The Crystal Empire (44 page)

“What in the name of Exile d’you think you’re about, son?”

The boy recovered from the thrust, assumed a stance straddling the gunwale. He let his weapon, a length of metal high as a man’s breast, broad as a man’s hand, sharp as a man’s memories, slam back into its scabbard.

“No more than to make the rowing easier, Father.”

The big man stared at his son. “And why should rowing be made ea
s
ier?”

The boy ran a hand through his graying mane, where feathers, bound at their bases with blood, replaced the braid he’d worn.

“Why, to ease thy suffering in Hell, Father, by sharing it with thee on earth.”

One of the women growled.

His father’s hands clenched into fists, the veins of his forehead threatening to explode. “What pigshit is this, you dung-ball? How darest thou speak to me thus?” The boy knew what was going on in his mind.

“Tell me, boy, who first thought of suffering? The idea belongeth to the community. Destroy it, thou committest blasphemy.”

The boy stamped a naked foot. “This idea is
mine!
Before I let you interfere, I’ll make you pay a tithe, in bone and blood!”

“Muttonhead! Fishbait! Cart-axle! Priest! What makes you think we want ideas?” the shaggy giant retorted. Foam formed upon his lips, whence sprayed gobbets. “Impious brat, ’tis your ideas’ve brought on every calamity your mot
h
er’s suffered for a thousand years!”

The boy was puzzled. He remembered well conceiving his father, across a barrel in the shop, a pillar of two grades of steel folded under the hammer to create a hero of the western wars they daren’t make trouble with.

Unable to answer, he let the sword, unequaled elsewhere in the world, drop until its blade rested on the older man’s hair, bleached by exposure to the sun.

“Yes, Father.”

There was a long pause. “Father, about my idea...I needs must start o’er again, a
n
yway.”

The boy’s eyes were crafty. He reached down to tousle one of his wives between the ears. Frae nodded meekly, golden curls bobbing. He seized her by the throat with his one good hand and squeezed, letting his thumb find the thin, ribbed cartilage beneath the skin. Sweat stood out upon his forehead. She tore frantically at his fingers, but to no avail.

A few paces away, Ursula Karlstochter snarled and bristled.

It was long before the young Helvetian let her inert body slip to the ground at his feet. Dove Blossom sat beside Ayesha, the glance she gave the Saracen girl curiously intelligent and ironic.

“The women need to rotate, independent of each other,” the boy told his f
a
ther. “I’ll make a drawing after supper.”

Calculation appeared on the father’s bearded face. “Be hush! You were f
a
shioned in my forge, by tinkering. What purpose do you serve? The village won’t permit you to have your way.”

Bending, he took hold of his son’s shoulder, wrenched him from his attac
h
ment to the gunwale. He gave the boy a casual toss.

“You’re too right-handed,” he called after his son. “You must put some work into your off-side.”

The boy sailed out upon the estuary and disappeared with a splash.

“Now,” the man declared, “a dangerous innovation’s gone from our comm
u
nity.”

Sedrich Sedrichsohn awoke with no remembrance of having gone to sleep. The bed he lay upon—

He leapt up, discovered that he had been suspended somehow in midair, wrenched his body face down as he fell, his warrior’s braid sla
p
ping at his cheek. His arms folded under him, trying to tuck his knees beneath him. His bare feet tangled in some sort of netting he’d not n
o
ticed as the floor rose up to meet his face.

He landed with a jarring crash, heart hammering, head pounding, stripped of everything he’d worn—and cleaner than ever he’d been for days. Even his prosthetic, with the molded fiber-resin cuff reaching nearly to his elbow, had been taken.

He groaned as he turned over.

The floor he now rested upon was warm, but very hard beneath a generous covering of fabric. Without thinking, he reached up. His head was a stubbled ball of agony, the stiff nap he felt there telling him that many hours had passed, the throbbing hum which filled it telling him—he knew not what. The room swam round him before his eyes.

He wanted to throw up.

Instead, he pushed himself backward, every muscle stiff and protes
t
ing, leaned exhaustedly against the wall, shifted his good hand to his naked-feeling right arm, flexed the little bit of wrist-joint remaining to him there, and fought down the blood-haze rising within him before it could dismind him to no useful purpose. The room entire seemed to v
i
brate about him with a low, smooth buzzing he imagined he could feel transmi
t
ted through his back and buttocks.

The bed he’d been lying upon—if “bed” were indeed the word to use, or “lying”—had been softer than any he’d known since leaving his f
a
ther’s house.

Perhaps that was what had alarmed him so.

He looked up to where it hung now in a twisted ruin over his head. It was a strange bed, a stranger’s bed, fashioned from an open lacery which might have been the work of fisherfolk, suspended at two points upon the close-spaced walls above the thickly carpeted floor. It had been draped over with a smooth, shiny fabric which now lay upon the floor beside him. The stuff was cool to the touch, caught at rough spots on his callused hand, and was of a garish brown-red color, decorated at its bo
r
ders with an unfamiliar yellow pattern.

Sedrich-called-Fireclaw, son of Sedrich, didn’t know where in the name of the Goddess he was, but, before too much more time passed, he swore by his mother’s staff and his father’s sword, he was bloody well going to choke it out of somebody!

Feeling more like himself with this resolve, he turned, shifting his weight onto his right hip. It was a small room they had put him in. He b
e
gan remembering, now, the animal-helmeted warriors in black and copper armor who had slaughtered the Utes. The ceiling would likely brush the bristles of his head. Had he possessed two hands, and had he stretched them far apart, his fingertips would just have missed touching the opposite walls in both directions.

