Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  “Easy, boy!” Buckle shouted. “Easy, lad!” But he knew his words could not crack the horse’s terror. He could do no more than stay in the saddle and hold on to Max and the fluttering torch, and hope beyond all hope that the sabertooths did not bring Cronos down.

  The loaded musket still lay across the front of the saddle, but Buckle could not reach it, not while holding on to the torch and Max at the same time. One musket shot was not going to save them, anyway. The trees they passed were denser now, whizzing by on either side at breakneck speed, but Cronos somehow avoided them.

  Cronos was charging as fast as he could when he ran off the edge of the cliff.

  In an instant they were in midair.

  Buckle found himself in free fall, out of the saddle, plummeting through swirling whiteness, his arms locked around Max, with the kicking horse descending alongside.

  A cliff? That simply wasn’t fair.

  THE CAVE

  BUCKLE, MAX, AND CRONOS FELL into the white void, the yellow orb of the torch waffling weirdly as it dropped through the torrent alongside them. They glanced off a near-vertical wall of snow, and the impact spun their bodies. Buckle kept his arms secure around Max, his face buried in the thick bearskin on her back as they tumbled.

  Then they were rolling, bouncing and rolling, down the steeply angled incline, each impact made soft by the snow, bringing down a small avalanche with them. What little Buckle could see of the world spun in rough, white bounces, and dark tufts of grass or splotches of stones.

  They rolled to a stop, Buckle on his back, Max’s limp form on top of him. Buckle gasped through the crust of snow coating his face and blinked. Even with the gale thundering in his ears, he heard Cronos stagger upright nearby, and then his frightened whinny trailing away along with the jangle of his tack as he set off running again.

  No more musket. No more horse, for that matter.

  Buckle carefully slid Max off his chest and leveraged himself to his knees. He should be running, but where? He could see nothing, but he guessed that the horse had dropped them in the ravine. His right forearm burned where the damned steampiper had cut him, and there were pains in his body, bruises and perhaps lacerations, but they were not injurious enough to slow him down. He leaned over Max, shielding her face from the storm, and yanked his hand from his glove to wipe a carapace of blood-streaked snow from her face and goggles.

  Her nose and mouth emerged, striped pale white and black, but whether she breathed or not he had no way to tell. He jammed his hand back into his glove and gathered her body in his arms, cradling her against his chest as he stood. If they were in the ravine there were caves there, caves everywhere. He had to find shelter soon and tend to Max’s wounds, or Max would most surely die.

  If she is not dead already. A fear crept over Buckle that had nothing to do with the sabertooths.

  Facing the incline they had just rolled down, Buckle turned right. He had no inkling why right was better than left. Given the choice, he preferred to turn right. The snow was deep and forced him to pump his legs high as he staggered forward, Max in his arms, advancing into the teeth of the raging blizzard.

  Perhaps it would have been better to turn left.

  The icy wind bit at Buckle’s exposed neck—whatever skin his helmet, goggles, and beard did not protect. The goggles were damned near frozen over again, thickening up with even more ice from his frantic exertions. It did not matter much—he could not see anything, anyway. Buckle moved forward, ever forward, his legs slinging snow as they drove like pistons through the snowdrifts cast up against the cliff. He struggled through close-packed trees, his shoulders and Max’s swinging boots shattering the ice encasing their branches.

  The muscles in Buckle’s thighs burned. He was stuck in slow motion, a fly stuck in molasses.

  And the sabertooths, relentless predators, did not give up easily.

  A shadow emerged from the murk on Buckle’s left, and his hammering heart leapt. He veered straight at it, splintering through a thin, dead, frozen tree that blocked his way. It was a cave, the mouth of a cave, mostly blocked by a snowdrift, and overhung by rafts of snow and icicles, its maw as dark as night.

  Buckle bounded through the deep snow between him and the cave in a matter of seconds. Once he’d plowed through the high snowdrift and stumbled in under the overhang, he found his snow-coated legs suddenly unencumbered, for the floor of the cavern was clear, the uneven granite gleaming under a layer of clear ice with a dusting of granular snow.

