Queen of Mars - Book III in the Masters of Mars Trilogy

by Al Sarrantonio

  “You just take good care of that piece of paper, all right?”

  “I will,” he said.

  “Now let me have one more look at Earth.”

  Later in my tent, by the dim light of a lamp, I pulled one of my own most precious possessions from its place in my traveling trunk. It was an Old One book, very old and brittle, with the names and pictures of Old One composers. It had originally been my Grandmother Haydn’s book. I had often wondered what their music had sounded like, and had even, when alone, written a few of my own little tunes on the tambon, trying to recreate what those sounds might have been like. The results had not been pretty.

  I turned the pages with care, noting the missing or disintegrated entries. I came to my father’s namesake, the beginning long disintegrated, only part of a fat old face visible above the partial name, SEBASTIAN BACH. My Aunt Amy, who I had never known, named for the Old One composer AMY BEACH, came next, and then the most intact of all the pictures in the book, FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN, for which my grandmother was named. The naked, severe visages of the Old Ones had often frightened me as a kit – they looked forbidding and massive, without humor or mercy. Only the picture of my own namesake, CLARA SCHUMAN, whose brother or perhaps husband ROBERT’s portrait faced hers in the book, held a strange beauty for me. Though she was hairless save for a bun of black hairs on the top of her head, and her ears were strangely shaped and low, and she was devoid of whiskers and her naked paws, folded in her lap, had strange flat claws at the end of too-long fingers, there was something about her I found attractive. I had often thought I saw some of my own demeanor in her elegance, despite her weird ugliness.

  I slowly closed the book and put it away, and lay back on my bed with my paws behind my head. I stared at the roof of the tent, undulating gently in the cool night breeze, and listened to the crackle and snap of distant and near camp fires.

  The Old Ones from Earth?

  I smiled at the fantastic nature of it.

  What would Newton say?

  Or, perhaps, did he already know?

  My mind, filled with fantastic thoughts, spiraled slowly down into sleep.

  Nine

  “Attack!”

  I awoke with a start, the desperate voice I heard mingling with a dream of the Old Ones. For a moment I stared at the ceiling of my tent, now suffused with faint light. Dawn?

  “Attack! We’re being attacked!”

  The dream dispersed, leaving waking reality.

  The flap of my tent was thrown open, showing a wild-eyed Rebecca. Outside I heard shouts and alarms, the clanging of armor and sword.

  “What is it, Rebecca?” I asked.

  “They–!” she said, unable to speak.

  I threw myself from the bed and pushed past her.

  A scene of chaos met my eyes. General Reis was nowhere to be seen, but his lieutenants were desperately trying to form their troops into some sort of order. In the distance I saw a mass of white bodies – Baldies? – at the edge of the camp and drawing closer. Within the camp was a huge and at first incomprehensible mass, charging like a huge bellowing machine from right to left.

  “It’s a h-harlow, your majesty!” Rebecca stammered, clutching at me.

  “Merciful Great One,” I breathed, my eyes fixed on the largest beast on the planet, a wild raging monster, unstoppable.

  It charged ahead, throwing bodies into the air, and then suddenly turned its bulk toward me. I saw behind it a running horde of white.

  “They’re herding it!” I shouted, more fascinated than frightened. “The Baldies are guiding it!”

  It was charging straight for us.

  I pulled Rebecca away from the tent, and broke into a run as the beast hurtled at us. Its eyes were wide and flat and black, filled with dark, mindless wild hate, and the unthinking brute suddenly leapt into the air–

  I pushed Rebecca down as the beast roared over us, flattening my tent before galloping on. In its wake came a score of screaming Baldies, bearing whips with which they urged the harlow. Two of them split off and ran straight at Rebecca and I, snarling, their fanged mouths wide.

  My sword was in my ruined tent, and I covered Rebecca with my body and turned to take the blow as the Baldie in front raised his whip to strike.

  He was cut down as his hand came forward by a rush of my soldiers, but the other Baldie was able to lower his whip arm before he was taken down.

