Copernicus sighed. “This is not good,” he said. “Our first night, and we’re to be welcomed with a storm.”
But it never materialized, and as we pushed out way down into the bowl the clouds magically dispersed above us, and Phobos and then Deimos rose and set, and dawn found us surrounded by hot sand, and pitching a poor man’s tent which Copernicus had packed and now unpacked, which stood chest high at the apex and five feet wide at the floor, but could be sealed on all sides.
“The smaller the better,” Copernicus explained, “since it gives the wind less area to work on.”
I stretched, feeling hot and ill tempered.
“There isn’t even a breeze,” I snapped. The sky had remained cloudless, and the sun stood out like a hot, angry coin against the pale and otherwise empty sky.
“Wait an hour,” the little fellow said patiently, and crawled into the tent.
While I stood regarding the empty landscape, hill upon rolling hill of nothing but bright pink sand, he added, “I suggest you stay out of the heat as much as possible, and get some sleep this time.”
For a moment I stood pat, until I heard him snoring inside.
Then, angry and tired, I crawled in after him, to find that for such a small feline he took up a lot of space, and had to conform my own curl to his own sprawl, leaving me with little room to sleep and his boot precariously close to my face. But I was suddenly exhausted, and finally slept –
– only to be awaked soon after by the wind, which had begun as a background hiss for my bad dreams, and which steadily increased to a whine and on to a howl before I was awake, watching the walls of our poor structure rattle and shake like a dying man, and buckle toward me with each pounding fist of gusting wind.
Copernicus slept blithely on through it all, and when I briefly unzipped the tightly closed front flap to look out, I was instantly blinded by rushing, pelting sand. I could see nothing a half foot in front of my face, and pulled my head back in immediately.
The wind only increased, and all that day, try as I might, I gained no more sleep.
When at last darkness was falling, tinting the walls of the tent with darker light, the wind subsided, and then fell to nothing.
Copernicus awoke, stretched, and cried his habitual, “Ah!”
I looked at him balefully when he asked, “Did you sleep well?”
“The sandstorm kept me awake.”
He frowned, and then said, “Oh! You mean the wind, of course. That was no sandstorm. You’d best pray to your benefactor that we don’t run into a real sandstorm, your majesty.”
He pulled out hardtack from his tunic, and after a while I did also, and almost treasured its dry, brittle taste in my empty stomach, which I then washed away with a few bitter sips from my canteen.
Then we packed, pulling our tent free from the sand walls which had built around it and breaking it down, pulling the hoods from our horses before feeding and watering them, and riding off, once again, into the indeterminate night.
The next night and day went much as the one before, and the one after that, also. I began to think, as fools often due when offered repetition, that this Great Desert wasn’t so great at all, and had nothing to show me that I could not handle. When the clouds rolled in on the third night and Copernicus began to make noises of alarm, I laughed and waited for them to disperse as they had on the first night. But they didn’t and only thickened, and then a fierce hot pelting rain began, with drops as big as a knuckle, which at first refreshed with their wetness but then began to assault.
“Tie the horses down, and get the tent up as quickly as possible!” Copernicus shouted, jumping from his mount and yanking the tent poles from their makeshift scabbard. I followed with the tent itself, and soon we had secreted ourselves inside, pushing our way through a thickening mixture of sand and water which resembled not so much mud as a kind of semi-liquid rock. Around us the landscape was turning to something resembling lava, rivers of water and viscous sand where only dry dunes and hollows had existed twenty minutes before.
“I hope we drove the tent stakes deep enough!” Copernicus fretted, as the floor beneath us undulated with flowing mixture of sand and rain. It felt like we were floating on a river, when in fact the river was flowing beneath us.
“Pray it doesn’t last long – they seldom do,” Copernicus said.
“And if it does?”
His doomed look told me all I needed to know.
But as quickly as the pelting rain had come it stopped – as if a giant switch in the sky had been violently turned off. One moment there was the roar of watery fury on our roof, and then it disappeared.
Already the ground beneath us stopped moving, and then settled.
“Quickly!” Copernicus cautioned. “We must break the tent down now or we’ll never get it out of the sand!”
We crawled out into a bizarre landscape of scudding clouds, dark patches of deep star-studded night overhead and a red black landscape altered around us – a hiss of drying sands arose, sending clouds of steam into the again-dry air. Already the sand was drying out underfoot, clumps held together by water falling and flaking apart. Our tent was mired in a pool of the stuff, and we dug around it madly before the sheer weight of drying sand kept it as a souvenir of the desert.
“I don’t understand,” I said to Copernicus as I furiously scooped sand away from it – it seemed to be sinking beneath us.
“The water goes back into the air, but the first rains went deep enough to be retained by the desert. Some of it will end up in underground aquifers. Some will form quicksand pools which won’t dissipate for days. The violence of the change when the hot sand once again takes over from the temporary water is such that anything of the surface will be sucked down into the ground – including the horses!” he cried, abandoning the tent for a moment to run to the horses, nearly ankle deep in sand and slowly sinking as I watched. He slapped them on their flanks and they reared up, then moved their hoofs and were free.
