Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  Max turned and ran. Buckle sprinted after her.

  He was going to kill her.

  They ran and ran, down the long corridors of Balthazar’s grand Tehachapi house. Max dashed like a gazelle, veering through doorways with elegant speed, her skirt fluttering about her legs, but Buckle, coming on with his greater size and speed, closed the gap; he grabbed one of her long black braids, lovingly threaded by Calypso, and yanked her head back.

  Max lunged forward, jerking the braid out of Buckle’s grasp. She stumbled and slammed headfirst into the oak jamb of the parlor door frame. Her forward motion suddenly arrested, Max dropped in a fluttering pile of skirt. She lay on her back, legs twitching, blood, bright red, crimson as cherry pigment, spilling from the gash in her forehead, trickling across both the white and black stripes.

  Buckle could not take his eyes off her. Something strange worked inside him, a disconcerted, unspeakable, unfair remorse: something he had never felt before.

  The sounds of boots on timber came pounding up behind him.

  “Max!” Calypso shrieked.

  Something powerful lifted Buckle from behind. He had been lifted up by the hair. He saw his feet kicking in the air.

  Balthazar Crankshaft had never before raised his hand against one of his own children, and never would again. But that morning, as Max was carried bleeding to the infirmary by the weeping Calypso, Romulus Buckle had the tar beaten out of him by the grand old man of the Crankshafts.

  And Buckle, his arse pink and his ears bruised, never cried. He deserved what he got. Part of him had wanted to be hated, had wanted to die.

  Buckle took a deep breath and brushed Max’s hair back from the scar on her forehead. The skin felt cold and clammy.

  Max had expressly forgiven him—the very next morning over breakfast—but her graciousness, her concern for the offender’s feelings, had done nothing but wound him to the quick. In later years, if the scar was noticed by a schoolmate, Max would claim that she barely even remembered the incident. But Buckle knew that Max remembered. And it pained him to think that she did.

  Martians never lied, people said. Max said. But Max was only half Martian.

  The water in the iron pot came to a boil, a thousand bubbles pinging against the metal. Buckle unsheathed the knife and stuck the blade into the rolling water.

  Buckle was no surgeon, but he had a surgeon’s work to do.

  And Max’s life depended on him doing it well.

  THE APPRENTICE SURGEON

  BUCKLE SLID HIS HEAVY COAT off Max and unhooked the latches of her bearskin. He tried to pull the fur lining from her left side, but found that the copious amounts of blood, now frozen in scarlet gobbets of ice, had stuck it to her woolen sweater beneath. He used his knife to cut the sweater away. The sweet, coppery smell of blood swamped his nostrils. As he worked the bearskin and the black woolen sweater out from under her light form, cradling her head against his thighs as he raised her upper body slightly, he found that the blouse beneath was in shreds, a white silk garment now utterly soaked the color of scarlet, heavy with slushy blood.

  Buckle worked quickly, handling Max as he would a sleeping baby. He wondered if he should give her a shot of morphine. He decided against it. She was unconscious now. She would need the painkiller once she roused. There was not a lot of it.

  Max started trembling. She was terribly weakened, susceptible to the cold. And the cave air did not feel much warmer, though the heat of the adolescent fire surged at his back. But it would have to do.

  Applying the knife to Max’s blouse, Buckle sliced it away, revealing the skin underneath: skin pale as cream where he wiped it, skin adorned with curving black stripes. Max’s entire left side was awash in thick blood that looked black in the firelight, down to where it had pooled over the belt at her waist. His heart sank, there was so much of it, steaming in places, dripping down the ribs. He pulled away the tattered remnants of the blouse, and she lay exposed from the waist up.

  It would have surprised Buckle, if he had time to consider it, that Max’s well-muscled stomach was all white. Buckle had never seen Max’s body beyond her face, neck, and hands. She had always kept it hidden under sleeves and high collars. Hers was a beautiful form, very human in appearance, except for the black stripes upon it, tapering off along her rib cage and swirling around her small, pink-nippled breasts, but Buckle was in no state of mind to register such things. Even though his invasion of her well-guarded privacy was necessary to save her life—he was her doctor now, after all—if anything, he experienced a sense of impropriety as he worked. And there arose another emotion, guilt, a despair at the violence of the wounds she had suffered in his defense, but he was too absorbed in his task to give such feelings any attention.

