Secrets of the Dragon Tomb

by Patrick Samphire

  Not taking our eyes from the hunter tripods, we kicked our way out toward where Olivia was treading water. We were safe. We had escaped the monsters.

  I was so relieved and so exhausted that I scarcely heard Olivia’s shout of warning.

  “Freddie!” she screamed. “Edward! Look out!”

  I flipped myself around just in time to see a large boat loom up in the water beside me.

  It knocked me sideways and thrust me under the surface. I lost my grip on Putty’s stretcher. Wood scraped over me, tumbling me about. I breathed in water. My limbs flapped helplessly. All I could see was a wide, flat shape above me. I was under the boat’s hull. It rolled across me, spinning me, pummeling me, and knocking the breath from my body. I kicked away, pushing myself further down into the water, away from the hull that could batter me unconscious.

  I didn’t have enough breath. I couldn’t get out from beneath the boat. I rose toward it again. I had to have air, but there wasn’t any. Something was roaring in my ears. Everything started to go black.

  Then an arm closed around my chest, powerful legs kicked beneath me, and I was pulled toward the daylight.

  PART THREE

  The Dragon Tombs of Mars

  17

  Lunae City

  I didn’t remember much after that. Someone grabbed me and hauled me out. I felt a wooden deck under my back, and hands on my chest. Then all was darkness.

  When I awoke, the only light I could see was a single candle. Its flickering yellow flame showed me a tall, narrow cabin with what looked like carpets on the walls and glass spheres dangling from the ceiling. The ceiling itself was covered with strange, swirling patterns painted in strong, bright colors. I wondered if I was dreaming. Then a figure I hadn’t noticed sat up from a low chair.

  “Edward! You’re awake!”

  Olivia bent over me. She seemed to have borrowed a shapeless, long robe, but otherwise she looked as much of a mess as when we’d been hiking through the wilderness.

  “Where are we?” I croaked. Even though I’d swallowed half the canal, my throat felt as dry as the desert.

  “On a boat. Freddie was right. The native Martians use the canal for travel. They pulled us out of the water.”

  I tried to sit up and immediately started coughing. Olivia pushed me down easily.

  “You mustn’t move. Freddie said you have to rest. You almost drowned.”

  “What about Putty?” I’d lost hold of her stretcher in the canal.

  “They pulled her out, too, but she’s still unconscious. The captain and his men have some experience of this bite. They put a tube between Parthenia’s lips and they’ve been feeding her sugared water. But they say we have to wait.” She took a deep breath. “There’s nothing more they can do.”

  I rested my hand on Olivia’s arm. It was hard to speak. “She’ll get better. Freddie said it’s just a matter of time, and if they’re feeding her…”

  “I know,” Olivia said, sounding choked. “But it’s too much. First Mama, Papa, and Jane were kidnapped by Sir Titus, now Parthenia won’t wake up, and I thought you were drowned.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t bear to lose all of you.”

  Sir Titus! He still had Jane and my parents. We were supposed to be rescuing them.

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Six hours. It’s night.”

  My brain felt like it was being drowned in thick oil. I could hardly think. I forced myself to count back. Sir Titus had kidnapped them five days ago.

  “We’ve only got seven days left!” I blurted. “How are we going to get to Lunae City in just seven days?”

  I tried to sit up again, but I couldn’t. My eyelids were too heavy, and my body was exhausted. My head fell back.

  “Hush,” Olivia said. “Go back to sleep.”

  So I did.

  * * *

  The next thing I knew, sunlight was streaming through a thin cloth that had been carefully fixed over a delicate wooden screen. I lay there for a while, feeling bruised and battered, following the carved patterns on the wooden screen. They seemed to flow and twist away from my eyes, but I thought I could make out a river and a great dragon and fish. Or maybe they were people working in a field. My eyes couldn’t settle on them for long enough to be sure what I was seeing.