For all of that, the place was richly furnished. An oddly shaped but comfortable-looking chair with a small table beside its arm was covered in the same fabric as that which had fallen from the strange bed and now lay draped across his knee. Nearest the strange bed, where he himself might have planned a window, there hung upon a wall of unreflective featureless gray a great brassy disk, a distorted, alien face embossed u
p
on its surface with its squarish tongue extended. Two other walls were decorated with ocean landscapes, so cunningly painted that they almost fooled the eye into believing they were windows, save that they would be dead to the touch and gave forth no light.

Mochamet al Rotshild had spoken of such an art among the Saracens, calling it—
Lishabha was dead!
Knife Thrower dead as well! David Shuli
e
man, and Shrimp—
and Ursi!

Breathing deeply, he seized the netting above him with his one good hand, lunged to his feet, waited out the dizziness, making an effort to co
l
lect himself. The dream he’d suffered began pouring back into his mind, along with the urge to vomit. The throbbing he’d felt had not been of his imagining; he could feel it now, in his unshod feet, coming up through the floor, and decided that it made sense—he had seen the size of the machines the copper-kilted warriors had arrived in, vaguely r
e
membered boarding one of them.

It must be idling at the moment, going nowhere, for the mountain te
r
rain was much too varied not to be felt in the rolling of even so great a v
e
hicle as this.

He glanced about.

The place boasted of no windows, but, among its other furnishings, the tiny room had been provided with three louvered doors, one upon the wall opposite the bed, two others in a third, across from the chair. Fireclaw proceeded to explore them.

The first such he tried, no different in appearance from the others, was low, slotted at an angle he couldn’t, in his present weakened state, bend down far enough to peer through, and of a most peculiar shape. He would have had to duck under its round-topped lintel to pass through it, but the round brass knob in its middle resisted the opening twist of his wrist.

In the back of his mind, beneath the layers of pain and disorientation, Fireclaw’s search now changed from one for clothing and an exit to one for weapons and escape.

The second door admitted him into a remarkable room, even smaller than the first, containing a porcelain sink, what must certainly be an i
n
door privy of the same substance, and what might be a small closet for vertical bathing. Running a hand over his freshly cleaned skin, he wo
n
dered how his keepers had managed to stand him up inside this thing and scrub him. There didn’t seem to be much room.

He took time to confirm his theory about the privy. His headache peaked unbearably just afterward, then began to slacken.

The third door concealed the greatest surprise of all, a wall-built wardrobe. Inside, suspended from an iron bar upon peculiar triangular wire frames, he found his freshly cleaned deer-suede breechclout, his an
t
ler-decorated vest, likewise the felted dog-hair cloak he wore over both when it was cold—

—and
Murderer,
cleansed of the gore of battle, standing in its half-scabbard in the corner.

Stepping from the closet, he let the sword ring out upon the brass throat of its scabbard. Light from some unseen source near the ceiling gleamed along its polished, feather-hammered surfaces. The edge still made a crisp little whisper when he crossed his thumb against it. The exultation he felt at the sight of that great weapon was, atop the hea
d
ache, almost more than he could bear.

If he were a prisoner, why had they left him his mightiest weapon? If not, why was the door locked?

Were men responsible for their dreams?

Further exploration only deepened the current mystery and added more to many contradictions. Pistol and dagger he found in the war
d
robe, also cleaned—although he noticed with an ironically appreciative grin that someone had relieved both belt and gun of their supply of a
m
munition. His prosthetic lay there as well, its soft-tanned fastening straps neatly folded. Among the objects which he carried in his pack—cleaned and propped up in the other corner of the closet, behind his cloak—the only item he missed was his reloading kit.

Perhaps it and his ammunition were still out being cleaned som
e
where. He doubted it. The only thing he knew for certain about these alien wa
r
riors was that they were tidy enough to please his mother. But there was something reeking of contempt in this generosity, as if the copper-kilts so trusted to the superiority of their own weapons that they feared not those they’d left to Fireclaw.

He looked forward to a chance to instruct them otherwise.

A rattle at the locked door brought Fireclaw whirling about to face it, nightmares and aches forgotten.

“Yourself now air t’come wit me,” a voice pronounced, in miserable Helvetian.

The door swung open upon a helmetless copper-kilted armsman, a
p
parently reading syllables from a penciled scrap of parchment in his ot
h
erwise empty hand.

“Yourself now will be pers’nally honorifized by audiencing wit His Imperial Dom—”

The armsman looked up.

His eyes widened.

He gasped.

He took a step backward at the terrifying sight, not of the helplessly groggy captive he had been instructed to expect, but of a giant savage, alert and raging, with a five-foot length of razor-edged steel held back in his hairy hand and poised for slaughter.

“But the parties have fallen into variance among themselves; then woe to those who disbelieve for the scene of a dreadful day. How well they will hear and see on the day they come to Us....Warn thou them of the day of anguish, when the matter shall be determined....Surely We shall inherit the earth and all that are upon it, and unto Us they shall be returned.”—
The
Koran,
Sura XIX

Fireclaw’s triumph was but momentary.

From either side of the startled messenger there stepped into the He
l
vetian’s view another of the copper-kilted warriors, black-helmeted, armed with one of the short, rapid-firing weapons he’d seen used to such lethal effect upon the Ute.