The Crystal Empire (18 page)

Shulieman sipped at the tea she had given him. Even just beneath his nose, its aroma was overmatched by her perfume. Much like his hostess, it was too sweet, yet promising of a bitter aftertaste. He considered long b
e
fore replying.

“I was thinking about the war, Marya, for the most part. How it seems to have grown while we were not looking, from a brief holiday excursion of splendid, gay-uniformed young Moslems and Jews into a nightmarish grind of muddy bloodshed.”

She smiled, as he thought she might have done at any answer he o
f
fered. She had removed her veil, and with it, it seemed, at least half of her clothing. From this vantage she had contrived, he could peer down into the heavy-scented abyss between her ample, tautly rounded breasts, if he wished it, to her jewel-bedecked navel.

He found, as usual, that he did not wish it.

She folded her white arms across her belly, ripening what was to him already overripe. “Do you not worry, David, about not being in the fighting?”

He laughed, tapping the nosepiece of his spectacles, “Saying I was nigh unto being blind, they would not take me. Nor am I much interes
t
ed in great adventures, Marya, save those purely of the intellect. I b
e
lieve that, if enough individuals thought about the problem long enough, we would not now be threatened by destruction in this war or any other. That would be adventure enough for me.”

Still, like many another man, he wondered privately how he would acquit himself challenged thus. Would he be brave? Could he kill anot
h
er man? These were not thoughts which he could share with someone like Marya, nor, for different reasons, with anyone else. Bespectacled and sedentary scholar that he was, too fast approaching middle age, something wild within him did yearn for physical adventure.

Marya, ignoring her own cup, which she had left unsipped upon the ornate table, flowed closer to him, placing one white, freckled, ring-laden hand upon his knee.

“Still, I sometimes try imagining what it would be like, fighting for the greater glory of God against the heretic.”

She fluttered her long eyelashes at him.

“I fear that the place of women in the scheme of things precludes their playing at being soldiers, rulers, or even advisers to the rulers of the world.”

Her index finger began making tiny circles upon his knee.

“Men always make the rules,” she murmured, her voice now a husky whisper. “They play their glorious games with warnings posted, No Girls Allowed. There are times—not now, though, dearest David—when I would that it were different.”

Understanding well that he lacked any charms which were not resis
t
ible, Shulieman began to worry about what Marya was after. Concealing any alarm he felt, he answered with caution. “Women play at different games, Marya, games which seem to have no rules at all.”

She sat up, brushed long, dark auburn hair back from her eyes, but did not take her hand from his body. Her movement raised one rounded breast until he thought it would erupt from its covering. Fine hairs pric
k
led along the back of his neck.

“Yes, David, there are indeed those women who find their own way in the world, rules or not.”

“Women such as?”

She purred, her tone belying the content of her words. “Such as our mutual charge, the Princess Ayesha, who feels no qualm intruding upon the councils of men.”

“So that is it,” he answered, somewhat relieved. “Marya, a thousand a
x
es are ground each day in this court of our enlightened sovereign Abu Bakr Mohammed VII...”

In Ayesha’s case, it was a choice among four current stepmothers, more than a dozen “honorably” retired wives (including Ayesha’s mot
h
er) pro
v
en incapable of providing the Caliph with male heirs, her only brother Ali, sisters, numberless grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces, all struggling for a tiny share of prominence. Uninte
r
ested in power, Ay
e
sha might become a pawn in such struggling, and he, uninterested in po
w
er himself, had likely slighted her in failing to prepare her against such a contingency. He looked down at Marya’s e
x
ploring fingers.

“Whose whetstone are you cranking at this moment?”

“I?” the woman protested, placing her free hand in a modest pose across her bosom. Her other hand slid from Shulieman’s knee halfway along inside his thigh. “You are asking such a question of Ayesha’s dearest lifelong friend?”

In defense, he placed a hand over hers, a gesture which made him feel silly, like a reluctant virgin. She responded by taking his cup, pla
c
ing it u
p
on the bright-polished table, then rising a little to face him, one hand upon each of his legs.

She looked into his eyes, sliding her soft hands higher. “But of what earthly worth can her counsel be, when she herself borders each night u
p
on raving madness?”

She passed a pink tongue across her lips.

He cleared his throat.

Become somewhat the pedant, he heard himself replying, “Marya, we both know that, despite the unreliability of her dubious gift—which her father, in an exercise of his own considerable intelligence, rightly distinguishes from the rational operations of her mind—he finds her easy to communicate with. He has come to rely upon the calm wisdom behind those night-tortured eyes of hers.”

To the rest of her “family,” all but her father—also her favorite teacher (she had few other friends at court)—she was something of an embarras
s
ment, regarded with increasing awe, even fear, by her own otherwise s
o
phisticated people.

Marya had moved forward again, so that her breasts were between his knees, her hands as high as they could go without leaving his thighs. “Pe
r
haps you are right, David darling, perhaps there is wisdom to be gained from pain. Do you like pain, David darling, do you, too, find wisdom in it—or do you prefer inflicting it?”

Again she licked her lips as one of her hands moved for his wais
t
band. He seized them both, holding them in one of his.

“And you, Marya,” he said hoarsely, “inconspicuous little mouse in the wainscoting that you pretend to be, have always and ever acted as an all-around snoop and outright spy against full half Ayesha’s family, in se
r
vice of the other.”

She rocked back, eyes wide, eyebrows arched in astonished outrage.

“In our complicated social, political, and religious situation—very like an artichoke I seem to have been thinking about all morning—with coun
t
less groups of individuals playing every side of every issue out of every conceivable motivation,
which
particular half of the family you serve seems somewhat inconstant.”

