The Crystal Empire

by L. Neil Smith

  Tonight the sky was clear and still.

  Coming unheard upon him, Dove Blossom saw Fireclaw sitting cross-legged before a fire no bigger than his fist. His back was toward the wind-twisted trunk of a fallen evergreen, too big to have lived upon this weather-tortured ridge, and having at last paid the price.

  His sword lay in its scabbard across his thighs.

  He watched the fire until a tiny pinecone she’d displaced with a fringe-moccasined foot rolled into a root-walled bed of last year’s scales at the base of a tree. It made no greater noise than the breathing of a field mouse, though it brought him to alertness, and coaxed a full hand’s width of gleaming, deadly steel from Murderer’s sheath before he saw that it was she who’d followed him.

  He spoke not but slid the sword back into place, acknowledging her glance with one of his own which she couldn’t read. This, more than anything else which had transpired this day, frightened her. He turned his eyes again into the blue-and-yellow heart of the palm-sized fire he’d built in a hollow of scooped-out sand.

  Dove Blossom crossed the clearing, a space little larger than their bedchamber at the ranch, and, finding a comfortable bend beside her husband along the same fallen trunk he leaned against, sat down on a carpet of red-brown pine needles.

  The fire crackled, sparks drifting upward where they winked and died. Fireclaw added a small branch, watched the bark-flakes curl and peel as the seasoned wood beneath it started burning.

  Incense rose about them.

  Of a sudden, and in terrifying silence, he was at her, seizing her sueded shirt, thrusting it off over her head. Murderer lay upon the ground, at the other side of the fire, unheeded and unnoticed. He tore at the waist-bindings of her skirt, breaking a thong in desperate haste. Naked save for her moccasins, she lay back where he’d pressed her, uncomfortable on an itching carpet of dried needles, looking up as he knelt over her, tearing at his own clothing.

  The worst was that he’d not meet her eyes, nor even look upon her face. His own was twisted, darkened, stony. Had it been blood-haze, that would have been bad enough. This was something else, far worse. Something she’d never seen before.

  Then he was upon her, forcing her legs apart, though she didn’t resist, entering against unready flesh. She bit her lower lip and squeezed her eyes shut, suffering the pain as long as she was able, feeling his lower jaw dig at her shoulder, his breath rasp in her ear, his one good hand bruise her hip. Her moaning gasp conveyed a different message than he was used to hearing from her, but, in the middle of his savage rhythm, he ignored it, hurting her with every breath and every heartbeat.

  He spent himself in silence and rolled away, still refusing to catch her eye, his back bent and his head low, his gaze once more upon the fire. Perhaps he was thinking, as she was trying not to, that a secret private place of theirs, this clearing, had been defiled irrevocably by his thoughtless urgency. She pulled her clothing to her breast and, concentrating hard upon the many years of tenderness between them, rather than upon this ugly moment—now blessedly behind them—of unthinking need, she laid a hand upon his sweat-sheened shoulder.

  Sedrich turned to his wife, as if continuing an interrupted conversation.

  “I’d believed, for all my life till that moment, that my mother’s Sisterhood was benevolent, protective, a shield and a shelter against the Cult.”

  He shook his head, keeping his eyes upon the fire before them.

  Arms wrapped close about her bare knees, Dove Blossom watched the fire also, disappointed that his thoughts were not upon her, yet understanding and eager to help her man in whatever wise she might.

  “Yet, when you needed help,” she offered, “the Sisterhood proved to be as bad as the Brotherhood?”

  “Worse, in their own deceptive wise. Sins of omission. You know, I brought up the matter of the fletcher, the man they mutilated when I was a boy. He was supposed to have had a Choice, as I did, ’tween that and ostracism, but ’twas complicated by the fact he was already crippled. So, in addition to the legs he’d given for his people, the Cult took his hand as well.” He shook his head. “This afternoon, Oln Woeck couldn’t e’en remember the incident.

  “Ah, well, memory’s selective. I didn’t remember their burning a cross upon his lawn—as they did upon my father’s when they came for me—but I remember kicking through the ashes afterward.”

