series 01 05 A Prince of Mars Read online

  “Wait,” Kak’hamish said.

  Nathanial heard scrambling noises from up ahead.

  “There is a low hill,” the fellow called, his voice more distant that Nathanial was used to. “Leave the sled and come forward alone.”

  Nathanial’s mouth went dry and he heard his blood pound in his ears. Carefully he lowered the travois, so as not to disturb Annabelle’s slumber, and then he drew the derringer from his coverall pocket. He held it for a moment in both hands, drawing reassurance from its mass and simple functionality. Here was a device good for only one thing, really: killing people.

  Nathanial took a deep breath, held the pistol in his left hand behind his back, and started forward, trying to make as little noise as he could. After a half dozen paces he came to a rise and within three more steps it became steep enough he had to use his free hand as well as his feet to keep his balance and climb forward.

  “Here,” the Martian called to him from ahead and to his right. Nathanial crawled carefully toward the sound. His vision narrowed and he felt detached, distant from what was about to happen.

  The ground under him levelled.

  “Careful,” Kak’hamish said, “the drop from here is steep.”

  Nathanial looked. Below them stretched the bed of the dry canal. Nathanial had expected something large, but this was enormous—more like a canyon than the barge canals which crossed southern England. It was twenty or thirty yards deep and easily a half mile wide, perhaps more. No wonder the canals were visible from Earth through a good telescope, although only the wet ones still sported enough of a green belt to be reliably mapped at that distance.

  “We are here, Nathanial” Kak’hamish said. “You may put your pistol away.”

  Chapter Two

  “Sickness in Paradise”

  1.

  “You must do it,” Annabelle said. The fainting spells came more frequently now, but her head was clear for the moment. She knew she had to speak and act now, while it remained so. “If it is abscessed, and it clearly is, then it must be drained.”

  “I am concerned about the pain,” Nathanial said. He wiped her forehead with a cool, wet rag. Water, at least, was no longer a problem since they had reached the dry canal basin the previous evening. “Laudanum can do only so much―ˮ

  “No more laudanum,” she said, and shuddered. “I’d just vomit it back up in any case.”

  “We have some chloroform in the medical supplies from the cutter. I can…”

  “No. I have a high tolerance for pain. I…I remember that. Something… I can’t recall what it was, but it was very painful, and I managed. I shall manage again. I require a strap to bite on. Your belt will do nicely, Nathanial.”

  He stared at her but did not move.

  “We haven’t got all day,” she said. “If we are going to do it, let us do it and be done with it. Let me have that belt, if you please.”

  Kak’hamish broke the thick, shiny leaves of several plants and squeezed their juices onto the taut, yellowish flesh of her lower leg. Her mouth went dry at the sight of it and she looked away. The juice was cool as spring water on her burning flesh.

  “These will help the pain a little,” he said.

  “Yes, it feels better already,” she answered. Nathanial, eyes wide with fear, handed her his belt. “I am ready if both of you are,” she said, and hoped she sounded braver than she felt.

  “Perhaps you should lie back,” Nathanial said, but for some reason Annabelle felt better resting on her elbows, partially sitting up, even though her left elbow still hurt a little from the damage sustained on Peregrine. This was how she had endured the other pain, she remembered. With trembling hand she put the belt between her teeth, planted her elbows and forearms securely on the sandy ground, and nodded for them to proceed.

  Pain!

  Lancing white-hot streaks of pain, pain which dimmed her vision, then made her see coloured flashes of light. She wanted to spit out the belt and scream at the top of her lungs, but the walk-a-heaps were near and she could not.

  The agony abated for a moment. She drew short panting breaths from around her teeth clenched on the leather strap. Then it came again, a towering yellow avalanche of pain. She leaned forward into it, tightening the muscles in her abdomen, pushing the pain down and away.

  Voices came to her as if from a very great distance.

  “Is it necessary to squeeze it so? Won’t the wound drain on its own?”

  “It is necessary.”

