Arabella of Mars

by David D. Levine

  The slight tug she felt steadied, pulling gently but firmly in a southeasterly direction. She allowed the finger to drift as it seemed to wish, until with a slight distinct click it came to a trembling halt. A slight nudge in any direction from that point met resistance.

  Arabella opened her eyes. Aadim’s finger had come to rest at a node on the chart where three prevailing winds of Mars’s planetary atmosphere came together. From there, the combined wind current would carry Diana directly to Arabella’s family plantation. Assuming, of course, that the charts were accurate, which the manuals had warned might not be the case in all seasons of the year.

  She would certainly never have noticed the node if she’d followed the path dictated by the manuals. It was well outside the area authorized for atmospheric entry by all the charts and tables.

  But the manuals were designed to bring the ship to Fort Augusta, not to a khoresh-wood plantation some miles away.

  It would be tricky to bring Diana round Mars’s Horn to that small node. But the more she studied the charts, the more necessary it seemed.

  She could not be certain this entry point would work. But with the information available to her, it seemed the best choice.

  “Very well,” she breathed. “We shall try it your way.”

  Did Aadim’s painted eyebrow quirk slightly? Did his head incline, ever so gently, in acknowledgement? Or were those simply the accidental motions of a complex and temperamental machine?

  Arabella met Aadim’s unblinking gaze for a long, uncertain moment. Then she shook her head and set about finding a sailing order through the turbulent Horn to the new entry point.

  * * *

  Of all the many strange feelings Arabella had experienced in the last few weeks, perhaps the strangest was when Captain Singh invited her to join him on the quarterdeck to observe the descent to Mars.

  After many hours in the great cabin, calculating and recalculating the sailing order with Aadim and trying to remember the details of the drying-sheds for Stross—whose conduct toward her remained coldly civil, which pained her after the avuncular warmth he’d shown when she’d been captain’s boy—she’d felt the ship begin to shake and jerk as Diana entered the outermost fringes of Mars’s Horn, and had emerged to witness with her own eyes the navigational path she’d plotted so many times on Aadim’s desk.

  The planet loomed below them now, no longer a globe ahead, but rather a vast red-gold dome that spread out to both sides beneath the ship’s keel. Already Arabella felt a slight but undeniable drift toward the deck as the planet’s gravitational attraction began to be felt.

  “Miss Ashby,” the captain called, and she turned to see him standing—yes, standing, not floating—near the wheel on the quarterdeck above. “Please do join us here for the rounding of the Horn.”

  She paused at the foot of the ladder. On her first aerial voyage the quarterdeck, whose name she had not even known, was a place she had never visited, nor even seen. Then, for the last two months and more, she’d been a mere captain’s boy, and entry into officers’ territory was a privilege granted but rarely and grudgingly. But now she was something other than what she had been—part passenger, part navigator, and entirely ex-airman—and apparently this new person was one to whom an invitation to the quarterdeck was extended as readily as an invitation to tea.

  With mingled pride and trepidation she made her way up the ladder, an awkward action with her skirts swirling in the weak gravity. Soon she would have to relearn the old familiar habits of standing, walking, and climbing.

  As she reached the deck she saw that the captain’s stance was artificial. He was braced to the deck by three leather straps which extended from a broad leather belt about his waist to brass rings set in the deck—rings she’d often cursed as she’d polished them. One of the midshipmen came over to her with a similar belt, which he handed to her with great embarrassment and averted eyes. If she’d been Arthur Ashby, she knew, he’d have buckled it about her waist with brusque dispatch—or, more likely, left her to manage her own safety line or simply to hang on to whatever rail or rigging might come to hand. She thanked the man as she took the belt, and swiftly cinched herself to the deck beside the captain. “How odd it feels,” she remarked, “to have pressure upon the soles of one’s feet again.”

