The Crystal Empire (31 page)

Upon returning from the nearby foothills, he had surprised Oln Woeck this morning with his curt agreement, at least to hear out this Commodore Mochamet al Rotshild, promising as well to advise the Sa
r
acens, to whate
v
er extent he was capable, upon the likelihood that their small company would reach their goal.

Fireclaw had left it to the Cultist to wonder about his reasons for c
o
operating. If the old man thought he knew what those reasons might be, so much the better.

“My single condition,” he had informed the astonished man upon summoning him to the ranch house where he and Dove Blossom had broken their fast well before dawn, “is that you, the wise and trusted mentor of my boyhood, must accompany me upon this great adventure, since your wise counsel is likely to be constantly required.”

Oln Woeck had paled.

“But, Sedrich,” he had protested, “I had planned returning eastward. I feel that I am needed there far more greatly.”

Ruffling the big dog’s ears, Fireclaw had laughed.

“Do you not return, Helvetia will go on existing, whereas, do you not continue with the Saracens and me upon this trek, to whatever extent its success depends upon me, to that extent shall it suffer by your absence, since it will foreordain mine.”

To a far greater extent than he appreciated, Oln Woeck had brought the man he knew as Sedrich Sedrichsohn—whom others, who knew him far better, now called Fireclaw—up to date concerning the village he had left abruptly and so long ago.

Land-ships, for example, such as a younger Sedrich had been pu
n
ished for experimenting with, were now in increasingly common use among the Helvetians everywhere. Oln Woeck seemed to have forgotten who inven
t
ed them, treating the matter just as if they had always existed.

Or grew upon trees, the warrior thought.

“Moreover,” the Cultist told him as they approached the hull of the Saracen vessel, still closed up tightly against the surprising chill of the prairie summer night—and any intruders it might bring—“contact is b
e
ginning in full measure with these rich and powerful strangers from across what they term the
Lesser
Ocean.”

Raising his steel-tipped stump to pound upon the hull, Fireclaw smiled down wolfishly at the old man.

“Had it not, in fact, begun covertly many years ago with Frae’s f
a
ther, Hethri—”

Oln Woeck’s jaw dropped.

“How could you have known that? How—”

Fireclaw paused, letting the old man sputter, refraining a moment more from awakening the Saracens.

Then: “And is there not much more to say, in full truth, concerning this ‘bargain’ which existed between you and my mother, which you have a
c
cused her of violating? Remember, as you answer, Oln Woeck, how dearly you want a favor of me.

The old man’s mouth was a tight, straight line.

“Aye, as long as thy son, Owald, wasn’t brought up in the Cult, the boy would be raised in the belief that I was his father. I was to supervise Sister Ilse’s handling of it.”

Fireclaw could well imagine the slow, relentless pressure upon his mother and the boy over the years, the solicitous presence, the pious grimaces, the incessant lectures, all eventually leading to suggestions about head-shaving and tattoos.

Possibly far worse, knowing the old man’s personal habits.

“Ere she had, in whatever witchy manner, sensed the imminence of her death, she delivered to the boy Owald, then fifteen years old, a pa
r
cel of her highly prejudiced opinions concerning his birth, the death of—
stay thy hand, I’ll not say her name!
—of his own mother, and the disappearance of his natural father.”

Fireclaw nodded.

“And young Owald had never gotten along with you, anyway, belie
v
ing you were his father or not.”

“He himself disappeared from our village”—Oln Woeck sighed—“the very day Sister Ilse was laid to rest.”

Sedrich pounded on the hull.

2

“Marghapaa, sapaagh chalhayr! Maa chajmal chathahs!”

Mochamet al Rotshild himself met Fireclaw with an engulfing hand as the Helvetian warrior and his unwelcome companion reached the top of the gangplank.

Ursi sniffed at the Saracen’s baggy clothing, then immediately found a corner and lay down.

Through that companion—seemingly no more popular with the Sar
a
cen captain than with Fireclaw—they exchanged a few words of court
e
sy, then proceeded aft to the wide-windowed cabin where, before Fir
e
claw’s wondering eyes, the “Commodore” began spreading map after map, each unrolled following its extraction from a tall case of pigeo
n
holes which o
c
cupied an entire wall of the small room.

From the first such, there had clattered to the floor an arrow.

In one corner swung a gilded cage, unoccupied.

“These Saracens,” Oln Woeck explained, providing his own casual translation of Mochamet al Rotshild’s opening remarks, “are transpa
r
ently terrified of someone or something called the Mughal—I can’t d
e
termine whether ’tis a man or millions—who seemeth to have decided to act upon a centuries-old grudge stemming from sectarian disagreements within their heathenish religion.”

The Saracen captain kept his eyes directly upon Fireclaw as the old man spoke, but he frowned at several points within his declamation. It was o
b
vious to the warrior that he was less ignorant of the Helvetian tongue than the leader of the Cult of Jesus believed.

Oln Woeck continued.

“That religion is called by its practitioners Islam. Its practitioners call themselves Moslems—and they are most assiduous in its practice. At any moment now, we shall be interrupted by their caterwauling prayers, which, like the ablution rituals of the Sisterhood, they perform several times a day.”

“How long,” asked Fireclaw, eager to plunge into the pile of maps rapidly growing upon the table before him, “will these infernal prayers go on?”

He had a second thought. “And are they so damnably obligatory as to interfere with the safe completion of this silly quest they’ve asked our help for?”