  Buckle tossed his torch, the flames now burning much brighter, away from the wind, into the darkness. Through his iced-up goggles, he could see little of the interior of the cave, and he remained in a ducking crouch, unable to measure the height of the ceiling above him. He carried Max a few strides farther, as far as he dared, until he could see where he was going, and then knelt, gently laying her on the icy floor.

  Buckle pulled his goggles up onto the brow of his helmet, knocking off the frosty crust that had accumulated there. The flickering torch lay about ten feet ahead, and in its ebbing light, he could see that the cavern was of a decent depth, perhaps thirty feet to the irregular back wall and wider on the sides, and the ceiling high enough for a man to stand. Small, secondary chambers honeycombed the rear and sides of the cavern, though how far into the mountain the subterranean intestines might reach, Buckle could not tell.

  Buckle could build a fire here and tend to Max. He could make a stand against the sabertooths here. If he had the time.

  Buckle removed his gloves and pressed his fingers against Max’s neck, searching for the pulse of the jugular vein. At least, he assumed that Max had jugular veins. He had no idea. He knew very little about the anatomy of the humanlike alien creature who had saved his life so many times. They had stood together through many a happy hour and sad, and yet he hardly knew her.

  The half-frozen skin of his fingertips managed to find the dull beat of her heart in the flesh, but it was weak and erratic. And the coldness of her body unsettled him.

  “You are one tough bird, I’ll give you that, Max,” Buckle said, hoping Max could hear him.

  Buckle lifted Max again. She sighed, not with an easy relaxation of air from the lungs, but with a shuddering tightness that suggested agony. Buckle carried her deeper into the cavern, closer to the back wall of the main chamber. He laid her on the ice-glazed floor and, after making sure she was as deeply folded into her warm clothes as he could arrange, reached into his ammunition pouch to reload the one pistol he had remaining in his belt.

  He worked quickly in the weak torchlight, biting off the top of the paper cartridge and pouring the blackbang powder down the barrel, ramming it home with the wadding and the lead ball. His eardrums, for so long brutalized by the battering storm, now roared of their own accord, drowning out the wail of the wind behind him.

  Removing his powder horn from his belt, Buckle poured fine-grained into the pan just under the flintlock. He grabbed the torch and stood up. “You hold fast, you hear me?” he said to the unconscious Max. “I shall be right back.”

  Buckle turned and strode toward the mouth of the cave, feeling oddly negligent for taking the torch with him, and leaving poor Max alone in the freezing dark. Max needed to be warmed up. He had to make a fire, and a fire required fuel. Beasties or no beasties, he had to go outside and gather wood.

  FIRE AND THE LITTLE PINK SCAR

  LASHED BY THE STORM, BUCKLE thankfully did not have far to go in the unnatural twilight to collect the pieces of the dead tree he had snapped only moments before. He stuck his pistol in his belt—and felt insanely vulnerable, as he bent to pick up the loose wood. The spindly twigs and branches were good tinder. Enough to get things started. Big, living fir and pine swung in the roiling murk, promising a slow-burning, smoky fuel that might be wet enough to last through the night.

  Once Buckle turned back toward the cave, his arms jammed full of twigs, his heart missed a beat when he could not see the entrance through the dense snowfall, even th
ough he knew it was there. He stopped. He should procure a big chunk of wood now, or else he was going to have to come out and get one later: later, when night had fallen and the sabertooths would have had time to sniff them out again.

  Buckle waded through waist-deep snow to reach the tall pines growing along the base of the cliff. Placing his tinder sticks in a pile, he shoved a raft of snowy branches aside to get ahold of a limb that he could snap away. As he rocked the branch back and forth, chunks of snow fell on him from the branches overhead, accompanied by the clatter of falling icicles.

  The branch broke off with a satisfyingly loud snap, and Buckle ripped it out of its tangle with its brothers. He tucked the heavy limb under his arm, picked up his kindling sticks, and loped through the snowdrifts back to the cave. Max lay where he had left her, bundled deep in her coat, and the mournful wail of the wind made her plight seem even more grave, as if she lay in a tomb.