  The sabertooth had sunk its fangs into Max’s shoulder near the neck, plunging into the muscle just above her clavicle. The two puncture wounds were dark red, deep, as regular as drill holes, and still wide open, leaking both blood and clear fluid. They were awful wounds, to be sure, but the beastie had not locked down, or Max would most surely be dead. The sabertooth’s first bite was for capture; the second bite would have been for the kill.

  More worrisome even than the bite wounds were the long claw slashes down Max’s back. Buckle carefully shifted her onto her uninjured right side to investigate. There were four separate gashes, each one longer and deeper than the next, ripped down the flesh of her back from the top of the shoulder blade to the waist. The narrow, ragged wounds had bled badly, though he could not see that any had sunk deep enough to damage the bones or organs beneath.

  Buckle decided to start with the bite wounds. He eased Max onto her back again, and then removed the pot from the fire, so the boiling water would not evaporate away. Taking the surgical knife from the pot, he cut away a section of the gauze roll, dipped it in the water, and began wiping the icy gouts of blood away from Max’s neck. Blood oozed from the bite punctures, flooding the white skin immediately after he wiped it. He used a small handful of the bandages to continue cleaning, but the cloth was soon soaked completely through.

  Buckle filled the syringe with hot water from the pot; he sank the point of the needle into the first bite wound and drove his thumb down on the plunger, expressing the near-boiling water with as much force as he could. He continued pressing the plunger until the water flooded out of the flesh clear and clean, and then repeated the procedure with the second wound. With the veins below freed from the debris and coagulate that had stifled them, new blood flowed from the bite punctures in rivers.

  Buckle unscrewed the Fassbinder’s Penicillin Paste tin and sank two fingers into the pale-green balm, then plugged the fingers into Max’s wounds, stanching the blood flow. He placed a folded gauze bandage on Max’s shoulder and pressed down on it. Max shifted, ever so slightly, uttering a small, plaintive sigh. The sound nearly broke Buckle’s heart. She started shivering. He felt her quivering muscles tighten as if she might be coming around.

  Buckle cautiously turned Max onto her stomach, allowing the weight of her body to maintain the pressure on her shoulder bandage, and immediately set to cleaning the claw wounds. Her thick black hair had become unbound from whatever device she had pinned it with, and he swept it aside. Her flesh continued to shiver, and he worked as fast as he could, a little more roughly than he would have liked, irrigating the length of the cuts with the syringe and wiping the excesses of blood away with the gauze. He used much of the rest of the penicillin paste to seal the wounds before laying strips of bandage along the length of each of them.

  Buckle was going to have to wind the gauze around her body to fasten the bandages tight to the wounds. He leveraged her onto her right side again; the bandages, already half-soaked with blood, remained in place, stuck to the wounds by the combination of coagulate and Fassbinder’s paste.

  “Perhaps it would be best if I were to sit up for you to proceed with your wrappings,” Max said in a hoarse whisper, startling Buckle. Her voice was even but quivering underneath, soake
d with pain.

  “Max,” Buckle whispered, overjoyed at the sound of her voice, peering down at her face. “Stay still. I can manage. I am going to give you morphine.”

  Max opened her eyes, the big black orbs shimmering in the orange firelight. “Not yet, Captain. Finish your surgery first.” Max planted her right hand on the floor and pushed with a feeble but determined heave, attempting to sit up.

  “Stay still. Blue blazes!” Buckle cursed. “Damn it, Max. All right.”

  Careful not to disturb any bandaging, Buckle slipped his hands under Max’s armpits and assisted her into a sitting position. She was shivering violently again, her teeth clamped against the convulsions, breathing hard through her nose. Her black eyes wavered gold in the deeper layers, the Martian color of pain.

  Buckle began unwinding the gauze at Max’s shoulder, looping it around her torso and under each arm, circling the back, and returning to cross the injured shoulder again. His face was often mere inches from hers as she waited him to finish his work, and if she was embarrassed by her nakedness, she never showed it, nor made any attempt to cover herself.