“Of the latter, young Sedrich, I know no more than thee. They’ve certainly a language well created for prayer, also for elaborate insults, curses, and—”

Mochamet al Rotshild spoke.

“The captain biddeth me remind thee that he and these other El
d
world Moslems wish to establish an alliance with whatever standoffish domain may exist across the Great Blue Mountains—they know as little about the facts of the matter as we—ere their great Asiatic rivals can. There’s a battle raging ’tween the two Islamic civilizations for control of what they call the basin of the Greater Ocean which lieth ’twixt this co
n
tinent and one called Great Asia.”

Fireclaw nodded.

The captain, through Oln Woeck, explained that there were many rumors about the magical accomplishments of those dwelling west of the Great Blue Mountains. Wizards there had learned the turning of base me
t
als to precious ones, it was said, or the extension of human life to immo
r
tality, even perhaps to make ships such as this one
fly.

Mochamet al Rotshild laughed with Fireclaw and Oln Woeck at these tales, then grew serious of aspect.

“Even more fabulous rumors,” he conveyed through the Cultist, “concern a weapon capable of destroying whole armies and fleets, wielded by a flesh-eating Sun-God—a notion, I might add, which both horrifies and fascinates these pious Moslems. The captain, who is not so pious—he bade me say that to you—hath his doubts about these other tales, all save the last about the weapon. He claimeth to have seen it work, and hath been o
r
dered by his king to investigate further.”

The captain pointed at a map purporting to display the entire earth. He made a short speech, then waited for Oln Woeck to translate it for Fir
e
claw before continuing.

“Open war is even now being waged in yet another place, here, which they call the ‘Island Continent.’”

From his mother’s teachings, and the crude hand-drawn maps in her many books, Fireclaw had known about Great Asia and the Greater Ocean, though in details the charts he’d seen in boyhood differed co
n
siderably from these of the Saracens.

Of this Island Continent, those same books had said nothing, not even acknowledging that it, or yet another, icebound at the bottom of the world, existed.

“Similar representations as this that he leadeth,” the captain e
x
plained through Oln Woeck, pointing to the southern continent of the New World, “are even now being made among the ‘Incas’, here, an a
n
cient, powerful, and subtle people.”

“‘Incas,’“ Fireclaw repeated, letting the alien word roll over upon his tongue.

“But I suppose,” the tattooed Cultist added on his own account, un
a
ble to resist a bigoted sneer, “that the mighty Fireclaw knoweth nothing of such matters, and careth less, having been most fully occupied with the carving out of his own domain among these benighted—but so very co
m
pliant—savages for many years.”

Fireclaw thrust the steel throat of the resin-impregnated leather cuff upon his severed right wrist over the oddly-shaped handle of the dagger at his waist.

There was a solid metal-to-metal click, although he did not withdraw the blade. Ursi lifted his head, whistled plaintively, then laid it across his paws again and was still.

“Priest,” Fireclaw answered, gratified to see that Oln Woeck still di
s
liked the title, “limit yourself to what the captain, here, has to tell me, and spare me your nasty little embellishments. Or I shall directly have need of learning his language for myself.”

Mochamet al Rotshild chuckled, having understood a bit of what had passed between the men.

“You-fella Fireclaw tellum priest-fella good,” the captain essayed in his faltering version of Helvetian. “Me-fella Mo quicky-quick learnum Fir
e
claw tongue, if helpum.”

His blue eyes twinkled with mischief as the leader of the Brothe
r
hood glared back at him.

Sedrich grinned back. He liked this wicked red-haired foreigner and resolved forthwith to learn the captain’s language whether or not he d
e
cided to dispense with Oln Woeck’s translation services by paying back the debt he’d owed the man for twenty years.

He looked from the Cultist to the Commodore and back again. As was always the case, the trouble with simply killing someone like Oln Woeck was that, within the hour of his death, there would be a thousand of his ilk—and maybe worse—to take his place.

That this was never the way with wiser men and more valiant warr
i
ors, Sedrich Fireclaw felt, constituted one of the greatest tragedies of human history.

He turned his attention to the map, where certain significant facts had begun to emerge.

From the Saracen point of view, one with which he could heartily agree, judging from the map, this expedition had already been under way a long time, demanding a weary-making and dangerous voyage across what they termed the Lesser Ocean to the shoreline of a barbaric New World, thence out of the eastern forests and across the western plains.

When asked about it, Mochamet al Rotshild told Fireclaw that Sar
a
cen seagoing ships ran on steam, a tidbit Oln Woeck was extremely loath to translate until he was once more shown a bit of dagger-blade.

This time, the captain’s.

Fireclaw was of course familiar with the small, alcohol-fueled steam e
n
gines used by the neighboring Red tribes. But he had not stayed at home quite long enough to see the march of progress alter the horizon of the eastern sea. In a way, he thought he might be glad about this. He might never have found a way to imitate these later marvels, had he grown up watching for them on the ocean.

Finally, nodding his head and shaking the hand of Mochamet al Ro
t
shild, he agreed to guide the Saracen expedition to the shore of the Greater Ocean. He was not surprised—given the one condition he’d e
x
tracted—that his fellow Helvetian was not quite as happy with the dec
i
sion as he had claimed he’d be.

Inside Fireclaw the Destroyer, a much younger Sedrich, son of Owaldsohn, father, it now appeared, of Owald, had time to wonder what Oln Woeck would find to steal from him this time.

3

Some time later, after one of the prayers Oln Woeck had promised would transpire, the three men stepped out upon the deck.