The Crystal Empire (28 page)

More talk followed, three-sided, among the old man, the redheaded man, and the man who was her husband.

These weren’t, of course, the first strangers they’d suffered to visit them a while. Neighboring tribes, bearing Comanche tokens of peace and safe passage, had sometimes stopped at their ranch for water, carr
y
ing with them trade-goods, and fair-haired, blue-eyed, broad-shouldered slaves who might have been of Fireclaw’s own kind.

This Fireclaw did naught about, as he did naught, for the most part, to wreak other changes to the world he found about him. From his face and eyes, the set and movement of his shoulders, she knew full well he found many such usages barbaric. Acknowledging no gods, he worshiped fre
e
dom—or he breathed it. Either expression would have served to describe him.

Nor, she knew, was his reluctance to act born out of fear. He seemed ignorant of that emotion, and would have been capable of shaping any change he wished.

Instead, he played his own game of life, seeming to want no more than to be left alone to dwell with wife and animals in peace in this place by the mountains. That there was something more to this game he played Dove Blossom never doubted, nor had she ever come to unde
r
stand just what that something more might be.

Perhaps until this day.

Below, there seemed to be some argument, no longer between Fir
e
claw and the strangers but among the passengers themselves, who, ha
v
ing for the most part cast their weapons aside, took turns shouting at that one among their number who refused to do so.

It was the dark-eyed, dark-haired girl who’d shot at Fireclaw.

Beside her, yet another foreign woman rose into view—somewhat pai
n
fully, it appeared. There was blood upon her garments. She wore a hastily wrapped bandage where one of Knife Thrower’s arrows, or that of one of his braves, had found a resting-place in the muscles of her u
p
per leg. This woman looked soft and terrified. She, too, argued with the stubborn, rifle-bearing female.

Dove Blossom allowed herself another snort, this of amused co
n
tempt.

Almost, however, she admired the stubborn one. Already she pe
r
ceived that Comanche women were of better stuff than these soft foreign women. She understood, despite her manner of being brought to Fir
e
claw, that he’d chosen her—having rejected others—only in part to e
s
tablish kinship with the tribe she belonged to. There were also qualities that he admired in her, individual qualities which she, unique among her sisters and tribe
s
women, had possessed. Grateful for this recognition, she placidly (though she’d never been considered such while dwelling in her mother’s lodge, being considered argumentative and one who thought too much) had made a home for him.

For all concerned, the arrangement had worked well.

She’d hoped bearing him children might establish something stronger between them in time, but children hadn’t been forthcoming. They’d built the ranch, establishing their machine shop, raised their dogs t
o
gether, hunted side by side in the nearby hills, kept extensive gardens in the wise he’d taught her of his people.

His were strange and foreign ways, yet he’d brought much useful knowledge with him, and, better yet, a means of gaining more, a manner of looking at things which served to increase knowledge almost daily, and which he taught to anyone who asked it of him.

Always, for example, within the living memory of her people, and in tales ancient with the telling, had they received their weapons and m
a
chinery from the west, wonderful things far beyond the capabilities of the Comanche to imitiate. Now, at the least, and thanks alone to Fir
e
claw, had they achieved a measure of independence and understood the fashioning and operation of their bows (although the sights remained a mystery, even yet to him). Thanks to skills he’d brought with him from the east, resinous adhesives and spun-glass fibers were in general use among the tribes.

The argument below continued. Now another face appeared beside the unyielding girl, the pale, half-conscious visage of another man, propping himself against the cargo hatch not far from the spot where Dove Blo
s
som’s first arrows still stood quivering. He, too, seemed to want to argue with the stubborn one.

For the first time, she spoke.

Curtly.

The wounded man bit his lip and uttered not another word.

Dove Blossom shook her head more in sadness than disgust. E’en the men were soft and pliant among these foreigners!

Once again she looked toward her husband. With her assistance, Fireclaw maintained the machines of scattered tribes whose gods, for unprec
e
dented reasons of their own, seemed to tolerate his presence in this land. Although the Comanche and their kind had access to many more sophist
i
cated devices than Fireclaw’s people had (so he himself had told her), the gods, it was insisted by the shamans—who ought to know—didn’t trust anybody with such weapons as the pistol Fireclaw had fashioned for himself, not even, it was whispered, the manlike d
e
mon servants which, in times long past, had acted as their divine armies, wiping out families, pra
i
rie villages, whole nations who’d dared dabble in the wizardry Fireclaw made practice of each day.

Yet even the gods left Fireclaw alone.

Perhaps they knew something of the awful circumstances of his di
s
figurement and exile. Perhaps even they—was this thought blasph
e
my?—held him in awe.

The gods, laughed the irreverent Helvetian—while she cowered deep inside herself, waiting for the lightning to strike—seemed to be a trifle sloppy about supplying parts and skilled labor. Ironically, his laughter at such moments, deeply as it shook what she believed in, was also the reed through which her sanity and courage drew breath. Many men she knew—her brother, Knife Thrower, was often one such—held their fee
l
ings in stringent check; their only visible emotion was wrath uncontro
l
lable. Excepting moments such as this one she was living through, Fir
e
claw’s most usual breach was laughter. Each time he worked upon the machinery, he told her, he learned things. The gods mightn’t be human, and they might be powerful, but they were not the best of artisans. It was as if—he’d said this only once to her, although it had impressed her fu
l
ly as much as an
y
thing he’d said to her a hundred times—it was as if they’d copied what they wrought from someone else whose lifelong dream the first fashioning had been. The gods knew much which he didn’t—but naught which he couldn’t learn, if time enough were left to him. Someday he’d puzzle out the lenses, and beyond that, who could tell?

