The Crystal Empire by L. Neil Smith
XXXVII: The Wanderer
“Do the people reckon that they will be left to say ‘We believe,’ and will
not be tried?”—The Koran, Sura XXIX
The armored figure froze a moment, held a hand out as if to tell the others to wait, then reached down and manipulated something in the helmet he held within the crook of his arm. Insanely, he spoke a word into the helmet, then looked up with a satisfied expression.
Less than a minute passed before they had more company.
Once inside the door, the young man stepped aside for two of his copper-kilted minions, one of them bearing a bright-colored rigid box swinging by a handle from his fist.
Without a word, these two shouldered Fireclaw and Ayesha out of the way—a small movement across the stateroom caught the Helvetian warrior’s eye: the Rabbi David Shulieman was out of his hammock, a curious expression on his face, leaning against the frame of the connecting door—and opened the Saracen sea-captain’s clothing.
Ayesha rose, hurried to her tutor.
Letting his eyes stray now and again to the man who claimed to be his son, Fireclaw had stepped back, seating himself in a low chair to watch what happened next.
The pair standing in the adjoining cabin doorway held a brief, muted exchange in Arabic—the Princess Ayesha pointing with angry gestures several times to the man’s heavy bandages—after which the curly-haired bespectacled scholar glanced helplessly toward the ceiling, perhaps appealing to some deity, and shrugged.
He allowed the girl to help him out of Fireclaw’s sight, back to the sickbed he’d just left.
From the handled kit-box the guardsmen removed a number of instruments foreign to the Helvetian, passing them over Mochamet al Rotshild’s supine body, along his arms, upon one occasion lifting him so that one of the objects might take the old man’s measure from the middle of his back to the center of his chest.
That implement, once unfolded, firmed into a C-shape with the careful tightening of several thumb-screws, resembled one of the calipers Fireclaw used to test dimensions of a work-piece upon his lathe. The chest-end of the device held a tiny gray-green glowing window which the guardsmen watched with the greatest of concentration, here and there remarking to one another upon some esoteric point of interest.
After a short while, they turned once again to their commander, who stood leaning against the corridor-side wall with his arms folded across his black-armored chest. They uttered no more than a dozen words, in a language Fireclaw couldn’t follow. If it were a question, it was not couched in the language spoken in the audience chamber.
Nodding, Owald replied in kind, receiving an answer.
To Fireclaw, he said in Helvetian: “Your Saracen friend’s an old man, Fa—Sedrich Fireclaw. E’en without proper treatment, he could recover, living on in vigorous health for another twenty years. Or with it, he could expire tomorrow.”
“No different,” Fireclaw observed, “from any of the rest of us. What troubles him? Is it his heart?”
Owald shrugged.
Medicines were administered with the aid of barreled needles, thrust into blood vessels beneath the skin, not unlike the dart which had been used upon the Helvetian warrior. With some effort, the guardsmen lifted Mochamet al Rotshild, who was beginning to stir a little upon his own now, into the nearby hammock.
Once he was comfortable, they folded up their devices, closed their case upon them. With an alien word of permission from the man who called himself Owald Sedrichsohn, they departed.
Owald crossed the little room in two deep strides, unlatched his broad, heavy weapons belt—Fireclaw noted pouches its entire length, which he presumed carried extra drug-darts, and a short, broad dagger hanging opposite the pistol—let the scabbarded pistol drop to the floor, along with his smoke-visored eagle helmet. Finding a second chair, he seated himself without relaxing, his blue eyes fastened upon his father’s brown as his father’s were upon his.
Again, a small movement at the other side of the room caught both men’s momentary attention.
The Princess Ayesha stood against the doorway, a neutral expression upon her features, the posture of her body—her arms were folded across her breasts—telling them, whatever propriety might demand, that she’d not leave them to their privacy.
Silence hung palpable for an unbearable time.
