Warren Murphy - The Seventh Stone

Destroyer 62: The Seventh Stone

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Chapter One

Before there was an Out Island Spa owned by Del Ray Promotions, before there was a Bahamian government, before there was the black slave or the British colonizer, back when the little Out Islands were too small to bother with, even for the Carib Indians, and the beaches were truly-as centuries later, advertisements would say "without footprints," there came to what would one day be known as Little Exuma Island a foot.

The foot was in a silver brocade slipper and before it touched the sandy beach a servant tried to place a gold carpet beneath it. The servant was waved away and so was the carpet as the royal feet were joined by others, wearing bronze and steel shin protectors.

They were the feet of soldiers and quickly they spread out, beyond the beach, into underbrush, scaring birds to flight and sending lizards scurrying to holes in the sparse white coral rocks. Neither the birds nor the lizards had ever seen men before, least of all men with glistening chestplates and helmets, swords at the ready and spears poking bushes and shaking the low-growing scrub trees.

On the beach, the prince shook off his slippers and pressed his bare feet into the pure white sand. He had never seen sand this white or a sea as turquoise blue before, and in the last few years he had seen many seas.

He looked back at his great royal barks, anchored in the sheltered cove, each with the single great sail, now only white, but once embroidered with the crossed swords of his royal family to proclaim its presence and powers.

But the crossed-swords crest had been shamefully unstitched years before on different seas as his men tried to disguise who he was. Even his standards had been removed from the prow of the boats and if his barks had not been so large, they could have belonged to any common merchant from any port in the world.

"Do you think here?" one of his lords asked the prince.

"Bring me the maps and my navigator."

The navigator was rowed from the main bark, wine-sotted and weeping. One of the noblemen readied his ivory-pommeled sword, sure that his prince would demand the navigator's head.

Two lords helped the weaving stricken man to stand. Another gathered the leather-bound tubes which held the maps. The iron breastplates and helmets, so good against arrow and spear, burned the flesh in this strange sun. By every lord's calculation, they knew it was winter, but there were no snows here, not even cold winds, just the burning sun and the scrub brush and that strange turquoise sea.

"The maps were useless, your Majesty," sobbed the navigator.

"Let us make sure of that," said the prince. The parchment maps, each protected by a thin wax coating, were laid out on the sand and held down by flat heavy swords at each corner. Some of the lords, seeing their passage on these maps, felt the anguish of lost homes and lost lands. They saw on the map the great city of Rome. They had been guests there of the great Augustus Caesar, emperor and god. They had been under his protection.

And of course his protection had been useless too.

On another map was the civilized China. They all remembered the courts of the Tang Dynasty. For an entire case of jewels, such as even the Tang emperor had never seen, they had been granted sanctuary within his palace walls.

But after just a few days, the Tang emperor had returned the jewels and told them to leave. "Are you admitting, great Emperor, that you do not rule in your own courtyards?" their prince had asked. "For if you are afraid of one man-any man-then you do not rule in your kingdom." The Tang court was hushed at such effrontery to their emperor, but the emperor had only laughed.

"You believe that?" asked the emperor.

"I do," said the prince, righteously.

"You still believe that, after all that has happened to you?"

"I do."

"Then let me give you more wisdom, Prince, because your throne-which you do not sit on any longer-was once almost as grand as ours," said the emperor. "When it is cold, one is not a coward to put on furs. When it is hot, it does not take fear to put on a shade hat. A man can rule only what a man can rule. Otherwise, he winds up as some who are too prideful, fleeing from one kingdom to another, without a throne, without lands, like a beggar on a dusty road."

Angrily, the prince had responded. "If one man frightens you so much, my Emperor, then sit forever on your throne. At his indulgence and at his whim."

Now everyone in the court knew such an insult would call for beheading, but the emperor had smiled again and ever so softly said:

"Your life is not mine to take. I leave that to my friend who is your enemy."

And so the prince and his lords had left the court of the Tangs too. And now their helmets burned their flesh in the month the Romans called January after the god janus. Foot soldiers came back from the underbrush.

"He is not here, my lord," they called out.

A white-bellied gull cawed as it lowered itself to a piece of gray driftwood. They all waited for the orders to remove their burning helmets. There were two hundred men now. When they had started, there were fifteen thousand.

When they had started, they all expected to return to their prince's palace within a week or two. After all, it was only one man. And one man, of course, had his limits, hadn't he? Their prince was all-powerful, wasn't he?

And their prince was right. The man had to be shown that he was just a hireling, scarcely more worthy of respect than a carpenter or a jeweler or a physician. After all, what did that man do that a common soldier could not do?

What their prince had never told any of them was that he could have kept his kingdom for just a simple sack of gold, only a fraction of what the Tang emperor had refused from them or only a small part of what the Romans took as just a gift to provide brief sanctuary.

The prince could have paid. Indeed, he owed it. But Prince Wo had found that out only later, when it was too late.

He had hired, on the highest recommendations, an assassin reputed to be so good that his work was at an entirely different level from anything that had ever been seen before. The word was that this little village in the country known as Korea had provided assassins for centuries, but only now were they becoming really popular west of China and the backward and barbaric Japan.

"You have got to try one," said a courtier. "They are wonderful. No excuses. No reasons why they fail. They just don't fail."

At the time Prince Wo did have a problem. His brother was hungrily eyeing his throne and was also building an army, too large an army just to defend his limited lands. Yet Prince Wo could not kill him until he started an attack, and his brother was not ready to start an attack until he had a good chance of winning it.

A quandary which could best be solved by his brother's death, and what Prince Wo wanted was for his brother to die by unknown hands.

"I want no one to be able to point a finger to this throne and say we were responsible for our brother's death," he told the assassin when he finally arrived at Prince Wo's court.

"You may begin composing the funeral dirge, your Majesty," said the assassin with a very low bow.

But the next day, Prince Wo's brother died in a fall from one of the parapets of his castle and the prince dismissed the assassin, no longer needing his services.

"Your Majesty," said the assassin. "Your brother's death was my services."

"He fell," said Prince Wo.

"You said you did not wish to appear to be behind his death."

"His death was an accident. It was a sign of the gods that I should not be opposed on this earth. I do not pay assassins for a gift from the gods."

"Your Majesty, I come from a small village, a poor village which if it did not get the tributes given my services would starve. Should it become thought that these tributes did not have to be paid, not only those living today in my village would starve but so would those to come in the future. So, your Majesty, giving full obeisance to your glory, nevertheless, I insist that I be paid, and paid publicly."