  2.

  nathanial thirsted, but he did not trust his trembling hands to pick up the water cup without splashing half its contents on the sand. They were not short of water, of course. He simply was loathe to show weakness in front of Kak’hamish.

  “You have pen and paper,” Kak’hamish said. “I will write out an explanation of your situation in Koline. All caravan masters speak Koline—it is a trade language, a pidgin of several tongues. If you are fortunate, the first caravan we see will be heading northwest, to Abak’hn. That is where you need to start. Then you must take a caravan or cloudship southwest to Siruahn, then another southwest to Thoth. Thoth is on the Grand Canal. From there you can obtain passage on a boat south to Shastapsh, where I hear there is a British garrison.”

  “You will not accompany us any farther?”

  “I have…other plans.”

  Rubbish! The fellow had no plans other than to wander back into the desert to die. If Nathanial had been by himself it might have been different. He could take care of himself, steal food if he had to, barter for passage using the instruments and valuables he had brought off the cutter. But with Annabelle in the state she was in, he wasn’t sure how he would manage. Much as he hated to admit it, this scoundrel could help.

  “You might at least tell me something of these cities we’re to pass through. Are they dangerous?”

  Kak’hamish moved his jaw from side to side in thought. Clack-clack. “Dangerous? All cities are dangerous to one degree or another, aren’t they? People live in cities so…well, there you are.

  “Abak’hn I suppose is particularly dangerous in that manner, although I have not been there for many years and it may have improved. Or deteriorated. It is cursed with a weak prince, Akhanoon III. He is absorbed by his own pleasures and content to let the city govern itself.”

  “Some would say the hand of government lying lightly is a blessing,” Nathanial said.

  “Yes, I have heard this as well but never from one who has actually experienced it first-hand, unless they were very rich. Without a patron or protector, you will be in considerable peril in Abak’hn. The strong take what they want and the town watch looks the other way, unless disorder threatens commerce or offends the sensibilities of the gentry—so there is sometimes danger in resisting the predators as well.”

  “Sounds like a rum place,” Nathanial observed, and he admitted to a pang of anxiety. He was armed, it was true, but he had no confidence in his own abilities in a violent confrontation. True, he’d shot Le Boeuf, a cold and considered act for what Le Boeuf had done to Annabelle. But still, thinking back, it almost seemed as if another man had pulled the trigger, not him at all. He had hardly had cause to even raise his voice to someone before embarking on this disastrous tour of the worlds. Since then, often as not it had been Annabelle who had taken the lead, charted a plan of action. Poor Annabelle! Still half out of her head with fever. He wished she would recover quickly. He desperately needed her clear head, courage, and decisive nature.

  The truth was he simply didn’t feel up to facing this by himself. If it came to that, could he kill a man? Well, yes. He had done it once and felt no regrets on that score. He could do it again, if necessary. But that was a devil he knew. What of the devils he knew not? Too many ill-understood dangers, and too many ambiguous situations requiring decisions on little or no reliable information, blocked the way forward. One had to trust one’s instincts, he supposed, and just forge ahead. But what if one had little faith in those instincts?
/>   Kak’hamish was talking again and Nathanial shook those maudlin thoughts from his head.

  “Siruahn is very different, of course. It once had a young prince like Akhanoon—stupid, vain, and convinced of his own indispensability. This was a conviction the people of Siruahn did not share. Twenty-some years ago they drove him out and turned the government over to a council elected from the different castes—merchants, tradesmen, farmers—even labourers, as I recall, although the wealthy are better represented than their numbers might warrant.”

  “Really? It sounds a bit like a parliament,” Nathanial said. “How are they chosen, by election?”

  Clack-clack. “I do not know exactly. Someone once told me, but it was very complicated and I have forgotten most of it. I understand they argue about the selection a great deal and make frequent changes, so it would be different now in any case. They argue about everything, I have heard. The poor argue with the rich, and are not even beaten for their insolence! It has become a very argumentative city.” Kak’hamish shook his head as if in disapproval, but Nathanial noticed he smiled as he did so. It was hard to tell a smile from a grimace on Kak’hamish unless you looked at his eyes. “This was a distressful business with Miss Annabelle’s wound,” Kak’hamish said. “It grows late and distress can bring fatigue. We should sleep, but also take turns watching. You still have your pistol?”

