Queen of Mars - Book III in the Masters of Mars Trilogy (7 page)

Strange...

W
e became a more
cautious army, more vigilant, more ready, with more probing
tendrils ahead and behind us, more careful reconnaissance by our
aerial companions – and yet for the next two weeks, as we drew
nearer to Frane’s army, all was quiet. There was a brief sandstorm,
whipped down from the desert to the north but petering out almost
before it began. In a way this was a disappointment, for we had
barely secured our equipment and locked ourselves in our battened
down tents than the skies cleared and it was time to move again.
Copernicus explained to me later that we were too far south to feel
the real wrath of any such storm, and that we had felt the farthest
edges of it.

“Another hundred miles north, though...” he
said, shaking his head, “and it would have been another story
indeed.”

He did not share my disappointment, and spent
that night in rapture with his telescope under the stars.

I had spent the previous three evenings alone
in my tent, trying to compose a letter to Darwin. There was no
doubt now in my mind that I loved him, and I thought it only right
that I express that love to the one I had left behind. But every
attempt –

My dearest Darwin...

Darwin, my love...

– had ended with my crumpling the offending
sheet of stationary in my paws and throwing it to the ground.

Finally, I decided to be direct:

Darwin,

I trust this letter finds you well. We
are about to engage in a great battle, and I find that I must tell
you certain things now, since there may be no other time. I don’t
know how this happened or why, but the fact is that I love you.
This is a mysterious thing to me, but it is a fact that must be
faced. When I return, if you feel the same, as I think you do, I
propose that we be betrothed and that you be my King.

I signed it with all my love, then read it
over again and nearly tore it up. It was lame and ineffectual, but
at that moment the evening courier arrived, and, almost without
thinking, I folded and shoved it into an envelope, closed it with
my seal and gave it to him. There would be no other chance before
battle, and I put the letter into his paw.

He bowed and left, and I took a great,
deep breath and then walked out to look at the stars with
Copernicus.

T
wo days later a
gypsy army of nearly two hundred joined with us, led by a fellow
named Costain, claiming to be a cousin of the great gypsy leader
Miklos, who my father had known. A day later, we met the forward
edge of Frane’s army. At dusk the perimeter alarms went off, and
three harlows were spotted by far scouts. There was plenty of time
to prepare, and an aerial bomb dispatched one of the beasts, along
with its attendant contingent of wailing, herding Baldies, before
it reached the fringes of our camp. The other two were dispatched
closer in, by the weapon which Newton had given us, consisting of a
ground analyzer, which picked up the beast’s tread, and a heavy box
on a tripod with a muzzle, which was aimed at the animal, and
issued a blast of blinding light which felled the monster. The
other got closer, but was brought down before it had reached the
perimeter.

There were two other attacks that night, and
as dawn broke we prepared for our last march. General Reis pointed
to the northwest, our direction of travel.

“Just over that ridge is a low plain, and
then Valles Marineris will come into sight.”

An unnatural thrill went through me.

“There are Baldies in the plain,” the general
continued, filling me in with scouting reports, “with the vast
majority waiting at the rim of the canyon.”

“Let’s meet them, then.”

He nodded, and we spurred our horses
forward.

T
he Baldies attacked
first with harlows, and then in packs consisting only of their own
number. But we had anticipated this, and spread our army to either
side so that we could not be outflanked. The canyon, a tremendous
cut in the ground that grew ever wider as we approached, seemed to
swallow all sounds and echo it back in a ghostly fashion. The hair
on the nape of my neck stood up as we grew near, and the battle
intensified. It was as if we were marching toward a giant hole in
Mars.

