Queen of Mars - Book III in the Masters of Mars Trilogy Page 6

It was then that a messenger arrived, white as a Baldy with fright, and handed Reis a note, which he quickly opened and read.

  His own pallor paled.

  “What is it?” I demanded.

  Without saying a word, he handed me the dispatch. “The concussion device,” he said, his voice cracking with disbelief.

  I read the note, and my own heart turned to stone in my chest.

  “The...city of Wells is... gone,” I whispered, dropping the note to the ground.

  I do not remember much about speaking to the assembled army, only that I said the words that were expected of me. I told them what they already knew, that their families, their loved ones, their way of life, their government, everything they treasured, was gone. Everyone they had known in the old city was dead, every shop they had loved to frequent, the gardens, the byways, the streets, the certain slant of light between two buildings, the house where one was born, the Hall of the Assembly, the Senate chambers and the senators themselves – all was no more. I told them that my heart wept for them, and did not lie – what I did not, could not, tell them was that my own heart was broken and would never mend. I told them what I could and then I turned away and spoke no more, but went to my tent, alone, and wept.

  I thought of the note I had agonized over writing to Darwin, and calculated the days it would have taken our fast rider to get back.

  Yes, I concluded, he had seen it before he died, along with almost everything else in the world I loved.

  Only Newton, I knew, had been spared, because he had been on his way north to one of the oxygenation stations near Bradbury. It was his people who had sent the message.

  Frane had camouflaged her stolen aerial machines to look like Newton’s own, and dropped her only great weapon on the finest city the face of Mars had ever known.

  And my beloved Darwin, who I had ordered to stay behind, was dead.

  In effect, by my own hand.

  I threw myself on my bed, curled up, and wept like a kit.

  “Oh, Darwin, Darwin...”

  The day went away, and it became night. There were stirrings in the camp, but I paid no heed. I was like one half-alive, uncaring. I would neither eat nor attend to my duties. I would stay in this tent forever, and mourn, and berate myself for my own failings and oversight.

  You should have known.

  You should have seen.

  How could I be a great queen, when my first act was to be fooled into losing almost everything that was worthy in the world?

  It was only hours later, when Copernicus stole into my tent, crawling beneath the back wall, his eyes wide as saucers, that I came back to the world.

  “What is it, Copernicus?” I asked. “I am not interested in the stars tonight.”

  “Your majesty,” he huffed, nearly petrified with fright.

  “What is it?”

  “You must come with me now. They are coming to kill you. General Reis is dead.”

  “What–!” I hissed.

  I heard a growing commotion, cries of alarm, outside. I lunged for my sword.

  Copernicus swatted my hand, and I dropped the weapon. “Too many! Come with me now!”

  “Where is Rebecca?” I shouted.

  “No time!”

  Something in his urgency made me follow him, grabbing only my bag with important state papers and my most precious possession, my book of the Old Ones, crawling beneath the back of the tent and then moving off into the night.

  I looked back and saw what looked to be a hundred figures closing in on the tent from all sides, swords and daggers drawn. A torch was lit and thrown at the tent, which went up in a great and instant blaze.

  “What...”

  “Corian’s men, they weren’t gypsies at all! Please follow!” he hissed, pulling at my arm.

  We went deeper into the darkness, past the field where Copernicus had set up his telescope on so many nights.

  “I still don’t understand—” I said, stopping again to look back at the camp – too many lights, not enough of my own soldiers, loud noises and exclamations.

  “Please!” Copernicus hissed, frantically.

  I stumbled after him deeper into the darkness, until we reached a little copse of junto trees. The night was cool and the leaves swayed as if to music.

  There were two horses there, eating grass, loaded with provisions.

  I looked at Copernicus, but he pushed me toward the less burdened one.

  I mounted, secured my bag, and, after a second attempt, he mounted his own.

  “Ride with me!” he urged, in the most frightened voice I had ever heard, and, numb with grief and disbelief and my own fright, I followed him into the night.

  Twelve

  As dawn broke tentatively in the east, a blot of purple against the horizon of a black sky, Copernicus allowed that we could slow our horses down to a canter. We had galloped nearly the whole night, keeping at first to the northern edge of the chasm of Valles Marineres, where various outcrops and the occasional stand of trees hid us. For a while Copernicus considered climbing down into the chasm by one of the wide switchbacks, and perhaps hiding for a time in one of the numerous caves set into its side, but in the end decided that it was essential to put as much distance between us and our assumed pursuers as possible. So we turned sharply north sometime long after midnight had passed. Strange echoes and soundings had come from the great chasm, as if it was filled with ghosts, and it was a relief to leave the monstrous cut in Mars behind us.

  But soon we met with other strange wonders, a forest the likes of which I never seen. As daylight rose, I saw that the bark of many of these trees was a light pink in color, and peeling as if shedding skin.

  “Rinto trees,” Copernicus explained. “They only grow in this region, and still are very rare.” He seemed suddenly interested in a particular stand of these trees, the lower bark of which was totally absent. He dismounted, studying these denuded specimens closely.

  “I’m not surprised,” he mumbled, half to himself.

