The Crystal Empire (37 page)

It was quite dark when, exhausted yet now unable to sleep, Ayesha co
v
ered 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 mou
n
tainous 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 jou
r
neying 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 su
r
rounded 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 “protec
t
ed” her would have bidden her take an escort, even so. What they most feared, n
a
turally 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 foo
t
sore toil and unknown peril which lay ahead.

Now, her eyesight dimmed by the smoky firelight she had left b
e
hind, 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. S
a
gheer 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, ner
v
ous 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 frigh
t
ened 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-wrapped 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 lut
h
bhah,
there is nothing about you which is small at all. And let me never u
t
ter such words as ‘savage’ or ‘infidel’ again, for in this God-forsaken wi
l
derness, 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.

Only then did the hand leave her face. She gasped, discovered to her terror she still could not get a breath, and began thrashing. Another arm, wrapped about her body, encountered more difficulty restraining her. Tea
r
ing at its fingers, trying to bend them backward, she believed she might break free. She was discouraged by a tightening of the thong, which brought whirring blackness to her eyes and ears.

In the same frozen instant, a pair of figures leapt upon Traveling Short Bear as his own hand—rendered clumsy by the bandaged wound—fumbled for the knife at his waist, blood already streaming black down his face. Something heavy smashed his head. The Ute groaned, his skull a fla
t
tened horror at one side. Limp-armed, his blade still in its beaded scabbard, he settled to his knees. Like the servant-girl before him, he was lifted to his feet again as his naked belly was torn by an upswept curve of metal, glinting in the starlight as it entered, gliste
n
ing as it ripped its way back out again. As his life spilled into the gravel, a whimper was all the man could wring from his dying mouth.

Too stunned now to struggle, weak from lack of air, Ayesha watched the same dark figures creep up upon her. One of the pair helped hold her. A third tore her robes away, slashing with the same bloody knife which had been used upon Traveling Short Bear. Sticky, crimsoned fi
n
gers imposed themselves upon parts of her which no man had ever seen, let alone touched before.

It was Kabeer!

Paralyzed with astonishment, Ayesha watched his hands violate her exposed and shivering body, his horrifying leer illuminated by a stroke of lightning.

“
Massach chalhghayr,
my Princess, good evening,” he murmured, licking his lips. “Your stepmother, the Lady Jamela, asked in this ma
n
ner, and from an exile somewhat less ignominious than your father planned it, to be remembered to you.”

“
Limaadaa,
”
she forced herself to ask, “but why—”

Before she finished, Kabeer gave answer.

“
Lima laa,
why not?”

There was muted, cruel laughter, whipped away in the rising, moi
s
ture-laden wind.

She opened her mouth to scream. A gore-smeared rag, once part of her dress, was forced between her teeth. More were knotted about her wrists. While thunder bellowed above them, they forced her down against the stony ground, her arms pulled back above her head, the two men holding her naked shoulders while Kabeer knelt, thrust his hands between her knees, and forced her legs apart.

Dazzling brightness seared the sky.

From some remote place within herself, she observed her own smooth, white thighs lashed by tongues of pale fire. How like those of the marble statues in her father’s gardens they were, something inside her observed with a calm which bordered upon insanity. She seized the thought. It was not as if none of this had ever happened to her before. She had known pain and terror all her life. She had killed and been killed a thousand times in dreams so real that it was the waking world about her which seemed like an illusion. And, somehow, she had su
r
vived it all.

Now, she told herself, as pain began to blot out the rest of her exis
t
ence, she would survive this. Now she would become that statue.

Statues feel nothing.

Lightning flashed. Spitting upon himself for lubrication, the sergeant grunted his way inside her as the men started taking brutal turns with her.

A cold rain began falling.

“But when the sight is dazed and the moon is eclipsed, and the sun and moon are brought together, upon that day man shall say, ‘Whither to flee?’”
—
The
Koran
, Sura LXXV

Lightning dashed a man-shaped shadow against a water-worn and weathered boulder. Thunder bellowed, drowning out the hearing sense as, just before it, momentary brilliance had inundated vision. The sha
d
ow faded as if washed away by rainfall streaming down the pitted su
r
face of the rock and vanished into the darkness it was made of.

Someone else had followed Ayesha to the creekbed.

That someone else was Sedrich Fireclaw.

Outnumbered, Fireclaw feared most that the Princess might be i
n
jured worse in any fighting he might start than even she was being i
n
jured now. He knew, from much experience, that the garotte about her slender throat could kill within a hand’s count of heartbeats. The streambed gravel precluded silent approach. Each of the men was armed. As the helpless girl resigned herself to the uses which they put her to, each kept watch as ot
h
ers took her, his help no longer needed to restrain her. Fireclaw couldn’t use his pistol, surrounded as his party was by Utes—soon enough to become hostile with the murder of an i
m
portant member of their tribe. His double-limbed bow he’d left behind in the camp.

He chafed to wade in bare-handed.

He bunched his cloak, felted out of oily fur combed from his dog-pack, closer about his body as the downpour sizzled around him. Water dripped from his razor-naked head, from his warrior’s braid and down his neck. He forced himself to watch, and to remember.

Lightning raged. Thunder coughed and grumbled in its wake.

Ursi’s muzzle pleated, showing teeth, as a low growl escaped into the rainy night.

“Quiet, Ursi!” Fireclaw whispered. “Sit!”

Despite the storm, he had recognized their voices. The menials of the party: Ali, the retainer supposed to protect his princess; Crab, one of the peculiar sailors; Ayesha’s guardian, Kabeer. The only one of their ilk mis
s
ing, he thought nastily was Oln Woeck—but then that one preferred m
o
lesting boy-children.

Rain fell, and the wet-dog odor which rose from Ursi’s oily pelt—or perhaps it was his own cloak—was the only familiar comfort in this a
l
ien place. Fireclaw watched the men rip their savage pleasure from the girl while even his missing phantom hand ached with the damp cold and the effort of restraint.

When there remained no liberty possible which they’d not several times inflicted upon her—they’d removed her gag, and, each having used her in that wise, replaced it e’er proceeding to an outrage worse, likelier to pr
o
duce screams—they quarreled about whether to kill the pitiable bundle of bleeding flesh in bloodstained, sodden clothing they’d left huddled upon the wet and stony ground. Kabeer insisted she must die, Crab argued wo
r
dlessly against it.

Emptied of his appetites, weather-soaked, and fearing now some u
n
named future retribution, the manservant Ali decided to settle the affair of words with action, releasing the garotte-ends he had held, grunting as he bent to pick up a large stone.