Arabella of Mars

by David D. Levine

  Lord Corey presented to the captain and Arabella the several dozen refugees who had retreated to his manor from the flames of Fort Augusta; Arabella presented the captain to Lord Corey. The refugees, as it turned out, were mostly people of Lord Corey’s elevated social stratum, which explained their unfamiliarity to Arabella, and the contrast between their fine clothes and refined accents and their current straitened circumstances was sharp. But though under other circumstances Arabella would have been honored to make their acquaintance, between introductions her eyes kept darting about, still seeking Michael.

  Many of the refugees had not left the house in a week or more, and they bombarded Arabella with questions. What was the situation beyond the gates? Had she any news of their relatives, their homes, their servants? And how had she, a lone girl with nothing but a heathen foreigner for company, managed to make her way through that mob of savages unharmed?

  Arabella pushed down her ire at that last remark, and responded as politely as she could. “Captain Singh is a highly respected airship captain, ma’am, and we were under the protection of one of the Martian akhmoks, or generals.”

  “And how did you obtain this protection?” begged the lady in question, raising her lorgnette and pressing forward eagerly. All other eyes also turned with desperate longing to this girl who had somehow obtained special sanction from the same Martians who had driven them from their homes.

  “The akhmok in question had been my itkhalya.”

  “Surely you must be mistaken,” said one of the men. “All itkhalyas are female.”

  “I believe it is you who are mistaken, sir,” she replied, and though she felt a degree of heat entering her words she did not care to reduce it. “Among Martians it is the female of the species who is larger, more robust, and has the thicker carapace; it is only English sensitivities that restrict them to the positions of cook and nanny when we engage them as servants. Have you not noticed that by far the majority of the warriors besieging you here are female? My itkhalya was a prominent strategist among her people even before she became an akhmok, and she taught me of strategy and tactics along with all other aspects of Martian culture and history. I assure you that she is entirely suited by both temperament and training, as well as the physical characteristics of her sex, to the position.”

  She found herself breathing heavily, glaring at the circle of distressed and indignant eyes that surrounded her. Most prominent among these were Lord Corey’s. “My dear Miss Ashby,” he said, “I believe you must be overtired after your long and difficult voyage. Please allow my wife to convey you to a private room, where you can rest … and reconsider your words.”

  Just as she was about to snap a reply to Lord Corey’s condescension, she noted the captain’s face. His head was tilted slightly toward her, one eyebrow raised, the corners of his mouth turned down.… It was an expression she’d learned to recognize as preceding a rebuke. And the captain’s rebukes were never, ever unearned.

  She took a deep breath, considered her response, and then let it out again with a deep sigh. “You are correct, of course, Lord Corey. These last few days have been extremely taxing, and I … I apologize for my outburst. I thank you again for your hospitality.” The captain, she saw, was not displeased by her expression of regret. “However, I must decline your offer of a place to rest until I have spoken with my brother.”

  The glance that Lord Corey exchanged with his wife brought a chill to Arabella’s heart.

  “Where is he?” she demanded.

  “My dear Miss Ashby,” Lord Corey said, “I regret to inform you that your brother was seriously injured while fleeing from his home after the attack there. One of the other members of your household carried him the last mile, saving his life. However…” His gaze lowered. “Unfortunately, he lost consciousness shortly after arriving here, and has not yet woken.”

  Arabella felt as though the floor had dropped away, leaving her in a state of free descent.

  “We have not lost hope,” Lord Corey said. “But we fear the worst.”

  22

  SIMON

  Michael’s face was pale and running with sweat, and his forehead burned with fever. From time to time he moaned and thrashed beneath the thin coverlet, but to Arabella’s expressions of love and hope he made no conscious reply.

  “I am very sorry for your brother’s condition,” Mr. Trombley said, “but it would be far worse if not for your brave cousin Mr. Ashby.”

  “My cousin Simon Ashby?” Arabella gasped.

  “Indeed, miss. It happened while we were fleeing from Woodthrush Woods. At one point I noticed that your brother and your cousin were not among us; I doubled back and found your cousin Mr. Ashby crouching quite solicitously over your brother, who had caught an arrow in the calf. He had lost a considerable amount of blood, and was unconscious.” Mr. Trombley closed his eyes and shook his head at the grisly memory. “I bound up the leg, but it was your cousin who carried your brother the rest of the way here. He was very brave and determined; your brother would surely never have survived otherwise.”

  Arabella stroked Michael’s fevered brow, not quite able to credit this tale of Simon’s heroism, but unable to deny the joy she felt at Michael’s survival.

  “Your brother was barely alive when we arrived at Corey House,” Mr. Trombley continued. “Fortunately Dr. Fellowes was here, and stitched up the wound, and we were all very hopeful. But then it began to fester, and the leg had to come off. He has not, sadly, regained consciousness since.”

  Arabella gazed upon the absence beneath the coverlet where her brother’s right leg should have been. She felt nothing but a cold numbness. Horror, she supposed, would come later.

  The captain’s strong brown hand rested upon her shoulder. She patted it absently, then stood. “Captain Singh, Mr. Trombley, Lord Corey … I appreciate your concern and expressions of support, but at the moment I desire to be left alone with my brother.”