“You know,” Owald essayed at last, “I’d planned for years the proper wise to begin this conversation, but now—”
Fireclaw interrupted. “You knew—”
“Aught there was to know,” the younger man answered, “aught about you, about your work, your woman, your great dogs. I see the questions boiling behind your eyes, Sedrich Fireclaw. Perhaps the best wise to begin is to go back many years, to explain why, knowing aught about you, I could ne’er come to you till first you came to me.
“When I was but a boy...”
2
“Owald!”
The young man turned his head a moment, toward the calling voice. His father’s latest bodyguard-companion took this as an opportunity—he had been interrupted by that voice, in mid-harangue—to teach the lad a painful lesson.
The huge, meaty fist whistled toward the side of Owald’s head.
Craack!
The eunuch danced back howling, cradling a forearm in which both bones had been broken.
Baring well-formed, even teeth in what might have been mistaken for a smile, Owald lowered his own forearm—after having snapped it upward in a dynamic block which had taken the older man by surprise—but didn’t relax his guard. He could never relax his guard, not in this company. For some reason he’d never understood, this man, like all the others who’d passed through their lives, resented him, jealous of each moment the boy and his father spent together.
Veins standing out beneath tattoos upon his temple, the injured eunuch lunged forward. Owald caught him with an upraised foot, not a thrust, in the solar plexus.
The man stopped as if he’d hit a wall.
Owald let his foot drop, danced for a flashing moment in a tight circle which brought the same foot slamming round again into the tattooed, shaven head.
Eyes empty, the eunuch sagged straight downward to his knees.
He fell upon his face.
Well, that was done with, the boy thought, at least for the moment.
Owald bore the scars of many such “lessons.” His father (Owald was charitable enough to believe the older man was unaware of the inevitable jealous resentment) had put the eunuch in charge of the boy’s deportment whenever he himself was absent.
Always he felt watched, though for what actions or betraying signs in his personality, he could never learn. He was not deaf to whisperings behind his back about “bad blood,” whatever that phrase meant. Whatever crimes he or his blood had unintentionally committed, it meant cruel punishment for every least imagined infraction—or, as the boy grew taller, more skill at a method of defense he had secretly himself invented and practiced, exchanges such as this which had established certain ground rules. The odd thing was that Owald never begrudged the times the two men, the eunuch and his father, spent together at night, after the single candle had been snuffed out.
But of course, Owald Olnsohn had never liked his father.
It took but a moment to observe that his “guardian” still breathed. Snatching up his coarse-woven robe, Owald crossed the compound, walking toward the Cult-Brother who’d called his name.
“Yes, Brother Hansl, what is it?”
Hansl Niemandsohn was a year older than Owald—and a foot shorter. His shoulders were narrow, his watery pale eyes useless beyond the length of his spindly extended arm. The surname he’d been given upon entering the Brotherhood was at once something of a courtesy and a joke, considering his unknown antecedents.
“It’s the old witch-woman, Owald, Ilse Sedrichsfrau. A traveler stopped outside our gate with a message. She’s asking for you, insisting you come. I don’t know why.”
Owald flipped the pl
He nodded at Brother Hansl.
The “witch-woman” had taken interest in him as long as he could remember, one of the few bright lights in his otherwise grim life. She had taught him many things, suggested this method of fighting to him, had even helped him learn to read, despite his father’s wishes to the contrary. He liked her, and she’d been ill of late.
Perhaps she needed him to do some chores for her.
All his short life, the Brotherhood had increasingly prospered, About him, tattooed, robed, and shaven Brothers of the Cult wielded brooms and mops and leaf-rakes, scouring the already spotless compound, sweeping up a thimbleful of soil and the few dead leaves the wind had yesternight blown there, washing ornately glazed windows, polishing the brass appointments of rich-furnished doors, watering the many decorative plantings, bustling from the cool shade of awning-draped buildings—chapel, meeting-hall, infirmary, the new dormitories—into the clean-swept, sunlit courtyard, flagged with imported green-veined marble from the far north.
The many lawns were thick and green.