  “What would he have of you, my husband? What has he traveled thus far to demand?”

  Sedrich laughed. “This I’ve asked of myself from the first moment his foul feet touched our land. Why does Oln Woeck enter my life again,” he reached up and touched her cheek with a gentle finger, “just when things are arranged as I like them?”

  He looked up toward the unanswering stars.

  “He supposes I should be grateful to him, for giving me a start upon this life we’ve built together, you and I, with broken fingernails and bleeding knuckles. He’s shocked and hurt to learn how much I burn to spit his guts upon my father’s sword.”

  He rubbed his temples with his fists.

  “What does he want of me? He told me, after dancing round about it for half an hour. Sinner that I be, said he, I’m needed. He says the future of all the Helvetii may depend upon me, offering other reasons, as well, why I should cooperate with what he has in mind.”

  “What reasons could he offer, Sedrich?”

  He took her small brown hand in his, telling her about the son he’d not known he had.

  “My mother labored mightily the child’s life to save, having within her expertise diverse and potent formulae, the distillation of them from the blood and organs of pigs and goats and other animals. These did she instill within one of the younger Sisters, who did give the baby suck as if she’d delivered him herself.

  “And he survived.”

  Five minutes passed before Fireclaw spoke again.

  “He’d be twenty by this time. He was called Owald, after my paternal grandfather—a fortuitous coincidence, since the same name also runs in Oln Woeck’s family, he says, and was acceptable to him. Young Owald was raised in the belief that he was Oln Woeck’s son—a ‘necessary deception’ to spare him the painful knowledge that his real father had ‘cruelly’ abandoned him.”

  Again he shook his head. “I think, by now, the pious son of a pig believes the lie himself.”

  He paused, then: “In truth ’twas my own mother did the raising, as Oln Woeck’s duties with the Brotherhood—”

  “Ne’er mind that.” Dove Blossom insisted, “What is it Oln Woeck wants of you?”

  “He’s asked me to guide a party westward, through the mountains, into whate’er domain lies beyond.”

  Dove Blossom’s sudden intake of breath would have been audible a hundred paces away, had there been anyone but her husband to hear it. Why was it, just when Sedrich had begun to open up to her after all these years, he was going to be taken away from her?

  Casting aside the final vestiges of the womanly reticence held to be proper among her people, she made bold to share these thoughts with Fireclaw. He appeared to ponder them a long while before giving her an answer in Comanche, or in Helvetian when the Red Man’s tongue—at least that warrior’s portion he knew—lacked words he needed.

  “Dove Blossom,” he began, unable to look at her when he spoke thus, yet knowing that, this once, he must. More than ever before, he was conscious of their many years together, years which sometimes seemed to have flown by like days, but which also, upon occasion, felt to him as if they’d been all his life. “My wife and partner. How can it be I’ve ne’er told you what’s in my heart about you?”

  She held up a hand to silence him, anxious that her husband not humiliate himself in betrayal of customs which she herself had violated. They were her people’s customs, she realized as she made the gesture, not his. Also, in his words—words she’d provoked, and now had no wish he should continue—she felt some sense of parting, which filled her with panic and an infinite sadness.

  Fire
claw took her hand from the air between them, kissed it upon the palm and placed it in her lap.

  “Now I’ve started this, contrary woman, I’ll be heard. You’re to me the most...” He struggled as if to find a word. “The most decent human being e’er I’ve known. The more that, since, unlike the innocent girl young Frae was, you’re wise in the ways of the world. Your decency is a matter of deliberation.”

  Although she couldn’t know it, the truth of Sedrich’s words was in that instant demonstrated by the fact Dove Blossom felt not the slightest twinge of jealousy at Frae Hethristochter’s name, but took them in the wise in which he’d meant them.

  “These are words of great respect, my husband, not of love—although I thank you for them and will carry them with me till I am no more.” This time her upraised hand forestalled an answer. “No, no I doubt not your love, for it has been a lifetime in the proving. Yet somehow your words, which touched not upon the subject, have nonetheless told me you will bow to Oln Woeck’s wishes and go with the Saracens.”

