Under the Moons of Mars (24 page)

I started to unroll it, and saw the beginnings of a picture. To this day I can’t say what it was a picture of, or what the colors were, or nothing like that. As soon as my eyes set on it, I felt mighty strange. I got cold and stiff all over, like I was becoming part of the rock I leaned against, and then I got awfully tired. I tried to look away from that cursed drawing, but my eyes wouldn’t move, and I couldn’t stop my eyelids drifting south.

When I woke up, I was standing ’bout ten yards farther along the path. I glanced back to where I’d been sitting and had the terrible shock of seeing myself a-sitting there, still as a statue!

I rushed over, and reached out to my own shoulder, thinking perhaps I could shake myself awake. But my hand was like a ghost’s, and for the first time in my life I couldn’t get a hold of anything.

Then I figured I must have gone and died without knowing it. Maybe another rattler had got me, quick and quiet, while I was setting down. Or my heart had give out, like what happened to Sergeant Ducas that day in the mess hall, raising his spoon one second and dead the next.

I looked up along the narrow walls of the canyon, up to the sky above, which was a lot darker than I expected, with the stars already coming out. It was already night, so I guess I’d slept the day away.

One star caught my eye. A red star, that grew brighter, and brighter still. With nary a thought from me, my arms reached up toward that star, as if I might somehow drag it down, or be lifted up toward it.

I remember thinking very clearly
This ain’t right,
then everything went red, as if I was passing through a fire, a huge fire that filled up the world, but a cold fire, ’cause I never felt it burn.

The next thing I knows, I was facedown in a tidy parcel of dust. I pushed myself up, noticing that once again I could feel the earth below me. I felt greatly relieved that I had been restored to my flesh, and now all would be well, that the strangeness would be over and done with.

Only I was mistaken about that. The first thing I saw when I stood up was the strangest figure of . . . a man, I guess . . . only he was some fifteen feet high, with two pairs of arms atop a pair of mighty legs, and an overall color reminiscent of a green tree frog, which is not exactly green but a kind of yellow greenness. He had a harness of leather and metal on his upper body and in each of his topmost hands he bore a long straight blade of some whitish metal. To top off this nightmarish aspect, his great head was riven by a mouth that bore enormous tusks, and his eyes were an evil red.

The green man tried to rise, and lift his other three blades. But before he could do so, I raised up the sword I had taken and plunged it deep into his chest. Again, my new strength surprised me, the blade driving through flesh and bone and into the ground beneath, so far that I could not easily withdraw it, particularly not when balanced upon a green giant undergoing the pangs and tremors of death.

But with a great exertion I did pull the blade free. Disturbed by my nakedness, I also cut away a broad swathe of leather from the creature’s trappings and quickly tied it around my waist to make a makeshift garment like a Scotchman’s kilt. Then I jumped, only to find myself hurtling high through the air once more, to land not next to the man as I’d thought, but dozens of yards away!

Given a moment’s respite from fighting the big green fellow, I looked around and saw that while I was indeed in a canyon of sorts, it was not the canyon I’d been in moments ago. It was shallower, and wider, and the rock wasn’t bare, but covered in some sort of moss or maybe lichen. The sun wasn’t right neither, being smaller and punier than it should have been.

But I only glanced at the strange, distant sun, because beyond the green man I had killed, only a few hundred yards along the canyon or valley, there was a whole damn regiment of those green four-armed men, only they was sittin’ atop those thoat things I mentioned, what were like horses but with eight legs.

There was nowhere to hide, and nowhere to run, and the enemy was coming on at a rush. My head almost turned completely around on my neck as I tried to find some way out, but it were all for naught. Within a minute or two, I would be ridden down, speared, and trampled to death.

Then I saw that between me and the green man I had killed, there was a perfectly round pattern in the dusty ground, like the hatch to a cellar, too regular to be natural. I jumped toward it but even though I’d held back on my full strength, I overshot my mark. Then, trying to run back, I kept bouncing up into the air, as if the very force of gravity that bound me to the Earth had lessened—and it had, as I would later confirm.

But I managed to get back to that circular depression and, using the green man’s sword, swept the red dust aside. There
was
a cellar hatch there, a round door of metal. But there was no handle, ring, or lever with which to open it. Reversing my blade, I banged on the strange door with the hilt, but there was no response, save the distant clang resulting from my blows.

Then, as the thunder of the charging thoats filled the canyon, and the green giants and their spear-points were only yards away, I was suddenly lifted into the air from behind and yanked up into the sky like a fish jerked out of the water by a long-handled gaff.

Which ain’t poetical talk, but a true saying, save that I’m no fish, and it was a boat of the sky that had lifted me aboard, the hook employed being very skillfully thrust through the back of my makeshift kilt, so that I had only a quarter-inch deep cut across one buttock to show for it and no more blood lost than a canteen might hold.

