The Crystal Empire (40 page)

“Stop it!” cried the Princess, then: “He uses you like a sheep—a whore—a boy!”

“Maadaa thureet?
Thus I never worry about losing him to sheep or whores or boys—small chance!” Lishabha observed with satisfaction that she had been right. Scandalized indignation was a vastly more d
e
sirable emotion—and more attractive as well—than cowering defeat. And more conducive, too, to the Princess’ swift recovery.

“That is disgusting!” Ayesha shivered. “It is perverted!”

“
Laa,
it is love, where nothing is withheld.” Lishabha leaned closer to Ayesha, shut her eyes, her inner focus upon a vision she abhorred but which she nevertheless considered in all aspects.

“He could be rocking, bouncing grandchildren upon his knee, letting time murder him.” She inhaled, opened her eyes. “Instead, he is explo
r
ing the world with the same ardor he has explored me. I keep him inte
r
ested.
Pismallagh,
may he live forever—if he does, then so shall I.”

A faraway flash of lightning illuminated the horizon. Ayesha shook her head violently. “
Chanaa la chabhgham!
I cannot believe I am hea
r
ing this! How could
that
keep a person alive? I have seen nothing since I came to this place but death and more death!”

“At least you are now argumentative and angry. Is that not better than the way you were? Facts of life, Princess.” Lishabha shrugged. “You may not approve, they may not suit the politics or religion of the day.
Laa thag
h
thaam.
They suit me to perfection. The wonderful thing is that the
facts
do not care, one way or another.”

Lishabha blew a ring of smoke into the night air. It drifted upon the damp breeze and disappeared.

“So, when they forgot that they were reminded of, We delivered those who were fo
r
bidding wickedness, and We seized the evildoers with evil chastisement for their u
n
go
d
liness.”—
The
Koran,
Sura VII

At dawn, the Saracen party proceeded with caution along the narrow trail to a ridge-top, where they began climbing downward again into a round-bottomed valley lined with rain-soaked yellow mountain grass.

Here, the novice travelers of the party, Rabbi David Shulieman among them, discovered what the experienced voyageurs had known all along. “As demanding as an uphill march might appear,” he wheezed at Fireclaw who trudged beside him, “downhill is much more difficult!”

“Inviting carelessness and falls.” The warrior laughed, not without sympathy.

“Yes,” David answered.

He removed his spectacles to polish off moisture they collected every few minutes in the steady drizzle. His hair and beard had curled into a thousand tight little ringlets. Then, placing the metal-framed lenses b
e
fore his eyes again, he cast an envious eye at Fireclaw’s knee-length fringe-topped moccasins, comparing them to the boots he wore.

“And ramming already trail-battered feet into the toes of shoes not well selected for the task we put them to.”

David studied this peculiar, savage man they traveled with. The la
n
guage he spoke—his native eastern tongue, not that of the even more s
a
vage tribesmen who had adopted him—was similar to a number of extinct Old World languages, their speakers one with the dust. In add
i
tion, the Helvetian was making rapid progress in the soft-syllabled and sibilant dialect of Arabic favored in the Judaeo-Saracen Empire. He loved to exercise his growing fluency whenever chance arose.

After a period of silence, Fireclaw shifted the enormous sword across his back to a more comfortable position, and waved a metal-tipped arm at the world about them.

“We’ve some good luck in the matter of weather, if not in your choice of footwear....” David knew, in Fireclaw’s view, they owed their present relative safety to rain which had fallen almost since they had entered the mountains. “The prairie tribes greatly fear thunder and ligh
t
ning—”

“This appears to be universal,” the Saracen scholar offered, thinking of sky-worshiping Mongols of days long past, “with primitive plains-dwellers everywhere.”

Fireclaw grimaced at David’s choice of adjectives, a choice the rabbi had regretted the instant he had uttered it.

“Knife Thrower’s an exception,” the Helvetian answered. With words—gestures filled the gaps in his vocabulary—he explained to the Saracen how he had duplicated boyhood experiments with static ele
c
tricity for the Comanche war chief, who had seen the connection straightaway between them and the displays which lit the heavens.

David was impressed, with both men. “Yet neither of you can say for certain whether the mountain Utes share this fear?”

Fireclaw shook his head, keeping an eye upon the trail ahead of them, on occasion fingering his dagger, or the grip of the handmade r
e
volver swinging below his left hip.

Polishing his glasses once again, David thought back to the previous night. When Fireclaw had encountered Knife Thrower, patrolling the short trail back from the streambed, the Comanche had guessed the truth of what had happened to Ayesha, but remained quiet, vowing to the Sa
r
acens to keep secret what had been done to her.

His good intentions in this regard were in vain.

Next morning, somewhat recovered, Ayesha had, as a duty, related to her worried tutor and to her father’s representative, Mochamet al Ro
t
shild, the entirety of what had happened to her. Conferring over what to tell the others, both considered omitting the rape as an accomplished fact. But it was a small party, and rumors found sustenance among them, fed especially by the cruel and strident moralizings of Oln Woeck. Those there were who felt the old man’s pious blathering must be cou
n
tered. In due course, something resembling the truth was known by the rest of the expedition.

They then took up with Fireclaw and Knife Thrower the question of whether any point remained to the expedition.

The rabbi’s assiduous scholarship and Mochamet al Rotshild’s worldly experiences, were equally useless. Nor did Fireclaw know an
y
thing about the secret civilization whose boundaries they were crossing. Gossip, passed down by generations of Knife Thrower’s people, more resembled theology than geography.

The callous but pragmatic question remained: Had Ayesha been “spoiled” for her diplomatic mission? One individual surprised David by speaking his objections to the manner in which the Princess was being thus regarded.

“This attitude you Saracens seem to share confuses me,” admitted Fireclaw.

It was by this time clear to the Rabbi David Schulieman that, in fact, very little in life confused this remarkable man, the oddest combination he had ever known of bloody-handed ruthlessness, astonishing compa
s
sion, and subtle intelligence.

“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 li
m
ited 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 aggr
e
gate, seldom did things logically, there could be no ready answer, whether from a sch
o
lar 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 cree
k
bed. Otherwise, he asked Mochamet al Rotshild and the rabbi, what did K
a
beer’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 Comm
o
dore’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, inte
r
rupted 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 compa
n
ion, 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 bla
n
kets, appa
r
ently 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 re
n
der the matter of virginity unimportant by the time a girl is of an age to ma
r
ry.”

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 you
r
selves 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 co
n
trary, his experience was that the closer two peoples were, the more si
m
ilar 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 dimi
n
ished 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 constern
a
tion—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 Fir
e
claw’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 Fir
e
claw later. “It is a well-known phenomenon, how terrifying events i
n
sinuate 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 Ay
e
sha’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 r
e
spec
t
ful 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.