Neither soft nor pliant was her husband, Fireclaw.

And now, with pride, he’d informed this dirty old stranger, a former countryman to all appearances, that her people were his own! This he’d intoned in ceremony many years ago, but never before within the hea
r
ing of foreigners.

Life, Dove Blossom thought to herself, never for a moment permi
t
ting the crosshairs of her bowsight to waver from the dark-eyed girl’s left breast, is very good.

At the land-ship’s side, Fireclaw spoke.

“If she’d have me say the words myself, tell them to me that I might say them aright.”

The old man started to relay Fireclaw’s request, but the giant red-haired stranger interrupted in something resembling Helvetian, with a heavy, burred, and rolling accent.

“Me understandum. Fireclaw fella sayum
‘sapaagh chalhayr.’
It meanum ‘good morning.’”

“Sapaagh chalhayr...
what’s her name?”

The red-haired one opened his mouth, but the girl spoke first.

“Ayesha. Anah ismih Ayesha.”

“Sapaagh chalhayr, Ayesha.”

A quiet, sharp command dispersed the dogs.

“Keep your weapon, girl, if you’re feeling a need of it. My oath you’ll not be harmed by me.”

He turned to Red-Hair. “Tell her.”

More conversation, strange words flitted about the ship.

“Maa manna...
” one person offered.

Another replied,
“Charjooh.”

“Min bhatlah”
and something else Dove Blossom couldn’t hear came from the red-haired man.

“Chanaa la chabhgham?”
asked the girl.

“D’you say I mean for her to keep the gun,” Fireclaw interrupted. “I’ll disarm no one upon my own land, do they not threaten me or mine. Tell her now and tell her straight.”

Dove Blossom heard the feeling in his voice. After what he’d su
f
fered as a youth, his hand-fashioned nine-shot, self-cocking revolver—born of a quarter century of continuing experiment and whence came the name his wife’s family had given him—served as an ever-present r
e
minder of the trumped-up offenses which had lost him his right hand, his homeland, and his first true love. That he’d taken an entirely diffe
r
ent lesson from the e
x
perience than most men, obedient to authority, would have, was one of the things she loved most about him.

Ne’er again would such a disaster be allowed—would he
allow
it—to come to pass.

The dark-eyed girl nodded.

She lowered her rifle.

She let it rest upon its buttplate upon the deck.

She leaned the barrel against the rail.

She took her hand away.

She smiled.

A collective sigh of relief escaped from a dozen pairs of lips.

Dove Blossom let the string of her bow relax, began to flex her ac
h
ing hand and the painfully cramped muscles of her shoulders.

Below her, the land-ship began emptying itself of passengers.

“Surely We have put on their necks fetters up to the chin, so their heads are raised; and We have put before them a barrier and behind them a barrier; and We have co
v
ered them, so they do not see.”—The
Koran,
Sura XXXVI

“S
aracens, you call them?”

Fighting a fatigue born of suppressing thoughts of what he’d truly like to do at this moment, Sedrich Fireclaw asked this of the man who stood across the machine shop from him, the man he’d dreamed of kil
l
ing slowly, very slowly, for the last twenty years.

There came no immediate reply.

“Saracens, then. What manner of people are Saracens?”

The sun of an early prairie afternoon filtered through the r
e
sin-impregnated skins which served as windows—the proprietor had pro
m
ised himself for years that he’d someday teach himself to make glass—filling the small sod building with a diffuse light.

While Fireclaw was struggling to control himself, Dove Blossom was seeing to the disposition of the land-ship’s passengers, showing them the well, sending word to her brother that supplies would be greatly we
l
come and well paid for.

For the time being, the foreigners would sleep in their own quarters aboard the land-ship, whose sails had been furled by the expedient of lo
w
ering the upper booms, and whose wheels, with their brakes applied, had been further secured with large stones piled about them.

Outside the shop, the alien gabble of the Saracens’ conversation filled the yard.

Oln Woeck laid a mill bastard file back upon the workbench whence he’d taken it for casual, disapproving examination, wiped a filthy yellow hand upon his filthier robe in a gesture reeking—among other things—of fastidious piety. As with aught else about the man, this infuriated Fireclaw, who by lifelong habit maintained a scrupulously spotless workspace.

Even so, he kept his peace.

With difficulty.

For the moment.

“They’re those whom we once knew as ‘Invader,’” Oln Woeck r
e
plied at last, turning to Fireclaw as he did. “Those unbelievers sent by an avenging God who did o’errun the Old World e’en as our forbears, steeped in sin, were rendered helpless with the Great Death.”

Shaking his tattooed head, he looked round the building, taking in Fireclaw’s drill-press, lathe, and mill.

“I see thou’rt still at it, boy. One would think thou’d’ve learned a le
s
son, after aught that hath transpired.”