I groaned. I suddenly very much wanted a cigarette.
“Do you have any tobacco?” I asked.
“No. It is against our faith. And it was very bad of you to sneak away during the Noon ritual,” he scolded, mildly. “There are many gods you may have angered.”
“Who exactly do you worship?”
“Why, the sun, of course! At least during the day. And the Two Moons at night. And then there is the Blue Lady, of course.”
“Blue lady...”
“In the night sky. The wanderer among the stars.”
“Earth.”
He scoffed. “I don’t know this name. To us, she is the Blue Lady. There are many tales...”
He noticed my discomfort, and turned to Myra. “Bathe her,” he ordered. “And apply ointment. And see that she is well fed.” To me he said, “Where were you going, Ransom, that you wanted to head east?”
I was silent.
“Ah,” he said. He bowed. “Until later, then.”
After he left Myra turned to me, holding a wet cloth and said, with smiling malice, “This will hurt. Turn over.”
It did hurt.
When the sun was sinking the Mighty came to see me again. We were now alone. He pulled up a stool to my bedside and looked at me seriously.
“I am beginning to understand you a little, Ransom,” he said. “But you must not try to run away again. It will only bring you grief. And not from me.
“We must travel tomorrow, which will bring pain to you, I’m afraid. We will travel through some interesting, and dangerous, places. Others would not treat you as I have.”
“The equator?”
“Eventually.” He stroked his whiskers thoughtfully. “The fact that you tried to get away does not bother me. It was to be expected, and showed courage. But the foolish nature of the act does bother me. That and something else...”
I waited for him to continue, but he stood up.
“We will speak of these things later. Suffice it to say that we are being pursued.”
My heart leaped.
“They are not your people,” he added, “so do not rejoice. They are F’rar. They want you very badly, Ransom. Another might give you to them, to protect his own. Honor, of course, does not allow me to do that. Also, I hate the F’rar. But their ardor troubles me. We have already assassinated two of their sentries, and still they come.”
He stretched. “Ah, well. They are F’rar, so they are stupid. And once we get to the middle lands, they will not dare follow.” He grinned slyly. “And you will be worth even more, the longer we keep you, eh?”
I said nothing, and he left.
Myra appeared with fearful eyes in the middle of the night and shook me awake.
“Get up!” she hissed, nearly pushing me out of bed. “Get up or we will all die!”
Painfully, I climbed out of bed and the girl threw a heavy cloak around me.
“Follow!” she ordered.
She nearly dragged me out of the tent. I could feel her fear. I began to be afraid myself. I stumbled out of the tent behind her and saw the sky full of lights, F’rar airships landing all around us.
“Come!”
I moved with her, keeping low to the ground, nearly on all fours, as she was. Somewhere in the near distance a gunshot sounded, followed by the hiss of arrows.
We moved away from the camp, down a sandy slope and amongst a stand of bushes.
“Down!” she ordered and I threw myself flat on the ground as a spotlight stabbed down from above, skittering off to our right and away.
“Move!”
We scrambled on a fair distance, and then the girl suddenly ordered, “Get in!” I was shoved ahead of her into a dark opening.
Like a crab, she scuttled in after me and then reached up and pulled something flat and wide over the opening. Huffing with the effort, she crouched down beside me and hissed into my ear, “Say nothing!”
I nodded in the darkness, and we sat and waited.
It was not a long wait. Above there was a sound like thunder on wheels, and many barking voices. The sounds became impossibly loud.
Suddenly I heard someone shout just over our heads: “Damn these sand rats! Where in hell did they go?”
“I saw them from above, sir. They were right here.”
“If they were right here where did they get to? Did they melt into thin air?”
“We’ll keep looking, sir.”
“You do that. Did we get anything out of the prisoner?”
I felt my companion stiffen beside me.
“Nothing. You know the way these creatures are. She died without speaking.”
“Damn!”
The sounds, the figures, moved off.
My companion was shivering, weeping softly beside me.
In the dark, while we waited, without speaking, I put my arm around her, and pulled her close.
I must have slept. Three taps on the trap door above us woke me.
My companion was already awake. She sprung up, and instantly pulled the door away, revealing bright sun.
“They are gone,” the Mighty reported. His face was grim.
“Ena!” my companion cried, climbing out of the hole and falling into the Mighty’s arms.
Idly he held and petted her. “Yes,” he said. “She is being prepared for burial. It is almost Noon. Come, Myra.”
Myra collapsed. “Ena! Ena!”
The Mighty supported her, and looked down at me as I climbed from the hole. “They caught her as she was making her way to her own hiding place,” he said. “Rather than reveal the spot, she let them take her. They burned her, and then they put her eyes out. And she said nothing.” There was a mixture of grief and pride in his voice.
“Oh, Ena!” Myra cried.
I stood, and took the weight of Myra from the Mighty. “Let me help her,” I said.
He nodded, and he looked at me in a new way. “I am beginning to think that taking you was very bad luck for me,” he said. “This is nothing against you, you must understand. But there are bigger things going on on this world of ours than I imagined.”