  I felt the hot lash of the whip across my face and then the Baldie fell dead at my feet, struck by a score of blows from rushing soldiers.

  “Your majesty!” Rebecca screamed, pulling herself from beneath me and kneeling to attend to my wound.

  “Is it that bad?” I said, trying to keep my voice light and at the same time trying to ignore the hot, searing pain.

  “It may scar!” Rebecca cried, dabbing at the streak of blood with her own tunic.

  “Then it will scar,” I answered, levelly. “I will look like general Xarr, perhaps.”

  I was being helped to my feet by a score of paws, and already my tent was being remounted. As I was helped inside I said, “What of the rest of them? And the harlow?”

  “Most of the Baldies were killed,” a young captain who strode up reported. The harlow is gone into the hills.”

  “Send out parties after it, and when we set up camp this evening use the perimeter defenses that Newton supplied us with. Isn’t it odd to find a harlow this far south?”

  “More than odd,” General Reis said, striding into my tent. “My apologies, your majesty – if we had had any indication of a harlow in the area we would of course have used the perimeter defenses.” He studied my face, which was still being dabbed at by Rebecca, who had retrieved a first aid kit.

  “Do I remind you of anyone?” I teased, but he did not, or chose not, to understand.

  He asked, “Shall I give orders to march?”

  “Of course. What of injuries?”

  “One soldier dead, trampled by the harlow. Eight Baldies killed. The attack was deliberate.”

  “We may expect more of the same?”

  “Perhaps. I’ve already doubled scouting parties.”

  I nodded, and after a moment he turned on his heel and left, marching out as he had marched in.

  “Strange...” I said, to no one in particular.

  “Your majesty?” Rebecca answered, halting her ministrations.

  I waved my paw. “Nothing, Rebecca. Thank you for your help. It feels much better.”

  There were sudden tears in her eyes. “You saved my life! And were hurt because of it!”

  I took her paw in my own, and squeezed it. “You would have done the same for me.”

  She snuffled, looking away, and continued to attend to my wound, which stung greatly but which I was already forgetting.

  Strange, I thought.

  Strange that the Baldies seemed to be in control of that harlow, when normally they would have been wild with lust for the beast’s tusks, which they valued above all else. I had never heard of a harlow being controlled before, by anyone.

  Did Frane now have power over the beasts of the world?

  And how had she been able to control the Baldies, who were notoriously wild and untamable, in the first place?

  Strange...

  Ten

  We became a more cautious army, more vigilant, more ready, with more probing tendrils ahead and behind us, more careful reconnaissance by our aerial companions – and yet for the next two weeks, as we drew nearer to Frane’s army, all was quiet. There was a brief sandstorm, whipped down from the desert to the north but petering out almost before it began. In a way this was a disappointment, for we had barely secured our equipment and locked ourselves in our battened down tents than the skies cleared and it was time to move again. Copernicus explained to me later that we were too far south to feel the real wrath of any such storm, and that we had felt the farthest edges of it.

  “Another hundred miles north, though...” he said, shaking his head, “and it would h
ave been another story indeed.”

  He did not share my disappointment, and spent that night in rapture with his telescope under the stars.

  I had spent the previous three evenings alone in my tent, trying to compose a letter to Darwin. There was no doubt now in my mind that I loved him, and I thought it only right that I express that love to the one I had left behind. But every attempt –

  My dearest Darwin...

  Darwin, my love...

  – had ended with my crumpling the offending sheet of stationary in my paws and throwing it to the ground.

  Finally, I decided to be direct:

  Darwin,

  I trust this letter finds you well. We are about to engage in a great battle, and I find that I must tell you certain things now, since there may be no other time. I don’t know how this happened or why, but the fact is that I love you. This is a mysterious thing to me, but it is a fact that must be faced. When I return, if you feel the same, as I think you do, I propose that we be betrothed and that you be my King.