  I dragged myself off the bed. I was weak, but at least I could stand. I found my shoes and slipped them on. They were still wet from the canal. I pulled a face. They were disgusting. On the deck up above, I heard the creak of sails, the gentle padding of feet, and strange, high singing. Water splashed against the hull.

  Putty! Olivia had said she was still unconscious. I shouldn’t have slept. Anything could have happened. I should have been with her.

  I slid open the door. There was a darkened corridor ahead of me, then a set of rough steps and a hatchway above. I climbed out onto the deck. Boxes and bales were stacked everywhere and covered in tarpaulins. A tall native Martian was coiling a rope a few feet away. When he saw me, he called something in his language, grinned at me, and returned to his work. It took me a moment to realize that he’d looked me in the eyes. I didn’t have time to think about it, though, because Freddie appeared around the mounds of cargo.

  “There you are,” he said. “I thought you’d sleep all day. You must be starving.”

  “Where’s Putty?” I demanded. “What’s happened to her?”

  Freddie nodded. “This way.”

  He led me to a shack-like cabin standing on the raised aft deck. I bit my lip. What if she was still unconscious? What if she hadn’t made it?

  The shack doors were folded back, and there on a low chair sat Putty. She sprang to her feet, with a slight wobble.

  “Putty?”

  “I can’t believe you let me sleep through all the excitement!” she said. “Freddie says we were chased by hunter tripods, and I missed them. What were they like? Freddie’s useless at describing them. Were they clockwork? Of course, they must have been, or they wouldn’t have been so fast. But how were they stabilized? How did they triangulate the sounds they followed? Really, I don’t know how you managed to survive without me.”

  I took two steps and engulfed her in a hug that lifted her off the deck.

  “I was so worried,” I said. “I thought you’d … you…”

  “Get off!” Putty wriggled free and looked around, flustered. “You must have hit your head too hard. I’m hardly about to die over something so stupid. I’m not that missish. Oh!” She collapsed back into her chair.

  I glanced across at Olivia, who was standing nearby, and she gave me a little nod.

  “Well, good,” I said, and cleared my throat.

  “You haven’t completely recovered your strength, Cousin Parthenia,” Freddie said. “You must rest. There’ll be plenty of time for details. We’ll be on this boat for several days.”

  Putty let out a grunt of dissatisfaction, but she didn’t argue.

  “How many days?” I demanded. “We have to get to Lunae City.”

  “I don’t know,” Freddie said. “It depends on the winds. There’s nothing any of us can do to hurry it up. We all need to rest and recover.”

  Grinding my teeth, I lowered myself into a chair next to Putty. Just walking from the cabin to the deck had left me shaky. I toed off my damp shoes and rested my feet on the warm wood. At least my clothes were dry. Someone must have undressed me, dried my clothes, and then redressed me. I’d slept through it all. But if they’d removed my jacket … My hand shot to the pocket.

  “The map!” I said. “It’s gone.”

  Freddie grimaced. “I know. It didn’t survive the water. The paper was sodden and the ink had run. There was nothing I could do.”

  “It’s ruined?” I said.

  Freddie nodded.

  I buried my face in my hands. After everything we’d been through—our house demolished, my family kidnapped, the airship crash, and the hell of that wilderness—Sir Titus Dane had gotten what he wanted after all. T
he map was destroyed. Now he was the only one who could find the tomb.

  “There was this, too,” Putty said.

  She passed me a sagging mass of wet pulp. It was disgusting. It felt like snail-bird slime.

  “What is it?”

  Putty looked pained. “Your Thrilling Martian Tales.”

  I stared down at it. The magazine was a mess. I tried to pull it open, but it tore. I let it fall to the deck.

  Freddie cleared his throat. “Your sisters have helped me reproduce what we can.”

  “Excuse me?” I blinked up from the seeping remains of my magazine.

  “The map.”

  “Right,” I said. “Right.”

  “I’ve stared at the ideograms so many times that I think I’ve got them,” Freddie said, “but the map feels wrong. If you could take a look and see what you remember?”

