The Crystal Empire (41 page)

All eyes upon trail, sky, forest, and surrounding hills—too many o
b
jects to watch for too few eyes—they had at last reached the summit of the fo
o
thills and started downward once again. The greater heights still loomed before them like an impassable wall. It was upon the gentle slope at the end of the alpine meadow that Fireclaw stopped them, ta
k
ing David ahead with him for a look at the meadow-end.

“If it happens, it will happen here.”

Fumbling with his still-unfamiliar holster-flap, David thumbed the breech-catch of his massive four-barreled pistol, tipped the long, heavy cluster forward, took some courage from the sight of the brass heads of the thumb-sized cartridges there. From the beginning, he thought, even to his own myopic and uneducated view, this place had looked like a trap—a trap they had no choice but enter.

To their left, their freedom of movement was confined by a low, crumbling cliff-face, not higher than three men standing upon one a
n
other’s shoulders, but underslung, worse than vertical, the back of one of the slo
p
ing upthrusts where they had camped the previous evening.

To their right, a pair of soft-contoured finger-shaped hills—sagebrush-covered leavings of great rivers of ancient ice, David e
x
plained to a ske
p
tical Fireclaw—pointed toward the cliff. That nearest them was broken into a pair of little round-topped hillocks with a low brush-filled dip ma
k
ing a gap between them.

At the end of the farther finger-hill stood a small copse, perhaps two dozen trees, of white-barked aspen. Their wet leaves trembled in the wind like the palsied hands of senile old women. Between this and the cliff was a broad gray gravel-wash which, a few weeks earlier, with melting snowpack, would have been a healthy stream. At present, it was nothing more than a muddy tumble of boulders, averaging Ursi’s size.

Lying among these scattered rocks, the shriveled carcass of a large dee
r
like animal Fireclaw called
Wapiti
thrust weather-whitened antlers toward the empty sky. Ahead of them rose a naked-crowned mountain, mantled upon its flanks by a dense stand of evergreens.

David snapped his pistol shut but did not replace it in its holster.

“This we’ll avoid,” Fireclaw told the party, “swinging to the right round the far side of the unbroken finger-hill, down into the next valley, behind the front range of the Great Blue Mountains. Thus, we’ll have acco
m
plished our first passage through the barrier, no epic feat—doubtless there’re many higher, more difficult passes ahead—but som
e
thing of a m
i
lestone, nonetheless.”

Well back in the meadow center, where they could see aught a
p
proach for a thousand paces, the rest of the party sat awhile, preparing their we
a
pons, battling with bold yellow deerflies for their first meal of the morning, jerked antelope and cornmeal, taken cold. But for their color, the insects resembled houseflies. There were not many of them, but their bites drew blood. Their buzzing in the mountain stillness seemed alarming, almost painful in itself.

Fireclaw—and Ursi—had by this time moved with David into the wash, where a steady breeze blew at their backs. Given the Saracen group’s small size, its consequent vulnerability, the Helvetian believed he could not afford to precede it by any great distance.

“If danger comes—as ’twill, I know—they’ll need my sword and pi
s
tol, Ursi’s fangs and claws.”

He and David and the black animal made irregular progress toward the base of the round-top nearest the cliffside, moving whenever a damp wind arose to whisper through the grass, clatter through the aspen, co
v
ering faint noises of their passage.

Between times, they waited and watched, David laying his pistol across his thighs, removing, cleaning, replacing his lenses as they steamed to near-opacity in the damp, miserable weather.

“Look!” Fireclaw’s voice was a harsh whisper.

As they skirted the hill, they saw a fat, glossy doe among the trees, nibbling at silver-colored bark, despite the fact she was downwind of them and should have been alerted. Perhaps it was the steady drizzle which masked their approach. A spotted fawn grazed beside her. Fir
e
claw took this as a good omen. The animals’ unfrightened demeanor caused him to decide their path ahead was clear.

“At least for the moment,” David offered with a growing understan
d
ing of their peril.

Fireclaw gave a snort which might have been an ironic chuckle. He rose, signaling to Mochamet al Rotshild to let the party move ahead. The pirate chieftain and his companion met them halfway back to the mea
d
ow-verge. They squatted together in sparse high grass, their clothing water-dark from passing through it, their voices still low for no reason either might have been able to name.

Pointing toward the gravel bed, Mochamet al Rotshild exercised his improving Helvetian. “Yon stone-littery would be a good place for an a
m
bush.” He loosened a pistol in his sash.

Beside him, Lishabha inspected the breech of her long-barreled rifle.

“Nanam chanaa chabhgham,”
Fireclaw replied in Arabic. “So I thought, as well.”

The men grinned at one another.

“When we’ve reached the bend, we’ll be subject to attack at all times, for the next several leagues beyond, from those woods yonder and the flanking hill.”

Mochamet al Rotshild assumed a pious expression. “Be thou valo
r
ous, Sedrich-called-Fireclaw. The All-merciful, Compassionate God loves ma
r
tyred warriors well.”

Fireclaw scrutinized the man’s weathered face. “The Goddess de
s
pises idiots.”

The pirate laughed. “
Nanam,
I am curious to discover which of the two prevails in this realm.” He grunted an old man’s grunt as he arose. “From the look of it, neither. No matter,
laa thaghthaam,
how would you have us dispose ourselves?”