As I stood regarding this I felt my own boots sinking into the ground, and had to yank them up, one after the other, before falling to the work of reclaiming the tent.
Copernicus rejoined me, and before long, with a mighty heave, we pulled the collapsed structure free of the pit in which it had been mired.
I looked down to see a retreating pool of water, which cracked and dried as I watched, then broke apart, with a sighing sound, into a plain and level measure of desert sand.
We lay the tent out on the now dry sandy surface nearby, and collapsed exhausted next to it. The horses were safe, and the night was once again clear and beautiful and full of stars, which Copernicus regarded with clear lust.
“If I wasn’t so tired I would set up the telescope,” he remarked, craning his head high to regard a red star overhead.
But a moment later he was asleep and snoring, and before long I followed his example, and retained the first sleep I had claimed since the beginning of our journey.
Fourteen
“As you’ve seen,” Copernicus remarked the following night, one crystal clear and free of even a hint of breeze, “the desert has its own set of rules. It has its own weather, its own way of tending to itself.”
I nodded, in a slightly better mood than I had been. I had slept nearly a whole night and following day, and my belly was full of hardtack and my thirst, which was not as great now as it had been at the beginning of this journey, had been sated with a mouthful of water from my nearly empty canteen.
“I’ve heard that there are tribes of nomads who never leave the desert,” I said, and I saw him, under the faint light of Deimos, shiver.
“The Sandies?” he said. “We can only hope this desert is wide enough that we don’t come across a Sandy.”
“Why? I’ve heard that they are cousins to the gypsies, and of a like temper.”
“Hardly. They boil kits alive, so happy are they to find meat of any kind – never mind what they would do to a full grown feline.”
I
laughed shortly. “That sounds like an old wives’ tale.”
He brought his horse around to face me, and stopped in his tracks. “It is no myth,” he said. “You must remember, I live on the other side of this desert. When I was a kit one of my playmates was spirited off in the middle of the night by Sandies and never seen alive again. His bones were found years later, half covered by sand at the bottom of a dune. His skull was never found.”
“How do you know it was him?” I asked, eager to play devil’s advocate. “And how do you know he was spirited away by Sandies? Every community has stories about beasts and outsiders, who they demonize and ascribe with powers and foul rites. Look at our concept of the gypsies, before my father fell in with them? He found them to be moral and even patriotic. Darwin told me stories that he had heard while growing up about gypsies that would curl your facial hair. And they turned out to be one hundred percent untrue. We always demonize the ‘other’.”
Copernicus merely shook his head, unable or unwilling to change his mind. “Believe me, we do not want to meet up with a Sandy.”
I shrugged. “As you wish.”
He was studying the dawn horizon, a mottled band of red and brown with strange patches. One of the tornadoes which we had witnessed periodically from afar was whipping its way from east to west, leaving a high brushstroke of dust behind it.
“We will travel a bit during the day, today. We need to find an oasis, and water, even if it takes us out of our way, and they are much harder to come across at night.”
I said nothing in answer, trusting his judgment, and we mounted, heading northwest toward one of the darker patches of landscape, a ruddy red blot in the distance.
It proved not to be an oasis, but rather a strange outcropping of red rocks thrust up through the surrounding sand. We passed this strange sculpture by and went on.
Our next destination was a fortuitous one, a dark patch which resolved itself from brown to dark green as we approached, and proved to be what we sought. There was a deep, bubbling pool of water surrounded by tiny desert flowers of blue and yellow. We filled our canteens. Our horses lapped greedily at this bounty, and it proved to be so cool and refreshing that I resolved to take a quick bath.
Copernicus, filled with modesty, moved off to examine the flora at the edge of the oasis while I removed my tunic and undergarments and slipped blissfully into the pool. The water was almost cold, and I happily submerged myself, feeling the dust and sand slide out of my fur.
Something tickled my foot and I looked down into the murky deep, just making out a huge shape –
With a yelp I was out of the pool and shivering on the bank, pulling on my underthings. I watched in wonder as a long, thin tentacle, mottled and dark blue in the sun, snaked up out of the water as if testing the air. It grew impossibly long, five feet, six feet, seven–
“Amazing!” Copernicus cried, appearing beside me. “A Gigantus! Here in the middle of the Great Desert! That pool must lead to an underground ocean or deep river!”
I continued to shiver.
“You’re lucky he didn’t pull you down,” Copernicus said gravely, as the tentacle formed a loop at its tip and then slowly sank back into the water, leaving a tiny splash behind.
In a moment the pool was smooth and inviting as it had been, but I was putting on the rest of my clothes and turning my back on it.
“We have water to last us the rest of the trip,” Copernicus announced happily an hour later, as we left the oasis behind and headed due north once more. He was studying the horizon and sky, paying particular attention to the west, which was now suffused with a line of mist or sand which rose high into the sky.
“I don’t like the looks of that,” Copernicus said. “But it may blow south of us.”
We pitched our tent in the early afternoon, after leaving the oasis, and any Sandies (“Where there is water there are Sandies,” Copernicus had declared) and sought to sleep, but Copernicus rose every half hour to check this approaching line. It did indeed move to the south, behind us, he reported, but was still growing in the west when night fell. We went on, and as the night wore on I heard, very faintly at first, a distant keening sound that grew incrementally.
