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

by Al Sarrantonio

  “It is what is required,” the thin feline said, making a slight bow with his head. “It is nothing more than the courtesy of the desert.”

  “Nevertheless, thank you.”

  Again he bowed his head, as did the female.

  “Are we your prisoners?” I asked, and now the two of them laughed out loud.

  “We are all prisoners of the desert,” the thin one said. “As to whether we hold you, the answer of course is no. You head north, I take it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you will reach it in a matter of days. You will fight no more storms. Your ponies are safe, tethered at an oasis an hour from here. We will show you the way.”

  “That’s very good to know.”

  Another bow.

  I stood and stepped out of the box we had been in, a red wooden coffin some six foot on a side, set into the desert floor.

  “We are lucky a takra was nearby when we found you,” the man said. He lowered the lid of the box and began to kick sand over it with his foot. The female joined in and, out of courtesy, so did I, until the box was covered. I noticed a thin red pole with a red flag on it which was attached to the back of the structure which stuck out of the sand and made the structure identifiable.

  “Are there many of these?” I asked.

  “All over the desert. One learns their locations as one learns the oases. It is a matter of survival.”

  “You’re not really cannibals, are you?”

  “Oh, yes,” the lilting voice said, with mock seriousness. She patted her stomach. “We also eat our own young when they pop.” She uncovered her face for a moment, showing a wolfish smile. “They are particularly tasty!” The smile broke down into laughter.

  “She jokes, of course,” the male said.

  “You two are betrothed?”

  The term seemed to mean nothing to them, so I amended, pointing on to the other, “You are...mated?”

  The male threw back his head and rasped laughter. “By heavens, no! She is my sister!” His laughter dissolved. “She carries the litter of our chieftain, as do all females. This makes all of us sons and daughters of the chieftain.”

  “I see...”

  He pointed to himself and then his sister. “I am Tlok, and my sister is Fline.” He pointed to me. “And you are...?”

  I hesitated, and then said, “My name is Clara.”

  “Clara...” Tlok seemed to roll that around in his head before deciding that it was acceptable. “Clara, yes. Very good.”

  His sister said, with a note of sarcasm, “And you and the chubby one, you are...as you say, betrothed?”

  It was my turn to laugh, as a very disturbed and unhappy looking Copernicus appeared, trudging toward us.

  “No,” I answered, “we are not—”

  I was interrupted by Tlok, who said to Copernicus in a mocking voice, “You had a nice walk?”

  Copernicus at first ignored him, and then said, “No.”

  “He did try to escape! Ha! And what did you find, little man?”

  “More of you. Kits. They taunted me.”

  “Ha!” Tlok laughed again. “Perhaps we will let them eat you!”

  Copernicus’s demeanor didn’t change. He offered Tlok a quick, sour look. “Perhaps you would.”

  Fline touched my arm lightly – I saw that her claws did not retract but were out and sharp. “We will not harm you,” she whispered.

  But the look in her eye was mysterious, filled with laughter, and something else, unreadable.

  Copernicus’s outlook brightened a bit when we were presented with our horses, unharmed, a few hours later. The trek to the oasis, where the mounts were feeding and watering themselves, was uneventful except for the cavorting troop of kits who accompanied us. They moved so fast, bouncing and jumping and cartwheeling in the sand, that it was hard to count there number, but I finally settled on seven. They, like their adult counterparts, were dressed head to toe in brown cloth coverings, and there were rough hewn sandals on their feet. Every once in a while one of them would throw back his head and yip or yowl, and his face cloth would slip, showing a variety of markings: white and black stripes, one jet black, many shadings of brown, and one curious mix of pure white and brown, each color on one side of the face split exactly down the middle. This one seemed to be the leader of the band, and directed them on their games, suddenly running out away from us, followed by the others, and then bringing this line of racing fellows back at top speed. They seemed to particularly enjoy bedeviling Copernicus, who made the mistake of letting them get under his skin. By mostly ignoring them and, occasionally, smiling at their antics, I was soon deemed boring and left alone. But poor Copernicus became the center of their universe and the butt of their pranks.

  “See what he has on underneath!” one of the rascals squeaked, and for the next ten minutes Copernicus was swatting the devils aside as one ran under his legs, trying to dislodge his tunic, while another attacked from a different angle.

  I held my tongue as long as I could, and then broke into laughter.

  “Don’t encourage them!” Copernicus brayed, pulling one away by the scruff of the neck while yet another darted between his boots.

  Finally he was sprawled in the sand, covered by a mob of pecking kits trying to tear the tunic from his body.

  A single sound from Fline, a kind of high-pitched yelp, and they instantly left Copernicus alone, running off to reassemble into a dancing ring thirty feet away.

  “I don’t trust them,” Copernicus whispered fiercely, as I helped him to his feet.” I tried to get away before, to get help, but those little monsters herded me like a heifer back to camp. They’ll eat us yet, I tell you.”

  “They seem hospitable enough, if a little strange,” I answered.

  “There’s nothing strange about them,” Copernicus nearly spat. “They’ll find our bones in the desert, I tell you. They’ll make a meal of me, then you.”

  “Why you first?” I teased.