  “Max! You stay with me, you hear?” Buckle whispered as he knelt beside her, expecting no response and getting none. Her eyes were shut inside her goggles, her lips slightly parted, the ashen paleness of her face startling in its nest of black fur. Buckle bashed each wooden stick on the floor to break away its casing of ice, and rushed to stack his kindling.

  Max had lost what seemed like gallons of blood. The wounds had to be stanched. But to strip her down in subzero air invited death by hypothermia. To attempt to clean her wounds without boiled water invited death by infection. And infection was the biggest specter haunting the kind of wounds she had taken. If she survived the shock and blood loss, which Buckle believed—maybe desperately—she would, the sabertooth claws and teeth that had penetrated her body were infamously infective, rotten with death as they were, not to mention the bits of leather and bear fur they had driven deep into the flesh. If the wounds were not properly treated, if they were not flushed and cleaned before they closed, then even the expertise of the Crankshaft physicians might not prove enough against the fester and gangrene.

  Buckle reached for the fire horn Pinter had given him—poor, unfortunate Pinter—and was surprised to find the horn warm to the touch, the flame still alive within it. There was a tinderbox inside the survival pouch on his belt, but the ready flame of the fire horn would be faster.

  Max gasped, suffering a violent bout of shivers. Buckle unbuttoned the front of his parka—the wad of papers he had salvaged from the Founders’ wreck spilled out onto the floor—and laid his fur on top of her. He still had on a sheepskin undercoat and his leather aviator coat beneath that, so the cold was of no concern to him now that they were out of the wind. “There you go, girl,” Buckle whispered close to Max’s face. He did not know why he felt the need to whisper, but he did. “We shall have you warm as toast in a few moments.”

  Max stopped shaking, but her sleeping face looked tense with pain.

  Buckle removed his survival pouch from his belt and, unfolding the neatly squared oilskin they were packed in, arranged the contents on the floor: one tinderbox, a small box of sulfur-tipped matches, six paraffin candles, a foot of coiled kindling hemp, five squares of chocolate, one knife, one flare gun with three cartridges, one roll of gauze, one roll of heavy bandage, three vials of morphine, one steel-and-glass syringe, one tin of Dr. Fassbinder’s Penicillin Paste, eight ounces of water in a cylindrical steel canteen, a small steel pot, and six firearm cartridges—three for a musket and three pistol shots.

  “I think we lost the beasties, at least,” Buckle said. “In a way, it is a bit unfortunate. I would have enjoyed chopping another one.”

  Buckle felt like he was running out of time. He cut off half a foot of the hemp and jammed it under his kindling tepee, tossing a half dozen of the matches under the stack as well. He lit one more match with the fire horn and tossed it in. The fire burst to life with harsh puffs of flame as the match heads ignited and set the hemp to burning. Thick gray smoke wafted up to the ceiling and pooled there, spilling away and upward into whatever depressions had the most elevation.

  Buckle wanted to keep talking. To let Max hear his voice. He wanted to describe a shared memory they had from childhood. But, he realized, they had never shared anything pleasant as children. That had been his fault. “How shall we pass the time? I am awful at telling stories,” he said, forcing lightness into his voice. “And I know you don’t want me to sing.”

  Once the kindling, frozen, but dry as parchment, caught flame, Buckle tucked the steel pot against the wood and filled it with the eight ounces of water from the canteen. He carefully nudged the stem of the heavy tree branch into the opposite skirt of the fire, close enough to allow the flames to lick it, without smothering them with its cold weight and melting ice. The wood immediately began to smoke black, the bark splitting, and that was a good sign. Buckle placed the syringe near the fire so the cold glass would warm and not crack when he filled it with hot water.

  “Look at that fire, eh? I make them good. Real rat cookers.”

  Buckle tucked back Max’s hood and placed his fingers on her fur-lined flying helmet, squarely pressing the spring-loaded switch on the aqueous humor reservoir; the clear liquid evacuated from the interior of her goggles within a few seconds, and he lifted the goggles up onto the helmet.

