Queen of Mars - Book III in the Masters of Mars Trilogy (11 page)

And I thought,
Told by whom?

W
e stopped that
evening, and to my surprise, Tlok announced that we had found
another underground shelter and must use it for the night, which
was clear and starlit.

“But why?” I asked.

He hesitated for a moment, and then said, “We
are in the Valley of Tornadoes, and must guard against the
possibility. Though the weather is clear, a tornado can appear at
almost any time. One moment the air is still and clear as water,
and then the winds come, seemingly from nowhere, and, well, one is
lost.”

“I see...”

I glanced at Copernicus, who looked very
unhappy indeed. But he held his tongue, and busied himself instead
with his mount.

The kits had found the red flag in the sand,
and were making a great game of uncovering the big square wooden
coffin which lay beneath it.

When the lid had been pried up, Tlok
indicated that we should climb in first.

“Please...”

I lay down in the box and so did Copernicus,
who was breathing heavily. When we were comfortable, Tlok began to
lower the lid over us. I saw Fline and the seven kits looking at us
soberly as the cover dropped upon us.

“But what of the rest of you!” I shouted, my
words already muffled.

I heard a clang of metal, following by a loud
click.

“I am sorry,” came Tlok’s voice, muffled
through the wood.

“What are you doing?”

“We must leave you for others to find. This
is what we were ordered to do. It was ordained by all the
chieftains. I see now that they may have been wrong in agreeing to
this. There is nothing evil about you.”

“What are you doing?” I pleaded.

“We know who you are, Queen Clara. But it was
ordained and agreed by our chieftains that you would be turned over
to Frane of the F’rar. Pacts were made, sealed with blood, which
cannot be broken. It saddens me, and I will speak with our
chieftain, Klek, when we return to him, but if I would act now
otherwise it would mean that his own word would be broken, and he
would be an outcast among all the chieftains. It would bring shame
and ruin on us all.”

Fline’s saddened voice added, “I am truly
sorry.”

Some of the kits were crying, and one of
them, their squeaking leader, was pleading, “What will happen to
them?”

“I don’t know...” Tlok’s receding voice
answered.

Barely heard, the little sprite pleaded, “But
the fat one was fun!”

And then we heard no more but the
silence of the night.

A
fter an interval
Copernicus spoke up. He breathed a huge sigh.

“Thank the sky Tlok was so upset by his task
that he didn’t see me taking my tools from my saddlebags and hiding
them in my tunic.”

I heard a rattle and metallic clunking, and
Copernicus moved away from me in the dark space.

“And thank the sky that there’s room to work.
This may take a while, your majesty, if you’d like to take a
nap.”

He began to pound on the door overhead, and I
heard a chewing sound of metal on wood.

“I couldn’t sleep if I wanted to, with that
racket. What are you doing?”

“I’m going to drill a series of holes, and
then saw between them and make us a door to escape from. I imagine
it will take most of the night.”

“What if our new visitors from Frane get here
before that?”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Had you thought of merely removing the
hinges?”

There was silence for a moment.

“That’s brilliant!” Copernicus cried,
finally. “And I have just the tool to remove them!”

He crawled off in the dark, and I followed,
and before long he had removed the pins from the metal hinges, and
we heaved up with our backs, throwing the door up and over and
away, where it broke the lock Tlok had secured it with, and we were
free.

Our horses stood tethered nearby.

Without a word, we left that place, galloping
our well-rested mounts, and before morning the sands began to
recede and thin, and the air lost its arid feel, filling with
humidity and a thicker warmth, and as the sun rose on our flank the
new day, and a world dominated not by sand and dry heat but by
greenery and rolling hills, spread out before us like a heavenly
vision.

Copernicus, filled with pride, pointed at a
distant valley, which looked as lush as anything I had ever
seen.

“My home,” he said.

A
nd so I spent the
fall and winter hiding in a place called Hammerfarm, and became a
farm girl.