  “Surprised at what?”

  He waved at me as if in dismissal, and set to carefully scraping one of the denuded spots, letting the shavings fall into a pouch. “Later, your majesty,” he explained, in effect telling me nothing. I must have shown disapproval because he quickly added, “It is a theory, and I will want to be sure.”

  Seeing as he had not been wrong to this point, I let him have his way and changed the subject.

  He remounted his horse, which, I now saw in the daylight, had been packed with many things – bundles and pouches and tools and, of course, his beloved telescope, mounted along the horse’s flank, its tube peeking from one end of a sheltering blanket.

  “Stay here and rest, your majesty,” he all but ordered me. “I want to backtrack a bit to that last ridge we climbed and make sure we are alone.”

  “We must be at this point.”

  He nodded briefly, but turned his horse sharply and rode off.

  I dismounted, stretching my bones and letting my horse crop at a sparse clump of grass. I heard the tinkle of running water nearby and led my mount to it – a thick gurgling stream, silver blue in the morning light. The trees overhead made a filtering canopy, letting the early sun frolic. I was suddenly chilled, and pulled a wrap from the bundles on my horse. I did not want to think, but only to live. As the horse drank I sat down and tried to empty my mind.

  A useless endeavor, but before long my weariness overcame me and I curled into an unrestful sleep on the banks of the stream, with the fresh smell of morning in my nostrils. I dreamed of horrible things, a battle all in blood red, a graceful black ship floating in the sky, letting loose a device which floated down like a spent leaf, falling, falling, falling into the center of my city, and I watched from afar as Wells burst into hot flame and was consumed alive, and no more...

  I awoke from this horror with a start, and heard mumbling beside me. For a moment I was disoriented, and reached into my tunic for my hidden blade, but then the sound resolved into C
opernicus’s voice and I relaxed my grip on the handle of my weapons. The horrid images leaked out of my thoughts and once again it was a beautiful late summer day, growing warm.

  I threw off my coverlet, which Copernicus must have arranged around me, and sat up, yawning.

  “Are you hungry, your majesty?”

  “Yes,” I said, without thinking, because, though last night I had thought I would never be hungry or care about anything again, the growling in my stomach was something real and had to be attended to.

  He was hunched over a makeshift workbench, constructed of a few fallen timbers laid across two piles of rocks. Something the deep color of blood was bubbling in a beaker, and another held a clear liquid which gave off a sinister sharp odor.

  He turned and grinned at me quickly. A makeshift pair of goggles occluded his eyes. He pointed to his mount. “Lunch is there, not here,” he said brightly. “You would not want to drink either of these, oh no...”

  “What are they?”

  “It’s what they will be that’s important,” he answered.

  “I’m in no mood for riddles,” I snapped peevishly, and went to the open pack on his horse. It contained something that looked like roots and tasted like...roots.

  “What is this?” I said, making a face.

  “Hard tack,” he answered. “Much of your army carried it, your majesty – though I doubt you ever had to endure it.”

  “It’s horrible.”

  “It would keep you alive for weeks on end – and probably will.”

  I sighed heavily and went to sit beside him while he worked. There was a rock that proved to be a suitable stool, and I made use of it.

  “It’s time for you to explain everything to me, Copernicus.”

  He cocked an eyebrow, but kept working, mumbling over his two beakers, going from one to the other and counting off numbers.

  “For instance,” I said, “where are we going?”

  “We’ll continue north,” he said. “It’s the one place they won’t dare to follow. Otherwise, I’m afraid we’ll be caught.”

  “Are we still being followed?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “No riddles, Copernicus.”

  “No riddle involved. There is a band of five heading northeast, and another heading due west. About twenty miles distant, but because of their line of march, that distance will only increase away from us.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I watched them.”

  My silence must have been like a scoff, for he turned to regard me.

  “The telescope,” he explained. “It’s a useful in the day as at night, is it not?”

  My face must have shown my admiration.

  “And our ultimate destination?”

  “My home. It is to the north, and then the east a bit. They will not think to look there, because they do not know I am with you. For all they know you fled alone.”

  I could find no argument with that – besides me, no one in camp had taken the slightest interest in the little fellow.

  He had resumed his counting, and when I asked another question he held up his paw for silence.

  “Twenty-nine...thirty...thirty-one, thirty – ah!”

  The blood- red liquid turned clear, and the clear turned blood-red, as if a magic trick had been performed.

  He immediately lost interest in the experiment, and grabbed the two beakers, emptying their contents onto the ground. They hissed like snakes.

  “That’s that,” he said, satisfied. “It’s as I thought. They were all drugged.”

  “Who was drugged?” I asked.

  He took off his goggles and dropped them onto his workbench. “Practically everybody,” he said, giving me a sober look. I opened my mouth but he plowed on, as if I were a science student in his own lecture hall. “It is called mocra, and it’s culled from the bark of the rinto tree. It is one of the most dangerous substances on Mars. I doubt you’ve ever heard of it, because, long before you were born, nearly every rinto tree on the planet was cut down and destroyed. This was before even the first republic was formed. Because it is such a dangerous and unstable narcotic, mocra never became a large problem, but the potential for disaster was there and so King Augustus, your great grandfather, decreed that all the trees be eliminated, thereby eliminating the problem. But here...”