  His face was pained. “I think me I must, beloved wife. I feared I was growing aged. Now the old, unanswered questions gall me as ne’er they did when I was young. P’rhaps because I know the time I’ve left to answer them is limited. ’Twould seem, as well, that westward’s where my son—”

  This time he seized her hand and held it tight.

  “—where our son’s gone.”

  “Good,” she replied, “I’ll go with you.”

  Fireclaw’s face brightened at her answer, but, even as she spoke it, some stirring deep inside her body told her that the gods, mocking their longest, dearest held wishes, had contrived that it shouldn’t be so.

  Fireclaw and Dove Blossom watched the fire.

  After a little time had passed in silence, he took her in his arms and made quiet, gentle love to her, as tender as e’er he’d been when first they’d known each other fifteen years—and a lifetime—ago.

  This time her moaning in his ear conveyed what it was supposed to.

  “Oln Woeck was right about one thing, dear my Sedrich,” she whispered between gasps. “You’re but one man, mighty Fireclaw. One man who can be replaced—at least for me—by no other.”

  XXIII: The Sword of God

  “...when Our command comes and the Oven boils...We charge not any soul

  save to its capacity.”—The Koran, Sura XXIII

  Morning sunlight streamed through a deep-bellied bay of windows spread abaft of Mochamet al Rotshild’s cabin—past a filtering barrier of battle-splintered frames and hasty patching.

  All about the low-ceilinged chamber—Fireclaw had to duck upon entering and continue stooping to avoid braining himself upon rafter-beams soot-blotched by gimbaled lamps of brass—Comanche arrows had been wrenched from the paneled walls, or simply broken off. Nor had the furnishing and fixtures avoided similar damage. What little there was left of the windows, after Knife Thrower’s enthusiastic welcome, was glass. The broken panes had been replaced with a material Sedrich Fireclaw had never seen before, gray-brown, fibrous, much like paper, only thicker.

  “One gathereth that the vessel’s master,” Oln Woeck had explained as they had crossed from the ranch-yard gate an hour earlier, toward the immobilized land-ship, “hath purposely kept her bow turned to the westward, so as to be awakened by the dawn each day.”

  Great black Ursi trotted happily beside Fireclaw, sniffing out unfamiliar footsteps stamped into every handspan of his accustomed domain. The animal sensed an excited bustling in the air about him, and, as often was the way of his kind, an impending voyage.

  Fireclaw nodded, understanding both of his companions.

  “Methinks,” the warrior replied, “that anyone else would have wanted a view of the mountains to wake up to.”

  He raised his eyes toward them, looming like a mighty deep-stepped wall to the west.

  “Still,” he offered, “the sight of yon great barrier can’t be a very comforting one to a seaman, looking like the very tidal wave of Doomsday as it must.”

  For once, the leader of the Cult of Jesus was in agreement.

  “Aye, and worse, this be as far as his land-ship goeth. From here, his expedition—and your own—doth proceed afoot.”

  Fireclaw shook his head. The man couldn’t let an opportunity pass to remind him of the coming search for “their” son—and the continuing necessity that Fireclaw permit the Cultist to go on living. Yet the voyage was vitally necessary as well, Fireclaw knew, to the Saracens, growing as it did directly out of a dangerous political situation in a broader world than he had ever known existed.

  Upon returning from the nearby foothills, he had surprised Oln Woeck this morning with his curt agreement, at least to hear out this Commodore Mochamet al Rotshild, promising as well to advise the Saracens, to whatever extent he was capable, upon the likelihood that their small company would reach their goal.

  Fireclaw had left it to the Cultist to wonder about his reasons for cooperating. If the old man thought he knew what those reasons might be, so much the better.

  “My single condition,” he had informed the astonished man upon summoning him to the ranch house where he and Dove Blossom had broken their fast well before dawn, “is that you, the wise and trusted mentor of my boyhood, must accompany me upon this great adventure, since your wise counsel is likely to be constantly required.”

  Oln Woeck had paled.

  “But, Sedrich,” he had protested, “I had planned returning eastward. I feel that I am needed there far more greatly.”

