The Crystal Empire (26 page)

Enough, thought Sedrich Fireclaw,
is enough.

The breathless morning silence was over. A brisk, sage-laden high-plains breeze gusted away the brimstone odor lingering in a dense cloud about the ranch yard, leaving behind an underlying metallic smell of freshly spilled blood.

It wasn’t that the carmine-handed killer, always present, leering like a freshly unearthed skull deep within him, in any wise begrudged his painted cycle-riding brothers their innocent amusements. And, after all, this was their land, their home, their place apart from all others in a world where every living thing and every force of nature conspired to end the lives of the hesitant and unwary.

Moreover, in some spiritual sense he’d never fully understood hi
m
self, he knew that, in keeping the golden prairie swept clean of interlo
p
ers—in particular those intruding from the east—they were performing what they solemnly considered a sacred duty to the unforgiving gods who dwelt in mystery across the Great Blue Mountains.

But when a projectile whirred past
his
face, the survival sense he’d acquired at a terrible price upon the untender breast of that same prairie told him it was time now—and perhaps time well past—to put a stop to the tribesmen’s harassment of the alien vessel circling round and round his freehold.

At least until he learned for himself something of the reasons which had brought it here.

Besides, he was discovering that he was curious again. His vision of long ago—and the bitter memories of its near-destruction—had been vindicated. This apparition, pressing wheel-marks wider spread and deeper than any vehicle before it into the cycle-rutted road before his gate, was a rotary-sailed land-ship of the very sort he’d himself co
n
ceived and been forced to abandon twenty years before.

More than that, he recognized certain details, solutions to the pro
b
lems of mechanics which had been born in his mind alone. These had merely been expanded to accommodate the admittedly grander scale of the giant vessel now arriving at his doorstep amidst a sleet of arrows from his adopted relatives. He’d reason to appreciate such differences in engineering style: the Comanche warriors pursued the land-ship astride knee-guided steam-cycles he’d no hand himself in designing, but which he and Dove Blossom had spent many of their days, for fifteen years, repairing and maintaining for them, and with which he was thus int
i
mately familiar.

Wheels roared past him, spattering him with sand.

Come to think upon it, one of those little machines—ridden, he thought, by his wife’s cross-cousin Porcupine Eater—had sounded a bit rough as it had passed him, its rider sending a flying shaft into the eye of one of the foreigners. Likeliest the drive-chain had gone a bit slack. Trail-wear in each of the bearing-holes of not more than a fine hair’s width, mu
l
tiplied times the number of links in the chain, quickly added up to fingers’ widths, loading the engine at stops and starts, and each time the gears were shifted to a different ratio.

Have to see to it soon, ere it cause other difficulties.

Another gun barked. Elsewhere somebody screamed with pain.

But service to the Comanche was an everyday consideration, to be put aside for later. Now it was the land-ship which held his fascinated atte
n
tion, and another, similar machine which occupied his thoughts.

There were differences, of course: the experimental vessel of his a
d
ve
n
turous boyhood had been little larger than a rowboat. This two-masted monster was incomparably greater, a veritable mobile village. Its two dozen spinning sail-booms, twelve per mast, six up and six down, stretched wider, tip to bronze-shod tip, than his entire ranch house. Its sails—each r
e
sin-saturated expanse was greater than Dove Blossom’s garden. The glass-fiber masts themselves soared into the prairie sky, straight and tall as mountain evergreens. The great spoked wheels, rimmed in iron, stood three times the height of a tall man.

Fireclaw watched with interest as its desperate and motley compl
e
ment discharged breech-loading rifles at their whooping tormentors, one slow and awkward loading after another. And to considerably less pra
c
tical e
f
fect, he observed, than the tribesmen with their optically sighted longbows, quick to load and quick to reload.

Here was yet another surprise. He’d believed he possessed the sole fir
e
arm within many months’ journey of this place, perhaps upon the entire co
n
tinent. They seemed to be forbidden or unknown to every culture he encou
n
tered.

Now here came a
boatload
of the things.

Nonetheless, these oddly clad assorted foreigners hadn’t learned a lesson yet which he himself had absorbed even before the first blood-drenched twelvemonth he’d settled here upon the western plains—that in order to survive, a lone warrior must be capable of fighting like many. This meant with a repeating weapon of some kind, like the fat-cylindered r
e
volving pistol hanging now upon his left hip.

He scanned the land-ship with a practiced tactical sweep, complex ideas and images flowing, twining, braiding together wordlessly within his mind in fractions of an eyeblink.

Three upper decks the land-ship boasted, those at bow and stern a few steps higher than the center where the masts were stepped. At the tiller there growled and bellowed a shaggy laughing giant, long-barreled pistol and curved dagger thrust into his colorful sash, a man who might well have been his own father, Sedrich, dead these many years, save for the tangled orange of his hair and beard.

Some sort of gray exotic bird perched screaming upon his shoulder. A flash of crimson showed among its tail feathers.

By either side of this outlandish, noisy pair there crouched another man. One slight, blue-clad, and darkly bearded foreigner wore transpa
r
ent coverings, set in polished metal frames, before his eyes. Even as the Helv
e
tian watched, two barrels of his huge four-barreled pistol belched, genera
t
ing twin balls of flame.

One of the riders fell, his face a ruin.

Another of them, slightly wounded several places in the same one-man volley, screamed with something more than pain and pointed at the shooter, cursing. Multiple projectiles, Fireclaw nodded approvingly, most likely pellets of iron or lead.