  “Because there’s more of me,” he said, and, perhaps realizing the silliness of what he was saying, he nearly smiled.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I’m very worried.”

  “About what?”

  Tlok and Fline had stopped ahead to wait for us, and Copernicus’s words were rushed.

  “Cannibalism aside, what they might do with us,” he said.

  But there were our horses, content and safe, and there were our provisions, untouched, and Copernicus’s demeanor lightened.

  Once we had taken our fill of water, I found Tlok marking a stone with a flint knife. The markings were strange to me. When he was finished he placed the stone at the bank of the oasis’s pool (this one shallow, and not inhabited by a Gigantus!).

  “What are you doing?” I inquired.

  “This is Bleen oasis, owned by that chieftain, and though we may partake, we must leave thanks and a message of reciprocity.”

  “Reciprocity meaning that if he or his people are in need of an oasis owned by your chieftain, he may partake in kind?”

  “Exactly!” He seemed pleased that I understood the concept.

  “You...” he began, sitting down by the edge of the water.

  “Yes?”

  His face was serious. “You are intelligent. We were told...”

  My ears pricked up. “You were told what?”

  He shook his head and stood up. “Nothing. Please, we must go. We have already overstayed our welcome in this place. And we have another place to be by nightfall.”

  He walked away, gathering the kits together with a loud whistle, and soon we were on our way, Copernicus and I mounted, and, mostly, out of reach of the scampering, jumping kits, whose energy had not flagged a bit, but Tlok’s words stayed in my mind.

  We were told.

  And I thought, Told by whom?

  Sixteen

  We stopped that evening, and to my surprise, Tlok announced that we had found another underground shelter and must use it for the night, which
was clear and starlit.

  “But why?” I asked.

  He hesitated for a moment, and then said, “We are in the Valley of Tornadoes, and must guard against the possibility. Though the weather is clear, a tornado can appear at almost any time. One moment the air is still and clear as water, and then the winds come, seemingly from nowhere, and, well, one is lost.”

  “I see...”

  I glanced at Copernicus, who looked very unhappy indeed. But he held his tongue, and busied himself instead with his mount.

  The kits had found the red flag in the sand, and were making a great game of uncovering the big square wooden coffin which lay beneath it.

  When the lid had been pried up, Tlok indicated that we should climb in first.

  “Please...”

  I lay down in the box and so did Copernicus, who was breathing heavily. When we were comfortable, Tlok began to lower the lid over us. I saw Fline and the seven kits looking at us soberly as the cover dropped upon us.

  “But what of the rest of you!” I shouted, my words already muffled.

  I heard a clang of metal, following by a loud click.

  “I am sorry,” came Tlok’s voice, muffled through the wood.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We must leave you for others to find. This is what we were ordered to do. It was ordained by all the chieftains. I see now that they may have been wrong in agreeing to this. There is nothing evil about you.”

  “What are you doing?” I pleaded.

  “We know who you are, Queen Clara. But it was ordained and agreed by our chieftains that you would be turned over to Frane of the F’rar. Pacts were made, sealed with blood, which cannot be broken. It saddens me, and I will speak with our chieftain, Klek, when we return to him, but if I would act now otherwise it would mean that his own word would be broken, and he would be an outcast among all the chieftains. It would bring shame and ruin on us all.”

  Fline’s saddened voice added, “I am truly sorry.”

  Some of the kits were crying, and one of them, their squeaking leader, was pleading, “What will happen to them?”

  “I don’t know...” Tlok’s receding voice answered.

  Barely heard, the little sprite pleaded, “But the fat one was fun!”

  And then we heard no more but the silence of the night.

  After an interval Copernicus spoke up. He breathed a huge sigh.

  “Thank the sky Tlok was so upset by his task that he didn’t see me taking my tools from my saddlebags and hiding them in my tunic.”

  I heard a rattle and metallic clunking, and Copernicus moved away from me in the dark space.

  “And thank the sky that there’s room to work. This may take a while, your majesty, if you’d like to take a nap.”

  He began to pound on the door overhead, and I heard a chewing sound of metal on wood.

  “I couldn’t sleep if I wanted to, with that racket. What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to drill a series of holes, and then saw between them and make us a door to escape from. I imagine it will take most of the night.”

  “What if our new visitors from Frane get here before that?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Had you thought of merely removing the hinges?”

  There was silence for a moment.

  “That’s brilliant!” Copernicus cried, finally. “And I have just the tool to remove them!”

  He crawled off in the dark, and I followed, and before long he had removed the pins from the metal hinges, and we heaved up with our backs, throwing the door up and over and away, where it broke the lock Tlok had secured it with, and we were free.

  Our horses stood tethered nearby.

  Without a word, we left that place, galloping our well-rested mounts, and before morning the sands began to recede and thin, and the air lost its arid feel, filling with humidity and a thicker warmth, and as the sun rose on our flank the new day, and a world dominated not by sand and dry heat but by greenery and rolling hills, spread out before us like a heavenly vision.

  Copernicus, filled with pride, pointed at a distant valley, which looked as lush as anything I had ever seen.

  “My home,” he said.

