series 01 05 A Prince of Mars Page 9

  We are very well guarded here by the local watch, supplemented by Onxym Haat’s musketeers, who remain ferociously devoted to Annabelle. Of the mounted guards, none remain. Several deserted to the raiders—were probably in league with them from the beginning—and the others either ran off or were discharged upon arrival here. The result of our confinement has been an overwhelming sense of boredom and frustration, rather than one of danger. Annabelle exercises more every day and makes remarkable progress, and I have had more time for this journal than I have lately enjoyed, but beyond that we have very little productive work to occupy us.

  As the religious pilgrims accompanying the caravan are sequestered with us I had hoped to speak with them and learn more of their theology, but I have been frustrated on that score as well. I have discovered they escort relics of great significance to their religion—the mummified remains of several church notables—which are to be located in a shrine in Thoth. Until that task is completed, they cannot risk “contamination” by even casual conversation with those not intimate with their faith. Perhaps after the relics are delivered to Thoth, and if Annabelle and I have the time before continuing our journey, we will have the opportunity to converse.

  Onxym Haat must hire more guards and replace several ruumet breehr before his caravan can begin its return journey to Sharranus, which it will do under the direction of his business partners. He will accompany us with his spice cargo by cloudship—assuming the day of our departure ever comes. Haat tells us nothing, and is distracted and distant. I sense his mind is on more than simply his caravan and spice, but I cannot divine what. I grow increasingly suspicious of his motives, as has Kak’hamish, who has stayed with us out of concern for our safety.

  That is the one bright spot in all of this—our apparent peril has kept our friend at our side, and will do so until we are delivered safely to Thoth and (I suspect) actually bundled on board a canal barge for Shastapsh. He was relieved to discover that the cloudship, when it finally leaves, will sail directly from here to Thoth, without calling at Siruahn. All that I recall of that place is that it seems to have some sort of parliamentary government—in contrast to the potentates who rule most of these city-states—and that Kak’hamish described its politics as extremely argumentative. He seems a singularly un-argumentative fellow, comfortable with his own counsels, and perhaps that is the basis of his antipathy for the place.

  In the meantime, Kak’hamish each day purchases a flying creature from the tradesmen, of a type called a coronape and normally sold as an ornamental pet. It is quite extraordinary, long and sinewy with a thin membrane running along the side of its body connected to its fore and hind limbs, in the same manner as the giant skrill and the flying Martians. Its face is so ferocious in aspect that one is compelled to smile, given its diminutive size—no more than a dozen inches in length—much as one does at the loud display of barking managed by the smaller breeds of dogs kept as ladies’ companions. He buys one flyer each morning, along with a long red streamer, and at noon releases the animal, the streamer affixed to a hind leg. I cannot but think this is a signal, sent to the mysterious lone skrill rider which shadowed us these last days, confirming Kak’hamish remains here in the city, safe.

  Our idleness has given me leisure to observe the local inhabitants of the city, when they are not inclined to hurl epithets and paving stones at the caravanserai. Local butchers and green grocers bring their produce here, as we are unable to visit the markets for ourselves. The people are not as homogeneous as I had imagined, or for that matter had been led to believe. There are three races of Martians, which Conklin’s labels as Canal, Hill, and High. All of the Martians I had met and conversed with to date were of the Canal variety. The desert raiders who attacked us were Hill folk, physically differing from the Canal Martians as I have recorded in an earlier entry. The so-called High Martians live in the mountains, are squat and bestial in appearance, and have the ability to fly, which is something to wonder at. Apparently they do so using the same biological mechanism as the skirl. The thin membrane between arm and lower body is much apparent, and upon closer examination shares the veiny translucence of a bat’s wing.