The harlows were dispensed with in short
order. Now the Baldy horde grew in front of us into a keening mass
of mad beasts armed with tooth and claw. Some held weapons, swords
and even an occasional shield. And yet we ploughed through them
methodically, hacking at their wild, hissing faces, their pink and
impossibly light blue eyes, their thin strange whipping tales, long
claws, nearly hairless bodies with patches of dirty white fur
covering their genitals and beneath their armpits with the
occasional tuft on their near-naked heads. And still they came at
us, and more of them, and we cut them down like shafts of wheat. We
had armored our legs against their claws and teeth, and the foot
soldiers wore light body armor which made the beasts’ advances
nearly ineffectual. It was only a stupid or inattentive feline who
fell to these brutes.

“This too easy,” I shouted to General Reis,
above the din of wailing Baldies and the clash of battle.

He looked at me steadily, and nodded, pausing
to hack down at a screeching beast that sought to gnaw at his boot
and scratched madly as he was felled with a sword blow. The beast
fell to the ground, its last breaths tramped from its body by the
general’s horse.

“There must be more than this!” he shouted,
and then turned to meet two beasts who sought to strike at him from
behind. They were dispatched.

I moved off, wading through the bodies of
dead or dying Baldies, bringing my own sword into play when one of
the brutes tried to tear my mare’s leg armor off with its teeth.
There was a curious odor which pervaded the battlefield, mingling
with the copper smell of blood. I thought I had smelled it
before...

I looked in the distance, where Baldies
filled the world from horizon to horizon, pressed against the rim
of the Valles Marineris chasm. We were already nearing the
cliffs.

I sought the blood red armor and banner of
Frane herself, and soon spied it to the left, amid a sea of her mad
protectors.

I began to move that way, hacking through the
mass of Baldies around me which parted like a dying wave. I almost
felt sorry for the brutes.

Frane’s banner drew closer – and now I saw
what looked to be the fiend herself, her left arm raised high with
a sword, urging the Baldies onward, her helmet crimson in the
sun.

The right arm was missing, and now I was sure
I had found my prize.

For my father, and my grandmother before
her!
I thought, my vision filling with blood lust.

I spurred my horse on, riding through a sea
of crazed white bodies as if they were water parting before me.

My prize drew closer – and now Frane’s head
turned to see me. Behind her, at the cliff’s edge, Baldies were
being pushed over into the nearly bottomless pit, flailing and
screaming as they fell. I saw a harlow, crazed and trapped by the
mass of bodies around it, hurl itself over the edge rather than be
hemmed in.

Ahead of me, Frane turned, studying the
terrain behind her. She tried to move to the left but was blocked
by her own mad army, now being pushed in great numbers to the ledge
and over. To the right there was room where the harlow had been,
and she drove herself into the spot even as more Baldies filled
it.

I drew closer, brandishing my sword, and
sought to meet her eye. Two Baldies, howling, jumped on my mare and
tried to scratch its eyes out. I dispatched them, left and right in
quick succession.

Frane looked straight at me, even as I came
within hailing range.

“Prepare to die, fiend!” I shouted, raising
my sword.

Raising her own in mock salute, the one-armed
monster turned quickly –

– and jumped into the chasm behind her,
followed by a score of white-bodied acolytes.

“No!” I screamed, driving my mare to the
chasm’s edge and rearing it up. White bodies pressed around me and
I drove them off, down, hacked at them screaming, “It cannot end
like this!”

The bodies thinned out around me, as others
of my army drove toward me, slaying Baldies in droves until their
numbers dwindled and then disappeared.

I dismounted and stood panting, filled with
impotent rage, staring down at the immense pit gouged in the
surface of Mars, and the tiny unmoving white bodies littering its
bottom like specks of dust.

I spied the single spot of red among them and
screamed in rage again.

“My Queen,” General Reis addressed me, riding
up and quickly dismounting. He took my arm. “My Queen, please move
away from the edge of the chasm.”

“She cheated me, even in death,” I spat.

“She is dead, that is all that matters,” he
answered, trying to soothe me.

I turned on him, fury in my eyes. “She
cheated me!”

He drew back, perhaps alarmed at my rage.
Suddenly he bowed. “I will have her body brought up from the pit,”
he said.

