The Crystal Empire (33 page)

Without waiting for an answer, Ayesha asked another question.

“Is that not the sailor whom the captain hired just after we made landfall back upon the coast?”

“No,” her servant argued, “it is the one they call Knife Thrower. The brother of Fireclaw’s woman.”

“I think you are mistaken, Marya.”

Marya shrugged, peered closely at the porcupine, then once again at the spiky object which she had folded in her kerchief for protection from its spikes.

Ayesha rose slightly.

“Stay here. I want to know what that fellow is up to.”

“Mistress, what if he is simply relieving himself?”

“Our host has better facilities than that. Stay here.”

The girl nodded and went back to looking at the animal.

It was a long while before Ayesha had made her stealthy way within a hu
n
dred paces of the native. She had been right; he was not one of the locals, but the man Mochamet al Rotshild had hired. She had always been somewhat suspicious of the man, of his intentions, caught him looking at her oddly when he thought she did not notice.

Now he was doing something even stranger.

He appeared to be speaking to a rock.

“You will do exactly as you’re told,” he told the stone he was hol
d
ing in his brown hand. When he had finished speaking this sentence
—
in Helvetian
—
he held the rock to his ear, presumably while it spoke back to him.

“No, I’ll brook no disagreement. When we’ve left this blasted and forsaken place, they all must die, every one. ’Tis a bargain I have made. Moreover, they can’t be allowed to spread the contamination any fu
r
ther. Do you understand?”

There was a pause.

“Good.”

The man tucked the stone into a pouch which he was carrying, stood, and walked back to the ranch.

3

And, back at the Helvetian ranch, in her snug, warm cabin bunk aboard the soon-to-be-abandoned land-ship, with Marya—who in the waking world had never yet been gifted with cockleburr or even a fl
a
mingo feat
h
er—snoring soundly in the adjoining room, with Sagheer safe and secure in his little cage, and with armed men—including the formidable Fireclaw, red-handed killer of five hundred—all around to protect her, the Princess Ayesha woke up shivering.

She sat up and wrapped her arms about herself.

“That was certainly an odd one.”

“Princess?”

That, and unintelligible muttering, came from the other room.

“Go back to sleep, dear Marya. It still lacks several hours before the sun is up.”

“Yes, Princess.”

Looking out through the open porthole, Ayesha could see the piles, moon-silvered, of supplies around the ship. She found it difficult to b
e
lieve that all of it, rough-hewn wooden boxes, furred and leather bu
n
dles, huge clay jars, rolls of fabric, everything, in fact, which had filled the land-ship’s single hold, plus all of that which the natives had brought with them, could be carried by the few of them who would be climbing into those mou
n
tains in just another day.

One more day.

Beyond the supplies, she saw Fireclaw’s sod ranch house.

Lights still burned within it. Still shivering, she wondered for a m
o
ment whether Fireclaw, too—or perhaps his woman—found it difficult this night to sleep soundly.

Certainly Dove Blossom had everything at risk, and little to gain, concerning this voyage. She would stay behind and take care of her hu
s
band’s house. The man she obviously loved would meanwhile be trave
l
ing to an uncertain fate in an unknown land which she believed was the dwe
l
ling-place of vengeful gods.

She had, Ayesha understood, no other family.

And her only brother, Knife Thrower, was going with him.

**

“Now We have made it easy by thy tongue that thou mayest bear good tidings thereby to the godfearing, and warn a people stubborn.”
—The
Holy Koran,
Sura XIX,
Ta Ha

“Some of you there are that desire this world, and some of you there are that desire the next world.”—
The
Koran,
Sura III

“A
small blade,” Knife Thrower muttered, almost to himself. He mea
s
ured the length of steel lying heavy and workmanlike in his palm. “No i
m
plement for fighting.”

Nor was it broader, he observed, where it met the unguarded grip—itself a full fingerwidth longer than the blade—than the nail of his thumb.

“Truly spoken,” his companion admitted, resting a hard fist upon his muscled thigh, “and ’tis but single-edged.” He pointed with a steel-capped wrist. “Yet see you how the back runs straight, trued to the handle’s taper, the edge curving at a leisurely rate to reach it at the point? ’Tis of such a hafty thic
k
ness”—he shook his shaggy head—“one might use it as a pry-bar in need.”

“My own sister truly fashioned this thing?”

Knife Thrower looked up at the bland-faced man, asking the question once again in wondering disbelief. That was indeed what Fireclaw had been telling him. And Fireclaw-whom-some-called-Sedrich never lied.

Not without good reason.

Fireclaw threw his head back, laughing at the consternation of his Comanche brother.

The war chief sat upon his own rolled blanket, in a small, slant-bottomed clearing undistinguished from any of a hundred others they had passed by in this sparse-covered country. It lay beside a narrow trail of packed red earth no human feet had ever hammered out. Deer and rabbit tracks embossed its surface. Northeast, the land tipped toward the prairie floor from which they had started five days before.

This long a pause so soon—the sun had just reached its midday apex—rankled both trail-wise warriors, but, upon examining the r
e
mainder of their company and conferring, they had decided little help could be found for it. Some, like the Saracen Princess and her servant, were una
c
customed to the exertions which this trek demanded of them. Two were elderly—although it was hard for the Comanche warrior to think of Oln Woeck and Mochamet al Rotshild as being the same sort of animal, let alone about the same age—and required more frequent re
s
pite than at least the red-bearded pirate was willing to confess. With each step forward, the situation would grow worse, the narrow trail steeper, the mountain air thinner, their co
m
panions from the level of the ocean shorter of breath. Let them gather strength now, while the gathe
r
ing was easy.

