“Good God, Atwood. You must be joking.”
“You find our predicament funny, Mr Shaw? How odd.”
“What if another storm crosses our path?”
“It won’t. Rest assured.”
“Atwood—”
“Shaw. Have you ever had a dream…” Atwood stared at the mountain and the sunrise and collected his thoughts. “Have you ever had a dream, Shaw, in which—for a moment, for a brief, tremendous moment—it appeared to you that you stood upon a high mountain-top, and that beneath you was laid out all the world, as God must see it, day and night at once? And the sky, Shaw, as if a great black veil had been pulled aside, so that you could see the stars—and hung between them the silver thread of your life, as you have lived it and now live it and will live it, the beginning swallowing the end?”
“I don’t believe I have.”
“I did once. In the Alps. I had a fever, the doctors said. I was no older than you are now.”
“This is no dream, Atwood.”
“Of course it’s not.”
Clouds obscured the mountain. The sun glowed faintly through them.
“Cheer up, Shaw.” Atwood began to try to light a match. “We shall find her.”
“Hmmph.”
“Blasted thing!” Atwood threw the dead match on the ground.
Sun lit a match, cupped it, and handed it to Atwood, who thanked him and lit his cigarette.
“It’s a pity,” Sun said, “That you didn’t climb higher, Mr Shaw.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yesterday, Mr Shaw, in the tower. His Lordship and I went up after you and what’s-his-name—the sailor. Had you climbed a little higher you would have seen a window that looked on Earth. A blue gem in a bed of velvet. It was a thing worth going a long way to see.”
“It certainly was,” Atwood said. “Now, Shaw, perhaps you should go and help Dimmick; I hear him tossing our supplies about, and we have little enough to spare as it is. If he breaks the bottle of champagne, I’ll have to have someone shot.”
* * *
It took an hour or two to gather up their supplies and dig out the sleds. Atwood smoked and stared into the distance. Payne was silent throughout the work, scratching grimly at his rash. After a while, he took one of the revolvers and wandered around the back of the tower. Nobody made any move to stop him. But for whatever reason, he decided not to shoot himself after all, and fell in with the rest of them as they headed west.
Chapter Thirty-four
Time flattened, as if the weight of the sky pressed it down. As the expedition moved westwards across the face of Mars, Dimmick marked the days and hours, his ice-axe ringing out through the gloom. Sometimes it seemed to Arthur that that was the purpose of their expedition: to mark their presence on the planet. To show that they had been there, should anyone else happen by, a thousand years from now.
The light was unnatural, the emptiness unbearable. Shapes swum in and out of the gloom. Sometimes it seemed that Atwood was suddenly very far in the distance, and at a weird angle, as if the expedition had somehow become scattered. That never failed to induce panic. When they camped—at irregular intervals, when full darkness and treacherous terrain made progress impossible—they huddled for warmth, like a picture Arthur had once seen: penguins on a frozen rock.
They were tormented by visions. Fragmentary, momentarily alarming horrors or absurdities. The wind carried telephone noises. A flicker of hell-fire dancing on the horizon. Rats underfoot, or the noises of London traffic. A column of ants crawling endlessly across the dunes. Mosquitos. Perhaps there really were mosquitos, or something like them. Certainly there was something in the air that buzzed and whined. Something that bit them. They watched the skies for more of those half-dead monsters they’d met in the tower. Did they see them? They weren’t sure. Something seemed to move through the clouds, casting long shadows that slipped across the plains like hunting wolves. Once Frank reported that the sun had become a vast eye. He became convinced that the expedition had somehow shrunk to the size of germs, and that the vast eye of a scientist in London was studying them. He sat on the ground, saying that he refused to be anyone’s experiment, and it took over an hour to talk him out of this delusion.