  Seventeen

  And so I spent the fall and winter hiding in a place called Hammerfarm, and became a farm girl.

  Autumn was brief, with junto trees shedding their leaves almost by the calendar, on the season’s first day. The air turned from warm to chill, and smelled colder. The nights, which Copernicus invariably spent with his telescope, became downright cold, and if I hadn’t carried a shawl out to the little fellow on occasion, I’m sure he would have frozen. But he was happy as a man could be with the turning of the season, which meant the coming of the winter stars. To me they were but a new set of bright dots in the sky, but to Copernicus they were old friends seen a new way.

  “Come look at this nebula, your majesty!” he would gasp in pleasure, and my eye was met with yet another faint cloud of gas.

  Which would invariably lead to argument when I told him so.

  The one thing that continued to spark my interest was Earth, which I made him turn the instrument toward whenever it rose. It was a strange blue and brown ball in the eyepiece, showing its various land masses and polar caps to great effect.

  “It’s strange, but I feel an affinity with that place,” I remarked one night.

  “Why?” Copernicus asked, taking over the instrument. “It’s just another rock in space. Great Jupiter shows as much to us – more, even.”

  I shrugged and went in, feeling the chill of night.

  To my surprise, little Copernicus followed me.

  “What’s bothering you, your majesty?” he asked, as I made gemel tea on his ancient stove. The farmhouse was older than the stove but cozy, a wood structure with a bedroom loft Copernicus had given to me which rattled when the wind blew but always managed to be warm inside. It was filled with Copernicus’s many lab tables and experiments, but there was a single cozy chair which I now sat down in to face him.

  “I’m restless. I should be doing something!”

  He frowned. “Didn’t we decide that the best thing to do was wait until spring? By then the search for you by Frane’s people will surely lessen. There haven’t been inquiries in almost a month, after that frantic first week.”

  Indeed: I had spent almost a week hiding in Copernicus’s root cellar, while a strange band of gypsies or pirates – we were never sure what, exactly – came through the area asking questions and worse; only the fact that everyone in the area looked exactly like Copernicus, and that they had no specific name for the “little fellow seen traveling with a thin black-furred girl named Clara” had saved us from detection. That and the fact that no one else in the area knew of my existence, since, as Copernicus had said, “Coin can make a betrayer of a friend in less time than it takes to clap your paws.”

  I looked at the little fellow. “I thought it was a good idea, but now I’m not so sure. I should be trying to reach my grandmother and father. Or Newton—”

  “That would be the worst thing you could do! There are spies everywhere! You’ve heard the news, that Newton controls the cities in the east and Frane has tentative control over the badlands in the west and north. But neither has a real army!”

  “Then I should be gathering one!”

  “How? This whole area is under Frane’s control! You would be caught in a minute or less!”

  “Still...”

  He took a step forward. “Please, your majesty. Give it time. Let me continue to make my own quiet inquiries. We will get word to Newton, eventually. But it will take time.”

  I looked at him and sighed. “You are right, Copernicus. Of course you are. But I am going mad doing nothing! I need something to do!”

  And so I became a farmer.

  This late in the year there was not much to do but get the fields ready for spring planting. But I threw myself into this task of preparation with ev
erything I had. I found that I liked working with the soil, getting my hands dirty, watching callouses form on them. I became good with the plow, learning the needs and moods of Copernicus’s pack mule, Tessie, when to push her, when to give her water, when to do nothing because that was what she was going to do. I learned how to use a hoe and a shovel, a spade and a rake. I learned how to bundle and burn refuse, how to feed chickens, gather eggs, milk a goat. These simple tasks served to lessen, over time, my sadness. When I thought of Darwin now it was from a strange, faraway place, as if he had been in another life.

  But I could not learn to get along with Copernicus’s dog.

  “I don’t understand how anyone could have one of those things as a pet,” I said to Copernicus one night at dinner, as a late autumn rain storm howled coldly outside. The fire was warm, the vegetables well cooked and tender. I felt like any domestic farm wife, proud of her full day.

  But the dog was constantly under my feet, with those cow-like eyes and its mournful brown face, floppy ears, short useless legs and wagging tail.

  “Come here, Hector,” Copernicus cooed, but the animal insisted on following me around wherever I went in the house.

  “I won’t pet you!” I growled at it. I stood at the sink, and the creature nuzzled up to me, making a needy noise in its throat and looking up at me expectantly.

  I turned on Copernicus. “How could any one creature need so much love?”

  He shrugged. “It’s their way.”

  I shivered, and nudged the beast away with the toe of my boot, which only made him beg louder.

  Suddenly he gave a mournful howl.

  “Oh, all right!” I spat, throwing down the carrot I was peeling and bending down to give the creature a pat on the head. He rolled over happily and showed me his belly.

  Copernicus laughed as I knelt, scratching the beast’s stomach, and the dog chuffed happily and squirmed back and forth like a river eel.

  “Disgusting animals,” I said, standing up.

  But the dog had not had enough, and continued to mewl and beg, still on its back, looking up at me.

  “He’ll win you over yet,” Copernicus said, getting up to help me finish the kitchen chores, before he spent the night with one experiment or other, or out under the stars with the telescope.