  That much was widely reported, but I had assumed there was very little cohabitation of the groups. This city gives the lie to that notion. Although the population is primarily of the Canal, I noticed substantial numbers of Hill folk living as city dwellers and—most remarkably—a number of flying Martians as well, perched on rooftops like gargoyles and observing the progress of our caravan through the outlying districts, and occasionally flying over the caravanserai for a look at us. Today when the tradesmen delivered our food, I noticed a Canal woman with her small child in tow, a toddler whose father must clearly be a flying Martian. The generally accepted rule, so far as I know, is that if two creatures can produce fertile offspring, they are members of the same species. I cannot speak to the fertility of this young Martian, but I think it a likely demonstration these three are all the same species, and their physical differences are simply the result of environmental pressures, as is the case with the Galapagos finches.

  I find this place most unsettling. On the one hand, everything I have seen of the country convinces me most of our confident assumptions about its people are wildly inaccurate. At the same time, the level of simmering resentment toward Earth in general, and Great Britain in particular, portends calamity, although I have not the wisdom to foresee what form that calamity may take.

  3.

  Shistomo watched the ribboned coronape soar into the sky with unease. A similar flyer had been released each day since the caravan’s arrival at Abak’hn. This was clearly a signal, but for whom? Not for him, that much was certain. That someone in the caravan signalled someone other than him suggested an unwanted complication, and reinforced his dissatisfaction with this early part of their plan.

  Having the would-be prince travel by caravan instead of flyer had certainly not been his decision, although he understood the logic of the move. If the Queln raids had not so disrupted merchant commerce, there would have been ships aplenty in Sharranus, and hiring one would not have attracted undue attention, but with all the flyers trending north to avoid the Queln, the situation had become difficult.

  Difficult, but not impossible, Shistomo thought. Better to risk suspicion in Sharranus by chartering a ship, regardless of cost, than court disaster in the gardenway. And disaster had very nearly come—twice.

  A light breeze lifted the hull of the cloudship beneath him and he steadied himself against the railing of the observation platform. The armed wind-wing, a handy little Bloodrunner mounting two guns, floated just above the desert’s surface two hundred paces back from the canal embankment, half a mile southwest of Abak’hn. Only the mast-mounted observation platform where Shistomo stood would have been visible from the city, and was small enough that none would see it unless already aware of the ship’s presence and looking specifically for the small wooden structure.

  That lone skrill rider, the one who shadowed the caravan since the aerial attack, would of course have seen the ship, but the rider’s interest was clearly invested in the caravan, not in a small, solitary armed vessel. Why did the rider follow? Perhaps a kinsman had perished in the attack, and the rider sought a blood price. That was the Queln way, but Shistomo had seen no rockets fired nor heard any musket shots, and the raid had not been pressed home, so he did not see how casualties could have been suffered. Perhaps he had missed part of the fight. He observed it from five thousand feet of altitude, where the grey sails and grey-painted hull bottom were effectively invisible to ground observers, but from which height he could see little detail.

  Shistomo relied instead on his own messages from the caravan, left in its wake and collected by him in the early morning, before he had his ship climb to altitude. Two English people now accompanied the caravan: a crippled woman of no importance, and a man of considerable potential worth to them. An accomplished scientist holding a responsible position with the Briti
sh government would make a useful hostage, or perhaps his “rescue” and release would give the British reason to favour the new prince. This new piece could be made to fit the puzzle of his plan quite well, if the hot-heads in the caravan could hold off from killing him.

  Passion was his enemy, Shistomo knew. Too many young acolytes felt fire in their bellies. The only true Way of the Worm was the cold, remorseless inevitability of the grave.

  4.

  THE cloudship was not what Nathanial had expected. It’s broad, beamy, nearly flat-bottomed, hull floated ten or twelve feet above the loading ramps, tethered securely fore and aft. That much was as the drawings in Lloyd’s News back on Earth had suggested. But where were the masts on the upper deck, the spars and furled sails? The drawings he had seen made the cloudships look like old square-rigged windjammers floating in the sky. He had always wondered, in a vague sort of way, how they kept from nosing over if all the sails were all on top. For that matter, he wondered how they steered, or did anything but drift down-wind, but he supposed there was some explanation.

