20

The palace occupied a bluff inland from the bustle of Meriahpuri, where it was washed both by breezes from the sea and from the not particularly high but quite steep mountains inland. The shade of tall trees spaced carefully throughout the garden helped the breeze cool the air. It was still midday in the tropics. Annja was glad for her sunglasses.

Wira walked beside her with hands clasped behind his wedge-shaped back. He carried himself with a distinctly military bearing.

“You mentioned stolen antiquities,” he said. “I’d point out that most recently the artifact presumably in question was stolen from us.”

“Yes,” Annja said. “But only after you stole it from the Knights of the Risen Savior. There were a couple of other thefts along the line, culminating in their stealing it back. But ultimately, they claim it rightly belongs to them.”

“The question is, is that true? To whom does this relic rightfully belong?” Wira asked.

“That’s my question. Certainly, whoever it belongs to, it isn’t a murderous gang of South Sea pirates. They’d have a pretty tough time documenting a claim, anyway.”

Wira stopped and turned toward her. She halted, too. “Before we go further, what happened to my men? The Philippine government was kind enough to send along transcripts of your interviews with their investigators, although I’ve no way of knowing how accurate they may be. But they leave out a few details. Such as how twenty-four of this land’s finest warriors set out on that ship, but only one returned!” His dark eyes blazed with passion.

“Don’t hold it against Bima, please, that he survived,” Annja said. “I persuaded him that our escaping was the only way for his superiors—for you—to learn what really happened. He never would have agreed to leave his comrades had he not been in shock from his wound. And he was concerned about me, although I don’t think that swayed him from his duty.”

“Do you know what his name means? Bima?” She shook her head. “It means brave. His comrades often teased him about that, did you know?”

She smiled wanly. “Not really. If they teased him when I was around, they did it in Malay.”

“I am satisfied he lived up to his name, Ms. Creed. And I am more pleased than I can say that he at least survived. Losing one man would be unacceptable. Losing so many—”

He shook his head and looked carefully away. For a moment he looked even younger than his age, and quite vulnerable.

“It may not be fashionable to say so,” he said, “but I will avenge them.” His voice was thick with emotion.

“It may not be fashionable to say so,” she said, “but I agree. Revenge can get out of hand, don’t get me wrong. But the men who did this are evil men. They’ve earned your vengeance.”

He nodded. They walked on, between rose bushes buzzing with bees. “You are an exceptional woman, Ms. Creed. The Filipino investigator, a Mr. Baxa, mentioned as much in his annotations to the transcripts.”

“He didn’t say the whole thing was a tissue of lies, did he?”

“He said that to you?”

“Well—not in those words. Exactly. But of course, it was. As you’re well aware.”

“I am. Will you please tell me, succinctly, what happened? I would appreciate it greatly if you would also agree to give a full account to my intelligence staff. It will help to bring the murderers to justice.”

“I’ll be glad to,” she said. It wasn’t entirely the truth—given her life as it was, she never felt comfortable talking to authorities about anything in any detail. And she had the depressing certainty Sultan Wira’s intelligence service would be distressingly competent. But she would willingly endure their scrutiny, if it might bring justice to the pirates who had slaughtered all those valiant, laughing young men. And win back the relic.

She gave the Sultan a quick account of events. It consisted mostly of details she hadn’t told the Filipinos. She edited out all mention of the sword, as well as the fact she had shot several pirates. In her version, Bima did the shooting needed to get them clear in spite of his agonizing wound. Annja also claimed that once out of the superstructure they encountered no more pirates, and that they stole an unattended boat while the pirate crew infiltrated the ship like maggots, mopping up defenders and looking for treasure.

“You didn’t hear anyone talk about what they intended to find?” he asked.

“Not in any language I could understand,” she said.

He nodded. His brow was furrowed thoughtfully. “They must have gotten some hint as to what the ship had aboard,” he said. “Even as bold as pirates have become these days, it’s no small thing for them to mount an operation of such size. It was overkill for a normal freighter. They knew they’d meet resistance. Otherwise they would have fled.”