  “Yes, it’s in my kit over there. Do you think we need it? I thought there were no large predators out here.”

  “Not in the deadlands, but we no longer sleep in their sandy embrace. There is much to sustain a predator in the gardenways—now including us. Some of the larger animals have developed a taste for stragglers from caravans. They may like the taste of Earth people less than my own folk, but by the time they discover that it will do you no good.”

  Nathanial tried not to look as if he was hurrying as he walked to the travois to get his derringer. That box of extra cartridges wouldn’t hurt either, come to think of it. Sometimes animals ran in packs, after all.

  3.

  Four days they waited in the sparse green grasslands of the gardenway. One day Kak’hamish pointed out a pair of skrill riders high overhead, to the southwest. Nathanial had read of them in his now-well-thumbed copy of Conklin’s, but actually seeing them was a different matter. It drove home to him how alien this world really was—as if Kak’hamish’s own presence and bizarre personality were not enough.

  The Martian told him anecdotes about life in a caravan, filled in more details about the cities ahead, and tended Annabelle’s wounded leg almost constantly—when he wasn’t gathering plants or cooking their meals. Damned fine cook, too.

  Although Nathanial sensed a current of melancholy beneath the surface, Kak’hamish was invariably cheerful. He still had every intention of simply walking off into the desert—cheerfully—and dying of thirst and starvation as soon as a caravan materialised to take Nathanial and Annabelle to safety. The fellow was clearly off his nut, but Nathanial had to admit to a grudging…well, not affection really, but he was growing used to having the chap around.

  Annabelle was better the day after they drained the abscessed wound. She actually took some stew made from tinned bully beef and starchy roots Kak’hamish had dug up—which tasted rather like turnips. Her colour improved and Nathanial for the first time began thinking of her recovery, rather than simply staving off a crisis.

  Unfortunately her improved condition did not endure. She again grew feverish on the third day, her leg swollen and inflamed, and by the morning of the fourth day Nathanial saw dark discoloured areas appear around the wound, unlike the yellow pockets of infection he had seen before.

  Kak’hamish grew more sombre as well and took to climbing onto a tall rubble pile made from pieces of the broken canal basin, thrust up by centuries of earthquakes, Nathanial supposed. From atop his perch he could see another mile or so up and down the canal. As the sun dipped low toward the horizon on the fourth day, Kak’hamish called to him and pointed to the southwest. Nathanial scrambled up the rubble pile to join him.

  He looked in the direction Kak’hamish pointed, screening his eyes from the glare of the sun. A string of small figures moved there, growing closer.

  “Are those animals?”

  “Ruumet breehr,” Kak’hamish answered. “As large as your elephants. They draw the wagons of the caravan. I see outriders as well—apparently a wealthy merchant.”

  “How do you know about elephants?” Nathanial asked.

  “How do you know about dry canals?”

  “I read it in a book.”

  “Ah. Tell me of these strange things called—books.”

  Nathanial opened his mouth to do so before he saw the wry expression in Kak’hamish’s eyes. “Oh, I see. Yes. Very amusing,” he said, although he was not amused at all. “Do you think there is a doctor with the caravan? I am very concerned about Annabelle.”

  Kak’hamish nodded but did not look at him. “I had nearly despaired of her life, Nathanial. She is very close to death, although her strength of will makes that less apparent than it would be in a person of lesser character.”

  Nathanial felt dizzy for a moment. Yes, Annabelle was certainly ill, but…close to death?

  “But she’ll be all right now? The caravan, I mean. A doctor?” Nathanial had no idea how skilful the local physicians might be—witch doctors for all he knew, but he hungered for any assistance.

  “Probably not a doctor, although they will have what we need to save her life, the one thing we lack.”

