Below them the mounted guards retreated to the spaces between the wagons, as did the walking servants and labourers. Of the Master of Sword, Kak’hamish saw nothing for the moment.
He looked up again and saw the skrill riders grow closer, details resolving as they made their rapid gliding descent. Their blue-grey hide rendered them nearly invisible at higher altitudes. Their upper limbs extended perhaps three meters to each side and ended in long articulated talons which he saw flexing in anticipation. Their large black eyes sparkled in the afternoon sun, and two long horns extended forward from their brow ridges above the eye sockets.
A bellowed command from below arrested his attention. In the open ground behind the clustered wagons, the Master of Sword and several dismounted guards hastily planted long poles in the ground, thrusting the narrow pointed ends into the soft soil and angling them toward the approaching Queln warriors and their mounts.
No, those were not simple poles. The ends aimed at the sky were much thicker, long cylinders on the end of a longer wooden rod. One of the soldiers ran from the wagon carrying a firebrand. Kak’hamish remembered what the Master of Sword had said that first evening at dinner. “My purpose is to make it rain skrill blood.”
“Good Lord, those are rockets!” Nathanial exclaimed, and Kak’hamish moved to his side to better see. Behind them Onxym Haat laughed and nodded vigorously.
“Yes, rockets from our friends the Ru-Shaans. They care little for trade, but Lord Jed-An persuaded them to supply us with these. The heads are filled with small rocks and when they burst in the sky, they will sweep it clear of your friends the Queln!”
Kak’hamish knew there was only one course. He inflated his lungs as full as he could, blew out the air, inflated them again, and again, trying to completely saturate his lungs with oxygen. Gathering one last chestful of air, he raised his hands to his mouth, placed the thumbs together to make a sort of trumpet, and blew the Depart! call.
For those close by, particularly as they had never heard it, the call was deafening, painful, and probably terrifying. Onxym Haat and the musketeers covered their ears in pain. Nathanial stood stock still, open-mouthed, perhaps dumbfounded that such a sound could issue from a man-sized being. There was confusion on the ground as guards and labourers turned fearful eyes to see if a skrill had come suddenly upon them from behind, but there was no skrill. There was only Kak’hamish, now dizzy from his exertion and steadying himself on the side of the howdah.
A cry from the men below made Onxym Haat and the others turn and shout in anger. Kak’hamish looked up and smiled. The formation of skrill dispersed and wheeled away. The mounts gathered altitude and headed south, away from the caravan. The crisis had been averted.
One crisis had been averted. Another appeared imminent as Onxym Haat turned on him, rage in his face.
“Treacherous son of a whore! Dung-eating Queln-loving bastard! You warned them away. We had them and you warned them away. That’s the last Queln raiding party you will save. Guards, cover him!”
The two musketeers levelled their weapons at him.
“Now see here!” Nathanial said and shouldered his way between Kak’hamish and the others. “I don’t know what just happened, but I won’t have someone shot over it. Do you understand me?”
Of course they did not understand his words, but his indignation was clear enough and Onxym Haat’s anger now turned on Nathanial as well.
“Ah, another one, aye? Well we can deal with you as well. Over the side and down to the ground. We’ll finish this there.”
All of this was in Koline, of course, of which the scientist remained completely innocent.
“We are to climb down, Nathanial. They are quite angry with us, I am afraid, so we should do this without protest. Give tempers some time to cool or there may be grave results.”
Whatever momentary surge of emotion had prompted Nathanial to intervene waned, and as it did so he noticed the round black bores of the two muskets now pointed at him and his eyes grew larger. “Yes…well, ah, we can sort this out down there as easily as here, I suppose.”
Kak’hamish followed Nathanial down the swaying ladder to a swarm of angry guards and labourers. As he reached the ground, the Master of Sword strode over, a rocket on its long stock held in his right hand. He shook the rocket at Kak’hamish, brandished it in his face.