  Buckle did not care one whit about her privacy right now. She was sitting up. She was speaking. She was very alive.

  “You do not listen to me as your captain, but I will demand that you listen to me as your surgeon,” Buckle said.

  “Aye,” Max whispered, with effort, followed by a rough swallow. She lifted her arms from her body slightly so that it would be easier for Buckle to loop the gauze. The motion must have caused her great discomfort, for she took a deep breath. Buckle tightened the bandages and tied off the ends. He laid Max down on the bearskin on her uninjured side, her frighteningly cold skin trembling under his warm fingers, and quickly covered her with his coat, tucking it up neatly under her chin. She was looking at him, looking at him with her big, bottomless black eyes, and he smiled at her.

  “You will get through this all right, Lieutenant,” Buckle said. “If you had not heard, I am one hell of a surgeon.”

  Max nodded. Martians were tough. A human being so torn up would have been dead by now, Buckle calculated. But her pain had to be immeasurable, no matter how she tried to hide it. He already had one of the glass morphine vials in his fingers. He worked his knife blade against the base of the nipple, weakening it enough that he could snap the cap away. He sank the syringe needle into the vial, drawing the golden liquid into the firelit glass.

  Max exhaled in a way Buckle knew meant disapproval. Martians did not like morphine much, though it alleviated pain for them in the same manner it did for humans. Buckle lifted the coat and swung out Max’s left arm. He searched for a vein inside her elbow, but the drained vessels refused to rise. He drove his thumb deep into the clammy flesh and finally found the flabby plumpness of a vein, and then he sank the needle home.

  Buckle slowly depressed the syringe plunger until the chamber was empty, then drew the needle free and replaced it in the still-steaming iron pot. He placed a patch of fresh gauze over the hole, but it hardly bled—Max’s body had little more to bleed with. Max released a sigh, a long, trembling signal of the onset of the morphine drowse, the release from the agony.

  Max was fast asleep before Buckle had time to tuck her arm back under her covers.

  THE CHAMBER OF NUMBERS

  THE FIRE BURNED WELL AND low, a gray husk packed with red embers, casting up bursts of sparks now and again, and Buckle hoped that the big chunk of wood he had procured would last them through the night. The blizzard still raged outside in the utter darkness where the weak illumination of the fire did not reach.

  Buckle was exhausted, and he might have felt sleepy if he was not so worried about Max. She had not moved since he had drugged her with the morphine about an hour before. His attention had barely drifted away from her sleeping face since.

  Her eyes moved back and forth beneath the lids, but he did not know if she was dreaming. He had heard that Martians did not dream in the same fashion as humans: rather than drifting into fanciful interludes that never escaped the confines of their skulls, like humans, they could somehow plug in to a massive Martian collective unconsciousness. Empowered in this mysterious way, some part of the mind could leave their sleeping bodies to travel, investigate, and interact with the conscious world.

  Buckle wondered how far away Max was from him in that moment.

  Would she remain that way forever? He was afraid that Max would die on him, and he knew the fear was justified.

  Once, he had removed his pocket watch and edged its polished brass cover close to her lips, to reassure himself that she was still breathing, and was relieved to see traces of pulsing condensation on the cold metal.

  Enough, Buckle thought to himself. He had been sitting there, his saber resting across his knees, the blade agleam with the firelight, long enough. He shoved the pile of bloody gauze and bandages—already frozen stiff—away from the fire, and filled the little flask with water from snow he had melted in the iron pot. As he screwed on the cap of the flask, the metal squeaking with each turn of the wrist, he appraised his remaining medical supplies: there were enough gauze and bandages left for one more dressing, plus enough penicillin paste to complete that job, but that was it. He could boil more snow for water. What worried him more were the two vials of morphine: enough to keep Max drowsing through the night and into the middle of the next day, but after that, her comfort would be her own.

  He had to get her down the mountain in the morning, but how? She was far too injured to carry, or even place on a horse, if they still had one. He could not fathom leaving her alone in the cave to traverse down the mountain on foot: there would be no way, even on horseback, that he could make it back to her before nightfall. And at nightfall, the sabertooths would come again.

