Read Under the Moons of Mars Online
Authors: John Joseph Adams
“It shall be,” John Carter said, taking the younger man’s
hand and placing the other on his shoulder. “Kaor, Jalvar Pan, and fortune go with you.”
“Kaor, Warlord!”
The younger man saluted and leapt to the deck of the little one-man flier that drifted at chest-height near a mooring stanchion of wrought bronze and crystal. The propeller whirred into life, and a moment later he was lost in the thronging air traffic over Helium.
“And how I wish I was going in your place,” the warlord murmured.
J
alvar Pan did not like Zodanga. Few who hadn’t been born there did. The city had never really recovered from its long-ago sack by the Green allies of the warlord, and its history since as a satellite of Helium had not been a happy one. At the sixth zode—he noted that it would be one o’clock in the afternoon in the odd twelve-based Jasoomian system, to which he must accustom himself—the street was still half-deserted. Only an occasional ground-flier went by overhead, and much of such traffic as there was went by on foot or thoat-back, or in vehicles pulled by zitidars.
Every fourth or fifth building was still scorched rubble thinly overgrown with scarlet or ochre weeds, and those that had been repaired often had a sleazy, run-down look to them, modern patches over the carvings of antiquity, with gaps where metal and ornament had been wrenched away. The mossy sward of the roadway was patchy and unkempt.
Jalvar had disguised himself; black hair-dye and a minor treatment for his half-Orovar skin rendered him indistinguishable from most, and he wore the plain harness of a panthan, a wandering mercenary.
Unfortunately, there was no way to disguise the fact that Tars Sojat was fourteen feet tall, green, tusked, and four-armed. Green men were not popular anywhere on Barsoom except among their own hordes, but here they were viciously hated still; Jalvar could tell that from the glances he saw, and the hands fingering sword-hilts and pistol-butts. Before the sack, Zodanga had made a policy of destroying the hidden incubators that held the eggs of the Green hordes in an attempt to wipe out the nomads altogether.
Neither party had forgotten.
“And I was hoping that my height would help disguise me,” Tars Sojat said mordantly.
Jalvar suppressed a chuckle; his friend
was
short . . . for a Thark. He was still more than twice the height of an ordinary man, of course.
Tars Sojat met the eyes of one passerby until the man looked away and strode on, scowling; probably that was partly for fear of what the Heliumitic garrison would probably do, partly for fear of what the local Jed’s men might do, and more particularly of what
Sojat
would most certainly do if annoyed. The Green Man had several perfectly legitimate dried severed hands of former enemies hanging from his leathers, in the fashion of his folk. Jalvar kept his eyes on the numbers, and guided them into a particular eating-house.
The sign over the circular door read:
HOME OF THE FIGHTING POTATO
.
Like most of the city outside the palace district, the eating-house had seen better days; there was a perceptible odor of frying food as they entered, which was appetizing
enough in itself but should never have escaped the cooking machinery. They seated themselves, Sojat on the floor with his lower set of elbows on the table.
Jalvar pressed the buttons set into the polished but battered and nicked skeel table. Nothing happened. Jalvar pressed again, harder. A snort of contemptuous laughter came from one of the nearby tables, and the young prince looked over.
“It’s been a while since the automatic systems worked in The Fighting Potato,” the man there said; he was scar-faced and there seemed to be a disquieting grin lurking somewhere under his impassive face. “Not from Zodanga, are you, friend?”
In fact, that blow across the cheek should have taken his eye. But he has two
, Jalvar noted with a thrill.
Perhaps we are near to what we seek.
“No,” Jalvar said aloud. “I and my companion are panthans, seeking an employer for our swords; I am named Gor Kova, and I am from Manator.”
“Manator!” the man said; the city was notorious for isolationism and a chess fetish. “I cannot recall ever seeing a man from Manator here.”