“What sort of man betrays his own blood to those carrion eaters? As sure as the northern snows melt in the spring, you’ll pay for this.”
The warrior struck Kak’hamish in the mouth with his fist, drove him back against the flank of the ruumet breehr. For a moment Kak’hamish saw only flashing light, thought he might fall, but his hand found the great beast’s harness and he steadied himself. His mouth filled with the taste of salt and iron. He spat out blood, but his vision cleared and his dizziness abated.
The angry muttering around them grew and one of the louder of the labourers took his lead from the Sword Master and pushed Nathanial sharply from behind. The Englishman stumbled forward and nearly lost his balance, but Kak’hamish caught him, held him up, and whispered one word in his ear.
“Courage.”
The embers of violence glowed bright and needed only a breeze to ignite them. If either he or Nathanial lost their nerve, if either of them reacted with fear or anger, they would die right here where they stood. In any case it would probably end that way for him, Kak’hamish knew, but it mustn’t for Annabelle and Nathanial. Their welfare mattered; his did not. He found it strange, though, that he still felt something akin to fear. He had not felt it in the desert. Of course, the desert had not threatened to beat him to death.
Nathanial drew himself up, turned, and looked at the leering man who had pushed him, simply looked at him, and then he looked at the semicircle of angry men surrounding them, hemming them against the leg and harness of the ruumet breehr. The mob grew calmer. Genuine dignity was not a quality Kak’hamish would have ascribed to the awkward young English inventor, this man who knew volumes about the silent spaces between the worlds and nothing of himself, but wherever it came from, for that moment he found the dignity to stare the beast in the eye, and the beast blinked.
“What is this?” The ambassador Jed-An’s voice cracked like a rifle shot and the remaining courage of the mob was extinguished as a candle’s flame is by a sharp puff of air. The ambassador shouldered his way past guards and labourers, his own hunched and shuffling servant in tow. The crowd edged back, giving him room in the small amphitheatre in which the drama played out.
“They…a moment, your lordship,” Onxym Haat puffed as he finished climbing down from the howdah. He paused to catch his breath, but extended his finger toward Kak’hamish in accusation. “He warned the Queln.”
Jed-An looked at Kak’hamish with a mixture of suspicion and satisfaction.
“And the Earthman helped him,” Haat said after two more pants of air. Kak’hamish saw a flicker of disappointment in the ambassador’s eyes, gone as quickly as it had come. He looked at Nathanial then back at Kak’hamish.
“Is this true?”
“I ordered them to depart and they did so. Lives were spared—lives in the caravan as well as aloft.”
“This was a warning of danger?” he asked, but Kak’hamish saw the flicker of a smile that came from already knowing the answer.
Kak’hamish chose his answer carefully. He did not wish to die with a lie on his lips. “It communicates only to depart. It can mean danger, but it can also mean the caravan travels under the protection of the iTaka-Queln.”
Jed-An nodded and turned to Onxym Haat. “Look south and tell me what you see, caravan master.”
The sweating merchant shielded his eyes from the afternoon sun and studied the sky. “I see five departing Queln raiders. No, wait! There are more of them, joining from the west. Why, there’s over a dozen more!”
So someone in the caravan had noticed the small size of the raid, and deduced what it meant. That it was an ambassador who had done so rather
than a warrior was interesting. The others turned and looked as well and the Master of Sword let the rocket pole in his right hand rest on the ground as he scratched his scalp with his other hand.
“What does it mean?” the Master of Sword asked.
“It means that while you set up your rockets to fire at the diversion,” Jed-An said, “the full raid approached unseen from the west, out of the afternoon sun, probably in single file. They would have been on us before we knew there was another, greater threat. If the Ru-Shaan rockets had done their murderous job on their decoys, the warriors would have fallen on us with rage in their bellies, hungry to extract the blood price twice over. That is the way of the Queln, is it not?”
This last question he directed to Kak’hamish.
