The Crystal Empire (7 page)

Sedrich set the bonded glass container, huge as a pumpkin, down on the bench. He stepped round the piled-up parts of what someday might become a spare dogcart. Somehow, they set a nagging tingle loose inside his mind. He’d thought of trying to apply his boat-crank to the thing—the reason for its having been reduced to constituent components—but the effort he for
e
saw, of propelling the resulting contrivance, was matched solely by the m
e
chanical difficulty of fitting a high-mounted crank-shaft to a low-mounted axle.

This had been no problem with the little boat; its gunwales had been just the right height above the waterline.

He frowned, dismaying Frae. Why, whenever he tripped over this jun
k
heap, did he think upon the ocean—and of rippling yellow prairies wes
t
ward, where his father’s name had become known to all Helvetii? It was a region of forbidding, blood-soaked reputation.

Sedrich covered his consternation with a gruffness learned from Owal
d
sohn, his adolescent maladroitness adding insult to an injury he’d no idea he inflicted.

Over his shoulder he observed, “Mother says in Eldworld the Cult of J
e
sus, or something like unto it, was that powerful—all must belong, or else—and the Sisterhood small and powerless and hidden.”

“In olden days,” Frae agreed (she, too, echoing what Ilse had taught her), “there were a lot more people. The world was crowded.”

In absent concentration, she picked at a splinter in one of the weathered shed uprights, watching with big eyes as the boy went about his mysterious boylike business.

From the corner of his own eye Sedrich watched the only friend he owned of his approximate age. Had he thought to, he’d have admitted—with relu
c
tance—in the end he’d likeliest find himself wedded to her. That she pleased his eyes—though such be true—no one might have extracted from him with red-hot pliers. He was curious—shy to the point of paral
y
sis—about the way of men with women.

Frae might satisfy his curiosity, and more.

Yet he resisted such thoughts, not for his age alone, but because it was natural to resent being forced, by circumstance or other people.

In particular, by other people.

In general, he’d learned—was learning, there was still this silliness with the rowboat—to keep wary silence regarding his ambitions. That he shared a bit of them with Frae betrayed beginnings of a certain feeling toward her which, in truth, confused him. It, too, might prove a mistake—or lead to one.

Ah, well, even great grim Owaldsohn had embarrassing failures, did he not, as was the fate of all who aspired to new things? The gravest of the ropy scars which marked his massive torso came not from mortal encou
n
ters with the Red Men westward but from an ill-fated attempt to accustom an unwilling whitetail to dogcart harness.

Not looking up again, Sedrich said, “And there were all kinds of strange animals: horses—sort of like a big deer without horns, so big you could climb on—unicorns, cats...”

Frae wrinkled her brow. “Cats?”

“Sure. They killed rats we have ourselves to kill now. Something bad happened to them—I don’t know as I believe what books say of them, an
y
way. But oxen there were, and gryphons...”

All of these existed now, both children knew, only in Ilse’s many illu
s
trated volumes and in talismanic carvings venerated by the superstitious. Sedrich wasn’t certain he believed any such had ever in truth existed.

On a block of granite which served as one of his father’s anvils he began making circular motions with the pumice he’d been using to sand the resin smooth. Before long, the softer stone was flat again. Not quite aware how closely his companion watched him, Sedrich went back to the jar, hoping this time he’d finish, the curved walls of the lightweight container would be un
i
form and smooth, before the pumice block, growing hollow in his hand, nee
d
ed truing up again.

There wasn’t much left.

It was expensive.

Sedrich knew his curious aptitudes were frowned upon, not by the Cult alone, but by most Helvetii. His parents—each for a particular reason—had encouraged him since first he’d shown interest in tinkering. Owaldsohn himself was bothered in the middle of the night by more ideas than ever he would, in his lifetime, have opportunity to explore. Ilse felt, among a people dominated by legends of the long ago, it was time something new got wri
t
ten into her books and those of her Sisters—and, of course, there was the visible joy with which the doing of these things filled her son.

“But how,” asked Frae, thinking Sedrich something of a sorcerer himself, “can you catch lightning in that thing?”

Motherless, with her father being the sort he was, the little girl had been neglected in the matter of her education. Unconsciously she twis
t
ed her fingers in the front of her simple shift. It was an honest question, without a trace of whine, disbelief, or disapproval. If Sedrich said he could do a thing, he could do it. Frae simply wanted to know how such a thing was possible.

Meanwhile, if he, at age eleven, sometimes demonstrated an outward, boyish indifference, even unwitting cruelty, toward her, neither realized it consciously.

He inspected his handiwork. “I don’t know. Last winter did my bla
n
kets crackle with a faint blue light when shaken in a dark room. Yeste
r
morning I awoke with an idea that I might make miniature lightning thuswise.”

He looked up, his dark eyes intent upon a sky he couldn’t see within the shed. “Perhaps the clouds are like blankets. They look woolly enough. And the greater lightning they make as they tumble can be trapped.”

He shook his head, returned attention to his work. “Anyway, I mean to try.”

Frae nodded meekly, golden curls bobbing. She remembered that people struck by lightning perish, at the least fall deaf or blind. Should aught ill befall
her
Sedrich—she pushed the thought away, and with it the incrim
i
nating possessive.

At the quenching bath the boy washed the last of the sanding dust off the big jar which Old Roger had given him. It had come off the mandrel a bit lopsided, with odd bumps and sticky patches where the trade-secret hardener hadn’t been mixed into the resin evenly. Sedrich would have been well pleased to have it, experiment or none.

There were always uses for such.