Examining her at arm’s length, he sighed to himself. Yet another missed opportunity.

It was going to be a long, rueful, bitter old age.

He continued. “Perhaps you are not so stupid after all, my dear, as I believed, but simply preoccupied, keeping track of all your lies, all your d
e
ceptions, all your trickeries, all your betrayals, each layered upon a contr
a
dictory predecessor. Now, what have you to say to that? Nothing? Well, then...”

Tossing her hands back at her, he levered himself from her over-upholstered divan, leaving her upon the floor, balanced upon her heels. As he opened an ornate, carven door into the family-quarters hallway outside, he turned once more.

“My thanks for the tea, Marya. Your life must be bewildering.”

“Hast thou not regarded those who were forbidden to converse secretly together,
then they return to that they were forbidden, and they converse secretly together
in sin and enmity...?
”
—
The
Koran,
Sura LVIII

The instant that her door shut with a soft whoosh behind David Shulieman’s back, Marya hurled herself to her feet, breathing harshly. No oath came to her lips. She was incoherent with insulted rage, fru
s
trated, desp
e
rate to fight back tears.

Behind her, a door opened. A woman, rich-clad, subtly perfumed, and perhaps ten years older, stepped from a nearby room.

“Well, Marya, are your charms beginning to fail you—and me?”

The younger woman whirled toward the voice behind her, a scorc
h
ing epithet at last upon her lips, but one which, under the circumstances, might well have cost her her life.

“Lady Jamela! A person that hairy could not be celibate, could he, ma’am? Perhaps he prefers boys.”

Abu Bakr Mohammed’s current senior wife chuckled. “Perhaps he prefers Princess Ayesha. I marked the color in his face when you were wor
k
ing your, er, magic upon him—or attempting to. He is no celibate, I assure you, and he prefers girls.”

Forgetting courtesy, Marya sank to the divan, feet and knees toget
h
er, her face buried in her hands. Jamela let it pass. She might have su
f
fered this indignity herself, had she not been wiser at an earlier age and begun e
m
ploying surrogates like Marya.

“The trouble, my dear, is that you are no longer a girl.”

Jamela sighed, more to herself than to her servant. Turning to a nearby window, she pulled back its heavy drapings to look out upon a gray fogbound lan
d
scape. Idly she played with one of the many rings upon her long-nailed fingers.

“Nor am I, I am afraid. We have reached a point in our lives when we shall have to depend upon something other than our looks. If you cannot extract information one way, I shall have to do it another. I go now, to wait upon my husband and his guest.”

Turning, Jamela walked toward the door. “Upon occasion I have made you lavish promises, Marya, which none has power to abrogate as long as I am here in Rome, and you to be rewarded.”

Marya looked up, sudden fear written into her eyes.

Jamela raised a hand.
“Laa, laa.
Read no irony into my words, child, for, unlike some others, I am ever faithful to them, believing it good business.

“I suggest, for sake of your confidence and self-esteem, that you test your wiles upon some other victim, for practice. Try Lady Shaabbah’s new lover, the guard-lieutenant Kabeer. I may require your abilities again in f
u
ture—I do not wish them blunted by any uncertainty.”

2

When Jamela arrived, voices were raised in her husband’s study.

“Bu, you are an optimist,” one of them was saying, “and a bloody fool! Just look at this!”

As she entered, Jamela gasped. A small, shiny gun was out, being poin
t
ed straight at the undefended belly of Abu Bakr Mohammed VII, Sword of God, Defender of the Faith, the Caliph of Rome, by the elde
r
ly—and equally fat—merchant, Mochamet al Rotshild. Yet it was this la
t
ter who appeared indignant.

“Your guard did not search me so much as once upon my way up here!”

Grinning, the Caliph sat forward in his chair, put a hand out, palm up, to receive the weapon. Jamela relaxed, turned to a tea service already laid out, listening.

“Mo,” the Caliph replied, “you have carried this lethal trinket with you for as long as We have known you. I must say, We would enjoy watching any ten guardsmen trying to take it away from you.”

He turned Mochamet al Rotshild’s weapon over in his hand.

“My, my, such a tiny thing—with such great big holes at the front! Here, take it back before We hurt Ourselves.”

He handed the gun back to his friend.

“Besides,” he continued, “—
Sghuhran,
thank you, my dear, why do you not pour yourself a cup, sit down, you look tired—what good would searching a determined assassin do? We have seen you deliver lectures u
p
on how to kill a man with nothing more than the binding of a book.”

He waved a hand about a room which, save for its windows and doors, was lined in nothing but books.

“
Laa
, a hundred bodyguards could not stay your hand, Mo, if you could not be trusted.”

Unsatisfied, the merchant frowned. His friend the Caliph observed this and laughed.

Jamela found a place to sit, discomfited at being required to listen to a conversation openly.

Still, there was always something to be learned. Looking at the two men, one might almost think them brothers, identical in some ways, twin-opposites in others. Both were heavy and bearded, somewhere b
e
tween fifty-five and sixty-five years of age, although neither showed it. The Caliph’s ebon hair and beard were close-trimmed and thick, the merchant’s fiery red, long and unruly. Abu Bakr Mohammed spoke with the cultured accent of a Roman, Mochamet al Rotshild with the glottal burr of his native Iskutlan. The Caliph wore no jewelry save the su
n
burst upon his breast which marked him Supreme Commander of the military. The merchant wore many rings, bracelets, the crossband and hanger for a cutlass which he had surrendered at the palace gate, and a piratical single earring. He was an enormous man. The Caliph was enormous-minded.