  I signed it with all my love, then read it over again and nearly tore it up. It was lame and ineffectual, but at that moment the evening courier arrived, and, almost without thinking, I folded and shoved it into an envelope, closed it with my seal and gave it to him. There would be no other chance before battle, and I put the letter into his paw.

  He bowed and left, and I took a great, deep breath and then walked out to look at the stars with Copernicus.

  Two days later a gypsy army of nearly two hundred joined with us, led by a fellow named Costain, claiming to be a cousin of the great gypsy leader Miklos, who my father had known. A day later, we met the forward edge of Frane’s army. At dusk the perimeter alarms went off, and three harlows were spotted by far scouts. There was plenty of time to prepare, and an aerial bomb dispatched one of the beasts, along with its attendant contingent of wailing, herding Baldies, before it reached the fringes of our camp. The other two were dispatched closer in, by the weapon which Newton had given us, consisting of a ground analyzer, which picked up the beast’s tread, and a heavy box on a tripod with a muzzle, which was aimed at the animal, and issued a blast of blinding light which felled the monster. The other got closer, but was brought down before it had reached the perimeter.

  There were two other attacks that night, and as dawn broke we prepared for our last march. General Reis pointed to the northwest, our direction of travel.

  “Just over that ridge is a low plain, and then Valles Marineris will come into sight.”

  An unnatural thrill went through me.

  “There are Baldies in the plain,” the general continued, filling me in with scouting reports, “with the vast majority waiting at the rim of the canyon.”

  “Let’s meet them, then.”

  He nodded, and we spurred our horses forward.

  The Baldies attacked first with harlows, and then in packs consisting only of their own number. But we had anticipated this, and spread our army to either side so that we could not be outflanked. The canyon, a tremendous cut in the ground that grew ever wider as we approached, seemed to swallow all sounds and echo it back in a ghostly fashion. The hair on the nape of my neck stood up as we grew near, and the battle intensified. It was as if we were marching toward a giant hole in Mars.

  The harlows were dispensed with in short order. Now the Baldy horde grew in front of us into a keening mass of mad beasts armed with tooth and claw. Some held weapons, swords and even an occasional shield. And yet we ploughed through them methodically, hacking at their wild, hissing faces, their pink and impossibly light blue eyes, their thin strange whipping tales, long claws, nearly hairless bodies with patches of dirty white fur covering their genitals and beneath their armpits with the occasional tuft on their near-naked heads. And still they came at us, and more of them, and we cut them down like shafts of wheat. We had armored our legs against their claws and teeth, and the foot soldiers wore light body armor which made the beasts’ advances nearly ineffectual. It was only a stupid or inattentive feline who fell to these brutes.

  “This too easy,” I shouted to General Reis, above the din of wailing Baldies and the clash of battle.

  He looked at me steadily, and nodded, pausing to hack down at a screeching beast that sought to gnaw at his boot and scratched madly as he was felled with a sword blow. The beast fell to the ground, its last breaths tramped from its body by the general’s horse.

  “There must be more than this!” he shouted, and then turned to meet two beasts who sought to strike at him from behind. They were dispatched.

  I moved off, wading through the bodies of dead or dying Baldies, bringing my own sword into play when one of the brutes tried to tear my mare’s leg armor off with its teeth. There was a curious odor which pervaded the battlefield, mingling with the copper smell of blood. I thought I had smelled it before...

  I looked in the distance, where Baldies filled the world from horizon to horizon, pressed against the rim of the Valles Marineris chasm. We were already nearing the cliffs.

  I sought the blood red armor and banner of Frane herself, and soon spied it to the left, amid a sea of her mad protectors.

  I began to move that way, hacking through the mass of Baldies around me which parted like a dying wave. I almost felt sorry for the brutes.

  Frane’s banner drew closer – and now I saw what looked to be the fiend herself, her left arm raised high with a sword, urging the Baldies onward, her helmet crimson in the sun.

  The right arm was missing, and now I was sure I had found my prize.