The gateposts—though the gates were never closed, lest some benefactor lose the opportunity to contribute to the Brotherhood—were fashioned of wrought iron, salvaged from some abandoned smithy hereabouts, overlaid with sheets of beaten gold.
Thanking Brother Hansl, Owald crossed the courtyard, told the proctor he was going out—Owald was not a member of the Brotherhood, nor under its discipline; he’d never been tapped, nor had he any desire in that direction—since his father was away upon one of his many pilgrimages. Once out of the compound he began dog-trotting up the road toward the overgrown ruins where the old woman lived.
The weather-grayed shack was in worse condition than he’d ever seen it before. Yellow weeds grew shoulder-high about it. Unpainted shutters hung limp over broken windowpanes of tallowed paper. The little stoop-porch was missing many of its floorboards. He knew, whene’er it rained, the unpatched roof leaked. This he’d offered thrice to repair. He’d been each time refused.
Behind the ramshackle little building lay the circular weed-grown jumble of fallen stones, of broken, fire-blackened columns which he knew—had never spoken to anyone about—was still the site of occasional clandestine gatherings by a group of women, for the most part old ones, which called itself the Sisterhood.
A strange feminine parody, it was, of the Cult his father led, the Cult which had been, for all of his short life, the center of the village’s religious existence. As a boy, he’d sneaked upon the circle such nights, listening, sometimes learning. He’d come to believe Ilse Sedrichsfrau had always known of this, yet, in tacit return upon his silence, had herself told no one of his trespass.
Taking care to avoid patches of rotted flooring, Owald stepped onto the porch, rapped with his knuckles upon the frame of a door swinging upon but a single leather hinge.
“Owald? Is it you, lad?”
The voice from inside was weak, but the syllables were crisp. To the boy, after the brilliant sunlight, peering into the humble dwelling was like looking into a cave.
He stepped inside, brushing with an absent gesture at his eyelashes to remove a fresh strand of spiderwebbing which he hadn’t seen stretched across the doorway.
“Yes, Ilse Sedrichsfrau, ’tis I.”
“Come in, lad, come closer.”
Inside, as his light-drenched eyes adjusted, young Owald could make out the old woman sitting upon a narrow cot, her bony knees draped with a patchy knitted coverlet, a crushed wicker basket of clothing beside her, her mending in her lap.
Her hands were white—he knew they’d feel icy to the touch, they ever had—the ropy veins upon them blue-black in this light. Beneath the short, well-combed white hair, her eyes, though they were surrounded with wrinkled, sagging flesh, were bright and clear.
Owald pulled a wobbling stool beside the cot.
“Are you not well today, Ilse?”
“You’re right, lad, I’m not well.”
She sighed, tidied up the mending in her lap, brushed at strands of thinning hair lying upon her forehead. She folded her pale hands across her thin frame.
“In fact, I’ll not last through this coming night. The Goddess, for all Her sense of humor, sets no great store in surprises. Sometimes She lets you know about these things.”
A pang went through the boy, followed by a surprising feeling of embarrassment.
“But, Ilse—”
“Now, now, if I’m not disturbed about it, there’s no reason for you to be. I’ve lived a long life. An eventful one, though, save for those precious moments spent with you, the happiest of times are far behind me. These last years are, for the most part, best set aside, not included in the count. I’ll have peace now, surcease from poignant memory—from this damnable aching in my bones! I just wanted to say goodbye to you, and to give you something belonging to you.”
With a twist Owald himself might not have managed, Ilse reached upward to a shelf fastened to the wall behind her cot, pulled out a small, battered leather-bound book.
She handed it to Owald.
“What’s this, Ilse? ’Tisn’t mine.”
“By right of inheritance it is,” she answered. “It belonged to your father. Well I ought to know. I gave it to him when he was a good deal younger than you are.”
“My father...”
Owald leafed through the book. It had been blank when given as a gift; now it was full of neatly-wrought sketches free of smudges, of arithmetic calculations, of brief cryptic passages concerning the fashioning of such things as leaf-springs, the cutting of screw-threads, the mixing of caustic bluing salts.