Knife Thrower gave the implement a small toss in his palm. “Know you, husband of a sister who knows not her place, that whatever name I am called by, I have never, neither in combat nor in play-practice, thrown a knife?”

Fireclaw grunted, running a hand over his fresh-shaven scalp, ending with an absent tug at the war-lock he had left, hanging braided down the back of his neck. He let the braid slip through his fingers, then lay his fist back upon his thigh.

Knife Thrower knew well that Fireclaw had heard the story before. Doubtless he would hear it many times again. With the Comanche wa
r
rior, meditating upon it constituted a means by which other matters were often contemplated.

“A thrown knife seldom kills,” Knife Thrower asserted. “I see no purpose in handing my enemy a weapon. I am called as I am for no be
t
ter reason than that once, close to my name-day, I cut myself on an u
n
sharpened blade which skidded upon a cottonwood root I carved. In temper, I threw the knife upon the ground, where it broke. For this, a war chief of the Comanche has a name which is a joke.”

For a time, both men kept silent, thinking the same thoughts. Toget
h
er, they watched the camp about them, paying particular attention to the younger of the pair of sailors—honing his own pair of outlandish da
g
gers upon a smoothfaced stone he carried with him—whom Mochamet al Ro
t
shild had hired to serve as guides and translators once the party reached the domain beyond the mountains.

Somewhat slight of stature, the fellow was, nonetheless, broad-shouldered, like an athlete, with hard, sharply defined, and rippling mu
s
cles upon his arms and legs and torso, smooth, tanned, nearly hairless skin—there was a faint yellow-reddish cast beneath the tan—and cap
a
ble-looking hands.

His eyes were a deep brown, nearly black, above the arched and prominent nose. Somewhat narrow, pointed at their corners, they po
s
sessed the foldless lids which marked him, to the limited extent of what Knife Thrower knew or Fireclaw could tell him, as neither European nor Helvetian, but as a native of the New World. His straight hair, cut eve
n
ly round his well-shaped head at a level with the tops of his ears, was so black as a
l
most to be blue where the sunlight glinted upon it.

Like his older, fatter companion, he wore a thin pair of moustaches which began nearly at the corners of his mouth, drooped around them, and tapered practically to his chin.

All in all, the outward aspect Hraytis, as he was called by the Sar
a
cens, offered the world to contemplate might have been as sinister as his plump companion’s, had it not been for the obvious youth he could not di
s
guise—he could not have been eighteen, by anybody’s measure—and his open good humor. He smiled and laughed, not foolishly, nor fr
e
quently, but upon occasion with a full throat, and a rounded, self-deprecating warmth which compensated for his tonguelessness among them, the C
o
manche, Saracens, and Helvetians he traveled with. The women of the party apparently found him charming, for all that he looked like a little boy with whiskers painted on—and for all that he had proven a skilled and merciless exterminator of the enemies of those who had befriended him.

By preference and custom, both he and his companion dressed the
m
selves only in breechclouts of a rough and heavy fabric they could have a
c
quired anywhere. In the cool of dawn, when the sun fell, or when the weat
h
er warranted it, they added a peculiar garment of the same material, like a small undecorated blanket with a slotted hole in its center for the head. Once donned, it draped itself from the back of the knee to a similar height in front, and, when the weather was especially inclement, would be belted about the waist.

“They say they are from the ‘Isle of the Pelicans,’ upon the western coastline.” Fireclaw spoke at last, then finding it necessary to explain to the landlocked Comanche what a pelican was.

He had spent more time with the strange pair over the last several days than had his brother-in-law. “’Tis the center for a people and a way of life which require remaining at sea, sometimes for decades, individuals and fa
m
ilies being born, growing up, living out their lives, and dying aboard ship.”

Knife Thrower nodded. He knew that, caught by a storm, the pair had been driven down the western coast until, at the pointed cape of a sout
h
ern continent of the New World which Mochamet al Rotshild had shown Fireclaw with his maps—and which neither man had ever known before existed—their ship had been destroyed by even more powerful storms which seemed never to abate in that region.

Whenever it was requested of them, Fireclaw explained, they chee
r
fully recounted the adventure at great length (though in despicable Ar
a
bic), naming places they had been, people they had met, ships upon which they had labored in an effort to return home—a home they appa
r
ently knew as little of, owing to a way of life which seemed natural to them, if to no one else, as the Saracens. From Mochamet al Rotshild’s perspective, the sailors simply happened to be the only representatives available to the Saracens as guides to the mysterious western domain.

Knife Thrower turned his gaze from his odd traveling companions to the land they traveled through.

To the south lay the canyon, slashing east and westward through the foothills, along whose steep-sloped, sagebrush-littered sides they were ma
k
ing their first climb toward the ice-tipped peaks lying ominous before them. The sky was a mind-emptying blue. A needle-scented breeze made sighing noises among the branches of twisted, winter-stunted pines which gave it its aroma. Long ago they had forgotten how to bend with it, but they had never br
o
ken. Chipmunks scolded the intruders. A meadowlark sang in a grove of aspen. The air was clear and cold, the sun hot and bright.