  “Indeed.” The captain smiled and flexed his toes, the polished boots squeaking. “But it would be even worse if your legs were weakened by unrelieved free descent. This is why I insist that every one on my ship, even officers and passengers, take his turn at the pedals.” He put his telescope to his eye, peering ahead at the cloudless air, then muttered a command to Richardson, who immediately called out a series of orders. Topmen scrambled up the rigging and began to adjust the sails.

  Arabella flexed her own legs and toes, pressing against the leather straps, feeling the strength of her calves and thighs. She had been surprised when the captain had insisted that, even as a passenger, she must continue taking a shift at the pedals, and had been embarrassed by the great production this entailed, with screens being erected around her so that none would be forced to observe her flailing limbs. But now, with the downward pressure of her weight increasing, she found herself glad she had not protested the inconvenience. Perhaps if she and her mother and sisters had worked the pedals on the voyage from Mars to Earth, they would not have had to be carried from the ship upon arrival.

  The captain was again gazing ahead through his telescope. “Horn ahead,” he called to Richardson, though Arabella could see nothing but empty air between Diana and the planet below.

  “Are there no storm clouds, Captain?” Arabella asked.

  He shook his head. “Not at Mars. The air is too dry. To observe the Horn’s outer edge you must look for scudding flotsam.” He handed her the telescope, but even with its aid her untrained eye saw nothing. Then, conversationally, he remarked, “And here it is.”

  Suddenly a great jolt struck the ship. With a creaking of timber and a rattling of lines against yards, Diana slewed hard to larboard. If Arabella had not been strapped to the deck she would surely have been flung over the rail and into the sky in a trice. As it was she nearly lost the telescope, and immediately handed it back to the captain.

  He took it with barely a nod to Arabella, being busy calling out commands to his men. Topmen bustled up and down the masts, unfurling and sheeting home t’gallants and royals, then mere minutes later furling them up again in response to the Horn’s ever-shifting winds.

  Amidst this maelstrom of wind and wood and voices one familiar voice stood out from the rest: Faunt, the captain of the waist, calling, “Heave away, ye b____ds! Heave away smartly!” Arabella peered over the forward rail to the deck below, wondering what task her former messmates were engaged in.

  What they were doing was opening the great cabinet, fixed to the deck, into which the balloon envelopes had been packed shortly after their departure from London. Immediately the wind caught at the alabaster Venusian silk, tugging billows and folds of it into the air, but the men grabbed the first envelope before it could be whipped away and began hauling it into a large untidy circle. From this perspective, the net of sturdy cables that would hold the envelope once it was inflated gave the impression of a gigantic spider’s web.

  “Open the flues!” called Faunt, a command that was repeated down the forward ladder. A moment later came a great bellowing roar, louder even than the rush of the wind through the rigging, and the circle of the envelope bellied out into a great flapping disc, then an inverted bowl, then a loose wobbly sphere that nearly filled Diana’s waist.

  A midshipman, black from top to toe with charcoal-dust, appeared and saluted the captain. The smell of burning charcoal on him was so strong that even the Horn’s whipping winds could not carry it away. “Boatswain’s compliments, sir,” he gasped. “Charcoal stores holding steady. We’re clear for descent.” The men below on charcoal duty must be shoveling like fiends.

  “Excellent,” the captain replied with a cur
t nod, then returned his attention to the sails.

  Soon the envelope was nearly full, straining against the net that held it down, and the men gradually paid off the lines that held it to the deck until it rose to dominate the sky abaft the mainmast. Though the roaring and swelling continued, the men immediately returned to the envelope cabinet to repeat the performance.

  As she watched her old messmates struggle with the envelope’s luffing fabric while topmen scrambled hither and yon and other men shoveled charcoal, Arabella felt herself nothing more than a pretty bauble, a decoration strapped safely to the deck at the captain’s side. Though her life as an airman had been hard, exhausting, and often tedious, the sense of accomplishment she had felt when a sail she had helped to raise billowed out in the sun against the bright blue sky, or when a gun whose load she had carried spoke out with a voice like a vengeful god, or even when she’d cried out “Who shall have this?” and passed a greasy bit of beef to another waister had been greater than any pleasure she’d had on land.