Everyone’s hair grew wild. They ate sparingly, and rarely slept. Atwood and Sun maintained that they needed neither food nor water nor sleep, but even they seemed to struggle to believe it. They practiced exercises of discipline and self-denial. Even so, the expedition’s supplies dwindled. Ropes frayed and snapped, as if something had been gnawing at them. Teeth yellowed and fell out. Hair thinned. They began to look like monsters, even to one another. The rash on Arthur’s arms spread and thickened and climbed onto his shoulders. Everyone suffered from it, even Atwood. Arthur began to see patterns in it, shapes, of unclear significance—it drove him mad that he couldn’t see what it was writing on his back, no matter how he craned his head! It began to resemble the shimmering skin of the Martians, their mottled wings. Perhaps that, too, was a hallucination.
* * *
They passed other ruins. The structures were days apart, and solitary, like the houses of desert hermits. No two were exactly the same. A stepped pyramid. A high crescent wall, half-enclosing a dome of empty stone. A cluster of towers growing out of each other like the stalks of a cactus. Minarets, monoliths. Structures that looked oddly familiar, like earthly houses or a Scottish castle or a London railway-station or a Bombay temple; other top-heavy structures that could make sense only to winged creatures, that could exist only in feeble gravity. They didn’t explore them. Atwood would allow no detours from their path.
They pressed on. The mountain grew larger and larger.
* * *
Atwood marched up ahead, flickering through the haze and half-light, a black candle flame. Had Arthur thought that before? Well, he thought it again. He stared at Atwood for hours, paying particular attention to the pistol in Atwood’s belt. He was developing deep suspicions regarding His Lordship’s intentions.
Atwood rarely spoke. He muttered sometimes, as if talking to the wind. When he did speak, he no longer talked about exploration, or conquest, or the treasures of Mars, or the friendly natives. He had quite forgotten about Josephine, and he hardly even seemed to care about finding a way home any more. He spoke of Mars as a trial, an ordeal of the spirit, a refining fire for the magician’s will: per ignem ad lucem. He spoke of the burning away of weakness, the purification through adversity of the inner eye, and so on and so on.
As a matter of fact, Arthur was developing deep suspicions of everyone, not just Atwood. The wind whispered unpleasant notions. Dimmick, for example: a thug, a common criminal, a killer. Dimmick might turn on them at any moment. Certainly he would turn on them, if Atwood commanded it. Hairy and filthy, he was starting to look positively bestial. Frank and Payne were little better. Soldiers turned mercenary—deserters, probably. God only knew where Atwood had found them, or for what purpose. Even Vaz seemed suspect—with his mysterious origins, his cleverness, his ratty little beard. Was it merely a coincidence that Vaz had been chosen for this expedition? Had Atwood chosen him to spy on Arthur? And if so, when? Had Vaz been spying on him even back in Gracewell’s offices in Deptford? And what about Josephine, for that matter—how long had she been secretly working with Atwood? Was it really an accident that had sent her to Mars, or …
How did Atwood know where he was going? Why was he so certain that they would find what they were looking for on the mountain?
If they had to stop Atwood, who was strong enough? Not Arthur, not if it came to magic. He well remembered the thrashing Atwood had given him in his library all those months ago; he didn’t relish the prospect of a rematch. Sun, perhaps; if any of them was a match for Atwood’s tricks, it would be Sun. If only Arthur could talk to him, somewhere in private, without Dimmick snooping around! Sun was no fool. He shared Arthur’s suspicions, that was plain. Why didn’t he act? He was so patient—as if he were waiting to see what Atwood would d
o next; as if he were drifting along in a dream.
* * *
One night, Sun told a story.
“Once upon a time,” he said. “Let us say, in India. Or perhaps in China. In any case, a very long way from London, gentlemen. One upon a time there lived many magicians, and they performed many wonders.”
They were all huddled together for warmth in utter darkness. Sun’s voice seemed to come from nowhere.
When they first started their long march, they’d told stories more often. Payne and Frank had talked about their campaigns, and Vaz had a good line in sea stories. But they’d all run out of stories a long time ago. This was the first time Sun had volunteered to speak.
“They lived on a great mountain, the greatest in their country. Of all the magicians in their country, they were the most learned, and the most powerful, and it seemed to them right that they should demand obedience from lesser magicians, and tribute. And I would say they were right, and I don’t doubt that Lord Atwood would agree. I know all this because that is the way of great magicians. It is the way of great men everywhere.”