“You are right,” I said.
“We will talk,” he said, and walked away, leaving the care of his harem girl to me.
Ena was buried at precisely noon, within the circle the remaining caravan members made.
I was not allowed to help form the circle, but stood just behind the Mighty, who explained everything to me.
“The body is purified by the Sun. The Sun is a good god to be buried under. He will protect her in the next world. The Moons are not so favorable, because they can be tricksters. It was a good omen for her to die when she did.”
The body lay sewn into a sack made of tent cloth next to a dug hole. After prayers Myra left the circle and anointed the sack with oils and aromatic herbs. Some of the odors wafted to my nostrils: jasmine and oleander, and the heavily rich perfume of cactus oil.
After Myra’s ministrations, there followed what I at first thought was an extended moment of silence, but I saw that each of the members of the circle were mumbling under their breaths.
When it was finished, the Mighty, the last to stop speaking in a low voice, explained to me, “The announcing of her sins.” I saw him give a slight, knowing smile. “She had many.”
Then the members of the circle collapsed upon the body, and lowered it into the ground, covering it and smoothing the area so that it looked as though they had never been there.
“Ordinarily,” the Mighty explained to me after this was done, “we would leave a mound so that the Sun could find the spot, but since we are being followed this cannot be done. For the next three days during Noon service we will remind the sun of her location.” He looked up at the small golden yellow coin in the sky. “He will not forget. She had her faults, but she was a good woman.”
He looked at me curiously.
“What is it you believe, Ransom?”
“You mean my religion?”
“Yes.”
“That is a difficult question to answer.”
“On the contrary, it is the easiest question to answer.”
“I was brought up to believe in the One,” I replied. “But sometimes it has been difficult to believe even in that.”
“Why so?” He looked genuinely puzzled.
“Because of the way things are.”
“You mean the evil in the world?”
“Yes.”
“All the more reason to believe in something. Even if it is only the silliness of one god.”
“Perhaps you are right.”
“We will speak of these things again, but now we will hide, and then tonight we will travel. And we will continue to travel tonight, and hide by day, until we are out of danger.”
“I had no idea you had built hiding spots,” I said.
I saw for the first time since that morning a little of his humor return. “Oh, I am full of surprises, Ransom.”
“Yes, you are,” I said to myself as he strode away, and I beheld the five bodies of F’rar he had captured and killed, then hung head down and naked on long poles on a distant hill to tell his enemy that he could not win.
Six
A month passed. Even though we approached the equator it grew colder, due to the changing of seasons. In effect, the southern winter was overtaking us.
I learned to wear their clothes, out of necessity. I became accustomed to their ways. My back had healed, and Myra’s ministrations were the cause. I knew she was proud of her work. A taut understanding, if not respect, had grown between us. Occasionally I still saw daggers in her eyes – but I had yet to see one in her paw.
I puzzled over her relationship with the Mighty. In the past weeks we had been joined by others of the Mighty’s clan. Often they appeared at night, like wraiths. More than once I had awakened in the morning to find that our camp had doubled in size during darkness. Among these newcomers were others of the Mighty’s harem. I awoke one morning to discover that one of the younger wives had managed to crawl into my bed undetected and slept beside me. And she snored! Which may have made it much more an indication of the ease I felt in this camp, that I would sleep so deeply.
My belly grew. It grew inexorably, and I could feel the life within me. By the movements and occasional kicks, I determined that there were at least two kits, possibly more. I know I glowed, because those around me glowed when they looked at me.
The Mighty maintained his polite but intense interest in me. I knew that he had sent spies hither in yon in search of my identity, but never did he reveal any of this, or what they might have found, to me. He was a very shrewd card player, even if I had to explain to him what card games were.
“We have no need for this rubbish,” he said, throwing down his hand of Jakra the first time I tried to teach him. It was a cool evening, and fires had been permitted. We had seen no signs of the F’rar in nearly two weeks. But I knew the Mighty had eyes out there, watching, listening.
I laughed, and showed him my own winning hand: three Vestas, the figure of a broad old feline with abundant whiskers staring seriously out of the face of the card.
“You have no need because you have no skill!” I teased.
He did not take this well, and turned back to the cards.
“Deal another...”
“Hand?” I offered, still teasing.
“Yes! Hand! Deal me out another!”
As I dealt he concentrated and spat, “We will see who has no skill.”
He won the next four hands.
“You see,” he explained as we took a break from the game, and sipped gemel tea which Hera, the latest, snoring member of his harem, brought. I had grown a fondness for this tea, which was robust, by no means weak. I noticed the young thing would not meet my eyes, since, I had been informed by the Mighty, she thought she was crawling into bed with him her first night in camp, “it is like this. When I call this...card playing” – and here he waved his paw in dismissal at the pile of discards on the ground between us – “rubbish, I mean it in a literal sense. Rubbish to my people is things that are irrelevant to survival, and the everyday. Even our kits would not indulge themselves in games like this. We draw our pleasure from constructing and preserving, not...” Again he waved his dismissive hand over the cards, “that.”
