Caliphate

Grolanhei, Province of Affrankon, 12 Safar, 1527 AH

(23 March, 2103)

"Wonderful strike!" applauded the man on horseback, slapping the stock of the rifle in the saddle holster at the horse's right. Mohammad was his name, though, as Mohammad was the most common name in Europe, this was less than significant, individually. "Wonderful strike, Rashid," he repeated. A third man, Bashir, agreed.

Bashir's rifle was in his arms. It was hardly necessary. The Nazrani were like rabbits and no man needed a rifle to ward off rabbits. Even so, the presence of the weapon, and its display, was a badge of the superiority of the faithful and the inferiority—the helpless inferiority—of the infidel. Virtually all of the masters carried them almost all the time they were in public. There was quite a lively trade in personal arms, too. Nearly every town with any numbers of the faithful had a shop full of shotguns, rifles, and even automatic weapons for sale.

Rashid, their companion, just nodded. Like Mohammad and Bashir, Rashid also sat astride a horse, in his case a magnificent white animal. In truth, Rashid's attention was not on the birds, nor even on their prey. Rather, he watched the little hamlet of Grolanhei, part of his personal domain as one of the tax gatherers for the emirate of Kitznen.

Grolanhei did not have an arms dealer.

All my little helpless rabbits, Rashid thought. All you disgusting filthy Nazrani are my prey.

As light skinned and blue eyed as the wretched heretics that peopled the town, still Rashid more resembled his hawks than he did them. His eyes were bright, keen and avaricious; his nose a beak jutting from his face. Inside, too, he resembled a hawk, all fierce and selfish appetite, all blood-lust and drive to dominate.

Every year, at tax time, Rashid made sure to collect a few children in lieu of the taxes he deliberately set too high. He received a direct bounty from the bundejaysh, the army, for the boys he collected for the Corps of Janissaries. The girls went on the market to whosoever might want a female child for service. Sometimes that service was domestic. Other girls, especially the prettiest ones, could be sold for other purposes.

But the bastard Nazrani hide their women and girls now, Rashid mentally cursed. It's become altogether too difficult to tell which of their little bitches might fetch a decent price. Shameful for them to pervert the law like that. Bastards.

"Stop being such a girl, Petra," the young boy said to his sister as the two watched the bird of prey swoop and strike.

Petra bint Minden, aged six, had shuddered at the swooping hawk's cry. She shuddered again, shielding her eyes with tiny hands, as the hare screamed out in pain and terror. Barely, she forced her fingers apart to see the eagle carry off its limp and bloody prey. Again she shuddered, pleased that she was not so small as to be the prey of a raptor.

Petra felt her brother tug at her arm. His voice commanded, "Come on. The masters are coming. And we're almost late for school."

Turning away from the pasture where the eagle had struck, Petra followed after her brother on little legs. It was hard to keep up, what with the enveloping cloth sack the girl wore that covered her from head to heel. The covering was whole, though her mother had spent long hours patching and mending it. For it wasn't the law that required Petra to be so enclosed; she was too young for it to matter.

Rather, she wore the burka at her mother's insistence. As the mother had said, "Some of the masters take a long view of things. You're a beautiful child, Petra, though you're too young to know what that means. Even so, no sense in letting them see you and put you on a list for when you've turned nine."

Behind her, Petra heard a horse neigh, the sound echoed by several more of them. Turning quickly, she spied a group of three riding across the bare and open field. Two held their arms out, she saw, as another twirled something overhead. Two great hunting birds came to rest on the outstretched arms, one of them bearing the corpse of the hare. Petra knew they must be from the masters; Nazrani weren't allowed to ride horseback.

"Come along, Petra," insisted her older brother, Hans. Hans was nine, big for his age and strong. He was her protector and the hero of Petra's existence. Like his sister, the boy was blond with bright blue eyes. Folk of the town were already whispering that he was sure to be gathered for the janissaries within a few years. Unlike their father, Hans was too young to have the bowed back of the dhimmi, those who submitted by treaty to the rule of the masters, their taxes, and their laws.

There were several orta of janissaries in the old al Harv barracks set roughly between the town of Grolanhei and the larger one of Kitznen. They sometimes came to the smaller town to drink forbidden beer or make use of the town's dozen or so whores. (For the janissaries were well disciplined and rarely indulged in rape.) Petra found their black uniforms with silver insignia strangely compelling.

"Come along," Hans commanded again, grabbing her by her arm and pulling her back to the town that edged the open field. "We don't want them to notice us."

Bad things, so it was whispered, sometimes happened to blond and blue-eyed children who attracted the notice of the masters. Petra shuddered again and followed her brother, stopping only once more to turn and peer at the magnificent horsemen.

* * *

The way to school, up the cobblestoned Haupstrasse, led past a fountain and a crumbling monument, a painted wall, which listed the names of the town's war dead going back centuries. No names had been added to the monument in over one hundred and fifty years. Few of those old names were visible now. The picture, painted on a wall over the town fountain, was of an angel lifting a fallen soldier to Heaven. It was part of the back of the Catholic church. As such, under the rules of protection imposed by the masters, the treaty of dhimmitude, neither it, nor the church, could be repaired.