Jalvar shrugged. “Many of us have to seek our fortunes, since the accursed Heliumites attacked the city and set the usurper from Manatos on the throne, may their first ancestors spurn them. Their heel lies heavy on us yet.”
The man’s eyes slitted, and he smiled with an unpleasant expression.
“You are not alone in feeling so about the men of Helium and their precious warlord,” he said.
Then his gaze shifted to Sojat. “We don’t see many Green Men here either,” he added.
Tars Sojat shrugged elaborately in the manner of his race, four palms turned upward.
“I am of the Horde of Torquas,” he said. “Or I was. Tars Sojat is my name. Now I wander, and fight.”
The Zodangan grunted; that remote dead city had given its name, like many others, to a tribal confederation of Green Men who used it as headquarters in their nomadic wanderings. The Horde of Torquas had
not
been one of the alliance that supported the warlord’s sack of Zodanga, either; that was why the two friends had selected it as Sojat’s putative nation.
“Kaor, Gor Kova, Tars Sojat,” the man said. “I am Dur Sivas. Also a . . . panthan.”
Torquas had the added advantage of being very, very far away. Green panthans were rare but not unknown; every now and then some warrior would break one of the innumerable taboos with which the hordes were bound, and less commonly would escape immediate death. For that matter,
panthan
was a profession anyone whose past didn’t bear close scrutiny could claim.
Assassins often did, for instance. Or rebels.
“How does one get food here, then?” Jalvar asked. “If the system no longer works.”
“You shout,” the stranger said succinctly, and did.
A woman who might have been comely if her face and one arm had not been disfigured by terrible burn scars came out from the rear of the establishment. At the sight of Tars Sojat she gave a little shriek and began to back away, but Dur Sivas growled an order and she left to return with a heavy platter.
“Eat, my friends,” the Zodangan said, and tossed a coin down on the table; the woman snatched it up and fled. “Let me greet fellow-panthans by treating them to a meal. Do not mind her; she has been strange in the head since the Sack.”
“Thank you,” Jalvar said. “Our swords are sharp, but our purses are light, just now.”
It was hot and surprisingly good prepared thus, especially with salt and a dab of the spicy red sauce that accompanied it.
“That is a
Paxton
,” Dur Sivas said. “A Jasoomian dish.”
“Jasoomian!” Jalvar said, startled.
Would a panthan from Manator know that Ulysses Paxton was also Vad Varo and came from Jasoom before he became assistant to Ras Thavas and then a prince of Duhor?
“Yes. Another of that cursed pasty Thern-colored breed has set himself up over good Red Barsoomians, in the city of Duhor. But I will grant him that these
Paxtons
are a worthwhile innovation.”
They were; Jalvar ate two, and Sojat put away a dozen. Green men ate hugely when they could, for hunger was a common companion on their treks across the dead sea bottoms in search of pasture for their thoats and zitidars. When they were at ease over their wine the Zodangan leaned back.
“You are in need of employment?” he said. “And by that, I do not mean sitting in a barracks and polishing your gear.”
Jalvar scowled; Sojat let a hand drop to the hilt of one of his array of weapons.
“We are panthans,” Jalvar said coldly. “If we were afraid of a little risk, we would have found another way to earn our livings. And few jeds or Jeddaks hire panthans for garrison work; they use their own subjects for that. We follow the scent of war.”
“Good,” the Zodangan said. “Then let us go—”
A woman screamed from among the kitchens, more in alarm and anger than pain, and then there was a man’s bellow of agony. A warrior wearing the metal of the Zodangan city watch stumbled through the open doorway the woman had used, his hands pressed to his face and boiling oil and blood leaking out between them. Dur Sivas’s longsword sprang into his hand; he leapt forward with astonishing agility and thrust in a single flickering movement that drove the slender point under one arm and deep into the watchman’s body. The corpse collapsed backward into the passageway still twitching and jerking; the lights went dark, and there was a confused flicker of steel.