While the jar dried by the forge, he turned to a pile of soft-tanned doe leather upon another bench. Unfolding it, he peeled up a corner of the lead-tin alloy he’d beaten to paper thinness inside its folds—this trade s
e
cret being one of his father’s—with a rawhide hammer whose rounded face was near the size of his own.

“Anyhaps, when all those olden people died, the few left—those the Invader didn’t slaughter, I guess—discovered the New World. Don’t ask me how. In the year 1078, it was, o’er three hundred years ago.”

“And what,” asked Frae, “happened thirteen hundred ninety-five years ago? Why count we the years thus?”

“’Twas not the Goddess’ birthday, for She is timeless and forever young, the Sisters say. Nor e’en of the Brotherhood’s Lord Jesus, whom they reckon came into the world more than two millennia ago. Father avows ’tis the way that the Invader calculates the years, from some event significant to them and no one else—that having lost everything first to the Death and then to them, our people took their calendar and brought it with them here. Nobody knows for certain,” the boy conclu
d
ed. “Not e’en my mot
h
er. Perhaps ’twas then the world began.”

Planting a loose confederation of settlements upon the eastern shor
e
line of the new continent, the survivors, Sedrich knew, of the Mortality, of the Invasion, and of the desperate journey across the great ocean, had come to owe much, for their initial survival and eventual prosperity, to the teac
h
ings of another people they’d found here, Iroquois and other nations of Red Men.

“Not those we Helvetii fight with now upon occasion,” he told the. little girl, “but others, with whom we trade, from whom we first o
b
tained our plainest, most wholesome foods.”

When the pliant hide was spread upon the bench, he began with care to separate it from the foil he’d made. Enough was there to cover his jar twice over, just as he’d planned.

He began applying it to the inside of the container, molding and smoothing as he went.

There were, indeed, other Red Men. As the Helvetii trickled wes
t
ward toward a legendary range of Great Blue Mountains no white man had seen and lived to tell of, they’d discovered—the discovery resulting in a series of violent small-scale wars—the presence of another culture.

“Native tribes,” Sedrich explained, mimicking Owaldsohn now. “Their mechanic arts are superior to our own—though none could stand long b
e
fore my father’s war-dogs or his greatsword
Murderer
.”

Having covered the inside of the jar, Sedrich applied foil to the ou
t
side. He’d turned a wooden stopple for it on his father’s lathe. Into this he now inserted a short, thick bit of wire to which he’d fastened a length of copper chain.

“Father’s told me there are rough, peculiar tracks across those plains, well worn. Frae, I am most curious about those, for, by description, they were beaten out neither by human feet nor by dogcarts.”

He assumed a crafty expression. “And I think I know what made them.”

He set the foil-covered container on the bench nearest the same lathe upon which he’d fashioned its cover. In its jaws he’d clamped a stranger contraption, a pair wooden dowels glued into a cross. At the ends of its arms were rods of the same resinous material the jar was fashioned from. These were hidden by a yard of wool he’d stitched into a broad, circular band, now hanging from the rafters.

Copper wire ran from the rods, down the wooden arms to the center, along the central shaft toward the chuck. A stiff length of copper lay on the shaft where it came into occasional contact with the revolving wire.

Its other end he fastened to the jar-chain.

“This won’t work quite as well as in the wintertime,” he observed, putting his foot on the treadle. “The air seems to need to be dry. Perhaps it won’t work at all in the daytime.”

The lathe began to spin, rubbing the resin rods round in their belt of homespun wool. To Sedrich’s satisfaction, he heard the fabric crackle. At least he was making
miniature
lightning—and in a more efficient manner than by shaking blankets. He hoped he was capturing it in his jar. It ought to work, he thought, with two layers of foil to ensure it couldn’t leak out.

Resting his hand upon the great iron anvil of the smithy, Sedrich reached across the complicated apparatus, making sure of its connection to the jar. A fat blue spark flashed from the container to his outstretched fi
n
gers. With a scream of convulsed muscles, he was tossed across the shed like a toy, slamming against the splintered wall where he slid to the dirt floor.

“Sedrich!”
Frae shouted, running to him. She seized his hand, laying her cheek upon it. “Are you still alive?” she asked in a small voice, tears streaming down her face.

Sedrich grunted.

He fluttered his eyelids.

He looked up at her.

He shook his head.

“Methinks”—he grinned—”I’ve discovered a new means of transpo
r
tation.”

As a timid smile began to creep into her expression of concern, a shadow fell across the front of the shed.

“’Twould be thought you were more capable of learning, young Sedrich.” Hethri Parcifal’s voice was deep and apologetic. “Not a week has passed since Oln Woeck led his followers through our village on your a
c
count. Your family’s troubles with the Cult continue e’en now!”

Confusion wrote itself upon young Sedrich’s countenance. He knew his mother was away this afternoon—as was usual. Had there been a
n
other incident of some kind with Oln Woeck?

Parcifal passed a weary hand over his eyes. “I see you don’t know what I speak of. Ilse takes the Sisterhood’s part in conflict ’tween her maternal, nurturative vocation and the paternalistic Cult, concerning a colony of rats discovered upon the latter’s unsanitary compound.”

He shook his head. “’Twould
be
no dispute, were her authority not compromised by the mischief you think of to be doing.”

Sedrich levered himself to his feet. Involuntarily his eyes went to the deep-shadowed back of the shed where, beneath a tarp, he’d hidden the mortar and pestle in which he’d ground a mixture of charcoal, sulfur, and nitre. There’d been no time, yet, to carry that experimentation fu
r
ther.