  For my father, and my grandmother before her! I thought, my vision filling with blood lust.

  I spurred my horse on, riding through a sea of crazed white bodies as if they were water parting before me.

  My prize drew closer – and now Frane’s head turned to see me. Behind her, at the cliff’s edge, Baldies were being pushed over into the nearly bottomless pit, flailing and screaming as they fell. I saw a harlow, crazed and trapped by the mass of bodies around it, hurl itself over the edge rather than be hemmed in.

  Ahead of me, Frane turned, studying the terrain behind her. She tried to move to the left but was blocked by her own mad army, now being pushed in great numbers to the ledge and over. To the right there was room where the harlow had been, and she drove herself into the spot even as more Baldies filled it.

  I drew closer, brandishing my sword, and sought to meet her eye. Two Baldies, howling, jumped on my mare and tried to scratch its eyes out. I dispatched them, left and right in quick succession.

  Frane looked straight at me, even as I came within hailing range.

  “Prepare to die, fiend!” I shouted, raising my sword.

  Raising her own in mock salute, the one-armed monster turned quickly –

  – and jumped into the chasm behind her, followed by a score of white-bodied acolytes.

  “No!” I screamed, driving my mare to the chasm’s edge and rearing it up. White bodies pressed around me and I drove them off, down, hacked at them screaming, “It cannot end like this!”

  The bodies thinned out around me, as others of my army drove toward me, slaying Baldies in droves until their numbers dwindled and then disappeared.

  I dismounted and stood panting, filled with impotent rage, staring down at the immense pit gouged in the surface of Mars, and the tiny unmoving white bodies littering its bottom like specks of dust.

  I spied the single spot of red among them and screamed in rage again.

  “My Queen,” General Reis addressed me, riding up and quickly dismounting. He took my arm. “My Queen, please move away from the edge of the chasm.”

  “She cheated me, even in death,” I spat.

  “She is dead, that is all that matters,” he answered, trying to soothe me.

  I turned on him, fury in my eyes. “She cheated me!”

  He drew back, perhaps alarmed at my rage. Suddenly he bowed. “I will have her body brought up from the pit,” he said.

  “Do that.”
I rammed my sword viciously into its scabbard, and strode past him to mount my horse and trot slowly away, trying to calm my own ire.

  The sounds of battle had died around me, leaving a field of white carnage and red blood. The moans of the dying and wounded were like a judgment on me.

  Frane is dead, I thought.

  The architect of so much unhappiness on my world, the murderer of my father, the sworn enemy of my grandmother, had been vanquished, and was no more.

  Now there would be true peace on the planet.

  Why did I feel so empty, so unsatisfied?

  It had all seemed almost too easy – was that it?

  Yes...something was wrong, out of place.

  What was it?

  Later that day I was to find out just how wrong things were.

  Eleven

  The body had been too short. I’m sure that had been in the back of my mind, even during the battle. It was not a F’rar body, and not Baldy, but of some indeterminate clan, possibly from the far north.

  “Perhaps a follower she picked up on her flight,” General Reis said. “She was bound to have a few fanatics still close to her.”

  “But how many?” I asked.

  On the slab before me, stripped of its armor and helmet, the body looked little like Frane. The missing left arm, hacked off at the shoulder, was the most telling part of its bodily disguise.

  “Do you think...?” I asked, pointing at the healed wound.

  Corian, who had joined us, laughed. “Whether she hacked it off herself or Frane helped her, it makes no difference. It was a bold stroke – pardon the pun.” He smiled, a thin gesture on his leathery face. “The fact remains, it was a daring disguise. It had my spies fooled, certainly.”

  Reis asked the nomad, “When was the last time Frane herself was in this area?”

  “That is hard to say, general.” Corian shrugged. “A week, two perhaps. She was seen and identified at one point, most assuredly.”

  Reis’s cold eye lingered on the gypsy, before turning to me.

  “It seems you may have your chance at her yet, your majesty.”

  “Yes...”