“But it’s enjoyable!” I protested.
He shook his head. “Enjoyment is in...” And wordlessly he spread his hands to take in the black sky overhead, the thousands of stars, the planets, the night air, the planet.
In my weeks with this man, I now knew what he meant.
“I must ask you,” he said, turning his attention back to the cards. He flipped a few of them over, exposing the faces of the great Martian feline composers. “These names you give to the faces...”
My eyes widened. “You cannot read?”
I saw the beginnings of anger. He stabbed at the cards with an outstretched clawed finger. “No.”
“But why not?”
Before he answered I did it for him: “More rubbish?”
His anger immediately receded, and he pointed to the cards again. “Who are all of these bum wipers?”
I riffled through them, and brought out a particular one: a tall proud feline with an abundant mane and kindly eyes. I handed it to the Mighty. “This is a composer named Haydn. She was a musician, as were all of these.”
He nodded as he took the card. “I wondered why the game was called Jakra: music.”
“It is said that Haydn was named after another composer, one of the Old Ones,” I explained.
“These Old Ones are rubbish to me, also,” he said, throwing the card down onto the pile. “If they are unknown they might as well be ghosts, to frighten the children with at night. They are not real.”
“They were real,” I insisted. “It’s just that we don’t know much about them. Only that they were here before us.”
He looked startled. “What is this? You say that these Old Ones were born of Mars before the Yern and the other clans?”
“They were here, and then they disappeared. And we don’t know why.”
He stood, kicking the cards aside, and became furious. “You spout nonsense! This cannot be! There are the gods, and the clans. Nothing more!”
I spoke calmly. “These are the beliefs of my people, just as you have yours. We believe in one god, and that the Blue Lady, as you call her, is another planet that circles the sun, just as Mars does. The other wanderers, Bright One, and Little Bright One, are also planets. And we believe in the Old Ones, because we have evidence that they were here.”
He was holding his head with his paws. “Enough! I will hear no more of this sacrilege!”
That night he burned two special fires facing west, and a particularly noxious incense was added, which, I am sure, he made sure drifted directly into my tent to keep me very awake.
The next morning he was, I think apologetic, though he did not, of course, apologize.
Over breakfast he said, “You will be very interested in our destination today.”
“How so?” I was still rubbing my eyes, and trying to clear the smell of chicken offal and cactus spice from my nostrils.
“You will see,” he said, cryptically Then he added, “As for last evening, I have decided that I have my beliefs, and you have yours. There is nothing I can do about that.”
“Thank you.”
“Even if your beliefs are those of a dog,” he said, and got up and strode away.
We decamped soon after. Our caravan had grown to over twenty wagons, nearly a hundred individuals. It was as if the Mighty was picking up a nation while he traveled, which was of course very nearly the case. His people were scattered, I gathered, in an area some two hundred kilos wide and nearly five hundred long. Since we had started in the extreme south of his territory, we were gathering them up as we went along like a farmer harvesting grain.
The territory was starker, and yet in its way as beautiful, as that in the south. Long stret
ches of near desert were punctuated by oasis of fertility, green and yellow patches that burst out of the pink-red scenery like dabs of color on a canvas. The sky was brighter here, a thinner pink but with many wisps of cloud. And it held fewer craters, more hills, and the occasional peak of a ridge or low mountain.
There was not much game to catch, but the Mighty did have his herd of dogs, which ran along at the rear of the caravan barking and complaining and, usually, less one member the next day. They bred fairly quickly.
Horn, my companion in the wine wagon, continued to be, as from the beginning, maddeningly incommunicative. He seemed content to hum to himself all day, or to point out things that held no particular interest. “There’s a bluff I used to play on when I was a kit!” he would exclaim, but when I asked him about his boyhood he would say nothing. Or, “Look at that line of junto trees!” to which I would say, “What about it?” which would leave his shaking his head, returning to his humming.
About midday this day the Mighty rode back to us leading a second horse. I had begun to learn to ride, but was still better off in the wagon.
“Come with me,” he said, and Horn immediately ceased his humming and stopped the wagon.
I climbed down and then up onto the stead.
“Where are we going?”
“I told you there was something you would like. It is complete rubbish, but you will like it.”
I followed him, and we headed to the west away from the caravan, up a long, seemingly endless hill. I noted that we were not alone; as usual, there were guards and sentries lining our route which the Mighty did not even bother to acknowledge.
After an hour of this upward trot, I said, “Are you sure there’s something worth seeing ahead?”
Without turning his head he answered, “You are like the kit who, in the wagon, keeps asking, ‘are we there yet’?”
Before I could say anything he added, “We will be there soon.”
After another hour he announced, “Just over this rise.”
We topped the second of two high hills we had mounted. I stopped a moment to look back. The caravan was invisible on the plain below us. A mist had settled far below.
Haydn of Mars Page 5