  He spread his hands out, highlighting our own copse of rinto trees.

  “And,” he continued, “that’s how Frane controlled the Baldies – before she sent them to their deaths against you.”

  “She drugged them...” I said.

  “Oh, yes, no doubt. She must have experimented for months or years before she found a dosage that would make the Baldies malleable. But there’s no doubt she did. It is usually made into a paste from dry powder, and is always red in color. It dissolves quickly in liquids of any kind. Do you recall smelling a particularly spicy odor on the battlefield yesterday?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “That was from the drug. Its ingestion produces that almost minty smell.”

  “And—”

  He held up a paw. “I haven’t finished, your majesty. That same smell permeated the army’s camp last night. It’s what alerted me to trouble. It was put into every chow bucket over every camp fire, and eaten by nearly every soldier in the army. Enough to produce complete disablement of the army. They became disoriented, and then, at that dosage, they went to sleep. I doubt many of them ever woke up.”

  “Merciful One,” I swore. “And the others, the officers, they were merely slaughtered. And I trusted the gypsies...”

  “Gypsies? There were no gypsies in camp,” Copernicus said with conviction.

  “Carion and his men were a gypsy band, sent from Miklos.”

  Copernicus shook his head. “Most assuredly not. I grew up dealing with gypsies, and that group that joined up just before the battle looked more liked raiders to me. In fact, I assumed that an alliance had been made, for this battle alone. They follow nothing but coin. They are mercenaries.”

  I was stunned by General Reis’s incompetence – even though his failure to vet our allies had cost him his life. Ultimately, though, the responsibility still rested with me, and my mood became even darker.

  Copernicus must have sensed this, because he said in a soothing voice, “You must remember, your majesty, that 20/20 hindsight is the clearest vision of all. It would have been very easy for those raiders to fool you. If only I had not been so caught up in my own studies, and had sought to ask...”

  Now his own mood darkened.

  “Well,” I said, “we can sit here and brood on our stupidity, or we can move on and live.”

  He looked at me, and a small smile lit his brown-furred face. “I agree, your majesty. If we follow my plan, and get to my home, there are inquiries I can make there, even as you hide from those who would destroy you.”

  “I will defeat Frane yet, if it is the last thing I accomplish on this world.”

  “That’s the spirit!” he cried. He set about cleaning and packing all of his chemical apparatus, and then broke apart his table, scattering the assembled pieces so that they were once more part of the natural landscape.

  “We have food for a week, and two good horses, and two good riders, and all the will in the world!”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Only that we have a very good chance of living through it!” he answered, trying to stay cheerful.

  “Living through the ride north, of course?”

  Seeing my continued incomprehension, he added, pointing ahead of us, “The ride north, where no one will follow us! Across the Great Desert!” His laugh sounded almost mad. “Don’t you remember, your majesty? When we got just a kiss of the dust storm from the north? I told you how harsh and forbidding it is – and now we’re heading straight into it!”

  Again his half-mad laugh. “Actually, there’s very little chance we’ll survive!”

  Thirteen

  That mad little
laugh of Copernicus’s stayed in my mind as we headed down into the forbidding bowl that was the Great Desert. From the sparsely grassed heights of the last plateau it didn’t look too forbidding – the sun was shining and there was only a hint of increased heat picked up from the hot sands below. Under the pink late summer sky it looked merely daunting, a huge version, to three horizons, north, east and west, of a child’s sand box. There were gentling rolling dunes and dark patches that promised oases and, under this summer sun on this gentle day, it looked no more horrid than a ride across a huge valley. Substitute sand for countryside, I told myself, and you would have this quick trip. There in the distance were a few dark patches above the sand that seemed to undulate.

  “What are those?” I said, pointing them out to Copernicus, who was engaged in tightly tying down everything on our two mounts, double and triple covering everything he could, especially his precious telescope, which had disappeared under a bulge of blanket layers.

  “Tornadoes,” he said simply, returning to his work, which I helped with in my clumsy way.

  Then he sat down beside his horse, crossed his legs, and closed his eyes.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “We wait.”

  “For what?”

  “For nightfall, of course. Only a madman would head into the Great Desert during the day.”

  In a moment his chin lolled forward, and he then gently collapsed onto the ground and curled up into sleep.

  I tried to follow but could not, but sat instead contemplating the subtle play of sinking sunlight on the sands, and the changing colors of the landscape, from severe even pink to shades of russet and dark brown, as dusk approached and finally fell.

  Just as I was nodding off to sleep, Copernicus rose from the ground, stretched, and cried, “Ah!” He shook me gently awake and said, “Time to leave!”

  “But I had no sleep,” I complained, seeking to find the ground and slumber.

  “All the worse for you, then, your majesty,” he said, and jostled me until I stood and then mounted my horse.

  It was cloudy, and pitch dark when our mounts made the first sifting steps into the sands.

  A hot breeze assaulted us from the west, as more stars overhead were eaten by mounting cloud cover.