The Crystal Empire (47 page)

Photographs framed and hung upon the walls of this room, hers, were of Mediterranean fisherfolk and their colorful, triangular-sailed boats, although where this “Sun Incarnate” might have come by them, she could not quite bring herself to guess.

Mochamet al Rotshild leaned against the wall beside the window, staring down and outward, as absent from the little room as he could be and still yet remain. Ayesha imagined she could discern a whiter cast to his hair and beard, more wrinkles about his eyes. Such was not possible, she knew. It required more than a single day to write the traces of trag
e
dy, however unbearable, upon a man’s face. Yet she often forgot how old a man he was, perhaps because he never seemed to remember it himself. The sudden kil
l
ing of Lishabha appeared to have reminded him.

Fireclaw stirred, thrashing, his steel-and-fiberglass prosthetic all but knocking her to the floor from the arm of the chair where she sat beside the low-slung sailor’s-bed. She understood but little of Helvetian, a word here, another there, recognizable from her studies of dead Europ
e
an languages. But the name Frae often recurred, as did fragmentary u
t
terances addressed to the warrior’s mother and father.

How very odd, she thought, considering the terrible events which had placed this warrior in her care, that Fireclaw never once uttered the name Oln Woeck.

That unpleasant individual—a premeditated murderer, if she had u
n
derstood the boy-ruler’s words aright—was absent altogether, having been dragged away somewhere by the copper-kilt guardsmen after Fir
e
claw had been rendered unconscious. They reminded her of the Roman legionnaires pictured in her history textbooks. She knew she ought to wonder what would now become of the old man.

But could not bring herself to care.

The rest of them had been brought back to this place—the animals, well tended, had been brought here then, as well—where, in one of the adjoining rooms, its round-arched door now lying open so that Ayesha could shuffle back and forth to care for recuperating occupants in each, the Rabbi David Shulieman lay in sleep induced, not by a dart-borne poison, but by wounds she feared were mortal, despite the fact that they had aw
a
kened to find him bathed and bandaged by some expert who had entered while they slept, upon first being brought aboard, and while their clothing and belongings had been likewise cleaned.

And searched.

Unlike Fireclaw, they had not been left their weapons.

She wondered which of them was being insulted by this gesture. Or was it yet another of Zhu Yuan-Coyotl’s experiments? Her first, u
n
guarded thought had startled her: that it would be a strange death for a gentle sch
o
lar to die, should, despite her most fervent wishes, David’s injuries claim him. Then she remembered Archimedes—and was proud in a way that David had not fallen, a helpless victim of someone else’s battle, but with a singed beard and hands blackened by burnt powder, in the exultant midst of striking down her enemies.

Barbaric!

This menacing conceit she again pushed away from herself before it had opportunity to take further shape, spreading warmth, as it did so, to recesses of her mind and body whose existence she was attempting to forget. Or at least to disregard. Scarce time had she to regain her sens
i
bilities more than to that extent, when the beast-helmeted guards had taken them away to Zhu Yuan-Coyotl’s audience chamber.

“Oln Woeck!”

Ursi’s ears pricked.

He lifted his head from his paws.

Fireclaw stopped stirring, opened his eyes, and sat up, all in a single swift moment, his left arm crossing his naked chest, seizing Ayesha by the shoulder.

Mochamet al Rotshild turned from the window, blinking, then went back to gazing downward at whatever alien landscape this vast ship-of-the-air traveled over at the moment.

“Girl, where is Oln Woeck?”

Sagheer chittered a warning.

Ignoring the marmoset, the flushed and sweaty Fireclaw repeated his demand in Arabic. Ayesha clamped her jaw, determined not to cry out against the pain the warrior’s clenching fingers inflicted upon her co
l
larbone without intention.

“I do not know, Fireclaw.”

Realizing he was hurting her, he released her shoulder, swung hard-muscled legs across the hammock-edge, and tipped himself onto the floor, landing with a sure-footed bounce. He put a hand to his brow, shook his head, spoke some phrase in his native language.

“He says,” Mochamet al Rotshild uttered with a dispirited sigh, “that he has had nothing but one headache after another since entering this land. He makes a jest, I think.”

The Saracen shook his own head.

“It is difficult to tell. He is a strange man.”

“No jest,” Fireclaw answered in Arabic, a twinge of humor in his voice nonetheless, “the simple truth.”

He patted Ursi upon the head, picked up his pistol-belt and dagger from the back of the chair where Ayesha had laid them, wrapped them about his middle. He slung the greatsword
Murderer
over his back, then turned to Mochamet al Rotshild.

“Where are we?
Chayn...ham chassaanagh?”

The Commodore stepped back from the window, weariness in his every motion, and offered the view to Fireclaw.

“I have never seen such country. It looks like the surface of the moon. I confess that it would not surprise me if it were. I had thought we J
u
daeo-Saracens were the richest, most progressive and advanced people in the world. I am stunned, however, at the artifices we have only thus far di
s
covered here.”

Far beneath them, the land was, indeed, barren.

To Fireclaw it resembled a burnt-off field following a clou
d
burst—sand-choked, washed over, deep-gullied, without a trace of greenery or a single rounded contour. Its color ranged from yellow-red to ye
l
low-brown. It seemed to go on forever.

He pushed his face against the glass.

The flanks of the vessel in which they traveled could not be seen from so small a window.

