Haydn of Mars

by Al Sarrantonio

  Haydn of Mars

  Book I in the Masters of Mars Trilogy

  By Al Sarrantonio

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2011 Al Sarrantonio

  Cover design by David Dodd / Copy-Edited by Patricia Lee Macomber

  Cover art courtesy of: http://dandzialf.deviantart.com/

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  To my brother Jerry

  Part One

  Clan

  One

  Tobacco was good.

  With a pipe, a smoke ring might linger for a full minute, but I preferred cigarettes. They were not easy to come by, though, and this, unfortunately, was my last one. Which was why I stood savoring it on a cliff overlooking beautiful Noachis Terra, with my home and the capital city of Wells at my back, studying a pink sunset just tinging to blue at the far horizon, and wondering what any other sky might look like.

  The scientists claim the sky on Earth was once blue, bluer even than our own fringe of twilight, but I can’t believe that.

  There are so many things that are hard to believe – and, these days, even science provides little more than idle thoughts.

  Kaylan, on all fours, moved up behind me and rested a paw lightly on the back of my leg before pulling himself up to full height. He stood silently for a moment gazing at the horizon before speaking. I turned to study his profile: his short mane swept back behind his ears, framing his almond eyes, slitted black, always deep pools of thought; his classically-shaped face covered in bare white down, soft white whiskers barely visible astride his perfect, regal nose, brown nostrilled, the downturn of his mouth that transformed itself, brightening his entire visage when he laughed – which was not often, these days.

  “It’s hard to believe this might all be gone in a week,” he said. I could not exactly place his emotions: sadness, a tinge of anger, bitterness.

  “They say that war will come, and I suppose it will.”

  “It always has,” he said, and turned his head briefly away. When he turned back he looked at me and not the horizon, and now there was defiance in his eyes.

  “We have failed, you and I.”

  I drew heavily on my cigarette, savoring the smoke in my lungs, and then threw it to the sandstone at my feet, crushing it with my foot.

  “Our marriage was supposed to prevent this. Our two clans together, J’arn and K’fry, cannot make the Frane stop now. They are too strong. I can make them do nothing.”

  “But–”

  “They are barbarians, Kaylan, and this is the way barbarians settle matters. Has it ever been different?” Now I turned with my own form of bitterness in my eyes. “Ever?”

  He stared into the distance. “No.”

  Twilight had deepened, making the horizon an even darker shade of blue. The pinkness overhead was deepening to rust, letting the feeble light of the night’s first stars bathe through.

  “I read a picture book once,” I answered, letting my tone lighten, “in which two kits travel to Earth. My mother read it to me.”

  He let his own voice soften, “Could you ever leave Mars, even if it was possible?”

  “Could you?”

  “No. You dream too much, Haydn. You always have. It’s the world we have to live in, not dreams.”

  “You’re right, of course. I’m just a spoiled girl, pampered from birth. But couldn’t you dream for their sake?” I gestured a paw at my belly, already swollen with litter. For a brief moment pride and happiness, the handmaidens of hope, invaded my troubled thoughts.

  “Especially not for their sake! Do you think we could raise them somewhere other than their own home? Here we might have barbarians, but we know the land. Somewhere else would be...” He let the thought pause in what looked like a shiver. “Unknowable.”

  I sighed. “You don’t have to be so literal, Kaylan. It’s one of the things that make us so different. A moment to dream is a good thing. Especially considering what has happened here in the real world.”

  Now his huge eyes were filled with alarm. “What do you mean?”

  “There is word a price has been put on my head by the F’rar.”

  “This can’t be so!”

  I wished for just one more cigarette; wanted to feel the burn of sweet tobacco in my throat and lungs. Instead, I had nothing to grasp but my own words.

  I nodded. “This is the word that Jamie brings me. My father was king. They see me as a threat.”

  “Then Jamie is a fool! The F’rar would not dare!”

  “Yes, they would,” I answered. I let a slight, knowing smile onto my face so that Kaylan could see it. “Come, it is getting dark. We should go in.”

  “Tell me what you know!”

  “I only know what I learned today. Jamie came with word that the council of the F’rar clan had convened an order of condemnation. I was listed, along with Parterine and Colin. There were others, too, even lesser in stature.”

  “How could they do this?”

  But he already knew how they could do this, and I waited for his to answer his own question: “Frane.”

  “Yes, Frane.”

  “She is evil.”

  I was silent.

  “I will not let you go to the Hall of Assembly tomorrow,” he said.

  “I must go. You know that. I must try to hold back this tide. Even if it is useless.”

  “We will leave tonight, with what we have on our backs.”

  “If it were only us, I would say yes. But there are others to think of.”

  “Some of them are of other clans.”

  I turned to look harshly at him. “I never would have expected to hear something like that from you, Kaylan. You and I are of different clans. And many of them are friends.”

  He was looking at the sky; his shame was evident. “I’m sorry. It was a cruel and thoughtless thing to say.” He continued to look away from me. “But I fear for you.”

  This, I knew, was something beyond the present argument. It spoke to something deeper -- our arranged union, his love for me, my lack of it for him...