  He pulled a piece of paper from his sleeve and unfolded it. In the line of symbols at the top, there was a bird standing on one leg and a cloud, and something that might have been a coiled snake, but those were the only ideograms that seemed familiar. I couldn’t have sworn that even those were accurate. The map, though … It showed a valley and the lines were roughly the right shape, but there was something wrong that I couldn’t put my finger on.

  “It’s not quite right,” I said, “but…” I shrugged.

  “I agree,” Freddie said. “We’ll just have to hope that the ideograms themselves give enough clues when they’re decoded. Either that or we’ll have to get Sir Titus’s original map.”

  “After we’ve rescued my family,” I said.

  “We will rescue them,” Freddie said. “This canal will take us all the way to the Martian Nile. From there, the captain plans to sail to Lunae City to deliver his goods. We will come up on Sir Titus, unexpected and beneath his notice.”

  “We’ve got less than seven days,” I said.

  “I know,” Freddie said. “But we’ll get there.” His eyes hardened. “And when we do, I will deliver justice to that man for what he has done.”

  * * *

  It took us seven days to reach Lunae City by boat, and I knew it was too long. Every day was another day closer to Papa finishing the water abacus and my family becoming expendable. I knew I should be resting and preparing, but I could hardly sit still.

  For the first four days, we sailed along the canal with a steady breeze behind us. Occasionally, we passed other native Martian boats heading in the other direction, tacking backward and forward across the wide canal against the wind.

  The canal was amazing. It went straight through the hills and mesas without changing direction. It looked like someone had picked up a giant axe and sliced through even the hardest rock. Where the land dipped down into valleys, great embankments had been raised to support the canal, and while these had crumbled in places, the canal had survived. It had been built thousands of years ago, but it was still there. I couldn’t imagine that anything we’d built on Mars would still be around two thousand years later.

  I’d never spent any time with a native Martian before. Whenever I’d seen them, they’d only been passing by. Sometimes the Martians on the boat would stop for no apparent reason to sit together on the deck and sing strange, quiet songs. At others, they would work nine or ten hours straight through without even breaking for food. I couldn’t figure out why. It certainly wasn’t because of anything Captain Sadalius Kol, the owner of the boat, said, but he seemed happy enough to join in even if it meant the boat drifted to a stop or if everyone went hungry. The captain spoke only a few words of English, and I didn’t speak any native Martian at all, so I couldn’t ask him what was going on.

  For some reason, the native Martians didn’t use any technology from the dragon tombs, either, even the things that were so cheap they must have been able to afford them. They did everything by hand, although it took twice as long.

  “How are we going to pay for this?” I asked Freddie one evening when we were alone. We’d lost most of our money in the airship crash.

  “We’re not,” Freddie said. “No native Martian would dream of charging us. I said they were generous.”

  “If they trust us, you said.”

  “Well, wouldn’t you trust someone you pulled drowning out of a canal?” Freddie laughed. “Anyway, I’m good at this.” He winked. “Spy training, don’t you know?”

  “You must be,” I said, “if they’re feeding and carrying us for free.”

  “You still don’t get it, do you?” Freddie said. “They’re grateful to us. Native Martians believe it’s a privilege to offer someone hospitality. You shouldn’t expect everyone to think and act like an Englishman. We’re their guests for as long as we want.” He stretched his back painfully. He was still covered in bruises from the airship crash and the hunter tripod attack.

  “It’s interesting, isn’t it?” he said. “That the poorest people tend to be more generous than the richest. Imagine what would happen if a group of lost, bedraggled native Martians appeared on your family’s doorstep.”

  I didn’t need to imagine. Mama would turn the automatic servants on them. If they came back, she would have them arrested. I’d have been so worried about protecting my family, I might have done the same. It made me feel guilty.

  The sailors had set up a canopy across part of the deck so that we could rest in the low, slung-back native Martian chairs and recover. Within a couple of days, Putty had picked up enough native Martian to chat away happily with the sailors. I was still trying to figure out the difference between “yes,” “no,” “thank you,” and “please may I have a bucket for my head.”