An angry flock of arrows coursed toward the eyeglass wearer.

He ducked behind a rail, untouched.

The Comanche—despite, or perhaps
because
of, their familiarity with telescopic sights—might well be taking the fellow’s eye-coverings for a sign of sorcerous capability. Fireclaw realized, in a flash of intu
i
tion, that these small windows compensated for short-sightedness such as Owaldsohn had complained of near the end of his life. He reme
m
bered, with a sad, hidden smile, watching his father hold his mother’s books at arm’s length, struggling to extract some meaning from the le
t
ters he was trying so hard to learn as an example to his son.

The window-wearing man fired another volley and reloaded.

The other figure beside the tiller was lean and brown, bereft of facial hair save for a thin, drooping mustache, almost naked and well muscled. Something deadly in this fellow’s posture seemed familiar, promising of reserves untapped. He fought in silence, defending the red-haired steersman with a weapon Fireclaw had never seen before, fitting a series of small spears—or perhaps large arrows—into a curve-ended stick, hurling them with surprising force at the enemy.

One such pierced a steam-cycle from side to side as Fireclaw watched, penetrating fuel tank and boiler. Another, following in its wake, trapped itself between two wheel-spokes, snapping the tautly a
d
justed wires, chewing the wheel free of its hub. Amidst a clattering u
p
roar, the gutted m
a
chine ground itself into the prairie floor, flipping end over end in a spectacular cloud of dust and small parts. Porcupine Ea
t
er’s successor would need more done to this machine he inherited, after this day, than a simple tig
h
tening of the drive-chain.

That was it! This spear-launching fighter reminded Fireclaw in some way of his own brother-in-law, Knife Thrower. The Helvetian chuckled to himself, resolving to keep a wary corner of his eye upon the man as he took in the rest of the ship.

Besides the oddly assorted valiants upon the afterdeck, Fireclaw watched three others forward. Another brown, mustached, and loi
n
clothed man with the squint eyes of a hired killer was armed, to Fir
e
claw’s asto
n
ishment, with a well-worn Helvetian shoulder-bow which he or his father might once have forged the prod for. He used it clums
i
ly—an unfamiliar task which he was learning—missing shot after shot, yet kept reloading and di
s
charging it as if he were himself a machine.

Fireclaw realized that this battle, a furious and desperate struggle for most of the participants aboard the land-ship, was merely finger-practice for the squint-eyed shoulder-bow man. When things are slack enough, a professional needs must acquire familiarity with as many outlandish weapons as one finds practical.

A swarthy rifleman beside the bowman was dressed much like the shaggy shouter upon the tiller deck, in bright, loose-hanging pants and jacket, weapon-heavy sash.

And—was not yon third rifle-wielder, more slender in vest and pa
n
taloons, a woman? Little matter. She handled her gun as if she knew what she was doing.

Amidships was the one who’d shot at him. Also a woman.

Her shining eyes were big for the rest of her face, black as a moo
n
less midnight sky. A slight blood trickle drew a thin and ragged sinuos
i
ty from her hairline to a gracefully arched eyebrow, although she a
p
peared not to have noticed it as yet. This one, thought Fireclaw, looked pale ’neath the olive cast of her flawless skin, inexperienced in combat, frightened into fearlessness, but determined. In his experience this made a dangerous and unpredictable mixture.

What was worse, her gaze never left him. Nor the front sight of a smoking breech-loader near as big as she was.

She’d bear watching, too.

He wondered whether there was anyone else aboard, belowdecks or behind the rail. Well, time enough to find out later. Glancing back past his shoulder to make certain Dove Blossom knew what he was about, and leaving his own weapons conspicuously untouched, he stepped out, em
p
ty-handed, into the very middle of the onslaught.

Delighted shrieks arose from one of the war-painted forms slashing by upon wire-spoked wheels.
Hi-yi!
A day to remember in lodge-song! An a
n
cient enemy, and honored, was joining this splendid new game!

Like some magical and deadly sprout, an arrow blossomed in the dirt between Fireclaw’s feet. It was soon followed by another and another as rider after cheering rider swept past him in a swirl of engine exhaust and taunting screams.

Fireclaw, unflinching, pretended not to notice. This was different from the gunshot. They’d not harm him, this he knew. Everyone was in fine spirits this day.

One valorous warrior of perhaps thirteen roared toward Fireclaw, his gracefully curved war-club, with the smooth round river stone cemented in the end, upraised.

Grinning, Fireclaw lifted his hand, palm upward, received a tap from the club as its wielder flashed by.

This day, the young ones would go home at sundown to their mot
h
er’s houses, bragging of the wise in which they’d counted coup upon Fireclaw the Destroyer, Fireclaw the Hewer of the People.

Fireclaw the Strander of Souls.

Just as their bedtime tales, growing up, had been filled with imagi
n
ings about him, he had himself heard all of these names whispered of him many times, though ne’er to his face—save for that once, when Knife Thrower had bargained and paid for a truce.

This day, too, the older warriors, those scarred and weathered vete
r
ans who’d fought with him in the old days and lived, would, with tole
r
ant amusement and affection, leave the young ones to their boasting and nod knowingly among themselves.

All, that was, save perhaps the war chief Knife Thrower himself, Dove Blossom’s brother, his own good friend and brother-in-law. Later they’d speak of this and laugh together. His had been the first arrow planted b
e
tween Fireclaw’s feet. The young ones had to learn their skill and bravado from someone.