The Crystal Empire (15 page)

The little girl, in fact a Princess, firstborn of Shaatirah, retired co
n
sort to Abu Bakr Mohammed VII, Sword of God, Keeper of the Faith, His Pan-Islamic Holiness, Caliph-in-Rome, sat up to accept the glass of water David offered her.

“Gross rivalry diverts you, even till you visit the tombs.”—
The Koran
, Sura CII

“S
apaagh chalhghayr, good morning, Da—Your Holiness!”

“
Sapaagh chalhghayr,
Ayesha. Is it The Day, then?”

Ayesha closed her book over a finger, shaded her eyes with a small hand. Sitting under a bright sky, upon a stone balustrade overlooking the Tiber and six hills of the ancient capital, she smiled, sensing one of her f
a
ther’s frequent jests in the offing.

“‘The Day,’ Your Holiness?”

In the gloom of a point-arched doorway leading from the palace, di
s
placing the nurse Marya, who normally played chaperon to her small charge, a pair of grim-faced uniformed guards, shortswords and stubby pistols ready, kept watch over their Caliph, awaiting his will—or the suici
d
al foolishness of some assassin.

Far at the other end of the balcony, a dozen pigeons, startled by some sudden noise or passing shadow, fluttered heavenward.

“
Nanam,
the Dreaded Day upon which Our favorite daughter ceases calling Us ‘Daddy’—”

The Caliph strode across the sun-warmed geometric flagging of the balcony. He poured himself a cup of fragrant coffee from a silver se
r
vice standing upon a table beside a wall.

“—and Our desire to walk the surface of this trouble-weary planet is at an end.”

Aside: “
Sapaagh chalhghayr,
David.”

Many floors below, in some unseen courtyard, palace guardsmen were changing shifts with what seemed to Shulieman something more than their usual military enthusiasm. There were hoarse shouts, followed by ji
n
gle-stamping from booted feet, a clack-clack-clack of inspected breech-loading chambers slamming shut, then the clattering thunder of rifle-buttstocks hitting pavement.

The young rabbi set his own cup down, annoyed a bit by this inte
r
ruption of the lessons of his only pupil. At another court he might have been an old man, dressed in formal vestments for the morning tutoring of the favorite daughter of the Caliph—and afraid to feel annoyed. In this one, brilliant, Byzantine, sometimes bizarre, renowned the world over for its respect of knowledge, exploration, and innovation—without any of the empty trappings of pedantry or piety—his thin form was adorned in sturdy blue-dyed cotton trousers, a short-tailed tunic open at the throat, untucked into his belt. His curly hair and beard were clean but, as usual, unkempt.

His thick spectacles gave back twin miniature images of the Caliph.

“Good morning, sir.”

Abu Bakr Mohammed VII, Sword of God, Keeper of the Faith, was a tall man, yet he gave everyone he met the opposite impression. Twi
n
kling of eye, jocular of temperament, rotund of form, he possessed hard, capable hands, not those of a king or philosopher but of a potter or stonemason. In fact, following a dictum of the Prophet—may his name be blessed—that a man should have a manual trade, whatever his off
i
cial station in life, he dabbled, in what had once been palace dungeons, at carpentry. Family quarters were filled with the furniture he had co
n
structed with those hands—while listening to reports from agents, a
d
vice from counselors, over the rasping buzz of saw and scraper.

For one so great of girth, he trod very lightly upon an earth whose surface he now threatened to depart. His voice was that of a singer-of-tales, a bit higher than most individuals remembered of him, rich and clear. Though he was nominal ruler of half the world, the broad, blue-black-bearded face he wore adorned no coin, no plaque, no statue. Yet his word went everywhere, and, being heard, was heeded.

“Ayesha.” The Caliph addressed himself more to David Shulieman than to his daughter. He had taken a sip of dark, sweet coffee, finding, beside the pair, a place upon the broad stone railing for his even broader fund
a
ment. “Marya informs Us that you had another bad one last night. Did you not take your medicine?”

“Why,
thapnan
, of course, Your—Daddy!” Ayesha shuddered in u
n
dimmed memory of her dream—likewise of a time not long ago when, for lack of extracts from a certain obscure desert plant her doctors had later compounded, nightmares had threatened to destroy her young mind alt
o
gether.

Her voice an octave lower, she nodded, “I always do.”

“Very well,” Abu Bakr Mohammed answered. “We shall speak again to Our physicians—provided that you add a big hug to that ‘Daddy.’”

Gathering her yellow silks about her, the little girl jumped up gi
g
gling and complied, almost upsetting the cup her father held. For a m
o
ment or two, he shared her smile, as she shared his dark complexion and darker eyes. From the beginning, she had been an unusual child, he thought, sweet, affectionate, her waking hours marked by quiet study and reflection, rather than boisterous play as with her brother and her many sisters.

She was pretty and would one day be beautiful.

She was clever and would one day be brilliant.

When she stepped away, he asked, “What is David having you study this morning?”

“History, Daddy. The Consultation of 878
a.h.”

The Caliph nodded, then looked gravely at Shulieman. “Incidentally, while Our female household may raise Gehenna about your presence in their quarters last night, We Ourselves thank you.
Sghuhran jazeelan.
We should have been there Ourselves, had not Commodore Mochamet al Ro
t
shild, arriving late from—”

It was at this moment Shulieman first noticed that the Caliph wore mil
i
tary garb, rough-tailored trousers, save in coloring not unlike those Shuli
e
man himself wore, a long, many-pocketed tunic the color of wet sand, knee-length high-heeled cavalry boots. Pistol and dagger swung from his broad leather belt.