“Do that.” I rammed my sword viciously into
its scabbard, and strode past him to mount my horse and trot slowly
away, trying to calm my own ire.

The sounds of battle had died around me,
leaving a field of white carnage and red blood. The moans of the
dying and wounded were like a judgment on me.

Frane is dead
, I thought.

The architect of so much unhappiness on my
world, the murderer of my father, the sworn enemy of my
grandmother, had been vanquished, and was no more.

Now there would be true peace on the
planet.

Why did I feel so empty, so unsatisfied?

It had all seemed almost too easy – was that
it?

Yes...something was wrong, out of place.

What was it?

Later that day I was to find out just how
wrong things were.

T
he body had been
too short. I’m sure that had been in the back of my mind, even
during the battle. It was not a F’rar body, and not Baldy, but of
some indeterminate clan, possibly from the far north.

“Perhaps a follower she picked up on her
flight,” General Reis said. “She was bound to have a few fanatics
still close to her.”

“But how many?” I asked.

On the slab before me, stripped of its armor
and helmet, the body looked little like Frane. The missing left
arm, hacked off at the shoulder, was the most telling part of its
bodily disguise.

“Do you think...?” I asked, pointing at the
healed wound.

Corian, who had joined us, laughed. “Whether
she hacked it off herself or Frane helped her, it makes no
difference. It was a bold stroke – pardon the pun.” He smiled, a
thin gesture on his leathery face. “The fact remains, it was a
daring disguise. It had my spies fooled, certainly.”

Reis asked the nomad, “When was the last time
Frane herself was in this area?”

“That is hard to say, general.” Corian
shrugged. “A week, two perhaps. She was seen and identified at one
point, most assuredly.”

Reis’s cold eye lingered on the gypsy, before
turning to me.

“It seems you may have your chance at her
yet, your majesty.”

“Yes...”

It was then that a messenger arrived, white
as a Baldy with fright, and handed Reis a note, which he quickly
opened and read.

His own pallor paled.

“What is it?” I demanded.

Without saying a word, he handed me the
dispatch. “The concussion device,” he said, his voice cracking with
disbelief.

I read the note, and my own heart turned to
stone in my chest.

“The...city of Wells is... gone,” I
whispered, dropping the note to the ground.

I
do not remember
much about speaking to the assembled army, only that I said the
words that were expected of me. I told them what they already knew,
that their families, their loved ones, their way of life, their
government, everything they treasured, was gone. Everyone they had
known in the old city was dead, every shop they had loved to
frequent, the gardens, the byways, the streets, the certain slant
of light between two buildings, the house where one was born, the
Hall of the Assembly, the Senate chambers and the senators
themselves – all was no more. I told them that my heart wept for
them, and did not lie – what I did not, could not, tell them was
that my own heart was broken and would never mend. I told them what
I could and then I turned away and spoke no more, but went to my
tent, alone, and wept.

I thought of the note I had agonized over
writing to Darwin, and calculated the days it would have taken our
fast rider to get back.

Yes, I concluded, he had seen it before he
died, along with almost everything else in the world I loved.

Only Newton, I knew, had been spared, because
he had been on his way north to one of the oxygenation stations
near Bradbury. It was his people who had sent the message.

Frane had camouflaged her stolen aerial
machines to look like Newton’s own, and dropped her only great
weapon on the finest city the face of Mars had ever known.

And my beloved Darwin, who I had ordered to
stay behind, was dead.

In effect, by my own hand.

I threw myself on my bed, curled up, and wept
like a kit.

“Oh, Darwin, Darwin...”

The day went away, and it became night. There
were stirrings in the camp, but I paid no heed. I was like one
half-alive, uncaring. I would neither eat nor attend to my duties.
I would stay in this tent forever, and mourn, and berate myself for
my own failings and oversight.

You should have known.

You should have seen.

How could I be a great queen, when my
first act was to be fooled into losing almost everything that was
worthy in the world?