  Buckle rose to his feet unsteadily. His knees felt stiff and cold. He stretched to get the blood circulating again, and looked around the cave. There was not much to the long, oval space and its shallow side chambers, but he noticed that the walls were streaked with a dark corruption. Buckle stepped to the wall and ran his fingers along the stone; sure enough, the tips came away black with soot. The cavern had been used for shelter before. It was coated with the greasy detritus of poorly ventilated cooking fires; judging from the thickness of the stains, it had been used for an extended period of time.

  Drawing his pistol from his belt, Buckle walked to the mouth of the cavern. The outside snowdrift obscured what little view there was through the swirling snowfall, but the trail left by his last foray was nearly erased, and he was thankful for that. His vision, now that he was away from the fire, slowly adjusted to the darkness, and he noticed an irregularity at the right-hand side of the cave mouth—a thick black line. As he stepped toward it, his eyes widened. It was a pipe, a section of black stovepipe, partially sunk into the rock, and bolted to it, as well.

  Buckle blinked. The outside end of the stovepipe was covered in a weather cap. The interior pipe ran into the cavern and turned a hard left to angle high along the front wall. Buckle followed the pipe inside, where it ran into the small adjoining chamber closest to the front of the cave, one he had not considered worth investigating. Buckle snatched up the torch and relit it in the fire, hurrying forward to the little chamber as he followed the stovepipe home.

  He entered the small cave, which, deceptively shallow-looking from the main cavern, on the left turn opened into a space about as big as a cottage.

  Buckle froze. Before him, in the wavering orange light of the torch, the stovepipe disappeared into a stone wall, and in the middle of the wall stood a heavy door, sheathed in iron plates and rivets, its surface running with rivers of rust. A horizontal slot had been cut into the face of the stone just to the right of the door, and Buckle peered into it with the torch. A metal handle gleamed, sunk deep in the recess. Without hesitation, Buckle reached in and yanked it.

  The mechanism responded: somewhere inside the wall, a set of gears and cogs rolled into a distressed motion, slowly sliding
the door open with a rumbling complaint of squeaking metal and grinding stone. Ten seconds later, the multitudinous noise stopped as the door came to rest inside the wall, leaving an open doorway leading into a darkness that reeked of musty old wood.

  Buckle advanced with his torch. The chamber was a small, enclosed space, but spacious enough to house a handmade bed frame, dressing table, writing desk, and bookshelf. All the furniture was warped from the cold and damp, and laced with old cobwebs.

  A large candle rested in a copper sconce on the table, its tubular form misshapen by the tendency of the wax to flow with gravity over time, the wick flopped over and splayed at the top, like a jester’s hat. Buckle lowered the torch gently over the candle. The wick caught flame, sputtering, and added its small sphere of yellow light to the room.

  The walls were covered in a riot of bizarre scribblings applied by sticks of charcoal. A black potbellied stove sat in one corner, home of the stovepipe that ran up to the ceiling and across, to exit through a hole cut just above the top of the doorway. Buckle noticed a large iron wheel protruding from the wall to the immediate left of the door, the device that would close the door and reload the mainspring. Beside the wheel, tucked in the corner, sat a stack of neatly cut wood, as dry as old brown bones. And there was an axe.

  Someone, a long time before, had made this little chamber his home, a little home safe from the beasties. And now the little chamber would make humans—well, a human and a Martian—safe from the beasties once again.

  Buckle heard a roar, a rough-throated, loud, echoing roar.

  A sabertooth had discovered their hiding place. And he was calling the others.

  Buckle spun on his heel, pistol and torch leading, and charged back into the main cave, suddenly fearful that the sabertooths might have slipped inside: inside where Max lay, helpless and inexcusably undefended. He found Max untouched and the chamber empty, but when he spun to the mouth of the cavern he saw a sabertooth, its massive black bulk atop the snowdrift in the churning darkness, pacing back and forth, its green eyes occasionally catching the glow of the fire and shining in a ghastly, jade-gold, ghoulish sort of way.