Later on I learned that John Carter himself had swung the hook, which was all to the good. Any normal fellow would probably have taken my head off. When it came to wielding a sword, gun, or even a hook, Carter really was the best. I often wondered how he might fare against Wild Bill Hickok, who was a wonder with a pistol. I met Hickok much later in what you might call my career, not on Mars, you understand. But even against Hickok, I reckon Carter might have had the edge.

So there I was, splayed and bleeding on the floor of this flying machine which was accelerating mightily toward the rim of the canyon, while an ordinary-looking fellow with a regular Earth-size number of arms and legs fired a long-barreled rifle of unfamiliar design over the stern. I was also relieved to see someone I at first took to be an Indian on account of him having the red skin that Indians was supposed to have (but didn’t in actual fact), was directing the craft from a half cockpit forr’ard.

“I fear I do not—” I started to reply.

This obviously surprised him greatly. Carter—for of course it was he—was never one to show much emotion in his face, but in this case both his eyebrows lifted for an instant, and a spark flashed across his steel-gray eyes.

“You speak English?” he interrupted. “Or have you learned it this moment from my mind?”

“I cain’t read minds,” I replied. “I’ve always spoken English, and a little Dutch and German, on account of being raised in Berks County, Pennsylvania.”

“You’re an Earthman!” exclaimed Carter. “I took you for some kind of White Dwarf Martian, emerged from the subterranean fastness back there.”

“I ain’t a dwarf, Martian or otherwise,” I replied stiffly. “And I don’t let no man call me one, neither. The name is Lam Jones, Arizonee miner, late quartermaster in the headquarters of General Sheridan.”

“A Union man,” said Carter, his manner immediately less friendly. “Allow me to introduce myself, Mister Jones. I am Captain John Carter of Virginia, and a Prince of Helium, here on Barsoom.”

“Pleased to meet you, Captain . . . that is to say . . . Prince,” I said weakly. I didn’t want to look, but I could feel the blood trickling down my leg, and it felt like there was a lot of it. “The War being over and all. Uh, where might Barsoom be, your honor?”

“It is the fourth planet of this solar system,” said Carter. “You would call it Mars.”

“Yes,” said Carter. There was still a mighty chill in his voice. “You are only the second Earthman to come here, as far as it is known.”

I kind of got the message then that he liked it better when there was only the one Earthman on Mars.

“Mars,” I repeated, looked down, saw my own blood spreading across the deck, and fainted.

When I awoke, I found myself on a kind of padded shelf of silk, with my ass bandaged up and a fur robe loosely tied around me, the kind of fur robe that would have cost more than a hundred dollars from one of the finest stores in Philadelphia, like I was going to buy with my gold. The whole store, I mean, not the fur robe.

Apart from my buttock wound, I felt refreshed, so with only a little difficulty in the sitting-up department, I swung myself off that shelf and took stock of my surroundings. I could see from the tall arched window opposite that I was in some kind of tower room, a room straight out of the color plates in the book of Araby that Captain O’Hoolihan of the New York Zouaves had lent me once, in return for three more hogs over his company’s allowance. It was all silk curtains and suchlike, that room, and more cushions than a madam’s fancy-house.

No sooner had I got down than a woman rose up out of those cushions, a mighty fine-looking woman, with that real red skin like the fellow who’d been driving the flying boat. She bent her head and then looked straight at me, her eyes seeming to bore into my head, and I felt something twitch and give inside my brain, right behind my eyes.

That’s how I got started with that Martian mindtalkin’ business, though I never got as good as Carter. I could talk with folks, but I couldn’t read their minds. He could, right enough, except for mine. I used to think up some pretty insulting thoughts sometimes, about Johnny Reb and all, but he never caught on.

I was stuck in that tower for nigh on a week before Carter showed up to see how I was going. I guess he’d been off slaughtering some of the Warhoon greens or similar activities of which he was right fond.

Straight away he wanted to know how I’d got to Barsoom, though he never told me nothing about his own journey. I read it years later, like everyone else, and wondered why he’d kept it secret. He wanted to know if I was an immortal too, or couldn’t remember my childhood. I reckon he was pleased to find out I was no one special in that regard.

’Course, I’d met quite a few folk along the way who couldn’t remember their childhoods, like old Noah for one, but I never suggested to Carter that it might be whiskey that done in his memory. I knew right early he wasn’t a man to trifle with. He killed too easily, and had it all sorted within himself. Just like my ma and pa. They would have whipped me to death over the smallest thing and said it was all for the best, just the way God intended.

Only Carter had his honor, instead of God, and that honor only had room for Virginian gentlemen and Martian princesses. Everyone else was pretty much window-dressing, providing a pretty frame for him and his lady to stand in the sunlight.