Autumn was brief, with junto trees shedding
their leaves almost by the calendar, on the season’s first day. The
air turned from warm to chill, and smelled colder. The nights,
which Copernicus invariably spent with his telescope, became
downright cold, and if I hadn’t carried a shawl out to the little
fellow on occasion, I’m sure he would have frozen. But he was happy
as a man could be with the turning of the season, which meant the
coming of the winter stars. To me they were but a new set of bright
dots in the sky, but to Copernicus they were old friends seen a new
way.

“Come look at this nebula, your majesty!” he
would gasp in pleasure, and my eye was met with yet another faint
cloud of gas.

Which would invariably lead to argument when
I told him so.

The one thing that continued to spark my
interest was Earth, which I made him turn the instrument toward
whenever it rose. It was a strange blue and brown ball in the
eyepiece, showing its various land masses and polar caps to great
effect.

“It’s strange, but I feel an affinity with
that place,” I remarked one night.

“Why?” Copernicus asked, taking over the
instrument. “It’s just another rock in space. Great Jupiter shows
as much to us – more, even.”

I shrugged and went in, feeling the chill of
night.

To my surprise, little Copernicus followed
me.

“What’s bothering you, your majesty?” he
asked, as I made gemel tea on his ancient stove. The farmhouse was
older than the stove but cozy, a wood structure with a bedroom loft
Copernicus had given to me which rattled when the wind blew but
always managed to be warm inside. It was filled with Copernicus’s
many lab tables and experiments, but there was a single cozy chair
which I now sat down in to face him.

“I’m restless. I should be doing
something!”

He frowned. “Didn’t we decide that the best
thing to do was wait until spring? By then the search for you by
Frane’s people will surely lessen. There haven’t been inquiries in
almost a month, after that frantic first week.”

Indeed: I had spent almost a week hiding in
Copernicus’s root cellar, while a strange band of gypsies or
pirates – we were never sure what, exactly – came through the area
asking questions and worse; only the fact that everyone in the area
looked exactly like Copernicus, and that they had no specific name
for the “little fellow seen traveling with a thin black-furred girl
named Clara” had saved us from detection. That and the fact that no
one else in the area knew of my existence, since, as Copernicus had
said, “Coin can make a betrayer of a friend in less time than it
takes to clap your paws.”

I looked at the little fellow. “I thought it
was a good idea, but now I’m not so sure. I should be trying to
reach my grandmother and father. Or Newton—”

“That would be the worst thing you could do!
There are spies everywhere! You’ve heard the news, that Newton
controls the cities in the east and Frane has tentative control
over the badlands in the west and north. But neither has a real
army!”

“Then I should be gathering one!”

“How? This whole area is under Frane’s
control! You would be caught in a minute or less!”

“Still...”

He took a step forward. “Please, your
majesty. Give it time. Let me continue to make my own quiet
inquiries. We will get word to Newton, eventually. But it will take
time.”

I looked at him and sighed. “You are
right, Copernicus. Of course you are. But I am going mad doing
nothing! I need something to do!”

A
nd so I became a
farmer.

This late in the year there was not much to
do but get the fields ready for spring planting. But I threw myself
into this task of preparation with everything I had. I found that I
liked working with the soil, getting my hands dirty, watching
callouses form on them. I became good with the plow, learning the
needs and moods of Copernicus’s pack mule, Tessie, when to push
her, when to give her water, when to do nothing because that was
what she was going to do. I learned how to use a hoe and a shovel,
a spade and a rake. I learned how to bundle and burn refuse, how to
feed chickens, gather eggs, milk a goat. These simple tasks served
to lessen, over time, my sadness. When I thought of Darwin now it
was from a strange, faraway place, as if he had been in another
life.

But I could not learn to get along with
Copernicus’s dog.

“I don’t understand how anyone could have one
of those things as a pet,” I said to Copernicus one night at
dinner, as a late autumn rain storm howled coldly outside. The fire
was warm, the vegetables well cooked and tender. I felt like any
domestic farm wife, proud of her full day.