“Surrender in the name of the Jed!” a man shouted. “We have this place surrounded!”
Jalvar’s longsword was in his hand as well. He leapt ahead and crossed blades with the next man forward. Fighting reflex moved his blade as it slithered and crashed against the Zodangan warrior’s. Only flickers of light came from behind the front door, barely enough to gleam on the razor-honed blades and darting points; it was like fencing in a closet, with only instinct to guide a yard of swift death.
This is a brave man,
Jalvar thought regretfully; he was also upholding lawful authority.
But no more than middling with the blade. And it is important the conspirators believe me.
His point ripped into the other’s sword arm; blood spurted blackly. The blade fell from his hand, but his other groped for his shortsword. Jalvar lunged and ran him through the shoulder, the narrow blade of his longsword bending as the unbreakable point grated on bone. The Zodangan fell back with a cry of rage, and there was a scrimmage as other hands sought to haul him out of the way and crowd forward.
Jalvar darted a look aside as he and Dur Sivas backed swiftly, shoulder to shoulder. Tars Sojat was fighting in the outer doorway; it was broader than the narrow door to the kitchens, but then again there was a great deal more of him to fill it—he had had to stoop a little to enter.
Just now he beat the blade out of a Watchman’s hand with a smashing chop that tore it free by main force, grabbed him by a strap of his harness with his upper left hand, hoisted him high, punched him economically in groin and face with the left and right lower fists, and threw the man into the faces of his comrades with a bellow of laughter that bared the long fighting tusks in his lower jaw.
“Tars Sojat! Come!” Jalvar shouted, and the Thark backed three long strides, turned and ran.
Dur Sivas dashed down a corridor with the two comrades at his back; he grabbed a lever and threw it. Behind them a heavy door slammed home. Seconds later they could hear the pounding of sword-hilts on metal; then the bark of a pistol, and screaming curses as an officer rebuked the luckless and reckless man who’d fired a bullet in those confined quarters.
“Aluminum-steel from a wrecked battleship we found,” Sivas said, with a snicker in his tone; it was too dark to see more than a gleam of teeth. “We who are loyal to the true Zodanga, the Zodanga that was, knew we might have to abandon this place swiftly with the Watch on our heels. They will not break through quickly; that slab is stronger than the stone of the wall. Come!”
It was very dark, but experienced warriors were prepared for such things. At the end of the passageway Sivas
threw up his hand and peered outward through an eyehole.
“The calots are all around us. Doubtless they are on the roof as well—a pity, there were two good scout fliers there. Well, to have forethought is to be forearmed.”
“We should move if you know somewhere to go,” Jalvar said. “They can bring up a powered cutter and break through the door. Through the wall, if necessary. Or explosives. And I presume you have just hired us.”
“Yes, we can use men like you! And the calots will curse the intellects of their first ancestors if they try to blow their way through. Quiet now. It will be
unfortunate
if I do this in the wrong order and it has been some time since I practiced. Yes, here it is—”
He pressed a carving in the wall in a particular rhythm. The stone was old, but something went
click
behind it. Noiselessly a section of the worn stone floor drew back, revealing a ladder leading downward. A waft of noisome dank air came upward.
“This leads to the sewers, and there are connections to the pits beneath the palace that the puppet Jed’s calots think were stopped. Quickly, quickly!”
They sheathed their swords and scrambled downward. The tunnel beneath had a dark trickle down its center; there were radium maintenance lights, but it had been a very long time since anyone maintained them. Only one in four or five was still lit, shining dimly through dust and dirt. The ceiling was high enough that Jalvar could have walked upright, but he stooped anyway. Sojat bent forward and loped along on his legs and the long middle set of limbs, his long limber neck letting him see easily forward and the high tubular ears on the top of his head cocked forward.
“Quickly!” Sivas said again, and he picked up the pace into a slow run, one hand stretched out to touch the wall.
Then as they came to a T-shaped junction: “Right here.”