“Enough,” Atwood said.
“Enough? The tribute of one world would not be enough for them, I think. Mastery is greedy by its very nature. They would have looked to the heavens. They would have looked on their flesh as a burden. Suppose that one day they learned to shrug it off, like an old coat, and go walking—the way one might go walking and then forget where one left one’s coat.”
“That’s enough.”
“Well. Lord Atwood perhaps knows this story better than I. Let him tell the rest of it.”
There was a long silence before Atwood spoke again, and when he did his tone was politely menacing.
“Would you like to take a walk with me, Sun?”
“No, thank you, Lord Atwood. I have more thinking to do.”
Sun lay down. No one said anything further. Payne began to cough.
They moved on at dawn. Arthur tried to talk to Sun, but Dimmick was watching them both.
* * *
Five miles a day, they reckoned; perhaps ten on their best days. It was hard to tell. What was a mile on Mars, anyway? They marched through the night. Despite all their exercises of discipline, their supplies ran low. A mouthful of stale water a day. Soon there would be nothing at all. Then they’d march on will alone, Atwood said. The prospect excited him. His lips were cracked and bloody, his eyes unfocused. The mountain grew day by day until it dominated the horizon; a shadow that rose into the heavens, impossibly tall and thin, like the funnel of a whirlwind inverted.
* * *
There was a vision of wings overhead. Shadows pursued them across the dunes. Pale emaciated shapes fell from the sky shrieking and buzzing. At first Arthur thought it was another hallucination. He’d been half asleep as he marched, dragging the sled. Now something slashed through his vague dream: patterns and motion, flashes of pale blue and faded rose, screaming. Ahead of him, Payne cried out and fell to his knees, and suddenly there was something standing over him: a tall, desperately thin shape, long-legged, mottled wings outspread. A Martian. Was it the one that had escaped from the tower? Payne tried to crawl away, but it held his hair in its long, deathly blue fingers. Payne was screaming, and another shrill and inhuman scream came from all around—from nowhere—from inside Arthur’s head. The Martian threw Payne onto his back on the ground, then swept up its wings as if it meant to strike with them. An ice-axe appeared with a thump in its back. A little splatter of thick pink blood, and it toppled forward onto Payne.
Dimmick had apparently thrown the axe. He now pushed past Arthur to snatch up one of the rifles from the sled.
Up ahead, Sun was wrestling with another of the creatures. How many were there? Arthur let go of the sled rope and looked around, trying to rouse himself from his dream.
Atwood drew his pistol, pointed it at Sun’s assailant, then stopped. He seemed paralyzed by fear—or perhaps he, too, was struggling to tell dream from reality.
Shadows swept across the ground. Arthur looked up to see a half-dozen wings approaching through the air. They came in a hectic, clumsy rush, landed messily, like squabbling geese in a pond, some of them falling flat on their faces, then jumping up and running. An odd, high-stepping run, bird-like. Wings raised like weapons. Arthur threw himself to the ground behind a sled as a ragged wing slashed through the air where his head had been. A shot sounded, slow and muffled, and continued to echo for some time.
Arthur got up on his knees. Dimmick had taken the rifle, but there was another ice-axe on the sled, somewhere under the blankets. Arthur reached for it just as one of the Martians landed on the sled. He retreated, but the thing wasn’t interested in him—it rummaged through the supplies, tossing aside tins of food and boxes of matches. It lifted up two small glass jars of coloured ink and leapt up into the sky, spreading its wings. It appeared to be trying to eat them.