“But, Ilse, ’tis the notebook of an artisan. A blacksmith, at a guess. My father—”
“Your father was that artisan, my lad. Sedrich was the name I gave him, son of Sedrich, himself the son of Owald, after whom you’re called. You’re my own grandson—don’t you be looking at me in that wise! I may be old, but I’m damned well not senile! I’m that glad to be going away ere such befalls me. You’re the son of my son Sedrich, self-exiled from Helvetia upon the very day I ripped you from your dead mother’s body—such a fresh pretty thing she was—to see you stolen by the wormy apple who now claims to be your father.”
“But, Ilse...”
“Ask Old Helga, the fletcher’s wife. She’s an ancient, too, like me, beyond fearing any reprisal the Cult might threaten. Ask anyone in this village with the spine to speak the truth—though I fear you’ll be a long time looking for one such, these bitter days. I let you grow up as you did that you would grow up, but the time’s short now. It’s past time you knew the truth.”
Owald’s mouth hung open, wordless.
This Ilse took immediate advantage of, speaking first of greathearted Sedrich Owaldsohn, her blacksmith husband, of clever and inquisitive Sedrich Sedrichsohn, her son—the father-in-truth young Owald Sedrichsohn had never been allowed to know.
She spoke, too, of beautiful Frae Hethristochter, of her loathing for the evil suitor Oln Woeck, of grim shining Murderer and the mighty and terrible deeds accomplished with it, of the ancient rise of the Brotherhood, the concomitant fall of the Sisterhood, of a lifetime of change, little of it for the better.
She spoke to Owald for a considerable time, at the end of which her voice had begun to rasp. There were salt-tears running down her wrinkled cheeks. Yet she was still in command of her voice when she pointed out a glazed bicolored pottery of apple cider sitting cool in the shade upon a rickety table beneath a shuttered window.
The boy fetched it.
They shared a drink.
“No one can say what became of my Sedrich.”
Ilse spoke after a long silence. The tears had ceased to flow. They would never flow again.
“Save that, wounded as he was, believing you
Owald rose from the stool.
“I’ve no weapon of power such as Murderer, but I swear by Jesus’ suffering—or by your Goddess, Ilse—I’ll slay my fa—Oln Woeck when he returns from pilgriming in the southland.”
The old woman shook her head.
“Pilgriming, my wrinkled old behind! He trades there with the Invader, as did your mother’s father, Hethri Parcifal, whose sideline he ‘inherited,’ to the enrichment of the coffers of the Cult, while villagers go hungry for the merciless tithing!”
Her voice dropped suddenly.
“Owald, hear me. There’s no such object as a sword of power. There’s naught but iron, and the ordinary powers men of power—powers of the mind, I tell you—have learned to put into it.”
She sighed, changing the subject.
“Ah, well, I can’t say ’twould be an altogether evil thing to do, filleting yon blue-templed old—but ’twould be a waste of effort. He’ll pass off in his time, as I’m about to do, and with less grace. And more fear, methinks. Meantime, letting him live’s the best revenge. It must be a miserable thing to be Oln Woeck.”
“What should I do...Grandmother?”
Ilse smiled at the boy’s use of the word. Tears threatened to spring forth once more. Controlling them, she replied, “Whate’er you will, lad. ’Tis what your father suffered to achieve. Wreak whate’er of yourself you wish to—”
“I’ll find him, if he yet lives.”
Ilse raised a hand to pat him upon the knee nearest.
“You please me beyond expectation, Owald Sedrichsohn. I couldn’t ask it of you, nor suggest it. There’s great peril to the westward, little hope of safety. Your father may be long dead.”
“Then I’ll find his bones—his father’s greatsword—then return to do Oln Woeck an unlooked-for mercy.”
Ilse sighed.
“Men. Find my Sedrich living, and you’ll not part him from his father’s sword—though this might be the undertaking to convince him. Tell him what I ne’er had a chance to. I loved him as a child. I was that proud of what he grew to be, albeit most of the growing was perforce accomplished upon one single, terrible—”