“That is our way, Lord.”
“Your way?” he spat back. “Do not play with lives, Ugly One! They are not your coins to gamble away.”
Kak’hamish said nothing but he bowed to Jed-An, because the ambassador was right. It was a foolish answer, prompted by pride, and it endangered Nathanial and Annabelle, if only slightly. He had no right to add even one pebble to the weight of their hazards, and no right to pride.
“This…creature Kak’hamish,” Jed-An said to Onxym Haat, but in a volume which made clear he meant his words for all, “whatever we may think of him, has saved us from grievous loss, and perhaps defeat. I will not thank him for it, because I know not what was in his belly, but neither will I condemn him. The English acted honourably; he owes the renegade a blood debt and stood by him in danger. No honest man here can fault that. No harm will come to them. They now travel under my protection.”
He turned and strode away to his covered carriage, followed by his servant whose shorter, faster steps emphasised the dignity of his master. The crowd drifted away, puzzled and vaguely disappointed that no blood had been spilled.
“What just happened?” Nathanial asked Kak’hamish.
Clack-clack. “I am not certain,” he answered. “All I can tell you is what words were spoken. Even that will take some time. Come, Miss Annabelle will be worried.”
“Beside herself with curiosity is more likely,” Nathanial said.
2.
Annabelle watched the lone skrill rider, high in the sky to the south, paralleling the caravan. She tried to imagine what it felt like to ride the skrill high in the sky, to climb in lazy spirals and then go into long, shallow dives which piled on speed, racing down toward the ground faster and faster, wings flaring at the last moment to soar up again. It must, she thought, feel a great deal like skiing. The thought gave her a tingling sensation down where she would have sat astride the skrill, pressed against its shoulders and neck, and the feeling made her blush.
The lone rider had appeared the day after the Queln raid and had shadowed the caravan ever since. Sometimes it disappeared, perhaps to rest or hunt, but always to return within an hour or two. Annabelle noticed Kak’hamish watching it as well, his eyes wistful as if he might know this rider.
In the three days since the attack Annabelle often thought of riding the skrill, at least when alone, but that had been less frequent of late. She was finally judged healthy enough to venture out in society, assisted by a crutch and her stalwart myrmidons—Nathanial and Kak’hamish—to either side. They were unlikely champions, and so much dearer to her for that. She had finally, the evening before, met their new benefactor, Kaleen Jed-An, the dignified ambassador from Sharranus. She saw his luxurious carriage drawn by eight of the two-legged gashants instead of a ruumet breehr, even dined with him. Kak’hamish said the food was much better at Jed-An’s table than at the caravan master’s, to which Nathanial agreed enthusiastically.
Annabelle had found Jed-An interesting. She imagined that Martian women found him very attractive, although she had little knowledge of what “look” was fashionable at the time, or even what masculine features Martians found handsome in general. Annabelle knew genuine, unaffected confidence when she saw it, however, and while good looks might prompt admiring glances, confidence aroused something deeper in women, or at least in those Annabelle had known—and in herself, she admitted.
She found his conversation, even through the filter of Kak’hamish’s translation, lively, witty, and indicative of a broad-ranging mind. He asked intelligent questions about their travels, about the worlds they had visited, and was particularly interested in the society of the Selenites, among whom she had spent so much time. His interests paralleled hers to a remarkable degree, and the more she talked, the more his interest grew, until it seemed as if they were the only two in the room.
That was illuminating: he was, in his way, seducing her. She enjoyed the sensation, but she wondered what motivated him. Did he intend to win her over for some purpose she did not understand? Or was seduction simply his habit? Possibly. She had on occasion met men who could not help but seduce, men who were not even aware they were doing so. After an hour of conversation over dinner, she felt as if she had known Jed-An all her life, but she also knew that if their acquaintance lasted another five years, she would never know him any better than she did at that moment. Perhaps diplomats made the best seducers. Or was it vice versa?
