“My engineers shall teach yours how to build air-ships in all respects equal to these, and submarine cruisers, a dozen of which could destroy your present navies in a day. With all the resources of your empire at command, you could possess in a year from now an aerial navy of a thousand ships and a sea fleet of equal strength.
“Then you would be strong enough to sweep the seas from pole to pole, and to storm the mountain battlements of Aeria itself. You must not forget that what the Aerians could do to your cities you could do to Aeria and to all the capitals of Christendom. City for city, you could take your revenge, until”—
“Until the whole earth was laid waste and the habitations of men were desolate,” broke in Khalid, overwhelmed by the horror of the prospect. “It is too great a price to pay, even for the empire of the world and the supremacy of Islam, even if we survived the ruin that we should have brought upon the world.”
“Too great if there were any need to pay it,” said Olga quickly, seeing that her lust of conquest and revenge had carried her too far. “But matters will never come to such a pass as that.
“Our battlefields will be the countries that we shall invade and conquer, not our own, and enough air-ships can be devoted to the defence of your cities to repel any attack the Aerians may make upon them. Your Majesty must not forget, too, that they will not dare to send any very large force away from Aeria, for they well know that the final battle for the possession of the earth will have to be fought out round the summits of its mountains.”
“You are right and I was wrong, Tsarina,” said the Sultan in an altered tone, “and the Prophet has said of the infidel, ‘Such as are stubborn and refuse the true faith ye shall slay without mercy. Kill them wherever ye find them’—but alas”—
He stopped suddenly and looked at her, and she could see a smile moving his lips under his black beard and moustache. She divined instantly what was passing in his mind, and saw the opportunity for a stroke of diplomacy which, base as it was, she made without a moment’s hesitation. Before he could continue, she turned and faced him, looking into his eyes with a glance that dazzled him, and said in a low, quick, earnest tone—
“I know what you would say, Sultan Khalid. You would say that I and my people are infidels in your eyes, and therefore worthy of destruction. I have thought of that—but the deck is too public a place for the discussion of such a matter. Call your Vizier and we will retire to my own saloon and talk of it there.”
Khalid obeyed, wondering what was coming next from the lips of the Syren whose fatal beauty of person and subtlety of mind were luring him on to plunge into an ocean of blood of which no human eyes could see the further shore—if it had one at all—and as soon as the three were seated in the room, which had once been Alan’s, Olga, addressing the Vizier first, rapidly but very clearly sketched out the project that had been suggested to her by Lossenski, and then, turning to the Sultan, she said—
“There seems now but one real bar to such an alliance, and that is the difference in our faiths, or, I should rather say, in our creeds. I have not ignored this; nay, I have pondered it deeply and earnestly. Creeds change with times, and Russia, like the rest of Europe, has now no real, living faith like yours. But you shall give it to them if you wish, and the day that I am proclaimed Empress of the Russias the Crescent shall shine on the towers of the Kremlin.”