But the dog was constantly under my feet,
with those cow-like eyes and its mournful brown face, floppy ears,
short useless legs and wagging tail.

“Come here, Hector,” Copernicus cooed, but
the animal insisted on following me around wherever I went in the
house.

“I won’t pet you!” I growled at it. I stood
at the sink, and the creature nuzzled up to me, making a needy
noise in its throat and looking up at me expectantly.

I turned on Copernicus. “How could any one
creature need so much love?”

He shrugged. “It’s their way.”

I shivered, and nudged the beast away with
the toe of my boot, which only made him beg louder.

Suddenly he gave a mournful howl.

“Oh, all right!” I spat, throwing down the
carrot I was peeling and bending down to give the creature a pat on
the head. He rolled over happily and showed me his belly.

Copernicus laughed as I knelt, scratching the
beast’s stomach, and the dog chuffed happily and squirmed back and
forth like a river eel.

“Disgusting animals,” I said, standing
up.

But the dog had not had enough, and continued
to mewl and beg, still on its back, looking up at me.

“He’ll win you over yet,” Copernicus said,
getting up to help me finish the kitchen chores, before he spent
the night with one experiment or other, or out under the stars with
the telescope.

“He’ll win you over yet,” he repeated,
scratching the dog behind the ears, which sent it into further
paroxysms of ecstasy.

“I doubt it,” I said, and shivered
again.

A
nd so autumn turned
to winter. The snows came early but gently, in blanketing white
storms with almost no wind. It was cold, but warm in the farmhouse.
And, I was happy to discover, work on a farm did not end when the
winter came. There was always something to do, good hard labor that
made the days go fast.

Hector the dog became, naturally, my constant
companion. And while I liked the beast no better, I did come to
value his company, especially on those days when Copernicus stole
off to the village down the hill to make a subtle inquiry for news
both local and broader, or to post one of his letters which might
eventually bring word to Newton, and through him to my father and
grandmother, that I was safe. Rather than becoming more frequent,
as the hand of Frane was pulled back from our area of Mars, that
hand seemed to be tightening into a fist, as Frane took advantage
of the reported disarray in the east to, miraculously, begin to
build yet another army to dominate the planet.

And there began to appear in the sky at
this time a strange, black air ship, which flew very high overhead,
and sent me hiding whenever it appeared.

“T
hat’s it, then,” I
said, after this latest news of Frane was delivered. “I can wait no
longer, Copernicus. I must leave, and try to pull the remnants of
the republic together.”

“But you’ll be caught! I told you, Frane now
has permanent ‘representatives’ in the village. It’s the same
everywhere, from what I hear! It would be madness to leave
now!”

“Then I’m mad. But I won’t sit on my heels
any longer. I must go. If I stay here, how long will it be before
I’m finally discovered?”

“Only a matter of time, I’m afraid. Even
today, old Roost was asking who the new worker was he saw from the
road...” He shook his head sadly.

It had begun to snow again, another gentle
storm with just a hint of wind. Gentle drifts were kissing the
farmhouse and the barn.

“I will go with you,” Copernicus said. Hector
sat at his feet, looking at me with his needy eyes.

“You will not. I will do as we planned months
ago, and follow the route you set out for me. But if you remember
that plan, you had to stay, to divert attention from me.”

He nodded, resigned. “I will continue to try
to get word to Newton. If he contacts me I’ll tell him where to
find you. But remember, you must keep to the route.”

“I will.”

We spent the rest of the night with
packing and provisions, while poor Hector, who I finally did admit
affection for, bayed as if the two moons overhead were no more.

T
he snow had ceased
when I stepped out of the farmhouse and bade Copernicus good-bye.
He did not hide his weeping, and I barely contained mine. I bent
down to rub Hector behind the ears, then kissed Copernicus quickly
on his furry cheek and turned and walked away.

To my surprise the dog followed me, and would
not be convinced to turn back.