It didn't really matter anyway. Petra couldn't read yet, though Hans was trying to teach her, no matter that the law forbade it. Left to the masters she would never learn to read. She was, after all, a mere female. In their view, her ultimate value was in her body, in the pleasure it might someday bring to a man, in the household work she would do, and in the children she would bear. For all practical purposes, she—like virtually all the females of the Caliphate, to include the Moslem ones—was considered to be not much more than a donkey who could speak and bear children.

Instead, her school taught her only basic theology—to include, by law, a theology not her own—and homemaking, as well as the rules under which she must live out her life. That last was a part of that theology not her own.

As she had nearly every day since she had learned to walk, Petra looked without understanding at the wretched and abandoned memorial, then turned and continued on her way. She expressly did not look across the street from the monument to the crude wooden gallows where the remains of two teenaged boys swung in the breeze by ropes around their stretched necks. The boys were dressed in girls' clothing, minus the hijab.

Petra had known both boys. Their names were—had been— Martin Müller and Ernst Ackermann. She, like the other women and girls of the town, had cried when the masters took the boys and hanged them before the crowd last Sunday after church. The dry-eyed Catholic priest had stood by and blessed the masters' work. The boys would sway there, if history was a guide, until the following Sunday, just before church. (For while the masters had firm rules for the timing of the burial of their own dead, Nazrani bodies could be left unburied for educational reasons.)

Petra remembered the pleading as the executioner had forced the boys onto the stools under the gallows' crosspiece, the tears on the boys' faces as they were noosed and then the flailing legs, the eyes bugging and the tongues swelling out past blackening lips. That's why she couldn't look; she remembered it too well.

She didn't know why the boys had been executed. They'd always seemed very nice to her, especially nice in comparison to most of the other boys of the town, her Hans, only, excepted. After the hanging, all the girls had agreed that, among a pretty rowdy lot, those two had been much kinder and more decent to them than were any of the other boys of the town. Indeed, they'd been so sweet that they might almost have been girls themselves.

There was too much in the world that Petra really didn't understand. Shaking her head, she followed her brother to the small schoolhouse where she would spend half her day before hurrying home to help mother with the daily chores.

At the schoolhouse, Petra and Hans split up, he going in by the front door, she walking around back to the girls' entrance. Inside, she doffed her coat and her confining burka, hung them on her own peg, and walked into the classroom. A set of solid and pretty much soundproof walls separated the girls, all in one room, from the boy's seven classes. That was not so bad, really. Though the classroom was overcrowded, a little, education for girls wasn't mandatory and so there were only about a fifth as many girls in the school as boys.

Sister Margarete, the sole teacher for the girls of the town, was old enough to have learned to read as a girl herself. What would happen to the girls, once she died, the nun didn't know. The masters had granted the church a local exemption to the strictures against educating Christian females, but it was at best a partial and limited exemption. Margarete didn't know if it stretched enough to provide a replacement for herself once she'd gone to her final reward.

Tapping a wooden pointer on the podium, Sister Margarete directed the girls to sit, then began with a review of the previous day's lesson:

"We must pay the jizya . . . we must submit to the Sharia . . . Slavery is a part of jihad and jihad a part of Islam . . . we must cover ourselves in accordance with the Sharia . . . We must submit to our fathers and husbands or any other masters the Almighty may decree for us . . . No one not of the True Faith may ride a horse or an automobile, except at the order of one of the faithful . . . " Petra knew what an automobile was but had only seen one occasionally in her life. She knew no one who had ever ridden one. . . . "No Christian may live in a house better, larger or higher than any lived in by a Moslem . . . In a court of Sharia a Christian's testimony"— Petra wasn't too sure what "testimony" meant—"counts for only half that of a Moslem, and a woman's for only half a man's. . . . No Christian or Jew"—Petra had no clue what a Jew was, either—"may possess a weapon . . . If the masters demand silver we must humbly offer gold . . . If a master wishes to fill our mouths with dirt we must open them to receive it . . . "

Along with the others, Petra recited. Like the other young girls, she didn't understand more than half of what she recited meant. Maybe it would come in time; she knew she was only six and that older people understood more than she did. Besides, her town was entirely Catholic, for the most part ruling itself. The Moslems all lived far away in the provincial capital of Kitznen or with the janissaries at the barracks of al Harv.

"Okay, children, school's over," announced Sister Margerete as she stood near the door. "You older girls, don't forget your burkas. Though you are not of the masters still you are subject to the same rules as the Moslem women."

This only made sense. How, after all, was one of the masters to have any peace at home if the shameless Christian hussies had more privileges than their own wives and daughters? Even many of the younger girls, such as Petra, wore burkas for the same reasons Petra's mother had for forcing it on her daughter.

School got out early. School, for girls, always got out early. After all, most of what they needed to know in this year of someone else's Lord, 1527, they would learn better at their mothers' knees than in a school. Pulling on her gray covering, Petra filed out with the other girls. Since Hans would be several hours more, Petra walked home alone. She took back streets, dirty and muddy, rather than the cobblestoned main street. That way she didn't have to walk by the swaying and soon to be rotting bodies of Martin and Ernst.

As she walked, Petra chanced to look to her right, out into the open fields. A small herd of goats was out there, property of one of the masters in Kitznen, no doubt. The goats were eating the shoots from a field of barley.