Arthur reached under the blankets, took the axe, turned, and buried it in the back of the first Martian he saw. More blood. He acted without thinking, lifting the axe again. Well, there would be time to think later. He looked around for another target. He saw, without a great deal of surprise, that Sun lay dead on the ground. There were two deep slashes across Sun’s chest and another that had almost taken off his head. He appeared to have lost a hand, as well. Two of the Martians were dead—Atwood appeared to have recovered his nerve, and was reloading his pistol. Dimmick was holding three of them off at once, jabbing at them with the end of a rifle. He didn’t have a moment to reload. He jabbed one Martian in the eye with the rifle’s muzzle, then clubbed another with the butt. Bleeding from a half-dozen cuts, he nevertheless advanced indefatigably on the third Martian. It fled—they all fled—snatching what they could from the back of the sleds as they went, then taking to the air. Payne fired wildly into the air at the retreating Martians, and Vaz roared in fury and hurled a tent-pole after them.
* * *
“I blame myself,” Atwood said. “In my haste to reach our destination, I allowed discipline to lapse. Did I think that this place would give up its secrets without a struggle?”
The Martians had made off with a few tins of ox-tail soup, some paint, some creosote, and a length of rope. Nothing very valuable. They appeared to have taken Sun’s hand, too.
“He was a great magician,” Atwood said. “And a brother to me.”
There wasn’t much they could do to bury him.
Frank spat at Sun’s body, then swung a fist at Atwood’s face, clipping his jaw and making him stumble.
“Discipline? Discipline? Atwood, you’ve ruined us, you bloody—”
Dimmick struck Frank in the back of the knee with a rifle-butt, knocking him to the ground. Then he beat Frank about the head and shoulders until he started to sob. Vaz, pale and sick, turned away. Arthur closed his eyes. Eventually Atwood said: Enough.
Chapter Thirty-five
The Martians’ flight was erratic. They were half-starved, half-dead, half-mad. Some of them had been wounded in the fight. Some were dead. The survivors—there were five of them—were burdened by the things they’d seized from the interlopers. Unfamiliar things, things they had no names for in any of the old languages of Mars. Food, they hoped.
They had no destination in mind. They didn’t know where they were. The skies were not the skies they remembered from before their long sleep; the face of Mars below was so hideously blighted that they could hardly bear to look down at it.
None of them remembered the world they’d gone to sleep in more than dimly. They were of various nations and of various philosophies and faiths. Once upon a time that would have mattered, but now their colours were faded, their names forgotten. They were already half-dead, and they expected to die soon.
They remembered the end of things: storm-clouds swallowing the skies, driving them out of the air and onto the ground; nonsense words screamed into the wind; shadows that crawled and laughed and pounced; men and women struck down by madness; the rivers sucked
dry by some tremendous and bodiless hunger; the forests turned to ash. None of them knew the cause. Sometimes it seemed to have happened in an instant and sometimes it seemed to have been a thousand-year decline. They remembered rumours of its cause—nothing more. There was no point in talking about it now. At the end they’d all come to the same place: alone, separated from their dying nations, they’d found some corner of a ruin somewhere to hide in; and there they’d dreamed, stiffening and withering and becoming like stone.
Something had prowled the edges of their dreams, screaming and murmuring, driving them mad. Now that they were moving again, it was only a matter of time before something found them, and ended them.
* * *
One of them remembered a little more than the rest. She was their leader, in so far as they had one. The first to awaken, she’d had more time to think. How long had she slept, in a remote corner of some meaningless ruin? She forgot what that ruin was, or who’d built it, or why. Perhaps she’d never known. She’d lain tangled with—who? A lover? A child? A parent? Some stranger who’d fallen there with her? She couldn’t remember, no matter how hard she struggled. She’d been asleep for so long, and she’d had such terrible dreams, and she was so hungry.
Then someone had moved her—a mind had touched hers. In that moment she’d woken, screaming with fear and hunger. Whoever had slept at her side had woken too. The thing that had moved her was a sort of monster: huge, square, heavy-footed, wingless, an awful mixture of pink and white and brown. At first she took it for a new sort of nightmare. There’d been a struggle, in the course of which her sleep-mate died. Then one of the monsters had spoken to her in a language she half-remembered: the language of the Eye, a language of pride, and command, and power. Though she didn’t fully understand what he was saying, she felt compelled to obey. At the monster’s command, she fled.
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