Mochamet al Rotshild explained to the Helvetian what had transpired from the time the pistol-dart had taken him—Oln Woeck’s absence, D
a
vid Shulieman’s condition—adding that the Princess Ayesha (who b
e
came embarrassed at this mention of her name) had for several hours watched over him, speaking to him, soothing him through his convu
l
sions, bathing his sweat-streaked face.

Leaving the window, Fireclaw smiled, reached out, and patted the girl’s blushing cheek—this liberty Sagheer also permitted, this time without a noise—with a hand whose gentleness came to her as a shock. The attention, she realized with unsortable feelings, was much as he might have gi
v
en one of his animals.

“Shguhran jazeelan,”
he told her, searching awkwardly for words. “I am sorry I hurt your shoulder. You are a good person.”

Without another syllable, the Helvetian strode across the stateroom, Ursi padding after him, toward the wounded rabbi’s quarters, while Ayesha struggled once again with feelings she dare not examine, and thus could never come to an accommodation with.

Po made noises which sounded to the Princess like mocking laughter.

By the time she had gathered her wits—and her pygmy marmoset—in sufficient degree to follow the man, she received yet another surprise. David Shulieman—who had but a few hours ago lain unconscious, f
e
verish, and weak within the netting of his own hammock—was sitting up conver
s
ing with Fireclaw.

“...by those who experiment with kites and suchlike,” she heard the rabbi tell the warrior in Helvetian, filling gaps with specialized vocab
u
lary from scientific Arabic.

“
Nanam chanaa chabhgham,
I see,” Fireclaw replied. “Some kite we have here!”

Shulieman smiled.

“It is true that heated gases, trapped within a large, lightweight co
n
tainer—tissue-paper sacking works quite well—can be made to carry it upward and away. I myself have tried that—in the process almost setting fire to the rooftops of the unfortunate neighborhood nearest the gymn
a
sium where I was educated.”

Fireclaw laughed, the pain-lines around his eyes disappearing for a moment.

He sat upon one arm of a chair, his moccasined feet flat upon its seat. No one of the Saracen party seemed willing to use the furniture here in the correct fashion, the girl thought as she watched the men. Not even herself. Perhaps this betrayed in them an unwillingness to acknowledge the perm
a
nence of their incarceration.

As if in answer to her unspoken thought, the warrior nodded, rising to his feet.

“I misdoubt,” he told Shulieman, “whether the same principle’s in application here. ’Twould take a walloping lot of hot air!”

The rabbi chuckled, then grimaced as a twinge shot through his body. Ayesha’s first thought—for in those characteristics that we most detes
t
ed in them, we are the children of our parents—was to rush between him and the warrior, ordering the latter out of the room, the former to lie once again flat upon his back.

She controlled the urge.

“Hydrogen gas,” she offered instead, at which words both men looked toward her, Fireclaw turning upon his heel.

“Recall, David, how you showed me that the hydrogenic and oxyge
n
ic humors might be separated from the water they comprise by electrical cu
r
rent? The hydrogen rose from the receiving vessel, once we turned it right side up, burning with an all-but-invisible blue flame, well above the candle we ignited it with.”

Shulieman nodded.

“So it did, Ayesha, so it did.”

He turned to Fireclaw.

“Well, then, here is one Jew grateful that he has always acted in a
c
cordance with the injunctions against tobacco to which his Moslem brothers subscribe. I trust this Zhu fellow of whom Fireclaw speaks has seen to similar precautionary measures aboard his mighty vessel. To paraphrase our large friend here, it would burn with a walloping lot of invisible blue flame!”

There was a puzzled expression upon the Helvetian’s face.

“Hydrogen?”

Some explaining was required then, during which Fireclaw, of whom they had at first meeting shared the opinion of the Sun Incarnate’s guards, again surprised both Saracens with the depth of his knowledge of the sciences—all of it wrested out of nature’s jealous grasp by his own cont
i
nuous, stubborn experimentation—and with the quickness of his mind where his own discoveries failed him.

If in no other wise, the boy-king to whom she had been in wedlock promised (and who had given them such a name to call him by that Ay
e
sha decided to keep calling him “Shrimp”—at least within the privacy of her own mind—for the sake of keeping her impressions of her future husband to manageable proportion) had been correct in his assessment of the He
l
vetian’s genius.

Had great Archimedes himself been more like Fireclaw, she thought, one more anonymous Roman soldier’s blood would have been mingled with the sand, doing no great injury to the course of history, while the a
n
cient Greek philosopher, his studies interrupted but a moment, would have returned to the contemplation of his geometric diagrams.

Perhaps the world would have turned out a better place.

Not feeling this a proper setting in which to give such thoughts a voice, Ayesha opened her mouth, intending to add another word or two concer
n
ing her experiments with hydrogen. She was interrupted, before she could begin, by an earsplitting shriek from the next room. It was Po, the parrot, making noises they had never heard from him before.

“What in the name of God or Goddess was that?”

The question could have come from any of them, thinking in Helv
e
tian as they were. Before any of the three reacted, the parrot’s shriek was fo
l
lowed by a meaty thump. David Shulieman began struggling to remove himself from the hammock.

Fireclaw laid a broad, work-callused hand upon the wounded rabbi’s chest, pushing him backward.

“Spare yourself, friend Saracen, lest you renew your injuries.”

He turned toward the door. Together, he and the Princess rushed into the adjoining cabin. Upon the carpeted floor, they discovered the inert form of Mochamet al Rotshild, still near the opened porthole, lying upon his face, his parrot perched upon his shoulder blades, tugging at the man’s clothing with his beak.