So now she rode in the back of her wagon. The morning sun, rising high in the eastern sky, had warmed her face, but it had passed over the top of the wagon and she rode in the shade. She dangled her leg over the back of the wagon, and her four musketeers kept up with their long, easy strides, joking with each other and flirting with her until a party of gashant riders, led by the ambassador Jed-An himself, trotted toward her. The musketeers parted and dropped back to a discreet distance and Jed-An reined in. His stooped translator rode beside him and two of his grim-faced guards followed close behind
“Ambassador, what a pleasure,” Annabelle said. “I was just thinking of you and our delightful dinner and conversation last evening.”
The servant translated, or so Annabelle assumed, as he spoke in an unfamiliar language, not Koline. Jed-An ignored him, never made eye contact with him, and listened with his eyes on Annabelle’s as if the words came directly from her. His smile broadened and he bowed in the saddle and replied.
“The ambassador is pleased he finds his way into your thoughts,” the servant translated, and his expression said he was pleased as well. Whatever pleased the master pleased the servant. Jed-An spoke again. “My master offers the service of two of his guards to accompany you.”
“Tell the ambassador I appreciate his most generous offer, but I feel completely secure in the company of my four Immortals.” Annabelle gestured to the four musketeers who walked behind the riders, fanned out to either side.
The servant’s face fell and he translated this with his eyes closed and head turned slightly away from Jed-An, as if he expected a blow for communicating unwelcome news. Apparently any negative response, no matter how politely worded, was unwelcome, although nothing in Jed-An’s demeanour suggested so.
Jed-An bowed from the saddle again and spoke, and the servant translated with relief. “They must be fine warriors indeed to have won your confidence. The Ambassador must meet with the caravan master, but hopes to see you again later.”
“And I him,” Annabelle replied. The four riders trotted forward past her wagon and as they left she thought about the stooped, cowed servant. Nothing in Jed-An’s behaviour seemed to warrant his frightened demeanour, and yet Jed-An seemed not to consider it extraordinary in any way. Annabelle was left with the conclusion that either Jed-An was a more tyrannical master in private than in front of guests, or that he was simply the sort of man who expected his servants to bow and scrape. Neither alternative reflected well on him, to Annabelle’s thinking. Some were called to serve, and some were given to be served, but it seemed to her that in both cases it could be accomplished with dignity. She had certainly seen such among both the British and the Apache. That it was not so in Jed-An’s household must be by his choice.
The musketeers closed up on her wagon. “Annabellanna,
I picked berries,” the one called Harran said, or at least that’s what she believed he said. Her Koline was still limited to one or two hundred words, so sentences sometimes contained blanks which her mind filled in with guesses. He held out his hat half-full of orange berries, covered with bumps like raspberries but as big as ripe olives, so she assumed the last word referred to them.
“What are the berries called?” she asked, using the unfamiliar word to learn it. “Or is that their name?” She tried one. It was very tart, so much so it made her pucker and close her eyes. The musketeers laughed, but Harran popped one into his own mouth to show it was not a practical joke. He puckered and squinted himself, but also smiled in pleasure.
“They are called cutberries, I think because plant has big thorns. Not quite ripe. In one week less sour, but good for thirst now.”
She admitted they were, in the same way lemon juice or tonic water quenched thirst more effectively than did sweet drinks. She took another one. “The liking grows,” she said.
Nathanial and Kak’hamish appeared from around the rear of the wagon, both bearing small packages wrapped in rags. She waved and smiled and had another cutberry.
“I see you are in good spirits this morning,” Nathanial said. “Those berries look delicious.”
“May Nathanial have one?” she asked Harran, and he quickly offered the hat to him, a smile on his face. Nathanial took one and nearly spat it out, but he had become far too considerate to do so and instead he gave the musketeers a pained grin. They laughed, but not unkindly.
series 01 05 A Prince of Mars Page 6