  “Some special medicine?” Nathanial asked.

  Kak’hamish turned and looked at him, his eyes boring into Nathanial’s soul. “A bone saw.”

  Nathanial slid down the rubble pile, unmindful of how the ragged stone scraped and cut his palms. Once he stood at the base of the pile he looked stupidly at his bleeding hands and then wiped them on his trousers. He looked around, unsure what he was supposed to do next. He walked briskly away from the rubble pile for a few steps and then began to run. He ran down the gentle slope to the tiny stream, splashed across it, but tripped in the tangled water reeds and fell.

  He lay in the grass for some time.

  4.

  Annabelle marvelled at the sights and smells and bustle of the caravan’s arrival. After a brief conversation between Kak’hamish and a fat Martian who seemed in charge of the affair, men hurried to set up a tent nearby. Under Kak’hamish’s supervision four of them gently lifted the canvas sheet on which Annabelle lay and carried it into the tent. With the sun setting, there seemed little enough reason to move her inside, but she did not protest. She felt heavy and bloated, but also very weak. She asked them for a cup of water but they seemed not to understand her. Instead they put her down wordlessly and left.

  A strange sour smell grew in the tent after a few minutes. She had not noticed it outside, but there had been a soft breeze. Was this the smell of the tent? Or was it her? She had not bathed in some time.

  The tent flap parted and Nathanial entered looking very grave and carrying a large book in his hand. Annabelle recognised it as the copy of Blackwood’s Pocket Physician that Nathanial had found in the cutter, although as she looked at it, she thought it too large to fit in any pocket she had ever seen. She felt light-headed and the thought of Nathanial trying to cram the book in his pocket made her feel like giggling

  Nathanial’s expression sobered her.

  “Oh, Nathanial, is the news so very bad as that?”

  “It is…serious, I am afraid. The infection has become aggravated and will soon spread throughout your body, unless we perform an…an operation.”

  Annabelle felt the blood drain from her face. “You need to drain it again? I understand. It was more painful than I anticipated, but I―ˮ

  Nathanial shook his head. “No, it is not a simple abscess as before.” He patted the book he held. “It is what physicians call necrosis of the tissue.”

  Annabelle raised herself on one elbow and with her other ha
nd threw back the canvas sheet which covered her leg. The sour odour grew immediately stronger and she saw the mottled black flesh of her swollen leg. Her vision grew indistinct and she felt Nathanial catch her as she fell back. For a moment her mind floated on the breeze above the broken canal, the place Kak’hamish called the gardenway. It was a lovely mix of dark greens and bright colours where the Martian wildflowers bloomed along the ruined waterways. She imagined strolling among the flowers, and then she was no longer in the gardenway. She was in a ballroom, dancing in the arms of George Bedford—Lieutenant George Bedford, he would no doubt insist. They danced a waltz, spun around the floor in a graceful swirl of ruffles and lace, two young, strong bodies working in perfect harmony.

  She opened her eyes, saw the stained canvas of the tent above her, smelled the stench of her rotting leg. Kak’hamish pushed through the tent flap with a cloth bundle. He knelt by her feet, unwrapped the bundle on the ground, and she heard the clatter of heavy metallic instruments. The sound frightened her as no other sound in her life ever had, left her dizzy and short of breath, and she felt tears run down her temples. She swallowed and forced herself to speak.

  “Will I have a knee?”

  Outside she heard the sounds of the caravan settling in for the night—men chattering in a strange tongue, mallets driving tent pegs into the ground, the deep but gentle braying of the enormous leathery-skinned beasts of burden, all of them going about their business as if nothing in the world were wrong.

  “I shall build you one,” Nathanial answered. “I swear it.”

  5.

  “he agreed,” Kak’hamish told Nathanial. “The caravan master has agreed to take us to Thoth, on the Grand Canal. I had to give him the liftwood vanes you salvaged from your flyer, as well as your excellent pistol and ammunition, as payment. They would have done us scant good on our own.”

  The young Englishman nodded listlessly in reply.