  Murmured condolences and sounds of departure followed, but Arabella simply stood and stared at her brother’s troubled face, holding his hot and twitching hand.

  He seemed so young to her now. Though he was still her elder, and of course nearly a year older now than the last time she had seen him, by comparison with the officers and men with whom she had spent the last few months—very eventful months indeed—he seemed little more than a child.

  Then, behind her, Arabella heard the sound of the door opening.

  She turned and beheld her cousin Simon, standing with his hand on the doorknob and a rather abashed expression on his face.

  * * *

  Simon closed the door behind himself and cleared his throat. “Miss Ashby, I…”

  “You nothing,” she interrupted in a harsh whisper. The others might be listening from the hall, but the fiction of privacy must be maintained. “You came here to kill him, and now it seems you have succeeded. You have won, and I and all my family have lost. So what now? Am I to beg for your generosity? I would not give you the pleasure.”

  “Do not speak thus of your brother,” Simon replied with unctuous calm. “It is said that even the unconscious can hear words of encouragement, or otherwise, spoken at their bedsides.” He turned to Michael and, raising his voice as though speaking to a slightly deaf uncle, said, “We have every confidence that he will pull through.”

  “You need not dissemble to me, sir,” she hissed. “Do you deny that the entire purpose of your journey to Mars was to murder my brother?”

  He turned his eyes downward, away from her accusing gaze. She waited for a response.

  “I cannot deny that I considered it,” he said at last, speaking to the floor. Then he raised his eyes to Arabella, his hands held out beseechingly. “Please understand, dear cousin, that when I left you in Oxford I was in a state of extreme confusion and despair. On the long voyage to Mars I confess that I entertained many different notions—of entreating your brother for funds, of demanding satisfaction for the thoughtless way his side of the family has
treated mine, and, yes, of outright murder. But when I arrived here, and met him in person for the first time, I was so … so impressed by his unaffected charm that I found it impossible to either beg from him or kill him. And then came this … this horrific business with the queen’s egg.” He hesitated, took a breath, looked at his feet. “I … I must confess that I…” Another breath. “… I do not know whether it was indeed he who stole the egg.” He looked up, his eyes beseeching. “But having met him, I am certain that he is incapable of such a dastardly act, and indeed that he is more knowledgeable of, and sympathetic to, the Martians than any man I have ever met. When your brother was wounded—and I swear by all that is holy that it was the Martians who wounded him, not I—I risked all to save him, not only out of love for my cousin, but also out of knowledge that, with his greater knowledge of Martian culture, he might be able to negotiate a settlement. But, alas, he has spent most of the time since then in an unconscious state.”

  He paused, as though awaiting Arabella’s forgiveness or at least understanding. She gave him neither, only a cold stare. Though his story seemed plausible, something in Simon’s manner and her personal experience with him suggested that she should withhold judgement.

  “Alas indeed,” Arabella said, and regarded Simon’s face with careful consideration. His tale, with its self-centered motivations, might even be true. Even if it were not—if, perhaps, he had been discovered leaning over Michael, intending to finish the job the Martians had started, and had rescued him instead only because of the presence of a witness—it would be very difficult to disprove, especially now that every one in the house considered Simon a hero.

  Simon dropped to his knees and clasped his hands imploringly before himself. “And so now, having confessed to you that which I have been unable to admit to any other soul, I throw myself upon your mercy.” He looked up at her with an apparently sincere expression of supplication. “I have seen that your understanding of the Martians is greater even than your brother’s. It is my fervent hope that with a full understanding of the situation, you may be able to find some way to bring this violence to a close.”

  Arabella looked down upon her cousin with mingled emotions of suspicion, pity, anger, and despair. Whether his story was true or not, she knew she must treat him with extreme caution, though to denounce him outright would never be believed.

  Simon was correct in one thing, though: It seemed to fall to her to make peace between Englishmen and Martians. Yet even with the captain’s brave and wise assistance, she had no idea how she might unravel this deadly conundrum.

  She turned her back on Simon and looked to her brother, his face insensible and racked with pain. “What am I to do, Michael?” she whispered in an anguish of uncertainty.

  Just then came a horrific crash from very nearby, a great grinding thud of stone against stone, followed by the tinkle of glass and the clatter of falling plaster.

  A moment later, the screaming began.

  23

  ROCKS FALL

  Arabella raced down the hall toward the sound, Simon forgotten behind her.

  She soon found herself in the manor’s grand dining room, whose great windows, now heavily shuttered, had once offered a magnificent prospect over Fort Augusta. But now a great swath of the shutters had been smashed to flinders by an enormous, craggy boulder of red rock.

  The boulder lay atop one end of the Coreys’ dining table, a precious antique brought out from Earth more than one hundred years ago, which now itself lay in splinters, two of its carved and gilt legs splayed out from the wreckage like those of a thurok that had been trodden upon. The massive silver centerpiece, which Arabella had always thought in ostentatiously poor taste, had slid down the length of the now-tilted table to crash like a ship upon the rock. All was covered by dust and bits of broken wood.

