct you in the methods of enciphering information within innocent-sounding phrases. Keep Us informed. Perhaps, when a happier time shall come to pass, visits home will not be beyond thin
k
ing.

“Do you serve Us, and in any case, your name will be remembered in every mosque, in every square and city within Islam, for as long as
this
C
a
liph reigns in Rome.”

He placed his stubby hands upon the chair-arms, pushed himself to his feet with a grunt, then, clapping his hands together, rubbed the palms upon his chest.

“Now, dear,
min bhatlah,
could you find it in your heart at least to o
f
fer an old man a hot cup of
shaay
before he once again must expose his poor dilapidated carcass to the cold?”

3

The ship struck some minor obstruction which sent a shudder through its keel.

Wind flapped at her porthole curtain.

Bitter memories giving way to an even more bitter reality, Ayesha rose at long last to her feet. This ship which bore her—no longer the p
i
rate Commodore’s
Daghapy Wezza
but a different conveyance entirely, by pr
e
vious arrangement fashioned for her party by a strange, barbaric people—now seemed in a terrible hurry.