  Far below, Mars’s broad dome had spread until he now appeared more landscape than ball, visible above the rail in every direction, curving off to a shimmering blue horizon. The familiar yellow-ochre of the sands below, now close enough that hills, valleys, and canals could plainly be seen, caused Arabella’s heart to ache with homesickness—and with concern for her brother and the family plantation, now threatened by rebellion as well as Simon’s depredations.

  Trepidation over what she would find when they landed warred in her heart with impatience to finish her journey, leaving her breast feeling as buffeted by emotion as Diana was by the gusts of wind that even now tossed her about beneath her swelling envelopes.

  * * *

  Though Mars’s Horn shook the ship and required many adjustments to the sails and envelopes, the captain and crew’s experience brought Diana safely to the aerial node that Aadim had located, and soon the ship was floating serenely along beneath her three great balloons, drifting in the gentle breezes of the lower planetary atmosphere toward Woodthrush Woods.

  Arabella unbuckled herself and peered over the rail, looking past the men who were even now hauling in the sails and sheets from the lower masts. Soon the masts themselves would be unshipped, returning Diana to her original configuration for landing. All of this was, she knew, ordinary standard procedure, but the situation they would encounter upon landfall was entirely extraordinary and nonstandard.

  A hazy bright spot on the ground seemed to pace the ship as she sailed along. “What is that, Captain?” Arabella asked, pointing.

  “The light of the sun,” he replied, pointing in exactly the opposite direction, “reflected back to us from innumerable grains of sand.”

  More and more details appeared as they drifted toward the ground: towering rock formations, orderly ranks of sand dunes marching to the horizon, rilles of soft and rounded stone. Arabella’s heart thrilled when they came upon a canal—the great Khef Shulash, it must be, it was so broad—which ran as straight as an arrow from one horizon to another. Tiny specks of boats floated upon its shining waters.

  And if that was the Khef Shulash … She shaded her eyes and peered ahead, to where the canal vanished in the haze of the horizon. Fort Augusta lay in that direction.

  From here, she thought, she should be able to see, if not the great sandstone walls of the fort itself, at least some sign of the town that surrounded it. Even if the port was closed and devoid of ships, the forest of masts that made up the shipyard should be clearly visible from this height. “May I borrow your telescope, sir?” she inquired of the captain.

  She raised the instrument to her eye, focused … and gasped.

  The haze that hid Fort Augusta from view was not haze. It was smoke.

  Great dark gouts of smoke, with orange flames flickering here and there. A few running figures were visible as well; at this distance she could not tell if they were human or Martian.

  “What is the matter, Miss Ashby?”

  “The town is afire,” she breathed.

  The captain took the telescope from her numb fingers, glared through it, and grunted as though struck in the stomach. “That is … terribly distressing,” he managed at last.

  18

  LANDING

  Diana sailed majestically along, the canal drawing nearer on her starboard side, but Arabella could not tear her eyes from the dark column of smoke ahead, which grew more and more plain as they approached.

  As the ship gradually drifted lower, Arabella could also begin to see that the boats that plied the canal were not, as usual, burdened with neat bundles of khoresh-logs and tidily stacked crates of other goods making their way to Fort Augusta from the provinces. They were, instead, piled high with hastily stacked heaps of household furniture, valises, and assorted boxes, and the vast majority were heading away from the town. Almost all of those on board were humans, who waved and hallooed at Diana as she passed overhead.

  Arabella glanced at the captain at one such halloo, but his jaw was set and he kept his eyes resolutely fixed on the horizon ahead. Following his lead, the officers and men focused their attention on the running of the ship.

  The few boats heading toward Fort Augusta rode high and bore no cargo. These were poled and crewed entirely by Martians, whose reaction to the airship sailing above was entirely different: the twang and thwap of bows and crossbows came clearly to Arabella’s ears through the cold dry air. Fortunately, Diana’s altitude and distance were too great for any projectiles to reach her, except for one arrow that bounced harmlessly off of a balloon and fell clattering to the deck. Several of the waisters immediately began to tussle over it.