“I’m afraid we’re in for it,” Copernicus said, just before dawn. The keening sound had become a high whistling howl, and the entire south and west were lost in a high, roiling cloud of disturbed sand. Copernicus brought us to a halt in a small valley. To my surprise, after securing our tent and filling it with our food and water supplies, he slapped the flanks of both horses, driving them away to the north. Needing no more encouragement, they galloped away, bearing with them the rest of our provisions and Copernicus’s beloved telescope.
“Why did you do that?” I asked, already half-knowing the answer.
“If they stay the storm will kill them. This way, without our added weight, there is a chance they will outrun it. If so, I will see my telescope again. If not...”
He shrugged, resigned to fate, and we crawled into our meager shelter and secured the flap after us. The howl outside was becoming a scream, and now Copernicus had to shout to be heard.
“We will get no rest, I’m afraid,” he said. “Soon, you will not be able to hear yourself think. You will believe you are going mad, with the roar of the storm. We must pray that our stakes are deep enough to hold us in place – otherwise, we will be blown away. And we must pray that the storm does not last too long, or we will be buried alive, too deep to dig our way out.”
“Cheerful thoughts!” I replied, trying to smile and show him the courage I did not possess.
He shook his head. “There are no cowards or heroes in sandstorms, your majesty. Only the dead, and the survivors.”
As if in answer, the wind kicked up another screeching notch, and I could no longer hear what the little fellow was saying when he opened his mouth.
And so the storm went. I did not think that any sound could be so loud, and yet it became even louder. I pressed my paws over my ears and gritted my teeth against screaming, and still it grew louder. Sand flew at our tent in slapping sheets, like water without wetness. This thumping and shearing sound only added to the din, which became unbearable. I looked at Copernicus who was rolled up on the ground, his ears covered, eyes wide, his mouth open – I could not hear his cries. And still the storm mounted. I watched in horror as one of our tent poles began to vibrate like a plucked string. It broke suddenly and one end of our structure collapsed. The other pole, nearer to our heads, also began to vibrate and, as I reached out to steady it, it broke in my hands and the tent collapsed completely on top of us. I felt a weight of sand pressing me down from above, and the wind keened higher, and yet higher.
This seemed to go on for hours, as the weight of sand steadily grew above us, pushing us down. It became difficult to breath. I reached out for Copernicus, who was shivering like a leaf.
“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” he screamed, a snatched whisper above the wind. I tried to push up the tent above us, but the weight was too much, and I could not budge it. It was as if a giant hand was pushing down on us, telling us to succumb.
We waited for the end.
Then there was another sound joined to the wind, now, a strange thumping and then scraping. I could no longer believe my own senses. This scraping went on and on, unidentifiable, and then suddenly the tent was ripped open above my head. The tear grew until both Copernicus and I were uncovered. The night was black, and sand beat against us mercilessly, and there was a shape in the dark, a wrapped figure with dark eyes which looked huge and reached down for me.
Before the world went away I heard Copernicus screech once, a mighty fearful sound above the wind:
“Sandies!”
Fifteen
I arose from blackness.
I could hear nothing but the inner beating of my own heart. I was in a dark place, but the dire howling of the wind was gone. No, not gone – but distant, muffled, quieted.
I reached up and my paw i
nstantly hit something, a smooth wall or ceiling, not a foot over my head. Behind me was another wall, and the toe of my boot found another at my feet. To my left my paw found fur, an arm, a face which, I determined by gentle probing, belonged to the sleeping form of Copernicus. To my right – another body, this one awake.
A low chuckle was followed by a rasping voice: “Sleep. That is all there is to do, now. Sleep through the storm.”
“Who—”
“I said sleep.” The low chuckle again. “We will discuss eating you after the storm is over.”
Again the chuckle, joined by other voices giggling elsewhere in this box we were in.
I tried to sleep, but could only think of those last words...
Finally I did sleep, but was awakened by a rough hand. I opened my eyes to brilliant daylight. I closed my eyes against the harsh light but they were immediately forced open by an ungentle paw. A wrapped face lowered itself over me and piercing eyes looked into my own, back and forth.
“There is no damage,” the voice, lilting, reported.
“The corneas are clean?” a second voice, the one I had heard in the box, inquired.
“Yes,” the lilt said.
“Good. They were not caught outside, which means at least one of them is not a fool.”
The face over me retreated.
“May I get up?” I inquired.
The rasping voice replied, “Of course! Get up! Dance if you wish! The storm is over and it is a brand new day!”
The lilting voice laughed.
I sat up, blinking, and saw that there were two of them. Copernicus was nowhere to be seen. The two, wrapped from head to foot in brown cloth, looked to be man and woman, and the woman looked to be with kit. Her belly under the cloth was huge.
“Where is..?” I began, but before I could finish, the gruff male, who was thin, replied, “We did not eat him, do not worry. He is using the...facilities, as he said, or he has run away. It is nothing to us.”
Noting the humor in the voice, I said, “You saved our lives. Thank you.”
Queen of Mars - Book III in the Masters of Mars Trilogy Page 7