  “Tomorrow will be all right. The order of condemnation does not go into effect for three days. Even the F’rar would not dare to move more quickly than that. Their purpose is to uproot us and make us flee, not to murder us.”

  I didn’t add: At least not yet.

  “Why must you go tomorrow? If we fled tonight, it would give us that many more hours ahead of the assassins.”

  “A final chance, Kaylan. To try to make them all see reason, before war.”

  “It will be fruitless.”

  After a moment, I said, “Yes, it will. I feel like a fool for trying. I am too young, and I have so little ex
perience. But it is what my father would have done.”

  The deep blue of the horizon had crawled up overhead like a cowl, banishing the pink sky of day. The stars were out in full now, muted through the atmosphere’s dust but beautiful nevertheless. There was The Pot and its companion The Ladle, and, farther south, hanging overhead like a totem, the starry figure of The Mother Cat herself, mane visible at least in the mind.

  And there, in the East, like a baleful, knowing green-blue eye, was Earth, perched on the darkest horizon. I thought briefly of my mother, long dead, and that picture book...

  Kaylan followed my gaze, and after a moment I felt his paw slip into mine, his slender silky fingers wrap around my own, a hint of flat claw pressing into my palm. Then he dropped to all fours, pressed his body against me before moving off toward the house -- a dim wide silhouette fifty feet behind us framed by the lights of distant Wells.

  “I love you,” he said.

  But the words were faint, a whisper.

  Almost, I knew, a resignation.

  Two

  Hadrian’s whiskers twitched when he spoke; it was a tic that had once been distinctively endearing but now was irritating beyond reason. The word traitor rose to my mind but I quickly banished it as unfit: weakling was the correct term.

  At the podium he rambled on, his words booming through the Hall of Assembly. Built in the ancient days of solid sandstone, with arching support beams of the now-rare junto tree gleaming a deep rich red as they met overhead in a domed cap of the polished bronze ten-pointed star of the Assembly of Mars, the very sight of the Assembly Hall still took my breath away; the fact that now the Hall stood half empty, with the presumed fleeing of many of its elected members, filled my heart with shame and anger.

  Hadrian’s basso boomed past the allotted time. I rose to speak as was my right – and yet I was ignored.

  I stood taller, and finally Frane, her figure resplendent in bright red robes, her short mane coifed to perfection, uncurled herself from her seat and stood. She held up a long-fingered paw, nails enameled a gaudy crimson, and Hadrian immediately stopped, in mid-sentence.

  “The chair will recognize Haydn of Argyre,” Frane purred theatrically. But before I could speak she added, “In good time.”

  “By the laws of assembly I demand to speak now,” I replied, keeping my anger under control.

  “The laws of assembly have been...suspended,” Frane answered. “You should have arrived for the pre-assembly meeting, Haydn.”

  “I was not told.”

  “Pity.”

  Frane curled herself back into her chair – which, I noted, had been newly adorned with rubies and deeply blue sapphires set in star-shaped gold settings, making it more throne than Assembly Speaker chair.

  Frane retracted her nails and waved a paw at Hadrian. “Continue.”

  After a moment, seeing no point in continuing to stand, I regained my seat.

  “And so,” Hadrian droned on in his deep voice, “the degenerate J’arn race, as well as the rotted branches of its descendent tree, the “K’fry, the Yern, the L’aag, the Sarn, and the other minor twigs of this infested, useless wood, should, in my opinion, be banished from the lands of the superior race, the only race, the pure race of the F’rar. For as we now know, the F’rar, and only the F’rar, are the Mother and Father of all that is good on Mars, all that is pure, and sane...”

  I listened to this swill for another twenty minutes, and then, finally, I had had my fill of it.

  Uncurling into a standing position, as tall as possible, I pointed a straight finger at Frane and shouted over the basso monotony of Hadrian, “This is an outrage!”

  Hadrian, startled from his own monotony, was instantly quiet, and there was silence in the cavernous Hall of Assembly. Even Frane merely narrowed her eyes.

  “I demand to speak!”

  Hadrian, beginning to sputter, gathered at his notes and looked to Frane for guidance. Without taking her eyes from me she said to the fat boor, “You may finish later, good Hadrian. Let Haydn speak.”

  She waved a languid paw at the podium, and I made my way quickly to it, passing Hadrian on all fours as he passed me, his pile of notes spilling from the pocket of his vest where they had been hastily shoved. There were some titters of amusement from the gathered assembly, but a sharp look from Frane quieted the hall.

  I stood at the podium and clutched it with both paws. I knew how angry I looked, but there was nothing to be done.

  “This entire proceeding is contemptible!” I began. I heard my words echo and fade into the back of the hall; to my further anger I watched as one row after another of the assembled members rose to leave.

  “Sit down and listen to me!” I shouted, and some of them stood in place to regard me; there were former colleagues in their number – friends, even – but after a moment they turned to slink away into the back of the hall.

  “It seems you are losing your audience,” Frane purred. She could not keep the amusement out of her voice.

  “Then I’ll direct my comments to you.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “What you have done – what you are doing – will not succeed.”