  “Don’t touch that!” cried Faunt. “D—n thing could be poisoned!”

  Arabella snorted at that, which attracted a quizzical glance from the captain. “Martians don’t use poison,” she explained.

  “Do they not have the making of it?”

  “Oh, no, they know all about it; thuroks and noshti are extremely venomous. But for one Martian to poison another would be a violation of okhaya—entirely unacceptable.”

  He arched an eyebrow at her. “And for a Martian to poison an Englishman?”

  “They’d never—” But she silenced herself before concluding that thought.

  Surely they’d never do such a thing. But then she’d thought that the Martians of Fort Augusta would never rebel; they were civilized and friendly, not like the savages one sometimes heard of from the outlying provinces.

  And yet, Fort Augusta still burned.

  Arabella pressed her lips together and stared forward at the approaching column of smoke.

  * * *

  They crossed the canal and then left it behind. Burning Fort Augusta beneath its column of black smoke drew nearer and then alongside, though still some two miles distant. Through the telescope Arabella watched Martians and humans in groups—each group, sadly, consisting entirely of only one species or the other—scurrying to and fro. A few groups of each type seemed to be trying to fight the conflagrations that engulfed the town, but there was no coordination between them and the flames leapt ever higher. Other groups merely dashed from one place to another between the flames—though whether plundering, murdering, or trying to help, Arabella could not say.

  Eventually the flaming town too fell behind, and Diana sailed across country, following the road toward Woodthrush Woods, which looked like the mark of a stick drawn through the sand.

  No humans or Martians were visible on the road, though it was littered with abandoned furniture, broken carts, and the occasional bodies of huresh that had collapsed in their traces.

  Sometimes a shattered cart was surrounded by dark stains in the sand. Arabella hoped these were spilled wine.

  Once a troop of Martians scurried rapidly past on huresh-back, the setting sun glittering from their forked spears, a cloud of dust rising in their wake. One or two raised their eye-stalks to Diana, but they did not pause in their rush toward the town. After they had passed, th
e captain drew a key from his pocket and handed it to Richardson. “Open the small-arms locker,” he muttered so quietly that none but Arabella, who remained close by her captain, could have heard, “but do not distribute the rifles just yet.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Richardson whispered, sweating, and hurried below.

  Arabella gripped the locket with her brother’s picture and tried not to cry.

  Yet a few stinging tears still forced themselves into the corners of her eyes.

  * * *

  By now they had descended so far that roadside shrines in their rocky cairns could be distinguished with the naked eye. Diana had flown over most of the miles from Fort Augusta to Woodthrush Woods in less than twenty minutes, and at this rate the manor house would surmount the last rise in just five or ten minutes more. Her hands, she realized, were gripping the rail so tightly they had gone entirely pale, and though she shook them and massaged them, the next time she thought to look down the knuckles were white again.

  Young Watson appeared again, eyes red-rimmed in his blackened face. “Boatswain’s compliments, sir,” he gasped, “we’ve used up the last of the charcoal.”

  The captain nodded in brusque acknowledgement, then cast an analytical eye upward at the balloons.

  “Cutting it too close by half,” muttered Stross.

  “Nonetheless,” the captain replied, raising the telescope to his eye, “we retain sufficient lift for a safe landing.” A moment later he handed the instrument to Arabella. “Is that the plain on which you would have us land? Between that reddish rock pillar and the three large stones?”

  She peered through the telescope. “Yes…,” she began, but then she noticed something that made the breath catch in her throat.

  “What is the matter, Miss Ashby?”

  She swallowed, struggling to focus the trembling instrument upon the distant, shimmering horizon. “The drying-sheds appear to be intact, but I … I think I see smoke. And running figures.” She handed the telescope back, realizing that the trembling was in her own hands. “I’m not certain.”