  The screaming came from Lady Corey. But she was not the injured party—it was Lord Corey who gasped beneath the wreckage, his face gone deathly pale beneath a coating of plaster dust. Blood was splashed everywhere.

  From without, through the gap in the broken shutters, came a great clattering war-cry of triumphant Martians, accompanied by rhythmic chanting.

  Arabella recalled a similar scene from the French attack, and how a second ball had come crashing in shortly thereafter. “This place is dangerous!” she cried to the men who now crowded in the door. “We must leave here at once!”

  “How dare you!” replied one of the men, a prosperous plantation owner called Sykes. “Our host is injured and requires succor!”

  But a long arm in a buff coat held the man back. “She is correct,” said the captain. “Our defenses have been breached, and the enemy are very likely to strike again at this same spot. We must retreat.”

  “Unhand me, you heathen,” Sykes spat, and extricated himself from the captain’s grip.

  “Very well,” the captain said, and backed away, deeper into the house. Arabella tried to push her way past the other men to follow him, but the press of their bodies blocked the door.

  Sykes ran to Lord Corey, whose eyes had fallen closed. “I will assist you, sir,” he said, and picked him up by the shoulders to pull him from beneath the shattered table.

  He came away easily. Too easily.

  The upper half of his body, separated from the lower, left a long red smear upon the carpet.

  Sykes looked up at Arabella in horror just as a second boulder came crashing in, sending glass and fragments of wood and plaster flying everywhere.

  Arabella screamed, then coughed as a great cloud of dust burst from the point of impact. Strong arms grasped her and pulled her away, saving her from the trampling feet of the men who, up until a moment earlier, had been pressing to enter the room and were now trying desperately to leave it.

  A moment later a huge slab of ceiling fell on the spot she had just vacated, spattering her and her protector with further stinging shards of plaster and stone. He shielded her with his body, his heavy buff coat serving to ward off the worst of the impact to himself.

  It was the captain, of course. “Are you hurt?” he shouted over the continuing clatter of falling plaster.

  “I think not, sir!”

  “We must retreat to the drawing-room!”

  * * *

  Arabella and the captain gathered every one they could find, servants included, into the drawing-room, which faced only the impassable crags behind the house. They soon determined that only Lord Corey and Mr. Sykes had been killed by the two catapult-stones; all the rest were present save the inconsolable Lady Corey, the unconscious Michael, and Dr. Fellowes, who was caring for both of them in Michael’s bedchamber.

  Simon, too, was present. He lurked at the edges of the gathering as though afraid of her—and well he might be—and yet he seemed unable to take his eyes off of her. To him she said nothing, favoring him instead with a withering glance, to which he replied by skulking away with a satisfyingly mortified expression.

  For the last two months she had looked forward to the day when she would publicly denounce her cousin for threatening her with a pistol, imprisoning her, and setting off to Mars to murder her brother … and yet, for now, she held her tongue. For all his faults, he had indeed saved Michael’s life—whether that had been his original intent or not—and the current crisis, which threatened every one in the house, seemed far too pressing for Simon’s crimes to obtain the attention they deserved even if she should mention them.

  And so she would wait until the crisis had passed. And if the waiting made Simon anxious as a cat, so much the better.

  Another loud crash sent dust pattering down from the ceiling beams and made the whole company look nervously about. A second crash followed shortly thereafter, then a long and nervous silence. After a time they all began to relax.

  “How many catapults did you say they had?” Lord Bertram muttered to Arabella.

  “We saw two nearing completion,” she replied, “but there were at least three more under construction. And no end of bou
lders.”

  Captain Singh called her over to where he was conferring with several of the men over a plan of the house hastily sketched by Collins, the late Lord Corey’s majordomo. “The dining-room, parlor, and master bedroom suite are lost to us,” the captain said, pointing. “They will certainly be destroyed by catapult soon, if they have not already been. Do we need to defend against boarders? Against Martians entering through the broken windows?”

  “This house is impregnable,” Collins replied, his confidence undiminished by recent events. “Those windows are at least thirty feet from the ground. And the walls are sheer, quite secure from scaling.”

  The captain glanced to Arabella, who shook her head. “I have seen Martians build ladders for descent into canyons far deeper than that.”

  “Descent is not ascent,” Collins sniffed.

  “But ladders are ladders,” the captain replied. He squinted at the plan, then at a staircase that spiraled up from one corner of the room. “How tall is that tower?” Another crash shook the house, rattling the table around which they stood.

  Collins licked his lips nervously. “Sixty or seventy feet from base to top.”

  The captain turned to Arabella. “Can the Martians’ arrows reach that high?”

  “Not with any accuracy, sir.”

  “Nor will it be an easy target for their catapults,” the captain muttered, half to himself. “Which is not to say they will not try, once we begin shooting at them from it.”

  “The gallery at the tower’s top is crenellated,” Arabella said. “It would be extremely defensible.” To the questioning looks she received from Collins and the other men, she said, “My brother and I would retreat to that tower during our parents’ whist games with Lord and Lady Corey. We would often imagine ourselves to be in charge of the house’s defense.” Though the attackers they had envisioned in those playful days had been French soldiers, not the Martians who were their servants and teachers.