  Ruffling the big dog’s ears, Fireclaw had laughed.

  “Do you not return, Helvetia will go on existing, whereas, do you not continue with the Saracens and me upon this trek, to whatever extent its success depends upon me, to that extent shall it suffer by your absence, since it will foreordain mine.”

  To a far greater extent than he appreciated, Oln Woeck had brought the man he knew as Sedrich Sedrichsohn—whom others, who knew him far better, now called Fireclaw—up to date concerning the village he had left abruptly and so long ago.

  Land-ships, for example, such as a younger Sedrich had been punished for experimenting with, were now in increasingly common use among the Helvetians everywhere. Oln Woeck seemed to have forgotten who invented them, treating the matter just as if they had always existed.

  Or grew upon trees, the warrior thought.

  “Moreover,” the Cultist told him as they approached the hull of the Saracen vessel, still closed up tightly against the surprising chill of the prairie summer night—and any intruders it might bring—“contact is beginning in full measure with these rich and powerful strangers from across what they term the Lesser Ocean.”

  Raising his steel-tipped stump to pound upon the hull, Fireclaw smiled down wolfishly at the old man.

  “Had it not, in fact, begun covertly many years ago with Frae’s father, Hethri—”

  Oln Woeck’s jaw dropped.

  “How could you have known that? How—”

  Fireclaw paused, letting the old man sputter, refraining a moment more from awakening the Saracens.

  Then: “And is there not much more to say, in full truth, concerning this ‘bargain’ which existed between you and my mother, which you have accused her of violating? Remember, as you answer, Oln Woeck, how dearly you want a favor of me.

  The old man’s mouth was a tight, straight line.

  “Aye, as long as thy son, Owald, wasn’t brought up in the Cult, the boy would be raised in the belief that I was his father. I was to supervise Sister Ilse’s handling of it.”

  Fireclaw could well imagine the slow, relentless pressure upon his mother and the boy over the years, the solicitous presence, the pious grimaces, the incessant lectures, all eventually leading to suggestions about head-shaving and tattoos.

  Possibly far worse, knowing the old man’s personal habits.

  “Ere she had, in whatever witchy manner, sensed the imminence of her death, she delivered to the boy Owald, then fif
teen years old, a parcel of her highly prejudiced opinions concerning his birth, the death of—stay thy hand, I’ll not say her name!—of his own mother, and the disappearance of his natural father.”

  Fireclaw nodded.

  “And young Owald had never gotten along with you, anyway, believing you were his father or not.”

  “He himself disappeared from our village”—Oln Woeck sighed—“the very day Sister Ilse was laid to rest.”

  Sedrich pounded on the hull.

  2

  “Marghapaa, sapaagh chalhayr! Maa chajmal chathahs!”

  Mochamet al Rotshild himself met Fireclaw with an engulfing hand as the Helvetian warrior and his unwelcome companion reached the top of the gangplank.

  Ursi sniffed at the Saracen’s baggy clothing, then immediately found a corner and lay down.

  Through that companion—seemingly no more popular with the Saracen captain than with Fireclaw—they exchanged a few words of courtesy, then proceeded aft to the wide-windowed cabin where, before Fireclaw’s wondering eyes, the “Commodore” began spreading map after map, each unrolled following its extraction from a tall case of pigeonholes which occupied an entire wall of the small room.

  From the first such, there had clattered to the floor an arrow.

  In one corner swung a gilded cage, unoccupied.

  “These Saracens,” Oln Woeck explained, providing his own casual translation of Mochamet al Rotshild’s opening remarks, “are transparently terrified of someone or something called the Mughal—I can’t determine whether ’tis a man or millions—who seemeth to have decided to act upon a centuries-old grudge stemming from sectarian disagreements within their heathenish religion.”

  The Saracen captain kept his eyes directly upon Fireclaw as the old man spoke, but he frowned at several points within his declamation. It was obvious to the warrior that he was less ignorant of the Helvetian tongue than the leader of the Cult of Jesus believed.

  Oln Woeck continued.