  “Dear Haydn, it already has.”

  Fat Hadrian disappeared through a rear bronze door, letting it close behind him with a clang. The Hall of Assembly was empty now.

  “You cannot hold all of the people in your hand.”

  A moment passed, as Frane locked eyes with me. I saw a score of emotions in her gaze, among them triumph, as well as a trace of something lost long ago between us.

  The moment passed, and she clutched her paw closed, and leaned forward with abrupt energy. “In my fist,” she said. “Fear will hold them here. And terror will keep them here.” She leaned closer, nearly uncurling from her throne, slowly opening her fist until her flat long red claws were protruded toward me. “I would be afraid if I were you, Haydn. I would feel terror.”

  “What do you–?”

  At that moment Jamie, my page, appeared behind me, face blank with fear. He put a paw on my arm.

  “They want me to take you.”

  “Where?”

  “I would go home, if I were you,” Frane said, and I turned to confront her.

  My voice was a whisper. “What have you done?”

  “Terror,” Frane answered, her eyes slitted and bright with hatred.

  Jamie was clutching my arm. “Come now, Haydn, before she has you murdered here and now!”

  “What have you done?” I screamed, letting Jamie pull me back a step. “War would be madness!”

  “There will be no war,” Frane said, curling herself into a more comfortable position on her throne. I saw that its seat had been brocaded in deep blue, with threaded pictures of ancient cats, wearing the crest of the family of F’rar. As she stretched up momentarily, before settling down into a more comfortable position, I saw that her own figure was brocaded in gold in the center of the seat.

  She closed her eyes, feigning sleep, and a smile came to her face. “There will be no war.”

  I thought suddenly of the many empty seats in the Assembly, how few of the other tribal representatives had made their way to the Hall that morning, how the few who were not F’rar looked ill at ease, afraid, even.

  Outside the Hall, there came a suddenly horrid screech, a scream of agony that as abruptly ceased; then there came another.

  “Go home,” Frane whispered languidly. “The republic is dissolved. I am Queen.”

  “The only reason you aren’t dead is that Frane wants you to see what she has done, because of your father. Because of...you. But she will have you killed later. Parterine and Colin are already dead.”

  “Kaylan...” I said.

  Jamie would not look me in the eye. “I tried to tell you about our movement months ago, but you wouldn’t listen. Now it is your only chance to survive.”

  “Frane doesn’t know about you.”

  “If she knew, I would be dead. We would all be d
ead.”

  “I must go to Kaylan.”

  “You must not go home, Haydn.”

  “No one will prevent me.”

  I looked at this youngster, this boy I had known from his birth, this page I had taken for granted for so many years, in a new way.

  “You knew of all this,” I said. Around us, the streets were swept clean of citizens, the tall buildings of Wells shut against the daylight. The sun overhead was a small bronze coin in a high pink sky. The day was as still as death. I thought briefly of the crowds I had seen around the outside of the Hall of Assembly, the red-shirted thugs surrounding one or two citizens, some of whom I knew – the flash of curled daggers against the light of that bronze coin, the screams as Jamie hurried me past, not letting me stop to help.

  After a moment Jamie answered. “Yes, I knew of most of it. All of our group did. But we did not know that today would be the day. And we did not know that Frane would act so...decisively.”

  “That’s a well chosen word, Jamie.”

  If you murder your foe, there can be no war.

  He smiled briefly, perhaps at my bitterness. I followed him through a narrow alley between two tall sandstone buildings; as we emerged into a square I heard a far-off howl of pain. I turned, my instinct to help, but Jamie took me by the arm and begged me to move on.

  “We must take back ways,” he explained; “there are redshirts who no doubt would consider it a badge of honor to kill you, no matter what Frane’s orders.”

  We continued in this fashion, making our way through Wells by less-traveled corridors. There was not a soul to be seen on the streets. As we passed through the bazaar section, the widest avenue of Wells, closed always to all but foot traffic, I was struck dumb by the silence, the abandoned or unopened stalls, their canvas covers flapping in the wind. Pink dust swirled in empty streets where thousands of citizens would normally be jostling one another at this time of day; the sound of laughter and the happy cries of children had been replaced by eerie, dry silence. I paused to look behind us; there, in the distance, at the end of the avenue, stood the old Imperial Tower, the seat of government when Mars had been ruled by monarch instead of legislature. It was a magnificent structure still, it’s slender, sand-colored columns topped by spired towers, its central bulk, darker in color, rising even above these to a massive bell tower whose four-sided clock face, white as polar snow, dominated the entire city. As I watched, the hour struck, sending a hollow, deathly-deep bong over the empty seat of power. Higher yet above that clock tower sat the old Imperial throne room, gilded in gold and bronze. I had no doubt that at this moment Frane was ascending the ancient stairs to take her place on the most magnificent of thrones. I had curled up in that throne once, when I was yet a kitten, placed there by my father. I could almost see the last king, the first true republican of Mars, looking down at me grimly, a strange light in his eyes, his lips pulled back in what I thought was a smile, though his voice held no humor.