  “You have made quite a business out of saving my skin, Max,” Buckle said as he slowly, carefully removed her leather helmet. “I would be most pleased if you would allow me to return the favor. If you care about my feelings one whit, you will kindly find a way not to die on me.”

  Max’s eyes were closed, of course, but Buckle hoped that they might open. Once again, he pressed his fingers against the white flesh over her jugular vein, battling a lurking despair that she was going to die on him right there. Her neck muscles tightened against his cold fingers—she was still alive, if only barely, and the knot in Buckle’s stomach eased a little.

  “And when a captain gives an order, he expects it to be followed,” Buckle said. “It appears that when I give an order, my own wicked officers only consider it a suggestion, as if I were asking them what they think of the Darwinists, or what, perhaps, might they like for dinner. I expressly forbade anyone to follow me up the mountain.”

  Max lay motionless under the heavy fur coats, her face now wreathed by her luxurious black hair. Her wide eyelids with their thick black lashes fluttered once as the flames of the fire rose and warmed her face, the yellow illumination pulsing across her white skin and the black, curving stripes that framed it. Her breath was coming and going, too quick and shallow for Buckle to feel good about it. On her forehead he noticed her little pink scar, thin and straight as a needle, which ran about two inches up from the end of her eyebrow to trail off into her hairline.

  Buckle had been seven years of age, Max of an age unknown. Buckle and Elizabeth had recently arrived in Balthazar’s house, the newest adopted orphans, and Buckle was confused, angry, and prey to night terrors after the violent deaths of his parents. Max and her brother, Tyro, were already there, well sequestered in the family, slender and striped, the stars of the classroom and imperturbable behind their liquid-sloshing goggles.

  Buckle hated them. He hated them.

  Dead-eyed freaks.

  He remembered only fragments of the day that his parents had been attacked on the mountain. He mostly remembered running and pulling Elizabeth along. But he did remember that one of the attackers was a Martian.

  He was always after them, both Max and Tyro, taunting, teasing, insulting, and when the opportunity presented itself, willing to inflict bodily harm. Such things were not an immediate part of Buckle’s makeup—he had not been raised to entertain such impulses—but the rage within him drove him to it. It shocked him, but he could not control himself. It was as if the rage would take control of his body and mind, and he would be shoved back, a mere spectator to the mayhem, either unable or unwilling to referee his own actions.

  Balthazar, Calypso, and the governess, Catherine Flick, always did their best to separate Buckle from the Martian childr
en, but he was always looking for an opening to pull hair, splash ink, or trip up. His punishments had increased in intensity, from being sent to his room to shoveling the dung out of the mews, but it deterred him little.

  He simply could not rein in his anger.

  One day, Buckle caught Max alone in the corridor of the house, without the company of Tyro or an adult. They were both on their way to geometry class, Balthazar’s leather-bound books tucked under their arms, and their paths from opposite ends of the house had somehow intersected.

  Buckle immediately pounced. He swiped Max’s books out of her hands, and they tumbled to the floor in heavy thuds. Her eyes flashed crimson in her goggles. He laughed, hating her, despising the slender, black-and-white striped hands that looked so out of place at the ends of her dress sleeves.

  “Look at me, you black-eyed zebe!” Buckle snarled. He ripped off her goggles, the aqueous humor spewing as they came free. Face dripping, Max stared at him, her big black eyes brimming with defiance. Brimming with hurt.

  “You look like a bug!” Buckle shouted, tossing the goggles aside. “Stinkbug!”

  Max stepped forward in a way she never had before. Jammed in her left fist was a geometry compass, which she now swung, driving the sharp point into Buckle’s right shoulder with surprising force, plunging it into the muscle deeply enough for the compass to remain stuck there even when she removed her hand.

  Buckle froze. The Martians never fought back. The Martians had always endured his attacks stoically, covering themselves as best they could and waiting for an adult or an older child, like the eldest son, Ryder, to step in for them.

  Not this time.

  Max stared at him, her eyes calm, victorious, condescending, and aquamarine.

  Buckle’s shoulder suddenly hurt like hell. He jerked the compass out of his flesh and hurled it against the wall, where it left a little splotch of blood before dropping to the floor with a clunk.