For some time, Fireclaw informed the older man, he had been thin
k
ing about little else. The Princess Ayesha, the reason they were here, should be protected at the center of the group. She was handy enough with the rifle she carried. Her little pet, Sagheer, was a fury unto hi
m
self. But Fireclaw was unsure how her present, brutalized condition would affect her fighting abilities. Rising, with a scratch at Ursi’s head behind the ears, he spoke more of his thoughts.

“You and I,” he told Mochamet al Rotshild, “will precede the party by several dozen paces.”

The Helvetian and his mighty warrior-dog would take the right side, u
n
til they reached the evergreens.

“’Tween us and the party’s center I’ll place Rabbi Schulieman, here, whose loyalty to his Princess, I think, is unquestionable, but whose ba
t
tle skills are untested.”

David did not know whether to be pleased or otherwise in this jud
g
ment, above all when the sea-captain concurred. He covered his emba
r
rassment by removing his spectacles, rubbing the spots upon his nose which they irritated, and said nothing.

Fireclaw went on.

“Flanking the Princess I’d have your girl Lishabha upon the right. Oln Woeck”—useless, he could be seen thinking to himself, but not yet e
x
pendable—“upon the left. Our rear will be guarded by my war-brother Knife Thrower and Shrimp—but here I’ll reverse order, placing the sai
l
or, of whom we’re both uncertain ....”

“Considering the events of last night,” Mochamet al Rotshild su
g
gested.

“Indeed...upon the right.”

The rabbi stroked his weather-kinked beard.

“Where he will be first to die, should such come to pass.
Nabhwan thi
s
maghly,
you are a hard man, Fireclaw.”

The Helvetian ignored David’s appraisal.

“In any event, his abilities and trustworthiness haven’t yet been tried. Should he survive—should any of us survive—at the least we’ll have taken his measure.”

David, Mochamet al Rotshild, and Lishabha returned to the others, passing along Fireclaw’s orders. In this formation they waded through the last sodden grass, placing a toe upon the margin of the gravel-wash.

They passed the round-topped hillock without event, making toward the left of the aspen grove. It, in itself, was little threat: David could see through it. It concealed no Ute warriors.

He was less sure of the longer hill behind it.

As they drew even with the overgrown gully between the two lines of the hills, disaster struck, as Fireclaw had suspected, from behind.

“O if the evildoers might see...that the power altogether belongs to God, and that God is terrible in chastisement.”—
The
Koran,
Sura II

A mind-numbing shrieking filled the air.

All vision limited by the heavy drizzle, Knife Thrower hurled a blunt, guttural Comanche exclamation at his brother-in-law. Both warriors r
e
alized the high-pitched noise was intended to panic them, to bunch the S
a
racen party up, drive it like a herd of frightened deer into the teeth of an opposing group certain to be ahead.

“Make left!” Fireclaw shouted, drawing his revolver. “Make left!”

A spear-throwing stick rattled in release. Its missile struck with a ho
l
low, meaty thump. Shrimp had counted his first coup. Fireclaw would wo
r
ry about the boy no longer.

With some semblance of deliberation, and before the Utes could reach them from behind, the party drifted leftward, toward the base of the cliff, into a clutter of boulders which afforded some protection. Here, Shrimp sent another Ute into oblivion with a spear in the solar plexus, stooped to gather up the shoulder-bow he’d also carried, discharged a projectile into the approaching Ute ranks once again.

A second party of mountain savages rounded the aspen copse, ru
n
ning toward where the Saracen group might have been caught had they conti
n
ued for the evergreens. A storm of arrows preceded them, though all of this first volley fell short or missed. A war chief upon the mist-shrouded hill shouted orders in falsetto, raised his feather-fringed lance, demonstra
t
ing the next angle of fire to be taken.

A rifle-shot cracked, lifting the chief from his feet, rolling him down the back side of the hill. The Helvetian had no time to see who’d fired it. He found himself hoping it had been Ayesha, but it had likelier been the wa
r
rior-girl, Lishabha.

The dull bellow of David Shulieman’s four-barreled pistol followed as an echo, a single load of roundshot tearing into the cluster of Utes, bloodying the lot. While they stood cursing, the rabbi killed three of them with the shots remaining to him. He removed his glasses, polished them, co
m
menced the process of reloading.

To Fireclaw’s surprise, a third party, hiding somewhere in the gully pe
r
pendicular to the wash, charged out in what would have been a well-timed rush from the side—had he permitted his own group to stay within the arms of the Ute pincer. He saw, now, how it was that he’d been fooled. As the Utes rushed by, their voices raised, the mule-doe decoy struggled in terror at the end of a long braided tether.

Her fawn danced frantically beneath her feet.

A second gun banged, without visible effect.

Knife Thrower and young Shrimp now stood side by side, blades flashing, guarding each other’s flanks as a dozen enemy warriors circled them and screamed.

The younger of the two had cast aside his shoulder-bow, drawing i
n
stead the odd pair of knives he carried, fighting with them as if he were fighting with his fists. At each punch and twist, an overconfident Ute died or backed away with something of himself missing.

Knife Thrower had seized an eagle-feathered lance from a fallen Ute, fending and thrusting with his left hand while he wielded his own much shorter dagger in his right.

Fireclaw holstered his still-unfired revolver, locked his double-limbed Comanche longbow into his prosthetic, nocked an arrow, sent it flying into the face of the young sally-chief leading the Utes from the gully. The Ute stumbled, fell, lay writhing for a longer time than the Helvetian would have imagined possible.

A second yard-length arrow was upon its way—this shaft struck a warrior from the frontal assault—as Saracen firearms began to go off all around him.