  This ship had no familiar upper masts. Instead it sported an array of spars and outriggers extending out to its sides fully as far as its overall length, which Nathanial estimated as over a hundred feet. The spars bore furled sails and were wrapped in heavy canvas bound around by rope lines, so they took on the appearance of bulging sausages. If there were masts on the upper deck, they must be folded up for now—”shipped,” he believed was the nautical term—and would be erected once they took to the air.

  A dozen crewmen groaned and sweated on the dock, lifting a cargo net full of bags of ereban spice—he deduced from the odour of one bag which had split open and spilled its contents across the ground—by means of a capstan-powered winch attached to a cargo boom. Four more crewmen waited above in the gaping cargo hatch, one armed with a boathook to snag and pull in the cargo net. Carefully-sized piles of ereban spice sacks stretched along the dock, each on a rolling cart, waiting their turn for loading. Nathanial saw other cargos as well—crates of various sizes, padded earthen jugs, large timber kegs and water butts, and exotic alien livestock confined in a pen. Some of the latter might be provisions for the journey, for all he knew. He had never seen any of these animals, which was hardly surprising as he thought about it. Most books and illustrated magazines dealing with Mars concentrated on romantic adventures, either factual or invented, and so described animals people rode and animals which occasionally ate people. The balance of the Martian animal kingdom provided little grist for the authors’ mills.

  It occurred to him one might say they wrote about actual Martians using a similar perspective.

  A rope ladder with wooden rungs dangled down from the broad boarding platform near the cargo bay and Annabelle stared at it in dismay.

  “Do not be distressed, Annabelle,” Kak’hamish said. “They will lower a boarding sling, which most ladies use in any case.”

  Kak’hamish had roused them well before dawn with news they would board and leave this morning. They had made their way silently through the dark streets, before even the farmer’s market opened, and reached the landing ground as the eastern horizon turned pink with the promise of a new day. The others would come later; unaccompanied by “the English” they would have no difficulty from the locals.

  Two crewmen took a break from the capstan and hauled on a block and tackle rig which lifted Annabelle in the boarding sling quickly up to the boarding platform. Nathanial took the opportunity to study the lines of the ship in more detail.

  The Martians called all of their aerial vessels cloudships, and those powered solely by wind “kites”, or at least that was how Earthmen had always translated the word which Kak’hamish said meant wind-wing. Whichever term you chose, this was a big one. The hull consisted of a large and deep cargo hold forward and a longer but somewhat shallower berthing hull aft, separate but linked by a common upper deck. Each hull section was thirty to forty-five feet long, and the linking deck between them at least another twenty feet. He had seen much larger ships, of course, but none of them floating a half-dozen feet over his head.

  The bottoms of the forward and aft hulls were covered with liftwood louvers, the lifting panels which held the ship aloft. A crewman stood near the front of the vessel by a lead line hanging down from the keel and touching the ground, marked off in clear regular increments. As a new net of cargo left the dock, the cloudship settled lower and the crewman called out an order, shouting toward the back of the ship. Nathanial watched two or three louvers change angle slightly and the ship rise. When it reached its original height, the crewman called out again, another slight adjustment, and the ship was stable.

  Liftwood—the Martian scientific oddity and treasure which had been its blessing in centuries of decline, which had kept planet-wide commerce flowing in the face of the collapse of its industrial-based technology, but which might now prove to be its final curse. European powers scrambled to control and harvest its extraordinary potential, and backed their claims with steam engines, magazine rifles, and field guns manufactured by Krupp, Armstrong, and Putilov. Nathanial felt again the sense of foreboding which had first troubled him in the caravanserai.

  Mars had come to terms with the inevitability of its long, steady decline. How had Kak’hamish put it? A thousand philosophies and theologies, but all of them about the End of Things. Now all of a sudden these Earthmen came, full of optimism and vigour, ready to build, improve, progress—and take whatever they needed to accomplish those ends, by force if necessary. This would not end well.