Annja had no idea how many casualties the commandos had inflicted on the pirates. The only actual fighting she had seen, as opposed to done by herself, had ended with both Rimba Perak warriors and the marauders indiscriminately chopped to pieces by the pirate heavy machine gun, probably firing blind. But I saw the commandos in action against the Knights, she reminded herself. I can’t believe they didn’t give better than they got.

“The pirates seemed awfully determined,” she said. “I know even a small ship like that, with cargo, is worth an awful lot of money. Especially to people who come from grinding poverty. But those men seemed to feel something really extraordinary was at stake.”

She looked at him hard. “And speaking of which, Sultan, what really is at stake here? What is it that so many people are willing to kill or die for?”

A white gazebo rose ahead of them. He gestured to it. “Let’s sit in the shade and have something to drink. I’ll tell you what I know.”

They sat in the small white structure’s shade and sipped lemonade served by a tall silent servant in khaki tunic and blue turban. “You have a lot of staff who don’t look ethnically Malay, if you don’t mind my saying so,” Annja said.

Wira nodded and grinned. It made him look even younger. “We’re pretty much a melting pot. The Pacific Rim’s always been like that, you know. My father, and my grandfather before him, took in a great many ethnically Indian refugees, Hindu and Muslim alike, fleeing persecution. What would today be called ethnic cleansing, in the sub-Saharan African states following the collapse of colonialism. The last wave of it, anyway. My mother was Indian. A Rajput—and a Hindu.”

Annja nodded. “You have a reputation as being very liberal, politically and religiously,” she said.

“I like to think of myself as liberal in the classical sense,” he said. “The modern usage seems to have acquired a lot of excess baggage. Of course that fits up pretty strangely with being a despot, no matter how hard I try to be an enlightened one. Those are the circumstances in which I find myself, however.”

He seemed at ease, sitting back with one long leg crossed over the other. He had a way about him that suggested he could snap into action like coiled spring from full relaxation, like a cat. Annja knew about that—it described her pretty well, too.

“I told your men on the Ozymandias,” she said, reluctant to wander back to potentially touchy subjects, “that they, and now you, don’t match up with the picture the Knights of the Risen Savior paint of you.”

His young face hardened as he sipped his lemonade. “You should be careful of them, Ms. Creed. They are dangerous men. Zealots, fanatics who long to bring back the days of the Crusades and help the gentle Issa, a holy man to Muslims as to Christians, to judge the world in fire.”

“Well, now, Your Excellency, that’s the thing,” she said. She was thinking, He probably won’t have an American television celebrity, even a very minor one, publicly beheaded or caned or anything for effrontery. “They don’t match your image of them any more than you match their image of you.”

“With all respect, people’s true motivations can be hidden by a winning nature and a smile.” He laughed. “As my own might well be, of course. At least, I try for a winning nature. Being confrontational causes more friction than it’s worth, I find. Especially when the nation one rules is the size, if not of a stamp, of only a largish postcard. Fortunately, I’ve studied a book on that very subject by a most wise man.”

“Jalal-ad-din Rumi?” she asked.

“Dale Carnegie,” the Sultan said. “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

She laughed. He shrugged. “It works,” he said. “Although sometimes I admit I have trouble behaving myself.”

He emptied his glass, set it down, and gazed at Annja for a moment. She tried hard not to think about other possible meanings of his words. She found herself more than a little drawn to him.

“I have set scholars to researching the relic’s history,” he said. “They come up with a great deal more speculation than solid information. There are persistent stories of some kind of relic being found in Jerusalem during the Sixth Crusade, long after the alleged True Cross was discovered. It has been alleged to be a coffin containing the remains of a very holy man.”

“That squares with what the Knights told me,” Annja said. “Also, I can confirm that the object in the crate appears to be a coffin.”

He blinked at her. “You can?”