  When I’d first seen the desert, I’d thought we were going to die there. I’d been shocked and scared by just how big, bleak, and threatening it was. Now that we were sitting comfortably beneath a cool canopy, I realized the desert was also beautiful, particularly at nightfall and sunrise.

  Great red and yellow sand dunes stretched like the backs of mile-long whales, but there were so many of them they looked like ripples on a lake. Putty wanted to stop and search for the sandfish she’d once been obsessed with, but the captain just laughed and kept on sailing.

  Between the dunes, there were a thousand different colors of rocks, delicately layered and bent into vast curves. Putty told me the native Martians thought that once, millions of years ago, this had all been beneath the sea and it had been pushed up by the working of unimaginable forces. It was a strange superstition. I agreed with Olivia that it was really evidence of the hand of a Creator.

  * * *

  It took me a few days to realize that some of the sailors were women, but Putty certainly didn’t miss it. By the time we reached the end of the canal, she’d decided to become a sailor. I’d expected Olivia to be horrified when she found out, but she simply said, “Their lives are so different from our own,” and spent the next hour staring in silence at the horizon.

  The canal joined the Martian Nile at an ancient, heavy lock that looked like it’d been repaired a hundred times. It was large enough to carry several boats, and a couple were waiting when we arrived, so we descended through the lock together.

  Once on the Martian Nile, we sped up. The strong current helped us, and although the crew had to watch out for sandbanks, we were making much better time. I still didn’t know if it would be enough. We had less than three days left, and the Martian Nile was a long river.

  Within a day, we caught sight of the first ruins of the Ancient Martian civilization. A single giant column rose from the middle of a lush green field. Pictures and ideograms were carved all the way up it, although we were too far away to make them out properly. At the top, the column twisted and became the head of a vast dragon, leering out in the direction of the river. Olivia let out a gasp of horror when she saw it.

  “Did they really keep tame dragons?” she said.

  “It was a great empire,” Freddie said. “Even if we don’t know much about it.” He laid a reassuring hand on Olivia’s arm. “The dragon
s are long gone, and it’s possible they weren’t as fierce as their statues make them look.”

  Soon we were passing more ruins, each more elaborate than the last. Massive stone walls jutted from the ground, still speckled here and there by fragments of red, gold, or green paint. Whole temples or palaces—Putty said historians were still arguing about which they were—sprawled over enormous areas, bigger than some towns. Strangely, none of the native Martians who lived and farmed along the banks of the river seemed to build their villages close to the ruins. Superstition, I supposed, or maybe they just realized how far they’d fallen from the glory of their ancestors.

  * * *

  We came into sight of Lunae City at midday, seven days after we’d started our trip on the boat. I should have been relieved, but if Putty and Freddie were right, Papa would already have finished the new water abacus. We were out of time, and we still had no idea where in the city Sir Titus was. We couldn’t even be certain he was in Lunae City. What if he’d gone somewhere else?

  We’d passed an increasing number of boats in the last day, ranging from cargo boats as large as ours, down through smaller versions used by visitors to sail between the ruins of temples and palaces, to tiny paddleboats ferrying the locals back and forth. The city docks stretched for nearly a mile along the river. Stone wharves stood high above the water, and the boats formed a gay confusion of brightly colored sails, flashing oars, and shouting sailors. At least Sir Titus wouldn’t be able to spot us here. There were too many boats and too many people. He’d need a hundred men to watch everything.

  Lunae City loomed over the river. Native Martian architecture, developed in the low gravity of Mars, looked completely different from that of Earth. The buildings were tall, narrow, and elaborate, often twisting in spirals or overhanging so far they looked like they’d topple over. Delicate spires competed for height above the buildings. Here and there among the Martian buildings were a few squat, bulky buildings of Earth design: a grand white hotel with neat lawns, a Turkish mosque, a long building in the Chinese style.