  “Nathanial,” Kak’hamish said softly, interrupting his reverie, and gestured to the dangling rope ladder.

  Nathanial climbed up, although doing so was more difficult than it appeared, as the ladder began swinging as soon as he started his ascent. The pendulous arc became greater with each step until he was forced to pause and let it settle, lest he become dizzy. Kak’hamish seized the ladder from below and held it steady.

  “Now proceed,” he ordered, and Nathanial finished the climb to the boarding platform easily. Annabelle waited there, having already sorted herself out, leaning on the crutch as well as steadying herself with her left hand on the platform railing.

  Nathanial turned to see how Kak’hamish negotiated the ladder without anyone below to steady it. The Martian first slung his bundle, a large covered box of some sort, but of very light weight, over his back. He faced the end of the ladder rather than its rungs, and quickly climbed hand-over-hand up the rope at that end, using the rungs only to steady himself as he scampered up. When he pulled himself lightly over the rail, he looked at Nathanial and his eyes gleamed with a mixture of triumph and humour.

  “Well, if one insists on doing it the easy way,” Nathanial said in mock derision, “one can hardly take much pride in the accomplishment, can one?”

  They made their way up the nearly-vertical wooden companionway to the main deck and Nathanial was pleased to see the comparative ease with which Annabelle managed. Once topside, they made their way aft to the raised superstructure holding the accommodations, and then again up stairs to the broad quarterdeck. Although he looked carefully on the main deck and quarterdeck, no masts folded or otherwise were in evidence, aside from a slender scaffold supporting what was clearly an observation platform and the fan-like expanding rudder, rising from the back of the quarterdeck. The spars sprouting from the vessel’s side appeared to mount the only actual working rigging on the vessel. That at least answered the question of how the cloudship avoided tipping over in a wind, and Nathanial felt gratified by his earlier suspicions. He still saw no way in which the vessel could steer, or even move any faster than the light breeze, but he was willing to be educated.

  The quarterdeck was broad and long, almost as long as the rest of the main deck. The forward part contained a raised gun platform mounting what looked to be an antique muzzle-loading cannon on a turntable mount. A capstan below it no doubt served to turn it in action, although neither capstan nor g
un looked as if they had been used in recent memory. Nathanial was unsure whether that was a good or bad sign.

  Aft of the gun platform was an open hatchway surrounded by a railing, and behind that was what Nathanial took to be the ship’s tiller, a long pole extending to a vertical shaft near the rear of the quarterdeck. Onxym Haat waited for them near the tiller, alongside his clerk and a well-muscled Martian sailor, the helmsman perhaps. Another Martian, tall and weathered, stood by the port rail, his attention entirely on the men loading the cargo and the adjustments to the lift of the vessel. Haat now carried Nathanial’s former pistol thrust into his sash, an obvious mark of wealth and status here. He looked more resigned to their presence than pleased by it, and his words were short, abrupt.

  “Onxym Haat says the man by the rail is Andan Moorie, the captain of the ship, which is called the Lady Zumaat,” Kak’hamish translated. “He says you have quarters here in the berthing deck. I am to sleep forward, with the crew.”

  “No, that won’t stand,” Nathanial started, but Kak’hamish shook his head.

  “It is better this way. Onxym Haat has never forgiven me for the Queln attack. If I sleep forward, out of his sight, he may be more cordial to you. It is a small thing.”

  It did not sit well with Nathanial, but he saw the sense in it.

  More passengers arrived and the three of them walked to the quarterdeck rail to watch, giving the ship’s captain a wide berth. First came a familiar pale red wagon drawn by a ruumet breehr—the religious pilgrims. Five men in pale grey robes dismounted and conversed with their driver, who in turn supervised the offloading of six darkly ornate sarcophagi, and then their lifting up and into the cargo bay. Apparently the driver was a member of the faith but not a consecrated priest, so it was permissible to speak to him and have him interact with other, without contamination. It made a certain sense to Nathanial, or at least as much as any sort of elaborate religious ritual ever did.