“But, then,” the Caliph continued, “that is none of your concern. You know what
is,
which is why We overpay you so well. Get yourself more coffee, boy,
relax!
”

Shulieman, incapable of obeying the latter of his sovereign’s co
m
mands, obeyed the former. Save upon occasions of marksmanship pra
c
tice—the Caliph had insisted that his daughter learn to shoot both rifle and pi
s
tol—he had never seen Abu Bakr Mohammed armed before, nor shadowed quite so closely by guards. His was a happy reign, an enligh
t
ened one, if Shulieman were any judge of history—and he had best be, for this was his chief value both to the Caliph and to his daughter.

He wondered what had happened in the night.

To Ayesha, the Caliph said, “The Consultation, eh? Always been r
a
ther fond of that period, Ourselves. One of a very few demonstrable i
n
stances of reason defeating stupidity. Humph. Or at least fighting it to a draw. Or maybe it is just that its hero—one of them—shared Our name: Abu Bakr Mohammed III.

“Tell Us, then, about the Consultation.”

Having taken her place atop the rail, Ayesha sat up, back straight, hands folded in her silk-draped lap. She closed her eyes, taking her lo
w
er lip b
e
tween her teeth.

“
That
Abu Bakr Mohammed was a mighty Sunnite Caliph who wo
r
ried a lot, for Moslems could not seem to get along with one another, even though they shared the same faith.”

Pigeons began drifting back to the other end of the balcony. The pr
e
sent Caliph laughed, driving them away again.

“Darling daughter, as you will learn all too soon, it is often far more di
f
ficult to obtain peace within your own family than with foreigners, even in these troubled times. Nevertheless, you are quite correct: in those days there were long-standing factional disputes within Islam b
e
tween Sunnite and Shiite (which was in essence a simple family arg
u
ment over inhe
r
itance), Fatimite and Druse.”

He gave David Shulieman a questioning look before continuing, wondering whether the palace tutor, discontent with answers expected to be satisfying in the public schools, had taken his little girl to the next level of analytic sophistication.

“Also he worried that one particular tenet of his denomination—that the Nazarene Carpenter was the Mahdi foretold to return at the end of time—had been discredited and would destroy his own people, even as the ancient Christians were destroyed.”

“
Nanam,
Daddy, that is just what David has told me. So he wisely persuaded all the leaders of all the other sects, under the Doctrine of...of...”

“
Ijma
,” the rabbi provided, sipping coffee, “‘Agreement of Islam,’ in which that which is believed by most of the Faithful is to be believed by all.”

Ayesha nodded. “
Ijma.
Abu Bakr argued that neutral referees should be obtained to resolve their disputes.”

“The Consultation with Rabbis,” Shulieman offered, “marked the b
e
ginnings of a new, vigorous, hybrid culture, more progressive and h
u
mane than any our world has ever known heretofore.”

“Never overlooking that a little blood got spilled along the path t
o
ward establishing our Great Consensus,” added the Caliph with a wry expre
s
sion. “We would not have Our daughter tutored in anything other than the plain, unvarnished truth. But it built a
dually
Semitic civiliz
a
tion which came to span our globe from Irland to the Steppes, from Skandinavia to the Cape at World’s End.”

“And you are boss.” Ayesha beamed up at her father.

The Caliph frowned, skeptical of any naïveté his precocious daughter displayed, wondering, with a small, anticipatory ache, whether this was a cynical ploy of a kind he had never seen her exercise before or just a subtle joke.

He motioned David Shulieman to answer.

Shulieman, the consternation of the Caliph visible to him, suppressed a grin. “It is a little-appreciated fact that your father is leader of half the Mo
s
lem world only through his wise and continuing moral example. He is not a king, such as ancient Christians had.”

They all sat silent with that eloquent phrase a moment, “half the Moslem world,” Abu Bakr Mohammed thinking about the other half, of the ironic term “consensus,” and of young men dying at this moment in far
a
way places at his express command.

Rabbi David Shulieman thought about the historic place of his own people in the scheme of things.

“Or your people,” Ayesha thought to say at last.

“What?” Shulieman laughed. He knew more about the unholy talents which held this little girl in their clutches than anyone. Still, she ma
n
aged to startle even him with embarrassing frequency. “Yes, well, I su
s
pect they should best have listened to their prophet Samuel, who tried very hard to warn them about kings.”

Little Ayesha, slyly or not, was far from finished asking unexpected, di
f
ficult questions of her elders. “But
limaadaa,
why only half, Daddy? I thought that—”

“Once upon a time,” the Caliph answered, taking fond revenge by talking down to her, “far away eastward, all of Great Asia was ruled by a wily Mongol fellow by the name of Kublai Khan. Grandson of the mightiest of conquerors, Genghis, he possessed the mind of a philos
o
pher, the heart of a desert chieftain. His passing might be regretted even by a civ
i
lized folk such as ourselves. The world of today contains no remnant of his once-vast e
m
pire, which must have been swept away in the same disaster which removed the ancient Christians from Europe.”

The rabbi added, “Just as Sunnites came to dominate Europe, so A
f
ghan inheritors of Zahirud-din Mohammed Babar, claiming descent from mighty Tamerlane, launched a dynasty which soon—in Mongol a
b
sence—dominated the largest continent of the earth.”