“I got a glimpse of it on the island of Le Rêve,” she said. “After your people took it away from the Knights and stashed it in a warehouse. Waiting for the Ozymandias, I suppose.”

“Quite,” the Sultan said. “You’re very resourceful, Ms. Creed. As well as most determined.”

“Thank you.”

He shrugged. “I myself am skeptical. At least, in terms of any sort of power belonging to such an object, although the Sufis assure me it might contain great baraka, which might be translated as ‘blessings.’” He paused a moment as if in thought.

“I do believe the coffin possesses, at the least, enormous symbolic significance. Enough to incite all manner of passions, in the wrong hands. That’s why I am determined to keep it from both our domestic extremists and present-day Crusaders.”

“I’m certainly behind you on that. Although I have to admit I don’t agree with you that the Knights are Crusader wanna-bes. Their own founder, the Emperor Frederick the Second, had to be excommunicated to get him even to go on Crusade. But that’s not my main motivation.”

He drummed fingers on the tabletop. “You do seem highly motivated. You’ve followed the coffin halfway around the world. Are you sure you don’t believe it has miraculous powers yourself?”

She shook her head. “I’m sure that I don’t,” she said. “My interest is to see the relic—which, regardless of its specific nature, is an archaeological relic of incalculable value to the world—properly conserved, and entrusted into the proper hands.”

“And whose hands might they be?”

She laughed without much humor. “That’s the question, isn’t it? I’ll give you my stock answer—I don’t know. I need more evidence to decide.”

“Will you help us recover the relic, then?”

She felt her lips compress. I need to choose my words very carefully, here.

The Sultan leaned forward intently. “I’m willing to have the matter adjudicated,” he said. “In fact, I’m willing for you to participate in the process. I’d like that. You seem to be impartially interested. You can call upon whatever experts and authorities you desire. I will pay for the procedure.”

“Well, since you put it that way—” She regarded him carefully. “One thing you must understand. I will not under any circumstances turn the artifact over to anyone I believe will use it for destructive ends.”

“That seems fair enough—if one accepts the premise that this object actually has that kind of power. But I guess it’s not too far-fetched that it might cause social upheaval, by overturning long-cherished beliefs.”

Annja drew in a deep breath, shaking her head. “Given all the blood spilled over it in just the last few days, there’s no denying its power to cause mayhem.”

She studied the Sultan closely. He seemed sincere, even ingenuous. All the same, sincerity wasn’t hard to fake—as he himself had pointed out.

“What’s your interest in the artifact?” she asked.

“I’m fascinated by history, and both personally and, as you might say, professionally interested in the question of reconciling people of different faiths. I decided to involve my people when I discovered that it had been stolen from the Knights who had held it for centuries, and that in some way the Sword of the Faith, the Islamist terrorist movement that afflicts this country, had gotten involved. My intelligence indicates it was from those terrorists that the Knights recovered the artifact in midocean.”

Annja blinked. “How did they get involved in all this?”

“I’ve no idea. My security advisers suggest they may want it to serve as a rallying point for a violent jihad.”

“Against you?”

“First,” he said.

She waited for him to say more. He didn’t. “I see your point,” she said. “But how about the allegation that you want to use the relic to further your own expansionist aims?”

He laughed. He sounded incredulous. He stood up and paced a few steps behind his chair.

“Only because our near neighbors the Malaysian Federation so quickly recognized our secession, leading to other nations of the world following suit, have we been able to resist being forcibly rejoined to Indonesia,” he said. “It’s an open question whether the pool of oil it has recently been learned we float upon will provide us sufficient means to prevent its being taken away from us by violence. If I am deranged enough to dream of conquest, won’t that be a self-correcting problem? Inasmuch as it will ensure I’m overthrown and killed, either by outsiders or my own people?”

“Good point,” she said. “Still, you could have powerful friends.”

He laughed again. “Representatives of various world powers have flocked to Meriahpuri proffering just such friendship,” he said. “Are they less to be feared than my declared enemies? I wonder.”